Lightning in a Bottle

Ever watch the 1980s version of Star Trek, where everyone wears a little communicator on their uniform? Reality catches up with fiction once again. Forbes has an online article about a company called Vocera Communications that has developed just such a device. (They don’t hide the fact that they are working from that exact inspiration - their meeting rooms are named after Star Trek characters.) To use the two-ounce communicator, which is worn like a badge, you tap it and speak the name of the person you wish to call. It connects wirelessly to a server that processes the spoken request and tracks down the needed individual and opens a link to them. It can even patch through to a cell phone.

So, when you need to talk to the office, just tap the button. On the other hand, when the office needs to talk to you, they’ll find you no matter where you are.

The article looks at how the system has been working in a hospital, and you can read it at www.forbes.com/technology/2004/03/16/cx_ah_0316chips.html.

eSchool News has an article about a new distance learning initiative in Alaska (www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStoryts.cfm?ArticleID=4503 .) The Alaska Online project is a consortium of nine districts. Most of Alaska’s high schools have less than 100 students, and it’s virtually impossible to provide a comprehensive schedule of classes with the teachers in those buildings. In particular, it’s hard to offer college prepartory and higher-level courses. The online classes are designed to help fill that need.

All of the classes offered through the program are developed by Alaska teachers, and are available to participating districts at no cost. Districts outside the cooperative can register students for a fee. The local building is required to assign a mentor who can provide in-person support and enouragment to the student.

One reality check is that the learning styles of some students aren’t suited to online courses. As the population of participants extends from more highly-motivated, college-bound kids, there may be more challenges. As one superintendent notes, most of his students are Native American that prefer to see things rather than read about them, and have a strong need to understand the local use of the information. (Sounds like the average adult learner, too.) He’s concerned that “…that this type of learning will really alienate a portion of our kids.” On the other hand, with high schools ranging in size from 5 to 25 (no, I’m not missing any digits there!), he hasn’t got many other options.

The website for the consortium is at www.eed.state.ak.us/Alaskan_Schools/ACS/alaskaonline/about.html.

If you want fast access to the Internet from home, right now the two major choices are through your cable system or your phone system using DSL (for Digital Subscriber Line). Both cost in the $40 a month range in our area, and both have a variety of advantages and disadvantages that pretty much balance out. In rural areas, often the only choice is digital satellite, which is a bit more expensive still.

Soon, however, we may have the possibility of third option called Broadband over Power Lines , or BPL. Using new technology, your Internet signals would be sent through the same lines that your house uses for electricity. The speeds are quite high as well, reaching as high as 3 million bits per second. Another important aspect is that this speed is both ways, allowing you to send data at that high speed as well as download. The competing options all have much slower upload speeds than download speeds.

BPL has been tested in several cities, and is being rolled out to potentially hundreds of thousands of customers over the next six to nine months. The exciting aspect of this is that there is no new wiring, cabling, or other new infrastructure to set up - once the system is set up at the power company, you just plug a router into an electrical outlet, and you’re good to go. This is a huge advantage for rural customers, where the cost of stringing cable or installing new phone line technology is too expensive.

This might be one of those “disruptive technologies” if it works out. That’s a big if, though. We’ll know in a year or two if this was a breakthrough, or one of those “whatever happened to flying cars?” kind of things.

Check out the Slate article on this at slate.msn.com/id/2097131/.

I must admit, I have a big soft spot in my heart for encylopedias. (Of course, I was the kind of nerdy kid that bought a dictionary for fun reading in 6th grade.) It’s probably not surprising that sales of printed encyclopedias has dropped off enormously over the last fifteen years. CNN has an article about the changing world for encyclopedia publishers at www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/internet/03/11/disappearing.encyclopedia.ap/index.html. Many now offer their information over the web for a fee, and the electronic versions have many advantages, including staying current and having more multimedia options. (However, I’m beginning to wonder if they have any multimedia other than the video of Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It seems like every single article and demonstration of electronic encyclopedias I have ever seen refers to or uses this same clip.)

Thing is, even when electronic encylopedias are often available in the school library, most kids head out to the web anyway. It’s just what they’re used to. We need to do a better job of steering students to other kinds of online resources (databases of periodicals, reference libraries, etc.) to make sure they have a range of resources for their work.

I also think we lose something with online resources. I’ve always enjoyed looking through old encyclopedias for a chance to see what was the most current knowledge of that day and time. Only printed material captures that moment - electronic resources change daily, and the ephemeral nature of the information will leave no snapshot for the future.

And will we need to update Encyclopedia Brown to Internet Brown? It just doesn’t have the same ring…

Wired has an article today on a report that looks at student performance in cyberschools, and find that most score below the average of regular schools. There can be a variety of reasons for this, of course, including the possibility that struggling students may make up a larger portion of the online learning population. In reading the article, however, it looks to me that the bigger issue is how poorly charter schools are being managed in some parts of the country. In many cases these schools appear to be run by enterprenuers who know little about education, but sense a a new and potentially lucrative market to target. (One person interviewed has already had one charter school shut down, but is opening a new cyber-school.)

The article is at www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,62662,00.html?tw=wn_tophead_2.

Microsoft supports a number of researchers as they explore possible technology devices and applications. During their annual TechFest last week, a number of the projects were put on display for other researchers and journalists. The project that received the most press was the SenseCam. The device is worn around your neck, and during the course of the day it monitors motion and light. If it detects a change, it snaps a picture. It can record and store up to 2,000 pictures a day, which you can download to your computer.

I’m torn between the geeky part of me that thinks this is pretty cool just from a purely technical point of view, and the more neo-Luddite part of myself that thinks this is pretty narcissistic. (Does the world really need to collect over a half-million pictures per individual per year?)

I suppose for students, it could add a lot to note-taking - they’d have pictures of all the work on the white board or overhead. As long as they were looking forward, anyhow. If someone missed class, their classmate could email the images of any projected material.

On the other hand, it would sure cut into the excuses. “OK, class, now that we’re back inside from the fire alarm, please hand over your SenseCams so we can scan to see who pulled the alarm. Anyone who’s SenseCam was shut off will automatically face detention.”

Some schools are already keeping all classrooms and hallways under constant video recording. The cost of this continues to get lower and lower, with the cost of video cameras already under $100. I think it will be a standard part of school setups within five years. Are we ready for that?

Getting back to where this all started, you can read about the SenseCam at www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/ptech/03/05/visual.diary.ap/index.html.

Just like many people nowadays, I turn to the Internet when I have to do some research. It?s quick, easy, and accessible from my desk. However, I recently had an experience that reminded me why the Internet shouldn?t be the only place I go.
In addition to my ESD job, I occasionally write books for children. One project I was asked to do was a kit for kids to design and paint a necktie. (If you are now the proud owner of a child?s hand-painted tie on yellow silk, you probably have me to blame.) As part of the content of the book, the publisher wanted a section on the history of the necktie.
Of course, the first thing I did was to connect to the Internet and type ?history of the tie? into a search page. I came up with over a dozen sites that had various interesting pieces of information about when and how neckties came to be. (Did you know the earliest recorded evidence of neckties is the Chinese terra cotta warriors in Xian, China?) Almost all the web pages that I visited traced the origin of the tie in western fashion to Louis XIV in France. He was said to have seen a troop of mounted Croatians in a parade, and they wore colorful scarves tied around their necks. Louis loved the look, and started wearing similar garments himself, which he called “cravats” from the French term for Croat. The king being the standard of fashion, soon everyone was wearing cravats and a new trend was born.
I thought this was a great story, and having found it in multiple sources, was satisfied that it was accurate. I incorporated it into my manuscript, and was set to send it to the publishers when I decided to take a trip to the library to see if I could find any more information to round out the book. It turned out that in my little local library there was a copy of a book written about neckties that had far more information between its covers than all of the web pages I had found on the Internet. Even worse, it had an extensive discussion of the Louis XIV story, only to point out that it was no more than a ?lovely myth?! It turns out that while the neckware was inspired by the Croatian military garb, it was introduced into France before Louis was even born. The book even documented when and by whom the myth was first published, early in the 19th century.
Obviously, I updated my manuscript. I also learned (or re-learned) that the Internet is not the one-size-fits-all research tool that it is sometimes held out to be. It?s great for being current, and for ease of access to huge amounts of data. Now, however, good research practice means not only looking for more than one source, but more than one kind of source. We shouldn?t lose sight of the fact that books are still a valuable and irreplaceable resource, and the vast majority of them are available only on paper and not on the Internet. We?ll need paper-based libraries for a long, long time.
While many books and their contents may not exist on the Internet, you can access tens of thousands of articles from magazines, newspapers, professional journals and reference books through subscription databases. Unlike the average web page, these have passed through some form of editorial review, and provide a more credible source of information. These databases tend to be very pricey, but two of the best of these databases, ProQuest and eLibrary, are available at no cost in almost every school in our region through an agreement with Puget Sound ESD. ProQuest and eLibrary combine the ease of Internet searching with the reliability of professionally published materials. (You can contact Karen Farley at kfarley@psesd.org for more information.)

You can also check with your school librarian, who?s there to help you and your students navigate the entire world of information, whether its on paper or electronic. And tell them how much you appreciate them while you?re at it!

The Christian Science Monitor has a new article about student plagiarism using services from the Internet, available at www.csmonitor.com/2004/0302/p12s01-legn.html. It’s not much new if you’ve read about plagiarism problems before, but covers the bases effectively. Schools are taking two approaches to dealing with plagiarism (actually, three, if you count ignoring it). The first is to use tools such as Turnitin (www.turnitin.com), which takes parts of student essays and searches for matches in a gigantic number of online papers collected from all over. The second is to emphasize a school culture of how to avoid innocent plagiarism and to not engage in plagiarism overtly.

I think a combination of the two is best. I heard a story about this issue from my daughter a couple of years ago while she was still in high school. The language arts teacher announced to the class that she had checked online for plagiarism in the papers she had recently received, and had found a significant number of them had been copied. She announced that the students who had turned in downloaded papers could admit to it and submit a new paper without penalty. Those whom she had caught that would not admit it, however, would receive a zero for their paper.

As the teacher in question is older and not the most technologically adept person you’ll meet, the students thought she was bluffing. All of the student plagiarists stood pat, expecting that they were safe.

She wasn’t bluffing. She had used one of the Internet services and had a number of the students dead-to-rights. They received failing grades for their projects, with no make-up allowed. I expect that a few events like this coupled with a direct effort to recognize plagiarism as an unnacceptable practice would hopefully reduce the practice. (Of course, making some effort to create assignments that the students actually care about would help, too. But that’s a different topic.)

In this modern day and age, it’s not surprising that we are moving to submitting grants electronically. On the face of it, that’s a good thing - you don’t have to worry about mail delivery or paying for Federal Express because the proposal wasn’t completed until the day before it’s due. (Who, me, procrastinate?)

On the other hand, you are left at the mercy of the online submission system and your access to it. I know how to deal with having a paper document ready at the last minute - either the above-mentioned Federal Express, or the Post Office at Sea-Tac Airport, which is open until 11 p.m. and is a lifesaver for getting your postmark at the latest time possible. When you can’t get into the grant website, however, there’s no alternative. It’s a single point of failure.

We just submitted a fairly significant federal Department of Education grant this morning, and have been using the website for a couple of weeks. Even last Friday, four days before the proposals were due, it was getting difficult to access the site. As of yesterday, it was taking as long as an hour of attempts to finally get in. Using the site late into the evening worked, because by seven o’clock our time, not many east coasters were still on the site. Things perked along just fine, until 9:00 p.m., when the site was shut down for midnight (eastern time) maintenance. Arrgh!

So, we came to the morning of the due date, still with some documents to upload. I spent most of the time from 8:00 a.m. until 9:00 a.m. just trying to get into the site again, trying not to feel too panicky because the deadline is 1:30 p.m. our time. (Extra deodorant today was a good idea.) Finally things opened up around 9:00, and though slow, I was able to get all the documents finally loaded, double-checked and in by 9:45. Heck, almost four hours to spare!

Interestingly, the site asked me to fill out a survey about my experience. I gave the design and layout of the site good marks, and on the whole it was very easy to use - a good example of how technology can make things better for us. However, I made strong recommendations to significantly increase the capacity of the system, because the best-designed system in the world isn’t much use if you can’t get to it.