I was one of the first people to order an OX when they first went on sale. I ordered it roughly 30 minutes after the site went live.
So where’s my XO? Uh, I mean where’s my five year-old daughter’s learning tool?
I came across a post this morning from OLPC news stating that it doesn’t necessarily matter when you bought it, as folks from week 2 are already getting them. So I’m getting anxious.
That post linked to a discussion board thread saying we should call FedEx to see if a package is en route. I didn’t think it would work, but I gave it a shot. Lo and behold, my her XO is slated to arrive on December 18! Yay!
(pic credit to the guy who got his XO stolen in transit)
I was over at Miguel’s blog reading about empanadas when I decided to leave a comment. I’ve always been a bit frustrated about Miguel’s use of Haloscan, but I survive.
Anyway, as I was leaving a comment about his empanada recipe I noticed the contextual ads above. Sheesh. I’m not losing weight eating empanadas!
A few days ago I was looking through my processes window here at work on the Windows machine I use. It runs Windows XP Pro, for what that’s worth. I saw this…
Since I was dealing with a slightly sluggish system of late, I decided to Google this process to find out what the heck it was.
Do you think what I thought? A trojan! I was worried about this because I am super careful and consider myself darn savvy about where to click and where not to. I immediately ran my Trend Micro OfficeScan client as well as Windows Defender. Didn’t pick up a thing.
According to one link, the trojan is totally memory resident so scans won’t detect it. Uh, ok.
I found a removal tool, which crashed each time I ran it. Did I really have it and the trojan was knocking out the removal tool? Yikes!
I managed to find the log file generated by the removal tool and it said my ssnetlib.dll was not vulnerable. It shouldn’t be, I am up to date with all my Microsoft Updates.
So what’s the problem, then? I’ve got a process taking up 50 megs (sometimes way more) and I don’t know why. As a side note, I am familiar with the plain jane SQL Server and I have not ever installed it here. I don’t have any reason to.
After a few hours of quitting it and having it restart itself (the process, that is) I happened on a link that mentioned Pinnacle. Well, after seeing Dean Shareski’s green screen presentation for the Flat Classroom Project, I grabbed a copy of Pinnacle Studio 10 with the green screen (couldn’t find v. 11 locally) and installed it.
On a whim, I checked the Add/Remove Programs section and lo and behold…
I promptly removed it and went on about my day with a speedier system. This post is intended to hit the search results rankings so that others can see the sqlserver.exe is not always a trojan.
3. Now I have this neat little tab below my post editing.
And all I have to do is paste in the code it gives and presto!
Darn that was easy. Nice plugin, Voicethread!
You have to sign in to Voicethread before you see the screen above, which means you can only embed the voicethreads you create, or does it?
Using the syntax it offers, you can embed any voicethread, just by using the number of the thread itself. For example, the wordpress plugin tutorial address bar looks like this…
So if I use the syntax it offers (which looks like voicethread b=xxxx) surrounded by brackets, I can embed any voicethread.
Here is the voicethread wordpress plugin tutorial…
All I’ll do is replace xxxx with 4643.
Voila! An embedded voicethread that I didn’t create.
It’s interesting to see how the network sort of travels from one new service to another. I was looking through my edu feeds today and came across upcoming, which was supposedly the latest and greatest centralized notification service for upcoming edblogger events.
Since its inception, I haven’t seen much from it, have you?
Ok so I’m working on a new project. Silly me, always a new project.
We’re working on a new site to teach folks Spanish. Specifically, Jeff Corwin. Trust me, I’ll announce it formally in a few weeks. My students and I have been working on this and now we need your help. We’re out of ideas!
One of my students came up to me and asked me to blog it. She asked, “can the network help”?
Can you imagine?
Anyway, here is their letter, can you help them?
We have an idea for a site. We have picked out a few 6th graders to help. The idea is to improve Jeff Corwin’s Spanish. We are planning to make a blog and a weekly show. We already have the basic format. We really need help with the idea (purpose) of the show. The show cannot be cheesy or boring. The show must be educational and unique. Most of all, this has to be fun and exiting. Will you help us?
We’re going to do a weekly show, a vodcast, if you will. It will be short and quirky but fun. At least, that’s what we’re hoping for. We need help with ideas for a show. Got any?
I’ve been thinking a lot about story telling. Since creating the Life Round Here project I’ve been wondering how the end results would turn out. As it turns out, as kids were going through the process of writing and then storyboarding, they ran into some serious roadblocks. Walking down Story Road turned out to be a more arduous journey than they expected…
I’ve been also wondering why they found this project to be so darn hard. You see, the kids were so looking forward to doing this project, in part based on the hype of competing against so many other schools, and in part because it is so technological. Some of them maintained that motivation throughout the duration of the project and others seemed to lose it. Once the novelty wore off and the story was still waiting inside the heart, kids found it difficult to coerce it out. Here are my reasons why I think this project was easier for some than others:
On a side note, please remember my students are young, typically 11 and 12 years old.
1. For some kids, it’s really tough to see what’s in their heart. Be it that they are young and perhaps they have not developed the schema to look inside the heart and articulate the emotions swirling around. Maybe it is because they are subject to such an onslaught of folks telling them how they feel that they do not understand how they actually feel or whether the feeling is genuine. For some, it may be that feeling and emotions are simply too painful and are simply avoided.
2. For some, it may be that circumstances are just so difficult that they are not willing to articulate them. I respect this. Quite simply, I have learned through talking kids through this project that there are some of them dealing with very adult issues and some of them are not handling it very well. Some are forced into maturity by the sheer gravity of the circumstance. This can make a project like mine even harder, because they ride the fine line of deciding whether to tell the whole story about what life is really like, or continue to hide it, sit down and remain quiet like we like so much.
3. Some kids are so wrapped up in a search for identity and are finding it in subculture. It’s interesting to watch kids from the beginning of the year to the end and how they can tend to change. The year they spend in our school (which is an amazing school, by the way) can be a defining one that has the tendency to catapault a kid on a certain course in terms of identity. The way they dress can radically change in a matter of weeks depending on the group of friends in close proximity. I would posit this not to be unique to our school, and is possibly a universal truth. I imagine the search for identity and the finding of identity in the context of subculture doesn’t stop when they leave us, either. This unawareness of self, however, can be detrimental to a personal project such as this because we can become clouded by the thoughts and emotions of others and unaware to analyze our own hearts through a clean lens. It is possible that we become unable to determine what is true and what is good because we are so impacted by those around us and what we allow to enter our ears and eyes. We identify ourselves in the context of something desirable, and if inauthentic, we are unable to see our true selves. If the self is hidden, any story created out of the center of the being will be nothing more than off center.
4. The technology can be frustrating. Despite the novelty effect of using this type of equipment, the kids do tend to get frustrated. Since we’ve taught them so well that any time they get frustrated they are to raise a hand and holler out our names, they do so frequently. Needless to say, this got irritating. Some kids have a seeming inability or unwillingness to work through a problem or logically consider a solution. These kids are totally teacher-dependant. It is possible that we have created this monster, but I’m unwilling to categorically state that. This is partly why I tend to disagree with radical constructivist learning and can tend to lean much more towards guided discovery. Kids need hand-holding, and that’s a natural part of the learning process. Often, they just needed me to prod them to seek first a solution themselves applying basic logic, and at times they needed a guiding word or two. More often than not, with just a smidge of help, they conquered their own problems through the process, and that makes the learning sweeter. I suppose I could have just gone over and done it for them, but…
These are just a few of my thoughts having watched kids create over one hundred stories over the past few weeks.
The winners from my school will be announced towards the end of this week, and the announcement will happen here. Stay tuned!
1. Story Rd. picture from umjanedoan’s flickr stream.
This actually sounds like quite an interesting development. Starting November 12, you’ll be able to buy an OLPC laptop which includes one donated to someone else. The price is $399 and they start selling next month.
Cybernet News is reporting the specs are as follows…
December 16, 2007
Tagged with: g1g1 xo laptop.org olpc olpcnews
5 Comments »
I’ve been thinking a lot about story telling. Since creating the 
1. For some kids, it’s really tough to see what’s in their heart. Be it that they are young and perhaps they have not developed the schema to look inside the heart and articulate the emotions swirling around. Maybe it is because they are subject to such an onslaught of folks telling them how they feel that they do not understand how they actually feel or whether the feeling is genuine. For some, it may be that feeling and emotions are simply too painful and are simply avoided.
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