Scratching an Itch

The MassCUE Conference for 2009 is over. Some part of me wishes it were still going on, but then sanity kicks in and I am glad the three days have passed. I look forward to the ghouls, goblins, ghosts and superheros who will visit in costume tonight for Halloween.

I’m dressing as Norm Abram, master woodworker, plaid shirt, toolbelt and all. I won’t be alone. Popular Woodworking has encouraged it. (Thanks for all the years of New Yankee Workshop, Norm!)

Gillette gave us a great venue. The conference was full; 1300+ over two days got to see speakers, keynotes, demos, vendors and the Patriots practicing on the field both days!

Several of you came by the registration table where my volunteer assignment put me (and I enjoyed immensely). It was great to see you and I was glad to be able to speak with several of you.

Share your tales of the sessions here because nobody could get to all of them. I sneaked away from the registration table long enough to attend the session on Scratch given by Mitchel Resnick of MIT.

Programming as a creative activity has been around since BASIC hooked me in on my TRS-80 back in the 1970s, and LOGO was great for kids, too. Scratch is another step in the right direction because it abstracts the tedium of typing correct programming syntax and lets a student concentrate on the creative structure instead. Scratch is very visual and embeds the programming effort in an effective envelope that allows a person to imagine, create, test, share and rework. The on line storage at the Scratch servers makes projects by others into tools for exploration and development. If your posted project inspires another user to experiment on your work, the result automatically shows the development sequence, giving credit to each contributor, your original work and that of your collaborator.

As a result, a community of effort can develop around a project with several people making contributions to create projects that have input from many, even when the contributors are scattered around the globe. Scratch may be to students and schools what open source is to professional programmers. Time will tell, but Scratch may be a path that leads young people into the culture and community of sharing/collaborating and and contributing. It could help to produce the next generation of open source programmers.

Scratch is available for download from http://scratch.mit.edu/ and is available for both Windows PC and Macintosh. A Linux version is in beta and can be downloaded for Debian/Ubuntu systems.

 

Ownership

When you put down money at the counter of your software retailer or open the package from the vendor who ships software to your district, who owns that software? If you read the license terms, it would appear that the owner is NOT you or even your school district. The terms of the license generally have language which offers you a non-exclusive USE of the software, but not ownership.

A court battle is under way, pitting a man named Timothy Vernor  who sold (by way of eBay) older versions of Autodesk products which he legitimately aquired.

Well, a federal district court in Washington state has ruled that when you buy shrink wrapped software you own it, at least in your ability to then sell it used.

Free software goes the court decision one better, of course. The GPL and similar licenses only limit the ability to lock up the software in any proprietary way. Once free, always free. I think I like that better all the way.

 

Abandonware and Orphaned Software

In the years since 1974, when I started to get seriously involved with computers, there have been many programs that have met my needs. Many, if not most, have disappeared. That’s not a big surprise; the computers for which they were written are long gone, too. However, most of the programs have been replaced by newer and mostly better versions. My computing needs have been met nicely. I don’t use Applewriter any more, but OpenOffice.org does what is needed…quite well, thanks.

However, there have been really nice programs that have just dropped off the grid. Either the company that owned the copyright went out of business or the company was bought out and the new owner didn’t support it. The software was buried, abandoned, orphaned.

Maybe the software didn’t sell millions of copies. Maybe it was niche software that teachers used for a lesson or so, but didn’t get used all year long, making it hard to justify for lab set or site license purchases. Some of these programs also didn’t fit the standard curriculum sequences. They were definitely not drill-and-kill software, though.

I miss some of these programs, for sure. Here are a few of my favorites:

• Rocky’s Boots – a logic puzzle “game” my students really liked. The program allowed a student to explore some practice rooms and eventually construct logic “circuits” that caused a boot to kick a target object. Higher order thinking skills and some basic understanding of logic and even the fundamentals of computer logic circuits were the result. Good stuff.
• The Factory – another high order thinking skills program challenged students to develop “products” through a sequence of punch and stripe “machines” in an assembly line.
• Bannermania – In a time of dot matrix printers, getting good-looking signs wasn’t easy. Bannermania made wonderful banners, signs, posters in color (if you had it), and even worked very well on laser printers to make signs on overlapping pages that aligned easily.
• HyperCard – the original card stack with hyperlinks programming environment. Apple Computer included it as part of the base software of early Macintosh computers. Students could easily create the buttons, connections to other cards and do their own graphics. We did a haunted house project that was loosely based on the “adventure” game idea. My students loved it. HyperStudio took over the educational market primarily because it added color and sound when Apple gave up on HyperCard development. Macintosh and Windows users can apparently get a freeware tool called HyperNext. (I’m going to check it out and will report on my experience…Have any of you used it?)

Do you have similar good memories of software we no longer have available?

What are the programs you used that you most miss today?

Wouldn’t it be great to have a modern version available?

Is this one of those opportunities that an open source software developer can take to fill a void?

One example of such an “adoption” is the creation of Pingus, an effective work-alike for the very popular Lemmings game.

What missing software tools would you like to see some developer create for education?

 

No Word?

I am no fan of software patents. It seems to me, as it has to many people vastly smarter than I am, program algorythms are not suited to patent protection.
Such patents are common these days, and a judge has just handed down an injunction against Microsoft which will prevent MS from selling Word, that well-known word processor in MSOffice.

Versions 2003 and 2007 contain the ability to import custom XML files, and that violates a U.S. patent held by a Canadian company i4i.

http://blog.seattlepi.com/microsoft/archives/176223.asp

For years, the Linux community has been watching the progress of court battles surrounding the Unix company SCO. SCO may be in its last stages of bankruptcy proceedings. Now we’ll be able to switch our attention to this new litigation.

Word definitely isn’t open source software, but if sales of Word cannot be made (presumably also the Office suite with Word in it) maybe more people will take a shot and try OpenOffice.org when they cannot upgrade to the latest Word.

If you have been looking for a “talking point” with the school administrators, why not bring this issue up?

 

Another OS Education List

Another list of Open Source Software for Education from Datamation.

http://itmanagement.earthweb.com/osrc/article.php/12068_3831751_1/50-Open-Source-Apps-Transforming-Education.htm

The list isn’t all for Linux. Windows and Mac software is included, and some of the stalwarts are not there, but you already knew about them, right?

What other software have you used to “transform” your classroom?

 

Summer Subjects

The kids have gone home. The chairs are being moved out of classrooms so washing and waxing can begin. Computer cleaning and imaging is at hand for the school tech staff.

Summer isn’t slack time. There are many things to do. Getting a bit of rest in the sun can be part of the plan (well not here in New England so far!)

Here’s a link for the school administrators. Technology Directors will also want to look at it. There is an emerging supply of open source school administration tools. It may be time to look at the products that are out there.

http://www.linux.com/news/enterprise/systems-management/24698:open-source-in-education-administation

 

Math and KIG and GeoGebra

KDE Interactive Geometry Program (KIG) is a great tool for teaching math. Here is a good set of directions on how to do it.

http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/teaching-math-kde-interactive-geometry-program

If that article interests you, but you don’t use Linux, check out GeoGebra which is a program written in Java so it should run on any operating system that supports  Java Runtime 1.4.2 or later. You can even do a launch of the program fromt the Web.

http://www.geogebra.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=67&Itemid=63

 

Sourceforge Project Vote

If you track open source projects, you are probably familiar with the Sourceforge site. It is a location on the Web which is designed to give developers space and an organizational structure to support the effort of building not only the software itself, but a community of users, supporters and team members.

It is currently time to vote for projects hosted there to give your opinion about which projects you find most useful or are the best in their category.

http://sourceforge.net/community/cca09/

Your input gives the projects emotional support and good press. Go ahead. Check out the nominees and vote.

 

No XP Downgrade after April 2010

Two dates are looming and may make the job of school technology leaders a bit more complex. Windows 7 is due in October 2009. More important, Microsoft says that after April 2010, you can’t downgrade to Windows XP, only Vista.

http://www.computerworlduk.com/technology/operating-systems/windows/in-depth/index.cfm?articleid=2313

Conservative school leaders have been downgrading new computer purchases from Vista to XP, and may also not want to jump too soon on the Windows 7 bandwagon. The “latest” hasn’t always been the “greatest”.

Will these two dates impact the way school leaders look at the GNU/Linux alternatives?

UPDATE: Within a day of the original date announcement, the ability to downgrade to XP has been extended. Now it is 18 months later April 2011, instead of just six months.

Apparently, Microsoft heard from somebody about the issue and paid attention!

 

Microsoft Margins and ODF

Microsoft sells a lot of software. Some of it is dominant in its area of impact. Microsoft Office is a perfect example. Open Document Format (ODF) is a challenge to that supremacy. If a person can successfully use an MSOffice alternative and move the produced data around effectively, Microsoft Office will lose its market dominance.

ODF is a file format. It is significant beyond that simple fact.

Through the years, every program which could produce a written document has had some file format. Even the venerable ASCII text file has/is a format, even though it lacks many abilities business, school and casual users expect today.

What ODF is attempting is really significant, though. When there are a bunch of competing file formats, the big deal is found in being able to “import” the file of a competitor’s program. And, if you cannot actually “export” quite so well, then it is easy to put the fault at the feet of the competitor whose format is inferior or otherwise inadequate. ODF seeks to make the file format a non-issue

Let’s use word processing as a basic example. With ODF, you choose your favorite WP program; you open a file from Joe in written in another program; Joe isn’t from your school; you add your information and then save it again; and finally you ship it to Susan at the Department of Education (whatever its official name) who can immediately open it in her favorite program. None of these “favorites” needs to be from Microsoft.

Clearly, that doesn’t play well in the world of Microsoft’s dreams. They don’t benefit from interoperability. They do, however, benefit even when they change the file format from time to time as it helps to ensure that people must buy the newest version of Word. That newest version isn’t often inexpensive, even if a business has gradually moved gradually over the years from Word 1.0, step by step, up to today’s shiny version.

Do you remember WordPerfect, MultiMate, XYWrite, WordStar, AppleWriter, Clarisworks, even Microsoft Works? They were once competitors for Word. Some were very successful  Have you used their most recent version lately? (Corel still sells WordPerfect in 2009 and MSWorks v9 is listed on Microsoft’s online store. I’m not sure about all the others, but some are gone.)

Today’s “favorite” word processing program is Microsoft Word. It dominates the word processing “industry”. But what if ODF succeeds? Microsoft probably doesn’t gain anything. Word will continue to be “favorite” for many, but increasingly there will be competition from the other guys. Users, some tired of the upgrade cycle, some not needing the new features of Word 20XX, some actually prefering another WP program. Those users will tell and teach others about their satisfaction over time, and Word will possibly become “just another word processing program”.

If you were in charge of Microsoft, would you encourage ODF?

If you are just a user, say a school user, maybe a teacher or a student and you need to pay for the program you use at home or the dorm, should you encourage ODF?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenDocument

http://www.odfalliance.org/

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I would also recommend the following blog/article from ComputerWorld by Glyn Moody on the same topic.

http://www.computerworlduk.com/toolbox/open-source/blogs/index.cfm?blogid=14&entryid=2269

(The reality of today is that the “favorite” program almost everywhere is Word because Microsoft has an amazing dominance in the