Lightning in a Bottle

We finished reading Qwest grants today. Qwest is funding a total of nine $10,000 innovative technology grants throughout the state, and we screen our region’s applications to send on three finalists to the state. At the state level they will pick one from our three, so there will be one grant funded at each of the nine Educational Service Districts.

What makes it a frustrating exercise is that there are so many good proposals from so many dedicated teachers. Projects covered almost every content area and grade, and focused on involving students in a variety of creative and exciting projects. I would fund many of them without batting an eye, but only the one will be accepted from our region.

All of these people clearly put a lot of thought and effort into the projects they envisioned, and it really bothers me not to be able to reward them for their dedication, passion, and skill. I’m hoping that we will have access to greater levels of money in the future to avoid this problem!

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.

Professor Michael Wesch from from Kansas State University has a great blog post that went up today.  It contains a link that shows a synchronized video/PowerPoint presentation he did at Educause on the “The Crisis of Significance.”  It incorporates some of the material from his videos, but puts it into a context that brings a clarity to those presentations.  It’s about an hour long, and incorporates 379 slides (!), but it effectively underscores a lot of what I’ve been thinking about lately.  We don’t have simply a technology gap with students coming into schools now, we have a cultural gap.  While the “generation gap” has been around for a long time, the impact of technology seems to be creating greater and faster levels of separation in ways that directly impact what and how we teach.

Note - I did have to install a plugin to make the video presentation work, and there are several comments to the effect that others were having difficulty viewing the presentation.  I used Firefox for Windows, and after installing the required plugin it played just fine.

Just to underscore another powerful trend, a number of manufacturers announced new camera and camcorder memory cards at the Consumer Electronics Show earlier this month, and the Washington Post covers several. Being a tech person old enough to remember spending $1,000 for 1 megabyte of computer memory, it boggles my mind that Panasonic will be coming out with an SD (Secure Digital) card that has a capacity of 32 gigabytes. In one of those little camera chips about the size of a postage stamp, you’ll be able to store eight hours of high-definition video. Prices haven’t been announced, but I would guess that little bitty chip will be in the $1,000 range. Not even accounting for inflation, that’s buying 32,000 times more memory for the same cost.

Another way to look at it - in 1985, a megabyte of memory cost $1,000. Today, it costs 3 cents. At that rate of change, in ten years it will cost .04 cents, or four hundredths of a cent. Free, for all intents and purposes.

This is a challenge we haven’t really addressed in our planning for educational technology. We still focus on how costly things are, and often plan for resource-starved settings. How would we plan if we operated on the assumption that the technology will eventually be free? Back in December Guy Kawasaki shared a video looking at that exact concept - planning for when technology will be free. It’s a presentation by Chris Anderson from Wired Magazine, and it’s an overview of a new book he has coming out. It’s pretty challenging, but I think his message is very important, and one we need to start considering sooner rather than later.

My technology explorations over the last few weeks have been in the world of the small. I’ve been using an iPod Touch and an Asus EeePC. The iPod Touch looks just like an iPhone, and whenever I pull it out everyone is somewhat disappointed to find that it isn’t. However, it will hook up to the wireless network in my home and office without a hitch, and I can browse just about any website I want at speeds close to laptop speed. Yes, it’s a small screen, but it has incredibly crisp resolution and can zoom in and out quickly and easily. I wouldn’t permanently replace my laptop with it, but it’s amazing to be able to pull a web browser out of my pocket for a trip quick to Google.

The EeePc (which I pronounce “e pc” because it gets really tiring to say “e e e pc” all the time) weighs two pounds and has a slightly smaller footprint than a composition book. The model I purchased has 512 megabytes of RAM, and 4 gigabytes of flash memory instead of a hard drive. It has a seven-inch screen, wireless networking, 4 USB ports, a VGA out port, an SD card slot, an Ethernet port, and a built-in webcam. It runs a version of Linux, and has a OpenOffice, the Firefox web browser, Skype, and a variety of other applications built in. It’s only $400.

I love its size, portability, power and quick boot-up time. (Under 30 seconds.) It would be a remarkable machine for students to use on a regular basis. I have just two quibbles with it. First, the seven inch screen is really bright and very readable, but the resolution of the screen means a lot of scrolling up and down on some web pages. That should be fixed in upcoming versions of the machine. Second, so far the wireless network connection seems to be unable to remember networks that I’ve connected to in the past, which means I have to re-enter the security code when return to my work network (which is a really long, ugly, irrational string of characters). That’s probably something that can be fixed by someone that understands Linux more than I do.

Both devices are a peek into a future that isn’t that far away, when we will have options for incredibly inexpensive yet incredibly powerful devices that we can carry with us anywhere and keep us connected to the vast resources available on the Internet, as well as each other. There may be a lot of upsides and downsides to this, but it is inevitable.

I was talking with some teachers the other day, and the issue of training came up. As we discussed the topic, I began to realize what they were up against. With more and more network-based applications (whether Internet or from a building server), they face a situation where their software can be changed overnight without anyone touching their computer. One day, the email software will be upgraded, or the gradebook program, or their favorite educational website will sport a new interface. That’s all well and good, but suddenly they are faced with having to learn new things just to do what they were already able to do yesterday. Yes, the new software is probably more effective/productive/whatever, but the fact is the teacher’s ability to use it just went backward.

In other words, not providing professional development for technology does not mean teachers aren’t moving forward - it means they’re moving backwards. We need ongoing training just to stand in place!

Technology is one area where static knowledge can have a short shelf-life. What we learn in an ed tech workshop can start to depreciate in value the moment we walk out the door. Sure, some things have long-lasting value - how to use a TI graphing calculator, basic word processing skills, and so on. However, many other parts of this huge puzzle are in a constant, increasing rate of change. Even simple things like which menu a particular command is hidden will change from one version of a product to the next, and few people have the time or the patience to hunt around for something that just awhile ago was right there.

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.

To add to yesterday’s topic, here’s another potential breakthrough product - the Amazon Kindle.  It’s an ebook reader, which is nothing new.  What is new is that it uses the e-ink technology we’ve heard about for so long that creates sharp, clear text.  What is really, really new is that it also uses a wireless technology called EV-DO, a cellular data network that provides high-speed access to the Amazon repository of books, magazines, and weblogs from just about anywhere that has cellular phone access. For free.

The genius of this is that there is no need for a computer.  You order your books through the Kindle, and they download wirelessly.  If you subscribe to one of the many newspapers or magazines available, you simply turn on the Kindle in the morning and they’re waiting for you, because they downloaded overnight. Oh, and it accesses Wikipedia, too!

For an interesting review of the Kindle, check out Guy Kawasaki’s impressions.

It’s not a device that’s ready to replace textbooks yet (questions about durability and the lack of color displays), but the trend is irresistible. Paper is costly, bulky, and obviously hard to update. This is the kind of device our students will spend their adult lives using, at least in their professional lives.

We’ve been predicting this for a long time, but it’s still kind of mind-boggling now that we’re actually seeing it. There are a variety of new laptops hitting the streets that represent a major shift in cost and size of student computers (or potentially student-used computers). Most famously, the OLPC project is finally seeing the light of day, and their little green machines are in production. Even though they ended up not costing $100 (they’re just a hair under $200), they are remarkable in what they can do for so little money. (David Pogue has done an in-depth review with a video at the New York Times if you want to learn more.)

The XO computer (the official name of the OLPC product) is not only important in itself, but it has kicked off the development of competing products. Intel has developed the Classmate PC, which is a framework for small, inexpensive Intel-based laptops for students. (You can’t buy one yet, though.) The Asus company has just released a device called the EeePC, which is a tiny Linux-based laptop with a 7-inch screen, no hard drive (all Flash-based memory), built-in wireless and webcam for $399. It has only been on the market for a week or two, and it’s already wildly popular. And if you haven’t spent a few minutes working with an iPhone or iPod Touch, take a field trip to your local Apple store and see how easy it is to browse the Internet and do your email from those pocket-sized devices. With third-party applications being officially supported by Apple starting in January, these will in essence be computers. (How are these different from Palms or PocketPCs? Screen size resolution. New devices such as these have larger and far sharper displays, so you can create much more usable screen images and text. That and a much zippier interface!)

And, as I often say, that’s what exists today. Full-powered, wireless computers with web browsing, standard applications, voice and videoconferencing (some of them, anyway), all for less cost than what I paid for my first scientific calculator in college. What will we have available in five years? For that matter, what will the average student be using next week - outside of class, anyway?

I had a long discussion with a teach yesterday. It’s not about the technology itself, it’s about the societal, cultural, and economic changes the technology is bringing about. Changes in how people view information, how they communicate, and how they use technology simply to live their lives. These changes are taking place at an increasingly rapid pace, and I don’t sense yet that schools are figuring out how to address these changes. It’s hard to respond to, and there are an awful lot of unknowns involved, but not dealing with the changes will at some time cease to be an option.

I taught another Photoshop workshop last week. It was an evening class, so it ran from 4:30 to 7:30 over two nights. This means that the teachers involved had already worked a full day, then had to drive and arrive in the dark (this is the Pacific Northwest) and spend another three hours working with a very cool but often confusing piece of software. (It helps that the workshops are only $10, due to a generous grant from the Adobe company.)

I’d also worked a full day myself each of those days, so you’d think we would constitute a room of tired, cranky people. However, it wasn’t - we had two very enjoyable evenings of exploring and learning that I was sorry to see end. And horrors of horrors, I never once spoke about pedagogy, or GLEs, or curricular alignment. Each participant was able to explore the software and create images that had meaning and purpose to them. Sometimes it was personal (one participant used the software to rework scanned images of his own remarkable paintings), sometimes it was school related (two colleagues were working on images for the yearbook), and sometimes it was a bit of both. Regardless, each learner was learning what they wanted and needed to learn for themselves. The excitement and energy that came from this helped to carry them through the difficult and confusing parts of learning the software.

It was also modeling for what a classroom needs to look like. We actually did talk about that during class - is it really that radical of a concept that a teacher training experience should look like what student learning should look like?

I like teaching programs such as Photoshop because of the impact I see on the people that learn how to use it. Guy Kawasaki has a great video presentation called The Art of Innovation, and in it he talks about skipping the mission statement and going straight to a “mantra,” a short phrase that captures the essence of what it is you do. (For example, he says for FedEx it would be Peace of Mind.) I’ve decided that for my ed tech efforts, the mantra is Unleashing the Potential. Whether I’m helping a district plan for a better technology implementation or showing a teacher how to use Photoshop to improve their pictures of students, my goal is to remove the roadblocks that keep the technologies - and people using them - from reaching their full potential.

That’s why I like teaching Photoshop. When it’s 8:00 at night, and I’m by myself putting away the computers, if I feel like I’ve helped those fifteen people move a few steps closer to where they want to be, I’m not tired at all. I’m thinking about the next workshop and how to make it even better.