Tonight, I had the pleasure of seeing Nel Noddings speak at Lewis & Clark College on "The Ethics of Care in a Social Justice Framework." Noddings presented several ideas, of which the following resonated the most with me.

• The "golden rule" is essentially self-serving. Instead of doing unto others as we would have done unto ourselves, whe should do unto others as they would have done unto themselves. The golden rule may reinforce a paternalistic attitude of imposing one's own values on others.
  
• A critical component of caring is the capacity to detect the feelings of others.
  
• Natural care is more meaningful than ethical care. Natural care happens as a result of our (maternal) instinct to respond to others. It is immediate and powerfully motivated. Ethical care happens when we make a conscious decision based on a principle. It takes more effort and can be less effective.
  
• The contributions of the care recipient to a caring relationship are not given enough significance by many. The care recipient sustains a caring interaction through their own reaction to the care they receive.

Though the presentation was centered on building an ethic of care in others, with references to standardized curriculum design and the war in Iraq, I found myself thinking about school technology departments. We spend our days responding to requests for help from our fellow employees, students, alumni, and parents. This week, we did a small self-study and estimated that we receive nearly 100 requests for support each day. Most of these involve some problem that the individual is having and cannot solve on his or her own. Our role is to understand and respond to that. We become experts at listening, asking questions to better understand the problem, observing the problem first-hand, sometimes sympathizing with circumstances that cannot be significantly improved, and then devising and implementing a solution to make things better. We do other work as well, but our core work is motivated by directly responding to the needs of people.

Why do individuals go into school technology support? If it were really about the technology, we might be better off in a pure technology company whose objective was simply to make the technology as run as well as possible for its own sake. I know that some tech professionals find their way to school because the environment is kinder to them. Some even find the range of work more varied and interesting than a narrowly-defined job in a large company. Still, anyone who lasts in a school tech department is oriented first to people and second to technology. Schools are human institutions first. I routinely observe my staff go above and beyond the call of duty to help a user get a technology to work for his or her purposes.

Why do people often think that technology staff don't care? Despite our best efforts, technology staff often gain a reputation of caring more for machines than people. This is more difficult for me to understand. With rare exception, technology professionals I meet are all about people. Perhaps we have a heavy workload and give the impression of disinterest while trying to keep our enterprise moving forward. Perhaps we give off the wrong impression when we immediately start talking about potential solutions when a person articulates their problem. Perhaps we get stereotyped because we work in a realm of knowledge that a lot of people do not comprehend. I don't have any good answers on this one.

What happens when technology professionals get negative feedback from the person they are trying to help? What if this happens repeatedly? One of Noddings' points is that the care recipient is an integral part of a care relationship. If one cares and the response is either bland or negative, then the carer needs support to be successful. This may take the form of regular department meetings, good supervision, professional development, and an open door and ear ready to listen to the support stories of the day.

What happens to our efforts to build a culture of care when interactions enter the digital realm? If detecting the feelings and needs of individuals is paramount to caring, does this become less effective in online forums, blogs, and chat rooms? Online conversations are certainly more effective when you have already established a face-to-face relationship with an individual. Should we try to limit email to information exchange? That doesn't seem practical. How do some people build entire long-distance relationships (presumably very caring ones) with people whom they have never met in person? Can electronic communication vehicles help us build a stronger affinity to people in faraway places that we may never have the opportunity to visit in person?

Many models for caring include the physical world. How can this body of work inform our efforts to help students and teachers care for their computers? It is not an impossible leap to make a link between caring for people and caring for physical objects. We encourage children to care for the physical spaces in which they live, such as their bedroom and classroom. People develop lifelong attachments to small objects of special meaning. Technology professionals are often the best at taking good care of their machines. Certainly, taking a computer apart or -- a popular student hobby -- putting a new machine together, appears to give many a better appreciation for and more caring orientation toward the computers they use. How do we encourage care for the virtual space out there: keeping our files in order, our virus protection up-to-date, and our system software well-tuned? Why do people devote all of their free time to cleaning Wikipedia of vandalism?

There's a lot more here -- maybe tomorrow. Please leave a comment.

tags: noddings, care, education, technology

I have been happy with iMovie for digital storytelling creation, but I faced a new problem last week. A staff member put together a slideshow in iPhoto and presented it to a handful of audiences. I proposed that we post the presentation as a digital story on our web site. A live recording tool like ProfCast would not do the trick, because it only works with Keynote or PowerPoint. iPhoto can play an audio soundtrack, but it cannot synchronize it to a slideshow. iMovie could independently handle video and audio, but synchronizing it required me to manually place each slide at the correct point of the audio track, and then the video clips corrupted when I started extending their lengths on the video track, ruining the project file.

Searching around the web, I found Ishmael, which turned out to be similar to ProfCast for iPhoto and PDFs. It loads your iPhoto presentation and then keeps track of your clicks as you record audio. Unlike ProfCast, you aren't actually showing the iPhoto slide show at this time, but it worked well as a post-production tool. I played the audio from another computer into the line in on this one and then ran Audacity simultaneously in order to get sound to play through to the speakers so I could hear it! Sounds crazy, I know, but it worked better than iMovie!



I read a little something about Apple introducing audio synchronization to the Leopard version of iPhoto, so we shall see what that looks like. In the meantime, does anyone know of a live iPhoto recording tool or a way to get an iPhoto slideshow into Keynote easily to take advantage of a tool like ProfCast?

This map collection from the University of Texas includes 11,000 high-quality map images, most of which are in the public domain. This is incredibly useful for educational purposes. It's tough to burrow through the Google results for "free maps," which includes advertisements and low-quality outline maps. While you can use Google Earth for educational purposes, this collection is better when you need quick access to one country, a complete set of geographical landmarks, or a map that you can publish on a public web site.

Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection


source

A few months after first considering the idea, I introduced podcasting by phone to the upper school today. Why start here when our students and teachers already have laptops? Because it adds something to our program that is qualitatively different and we don't already do. Our teachers already post a few audio files online, and that aspect of our work will grow. However, most of the podcasting that interests students the most does not happen in class or when they have their laptops. It happens when the students are at athletic events, on outdoor education field trips, and traveling abroad. Will they call into the toll-free number and update the rest of the school community? We will find out.

Podcasting by phone may have greater direct application to school business in the middle and lower school divisions. The middle school is already very excited about conventional podcasting. The seventh grade group applied for and received a grant to set up a podcasting infrastructure. They have already recorded one set of complete science class presentations and are planning on world cultures, music, and weekly assemblies. It would be a pretty short jump to carry this enthusiasm to off-campus events. The lower school was already interested in podcasting student book reports, and they might go for podcast-by-phone field trip reports on their annual overnight.

I am fully prepared for this to either completely take off and become really big or not get too far. It is fun to live with this uncertainty and then be surprised (one way or the other) when time has passed and the results become clear.

Oh, by the way. I settled on GabCast, for its toll-free number, relatively large storage quota, multi-episode Flash-based player, and support for multiple channels.

I spent an hour with a teacher today doing one of my favorite things -- choosing a technology to meet the goals of a class project. The project is a set of essays on cultural objects for a globalization class. Cultural objects are popular items that have achieved world recognition -- Coca-Cola, Ronald McDonald, and so on. We quickly settled on wiki technology, and within the course of a day, I moved from the Moodle wiki activity module to MediaWiki and finally to DokuWiki.

I had been there before at my previous school. In my limited experience, DokuWiki is more appropriate for schools than MediaWiki. I got DokuWiki installed more quickly, bound to LDAP, and configured for use. It is also simpler to use for beginners. MediaWiki is still the gold standard for wiki software, but they make no bones about how it is designed for the Wikipedia site. Its features are not necessarily ideal for a school site with lots of beginner users. Moodle wiki looks fine within the context of Moodle, but the image upload feature is broken for student users and the diff feature falls far short of the DokuWiki version. DokuWiki also supports email and RSS subscription! Rock on.

Let the project begin!

I recently found out that we have a lot of cable TV running through our campus ... except that no one is using it! According to one teacher, it was installed around the time of 9/11, when the school realized it had no way to broadcast current events to the school body in the case of a momentous event. Now, I'm no big fan of live TV in the classroom, and there doesn't seem to be much call for it. In contrast, considerable demand exists for recorded shows. A number of times this year, a teacher has asked whether anyone has the capability to record an episode of a science or history documentary for them. People can, of course ... from home! Digital video recorders make it trivial to record and store a TV show at home. Why not make this capability available at school? The best part is that this would likely be an inexpensive experiment:
less than $1,000 to make this service available to the entire school.

The leading digital video recorder, TiVo, is easier to use than the old VCR recording scheme. I figured I would ask our librarians to offer TiVo-to-DVD as a service to our teachers. It's a piece of cake to set a TiVo to record episodes for multiple teachers at different times, and I figured that a companion DVD burner would be the best way to make the video available to our teachers. Then, with a little investigation, I discovered that the new TiVo sets already offer enough features to make this system self-serve! TiVo now offers online scheduling, TiVoToGo, and TiVo Desktop. On paper at least, a teacher could scheduling a recording on a web site, then play the video on their PC or transfer it to a video iPod! Amazing. (Oh. Note that TiVo Desktop does not play video to OSX, only Windows)! I imagine that many teachers would still want the librarians to facilitate this process and put the file on a DVD, but even that would allow us to leverage an underutilized resource. I wonder how we could put this service in the hands of students?

What copyright concerns exist in this system? Seeing that educational institutions have "fair-use" allowances for the incorporation of copyrighted materials within lessons, we would likely be okay. Without having investigated this issue in depth, I imagine that we would only have to keep an eye on the permanence of the use. A recorded show could probably be only used once in class, not kept forever for annual repeat performances.

However neat, would this technology improve teaching and learning? It could help bring more current information into classes than textbooks can provide, in a format that engages the visual and auditory learner. TV shows typically incorporate a higher production quality than your average web news article, and TiVo video is more complete, easier to find, and higher quality than your average YouTube video. Students may also come up with creative uses of such video in their classes and activities. But what if teachers made fairly mundane uses of the new, fancy technology? I don't think that reproducing existing teaching methods through new technologies is necessarily bad. It accords the teacher more respect than if one were to insist on project-based classroom work. It also provides teachers with an entry point to easy-to-use technologies, which may encourage them to be more adventurous in their selection of more project-based technologies in the future. Don't get me wrong. I am more excited about developing constructivist, project-based technology applications in the classroom. But it's not appropriate for me to serve some teachers better than others based solely on their teaching style.

I have just completed migrating a parent account self-registration script from my old school to the new. It took a bit of work to complete the migration, as I wanted to allow parents to create unique usernames instead of using email addresses, and I wanted the store the accounts within Moodle (on our Linux server) instead of DAF (on a Windows server).

Parent self-registration is one key to fully including parents in a school intranet. With individual logins, parents can access protected resources such as course web sites, information, and forms. Next week, I hope to build consensus for making our internal employee and student photo directories available to the entire parent body. Parents are also immediately identified when using interactive features such as the volunteer registration tool. This makes it possible to have parents to update their personal information online, an enormous time-saver compared to sending out paper forms that parents must complete and return.

This is all possible without much tech support effort. The system registers parents through email verification, and it presents the ubiquitous "forgot password" function when that inevitably happens. If a parent does not have his/her email on file, then they update the appropriate academic office with that information. Flawless.

The upper school newspaper, Catlin Speak, is now online. Check out the Drupal-powered, student-run publication.

We have spent the last few weeks gradually rolling out a new helpdesk system for tech support requests. We needed to handle this delicately, as our small independent school prides itself on personal touch and informality. However, we badly needed a good way to ensure that support requests are visible to all tech staff and no requests fall through the cracks. In the past, we needed to spend weekly meeting time checking in on the status of previous requests.

One key to resolving this apparent dichotomy between our department's and our users' needs has been to ensure that users automatically receive copies of internal correspondence related to a user's case. Any time we add information to a support request history, such as assigning it to one of us, performing some research, or sending a unit our for repair, we note it in the helpdesk system and the user automatically receives a copy. This is a much higher frequency of communication than we were able to manage in the past. Finally, the email templates themselves are highly modifiable, which is more important than it sounds. I joke that adding a Catlin "tree" will greatly increase people's comfort with the system.

Since we already had Altiris as our Windows deployment solution, we simply activated the HelpDesk component. As I'm usually not a big fan of proprietary, unmodifiable solutions, I was pleased to find that this one pretty much gets the job done. All of the categories and queues are customizable, and it integrates with LDAP and Altiris' inventory system out of the box. That's a lot more than I could write on my own in Perl within a reasonable amount of time!

Before break, we spent a day decluttering and rewiring the entire server room. It was both a cathartic and productive day. Now we can sleep better at night knowing that each server has one power supply connected to a newly beefed-up UPS and the other connected to filtered power. This will no doubt pay off down the line in reduced power supply failure and cleaner shutdowns when we lose power.