Check out Michael Stevens’s TED talk on hooking audience members through curiosity. It’s a great framework for instructional design. The video also has links to other educational video channels.
How much does a video weigh?
April 29th, 2013 by Brian No comments »Voice-to-text may be just as dangerous as visual texting
April 23rd, 2013 by Brian No comments »A recent study at Texas A & M suggests that using voice commands to dictate a text message while driving may be just as dangerous as looking at the phone to do it. There are two factors involved. First, the driver’s brain is still distracted, especially if the voice recognition software is not recognizing voice. Second, drivers sometimes have more of a false sense of security when they use voice-to-text, leading them to not be as cautious.
I’ll be curious to see how Google Glass impacts this. (Another factor then would be distracted pedestrians in crosswalks.)
A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix
April 15th, 2013 by Brian No comments »Throw Dune, Ender’s Game, Star Trek, Dr. Who, and Hunger Games into a blender and you get A Confusion of Princes by Garth Nix. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; I like all of those stories. There’s centuries of intergalactic scheming. There’s a battle school. There’s even an arena where tributes run to the weapons to get the upper hand in combat. (Okay, so the arena scene was kinda meh because I kept picturing Katniss in the background trying to get to the cornucopia.)
Princes are superhumans that travel the galaxy and do whatever they want – or at least that’s what Prince Khemri thinks as he is connected to the Imperial Mind. When he’s connected to the Imperial Mind, he doesn’t have to fear death. He can be reborn as long as the Imperial Mind finds him worthy. It’s when Khemri is stripped of his connection to the Imperial Mind that we start to worry about him as a character. He becomes a regular mortal – a la Superman II when the Man of Steel just wants to be Clark Kent. While he’s mortal, he starts to relate to the humans that he once thought were subservient. He is engrossed in a tiny conflict in one small solar system, but is willing to risk it all to help his newfound friends and realizes that one tiny system may play a bigger role in the Empire.
The worldbuilding is great. The Tek is well-defined (this device is biological, this one is mechanical) and consistent. Part of it felt like a video game power system, and that may very well be because the game was released before the book as an advertisement. I liked P.J. Haarsma’s Rings of Orbis better as a pioneer in book-related gaming, though.
It is a standalone book, not a series, which is quite the shocker in today’s YA speculative fiction market. I liked it and wouldn’t mind seeing more stories from different Princes.
Wendell, Custodian of the Galaxy
April 9th, 2013 by Brian No comments »I’m really excited that one of my short stories is in Penumbra Magazine’s March issue. It was space opera. I mean, I had to write a story for that.
You have to pay for a copy of the magazine, but it’s a great issue (I think I may be a tad biased). You can also check out the guest post that I wrote for Penumbra about T-Rexes, tea parties, and time travel. Leave a comment on their site. I’m interested to hear what you think about missed opportunities.
You can find a listing of some of my other published works here.
Seeing Google as a BBS is making me nostalgic
April 8th, 2013 by Brian No comments »Yes, Google was after the BBS era, but it’s still fun hearing that modem successfully connect. The image search with an ASCII preview is even funnier.
Now to play a MUD…
Fidel Castro advises AGAINST nuclear war
April 5th, 2013 by Brian No comments »It’s interesting that, as we’re studying the Cuban Missile Crisis in Social Studies classes, the news headlines are full of North Korea-related threats of a nuclear attack.
One person that seems to have learned from it all is Fidel Castro – the Cuban leader who once wrote a letter to convince Khruschev to launch nuclear weapons at the United States. It seems that as he’s reaching the end of his life, he’s realizing that a nuclear attack would impact a large part of the world.
Thomas Friedman on Teaching Innovation
April 2nd, 2013 by Brian No comments »Thomas Friedman, journalist and author of a number of social change books, is advocating for more innovation instruction in the K-12 and college school system in the United States. He makes an interesting point when he says that most information can be found online now on a handheld device, so we can’t just be about knowledge acquisition. (The librarian side of me interjects that we need to teach students how to decipher which sources to trust on those handheld devices.)
I agree and add to the discussion that in many disciplines there are great discoveries happening daily through easier collaboration with colleagues around the world. I mean, we’re trying to bring back sabertooth tigers, after all. With such advances, we need to teach the foundation information but must also train students on how to think critically. I know that we’ve been saying it as a school for a long time now, but I think that with some of the team efforts that we’ve seen locally and abroad, we’re getting more and more successful ideas of what that looks like.
Flipboard vs. Feedly
March 22nd, 2013 by Brian No comments »I am a huge fan of Flipboard. Normally, when I think of RSS readers, I think of a chaotic swarm of information. Flipboard simplifies what’s current on the Internet into a visually-pleasing set of squares based on categories. The issue that I have with it, though, is that it’s a little limited on some of the features that I have come to appreciate in Google Reader. Since Google Reader is being discontinued, I thought that I would see what all of the buzz about Feedly was.
Here are my thoughts after spending a few days with Feedly. I do the vast majority of my Internet reading on my phone, so that’s the context of the comments.
Flipboard allows you to add RSS (and Twitter and…) feeds, which is great. The limitation, though, is that Flipboard only gives you four screens (six feeds (in beautiful big boxes) per screen) of information. There are preset categories like News or Technology that you can use, but those (to the best of my knowledge) are not customizable. You can add more feeds, but they hang out off in the wilderness a few clicks away. For scrolling through news quickly, those feeds will be missed.
Feedly is more customizable as long as you use the Google Chrome or Firefox plug-in on a computer to get it started (which was kinda annoying since, like I said, I run most of this off of my phone). In the plug-in you can create as many categories as you want and sort the information based on the number of articles to read and how many times you like to read from certain categories. You can even get categories to show you bar graphs for buttons as to which ones contain more unread information.
Both Feedly and Flipboard display graphics from feeds in a nice manner. Both have widgets that display on your device’s home screen. Feedly’s main negative, though, is that it lags a bit more than Flipboard. Jon Virtes from Flipboard says that the speed of the app is the reason why they probably won’t add more pages to Flipboard.
The final verdict? If you’re just going to read a few general categories like Business or Politics, go with Flipboard. If you want to separate feeds into umbrella categories like Teaching Ideas, School Leadership, and Typography, go with Feedly.
The Lord of Opium by Nancy Farmer (House of the Scorpion #2)
March 20th, 2013 by Brian 1 comment »If you haven’t read House of the Scorpion, stop here. It is an excellent book and I don’t want to spoil any of its details. If you have read it, meet me after the scorpion…
Yes, House of the Scorpion has a sequel. Many students will be excited. I even had one class a few years ago get so mad that there wasn’t a sequel that they wanted me to write to Nancy Farmer and make her write a sequel.
It seems that more people wanted a sequel because here we are.
A caution, though: I started reading with extremely high expectations and it took me a bit to realize that the sequel is different. Where the first book is about a young boy trying to survive in a crazy cartel world, the sequel is about Matt trying to run the cartel. The book spends a significant part of the narrative taking the reader on a tour of the new Lord of Opium’s palace. His ideals come into conflict with some of the staff from the previous leader, but most respect him – at least on a surface level. This was the part of the book where my attention waned for a bit. While it’s interesting learning about the inner workings of a household, it wasn’t what I was reading the book for. I wanted suspense. In the first book, a clone could be killed without any real consequences because they were property. How harrowing! I wanted that level of suspense and/or intrigue.
The rival drug lord was scary sounding. I mean, his name is Glass Eye. I wanted more threats from him, more brooding foreshadowing from him. Something. Anything.
I had to accept that the big conflict for The Lord of Opium is person vs. self. Matt is a clone of a violent man. One question haunts Matt’s existence: Will his genetics destine him to a life of violence or will the world around him forge him into a violent man? (Okay, so maybe that’s technically two questions.) Once I realized that it was Matt’s own fears that we should worry about, it made for a more interesting read.
The scientific detail matches the first book and challenges the ethics of why we do what we do. I loved that about House of the Scorpion and appreciated it here. I didn’t quite anticipate just what tech level the society was at, though. Imagine my surprise when a wormhole opened up in the hacienda. It was jarring (my reading, but I’m sure the portal was, too), but once I shifted my perspective, I was good.
Nancy Farmer works in many details from Arizona. As a fellow Arizonan, I appreciated references to Kitt Peak, Ajo, and the Chiricahua Mountains. Those details were spot on.
So, what did I think of the book? I enjoyed it, but there were noticeable hurdles for me to get over. Some were in the pacing of the novel and the focus of the scenes. Some, though, were a result of perhaps unrealistic expectations on my part for a follow-up to such a staple of YA fiction that House of the Scorpion is. I’ll definitely pick up a copy when it releases for the Fall semester, but I’ll hold off on getting multiple copies until I hear from the students about what they think of the book. My copy was a digital ARC on my phone. Yes, publishers, this may save you printing costs, but it would help you out in the long run if I could hand out a paper copy to a student to give me their opinion.
I heard back from Guinness about being the World’s Tallest Librarian
March 20th, 2013 by Brian No comments »Back in November I submitted a claim to Guinness to check if I was truly the World’s Tallest Librarian. It turns out that they don’t track that record. Here’s a quote from their email:
Guinness World Records is in no way associated with the activity relating to your record proposal and we in no way endorse this activity. If you choose to proceed with this activity then this is will be of your own volition and at your own risk.
So, I can continue to be the World’s Tallest Librarian; I just do so at my own risk.
