GHOST
My hour is almost come,
When I to sulphurous and tormenting flames
Must… hang on, what is that?
HAMLET
A camcorder.
GHOST
Film me not, but lend thy serious hearing
To what I shall unfold.
HAMLET
Dude; I have to vlog this.
GHOST
Rather vlog of revenge, when thou shalt hear.
HAMLET
What?
GHOST
I am thy father’s spirit,
Doom’d for a certain term to walk the night,
And for the day confined to fast in fires,
Till the foul crimes done in- PUT THAT DAMN THING DOWN!
HAMLET
No way! I got this Flip so I could show
The world all the events that I might see
And a ghost might get me linked off Boing Boing! (more…)
I don’t really have time to blog this, but I had to post it anyway. Jim Cramer is the whipping boy, but really this is a message meant for CNBC. I would add that the same shout out should go to our financial regulators. Be warned that Jon Stewart drops a couple F-bombs in the clip, but just like the ones used by the US military, these babies are laser guided and hit their targets with amazing precision. (more…)
I just saw Torrent Droid, the Android app that allows you to scan a barcode from your Android phone and initiate a bit torrent download on your computer at home. It’s not currently available anywhere, but that doesn’t stop it from being the coolest Android app ever. Of course, this should not be used for downloading proprietary stuff… just all the free stuff that has barcodes. Seriously, though, I see a totally new delivery vehicle for (even legitimate) digital products. Forget the bit torrent part for a sec. You scan a movie, an album, or a software package in a store, and the product makes it home before you do. What if it gave you a 25-50% discount over the lowest store price? I would probably do it just to bypass all the useless packaging. (This could be done with 2D barcodes on billboards as well.) Of course, some of you are probably thinking, ‘What’s wrong with a 100% discount?’ We won’t go there…
This is another one of those comments that turned into it’s own blog post. The gist of the article on themacsucks.com is that macs are overpriced and education dollars could be better spent on other solutions. It got me thinking about an age-old debate: Which computer is best for education? Here is my response:
First of all, congratulations on a very clever way to set up your blog. Hitting the mac love/hate nerve should help your pagerank as thousands of mac fanboys go one the defensive and still others take the opposite side. I won’t take either side, but as a former High School Computer Science teacher I have to offer my 2 cents…
Focusing on ratios such as kids/computer and dollars/computer ignores the more central issue: What do you want to do with the computers? Simply creating more “computer time” does not improve learning. Throwing more computer hardware at teachers and kids doesn’t improve learning either. We found this out the hard way in California. It’s amazing to me how little thought goes into spending 100’s of millions of dollars on technology.
There is also setup and maintenance to consider. This is rarely ever included in the cost of new systems. Installing and maintaining software is often left to the classroom teacher, which is a major reason why so many school computers end up sitting idle, collecting dust. I am a former Computer Science teacher in Southern California, I designed my own computer lab, set up and managed my own software, etc, etc. I chose to buy Dells, but I also spent hundreds of hours of my own time setting up and imaging computer after computer. If I had to do it again, I would probably go with a solution better suited to a classroom environment. Something like Edubuntu running on a thin client system would be a great way to cut down on maintenance issues and dramatically lower costs. All you need is a single thin client server and a bunch of thin clients with screens, keyboards, and mice. And by the way, thin clients don’t need to be upgraded every few years like stand-alone computers. Their life-cycle is more like 10-15 years.
Let’s face it, for most of what we do these days, all you need is a browser, a PDF viewer, and OpenOffice. But I wouldn’t rule out buying macs for something like video editing, even if it means buying fewer machines. It really depends on what you are trying to help people learn. If Edubuntu can’t do it, then I have to go elsewhere until it can. I only wish we could take some of the money we plan to spend on school technology and put it towards projects like Edubuntu. Then we’d get a decent video editor and much, much more! And while I am wishing, I wish my school district had listened to Kevin Haugh. He advocated for thin clients back in 2001 and no one listened.
I decided to track myself for a couple hours to see if I can connect the various activities I do in an average day. Here goes…
My initial plan was to review some proposals within the Teacher Education Group for the 2009 AECT conference. For anyone who is going into academia, I highly recommend signing up to review proposals. A good way to understand what reviewers are looking for is to be one. As I login to the AECT site I realize that they have a jobs section. My MIT job ends in 4 months, so I decide to take a quick detour and post my resume. But rather than allowing me to post my newly polished resume as a PDF, the AECT site asks me for all the same information, piece by piece, in little forms. So I do some quick copying and pasting. Except it asks me to fill in the number of employees at each company I’ve worked for. Grr… How many employees are at MIT? Google search. How many employees at Utah State University? Google search. How about Redlands Unified School District? Another Google search. And at the end (step 5 of 6) it asks me for a goal statement. GRRR… I don’t have time for this. No one is ever going to look for my resume on AECT.org anyway… Wait! I did on of those when I filled out my LinkedIn profile. Copy… paste… done. After about 30 minutes I go back to reading proposal #1. Just then, my boss at Notre Dame instant messages me with a question about a session for an upcoming conference. But someone else messages her and, poof, she’s gone. Then I get another IM from someone. Then my wife calls me back. Another 30 minutes later I’m back to reviewing proposal #1. It is unclear and poorly written, and I think I did the AECT attendees a favor by rejecting it. As I start on the second proposal, I see a tweet from Doug Holton to Andy Carvin on Apple in education. I’m curious to see that two seemingly unrelated twits I follow on Twitter know eachother, so I click the link. The site is call themacsucks.com, and makes the claim that macs are too expensive for tight education budgets. I agree, but it’s an oversimplification, so I take the bait and add a quick comment. Then I realize that for all it’s posts, themacsucks.com has a pagerank of zero. So I am basically commenting to myself and one other guy who admits he is not an educator. It’s been an hour and a half, and once again I’m reading AECT proposal #2.
Some would say that I am easily distracted. I prefer to call it “flexible.” This is what most days are like as I work on my PhD, my job, and everything in between.
