Lightning in a Bottle

So, is the stuff on your hard drive important to you? How would you feel if it was all suddenly, irretrevably lost? Have you done anything to protect your data?

There I was last week, doing some reading at my desk, when my desktop computer starting making a noise like someone bouncing a golf ball on the tabletop. I tapped the keyboard to wake the computer up to see what was going on, and it wouldn’t respond. I pressed the reset key to restart the computer, and got nothing but a plain grey screen. After various ways of working the problem, it became clear what was wrong - my hard drive had crashed. Utterly, totally gone, with all 12 gigabytes of data. No preliminary symptoms or warnings, no evil virus or deadly attack, just a four-year-old piece of hardware that reached the end of it’s life cycle.

This sounds like a total disaster, of course, and it would be but for one thing - I had virtually everything important backed up. Actually, most of it is backed up twice. I have an external hard drive on my desk, and we have a file server for network backup as well. While it was a mild hassle to install a new hard drive and re-install the necessary applications, it wasn’t all that difficult. (Twenty minutes to put the new hard drive in, and it would have taken less if I hadn’t left the RAM out when I first put it back together. OS X took about 30 minutes to install, and the other major apps took another 45 minutes.)

It always pays to have a disaster plan in place, because it’s not a question of if your computer breaks down, it’s a question of when. How many documents, or pictures, or web bookmarks would you lose? If you have a CD or DVD burner on your computer, take a few minutes each month and record a copy of your most important files. The disks are fairly inexpensive, and certainly cost a lot less than trying to re-create any files that are lost. Then store them somewhere else - it won’t help if you computer is destroyed in a fire if the CDs are destroyed, too.

On a more humorous note, one of my favorite comic strips is Foxtrot. They touched on this topic last week, and you can see the strip at www.ucomics.com/foxtrot/2004/04/09/.

It’s spring, the time when a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. But how to know if it’s true love or merely an infatuation?
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Here is one of those ideas I want someone to use in a classroom and report back to me how it worked: Wikibooks are free, open content textbooks. The site contains over 50 textbooks in various stages of development, as well as links to other wiki references. Users, that is anyone with a desire, can read, edit and write the texts. What’s a wiki? A website that is editable by anyone. There is real appeal
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In an article from the Journal Albion, Camille Paglia looks at the impact of modern media on our ability to read, to process, and to interpret images with depth and insight. She describes the activities she uses in her university classes to help students learn to take the time to really examine images in meaningful way, rather than leap from image to image as we typically do with modern media. I don’t agree with everything she has to say (she sees sexual messages in a lot of unusual places, such as statues of saints), but it does provide some food for thought. The article is at www.bu.edu/arion/Paglia_11.3/Paglia_Magic%20of%20Images.htm.

You can find K-12 activities similar to this at the National Archives. To compliment their online collection of hundreds of thousands of historic photographs, documents, and artifacts, they have developed a series of analysis worksheets for students use to guide their observation and investigation of original source materials. The worksheet for photographs starts out with “Study the photograph for 2 minutes.” That all by itself is a hard task for many of our kids! The NARA Digital Classroom site is at www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/index.html, while just the analysis worksheets (for images, documents, artifacts, maps, sound recordings and more) are at www.archives.gov/digital_classroom/lessons/analysis_worksheets/worksheets.html.

The private company K12, founded by William Bennett in 1999, has contracts in several states to run virtual charter schools. Funding for several of these schools is in jeopardy due to questions about how the contracts were negotiated. Wired has an article today (www.wired.com/news/politics/0,1283,62889,00.html?tw=wn_story_page_prev2) that looks into the controversies in Florida and Idaho. Much of the concern revolves around the alleged use of political connections to land the multi-million dollar contracts.

Here are some more links for your researching enjoyment:

Technology and Achievement: The Essential Work of School Leaders, A Shared Vision for Student Learning. This is a series of downloadable articles from the Fall 2003 issue of Threshold, an online educational technology magazine. The articles are relatively brief and readable, ideal for handouts. www.ciconline.org/AboutCIC/Publications/Archives/threshold_fall03.htm .

Key Building Blocks for Student Achievement in the 21st Century. This is the fourth ed tech report from the CEO Forum on Education, which looks not only at the link between ed tech and student achievement but also looks at the “21st Century Skills” that our students should have. www.ceoforum.org/downloads/report4.pdf .

One-to-One Computing in Maine: A State Profile. The Metiri Group published this initial report on the massive computer initiative in Maine. There is little direct data on student achievement because the report is from early in the program, but the opinions and attitudes of students and staff are quite striking. http://www.metiri.com/NSF-Study/ME-Profile.pdf .

A Decade of Reform: A Summary of Research Findings on Classroom, School, and District Effectiveness in Washington State. Ok, this isn’t directly related to educational technology, but this study by the Washington Schools Research Center provides some really interesting information contrasting schools that are either successful or unsuccessful in moving students to success on the WASL. The conditions for success on the WASL are (unsurprisingly!) the same conditions we should be looking for if we want the successful application of technology. www.spu.edu/orgs/research/ADecadeofReformOctober192003v5.pdf .

I spent a fair amount of time doing a research report on the impact of educational technology on student achievement, and was honestly surprised by the amount of information I could find. I’ll put a link to the PowerPoint presentation after I fix a few errors, but for the meantime I’m here are links to some of the best reports and overviews that I found. (I wouldn’t read then all at once unless you want to risk an attack of narcolepsy.) What was interesting to me was how some themes came up over and over. However, is it surprising to find out that one common finding was “it isn’t what you have, it’s how you use it”?

What was informative was how important it is to have strong leadership, a school or district-wide shared vision of the use of technology, and tying the use of technology directly to desired learning goals. As an overall finding, the use of technology has the greatest impact on student achievement (yes, even on standardized tests and the WASL) when it is used in constructivist/student-centered/project-based learning. Then again, students learn better in that kind of environment without technology, so again this shouldn’t be a big shock.

Ed Tech Clearinghouse. Put together by Rita Hale from ESD 112, this site gives an overview of the research on educational technology, with links to resources. A great starting point, and there will be some overlap with the resources I list. www.edtech.wednet.edu/Resources/research.

Research on computers and education: Past, present, and future. A research report for the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation by the Washington Schools Research Center and Jeff Fouts. www.gatesfoundation.org/nr/downloads/ed/evaluation/Computer_Research_Summary.pdf.

The Learning Return on Our Educational Investment. This report looks at the question of educational technology on a cost-for-return basis. One of a number of good papers from WestEd. www.wested.org/online_pubs/learning_return.pdf.

More tomorrow -

IM (instant messaging) has started to infiltrate into language arts classes. The Baltimore Sun talks with some teachers and students about the inadvertent use of the many abbreviations and inventive spellings that are used in text messaging (btw for “by the way”, gtg for “got to go”, or my personal favorite “pos” for “parent over shoulder”). The article is at www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/carroll/bal-ca.instant05apr05,0,4736145.story. There is actually some research that correlates use of email and instant messaging with higher test scores, so all that writing is doing something good, even if it isn’t spelling.