@blazingfruit on twitter will reach me now. I’ll be using this page to let people know where I am and when as I’m teaching across three campusses (campii?) this year. Twitter won’t send updates to my phone in the UK - you need to have a Vodaphone account to receive updates – but I can send updates from my phone and they appear on the twitter page almost instantly. They cost the same as a text to a UK number according to feedback on the twitter help page that deals with sms updates.
The ‘telling people where I am today’ bit is rarely mentioned in all the hype but will actually be really useful. I wanted to use the twitter name ‘bodmas’ for obvious reasons, but some bored teenager in the US has registered that name (along with sohcahtoa and other obvious Maths words) and not used them – c’est la vie.
Alan Lew has a page about educational uses of Twitter with lots of links on his blog. The iLibrarian has a useful Twitter guide (although I just stumbled through the sign up process in about 5 minutes).
My cheapish Fujifilm J12 digital compact camera provides relatively sharp images under a variety of lighting conditions, and has a useful macro setting. The widest angle on the zoom is equivalent to approximately 35mm on a 35mm film frame, so moderate wide by my normal standards. As you can see above, not a straight line in the image! Barrel distortion of an obvious kind.
Zooming out to medium focal length (as shown by the little bar on the LCD while zooming) and walking backwards to keep the image scale about the same produces much more Cartesian lines.
The graphic above (taken on my little Fuji compact digital camera in macro mode) shows my check answer for the long multiplication. I had to actually calculate the answer as my calculator does not have enough places. I think I’ll do the lattice multiplication version as a YouTube as I have not yet seen a really long multiplication demonstrated using the lattice method.
“As an editor I knew that almost anything can be cut to 300 words; the material is somewhere in the marble, waiting to be quarried out.”
William Zinsser – I’ve just ordered the book. Next year’s study skills module for HND will have some short writing tasks that will give students time and the incentive to draft, redraft and tweak.
“For those uninitiated with Layer Tennis, the premise is simple: two players trade a Photoshop document back and forth, each player has 15 minutes to iterate on the previous “volley†however they see fit. The matches are played live on Friday afternoons, and people follow along and comment via Twitter. It really isn’t about winning or losing, which is determined by voting on Twitter, it’s more of a exercise in visual literacy and design constraints.”
Anyone trying anything like this with students? Like writing a story using a Moodle forum? I remember last year a tutorial on the final major project on a BTEC Art and Design course, the student had preserved the various states of his work as hidden layers in a massive Illustrator file. He was scanning in sketches, modifying them in Photoshop, popping them back into Illustrator as bitmap objects, annotating his thinking in text objects, then hiding the layer and implementing the drawing….
http://m.slideshare.com/ is a landing page on Slideshare for mobile phones. The resolution of each slide is reduced to 240 by 180 (still in horizontal mode). I noticed that slides with white backgrounds and sparse content did not always render properly (big black blocks on some slides obscuring the image, as if the writing was ‘missed’ and averaged when the slides were compressed). A slide deck with yellow as the background colour worked fine (in my Web browser on the laptop, not on a real phone).
As you can see, writing is reduced even further in size so we are looking at a few words per slide and very crude diagrams. Interesting way of getting content onto mobile devices though…
Just testing Magnatune’s new embed this album function. Mediva play early music with a modern twist. Just what you need when spending your Sunday hacking through the marking (again).
The only change I needed to make to the ‘embed’ code on the Magnatune page was to remove the new lines after each angle bracket. Many blogging systems interpret a new line in the code as a new paragraph or line break when they process the html, resulting in a lot of empty lines around the player. I selected the ‘play when the user presses play’ option as otherwise, your computer will attempt to play the audio when the page loads – I have always found that to be intrusive and potentially resource draining! The ‘custom’ size adjustments do not change the text size alas.
