Lightning in a Bottle

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!

So, just to keep on a theme, yet another potentially disruptive technology will be coming our way next year. A group of 27 technology companies have agreed to a new standard for the “Wi-Fi” networking standard. The versions of Wi-Fi that we use at home, classrooms, and Starbucks ranges in speed from roughly five to fifty megabits per second. This newest version (802.11n, if you’re keeping score) will be somewhere between one hundred and five hundred megabits. That’s fast enough to stream high quality video, or just send a lot of data.

In a school environment, this speed of data transmission would open up a lot of options. Many of the network-based applications and services that schools use don’t work well over the current wireless standards because of speed issues. This level of bandwidth will (hopefully) get around this, allowing for network-based instructional materials to be available at any place in the school. Combined with broadband over power lines, we’re going to be living the Star Trek lifestyle in no time. Hopefully, it won’t end up being everywhere except school.

MIT is hosting a free streaming video of a presentation by Thomas Friedman. He is the author of the best-selling book The World is Flat, and in this video he covers the main ideas of this provocative book. He looks at how the convergence of a variety of technologies has “flattened” the world economy, allowing companies and individuals in other countries to compete with countries like the United States in ways that were never before possible.

It’s a great presentaion, and should be required viewing for just about anyone involved in education. I particularly like his emphasis on innovation as a key skill. Where is that in our curriculum right now? For that matter, how can teacher teach innovation if they aren’t allowed to innovate themselves? I think educational standards provide a foundation for kids to learn to innovate, but if we just stop at the standards, our kids will be ill prepared for the economy of our very near future.

And next in our lineup of potentially disruptive technologies, we have broadband network access over power lines. This technology would allow power companies to provide high-speed network access through your power service, so you would theoretically be able to connect through any power outlet in your home.

This idea has been kicked around for awhile, but there have been technical limitations that have prevented it from moving to a practical stage. Now, however, the Matsushita company in Japan has developed a specialized chip that allows speeds of up to 170 megabits per second.

The big holdup in the widespread use of high-speed Internet is the cost of getting the signal down to the household level. Running lines to every individual home is costly, and results in only one or two options (cable or DSL) for most people looking for such access. Since the powerline technology uses the existing wiring, that cost is gone. If the speeds Matsushita claims are real (always a big “if”), then this would provide a very interesting new twist.

There is a very sobering article on computer security in this week’s issue of InfoWorld. In the last year or so, the major threats have moved from young hackers to professional criminal organizations. The types of attacks are quickly getting very sophisticated. Some of these desperados use hard-to-detect code to infect thousands of computers and turn them into “zombie PCs.” While this isn’t new, what is different is that they are advertising through online chat rooms and renting out access to their vast network of compromised computers on an hourly basis.

That’s just one of the issues discussed in the article. Security experts have even had to coin a new term to describe this new breed of larcenous program code - “criminal ware.” Lovely.

Looks like I was a day early on the $100 laptops. Nicholas Negroponte did presentation at an MIT conference about the project yesterday. There is an blogger Andy Carvin, and a gallery of images of the prototype (thanks to Jeff Allen for the latter two links!)

I sure hope this doesn’t turn out to be vaporware. What a transformational tool! If nothing else, I have to admire the sheer aduacity of the effort. I really like this Negroponte quote from the Andy Carvin blog:

Impossible is a code word at MIT for “do it!”

Last year Nicholas Negroponte and his colleagues at MIT proposed the idea of creating $100 student laptops. The idea seems to have moved beyond pie-in-the-sky and a step closer to reality. Some of the companies that have joined the project include Google, AMD (the chip manufacturer), and Red Hat, which distributes a version of the Linux operating system. In addition, the governments of China and Brazil are working with the MIT group to distribute the machines in their countries.

Now, the governor of Massachusetts joined the party. Governor Romney has proposed purchasing the same computers for middle-school students throughout the state, starting in 2006 or 2007, whenever they become available.

I’ll be really interested to see if they can pull this off. It sounds like they have most of their ducks in a row to make it happen. It has the potential of being a very disruptive technology - especially if they hit their goal of 150-200 million machines in the first two years

Some people figure out ways to create a focal point that combines a variety of disciplines. The artist Bathsheba Grossman is one of those people.

She is a sculptor that uses high-tech devices to create intricate sculptures of mathematical and scientific models. Her metal pieces use created using a 3-D printer (a process she describes here.) She also creates 3-D images in glass of math functions and scientific models using a computer-controlled laser that creates thousands of tiny little fractures in glass (described here. You’ve probably seen similar kinds of displays at the local mall, but this takes it to a different level of sophistication.

I’m referencing this site because it demonstrates how technology can be used to bridge disciplines. It also makes me think about a term someone used in a meeting I was in a few weeks ago. We were talking about how technology can impact kids in schools, and that for some kids technology is the “magic door” that can allow those kids to do things they could never have done before, or engage them in new ways.

Imagine being able to let kids have access to something like a 3-D printer. What could they create? Imagine taking kids in a math class and giving them the option of creating models of math functions, or kids in a science class being able to create models of DNA or the molecule of their choice. How much more engaged might they be? How much more might they learn? Perhaps not every kid would care, but there are some kids out there that would not only care, their world would turn inside out. I hope we continue to use technology to create more magic doors like this for kids to open.