Listen to this postposted in apple | 0 Comments
For weeks I have languished with a broken digital camera on my iPhone. The camera has not been mechanically broken, but functionally broken, since each time I snapped a picture a mysterious grey box would appear in my camera roll photos instead of an image thumbnail. When I would click on the mysterious box, the iPhone would quit out of the Photo Library application and return to the home screen. I tried updating my iPhone software, restoring the software from a backup, rebuilding my iPhoto library, and asking local friends with iPhones for other troubleshooting ideas. Nothing worked. Finally, I took my iPhone to our local Apple Store (after making an appointment online for the Genius Bar) and explained the situation. The helpful Apple Genius immediately provided me with a new iPhone, which I was delighted to receive, but didn’t have any advice about what caused this problem or how it could be avoided in the future.
The new iPhone took and saved pictures fine, and I was able to restore all my music and video files, as well as other settings, to the new iPhone when I returned home and connected it to my computer and iTunes library. The first time I synced the new iPhone to iPhoto and chose to DELETE ALL my iPhone pictures after they transferred to iPhoto, however, the problem reappeared! I could no longer take any photos on my iPhone. How frustrating!
This evening I resolved to take some time to hunt for possible fixes to this glitch, and I’m pleased to report I found a workaround which did NOT require that I “jailbreak” my iPhone. Before I share the solution that worked for me, I will detail my linktribution:
Whoa-la! Like magic, my iPhone now takes pictures like a champion and I can sync them to iPhoto without a problem! The only catch: As doh-boy recommended, I have to avoid deleting ALL the pictures from my iPhone after I sync them to iPhoto, and leave at least one of them on the iPhone. Here are the steps that doh-boy recommended which worked for me:
- Make sure you sync your phone so you have the most current back-up of your information.
- Click on the Restore button located in the Summary tab of iTunes.
- After the phone settings are restored, DO NOT restore your personal information from a back-up, instead eject the iPhone and take a photo. The photo should now appear in the camera roll, like normal.
- Attach the phone to the dock and import the photo into iPhoto (I did not delete the photo from the phone).
- NOW restore your personal information from a back-up through iTunes.
If you have this problem on your iPhone, perhaps this solution will work for you as well. The Apple support discussion page where this solution is shared still lists this issue as unresolved with the statement at the top, “This question is not answered.” I’m guessing this software glitch will be resolved in an upcoming iPhone software update from Apple. Thanks to doh-boy for this solution… I “languish” no longer! I’m again armed and ready to document life events with my iPhone camera! 
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iphone, disappear, disappearing, photos, iphoto, apple, troubleshoot, solution
Listen to this postposted in games, web 2.0 | 0 Comments
For several months now, my 10 year old son and I have been having LOTS of fun playing the online real-time war game Travian. We recorded podcasts in December 2007 and March 2008 to discuss what we have learned so far playing the game. This week, we have been focusing on “chiefing” other villages. There are two basic ways to expand your personal “empire” in Travian and build/obtain more villages. The first way is to build up your palace or residence (one of the buildings in each of your villages) to level 10, 15, or 20, and earn enough “culture points” to found a new village. You can found a new village either by training “settlers” who can be sent with basic resources to an unoccupied area on the virtual Travian map grid, or you can train a “chief” (in my case he is called a Senator, because I am in the Roman tribe) who can be sent repeatedly to another existing village. It is necessary to destroy the residence in the village you want to take over with your chief first, before sending the chief, and afterwards each time your chief arrives in the village he lowers the “loyalty” of that village by a percentage. When the village’s loyalty is lowered to zero, the entire village becomes yours. This entire process (which is admittedly and delightfully complex) is explained well in this official Travian tutorial, “Preventing Conquerings.” This is the screen I saw yesterday after having destroyed the residence of a nearby village and repeatedly sending my Senator to it with an armed escort:
I chose to “chief” a smaller village than Alexander did, and the player who owned the village I successfully “chiefed” wasn’t active in trying to fight off or resist my attacks. The situation with the village Alexander is trying to take over has been quite different, however. The population of the village is larger, and the player is very active. This situation has provided a great context for us to discuss math skills and learn some new ways to use mathematical tools as well as strategies to solve problems.
I have written previously about the value of playing Travian in terms of learning Internet safety. I have not posted about the mathematics learning value of Travian previously, but this has been one of the main reasons Travian caught my attention in the first place and I considered playing this game with my son. One evening a few months ago, Alexander was working out double digit multiplication problems on paper at the dining room table. He was not doing any homework, so I asked him what he was doing, and he explained that he was calculating how many resources he needed to trade or send to his village to build some type of new building. I was quite impressed that he was voluntarily doing some arithmetic “for fun,” and the more I learned about Travian, the more I learned about the value it can provide as a meaningful context for problem solving, math skills, communication skills, team leadership, and other important things.
I will post later about what Alexander has learned about coordinate plane geometry and two-dimensional graphing, because I am not able to locate a copy of one of the early graphs he created for our alliance using an online graphing program. This evening, I’d like to relate and document some of the learning I’ve seen him experience related to “chiefing” a new village.”
The following image shows a troop report from Alexander’s “rally point” in Travian, from his main village which he is using to “chief” or take over a neighboring village.
In this report, you can see that Alexander had sent two attacks to the target village. The first attack includes two different types of soldiers, battering rams, and trebuchets. (Trebuchets are the catapults or “cats” for Gauls in Travian.) This first attack is sent to destroy the “residence” building of the opponent. Alexander timed his second attack, which included soldiers that could move much faster because they weren’t traveling with battering rams at cats, to “land” (arrive) 1 minute and 34 seconds after the first attack landed. This was somewhat challenging to do, because of the different speeds of the attack forces. He did it, however, and the result was that his opponent did not have time to reconstruct (or start construction) on a new residence building after the first attack destroyed that building via the trebuchets.
Since I have a larger set of villages on our Travian server and want to help out my son, I offered (and he accepted) to send my own troops and catpults (called “Fire Catapults” since I am a Roman) to destroy the residence building in the village Alexander is trying to “chief.” I am much farther away, geographically, from the targeted village than Alexander’s main village is, however. One result of this difference is that my troops take MUCH longer to travel to that village and attack it. Travian is a realtime war and strategy came, which means events take place according to real time in the face-to-face world. Alexander’s cats can depart and land in the target village in a just under two hours, but it takes over ten hours for my troops and cats to land. Because of this challenge, last night we created a basic Excel spreadsheet together to make some calculations, based on the inputs we knew. We used the Travian website to calculate when I should send my troops and cats, so they could hopefully arrive just before Alexander’s. We were basing his options on when he would get up in the morning, since he couldn’t send the attacks in the middle of the night. This is what our spreadsheet looked like:
This morning Alexander launched his attack, but it turned out the defending player had enough time (about 30 minutes) to start reconstruction on his residence after my attacks had landed. The result was that Alexander’s “chief” attack failed. The message he received said the residence had not yet been destroyed:
In considering these events, keep in mind that Alexander is attending 4th grade at our local, public elementary school during the day, so is having to make these decisions and send out these attacks before and after school. (He doesn’t have web access to Travian during the day, since he doesn’t use his personal laptop at school at all or have an iPhone.) Since our attempted coordinated attack had failed this morning when he was at school, we discussed a new battle strategy late this afternoon. We realized that instead of sending ALL his cats in an initial “cleaning wave” attack, and then having to carefully time his second attack with his “chief” to arrive closely after the first one, he could hold back one cat (trebuchet) and send it with the chief’s attack. That way, the two attacking parties would have the same speed and “land” immediately after one another. The result? The first “cleaning attack” successfully destroyed the opponent village’s residence and village wall:
The second attack (including the “chief” who would persuade the inhabitants of the receiving village to have lessened “loyalty” to the current owner/ruler/player of that village) landed exactly 1 minute and 34 seconds later. The defending player didn’t have sufficient time to rebuild his/her residence, so the village’s loyalty was reduced by almost 25 percent:
This entire sequence of conversations, decisions, and actions by Alexander was a great opportunity to see him practice problem solving and mathematical calculations in a relevant, meaningful context. Too often in school, we are teaching skills “just in case” instead of “just in time.” Alexander is using his math skills and learning new ones in Travian, as well as further developing his problem solving skills, to accomplish tangible objectives he really cares about.
It is exciting to be learning and playing together in Travian, and to witness how online games like Travian can help young students develop a rich repertoire of skills– including mathematical abilities!
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travian, game, online, war, strategy, learning, excel, spreadsheet, problemsolving, problem, solving
Listen to this postposted in isafety, literacy | 0 Comments
I’m a big fan of using OpenDNS for home content filtering for many reasons, and tonight I ran across another one. I was watching a YouTube video on my iPhone of some pretty amazing guitar play, and noticed in the video description the alleged author wrote:
http://websiteaddress.com I learned to play guitar with http://websiteaddress.com….
Thinking if he REALLY did learn to play the guitar on that website, it must be a pretty amazing online tutorial system for guitar players, I tried to visit the website he provided. Result?
Now, I am honestly not sure if the website address to which I was trying to link has adware / malware on it or not. It appears, however, that the website I typed in is registered to an advertisement redirection link, which is known to be used by adware / malware distributors. Since I’m running a Mac (of course, how else would I want to safely surf the web) it is VERY unlikely any adware or malware that could be present on the site could infect my system– since I have not ever heard of malware “in the wild” yet for Mac OS X. None the less, I’m still glad to have a layer of FREE protection at home from malware from sites like this.
Thank you OpenDNS!
For more about OpenDNS, see my March 2008 post, “The Value of OpenDNS (free) content filtering at home.”
Not only does this incident point to the value of having at least a basic, FREE level of content filtering present on your home network, it also reveals the importance of MEDIA LITERACY and always being aware of how people and companies are using guerilla marketing strategies to influence consumer behavior. On the subject of media literacy, I recently discovered and started to enjoy Understand Media’s podcast channel on media literacy. GREAT content there! For more on the dark side of guerilla marketing (as well as many other topics) check out the bonus features DVD of the 2003 Canadian documentary “The Corporation.”
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adware, malware, filter, protection, home, free, opendns
Listen to this postposted in distributed-learning | 0 Comments
Chris Walsh recently let me know about an intriguing summertime travel, PD, and curriculum development opportunity with Big Tree Learning. Chris and others with Big Tree are looking for “Rock Star Teachers” to help with curriculum development for 3-4 weeks in San Francisco, and a stipend is provided. Read more and submit an application form on the Big Tree Learning website. If Chris Walsh is involved, it’s sure to be:
If you’re not familiar with Chris, his ideas and his work, be sure to check out his blog as well as the video channel on the Infinite Thinking Machine! The video podcasts for the ITM have not updated lately because of funding issues, but blog posts on the ITM continue. I’m looking forward to stepping up my own contributions there starting this summer after NECC. 
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Listen to this postposted in leadership, web 2.0 | 0 Comments
The K12Online08 Call for Proposals: Amplifying Possibilities has been released! Please share this call far and wide, and consider sharing a presentation yourself. Team presentations are welcome! The deadline for proposals is June 23rd, and we will announce selected presentations at NECC on July 2nd. There are several changes from last year which are detailed in the call. I’m very enthused to be convening the strand “Leading the Change” this year. Read all about it and tell all your friends!
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Listen to this postposted in organization, web 2.0 | 12 Comments
I’ve been using the website 43actions to keep track of my personal to-do lists for a few weeks now. Today I visited with two friends who are using reQall and Toodledo for their personal to-do lists, and both like the tools a great deal. None of these tools (as far as I know) are configured to be used by groups, however, just individuals. Short of utilizing full-blown project management software, does anyone know of a website offering group “to-do list” functionality? I’m thinking of something which would permit tasks to be defined, assigned to individuals, and tracked per specified deadlines. This sounds like a great application for Google Labs to tackle! Does anyone know of group “to-do list” webapps which are available today? (And preferably free!)
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Listen to this postposted in edtech | 4 Comments
Listen to this postposted in creativity, digitalstorytelling, history, politics | 2 Comments
U.S. Presidential elections inevitably lead to interesting and thought provoking advertisements, but I am not sure previous elections generated as many opportunities to learn from effective electoral marketing ads as the 2008 campaign. The primary reason for this is user-created content: It continues to explode, and the variety as well as quantity of video content being created that relates to the election this year is amazing. The contest Obama in 30 Seconds is a case in point. Fifteen finalist videos have been selected from hundreds of submissions. My personal favorites are:
Imagine… (a very creative stop-motion video)
and
They Said He was Unprepared… (A surprising historical comparison)
The first video is a great example of applying reverse engineering techniques to stopmotion moviemaking I think: The final claymation objects were created and videotaped first, and then slowly smashed so that process could be shown in reverse as “growth” videos.
I like the second video because of the juxtaposition of historical parallels. Gets you thinking. All in 30 seconds!
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Listen to this postposted in open source, podcasting | 2 Comments
I have absolutely LOVED using Juice Receiver along with PodNova and iTunes to manage my podcast subscriptions the past several years. Unfortunately, the developers of Juice Receiver appear to have discontinued updates, and the available version (2.2) for Macintosh OS X runs VERRRYYYY slowly and sometimes (at least for me) doesn’t run at all. I usually run Juice Receiver every week or so to update my podcast channel subscriptions, and have noticed for several months that Juice runs very slow. (I keep my primary iTunes library on an external hard drive, so this updating process requires a bit more inconvenience because of this.) For some reason this evening, however, Juice will not run an update. It launches fine, but locks up when I click the update button. My computer shows that Python maxes out the CPU cycles on my MacBook, and I really can’t do anything until I force quit the application. The graphic below shows my CPU usage history (with iStat) just after I force quit Juice Receiver. You can see the cycles were just maxed out before this screenshot was captured with Skitch:
Since I maintain my podcast channels on PodNova and PodNova permits the downloading of an OPML file of podcast subscriptions, I decided to download the OPML and then import the podcast channels included in it directly into iTunes. Initially I had trouble with this because PodNova wanted to append the extention “.xml” to the OPML file, and iTunes didn’t like that. When I chose FILE - IMPORT within iTunes, I could select the opml.xml file created by PodNova, but iTunes wouldn’t import anything.
To troubleshoot this, I subscribed to a couple podcasts via the podcast directory in iTunes, and then exported that OPML file from iTunes to the desktop to see if I could identify a difference between the OPML file syntax which iTunes likes versus the OPML file syntax of PodNova using TextWrangler. Fortunately, I didn’t have to even look “inside” the OPML file and make any changes– the difference was the file extension! iTunes apparently requires OPML files have the extension “.opml” to import them as podcast channels. Once I changed the extension, whoa-la! All 44 channels directly imported into iTunes!
It is entirely possible I have a misconfiguration or a corrupt file on my system which is causing Juice Receiver to malfunction on my Macbook running OS 10.5.2. I have actually ordered a new laptop hard drive and plan to soon reinstall my OS and all my applications– At that time I’ll give Juice Receiver another try. For now, however, it looks like I’ll have to settle for using iTunes to manage my podcast channel subscriptions. The main feature of Juice Receiver I’ll miss is the “clean up” feature, which I detailed in my January video podcast “Cleaning Up Downloaded Podcasts with Juice Receiver.”
Is anyone else continuing to use Juice Receiver on a Macintosh computer with iTunes, running the latest operating system? I’m hopeful I’ll be able to return to Juice Receiver at some point in the not too distant future.
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podnova, juice, itunes, podcast, subscribe
Listen to this postposted in isafety, leadership, socialnetworking | 0 Comments
I updated my scheduled presentations and workshops for the month of May on my RSS Calendar recently. (The next 30 days of events are shown on my blog in the left sidebar.) One of the sessions I’m looking forward to is a May 12th workshop presentation for the Oklahoma Library Association at the public library in Midwest City. The overall workshop is titled “Safety on the Internet Highway.” My first session in the afternoon is titled “Beyond the Fear Factor.” Given the fact I’ll be following Joel Gabel of Google Hardware Operations and Larry Boggess of the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation’s Internet Crimes Division, this is sure to be challenging! I am very glad to have this opportunity, however, and think it is GREAT for the Oklahoma Library Association to have put together a mixed panel on this very important topic.
My second afternoon session for May 12th is titled “Educating [Library] Customers & Legislators about the benefits vs. dangers of online networking.” This presentation will focus on digital citizenship and the pivotal role which librarians ARE playing and can play in larger conversations than simply “Internet Safety.” These include media literacy and 21st century workforce skill development.
If you are interested in learning more about digital citizenship, check out ISTE’s scheduled webinar by Dr. Mike Ribble on May 7th, in just two days. Dr. Ribble and Dr. Mike Bailey are the authors of an ISTE published book on digital citizenship, and maintain the KSU College of Education website on digital citizenship which continues to be the first Google search result for “digital citizenship” out of over 250,000 hits. Dr. Ribble’s personal website on digital citizenship is available on www.digitalcitizenship.net, but his blog there has not been updated since November of 2007.
My bookmarks related to digital citizenship are available both on Diigo and del.icio.us (where my Diigo bookmarks automatically cross-post.) I’ve created a new group on Diigo for digital citizenship: You are welcome to join and contribute links! I’m particularly interested in finding examples of libraries and library organizations which are actively helping students safely utilize social networking environments as suggested in the summer 2007 NSBA report “Creating and Connecting.” YALSA (the Young Adult Library Services Association) is definitely one library organization which continues to embrace new media communication possibilities via its blog, wiki, Twitter account, Flickr pics, del.icio.us social bookmarks, and MySpace page.
Are you aware of other examples of library organizations and libraries focused on supporting the development of digital literacy skills for their patrons, both young and old? If you’re willing to share links, please add them here as comments and/or join the Digital Citizenship Diigo group and add them there.
Listen to this postposted in edtech | 0 Comments
Listen to this postposted in blogs, geography, globalvoices, web 2.0 | 1 Comment
This evening I took some time to review the ClustrMaps for my blog over the course of the past month (April 2008.) ClustrMaps is a wonderful website which provides code people can insert onto their blog or other website to track (by IP address) the general locations of people who are accessing and viewing content on that particular website. As I have remarked previously, these visual representations of readership continue to absolutely astound me! The Pitcairn Islands ClustrMap Mystery continues, however. I would love to know who my reader(s) are on the Pitcairn Islands, or on the other south Pacific island which is showing up on my ClustrMap again! The April 2008 ClustrMaps show visitors to my blog from almost 25,000 different locations worldwide. This is a clear sign of the times. We’re not living in 20th century Kansas anymore.
Hello to Sue Waters in Perth! I can see your city on the ClustrMap image above! But who is making that access dot in Alice Springs?!
What I’d really love to do is arrange to travel IN PERSON to all these locations around the world, along with members of my family. Planning an international education, learning, or educational technology conference in 2008-2009? Please consider me as a possible keynote speaker and drop me a line! I was able to take my son to COSN this past March in Washington DC, but I’m sure he’d flip if at some point he could accompany me to Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, or another location which seems quite exotic to us living here in central Oklahoma!
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clustrmap, blog, readership
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