RichardRadio

An entertaining and thought provoking talk by Ken Robinson. I have his book “The Element” if anyone at school wants to borrow it.

Whilst I support wholeheartedly moving to a more creative and project based curriculum I do have a problem with people who seem to be saying lets have no structured learning and no assessment. It is one thing to identify the desired destination it is another to work out how to get there.

I hope to post more on this later during the Easter holidays.

I felt p***ed off with University teaching methods (or lack of) when I was there 20 years ago so I have sympathy with students who find them even more outdated now.

Check out this video.  I wasn’t surprised to see  Marco Torres  was involved He’s been getting kids doing interesting things with Video for years.

http://www.teachertube.com/view_video.php?viewkey=b5c8973ade16764156be

Annoyingly I can’t get this clip to embed properly. I’ll try and fix it later.

I managed to get Riven the 1997 Point and Click adventure game working today. It only works with Quicktime 2 so you have to mess about a bit getting it to work on XP.

Rather than waste the whole day playing, I did a little bit of reading on Riven and Myst (perhaps its more famous predecessor). Seems like recently the code has been open sourced. Makes sense because the nature of the game’s simple (but stunning) interface lends itself to online playing – you could almost program the game in Powerpoint, you move between a series of photographs the interactive pieces eg. levers and doors are very simple animations.

In 1997 on a 800×600 screen the photograph quality images and beautiful soundscapes were quite a thing.

Doing a Powerpoint version of the school was a project that I dreamed up a couple of years ago for the kids at school. Now we have the gifted and talented kids turning up on Thursday night, I might have to dust that plan off.

That and keeping my eye on development of independent Riven games based on the opens source code.

See 30 Second TV advert for Riven. This animation is actually an unusual part of the game like a video reward for when you beat a level and go up to the next one. The game play is more sedate.

Wondering why my new XP install has already filled an 8GB partition, it turns out that Adobe Acrobat 9 takes up 210 MB of disk space. Astonished that a pdf reader could be so large, I googled “Adobe Reader bloat”.  For an entertaining and informative read check out http://blog.micropledge.com/2008/07/adobe-reader-9/

Foxit is a good alternative. I also downloaded Foxits pdf creator (unfortuneatly not free – the evaluation copy leaves a saved by Foxit message). When experimented printing pdfs from a couple of browsers I noticed that Safari created a 1.2 MB file whilst Opera made a 78 KB file - a factor of 15. Add that on to Safari’s slow startup time Its bye bye Safari too. What was it that made me think that apple would write good PC software? I have no idea.

Only remains to see if I can unbloat Service Pack 3

Reading Toxic Childhood produced some kind of epiphany for me. It has clarified so many of the questions I have had in my head not only about teaching but also how I view the UK and modern industrialised soceities.

It tells us why teaching is hard and getting harder. And that is surprisingly freeing. Our failures in the class room are not because we teachers are lazy or inadequate there are actually powerful forces at work in soceity that make it a difficult – but not an impossible job.

We’ve always worried and moaned about previous generations and its difficult to distinguish the messiness of forming young minds with systematic change in soceity.

Once we allow ourselves to realise we CANNOT actually hold back the tide on our own, we can look to solutions that allow us to group together to solve the problem. And a book like this is a good start. What a secondary school teacher (me) should actually do is not really the subject of the book.  Nor what school leaders should do, but I do feel that they should read it.

One small help would be to give parenting skills classes for 16 year olds. I think this could be easily achieved. But this is a small part of the solutions that Sue Palmer offers. Ideally initiatives should come from the parents. But if they do come to schools and say help us? Schools need to be ready.

I just successfully used a Gparted Live CD to resize my C: drive that I made too small over three years ago when I installed Windows XP.  I used to make the partition small (5.5 GB) for speed, XP installed in just over 3 GB at that time, but what with Service Pack 2 and Office updates I later came up against drive capacity problems.  I’ve been avoiding solving this problem for a while. Partition resizing could of course go drastically wrong.

So Phew.

Other than the stability of the drive, what was it that forced me to action? Well its a convoluted chain of events that ends in Audible audio books. My iPod died so I can’t listen to the books in the car. The only way I have is to burn the books onto CD as the iTunes plugin allows you to do.  I haven’t yet found another way of listening to these DRM protected books on my other non compliant mp3 players. The lack of drive space caused the CD burn to fail as there wasn’t enough space to create the CD audio cache.

An interesting result is that if you leave the CD in the drive iTunes will rip it again giving you, hey presto, DRM free mp3 files. So now I have 2 ways of listening in the car!

I’ve been playing with a lot of Linux distros over the summer. Once I’ve got an Mp3 player and media player that can play wmv and DVDs working and once flash video is configured, here is a list that follows of the stuff that needs to be installed.  I love the distros like Linux Mint (based on Ubuntu) that has all of the above working out of the box.

Fspot or Picassa
GPaint
Google Earth
Inkscape or scribus
Kino (best of a poor bunch on linux)
Mame
OpenArena – Quake
Skype