From: Jim Freeze <jimfreeze@...>
Date: 2005-08-05T06:25:42+09:00
Subject: Re: FOSCON Photos

Cool.

Did _why release his interactive drb/irb code?


On 8/4/05, Phil Tomson <ptkwt@aracnet.com> wrote:
> In article <5cd596d605080413076e56006c@mail.gmail.com>,
> Jim Freeze  <jimfreeze@gmail.com> wrote:
> >On 8/4/05, Phil Tomson <ptkwt@aracnet.com> wrote:
> >>=20
> >> Last night in Portland we had a very good turnout for FOSCON (the Free
> >> Open Source Convention).  Speakers included:
> >>  - Why the lucky stiff (Music, shadow puppets, audience participation
> >> via drb, Rubyfun, animated Least Surprised)
> >>=20
> >> Why's performance is hard to describe.  Suffice it to say he had us all
> >> in stitches.  I think he's really on to something with this drb/irb
> >> audience participation thing. At a greedier venue patents would be
> >> filed. This will no doubt set the trend in interactive presentations for
> >> years to come.  Perhaps the end of PowerPoint is near. The age of
> >> mixed-media drb-enabled shadow puppets is here.
> >
> >Please describe more about this drb/irb.
> >
> 
> He had people fire up irb and then displayed some code they would need to
> log into his drb server running on his laptop.  As each person logged in
> the colors on the projected screen changed and it would divide into
> different regions so you could tell how many people were logged in.
> Audience members could
> change colors on Why's display by changine their code in irb.  It was
> very cool... though some wise guy changed part of the screen to
> white-on-white which made it impossible to
> read the code on that section (but Why got some jokes out of this too).
> Why's talk was extremely funny so it can be easy to overlook the fact
> that this was a very innovative idea for creating an interactive
> presentation.  Most presentations are all one-sided: A speaker delivers
> some information to an audience - there may be a Q&A session afterwards,
> but other than that it's not interactive at all.  What Why did last
> night, I've not seen before: He invited the audience to directly
> participate and even effect his presentation.  This aspect deserves a lot
> more examination.
> 
> One can imagine variations on this theme: For example you could run a
> webrick server on your laptop and allow audience members to interact with
> (and potentially effect) your presentation through their browsers.  Lots
> of potential uses: audience voting in real time, for example.  Code
> contests with the audience.  It's great for tutorials (This is how Why
> used it): you get people to actually try out the code you're talking
> about with some kind of feedback to the speaker.  Nobody gets bored.
> 
> I think that Ruby historians and sociologists will look at this
> event as a seminal development in the direction of interactive teaching.
> Oh, and two shadow puppet birds debated teaching methodologies just
> prior to this part of the show - that was no accident.
> 
> 
> Phil
> 
> 


-- 
Jim Freeze