Taste of Tech

Here are two old videos that predict the future. Paul Otlet (1868-1944) was the founding father of information science. His major work included the development of new ways to collect, organize, and classify information. He’s the guy who came up with the standard 3×5 catalog cards that we used to use in libraries before online catalogs were available. This video describes his Traité de documentation, in which he fairly accurately describes the World Wide Web more than fifty years before it was developed:

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Thanks to Alec Couros for pointing this one out.

Thirty years later, the visionaries were still hard at work. This is a 1967 video produced by Philco-Ford that predicts technological developments for the year 1999. It predicts online shopping, email, online financial transactions, webcams, and laser printers. Interestingly, though, no changes are predicted in societal roles. The man is the breadwinner and bill payer; the woman takes care of the kids, does the shopping, and manages the household.

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Debbie found this one on Snopes and pointed it out.

So what are we predicting now? How is the world going to be different in another half century? Is is even possible to create an educational system that prepares our children for the world they’re going to build?

I’m still trying to work my way through this whole Twitter thing. I’m getting updates from a few people. Some of them are interesting. It’s neat to see what kinds of things people are working on, and what kinds of puzzles they’re trying to solve. Some of the Twitter messages (tweets) are irrelevant. While I like you personally and respect you professionally, I don’t care if you’re having Chinese takeout tonight. Some of the tweets don’t make any sense, because they’re replies from people I’m following to people I’m not following. So I’m only hearing one side of the conversation.

On Sunday night, I was discussing some of this with Jennifer Wagner (yes, she’s the famous educational technology expert Jdub that you’ve heard so much about). She jumped into the Twitter universe head-first, and found that it was so addicting that it was interfering with her work and her life. She finally asked to have it blocked in her school so she could get some work done. She finally settled on some personal rules for Twitter:

• Don’t follow more than 55 people. If you follow a lot of people, you’re constantly being interrupted by their messages. Fifty-five is a good number (as long as none of them are too Twitter-obsessed), because it keeps you informed without being too distracting.
• Limit yourself to five tweets a day. Don’t inundate the network with the inane details of your life. Stick to the really good stuff.
• Don’t small talk on Twitter. Get to the point.
• Remember that every time you Tweet, it’s like hitting Reply-All, or using the school PA system. You’re talking to a lot of people. Make sure you say something they want to hear. This ties in with John’s Rule #1: Don’t waste people’s time. Use direct messages if you want to talk to individual people.
• Share successes. Tell people about things that work. Twitter should be a give and take. So ask questions and express frustrations. That’s part of relying on the network. But answer questions, too, and share the positive success stories. Give as much as you receive.
• If you can’t say it in 140 characters, it doesn’t belong on Twitter.

I’m still not sure if it’s right for me. I may not be following enough people yet. I know that I haven’t yet reached the point where I recognize the Twitter-worthy moments. But I’m sticking with it for a while.

I’ll keep you posted.

It’s a different kind of social network. These students aren’t on Facebook talking about music and relationships and fashion and popular culture. While they’re probably interested in these things, their new network, Students 2.0, has a higher purpose. They want to be taken seriously by adults. They have opinions on technology and learning in the 21st century. As the silent majority, they offer a perspective not often heard in education circles — the perspective of the student.

The introductory video puts the education world on notice: “Be prepared. We won’t be raising our hands anymore.” While they’re generally respectful of adults, and empathetic about current teaching practice, they’re also making it clear that some things are going to need to change. Their site, which launches December 10, is described this way:

Administered, designed, edited, and written by a global mix of students of varying ages, interests, voices, and points of view, Students 2.0 will feature content written by both staff writers and guest contributors. From Hawaii and Washington, from St. Louis and Chicago, from Vermont, New York, Scotland, Korea, and other points on the globe, these writings will be united in one central aspect: quality student writing, full-voiced and engaging, about education.

The moment for a student-centered edublogosphere has come. The staff at Students 2.0 invite their adult partners in education to treat their posts as they treat all others: as serious writing, as invitations to their readers to listen, reflect, agree, disagree, extend ideas - and above all, to create new possibilities, understandings, and insights in education.

They’re doing this by starting a blog. The eight student contributors will each write a few posts per month. All posts will be peer-reviewed prior to being posted. Everyone involved with creating, managing, writing, and editing the site is a student between 12-18. They’re encouraging comments and discussion about their posts, and hope to create a conversation where students, teachers, administrators, and other stakeholders can rationally and openly discuss issues facing education and technology in our time.  If you’re using RSS, you can grab one of their many feeds. If not, visit the site and see what these students have to say.

Two stories about the use of robotics in music caught my eye this week. On Thursday, Toyota demonstrated a robot that can play the violin. From a technological standpoint, that’s pretty amazing. I can barely make noise with the thing, and my children have spent years learning to play what are still very elementary pieces. This robot plays with the technical proficiency of a late book one student, albeit with the feeling of, well, a robot. You can see it for yourself in this YouTube video, unless it’s blocked by a school web filter.

As Suzuki parents, we were of course very critical. “Its elbow is too high,” my wife reported. She said the same thing about a Boston Pops violinist last summer. I noted that it inserted an extra note at the end of the first phase of Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance to avoid doing a circle bow, where the bow is lifted from the string and repositioned. Maybe it’s not late book one after all. But it was still pretty amazing for a machine.

Of course, that isn’t the point. No one is suggesting that robots can play music the way humans can. It’s much easier, anyway, to emulate the sound of an instrument with technology than it is to create the technology to physically play the instrument. But the fine motor skills required allow the researchers to develop the precision of the technology while working on an interesting challenge. Toyota is also working on several other robotic technologies that are potentially more useful, including a transporter that uses Segway-like technology to make it easier for handicapped people to move around.

A more useful, but still gadgety use of robotics also appeared this week in the form of Gibson’s new self tuning guitar. You press a button, strum the guitar, and it tunes itself. It does this by sensing the pitch of each of the strings, and then adjusting the string’s tension accordingly to correct it. It can remember up to six different tunings, and can adjust itself to any of them. Want to switch from standard tuning to open G? Turn the dial, press the button, strum the guitar. That’s all there is to it. This video shows how it works.

Interestingly, the technology is made to look high tech, too. The motors that turn the pegs are needlessly noisy, and it uses flashing colored LEDs as high tech indicators for the guitar’s various functions. The price tag is not nearly as attractive as the technology. Gadgetell is reporting a US list price of $3399. I think I’ll still be tuning mine by hand for a while.

It was my first year teaching computer applications in a new district. After half a year of complaining, I received a new computer for my office. It had everything I could possibly need. With it, I could send and receive email and access the World Wide Web. I could create and edit word processing, spreadsheet, database, and presentation documents. I could print to network printers. I could import pictures from a digital camera or a scanner (which I received the next year). What more could I possibly need?

That was 1995. The computer was a Power Macintosh 5200/75. It had 8 MB of RAM, a 75 mhz processor, and a 500 MB hard drive. History hasn’t been kind to this particular machine, and some consider it to be the worst Macintosh ever produced. Still, despite its shortcomings, it still did just about everything I needed it to.

For the last year or two, we’ve been buying new computers with 1,000 MB of RAM, a 2,200 mhz processor, and an 80,000 MB hard drive. Given the improvements in processor technology, that’s 100 times the computing power of that 12-year-old computer. What are we doing with all of this power? Sending and receiving email. Accessing the web. Using word processors and spreadsheets and presentation programs. We’re doing the same things.

Sure. I know. I can’t use Netscape 4 to surf the Web anymore. And if somebody emails me a word processing document, the likelihood that I’ll be able to open it in Word 6 on a Mac is pretty low. I’m pretty sure I can’t connect my usb scanner or digital camera to a computer that only had serial and SCSI ports. And Skype probably won’t run on Mac System 7. The technologies have moved on. But the tasks haven’t.

As we face another round of hardware upgrades, I have to wonder why. Do we really need Flash 9? What does MS Office 2007 offer that we didn’t have in Office 2003 or XP or 2000 or 97? Is there anything that we really need to do that isn’t available in the old version? What does this week’s version of Adobe Reader have that the free and rarely-annoying Foxit can’t handle? Did Internet Explorer really fix more things than it broke? Why in the world would anyone run Vista if they didn’t have to?

The computers we’re going to replace next year were wonderful when we installed them. They were fast and reliable and people were really excited about them. Nearly six years later, what has happened? We upgraded operating systems, installed a lot of security patches, and kept anti-virus software up-to-date. We tried not to needlessly upgrade productivity suites or other software, but some of those upgrades were unavoidable. Now, they’re slow. But we haven’t really gained any more functionality from them.

Sometimes I think it wouldn’t be such a bad thing to get off the tech roller coaster for a while. I was in a school recently where every piece of technology — every computer, printer, monitor, scanner — everything was a model that we have already discarded in our district. I didn’t see anything in the school that was less than eight years old. What are they doing with it? Email, word processing, presentations, some Web work. Maybe they’re on the right track.