Monthly Archives: February 2011

Feb 20 2011

OTR Links for 02/20/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Feb 19 2011

How Many Ways?

How many ways can you say "Great Blog"?  The spammers tried to do it overnight.  Here are a few caps from what I just had marked as spam and awaiting approval.

Sigh.  Think I’ll go for a walk…  Thank you Akismet.

Imagine the discussion if those 47k+ spam comments had been real comments!

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Feb 19 2011

Quite a Day

Nothing educational today but just a sharing of my trip home from New York.

It was a challenging day.  Usually when people talk about these things, it includes bad experiences with the TSA but they may well have been the best part of the day.

I knew that it was going to be an interesting day when I was sitting in the lobby of the On the Ave Hotel and my travelling partner didn’t recognize me.  I had elected not to buy another day of Internet access in my room so was using the free lobby internet to do my #FollowFriday updates.  Once I convinced her that it was indeed me, we headed out to grab a cab.

Now, Betsy had no problem as she got in on the street side.  I, on the other hand, elected to get in on the other side.  I estimated that it would just take two steps in the snow bank to get to the door.  What I didn’t estimated was that, with all the warm weather, the snow had melted and had become ice.  It’s the stuff that we’ve always called “super snow”.  Except that super snow is usually white.  This was more black than white.  I didn’t realize this until we’d taken off and I could see that my hand was entirely black from the crud.  I think I’ll call it “snirt” – sort of a cross between snow and dirt.

Thankfully, Betsy had some tissues in her bag and I managed to wipe off the outer layer but even in the low light, I could see that it was still filthy.  As I held up my arm, it was all the way up my new jacket to the shoulder.  Come to think of it, my legs felt wet and it ran all the way down as well.  What a mess!

But, that didn’t enjoy viewing the sights – Broadway, Central Park, Triborough/Robert F. Kennedy Bridge – on the way.  Then, it was LaGuardia.  It’s a big airport but flying Spirit Air, you just see a portion of it.  Those of us who fly from Detroit Metro are really spoiled with McNamara and North Terminals.  Bright, shiny, open are all words that wouldn’t describe Terminal B.  It’s an older terminal and your first stop is to check luggage.  Unlike Detroit, once you’re tagged, you have to carry it to the screening area and then it’s left to the miracles of baggage delivery.  Next on to screening.  It’s the part of flying that’s always a crapshoot.  Sometimes, you can fly through and over times it can take forever.

The entry to the screening is actually out in what seems to be the main concourse. And, the lines were long.  At the end when I joined, it just appeared to be a mass of humanity.  When you get closer, it was actually four lines and three of them were moving nicely.  The fourth involved a family of children with a great deal of questions.  I was quite impressed.  Once the boarding passes were checked, it was on to the screening area.  Physically very small and with snaking lines, this could be a challenge too.  What line to take?  I elected the outside.  We actually started moving along pretty quickly.

Until the jerk.

I figured that I would be in line for some extra questioning with my muddy hands, coat, and now I found pants.  But, I couldn’t believe this.  It’s the goal of the TSA to make sure that folks are flying without items that don’t pose safety hazards.  I get it.  Why doesn’t everyone?  Why do you make an issue and argue with people just doing their job?  This just isn’t the time or place to do it.  Meanwhile, back in the pack, I’m chatting with a TSA agent about baseball.  I’m wearing my Tigers’ hat and he’s a Yankees’ fan.  I figure that I’ll likely be strip searched as payback.  Fortunately, he’s disenchanted with the Yankees and considering switching to the Red Sox.  We wondered about the wisdom of that, living in New York!

Eventually, I’m through, have some breakfast and get on the plane and we’re headed to Detroit – sort of.  We push back a couple of minutes early and the pilot points out that we’re 15th in line for takeoff should you care to look to the right to see the lineup!  As we’re sitting there, it seems to get worse as other planes do some line cutting.  I wouldn’t have guessed that possible in an airplane!  But, we start moving along.  Now’s the time to talk about the seating arrangements in Spirit.  They’re a discount airline and one of the ways that they handle costs is in the seating.  Normally, I’m a Delta flyer and both have Airbus 319s flying to New York.  What difference could it makes?

Well, the size of the plane is the same, but the number of seats isn’t!  Use SeatGuru to compare the number of rows of seats at Delta versus Spirit. Ah, but I’m saving CSTA money on the ticket.  In a short flight, who needs leg room?  So, we’re sitting there in our uncomfortable seats counting the planes taking off in the other direction, flight attendents going nuts because people are getting up to use the washroom, and when the count is 13, we turn away from the lineup.  The pilot comes on to let us know that there is a maintenance issue that needs to be addressed and he hoped that the tower would let us jump the line to get back to the top.  After a few minutes, the issue seems to be resolved and we turn back to the lineup and there’s only three planes in line!  I think that the schedulers need to sign up for Michelle Hutton’s scheduling session at the CSIT Symposium.

Eventually we’re airborne and headed west.  Maybe things will fall into place now.  I’m listening to iTunes and playing Mah Jongg (in landscape mode because of leg room) when I notice the flight attendent pull a board across the aisle up front.  That seems weird but then I find out why.  One of the pilots needs to use the rest room.  When he’s done, I see him with a cell phone I guess calling the other pilot because the door opens and they exchange places.  I keep wondering if they need two people forward.  But, I catch a glimpse of another flight attendent in the cabin so there were two physical bodies.  Regardless, there was a sense of relief when both pilots went back and the board released.

Now, we’re in for the rest of the trip.  What else could happen?

Well, there was the wind!  Now, I know why the pilots had to hit the washroom!  At an amusement part, you’d have to spend big bucks to get the ride that we experienced.  I swear that one time as we weaved back and forth in decent that we could have gone through one of those gates that you see in Red Bull racing.  Wow.  Kudos to the pilot(s) for eventually getting us to the ground.  Even later on in the day, as I looked skyward, you could see planes flying into Metro very low so you could tell that it took some special skill to get us there.  I think that we landed half way to Ann Arbor though as taxiing back to the terminal took what seemed forever.  But, we were home safe and sound.

I hit the shower as soon as I entered the house to clear off the snirt appropriately and there’s nothing like having the new puppy curl up on your feet to close the day.  What a day.

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Feb 19 2011

OTR 02/19/2011

Posted from Diigo. The rest of my favorite links are here.

Feb 18 2011

#FollowFriday at #OTF21C

Last week, over 200 educators (and one US speaker) descended on the Hilton Hotel by Pearson International Airport to participate in the Ontario Teachers’ Federation sponsored “Teaching and Learning in the 21st Century”.  There have been some great posts from the following Ontario educators about the event that are worth reading to relive what happened if you were there.  If you couldn’t attend, you can relive it vicariously and keep your eyes peeled on your mailbox at school or the OTF/FEO website for the announcement of another event.

There are what I could find and have read.  If you know of another blog that made reference to things, please let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

Those that didn’t blog were liable to be micro-blogging.  Will Richardson introduced the concept using Today’s Meet and folks participated in the discussion there.  You can relive those introductory moments here.

Once the group was introduced to Twitter, the conversation continued over there with the hashtag #otf21c.  It’s great reading and you can definitely see the growth in confidence and abilities as the messages went from “I hope this works” to “I’m researching great resources for blogging in the classroom.”  The conversation was so intriguing that it would be nice to keep it forever.

Peter Skillen, one of the Minds on Media gurus has done this for us.  Using Keepstream, Peter has captured the entire conversation stream.  It can be reviewed here.  There are detractors that indicate that Twitter doesn’t go deeply enough.  The comment is probably correct if you focus on one single message.  It gets deeper when that message inspires a conversation.  It gets even deeper when the ensuing messages contain links to resources and other inspirations.  But, the real power comes when you amass the totality of conversations around a single topic/theme/activity or anything where there’s a meeting of the minds.  In the Keepstream, you’ll experience the wit and wisdom of the over 200 people, in a room for three days, focusing on developing skills to bring to their classrooms and professional learning.  Follow the conversation, leapfrog to the referenced resource, and there is so much to take away from this event.

 

The only thing that you’ll miss is the hotel food.

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Feb 17 2011

Moving it to the Mainstream

We had an interesting conversation at supper last evening.  Today is going to be a full day of evaluation of proposals for the CSTA’s Computer Science / Information Technology Symposium to be held this summer.  Look for details here or on the CSTA website when things are finalized.

The committee met for supper and our meeting organizer had made an excellent choice of restaurants.  (although walking by the Chirping Chicken had me drooling to drop in there…)  Over supper, we were talking about the status of Computer Science in secondary schools.  In so many ways, it’s the forgotten discipline.   In fact, our meeting organizer noted that she didn’t even know that subjects like that or Computer Engineering existed when she went to high school.  As sad as that comment is, it is the reality for the majority, I suspect.

Recently, Alfred Thompson (@alfredtwo on Twitter, who was sitting at the other end of the table) posted his thoughts about Computing Education and Education Reform.  I thought that he summed his thoughts nicely at the end of the post.

We can use computer science to teach math better. We can use computer science to teach problems solving better. We can use the context of computer science to talk about and teach ethical behavior. There are computer science concepts that are intrinsic parts of social networking so we can better prepare students to live in a connected (networked) world. Rather than being absent from the education reform discussion computer science should be an integral part of the discussion.

He was making reference to the position of Social Networking in education.  Alfred talks of the value but also asks where is the respect for true Computer Science?

It is the reality that Computer Science, if it’s even offered at a school, remains an elective duking it out on student option sheets with other subject areas.  In an educational reality where testing is king, emphasis is on increasing literacy scores.  While nobody is about to deny the importance of this, we should be turning an eye towards all subject areas.  Thinking about mathematics and science is equally as important.  As Alfred notes, a good Computer Science teacher can weave the elements of computer science through all subject areas.

We talk about the importance of media literacy in today’s world.  Absolutely, this should be an important element of what composes a student’s education.  However, this literacy needs to go beyond, far beyond, watching a YouTube video and determining whether it’s real or staged.  In a world where so many students are packing their own portable technologies and have access to computer technologies at home, school, on the bus, …, isn’t it equally as important that they understand how these things work?  We teach the analysis of literary forms at all grade levels.  In how many cases, does the deep understanding extend to the concept of “Googling Something”?

In a timely fashion, my quote from The Daily Papert was the following.

“Part of learning is getting information. Somebody stands in front of the classroom and preaches, and information is somehow flowing into people’s heads, or so it is said. But that’s only one part of education. The other part, which Dewey would have emphasized, is about doing things, making things, constructing things. However, in our school systems, as in the popular image of education, the informational side is again dominating.”

Papert, S. (1998) Child Power: Keys to the New Learning of the Digital Century

This speech was delivered at the eleventh Colin Cherry Memorial Lecture on Communication on June 2, 1998, at the Imperial College in London. The introduction is by Professor Bruce Sayers, professor emeritus, Imperial College.

It is only when we start to emphasize the “constructing things” that the true power of technology and, indeed, the true power of the student mind and imagination, is unleashed.  In the area of Computer Science and the understanding of technology, there are no limits to what can be done.  Students are not held back by the lack of chemicals or dated textbooks.  The sky’s the limit and in a great classroom, there is no low hanging fruit.

Now, our students aren’t all going to develop the latest, greatest software package.  But, as I preview the session proposals that we’ll dig into later this morning, I see things like…

  • Robots and robotics
  • Small Basic programming
  • Computational Thinking
  • Java (Whack of Java)
  • Python (Whack of Python)

  • Kudo (Lots of Kudo)

  • Reaching all students with Computer Science
  • Web Design as a communication skill
  • Scratch
  • Cloud Computing
  • Programming for Mobile Devices (all kinds)
  • and so much more

These are only a summary of the sessions that I pre-evaluated before this meeting.  I’m as excited as all get out.  These are the things I want my own kids to know and understand.  Heck, these are the things that I want to know and understand.

There is a buzz, an enjoyment, and indeed a literacy that comes from understanding how to make the technology work for you instead of the other way around.  There is no better way for this to happen than to move Computer Science into the mainstream.

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Feb 17 2011

links for 2011-02-16

By dougpete • Posted in Uncategorized
1
Feb 16 2011

A New “Spin” for Social Media

Fuse Labs has done it again.  Another offering from there has my interest.  One of the handiest things that you can have in a social browser is to have all of your social content easily presented and collated for you.  Spindex does that for you without installing anything.  Just fire up your web browser, configure your Twitter, Facebook and any RSS feeds that you want to monitor and Spindex does the rest.

And a great deal more.

Updates to these services come across as a stream right in your web browser.  Nothing more is needed to download or install.  In many ways, it reminds me of Friend Stream on my phone.  It’s handy on the phone since you don’t have to wander from application to application to pull it all together.

In addition to just the stream though, Spindex also collected the media that has been shared recently from the resources.  I find this very interesting.  Rather than scrolling through the history looking for something, the most recent is sitting there, in the right panel, just waiting for you to do something with it.  It’s a handy collection of photos, links, and stories that the people that you’re following have mentioned.

That takes care of the recent past.  For what’s happening right now, images are embedded right in the middle of the post.  Want to know what’s trending right at the moment?  Spindex has you covered there.

Because it’s a Microsoft project, you just have to know that search will be a key component in all this.  Not only can you search your own information stream (which is always helpful), clicking on a particular tweet seems to somehow pull the key words from the message and returns a collection of related searches in the right panel.  It’s very slick if you want to do some research on a topic right in your social browser.

Finally, how many times do you wish that you could post to both Twitter and Facebook at the same time?  There are configuration options in Facebook that make it happen.  But, because you’ve connected both services to Spindex, you can post to either or both with a simple click like you would with any service.

I find Spindex and interesting “spin” on the concept of social monitoring.  I would encourage you to give it a try and see what you think.  The nice, clean interface may change your thoughts about how to best monitor your accounts.

 

Feb 16 2011

links for 2011-02-15

By dougpete • Posted in Uncategorized
0
Feb 15 2011

Late? Better?

There’s no question that the Apple products took the world by storm with iPod Touch, iPhone, and iPad.  Through my connections, I’ve experienced each.  The technologies certainly change a number of ways that I do things.  When it came time to get my own personal phone, rather than through my employer, I left the Apple product line and went with an HTC Legend.  A couple of things went in to the choice; both products and more were available through Bell but the cost was a major factor plus I had just returned from Mountain View where I’d done some programming on the Android devices.  I haven’t regretted the decision.

Sure, there are more applications for iOS but the ones that I use on a regularly basis are ubiquitous.  With all that’s available, I want to check my email, communicate with others using Twitter, see what’s up with Facebook, or do some internet browsing.  For fun, I’ll use the location abilities to check in at my favourite Tim Horton’s or Dog Park using the Foursquare application.  Simple document editing can be done with an Office application but major construction projects still have me turning to a traditional computer.

This approach was somewhat confirmed in this article from Edudemic.  It’s pretty clear that the direction was entertainment and being connected.  While the focus of this article was on the use of laptop computers, it’s not a large leap to see that it’s happening on the mobile platform as well.  My own observations of my class and observing the masses at shopping malls confirms this.  With all that’s available at shopping malls, I’m constantly amazed as the large crowds that you’ll find at virtually every technology store.  It seems to be the modern version of the arcade, filled with teenagers checking out all of the devices and the applications.  Last Sunday, it was like YouTube Central as I observed the Rogers and Bell stores as my wife was gift shopping.

At the recent OTF event, I sat for a few minutes with a gentleman that I’ve known for years and while I was using my iPad for productivity, he was using his Galaxy Tab for exactly the same purposes.  I did have some envy when he showed off his camera and the speed of the device was very impressive.  He was definitely in the minority amidst all of the other Apple devices but it didn’t bother him – he was able to do what he needed.

I have the same feeling with my phone.  There’s another thing that factors in all of this and that is the interface.  One of the coolest things about the HTC product is the HTC Sense Interface.

Consequently, I stood up and really noticed when I read this article about a new product from HTC.  The HTC Flyer is a tablet device from HTC and has the Sense Interface and some pretty impressive specifications.  It looks like it might just fit the bill for those who wish to enter the tablet world.  The question though is it too late to the party?  There are definitely better specifications than the current iPad but iPad2 looms on the horizon.  Can a vendor succeed with a better product if they’re late to the party?  Or will the newer products force the original to better specifications?

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