Taste of Tech

A little shameless self-promotion here. A few weeks ago I was talking online with some other ed-tech people, and Alvin repeated his assertion that if you Google “Alvin technology” he comes up as the first link. That, of course, led us to all to start Googling ourselves, an activity that was fun until I arrogantly pointed out that when you Google “John Schinker,” every link on the first page is about me. Ryan grumbled something about me having an unusual name, and we moved on to something else.

So tonight, I Googled myself to see how many links I’d have to go through to get to one that’s not about me. (I did warn you about the self-promotion, right? Besides, I’m sure you do this all the time.)

As it turns out, the 20th item in the list is not about me. I’m not one of the Iowa Sportsmen and Sportswomen for Edwards. Then, the streak continues for another 20 or so links until there are several that aren’t about me.

In the process of doing all of this, though, I was surprised to learn a few things. Cathy Evanoff wrote a nice article about their Read Across America activities back in March, in which I played a very small role. I apparently still have a personal home page (that I’m not going to link to), which was last updated before my six-year-old was born. And I was featured in a Computerworld article earlier this month about Linux in schools. Who knew? All I did was answer a couple emails, and there I am.

So… umm… thank you, all you nice people who have been saying favorable things about me on the Internet. Now, go Google yourself and see what you’ve been up to.

One of the interesting things to come out in the Beta Survey was a shift in how teachers are using technology and a shift in the availability of technology to students. Teachers reported that they’re spending more time on Internet-based activities, both to provide instruction and to use as a research tool. The most-often-used technologies are now Internet for Instruction, Internet for Research, Word Processing, and Drill and Practice. We’re not doing so much with Spreadsheets, Desktop Publishing, or Simulations, and student use of technology in all of those areas is declining in our district.

Teachers also reported that technology is less readily available to students. On average, 13.5% of our teachers reported that the technology is not available to students for academic work in the categories I mentioned. This is an increase from the 2005 survey, when 10.5% said the technology is not available.

Over the intervening two years, we improved the student-to-computer ratio in our district from 6.5 to 5.8. That’s a 12% increase in technology availability for students. While that’s not a bad improvement, it’s clearly not keeping pace with the demand.

In order to make real improvements in these areas, we need to either spend more money on technology, reduce the amount of money we’re spending per computing device, or keep computers in service longer.

Given the gloomy financial outlook for the district, it is unlikely that we’re going to see any kind of substantial, transformational change in technology funding within the next several years. We have been looking at two possibilities for spending less money on computing devices recently. The first is the little laptop. While there are several options available, we’ve been considering the Asus eeePC. While our teacher certainly have concerns about the durability and sustainability of these machines, we like them well enough to move forward with a pilot project. If they can really do most of what we need at half the price of a desktop computer while throwing in portability, it would be a bargain.

The second is the nComputing X-300 system. In the right classroom situation, a card could be added to the teacher’s computer allowing three additional monitors, keyboards, and mice to use the system simultaneously. This would allow up to four people to use a single computer at a time. While there are some performance tradeoffs, the initial tests look promising. The system costs about $200, and we’re going to be trying it with a couple new classroom computers we’re installing. We would use old monitors and keyboards that we have on-hand to keep costs down. Several area school districts are using these effectively already.

In the area of improving access to technology by keeping it in service longer, we’re looking at several different products. Two interesting Linux distributions are designed to run with a minimal amount of memory and processing power. Linpus Lite is designed to run on low end hardware, and looks a lot like the interface on the eeePC. It’s only a live CD at this point, so it’s not very practical for use in a classroom yet. But it’s worth keeping an eye on. Meanwhile, gOS is the software the came pre-loaded on the Everex $200 Wal-Mart computers last fall. Again, it’s designed to give a lot of performance without needing fancy hardware.

Either of these might be used on older computers to allow people to continue to make productive use of them even after they’re too slow to run Windows with all of the bells and whistles. We’re also starting to play with nLite, which allows us to build a customized Windows install that leaves out a lot of components we don’t need. This will allow Windows to run with fewer performance issues on older hardware. While we can’t do much about aging hardware going bad, we can at least try to keep working computers in service longer.

All of this adds up to a more concerted effort to maximize our technology investments. While these measures certainly aren’t substitutes for adequate funding, we may be able to get more useful technology into the hands of our students this way.

World Have Your Say is a call-in radio program. There’s nothing special about that. Nearly every station on the AM dial has one. The hosts talk about current events, and people can call in to give their opinions. WHYS, though, takes the idea of talk radio several steps further.

First of all, it’s a global show. Originating in London, it actively seeks participation from the global audience. They regularly have callers from the middle east, and Africa, and Asia, and places where you’d think they can’t even listen to the BBC. And the perspectives of these people can differ drastically from the media we’re fed by CNN and AP and even Reuters.

The other neat thing WHYS has done is to embrace some of the interactive web technologies. They blog about the topics discussed on the show, and encourage site visitors to comment. They also solicit discussion and debate topics through the web site. And, of course, you can listen live to the show online or catch the podcast version later.

Recently, they’ve begun using Twitter to let people know about the topics they’re going to be discussing on the show. In addition to giving people a heads-up about show topics, it provides a nice, concise list of world events and issues. Here’s the recent list:

• Do you want your leader to go to Olympics?
• What’s it like being white in Zimbabwe at the moment?
• Are you worried about rising food prices?
• Should your boss know your family plans?
• Are protesters ruining the Olympics?
• Should women dress modestly?
• Can Muslims take a joke about Islam?

Nearly every day, they have a compelling question or two, and they seek input from the global audience. If we really want our students to have a global perspective, and to be able to work with people from different cultures, this is the kind of thing they should be listening to.

World Have Your Say is broadcast on weekdays at 1700 GMT. If you’re in the North American Eastern time zone, that’s 1:00 PM. You can listen online or find a station near you.

Over the last couple days, we’ve had a discussion in my department over Microsoft Office versions. We’re trying to build an image to run on old computers. We want the performance to be as good as possible, even though it’s going to be running on 6-7 year old computers with limited processing power and memory.

Dan used the excellent nLite Windows Installation Customizer to weed out a lot of the unneeded Windows features. We don’t really need support for 50 different languages. We don’t have to have the Novell networking protocols installed. With these computers, it’s unlikely that anyone’s going to be doing any video editing, so those tools aren’t needed. He did a great job of creating a Windows installation with just the stuff we need.

When it comes to Office, though, the debate is over whether we should use Office 2000 or Office 97. We know that there’s nothing in Office 2007 that we need that isn’t in Office 2003. We also know that 2003 doesn’t offer significant improvements over Office XP (which is the version we run on most computers). With the exception of making mail merge more difficult to use, I don’t really recall any major advantages to XP over 2000. And, though it’s been the better part of a decade since we upgraded, I don’t recall Office 2000 being that much of an improvement over Office 97.

All of this discussion of Office versions prompted me to think about how much I actually use a word processor. Most of my writing is done in other places. In the last year, I’ve written twice as many blog posts as word processing documents, and 23 times as many email messages as blog posts.

Yet, when I look at the complexity of the tools, it’s backwards. Take the toolbars, for example. In the version of Word I’m running, if I have all of the toolbars enabled, there are 224 toolbar buttons to click on. That’s without customizing any of the toolbars or adding anything that’s not there by default. In Wordpress 2.5, there are 35 with the “kitchen sink” option enabled. In my email program (Thunderbird), there are 15. How many do I actually use? Maybe half a dozen.

Maybe I haven’t used Office 97 in so long that I forgot how bad it is. But I think I’m going to dig out an old installer and try it.

I attended a meeting last week that wasn’t a complete waste of time. A shock, I know. Sure, it did take 45 minutes to drive the 13 miles to the meeting. It was rush hour, after all. All told, the trip took me 4 1/2 hours, which included about 2 1/2 hours of presentations.

The presentations were mostly of the endless-Powerpoint-bullet variety. While they did contain a few nuggets of really useful information, that information was more than covered in the 150 pages (!) of printed materials provided. Still, the presenters had something to say, and they were well prepared. That made this meeting better than most.

The valuable part, of course, was the informal interaction with the other participants. In all, there were about 100 people in attendance. I talked to other tech coordinators about Internet filtering, and learned about a new method students are using to bypass proxy servers. We also discussed various approaches to professional development, online learning with Moodle, and e-rate filing procedures. None of these were on the agenda for the day.

It’s not new for the informal bits of meetings and conferences to be more valuable than the structured parts. Many people express the idea that the best part of a conference is the discussion that takes place in the hallway, or the person you meet while waiting for a keynote to start, or the breakout session you attended by mistake after getting the room number wrong. These serendipitous moments are the best part.

So why do we bother with the formal agenda? If the whole event were structured to take advantage of these informal moments, it would certainly save a lot of planning time, and everyone would get more out of it, right? That’s the concept behind an unconference. While the idea has been around for decades, they’ve started to become really popular in the last few years.

The concept is an acknowledgment that, in most cases, the expertise present in the audience far outpaces the expertise of the people on stage. Dave Winer explained it better than I can, but I’ll give it a shot. Everyone in the audience becomes a “participant.” The leader isn’t a presenter. He doesn’t have scores of Powerpoint slides prepared. He knows something about the topic (yes, there’s a topic pre-decided). He leads a discussion, asks questions, and encourages people in the room to participate. No one gets to dominate the discourse. Different points of view are expressed and challenged. At the end of it all, we have a broader picture of the topic, based on the collective experience of the participants, that is far more valuable than anything a single person could have presented.

Now, what if we take this a step further? Rather than meeting in a conference room at a hotel or convention center, why can’t we meet online? We have all of the tools. Combine Skype, Yugma, Skrbl, Google Docs, and Ustream, all of which are free. The session can be recorded, so people unable to attend can watch it later. I don’t have to sit in traffic, so a one hour meeting actually takes one hour. Plus, anyone in the world can attend.

It’s going to take a while, but this is going to change how we interact professionally.