I blogged a couple of days ago about one application which I really like when it comes to writing: WriteRoom. The application allows to fade out all the unimportant features of the interface to let the user concentrate on the text.
People from freeverse have expanded the concept further with Think, an application that allows to set the focus on each application of interest and to hide all the rest.
At this very moment, applications are fighting for your attention. Between chat windows, Finder windows, Web browser windows, and everything else, it’s amazing any of us can concentrate at all. As it has become easier to multitask, we’ve become more likely to have two dozen windows on the screen at any given moment. Innovations like Expose makes finding what you want in the sea of visual stimuli easier, but they’ve done little to remove those distractions.
I have to admit that I am really enjoying using the LG Shine. One thing though is still lacking: I cannot sync the Address book and the iCal appointments on my Mac. The problem is more serious when you need to call somebody and you do not have the number with you …
The unit I received was shipped without the necessary software. However, from the web site, I realized that in the commercial version a Phone Manager (only for Windows) will be included.
While I was waiting for the official launch next week, I tried a couple of things, one of which worked. So, the first thing I tried was to send each vCard individually to the phone using the Bluetooth file exchange utility. While this worked with a Symbian phone, I have got an error message trying to transfer the card to the LG unit. Probably the format is not recognized by the OS.
The thing the worked was to use a synced Symbian phone. From the phone menu is possible to send a contact in the address book via bluetooth to another unit. In this way the Shine recognize the business card and imports it correctly. The backside is that is a manual process that can be extremely tedious if you have dozens of contacts.
Yesterday evening, TSR1, the Swiss National Television for the French-speaking part, has broadcasted a documentary showing some of our projects in the domain of Interactive Furniture. Two major projects were featured: the noise-sensitive table, which respond to the ambient noise with the aim of regulating the interactions of the conversation participants; and the docking lamp, a portable and intelligent beamer that can help to share laptop displays while working collaboratively.
Au centre de recherche pédagogique de l’EPFL, chaque séance se fait autour d’une table interactive qui clignote au gré de la discussion. Objectif : indiquer quand une personne s’exprime, repérer qui parle, qui ne parle pas. Et bien sûr tout est gardé en mémoire. «Plus je parle, plus le nombre de lumières devant moi s’allume, explique le professeur Pierre Dillenbourg, directeur du CRAFT. On pourra dire à quelqu’un: regarde tu parles depuis vingt minutes, ou alors: tu n’as pas encore parlé qu’en penses-tu? Le but de cette table est de favoriser la régulation dans un groupe. Apprendre en groupe est plus efficace s’il y a une répartition homogène de la participation. Si quelqu’un domine, les autres apprennent moins»
Reading the Microsoft Research headlines this news attracted my attention: “MultiPoint, technology originating from Microsoft Research India, enables multiple computer mice to be connected to a single PC, thereby enhancing the educational value of that PC.”
While it is easy to see the economical value of the idea, the question is: what is the educational value of having multiple controls on the same machine? I sketch here a possible answer.
Parallel controls on a shared computation. One of the script we work with on CSCL (Computer Supported Collaborative Learning) consists in splitting the controls of a simulation to the different participants. Each participant is in charge of a part of the simulation. It this way for the team to succeed it is important to coordinate the control efforts.
Coordinating, in this case means discussing pros and cons of each action, which was demonstrated to be connected to higher learning performances.
J. Cadiz, A. Gupta, and J. Grudin. Using web annotations for asynchronous collaboration around documents. In Proceeding of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW’00), pages 309–318, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States, December, 2-6 2000. [pdf]
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This paper presents a study of annotations on specs documents made using Microsoft Office web annotations. The authors presented statistics of usage over nine thousands annotations made on 1243 documents by 450 developers at Microsoft.
Interestingly, the authors noted as some limitations in the interaction desing of the annotation system affected the level of discussion in the annotations: a small portion of the notes were involved in threads with multiple answers.
The authors identified the changes awareness as an important mechanism for the users to be aware of the changes included in the system and the availability of new notes.
Writing is part of my work. For me is a daily activity and a pain because I tend to multi-task a lot. Writing, on the other hand requires concentration and being away from the thousands of distraction that sorrounds us in each office. Most of these distractions are also inside our computers like small reminders and bouncing icons …
Fore this last category of distractions there is a nice program that I am using more and more: WriteRoom! An environment for removing all the superfluousness of the OS: it is just me and the text:
Walk into WriteRoom, and watch the distractions fade away. Now it’s just you and your text. It’s a place where your mind clears and your work gets done. When your writing is complete, exit WriteRoom and re-enter the busy world.
In the last couple of days I had a chance of test the upcoming LG KE970, codenamed ‘Shine’. I have received this unit from Hill & Knowlton, LG’s communications agency, for evaluation purposes. In this post I am summarizing my initial impressions.
First of all the phone is awesome! It has a full-metal case and the display is a mirror. When the phone is on standby then the display really acts as a mirror, whereas when the display is on it passes through. The effect is really spectacular, however its very difficult to take pictures of it or to video record what is happening on the display as the mirror fools the automatic focus of the cameras.
The package was also nice, although I received a pre-launch material which might differ from the commercial one. For instance, the manual and the sync softwares were missing (I took the pictures below with the phone’s camera at standard resolution 640×480). I also had an hard time to find the manual online (something in Korean here).
The display is really bright and the interaction with the scroll key is fluid. It took me some time to get used to the left-right function keys but after was easy to use. The menus are pretty intuitive and everything seemed easy to find. It has a 2MB camera with Schneider-Kreuznach lens (+ it has a flash), and it also records voice and video.
The image viewer is able to display Macromedia Flash animations and to open simple Office documents and PDFs.
The internal memory is 50 Mb with the possibility to extend it with microSD memory cards.
There are much better reviews out there that make a better work in detailing all the features of the phone [1], [2]. What I will be doing in the next posts is to detail how to use it with a Macintosh, the thing that interests me. So far it seems to be pretty hard …
One last thing: I posted a video on YouTube that I took with my iSight of the Menus of the phone. The result is decent but it was extremely difficult to realize due to the auto-focus problem discussed above.
In this blog post I am reporting the real-time notes which I took during the round of presentation of the Mobile Learning workshop happening in Villars, Switzerland.
Some initial notes from the Mobile Learning workshop I am involved in this week. The organizers, Inmaculada Arnedillo-Sanchez, Mike Sharples, and Giansemi Vavoula, introduced the activities in which we will be involved during these days. They are particularly interested in using mobile technologies for shifting from being a ‘spectator’ of media to ‘creator’ of media.
One of the pedagogical value they see in these is the fact that media creation can bring a group of participant to a negotiation of perspectives. The idea is to discuss what media creation will mean in the future.
The first activity is an hands-on media creation using a script/technique refined at Trinity College. The activity begins filling a mind-map-like template which helps building the script of the movie that we need to make. After, the group splits in three sub-groups: one of them makes the shooting, the second the sounds recordings for the effects, and the other group will edit the raw content and add the effects.
The editing is also done in group to have a sense of the whole movie and to check whether the raw material correspond to the script defined in the initial part. The shooting was fun and the editing was even better. I hope the result will be on youtube before the end of the day.
The final phase of the script involved a group discussion:
1- Maybe there is a missing phase in the script like transforming the story into dialogues;
2- Have you ever thought of dividing the team into acts-team to reduce the editing time?
3- The editing process was extremely creative as the different media needed to be smoothed or adapted in order to make sense together; What is was difficult was guessing the intentions of the different teams creating the media;
4- Different opinions points out that the whole process could stimulate creativity at a whole. Each production phase involved a discussion process where the participants had to negotiate the perspectives and the processes to reach those perspectives;
5- This activity fits extremely well in the mobile learning framework, as the external world contribute changing the story and modifying perspectives;
6- The script would need to be adjusted to support a documentary creation;
7- Doing film-making with mobiles is a rapid prototyping technique; The script that we use was adapted from a film-making class;
8- having an end-rpduct is extremely important as it supports appropriation.
Finally in Villars for the Alpine Rendez-Vous. It quite exciting to be here and to meet again friends and the CSCL community. It is nice to see the human-side of great researchers. In the first part of the week I’ll be working on the mobile learning workshop participating in hands-on on media authoring and future technologies brainstorming.
Tags: interaction design, mac
