Taste of Tech

About a month ago, I started listening to the Immigration Tales podcast. The show features interviews with people who came to the United States as immigrants. The program is produced by Cuban American Vitor Cajiao, who came from Cuba at age 11. The first episode tells his story. Since then, he has interviewed people from El Salvadore, Montenegro, Poland, and England. Each talks about his or her experience, life in the old country, the process of coming to the United States, and the sometimes difficult adaptation to American life.

It occurred to me that many of our English Language Learner (ELL) students are probably immigrants. They may be able to relate to some of these people. Because most of the guests on the podcast are non-native English speakers, their language may be easier for our students to understand. Their use of idioms and colloquialisms is kept to a minimum, and they tend to be more consistent in their application of grammar.

Several applications of this resource came to mind:

• Students could listen to the podcasts, discuss some of the challenges faced by the guests, and relate the stories to their own experiences.
• Students could volunteer — either individually or collectively — to be guests on the show. The podcast is actively seeking guests for future shows.
• Students could use simple, inexpensive recording devices to record their own stories, borrowing the concept of the show for their own use. This could be burned to audio CD to share with families or published as a podcast.

It’s definitely a resource that could help these students work on their English while also addressing some of the social challenges they’re facing. I sent a CD with the first couple episodes to some of our ELL teachers last week. We’ll see what happens….

When we dispose of old computer equipment, we generally keep most of the parts that we can use elsewhere. We pull out hard drives, memory, CD-ROM drives, etc. We then use these as replacement parts in newer computers, and reduce the amount of money we have to spend on parts.

Keyboards are a problem, though. They’re generally pretty durable, and we often find that the keyboards for computers that we’re discarding are perfectly serviceable. They do have one problem, though: they’re filthy. After six or eight years of students and staff members constantly using them, they’re covered with dirt, dust, coffee stains and cracker crumbs. If you turn one over and shake it, all kinds of interesting things fall out.

They are possible to clean. Take a cotton swab and some rubbing alcohol and almost anything will come off. You can pop the keys off and clean the sides of them more easily. You can use compressed air to blow the dust out. But this is time consuming. When a new replacement keyboard is only $10, why would I spend an hour trying to clean up an old one?

A while ago, James Conley, from Piqua City Schools, suggested on the state tech coordinators’ listserv that dishwashers can be used to clean up old keyboards. In June of 2005, he wrote:

“However, for the really bad keyboards, a friend of mine suggests using a dishwasher. Don’t laugh, it works great and you can do about 20 keyboards at a time. Don’t have it dry them of course. I have used it to resolve pop being dumped on keyboards. It is the only thing that will get them working again.”

Last week, I was cleaning out a storage room and had a bunch of old keyboards, so I decided to try it out. I loaded up fifteen keyboards of various models. Seven were Gateway keyboards, two were Dells, two were Compaqs, and four were Apples. All of them were PS/2 keyboards except the Apple ones, which are USB. I carted them down to the MH unit, which has a kitchen with a dishwasher.

I set the dishwasher for a normal wash, without heated drying. I didn’t add any soap. I ran it through the cycle, and then pulled them out. I think I blew a couple fuses in MH kids’ heads when they saw me open the dishwasher and start taking out wet keyboards.

I stored them, keys-down, on paper towels for a week. Today, I tested them. For each keyboard, I rated it on functionality and cleanliness on a scale of 1-10. For the USB keyboards, I also tested the integrated USB ports on the keyboards. The numbers are probably pretty meaningless, since I didn’t bother to test the keyboards before cleaning them, and I didn’t assess their cleanliness then. But here’s what I found:

Of the 15 keyboards, 11 of them were in a condition good enough that I would deploy them. Of the remaining four, three were not clean enough, and one didn’t work. The one that didn’t work has a malfunctioning space bar. It’s possible that it was broken before the cleaning, but I don’t know for sure.

On my 1-10 scale, the median cleanliness score was 8. I consider a score of 7 or higher to be good enough to put the keyboard into use. Of the failures, interestingly, two of the three were the Compaqs.

Normal people would stop here and say “73% of the keyboards washed with the dishwasher end up in good enough condition to put to good use. Wash all of the old keyboards, throw away the ones that don’t work, and move on. You will certainly have more keyboards than you could ever use.”

I’m not “normal people.” I took one of the Compaq keyboards that scored a “5″ down to the kitchen. The food service supervisor helped me run it through the dishwasher. Twice. There are a few differences between the garden-variety kitchen dishwasher and this industrial-sized one. First of all, there’s no way to not use soap. It’s automatically added. Second, it uses 160 degree water to clean, and 180 degree water to rinse. Knowing how well hot water works elsewhere in the building, we would have been lucky to have 100 degree water in the first round.

Two passes through the cafeteria dishwasher were enough to raise the cleanliness rating from a 5 to an 8. It’s still not perfect, but I wouldn’t be embarassed to have people using it. Now, we’ll just let it dry for a week, and see if it works.

My blog receives a lot more traffic when I update it . Can you tell how many times I’ve updated it in the last nine days?

These little graphs are called Sparklines. They’re easy to make and embed in a document. They can also be used (as you can see) on web pages and blogs. They’re not full-blown, data-intense graphs. Sure, I could (and would) jump into Excel, plug in some data, and whip up a graph in a couple minutes to illustrate a point. But that graph would be separate from my text, and the reader has to stop reading to look at it. When you want to quickly show a trend, or present data within a broader context, sparklines can help.

Sparklines were invented by Edward Tuft, professor emeritus of statistics, graphic design (there’s a combination!), and political economy at Yale. He describes them as “data-intense, design-simple, word-sized graphics.” They’re bite-sized chunks of data, shown graphically, in a space that’s about the size of a word.

Where do you get ‘em? For the graph above, I used Joe Gregorio’s Sparkline Generator. This is a free web script. Go to his page, plug in your data, and it gives you an image tag that you can paste into your web page. I could also just copy the image from there and paste it into a document. Joe also offers the script and source code for free, so you could host it on your own server.

There’s also a commercial plugin for Microsoft Office to create sparklines and embed them into documents. Bissantz SparkMaker allows you to easily incorporate the little graphs into your Office presentations. Personally, I’d rather save the $199 and paste them in from the free web generator, but the option is available.

There’s also a php library, for the programmers among us.  I could see us doing some neat things with this to show spam stats, Internet traffic use, server health, and other geeky data.

Old books are everywhere. We buy books, or receive them as gifts. We read them, and put them on the shelf. In our house, we have a separate room for them. We’ve lived in the same place now for ten years, because no one will help us move any more.

We try to get rid of them. We take a pile to the church book sale. We give them away. We try to “return” books to the library that don’t belong there. We take them to coffee shops and restaurants and “forget” them. But invariably, we pass a book sale on the way home, and the piles continue to grow.

Sure. There are some books we like to read over and over. There are others that make great reference tools. There’s a C++ book on the shelf behind me. I haven’t programmed in C++ in fifteen years, but there’s this one really useful appendix, and when I need it, I know where to go. But the majority of the books we have sit unloved on dusty shelves.

You can sell books on eBay. But once you add shipping, and the hassle of dealing with the auction, and the listing fees, it’s hardly worth the effort.

BookMooch changes that. Here’s how it works: You go to the site and register (which is free). You list ten books that you have that you’re willing to part with. In return, you receive one credit to get you started. You can use this credit to mooch a book from someone else. You use the web site to request the book, and the owner sends it to you. When someone wants one of your books, you send it to them. Every time you send a book out, you get another credit that you can use to get more books.

No money changes hands. Your only cost is the cost of shipping books to other people. It’s a simple and elegant way to share books. The site has been up for about a month, now. So far, there are about 60,000 books available, and about 9,000 books have been mooched.

My wife told me I should read this Scientific American Article. She found a link to it on Ryan’s blog. I immediately noticed that it’s much longer than my normal attention span. “Make sure you read all the way to the end,” her email told me. I knew I was going to be quizzed on this, so I dutifly clicked on the link.

That was a couple weeks ago. I’ve been thinking about the concepts in the article ever since. The article examines how “experts” think, reason, and make decisions within their areas of expertise. Researchers have concluded that experts rely more on structured knowledge than on analysis of options. An expert chess player doesn’t examine the implications of all of the possible moves. He or she simply looks at the game as a whole — the relation of the pieces to one another, and picks the best move.

This approach to memory is known as chunking. The article uses this example: The sentence “Mary had a little lamb” can convey infomation of vastly different complexity depending on the reader’s background. If you know the story, you’re thinking about fleece as white as snow, and the lamb following her to school (which is against the rule in the story, but I don’t see that mentioned in our student handbook). The sentence is a single chunk which represents quite a bit of information.

If you don’t know the story, the sentence represents a single chunk, but doesn’t convey any more information. A young reader who can read without comprehension sees five chunks (words) without necessarily getting the connection between them, or the broader meaning. Non-readers may see 18 chunks, if they know their alphabets. Non-Westerners may not even recognize the alphabet, and may break the letters down into a series of lines, dots, and curves. At this level, there’s an incredible complexity to the information.

So, when my football-coaching brother looks at a defense, he knows they’re in double coverage at a glance. and he can call out the line’s techniques in the couple seconds before the ball is snapped. I’m still trying to make sure there are eleven guys on the field. The chunks depend on the level of expertise.

The same is true of technology “experts.” Two people at the middle school call from different offices within a few minutes of each other. One can’t get to email, and the other is having trouble changing a student’s schedule. The technician puts these together, along with the fact that school is starting in a couple days, and determines (correctly) that a teacher somewhere else in the building has plugged a hub into two network ports and created a network loop. It’s not jumping to conclusions. It’s just applying previous knowledge to the current situation, and looking at the big picture.

The major implication is that these talents are developed, not inborn. Dr. Suzuki recognized that all students are fluent in their native languages. Even in really difficult languages, the slowest kids are language experts in their native tongues. He applied this to music instruction, concluding that anyone can be an instumental master. He built the Suzuki Method of music instruction around this philosophy, and millions of very young kids are outstanding musicians.

I’m at the level where I can play chords on the guitar. My fingers don’t have to think about where to go to play a C chord. If I’m in they key of D, I know that I’ll probably be going to A or G at some point in the song. If I’m throwing in a minor, it’ll probably be B minor. If we want to play the same song in G, that’ll be an E minor with C and D major chords. I can look at a key and know which chords are probably going to be there. What I can’t do yet is figure out how a blues song would differ from a country song or a rock song in this area. I also don’t understand augmented and diminished chords. But that’s just a bigger chunk.