The following video, from TED 2007, highlights some very important aspects of the One Laptop Per Child program that tends to get completely missed by competing programs and tech journalists. It used to drive me nuts when John C. Dvorak or Lance Ulanoff (formerly from PC Magazine) would go off on how it’s not a real computer or what the hell are third world kids going to do with a computer. Even some supporters speculated that this could be used by third world farmers to better market their crops, or some such foolishness. Argh!

The OLPC program was born out of findings of Seymour Papert at MIT and early experiments that Negroponte did taking laptops to Cambodia in the 2000s. From Papert the realization was that using computers in education was not about teaching applications to children. It makes no sense for me to teach Word to a six-year-old, justifying it by saying that I’m preparing that student for the future job market. God help us if they are still using the version of Word that that child learned twelve-years earlier. No. Papert laid out in The Children’s Machine that the real benefit of using computers in the classroom was teaching children thinking through teaching them how to computer program (using simple languages like LOGO). The thing that came from the Cambodian experiments, that sounds very Apple-esque, is that you have to have a vision for the whole process and not reduce things to just hitting a price target. What this means is that Negroponte understood that they had to design the thing to work in the intended environments where there was no infra-structure common to the developed countries. One cannot assume that there’s easily available connectivity or power, so the device has be designed to be extremely low powered (less than two Watts), work well in sunlight, use mesh-networking to get online and be rugged. And of course the software needs to be designed for learning. Alas, Microsoft and Intel tried to undercut the OLPC by going low-cost with their Classmate PCs. Negroponte said it best when describing how this isn’t about laptops, technology or emerging markets: “This is a mission or a market.”

So, what happened to my OLPC? It sits on a shelf in my office. I wanted to use it as a kind of netbook and take it with me to coffee shops and Taco Beach so that I could do my writing when I was out and about. Two things killed that dream. The first was that I couldn’t get the thing to connect to most wifi networks. Duh, it was designed for a kind of mesh-networking that I didn’t have in 2008 in Long Beach, California. The second thing was that, even when I did get a connection, it was difficult to run more than one task at once and switching between multiple browsers screens proved to be too tedious. So, I couldn’t do the writing that I wanted to do with additional windows opened to the resources I’m using, just like what I do on my other computers. Of course, the real failure, that I’m just now realizing, is that I should have used it to learn how to program, that’s what it was designed to do and I completely biffed that one. Doh!

The following videos are related to the coming of the newer version of the OLPC recently announced, the OX-3.

Sources:

My previous OLPC-related articles:

• NECC Conference Observation: Negroponte Rocks! by Joe Bustillos, July 6, 2006, http://josephbustillos.com/2006/07/06/necc-conference-observation-negroponte-rocks/ retrieved 2/9/2012.
• Why Tech Journalists Don’t Get Negroponte’s OLPC (AKA The $100 Laptop) by Joe Bustillos, Sept 2007: http://josephbustillos.com/2007/09/14/why-tech-journalists-dont-get-negrapontes-olpc-aka-the-100-laptop/ retrieved 2/9/2012.
• David Pogue Gets The OLPC! by Joe Bustillos, Oct 2007, http://josephbustillos.com/2007/10/08/david-pogue-gets-the-olpc/ retrieved 2/9/2012.
• The XO-1 Arrives, by Joe Bustillos, Jan 2008, http://josephbustillos.com/2008/01/04/the-xo-1-arrives/ retrieved 2/9/2012.
• My Year with the OLPC – NT4PT by Joe Bustillos, Dec 25, 2008, http://josephbustillos.com/2008/12/25/my-year-with-the-olpc-nr4pt/ retrieved 2/9/2012.

Videos/Images:

• image: My OLPC by Joe Bustillos
• youtube video: Nicholas Negroponte: One Laptop per Child, two years on, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y_TKjfgjiQs&feature=player_embedded retrieved 2/9/2012.
• youtube video: OLPC’s Negroponte says XO-3 prototype tablet coming in 2010, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILMzuS2qZfc&feature=related retrieved 2/9/2012.
• youtube video: OLPC Unveils XO 3.0 Tablet at CES 2012, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Oc2Cte1oWE&feature=related retrieved 2/9/2012.
• images: OLPC XO 3.0 tablet: an 8-inch tablet for $100, with Android and Sugar options for the children (update: pictures!), http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/6/2688604/olpc-xo-3-0-tablet-a-8-inch-tablet-with-android-and-sugar-options-for retrieved 2/9/2012.

One thought that lingers came from a heated conversation that I had with one brother-in-law about the anti-SOPA movement. If the conversation is any indication of what the masses feel about what happened with the anti-SOPA movement that the message is getting really mangled out there.

My brother-in-law, a former science-teacher, is a fellow affectionado for all things NPR and one of the few remaining humans that I personally know who still reads the local LA Times in paper form pretty much every single day. So we’re not talking about some Fox “News” unfortunate. Anyway, the gist of his argument was that stealing/piracy is wrong and that the anti-SOPA movement must be the outcry of those websites and individuals who are benefitting from the continuation of this unregulated, mostly lawless Internet. Hmmm. Did I mention that he’s a pretty smart guy? He admitted that he understood that SOPA was a poorly written law, but this was another example of those connected with the Internet trying to get away with what in “normal life” would be understood as theft. And the fact that there was such a huge backlash that reversed what looked like a governmental done-deal must have meant that these Internet players are pretty big. It’s a safe bet that he feels like these Internet people are all an anarchic selfish bunch who are completely self-absorbed with their Twitters and Facebook.

Trying to explain that SOPA/PIPA had the potential of breaking the Internet, downgrading our first amendment rights and throwing the copyright balance of power to the already powerful media companies, didn’t seem to break his resolve that the anti-SOPA people were just trying to get away with theft. I tried to explain that the infinite copyable nature of digital goods changes the business practices. Nope. Theft. I tried to explain that music and musicians can and are being supported because fans understand that if they want more music from their favorite artists, that the only way for that to continue is to support them by attending their performance and buying their music on amazon and iTunes, and that by keeping the prices low it makes piracy impractical. Nope. In his mind the vast majority of music on the Internet is stolen. Okay. I think this goes beyond distrust of the Internet, to feelings that Internet culture is undermining what is good in life, period.

On the way to the restaurant one night I showed him the little blue dot representing where we were on the map on my iPhone. On the way back from the restaurant he asked if I’d ever unplugged for a week before. I’ve had crappy Internet for a week but I’ve never just unplugged. He asked if I would consider unplugging (for a week). Nah, not really. I tried to explain that this is what I do, being plugged in is part of my fun. I tried the pager analogy, that when I worked for the phone company driving all over Orange County I looked at my pager as a means to have some freedom, that I was always about 15-minutes away from being where I needed to be. So the pager freed me from having to be tied to a desk in an office. My brother, however, thought of his pager as the means for others to keep tabs on him, so he was always leaving the little thing at home. Same device, but I saw it as a means of freedom while my brother saw it as a device of control. Yeah, my brother-in-law wasn’t buying it and I felt the distinct impression that he felt sorry for me because I was deluded enough to believe that my life online was real. Wow.

I know that I live and have lived ahead of the technological curve for some time now. The world has changed and continues to change and it’s not just about pretty toys but the real connections that these pretty toys can enable. Friendships, politics, the classroom, entertainment, they’ve all changed because of these pretty little toys, in ways that even their creators could never imagine. I understand that some of us don’t like change and only see the destructive potential of these things. But just like the pager, this change can something that brings out the best in us and doesn’t have to destroy all the things that we love. I have to wonder what the distrust says about the worrier. So, whether this is the end of what we love or an opportunity for something good will depend on the user of the tool(s).

Uploaded by anthodium on Jun 4, 2010

I was cleaning out my VHS tapes and stumbled upon this time capsule: a 1994 infomercial on “high-tech gifts for Father’s Day.” Most segments were hilarious: enormous cellular phone, $400 Sega CD game system, large monochrome laptop, etc. In this segment: “Hot New technology: The Internet/”

Me: Love the Wired plug with their cutting edge offices and all those tube CRTs. “Wired”… Me… I prefer Wire-less.

In typical Apple-style with it’s lightning-focus on delivering the perfect user-experience across three different platforms (desktop/laptops, handhelds and tablets) Jobs proposed the next step in the online evolution. I was there, at a Steve keynote in 2000 when iTools was introduced as an easy way to make websites and send email iCards. Contrast that to today’s announced iCloud services, where we’re not posting websites but making our media seamlessly accessible across multiple devices. Alas, there are still some of us who are just looking for online disk space where we can host our webpages and associated media. Apparently, and not too surprisingly, “we’re” in the minority.

A cursory survey of friends and family pretty much confirms that almost no one really is into creating websites or having an online presence beyond a Facebook account. There are a few, very few, among my geek friends who created slideshow galleries back in the day, mostly of their kids, and there were a few who did blogs back in the LiveJournal days. But as the tools have become more and more powerful, I see virtually no draw amongst my friends and co-workers. A couple years ago I gave pro-flickr accounts to my four siblings. One is being used by my niece to share photos of her first born and another account was taken over by a brother-in-law for his business. The others went unused. None of my immediate co-workers have a personal blog, though they all have personal and professional facebook accounts. A few coworkers use Twitter but I don’t know if any use it personally or just have a “work” account. So, what an online presence means for most is mostly about micro-posting/social networking a la facebook and having this connection available on one’s handheld device(s). And, except for our current dependence on using MobileMe to host student capstone project websites (which could easily be hosted anywhere else), I do not know that anyone would care at all if iDisk or the web-hosting part of MobileMe disappears. Does this, my concern about creating and hosting my own sites and blogs… does this put me ahead of the curve or terribly behind it? I love what Apple has done over the years and plan to continue to explore new ways to use my iPad2, Apple TV, etc., etc. But somehow I do feel like I’m getting lapped and left behind. Adios, mm, we hardly knew ye.

Addendum:

The same day I wrote this post Steven Sande at The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) speculated about the transition from MobileMe to iCloud, with the delightful subtitle: “So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.” Sande listed the following four speculations about what this transition will mean:

• Speculation #1: Web-based versions of Mail, Contacts, and Calendar will be de-emphasized
• Speculation #2: iDisk disappears
• Speculation #3: Gallery is toast
• Speculation #4: So long, iWeb hosting

Though completely based on speculation, Sande seems to agree with my fears that those of us needing web-hosting are going to be EOL’ed. Awesome. I guess I need to look into how/whether one can post iWeb sites using DropBox hosting (next post…). Check out Sande’s article here: http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/07/mobileme-some-speculation-about-the-transition-to-icloud/.

Resources:
CNET News: Steve Jobs introduces iCloud, http://youtu.be/O_C1TZIT-qQ retrieved 6/7/2011
Apple – Introducing iOS 5, http://youtu.be/LLJIef-e-7g retrieved 6/7/2011
MobileMe: Some speculation about the transition to iCloud by Steven Sande, http://www.tuaw.com/2011/06/07/mobileme-some-speculation-about-the-transition-to-icloud/ retrieved 6/9/2011.

This is a vent and a bit of a rant. It’s probably unwise for me to share this, and so I want to offer a blanket apology to anyone who feels that I’m being unfair or that it’s wrong for me to write about this. I guess that’s kind’a what this comes down to: as a writer (and photographer) I’m compelled to share my work with the biggest audience possible. In the pre-Full Sail days, it was the need to share that motivated me to post my musings and photos. But I had little concern about who was watching/reading because the truth was I was probably my own audience of one most of the time. Since then I’ve become aware that I have students, co-workers and the occasional relative visiting. Believe me, that makes me a bit more cautious, but the artist in me still compels me to share.

So, it saddens me when I get the pull-down email from someone who feels that I’m invading their privacy with my work. Okay, it more than saddens me when the email accuses me of being careless or even mean-spirited with my postings. “Really Joe, you should know better!” Here’s what I do know: when I pull out my camera I’m just trying to capture enough of what’s happening so that those who were there can enjoy the memories of a shared experience. I’m not trying to capture embarrassing moments or looking to make anyone look silly. Although, I’m the first to admit that there have been a few whom I’ve consistently caught with food in their mouths (sorry M Haynes). But the point is that I’m just making the effort to capture the moment, not to embarrass anyone.

At the same time I’m fully aware that there is the personal lens by which everyone sees the world such that we’re all drawn to seeing all of our own imperfections whenever we see ourselves in a photo. For example, I see a little kid playing with his toys on the floor possibly thinking about how he’s going to get the stuff behind the kiddie-fence, while someone else sees themselves with their back to the camera and they can only see that it’s not very flattering (to them). I guess I could crop the photo so that the unflattering bits are cut out, but the point of such a photo might be the interplay between the little one on the floor and the one not facing the camera.

So, when I see the photo I see the interplay between a little kid on the floor and the adult and it seems like a reasonable image capturing that moment. If I were in the photo with my back toward the camera would I be uncomfortable? Well, that test doesn’t work because I would see the photo as being about the kid AND me (in this version) and not about my posterior. Now if it were a close-up of the Buddha-belly, I might cringe. But if it told a story about that day and those people or about what happened, I’d find a way to get over myself.

All I wanted to do was to capture these moments and share them. No malice, no agenda, just wanting to share the moment. And it takes a lot of time and effort to post the photos, so it’s all the more irritating when I get the pull-down email. As much as I probably should publish a lot fewer photos (i’m up to over 11,500 pix) this isn’t the same as saying that I post everything. There is some cropping and image enhancement and selection that goes into this. So, yeah, I feel like no good deed goes unpunished when someone tells me that they don’t want all those photos posted. I’m mean, why bother taking the pictures in the first place if no one is ever going to see them?

There must be something to wanting to share our photos in that many of us exchanged DVDs and CDs with photos from over the years this past Christmas. “But Joe, why would you want to share your photos on the open Internet, I mean, really!” I’ve chosen to post my photos to Flickr because I’ve learned over the years that any barrier to entry, anything that requires passwords or signing up for this service or that service, is enough to make it too difficult for anyone to find the photos, thus defeating the purpose of sharing. Period. I’ve decided that I’m going to make it as simple as possible for the photos to be found and enjoyed. As for the danger of posting things on the “open Internet,” except for those in the photos or close friends, no one cares. Remember, I’m just capturing little moments that only matter to us. The paranoia that posting photos on the Internet might lead to a life of misery or visit from the agency with the black helicopters is just plain silly. Believe me, I know, it’s part of my job to know about this Internet stuff.

Alas, among most of my relations I know that I’m the odd one who has consistently chosen to live my life on the open Internet. It’s frustrating to know that my siblings have the most amazing collection of photos and except for this one time, last Christmas, almost no one has access to any of it. I have tried to be a cheerleader and in the past gave Pro-accounts to flickr.com to the siblings only to have them expire with only two of the sibs taking advantage of the accounts. Sad. All the hours I put into this… funny thing, a co-worker was looking for work-related photos for a project she was working on and ended up spending probably too much time wandering through the family-related stuff and later complimented me, well, us because she thought we seemed to be a very fun group, based on the photos she saw. She seemed to get the point of all of these photos. Yeah, beware of Joe and his camera, he’s nefariously capturing images of us and stealing our privacy by posting the images on the web. Or maybe he’s just making it possible for us to enjoy our brief moments together long after the moments have past.

Sources:

• All images by joe bustillos, http://www.flickr.com/photos/joebustillos/sets/72157625956141627/with/5455875395/

Next surprise I encountered during my maiden voyage to iPad-land was that when I pulled up my blog on the iPad all of the videos worked. Cool. Then when I went to my course blog none of the videos worked. Not cool. So YouTube works but Viddler doesn’t? A few weeks ago I checked out the HTML5 beta on YouTube but I don’t think that changed anything. I’m guessing that YouTube has the horsepower to detect that you are browsing on an iPad and transcode the feed so that it streams video that’s playable on the iPad (and iPhone). Viddler on the iPad I didn’t even get the broken media lego block. Fail. I might have to move my course videos back to YouTube. Ack. I was checking out Blip.tv because their pro-account offers an encoding option that’s iPhone-friendly. More research on this is is going to be needed. Archive.org?

Next item I checked out was Google Docs. Apple and iPad-hater, Molly Wood, complained that Google docs doesn’t work on the iPad . Anticipating needing to have access to my data on multiple macs and the future iPad I’d moved whatever I could to Google Docs months ago and anywhere I had Internet I could access student work on their blogs and record their grade on my google docs spreadsheet. I never had to wonder which device had the most current version of my spreadsheet, for example. So, when I pulled up Google Docs on the iPad, I noticed that there was a mobile/desktop option at the bottom, so I selected desktop and pulled up a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet was editable, but it treated each cell like a “saveable” zone, so that you needed to save each cell edit individually (and there wasn’t any “File menu > save and close” option that is in the normal computer version). So that worked, albeit, in a clunky fashion. Text documents, however, didn’t appear to be editable. Damn. This is a problem. I’m not sure if that’s a safari thing or an Apple thing or a Google thing. Damn. Why would they disable text editing? BTW, it’s the same using Google Docs on the iPhone. Ack. May have to switch to using something like Evernote (assuming that note editing is permitted there). Plan B time.

On a recent MacBreak Weekly, John Gruber nailed it, saying that Apple needs to give more thought to workflow when it comes to working with documents that you want to work on without having to move the document/data from device to device. I have MobileMe’s iDisk, a Pogoplug connected to the 1.5TB drive and Google Docs and I always use Google Docs as much as possible. I use Google Docs because I’m not downloading or uploading anything, but working on the data directly from the cloud as if it were local, and it’s accessible from any Internet connected device. Many moons ago I tried using iDisk but just copying files back and forth was buggy and slow to the point where I’ve never copied/backed up my work folders to the iDisk. I also tried to use data stored on a Pogoplug like it was a local device, but then the performance of my brand new 27″ iMac slowed down to a crawl because any system call meant to browse the connected drives would include the pogoplug drive and I started getting the spinning-beach-ball-of-death, so that didn’t seem like much of a solution. I wouldn’t really mind copying the data off Internet-connected storage if there was an intelligent way to make sure that i was working with the most recent version, but I haven’t found a mac utility that really does document synchronization, comparing two directories and making sure that both directories have the most recent version of all files in the directory (that seemed to a very basic function when I was working in Windows/DOS). Anyway, having usable storage in the cloud would work. According to Gruber, the iPad versions of Pages, Keynote and Numbers use iTunes to copy documents back and forth from the home computer to the iPad, giving us a 2010 version of sneaker-net where copies are being made all over the place instead of having one copy in the cloud that all devices and editors can access and edit (a la Google Docs). I guess that must point out the difference of coming at this problem from the approach of a network-focused engineer versus someone just focused on having some access to their pretty document. Ugh. Much more study required on this item.

Speaking of Fan Boys, here’s iPad Saturday iJustine-style (I like it when her male friend says after much random dancing in line, “you can stop now”):

The segment featured a shorter version of the video and a little Q&A between Winfrey, Gabriel, Bergh and the students, and ended with Oprah announcing that Target Stores had been enlisted to help upgrade Ocoee’s library. Below is the original video and beneath that several stills of the 1,285 that I shot during the video shoot.

Hard to imagine that an idea shared last Fall in a downtown Orlando restaurant has resulted in an inspirational video that’ll be a life-long memory for the 1,700 students who participated and now has become part of the national conversation on the importance of reading.

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

image by joe bustillos

sources:
all images by Joe Bustillos.

Here’s a bonus outtake of Dr. Siegel wanting to join in as we were setting up the interview:

Post-Mortem: Educatium only lasted another two episodes which you can find here:

Sources:

Nick Briscoe’s YouTube Videos

Boxee Beta from boxee on Vimeo.

One of the things that I’ve learned so far is that even though I’m using fast wireless “N” and or a fast “power” Ethernet connection between the first and second floors, ripped DVDs stored on hard drives in their original Mpeg2 format won’t play across the network without lots of buffering or dropped frames. Unacceptable. I was anticipating using my PS3 as the movie/media player downstairs (still working on that), so I had previous converted some movies to mp4 and those videos seemed to play nicely across the network. So, even though I’m a firm believer in having access to all of the “extra features” that I look for with my DVDs (and how convenient they are to access using the DVD menu system), I’ll need to rip and convert my media to a more network friendly format, like mp4 (which makes each extra feature into it’s own separate video file). Grrr.

image by Joe Bustillos

I have a huge DVD and music collection and get most of my more daily news and entertainment via video and audio podcasts, so I need some kind of box attached to my TVs so that I can get my Internet/network media. I was hoping to use my PS3 as the player in my living room, but it has a crappy web-browser and doesn’t do RSS, so it can’t natively do podcasts. More work needed here. At the moment my mac mini is doing living room media duties. I love the Front Row interface, but it seems a bit confused that my episodes of StarTrek (classic and Next Gen) are not movies and won’t let me organize things. So maybe the updated Boxee interface will do the job.

I’ve played with Boxee previously, but couldn’t break away from my iTunes addiction. With the software upgrade and set-top box, I’m thinking that this might be the solution to my Internet TV/podcast thing, either the software or the set-top box. Depending on my success using the PS3 as a media player, I still might need another set-top box for the bedroom TV. I’m also thinking that I need to plug into the NetFlix thing (streaming and disc) so that I don’t find myself buying every movie I want to see. So whatever box I get needs to do Netflix, access my music and DVDs across the network and either grab podcasts off the net or the ones stored on my other computers. Having invested in the PS3, I’m aware of the problems of getting a box that isn’t as expandable to handle all of the twists and turns that tends to happen in the media market.

Sources:
* Boxee Demo. http://www.boxee.tv/box retrieved on 1/23/2010
* FrontRow image by Joe Bustillos
* Tekzilla » Episode 124: “Should I buy a Boxee Box or a Roku or Stick With My xbox?” http://revision3.com/tekzilla/veronicapc/should-i-buy-a-boxee-box-or-a-roku-or-stick-with-my-xbox-360- retrieved on 1/23/2010
* Tekzilla » Episode 121: Boxee Box. http://revision3.com/tekzilla/2010newyear/boxee-box retrieved on 1/23/2010

I’ve been watching Leo since the early ZD-TV days. It feels like it was early Internet, but it really wasn’t. Here was a guy and a show that was part of this tech world that I was a part of, that no one else understood. So for their last podcast for 2009, TWiT 228, they got a bit nostalgic (and funny). Good times. This was not the case several weeks ago when Leo and John C. Dvorak made fun of the NASA Tweet-up and totally forgot about what Twitter really means. Basically they took the low road and made jokes about what the hell are you going to say in 140 characters except, “I just peed in my diaper.” Twitter isn’t about the 140 characters or what one has for lunch. It’s about the community and connections that happen over time. So, sometime Leo gets it, and other times he goes for the cheap shot. Surprise, he’s human.

It is a bit strange to feel a connection with an Internet personality (who was a Cable-TV personality from a small network before that) and then discover that there’s a whole community of weirdos like me who work in tech. Following is a short documentary featuring Leo talking about the moment we’re at right now where it’s possible for a small media company can compete with giant corporations and get their message out without all the filters imposed in the past. It’s about the individual and the community and the message. It’s not about 140-characters.

Bonus video: Here’s a video circa 1996 during which Leo Laporte predicts the future. Given next week’s Apple announcement, Leo’s talk about the power of the Newton in 1996 might be all the more interesting:

Sources:
* YouTube video: TWiT 228: The TWiT Of The Decade posted by TWiT. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gaq_FoA8jmo retrieved on 1/19/2010
* The Spark Series, Part 3: OPEN by Michael Sean Wright and Marc Ostrick. http://www.eguiders.com/exclusive/the-spark-series-part-3-open retrieved on 1/19/2010
* Of Mouse and Man. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzIV8BxlaQs retrieved on 1/19/2010

Moodle is not a verb, or is it?

I’ve been hearing about Moodle at ed/tech conferences for longer than I can remember. In the early years it seemed to be an “under the radar” project bringing together the open source tech community and educators. More recently, with district administrators making decisions to roll-out Moodle, the concept seems to have shifted from a roll-your-own thing to something imposed upon teachers with little training, assistance or attempts to generate buy-in. In either case the platform has appeared to be largely text-driven and visually challenging. Wikipedia has an excellent overview of Moodle at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moodle.

The following video is intended to help those unfamiliar with Moodle’s module-mentality (and also for big fans of Legos!):

This next video is a good overview of the Moodle interface that includes a few commons tasks teachers might do:

For those curious for more in-depth training I located a course available through Lynda.com at
http://www.lynda.com/home/DisplayCourseN.aspx?lpk2=47547

Other tutorials are available at: http://moodle-tutorials.blogspot.com/search/label/Moodle%20Video%20Tutorials and
http://docs.moodle.org/en/Teacher_documentation.

One of the most important thing to remember about learning platforms, whether we have a say in their roll-out or not, is that it’s an opportunity to enlarge your reach with your students and that it’s your input that changes these things from being just tools to becoming learning opportunities.

Please review these videos and info and come to our Wimba session ready to talk about Moodle.

Sources:

* moodle logo. http://docs.moodle.org/en/License retrieved on 12/13/2009

* youtube video/image: Moodle explained with LEGO short version posted by moodlefan. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_XPZl6LLvik retrieved on 12/13/2009

* Youtube video: What’s Moodle? posted by jenericjarvis. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jY9KcHwIWI&feature=related retrieved on 12/13/2009

Digication Revisited

In between large-scale enterprise level learning management systems imposed upon educators and roll-your-own systems like moodle are many smaller online options such as Digication (http://digication.com/). I heard about Digication from an interview of one of the founders, Jeffrey Yan, on Leo Laporte’s “Inside the Net“ podcast. Digication’s founders recognized the need for something more than just another place to post content, something that would cater to educators’ special needs that aren’t being addressed by overly-generalized web-portals, and at the same time be as simple to manage as an email account. Following is a Behind-the-Scenes tour of Digication and the “Inside the Net” interview of Digication founder, Jeffrey Yan (NOTE: the interview is a bit long…). Please review these items before our wimba session.

Inside the Net 35: Digication (http://www.twit.tv/itn35)

Click here to play episode in separate window: Inside the Net 35: Digication

One of the things that attracted me to Digication was that it had all of the features of a full CMS but didn’t require that I code it myself or try to get the assistance/permission from my district IT. Only limitation for the free account was that there couldn’t be more than 1,000 users at my school. I’ve written about my experiences with Digication a few times on my blog:
* Digication Gets My Vote
* Classroom Website on Digication

* Utudu & You: You should be well into creating your Udutu course/unit. Make sure that you make your way through the Udutu tutorials at http://udutu.com/tutorials.html. Please come to our Wimba session ready to share your progress, frustrations and victories. Remember, you want to have your Udutu course set-up quickly enough so that your fellow students have time to visit and comment on your Udutu course (during week 4). The following examples of Udutu units are offered as an inspiration and encouragement (the first one was created by the President of Udutu!). Enjoy:

All About Web 2.0 and Udutu Genesis by Roger Mundell

Introduction to 20th Century Art by Liz Perry

Introduction to Technology Accessibility by Emily Wray

Sources:

* featured image: Study by hermes. http://www.flickr.com/photos/hermes-/421203877/ retrieved on 12/9/2009

* audio podcast: Inside the Net 35: Digication by Leo Laporte and Megan Morrone with Guest: Jeffrey Yan of Digication. http://www.twit.tv/itn35 retrieved on 12/7/2009

* videos: LMO Moments: Behind the Scenes Tour: Digication by Joe Bustillos – emdt/FSO. http://www.viddler.com/explore/joebeebee/videos/22/ retrieved on 12/7/2009

* Udutu units: All About Web 2.0 and Udutu Genesis by Roger Mundell. http://publish.myudutu.com/published/launch/1612/Course15573/Launch.html?redirect=true retrieved on 12/7/2009

* Udutu units: Introduction to 20th Century Art by Liz Perry. http://publish.myudutu.com/published/launch/12441/Course21598/Launch.html?redirect=true retrieved on 12/7/2009

* Udutu units: Introduction to Technology Accessibility by Emily Wray. http://lms.myudutu.com/LMSGadget/courses/lms/12244/Course21696/881/v2009_8_24_18_23_39/course/Course21696.html?redirect=true retrieved on 12/7/2009

Me and Sparky before the End - photo by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

My proposed consultancy was to help an independent folk artist, Neva, with her website, to take her web-presence to the next level and leverage the tools out there for many many others to discover her music and great onstage presence. Sparky has known me for a long time, going back to getting my masters degree at Pepperdine in 2002, so to him it probably looked like Joe was just doing another web project and not stretching himself all that much. Though he would never say this directly, he was asking me what makes me think that I deserve to be part of their “doctorate club,” what do I bring to the table that might permit me to add “Ed.D” to the end of my name?

Kirk: Captain of the Enterprise, huh?
Picard: That’s right.
Kirk: Close to retirement?
Picard: I’m not planning on it.
Kirk: Well let me tell you something. Don’t! Don’t let them promote you. Don’t let them transfer you. Don’t let them do *anything* that takes you off the bridge of that ship, because while you’re there… you can make a difference. – Star Trek: Generations (1994)

I had a friend who became my friend after he beat me, getting the job that I wanted as technology coordinator for the school district we both worked in. He was the much better choice for the job. I’d go to his office every once in a while and he’d be required in a hundred places at once and after the dust settled, he’d ask what I was working on in my lab. He’d listen carefully and then say how much he missed crawling under tables, connecting CAT-5 cables, setting up servers and making the hardware and software work. I don’t doubt that there were days that he’d easily give up the suit and tie for the cable-ties and dust-bunnies, but he did so much good setting the policies, practices and standards that enabled the school site tech-coordinators to be education- and student-centric, to drive the technology to do what the vendor promised in pursuit of delivering the best educational experience. I was told that he was a pretty damn good teacher in the computer lab. But the circle of his influence reached so many more students when he left the classroom and started enabling teachers and tech-coordinators to do their best. That’s what I wanted for myself when I began the doctorate program five years ago, to take the good that I’d learned with my classroom of students and enable other teachers to give the same opportunities and learning experiences to their students.

When I began the doctorate program I was a computer lab teacher working at a K-5 elementary school, seeing about 600 students per week, working on everything from basic keyboarding, to teaching PowerPoint to first graders, Excel to second graders and HyperStudio to everyone else. Beginning the second year of the doctorate program I took a job teaching print media/technology and math to sixth, seventh and eighth graders at the middle school level. The transition wasn’t particularly smooth and I ended up taking a leave of absence from Pepperdine after the winter term in order to adjust to my new assignment. Before taking the middle school job I had applied for the same tech coordinator job that I’d lost out to my friend, who was being kicked upstairs to an assistant superintendent job. It was another “no,” and I knew that I lacked secondary ed experience, so that was one thing that was in the back of my mind when I took the middle school job. At the end of three years teaching at the middle school level I could say that I was pretty good at what I did but I was still working on a level that wasn’t really reaching much beyond the walls of my classroom. Fortunately, the opportunity presented itself to break free from my former classroom’s walls and teach online at the masters level for Full Sail University.

Stickam screenshot by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

While not as influential on a policy level as a district tech coordinator might be, I was influencing a new group of teachers every month, making a difference in their professional lives, helping them develop new tech and media skills and enabling them to deliver a better educational experience to their students. Thus, working at Full Sail has definitely helped me realize part of the dream to be an influencer on a much bigger level than my previous classroom had afforded to me. And while there are monetary benefits that would come from having the doctorate, the job is not depended on adding three letters to the end of my name.

What still lacks, though, was something that I knew when I set about to get my masters degree. At the time I was teaching video journalism to fifth and sixth graders as part of a Magnet school program that I had helped to develop, but I knew that my position was dependent on the whim and choices made by people further up the chain of command. And sure enough, at the end of the grant I was “encouraged” to find another assignment and ended up at the K-5 computer lab, switching districts. Then four years later it happened again (funding changed and my job was eliminated) and that’s when I switched to the middle school job. The masters degree was supposed to help me keep my tech position and it did help me keep my middle school job because I didn’t have a single-subject credential or a computer science undergraduate degree. But I still was working at a level where if someone up the chain sneezed, I caught the cold. These days there are no teaching jobs with 100% security, but I think what I’m really driving at is working on things that are much more fundamental to teaching and technology than ensuring a cushy teaching position.

The research that I was beginning to work on, before my disenrollment from Pepperdine, was what impact might happen if a public school district were to switch from printed textbooks to e-textbooks delivered on small devices like iTouches and Kindles. I wasn’t thinking in terms of literacy improvement but on bottom-line TCO level and the possible shift away from fixed, one-size-fits-all curriculum to dynamic, interactive, current, classroom-specific curriculum where the expertise of the classroom educator and familiarity with specific class’ strengths and need might be drawn into the process of what e-textbooks are used in the classroom. I was also thinking about the destabilizing factor this shift might have with the powerful textbook lobby as far as reducing their part of the budget which might also reduce their influence on the politicians who determine which curriculum to follow. Then, of course, the governator announced his proposal to go computer-based e-textbooks to save the California millions of dollars. I guess I was on the right track.

So, if I were to continue this research than the whole state of California might become the testbed. The point is that as I was watching the deployment of this technology into the general public over a year and a half ago and I could see how it would benefit educational users in terms of TCO and, more importantly, in terms of shifting towards a much more flexible system for delivering educational content.

Raising my sights from this particular example to the larger picture of my life’s mission, which is what I think Sparky was trying to guide me toward, I have to lock on to the common threads that I have seen since my masters program days:

• The power of online technology to enable deep, long lasting, life changing communities of practice,
• The need to balance measurable learning growth with the fact that education is at it’s heart a human endeavor, and while we humans are forever capable of exceeding anyone’s expectations, we do not do so on anyone’s set schedule or according to anyone’s predetermined quotas,
• After 30-years in the classroom the problems with Technology are not about the need for more teacher training or even better technological tools. The problem is a persistent “school” culture that is still run on the competitive factory manager model where little unformed minds come in one door and little learners walk out the other, having all had the same coat of paint and varnish applied to their outsides.
• The world of technology is changing and moving forward at a pace that the traditional world of education cannot hope to keep up . But we have to find meaningful ways to keep up, which means we might have to abandon fixed mindsets about education and the classroom and teaching that were from a time when a high school graduate could enter the job market and build a lifelong career with one company.

What this means to me is that I see my position at Full Sail as a foundation to enable my graduate students to mine the depths of community, to change their learning environments one student and one classroom at a time, to reflect the best that we can accomplish by efficiently using technology and media in our instruction and interaction with our students, and to learn from every success and every set-back. This also means that I must dig deeper into my own community of learners and be less of a lurker and more of a participant and agent of change. Too long the writer in me has enjoyed the anonymous vantage of the untraceable voice making sarcastic comments from a hidden perch. And it is too tempting to let myself get distracted in my little cubicle by all of the shiny gadgets being introduced on a regular basis and to favorably compare my lack of progress with those around me who have no calling in their lives. It’s time to occupy the Captain’s chair.

It isn’t about getting a doctorate and then “retiring” on some level. Perhaps that’s part of my previous caution, is that I didn’t want to expend so much energy in the pursuit that I wouldn’t have anything left for the post-doctorate part of my life. I don’t know where I got that notion from but it seems pretty stupid as I commit the thought to words on the screen. Anyway, I don’t come from a family with too many doctoral academics. There are plenty of masters graduates among my siblings and cousins (amazing when one considers that a high school diploma was the terminating degree of almost 100% of my parents’ associates who graduated at all). So I don’t come at this with any sense of expectation beyond acknowledging that I have been one lucky kid who worked to keep his options open to pursue his academic musings. I guess it’s time to be the adult and not the lurker, to do more than guide the next generation, but to have part in changing the paths that they will follow.

I think that drive, the intellect and passion behind it are the keys to my entrance into the hall of academics, the mythic doctorate club. I will not check my ID or my iPhone at the door.

Sources:
images: Me and Sparky and 090723 stickam session by Joe Bustillos (cc) 2009

Quote: “Captain of the Enterprise?” from the movie: Star Trek: Generations, story by Rick Berman, Ronald D. Moore and Brannon Braga, http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0111280/quotes retrieved on 7/23/2009

YouTube video: Leading the Nation Into a Digital Textbook Future – Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (Teil 1), posted by http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hPi1hrJxFQ retrieved on 7/23/2009

image by joe bustillos

In the time that I’ve had my one dating experience most relationships have gone through whole life-cycles from discovery to death. Truth be told, the vast majority of my time with e-harmony I haven’t been actively pursuing anything as much as kept the service in my emotional back-pocket as a “Plan B.” I had a lot of fun the first few months when I was convinced that my former relationship was over and loved the possibility of meeting someone who was specially selected for me. Then that former relationship came back… kind’a. Well, it didn’t quite come back as much as it just took an extended period to expire. In the meantime, some of the air was let out of my e-Harmony expectations to the point where I just kept the subscription so that I could feel like there was a possibility of something for me in the future. Then when that former relationship really expired (for real this time!), it took almost all of my ability to trust myself and relationships with it. At that point I kept the e-Harmony account because I wasn’t ready to kill it too. Lately I’ve been thinking that it’s time to change a few things.

Something a match wrote in her profile reminded me of a quote from one of my favorite movies, American Beauty, when the main character, played by Kevin Spacey, is accused of being a bastard, to which he says, “Nope; I’m just an ordinary guy who has nothing left to lose.” In my case, with 1,251 rejections to my name, I’m clearly doing something wrong and I most definitely have nothing to lose. It should also go without saying that I’m counting on my results turning out way better than how things turned out for Lester Burnham, the American Beauty character by Kevin Spacey.

So, I started to think about putting some effort into opening up the social circle using Meet-Up.com to get out and hang out with folks with similar interests. I’ve also been hearing good things about the Plenty of Fish dating site. But none of that is all that different from what I’ve been doing for ages. So, the “got nothing to lose” twist is that I’m thinking that, given how much I post online, I should include a link to my Facebook profile (or this blog) in my e-harmony profile or whatever website I sign up for.

This definitely isn’t a plan that Dr. Warren from e-Harmony would recommend and there is a definite danger of giving away too much information too quickly, which is a bit like insisting on telling one’s whole life story when someone just asks “how ya doin’?” And there’s the risk that being this open makes it more difficult to walk away from an unwanted match if the match is persistent. Of course, once someone that I meet online knows my name all of this information is just a Google-search away anyway. So, what do I gain from this level of exposure? It counteracts the possibility that someone is going to close a match because nothing popped out at them in my initial profile or in my answers to their five questions. If they click the links they’ll get to know the things that are important enough to me for me to write about (assuming that they’d bother with the links… which is a big assumption).

Another thing that I’m thinking about here is that I’ve always seemed to do best in my relationships that were more based on friendship first, where the level of communication is left as open as possible, where there’s no real fear that saying the wrong thing might chase the other person away. This idea does run a risk that has been a running theme of my relationships with females, of always being seen as the buddy and never as the lover. But I’d much rather do the work needed to be the lover with the foundation of a kick-ass friendship than be someone’s lost weekend with nothing to talk about in between (not that I’m having to turn anyone away… [sigh]). I do have to work on a lot of bad habits, beginning with putting almost no effort into meeting or spending time with new people. I love having a lot of control of how I spend my time, but Life is passing me by while I ponder the words of this blog entry. Onward and upward: “I’m just an ordinary guy with nothing to lose.”

Sources:
image: Emotional Cut-Out by Joe Bustillos, © 2009 · Some Rights Reserved ·

video: American Beauty: Trailer, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Q3ltyPJJMQ Retrieved 7/10/2009

image: mouseguy, microsoft clip-art

Last year I’d switched from three separate blogs to a single “magazine” themed blog with multiple categories/embedded blogs (love the Revolution Media-Pro theme by Brian Gardner). But, much like the problems mentioned by Sarah Lane, I found that because I wasn’t writing for all of the categories consistently that there were sections that grew more stale and what I was working on only pointed out the sections that were more neglected (I’m talking about you “sex & the single brain cell”!). So I went back to Gardner’s new theme operation, Studio Press, to upgrade the visual look. At the same time, I started looking at re-organizing certain sections so that what appears on the front page is more flexible to highlight what I’m working on without forcing me to write articles just to keep some sections from looking old. I also need to continue working on making it so that there’s a little different feel for the different sub-blog/category pages. Onward and upward.

Music: C’mon C’mon from the “C’mon C’mon“ CD by Sheryl Crow

Source:
history of my blogging by Hugh MacLeod of gapingvoid.com retrieved on 6/6/2009