Spaced Out :: 2005

Of course you can’t always been near a quality espresso all the time which means the need for portable coffee solutions. My two favourites (because the are neat in a “portable” way) currently are:

• Swiss Gold Filter - this is an “on-cup” filter that is re-usable (rather than the disposable version used in restaurants). Drip filter coffee provides a good brew and the simplicity of the design, as well as portability, make this a great office device. It incorporates a gold-plated filter for a btter brew.
• Smart Cafe Travel Cafetiere - cafetieres also produce nice brews, although they tend to be fuller and less smooth than filter or espresso. The Smart Cafe design is clever and ideally suited to hotels and cards.

We use GPS fairly regularly in the Centre for GIS at Kingston so tend to keep an eye on developments in kit, particularly those that are useful for human geography/geoscience. We currently use (in conjunction with PDAs running ESRI’s Arcpad) some Fortuna Slim bluetooth GPSs which are cheap and sufficient for many purposes.

Recent announcements up the ante for low-cost, accurate, GPS. In particular the fully integrated Trimble GeoXH which claims a <30cm post-processed accuracy. For a little bit more money you can acquire the Thales Promark 3 which boasts <1m real-time accuracy and <1cm post-processed.

I don’t know about other users, but I have a mixed reaction to the use of “virtual learning environments” (in my case Blackboard). On the one hand I am a proponent of the web based dissemination of learning materials. If you are to integrate this within an environment that incorporates enrolment, then the benefits can be clearly seen (e.g. summative and formative testing, access restrictions etc). However this is not a grown up networking environment; just look at the rich facilities available to users of Microsoft Sharepoint. The overarching web-based, group-based, environment is still the same, but the facilities and power are so much more apparent. That said, Sharepoint is clearly not directed at educational environments. So for the moment Blackboard it is and, to a large extent, it does a reasonable job. However one key area is dissemination of learning materials and in Blackboard this requires adding learning materials one at a time; a painfully slow experience. Not only that, but if you come to download past modules, then the XML-only format is painful-in-the-extreme to work with.

One of the features supported by Blackboard is the uploading of “package” files. These are standard ZIP files that you can use to contain mini web sites. For me, they are the ideal means to create your own easily updatable material that can be uploaded to Blackboard. Not only that, but they are easy to extract from the debris of an exported Blackboard XML file should you so need. You can also apply your own design, including the use of forms, to create a bespoke and, if you’re good enough, rich environment. A little bit of flexibility and lateral thinking is a good thing, particularly in the world of Blackboard.

At Kingston University we use Blackboard as our learning management system for registering students on modules and allowing interaction with course material. Specifically I use Blackboard for the distribution of lectures/practicals (including data), assignment submission, sitting exams and group interaction.

Something I have been increasingly using is the exam mode where students take formative and summative exams. The benefits for me are a unified environment for sitting exams, automatic grading, instant feedback and easy to download marks. In addition I can monitor at how students perform on different parts of the exam and so help me write better exams in the future. This semester I have been experimenting with weekly formative multiple choice questions (MCQs) and have generally been pleased with the rapid feedback and progression of the students. Setting MCQs takes considerable time (I have written well over 100!) which then requires them to be incorporated in to the Blackboard environment. KU have therefore invested in Respondus for generating tests and uploading/integrating them in to Blackboard. I have to say that I am converted to using Respondus; it is relatively simple to use, generates fully operational questions and has so far seamlessly integrated in to Blackboard. And if you purchase the “campus” version it can publish to multiple courses.

For me the benefits are off-line exam composition, local storage of exams and easy upload/setup of exams. Its not perfect though as it uses an almost completely non-standard window environment that feels antiquated and loosely based upon an HTML page. It does try to present a wizard-style interface but I personally don’t like it. It also insists upon storing all exams in a “data” directory; yes you can change this to any directory on your system (and I have changed this from its location in “Programe Files” to “My Documents”), however this is irksome as I much prefer working in a file-based manner. This means I would normally store the exams with the other teaching materials for a module and then double click on it to start Respondus. Not so, you have to start Respondus and then load a file from its data directory. I can only request that software companies try to stick to default windows work methods otherwise you end up with a horrible mush of usability add-ons that end up confusing the user. That said, it does what it says on the tin and does it very well.

As part of my project exploring the use of kite-based remote sensing I have been using a Nikon D70 to take aerial imagery. Initially I have been shooting images and storing then as RAW mode files. This is an interesting area as, for the D70, the images are initially captured in 12-bit mode (per channel). I was quite surprised by this as I had been expecting 24-bit colour images, with 8-bits for each of the red, green and blue channels. The Nikon is somewhat unusual as it stores then in the proprietary Nikon NEF format; this can be uncompressed or compressed. It would appear that the compressed format (the only one available for the D70) quantises the data down to 9.5-bit, although the dynamic range is maintained.

Anyway, once you have NEF files (or any other RAW mode files) you need to convert them to something that most bits of image processing or remote sensing software can understand. I had initially used Adobe Photoshop, however it applies a shed-load of post-processing to the file (to make it look nice). If you are interested in “raw” pixel values then you need something else. Thankfully DCRAW came to the rescue. This is a command line programme that has reverse-engineered the structure of a whole swathe of commercial RAW files, allowing you to convert them to PSD (Photoshop) or TIFF formats. Usefully for an impatient person like me, RAWDROP has provided a graphical frontend to this. The final result does not look nice, but you do get the raw pixel values to play with.