Monthly Archives: June 2015

Finding a use for Minecraft and Hololens enabled augmented reality

This isn’t exactly news now (it’s so last week) but I keep thinking about the demonstration at the E3 games expo of an augmented reality version of Minecraft via Microsoft’s upcoming Hololens tool.

(The good stuff kicks in around 2:05)

Sadly from an ed design perspective – for me at least – this is a classic example of a solution looking for a problem. Working in a college of business and economics, the only immediate application for this is 3D bar graphs and pie charts. Wooo.

Still, it’s very cool.

Why mathematicians are hoarding chalk – and why it matters

This post  on Gizmodo caught my eye because I noticed the other day that one of our classrooms still has a blackboard / chalkboard that appears to be getting a decent amount of use.  At first I just put it down to the conservative nature of some of our older lecturers.

As I read this article though, the arguments made for this older tech (in this case a particular brand of Japanese chalk that has just gone bust) actually made some sense to me.

Projectors do sometimes fail in the middle of a demonstration, solving an equation on a powerpoint slide doesn’t have the same flow and whiteboard markers can run out without you being aware of it before you start.

Even though I feel in my bones that there must be a tech enhanced option, these people – our users/clients – often have deep experience that has led them to do what they do now. We need to leave our assumptions behind and make sure we ask the right questions about current practices before we offer new ones.

(Maybe deep down I knew this when I designed my logo)

Two great presentations from iMoot – Jim Judges and Gina Veliotis

The iMoot online Moodle conference was held recently and while the overall standard of presentations was quite high, there were two stand-outs for me.

Jim Judges from the University of Warwick in the UK was probably the presenter of the conference for me – he was eminently comfortable in the online presentation space and kept the audience engaged with his Confessions of a Moodle Trainer. It is a 50 minute recording but well worth the time.

Gina Veliotis from Sydney presented on material that was fresher to me but which gave me a lot to think about in her presentation on Design Thinking to create Moodle Magic. (Again, around 50 minutes but worth the time)