Lightning in a Bottle

I just have to get this out of my system.  I know being a techie is actually really fun (the joy of nerdness is a little-known secret), but if we want other people to take our work seriously, we have to stop being so darn cute with how we name things.

Example number one is Moodle. Here is a great, powerful learning management system that is free and offers incredible opportunities for educators, but every time I introduce it the first part of the conversation always revolves around the name.There are the obligatory jokes about noodles, of course, and then the need to explain that it’s an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment before finally getting into why it’s important and how it can be used. Unfortunately, I always end up feeling that the silly first impression sticks, and it undermines the credibility of the whole endeavor.

This is just one example, of course. There’s Drupal for content management, and the programs Yugma and Dim Dim for webconferencing, just to name a few. Ning. Twitter. Is it any wonder that non-techies think we’re just a bit weird? (Ok, so we are, but why make it so darned obvious?)

I’m not saying we need to become the modern equivalent of the 1960s stereotypical white-shirted computer operators. After all, if technology stops being fun, I’ll lose interest myself, and I love an inside joke just as much as the next nerd. But the next time we create something that’s supposed to reach out to the non-techies, let’s try to give it a name that has a touch more gravitas. Or at least something that doesn’t sound like a cartoon noise.

My big Christmas gift this year was getting to go out and purchase myself a flat-panel television.  I was able to get a pretty good deal in the post-holiday, depressed-economy sale, and by getting a last-year model to boot.  (I may be a techie and love gadgets, but I’m also pretty cheap when it comes to buying doodads.)  I chose a 42-inch model, and paid about what I was considering for a 37-inch model a few months ago. I am ridiculously pleased with it.

Last night we had planned on going out to the movies, but yet another round of snow hit us and we had to stay home.  Not a problem, my daughter says - she’d purchased WALL-E from the iTunes store, and had a new cable for her iPhone to hook it to the TV.  In two minutes’ time, she has her iPhone hooked into the TV, and we’re watching the opening credits to the movie in full-screen resolution.  It wasn’t HD sharp, but it was DVD quality, and very, very good.  From her iPhone!

This is not intended to be an advertisement for Apple products.  You can also access films from other online vendors, and there are other devices that can be hooked to your television.  But it’s just another illustration of the shift of media away from any sort of traditional storage or viewing.  There were no tapes or discs involved in watching the film; if I’d had the right device hooked up to the television, there wouldn’t even have been a cable involved - it could have been wireless.

We’re so close to being there in schools.  We need to get there as quickly as possible, because the rich visual media available now can be such a powerful aid to student learning, particularly for our visually-attuned students.  Many classrooms have the projectors now, which is a huge leap forward.   Some schools actually have the full setup for digital video completely in place, but many more are missing just one or two elements, such as good sound system, sufficient network capacity or access to a streaming video service.  But even when a classroom has the entire setup,  there’s still the need for time to preview media, figure out how to integrate it into instruction, and a place in the daily schedule to actually show it.  Back in the dark ages when I was in school, there were very few choices of 16 mm films that my teachers had to ponder (Hemo the Magnificent for human biology and The Restless Sea for oceanography seemed to be the ONLY choices in those content areas, based on how many times I saw them). Now teachers are faced with thousands of options, all correlated to state standards in one way or another.

Somebody told me recently that making changes is often just substituting a new set of problems for an old one.  I suppose having an embarrassment of  media riches is a good problem to have, but it wouldn’t even be a problem if we didn’t have the underlying problem of teachers simply not having enough time to plan and learn.  I think many of our issues of technology integration and improving instruction would largely vanish if we simply provided enough time for teachers to continuously develop their skills.  When people such as me can’t keep up with the change, and I work with technology full time, is it any wonder that our teachers struggle to be able to take full advantage of it.

OSPI has recently finished developing our new Washington state Educational Technology Standards, completing great year-long effort by their staff.  (Congratulations, Georgia!)  They now bookend the Tiers of Technology for providing guidance to districts and schools as they plan for and implement educational technology.

I know from my work with technology leaders from around our region that the Tiers have had an impact in at least some of our districts, and that the standards are being greeted with great interest.  However, in a roundtable discussion earlier this month, one person said pretty plainly that he didn’t forsee any significant impact in his district.  Why?  There aren’t any high-stakes accountability tests attached to them.  He didn’t advocate that there should be; he was simply stating what seemed to be obvious - that his board, superintendent, and principals were spending their energies on subjects that have high-profile measures, such as reading, math, and soon science.  Ed tech standards were all well and good, but wayyyy down the priority list.

It’s kind of pessimistic view, but I’m not sure it’s that far off right now.  Our schools are struggling to meet their accountability demands, and in an era of limited financial resources are going to focus ever more tightly on those goals.  In the absence of a clear bright line tying technology use to improved student achievement in basic content areas, support for integrating additional standards is probably going to be pretty thin.  The developers at OSPI have tried to address this in the state standards by developing an extensive set of examples of how technology can be integrated into content GLEs.  It’s really great work, but it still requires that decision makers actually care if technology is integrated.

I know from our time working with districts that technology has become a hugely important part of every school.  However, where it’s important is what’s telling - in administration, data collecting and processing, communication, grading, teacher presentations and testing.  Student use of computers in their own learning is often one of the lowest priorities in the system.  Tech standards are a very useful tool in building awareness of where we want things to be, but in the current environment there tends to be a line between should do and have to, and often only the have to things get done (and not even all of them).  Is it possible for us to somehow move ed tech over that line?

We’ve been really clobbered with snow the last week, and our offices have either been closed or run late several days.  However, two meetings that were scheduled during this period went on as usual, despite the fact that the attendees couldn’t make it.  We were using GotoMeeting, an online meeting and screen-sharing system from Citrix. (This is definitely a good news/bad news thing - after all, a snow day used to mean you didn’t have to work!)  I’ve used GotoMeeting for three years, primarily for broadcasting a shared screen in parallel to a video conference to get around the poor resolution of sharing a computer display via video conference technology.

The big change in the product is that earlier this year they added voice.  Before you needed to use a phone conference, Skype, or some other way to get audio to the participants.  Now it’s part of the product, and it’s a real game-changer.  What I particularly like is the very simple, direct interface - it’s very intuitive and does a really good job of staying out of your way and just letting you concentrate on your meeting or presentation.

There are other options out there.  Elluminate is a more full-featured product for distance learning (and for Washington state public and private schools has special pricing through the Washington Learning Source.)  Yugma has free and paid versions, as does Dimdim.  Comotiv is a related product focused on creating online collaboration.  Adobe has Acrobat Connect and the grandaddy of them all is WebEx.  Some of these products have videoconferencing, some let you send out files to the other participants, some have shared whiteboards, and all let you record a meeting for future playback.

While tools like this have been around for awhile, the big change in the last couple of years has been a huge drop in cost.  You can now access these online collaboration tools for 10% or less than what the same capabilities would have cost three years ago.  All you need is a good microphone, headphones (to prevent echoing), and a quick download to give it a try.  Oh, yeah, and someone to try it with!

The website Engadget had an interesting observation last week - nine of the top ten best-selling laptops on Amazon.com are ultra-mobile PCs.  (This is true as of 9:12 a.m. on September 30, 2008.  Who knows what this link will show in the future?)  As a matter of fact, at the time of this posting, most of the top 25 computers are UMPCs of one form or another.

This further underscores why technology planning and the standards that grow out of them have to remain flexible.  This market niche didn’t exist twelve months ago, and even when the initial devices came to market and sold well, many technology observers openly derided them as under-powered and over-priced.   And yet, here we are eleven months after the Asus EEEPC came to market, and that brand has six of the top twelve best-selling laptops at Amazon.

Standards are important to making things work smoothly, but the concept of standards assumes a level of stability and predictablility.  That works for awhile in technology, but eventually there is a disruption and your standards need to be reconsidered.  I think the rise of the UMPCs is going to be one of those disruptions.

We had a small crisis on our hands one evening at our digital photography camp this summer. Two individuals both had their camera storage cards wiped out, with a significant number of unsaved images on each card.  (Strangely enough, they were sitting next to each other, even though the two events were completely unrelated - different cameras, different computers, different kinds of cards, different causes.)  When it became clear how completely gone the images were, I told the two I would spend some time researching the process of recovering files from cards during our dinner break, but not to get too hopeful.  The two participants were stoic and brave, but you could tell they were pretty upset about the loss of so many pictures they had taken on our trip to Mt. Rainier earlier that day.

In searching online, I pretty quickly came across several references to a Windows program called PC Inspector, which not only had good reviews but had the added benefit of being free.  It can recover some damaged files, but it’s main focus is files that were accidentally deleted.  As long as you haven’t taken a lot of new pictures with the card, they can be recovered.  (It will work for other forms of storage, too, such as hard drives and USB memory sticks.)

I downloaded it, fired it up and tried to access the missing files on one of the cards.  After what seemed like forever, a file appeared in the recovery window.  A few moments later, a second one.  It wasn’t fast, but over the course of a few hours it recovered all of the images on both of the cards - and there were hundreds.   The participants were thrilled, and I have a great new tool in my box o’ solutions.  It’s always fun to be able to fix someone’s disaster!

Anne and I ran our ninth (!) Digital Photography Bootcamp last week, our fourth summer of offering this program. Over forty individuals came and spent three days in the woods learning more about their cameras and image composition, taking loads of pictures, learning how to organize and edit them on the computer, and much more. It was a bit rainy and cloudy when we went up to Paradise at Mt. Rainier, but nobody complained and we had a great time. We also had our usual great team of assistants, and Ed, Mark, Mark, Paula and Caitlin really helped to make things spin.

I’ve worked with few technologies that have such a strong personal connection as photography, and digital photography takes this to a whole new level. It also, unfortunately, adds a layer of complexity and intimidation to the process. I get a great deal of pleasure in helping people past that complexity and allowing them to feel more in control of their use of the camera, and better able to capture meaningful, fulfilling images. That’s why we’ll be out there doing it again next summer!

The Seattle Times just published an article from the San Jose Mercury News about the worldwide development of the ultra mobile PC market.  It’s probably the best overview I’ve read, and it recognizes the influence of the One Laptop Per Child project in laying the groundwork for it, at least in terms of opening minds to the idea that a computer could be cheap, small, and very usable.  I also get a kick out of the fact that the experts they interviewed are all over the map in terms of the importance of this niche.  I think those that downplay it are stuck in mindset where laptops can only exist in a narrow range of functionality, and that range doesn’t dip down to the world of the UMPC.  If that were true in the calculator market, we’d all buy graphing calculators and there would be no $5.00 calculators at the checkstand of the grocery store.

Susan Brooks-Young introduced me to a great online resource with the odd name CogDogRoo. It turns out a very busy person named Alan Levine created an online resource for a series of workshops that lists (at the time of this writing) 57 different Web 2.0 tools that can be used for digital storytelling. That in itself isn’t unusual, of course, but what he did that was different was he took the time to retell the same story with each tool!

The specific page on Alan’s wiki is here, and it is wonderfully comprehensive. In addition to his own oft-retold story, almost all of the titles also include examples of stories told by others. He also has a shorter list at the end of tools that he’s tried that weren’t successful for one reason or another, so you can see what sites to avoid (at least for now). Susan took us through a one-hour workshop where we each picked a different tool and spent ten or fifteen minutes creating a presentation. I put together a short Animoto video about the aftermath of a windstorm in our neighborhood last year. (No great shakes, but only about four minutes to create it with images from my Flickr account!) It’s a great site for a quick Web 2.0 training - as long as they aren’t blocked, anyway.

I’ve been trying out a loaner of the new ultra-mobile device from HP, the HP 2133 Mini-Note PC. It’s slightly larger larger than an EeePC or 2Go laptop - in the image, the HP is on the left, the EeePC is on the right, and a standard 15-inch Macbook is in the middle. The slightly larger size offers some distinct advantages - nearly a full-size keyboard (much easier to type on), and an 8.9 inch WXGA (1366 x 768) resolution screen, which allows you to see much more than the 800 x 480 resolution on the smaller devices. It has a 12o gb hard drive and up to two gigabytes of RAM. It’s really a very small, full-featured computer.

There are a few issues, though. It doesn’t feel quite as rugged as its slightly smaller brethren (particularly the 2Go), and the screen resolution may be too tiny for some of us older folks. The model I have came with Vista Business installed, which really strains the computer at times. I’m sure it would run much snappier with XP or Linux. It also (at least running Vista) gets very, very hot. Lastly, that added functionality comes at a price - it costs between $200 and $300 more than the EeePC class of devices.

Still in all, I’ve really enjoyed working with it. It is a very polished, well-designed device, and one that I would be willing to use on a daily basis instead of my much larger, older laptops. Just with an OS other than Vista Business.