Taste of Tech

A couple years ago, our high school principal purchased some laptops to use in the media center. Our media center is small, and frequently crowded, and there wasn’t room for more tables full of computers. Still, he wanted to accommodate as many students as possible. With the freedom of wireless technology, it seemed like a natural fit.

We knew from the outset that we were going to want to use the computers in other areas of the building, too, and that wireless security was going to be an issue. We also thought that it would make sense to build a network that students could access with their own wifi devices, too. The project was getting more and more complicated.

In the end, we created a separate network for our wireless devices. We placed a firewall between the wireless network and the wired network. If a device connecting to the wireless network is a “known” device — one that we’ve set up — it behaves like our normal student-use computers. If the device is an “unknown” device, it requires the user to authenticate through a web browser, and then gives them access to the web. With this setup, we could leave the access points wide open, so configuration is easy. The security comes at the firewall level.

This system has worked fairly well. We purchased fifteen laptops for the media center. These computers can be carried down to the cafeteria, or to the large group instruction room, or outside to the football stadium. No configuration changes are needed to connect to the network, the system is secure, and everyone’s happy.

The problem came when we bought another fifteen laptops. Now, we have 30 laptops in the media center, all connecting through the same access point.  Since our access points are only really designed to handle about 12 connections at a time, that presented a problem. We added a second access point, but the clients all connect to the one with the better signal, and it still gets overloaded. There isn’t any reasonable way to load balance them without using multiple SSIDs, and that would mess up the connections in other locations.

As is often the case in our district, the solution came in the form of open source software. The Linksys access points we’re using have a firmware that runs on linux. Since this software is open source, the source code for the firmware is also available. As it turns out, there are many different alternative firmware packages for these devices. The one we settled on is DD-Wrt.  We flashed the access points with this software, and suddenly found ourselves with a lot of new configuration options. One of these allows us to set the maximum number of clients that can connect at a time. So we set up three access points, limited each to 12 simultaneous connections, and voila: a load-balanced solution.

This path isn’t for the faint of heart. It’s possible to render the access point unusable if something goes wrong with the software install. We’re also proceeding cautiously until we can verify the reliability of these things. But it looks like a very promising solution.

This week, one of our physics teachers requested that a physics simulation site be unblocked by our web filter. The site is Paul Falstad’s Math and Physics Applets, and it’s classified as a “personal page” and therefore blocked by the filter. Our teachers can request that sites be unblocked. Those requests go to a panel of seven people who evaluate the site based on our filtering criteria, and make a decision. In this case, the decision was to continue blocking the site. In addition to the applets, which provide math and physics demonstrations of various principles, there’s some humor on the site that’s inappropriate for school. The teacher can request to have individual pages within the site unblocked, but because of the way the site’s organized, this will become a tedious process.

In the end, I suggested that he save the applets from the site and run them on the local computer. It’s more work for him, but it will at least give him access to the things he needs.

Today, I discovered the Physics Education Technology (PhET) resource at the University of Colorado. This site has dozens of simulations for math and physics that cover many of the same topics as Paul’s applets. These simulations are written in Java, so they’ll run on any platform. Access to them is free, and there is a database of supporting materials, lesson plans, and activity ideas for teachers to use. In addition, you can easily download and install all of the simulations on your computer, so you don’t need to worry about web filters (though the site is not blocked).

The site is not without humor, either. In the trajectory simulation, you can throw relatively common items (baseballs, bowling balls, pumpkins) or the more exciting pianos and Buicks. When studying magnetism and electricity, you can use the “John Travoltage” simulation to see how static electricity works.

With support from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Kavli Operating Institute, and the National Science Foundation, the team continues to develop new tools and refine old ones. In the latest update (January, 2007), sixteen simulations were added or updated. This is a wonderful resource for science teachers, but it’s also a lot of fun for anyone who wants to gain a better understanding of how the world works.

I have four copies of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. There’s the original vinyl, the vinyl picture disk (unopened, no less), the cassette version that I bought before I had a CD player but after I stopped listening to records, and the CD version. All are original, genuine copies, obtained legally.

Why did I have to buy it four times? I didn’t. Even discounting the picture disk, I really only needed to buy it twice. I could have copied the vinyl to cassette. But I still would have had to repurchase to get the CD. There are lots of things I have multiple legal copies of, including Dark Side of the Moon, Band on the Run, James Taylor’s Greatest Hits, and most of the Springsteen catalog. If I were a few years older, I would have had 8-tracks of all of these, too.

Though no one talks about it, the media companies make huge sums of money from repurchases. Every time there’s a new format, everyone goes out and buys new copies of everything. We now have The Little Mermaid on both VHS and DVD. How much of the $25 for that movie went to recoup production costs? None. It was paid for long ago, even before the first limited-release VHS version. This is all gravy.

But digital media is threatening that. I can take my current CD of Dark Side of the Moon and rip it into mp3 files that will play on my computer or mp3 player. This is legal in the United States as long as I’m not distributing copies of it (though there are currently challenges to these fair use provisions in the Canadian parliament). The music industry would rather I not do that. It would be much better if I went to the iTunes Music Store and purchased it. Then, I could listen to it on my computer, or sync it to my iPod(tm). Except I don’t have an iPod. I have a Sandisk Sansa. So I’d be out of luck, because songs purchased in iTunes won’t work on most other mp3 players. I could choose Microsoft’s Zune instead. If I had purchased music in the iTunes music store, I could simply repurchase them in the Zune store. Then, I could listen to them on my computer using the Zune software, or on my Zune portable media device. But I couldn’t listen to them in Windows Media Player, because it’s incompatible. And if I had purchased content that uses Microsoft’s PlaysForSure copy protection technology, it wouldn’t work on the Zune.

Needless to say, consumers are getting a little fed up with all of the digital rights management (DRM) technology. American Public Media’s Future Tense recently reported that iTunes rival eMusic has sold its 100 millionth song. While that’s tiny compared to the volume iTunes generates, it’s not bad for a company that only has 2 million songs. They attribute their success largely to the fact that they don’t use DRM technology.

Meanwhile, the music industry is realizing that everything is at stake. Artists don’t need record deals to get on the pop charts anymore. They can distribute their music online by themselves. The physical music stores are continuing to vanish, and even Amazon.Com appears to be getting into the online music business, which will no doubt cut into CD sales. Pushing harder on the DRM issue is just convincing consumers that they don’t need the big media companies.
What about me? First of all, I’ve decided that I’m done re-purchasing old music in new formats. And I’m not really buying all that much new music anymore. The stuff I do buy mostly comes from independent artists without major labels. But when I do buy music, I’m still going to opt for the CD. Then I can just rip it and play it where I want. I prefer to manage my own digital rights.

I usually start my tech team meetings with a demonstration of some software, resource, or other tech-related concept. We had a meeting yesterday, but it’s been a busy week, and I was going to skip the demo. I didn’t have time to prepare anything, and there weren’t any resources jumping out screaming to be shown.

I arrived a little early for the meeting. It’s after school in one of our elementary schools, and if you get caught in bus traffic, it can be a real headache. So I had about half an hour to kill before the meeting. I was looking through my bookmarks and I found Wink. I don’t know exactly where I heard about it; it was one of those things that you hear about and file away to look at when you have more time. I remembered that it had something to do with screen captures, and that people used it to create little tutorials. So I downloaded it and installed it. I played around with it for about five minutes and created a short little Flash movie. Then, I searched the forums and found lots of good examples (like these) of how people are using it.

Meeting time came. I showed the assembled teachers, administrators, and other educational technology professionals the program. You launch it create a new presentation. You tell it to capture the screen in one of several resolutions, and whether you want it to record audio at the same time. Then, you minimize the program. You start and stop the recording with key combinations (now I actually have a use for the pause key). When you’re done, it imports the captured frames into the Wink program. Then, you can add text, navigation links, audio, or graphics to highlight various parts of the screen. When you’re done, export it as a web page, PDF file, or Flash movie. We spent maybe five minutes in the program.

The teachers were excited about it. Several thought of immediate applications for it. Maybe a 4th grade science class is going to be graphing data they’ve collected. The teacher records a little movie showing them how to do exactly what they need. The kids get a little just-in-time demonstration, then they’re off to the task at hand.

Today, I received this in email from one of our elementary computer lab managers:

That Wink program is awesome. I’ve already created 4 PowerPoint tutorials with it, narration and all. It will be interesting to see if 2nd or 3rd graders can watch them and then transfer what they have seen and heard to their own work. I’ve made an adding text, inserting a picture from file, adding narration, and saving a pp slide. I’ll let you know how they work out. It was really easier than I realized.

Here are the presentations she created the first time she used the program:

• Text in PowerPoint
• Pictures in PowerPoint
• Narration in PowerPoint
• Saving in PowerPoint

This morning, our high school assistant principal was talking about how math teachers could use it to demonstrate working through various types of projects. One of my technicians has already created a couple short tutorials, and will probably make more to help people configure email, install anti-virus software, and set up printers. It looks like we have a winner.

Did I mention it’s free?

In 1999, Sun Microsystems acquired StarDivision, and its flagship product, Star Office. The following year, they took aim at Microsoft’s near-monopoly on the desktop productivity market by offering a free, open source version of the package, StarOffice 5.2. In my December, 2000 technology newsletter, I wrote:

Sun Microsystems has decided to play Microsoft’s game [of underpricing their products to force the competition out of business] in an attempt to foil the software giant. Sun primarily makes high-end servers and network applications. They are also the primary developers of the Java programming language. Now, they’re getting in to the applications software market.

I concluded that article by saying that it makes economic sense to run Star Office, and that competition is a good thing for the consumer. The product was good enough to allow people concerned about Microsoft’s market dominance to switch without a major sacrifice in program performance.

As an institution, we didn’t switch. At that point, we were still trying to standardize on a single productivity suite, and had just selected MS Office as our standard. We were still going through the headaches of document conversion from AppleWorks and Microsoft Works, and throwing another wrench into the works would have been a very bad move.

Six years later, we’re still standardized on Microsoft Office. It’s an easy, safe choice, and Microsoft makes it economically attractive to stay with it. When we buy new computers, we purchase an open academic license for the current version of Office. That costs us around $60 per computer. That’s one of the big advantages to being an academic institution. We don’t ever upgrade Office beyond that version on that computer, and when we replace the computer, we buy a new copy of the current version again. In the grand scheme of things, it adds about 4-8% to the cost of a new computer.

Office 2007 may change that, though. The release marks a major departure for the Office user interface. The familiar pull-down menus and toolbars are gone, replaced with the infamous ribbon. Microsoft claims it’s optimized for efficiency and discoverability. My users are going to claim that it’s optimized for confusability. In addition to requiring them to learn a new interface to do the same things they’ve always done, it also takes a lot more screen space to display all of the tools, leaving less room for the document. The ribbon serves as a great reminder of all the wonderful tools Office has built in that nobody ever uses.

Add to this the fact that Microsoft removed most of the useful new features from Office 2007 (why can’t I create a PDF file yet?), plus the fact that Office ‘97 met most of my users’ needs, and we have a pretty compelling reason to keep what we have.

Meanwhile, OpenOffice.org (the full-blown open source project that grew out of the StarOffice application, abbreviated “OOo”) has been slowly chipping away at the market. Sure, Microsoft still has a 95% share, but OpenOffice had 14% of the large enterprise market in 2004, a market Microsoft can’t afford to lose. The product has matured significantly, and many schools are seeing it as a way to save some money while providing take-home copies of the productivity suite for all staff and students.

Last spring, Tech Soup published a fairly comprehensive comparison of the two packages. Granted, this is nearly a year old now, and both products have undergone major updates since then. But the article does a remarkably thorough job of comparing the two products, and pointing out the advantages and disadvantages of each. For the most part, OpenOffice is a viable alternative to Microsoft Office. You do give up a few things by switching, though, including:

• Grammar check. It’s true that MS Word makes some really poor suggestions sometimes, and I generally keep it turned off. But some people actually use this feature, and it’s worth noting that OOo Writer doesn’t have it.
• Macros. While both suites have macro capabilities, they’re not interchangeable. If you use Macros extensively in MS Office, you’ll probably have to re-create them on OOo.
• Pivot tables. If you use pivot tables in Microsoft Excel, you should know that this feature doesn’t exist in OOo Calc. Similar functionality is provided by the OpenOffice DataPilot, but it’s not going to be a seamless migration. If you don’t know what pivot tables are, you don’t need to worry about it.
• Email and Calendars. If you use Microsoft Outlook, you should know that there’s no email/groupware/calendar application in OpenOffice. Of course, there are lots of alternatives, but there is no built-in application.

On the other hand, switching to OpenOffice would have these benefits:

• PDF Support. You can generate a PDF document directly from any OpenOffice application.
• Web page production. While I’d argue that saving a word processing document as a web page, and using that as a web development platform is the wrong way to go, OOo at least produces web pages that work in any browser on any platform, instead of assuming that everyone on the Internet is using Internet Explorer and Windows.
• Flash export. You can export an Impress document as a flash movie, which can then be played on any computer that has flash installed. Impress is the presentation package for OOo.
• Cost. It’s free. You can install it anywhere. You can give it away. Students and staff can use it at home.

We’re not ready to switch yet. The small cost savings we would have by switching would be more than absorbed by the additional resources in staff development and support needed to manage the transition. There’s no compelling reason to make the move. But we’re also not switching to MS Office 2007. For at least the next year, we’ll be buying 2007 and downgrading the new machines to our current standard (Office 2002). When we have enough of a critical mass to migrate to Office 2007, we’ll re-examine the feasiblity of a switch. In the meantime, we’re going to start installing OpenOffice in addition to Microsoft Office on our new computers to start giving our users a choice.