edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: New PhD scholarships at Edinburgh http://www.scholarships.ed.ac.uk/postgraduate/development.htm
“Readers have to work out what they have to do in the story to progress,” says Adrian Hon, who created the application and co-founded Six to Start with his brother Dan. “The story might say something like ‘the witch went up to the door and knocked three times’. The player would then have to tap on the phone three times in order to advance. Or they might read that the house fell to the right and they have to tilt the phone to the right to read about what happens next.”
The goal is to encourage young people to write their own stories and include their own “gestures”.
Once a tale has been created, users can upload them to the TapTale website, where other registered users can download and read them. Registered users can also provide feedback on any tale via the website, by slotting pre-written statements into a form.
Brian Clark, working with LTS on trialling the project, describes how it might be used in practice this term:
TapTale’s primary goal is to promote literacy through the reading and writing of tales using the tap, tilt, shake and swipe functions of Apples touch screen devices.
When creating a tale, pupils are asked to write chapters using the touchscreen keyboard on the device. In order to progress from chapter to chapter, the reader must use one of the tap, swipe, tilt or shake sequences. It is up to the author of the tale to decide what action must be taken for the reader to see the next chapter.
Once a tale has been created, users can upload them via the device to the taptale website. This allows other registered user to download and read their tales directly on the device. Registered users can provide feedback on any tale via the website using a ‘fridge magnet’ style form. Anyone can read the tales created directly from the site, but of course the tapping and tilting functions are not possible in this view.
My favourite part of this exercise may not even be the iPhone app itself. Rather, the online peer-assessment community we've developed is, I think, a first (though I'm happily corrected). I wanted to see a fridge-magnet approach to student feedback, something that would allow structured feedback to take place but not just in a "tick-box" fashion. I think I also wanted to hark back stylistically to the days of scholastic readers that I had when I was aged four in primary school, learning how to read for the first time. The result is quite a delightful way of helping students - and the general public who stop off by their writings - to learn new ways to provide "two stars and a wish" type feedback to each other anonymously, while maintaining the integrity and safety of a learning site used by young people.
The system prompts you to use one of the many critiques that Derek and I thrashed out over a boring train trip or two, to accept it, before pushing up the next set of options. Go and have a play on one of Naomi's stories and you'll see how challenging some of the vocabulary is yet how easy the interface is: struggleware if ever there was any.
Above all, though, it's about the written word, not the graphic, the design or the picture.
If anything, the lack of features is what makes this app special, what's going to make it work well. Children will, lo and behold, have to think about how to describe what's in their mind's eye, not just photograph it with the cellphone camera or Google it, right-click it, save it and insert it. Stripping all that away is, if anything, at least one educational advance we'll have made.
Taptale stories are free to view on the website throughout the pilot. The app is free in the UK from the iTunes store.
Pic from Anthony
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: RT @ElrikMerlin: Should Linden Lab (SL owners) switch to OpenSim? (Hypergrid): http://bit.ly/9Oq6GP #idgbl10
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: http://bit.ly/8MbfSV call for proposals for the Virtual Worlds Best Practices in Education 2010 in-world conference
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: Women in Games conference - 25-26th March 2010 - Bradford. http://www.womeningames.com/
edinburghmsc: via @sbayne: Two technology-enhanced learning advisors needed at Thames Valley http://www.tvu.ac.uk/the_university/Jobs.jsp
The Edge has some brilliant essays from brilliant minds, on how the internet has changed them and will continue to morph our brains over the next decade. George Dyson explains with more clarity than I've ever seen the principal difference in how we deal with information properly in 2010:
In the North Pacific ocean, there were two approaches to boatbuilding. The Aleuts (and their kayak-building relatives) lived on barren, treeless islands and built their vessels by piecing together skeletal frameworks from fragments of beach-combed wood. The Tlingit (and their dugout canoe-building relatives) built their vessels by selecting entire trees out of the rainforest and removing wood until there was nothing left but a canoe.
The Aleut and the Tlingit achieved similar results — maximum boat / minimum material — by opposite means. The flood of information unleashed by the Internet has produced a similar cultural split. We used to be kayak builders, collecting all available fragments of information to assemble the framework that kept us afloat. Now, we have to learn to become dugout-canoe builders, discarding unneccessary information to reveal the shape of knowledge hidden within.
I was a hardened kayak builder, trained to collect every available stick. I resent having to learn the new skills. But those who don't will be left paddling logs, not canoes.
It's all too easy to relegate our personal projects to the bottom of the pile until "the day job" is complete. The result? We nearly always end up having to leave creative, fun, new projects behind in the interest of ticking someone else's boxes, when those same personal projects could be the very innovation that make the difference.
Ji Lee was fed up with his life as an ad exec when he decided to engage the public in parodying that very same world, printing out 50,000 speech bubble stickers and placing them over ads around New York City. Over time, the public took the lead in inventing political or comical speech to make the parody. The ultimate parody in this project is, of course, that ad agencies used them to further promote their products. He spins a good yarn in his 99% video.
A personal project that took Ji Lee's name to the world and helped him find a seat as Director of Google's Creative Labs.
What's your personal project, and what's stopping you just getting on with it?
Oxford University has banned Spotify, the legal music-sharing service currently available across Europe. The reason? It uses up too much bandwidth. I've been in a few clients' establishments where this is also true, whether the bandwidth-hungry service be well-known and seen as 'legitimate' (e.g. BBC iPlayer) or little known and misunderstood (e.g. Spotify).
When we're building national internet infrastructures, as we have done in the UK and which are emerging at great speed in New Zealand, India and China, we can underestimate by some distance what is going to be required by generations not too much in the future. In 2005, 100mbps for a 1000-student secondary school seemed lightning fast, given that we had been struggling on 10mbps until then. However, in an age where most new content is available, first and foremost, in high quality HD, this "high" speed feels like a snail's pace, especially when any more than 20 of those 1000 students is using such a service.
What's the answer? Invest more than we can afford now on the understanding that it will pay off by the time it's installed? See internet infrastructure as a genuine investment, like motorways and skyscrapers, rather than just a spend that has to be made?
Thanks to SwissMiss for the link to this lovely video palindrome, showing how some scrolling text on iMovie can make the difference in explaining, understanding, passing on meaning.
This is mind-bending stuff from the clever Swedes at TAT, and I want one now. Point your mobile phone at the person speaking at the lectern, the cute person in the bar or that potential recruit and see, hovering around their head, all their social networks, tastes in music and books, and dodgy photos from last night. In a schools context this could be seen as lethal.
But there are some amazing potential side effects - what would yours be?
edinburghmsc: via @claraoshea: vacancy: e-learning instructional designer at ICAS http://www.elearningalliance.org/content.asp?ArticleCode=6084
edinburghmsc: via @flittleton: RT @A_L_T: Speakers from Google & Yahoo! at ALT/JISC Techdis 'Rewiring Inclusion' Feb 8/9 Nottingham http://is.gd/5LWpn
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