Lightning in a Bottle

The ustream.tv site we’ve been experimenting with (check and see if I’m online - sorry if I don’t notice when you enter, there’s no sound clue when someone pops in) is being used by a school district in eastern Washington for daily updates and things such as broadcasting band practice. John Kelly from ESD 123 introduced the site to a teacher there, and they have jumped all over it. Check them out, and if they aren’t live watch one or two of their archived sessions!

John Pederson posted a link to a new YouTube video on his TechLearning blog today. It’s a short, interesting piece that explores the nature of sharing in the modern age.

I’ve been a big supporter of having students work with robotics since we taught robot camps at the Pacific Science Center back in the 1980s. I am always enthralled with the complexity and depth of the kids’ learning experiences as they collaborate, invent, design, built, and program their creations. Interest in this area has grown, and over the years their have been several generations of Lego Robotics systems and other classroom robotics curricula. On a much grander scale, the last decade has seen huge growth in the FIRST Robotics and FIRST Lego League after-school programs which have expanded to include tens of thousands of students. (I missed the FIRST competition in Tacoma a few weeks ago - drat!) Still, robotics languishes primarily as an after-school activity available in a few isolated school, and that’s always disappointed me.

In addition to the tremendous educational value I have seen in robotics, however, there is growing value in that area in terms of future careers. As the power of processing continues its relentless march into seeming infinity, we are getting close to a world of robotic devices that would appear to be out of science fiction. A popular video on YouTube lately has been film of a robot called Big Dog, a quadruped walking robot designed to carry military equipment. Another video making the rounds shows a prosthetic arm designed by Dean Kamen’s company that is so lifelike they call it the Luke Arm (as in Luke Skywalker). The military is funding much of the development of this field of study, but the spinoffs will move rapidly into other applications.

And this article describes a prediction just made that 3.5 million jobs will be replaced by robots in Japan by 2025. Not manufacturing jobs, but service jobs like nurses’ aides, receptionists, and so on. The Japanese population is aging rapidly, and there will be fewer and fewer young people to take on these jobs.

So this starts to look like a serious win-win situation to me. Robotics is a phenomenally exciting project-based learning experience for students of a wide variety of learning styles, one that immerses them in a process that thoroughly integrates design, creativity, mechanics, electronics, physics, math, and a host of many other areas - even art! And now, robotics is also a rapidly expanding career opportunity for our students. We need to look for more ways to give kids the chance to explore this fascinating, exciting area of study. (Or we may be importing all of our robots from Japan.)

The new particle accelerator in Europe at the Cern laboratory has been in the news quite a bit the last month or so. This massive device is designed to smash subatomic particles together at tremendous speed to try and uncover new information about the nature of matter, including looking for a conjectured particle called the Higgs boson, the only particle predicted by the Standard Model of Particle Physics that has never been directly observed. (Ok, sorry about all that. I’m a science nerd, after all.)

I mention it here not to revel in arcane science, but because of an interesting technology backstory to this effort. As the Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, was being designed, the researchers realized that the volume of data it would produce was so large that it would potentially overwhelm the Internet when shared with scientists around the world. Their solution was to create a parallel network - that is amazingly fast. In addition to using fiber optics, the researchers designed an entirely new system for managing the transfer of the data. This combination creates a network that is up to 10,000 times faster than the existing Internet.

This technology is currently only available to certain institutions, but it will at some time begin to replace the Internet we currently use. Bandwidth will increase to a level that we literally can’t envision. What will we do with a technology that lets us back up a 120 gigabyte hard drive onto a remote server in five or ten seconds? The article linked above explores some of the conjectures, but the most dependable prediction for what we will do with that much capacity is something we haven’t thought of yet.

I’ve been recently enjoying exploring social networking programs like Twitter and Facebook, and I’ve been a long-time user of instant messaging (MSN Messenger, AOL’s AIM, Yahoo Instant Messenger and Apple’s iChat) as well as web-based email through Yahoo. The problem, however, is keeping track of all of these different possible communications systems without going crazy.

I’ve known there were clients (such as Adium for the Mac) that combine multiple IM services into one interface. However, today I’ve been exploring Digsby, which not only combines IM services, but also social networking applications such as Twitter and Facebook.

Now I have one application that sits on my screen and alerts me if any buddy is online from any of my online accounts, if there have been updates to any of the Twitter users that I follow, updates to my Facebook friends, or new emails to my Yahoo account. It will take a few weeks to see if it really changes my habits long-term, but for now I am finding myself far more likely to use these services because I can do it so much more quickly.

As expected, more devices are coming to market to compete with the Asus EeePC. Laptop Magazine now has a hands-on review of the 2go PC, which is one manufacturer’s version of the Intel Classmate 2 design. It’s fairly rugged to hold up to student use, sports a carry handle, has a 9-inch screen, 30 gigabyte hard drive, webcam, and the option of Linux or Windows XP. Reportedly the Linux version will be $399 and the Windows version $499 at list price.

I can’t wait to see what happens in this market niche over the next 12 months!