So we have a new professor who's interested in doing neat things in Music Ed. He'd like to use a SMART board or some similar interface to be able to mark up music and take notes. Great.
The physical layout of the room makes a touch screen or standalone unit not really viable, but SMART markets a wireless slate that he's really excited about using. We order one and install it and get ready for interactive goodness.
Pen works, highliter works, camera does the neat little snapshot animation. Hmm, the Notebook icon doesn't seem to be working. That's a problem- without that you can't save your files, edit them, put up backgrounds (like musical staves) and so forth- the device is close to useless without it. So I go to the SMART site and try and download the software.
"This product is not eligible"
I spent a while going around in circles with tech support yesterday- the Notebook software is *not* included because, quote "People are using the Notebook software with non-SMART hardware"
Hunh? I just bought a $400 piece of SMART hardware and I want to actually, you know, use it. Instead, I'm being told that I can only use it if I purchase yet another piece of SMART hardware that does come with a license. If you read carefully the web page you'll find hints of that, but given that every other piece of SMART hardware comes with the Notebook software it's not exactly what you might expect.
Anyone know another good vendor, because I'm not so sure these folks are very SMART.
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
Rant time1; Microsoft
What is it with companies and interesting interfaces?
A couple of professors here are interested in using Microsoft Surface. Looks like a neat idea. Check price: Commercial version $12500. Ouch. But they're developers- we should get a discount, right? MS will sell developers a table for $2500 *more* than the commercial version. I'm not sure I can publish the academic pricing discount, but let's just say it's pretty skimpy. As in, I spend more on a trip to the grocery store than the academic discount is for a $15000 item. Do they care about this product at all? I remember back when NT 4 came out and seeing a student package of Visual Studio for every language plus a full version of NT 4.0 for $90- it’s the day I knew OS/2 was dead, since the equivalent boxes of OS/2 software sat next to it and cost over $1000.
I thought the chant was "Developers! Developers! Developers"
A couple of professors here are interested in using Microsoft Surface. Looks like a neat idea. Check price: Commercial version $12500. Ouch. But they're developers- we should get a discount, right? MS will sell developers a table for $2500 *more* than the commercial version. I'm not sure I can publish the academic pricing discount, but let's just say it's pretty skimpy. As in, I spend more on a trip to the grocery store than the academic discount is for a $15000 item. Do they care about this product at all? I remember back when NT 4 came out and seeing a student package of Visual Studio for every language plus a full version of NT 4.0 for $90- it’s the day I knew OS/2 was dead, since the equivalent boxes of OS/2 software sat next to it and cost over $1000.
I thought the chant was "Developers! Developers! Developers"
Thursday, March 25, 2010
On failure
One thing I'm realizing from the NITLE summit so far is that the talks focused on failure are generally much more effective than those of successes. First, they tend to be funny- it's easier to poke fun at yourself when you look foolish. Second, it's easier to draw parallels in failures- the major successes, with all sorts of structure, collaboration, planning and assessment attached to it can seem awfully daunting when you haven't started down the path, especially when you know the stars won't align as well in your situation. But everyone has some terrible story to tell, and learning how to work around the issues ends up being the real interesting information. Finally, it reinforces the idea that failure is sometimes an option- when you try new things it doesn't always work, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. Experiments often fail- it's part of life even if we don't want to admit that we're the ones failing, and it shows ways to bets cut your losses and move on to something new.
I love failure...
I love failure...
Two visions of Powerpoint
I feel a bit like Jim Anchower since it's been so long since I updated, but Hola again.
I spent a day last week at a Edward Tufte workshop, focused entirely around presenting huge amounts of data in limited spaces, and how Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. Tufte has some good points here- the average bulleted list Powerpoint slide, read in a monotone by a speaker unsure of the material is one of the worst possible ways to get information across to a group. It's boring, slow and information poor. But I have to disagree that this is Powerpoint's fault: it's just a crappy speaker using a tool badly. Just because you're trying to drive a screw with a hammer doesn't mean that a screw is bad way to join things- it's just a crappy way to use the screw.
The NITLE workshop I'm at right now has a variety of people (including me) using a pecha-kucha format for our talks- 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. No more bullet lists, no more reading a slide of text - you don't have the time. 3-4 words and a funny picture or a single graph, that's it. It actually works even better IMHO if you both mess with the timings a bit as well as throw in blank slides to break up the flow- go fast, use the slides either for a bit of data or something to make the audience laugh and talk for the rest
The true irony was watching Mike Winiski from Furman doing a pecha-kucha Powerpoint talk on data visualization, using a lot of Tufte-like examples. He did his much more slowly and carefully than I did mine, and it worked very nicely- just enough to get you thinking about how you might want to do new stuff without bogging down into a boring discussion of how you make or use them. You can do all that off line at lunch, after 6 more talks in the P-K format.
I spent a day last week at a Edward Tufte workshop, focused entirely around presenting huge amounts of data in limited spaces, and how Powerpoint is a tool of the devil. Tufte has some good points here- the average bulleted list Powerpoint slide, read in a monotone by a speaker unsure of the material is one of the worst possible ways to get information across to a group. It's boring, slow and information poor. But I have to disagree that this is Powerpoint's fault: it's just a crappy speaker using a tool badly. Just because you're trying to drive a screw with a hammer doesn't mean that a screw is bad way to join things- it's just a crappy way to use the screw.
The NITLE workshop I'm at right now has a variety of people (including me) using a pecha-kucha format for our talks- 20 slides, 20 seconds per slide. No more bullet lists, no more reading a slide of text - you don't have the time. 3-4 words and a funny picture or a single graph, that's it. It actually works even better IMHO if you both mess with the timings a bit as well as throw in blank slides to break up the flow- go fast, use the slides either for a bit of data or something to make the audience laugh and talk for the rest
The true irony was watching Mike Winiski from Furman doing a pecha-kucha Powerpoint talk on data visualization, using a lot of Tufte-like examples. He did his much more slowly and carefully than I did mine, and it worked very nicely- just enough to get you thinking about how you might want to do new stuff without bogging down into a boring discussion of how you make or use them. You can do all that off line at lunch, after 6 more talks in the P-K format.
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