Lightning in a Bottle

I’ve been experimenting with a service called Ustream.tv, and it’s very intriguing. Basically, it’s YouTube for live video broadcasting over the Internet. It took me five minutes to set up an account, and now I can broadcast live video any time I want!

Wesley Fryer used this system last week to broadcast live presentations from the Air and Space Museum in Washington D.C. Using a cellular data modem, a laptop and camcorder, he was able to set up anywhere he could receive a cell signal. And since the broadcasts can be archived, anyone who misses the live broadcasts can view them after the fact.

There are dozens of live broadcasts going on at any one time. Right now some guy is doing music lessons, answering questions of the people logged into the session. (He’s on every day from noon to four Pacific time.)

Of course, there will probably be some channels that have programs that won’t be appropriate for kids, so getting this through to a school network may prove to be a problem. (Not to mention the nonsense that shows up in the chat windows and protecting the bandwidth of the district.) But sooner or later there will school-safe versions and we’ll have enough bandwidth to have this a tool that students can use to share presentations across the world, or participate in presentations of mentors or experts out in the field.

I’ve even set up my own channel! I’ll be hanging out at http://www.ustream.tv/channel/ed-tech-chat off and on during the week of March 17. Drop on by and see if I’m online.

Someone sent me a link to a YouTube video called Wikis in Plain English. I loved the simple, effective way the video explained what wikis are and how they work, so I followed the URL at the end of the video to find the site from which the production originated. It’s called The Common Craft Show, and they have produced a series of these neat little explanatory videos using paper cutouts, a whiteboard, and hands.

I love these little videos. (I wish I’d come up with the idea!) I also think the format lends itself very well to student-created videos. These producers have shown you can create compelling presentations using very simple materials and techniques. Good communication technique works with any medium!

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.

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.

John Kelly from ESD 123 alerted me to Pop!Tech, another cool online conference that’s starting Wednesday, October 17. The theme is The Impact of Technology, and while the actual conference itself is in Camden, Maine, all of the sessions are being broadcast live on the Internet. Many of the previous sessions are available to be viewed online or downloaded. The topics are varied, wide-ranging, and very interesting.

And don’t forget that the K-12 Online Conference is under way!

This October will see the second K12 Online Conference, a free conference on educational technology that takes place entirely online. It is made up of several dozen podcast presentations that are released four or five a day over two weeks, with several live “Fireside Chats” to interact in real time with featured presenters. The peripatetic David Warlick is the keynote speaker again this year, and I assume it will be just as good or better than his presentation last year. I think this is a very intriguing model and I’m trying to figure out how to try something like it here.

I do have one concern, however. If I go to a regular conference, no matter how many presentations there are I can only attend one per time slot, so there is a maximum amount of information I can attempt to absorb. I simply can’t go to every session, which is probably better for my brain. However, in this model, every darn session is available to me! I haven’t got the time to view them all, so I still have to prioritize. It’s just harder!

There is an article in the online version of The Oregonian about the success of and controversy surrounding a new online charter school. Demand is outstripping the school’s capacity, despite heavy reliance on parents being the student’s “learning coach.” What probably ups the controversy is the fact that the school is run by a for-profit company from Baltimore named Connections Academy. They are now running 11 schools nationwide.

60% of the families currently signed up for the Oregon Connections Academy were already homeschoolers . (The school has a really cool acronym -ORCA. We’d be stuck with WACA. Better than Colorado, though - I’m not sure how many parents would sign up their kids for COCA. But I digress.) I have been saying for a number of years that technology is going to provide parents with many more options for homeschooling, and I’m sure programs like this will only add to the trend.

Whether online schooling is good or bad isn’t really important. If parents and students perceive that it’s good, they will take that opportunity. We can provide it through public education and maintain that connection with our community, or leave it to private schoools or for-profit companies and become increasingly irrelevant to larger numbers of constituents. I don’t see a postive outcome to the latter choice.

Yet another article about online learning, this time in the Christian Science Monitor. There isn’t too much radically new, but it does reflect this continues to be an increasing trend. The Florida Virtual High School is growing at the phenomenal pace of 40-60% per year, and now Michigan is poised to be the first state to require that every student take at least one online course before graduating from high school.

There’s still some muddy thinking floating around out there, though. One expert is quoted as thinking that virtual classes “…could help ease the nationwide shortage of math and science teachers.” All of the online classes referred to in the story use real teachers, so I don’t see how that affects the overall shortage problem. Unless, of course, the online teacher supports more students than a face-to-face teacher - which they don’t in any (good) program I’ve seen.

I’ll be really happy when we have stamped out the notion that online learning somehow costs less than classroom learning.

You know, we’re having enough trouble trying to get things like instant messaging (appropriately used, of course) into schools. It doesn’t help when everyone’s concerns are justifed by the companies making the programs or services we want.

I just upgraded my Microsoft instant message client yesterday at the behest of the program. What the heck, it will only take a minute, and it offers new functionality, right? (Ok, it was a cute animation function. It sounded fun!)

This is already a robust messenger, with screen sharing, voice, video, and document sharing. Potentially a very powerful tool in a collaborative online environment.

So what is the first thing I notice after the upgrade? The advertising inserted into my buddy list.

Maybe there were ads there before and I never noticed - I do tune these things out. But it was difficult not to notice the young woman clad only in a small, red bikini in the ad for a “sexy singles” dating service with the big caption Sometimes it’s nice to be naughty!

Great. I can just imagine that ad popping up while I’m doing a demonstration on the power of online collaborative tools with a room full of administrators or parents. I’m sure I’ll be doing the demo sometime, but it won’t be with MSN Messenger for Windows. (The Mac version is still ad-free.)

My ASCD SmartBrief newsletter from a couple of days ago had a link to an article from the online Rocky Mountain News about the controversy brewing over the Vilas School district and their online classes. Why is there a controversy? The district only has 100 students, but has enrolled almost 2,000 students in online courses from other districts across the state. Their level of funding has quadrupled in the last twelve months as the state support for the students follows them from their own home district to the online classes.

Needless to say, the home districts aren’t really pleased. Just to muddy the waters, most of the students are enrolled through a separate enitity that runs the online charter school under a contract with the Vilas district. To some degree, the district is a front for the Hope Online Learning Academy Co-op, which contracts with local non-profit groups around the state to run its 40 centers where students can take the online classes and receive tutoring. Is this a healthy public-private partnership, or someone taking advantage of the system to make money from the public schools? It’s certainly not clear from the amount of info in the article, but there is also no clear agreement among the folks in Colorado.

My favorite quote is

“What really shocked me was that online students could drive costs” instead of saving money, said Rep. Tom Plant, D-Nederland, chairman of the Joint Budget Committee.

One of the biggest problems we have with online learning is the very mistaken belief that it will somehow be less expensive. Hopefully we can get this idea stamped out.

My second-favorite quote is

“They don’t like free enterprise. They don’t like competition,” Sen. John Evans, R-Parker, a member of the education committee, said of those critical of online programs.

I hope we can get away from the idea that free enterprise and competition are silver bullets that will fix anything, too.

Lots to think about here!