May 11th, 2008
Will Microsoft kill Linux on ULPCs?
Obviously, Microsoft has a significant interest in making sure that users of the new breed of netbooks and MIDs hitting the market don’t get too comfortable using Linux. Many manufacturers have taken to installing various flavors of Linux on these devices to minimize footprint, improve performance, and reduce costs on low-power, low-margin hardware. Similarly, most modern Linux distributions provide features that are tough to find on Windows XP (especially XP Home); Vista clearly isn’t an option on these little guys.
ULPCs come up a lot in Ed Tech, partly because the OLPC XO, largely credited with creating this market, is an educational tool and also because ULPCs have the potential to make 1:1 computing realistic (or even to simply make any sort of computing realistic in developing markets). The OS of choice for students today will be the OS of choice in business tomorrow; hence, Microsoft’s concern over the use of Linux. Read the rest of this entry »
May 11th, 2008
Is the time right for iPhones in Ed Tech?
A growing number of kids in our school have iPhones, or at least iPod touch models. They’re everywhere at WPI, where I’m finishing up my masters. Most students aren’t using them for much in the way of academics, but as I increasingly use my own phone (a mere LG enV) for web browsing and the price of smartphones (or at least smarter phones like the enV) comes down, I have to wonder if these might not be reaching a point where they could be really useful in Ed Tech.
Their complete portability obviously makes it easier for kids to sneak them out in class, but as the relative richness of the Web experience they can provide increases, their real utility seems to increase as well. I can read Google Docs and Spreadsheets, quickly look up information sans laptop, and Tweet with ease. The iPhone, in particular, has an intuitive and powerful interface and a large enough screen to allow meaningful browsing.
While there aren’t many applications that allow users to edit or enter text yet (aside from mail apps), new functionality is emerging all the time aimed squarely at mobile markets. Sure, ULPCs allow full PC functionality in a nicely-sized package, but a shirt-pocket-sized package has a lot of appeal.
Previous efforts to provide students with iPods have largely fallen flat, although plenty of instructors provide podcasts of lectures. However, it seems that the time may finally be right to provide more educational content via cell phone.
Many readers have suggested that smartphones have a greater place in developing countries than even the XO and the Classmate since cellular service is widespread even in many developing countries. Is this the case? I’m not suggesting that iPhones can replace a full-featured computer, but I am wondering if they could combat the laptop wall in so many classes.
What do you think?
Loading …May 8th, 2008
How does OpenSolaris fare for Ed Tech?
In a nutshell, just fine. It’s Unix, it’s stable, it’s robust, it’s free, and includes a solid repository of free software. The real question is, does it have a place in Ed Tech?
It’s certainly pretty, but it’s running Gnome and looks an awful lot like a standard Ubuntu install. OpenOffice, the GIMP, and most of the business software we’ve come to expect from a full-featured Linux distribution are right there.
There’s a very familiar package manager, but I’m not seeing anything that I haven’t already seen in Fedora, OpenSUSE, or *buntu. So where is the advantage? I freely admit that my only forays into Unix Land have been via OS X and various Linux distributions. So for those of you with Solaris experience, can OpenSolaris bring something new to the table?
Of course the OpenSolaris website points to the immediate scalability of the platform and applications developed on it. However, to my understanding, the same could be said for many Linux distributions that have a more active community to provide support.
Share your thoughts. I have it running in a virtual machine on my MacBook now, so any suggestions of things to try would be much appreciated.
May 8th, 2008
A new must-read for math/science teachers
I stumbled across an extraordinary children’s book at our local library (for a town of 600, we somehow manage to have a great library). The book, though published in 1995, is still available new on Amazon. Called Math Curse, it was written by John Scieszca, and answers that fundamental question, when will I ever use this stuff?
It may be a children’s book, but I couldn’t help but start explaining the significance of the math teacher’s name in the book to my wife. Unfortunately, she doesn’t share my love of mathematics, but how can you go wrong with a book that includes a teacher named Mrs. Fibonacci? My 5-year old thought the Fibonacci numbers associated with plants and flowers were cool (he’s just getting addition down), so I guess I’ll let the wife go until next week for a little talk about the Golden Ratio.
The book is called Math Curse because Mrs. Fibonacci begins class Monday morning with the words,
You know, you can think of almost everything as a math problem.
Suddenly, the main character is seeing math everywhere in her daily life and adding it (no pun intended) where it might not have been obvious. For the reader, especially a teacher reading it to an elementary or low-level math class, every page includes problems or discussion topics embedded in the story. When the character gets up for school on Tuesday, she
“…[takes] the milk out for her cereal and wonders
- How many quarts in a gallon?
- How many pints in a quart?
- How many inches in a foot?…
The questions go on, but ultimately she decides not to even take out the cereal for fear of calculating how many flakes would enter her bowl.
Math Curse is just plain fun, maybe because I’m a big geek, but also because it actually managed to interest both my 5-year old and my 15-year old who happened to be listening during storytime tonight. It didn’t cut it for my wife, but maybe I can get her interested in the sequel, Science Verse.
May 8th, 2008
Second Life is the latest reason our kids are doomed
I’m kidding of course, but U.S. Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) apparently isn’t. According to the Chicago Tribune,
Kirk sent a letter to the Federal Trade Commission requesting a consumer-alert warning about its dangers….Kirk said he knew of no cases in which children were targeted by sexual predators on Second Life, but he said he considers the virtual world an emerging danger.
Ars Technica provides a nice counterpoint, however:
First up, Kirk is running for reelection in a hotly-contested district, and using technology as a scare tactic to get parents on your side is an easy move. Second, Second Life has age-verification technology in place that meets, and in some cases, exceeds the legal requirements. Third, and perhaps the most importantly, there are far easier ways for predators to find teens in much greater numbers.
I’m inclined to agree. MySpace has roughly 110 million users. Facebook has 60 million. Neither is as tough on age verification and, unlike Second Life, neither provides a teen area off limits to adults. The age limitations can be circumvented, but are relatively robust, as are the algorithms for detecting whether youngsters are using the adult Second Life area.
Do we need to keep our kids safe online? Of course, but chances are, by the time they hit college, they’ll be taking a class or two in a virtual world like Second Life. Perhaps Representative Kirk could take some time and think about funding online safety education or technology integration in schools so that kids learn responsible use of the Internet, rather than targeting a convenient and sexy scapegoat.
May 8th, 2008
Large Hadron Collider will put academic networks to the test
The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will be coming online this summer when its construction is complete outside of Geneva. Run by CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, the collider will be the largest facility of its type, designed to detect new types of subatomic particles, generate previously unseen nuclear phenomena, create black holes, and possibly detect new dimensions.
While this is all very cool, what does it have to do with the Internet? Because of the nature of the physics being explored, terabytes of data must be analyzed to “see” what is happening inside the LHC. These data are being transmitted over Internet2 and DANTE, the second generation US and European high-speed academic networks. The data are stored at several facilities in the US and Europe and then made available in near-real time to other academic institutions such as CalTech and UCSD.
This will, in fact, serve as a major test of the capacity of these networks (largely leased dark fiber) and the networks at the universities. As Dai Davies of the European DANTE network explains to Ars Technica,
The biggest barrier, however, is simply the challenges of getting things to work properly. “This isn’t exactly plug-and-play,” Davies said, noting that, even in cases where high-speed connections are in place, it’s often the case that “you connect it to the computer systems at either end, and it doesn’t work anymore.”
Because LHC data are transmitted via a hybrid of dedicated research lines and regular packet-switched lines, considerable human intervention is required to manage the flow of data. As CERN data begin pouring over the network and other academicians begin to leverage the serious capacity afforded by DANTE and Internet2, the focus will turn towards automating much of the process, ultimately allowing these technologies to trickle down to businesses and consumers.
May 6th, 2008
Expensive certification requirements hurt recruiting
Not everyone is cut out to be a teacher. It’s a demanding job, summers off or not, and it helps to like kids. However, there are many instances when students can really benefit from teachers who have worked in private industry. This isn’t the old adage, those who can do, those who can’t teach. Rather, many people (like me) decide for a variety of reasons to begin teaching after working outside of education.
Programmers, scientists, researchers, mathematicians, business owners, entrepreneurs, project managers, and countless other professionals can bring remarkable amounts of education and experience to the table if they begin teaching. Yet certification requirements in many states dictate post-graduate study in education, regardless of experience or expertise.
I’m a couple months from completing my masters degree in math, worked as a statistical programmer for several years at a university and in private industry, and also really happen to enjoy teaching. I’ve also been teaching at the high school level for 5 years. Yet the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, in its infinite wisdom, requires that I now complete several thousand dollars of additional coursework just to move from a preliminary to an initial license (never mind the professional license to which my masters program would entitle me).
Unfortunately, licensure requirements such as these ignore experience and education and serve as barriers, keeping talented individuals from teaching our kids. Even more unfortunate is that these barriers disproportionately affect math, science, computing, and business, all of which have been identified as areas of weakness in this country.
International readers, as well as readers from states with more progressive requirements, how do your countries/states/regions/provinces/whatever recruit talented teachers who may not have formal backgrounds in education?
May 6th, 2008
Everyone loves the Eee
I spent the day at a conference sponsored by our SIS developer. The food was excellent, which is always a solid barometer for conference success and I learned that I’ve forgotten too much java (X2’s Aspen SIS largely uses java to interact with the relational database that sits on its back end) and really need to get back into programming this summer.
What’s more interesting, however, was the participants’ reactions to an Asus Eee PC that one of the other attendees brought with her. It was one of their 4GB matte black models with the 7″ screen and was running Linux. From the moment she broke it out to check her email during the morning’s keynote address to the time we wrapped up in the afternoon, it was being passed from person to person, as they all used it to check their own emails, view presentations, and access their student data.
It wasn’t as if we didn’t all have laptops. Read the rest of this entry »
May 6th, 2008
ePals provides safe student collaboration tools
Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak with Ed Fish, CEO of ePals Corporation. I first heard about ePals through Intel, who recently announced that they would provide hooks to ePals’ services on their Classmate PCs. While it’s easy to describe ePals as “the world’s largest social network for learning,” an anecdote that Mr. Fish recounted gives a much better feel for just what this company does. I’m paraphrasing here, but I think you’ll get the point:
Recently, a classroom of Chinese-speaking students learning Spanish posted a “want-ad” on ePals (part of their classroom matching service). A classroom of Spanish-speaking students who were learning Chinese responded and now the two classes are corresponding regularly to practice Spanish and Chinese together
May 6th, 2008
The “ubiquitous computer” changing the ed tech landscape
The Christian Science Monitor is featuring a piece on netbooks and the drastically decreased cost of bringing computing to students (and adults) in both mature and developing markets. According to Michael Gartenberg, vice president and research director at Jupiter Research,
They represent the idea of the “ubiquitous computer – the computer that you can have with you at all times,” he says. These micro-PCs are more likely to eat into laptop sales than threaten even-smaller hand-held devices, phones with extra features such as Web-browsing, Mr. Gartenberg says.
The market, arguably created by the One Laptop Per Child organization, was originally directed towards students. Now, as the article points out, the value of these netbooks is apparent in the classroom, but also in the ability to fit a minilaptop in a purse or to provide households with second or third computers.
Nicholas Negroponte, founder of OLPC, has been under fire recently from many fronts. However,
OLPC is a humanitarian effort, not a business, Negroponte says. He likens the OLPC to the World Food Program, which does not try to compete with McDonald’s. “I don’t want to compete with anyone,” he says.
Too late, Nick. Intel, Asus, and HP all have competitors on the market with many more to follow. As Paul Otellini noted recently,
“I really think the unknown dynamic is what happens when these $200 to $300 netbooks are unleashed in India and China and Indonesia…And we don’t [know]. There is no model for that at this point in time because you are dealing with something that’s never existed before.”
Clearly, however, this market is growing rapidly. So rapidly, in fact, that Intel is ramping up production of its Atom processors to avoid shortfalls when companies begin shipping Atom-based netbooks and MIDs in the coming months.
Interestingly, the article concludes with a discussion of thin clients and the role they play in creating a ubiquitous computing model, especially in schools. These so-called dumb terminals have a lot of value to educational institutions, many of which are looking for energy-efficient, cost-effective ways to bring computing to as many students as possible.
Christopher Dawson is a teacher and IT administrator for Athol, MA High School. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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