Teaching, Technology, and Learning

Kenrick is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Alaska Anchorage. This blog is about his thoughts on technology with an emphasis on tablets, UMPC's, and other technologies applied to education.

Once in a while I rotate the screen on my Sony Vaio P, as shown in this image from pocketables:

On Windows machines with Intel graphics you can press Control+Alt+Arrow Key to rotate in one of four orientations depending on which arrow key is pressed. However, the mouse doesn't rotate with the screen. This always bugs me a bit when the occasion arises to use the mouse. There is the Sakasa Mouse program to rotate the mouse, but it's not nicely integrated with the rotate function.

I purchased a Sony Vaio P several weeks ago and have been enjoying it quite a bit. It's my favorite computer for meetings or trips when I have a table or desk available (for no desk, I still use my OQO 02, but it hasn't gotten much action lately).

The Sony Vaio P series was unveiled at CES in January 2009 and is essentially Sony's entry in the netbook market. I won't go into specs or the typical things you'd find in a review, because you can google the machine and find many excellent reviews already. I purchased the "peridot" green machine (since I'm a little tired of black/white laptops) with hard disk drive and extended battery.

A few comments I've gotten:

Just like a stock of a company can be delisted from the exchange for failing to trade above a certain price, our computer science labs were recently "delisted" by ITS for failing to meet a utilization threshold of 5%.

I'm not sure how the 5% was calculated (time spent logged in? number of logins?) but when our two labs were delisted one was about 4.5% and the other was around 1.5% utilization.

What this means for our labs is they are no longer supported by ITS. Supported labs get money for maintenance and machine lifecycle replacement every 4-5 years. The money came from student technology fees. This means we'll have to pay for upgrading the lab machines ourselves.

It was brought to my attention that PenAttention and CursorAttention don't work on 64 bit operating systems. I've recompiled both of them and here is a version of each that runs on XP 64 or Vista 64:

PenAttention64.zip

CursorAttention64.zip

Sorry, I didn't make an installer for these, but if you unzip them somewhere then just run the .exe to start it up. You can put a shortcut in your startup folder if you want it to start up when Windows boots up.

I was at the potluck for my first grader last week and there was some time where the kids were milling around doing whatever they wanted. Suddenly, one of them shouted "Let's do math problems!" Another yelled "Yeah! Math!" Four boys ran over to the whiteboard and began writing down apparently random addition and subtraction problems and solving them. The impromptu math session ended about a minute later when the teacher summoned them for instructions on a different activity.

How awesome is that? I hope the enthusiasm for math keeps up.

"Serious Games" (see http://www.seriousgames.org) have been getting some attention lately by using games and computer simulation to attack real problems like health care and public policy. Education has been addressed as well, with games like VirtualU (http://www.virtual-u.org/) to simulate an entire university.

David Gibson from Curveshift, an educational technology company, has developed an interesting simulation game called simSchool (http://www.simschool.org/). In it you have a virtual simulated classroom and need to adapt your teaching delivery mechanisms to the particular learning styles of the students. It's an interesting training tool and is based on pedagogical models of student learning.

UAA is primarily an undergraduate institution, yet many faculty members have research as a component of their workload contract. I've been fortunate to enlist a number of wonderful undergraduate students as research assistants and the collaboration has been very positive. The students help me get some research done and in the process they learn how to conduct research.

A couple of people have sent in bugs regarding my PenAttention program. I might have some workarounds:

Bug #1: Program crashes when trying to run

It may be that there is an old version of the Ink DLL. You can update it here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=84bbefa4-7047-4...

This is a great example of what you can do in an educational setting if all of your students have tablet PC's and OneNote:

http://blogs.msdn.com/onenote_and_education/archive/2008/10/17/onenote-a...

Today, it's a pipe dream at my university to consider a scenario where every student has a tablet PC. One can still dream though! Aside from saving paper, it would open up a huge number of new learning possibilities. In addition to the electronic portfolios, a sample of new activities that would be possible include:

- collaborative note-taking
- real-time lecture/screen sharing/student submission of work in class
- electronic grading
- electronic lab book
- integration of distance and in-class lectures