I have been trawling the web for more information behind the obscure software contract law that we read with pleasure before nibbling at a corner then tearing the clear plastic software shrink wrapping off.

".. don't have the right to read a book out loud. That's an audio right, which is derivative under copyright law."  blog reference

In addition, large parts of some software licences are WRITTEN ENTIRELY IN UPPERCASE? I am puzzled by the obscure legal reason that escapes me or is it a form of SHOUTING to make me sit up and pay attention instead of ripping the plastic wrap off with my teeth.

I now wonder if I the bean counters will permit me to read the contract out aloud. It disturbs any small pleasure I once obtained from being the first to pop the cardboard flap and breaking the mythical software seal.

An online friend Bryn Jones pointed out that It's because people don't read large tracts of uppercase. He suggests that it is easily provable and an interesting experiment to do with students and teachers. Give the same comprehension test in mixed case and UPPER CASE and compare results. Lots of packaging has the small print in upper case to make it harder to work out what is in it. Tonight, I stumbled across this gem of a blog post that confirms this legal conundrum and the basis for my confusion. It is worthy of a read for anybody that still has a love for commercial software.

     http://tr.im/ihlo

The post provides me with a number of tips to decrease the readability and understandability (sic) of any legal document. Enlightened, I can now read these contacts with an open mind to the mastery of FUD and bow my head in respect to those that have gone before, seeking to disinform and disempower us from the plain english and truth we all seek.

Here are a couple of things that I have been doing with my students over the past few years:

• Understand the big picture by collecting atmospheric data and sharing this on the GLOBE project website.
• Global warming was a big topic so the students negotiated producing some media (video / animation / radio commercial ) .. some brought in material to the class such as the trailer for the the Al Gore climate change film released last year. It was great to watch them deconstruct this media. Kids had fun making movies with the digital cameras, animations with MonkeyJam and radio stuff with audacity.
• Use Google Earth to take pictures standing on the top of famous locations (Ularu, Kilimanjaro etc) then reformat these into a hand copy postcard with stamp etc.
• Use a database printout of several thousand weather data observations and race along the floor with calculators for a small prize, adding up the numbers in your team column to determine min, max and average "Sir is there an easier way .. " (grin)
• Remote sensing is big in Australia so I get them to design, model, build cardboard satellites. First we design the satellites with Google Sketchup, take photographs and add backgrounds / layers with Gimp, Paintshop Pro and Inkscape. Then we blog and gallery the experience in Moodle. I was delighted by those that revisited their models using the free software at home to extend their thoughts and interests.
• After watching a small video clip about Ubuntu by Nenson Mandella we decided on another project was to program a game that highlighted the problems in Africa. As a hypothetical, the local Rotary club was to pay $2000 for a fun game that would highlight an issue (Aids, Food, Poverty) with programming, artwork and music. I got the Rotary Club president to give a brief talk and set the challenge. Kids were in awe that people got paid to have fun (and do work of course ;-)
• We also used of a bag of hand puppets to make our own movies that consider a range of IT issues.

I was rather ruthless, insisting that they had no money to buy software, commercial artwork or external support. Instead, they had to rely on their own skills and resources, working with what we have, who we knew and what each other could contribute, respecting copyright and using creative commons material, showing some pride in all our work.

We celebate innovation and work-arounds, laugh off our failures and have fun at what we are doing, not gloat over the gloss of a final destination. I have avoided slick, polished productions. Pride in a great animation can be easily killed by a colleague that says "If we all had (insert expensive software) we could then (insert fancy feature / eye candy) without any effort (insert thinking / planning / cognitive development) ". Whilst the solar panels might fall off the satellites that hang from our classroom ceiling, the hand drawn sprites and animations might look rough and the games might play-out crude .. at least we have tried to inspire each other to reach a new ceiling.

Considering different backgrounds of my students, this is enough of a challenge. :-)

They have a growing sense of social justice at this age so it is stimulating to explore Etoys,  Squeak and Python, programming environments that are all being distributed on the OPLC (One Laptop per Child) Project. I use this as a context for examining, introducing hardware with the opening discussion imagine if you had to design and build a super cheap computer for students in East Timor from parts you could buy in Australia. What would it look like, what would you put into it, how could you network it, what would you run on it? Get into your groups, grab a pencil and start drawing out your ideas whilst I shop around to build a new computer from this catalogue of parts. (grin) Bill Kerr has a good review and samples about his work with Squeak at this tag location.
     http://billkerr2.blogspot.com/search/label/scratch

It goes beyond what teachers feel most comfortable about learning to teach, towards what students can do to best learn. I think that it is good to push these students out of their comfort zone, it is about creating a cognitive challenge that can help stimulate their learning. I have seen much the same happening when we learned to play with new tools or operating systems such as Ubuntu.

Now, we may not end up with as many flashy looking electronic folios that show off our stepwise development, or pretend to demonstrate mastery over a particular software tool, we still seem to have fun with some covert learning happening along the way.

Whilst the snow was falling outside, open fire crackling and full of hot pancakes, I decided to dabble with some art. First step was to update Inkscape to version 0.46.

In all, this is a good bit of FLOSS software that I have preloaded onto all the school workstations and staff notebooks.

Here I took one of my old pictures of an incandescent light bulb that I drew by hand and scanned a decade ago.  After converting this to SVG I added two colour layers and experimented with gradient fills. Here is a snap of my efforts including one that I made an hour later with an old mobile phone sketch.

You can view some of my other images with my online gallery at OpenClipArt.
     http://openclipart.org/media/people/rgesthuizen

I will admit my inspiration from the mastery demonstrated by Kattekrab last week. It is worth having a look over her gallery of inkscape artwork. What a wizzard.

The snow has gone, now to duck out and do some shopping for dinner.

There needs to be some dignity in any debate that surrounds any open source issues. We also need to be cautious about making sweeping claims or kicking any handy commercial software provider. It is only when I am pressed that I try to explain some of the cost, freedom and other advantages. Sometimes when we are asked why we might use an open source tool, it is sometimes sufficient to say that it is a good point to start teaching students and certainly enough to say that it is FUN!

I will admit to being weary of correcting teachers and technicians who state that all the software provided on their teacher laptops is free. It needs to be pointed out that Australian tax payers have paid for their software and that this generosity is not boundless. It is about as 'free' as the classroom lighting / heating and Internet bandwidth that they so generously consume and we all pay for (sigh).

Yesterday I lost my mouse and suddently today, the power supply on my laptop has failed. I hope that this is only a temporary setback as I dont want to lug so much dead weight and technology around the United States over the next few weeks. It is refreshing to spot a conference workshop about open source software offer the use of thin-client computers. I am using one that saw a former life as an IBM 2647 notebook computer. They are easy to use and a powerful way to recycle old equipment.

The presenter did not turn up for this session so a cool volunteer has taken over. She really knows her work and is taking the group of 150+ deligates on an interesting journey of how to use open source and creative commons tools in the classroom. In the spirt of collaboration that weaves it's way through the open source community, it is engaging to spot how a teahcer has filled the spot at such short notice!

The New Zealand Ministry for Justice believes that open source software is a more stable, supportable, and cost-effective choice compared to proprietary solutions.
      http://nzoss.org.nz/system/files/moj_oss_strategy_1.0.pdf

This is a well considered opinion that might interest those that have had problems getting their school to adopt open source software. It would be good if other government departments had this well informed

Somebody mentioned something about voting by touching an Interactive White Board (IWB) so I tossed my departing senior class a traditional set of white-board markers and asked them to scribble a 'vote' on the board as they left the room. (typical XY plot that ranks boring <----> interesting, vs learned heaps <----> nothing). I then photographed the result to reflect and perhaps later discuss.

I enjoy using low tech touches like this, blue tooth devices, sticky pads and hand puppets. They had fun and I got all my coloured markers back.

Did make me think as they giggled over the new feedback option that any IWB solution needs to get over the initial positive gain that is observed from the Hawthorne effect. Measuring a 'real' improvement is going to be hard after spending all that money, is anybody going to be brave enough to claim only an incremental benefit?
   
Cameron raised on the lists an important point about the issue about IWB vendor lock-in with the hardware, software and the precious lessons and intellectual capital that we might record. Not only is this bad , in some counties it can be quite illegal. It has been noted that the best solution to this problem is FLOSS combined with free, public standards.

Last year there was a campaign to promote FLOSS or free software in Polish schools. In this report, I could relate to the part that described why some schools did not show an initial interest in the FLOSS campaign because of a reluctance by IT teachers to learn new things, a fear of losing authority to another group or admitting that nobody had any idea what was being talked about and what was on offer.

I laughed when I read that the most interesting way of saying “no” was “the school already has such thing”.

Now, who is in control?

In ye olde days of lore when I once used this simple, DOS command line word processor. Nice to explore how this works with your students.
     c:\>type con>lpt1:
     Press Ctrl-Z to exit (EOF)

you should be able to run and use WordStar to your heart’s content. with FreeDos 1.0. We had fun using this at school last year. Even Python can run on FreeDos.  :-)
     http://www.freedos.org/

Thats the nice thing about a scripted languages like Python and Logo. You can fiddle about with single line commands, trying things out. Baby steps are a great way to learn.
     Print "Hello, World!"

I am currently trying to follow the instructions to reassemble a giant spingless trampoline.  We did all right last evening but the final assembly was too big to take out of the garage. Christmas bloatware, AGHHH!

Regards Roland

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 :-)

I read an interesting report about the failure of a proprietary software developer to open the source code to the graphics package Xara Xtreme. A quick glance at the website home page revels no new new announcements and a stagnant set of download updates. Ultimately we can expect code rot to eat away at the health of this once promising project.

The article lists two important lessons for open source developers:

1. You can't boss around volunteers
   at best you will drive them away, and at worst you will drive them toward the competition.
2. Collaborating with a community means willingness to adapt and change.
   The community may move in directions that you did not anticipate before you began; if you refuse to listen to it or refuse to make adjustments, you are likely going to kill it. (Willis 2007)
   

For now, the well supported FLOSS graphics software packages GIMP and Inkscape should provide the art and graphics features required by most users.

Here is a screenshot of the graphics software Gimp version 2.4 This is a powerful software package with many cool features including new icon theme, scalable brushes, revised selection tools, new color menu, full-screen editing, new crop tool, improved printing, red eye removal, perspective clone and lens distortion tools.

Not only are there flavours of Gimp that run on just about any computer operating system, because the software is FLOSS it can be freely downloaded and used by my  students and colleagues. There is even a  variant called GIMP Portable that can run on a USB drive or another called Gimpshop that changes the interface to something resembling Adobe Photoshop,

Gimp has attracted some criticism (perhaps unfairly) because of its user interface. As Donna once pointed out to me, the right mouse button is your friend in the default Gimp interface and will bring up many of the functions needed.

Once users get become familiar with the interface of one software package they are often reluctant to adapt or master the interface of another. When the general concepts of layers, filters and functions are so similar, it is sad to see them stuck on this learning curve. None of the major graphics software packages really work 'out of the box' without some external help with lessons or tutorials. In the context of a secondary school, arguments about 'industrial software standards' are phony and undignified. It all comes down to your personal taste, needs, funding and experience.

As a lite user, it does exactly what I need from a software graphics package with the basic functions just a click away. Money saved is money in my pocket.

Over the past few weeks, I have been doing my homework learning the basics of programming with Python on my laptop over the last few weeks on my long service leave (when everybody was asleep in the caravan). It is a very nice language and I can now see why it is great for teaching students programming.

Today I downloaded DrPython and some cute little python scripts and plugins. It was written in Python with teaching in mind using a clean and simple interface.

DrPython is much friendlier to use this python IDE than constantly jumping in and out of a text editor but hey, what can beat the handy rubber band that holds a stack of programming cards, ready to be loaded into the main frame or accidentally dropped on a staircase. :-)

I was able to get Squeak to work within my browser on Ubuntu.

The problem that I had with the Firefox browser plugin was registering the client application to the browser. I managed to find the details on how to do this with a quick Google search on this e-mail post.

Now that I can get some of the eToys working on the SqueakLand website, I can explore some of the work by other students.

Nice way to spend Software Freedom Day. :-)

Bill forwarded me a fascinating discussion he had with Alan Kay about programming and pedagogy. I have enjoyed rereading some of the fascinating new ideas raised by both of them.

He included this fascinating link to an 18 min video about Squeak. Whilst over a year old, I am impressed how Extremadura is using this programming language in their classrooms. They have certainly come a long way.

It would be nice if we could model something like that here..

I just registered our team for Software Freedom Day on September 15. You see a map of all the teams around the world and our team on this page.
     http://softwarefreedomday.org/map/2007

The early bird team registration deadline is the 31st July 31 for a free pack of Ubuntu CD's, TheOpenCD, tshirts, balloons and more. Teams wishing to get going should check out the guide at
     http://softwarefreedomday.org/StartGuide.

Not as funny as it sounds .. an English teacher had some horrid connection issues that caused several blue screens of death. I had too much on my plate and a technician would be able to make good any repairs until after the weekend. Instead I I tossed him a self booting Ubuntu CDROM and a spare IT student to show him how to boot from it. I was only buying him some time so he could do some typing with OpenOffice on his USB key but in fact, with no instruction they got the wireless Internet working at school, a printer and later even got it working at home. The following week he asked for it to be installed as a dual boot option and refuses to hand back the CDROM.

As he put it, "insurance from the madness with something that bloody works".

We forget that most casual users are less than forgiving with computer errors and perhaps less demanding of what we think that they might need from a computer.

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.

This is a screenshot of the software called jUploader that I am using to upload some photographs to a Flickr account. jUploader is free open source software written in Java and like all good software, it happily runs on Linux, Windows and Macintosh computers.

Cool FLOSS that I am also currently evaluating for installation on my Ubuntu computer.