The magic is enabled by a $10 app called AirDisplay that runs on the iPad, along with its free desktop companion that runs on the Mac (or PC). I found out about it from a post on Practical Practice, a blog by Tim Tyson, where you’ll find very clear and detailed instructions for setting this up yourself if you want to. Essentially, the app on your iPad talks to the application on your computer, provided both machines are on the same wifi network (or a private network that originates from the computer). You can use a projector instead of an external monitor to turn your iPad into an interactive whiteboard, and you can connect several iPads and use them in turn, like in a classroom setting.

So far, I’ve only experimented enough to have first impressions: I used SketchbookPro instead of trying Ink2Go as Dr. Tyson recommends, and I found it a little difficult but promising. I used the wifi hookup and haven’t yet tried the private network. I’d like to try that, and maybe Ink2Go, and I’d like to test it over WebEx to see how it might look in a virtual meeting setting. (Any volunteers to attend and give me some feedback?) If it’s workable, it means that you could visually record a web meeting even without owning a graphics tablet, if you have an iPad. And no wires!

More on this later, after more experimentation. Meanwhile, take a look at Dr. Tyson’s post for more details on how he did it and what he used it for.

The Goal
The idea here is to take those dark, uneven photos of charts taken right after they’ve been drawn…

the original photo... bleh!

the finished image, much cleaner

The Process
1. Crop the image.
Open your image in Photoshop and crop it so that you have all the white edges and as little other stuff as possible:

the cropped image

Now we can work with the edges. With nothing selected in the image, go to this menu selection: Edit > Transform > Distort. Now you should have little open boxes at the corners and in the middle of the edges of your image. If you can pull the canvas out so there’s some empty space around the image, this will be easier. Just grab a corner triangle and pull it out and up or down until the edges of the image are nice and straight. Do this gently — it’s called “Distort” for a reason — so that the lettering is pretty straight overall. It will look blurry or fuzzy as you do this. Don’t worry about it.

dragging the top corner straight

dragging the bottom corner straight

Tip: If you find that your Photoshop menus are all grayed out and you can’t use any tools or anything, check to make sure you aren’t still editing the edges. You can hit ENTER to keep your changes or ESCAPE to discard them and get out of the distort mode.

3. Even out the background.
We’re going to use Levels to make the background as even as possible. Essentially, we’re going to tell Photoshop which part should be considered white. This will give different results depending on what your original photo looks like, so you’ll need to experiment to get the best result with any given picture. First, open the Levels dialog box (Command-L). This box will be your friend throughout this process. Yay Levels! We’re going to use the white point eyedropper to show Photoshop where the background is white. Click on the right-most eyedropper:

white point eyedropper

still pretty yellow

looking for the white point

Tip: If you have stitched together several images to make up a larger chart, the Levels box will only affect (a) the layer you’re on and (b) anything you might have selected. Either do each layer separately, or merge them before using the dropper (if they’re wildly different in tone, do each one separately).

4. Tediously fix the edge shadows.
This is the worst part, or maybe the second-worst. Step 6 is a pain, too. Anyway. To fix the shadowy edges, use the rectangle marquee (selection) tool to select one half of your image, then open the Levels box again. This time, instead of the eyedropper, you’re going to use the right-hand triangle slider under the graph to gently edge out the dark shadows.

the lightening slider

Now select a smaller portion of that same section, leaving out the part you have lightened, so that the marquee starts at the image edge but doesn’t go all the way to the center. Focus on the areas that are still shadowy. The amount you select will depend on how light you got it last time.

selecting a part to edit

• Open the Levels box, move the slider to the left, keep an eye on the colors, click OK.
• Select a smaller section of the part you just worked on, and repeat.
• Keep doing this in smaller and smaller sections until you get to the edge and the image has lightened considerably. On this half, anyway. Then do the other half. Gah!

Sometimes you’ll have “problem areas” that are smaller than the slices you’ve been working on. It’s okay to make smaller or weird-shaped selections to work on those parts:

working on a problem area

Just be careful not to go overboard, especially where your selection divides a shaded area. Notice the difference in value on the left and right sides of this selection line:

don't lighten too much!

5. Bring back that color!
This part is easy, fun, and full of instant gratification. Yay! Make sure nothing is selected in your image (Command-D will drop all selections) and open Our Friend the Levels Box again. This time, use the input box on the left:

use this box to make your colors brighter

6. Erase the smudges.
I like to listen to music or podcasts while I do this. Books on tape maybe. First, make sure your computer monitor is clean or you will make yourself nuts trying to erase stuff that isn’t there. (Explains something about me, doesn’t it?) Then zoom in until you can see a small portion of your chart really, really well:

zoomed way in

smudges to erase

Go over the chart section by section, using bigger or smaller erasers as needed. You can erase other marks now, too, like tape or clips or people’s hands or stuff you just wish you hadn’t drawn in the first place. Jam out to your favorite tunes. Save often. Eventually you’ll be done. Ta-da!

the finished image, much cleaner

Problems with This Image
If you look at the final version here, you’ll see that the number “4″ looks teal while the number “1″ is green. In the actual chart, they’re all green. What I should have done was to make my marquee selections in quarters of the image, or by top half and bottom half as well as left and right halves. Then I could have controlled better how much color was lost in the lower half of the image. Live and learn. A lot of the blue chalk highlighting was lost, too.

Making It Easier Before You Begin
The way you photograph your charts has a lot to do with the amount of work you’ll have to do later. Unfortunately, we don’t often work in the best-lit situations. Hotel meeting rooms in particular are notorious for poor and uneven lighting. When you take the pictures, take one with your flash and one without so that you have some choice later. (Some cameras have a setting to do this automatically with a single shutter click.) If the light’s really bad, like spot lighting that casts pools of light and dark on your charts, consider turning the lights off and then using your flash for a more evenly lit photo. If you can, take the charts down and hang them somewhere where there’s better, brighter, or more even light.

If the light’s poor and there’s not much you can do about it, take closer photos of your charts in sections and stitch them together in Photoshop afterward. You’ll get clearer images with better detail and less variations in the lighting. Then go through all these cleanup steps after the stitching so that you get results that are as even as possible. If the photos are very different in tone to start with, I usually stitch them together but leave them on different layers, and then work on one layer at a time to get them all to a similar point of being clean, before merging them for the erasing-smudges step.

Feel free to post comments with whatever methods or software you like. As I said, there are lots of ways to do this!

The chart image used here was a work product of the Horizon.ANZ Advisory Board, used in the production of the New Media Consortium‘s 2010 Horizon Report: Australia-New Zealand edition. Chart by Rachel Smith (Creative Commons BY).

Here’s a terrible picture of me making squiggly lines so that you can see the bristles fan out:

drawing (well, markmaking) with the Nomad Brush

Click the photo for a closer view of the bristles. Neat, eh?

First off, how do you manage to not run out of paper (the page) when taking notes?
Practice, mostly. The screen size is good for about an hour’s worth of a keynote or presentation-style talk. A lecture might take more space, because I’d want to take more detailed notes. A conversation takes less space, because there’s a lot more pausing and back-and-forth. Or, to look at it another way, since the space is the same (one screenful), it’s good for 1 hour of keynote, 45 minutes of lecture, and maybe 2 hours of conversation or meeting. Sometimes I don’t fill up the whole screen, and sometimes I do need to continue on to a second one.

I also break up my notes with larger headers and smaller images and detail text. If you compare my earlier work with some of my later work, you’ll see that it took me a few tries to get control of the sizing so that it’s consistent throughout the page. Sometimes I still don’t nail it ;-)

How do you manage to write the dot above the letter “i”? Every time I try to touch the screen with one finger, the menu shows up.
You’re not the first person with this question. It turns out I didn’t discover it because I don’t usually punctuate, I use all caps most of the time, and even when I use lower case, I don’t dot my i’s. You need to move your finger (or stylus) in a tiny circle, curve, or up-down motion to dot your i’s or make a period. It takes a little practice to break yourself of the tapping habit.

What zoom level do you prefer to take notes in?
I’m all over the map. The first thing I do is to make a sizing mark for my header — a little stroke at 100% zoom to show myself how tall to make the header letters. This varies depending on the number of words I want to write. Then I zoom in so that size is comfortable and I write the header. Then I zoom out to make sure I got it straight and didn’t switch sizes in the middle and so forth. Everything else kind of keys off that — topic headers are the next largest thing, but smaller than the page header, and detail text gets smaller in varying degrees. Sometimes I emphasize something by making it larger than the header. When I’m writing the smallest details I’m often zoomed in all the way. I move my screen a lot while I work. It’s one reason I hesitate to project from my iPad as I work — I’m afraid of making the audience seasick.

How do you color the background (the paper) and the inside of the letters? And do you do that after you’ve finished notetaking or while doing it?
I add a layer, drag it under the text layer, and use a wider brush to put the color where I want it. This way, I’m coloring under the outline of the letters so it looks neater. I usually have one layer for the lettering (the black text and outlines), one for the coloring of letters and objects, and another one at the bottom for the background colors. Sometimes there’s an upper layer with borders, and usually there’s one more layer with miscellaneous stuff that gets added at odd times. Layers are a great way to experiment with different coloring options, too.

I usually go back and forth between coloring and writing. Sometimes, there’s a rambly part of the talk or conversation that doesn’t need to be recorded, and that’s a good time to color. Other times, the speaker is so jazzed and spot-on that I end up doing all the coloring after the talk is over. Both methods work. I usually add the background coloring last.

Do you prefer using the stylus or your fingertip while taking notes (in Brushes)?
My fingertip, by a lot. I have a stylus, but I find that it gets in the way. Zooming, changing colors and brushes, and even writing and drawing come more naturally to me when I’m using my finger. This is very much a personal preference — I know people who are artistic geniuses with the stylus, but can’t do a thing with their fingertips.

Any other tips worth listening to before I try making better notes?
You’re assuming any of these tips are worth listening to :-) The best thing you can do is to practice and don’t be afraid to make mistakes. Any time you can, whip out the iPad and take notes, even if you only end up filling part of the screen. Pixels are cheap :-)

If you’re not confident about your lettering, practice that. Just write alphabets or spelling lists or shopping lists or journal entries. I’ve changed my handwriting several times over the course of my life, just because I wanted to see different shapes in my letters. Takes a lot of practice to turn it into habit, but if you’re taking handwritten notes, it’s worth it.

Layers are really handy for experimenting, as I said; if you think something might not work, just pop up a new layer and try it on that. You can always merge it down if you like it, or trash it if you don’t.

To capture a lot of thoughts really quickly, just write enough of the word to remind you what it was and you can go finish it later. For instance, if the speaker is giving a list of five things, and she’s going really quickly, just write the first one or two words (or partial words) and leave space to fill in after she’s done with the list. It’s very unsatisfying to miss things because you’re still writing the first few words.

Thanks for asking, and good luck with your foray into visual practice!

…IF the panel is selected. As you know if you are a SXSW veteran, the community has a 30% say in the selection of panels. All you have to do to vote is create an account on SXSW’s PanelPicker, which right there gets you some solid geek cred, and then you can vote for mine or any other panel that you like, whether or not you’re able to go to the conference. (If you can’t go, pick the ones you want to read about afterward, ’cause they will be all over the blogosphere.)

Oh oh oh AND there’s this neat little tool that links your Twitter account to your panel choices. Check it out! It’s called FriendsPanels, and it lets you tag panels you’re on as well as panels you like. It doesn’t automatically “like” panels you vote on (yay), so your votes are still cast in confidence, but you can specifically “like” a panel if you want to call attention to it. Nifty!

Um, what are you still doing here? Go vote for my panel! (Please.)

Creating Games: Labyrinth 2
Weeks ago, I wandered into an Apple store to pick up an iPad for the first time. Naturally, I dragged my son along, just to round out the playtesting. He had a great time playing Labyrinth 2, a beautifully-rendered marble-maze game by Illusion Labs. (Labyrinth is also available for the iPhone.) When I got my shiny new iPad, that was the first thing he wanted to play. I liked it too so I got the free one and then eventually bought the game. After we’d taken turns playing a few levels, David said, “I wish I could make a level. That would be COOL!”

Guess what? You can.

On the main screen, there’s a little button labeled “Create.” If you tap it, you get a URL, an ID code, and a password. Put ‘em together and you get a drag-and-drop editor that lets you make all the levels you want — and then they magically appear on your iPad! I gather that the gaming community is disappointed that editing can’t be done right on the iPad, and I can see their point, but I was delighted to find out you can make levels at all. David was thrilled and immediately created a very challenging level. I playtested it and he made some adjustments, and now it’s tough but doable.

Conanza, Level 1

Maybe you can’t create all the same kinds of content on an iPad that you can create on a traditional computer, but maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe the kinds of content that you can create on (or for) an iPad or similar devices are sometimes things that you couldn’t create on any other kind of platform, like my visual notes or David’s latest Labyrinth 2 level, which was instantly delivered to my iPad all the way up in Vancouver, where I was stuck in the airport for a few hours last Sunday:

the Mom level

Best. Mother’s Day. Card. EVER. How cool is that?

3D Virtual Worlds: Avatar
I found Avatar (the game) while looking for Avatar (the movie) in the iTunes store. Created by Gameloft, it’s an actual 3D world, right there on the iPad. It’s pretty good, and I really admire what they’ve done with the controls given that you have to hold the iPad while you play it so you can really only use your thumbs. There are a few issues, but I expect those will be ironed out quickly. The premise is that you’re controlling an avatar and you have to go on missions. It’s a fancy levels game, kind of like Donkey Kong on steroids, where you run and jump and touch things and fight things.

Avatar, by Gameloft

The controls are very clever. There’s a thumb pad to move around with, and jump/shoot/other functions are handy buttons under the other thumb. The graphics are quite nice — not as stunning as the movie, but very pleasing — and the motion is smooth. And the fact that something like this can be played on a computer I can hold in my hands just blows my mind.

I do have a few issues with it. First, you can’t turn the camera around, at least not that I’ve seen, so if you have to retrace your steps you have to do it blind. Second, when you’re working on a quest (bring me 8 shrubberies*, for instance), the game doesn’t indicate how many shrubberies you’ve found. And dangit, I want to be able to pick a female avatar. Would that be so hard? And I want her to look like Neytiri, not like Barb Wire, please.

More 3D, plus Flying: Nanosaur II
I have Nanosaur II (by Pangea Software) on my iPhone, but it’s hard to play because the screen is so tiny and visual cues matter a great deal, and also because it chews through the phone battery. It’s much sweeter on the iPad. I can actually see where the little eggs are, and I can at last distinguish between mounted guns (that fire at me) and eye gate switches (that don’t) before getting close enough for an empirical test.

Nanosaur II

There are hundreds of games for the iPad, of course. These are just three that I like. Gameloft makes a whole set of action/adventure games (and others), as do Illusion Labs and Pangea Software. The games that are being developed for in-between devices are going to have qualities not found on games designed for other platforms, either larger or smaller ones. At first, a lot of them will look like games we already play, but gamers and game developers are wonderfully ingenious. Even the three I mention here are beginning to push the boundaries; I can’t wait to see what’s coming in the next several months.

excerpt from a keynote by Gardner Campbell that I recorded in San Antonio, April 2010

Allthis is an online auction where you can donate anything — things you’d sell on eBay, or your time doing something you’re good at — and the proceeds go to a charity or nonprofit. I was intrigued so I set up an auction for half a day of visual facilitation. If anyone bids on my auction and wins it, as long as they’re within driving distance and we can agree on a date, I’ll go facilitate a meeting of up to four hours for them. The money that they pay for the auction will go to the Mt. Diablo Chapter’s fundraising effort. My auction doesn’t open til May 10, which is the date that I guess the Mt. Diablo Chapter auctions start, but there are others that can be bid on now.

I really like the way Allthis makes it easy to give something that you really want to give, and still have the charity or nonprofit receive what they really need (money). From the Allthis press release:

Until now, if someone wanted to support a charity, there were only two options – write a check or volunteer. Beginning today allthis, the marketplace for things money can’t buy, offers a new way to support a cause: by turning an individual’s time and expertise into cash. Allthis is an all new way to give.

People have two options to support a charity – bid on an existing auction item or create a new one. Non-profits, clubs, companies, or any type of affinity group may also create teams to raise money together for a common cause, competing against each other to raise the most. The real winner is the non-profit, which receives the money from all the auctions in the end.

You can browse Allthis to find a cause to support, or if you ARE a cause (well, not you personally, but you know what I mean) you can set up a profile so that people can donate and bid on your behalf. It was very easy to set up the auction — only took a few minutes. It seems like a neat use of social media to facilitate what is essentially a barter system to support good causes.

I need an iPad because the iPad redefines portable computing.
It’s just possible that the laptop has too much overhead, and that we simply never noticed before. If I want to go sit on the back porch and read email, I have to unmount a couple of hard drives, turn on monitor mirroring, unplug my USB headset, and carry the laptop outside. That used to be fine because it was better than lugging a tower and monitor out there. But it turns out there’s another level of portability, almost satisfied by devices like the iPhone — but not quite. The screen and keyboard on the iPhone are too small for anything but really short emails. Forget document review or authoring — it’s really just too painful.

I want something bigger than the iPhone but smaller than the laptop, and I want to be able to pick it up in one hand and carry it outside — or pull it out on an airplane, even if the person in front of me leans back; or on a bus; or in the waiting room at the doctor’s office; or… you get the idea. I need an iPad so that I can overcome “the phone’s screen is too small” or “the laptop is too bulky,” which is true even though there’s no way I would have admitted either until there was a better solution. I need an iPad so that I can really work anytime, anywhere.

I need an iPad because I read and I write, and books are changing.
In this post, Books in the Age of the iPad, Craig Mod addresses the point that print is dying. He says that’s okay, though, and that having fewer books printed will result in higher quality of printed material overall. He also says:

“In printed books, the two-page spread was our canvas. It’s easy to think similarly about the iPad. Let’s not. The canvas of the iPad must be considered in a way that acknowledge the physical boundaries of the device, while also embracing the effective limitlessness of space just beyond those edges.

“We’re going to see new forms of storytelling emerge from this canvas. This is an opportunity to redefine modes of conversation between reader and content. And that’s one hell of an opportunity if making content is your thing.”

I think that’s just brilliant. “Let’s not.” Let’s invent formats that really work on this kind of device, and no other. Making content *is* my thing, or a big part of my thing, and I agree that devices like the iPad are going to change the way writers communicate with readers. I need an iPad so that I can imagine the possibilities for those new forms of storytelling — and so I can help invent them.

I need an iPad so I can use more of my skills in more places.
One of the things I do is visual facilitation (drawing on giant wall charts with big markers while a group discusses something). There are varying levels of portability: Sometimes I can just bring paper, tape, and pens, and tape the charts right to the walls or whiteboards. NMC has a nice set of portable walls for rooms where I can’t do that. But some rooms are just too small for the portable walls and also don’t have a place to tape the paper. I’ve also been in situations where the event was at a restaurant or other odd venue, where it’s just not appropriate or possible to set up the charts. And I’ve been in situations where the need for visual facilitation arises spontaneously, and I don’t have markers or paper or tape.

The iPad, and devices like it, may make it possible to do impromptu visual facilitation on the go. As Fred Lakin* points out in this post on graphic recording, it will depend on the resolution of the software, but if it does turn out to be possible, I could have an always-available set of “markers” and “paper” that I could use anywhere. It could be projected on a screen if one is handy, and the visual record would already be digital when I was done (I always spend time digitizing and cleaning up chart photos after meetings). I need an iPad so I can experiment with digital visual recording and, hopefully, help influence the state of the art.

I want an iPad so I can play games with it.
Okay, this may not be a need — although that could be arguable too, play being as important to learning as it is — but I really want to find out what kind of games we develop for devices like the iPad. Tim Bajarin says in a post on PCMag.com:

“There is some real innovation happening in the games space, as well. I downloaded the iPad version of Scrabble and found that it could be played with iPhones and iPod touches through the Bluetooth feature. You place the iPad down on the table between yourself and a group of friends. The iPad serves as the board, and everyone around the table uses their iPhones and iPod touches to create words, which magically show up on the iPad in the center.”

Okay, that rocks. What else can we do with this device? It reminds me of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age (warning: link contains spoilers). This is a device — in Diamond Age, it looked and functioned like a book — that “contains” nearly all the information you could need to know, and lets you access it when you need it — the ultimate just-in-time learning device. I want an iPad so I can play games, watch movies, learn things, and be curious, in addition to reading and working, whenever and wherever I want.

But none of those is the main reason I need an iPad.
The main reason is the same reason I needed to build a web page in 1994 when a friend told me to. (I thought he was nuts, but I did it anyway. It changed my life.) It’s the same reason I needed a Second Life avatar in 2006 and a Twitter account in 2007. I had no idea what they might be good for, but there was a sense that they would turn into something.

The main reason I needed all of those, and the main reason that I need an iPad, is because I don’t know what the best reason is. No one does. But with some things, you can sense that there is a “there” there. You can sense that this train is going places, and that those are places you want to be.

The main reason I need an iPad is simply to discover why people need iPads. Or, if I’m really, really lucky, to help invent why people need iPads.

*Small update: The blog author formerly known as [the author who, despite my best efforts, I can only identify as Visual Raccoon] has been identified. Sorry, Fred!

From the Prezi release announcement:

Prezi changes the way you think about presentations. It lets you arrange your ideas and images on a large canvas, where you can zoom around to show details and overview. And it is still very simple to use.

After a year in intensive private beta development, Prezi is going public on April 5. Please visit www.prezi.com and start to convince, amaze and take the day.

I’m still planning to try Prezi with some of the charts from my visual facilitation. Those should be very easy to set up, since I’ll just pop the cleaned-up chart graphic in there and then set a zooming path.

Meanwhile, congratulations to the Prezi team for creating — and releasing — such a clever little tool. I wish I could be at the release party, but alas, I will not be in Budapest anytime soon.

I spent the morning at Big Rock Ranch, which was once and may still be part of Skywalker Ranch (yes THAT Skywalker Ranch) and which is where GLEF makes its home. Marin County teachers and multimedia enthusiasts gathered to talk about multimedia in Marin’s schools. The event was sponsored by GLEF, the Marin County Office of Education, and the Marin Learning Conservancy.

The program was short — 8:30 to noon — but packed a big punch. Kristina Woolsey kicked it off by telling us all about the Golden Age of Multimedia and specifically the MacMagic Classroom, which started in 1991 at Davidson Middle School, and ran right up until last year. She showed a video of kids in the program that was just amazing: using multimedia in a collaborative environment to create projects that showcased learning and included student reflections on the process and on their own personal development.

Afterward, there was a panel discussion featuring two of the teachers from the 1991 MacMagic classroom (Karla Kelly and Steve Arnold), Kristina Woolsey, Reed School District Superintendent Chris Carter, and 8th grade teacher Anthony Armstrong. We talked about how technology tools can help kids get past learning blockages, and how teachers are really working on the same things now that they were then, although the tools have gotten more diverse and plentiful.

Anthony Armstrong spoke next, and he totally knocked my socks off. This is not to say that Kristina didn’t; I think my socks have been so repeatedly knocked off by Kristina that I just check them at the door when I go to hear her speak. Anthony teaches 8th grade history in Marin and he talked about how he uses Wikispaces in his classes. And he really uses Wikispaces. He knows it inside and out, and he pulls in videos and polls and Wordle diagrams and all kinds of other tools too. His students have to use primary source material that he pulls together and links from the wiki — including texts, videos, images, and everything you can think of — to construct their own understanding of events in United States history. Anthony is very firmly off the stage in his class, and the students are on it. His kids work collaboratively to understand why people made the historical decisions they did, to argue for other options that might have happened, to explain the context of events… they debate and write and record videos… and they do the wiki work as homework. In class, they work in groups using their own pencil-and-paper notes to have conversations about what they have discovered in their research. In short, at the end of his talk, all of us in that room were ready to enroll in his class. I know I was.

When he was done, the panel came up again to talk about how that kind of teaching and learning can happen in more classrooms. Anthony credited colleagues (in particular, Jennifer Carrier Dorman) that he met through their blogs for giving him ideas and helping him along the way, and pointed out that a lot of this work exists, because other teachers have put together things for their classes. He encouraged other teachers to reach out and contact someone whose projects they admire or have questions about.

All in all, it was an amazing morning. I came away with some practical things I can use, too, even though I’m not a teacher: a new angle for Smart Objects, which I’m struggling with for the K-12 Horizon Report right now; ideas for how to work on projects at home with my own son, who is in 3rd grade and not bored by learning, and who won’t ever be if I can help it; and a renewed desire to help public education be something more than what a lot of it is now, instead of just turning my back on it as I am so often tempted to do.

Thanks to all who organized and spoke at the event today. I am so glad to have gone.