Labor saving toys

It's been pretty busy around here with one project or another. I have been designing an online course ---best exemplified by the term "the devil's in the details". Life has been made much easier by my coming across a tool that lets you build online classes that can drop into any course management system that will accept them. It is a product out of Canada called UDUTU and it is amazingly enough-- free.

It's not open source, as the company will charge to host by the page (or screen) ,but they are very helpful as you learn the process. In the end you can export your course as a SCORM (Sharable Content Object Reference Model) that you can drop into a course management system such as Moodle or Blackboard. Of course I haven't developed it to that stage yet but the interface is easy enough to learn and the help forum has been very responsive to my questions. It suits my learning style which requires an overview of the larger picture to keep my perspective.

Of course to mitigate the intensity of developing this level of instruction it is helpful to be able to divert the mind as one thinks so the other tool that has proven invaluable in those moments is a web site called Pandora . It uses some magical algorithm to take a musician or song you name and search the web for similar sounds. I plugged in Alex Di Grassi and have been mellowing out to the guitar music as I design. I tried "Jeff Lorber" also but found that that type of jazz was too harsh to think around. Sadly it didn't seem to recognize "Leahy" a family of Celtic fiddlers out of Canada but one can't have everthing, at least for free.

Perhaps I am too naive but I am still astounded by some of the tools being developed. I often feel like a kid in a candy factory (or a geek in a software factory).

Reach out and touch someone...

We had a speaker today at the Institute who has some very timely ideas about a neglected mode of learning and knowing the world. Roz Driscoll is a sculptor who makes haptic sculpture. That is sculpture that you can touch. As a person tossed out of many museums for touching the sculpture I can really relate to sculpture that is touchable. And Roz has identified something that has compelling importance for our relationship to the world. The sense of touch.

We live in wonderful times, using technology that can literally create worlds (of the virtual sort) and let us "fly" but the cost of this is a loss of a piece of how we relate to the world. We have replaced the making of art with paint and pencil, clay and wood with computer programs that let us draw a box and pull it up into a building on the screen, to make a watercolor with no water in sight and almost anything else. What are we killing in ourselves ( or allowing to atrophy) with this process. Even more frightening what are we doing to our children as they cursor their way across the screen.

The Last Child in the Woods is a book that looks at the nature deficiency that is another part of our societal disassociation from the world. I have a five year old. He is a master computer user, conversant in two operating systems. He has virtually taught himself with minimal input from me. When I was his age you couldn't get me indoors on a good day. It is difficult to get him to go out. He certainly doesn't get grubby enough for a five year old using the computer.

I plan to enroll him in 4-H. You can't relate to animals without touching them...and you're are bound to get dirty.

I often suprise myself...

...when I find that I have been up to things like creating a blogging site without telling myself. This blog, for instance, came to my attention when I followed a link to a fellow who is exploring the experience of disability in Second Life. It's something that I have been thinking of doing in terms of the possibilities around Deaf education. I have no idea when I set it up...

The possibilities for Second Life as a teaching tools are intriguing given the visual nature of both second life and some of the successful learning and teaching techniques in Deaf education.