mikes web log

Up at 6.30. Woken by Virgin on the DAB radio. Downstairs, feed two cats, empty dishwasher and get a breakfast of a pint of orange juice and water and two toasted slices of white bread covered in a thick layer of margarine and lime marmalade. My wife gets up uses the bathroom and now it’s my turn. Always have a bath in the morning, a reflective time. Watch the news before embarking on the trip to work. Today I have put a tie on because I will be visiting a secondary school. Before that I need to drop my wife off at her school and I’m off to Nottingham for a 9.30 meeting.

Quite a good journey to the motorway (M42), a nice smooth journey even though it was slightly foggy. The fog today is nothing like the fog of the past. The car is a Ford Fiesta, only a few months old. Listened to Radio 4 on the journey where it mentioned History Day. I’d forgotten about it so it was a timely reminder. Journey from Birmingham to Nottingham took approximately one hour. My meeting was with an IT developer, who could be building a web site for one of the organisations I work for. The project is the building of an interactive mythical Green Man who will be based at Birmingham Botanical gardens. I was confirming project details. Like to meet face to face. Meeting over in 45 minutes, then into car and back to Birmingham.

The car has one of those electronic gauges that tell you how many miles you are to an empty petrol tank. Very clever, I think I shall see how close I can get to zero. OK for now I still have 85 miles to go.

I leave the motorway at the Washwood Heath exit, then to, Aston. Arrive in Aston by 11.30 and feeling peckish. Next appointment is at 12.15 so I pop in at the local MacDonald’s and enjoys a half pound cheeseburger with chips and a coke. Buy Guardian.- something to read while eating.

Onto Aston Manor school whereat 12.15 I talk to some Year 7 pupils about the other project I am involved in. We have put a wireless cloud over Aston and are making sure that all Year 3/4 and 7 pupils in four schools in Aston have a computer at home and access to the Internet. My chat was about why some pupils say that they didn’t want a computer. Some were frightened of the cost, some parents worried about the Internet and others already had a computer with Internet access. 60 minutes later I moved onto another project school Prince Albert. Here I was met by a sales representative who wanted to talk to me and the headteacher about Personal Digital Assistants. Maybe we will buy 50 of them for a neighbouring school in Nechells. Then a meeting with the project lead teacher to mull over incoming problems and then onto another project school, Aston Tower to talk to parents (3.15).

4.00 home, home by 4.30. My wife will not be home until 6.15 because of a parents evening so I cook dinner. Chilli con carne then a relaxing period while I complete this report. At 6.15 my wife phones, the parents evening is over I can pick her up. 6.30 the food is served and the first glasses of wine are consumed. Looking forward to an evening in front of the telly sorting out today’s data, online preparing for tomorrow and relaxing. Probably in bed by 10.15.

Had a great brainstorming(thought showering) session with Jay and Deborah at the Botanical Gardens. How can podcasting augment the work of the gardens?

How about

- Podcasts of visitors talking about the gardens

- Podcasts for pupils coming into the gardens -sub-themed for different age groups.

- Vid casts of special plants and habitats which they can access before they arrive.

- Themed podcasts – the medicinal podcasts – conservation podcasts.

- Podcasts of trail around the gardens

- The gardeners talking about their areas of the gardens.

 -The Green Man podcasts

These could all be different subscription items made up of small manageable chunks podcasts will. There is a botanical garden in Melbourne that has one substantial podcast that takes you on a tour of the gardens. A bit big (30 minutes) for my liking. The Birmingham Botanical Gardens podcasts will be short and sweet and make the listener WANT to visit the gardens.

We had our first and I hope only assault last week. We are now beginning the install of year 4 computers. This involves the three main players, the computer company, the wireless company and a member of Aston Pride who does the initial introduction of the computer to the family. On this occasion there were two people on site, in the home, a wireless engineer installing the aerial and a female member of the Aston Pride team. It was this latter member of the team who was assaulted by a male member of the family. 

This obviously raises questions on security of personnel so we are having to adopt new arrangements where there are at least two members of the team onsite and no member of the team must be alone in the house. For any individuals members visiting the homes a system of timed telephone contact to a school base will be established. 

At the recent London Conference I attended a seminar on security where it was emphasised that talking to the local police about the project and organising regular high level meeting was important. We will soon have over 500 computers in the local community with most of them having aerial boxes on the houses advertising their presence. Could be rich pickings for somebody. 

A great opportunity has arisen linked to two of my present focii. We are at the present time beginning to expand the ‘Computers in Homes’ project into Year 4 at two of the project primary schools. A total of 150 families.

Year 4 in Prince Albert primary are visiting Birmingham Botanical Gardens on 7th/8th November to look at different habitats. This gives me a great opportunity of a podcast with PICTURES. We will get the children to take photographs of the plants and then record them talking about them. What a wonderful resource to share with their parents.

Podcasting photographs can use the facilities of Windows Movie Maker. Create the audio file using Audacity and then drop it into Movie Maker. The still images can then be dropped into the video section. The whole thing can then be published as a file that can be succesfully podcasted. Look out for the instructions …..and problems and evaluation.

Working for Birmingham Botanical Gardens on the Green Man Project is proving to be a great experience. I’m actually learning something about those things called plants. They are almost as amazing as animals. How about a ‘Prayer Plant’ that survives under the rain forest canopy by collecting light during the day by displaying the green upper leaf and then prays at dusk (hands – no leaves together) so that the red under leaf is exposed. Still trying to get my mind around the lighting that causes this. Then we have the cacti that have no leaves, just stems, so that they can preserve water

The Green man will reside in a Victorian cottage in the gardens. Visitors will enter the cottage and the entrance area will be the inside of a tree. On the floor you will see the rings of growth around you will see and hear the tree growing. The Green Man will greet you; he will suddenly appear above you. A delightful leafy, smiling face that will welcome you into his home.

The home, which is the bigger room of the cottage, will be the canopy of the rainforest. There will be seats sculptured out of tree fruits and in the centre will be a series of computer screens where you as the visitor will be able to interact with the Green Man. 

“Hello Green Man”. “Can you help me?” says the Green Man. “I have a headache can you find the aspirin tree?” The visitor is given a quest which takes them out into the Botanical Gardens to find the aspirin tree and get some information about it. This is then fed back to the Green Man and is the head ache cured. That depends on what is found out. 

How far are we away from this realisation? About 7 months. Software needs to be developed. The cottage needs to be developed. Quests need to be discovered - medicinal, smelly, food, household, mathematical, carnivorous, arid, tropical and conservational quests are just a few examples of the wonderful trails that can be developed within this wonderful \compact environment.

Attached here is the DfES presentation and my notes. Attached here are more detailed notes on the different aspects of the project.

Now in the fourth week of the project and we are meeting anticipated and unanticipated problems. What else would you expect! Over the summer there was an expectation of getting computers into most of the homes. A dispute with our Internet suppliers and the company supplying the computers halted this process. We therefore have 200 computers installed at the beginning of September compared to the 300 we wanted. Never mind. The secondary school situation was predictable – they didn’t really know their intake until September. Two schools were reasonably covered so the teachers started replanning their curriculum delivery. Homework linked to BBC websites was issued. This then led to other problems.

The Internet is down! We have deliberately let ourself into a quagmire by allowing the users quite a lot of freedom in what they do with the computers. In the pilot project their was an initial surge of problems which after sorting soon levelled as the users realised that adventurous usage would lead to considerable time intervals when they didn’t have Internet access. We seem to be going through the same problems again.

There is also the problem…its all problems…of installing the school software on 210 computers. This arose because the supplying company ghosted the computers before the schools had decided upon the software they needed to support their teaching. There are positive elements in this with respect to chatting with parents and getting them to fill in necessary forms within a home environment.

We also have another problem. We ordered and paid for computers with 512 whatever RAM now we find they have 256 whatever RAM. Now more troubles. People seem to be switching the network on and off. The major transmitter on a local tower block might be linked to a pirate radio station and the transmitter in the secondary school was replaced by a laptop! So we loose two of our major transmission sites.

Wow