bodmas blog

The Web site for the exhibition is a nicely produced Flash based series of slide shows. Advertised on bus stops and lamp posts in Birmingham.

The MS Internet Explorer 7 beta 3 runs (well, perhaps more sort of jogs) on my 700Mhz Dell L400 laptop. I had to do the software update to get the .NET framework and a few other things before downloading the beta package itself. I think Microsoft verified that my copy of Windows XP SP2 was genuine about 5 times. I particularily cherish having my OS verified to get to the download link for MS Internet Explorer beta 7, and then when the installer runs… yup, it verifies the OS again. None of this pinko Open Source pass copies round stuff here!

You get tabbed browsing and RSS feeds in a side pane… sort of like Netscape SeaMonkey. There is a cute Expose like Quick Tabs view that will show minature thumbnails of the state of all the loaded tabs: I suppose that is a preview of a Vista feature. The Page drop down menu has a Zoom feature – the page including graphics can be zoomed up to 400% and this will help when projecting Web sites. The familiar Text Size control appears not to scale text within any kind of CSS DIV even ones that do not use pixel based sizes; unstyled pages can have text size changed.

When the final version ships a lot of my colleages on College managed systems will be able to subscribe to RSS feeds that they choose and prioritise. Intranet by RSS? Why not; have a server pushing out XML and then teachers can tune into the feeds they need – instant personalisation. I just hope that the final version has the menu bar at the top of the window like most other Windows applications.

Some of the HTML rendering is a bit strange (including the search box on this site when using the Kubrick theme) but we are used to MS having fun with CSS standards. The MS Internet Explorer beta replaces your MS Internet Explorer 6 installation – you can’t do side by side testing of versions on sites other than by having a second computer.

Small is 800 by 600 and large is 1024 by 768 pixels.

• Sept 06 | Small | Large
• Oct 06 | Small | Large
• Nov 06 | Small | Large
• Dec 06 | Small | Large

If you don’t like my images, try the Phenology Society wallpapers! I find their excellent images have the calendar placed so as to obscure the task bar on Windows XP at work. Hence 10 minutes work with the cal command on terminal and Photoshop.

The Reboot :: BBC competition invited people to re-design the BBC Web site, both regarding appearance and the kinds of services offered. Predictably, the winning design Is White With Lots Of Space And Uses Small Fonts And Pastel Colours – the usual Web 2.0 look – complete with a tag cloud at the bottom left. The winners called themselves FF Ecosystem.

The interesting bit (both to me, and more importantly for the winners, the judges) was the idea of allowing users to see how other people view the site content. The designers would include tools that would enable site users to view the selections, choices and content as mixed by other people. For me as a teacher, I’m thinking that I can have a BBC View set up for a class that emphasises content needed for the unit or syllabus and students can then further re-mix this with the views for other units or classes….

Glenn Gould wanted Columbia Records to issue ‘kits’ of recordings of Bach and other composers so that the listeners could choose between different interpretations of the same passage and build their own versions. 35 years later we may be getting close to that with news and other written content.

The image above was taken from the Reboot :: BBC Web site and resized to fit the width of my template. If any interested party has any objections to my use of this image just let me know and I’ll pull it down

“Does the Livebox work with Apple Macs?
Our wireless adaptor isn’t compatible with Apple Macs but you should be able to connect to the Livebox using your AirPort. We’re sorry we don’t provide technical support for Apple computers and Livebox – we hope to do this shortly.”

Two changes of branding in 18 months, and major redundancies, but this message has stayed the same. Orange/Wanadoo/Freeserve won’t upsell to me until the message changes, and I don’t care how tasteful the Web site is

“E-learning is learning facilitated and supported through the use of ICT. It may involve the use of computers, interactive whiteboards, digital cameras, the internet, the college intranet, virtual learning environments and electronic communication tools such as email, discussion boards, chat facilities and video conferencing. E-learning should form part of the overall teaching and learning strategy for courses. There should be appropriate references to e-learning in schemes of work, lesson plans, assignments, course reviews and staff development plans. An overall strategy for e-learning should be supported by senior managers.”

From Nigel Ecclesfield’s review the Ofsted Inspector’s Handbook from the standpoint of ICT and e-learning signposted from Seb Schmoller’s fortnighly mailing. Many people regard this view as so wide as to be less than useful. My take on this can be summarised below;

• Blogs in education
• What is a VLE?
• Online learning overview
• Blogs and VLEs
• Five things to do with a forum (subtext: I can use generic Web tools to teach outside the institutional framework if needed)

But your mileage will probably vary. I became aware how much institutional history has to do with all this recently at a local Moodle user’s meeting; some Colleges are using the Intranet and MIS data to write records to the Moodle MySQL database, and other Colleges are using Moodle as an Intranet!

I planned and produced the simple animation above to consoldiate my understanding of the material in Lessons 2 and 3 of the Flash Journalism book. As you can see I need more practice with the graphics editing tools, Lesson 1, and yes there is space above the animation for text. The animation loops once and then stops, reload the page if you missed it.

I think I have worked out the timeline and layers, although I am still a bit in the dark about symbol editing. If you look at the layers in the timeline, the pairs of chevrons up and right and the blue lines are examples of using instances of symbols in separate layers to allow independent animation. When I imported the grid background symbol from the Lesson 2 FLA file, I found that I could not export the completed animation as compatible with Flash Player 5. Deleting the background layer solved the problem.

The plan for this work of art was hacked up on a sheet of A4 - the point is I think you will need some kind of plan of the sequence you need on paper before you start. I just sketched the sequence of images and listed the objects I thought I would need. That helps to make lists of the symbols and layers needed for the independent animations. Then I just sketched a time line to give me some idea of what happens when.

Next comes lessons 4 and 5, buttons and then making the buttons do something.