Only Love Remains

The final class. PowerPoints and Movies. Kudos to Commander Pietrzak. He, our technology maven, commented that although he admired our class, we had more technical problems than other classes. I have a theory about that. Perhaps it was the three hour drive to school in six inches of snow. Many classmates were crunching time to iron out the inevitable last minute glitches that crop up in this mess we call TED. Three hours! My journey was to Division and Ashland to pay my cab lease, and then back to Bryn Mawr and St. Louis, normally an hour on a bad traffic day. On this snowy eve however I could have watched the Deer Hunter and some selected shorts instead of gnawing on my steering wheel like a giant filth glazed donut as I watched precious computer time swirl away in glittering gusts of snow. I had been determined all day to have at least my two links to the two multimedia projects done. I thought I would have time to other things on my page as well. There are many finished items in my http folder with only two working links on my page I had some good fortune last weekwoth linking and wanted to do it at school thinkingit would be easier. No such luck. The first thing I did was check to see if my movie was there, it was!!!!! So I thought I might open it to see if there was a loading delay that cost me points. points!!!! Flippin' Moses in the Bull Rushes, not only would it not load, my powerpoint seemed to disintegrate right before my very eyes. So now I'm looking at no points, baby and probably a failing grade in the class. I was hopeful up until the last minute that our intrepid leader would be unable to pass the crystal laden streets or that my classmates might not show up. Damn their dedicated souls they all--all minus one-- arrived. I thought I was doomed but my group mate Jon and my back table pal Belinda took one look at me and said com'on you got it done all you have to is link it. Under Belinda's tutorage I got the powerpoint up and with Jon's help got some of the sound going. We three each tool a wack at different ways to get the movie going but it was for naught. When Jeff Mangrum and I finished it last night (he was my camera man and we used his adobe film editor) we saved the file as a avi file when it needed to be wmv and play in realtime. Sir Pietrzak thought that might be the source of my trouble although an avi file should have worked. I am grateful to everyone who has been instrumental in the last two days in helping me stay somewhat sane. I have til Saturday to finish the bulk and then the paper for next Thursday. Is a rare thing but I will miss this class inspite of the fact that it put me through six layers of hell and met at a horrible time. I don't know if I will continue this blog but I will certainly continue blogging, like most things in this class it serves a purpose and allows for creative outlet.

Navigation Problems Allayed

"Four point seven, numbskull!" Moe says as he sticks the business end of his keyboard cleaning device in Curly's ear and depresses the button.
"But Moe," Curly says as a puff of dust blooms out the opposite ear. "I downloaded the Navigator last week."
"You downloaded the most recent version of the software porcupine." Moe admonishes with a fist to Curly's bristled dome creating a effervescent popping sound. "And for over a month you have been working in four point seven at school."
"Hey, leave him alone!" Interjects Larry. "He didn't know."
"Pick two." Moe replies holding up his hand fingers spread. Larry smiles and points at the index finger and the pinky.
"One . . . Two." Immediately Moe plunges the chosen fingers into Larry's eyes creating the twanging sound of a plucked violin string.
"Get Out." Moe growls.
"Hey Moe!" Curly erupts, pointing at the computer screen they have gathered around.
"Whadda you want?" Moe says turning and slapping Curly on the forehead with a resounding smack. Curly clutches his head and cries.
"Oh-wo-hho-wo-ho-ho-hoholoook!" He points at the screen.
Moe and Larry look. They smile excitedly. "Why that's the web-page we created at school" Larry says.
"And look," enthuses Moe, "those tools at the top are the ones we learned how to use. Now this thing makes some kind of sense we can do alot of work here at home. Curly you're a genius!" Both Moe and Larry kiss Curly on the head. He smiles turning on his toes and clasping his hands to one hip.
"And they say home is where the heart is . . .it's where the 'start' is. Nnyuk-nyuk-nyuk!"
"Get out!" Says Moe to the sound of a bass drum being struck when his fist bounces off Curly's belly. . . . (Repeat as necessary)

Link, ahlinkalee, ahlinkaloo

A miracle happened. I went to the computerlab aftre class tonight to take one more shot at uplaoding my newsletter. When I checked my webpage to see if I should rebuild it from the bottom up I noticed that my damnable newsletter link was still there. I clicked it as much out of frustration as anything else and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a newsletter right where it should be dears. It must have worked the last time I tried it from home last week. Now I need to figure out what the next assignment is. I was concerned that the hard copies of the newsletter were not collected in class but now I hardy care. I don't give a crap. I am just glad all that work did not go for naught. What a horribly frustrating experience. He got walrus gumboots he need Mojofilter.

Pieces for Peace

I have written the core of the newsletter, later today at about noon I will head over to school to lay it into Publisher and make it work. I have my clip-art and each article on my memory stick and saved on my computer. Hopefully doing the lay-out will be simple cut and paste. Simple, unimpeded, no implosion, no unwarranted disappearances or appearances, just a little fucking newsletter for Christ's sake . . . "for the love of God, Montressor, Please!!!!"
I have to admit after dealing with some of the articles for weeks the write went fairly smoothly. The articles which showed up in the last few days really knocked things into place. Right now I fear it is probably disjointed but I will be massaging things making them fit and juicing the rhetoric a tad. Whereever James Paul Gee is I am sending out a thank you for his endless stream of ideas about how to drag in-school learning into the 21st Century. Could anything slow that process down more than George W. Bush and William Bennett? The clown factor in government these days is absolutely brutal.

One Way or Another

Okay. So I've been noodling around with the different parts of this project for about a month now. From the first general search the night it was assigned to the peaks and pitfalls of gathering the articles and experimenting with Publisher. I am very annoyed that I cannot use Publisher at home and especially that it is not included in my office works 2003 that came with my computer. So I will shlub it to NEIU later today to get the format right. I hope. Will it matter in the end? Doubtful. I am losing my enthusiasm for the class.
I finally got an article I have been trying to get since the initial Firstsearch in Eric I did the night I went to Video Games rather than Virtual Reality as keywords. It turns out the citation in Eric was incorrect. The Reference librarian said she had never seen anything like it and asked to keep my printout. We discovered the error while trying to track down a hard copy in the periodicals section on the second floor of the library. I mentioned to her that I had seen the article in other databases, in particular ebsco, She suggested we check that database for more clues as the volume number and the date in The Journal of Higher Education citation did not seem to correspond. We did a search at a computer station nearby and low and behold in ebsco the citation was for the Chronicle of Higher Learning and there was a full text link. Of course the printers on campus were all down (hopefully not tonight) but I e-mailed it to myself and was able to print it out at home. It is a "red thread" article as I suspected. I will write more about that later but the cafe near my apartment is about to open and I am doing much of the parsing and planning there this morning. Adding this new article to the mix I am feeling good about my material (one of my other articles is an interview with the professor featured in the seminal article) and am confident I have a comprehensive grouping for my review of literature.

Out Here in the Desert of Fear

In a week there will be a modicum of celebration for either completing the assignments or the relief of dropping the class. (I do not intend to do that!) So here I am at 4:30 in the morning making sure I have all the articles for my journal review.
Went early to school yesterday to work on my web page (I haven't figured out how to work on it at home) and ended up trying to put the first of my reviews in the newsletter format. I ran into the usual snafus. I was hoping I could just plug my text into the newsletter template. Alas no, and no surprise! Having not mastered the newsletter editing suite I quickly found myself in a helluva fix. Failure and f**king-up couldn't slow me down though, oh, nononooooooo! I clipped a photo of one of my experts from some website into the image portion of the first article of my chosen template and ended up with several overlays of mirrored text running over the photo. A grand expressionistic art project but a piss poor newsletter. I saved it all to my memory stick and went to class. I got no idea if any of it is salvageable.
Not good practice to follow a frustrating out of class session with a frustrating in class session. By the time we got to groups Jon and Ivan could tell I was pulling my hair out and eating it in a near total meltdown. Repeatedly the noble Professor P warned us to simply complete the assignment, get the "A", without complicating things. Yeah sure. Every week it seems there is another elaborately time consuming project that goes on the woodpile of things I may get to when I get a third of the things I have to do out of the way first. I wonder if I will ever complete a single assignment for this class. I have learned a boodle but what good is it if I can't get the things done which get the credit? Story of my life actually.

Video Game Teacher

Break through. I have been searching for Virtual Reality in Education articles for three weeks now. Not as many articles to choose from as I expected but enough to complete the newsletter assignment. However the articles were about things which were not what I wanted to write about. I was expecting immersive learning environments that would stimulate students to new learning plateaus. I discovered practice programs for surgical technique, automotive diagnostics and sight simulations for the blind. I wanted computer generated environments in which students would learn through manipulating the environments and advance through problem solving and reasoning. Instead I was finding bulk material on studying human behavior through subjecting people to computer programs that measured their response to stimuli.
My interest in immersive environments had been peaked while I was in law school and I sat down to watch my roommates play Grand Theft Auto III. The game was incredibly violent but I was fascinated by the city itself. It seemed real. It was manipulable. They played scenarios over and over to get them just right. One of these guys was a high school drop out but here he was hour after hour learning theoretical techniques through direct applications. At the time struggling with my law Studies I wondered why a game couldn't be found to train kids to think in certain ways through the use of video game-like immersive environments. Certainly would have made Law School more fun. It seemed to me that the learning structure (basically that of an ornate maze) was not unlike trying to learn precedent cases and analogizing or distinguishing them from legislative law. Now four years later I figure someone must be doing that. Slow me took three weeks to figure out that wasn't virtual reality but video games. When I searched for video games in education the EBSCO almost exploded. There it was, what I had been trying to find in the wrong place. I am still trying to narrow my list to the prerequisite ten but that is soon to bee accomplished the important thing is the info I wanted is there and I will find it,