1040 STE : Revival : CosmosEx

CosmosEx

Earlier last year (which seems a *long* time ago now, for many reasons...) I got my hands on a CosmosEx device from Jookie, and since then, when time and geopolitical angst has allowed, I've been really enjoying using it with the old Atari 1040 STE.

It's a really powerful little device, but can be tricky to get to grips with, so I thought I would detail how I've put mine together and some of the things I've done with it. 

Installation and ACSI extension

First of all, I had a quandary about how to install it. I'm really *really* reluctant to make any modifications to an original ST case, so I wanted to try to find a solution that didn't involve any amateurish cutting on my part.

The unit fits neatly into the internal floppy drive space. It uses the floppy's molex power connector, and the existing floppy ribbon cable plugs straight in. That's the easy part.

The ACSI cable that allows for hard disk emulation, as well as all the other really clever stuff, either has to be routed out to the rear external ACSI port, or soldered directly to the motherboard internally. The latter was a non-starter for me and I didn't want to have to cut a notch or hole in the back of the case to route the cable, as suggested in the manual and other places.

Instead, what I did was to put together an extension cable, allowing me to route the cable out of the floppy drive slot at the side, and round the back to the ACSI port. In my machine, at least, there's just enough room between the CosmosEx and the case for the ribbon cable to squeeze through.

I've seen other users who have cut away the casing at the side, leaving a big rectangular gap, but I found I could access all the ports I needed on the CosmosEx without doing this. Two USB ports are obscured, but I can live with just the other two.

The ACSI extension cable was a little tricky to source parts for. I found a female-to-female 20 pin ribbon cable, but this needed a gender changer of some kind to connect with the supplied 20-pin female to DB-19 cable. I thought that some header pins would do the trick, but the ones I ordered were a millimetre or so too short! In the end I cut up an old floppy drive ribbon cable and laboriously soldered two male 20-pin JTAG header connectors to either end. Not ideal, but it works!

With it all working and at home inside the case, the next thing was to set it up for the various configurations I would need. I won't go through the basic initial setup, as there are some excellent guides on this by Jookie, DrCoolZic and others. Here are my configurations, though:

Working configurations

SD card

The SD card hard drive is the most straightforward to set up and use. First of all I created a floppy disk image with the ICD Pro hard disk driver and tools and then formatted and partitioned my SD card.

There's a good tutorial here, so I won't go over this again.

Once the SD card was ready, I set: 

ACSI 0 as SD Card
ACSI 1 as CE_DD

in the CosmosEx configuration tool.

Booting it this way gives me drives C to J for my SD card partitions and then CE_DD (CosmosEx Disk Driver) provides O for the CosmosEx tools drive (for accessing the configuration tool and other bits and bobs) and with L, the drive letter for USB sticks.

Using a USB thumb drive I was able to copy across all the HD-installable games and tools I needed. Awesome!

On the SD card, I have CE_DD.PRG in my AUTO folder. This does the same job as having CE_DD in the ACSI chain, but I like to have the latter just in case something happens to my SD card, leaving me unable to access the configuration tools at all.

There seems to be some confusion about what should be in the AUTO folder. Apart from CE_DD.PRG, I also have CE_STING.PRG (see below) but I also use Super Boot 8.1 so that I can pick and choose between these and others, depending on how I feel :)

Floppy games (no ce_dd)

Using the floppy disk emulation to load bootable games (what else?!) proved to be a bit trickier to get going. With floppy disk games, you really don't want to be using up valuable memory with hard disk drivers and the like, so booting from the A: drive before these kick in is what's required. Sometimes, though, menu disks' 'anti-virus' bootsectors seems to get in the way of things - they'll display first.

The most reliable way to configure this, I've found, is to alter the CosmosEx config, so that:
ACSI 0 is CE_DD
all the other ACSI slots are empty
Then, insert the floppy, reboot and mash the 'A' key so that the system boots from the floppy before anything else is loaded. It works most of the time, but some menu disks are a bit temperamental.

Again, I could just clear the ACSI slots entirely, but there's always a danger of not being able to access the configuration tools (say, if the network doesn't come up) if CE_DD isn't there at all.

HD image file on USB

Last year I opened a thread in the Atari-Forum, in the CosmosEx section, suggesting a useful feature (for me, at least) - being able to mount hard disk image files.

There were a few reasons for this. I thought it would be interesting to try out some of the files I've seen floating around on websites and forums, such as Minix, ST Mint and others which people have put together containing lots of hard disk-installed games, without having to use a new SD card each time.

Mainly, though, I wanted to be able to experiment further with a system I'd been building in the Hatari emulator, and I liked the idea of being able to move the same hard disk image file back and forth between the real hardware and an emulator.

Very kindly, Jookie and the team implemented this feature, with a nice interface in the configuration utility.

My HD image

My hard disk image file has 4 partitions and the main partition boots into Geneva and Neodesk 4. The second partition contains some files and applications, and the third has emulators which run on the ST. The final partition is a Mac formatted partition for Mac emulation under Spectre GCR! More of that later.

One of the main reasons for running this system on an image file is because Spectre GCR can only run on hard disks which contain four partitions or less, and the last one must be the Mac one. On modern SD cards or USB sticks this would mean a lot of wasted space!

ACSI Configuration

ACSI 0 is CE_DD
ACSI 1 is Raw Image

Boot process

1. Cold boot and allow CE_DD to boot from 'O'. Access the configuration tool and reset the HD image path in settings (the internal mount point occasionally changes between /mnt/sda1 and /mnt/sdb1, especially if you are plugging and unplugging the USB stick, so best to make sure it's right)
2. Reset the ST
3. Hit 'C' key so that the ST boots from drive C before CE_DD is loaded (I keep CE_DD in the chain so that if it all goes wrong - and that has happened to me - I can go back and allow it to load so that I can access the configuration tools)

It works really well, although it did take me a long time to figure out the processes above, and what was required for them to work each time.

Other things I've tried

SpectreGCR

Here are a few tips to get this working:

Disable the floppy drive in the CosmosEx config tool (it causes a disk error on starting up the Macintosh otherwise) Enabling the floppy drive once booted into System 6 results in 'This is not a Macintosh Disk' and a flashing A which effectively halts the system.

But, we can use emulators (Mini vMac and Hatari) on a PC or Mac to transfer Mac files over to the image file and then mount on the ST. At the moment, the only reliable way I've found to do this is using 400Kb floppy images which can be read on both, so anything bigger has to be broken down into chunks. I'd love to hear about a better way that works!

Within the Spectre application (I'm using 3.0), before booting into System 6, select the Mac partition so that's it's ticked and make sure to also tick 'Automount HD'.

The Macintosh system looks great on the Atari SM124 high res monitor, and if I can find an easy way to transfer files across I think this will be a lot of fun.

Minix 2

Various disk images for this system are available from here.

Configuration:

ACSI 0 is Raw Image
ACSI 1 is CE_DD (just in case!)

It boots fine, although slowly. I'm not really sure it has any useful purpose, but it was fun to see it boot!

ST_Mint 0.7

Disk image available here.

Works fine with the same ACSI configuration as my own HD image:
ACSI 0 is CE_DD
ACSI 1 is Raw Image
Remember to mash the 'C' key before CE_DD gets loaded!

Again, I'm not really sure what to do with it, but it looks lovely :)

FakeSTinG

If you've read my previous posts about getting the Mega ST up and running and connected to the Internet, you'll understand why I was interested to hear about the networking possibilities of the CosmosEx. Because the Raspberry Pi inside the CosmosEx is already connected to the network, it makes sense to allow the ST to piggyback on this connection rather than have to fiddle around with extra hardware.

The provided 'fakeSTinG' driver has to be loaded in the AUTO folder, so I've set up a separate Super Boot configuration which allows me to choose whether to load it or not.

Once loaded, any applications which support STinG should use the CosmosEx's network connection.

It works really well, but one thing is keeping me from using it much so far. For some reason, the telnet application I use seems to think the 'S' key is being held down, so it's impossible to use any telnet BBS's. I haven't managed to work out whether the fault is with my ST's keyboard (it's possible, some keys on the left-hand side don't work properly any more) or if something's up with the network stack. More investigation required...

Remote configuration

The CosmosEx has a lovely web interface, so you can remote control the Atari mouse and keyboard, change settings and upload floppy image files to the floppy disk emulator. Unfortunately, I've had a few problems where occasionally the device doesn't pick up an IP address from my router (quite possibly the fault of my router, rather than the device!).

If the configuration utility is accessible on the 'O' drive on the ST, the solution is to launch the utility, then press F8 to drop into the CosmosEx's Linux console and type 'ifup eth0'. This seems to kick the dhcp process into life and the device will pick up its IP address.

As I explained above, if CE_DD isn't loaded and can't be accessed, and the network isn't up, then you can be in a pickle. At that point the only way to reconfigure the ACSI chain is to open up the ST, pull of the CosmosEx, hook it up to an HDMI monitor and USB keyboard and then log in to the internal Raspberry Pi. Not fun!

Onwards

There are lots of other potential features/uses for the CosmosEx, including printer support, which would be really exciting if they can be implemented. Jookie has done an amazing job putting together the device and the software it comes with, and it's to be hoped that he and the community will continue to develop and enhance it.

I'm sure I'm not doing everything 100% right, so if you've any comments, let me know below!

1040 STE Revival! (with added joysticks)

There's no doubt about it, reviving my Mega ST has revived my Atari obsession too. I'm now up until the wee small hours every night browsing the Atari Forum and researching obscure bits of hardware and software!

The next step was, as I mentioned last time out, to rescue my 'original' STE - the one I grew up with - from storage.

STE Cleaning and RAM upgrade

First things first - it was *filthy* ! At least fifteen years of sitting near a window (before being stored away) also means that it's now very sunburned. Next to my Mega ST, which has obviously been kept away from sunlight in a studio for its whole life, the STE looks really yellowed.

Opening up the case, revealed decades worth of dust and dirt, so the first task was to give the upper part of the case a good wash and clean:

I'm not sure I'll go the whole hog and try to remove the yellowing, with hydrogen peroxide or 'Retr0Brite'. Although I've seen some positive reports, part of me quite likes the sunburned look, an indicator of a life well lived :)

A can of compressed air helped clean out the keyboard and the dust that had gotten past all the internal shielding to the motherboard. Much, much better!

Next, I decided to take advantage of the fact that the STE has easily removable RAM on SIMMs, unlike some other models which had the memory soldered directly to the motherboard. Replacement RAM is very cheaply available on eBay and elsewhere, so I decided to order the 4Mb upgrade. Now the STE will be able to handle some of the hard drive enabled games, networking tools and other software that requires 2Mb+  - ready for anything, in fact!

Post-RAM-upgrade STE sysinfo

Essential software

NVDI

One of the best pieces of software I've come across, for both the STE and the Mega, is also one that benefits from having more than a Megabyte of RAM. It's NVDI, a great graphics accelerator. Quite simply, it makes the whole system zip along like never before. Opening files and folders on the desktop really is noticeably faster, making it a real joy to use.

The latest version is 6, I think, but the v.5 download can be found on a number of websites and on the Atari Forum. It can be a little tricky to install from hard drive (it originally came on 3 floppy disks) and it does require a hard drive with a few megabytes of free space, but for GEM applications it's well worth it.

Super Boot III

https://sites.google.com/site/stessential/boot-managers/super-boot

Super Boot is an excellent boot manager for the ST. I found that I needed different boot configurations for different scenarios. Sometimes I would need NVDI, for example, but sometimes it took up too much memory. Sometimes I need the STinG networking stack and sometimes not. With Super Boot it's easy to pick and choose which components to load from the hard drive at boot time.

It's tricky to set up and get the hang of - there are lots of options, not all of which are clear. But there's a comprehensive readme file with the installer, which explains everything and tells you what files to put where.

I wouldn't be without it now and highly recommend it for hard drive owners.

Floppy imaging

With both STs set up and ready to go, my next task was to begin archiving the 250-odd floppy disks I had from back in the 90s. The aim was to preserve the data and to make it available for use in emulators. This is still very much an ongoing project, but I thought I'd mention a couple of tools which have proved essential:

JayMSA

http://phoenix.inf.upol.cz/~opichals/jay/

JayMSA on my Mega

JayMSA works really well for converting standard ST disks with no errors to .ST and .MSA image formats. It's quick and easy to use - especially when used on a system with NVDI. (For some reason, without the graphics accelerator some of the fonts can be partially obscured.)

It tends to baulk at disks with non-standard geometry (extra tracks and/or sectors, usually), copy protected games and disks with sector errors. But for the most part, it's coped really well with most of the disks I've thrown at it.

I can usually image around 25 floppies before my data partition is full. That's when I hook up my PARCP-USB adapter and transfer them over to my Mac, and to Dropbox.

Pasti

http://pasti.fxatari.com/


The Pasti format (.STX) contains more metadata about the disk's geometry and layout. Unfortunately it's closed source and the imaging tool doesn't appear to be maintained any more, so it's not ideal. But it is pretty much the only solution for imaging the slightly 'odd' disks, copy protected games and disks with errors. So far it's only baulked at one of my disks - not too bad.

Joystick repairs

Another work in progress - something to keep me busy while the ST is chuntering away imaging disks.

I've dug out three old joysticks, only one of which was still working (strangely, the one with my sister's name on the box - yes, I was a notorious joystick-wrecker back in the day!)

They all needed a thoroughly good clean!

Opening up one of the non-working ones, I was able to clean the contacts on the internal micro switches and bring it back to life, relatively simply.

Sunday morning spent cleaning and repairing this venerable old geezer #zipstik #atarist

A photo posted by @alectronic on Mar 13, 2016 at 6:28am PDT

This YouTube video was a great help, as was this wiki page, but luckily I didn't need to replace any micro switches (although a couple of the fire buttons are perhaps a bit worn, so could probably benefit from a new set). So, I now have two working Zip Stiks - anyone for a quick blast of Sensible Soccer?!

Sadly the third, a QuickJoy Turbo needs a bit of soldering doing, so that will have to wait.

It's great to get these cleaned and working again - especially given the eye-watering prices these are advertised for on eBay at the moment! (Ahm no' selling!)


Next up... I have some new gadgets...

Mega ST : Revival pt.3

Getting my Mega ST up and running and onto my home network was an achievement in itself, but since then I've found a few interesting tools to use on the network

UIPTool

I've been really enjoying using my PARCP-USB adapter for transferring files to and from the ST. It's quick, easy and reliable. But I came across a tool which could be really useful in situations where connecting up to another computer with the USB cable isn't ideal.

It's called UIPTool, and it's an open source project, available from https://bitbucket.org/sqward/uip-tools

One of the great things about it is that it doesn't require the STinG networking stack (in my previous post I documented the tricky process of setting this up) You just run the program and it automatically detects the network card and requests DHCP from the router. Very easy!

Once up and running, you can access the ST via a web browser from any computer on the same LAN. Directories can be browsed and files can be copied to and from the ST with ease.




James Mackenzie has put together an excellent YouTube video which shows the whole process. He has a fancy wee NetUSBee adapter, but it's exactly the same process with my hulking great EtherNEC box :-)



The UPTool author appears to be continuing to add features such as a built in FTP server and static IP support. There's certainly lots of potential for this, so one to keep an eye on.

TelStar

Telstar is a Telnet client for the ST. It's available (TELSTAR.LZH) from a number of FTP sites, including this one: http://storage.atari-source.org/atari/mirrors/kurobox.serveftp.net/internet/

Using this, I was able to access the excellent Atari-hosted DarkForce Bulletin Board System (BBS) and relive lots of 90s memories!

Telnetting in to the Darkforce BBS from my Atari ST #atarist #bbs #atari #90sthrills

A photo posted by @alectronic on Feb 14, 2016 at 9:10am PST

Next up

Getting the Mega ST up and running and interacting with other machines on my home network and out on the internet has inspired me to dig out my original, much loved 1040 STE from my Mum's house, as well as the hundreds of floppy discs stored away for safe-keeping, and rediscover some of the software and games from my youth.

I've also managed to get myself a CosmosEx, during one of the (very short) windows of opportunity. Once it arrives it should be a lot of fun...

Mega ST : Revival pt.2

With a pristine, formatted 50Mb hard drive (see previous post), my first inclination was to fill it with games from the vast quantity that have been adapted to run from hard drives (and newer gadgets such as the UltraSatan or CosmoEx, neither of which I can quite afford at the moment, sadly)

But this urge had to be resisted (for now!)

Networking my Mega ST

First priority was to get my EtherNEC box working. The EtherNEC has been somewhat surpassed now by the NetUSBee, a neat little device that as well as an ethernet network connection gives a USB port so you can plug in a USB mouse. But, you can only work with what you have :) It seems the NetUSBee networking part uses the same drivers as EtherNEC, so it'll be the same process to set up if you have one of the newer devices.

The EtherNEC is a big black box containing an old ISA RTL8019AS ethernet card. It has a standard ethernet port on one end, and a ribbon cable extending from the side. On the end of this is an adapter that plugs into the Atari cartridge port. Thankfully it's clearly labelled so that you know which way round to plug it in.

EtherNEC - photo from http://www.atarikit.co.uk/ethernec/ethernec.html

As I was using the PARCP-USB adapter, my strategy was to download all the files necessary, get them unzipped and into the right places and edit the required config files on my Mac, before transfer to the ST.

I should probably also mention that my Mega has 4Mb of RAM - if you have less you may struggle, unfortunately.

STinG

First of all, I grabbed sfl.zip from Step Two here:
http://hardware.atari.org/sfl/
This is STinG, the ST networking stack. It's also available from the ST Essentials site, but the zip file above gave me just the files I needed (the full STinG package contains lots of other files which are unnecessary in this situation)

I extracted the following:

/XCONTROL.ACC
/CONTROL.INF

/AUTO/STING.PRG
/AUTO/STING.INF

/CPX/SERIAL.CPZ
/CPX/SERIAL.TXT
/CPX/STING.CPX
/CPX/STNGPORT.CPX
/CPX/STNGPROT.CPZ

/STING/CEN_PLEP.STY
/STING/CEN_PLIP.STY
/STING/DEFAULT.CFG
/STING/DIAL.INF
/STING/DIAL.RSC
/STING/DIAL.SCR
/STING/DIALER.APP
/STING/ICON.RSC
/STING/LCLTLK.STY
/STING/LOCAL.FEE
/STING/LOGIN.BAT
/STING/MASQUE.STY
/STING/MIDI.STY
/STING/RESOLVE.STX
/STING/ROUTE.TAB
/STING/SERIAL.STX
/STING/TCP.STX
/STING/UDP.STX

/STING/TOOLS/MASQLOOK.APP
/STING/TOOLS/M_MASTER.APP
/STING/TOOLS/PING.PRG
/STING/TOOLS/PING.RSC
/STING/TOOLS/SAVE_IP.GTP
/STING/TOOLS/SHUTDOWN.PRG
/STING/TOOLS/SYSINFO.TTP
/STING/TOOLS/TOOLS.TXT
/STING/TOOLS/TRACROUT.PRG
/STING/TOOLS/TRACROUT.RSC

/STING/DOCS/DIALER.TXT

/STING/DOCS/FEE.DOC

/STING/DOCS/KERN_UPD.TXT

/STING/DOCS/REM_CTRL.TXT

/STING/DOCS/RESOLVE.TXT

/STING/DOCS/SER_STX.TXT

/STING/DOCS/STING.HYP

/STING/DOCS/STING.REF

/STING/DOCS/TCP_STX.TXT

/STING/DOCS/UDP_STX.TXT

/STING/DOCS/UPDATE.TXT

EtherNEC driver

The next step was to grab the EtherNEC drivers (etherne.zip) from here:
http://home.arcor.de/thomas.redelberger/prj/atari/etherne/index.htm

There are a few files here and you need to pick the right one, depending on the processor and OS used.

My system is a stock 68000 processor with TOS 1.04, so the file I needed was enec.stx and this went into the STING folder.

Configuration files

There are a couple of configuration files to edit. I could have used Edith or similar on the ST itself, but for quickness I used my favourite text editor, Smultron (the free, open source version) on my Mac, before transfer.


First up is /STING/DEFAULT.CFG

Under NAMESERVER, I changed the line to point to the IP address of my router, so:

NAMESERVER  = 192.168.1.1

Everything else can stay as it is.


Next, it's /STING/ROUTE.TAB

This was the trickiest to get right. The lines to be changed are right at the bottom - all the rest is just comments.

The spaces between the IP addresses need to be tabs (only one and definitely a tab, not a space!)

I read some different opinions on what was required - some places specified two lines, but my configuration worked with only one (everything else should be commented out):


0.0.0.0 0.0.0.0 EtherNet 192.168.1.1

The last number there is, again, the IP address of my router.

Strangely, the comments in the file say that the second set of numbers should be the netmask (in my case 255.255.255.0 but this didn't work - 0.0.0.0 did)

XControl configuration

Once those files were all copied over, I rebooted into TOS and opened up the 'Control Panel' desk accessory from the Desk menu.

Here there are two new options - 'STinG Internals' and 'STinG Port Setup'. I didn't touch STinG Internals.

'STinG Port Setup' is where the EtherNEC card is selected and the IP address of the ST set.

There are two dropdown menus at the top. The lower one should always be set to 'EtherNet'. The top one toggles between 'General' and 'Addressing'.

Under 'General' I was able to select the NE2000 hardware (the network card inside EtherNEC), and the MAC address was automatically detected and displayed.

Under addressing, I entered a static IP address and the subnet mask 255.255.255.0  The default MTU figure of 1500 worked fine for me.

Router configuration

Because of my setup I had to add the MAC address and IP address to my router's list of static IP addresses. Your Mileage May Vary :)

Pinging!

A quick reboot and I was able to run PING.PRG from within the STING/TOOLS folder.

It only accepts numeric IP addresses, so I tested it with 8.8.4.4, which is Google's public DNS server (and easily memorable)

It worked!

After quite a bit of fiddling, this is my venerable Atari Mega ST pinging the internet like it's the 21st century or something #atarist #atari #ping

A photo posted by @alectronic on Feb 9, 2016 at 9:01am PST

( If only it had been this quick - it took many reboots and much editing of the config files before I got to this point - you have this handy guide, so your pain will be saved :)   )

Apps

This post is long enough already, so next time I'll describe a couple of the apps I've been using, now my Atari Mega is successfully connected up to the net.

Let me know if you've found this useful, or if you have any tips for networking on the ST :)

Mega ST : Revival pt.1

This blog tends to randomly wake up and set off on new tangents, and here comes another one....

A few years ago I heroically saved an Atari Mega ST 4 from almost certain doom, as it was about to be disposed of from a huge uncaring bureaucratic institution where I happened to work. Getting it up and running and exploring what it's capable of in the 21st Century has been an interesting process, so the next few posts will describe what I've been up to, just in case it might be interesting and/or useful.

Growing up I cut my teeth (not literally, ouch) on an Atari STe, so I have a real fondness for the Atari platform. Letting the Mega go to waste would have been a crime! Plus, this machine came with a 50Mb Protar hard drive, which was the stuff of dreams back in the day.

Bringing it back to life was always going to be easier said than done. In the first rush of enthusiasm I cleaned it up, inside and out and it all appeared to be working fine. I bought an RGB to SCART adapter so I could hook it up to a modern(ish) TV, and invested in an EtherNEC box, which at that time appeared to offer the best hope for being able to easily transfer files to and from modern machines. However, this really required a hard drive - and my inherited hard drive had all of its partitions password protected and any people who might have originally known them were all long gone (not dead, just... not around any more)

So, my first attempts faltered. I had no way of accessing the hard drive and no drivers or tools to wipe it and start again. I found a few tools online that might have helped, but transferring them onto floppies was a painstaking process and when they didn't work my enthusiasm slowly ebbed away.

Fast forward to late 2015 and I decided it was about time to dig it out again and make a serious attempt at getting it all up and running.

Key to this process was my discovery, via AtariCrypt and the wonderful Atari-Forum, of Petr Stehlik's PARCP-USB device, which allows an ST to connect to a PC, Mac or Linux machine via USB and quickly transfer files back and forth.

After a long search this thread gave me the Protar drivers I needed for the ProGate 50DC. Using the PARCP-USB adapter I was able to transfer the utilities, update the driver and then format and re-partition the hard drive. I now had 50 whole megabytes of storage to play with! Unimaginable :-)

With that accomplished I had a few goals in mind. The first was to get the EtherNEC box working and find out whether a 30-year old Atari ST could connect to the internet successfully and do anything useful or interesting.

I also had a project in mind to back up a lot of old floppy disks that had been stored away since my STe days, before they succumb to bit-rot and the other perils of ageing magnetic media.

Plus, I also wanted to investigate a strange and intriguing expansion card that I found inside when I first opened up the Mega...

Over the next couple of posts I'll detail some of my experiences setting up the machine, getting it connected to the Internet, and beyond!

#ocTEL Into a routine

I've been settling into ocTEL and a routine of only dipping into what I need to (and can realistically achieve)

I realised quite quickly that as I'm at an early stage of my career in Learning Technology I don't have the same practice experience that others do, or much knowledge of methods and strategies and frameworks, but it's been really interesting to 'eavesdrop' on some of the discussions in the forums and elsewhere.

I think one of the tricky things to deal with (for me anyway) on an open and less structured course like this is the feeling of "being behind". With so much to read and posts continually coming in, I've had to constantly remind myself that it's ok to stop reading and take time to review what I've learned and think reflectively (and critically).

The 'badges' on offer are a great incentive, but at the same time I need to remind myself that not necessarily achieving every single one is ok too :)

Over the last week I enjoyed looking at the Pre-Course Questionnaires, and thinking critically about my own readiness and approach to learning.

I initially chose this questionnaire, as it seemed to be more in-depth than some, and offered more choices than just yes or no:

University of Houston - Distance Education
http://distance.uh.edu/online_learning.html

Although I scored highly on the computer skills areas, I ended up in the 'almost there' category, which I suppose was something of a surprise. Perhaps I was being cautious with my answers, or perhaps (more likely) I genuinely do need to work on preparing for any online learning I might do. Certainly it's been some time since I did any serious study myself, so I'm sure there are some "academic skills" I could do with brushing up on. So, in a way, that outcome has been a positive one, as it's made me take some time to reflect on this and work out how to improve these skills.

I like the idea that a pre-course questionnaire can be for the benefit of both the institution (to gain an insight into the capabilities and potential needs of students-to-be) but also for the potential student (to give them constructive suggestions and pointers about which areas they might need to pay extra attention)

I suppose what struck me most overall was that the questionnaires could easily have been tweaked (and only slightly!) to apply to 'traditional' on-campus courses. I wonder how many Colleges and Universties take into account things like IT literacy, independent study skills and time management skills when preparing to admit undergraduates or postgraduates to face to face courses?

#ocTEL Week 0 thoughts

Over the next couple of months I'm going to attempt to flout all the basic laws of time and space by participating in the Open Course for Technology Enhanced Learning (ocTEL), run by the nice people at the Association for Learning Technology.

I participated in the second run of the EDCMOOC last November and although I enjoyed it, I found it hard to keep up with all the various discussions and diversions and groups that formed and morphed and spread out.

Perhaps I relied a bit too much on Twitter. It's very easy to get disheartened when everyone seems so far ahead in their thinking, and I think Twitter heightened this feeling for me. (For some reason, right from the get-go, EVERYONE seems to be much further advanced on Twitter!)

I found it interesting just how much my perception of my own progress and accomplishment relied on interaction and feedback from others. Getting a comment on a blog post seemed to validate it, somehow, whereas a post or a tweet that went seemingly unnoticed was really disheartening. Obviously in course with such a huge membership there's no way to guarantee interaction, but when the whole premise of the cMOOC relies on connectivity and peer-learning - and on each participant being brave and putting stuff out there into the big wide webby world - it's bound to be disheartening when silence is the result.

I did find myself considering giving up on the EDCMOOC before the last couple of weeks when I got my teeth into the practical element of creating the final assessment piece, and this spurred me on to complete the course.

This time, I hope that setting some learning goals will help - both to reduce the pressure I put on myself, but also to keep me focused on getting what I want out of the experience.

I also like the idea of forming small groups for reflection and discussion, in order to keep things manageable.

Activity 0.1 Big and Little questions

I'm not sure I have one 'Big Question' I'm looking to find answers or ideas about. I'm still at an early stage in my career in Learning Technology, so I feel I have lots of listening and reading to do. That might seem like a cop-out!

I suppose if I had to pick one area of particular interest, it would be around video and audio, and creating media content in and around TEL. That's quite a wide area, but by that I would include opportunities for collaborative work on such content, perhaps in innovative ways over the web - perhaps I'll blog about this later.