tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-196628402011-12-03T15:03:35.128-05:00projects in ubiquitous computing and learningBrian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.comBlogger241100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1155128563791400652006-08-09T07:58:00.000-05:002006-08-09T08:02:43.806-05:00

If you actually read this blog, reset your bookmarks, RSS feeds, etc. I'm moving over to a blog network hosted by Cole Camplese. The hope is to group a bunch of people with interests in education and computing into a sorta of MOAB (Mother of All Blogs).New digs are at http://camplesegroup.com/ublearnin/. Come check out the network!

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1154994890702291742006-08-07T18:19:00.000-05:002006-08-07T19:16:11.833-05:00

Well, that didn't take long. Here I was setting up a space to teach in Facebook when reporters caught wind of my plans. I don't usually...ok, I never talk to reporters cause whatever gets printed always comes back to haunt. But these were student reporters. They're different...happy to help them learn their trade.The story broke this morning. And the email starting flowing soon after. I was told,

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1154564132844029102006-08-02T19:05:00.000-05:002006-08-02T19:51:19.726-05:00

The BBC featured an article on their site last week, The rise of the cyber children. Basically describes a debate concerning when kids should begin using computers and if they gain any benefits from starting at an early age. Some of the interesting nuggets:1) 4-7 year olds in a London school participating in weekend computer programs. Article says the kids were recently plugging numbers into

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1154204775613616942006-07-29T18:52:00.000-05:002006-07-29T21:07:05.286-05:00

Back in December 05, I mentioned that I was going to get one of Microsoft Research's SenseCams for an experience capture project. Microsoft delayed the release of the hardware, but we got hold of them in late June. I've been wearing it lately to see what it does.Basic gist. The camera has sensors onboard that trigger image collection. Motion, temperature, light, and objects coming into view are

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1154144213298501672006-07-28T22:15:00.000-05:002006-07-28T22:36:53.320-05:00

Stop reading now if you don't know what Facebook is. Or maybe keep reading since you must be out of touch with the post-digital world that young people live in.I set up my Facebook profile awhile ago, curious to see what all the buzz was about. My sister promptly told me that my space needed some serious work since it only had my name back then. I thought I had better things to do then play

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com100tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1152236624502853782006-07-06T20:37:00.000-05:002006-07-06T21:15:40.663-05:00

Our household is in the process of eliminating our last working non-Apple machine. I bought the lady of the house (ok, lady #1 vs. Samantha who's been on a Powerbook since birth) a MacBook for her birthday. I put Parallels on it last night, installed Windows XP. No problems installing. But I kept getting some error whenver I tried Windows Update. Google is good. After searching around for a long

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1150512718557201772006-06-16T21:34:00.000-05:002006-06-16T21:53:03.640-05:00

I just got back from Boston tonight. Was visiting MIT's Media Lab (my old "home") yesterday, hung out at the offices of One Laptop per Child this morning. Good to see friends in both places...But this post if all about OLPC's $100 laptop. Got to play with a prototype today, take a look at her guts. Much slicker than I imagined. Tiny machine, perfect for travel (can't help but think Nicholas had

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1148612295733668952006-05-25T21:47:00.000-05:002006-05-25T21:58:15.746-05:00

Pearson Education appears ready to create educational content for Apple's iPods. Not clear what the content would be, but it's hard to imagine listening to calculus lectures through white earbuds. I'm more excited about the Nike/Apple partnership than this one. I just can't get into the lisening to lectures offline thing. Then again, I'm old...today's students may think it's the best thing since.

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1148441025687315762006-05-23T22:14:00.000-05:002006-05-23T22:23:45.690-05:00

The National Research Council is about to begin a "comprehensive synthesis of research on science learning in informal environments." The panel on Learning Science in Informal Environments will meet for the first time in early June. Not sure how I got to be part of this, but it'll no doubt be very interesting. Diverse group of people all thinking about how to understand how people learn outside

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1148440407615556852006-05-23T21:49:00.000-05:002006-05-23T22:13:51.110-05:00

Apple and Nike sorta snuck this one on us. The gist is a sensor that fits into Nike+ shoes plus an attachment for your iPod Nano. You go running, the sensor measures distance and pace, relays that to your Nano to give you real-time performance info. Pretty slick...just you, your shoes, and the iPod that you always wear while running (I'm not a runner, but I can't imagine doing it for miles

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1145143050992300312006-04-15T18:14:00.000-05:002006-04-15T18:26:14.536-05:00

Amazon's Mechanical Turk is a strange twist on artificial intelligence problems. Rather than having people ask computers question and hope they're intelligent (they usually aren't), let computers ask people questions and get intelligent answers. After all, there are tasks that people are much better at than computers. Amazon gives an example of image annotation ("find pizzas in these photos").

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1144545076456355322006-04-08T20:03:00.000-05:002006-04-08T20:11:16.476-05:00

The big news this week was Apple's release of Boot Camp, the "install Windows on your Intel Mac software for the rest of us." Having already done the XP trick, I didn't really need the software, but I did once the OS 10.4.6 update wrecked my partition and wouldn't allow to upgrade the MacBook firmware. Wiped the disk, started from scratch, all good now. Great to have Apple give us working drivers

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1144197383702056502006-04-04T19:20:00.000-05:002006-04-04T20:32:22.110-05:00

Jeana Frost and I spent some time thinking about diabetes education. During those years of research, my dog, Lizzie, was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes. She lived five years longer than vets imagined, mostly due to a whole lot of care from her parents. We used to check her glucose with urine strips since getting blood from a dog ain't easy. More so, there's some thoughts that blood meters

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com27tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1142736765470434422006-03-18T21:41:00.000-05:002006-03-19T10:39:05.896-05:00

The MacBook is now a dual-boot machine running OS X and Win XP. Wasn't as hard as I feared, although I did have to do some tweaking. Biggest issue was Windows asking for a product key. Yeah, that's just the thing everyone keeps around. Visual Studio is installed, other stuff needed for development coming tonight. By the way, the install was light years faster than the PIII install I wrote about

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1142601497723539622006-03-17T08:17:00.000-05:002006-03-17T08:18:58.976-05:00

I got a nice message from IBM/Lenovo today saying my laptop won't ship until late April. Less than ideal, for sure. I thought about going to some other manufacturer of dual core laptops to get something sooner. After all, I got the "Windows Jones" right now, and I just want to get down to business.Turns out my "other" Intel dual core machine came yesterday, a 2.16MhZ MacBook Pro. I got no time to

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1142562873797467812006-03-15T21:10:00.000-05:002006-03-18T23:41:15.423-05:00

Rumor has it that Sony's PlayStation Portable will soon have GPS and camera peripherals, Macromedia Flash compatibility, and RSS for accessing content. Could have used all this years ago when Erik Blankinship and I were working on our Image Maps project years ago. PSP gets price cut, GPS, camera, VoIP and future media download service

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1142468256392999962006-03-15T19:15:00.000-05:002006-03-15T19:19:16.110-05:00

Damien Stolarz talks about his daughter using a label maker as a language toy. I doubt that's what Brother had in mind when they developed their P-Touch labelers, but kids recognize opportunities. Read his version of it. Interesting to think about ways that ordinary objects provide opportunities for learning. Brother P-Touch as kid's toy:

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1142222336133427742006-03-12T22:58:00.000-05:002006-03-12T23:05:53.116-05:00

DVD reader installed, up and running. No real issues there, XP handled it like a champ. While I was at it, I bought a wireless keyboard and mouse, got that installed too. All positive? Come on, there has to be a catch. So here's the catch, and it has nothing to do with Microsoft.What's the deal with companies who decide they need to make their own "fancy" install programs? The DVD and keyboard/

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1141843962287097722006-03-08T13:38:00.000-05:002006-03-09T09:11:59.346-05:00

Now that I have this pristine OS on an equally pristine Toshiba tablet PC, I'm ready to work. Ok, I'm still procrastinating on the DVD reader...it just seems like it has to be harder than I'd like it to be. Let's leave that for episode 3.Today, I'm sorta amazed that whenever I login into the machine (and I've done it a lot), the OS tries to talk to me. "Would you like to know more about the table

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1141782159242629722006-03-07T20:39:00.000-05:002006-03-08T19:23:14.756-05:00

My research dean loaned me a Toshiba tablet PC since my old PCs all have CD-ROM drives and the current versions of Microsoft Developer Network software are on DVDs. Yeah, it's been that long since I've touched a Windows machine. Thanks to the Dean...neat machine although I have no desire to mess with the tablet features. I'd use paper if I wanted to write...still haven't figured out that whole "

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1141781834101139652006-03-07T20:36:00.000-05:002006-03-08T13:37:15.110-05:00

For the first time since 1997, I've moved over to Intel machines. One on the way is a MacBook Pro...that's to be expected. But I've also got an IBM/Lenovo machine on order. Yup, I'm gonna try Windows again for the first time in forever. Mostly cause I'm working with Microsoft on a project. Smart people in Redmond, WA, happy to be a research partner with them.But it's also been hard to make the "

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1141274635662801082006-03-01T23:37:00.000-05:002006-03-01T23:45:11.833-05:00

Here's high tech science with an ol' school Mac II. Pretty slick. Shows that we don't need the newest, coolest gear to do important stuff. John Maeda and I used to argue that smart people could create smarter solutions with old machines. These guys obviously did it…can the rest of us do the same?

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1134442511042038172005-12-12T21:47:00.000-05:002005-12-12T21:55:11.050-05:00

Jeana Frost and I just got some gear from Microsoft Research to look at another aspect of our diabetes research. This is part of their Digital Memories initiative, research around the continous capture of life experiences with ubiquitous computing. In particular, we'll be using Microsoft's SenseCam to examine differences between manual and automatic capture of health-related photographs. More

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19662840.post-1133972961732246732005-12-07T11:28:00.000-05:002005-12-07T11:29:21.746-05:00

WIth luck, we'll regularly post content to this site about our research, interesting stuff we see in the world, etc.

Brian K Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/07270630754742017859noreply@blogger.com