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May 10, 2008
Saga of the Wiimote Whiteboard
Been having a good time this week really being a geek again!
My project has been to make my own Wii Whiteboard as developed originally by Johnny Lee of Carnegie Mellon and featured at the 2008 TED conference. This let's you use your $40 Wiimote, a homemade <$10 IR Lightpen, and any surface in place of a commercial $1000+ whiteboard system. You bring the computer and the projector and here's the rest of the story.
The basic idea here is to use the Wiimote's infrared camera to point at an infrared light source and relay that information back to the computer via Bluetooth. As with so many other projects, the Wiimote projects have had most of their development on the Windows side and there are many variants of the software around the web. Although there are fewer choices, the ones I found did the job just fine.
So, what's needed.
First, you need to connect your Wiimote to your computer via Bluetooth. On the Mac, that deed is done quite simply through the System Preferences. Fire up the Blootooth control panel and add the Wiimote by pressing both the 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously when it's time to have the device discovered.
Second, let's just try to use the Wiimote as a remote mouse. For this task, the best software I found was Darwiin Remote. Again, a few little tricks. Although the directions tell you to press the software's "Find Remote" button and then the Wiimote's 1 and 2 buttons simultaneously, I found it worked more reliably if you do it the other way around. So, press 1 and 2 and your 4 LEDs will be flashing. Press the "Find Remote" button and you get confirmation that the Wiimote is all hooked up.
One more thing to take care of here. You'll need to open the Darwiin Remote buttons and define the left click and right click. I used the A and B buttons since that felt most natural.
You could stop right here and have a remote mouse and amaze your friends! But let's get to the really interesting stuff!
Third, you'll need an Infrared Lightpen to turn the whole setup into an interactive whiteboard. The complete directions can be found on Johnny Lee's site but there are variations all over the place. The best directions I found were on Youtube. This will give you a good grounding in the electronics, even if you are as much of a novice as me! This other Youtube video gives a simpler version, but you need to find the right pen. I found it useful for the closeup of the diode.
Coolcatteacher, Vicki Davis, blogged about this and found a nice Flickr image. Here's my first attempt. (I know...but it works!)
Fourth, you need the software to turn that funky IR pen into a true Interactive Whiteboard tool. That's the Wiimote Whiteboard software. In this case, the Mac version. The simplest way to get this running is to press the 1 and 2 buttons on your Wiimote and then launch the software. You'll now be able to calibrate the pen and from there it can be used as a your Whiteboard mouse complete with left and right mouse buttons.
The biggest hurdles from here are tuning your setup of the projector, screen and Wiimote considering all our options.
For an educator's journey through all of this, you can read this post from Tom Sextro, the Technology Director for Holton USD 336, who is using these in the classroom. He does a great job of chronicling their journey.
Okay, it's not exactly simple, but it's $50 and a few hours or $1500. And, it's fun!
Posted by Pat on 8:10 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack
May 6, 2008
Learned Helplessness
Just finished reading an interesting post from Liz Davis expressing her end of year frustration about the slowness of change called Dealing with Negativity. She did a Twitter poll and collected responses from her followers that range from consolation to commiseration. Funny, nobody said that it doesn't happen in their lives.
Then I started listening to Tech Therapy, a podcast that deals with using and supporting educational technology in higher ed. Basically, the same topic. What they decided was that it was an example of "learned helplessness."
I'll use the definition they used, from Wikipedia.
Learned helplessness is a psychological condition in which a human being or an animal has learned to believe that it is helpless in a particular situation. It has come to believe that it has no control over its situation and that whatever it does is futile. As a result, the human being or the animal will stay passive in the face of an unpleasant, harmful or damaging situation, even when it does actually have the power to change its circumstances.
That's an interesting way to look at the way teachers approach our approaches to introducing technology into their current practice. They haven't learned that technology is hard, but they've learned to believe that technology is hard.
I'm not sure just how to apply this to working with teachers, but it gives another way to look at things. For me, on those most frustrating days I remember that at worst, it lets me keep working at a job I love!
Posted by Pat on 7:44 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 4, 2008
New Knowlege...Collectively
This snippet came from Will Richardson's blog.
From "Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace" (600+ page .pdf) comes this passage by Robert Steele in his essay “Creating a Smart Nation:”
"Published knowledge is old knowledge: The art of intelligence in the 21st Century will be less concerned with integrating old knowledge and more concerned with using published knowledge as a path to exactly the right source or sources that can create new knowledege tailored to a new situation, in real time."
So much of interest here:
- Of course, the notion of the new intelligence is very compelling. This thread just goes on and on in the lesson reviews and training we all do, but just doesn't show up enough in the classrooms.
- Also, the whole 600 pages turn out to be a link to the entire book, available freely as a PDF, and licensed through Creative Commons.
I'm planning for my summer course this year and grazing for new ideas to really challenge the teaching of the inservice teachers. This one will certainly be part of the raw materials.
Posted by Pat on 11:57 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack
May 2, 2008
Conference Attendance -- Real and Virtual
I've been sitting in a wonderful session today at Princeton called The Future of Children. This is all focused around the latest edition of the journal Children and Electronic Media.
Besides the presentations, there are many laptops around the room. Many of the attendees are participating in backchannels. Some of the sessions were Ustreamed. The people in the room contacted friends and colleagues around the world who couldn't attend and they are all in the chats as well. Note, that this is all the work of the conference attendees, not the conference conveners.
All of the people I see clicking around me are engaged and exchanging interesting insights in the chats. And they are all concerned both about their own learning and that of their colleagues. The chats are posted -- by the presenters and participants -- at various blogs.
Of course, I'm also checking email and I come across this headline.
University nixes web access during class: Officials see internet as a distraction for students in eSchool News
Banning internet access in classrooms, Levmore said, would restore basic rules of politeness and professional etiquette between students and professors.
The people I see are using their computers to check figures, to collect links and readings for themselves and others (like Ann Oro's del.icio.us links tagged 08Princeton) , and amplifying their own learning by actively discussing the presentation as a way to get the information into its proper context in their own minds.
This was a great day, enhanced by the informal interaction with a great group of caring educators!
Posted by Pat on 8:36 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
May 1, 2008
Finally Getting Twitter...
Last night, I think I finally started to "get" Twitter! I had my window open and just randomly commented on whoever I saw say something interesting. Kind of the "bull in a china shop" approach. Had some wonderful exchanges with Mindelei (who I only know from last night's conversation), DMCordell (who I've followed on Twitter and worked with online), and many others.
The conversation was all around David Jakes' recent blog post, Tragedy of the Commons, and a blog post commenting on this from Al (no last name), Special Twitter Message.
Okay, I'm not going further down that path, but it did get me thinking and tweeting.
The question everyone seems to be grappling with is how to balance followers and following.
- Should you follow everyone who follows you? Is that a question of sociability or building your source of information?
- Should you expand your list of folks you follow and graze widely or should you prune your list to those who say something you find useful?
- What's the right number of each?
Besides my ed tech RSS feeds and podcasts and Twitter friends, I have a number of technology-focused feeds, podcasts and Twitterers. Among my favorites are Leo Laporte's collection of podcasts and GeekBrief.TV They are both Twitterers with many followers. (Check the list at Twitterholic) For them the whole point is really to get lots of followers so they can tweet out updates to their products...their blogs and podcasts which have the advertising that pays their bills.
BTW, the Twitterer with the most followers is BarackObama who is following more people than follow him ( 27,746 - 27,393). Hillary Clinton only has 3554 followers and only follows 0, not even Bill! And who knows this is the real deal....after all one of my MySpace pages is this one.
Posted by Pat on 12:24 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
