Lightning in a Bottle

I just delivered a conference presentation from about 150 miles away. I was unable to attend the annual Northwest Council for Computers in Education conference, which is being held in Portland this year. I was scheduled to do a presentation, but family issues intervened and I couldn’t go. However, I’ve also been experimenting with a webconferencing service called GotoMeeting, so I thought it would be fun to try a little presentation to the booth my colleagues were operating on the exhibit floor for our regional educational technology programs.

One drawback of GotoMeeting is the lack of a voice over IP client, which requires the use of a telephone for audio. We addressed it with Skype instead. Skype is a free Internet telephone program, which was recently taken over by eBay.

Down in Portland, Anne and Deb set up Anne’s computer on a projector, and then hooked up the audio-out to speakers. I set up a GotoMeeting webconference to share my Powerpoint screen, and they logged in to view it and project it. We then connected through Skype, so I could speak through my headset here and the participants could hear me at the other end. (I could hear them, too.)

The only thing I didn’t clearly understand beforehand was that they scheduled me in my previously-scheduled timeslot and location, so I wasn’t presenting to a handful of passersby at the booth, but a roomful of sixty people! Yikes.

From everything I hear, though, it went well. It was remarkably easy to run the Powerpoint, pretty much like doing it in person. The only mild challenge in speaking was ignoring my own voice coming back through the headphones as I heard it being amplified at the other end. The most interesting part of the whole experience was how easy and natural it was! Now if I had just planned a bit further ahead, I could have recorded it and made a podcast out of it. Oh, well, next time.

By the way, the conference is being blogged through this site here. Go see what I’m missing!

We had a number of districts run technology levies yesterday, and most passed. Yay! (For those of you that my be reading from out of state, Washington schools have to pass local taxes to fund things above “basic ed”, including frills such as technology. The taxes have to be approved by a supermajority of 60%.) Of eight districts putting up levies focused solely on technology, seven passed, and the one that is failing is only behind by less than nine-tenths of one percent, with a 59.13% yes vote.

Ironically, this happened the same day that the President’s proposed budget for next year was released, where the last remaining federal educational technology program (Enhancing Education Through Technology) was proposed for elimination. This is the second year that the administration has zeroed out this funding. Congress has already made significant cuts to the program, totalling 60% over the last two years.

ISTE has already posted their deep concern over this. It seems kind of odd that a big emphasis for this budget is improving the teaching of math and science, while at the same time cutting off funding for schools to purchase the tools that mathematicians and scientists use. A parent once said to me that “The technology we had in high school was good enough to put a man on the moon, and it’s good enough for today.” I somehow doubt that someone from NASA would agree.

We lost both of my in-laws in the last three months, and have started the difficult process of sorting through their belongings. My mother-in-law was a natural archivist, and there is a huge trove of family memorabilia that we have been slowly working through. It’s both comforting and sad as we look through years of photographs, letters, clippings, and other treasures.

It also reinforces my disquiet with our increasingly digital world. Here in these folders are letters, cards, and notes from friends and family members, many long since gone. Where will the cell phone calls, emails, and instant messages be for future generations to look through?

There is a deeper connection with the materials as well. There are photo albums put together by my wife’s grandfather, going back to his college days one hundred years ago. They have his hand-written notes by each image. When I hold that book in my hands, I touch the pages that he touched. It’s somehow not the same looking at an image on the screen of the computer.

My father-in-law was captured in the fall of the Philippines in World War II, and survived the Bataan Death March. His father kept a spare daily journal, and we have the 1945 volume. Every day after the end of the war in early August he wrote a brief comment, often about waiting for some word about whether his son was still alive. The tone of the comments grew increasingly frustrated as the weeks dragged on with no word. Finally, in late September (six weeks after the end of the war!) he received a telegram from his son in Manila, telling the family he was ok and on the way home.

As I read his joyous words in the journal, I am keenly aware that I hold the very book that he held as he wrote them. Even though he died before my wife was even born, I feel a sense of connection to her grandfather. I will never get that same sense of connection from reading an email.

This isn’t to say that I will stop using email, or weblogging, or instant messaging. I haven’t the will power to stop! What I am going to try to do is more “analog” stuff - cards, notes, and letters. I want to keep clear on the choices I make for communicating, and what I gain or lose through my choices. And I want to make my kids aware of it as well.