Your iPhone as your Life Remote Control

My friend Mark has a really interesting blog post about how your iPhone (or other handheld) is quickly becoming the remote control to your life. He doesn't say it exactly that way, but what he said sparked this idea in me, which I think is a really interesting one. Ubiquitous computing, it's often called. We used to dream of this and do funky demos of imagined software that could, for instance, automatically add milk to the shopping list when the last of the milk is taken out of the refrigerator (or when the last swig is left swirling at the bottom. That's got to be user-configurable, right?)

That was 13 years ago. Where are we today? In many ways we're way beyond that. Back then everyone was just starting to carry cell phones, they were just becoming portable instead of those monstrous luggable ones. But I still don't have a computer on my refrigerator. Of course there are and have been some models, but let's be honest, I don't want to replace a $2500 appliance just so I can make sure I have milk in the fridge when I want it. Come to think of it, I don't get milk from the grocery store anyway - it's delivered from the local dairy that doesn't do GMOs and antibiotics and growth hormones and stuff. And when I want to change my order, I call the helpfully memorable number (1-888-Milk-to-u) and ask the nice person on the phone to change my order. They can make a permanent change to my standing every 2-weeks order, or they can make a one-time change (helpful when pies are on sale...)

But enough about my positive customer-service digression, point is - I think that maybe back in the 90s we were thinking about it wrong. We were thinking about inserting all these devices *into* existing appliances. Instead, it looks to me like the technology horizon is an augmentation one. Add Apple TV to the home network. Use your iPhone in new ways through apps (iPhone developers - here's an idea: use the input from the camera to scan bar codes...or even just photograph and search peapod's database. Actually, peapod take note - you could make me a customer just by giving me that cool feature. I've wanted to be a peapod customer for a long time but somehow haven't managed to yet...) Augment your home technology system instead of replacing non-wired devices. Add wifi speakers. Sure, when things crap out, replace them, but otherwise our portable devices are going to open up more opportunities for us than I think anyone was dreaming about back in the 90s.

A wired president

I don't even know how to begin assessing what it's going to mean to have a truly wired president, a truly online White House. But I continue to be amazed at the things I'm finding.

Just a few bits from today:

Obama's Linked In Profile (take a particular look at current job...)
The whitehouse.gov twitter feed

The whitehouse.gov blog (our president/the administration has a blog!? Maybe this existed before, can't say I was a frequent visitor to whitehouse.gov in the past, but there's some really cool stuff on the whole whitehouse.gov site now.)

Anyway, too much to absorb and process for one night, but a start. A very very interesting start.

Call off the search! Researcher says little chance of extraterrestrial life

I find this news item just plain depressing.

Why?

I've spent all of my adult life, and most of my childhood for that matter, dreaming of life on other planets. I remember when it first occurred to me that not everyone shared my viewpoint. I was in third grade. I have no idea what subject we were in, but I remember raising my hand and saying something along the lines of, "What if there's other planets out there and they're still in the dinosaur times!" I eagerly looked around the room for the nods of encouragement, friendly smiles. Hmm...

No, no. Just gave them more evidence for how weird I was! Somewhere not long after I discovered the wonders of the Golden Age science fiction writers - Asimov and Heinlein were my two favorites. I dreamed with them, and continue to this day. I write science fiction as a hobby, and feel personally offended by this researcher, how funny is that? I want to write him a letter to tell him to stop pissing in my wheaties. I'm finding holes in his logic, all kinds of reasons he's wrong. Care to join me on my self-riteous geek-induced extraterrestrial hissy fit?

Online Cheating

Interesting article today on cnn about a case in Canada where a student was on the verge of expulsion for cheating. As far as I can tell from the article, the student encouraged others to post their answers/thoughts/work on a set of chemistry problems on a facebook workgroup page.

Hmm. That's cheating? How is that different from a group of students working together on the same problems? Something which happens on a not-infrequent basis on school campuses worldwide. I suspect there is more to the story, but I'm left wondering if the school has overstepped. There was mention in the article that the professor required the work to be done "independently" - but there seems to be some gray area between completing the work independently and discussing it with other students.

Either way, it makes for an interesting and important consideration for students today in collaborating online with classmates and friends. Moms, if you're reading this, you need to pay heed as well so that your child is following the rules as laid out by his/her school. Most should have online policies by now (I shudder at the thought if they don't) - is this kind of case spelled out in them? If it isn't, might be time to suggest it...

This laptop is so simple even a six-year-old can show you

My six-year-old son, Liam, and I recently attended a One Laptop Per Child networking event at the Marie Murphy school in Wilmette, IL. The event was put on by Chris Brown as part of a teacher professional development day. He invited area XO owners to come talk about our computers as well as have the opportunity to network with others in the community. One blogged about it here.



About 10-15 laptops were present at peak. We gathered around a large conference table in the resource room and quickly got to work. Liam was beyond excited to have so many “friends” show up on his neighborhood view.

We quickly “friended” everyone (by hovering on their icons and selecting “add as friend”) we could from the neighborhood view, then looked at the Group view to see all the colorful XOs on our screens. Shh, don’t tell Anastasia I had her laptop out while she was at school.

Initially, I wasn’t sure about bringing Liam. He’s only 6, it was a regular school day for him that he would miss, he’s bound to get bored, etc. etc. However, I thought it would be a good opportunity for him to share what he’s been learning and doing with his laptop. I figured a community of teachers would like to see what first graders might do with this technology. Plus, he was excited about the idea of coming, even though it meant missing school (and, of all things, library day!)



To be on the safe side, though, the night before I had him pick out a few books, games, and other activities and packed those into his backpack next to his friendly green laptop. You know, just in case.



What was I worried about?



Within the first twenty minutes, Liam turned to me and said “Mommy – can we make this a long meeting?”



Confused, I asked for clarification. “You know, a long meeting. Can we stay a while? I don’t want to go!”



To bookend that comment, he asked me at least a dozen times on the car ride home and later that day if we could “set up another meeting, just like that. I want to do another meeting.”


What was so fun? Well, for starters, everyone else had the same machine. Adding friends to the network was neat. Then, as teachers are so excellent at doing – everyone who talked to Liam treated him as though the things he had to say were interesting and important. And last, lucky for them and us -- what he had to say was interesting and important, and he was able to contribute in a positive way to the dialogue at the table about ways to use the XO with school children.





He showed the principal of the school how he can test himself on his spelling words using the Memorize activity. I had programmed in his spelling list, with one half of a pair jumbled. He had to match the jumbled word with its correctly spelled counterpart. He played with the various tamtams for a while, composing music on the fly with tamtam edit, something we hadn’t played with at home before.




He also showed one of the teachers a few things we’d been exploring with Pippy. Pippy is a front end to the Python programming language that includes some mini sample programs. Liam and I spent about 20 minutes a few nights before playing with Pippy, talking about how the ordered lines of instructions tell the computer exactly what to do, and if you edit the instructions – well, the computer is only as stupid as you are. It’ll do exactly what you tell it to do. While I don’t have any expectations that he’ll be programming at age 6 and 7, all of these activities like pippy and turtle are beginning to expose him to the concepts that underlie all computer systems – a series of instructions, executed in a specific order, with different types of commands. Heck, there are many grownups who don’t know this much about how computers work.


Liam also had fun working with George on the Acoustic Tape Measure activity. They had to work together to figure out the right order of events – who would launch the activity, who would invite the other participant, when to start the measuring, etc. Liam would scurry between his computer and George’s, evaluating settings and trying to determine the right way to do things. While we’re not positive we ever got an accurate reading, they were both very excited when the machines bzzt’d at each other and numbers appeared on screen. We decided to read up more about the activity and try it again at home.




What made the entire day worth it for me was the moment when I suddenly saw my child the way others see him. You know how usually you view your child(ren) in your own cloud of love and pride mixed up with an awareness of all his/her strengths and weaknesses and the baggage you carry from how they pestered you non-stop yesterday for a second lollipop/more time on the xbox/another drink of water before bed?


For a beautiful moment at Marie Murphy school that cold, wet day in February, it all fell away and I saw an excited little guy talking with no fear or hesitation to a group of adults gathered behind him, answering their questions and eagerly pointing out features or components to explore with them.





My six-year-old was demoing.








These laptops are magic. Put a child in front of them and watch it flow.

XO on the go

My daughter's XO laptop, all tricked out for an adult. That's a Targus brand USB folding keyboard (works great, just the right size for my hands, although I am still going through the learning curve with it as there are subtle spacing differences when compared to my other primary keyboard.)

I swiveled the screen 180 degrees to make the USB keyboard feel more naturally connected to the screen.

There's also a Crayola USB mouse, which causes Anastasia all sorts of consternation. "Mommy, I thought you said we couldn't have water by the computers, but this mouse has WATER in it!!" Naturally there's some caffeine in the picture, and those friendly ears perked up for the T-Mobile wifi at Starbucks.

Geek Heaven

On Tuesday January 22, 2008 at 6:45 PM I was in Heaven. Geek heaven, to be accurate. Google’s Chicago office. The smell of…was that fresh salsa and flauta’s… wafted through the room. Friendly green computers were tucked under numerous arms. A group of exuberant (there really is no better word) high school students from the Illinois Math and Science Academy (IMSA) twittered in a corner. Men with scruffy facial hair (I found the developers!) were scattered among the attendees. I was surprised to find a wide range of ages, interests, hair lengths, and body art in the room. I thought we geek-folk all looked alike. Then again, I’m a suburban mom and think all suburban moms look alike, and the suburban mom-type is quite different from the geek-type, so perhaps I’m not the best judge.

The Chicago OLPC meet-up was an unqualified success. There were about 50 attendees, including a few (but not many, it was a school night) children. 5-10 of the attendees had never seen an XO laptop before. They were in luck, I spotted at least 20 of the green machines roving the room, being passed from hand to hand. Much credit and thanks goes to Mel Chua who coordinated the evening, and her hosts from Google who I never did quite catch the names of. They smiled benevolently from near the chafing dishes. They even gave us some nifty swag .
The evening opened with some presentations by the IMSA students. The thing you need to know about them is that they are scary smart. In a good way. Whatever you do, don’t underestimate them. Students at IMSA are proud to hold the distinction of the only OLPC High School interest group.

They are working on a variety of projects from the ambitious (building an EKG device to plug into the microphone jack) to the seemingly simple (clock.) The EKG team was geeky-excited to have talked to the developer of the Measure activity about the nuances of instrumental amplifier hardware. They haven’t sustained any permanent damage from their experiments, though that left-leaning limp looked a little suspicious, and are proud to report they now know how to solder. How many 16 year olds do YOU know who have soldering skills? If their educational dreams crumble, they can always work an assembly line.

Their work with the acoustic tape measure activity led them to believe that the OLPC is a good tool for conducting experiments. From here, they decided to work on a module to present the scientific method. This led them to do research on the societies where OLPC laptops are targeted for, so as to understand social constraints around manner of dress and gestures for video-based content.

The seemingly simple clock activity is much more than that. The two students working on this activity came upon the idea by reading the bug reports in the OLPC system. They decided to work on an activity to not just provide a report of current time, but allow children to explore the idea of time. A bar with a draggable sun and a simple hand-drawn graphic of a tree with a sun behind it led to much discussion among the audience about ways to cause a shadow to be cast by the tree, sundial-esque, and the possibility of using celestial charts, which I see has come up on OLPCNews before.

One thing most of the students could use is programming/technical mentors for their work. The clock team mentioned the code they have available right now is too embarrassing to post anywhere, yet I predict an hour on the phone or IRC with a python guru would change that. Please consider visiting their wiki page and volunteer to help.

Afterwards, we heard from other OLPC enthusiasts about their pet projects and efforts. Francisco Athens from the Chicago Linux User Group is busy testing alternate operating systems on the XO. He points to the wiki for his latest information about getting XFCE working, as well as ubuntu.

Chaz (missed his last name) from the University of Chicago talked about efforts to assist the Chicago Public Schools with integrating technology in the classroom. One hurdle will be the CPS system does not formally support Linux, but a pilot program in the 3rd/4th grade level is a possibility. They have a curricular group convening on Feb 12 for anyone interested.
Carl Karston mentioned the Chicago Python Conference in March, and made a pointed remark in the direction of the IMSA students that there were financial aid opportunities available for those who couldn’t afford the conference fees. Vehan from the Python users group mentioned that the illustrious Mike Fletcher will be leading at least one workshop during the con.

Gabriel Burt talked about what he’s been doing with his XO. Turns out he wants to alter the space-time continuum. More or less. As he details on his blog, he has been working out ways to get Pippy talking to the camera built into the XO laptops. He wrote a script to create a time-lapse photo sequence, which is not the coolest part. He also discovered a way to have the computer display a videostream that is delayed, via a setdelay command of some sort. He’s going to have to elaborate because all I know is that it creeped me out to hold a laptop that showed me what I did 5 seconds before.

The rest of the evening was spent in small groups sharing ideas, passing laptops around, and exchanging business cards. Note to those attending meetups – bring something with your name/email/preferred way of reaching you, even if it’s one of those freebie St. Jude’s Hospital name and address stickers on an index card. It’ll save you time so you can meet more fabulous people involved with the OLPC project. P.S. Try a meetup at Google. They give nifty swag!