Last work post was back in March 2009! Just a quick update to keep things ticking over.
I'll be heading off to the Franklin Pierce Law Center (www.piercelaw.edu) in Concord, NH, USA (Map) at the end of October to show off SIMPLE, and I'm also involved as an advisor to the UKCLE's OER project
and the diary is starting to fill up. Currently I have pencilled in a return trip to Australia & the Australian National University and the CALI conference in June, and then Concord, NH in August.
Oh wow, again a long time since my last post on here, but let's not dwell on that!
Instead lets have a quick first look at Google's new "Chrome" web browser. Many may ask why exactly is there a need for yet another web browser on the block what with Firefox increasing its market share, IE still up on top, and the Safaris and Operas doing reasonably well for themselves.
Google think that all of these browsers are doing it, not wrong, but not necessarily well. And I think I have to agree. I've been a web user for nearly a decade now, not really very long in the horn, but I do still remember when the majority of the "Internet" was actually just bulletin boards. Consequently I've used just about every web browser that's come along, starting with Netscape, Lynx, Motif all the way through to Internet Explorer and Firefox, and over the last couple of years Safari.
Now I've been pretty happy with the latest generation of web browsers, except for the inconsistencies in rendering, increasingly sluggish performance and lack of any real cross-compatibility.
Hopefully with Chrome I'll at least get some thing that addresses issue 2! IE for me runs slow as hell, Firefox is pretty much starting to chew up as much memory as it can get is grubby paws on and Safari just seems to be chugging along at its own merry pace. Chrome on the other hand seems to go like shit of the proverbial shovel. Of course my tests (load up as many tabs as Firefox would complain at) are hardly rigorous!
So that's one up for Chrome, but cross compatibility and rendering? Well on the rendering front its nice to see a sensible approach and the re-use of what looks like it could (or at least should) be come an option for a standard rendering engine, in the form of WebKit, which is already used in Apple's Safari browser.
The holy grail however for web browsers will be cross compatibility. I'd love the ability to take data from any web browser and re-use it in another one, and then port it back. Google would be in a prime position to do this, although they have already deprecated their Google Browser Sync plugin for Firefox (which kept multiple installs of FF in sync and was GREAT!). At least however it looks like there's going to be Mac and Linux Chrome versions to boot, which means in addition Opera and Firefox there's at least there's web browser that I can have a consistent experience on across my different machines. Of course the final strength should be the open-source nature of Chrome, unlike all the other browsers (with Firefox as an exception), and hopefully this will mean that all the nice OS specific features that make Safari really useful for me can get implemented too
I don't believe that mashup's themselves will ever be "mass market" in themselves. This is not the same as saying that a mash-up can't be a great idea and potentially lead to addressing a niche market (even one that becomes ubiquitous), but at the point it is no longer really (IMHO) a "mashup" and has graduated in to the big-wide world of reliablity, scalablity and robustness.
I believe that mashups themselve can't be mass market because they are principally there to solve a single person's problem. I do think that that the infrastructre and tools to build mashups can, however, become mass market and creating enough pieces to be mashed is already getting there.
We're coming up to lunch time at the Need for a New law School conference in Krakow and there have been lots of interesting topics discussed so far.
From a SIMPLE perspective, it has been intriguing to see a pre-dominance of "clinic" based learning. Unlike Scotland where Strathclyde as the only law clinic in the country, the clinic approach is very common in Poland.
i'm off to Poland. Unfortunately that's tomorrow and i've got to get to to Gatwick tonight for a 7am flight. Whilst Paul is off in the States talking about SIMPLE, i'll be in Krakow doing the same.
Round about 5:29 she makes a very good point about immersion:
It's not every day that you get to claim that you've been compared to Gary Gygax, but amazingly that comparison has been made.
This I think gives us a massive legacy to stand up to now, and I for one am ready. SIMPLE and simulation based learning has a huge potential to change how students learn and engage in their learning. And could have as much of an effect as D&D has had.
It may not make it cool to go down the basement again just yet, but we'll make (serious) gamers out of everyone :-)
It's been mentioned in one of my boss's and the UKCLE blog posts(which unfortunately always seems to crash my browser) that the SIMPLE project is having its launch event on Monday & Tuesday, well I'll be there as well to cover more of the "technical" issues in my role as lead developer.
The more technical parts of the day that I'll be covering will be about the Platform and Tools we have developed and where we want to take them in the future. I'll also be doing the workshop session on how to think about simulations, and getting starting on building them using our tools.
Hopefully maybe get an opportunity to live blog the days too. Anyway more information is available from the SIMPLE Community site, which will be getting upgraded to be the focal point for SIMPLE.
I've been off reading one of my collegue's blogs about videos and learning, and this time I've got to get stuck right in!
"Why are they videotaping actual lectures?"
In the most primitive terms, the main reason is one of investment: money but more likely time. I'd entirely agree that video presentations such as
The Web is Us/ing Us are fantastic presentations: highly informative, imaginative and entertaining. But look at the requirements for production: It is made up of lots of text, typed in a large number of locations, transitions.
"It isn't heavyweight video stuff"
It may not be heavyweight in the tools required to produce, but it is in performance, and in performance 90% of your effort does not go into putting it together, it is deciding what to put together in the first place. I would also surmise that each of these producers is now fairly expert in using the tools to achieve the narrative effect they desire...I can just about guarantee that at some point they weren't and their first attempt was not neatly produced or fast!
So what's the alternative? Well you have people like me and my collegues or media departments who will quickly and neatly produce an archive of the content. The presentation may not be slick, or even very effective, but the content is there, and is usable. Yes, it doesn't provide much entertainment (unless the presenter is actually "good") but it is fast, and it is much faster. It is entirely concievable to turn around a live event to a recorded, re-usable medium, in well, 30 minutes (as proved by DiscLive & Instant Live).
And so to the comments...
Live lectures...yes definately a great resource for sources, background even just plain archival.
For example -- if I come across a passage that I want to capture, say, 34 mins 23 secs into the video, that lasts for 2 mins, how do I capture that easily without a video-edit desk or specialist software? I'll probably also want to embed it beside similar extracts, maybe link it up, comment on it, share it, etc. -- mashup! as you said. But I guess I'd have to download the video, open it with specialist software, view it, cut the bit I wanted, etc., possibly upload to another specialist tool to splice with other media. As I was saying in the previous post, 3D Rhetoric, we don't yet have the simple manipulative tools to match the potential conceptual sophistication that the digital environment allows us to create.
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