Childish 30's: Zelda and the Transformers

This week I have been regressing to childhood. It started when I received a Wii for my 31st birthday, immediately turning it into my 13th birthday. As a paid up member of Generation X I grew up with gaming culture, but I haven't had a console since my original Playstation died of dust poisoning a few years ago. Wii Sports is a lot of fun but it's The Legend of Zelda that's been soaking up my time.

Zelda is a beautifully crafted game - just stunningly well thought out - with a perfect pace, that ebbs and flows as the game mode changes between Link the Hero, Link the Wolf and a number of well-placed minigames that slot carefully into both the storyline and the environment. For once puzzles seem natural, and the solutions are pitched at just the right level of difficulty.

I've played this type of arcade adventure before, but none have managed to create such a structured experience without making it feel linear (the only example I can think of is Knights of the Old Republic, but that didn't have the same pleasing variety of gameplay).

Now Zelda is worth regressing for on its own, but a few days after my birthday I had the chance to see the Transformers movie. When I was a kid Transformers were absolutely the toy of choice and god knows how much money I nagged out of my poor parents to build my collection of plasticy little alien robots. I watched the cartoon movie when it was on in the cinema, and even read the comic for a while, so the Autobots and Decepticons are imprinted on some impressionable part of my brain.

I'm a happy Britisher, but every now and again something comes along that makes me wish I was an American; the 2000 American election was one (in fact I wished I was 538 Floridians) and the new Transformers film is another. The reason being that if I was an American I could lobby for a new law that would force Micheal Bay to only ever make movies with giant robots in them.

Trust me - Micheal Bay was born to make this movie. Everything about his style: the ridiculous action shots, the hammy music, the slo-mo army dudes, and all the rest of the military pornography, everything is geared up to support giant robots in the best possible way. In fact, thinking back, Pearl Harbour would have been a lot better had the Japanese fleet been intercepted by a host of flying giant robots, and think how great Armageddon would have turned out had Bruce Willis been forced to put away his silly pimp-my-space-shuttle and fight some giant robot asteroids - for all mankind!


My one and only niggle with the ridiculous, testosterone fueled two hours that is Transformers, is that the new robot designs don't look that great when they're moving about, especially when Micheal Bay is having an attack of editor's Tourettes and fast cutting between fighting robots, giant guns and sweaty female midriffs. I mean look at Megatron, imagine that as a toy, you could have someone's eye out!

All in all its been a fun week being 13 again, sadly the mortgage needs paying and no amount of reminiscing will mow the lawn, so I better put the wii-mote aside and do some real work - at least until the next Giant Robot film, or they release No More Heroes:

Missile Command for Monks

Discovered this fabulous little flash game called Boomshine. It's a bit like Missile Command but with a calm sense of oneness instead of the needless aggression. Wonderfully Zen.

Ubuntu - a tale of discovery and woe

In the last few weeks I've been getting bored with Windows XP (my OS of lack of choice) and have had a bit of a roving eye, sneaking lusty glances over the shoulders of Mac users and hanging around in dodgy Windows Vista galleries ogling Aero through the glass.

Having decided that I cant really justify a MacBook when my Samsung PC has pretty much identical hardware already, I have resorted to a PC-based alternative and tried out Ubuntu.

For those that don't know, Ubuntu is a kind of Linux-for-dummies, a UNIX solution targeted at desktop users who cant be bothered to recompile their kernel every five minutes. Now don't get me wrong, I've been using flavours of Linux for over ten years, but I've never been religious about it, and I don't have the time or the energy to build, configure and tweak my laptop setup - I just want it to work.

The experience started off really well, I found a simple Ubuntu installer called Wubi that installs Ubuntu into a single file on your windows store and changes the bootloader to make Ubuntu an option on startup (this is handy as it means you don't have to repartition your drive - and essentially means you can try out Ubuntu risk free). Wubi worked really well, and (after waiting an hour or two for the 600MB download) I booted for the first time into Ubuntu.

Out of the box it seemed to work pretty well; the basic apps are all solid and critically it managed to autodetect and install the right driver for my wireless card and gave me a preinstalled Firefox, pretty much all you need to get started with anything.

But then I got greedy. I was after the whizzy 3d effects and fancy transparencies (check out the video above) and chose to ignore the bones of the dead that littered the way ahead. It all seemed simple enough, I had to install a specific ATI driver for my X1600, install an OpenGL driver, add a few installation repositories and then point the auto-installer at Beryl (a GUI extension that more properly would be called Candy). I even found some helpful tutorials using my complete and fully operational firefox to show me the way.

Mmmm... within five minutes I had resorted to the command line to try and install the ATI drivers. Within ten minutes I was busily editing my X config file - although in Ubuntu's defence I didn't have to use vi. Within fifteen minutes I'd broken X and had been chucked into fullscreen console mode, not very useful when your tutorial is on a web page in your broken X session :-( Luckily I had my trusty Glofiish with me (damnable thing) and so I found the tutorial on that, rediscovered the location of the config file and managed to fix it (with pico, I'm not using vi for anyone).

After an hour or so of hard work I just about had Ubuntu back into the same state it had been when I first installed it, not quite the experience I had been hoping for, but at least I hadn't killed anyone or resorted to sticking pins in a little Linus Torvalds doll like the last time I dated RedHat back in 99 or so.

Anyway, these things take time, and I still haven't forgiven XP for rebooting without asking every time I turn my back, or for popping up modal dialog boxes in the middle of typing a sentence, so I'm willing to give Ubuntu a second chance. But the second I see that bloody text editor coming it's out of here, and I'll be grabbing a Vista CD from the Uni's distribution site. Ubuntu - you have been warned!

Update 8th August 07: Ok - so I finally managed to get Beryl working. I have an ATI x1600 graphics card and I have to use the proprietary ATI driver (i.e. use fglrx) + XGL; a few places say to use the open source driver but I just couldn't get that to work. These guides were of great help:

• Paerez (on the Ubuntu forum)
• ArsGeek's guide
• ATI driver Wiki
• and especially happis' guide (also on the Ununtu forum)

One thing not mentioned very much is that XGL support is accidentally missing from Beryl 0.2.1, so I had to revert to version 0.2.0 using Synaptic and locking it to prevent it updating(which meant learning how Synaptic works). So now I have a very pretty looking Ubuntu setup - but it wasn't exactly effortless to set up, I think it took me around 5 hours to get it going in the end.

ICALT Japan Photos

I've had a chance to organise my photos since coming back from Japan, and also had a chance to play with Picasa (which as you'd expect is very polished and nicely integrates with all Google's other goodies). Turns out that we've all been busy little photo sharers:

• Dave's Photos
• Hugh's Photos
• Maurice's Photos
• Alex's album

Especially Alex's album of bad English translations and general weirdness :-)

My favorite pic is of this ema at the Meiji Jingu shrine (prayers written on wooden plaques at the shrine) . There's something oddly satisying about flying 5000 miles and finding a homage to the flying spagetti monster :-)

ICALT 2007 - Two steps behind

So the ICALT conference is over for another year. It's an interesting event that tries to bring together researchers from both east and west, and for the most part it succeeds - the mixture of presenters is about half and half and there is a lot of opportunity to meet people from countries that in the past have been under-represented in international academic research.

Of course there are some problems too. English is the conference language but not all participants have strong English skills which can make communication difficult (I probably experience this most jarringly as a native English speaker, but can guess that it is frustrating for everyone else as well).

But probably the most disappointing thing for me is that all the researchers, east or west, still seem to show undue reverence to the e-learning techniques, technologies and methods that have been built up in the last ten years or so. Many papers continue to look at standards such as SCORM, and systems like LMSs as if there existence was pre-ordained and their execution canon. What I'm really hoping to get out of a conference is an exciting dialogue or two, sounds of dissension and dissatisfaction, and if I'm really lucky some ideas for innovative new solutions.

In ICALT I really only got that feeling in the three keynotes, which were all rather good. Perhaps the best was from Marc Eisenstadt, entitled "Does e-learning have to be so awful?".

Its difficult (and never that accurate) to sum up someone else's argument, but the main message that I took away from Marc's talk was that if we want to understand how student's might make use of new technologies then we need to be using those technologies, and if we need to understand the issues then the best way is to have those issues ourselves. This extends to the wider case as well, and Marc argued that to gain a proper understanding of how those technologies effect learning we need to roll them out to real students on a real scale and experience the results.

I personally felt that given his provocative title Marc was pulling his punches a bit. There was an undercurrent of real dissatisfaction throughout his talk, a subtext of couldn't-we-do-better, and I think he's right to draw attention to the misalignment of our research on e-learning and our real world teaching. What I found frustrating about this conference was that everyone (and on reflection I am probably just to blame as everyone else) is about two steps behind where they should be. Two whole steps!

The people on the bottom step are the ones who haven't realised that the stone is already rolling and that the world is moving on. These folks are still working with the temporary solutions that are LMSs and ITS systems (temporary in that there existence is only justified in the narrow technology deficit decade of 1995-2005 - where IT skills were playing catch up).

The people on the first step, and I like to think that this is where I live, are focused more on the reality of students today, they are excited about social software and radical new ideas like Second Life (radical in the non-fictitious sense anyway!). They enthuse about the wisdom of crowds, loosely coupled systems and mashups. But even these people aren't really in the right place, because this stuff is happening anyway - there are teachers out there using second life, lecturers building learning communities on Wikis, students sharing their experiences on the blogosphere. The people on the first step don't have to enthuse, this is the reality.

So what's the second step, what should a conference like ICALT be serving up on its east-west plate? I think that we all need to move forward to a place where we can set the enthusiasm aside and begin to think more critically about social software and the consequences of all this can-do power in the hands of our students. At the minute we're so busy trying to persuade everyone that the rolling stone is right that we can't take the time to reflect on the times when it rolls down an inconvenient gully, or crushes a pedagogy when no-ones looking. How do we deal with the sidelining of experts, how can assessment cope with so much sharing, how can we manage cultural differences that might disadvantage some students in online settings?

As we left Japan I realised that despite Marc's excellent talk, this is what made me so dissatisfied with ICALT this year. No-one seems to be asking these difficult questions - and surely that's what the academic community is for?

ICALT 2007, Japan - a shaky start

I'm off on my travels again, this time to sunny (well, luke warm and sticky) Japan, and the International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies (ICALT) 2007, held in Niigata on the north coast.

It was an interesting start to the trip. Just after we landed in Tokyo the Niigata area was hit by a 6.7 earthquake which caused quite a bit of damage to buildings and disruption to the travel systems in the area. As a result we ended up staying the night in Tokyo waiting for the Shinkansen to start running again.

Tokyo

It's my first time in Tokyo and the city seems a massive, sprawling urban landscape, without the defining centres that characterise other megacities like London and New York. Much of it is disappointingly bleak - as if someone cut and pasted Birmingham a hundred times - but some is fabulously alive with neon and activity, with fascinating curios stuffed into every possible space. For example, we walked along the edge of a raised train express route and the number and variety of businesses crammed beneath its arches was incredible; traditional Japanese drinking holes side by side with Limousine garages and trinket shops. We ended our unexpected day with a Lost in Translation moment in the 40th story of our hotel block, with a melancholy nightcap overlooking the steel canyons of Shinjuko.

Niigata

With the Shinkansen running again we made our way to Niigata. The Shinkansen (the bullet train) is just stunningly fast, although we were frustratingly sitting on the bottom floor of a double-decker coach and the Japanese have built a wall 4 feet high and 200 miles long between Tokyo and Niigata which did an excellent job of blocking the view. Niigata itself is markedly quieter than Tokyo, it's a city the size of Glasgow with the personality of Wadebridge, perhaps Japanese metropolitan culture only ignites with millionaire populations.

Launchy

I'm quite bare-bones when it comes to my PC. I go through the damn things like a wrecker ball in PC world and so cant be bothered to personalise them much. As a result I use them pretty much out of the box, so I'm not a big fan of fiddly little productivity apps. However, in the last few days I've come across a neat little utility called Launchy, a very lightweight application launcher, and I'm rather taken by it.

When you press Alt-Space Launchy pops up a command box in the center of the screen and allows you to type common app names to launch them, or set up simple commands (for example to open a web browser at a particular URL). This gives you back some of the productivity we all lost back in 1969 when Doug Engelbart invented the mouse, simultaneously opening up computers to the common person, and slamming the door on the fingers of powerusers everywhere.

I think Launchy has just made it onto the list of apps-that-I-can-be-bothered-to-install-on-the-first-afternoon-with-a-new-machine list. Joining such luminaries as Textpad, Putty, VLC and Paint.Net. Bare-bones compared to some, but those apps are all free and very hard to beat.