Lightning in a Bottle

Anne and I ran our ninth (!) Digital Photography Bootcamp last week, our fourth summer of offering this program. Over forty individuals came and spent three days in the woods learning more about their cameras and image composition, taking loads of pictures, learning how to organize and edit them on the computer, and much more. It was a bit rainy and cloudy when we went up to Paradise at Mt. Rainier, but nobody complained and we had a great time. We also had our usual great team of assistants, and Ed, Mark, Mark, Paula and Caitlin really helped to make things spin.

I’ve worked with few technologies that have such a strong personal connection as photography, and digital photography takes this to a whole new level. It also, unfortunately, adds a layer of complexity and intimidation to the process. I get a great deal of pleasure in helping people past that complexity and allowing them to feel more in control of their use of the camera, and better able to capture meaningful, fulfilling images. That’s why we’ll be out there doing it again next summer!

The Seattle Times just published an article from the San Jose Mercury News about the worldwide development of the ultra mobile PC market.  It’s probably the best overview I’ve read, and it recognizes the influence of the One Laptop Per Child project in laying the groundwork for it, at least in terms of opening minds to the idea that a computer could be cheap, small, and very usable.  I also get a kick out of the fact that the experts they interviewed are all over the map in terms of the importance of this niche.  I think those that downplay it are stuck in mindset where laptops can only exist in a narrow range of functionality, and that range doesn’t dip down to the world of the UMPC.  If that were true in the calculator market, we’d all buy graphing calculators and there would be no $5.00 calculators at the checkstand of the grocery store.

Susan Brooks-Young introduced me to a great online resource with the odd name CogDogRoo. It turns out a very busy person named Alan Levine created an online resource for a series of workshops that lists (at the time of this writing) 57 different Web 2.0 tools that can be used for digital storytelling. That in itself isn’t unusual, of course, but what he did that was different was he took the time to retell the same story with each tool!

The specific page on Alan’s wiki is here, and it is wonderfully comprehensive. In addition to his own oft-retold story, almost all of the titles also include examples of stories told by others. He also has a shorter list at the end of tools that he’s tried that weren’t successful for one reason or another, so you can see what sites to avoid (at least for now). Susan took us through a one-hour workshop where we each picked a different tool and spent ten or fifteen minutes creating a presentation. I put together a short Animoto video about the aftermath of a windstorm in our neighborhood last year. (No great shakes, but only about four minutes to create it with images from my Flickr account!) It’s a great site for a quick Web 2.0 training - as long as they aren’t blocked, anyway.

I’ve been trying out a loaner of the new ultra-mobile device from HP, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC. It’s slightly larger larger than an EeePC or 2Go laptop - in the image, the HP is on the left, the EeePC is on the right, and a standard 15-inch Macbook is in the middle. The slightly larger size offers some distinct advantages - nearly a full-size keyboard (much easier to type on), and an 8.9 inch WXGA (1366 x 768) resolution screen, which allows you to see much more than the 800 x 480 resolution on the smaller devices. It has a 12o gb hard drive and up to two gigabytes of RAM. It’s really a very small, full-featured computer.

There are a few issues, though. It doesn’t feel quite as rugged as its slightly smaller brethren (particularly the 2Go), and the screen resolution may be too tiny for some of us older folks. The model I have came with Vista Business installed, which really strains the computer at times. I’m sure it would run much snappier with XP or Linux. It also (at least running Vista) gets very, very hot. Lastly, that added functionality comes at a price - it costs between $200 and $300 more than the EeePC class of devices.

Still in all, I’ve really enjoyed working with it. It is a very polished, well-designed device, and one that I would be willing to use on a daily basis instead of my much larger, older laptops. Just with an OS other than Vista Business.

While I was at the ACPE conference last week I had a chance to work for a few minutes with a CTL 2Go PC (the same device I mentioned a few weeks ago).  It feels much more rugged than the EeePC, and to underscore the point, the company representative repeatedly demonstrated dropping the device from about five feet in the air.  The trade-off is that it is a little larger and heavier than the EeePC, but that also gives you a larger screen and longer battery life.  As the previously-linked review noted, the keyboard is still pretty cramped, and the screen resolution is still only 800×480, despite the larger display.  My major frustration with the keyboard is that the right Shift key is very small, and the Enter key is where I expect the quote/apostrophe key to be,  which causes me to regularly break sentences (or IM messages) when  I try to type I’m or similar words. They’re still pretty amazing, though!

The ustream.tv site we’ve been experimenting with (check and see if I’m online - sorry if I don’t notice when you enter, there’s no sound clue when someone pops in) is being used by a school district in eastern Washington for daily updates and things such as broadcasting band practice. John Kelly from ESD 123 introduced the site to a teacher there, and they have jumped all over it. Check them out, and if they aren’t live watch one or two of their archived sessions!

John Pederson posted a link to a new YouTube video on his TechLearning blog today. It’s a short, interesting piece that explores the nature of sharing in the modern age.

I’ve been a big supporter of having students work with robotics since we taught robot camps at the Pacific Science Center back in the 1980s. I am always enthralled with the complexity and depth of the kids’ learning experiences as they collaborate, invent, design, built, and program their creations. Interest in this area has grown, and over the years their have been several generations of Lego Robotics systems and other classroom robotics curricula. On a much grander scale, the last decade has seen huge growth in the FIRST Robotics and FIRST Lego League after-school programs which have expanded to include tens of thousands of students. (I missed the FIRST competition in Tacoma a few weeks ago - drat!) Still, robotics languishes primarily as an after-school activity available in a few isolated school, and that’s always disappointed me.

In addition to the tremendous educational value I have seen in robotics, however, there is growing value in that area in terms of future careers. As the power of processing continues its relentless march into seeming infinity, we are getting close to a world of robotic devices that would appear to be out of science fiction. A popular video on YouTube lately has been film of a robot called Big Dog, a quadruped walking robot designed to carry military equipment. Another video making the rounds shows a prosthetic arm designed by Dean Kamen’s company that is so lifelike they call it the Luke Arm (as in Luke Skywalker). The military is funding much of the development of this field of study, but the spinoffs will move rapidly into other applications.

And this article describes a prediction just made that 3.5 million jobs will be replaced by robots in Japan by 2025. Not manufacturing jobs, but service jobs like nurses’ aides, receptionists, and so on. The Japanese population is aging rapidly, and there will be fewer and fewer young people to take on these jobs.

So this starts to look like a serious win-win situation to me. Robotics is a phenomenally exciting project-based learning experience for students of a wide variety of learning styles, one that immerses them in a process that thoroughly integrates design, creativity, mechanics, electronics, physics, math, and a host of many other areas - even art! And now, robotics is also a rapidly expanding career opportunity for our students. We need to look for more ways to give kids the chance to explore this fascinating, exciting area of study. (Or we may be importing all of our robots from Japan.)

The new particle accelerator in Europe at the Cern laboratory has been in the news quite a bit the last month or so. This massive device is designed to smash subatomic particles together at tremendous speed to try and uncover new information about the nature of matter, including looking for a conjectured particle called the Higgs boson, the only particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has never been directly observed. (Ok, sorry about all that. I’m a science nerd, after all.)

I mention it here not to revel in arcane science, but because of an interesting technology backstory to this effort. As the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, was being designed, the researchers realized that the volume of data it would produce was so large that it would potentially overwhelm the Internet when shared with scientists around the world. Their solution was to create a parallel network - that is amazingly fast. In addition to using fiber optics, the researchers designed an entirely new system for managing the transfer of the data. This combination creates a network that is up to 10,000 times faster than the existing Internet.

This technology is currently only available to certain institutions, but it will at some time begin to replace the Internet we currently use. Bandwidth will increase to a level that we literally can’t envision. What will we do with a technology that lets us back up a 120 gigabyte hard drive onto a remote server in five or ten seconds? The article linked above explores some of the conjectures, but the most dependable prediction for what we will do with that much capacity is something we haven’t thought of yet.

I’ve been recently enjoying exploring social networking programs like Twitter and Facebook, and I’ve been a long-time user of instant messaging (MSN Messenger, AOL’s AIM, Yahoo Instant Messenger and Apple’s iChat) as well as web-based email through Yahoo. The problem, however, is keeping track of all of these different possible communications systems without going crazy.

I’ve known there were clients (such as Adium for the Mac) that combine multiple IM services into one interface. However, today I’ve been exploring Digsby, which not only combines IM services, but also social networking applications such as Twitter and Facebook.

Now I have one application that sits on my screen and alerts me if any buddy is online from any of my online accounts, if there have been updates to any of the Twitter users that I follow, updates to my Facebook friends, or new emails to my Yahoo account. It will take a few weeks to see if it really changes my habits long-term, but for now I am finding myself far more likely to use these services because I can do it so much more quickly.