Turning the Supertanker

I had one of the guys from Connector Systems come aboard the Supertanker today to make a site survey for a WiFi project I have had on the back burner ever since I arrived. For those of you who are not quite sure where the Supertanker is, I suggest that you take a look at a little video that I made well over a year ago, called ‘Where in the world is Meadowbank School?‘ To date nearly 9000 people have asked that same question and have used the video to find out.  The most obvious and special part of the school is the stupendous gully that bisects our site and the entire school into two separate sites.  It has been an environmental reclamation scheme over the last 8 years or so and today it is a wonderful resource that the students and teachers use regularly.  A connecting foot bridge spans the gully at canopy level and provides great views into the bush clad gully.  It is a special place indeed.

When I joined the Supertanker I decided then and there that this resource was too special not to share.  I have been slowly inching my way to that goal ever since.  It is my aim to set up wireless access points in the gully so that I can have several cameras set up to stream live content to the web in order that others can benefit from our good fortune.  At the moment I want to set up an ‘eelcam’ in the creek, a ‘fungi cam’ by the rotting logs in addition to that I want to set up feed stations with a camera at each so that students can monitor how and what different native birds eat.  Steve at Connector Systems now knows that we have a large technical issue to solve.  He has gone away scratching his head, to get what we want will not be cheap and will take several iterations to afford and roll out.

Once the infrastructure is in place I will be using a resource called Mogulus to capture and record the streamed video, so that even when we are offline or at night, others in other time zones will be able to see and share our resource. This is all mangaged by the multiple camera facility and the ability to record live streams and build storyboards within Mogulus. Mogulus is a really cool resource that I will be presenting on at Ulearn08, I have just discovered today.

In the meantime we have to rely on static images to share the flora and fauna of our urban Eden.  Currently one of the ornamental cherry trees is in flower and the Tui’s have gone mad over it.  It is not unusual for 10 or  more of these birds to be feasting and squabbling in the same tree.  Take a look at some of the images that I took a couple of weekends ago and imagine what a live feed of the same thing would mean to your class.  All donations to the cause gratefully accepted!

I was on the phone today to the guys at Novell, letting them know of our open source plans, they were very keen to hear more and we discussed options for “…getting the word on the streets.” We are pushing ahead. After I put the phone down I ordered 22 HP small form factor workstations. 5 of these will go into our new library and will represent the first of our true open source machines in school. Our library software AccessIT is based on an open source database and so the OPAC machines will be swapped over to the new system one at at a time and then the two issues machines will follow. The remaining machines are all destined for our ICT suite and will be dual booted in the first instance. However on the Windows partition I will load up all the open source windows variants that will be on the other Linux partition.

I am hoping to actually link Open Office Writer to the MS word icon and see if anyone notices the difference! I will simply package the new software as the latest update and see who squeals. I suspect that not many will. The biggest issue will be the actual swap from a Windows interface to the SUSE desktop environment and getting these Windows users to stop thinking like a Windows user to get things to work.

Today we got our first server built with SUSE server 10, early days yet and it has no function on the domain other than to be a Linux machine! We have also dual booted another couple of legacy laptops without any bother. We would have done one of the AP’s machines, but she was out on a course. She will be our first advocate in the field to run with our dual boot platforms.

Today has also been good for other reasons to. I have been hatching a plan to share our wonderful gully online for a while now. You can see it from Google Earth and in this video I made last year to let the students at Woodford know where we are in the world. It is my intention and has been for a long time to get a wireless gimbaled web cam set up at a bird feeding station somewhere in the gully so that we can share our wonderful resource online. I will stream live to the web and record the feed of Tuis feeding or whatever aspect we decide to record. The live stuff will be played via Mogulus and the recorded stuff will be played while we are offline and asleep, again via Mogulus so that the Northern hemisphere and other time zones can share in our bounty. Today I hope to have convinced one of the teachers on the supertanker to design a G+T course to create feed stations to attract the birds to the camera and in addition to investigate the potential to create a solar panel array to keep the camera charged all the times without the need for cables everywhere.

Finally today marked the start of this year’s robotics challenge. The students are excited and I am raring to go. This years challenge is designed to be a display at the art exhibition at the end of term three. The students have to build a standard NXT out of the box robot and then design an arm that can carry a whiteboard marker pen. The pen has to be able to be lifted and dropped so that they can control where the pen makes contact with the drawing surface. They will then have to write a program or programmes that create art, watch this space as I upload videos of their progress. Thursday afternoons have never been such fun, that is since the robotics programme on Friday mornings last year!

I think that I have found the ultimate bandwidth killer!  This little utility from Mogulus is yet another brilliant tool and is yet another reason why I will need a fibre cable as thick as my arm to feed my school pretty soon! 

What this cool utility allows you to do is to create your own web based TV station.  What is more it is live.  The image that you see above is my live stream embedded into my blog that I use to test things on.  As you can see my station has its own name - Madfish which is now part of the Madfish Broadcasting Corporation!  I have a ticker and all sorts of other goodies that I add or remove.  The terminal that I log into enables me to cut between live feeds and pre-prepared video footage, just like the editor up in the gallery would do in a real TV station.  It is really cool, I can see huge potential for this in education, I now need some willing classroom to take it on…

I have been looking for this kind of utility for ages, I have investigated VLC media player and while that is good and can handle a live feed within my network, what I have wanted to achieve is a live feed to the Internet.  It is my aim to set up bird feed stations in our gully so that we can share our wonderful natural resource with others from all over the world.  This cool utility will enable us to do that, we will be able to have several feed stations all linked into the one portal and our students will be able to cue between cameras to give our on-line audience the best images of the Tuis, fungi or whatever we are observing at the time.  I can see a future where students will be able to do scientific observations, statistical work etc through this portal and we can share the flora and fauna that our students are lucky enough to have within their school grounds.

Any takers for the stream?  Once I have set up a proper school TV station I will post the details here.  The future of education is not moving towards us, it is galloping! It had better hurry up, I can’t wait any longer!