Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

After reading John’s post about “An Inconvenient Truth”, I decided I should give it a viewing.  I did this mostly for professional reasons.  I’m at a point in two of the courses I teach where we will be focusing on PowerPoint.  I wanted to see how the Oscar winning presentation looked.

The first thing I noticed – no bullet points.  It wasn’t that he chopped the bullets off the beginning of his lists.  He had almost no lists of the type that would normally have bulleted items.  Most of his lists were charted on graphs showing different trends.  When he did have a list, it was usually something big, like the number of countries that have signed the Kyoto Treaty.  These lists were long and the font size was intentionally almost too small to read.  It was as if the text was being treated like a graphic showing the magnitude of the data.

When there was text on the screen, it was usually a label for a graphic.  The few times quotes were used, each word of the quote was “typed” onto the screen slightly faster than he read the words.  That was the one part of the presentation that could have been done better.

At times the camera panned the picture on the screen.  I think the camera was panning.  I don’t know if he was doing a “zoom” effect.  The edges of the screen were not always in view, so I couldn’t tell how the image was moving.

The black background was interesting.  When a few words in white were on the vast sea of darkness, it really stood out.  I have thought of doing presentations this way.  It reminded me of the Lessig style I talked about a couple of weeks ago.

There were some things that were out of place.  I’m not sure why he did the whole “hanging chad” bit.  It had no place in this film.  Also, are we expected to believe that the clips showing him working on the presentation were real?  He didn’t even have a mouse.  Those animations were done by high-dollar animators that used a lot more than a track pad.

In my garage I have a filing cabinet with one drawer containing all the important papers from my undergraduate courses.  In the second drawer I have everything from graduate school.  These are all papers and they are approaching twenty years of age.  I don’t think anyone will ever care to look at them.  It’s just that they took so much of my time to create.  I can’t bear to throw them away.  I am certain no one will ever digitize them.

According to this article, a famous person like John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath, has thousands of pages that will never be digitized.  Steinbeck’s work isn’t the only thing lacking digital preservation.  Of the 132 million objects held in the Library of Congress, only 10% will probably ever be digitized.

For the most part I am ahead of the game.  All the important papers that I wrote in college are in digital format.  We had a mini-mainframe with an ASCII text editor.  All my papers fit on one (state of the art at the time) 3.5 inch floppy.  I still have that floppy.  I have copied it over to a CD for long term storage.

I went to graduate school immediately after undergrad.  It was during this time that I really learned to use a PC to publish.  All my writing was done using WordPerfect 4.  I used Ventura Publisher for all my publications and CorelDraw 2 (that’s right… TWO) for all the graphics.  I also started to back everything up to a Colorado 120 MB tape drive.  I still have all those tapes too.  In the box with the tapes I kept an external drive with an eight bit card.  Hopefully, if I ever want to retrieve any of that information, I will have a computer with an eight bit slot. 

That equipment brought me up to the age web publishing.  Since about 1995 I have had access to a CD burner.  All of my archives have been to optical disks.  Now I have thousands of CDs and DVDs from weekly backups.  Last week’s backup filled ten DVDs.

Over the weekend I was talking to my wife about video of the kids.  We have about 100 VHS tapes that we would like to keep, but don’t want to bother with digitizing.  I think my dad bought a VHS to DVD recorder last year.  I could use that to get all those tapes into digital format.  They would take up a lot less space and I wouldn’t be stuck with a VHS player for the rest of my life.

I try to keep my digital archives in a format that is useful to me as time goes on.  For instance, I have used Eudora for my email since 1992.  I have fifteen years of email that I can search fairly easily.  Just last weekend I needed a username and password that was emailed to me several years ago (I didn’t know what year).  I found the message from March of 2004 in about a minute.

Backups are not only important for the occasional hard drive crash.  They are also important for long-term storage of information.  Keeping all these things organized is important.  I keep a database that has a list of all the archives I have.  I number all my disks and record the disk number with the contents of the disk in the database.  Every time I burn a new archive set, the first thing on the disk is the database of all the previous archives.  So I can pull out last week’s archive and get a list of all my archived disks with their contents.  I keep all the disks in binders.  I use a Sharpie to write the disk number range on the spine of each binder.  That makes it easy to find old information.

In fifty years it will be interesting to see how much of this information I can still access.  As long as I have a DVD drive, I will be safe.  I suppose the last DVD I burn will have to go into a box with an external DVD drive.

This morning I got a call from a tech person interested in video streaming.  He wanted to setup his own server.  My first question was “are you crazy?”  Google Video, YouTube and a dozen other places will not only stream your video using band width that you don’t have to pay for, they will also store all those videos for you.  On top of that, these services have slick interfaces that will let anyone easily upload almost any format of video.  Arguably, the most difficult steps (from a user perspective) are getting the video into an acceptable format, uploading it and getting it to “play” in an embedded window on a web page.  All of these things are super-simple if you use YouTube or one of the similar free services.

The user end is only a small piece of the puzzle from the administrative end.  Putting a video server into a school’s network is expensive.  The server will require a lot of horsepower and disk space.  Depending on the format, video can be a few hundred kilobytes per minute to a few megabytes per minute.  In a building with a couple hundred students, each creating a ten minute presentation… the storage alone can get out of hand fast.  I have several presentations on Google Video that are almost an hour each.

Once all this video is stored on the server, it has to be streamed.  This is where things get completely out of hand.  Most schools don’t have the bandwidth required to continuously stream video to a significant number of users.  The free services do a great job of minimizing the effect on a network by compressing the video to a reasonable size while maintaining an acceptable presentation quality.

For most schools, using a public streaming service is not even an option.  All of them are filtered out.  It’s unfortunately that a few users of these public streaming services have ruined it for all of us.  Most of the streaming services have policies that prohibit objectionable video uploads, but things do slip by just like they do with every filtering system in every public school.

I don’t play a lot of games.  When I do, I get way too involved, and before I know it, a whole day goes by.  That’s why I don’t play a lot of games.

This week is spring break.  That means I have some free time.  Last week, Supreme Commander hit the market (trailer).  SupCom is the long awaited sequel to Total Annihilation (Cavedog – 1997).  These are RTS games.  If you are unfamiliar with RTS games, think of Risk but without turns.  Everything happens in real time.  Both players can move at the same time.

TA was so great.  It’s still my favorite RTS game ten years after its release.  SupCom takes everything TA does, and adds to it.  All the same shortcut keys work.  The graphics are stunning and the game play just as intense as with TA.  There are more advanced units and the limit is now 1000 units per team.

It has taken me three days to beat the computer at the “normal” level.

To get the full experience, you’ll need a fairly advanced machine.  I have a 3.2 Ghz machine with a GeForce 7900 and it gets bogged down once three or four hundred units are on the screen.

I haven’t played head-to-head yet.  I will probably hold off on that until Easter break.  By then I should know enough to keep from being embarrassed.

If you are interested in a match, let me know.