Lightning in a Bottle

With wireless network access on college campuses, professors have had a new challenge in the lecture hall - students surfing the web. Now, however, some students are actually using the technology in a productive way. In an article in the New York Times (www.nytimes.com/2003/07/24/technology/circuits/24mess.html, free registration required), students describe how they set up chat sessions to discuss the lecture live during class. It seems to be a way to counteract the anonymity of large lecture halls. Some professors don’t like it, but as long as the discussion keeps to the lecture, it sounds to me to be a way to take traditional one-way lectures and make them interactive. (Making quieter keyboards will probably help, though.) However, some students did admit that they sometimes got so deeply into the discussions that they lost track of the lecture.

I guess it could feed into your insecurities as a teacher pretty quickly. If they’re typing a lot, then maybe they’re bored; if they’re not typing at all, maybe what you’re saying is so unimportant that the students can’t think of anything to chat about…

The first sub-$1,000 Tablet PCs will be released in September, according to press release from the manufacturer TDVision. There will be two models - a 14 inch model, with swivel-screen and keyboard, for $999, and a 8.4 inch model with a separate keyboard for $799. You can read the descriptions at www.tdvvison.com/Press.aspx?NewsID=7. The big missing item would appear to be wireless networking, but maybe that will be in there by September…

eSchool News has a new paper on the connection between technology, No Child Left Behind (NCLB), and data-driven decision making. The student achievement tracking required through NCLB is so complicated that it is only truly possible through the use of data management systems. This article at www.eschoolnews.org/resources/reports/datamgmt/ gives a good overview of the situation, and some of the tools available in the marketplace.

Of course, this assumes that the NEA’s suit against NCLB isn’t successful. As described by EdWeek at www.edweek.org/ew/ewstory.cfm?slug=42nea_web.h22, the NEA is suing to stop implementation of the legislation until the federal government fully funds the requirements, as the legislation language requires. Several states are considering joing the suit, as the law is turning into a substantial unfunded mandate.

The massive National Educational Computing Conference was held in Seattle last week, and it was the first year that weblogging became a major topic. In fact, the conference itself was heavily weblogged, with a website set up just for NECC weblog discussions. You can read about it (for a long time, there’s a lot of comments!) at necc.edweblogs.org. It gives a good overview of educational weblogging as well as some interesting observations from the conference itself. Some comments were written from within presentations using live wireless connections. We’re not all that far off from live, Internet broadcasting of these conferences!

The spreading use of digital cameras and camera-equipped cell phones has created new challenges for bookstore owners in Japan. (They’re such trend-setters!) It’s called “digital shoplifting” - taking pictures of magazine articles and images, and then putting the magazine back on the rack. You can read about it at a Japanese page here. Yes, it’s in English!

More troubling is the that these cameras and camera/phones are so easily overlooked that they are finding their way to places where they shouldn’t, such as locker rooms. Schools need to be looking ahead and developing policies before some unpleasant incident takes place.

There’s a great website about the topic of time at www.time.gov. The main page tells you what time it is (accurate to .3 seconds) while http://www.time.gov/exhibits.html has links to interesting articles on such things as Daylight Saving Time. (For instance, did you know that it’s really called “Saving”, not “Savings“?)