Borrowing ideas from Sheryl Nussbaum-Beach and Chris Lehmann, I would like to strengthen the connection between progressive education and instructional technology next year.

Lehmann deconstructs the Learning to Change video to propose several practical, potentially unpopular ideas: 1) fully adopting social web technologies in education implies committment to progressive educational principles; 2) doing this right requires a lot of effort.

Nussbaum-Beach proposes that educators may, through virtual professional communities, better understand how to teach students 21st century technology literacies.

In our school, teachers normally meet in face-to-face faculty meetings, departmental discussions, and informal conversations around campus. These provide limited opportunities to engage practitioners in thoughtful conversations about using technology to support teaching and learning. I have before experimented with a blog-like format for communicating new resources and ideas to my colleagues, but this became far too one-sided. Teachers rarely replied.

Teachers at our school are innovating uses of educational technologies in remarkable ways but mostly in isolation from each other and based on very different learning objectives. What if we were able to increase the extent to which innovators worked from shared principles and practices?

Could we attempt to create a virtual community of practice within our single school? We have several factors working in our favor. Most of our teachers already know each other. A virtual community could provide more frequent opportunities for discussion than faculty and department meetings. It would overcome obstacles of time and space keeping apart teachers from different divisions (e.g., lower and middle schools).

Challenges are also numerous: the competition for teachers' free time is just as fierce as it is for face-to-face meetings. Email has so dominated in our school for the last decade that it is difficult to get teachers to hold meaningful discussion in another format. So many initiatives have a history of strong starts and then fizzle out.

One idea (from Nussbaum-Beach): to increase the potential success of this initiative, gain the agreement of a big enough core to actively participate in the online community from the start and take responsibility for its success. Others who show up will find an active discussion taking place, and the burden won't fall on a tiny group of people (or perhaps just one) to keep the discussion going. Another idea: use occasional face-to-face opportunities to build synergy with the online discussions. A third: create one online space in which to conduct all discussions schoolwide, so that users will have multiple discussions in which to consider participating.

We had success this year building momentum around discussion of social network sites within our "technology advisory group," a committee that meets monthly face-to-face. We produced two carefully thought-out emails that we sent out to the community, but these on their own did not generate actual discussion, though they did accomplish other objectives.


I field tested the idea of a virtual discussion group for instructional technologies with one teacher the other day and received an overwhelmingly positive response. This encourages me to keep trying with others.

To what extent will we discuss pedagogical theory? I don't know. For one, many of our teachers already practice progressive education. Yet, it is so difficult to disengage many from the traditional emphasis on the technology itself.

Have you tried to generate online discussions among your teachers? Tell us about it.



tags: plc, blc08

Our committee on technology use wrote the following article to help explain social network sites to the teachers and staff in our community. What explanations have you found particular helpful/unhelpful at your school?

Understanding Social Network Sites
Catlin Gabel Technology Advisory Group

Last fall, the Technology Advisory Group (TAG) distributed a survey to solicit your advice about a vision for technology at Catlin Gabel. A number of you asked about social network sites: what are they, why are they popular, and what can we do about them? TAG devoted some time this year to study these questions. While we did not find simple answers, we did find a great variety of “expert” perspectives that helped us better frame the issue. We found several passages in these articles particularly helpful.

Social network sites (SNS) put people in contact with each other. You can maintain a personal profile, create links to “friends,” and share information with them. Online communities have existed since at least 1985, with the founding of The Well. Some of today’s leading social network sites include Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and Ning. To better understand one, register a new account for yourself, and then search for “Catlin Gabel!”

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com
Global Education Collaborative: http://globaleducation.ning.com/
Independent School Educators Network: http://isenet.ning.com/

What value do social network sites have for our students? Are they simply time-wasters?

When it comes to socializing with friends, youth prefer in-person (unregulated) encounters. They turn to SNSs when they can't get together with their friends en masse or when they can't get together without surveilling adults. They are desperately craving an opportunity to connect with their friends; not surprisingly, their use of anything that enables socialization while at school is deeply desired. [1]

Bridging social capital reflects the benefits we receive from our “weak ties” — people we don’t know very well but who provide us with useful information and ideas. Undergraduates who used Facebook intensively had higher bridging social capital scores than those who didn’t, and our longitudinal data show that Facebook use preceded these social capital gains. [2]

How does classroom management change? The above quotes help explain students’ motivation for using Facebook during class, but they do not help guide us toward particular classroom management strategies.

What effects do social network technologies have on our students’ social interactions with others?

Weak ties (e.g., casual acquaintances, colleagues) may not be reliable for long-term support; their strength instead is in providing a wide range of perspectives, information, and opportunities. As society becomes increasingly dynamic, with access to information playing a growing role, having many diverse connections will be key. [3]

While all humans need to feel connected to each other or to some cause, there are also times when we simply want to disconnect, and disconnecting is becoming increasingly hard thanks to social networking technology. [4]

How concerned should we be about online cruelty and privacy?

For teens, who can be viciously competitive, networking sites that feature a list of one’s best friends and space for everyone to comment about you can be an unpleasant venue for social humiliation and bullying. These sites can make the emotional landmines of adolescence concrete and explicit. [5]

It’s a lot harder to accept that social media is mirroring and magnifying all of the good, bad, and ugly about today’s society, shoving it right back in our faces in the hopes that we might face the underlying problems. Technology does not create bullying; it simply makes it more visible and much harder for adults to ignore. [6]

Our students are growing up in an increasingly interconnected world, mediated by social web technologies. The better we understand this landscape, the better we will be able to adopt the pieces that best support teaching and learning, relate to our students’ social needs, and manage a changing classroom environment.



Resources Cited

1. boyd, danah. “The Economist Debate on Social ‘Networking’”. Zephoria January 15, 2008 http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2008/01/15/the_economist_d.html
2. Ellison, Nichole as quoted in Dubner, Stephen J. “Is MySpace Good for Society? A Freakonomics Quorum” New York Times February 15, 2008 http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/02/15/is-myspace-good-for-society-a-freakonomics-quorum/?hp
3. Donath, Judith, as quoted in ibid.
4. Chazin, Steve, as quoted in ibid.
5. Donath, Judith, as quoted in ibid
6. boyd, danah, as quoted in ibid.


Further Reading

boyd, danah, and Ellison, Nichole. Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship <http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol13/issue1/boyd.ellison.html>

Lenhart, Amanda. Madden, Mary. Macgill, Alexandra Rankin. Smith, Aaron. Pew Internet Life Report: Teens and Social Media <http://www.pewinternet.org/PPF/r/230/report_display.asp>

VanPetten, Vanessa. For Parents: Why do Teens Use Social Networking Sites? (video) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6YT6sEDZiE

The Economist: Debate: Social Networking. http://www.economist.com/debate/index.cfm?action=summary&debate_id=3




tags: sns, facebook

(uStreamed here)

Chris is challenging the audience in several ways. I think he's trying to raise the level of urgency for school reform.

School 2.0 is simple: progressive education with 21st century tools
Who has read Dewey (a few hands) since grad school (almost none)
There is no silver bullet (to school reform)
Stop blaming schools
Industrial age created the current dominant school model
Funding does matter, because it pays people
John Cleese: "If you want creative workers, give them enough time to play."
"Lifelong kindergarten" (MIT Media Lab)
"Scary thought: What are we willing to unlearn and relearn?"

How?
Pedagogy matters: be more intentional about the way we create our schools
Create caring institutions
Student-centered
Inquiry-driven
Meta-cognitive
If you give a test, you are not doing project-based learning
Incredibly empowered students

What do we gain/lose?
Have to give up breadth as the goal
Technology must be like oxygen: ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible
Don't talk about "what" before "why"
Certain technologies are not additive, they are transformative (Neil Postman) (e.g., printing press)
Process trumps product
Simplify all the easy tasks, so we have time and energy for the complex
Research -> Collaborate -> Present -> Network
George Siemens: Connectivism
What if kids did "academic" networking, not just social network?
Transparency: we can invite the world to our schools
What is the role of the teacher in the age of Google?



tags: acpe08

(very broad liveblogging)

David Pogue "sticks his neck out" to predict five rising technology trends.

Convergence of phone and internet

VOIP, Vonage, Skype, TMobile @ Home

GrandCentral.com (phone call forwarding)

Google Cellular (texting Google to get business lookups, weather, driving directions, etc.

800 GOOG 411

Voice-to-text, e.g., SimulScribe, CallWave

Popularity Dialer (funny way to get out of a meeting)

RFID transmitters (embedding transmittable digital information in library books, shipping pallets, pets!, clothing, prisoners!)

FuturePhone: free international phone calls via Iowa due to a government subsidy for calls from rural areas, but they've been shut down as a result!

A la Carte Video

Hulul

iTunes Video

Web 2.0

Facebook, YouTube, Craigslist

"Blogs can put a face on a company" -- a more personal face on an organization (my note: this works when regular employees post about daily life, not when an organization posts official notices in a blog-type format)

Less well-known sites that are incredibly successful at putting people in touch with each other around certain information:

Prosper: person-to-person microloans

Kiva: Microloans for international businesses

Goloco: ad-hoc carpooling

E-Petitions: UK site for anyone to create a petition on any topic

Who Is Sick?: tracking what illnesses are going around



tags: acpe08

I am hoping to blog a lot while at ACPE the next two days. I thought I would start with an idea that has been nagging at me for a few weeks. I often hear school leaders explain that technology is like "a pencil." I think they mean that technology should be incredibly simple and easily accomplish the job it is designed for. Pencils intimidate few. We don't think too often about the pencil itself. Is it sharp? Eraser intact? Okay, let's write.

Reducing technology to a pencil overlooks the manner in which it connects people to content and each other. The resultant learning environment is the focus, and it's not a pencil. It is a complex, interwoven fabric through which students and teachers move to find, analyze, create, and share. The pencil (or whiteboard) metaphor discourages people from exploring the unique types of learning environments that one may create with technology.

Yes, we deserve technology systems that are easy to use, but we also deserve richness and power from these educational tools.

Paul, nice job introducing the trip planning project using Google Earth. I especially liked how you explained how teacher authority (or "genius," as you put it) is actually the face of experience. Students think you magically know all the answers, but this is actually because you've done the project many times before. Then you explained that moving the project into Google Earth means that you will encounter problems for the first time and not be as able to answer the students' questions correctly the first time. I couldn't read the students' reactions to this ... perhaps they were mildly stunned. I hope that the more adventuresome among them will view this as an opportunity to lead the exploration and define the project for future classes! Onward and upward. Good luck with it.

tags: googleearth

The PNAIS technology directors listserv has experienced a rebirth this year. As we seek to understand the factors that build successful online learning communities, it's worth asking why the group took off again this year. No doubt, school technology professionals have a need to get in touch with each other. Most work amongst only a small group of peers in their own institutions -- the ability to ask questions of a large number of like-positioned peers has great value. Last year's TechShare conference may have also had something to do with it. At the conference, 30 regional tech staff got together for the second annual conference, continuing to build face-to-face rapport that bleeds into successful online interactions. In the lead-up to the conference and immediately afterward, conversation on the listserv picked up pace. Don at PNAIS (the list sponsor and host) periodically injects some momentum into the group with well-placed, useful announcements of opportunities or projects in process. Finally, critical mass: when only a few people posted to the list, many stopped paying attention. Now, the more that some people participate, the more that others do as well.

If "technology directors" follows in the footsteps of BAISNet, the next step will involve someone proposing an impromptu, face-to-face meetup when the level of discussion on a particular topic reaches a fever pitch. Then we will be able to mark a new milestone for this online community. Will MACEP get there first?

tags: sns, community, listserv, blc08

I shared this with our upper school faculty today. danah boyd provides insight into why students spend so much time on social network sites, even during class.

When it comes to socializing with friends, youth prefer in-person (unregulated) encounters. They turn to SNSs when they can't get together with their friends en masse or when they can't get together without surveilling adults. By and large, there are few free spaces where youth can gather with their friends en masse and, even then, inevitably a chunk of parents refuse to let them, thereby destroying cluster effects. So, of course, they turn to SNSs. School is one of the few times when they can get together with their friends and they use every unscheduled moment to socialize - passing time, when the teacher's back is turned, lunch, bathroom breaks, etc. They are desperately craving an opportunity to connect with their friends; not surprisingly, their use of anything that enables socialization while at school is deeply desired. This is why they text during classes. They go onto SNSs during the day to write to friends who have different schedules or to write to the whole group if a portion of them are on a different lunch. Given how regulated youth are, any open space where socializing is possible will be taken up by socializing; it's often the only place they can see their friends. This isn't something that the schools can fix, but they also shouldn't be surprised when group time turns into gossip time.

Read the full article

A mentor teacher once told me, "When I want something done, I ask a busy person. That way, I know it will get done." Teachers often express that their professional lives are too busy to permit much experimentation with technology. Yet, somehow every school has a minority of teachers, often very busy ones, who are doing wonderful work with new technologies. Why?

Maybe this results from priority-setting. Even the busiest person makes time to focus on his or her top priorities. When I present new technologies to a group of teachers, some hear what the new tools can do and find that they fit perfectly with their existing teaching strategies. Others find the capabilities of the new tools intriguing but foreign. Those who prioritize technology are always able to find the time for it, both teacher time for learning and planning and student time for completing new, sometimes time-consuming, activities.

Those who find technology socially isolating or excessively complicated are unlikely to devote time to it. I trust that training and schoolwide discussion help paint a rich picture of the realities and potential for new technologies to support teaching and learning. A multi-faceted training program offers workshops, individual support, classroom/office visits, online resources, and tech-shares. A tech-share provides an opportunity for teachers using technology to share their work with their peers, explaining the teaching objectives and evidence of learning. In order to understand how young people are using computers to connect with each other, teachers should hear students' voices and study this with great interest.

I don't buy the popular belief that technology can change pedagogy. Only teachers change their teaching strategies. More likely, the right technology allows a teacher to amplify some aspects of his/her practice that he/she has always wanted to do a better job with. Teachers may even find ways to use new tools to reinforce existing teaching strategies, good or bad. The concept that technology can change pedagogy by itself leads to bad policy, such as large, public technology programs that fund only computer acquisition and not professional development or support staff salaries.

I started this blog post headed in one direction but finish in a familiar place: a focus on teachers. Choose technologies that have potential to match teachers' objectives, support teachers as well as we can, and share exemplary work broadly.

It is difficult to maintain a healthy balance between providing service and encouraging self-sufficiency in independent schools. Well-endowed, such schools often find it easier to buy more staff or products to meet an expressed or implied service need. We find ourselves now wanting to hold tuition increases in check as the country's economic downturn exerts pressure on our tuition-paying families. This forces us to consider other options to keep technology costs increasing at a reasonable rate while, at the same time, our clients want to take advantage of new, exciting technologies that no doubt would help support teaching and learning at school and home.

A key example is our annual laptop preparation work. This year, it took nine people all week, working day and night, to complete a checklist of 15 or so items for 270 student computers and approximately 100 employee laptops. This simply isn't sustainable any longer. How could we encourage students and employees to perform more annual maintenance tasks for their computers? At least two components exist to this question: knowledge and motivation. The knowledge part is relatively easy. Experienced both at providing documentation and teaching others, we should be able to equip our users with the necessary knowledge and skills to complete most of the maintenance tasks themselves: software updates, application installations, control panel configurations, drive mappings, and so on. Motivation is a trickier question. What if we provided a list for students and employees to complete, and then most didn't complete it? What motivation could persuade individuals to complete the items in list?

One idea is to offer a refund on our annual laptop fee. That would motivate the parents. However, it's a bit of a misplaced motivation, since the laptop fee doesn't pay for the maintenance work, it pays for the students' share of licensed security software. What if we got the computers back to these individuals the most quickly? In fact, if a student or employee successfully completed all of the items in the list, he/she could get their machine back right away. Given the attachment that users have to their computers, this could be powerful motivation, indeed. But would it be enough? What about an iPod raffle? That might get their attention!

A long-term strategy should be more subtle. In order to slowly change a strongly-held cultural norm in the school, we will need to gradually provide training, instructions, and a subtle push so that users gradually take more ownership over the routine maintenance of their computers over time. Strengthening the shared vision within the tech team, consistently communicating our expectations of users during daily interactions, providing high-quality training materials and support, tapping into a schoolwide effort to contain program costs, we should be able to increase user self-sufficiency over time.

Tech staff from resource-poor schools may laugh reading this post. Certainly, we are very fortunate to experience a problem caused by having enough resources to provide enterprise-level services to this school. I know, having been there in the past in two former institutions. Teachers and students working in schools with 0-1 tech staff and a $17,000 annual operating budget build self-sufficiency out of necessity. The occasional grant can provide room for enhancement and growth, yet systems are perhaps more likely to fall into disrepair and disuse. The creative application of open-source technologies, free, hosted services, and E-Rate funding can help, and we may read of success stories at institutions that have managed to keep their tech operations afloat. Nevertheless, this is a challenge that we face at our institution -- valid and authentic in its own context.

Your thoughts are welcome here ...

My to-do list six months ago:
- Build admission inquiry web site
- Build bookstore checkout system
- Prep computers for start of year
- Introduce Drupal schoolwide
- Roll out wireless security system

My to-do list this month
- Plan technology staff retreat
- Hire second support technician
- Tie up loose ends in admission and bookstore web scripts
- Write curricular technology integration report
- Publish newsletters responding to aspects of schoolwide tech survey
- Present web 2.0 philosophy to middle school parents
- Redesign school-provided cellphone policies
- Evaluate viability of wireless security system

Over the last six months, I have recognized the need to shift my emphasis from development and configuration (building new technology capacity) to team-building, communication and training. On the one hand, this is natural for this point in the year -- the summer is prime time for rolling out new technologies, supporting new technologies and new uses of old technologies dominates the fall, and then we begin to plan for future initiatives once winter arrives. However, a larger change is also afoot. I have discovered (the hard way, sometimes), that this school technology program requires more management than I had previously thought. It just doesn't run itself the way it did at my previous, smaller school. The larger school is much more complicated, with more varied uses of technology and a greater need to coordinate practices from different parts of the school. In some ways, it's like running a very small school district, as our four age-level divisions operate to some degree as four separate schools. Cultural differences also exist, especially in amount of direct support that teachers and staff expect for their technology activities.

My role shifts from developer/initiator to facilitator/manager. I gain an exciting new set of professional objectives. How do I coordinate the technology team to best serve the school? How can I best influence the schoolwide dialogue about technology integration and its relationship to new societal norms? At the same time, I lose long stretches of uninterrupted time to develop, install, and configure new technologies myself. I would like to continue to build new tools to support school curricular and operational programs, but I have my hands more than full with existing initiatives. Hopefully, the need for rapid introduction of new technologies has now passed at this school -- we now have most of the tools that we should for a leading school in 2008. Perhaps other members of the tech team will grow into the burgeoning field of community web site development.

Other school leaders experience the same issues. Chris Lehmann has written about the same experience since becoming principal of Science Leadership Academy. Another school leader spoke to "view from the balcony" at Leadertalk the other day. Of course, they are principals, and I run a tech department, but I feel similar pressures on a smaller scale. I guess that everyone makes their own decision at some point about how much daily practice to give up in order to serve the schoolwide needs of the institution. Certainly, forums and resources for leadership studies are of great value to help individuals make these transitions.

This past Sunday's New York Times included an article about the looming confrontation between Google and Microsoft. The section of the article that described Google's software development method caught my eye.

New features and improvements are made and tested on Google’s computers and constantly sprinkled into the services users tap into online. In the last two months alone, eight new features or improvements have been added to Google’s e-mail system, Gmail, including a tweak to improve the processing speed and code to simplify the handling of e-mail on mobile phones. A similar number of enhancements have been made in the last two months to Google’s online spreadsheet, word processing and presentation software.
source

The rapid development software model is not new, but Google has implemented it to perfection. I would like to think that we have adopted some aspects of this model at school. Sometimes, we quickly develop a custom web script, install an open-source application, or adopt a new IT policy after a short conversation and see how well it plays in the field. At other times, we adopt a more conventional approach, quietly developing and testing an idea until it is fully mature before throwing it out to the community.

To some extent, the choice of which strategy to employ depends on the centrality of the system. When rolling out a new wireless security scheme or file server, much testing and gathering of feedback is required. When creating a new opportunity for teachers to post video on the web, one may proceed with abandon. Even Google appears to modify its core applications only to introduce new features in a test environment. Recently, Facebook took a big hit from failing to anticipate how users would react to yet another big feature change that impinged on their privacy.

We can stand to remember that the best feedback on an innovation is gained from everyday users giving it a try. Get user feedback early rather than working in isolation for long periods of time. Maybe we can benefit from more often adopting such a "perpetual beta" model.

We recently discovered a Facebook profile impersonating a staff member on campus. We contacted Facebook, who immediately pulled the profile -- the speed of their response was impressive. However, Facebook would not offer any help to identify the individual responsible, apparently an effort to protect the privacy of their users. Imagine the difficulty if they attempted to distinguish between legitimate and fraudulent requests for personal information about other users! At the same time, it's easy to write sarcastically about Facebook's intentions, given the liberty with which they share users' personal information with Google and advertisers.

To find the person responsible, we decided to appeal to a feature of our school that we believe is strong -- students taking responsibility for their actions -- but it didn't work. We wrote to a number of students connected to the fake profile, asking them to do the right thing and help the person who impersonated the staff member to come forward and explain himself. No one came forward. This could be for any number of reasons, but for the moment, I'm just disappointed that the school community did not live up to its ideals. Thankfully, I can point to a dozen examples of students acting with great responsibility and care. I just wish that it had happened this time, too.

A student recently received a threatening, anonymous email message. Twenty four hours later, the offender was identified and profusely apologized. How? The student told her parents. The parents contacted her teacher. The teacher told IT. IT told the division head and together met with the mother. The division head told her faculty. One faculty member witnessed a suspicious activity, which led to the offender.

I am reminded of sensational news stories about cyberbullying, in which open communication did not exist, and the extent of harm was far greater. I am glad that the strengths of our school community work to minimize the effects of harmful actions such as these.

In this post, I explore the values of digital and physical media and examine devices that help bridge the two.

As information becomes increasingly digitized, I find myself within an interesting dynamic. On the one hand, we have liberated information by freeing it from its physical forms. Text, pictures, music and videos can now move easily from one place to another through digital networks. Well documented are the new possibilities that this creates, such as publishing, collaboration, and research. However, this shift in the dominant media for information has caused us to lose some things along the way -- immediacy of access and certain physical sensations.

The computer has become the dominant context to view some forms of information, especially text, photos, illustrations, music, speeches, and videos. Physical interactions remain dominant for more complex information forms, such as conversations, debates, paintings, sculpture, theater, teaching, and sport. Very slowly, digital media has made inroads into more complex media, but it still has a long way to go!

Let's take digital photography as an example. Photographers have largely let go of developer and enlargers in order to gain the ability to shoot an unlimited number of images, easily modify the results in a nondestructive fashion, and share them instantly with people around the world. Recent technological advances, especially the development of digital SLRs, which combine the power of professional lenses with digital image capture, have made this possible. But what have we lost? For the average user, we do not as often print our photos or assemble comprehensive, paper photo albums. Most people I know have migrated almost entirely into the digital realm, printing only a few of the best photos.

Our photos are instantly accessible through web galleries, making them easier to access when we are at our computers. However, we are often distracted by a myriad other tasks when we are at our computers, and looking at our photo galleries isn't a top priority. This significantly changes our interaction with photos. Less often do we stumble across photographic prints while leafing through our bookcase or shuffling through the papers on the kitchen table. We largely view photos when sitting down at our computer, with the same presentation every time -- ambient light, desktop background, web-based presentation. Laptops change this slightly, allowing us to take the same presentation to somewhat different places, such as the living room sofa, kitchen table, or hotel room.

What devices allow us to free digital information from the computer context? For music, the iPod has been incredibly successful. We get the best of both worlds -- the ability to easily acquire and transfer digital music from one location to another without being confined to the computer. For the most part, we have gained so much with digital music and lost little. With an iPod, you may listen to the music practically anywhere, especially connecting it to traditional presentation systems such as the home or car stereo. You can even play your music at a community dance or party. What have we lost? Audiophile quality, the physical sensation of picking up an album, flipping through the liner notes, and listening to an entire album, especially in order. Mostly, people find that the losses have been worth the gains.

Amazon is trying hard to push the digital book with the Kindle, trying to resolve skepticism about readability, page turning, and portability with a specialized device. However, many still wonder what there is to gain from a $400 device when an actual book is surprisingly versatile and accessible.

With the holidays coming, I have taken another look at digital picture frames. I have always wanted a digital picture frame, in order to gain back the serendipity that comes from coming across a framed picture while walking into a bedroom at home or strolling a hallway at work. I am pleased to see that digital picture frames are diversifying and becoming more capable. When I first examined them some years ago, Ceiva was the leader, offering a subscription-based system. I wanted to avoid monthly fees. I can't imagine paying ten dollars a month to display photos from the Internet. About last year, I noticed a number of new models that displayed photos from portable media, such as media cards and USB drives. No monthly fees apply, but you are limited to a physical card, so it's harder to send photos to the grandparents, for instance.

Today, I took another look. PhotoVu has gone for the high end. Their least expensive frame is at 17" for $700. Frames are matted, and you can even choose from a variety of frame borders. It's especially cool that PhotoVu permits multiple non-subscription formats: USB drive, Picasa, iPhoto, or laptop connection. This is far preferable than paying for a proprietary monthly service. However, the cost is still too high for me, considering that you can practically get a laptop computer for the same price. Some Windows-friendly frames have also appeared, but I shy away from the proprietary lock-in. I'm looking for small, inexpensive, wifi-enabled, and simple to use. I'll keep looking for the perfect device, or perhaps I'll just wait until next year!

Update 12/15/2007 I bought the DigitalLiving 7" frame from Target for my parents. To my surprise, I found out that it's billed as a children's picture frame, a surprise because it has the highest-quality image at $90 of any device I've seen. I'm not sure how tangible the DigitalLiving brand is. It only appears at Target and doesn't appear to have a web site or product line of its own. The frame itself works great -- it picks up images automagically from USB drives or media cards and is very simple to operate. I gave up wireless access and battery power to get this device and am completely happy with that decision.

Update 2/6/2008 Now this is more like it: EStarling Digital Wireless