On one of the several mailing lists I subscribe to, I saw a question from a network manager in another school asking for advice in dealing with some mistreatment of computer equipment by students. His proposed solution was to install webcams in the computer rooms and to stream their output to a server where it could be recorder and monitored. This person was asking for suggestions or advice from anyone else who had gone down this path.

It’s not a path I particularly like…

I don’t mean for this reply to become a lengthy diatribe (or worse yet, a cranky rant), but I think this approach is totally going down the wrong path and it’s something I feel strongly about. I see many in school IT management who seem to be taking the path of constant surveillance and security over the harder-to-do but better-in-the-long-run approach of teaching students appropriate behaviour with technology in the first place. I see it happening with the way school lockdown their computers with complex security procedures, with the way some schools turn up their web filtering and proxy control to the point where it renders the simple act of foraging for information on the web a completely futile exercise. In the same vein of idealistic optimism, the idea of installing surveillance cameras into classrooms just doesn’t make sense to me.

Personally, I think if students are mishandling equipment there are two possible reasons for it… they either don’t know any better, or they just don’t care. The former is solvable through simple education - set up a plan that will teach the kids the appropriate ways to handle the gear and will encourage them to have respect for it. Maybe they are mishandling things because they just don’t know it’s supposed to be done any differently. So teach them what to do.

The second reason - that they are damaging equipment because they just don’t care - is a little more confronting, a little harder to solve, but I think it’s important that we do solve it. I think as educators we need to find out why they don’t care, and why they have so little regard for the equipment. I know this more pastoral approach is rather more difficult and time-consuming to implement and at times almost nebulous to be able to actually make happen, but in the long run is the only approach that makes sense. Locking equipment down or monitoring it with security cameras fails in the longer term and for many reasons … it only works while vigilance is kept high; it is rarely foolproof and often turns into a war between students and admins somewhat akin to a whack-a-mole game; and most importantly of all, it fails to treat the great majority of students with the respect they deserve. The underlying message is one of mistrust and ultimately does nothing to teach students to make good decisions for themselves.

In my experience, creating a low-trust environment with students rarely succeeds in the long term and only makes for a less-pleasant learning environment for everyone, even if you save a few dollars on damaged hardware in the short term. You can only win with intimidation for so long, and in the end everyone loses.

Tags: schools, computers, equipment

I occasionally feel a little guilty. Although I am very much committed to the idea that technology should be integrated, no, more than that, embedded, into what happens in a classroom on a day-to-day basis, the truth is that I have spent many years teaching computing as a discipline in its own right. And I have to keep telling myself that that’s ok, that there are still many kids who have a deep interest in technology for the sake of technology and find the very nature of computing highly engaging as a stand alone topic. So I’m cool with that. It’s ok to be a geek.

I believe one mark of a good teacher is to be able to take complex ideas and simplify them without making them simple. For example, there are a couple of concepts in the realm of computing that are not really all that hard to understand but can be very hard to explain. Binary numbers can be one. Vector graphics another.

So I was really impressed when I saw VectorMagic, a somewhat geeky (yet very cool) web app put together by James Diebel and Jacob Norda from the Stanford University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. I blogged a couple of thoughts about EPS files and vector graphics the other day and in the comments I was pointed to VectorMagic by Kathy Nann. What an amazing tool! Thanks Kathy!

I won’t blather on about the need for vector graphics and when you should use them… I blathered enough about that in that other post, so go read that if you dare.

What VectorMagic does is to take a bitmapped image (jpg, gif, bmp, etc) and trace the shapes contained within them in order to to convert them into vector outlines. This gives a remarkable crispness to the image at any resolution. Vector images don’t get blocky and full of artifacts as they get bigger. They just recalculate how to draw that shape a bit bigger using a nice sharp edge. I’m so glad I found this tool and I know I will get lots of use out of it. (Well, maybe not lots, but just knowing its there and what it can do makes it all worth it.

But the other thing that really struck me is just how good this sort of application is as a teaching tool. Because of the way it steps through the process and how it asks the user for questions about the image, it makes it so much clearer as to the real differences between bitmap and vector graphics. It even places them next to each other at the end, and lets you zoom and pan in real time to inspect the two image types. Visually, this is a really powerful way to learn about a concept that can be otherwise quite nebulous and hard to explain, and after using Vector Magic to convert a few images it would be hard NOT to understand the difference.

And it got me thinking about just how much we can use the the intuitive and malleable nature of software to assist us in explaining and investigating tricky ideas. Programs like VectorMagic are amazing in the way they can be used to visually demonstrate the bitmap/vector concept. Trying to explain sound waves to junior students can be hard, but when theses students can create, see and manipulate waveforms directly using Audacity it makes it much more concrete. Playing whatif games with spreadsheets, tracking data visually using Gapminder, directly manipulating the globe with Google Earth or creating 3D models with SketchUp… these tools make it almost trivial to convey what used to be challenging and hard-to-grasp ideas.

All of this should pave the way for us to help kids come up with better questions, and make better use of this new information. I’m going to try harder to make these tools do the jobs that they are good at, so that I can spend more quality time working with kids on the thinking skills that really matter.

Tags: tools, vector, higherorder, thinking, software

During the second plenary session at the AIS conference today, I was looking forward to hearing Pia Waugh speak. Pia is co-owner of Waugh Partners, vice-president of Linux Australia, and a huge advocate for both Linux and the Open Source Software movement generally. I met Pia last month at the CSTA meeting where we were both speaking, and I had a great chat to her over dinner about all sorts of things that any normal person would probably consider geeky in the extreme. Pia is a super smart lady and very passionate about the whole Open Source movement, so I really enjoyed talking with her that night.

When I saw her in the auditorium today before her session I went to say hi, and was pretty surprised to see her holding a little green and white plastic device in her hands… after the initial g’days were exchanged, I said “Is that what I think it is?” She gave me a big grin, and said “yep!”

Pia had managed to get herself one of the “$100 laptops” that MIT has been working on. For those that don’t know, the “$100 laptop”, or more correctly known as the One Laptop Per Child project, is an initiative started a few years ago by Nicholas Negroponte from the MIT’s Media Lab, with an aim to get computers into the hands of Third World children. By employing clever, simple design and open technologies Negroponte’s dream is starting to come true, with the first shipments of OLPC laptops being delivered this year. They are not quite down to $100 each yet, but are getting closer… Pia said they are being produced for about $170 at the moment.

I was fascinated to be able to have a look at this little device. It’s got a very “Fischer Price” feel to it, with shiny green and white plastic, funny little wireless antennas that stick up, and a cute little keyboard and screen. But underlying the toyish look is some sophisticated - and open - technology. It runs Redhat Linux as the operating system, and comes with an innovative user interface called Sugar. Sugar does not try to model itself on the more traditional WIMP-style UI such as that found in Windows-style interfaces, but instead was designed to answer the question “What would a user interface look like for a child who has never seen a computer before?” It’s cute, very different, and very intuitive. I had a little play, but had to hand it back all too soon so Pia could deliver her presentation.

During lunch however, I spotted Pia again and she let me take the OLPC for an extended play. I wandered over to Bryn Jones’ table and the two of us had a chance to check it out a bit further. I was pretty impressed to be able to get so much hands-on with it, as these things are still very hard to come by unless you are a child in one of the targeted countries. Pretty much the entire production run is going to the kids, and the only reason Pia had one was because she helped do some development work for it. I felt pretty lucky to be able to see and use one, as I don’t imagine too many other people have had the chance.

With built in wifi, mesh networking, longlife battery, tablet or laptop mode, built-in speakers and microphone, USB ports, SD slot, flash-based storage drive, wireless web access, music composition software, notetaking software, and a bunch of other built in apps, it really is a very interesting piece of hardware! Thanks for sharing Pia!

PS. Look forward to hearing Pia as a special guest on the Virtual Staffroom very soon.

Tags: linux, olpc, mit, opensource, piawaugh

I just read a great quote from Kim Cofino’s blog, Always Learning, as she was reflecting on the Shanghai Conference from last weekend…

“I didn’t realize before how much blogging (reading and writing in collaboration with others) would change my life - not just enhance my professional development like reading a journal article, but change my life - the way I think, the way I interact with people, the way I work, the way I look at the world. It’s impossible to understand the impact of these technologies unless you are using them yourself.”

I totally agree. Even before Web 2.0, I experienced the same thing, albiet on a slightly smaller and slower scale just through email forums and message boards. I’ve been active on mailing lists and forums since about 1994 and cannot imagine what it would be like to not be connected to others. Now, with blogs and RSS and Twitter and podcasts and all these other incredible tools, the fibres that forms those connections are just getting stronger and more intertwined. It really is life changing, because it affects more than just your day to day work. These connections and conversations change you from the inside out.

I know some incredibly dedicated and well-meaning teachers. They work hard, spending hours of their day planning and marking and preparing, and yet, I just think if they made even a small part of their day available for just connecting and conversing with other educators, reading the ideas of others, sharing their thoughts about those ideas, reflecting on what they read and write… it would totally turbocharge all the other great stuff they do. I’ve mentioned it to many people over the years, but so often hear back, “I don’t have time for that”.

I don’t have time NOT to. There is only just so much you can do when you work in a vacuum, and Kim’s right… it’s the networking and mind expanding that goes along with these technologies that can have such a huge impact on your effectiveness as an educator. Thanks for the great post Kim.

Tags: kimcofino, connectedness, web2.0

Because I was doing a bit of blog navel-gazing tonight writing that last post, I decided to take a quick look at the site stats just to see what’s happening there. One of the figures that really jumped out at me was the one shown in this graph.

As you can see here, the majority of browser share is now coming from Firefox! Of course this is only just the stats from my blog, and being an educational blog with a predominantly teacher audience I guess there may be a disproportionate number of users who don’t use Internet Explorer, but I was still surprised to see Firefox edging out IE. Not so long ago IE had no competition at all, then Firefox came along and started to gradually steal market share, but last stats I read still showed it with a fair way to go before it could claim to have a greater share than IE. Based on these numbers, Internet Explorer 6 and 7 combined only account for 38% of the traffic! That’s a huge drop and won’t be making Microsoft happy at all.

As a Flock user myself (which is based on the Gecko rendering engine in Firefox) I’m pleased to see the gain. By the way, I exclude my own visits to the site to try not to skew the numbers.

I’m sitting on a Virgin Blue 737-800 as I write this, flying home to Sydney after an excellent weekend at the 4th Australian Interactive Whiteboard Conference hosted by IWBnet and Emmanuel College on the Gold Coast. As I mentioned in previous posts it was a thoroughly enjoyable conference. It had “buzz”… a great general ambience and perfect location. I was fortunate to have been asked to present a few sessions at the conference too, since I always enjoy the opportunity to share ideas with other teachers as I find I learn a great deal from the experience myself. The feedback was also fairly positive, so that’s a nice thing. Whether is was just because I got to hang out with great teachers, catch up with old friends, stay in a nice resort, or do canapes and cocktails from the observation deck at Q1on Friday night, I thought it was a top conference.

If you’re interested in hearing a bit about what went on there you might like to keep an ear on The Virtual Staffroom podcast… I recorded a whole lot of audio from the event as I wandered around with my iPod nano and iTalk voice recorder. There are some interviews with the organisers, impromptu chats with some of the delegates and a special interview with Ben Hazzard from the infamous Smartboard Lesson Podcast. Check it out!

As fellow OzTeacher Fiona Banjer pointed out to me, it’s nice to be able to go somewhere where you can talk geek stuff without people looking at you like you’re a geek. There were lots and lots of sessions over the two days of the conference covering just about every aspect of interactive whiteboards you can think of… from implementation strategies, creative use of the software, linking it to sound pedagogy, and great hands-on practical examples of how teachers are using it in their schools. If you had any doubts about the impact that IWBs are having in schools, attending this conference would quickly dispel them. There is enormous interest in this technology, and the fact that the conference has grown so much in size since last year is testament to this fact. It’s clear that IWBs are not just a passing educational fad but are here to stay, with many schools making large investments into the technology and many claiming some remarkable improvements to student learning outcomes in the process.

However, one question that arose for me was where the hell was Smart? SmartBoards, made by Smart Technology and distributed excusively in Australia by Electroboard, was notable by their absence at this event. The fact that they didn’t turn up to this event (and most every other major IWB event) is starting to worry me. My school is looking at a fairly significant IWB rollout over the next few months - over $100,000 - and we had planned to implement the SmartBoard brand because we really like them. I have done my comparisons between Smart, Promethean, Easiteach, StarBoard, Interwrite and so on - in fact there were 18 different vendors at the conference - but so far I still like Smart the best. I find their software effective and easy to use and overall I am impressed with their products… what I don’t get is their stealth approach to marketing in this country. I don’t know if it’s just a sense of arrogance that they feel they are the major players in the IWB market and therefore don’t need to promote any sort of presence at events like this, or whether they are not planning on staying in the Australian market… I really just don’t get their lack of interest in promoting their product.

There were lots of vendors at the conference, all showing their wares. There is tremendous innovation happening with IWB technology at the moment and delegates came to the conference eager to learn more about the hottest new emerging products. There’s no doubt that Smart is historically a major player in the IWB market, but they were certainly not around to solidify that reputation at Emmanuel. If I were a teacher in the market for IWB technology (and lots of people at the conference were) I might well be having a few nagging doubts about Smart’s ongoing presence in the Australian marketplace. I’ve been watching this technology for a couple of years now, and having taught in Canada at a Smart reference school in Ontario and getting training from the PD team attached to Smart’s Calgary headquarters, I feel I have a reasonable grasp of what Smart offers. But to a casual observer, or someone taking a more recent interest in IWB technology, Smart in Australia is all but invisible.

I’m really disappointed with Electroboard, since they are supposed to be Smart’s Australian distributor. From what I see, Electroboard is doing nothing to promote the brand here… I think Electroboard’s lack of presence at this event sent a hugely negative message about their committment level to this market… to me it screams “we are not interested in the education market”. Just think… there will be 450 people going home from the conference this weekend, many of them all fired up about what this technology offers and eager to start implementing an IWB program. Many are ready to spend their money on what they think is the right technology for their school. These teachers, principals, ICT coordinators, librarians, etc, came to this conference to learn more about what they need and to look at what options they have, and there is little doubt in my mind that this conference will be a catalyst for hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of IWB purchases over the next 12 months. To many people who attended the conference this weekend, Smart appears not to even exist, and it’s quite unfortunate to think that so many of them will not even consider Smart when it comes time to purchase. I’ve always been a big SmartBoard fan, but I’m starting to have second thoughts about whether they are at all interested in gaining my school’s business and wondering whether maybe I need to start looking at other brands more seriously.

So come on Electroboard! Get your act together! I don’t know what issue you have with respresenting your product at this sort of event but it’s about time you dealt with it and started convincing us that you really do want to be a player in this game.

I’d be interested in your comments…

Tags: iwb, smartboard, iwbnet, conference

 I’m currently on the Gold Coast at the 4th Interactive Whiteboard Conference.  It’s a big event with  around 450 delegates, and about 120 different presentation sessions!   I had the pleasure this morning of presenting two of those sessions, and have spent most of the  rest of the day flitting around, checking out what else is on offer, looking at new products and generally enjoying the beautiful weather here on the Gold Coast.  Right now, I’m sitting here in a Web 2.0 workshop run by John Pearce.  John is teaching teachers how to set up their own blogs and wikis, so I figured this would be a good moment to add a quick blog entry myself.  There are a few photos in the Flickr sidebar, and I’ll add more over the weekend.

That old argument about the validity of Wikipedia as a tool for research raised its head again at school this week when our library staff asked that a link to Wikipedia be removed from the “Library Links” section of our school intranet. Naturally, I questioned this and was politely informed that although the library staff think Wikipedia probably has a use, that use was not as a legitimate research tool. They preferred to disassociate the school library from Wikipedia, and only endorse “real” encyclopedias like Britannica and World Book. It seems that real encyclopedias are not free and require a login.

To avoid an argument I removed it. (Besides, the kids would still use it anyway whether it was linked from the library links list or not.) But it made me disappointed to realise just how much some of us still don’t “get it”, to say nothing of how embarrassing it is that I work at a school where the library wants to stick its head in the sand about tools like Wikipedia and pretend they don’t exist. I sent a reply back explaining that I was disappointed we didn’t want to acknowledge Wikipedia as a useful research option. I tried to point out that, like all tools for research, wikipedia need to be validated and cross-checked against other references. I also tried to make the point that kids WILL use wikipedia to gather information on a wide range of topics whether the library endorses it or not, and simply removing it from the list of links won’t change that, and that perhaps we should be teaching kids to use tools like this properly and not just avoiding them or pretending they don’t exist.

I promptly got a reply back, basically saying we are the library and they are our toys, so just remove the link anyway.

Feeling somewhat frustrated, I put a note out to my colleagues on the OzTeachers list asking for their experiences with Wikipedia in schools. Perhaps it was me that was wrong. Maybe I was the one who didn’t “get it”. The replies flooded back in over the next couple of hours with a series of overwhelmingly positive responses about how Wikipedia was used in school across Australia. I was pleased to see that so many educators (and librarians) are embracing this tool and using is as a means to teach better research skills. I was sent an excellent link to the Education Department of WA’s website where they not only tolerated Wikipedia, they are actually promoting its use. You can read the mailing list’s responses at the OZTeachers Archives… just scroll down to the bottom of this page.

I was particularly struck by a post by Peter Ruwoldt, who suggested I take a look at the Wikipedia entry for the recent Virginia Tech Massacre, and in particular to cross check the creation date for the article with the date of the actual event. It was no real surprise to discover that both the event and the first Wikipedia entry about the event happened on the same date, April 16, 2007… in other words, the article was being written as the event unfolded. What I found really fascinating as I searched for the article creation date was to browse through the history of page revisions to see how the article actually grew minute by minute.

It began with a very simple line, “The Virigina Tech shooting incident occurred on April 16th, 2007. One person has been reported to be slain.” Three minutes later, it was amended to read “The Virginia Tech shooting incident occurred on April 16, 2007. One person has been reported to be slain and one person is reported wounded.” The next revision came 2 minutes later and added a citation to a newspaper report. 7 minutes later, someone corrected a minor grammatical error. The article continued to grow, with over 100 edits in the next few hours, each one improving and correcting the one before it. There was a clearly evident group of people whose names keep appearing in the edit history list, demonstrating how people emerge to become the “keepers” of these articles. This is a completely organic process…. No one is elected to be in charge, no one has to hold a meeting to delegate responsibility. It just works.

The article has now been edited over 500 times, with each revision building on what has gone before it. The quality of the writing and the way it explains the incident seem to be excellent quality… at least of the standard that one would expect in a “real” encyclopedia.

This is what people who are critical of wikis don’t seem to get… Their assumption is that articles are spuriously written by people wishing to cause trouble by spreading misinformation. They don’t seem to get that these things are written by large groups of people who, through a process of self governance and wisdom-of-crowds, manage to refine and evolve some very good articles through a process of constant iteration. By the time this article has come to its current revision, many hundreds of people have contributed to it, and thousands of eyes have looked at it. How long do you think a spurious edit or a vandalised paragraph would last? Do you really think that the volunteer army that helped create this information would stand idly by and allow it to be ruined?

We live in a connected world, where peer-to-peer networks of people and information have forever changed the top-down approach that characterised the pre-web world. We can fight it, or we can embrace it. The fact is that no matter how much you might want to stand by the ocean and command the tide not to come in, it will come in anyway. The sooner we all “get that”, the better.

Technorati Tags: encyclopedia, wikipedia, virginiatech