Whilst playing the computer game Spore by EA games, I documented part of my 'evolutionary' journey with some screen shots.   Last year I managed to assemble a nice collection whilst playing the computer game Oblivion. I wish I had thought of this earlier and taken more.

This is the space stage. The costume that I have built here seems clash of Roman Centurion with Buck Rogers influences. Good evolutionary advice from my son was to keep the eyes together and say away from eye stalks as it makes wearing hats and helmets a pain. Perhaps I should have also lost the tusks and wings.

Whilst some licence is taken with the relative sizes of the planets, it is really nice to see in this game how they depict the different habitation space orbits around a star with red, green and blue zones, how comet tails point away from the star and how the shadows and light change as planets slowly rotate and orbit the star. Landing on the surface of a planet, it was nice to see that they mirror this dance with the objects in the sky.

You are permitted to smile at the space ship that I built for myself to zoom around the universe and my jugging to get a good picture angle. It took a while to build this particular model inspired by the USS Enterprise from Star Trek. I even managed to include an set of flashing navigation lights by building the main saucer around an embedded police light bar.

Using a SETI tool and some huge star maps, I enjoyed looking around for intelligent life. At one point I was defending myself from some hostile ancient technology hiding in the remains of their ruined city. OK, I don't blame these little bots for their irritation as I try to position myself for a good screenshot angle whilst testing my small laser on them. This wasn't the only time I was distracted by camera angles. Took me ages to line up a shot of the sun rising in the front of my spaceship because the planet keep orbiting the sun and rotating (as they do).

You can view a slideshow of my Spore game pictures here.

It is interesting to track the 40th anniversary of the humans first setting foot on the Moon with the NASA Apollo 11 mission that is being re-enacted in real time, delayed by 40 years, using Twitter.

Whilst browsing an interesting podcast describing why the astronauts could not sleep on the moon I bumped into this wikipedia page about Jack Garman and the spacecraft computer system error 1202 that nearly aborted the landing

It took some quick thinking by the support staff back on Earth to figure this out and again emphasises that like many missions before, this one was a team effort and win for the team.

After helping a friend to reflash the firmware on his HDD television recorder, we confirmed the completion of this task with this odd message SUCC. (yes, he insisted that we do it all by the manual)

The meaning escapes me. Perhaps it is a last cry of pain from the old flash memory as the depolarized electrons spiral off and into the ether. Perhaps it is a message to confirm our success.

Who really knows?

(or cares)

Here is a cool OpenSource, cross platform application mentioned on the eChalk list by a University of Washington mathematician to replace the Maths software used in education and research with a free, open-source version. Around than 100 mathematicians around the world are collaborating to develop the tool.

"SAGE for studying a huge range of mathematics, including algebra, calculus, elementary to very advanced number theory, cryptography, numerical computation, commutative algebra, group theory, combinatorics, graph theory, and exact linear algebra."

http://uwnews.washington.edu/ni/article.asp?articleID=38459
http://www.sagemath.org/

From what I can see the home page slideshow, students can write Python scripted programs with SAGE that combine serious mathematics with anything else and view the output with a Firefox web browser. We have Python and Firefox on our computer image deployed at school, I must check out the value of SAGE for our maths staff.

Reminds me of learning Fortran as a biochemist. Fun days with real science, huge computers and lots of punched cards. :-)

I have been reading reports that DELL computers, Hewlett Packard, and Google will all become greenhouse neutral.

Speaking of recycling, this splendid photograph was shared by Craig Blair (North Lake Senior Campus, WA Australia) and I have been given permission to reproduce it again here.

This collection of computer hardware spans over two decades and much of it is still in use or made usable with new operating systems. This is more than just an effort to catalog and classify junk, it is a great historical sounding board for his students. It raises some good questions about the pandemic of afluenza sweeping our word, the power of computer recycling and the value of digital archives. Bravo Craig.

He indicates that his collection has the following items:

• Apple Blueberry G3 - student find. Replaced HD and works well - for in class use
• MacPlus - I found - works a treat... just reinstalling the OS at the moment - for in class use
• Apple G3 - Staff find. not a lot except the 1.5 GB of RAM - haven't got much further with this yet.
• Pentium III 900 MHz - student find. put in 20 Gig harddrive, installed ubuntu and gave to senior for surfing the net... very happy customer
• Pentium IV 1.2GHz - I found. dual monitor card. 2 hardrives, 2 monitors (17 inch). Works just fine... sitting at my house as my only Desktop PC in the house... (very rarely used...)
• Pentium P166 - student find - cd burner, windows 98. very quick machine... given to a student from lower socio-economic area who now uses it for recording music.... etc... very very happy customer
• Pentium III - I found - 800 MHz - came with DVD player, CD burner. Reinstalled Ubuntu and use this machine for burning ubuntu onto students external harddrives
• Commodore 64 - donated by a prac student
• XT - something I have had for awhile
• Microbee - something I have had for awhile

Graham proudly showed me his Apple notebook computer following his upgrade to Leopard. Although nervous about losing any of his files, he was quite pleased with some of the new effects when browsing for files and all up, felt that the upgrade he purchased was good value for money.

Oddly enough, I had also upgraded my computer but it didn't cost me a cent. Following this prompt from the upgrade manager on my Ubuntu desktop, I started the upgrade on my computer operating system to Gutsy Gibbon.

After all the necessary bits were automatically downloaded, the installation went quite well. The kids helped out by pressing the enter key to move onto the next step.

It is now running Ubuntu version 7.10 and I am really curious to see what has changed :-)

An interesting bit of technology was mentioned on the NewScientist and the BBC news of an experiment, demonstrating how radiation could be used to power and recharge devices.

I will admit to being curious and cautious how energy efficient this might be .. there is little point in charging your mobile phone whilst warming up the planet with more stray radiation. After a little more research and I found out thatany energy not transferred to laptop is re-absorbed by source antenna. This is good news as I generally like to avoid resonating at 10 MHz whilst sitting next to an RF transmitter in my home.

I do have one curious thought if this technology is adapted for wider use in schools. Not only will it kindly recharge any laptops in a staff room, it could probably recharge the mobile phones left in the nearby locker bay, mp3 players left in pockets and any game devices hidden out of sight in student pockets.

Let the power run free. :-)

In the Melbourne Science Museum there is an analogue computer that plays the game naughts and crosses. I have fond memories of playing this as a child when it was located in the Melbourne Museum when it was located in the middle of the city of Melbourne, next to the state library. Back then, a visit to the city with my friends always included a quick detour and excursion to play with this computer.

We were not really trying play this game to beat the computer. Most kids figure out that nobody can win at playing naughts and crosses if they they make the right first moves. Even the computer WOPR quickly figured this out in the 1983 film War Games.

Instead, whilst watching the flash of lights and clicking of circuit breakers, I was trying to figure out how a panel of circuits could compute a response and make a decision then display it on this crude interface.

Here you can see an analogue computer slideshow that I assembled after a recent visit. Kind of ironic that it was relocated to the kids science area, close to where my children now play.

With the literal explosion of virtual worlds that we now take for granted, it is easy to forget how far we have come with computers and their interface today. Kolabora explores this further in his blog, asking what we would do if we could have built these features into the operating systems of 20 years ago, drawing attention to then FLOSS operating system Croquet.

I rather like the following quote that he includes in this blog entry:

"Existing operating systems are like the castles that were owned by their respective Lords in the Middle Ages. They were the centers of power, a way to control the population and threaten the competition. Sometimes, a particular Lord would become overpowering, and he would declare himself as King. This was great for the King. And not too bad for the rest of the nobles, but in the end -- technology progressed and people started blowing holes in the sides of the castles. The castles were eventually abandoned" -David A. Smith

As WOPR said in War Games "A strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

Our school council supported the notion that college needs to consider the sustainable disposal of old hardware. Tossing it into the domestic rubbish or dump master was no longer an acceptable option. If there is no residual value, I can now pay for computer equipment to be recycled instead of pretending that the heavy metals do not exist and tossing it into landfill. We do a shuttle run to a merchant that disassembles the broken hardware.

If we accept the notion that the supplier has a responsibility in the waste cycle, then schools need to consider the final destination for their old hardware. We already see this with printer cartridges and mobile phones. The prickly issue for me now is, should we take back old or obsolete hardware that was donated or sold in good faith to students? If we don't accept this responsibility, then we have to accept the practice of dumping toxic electronic waste in third world countries that don't have in place either the technology or systems for correct disposal.

I must admit, when a student turned up with a "useless old computer" that refused to work, we managed to build a working Xubuntu Linux system he took back home as a second family computer. In an increasingly disposable world, the notion of "No hardware left behind" is appealing. Golly, I even remember many years ago whenJohn Widmer managed to get the Internet running on some donated IBM XT computers.

I am greatly pleased and encouraged by the efforts by Kevork to spend those extra hours in his own time to build up a batch of working systems and taking responsibility for its decomissioning, instead of tossing it all into the dump master. The return may be small but the investment in the future is priceless. Well done :-) Our sister school in the Cook Islands doesnt want any more junk as throwing it into the sea is no longer an option. They are just looking to extend the life of the hardware they buy and the hardware they have. This is why they are exploring stuff like Xubuntu, where we picked up the "No hardware left behind" message.      http://www.xubuntu.org/

Chap from GreenPC that I spoke to indicated that they established an Info Timor enterprise in a tin shed and trained six East Timorese students for six months in Australia to run a purpose-built IT Centre is being designed to allow more Ubuntu Certificate-level training to be delivered. I was really proud to read what they are doing to help empower a community with this free libre open source software and the donated hardware.
     http://tulundili.infoxchange.net.au This link to the computer recycling Byteback page from Boroondara council is fantastic and an outstanding example of what every city council should be striving for. Sounds like a good letter campaign that IT student can initiate to encourage a similar service with their local council. The guess the thing we need to emphasis to the college admin is that it is now never an option to fill the school dump master with toxic eWaste. If it costs the school money and time to correctly dispose of this waste, then so be it. I might use some of the new suggestions posted here to update the VITTA eWaste position statement
     http://www.vitta.org.au/pubs/infonet/view.php?id=250 (may need VITTA website login)

Interesting article in The Age. The modern young geek seems content to socialise online, rather than seek physical company of fellow geeks. link

Young people live life faster," says Lyn Goodall, president of the Melbourne PC User Group. "They don't have a need or a wish to know what is going on under the bonnet of their computer."

Another Age newspaper article considered how Technology has changed the family relationships at home.  This does me give a clue into the mind of what might now motivate my students.

For a different perspective, I read in a New Scientist Technology blog of a programmer who explained why computer games need emotions. He then justified why he is trying to program this into his next game and where this might lead. The Blog entry includes a brief video.

"If we really want to introduce a new level of innovation into computer games, then things like emotion are important .. books and films show just about every emotion"

This image was taken whilst playing 'Khalid Slayer', a locally produced modification of a third-party computer game called Vampire Slayer that was played over the network at our computer club. The code for this was based on the Half Life game engine by Valve Software that in turn, uses a heavily modified version of the Quake engine. Mods layered upon mods.

This game turned a futuristic, first-person shooter game turned into a fast paced, multi-player vampire hunt including gothic organ music, movie horror screams and wooden stakes. Secondary modifications we made included new wall pictures, sound effects, tweaked character skins and hilarious posters.

Much of this kind of reconstruction of a virtual world is now regularly seen in 3D online games such as SecondLife. Although the graphics were simple and crude, the play was generally fast and funny enough to keep the game fun. Since it was first built in the year 2000. It has become a bit of a tradition to regularly try it out again and fun to reintroduce this mod to a new generation of students.

The pictures were taken during the reunion of a group that regularly played the game each week many years ago. This particular image is a bit of a giggle and play with the Buffy character in the then popular television series. You can view a Khalid Slayer slideshow including a silly group photograph that took ages to organise, vampires lacking vitamin D and some funny posters. These were all 'photographed' whilst playing the game at various points and pressing the print screen button. Enjoy. :-)

A while ago on the National Planning Committee for an ACEC 1997 conference held in Brisbane, I had the good fortune to work with Margaret Lloyd at QUT. I was interested to read of the following competition that she has just posted onto the Internet for students to design, build and race land yachts. I had the chance to briefly meet up with her at the ACEC2006 conference.

CSIRO do something very similar with their Bronze, Silver and Gold CREST awards to inspire creativity. When I launched this at Glen Wavlerley SC over a decade ago, the projects motivated many kids to take up a career in science / technology. I recall that former ECAWA president and leading technology educator, Mark Webber had the idea of building and racing cars made from CDROM motors and junk that he called Falcon Fliers.  Students negotiate a project, given a swag of ideas and resources, scope and guidance to help realise their work.

On the long drive back from the Benella GameMaker workshop with Maggie I was thinking though the seed of an idea. Later that weekend the ASISTM cluster has released me to run something on a small scale this week. I would like to try it again during ICT week in June.

I now think that the state competition model that we should be working towards should involve a six hour programming boot-camp incorporating web2 elements of cooperation and collaboration with a constructionist flavor of just in time learning. It will require little management overhead to organise or buckets of funding to run. It can work regardless of the programming language used, gender of the team members or their programming experience.

If the journey is more important than the destination, then this competition vehicle could best help teachers to organise and showcase what students can do by working together to program a small game, solve a simple problem that can help the us make the world a better place to live in. If we hold it on a specific competition day, there is no reason why we a chat room / forum / skypecast / online review system could not be set up in partnership with a group like OSV where some programmers can be to be on  hand for advice, reviews or suggestions.

All we need to do in advance is prepare a planning kit, resource guide and audit sheet, something we can even sell on with the certificates to recover some of our costs. The projects are later audited by the teachers who check the things done by the team against a a criteria sheet (something I did with the crest awards) then later issue certificate. Whilst this will mean dropping the key competitive thrust of our current programming award, it can still lend itself to a team spirit of innovation and creativity where any school team that participates can become winners.

I welcome your feedback.

Following the installation of GameMaker version 7 on my computer system, this program alert flashed up on my screen and the program terminated. As with my previous tests with GameMaker on Linux that i have reported back to my ASISTM cluster, the computer is running Ubuntu Feisty Fawn 7.10 and this software is running on Linux with the support of Wine.

The software installs fine but reports this alert message "XtreamLok Alert. DLL loading problem or Debugger detected or Integrity violated" then stops.

XtreamLok is apparently some kind of copyright protection software that prevents software being reverse engineered. Hardly in my case as I was just trying install and run GameMaker version 7 on my computer. Was I doing something wrong, was this a threat, was I being warned, whose integrity was being violated?

I wondered if others are aware of this feature that added by YoYo Games to GameMaker and saw no mention on their website although it seemed from this GameMaker forum discussion that the software is potentially spyware or at the very least, part of the DRM movement that threatens to prosecute me if I look at or circumvent it.

YoYo games of course has right to protect their intellectual property including GameMaker software. I still have some serious security and privacy reservations about undocumented features, spyware, DRM by the back door or loss of freedom. When the doors to a house are welded tightly closed and the alarm is turned on, trust me only goes so far.

I have promptly removed GameMaker from this test computer. Commercial, closed source software is now making me feel increasingly nervous.

Phil posted an interesting question on the Moodle mailing list about using tablet computers with interactive electronic whiteboards that got me thinking.  Yesterday at the VITTA conference I have heard Don mention about using a classroom set of cheaper graphics tablets, shared whiteboard software and a conventional projection system. This would work in a similar way to this flash based, ImaginationCubed collaborative drawing too.

I had a chance to see Elluminate, a slick Java solution. Whilst free for up to 3 users, it seems sadly overpriced when you consider any enterprise wide. A quick dig about the web showed me some cool open source software whiteboards under development that could be used in the classroom such as HiveBoard, DimDim or Drawboard.

There are a couple of different groups working to integrate these free tools DimDim into Moodle and another group at Cornell that has undertaken an even more challenging Moodle and Second Life integration with Drawboard and other project at San Jose State University.

All up, this is fun collaborative stuff that doesn't lock users or presenters into using a particular vendor or hardware system :-)

Last cluster meeting of our ASISTM cluster to consider our achievements and future plans, held at ACMI, Melbourne. Using Skype, Bill was able to listen in and connect to us remotely, speaking from the two speakers at the end of the table.

Here we are showing off a prototype model for the OLPC project whilst considering ways that we can support this initiative by involving Australian schools. The OLPC notebook computers are the cool looking, green and white units scattered across the board room table. The group was engaged with the idea of all Australian children having such a computer and what we could do to work towards this goal.

I am now interested in exploring further the XO system, Sugar interface and eToys software.

We are reinventing many aspects of business and schooling with a focus on networks. It imperative for teachers to understand and objectively enage with the new technologies that underpin these new distributed networks. It is an issue that our ASISTM cluster has been working through.

Glen Boreham, the new CEO and managing director of IBM, points out that Australia's information and communications technology needs to become more competitive to take advantage of new ways of working and doing business. Organisations are being replaced by highly responsive, globally resourced enterprises that do not think of themselves as organisations but as networks. We see this happening with the development of Linux, open source, eBay, Secondlife, blogging and many other web2 and other folksomony initiatives.

Glen notes that the skills of the future will come at the intersection of the disciplines of IT, science, engineering, mathematics and business yet sadly, the Australian education system fall short of supporting both a fusion of these skills and misses out from our fantastic first hand knowledge of other cultures and languages. The window of opportunity is fast closing. (March 2007 National Press Club address, Computerworld - March 2087- IBM CEO urges Education Revolution)

So what is going on in the minds of our students?The president of the Melbourne PC User Lyn Goodall group recently observed from their aging membership profile that young people don't have much of an interest in understanding the workings of technology. Rather, they seem to be increasingly motivated by the socialisation that happens online than the physical company of others. (The Age - bunch of old mugs)

We also know that technology has changed family relationships at home, sometimes for the worse. Whilst mobile phones and instant messaging can give children a stronger sense of individual identity and independence, these tools may also undermine the time that families can spend together, making it harder for parents to know what is going on in the lives of their children as mentioned in (The Age - Technology threatens family bonding, Parents should monitor childrens web use)

I guess that it is all about swings and roundabouts. With these new freedoms and liberties will come new responsibilities to manage these opportunities.

Parents are responsible to provide effective parenting and supervision of their children, technology should not replace this supervision or undermine this relationship. Similarly, if teachers are going to effectively and safely engage with this technology in the classroom, they need to consider safe collaborative and virtual learning sandpits such as Moodle whilst ensuring that their curriculum covers any important Internet safety issues.

Teachers don't all need to create a personal webblog for every lesson, a Secondlife account, edit a movie, program a game or jump online to play one. They all do need to keep open the channels of communication with their students and critically understand the challenges presented by web2 technologies, drawing upon the interests, language and cultural backgrounds of their students. We ignore this at the peril of our role as leaders in the lives of our students.

The revolution is real and it will not stop because our minds are closed shut.

I have just finished installing Ubuntu version 7.04 or Feisty Fawn on the home computer. I notice that this release includes some cool tools including this disk usage analyzer software.

It enables users to view a cool, colour graphical image of their hard disk drive usage, helping users to quickly nail down a rogue directory or location that is chewing up all their hard disk storage space. Trying to display diagnostic information like this in a user readable form is always going to be tricky balance between information and graphical alerts, they seem to have the balance right here.

Fantastic that they bundle this with Ubuntu.

Frustrating session, trying to remove virus and trojan software from a heavily infected notebook computer running Windows XP. I have a picture of my old IBM R30 thinkpad computer here. This problem was causing the owner some grief with a flood of outbound e-mail each time they connected to the Internet.

Thankfully Symantic was able to stop .. but only to a point. Check out the picture. This image is not a special effect or background picture but an overload of hundreds of warning messages that needed to be individually closed. The barrage of alert messages prevented any meaningful use of the computer by the owner. This was only part of the problem with other viruses and trojan software lurking on the laptop. You can see a portion on this r30-virus series of screenshots that I took.

I managed to clean up the laptop with Spybot and some other tools. Afterwards I replaced Internet Explorer with Firefox, deleted Outlook and installed Thunderbird and Open Office. Lastly I educated the laptop owner about not opening odd attachments or links on web popups. Next step was to install Xubuntu.

So far the advice and action seems to have worked.

Tony posted a good set of links online, they discussed a research report that found that Students Using Technology-Based reading and maths products did no better than that that did not.


IT teachers have a large slab of the school budget and some are under fire for not dividing up these same technology goodies amongst the rest of the school. Although we now have a better idea about what it means to be a good IT teacher, there is still confusion about what is our territory in the new VELS.

Now, every time we talk about kids doing interesting stuff that involves a computer, we'll get hit with this. Making movies, programming, blogging, collaboration, projects, kids making games, exploring virtual worlds, GIS, Google Earth? What are you thinking, haven't you heard? Educational Technology Doesn't Work.

We need to make a meaningful distinction between educational software that pretends to replace teachers and that which supports a learning community and helps empower students to learn.

Perhaps it is time for us to speak out together and articulate what "Educational Technology" really means.

Although our ASISTM cluster has been using GameMaker, I have kept an eye out for other game programming options.

Over the January break, one of my students attended a summer school at NSW University. She was really motivated by the use of Python and with her team, built an Internet search engine. Python has had a splendid writeup and great future in our classrooms. To date I have found..

• A Python programming competition on the Internet.
• A physics-based puzzle game written in Python for PyWeek 2. Features over 15 levels, a "free-play" mode and an integrated level editor.
• A research paper that compares eleven programming languages which are currently used in introductory courses. The comparison suggests that Python is one of the most suitable languages to be considered for use in the classroom.
• A game programming exercise and challenge, this chap created a role playing game from scratch in 40 hours using python and a suite of free software.

Those that might find Python a bit too hard, there is always Gambas.