An adventure with a cross-country klunker

This project I am about to describe and reflect on was about the experience of using a process of information inquiry to learn something that was personally interesting to me.  The process I was to engage was developed by IU professor Dr. Annette Lamb called the 8Ws.  The process involves watching, wondering, webbing, wiggling, weaving, wrapping, and waving.

For information to be important there has to be a need for information.  Watching is about exploring, "becoming more in tune with the world" through observation, reading, listening, discussing etc.  Wondering is about asking questions.  It's about taking inventory of the things you know and have observed as a way to define a topic for exploration.  Choosing a topic was difficult because I came to realize that I was not really interested in anything that was going to take time if there was not a real and personally significant and practical purpose for whatever I was going to investigate.  I discussed ideas with my wife and brother who offered possibilities.  The ideas we discussed were significant but not ones I was ready to commit time to at present nor did I want to deal with the emotional issues that would be involved.

I finally decided to find a solution to a problem I encountered while trying unsuccessfully to install a new operating system on a retired but functional laptop.  From a discussion of  computer operating systems I had had with the school's IT, I learned of an open source operating system called Ubuntu Studio that was said to be developed especially for those interested in multimedia production.  I downloaded the software, burned a disk and began the installation process.  The software loaded and nothing looked familiar and nothing would work until an Internet connection could be made.  The computer could not access my home wireless system.  After repeated and unsuccessful efforts to get connected to my network, I just abandoned the project because there was no real need or urgency.  Just an experiment that failed.  That was nearly two years ago. 

As I noted in an earlier post to this blog, I had to get serious about what I knew and what I didn't know in order to be able to find a solution for an unsuccessful installation.  Finding information was not difficult.  Ubuntu's website was well organized and easily navigated.  However it took a lot of searching, reading of explanations and looking up definitions of terms.  Webbing (reading, viewing, listening, searching, identifying useful information), Wiggling (accepting, incorporating, rejecting information, evaluating information resources) and Weaving (synthesizing, processing information)  became time consuming activities but because I knew I was in the right place and finding relevent information, it took time not so much to find the information as in trying to decide what I needed.  The instructions said to download the software and burn a disk for installation.  Over all five attempts were made to get a successful download of the software.  (4 gigs takes a long time to download even with a cable connection to the Internet)  Instructions said the computer would boot and install the new software directly from the disk if the boot sequence were immediately interrupted when the computer was powered on and the optical disk drive was entered as the primary boot source.  Three disks and three attempts were made to boot the computer from the burned disks.  None worked.  I went back to the Ubuntu website looking for what to look for and what to do to determine if the burned disk was without error.  There were a couple of programs offered to check the burned disk for error.  They sounded complicated and confusing and I wasn't sure that pursuing those options would be successful.  I did discover a Ubuntu webpage that offered screen shots of what the files should look like if the optical drive were opened.  That test revealed that three burned disks were defective.  I made a fourth try to download the latest release of an Ubuntu operating system that was not specifically the "Studio" version I was wanting.  The computer must have run the download most of the night.  After reaching school the next day, I immediately burned a disk and opened the drive to view the written files.  Success at last.  Not the operating system I wanted but at this point I was wanting to see if anything could be successfully installed on the waiting computer.

Arriving home that evening, I was able to boot and install directly from the disk as the instructions said I could.  I began to test the software that was included in the download.  Every program opened successfully except Foxfire, the web browser.  I discovered the wireless radio in the computer did not seem to be functioning,  hardwiring the computer to my network allowed me to connect to the Internet where I discovered there were 292 updates to the April 2010 version that had just been installed.  I instructed the computer to execute a download and I went to bed.  Not until I came home from school did I discover that the program had been successfully updated.  While I have a successful installation of an open source operating system and opensource software that to this point opens all my Windows creations, it is not the Studio version that I want.  I have a "Studio" disk that burned successfully.  I have not attempted to install the contents of that disk because the information I have read leads me to believe that installing from that disk requires more attention from me than just interrupting the boot sequence.

What remains of the inquiry process according to Dr.Lamb is Wrapping (applying information for a solution or for meaning, creating a product), Waving (communicating, sharing ideas with an audience) finally, Wishing (adjusting for additional questioning, assessing the product and reflecting on the process).  These will be discussed in the next post.