My original switch was the result of my laptop, then a VIAO, getting sick one too many times. My beloved VIAO with its x-windows emulator allowed me to login to a Solaris server somewhere else and do my astronomy work. I had virus protection and always surfed safe. Then I discovered there are viruses that will swim up closed ports. I got series of viruses that wiped my hard drive while at work at Harvard, and was twice one of the first 100 sufferers. It sucked. I live by software. I am more of a digital person than a real person in a lot of ways – taking all notes on computer/phone and talking more through IM and email than in person. I also have dyslexia, and computers allow me to mostly hide my problems behind spell checks and auto correcting tools. I love my laptops – they are a third arm and a second brain. And after two cases of digital amputation in short order, I switched to Mac. Back in 2004 I bought my first MacBook and I haven’t looked back.

But now I’m working with my students to develop software that integrate with Microsoft Research software. I’m typing this message on my ASUS EeePC 1000HE in Windows XP. In this tiny environment, I can hold the universe in my hands using MS World Wide Telescope. This many layered software package is being designed to facilitate not just looking at the sky, but for searching databases of images and information, allowing users to side by side explore the Sloan Digital Sky Survey and the Hubble image archive.

While I will leap frog Vista, staring suspiciously at it while I pass to Windows 7 someday in the future, XP is an old friend, and I feel like I’m falling back into the multi-platform days of graduate school. I have found a cool toy that I can only code if I’m using Windows, so I’m going to use Windows to play along with my software developing students.

MS Research has a bunch of cool toys. They are building George Jetson‘s tomorrow with a Star Trek aesthetic. From Surface, to the virtual receptionist, to, well, World Wide Telescope, they have my attention again.

Now, if only Apple and Mac would just use the same keyboard layout…

I would like to state for the record that the Google Sandbox does not work equally elegantly in all themes. I would also like to say that caching can drive you crazy. Nonetheless, it is highly satisfying to code things that proclaim “Goodbye, World!” or “Delete World” instead of the normal “Hello, World!” It was a sarcastic day.

Okay, whining over.

Wanna see what I did? As I create gadgets, they will appear in the Gadget’s link above. One of the two gadgets I created is one that combines a webcam and a twitter feed. It has some issues and I’m hoping that if I tell you what I did, the javascript experts in the audience may have some ideas.

First the gadget:

Now, for reason’s I can’t explain the twitter feed associated with this gadget randomly shows up. (Admittedly, I’m testing this during the debates and I think twitter might be a bit busy right now). Here is a screen capture of what it looks like when working right:

The code for this gadget does 3 things:

• Retrieves an image from the Jodrell Bank Telescope webpage to display (It is coming from a cach though – I can’t figure out how to get the image to correctly refresh every 30 seconds.)
• Get’s the latest tweet from JodrellBank and parse it so the name jodrellbank links through to the twitter page
• Has title and footer info that redirects the user to Jodrell Bank

(I selected Jodrell Bank simply because I know they have a webcam and twitter feeds. I will repeat this with other scopes as I find them).

This gadget required about 1 page of code presented here.

<UserPref name=”num_entries” display_name=”Number of Entries:” defaultvalue=”1″/>

<Content type=”html”>
<![CDATA[

<p style="text-align: center;"><img src="http://www.jb.man.ac.uk/distance/observatory/images/webcam.jpg" width="150px"></p>

<style> #content_div { font-size: 80%;  margin: 5px;} </style>
<div id="content_div"></div>

<!---- Use Javascript to get the twitter feed and parse what I want. ---->
<!---- Refer to http://code.google.com/apis/gadgets/docs/remote-content.html#Fetch_Feed ---->
<script type="text/javascript">

// Get userprefs
var prefs = new gadgets.Prefs();
var entries = prefs.getInt("num_entries");

// Get the feed, SUMMARIES is the content. Can also get title and date, but decide not to
function getFeed() {
var params = {};
params[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.CONTENT_TYPE] = gadgets.io.ContentType.FEED;
params[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.NUM_ENTRIES] = new Number(entries);
var summaries = true;
params[gadgets.io.RequestParameters.GET_SUMMARIES] = summaries;
var url = “http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/5747502.rss”;
// response calls function below
gadgets.io.makeRequest(url, response, params);
};

function response(obj) {
// obj.data contains the feed data
var feed = obj.data;
// Initialize the variable all the html goes in
var html = “”;

// Access the data for a given entry
if (feed.Entry) {
for (var i = 0; i < feed.Entry.length; i++) {
// find the break between twitter name and tweet and grab the tweet
var Delim = feed.Entry[i].Summary.indexOf(“:”);
var Tweet = feed.Entry[i].Summary.slice(Delim+1);

// find the name of the tweater and grab it
var Twit = feed.Entry[i].Summary.split(“:”, 1);

// post the tweater’s name as a link their page and then show tweat
html += “<div>”;
html += “<a href=’http://www.twitter.com/” + Twit + “‘ target=’_blank’><b>” + Twit + “:</b></a>”;
html += Tweet;
html += “</div>”;
}
}
// This changes the content between the div open and close to contain the html variable
document.getElementById(‘content_div’).innerHTML = html;
};
// this calls getFeed, which calls response
gadgets.util.registerOnLoadHandler(getFeed);
</script>
<p style=”font-family: times; font-size: 80%; font-weight: bold; text-align: center; border-top: thin solid #999999;”>Learn more about
<a href=”http://www.jodrellbank.manchester.ac.uk/aboutus/”>Jodrell Bank</a></p>
]]>
</Content>
</Module>

Now, as I stated, the Twitter code magically does and not appear at will. This has me sad. But then, we’re talking twitter. I also can’t figure out how to make the image refresh in a sensible manner. Help?

I also have a wish list of things to do: I want to turn links into, well, links, and make sure that @person shows up as a link to that person. This is a lot of complicated string parsing. I am just learning javascript, so this is a fun little puzzle when I’m not being confused by twitter not loading.

I’m also working on a “Keeping up with Star Stryder” gadget. I’ll post it under the tab above when I’m done

There is a certain intimacy to writing my blog. It’s me and the words in my head spilling out across the screen. I work in silence, no one knowing what I’m saying, until I hit the publish button. And then it all goes live at once. As I sit here talking to my computer, talking to Firefox, I feel this terrible urge to pace and rant and use my arms to talk. I’m not giving in to my desires, I’m sitting quite still at the kitchen table, speaking softly to my computer while my husband plays Wii in the living room. I’m not sure what will happen to my writing style – I’m not sure how my language will change as I speak to you rather than letting the words spill across my fingertips. I’m going to take a risk, I’m going to try and figure it out.

I’m not sure how I feel about the software, but after using computers almost every day since I was in the fifth grade, I a realized who is running up against maximum number of uses numbers. My joints only had so many tries left in them. I needed to find a new way to communicate to my software before my parts demanded replacement. This is a compromise. There are some things I can’t speak to my computer, at least not easily, like when I’m coding, when I’m drawing, when I’m creating things for the Web. But at least this is a partial solution. I want to keep working online for another 40 years. It’s a good fantasy at least.

I have to admit, mostly I like the software. Nevertheless, I have to reprogram my brain. I can think, I can speak, I can do many things faster than I can type. This software spells better than I do – I don’t have to keep going back to figure out what I’ve done that has caused little red lines under my every fifth word! It’s odd though, my internal wetware is struggling with this new device more then the software is struggling with my voice. As I speak I feel my brain pausing in ways it doesn’t do when I’m speaking in front of an audience. It’s an interesting challenge, changing how I do this thing have been doing so naturally for so many years.

I am really impressed with MacSpeech. While there are certain things I just can’t get it to do consistently, it’s not too bad except when I’m using Mail. For instance, deleting an e-mail message just doesn’t seem to work. There is something about how I say deleting, that causes it to hear “leading” most of the time. I think I’ve crashed mail 20 times today. There are other interesting errors it makes occasionally. But than there are no more errors than I make myself. I’m guessing most of you have read my posts that weren’t correctly proofread. This seems to be doing a better job than I do when I try and type. I’m going to try and work through this, and see if I can adapt. So far so good.

Tomorrow morning I’m going to try and see what its astronomy vocabulary looks like. Tomorrow I need to think, and write about something that challenges my brain. Write about something that challenges your brain, maybe? And that will definitely challenge the software.

Preface – My laptop is at the Apple Store being repaired. This means my computer with all my best toys is not available for use.

For those who have been following my twitter whining, here is the full story.
1) Yesterday I noticed starstryder was no longer googlable (is that a word), and asked for ideas
2) The wonderful Stuart Lowe noted that if I did a view source, many naughty and pharmaceutically related words appeared.
3) I realized I’d been hacked. As had my university computer (growl). Astronomy Cast was safe.
4) I restored my theme, removing all google ads and stuff, on this site and upgraded wordpress (this site is privately hosted.
5) I upgraded Astronomy Cast for good measure. This totally broke the site. Dead Dead Dead. I can’t repair it and cried via email to Fraser. I tried every trick I know – and I know many. Ugh.
6) I went into campus (where I have now been for 8 hours on a Sunday) and upgraded my work server to 10.5. This broke *everything.* Blue screen of pointer only. I reduced myself to the command line and fixed it. I then updated everything, fixed permissions, and reconfigured the server.
7) Part way though this I began to understand why Wil Wheaton’s original blog is still toast.
8 ) After getting my office and starstryder.com servers fixed, I looked into why I wasn’t in google search and learned I’d been officially banned from their index (joy). According to Google “We’ll review the site. If we find that it’s no longer in violation of our Webmaster Guidelines, we’ll reconsider our indexing of the site. Please allow several weeks for the reconsideration request.”

At this point, I probably need to crawl under the bed and cry, however, instead I’m going to work on a programming project that I should have completed hours ago.

Worst. Tech. Week. Ever.

Eek!

Today I have two hours to discuss all the ways new media can be a part of education.

Before launching into what all I’m going to discuss, I want to take a moment to say the field of education can suck in a lot of content you’d never think of as education. For instance, listening to the character of “Data” on Star Trek Next Generation blather about Dyson Spheres may teach you something. As someone whose passion is for informal education, I’m very tuned in to the fact that any moment in time that gives you new information you didn’t have before is an educational moment. This means that if you learn physics equations from FoxTrot, I consider the Sunday comics an piece of education materials.

When you expand your definition of “Education” to include public outreach, you are also making moments in time that inspire people to learn into educational moments. This means that if you’re watching the Star Trek and decide you want to look up an article on black holes or to Google if Tachyons are real, then Star Trek was inspiring learning and in that one instance it becomes public outreach.

Now, in general, Star Trek is not constructed purposely as a tool for education and public outreach. It is a money making source of entertainment. But why can’t I turn the Star Trek model on its head and purposely create materials where my goal is to teach and inspire people to go out and want to learn to more, and do it in a way that happens to be entertaining in the same way that Star Trek’s science advisors make sure that it sometimes educational. (Although, my goal would be to always be entertaining, rather than to sometimes randomly be entertaining.)

Okay, lecture over. Stepping of my “Edutainment is ok” soapbox.

In selecting new media to give teachers to stick in the intellectual toolbox, I want to give them new ways that will both help them convey content and that will help them inspire kids to want to go out and seek content on their own.

So, with no further blathering, here are the things I think every educator should know about (which doesn’t mean they should be fluent – but they should know they exist).

Blogs: Get content. Get it now. The best way to find the blogs you like is to follow the Carnival of Space and see who catches your attention and than subscribe to those people using your favorite choice of aggregator (I use Google Reader). Also in the land of blogs is twitter. Phoenix, LRO, and many other science programs have their own feeds that are fun to follow. (And I have one too)

Podcasts / Vodcasts: Didn’t see this one coming, did you? Seriously though, if you have a kid who likes astronomy, the videocast “Ask an Astronomer” is about the cutest thing out there. There is also a huge variety podcasts out there both being created and in the archives. This means you can find a content delivery style that meets the needs of any audience, from the sarcastic to the on-the-level, from the quiet stereotypical planetarium disembodied voice to the video with special FX. Just as you might recommend a book based on the personality of the reader, you can do the same with podcasts and vodcasts (and this is also a free source of content).

Webcomics: From stuff good for kids like the newly EPO’s Chronicles to things strictly for adults like xkcd, webcomics are good way to abuse science to encourage laughter.

Social Networks: Any of you who are in Facebook have probably seen groups that use peer pressure involve people in things that touch on science. I personally belong to “When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.” You also might have become “Friends” with different satellites, joined a group focusing on science like the “Astrobiology Club” or “attended” an event like a solar eclipse or solstice. MySpace has a lot of these same features, but it’s much more frenetic in design.

Social Sharing Networks: The Internet is a big place. A really big place. Don’t know where the coolest new stories might be or even what they might be about? Check out Digg! Now, admittedly, certain websites are unfairly represented. APOD is really cool, but does every image really need to get Dugg more than the typical Orbiting Frog article?

Virtual Skies: While Google Sky makes for a pretty terrible replacement for planetarium software, but it does allow for a new form of exploration that is totally cool in its own right. Within Google Sky images are merged and layered, comments are left, and you the individual and download and travel on tours. The Hubble Site even adds in their podcasts. I have to admit my Mac and I haven’t made it into the World Wide Telescope yet, but the demos I’ve seen are striking and it seems to easily allow multi-wavelength studies to be done. Hopefully, in the coming months we’ll begin to see a gamma-ray skin.

Virtual Worlds: Yes, I know that people with a real life don’t need a Second Life, but as someone who primarily lives a virtual life, I find a lot of value in digital worlds. Within Second Life I can gather and talk with audio to groups of people from around the globe, and sit down and share experiences ranging from public lectures, to streamed video of NASA events, to walk/fly through models of spacecraft, planetary surfaces, and even the solar system. By having “human” avatars embedded in the virtual world it makes the experience easier to get into, and provides an instant set of scale. Check out the SciLands.

I’m sure there is even more out there with new media, but this is where I’m going to stop for today. What’s your favorite new media (and Heaven’s Above and Clear Sky calculator are old media in my book).

The first thing I learned is Google actually has folks assigned to nurture non-profits to help them plug in. http://www.google.com/educators/geo . They have help, tutorials, ideas and more pre-prepared to help us build our content into virtual worlds. Their latest and greatet includes: weather, sunlight skins, 3D Buildinsg/SketchUp, a Swoop feature that lets you fly and zoom, and a “My Maps” feature to share content among friends.

Part of what this makes powerful is it allows people to explore independently and it has almost limitless applications and places to explore. Educational research (out of my head not out of the talk) shows that if you sit with a kid and work through every possible way of triggering a jack-in-the-box, the child when handed the toy will pretty much set it down and wander off. Show them only a couple of many ways, and they will sit down and try all the unseen permutations they can figure out. This means that you can hand a person the tools to access the “oh wow” factors of Google Earth and Google Sky, and students will continue to play and explore and learn to find all the ways the “oh wow” Jack jumps out of the Google box.

Google wants to be a part of IYA. (And I’ll be hunting them down later.) They encourage all of us to go to the Geo Education online community and participate. I’m ready, I’m primed, and I want to learn.

After a brief talk, our presenter showed a series of examples (.kml files), including animations, content from missions, and other “Google Skins” created in the kml markup language for people to explore. These can be found in the Google Earth “Gallery” window.

I have come to realize that I desperately need to find a Google Sky and Google Earth expert for the IYA New Media Task Group.

(Side note: There is a Johannes Kepler actor here who has a southern bit of twang! I find this very amusing.)

This isn’t to say I don’t like reading paper books. Back when I had a subway commute (which I actually miss for many reasons), I’d chew through a couple books a month. Now, I don’t have those random minutes for paper books except when I fly (or ride the subway in London). What I have instead is a lot of time for audio books. While I weed / plant / otherwise mutate our yard to fit my whims, I am generally bored. I enjoy the physical labor and the outcomes, but while I work outside my brain drifts off in impatient circles, as it contemplates all the desk tasks I should be doing instead of being out in the sun. The best way I know to silence these “To Do” list daemons is to stuff my head first with podcasts, and then with Audio books. Faced with something interesting to pay attention to, the voices in my head generally settle in to voyage with characters of fiction across lands of fantasy.

The thing is, there are those among us who view listening to audio books as somehow less then actually reading. I know professors who don’t approve of any but the visually impaired listening to books. I know people who scoff at the dyslexic lawyer as being less educated because he listened to his law books. I don’t understand this. If you hear every single word – if you listen to an unabridged book – aren’t you receiving all the same content? The only thing that is different is that you don’t create all the characters voices for yourself – the narrator determines the voices for you. But is that such a tragic loss? Aren’t there times when I can gain from the nuanced voice an artistry of rhythm that I might miss if I read quickly to myself? It is a different experience, and there are books that I need to read on paper so I can mark my thoughts, but is different always bad?

Listening to books has always been a guilty pleasure for me. As a small child, my grandmother recorded a bunch of books on audio cassettes for me and I’d listen to them and other books on tape as I lay in bed looking at my nightlight shaped as a dancer. As an older child, when my family went on road trips my dad would put audio books in the car’s tape player and we’d make our way across America while listening to the “Day of the Triffid,” “The Adventures of Sherlock Holms,” and various Star Trek books on tape. As an adult, I felt confident trekking across the country alone by car because I new I had company; The BBC’s audio rendition of “Lord of the Rings” could get me from Austin to Albuquerque and almost back again, and Toni Morrison and Anne Rice both (in very different ways) called shot gun as I went back and forth from McDonald Observatory. I made it through all of Steve King’s Dark Tower series while packing to move to Illinois, and I tried not to cry listening to Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close while I walked the beach in Hawaii last year, alone except for my words and the sky. Books flavor the places I listen to them – Shalimar the Clown helped me create a brick patio, and Eragorn‘s magic sustained me as I hung insulation in the attic. I wouldn’t have been able to experience these books if I hadn’t been able to listen to them while my body experienced and did other things. Audio liberated me to “read” in a way I wouldn’t otherwise be able to.

And I wish I understood better the bigotry against “reading” audio books.

For now though, let me say, when I advertise Audible.com on Astronomy Cast, I’m advertising a company I’ve had a membership with (with a couple no-spare-cash induced breaks) for about 4 years, and PodioBooks has excellent content that in some cases can’t be found anywhere else. Next time you are out of podcasts and you have a day of brainless tasks ahead of you, take a book out into the yard to play.

So, there was the hate that came from having to solve too many problems that really shouldn’t have ever happened. There is also the hate of the price. As a grad student at the University of Texas we could get MS products for $5 a disk, but once I entered the real world I was forced to fork over (if I wanted to be legal) $400+ hard earned dollars. Luckily I didn’t stay in the real world very long, and as an academic I only have to pay $180 for my professional Office pal. It’s not like I can avoid word processing; MS Office is a product that has become ubiquitous and many places require its use (for instance, some journals require .doc instead of .tex files, and UT required my dissertation to be done in Word). Its exorbitant price really is a tax that only serves to increase the digital divide.

Admittedly, there are alternatives, especially for Mac and Linux users. For a while, I tried switching to Open Office / Star Office / NeoOffice, but while this was philosophically satisfying, these packages didn’t offer me the power of MS Office, so… Back I went, offering up my hard won earnings to The Man in exchange for the ability to make documents that I could make do anything. Then, in a moment of artistic misdirection, I tried Quark and InDesign, but the editing tools (spelling, grammar, tables), and equation tools just weren’t there. So again, back I went, letting Mr Gate’s icons take up space in my dock, where they taunted me with their failure to be truly friendly and mocked me with their potential to crash my normally imperturbable Mac.

But, watching Steve Jobs recent MacWorld Keynote reminded me of the little guy on the office software block. iWork has the theoretical ability to almost everything I want (although getting equations into documents may challenge me a bit at first). So, I’m going to make the leap. My New Year’s resolution is to be 100% iWork / iLife by years end. It won’t be easy, but I’m going to try.

But… but… It’s really not going to be easy. Already, seconds into my resolution, I feel like a drug addict trying to justify why I can’t afford to go through the symptoms of withdrawal at this particular moment in life. I have about 100 PowerPoint presentations that I regularly reuse in teaching and presenting. Making this switch isn’t going to be easy. Translating between software packages is an inexact science and I know that importing my beloved old presentations will not go smoothly.

And there are habits to break. I write these blog entries in a word processing program with a spell checker so I can avoid having too many egregious spelling errors. When I had the “Hey… iWorks!” realization and went to start this blog entry my mouse went on autopilot to the mutant Microsoft W in my dock and only two paragraphs in did I realize the irony of what I had done. (I then copied my content into a Pages page, and I am now working in an iFriendly window.)

I don’t know if Apple and Steve Jobs are going to simply become the next “The Man,” but here’s to hoping that I have finally found a powerful, non-crashing, alternative under $100. The only thing it really seems to lack is a spreadsheet, but Think Secret and MacRumors have both reported that iWork 07 may fill that gap. For now, maybe I’ll just more consistently use KaleidaGraph.

Here’s to iWork in 07.