Vroom vroom iPad!

Last week, my husband caved. I knew it was going to be one of us, but to be honest, I always thought it would be me.

He bought an iPad.

It became part of our day-to-day immediately - I love the sweet little thing (especially 'Plants vs Zombies'). It's so easy! So fast! So many cute little apps, look at them, they're adorable!

I was reminded of an analogy I thought of months ago, but didn't realise was true until now (because I was busy *talking* about iPads rather than *using them and learning about them properly*, naturally):

• Desktop (and laptop) computers are like geared cars.
• iPads (and their tablety kin) are like automatics.

Here's the thinking behind that:

• Desktops give you more control, but they're harder to use
• Tablets give you less control, but they're easier to use

I prefer PCs myself (stop laughing), and I'm quite happy to wander off into the more bewildering realms of 'My Computer' and tinker with what I find. Sometimes I mess things up terribly, and often I get confused. It's hard territory in there, and sometimes, when the task is boring or fiddly (installing new software for example) I'd really rather not. But I do have a huge amount of control - if I want to have a poke around the program files, I can.

With a tablet, you don't have to know much about anything to make them work, and nothing is boring or fiddly or a chore. It's all smooth. What you give up is the ability to wander around places like 'My Computer', because there isn't one - or at least, not one you can ever find to access.

I think, in a couple of years' time, the current (but starting to fade) idea that all computer users - from the highly skilled to the I-just-want-it-to-work types - should use the same machines will emerge as having been a bad call. The same machines that bewilder the less-skilled irritate the life out of the highly-skilled, so why should they be the same? No happy middle-ground has emerged (yes, pipe down Mac users) and the odds are good that that's because there isn't one. The two groups have different needs, why should they use the same machines?

We have different tools for different tasks for different users in almost all fields of life, and I can't see why computers should be any different - or how they've stayed different for so long.

And until the division becomes clearer, I'm just going to keep playing 'Plants vs. Zombies'.

Explaining the structure of XML

I thought of a good way to explain the structure of XML to someone who hadn't seen it before today:

XML is like Russian dolls.

Each doll has two halves, just like each XML element has two tags.

Each doll needs both halves to match up to be complete.

The dolls have to match up in order - the littler ones must always go inside the bigger ones.

(NB. I haven't managed to stretch this out to schemas yet, but I'm working on it...)

Inception: I think I've cracked it

Ok. I could be wrong, but I *think* I've worked out Inception. Which is to say - there is an answer, and this might just be it. Naturally, the following contains spoilers.

If you can prove me wrong, please do.


Here we go...

1. Cobb is dreaming for the entire movie.

2. Cobb is not the protagonist. Mal is.

3. Because we are watching Cobb's dream, we never actually meet Mal. This is a movie where we never meet the main character.

4. All the characters but Cobb - including Cobb's version of Mal - are dreamed by Cobb. All the things that happen are events dreamed by Cobb. Consequently - the entire movie is a McGuffin.

5. No, all of it. It's all a McGuffin.

6. It's a McGuffin because it's the story Cobb's unconscious has made up to protect itself. But one real thing did happen -

7. Cobb and Mal were indeed stuck in limbo together.

8. She got out.

9. He didn't - he's still there.

10. (Brace yourselves)

11. He didn't plant the suicide idea in her. She planted it in him. She did the inception.

11.5 Consider - on whose word do we have it that Cobb did the inception? Cobb's. We see them both reciting the lines about waiting for a train, but we never see anyone say it for the first time.

12. It didn't work.

13. Because inception doesn't work.

14. It's because Cobb's drive to be the protagonist was so strong that he couldn't accept the incepted idea, or with it, the truth that she was right the whole time, and that he was the one living in the not-real world. The story was made up by his subconscious as a way to protect him from the idea that he wasn't the protagonist.

15. That drive - to be the protagonist - was, in the story-pattern used by mainstream movies, masculine.

16. The movie was pulling an act of inception on you - planting the idea that the woman might be the agent, the protagonist. Female agents do not happen in our mainstream movies, our stories. The movie is a story about our stories and our stories are gendered. The story world were the men are always the protagonists, that is a not-real world. Those stories are not good for us. They're keeping us stuck in not-real thinking. We need better stories now.

17. It won't work.

18. Because inception doesn't work.

Embedded learning materials

Here is an example of how common cartridge materials can embed in websites like blogs.

This quiz material (it's QTI 1.2, standards fans) is actually hosted on cloud.icodeon.com by the good people at Icodeon, who are the only folk who are making a non-VLE-dependent Common Cartridge player at the moment (if you know of another, please let me know!)

It's embedded here the same way that a youtube video embeds - the content isn't present on this site at all.

It looks pretty shmick, but the key point here is that the content isn't present on this site. Publishing people I know you've spotted this already - that means it can't be copied, which means in turn, it can't be pirated.

Sweet, eh?

(Common Cartridge is a new educational content packaging standard by IMS global. More about Common Cartridge can be found here.)