Handheld Learning - learning with mobile and ubiquitous technologies

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00fhkmk

A series of nine films looking at the way young people operate in the digital world, focusing on the positive aspects and on the potential pitfalls.

sorry if Ive duplicated a previous announcement of this!

sounds interesting. Certainly found things like twitter useful at events I was at and those I wasnt! :-)

I'd gladly supply a crate of nails and a hammer.

Thomas Cochrane summed it up very well at mlearn08....."What student would buy a windows mobile device". and somethng a bit stronger :-)

Theres some example scripts for doing this at the SL developers corner as well
http://sl-devcorner.blogspot.com/2007/03/second-life-twitter.html.

At one of the HHL08  Wednesday morning sessions I'll be talking a little bit about a project at Glasgow that is exploring  the use for communication between SecondLife  and  outside world mobile devices. (Interested users who want such applications or indeed anyone interested in helping to develop such apps , please come along or contact me )

For myself (as Kath knows only too well) Ive setup a couple of bits of hardware to send information in world and another to control real world devices from within SL.

I am just tidying up a little web based service to help provide the bridge between worlds if anyone else is struggling to do this.


Jon

Of possible interest
http://www.pembrokeshire.ac.uk/mlearning
the guy did a good tak at last years hhl

and of course....
http://hosting.tribalctad.net/m-learning/project/index.htm
(Suspect Geoff will be along at hhl2008)

Thats should be a good starting point :-)

I amsure others will add more....

Bostin' news :-)
Congratulations Dave.

Hi Stu,

(note Some of this veers off topic, if you are a diehard windows fan, suggest you read no further...)

The update that finally convinced me to drop xandros did two things....It called cards and usb devices D: and E: presumably to make it easier for Windows users who got confused by not having drive letters and removing the ability to run applications from cards/USB.

Linux/Windows General
===============
Ive been a Windows user for a long time, however for me Vista + dealing with a large document in Word was the final push I needed to look elsewhere. On the desktop I now run Linux but still have windows inside Virtualbox, mainly to run IE to configure certain makes of brain dead comms equipment.

I have managed to extract most of my data/documents etc from proprietary formats into cross platform friendly text or XML form.  Which is weird as it feels like you are getting your data back :-)

Its only after a few weeks using Ubuntu that you start to notice how bad the user experience and stability of windows actually is. (I would have to say hardware support for things like webcams is still a bit shakey, thanks to the manufacturers of such devices!)

I have a Windows partition still , mainly for when I want to do dev work relating to Windows/WinMob + hardware.

Ubuntu on the eeePC.....
================
We had experimented here on one of our other eeePCs for a while and it seemed ok. Tried 7.10 and had a few problems with the camera. Now on 8 (Hardy) and all seems ok. Standard repositories to use , a wealth of applications to choose from, the support of a large community.

There are good instructions out there are on how to tweak the settings. In some cases you may to have to edit a text file, which for many of the point and click generation looks difficult, but thats an artifact of how we get de-skilled by things like windows...... (no doubt I'll attract criticism for not believing the world should be all point and click as well)

For the time being for schools I suspect Xandros is the better option just for the simplified interface. However if someone produced a nice similar front end for other distro's.......


Jon

Interesting figures.

With all these machines going into the classroom I wonder what the effect on power consumption will be or indeed how many more sockets will be needed in classrooms.

Its amusing with all these "portable" devices that these days one of the most sought after locations in any conference or seminar room is one near a mains socket :-)

What add-on applications are proving most popular on the eeePCs or are the stock applications enough...Also are schools staying with Xandros or have any gone for alternatives?

Jon

Hi Stu,

Thanks for that. I had updated Xandros a couple of times and it meant it started calling devices like cards D: and E:, which was bad enough.
But in doing this they also broke the facility for making items on USB keys or sdcards executable.

Currently tweaking an ubuntu install......its nice to have a c compiler again :-)

Jon

Are all our eeePC users here sticking with the OS that came with it (be it Windows or Xandros) or using alternatives? and if so which ones and why?

As we now carry an eeePCs round for doing network diagnostic "things" we needed a case.

We've found these are ok.

http://www.falconbags.co.uk/search.php

http://www.bagsdirect.com/Product/10061_7_Laptop_Sleeve_For_Asus_Eee_PC_4G_-_8G_-_EeePC_900_Series_with_shoulder_strap.aspx

Jon

Interesting, is this more pseudo-open source  or real I wonder?

Perhaps I should clarify my position, its the extremes that cause a problem.
Those that are really touchy about the small fairly insignificant points when there are bigger things to worry about turn people away from their cause.
I find this with  many of the open source advocates, they do more to turn people away.

I see worrying about hero/heroine as trivial and fairly pointless.

We'll agree to differ. :-) (again)

Maybe we should start a PC thread in the members area, then mac users can come along and complain about its name :-)))

Anyway back to Non-Gender Specific Heros

thanks for the info will take a look,

 but the other one  funded by microsoft hmmm.... I am currently on a "use as few microsoft related products as possible" kick
and feeling very well for it. 

This is working quite well http://cmap.ihmc.us/

Jon


 

One online resources states "Usage Note:  Many writers now consider hero, long restricted to men in the sense "a person noted for courageous action," to be a gender-neutral term."

The touchiness about this sort of thing is as irritating as the blinkered attitudes to phones in schools.
Anyway innovators

Anyway, theres been some forgotten heros that kicked a few things off such as John Davies in Dudley, dunno he is doing at present but the work  did helped things get to where they are



Jon