We may not have reached that yet but applications that are aware of the context in which its user exists is becoming more and more important especially are we are wanting our computing to be more and more mobile.

Applications ability to adapt to social, functional, locational, temporal and motivation context allow our computing experience to be more in tune with what we need and use less of our limited resources (such as battery power, bandwidth etc..). Development is even underway to make sensor that can interact with computers to input emotional context. Imagine a sensor that could measure things like your heart rate, temperature, blood pressure and map it against human emotions and have applications that adapt to it. Envision what it would like if an email sent when the user was angry sat in the outbox until their ‘emotions’ cooled off, giving a second look at them before really sending or when the user was sad, their phone automatically sent a ‘call me’ SMS to their partner, mum or best friend.
Would this be a good thing?
Any thoughts or ideas on how emotional context could be used or misused?

Teaching and Facilitating while closely linked, they can be poles apart. As a teacher, I aimed to help facilitate students learning, create classroom environments that aided and allowed students to come to learning form their own unique place and draw from the experience the knowledge and skills that interested them. While this was my aim, in realty sometimes teaching is just making sure that you cover the vast amounts of knowledge and skills that need to be past on for students to reach benchmarks. I believe that both can happen. Conversely, when facilitating a session, it is easy to slip into teacher mode, especially when there is some group knowledge lacking or when some side (usually the facilitators side) of an argument is left out.

Moderation is another kettle of fish again. Online communities, like any communities, tend to have leaders (facilitators) teachers and people who moderate content. Moderation may compromise facilitation when some members of the community don’t get their voices heard or discussions get heated or passionate. Listening and sharing is important in any community. Also if moderation is not performed, a few can dislodge and offend others making the environment no longer feel save, hence breaking down the facilitation and communication processes.

Online communities need to have healthy discussions about what these roles entail and when they are appropriate, possibly working in a push and pull mechanism. When facilitation is needed, then that takes place, when there is something to be learnt, teaching will be required and when moderation is on the cards, then that should be conducted. Protocols help to maintain uniformity throughout these processes. In some communities these roles will be organic and will flow with the content and emphasise that have been created around certain issues, in others more static and provide guidance and boundaries for participants.

But when do all these individual online voices, become a community?

When they listen, and respond and interact, when ideas are collaborated and knowledge shared, when a connection is felt.

What makes a good online community?

interaction, connection openness, communication… Community comes together when we need each other.

Extra tools: a car, a car phone charger, a 100w 12 – 240V inverter that plugs into my car’s cigarette lighter… and a resource center 4km down the road with internet that is open two days a week.

Can it be done? - Adapting to the constraints of remote mobile computing:

Constraint 1 - download limits and expense

My internet is through my mobile phone on the Telstra next G network with a measly 300 MB per month data plan (with 1GB costing almost $90) but in my remote location this is my only option except for a satellite contection and that doesn’t gel with my mobile way of life. Downloading 3 video lectures would chew up my limit.

Adaptation: Connect to the internet though the local resource center’s wired internet once or twice a week and download/hoard information from the Uni site. My laptop can then access course information as a stand alone computer or on the ne

t through next G wireless but with all the large files being accessed locally from my computer. Use of an email client and a computer based RSS reader assist with hoarding information.

Constraint 2 - connecting to the internet.

Once my laptop is connected to the internet via bluetooth connection with my next G mobile, it seems to be reasonably fast and reliable. But the signal sometimes drops out and connection is resumed minutes later. Often connecting can take 5 or 6 attempts to get on to the net. Sometimes a connection can not be made for and hour or so.

Adaptation: At this point - patience. Time to make a cup of tea?

Constrain 3 - Power

My laptop battery lasts for 3 hours and my mobile lasts only 1or 2 hours as a modem.

Adaptation: Charge phone and laptop in the car. Distribute my resources to other devices - ie: Lectures to my ipod, print reading material.

While it is possible to work this way, I am looking forward to getting my solar power system up and running.

Mobile Computing - tut - chapter one

I hope that participating in this informal course: Facilitating online communities will give me the knowledge and the skills to make this step.

Why?
When I was the principal at Parnngurr Community School, the satellite internet connection had periods of being unreliable. We wanted to do blogging with the kids but not knowing whether or not the internet would be functioning made it really hard on the teachers. This combined with wanting community to have control over content, made me look for someway of doing it without internet connection…. locally on our server. Alexander Hayes came out to Parnngurr and introduced me the the joys of Linux… a word press blog and two media wiki run locally on our server. This allowed blogging classes to run even when our internet was down, it also allowed me to show the community school’s council and parents what the kids had been doing and get approval before it was published online. It could then be exported to the blog on the internet.

As I was often outside of internet areas, with the help of Jim Sligar, we installed virtual box and fedora 7 on my pc laptop that enable me to play with the school wikis while I was on holidays.
After this really positive experience with both local and online blogs and wikis, I wanted to recreate this experience on my new mac.

Windows on Mac
Also I have software to run my gadgets that only has software for windows, so having a virtual machine for windows will be very handy.

Vitrual machine number 1

I tried the 15 day trial of parallels: this worked great installing a windows os but I had trouble loading fedora 7… It took many goes of it crashing at various points. I was going to download ubuntu to give that a go but my trial ran out. As I was unsure that it was going to work with another type of Linix I though that I would trail another VM.

Vitrual machine number 2
I have installed a 30 day trial version of VMware Fusion and fedora 7 had load up no problem….. I have also installed windows.
I can drag and drop into the windows virtual box… but not into the linux window.

I used bluetooth to pair my phone with my Mac and ticked the allow internet connection through this device box… then hey presto… it comes up in my network system preferences. Data plans are not cheap but comparable with wireless charges… and I am not tied into a plan.

Happy to be wireless again.

The keys feel great under my fingers, the hot corner just rock and the screen is lovely. Files transfered over easily from my pc formatted external hard drives. Widgets are super handy…. (while skyping a friend in Sardegna, I could translate words so my Italian sounded better that it was and see what the weather was over there… super easy!)

Still feeling a bit challenged by iPhoto… anyone with advice, please let me know.