Parents: here’s a template for technology contract with your kids

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech on Thursday, January 20, 2011 Permalink

From balanced gaming,  I’ve found this to be an excellent (PDF) contract with kids.

The four noble truths of technology and learning

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 Permalink

With apologies to my Buddhist friends.

The four noble truths of technology and learning.

1. Engage, stop, turn off, reflect.
2. Program
3. Participate
4. Sift


As I work in this business, reflect on my practice, and see what works and what doesn't work, I see four noble truths.

1. Engage in this stuff. Get involved with multimedia, searching, web 2.0 tools, programming, chatting, mashups, game playing, learning. Dive deep into this and then stop. Turn off -> insert noun here <- and reflect. I say an hour of day of no screen time. Just stop and reflect on the chaos, and then on something important. Pretty simple. There is a pattern, a ratio, we should aim for. For every X amount of time in front of a screen, Y amount of time away from it. Learning, understanding, and depth are important 21st century skills. You can't think if you don't have time to think, eh? I say depth is better than breadth.

2. Create something deep with technology. All the snazzy web 2.0 tools are great, but if you don't program, you don't speak computer. It's important. Coding is our lingua franca. Think about books. Anyone who can write, can write a book (not everyone should, but that's another story). Very few people who use a computer can code (but they should). As schools, we have a responsibility to teach literacy. Reading and writing. As books diminish and our primary means of knowing the world comes from a screen, we need to understand beneath the glossy interface. How to create something in this world.

3. Participation and engagement with technology is the only way to learn about it. I can teach you all about computers with pictures and diagrams, but until you start using it, you won't really know it. Engage in technology, participate in the bigger world. It's unprecedented, isn't it? The access and availability of information is unlike anything we've ever known. Encourage students to enter into affinity space.

4. Mountains of data, ranges of information requires a new skill. Sifting. What is true? What is fluff? What is some multinational corporation trying to sell? A hint about sifting: paying attention to smart voices.

I'll write more about each of these points in the coming days. Please share your pointed observations.

Facebook in class isn’t the problem

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Leadership on Friday, January 14, 2011 Permalink

Not quite sure how I can be more clear here.

If kids are spending to much time during class mucking about with facebook, it is not a problem with facebook. It's a problem with classroom management. If a teacher is allowing kids to "do whatever they want" during class, then they will!

Block Facebook, they will play games
Block games, they will surf the web
Block the web, they will play solitaire
Block solitaire, they will play with paint
Block paint, they will draw ascii pictures in notepad
...ad nauseum...

When I was in 8th grade (16 years old) I devoted roughly 80% of my in-class time to drawing pictures of space battles and writing stories about World War 2. I also enjoyed designing futuristic cities - all with a pencil and paper. Happy my teacher didn't take that away....

That thing about Twitter - I still prefer RSS

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Twitter on Tuesday, January 11, 2011 Permalink

Stephen Dowes writes about the possible beginning of the end of twitter here.

Mr. Dowes writes:

"This post shows how easy it is to create a Twitter account and have it automatically reply to Twitter posts of any description. At the very least, it greatly increases Twitter volume. At worse, it renders useless any search and fills your screen with 'replies' to your tweets."

So people are writing programs that look for specific words in a twitter post and then reply with a random quote. Yawn. That's been going on for years over on IRC in the form of chat bots. It's not totally unexpected to emerge on twitter, and I agree with the idea that could be really annoying for twitter. There's probably something smart to say about broad and shallow versus narrow and deep. Maybe we all love twitter so much because we've been taught to think broadly instead of deeply?

The problem is this just amplifies the signal to noise ratio I see on twitter. I've carefully followed and unfollowed people on twitter, and I finally have a decent list that generally gives me something interesting to read - I've often referred to twitter as human RSS. But even amongst my cultivated twitter friends, the signal to noise is high. For every great twit that points to an interested resource, I see ten that talk about their cat.

I think Will RIchardson nails twitter when he says:

"I thought a lot about Twitter, actually, and realized (again) that for me at least, it’s become as much of a bane as it has a boon. (This really isn’t news.) Much of the reason I don’t blog any longer, I think, is the Twitter effect. It’s easier just to Tweet out an interesting idea than to examine it more deeply here." (source).

I still read RSS most mornings. I scan headlines, stories, and open a new tab for stories I like. I find the discourse on blogs richer and more deliberate. That there is value in twitter goes without saying, but signal to noise ratio for twitter is a bit high for my taste.

Parents: your kids will probably see these movies soon. Beware.

Posted by Bill in Blogging ,  Educational Tech on Monday, January 10, 2011 Permalink

Looks like the fine gents at the lonely island have released another chart-topper for the Christian charts! This one is entitled “I just had sex” (vid here). The Lonely Island is a comedy troupe who, among other things, creates these funny videos. The videos often have inappropriate language, racy themes, and pretty much everything disdainful and horrible to well-adjusted parents of young children. The same comedy troupe made a very popular video (over 30 million combined views) entitled “I’m on a boat” (vid here). Again, inappropriate for young kids, and certainly questionable for teenagers.

This video has been viewed 30 million times, and there is a pretty good chance your kid has seen it, will see it, or will soon hear about it, and then watch it.

So what should you do?

I suggest you talk to your kid about their internet use, create clear expectations of behavior, and be aware these videos are around. As always, we prefer a proactive approach to computer issues rather than reactive.

Parent technology partnership is filtering at the router

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Security on Friday, December 17, 2010 Permalink

Last week, a parent installed some internet filtering software on his son’s school-owned computer.  His son is 11 years old, and has just started discovering, you know, the internet that 11 year old kids find. Unfortunately, the software the dad installed conflicted with our pre-installed AV software, Kaspersky.  The son, perhaps being less than 100% honest, told us he needed to install some printer drivers. Normally students can do this without any intervention on the part of IT. However, we noticed we couldn’t install the software.

After spending the requisite 15 minutes trying to install the software, we realized we couldn’t get around the dad-installed software, so we re-imaged the machine. The son came back a day later with a clean machine,  the printer drivers installed, but no dad-installed software.

The dad is, quite understandably, pissed. Our current blocking strategy is to restrict DNS queries to our internal DNS or to an outside DNS service (openDNS). We block any DNS queries that don’t go to one of our approved dns servers. Inside our school, we feel fairly comfortable that “joe average student” can’t access unauthorized content. Even so, we monitor network traffic carefully. But outside of school, students can change DNS settings and access inappropriate content (for a whole lot of reasons we grant student admin access on their laptops, so we can’t easily block access to dns settings).

What could we do differently, better?

I think the real challenge here is how can we support parents to block according to their standards? Some families will want very strict blocking, and some not at all. My take on this is to help parents understand how to use router-based filtering. Unless you child connects to another unsecured wireless network, the best place to block is at the router.

Next up: a list of resources to help parents control their wireless connection

On Gawker and Passwords

Posted by Bill in Blogging ,  Educational Tech ,  Security ,  News ,  Personal on Tuesday, December 14, 2010 Permalink

Looks like Gawker was hacked. I’m not a “gawker” guy, but I am a lifehacker reader. And, in 2008, I left a comment about my favorite RSS reader. And, after downloading the torrent, I saw my password and email.  I’m sure this will be indexable by google in a few days. I guess they didn’t store the passwords securely. oops.

Bummer.

I’ve been using the interwebs since before AOL and 2400 baud modems, and this is the first time I’ve been aware of being compromised. Thankfully, I used my normal stupid web password, and not one of my stronger passwords. However, I will now be searching for my username and changing my password whenever I see it pop up. I’m also using a new easy-to-remember web password.

Of course, the moment lifehacker lets me delete my account, I will. 

Great Prezi from Nick Kwan on the SAMR model

Posted by Bill in Blogging ,  Educational Tech ,  Design ,  HOWTO ,  web 2.0 on Thursday, December 09, 2010 Permalink

Please click here to see a fantastic Prezi from Nick Kwan, the High School tech integrator. Nick hilights the SAMR model and some good resources for our teachers. Enjoy!

Online cyberbullying - a real challenge for parents

Posted by Bill in Blogging ,  Educational Tech ,  Leadership on Tuesday, December 07, 2010 Permalink

Amazing article in the New York Times about parents struggling with Cyberbullying  (PDF here).

I often rest my feet at “parents are responsible” for monitoring their children. They must take computers out of the bedroom, have clear rules for computer use, and look at website history. Let’s see your facebook account, let’s see your twitter feed, etc… I really do believe there needs to be a technology partnership with parents. They might not know how to check facebook settings, or profile pages, or even web browser history.  Parents might not know what kinds of threats are out in the world of cyberspace. Thats where schools come in. We have the technical expertise to help parents use computers and tools to monitor their children.

School websites and information overload

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Design ,  Leadership ,  platform ,  Support on Monday, December 06, 2010 Permalink

This is in response to a query about how to approach school web design.

Finalsite, Silverpoint and Whipplehill seem to be the big players here. They all charge a premium, but have excellent design and back-end control panels. A word about design, all the companies do design beautifully. I've no doubt you can craft up something really nice, but these companies make world-class website design. Clean, elegant and information rich.

The issue I've had with these sites is keeping them up to date and current. Whipplehill especially, which is based on a really neat portal system, seems to have the right idea about how websites should work. But without long term "web person" in your organization, and without a clear, clean connection to your LMS, how useful will your site be?

We are using silverpoint, and we love our site, love the support, and I like the in-page editing; intuitive and easy. Also, Silverpoints design process is great - they actually bring their design team to your school - instead of design taking weeks or months, it takes a week.

But we are a moodle school, and increasingly a google-docs school. So our information is fragmented across those three major systems. We have teachers using wiki's, blogs, yadda yadda yadda - so I'm constantly looking for ways to index all the different content so people dont have to look "in 20 different places" for relevant information.

I think your question also hits a really common theme I hear in student information systems; do we roll our own, or go with an outside company? There are genuine benefits and drawbacks for each approach. As I mentioned, the support we get from silverpoint is top-notch, but the meta-issues here are how the site will stay current, and how we can make fragmented information easier to access.

MYSQL: changing a field type to longtext

Posted by Bill in Blogging ,  Personal on Friday, December 03, 2010 Permalink

Note to self:

To change a mysql fieldtype from mediumtext to longtext simply type:


ALTER TABLE exp_templates CHANGE template_data template_data longtext;

This will change the field "template_data" in the table "exp_templates" to longtext.

Hope this helps someone.

Hspace and Textual 3D space

Posted by Bill in Text-based gaming ,  Links on Monday, November 29, 2010 Permalink

As my 4 regular readers know, I'm a text-based gaming guy. There's something "pure" about computers, networks, and text based games that appeals to me. I started back in the heady days of infocom, and moved to pennmush.

In the interest of sharing my geek cred, I became interested in Star Trek MUSHes about 5 or 6 years ago - really great coded systems, especially their space systems. You interact with the game (only through text) and fly through 3D space. Imagine Eve online, only textual.

A text-based space system is exactly what it sounds like; a text-based representation of 3 dimensional space. You want a sensor report? Try this:

--[Sensor Report]--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
### Type Res Bearing Range S Heading Speed S Name Class Flags
--- ---- --- ------- ------- - ------- ------ - ------------------------ ------
1 Base 100 224 328 0.71981 A 0 0 None F IRS D'Stelam AbEem
--- ---- --- ------- ------- - ------- ------ - ------------------------ ------
2 Plan 100 296 309 [0.933] V 0 0 None D Addams IX A
3 Plan 100 0 0 0.00000 F 0 0 None F Marion III AEe
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Course: 0.000 0.000 Speed: Stationary
Location: Open Space Velocity: Stationary
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
(screen grab from ats: among the stars, which uses A-Space). Trading, combat, role playing, and even skill building are all custom built text-based systems.

My point is these games are totally textual and totally immersive. Really great stuff. Imagine, if you will, what it would be like to play a book - except of course you choose where you want to go, and what you want to do. I'll be increasing my frequency of text-based gaming, and text based gaming resources.

http://www.hspace.org/
https://www.hsdev.org/trac/
http://community.pennmush.org
http://code.google.com/p/pennmush/downloads/list

FAQ’s and information centralization

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  platform on Wednesday, November 24, 2010 Permalink

We are in the processing of putting all our policies, procedures, and common technology questions in one place. Does our school block or filter? Are teachers allowed to use facebook? Are students allowed to use personal computers? What's the deal with cellphones in classes? How should teachers setup their wireless projector?

These are questions I have heard in the last few months. There is a general sense of "what's the deal?" from teachers and some staff. I really like FAQ's as a way to communicate with an organization about policies and procedures. As a general rule, I find policy manuals dry, boring, and usually unreadable. In some cases, it seems to me like policies and procedures are more about protecting the organization than serving genuine organizational needs. FAQ's, on the other hand are easily browsable, answer real questions, and (if they are spiffy enough) allow for interaction such as rating, comments, and searching. As a general rule, I think FAQ's are a good way to organize and centralize information.

We've got two different FAQ systems brewing at our school, one for parents and one for teachers and staff. I'm using phpmyfaq for the teacher faq, and I love it. Decent feature list, I especially like the ability for users to submit questions, and tagging entries.

The idea of centralizing information is a bit of a misnomer, though. I think it should be more about making sure information is indexable and searchable. When a user has a technology question (or policy question) there should be a clear digital home for resources, questions, and answers.

Growing Up Digital, Wired for Distraction

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Support ,  Teaching Diary on Monday, November 22, 2010 Permalink

Full story here (pdf here).

My first reaction? Anger.
My second reaction? Yea, about that….

I’m reminded about the call for balanced parenting and computer use. Oh wait, that’s me.

Great slideshow about searching - a question to Dulcinea, though…

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Design ,  platform on Monday, November 22, 2010 Permalink

I stumbled upon this great slideshow about effective searching - great points, and it fits with my understanding of how we should search on the internet. The questions it raises are valid, and important:

Click here for the slideshow here is the embedded version:

There is this thing about Dulcinea that bothers me; I can’t quite put my finger on it. They don’t implicitly say this, but they seem to say “don’t trust anything on the internet unless we say so”. From their home page they say:

“Dulcinea Media is the Curator of the Internet. Its mission is to help change the reality that most students cannot effectively conduct research on the Internet”

I agree with the idea that most students (and adults) don’t search effectively. But I think the answer to this problem isn’t to direct students to a “curated” search experience, I think it is to teach them how to sift through the mess out there and think critically about the information they encounter.

When you are offering a service for effective searching and you write about the dearth of good search resources and a problem with search reliability, your commentary on bad search sounds a lot like FUD.

 

Why Gaikai is important

Posted by Bill in Educational Tech ,  Design ,  platform on Thursday, November 18, 2010 Permalink

Streaming games to the desktop - any browser, all you need is a browser and a connection. This model works well for email and simple apps, but surely not for streaming video games?

The way the high-end computer game model works now is for game players to download a client and then connect to a shared server to play. The graphics and animations are stored locally on a users machine, and are rendered by the users computer. Gaikai (and onlive) are changing this - now the game servers are sending rendered frames to the user - there is no longer any need for the users to have souped up computers. All the processing is done on remote computers - the network is king.

This is important because as we transition to web 2.0 applications and move to a cloud-based idea of computing we can see where it is going. Gaming is a multi-billion dollar business, with global video game sales surpassing movie industry income. I think our paradigm of technology use is changing - or rather, returning to an idea of thin client solution we had in the 70's and 80's.

Now, I'm not saying there is no need for local processing power. I cut my teeth on an IBM PCjr, TRS-80's, and TI-99a. I learned how to hack on these machines, and I still believe it's important for students to learn how to program. However, as a trend, the action will be on the cloud.

Now, for education: how can we teach our kids to create cloud applications (real applications)?