Posts made by Susanne Nyrop

I am currently looking into Issuu which ia a magazine-alike ebook builder and host. http://issuu.com/ - there are many examples and as a member you can pick your samples for a personal book shelf. It is said to allow all sorts of formatted text, but it was not possble to upload a mac-made .key (like PPT) presentation). I'll see if I can save the stuff in a workable format and upload it to Issuu. Anyone knows this tool?

Richard, the photo wall with examples from possible and existing digital augmented reality gives me the opportunity to share my impressions of a recent visit with granddaughters age 10, to the State Museum of Art here in Copenhagen.

It was on a stormy rainy day, so getting indoor felt really nice. The building is huge and impressive, there were some practicalities around getting rid of winterly outfit in the wardrobe, some typical  and outspoken twin negociations around turn taking of the closet door with the coin insert and key, taking the stairs or the elevator, etc . Not very much attention to the fact that wthey were going to have a great time with old paintings.

The traditional permanent exhibitions are on first floor, with four posssible starting points (and free entrance). I let serendipity rule and we entered the European paintings from about 1400 to 1850 I think. The kids were instantly drawn towards a large touch screen, placed horizontally like a work table, and without asking for any sort of instruction, they just started experimenting. There were many different layers - all paintings from a certain period, related motives, or by artists who had influenced one another. by finger touch, the kids were able to browse the collection and find their own ways into this new world of art. The table had two sides with independent workplace, but some moves would influence on the whole screen. They could listen to spoken descriptions with headphones, which they really enjoyed. There were also written notes with factual knowledge about the artists and their works, but as they are both still in the phase of making sense of unknown words, this did not hate the same appeal as the image based inspiration.

After about ten minutes of exploring the digital marvel scren, they turned wround - and found the walls around them covered with paintings that they already knew by proxy! Now they were ready to walk (or run) around an explore details, ask all sorts of questions and learn a great deal of the cultural history that the painters have enriched and interpreted. We spent three full hours doing about eight large room, we ended up at the touch screen where they repeated a lot of their favorite pieces and little details -  and they did not want to go home! They did not ask for snacks or stuff from the museum sho but enjoyed granny's nice raw carrot; this was right after christmas so I guess they had had enough of all that crap.  I feel that their eyes were wide open after their intuitive exploration of the touch screen. Insight and knowledge that not the best printed catalogue would have helped them obtain. And, I had to promise that our next tour would go back to this museum. As Cecilie said: " You know - we are very curious about everything in this place!"

Scott, I am really looking forward to your presentation and our following discussion. I skimmed your slides (another convenient way of getting a fast forward knowledge in no time using screen reading).

In the past, ever since I grew into such a webhead, I've been blogging, wordpress-style, with blogspot, xanga and Elgg, in the context of Edublogs (that has now been put to sleep). I've been into wiki(spaces) as an easy manageable writing tool. Moodle also allows quite a bit of easy sharing with a select group.

Like you, I'm not yet convinced that iPads would be my preferred standard, especially because of Apple's possesive rules. And also because my poor vision enjoys the comfort of the large 24" screen on my iMac

And then I stumbled on something new (or classic - but in a new dress):         the idea of Book Sprints, not because of the technology but of the collaboration model. get together, decide what has to be done, and then do it. More or less so. Now that is something I've been doing in the past, somehow, I would like to do more, and more often.

Back to reading Scott's slides...

yours, Sus

Edward, these are very inspiring thoughts. I'd like to share my personal experience with a grandson, age nine, who was desperately trying to avoid learning how to read! As we only meet once in a while, this happened to be the very first time I was going to have all three of my grandchildren for an overnight in our house, and I was thrilled. First of all, I cleared up the big room downstairs where I kept many of my less actual but still very important bookshelves, my laundry and ironing, and a lot of leftover furniture, all in all, a mess! Then I started to fill the room with whatever I could imagine the kids would like.  Apart from the very sparse toy collection, these were my own things. On the top of the table there was soon heaps of assorted stationery, in a total disorder. Then I realized this would just bring confusion and stride. So instead I made a special place for each of them, with place mats,  two relevant books well chosen for each of their actual interest, two sharpened pencils, a rubber and blank notebook, and a magnifying glass. All of the rest, I stored on shelves in boxes and tins, away from their reach. The noisy book shelves were hidden behind large sheets on the laundry string, like a theater, This way, the unfamilar room was made smaller and the distraction factors left out! I had to do some organisation and mindful preparation to set the stage.

One major reason is my mentally fragile husband who had resisted for a very long period to let the children into our life. No uncontrolled noise would be acceptable!

Another must in  these considerations is the children's overall learning disbilities, the older, a boy age 9, was in a special class for children with asperger; the twin girls age 7 also had their share of attention difficulties. Plus the usual power game among (half) siblings. Who meet only every second weekend.

Best of all this was the small brass bell that is a heritage from my grandmother's home, for the maid. Whenever they needed a break, I rang the bell!

Ok, so now you have the stringent setting - a perfect old fashioned home-schooling classroom for the weekend. And then, they loved it! Back to the boy whose ambitions on how to learn to read ere frustrated to despair! He was desperately shouting, kicking and crying with rage, because he was unable to read anything! And never would learn, it was all too complicated! The litlle ones were listening with awe. If their beloved role model could not learn this, how would they? Then, the magnifyers came in handy! Reading out alphabet and make it onto words you can understand is like a code you need to break, I said. I have in my possesion a clay tablet from the ancient Crete, the Phaistos disk, with a very intriguing message that has never been decoded! (Well - mine is just a copy :-). I showed him this, and told him about the Rosetta Stone where three different languages were found and dechiphered. Now he was really interested! Do you think I could break the code? Aha! he spent hours on this project with the clay tablet, we found some more about this ia books with photos, and the whole weekend it was all about code breaking in many ways, including how to open a safe with asecret code (as in the fabulous Olsen gang movies that are very popular here in Denmark).

Chalk and old blackboard was also part of this plot, as well as some very old ABC books that might tell them how many ways there are to learn the ropes.  Well - three months later I saw my grandson again. He said, with a natural nonchalance I will never forget: I started to read Harry Potter, and now I am halfway into the book!

These kids are digital naturals, in a manner. Actually, they were already spending hours and days playing WOW with their daddy online!!!  So why is it that the paper based book as such had become an intimidating obstacle?

 

 

 

 

Phew! For some reason, Firefox (!) did not allow me to make any replys here in Moodle. Just to say that I loved Sylvia and Richard's loving Hypercard-and-oldMac veteran self portraits. Thank you! I've been researching and it appears that you might be able to track an old Hypercard version for download, and then install some old-system-emulator. But honestly, I got distracted and forgot to make bookmarks, such a fluctuant message to send out!

(oh! is that safe? for free? can we really DO this without the risk of being balmed for dirty piracy intentions? Here in Europe we are currently debating the ACTA legislation, pretending so nicely just to protect copyright owners but probably reaching very far further into Big Brother-oriented loss of integrity...