Lightning in a Bottle

NCCE is next week!  It looks like we’re going to have a really well-attended conference with lots of great workshops and presentations.  Among many things, I’m looking forward to seeing Wesley Fryer speak in person, having read his blog for quite awhile. (Well, as much as I can keep up with - I’m not sure the man ever sleeps.)  There are the usual load of exhibitors, and there’s just frankly too much to see and do.  I’ll spend a lot of time in the exhibit area, I know, and I’ll spend a lot of time in those wonderfully spontaneous conversations that only seem to happen in conferences.  If you haven’t registered, it’s not too late - I hope we see you there!

There was an article in The Guardian yesterday about how many schools are purchasing the British equivalent of the Asus EeePC.  (In England it’s marketed as the RM Minibook, but it is the same device.)   When they looked at the cost, I thought it was interesting that one of the measures was the cost per week – 1.6 pounds, or $3.13 over a three-year period.  They are projecting sales of over 30,000 to schools by the end of the year, which is even more impressive when you consider that ASUS has not marketed to education.

 Now that I’ve had a chance to use my EeePC for a couple of weeks, I like it even more.  I’ve figured out how to set the wireless connection so it automatically connects to my home and work networks, and I’ve found that the battery life is much better now that I’ve fully charged it overnight, running for three hours at least.  I was able to update Skype so it uses the web cam, so I can videoconference with it.  I’ll keep reporting as I explore it more.

David Pogue of the New York Times has posted both a written and video review of the XO Computer from the One Laptop Per Child project. Originally called the “$100 laptop”, the device is currently costing $188. The review, however, does a great job of pointing out what a truly revolutionary device it is, and it incorporates many technologies that aren’t available in any other device.

It also illustrates the value of shooting for improbable goals. Nicholas Negroponte has been the target of an enormous amount of criticism and derision for trying to create a $100 laptop. Even now, many are making quite a bit out of the fact that they didn’t hit their target price, and it’s almost twice what they had shot for. However, creating such an incredibly capable machine for $188 would have seemed just as improbable a goal four years ago, and it is a far more sophisticated device than I think anyone would have imagined. I think the XO computer and the technologies it incorporates have the potential to change the face of computing, thanks to the determination of a community of people to reach an improbable goal for the benefit of children.

Just to reinforce my last post, within two days of each other last week my daughter’s iBook and my work PowerBook had serious breakdowns. (For those of you with PCs snickering at me, you should also know that my PC laptop needed to have its entire logic board replaced four months ago, too.) In other words, every one of the four computers that I either regularly use or have paid for has had some form of major breakdown this year. Every breakdown risked all the data on the hard drive. Even as I write this, the miraculous software I used to rescue my home computer’s data is valiantly fighting to rescue the data on my PowerBook’s dying hard drive. The struggle has been going on for over 24 hours. The good news is that everything important was backed up just a few weeks ago, but it will still be sad to lose that last batch of pictures from the park.

We must really like these things to put up with all this trouble!

Andy Carvin has a good post today about schools being blocked from editing Wikipedia. Not blocked by their district, but blocked by Wikipedia itself. Apparently there was a long history of vandalism of articles from that school’s IP address, and so they cut them off. They can still visit the site and read the articles, but no longer make changes.

The posting itself gives a good overview of how the Wikipedia community works, too. I didn’t know about watchlists or user talk pages, for instance. Now I have a better grasp of how the Wikipedia works, and I also feel a need to go and find out more!

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a report about how teens use the Internet. 57% of students surveyed are not passive browsers of information, but actually creating content through posting web pages, blogs, or uploading music and movies. The latter are often re-mixed media that they have created themselves.

I find this very encouraging. Realizing that the vast majority of what kids are creating may simply be drivel, it’s still better for them to create drivel than to be passive consumers of drivel that others create. If kids are already in frame of mind to be creators, it’s a lot easier to move them into creating worthwhile stuff.

This follows a pattern that I’ve noticed with technology over the many years I’ve been messing around with this stuff. The most enthusiastically adopted technologies are usually those that feed into our innate needs to communicate and build social connections (such as cell phones and email) and those that support our drive to create (such as word processors and digital cameras). The frustrating part is that it’s often really hard to get these technologies integrated into school use.

(By the way, the term “screenager” was used in a New York Times article from a week ago. I’d give you the link, but now you have to pay to see archived articles at the Times. Hrmph.)

A research report written up in the Times Online (of the UK) showed up in today’s ASCD Smartbrief. The research indicates that, contrary to what most people have assumed, kids that have grown up using text messaging are better writers than previous generations.

It’s just one study, so it isn’t the end of the argument, but it does at least sort of slap the widely held belief that text messaging is corrupting our kids’ writing skills. Instead, it found that “…today?s teenagers are using far more complex sentence structures, a wider vocabulary and a more accurate use of capital letters, punctuation and spelling.”

We ran a technology and writing project for three years centered on the use of Alphasmarts. By removing the access issue (one Alphasmart for every kid meant that anytime a child wanted to write, they could grab one), we also increased the amount of time writing. The basic underlying assumption was that the more kids write, the better they’ll get. That turned out to be true. Beyond Alphasmarts, any tool that encourages increased time spent writing is our friend. That includes instant messaging, texting, and blogs. And with a few more research reports like this, maybe we can stop being accused of contributing to the fall of western civilization for using new writing-based technologies.

For any of you reading this from somewhere in our area, the ESD is moving. Friday the 28th was our last day in Burien. Between furniture installation and moving our our hundreds of bright yellow plastic tubs o’ stuff, we operate without offices for the next two weeks. We open for business in our new Renton office on November 14th.

Of course, this being the 21st century, it doesn’t matter much. Our email server has been moved and is running, and our new voicemail system is set up and functional. (I can call in and have it read email back to me over the phone, and it sends the voicemails right into my email - how cool is that! Yeah, yeah, you Blackberry and Treo people can just stop feeling smug. This is still new for a lot of us, ok?). With broadband at home and free wireless at the local library, most of the people with whom I interact will never know I’m working from somewhere other than an office.

I really don’t like moving, though. I hate the packing and unpacking, and it takes forever to get everything sorted out properly at the other end. Of course, I also lived just five minutes from the Burien office, and now I’ll have to drive another six miles to get to work. (Oh, the pain!)

But there are certainly some advantages, too. The new building is completely remodeled, our training facility will be state-of-the-art (well, except for the three-year-old laptops we use), and I’ll have a real office with a door and a window. It may be small, but when I start doing podcasting and video blogs, that door will come in handy!

Besides, as I carried out the last boxes of office stuff to bring home, I turned back to the old building and here’s what I saw:

Seemed like a good sign to me. I think everything will turn out just fine.

Lego robotics time! The 2005-2006 challenge for the FIRST Lego League project is up and ready. This year’s challenge is called Ocean Odyssey.

If you are not familiar with the FIRST Lego League, they run annual events where teams compete with robots built and programmed from Lego Mindstorms kits. The challenge is actually a series of tasks that must be completed by the robots, which must operate completely autonomously.

I can’t describe one of these programs well enough to do it justice. If you can find a local competition in your region, make every attempt to go and spend an hour or two to see these kids in action. You won’t believe the energy level or the sophistication of the devices they can create.

In Washington state, the local competition is sponsored by FIRST Washington, a subgroup of the Seattle Robotics Society. The regional competition will be December 3rd at Highland Middle school. I’ll be there!

The Kutztown Area School District in Pennsylvania has found a creative way to deal with students bypassing user restrictions on their computers - have them arrested and charged with felonies.

This is definitely one of those “shades of grey” issues for me. On the one hand, the students did violate the terms of their user agreement, sometimes repeatedly. The district has the responsibility to follow through on the violations. On the other hand, almost none of the 13 students charged did anything outright malicious. No changing of grades, stealing credit card numbers, or other traditional bad computing, just downloading iChat and installing unnapproved software. (However, the remote viewing of teachers and administrators on their computers was definitely not a good idea.)

Still, having the kids arrested seems like the wrong approach. If a kid in the wood shop repeatedly misuses the table saw, you take away the privilege of using the table saw. If kids misuse district laptops, then take away the laptops, suspend them, flunk them or expel them. Calling the police seems a little much.

The whole episode also underscores the perceptual divide between young people and older folks over what a computer is and how it is to be used. Adults tend to look at a computer with expectations for a limited set of options and uses, and see no big deal in locking the computer down to that small set of applications. Kids see the computer as a wildly adaptable mult-purpose device that can communicate, entertain, and create. To lock down a computer to a narrow set of purposes is to students the equivalent of having a radio that can only play four stations chosen by their parents, or a car with restrictors on it so it can only be driven back and forth to school, and only at 25 miles an hour. It just violates the whole concept of the technology for them.