I am flying to Boston this weekend to attend an American Friends of Maru a Pula meeting. Don't expect much from this space until Monday.

Our primary agenda item is raising funds to provide scholarships to AIDS orphans in Botswana, but there will also be some discussion of the school's technology needs. The technology landscape is considerably different in Botswana. High-speed internet access is nearly impossible to obtain, due to governmental regulation. Even telephone lines are difficult to obtain due to slow response time from the appropriate government ministry. (When I arrived for my two-year stay in 1994, I was told that I would not be staying long enough to order a phone. Of course, cell phones have changed that issue in more recent years.) The leading solution is satellite service, which would allow the school to provide itself internet access, but at great cost and slow speeds. Though the cost is difficult to swallow, slow internet access is the school's greatest technology problem, especially for a school community that is so outward looking.

The cost of hardware replacement is still quite high in Botswana. Even though many clone manufacturers exist, the cost of importing components keeps overall system prices 50-100% higher than in the U.S. Interestingly, Apple maintains a solid presence in South Africa and Botswana, having made a strong bid to win customers back after pulling out of the country during the apartheid era. Maru a Pula needs to allocate funds to purchase new machines and service existing ones.

Once these conditions are met, it may be possible to move in a more progressive direction, such as installing one or two computer-enhanced classrooms. This would give Maru a Pula teachers the opportunity to use technology for more than just clerical and communication tasks. I am unsure how many MAP teachers are prepared to take this step, but perhaps I will find out this weekend.

I sat on a panel of three technology directors at a BATDC (Bay Area Teacher Development Collaborative) workshop today. The participants were all independent school administrators from around the Bay. The topic was relatively wide-open: opportunities and challenges in technology-based communication. Specific discussion ranged from online services to staff and parent use of email.

The group brought an expected sense of uncertainty to the meeting, as most had developed some fear of new online services used by students, such as mySpace and LiveJournal. Clearly, students are accustomed to trying new communication systems as they become available, but adults take longer to adjust.

I think we relieved many of those tensions through the course of the meeting. There is very little unique to the communication and behavior challenges that some are currently experiencing with new technologies. One of the few exceptions is the degree to which a person can print an offensive email, chat transcript, or blog page in order to present it as evidence of wrongdoing. Otherwise, all of the regular rules apply to electronic communications as do to other written or verbal forms: think before you write, hold people accountable for their actions, and expect that children will alternately succeed and fail as they explore their own identities and the world around them.

On November 8, I will co-present a related BATDC workshop on technology and ethics at The Bay School.

We continue to make progress toward the possible implementation of a 1:1 student laptop program at UHS. Yesterday, I presented a comprehensive overview of the program to the full board of trustees for the first time. My main thrust was to provide as much context as possible so that everyone could understand how we got to this point. I explained that the genesis of the student laptop idea rested in the strategic planning process that the school undertook two years ago. The plan's technology recommendations included a mandate to review annually the methods used to provide computers to students at UHS.

The purchase of a new building on Sacramento Street accelerated our consideration of change, so that our academic technology committee spent the fall semester of last year reviewing different ways to provide student computer access in our new campus configuration. Last spring, we presented the Faculty with two choices: an expanded desktop computer program that would place more computers in science labs and art classrooms to accommodate the increase in classrooms, and a student laptop program that would virtually eliminate computer labs and provide individual computers to students.

Trustees asked quality, critical questions about the presentation. How will the laptop program bring greater equity to student computer access? Are there less expensive ways to accomplish this? Are alternative devices besides laptop computers available for such a program? How enthusiastically do teachers support this initiative? What are some of the curricular ideas that they envision being able to implement with a laptop program? How will laptops help students do their work for school? Are teachers concerned about possible disruption to classes? Should the school introduce the program in August 2006, January 2007, or August 2007? What other schools have or are considering student laptop programs? What have we learned from our faculty laptop program? How would laptops change teacher practice in the classroom? How would our professional development program support teacher training for student laptop use?

One challenge during this process has been to maintain the focus of the trustees on the students. In my mind, this is primarily a student laptop initiative, and the students will be the primary beneficiaries of the laptop computers. I would predict a rapid increase in student communication and great increases in organization and efficiency of managing documents and other files.

Here are the next steps in the process of considering this proposal. The board chair has created a subcommittee of the finance committee to put together a detailed proposal considering multiple program options that would affect overall cost. The finance committee will review and consider this proposal and then forward it to the full board on November 28 for approval or denial. It is going to be an eventful month!

I quietly installed new forum software at the end of our academic first quarter on Friday. The main motivation was to upgrade to a different forum package that would use a more robust database backend. Our old forum, YaBB, used a flat file database, which became corrupted when a server log file filled up. The new forum, phpBB, uses mySQL, which should be more robust. Amusingly, those students who were attempting to "break the post limit" claimed victory with the recent forum crash.

I made my usual modifications to the new phpBB forum, such as hijacking the login/registration scheme to automatically tie in to the auth_user environment variable, and modifying the default skin to use UHS colors and logos. I took the additional steps of disabling post counts and re-ordering the forums to place the more serious ones at the top. It will be interesting to see how much of an effect (if any) structural changes have on the quality of discourse in the forums.

The largest effect by far has been starting over again. While I provided links back to the old forum (which is still running in read-only mode), most students have focused on the new posts (or lack of them). In comments to me, some have characterized this as the loss of all of the old conversations, whereas others have seized the opportunity to set new precedents for thoughtful discussion in the new forums. As has been the case over the past three years, time will tell whether thoughtful discussion will maintain a critical mass in the new forums.

Another surprising result has been the poster-lurker ratio. While only a few dozen students are active posters, fully 180 students visited the forums over the weekend. I tracked this by observing the number of new forum accounts created as students logged in for the first time. Apparently, three to four times as many students are reading the forums as are posting.

Thanks go to Tobias for responding to the call to create the new forums logo. I try to operate these forums with a light touch, and student leadership is the best way to determine their character.

I just received this in an email from Toshiba.

Take Your Projector Home for the Weekend

Professionals who use digital projectors in commercial and educational environments are discovering their versatility and entertainment value outside the office or classroom.

Why? Projectors can be used in any situation where a big-screen TV can for less cost and a larger viewing area. And because of their easy portability and set-up, projectors can be used in environments that TVs can't.

In the home, for instance, teenagers and the young-at-heart can enjoy computer games with devices such as Microsoft's Xbox or the Sony PlayStation with a projector to give players a "larger-than-life" gaming experience. Families can use a projector to watch a movie display that is larger than any big-screen TV, simulating the movie theater experience (without the pricey popcorn).

That's a great idea. Encourage school staff to take their $2,000 projectors home so that they can break more quickly and need to be replaced. (sarcasm intended)

We have successfully implemented Radius server authentication using Microsoft IAS for our wireless access points. For a small institution such as ours, inexpensive, centralized authentication is essential. Our access points cost about $200 each, and the IAS server is part of Windows 2000 server.

We purchased Netgear WG302 wireless access points over a year ago. These are medium-priced access points, somewhere between low-end residential models and expensive, corporate models. We were hoping to centralize administration either by FTP-ing a config file to each access point or installing a Radius server. Last year, both methods failed. The FTP server within the access point limited the number of MAC addresses you could upload to 10. The access point's support for Radius was limited to WPA. That would require us to distribute a password to students, which we did not want to do.

We were upset that the access point did not live up to advance billing, since two of the centralized administration protocols did not work in a practical mannner. However, our network admin managed to develop a scheme that worked all last year despite its awkwardness: a macro that would successively visit the web administration page of each access point and add one address at a time. Unbelieveably, it worked, but it took a while to run and would not permit batch additions or subtractions -- Clearly a short-term solution.

Fortunately for us, Netgear updated their access point firmware this year to allow Radius for MAC access control. Now, when you turn access control on, you have the option of using either a local MAC address database or a Radius server. Nonetheless, it still required our network admin three days of trial and error to get it to work, since documentation was both scarce and conflicting. A couple of key tips were that it only worked if the MAC address objects in Active Directory were all lower-case, the AD password was lower-case, and dial-in/remote access permission for the AD object was turned on.

Two great features of the new system are that one can quickly create or update a MAC address by manipulating AD objects, and one may monitor access point status in the event log.

Write me if you want more implementation details. I would not be surprised if the required tips vary from platform to platform.

[Update] Implementation details posted here.

With the rapid proliferation of blogs, it is high time to re-emphasize fundamental principles of good web design.

• Readable text
  
• Pertinent content
  
• Effective navigation and search
  
• Short and simple forms
  
• No bugs, typos, or outdated content.

(source)

Apply these ideas to blogs and you get Jakob Nielsen: Weblog Usability: The Top Ten Design Mistakes

1. No Author Biographies
2. No Author Photo
3. Nondescript Posting Titles
4. Links Don't Say Where They Go
5. Classic Hits are Buried
6. The Calendar is the Only Navigation
7. Irregular Publishing Frequency
8. Mixing Topics
9. Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
10. Having a Domain Name Owned by a Weblog Service

Hooray, the forums are back! Spurred by a controversy over student use of a "free speech" section of wall on campus, a number of students have succeeded in having a lengthy, mutually respectful conversation in our online forums. Okay, I exaggerate the dominance of silly chatter in our online conversation space, but it has been a pleasure to see the forums being used as they were originally intended. One takeaway lesson is how it only takes a few online leaders, those who have developed a reputation for "fair play" and thoughtful commentary on the forums, to set the tone for the rest of the participants. The same can be said for silly online chatter. When a few respected voices promote gratuitous online play, the rest happily participate. My goal is to maintain separate, safe spaces for students to engage in both kinds of online interaction.

Blackboard has acquired WebCT (press release). I first read about this news on Stuart Yates, eduCause, and Assorted Stuff. This appears to be either a move by Blackboard to eliminate its primary competition by acquisition or an attempt to strengthen itself to take on open-source powerhouse Moodle.

Either way, it reminds me of why we dropped WebCT over three years ago. The school had invested a lot of money and professional development time on WebCT, then WebCT upped the minimum number of seats required to obtain a license to 1000. Because we are a school of only 400 students, that would have more than doubled our annual license fee. We decided instead to build our own web pages in Dreamweaver, which also required considerable skill acquistion. Now, Moodle has arrived, boasting a comparable features set to Blackboard or WebCT, and has required very little training in order for teachers to get course web sites up and running. I imagine that a larger, more powerful Blackboard will not be terribly responsive to the needs of small, independent schools while trying to protect its vulnerable higher education market.

School was hit by the MyTob worm this week. We plugged the hole with tighter restrictions on SMTP traffic within our network, but the successful infection underscores a larger problem with networks on the whole. Schools and other institutions typically protect their networks with firewall, antivirus software, and spam filters. This kind of worm defies all three of these in the typical network, because it only takes one infected laptop carried onto campus to bypass these server-based, externally-focused defenses. In a mobile world, we need to focus more attention on protective measures for internal traffic. Unfortunately, this creates more work to implement these measures and deal with restrictions on legitimate uses that will undoubtedly arise.

Zimbra is an open source server and client technology for next-generation enterprise messaging and collaboration. Zimbra delivers innovation for both the administrator and the end-user as well as compatability with existing infrastructure and applications (both open source and proprietary). Zimbra is open source in order to leverage the collective talent of the greater community, and to ensure investment protection for Zimbra partners and end-users.

Zimbra combines the best features of Exchange Server, such as centralized file storage and collaboration tools, and GMail, most notably their AJAX-powered interface. The compatibility list contains some of my best friends: Outlook, Mobile, IMAP, POP, iCalendar, RSS, Active Directory/LDAP. AJAX stands for Asynchronous Javascript And XML, which allows web sites to act much more like applications by changing their content without reloading. GMail is a notable example of this kind of web interface. The Zimbra demo will give you a good idea of how well it runs.

Could we replace Exchange server with Zimbra? Perhaps, but since Zimbra is only in beta and an Exchange server license we would use for four years will cost us about $2,000, I'm not yet prepared to take the plunge.

I recommended Celestia to our Astronomy teacher based this article, and it is his new favorite application. He told me that it could replace a two-week unit of his curriculum by allowing students to visualize aspects of the solar system that are difficult to understand. The limitation with previous solar system simulations, he notes, is that the observer is limited to one position in the system, usually Earth, and one point in time. Celestia allows users to move to different positions and speed up time. It's nothing short of remarkable.

I sometimes long for the pre-Internet days of CD-ROM based simulations, when visualization of abstract concepts was all the rage. When the web took over, graphical simulations all but disappeared, since they relied on high-bandwidth tools such as Director, Flash, and 3D modeling applications. I truly hope that Celestia is a sign of more high-quality visual simulation to come. Would anyone like to convert my old cell biology animations from Strata StudioPro into a web format?

Here are instructions for including phpiCalendar events in a web page via SSI (server-side include). You may see an example on insideUHS.

Make a new .tpl in templates/default or make a copy of an existing one. Add the appropriate calendar fields and HTML comments. My file looks like this:

<!-- switch some_events on -->
<!-- loop events on -->
<tr><td class=celldivider><P>{EVENT_TEXT}, {EVENT_START}</td></tr>
<!-- switch description_events on -->
<!-- switch description_events off -->
<!-- loop events off -->
<!-- switch some_events off -->

<!-- switch no_events on -->
{L_NO_RESULTS}
<!-- switch no_events off -->

If you want to include more fields than this, then study existing .tpl files to see what your other options are. It is important to include the HTML comments in the file, as phpiCalendar uses them to parse the template.

Make a copy of day.php and rename it to a name of your choice.

Edit line 39 to read as follows:

$page = new Page(BASE.'templates/'.$template.'/yourtemplate.tpl');

(yourtemplate is the name of your template file)

The SSI URL will be something like:

/calendar/yourfile.php?cal=yourcal&printview=day

I aam pretty excited about our new, iCal-based online calendar. Multiple authors may maintain it using a desktop application such as Sunbird, and anyone may view the calendar on our web site using phpiCalendar or subscribe to the calendar via an iCal-compatible application or RSS.

This article reviews the basics for parsing iCal data using PERL, PHP, or WML.

In this article, I?ll go over some options for publishing your iCal data through outside services. I?ll then show you how you can start working with code that will let you display your calendars on your own OS X server. I?ll start with the basics of the iCalendar file format, introduce you to some ways of dealing with iCal files in Perl and PHP, and finally demonstrate a PHP-based WML calendar viewer for cellular phones and other mobile devices.

Full Article

I have recovered nearly my entire blog through Google's and MSN's search databases! Both services cache entire pages, which allows one to view them even after they have been deleted. While this has raised concerns about control over one's own web site, it saved my butt this week. It took me only a couple of hours to comb through the cached listings using queries such as "Forums Diary Kassblog site:inside.sfuhs.org." Interestingly, I found that MSN's cache went further back in time than Google's, that Yahoo! doesn't make cached pages available on its search page, and that I had to find these pages quickly before more documents disappeared from the cache!

I recovered all but three articles since I started blogging on July 1. I didn't try to recover comments.

Nucleus CMS's "post to the past" feature also helped me reconstruct the blog entries in their original order.

Hooray for Google! No need to hooray for MSN, since they only copied Google ;^)

A hard drive crash has left the most vulnerable of our three servers in tatters. One day later, it is mostly restored, but this blog took one of the hardest hits. Starting over gives me the opportunity to reflect on whether I have made any progress toward my goals for this blog:

1. Post tips that other people might find useful.
A couple of people wrote to say thanks for technical explanations or strategies that I had posted.

2. Post ideas under development in the hope of receiving feedback.
I found that posting new, partially developed ideas to my blog helped me reflect on them, but I didn't receive much feedback from other people.

3. Maintain a personal knowledgebase
If you are going to create a personal knowledgebase, make sure it is on regular backup! This didn't have much value over the three months I blogged.

I guess I'll keep blogging, though it's mostly a personal, reflective exercise at this point.

Since we are releasing a new server architecture in the middle of the school year, we do not have the usual luxury of lots of unstructured summer days to sit down and plan every last detail of the network in advance. Instead, we find little bits of time here and there to have short conversations with each other, document them in our shared online workspace, and reflect about the changes on our own. Thankfully, this strategy has proven very effective so far.

We had our first network design department meeting yesterday, and we were all well-versed in the issues on the table. We thought that we had figured out what network design we were going to select. To my surprise, we ended the meeting in a very different place from where we started.

Our current design was created by network consultants three and a half years ago. It called for a parent domain for administrators and a child domain for teachers and students. At the meeting, we came up with a new design: one parent domain and three child domains: one for admins, one for teachers, and one for students. This will streamline the exchange of information among different domains and create a new security barrier between student and teacher data. All of the user data will reside in the child domains, and shared services (mail, list, and web servers) will reside in the parent domain.

I am convinced that we would not have been able to move to a new network design had we not already had our individual conversations, personal reflections, and shared documentation. At the same time, we would not have been able to move to a new model without our hour and a half group meeting. We intend to continue to employ this design method for the other aspects of our network.