No matter how well we prepare during the summer, we always have a thousand small tasks to take care of in the first week of school. Why? It's a testing phenomenon. All summer, our little department of three looks for potential problems and attempts to solve them. Then five hundred members of our community return and begin to use every corner of the school's network. We find out about computers without wireless access, printers that don't work, dim data projectors, and countless needs that have changed since the end of last year. Our to-do list has grown quite long in the last day, but we will consider it a success if things return to normal within a week or two.

On a related note, I am considering rolling the Mac Lab computers back to Panther. Tiger is definitely causing BlueJ to behave erratically, and it may also be related to strange download problems with PDFs and Plone. Aside from the potential to get Active Directory integration to finally work, not much will be lost by falling back to Panther. The new features in Tiger seem geared more to the individual or home user than a computer lab environment.

Enfold Systems has announced the release of Server 2.0 Beta, which promises full integration of Plone with Active Directory. I currently have an installation of Plone running on a Windows server with partial AD integration using Group User Folder (GRUF). It permits authentication and the use of LDAP groups for sharing permissions (sometimes with difficulty) but does not allow the same operations at the individual user level. Unfortunately, it looks as if the product will cost about $2000, which is a lot to pay for Windows integration when the base install of Plone is free. How badly do we want full AD integration? Probably not this badly.

Enfold Systems is the for-profit company of a handful of Plone biggies, including the founder. It competes with other open-source content management systems such as Mambo and PHP-Nuke.

Gavin Newsom is again trying to make his mark in San Francisco, announcing a plan to provide city-wide wireless coverage to all of San Francisco. Critics have sprung forward to take aim at the mayor's lack of specifics, poor order of priorities, and duplication of effort. Newsom cites the need to bridge the digital divide as one reason for the proposal.

Absent from the most publicized responses has been discussion of the potential impact on schools. All schools are wired in that the Internet reaches the school, but many schools do not have comprehensive network coverage throughout all their rooms, never mind wireless coverage. If successful, a municipal wireless network (if free to schools) could have a major impact on the availability of the Internet in classrooms.

Ubiquity has the potential to take a technological innovation to the next level of use (witness email). What if students brought their laptop computers to school yet could maintain a connection wherever they were along the way?

I just finished a week training teachers to build course web pages. For the first time, I introduced other options than Dreamweaver: Moodle, Plone, and Nucleus blogs. Moodle was the runaway favorite, winning over five of the eight teachers there, most of whom had never seen it before.

Function Wins
Dreamweaver provides much tighter control over page layout and presentation of information, but teachers were excited by the potential to quickly update a site and provide students with places to produce work in their Moodle courses. Much of Moodle's appeal is grounded in its pedagogically sound roots. Moodle was invented by Martin Dougiamas, a Ph.D. student in Australia who wanted to design a better e-learning platform. Many of Moodle's activity modules were carefully designed to encourage students to construct knowledge.

On the technical side, I upgraded to the latest version of Moodle this year, improved my modifications to the graphic design, changed the default language to U.S. English, and improved the registration process so that it would automatically complete the user's profile using information from Blackbaud.

I am excited to see whether this group of teachers constructing courses develops into a critical mass this year.

From TechLearning

FeedDemon ($29.95) full-featured Windows news aggregator

Bloglines (free) Web-based aggregator

SharpReader (free) simple, well designed, reads RSS and Atom

NewsGator plug-in for Outlook 2000 and newer, online version is free

NetNewsWire ($24.95) well-thought-of Mac RSS reader.

NewsMonster (free or pro) Mozilla browser plug-in supports Linux, Windows

Google Search: News Aggregators.

In case you were wondering, this blog is wholly unrelated to Kassbloog.

Tech staff from four area schools got together today to test the K12LTSP concept. If you have not heard of the project before, the idea is to install a special distribution of Linux on one server and have all of the clients run via terminal sessions. Our goal was to create an impromptu Linux computer lab using spare, low-performance machines that we brought from each of our schools. It was a complete success!

Hoover downloaded the installer disk images and burned them in advance, but otherwise we got the whole thing up and running in one hour. Our first server ran on a Thinkpad A-31 with 128MB RAM. Four clients were able to connect before performance declined. We moved the server to a Thinkpad R series laptop with 512MB RAM, and then five clients were able to run simultaneously with terrific performance until one client started running a graphics-intensive game. If we had a 100MB hub or switch and more RAM, our installation could easily support a complete student computer lab.

We came up with several potential uses for a K12LTSP lab. One is the original idea of having a low-cost, standalone computer lab. However, I am thinking of simply adding Linux capability to our existing PC Lab. It will only take the addition of one extra machine to add that feature to a lab full of machines. Another interesting idea is to require students using a computer in a test situation to boot into the Linux environment with a unique username. This could be more secure that our standard practice of laptop loaners.

More power to K12LTSP!

The technologies that run insideUHS are a blend of brand name products, proprietary shareware, free, open source software, and custom developed scripts. I presented this list to a small but very enthusiastic group of BAISnet members that visited UHS today.

Brand Names
- Microsoft Exchange Server (Outlook Web Access)
- Microsoft Server (Internet Information Services, file server)
- Macromedia Dreamweaver (HTML documents)
- Athena (library catalog)
- Naviance (college counseling)

Proprietary Shareware
- DAF: Dynamic Authentication Filter (user authentication)
- FileMan (remote file access)

Free Open Source Software
- YaBB Forum (bulletin board)
- Moodle (course web sites)
- Greymatter (blog)
- Nucleus CMS (blog)
- CalendarScript (calendar)
- Plone (content management system, wiki)
- Coppermine (photo gallery)

Custom Scripts Developed In-House
- Athletics schedules and results
- Community service learning plans and hours
- Independent study proposals
- Wireless registration
- EMU announcements
- Student class schedule
- Student directory
- Application for admission
- Alumni community site
- English 1 vocabulary activity
- Parent web account registration
- Slideshow
- School Council elections
- Attendance submission and reports

I failed to keep up my forums journal during the 2004-2005 academic year, so today I will look back at the evolution of the forums last year.

August 9, 2005

Like many innovations, maturity was not entirely kind to the forums. The early adopters were serious conversationalists, the kinds of students who wanted to delve deeply into ideas. Their knowledge of the forums was mainly acquired through word of mouth. Gradually, nearly every member of the school logged into the forums to find out what all of the fuss was about, and this led to a second wave of forum enthusiasts. These students were generally younger and more interested in the act of chatting with each other than the content specifically. They invented creative forum games such as "break the post count," "the longest sentence ever," and "middle of the night." Much of the thrill was in the moment of interaction, and most threads had little value as soon as the next day. Student leadership was not as invested in supporting the forums as the previous year.

Last year was by no means a complete disaster, just a decline. Nearly a dozen classes maintained forums to support teaching and learning. Serious discussions still took place in the MORE (Moving On Racial Equality), GSA (Gay Straight Alliance) and NOW (National Organization of Women) forums. The kids playing around in the silly forums genuinely had a good time, usually without becoming inappropriate. I only had once discipline case all year.

If the forums were a person, I hope she is experiencing adolescence and not middle age! I have some questions about the role of the forums this year. Will superficiality dominate again? Will new student leadership restore a sense of purpose to popular discussions? Will classes continue to use the forums as much as before? What new purposes will students find for online discussion? On the technical side, I am planning two innovations that may impact the forums. The first is to introduce Moodle and Plone as alternative systems for online course support. The second is to introduce blogs by way of Nucleus-phpBB integration. It is possible that course discussions may find their way into Moodle, in which teachers may create multiple forum objects anywhere in their courses. Plone may become an alternative medium for producing student work. The integrated pair of Nucleus and phpBB may inject more thoughtful, intentional writing into the forums. It will also necessitate clearing out the old forums and starting from scratch.

I will talk more about Nucleus-phpBB integration in a future post.

Some have asked how long it takes to write a custom web script for our school. This time, I kept track. It took 2-1/2 weeks of about half-time work to create our new admission script, a relatively large project. That's about 48 hours of work for 2000 lines of code. The project requirements are here.

By any calculations, two weeks of my summer are worth a lot less than the cost of a commercial application that will handle online admission applications and share data with Blackbaud.

I have added an optional photo upload field to the online admission application I am developing. This clever feature is ubiquitous in online communities and photo sharing sites, but how does it work. If you use the CGI library in PERL, it is quite easy.

First, create a multipart form instead of a standard form:

$output_text .= start_multipart_form;


Include a file upload field in your form:

$output_text .= filefield(-name=>'photo', -default=>'', -size=>30, -maxlength=>80 -class=>'BodyNormal');


When processing the form, capture the file handle using upload() instead of param(). This ensures a legit filehandle.

$fh = upload('photo');


Then write the contents of the file to the desired location:

$outfile = $basedir . '/' . $uploaddir . '/' . param('student_id') . '.jpg';
open (OUTFILE, ">$outfile");
binmode(OUTFILE);
flock(OUTFILE,2);
while ($bytes=read($fh,$buffer,1024)) {
print OUTFILE $buffer;
$totalbytes += $bytes;
}
close OUTFILE;


Note that I have not yet added a trap for excessively large files. Mostly, this is a favor to the user, who will have to wait a long time for the form to process if the upload image is too large. You can add the trap by keeping track of the number of bytes uploaded and exiting the write loop/deleting the file if the total exceeds a certain amount.

I have also restricted the file type to JPG in order to ensure higher image quality and prevent people from trying to run executables off my server. It would be good practice to add an error message if someone tries to upload an image of a different type.

YotoPhoto is a new image search tool that finds stock photography that is free to use. It appears to provide a great advantage over other image search tools like Google Images, for which the copyright status of the results is not known, Creative Commons, whose search engine does not show thumbnails, or Flickr, which caters mostly to personal photos. YotoPhoto includes content from Creative Commons and many other image repositories. I haven't yet found a license statement on YotoPhoto that would restrict educational use, so this very much seems to be a good site for schools.