Being too tired to think straight and not yet having any means of communication we dropped our bags in the room and walked around the block. By now it was about 7am and uncomfortably hot. We seemed to be in a ‘computer district’ and there were a whole bunch of people carrying shopping bags that looked like they would contain electronic gadgetry. The people on their way to work seemed to be mostly from India. Our Telestial SIM card burst into life and we were able to get in touch with our friend Andrew who gave us a few suggestions on things to see and an invite to his church the following day (Friday).

We took Andrew’s advice and used taxis instead of booking on one of the circular bus tour things. This worked out well and it was quite cheap to get to the places we wanted to see – like the famous Dubai Mall with it’s rather fancy fountain. It was almost deserted by the time we got there and we treated ourselves to an american hamburger at an empty Johhny Rocket franchise followed by a look at the aquarium.

By the time we got back to the Hotel, a non-smoking room was available and we changed rooms with a minimum of fuss – phew. We then took a short walk down to the Dubai Creek and caught a Abra over to the spice souk (market) on the other side.

We walked a bit too far then lost the will to live searching for a supermarket for some brekkie cereal and instant noodles. Finally found one & staggered back to find that we had no kettle with which to prepare the noodles. Had one beer at the very smelly Irish pub and went to bed.

Next morning we grabbed a cab to the ‘Madinat Jumeirah’ and enjoyed a fantastic breakfast looking at the Burj Al Arab then wandering the resort shops. A very short cab ride took us to the convention centre at another very flash hotel where our friend’s church meets. That was quite an interesting experience with heaps of ex-pats working in Dubai. We even met the Emirates pilot who flew our plane from Adelaide!

Next we enjoyed a wonderful lunch at an even flasher resort followed by a wonderful cruise out of the Palm marina in his boat. The feel from out on the water on a Friday was awesome. We jumped overboard and sat in the clean, safe water surrounded by locals and ex-pats having fun boating & skydiving around us for about two hours catching up on our respective life journeys. Something I will always remember fondly.

Feeling adventurous, we grabbed a metro to the Dubai Mall so we could check out the fountain again (they say it is better at night). In stark contrast to our Thursday morning visit, the place was packed – we saw the blasted fountain the joined an uncomfortably long queue for a cab back to the hotel. Slept well, off at the crack of dawn for our flight to Paris.

Search flickr for ‘fangoparis‘ to find a whole bunch more of our photos from this trip.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

YAK:

It looks like this and has served me extremely well – indoor flying at ETSA park with SSL one Thursday per month and most mornings out on Glenelg Oval.

Runs 2s batteries to power trusty TURNIGY 2204-14T 19g Outrunner with 8×4.3 props. Other bits:

• TURNIGY 2204-14T 19g Outrunner
  
• TURNIGY Plush 6A /.8bec/6g Speed Controller
• OrangeRx R410 Spektrum DSM2 Compatible 4Ch 2.4Ghz Receiver
• HXT500 5g / .8kg / .10sec Micro Servo
• ZIPPY Flightmax 350mAh 2S 20C (AUS Warehouse)

Fang - Mike Seyfang

60 Size Thunder Tiger Trainer:
I jumped on the HobbyKing website and ordered:

• 13/4/2011 Turnigy 5000mAh 6S 20C Lipo Pack (AUS Warehouse)
•  1/4 /2011 H-King 60A Brushless Speed Controller – Helicopter & Fixed Wing
•  1/4 /2011 TGY AerodriveXp SK Series 42-60 500Kv / 1475W
•  1/4 /2011 APC style propeller 12×6-E
•  1/4 /2011 PolyMax 3.5mm Gold Connectors 10 PAIRS (20PC)
•  1/4 /2011 EC3 plugs (10pairs/set)

Then I started scouring the web for a ‘Thunder Tiger 60′ model – to no avail. So I started wandering around the local hobby shops and when I got to ‘Model Mania’ in Morphett Vale I found one that had just been bought in on consignment. $130 later I had my plane!

RX – 14ch Futaba that shipped with my 12FG TX.

DATA:

Running on 6s with a 14×7 prop gives 1381 watts of power at a max of just under 60 amps.

# Note – Flight Thu Nov 17 2011.
# Note – Thunder Tiger Trainer with ICE100.
# Note – Various props tested:
# Note – 13×7 session a b
# Note – 14×7 session c d
# Note – 12×6 session e
# Note – 13×6.5 session f
# Note – Max: 58.3a 25.3v (1382Watt recorded]

Ashley’s is the red one, mine is the blue one.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

R2DIAN:

Still flying at the time of writing this post (April 2013). In fact, I flew it today!

Fang - Mike Seyfang

I literally flew this thing to death. It just plain collapsed from EPP/Tarzan’s grip repair fatigue.

OSIRIS copy:

This one is a ‘Mike Schneider’ special. Cut from EPP foam with a home-made laser cutter in his loungeroom. These shots are the closest thing to an ‘instruction manual’ you will find. Wish I had recorded Mike’s narrative while he assembled the bits on his lounge floor.

The build for these EPP planes takes a couple of days and requires:

• Tarzan’s grip (glue)
• Some 1mm, 3mm carbon rod
• A length of carbon strip 3-4mm wide for wing leading edge
• Cut up old floppy disk mylar to make hinges that are glued in (Mike tells me that blenderm tape works much better, but I like the nostalgia and durability of the old floppy disks)
• No 13 hose Oring to attach prop to motor (Prop saver)
• Servos, Motor, prop, ESC, receiver, batteries (the orange list was hand written by Andy at my first appearance at Aberfoyle HUB indoor flying one Sunday morning (with input from Scott Gage, Mike Schneider and Bob Tait).

Fang - Mike Seyfang

Flew it once on Glenelg oval one calm morning and decided to put it away before I trashed it. Just love the hand-stitched hinges on elevator and rudder.

Decided I am going to fly it on the next calm morning – stay tuned for update.

UPDATE:

This morning was calm and fly she did – what a joy to control something that actually flies through the air – as opposed to being dragged around by brute force and ignorance. Such a graceful, gentle craft – totally affected by any tiny gust of wind or rising air. First flight was a tad hairy because I had too much up elevator trim – she would oscillate quite badly in a series of very gentle stalls while turning or on descent. Threw in about 20 clicks of down trim and all good. See for yourself on the sneaky iPhone video I took with one hand, while flying with the other!

Chatterbox:

2s 10a esc, TURNIGY 2204-14T 19g Outrunner 1450Kv motor, 8×6 prop. (also flew i2th 8×4.3 a tad under-powered if a quick burst of upwardness is required).

Fang - Mike Seyfang

Parkzone Radian:

What a fluke – this foam glider model by ParkZone turned out to be a real ripper and kick-started my radio controlled flying obsession and kindled a love for aircraft of the soaring kind. Having recieved a ‘looxcie’ bluetooth video camera (as a gift from friend and twitter follower mr VAF) I thought it might be fun to get some footage from a radio controlled airplane. A few google searches later I had discovered First Person Viewer (FPV) flight and a foam glider called the parkzone radian.

I (eventually) got hold of a ‘Ready to Fly’ version that included a Spektrum DX5e 2.4ghz transmitter for a couple of hundred dollars. I put it together on Christmas day 2010, and took it over to Glenelg Oval for a test flight. I was expecting to gently circle around a few times and land safely. I had no idea the radian was designed to climb rapidly then catch thermals and eventually land! After a brief but terrifying flight I decided to join a club (with a bit more space than a footy oval) and learn how to fly. I joined the Holdfast Model Aero club and was eventually (and somewhat reluctantly) granted my solo license on an electric glider.

My first real flying was done in Feb 2011 at the Bowman’s farm near Ororoo (site of my motorcycle accident). All pieces were carefully transported in the original foam box and I had a great time learning to glide about and land safely. I also learned a lot about charging the LiPo batteries and went back to basic electronics to revisit OHM’s law and to finally figure out the relationship between Coulombs, Amps, Volts, Watts and Amp-hours.

After a time, or few times anyway, the ratio of adventure to mis-adventure began to climb and I started to get the hang of basic flight control. Soon I would be ready for my first ‘solo’ flight as a fully fledged club member. Little did I know that my first ‘solo’ flight would include a head-on-collision with a large nitro powered plane!

I lost!

But that was not the end of this radian. It was repaired and resurrected as ‘franken-radian’ which subsequently had a few more crashes, was stiffened with carbon fibre and gave me the courage to attempt slope-soaring with zero tuition! At the time of writing (April 2013 – two and a quarter years later, the franken-radian was still flyable). This flickr set has more photos of my model planes and their flying adventures.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

This toy did not fly!

Fang - Mike Seyfang

• Re-visit my old NetNewsWire application I purchased for Mac OSX many moons ago (and check the landscape for equivalent applications).
• Bite the bullet and ‘selfDogFood‘ a server side RSS aggregator like Tiny Tiny RSS or similar.
• Find something new (bearing in mind the magazine style iOS apps that lack the ability to manage unread items).

p.s. Hat Tip to Leo and Stephen for getting me thinking about server side.

Good bye Google #reader – hello TT RSS. Finally found a suitable replacement. Time to de-google a bit more .. – .. bit.ly/XWkCvv

— Leo Gaggl (@leogaggl) March 18, 2013

Fang - Mike Seyfang

I wasn’t going to whinge about this until I met up with my esteemed colleague (and the other ‘mayor’ of most of the Womad stages) Michael Coghlan. He echoed my sentiment that it seems that the ‘success’ (ie growth) of WOMADelaide has gone a tad too far. With so many rules & regulations designed to protect financial interests it feels like one is cheating by trying to SHARE anything of the experience with others who have not PAID. By sharing I mean anything from extra tickets to photos, and heaven forbid – video recording from smart phone if you are lucky enough to get front and centre!

Now that I have that off my chest, I do want to say how grateful I am to have been there for the full four days to suck the marrow from the awesome array of artistry that the event attracts. With the help of a few well informed friends and the awesome program guide I was able to discover some real unexpected treats. What follows is my journal as compiled by my FourSquare check-ins.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

Textbook Publisher Pearson Takes Down 1.5 Million Teacher And Student Blogs With A Single DMCA Notice

because it affects this blog, my friend James Farmer (who runs this excellent blogging service) and all my Edu-blogging colleagues who have ever blogged here.

I have long been nervous about working with copyright materials online. Not because I think money is evil, or those evil corporations are out to get little guys like me, or even that people should not have the right to protect their intellectual property. Rather, I see great value in the re-use of digital material as it flows freely through the interwebs and I worry about what can happen when a non malicious infringement throws a spanner in the works of a successful enterprise. This is why I favor distributed publishing models and license all my own work as Creative Commons: Attribution and try to avoid using any digital text, image, audio or video that is ‘protected’ by copyright.

Let’s try to put all the emotions to one side and look at what happened.

• [T+6 days] OLDaily newsletter links to TechDirt article (bringing the whole issue to my attention)
• [T+5 days] TechDirt and others spread the news
• [T+hours] Edublogs founder writes detailed post about entire kerfuffle
• [T=0] Hosting company takes server(s) off the air. (up to 1,451,943 blogs can’t be accessed for hour(s))
• [T-weeks] Hosting company receives DCMA copyright infringement notice
• [T-years] Publishing company implements process to enforce rights on material
• [T-5years] Teacher includes ‘Becks hopelessness scale’ in a blog post about a session
• [T-24years] Publisher included ‘Becks hopelessness scale’ in a publication
• [T-  38years] Beck creates hopelessness scale

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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mikese.wordpress.com

See you there!

• Pinboard bookmarks for examples and demos.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

Here are some notes/links to things I may talk about.

- narrated vid (show in person)

- iPad ELFS three story summary (APHS)

- iPad ELFS blog posts (category)

- iPad ELFS images on flickr

- 10bigQuestions first iPad promo Video

- 10bigQuestions re-mixable video collection

- NMC Horizon 2011-2016 Aus Tertiary Outlook

- experimental TedED flip lesson

- iTunesU: Duke Core Concepts in Chemistry

- iTunesU: South Australian DECD

- OLDaily from downes.ca

- EdTechTalk network

-others?

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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I hope it won’t be too long till I can write a ‘thank you’ post to whoever it will be that allows me to co-create my own stories using all these tunes. Without being a ‘pirate’ that is.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

technorati tags:seyfang, mikeseyfang

UPDATE:

• The TedED flip is now live – give it a go. (best if you login to ted.com – accounts are free)

youtu.be/pYgqct9f8T8

Why did I do this?

I’ts a long (but important to me) story so sit down, grab a drink and see if you can join the dots with me…

Last week I was minding my own business when two announcements got my attention via Stephen Downes OLDaily newsletter - TedED ‘Flipped’ lessons and NASA’s DIY Podcast. Together, these two announcements sent my brain into a frenzy of “bloody hell, that’s what I’ve been trying to do since I left Microsoft in 2005″ activity. Before I try to explain all that, let’s take a look at each of the announcements.

TedED ‘Flipped’ lessons: Lots of hype and looks rather cool so I jumped right in to see what all the fuss was about. You can follow that journey in this post. No doubt there is a lot of potential here. The OLDaily readers / contributors were not so gushy with enthusiasm: New TED-Ed Site Turns YouTube Videos Into ‘Flipped’ Lessons & The Problem with TED Ed being just a tad cynical (in a very healthy way). I’ve always been a bit skeptical about YouTube as a platform for Video ReMix due to the lack of proper support for multi-format downloads and their walled garden approach to ‘Remix this Video” function.

NASA’s DIY Podcast:  NASA’s DIY Podcast really got my attention because this is *exactly* the approach I began to take with LearnDog back in 2005 and continue to push in my work for the Faculty of Sciences at the University of Adelaide. Ever since Stephen Downes ‘clued me in’ to the idea that video re-mix is in fact a kind of post-linguistic and sub-symbolic language via a podcast back in 2005(ish), I have taken a keen interest in all things Re-Mix or Mash-Up. I have dabbled in audio Re-Mix via various podcasts and try to have a crack at a video Re-Mix at least once a year. More importantly, in various jobs I have held since then, I have worked hard to try and convince educators that it would be a good idea to build a collection of digital ‘artifacts’ that learners could use to tell stories of their own. Sound familiar? this is *exactly* what the NASA DIY Podcast site is all about. You can see some of my own modest attempts to build libraries of re-usable digital artefacts:

• Institute for Photonics & Advanced sensing (IPAS) on blip.tv and archive.org
• The Environment Institute on blip.tv
• My own collection of Science Goodness on archive.org
• Faculty of Sciences “10BigQuestions” on archive.org

The hard part seems to be getting people to notice and to engage with all this re-mixable digital content. I’m guessing even NASA aren’t seeing vast numbers of Re-Mixes of their awesome, openly licensed digital content. Sure, it’s early days yet and it will be interesting to see how things play out over the next several years. Meanwhile, I will continue with my meagre efforts to blaze a trail through the unknown by using whatever technology and tools are available to help learners of all ages find a voice in this language of digital ReMix.

The next step for this little ROCKet Science clip will be to do some thinking and research on Newton’s laws of motion so that I can ‘FLIP’ my YouTube into a lesson on TedED. Maybe you would like to have a crack at ‘FLIP’ping it too. Go ahead, be my guest.

p.s. One last thing. You will notice I license my stuff cc:by. I know public domain is more open, I’m just trying to encourage/model good scientific practice – ‘FIND IT, USE IT, CITE IT’ (You know, standing on the shoulders of giants and all that stuff).

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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• Works best on a computer (not iPad etc) while logged into ted.com
• there is no facility to add or edit a ‘Quick Quiz’ section when starting with a YouTube
• but you can munge existing ‘Quick Quiz’ questions when flipping a featured lesson.
• The ‘add link’ UI while editing ‘Dig Deeper’ didnt work (chrome or firefox on Mac) – {actually, it probably did, but it is rather fiddly – must select text for the UI to become live. Figured this out on a vista PC running firefox at work.}
• You cannot go back and fix (or re-edit) once you hit publish
• Couldn’t find any UI to work with responses to my ‘flip’. Was hoping to at least see counters for views / answers etc. Thought I might see a dashboard where I could manage responses to each element of every flip…
• Login to ted.com profile has new ‘TED-Ed Activity’ tab. THis lists each lesson I have viewed, in progress, completed, flipped. Still can’t see anything like the ‘teacher dashboard’ promised in the tour video. http://www.ted.com/profiles/98898/ted_ed
• Found it! – the ‘Recent Activity’ tab when logged in to ed.ted.com. This includes stats like ‘Active Students’, ‘percent answered’ and ‘Class Statistics’. Now all I need is for somebody to login and do one of my flip lessons!
• Activity by ‘guests’ (not logged in to ted.com) doesn’t show in Recent Activity.

Note to self: upload some pictures of each and write something about each and every model:

Radian

Schneider ‘Osiris’ indoor EPP

Thunder Tiger trainer 60

Schnieder ‘Yak’ indoor EPP #1

Radian #2

Ashley’s ‘foam yak’

Blackhorse sprinter

Schnieder ‘UYak’ indoor EPP #2

Green 1.5m slope soarer (ex Nigel)

Art-Hobby 2m Boar

Parkzone Polecat UMX

Art-Hobby 1.5m Agena

UMX Extra-3D

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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Annotated bibliography assignment due.
Extra 2 days “for all” announced.
(spontaneous applause)
Reason: attempting LMS e-submission (student submits PDF to myUni, simon gets a stack o paper)

Questions on how to save as PDF. Those with recent MSOffice can “save-as” their word.doc, those with mac can print to .pdf. The LMS help screens have a list of free online .pdf converters.

Spent some time with a student who does not have any computer or internet access at home. We were able to find ways to get the .doc template from the LMS into google docs, edit and print to .pdf from an iPad. There was, however, no way to submit the .pdf on the LMS assignment page. Access to a computer is required for that step.

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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UPDATE:

Well, actually it went surprisingly smoothly. Didn’t smash anything and failed to come dead last in the comp. Most of my landings were quite close to the spot and I fluked a couple of great thermals for 10minute flights.

Fang – Mike Seyfang

Fortunately, this was not a repeat of the disaster that occurred on the oval of Maitland Area School in the early 1970′s. In that case I totally destroyed a control-line model aircraft by smashing a wingtip into a goal-post at full speed. Today’s episode on the (newly flood-lit) Glenelg Oval was not nearly so traumatic.

p.s. Thanks to Glenelg Oval for the fancy new lights – can’t wait to sneak in a night fly after footy practice on a balmy autumn evening.

This post is an attempt to create a useful path through the messy maze of information I published last year – by pulling together links into three stories.

Story1 – (15min) “swiss army iPad”

• History: 2008 laptop (no), 2009 iPhone (no), 2010 iPad (yes) – Friday September 10, 2010 (very) public.
• Reactions to the project between media frenzy & first batch of iPads
• Calm before storm – looking back from Feb11 to Sept10. Staff iPads, Christmas break, teams & committees, first-year directors, 10bigQuestions (&video), weekly morning teas, focus group students. Next step = ceremony handover (first batch of students).
• Sen Carr - handover ceremony – 30 students, two weeks prior to each first-year science student getting iPad on day 1 of Oweek.
• Testing WiFi (special room) with 55 iPads.
• Handover day – 650 iPads off truck to students in one day (0 d.o.a. / flat batt)
• Introduce #sc1100, Simon Pyke & each student in ‘class’. My role = inspire & enable crazy ideas, attend & help, social media connect & document narrative. My first day in #sc1100 class. (intro, network stats graphs, groups = big deal for ‘lecture theatre’.
• That day in class where YouSpin roulette wheel saved the day when chalk-dust prevented use of the AV lecturn computer – “swiss army iPad”
• finish on “YouSpin” roulette wheel post & youtube video
• Exercise – think about possibilities that could emerge when teacher has an iPad…

Story2 – (20min) “ubiquitous iPad”

• Now that we have the background, lets dig a little deeper into the only class in which every student had an iPad.
• Science1100 survey, blackboard crash & find my iPad (tweets, network graphs)
• Science1100 week3 – group task, journal links & LMS wiki updates
• Science1100 bad science – technology becoming transparent/tool
• Science1100 .pdf vs paper – LMS links, read journals on iPad, fill in (paper/pdf) template [*this is where only a few students updated template electronically - via second iPad or laptop!]
• Science1100 and social media – coghlan visit & podcast, twitter “2 finger scroll” crowdsource & myWritingLab.
• Science1100 peer review & plagiarism - whole class turnitin setup, iPad to work around “forgot to bring printout” students.
• (focus on tasks survey, group blog updates, … , possible when many students have iPad. As time moved on the technology moved further toward the background. My fav example (and the photo for this post) is as a flat surface on which to fill in the journal review template!
• Wordcloud brilliant when every student has iPad – think about other possibilities. Drill into some detail in following post prior to exercise…
• finish on “WordCloud”  post & youtube video
• Exercise – think about possibilities that could emerge when every student has an iPad… [with some detail on how to use google docs to collect virtually any data, spreadsheet/form for open-ended question, paste into wordle.net]
• ShortLink: bit.ly/aphs01 -> Form, bring up google sheet (clean up then share how it works), wordle.net/create

Must fix that!

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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As Prof Findlay pointed out in his opening remarks, the University of Adelaide is ideally placed to bring together world class researchers from a range of fields to tackle diverse challenges from the science of food production right through to international economic policy. The University has invested in the Waite Research Institute (and others) which can bring a focus for collaboration across disciplines providing an extremely potent response to challenges such as those outlined in the recent Chubb report “A Strategic Framework for International Agricultural Research within Australia’s aid program”.

Which brings me to the ‘connecting dots’ part of this little monologue.

One of the aims of yesterday’s forum is to see new research collaborations formed that will attract funding to tackle some of the really hard questions that have already emerged in conversations that will no doubt continue long after the wine tasting at the end of the day. This aim was shared by a wine2030 conference held back in September 2008. Professor Findlay engaged my services to see if social media (or Web2.0 as it was called back then) tools could extend the connections between potential research collaborators and amplify the conversations beyond the four walls of the National Wine Centre. I would like to think that the podcast recordings, photos, tweets and blog posts from that day had something to do with the success of otherwise unlikely collaborations such as the ‘SmartBungs’ project. This project leverages the Institute for Photonics and Advanced Sensing to bring together an unlikely collaboration between researchers in physics, chemistry & wine-making that was conceived in conversations rather similar to yesterday’s.  I’d love to think that in a few years time I could be writing a blog post comparing the success of ‘SmartBungs’ to an internationally significant food security project that is currently just a twinkle in the eyes of a few researchers. With that in mind, I have created two ‘storify’ archives of some of the social media coverage from yesterday and some bits and pieces connected with the SmartBungs project for your consideration:

• Yesterday’s #food2050 forum
• SmartBungs and #wine2030 events from years gone by

Fang - Mike Seyfang

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Anne

Howard

Me [more, twitter, website]

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mikeblogs/tags/idea11/

Panel chair Heather Watson asked me to spend 10minutes saying something inspirational then share some practical examples. My plan was to play with the title, making reference to the diminishing timeframes reflected in my old school motto “sieze the day” mutating into “seize the moment”. This makes me think of the need for AGILITY at the learner, teacher & institutional levels. My examples would be a comparison of my own and my daughter’s first year Uni study habits, those ‘rogue’ teachers who just started blogging & podcasting because they could & the iPad ELFS project at the University of Adelaide.

Reactions:

Discussions:

After the pane l I was delighted by the enthusiasm of a few young librarians and an ex Maitland Area School (the small country town on Yorke Peninsula where I was ‘educated’)  principal.

Links:

In various discussions, I mentioned interesting things & promised links. Here they are:

Cluetrain

Open Access Citation Advantage (OACA) literature review

Pop & sign YouTube

iPad E.L.F.S. at the University of Adelaide

http://sciences.adelaide.edu.au/aspire/

http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=10bigquestions

http://www.sciences.adelaide.edu.au/future/elfs/elfs.html

John travers iPad apps blogs

My new P2PU course on walking

OER SlideShare

MESH – mobile phones without towers

Ramona Pierson – Promethian http://bit.ly/uEIJ2H

End

Enjoy

Fang – Mike Seyfang

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