Random
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...
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
:-)
My new favorite fast food joint | A Whole Lotta NothingMatt Haughey, a recently arrived Oregonian, talks of Burgerville, a very unique Northwest fast food outlet. Not only is the food good and very unlike most fast food places, but their kids' meals include things lilke garden tools and seeds instead of the standard plastic toy junk.
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...
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.
NECC 2004:Blogs@School Next month I will have the opportunity to work with Will Richardson, Anne Davis, Tom Hoffman and Steve Burt at NECC helping conduct a 3 hour workshop on weblog use in education. Am looking forward to the conference and the workshop.
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.
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...
Tom says it very well.
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?
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...
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
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.