Lightning in a Bottle

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.

I just learned about a new product coming to the market that should be interesting to try out. It’s called the Nova 5000, and it’s a Windows CE device designed specifically for education.

It has a 7.5 inch screen, weighs 1.8 pounds, and variety of other necessary items such as USB 2.0 ports, Compact Flash ports, and others. It’s supposed to come in at a price point in the $500 range.

It looks like sort of a Super PDA. I like the idea of a stripped-down machine that can be used for a lot of core applications, such as word processing and web browsing. The downfall for PDAs has always been that despite being simplified devices, the syncing and other operational chores made them almost as costly to maintain as a full computer. From my perspective, quick and easy syncing will be one of the three make-or-break issues for these little devices.

The other two will be battery life and network connectivity. If they can last most of one day on a charge, and can surf the web with appropriate responsiveness (and the CE version of Internet Explorer is robust enough to handle Flash and other important plug-ins), then it could be a real winner. If it misses on any one of those, it could just be the reincarnation of the NTS Dreamwriter, which should have been a winner, too!

During my lunch break I was able to help my son with his homework. (He has one more day of vacation than I do.) He has a pretty big paper due tomorrow, and he needed some assistance.

Instant messaging made it work. I logged into iChat and reminded him that I wanted it soon. A few minutes later, he messaged me with a few questions that were giving him trouble. I did a quick Google search and found some sites that would help, and sent him the URLs. I also popped a couple of images into the chat that illustrated the answers. Eventually, he sent me the document (again, through the instant messenger), which I read through, and then sent him edits and comments.

The whole process took about an hour and a half, with much of that time being spent doing other things and simply responding to the messages when they came in. In some ways, it was actually easier than if I was there in person. There was less opportunity to get defensive or cranky when we’re eight miles apart, which some might say is the minimum distance to maintain with teenagers. I can see that it would be a very comfortable part of remote teaching, either for students or adults that are comforable with the technology. I actually increasingly find that I prefer it to telephone conversations, particularly with the ability to log and store the conversations.

Today, though, I’m just glad that I have the opportunity to chat with my son during the day - and that his project will be done before I get home!

I’m on the cusp of a transition that I never thought I’d really consider.

I’m ready to throw out my magazines.

I have several file drawers of back issues of magazines full of important articles (not to mention good advertisements). Things like Teaching and Learning, Presentations, Edutopia, and many more than I care to admit. It gives me a huge thrill when, in the course of a conversation, I can say “Wait a minute! There was an article about that a couple of months ago!” and whip the magazine in question out of the drawer.

Thing is, just about all of the periodicals in question are in Proquest now. And instead of having to remember which magazine it was in, which issue, and what page, and then trot down to the photocopier to make an article, I can instead do a search, find it, and either print the plain text or, when possible, print a PDF of the article. (That has the added advantage of the good advertisements still being intact.)

Still, I remain awfully skeptical of digital storage. My old magazines will be readable for much longer than the content will be relevant. And I don’t need a fast Internet connection to take advantage of them, either. I’ve also listened to Nicholson Baker, author of Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on Paper(here at Amazon.com), who documents the destruction of hundreds of thousands of pages of print media after converting to other formats for archiving, only to have many of the archived versions to be of lesser quality or more easily degraded than the original materials.

Hmmm. I’ll let you know when I finally pull the plug. If.

I’ve messed around with this technology stuff for a long time. When I started, there was a range of knowledge, with people that knew nothing about personal computers at one end of the range, and people that knew all the state-of-the-art stuff at the other end. Most people were clustered down at the “know nothing” end of the range, but that shifted over time.

The problem is, the other end of the range didn’t stay still. While many people were struggling to get some degree of understanding of personal computers, the top end of the range of knowledge kept moving away from them at a startling pace.

Look at where we are now. We have many teachers that are still off to the side of the curve that indicates some degree of knowledge, but not a lot. At the other end of the curve, we have teachers doing podcasts, running wikis, using classroom weblogs, and who know what else.

The gap between those teachers is gigantic compared to, say, teachers that have learned how to use email and those that haven’t. Frankly, even with my level of experience (messing with this stuff is my full time job, after all), I still haven’t gotten around to learning how to use an RSS feed, much less create my own podcast. (That’s coming, though, if for no other reason than a driving need to keep up. Peer pressure is an ugly thing.) If I think this stuff is arcane, I can understand why a normal person wouldn’t get too excited about it.

That doesn’t negate how exciting some of these new technologies are. I’m just wondering how we support both the normal teacher in using technology well, while still supporting those teachers that are out at the cutting edge. I certainly don’t think we should expect every teacher to create wikis or generate podcasts, at least not without a lot of technical and pedagogical support. Not unless we make the technology a lot easier to use. More on that next time.

Prolific weblogger Andy Carvin was in Tunisia at the conference where the MIT $100 laptop was formally introduced. While there have been many news reports discussing it over the last two days, he has posted a web video interview with MIT represenatives at the conference that is very informative.

I continue to be intrigued by the possibilities of this device, although there is still a long road between here and the actual rollout of the machine. I’ve seen many exciting technologies at this stage evaporate like morning dew, so I’ll reserve judgement until it hits the ground. Still, in the category of the United States competitiveness, it will really make for a new, flatter world (to quote Thomas Friedman) if suddenly huge numbers of kids in countries like Brazil, India, and China all have their own personal computers when here in the U.S. we’re still arguing over whether they’re important to education or not.

The Seattle P-I wrote about the University of Washington experimenting with podcasting lectures. Several professors are using DAT recorders (which, from the Land of Confusing Acronyms, stands for “Digital Audio Tape,” notwithstanding the fact that current DATs are solid state and use no tape) to capture their lectures, which are uploaded to Apple iTunes. Students subscribe to the lectures, which means they are automatically downloaded to their iPods as soon as the students connect after the lecture is posted.

Of course, the UW is not the only place doing this. As a matter of fact, just go to news.google.com and type the terms student and podcasting, and you’ll find a boatload of articles about universities and colleges across the country that are even more active in using this technology.

What I was intrigued with was the comment in the PI article that the tech folks have, for the most part, automated the process. I’m curious what it would take to set up a system in a high-school classroom to automatically capture a lecture and post it to the web. And while I’m intrigued by that, I’m also wondering just how many privacy issues we would open up. Does every teacher want the whole world to be able to eavesdrop on their classes? Does every student want all their friends to be able to play back the dumb question they asked in third period?

Raising parents’ awareness of what students are doing on the web outside of school is a very important thing. There is a whole world of blogging and instant messaging that can lead to online bullying and other nasty situations if students aren’t being careful and appropriate in what they say and do online.

Still, I have qualms about wholesale banning students from blogging. A private school such as Pope John High School certainly works under a different set of expectations than a public school, which I understand and respect. It just seems a bit of overkill to suspend students for using a communication system that they will use for the rest of their llives, or at least until the next technology comes along. Not letting kids use MySpace because some people post innappropriate stuff is sort of like not letting them answer the phone because some people make obscene phone calls.

I feel like there has to be a rational balance here somewhere. I’d rather spend more time teaching kids how to be appropriate with their online experience, rather than cut it off entirely. Sooner or later they will be out from under our control, and I want them leaving with the skills to protect themselves already in place, not dropped unprepared into the virtual world.

You would have to work pretty hard to have avoided seeing all the press last week about the new Apple iPod with video. While most of the chatter was over being able to download television shows, what has me most intrigued is how easy it is to convert virtually any video for playback on the device. I’ve been looking at PowerMediaPlus from Clearvue, which is an educational video company that has made the crossover to digital media. When you license their video and image files (thousands and thousands), you can use them any way you want, including letting students use the materials and edit them into new media projects.

And, as it turns out, the file format is compatible with iPods, so you could also download educational videos for viewing anywhere in the classroom.

What makes it really look appealing to me is the accompanying iTunes 6 software. It will now handle videos, and it’s a great video organizer. You can not only organize imported videos into separate playlists, you can also add comments or key terms to each video, and then (once you modify the view of the playlist in the preferences) search by word or phrase to find the videos you want. You can also set the preferences so that any video you play automatically plays back fullscreen, with no annoying windows or controls. I’ll be using the software as my video viewer on both my Mac and Windows laptops.

Combine these techologies with some of the great software out there for creating studio-like video reports (see Visual Communicator and Vlog It from Serious Magic Software for Windows, or Videocue from Vara Software for the Mac), and you have a pretty amazing video environment that was unimaginable just a couple of years ago. Pretty soon some our students will be bringing professional-looking video reports from home. It would be really great if we could give them that option at school, too.

CNET has a good article today on blogging in schools. (I know, it seems kind of circular to post a blog about blogging. Then again, many bloggers just talk about other bloggers…) Imagine having a setting where every kid writes every day, and peers can view and comment on each other’s writing in a safe setting. Sounds pretty cool to me. Now, if we can just get enough computers into schools to make it possible.

I was also really fascinated by the diagram that sits to the right of the article. I thought it was an ad at first, but it’s actually a story web that links the article on blogging to other technology articles that CNET has published recently. You can see the whole-screen view here.

I think this is really pretty cool. I would love to see more of this on educational websites. What a great way to lay out information from a textbook or unit of study for kids!