Out of My Black Bag

The last few weeks have been pretty intense with travel.  My life has consisted of navigating a wild variety of travel modes, trying to remember my current hotel room number, presenting to fantastic audiences, conversing and learning, resting as much as I could, and not a lot of writing.

The most of Alaska I got to see…

Figure 1

Figure 2

Figure 3

I’ve been home all weekend, catching up with e-mail, doing a little bit of programming, and resting as much as I could.  The dog got me up at 4:10 this morning, so I thought I’d take the early morning wake to go through the  pockets of my computer bag, where I stuff things for later reference.  First out, was my camera.  The photo to the right was as close as I got to seeing Alaska.  It was overcast for the day I was there, and snowing.  The clouds lifted a bit for just a few minutes.

One of the more interesting conferences I’ve worked lately was the Ohio School Boards conference, in Columbus.  It was one of the largest audiences I’ve spoken to, and at least I didn’t have to follow Louis Gossett Jr., their closing keynote.  When I can, I always try to walk through the exhibitor’s hall, to see what’s new.  It was immense, and, for row after row, I saw nothing new.  And then, around the corner, I saw a machine, sitting on a table, with two men discussing it.  One of the men was holding a working gear set (see figure 1), and I knew then what it was.  Personal fabrication is a technology that many say will be the next killer app.  Basically, it’s like having your own personal factory.  You use AutoCad, or what ever, to design what you want, and the machine makes it for you. 

Earlier generations used starch as the building material, but this device uses plastic (see figure 2).  This one (Dimension BST 1200) uses plastic and can refine the textures down to a real sheen.  All kinds of things are possible.  When you want a cell phone, you buy the the chassis and then design your own phone shape and look.  And think of shopping.  Rather than having UPS deliver your lamp, you’d get the lamp’s design, downloading it directly into your fabricator, which would make the lamp for you.

This might be an interesting writing prompt.  What could you do with a personal fabricator?

I also ran across an interesting clicker.  There are probably a dozen of these remote voting devices out there that allow students to click back to the teacher the answers to questions, mostly used for anytime assessment.  What I saw that was new (to me) in the TouchPoint was a PowerPoint addon, where surveys can be embedded directly into your PowerPoint presentation, and as students click their answers, the graphs appear directly into the presentation slide — real time.  This is very cool.

Finally, and this was a first for me, the conference had an entire isle called the “Avenue of Answers” (see Figure 3).  It featured booths from various Ohio state agencies and other groups who were there to simply answer questions.  I spoke at length with the man who was in charge of distance learning for the department of education. 

Enough for now.  Just two short North Carolina trips this week before the U.S. Thanksgiving.

Below is a short video of this personal fabricator or 3D printer in action.