Asus Eee Reader

Early information says that this is the Ebook Reader to watch.

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/tech_and_web/article6822723.ece

Basic and premium versions sound like they are scheduled for release by the end of 2009. The premium version sounds fantastic. Two touch screens that close to face each other and protect the screens, color, virtual keyboard on one of the screens, WiFi connectivity. More details need to be available, and I’ll probably want to hold one in my hands before I jump.

The basic model is slated for $150. If the premium model is under double that, it sounds like a winner.

Asus gave us an inexpensive, very portable netbook a couple of years ago. This sounds like the merging of netbook and ebook reader that will cover most of my needs, easy to carry, access to the Internet, ability to hold like a traditional book while reading the etext, and the ability to take notes in a more serious way with the integrated virtual keyboard.

I am really looking forward to getting my hands on one of these.

Can your imagining eye see your students carrying these around?

 

Audience

In my neck of the woods, Massachusetts, school is about to start for the 2009-2010 academic year. Teachers have rested, restored, researched, reviewed, and generally gotten themselves ready to perform again, to act on all the training and experiences they have had. They are ready for the job ahead, giving students the chance to develop new skills and build on the ones that they more or less mastered the last time around.

Teachers are about to have the opening day meetings with the superintendent, principal, curriculum coordinator, department head, etc. That mixes with some scurrying around to make sure all the textbooks have the school’s official stamp in them, and there are actually enough desks for the arrival of the audience.

After reading a blog post about journalists, bloggers and the “audience”, it seemed valid to remind us all that students are a teacher’s audience. The students are ready to interact with the teachers they have and with the tasks they are assigned and…

In this 21st century, they also have the tools to be really interactive. It may be just a guess, but I think it is true. I bet there are more students doing live publishing to an Internet audience than there are teachers doing so.

There are Facebook, Twitter, Edublogger, WordPress, among other tools. There is email, too, with a more direct connection even if it is with a smaller scope. Email reaches those who are in the “To:” list and maybe the recipients “Forward to:” list and reactions appear very quickly in the “Reply to all” messages. Facebook, Twitter, etc. can have an even bigger audience if you get “followed”.

So what does it mean for the final year of the first decade of the 21st century? If your teaching is amazing, your students may talk about what they learned in your classroom. If your teaching stinks, they may also talk about the classes that really rot. Especially, if your teaching stinks, students will ask each other for help before they will ask to stay after school to get extra help from you.

Embrace the challenge. Get hooked in to the tools of the Internet yourself, Mr./Mrs./Ms./Miss Teacher. Find out what it means to be part of the wider interactive process of learning going on these days.

If you have embraced email on a personal level, consider taking it to the next level and connect with your students by email, and with their parents. Be honest, don’t give them the false hope of constant one-on-one interaction. Parents do generally have brains. They know that having even two children to handle around the breakfast “minute” before the bus arrives doesn’t leave time for accepting the squabbles which delay everything. Students and parents will value honest interaction from you, even if it is periodic instead of instant feedback to a yammered question. Your superintendent and principal have probably harped for years about “keeping the parents informed”. Email can be a path that works for you on many levels. Students who know you send email to thier parents will need to acknowledge the assignments you mention. Parents who know what your expectations are may be willing to support them at home. Administrators might even acknowledge your effort, even if they cannot recommend a raise.

Go further, if you dare. Start a blog. Write about your assignments from the perspective you have of them. You are a teacher. Teach with all the tools at your disposal. Don’t hand out a reading assignment from a 10 year old textbook and then drone on about it in class the following day. Give the reading assignment. In your blog, encourage students to find supporting information on the Internet. Talk about your understanding of the content, and give them some links to sources about which you are aware. Encourage them to leave comments at the blog about other sources they find. Make your blog an extension of the classroom discussion. Students will share their finds behind your back because their friends appreciate their effort. Build in that curriculum support to the assignments you give. Your effective students should be able to get wider appreciation for what they were able to do.

If you are not sure about this and want help, that’s fine. ASK! There are teachers who have been eager early adopters who are already telling how to do it. If you cannot find a local “guru”, look beyond your school’s walls. There are numerous early adopters talking about the 21st century tools. One example is Greg Kulowiec, a dynamic history teacher in Plymouth, MA. Take a look at his blog: The History 2.0 Classroom.

Find out more directly from Greg by looking into two events. Greg is going to be a presenter at the MassCUE Technology Conference, October 28 and 29 at Gillette Stadium. Since the Massachusetts Superintendents organization, M.A.S.S. is co-sponsoring the conference, there may be more opportunities for school personnel to get attendance approved. ASK Tomorrow!

Greg is also going to host the TEDxPlymouth gathering at Plymouth South High School and is also tentatively scheduled for October. TED is all about “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

Look, too, at other teacher blogs. See what they are doing.

Leave comments here about the best ones you find. Include your own, of course.

No matter how you embrace the 21st century tools available to education, take the step into your classroom, your stage. Look directly into the eyes of your students, your audience. Begin your interaction.

 

Ebook Evolution

Here’s a challenge:

Read the following post.

http://www.olpcnews.com/content/ebooks/braindump_on_future_of_ebooks.html

Then think; digest the ideas.

Write a proposal for what you want to see in the evolving ebook “format”. Submit it to somebody. Let your wishes be known. Comments will be enthusiastically accepted here, but don’t stop there. Spread your ideas as widely as you can

Help make sure ebooks meet your educational needs.

 

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?

 

Podcast Patent

Before school starts up again, and designed to get you involved with new skills for the new year, TEC Professional Development Center in Dedham is offering a course for K12 teachers to get them (you) up to speed with “21st century skills, Web 2.0 tools, digital stories, webquests, podcasts, blogs and wikis”. All of these skills involve making effective use of the Internet with computers in and beyond your classroom. Students can benefit while they are with you and continue to benefit when they go home or go to study in the local library.

For more information, contact: TEC Professional Development, PO Box 186, Dedham, MA 02027

More info may also be available through the TEC Web site.

One of the activities included is, as mentioned, podcasting. Fundamentally, it involves recording some audio into a format like the open format OGG or other computer format like MP3 and putting the file onto a Web site or blog where other people can get it. Aside from the details (which the course is going to teach), it sounds pretty obvious. However, the US Patent Office has recently granted a patent for podcasting to a company called VoloMedia.

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/company_receives_patent_for_podcasting.php

Let’s hope the impact of this patent is minimized, especially for educational purposes. Giving audio and, more recently, video to students through the Internet is certainly a powerful way to engage your students in a style that is apt to attract their attention.

 

GNU Generation

High school teachers, if you teach programming, or even just computer “literacy”, here is something for you to do for your students. Promote the opportunity for your students to get involved in a free software project.

The Free Software Foundation has instituted an annual contest that will award a GNU powered netbook computer to a student at the end of each year and a tee shirt monthly based on feedback from the projects that students work on.

http://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/gnugeneration

This is a “real world” opportunity that can take your students’ work out of the ordinary limits of classroom assignments, and can engage your most eager students to use their talents to advance the FOSS community. You know some of your students will benefit. Give them the chance. Tell them about the opportunity, encourage them to get involved. Offer to give them support, too.

 

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?

 

DRM and Kindle

I think the issue of Digital Rights Management will eventually resolve itself. For now, though, DRM is the main reason I am waiting, and not buying a new dedicated ebook reader, Kindle or otherwise.

The Corante “Copyfight” blog post added good perspective for me.

http://copyfight.corante.com/archives/2009/07/21/amazons_gaffe_isnt_what_you_think_it_is.php

A traditional book is “mine” from the moment I leave the store from which I purchased it. I think that the sense of property ownership is comfortable. It is more satisfying to have “ownership” than a “non-exclusive license to use” the contents of the book. If the pages of my book could suddenly go blank, I wouldn’t think I owned much since the traditional book, as property, isn’t really its paper and cover.

I actually think that the contents of a book can lead to profit for me. The concepts of a book, even if fiction, improve my scope of thought. It isn’t my ability to resell the content as-is. It is my ability to merge the new ideas into my Vast Fund of General Information (VFOGI). Thanks to my high school teacher, Hugh Semple for the term. Being able to review or completely re-read a book is sometimes important to the process. Yes, I can go to a library or pay for a second copy, but for the most significant of my resources, I don’t want to need to do either. The information needs to be within arm’s reach.

I don’t think that content held in the “cloud” space of the Internet is truly mine, as events in the Kindle fiasco show. Even if I must keep more than one backup copy of a document to avoid technological data failures, I do want to “hold” my electronic copies of resources: ebooks, digital photos, etc.

The blog’s author, Alan Wexelblat, even addresses the issue from an educational perspective. All of us who have taught know it is wise to have a “plan B” for the times a computer presentation doesn’t go well. If we were to depend on textbooks that could disappear like the books in the Kindle fiasco, whole school departments would suddenly need to do a plan B shift. That’s not a pretty thought.

 

Digital Library

How big is your school’s digital library?

What is in it?

How do you get access to it?

Who “controls” access?

There’s a free access magazine on the Internet that covers issues related to the digital content of libraries.

http://www.dlib.org

In the most recent issue, an article titled:

“21st Century Shipping
Network Data Transfer to the Library of Congress “

Between 2008 and 2009 the Library of Congress added approximately 100 TB of data to its digital collections, transferred from universities, publishers, web archivists and other organizations. The data comprised a broad range of content from photos to video, from books and periodicals to websites.

WOW!

I am not suggesting a school might or should have a digital collection like that, but aren’t we at a point when educational support materials can be made more accessible if in digital formats. And, though an IT department might have the skills to maintain the integrity of the content, it probably should be a librarian who is the “maintainer” of the data. It needs appropriate cataloging, integration into the scope and sequence documents of the school, etc.

Certainly, any materials that are available in the public domain and other licenses such as the Creative Commons Attribution license should be considered for inclusion, even though they are available from sources on the Internet. I would argue for local copies instead of just links to the content housed elsewhere, but maybe some combination of the two is appropriate.

More and more teachers are creating materials with computers, but I would bet that most of those materials are not often shared even among colleagues in the same building. Creative effort in an educational setting needs a place to shine through the walls of the individual classrooms. What better place to collect such artifacts than in a school’s digital library where they can be accessed, used, expanded and possibly even outlive the tenure of the individual who created them.

A school or district could even gain positive notice by generating a critical mass of such content and making it available to other schools. Naturally, such a generous spirit requires that the materials be properly licensed, but what makes more sense than that? Tying the material up in copyright because a teacher might hope to be made rich? Unlikely…and probable, too that most teachers don’t get into the field of education with expectation of riches. The more probable scenario is that the individual items in the digital collection are made more powerful when mixed with other items in the collection created by others.

Of course, I would recommend that as much of the material be created or converted to an open format so that tie in to a particular software program isn’t a limitation. Time has a funny way of making old proprietary formats inaccessible.

Start the committee, make the proposal to your librarian, IT department, principal, and superintendent. Get the ball rolling. It’s summer, a great time to start a digital library.

Network Data Transfer to the Library of Congress

 

GPL – Freedom for the User

Please read Glyn Moody’s recent post.

http://www.computerworlduk.com/community/blogs/index.cfm?entryid=2359&blogid=14

Are you “moved” by freedom as Glyn Moody appears to be?

I use Google because there is no alternative, just as I used Windows before I made the move to GNU/Linux. Once there is are alternatives that respect me in the way free software respects me, I shall move, and I suspect others will too.

You use software if you are reading this blog post. Is it software that respects you? Is it GPL licensed software, or at least open source with a more liberal license?

In the United States “Home of the free and the brave”, how well is your freedom being treated by your software?