Anne Davis on Blogs and NECC...

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I'm putting the final touches on my NECC concurrent session, Weblogs in Education: The Possibilities Are Limitless! I'll be presenting with Sandy Peters.

I work all next week. Then I'm taking off a week early for a "much-looked forward to" vacation prior to the conference. The conference is going to be fun. I hope lots of you are going. I plan to use some student video clips. I thought you might enjoy the blogging rap my Wrinkles' students created. I'll also be participating in a NECC 2004:Blogs@School workshop with Tim Lauer, Will Richardson, Steve Burt and Tom Hoffman. They'll be a whole of blogging going on! Yep, weblogs are off the chart![EduBlog Insights]

Anne Davis points to her concurrent session at NECC and also to the 3 hour workshop that she will be taking part in along with Steve Burt, Tom Hoffman, Will Richardson and myself. If you go to the NECC program site and search under the term weblogs, you'll find 6 sessions listed.

Tom Hoffman Proposes a Conference For The Rest of Us...

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I think this article should earn Matt an imaginary invitation to present his work at a fake educational technology conference I'm pretending to begin planning. The working title is "Why doesn't all this "stuff" work? 2004." The imaginary theme is "Cheap, robust technologies to make the computers actually work in your school." Or something like that. Topics would hypothetically include Rendezvous, K12LTSP, LDAP, RSS, weblogs and wikis, wifi, when to use PHP, where you can use Python, how to buy gear on EBay, how to figure our what's wrong with and return that new computer that crashes intermittently but persistently but passes all the manufacturer's diagnostics, etc. I'll round up some imaginary sponsors at NECC.

Tom starts off by pointing to a review of USB pen drives and then proposes a conference for the ed-tech community geared toward making all this wonderful technology work. I'm hoping to help him round up sponsors at NECC in New Orleans later this month... Maybe some of the ISTE 40 or so...

Providence Portland Center For Medically Fragile Children

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PortlandTribune.com | Some enchanted evening

There are 18 residents at the prom this evening, out of a total of 58 who live full time at the Center for Medically Fragile Children. Part of the Providence Portland Child Center, it’s the only facility of its kind in the Pacific Northwest, having started several decades ago as an orphanage operated by the Sisters of Providence. The orphanage closed in the 1960s but the center still serves children from birth to age 21, some coming from as far away as Idaho and Montana.

The Portland Tribune has a very nice article about young people who live at the Providence Portland’s Center for Medically Fragile Children. These students are medically fragile with complex medical needs. Most are unable to communicate verbally, and all are physically disabled to a profound degree. Lewis Elementary has a classroom that serves several of the 58 students who live at the Providence Center. The teacher, nurse, and paraprofessionals who work in this classroom are exceptional people doing exceptional work.

New Media Consortium Summer Conferrence

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UBCWiki: SmallPiecesLooselyJoined/AboutSmallPieces

Colloboration via the net does not necessarilty require monolithic, expensive tool suites that aim to do everything under one umbrella. We will share and demonstrate the use of readily available, mostly free, discrete sets of "small" and "loosely joined" technologies - weblogs, wikis, instant messaging, audio/video chat. The loose joining means that how they are connected are not necessarily in the programming of the software, but the ways people can use them in a social context that is an environment of dynamic, changing relationships and connections, rather than the rigid, limited ones defined by computer code...

Alan Levine, Brian Lamb and D'Arcy Norman will be presenting a very interesting session at the NMC 2004 - New Media Consortium 2004 Summer Conference. They are looking for participation by others who will not be at the session. I will be taking part in a video chat session during the session.

I like the idea of encouraging and experimenting with the use of free/low cost and readily available technologies such as weblogs, wiki's, and chat. I also like the philosophy behind this experimentation... Maybe they can add a tool such as Flickr to the mix. More later...

VoIP for Mobile Users...

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TheFeature :: VoIP goes Mobile Here's how the MG-3 works: first, you have to sign up for VoIP service with a company that resells i2 Telecom's hardware and network access. You'll get the MG-3, a little plastic box stuffed with microchips, which you plug into your broadband connection and existing phone line. Then, when you want to make a long distance call with your mobile, you just call your home number. The MG-3 will recognize the mobile's number using Caller ID, and connect you to i2 Telecom's VoIP network. You get a second dial tone, and you can make your overseas call. Want to talk to somebody in China? You'll get charged 5 cents a minute. Cingular has been having a great time charging you $3.49 a minute for making the same call. (Wanna bet they're screaming at their lawyers right now to cook up a way to kill this in court?) [by way of: Dan Gillmor's eJournal]

The Feature has an interesting article about a company that has developed a system for the use of VoIP by your mobile phone. Am thinking if something like this could be used in schools. In Portland, very few classrooms have telephone access. I know that our IT folks are looking at VoIP as one method of providing this to our teachers. Adding mobile phones to mix is interesting.

Street Maps in Political Hues

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If you are curious about your neighbors political donations, a new Web site follows the money in your hometown, address by address. Not everyone is pleased. [NY Times Technology]

This is pretty amazing... Type in your zip code and see who in your neighborhood contributed to which candidates, and how much... or type in a name and see if that person contributed how much to which candidate...

Why Will Thinks Linux Has a Long Way to Go in Schools

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But if you take my fairly high-tech, well supported (technology-wise) school as an example, it just ain't going to happen here any time soon. Call it dancing with the girl you brought to the prom (or whatever that silly metaphor is,) but Linux on it's surface just seems too "out there" when you've got something that works pretty well already, the resources to change are slim, and no one has any time to learn something new. [weblogged News]

Will's latest post points to Tom Hoffman's discussion of his installation of the SUSE Linux distribution. Will wonders outloud about the viability of the use of Linux in school environments. I think the key point here is...

But if you take my fairly high-tech, well supported (technology-wise) school as an example, it just ain't going to happen here any time soon...

when you've got something that works pretty well already, the resources to change are slim, and no one has any time to learn something new.

Tom, and our mutual friend Ben, are working with very limited resources. Machines that will barely run Windows 98, let alone XP or Longhorn. Linux is a very viable and proven solution. The Linux Terminal Server Project is built from the ground up for use in the K-12 environment. For an excellent example of the use of Linux in a high school, see Paul Nelson's work at Riverdale High School in Portland.

As for Will's list of terms and acronyms that seems to be confusing his technicians? I'll add to the list...

Blog
Feed
RSS
Radio
Manila
MoveableType
Blosoxm
Atom
Furling
and my favorite... Moblogging :-)

Not Dave Kingman

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The Dave Kingman Web SiteTonight my son and I were playing catch, or as some folks say... having catch. Anyway he wanted popups. So i start to throw him popups. As he catches them he asks which of the Chicago Cubs he caught it like. So as he made catches he'd ask... "Which one?" I'd say..."Andre Dawson"... "Billy Williams"... "Adolfo Phillips"... "Sammy Sosa"... "Jim Hickman"... and the game would continue. When he would drop one, or not quite get to it he's ask, "Which One?" and for some reason I said ...."Dave Kingman" Now Kingman did hit a lot of home runs, 442 to be exact... but for some reason I have visions of him in left field at Wrigley having trouble with some flyballs. Anyway, the game we play is now called... "Not Dave Kingman..." I'll make a point of showing Nando the Dave Kingman web site, and point out that he was a pretty darn good hitter...

"Woe is Me" and MT3

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But just a minute-- It is not like any of our beautifully running installations of MT 2.6 and earlier will suddenly blink out or self-destruct in 5 minutes, Mr. Phelps. This insane rush to upgrade or jump seems awfully.... hasty. Sure down the road, there are going to perhaps be compelling technical, feature reasons to upgrade or switch blog platforms, but there is nothing wrong with staying where you are at. MT 2.X still works, eh? It's not broken, eh? [cogdogblog]

Alan Levine sums up very well the whole MT 3.0 bloodletting.

The New Blogger...

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Bryan Bell points to this post (Stopdesign | The New Blogger) by Douglas Bowman about the new Blogger role out and some of the design considerations that went into the redesign. I launched my Blogger account and took a look around and was very impressed. Comments are now an option, along with file uploading. With all the talk of the new licensing pricing of MoveableType, I'm thinking I may just go ahead and have my students in my Pacific University class set up a Blogger site for use in the class. They can get a free spot on Blogspot, or if I do some planning, I can create each of them a directory and ftp login on my server and have them post their class weblog there. More MoveableType: Lots of discussion going on about the new MoveableType 3.0 licenseing. As Liz Lawley noted, it looks like the SixApart folks are aware of the use of MT at educational institutions, and how their new pricing makes use of the 3.0 version prohibitive. Hopefully they get this right. But, as it has been noted, there are quite a few OpenSource solutions out there.

The 2.6x version of MT works very well for us at Lewis, and I plan to continue to use it. But I will spend some time this summer playing around with some other tools. Tom is very high on Plone, also Drupal looks like a very feature rich tool. Will suggests Manila. I have experience running a Manila server. For about a year and a half we hosted several teacher support sites using Frontier and Manila, but Manila is not an option for us at Lewis. For one thing we have our site hosted and don't run our own server. Another reason is cost. I really want to work with a tool that will not have ongoing licensing costs.

Resistance is Futile

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We've known these changes were coming down the pike for a while, but a little advance warning about the actual changeover would have been helpful.

We managed to get them to keep the old connection open for the time being, and after some confusion caused by the power cord falling out of a switch, we're still on line, but this is really just the first step in being assimilated into the borg.

[Tuttle SVC]

I laughed when I read Tom's post tonight. Today our CTO (I think that means Chief Technology Officer...) came to visit Lewis. Was worried a bit about the visit. Was afraid he would notice all those iMacs we updated to OS X. Turns out he had some interesting ideas to share. One thing he wants to do is create a sandbox environment segmented off the main admin network, for teachers and students to work in. (Am thinking of things like Plone, student blogs, web based assessment databases and such...) I have always felt it necessary for schools to have a bit of freedom to explore uses of technology that go beyond just record keeping. From what he said today, it looks like he thinks the same. I refrained from sharing our web site. Will do that next time I meet with him...

Lewis Art Night

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Lewis Elementary School On Thursday we had our annual Art Night at Lewis Elementary. The school hallways were turned into an art gallery with art projects from thoughout the school year displayed in the hallway. Students worked as docents and helped explain the projects to visiting parents and community members. In addition our music students preformed throughout the evening. Over the years I have heard great comments about the Lewis Art Night, but it was great to be able to take part this year as principal and to see the positive reaction from our families and community.

Why Schools Will Move to Linux

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Tom says it very well.

Mary Jo Foley:

Microsoft is expected to recommend that the "average" Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.

via Airbag.

The second factor is Will Novell Adopt the Linux Terminal Server Project?

[Tuttle SVC]

At Lewis, we have mostly iMacs. With a RAM upgrade, all of the iMacs can and will soon run the latest version of OS X. So as long as the Macs are running we will go the route or OS X. If I had come to a school with a majority of PC's we would of worked to move to LTSP. Of the 2 instructional PC's none have the specs to run XP, let alone Longhorn...

Alan Levine's Photoblog Online Workshop

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Well I think it went well. You just are not 100% sure doing an online presentation who is snoring at the other end. But we had some good discussion and some folks finally popped some images to a Conference PhotoBlog-- oops, I forgot the context... [by way of cogdogblog]

Alan Levine talks of his experiences doing an online photoblog workshop... He also points to Robert Burget's experiences using Buzznet in a community college class... see his experiences blogged as Testing the Waters and his shared Buzznet Gallery for his students' work, ART 177 Side Show

Classroom Weblogs...

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This week on the back of the Lewis Elementary newsletter we published a short update from each classroom teacher, and from our support teachers. These classroom notes are designed to give families a quick update of upcoming events, curriculum activities and topical information about our classrooms. The way we accomplished this is that we set up a community weblog using Moveable Type and had each teacher write a short piece about upcoming events for the coming week. We then edited the index page for the community blog and set it up so that each teacher's most recent post was listed on that page. Then we just copied and pasted the content into a Word template for publication. The interesting part of this is we did this because we wanted to easily collect the content in one place and as a result we now have a community weblog for our classrooms. Next we plan to create individual pages based on category tags in Moveable Type. This will allow each teacher to have a very simple web page with their weekly notes in the center and other content flowing into the sidebars.