Lightning in a Bottle

The omnibus budget passed by Congress on November 20 had an unpleasant surprise for education technology. The main federal program for ed tech is Enhancing Education Through Technology (EETT), which in the current fiscal year distributed $692 million to states. The Senate had proposed level funding, and the House had proposed cutting $92 million, but in the end the budget committee cut $192 million, or 28%.

For Washington state, this will mean a loss of over $2 million.

eSchool news has an article about this at their site. If you want to look at the actual education budget document as passed, you can find it at the House Appropriations Committee website. It’s the second document on the list titled “2005 LHHS Education Conference Detail Table.” Title IID is on page 34.

The busy folks at eSchool News have a new web resource called Ed Tech Insider. It is a collection of online resources and blogs from ed tech experts from around the country. You need to register to add your own comments to the blogs, but that part of the site is down this morning (probably due to the number of people trying to get in). There is a lot of interesting stuff already.

An article in today’s Skagit Valley Herald (for those of you not from the Northwest, that’s pronounced ska’-jit, not skaggit) looks at how one school has installed all new technology in their building, and the most immediate impact is the document cameras they have installed. This is certainly what I have been observing in working with teachers over the last couple of years. The great thing about document cameras is that they directly replace an existing technology (those awful overheads), they do much more than the replaced technology (no special overheads, just stick the object, book, paper or magazine under the camera), and they don’t take more than two minutes of training to be able to use. Teachers I’ve spoken to use them to

• Share student work without having to recopy onto the board or overhead

• Show problems from the textbook while discussing with students
• Share illustrations from the textbook for discussion
• Share articles from the morning paper for current events
• Demonstrate how to use a calculator (as described in the linked article)

Just another example of how simple tools can often be the best!

The most interesting technology story to come out of the election is the leaking of preliminary exit poll data to a handful of websites. Hours before the mainline news services referred to the information, websites such as the Drudge report and Slate.com were publishing numbers that indicated trends in the polls.

The problem is the data was wrong. Or, more accurately, it was displayed out of context. The bare numbers seemed to indicate that Kerry would win in Florida and Ohio. However, in the context of the reports from the exit polling services (which was not available with the leaked info), it was clear tht the numbers were only partial, preliminary and not definitive. Out of that context they were perceived by millions of websurfers as predictive of the outcome of the election, leading to a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding. There are already websites claiming that vote fraud must have taken place because of the difference in the exit polls and the final result.

There in a nutshell is the promise and the peril of the unfettered flow of information. We desire to live in a transparent world where information is always accessible, and the internet makes that possible. Unfortunately, sometimes the data gets to us before it can be validated, or like an looted artifact, stripped of the context that gives it meaning. I’ve read that the Constitutional Convention only succeeded because the participants labored for months in total secrecy, so they could openly work through a wide range of approaches without having to deal with the political reactions of special interests outside the room. That probably wouldn’t be possible today. Heck, each member of the Convention would probably have their own weblog.

BBC News has an online article about the development of augmented reality for use in historic sites and museums. As opposed to virtual reality, in which everything you see is computer generated, augmented reality lets you see your surroundings with computer images inserted into your view. It currently requires wearing a portable computer and transparent viewing screen, but as computers get smaller and faster it will become less intrusive.

The goal of the company profiled in the article is to create devices that can be used by tourists in places such as Pompeii. As the visitor walks around the ruins, images of the original inhabitants and their furnishings would be superimposed in the visitor’s view. Similarly, insteach of wearing audio players to hear information about exhibits in a museum, visitors can see video of an artifact in use, or flesh covering a fossil’s bones.

I suppose it will be built in to cell phones in a few years.

For those of you in the Pacific Northwest, the 2005 Digitalkies Film Festival competition is now open. Sponsored by NCCE (Northwest Council for Computers in Education), this contest is open to K-12 students to create and submit 3-minute films. Winners will be announced at the spring NCCE Conference in Seattle March 16-19. The announcement website has all the details, categories, and scoring rubrics. You can also view previous winners for inspiration.