Mind Tools
I occasionally feel a little guilty. Although I am very much committed to the idea that technology should be integrated, no, more than that, embedded, into what happens in a classroom on a day-to-day basis, the truth is that I have spent many years teaching computing as a discipline in its own right. And I have to keep telling myself that that's ok, that there are still many kids who have a deep interest in technology for the sake of technology and find the very nature of computing highly engaging as a stand alone topic. So I'm cool with that. It's ok to be a geek.
I believe one mark of a good teacher is to be able to take complex ideas and simplify them without making them simple. For example, there are a couple of concepts in the realm of computing that are not really all that hard to understand but can be very hard to explain. Binary numbers can be one. Vector graphics another.
So I was really impressed when I saw VectorMagic, a somewhat geeky (yet very cool) web app put together by James Diebel and Jacob Norda from the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I blogged a couple of thoughts about EPS files and vector graphics the other day and in the comments I was pointed to VectorMagic by Kathy Nann. What an amazing tool! Thanks Kathy!
I won't blather on about the need for vector graphics and when you should use them... I blathered enough about that in that other post, so go read that if you dare.
What VectorMagic does is to take a bitmapped image (jpg, gif, bmp, etc) and trace the shapes contained within them in order to to convert them into vector outlines. This gives a remarkable crispness to the image at any resolution. Vector images don't get blocky and full of artifacts as they get bigger. They just recalculate how to draw that shape a bit bigger using a nice sharp edge. I'm so glad I found this tool and I know I will get lots of use out of it. (Well, maybe not lots, but just knowing its there and what it can do makes it all worth it.
But the other thing that really struck me is just how good this sort of application is as a teaching tool. Because of the way it steps through the process and how it asks the user for questions about the image, it makes it so much clearer as to the real differences between bitmap and vector graphics. It even places them next to each other at the end, and lets you zoom and pan in real time to inspect the two image types. Visually, this is a really powerful way to learn about a concept that can be otherwise quite nebulous and hard to explain, and after using Vector Magic to convert a few images it would be hard NOT to understand the difference.
And it got me thinking about just how much we can use the the intuitive and malleable nature of software to assist us in explaining and investigating tricky ideas. Programs like VectorMagic are amazing in the way they can be used to visually demonstrate the bitmap/vector concept. Trying to explain sound waves to junior students can be hard, but when theses students can create, see and manipulate waveforms directly using Audacity it makes it much more concrete. Playing whatif games with spreadsheets, tracking data visually using Gapminder, directly manipulating the globe with Google Earth or creating 3D models with SketchUp... these tools make it almost trivial to convey what used to be challenging and hard-to-grasp ideas.
All of this should pave the way for us to help kids come up with better questions, and make better use of this new information. I'm going to try harder to make these tools do the jobs that they are good at, so that I can spend more quality time working with kids on the thinking skills that really matter.
Tags: tools, vector, higherorder, thinking, software
Popularity: 1% [?]
Audio Plumbing
I've been trying to make a screencast of Skype conversation. And I thought it would be pretty simple. But as so often happens, there are technical issues to overcome that can make things so much trickier than you first thought they would be.
I've done quite a bit of screen capturing before, usually for short training videos on how to do certain software tasks. In fact I made a CD for a commercial training organisation a few years back that had over 80 tutorial screencasts on it made with Capture Cam Pro, so I figured I knew how to do this stuff. I've also been using Jing lately to make short screencasts on tech tips for our school network users. I think that screencasting is a great way to learn (and teach) this sort of practical, "show me" sort of stuff. Atomic Learning is another excellent resource based on this idea.
So I wanted to make a couple of screencasts to demonstrate how to use the features of Skype. I'd been using Snapz Pro X on the Mac, but wasn't totally happy with it. I'd heard good things about iShowU so I downloaded a copy to try. I only had to use it a couple of times before I realised that it was going to be well worth the $20 they were asking for it, so bought a copy immediately. Easy to use, lots of professional options, and very customisable. A cool tool.
So I set up a screen capture, fired up Skype and called the Skype call testing service at echo123. iShowU captured all the on-screen action easily, as well as my microphone input, BUT not the audio coming out of Skype. Hmmm, that's no good... I can't do a demo of Skype if I can't hear the conversation played back in the screen capture. I thought of a bunch of ideas to solve this, including using Audio Hijack Pro to capture the Skype audio, iShowU to capture everything else, and then dropping it into iMovie to edit them into a single movie but that seemed like it was all getting too hard and time consuming. I'm basically quite lazy, so I wanted a better, more elegant solution.
After quite a bit of trial and error I finally figured out how to do this, so here is my solution in case you ever need to do it yourself.
The trick is to use Soundflower, a Mac system extension that lets you route audio around the system in non-standard ways. From the Soundflower website, it says "Soundflower is a Mac OS X system extension that allows applications to pass audio to other applications. Soundflower is easy to use, it simply presents itself as an audio device, allowing any audio application to send and receive audio with no other support needed. Soundflower is free, open-source, and runs on Mac Intel and PPC computers."
So, here's how you do it - or at least it's what eventually worked for me after much trial and error...
- First, I set the audio inputs of the Mac to Soundflower (2ch), that's input, output and system.
- Then in the Skype preferences, set the Audio input to your desired microphone (I used a USB headset mic) and the Audio output to Soundflower (2ch). I set the ringing to Soundflower as well, but that's probably not so important.
Finally, in iShowU, set the Input selection to Record Microphone Audio, Force it to Mono, and turn on Record System Audio. Set the microphone input to the USB headset (in my case). I also prefer to get the monitor feed while both previewing and recording, so turn that on if you want.- By the way, setting the compression to H.264 makes a huge difference to the size of the final files.
There you have it. From what I can figure out, it works by routing the Skype microphone input to Soundflower, then routing its output to be the Mac's regular audio input as a Soundflower stream. Then the Mac uses that diverted audio stream and treats it as the regular mic input to the computer (except after passing it via Skype it now has the entire Skype conversation in it) and then using iShowU to monitor the standard audio feed, which now contains the Skype audio. This may all be totally useless information to most of you, but for someone out there it may just save you a whole lot of time. I hope so.
Tags: skype, soundflower, ishowu, mac. audio
Popularity: 1% [?]
Good Ideas come from complete Twits
Twitter is a really interesting bit of software. When I first heard about it on MacBreak Weekly I thought it sounded pretty interesting although it still didn't really make a lot of sense to me. Being naturally curious I headed over to the Twitter website and signed up for an account. After having a play with it for a while, it seemed to make even less sense so I gradually lost interest in it and moved on to other diversions.
I've now changed my mind about it. Twitter is a way cool tool!
How to explain it? Twitter is designed as a sort of cross-hybrid tool that merges email, SMS, instant messaging and waving your arms around trying to get attention. It is aimed at answering the very simple question - "What are you doing?" You simply type your response to that question in no more than 140 characters and send your current activity, thought, question, mood or state of mind out into the Cloud that is the Internet.
My first thought about Twitter was the same as most people's first thoughts about blogging... "Why?" Why on earth would anyone be at all interested in what I am doing right now? Who would care? The idea of taking the time to write a short sentence stating my current activity or thoughts, and sending them to who-knows-where just seemed to be totally bizarre to me. Not only that, but it seemed so inconvenient to have to go to the Twitter website just to do this... I simply couldn't see what the attraction was.
And then I started to piece a few things together, and it slowly started to make sense to me. First I changed my primary browser to Flock. Flock has a lot of very neat integration with Web 2.0 tools and one of its benefits is built-in support for Twitter using a plugin called TwitterBar. Instead of having to go to the Twitter website to add a "Tweet", I could just type it into the browser's address bar and click the send button. That made it very simple to send a message but I still couldn't quite see why I'd want to do that.
Then I discovered that Edublogs had a sidebar widget plugin called Twitters and it was able to take the RSS feed from my own Twitter account and automatically make my own messages appear on my blog. Interesting, but still bizarre. It meant I could now easily send a short message to the web stating what I was doing at any given moment, and then have it appear on my blog without actually doing anything to put it there. Conceptually interesting, but for what purpose would I want to do this?
But I kept hearing people talk about Twitter in glowing terms. I had to be missing something surely? So after quite a while of ignoring it, I eventually revisited my Twitter account to see if I could get to the bottom of this bizarre tool. I noticed that some other people's tweet lists had other names with an @ symbol in front of them, so I tried to find out what that meant. It appeared to be a sort of conversation taking place and the @ symbol was being used as a way of indicating who was being replied to in a much larger group conversation.
Still intrigued, I started to see who else was using Twitter that I might know. Browsing through the users list, I spotted someone whose name I recognised and a button marked Follow. I clicked it. You are now following this person. Hmm, not sure what that means but let's keep playing. I wonder who they know? Oh,I recognise this other person that they know. Follow them too. Hey, they know this other person that I've heard of too. Click. Follow them as well. Eventually I started to build a biggish list of people whose names I recognised who I was now "following". As I played, a couple of emails arrived telling me that some of these people were now following me. When I went back to my main Twitter webpage I started to see several messages in the list from the people I was following. All of a sudden, I got it. These people, who I have some respect and interest in, are telling me what they are doing right now. I was getting an insight into what was going on in their world. They were sharing ideas, insights, websites, links, suggestions, all appearing in a list on my own page. Ahhhh! I get it! This is my network of people, and I can stay in touch with them constantly, vicariously, discretely and silently.
The real magic happened when I discovered a wonderful bit of software for the Mac called Twitterific. Twitterific installs and runs in the background, popping up a small message using Growl whenever one of my Twit friends sends a message - or tweet - out. I then discovered that by sending a return tweet, and prefacing it with an @ symbol followed by their username, I could indicate to who this tweet was replying to. This is necessary because tweets are public to anyone following me so the @ convention helps keep the conversation making sense. Twitterific suddenly made the whole thing make sense since I no longer had to monitor the Twitter website for activity... the activity came to me! (PC users might like to try Twitteroo, which is kind of similar) I can also tweet directly from my mobile phone by sending an SMS message or going to Twitter Mobile.
Now I get it, I really like Twitter. You have to have a few people to follow, and a few people to follow you, before it really makes any sense. I'm currently following 63 people, and 67 people are following me. It makes perfect sense, in a kind of bizarre exhibitionist way.
What does make perfect sense is what Twitter suddenly enables. I have a network of 63 people, comprised mostly of some of the world's most innovative educators. 63 people to bounce ideas off, share links with, get advice from. 63 people who are willing to share a little insight into how they think and what they do. 63 people all stumbling across new cool web tools and willingly sharing them. 63 people to tap into when I need to gather a crowd to try an idea, find a partner to test a technology, or simply have a whine about my day.
I know it sounds bizarre, but it works, and its awesome.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Magical Bundles of Numbers
The other day, a colleague on a mailing list asked for some background info on EPS graphic files. It seems her school wanted something professionally printed and the printer asked that the artwork be provided in EPS format. Thanks to the ubiquity of the web, we are mostly only exposed to the more common web graphic formats like JPEG and GIF files these days, so some of the more exotic types like EPS are not as well understood as they could be. For what it's worth, here is my reply...
Ah, EPS files! A thing of beauty and a joy forever!
For anyone who works with graphics Encapsulated Post Script, or EPS files, are the holy grail of image formats. They are the ideal format for storing original artwork, although they are generally pretty useless for actually applying that artwork to a final format. By that I mean that most final applications for graphics, whether it be the web or printed documents, cannot use EPS files natively. But for a way of storing the original artwork, EPS files reign supreme. Here’s why...
Imagine you have a school logo image that gets used for a variety of purposes. It gets printed on school letterheads and business cards in very small sizes, reproduced on school coffeemugs and Tshirts at slightly larger sizes, and even gets blown up to very large sizes to make a banner for outside the school on open day. To get an image that looks good at all these different sizes, the artwork needs to be at different resolutions... A small jpeg file suitable for printing on the letterhead will look awful when stretched to be a large image for a banner for example. What you need is a way of creating these images that is resolution independent, so you can have the right resolution for the right situation.
That’s where EPS files come in. In an EPS, all the shapes and lines in the image are described mathematically. A very simple example would be a circle... Imagine you had a circle in an image, all you’d really need is the formula for creating a circle and the specific information about that particular circle. Mathematically, a big circle is exactly the same as a little circle but with different values for the key factors of radius, colour, edge thickness, etc... In an EPS file, this technique of using functions to describe objects is how the shapes are defined. This is very different to a JPEG or GIF, where shapes are created by a mosaic of pixels placed next to each other, a technique known as Bitmapping. Using bitmapping, a small circle and a big circle are two totally different patterns of bitmaps, which is why small graphics look so awful when they get stretched to be larger... You cannot just create new pixels from out of thin air to fill the gaps... the original pixels need to stretch, making the image look blocky and rather awful.
So in an EPS, the basic mathematical descriptions of the shapes that make up the image (called vectors) are embedded into the file using a language called PostScript. Postscript is a language that many laser printers use to describe how an image will be printed... When you print to a postscript-enabled laser printer, your printed image (whether that be text or pictures) is bundled up as little mathematical descriptions and sent to the printer where it is decoded back into the images and then printed. EPS files are that bundle of mathematical descriptions which define the image, but instead of being decoded by a printer they are just stored as a file.
Here’s the good bit... When you open an EPS file (which is vector based) in a graphics editing program like Photoshop (which is bitmap based), it asks you what size and resolution you’d like the image to be created at. Once you tell it the desired size and resolution, the EPS is then converted to a bitmap using the exact values you specify. This is the real magic of an EPS file... EPS gives you a single vector-based, size and resolution-independent file that unpacks to a bitmap-based, size and resolution-specific file at whatever specs you like. No wonder people who work in the printing industry love ‘em! They can be all things to all people. A single EPS file can be used to convert the image into whatever size and quality is required, be it the tiny artwork for the business card or the huge artwork for banner.
Tags: graphics, file formats, eps, postscript
Popularity: 1% [?]
Winning the Browser Wars
Because I was doing a bit of blog navel-gazing tonight writing that last post, I decided to take a quick look at the site stats just to see what's happening there. One of the figures that really jumped out at me was the one shown in this graph.
As you can see here, the majority of browser share is now coming from Firefox! Of course this is only just the stats from my blog, and being an educational blog with a predominantly teacher audience I guess there may be a disproportionate number of users who don't use Internet Explorer, but I was still surprised to see Firefox edging out IE. Not so long ago IE had no competition at all, then Firefox came along and started to gradually steal market share, but last stats I read still showed it with a fair way to go before it could claim to have a greater share than IE. Based on these numbers, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 combined only account for 38% of the traffic! That's a huge drop and won't be making Microsoft happy at all.
As a Flock user myself (which is based on the Gecko rendering engine in Firefox) I'm pleased to see the gain. By the way, I exclude my own visits to the site to try not to skew the numbers.
Popularity: 1% [?]
The Blog as a Conversation Room
I put this slide together for the spot I did in Sheryl's presentation in Shanghai this morning. My bit was entitled Learning is a Conversation, and I was trying to get across the idea that a blog is a wonderful vehicle for getting conversations started, and that a blog is much more than just a website. Unlike a website - which is a very Web 1.0 concept - a blog is dynamic and changes often (or should!), it encourages conversation and interaction through the commenting feature, and it also enables the use of external feeds and services to help bring the page to life, making it far more than just static content on the web.
You can click to enlarge the image, but the idea is that most of the sidebar features on this blog are dynamically fed by data from either the internal content management of the blog engine itself (past posts, archives, and comment management) and also from external sources such as Twitter, Flickr, Clustrmap, del.icio.us, YouTube, RSS feeds and so on. As I add content to all those external services, the results just flow onto my blog page. Once you start to automate that process from start to finish, it becomes a much more interesting tool... for example, using a Java phone app called Shozu I can take photos on my mobile phone (a Sony Ericsson K610i) and then push those digital files directly from the phone to Flickr. Once the end up in my Flickr photostream they then automatically appear in the blog sidebar without any further intervention from me.
Similarly, I can push comments to Twitter using a variety of methods - the Twitter website, Twitterbar, my mobile phone, or Twitterific - and they just magically appear on my blog page. Same with any websites I bookmark using del.icio.us. Same with RSS feeds. I save and store those things as normal, but they just appear on the page without any further work from me. This is a huge difference between a regular "webpage" and a blog.
If you take a good look at the optional plugins available you can start to do some pretty cool things. This makes it super easy for your blog page to become a central hub for your digital world as it pulls all your resources into one place, as well as being a place to start and continue conversations. Blockquoting lets you bring in snippets from other sites you read, while commenting lets those ideas bounce back from your readers, starting real conversations and making your blog into far more of a conduit through which ideas can flow. Combine all this with the built in trackbacking feature and the humble blog becomes a remarkable tool for personal communication.
Popularity: 1% [?]
My Podcasting Workflow
For a while now, ever since I've been producing The Virtual Staffroom podcast, I've been meaning to blog about the workflow I've developed for producing it. After a lot of trial and error, and making plenty of mistakes, I'd started getting a system happening on the best way to put the podcast together.
Then along comes the new GarageBand as part of iLife '08 and all that changed. Normally I don't like it when my systems get disrupted, but in this case I am thrilled about the changes as it reduces the steps needed to make a podcast considerably. Added to that are some configuration changes I made to the way I capture the audio, and I reckon I can now do better quality recordings at much smaller filesizes with far less effort, so it's win-win all round.
For anyone that might be interested, here are the tools and the workflow I plan on using from now on to create podcasts. I've got another podcast interview lined up for tomorrow night so I'm excited about these new workflows.
Firstly, I record my interviews using Skype. I use a decent USB headset microphone, a Logitech 250... I had a 350 but it broke, and the 250 was cheaper with the same audio specs. With Skype I can call to another computer anywhere in the world, but I can also call to a telephone line as well, so either works fine. Skype also let me do multiparty calls, so it can be several people online in the chat at once.
To record the call I use Audio Hijack Pro. I used to use Call Recorder which is one-button easy, but it can be a bit flaky and drop out at times. It's mostly reliable, but for podcast interview mostly reliable is not acceptable of course... I once did an hour long interview with Luc Zwartjes from Belgium only find that Call recorder crapped out and dropped the whole recording. Not happy, and I felt very embarrased to have to let Luc know about it, although he was gracious enough to record it again with me. From then on I have always used both Call Recorder and Audio Hijack together, but have since decided that Audio Hijack is good enough just on it's own.
What I like about Audio Hijack is the way you can capture the audio of the call to AIFF format. I never realised this for a long time and was capturing to MP3 and using Quicktime Pro to convert it to AIFF, but I've since discovered that I can go directly to AIFF which simplifies things a lot. The other advantage is that I can choose the bitrate and mono/stereo setting, which can bring the file size down a lot. I currently record using AIIF format, 16 bit, Auto Sample rate, Mono and it seems to work really well. Recording in mono halves the filesize of stereo.
Once I record, I drag the AIFF file to The Levelator. This simple and easy to use tool runs a very complex analysis of the file and applies compression and normalisation filters to the audio. This fixes any overly quiet or loud bits and makes it sound much better. If I wasn't fussy, I could leave this step out, but I think it's worth doing for the better audio quality.
Once I get the adjusted AIFF file out of Levelator I drag it into a new podcast episode in GarageBand. I really like Garageband as an editor and find it simple to use and easy to shuffle audio tracks around, make edit points, add multitracks, etc. I also add the tops and tails to the interview directly in GarageBand, and well as any music, sound effects, etc.
The big news in GarageBand '08 is that you can now export directly out in MP3 format. This is great... prior to this I had to export out as an M4A file and then use Quicktime Pro again to convert it to an MP3... it was an extra step and made it hard to work in mono. The new export dialog in GarageBand has all the features that a podcaster could want... I set mine to MP3, 64kbps, Medium High VBR and Mono. The sound quality in the tests I've done is really good, and the filesizes are way down on the older episodes.
Finally, I use Podcast Maker to add my metadata, shownotes, XML data and album artwork, and in one click upload it to the Virtual Staffroom server. Podcast Maker generates all the required XML and RSS feeds very nicely. It's a wonderful tool.
So there you have it... it might sound complicated but it's not really, and this new workflow is way more simplified than the previous method I used to use. Apple has really listened to podcasters and added just the right features into the new GarageBand. Combined with the extra tools like Skype, Audio Hijack, Levelator and Podcast Maker, making podcasts has never been easier!
Tags: podcasting, virtual staffroom, tools
Popularity: 1% [?]
Blown away by Jing
I think I just experienced one of those "Oh my God" moments when you see a new technology that takes a task you potentially do often and simplifies in a way that you never thought possible. The reason I say that you "potentially" do it often is that these tasks are usually either difficult or time consuming or just plain inconvenient because they involve too many steps, so you tend to avoid them where possible. An example would be sharing what you see on your screen with someone else across a network. Still images aren't too hard, but capturing an animated movie of what you are doing on your screen is tricky and usually requires special software, and then the task of sharing that movie over the Internet usually requires a few more steps, plus the issues of incompatable file formats, Mac/Windows issues, yaddah, yaddah... Too hard!
So when I just downloaded and installed Jing from the Jing Project, I was blown away by just how much they have simplified this process. I literally sat in front of the computer repeating "Oh my God!" several times. Perhaps I am just easily impressed, or perhaps this is just the sort of thing that I see very clear uses for, but I am amazed at what Jing does, and even moreso at how it does it. I can see tons of uses for this in a school... for example, teachers could create their own support pages for software the kids need to use so that they don't have to answer the same questions over and over... students can be creating movies to document their software skills... you can make tutorials for teachers showing them how to do specific tasks... or an end-user could use it to show you exactly what is happening on their screen... and lots more. The finished out is a .swf Flash file.
The Jing Project website will explain more, so check it out or check out my little sample. Let me know if I'm just being easily impressed.
Popularity: 1% [?]
Collecting Cool Clips
Someone at work asked me a question today about how to do something, and I thought it was a good question. Sometimes, the definition of a good question is a question I happen to know the answer to, and in this case I did.
Although I've written about this topic before, it was a while ago and since the answer might be of use to others I thought I'd respond here in my blog. That way I can just direct my colleague Bernie to the blog to get the answer, plus it might benefit a few others as well.
The question was this... "If I see a video on YouTube that would be useful to me, how can I get my own standalone copy?"
This would be useful if you needed to show that video somewhere you weren't connected to the Net, or to embed it into a slideshow for example. The videos on YouTube are in Flash Video format, (.flv) and don't play nicely with most other programs such as PowerPoint or Keynote files. (The notable exception is SmartNotebook, which works really well with them).
So, here's a solution...
- Go to YouTube and load up the video you wish to view.
- Select the URL of that page and copy it to the clipboard.
- Go to www.vixy.net and paste the URL link from YouTube into the empty URL field.
- Select your choice of output video format from the dropdown list.
- Click the Start button.
Just be a bit patient, as Vixy goes over to YouTube, finds the video, converts it, and then downloads it to your computer in the format you've selected. Too easy! Hope that helps you out Bernie...
Now, if you're the more geeky type (like me) and you use Firefox or Flock or Camino or any other Gecko-powered browser, you might like to try another method using the free Mozilla add-on called UnPlug... it's one of my favourite add-ons for the Gecko engine... Unplug let's you, well, unplug any embedded media from a webpage and save it to your computer. Of course, this means it is still in .flv format, but I then just drop it into the wonderful VisualHub application and it spits it out in whatever format I want. Noice!
BTW, this is the video we were trying to convert...
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.
Tags: mediaconversion, unplug, firefox, vixy
Popularity: 1% [?]
Getting to Inbox Zero
How many messages do you have in your inbox right now? If your answer was "too many!", you may like to check out this presentation by Merlin Mann from 43 Folders called Inbox Zero. If you get a lot of email, and you sometimes feel like you're drowning in it, then this talk could be for you. Merlin presented this to the guys at Google, who I hear live and breathe email. If these tips are able to help the Google guys better handle their email, then they can probably help you too...
Of course, most of the stuff Merlin talks about is just common sense, but remember, the most uncommon thing in the world is common sense.
Please enable Javascript and Flash to view this Flash video.
Popularity: 1% [?]






