Authentic Tech

Most of the readings I used this week revolved around interpersonal skills.  Not surprising, there is a clear relationship between the synergy of a team-based approach and successful online learning. 

This image is of my LinoIt page.  The small image on the bottom right is the page in its entirety, where the four new reading summaries are in the upper right-hand corner of my "LinoIt World".

OK, so these last two days have been pretty frustrating.  I have a script error that I've spent a day trying to debug.  I've gone as far as copying the script from the sample completed project, but still no luck.  Without finding the source of the error, I can't load the project to my iPhone, which is pretty disappointing.  I've visited the Unity forums and it seems like I may not be the only one with this particular error, so with a little more digging, I'm sure I'll come up with the solution.  In the meantime, I've been trudging forward. 

As far as the scripting language and becoming familiar with the IDE, it's getting a bit more comfortable. Every programming language has its little syntactical idiosyncrasies, and this one is no different.   Every programmer has his/her little personal conventions, and this tutorial was written fairly well, but clearly has the thumbprint of the author on it.  All in all, it hasn't been that bad -- save that one error.

Flash, Flash, Flash -- that's all we hear about.  And Flash is good, but with the advent of AS3, some of the best things is Flash now rely on some pretty heavy-duty code.  How about considering Fireworks as an alternative?

I’m learning something that probably no one else has any desire to learn:  programming iOS devices -- specifically iTouch, iPad, and iPhone 4.  The motivation for this came from my Cryptology class last week when I was teaching QR code (a two-dimensional barcoding system developed by Denso-Wave for cataloging Toyota parts).  I had given my students a copy of a newspaper article that featured QR code in which there was an example.  One student that we’ll call Frankie asked, “Hey Ms. Parler, do you know what this says?”  I replied that it was the author’s website URL.  About a minute passed.  Frankie wildly raised his hand -- quite unusual for Frankie as he has rarely been engaged in anything other than baseball throughout his four-year existence at DePaul.

I said, “Yes, Frankie?”. 

“Promise you won’t get mad.”

I looked at him.  How much trouble could he have gotten into in the last minute?  “I won’t get mad.”

“No, really, ya gotta promise you won’t take away my phone”, replied Frankie.

Students are not permitted to use phones on campus.  Nor are they permitted to use iPads, iPods, etc.  If we see a student with a phone, iPad, iPod, etc., we are supposed to confiscate it and send it to the office.  The first time they get off with a warning.  The second time there is a fine (meaning tariff  - not a comment on quality) system.  So, clearly Frankie had accessed his phone in the last minute.  “OK, I won’t take your phone away. What did you discover?”

“I scanned this code thing with my phone and it took me to the guy’s website.  It’s so cool.  Do you want to see?”  Frankie was engaged.  Suddenly cellphones were being whipped out all over the place.  Three other students discovered they had the app as well.  My next day’s lesson included a QR-encoded message they they could decode using their phone cameras.  Now a total of nine kids had the app.  OK, yes -- it’s not exactly according to the rules, but I ran with it.  Next semester, I’ll post the assignment on Blackboard as a discussion topic, so I can stay within the rules and still engage the disengaged.

So, I’m trying to figure out how I can write an app for those of my kids who have iOS devices to light the fire.  Hey, whatever it takes.

And with Week 4 just a little lighter in work than Week 3 (it couldn't possibly be worse!). I'm looking forward to finishing Penelope by then!