Lightning in a Bottle

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.

We held a statewide videoconference last week, and really pushed the limits of the technology at hand. We had a great guest speaker named John Kuglin, who is currently the Director of Technology for the Eagle County school district in Colorado. We had 11 sites in Washington hooked up, and then John came in from Colorado. Things started off OK, but then a glitch kicked in that prevented us from seeing John. We could hear him, and he could hear and see us, but no video came through from his site (except for frustratingly brief two-second moments when his smiling face would appear).

So what did we do? Well thankfully, we were also running a screen-sharing session using a program called GotoMeeting from Citrix. Each of the eleven sites had, in addition to the videoconferencing system, a computer and projector hooked up. The computers were logged into a GotoMeeting session with John’s computer, so his Powerpoint presentation on 21st Century Students was being shared on each screen, projected in each of sites. Since we could hear his voice and see his screen, the presentation was able to continue with only minor problems. (John uses a lot of videos in his presentation, and the screen-sharing system couldn’t handle those. They had to be skipped.) There is also a chat window embedded into the product, so I could send messages back and forth to John and to the facilitators at other sites without interrupting the videoconference.

The added advantage of the GotoMeeting software was that, in addition to preventing a disaster, it actually works far better than sharing a PowerPoint in the videoconferencing system. The video quality of the average video conference is murky at best, and it can render presentation slides almost completely unreadable. Through the screen sharing, it comes through as sharp and clear as if you are watching in on the presenter’s own computer.

Just to be clear, there are other similar products besides GotoMeeting - WebEx has a new similar product, and there are others such as Elluminate and Adobe’s Acrobat Connect. Regardless of the product, however, it was just fun to try out new ways to present and collaborate.

Michael Welsh and 200 of his students at Kansas State University created the this video about college students and how their lives relate (or don’t) to college. It’s a great discussion starter for a staff or board meeting! (I’d also love to see someone create a high school version of the project.)

John Kelly from ESD 123 alerted me to Pop!Tech, another cool online conference that’s starting Wednesday, October 17. The theme is The Impact of Technology, and while the actual conference itself is in Camden, Maine, all of the sessions are being broadcast live on the Internet. Many of the previous sessions are available to be viewed online or downloaded. The topics are varied, wide-ranging, and very interesting.

And don’t forget that the K-12 Online Conference is under way!

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.

This October will see the second K12 Online Conference, a free conference on educational technology that takes place entirely online. It is made up of several dozen podcast presentations that are released four or five a day over two weeks, with several live “Fireside Chats” to interact in real time with featured presenters. The peripatetic David Warlick is the keynote speaker again this year, and I assume it will be just as good or better than his presentation last year. I think this is a very intriguing model and I’m trying to figure out how to try something like it here.

I do have one concern, however. If I go to a regular conference, no matter how many presentations there are I can only attend one per time slot, so there is a maximum amount of information I can attempt to absorb. I simply can’t go to every session, which is probably better for my brain. However, in this model, every darn session is available to me! I haven’t got the time to view them all, so I still have to prioritize. It’s just harder!

After what seems like decades, Texas Instruments has announced a new line of calculators that leap to a new level of technological power. Called TI-Nspire, the new devices sport larger, higher-resolutions screens, and much more powerful software for exploring math concepts.

Graphing calculators are an interesting study in educational technology. Even though they are really small computers, in most districts they don’t seem to be considered part of the technology infrastructure - they’re math teaching tools, managed by the math staff. They’ve also been a technology that was fairly static, even as computers evolved at a rapid pace, graphing calculators just sort of ambled along, safe, secure, and effective in their little niche.

TI did two very intelligent things with this new lline of calculators. First, they will release computer software that works exactly like the calculators do (for Windows and Macs - yay!). While there have been software emulators for calculators before for teachers to use in demonstrations, this is standalone software for students to use either instead of the calculator, or in conjunction with it. It looks pretty slick.

The second thing they did is really, really smart. If you spend time around math teachers, you’ll find out that a lot of curriculum is built around the TI calculator line. No matter how powerful the new devices are, there is the inertia of the pre-existing instructional materials that use the older devices. Recognizing this, TI designed the new devices so that you can swap out the new keyboards and replace them with keyboards that match the older calculators. That’s understanding your customers!

I was distressed over the last couple of weeks to watch one of my favorite blogs (which I have referred to here in the past) basically shut down. Kathy Sierra has written Creating Passionate Users, a blog that covered business practices, customer service, adult learning, and a wide variety of related topics. She writes in an engaging way, and pulls together a variety of resources and blends them together into clear, concise, and easily understood commentaries.

Sadly, as of two weeks ago, she has stopped public speaking engagements and blogging. She became the target of such intense online harassment that she could no longer tolerate it. I won’t discuss in even vague detail the kinds of threats and vulgar material she was subjected to, but it was the kind of thing that no person should ever have to deal with.

As depressed as I am about Kathy’s decision (I spoke of her blog so often around the office that I have been accused of having a crush on her), I was even more depressed by the responses posted in some of the many online discussions about her situation. While the huge majority of people were in complete agreement with her concerns, there was a very small but very vocal minority that seemed to think she was a crybaby who was just looking for attention, and if she couldn’t handle the stress she was just a wimp and good riddance.

I refuse to accept that in the online world, which holds so much promise, must be reduced to the lowest common denominator, where the most vulgar voice in the room defines the level of discussion.

The only good thing to come out of this mess is that Kathy’s choice to go public with her situation has created an enormous amount of awareness, and has resulted in many people examining this kind of online behavior. The New York Times has an article about a new code of ethics for bloggers. I think it’s a great idea. Some people think that having a cultural norm for civil, respectful discussion is a form of censorship, but as Tim O’Reilly points out in the article,

?That is one of the mistakes a lot of people make ? believing that uncensored speech is the most free, when in fact, managed civil dialogue is actually the freer speech,? he said. ?Free speech is enhanced by civility.?

Harassment is a form of censorship, too. How many other voices such as Kathy’s have been silenced by threatening, boorish behavior?