Taste of Tech

We’ve been using linear text for centuries. Ever since written language became — well — written, we’ve been stringing words together into sentences, and sentences into paragraphs, and paragraphs into stories or essays or arguments. It’s very familiar. Pick up a book. Start at page one. Read every word, in order, until you get to the end. It’s easy.

About 45 years ago, people started talking about this thing called “hypertext.” Hypertext is kind of like a Choose Your Own Adventure story. As you’re reading, you can follow hyperlinks to other information about a particular topic. As a writer, this allows you to have much more detail in your writing than most people would want to read. It also allows you to cite sources for the arguments you’re making.

Look at the previous paragraph as an example. If you read the first sentence, you might wonder what hypertext is. If you click the link, you’ll find that it goes to a Wikipedia article that tells you more than you ever wanted to know about it. If you know about hypertext, but doubt my claim that it has been around for 45 years, you can click on the “about 45 years ago” link. This will take you to an article about Ted Nelson, who founded Project Xanadu in 1960. What’s Project Xanadu? Click on the link two sentences back to find out. None of this information is critical for you, my reader. You’ll get a basic understanding of hypertext just by reading the text I’ve written in this post. But if you want more in-depth information, it is provided in a non-intrusive way.

That brings us to perhaps the most successful implementation of hypertext, the World Wide Web. Here you are, reading this blog post, which is essentially just a document on a web server. But the hyperlinks provide connections to other documents on other web servers that could be anywhere in the world. By publishing hypertext online, we are creating our own links, our own connections between different ideas.

Take this example: There’s a book on my bookshelf called Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. It’s a book examining the connections between the works of mathematician Kurt Gödel, artist M. C. Escher, and composer J. S. Bach. Where would you go in the library to find this book? If it’s a book on mathematics, Dewey would put it in the 510s. If it’s about art, it would go in the 740s or 760s. If it’s a music book, it belongs in the 780s. If it’s primarily about these three people, you might find it in the biographies over in the 920s. Sure, you can check the library catalog to find it, but its classification is relatively arbitrary. It can’t belong to more than one category at the same time.

But the web is different. We decide how ideas are connected, and what is related. Just create a web page or a blog post, and you can tie any ideas together just by making links to them.

Now, take a look at what I haven’t done in this post. The hypertext augments the text. It provides supporting information. This post should stand on its own, even without the links. Sure, they help the argument and provide clarification, but they’re not strictly necessary to get something out of this text.

Compare this approach to the following picture:

The words “Click here.” are a link to a PDF file. One could argue that the text loses a lot of its meaning if you don’t follow the link. The link doesn’t really provide supporting information; it provides all of the information. You could make the point, I suppose, that this article exists just to provide a link to the PDF file. But we’re making the reader jump through unnecessary hoops just to see what this item is about.

Let’s take a less extreme example. This one is from an old post on Midnight Musings:

This one isn’t nearly as bad. But the “details here” links could have been avoided by just linking the relevant text. In most cases, I tend to either highlight my point, or the part that needs the clarification or the source. For example, I would make “10 times more frequently” the first link, and “already been distributed” the second one. If I had a link to pictures of the city in 2005 and 2007, I would link to them from “still look like they did.” If I had a list of federal fund allocations for Katrina relief, I would link to them from “allotted federal funds.” See how this works?

Be nice to your readers. Provide links if they help clarify something. Don’t rely on the links to tell the whole story. Give them some context. And don’t let the links get in the way.

You’ve probably noticed that California is on fire. At the moment, there are ten active wildfires. Half a million acres have burned, claiming seven lives, destroying 1600 homes, and displacing almost a million people.

Radio station KPBS in San Diego switched formats to 24-hour fire coverage last Sunday. The residents in their broadcast area needed timely, specific, detailed information that didn’t fit in the format of typical radio news.

I should point out that KPBS is an NPR affiliate, and that NPR ran a national story on them. In-depth news is their business. Still, when compared to major commercial stations in the area, they have a tiny staff. Round-the-clock local news is way beyond their means. They enlisted the help of their listeners, allowing them to call in and describe what was happening. Displaced residents needed information on a house-by-house basis, so they set up a customized Google Map to show where the fires are, which houses have been saved, and where evacuation orders have been issued and lifted. They also started using Twitter to send short text updates to anyone who wants them. You can sign up for free, and these updates will come to your cell phone or computer as text messages. The information is more authoritative than the information provided by the California State Fire Agency. The agency started linking to the KPBS map, because it’s more complete and easier for people to use.

On Tuesday, KPBS lost its transmitter. The power and communications lines running up the mountain to the radio tower were burned. Commercial station KBZT-FM stepped in, and offered to air the KPBS signal instead of its own. While they were able to resume their own broadcasting relatively quickly, this does show how much their efforts are valued by the community.

I’ve occasionally thought about the role of the educational technologist in the event of an emergency like this. KPBS isn’t doing anything we can’t do. We have the technology in our high school to broadcast live TV over the cable channels to our community. Thanks to the folks at Worldbridges, I could probably muddle my way through broadcasting live audio on the Internet. Theoretically, we could also broadcast video live online. We can use the interactive tools like Google Maps and Twitter. We can use cell technologies and Skype and regular old phone lines to host call-in types of programs. We use a rapid notification service that can inform our students and their parents quickly by telephone in the event of an emergency affecting the schools, and that would be valuable.

The key is that innovation and adaptability are necessary. We wouldn’t necessarily know which services are or are not available. Maybe we lose telephone service, or electrical power, or our fiber. How could we adapt to still get the word out in the best way possible given the resources available to us? That’s a 21st century skill.

It’s worth thinking about how technologies might be repurposed and leveraged as communication tools in the event of an emergency. It may be possible to have some extraordinarily useful tools with a little forethought and a lot of innovative thinking.

A couple weeks ago, I mentioned that I needed to write about this. When you want to copy things from one place to another on the computer, copy/paste is a common way to get that done. I can copy some text out of an email and paste it into a Word document. Or I can copy some text from a web page and paste it into an email.

But what if I don’t want an exact copy? Maybe the email message is using Verdana as the font, and my Word document is in boring old Times New Roman. Or maybe that web page has blue text. I don’t want that in my email message.

This is where Paste Special comes in handy.  Depending on the program and the type of data, paste special will give you some different options. In Microsoft Word, for example, I frequently use “unformatted text”. This pastes the text without the formatting.  If you’ve ever pasted something from a web page, and then struggled to get the formatting to match the rest of your document, this is what you needed.

In Excel, I use paste special when I want to separate the data from the formulas that generated it. I copy the cells I want, and then use paste special, selecting “values.” This replaces the formula in each cell with the data generated by the formula. It’s especially useful when working with data from multiple sources to generate a single spreadsheet. By doing this, we don’t have to worry about keeping the connections between those files intact.

When I taught middle school, I caught a lot of kids plagiarizing text from the Internet because the fonts and text sizes didn’t match the rest of the document. If they had known about paste special, I would have had to actually do a web search to catch them.

The Linux Experiment continues, and I realized I haven’t provided an update in a couple weeks.

I LOVE:

• Firefox. It works just as well as it does in Windows. Once I got Flash working, I haven’t had any trouble with it at all. Frankly, this surprised me a bit. I thought there would be more problems than there really are.
• Thunderbird. Same thing. It just works. I can switch back and forth. I can save a message as a draft on the Linux box and open it and finish it on the Windows one. It’s convenient.
• The screen savers. All right, you noticed that productivity slipped very quickly in this list, which should tell you were I’m heading with the post. But the screen savers in Linux have always been wonderful. I’m generally a “plain black screen” kind of guy over on the Windows site, but in Ubuntu I’m changing them every couple days.

I’m INDIFFERENT about:

• Terminal. I’m running Gnome Terminal 2.18.0, for what it’s worth. The translucent background is pretty cool. The fact that I can’t default it to a larger text size isn’t. I was initially very excited about tabbed terminaling, but as it turns out, I don’t ever remember to use them. I also find myself regularly forgetting to shell to my servers as a different user, since I don’t need to specify the user in Putty.
• PDF Handling. I’m using Evince to read PDFs, and it works reasonably well. It seems like I spend a lot of time looking at the “Loading…” graphic. Generating PDFs with GhostScript works okay, but I like the fact that PDF Creator prompts me for a filename in Windows. In Ubutntu, it just sticks a generically named file in my home directory, and I have to go rename it and move it to wherever I want it.

I’m ANNOYED by:

• The Word Processors. I don’t do complicated things with MS Word. Really, I don’t. Sometimes I have headers and footers. Usually I have some clipart. Once in a great while I’ll have a table. I don’t ever use any features that weren’t in Word 97, because that’s when I stopped paying attention to it. But I have NEVER opened ANY word processing document on my Ubuntu box that didn’t need significant reformatting. I tried OpenOffice. I tried AbiWord. I even tried Lotus Symphony (which should tell you how desperate I was). They’re all pretty good at handling Word XP files, but not really good enough. This is especially true if I need to edit something and send it back to a Word user. Honestly, I don’t use Word all that often if it’s something I’m just doing for myself. I’m almost always sharing documents with others.
• I already told you about the spreadsheets. I’ve installed Gnumeric and the aforementioned Symphony, but I have to admit I haven’t tried them. Mostly, I’m afraid that a 15-minute job is going to take all afternoon, and I end up just doing it in Excel.
• Accessing file shares. This shouldn’t be rocket science. All of my servers are running Linux, for crying out loud. But NFS is very messy, and certainly not scalable to more than a few users. SCP and rsync take too long and end up giving me multiple copies of the same file in different locations. On my Windows computer, if I need a file on a share somewhere, I just type it in the location bar. “\\10.1.50.111\offices\alertnow\students.csv” will get me the file I want. I know. People don’t generally do it this way. But it’s quick and easy. The trouble is, even though I have Linux servers, they’re set up to talk to Windows clients. So I have to have Ubuntu pretending to be Windows connecting to what it thinks is a Windows server, but is actually a Linux server pretending to be a Windows server. Messy, and enough to leave me reaching for my flash drive.
• Printing. Again, this is about my experience. I don’t care that I’m using a 15 year old printer. I shouldn’t have to change the resolution to 300 DPI every time I print something with graphics.

I’ve GIVEN UP on:

• Palm syncing. I spent about five hours on it over the course of three days. I have a LifeDrive. It won’t hotsync. If you have a way of making this work, I’m willing to try again, but I’m not interested in spending half a day trying things that might work that I shouldn’t have to do. Given the fact that there are two different applications for handling this, I didn’t expect this to be the problem that it is.
• Audio and Video. It’s not that I can’t get it to work, it’s more that I never really bothered to try. Skype seems to work, but I haven’t tried to subscribe to podcasts or anything.

Where does that leave me? I’m still using it, but I’m far from using it exclusively. Stay tuned…

We’re switching webmail systems in our district in a few weeks. We’ve been using OpenXchange for the last few years, but are switching to Squirrelmail because of its simplicity and extendability. We initially set up OpenXchange with the hopes of implementing a district-wide groupware solution, but the reluctance of some people to give up their Franklin planners, along with Microsoft Outlook’s inability to handle IMAP in a sane way, made this impractical for us. Now, as we try to improve the reliability of the system, it makes sense to go with a simpler product.

I showed the new webmail to my tech team yesterday. This isn’t rocket science. The login screen prompts for username and password, which are the same ones they’ve been using for years. Folders are shown on the left, and the message list on the right. You can sort the message list by sender, subject, date, or size. Click on a message to open it. You can reply, forward, or delete messages. Use Compose to create a new message. There’s a form at the bottom for handling attachments. It’s webmail.

The response was a little unexpected. What kind of training are you going to provide? Can you come to our staff meeting and show us how to use it? Who should the teachers contact when they need help?

Let me put this diplomatically….

No, on second thought, let’s not.

We have had Internet access in every classroom in our district since 1995. We have had computers in every elementary classroom since 1996. Every teacher has had an email account since 1997. If you need someone to show you how to use webmail, you are illiterate in this century, and you have no business working with kids in our schools. I can understand that someone going into webmail would be confused that it looks different. I would certainly be concerned if it was not expected. But if they know ahead of time that we’re changing webmail systems, that confusion shouldn’t last more than 30 seconds.

Today I was stopped in the hall by a professional staff member. “The assistant principal would like this form to be placed online so all the teachers can access it when needed.”

“Just put it on the staff drive. Everyone has access to that.”

“Do I just use Save As?”

“You could do it that way. But it’s easier to just drag the file over to your T: drive.”

“Do I have to rename it?”

“You should call it something that lets people know what it is so they can find it.”

“Can you come help me?”

“You can do it. You’re just copying the file from one disk to another.”

“Okay, but I might have to call you. Technology is not my thing.”

Not being able to copy a file from one disk to another is like saying subtraction is too hard, because I never understood that advanced math stuff.

“The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” — Alvin Toffler

If you are living and working in this world, you have to take personal responsibility for your learning. If you are writing down step-by-step directions to do things, and blindly following them, you are hopelessly lost in this society. If you cannot do something you’ve never done simply because no one has taken your hand and shown you how to do it, I don’t want you teaching my kids.

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed above probably don’t represent those of my employer, who is gracious enough to extend me the professional courtesy of allowing me to express my opinions on a blog hosted on their server. These opinions probably don’t even represent those of the department of which I am the head. So lighten up already. But stop being so helpless, for crying out loud.