Teachertube & Pivot Stickfigure Animator

By the way, have you come across this site http://www.teachertube.com/ yet? It's a retty cool alternative to YouTube and obviously has a lot less issues about language, profanity (some YouTube comments are amazingly profance) and questionable images. Not only good for students but also for teachers as well as it has some good motivational videos and other material that illustrate how ICT in everyday life and in education are changing (almost in front of our eyes). Plus its gots lots of small student created materials that can really help orient and inspire a class of students.

And yay! it's not blocked by default by DECS - so it must be clean and wholesome and teachers can go to it straight away.

I've also been using a nice little freeware program called Pivot Stickfigure Animator. It's a small 485 kb download and it comes with some sample files and you can save your work as animated gif's. It lets you create stick figure animations. It works well with students and provides a very simple way of giving them the chance to do a 'free time' (if you like) fill in lesson where they use the computer to CREATE something. But even a simple free time filler can be scaffolded into quite productive projects if you have a mind to do it. You can save the little files it creates as animated image files (animated gif's) and these files (there's only one file for a whole movie) will keep on replaying over and over. Then you can take these images and use them in Word documents, in PowerPoints and even embed them into excel spreadsheets. You could use Excel to create a timeline and have images for each stage or for key events in a narrative- a good way to use Excel with it's ability to pivot text, colour cells to represent sections and so on).

Anyway I've taken students individual animated gif's and stitched them together into a PowerPoint presentation. I did this during a lesson as they were creating their animations. You can simply save what they have and it will be animated provided there are more than 2 frames.

I added some colour effects, the names of the student authors and this certainly impressed the year 2/3 middle primary class. We could use the PowerPoint to go and create a movie and storyboard what we want to cover in future lessons. A teacher could also insert these animated gif's into Photostory, Movie Maker and add narration and descriptive captions and build up quite powerful texts combining sounds / narration, images, text - and all without photographs! The default background is white but you can add a single background image if you like and this gives us lots of options (scanned pictures of student art, photographs, images created in kidpix and so on) to go on with.

Digital / Manual

All my life I've had hobbies - even before I knew what a 'hobby' was. I look back at my life and see what must be a cycle - hobby 1, hobby 2, hobby 3, hobby 1 - over and over again. I'm back onto photography again. But things have changed - this time I'm using a Pentax *ist DL but with a manual screw mount lens. It's kind of a blast. However as more than person has noticed - swapping from k-mount to M42 lens mount is about the the easiest thing to do in the world. Getting it undone - well that takes some effort and I note here what one has to do so that I can remember it for next time:

The screw mount to bayonet adapter is easy enough to insert in the camera, removing it turned out to be more tricky. If you study the adapter closely, you see a small spring steel spring that is screwed on to the adapter proper. When this is in the camera, the spring will engage a small catch inside the lens mount, preventing the adapter from rotating when the lens is unscrewed. To remove the adapter it is necessary to disengage the spring by inserting the tool that comes with the adapter in the right place, that is outside the spring. However, when subsequently trying to turn the adpater clockwise, the tool easily cathes on to the bayonet flange, preventing removal.Obviously, this procedure requires training, preferably in a dust free environment, before trying it in the field. I am tempted to purchase a prime screw mount lens to use in the field together with the Peleng, just to avoid having to fiddle with the adapter!

However, the instructions don't mention why the adaptor ring tool has a small prong on one side. The prong is what goes over the spring to push it in. After the first few degrees of movement you then have to raise up the prong so that you can then turn the adaptor for the final turn. It's no where near as easy as a bayonet mount lens. But I still think using the M42 lenses is worth the effort.

DVD Commentaries and Oral Literacy

I'm feeling sick today as a great wave of pestilence sweeps across our merry school. I would have taken a sick day off last week, but you know how it is ... programming requirements - gotta get to meetings, a sports / dance carnival. Hey grin and bear it baby! And that was before we all swagged it out by a campfire overnight in another school's grounds. Sometimes, you know, even when we're feeling down - living and working out in The APY Lands has its real upsides.

Anyway feeling poorly as I was this morning I lingered over that coffee and was casting my eyes through The Weekend Australian when I came across an article about alternative homebrewed DVD commentaries that appeared in Lawrie Zion's DVD Letterbox column on the 9th of September, 2006. In the article (see below) Zion refers to MMM Commentaries, an Aussie site. It occured to me what an excellent opportunity this could provide for an alternative literacy outlet - students creating their own commentary of a movie (perhaps based on their shared class reading of a text) or providing a commentary to any genre movie / documentary or whatever based on their study (for example they could take on the role of 'scholar' and explain some technical detail - or tell you why its wrong). It would certainly provide a refreshing alternative to the traditional 'my book report' format. And I think in my context, it would give students who are essentially ESL / EFL, an opportunity to construct a higher order text when they don't (mostly) have the necessary independent reading and writing skills to construct an equivalent written text. More information on Alternative DVD commentaries can be found here in a 2002 article and of course here, on Wikipedia.

Be the sound of a tech savy teacher (there is no sound)

Graham Wegener's Teaching Generation Z blog reflects on The Blue Skunk Blog's perspective on Hiring a tech savvy teacher. In particular I was taken with the question:

How should a tech-savvy teacher create lesson plans? What is the mix of off-the-shelf apps, teacher-created projects/apps and traditional media (books etc.)? I've always thought the first sign of a technologically literate teacher is one who knows when to use technology and when not to use technology. A good teacher will use a variety of instructional strategies depending on the needs of the individual learner and the skill to be mastered.

It was just earlier today that I was faced with the imortance of this point; knowing when to use technology. Namely that tech savvy teaching doesn't just mean that you use computers. At the end of the day computers / the internet can be a potentially wide-band medium for us to convey our message with (just as a pen and paper can be narrow band). I think that potentially, the sound of a tech-savy teacher is going to be the sound of someone making the links between formal literacy lessons, various classroom discussions, pen and paper / chalk and talk learning activities. All of these things need to come along (and sometimes it may seem like these things come kicking and screaming) when one enters the tech-savy ICT zone.

I think that all too often we see teachers entering the computer room as if that room were a place apart, another realm on the far side of a great divide. And routinely we see lessons undertaken as if all that had been planned and learned in the past was now, somehow, irrelevant (i.e. that's old technology). It's not any great point, but it has to be recognised that ICT is everywhere - it isn't a mode in other words like old word processing programs used to operate (1st I'm in type mode, then I'm in preview mode, now I'm in print mode after I've been in spelling mode). ICT is essentially modeless - or it should be - and we should recognise that, ideally, technology is not a divide in our lives, rather it is everywhere. I'm sure that a lot of teachers get put off the idea of teaching ICT / or teaching in a tech savy manner because they do not realise this very point. And so they still go to the computer room and think 'computer mode'.

Wikis, education and blocked websites

Just a series of links concerning wiki's for this one: Wiki's what are they and how to use them and How I use wiki's. What do you do?

Although its a little ironic - most of the links that I want to go to are blocked by our Education department. As an educatator I want to access these links for the reasons that they were blocked in the first place - for example a skypecast about wiki's and education is blocked because it is "Chat". It's the little things like this that can spring up - unblocking isn't a problem for me - getting a website unblocked can be a real hassle; I remember when I started out. A block appears at the last minute and you have to locate the person who can unblock it, ask them to do it, and then perhaps wait ... wait until they get around it, wait until their humour improves, etc. At any rate, some of the links are blocked for reasons that are hard to explain your way around - for example bittorrent is blocked (reason "illegal") by default at my site. Now to explain why you want to access it (i.e. some files are 'free' - for example a bootable linux version of gcompris) that I want to try out on some of our older classroom PC's. It's not a 1 minute chat to explain why it's free, why the block can be removed without fear of repercussion. Well, there's this little thing called open source software ... But you have to contextualise this conversation against less than clear job descriptions, informal workplace norms / conventions that have established themselves. You know, the usual stuff - you can have all the official support in the world, but you end up having to work through other people that haven't been apprised of all the official support that you've been afforded.

Anyway, better get off to work.

Time and Tide

We live in an extraordinary time. As Vannevar Bush famously noted as far back as 1945:

The world has arrived at an age of cheap complex devices of great reliability; and something is bound to come of it.

However, it seems to me that whilst so much is potentially available to empower us as educators and so much appears to be 'just around the corner' as it were. I wonder who it is, exactly, that is going to use these devices and what teaching methodology they are going to use to achieve wonderful (but often unstated) learning outcomes.

To put this question into perspective consider the One Laptop per Child organization and their goal of creating the US$100 laptop for third world students. Whilst I personally support and applaud this project I sometimes wonder about its aims, which seem to some extent, to consider that the provision of technology is an end that will provide an educational result in itself. Consider the text on their homepage:

Introducing 2B1, the children's laptop from One Laptop per Child — a potent learning tool … a flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development — immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning.

If we consider Marc Prensky’s “Do They Really Think Differently”, it becomes apparent that even if we do use technology, it won’t, in itself, provide much of a impact if we end up simply using this new technology to repurpose our old curriculum. What then, is the future then of 'literacy' - (if we take literacy as the abitlity to read and decode a traditional text like a novel - a handy skill to have if you ever have to read a report) - if what I or we are teaching (and I am mandated to do so) is a certain type of program requiring a monolithic block of time (perhaps 2 continuous hours) and a fairly linear approach to completing a session? How exactly then does my use of an A$6500.00 IWB / Projector / laptop combination - despite being incredibly ICT centric (merging as it does text / pictures / sound and reconstruction) - actually address such fundamental challenges as short attention spans or a tendency towards random access of text?

What exactly is it that changing our technology base / lesson mindset will require and how are we to use what we have, whether it’s a fleet of US$100 laptops in the developing world or an IWB and predominance of computers in the classroom?

Some nights

Some nights you just want to write; pull back from living and reflect - pen on paper - without worrying how many words it takes to say something, to let an idea bubble up to the surface and out itself.

Moleskine Notebooks

I've taken the step back into using paper journals. To this end I purchased a Moleskine notebook. It's so tempting to be in some 'secret' band of creative types, to have chanced upon - unknown and unexpected - a great secret. I feel that a lot of the 'Moleskinesque' webpages that we see are no more than covert viral marketing ploys. And they work - I've gone out and bought a Moleskine myself. But 'real' artists / dreamers / poets / philosphers / diarists / notetakers and plain old compulsive paper-purchasers, well they write because 'its' in them; the urge to be, to release on paper, some part of oneself. But the page can be lonely too and it's only natural for us to want to face that off-white challenge in the company of others - even if we only know that those others are out there in time and space. Hey, thanks for the marketing to let me know that I don't need to be alone!

Perhaps (hopefully) what people are really excited about is the idea of thinking and writing when all they seem to be doing is raving as if the notebook had just been invented?

To be fair though, the Moleskine suits me - it's a touch larger than A4 folded in half and the paper is a nice buff tone and the covers are hard enough to write anywhere. The corners are rounded which is practical and the binding opens flat. All over a good range of qualities. Not cheap, but not bulky either. By the way, the paper seems fine even though many people complain of ink seeping through the pages. I'm using a medium Waterman (Phileas I think?) of some sort with blue Waterman ink. There's the odd splotch that appears on the underside of a page, but nothing significant. I've ordered a few Hero 329's (eBay - 3 for $9.95 plus postage!) as they have fine/fine nibs - plus they'll remind me of the old Parker 51 that I lost all those years ago ...

My Search history

I've started to use Google's "My Search History" service. I feel as if I've taken the next step in computing. Whilst people may be concerned over privacy, as you are storing a record of the things you are interested in on someone else's computer, I feel that the benefits really outweigh the concerns implicit to that. Consider how many times - for example - that you've searched for something, followed the link in your search engine and found that magic page, the page with exactly what it is that you were looking for. Google will record that moment for you and locate it in a calendar for a visual date search (I looked at it last week, last month) or you can search your old searches and find it that way; absolutely brilliant, instead of searching through every page you search through your old searches - a few hundred or a few thousand pages instead of millions of pages. Plus once you've logged in you seem to be able to use the separate search window found in Safari or Firefox, for example. For people that work across multiple computers, the ability to record your searches and go back to them is a godsend. You do need to have gmail mail account to log in and use it. I wonder if this is going to make bookmarks redundant?


Check it out at http://www.google.com/searchhistory/

Japanese bike ride

The sun rises and the morning is cool. My bicycle hums as overinflated tyres rush along 1970's terrazzo floors. I pass through near empty arcades. Everywhere is a blaze of Kanji in all the colours that the Nippon Densu Neon Works (or whoever they are) is capable of creating. Faces on billboards smile with whiter than white teeth; straight and narrow and even. Jean Reno, the French movie star, has something good to say about soda. Above me, exactly 1000 Japanese Summer Festival Bells tinkle - lazy in the cool breeze. All is well when the day is new. Even Japanese workers rest sometime.

Shadows play a game of tag whilst running alongside my bicycle. Old men and short men in hard polyester pants (shiny with wear) glide alongside me, their bicycles dull with age and use. They are burdened with strange cardboard cargoes. They are a disappearing past of cheap paint gone dull and rough and crinkly. Rust nibbling away at the extremities. Blink and you'll miss Japan.

One hundred and twenty million Japanese. A billion Chinese. Countless stars fallen behind the dawn. How many bicycles are rolling along in the cool of the morning at this exact moment?

"We Japanese like details."

The gentle breeze is to my back now, the half remembered speckling of light must remain outside this cool passageway - but a memory of that light brightly fluttering as white dice on sooty baize remains with me.

It's Summer Festival week which is a time when Japanese people dance badly, spontaneously and unselfconsciously in the street. All whilst marching in well organised lines. There is the constant banging of drums that continues for hours on end. Men dressed in white with great big headbands hammer away furiously at wine barrel sized drums. A splash of red dye on white is to be seen. People stare, endlessly watching on. Fireworks will explode in tidy, well mannered, arrangements. Each individual spark a conscious well arranged part of the whole.

Lucky morning.

Seminar

I went to my 'first' graduate or higher seminar today -I know what have I been doing with my time? Imagine, if you will, a room full of post-structuralists nodding their heads sanely while this Dr Dude out the front embeds the wildest assertions about the nature (or lack thereof) of 'tings into his presentation. Its a pity that my other supervisor hadn't turned up - he would have gone wild. And I mean WILD - and he would have definitely used the word incoherent. Ahh, these university guys - they all know each other anyway.

Call ME reactionary, but when someone says Yes, language determines the nature of physics, my dander gets up.

Anyway, I took notes and copied the (extensive) handouts that were provided and I've got some other readings, and a contact out of the 'effort' of going. To be fair, the presenter handed out an excellent overview / flowchart that he'd drawn up; it indicated what intellectual traditions are involved in this area (dating back to the Enlightenment) and how they connect with each other. I'll probably end up creating an electronic form of this document and uploading it - it makes the ground a lot clearer for someone interested in the history or ideas / and the firmness of reality I think.

There have been moments recently where I've felt like I should be getting a job a buying a house. The world moves on and here I am playing 'laptop man and the thesisicons' - perhaps I want my cake and to eat too. Going to today's seminar really reminded me how much it is that I love this stuff. A world of ideas, of thinking, of questioning how it is that things are. This world is not easy to come by. Not in most jobs anyway.

Singlespeed

Simplicity

The beauty of singlespeeding lies in its simplicity - no gears and fewer 'knick-knacks'. There is also less abstraction of the chain line. Singlespeeding is an aesthetic and practical ideal that involves less clutter in favor of a more simple, but not less involved, riding experience. I believe that singlespeeding frees the rider from the tyranny of gear selection. Whatever gear you are in, you are in the right gear; so don't even worry about it. I think that singlespeeding reconnects a rider with some of the essentials of bike riding: the fun, the pleasure, the unpretentiousness of it all. A common misconception about singlespeeding is expressed in the worry about what happens when the hill becomes too steep. Well the answer is simple, you keep pedaling until you can't turn your legs anymore and then you get off and walk. In reality one is more likely to actually run out of top end than bottom end - i.e. you are more likely to feel the need for a higher gear on the flats than for a lower gear in the hills.

With a 'singlespeeder' the thing is to spin

If you haven't tried singlespeeding yet - give it a go. Less can be more and it's a (quiet) revolution to discover that one doesn't need a minimum of 21 or more gears to have fun or to 'make it' to the end of one's street. Gears aren't needed for small rides any more than they're needed for long rides. So ride into town or climb that hill - you'll be surprised and possibly satisfied when you complete these simple tasks.

When I worked in Japan I rode a singlespeed almost every day. In fact if I didn't ride to work I felt somewhat diminished. That's how it is with some things in life; they just get under your skin. By now I've mentally cataloged all those riding experiences into the hazy locker of memory. The reality of riding everyday is that you get wet when it rains, cold when its snowing and sticky in the heat of the summer. But one also gains time to think a great deal about life and about living - something that's harder to do when you're hunched over and fretting about gearing and position. So spin away friends, spin away ....

Reflections around graduation

I'm not sure about this whole graduation thing ... perhaps its because I'm not feeling well. However I'm not sure if this 'unwellness' is related to my flu like symptoms or to a more metaphysical malaise. The slight temperature that I'm carrying, the dull ache running across my shoulders, the tension in my neck; perhaps all these things conspire to tell me that I'm not 100% behind turning up tomorrow? So much has changed since starting the degree; doubly so since I first countenanced undertaking it back in 2000 / 2001 (?) in Japan. Angela, that person who encouraged me then to do this, she now plays parts in other people's lives. Dim are the memories of why I actually chose to do it anyway. However I remember her beside me back then but sitting behind and slightly to my right in that Internet cafe with the cheerful owner in the 'trendy thing' department store behind the railway station in downtown Kokura. A beathless sentence for a breathless country.

I remember because today I was online at Uni via wireless internet using Apple Airport technology, I didn't realise it at that moment, but today I had been looking at the same website that I searched through four years ago whilst using that ISDN internet cafe connection back in Japan. My black coffee completed a journey lasting 4 years - all over in the blink of an eye. So thinking about this now, I'm smiling at the thought of all the keystrokes typed by me on computers over the years. I'm smiling also for a deeper reason, because at least in part I've made a connection with my past and folded the page of my life in such a way as to make two points connect and be meaningful. It's a creased sheet of paper is my life.

I'll go then to the graduation and enjoy it for what it is - a brief moment of celebration, not of achievement but of passing on - all of us in that room will be thinking our thoughts and remembering our pasts; past lives, past occupations, and indeed the people who have passed through. So much happens every day that it would be (and is), easy to miss out on what is happening to us. But in the quite moments, if we are lucky, we come to think and understand who it is that we are and what it is that we are about. To write is to understand oneself, to scratch about in the mists of one's life and start to pull out surprisingly concrete things; things which were there all along, unnoticed yet all the while troubling us like sharp splinters of reality that get under one's skin.

Lorem ipsum

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit. Aliquam condimentum feugiat est. Donec euismod elit tincidunt arcu. Curabitur gravida magna eu orci aliquet ultrices. Donec eleifend imperdiet dolor. Mauris in leo in lacus porta luctus.

Lorem Ipsum is printing and typesetting dummy text, according to this website, it has been in use since the 1500s when an unknown printer took a galley of latin type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. The whole point of Lorem Ipsum is that it allows a person to look at the 'form' of a page without being distracted by the content. I suspect that many honours students could use Lorem Ipsum in their theses - a possible defence of such use being 'Hey man, almost all the letters that would be found in the words that you want are there".

Surviving not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, Lorem Ipsum has remained essentially unchanged. However some feel that 'the heart' has left the Lorem Ipsum world since we all moved from cold type presses. Still others complain that moving away from woodblock lettering lies at the foundation of the great Lorem Ipsum wars that have plagued the last decades. Regardless of it's nature (electronic or otherwise) Lorem Ipsum has endured and prospered, coming to wide popularity in the groovy 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages. A follow up single "Lorem Ipsum and the brass rubbings" failed to chart.

More recently Lorem Ipsum has 'gone digital' and it can be found in such computer software programs as "Apple Pages" which comes with templates filled with Lorem Ipsum. A cynic would suggest that this is the ultimate end that computer programs are working towards: not only do they make life easier for you, they also complete the job without you having to do anything at all. A 'knock-off' of Lorem Ipsum (Morel muspl) has recently been released by a possie of Postmodernists. However nobody is sure what this knock-off looks really looks like, if it really exists anyway and why, since pages are a 'construct' and don't need to be as they are, it should be used at all.

Perhaps the most accurate thing one can say about Lorem Ipsum is that it is not simply random text; its roots lie in a piece of classical Latin literature by Cicero dating from 45 BCE. Typical of Cicero's light bedside manner some of the piece  that Lorem Ipsum was based upon is as follows: "Neque porro quisquam est qui dolorem ipsum quia dolor sit amet, consectetur, adipisci velit..." This translates as: "There is no one who loves pain itself, who seeks after it and wants to have it, simply because it is pain..." Presumably this was the equivalent of Roman 'Light Entertainment', something light to entertain jittery locals living on the borders of the Rhine.  

Tiger

Welly well well, the day after I give in to my primal urges and buy a powerbook, Tiger 10.4 is released! I'd been expecting no news on that front until the next developers conference in May(?) or maybe even until the middle of the year. Thankfully all is not lost as Apple have put out an offer where all purchases backdated up to the 12th of April qualify for an Aus$14.95 upgrade offer. I've already faxed mine off with a copy of the tax invoice. Its a good deal, but its a far cry from the 'goode olde dayes' when the system software was free and you were only paying for the mac. Ah well - I shall have to wait until the 29th of April.

Image editing freeware

I've come across a couple nice (and light)OS X image editing applications. Up until now I've used Corel Draw/Paint for my image editing needs - modest as those needs are - but to say that these programs are slow is a profound understatement; I'm sure that there are divorces that feel quicker than either of these monsters. Anyway, irritated beyond belief that I couldn't open a tiff image that I had scanned and then, after I converted the image to a jpeg, irritated even further because I couldn't figure out how to easily resample the image and make it smaller. I just gave up in disgust - I used to know how to do this with these programs but I just couldn't remember for the life of me. So I scouted around and managed to find a couple of interesting freeware alternatives:

The first program that I found is called Teal, it's all of 218kb in size! It reminds me of the sort of tight code that one used to come across all the time when hard drives were small and being an economical programmer was seen as a virtue. Anyway, Teal strikes me as being something of a simple yet enhanced "Windows Paint" program. It features a few simple brushes aswell as a couple of simple filters. It needs a nicer icon though :). Teal doesn't seem to open tiffs or bmps at the moment - it is fine with jpegs though. At the moment this program is listed as being in a preview stage, but it looks really promising. Take a gander at it here.

The second program, called Seashore, is to quote it's developer:

an open source image editor for Cocoa. It features gradients, textures and anti-aliasing for both text and brush strokes. It supports multiple layers and alpha channel editing. It is based around the GIMP's technology and uses the same native file format.

Now I've never been a big fan of the Gimp (fairly steep learning curve, lots of features, usually needs X11 on OS X), but this (2mb) program was a real eye-opener; fast and light, pretty powerful but not so overwhelming that you can't get into it quickly and an aqua application aswell. As the original author admits in the 39 page user manual, this program was started to solve a need that he had. I found it straight forward to use, it handled the file types that I was working with, and it allowed me to resample the size of my image in an intuitive manner. Of course one person's intuitive is anothers ... Anyway an excellent program that does have a really pretty icon. If your interested in seeing what it looks like:Go here. Good stuff.

Powerbook

My ibook/powerbook 'debate' has been resolved with the purchase of an 'old stock' 12" G4 1.33ghz superdrive powerbook. For this sort of purchase (and after the event) one can be very measured and list out all sorts of pros and cons for their decision; why this model and not some newer, 'better' alternative? Perhaps the best thing to reflect on, in the end, is that this purchase complied with a deep seated fundamental that's required for a sale to happen; namely I wanted to buy something ASAP. In other words I got the fever and had to do something about it.

In the store I was really tempted to buy an ibook 12"/30gig/1.2ghz (low weight, rugged, low initial purchase price) but I decided that by the time I purchased and installed a larger hard drive it would cost, if not as much as a powerbook, then enough to put me off the idea of bothering - and it would still have no proper clamshell mode or monitor spanning support either. Plus the ibook is due for an upgrade and I didn't want to wait up-to-a-month for a special order. I've always half regretted getting my 14" ibook as it was half kilo bit heavier than the 12" ibook. I also want to make my purchase and pick it up at the same point in time. Not order something and then wait ...

So first thoughts/impressions - I absolutely love it!

I definitely complied with a fundamental requirement for a sale to happen - I was 'the' motivated buyer - I wanted a laptop more than the people on the other side of the counter wanted to sell. In fact after asking if they had any 1.5ghz 12" powerbooks and being told no, I had to think and then ask a second time if they had any of the old models (this was after the salesman told me that he couldn't guarantee any order that I might make within less than a month). Anyway the dude makes a call down to the storeroom and then says "Oh, you do! How many? Four? Oh could you bring one up please?" And up comes the little black box. After a $500 discount and making sure iLife05 was included I've got my next 24 month interest free purchase - for about $5 a month more than I was paying for a 933 mhz iBook with no DVD burning, no airport, no bluetooth, a smaller HD (40 gig v. 60 gig), 32 v. 64 mb video, no digital/spanning video out and a slower system bus.

In the wash-up this unit works out as being about $400 cheaper than the current base model superdrive 1.5 Powerbook. For that $400 I give up Bluetooth 2, a 5400 rpm HD, a scrolling trackpad, 8x DVD (- and +) v. 4x DVD-R, a newer revision of Airport (g v. b) and a hard drive that will suspend if I drop the laptop. However using iScroll2 gives me excellent two-finger trackpad scrolling features and I don't mind having slower bluetooth (I have no bluetooth devices) or slower airport and hard drive. The only DVD burning that I plan to do is data backup so I'll pretty happy just to have the extra capacity that that brings me. The real deal for me was getting it on a 2 year interest free offer which I obviously can't get from Apple.

Going back to first impressions, I must say how 'nice' this machine is; the screen seems brighter and with better contrast than my old ibook. It is certainly much sharper and crisp. Fonts on the the old 14" ibook screen now seem to be HUGE in comparison. Probably the single nicest difference lies in the quality of the trackpad mouse button; the powerbook's is more crisp to view and tactile to use, with much less 'clunk' when it's depressed. In other words it has more of a precision 'click'. The keyboard is a delight to use, the keys seem to have greater indent and a more tactile response than the old ibook. I'm somewhat concerned about the battery life - it seems to be less than my (18 month old) ibooks at this point. But we'll see how we go on that count after I've power cycled the battery a few times.

Why?

Of course one wonders why it is that they feel compelled to do anything in life? For example why is it that I want to change laptops all of a sudden? Where did this thought come from and why is it with me now? Will my current 933 14" unit no longer do the job? Or is this current process a ripple brought about by some stone thrown into the pond of my life, the ripples that are created for me now being no more than reactions to something that has happened in the past. If this is so, who then threw that stone? Me? Advertising? A pent up consumerism that must out itself and be sated?

The claims of social constructionism

Its been a while since I've managed to say anything about my uni work, despite me spending day after day working on or around it. I had to do a presentation today to let the honours coordinator know that I was on top of things and that everything was moving ahead. I gave my best impression of coherance and presented a 20 page paper that I'd prepared. In this paper I basically outlined a brief and very limited history of social constructionism, the main claims of social constructionism, a brief outline of how a consideration of this would inform an empircal document based study and a small reflection as to why any of this is of interest anyway.

The claims of social constructionism:

1. Individuals engage in communication processes that generate meaning and create knowledge (moderate)
2. Social phenomena are created, institutionalised, and made into tradition; there is an implicit relationship between human thought and the context within which it arises (moderate)
3a. There is no given, determined nature to the social world or to people who do not contain 'essences’ that make them in any way what they are
3b. Anti-essentialism: There is no given, determined nature to the world or to people who do not contain ‘essences’ that make them in any way what they are
4. Anti-realism: Knowledge does not arise from direct access of reality (moderate)
5a. Anti-realism: Knowledge of the social world does not arise from access to reality; there are no objective facts about the social world
5b. Anti-realism: Knowledge does not arise from reality at all; there are no objective facts about the world.

Hacking the ibook

I've thought of another nice feature of the iBook - you can cut and polish it! Seriously the polycarbonate shell (sounds much more 'tech' to me than saying 'covering') responds very well to a dose of cutting compound - my ibook's lid had numerous striations running across its surface from being slid into and pulled out of my Crumpler McBain's Baby L. A good hand cut and polish really reduced these minor surface imperfections.

At the moment I'm kind of leaning towards an ibook, especially if I could get something like a 12" G4 1.2 demo unit or even a second hand example (I saw a one and half month old unit - the updated model with built in Wireless - advertised on the wall at Uni for AUS$1400. Hmm, I like the idea of 'project' mac and something like that would suit if the price was 'right'. Thinking along project/low end terms has led me to dredge up a few links that may be of interest. Various people have hacked their ibooks to add such things as internal bluetooth, a larger hard drive in the dual USB G3 ibook and in the current model G4 ibook which is somewhat easier to do because it does not not require the bottom plate of it's shell removed.