The Christian Science Monitor ran an interesting piece Monday on increasingly severe penalties for online harassment and defamation of school staff by students. As the article points out, students have harassed teachers since kids had teachers to harass. However, administrators and teachers are concerned about the highly public and potentially threatening nature of the harassment now taking place via the Internet.

“Kids have been pulling pranks on teachers and principals since there have been schools in the US, but now there’s an edge to it – the tone and tenor of some of these attacks cross the line,” says Nora Carr, a spokeswoman for Charlotte-Mecklenburg schools in North Carolina.

Who determines where that line is, though? In North Carolina, the line is remarkably wide:

North Carolina’s cyberstalking law makes it illegal to electronically communicate false statements about “indecent conduct or criminal conduct … with the intent to abuse, annoy, threaten, terrify, harass or embarrass.”

Courts have ruled that students may be held responsible for actions off campus if it substantially interferes with a teacher’s ability to conduct a class. Does “annoying” substantially interfere?

The line between free speech, run-of-the-mill pranks, and dangerous or genuinely harmful conduct is certainly being tested as students live more of their lives online and share those lives with anyone willing to glance at their MySpace.

We recently installed a new firewall that will ultimately allow the high school to act as a hub for all district network traffic. Since we’re the only building with the space, HVAC, and bandwidth to act as a de facto data center, this makes good sense and will allow for common authentication, distributed backups, and centralized anti-malware and content filtering.

While we will be adding a separate content filter and proxy server as we implement this vision over the next 6 months, for now, the new firewall is handling subscription and keyword-based content filtering. Suffice to say, it’s quite a bit more aggressive (read, “effective”) than the last model that was easily bypassed with proxy servers and failed to block the latest generation of IM clients. Read the rest of this entry »

As tech refreshes come and go, donations find their way to your desk or office, and students and teachers otherwise look to get rid of aging laptops, we look for ways to extract every last bit of life out of these expensive investments.  While many of us have turned to leasing models that generally involve the old equipment being hauled away for free, countless laptops (in addition to plenty of other hardware) still end up looking for new homes.

Some can simply be wiped and redeployed for less critical uses.  They can often beat Alphasmarts with one shift key tied behind their backs as word processors for students.  If they can PXE boot, then Edubuntu would happily find them as all-in-one thin clients.  We have a physics lab that needs several dedicated, low-powered workstations to gather data from various probes: enter our beaten and abused laptops that are being replaced this summer.

Others, however, aren’t in any shape for redeployment to users.  For these, Lifehacker has several great suggestions.  While most in the article linked here are directed towards consumers and home users, there are several that I see my interns working on with a batch of recently-donated and largely unusable laptops.  Routers, wireless hotspots, media servers, standalone monitors, etc., can all give new life to equipment that most home users and businesses would discard.  Check out the article and share any additional suggestions that you have.  My hacker interns await with their screwdrivers and soldering guns.

I finally received an email response from Google relating to my disabled account Friday afternoon. It was apologetic and somewhat unsatisfying, but at least gave me a clue as to what happened:

Thank you for your report. We sincerely apologize for our delayed response
and appreciate your patience and understanding.

After temporarily disabling your account for your security, we have
completed our investigation and are re-enabling your access to this
account…

Please note that we aren’t able to provide you with information about
attempted logins to your account including, but not limited to, the IP
address from which the attempted login was made, and the time and date
attempted logins occurred.

We look forward to having you as a Gmail user again.

Read the rest of this entry »

My Gmail account was mysteriously re-enabled this morning (woo hoo!). I’m synchronizing as we speak with Apple’s IMAP/POP client. The question is, will I continue using Gmail with frequent synchronization for backup purposes or am I done with Gmail?

I don’t know yet. I need to see just how bitter I am and determine if that’s enough to give up an interface (both mobile and on the web) that I really like.

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In my ongoing effort to design a testbed for my teachers to examine OS X, Windows Vista, and Ubuntu before I start spending money in July, I fired up Boot Camp on my MacBook.  Boot Camp is a utility built into OS X much like the GNU Partition Editor (gparted) in Linux that allows users to create and resize partitions on the fly to facilitate dual-boot options.  While it’s not as powerful as gparted, it, like most Apple applications, is a no-brainer, easily creating a target partition, and then prompting users for an installation CD/DVD.

Better yet, Boot Camp launches the install of a second operating system and then, once installed, provides a Windows application (found on the OS X restore DVD) for managing default operating systems and installing appropriate drivers.

I used Boot Camp to install Vista Business (SP1) on the 32GB partition it suggested I create.  The install was quick (less than 45 minutes, although I was building IKEA furniture at the time, so my sense of relativity may have been out of whack) and, once booted into Windows, it only took a couple minutes to install drivers and the Boot Camp control panel.

While I could simply use Parallels or VMWare to virtualize Windows (and Parallels can actually access my new Boot Camp partition), this gives my users and me a chance to fully evaluate Vista on identical hardware at full speed (Parallels is quite snappy, but shared memory and resources obviously can’t match full hardware speed).

If you must dual boot, Boot Camp makes it extremely easy.  I have enough XP licenses that I could easily load XP on every machine I roll out if we chose to deploy Macs for the teachers.  My concern, though, is that many teachers would ignore OS X and always boot into XP for the sake of familiarity.  Maybe that isn’t a problem; maybe it provides a greater degree of flexibility.  What do you think?

It’s been a couple days and still no Gmail. I suppose I’d feel a little bit better if an autoresponder or some little bit of technical wizardry had let me know that Google was actively looking into this and would have me up and running in no time. However, I haven’t even gotten a “Please do not respond to this email” acknowledgment of the Gmail agony in the alternate account I provided for them.

I’ve loved Google from the moment one of my students invited me to Gmail a few years ago. Since then I’ve accumulated hundreds of thousands of messages, used Google Docs extensively, blogged in Blogger, and otherwise utterly embraced all things Google. They’re slick, ubiquitous, and free. I guess you get what you pay for. Read the rest of this entry »

The O’Reilly School of Technology (a partnership between the University of Illinois and O’Reilly Media) will begin offering online courses using a new AJAX-based implementation of Mathematica. According to an article on the O’Reilly School’s website,

[The Web 2.0 version of Mathematica] will have extremely high fidelity with the Mathematica software. The only difference will be that users will be reading, typing and executing commands on a web page version that connects to a server via AJAX. Mathematica output is rendered real-time via AJAX and CSS.

Wolfram Research’s Mathematica has long been at the forefront of computer-based mathematical education. The advent of a browser-based version of Mathematica will provide access to the software for a much broader base of students since its considerable hardware requirements will be handled server-side.

I posted the first part of my evaluation of an Apple MacBook for an educational deployment Wednesday morning (MacBooks - to deploy or not to deploy, part 1). While of course sparking the usual Mac vs. PC talk, one reader made an interesting point:

Are teachers asked what they think of their desk? The kids’ desks? The tile floor? The windows? In fact, did anyone ever ask them if they WANTED Windows?

The short answer is “No.” In fact, the teachers I know are rarely consulted about any major changes, they are told about then and given training to help the migration…

It floors me that Mac has to do a road test, Windows never did and still doesn’t.

Just give it to them.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most of you know that I just got a new MacBook and really love it. On a personal level, it’s darned close to perfect for what I do. Writing; systems administration; creating movies, presentations, and websites; and otherwise getting my jobs done come very naturally (and come in a lightweight package that easily slips into my messenger bag). Everything really does just work. The ads, to this point, seem quite accurate.

However, what works really well for me may not make sense for a large-scale deployment in a public school. I feel like I make good use of all $1400 worth of MacBook goodness (including the $140 I spent on 4GB of memory from Crucial). I’m not so sure for 3/4 of the teachers in my school. Sure, I’d back them off to 2GB of RAM, but RAM is cheap. Does the Mac add enough value in OS X and it’s bundled applications to justify its cost (I know comparably-configured Windows machines don’t have much a price differential - I’m talking about low-powered cheap machines for my low-powered users)? Maybe more importantly, are the users I support flexible enough to exploit its power without getting bogged down in the fact that it isn’t Windows? Read the rest of this entry »