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Touch me there… and there.

You probably know about Single-touch screens.  If you have ever used a SmartBoard, Tablet PC or any other sort of touch sensitive device you will probably have noticed that you can only have a single point of contact.  If you try and draw on a SmartBoard in two places at once, it takes an average of the two locations and draws the line halfway between the two contact points.  Getting used to writing on a SmartBoard without touching the screen is a bit disconcerting at first but most people pretty quickly adapt.

Likewise, the reason that you can’t write on a Tablet PC with just your finger and why it requires a stylus pen is that it’s really the only way to give the screen a single contact point, allowing you to interact with the panel using the stylus tip while having it ignore the rest of your hand resting on the screen while you write.  Basically, most of the touch devices we are familiar with will tolerate a single point of contact only.

So what we really need to move forward is a multi-touch screen.  I was rather impressed when I first saw Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone at the last MacWorld Expo, especially the way he was able to interact with the screen by touching it in more than once place at a time.  The shrink and expand gestures for images were particularly fascinating; the way you can resize an image by stretching or pinching it with your thumb and finger.  Very cool stuff.

Apparently the  multi-touch technology was developed by a guy named Jefferson Y Han.  You can see a video of the touch screen technology being used here… watch it all the way through, as it starts off with just arty farty stuff, but gets into some very interesting deveopments with the image handling…

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/89sz8ExZndc" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Apparently, it seems that Han originally developed the technology and was approached by Apple to go work for them, but he declined.  Seems like Apple managed to licence the technology from him though for use in the new iPhone.  I don’t really know any further details of that deal and I’d only be speculating if I tried, but it certainly seems an interesting development and one which could bring some cool new ideas to the traditional user interface over the next couple of years.

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Moblogging

Yes, it’s yet another made-up word from the wonderful world of Web 2.0… Moblogging.

Moblogging, or mobile blogging, is all about being able to take photos on your mobile phone and blog them directly to a blogging service without the need to go via a computer as such. I bought a new Sony Ericsson K610i mobile phone recently and was quite excited to find not only a good quality camera that took a decent photo, but also an option in the photo gallery menu that said “Blog this”. Naturally it didn’t take me long to have a play with it and I can now snap a photo with the phone, and with a single menu selection it will resize the photo and upload to a blog in one fell swoop! Unfortunately, it doesn’t let you specify which blogging service you use so I can’t set it to upload to this blog, but it does do a fairly seamless job of going to a Blogger account.

The very first time you send a photo off into cyberspace, it automatically creates a new blog account on Blogger with a random name, and then sends a text message to your phone with a URL and a token code to log in. Once you log in with a Google account (which you now need anyway since Blogger went to Blogger v2 a few months ago) it asks you if you’d like to merge the newly created moblogging site with an existing Blogger site. I said yes, it chugged away for a few minutes, and in no time at all I had the phone photos up and live on a spare Blogger site that I wasn’t using anyway! Too easy!

I love this idea of moblogging, and have been uploading photos fairly regularly, in an almost Twitter-ish manner! I think I’ll keep it going… Maybe I really am an exhibitionist! And one can’t help but ponder about the possibilities for using this in the classroom.

My moblog can be found at betchablog.blogspot.com

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Questions are the Answers

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If you’ve been involved in education circles for any length of time, you would no doubt be aware of the work of Jamie Mackenzie.  Jamie is probably best known as the creator of the Webquest concept, but also does a lot of great work with higher order thinking, and the use of deep questions to deal with complexity and encourage kids to really think.  I was fortunate to be invited to attend a two day CEO workshop with Jamie Mackenzie over the last couple of days and I found it really worthwhile.  Like a lot of good information, you find yourself marvelling at the sheer simplicity of his ideas but still wondering why you’ve never thought of this stuff yourself.  It was great to meet the guy in person after having heard and read so much about his work over the years.

His workshops focussed on the use of deep questions to encourage deep thinking, with some great hands-on examples of using primary sources of information to investigate suppositional questions about interesting topics.  We also looked at a lot of great ideas for developing visual, textual and numeric literacies.  It’s amazing how things change when you use Jamie’s simple approach, especially the way all the concerns about plagiarism just become suddenly irellevant!  It’s so true that if we don’t want kids to have a cut-and-paste mentality then we as teachers have to rethink the way we ask kids to do things.

We also had a few workshops about some “hot topics” like podcasting, smartboards and Web 2.0.  It’s clear to me that there has been a major shift in committment to technology within the CEO… well, not so much a shift for the technology itself – that committment was always there even if it was not always well executed – but there was a real sense, from the top of the organisation down, that the times they are a-changin’, and that there was a real imperative for schools to change as well.  I heard a lot of good talk coming from the bigwigs of CEO, as well as a lot of enthusiasm from the teachers, so I was very encouraged to see some fundamental thought shifts about education taking place.  It was one of the reasons that I left the CEO schools a few years ago, that lack of vision.

It’s good to see it’s finally starting to appear!

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