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I was reviewing new sets of surveys of students today about technology, and I was surprised by how trends over the past few years have continued and increased.

By far, the favored use of computers is for communication, with music and games falling behind in the listings. I’m becoming to think of computers a social tools as much as individual tools. It would be interesting to plot a chart showing five years of data comparing computer use for individual creativity and production vs. collaborative creativity and production.

To simply call it networking is too limited. It is a culture and community, with certain rules, but also some boundaries that are unclear. It’s easy to see how individuals portray themselves on discussion boards, for example, trying to build reputation with meaningful input. Sometimes put-downs or flames are used, but typically that doesn’t lead to lasting gains. In the end, building reputation is a continuing goal, and self-awareness grows from that. It can create a feed-back loop of giving to receive.

There are also signs in the surveys of more awareness of computer use as a limited function, instead of endless possibilities. Some colleagues the other day were referring to iMovie as the the new PowerPoint– it has a place, but can also be overused. The wow factor of certain technologies may have a shelf-life, and in the end it appears that the students feel the chats, emails and social and academic exchanges offer the real return on their investment of time.

This came up during a discussion with colleagues today.

Given computers and nothing else, students won’t create a culture of academic technology use on their own.

Sorry. I had to say it. Adults are needed in the room to shape and focus technology use by kids. I don’t buy the idea that kids are so far ahead that they can figure out computers on their own. For evidence, check out the typical student who spends six hours a night on a computer doing homework…

We’ve been running Moodle on our new, two server cluster all this week. It’s the first time we’ve had it under load.

So far, so good. The performance is much, much better than before, and the performance stats on the servers indicate that they have plenty of reserve CPU and memory capacity. We are using CentOS as the Linux operating system, running without a GUI on both servers. The front end server has Moodle and the file store, and the back end server has MySQL running. Each server has eight gigs of memory, and dual quad core Xeon CPUs.

You can visit the system at

http://athena.asl.org/

We had some initial problems with the cut over. The most significant was the following– we copied over a full copy of the database and the filestore for testing. During that time, our consultants installed and configured Moddle to use the Eaccelerator, a PHP accellerator. When we did the full and real cutover, the final and most recent copy of the database and file store from our overwhelmed Windows server came over, but it was not configured to use Eaccellerator. This caused a conflict for about half of our users (those with more than ten courses), and kept them from logging in. The knock-on effect was that some were un-enrolled from classes.

Once getting the configuration changed, and the students re-enrolled, we could finally start enjoying some of the performance benefits. For the first time ever, we could actually turn on stats and other features.

We are currently considering a third Linux server, simply to sit as a mirror of both the database and the Moodle installation, to serve as a fall-back system should either servers in the cluster fail.

Spring break is just about over, and we’re back from our sailing adventures.

On Monday, we motored the boat from Brighton to her new slip in Gosport, a trip of about 45 nautical miles. On Thursday, we sailed to the Isle of Wight and spent the night at the Folly Inn dock. On Friday the weather went terrible and we motored home to Gosport through a gale on the Solent.

A full photo gallery is here–

http://www.photos.sailingvoyage.com/v/album_025/

As a reminder, the temps are quite low here, and most of the time we looked like this–

Back to school on Monday, and plenty of things to wrap up this year. The new Moodle cluster is now fully operational, and our first load tests will happen when the students are back and start hitting it for real.

We did the official cut over to the new Moodle cluster yesterday, and overall it went smoothly. It appears to be quite snappy in terms of speed, but I did have a report this morning from a teacher who noted that his course files didn’t copy across. More work there. It was recommended that we consider an alternative content management system that works in parallel with Moode called Alfresco, and we’re looking into it.

I had an interesting talk yesterday with a colleague. It was about “in-house” software development vs. “off-the-shelf.” It’s pretty easy to list the problems with some commercial software that is so rigid that it never changes and doesn’t share information easily with other databases, etc. What’s interesting, however, is that fully custom software can also have faults– such as taking creativity out of the hands of the users. In this day and age, just about everyone who uses data to inform decisions needs to have some Excel or Crystal Reports experience and creative control to fold and unfold data on their own, instead of always having it become a “push button” on an in-house interface.

We have a follow-up meeting with a potential consulting firm today. Interesting concepts to be discussed include off-site rack space and storage, redundant fiber connectivity, and server monitoring software that is both local and monitored by them.

I have a couple of days left, and then it’s time for a bit of spring break. Steph and the kids are already at the boat, and Doug caught four fish yesterday at the Brighton Marina breakwater. We plan to move the boat to Gosport either this weekend or next week, weather permitting.

It was great at NAIS to meet old friends. Even more fun was that often their first question was “did you buy a sailboat” or “are you sailing?”

Rob Evans did a presentation called “Six Secrets of the Wily Leader,” and this point was Number Six: Nourish to Flourish: get support, go away; drink cognac; lighten up.

Thus, I now have official, documented and expert advice that says I have to go away, lighten up and sail a boat.

We did our maiden sail with the kids on Southern Rival just a week ago last Sunday:

http://www.photos.sailingvoyage.com/v/album_024/

We were particularly proud of our daughter Eve, who had been too scared to go out on the test sail of the boat. She was just the opposite on our maiden sail, and felt calmer and more excited and happy as the sail went on. Just as important, she and I had no signs of feeling seasick, as Doug and Steph were both feeling a touch of mal de mer.

We plan to sail again next weekend. Here’s a pic of Doug at the helm:

I just got back today from the NAIS 2008 conference, and I posted a discussion at the ISEN Ning about the event:

http://isenet.ning.com/forum/topic/show?id=1194706%3ATopic%3A24063

For more details, there were two official “bloggers” at the event with information on the sessions here:

http://www.nais.org/ac/eventdoc.cfm?ItemNumber=150585&sn.ItemNumber=149439&tn.ItemNumber=150602

In Daniel Pink’s presentation, he referred to our times as being defined by “Affluence, Asia and Automation,” and I enjoyed the chart he showed that tracked the prevalence of many “conveniences” in American homes (phones, tvs, computers) in growing percentages over the last 80 years. To compete in a world of affluence, one must either create a product we didn’t know we needed (the iPod) or use design to distinguish an existing product (a Michael Graves designed toilet brush). His point was that “right brained” thinking was essential to making a place in the new economy– especially in the area of creative design.

As one might expect, the audience responded positively to this. My question leaving Radio City Music Hall, however, was if he was thinking far enough ahead. My parents were young teenagers in the Depression, for example. They were amused by the development of our age of affluence, but they also had suspicion that it would last. I don’t think they would have thought aircraft aluminum toilet brushes were a good investment of either time or money.

It seems we’re on a wave (inexpensive resources, global production and design, low labor costs), but I wonder about the time frame– 100 years, 50 years, 20 years? Advice to students focusing on Pink’s six recommendations (Design, Story, Empathy, Play, Meaning, Symphony) may be perfect for staying on the wave, but what comes after the wave?

As he noted, India has a billion people, and if only 15% become “routine workers” in the global workplace, they will exceed the US number of workers, and exceed even the entire population of Japan.

I rather like the idea of people around the world having a higher standard of living, and more interesting work (even beyond the routine that can be outsourced easily), but is it feasible for everyone to use resources at the rate that the US does?

I don’t know, but I find it an interesting question to ponder.

Very busy lately…

Progress is occuring with the Moodle Cluster, but it’s slow. We have the system running now with the database, but we’re still waiting for the consulting firm to repoint Moodle to access the file storage on the second server. Once that is done, we can do full testing.

Tomorrow, I fly to New York for the NAIS annual meeting. I’m looking forward to dinner with ISEN and ISED-L members. I’m also meeting with portal and student information system vendors. I’ll try to take some pics from the trip to post here.

Okay, back to work!

Just for the record, we’re closing the deal on our third sailboat this week– a 1973 Rival 34 that was built in Southampton. It’s a solid, off-shore capable boat that happens to be easy enough to daysail but sea-kindly enough to not scare our kids if a gale blows up (which is remarkably common on the English Channel and Solent).

Her name is Southern Rival (based on the name of her builder– Southern Boatyard, and the name of her design– Rival). Her decks are gray, as she was when new, because the color reduces glare from bright sunlight on long ocean passages. It’s relatively common for these boats to cross the Atlantic and some have circumnavigated.

We had an excellent test sail out of Brighton yesterday with the owner, and we’ll finalize the paperwork this week. If all goes well, we’ll be spending more time with the boat next weekend.

For pictures from the test sail, see

http://www.photos.sailingvoyage.com/v/album_022/

Some trailing thoughts from the ECIS 2008 Technology Leadership Conference in Prague.

By far, the best question I heard at the event was the following: “Why are asking the same questions after 20 years of technology integration work?” Overall, I think this is a fair question, but it is a difficult one. If the same problems and issues continue to circle back, perhaps our approach to the challenges is somehow wrong.

As I think about this, I’m reminded of the Open Classroom concept that was popular in the 1970s. Research showed positive effects from the architectural changes, and I’d surprised if there weren’t open classroom schools that continue to thrive. In the same vein, however, I’ve been to several schools built in the 1970s to the Open Classroom design, and then had walls added in to split the classrooms again a few years later. The philosophy of the design didn’t stick– there had to be compromises.

Maybe there are no parallels with “the promises of technology to revolutionize education,” but it’s always worth looking for similarities. Maybe the most important is that of strategic compromise. Much of the Open Classroom concept (at least as reflected in the architecture) seemed to be “all or nothing,” but really a compromise was needed for successful integration. The promise of a revolution makes it sounds like everything changes, but should it?

As I’ve noted before, it would be good if we had a clearer picture of “victory” in terms of technology integration. In some schools, it could be a lot of technology used throughout the entire day. In other schools, it might be much more targeted but fully focused on higher order thinking skills. Each school might be different, but the technology should support a broader philosophy instead of trying to create one.

Anyway, it was a great conference. At the end of the month, I head to NY for the NAIS Annual Conference. I also believe I’m doing a session at the Lausanne Laptop Conference in July titled “When One Size Doesn’t Fit All.” (More on this later.)

As for now, it’s time for a walk on Hampstead Heath, and then a morning reading and coffee session at a coffee house with the family.

While others were working hard today, my flight got in early enough for a long walk in Prague.

Here’s a photo gallery:

http://www.photos.sailingvoyage.com/v/prague/

The architecture is amazing, but there are piles of tourist shops on the ground floors.

My favorite part was riding their underground back to the hotel. There, I felt I was with the locals instead of the visitors to the city.

Fun– but tomorrow, I’ll be at the ECIS tech leadership conference.

Sorry about the long breaks between posts– things have been moving like a steam train.

On the quick updates: we have five Meru high density, centrally controlled access points in place as a trial, and we’ll soon be trying the new N units. All of us wish the central control software was more clear and easy to use.

We have two new, Dell servers with dual quad-core Xeon chips and 8 gigs of memory each for our Moodle cluster, and I hope that our consulting group will help us with the CentOS install of Linux to get the ball rolling on the build and transfer of our current database to it.

We’re in phase two of the Student Information System research process, and our goals, needs and objectives in that area are becoming clearer.

I enjoyed doing a board presentation last week, and two high school parent meetings. I have an interview today with a candidate for an important tech position.

Tomorrow morning I fly to Prague for the rest of the week to participate in the ECIS Technology Leadership Conference. I’m really looking forward to this– it should be a tad more relaxing than the Accreditation Team trip to Barcelona.

Lots of things– I’ll try to post some pics from Prague soon.

p.s. We’re also in the final stages of buying our third sailboat as a family. On Sunday, we have the sea trial.

We’ve recently signed a support agreement for Moodle consulting, and we’re preparing for the next steps of an advanced Moodle system.

Currently, we have as many as 200 concurrent users with the 7/8 laptop program students, many of them trying to do things like quizzes simultaneously. This overloads our current Windows-based Moodle server and prevents logins and other work from taking place.

We worked quite awhile on trying to improve the performance of the Windows server, but in the end it was going to to take advanced PHP accelleration calibrated to use large amounts of RAM, and advanced MYSQL caching changes to use large amounts of RAM, and we knew that neither of these were easy to pull off in a Windows environment. Also, we didn’t want to “practice” on a production server that is currently supporting a large number of students.

So, we now have a good consulting firm, and we are ordering in a pair of servers that will be Linux-based for a Moodle cluster. The front end box will handle the PHP and the Moodle app (with dual quad-core Xeon chips, 8-12 gigs of memory, and a pair of 400 gig SAS drives in Raid 1 configuration), and the backend server will handle the MYSQL and file store with the same hardware configuration.

In the end, we’re after a Moodle system that can handle 300-400 concurrent users doing relatively intensive things CPU-wise. If we have to grow again, we can continue to split the front end and load balance, or split the back-end and separate database from filestore. I think this is a good approach, since we’ll now have a supported system that can grow and scale.

I’ll write an update in a couple of weeks once we have the new Moodle cluster up and running.

Perhaps the most special event of this holiday occurred on Christmas Eve. It was the first day I was well enough to travel downtown, so we took the kids down to the Strand where there is a used camera shop. My daughter Eve has always liked photography and has “documented” our sailing adventures, so we signed her up for an after-school photography class. Surprisingly, the class required a 35mm camera, so the kids could do B&W work. No digital.

My Nikon N200 was abandoned in the US– its shutter being bad for years. There was a professional photographer in the shop picking up a repaired lens, and he thought it was the coolest thing that we were buying a used SLR film camera for Eve. He really got into helping us pick the best model in the case. So we bought Eve a used Canon EOS 1000 setup for about 70 quid, completed with two rolls of 400 speed B&W and a 200 ASA color roll. We immediately began to shoot.

For her first online gallery, see

http://www.photos.sailingvoyage.com/v/album_017/

(The shots of her were either by me or her brother Doug.) So far, I’m impressed by her natural framing ideas, and the ease displayed by her subjects. The Canon is a big SLR, but light, and it’s amazing to watch her manually focus and compose with the zoom ring. I hope to share more of her work as she advances. Interesting work, for an eight year-old.

We’re relaxing this afternoon after Christmas morning. My son is flying a small RC helicopter around the flat, and trying out the eeePC. He also got the 1 gig jumpdrive he requested. My daughter just registered her new Webkinz pet into its virtual world, and added some holiday furniture to its virtual residence. Good clothes were received by all, and I have a nice, tiny 120 gb usb drive to use for backups.

There were more traditional gifts as well– sewing gear requested by my daughter, a wood Roman crossbow my son has already built (and shot me with). A model car to be built, a scooter for my daughter, several books both kids wanted, art supplies, and crackers, of course. The main gifts between Steph and I were the 13 week evening sailing courses and week-long cruises with the British Offshore sailing school in May and June.

We made some “thank you” videos on the eeePC, but I’ve been too lazy to track down a way to convert the OGG files to something more cross-platform before emailing them off. Steph is prepping the Christmas ham, and this evening we plan to watch the “African Queen” together for fun. It was pouring rain outside today, but we still hiked to West End Green and then back to Hampstead High Street, where the Starbucks was open so we read there for an hour and enjoyed the holiday music.

Tomorrow, Boxing Day!