Archive for November 17, 2005

Richard | November 24, 2005
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Strategic Design Of Technology Supports

My favorite annual technology integration activity each year is to sit down with Raleigh to plan the culminating Globalization class research presentation format. Raleigh is one teacher who takes to heart my greatest wish for tech integration: that teachers approach me before they decided how to use technology to support a class activity. Wiping the slate clean of predetermined solutions makes it possible to step back and strategize the best possible technology format for the goals and objectives of the project.

For the past two years, Raleigh’s students have researched different environmental issues around the world and compiled them into one web resource that we have posted on our public web site. Since the students have written the articles themselves and included only copyright-permitted images, we have been able to post these two sites in our public web space. This is in contrast to most other web projects at our school, for which educational fair-use law has required us to restrict the display of these sites to within our educational community.

The format for these two projects has been a static web site composed in Dreamweaver. Students have worked in pairs to write the articles, and each pair has had another specialization. For example, one pair has created the graphic design and another assembled the site on a template. Here are the two previous sites.

2004: Global Environmental Issues

2005: Changing the Environment

The second year, we improved the process for document collection by organizing content in Plone. This allowed groups to easily review and collect each others’ work when needed. However, we experienced odd errors when pasting content from Word into Plone, so the use of this tool was not a total success.

This year, Raleigh and I decided that the process of creating these static web sites was more valuable than the end product. We wanted a presentation format that restores the correct emphasis to the process while still producing a public document for the world to (potentially) see. Raleigh is going to come up with a hypothetical international development scenario for the students to consider in groups, and then we will have the students co-author a development strategy in a wiki (probably within Moodle). At one point in our discussion, we were going to choose blogs, but we then realized that we wanted a technology that required the students to work more closely together than a blog.

This decision underscores the importance of sitting down to strategize a technology support from scratch for a class project. Wiki more accurately captures the collaborative intentions of this teacher than a static web site or even a class blog. Then the result can be published in static form on the web and opened to the public for comment. This project will run over the next three weeks, and the final development statement will be published before we leave for winter break.

Category: Curricular integration |
Richard | November 24, 2005
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(Not) Teaching PowerPoint

I taught two classes on supporting oral presentations with PowerPoint for a history teacher on Friday. Though PowerPoint is a visual aid designed to support oral presentations, too many users let it drive their presentations. I emphasized three principles:

1. Write separate speaking notes for your presentation.
2. Reading from your bullet points makes you a talking head.
3. Include multimedia content that supports your arguments.

It is ironic to be invited to teach a class on PowerPoint yet spend most of my time deemphasizing the role of PowerPoint in an oral presentation. This underscores how far we have to go in the use of technology as a tool to support educational endeavors.

I will post my supporting PowerPoint presentation once I remove some fair-use copyrighted content from it!

Category: Software/desktop |
Richard | November 24, 2005
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Oh Dock, How You’ve Changed!

Open source and Web 2.0 applications have given my dock a facelift within just the past year. New arrivals include NetNewsWire, Sunbird, Cyberduck, Smultron, Skype, and Dashboard.

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After years of perfect happiness using Dreamweaver as my PERL editor and FTP tool, I am trying out Cyberduck and Smultron, both of which are free and open source. They are integrated enough that hitting the Edit button in Cyberduck opens the file in Smultron, and then saving the file in Smultron triggers file upload in Cyberduck. Smultron supports PERL syntax color coding, whereas Dreamweaver does not.

I had become a little tired of Dreamweaver’s FTP operations. Dreamweaver 8′s background FTP feature should have made this better, but for some reason the program now sends more commands than it used to, making file transfer operations take even longer. Yet, Dreamweaver is still better when switching between WYSIWYG web page editing and script coding and runs better on my PC at work. It’s faster under Windows than Mac and file transfer isn’t a problem when your servers are on campus!

Category: Software/desktop |
Richard | November 24, 2005
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Network Security Standards

An article at Newsforge presents a concise overview of nine security architecture principles. This confirms the importance of having a highly capable network administrator, which we are very lucky to have. It also underscores my favorite point about security: our network is only as secure as the least well-kept password in our user base. This article on password security outlines the problems with passwords and the new technologies that may replace them.

Source: Stuart Yeates

Category: Server |
Richard | November 23, 2005
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What Does a Tech Director Do On Vacation?

Hooray! These are my first days off since the end of July. What does a tech director do while on vacation? Mostly staying away from my computer, enjoying family, catching up on book club reading, and getting outdoors. When I do spend a few minutes at my laptop, I am going to clean up a panoramic photo of the view from the Oakland hills, post new photos of the children on my personal web site, and keep up with blogging, of course!

Category: Social studies |
Richard | November 23, 2005
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“Open” Document Format

Microsoft has announced its intention to “open” its document file formats. Will this allow alternative word processing programs to fully read and write current Word formats? Maybe. Will it release the DOC specification to the open-source community? No. Is this a political move to placate open standards proponents and compete with OpenOffice? Probably. What does it mean for the end-user? Who knows.

Update: legal analysis

Category: Software/desktop |
Richard | November 21, 2005
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Your Space Or Mine?

The education listservs have been all abuzz lately regarding the “student blog” menace. Most of the attention has focused on mySpace, a service that allows students to build online web pages including photos, blogs, comments, and links to friends’ pages. Opinions about student use of the site ranges from strong concerns about unhealthy student behavior to a new format for old adolescent playground behavior.

One must be sure not to confuse serious blogs with social network blog features. Many students run serious, “adult-style” blogs at conventional blogging sites such as Blogger. In contrast, the blog component in mySpace is dramatically underused, as students spend most of their time chatting and posting photos rather than writing lengthy blog posts.

I wonder why adults get so nervous about unmoderated online spaces without consideration of the many other unsupervised spaces within which students operate. Free time at school, private time at home, sports, clubs, and social events on weekends all provide many opportunities for adolescents to get into trouble in the absence of adults. Teens learn by making mistakes. Though we should not encourage them to make the worst of mistakes, control or preaching are not viable alternatives.

Schools tend to react to social networks in two ways. In some cases, the online world intrudes on school life, when a student or parent brings an online site to the school’s attention, especially if the content slanders a student, teacher, or school administration. In other cases, motivated individuals within the school choose to introduce education programs about social networks before something bad happens on a large scale. Programs described on education listservs tend to address both students and parents. Either scenario leads to small-scale or schoolwide conversations about social networking and its impact on children.

Whose space is it, exactly? Adults tend to feel that all social network content is public, since it can be freely accessed by anyone. High school students are growing increasingly aware of broader social contexts, although some are further along than others. This may help explain why some students knowingly publish photos, full names, and school affiliations on public web sites without giving much concern to privacy. Have many parents viewed their children’s mySpace sites and had meaningful conversations about them? Would students consider this an invasion of their private social space? I would love to know.

Category: Software/web |
Richard | November 20, 2005
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OpenSourceMac.org

OpenSourceMac.org clearly presents most of the best open source software projects for Macintosh. Some of my favorites are here, such as Camino and Celestia. I also learned about some new applications that I will have to try, such as Cyberduck (FTP client) and Vienna (RSS reader). While shareware stalwarts NetNewsWire and Fetch work well for me, free works better, especially when others ask for recommendations.

Referred by: Tim Wilson

Category: Software/desktop |
Richard | November 20, 2005
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It’s Not Easy To Start an Open Source Project

Is there an Open Source Collaboration for Dummies guide? Thinking it would not be so difficult, I made an amateur attempt to start a collaborative open source project for independent high schools last year. I was happy with that which I had authored for UHS, but I wanted to make a better product through collaboration with other like-minded school technology developers. I hosted an open source workshop for interested school technology staff and shared the source code for two projects: community service learning database and student schedule display tool (reads from Blackbaud).

It must require a lot more effort and know-how to start an open source project, for this one never got going. High school tech staff do not have a lot of time to program, so our projects tend to serve our immediate needs. Quite likely, the immediate needs of my school do not perfectly match those of other schools. Also, attempting to start a project within a limited geographic area does not exactly match the strengths of the Internet, where I need to find more like-minded technology directors to get the ball rolling on such collaboration. Finally, I wonder whether my projects are too small in scope, compared to popular open source projects for secondary schools such as Centre and SchoolTool. Larger projects could attract more support.

I am still willing to share and co-develop a suite of co-curricular program administration tools and Blackbaud tie-ins. Let me know if you are interested in joining me.

Category: Programming |
Richard | November 17, 2005
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Satellite Campus

We are finalizing architectural plans for our new building on Sacramento St., two blocks away from the three main buildings in our campus. Linking a satellite facility is a new problem for us, so we have to learn quickly. Here are some preliminary thoughts — comments and advice are most welcome.

We seem to have two options to create a data link between the buildings: leased T1 and radio frequency. Luckily, we do have line of sight from the roof of our lower campus building to the Sacramento St. building. A dish would appear to offer faster connection speeds, and a leased T1 better reliability.

We realized today that it would be a good idea to put a domain controller and file server in the new building, so that employees and specific academic programs will have fast access to authentication information and storage space without having to cross the new connection to the servers in the main campus. For example, digital photography students will have to move large PSD files among various computers, so they had better have fast access there.

Our old buildings have one switch and then individual data runs to all floors. We plan to put a switch in at least two of the three floors in the new building, to keep the data runs shorter. This way, if they break, it will be less difficult to replace the wire run.

Finally, we plan to run gigabit fiber to the film/photo suite, so that those users have gigabit access to their storage server.

Category: Server |
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