I was on a plane coming back from Zurich and watched the new remake of the Aurthur movie.

I loved the movie. It is hard to remake a movie that is so beloved and succeed – but this movie worked for me. It was a wise combination of the familiar and the new in a way that will please the viewer regardless of whether they saw the original or not.

Helen Mirren as Hobson was a brilliant idea. I thought that updating the show to include scenes from Alcoholics Anonymous helped the plot nicely and provided a better explanation for the plot resolution. I though the plot result ion at the end was more “responsible” and logical in the remake. All the characters were a delight and were the perfect combination of capturing the essence of the characters in the original and yet making the characters all their own.

I kept wondering if my favourite line, “Perry you are a dead man!” would show up. I was initially disappointed when that little sub-plot was done differently, but then realized that one thing that a sequel needs to do is not try to replicate already perfect scenes that that cannot improve on – so they gently wound the plot right by that line.

The ending was more detailed and and so it felt like I was watching it for the first time. Of course there was a moderate need for tissues after the movie completed.

In this Computing Conversations column, I talk with Brendan Eich, the CTO of Mozilla on the beginnings of the JavaScript language which was created in about 10 days back in 1995 when he was working at Netscape.

This is my column for the February 2012 issue of IEEE Computer magazine’s Computing Conversations column.

Audio version of the column.

Here is the associated video:

This video was filmed December 16, 2011 in Mountain View, CA.

Other Videos in The February Issue

I also produced the following video for the February issue of IEEE Computer associated with an
article in the issue.

This is an excellent post that I saw via a mention from Ben Kamens of Khan Academy on twitter. The blog post is written by Joel Spolsky. It is a great post. The following snippet nicely summarizes the essence:

The “management team” isn’t the “decision making” team. It’s a support function. You may want to call them administration instead of management, which will keep them from getting too big for their britches.

Administrators aren’t supposed to make the hard decisions. They don’t know enough. All those super genius computer scientists that you had to recruit from MIT at great expense are supposed to make the hard decisions. That’s why you’re paying them. Administrators exist to move the furniture around so that the people at the top of the tree can make the hard decisions.

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2012/02/the-management-team-guest-post-from-joel-spolsky.html

I would add my own corollary to this: It is the job of management to find the funding and create the environment where creativity can happen and then help the creativity happen. Just because someone is great with powerpoint and can get the funding – it does not mean they are the smartest person on the team and it does not mean that the PowerPoint jockey gets final say over product design decisions.

Smart projects with innovation as a goal, keep the creative engine as independent as practical from the money engine. At the same time, those in management can contribute to the creative processes in an organization if they do as as a peer rather then the boss.

This is a bit of personal pain for me because my demise as the Executive Director of the Sakai Foundation was because of management-types feeling and asserting their “power” over a product simply because there were management.

… “With great PowerPoint comes great responsibility”

I am not very into politics – but I am into markets, crowds, social, computing, etc. So when I heard that last night Rick Santorum surprised folks with some Republican primary wins, I figured that I would go and check the Iowa Electronic Market to see if it was somehow smarter than the other pundits.

Folks like James Surowecki in his book The Wisdom of Crowds (which we use in my SI124 class) like to cite the IEM as a better way to aggregate knowledge than polls. So I ran to the IEM to see the current trade values for the “Winner of the Republican Primary” market.

http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/quotes/356.html (data)
http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/graphs/graph_RCONV12.cfm (Graph)

The numbers in the data indicate the current market price to buy a $1.00 payoff if you guess right. A summary of the top-candidates as of right now is:

		Bid	Ask	Last	Low	High	Average
ROMN_NOM	0.804	0.842	0.804	0.780	0.832	0.804
RROF_NOM	0.120	0.135	0.142	0.120	0.159	0.147
PAUL_NOM	0.015	0.022	0.015	0.015	0.015	0.015
GING_NOM	0.040	0.046	0.036	---	---	---
BACH_NOM	0.001	0.002	0.001	0.001	0.001	0.001
PERR_NOM	0.001	0.002	0.001	0.001	0.001	0.001
CAIN_NOM	0.001	0.002	0.001	0.001	0.001	0.001

As of this morning, Romney is trending downwards. The second highest bid is for “Rest of the field”. RROF_NOM is anyone other than the listed folks. Apparently those who set up the market apparently gave Santorum so little chance of winning they did not even include him in the list of options.

Funny and kind of a “fail” in a way. But of course it supports James Surowecki’s concept of the wisdom of the crowds. I would assume a small group of people at the IEM decided who the six best candidates might be (oops).

It is funny and ironic that there is some non-zero chance that the members of the Iowa Electronic Market will in effect be betting that “None of the above” will win. It will be funny if Santorum gains steam and the bidding goes through the roof for “none of the above”.

Again, I must emphasize that I really am not very political at all and this is not a political post nor a political commentary on anyone in the race. It is just a really fun example of the concepts in SI124 at work and a teachable moment for my class. It is fun to teach a class titled, “Network Thinking” (SI124) during an election year. :)

This is the camera setup that I use for my IEEE Computer Computing Conversations column.

The contents of my two-camera HD Interview kit fit in a backpack (except for two sixty inch tripods). With this kit, I can travel with the full kit and a week of clothes in a backpack and small rolling carry-on case. I pack the tripods in the carry on case and they have their own cases that I use once I unpack to go to each interview shoot. I can comfortably carry the kit on a bus, train, public transportation, or taxi. A particular feature I like is that I do *not* look like a television crew walking around – I just look like a normal guy with a backpack that no one should pay any special attention to. Sometimes it is nice not to advertise that you are packing about three grand of video gear when you are walking around….

A key for this kit is that it is specialized for interviews and in particular aimed at traveling as light as possible. In particular, it is well suited for interviews in offices or conference rooms. It is self-contained and can be transported, set up, and operated by one person.

Here is a sample video using this setup http://youtu.be/IPxQ9kEaF8c using this kit, taped, December 16, 2011.

I will update this document as I add new equipment and gain more experience and add some “as packed” pictures as well in an upcoming blog post. I wanted to get this “initial equipment list” post out and then add to it later.

I will also talk about setup, lighting, and interview technique in upcoming blog posts.

Comments welcome.

Lowepro CompuDaypack Camera Bag

This is a great backpack, combining space for a laptop and normal stuff I need traveling with a bottom compartment for camera gear and lights. I can fit both my cameras, both my lights, and the power supplies for the lights, and shotgun microphone in the bottom compartment. I use the upper compartment for my 42-inch tripods and clamps as well as my laptop power supply. The space for the laptop works really well and I can carry papers, my iPad, a few copies of IEEE Computer Magazine or books as props, and all my travel documents with room to spare.

Packed this way, it does get pretty heavy. All the equipment is small but dense. So I need to carry it with both straps. In general the CompuDaypack is the perfect compromise for me and my kit *just* fits. I am very happy with it.

Sony HDR-CX360V

This is one of my HD cameras. It costs about $700. It is the lowest price Sony HD camera that does 24 frames per second progressive (24p). I prefer progressive mode for interviews since there is less motion and since an interview is pretty static, not needing ability to handle motion each frame is more like a picture. And since the destination of these interviews is the Web, I figure that I might as well let the camera do the de-interlace. I really like this camera. It is small, compact, and shoots great video. It also has a built in LED light that is surprisingly bright for hand-held filming.

Sony HDR-CX550V

This is my other HD camera. It costs about $1000. I wanted this camera because it has manual focus. But I find the manual focus hard to use because you just turn the knob and there are no stops. With a roll-focus move you want to know when to stop moving. And the focus knob is hard to get to without disturbing the camera and is very unnatural to use. So If I were doing this again – I would save the extra money and just get two HDR-CS360X cameras. This camera also has 64GB of memory – but I find that hte 32GB of the HDR-CS360X is more than sufficient. The CX550V does not have an on-camera LED video light. It has a LED flash – but it cannot be used while video taping.

Sony WCS999 Wireless Microphone

I really am a fan of wireless microphones in interview settings. I want my interviewee to feel like they are not strapped into their chair and can move around. So I really like this microphone. I am only using it at distances of about 5 feet or less and only using it for indoor applications. But is has good strong sound. The weakest aspect is the clip on the microphone. It is not the typical alligator clip – it is a little spring-thing and is terrible. It tends to move around and ends up with clothing noise. I cannot understand why Sony made this mistake.

3.5mm Stereo Male to 3.5mm Mono Female Adapter

Using this adapter makes sure that your mono microphone signals end up on both channels.

Audio-Technica ATR-3350 Microphone

I use this microphone as a backup if something goes wrong with my wireless microphones.

Sony ECM-HGZ1 Shotgun Microphone

I use this microphone for outdoor taping and use the microphone in “Gun/Shotgun mode” rather than Zoom Mode. I like it because it is powered by the hot–shoe and does not need any cables. It feels a little light but it is nice and small and fits nicely in my backpack.

Sony ECM-HGZ1 Foam and Standard Black WindCutter Set (WC03-HGZ1SET-STDBLK)

This is a rather expensive ($60) foam cover and wind cutter (a.k.a. Dead Cat) for the Sony ECM-HGZ1 microphone. I could not find any other option for a wind cutter and it is pointless to record outside without a wind cutter so I spent the money. It is a nice product and well-made.

Polaroid 42″ Travel Tripod

This little tripod folds up to a very small size and fits in the backpack. It uses a novel way to extend and store the legs. It only goes up to 42-inches – but it works great for interviews and travels very well. There are lots of vendors for this product and they all look completely identical except for the brand label on the item. You might find it searching for “Sima STV-42K” – I actually found these locally in a department store but they are cheaper on Amazon. I carry two of these and use them either for lights or camera, depending on the setup. I use them either floor-standing or on a table.

Their only weakness is that they don’t last very long. The little spring loaded-balls that keep the legs extended fall apart pretty quickly. But they are so perfect for my travel kit that it is worth replacing one every few months. So I always keep an extra one in stock.

Sunpak ClampPod Pro

I also carry two of these clamps. Usually I use these for lights and they work very well to clamp a light to a shelf or a chair but they can hold a camera in a pinch.

Sony VCT-60AV Remote Control Tripod

This is the most amazing tripod ever. It is inexpensive and light and allows really smooth pan-tilt-zoom shots with the zoom controls on the handle. I use it both for B-Roll and for my primary camera in interviews. Note: The remote for this tripod only works with Sony camcorders – but it works really well. I only carry one of these tripods since I can only operate one camera at the same time. My secondary camera for interviews is locked down and slightly zoomed out.

I also have a generic 60-inch lightweight tripod with carrying case that I purchased at a local electronics store so I have two 60-inch tripods, two 42-inch tripods, and two clamp-on mounts. This combination allows me to deploy two cameras and two lights in most situations.

Switronix TL-50 Dimmable LED Light

I have two of these lights and they are an essential part of the kit. They cost about $200 but they are truly worth it. They are self-contained with built-in batteries and run for about two hours at full power. They are perfect for interviews since I can keep the lights within four feet of the interviewee. They have three filters to adjust the color temperature. I tend to use the orange filter for indoor filming and to reduce the eye-strain on the interviewee. The charger for this unit only works with 110V so I need the power-adapter (below) for international travel/filming.

240 To 110 200W Step Down Adapter

I need this adapter for international travel because the power supplies for the TorchLED lights are 110V-only.

Still in progress…

I should buy a couple of spare batteries. Most interviews are 40 minutes and the batteries have plenty of juice. But sometimes I shoot two interviews in a day with no chance to recharge and if the interviews go really well and go a little long I don’t want to sweat watching battery life drain down. Replacement batteries are so expensive so I will likely hold off for a bit.

Since I am experiencing problems with the WCS999 microphone, I have decided I want high quality audio on both cameras. I want a second wireless microphone and since I am a little unhappy with the microphone clip on the Sony WCS999 Microphone – I am looking at the very popular Azden WMS-PRO Wireless Microphone as a possible replacement. I also have ordered a replacement clip on Olympus ME-15 Microphone to see if it works with the WCS999.

Once I finish the evaluation, I will carry two of the same wireless microphones. As a Sony fan-boy, it bums me out that Sony made this little mistake on the WCS999 that puts me on this quest to find non-Sony equipment :)

This is a couple of abstracts that I wrote up and added to my page on speaking engagements

http://www.dr-chuck.com/dr-chuck/resume/speaking.htm

Sakai: Free as in Freedom

This presentation describes the experiences of building the open-source Sakai teaching and learning environment and community from the inside. Sakai was founded by the University of Michigan, Indiana University, Stanford University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The Sakai project was funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and over 100 Sakai partner schools and companies for over five million dollars over a two year period.

The project was very ambitious with an almost impossible schedule for delivery. Almost nothing in the project went according to the plans and yet today, the Sakai software is in enterprise production use at nearly 300 schools world wide with three million daily users and a ten percent market share of top-100 universities worldwide.

This is the story of the successes and failures and challenges and recoveries along the way as well as the laughter, joy and sadness as the project went forward from the perspective of the chief architect and later executive director. The book “Sakai: Free as in Freedom (Alpha)” describes this period of the Sakai effort.

Experiences Teaching a First Programming/Technology Course at the Graduate Level

The University of Michigan School of Information master’s program has a programming requirement (www.si502.com) for all students regardless of whether their major is Human Computer Interaction, Social Computing, or Library and Information Science. With a typical enrollment of 70% women and almost no prior programming technical experience for the typical student, this class provides unique challenges in the design and teaching of the course. The course features a textbook specially designed for the course (Python for Informatics: Exploring Information). The course is much broader than most first computing courses and includes topics like database modeling, SQL, HMTL, CSS, XML parsing, security, web scraping, internet architecture, and others in addition to the programming component of the course. The course moves back and forth between programming and conceptual topics throughout the semester. One of the goals of the course is to empower and encourage students to take additional technology courses such as web site design and development. The presentation will describe the course and describe the results of the course to date.

Workshop: Building Learning Tools using IMS Learning Tools Interoperability

The IMS Learning Tools Interoperability standard (www.imsglobal.org/lti) greatly reduces the effort required to integrate an externally hosted learning tool into nearly all of the mainstream learning management systems (Blackboard, Desire2Learn, Moodle, Canvas, Sakai, OLAT, and others). IMS Learning Tools Interoperability uses the OAuth protocol to send identity, course, user, and role data to the external tools. External tools can do roster transparent provisioning and single sign on using LTI as well as return grades to the calling learning management system. LTI allows those who would build innovative tools for teaching and learning an unprecedented simplicity in plugging their tool into any number of different learning management systems. This workshop will introduce the standard as well as demonstrate freely available sample code to simplify the building LTI compliant tools in PHP. Participants will develop and integrate a simple tool into Canvas, Sakai, Blackboard, or Moodle as part of the workshop.

This is an abstract I prepared for the 2012 Blackboard Developer Conference – BbDevCon. We shall see if it gets accepted.

IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.0 now has very broad market adoption and has been in Blackboard since Release 9.1SP4. Blackboard has added LTI support to building blocks, making it very simple to add LTI to a building block. Developers can plug externally hosted learning tools into Blackboard and the rest of the marketplace with a few lines of PHP. Now that the low-level LTI “plumbing” is in place, what will we do with it. This talk looks at the tools that are available in the marketplace that support IMS LTI and show them plugged into Blackboard. We will introduce and describe IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 1.1 that includes support for returning grades from external tools back to the grade book and demonstrate this. This talk also looks at ways to quickly build and host tools that function as LTI Providers and plug those tools into Blackboard. This talk also looks at the next release of IMS Learning Tools Interoperability 2.0 that includes even simpler provisioning and installation of tools, expanded grade/outcome services, and improved ability to import and export classes with links to dynamic content and services hosted on the web.

Nine days ago, Apple announced iBooks 2 and iBooks Author. While everyone else was writing “me too” columns critical of the license agreement, I was busily downloading the software, converting my Sakai book to iBooks Author, getting an iTunes Connect Account, figuring out iTunes Publisher, and getting a book published.

My conclusion is that virtually everyone has it wrong. iBooks Author is a brilliant move on Apple’s part.

I have long called for a decent desk-top tool as the single MOST CRITICAL missing link in empowering teachers to become authors. I rail over and over that most of the Open Educational Resource funding effectively wasted on organizations that are trying to enhance their own brand by republishing faculty products in their name instead of trying to improve teaching and learning.

Here are a few of my recent rants with a theme of editable exchange formats for authors:

What are the Key Challenges for the OER Movement?

OER Rant 2.0 (Angry teacher and student)

Open Educational Resources (OER) – Rant-Fest

So now someone has heard my lonely cry for help and answered. Apple (like it always does) saw the massively obvious missing use cases in the endless lame offerings for authors and given us a tool that it the right use case (at least the best we have seen so far).

Apple’s iBooks Author tool was announced Thursday January 19 and my Sakai book was uploaded by midnight on Friday January 20. I little mistake in my metadata took a few days to figure out (their tech support is obviously swamped). Once I figured the metadata out and fixed it – 36 hours later I am in the book store with a very pretty book with swipe-style table of contents, revenue model, distribution channel and the whole works.

You can click the link below or search for “Charles Severance” or “Sakai” in iTunes and you get my book. It is free for a while because a pay account takes longer to get approved than a free account. So hurry and download the book while it is free.

Technically, the path was not too bad. I downloaded a LaTeX to RTF convertor, then imported the RTF into Pages and then pasted the text into iBooks Author one chapter at a time, cleaning up extra whitespace here and there. It could have been better and the documentation could have been more helpful – but you cannot argue with moving 230 pages from LaTeX to iBooks Author in 5 hours. And it even caught a couple of spelling errors I had missed.

But this book (Alpha) is just the start. I want to add pictures, multimedia, and supporting material like E-Mails that will slide out over the text. Over the next few months, I will enhance the book with these materials and create an awesome enhanced book that I will call (Beta) and sell. I want to see how Apple handles all the extra stuff and makes a truly beautiful book.

I need to do a rewrite of my Python for Informatics book because of copyright issues. I am simply going to convert to iBooks Author first and then do the rewrite there because it is far easier for me AS AN AUTHOR (are you getting the picture????) to be creative and produce an excellent book where I am spending my time on the creative aspects of creating an enhanced book and not worrying about the technical pain of HTML5 that is still emerging.

(This next bit is the MOST IMPORTANT PART of this entire post.)

People complain about the state of iBooks Author at this moment in time. What they miss is that we authors have a pipeline of work. Some books take 6 months and others take two years, there is a need to revise over and over. I can live with the few imperfections in today’s iBooks Author because by the time my next books come out, nearly all of those problems will be resolved. I really do not like the Pages/iBooks Author interface – but I have years to figure it out. This is a moving target and Apple is just getting started.

The Market Impact

Remember that it was *years* before iTunes became profitable – it was not an overnight success. All the people nay-saying iBooks Author are reacting to what it is *right now*. Already it is surprisingly impressive – but what is more important is that if folks could stop complaining about the EULA for a second and imagine where this roadmap leads – they would immediately see that the publishing industry has about five years before the door is completely shut by Apple.

The good news is that it will take Apple some time to strangle the industry. Companies like Amazon or Pearson or some startup could build a good tool or a funding agencies like Gates and Hewlett could fund an open effort to build a tool. Or perhaps one of the startups that are trying to multi-publish book authoring “in the cloud” (whoever came up with this idea never spoke to a single author) will change direction and build a desktop tool. One way or another the market can and will build a “Zune Author” to compete with iBooks Author. The “Zune Author” will likely be better, cheaper, more usable, and more open, and better in an infinite number of ways. But since so many people in this industry think about the next six months rather than the next five years, “Zune Author” will arrive too late, and technical superiority will not matter.

So the question is who in this educational space will take this on this problem head-on. I predict that no one will. Venture capitalists and philanthropic funders will continue to fund last year’s good ideas that we see over and over in keynote speeches from education futurists in the pursuit of the quick buck while Apple quietly sits in their spaceship-like headquarters and quietly builds on their lead in the publishing market and then all the “futuristic thinking geniuses” will wake up one day gasping for air and with their last breath, saying “DAMN YOU APPLE!” and wondering where things went wrong.

And on that day in 2017 when the publishing industry has been killed by Apple, please do a google search and find this blog post where I told you what to do and you did not listen. Of course it won’t change anything. And whatever I am telling you in 2017 – you won’t listen to that either. It is very frustrating to be right and have no one listen.
——-

If you liked this rant, you can read 200+ pages of my ranting about what worked and what did not work in the Sakai Project between 2003 and 2007 on your iPad –
Sakai: Free as in Freedom (Alpha) is now available in iTunes and the Apples iBookstore.

I am doing a good bit of video editing these days and I want to send the original HD video to my collaborators around the country. The data ranges from 10GB to 40GB depending on how long the interview ran. I basically need to get it to one other person – one upload, one download, and delete the data.

DVD is completely useless here as it would take 3-10 DVDs and there is no easy-to-use spanning software. I have an ISP that gives me 630GB of storage and unlimited bandwidth – but any one connection only sees 350KB/sec – which leads to a 15GB taking over 40,000 seconds – most of a day.

Amazon’s S3 charges for outgoing bandwidth and storage but does not limit outgoing bandwidth. That drops the 15GB transfer time to less than an hour on a wired connection. Doable given that I only need to do this 3-4 times per month. The S3 charge for a week of storage and a single transfer of a 30GB file is about $4.50.

If I purchase a 32GB USB stick and put it in a photo mailer, it can be sent for $2.00 first class each way. I have a photo mailer that can be reused both ways that costs about $0.50. So sending 30GB via mail ignoring the cost of the 32GB memory stick is also about $4.50 as long as I get my 32GB memory stick back.

Interestingly I can pay an $20.00 per month to get an extra 30GB of space on the University of Michigan AFS servers. Which if I moved 30GB of video four times per month, turns out to be about $5.00 per transfer.

I think that I am going to give up and compress the video to H.264. If I could get it under 3GB, then a whole host of options open up – one-way sending of a DVD or upload/download any number of free resources I already have.

This is my first column for the January 2012 issue of IEEE Computer magazine’s Computing Conversations column. The idea of the column is to make it about people who make up the field of computing and getting to know those people. The January issue is called the “Outlook” issue dedicated to looking a bit more and encourages fritters to think a bit “out of the box’.

For this column, I figured that IEEE Computer (the flagship publication of the IEEE Computer Society) needed to acknowledge the passing of Steve Jobs. But since IEEE Compuer is a magazine with several months of lead time, it would look a little silly for us to write an article similar to the plethora of articles that appeared back in October, two months afterwards. So I wanted to take a more reflective view on what Steve Jobs had accomplished in terms of how we in computing who used his technology to accelerate our own thinking and innovation. I wanted to highlight the second order / knock-on effects of the products that Jobs produced. The column looked at several examples of where Steve Jobs simply pushed us forward and made us think differently.

Audio version of the column.

Here is the associated video:

I also have a High Quality Archive on Vimeo (with download link).

Other Videos in The January Issue

I also produced the following video for the January issue of IEEE Computer associated with an
article in the issue.