Lightning in a Bottle

The Asus EEEPc that I recently mentioned has already been picked up by a school district.  According to an article in the Fresno Bee, the Fresno Unified School District is purchasing 1,000 of the little laptops. This is pretty amazing - not only is it a model of laptop not previously marketed to education, the manufacturer has never (to my knowledge) targeted education, and the Linux operating system that it uses is obviously not the product of a major educational technology company either.

This an example of where standards could have been a problem, rather than a help.  Given how new this technology is, it simply couldn’t have been on a list of approved, standardized computers that any district would be using.   The district had been looking for a small, inexpensive solution to giving students wireless access to the school network for working on and storing materials for their student portfolios.  The selection of the laptops was driven by defined user needs, not technology standards.  What an interesting idea!

I’m sure it will create new challenges for support, as I suspect the district doesn’t already work with Linux very much.  But the focus should be to pick the technology that best supports the learning process, and then figure out how to support it effectively.  It should not be driven by picking the technology that is easiest to support.

To add to yesterday’s topic, here’s another potential breakthrough product - the Amazon Kindle.  It’s an ebook reader, which is nothing new.  What is new is that it uses the e-ink technology we’ve heard about for so long that creates sharp, clear text.  What is really, really new is that it also uses a wireless technology called EV-DO, a cellular data network that provides high-speed access to the Amazon repository of books, magazines, and weblogs from just about anywhere that has cellular phone access. For free.

The genius of this is that there is no need for a computer.  You order your books through the Kindle, and they download wirelessly.  If you subscribe to one of the many newspapers or magazines available, you simply turn on the Kindle in the morning and they’re waiting for you, because they downloaded overnight. Oh, and it accesses Wikipedia, too!

For an interesting review of the Kindle, check out Guy Kawasaki’s impressions.

It’s not a device that’s ready to replace textbooks yet (questions about durability and the lack of color displays), but the trend is irresistible. Paper is costly, bulky, and obviously hard to update. This is the kind of device our students will spend their adult lives using, at least in their professional lives.

We’ve been predicting this for a long time, but it’s still kind of mind-boggling now that we’re actually seeing it. There are a variety of new laptops hitting the streets that represent a major shift in cost and size of student computers (or potentially student-used computers). Most famously, the OLPC project is finally seeing the light of day, and their little green machines are in production. Even though they ended up not costing $100 (they’re just a hair under $200), they are remarkable in what they can do for so little money. (David Pogue has done an in-depth review with a video at the New York Times if you want to learn more.)

The XO computer (the official name of the OLPC product) is not only important in itself, but it has kicked off the development of competing products. Intel has developed the Classmate PC, which is a framework for small, inexpensive Intel-based laptops for students. (You can’t buy one yet, though.) The Asus company has just released a device called the EeePC, which is a tiny Linux-based laptop with a 7-inch screen, no hard drive (all Flash-based memory), built-in wireless and webcam for $399. It has only been on the market for a week or two, and it’s already wildly popular. And if you haven’t spent a few minutes working with an iPhone or iPod Touch, take a field trip to your local Apple store and see how easy it is to browse the Internet and do your email from those pocket-sized devices. With third-party applications being officially supported by Apple starting in January, these will in essence be computers. (How are these different from Palms or PocketPCs? Screen size resolution. New devices such as these have larger and far sharper displays, so you can create much more usable screen images and text. That and a much zippier interface!)

And, as I often say, that’s what exists today. Full-powered, wireless computers with web browsing, standard applications, voice and videoconferencing (some of them, anyway), all for less cost than what I paid for my first scientific calculator in college. What will we have available in five years? For that matter, what will the average student be using next week - outside of class, anyway?

I had a long discussion with a teach yesterday. It’s not about the technology itself, it’s about the societal, cultural, and economic changes the technology is bringing about. Changes in how people view information, how they communicate, and how they use technology simply to live their lives. These changes are taking place at an increasingly rapid pace, and I don’t sense yet that schools are figuring out how to address these changes. It’s hard to respond to, and there are an awful lot of unknowns involved, but not dealing with the changes will at some time cease to be an option.

I taught another Photoshop workshop last week. It was an evening class, so it ran from 4:30 to 7:30 over two nights. This means that the teachers involved had already worked a full day, then had to drive and arrive in the dark (this is the Pacific Northwest) and spend another three hours working with a very cool but often confusing piece of software. (It helps that the workshops are only $10, due to a generous grant from the Adobe company.)

I’d also worked a full day myself each of those days, so you’d think we would constitute a room of tired, cranky people. However, it wasn’t - we had two very enjoyable evenings of exploring and learning that I was sorry to see end. And horrors of horrors, I never once spoke about pedagogy, or GLEs, or curricular alignment. Each participant was able to explore the software and create images that had meaning and purpose to them. Sometimes it was personal (one participant used the software to rework scanned images of his own remarkable paintings), sometimes it was school related (two colleagues were working on images for the yearbook), and sometimes it was a bit of both. Regardless, each learner was learning what they wanted and needed to learn for themselves. The excitement and energy that came from this helped to carry them through the difficult and confusing parts of learning the software.

It was also modeling for what a classroom needs to look like. We actually did talk about that during class - is it really that radical of a concept that a teacher training experience should look like what student learning should look like?

I like teaching programs such as Photoshop because of the impact I see on the people that learn how to use it. Guy Kawasaki has a great video presentation called The Art of Innovation, and in it he talks about skipping the mission statement and going straight to a “mantra,” a short phrase that captures the essence of what it is you do. (For example, he says for FedEx it would be Peace of Mind.) I’ve decided that for my ed tech efforts, the mantra is Unleashing the Potential. Whether I’m helping a district plan for a better technology implementation or showing a teacher how to use Photoshop to improve their pictures of students, my goal is to remove the roadblocks that keep the technologies - and people using them - from reaching their full potential.

That’s why I like teaching Photoshop. When it’s 8:00 at night, and I’m by myself putting away the computers, if I feel like I’ve helped those fifteen people move a few steps closer to where they want to be, I’m not tired at all. I’m thinking about the next workshop and how to make it even better.

We held a statewide videoconference last week, and really pushed the limits of the technology at hand. We had a great guest speaker named John Kuglin, who is currently the Director of Technology for the Eagle County school district in Colorado. We had 11 sites in Washington hooked up, and then John came in from Colorado. Things started off OK, but then a glitch kicked in that prevented us from seeing John. We could hear him, and he could hear and see us, but no video came through from his site (except for frustratingly brief two-second moments when his smiling face would appear).

So what did we do? Well thankfully, we were also running a screen-sharing session using a program called GotoMeeting from Citrix. Each of the eleven sites had, in addition to the videoconferencing system, a computer and projector hooked up. The computers were logged into a GotoMeeting session with John’s computer, so his Powerpoint presentation on 21st Century Students was being shared on each screen, projected in each of sites. Since we could hear his voice and see his screen, the presentation was able to continue with only minor problems. (John uses a lot of videos in his presentation, and the screen-sharing system couldn’t handle those. They had to be skipped.) There is also a chat window embedded into the product, so I could send messages back and forth to John and to the facilitators at other sites without interrupting the videoconference.

The added advantage of the GotoMeeting software was that, in addition to preventing a disaster, it actually works far better than sharing a PowerPoint in the videoconferencing system. The video quality of the average video conference is murky at best, and it can render presentation slides almost completely unreadable. Through the screen sharing, it comes through as sharp and clear as if you are watching in on the presenter’s own computer.

Just to be clear, there are other similar products besides GotoMeeting - WebEx has a new similar product, and there are others such as Elluminate and Adobe’s Acrobat Connect. Regardless of the product, however, it was just fun to try out new ways to present and collaborate.

Michael Welsh and 200 of his students at Kansas State University created the this video about college students and how their lives relate (or don’t) to college. It’s a great discussion starter for a staff or board meeting! (I’d also love to see someone create a high school version of the project.)