Lightning in a Bottle

The $100 OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project headed by Nicholas Negroponte is having a ripple effect. For instance, it’s a pretty good sign as to how seriously the project is being taken by Microsoft that Bill Gates felt the need to disparage the project and suggest Microsoft is working on alternatives using cell phones.

The newest indication of the impact of this project is that Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off a new $400 laptop they are developing called the Edu-Wise. The announcement was in Brazil (a hotbed of open source software and a partner in the OLPC project), so the only news article online about it right now is from S?o Paulo, and can be viewed in translated form here through Google. It’s projected to be available in 2007. Otellini is quite up front that the device is in direct response to the OLPC project. While it’s still just a proposal, it’s just more proof that access to inexpensive portable computing appropriate to schools is a matter of when, not if. We have to shake off the mindset of computers and expensive being inseparable. Our long-term challenge is not in how to afford computers; it’s how to change education to take full advantage of them.

[Thanks, Engadget!]

Kathy Sierra has another great blog entry today over at Creating Passionate Users. She starts off by sharing a discussion with her teenage daughter about MySpace, which leads to observations about what makes services like MySpace work. Part of it is what she refers to as lightning release cycles. Users constantly make suggestions for improvements, and the developers constantly upgrade the system, often daily. It’s come to be an expectation that the system will be in a constant state of change and growth.

Contrast that with schools for a minute. How often do we “upgrade” the textbooks? How often do we adjust the curriculum? The software environments that our kids are living in are in a continually evolving, but school probably looks pretty much the same as it did last year, or five years ago, or even twenty years ago. No wonder there is a sense of disconnect for many kids.

I suppose that the constant change may not be healthy. Kathy uses the term “code crack” to describe the need of the users for their latest dose of change. I certainly want more stability in school than we see in the software industry, but I would even more like to see an ability of schools to take on these new tools and put them to greater use.

This idea came up in a different manner in a podcast by Wesley Fryer yesterday. (It was an international discussion, but two northwesterners represented us well - Jeff Allen of Olympic ESD in Bremerton, and Mark Ahlness from Arbor Heights Elementary in Seattle.) One of his guests on the “Skypecast” was Ewan McIntosh, and he made a point that I really liked. Instead of following the lead of others in adopting new tools such as blogging or wikis, education should be taking the lead in developing new and creative uses of these tools. Yeah! That’s the attitude I want to see. I don’t want to sit around (or expect teachers to sit around) and wait for somebody from outside our profession to come and tell us which technologies we should be using and how we should be using them. Don’t get me wrong; I love and highly value the insights of outsiders (that’s why I linked to a blog from a software designer!), but I don’t want to give them the keys to the schoolhouse.

My son left on a band trip this afternoon. He spent the last two days packing and sorting, trying to make sure he had everything he needed.

About an hour before he was picked up to go to the airport, he was online chatting with his bandmates, and it turned out they had one whole chatroom going just on the topic of “What did you forget to pack?” As I looked over his shoulder, there were reminders flying back and forth about black socks, cellphone chargers, and other necessary elements of teenage life and band performances.

It was fun to watch how much this communication technology is integral to their school lives, even though the technology in question had nothing to do with school. Very often my son works on his homework projects with classmates using instant messaging. Sometimes it’s no more than checking what the assignment is, and sometimes it’s actually collaborating on team projects.

I wish we could stop being paranoid about messaging and similar technologies, and figure out how to harness their appeal and real power to the benefit of student learning. The district just passed a new bond, with a significant amount of money for technology. (The first ever!) I’m hoping we will see new communication tools in the district that will allow this kind of collaboration to take place within the school itself!

Microsoft and Intel have teamed with three different companies (so far) to roll out their new Ultra-Mobile PC, or UMPC. You can read articles about it here and here, or visit the Origami Project (Microsoft’s code name for it) website.

The devices all have 7-inch touch screens, and use the full version of Windows XP Tablet PC. They also incorporate a new set of software add-ons called Touch Pack that improve the touch interface, including an intriguing onscreen touch keyboard. (Unlike the standard Tablet PC, you can use your fingers or thumbs for touch input, rather than the official stylus.)

This is version 1.0 of the platform, but it sure looks promising to me as an education solution. The apparent price goal is in the $500 range, but these early-adopter models will be more like $1,000 and up. The battery life is too short, too (only around three hours or so). However, if they can get the cost down to the goal and increase the battery life, these could be great classroom devices.

There’s a marketing video that got loose on the Internet before Microsoft intended, and in one part about two-thirds of the way through, a young man is using the device in a wallet-like case, with an optional keyboard in the lower part of the case:

I have to admit it makes my little techie heart go pitty-pat. A much bigger screen than a PDA, but much more portable form factor than a laptop. I hope the product is successful enough to make the transition to classroom use, because education itself isn’t a big enough market to support it. And I hope Microsoft supports its use in classrooms, unlike their approach with Pocket PCs.

BusinessWeek has an online article today about the possibility of electronic books finally breaking through. The most important factors seem to be the refinement of electronic ink (which makes a more legible, low-power display than LCD screens) and the success of the iPod and iTunes, showing that significant numbers of people will pay for downloadable digital content.

I can’t wait until we get to the point where we can replace the thirty pounds of textbooks kids pack around with digital equivalents. It will also make it easier to keep textbooks up to date, and allow publishers greater flexibility in adapting textbooks to regional needs. (It also would make it much easier to take advantage of open source textbooks or develop staff-written materials.) It also means that books can be “kept in print” essentially forever, which is great for the vast majority of books that don’t hit bestseller status.

But while I love where the technology is going, from what I’ve seen so far the mainstream publishing industry doesn’t seem to understand what they’re doing. All of the proposed pricing I’ve seen so far comes out to about at 30% discount over the cost of a printed book. Since the cost of actually printing a real book is quite high, and the advantages of a printed book over an ephemeral digital copy are also pretty high, I don’t see that price structure as workable, especially when the Amazon.com discount is about the same. If a non-geek reader is going to switch from using paper-based books to electronic ones, there has to be a significant motivation for the change of habit. That can be convenience, or price, or probably both. Most people using ebooks now do it for convenience, but I don’t think the average consumer will make the shift until the pricing is the major advantage. After all, when I’m done with a print book, I can shelve it, loan it out, or donate it to the local library. I won’t be able to do any of that with an electronic copy.

We’ll see if the publishers figure this out. If they insist on keeping the prices too high, the market may end up restricted to niches like textbooks and specialty publications where the convenience factor outweighs concerns about pricing. On the other hand, maybe it will provide an opening for new, aggressive small publishers to bring low-priced ebooks to the market that aren’t currently possible in a world dominated by a few giant publishing conglomerates. The only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know what will happen, and that’s what makes it so darned fun to watch.

We are working with eleven middle schools in our region that are using competitive Title IID/EETT grants to focus on improving math success. The goal is to use technology to leverage good instructional strategies. The project is called NO LIMIT (New Outcomes: Learning Improvement in Math by Integrating Technology), and is currently supporting over 200 teachers throughout the state. The standard set of technology that each classroom is using is a laptop, document camera, and LCD projector. We’re in our third phase of the project, and we’ve seen some pretty awesome work done by our participants over the five year history of the program.

Today I went and visited African-American Academy, one of our participating schools. They were trying out a new activity for the first time today, and it was a blast.

A little background first. Our state test here in Washington is called the WASL, and the staff at African-American Academy have their kids regularly practicing WASL-type tests in what they call “WASL Warriors.” The scholar (they don’t call kids students) that solves the problem the best is videotaped demonstrating the solution and broadcast to the entire school. It’s a K-8 school, and one week it was a kindergartner that was featured!

Today, Sandy Gady from here at the ESD supported the AAA staff as they took the WASL Warrior program to a different level. It was set up as a team-based activity. They divided the scholars into four age groups (K-2 at the young end and 6-8 at the high end), and then assigned students to cross-age teams within those groups. This is the 6-8 set of teams in the gym.

Once assigned to a team, a math problem was distributed and put up on the projection screen at the front of the room.

(The colored boxes across the bottom indicate which handhelds have submitted answers. It gives the teacher a quick visual to see how many have completed their work.)

The scholars first try to solve the problem on their own. At the end of the ten minutes, they entered the answer they have reached using a Qwizdom group response system handheld. The sets used for today were radio-frequency (RF) handhelds, rather than infra-red (IR). This allows users to enter mult-digit numbers, rather than pick a multiple-choice answer. (Also, they have better range and aren’t blocked by people’s heads.) The larger devices in the image below are the Qwizdom units.

Note that the scholars also have to show their work on the handout, which is eventually turned in. There’s more involved here than just getting the right number.

After the individual students - oops, scholars - have solved the question (or not - the problems were difficult intentionally), they then start discussions with their cross-grade team members, and work on a common answer to represent the team. When consensus is reached, one Qwizdom remote is used to enter the team’s answer, and one paper is selected to represent the entire team.

This is where it was really fun to walk around, and listen to a room full young people intensely discussing math. The images can’t really capture the feeling in the room as all of this whispered, animated work was going on. (It was whispered in the older grades, that it. The K-2 room was a different story!)

This was an exciting example of teachers and staff taking technology and using it in new, creative ways. Congratulations to the AAA team for a job well done! Qwizdom, which is a local company, stepped up and supported the project by loaning the school over 400 response units and staff time. The scholars had several opportunities to work with the system before today, so the technology was quite transparent.

When the staff sits down next week to go over the submitted work, they will have detailed data from the Qwizdom system on which individuals completed the problems and whether their answers were correct, and the same data for each team of scholars. The teachers can use that as baseline data as they look over the work of the scholars, and look for patterns of success and struggles. As the problems were correlated with state standards, they should be able to diagnose specific areas to address. All from a technology-facilitated, problem-oriented, collaborative learning activity. Too cool!

This may not be directly related to ed tech, but I sure think it’s relevant. ASCD had a link today to a fascinating article in the British online edition of The Independent. It describes a school where students are giving a great deal of authority in the teaching practices at the school, including observing and evaluating teachers and participating in the hiring process. (Now that’s taking student-centered instruction to a new height!)

Over a quarter of the students in the school participate as Making Learning Better (or MLB) consultants. The school has a very demographically mixed population, and has struggled with low test scores. The number of students getting five “good GCSEs” (their performance-based tests taken at around age 16) has more than doubled in two years, from 20% to 43%. Both teachers and students also report a dramatic change in the culture of the school. Contrary to cynical expectations, students who have ownership in the running of the school take on greater levels of work and set higher expectations for themselves.

What would our students tell us about the use of technology if they were given this level of trust and responsibility in our schools?

There is a new video that’s been posted at YouTube (among other places) that is a demonstration of a “multi-touch” screen interface. This is a huge leap from the kind of touch screen we’ve all used at ATMs or with Tablet PCs. Not only can the screen recognize and respond to up to ten different touch-points at one time, it also recognizes getures. The first minute or two of the video looks at messing around with cool, colorful graphics, but the real interesting stuff is further in. The section on labeling, rearranging and resizing a collection of images really shows what an interface like this could do for computing.

Yes, it’s just one more thing to break. However, it looks like a much more natural interface than anything I’ve ever seen before. I hope it makes it out of the lab sometime soon!

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.