The ninjawords on-line dictionary is fast and carries no adverts. Definitions are short and many have usage examples provided. There is an iPhone app, and the page is mobile friendly. I’m putting it on the front of our Moodle.

Definitions contain hyper links to other defined words so you can play the game where you look up a word then look up the words used to define the word…

#! /bin/sh
curl  --basic --user "username:password"
        --data-ascii "status=`echo $@|tr ' ' '+'`"
          "http://twitter.com/statuses/update.xml" > /dev/null

Update of something I found from 2007, when twitter was using a different API by the look of it.

The curl command line should all be on one line, no line breaks. I’ve had to add line breaks here so the line does not disappear into the sidebar. The redirect to /dev/null simply suppresses the 20 lines of xml that are returned by twitter when the twit is received.

If I used the short version of the—user option to curl, and if I put up with the xml output, I could have a script that posts to twitter that I could tweet.

FreeMind by Jörg Müller and a team of contributors is an open source mind mapping tool written in Java. It is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

The package makes Buzan style mind maps with some repositioning of nodes and a variety of symbols. You can ‘fold’ nodes with a mouse click and insert a new node at the currently selected node by pressing the Ins button on the keyboard. FreeMind 0.8.1 (the current Windows release) can add notes to nodes. The only format that seems to export notes with the nodes is the OpenOffice Writer export format, and this produces an .sxw file. The resulting file gives an error when importing into OpenOffice 3.1, however the map does load as an outline view with the notes in place.

Because FreeMind is written in Java, I’m hoping I can get a copy to run off a USB stick on IT room student computers at College. That way, we can have students producing mind maps.

“An organization that wins by exercising power starts to lose the ability to win by doing better work. And it’s not fun for a smart person to work in a place where the best ideas aren’t the ones that win.”
Paul Graham, via daring fireball

I’m getting serious about mobile platforms. I need to decide if I’m buying an iPhone or an Android. A lot of younger colleagues and friends love their iPhones (go for it Jonathan), but I’m leaning towards an Android at present for the openness. We can ignore all the app store hassle by using web apps that run in the safari sandbox to deliver learning experiences, plus Moodle Mobile.

I’ll squeeze the knowledge I can out of the HTC running Mobile Windows 6 I was lent by the college, I’m still learning about mobile computing. Watch this space.

Paul Graham’s essay suggests ignoring market share and focussing on what developers use. I need eyeballs, market share, access to use the mobile platform for learning.

Students on science degrees usually learn how to present findings in the form of a ‘poster’. A science poster is a special kind of wall display invented so everyone who attends a conference can present their results even though there is not enough time for them all to speak. MS PowerPoint (and OpenOffice Impress) can be used to make posters easily – just use a single slide resized to A1 or A0 depending on the size of your poster. Then set up columns using text boxes and import (or draw) some images.

Must

Below are some links to places where you can find out more about scientific posters.

The handout I used in the session today – (Leinonen, 2007)

A Swarthmore College page on scientific poster design, with a downloadable PPT Column based template already set up, and an alternative template based on a central graphic with boxes.

North Carolina State University provides a very full web site on the principles of scientific poster design. Excellent material but will take you a bit of time to read through. If you want to use poster design with your students, it would be good to read this material first – you will get plenty of ideas for activities out of it.

Should

morguefile.com is a Web site where you can obtain free large resolution images. The strange name comes from newspaper practice. The ‘morgue file’ was a filing cabinet where journalists kept photos and pieces of writing that were not actually used in the newspaper.

A periodic table of visualisation. This is an unusual site that shows examples of lots of different visual metaphors. You could make use of a visual metaphor to help you structure the information on your poster.

Could

You don’t have to use PowerPoint if you know another package well and prefer to use that. To ensure that the result can be printed on a College printer, export your completed product as a PDF file. Use ‘embedded fonts’ if you are using more than Arial/Times New Roman/Courier or the Web safe fonts, at least I think that will work!

General PowerPoint tips: One Hour PowerPoint looks like quite a nice page.

Something completely different: This has nothing to do with scientific posters, but is another different way of using PowerPoint. Pecha-Kucha is the Japanese word for ‘chit-chat’. A Pecha-Kucha presentation has 20 slides and each slide is shown for 20 seconds. The slides are usually purely visual, just photos with a bit of text on top. The presenter has to talk over the slides in a structured way. People organise Pecha-Kucha nights, and the phenomenon has taken off among designers and other Web types. Planning a Pecha-Kucha presentation would help a student focus on the essentials of a topic and cut away the extraneous material. I’ll screen cast a Pecha-Kucha presentation about e-learning and you can see what you think…

I’ve already blogged about the Most Important Key When Presenting with PowerPoint. The next most useful is the B key. Press the B key while presenting, and the screen goes black – your audience have nothing else to look at except you, and that means that you can get a hearing no matter how zappy your slides are. Pressing B again unblanks the screen, restoring your slides. The W key blanks the screen to white, and it strikes me that this could be handy with an interactive whiteboard (make notes on points raised by the students and save them as a notebook/pdf file).

Pressing F1 while presenting brings up the dialogue box above. More detail at Dave Paradi’s PowerPoint blog.

Computers have windows and some way of pointing at things on the display. Mobile devices are moving over to touch sensitive displays with ‘gestural’ commands. Here is some pre-history…

Ivan Sutherland’s SketchPad demonstrated by Alan Kay. Sutherland’s PhD supervisor what Claude Shannon, and he in turn supervised Kay’s research. Alan Kay contributed to the development of modern GUIs.

Douglas Engelbart fronted a famous demonstration of an interactive text editor with file management. The demo was filmed but the sound track was picking up both the direct microphone signal and (somehow) the echo from the hall, so the voice sounds rather strange and ‘spooky’. Engelbart is basically demonstrating a system about as sophisticated as NotePad (but with paragraph level folding) and the ‘mouse’ has 5 buttons.

I’ve linked to videos of Engelbart’s demonstrations before, but now the videos are on YouTube as well.

A spin on Godin’s (the bald one) first few sentences: Running a class blog for students gets the teacher searching for really good Web links that fit that particular lesson’s content and that help students understand it. As Dave C (the chemist blogger) has worked out, you can use those links next year and in other contexts. It takes 20 minutes a week.

Via Seth Godin’s blog.

A colleague draws a short line at the edge of the whiteboard recording the image of the window frame when the Sun shines in the classroom window and then carries on. As he is an enthusiastic and engaging teacher, the students’ attention is drawn away from the mark. The students are always amazed at how far the image of the window has moved 10 or 20 minutes later. He reminds them that we, the desks and chairs, and the building are on the surface of a planet that rotates once each 24 hours. In the short silence that follows, you can hear the reference frames shift.

The sundial was showing a few minutes before XII (the shadow of the gnomon was thick enough to cover 8 minutes worth of the scale) at 1304 BST. Worcester is about 2 and a quarter degrees West, so it should be about 8 minutes early compared to UT, and we are on British Summer Time at present, so that explains the hour. Not bad for a small metal plate and a simple gnomon. If my watch stays set correctly, I can estimate my latitude to a fraction of a degree or so by looking at a sundial (360 degrees in 24 hours, so 15 degrees in one hour, if a sundial is 4 minutes early it is one degree West).

Google Earth gives the latitude and longitude of the red spot (on the tree, but as photographed by the satellites in April 2007) as 52° 11’ 18.34” North and 2° 13’ 16.37” West. As the cloister garden is a couple of seconds or so of latitude across, and as the Google Earth images appear to be projected onto a slanting plane, I’m somewhat dubious about the last few decimal places!

A simple sum: circumference of the Earth is about 24000 miles, so each degree of latitude is about 67 miles (66 and two thirds by cancelling), so one minute of arc is about a mile and tenth. So a second of arc is about (1760 + 176) ÷ 60 or 32 yards. Google Earth is claiming 2 decimal places of arc second, a change of one digit in the last decimal place represents a distance of about 12 inches!

It is difficult for us now to understand the symbols that surrounded people in the decades after 1000 AD. The ‘great chain of being’ that provided meaning for them is explained in the history books but we can’t think like they did. Are we changing again? Will the Web and the services built on top of the ubiquitous network change the meaning of our streets and buildings?

Twitter includes a 140 character limit on each twit. Sounds like an ideal constraint to me. Challenge to students: summarise today’s lesson in one twit. Provide a copy of the blank above to each student…

Paul Constant has written a review of twitter as a series of twitter posts (via daringfireball.net). Now, what I want to get going is a short story told by 5 to 7 twitterers taking turns…

...as anyone who has looked at my twitter page will have guessed, I’m using twitter simply as a way of saying where I am each day. I’ll try a bit of the location specific writing over the holiday. Photos on flickr.