Lightning in a Bottle

Palm introduced two new Palm handhelds today. The Palm Zire 31 is an entry-level color handheld for $149, and the Zire 72 has a built-in 1.2 megapixel camera and Bluetooth wireless networking.

The Zire 72 replaces the 71, with a much higher resoultion camera, faster processor, more memory, and a variety of other improvements. The Zire 31 is a new mid-level model that doesn’t replace anything, just adds a step between the monochrome 21 and the color 72. For a good overview of the features of the two models, check out these reviews at www.brighthand.com (Zire 72 here and Zire 31 here.) Forbes also has a quick overview here.

Will the Sony Libri? finally start to change the acceptance of electronic books? Only available in Japan for now, this device is the first consumer product to use the E Ink process. E Ink uses microscopic capsules of ink to create black-and-white displays of 170 dots per inch (or dpi), which is about the clarity of a newspaper. It costs the equivalent of $350, can hold around 500 books, and can change page displays 10,000 times before replacing batteries.

Forbes has an overview and photograph of the new product, along with some conjecture about the future of the electronic book. The article is at www.forbes.com/personaltech/2004/04/26/cx_ah_0426tentech.html. I think devices along these lines will find a very successful niche in the education market in the next few years. It’s certainly cheaper, lighter, and less cumbersome than the laptop solution mentioned yesterday.

With book budgets going up and laptop prices coming down, it was only a matter of time until the funds get shifted. At Johnson Elementary in Dallas, Texas, that time is now.

According to an article from the Associated Press (story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=562&ncid=738&e=4&u=/ap/20040427/ap_on_hi_te/digital_textbooks), the school is responding to several trends. Enrollments keep climbing, and they have a constant shortage of books - it takes three months to get new books after fall student counts. One laptop can hold normal textbooks in digital form (which many publishers are making available now), as well as hundreds of other electronic texts. In addition, wireless networking makes online resources available to the students wherever they are.

The contract with IBM provides the laptops with texts already installed for $1,350. The computers have also been engineered for a more rugged environment, using a circuit that senses when the computer is falling to shut down the hard drive in midair to prevent damage to the data.

File this under, “see this is why I warn people about the evils of copyright infringement”: As reported in the Arizona Republic, late last week Federal Agents, armed with sealed search warrants, raided Deer Valley School District in Arizona to search for pirated music and movies. The district received no warning and the school network was down the entire day.

This is a chilling reminder of why a district needs to have a clear AUP and a Copyright Compliance Agent. Expect to hear more about the newly formed Intellectual Property Task Force’s aggressive copyright enforement program.

Ed tech people often joke about directly implanting the computers into students’ or teachers’ brains to just bypass that messy learning stuff. As is often the case, science fiction is catching up with science fact.

According to an article in eSchool News (www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=5003), the Food and Drug Administration has approved the first clinical to allow the implantation of computer chips into the brains of paralyzed patients. If successful, the chips will allow the patients to control a computer just through thought alone. It offers the potential for a significantly improved quality of life for a variety of disabled people.

As this technology expands in use (and you know it will) the kinds of patients that will benefit will grow. Sooner or later, people that we currently think of as healthy will see a need to have some kind of cybernetic enhancement. Will we need to develop school policies about the allowable use of implants on test-taking?

This isn’t that far off from reality. The National Institute of Health began experiments with the use of human growth hormone to help children with underactive pituitary glands back in the 1960s. Due to the scarcity of the treatment (the hormone had to be harvested from cadavers, and was in very short supply) it was only used for children with relatively extreme stature problems. However, with the advent of genetic engineering, it is now possible to manufacture the hormone in much greater quantities.

With greater availability, the definition of “short” became a matter of opinion. A black market for the use of the hormone developed, with many parents buying it for their children not because they were short, but because they wanted them even taller - maybe 6′ 2″, not 5′ 11″. That could make the difference between being the third-string quarterback or the starter.

Last year, the FDA (which opposes cosmetic use) approved the prescription of human growth hormone (HGH) for otherwise healthy students who would be shorter than 5′ 3″ (boys) or 4′ 11″. The treatment typically adds 2-3 inches in height over two or three years of daily injections, at a cost of up to $25,000 per year. (There is also a popular belief that HGH will slow the aging process. Do a Google search with the term “hgh” and it’s very eye-opening.)

I think we’ll end up looking at similar issues with brain implants, especially when the chips get so small that they can be popped in with outpatient surgery. A quick trip to the doctor for laser eye surgery to fix my astigmatism, and a quick shot of better spelling and math chip enhancements, and I’ll be on my way.

A new set of rules (or protocols) that drive the underlying mechanism for the Internet are being tested by researchers. One version, called BIC-TCP, dramatically increases the data speed of the network in the lab. If translated into use, a current high-speed home connection could run up to 6,000 times faster.

The original protocol (TCP/IP) was developed in the 1980s, and the size of networks and the volume of data has grown tremendously. The new protocol is designed to handle that data more quickly and effectively, particularly in areas of data congestion.

So at the rate things are going, pretty soon we’ll have high-capacity wireless Internet connectivity anywhere, anytime, almost free, and we’ll use cheap cardboard computers to access it (see previous article). Just what will that mean? Will ebooks finally take off? If you have virtually infinite storage capacity on a network, virtually limitless wireless capacity to send data, and inexpensive high-resolution devices for receiving and displaying that data, will we actually see the shift away from the printed book that has been predicted for so long? (It will certainly be cheaper and more environmentally friendly than huge printed books.) It will be very interesting to see where we are in five years.

Of course, we will still have millions of books under copyright (now extended to 75 years past the death of the author) that will be left outside this technology, often for lack of anyone to contact to obtain the permission to re-publish in digital form. Nobody ever said the issues created by technology would be easy to resolve!

You can read more about the new protocol (warning: somewhat geeky) at story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/nf/20040415/tc_nf/23720&e=4.

“Oh, nuts, the computer just went down. Honey, would you print me another?” Researchers at Xerox have developed printer technologies that should soon result in the ability to print circuits in a process very close to inkjet printing.

Integrated circuits need three kinds of parts - conductor, semiconductor, and dielectric. The Xerox team can now print each of these components on paper or plastic, using specialized inks that work fine at room temperature, and in normal air (not currently possible with silicon-based chips). What they can’t do yet is print all three at the same time, but they anticipate getting past this problem soon.

The applications of this technology range pretty widely, but the first areas where it is expected to be used are rollable computer displays, and making Radio Frequency Identification Device (RFID) tags much less expensive. RFID chips replace barcodes, and use radio signals that allow scanning from a short distance. They’ll be used on store items, library books, and almost certainly on school ID tags sometime soon. Actually, it’s sort of a good news/bad news situation - it will be much cheaper for us to tag and track inventory wirelessly, and it will be much cheaper and easier to tag and track people wirelessly, too.

InformationWeek looks at this technology at www.informationweek.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=18901869.

Instead of laptops, all of the 7th-grade students at Ensign Intermediate School have their own PDAs. While other schools are purchasing laptops, the staff at this middle school chose handhelds instead.

It certainly makes sense. While some laptops are down in the $1,000 range, the handhelds purchased by this school cost $209. In addition, there are far fewer hassle with battery power and other headaches associated with full-fledged laptops.

Everything seems to be in the honeymoon phase right now, but this article at www.detnews.com/2004/schools/0404/16/a02-124874.htm will tell you more about the intitial impressions and expectations of the students and staff trying out this new technology.

A panel of educators from across Florida has recommended that the state pursue a one-to-one laptop program for students. Convened by a state legislator, the 15 educators studied laptop initiatives across the country, and also examined the level of infrastructure currently in place in Florida before deciding that the model can be effective, and that the state can handle the task.

Chaired by Dr. Tina Barrios, supervisor for instructional technology for Manatee County schools, the panel felt the time was right for such a program. However, it has to be done correctly. In making the announcement, Dr. Barrios said this:

“We tried to take the best of the best, because certainly some of the laptop initiatives were not as successful. In some cases, what they did was find a pot of money and dumped the laptops in the schools but they didn’t have the infrastructure to support it, they didn’t have professional development, they didn’t have buy in from the staff and they didn’t have a good implementation plan.”

I’d say that pretty well says it all. The entire article is at www.bradenton.com/mld/bradenton/news/local/8417454.htm.

What is it like to be a student at on online high school? Student Cody Wall has written an article about the Utah Electric High School, published appropriately enough in their online school newspaper The Electric Buzz.

Now ten years old, the school has over 19,000 students enrolled, and employs 88 teachers. Cody’s article gives a history of the development school, and an overview of how it operates today. It’s an interesting student-eye view of this educational trend. You can read it at www.my.highschooljournalism.org/ut/saltlakecity/ehs/article.cfm?eid=1661&aid=21562.