Blogg-Ed Indetermination

When the Kindle was first released two years ago, my first reaction was that of a typical geek. I wanted one. But I wasn’t about the plop down $400 for one, so I put it on my Amazon wish list and waited. Two Christmases came and went without a Kindle, and while the price has declined and the feature set of the Kindle has gotten better, I recently decided to drop it from my Amazon list altogether.

The reason for this is that I recently got a my chance to use one for a couple of weeks, borrowing the one from our school library. To my disappointment, the Kindle suffers from many of the same shortcomings I pointed out in my review of the Sony Touch Reader, namely the lack of color and no backlit screen. I’m afraid this is a fundamental shortcoming in all e-readers. We may have to wait until Apple releases its long-rumored netbook-tablet-Kindle-Killer before we see something better.

But the Amazon has it’s own unique foibles as well. The side buttons are, for me, incorrectly laid out. The bottom right button is next page, the bottom left button is also next page. Hmm. Previous page makes more sense to me. But no, previous page is above the next page button on the left side of the screen, opposite the Home button on the right side of the screen.

While I am sure that I would quickly adapt to this idiosyncratic layout, it just seems to me that it’s not just unfamiliar, it’s unintuitive.

You evoke most of the commands and move the cursor around the screen with a small joystick aside the keyboard. I found the feel of the joystick to a bit sharp; I’d prefer rounded edges.

Hi marks go to the Kindle for it’s long battery life. I’m 90% done with my book and the Kindle is still well charged. This is much better than the better life I experience with the previously mentioned Sony Touch. The screen refresh rate is also better than the Sony, and I like the fact that I can get the definition of any word by quickly navigating to it with the cursor. But the Sony’s touch screen is a big advantage for highlighting text.

Finally, even if the Kindle addressed all of my technical and human factors concerns, I’m still troubled by their content policies. You have to convert PDFs to work, and I want an e-reader to read any e-text I have purchased without any DRM issues getting in the way. So if I but a book from the Sony store, Barnes and Nobel, Borders, or my favorite independent bookstore, Kepler’s, I want to be able to read it any any electronic device of my choice. I don’t think this is asking too much. And, if I want to lend a copy of my purchased book to a friend, I should be able to do so. I’m willing to give up my copy of it on my local device—just as I would in the analog world give my friend a paper copy of a book. But as it is an electronic copy, and as my friends sometimes forget to return my books, I should also be able to electronically retrieve my copy from my friend and erase their copy. Friendship does have its limits, and authors have their rights.

The surge in the use of social media, the desire for authentic assessment and real-world projects, and the emergence of ubiquitous access to the Internet has brought the subject of how to balance reasonable student access to online resources and their personal security to the forefront of discussions in many classrooms, board rooms, and living rooms.

In the Unites Stated, children under the age of thirteen are prohibited from using most online services by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act. So by law, children 12 and under are not using Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, et al. Hmm.

Facebook Users by Age and Gender. No One Under 13. Yeah, right!

Most school’s Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) read like laundry lists of what students are not supposed to do online. Keeping such policies up-to-date is a nightmare, for it seems every over month some new use of the Internet comes along that the policy doesn’t cover.

The result is is that the AUP gets longer and longer. Students, who tend not to read such policies anyway, continue to use and innovate as new online services become available, and schools wring their hands and issue more rules.

Schools and parents are caught in the middle of all of this, wanting to abide by the law and do what is right for their students and children. It is in the area of determining what is “right” where controversy takes root. For some, what is “right” is black and white, with no shades of gray, no negotiating based on the individual differences between and among children. It’s simply easier to have a one-size fits all set of policies and procedures.

But educators are supposed to take individual differences into account in their teaching, and most do every day. Teachers realize the need to vary instructional approaches based on a multitude of factors, and many do it with such great grace and ease that we may not even notice.

And yet when it comes to school policies, it seems as if many school administrators stop being educators and become, what? Cops? Judges? Executioners?

Clearly most school administrators don’t want to cease to be educators at any point in their role within the school, including the enforcement of school policies. But it is hard to show any flexibility without being accused of favoritism. I understand the allure of “one size fits all” and “zero tolerance” policies. They just don’t make sense.

So it is that we come to the point of this whole post: What should schools do about students and their presence in the online world?

Most schools have media policies determining the circumstances under which a child may be identified by name in publications, including online publications. Identifying a child by name, especially when accompanied by a photo, is generally considered to be verboten unless permission has been granted by the child’s parents or legal guardians. The idea is to prevent strangers from using such information as means to approach the child for purposes of abduction or worse. Who can argue with that?

But has the online world turned this practice into a relic of the past?

Millions of photos, complete with captions, are on Flickr, Picassa, Facebook, and MySpace. While many are available only to the poster’s “friends,” the definition of  friend varies widely among users, and friends of friends may still have access to this information. Once children reach the age of 13 and legally have access to these sites, many of them may post captioned or tagged photos of themselves and their friends, which may or may not be available to the general public.

Added to this are the officially sanctioned photos in events covered by the press, including the arts, athletics, and all forms of public events, academic fairs, and other competitions—all of which end up on media web sites. “Security through obscurity,” at least when it comes to keeping images of oneself private, is becoming increasingly difficult, perhaps even impossible.

My advice to educators is not to throw out all of their policies and guidelines, but to engage in a discussion of their relevance in the face of new technologies and social norms. Don’t despair about there being nothing you can do when, in fact, these changes represent a wonderful opportunity to engage parents and students in deep and meaningful conversation about the changing landscape of privacy and anonymity.

In a previous post, I laid out ten ideas for making Google docs better. Here are ten more. Feel free to contribute to the list!

1. Invitations to meetings in the calendar view are too subtle. I mean really, do you expect me to see that tiny question mark?
2. I like that you add email addresses automatically for me. That’s cool. What would be even cooler, would be to scan the message for additional address-like data (like that in most signature files), open a window in my contacts, and add that data too, allowing me to edit as needed.
3. When you add a new document folder in Google Docs, the list should automatically refresh to reflect the new alphabetical order.
4. There’s no way for end users to see who is in an enterprise-wide email group, so what we do is to maintain a separate Google doc which, of course, needs to be updated every time we make a group address change. We shouldn’t have to do that. Let the administrator determine who has rights to view the members of an email group.
5. In Google Sites, you should offer a report to the site owner about dead links, and automatically fix links to other Google sites within the enterprise if and when they change.
6. While you’re at it in Google Sites, allow the webmaster or users to tag individual pages, to then crate tag clouds.
7. All, and I mean all, of your K-12 Google docs customers would benefit from a better calendar. Start with allowing the administrator to setup a daily schedule for the school that can be toggled on-and-off by users so they can easily schedule events by time of day or by period of day.
8. Any color (labels, calendars, and so on) would benefit by being able to control their transparency. Solid color are not only passé, they hinder multiple calendars within the same view.
9. Google To Do lists are lame. See Remember the Milk for some ideas about getting it better.
10. Appreciate the fact that we can upload PDF documents into Google Docs. Now, make them editable!

What’s on your mind about Google docs?

Among the topics sure to crop up in the listservs I frequent (BAISNET and ISED-L), as well as various Nings, blogs, and wikis is that of calendars. A composite inquiry of all the things people are looking for in a school calendaring system might look something like this:

I suspect we have talked about this before, but we’re looking for a new calendaring program that:

1. will easily schedule resources, meetings, and parent conferences
2. will automatically find open meeting times & reserve needed resources
3. is cross-platform, and web based
4. will automatically adjust to schedule changes as they are made
5. will send meeting changes and to-do list reminders via email, SMS, or Twitter
6. will allow for meeting agenda and other documents to be attached to in the invitation
7. is very user friendly
8. is available 24 x 7 x 365
9. supports a variety devices both online and off-line, with automatic synchronization
10. has flexible, easy to use security, with various levels of permissions to allow access to certain events by role
11. is compatible with ical and other web calendaring standards
12. prints a range of attractive, easy-to-read formats
13. allows for secure access by administrative assistants
    
14. allows for easy analysis of meeting and task loads and responsibilities by individuals and groups, and FINALLY
    
15. is free, with high quality technical support and, low maintenance, and requested features added in a timely manner.

Aah. The holy grail of calendars. A fortune awaits the company that can create one, though point #15 suggests it will be a very, very small fortune.

Over my career, I have tried a range of calendaring solutions in search of the perfect system, including Meeting Maker, Outlook, FirstClass, CalendarMaker, Web Event, Google Calendar, and iCal. In some ways these are all great programs. But in some fundamental way, each of them also sucked.

The companies that make calendaring software focus their products on individuals and businesses. Schools are a secondary market, and they don’t understand us.

To start with, schools operate in two different time spheres: (a) the time observed by the rest of the world and (b) school time. School time is normally meant to be class periods. Such as a period 1, period 2, period 3, or period A, 1A, nap time, math time, reading time, block 1, block 2, and so on. No one outside of the school has any idea how these times correlate to real world time, and even those inside of schools often have to rely on cheat sheets to make the translation. Think of these different time spheres as our equivalent of the metric versus the English measurement system.

So right out of the starting gate calendaring programs made for the real (metric) world are incompatible with time as observed in the school world.

But wait, computers are smart. Can’t they bridge the gap? A computer can instantly convert metric to English units and back in measurement, why can’t a computer convert between different time spheres?

Computers could do this of course. But there’s this niggling little problem of no two schools using exactly the same class schedule. Plus schedules change, often by the day of the week—and let’s not forget special schedules that are used for planned events such as assemblies and sports, or unplanned events such as school closings or late starts do to weather.

So now the problem has become much more complex, because you must allow the end user to be able to enter the information peculiar to their school’s schedule, with the ability for it to be instantly updated, with these updates recalculating real-world time, checking for conflicts with people’s schedules and resources, and then synchronizing across devices.

It’s enough to make even a Google engineer weep.

Schools are not likely to change to real-world time anytime soon (pun intended). This leaves us at the mercy of benevolent calendar makers who will listen to our plea and come to our aid. If I had to bet on who that might be, I would lay my money on Google (who has a burgeoning number of K-12 schools using their Google Apps for Education) or Rjenda (a new company that has taken assessment calendaring to a new high).

I’m curious to know what readers may think not only of the list of 15 requirement for school calendars that I listed above, but also what solutions you have found that work best for you.

What if…

1. school superintendents or heads of school could be paid no more than 3x that of the lowest paid school employee?
2. someone designed a school from the ground up having never set foot in one before?
3. the ratio of students to teachers was no more than three to one?
4. educators were free of all copyright or patent restrictions?
5. teachers, students, and parents regularly visited one another’s homes?
6. if school administrators were elected by the faculty?
7. no school could house more than four hundred students?
8. students called teachers by the first names?
9. teachers were not allowed to use PowerPoint, Keynote, Impress or similar presentation tools?
10. mastery was the important variable for student learning instead of time on task?
11. faculty and staff had to demonstrate current knowledge and skills in their field very few years?
12. faculty and staff could take fitness classes along with the students?
13. college of education professors had to regularly teach in K-12 schools?

What we'd all like to do sometimes to those who print too much!

My tech team and I were having a discussion the other day about printing. Specifically, we were trying to figure out ways to encourage people to print less, enforce accountability when they choose to print, and make the process as easy as possible for both us and the end user. We know that we are a long ways from becoming a paperless school, but we believe we can become a less paper school.

Whether it is incompatible print drivers, fonts that don’t print correctly, mechanical failures and jams, or the constant feeding of paper, ink, and toner, printers are the bane of every IT department’s existence. All this trouble for a pieces of cellulose that often end up being thrown away or recycled within a few minutes, days, or weeks of being used. In my organization alone, about 1 million sheets of paper go through our copy machines every year; a few hundred thousand more through our printers. According to GreenPDF.com, each ream (500 sheets) of paper is equal to about 18.5 lbs. of carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere through the harvesting of the tree and the manufacturing process. 1,000,000 pages = 2000 reams of paper, or 37,000 pounds of CO2.

There are abundant ways for IT departments to encourage less paper use:

1. force duplex (two-sided) printing. One sheet is better than two.
2. provide economic disincentives for printing by making users pay for each page they print.
3. provide economic incentives for print savings, perhaps by using cost savings for professional development programs for faculty and staff, or a beer bust. (Which would YOU choose?)
4. provide printer release stations so that people have to walk to the printer and release the print job, thereby cutting back on print hobs that are never picked up.
5. provide ubiquitous access to non-printing alternatives, such as electronic document exchange, markup, collaboration tools and e-readers.
6. guilt. Yeah, there may already be enough of this in the world, but sometimes we should feel a sense of guilt for what we’re doing to the planet.

But at the end of the day the overuse of paper is not an IT problem, it’s a human factors problem.

People are addicted to paper. That means that anything that is going to supplant paper has a long row to hoe, and it darn well better give us a bigger and better fix than paper.  Criminalizing the use of  paper won’t work (when paper is outlawed, only outlaws will have paper). Perhaps we need a 12-step program, or a paper-patch.

Sarcasm aside, if schools want to get serious about reducing the use of paper, the place to start is not with technology, but with people. Just as our school has decided not to filter internet content, perhaps we should restrict printing in any way, shape or form. Instead, we could engage our colleagues and students in a discussion of printing, and help all of us make mindful decisions about the use of paper and other printer resources.

Mindful printing. What might that look like?

Well, it might entail thinking about the soil, the rain, and the sunlight that grows the tree that provides the pulp. Thinking about the lumber workers who harvest the tree, the truckers who bring it to the mill, the mill workers, chemists, and other laborers who manufacture, transport, and stock the warehouse.s Thinking about the electricity to power the printer, the factory and the workers that made the printer and the toner. All these people. All this electricity. All these chemicals and raw materials. It’s a lot to think about. And in that brief moment when you think before you print, perhaps you’ll decide that you need fewer copies, or that you can print two-sided, or that a PDF or Google Doc is just as good as paper.

Parker Palmer is one of my heroes, and his book, The Courage To Teach, is one that I recommend to all teachers and friends of education. I don’t recall how I ran across this video snippet, but watching it reminded me of how much I am missing deep conversations in learning communities that address the uncertainty that we all live with. Some people respond to uncertainty with what Palmer calls “corrosive cynicism.” You know the type: always blaming “them,” the eternal pessimist, the glass half-empty person who has seen it all before and knows for sure that no good deed goes unpunished. These are the naysayers to any and all talk of change or innovation, who believes that everything is going to hell in a hand basket and so to hell with everyone else.

The counterpoint to corrosive cynicism is irrelevant idealism. Idealists operate in a world not connected to reality. They dismiss real-world problems and challenges flippantly, and exhort people to simply try harder or believe more deeply for things to get better. You can make Tinkerbell—and the world—well by simply clapping loudly enough. The live in a delusional world without evil, without pain, and without mistakes.

Most of us live between those two worlds, in “the gap.” And it is in this gap that we deal with the tension of ambiguity, the paradox of both/and. In the gap, it’s okay if you are uncertain and wavering. It’s okay to make mistakes. And it is in this gap that we need to work and play with others in community as you find your own answers, your own place.

This is not an easy task. And it is a task which rarely is addressed head on in schools, among students, or among faculty and staff. To address it in community requires to permit a vulnerability that few are willing to risk. Academics are in the knowledge business, we are supposed to know are we not? Actually, I think it is more important that we know we don’t know. Only then can the real conversation begin, in the gap, within a community of others who also know they don’t know.

What if…

1. teachers had to pay for textbooks just like their students do, semester after semester, year after year?
2. schools spent as much money on professional development to use new technology as they did on the technology itself?
3. teachers were asked to pass the exams they had to take when they were in high school?
4. school employees were given grades on their performance evaluations of A-F, just like students?
5. teachers were asked to spend 10% of their day innovating?
6. schools had a profit sharing plan based on reducing their use of paper and toner, saving power, reducing carbon emissions, and conserving water?
7. we spent a day, or a week, without using email?
8. there weren’t subject matter departments or grade levels?
9. each class met out-of-doors at least once a week?
10. faculty and staff swapped jobs for a day?
11. what if new faculty were given a reduced teaching load their first year?
12. what if there were no “front” to a classroom?
13. you laid all of the sacred cows to rest.

Have reports of the death of newspapers been exaggerated?

I’ve been thinking a lot about student publications. Newspapers and literary magazines mostly. Yearbooks are a different beastie.

Print publications by and for students maintain a strong hold on our student writers. Perhaps because they are so used to seeing their own words (albeit in the a very different form) in their social networks, that having their name in a print publication carries more gravitas. Be that as it may, we are obliged to prepare students for their future, not our past, and I think we would all agree that print publications are undergoing major change.

As an environmentalist, I am also mindful of the resources consumed  by print publications. True, it may be argued that electronic communication is simply a matter of shifting the burden from producing paper to producing servers, but in my view the servers win out.

To date, most high school publications have had a very limited reach: other students, faculty, staff, and parents. These groups comprised the writers audience, there was little opportunity for feedback, interaction, or for reaching a broader audience.

I believe that as young scholars, artists, writers, journalists, videographers, photographers, composers, musicians, and performers, students can gain insight and invaluable experience by interacting with a  diverse audience of readers. New technologies enable students to reach national and international audiences, readers of all ages and occupations.

Students will write differently for a broader audience and, I think, they will write better.

There are some issues to deal with when moving from a small, “in-house” audience to a global audience, and from a print-based publication to online.

• Privacy. Many schools have guidelines or policies about the use of student names and photos outside of the school. The fact that a print publication could, in theory, be snail mailed to people outside of the school seems to have not crossed the minds of some policy makers. The Internet, however, puts the issue right before their eyes.
• Audience. If your audience is broader, than the use of in-house humor, jargon, and so on renders articles that use such language less accessible to some readers. This means that editors need to step up and determine when such language is appropriate and when it obfuscates meaning.
• Interactivity. Why have an electronic publication if there is not a means for the readers to provide feedback? And what will become of that feedback? Are the editors willing to engage in conversation? Who will moderate the comments, and do they need to be moderated?
• Rich media and COLOR. ‘nuf said.
• New production roles. Currently, all one needs to produce a decent paper or lit magazine is a word processor, maybe a page layout program, and a copier. Electronic journalism has roles beyond copy writing and editing, to audio and video production, web site design, and even custom coding.
• Publication schedules. Since there is no longer a print publication to create—which means that content is released all at once—online publication allows for a more varied and timely schedule of publication. To draw readers to the site on a regular basis, content can be refreshed as it becomes available, and not held hostage until everything else is ready to go.
• New types of “news.” Papers and lit magazines can expand their repertoire of content to include exemplary scholarly works. Or perhaps schools can launch a research magazine highlighting some of the best academic work of students. Instead of only being read by student and their teacher, the student’s work can now reach a a broad group of scholars.

There are many among us who fear for the demise of the “paper.” Personally, I am more concerned about the consolidation of professional journalism in to the hands of a few media giants. And while I no longer subscribe to a daily paper, I do like picking one up at my local Peets when I stop for coffee. But when a paper isn’t available, I happily turn to my iPhone where I read the NY Times—for free, and without a single wasted tree.

In my last post, I reviewed the Sony Touch e-reader. The book I chose to read on it was Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. It seemed like a perfect marriage of medium and message.

Well this marriages got off to a rocky start, but in this case the fault lies more with the e-reader than Shirky’s prose.

The premise of Shirky’s book will not come as a big news to most readers: new technology is changing everything about how groups form, communicate, influence, collaborate, and are managed. Replete with numerous (and sometimes overly-long) examples of how groups have spontaneously or more deliberately formed to address issues ranging from petty theft to child abuse, informal thought experiments to commercial ventures involving millions of people,  Shirks demonstrates the “tetonic shift” that social computing is causing. Shirky writes “The current change, in one sentence, is this: most of the barriers to group action have collapsed, and without those barriers, we are free to explore new ways of gathering together and getting things done.” [Note. I'd cite the page number, but it's different depending on which resolution you have the reader set at. So what are you supposed to do?]

Self-organizing groups hold a special fascination for Shirky. He describes the origin of the organization chart in the early railroad business, and how its hierarchical structure caught on in other industries. [I would have thought the org chart was military in origin.] Hierarchical organization works well for awhile, but “at some point an institution simply cannot grow anymore, and still remain functional, because the cost of managing the business will destroy any profit margin.” But for many social groups on the Internet, the “costs don’t fall moderately…they collapse. Thousands of volunteers contribute and moderate content, for free. Loosely coordinated groups can now achieve things that were previously out of reach for any other organizational structure.”

Shirky uses the metaphor of a ladder to describe the group activities that are more easily facilitated by online tools, with the rungs of the ladder,”in order of difficulty… sharing, cooperation, and collective action.”

News organizations in general, and newspapers in particular, are still reeling from the effect of the internet, bloggers, and the proliferation of amateur news reporters on the viability of their businesses. Shirky reminds us that these amateurs are not professional journalists, that “mass professionalization is an oxymoron.” (This offers little solace to the thousands of professional journalists who have been given their walking papers in the last few years.) Such monumental change (and Shirky likens our period ot that following the invention of the printing press) is messy. “Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather, they go from A to B through a long period of chaos and only then reach B.” The practical effects of anyone being able to claim journalistic privilege in a court of law is unknown, but sounds a bit scary to me.

Chaotic times lead a lot of people to be be scared, and scared people often react with “fight or flight.” Take the music industry, which is using its own user base. Or any other content provider that goes after those who “mash-up” their original works into new creations.

One of the most memorable phrases from Here Comes Everybody is this: “much of what gets published on any given day is public but not for [emphasis added] the public.”

That explains all the idiotic things I run into.

So with so much stuff out there, Shirky tells us that the only reasonable means to make sense of it is to filter it, and technology, which provides an avenue for so much stuff, can also provide a solutions for getting you just the stuff you are interested in. “Mass amateurization of publishing makes mass amateurization of filtering a forced move.” Communities of practice, such as those that have formed in Flickr and Wikipedia, are two examples of how legions of amateurs can help make sense, and ensure quality, from the legions of stuff.

As an educator, I am passionately interested in what these new tools may mean for today’s students. Shirky asserts:

Communications tools don’t get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. The invention of a tool doesn’t create change; it has to have been around long enough that most of society is using it. It’s when a technology becomes normal, then ubiquitous, and finally so pervasive as to be invisible, that the really profound changes happen, and for young people today, our new social tools have passed normal and are heading to ubiquitous, and invisible is coming.

Then Shirky lets fall the other shoe, claiming: “Our social tools are not an improvement to modern society; they are a challenge to it.”

But in the midst of all of this mess there are signs of hope that society can meet the challenge, and be the better for it. In chapter five, “Personal Motivation Meets Collaborative Production,” Shirky writes at length about Wikipedia, and how its model of collaborative writing and editing demonstrates every day the power and possibility of social tools, where “a Wikipedia article is a process, not a product, and as a result, it is never finished.” He concludes the chapter, with this: “When people care enough, they can come together and accomplish things of scope and longevity that were previously impossible.” And therein lies the hope for making sense out of chaos.

Shirky also weighs in on one of my favorite topics, open source software, and how the open source movement has changed the economics of failure. “Most organizations attempt to reduce the effect of failure by reducing its likelihood.” So Microsoft, Apple, and other commercial firms are risk-averse. But “open source doesn’t reduce the likelihood of failure, it reduces the cost [emphasis added] of failure.” More risk, means a greater likelihood of big breakthroughs and innovation. “When a company or indeed any organization [might I suggest schools?—ed] finds a strategy that works, the drive to adopt it and stick with it strong. Even if there is a better strategy out there.” The resulting “systematic bias for continuity creates tolerance for the substandard.”

Towards the end of his book, Shirky poses a question worth pondering by all of us interested in social media. “The most obvious change is that we are going to get into more groups, many more groups, than have ever existed before. Is this a good thing?” Later, he posits “Arguments about whether new forms of sharing or collaboration are, on balance, good or bad reveal more about the speaker than the subject.” But “To ask the question, ‘Should we allow the spread of these social tools?’ presumes that there is something we could do about it were the answer no. This hypothesis is suspect, precisely because of the kinds of changes involved.” So now that the genie has already escaped the bottle, what do we do? Shirky replies that for himself, “In the last fifteen years I’ve had to unlearn a million [things], because they have stopped being true.” Unlearning: the first step in learning.

Shirky can be a bit long-winded for my taste, but there’s no doubt that he has done his homework and he provides a valuable resource to readers interested in the societal effects of new technologies.