Taste of Tech

Sometimes, we fail to realize the degree to which systems are interdependent on one another.

Last Friday, a sign appeared on the front door of the high school. “The building will be closed on Saturday due to electrical work.” The custodian clarified. The electricity at the high school will be off on Saturday between 8:00 AM and noon. If the maintenance work goes poorly, we may be out longer.

No one seemed to think that this would affect anyone except the high school. But an extended power outage like this one would have a substantial effect on the district as a whole. I sent out an email to all staff. Some major things would be broken, including the district’s web site and all teacher web sites, the email server, and our Internet connection. All of these are in the high school. Since the core switch for the data network is in the high school, data communications between the buildings would be impossible.

Then, it gets interesting. People get upset when they lose Internet access. They get irate when email goes down. But the world ends when the phones stop working. Since the phone system relies on the data network for trunking, phone service would be out districtwide except for voice service within the various buidings. But since the buidlngs themselves would still have power, their phone systems would not failover to the analog lines that they’re supposed to use when the power’s out. And since the voice mail system actually gets calls forwarded from the buildings, that wouldn’t work either.

We have a public access cable channel which carries text information about our district. That’s in the high school, too, so we would be off the air there, too.

As it turned out, they only turned off power to part of the building, and the technology and communications infrastructure was not affected. But it did serve as a wakeup call. If we were to lose the high school (or, more likely, the fiber going to the high school), it would have a crippling effect on our ability to communicate. We should make sure that our disaster management and recover plans take these things into account.

In 1999, I was applying for a teaching position in the Brecksville-Broadview Heights Schools. The first interview was at the high school. After the interview, I asked if I could walk around the building a little before leaving. I had never been there before, and wanted to take a look around. School was out for the summer, and I was given permission to roam the building.

I quickly realized that most of the classrooms were locked. I poked my head in the cafeteria, noted how small the library was, and then found that the only unlocked room was the distance learning room.

In the front of the room were four TVs where one would normally find the chalkboard. Facing the screens were tables with seating for 16 students. In the back of the room were four more screens, so the teacher (who stood beside the monitors in the front) could see the same video as the students.

The room allowed simultaneous connections with up to three remote schools. The four locations could all see and hear each other, thanks to cameras and microphones in each of the rooms. The teaching station had a touch-screen computer for controlling all of the electronics, as well as a document camera, VCR, and a few other gadgets.

I later found out that this room was used four times per day. We had teachers teaching reading and accounting in the room, with students participating in the classes from remote schools. We also had students taking AP Calculus and Japanese with teachers at remote schools.

It was fortunate that I had looked at this room. A week later, in the final interview for the position, the superintendent asked me one question. “We are in a distance learning consortium that allows students to remotely take classes for which there is not sufficient enrollment to justify a class at their home school. What do you think about this technology and its potential?”

I told him that it was a waste of time and money. I pointed out that it takes the worst model of teaching and learning — the teacher standing in front of a group of students and lecturing — and propogates it across a wire. It does not allow teachers to break students into groups. It does not allow the teacher to confer privately with a student or small group of students. It simply allows the teacher to lecture to the whole group. I told him that asynchronous models held much more promise. While the teachers and students wouldn’t be seeing each other in real time, they could interact much more productively in online forums, which encouraged reflection, discussion, and debate.

He disagreed, but hired me anyway. Last week, we sat at the same table during the new teacher luncheon. He has less than a week left before retirement, and it was probably our last chance to talk before his departure. He asked about the distance learning program.

It’s still there. We stopped teaching classes in it four years ago, because we can only fit 16 students, and the teacher would have to have an additional planning period. We still allow students to participate in remote courses, but this year, for the first time, we have to pay the other schools for them. The equipment is aging, and the consortium will be switching to an IP-based system next year. Our district will have to decide whether to make the investment and continue participating.

In the meantime, the asynchronous, Internet-based model of distance learning has taken off. Most colleges offer courses online. Some charter schools do, too. In our schools, we’ve used tools like Moodle to expand our existing courses, teaching parts of them online. As early as fourth grade, we have students logging in to their classes from home, participating in online discussions, accessing resources their teachers have selected for them, and completing and submitting assignments electronically. While we’re not teaching any courses entirely online yet, it won’t be long before we do.

The Stop Badware Coalition was mentioned last week on Security Now! In a week of truly depressing security news, this was the one beacon of optimism discussed. The Stop Badware Coalition is an organization that is developing a list of web sites with known malware content. The coalition categorizes software that disregards a user’s choice over how his or her computer will be used as badware. This broad categorization includes things like spyware, malware, and adware that can compromise a computer’s privacy, download advertising without the user’s consent, or compromise the system’s security.

The coalition is spearheaded by Harvard’s Beckman Center for Internet & Society in cooperation with the Oxford Internet Institute. Recently, they have partnered with Google to try to protect Internet users from this malware. When a person uses Google to search for something and encounters a site on the “badware” list, Google will display a message indicating that the site has known badware. The user can then choose to enter the site anyway or to go back to the search results and choose something else.

While I applaud the effort to protect consumers, this is a very dangerous technology. The badware warning page says “The website you attempted to visit has been reported to StopBadware.org as a site that hosts or distributes badware,” and then gives the user some more options. The potential for abuse is enormous.

Let’s say we use Dell computers in our school. I could go to stopbadware.org and submit gateway.com. hp.com, and apple.com as sites that contain “badware.” Then, when people go to those sites from Google, they’d get a scary warning.

Sure, they’re going to check the sites and make sure they really do have bad content. And with huge companies like the ones I mentioned, it won’t take very long. But if I’m a small business owner and I’ve been blacklisted by my competitors, you can bet that it’s not going to be easy to get off the list. They certainly don’t have the human resources to check all of the sites that are going to be submitted. And if they wait to list sites that haven’t been verified, they’re not going to be responsive enough to protect people.

I’m not crazy about other people deciding what’s good or bad for me to do on the Internet. Even well-intentioned efforts (like this one undoubtedly is) may end up doing more harm than good.

I have three calendars on my bulletin board in my office. One is a standard calendar that clearly shows the days with Sundays highlighted and holidays easy to pick out. The second is the school calendar. This one-page calendar shows the whole school year at a glance. If I can find the month we’re on, it’s easy to find the next school holiday, or to see when spring break is, or when the teachers start. The third calendar is a lunch calendar. Currently, it shows what’s for lunch in the high school cafeteria last May, but soon enough, it’ll be replaced with the current menu.

On my whiteboard, there’s a large calendar showing all of the things that have to happen before school starts, and when they’re going to get done. This one changes every day.

In my Palm desktop software, all of the personal events and appointments are listed. By looking at my calendar, I know that Megan has a violin lesson today, and Emily has a dentist appointment next Thursday. This calendar syncs with my wife’s calendar, so I’m always up to date on the events happening in the household. By “syncs,” I mean she updates, manually, my Palm pilot. There isn’t a way for her to say, in her calendar program, “this is something John needs to know about. Send it over to his calendar.”
On the school district’s web site (www.bbhcsd.org), there’s a calendar on the right side that shows all of the school events happening this week. I can also find other school events happening throughout the year. On each school’s page, I can see the events for that school, along with the district events. These don’t include sporting events, though. The athletic calendar has more events on it than all of these other calendars combined. That’s over at Schedule Star.

If this isn’t all bad enough, sometimes we like to share resources. If I want to use the meeting room in the board office, I have to check the paper calendar hanging on the wall in the reception area at the board office. If a sixth grade teacher wants to take her class to the computer lab, she has to sign up on an electronic calendar on her building’s staff drive. She may sign up weeks in advance, only to find out at the last minute that some other teacher has removed her name and signed themselves up instead.

There has to be a better way to do all of this. Unfortunately, it’s not easy. Here are some of the challenges:

• No Standard Format: Each calendar application uses its own system for storing calendar items. Some of these use flat files. Some use databases. Some get along with others pretty well. Other don’t. This problem will get worse before it gets better. Windows Vista is rumored to have a built-in calendar application which will not share data with Microsoft Outlook. Outlook, of course, assumes that the entire world uses Outlook, and gets very crabby if it has to talk to something else.
• Too Much Information: If I could put all of the stuff I listed above into a single calendar, it would be unusable. I generally don’t care that there’s a freshman girls’ soccer game this afternoon in Westlake. I also don’t care that Mrs. Harris’s English class will be in the library on Friday and Monday during third period. There will have to be a way to only show the things I care about. That will have to be customizable for each person who uses the calendar.
• Public vs Private: I need to know that my wife has a Creative Memories event at our house on Friday evening. She needs to know that, too. But that information doesn’t need to be on the school web site. The calendars have to integrate and synchronize without propogating all of the data everywhere. In some cases, we have to know that other people have something scheduled during a specific time, without necessarily knowing what that thing is.
• Everything Changes: Our Parent-School Organization does a wonderful job each year of producing a “PSO Calendar” that is mailed to every student’s home each August. It has all of the school events for the year. Tomorrow, I’ll be posting a CSV file (or maybe an iCal file, see “no standard format,” above) that contains all of those events. People can import those events into their PDAs and personal calendars. But when Central School’s open house gets rescheduled, they’re not going to know. It’s not good enough to just import the events, because they’re just a snapshot of the schedule as it exists today.

I don’t know that we can solve all of the problems. Actually, I’m not sure we can solve any of the problems. But it’s definitely on the list of things to work on this year.

I was doing some maintenance on our online learning system (Moodle) in July. I decided that it would be a good idea to remove teachers who aren’t using the system. We have a lot of people who express interest, play around with it for a while, and then decide it’s not for them. So I wanted to remove all of the staff accounts who hadn’t logged in for more than a year. I sorted the user list by last login date.

I was surprised at the results. “Last access: 8 miinutes ago.” That’s odd, it’s a student account. The first dozen or so entries had logged in within the last week. Sixty had logged in since school let out in June. Something was up.

Checking the logs, I found most of the activity in a sixth grade science class. I posted a message? What are you guys doing here?

“This is the only way i can talk 2 my buddies whos phone numba i dont have!”

“We love this site cuz its created just for us!”

“We use it all the time to talk to ppl…..so thank u for creating this!!”

And it’s not all social. They were talking about racism. They were discussing whether students should be allowed to have water bottles in school. They talked about the flooding that we had in the community in June. As the summer progress, thoughts turned to returning to school:

“I’m ready to go back to school… my backpack is even already packed!”

“i dont want to [go back to school] cuz i havent taken any notes on the [summer reading] books.”

Of course, the problem is that they’re doing this in a sixth grade science class. That sixth grade teachers is going to come back and want to put his new students in the class, and I’m not sure the seventh grade teachers are ready for this. So I created another course for them (without a teacher) so they can continue the conversation.

Moodle is a closed system. This lets the students interact online without opening them up to the dangers (real and perceived) of posting information on publically-accessible sites. They can still interact with their friends, and they know that this is a school setting, so there are defined boundaries for acceptible behavior. On the school’s side, we have access to the logs — they can’t be anonymous, and they’re more accountable for their actions. As they use the system, they learn about appropriate and inaapropriate things to post (”I’m not posting my phone number on here!” exclaimed one student). By the time they outgrow it, they’ll be ready for the real Internet.