July 2006 - Posts
I bought Electroplankon for the Nintendo DS over the weekend. Electroplankon isn't a really game - Nintendo have marketed it as a musical toy, but has been also been described as touchable media art, an interactive art installation and music creation software.
It was developed by Japenese artist Toshio Iwai (see
for an example of more of his work).
This will probably sound a little strange, but it works by allowing you to interact with electroplankon to produce music and visual images. That sentence doesn't really do it justice though... you really need to play it (or watch it been played) to experience it. This Google Video is fairly poor quality but gives you the general idea.
TI guess this is probably the sort of thing that would appeal to me, I've made electronic music for a long time (mostly before my kids were born though!) , and can sit for hours playing with the appregiator on my Sequential Circuits six-trak analogue synthesiser for hours on end. What suprised me about Electroplankton though was that my whole family wanted to play. My wife never shows any interest in games normally, and my two year old daughter fought everyone off and was happily making music and giggly at the plankton.
I think Electronplankon is one of the most orginal and fun mass-market software released on any platform, and a great way to get help very young children start to enjoy music making. I also think it will be my most used DS 'game' by a long way - almost worth buying a DS for on its own (make sure it's a DS lite - it's much better on the bright screen).
I'm trying to work out what the copyright rules are (is it my music?) - if I resolve that I'll post some created with it.
There's an interesting article in the Guardian today - What is the 1% Rule? that says:
"It's an emerging rule of thumb that suggests that if you get a group of 100 people online then one will create content, 10 will "interact" with it (commenting or offering improvements) and the other 89 will just view it."
That sounds about right to me, and fits in with the sorts of use I'm hoping for as a minimum from myCommunity - our blogging, forum and photosharing community. If we focus on our full time students (those that use our services the most), it means that we'll maybe get 30 authors and 300 interactors. If that does happen then I think the service will work well - we should get enough variation to get some sort of vibrancy, but it would be great if we can get more than that, particularly for the photos.
Nintendo have produced a Web browser for the Nintendo DS, which should be release in this country later this year. Here's a wonderfully Japanese video demoing it...
http://touch-ds.jp/mfs/dsbrowser/intro.html
I think the dual screen could make it the best solution for mobile Wi-fi browsing - the two screens can be used together to over come the problems with small screen browsing, either by combining together to make a big screen, or even better, by using one as a map of the whole page and the other a close-up of the bit you are looking at.
Our instant messaging service is now available to any member of the University.
For those that are interested, its a Jabber based service running on WildFire server. Wildfire is an open source application.
It will be interesting to see what the take up of the service is, and how students and staff use it (or not) compared to a commercial service (eg MSN Messenger).
The main advantage of our own service is that it is a very safe environment, and you can be fairly sure that the person you are talking to is who they say they are.
If you are a member of the University and want to give it a go, download the Spark client from here: http://www.jivesoftware.org/ . The address of the service is im.newport.ac.uk, and you use your normal username and password. Obviously you need someone to talk to - if you haven't got anyone else then speak to me - mwebb02@im.newport.ac.uk (or you can search in the directory).
Enjoy!
Passed to me by a colleague, and worth passing on if you haven't seen it before...!
Count every " F" in the following text:
FINISHED FILES ARE THE RE
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTI
FIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS...
Post a comment with the answer...
Some interesting comments in various blogs about a report on the use of VLEs in Universities by IM+M:
http://www.immagic.com/eLibrary/GENERAL/IMM/I060616F.pdf
This was picked up by Michael Feldstein from the SUNY Learning Network and John Dale from Warwick.
The report shows that the market share for commerical VLEs is declining (down from 93% in 2001 to 57% in 2005), whereas home grown VLEs (like our own) has grown from 7% to 30% in the same time period. Open source solutions have an 11% market share. This is a massive change in the market place!
It's well worth reading John Dale's comments - I pretty much agree with what he says in that post.
It's good to see that more and more people seem to be agreeing with our approach - ie provide the tools that your institution needs to support teaching and learning, rather than buy a monolithic VLE application and fit your teaching round it.
We've decided to make BlogBridge our RSS reader of choice. We'll be installing it on all of our student computers over the summer, and making it available to staff.
An RSS reader allows you to read all your favourite blogs and news sites from one place by making use of technology called RSS feeds. The reader automatically checks for updates, so there is no more trudging round sites to see if anything has changed.
There are loads of free RSS Readers available, so it was a tough choice, but we went for BlogBridge as it meet all our key critera:
- Friendly user interface
- Ability to access your feeds at home or at work.
- Available for Windows and Mac.
You need to sign up to the BlogBridge service if you want your feeds to be available from any location, but this is a quick and painless excercise.
It's also got the added advantage of integrating with Del.icio.us - a service that allows you share your web bookmarks on line. That might sound pointless but in practice it is great - I'll talk more about Del.icio.us and my success (or otherwise) in getting other colleagues to us it another time.
We've just invested in a (relatively!) small VMWare setup. VMWare allows you to run multiple virtual servers on a single physical server.
To get us started we've ordered an DL580 server with two processors, 8GB of RAM and about 1TB of storage, along with VMWare ESX. VMWare ESX runs without any host operating system, providing better performance than the free version.
We've bought this for two reasons.
The first, rather practical reason, is that we have a number of niche server installations running on old equipment, or sometime even workstations, which are hard to manage and take up a lot of space. With this set up we should be able to remove these.
The second, and more important reason, is to support our aim of being an agile, flexible service. We'll be able to try out and deploy specialist applications regardless of operating system (Windows, Linux) without needing to aquire anymore hardware. If the applications outgrow our VMWare server we can either expand the VMWare hardware or move it to its own server, depending on the application. This relatively small investment should have a real postive impact on the services we provide to our users.
I'd like to thank Alastair King, Technical Director of ICM Computing, who gave an excellent presentation on this subject at our Gregynog IT conference.
We've just upgraded to Community Server Professional - the main advantage of this for us is that now any member of the University (staff and students) can login and start blogging and contributing to forums.
We've still got a bit of work to do on the aesthetics etc, but it you are a University member and want to give it a try login with your normal username and password and have a go. It would be great to get some feedback, either via this post, or direct to me: michael.webb@newport.ac.uk .