Last night I had this burning blog post in mind as I feel asleep. When I woke up, as you might guess, it had gone. Thanks to Cog Dog's post about 'best tools' I remembered the idea though.
It's quite simply this:
Many real life (as in out of the classroom) situations have more than one good solutions (as well as many bad ones or failing ones). Not all of them, but many. If you are determining the haemoglobin concentration in blood in an NHS hospital lab there is only one solution - there's one method and one correct answer. There are alternative methods to do the job, but the NHS has standardised on a single method that is cheap, accurate, precise and safe.
But lets say I ask you to do 32 X 27. There's only one correct solution, but I can think of six 100% reliable ways to do this sum with pen and pencil and no other tools, plus I could use things like log tables, a slide rule, or a calculator, and I could do it in my head with some of the methods quite easily. I will bet that most of you reading this have, apart from the calculator method of course, some memories of one way that you were taught to do this at school.
If we move further afield, and consider a scripting problem that we're largely familiar with the results of: storing, tagging and sharing images say - then there are at least two big Web 2.0 solutions (Flickr™ and Photobucket) and we could easily get into wikis, blogs and the like. You can also, as I have, write your own solution too, and then you get into "should I use PHP, C# or Javascript?" type questions (and I know there are possible methods missing from this list: python, ruby on rails, VB and more could do the job too). Even once I've chosen PHP (C# is rusty, Javascript, python, ruby on rails are worse and VB is an abomination), there are multiple solutions available, different routes to get the job done. I could probably do the whole job in one large page. I might decide I want multiple pages for different functions of the site and the sharing process. If I go down the one page route I can choose several ways to split the functions, if I go down the multiple pages route I can choose even more ways to arrange them and move between them.
None of these solutions is wrong at least it's not wrong assuming they all work. There will probably be trade-offs in terms of speed, usability, ease of alteration and the like, but they are all viable solutions.
But, as teachers, we need to be able to assess learning - give tests, grades, final marks and the like. Do you write them in ways that help your students explore and utilise many different solutions? Do you encourage that width of thinking that will, in many real situations make the difference?
I know I try. I know I don't always succeed. How about you?
I was teaching in Second Life yesterday, a kind of meta-class about how to teach.
One of the learners in the group asked how Second Life might help with Bloom's taxonomy. I was a little confused (not with what Bloom's taxonomy of learning is), but with where the question came from, so I answered that I still have some doubts about using Second Life for teaching in the psychomotor domain, although there are skills that fall into that category that can be taught here, but that it was fine for the cognitive and affective domains. Phew.
Then the learner followed up with "No, I meant which of the levels of the domains will it help me achieve?"
I will freely admit I was stumped and said so. But, after some reflection I found myself wondering if the question has any meaning.
To my mind, for educators Second Life is both an environment in which you can teach and a tool to assist (hopefully) your teaching. (It can be other things too: a place to make a living, a social networking environment etc. but if you have different ways you define Second Life as an educational venue/tool, please let me know!)
Given my definitions, the question about levels doesn't make sense to me. Would you ask which levels of which domains powerpoint helps you achieve? A smart board? A whiteboard? Teaching tools don't achieve specific levels to my mind: teachers do.
I think that a good teacher will manage to have some of their learners achieve the highest levels of learning in the cognitive and affective domains in a terrible teaching environment and with few or no tools. They will, naturally, manage this more easily and thus probably with a larger number of learners in better environments and with better tools. A poor teacher will find it hard to manage this achievement - but some students will achieve the highest level of learning despite poor teachers of course - despite the greatest tools being available to them. Again the psychomotor domain might be different - I still struggle to think of ways that you would achieve precision, articulation and naturalisation of psychomotor skills, and I think even imitation and manipulation are tricky without the thing you're meant to be working on being available to use and so no tools and high levels of learning in this domain strike me as mutually exclusive.
Perhaps it's just me. Do you think Second Life causes you to teach learners at higher levels in the cognitive and/or affective domains in and of itself? I'm not saying it can't help you, as a good tool, to teach at those higher levels more easily but does it enable you to reach those levels where you can't normally? Do you think my assertion that it's teachers that enable learning at higher levels and the tools just help them is wrong?
Digital Urban is more about modelling real places in virtual environments than my normal reading, although it's often quite interesting to see some of the applications they're coming up with. But this, particularly the last third or so is more interesting in general I think. The mapper remembered Laurel and Hardy films shot here and has modelled the Culver City of that period. The video neatly edits together a mix of Laurel and Hardy footage and the modelling, giving it a rather interesting hook - as well as being an indication of a fascinating potential development for this technology.
This isn't about whether we should teach kids about sex at school, it's about a rather surprising and to me quite worrying difference in how we teach adults about coping with it.
As some of you know I teach on a Tuesday afternoon in real life. I have a gap between my students where I grab a coffee. Sometimes this coincides with other folks and we have a chat about this, that or the other. In fact, today it coincided with the start of a mentoring session for one of my colleagues who is doing in-service teacher training, but who has previously changed as a nurse. (Just for the sake of the reputations of all involved, they asked if it was OK to join me at the table, I said yes, and they said they were discussing ethics and the like and asked if I would like to join in, so I didn't barge into their private session, nor did they impose on me.)
Anyway, this person during their nursing training had quite extensive training about how to cope with patients getting 'frisky' during treatment. He, being gay, found the compulsory training quite a giggle personally, although he did realise that it has the potential to be a real issue for some of the other people he was training with. The teacher training covers the potential issues in about 10 minutes, and basically says "don't do it" but doesn't offer any strategies for coping with it.
Now, of course, nurses have, as part of their job, to handle patients, wash them, and may be required to touch them in areas we regard as intimate. A teacher shouldn't really have to do any of that. So, identical training is not really appropriate. On the other hand, young teachers may be teaching people that regard them as "sexy" and are not that dissimilar in age, and/or with those running through the hell of puberty and all those hormones and first "adult" crushes and the like, and will almost certainly have prolonged contact with the students. Although that 10 minutes saying "Don't do it" is certainly excellent advice, is it really sufficient?
Being in my 40's it is no longer an issue for me - 16 year old don't tend to hit on me, and I have answers to hand anyway to deflect their attention in the unlikely event I'm subjected to it. But for teachers in their 20's it strikes me as more of an issue, and something we might like to address. Any thoughts?
Stanza is, according to Stephen Fry's blog, the most popular eBook software out there. It's a free download for the iPhone from the app store.
Now, I'm a huge reader, and I've looked on and off at eBooks because the idea of a book that contains thousands of books is just too good...
Stanza will, it appears, let you read pdfs and stuff formatted for Kindle too, although I must admit I've not used it that way yet... I really must try.
But, I have used it to read eBooks on the iPhone and I have to say OMG this is how it should be. You get about 60 choices of background and text colour - so you can make it comfortable to read under almost any circumstances. You can pinch the text to make it bigger or smaller to make it more comfortable to read. If you do this, just like resizing a webpage, the text reflows to fill the screen at the new size, but you can have really odd font sizes if you like (and of course I do).
Turning pages is simply touching the relevant side of the screen, but you can also swipe across. The middle gives you access to the tools menu. If you open stanza and you're in the middle of a book, it defaults to opening your book at the page you were reading...
Most telling of all, I went for a takeaway the other night. Whilst waiting for it to cook, I was reading a book in Stanza. I got home and continued, very happily, to read it for about an hour - it really is that easy on the eyes.
This causes any swings using this to fail to reset their position and rotation most times (in my test about 85% of the time) and so to jump out of their frame.
There are two solutions to this problem using the current script: you can either move the swing and reset the script (this should always work), or you can move, test, move, test and repeat until the event acts as it is meant to and your swing behaves properly.
There is an alteration to the script that can change this behaviour, but this is currently not available in-world. I am considering how to distribute it, given I have a number of people telling me they are acquiring my script as a freebie despite the licensing conditions. If you would like to contribute to the discussion, I have opened a Get Satisfaction page for this product.
According to the announcement that goes with SLim being launched (to what effect remains to be seen - I STILL have no friends using it) 50% of the users in Second Life are also connecting to voice and vivox.
I'm prepared to admit I'm a bit surprised by that, but was recently I've been compiling alternate clients with the Imprudence people for the Mac (a long and less than wonderfully fun process, but interesting) and when you log in on a new fresh install (or after clearing out your preferences) you log in with voice enabled. So, every new user that signs up (and there were just under 100,000 of them last week) you have voice on unless you specifically turn it off. There were, according to the official website, 550,000 people (more or less) logged in last week, and so about 275,000 used voice. It's a pretty safe bet at least 100,000 of those 550,000 didn't know anything about turning voice on and off. Some of them probably want it, but it's probably fairer to say 175,000 of 550,000 people (about 32%) of residents logged in last week CHOSE to use Second Life using voice. Of course it's not as impressive as "50% of all our residents use voice" but it's less open to rather simple and obvious criticism too - something you'd think Linden Lab might be quite sensitive to.
This, on its own, isn't enough to fire me up to write about silly data. I don't normally watch American Football, but I caught a little bit of an analysis show today before turning over in disgust. There's a team, I don't know who, who are having a terrible season. They're second worst at this since 1970, second worst at that since 1990, second worse at the other since 1982. What on earth?! I can see saying they're the worst of all time, or it's the worst record for the last 28 years or whatever, but if you're going to rank them like that, why all the different start times?
Surely knowing they're the second worst at this since 1970, fourth worst at that since 1970 and fifth worst at the other since 1970 is actually more generally useful (assuming something interesting happened in 1970 to make it a good starting point for comparison) than second worst in all these seemingly random time frames?
Giving hard data is meant (and I say meant) to give you something to think about. Of course in a marketing announcement it's supposed to make you think "Oh what a good idea, I must use that" but it's still supposed to be make you think. It's not supposed to make you think "God, I wish they'd get their heads out of their arses and tell me something useful!"
The headline says it all really... but for the gory details:
The SLim client & messenger strikes me as a solution in need of a problem, or at least a possible solution to a real problem that is no better than the extant solutions.
Forgive me if this gets confusing: there are two programmes where SLim is the sensible name. First there is a SLim Second Life Client (something that connects you to the grid), hereafter the SLim client; and second there there is a SLim IM tool (something that lets you send voice/IM into SL and talk to your SLim enabled online friends), hereafter the SLim messenger.
And really there's the crux of it: to use SLim you have to go in-world in the SLim client to register with vivox. Then you have to register with them separately to register your SLim messenger (and a different password ideally of course). Then, oh-so-cleverly, you can open up the SLim client to talk to your in-world friends who have registered with vivox (both steps I think, I'd lost the patience to test it fully at this point). So what does this gain me? If I wanted voice chat, I could use Skype or Gizmo, and use it with any of my friends, unlikely since I don't like voice being hard of hearing, but I could. If I want to IM someone I can ask them for their username in any of a multitude of IM protocols (AIM, ICQ, YIM, gChat etc.) and IM them that way. This is independent of their being in SL, independent of them using the right Second Life client and so on. So, I have a tool that lets me talk in a way that it integrated into the SLim client whilst they're in-world... um I ask again, so what?
I have a fairly long friends list. A lot of them count as early adopters. None of them show up as SLim users as yet... I have a feeling I won't be looking for them to show up either. Your mileage may, of course, vary.
In case you're a Second Lifer who has been living under a rock, or you don't follow Second Life, there was a blog announcement about an increase in prices for Open Space Sims. It has also produced a veritable deluge of SLogosphere commenting - I'm only going to link to two: Second Life Herald and Massively both ran recent articles about the "Second Life Revolt" in protest.
I should say that I'm not directly affected by this news, I don't have an open space sim, I didn't intend to purchase one, I'm not changing my mind. I do, however, know a lot of people who are up in arms about it.
My question is really why? There is a lot of hot air about "criminal and illegal acts by Linden Lab" which I think is rather unlikely. Linden Lab have announced with over two months notice on a monthly bill, a change in their billing policies. That is almost certainly not illegal, nor criminal. It may or may not be moral, but it isn't illegal as I understand the law. It may have specific implications for education, NFP and corporate customers - certainly the former two pay a lump sum for a year in advance. My understanding of the situation would be that they should not have their prices increased for the duration of the existing pre-paid time - but the announcement says that Linden Lab will contact them in private to discuss the situation so let's assume that Linden Lab will do the legally correct thing here too.
The fuss is basically because Linden Lab has found that Open Space sims, which are advertised as "not suitable for residential use" and as "low use spaces, such as parks or other open space" (hence the name) are actually being quite widely used for residential use, shopping, clubs and so on, and this is causing a strain on the resources of the system.
But, in my opinion, the style of the announcement has exacerbated the situation. It's a good time to stop and consider one of the basic rules of writing (of communicating in general in fact): consider your audience and write to them. The actual article (go read if you haven't) reads like it was written by a committee of lawyers - two writing groups that typically don't manage to get the most clarity into their communications.
The core messages that are hiding in there could have been written as:
The Open Space sims was advertised as being for low use spaces and not suitable for residential use.
We are noticing that, despite this clear indication, the sims are being used more heavily than we expected.
Because of this heavier use we were faced with three choices:
Stop the programme and remove all Open Space Sims
Alter the technical specifications (e.g. prim allowance) so the sims are used at a level that is more in line with the resources available
Alter the technical specifications of the servers so that the hardware copes with the demands being placed upon them, and increase the price to cover this upgrading of the hardware
Introduce a third tier of server class
We have decided that options 1 and 2 are unreasonable. Whilst we considered option 4, we do not wish to arbitrate on each of the current Open Space sims and their usage.
Thus, from January 1st 2009, we are increasing the prices of Open Space sims as follows...(insert relevant details) We will be upgrading the servers between now and this date so that by January 1st all servers will be running on the new servers. Note that this constitutes fair notice of an increase, being more than 2 rental periods in advance of the price increase. If you pay on a different cycle, we will contact you individually about the changes to your circumstances.
We are also introducing X, Y, Z other changes to the terms and conditions to limit the worst abuses
I don't think it missed anything - and I think it makes some of the salient features that those screaming in protest are ignoring (and are hard to find) much easier to see and think about.
Would this have stopped the outrage? Not completely, no. There are, most definitely, people who are using the sims in the way that they were advertised who are suffering a 67% increase in running costs thanks to the actions of the remainder of OS sim users. But, only option 4 (or variations around it) would have worked to account for this, and I'm not sure that Linden Lab has the resources to successfully run a third category of server. I'm also not sure there's a reasonable, scalable solution. Solutions such as "keep number of scripts under 1,000 and/or monthly traffic under 5,000" (say) - well what happens if you break either limit? Do you pay a penalty? What happens if someone with a full exoskeleton type avatar comes in. I've seen single attachments with 250+ scripts... you balance your sim to run on 800 scripts, have one visitor with the wrong attachments, and bang, you're over the limit without knowing anything about it. The griefers would be able to target your credit card directly - no thanks!
Face it - you're meant to be an adult and you are allegedly capable of rational thought after all - there is no single, simple solution here. Unless you assume that Linden Lab are lying to us for some reason, doing nothing will cause the continued problem of Open Space sims draining resources and money out of the system. Their might be other solutions to the problem, but of the four really obvious ones, which would you prefer? As an uninterested party, I still like the option they've gone for the best. "We've noticed you're using things in a way we didn't expect. Rather than stopping you doing that, we're changing the pricing and improving the hardware so the use that exists is supported at a reasonable level."
Would you complain if your other services did this? Yes, probably. But you might stop to consider it before rioting, or is that too optimistic?
Congratulations Linden Lab - I'm one of the seemingly few people that think you probably made the right, if a tough, decision on this issue. But how I wish you'd had someone explain it and present it better. And now I'm sounding like a broken record - but you really, really need to work out how to communicate to us. You've shot yourselves in the foot once again by shocking communication skills.
Over on dekeOnline there was a tutorial for faking HDR in CS3 and CS4 - but two of the core techniques don't work in CS2, which is what I've got. So, I decided to give it a go...
In case you're not sure what HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography is, it's a tool that makes your normal snapshots look brighter and more vibrant. It also makes your Second Life snaps shout with life without spending hours tweaking windlight, in world lights and so on. It converts this:
into this:
There's not a huge number of steps to be taken to achieve this.
Step 1: Convert your base image to Lab Colour (Image>Mode>Lab Colour).
Step 2: Duplicate the background layer up to work on the top layer.
Step 3: Tweak the shadows and highlights (Image>Adjustments>Shadows and Highlights). The settings below are subject to artistic interpretation - play with the sliders in other words! - but these are a good starting point for most pictures. You'll need to check "show more options" to get all of this to show by the way.
Step 4: Tweak the curves for a and b. They need to be roughly like this:
You'll notice that curves b has a little jink to the left in the middle... that adds a little bit of yellow to the mix which makes skin tones come to life. It makes more difference on real flesh, but it does make a difference on SL skins too.
Step 5: Sharpen it to hell and beyond... I used Filters>Sharpen>Unsharp Mask with:
There may be better techniques... at dekeOnline they recommend high pass filters and linear light but I can't get that to work. Unsharp mask with a lot of unsharp works OK. You'll want to have preview on for this and give it a little while to settle down. I often have the sliders for sharpen hammered right over to the right, but in this picture sharpening that much gives me odd highlights in my hair, so I trimmed it back a bit.
Step 6: It probably doesn't look great, so play with the transparency of the top layer until it looks great... you're adding darker colours back in here. Around 80% works nicely for me here.
Step 7: Save as .psd, then change the mode back to RGB colour to save as a targa, jpeg, tiff etc. All done!
Now, I'm not a great Second Life photographer, I don't have the patience for setting up the studio, getting the lights just right and so on. In particular, when relaxing after playing out one night, at about 6 in the morning in a place I can't rez lights... the first picture is just a candid snapshot taken in Second Life and cropped in Photoshop. The second one is the same after this process and doesn't it look loads more vibrant?
We expect higher standards than the norm from a range of people. It's often those in public office and/or those in positions of trust/power.
For example, we expect our teachers and professors to, in some areas stand up to a higher standard than the general population. Leaving aside my desire, or lack thereof, my current teaching contract specifically indicates that sexual relationships with my students is grounds for dismissal. My students are over the age of consent - if they weren't my students and the desire was there, we could legally have sex with each other. Because I'm their teacher I'm expected and in fact required NOT to indulge in this behaviour. I honestly don't have a problem with this by the way, but since many of the readers are educators, I'm sure they're in the same position, so I'm starting here.
In the UK this week, there's a lot of news about George Osbourn, Shadow Chancellor. He had several meetings with a Russian billionaire, in which he, according to eye witness reports, solicited funds for the Conservative Party. Although many of us expect our politicians to be venal, power-hungry and cash-hungry, this is causing quite a furore on the news over here. Why? Well, the Shadow Chancellor, Leader of the Opposition, Prime Minister and Chancellor in particular are people in, or hoping soon to be in positions of extreme power and they are expected to make decisions that, in their judgement, are the best for the country. Taking large gifts from people is not really guaranteed to make people consider your judgement is based on the advice you receive without bias - there is (rightly or not) an expectation that the person who has just given your party £1million through you will have some influence over you.
The fact that British political parties aren't allowed to take donations from foreign nationals, so the donation would have been illegal adds to the lack of judgement call. Political parties, naturally, solicit donations as well as accepting them. They have officers appointed to do precisely this. The conversation should have gone in one of two ways: "Sorry, whilst we might like that, it's illegal." OR "Thank you for your offer, you need to be talking to X rather than me, I'm not the right person to discuss this with." In the US there isn't quite the same position as I understand it - but imagine if you thought the Secretary of State might be guilty of soliciting gifts from a Russian national. Fill you with confidence?
In the US you might hope that your president is a decent human being, and your choice in a fortnight will be, in part, about which of them you feel you trust the most. Of course the fact that there's a smear campaign based on the "fact" that Barack Obama is an arab terrorist despite the well-documented fact that's he's an American-born citizen of mixed white and African origin (he really is African American, his father was Kenyan) suggests that not everyone wants this to be such a clear-cut choice, although it does strongly suggest they recognise the value of trust in the public image.
With both teachers and politicians, we expect the higher standards of behaviour in a limited fashion. I'm contractually bound not to start a relationship with my students, but I'm not bound not to get drunk as long as I don't show up for work still drunk. I'm not (unlike, as I understand it, many Americans) subjected to drug testing to ensure I don't break the laws about illegal drugs. I expect politicians to be venal and self-serving, but, for example, I'm not disappointed in hearing that MP X is gay, or bi, or likes orgies, or smoked pot or whatever, as long as they're not currently campaigning for an end to gay marriage and increasing the penalties on pot. (In fact, as an aside, I feel more confident in our current home secretary, the person responsible in part for the decision about the legal status of pot smoking because she has stood up and said "Yes, I smoked pot as a student" than if she'd stood up and denied ever having tried it. I'd feel less sanguine if she was smoking a spliff as she was debating increasing the penalties once again though.)
Another group of people where we have such an expectation is the police. Whether or not we agree with the law they're trying (or not) to uphold, we expect our police to live according to the laws they uphold for us, and to go further than a normal, law-abiding citizen in both public and private in living a virtuously law-abiding life. However, our police force (I suspect many others to) is quite institutionally conservative: in particular it's still racist and sexist. A recent query under Freedom of Information reported on the BBC shows that if you're not white you are between 2 and 5 times more likely to be the subject of an internal investigation than if you are white. Oops. We only have one non-white chief constable (that's not too bad given our demographics actually - chief constable is a bit like chief of police I guess), but there is, according to him, no one in the next tier down who is likely to become the next non-white chief constable. All of the Met's senior non-white police officers are currently under investigation. It's possible they're also all guilty of what they're being investigated for, but from the outside it seems vanishingly unlikely.
It seems like the system is pretty broken, and although the police (overall) might be good at some parts of being exemplary, they by and large need to learn that the UK isn't racist although they still are, and adjust to that. Any ideas just how we might do that?
Microsoft used to be the 8,000lb gorilla in any computing room. Now Google are certainly rivals in many ways albeit not in OS terms, MS are losing market share in education and the home to Apple and to Linux in the home. Cloud computing applications (which include Google, but also zoho and the like), and freeware/donationware like Open Office/Neo Office and tools like iLife are biting into the dominance of MS Office.
They're still the 800lb gorilla in most rooms, but they're no longer the force they used to be, even to those tied in by their company to their operating system.
Despite that, Microsoft thinks it knows the way forward for virtual worlds. The future of virtual worlds is, apparently, "photosynthed" versions of the real world. Second Life has a "limited market of those willing to create avatars and learn how to navigate the space."
So apparently if Microsoft make their world, you won't have to use a keyboard of anything to interact with it. Presumably their software is psychic? Or maybe they're looking far enough ahead that keyboards are "of the past" and VR gloves and headsets or similar will be the interface - and they're assuming that Second Life won't adapt to the new interfaces? (In fact there are people that have hooked up a variety of these potential new tools to Second Life already, it's just the price tag is a bit high for routine users these days.
You won't have an avatar... um how? Even if what you have to do is take pictures of yourself to create a photosynthed presence, how it that different to an avatar?
I'm willing to bet that, at some time and possibly soon, people will develop systems that let you have even higher resolutions and tools to import 3D RL into a virtual world reliably and easily. That might be SL, it might be something else, but somewhere it will come. Of course SL has a number of "tourist" sims that duplicate some or all of a RL situation already - the ability to improve the quality of that will be attractive to a lot of people.
But Second Life, There, etc. allow something that Microsoft's vision of the future doesn't. It offers an escape, a chance to live out your imagination. It offers (albeit poorly) tools that let you collaborate, and (reasonable level) tools that let you create, experiment and play. If I'm the Vatican City tourist board chief ex, I might not want that and there will be a market for that kind of control, but I'm pretty sure the future of the 3D internet will be wilder than Microsoft seem to imagine.
Businesses, a LOT of businesses are using non-photo-realistic worlds for training, meetings and the like already. They're struggling to get their routine advertising campaigns to work, but there are businesses that are making positive strides in creating a presence in Second Life, it just takes a different approach to the standard advertising campaign. And whilst we're thinking of it, a few minutes research suggests that a simple taster campaign will cost £35,000 ($70k) or more, and a full-blown campaign will be in the £2 million+ ($5million+) territory. Even at the £35k end, you could establish an office in SL and have it open for "office hours" for quite a few months. At the £2million+ end you're talking being able to have a multiple-avatar continuous presence on a continent and not get close to the same expenditure.
You'd get different end products of course... but you might well consider adding it to the advertising budget and get positives. Could this be done in a photosynthed world? Of course. But I have to wonder why you would... if you look at the Apple adverts (love them or loathe them) do you create a photosynthed model of the Apple offices? Do you heck. Businesses are going to want to have "unreal" spaces for advertising, and I rather suspect "unreal" spaces for other things - training they'll want to be able to simulate things that aren't real (fires for example, or workstation mock-ups or whatever) and they might well meet in nicer environments than the video conferencing room by choice too - and get more work done for it too!
I don't regularly make screen casts, but when I do I use Snapz Pro X, which I also use for all my screen shots except shots in Second Life where I usually use the snapshot tool and then edit in Photoshop.
However, Snapz Pro X is not free (it is worth the cost though) and I've recently come across two free tools that you might like to consider.
First up, screencast-o-matic which lets you make screencasts via your browser on Java 1.5 or better enabled machines. The system seems to work quite well, although only at 2-3fps and I have to say that on every one I've heard I really struggle to understand the recorded vocal track, but that is probably due to my hearing as others find it quite clear. Particularly attractive for educational uses, you can add notes at certain times to the video, and you can choose to allow people to add comments too. Thanks to Peter for pointing this out to me. You can see one of Peter's introduction to Second Life videos to judge the quality for yourself.
Sktich, which I have to say I hated, is a Web 2.0 concept screen grab tool. It gives you some quick and easy to use tools to resize, crop etc. your image. Now, part of the reason I hate it I suspect is the fact that all the tools don't work quite as I expect them - I'm hugely used to Photoshop and whilst it might have taken me a while to get used to working in Photoshop now I think it's mostly very straight-forward and logical. Skitch is quite different and doesn't behave quite how I expected in other ways either. It might be faster than take snap, open Photoshop, process image, but it's not so much faster and is so different to use that I don't feel I gain anything from the extra couple of seconds it supposedly saves.
A little while ago I gave a link to a list of creative writing tools. For the last couple of days I've had reason to use one - Jer's Novel Writer. Of course in two days I haven't used it to write a novel, but I have used to it structure and re-order a short reflective piece for public consumption - it would (according to the world counter) covert to 17 pages of a regular paperback so it's a bit long for a typical short story, but it's that kind of size.
I should also point out, because it's a reflective piece, there I haven't used all the tools - no need to keep a reference of the characters and places for example, so I've not used the database tool.
The outlining and structure has worked nicely. I divided the piece into sections: Introduction, a few body elements, conclusion. Within those sections I created blocks of paragraphs (sometimes only one paragraph long, sometimes thematically linked paragraphs), and then I wrote the paragraphs. Those of you familiar with planning by spidergram and then a list would have found this very familiar and may well wish to consider using this tool to supplement your writing.
Creating new sections, blocks and paragraphs was easy - and resetting the organisation as I wanted (no chapters and books for this project for example) was also fairly easy.
The margin notes were a godsend, and I used them in a variety of ways - to catch long sentence I need to rewrite, to indicate that I had to add some more detail, to check some facts and so on. The ability to drag the blocks around was also a godsend. I'd initially planned a short introduction, then an introduction to the metaphor I was going to use throughout the piece. I wrote it that way. Then... it wasn't working. The metaphor needed to go earlier. So, introduce a new text block, but and paste between them and slide the blocks around and the metaphor block around until it looks right.
I'll certainly be using this again for free form writing, even if it never inspires me to write a novel. But, on a less frivolous note - if you're working with a dyslexic learner, or someone struggling with literacy skills and you use writing frames, Jer's Novel Writer could be just what you need. It should be very easy to create a variety of writing frames, share them with the student and let the student write confidently in a more structured fashion. When the student needs more structure or to amend the frame, this is simple too. It really could be an excellent tool for this as well as the writing for which it is intended.
This is a rather uncomfortable film to watch - but that's not a bad thing.
The basic setting of the story is Nazi Germany. The father of an eight-year old boy has just been promoted at the start of the film, and is moving his family out of Berlin to "the country" to take up his new post. The boy makes friend with another boy the same age, in striped pyjamas, or as the older people watching it know, in the prison uniform of the camp he is in - the camp of which his father is commandant in fact.
What this film rather cleverly does is make you watch some of the most horrific events of the last century through the eyes of an innocent, and watch not only the big picture of history, but watch the family dynamics as they unravel as the family learn more about what the father does and the truth of the situation.
On that level it is a powerful and rather new way to tell the story of the Holocaust and should be applauded.
BUT... and sadly there is all too often a but, there are a number of things that struck different people that pulled us out of the film on a number of occasions. The son spoke with a much lower class accent than the maid, and that jarred. The commandant addresses one of his officers by the wrong rank and not only the wrong rank, but the rank is from the wrong arm of the forces (army rather than SS). The security on the camp was, frankly, terrible. I know they have to have some system that lets the children talk to each other and make friends, but whatever sort of camp it was meant to be should have had more security - it was, inevitably, child's play to break into the camp, leading up to the final scene.
And the ending was bad too. We all didn't really like it for different reasons. The main one, from a story perspective, was that it failed to deliver what it needed to. The story should have been about the death of innocence as the boy realised the true horror of what was going on. But, despite the terrible way he died, and the presumed impact on the family, he died an innocent and that left the film weaker than it should have been.
It is still well worth the time though, as long as you're braced for both its flaws and the frankly cheerless, relentless march of human evil growing throughout the film. Some of the family scenes, particularly when you see the parents conspiring to lie to their children about what's going on struck me as particularly painful and thought provoking despite not having children of my own.
