Just in case you need confirmation for what you already now, there’s a news story out that gives us an exact figure: 83% of all email in the U.S. is spam.
I’d write more about this, but I have to go clean out my mailbox. Again.
The overlapping functions of digital still cameras and video cameras continues to blur the lines between these two kinds of devices. There is a pretty good article on this topic today at USA Today. The truth is that no camera does both well - they either take better still images than video, or better video than still images. However, the quality of the video captured by a still camera (or the quality of stills captured by video cameras) continues to improve to the point that for many users, the quality is good enough to trade for the simplicity of carrying around one device instead of two.
Looking at educational purposes, if the point of a video is to capture a student sharing thoughts about their work to put into an electronic portfolio, many of the newer digital still cameras will do an acceptable job. It may not be good enough for the evening news, but it captures the content you need quite efficiently. And as time goes on, this quality will continue to improve. (I have seen few electronic technologies improve faster than digital photography.)
Heck, my new Palm not only keeps track of my calendar and contacts, it also takes digital pictures and video. It’s not great quality, but it’s passable. In two or three years the equivalent models will be as good as a standalone camera is today. In essence, the camera will be free!
There’s another article today on the concept of people storing their whole lives on the computer. Microsoft is researching ways to manage the enormous amount of data we will start accumulating so that we can actually find that one picture we want from the millions we have stored.
At least one company has already released a hard drive that will store a terabyte of data for $1,200. Just three or four years ago, that level of storage was only affordable to large corporations. A terabyte is a trillion bytes, or a thousand billion bytes, or a million million bytes. That’s probably enough to record every conversation you have in your entire life, or record one picture every waking minute for eleven years.
Needless to say, there are a lot of privacy issues at stake here. Very shortly you will need to assume that, unless you are alone in the wilderness, the odds are that someone nearby is recording you. The devices will be so small and inconspicuous (Microsoft is anticipating jewelry that does the recording) that you will never know where it is.
Never mind the fact that we’ll end up spending more time looking at what we did in the past rather than living our lives. I suppose that will get to be self-limiting, however - who will want to look at pictures of themselves yesterday, if they spent all their time yesterday looking at pictures of the day before?
The other comment in the article that struck me is that “we’ll never need to throw anything away.” As someone who struggles to break free of deeply ingrained packrat tendencies, this could set me back years.
I have been looking at a software system from ETS called Criterion, which is an online essay-evaluation program. In other words, students write essays in the system in response to a large bank of prompts. The artificial intelligence in the software compares the submitted work and generates a detailed feedback report. More importantly, it generates and immediate feedback report, not next week after the teacher has spent a frustratingly short weekend grading 120 papers. It also offers the possibility of students writing more essays and getting more feedback than any overworked teacher could ever provide.
The biggest hurdle is the deep, gut feeling many people have that a computer could never do a good job of evaluating something like an essay. A new research study discussed today in an article in the New York Times (free registration required) looks at the use of the software in Indiana, where it is being used as part of the 11th grade testing statewide. A two-year pilot study had student work graded by both the program and by real teachers. The results showed virtually no difference between the software and live raters. Still, virtually all of the teachers interviewed for the article are very skeptical of the idea.
I’m not sure I’m too excited about having the student work actually graded by a computer, but I think using it as an add-on to increase the amount of writing and feedback students can do is a really viable option. And while a good teacher can almost certainly grade a few essays with more detail and precision than the computer, once that pile of essays gets to be in the range of 100 or so, I suspect the quality of the teacher assessments begins to degrade quite a bit.
The New York State Department of Education has submitted recommendations to the state Board of Regents to make changes in the schedule of middle schools. According to this article in Newsday, the department wants to “…cut back on noncore subjects in middle school so more time spent is spent on math, reading and English to improve performance.”
The main “noncore subjects” are apparently technology and career skills courses. The department recommends cutting these classes down to about half of their current time, and refocusing the content to include other topics such as health and diet. (Less time, more topics - hmmm.)
As the focus on standards gets more intense, I suspect we’ll see more of this kind of movement. Despite the research that we have on the use of technology and improvement of test scores, it’s not the kind of straight-line connection that many decision makers are looking for.
Brighthand has an article profiling a new WindowsCE laptop being developed specifically for the education market. WindowsCE is a stripped-down version of Windows that is similar to the PocketPC operating system. It is simpler to operate, has instant-on, longer battery life. and a variety of other education-friendly attributes.
Called the Cathena, it’s slated for a fall release. It’s expected to have built-in 802.11 wireless, a 12-inch, 800×600 resolution screen, and weigh around three pounds. The most important issue is pricing, of course, but that hasn’t been announced yet. I’ll be curious to see how low they can set the price, but a similar device from HP a few years ago had an education cost of around $600. (That device was very popular among the few educators that knew it existed, before it was quickly discontinued by the company because businesses didn’t like it.)
There’s a new article at the Christian Science Monitor about virtual home schools. It doesn’t say too much more than earlier articles I’ve referenced, but it does include a few interesting comments from a sophomore from Forks, Washington about what it’s like being a student from a very isolated location taking online classes from the national Virtual High School.
A lot of the discomfort is not on the online nature of the learning, but on the role of for-profit companies in many virtual charter schools. In particular, the K12 company founded by William Bennett keeps coming up, not only for it’s for-profit status but for the quality of the curriculum they provide.
The article does also point out that, contrary to what many people might assume, online learning is not necessarily an impersonal experience. Properly constructed, there can be better student-to-student interaction and student-teacher interaction than in many classrooms. With the spread of high-speed home Internet access and simple videoconferencing systems like iChat and Yahoo messenger, it’s possible now for students to converse with each other and their teachers (although I’m not familiar with any virtual schools doing this as yet). In three or four years, it will be such a commonplace technology that it will seem as normal as a telephone for many of our kids. As a matter of fact, it will probably BE a telephone!
The latest computer security issue to confront computer users is spyware. This is software that gets installed on your computer that can do a variety of sneaky tasks that you know nothing about, including tracking the websites you visit, putting pop-up advertisements on your screen, reading email addresses from your files and sending them to spammers, or even recording everything you type (including all your passwords) and mailing them off to people of ill repute.
This has become a particular high-profile issue in business, because many users have unknowingly installed spyware on their work computers. There are many free program downloads (like the Kazaa file-sharing program) that actually do two functions - one that you know of, and then spyware working quietly in the background.
This would be a particularly nasty situation in a school. If a teacher’s computer is compromised with spyware, someone somewhere can get the teacher’s passwords for email, student records, and file server access. This actually happened a few years ago in one of our districts, and had some very messy results.
One of the first steps is to stop letting students or staff download freeware and installing it on their computers. I like having an animated kitty on my desktop as much as the next guy, but since I don’t know where it’s been, I won’t let it or programs like it into my computers.
There is a very informative online article about this topic at the online version of Computerworld. It’s worth checking out, and be sure to read the sidebar stories in the side section labeled “There’s more to this story.”
While there has been a lot of argument over whether online learning is more or less expensive than face-to-face training, the issue is a little clearer when the online training comes for free. Hewlett-Packard (or HP, as they are now officially known) has set up a learning center offering a large number of classes, all available at no charge.
The classes cover a range of topics, from basic tech skills (Become a Microsoft Windows XP power user) to broader application (Real estate marketing made easy). These are actual classes with a real instructor, which makes the “free” aspect all the more impressive. While there aren’t any education-specific classes, there are a lot of teachers that would benefit from topics like Scanning basics or Virus protection best practices.
The HP Learning Center is at www.hplearningcenter.com/.