Timothy King – Page 45 – Mechanical Sympathy

Motorcycling & Autism

Originally published on Tim’s Motorcycle Diaries in March, 2014.

In 2004 my wife and I had our son Max. At the age of three his daycare provider was wondering about his reactions to sudden loud noises and encouraged us to have him in for assessment. This was a difficult process for me, I didn’t want him labelled and pigeon holed for the rest of his life, but at the age of seven he was diagnosed as being on the autism spectrum.

Autism presents in an astonishing number of ways. In Max’s case he’s hyperlexic, and has many of the social cues you’d associate with autism (lack of eye contact, nervousness around strangers, generally missing social cues). Encouraging Max into activities that other kids would leap at was always tricky. We tried soccer for a year, but it wasn’t his thing; Max does things in his own way. When we started him on a bicycle he was slow to get into it and then wouldn’t take the training wheels off. After an intensive week last summer with Kid’s Ability he was shooting around on two wheels.

We built him a bike (pretty much from scratch) and he’s been inseparable from it since. Last summer was, coincidentally, my first summer motorbiking. While I was fettling my bike, he was fettling his. I took him for a couple of short rides around town on the Ninja, but I was worried about how much attention he was paying on the back there.

This past weekend we took the bike down to Guelph on a sunny but cool Saturday morning. With the topbox (and backrest!) on, it was a lovely ride. I was no longer worried about him disappearing off the back.

He is very excited about the idea of riding which has me wondering about autism and motorcycling. I think he enjoys the anonymity a helmet gives him (something not uncommon in autistic people). In addition to the sense of anonymity is also the mechanical sympathy I see in a lot of autistic kids.

My day job is as a high school teacher of computer engineering and we have a high number of autistic kids in our program. I think they enjoy computers because they are consistent in ways that human beings simply aren’t. That consistency creates a trust in those kids; they can work with a computer and know that it won’t be bizarre, random or emotionally difficult. Some of my most focused, strongest students are on the spectrum and present a deep, nuanced understanding of technology.

Having a son who is autistic, I’ve moved from a professional relationship with autism to a much more personal one. When it’s your own son you start to see it in yourself as well. My own mechanical empathy has a lot to do with my seeing machines as more than a sum of their parts. Where I find people difficult, often frustratingly so, machines reward consistency and right action; I like them for that very reason, and suspect that my son does too.

I tried looking around online to see if there have been any links made between autism and motorcycling but I couldn’t find anything other than a lot of ‘rides for autism’. The immersive nature of motorcycling fits nicely with the hyper-focus many autistic people are able to demonstrate. You get to be anonymous inside your helmet and alone with your thoughts. On top of it all, motorcyclists seem to have an intense relationship with their rides, what many ‘normals’ would consider to be mere chunks of metal, or worse, pointless infatuations. A sympathetic if not empathic relationship with machines is a trait many motorcyclists and autistics seem to share.

I suspect there is a deep and lasting relationship between motorcycling and autism. I wonder that there is nothing written about this anywhere.

Gitchigoomee Iron Butt

I’d originally read about touring around Lake Superior and called it the Gitchigoomee Goaround. I figured it’d be a week of riding. I came across another motorbike blog where the guy was talking about doing it in 24 hours. It turns out that focused, long distance, intense rides have a club! The IBA.

It turns out that circumnavigating Lake Superior is 1673kms, which happens to be just over 1000 miles. Leaving and returning to The Sault and going south through Michigan and around Superior to Ontario again, it would be a two border crossing trip with an awful lot of winding lake-side roads in between. That would be an ironbutt you’d earn the hard way.

What better time to do it than Thanksgiving Day weekend (October 12-14) in Canada? If we met up at Sault Ste. Marie on Friday and prepped, we could leave early Saturday morning before sunrise when there is minimal traffic at the border. As the sun rises we’re already making tracks through Northern Michigan.

The route: Sault Ste. Marie and back to The Sault, 1039 miles in 24 hours!

44 miles per hour (70 km/hr) average speed is needed, so packing in fifty miles per hour (80km/hr) gives you the wiggle room to stop for things like gas, or peeing, or eating, or a cat nap.

In a world of perfect efficiency with no road works, border crossings, traffic lights, mechanical considerations, weather, or traffic, keeping a steady 44 mph would be pretty easy. Doing it with all those things and the onset of a Canadian winter (along with early sunsets and late sunrises) raises the stakes.

I think I’d want to get in shape for this one. I was going to dare a buddy of mine to do it this year, but maybe this would be a better next year dare.

Update:

With next year in mind I’m adding in the weather this Thanksgiving weekend for Thunder Bay and Sault Ste Marie, which should give us an idea of what to expect. With showers on Saturday a Sunday to Monday run looks like it might have been the best bet. Cold at night, cool during the day, the right kit would be imperative. Leaving The Sault about 4pm so that the last hours are done in daylight on the afternoon of the next day. By the time we’re pushing east again the sun should be getting high in the sky so we’re not riding into it.

Sault weather days

Sault weather nights

Thunder Bay days

Thunder Bay nights

Warming up into the teens during the day, flirting with freezing over night.

ECOO13: soaking in the future

When you see this in the morning, it’s hard not to be inspired!

ECOO13 was bigger better, and better located that any of the ECOOs I’ve previously attended. If you believe in ley lines then putting ECOO on the edge of a natural wonder captured some wonderfully thunderous energy.

I’m told that back in the day ECOO was enormous, much bigger, but those early immigrants were following a huge first wave of personal computing. Since then computers have insinuated themselves into so many aspects of life that they often feel like just more work.

Informational democracy courtesy of computer networking on social media is a slow burn and is still building. Instead of feeling disenfranchised by machines more and more people are recognizing them as an enabling influence, allowing individuals a voice where only mainstream media and large organizations once broadcast their influence. ECOO has been building on this new wave of social media democratization every year since I’ve been attending. It’s always in peril of being spun by the powers that be, but I still hold out hope that places like ECOO will allow people to realize how powerful they are in our new, flattened mediascape.

How to think in a new era? ECOO asking some big questions with Jaime Casap.

On a personal level I’ve been finding it difficult to engage with educational technology in the past few months. Between a new infatuation and a year of difficult technology events (GAFE summit. Pearson Social Media Event), I’ve been finding the business of education to be politically charged and inexplicably restrictive. The cavalier and simplistic manner in which technology is rolled out frustrates me. In a difficult year I’ve been finding personal growth in other areas.

I’d signed up for an ECOO presentation without any really clear sense of direction. The past two years were pretty easy, I knew what I wanted to say and went after it, but after developing a digital skills continuum around pedagogy rather than cost cutting, and instead watching monopolistic corporate buy in, I’m not feeling overly engaged. Sometimes rolling the rock up the hill just gets too heavy.

They ain’t kiddin!

It was with this sense of unease that I went to ECOO, but quickly found my happy place again. From the conversations I had with intelligent, interrogative educators to the fantastically chosen keynotes that went straight after the larger questions around the information revolution we are living through, ECOO does indeed tackle tough issues.

I really enjoyed all three keynotes and they didn’t shy away from asking what education isn’t doing to help our students get ready for a world most of us have no idea is coming.

Wired caught up with our ECOO keynotes in their latest issue. Coming back to the 19th Century, factory designed education system hasn’t been easy after soaking in the future for a few days. ECOO is what education could be like if there wasn’t all the friction from dinosaurs.

If nothing else, ECOO reminded me that change is inevitable and not to give in to the pessimism of bureaucratic thinking. Being an agent of change is difficult. There are a lot of entrenched educational interests that have no interest in adapting to change. After being at ECOO for a few days surrounded by educators who have already made steps into the future I realize I’m not alone in this, and I’m on the right side of history.

Dipping a Toe in Georgian Bay

The plan:

The execution:

Why you going looking for the Niagara Escarpment: it’s the only place where you’re not riding on the crown of your tire all the time in Southern Ontario.

A bit windy, but otherwise perfect weather. 24°C in Elora down to 18°C on Georgian Bay in Thornbury; comfortable without ever being sweaty. The 360° shots are from a Ricoh Theta 360° Camera, the rest are taken from my Samsung S5 smartphone. Videos are at the bottom.

Getting ready for liftoff.

The wind fields of Shelburne

The look on my face when I’m about to ride up River Road out of Hornings Mills.

A thumbs up from Max, he likes the twisties.

A pheasant and baby! But you can’t see it due to poor resolution and lens distortion. The Theta is an interesting idea,
but even with giant, unwieldy files, it still has poor image quality.

Thornbury Harbour

Thornbury

Big sky on the never ending farm field ride home.

Another Tiger double take. There is another!

Smartphone pics:

Creemore for lunch at The Old Mill House Pub (never had a bad meal there)

The new adventurers (a Kawasaki Versys & Suzuki V-Strom), along with the Tiger
that has always been (mine’s 13 years older – made back before Ewan & Charlie did that thing)

A map of the good bits: https://goo.gl/maps/zpdGaSLMuy82

Coast to Coast to Coast

It can be done! Coast to Coast to Coast in Canada. It’s a monster ride though, over twenty thousand kilometres, all in the second biggest country in the world.

Leg 1: Go West Young Man

Starting from home in Southern Ontario I’d strike west up the Bruce Peninsula and over Manitoulin Island and up around Lake Superior. From there it’s a straight shot across the Prairies and then through Calgary into the Rockies. Through the Southern Rockies and Vancouver and then a ferry over to Vancouver Island and on to Tofino on the Pacific Ocean.

Leg 2: True North, all the way

Dempster Highway, North West Territories

From Tofino it’s back across Vancouver Island and then north up the coast before taking the ferry from Port Hardy to Prince Rupert. The ride from Prince Rupert is where things start to get tricky. You’re on paved if very remote roads all the way up to the Dempster Highway and then it’s hundreds of kilometres up to the arctic circle and the mid-night sun. By 2016 they hope to have an extension of the highway all the way to Tuktoyaktuk on the edge of the Arctic Ocean, then it’ll really be coast to coast to coast.

Leg 3: Eastern Promises

After dipping a toe in the Arctic Ocean it’s back down the Dempster before striking east through Grande Prarie and Edmonton. The trip east retraces a bit of the Trans-Canada past Winnipeg before crossing Northern Ontario to Montreal. It’s then up the North Shore to Quebec City before crossing the St. Laurence and making the turn at Rivière du Loup and heading into New Brunswick. Crossing New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, it’s then a ferry ride to Newfoundland for the final leg to Cape Spear, the eastern-most point in Canada.

I think I’d have to make a point of crossing Confederation Bridge on the way past just to have set foot in every province and every Territory you can ride to in Canada.

The round trip is over twenty thousand kilometres, all in Canada, crazy! Between higher kilometre days on highways and the lower mileage moments in the north, I’d hope to average 800kms a day. If I could keep that up it could be done in just under a month (27 days). Aiming at July of 2015, leaving on Canada Day (July 1st), I’d aim to be back home by July 31st, giving me four extra days in the mix to get the job done. Leaving at that time will also mean seeing the mid-night sun above the Arctic Circle.

At about $60 in gas a day (3 fillups), a conservative $100 for lodging and $40 a day in food, I’d have an operating budget of $6200. BC Ferries look like they’ll be about $260. To get on and off Newfoundland it looks to be about $180 in ferry costs. I’d land at Port Aux Basques and cross NFLD on the way to Cape Spear, but take the Agentia Ferry back directly to Sydney for the ride home. All in I think I’d be looking at about seven grand to cover the trip.

Bike-wise I think I’d be considering sport touring options. The vast majority of mileage would be on pavement, with only the push north on gravel. Tire-wise I’d start on street tires and then switch over to something more multi-purpose in Whitehorse for the ride to the Arctic. If John Ryan can go from Prudhoe Bay on an FJR, I don’t think I need to go full-SUV motorcycle with an adventure bike to get up to and back from the arctic. The rest is a high mileage ride on first world roads. I’d want to do it on a bike that makes corners fun.

My current choice would be a bike that handles long distance duties well. The Kawasaki Concours is just such a machine. Two-Wheel Motorsport happens to have just what I’m looking for, a low mileage 2006 that would do the deed. With a shaft drive and a bullet proof reputation, it would cover the miles enthusiastically. My other bike choice would be the new Honda VFR800F. It’s another sports tourer that could swallow these huge distances with confidence.

The final piece would be the media. A Gopro clipped onto the bike would be running whenever the bike was in motion. I’d also have a mobile video camera and my trusty Olympus SLR for other footage. The trick would be not to get hung up with the photography, I tend to lollygag when I have a camera in my hand.

If the production was stepped up a notch, I’d meet up with my production crew at various spots along the way to off load footage and do some stock footage of me on the bike (which wouldn’t happen so much when I was alone). Ideally I’d have a wingman for the trip and we’d both take turns at filming (and half the cost of lodging). The trip itself would offer a live webfeed of mileage covered and where we are, including uploads of recent images and footage.

In the more fully-decked out version I’d go to OLN or Discovery Channel or the Travel Channel for some media support. Then Telus, Rogers or Bell for some communications support, and finally to Kawasaki Canada or Honda Canada for some bike support. It wouldn’t hurt to hit up local, provincial and federal governments to help as well, this is a uniquely Canadian focused trip, and with the final leg of the Dempster Highway finally happening coast-to-coast-to-coast is at last a possibility, it’d be nice to get the word out.

For more check out Coast to Coast to Coast 2.0.

Hibernating a Motorcycle: Tires

Dave Hatch’s Motorcycle Experience is doing a series on how to store a motorcycle over the winter (or for any extended period). The first bit is on how to prepare and look after your tires while the snow flies outside:

So, make sure they are clean and at maximum pressure when you put the bike away, and move the bike every once in a while to prevent the tire from settling on one spot. It was interesting what Warren Milner, the tire expert, said about what super sticky sport bike tires can do in extreme cold. It’s an issue with all super sticky tires evidently.

Space Limitations

At 12x20ft, I’m feeling the pinch…

I wish I had a bigger bike cave. With only a one car garage I’m having to pick and choose my next steps. In a perfect world I’d have room for active bikes and a workshop at the back with longer term projects on the go.

The 2 ½ car option at 24x30ft would feel cavernous by comparison to my cramped 9x20ft space, but a garage that big would mean I’d probably have to keep cars in it. A safer bet would be an outbuilding workshop, like this Canadian made prefab kit.

They have an A style 20×30 footer for just over $12 grand. That would be wider than my current space is long. Instead of my meagre 180 ft², I’d have a whopping 600ft². That kind of space would let me chase down all the loose ends I’m considering right now.

My current urges run toward a couple of dirt bikes for my son and I, a distance capable road bike and something more intimate for short blasts and track days. While the working bikes get their occasional maintenance, I’d also like space for a project bike.

Roughly to scale, that 20×30 workshop would fit the bill nicely.

The Perils of Riding Someone Else’s Bike

It was a cold and windy ride through the Superstition Mountains yesterday. The route we took after taking Gaylen’s advice at azride.com gets you out of the city and into the desert quickly and lets you bypass most of the urban sprawl east of Phoenix.

Our trusty mount was a Kawasaki Concours 14. I thought it would be interesting to compare my 20 year old Concours to a younger one.

After I got myself turned around and rode ten minutes the wrong way into Phoenix, we got moving in the right direction and soon found ourselves on the Bush Highway, a twisty, bumpy highway that doesn’t go anywhere – I guess that’s why they named it that.

It took me some time to get used to this unfamiliar bike. The gear shift was very close to and felt lower than the foot peg which made for awkward shifts, and the brakes felt very (dare I say over?) assisted unlike the old-school hydraulic brakes on my classic Concours. When you applied the front brake you stopped in a hurry causing my pillion to plough into the back of me a number of times until I got really ginger with brake application. The other off-putting part was that each time I used the front brake it was accompanied by a loud electrical whining noise like a cicada chirping. Sometimes it would stop when I let go of the brake, sometimes it would keep whining afterwards.

I was unsure if this was a Concours 14 thing (doubtful) or an azride.com maintenance thing. CoG didn’t suggest any known brake electrical noise problems so I suspect this is a maintenance issue. The azride.com website didn’t mention what year the Concours was (unlike other rental sites which tell you it’s a 2015 but show you a five year old bike), but based on the body the bike we had was a pre-2011 model. Maybe it’s starting to get cranky in its old age.

Taking a water break on the Bush Highway. It was about 15°C, comfortable riding weather.
Up in the mountains it was 5°C when we stopped for lunch.

After owning three Kawasakis I have to say, man do they know engines. Every one I’ve owned or ridden has had a jewel of an engine and this Concours was no different. Passing through the tunnel leading out of Superior, the engine sounds echoing off the walls were spine tingling – it sounded like something straight out of MotoGP.

With that big wobbly wind screen up
high you’re in a big air bubble, but it
looks ungainly. Fortunately you can
lower the screen in town to restore
a sportier look.

The engine didn’t disappoint in power either. My Connie does the business with carburators and 300 less ccs, but what this bike does with the monsterous ZX14 1300cc lump is truly ominous. I’ve ridden fast bikes before and this is one of the fastest.

On mountain roads this newer Concours felt smaller than my bike though they weigh the same. The newer bike is much narrower and quite wasp wasted compared to the chunky older model. That monumental engine that produces sixty more horsepower than my bike probably helps with that feeling of lightness too.

Wind-wise, I was able to ride in jeans all day into single digit Celsius temperatures without a problem. The heat that pours off my Concours was absent on this one, though it was a cold day so it wasn’t something I’d notice anyway.

The windscreen is electrically adjustable and at the top it stopped all but the top of my head getting hit by wind (I’m 6’3″ and I had given up on windshields doing anything for me). My bike gets me squarely in the shoulders and up all the time. I didn’t like how much the windscreen wobbled at speed, it looked flimsy, not to mention goofy in its highest position. Once I was back in town I lowered it back to a less Jurassic Park look. Goofy or not though, it made a cold ride through the mountains much more bearable. A transformable windshield is a piece of magic, though a more solid feeling one with manual adjustment would do the job better. I’d rather not have the added weight and complexity of the electrical one.

You can see just how ridiculously high the risers
are in this view of the Concours back in the lot.
The big googly-eyed headlights don’t do
much for me either.

I’ve got a 32″ leg and find my bike a bit cramped. The ZG1400 was a bit more relaxed in the legs. After a couple of hours in the saddle I had no problems.

The ergonomic problems began where azride.com made changes. The huge risers they installed on this Concours looked like comedy units off a 1970s banana seat bike – huge bull horn things that put the grips right under my nipples, or so it felt. They pushed me so far back that I was riding more on my tailbone – cruiser style – than I otherwise would have. The narrow Concours 14 seat wasn’t build for this contortion and it became quite uncomfortable. It makes me wonder how the stock handle bars would have worked. I have low risers on my old Concours and have a slight forward lean, which I prefer to a bolt upright or reclined stance.

No fancy paint, electrical wind screens or whining
electronics, but it’s a solid old thing that does the
business with gusto. I’m still wishing for the
bike bag to magically whisk my bike along.

All of the electrical noise from the brakes and fuel injection made me cross. I don’t mind electronics (I teach computer engineering), and my Ninja had EFI that was bullet proof, silent and efficient, but when the electronics are whirring away it is intrusive and just reminds you of another expensive thing that will break on you. I don’t feel that this Concours 14 gave me a fair idea of what the breed is capable of. I’d especially like to try a newer one to get a better sense of the machine. Maybe Kawasaki will be doing a riding tour again next year and I can try a 2016 model.

That whacky old-guy handle bar riser (and accompanying sore ass) conspired to make me long for my own bike. It might not have the heat management, or easier reach to the ground (which I don’t need anyway), or fancy moving windshield, but my old Concours feels solid, is usually the fastest thing on the road when you twist the throttle and offers a satisfying mechanical simplicity that I missed on this electronically whinny newer machine.

Final OISE Blog

The final blog entry from my OISE computer engineering program:

Name and describe the school, board and ministry standards you must follow.
Our school and board follow Ministry standards and our collective agreement based upon it. One of the challenges we have is in following changing standards. One of those specific problems is the adoption of skills based assessment (a holdover from the Harris years). Many teachers have a great deal of trouble following this protocol (the learning to 18/student success plan works with it extensively).

I recently had to do a heads thing and sit on a committee that would create school level language around assessment. The fights were pretty epic. Many of the academic teachers believed that students should be marked on their behavior, not what they know about their subject. To them, school is about control and discipline, not subject matter (this dovetails nicely with a conversation I had with my wife last night – I think I’ll be blogging about it on Dusty World shortly).

In any case, our admin is determined to even out the radically different approaches to assessment that go on in our school (even within the same department). I’m curious to see how much this affects teachers this coming year. There is a great deal of professional latitude given to teachers whenever the door closes to the classroom. Unlike the US system, our lessons aren’t mandated and while we have invasive standardized testing, we aren’t held too tightly to them. US schools are required to force feed students lessons year round to feed standardized testing. They then rank poorly world wide.

As much as a loose, teacher centred approach grates on the nerves of hard core curriculumists, it does produce broad based learners who score well in general testing (and adapt well in a changing work environment).

I personally have issues with student success and many of the shortcuts they take in getting students diplomas. But even that process is one I can live with if it allows the majority of students to maximize their learning.

What would you see changed?

One of the few countries ahead of use in world rankings is Finland. Finland does a couple of things that I think would fit well with Ontario’s approach to education. Firstly, they expect teachers to be highly trained specialists in education. In order to teach in Finland, a teacher must have a Masters in Education. I think university focus on this isn’t a great idea, but I’d like to see teacher’s college be much more rigorous in producing teachers. A two year program that offers easy outs into other programs (teaching assistant, educational support worker, business training, etc), or out of education entirely, would be helpful. A greater stress on teacher’s college as an apprenticeship with many more weeks spent in-class with an associate teacher/mentor would also shake out the applicants.

I found a number of candidates in my program who wanted to drop out, but were given no option other than withdrawal with financial penalty. I’d really like to see a first semester drop out option (available after the first in school, teaching COOP session), that offers escape with no financial penalty. I’ve seen too many people teaching who aren’t particularly good at it, have no interest in changing that, and are doing it because they feel trapped into doing so. A more stringent, apprenticeship based, exit enabled teacher training system establishes higher standards (like Finland’s) without the university bias, and with a firm focus on developing teachers actually interested in teaching well.

The other thing Finland did was abolish all standardized testing. Standardized tests do not produce broad-based students who are able to adapt to new situations in creative ways. Standardized testing produces myopic, specifically focused students who fail in open, changing environments (the kind most students will be facing when they enter the workforce).
I’d also like to see a huge push away from the walled garden/board run IT model. The language around protecting students produces overly restrictive access to technology that reduces students’ ability to learn how to author, manage and effectively use current digital tools. If we want to remain relevant, we need to be able to meet students where they live, and show them how to manage modern digital tools effectively.

Develop an action plan to push forward your idea(s).Process:

Figure out what my stance is on effective educational reform

Read other theory, review statistics (don’t be Ontario-centric, look at educational theory from around the world), establish an understanding of what you believe effective reform is

Metacognitively, reflect on your own experiences in the classroom. What is a modern student like? What is needed to reach them? What would an effective learning environment look like in 2012 and beyond?

Develop your own ideas

Collaborate with others to organize and present them

Publish your thinking and invite critical response

Build a following or establish connections with other people who share your vision

Continue to respond to conditions in education,

I’ve done this by starting a blog that continually looks at current digital learning. I use it to reflect on my own experiences, think of ways to produce better results, publish my ideas and continue to evolve my own understandings of this very complicated (and very simple) profession. The blog led to presentations at Edcamps, conferences and PD. It’ll lead to a book at some point me-thinks.

The most important step in this action plan is to take action, and make other people aware of what you’re struggling with in education. If you’re a teacher who doesn’t think twice about teaching, I’d suggest that you’re probably not a very good teacher. If I had to mandate any Ministry requirement for teaching, it would be that teachers should be life long learners, who love the process of teaching and learning, and demonstrate how they are actively working to improve it, in themselves, their classroom, their board and their profession in general.

http://pinterest.com/scottmcleod/slides/ Some good (and funny, and sometimes nasty) comments on educational irrelevance

Dancing In The Clouds

This guy really seems to know what he’s talking about:
http://ugdsbpd.blogspot.ca/2013/11/working-cloud-with-mobile-edtech.html

Working The Cloud With Mobile Edtech

I got a couple of android tablets for the department… $99 each at Factory Direct! You could pick up a class set of twenty-four of these for about $2500, or about the cost of a single Macbook Pro… crazy.

What could you do with them? Well, my grade 9 intro to computers class are doing a review of information technology. We’re using wikispaces.com to build shared notes for review. What’s so good about shared notes? You can’t trust them, so instead of reading something and blindly accepting it, students are reading it critically because their peer might have done it wrong; a much better review process.

wikispace live assessment/engagement tool

If you get a wikispace up and running check out the assessment button in the top right corner – it shows you a live feed of student activity on the wiki. I threw this on the projector and it turned into a race to see who could get the most material down (the engagement graph updates every ten seconds or so, so it’s almost live).

I set up the tablets with their own gmail and then linked a dropboxaccount to it. As students take pictures and make video using the tablet it is automatically shared to the dropbox account, so they can pull the media out of the cloud and include it in their wiki-pages easily. Automating this process is fairly easy, and means that only seconds after taking a photo with the tablet, students are able to easily access it online for use.

Every android tablet I get now can be signed in to that single gmail address and then auto-linked to a shared dropbox account. Any media generated from the tablets is immediately available online.

The rules for the wiki were specific: all notes had to be in your own words. Students got acknowledged for:

media: using original photos and video to explain their focus
media: using the snip tool in Windows 7 to snip screen shots of various parts of our etext
content: explaining their focus in their own words
links: to other material online that support understanding of their focus (all links had to include an explanation of the site and why it was useful.

The benefits are many. Students get to use a new device and recognize its uses in a learning context – this often led to more effective use of their own devices. A number of them have since set up their own dropbox backups on their own devices. Because media is easy to create and access students are able to focus on the material at hand instead of worrying about their spelling and grammar in a google doc.

Being open Android tablets, the apps available are many, and I’ve only begun to scratch the surface of what they could do. Next semester in introduction to coding I’m thinking we’ll use them to run the flash games we design and build.

TEJ wikispace: students learning about information technology through an etext shared on UGcloud.
Notes are created in wikispaces and dropbox is used to quickly and automatically share student-made media.

All told this set up uses three cloud services (ugcloud, wikispaces and dropbox) and some open, accessible and shockingly cheap mobile tablets to offer students a media rich way to tackle note taking. If we can set up a fluid, information sharing environment like this now, imagine where we’ll be in five years.