April 29th, 2008
Inevitable, huh? Not in Ed Tech
I just finished a post on Ubuntu 8.04; the OS has converted my son from a Linux-hater to an OS-not-carer (yes, I just made that term up, but I think you know what I mean). Then I stumbled across a ComputerWorld article on the inevitability of Vista adoption in the enterprise.
The article itself actually made some good points.
“Vista is an inevitability, for a number of reasons,” said Ben Gray, an analyst at Forrester Research Inc…
“They are sort of in a ‘caught between a rock and a hard place’ situation,” said Gray. Administrators may not want to move to Vista, but neither of the alternatives — the older XP and the not-even-officially-scheduled Windows 7 — is attractive, he said.In a report he authored, Gray damned Vista with some faint praise, saying that for large businesses, there was “no viable alternative.” Companies may talk about non-Windows operating systems — Apple Inc.’s Mac OS X and the open-source Linux in particular — but “they’re not looking to swap out thousands of users,” Gray said.
Therein lies a problem that large businesses face but that is far less significant for many educational institutions. Read the rest of this entry »
April 29th, 2008
“Don’t tell them that I love it”
These were my son’s words after living with Ubuntu 8.04 on his laptop for a day. Interestingly, he said, “I never loved Windows either, but it always worked for me.” Of his fresh installation (sans a Windows XP virtual machine), he noted that drastic improvements in boot and shut down times, stability and reliability of his core applications (especially Firefox and the installed plugins that handled any website he threw at it), and the desktop effects that could “amuse him for hours” all made the computer much more user-friendly.
He emphasized, however, that he didn’t love it. Unlike his old man, but very much like most of his peers, he has no desire to tweak, fiddle, or otherwise waste time on an OS. This is where the latest version of Ubuntu really seems to shine and could have a more significant place in Ed Tech. Any administrator with a little bit of time to explore can easily have highly functional systems deployed and in students’ and teachers’ hands quickly and easily.
For our student users, training needs will be relatively minimal. A bit of clicking, point them to OpenOffice if they aren’t already familiar with it, and off they go. Read the rest of this entry »
April 28th, 2008
Is Google locking up historical works?
Google provides funding to universities and researchers around the world who scan and digitize books for them. Many of these books have considerable historical significance, although Google’s real goal, according to a CNN piece on the effort, is to create
Google Inc.’s Book Search, a portal that will eventually lead users to all the estimated 50 million to 100 million books in the world.
The “book turners” are especially interested in preserving works that might otherwise be lost to age. One, for example, is scanning the oldest bible in Arabic typesetting known to man. While Google has a proprietary process for quickly scanning and indexing newer texts, the historical works must be individually photographed and sent to Google who complete optical character recognition, indexing, and ultimately provide the universities with electronic copies (in addition to posting copies to the Web).
However, some researchers are concerned about both copyright issues and with Google’s potential ability to “own” historical works.
Book Search has the support of many publishers, authors and librarians, including Cambridge University Press and Wisdom Publications. But some publishers and authors have sued, claiming the service violates their copyrights. Google says Book Search is aboveboard because Web surfers can retrieve only snippets of copyright material through the service.
Brewster Kahle, founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive at the Open Content Alliance, said Google may be trying to “lock up the public domain” by making proprietary copies of works whose copyrights have expired — which includes the vast majority of the world’s books.
What do you think? Will Google continue to do no evil? Better yet, how will they monetize this effort?
April 28th, 2008
If my kid doesn’t like Linux now…
…then I’ll give him Vista. I finally had the chance to install Ubuntu 8.04 on his laptop last night, wiping out an unhappy 64-bit Kubuntu 7.10 installation. His final words before I took the laptop were, “Just save my music.” Typical teenager. So I backed up his music and then booted from a CD I’d burned earlier.
Wiping out the hard drive and completing a full install of Ubuntu (32-bit, this time around) only took about 20 minutes. Improvements, especially in boot time and resolution of the Nvidia flashing screen bug, were immediately apparent. This wasn’t surprising, since Hardy Heron has been well-reviewed (and well-received) already.
As I started poking around a bit, though, I found that I couldn’t enable any of the desktop effects. A quick check on the Nvidia drivers (not open source yet) showed that they were installed, enabled, but not in use. Restarting X, re-enabling, and the usual battery of troubleshooting didn’t resolve the problem, but a minute of Googling suggested that enabling all of the software repositories (proprietary and 3rd-party are disabled by default) and installing the latest Nvidia packages would take care of things.
5 minutes of download/installation later, and desktop effects were up and running. The out-of-the-box effects should be enough to take care of the wow-factor initially for my son (they really are pretty cool - my favorite is the way the windows stretch when they’re dragged across the screen). I took advantage of the software repositories and made sure that Flash and all of the bits of media playback he might want were installed as well. In all, it took an hour to fully install, test, troubleshoot, and configure Hardy Heron.
I have a distinct feeling that he’s going to like this incarnation of his laptop a little better. Read the rest of this entry »
April 25th, 2008
Writing is important…LOL
A new study conducted by the Pew Internet & American Life Project and the National Commission on Writing suggests that both students and their parents believe that writing is extremely important their future success. It also suggests that kids draw a distinction between the electronic communications (text and IM) that they use on a regular basis and actual writing.
However, according to News.com,
Despite that, at least 64 percent of kids age 12 to 17 admit that they incorporate, often accidentally, some informal writing styles from digital communication (e.g., emoticons, “LOL” acronyms, and bad punctuation) into their writing for school.
All of us have received our share of Internet jargon in papers from kids. The real question is how do we stop it? I don’t think we’re going to put an end to the text message as a communication medium, so somehow, the distinction of which kids are already aware must be further emphasized.
As the researchers summarized,
“There is clearly a big gap in the minds of teenagers between the ‘real’ writing they do for school and the texts they compose for their friends,” Amanda Lenhart, co-author of the Pew report, said in a statement. “Yet, it is also clear that writing holds a central place in the lives of teens and in their vision about the skills they need for the future.”
April 25th, 2008
Stop! It may be time to change the way you teach math
A new article in the journal Science describes a controlled trial conducted by Ohio State University researchers testing modern approaches to math education. Though the subject of debate for many years, most math teachers use a variety of concrete examples to demonstrate mathematical concepts and techniques.
A more traditional approach is to head straight for the abstract algebraic approach. A New York Times summary of the article gives the following example:
One train leaves Station A at 6 p.m. traveling at 40 miles per hour toward Station B. A second train leaves Station B at 7 p.m. traveling on parallel tracks at 50 m.p.h. toward Station A. The stations are 400 miles apart. When do the trains pass each other?…An experiment by the researchers suggests that it might be better…to focus on abstract equations, in this case 40 (t + 1) = 400 - 50t, where t is the travel time in hours of the second train.
Sitting in college lectures, we still see this traditional approach very frequently and the flexibility and generalizability afforded by the abstract rather than specific real world examples seems an obvious choice to university professors. They obviously don’t care which train gets to Topeka first.
As the researchers at Ohio State concluded, most people, when presented with the abstract tools, are better-prepared to solve a variety of applied problems (including problems like the train question above) than those who were given real-world examples:
The problem with the real-world examples, Dr. Kaminski [one of the OSU researchers] said, was that they obscured the underlying math, and students were not able to transfer their knowledge to new problems.
“They tend to remember the superficial, the two trains passing in the night,” Dr. Kaminski said. “It’s really a problem of our attention getting pulled to superficial information.”
While the researchers conducted their trial on college volunteers, they noted that evidence exists that similar problems occur for younger students. This suggests both that students in both primary and secondary schools should see math presented abstractly and that primary school teachers really need a fundamentally better understanding of mathematics to be able to present it in such a way. Even the use of manipulatives was discouraged, except to jumpstart some students.
April 23rd, 2008
No cell phone for NYC school kids
I was amazed when I walked through a school in a nearby district a couple of weeks ago and saw kids texting and talking away on their cell phones. This same school had bathroom monitors (actual people who sat in the bathroom all day ensuring that nothing untoward took place), but kids on cell phones were apparently not a problem.
Our school has long banned cell phones, only allowing their use after school hours or during the occasional emergency (an early dismissal for snow, for example). New York City also tried to ban cell phones in 2005 to the outcry of students and parents.
However, the New York Supreme court upheld the ban, according to an article in Ars Technica:
[The presiding judge] noted that the ban does not infringe on parents’ constitutional right to care for their children, because “the right is not absolute and is only afforded constitutional protection in ‘appropriate cases.’”
Similarly,
She noted that cell phones have been used for cheating, sexual harassment, prank calls, and intimidation, and that all of these things threaten order during school hours. She also rejected the suggestion that kids be able to carry cell phones but not use them, pointing out that even adults cannot be trusted to turn their phones off (or on silent) during movies and cultural events. “While the vast majority of public school children are respectful and well-behaved, it was not unreasonable for the Chancellor to recognize that if adults cannot be fully trusted to practice proper cell phone etiquette, then neither can children,” she wrote.
My take? Good for her. Cell phones, as much as we all love them, are disruptive in schools. This is one little bit of tech that has nothing to do with Ed Tech. What do you think?
Loading …April 23rd, 2008
Redeveloping Sugar for Windows XP Home…yeah, great idea, Nick
PC World, among other outlets, is reporting on Nicholas Negroponte’s call to make the Sugar interface used on the OLPC XO laptops “platform agnostic.” In other words, redevelop it to run on top of Windows XP. Of course, since Microsoft will only allow Windows XP Home to be installed on new laptops shortly, this means that the interface that many have dubbed revolutionary will need to be reworked for this aging platform.
One developer wrote on the OLPC community site,
“I approve of keeping OLPC’s options open, in case your current development team (myself included) cannot deliver on Sugar’s potential, but setting vague (and demoralizing) goals for future development — without actually devoting the resources to achieve those goals — is madness. You have only succeeded in alienating the developers you need to make Sugar-on-Linux work, without actually achieving any progress on Sugar-on-Windows.”
Another developer asked of Negroponte’s vision of separating the interface from the underlying OS,
“My understanding is that the Sugar UI is composed of inseparable components because we wanted to give an integrated and coherent experience. In which way are you suggesting to split Sugar?”
So what will this leave the XO’s target audience running? Windows XP Home, with the requisite anti-malware software and the Sugar interface both running on top. That should be extra snappy (insert sarcasm here).
Given the number of available distributions, many of which can be made quite lean (Xubuntu and Puppy Linux being two obvious examples among many), why shoehorn Windows onto the XO? And why saddle local developers with closed source software when so many people-years of effort have gone into developing an accessible open source solution? How many times did Intel (as in the intel in Wintel) did Intel mention Windows at IDF? Not many times. Even if Windows continues to dominate many markets (enterprise, enthusiast, gaming, whatever), it doesn’t need to dominate a market in which openness, collaboration, and collegiality should, in fact, be the dominant forces.
I understand that Negroponte is trying to increase sales by incorporating what he sees as a necessary force in computing; however, if this amounts to selling out and diluting the value of this effort, then I’ll be looking forward to successful spinoffs and competitors from the defecting OLPC developers. This isn’t about open-source fundamentalism, as Negroponte calls it; this is about satisfying the needs of users. Will Windows satisfy the needs of kids better than a mature, extensible, open source platform?
April 22nd, 2008
I hate eigenvectors
I’m only a couple months from wrapping up a masters degree in math. The program has been great and has catered to a cohort of educators who are all seeking to drastically improve math education in our respective schools and communities. However, every time I hear the prefix eigen-, I cringe. Eigenvectors, eigenvalues, eigenspaces, you name it, for some reason these really important bits of linear algebra always gave me fits.
Math generally comes pretty easily to me, but my adviser could best be described as a linear algebraist. He really loves this stuff. Hence, it appeared in an awful lot of lectures that he gave and was largely unavoidable throughout the program, since he was instrumental in designing the curriculum that focused both on applied mathematics and math education.
Given the choice, I’ll stick with calculus. As it turns out, I probably should have paid closer attention to those eigenlectures, as I bitterly called them. Today, I stumbled across an article summarizing the role that eigenvectors and linear algebra play in Google’s search algorithms. Yup, that’s right, my hated eigenvalues help make Google billions of dollars.
In the article’s introduction, the author notes,
When Google went online in the late 1990’s, one thing that set it apart from other search engines was that its search result listings always seemed deliver the “good stuff ” up front. With other search engines you often had to wade through screen after screen of links to irrelevant web pages that just happened to match the search text. Part of the magic behind Google is its PageRank algorithm, which quantitatively rates the importance of each page on the
web, allowing Google to rank the pages and thereby present to the user the more important (and typically most relevant and helpful) pages first.
I think my professor would have hugged me via email if he could have when I sent him a link not only to the article but to Maple and Mathematica demonstrations of the concepts in the article. There’s a lot of math here, so it isn’t for the faint of heart, but for any students struggling to see the relevance of linear algebra, or for anyone who would like an incredible primer on applied linear algebra, look no further. Cheers and happy reading!
April 22nd, 2008
Trouble at OLPC? That’s OK, they started the revolution
OLPC is in the midst of corporate reorganization, hardware difficulties, manufacturing and distribution challenges, and an overall dulling of their original vision as Nicholas Negroponte rails against “open source fundamentalism” and tries to further align himself with Microsoft.
According to Ars Technica,
There are many aspects of OLPC’s plan that have contributed to its current predicament, but it seems obvious now that the project’s extreme dependence on scale to bring down cost was deeply misguided. The project couldn’t achieve the necessary manufacturing capacity or sales volume required to meet its target price and ended up in a position where it couldn’t sustain itself in a free-market situation where other competitors are creating commercial products for the same space.
The sustainability of the OLPC model, or even its wisdom, have long been in question, even if the vision and altruism of its founders are beyond reproach. As the market for low-cost, kid-centric mobile computing explodes, it is becoming clearer that models of altruistic capitalism will be required to bring a lot of netbooks to market, especially markets that have previously been underserved. It has worked for Asus, HP and Dell are pushing into this space, and the second-generation Intel Classmate is a great product, even if it lacks some of the raw innovation of the XO.
Quite frankly, though, I can’t help but think that all of this is OK. After all, the entire movement towards low-cost, realistic 1:1 computing began with OLPC. They started it. Good for them. Whether or not I agree with everything that Negroponte brings to the table, he and OLPC deserve huge kudos for driving these efforts and creating a market where competition is beginning to flourish. However, as the Ars article notes,
In light of the serious process and organizational problems that OLPC has encountered in its efforts to bring its technology to the market, it might make more sense at this point for them to leave the production, deployment, and sales process to companies that are better equipped to handle it.
Christopher Dawson is a teacher and IT administrator for Athol, MA High School. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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