Mar
28
2010
I left work and went straight to Waterloo Station on Friday, the last day before a two-week break for students and faculty. I’ll be working next week, but the second week we intend to do some Channel sailing.
From Waterloo I trained to Portsmouth and took the ferry to Gosport to dine at the Haslar Lightship and then sleep on our boat. All day Saturday I did the annual cleaning and filter renewals on the fuel system, the cooling systems, the air intake, etc. on our Volvo MD2030 marine diesel engine.
(I don’t mention to many that boys in my family were expected to rebuild cars from a young age, and close to my 15th birthday I started with two 1960 Morris Minors that I bought at a farm estate sale of a man who had passed away. I used one for parts, rebuilt the other’s engine, and that was my first car in college. After that, I had a ‘68 MG Midget, a ‘68 MGB, etc.)
So, on the boat, I have renewed the oil, fuel, air filters and fluids. I upgraded the seawater pump to have a speedseal cover for fast access to the seawater impeller, that pushes sea water through the heat exchanger to help cool the engine (no air going through a radiator like on a car). As I do these things, I feel reconnected to working on machines of an honest type, and I like to make them slightly better as I work.
In addition, we replaced our out-of-date flares with an off-shore pack, and we recently bought an EPIRB in case we need satellites to get us out of a bind. With all this, our four-man life raft is out of date and needs a £250 service, and our fire extinguishers are out of date, and our first aid kit expired in 2007, and the filter packs on our drinking water tanks expired two months ago. So, I have more to do this week.
Doing all this made me think of cycles of renewal versus cycles of change. On the boat, we try to make incremental improvements as we renew. Back in December, we were advised the original 1973 winches had broken internal parts, and the drums were wearing though, so we replaced and upgraded to self tailing winches that look like this:
These winches are easier to use by one person, and safer for a smaller crew, and to idiots like us they are attractive pieces of gear.
To relate all this back to educational technology, we’ve been doing major cycles of change in the last three years that were more than incremental upgrades. We’ve replaced the school web page (to Finalsite), the school wireless system (to Meru), the school email system (to Zimbra), we’ve created a large VLE (Moodle), we replaced the network core and firewalls (all Cisco), we are replacing the school Internet connection (100 mbit fiber), we are half-way through the replacement of the student information system (to Veracross), we replaced the backup systems (to HP SANs, drives that go off campus, and Mozy Pro),and we have modified the MS 1:1 laptop program.
That’s a lot of change, and it’s time to slow down for a few years. I’m really looking forward now to more incremental cycles of renewal now, like our projector systems. We have 6-7 year old NEC projectors in most classrooms with Avervision document cameras. Most classrooms don’t have screens. We’re thinking of either going to higer rez (1200 x 800) 3000 lumen projectors (NEC NP510W EDU units) and upgraded document cameras (Lumens DC265s), or going ultra short throw (Epson or Hitachi) with an eye toward more interactive boards in the future.
Either way, balancing costs, it’s relaxing to be moving into more of that type of phase right now (both at work, and on the boat). As of right now, I get to type this in the cockpit of SR (on a little Samsung netbook with a Vodaphone 3G stick), on a sunny English morning in March, having my first coffee of the day while the family sleeps in below. This is not a bad place to relax and think awhile, and my boat work is done for this weekend.
Time for a second coffee from the galley.
Mar
26
2010
We rolled out about forty more Meru wireless access points this week, giving us a total of just over 90 in the building. We have pulled in the 50 remaining Apple Extreme airports that were in the building, so we could be on a unified system.
Our first morning with the unified Meru points was a bit rough– we had over 400 users come on in about 30 minutes, as well as 240 Middle School students trying to do a secure login for a writing test trial. We have over half of these students fail because of rejected logins or massively slow network performance (or none at all).
After the smoke clearned, we noted that wireless was slow throughout the building, and many people were getting dropped connections– when we turned off the Single Cell technology on the G radios, these problems went away, so we did that on all G radios. (The Single Cell has worked fine for us for months on the N radios).
So, today, we’re trying the 240 at once test again. The G radios should work better, but we may still major slow-downs and login problems. It crossed our minds that the 240 laptops may be going to 8 access points, but thos 8 access points may be running into a single POE switch, that runs back to the network core on a single copper gigabit line (on wiring that wasn’t gigabit certified). Thus, we are patching in a second gigabit uplink for both POE switches in that area of the building right now. We may also have a fiber option for the runs back to the core if needed.
Mar
14
2010
My son is doing a video editing activity at school, and we bought him a Canon FS 200 flash-based camcorder for the class, with the stipulation he would be the ship’s videographer when we went sailing.
Whether that was a good decision or not is still to be determined… 
Here’s his first Jacques Cousteau style entry from a very cold trip we may a few weeks ago to the Isle of Wight.
Not as many sailing shots as I would like, but it was raining and about 2 degrees Celsius, so I guess I’ll give him a pass this time.
We are watching old Cousteau programs on Youtube with the kids, with the classic Rod Sterling narration. Who knows– maybe we have a young Steve Zissou in the family…
Mar
14
2010
Not much time to post lately– too many simultaneous projects underway:
- Migration work to Veracross
- Recent completion of Open Air lab
- Soon-to-launch Chronos Blog System built on Drupal
- 48 more wireless access points to be installed
- Projector and Document Camera Research
- Sudden loss of School Internet Connection for nine hours
- New 100 mbit Internet connection coming in June
- Purchase planning for May/June, next year’s computers
- Moodle development plans and integration
- Hosting visiting teams (fun!) looking at tech
There’s more, of course. A few notes on the above:
- We’re leaning toward NEC NP510W EDU projectors for high resolution and 3000 lumens. We have two, but one had reliability issues, so we have ordered a third for testing. Excellent image quality at HD.
- We should have a redundant ADSL connection on the new 100 mbit Fiber that will even carry over the public IP range to the ADSL if the fiber is down.
- I’ll report soon on our hopefully unified G/N single cell, load balancing wireless network.
- Drupal is fun, but it’s like creating a statue out of big block of marble, which sometimes cracks. I’ll post some screen shots of our blog/portfolio system once it has student users starting this week.
- I want others of you to buy a bunch of iPads and give clear and informative reports about them, so I don’t have to worry about them for awhile…
- Spent all day at work yesterday trying to get our Internet service provider to restore service.
- I really like the sleek Lenovo X200S laptop I just bought for my own use, but I’m still not certain that Lenovo could provide custom builds in adequate time for us, as Dell does.
- The three Eno boards we installed last summer (with ultra short throw Hitachi projectors) are being used, loved by one, mixed reviews from others.
- I ordered a Lumens DC265 Document Camera to compare/contrast with our aging Avervisions. I like the idea of two real lamps for light, higher rez, HDMI to the new projectors. I don’t like the poor lighting of the Avervisions.
Okay, that’s enough for now. I promise images of the Open Air lab and the Chronos system later this week.
Right now, I must do my Yachtmaster homework (mostly chart navigation) if I’m going to pass the test in 10 days…
Mar
3
2010
Pat Basset forwarded a link to ISED-L about the research article about 1:1 programs:
It’s an interesting article on several levels. It addresses criticism of 1:1 laptop program, but it also defines laptops as cognitive tools that should be part of larger whole school change initiatives in pedagogy and curriculum. This is something I’ve advocated for many years.
Of particular interest to me is the final third of the report, which makes suggestions as to how “embedded design” is needed when schools change or adopt new objectives.
Here are two paragraphs from page 12.
One, the community comprising the school – students, teachers, school leaders, and parents – must have an explicit set of simple rules (Bain, 2007; Seel, 2000) that defines what the community believes about teaching and learning. The rules and the process of building consensus about them, assign value to what the community believes (e.g. cooperation, curriculum, feedback, time). The rules are not a mission statement; instead, they are the drivers for the overall design of the school and the schooling that occurs therein (Weston & Bain, 2009).
Two, the school community deliberately and systematically uses its rules to embed its big ideas, values, aspirations, and commitments in the day-to-day actions and processes of the school (e.g., physical space, classroom organization, equipment, job descriptions, career paths, salary scales, curriculum documents, classroom practice, performance evaluation, technology, professional development). Embedded design yields a complete picture, absent of the broad, loosely coupled (Weick, 1976) brush strokes and sweeping references to “best practice” (Daniels et al., 2001) or “excellence” (Peters, 2009) that characterize techno-critique and are common in most approaches to educational change, innovation, and reform.
The following sections discuss building community involvement in this process, so that new embedded tools or objectives are requested as part of the overall change, instead of layered on top with unclear objectives.
It’s a good article– check it out.
Feb
25
2010
First Draft of a unified learning spaces theory
I wasn’t able to fly to San Francisco this week to attend the annual NAIS conference, but I’m still doing my best to follow the blog posts from Demetri and others about the events. I’ve been impressed by the ideas and quotes from the sessions so far.
Back here in cloudy and wet London, however, I’m thinking about learning spaces. We worked last week on a new open air lab (photos to follow), and also how to improve the environments of existing classrooms. At the same time, we’re working on the Veracross migration that will have a strong online space, to complement our Moodle system, yet that hasn’t stopped us from building a pilot project for blogging in Drupal. Geez.
Anyway, in looking for a common thread for all this work, it’s learning spaces. In fact, I’m curious about a unified learning spaces theory. How does a classroom relate to a campus relate to online networked learning relate to home learning. Maybe this too big picture, but some of the decisions we’re trying to make deal with at-home academic work as much as (or more than) in-classroom work, and that is interesting.
As seen in the post below about the Khan Academy, even pure academic learning does not only exist in the classroom, and it’s time to try and understand how students become self-sufficient learners, or expert learners. Much of this happens outside of the classroom, but all of the features of a school (from lunch room, to gyms, to art workshops, to the front steps) contribute to a larger learning space.
Here’s a copy of the draft idea above:
Comprehensive Learning Environment
Feel free to comment– obviously, I’m only at the start of this work.
Feb
23
2010
It’s worth watching this short video about the Microsoft Education Award winner this year:
http://www.youtube.com/khanacademy
He was also featured on the PBS News Hour last night.
Inspiring.
Feb
19
2010
It was February break, and I worked about half of the week, but earlier this week we took off to the boat and sailed to the Isle of Wight for an overnight on the Medina River.
That may sound great, but it was just a few degrees above freezing, it rained frequently, we have no heat on the boat, and our favorite pub and restaurant on the island was closed. No food, and no water taxi to get to it.
So, we spent the afternoon and night in a very cold boat, trying to heat it with candles, a lantern and the stove. Good dinner, but seriously cold overnight. The next morning we sailed for home– proud of a winter sail, but ready to warm up again back in London.
Full photo gallery from the trip at
Feb
19
2010
Okay, if you read this blog and others, it will seem like new technologies like Zimbra and Drupal are set and forget. Five minute installs followed by months of enjoyment and feet on the desk.
Most untrue.
Here’s one that plagued us for almost a month– the main log in screen to Zimbra (for the web clients) would stall. Not all the time, but maybe one out of ten times. A typical log in is around 20 seconds. When stalled, it may be 2-5 minutes, or not at all. Users were unhappy.
So, we tore our hair out– the server looked fine, nothing in the logs, so it had to be the clients. The problem was occurring on Macs and PCs, Firefox and IE and Safari and Chrome. We tried turning off plug-ins, rolling back JIT Java compilers, the works. Nothing seemed to prevent the problem. Some felt we were just overloading the server, but nothing indicated that server-side. In fact, the stalls could occur with very few users on.
About the same time, our Zimbra Admin noticed that he had lost login access to a key shared account– one that shared out briefcases, RSS feeds and a mailbox with sub folders to all users. No go on login– we were cut off from accessing the account.
The reason– when we deleted student accounts from last school year, there were still shares in their accounts from the master account, and they may have been renamed or altered. By deleting them, we corrupted the main account.
On that issue, we worked out complicated processes to change to a new shared account, but then our Zimbra admin found a way to remove the corrupted shares from the account, and we go access back to it. Then he built a script to remove all corrupted share.
At that moment, the stalled logins stopped. Apparently, they were related to the semi-corrupted shared account (for mailbox, RSS feed folder, briefcases) to most users. Once it was cleaned up, the loading at login for users returned to normal.
Supposedly, the bug in Zimbra regarding shared account corruption when accounts are deleted with existing shares is still around. We have a script now that removes all shares before accounts are taken out. However, we lucky to have such a strong Zimbra admin who can write these scripts and get us out of trouble. Cheers to him.
We like Zimbra a lot, but we are using it at a high level of complexity, and it runs at a relatively high level of complexity. If you are considering it, proceed with growth in a careful way, and have a lead admin who understand the Command Line Interface and can write scripts.
Meanwhile, I’ll put my feet up.
Feb
13
2010
February break has started. We head to a cold boat on a train.
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13
2010
We worked on Drupal most of the week. Actually, I started the week before with a simple Drupal installation on my bluehost.com account. This week, we built a proper Redhad Linux server and installed Drupal to start building it as a production server.
Our goal is a pilot project for the rest of the year with three or four middle school classrooms. They are looking for better ways for students to post writing and other creative work and media online to each other, and to allow commenting on it. Our Moodle system can do some of that, but it’s not great with the commenting and broader sharing with students outside of the class groups. (Moodle could be enhanced to be better at this, but it’s our main homework delivery and listing system for dozens of classes, so we are very hesitant to start trying out add-in modules in the middle of a school year.)
So far, we’ve been following Bill Fitzgerald’s book (noted in last post) and trying to upgrade the file management system. We had one scare when we lost all admin access, but we found the solution the next day. Now that we have over a dozen modules installed, we’re finding the system to be a bit fragile. (Views module can crash repeatedly and need to be reinstalled, etc.)
However, we are excited about getting Organic Groups working, so that teachers can create their own class groups as desired (instead of us locking everything down with student information class list exports). We also like the idea of the portfolios having many publication options (private, teacher only, class only, grade level only, division only, school only, and possibly public in the future).
It’s good work, and we’ll continue next week with a hopeful launch the following week (once students are back from February break). We are also building an open air lab in the MS/HS library next week, and I really like the idea of students using paper and digital resources at the same time.
Feb
7
2010
Although I missed Bill Fitzgerald’s Educon 2.2 presentation about online portfolios in Drupal, I’ve been studying his demo site for that presentation:
http://educon20.com/posts/4/user
I need to overlay his recent work with his book about the educational development of Drupal (http://www.funnymonkey.com/), but he’s stating some very intriguing ideas about a more simplified portfolio structure that servers several purposes at once.
We normally think of portfolios as a way to students to select and share work for assessment, but his approach is to build the portfolio concept right into the development of units by teachers. Thus, they are building and sharing multi-year teaching portfolios with each other, while also using the units with students, who develop their own portfolios in response.
He speaks of this as possibly creating more openness and searchable examples between faculty, much in the way that curriculum mapping has attempted in the past. We are spending next week building and revising a pilot Drupal system for middle school students to use for blogging (using ideas from his book), but at the same time we’ll try to think about larger issues like this as we map out the information and access design of the site.
Should be fun.
Feb
6
2010
Always nice to visit Ray’s Jazz Club at Foyles. Worked on Drupal today.
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1
2010
A very simple comment: the iPad is a step forward to larger computers becoming more like mobile phones. Many people will like that, given that there is nostalgia for land-line phones because of their simplicity and durability. (The black rotary in my parents home has been working about as long as I’ve been alive.)
If we move into a realm where more of our users (faculty and students) use their own computer hardware for school work, then the more reliable it is the better. Even the lack of multitasking could be a benefit, since it prevents users from overloading system resources with a pile of background widgets.
Maybe the biggest lost is a definite shift from laptops being creative tools to iPads being information access tools. I’ve already seen that with iPhones– why carry a laptop when you can do email, calendars, contacts with the phone. It’s not that iPads can’t create content, but…
I think we’re going to lose a lot of related to computing becomes a sealed environment, and you toss it if it stops working (like a mobile phone). At the same time, it will make computers boring in a technical way, which Clay Shirky believes is the key for them becoming socially interesting (and trans-formative).
So it goes.
Feb
1
2010
Okay, let’s conclude my notes about Educon 2.2.
School Policy Panel Discussion: I listed to some, but the parts I heard were very general– “we all make policies all the time” sort of thing. I won’t comment more, since I switched to working online.
Invitation to Inquiry: This was a relatively fun session, because different groups got different inquiry materials for a project design. We had science, and articles about the earthquakes in California and Haiti. Members of my group did a great job of discussing different inquiry project designs for the material. My only wish was that the leaders were a little clearer about scaffolding inquiry learning. How much focusing do students need to stay on topic? For example, our content could have been used for social/political inquiry projects, but could you allow that to happen in the same classroom (and probably not if you are a science teacher).
Lunch Meeting: fun discussion with an open source developer and planner. We shared a lot of views about truths and misconceptions about open source software for schools. Perhaps like Veracross, the goal of open source is to become a service more than a product. Getting started may be “free” in a few respects, but sustainability is only achieved with support (for both upgrades, modifications, new modules and new ideas). It is fun to think of multi-school collaborations for new open source modules or tools– curriculum mapping for Drupal or Moodle, anyone? (I should also note that Zimbra benefits from an open source version and community, and a paid-support contract.)
On the Development of Learning Spaces: it was fun to hear David Jakes leads conversations and share ideas about changing physical learning spaces, and actively integrating virtual learning spaces with the physical. Some basic ideas: move your desks into a fish-bowl design (inner facing circle inside a larger inner facing circle of desks). Bring in floor lamps from Oxfam, Goodwill or Walmart, and turn off the in-ceiling fluorescent lights. In fact, in one classroom he removed all the ceiling tiles and went for an industrial look, changing the eye lines of his students by raising the ceiling by four feet (and then using that space creatively). Ask the students what they think should be changed. Create a Genius Bar for the school. Create a Starbucks space in the library. I need to get the book he referenced: Learning Space Design. I also liked how Jakes was using Etherpad.
After that session, I took public transport to the Philadelphia airport (getting there far too quickly) and then flew over the Atlantic, over-night. I’ll be processing more ideas from Educon over the next few days, and I may post a bit more. Good conversational conference– my main request would be for a bit more focus instead of too many major ideas mixed together too briefly.