Hartman's Blogtastic Blog

The Android Market: a Solution for Apps at Last?

2011-02-03T17:17:00.000-08:00

One of the main problems I've heard about these iPad and iPod Touch educational pilot programs that everyone seems to be so enamored with is application management. Everyone loves apps because they're cheap and good ones are so intuitive that almost no training is required at all to get them working. The problem is that apps are by and large built around a consumer market model, and almost exclusively delivered through the cloud whether via iTunes for iOS or over the air via the Android Market (or Blackberry Market, Palm Market, etc.). Has anyone honestly ever gone into a store to purchase an SD card with an app on it and then inserted that SD card into their phone and installed that app on their phone/tablet? (Nevermind iOS devices don't have SD card slots in the first place). That now absurd sounding process is exactly what consumers and organizations used to do with CD-Roms and DVDs, and that was one (admittedly complicated) way to concretely manage applications across an organization.

With the advent of app stores, how does an organization manage applications effectively? Is an application licensed to a device or a user? If several classes and dozens of students are utilizing one iPod Touch cart, how many instances of a given application are they supposed to purchase? How does a student make sure the progress they make in the app or the work they do in an app is associated with the correct user account? What about updates?

Yesterday Google officially unveiled the Android Market, which seems to have answers for some of these questions. The Android Market is a website, (not a program like iTunes) and programs can be purchased and installed to multiple Android devices over the air. The skeleton of a comprehensive application management system appears to be there, but there is still much progress to be made:

Firstly, I haven't been able to find out if Android devices have the ability to support multiple users logging in and out. This would be important since the Android Market associates all applications on the device(s) with whatever Google Account is active on the devices at the time.

Secondly, the Android Market does not appear to support multiple application management rights levels. It would be nice if, for example, an IT administrator could log in to see all the applications and devices owned by the organization, while a teacher could log in and see all the applications and devices being used in their class, etc.

Thirdly, the Android Market appears to only have the ability to install applications to devices, whereas a complete central application management system would have to allow an administrator the ability to install, update, and uninstall applications to any device or groups of devices.

That being said, it does now seem possible for a rudimentary application management system to exist. An administrator could purchase a dozen Android tablets, register a dummy Google account, purchase an app through the Android Market and deploy it to all 12 devices over the air. In fact, this appears to be the recommended strategy for just such a situation. (I should probably mention that this strategy is probably also possible on iOS devices using iTunes except that the devices would have to be physically tethered one after the other to a computer to get the apps instead of getting them pushed over wireless).

This rudimentary strategy may not have all the advantages of a fully fledged application management environment, but at least you only have to buy each app once!

Canvas LMS: newly Open Sourced and ready for Education

2011-02-03T17:15:00.000-08:00

I've never heard of Canvas before, but it looks like an amazing product. I suppose that has something to do with it being written in Ruby. I have some friends who code in Ruby and they swear by it. I'd love to get an install up and running for this and see what it can do, but the youtube videos (apparently not working anymore on this link for some reason) show a lot. The grader looks incredible in its own right.
http://www.zdnet.com/blog/education/there-are-alternatives-to-blackboard-and-moodle-instructure-canvas-goes-open-source/4475?tag=mantle_skin;content

The Five Orders of Technology OR Why OpenOffice Impress Sucks

2010-07-10T22:35:00.000-07:00

I don't have decades of experience supporting technology, but in the few years I've been at the academies I've noticed that several mistakes I've made were as a result of my failure to properly understand what I've come to refer to as the "Five Orders of Technology". The Order is a classification system of technology tools that has been, in my experience, a useful way of evaluating both potential purchases as well as existing technology and the ways to best support its use.

Technology tools at the top of the Order are the most preferred. They are tools that are both good AND predictable, meaning they accomplishes useful tasks with a high degree of quality while operating in a consistent and reliable manner. Examples would be a quality gigabit ethernet switch or an excellent industrial air conditioner.

The second order of technology are tools that are worth having, but just barely. They are bad, but operate predictably. They might be a network hub or Microsoft's Movie Maker. Neither one of these tools is particularly good at what it is built to do, but at least they both can be depended upon to accomplish what they do with consistency.

The third order of technology is a bit of a misnomer. It is to have no technology at all. This may seem counterintuitive, but I'll explain later on why this is where "no technology" belongs in the order.

Fourth in the Order of technology is that which is good but unreliable. It is like Google Chrome on my home theater PC. It works beautifully, but crashes at unpredictable times (unless I have guests over and am trying to show them something cool on the Internet. Then it can be depended upon to crash without fail).

The fifth and least desirable level of technology is that which is both bad AND unreliable. It is at this lowest and least preferred level that OpenOffice Impress resides. It is bad software in nearly every sense of the word: unintuitive, complicated, overwhelming, underpowered, and slow. It is also unreliable; actions do not behave in predictable ways. Bullet points, for example, move higher or lower on text (or vanish altogether) depending on seemingly arbitrary and unseen circumstances.

Using OpenOffice Impress is an obvious exercise in self-flagellation and clearly worse than good and reliable software, but is it really worse than having no presentation software at all as suggested by the Order? Allow me to illustrate how it is with the example of a restaurant chef and his refrigerator.

The first order of technology assumes the chef has a high quality refrigerator that works well and dependably. It keeps his ingredients fresh and rarely fails (or maybe even has a backup power mechanism in the event of failure).

At the second order, the chef has a lesser quality fridge, but one that works predictably. Maybe it doesn't have as much room, or the same features, or isn't as customizable as the top tier refrigerators, but it does the job the chef asks of it and rarely lets him down.

The third order gives the chef no refrigerator at all. This is a burden, but at least it is predictable. The chef knows he does not have the ability to keep ingredients cold, and so devises methods of running his kitchen that do not require that ability. Perhaps ice is brought daily and kept in a cooler or ingredients are purchased each morning instead of once per week. The point is that the chef can adapt to his situation because he knows what to expect.

The fourth order assumes the chef has a top quality refrigerator that regularly malfunctions. Perhaps it powers off in the middle of the night, spoiling the food it was supposed to keep fresh. Maybe it affects other tools in its surroundings by blowing fuses or short circuiting other devices. In any case, the quality of the device is overwhelmed by its unreliability and the chef's work is made more challenging for it. Some mornings he shows up and his ingredients are perfectly preserved, ready for preparation. Other mornings are disastrous, and he is left scrambling for solutions.

The fifth order is worse than the fourth only in that the refrigerator is of a lower initial quality. This difference is negligible really, as the main problem continues to be the predictability of the fridge, not its quality. (In fact, it could be argued that the fifth order is actually preferable to the fourth in that the chef might be less frustrated by unpredictable performance from a substandard refrigerator than a top caliber one, and thus more likely to either rid himself of the technology and move up to order 3, or purchase a new one and move to order 1 or 2).

There are, of course, situations when bad and unpredictable technology is preferable to no technology at all. If I were stranded on a desert island, for example, I think I'd rather have a cheap and unreliable long-wave radio than no radio at all. Similarly, it might be embarrassing for me to have Google Chrome crash when I have guests over, but I prefer it to having no browser at all.

In production environments, however, like a school or a classroom, predictability is much more important (as seen with the chef illustration). It is far better, for example, for a teacher to know that there are no laptops to use this month than to design a lesson around using laptops only to discover they aren't working properly. The former scenario at least allows the teacher the opportunity to plan a non technology-infused lesson, while the latter wastes both the teacher's and students' time and, perhaps even more damaging, leads eventually to their developing a wary and apprehensive attitude towards the technology itself.

In my experience, if a user is burned by unpredictable technology more than twice, they "learn their lesson" and are much less likely to attempt to use that technology in the future. This attitude can prevail even in the face of updates, troubleshooting, or even the wholesale replacement of the technology and is, of course, especially potent if that particular teacher is already fishing for an excuse to dismiss the use of the technology in the first place.

Therefore, in an age when seemingly everyone is looking to technology to bridge divides in education and push student achievement higher, not heeding the implications of the 5 Orders of Technology is, in my opinion, a big mistake.

Our Google Secure Search Troubles Highlighted by Chris Dawson of ZDNet

2010-06-08T23:28:00.000-07:00

Chris Dawson is one of the few bloggers of whose posts I read each and every one. Therefore it is a great honor for me to be mentioned in one of his posts and, furthermore, I'm very thankful to him for taking the time to highlight our troubles. It is a shame that the occasion was prompted by such unfortunate circumstances as our being without any Google services for nearly two weeks however.

How to Undo an Update in Ubuntu Lucid

2010-06-08T22:46:00.000-07:00

Well it took me a few hours but I finally figured out why a couple of the images I've been working on were taking so long to fully load the Gnome Panel upon login (about 30 seconds as opposed to the 5-8 it normally takes). After ruling out dozens of other possibilities I finally realized that it was a gnome-keyring update I installed just today that was causing the panel to load so slowly. It wasn't easy though.

The first step to undoing the offending update was to find out what updates it was exactly. After searching some forums I came across a way to see my update history:

Open synaptic package manager ("sudo synaptic" in the terminal). From the menu bar, click File -> History and you will see all your updates sorted by date.

Unfortunately I had installed about 20 updates today, and I didn't know which one had caused the problem. By searching through each of the packages named in the History list, I was able to downgrade a few at a time until the problem was solved and I had identified the offending update. To do this:

Use the search bar to find the package you want to downgrade. Once you've found what you're looking for, click on the package to select it. From the menu bar, click Package -> Force Version and select the previous version of the package from the drop down menu. Click the "Apply" button to apply the downgrade.

It's not an elegant solution, but it did the trick for me. Hopefully it will help someone else out there sometime too. Cheers! -Joe

Lock Down Firefox Preferences on Ubuntu Lucid With a New firefox.js File

2010-06-08T13:43:00.001-07:00

In the past couple of weeks we've received 105 donated computers. Dell GX260/270 towers, P4's all, 512MB-1GB of RAM and decent specs otherwise. This has dramatically shifted my vision for the technology infrastructure of the Academies. We no longer have to worry about utilizing underpowered Pentium 3 machines any longer, which means the need for LTSP and all its advantages is gone as well.

LTSP is, in my opinion, an elegant but troublesome solution. Without consistent and frequent monitoring there are simply too many ways for individual workstations to stop functioning. Of course, when a breaker flips, a student accidentally kicks a surge protector strip off, or someone knocks out the switch the whole thing comes to a crashing halt.

Therefore, I've recently begun building several images of both Windows XP (for our Rosetta Stone utilizing teachers) and Ubuntu Lucid for the various machines we have on campus. I'm hoping to find the time to put together a complete "From Square One" guide to locking down the Ubuntu desktop (as I've done it a few times already this week), but for now I thought I'd share a particularly useful bit of code, following up from a previous post of mine.

Some of the old firefox.js settings no longer work, but I've managed to fix all of them and add a couple more that I like. I think the descriptions are mostly adequate to see what I'm attempting, but if you have any questions drop a comment and I'll reply. Cheers! -Joe

As before, this is the firefox.js file located in etc/firefox/pref/

// This is the Debian specific preferences file for Mozilla Firefox
// You can make any change in here, it is the purpose of this file.
// You can, with this file and all files present in the
// /etc/firefox/pref directory, override any preference that is
// present in /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref directory.
// While your changes will be kept on upgrade if you modify files in
// /etc/firefox/pref, please note that they won't be kept if you
// do them in /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref.

pref("extensions.update.enabled", true);

// Use LANG environment variable to choose locale
pref("intl.locale.matchOS", true);

// Disable default browser checking.
pref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser", false);

// Prevent EULA dialog to popup on first run
pref("browser.EULA.override", true);

// identify default locale to use if no /usr/lib/firefox-addons/searchplugins/LOCALE
// exists for the current used LOCALE
pref("distribution.searchplugins.defaultLocale", "en-US");

// Enable the NetworkManager integration
pref("toolkit.networkmanager.disable", false);

// Other preferences

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.aeacs.org");

user_pref("startup.homepage_override_url", "http://www.aeacs.org");

user_pref("startup.homepage_welcome_url", "http://www.aeacs.org");

pref("browser.startup.homepage_reset", "http://www.aeacs.org");

pref("privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown", true);

pref("privacy.sanitize.promptOnSanitize", false);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.offlineApps", true);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.passwords", true);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.siteSettings", true);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.history", false);

pref("privacy.clearOnShutdown.downloads", false);

pref("signon.rememberSignons", false);

pref("browser.tabs.warnOnClose", false);

My personal statement for admission to Pepperdine's Ed.D in Learning Technologies program

2010-03-31T16:07:00.000-07:00

I once read a story about an economist who was travelling through China and took the opportunity to attend a tour of a new dam being constructed. The tour was given by the town mayor, and when the two men came to a summit from which they could survey the construction in its entirety, the economist noticed for the first time the many hundreds of workers laboring with their shovels to move the earth. He remarked, "You know Mayor, you should consider purchasing some bulldozers and cranes for this project, it would go much quicker."

"Ah," said the mayor, "But then what would happen to the workers employed here? The way it is now these men enjoy a good wage and can provide for their families."

"Oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were trying to build a dam," replied the economist. "If it's employment you want you should take their shovels away and replace them with spoons."

The lesson illustrated in the story is one of efficiency, perhaps the most fundamental concept of economics and one that technology is inherently bound to. My vision for technology is one in which increased efficiency, due to the use of technology in education, leads to transformative changes that increase academic oversight, opportunity, and achievement through an increased ability to differentiate and personalize instruction. In other words, I think technology should enable students to learn at their own perfect pace across all subject areas with whatever tools they want.

Any educator will acknowledge that the most difficult aspect of teaching is challenging all learners at their individual ability levels. At the post graduate level this issue is often addressed through criterion based assessments outlined in syllabi that inform each student what the requirements of the class will be. In this scenario it is often the less capable students who suffer from inadequate support, failing to meet the criteria for advancement in the allotted amount of time and forced to repeat or abandon the class.

Primary schools, in recent years, have taken the virtually inverse approach of "leaving no child behind". Until virtually every learner has grasped the concept at hand, the class is prevented from advancing to more difficult material. In this scenario, it is the most capable students who suffer.

Excellent teachers in either case can mitigate the harm inflicted through these systems by differentiating instruction. That is, by providing extra support to less capable students while simultaneously providing extra challenges to more capable ones. The trouble with differentiating instruction is that it is extremely time consuming, mainly because units of learning are not very scalable. There will be some overlap between what one group of students is learning and what another is learning, but in general, any increase in the sets of learners for a given unit results in a corresponding and equal increase in the amount of time it takes the teacher to design the unit. In addition, designing a unit for multiple sets of learners increases not only the amount of preparation for a teacher, but the amount of instruction, and the amount of assessment as well. The very best teachers may be able to maintain a three-tiered system of differentiated instruction across multiple units, but teacher-differentiated instruction on an individual student level is simply too inefficient to be feasible.

I believe that current, existing technology is capable of increasing the efficiency of this process to the point where it is viable to differentiate instruction at the individual learner level. Many districts are already using advanced technological tools and software to assess individual student abilities and target areas of weakness. The next step will be for them to utilize tools and software to design individual learning coursework. The popular language acquisition software Rosetta Stone already does an admirable job of this. The final step will be to design and utilize tools and software to deliver the coursework itself.

Some may balk at this last suggestion that technology could replace a teacher, and it is true that there may never be technology sophisticated enough to replace the unique abilities of a human educator. It is also likely true that there will always be a place for subjective, human assessments of student work in areas like creativity, originality, and endeavor, especially given the recent calls for teaching "21st century skills". But I believe we can agree that to the extent technology is able to replace a teacher's work, it should.

Computerized assessments are a proven example. Arguments against non teacher-graded assessments abound: they are impersonal, the teacher doesn't see the students' work firsthand, it's difficult or impossible to assess the students' line of thinking, etc. These are not invalid arguments, but the bottom line is that computer-graded assessments are more efficient than teacher-graded ones. In addition, this increase in efficiency allows the assessments to be exceptionally thorough, and they open up a host of other benefits such as cross-referenced reports and comparative graphs that make the data easier for educators to understand and act upon. Contrary to hindering the teacher from learning more about their students, computerized assessments enable the teacher to learn more about their students' abilities than ever before because they can be done more efficiently than ever before.

At this point in time, however, even the most advanced computerized assessments serve mainly to allow teachers to make curriculum decisions at the whole class level. The data aggregation extrapolates information from the individuals so that the teacher can make inferences about the class as a whole. In my vision for technology, the aggregation begins and ends at the individual learner level. Each student is instructed and assessed within their own optimized learning stream, without regard to their standing relative to their peers.

There are obviously many hurdles to reform on such a scale as this. Political will, funding, and even the wisdom of such drastic changes would all need to be determined before moving forward. But as with many of the world's most intractable problems, the existing culture surrounding education in America may be reform's single biggest adversary.

Americans are accustomed to an educational system that is organized around time. Whether the time is the school year, the semester lengths, the periodic breaks, the length of the school day, or the age of the students in a grade, the entire educational system has been organized around it. An individualized approach to education would deemphasize the role of time, and instead emphasize the role of accomplishment. In my vision, instead of asking certain students to accomplish either more or less than other students in the same amount of time, we would ask all students to accomplish equally, even if it took different amounts of time. Such an paradigm shift is unlikely to be easy for Americans to adjust to, but it has already begun to happen in the business world.

Many successful businesses, Google being perhaps the most famous, are renowned for their commitment to accomplishment rather than time. Their employees are not subjected to time cards, 30 minute lunches, or even a steadfast start to the working day. In return, however, employees are held accountable for their accomplishments (or lack thereof) and expected to be productive during their time on the job.

Globalization, in emphasizing the relativity of time, has succeeded in shifting the paradigm as well. In a world where executives are frequently in meetings with individuals in other time zones and much of the Muslim world takes weekends on entirely different days of the week, a rigid adherence to the eight hour day and 40 hour week is competitively disadvantageous.

Finally, technology itself has affected the way the business world regards time. When business trips were the norm, time was an abnormal concern only with respect to jet lag. With the advent of conference calls, video conferences, and mobile phones, business meetings no longer necessarily coincide with traditional business operating hours, and instead of being defined by the clock, the modern businessman's climate is defined by the accomplishment of tasks.

Therefore, there is reason to believe that such a paradigm shift in educational culture would be possible for Americans to accept. What circumstances would have to arise to allow such acceptance is unclear, but given that competition was the main motivator in the business world, it seems reasonable to assume that it would be the same in education. Where that competition comes from then becomes the question, and while there are many, even at the highest levels of government, who are trying to manufacture competition in education through the establishment of charter schools and voucher programs, I believe that the majority of the competition will come from outside America's borders.

My tenure as an Edtec graduate student at San Diego State was one of best times of my life. I took the trolley to campus and read books for pleasure on the ride. I got a graduate assistantship in the College of Education and learned how to repair computers and train faculty to utilize technology in their classes. I even got to oversee a distance learning class for one of my professors, where half the class participated in person with microphones and a camera that I controlled, and the other half participated through webcams and their computers at home. Perhaps my best experiences during that time, however, were the two trips I took to China to see and learn about the implementation of technology in education across that country.

My first trip lasted nearly two months, that time being split between a few days in Shanghai, about a month in Shenzhen (near Hong Kong), and the remaining weeks in Beijing. The internship was the result of a collaboration between SDSU and Beijing Normal University, and I was assigned a mentor in Shenzhen, a fellow Edtec graduate student, to shadow and learn from. Together we traveled across the city to see "experimental" schools whose express purpose for existing was to be testbeds for technological innovation in education.

I had spent the preceding school year working in what was my first teaching position: sixth grade math and science teacher at High Tech Middle School. HTM is affiliated with the highly respected High Tech High consortium of charter schools centered around project-based learning and abundant technology use. In my classroom, in 2004, we had enough laptops for a 1:2 ratio of computers to students, but it was easy enough to borrow a set of laptops from a neighboring classroom to allow a true 1:1 ratio when needed. This experience made me believe I was prepared for whatever innovations I would see in China, but I was wrong. Nothing I experienced at HTM compared to what I saw in China. Indeed, in the six years hence I have yet to see anything in American education compare in scale or maturity to what I saw being done there.

In Shenzhen I saw incredible, systemic innovations being applied across multiple schools. Entire primary school lessons incorporating flash-based interactive modules were delivered by teachers to classrooms of fifty or more students, each with their own computer built into their desk. Familiarity with the routines were self-evident, and teachers took pains to extend the lesson beyond the computer screen by instructing students to pair up and peer evaluate one another, or put on their headphones and repeat out loud the words they were learning from the flash modules. Confident volunteers were invited to recite points of the lesson from their seats or from the teacher's control podium at the front of the room, and when the lesson was all over, students as young as American kindergarteners gathered up their belongings and scurried off to their next subject-based class.

In Shanghai I saw lectures by college professors, both live and recorded, streamed to mobile phones with audio and the ability to pause and rewind. Then I was shown on the same mobile phone, a live camera view of the room directly adjacent to the one I was standing in. What Americans might mistake for security cameras were being used to record and broadcast lectures across a mobile network.

During my second trip to Beijing, about a year after the first, I attended a conference where Edtec graduate students from Hong Kong showed me a farm-centered Massively Multi-player Online Role Playing game they had created. Americans might recognize it now as similar to Farmville, the popular social game within Facebook. The difference, of course, is that China's version was designed to be implemented in the classroom and teach economic concepts, whereas Farmville is seen to be mostly a good way to waste time and spam your friends' Facebook feed.

As blown away by all this as I was, the most impressive aspect of the innovation I saw in China was not the technology itself, or even its use. It was instead the collaboration across the technology that struck me as being so far beyond anything in America. The technology alone served to simply link the different participants together, to make the work of one body accessible to a different body.

The farm-centered MMORPG was designed by Edtec students in Hong Kong, but coded by computer science majors at the same school, and implemented by teachers across the country. The lectures being recorded in Shanghai were archived and made available to universities across the country, specifically the underserved and more rural eastern provinces. The flash-based modules the teacher in Shenzhen used were designed by a Beijing Normal University Edtec graduate student and stored in a database of similar lessons. The system of collaboration even included me, a lowly foreign intern. My job in Beijing was to transcript the English flash-based lessons and input their entire text into the central database so that any teacher across the country could search for any given lesson by title, subject, or keyword.

Today I work at a different charter school in San Diego, teaching fifth grade and also overseeing the entire IT infrastructure of the organization. Over the past four years we've made great strides in providing our teachers and students with access to technology. We've moved both the student body and the entire faculty, staff, and administration over to Google Apps for Education. We've provided every teacher with a laptop and projector cart with document camera. We've installed WiFi across the campus and bought some netbooks that students can check out from the library. I'm proud of the progress we've made, but we're still years away from utilizing technology to the extent that those schools in Shenzhen were, and that was over five years ago now.

The most depressing thought for me to ponder though, is the fact that many of my fellow teachers don't utilize the technology we've given them at all. Several, especially in the lower grades, don't even know how to operate the projector cart adequately. If we, a small, unencumbered charter school, can't collaborate effectively across even the few grades we serve, how will we, as a city, state, or country collaborate to the extent that China has been for years?

My personal hope for this degree is that it will lead me towards acquiring the knowledge and understanding needed to begin to answer daunting questions like the one I've asked above. I know that without the ability to address these sorts of problems, my vision for technology, much less more audacious visions, have no chance of coming to fruition.

I'm in the midst of interviewing for a position with the San Diego County Office of Education, and I hope to work with districts there to not only help them effectively implement technology within their own schools, but also help them implement technology effectively between their schools, between districts, and even between educational realms. I could see myself working within this specific office for the rest of my career, but not if I don't have the skills and understanding to be a productive member of the team.

I want to become an agent of positive change in America's system of education. I believe I have seen the future of education: the entire system working collaboratively, from postgraduates to preschoolers, helping one another become more accomplished learners and better citizens. I hope an Ed.D in Learning Technologies will introduce me to new possibilities for implementing technology in education and that it will introduce me to new people with the same passions as myself, but I also hope it will help me reach this goal of being an effective and positive agent of change within the system of education itself.

America may no longer be the global leader of public education (if it ever was) but that only means that our current path forward has been more clearly laid out by the current leaders than it would have been otherwise. I, for one, am anxious to get started down that path.

Respectfully, Joseph Hartman

Resolution issues in LTSP

2009-09-02T17:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I brought my whole class down to my newly configured LTSP lab with my dual quad core xeon, 8 gigs of RAM server powering my 22 Pentium 3, 128 MB RAM thin clients across a 10/100 switch with gigabit uplink from the server to the switch. From everything I've read this setup should work fine, especially since I've got firefox running as a local app now. Alas, it was not long before the familiar old complaints were ravaging my ears. "Mine's frozen!" "The computer's not working!" "Mine's slow!"

Ugh.

I did my best to alleviate the immediate issue by moving kids off of computers and that seemed to help a bit, but I still think there must be some sort of issue with my switch or something. I'm not entirely sure what the problem could be, but I knew that 128MB was pretty lean for the clients so after school I collected all the old PC133 SDRAM I had in stock and installed an extra stick in each client. This brings me to 256MB RAM in each machine which should be adequate.

I figured out how to check on the switch settings and all the ports are running at full duplex, but I've got a parent here who's pretty saavy with network issues so I might have him probe around a bit more.

One thing still left me puzzled yesterday, and that was the fact that some of the machines were not showing the screen correctly. Things were showing tracks around the screen and the resolution was different on different monitors. This despite the clients all being the same make and model. Very confusing.

It's taken me a couple of hours this afternoon, but I finally figured out the problem. I noticed that the problem was only happening on certain monitors, Dell M782 models to be exact. The Dell 781P's, which are actually a year older than the 782's, were working perfectly.

After wading through the ltsp handbook for a while and trying all kinds of settings in my lts.conf (/var/lib/tftpboot/ltsp/i386/lts.conf) I finally found the one setting that fixed all my problems:

XRANDR_DISABLE = True

Apparently Xrandr was trying to autoconfigure the settings on the monitor and was somehow getting them wrong. By disabling xrandr I was able to dictate the resolution I wanted and all the tracing and slow performance disappeared! Sweet. Here's my complete lts.conf if you're curious, but disabling xrandr was really the key to getting the monitor resolutions right. Cheers! -joe

[Default]
LDM_DIRECTX = True
XRANDR_DISABLE = True
X_RAMPERC = 80
X_MODE_0 = 1280x1024
LOCAL_APPS = True
LOCAL_APPS_MENU = True
LOCAL_APPS_MENU_ITEMS = firefox
SEARCH_DOMAIN = 192.168.0.1 || Change this for your own network
DNS_SERVER = 92.168.0.1 || Change this for your own network
RCFILE_01 = /etc/init.d/chmod-resolv.sh

LTSP Local Apps progress: Firefox AND Flash Success!

2009-08-30T09:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday (Saturday) the schools campus was open until 4pm to give teachers one last shot at preparing for the kids' arrival on Monday. At about 3:50 I finally got my classroom LTSP server running Firefox with Flash as a local app!

It took a few clean installs to get it working and I never could get it to work with XFCE, which may be just as well since their support listserv still hasn't gotten back to me about kiosk mode in XFCE 4.6 and there is still no documentation on their website for 4.6 at all.

In the end I used GNOME, but I was also successful using KDE on one of the computer lab servers a couple of days ago. I plan on sticking with GNOME for the time being mostly because it is a faster desktop environment, but also because kiosktool for KDE appears to be a pain to install AND rarely maintained. I just wasn't willing to muddle my way through another lockdown program so it looks like GConf will be my new best friend for the time being.

I took the time to create a new page on the wiki that describes for beginners the process to getting Firefox and flash working as a local app on an LTSP setup. I haven't run through it myself to make sure every line is accurate, but I plan on doing so this week when I switch the computer lab over to GNOME from KDE.

In summary: it should now be possible for nearly anyone to install an LTSP setup with nothing more than a Pentium 4 as a server and then run Firefox with flash as a local application on the thin clients without too much trouble. LTSP is getting more viable by the day! -joe

2009-2010 Year Approaching

2009-08-22T23:52:00.000-07:00

School starts in 8 days, but I started back at school a couple of weeks ago. We had a string of break-ins on campus at the end of last year and while the thief initially (and surprisingly) didn't take anything aside from a few dollars laying around during the first two incidents, he eventually wised up and swiped a laptop.

In any case, I had some work to do processing some new equipment brought in for different situations like the one above, and of course I wanted to make a little progress on the Ubuntu servers we have in the labs and classrooms to see if I could have them running local apps at the start of the year.

Anyone looking to implement local apps at this point (myself included) would be wise to remember that it is a very experimental proposition as it currently exists. That being said, there are a few people around who seem to have gotten not only firefox to work as a local app, but flash as well. If envy could be sent across the intertubes, you would detect an abundance of it emanating from me right now.

The good news is that I know that I've at least got the first step of firefox as a local app going thanks to Gavin and the guys on the edubuntu user list who really did a great job of dumbing down the Thin Client How to NAT so an amateur like me can follow it without frustration. In case you're thinking of trying local apps yourself you'll soon realize the first step is setting up the LTSP server as a NAT gateway so thin clients that don't boot off of the server (or local apps running off the thin client instead of the server) can get Internet access.

Regrettably, there's not a similarly concise and simple How To page for setting firefox as a local app, but I'm working on the process and if I get it nailed down I'll be sure to put some hours into a comprehensive How To for others to follow. Paying it forward and all that I suppose.

Finally, I sent a message to the xfce users listserv asking how to set up kiosk mode in xfce 4.6 but I haven't heard a response yet. I'm hoping it is just because it's the weekend, but the pessimist in me says it's time to move to KDE's well documented kiosk tool. I downloaded the latest Linux Mint image with KDE 4.3 as a means of reviving an old Gateway laptop my cousin sent my way a few months back. I'm planning on experimenting with the kiosk tool there and hoping it works as well as it claims. Great to be back! -joe

LTSP Local Apps Progress (Or Lack Thereof)

2009-05-07T17:31:00.000-07:00

I've been working hard this afternoon to try and get Local Apps up and running as mentioned in the Edubuntu Jaunty Release Notes. Alas, I've experienced little more than the all-too-familiar Linux fatigue trying to navigate my way through a relatively complex set of instructions with little to no (or in the worst cases, inaccurate) documentation. My (least) favorite part is the little blurb in the release notes that makes everything seem so simple:

Installing Firefox inside the LTSP chroot and setting LOCAL_APPS_MENU=True in lts.conf will make Firefox to run locally on the thin client. The XDG integration takes care of adding the application in the menu or replacing it by the local application if it's already present.

Ahhh, the art of deception. I have, in fact been able to install Firefox in the LTSP chroot, and have also created and modified the lts.conf file appropriately. I have not found it true that the the application is replaced by the local application however. Nor have I been able to actually get Internet on Firefox when it is running as a local application. This is important because, as much as I enjoy seeing that familiar Firefox screen indicating that I am NOT, in fact, connected to the Internet, I think I speak for most users when I say that the value of Firefox is vastly diminished without Internet connectivity. Before I write more about that, however, let me give a little background to those who are about to walk in my footsteps.

I really don't understand why there is an opt/ltsp folder on the server or why it seems to have the exact same files that are on the Server file system already. I used to think that the server was operating in its own environment and the Clients were all in another environment under opt/ltsp and that to update the server was one thing, but to update the clients you had to use the command line and change root to opt/ltsp and then run updates from there. And while I still think this is sort of true, it doesn't explain why I can just install an application on the Server and that application will then become available on the Thin Clints. Shouldn't I have to install the application within opt/ltsp as well?

Anyhow, I followed this post and was able to install Firefox in the LTSP chroot, which I guess lets it run on the Thin Clients instead of the Server, and everything seemed to be fine. I can follow his command "ltsp-localapps firefox" on the Thin Clients and Firefox indeed pops up, although with no Internet. According to the post, I have to set up the Server as a NAT/Gateway or whatever. No problem, I get that: normally the Thin Clients look no further than the Server for their network information, but now we need them to be able to look beyond the Server to the actual Internet. Fine.

I followed as best as I could all the instructions on the How to NAT wiki page, and I thought I did everything right, even performing the checks (accurately I thought). At the end of the day, however, I could still not get Internet on Firefox as a local app. I even used my work Windows XP laptop to run ipconfig while on the LTSP network and couldn't get it to see past the Server. I'm not sure what I did wrong, but if I ever find out I'll be sure to post it here with the quickness.

What I really want to whine about, though, is the lack of accurate documentation available for things like this. I feel like the devs all complain about a lack of testers and inaccurate bug filing and maybe they are right about that last one (I wouldn't know, the process is so complex I just avoid it altogether because I'm afraid of doing something wrong). The former issue, though, could be helped with a little better documentation on things. Two examples:

Example 1:
I tried to set up my Server as a Gateway/NAT as described above, but here is the first check I am supposed to perform:

Test: Reboot the PC, to ensure it sees this and examine the default route (on linux type route -n).

Okay, I can reboot the PC (although the first time I followed this tutorial I thought I was supposed to reboot the Thin Client) but then what? I am supposed to ensure that it sees WHAT? How do I ensure that it sees this? What do I specifically do to ensure it sees whatever it is supposed to be seeing? Then I am supposed to examine the default route? Examine it for what? What am I examining and how will I know if something is wrong?

I guessed that I was supposed to ensure that the PC saw the change in the option routers. But there was no change to make for me. The "change" was to "change" a network address to what was set up by the LTSP install by default. If this is correct, shouldn't there be a note that this might be the case? As far as "examining" the default route, I guessed that this meant typing "ipconfig" in the command line on my Windows XP laptop while it was connected to the LTSP network. When I did this it seemed to show that it was seeing the "new" network address, but I didn't really know if what I was looking at was correct and I could proceed or not.

Example #2:
A while back I posted about kiosk mode in XFCE 4 and even posted the contents of my kioskrc file that locks down the Thin Clients. This was a huge breakthough because it allowed me to configure all the clients quickly with just one small file and I could be confident that they wouldn't be tinkered with my malevolent students. Well, Xubuntu Jaunty uses the latest version of XFCE, version 4.6. Overall the changes seem positive (I LOVE being able to click and drag to select multiple files on the desktop) but my old kioskrc trick doesn't work anymore, and there is NO documentation for XFCE 4.6. I don't mean that there is little documentation, or that the documentation is inadequate or hard to find. I mean that on the XFCE.org website under "documentation" it says:

We're sorry, but there is no documentation for 4.6 (yet).

So, I play the waiting game (again) and they don't get their user testing.

Today I switched to GNOME , deciding to give it another try after bailing on it over a year ago. Unfortunately GNOME remains slower on Thin Clients than XFCE, gconf still sucks to use (I set a "disable switching users" key to "mandatory" and it entirely removed from the panel the button to log out AND refused to let me change the key back!), Pessulus is still lacking all the options I need (and thinks people are using Epiphany instead of Firefox for some inane reason) and Sabayon still crashes when I try to run it. It's like May 2008 all over again!

I'll be sure to post again when I have some good news. For now, I'm going to litter the intertubes with requests for information about XFCE kiosk details and clarification on the How to NAT. Cheers! -joe

Back (again), Jaunty Jackalope, LTSP local apps, and a new way to set firefox preferences

2009-04-28T16:17:00.000-07:00

Well it has been way too long since I posted an actual post here. Last year I had a lot to say as the Technology Teacher and School Techguy. Unfortunately the budget cuts to California's school system led to the outright elimination of my position at the school. Fortunately my administrator saw fit to offer me a position teaching 5th grade and even offered me a stipend to continue working a few hours each week solving various technology issues. Although I really miss participating in the overall edtec community as much as I was able to do last year, I have a lot to be thankful for with this new position and it has been a great experience. That being said, I still have some thoughts to share regarding the current state of technology in education and I thought I'd take some time to convey them (especially since I have little else to do while Xubuntu 9.04 loads on my student server).

Speaking of Xubuntu 9.04, if you haven't had time to read up on all the changes in Jaunty I suggest you do so. I think I agree with the consensus, which is basically that everything just works a little bit better. I'm glad to see they didn't adding any major changes like pulseaudio or compiz and instead seemed to focus more on making everything more reliable and faster.

9.04 has seen some significant improvements in LTSP as well, including something that has the potential to revolutionize (at least for me) how LTSP deployments are configured and used. That thing is support for local apps. You can read more about it in the release notes. If and when I get this feature working I'll be sure to post back about it.

Finally, I wanted to share something I discovered recently that relates to a popular former post of mine about setting firefox preferences. I've since found a better way to set these preferences. Instead of creating and editing a user.js file I now just edit the firefox.js file in etc/firefox/pref/

Things aside from the typical preferences that are included in Xubuntu by default that I decided to tic are:
setting the homepage
automatically clearing cookies and passwords after each session
not asking the user if they want to clear the cookies and passwords
not remembering any passwords by default

Here is my entire firefox.js file that I use at school:

// This is the Debian specific preferences file for Mozilla Firefox
// You can make any change in here, it is the purpose of this file.

// You can, with this file and all files present in the
// /etc/firefox/pref directory, override any preference that is
// present in /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref directory.
// While your changes will be kept on upgrade if you modify files in
// /etc/firefox/pref, please note that they won't be kept if you

// do them in /usr/lib/firefox/defaults/pref.
pref("extensions.update.enabled", true);
// Use LANG environment variable to choose locale

pref("intl.locale.matchOS", true);
// Disable default browser checking.
pref("browser.shell.checkDefaultBrowser", false);

// Prevent EULA dialog to popup on first run
pref("browser.EULA.override", true);
// Disable "safe browsing" feature that hogs CPU, HDD, etc. etc. in LTSP

pref("browser.safebrowsing.enabled", false);
pref("browser.safebrowsing.malware.enabled", false);
// Disable annoying location-bar suggestion "feature" that is sludgy with thin-clients
pref("browser.urlbar.maxRichResults", 0);
// Disable offline/disk caching of web pages
pref("browser.cache.offline.enable", false);
pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);

// Other preferences
pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.aeacs.org");
pref("browser.startup.homepage_reset", "http://www.aeacs.org");
pref("privacy.item.passwords", true);
pref("privacy.item.offlineApps", true);
pref("privacy.item.cookies", true);
pref("privacy.sanitize.promptOnSanitize", false);

pref("privacy.sanitize.sanitizeOnShutdown", true);
pref("signon.rememberSignons", false);

Hope that helps some of you out. Good luck! -joe

2009-04-25T20:41:00.001-07:00

Study without desire spoils the memory, and it retains nothing that it takes in.
- Leonardo da Vinci

Locking Down Xubuntu LTSP

2008-06-25T12:03:00.000-07:00

One of the most annoying things I've had to deal with this year in the lab is students constantly changing settings on the Windows 2000 computers. It has varied from the mostly harmless (pictures of a student's cat on the desktop) to the mildly annoying (students changing the theme to have tiny fonts and garish colors) to the embarassing and offensive (Family Guy characters floating on a raft of blow-up women tiled across the desktop).

Sadly, an even more annoying experience has been trying to find an easy way to lock these settings down with Ubuntu. There are lots of options out there (gconf editor, KDE kiosk) but many of the ones I tried had flaws of some kind. The most difficult thing to fix seemed to be locking down the backdrop picture. Unfortunately this was also one of the most important.

I do think I've finally solved my problem though, and while the following steps are specific to Xubuntu and XFCE, they may be transferrable to GNOME or KDE at least in part.

The solution began with this page on the kiosk mode in XFCE:
http://wiki.xfce.org/howto/kiosk_mode

Here is what my kioskrc file looks like:

[xfdesktop]
UserMenu=aeinstein
CustomizeBackdrop=aeinstein
CustomizeDesktopMenu=aeinstein
CustomizeWindowlist=aeinstein
CustomizeDesktopIcons=aeinstein

[xfce4-panel]
CustomizePanel=aeinstein

[xfce4-session]
CustomizeSplash=aeinstein
CustomizeChooser=aeinstein
CustomizeLogout=aeinstein
CustomizeCompatibility=aeinstein
Shutdown=aeinstein
CustomizeSecurity=aeinstein

Once the kioskrc file is placed in etc/xdg/xfce4/kiosk it locks down everything for all users except user "aeinstein"

Since I also wanted a custom backdrop on all the student computers I made one in GIMP, named it "xubuntu-jmak.png" and saved it in usr/share/xfce4/backdrops

This basically just replaces the default backdrop that xubuntu looks for when a user logs in.

I also wanted a custom homepage for all the student computers so I created a file called "user.js" in usr/lib/firefox-3.0/defaults/profile

Here is what my user.js file looks like:

user_pref("browser.startup.homepage", "http://www.aeacs.org");
user_pref("browser.startup.homepage_reset", "http://www.aeacs.org");

The custom homepage only works for users who have never logged on before though.

The real test will come next year when the students are using it all the time, but for now I think I'm pretty well set. Cheers! -joe

Could the EEE 900 be the School Computer of the Future?

2008-05-29T19:29:00.000-07:00

My eee 900 test unit arrived on May 19th, exactly one week after the official release day. I literally ran down the stairs to the office when I saw that it had been "delivered" and the reaction from all the office ladies and parents was exactly what I had come to expect after reading about the little machine all over the net: intrigue, excitement, and enthusiasm. I'd be lying if I said I wasn't excited too, but I sobered up pretty quick. But let's start at the beginning.

The Plan
I've got several thousand dollars in a grant to provide the Middle School with a mobile lab. The idea of a $250 little laptop to get on Google Docs was pretty attractive and I almost pulled the trigger on an old eee 700 last month before reading about the 900's impending release and deciding that 9" is a lot bigger than 7", 1gb of RAM is a lot more than 512mb, and a 20 gig hard drive is a lot bigger than a 4 gig. (the verdict: $550 isn't $250 and 9" is still pretty stinking small).

A secondary experiment was to let some teachers try the machine out for a bit and evaluate its potential as a teacher machine. Obviously I knew the eee would be insufficient for 100% use and figured on an ideal situation of pairing up the eee with a 22" wide screen LCD, a full keyboard, mouse and printer all connected to a usb hub at work. Thus, with two simple plugs (1 from the USB hub and one VGA out) a teacher has a nice desktop setup.

The Machine
I've seen hundreds of pics of the thing online but I still wasn't prepared for exactly how small this thing is. I tried to convey its size with the picture to the right, but I think the best way to imagine it is to think of a DVD case, it really isn't much bigger than that. Tiny.

The responsiveness of the machine is pretty snappy. My student tester commented almost immediately about how fast it was. Of course she's used to P3's running Windows 2000 but I noticed it too. I did have to wait a few seconds for OpenOffice to get running (what else is new?) and there was a noticeable delay in getting the camera going, but otherwise it was faster than I expected. We're all (students and staff) on Google Apps over here so I was particularly pleased to see the impressive performance of Firefox 2. When Firefox 3 comes out it should be even better.

The user interface is pretty interesting, and while much has been made of the tabs at the top of the screen in lieu of a traditional desktop, what I found most interesting was the fact that Asus blatantly mimicked the Windows XP theme as far as buttons and menu bars (see pictures below). It's an interesting way to go, trying to lessen the Linux shock for newcomers by making things at least appear to be the same, but I suppose that's a topic for another time. In any case, I had a few people who needed help noticing the tabs at the top of the screen, but once they saw them nobody had any trouble finding what they needed. Seemed to be effective, if not exactly expected.

The multi-touch track pad is a nice feature when it works. Where it doesn't work is Firefox. I couldn't even get the track pad to scroll in Firefox, and even though my mom's HP laptop does the same thing it's a pretty egregious oversight given that Firefox is the default browser. In fact, the only program I got multi-touch to work in (not that I tried all the programs by any means) was OpenOffice. Multi-touch zoom makes a lot of sense given the small screen but it needs to work everywhere.

One annoyance was the eee's sleep function which seemed to take an abnormally long amount of time to wake up. More than once I closed the screen to move the thing and would bump into someone, go to show them the eee, press the power button to wake it up, and then wait for 10 or 15 seconds before anything even appeared on the screen. I figured for a SSD based machine that's centered around being ultra portable it would be a little faster waking up. Not sure what the problem is there but it's a pain.

Connectivity for me wasn't an issue as far as the Internet was concerned. I took the eee home for a night and it flawlessly connected not only to my wireless network (simple WPA protected Linksys Wireless G) but to my buddy's wireless as well. Connecting to a networked printer was a different story though. The process was a little more complicated than it probably should have been (and way more complicated than with Ubuntu) and then, after supposedly installing the drivers, would not print to a simple HP LaserJet 4050.

Peripheral support and drivers is always the Achilles heel of Linux distros and Xandros appears to be no different. This was a big strike for my plan because many teachers print not only to their locally connected printer, but to various networked laser printers and even directly to the Canon ImageRunner copiers we've got in the workroom. If the eee can't handle an HP 4050 there's little chance it's going to be able to manage all the other printers we've got around campus.

The Screen
9" does not seem too small at first. That seemed to be the general thought of almost everyone who saw the eee. I did notice, however, that after just a few minutes of use the 9" screen gets pretty tedious to use. Maybe I just got used to my new 22" wide screen but I think 9" is actually just really small. My student tester definitely commented on the size after playing around for just a few minutes. Definitely not the way to go if a lot of work needs to be done over a long period of time. Reading Internet articles may be fine for a while, I haven't tried it out yet.

The eee does have a VGA out on the side, but it does not auto detect an external monitor and requires the user to press "function+F4" to send the video signal. Pressing the combination again will enable video to both the eee and the external monitor as is generally customary with laptops. I was kind of hoping for auto detect, but it isn't a big deal.

1024 by 600 is the standard resolution of the 9" screen, but that can be changed on an external monitor to the more standard 1024 by 768. Unfortunately this must be done manually not only when the external monitor is connected, but also undone when it is disconnected. This is no small matter since, as you can see from the pictures above, in 1024 by 768 resolution the eee cuts off the bottom of the screen which not only eliminates significant parts of displayed content but also eliminates the lower panel with the clock and status bar and everything. It's too bad auto detect of external monitors wasn't figured out because that could have solved this issue as well.

That 1024 by 768 is the highest output resolution for the eee was a major strike against it in my book. To really take advantage of a 22" wide screen monitor, teachers would need a significantly higher resolution than that, and they certainly aren't going to want to be manually changing the settings every time the pick the thing up to take it across the room or something.

The Keyboard
Much has been made of the minute eee keyboard on the Internet, but in my experience this was the least concerning aspect of the machine. Nearly everyone who tried out the eee made a few errors off the bat, but within just a few minutes was typing almost as regularly as they would be on a normal keyboard. My experience was no different. It seems like Asus has basically just eliminated any part of the key that you don't normally touch, like the corners and the very top and bottom. It does make the margin for error much smaller, but in direct opposition to the 9" screen, the keyboard gets less irritating with time.

I certainly understand how it could be unusable for someone with huge hands, but you can see below how well it fits a sixth grade student's fingers versus an adults. Despite this, even my student tester had a little difficulty making the adjustment at first. This would indicate that keyboard size is an acquired preference rather than an innate one for most people. I don't think the keyboard could get any smaller, but in contrast to the 9" screen, I don't see a pressing need for Asus to go much bigger at this time.

Conclusions
Despite my own reservations about the eee 900, since I started loaning it out to teachers last week it's gotten nothing but positive results. Women especially seem to like it (maybe because they can see carrying it in a purse?) which is good since 80% of our staff is female. I think the reason for this is twofold: first, they really do like the small form factor offered by the eee. The EEE makes a lot of sense if a teacher is going to be carrying a computer around to IEP meetings in the morning, staff meetings after school, and home at night. Second, I think the teachers fail to understand the limitations they would have in trying to use the eee as their sole machine. Nobody is really using it as a replacement for their desktop yet (maybe that is the next step) which means that every dead end the come to whether it's printing or eye fatigue from working on a tiny screen can be solved by simply hopping on their trusty old Windows 2000 box.

As far as students are concerned I've all but ruled the eee out as a viable option for the mobile lab. The advantages that the eee presents to users (mainly those related to increased mobility) simply aren't applicable to students working in a classroom. When my student tester confessed that she'd rather be working on a full size laptop I didn't really need to hear anymore. At $250 it might be tempting enough to try, but with Lenovo and Dell regularly offering sub-$500 notebooks now, there just aren't enough reasons to go with the eee. Maybe the new Dell UMPC will fit the bill a little better. Cheers! -joe

Economist Article Response

2008-05-16T17:04:00.000-07:00

I have been an Economist subscriber since shortly after I stumbled across an issue while waiting for a sandwich at the Shoreline Park Lakeside Cafe in 2001. I vividly remember standing next to the trash receptacle, reading over the "World This Week" section of the magazine that appears at the front of every issue, and just being stunned by the realization that I knew so little about what was happening in the world.

My favorite part was how the section gave equal footing to the United States and what I regarded at the time as "countries of little consequence" like Sri Lanka or Finland. Here are a couple of snippets from this week to illustrate the point:

A computer hacker published on the internet confidential records belonging to 6m Chileans, including their ID-card numbers, academic records and telephone numbers. He said his aim was to demonstrate Chile's poor level of data protection.

Several bombs were set off in the Indian city of Jaipur, killing at least 61 people and injuring more than 200. A little-known group, Indian Mujahideen, claimed responsibility. See article

As expected, Hillary Clinton won the Democratic primary in West Virginia by a whopping margin, 67% to 26%, underlining Barack Obama's lack of support among blue-collar voters. But the party began to unite behind Mr Obama and he secured the endorsement of John Edwards, who pulled out of the presidential race in January. See article

Here is the link to all the snippets if you are so inclined.

For the most part the articles covered in the economist address issues I have little to no knowledge of or expertise in. This leads me to oftentimes accept their view on a given issue as law, as it frequently represents the only point of reference I really have on the issue. The only subject with which this does not regularly occur is education.

Education is the one subject in which I feel I have enough knowledge and experience to really effectively engage with what the Economist writes about on the topic. Sometimes I agree completely with what the magazine has to say, but most of the time I find myself in a position of slight to severe disagreement that has caused me many times to question the magazine's expertise in the other areas it writes about and that I am less knowledgeable in.

One example of the latter situation begins with the recent article, "From Literacy to Digiracy" wherein the magazine derides the rise of personal computers, and links their proliferation to falling literacy scores in the United States. It may be true that literacy scores in the United States have fallen over the same time as computer use has risen, but correlation is not causality as the Economist well knows. This association is an egregious example of journalistic failure the likes of which is uncommon for the magazine. Could the falling literacy scores not be associated with rising immigration patterns, decreases in traditional family units, or reductions in per pupil spending over the same period? I'm not a journalist so I don't know the answer to these questions, but it seems a shame that article leaves the reader wondering.

Likewise, a section quoting statistics purporting to show a decline in leisure reading among teenagers does not even bother to define what "leisure reading" is. Is the definition reduced to printed material only, like novels and magazines? If so then I would say that I fall into the same category as my reading of magazines and novels has declined significantly in recent years while my computer use has increased significantly. This does not mean that I am reading any less though. Quite the opposite in fact. Earlier this year I had such trouble managing the deluge of articles sent to me through Google Reader each day that it was a strain on my marriage. Even after reducing my number of RSS feeds considerably I still receive several dozen articles each day and read close to twenty of them on average. It's too bad the article did not give enough background to tell me whether I was in the majority or minority because of this.

Neither of these points is not the most aggrevating part of the article unfortunately. That is saved for the end where it is written:

In Mr Federman’s view, the quest for truth has given way to the quest for making sense of the world as experienced. For anyone under the age of 20, the world being experienced is one where the internet has always existed, and where everyone who matters is only a click, speed dial or text message away. “Tomorrow’s adults,” says Mr Federman, “live in a world of ubiquitous connectivity and pervasive proximity.” Their direct experience of the world is wholly different from yours or mine.

So, no surprise that when we incarcerate teenagers of today in traditional classroom settings, they react with predictable disinterest and flunk their literacy tests. They are skilled in making sense not of a body of known content, but of contexts that are continually changing.

Teachers must recognise that our pedagogical tools are inconsistent with the skills needed to survive in a world where people are always connected to everyone and everything. In such a world, learning to think for oneself could well be more important than simply learning to read and write.

It is appalling how often such bland and generic illustrations as these appear in modern educational writing. What exactly is being said over these three paragraphs? That times are changing? That advancements in technology are having an effect on new generations of human beings? That individuality and independence are important things for a person to possess? At what point in the history of mankind could these things not have been said? At what point in the future of mankind will these things not be said?

To it's credit the article does relate the Internet and the rise of computers to the telegraph of the last millenium. It is an apt comparison because in the classroom (where students are "incarcerated") all three simply become tools with which to grow citizens. In education the Internet, the book, and the pencil are all only as valuable as the owner is capable in wielding them.

So this is the teacher's job, to prepare the children of today to be citizens in the world of tomorrow. It is a job description that has not changed ever, and just because Johannes Gutenberg invents a printing press or Al Gore invents the Internet (yes I know he never actually said he did this but it illustrates my point better to say it this way) does not mean that students are going to fundamentally learn any differently than you or I or our parents and ancestors did. Nor does it mean that students needent learn the same lessons that you and I and our parents and ancestors learned. It simply means that we have newer and possibly better tools with which to teach them.

A Better Update on Quad Core Xubuntu Performance

2008-05-16T16:49:00.000-07:00

Looking over my recent posts I realized that I never really followed up that well with a report on Xubuntu on the Quad Core Dell. In short, it's working great! The thin clients load faster than ever and flash is responsive enough that kids are able to play their games after school, even if they still complain about the performance. Watching the system monitor for a while revealed what I judged to be adequate load balancing between the cores. All four of them were doing something all the time, and while one or another would max out occasionally, they seemed to trade off the job at pretty regular intervals. From everything I know, that was the expected results so I was happy.

Like I mentioned before, XFCE gives a little more control over the desktop and by logging on as each user I was able to unclick the "enable XFCE to manage the desktop" option which got rid of students' ability to change the desktop to some scantily clad Brittany Spears picture or something. Of course many of the students are smart enough to figure out how to undo this which is why I also installed Sabayon from the repositories and hid the "settings" option from the menu. This is a sophisticated enough solution that I think most students won't figure out how to undo it, but even if they did I could always use Sabayon to completely delete the taskbars and just have firefox start up when the user logs on.

All in all I'm very happy with Xubuntu. It does sacrifice a bit in usability when compared to GNOME. Some annoyances include some sacrifices in Firefox integration (pdf's don't open as smoothly when downloaded), and the mouse can't be clicked and dragged on the desktop to select multiple icons at one time. For the most part though, the experience is very similar to what I had with GNOME and regular Ubuntu. Now I just have to wait to get my Eee 900 (shipped today!) and experiment with eeeXubuntu a bit and see what I think. Cheers! -joe

Comment Responses and The Many Differences Between Private Sector and Public Sector Employment

2008-05-14T15:43:00.001-07:00

Earlier today I got an email from the Middle School Spanish Teacher explaining that her student computers (Edubuntu Feisty LTSP setup) weren't working and wondering if I could take a look at the problem. The first thing I noticed in turning on the server was the fact a horrible rattling noise assuredly coming from a fan or some other spinning device. Opening the box up I noticed a couple of wires had fallen beneath the fan shield and were the cause of the noise. A couple of seconds later the box was up and running perfect....except that there was no picture on the monitor.

I pulled the VGA cord out of the server, plugged in a different monitor and it lit right up. What could be the problem? I restarted the computer, verified that it was fine and switched back to the original monitor. No luck. I power cycled the monitor to no avail before the solution hit me.

Can you think of what it could be? The monitor is not broken btw. Pretty puzzling right?

Apparently some kid had flipped open the front flap on the monitor and changed the "contrast" and "brightness" settings so that the screen was completely black. I tried resetting the monitor but for some reason that didn't work and it was only after I manually upped both the contrast and brightness that the screen came back to life.

Just one little story illustrating the many little differences between tech support in a public school and tech support in the private sector (I'm assuming most adults don't intentionally screw with the brightness and contrast levels of their monitors until no picture at all is showing). Good Times.

So I also thought I'd take the time to post a little response I wrote up to some of the comments on last week's post about Xubuntu (still loving it btw, just got Win2k running on Virtualbox on a P4 2GHz test machine).

Apparently someone linked to the post because the 7 comments I got exceeded my previous comment total by about.....6. Here's my response to the various things people had to say:

"Thanks for all the replies fellas. I've got a quick couple of minutes before my 7th graders show up to learn Google Sites (super sweet new addition to Apps BTW) but so far Xubuntu is doing great on the quad core Dell. (Now we'll see how it does with 8 cores!)

Flash is very reliable BTW, not a problem so far except that it's slow on the clients which I've posted about. This does get a little better if "hardware acceleration" is turned off in the settings though.

I like Ubuntu for lots of reasons, but most of them are described in slide 7 of my presentation on hartmanbot.com.

I haven't tried PCLinuxOS, but from everything I've read Ubuntu, Fedora, and OpenSUSE are the big three in terms of hardware compatibility and ease of use. I owe it to myself to try it out in any case.

I did try puppy and deli and a couple of others while I was debating the merits of Ubuntu and actually wrote about it in the previous post here:
http://hartmansblog.blogspot.com/2008/05/hardy-hardy-hardy-happy-return-to.html

I guess I should elaborate a bit on what I did and didn't like about each of the other distributions. Better yet, I'll post on EXACTLY what I need out of a distro and maybe someone can prescribe me the perfect one.

Fluxbuntu sounds good BTW. I'm definitely going to check that out for my stand alone machines. News coming soon...

Cheers! -joe"

Cheers! -joe

New Purchases: EEE 900 and My Dell Dual Xeon Servers

2008-05-14T11:05:00.000-07:00

At long last and after much deliberation I finally bit the bullet today and had my Dual Xeon Dell Servers ordered. The justification for such a decision will become clearer on this blog in the coming days, but the most influential motive was the simple fact that the money had to be spent by the end of May and Dell had a special on the SC1430 model with 2 E5310 Quad Core Xeon processors. In fact, the whole package for both servers cost me less than $2000. Now I just have to hope that Xubuntu knows how to take advanatge of 8 cores of processing prowress!

In addition I ordered my 20G EEE 900 from Buy.com (the only place around that seems to have the things in stock for the advertised price of $550). I'm really excited for this purchase as well since this particular machine will be serving as the EEE Ambassador to the entire faculty/staff/student population of the school. Positive responses from all the parties will hopefully lead us to purchase a few dozen more for our Middle School Mobile Lab. If not, then Dell seems to have some decent Vostro laptops on sale for pretty reasonable prices.

In any case, I'm stoked about the new possibilities these purchases represent for our school. I'll post soon about my first impressions and what other people around have to say about them. Cheers! -joe

Xubuntu: Better than Ubuntu (at least for me)

2008-05-07T11:32:00.000-07:00

So my situation here at AEA has been pretty well stated in this blog, but to briefly reiterate where we are:

There are approximately 200 workstations around campus for student use of which approximately 35 are Pentium 4 powered. The rest are either P3 or P2 machines with around 256MB RAM.

The simple fact of the matter is that with machines like these there are few options when it comes to Operating Systems. I'm sad to say that the best option as far as performance is Windows 2000 (as long as I don't install any updates on it ever and just run Firefox).

Of course Win2k is the worst option as far as stability, viruses, and ease of upkeep, especially when compared to a Linux LTSP setup. Ubuntu doesn't run that smoothly on these machines though, I've heard that 512MB is the minimum realistic requirement as far as RAM and that's just more than we have available for these workstations.

Xubuntu though seems to work pretty well, and even better, it comes with an LTSP option right out of the box (something that is not offered with Kubuntu Hardy Beta, although that may have changed with the official release).

Even better, XFCE allows the user to disable control of the desktop which GNOME stupidly does not (at least without manually editing some ridiculous .conf file by hand) which means that I don't have to worry about students putting inappropriate or obsene images as their desktop backgrounds anymore! Xubuntu also works with Sabayon (it's in the repositories although it's a little buggy still) so I can pretty much control every aspect of each users desktop.

Best of all I did a little accidental user testing with some 6th graders today and the results were great! Basically I had 3 classes today and in each one a kid jumped on the Xubuntu machine I set up yesterday. None of the three kids even mentioned the fact that their machine looked different from everyone elses, they all just hopped on firefox and got to work!

Now all I'm hoping for is a little performance boost across the LTSP network since XFCE is supposedly less resource intensive than GNOME or KDE. I'm installing Xubunutu on our new Quad Core Dell box right now so I'll post any interesting results soon. Cheers! -joe

Hardy Hardy Hardy: A Happy Return to Blogging, My Thoughts on Hardy, and What I've Been Up To Since We Last Spoke

2008-05-06T17:01:00.000-07:00

Well faithful (and unfaithful) readers, it's been far too long since I last posted, and though my goal in doing so has for years to minimize the long posts and maximize the short ones, thus far I've proven singularly ineffective at heeding that advice. Nevertheless I will attempt once again to do so.

When we last spoke I was in a state of dismay over the atrocious performance of Adobe Flash on an LTSP Thin Client running off of a P4 3.0 GHz server even with a new gigabit switch and Hardy (if you understood that, god bless you).

Since that time I've made some great strides towards figuring out exactly what I need to do in order to have a functioning computer setup at this school that serves both the purposes of the users (the students) and the administrator (me). These strides have not all been in the same direction unfortunately, which was one of the main reasons for my prolonged absence in posting (that and my trip up to the Bay Area over Spring Break when I kind of lost some momentum).

So that losing of momentum was probably more drastic than even I initially realized as I really found myself disbelieving in the whole LTSP idea and even Ubuntu in general. I did get to see Shuttleworth speak in SF over Spring Break but was generally underwhelmed by what he had to say. This had little to do with what he actually said and far more to do with the fact that I had pretty much already read what he was speaking on (at least in terms of Ubuntu and its future) so the whole experience was a bit like watching a very predictable movie. And of course I wussed out when the question and answer portion came along.

So after that whole affair I started seriously looking at other Linux options. I checked out Deli Linux, DSL Linux, Puppy Linux, and of course Fedora and OpenSUSE. With all of these options I looked at the possibility of installing stand alone machines versus pushing forward with LTSP as well as the supposed strengths and weaknesses of each distrobution relative to what I knew about Ubuntu.

In the end I decided that Ubuntu had the same weaknesses as the rest, but more strengths (not the least of which were my own familiarity and experience with it and the community support of course). So now you probably understand why I failed to write for a while: I couldn't bear to write that I had given up on Ubuntu without actually being sure that I was going to do so.

I'll wrap up this post by saying I'm not giving up on Ubuntu, although as of today I think I'm moving over to Xubuntu. There's a few reasons for this which I'll discuss in my next post, to be followed shortly by posts about:

1. My job and recent developments related to the now notorious 2008 California State Budget Cuts
2. Next year's plan for the school (including potentially extremely controversial proposed changes in the technology layout courtesy of yours truly)
3. How things are going with my current setup in the labs and the library.

Glad to be back and sharing again, (as down on Ubuntu as I was last time, I'm up on Xubuntu this time!) -joe

2008-05-03T10:41:00.000-07:00

Google Certified Teacher Final Reflection

Joseph Hartman

K-8 Technology Teacher

Albert Einstein Academies

San Diego, Ca.

jhartman@aeacs.org

Summary

The majority of training that I did related to Google Apps and the tools offered therein. My first foray into any Google Apps training activities began immediately after converting every Albert Einstein Academies (AEA) teacher's email account over to the new Google Apps gmail service. It was the summer of 2007 and I was working as an IT Consultant at San Diego State University. It was here that I learned to use Adobe Captivate to create flash based video tutorials for SDSU faculty, staff, and students. Captivate seemed like a good tool to use for the purpose of introducing my colleagues at AEA to their new Google Apps tools so I created tutorials on how to use the Google Calendar and how to use Googlepages. I then uploaded these tutorials and sent them out to the teachers a couple of weeks before the school year even began.

Before each school year AEA does an annual retreat with the entire faculty and staff, so this was my first opportunity to show off Google Apps in front of everyone. I made a succinct presentation that showed off all the new tools that would be available to the teachers, although not exactly how to actually use the tools. This was more of an introduction to make them aware of the possibilities afforded by our migration to Google Apps.

Once the school year started I did a lot of one-on-one coaching with various teachers, held a couple of all staff training sessions for the more basic Apps, and also held a few optional after-school trainings on specific aspects of the Google Apps. In total I was able to reach nearly every member of our 55 person staff. Additionally all 34 teachers in both the elementary and middle school are using Googlepages as their classroom website solution.

Midway through this year I began to seriously consider creating another domain with Google Apps for the student population to use. In February 2008 this idea came to fruition and aeastudents.org went live, offering over 500 students in grades 2-8 their own Google Apps Calendars, Docs, and Sites (Chat and Email are disabled). Since that day I have devoted countless hours teaching and training these students on the various Google Apps. In the process I've utilized various teaching methods, but the most effective has been to create an example of what I want the students to produce, show them the example, then give them a good start on recreating the example before cutting them loose and allowing them to explore the apps in attempts to complete the assignment. At this time the different grade levels are in different levels of completion, but the furthest along have finished lessons in both Documents and Presentations and will begin the Sites lesson next week.

Impact

The impact of Google Apps on our school has been tremendous. On the faculty/staff side the most tangible result has been an increase in productivity due to the streamlined nature of Gmail and the elimination of any need to delete old messages. The most exciting result, however, has been an increase in collaboration due to the Google Docs and Chat (the Middle School Principal is especially fond of this outcome). I myself really appreciate the Calendar and its ability to assign and reserve "resources" because so many of our resources and related to technology (projector carts, etc.) and Google Apps has made turned the logistical nightmare this could be for me into something so simple I rarely even think about it.

The student side impact of Google Apps is a little more difficult to quantify because there has not been the same amount of time from which to draw conclusions as there has been on the faculty/staff side. The biggest gain thus far has definitely been the Google Docs because it simply eliminates the need for students to "save" work on a disc or flashdrive and allows them to access all their files no matter where they are. We have recently moved our Middle School Newsletter team over to Google Sites for their monthly releases instead of using a graphic layout editor. I'm hoping that the 2008-2009 school year will prove to be a transformative year for our school in terms of student/teacher collaboration and cooperation across Google Apps. I will be spending the summer thinking of ways to encourage teachers to share calendars and sites with their students, and to accept shared assignments digitally from their students as well (hopefully resulting in a significant decrease in our school wide paper consumption).

That said, I think the best measure of success is made by simply looking at the teachers who are using google apps and how they are using it. Every teacher at our school believes that their classroom website is the best one in the school and the all take great pride in what they put online for their students. In simply making it a painless process to put content online Google Apps is making a huge and tangible difference in the way our teachers teach and our students learn.

Challenges

The biggest challenge by far has been encouraging the teachers and staff to move from using MS Office and their normal set of technology tools towards using the Google Apps suite. Certain Apps like Googlepages were much more easily adopted by the general faculty because few had any experience using web page tools to migrate from. Therefore Googlepages was their first foray into the world of web page creation. Google Docs on the other hand has been much slower on the road to acceptance because so many teachers are familiar with MS Word that they see little reason to set aside the hours of time it would take to become proficient on Google Docs to accomplish what is essentially the same task they already do with MS Word.

Certain facts are changing this belief though. When our principal's hard drive crashed on her PowerBook everyone noticed that she had not lost any work that she had created on Google Docs.
There also seems to be a slow trickling effect within the school in which one user begins using Google Docs more effectively and a close colleague takes notice before venturing into the program a little further than they may have otherwise.

I have also noticed that my work training the students on Google Apps has helped to coax some of the teachers to use Google Docs a little more effectively. This is because the students oftentimes have not significantly used Word Processing Software or Digital Presentation Software before and Google Apps is their first experience really getting to know how to use such programs. Thus when they return to their home classroom from my class and their teacher asks them to write a story about their fieldtrip or something, they naturally ask their teacher if they can use Google Docs to do so. This has been my most proactive approach towards encouraging adoption among the faculty and staff and it seems to be working really well because I have noticed a recent increase in faculty requests for tutoring in Google Docs and its features.

Personal Growth

Implementing Google Apps has affected my teaching greatly. Training teachers was something I had prior experience with, but teaching students how to use an online suite of software was something entirely new for me. It was also a unique experience because I was attempting to teach it to students ranging in age from 7 to 14. My strategies for accomplishing this goal went through quite an evolutionary process, but with the latest iteration (see a description of my latest method in the "Summary" section) I think I have been able to find a solution that succeeds in both teaching the students the capabilities of the programs while simultaneously encouraging their imagination and curiosity about what these programs can really do. By finding that balance between explicit instruction and guided inquiryin my Google Apps lessons I really notice an opportunity to make similar changes in the other areas of my teaching. Ideally I would be able to mimic the teaching method I utilize in teaching Google Apps across all my other lessons, but whether that is feasible or not at this point I will have to wait to find out.

Maintaining Momentum

My biggest hope for the coming school year is to eliminate the option for teachers to use any office productivity suite at all except for Google Apps. There are several good reasons for this change, not the least of which would be to lessen the potential for catastrophic IT emergencies given that we will have virtually no IT support next year due to the budget cuts. I also think such a move would ultimately be a positive one for the students as teachers, now at least introduced to Google Docs, would be forced to utilize it in ways they may not have been this year and would hopefully pass on some of that newfound knowledge to their students.

Aside from such a drastic step as this, I hope to produce some additional Adobe Captivate tutorials about how to use other aspects of Google Apps such as Sites. A few brief training sessions might also be in order, especially in the arena of layout options within Google Docs since this is one area that MS Word easily trumps its competitor. Finally I would like to initiate some incentives for students to further their mastery of the Google Apps, so things like a Google Presentations competition among the students might be an option.

Overall Google Apps has been a transformative force in the way our school community works and interacts. What gains might be seen should we ever begin using Google Apps to its full potential is something I would love to find out.

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2008-03-25T20:13:00.000-07:00

Shuttleworth speaks!

More Good News (Ubuntu Community Support is Still Great) and Bad News (Using Flash on LTSP Will Evidently Cost Me More Money)

2008-03-21T00:26:00.000-07:00

Well I've already got a response to my question about flash player being so slow. This is due to the amazing support from the Ubuntu (and Edubuntu specifically) community that I've continually received. What follows is a transcript of the first response I received to my listserv post. Of course I'll be sure to post here tomorrow about the steps I took and the results they gave. Cheers! (and thanks for the help Robert!) -joe

> I'm having the same problem as Uwe with flash being slow. In this flash game
> (I use it to help my kinders practice using the mouse) I can literally see
> the frames refreshing and it is utterly unusable. I got my gigabit uplink
> switch today and connected it but there was no change from the old 10/100
> switch I was using before. The new switch should just work out of the box
> right? The LED indicates it has a gigabit connection. Since this made no
> difference I also did a clean install of Hardy Beta hoping to see some
> change. Alas.
>
>Here is a link to the system monitor display after I hooked up the switch
> but before the Hardy install. I would say this image is typical of what I've
> seen with 5 thin clients running the aforementioned flash game whether in
> Gutsy or Hardy with Gigabit or not (although the RAM and CPU is running a
> bit high since I had just opened firefox on a couple machines before I took
> the screenshot).
>
> The server is a Dell GX270 P4 running at 3 GHz. It seems like the whole
> server slows down when flash is playing, but I haven't confirmed this. With

You have multiple reasons for the poor performance.
1) You have a weak server. It is not even dual cpu. Old netburst architecture.
2) You don't have much ram. 1GB is only enough for about 7 clients.
3) make sure you are running without ssh overhead for X. ( enable direct X )
4) even if you get a fast server and do all the tweaking I'm afraid
that site is still going to be slow

LTSP is not good at streaming video AND sound to thin clients. Network
latency, remote X, high cpu usage for many clients just doesn't work
well. It can get better than what you currently have but it will never
be like running the browser locally (on the client). If you have
powerful enough clients (min P3 800 + 256MB) check this out.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/UbuntuLTSP/LTSPFatClients

> Hardy the game is even slow on the server, although this was not the case
> with Gutsy (BTW Hardy seems realllllllly slow to log in on the server. Like
> Gutsy on my laptop. Not good.) I've tried different thin clients with no
> changes. I've also tried Cat 5 and 6 cables to the clients with no change. I
> haven't tried Gnash in a while so I could give that a shot, but that still
> doesn't solve the real problem.

BTW Gnash just release 0.8.2.

>
> Is the network activity supposed to peak and valley like that? It does this
> even if I'm doing something other than flash, like a google docs or

All your X display traffic is flowing through your network.

Headphones in the Lab, a new gigabit switch, and Ubuntu flash player still sucks

2008-03-20T13:07:00.001-07:00

I have good news and bad news. Let's start with the good news first since the bad news is pretty bad.

For a while now I've had a box full of headsets for the kids to use but I haven't ever put them out because I just didn't want them getting all tangled up and broken. I've been meaning to get a bunch of adhesive hooks to hold the headsets on the side of the computer monitors and even put in a purchase order with the controller earlier this week, but yesterday I found myself at Office Depot and just went for it.

So with the help of a couple of students I've now got the lab all hooked up with headsets and the difference is unbelievable! It's eerily quiet in the lab now that all the kids are tuned into their own work instead of whatever all their friends around them are doing. I can not believe I took so long to put this thing together, but I try to think about the fact that I've got it together now instead of all the months I went through without it.

In any case I definitely have a new number one piece of advice for any noobie tech teacher: GET HEADSETS! For EVERY kid! It doesn't MATTER that it looks like you're running an illegal child labor call center!

Now for the bad news. Just like the worst kind of bad news it arrived on the heels of seemingly great news, this being the arrival of my gigabit switch and the beta release of Ubuntu's latest release Hardy Heron. Little did I know what a disappointment these supposedly beneficial arrivals would be. Allow me to explain.

For a long time now our students have been unable to use the adobe flash player on our thin clients. For whatever reason the performance is absolutely abysmal. Worse than abysmal actually, it is literally unusable. Until this afternoon I believed this was due to the fact that the thin clients were connecting to the server through a 10/100 switch instead of a switch with a gigabit uplink which I had read in many places would be far more preferable.

Thus when I connected my new switch with the gigabit uplink I expected to see a marked change in performance on flash player apps. Alas, you can guess what I saw instead. Taking a look at the system monitor revealed the following disturbing image.

If only I knew how to interpret it and diagnose the problem :(

It occurred to me that the issue might be with Gutsy and not the switch after all so I even tried installing the new Beta release of Hardy on the server after I had finished downloading it and still noticed no change. Just more of the same I'm sad to say.

The really disturbing part of all of this is the effect that these types of flaws have on my students. I started using Edubuntu in the first place both because it seemed like a good way to use the existing equipment we had, but also because I hated the idea of helping raise another generation of American citizens unable to wean themselves from the crippling teats of Microsoft and Apple. I imagined students who would be surprised and unfamiliar when they saw a Windows computer, who would appreciate the fact that their school used money to buy more computer equipment for them to play with instead of licenses for software just to make them work.

Tragically the precise opposite of this has happened simply because Ubuntu LTSP just CAN NOT play flash files. Subsequently the kids hate Linux, moan about how slow it is and marvel in small groups while flash files load frame by frame by frame. They LONG for Windows 2000. WINDOWS 2000!!!! How can this be?

For the past few months I've played the apologist, telling myself the kids mostly just played games in flash anyways and would be better off without them. That's not the point though. The point is that Ubuntu can't do something as well as an EIGHT YEAR OLD Microsoft OS can. This speaks volumes about the state of Ubuntu and I really don't know where to go from here.

I'm not giving up yet, but I'm through making excuses too. If Ubuntu can't figure it out, maybe another OS can. It might be time to personally look into SUSE or RHEL to see exactly how Ubuntu measures up. I'll keep you posted. -joe

The Eee PC 9" and the Hopes of Linux in Teacherland

2008-03-03T14:12:00.000-08:00

Well I haven't got a lot of time to expound on this story, but I was so excited to see that the rumors have proven true that I had to talk about it at least a little. At long last, we have photographic proof of a new, soon to be released Eee PC by Asus with a dazzling large 9" screen. Super Sweet.

I've been tracking the development of the Eee for well over a year now, from back in the days when the original 7" screen model was no more of a reality than the 9" one is now. It may have taken a long time for the first mini machine to make its debut (and unfortunately it failed to do so at the $200 price point that had been initially rumored) but when it did it certainly made some waves.

It has been my ambition to secure one of these little guys for all of my teachers for quite some time now. I might have pursued the matter a little more if the rumors about the existence of this 9" version hadn't been circulated almost immediately after the 7" versions release. The fact is, as most people have noted, that a 7" screen is simply inadequate for almost any kind of serious computing. This isn't a huge deal since the machine comes with a VGA out on the side and can obviously support full size keyboards and mice through their USB ports. It's more the fact that I sincerely doubt that anyone of my colleague teachers would reliably take such measures. I think it being infinitely more likely that they would just squint away at the tiny 7" screen all day and then all I would hear would be complaints about how it was too small. The Linux factor is something to be addressed as well.

Getting the students to use Linux is unbelieeeeeeeeeeeevably easier than getting the teachers to use it. Don't get me wrong, there are some teachers who have little to no trouble, but most ask the typical questions, "where is the My Computer?".

It's actually easier to convert students on two counts. The first of these is the classic "digital native" argument that they are younger yet more familiar with technology and, while I see this, the bigger factor I notice is simply that they are less set in their ways. It seems to me, for example, that adults are much more likely to try to bend a program to their will than a child is. An adult will try to organize tables in MS Word rather than use Excel simply because they are familiar with Word. A child will be more likely to search for or ask about a more appropriate program and then learn how to use it (in my experience).

The second count may be limited to schools and the school environment, but it deals with the fact that students are expected to be flexible and dynamic and adaptable; so suddenly ridding them of all Windows machines and replacing them with Linux is spun as a wonderful teachable moment instead of an untenable burden. Sadly, this is not the case when repeated with the faculty. In fact, I could probably keep an entire blog on the subject of things we expect out of our students that we neither expect out of nor ask of ourselves (line up to go anywhere? no talking in the halls?).

In any case, I have high hopes for this new 9" Eee as the harbinger of Linux to the faculty. It is just big enough, just small enough, just cheap enough (actually, this is just a guess at this point) and just cool enough to actually persuade some of the teachers to switch over....perhaps. Stay tuned for further adventures of Linux in Teacherland. Cheers! -joe
btw: photos from engadget.

Ubuntu Brainstorm and the Cross Pollination of Ideas

2008-02-28T17:31:00.000-08:00

Today Ubuntu announced Brainstorm, a site devoted to letting Ubuntu users nominate and vote for their favorite ideas related to Ubuntu. The premise is based around the assumption that any idea garnering enough votes will be worked on by either Canonical or the Ubuntu Developer Community for inclusion in a future Ubuntu Release and goes a long ways towards including some of us less technically-capable devotees.

I love this idea, and there are two things about it that really surprise me . The first is that it didn't exist before and the second is that I never noticed that it didn't exist before. This is one of those win, win, win, win, win ideas that fits in so perfectly with what has already been put into place that while it's difficult to understand why it took so long, you're still just glad its come around.

A beautiful thing about Brainstorm is that it has essentially been in place for a while over at Dell.com. In fact, it was through Dell's own version (called Ideastorm) that the first Dell Ubuntu machines were proposed, voted on, and ultimately released. This cross pollination of ideas is something that the technology sector has gotten down really well. It seems like most other industries actively avoid sharing ideas, first by protecting them to absurd degrees and then by trying to reinvent a wheel (sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing) that others have already built.

Our government seems even worse at this, refusing to acknowledge that successful programs in other countries could possibly work in America (as if we were so unique). This isn't a political blog, but one of the first steps for any educational technologist to undertake in attempting to solve a problem is to look around for any existing solutions. Maybe I'm naive, but this seems like a pretty common sense tactic and I fail to understand why it wouldn't work for pretty much any issue (healthcare, welfare, taxes...).

But I digress. Brainstorm may be a Dell ripoff, but it makes much more sense for Ubuntu than it could ever over at Dell (I've never even heard of a "Dell community" before, but maybe that's just me). Here's to Ubuntu, Brainstorm, and the continued cross pollination (or ripoff if you prefer) of ideas. -joe

SCaLE 2008 Impressions and Photos

2008-02-21T22:08:00.000-08:00

It's been a busy couple of weekends for me the past two weeks. Last weekend was Valentine's Day in NYC of course and the weekend before was the Southern California Linux Exposition (SCaLE) in Los Angeles.

I was fortunate enough to have my presentation on using Edubuntu in the classroom accepted for one of the sessions on the first day of the Expo and since this took place on Friday amidst an offshoot track of SCaLE called OSSIE (Open Source Software in Education) I got a substitute to cover my classes and drove the Towncar the two hours north to La La Land. I arrived at the Expo around noon which meant I had a couple of hours to hang out before I was due to talk. I spent a little time wandering around the event just seeing what there was to be seen. I'd say it was a smaller than average event but bigger than I expected, which was an exciting surprise.

After a few minutes I found myself a seat and listened to the speaker scheduled before me. I'm sad to say I forget her name now, but she was a doctoral student who used FreeMind in her research to see how concept maps changed information retention in students. I'm a little ashamed to admit that I was more involved in polishing up my own presentation than I should have been to pay ample attention to what she was saying, but as good as FreeMind looks I'm still pretty committed to using Internet based applications as much as possible. This means that sites like bubbl.us are a lot more attractive to me than software programs like FreeMind. The data that she had was very encouraging towards the use of mind maps in general though, so that was good news.

When it was finally my time to present I was relieved to see that my laptop worked on the projector without any major flaw, but I was disappointed to see that audience members couldn't post comments to my Google-based presentation which meant while I talked. Later I figured out that this was because I hadn't "published" the presentation, but that was hours later of course.

The presentation itself went pretty well. I was nervous as usual, which meant I talked even faster than I normally do and ended up doing my presentation in about 25 minutes (last time I did it at the SDCUE conference it took 45 minutes!). Fortunately there were a lot of questions from the audience and that saved me.

Afterwards I hung around outside the auditorium for a while and just chatted with colleagues (including Tim, the OSSIE organizer and an all-around great guy). Then I wandered over to the OLPC area and fiddled with the machines for a bit. I'm still waiting for mine to be delivered by the way. I had meant to take some pictures with my camera phone and post them here, but I forgot of course. The rest of the weekend I spent hanging around Santa Monica with my old college roomies and playing golf in Century City. Not a bad weekend at all! I look forward to next year!. -joe

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2008-02-16T10:56:00.001-08:00

The emerald city beckons. If only these were our seats. :-(

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2008-02-16T10:41:00.001-08:00

We won the Wicked lottery!

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2008-02-16T10:17:00.001-08:00

My favorite nyc deli!

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2008-02-14T05:17:00.001-08:00

Made it! Enjoying a beautiful brisk winter morning in nyc.

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2008-02-13T18:30:00.001-08:00

B gets close with the virgin in air entertainment system. Available games include doom and circus linux! Sweet!

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2008-02-13T18:26:00.001-08:00

Virgin america rocks! On the way to ny via sf.

Looking Forward to Hardy, More Video Card Confusion

2008-02-06T08:27:00.000-08:00

It was a while back that I first noticed something seemed amiss with these old IBM P3 desktops that we seem to have so many of. I was almost sure that I had used them successfully in the past with Feisty but here they were crapping out on me after showing the Edubuntu splash screen with Gutsy. I wasn't that worried as it looked like I was going to have more than enough thin clients anyways, but still...

A couple of days ago I confirmed my feelings when I was in a kindergarten class that I knew had an up and running miniLAN and noticed that one of those IBMs was being used as a thin client. So there was indeed some regression in the compatibility of thin clients from Feisty to Gutsy. What a disappointing revelation to make.

I hoped to make lemonade out of this lemon of a development by installing Feisty on the Fujitsu-Siemens machines I got from the German Consulate in LA (especially since my $50 dollar solution did NOT work as they sent me 3.3V AGP cards instead of the 1.%V ones I needed). For a bit it seemed to be no use. I got the same strange behavior out of the Fujitsu with Feisty as I did with Gutsy. But I left the machine on for some reason, and a few minutes later there was the sign in screen, as if everything was okay!

I logged in, ran updates, restarted, created users, moved the machine to a 3rd grade class, connected thin clients, rebooted, and even let the teacher's daughter play Webkinz on the server before I got a call the next morning that none of the machines were working. It was the same old problem as before, and now I discovered that it wasn't just a problem with the video card. In fact the computer wasn't even fully booting the OS which meant that the thin clients couldn't boot either. Bummer.

So obviously I'm looking forward to Hardy being released in April (even if there won't be any new graphical redesign) mostly because there is supposed to be better support for video cards and monitor detection. Needless to say, the fact that these two changes were not highlighted on Ars Technica's First Look article was disheartening, but I still have high hopes. Let's hope they don't get crushed. -joe

A Letter From Tim about SCaLE 2007

2008-01-31T17:48:00.000-08:00

So I've got no shortage of things in Edubuntu Gutsy to complain about but these same things have been keeping me pretty busy so in the meantime I'll just pass along some promotional information about the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles next weekend. I'm actually presenting my slides (hartmanbot.com) again at this event and I'll be sure to not only take my own pictures but also have someone else photograph me on stage this time. I'm sure the one person who comes to listen won't mind. ;^)

"Learn about Free Open Source Software you can use in your school during a
Friday conference this February 8th, 2008 at the LAX Westin Hotel.

This isn't a software sales pitch – the Southern California Linux Expo (a
non-profit, all volunteer organization) is holding their 6th annual Open
Source Software Expo – and this year, we've added a speaker track for
Educators.

What is Open Source Software (OSS)? It is software that is developed
collaboratively, then donated and made available for use at no charge.
This isn't “shareware” or “demo-ware”. OSS is full-featured software,
used by leading companies like IBM, Google and Yahoo. OSS is used around
the world, in government, business, and schools. You are free to use,
share and change any OSS program at no cost.

No more tracking licenses, fighting different versions or coping with
software budget constraints. As an added benefit, many OSS programs work
on Linux, Windows and Mac. With Linux and Open Source Software, you can
put together computer labs, or 1 to 1 computing at a much lower cost than
with traditional Mac and Windows solutions.

OSS is a worldwide effort, but the Expo brings it to Los Angeles. Our OSS
in Education track focuses on programs appropriate for schools.

The Friday speaker track is only $10 for the full day. If you prefer,
admission to all three days – which includes Friday's education
presentations, 40 weekend presentations, the “Try It Lab”, and 60+ booths
in the exhibit hall is only $70. Registration for teachers and students
(with ID) is 50% off.

To register, visit https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/reg6/ To receive the
50% discount teachers should enter “EDU08” in the promo code field.
Students should use promo code “STDNT”.

The OSS in Education speaker track on Friday the 8th starts with
registration at 8am, followed by:
* Introduction to Open Source Software for Education (9-10 am)
* Linux in Early Education (10-11 am)
* Computer programming concepts for Science, Math and Technology (11-12)
* Mind mapping with FreeMind (1-2 pm)
* MiniLANs and thin clients with LTSP and Edubutu (2-3 pm)
* Network Directory Services (4-5 pm)
* Creating Publications (5-6 pm)

To learn more about each presentation, please visit:
http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale6x/conference-info/open-source-software-in-education/

Want to do more than just sit in a lecture? This year the Expo introduces
our “Try It Lab” on Saturday and Sunday. In the lab, you'll participate
in hands-on sessions where you can learn about OSS first-hand. Volunteer
instructors will guide you as you learn by using leading OSS programs
comparable to well-known Windows and Mac software. In the lab, we will
have a variety of computers and thin-clients, so you can see the many
options you have with OSS.

Lab topics will include:
* Open Office – the OSS alternative to Microsoft Office
* GNU Image Manipulation Program – the power of Photoshop, without the cost
* Inkscape – a powerful drawing tool like Adobe Illustrator
* Joomla! - a flexible web publishing tool for dynamic web sites
* Linux – desktop software replacing Windows and Mac OS-X
* Thin Client Computing – learn how to dramatically reduce PC costs and
support

For more information about the Southern California Linux Expo, visit our
website:

http://www.SoCalLinuxExpo.org"

Cheers! -joe

Edubuntu Users Listserv and How My Curriculum Works

2008-01-25T16:49:00.000-08:00

Hello again faithful followers. I must apologize for my extended delay from posting. I wish I could say it was due to some exciting adventure in my life that occurred over the Holidays but alas, I did little more than get myself addicted to Battlestar Galactica. I did get an OLPC machine for Christmas from my parents, but in case you haven't heard, there have been some "complications" in actually receiving the machine. I'll be sure to post my thoughts on the device as soon as it comes in.

No, the real reason I haven't been posting recently is because I discovered a thriving edubuntu user community on a listserv and have been reading and contributing to that as much as I can. You can sign yourself up here if you're interested. Since the main purpose of me maintaining this blog was to have somewhere to vent, question, and participate somehow in the community, finding an alternative has supplanted my time somewhat. In fact, for a while I kind of forgot about posting here until I actually ran into an issue with thin client resolution last week and googled the problem, only to have the top two hits link back to this very blog! Now I'm not sure if that is a case of Google self-promotion or something, but I certainly hope so because the alternative (being the idea that I have somehow become an expert in edubuntu problem solving) is a far more frightening thought.

Nevertheless, it did make me realize that I have something to offer more than just my contributions to the listserv since even an ubuntu junkie like me did not discover it until very recently. Therefore I present you with my first listserv poached post below, a response to a question by another member that asked me to clarify what programs I was using in the lab with my students and how I was using them. I hope you find it interesting. Cheerio! -joe

"Hi Bill,

The current curriculum has just undergone some recent changes in light of my beginning to teach middle school students in addition to elementary school students for the first time but I'd be happy to comment about the reasoning behind the current plan.

It arose out of specific school needs, state and professional organization standards (especially ISTE and Massachusettes since California doesn't have specific computer related technology standards), and my own experience/vision. The primary driving force towards Linux, LTSP, and Edubuntu arose out of necessity as much as anything else. I work at a charter school and we inherited a campus from a defunct public school complete with network and computers, the vast majority of the latter being from the wrong side of the millennium. Many of the machines we are using now were donated by organizations (the border patrol, district attorney's office, private companies, German Consulate) that were upgrading infrastructure and would otherwise have been discarded. Thus the ability to use these many underpowered and outdated machines as thin clients appealed to me. I'd guess we have about 200 workstations on campus altogether, of which about 50 are Pentium 4 and four are Core 2 Duo (the administrators' laptops and my own). The rest are P3, P2, or slower.

I should also mention that my school is an International Baccalaureate (IB) World School on the elementary side while the Middle School that just started up last year is in the accreditation process. Additionally, the elementary school operates under a German Immersion program that has the students spend one week learning in English under an English speaking teacher and the next week learning in German under a German speaking teacher. And the campus we inherited two years ago resides in a primarily Spanish-speaking and relatively underprivileged area of San Diego so our incoming students are rapidly changing the face of the school. All additional reasons to use the similarly multicultural and globally minded products of Ubuntu and GNU/Linux.

Because we are an IB school on the elementary side we have what is called a Program of Inquiry (POI) that is essentially a matrix of 6 big ideas per grade (so 36 big ideas total) that are divided up and taught throughout the year in addition (and hopefully in conjunction with) the normal classroom curriculum. POI topics are things like "objects in the sky move in predictable patterns" or "water is essential to life" and typically last for about 6 weeks. Thus my own curriculum assignments are designed around supporting these topics while at the same time teaching the students specific hard skills about the programs they are learning to use. I also try to collaborate with the teachers and their own projects as much as possible, although this is difficult since I only see each class for 45 minutes per week.

On to the curriculum....

In Kindergarten the students learn how to use a computer as many have never used one before or if they have it was for very specific tasks. Mouse practice, Tuxpaint, and learning about the parts of a computer pretty much sum it up, although I do try to collaborate with the teachers as much as possible

In First Grade the students begin typing with Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing 15 (the one and only piece of Windows only software I will miss in the transition to Edubuntu in the lab. If anyone has any recommendations for a similar full-featured typing tutor that will work with GNU/Linux I'd love to hear about it). They also start doing somewhat harder online activities since they can read fairly well by this age.

In Second Grade we introduce Open Office Writer. I thought it was a bit early to start with word processing so young, but the Massachusetts state technology standards called for it so I thought we'd give it a shot. After just a year of typing the kids aren't all that adept at using the program, but I've noticed that it serves as a good introduction to the common interface of toolbars and drop down menus. It also introduces the ideas of saving, opening, and printing.

In Third Grade we introduce Open Office Impress. This is actually the program I would have started with in second grade because it is so visual, but third grade seems to be about the youngest age a student can really begin doing coherent presentations in front of the class so I suppose it works here as well. Of course we continue building on what the students have learned in previous years so they learn more about Writer this year as well.

In Fourth Grade the students begin learning Scribus. Publishing and writing labs are a big part of our school's fourth grade curriculum so this was an obvious choice.

Fifth grade focuses on Kompozer and web design in preparation for middle school and the online portfolios that the students begin in 6th grade.

Sixth grade centers around Web 2.0 sites and strategies like blogger and google docs and posting to forums and emailing experts. I originally wanted to do this in 5th grade but didn't feel comfortable asking elementary school students to sign up for the Internet IDs they will need to access certain sites.

In Seventh Grade the students learn Inkscape in the hopes that it will help them spice up their digital portfolios.

In Eighth Grade the students learn GIMP for the same reason as Inkscape.

Basically the idea is to give students the hard skills they need to be able to satisfy their class requirements in the method they prefer. If they want to fulfill an assignment on the fall of the Roman empire they can choose to write a paper, create a brochure, make a newspaper or magazine, create a website, present a powerpoint or whatever. You asked if the curriculum meets the needs of teachers and I feel like this is where it helps them out (Internet safety and research skills and stuff like that falls in the librarians domain) although I will be asking the teachers to fill out a survey on the whole curriculum at the end of the year so I guess I'll know more after that happens. I also like the idea of introducing students to computer parts and programming at least a little bit, thus the mention of kturtle which I'm hoping to introduce across every grade 2 and up (as soon as I learn Logo a little better).

As much as I'd like some new iMacs and to be able to work with the middle schoolers on video editing and animation I'm also pretty committed to using open source (or at least free) software not only to avoid legacy costs for the school but also so that anything I teach in the lab can be practiced at home by the students for no additional cost (assuming the student has a computer at home). I'm more likely to just hope for some new P4s to come through the school, buy some RAM for them and set up some stand-alone Edubuntu boxes.

Sorry for the long winded response, I wasn't sure where you were coming from and (as with all teachers) once I get started I can be hard to stop. Are you in education as well? If you're in the area I'll be presenting on my Edubuntu experiences at the SCALE conference in Los Angeles next month as well as at the CUE conference in Palm Springs in March. If you're interested you can learn more about my school at aeacs.org and see my presentation at hartmanbot.com. Cheers! -joe"

Sync out of Range issues with new Fujitsu-Siemens donated computers

2007-12-07T08:50:00.001-08:00

Last summer I got word that the German Consulate in Los Angeles might have
some computers to donate to our school. 25 Pentium 4 computers to be exact, and while I didn't know all the specs on the machines, knowing that they had P4 processors was enough for me to know that we needed those machines as soon as possible. Unfortunately the German Government is apparently as bureaucratic as the United States' and it wasn't until this Monday that I was able to drive up to Santa Monica to get them. The good news is that there are indeed 25 P4 Fujitsu-Siemens Scenic N600 computers and better yet they are running at 2 GHz, more than fast enough to power a few thin clients, so that is a plus.

The minus came on Tuesday when I tried to install Edubuntu on them and discovered that nearly every monitor I had gave the "sync out of range" message when edubuntu tried to boot. I'm guessing it is a driver issue with the onboard display adapter, but it was puzzling that certain monitors showed things just fine. Even stranger was the fact that one monitor apparently worked fine, but another of the exact same make and model didn't work at all! It was a very disheartening and frustrating discovery and basically sapped my entire Tuesday trying to solve. Eventually I got so frustrated I wrote an irate plea for help on the Ubuntu Forums. Alas, I received no reply.

That night I had an idea for how to fix my problem. Since Ubuntu has pretty good video card support I would just purchase 25 cheap AVG video cards and use them to show the OS. I tested the theory on Wednesday with some old cards I had and it seemed to work so I started shopping around. Eventually I came across pacificgeek.com and ordered 26 8MB video cards for about $50. What a deal!

So now I'm waiting for my video cards and RAM to arrive so I can start putting these babies to work! Let's hope my $50 solution works. -joe

From the Obvious Department: Updates help Ubuntu

2007-12-01T21:01:00.000-08:00

Well, I'm kind of disappointed. I was all set to whine and moan about Edubuntu screwing things up on my LTSP in the outside lab and how it made me reinstall the entire OS again but then a funny thing happened. After I reinstalled the OS I noticed that it not only worked exactly as it should, but it also had solved one of the most annoying changes from Feisty to Gutsy. So now I guess this is going to be more of a fanboy post than I originally planned to do. Oh well.

So there were basically two problems with the outside lab. I'm not sure whether they were both due to a faulty install or not, but the first was really strange. I have 24 computers in the lab including the server. Therefore I set up 24 user accounts numbered "student1" through "student24" and gave them all the same password so as to make logging on as easy as possible for the students. The only problem was for some reason the server would not accept a few usernames, like "student11" and "student15" for example. I tried looking around the file system and saw that there actually were directories for the malfunctioning user accounts, but I still couldn't get the server to accept the user IDs and couldn't log on to any of the thin clients using any of the malfunctioning IDs either. Really strange stuff.

The second problem was with Flash. Feisty used to require every individual thin client to install its own version of the flash player. Annoying, but not a big deal since it was just a matter of clicking through the plug-in prompts. At least there wasn't any password or authentication required. That changed when I first installed Gutsy. It kept asking for a password and I couldn't figure out which one it wanted. Was it the admin password, the root password, or the user password? Did I need to make the user an administrator and then install flash player? In the end I just decided it was better to leave flash uninstalled. After all the outside lab is too underpowered for anything but research and word processing.

So due to the user problem I decided to just reinstall the entire thing (during which I wrote the previous post). Upon updating and checking out the above mentioned problems I noticed that my user account issue had been solved and worked just as it should, while the flash player issue was not only fixed, but no longer required each thin client to install it on its own! Once I installed the player on the server, all the thin clients had it as well! Super-sweet.

I assume that the updates since the initial release of Gutsy had done something to solve at least the flash problem if not both issues, which brings me to the point of this post: Ubuntu updates help make the OS work better.

That may seem a silly, even contrived statement, but those of us with extensive experience using Windows know that it is anything but. This is because Windows updates frequently cause as many problems as they fix. I'm not sure if it is a Windows issue or a Firefox one, but just last week I had to remove the automatic updating of Firefox on a teacher's computer because it kept losing her bookmarks and passwords with every update. I also got yelled at quite severely last year when I installed updates on a colleagues laptop. "It screws up my computer when I install the updates!" she wailed. And it was just earlier toady that I read about a software update that brought down a call center at AT&T in 1990. Now granted that last example doesn't necessarily name Windows as the culprit, but the point is that Ubuntu gets it right.

This isn't the first time Ubuntu updates have helped me out, but it's still a nice feeling every time it happens. It feels like someone is listening, paying attention, and doing something about the issues that annoy you. It makes me think Mark Shuttleworth should go into politics or something. Cheerio! -joe

Some overdue praise for Edubuntu Gutsy regarding an HP Deskjet F4180 and Canon MP470

2007-11-29T16:39:00.000-08:00

One of the things I love about Albert Einstein Academies is that they require their parents to commit to a certain amount of volunteer hours at the school as part of their child's acceptance. How they get away with this is beyond me as we are a public, not private school but they get away with it nonetheless. Occasionally a parent will opt to donate a sum of money or product to the school in lieu of volunteering for that month. And then on even rarer occasions a parent will opt to donate a sum of money or product to the school in lieu of volunteering for the entire YEAR. It just so happened that a parent went this route at the start of the year and purchased (apparently from the UCSD bookstore which, barring an employee discount or something, is probably the single most expensive place in the county they could have done so) and donated a brand new Canon MP160 all-in-one printer. Since anything that even hints of technology falls under my domain the office staff called me up and told me there was a package for me in the office.

Now I do everything I can to run a paperless classroom so I honestly asked myself if there was anyone who might be able to make better use of this machine than I would. The donation came a few weeks into the school year though and most teachers had already set themselves up pretty well with printers so I brought it up to the lab as much to test it out with Feisty as anything else. You won't be surprised to learn that after much research and downloading of drivers the best I was able to do was get the thing to print reliably (although once it did seem to copy, but not when I wanted it to).

Fast forward to yesterday when the 6th grade math teacher called me down to disable her automatic Firefox updates and told me that despite hours and hours of time on the phone with HP support she was still unable to get her HP DeskJet 4180 All-In-One to scan into Windows 2000 correctly. I suggested that we trade machines. I figured my Canon would be able to scan for her and I could at least achieve performance parity with her HP on Gutsy.

You can imagine my elation when I finally hooked up the HP to gutsy, installed the driver (incredibly easier than Win2k of course) and was able to print, copy AND scan into GIMP perfectly! What a treat! Feisty had always hinted that hooking up a printer could be this easy but failed to deliver for me despite supposed "linux" drivers for my Canon. Excepting a "new device" notice when I plugged in the printer and automatic driver installation I can't imagine the process being much easier. Best of all I don't have all that extra HP crapware that the math teacher had to have just to be able to use the machine. I couldn't be happier.

Next time I'll change gears and gripe about how I'm reformatting my outside lab server right now because it won't let me make a user account named "student11" or "student15". Stupid Edubuntu...j/k -joe

About my Wedding and the 2007 SDCUE Conference

2007-11-26T15:41:00.000-08:00

Well, after months of planning we finally got married. The wedding was amazing, better than I could have imagined and I can honestly say that it was the best day of my life. How often to hundreds of people who love you come together to pay tribute and speak so kindly of you? It was really a fantastic time, and of course our honeymoon in Jamaica wasn't too shabby either.

Now I'm back though, ready to get into more trouble with Edubuntu even as I sing its praises at local area conferences. Most recently I did a presentation at the San Diego Computer Using Educators (SDCUE) conference at a local high school. My presentation slides can be seen at my website (hartmanbot.com) if anyone is interested. The presentation went really well, I probably had a dozen or so people who attended and it was a good mix of experienced IT professionals and newer educators so I was able to get some help with my explanations from the audience.

Overall my presentation seemed really well received, and although I worry that it may have been beneath a few of the attendees I got the feeling that everyone was at least entertained to hear of my successes and failures. I was especially pleased by the unexpected demand for Edubuntu Install CDs after the presentation. I had anticipated that perhaps a couple of people would want them so I had brought a few blank CDs and figured I would just burn them on the spot since I had the images on my laptop. Instead of just a couple of people though, probably seven or eight people requested CDs. It wasn't that big of a deal really, I just spent a few minutes after my presentation burning images and labeling them. Then I dropped the finished CDs off at the raffle counter where they could be picked up any time later in the day. Hopefully everyone got their requested copies.

I've also already been accepted to speak at the West Coast CUE Conference in Palm Springs in March so I think both Benita and I will make a weekend trip out of it. I'm just delivering the same talk so there won't be as much stress this time around (not to mention it won't be eight days before my wedding this time). I'm also not planning on setting up a working example of the LTSP for people, so that should save me some hassle as well. While I've applied to speak at the Southern California Linux Expo in Los Angeles in February, I haven't heard definitively whether I've been accepted or not, although I'm pretty sure I'll be invited. I'll be sure to take some pictures this time and post them. Until next time! -joe

Xrandr, why Xorg crashed last time and the benefits of Internet based computing.

2007-11-02T14:13:00.000-07:00

Well my reinstall of Gutsy went well. I figured out that Xorg crashed last time because I had changed the display driver from the experimental Intel driver to the older i810 driver. While this had been suggested in one of the forums as a way to enable a secondary monitor output it apparently was also the reason Xorg could not find any screens the next time I started the computer up. Since the reinstall I've tried using the same terminal command that worked for me before:

xrandr --output VGA --auto

and it seemed to do the trick. I was also able to then shut down the computer and start it again later without a hitch, so that's always a good thing.

I suppose if I were a bit more knowledgeable, daring, or motivated after the crash I could have figured out how to reconfigure Xorg so that I didn't have to do a complete reinstall of edubuntu, but after a few minutes of contemplating this I realized that there really wasn't anything on the machine that I didn't also have somewhere else. Moving from using Word to Google Docs hasn't always been easy, but in cases such as this it was enormously advantageous. I suppose I do have to worry about Google's servers crashing and losing all my stuff, but those guys seem to know what they're doing over there so I think I'll take my chances. I'll try to blog more about our school's recent move to Google Apps, but for now I'm pretty focused on the wedding. We're like 52 hours away at this point and I'm not even packed for Jamaica yet. Cheers! -joe

Xorg is ruining my life!

2007-10-31T14:56:00.000-07:00

It would be hard to state how much I was looking forward to the Ggaphic user interface for multiple monitors that was supposed to arrive with Gutsy. Since the beginning of the school year I've had a pretty nice VAIO laptop that used to be my principal's machine (she got a new macbook), but I've been unable to use it at all with a projector to show slideshows and the like to the staff during presentations or meetings. Perhaps designing and implementing a reliable GUI for external monitors and projectors is more difficult than I understand, but this is a such HUGE issue for so many people that I'm honestly appalled that it hasn't been addressed sooner.

In any case, all is to be fixed with Gutsy right? I mean I'd seen screenshots of the Multiple Monitors GUI since the beta releases. How great would it be to be able to just connect a VGA projector to my laptop and mirror the output? I mean, under Windows MCE the machine does it AUTOMATICALLY! I just plug in the cable with the projector on and BAM! it's up on the screen. It should honestly be this easy under Ubuntu too. Alas it is not.

I wrote last time about my disappointment with the Multiple Monitors GUI on my classroom computer, but today has been an absolute debacle. Not only did the GUI not work (surprise, surprise) but after doing some command line junk (which again, should NEVER be necessary) and actually getting the setup to work fine, my Xorg server crashed and as I type this, Edubuntu is reloading all over again. Crap.

So I'm sure there's a very good reason the GUI doesn't work. I've actually read about it on the forums and whatnot, something to do with specific video cards or something. Here's the thing though: I Don't Care. This is something that "just needs to work". It's unacceptable that something this necessary requires me to scour forums, sort through a bunch of stuff about changing device drivers, xrandr, my Xorg.conf file and then eventually leads me to try some command line code that appears to work but also crashes my system.

The good news is that bulletproofX is coming with Hardy Heron and is supposed to solve these problems the way windows did way back in the last millennium, namely by defaulting to a basic GUI display set instead of just crapping out entirely. So if you thought I was anxious for this change before Gutsy, you can imagine how I'm feeling right now. Hoping beyond all hope. -joe

Weddings, firestorms, my first impressions of Gutsy, and Manhattan Rats

2007-10-30T23:11:00.000-07:00

Well my wedding is only 12 short days away. Things are getting pretty crazy but I've actually been able to find some relief in tinkering around with the Gibbon a bit (the latest version of Ubuntu is codenamed Gutsy Gibbon for all you n00beez out there). I heard time and again how much work a wedding is to plan when I got engaged, but I guess I thought that weddings are only as difficult as you make them. And while I still kind of believe that still, I now realize that almost every woman is going to make their wedding as difficult as they can possibly stand, which means that planning your wedding is going to be a lot of work.

I had actually been pretty far behind in my own responsibilities with the wedding (it didn't help that I was gone two weekends ago to Seattle for an International Baccalaureate training) when the fires struck Southern California. A lot of us were doubting whether we would be able to fly into San Diego from Seattle at all. Fortunately we all got home safe and I don't think anyone from our school was evacuated or hurt at all. The fact that school was canceled for the rest of the week didn't hurt as far as catching up on my wedding responsibilities either (or my Gutsy tinkering for that matter). I guess you have to try and look on the bright side of bad situations sometimes.

So my first impression of Gutsy was not as good as I might have hoped. I spent several hours on Ubuntu Day trying to upgrade my existing teacher station just to have it crap out on me at the end and revert back to Feisty. Then I downloaded the .iso file a couple of times only to have the discs be corrupted somehow. I was able to upgrade from feisty on my laptop, but at the end when it was supposed to remove the old programs it froze up and I had to restart. For a few days I was kind of suspicious of the whole thing and when I finally got back from Seattle I decided to just do a clean install which meant losing Windows XP MCE altogether.

The .iso I downloaded this third time worked fine, so now I'm Windowsless and loving every minute. I like the codec search and install feature like many others have mentioned (although I still can't watch nba.com videos for some reason, but yahoo videos look great!) and I also definitely spent a couple of hours tinkering with the Compiz settings last night so I could watch walls of fire burn up my closed applications and whatnot. Otherwise I really don't notice much that different about Gutsy from Feisty.

There are still a number of things that annoy me about the OS, like my mouse settings aren't adjustable and it takes me three swipes to move it completely across the screen. I also tried out that FOSS flash alternative and it bombed right off the bat. They shouldn't includ that as an option at all unless it's ready for primetime. I was able to successfully and completely upgrade my classroom computer this afternoon, but the built in monitor control wasn't able to access my attached projector and I had to configure it through the nVidia controls like I do every time either the computer or projector is turned off (really annoying). I will admit that I haven't tried Gutsy as a thin client server yet and they are supposed to have sped up some things on that front so I'll have to get back to you on that one.

Mostly I was just looking for the big leap I saw from Edgy to Feisty and was kind of disappointed not to see it right off the bat. Maybe I just wasn't as familiar with Ubuntu back then or I had higher expectations, but I think the situation was more akin to the rats in Manhattan. Allow me to explain:

About two years ago a poll was taken in NYC that asked citizens what their number one problem was with the city. The surprising top result: rats. There were varying speculatory lines of thought about why this might have happened. Were rats moving into new areas of the city? Where there more of them or where they just getting bigger and bolder? Why have rats suddenly become such a concern? The real answer was much simpler though: all of the previous top concerns had been addressed and thus moved lower on the list. Two years ago NYC was doing pretty well. Crime wasn't as big a problem anymore, the economy was doing well, police and firefighters were doing a good job and people were happy with both their Mayor and Governor. Thus the citizens had no greater concern in their lives at the time except the rats that had alwasy been there but now assumed the top spot among the city's problems.

Similarly Ubuntu has come a long, long way since I started using it back in the Dapper days. Most of the top concerns were addressed in the Edgy and Feisty releases with bulletproof X being the only major thing I can find taken care of with Gutsy. I never had a problem with Feisty and display resolutions or the like so I haven't noticed any change at all. Mostly I'm just busy complaining about small things that would have been silly to complain about just a year ago. Who cares if your mouse doesn't respond exactly how you like it when your wireless card doesn't even work? Who cares about rats when your car keeps getting stolen?

In any case, Gutsy strikes me as the next step in a natural progression of Ubuntu releases. That is, releases that solve a myriad of minor problems left unaddressed by the previous release, but that lack the revolutionary changes and improvements of the earlier versions. And while I'm happy to take what I can get, I'm not going to forget which wheel gets the grease. Steady Squeakin' -joe

Ubuntu Day and understanding operating systems through the metaphor of automobiles

2007-10-18T19:08:00.000-07:00

It is ridiculous how much I look forward to days like today. They only come around a couple of times a year and I honestly look forward to them like I do for a movie that I heard was being made two years before its release date. Yes, today is Ubuntu Day, the day the latest release of Ubuntu hits the streets and my computing life is filled with optimism.

Much has been written about Gutsy Gibbon and all the new features it supposedly contains. I have high hopes myself that this latest release will solve some of the most annoying problems that I have blogged about in this space. I think most of all though I look forward to Ubuntu release days because they each show such progress toward a final admirable goal. My cousin once told me about a mix tape his friend had made and titled "approaching perfection". This to me sums up nicely the work attitude of the folks at Canonical and in the Ubuntu community (of which I try to do my small part within) and each release day just serves as a tangible example of how everyone's efforts come together to further that elusive goal.

This may seem hard for some people to understand but I think the best way I can explain it is to use an automobile as a metaphor. Imagine that you are shopping for a car and basically you have two choices. The first car is extremely popular but unreliable and kind of boring although it does come with a myriad of options and add-ons. The real problem with this car though is that thieves are constantly trying to break into it no matter where you go. This means that you are forced to take all kinds of precautionary measures which not only add to the expense of the car but also hinder its aerodynamics and cause the car to travel far slower than it might otherwise. Then, every five years or so a new version of the car comes out, except the same problems persist and the new version not only requires you to pay for the new car, but also give up the old one.

The second type of car is very stylish and highly reliable but not much else. Aside from being much more expensive than the first type of car the second type is almost completely uncustomizable. It comes in only a couple of colors with scant options and almost no third party add-ons are supported although add-ons that are made by the car company work flawlessly and even color-coordinate. If you are a mechanic, this car is the worst because if it breaks you must buy parts from the manufacturer and it is practically impossible to trick out the car to any degree.

Then, as you are shopping you come across a third car. This car has at least as many problems as the other two, the main one being that it is far more difficult to drive than the other two, practically requiring a different license if you intend to use it on certain roads. It also only works with certain add-ons which frequently require help from a mechanic to install. But it's reliable, isn't attractive to thieves, comes in lots of colors with lots of options and has one big advantage over the other two cars: its free.

So you "buy" the third car and within a few weeks start wondering if you've made the wrong decision. You start running into problems you know wouldn't have been an issue with the other two cars and start tallying up the hours you spend fixing your car against the money you saved by buying it. Then, six months to the day after you bought the car the manufacturer comes to your house and drops off a brand new car! This new car still has problems, but not as many as the other car did and you feel like the time you spent fixing the other one helps you to drive this new one even better. You're feeling good about your purchase and happy with how things are going when, six months later, the manufacturer drops off another new car! This one is even better than the second one they gave you and fixes almost all the problems you hated about the first one. There are still some annoying things you don't like, but you know that in six months you'll get another new car and just the thought of that day arriving makes you feel positive and hopeful.

That's the best I can do to describe what Ubuntu Day is for me. It represents new hope and new possibilities. I guess all there is to do now is find out what's wrong with it. Upgraaaaade....GO! -joe

Found a colleague from the UK and got a good tip on my BIOS issues. Gotta love my Internets!

2007-10-11T15:55:00.000-07:00

Now I would never describe myself as a "Mac person". I got strange looks just a few minutes ago from a co-worker when I told her I had never used iTunes (which is really only partly true as I did try it out when it was first released and found winamp to be far superior). Nevertheless the school does have about a dozen of the old colorful clamshell iBooks sitting around with about 128 MB RAM or something ridiculous. In any case I thought I might be able to boot these suckers up like a normal thin client except I didn't know how to get into the Mac BIOS (silly me, BIOS is for PCs not Macs).

So I start googling around stuff like "Mac thin client" and come across the old free software magazine article on Edubuntu and thin clients that has basically been my guiding light for this whole project (nevermind it hasn't exactly guided me flawlessly). Although I'm sure I've read the comments at the bottom of the post before yesterday I'd never noticed a particular comment that mentioned a blog on Edubuntu and LTSP before. For whatever reason I checked out the blog and found out that the author was basically doing the exact same thing as me at an elementary school in England. Best of all he had some insight into some issues I was unaware of (hard to believe considering the amount of time I spend reading about Edubuntu).

I left a comment on his blog in the hopes of talking about tech issues and then wrote my own entry on the BIOS issues. You can imagine my surprise then to find this afternoon that I not only had a comment on my own blog but a comment with a pretty nifty tip for fixing my BIOS problem. Apparently the BIOS is sustained on the motherboard by a battery that I can simply remove and then reinsert later at which the BIOS should be reset. I'm stoked to try this out, but even more stoked to have a colleague who not only knows about this stuff but is interested in it and willing to help out. I guess I knew that the Ubuntu community was pretty helpful but the Edubuntu community is so small that it's nice to find another person in the same boat.

I'm sure I'll be back to complaining about how my scanner doesn't work right, but for now I'm feeling pretty optimistic about everything. (btw, I never did get the iBooks to work). Cheers -joe

Locked out of BIOS, LTSP won't work right

2007-10-10T22:14:00.000-07:00

This summer AEA was the beneficiary of a generous donation of a dozen Dell P4 3.0 GHz towers. I quickly resolved to use these towers as servers for both the inside and outside labs, as well as the library and some classrooms where I anticipated heavy use. Of course at the time I believed that a gig of RAM with a P4 running at that speed would be more than enough for what I was trying to do. I now know better. In any case I quickly came across the minor annoyance of being locked out of the BIOS on about 4 of the donated towers. "Not a big deal," I told myself, I could easily install the LTSP on an unlocked machine and swap hard drives with a locked machine. I followed this procedure with all the affected machines and for over a month believed myself to be golden. My world came crashing down earlier this week after I got all the switches in from Newegg and tried to set up the servers in a middle school classroom to no avail.

The potential problems ran through my head like they always do when I get stumped (which happens embarrassingly often): bad ethernet cable? bad port? problems with the network? problems with the thin client? problems with the switch? problems with the server?

After some basic troubleshooting it quickly became clear that the source of my troubles lay with the server, specifically with the network card settings. For some reason the computer was confused as to which ethernet card was the incoming port from the wall and which was the outgoing to the switch. When I figured this out I grabbed another server from a nearby room and tried it out. Except I had the exact same problem! (I now realize that both of the servers I grabbed had their BIOS locked). Now I was really stumped.

It has taken me two days to finally understand what the true source of the problem is (at least I think I've figured it out). Evidently there is some setting that is changed on the BIOS when Edubuntu is installed that does not get set otherwise. I believe this to be the case because this afternoon I took an unlocked computer with a good hard drive and got it to work fine. Then I swapped the hard drive into a locked computer and ran into the same networking confusion. Swapped back the server worked fine.

So I guess my next step is to email the donor from this summer and hope that he knows what the BIOS password is. Otherwise I'm not sure what options I have. Maybe I can call Dell and figure out some way around the password. Or I could try and guess it. That's never worked for me before but who knows? Cheerio -joe

Another setback

2007-10-09T16:04:00.000-07:00

So I'm back to running Windows 2k in the inside lab. That's the one that I spend most of my time teaching in. I'm going to stick with Edubuntu in the outside lab even though it is slower than molasses because at least then I don't have to worry about things breaking so much and viruses aren't an issue.

I have much higher requirements for the inside lab though. In here I hope to do everything from web programming to podcasts to video editing. The machines can barely handle 12 students playing the same flash game at the same time though, so I had no choice but to go back to Windows 2000 in here. I'm really disappointed, but at least now I can go back to using Mavis Beacon 15 with the kids. As many typing programs as there are out there, it's astounding how awful the vast majority of them really are.

ATTENTION ENTREPRENEURS, THE UNIVERSE IS IN DIRE NEED OF A SLICK YET EFFECTIVE ONLINE AJAX TYPING TUTOR SITE THAT AT LEAST TRACKS STUDENT PROGRESS AND HOPEFULLY INCLUDES A PLETHORA OF FUN TYPING GAMES. NOW GET TO IT!

cheers -joe

Troubles with Bluetooth

2007-10-05T12:53:00.000-07:00

So somehow (I think on Digg) I heard about GrandCentral, an internet company that offers "one phone number for life". Naturally they were purchased by Google and only recently opened up for new customers again. I decided to sign up and got a pretty sweet number that I'm looking forward to trying out. Of course it also has all the options it should like contacts and stuff, but it has some cool features as well like visual voice mail and the like. Well I decided to try to port my contacts over from my phone to my computer and then upload them but ran into some trouble.

The first problem is that of my LG CU500 phone with AT&T (formerly Cingular, formerly AT&T). It only allows me to save my contacts either on my phone or on the SIM card and not onto the MicroSD card I have that conveniently plugs into the computer via a USB adapter via a MiniSD adapter (or is it the other way around?). I have no way of plugging my SIM card into the computer to get the contact information. I can however use Bluetooth to send a vCard with the contact information on it from the phone to the computer, and it so happens that I have a Bluetake 007si Bluetooth Dongle for just this sort of situation. Problem solved right?

Well the first issue I had was that when I plug in the dongle there is no immediate indication on the part of GNOME or Edubuntu that anything has happened. The little blue light on the dongle only lights up intermittently as well so I figured it wasn't even working. I googled the problem and found some ubuntuforums.com stuff that made me use the Terminal (this should never HAVE to be used if Edubuntu ever hopes of capturing a significant population of educators) to install the Bluetooth tools and while I was not at all surprised to discover that the process didn't proceed as the howto described I was a little surprised to discover that the Bluetooth software was evidently already installed on my system. Nice!

So I tried to pair my phone and computer through the dongle. Everything's working fine, the comptuer shows up on my phone, but then my phone asks for the passcode. I try the default 0000 and it doesn't work. I try all other kinds of combinations in case I ever actually programmed a passcode into the thing and nothing works.

I go into Add/Remove... and add the Bluetooth tool for GNOME. No luck. I add the Bluetooth tools for KDE and my phone now shows up but it can't connect.

At this point I'm not sure what to do. I've googled and looked through forums and it seems like a pretty standard complaint. Now granted that Bluetooth still isn't quite ready for primetime (astounding considering how prevalent it is now) as even with XP I would have trouble getting all the features to work with my Bluetooth stereo headphones without proprietary software. In fact I imagine the trouble has as much to do with my phone as Edubuntu. Nevertheless, this is yet another case of me trying to expand the capability of my Edubuntu machine and falling into the time warp trap of googling, scanning forums, using the Terminal, etc. to try and get the new capability to work. None of those things should ever be necessary, and at the very least, shouldn't Edubuntu at least tell you that it has detected a dongle? At least it's Friday. -joe

I have a new focus

2007-10-04T13:03:00.000-07:00

Okay, after a long time of trying to decide exactly what this blog would be about I guess I've decided to make it about open source in education. Specifically I will be dealing with issues associated with using Edubuntu in the classroom. I suppose I will still find time to contribute some personal information about myself, but I guess I'll try to title those ones "personal" or something. Mostly I guess I just don't care to have an online diary and would rather put my thoughts and frustrations trying to implement Edubuntu into the Internets so that maybe someone will find it useful and improve the product. So a few things:

Just yesterday I received our order for 35 8-port 10/100 ethernet switches. I plan on using them to setup Edubuntu LTSP miniLANs in every teachers classroom. I'm still waiting on the ethernet cords we ordered so it probably won't happen until next week some time. In the meantime though I'll probably have my tech crew (6 middle schoolers I have been training on tech stuff after school each week) at least start setting up the servers and thin clients in each teachers room.

I finally got the labs both set up. I have my own that has a bunch of donated P3 dell GX150s running at 800Mhz with 128MB RAM and the outside lab with a bunch of donated Compaq P2s running at like 333Mhz with 128MB RAM or something. Here are some pics of the process of setting up just the inside lab (in the pics are the Compaqs, I switched the computers after a few days so the better ones would be inside with me).

So on the first day I'm running 12 of the Compaqs in the inside lab computers off of a 3Ghz P4 Dell with 2GB DDR400 Dual Channel RAM and I have my first class of kindergarteners go to this alphabet flash game on the bbc site and the thin clients all run like molasses! I was so disappointed. I did have some extra ram so I bumped it up to 4GB but they still ran terribly. It was impossible for the students to do the assignment. After school I tried to go to the bbc game under Windows 2000 and it ran nearly as slow so I figured it had to do with the thin clients' processor and switched all the Compaq's with the Dell's with some help from the librarian and my Tech Crew. The problem seems to have been fixed a little bit, but when I watch the system monitor on the Server the CPU is pretty much maxed out with 12 thin clients. I think I need to look into getting a better server because I really want to do some cool stuff in the inside lab. I'm hoping to use kompozer for webpages and Google Earth and definitely some fun games for free time rewards. Plus, what if I want to use Kino or do some podcasts? So I'm not sure what the relationship is for what kind of servers and thin clients are needed for that level of computing but everything I read seemed to suggest that I had adequate levels of equipment. I'm guessing those sources were referring to simply being able to power the thin clients and to use them for any serious tasks would require more power, but this was never clearly stated and now I find myself in the unenviable position of needing another 3k or so to buy my new Dual Xeon server. Hopefully future guides will provide some sort of graph or chart to illustrate exactly what kinds of processes are capable of being executed with a given server/thin client setup. I know I would have appreciated one (still would!) Until next time. -joe

Job RENEWED!

2007-05-30T21:51:00.000-07:00

So after several months of waiting whether I would get my job back (except this time as a full time position) I was called in to a budget meeting and told that enough funds had been set aside for me to have my job back! Sweet! Apparently I'll be funded at 85% by the elementary school and 15% by the middle school. I guess if everything goes according to plan I will be teaching every grade from K-8 next year. What an opportunity! I'm so excited (and relieved) to know that I'll be coming back next year. I have so many plans for the school it is really going to be a fun summer and school year trying to implement all of them. First off of course is the switch to edubuntu mini-labs in all the classrooms and then the switch to Google Apps for Education. But I also got an pleasant surprise when I was told there were sufficient funds for me to purchase an LTSP server for the lab as well! Great news all around! Hope everyone had as great a Memorial Day weekend as I did. Cheers -joe

The Google Teacher Academy

2007-05-23T18:25:00.000-07:00

So I'm here in Santa Monica at the Google Teacher Academy and having a great time. Learned all about their apps for educators as well as Google Earth and Sketch Up among other things. I'd write more about it right now, but my laptop's space bar is kind of messed up. More info to come, (and pictures from the Coachella Bjork concert as well as the Shoreline concert too!). -joe

Google Academy!

2007-04-30T19:30:00.000-07:00

So I promise to post some pictures and even video of the Bjork concert (amazing of course) here soon. In the meantime though I thought I'd take the time to announce my acceptance into the Google Teacher Academy for Southern California. SWEET! I've been really excited about Google for Educators and the services they provide, even going so far as to sign up my school for 500 email addresses earlier this year when we thought our original e-mail provider was on the fritz. I still have plans to move our site over to Google this summer, but since our provider seemed to fix itself over winter break we decided that switching horses midstream was an unnecessarily risky proposition.

Needless to say I'm ecstatic about the opportunity to participate in a Google-centered community of educators and can't wait to spend my entire Saturday driving up to LA and learning cool stuff (ok, maybe I could do without the LA part). I'll be sure to post what I learn here as soon as possible, which should be about a month from now. Cheers -joe

Coachella!

2007-04-27T18:32:00.000-07:00

Bjork is headlining the first day this year. B and I drove up this morning and while there is only basic cellular connection here, they do have an AT&T Blue Room. So I'm coming at you from the Coachella Music and Arts Festival 2007. We just came from the Amy Winehouse performance and am basically just waiting around for Bjork to go on at 11. We're planning on getting to the stage about 2 hours early in the hopes of staking out a decent place near the front of the stage. Shouldn't be too hard, but it's hard to know how many people here are really interested in Bjork. It could be thousands. We'll see. Hopefully I'll find a pocket with at least EDGE connection and pix will follow. Rock ON! -joe

Printing to Canon in Edubuntu

2007-04-26T19:41:00.000-07:00

Well, it appears I was a bit mistaken to bellyache yesterday about the difficulty of installing the driver for the Canon 5000 print station we have. The BrightQ program I installed worked just fine, and in fact was quite easy to use if lacking a bit as far as UI appeal. In fact, it turns out I had everything right yesterday except for one thing, the user ID for the printer. Obviously our school tracks all the printing jobs that each teacher does by assigning each teacher a specific user id. On Windows machines a prompt pops up after each print job is sent asking the user to input their ID. I guess BrightQ just requires that this ID number be input when setting up the printer. I actually suspected as much yesterday but decided to chance it, failing of course. So today I just uninstalled the printer and then reinstalled it with my User ID as the only change. Fired right up! I was even able to set up the printer in the teacher work room too. I was riding high all afternoon following this victory. If I hadn't been able to work this out it would have been a definite deal breaker as far as setting up Linux at the school. Now I feel like I'm back on track. -joe

FOSS Education

2007-04-25T22:25:00.000-07:00

In my never ending search for some sort of common thread for this blog my latest idea is to make it about my job and specifically about what I'd like to do with my job. This I suppose means I would write about what I'm doing at my school and my struggles, successes and ideas. Recently of course I've been spending inordinate amounts of time trying to roll out Edubuntu on some sort of level. It's been really great for me to have both the power and the time to do such a project, and I suppose I realized today that this has come at the expense of some of my other duties, but nevertheless it has been an enlightening and rewarding experience.

One of the main problems in FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) education I've recently discovered is the lack of drivers for things like Linux. For example at work we have several different Canon ImageRunner print stations. These things do it all from scanning to copying to printing and stapling and 3-hole punching etc. Pretty sweet machines when they aren't broken. So naturally they will HAVE to work with whatever software OS we are using at the school. If I can't find a way for Linux to operate these things, it is a complete deal breaker. I might be able to skate by with still moving the student computers over to Edubuntu since there does seem to be better drivers available for small printers and laserjets and things. There's no way I'm going to realize my dream of being a totally FOSS school without this though.

I did find one site here that apparently makes drivers. I haven't had a lot of time to look it over yet so I'm not even sure if they are free to use or not. I'm guessing they are though. The good news is that I was able to decompress and install them. The bad news is that it didn't immediately work. Some RTFM work may be in order here, but really this shouldn't be that difficult to do. So I guess that is the worse news: that to even get to the point of having the program NOT work I had to use the terminal plenty, restart the computer a couple of times just to be sure that wasn't the solution to any of my problems, change the boot password (which ended up being my problem) and then finally trying to figure out this unnecessarily confusing UI on the program. Ugh. Unless these issues can be solved, Linux will NEVER be a viable alternative to Windows, much less OS X in the field of education.

So let's not go out on a sour note. The Really Good news is that within Edubuntu, setting up a networked printer was an absolute piece of cake! I've installed networked printers galore on Macs and PCs all over SDSU and I can say that the Ubuntu UI for this procedure is incredibly easy. It combines the best of both the PC and Mac worlds with a simple procedural wizard ala Windows with the brilliant functionality of OS X. Basically I just searched for a networked printer and it found several, even successfully guessing which one I wanted to install. Then the driver screen popped up and it knew the printer was Canon, except on the long list of available drivers only one ImageRunner was to be found. Unfortunately it was not the model I needed for any of my three print stations.

Thus, I'm trying to take away two positive ideas from the experience. First: Ubuntu has the right idea down pat for adding printers. If I had been trying to install a printer that a driver existed for, I have no doubt it would have installed brilliantly and I'd have taken a much different tone for this post. Second: Ubuntu and the FOSS community in general are assuredly adding to that list of drivers continuously, so some day soon (hopefully) installing these printers will not be anything to blog about (except for the ease with which it is done). Alas, for the time being, this is quite a stumbling block for me. Cheers -joe

Mobile Classroom on a Bus

2007-04-17T23:33:00.000-07:00

Here's an interesting article about a rural school using the commuting hours on a bus to educate students. I guess it's going to use laptops and iPods, but I'm skeptical that such a think could succeed without supervision. -joe

My Star Wars Personality

2007-04-17T23:16:00.000-07:00

Sweet!

Multimedia message

2007-04-07T13:23:00.001-07:00

Today i took a class on learning space design and visited this five hundred seat classroom at sdsu.

Edubuntu LTSP

2007-03-25T16:24:00.001-07:00

Well, I took the time to haul two computers from Einstein over to SDSU with the hopes of figuring out exactly why I can't boot up a thin client from the server, but I still haven't figured it out. I'm hoping by Wednesday I'll have it all solved since Gregg will be in the lab. The only question is whether he'll help me or not. Maybe more accurately the question is whether I can get the problem under his skin to the point that he won't rest until it is solved.

In the meantime I finished up my Saturday course with Dr. Dodge on Drupal. Pretty sweet I guess, but it is a completely different way of thinking about how webpages work. I'm not really sure that I'm ready to implement something like that across Einstein, but I'll just have to see how much time I have this summer to look at it. So far it is pretty complicated getting some of the modules installed, and I'm not at all confident in the teachers being able to do something like that for themselves. I have more hope for getting some sort of drupal site up for the school and then just linking to teacher pages that they can make themselves, perhaps with Google Page Creator or something. Overall it is a pretty daunting undertaking, but one that seems worthwhile, I'm just not sure I'm ready to tackle it yet, especially seeing as how I'm only just starting to feel proficient at CSS and somewhat capable with Javascript.

I'm still debating about what this blog will be, or become, but I think I'm just going to use it for my own personal stuff. I like the idea of lots of people reading it, but I think in the end the greatest use will be done by my future self, looking back at what I used to do and laughing at how foolish I was (or am). I have so many other goals for blogs and stuff, but I think this idea is still worthwhile. Other ideas include: a podcast blog for Jon about economist articles with commentary by me afterwards, a blog on K-12 educational technology stuff for tech teachers (I think I'll do this in Drupal and link it off of hartmanbot), and of course the einsteintech blog. I guess it isn't as much as I thought actually. Hope all is well with everyone. -joe

Screwtape proposes a toast

2007-03-21T17:17:00.000-07:00

So last night in my church growth group we read CS Lewis' short work, "Screwtape Proposes a Toast". For the uninitiated, Screwtape is a demon in the pits of hell, so the wise will be sure to avoid following any advice he has. You can read the whole thing here if you're inclined. What really struck me in the story is the part where Screwtape talks about how Democracy can be twisted into a thinly veiled excuse for envy, and moreso, how this attitude quickly spreads into education. These two paragraphs were especially profound for me:

"The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be “undemocratic.” These differences between pupils – for they are obviously and nakedly individual differences – must be disguised. This can be done at various levels. At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not. At schools, the children who are too stupid or lazy to learn languages and mathematics and elementary science can be set to doing things that children used to do in their spare time. Let, them, for example, make mud pies and call it modelling. But all the time there must be no faintest hint that they are inferior to the children who are at work. Whatever nonsense they are engaged in must have – I believe the English already use the phrase – “parity of esteem.” An even more drastic scheme is not possible. Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma -- Beelzebub, what a useful word! – by being left behind. The bright pupil thus remains democratically fettered to his own age group throughout his school career, and a boy who would be capable of tackling Aeschylus or Dante sits listening to his coeval’s attempts to spell out A CAT SAT ON A MAT.

In a word, we may reasonably hope for the virtual abolition of education when I’m as good as you has fully had its way. All incentives to learn and all penalties for not learning will be prevented; who are they to overtop their fellows? And anyway the teachers – or should I say, nurses? – will be far too busy reassuring the dunces and patting them on the back to waste any time on real teaching. We shall no longer have to plan and toil to spread imperturbable conceit and incurable ignorance among men. The little vermin themselves will do it for us."

A sobering assessment in any respect, but especially when you consider that this was written forty years ago. Here are my own thoughts on the subject, borrowed from a blackboard discussion from a couple of weeks ago for my Ed 795B class at SDSU:

"The problem with education in America is that there's no scarcity. Scarcity is why Chinese schools work, and why American Universities work. This is why if I could do just one thing for education, and only one thing, I would get rid of truancy laws. I figure if parents can't even get their kid to ATTEND school it isn't our job to do so. Attending school should be a privilege not a right, like driving a car. I know there is a societal cost to having uneducated citizens, but there is also a societal cost in trying to educate them. I totally understand being an advocate for low achieving kids who've got it rough, but we've got a responsibility to be advocates for those kids who don't. These are the kids who try hard every single day and get essentially ignored for it because they aren't dyslexic or ADD or emotionally disturbed. Imagine if we could take all the resources we spend on raising up the lowest kids who don't give a lick anyways and instead applied them to the highest of the high, making sure they were consistently challenged throughout their school day. Maybe we leave a few children behind, but at least we aren't holding anyone back either."

Until last night I thought my view was too harsh, and while I guess I still feel that way a little, it is much less so now that I read Mr. Lewis' thoughts. Even so, I've come to think that it might not be necessary to do away with truancy laws altogether, so long as that feeling of scarcity is created somehow. It could be artificially created within the schools along the lines of what Germany does now, effectively creating tiers of schooling for all pupils. Those without the grades are not permitted access to all the offerings of the school, akin to our own AP course offerings in high school. This would create a level of scarcity that I think would benefit education overall, though it would not alleviate the suffering of teachers still asked to educate the unmotivated and unsupported (and then berated for failing to do so). That may require another set of solutions I haven't yet thought of. -joe

Edubuntu

2007-02-28T15:34:00.000-08:00

So I still haven't received my first message from the Economist that I signed up for last week, so I guess I'm still resorting to writing about my life. Lately I've been getting more interested in setting up an LTSP server running edubuntu (a version of Linux designed expressly for K-12 use) and using thin clients in classrooms. Seeing as how my school has a plethora of lousy computers, this setup seems like the best solution to our technology needs. I was disappointed to read this afternoon that we'll likely need some more RAM to power the servers themselves, but we are slated to receive 80 new P3 computers next month, so maybe enough of them will come with 256 MB of memory to piece together a few good terminal servers for my edubuntu project. If not I guess we'll just be running some slow setups.

In other news, I'm hoping to start a blog on my own experiences in the lab trying to come up with creative things for the kids to do, but I think a whole website might be more appropriate. Maybe that's what hartmanbot will have to eventually become. It seems like a worthy cause, which probably means someone is already doing it. I haven't really investigated that much.

Finally, Benita and I booked tickets to Costa Rica for this summer and we're both pretty excited about the trip. We take off at 2am on June 30th and have an 8 hour layover in Panama City before heading on to San Jose. We're going with a few other people, so it should be a really fun trip. I'll be sure to blog about it a bit when the date arrives. Cheers -joe

Hartmanbot.com

2007-02-22T11:11:00.000-08:00

So I finally registered a site and started putting stuff up on it. Check it out if you have some time to kill: hartmanbot.com

Hartmanbot was the name of my botball robot last year. I used to challenge the teams of students in my elective class to sumo matches against Hartmanbot and I think he only lost one time, maybe twice. In any case, pretty much all the other names I would choose were already taken. I guess Hartman is a more popular name than I realized.

So the best part of getting a site is that I have been learning a lot of new CSS programming stuff. I actually rebuilt the entire site from an existing template, but the new one is all in CSS, which I'm really enjoying experimenting with. Oh, and I've also started a site for the Geosense tournament I'm planning on holding later this year at Albert Einstien. You can check it out here, it's also all in CSS.

Finally, I've been trying to think of some way to be more consistent with my posts, and I decided that I needed some sort of catalyst for writing. Since I pretty much only get any informational knowledge from The Economist, I immediately thought of some way to incorporate that into my blog. So I think what I'll do is comment each week on one of the articles that The Economist features in one of its free weekly emails. There are three that I signed up for: business this week, politics this week, and from the editors desk (or something like that). I'm leaning towards the editor's desk right now, but we'll just have to see what I think of them. Hopefully with a little more regular posting I can get some other people's opinions on some topics and I can stop just being an Economist mouthpiece repeating back everything I read within their pages. Cheers -joe

The ROOTS!

2007-02-13T14:24:00.000-08:00

So I finally got to see the Roots last night. Great show at the House of Blues in San Diego. They had a four piece guest horns section that was incredible, and of course the regular members were great as well. There were three definite highlights for myself, the first being that it was the bass player's birthday last night so at one point the whole band stopped the show and we all sang Happy Birthday to him. The second was the very end of the show, when Black Thought did his best James Brown impression and the horns section really got going, it was like a soul concert, and I can't say how privileged I felt to witness it. There just aren't that many bands out there doing music like that anymore, just great. My favorite part though was the first song the band did for their encore. They all came back out to applause and started in with the guitar tune of "Roxanne" which the newly reunited Police just performed at the Grammy's the night before. Then Questlove himself did his best Sting impression and the place just exploded. I can't believe the crowd had that much energy that far into the show, but it was just infectious and everybody started yelling and jumping around. Good times all around.

Back to School Night

2006-09-21T18:26:00.000-07:00

Here I am, wondering if anyone is going to come up to see my amazing computer lab here at Einstein. I figured since it looks like such an occurrance is unlikely, I'd at least try to get something of some value done. But then I just decided to update my blog.

So I started taking students in the lab this week, and for the most part it's been pretty good. I'm still getting adjusted to the little ones (K - 2) but I think I'm doing okay. At the staff retreat a few weeks ago some of the 1st grade teachers were emphasizing to me how specific I'd need to be with the students. "You've got to tell them EVERYTHING," they'd tell me, eyes widening with each syllable. "How to walk, how to talk, where the bathrooms are...." "Oh, YES! The BATHROOMS, make sure you tell them where the BATHROOMS are," they'd say, lighting into stories of students past who were unable to control their bladder, bowels or both at some point of the school day.

These nightmares got me thinking though. How could I teach the students how to walk? Don't they already know how to walk? Eventually I got the idea to have the students walk "like robots" on the way to and from the lab. They would have to walk with stiff arms and legs and look straight ahead. Of course, the first images that popped into my head when I thought of this were the lines of militant North Korean soldiers high-stepping past Kim Jong Il. That would never do. "Besides," I thought, "what kind of school would this look like to some random bystander who just happened to witness me marching little six year olds through the halls?" I'm sure it isn't the kind of impression that the school is interested in projecting in any case.

Of course, all of this doubting was out the window with my first class of the week. A first grade troop of students quickly taught me exactly how crazy it can get on a simple walk back to the classroom. Not to mislead you, nothing extraordinary happened at all, it was just six year olds being six year olds. Walking without paying attention to where they were going, talking to their friends next to them, chasing after a bug or two enroute....

So with the next class I tried the "robot walk" bit. "There are three things you need to know about robots," I began. "The first is that robots don't talk. 'But Mr. Hartman, Mr. Hartman' you'll say. 'I saw a movie with robots in it and they talked!'" I whined using my best five year old voice. "Those aren't robots, those are CYBORGS! Robots don't talk."

"The second thing you need to know about robots is that they always walk in a straight line. Humans? Humans walk all over the place. They walk left, they walk right, they might even walk in a circle. But robots always walk in a straight line."

"The last thing you need to know about robots is... they have NO elbows! If a robot wants to scratch his head, he has to use his shoulder," I said, my ear rubbing against the sleeve of my shirt.

The kids ate it up, and I had no problems for the rest of the week making all of the students walk like robots to and from the lab. Now, I still kind of worry what it might look like to a random bystander, but I decided that most people, for better or worse, have simply forgotten what it is like to not only have a six year old child around, but to be a six year old child. They simply have the attention span of a gnat, and it is quickly the most infuriating thing in your life to try and get 20 of them to walk in a somewhat organized and timely fashion anywhere without screaming like banshees. I don't think there's a mother in the world that would convict me, but part of me still misses the simplicity of simply asking my 6th graders to just go somewhere and having them do it. -joe

2006-09-05T16:09:00.000-07:00

Okay, so I know it's been a while since I posted, but now that I'm trying to keep a running blog for my new job as the technology guy at Albert Einstein Academy, I thought it wouldn't take much for me to blog some on my own neglected site. I guess this new job is the biggest thing I've got going right now. It seems like it's going to be pretty cool. A new middle school is starting up here this year, so that's always an interesting development to undertake. Thankfully I'm only working with the established elementary staff and students (this year). We'll have to see. I think it is all really interesting to witness (by all, I mean the chaos confusion and utter disorganization that accompanies trying to open a new school). Hopefully if I ever end up starting a school in Africa, I'll be able to dodge some of the more devastating bullets by remembering what I've seen both here and at High Tech. Well, I'd better get started on my other blog for now. Hopefully someone around here will find it useful in some way. Cheers -joe

First day as a noobie

2006-03-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

I decided to sign up for a MapleStory account several weeks ago and mentioned the idea to my students, becoming instantly inundated with advice and ideas about what world to play in and what job to take (magician, warrior, thief, or bowman). I even took the time to call my cousin and ask for his advice. It wasn't until nine days ago that I actually signed up for the account though, using a couple of e-mail messages my cousin had written me to guide my decisions. I even gave him a call as I got my username and password, just to make sure I was doing everything ok.
My cousin had mentioned that he could "train" me in the game, but as I began playing I realized that I was stuck on a training level, apart from the main game where he was playing and thus, unable to be "trained" by him. The idea of "training" levels in games is relatively new, a product of the digital native generation. As I child I used to pore over manuals to video games I had just bought in attempts to understand exactly how the game worked and how it was played. Such a resource is rarely necessary in modern video games though, as the manual to play is frequently built into the game's first levels and players are either forced or encouraged to go through some sort of initiation stage to learn the basics of game control and operation.
Believing the training ground to be the only barrier between myself and my "training" at the hands of my cousin, I was overly anxious to leave the training ground and join the main island of players. Had I joined the game without prior knowledge and advice from my students and cousin though, I'm sure I would have been more receptive to the lessons being taught on the training island of MapleStory.
I did learn more about the basic operations of the game in the training ground though, mainly how to complete a quest for a non-player character (NPC) and how the map function operates in the game. I also learned how to use the chat feature of the game as my cousin answered various questions I had about the training island and how to advance to the main island in the game.
When I finally did make it to the main island, I immediately contacted my cousin about training me. He informed that there was a good area to train near Hensys, a town I located on the map and headed towards. On my way to Hensys I passed by several NPCs and talked with them, accepting more quests and learning about which animals I could defeat easily and which were too difficult for me to kill. Playing for only a couple of hours, I quickly learned the controls of the game, strategies for moving within the world, and how to communicate with another player with the game's chat program. The second day I would learn more about the most important aspect of the game: levelling.

Maple Story Week 1

2006-03-04T02:23:00.000-08:00

Well, I've just got the green light from my professor to use this blog as data (how often do you get to make up your own data to use in a study?) so I guess I better get to work before I forget too much. I won't waste your time by telling you about the game itself, if you're curious you can read all about it on wikipedia here. The first time I heard about the game was from my aunt, who was appalled by two things about it: one that her two sons (ages 7 and 12) were both so engrossed by it, and two that it was free for them to play. I was familiar with MMORPG's, specifically EverQuest, the attributes of which had been explained to me in minutae by a former co-worker at The Olive Garden several years ago during my table waiting days. When I was a young lad though, one of the main draws for new video games was improved (more realistic) graphics. The fact that EverQuest had an immersible, three dimensional, and fully interactive world with which to engage enabled me to at least somewhat understand the appeal. You can imagine my surprise then, to see MapleStory for the first time as a side scrolling two-dimensional game much closer in visual resemblance to Super Mario Bros. then EverQuest.
"What is the point?" I asked my cousin (age 12)
"There is no point," he explained. "It's for little kids, but it's really addictive."
I lost interest pretty quickly at that point, but each week when I returned for dinner with my family, I noted the absurd amount of time my cousins spent in the game. I may have even asked a few more detailed questions of my cousin in attempts to better understand the game, but the truth is that the idea of interacting with dozens ( much less hundreds or thousands) of people at the same time was intimidating to me.
"What will they think of me? Will I be a joke? Will I be ridiculed?" were all thoughts that passed through my head while merely thinking about playing the game. I should explain that I'm not a very competitive person by nature, but I don't like losing either, and the idea of a game where there aren't any losers was still difficult for me to grasp. I suppose the reason I was hesitant to join the game earlier (aside from being very busy) is similar to the reason I don't start surfing: I don't want to go through the "newbie" period that all beginners must suffer through.
What finally grabbed my attention with MapleStory though was when I noticed how many of my 6th grade students were involved in the game. At that point I started asking my cousins more about the game and when the opportunity came up to do a case study for my Ed 690 class, I immediately thought of MMORPG's and MapleStory. I'll post more tomorrow about my first day as a Mapler. -joe

Maple Story

2006-03-01T08:57:00.000-08:00

Well, it seems as though another project for me to blog about has entered my life. This time the culprit is the popular MMORPG (massive multiplayer online role playing game) Maple Story. A couple of days ago I joined the game as part of a Case Study I'll be producing for my Introduction to Evaluative Research class. I meant to start blogging my experiences as soon as I signed up, and now that I think about it I probably should have started blogging about it all as soon as I thought of the idea. Now I've already reached Level 7 and I still haven't said a thing. I'll do my best to remedy that situation as soon as possible. -joe

The Forbidden City and The Great Wall

2005-08-01T00:40:00.000-07:00

Last Saturday I caught a bus and took it a few stops south to go see The Forbidden City and Tienamen Square and everything else tourists go to Beijing to see. I got off the bus a little early having seen a McDonalds and not eaten yet, and afterwards just wandered along the road I knew led to Tienamen Square. Just ambling along, I noticed a fair sized gathering of people taking photographs of a large Chinese gate with some guards nearby. The gate looked pretty nice, pretty big too, but I honestly didn't know why people were photographing it. Nice, big gates abound in China, security guards too, so I couldn't figure out what was so special about this particular gate that had compelled so many people to capture it on film. I momentarily considered just walking on by the crowd, but then thought better and stopped to watch everyone. Just past the gate and between two guards was a large red wall, not unlike the one that runs along the entire road. This wall made it impossible to see what was beyond the gate and, while it seemed to be acceptable to venture inside, I noticed that nobody did. I decided to pull out my tourist map and figure out exactly what the underwhelming thing I was looking at really was. To my surprise, my map seemed to suggest that this gate was the entrance to Tienamen Square. As I looked very carefully again at my map, a young Taiwanese man approached me and asked if he could look over my shoulder. He was looking for somewhere to get lunch.
"This is Tienamen Square?"
"Yes, Tienamen Square."
"Can you go in there?" I asked, motioning through the gate. The young man laughed.
"No."
Apparently Tienamen Square is the Chinese equivalent of the White House, except under far greater cover. I still found it such an uneventful site, I didn't even bother to take a digital photograph of it. What I did do was begin to wonder exactly what it was I had seen so many years ago on television during the famous student protests. If it wasn't here at Tienamen Square, it must have been nearby. I crossed under the boulevard to the other side of the street, pulled out my map again, and then decided to cross back. I walked further down the street, looking for a way into what my map showed as The Palace Museum, which appeared to be just over the wall broken by the gate at Tienamen Square. I came across a small side street and walked a ways down it, hoping to find a side way into the Palace Museum.
"Shouldn't there be throngs of tourists around here?" I thought to myself and, noting the lack of any, turned around again to continue along my original course. I was getting quite frustrated at the sight of the continuous red wall that ran alongside me without every allowing access to that which it protected (not to mention the lack of public toilets), when I suddenly came to a corner of the wall that opened up into a vast expanse with an absolute throng of tourists. A prominent 20 foot tall painting of Chairman Mao above an arch in the wall signalled that I had at last found what I was looking for. The walls of The Forbidden City are astonishingly large. Straight out of Lord of the Rings, there are numerous inner and outer layers which, on the South side of the city, encase astonishingly large stone courtyards. Atop each subsequent wall's gate is an elaborate building that I wasn't able to investigate, but the elaborate and impressive characteristics of the gates themselves give some clue as to what the guard buildings might be like.
For me, the highlight of The Forbidden City was the North end. Characterized by smaller buildings built closer together, the Northern city was originally inhabited exclusively by the Emporer and a select few others (mostly workers who were forbidden to leave and concubines). High red walls exist in the Northern city as well, but they aren't as imposing, and serve more to divide the area into different courtyards. Each courtyard, in turn, is divided by different buildings, with a temple in the center. There are maybe a dozen such courtyards, and they are exceedingly interesting to explore. The Chinese government has decorated each courtyard with different exhibits, but the real charm just comes from wandering around the labryinth-like grounds, imagining what it might have been like five hundred years earlier. Wondering what it might be like to play laser tag in the North city occupied a fair amount of my time as well.
The Great Wall at Ba Da Ling, is a tourist destination at least as popular as The Forbidden City. I was encouraged by a front desk worker at my hotel to take a taxi there, but she appeared a little too excited at the idea, and I decided her hope of a kickback from the taxi company was affecting her faith in my independence. So I took a bus instead. This turned out to be an astonishingly simple affair, as roughly six hundred million buses leave Beijing for The Great Wall every hour, and that number evidently doubles on Sundays, the day in which I was going. We arrived at Ba Da Ling after about half an hour, and once I learned to preemptively strike the overly aggressively souvenier purveyors that line the road to the wall, I was able to buy a ticket and wander around the immense structure. The wall at Ba Da Ling is apparently renovated to extreme measures, but it's impressiveness is not derived from the immaculate condition of it's construction, but rather its imposing location and sheer scale. I wandered around the wall for the better part of an hour, hiking up stairs reminiscent of the Inca Trail in Peru and taking pictures that failed to capture even a hint of the majesty of the view; but after a short while the whole scene was fairly uninteresting and I walked back down towards the buses, head-butting the tourist shop sellers as I went. I had noticed upon arriving that there was a Circle Vision theatre on the site, something I recalled with fondness from the early days of Disneyland. I took a chance that the price would be cheap (a good bet in China) and it turned out to be free with a paid ticket to see the wall. With exuberance I waited the twenty five minutes until the next showtime (this despite the film being only eight minutes long) and prepared myself for a trip back to the past. For those of you who have never experienced the bliss that is Circle Vision, it is essentially a film in which several cameras have been aimed outwards, and the resulting footage is then projected on screens in a circular room. The effect is that you get to see entire scenes in 360 degrees, which would be really amazing to see if humans had eyes in the back of their heads, but is pretty cool regardless. This particular film would have been even cooler if it hadn't been in Chinese and revolved around a lengthy reenactment of the first commissioning of the wall, but the impressive aerial shots were enough to make me look past all that. A thoroughly enjoyable weekend when all was said and done actually, I'm sure I'll look back on it with disbelief when I'm washing my clothes and cleaning my room back in San Diego next weekend. -joe

Beijing

2005-07-28T20:18:00.000-07:00

Hello, hello all. Sorry it's taken me so long to get back to this blog. Governmental influence in China increases as you get closer to Beijing, meaning that even here at Beijing Normal University I can't get access to the general Internet without leaving campus and asking a friend of Dr. Yu's to use his computer. I have managed to remain busy in my world-wide-web-free existence though. My days here so far has been used to contribute to a database for teachers to use in searching for appropriate flash based educational media to supplement their English lessons. I only just wrapped up the assignment a few minutes ago in fact. In the remaining five or so days I've got here, I'm planning on touring a bit - Tienamen Square and the Forbidden City (not to mention the six party nuclear arms talks) are just a few blocks from my hotel - and then writing another paper on flash based educational media attributes both positive and negative. Speaking of papers, I've included the first one I wrote in Shenzhen just below. Some of you might find it interesting, for the rest of you, I'm sorry. I'll try to post some nice pictures of Beijing in a couple of days. -joe

A Comparison of Modern Teaching Methods in China and the United States
By
Joseph L. Hartman

Synopsis:
With respect to English language acquisition, Chinese and American schools have many similarities in their organizational structure and curriculum development. Yet there are marked contrasts in the curriculum delivery methods and student achievement philosophies each country exhibits. America’s English classrooms are noticeably less technologically integrated and less rigid than those in China, whose goal is to educate with efficiency through focus and familiarity. The differences seen in the two classrooms are indicative of a deeper philosophical divide between the two countries, pitting the Chinese belief in maximizing student potential against the American belief in leaving no child behind. Both could benefit from an adoption of the strengths of the other. For America this means an embrace of personal computers for every student, increases in technological integration across the curriculum, training for teacher involvement in the utilization of technology, and focused measures for pushing those at the head of the learning curve. For China it means embracing a balance of less defined individual lessons, increases in student-selected content, further integration of contextualization, and defined measures for ensuring the opportunity of success for all students.

Introduction:
Both Chinese and American schools depend upon their governments to dictate the content students study in every grade. Beyond this guidance however, the institutions in both countries are afforded the freedom to decide how best to deliver that content to their respective students. This paper will seek to analyze the differences in recent methods adopted by the two countries with respect to their English language curriculum, hypothesize about the possible underlying causes for those differences, and explore how each country may be able to benefit from the experiences of the other.

The American Model:
Integration, as witnessed in recent English classrooms in America, refers less to computers and software than to literature and books. Moving away from such historical staples of English development as weekly spelling and vocabulary tests, modern methods of English teaching emphasize context over content. Spelling and vocabulary words are no longer photocopied from long lists in standalone workbooks, but are instead taken from the pages of passages or novels the students are reading in class. Often, these words are previewed by the instructor to prepare the students for what they will be reading. In this way, expansion of the language is accompanied by a contextualization that enables the students to apply their prior learning towards a more effective synthesis of new information.

Current Language Arts education trends in elementary schools continue to expand upon this integration, utilizing several different types of reading strategies to encourage students as they acquire greater mastery of the language. In the very young grades teachers may utilize a picture-walk, a read-aloud, popcorn reading, or the lean-in lean-out strategy among others. The forefront of current English language curriculum in elementary schools is, however, dominated by class reading groups.

The Reading Groups Model allows students to independently advance through a self selected series of books read both individually and during designated class times. Reading during class time takes place in small groups of students with like books and may implement a number of comprehension strategies ranging from vocabulary study to character analysis. This is also the time when the instructor is free to circulate the class and provide assistance or evaluation to individual students. The Reading Groups Model may be implemented as a complement to more traditional spelling and vocabulary tests, or used as the source for such strategies. It relies upon student self-motivation for success and is highly structured out of necessity. Several students reading different books simultaneously denote an organized system for tracking student progress, and this can result in a high learning curve for beginning teachers. The balances within the Reading Group Model can also be difficult to maintain, but are immensely beneficial as they aim to simultaneously allow the maximum amount of individual student advancement, high levels of class independence, and ample teacher oversight.

Technological integration in American English classes often applies only to the instructor. A CD-ROM with pre-made lesson plans and answer keys may be included with the Teacher’s Edition of class text books, and occasionally includes audio for the stories in the text and limited visuals. Unlike the Chinese curriculum however, the software is rarely intended for interactive use by the students themselves. The primary reason for the lack of technological integration in English lessons is due to a low ratio of students to computers in the classroom. Most American classrooms are equipped with only one computer for every four or five students, thus often relegating the equipment to a secondary status within the curriculum. More often used for word processing and evaluations of learned material than anything else, computer use is also hindered by a lack of training on the part of the instructors. Because of this, even the availability most schools provide of a computer lab with ample hardware for each student fails to motivate the average English teacher to integrate to the greatest degree these resources into their class curriculum.

The Chinese Model:
For the modern Chinese student, integration in the English classroom refers to the rapidly growing inclusion of technology into the lessons. This refers to Flash programs, the Internet, personal computers for every student, a large projector, and corresponding workbooks and teaching materials for both the students and instructor with which to support it all. Each lesson is highly structured and follows a predictable pattern with teachers utilizing an array of proven and successful strategies to engage their learners. Songs are used to review with the students at the beginning of the lesson, new material is previewed on the blackboard and projection screen before the class is permitted to explore it using individual notebook computers. A class review of the lesson is conducted using interactive games afterwards, and the students end each lesson by role playing with partners the scenarios they’ve seen.

The Internet lesson content is compiled by various community teachers and overseen by The Modern Education Technology Research Institute, a government body that oversees the distribution of the lessons to area schools. Lessons are generally organized into units, such as “family”, “jobs”, or “food and drink”, with the units then organized into a website template with different pages such as “games”, “stories”, and “songs”. The content of each page is generally delivered through Flash programs that are found on the Internet and then copied. Any required modifications to the content are made by the teachers themselves using Flash or another appropriate editing program. Because these multimedia lessons are available on each school’s intranet server, every teacher and student is able to easily access it.

The Chinese model, while efficient and designed to take advantage of the most effective and proven teaching strategies, does not afford its students the same individualized choices for learning as the American model. While there are multiple routes available to each student within the lesson, such as different games or stories (some of which are more difficult than others), in essence every student in the classroom learns the same lesson at the same pace as the rest of the class. Additionally, the context that American teachers provide for their students through the Reading Groups Model is a challenge for the Internet lessons to match. For example: a lesson may be about different kinds of food and include a flash-based game of Concentration with a song about a pickle at the circus, but this leaves something to be desired in the area of contextual relevance. In theory, the units could be integrated to a greater degree and eventually match or even better the level of contextualization offered in reading groups, but this is not currently the case.

Modern models for English instruction in America and China clearly vary on several different levels. Less clear is how and why those models came to differ so greatly despite similarities in their goals and origins within the educational system of each country. The differences in how Chinese and American classrooms have come to embrace technology are responsible for some of the variations, but many of them would be present even if computers had never been invented.

The Philosophical Models:
Summer school does not exist in Shenzhen. Student advancement from grade to grade depends entirely on age, regardless of whether or not the student is able to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of the curriculum. This runs directly contrary to the model for student advancement in America where a student who fails to learn the subject matter may not only be required to attend intersession classes to compensate for the lost time, but may perhaps be held back to repeat the school year a second time. No other circumstance more clearly demonstrates the underlying difference in the educational philosophies of the two countries as this.

In its most simplistic form, the Chinese educational philosophy views school as a forum within which students compete for success. The simplistic American philosophy views school as an institution of entitlement, within which equality must be assured and success all but guaranteed. The former could be seen as unfair to the slower learners, the latter as being unfair to the high achievers. The debate could most aptly be summarized as Chinese efficiency versus American equality.

The roots of this philosophical divide help define not only the different approaches to student support, but also partly explain the differences in elementary class sizes (40 – 50 students in China, 20 – 30 in the United States) and school sizes (hundreds of students in the U.S. versus thousands in China). The costs of public schooling in each country (free for 13 years in the U.S., heavily subsidized for 9 years in China) and books (provided by schools in America, purchased by parents in China) differ along these lines as well. Employing specialists who focus on single subjects of teaching is more efficient, if less nurturing, than employing teachers who instruct in all areas of learning; so this is what Chinese schools do from the earliest grades, while American schools typically wait until the middle school level.

Neither country dares to assume that its educational philosophy is without shortcomings. Similarly neither pretends not to be aware of the merits in contrary views. What often goes unanswered on both sides though is the question of how gains made in one respect can be made without resulting losses in another. Alas, education is not a zero-sum game.

Lessons to Learn:
American English classes would benefit from a move towards increased integration of technology into the curriculum like that seen in China. To effectively accomplish this denotes greater numbers of technological hardware - personal computers for every student at a minimum - hours of teacher training to instill confidence, competence, and to assure use of the technology, as well as centralized oversight of the ongoing curriculum changes to occur.

American students would also benefit from an increased emphasis on the part of schools to maximize student potential across all ability levels, especially those at the high end. Increased utilization of technology may hold some solutions for the most apt students to continually be challenged without diverting resources from the least apt, but other options are surely available. If intersession instruction is provided for those students who fail to meet expectations during the school term, why not make it available to those students who surpass expectations?

English classes in China would benefit from an increase in structural balance and organization like that seen in the Reading Groups Model. This requires an embrace of more flexible and student-selected lesson objectives to equalize the straightforward ones already being taught, as well as new focus on increasingly infusing lessons with relevant contextualization. Greater directional oversight of the model and further collaboration between lesson creators will eventually result in a learning system as competently structured and free as the Reading Groups Model, but with immensely greater learning efficiency and engagement potential.

Finally, China's schools would be well served to consider employing a system of support for failing students such as summer school or remedial courses. The inherent scholastic competition among students will only benefit from increases in the competency of all participants. A reduction in class sizes too would benefit students, as future increases in student learning independence will quickly warrant increases in individualized instructor guidance.

Conclusion:
Both China and America stand on the brink of a great educational revolution. The promise modern technology holds for students and teachers is astonishing and inspiring, but will not inherently solve every complication associated with education. Ensuring effective employment of these technological tools equally across student populations will require both countries to continually analyze lessons learned in the past and implement adjustments in the future. It will be only beneficial if these lessons can be learned second-hand and the adjustments made jointly, with international collaboration providing the knowledge and experiences to do so.

Hong Kong and such

2005-07-13T21:51:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since my last post so I though I'd try to bring everyone up to speed with the happenings in China.

Last Friday I finally met my official contact here in China, Dr. Yu. A professor with Beijing Normal University, Dr. Yu was in Shenzhen to make a short presentation during the teacher training Mr. Xu and I have been preparing for. Although I was only able to spend a few hours with Dr. Yu in the morning, it was a very reassuring visit and we talked about education and technology in America and China as well as the paper I've been working on. It's Dr. Yu who I will be working under next week when I fly up to Beijing, and he apparently has a different type of project in mind for me to work on when I get there, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing what that trip will have in store for me.

On Saturday I decided to take the weekend to visit Hong Kong. Although it may seem silly to say this, (given that I'm writing it from a desk in China) I'd really forgotten what it was like to travel. Since I've arrived here, I've had quite an easy time getting from place to place and making my way. In both Shanghai and Shenzhen I've always had a companion or two to take me around and translate and give me written directions to anywhere I had to go alone. It has been quite different from my trip across Europe a few years ago, when I was completely alone and inexperienced. Quite frankly, I'd forgotten what a stressful experience it can be to travel. Fortunately, just a weekend trip to Hong Kong brought it all rushing back.
I've always been under the impression that Hong Kong was just one island off the coast of southern China. I knew that it had been taken over by the British after the Opium Wars and was only recently returned to China for governance, but what I didn't realize was that Hong Kong actually consists of several islands. The most famous of these is Hong Kong Island, but the more recent development has been in Kowloon and the New Territories, just North of and across the water. I also completely failed to realize that Hong Kong is still essentially treated as if it were a foreign country by mainland China, a fact that made the ordeal of getting there and back infinitely more difficult.

The first step in my journey was to take a taxi from Shenzhen to the Hong Kong border, a bustling hub of human traffic that would have been nearly innagivable without the assistance of several English speaking ambassadors in yellow sashes. I was directed to a crossing exactly like that at an international airport, had my passport stamped, and continued on into Hong Kong. Curiously, the large rolling luggage bag I had stuffed with dirty clothes to wash at the hostel went unchecked, even by x-ray.

Mr. Xu had told me that I would be able to get another taxi to my hostel once I was in Hong Kong, but through the border I saw only large travel buses lined up. Along the sidewalk I looked for a taxi stand, but found only ticket vendors for the buses. Figuring a bus ride would save me some money anyway, I approached the vendor windows. Each window seemed to correspond to a certain destination within Hong Kong, and out of luck, I happened to see that one bus went to Mong Kok, a market district I had read about when reserving my hostel room. I remembered that the hostel’s close proximity to Mong Kok had been used as a selling point, and asked the vendor at the window about purchasing a ticket.

"Do you take Yuan?" I asked. He shook his head "no".

"Where can I get Hong Kong Dollars?"

The man pointed off to the side, where I had been looking for taxis. I wandered back to that end of the line of buses but saw no bank or ATM. I approached a woman in charge of tearing bus tickets and, with a ten Yuan note in my hand, asked where I could get Hong Kong dollars. She called over a nearby man and explained to him my situation. He gave me a strange look, and then began fishing around in his pocket to pull out some coins.

"No, no" I said and motioned for the man to put his change back. "I need to buy a ticket."

"They can take yuan," the woman replied and she pointed to the vendor windows.

So back to the vendor I went, except his time I just pulled out 100 Yuan and handed it to him. No problem this time.

I settled down in the back of the bus, excited at the thought of a long bus ride through the New Territories and the upper, rural parts of Hong Kong. We had only been driving for about three minutes when the bus suddenly stopped under an overhang. I thought we were maybe at a different station to drop off some passengers, but everyone on the bus stood up and got ready to disembark. I followed suit, retrieving my bag from under the bus and following the crowd into another line at another border crossing. Apparently there is one to leave China, and another one to enter Hong Kong. After a long wait I walked outside the building and found my bus, at last able to enjoy the ride I had anticipated long before.

The bus station in Mong Kok is along Nathan Road, the central thoroughfare for the city that one can follow to the coastline and views of Hong Kong Island. I stumbled around the people-packed sidewalks, luggage in tow, before finally asking a newspaper vendor where I could find the road my hostel was on. Fortunately it was only a couple of blocks away, but the address numbers were inconsistently marked and differed depending on the side of the street. I ended up pulling out a map on the sidewalk (a plea for help in any country) and sure enough, a man asked me a few moments later if I needed assistance. With his guidance I was able to find my hostel, get my room, and drop off four pairs of pants for washing before heading out for dinner.

Walking around Hong Kong for the first time without having to worry about finding my hostel or tripping someone with my bag, I was able to actually notice a few things about the city. The first thing I noticed was that there are fat people in Hong Kong. This was quite surprising, because I had begun to think that people just didn’t get fat in China. In fact, I remembered pondering the lack of obese citizens about a week earlier as I returned from KFC in Shenzhen, and had simply chalked up the phenomenon to the effects of a strict and healthy diet of rice and vegetables. Hong Kong, however, was an awakening.

Just how much of an awakening this was for me can be expressed by the fact that I noticed this difference between Hong Kong and mainland China before I noticed that the traffic in each area travels on opposite sides of the road. Like England, right down to the large double-decker buses everywhere, Hong Kong citizens drive on the left side of the road.

The third thing I noticed about the city was the prevalence of western businesses. While KFC has become quite a staple of my diet since arriving in Shenzhen (being the only alternative to Chinese food I know of), I have not seen here a single McDonalds or Starbucks (to my continual dismay, if to the benefit of my health). Naturally, my first excursion in Hong Kong was in the form of a beeline to the Mickey Dee’s I passed on the way to the hostel. After leaving the restaurant, and still feeling quite fortunate to have noticed it, I began my walk down Nathan Road and spotted another McDonald’s. Then another appeared down an alley, and I started to realize that luck had little to do with my hostel’s close proximity to the restaurant I had patronized. I also began to see several Starbucks and 7-11’s; even a Circle K or two could be found. As I continued south down Nathan Road I noticed one final difference between Hong Kong and the mainland: diversity.

It’s not so much that I’d never noticed that mainland China isn’t particularly diverse (it’s a bit of a hard reality to miss when you don’t see anyone who isn’t Chinese for weeks at a time). It’s more like I had forgotten what it was to live among a diverse community. Before Hong Kong the last black person I saw was at LAX (and this is over a period of nearly a month including four days in a city of 17 million people). There were also plenty of Indian people and middle-easterners of all kinds. This attribute, along with the businesses and fat people, made Hong Kong feel like more of a blend between China and America (with a little Britain because of the traffic, buses, and accents) than just another Chinese city. While I suppose this makes plenty of sense given its long history of British occupation, it was still bewildering at first and there was something about it that I just didn’t like.

It took me a long time to figure out exactly what it was about Hong Kong that made me uneasy, but I finally decided it was the lack of identity in the city. It’s difficult to explain, but there doesn’t seem to be a real feeling of culture in Hong Kong, or at least, not as much culture as there is in Shanghai or Shenzhen. If I had to say there was a culture at all to the city, I’d say it was the culture of business. It seems that everyone and everything in Hong Kong is geared towards business and money. Even the Frommer’s China Guide my grandmother gave me mentioned the lack of culturally interesting sites in Hong Kong. For sightseeing it recommended admiring the tall banks downtown.

There could certainly be other explanations as to why I felt this way about the city: I didn’t have a guide, I was staying at a hostel, the city was in the middle of a shopping festival right. Yet, even as I traveled alone and stayed in the hostels of other cities of the world where shopping was popular, I never felt the void of identity that I felt in Hong Kong.

I think this feeling can be linked to the role that Hong Kong played for China in the communist years and, to a lesser degree, continues to play. Being the isolated outpost for capitalism and business that it was, these attributes naturally became its culture. People visited Hong Kong to do business not to appreciate Chinese history, and so that is how the city has grown to define itself. Plus, with a British government and Chinese population, it only seems logical that an identity crises would eventually emerge. The advantage of such an attitude is that it caters perfectly to travelers, and I found Hong Kong much easier to manage alone than either Shanghai or Shenzhen.

I spent Saturday night wandering around the markets of Kowloon and Tsim Sha Tsui,
and I got up early on Sunday to see Victoria Peak on the island. The Star Ferry is a popular way to cross the water and only costs about 25 cents so I decided that would be the way to go. I found a Starbucks, got a Green Tea frappucino and was pointed to the Peak Tram, a famous and historic mode of transport to what is probably Hong Kong’s most famous tourist destination. Victoria Peak provides stunning views of both sides of Hong Kong Island, and the differences between the two couldn’t be more blatant. There is also a small shopping mall at the top, a few restaurants, and even a Madame Toussad’s Wax Museum. I avoided all of these (except the Mickey Dee’s in the mall before I left) and headed for the Peak Circle Walk, which traverses some of the most unexpected terrain I’ve ever encountered. Beautiful foliage and views, a waterfall, and innumerable butterflies can be seen on the circle walk, and there is no shortage of anxious visitors keen to do so. I ended up taking a bus instead of the tram back down the mountain, enjoying a memorable (if frightening) winding ride through thick tropical forest that inexplicably ends in the center of a metropolis without warning.

Around six I decided to head back to Shenzhen and so returned to my hostel. I hauled my luggage back along the crowded sidewalks to the bus station, purchased a ticket and took a seat in the back. I waited in line to exit Hong Kong and found my bus to take me to the entry border to China before standing in line once again to enter the mainland. When I got to the counter and presented my passport, the clerk seemed to check over my papers a little more intently than anyone else before. After a few seconds, another man appeared to take my passport and direct me to a different booth. Given a chair to sit on, I waited for a few minutes in confusion before the man reappeared.

“Your visa is expired,” he informed me.

“What!?”

“You have only one entry on this visa. You must return to Hong Kong. Follow me.”

I had only received a single-entry visa to enter China, with my one entry being used at the airport in Shanghai when I arrived. Since I left the mainland for Hong Kong, I needed another entry to return to Shenzhen.

One of the first things Mr. Xu did for me when I arrived in Shenzhen was to print out for me an information sheet in Chinese explaining my situation as an intern, the address of the office, and his phone numbers. If I got lost somewhere or needed help, I could then show the paper to a taxi driver or someone on the street to get assistance. Now I pleaded with the border worker to call Mr. Xu, not so much in the hopes of being able to return, but so he would know why I wasn’t going to be at the teacher training on Monday morning. The man took my paper and directed me to a different office and officer on the exiting side of the border. There I waited for another few minutes before the new officer returned my passport and paper and sent me on my way.

“You go back to Hong Kong now,” was all she said, her finger pointing the way.

Back on the Mong Kok bus, back in line to enter Hong Kong, back to the bus station, and back to my hostel I went. Luckily, the only space available for the night was the very room I had reserved for the previous night. I called Mr. Xu myself, talked with the hostel manager about where to go for a new visa and went to bed a little scared, but mostly just befuddled.

My last day in Hong Kong was pretty uneventful. I woke up early to get to the visa office before the lines got too long, but still ended up waiting for nearly an hour. The regular terms for a visa were fifty U.S. dollars and three days, but for an extra thirty dollars I was able to get a new visa in a few hours. I split the time waiting at the hostel and reading in a Starbucks where I indulged in another Green Tea frappucino. I made it back to my room in Shenzhen around 7, and although I had missed Dr. Yu’s speech to the teachers that morning, at least I was going to be able to go with Mr. Xu to the training on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Hope you’re all enjoying your July. I’ll try to write more tomorrow. -joe

I had to say this

2005-07-06T03:09:00.000-07:00

So my time here has (not unexpectedly) led me towards greater utilization of technology. Some of the programs I've been using recently have been introduced to me previously such as flickr, an online website that was recently bought by yahoo. Like the also popular shutterfly, flickr allows sharing, uploading, searching, and management of photographs. I've recently uploaded quite a few pictures taken during my internship in China that can be seen alongside some other photos at
http://www.flickr.com/photos/jlhartman/
My real reason for writing this entry though is another program: Google Earth. I would be lying if I said this wasn't the single most impressive program I've ever seen. If you thought Google Satellite Maps or Keyhole was cool, wait until you see Google Earth. I haven't even had the time to explore it completely yet (I had to write this first) but I would highly recommend simply downloading the program, running it, clicking on every possible button, and then just thoroughly enjoying yourself. (Make sure to get directions somewhere, and then hit the play button. Trust me on this).
http://earth.google.com/
Have a blast -joe

Teachers of the World Unite!

2005-07-06T01:41:00.000-07:00

Teachers of the World Unite!
Originally uploaded by jlhartman.

Yesterday I got to go with Mr. Xu to a local elementary school and meet with these six English teachers. We talked for a couple of hours about differences and similarities between schools in America and China, and what strategies our respective schools might employ to make teaching more effective. While my hopes of observing a class in action have been delayed due to student testing at the end of the term, my time with these wonderful women opened my eyes as to the incredible changes that the Chinese schooling system is undergoing. They too seemed to appreciate my time and words, and I think the meeting was beneficial for all of us involved. I'm currently helping Mr. Xu prepare for a meeting we will hold here at the Institute next week to help teachers broaden the scope of their multimedia curriculum, and I think this preliminary meeting will help me to better understand the specific needs these teachers will have next week when the training begins. -joe

The Long Answer

2005-07-03T02:54:00.000-07:00

There are only two English language television stations here in Shenzhen, and neither broadcasts in English for the entire programming time. In fact neither broadcasts continuously throughout the day at all, reminding me of the few times I’ve either heard about or seen in movies the famous American Indian Head and national anthem that used to signal the end of the broadcast day for American stations so many years ago. Fortunately for me, both channels here feature shows that largely suit my interests.

Since my arrival I’ve seen fascinating travel and nature shows on Marco Polo, the Nile River, and the South African Coast. Political, world, and financial news programs abound, as well as various documentary-style shows produced by the BBC. A particularly interesting one features a British celebrity chef’s efforts to overhaul the United Kingdom’s public school lunch program. (Being a teacher, I find few things more entertaining than watching the reactions of under-prepared adults’ attempts at coercing a large group of children into unfamiliar actions. “Children DON’T like vegetables! I can’t BELIEVE this! They actually PREFER unhealthy rubbish food!”) When all of this programming is combined with the American shows they air (ER, CSI: Miami, David Letterman, Lost) and the surprisingly similar commercials - albeit in Chinese - the result is a television viewing experience very close to that one might enjoy stateside. In fact, the only glaring difference between the two is the vastly different amount of public service announcements aired here.

During the presidential campaigns a few months ago I remember a prominent party representative being questioned about the incredible amount of money being spent on television ads to advance the cause of his candidate. He gave, what I thought, was a surprisingly relevant answer:

“Companies spend hundreds of millions of dollars each year to convince people to buy the right toothpaste. So no, I don’t think we’re spending too much money on the ad campaign.”

His response made me think about all the commercials I regularly watched, and how little they actually mattered in terms of social education and improvement. I watch a lot of sports, so I noticed how several times in the course of one evening I was exposed to commercials comparing calorie counts between different types of beer, but I didn’t know where to take my empty bottles to recycle them since the privately owned apartment building I live in doesn’t enjoy the benefit of county waste management services.

If you imagine the amount of beer ads you might see during a basketball playoff game or the amount of political ads you might see in October of an election year, you can imagine the amount of public service ads that air here in China. There are commercials here on nearly every topic of social responsibility: water conservation, mosquito control, television viewing responsibilities with respect to children, restaurant quality standards, staying safe in large crowds, dealing with sexual assault, appreciating cultural diversity, how to avoid spreading the flu, why stealing cable is bad, how to properly treat and maintain apartment windows (this one closely following on the heels of a recent rash of cases involving windows falling from tall residential buildings). The list goes on and on, but my favorite PSA has to be the one that educates the viewer on proper methods of customer service. (You mean I shouldn’t just totally blow off a customer if they ask me something? I should be polite to them? and honest too? That’s just crazy talk.)

I’m unsure exactly how the television media in China is regulated, and why it is that so many PSAs air. It seems to me that a disproportionate amount of them are shown on the English channels, but since I rarely watch anything else I can’t say for sure. I do know that a large part of television content is aired on various CCTV stations. CCTV stands for China Central Television, and all of those stations are apparently directly operated by the government. There seem to be several private stations as well – especially here in Shenzhen, with its close proximity to Hong Kong - but how each station’s advertising system is organized, I don’t know. Ultimately, how much any of the business behind airing the PSAs really matters is, I think, less important than the fact that they are aired at all.

In addressing The Short Answer in my previous post I made the point that China was obviously learning from America and other successful capitalist nations to gain insight as to how to most effectively modernize and join the ranks of the most powerful nations in the world. That China was doing so with more models to copy, more technology to utilize, and more human understanding to exploit than any nation that preceded it was resulting in an unparalleled pace of development. This, in turn, was enabling the country to enjoy the unprecedented luxury of avoiding, postponing, and in some cases completely leapfrogging many of the common pitfalls associated with modernization; and after spending less than two weeks in the country it was obvious to me that China was well on its way to becoming a worthy challenger to the United States for the title of World Superpower. I concluded that the U.S. should fear China essentially for its potential to “outamerica” America itself. The caveat to my conclusion was that the U.S. essentially controls its own destiny with respect to China’s rise. I’m not referring to preemptive military action or protectionist subsidies, although I doubt either would hurt China any more than America at this point. I’m referring to America’s ability to reciprocate China’s successful strategies and learn some lessons from its challenger. Public Service Announcements may be one place to start.

Any sports fan can tell you that commercial spots during the Super Bowl are as expensive as advertising on television gets. For the 2005 game, the price was apparently $2.4 million per commercial. Any sports fan can also tell you that there are precious few Public Service Announcements during the Super Bowl. After all, what politician could justify spending 2.4 million taxpayer dollars to remind people to cover their mouths when they sneeze? I don’t know whether the Chinese government pays for the ad time to air their PSAs or whether they simply legislate themselves the ability to do so, but I would suspect the latter. As uncool, and possibly ineffective (I’d really like to do a study on this while I’m here seeing as how they’re essentially attempts at educating an entire society) as these PSA’s are, there is no way the Chinese government would let a big event like the Super Bowl be broadcast without reminding the viewing public many times over about the dangers of driving while intoxicated. (Americans? We just hope that beer companies will take some time after the bikini clad super-models/NASCAR/beach volleyball/burping frog montage to mention it…or at least put it up on the screen somewhere…or at least direct the viewer to the company website so they can learn more...please?).

Like an overzealous basketball referee (sticking with the sports theme here), China is notorious for keeping a close eye on all its companies. Foreign corporations are outlawed from holding more than a 50% stake in any Chinese business, most large companies are at least partly owned by the government, and the country is carefully and strategically divided into different economic zones. Hong Kong and Macau in the south are both Special Administrative Regions, with different regulations than the mainland with Hong Kong even requiring a separate Visa to enter by air. Even Shenzhen is divided into different zones complete with government checkpoints. (At the airport I had to make sure I got an orange taxi and not a green one because the green ones can’t go into the Special Economic Areas). While all of this may sound like a hassle (which I suppose it is), the flip side of such a diligent government is that it doesn’t let business concerns inhibit its attempts to better society. (China wants you to know that there are ways to get rid of disease carrying mosquitoes, and here’s how. Now here’s how again…and again…and again…). Certainly China’s communists are beginning to learn that economic prosperity is contingent upon free and independent markets. So, will the U.S. learn that social prosperity is contingent upon strong government oversight of those markets and their participants?

Without getting too political, I think a case can be made for America becoming excessively involved in business and corporate affairs; or perhaps better stated, for business and corporate affairs getting excessively involved with America. That elected politicians work closely with union and corporate heads should be a shock to nobody, but whether that relationship is beneficial to the nation can be debated. In some cases, such as Vice President Cheney’s “secret” meetings with oil company executives concerning energy legislation, a case could be made for seeking the counsel of those men most intimate with the industry (although I can think of no legitimate reason why their identities should be kept from the public). Other times, the close working relationships seems to work more to the advantage of the businesses. One recent example could be the current energy bill passed by the House of Representatives that contains protection from lawsuits for MTBE producers whose product leaked into and polluted the groundwater of communities in as many as 29 states. Instead of an overzealous referee, in this case the government comes across as one who has obviously been bribed by one of the teams.

None of this is to say that China understands the role of government better than the United States (personally, I feel like there are too many restrictions here, I can’t even read my own blog!). Rather, the country’s concerns and cautious approach towards private enterprise appear at least somewhat justified, and they show that China is not only learning from America’s successes, but its failures as well. This may explain why despite the country’s embracing of capitalism over the past 20 years, its communist past is still evident through its concerns for the working class (even if the most visible form of this concern is the veritable barrage of PSAs) and the more heavy handed approach to business regulation it takes. America also regulates corporations, as evidenced by seatbelts, the SEC, and child labor laws, but the Chinese government does not seem content with just these basic principles. Instead, China seems interested in a different type of government involvement, a type that results in making business work for it, rather than it working for business (the latter situation being what happens if the U.S. wants to air a PSA during the Super Bowl).

If we imagine our basketball referee was also the owner of one of the teams he was calling in a game, we would have a situation close to that of the Chinese National Offshore Oil Corporation. CNOOC is largely controlled by the Chinese government and recently made headlines for its offer to acquire Unocal, the west-coast based American oil company. This offer, while not directly made with citizen money, is made possible through special loan guarantees by the government. So the offer is ultimately supported by the Chinese public. To draw a comparison, imagine if Ford Motor Company wanted to purchase Volkswagen, except didn’t have the money to do so. Imagine then that Congress voted to give Ford as much money as it needed to make the deal possible until Ford could pay it back. (I doubt whether the American public would support such a move, but if Ford was already half owned by the government and overseen by the State Department, it might be seen as a victory for the nation). While the idea of something like this occurring is almost laughable to Americans, it is exactly what the Chinese are accustomed to. The government foresees a national increase in oil demand and wants to shore up its assets and reserves. Why wouldn't it use businesses to help it do so?

The fact is that, because energy is so important to every nation, the Chinese model is increasingly the manner in which countries have addressed petroleum dependence. The top nine oil companies in terms of reserves are all 100% government owned (in Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Venezuela, United Arab Emirates, Libya, Nigeria, and Mexico by descending order of available supply). PetroChina is number fourteen on the list and 90% government owned, while ExxonMobil checks in two higher at number twelve. Of course, ExxonMobil is not owned - even in part - by any government, the only company in the top 16 that can say so. (It is interesting to note that the U.S. government is reportedly considering blocking the sale of Unocal to CNOOC on national security grounds, a move that would evidently move it more in line with the approach of the above listed nations).

It would appear the international model for corporate regulation approves of great government involvement in those areas of business that are of great national importance. That America disagrees can be illustrated by the fact that it is the only industrialized nation without a national health care system. While there is obviously a place for government oversight within private enterprise - Arthur Anderson painfully taught us the danger of letting it oversee itself – a consensus about how much and when has yet to be reached. (Personally, I feel the answer lies somewhere about equidistant from where China and the U.S. currently reside).

There are obviously other factors separating China from the United States that could be pointed at to either support or discount its recent rapid growth– democracy and currency market methods not the least of them – and yet the country has clearly acknowledged it has something to gain by moving away from its old economic policies and towards more American ones. The question now becomes whether the U.S. will make a similar realization and adopt any winning Chinese policies (at which point I’ll hopefully figure out where to take my empty beer bottles).

If so, where does that leave Americans? Our quality of life may collectively improve, and we may avoid the embarrassing sight of a Wal-Mart on the White House Lawn, but will not our two countries remain opponents and adversaries? At what point does Cold War II begin? Next time I’ll try to address The Real Answer, and offer a more appealing alternative choice for our nations to make. -joe

My Dinner with Mr. Jong

2005-06-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

Robotics and I don't go back too far. I only started to involve myself with the pasttime earlier this year when my director at High Tech Middle asked me if I would be the coach for the school Botball team (http://www.botball.org/). Once word had spread among the school community that I would be taking the reins of the team (regional champions the year before), Robots and I began to get much more comfortable with one another.
I started out mentoring a robotics team from school associated with a local competition at Legoland, the First Lego League. In general, the challenges and rules of Lego League are less difficult than those of Botball. For example, you are allowed to grab, position, and modify your robot in Lego League once the competition has begun. The two competitions do have many similarities though (both are timed competitions requiring pre-programmed robots built from Legos to complete various tasks on a ping-pong sized table in an effort to accumulate more points than the opposing team), and by the time the Lego League tournament rolled around, I was feeling ready to take the next step in my Robotics career.
I began teaching a robotics class at High Tech as an elective for the second semester. Borrowing supplies from the high school and several lesson ideas from it's director and robotics teacher, I was able to attract a class of about 20 students. Unfortunately, I was still vastly unfamiliar with the programming language and intracacies of Botball robotic engines and was unable to instruct the class as effectively as I would have liked. Fortunately, about two weeks into the semester the Botball organizers held their annual tournament information meeting. The meeting lasted for sixteen hours over one weekend, and while the highlight for most teams is finally getting to see what the year's tournament challenge will be, for me the highlight was getting some instruction on programming the robots.
Armed with my newly acquired skills I returned to school and my elective course with renewed confidence. I also began serious meetings after school with those students who were interested in participating on the team and in the tournament and discovered coaching to be much more difficult than teaching. The main reason for this is because students participate in after school clubs for pleasure, and striking the balance between productivity and fun without the availability of such threats as phone calls home or failing grades is simply challenging (and frustrating). Ultimately we placed 11th out of about 40 teams. Not bad, but definitely leaving room for improvement. All of this is to say that robotics has become an unexpected part of my life recently, and the opportunities it regularly presents to me are surprising.
Such an opportunity presented itself yesterday afternoon when Mr. Xu told me about a friend of his who wanted to take me out to dinner.
"He's interested in doing robotics at his school." I was told.
I'm always game for a good robot talk, and that this one presented the added benefit of a non-KFC dinner was just icing on the cake.
Around 7 o'clock I was watching the Top Ten Dunks of the basketball season on NBA Action (I think the best was Robert Horry in game 5 of the finals after he faked the three, but the show was taped before that had happened), when Mr. Xu called me on the cell phone I've been given. I met him at the gate of the elementary school and we were both picked up by Mr. Jong and Marcie, an English teacher at the school Mr. Jong oversees.
The car ride was half of the fun, as I was finally able to explore a little more of Shenzhen, but the restaurant we went to was the real highlight. Perched atop a small hill that peers over various buildings the restaurant is a three-story structure with a tea house on the first floor. All wood floors and tables lined the perimeter of the room with bamboo stalks threaded through lattice in the ceiling. Tall windows at the front of the building look out on an immaculate Chinese garden with a gazebo and bridges spanning small waterways before a clear view of the far off dusk horizon. We sat down at a small table with two wood loveseats next to the window and I talked to Marcie about her school schedule while Mr. Jong and Xu ordered.
I haven't been to enough restaurants to know for sure, but I think Chinese people take an inordinate amount of time to order their meals. It must have taken fifteen minutes to decide what we would have, a process made all the more uncomfortable by the fact that the servers wait tableside for the entire process. At one point last night we even had a second waitress visit the table to help the the process. It really didn't hinder my enjoyment too much, as it offered me the opportunity to get some background information on Marcie's teaching, which you will recall from my last post is the potential center of my project work here.
Marcie teaches first grade English to four different classes of students from about 8 am until 11:30 am. Unlike at American schools, Chinese students rotate teachers and subjects from the start of their academic career. (Perhaps this is an area of study I could exploit if the whole ESL thing doesn't go over well with Mr. Wong). From 11:30 until 2:30 the whole school takes a break. Teachers take a nap and maybe grade some papers or plan lessons. Students take a nap at the school or may even return home for lunch and a rest. After 2:30 the students return to school for more classes centered around electives and physical fitness that last until 5:30. During this time Marcie is responsible for aiding the other teachers. It is quite a different job from what I do, and was fascinating to learn about.
After a while the food arrived and we got around to talking about robots. My hosts are all under the impression that the U.S. is much further ahead of China with respect to Science education. This seems to contradict what I read in Newsweek about the number of participants from both countries in a global science competition, but I figured they had a better pulse of what's happening in Chinese schools than I did. Mr. Jong is hopeful that the implementation of a robotics club could help some of his students advance their scientific knowledge. I told him he's probably right. Robotics as a study is highly scientific, especially if one incorporates programming into it. It facilitates logic and lateral thinking, all aspects of the scientific method, creative thinking, problem solving, math, and probably a few areas of development I've forgotten. The only problem is the high initial cost of setting up a team.
We talked about what the school could afford, how they might be able to get started in Botball, and strategies for setting up an effective after school program. I even wrote out a short code to give them an idea of what the students would have to learn to participate effectively. I became really impressed by the dedication all three of my hosts showed towards the idea. After all, here they all were at 9pm on a Sunday night, discussing with someone who didn't even speak their language a subject that probably none of them would tackle directly. And yet their commitment and resolve was clear.
For me, the most exciting part of the evening arose when I began to tell them about my own plans for Botball next year at High Tech Middle. Botball team registration fees are about $2500, a sum that weighed heavily on my mind last year as I watched several team members waste valuable practice time. This year I decided a preliminary tournament could help solve this problem. Teams from the school could organize themselves and participate in a tournament of our own design. Perhaps just recycling one of the previous year's tasks from Botball. In any case, the two top teams from the preliminary tournament would then be invited to participate in the botball tournament. Hopefully, by rewarding the highest achievers at the onset, this strategy would ensure that only dedicated students made it onto the Botball team.
While explaining this to my hosts, it occurred to me that they might be able to save some money on Botball registration by simply taking part in our own High Tech Tournament. It wouldn't have the same level of intensity as Botball, but since the school was just starting its program from scratch, participating in Botball during their first year might not be much more than a waste of money anyway. I mentioned the idea at the table and seemed to get a positive response, so I'm not sure what will happen at this point. I've already e-mailed the powers that be at Botball, and I haven't discussed any of this with anyone at High Tech. Still, I think these are exciting developments for the students here as well as those stateside. I'll be sure to keep you all up to date. Robots Baby! -joe

Job Hunting

2005-06-26T00:03:00.000-07:00

Before I take the time to address The Long Answer in reference to my previous post, I decided I had better figure out something useful and education-related to do here. Xu actually does have a project for me to assist him on, an English language evaluation form for elementary students. He won't have it ready for me for a couple of days though, and even then it doesn't appear to be something that I can work on for the whole of the three weeks I'll be here in Shenzhen. In discussing with him what else I might be able to apply myself towards, he indicated that the decision was very much up to me. He suggested perhaps a study on the use of instructional space, and this might be something I may pursue once I have a look at some of the classes. In the meantime though, I've decided to propose a study dealing with second language instruction here. My reasons for this are two-fold. First, because I figure I will have an easier time communicating with teachers whose job it actually is to teach language (and especially those who teach English), than one whose job may be to teach math or science. Second, because I have a background in ESL instruction and second language development is an issue that has grown increasingly important in California, as well as the U.S. in general. I think I would like to begin by producing a paper along the lines of the one written here, but focusing on language rather than mathematics:
http://www.nctm.org/dialogues/2001-11/20011116.htm
I expect to also pursue the issue of how teachers here address those students who move from a different area of the country and speak a different language, thus paralleling the situation of those students I worked with at Hoover and Rosa Parks. My first step will be to run this idea by Xu and Mr. Wong (another teacher I have met here at the Institute). Hopefully they'll be able to give me some guidance within the topic and I'll ultimately be able to provide some insight into how both of our systems may be able to improve their techniques, or at least how they can learn from one another. Look for posts next week about my time spent observing Chinese classrooms and students, my conversations with ESL teachers, and at some point The Long Answer. -joe

Should America fear China?

2005-06-24T07:13:00.000-07:00

I remember fondly stories told by my uncle about how Japanese products in the 50’s and 60’s were renowned for their cheap construction and flimsy design.

“Everything made in Japan was just crap,” he’d chuckle. “It was all finger traps and paddle balls and anything else that broke within hours.”

But it wasn’t Japan’s apparent incapability for producing quality goods that so entertained my uncle, it was seeing the marked change in the attitudes consumers took towards Japanese goods over just his young adult life. By the time I was old enough to hit a paddle ball with some consistency Japanese products were renowned not for their cheap construction, but for their incredible reliability…and durability…and affordability. Indeed, my parents’ old 1980’s Sony receiver still rests in my room, annoying the neighbors as effectively as ever. Japan’s sudden rise to the position of World Economic Powerhouse was as big a surprise to Americans as the comment that they are “lazy” by a Japanese Parliament member. But shouldn’t we now be better prepared for the rise of China?

Even before I left (or even knew I would leave) for China, the question of what Sino-American relations would become in my lifetime was on my mind. This is not because I have a preoccupation with the country or because my girlfriend is Chinese (although Sin-American relations of a different kind may apply here), but because this is a question on the mind of just about every American today. The rise of China is no longer a debate, it is a fact; one that we are constantly reminded of by the media, the market, and our own government, so I won’t bother to remind you of it myself here (at least anymore). All I will say is that the figures are not misleading, and the development I’ve seen since arriving here has been awe-inspiring.

So, should America fear China? The short answer is: yes. The long answer is: it depends as much upon how America handles China’s rise to power as much, if not more, than anything else. I’ll address the short answer first (just don’t expect the explanation to be short).

After writing on my blog yesterday that I would be addressing this question in today’s entry, I went out to a Chinese fast food restaurant for a dinner of what can best be described as spaghetti soup with tomato and egg. Delicious, in case you were wondering. Naturally, I took along my trusty Economist from a couple of weeks ago and, upon opening it, discovered that the first article was a special report on the skyrocketing automobile market in China. Surprise, surprise. But there was a quote in it that summed up The Short Answer pretty well for me. It comes from David Thomas, the head of distribution for Ford over here:

“China is developing in very similar ways (to the developed markets), but doing it so much quicker,” Mr. Thomas adds. “So much quicker,” he repeats.

There was another article I read, or it may have been the same one, that compared China today with America in the 20’s. Apparently America was pretty much rockin’ and rollin’ in the world back then, at least before Black Tuesday. From my own experiences here, I’d have to say that China is like what I imagine London or New York to have been during the Industrial Revolution. I don’t mean there are horse-drawn carriages in the streets and little kids working in factories, I mean that there is this overwhelming sense of modernity pervading the atmosphere here. It’s almost a magical feeling of indefensibility and the public seems to be in awe at the possibilities made available to it. Their lives aren’t even that great (by American standards), but they are way better than their parents’ or grandparents’ lives and they know it. (Heck, they probably hear about it from their parents and grandparents all the time. “In my day…”)

Most importantly the workers don’t seem to have a collective feeling of how good it can get. The average citizen hasn’t reached the ceiling yet, but they can see it. This means that there is an overabundance of workers willing to toil away at monotonous and laborious jobs in the city for the opportunity of what will most likely settle out to be just a position in close proximity to wealth and not actual wealth itself. Taking advantage of this willingness on the part of the public, the government and private enterprise are modernizing the country like crazy.

Think about how quickly Manhattan, Paris, and their surrounding areas must have urbanized with the spread of factories 100 years ago. Now imagine that Manhattan and Paris had bulldozers, cranes, and cement mixers, cellular phones and the Internet, personal computers with AutoCAD drafting programs. Then imagine that Manhattan and Paris weren’t even on the cutting edge of all this development. In fact, there were already modern cities, even modern countries, around the world for them to emulate. Shanghai needs a subway? Look at Barcelona and Seoul. Skyscraper? Look at Chicago and Kuala Lumpur. Roadways? Look at Los Angeles (for what NOT to do) and Berlin. I witnessed the resurgence of the Silicon Valley when I lived in San Jose in the late 90’s, but China’s rise is different. It doesn’t require buildings to be torn down to make room for the new stuff. Shanghai’s financial district was farmland fifteen years ago and is the size of Chicago today. It starts becoming a little easier to believe what I heard on ABC World News Tonight this morning:

“China is building a city the size of Philadelphia every month.”

Actually, that’s still pretty hard to believe.

So what about when China finally closes in on the U.S.? Any economist will tell you that it is much easier for underdeveloped countries to grow their GDP by 10% than it is for developed countries to do so. In fact, the ease with which this is accomplished decreases exponentially with increases in the level of development. Isn’t it reasonable to expect China to follow the model? Probably, but to provide insight into this I must refer back to my past teaching experiences and my recent introduction to the English class videos I mentioned in yesterday’s entry.

Less than a month after earning my Multiple Subject Teaching Credential in December of 2003, I was hired by the San Diego State University Foundation as a Reading Intervention Tutor. My first assignment was at Hoover High School in City Heights. While Hoover is best known for having schooled the famous New York Yankee Ted Williams, it is second best known for being a lousy school. In my experience this was less the fault of the school itself than of Hoover having abysmal community support, but nevertheless it currently is a “failing school” and resides on the short list of candidates for government takeover. My job while I was there was to tutor, one-on-one, students whose English language abilities were below the acceptable level for their grade. After Hoover shut down for summer break I did the same job at the nearby Rosa Parks Elementary School for about two months. Out of the maybe 40 students I tutored at both locations, I think every single one was learning English as a second language.

When Xu showed me a video of second grade Chinese students speaking English nearly as well as native speakers (and far better than many of my former students), I immediately began to wonder about getting copies of the software I saw being used. “If little Chinese children can learn English this well using these lessons, surely they’ll work for American kids,” I reasoned. I had already begun thinking of how I would break down the content and synthesize it for my former students at Hoover before I realized that high school kids from City Heights don’t want to listen to some dude read them a story in English about two kangaroos on a fishing trip.

After watching more I started to wonder, “Why wouldn’t this work to teach American students Chinese?” While it probably would to some degree, I doubt it would be as successful as it is in China. The reason for this begins with the lesson being largely dependent upon direct instruction. Because the students can’t provide feedback to the computers they are using (which the teacher attempts to correct with interactive games and role plays, to some success), the lesson is ultimately unforgiving towards individual student progress.

It is also because a class in Shenzhen, while it is composed of nearly 50 students, is more homogenous in terms of ethnicity and especially in terms of economics than even the most segregated schools in America. This means the teacher can get away with less individualized instruction than might be possible in the vastly more diverse United States. (China’s population is 92% Han Chinese, America’s 77% White. China’s richest 10% own 45% of all wealth; America’s richest 10% own 70% of all wealth). The high level of diversity at High Tech Middle (where I currently teach sixth grade) is something I take great pride in, but it ultimately does make my job more difficult. Balancing the vastly different home lives, histories, religions, and cultural practices of a classroom of students (and very often their parents as well) is time consuming. I would be remiss not to mention that not all of China’s citizens speak the same language; but, of course, language is only a small part of the issue.

So won’t China still end up like America? Won’t citizens of Myanmar, Nepal, and Vietnam start immigrating to China when they realize the potential for opportunity and education there? Won’t society continue to settle into classes and the communist government be forced to address the accompanying concerns such as welfare, healthcare, and housing? Aside from the fact that the government here is entirely more likely than The White House to heavily restrict immigration, or at the least to be unaccommodating towards it (there are very few buildings here accessible by the disabled), the question is purely beside the point. Again, Mr. Thomas’ quote can be referenced to reveal that when China does reach that point, it will already have in place the systems of enterprise, government, and yes, education, to rival America’s. The Chinese are using the latest knowledge and technology to propel themselves far faster than any nation in history to a level of state achievement on par with America’s. Yes, they probably will have to deal with some of these issues, just as America dealt (and in many cases, is dealing) with them. The meteoric pace of growth simply means that China will be able to do so with a much more developed state than America had at the same juncture.

Simply put, if China does finally catch up with the United States, they will have all of the assets, but fewer of the liabilities.

So with all these willing workers utilizing the latest technology to do pretty much whatever the government wants of them, it starts to look like keeping Top Dog Status in America is going to require an event along the lines of the banking debacle that brought Japan back down to earth. Except it probably won’t be a banking crisis like Japan’s as most of the banks here are, as with much of the enterprise, state-owned. Which brings me to an appropriate stopping point until tomorrow when I’ll ponder in prose about competition in China, outside China, with the United States, and hopefully provide a satisfactory explanation of The Long Answer as well. -joe

You can check out the China car market story below, but it might require an Economist.com membership. E-mail me and I can send you the story directly if you like. http://www.economist.com/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4032842

These videos I was given

2005-06-22T23:04:00.000-07:00

Since I arrived in Shenzhen a couple of days ago I've been spending my mornings and afternoons in an office on the seventh floor of the Modern Education Technical Research Institute with Mr. Xu, my mentor here. Our first encounter was interesting, as he had agreed to stay in his office until I arrived from the airport sometime around 7pm. Of course the weather around China, and especially the south, has not been very conducive to air travel (it has rained every day since I arrived in Shenzhen with little sign of change in the next three or four days) and my flight was predictably delayed by about an hour. I had only a piece of paper that Minjie had written for me in Shanghai to show my taxi driver at the airport, and I quickly ascertained that he did not know the exact location of my destination. Fortunately Minjie had the foresight to include Mr. Xu's mobile phone number on the paper, and once we got to the general area of the METRI, he was able to call Xu to get exact directions.
When I first approached the building my driver had so enthusiastically pointed out to me as my destination, I was sure they were closed. On two of the three large, clear glass double doors I could clearly see bicycle locks. The third set of doors I noticed were not locked shut, but this appeared to be for the purpose of allowing the night cleaning staff access to the building. I tentatively wheeled my two bags of luggage and laptop shoulder bag through the door and leaned them up against a wall.
Wandering around the lobby of the building I noticed a directory near the elevators. While it did provide me with information by which to make a guess about what floor Mr. Xu's office might be on, it did not tell me explicitly and I was beginning to consider leaving in the hopes of finding another person with a mobile phone to call him again. Then I heard voices from down a hall.
What looked like a member of the cleaning crew appeared in the lobby and to my surprise, did not immediately attempt to address me, instead seeming unusually disinterested in me. As he walked past on his way out of the building, I was able to get his attention with the paper Minjie had written for me. His enthusiastic response encouraged the assertion that I was at least in the right building and, after yelling to an unseen coworker, he even guided me (luggage in tow) to the elevators and told me "seven".
As I waited for the elevator to open and take me to the seventh floor, a young man with short hair appeared from around the corner, nodded his head politely, and continued to the exit. I thought about asking him about Mr. Xu, but he was past me so quickly I wasn't able. "White people wandering around here must not be that rare of an occurrence," I thought to myself. When I arrived on the seventh floor of the building I noticed that all the lights were off in every office. I didn't know whether to go left or right, but chose right and hoped to come across some sort of name tag on an office wall.
My visit here has so far been punctuated by enlightening moments in awkward situations when I am able to finally remove myself from the scenario enough to see it for its true absurdity. Most of these moments have been the result of various communication barriers, but the moment of my wandering down a dark hallway on the seventh floor in an abandoned business building at 8 o'clock in the evening with my rolling suitcase behind me and nobody around was surely one of the most absurd of such moments to realize.
I had no sooner come to get this third-person picture of myself and feel a little smile come to my face when a voice beckoned me from back by the elevator. It was the young man with short hair from before, Mr. Xu. We both laughed at having passed each other downstairs and left for the housing building that holds both of our rooms (conveniently next door to each other). Xu then took me to eat at a Hunan restaurant (the different areas of China have very different cuisines, with Hunan being defined by its spicy flavors) before telling me about his family and wife on the walk back.
The next day, as Xu prepared to leave for Guangdong for an interview about teaching technology, I was given some CDs with some videos of Chinese students in English class. I assume that the footage was taken at the experimental elementary school next to our housing and just a block from the METRI, but I don't actually know. I took time yesterday while Xu was gone to watch the videos and take some notes, the content of which I thought I might share.
First I should say that the lessons are very impressive, employing the use of technology to a level I have yet to witness in any U.S. classroom. Each student is outfitted with a computer, either all laptops or all desktops depending upon the room, and the teacher has a large projection screen with a computer feed.
Every lesson I have watched so far proceeds through a fairly regimented, but highly effective from an educational principles point of view, structure. The entire lesson is conducted exclusively in English beginning with the teacher greeting the second grade students, to which they respond appropriately and collectively. The class then moves into reciting a song they have apparently learned previously, complete with hand motions and accompanying music. Then the teacher introduces the topic to the class, pointing to several laminated words on the blackboard that correspond to the lesson. A couple of verbal examples are given and the teacher may use the large screen for reinforcement using custom created software accessed through the Internet.
Each child is then allowed to individually browse stories on the Internet with headphones, encouraged by the teacher to speak aloud when prompted. The software is perhaps the most impressive component of the entire affair, with kid-friendly animations, text on the screen with accompanying narration in English, and many opportunities for the students themselves to speak. Each student proceeds at their own pace through the lesson until the teacher calls the class back to order. At this point, the lesson is collectively reviewed on the board, complete with laminated words and illustrations that match those seen on the computer. Then a review game of some kind is played in front of the class using volunteers. After a few students, and perhaps even the teacher have participated in the game, the students are instructed to group themselves together in preparation for role playing.
Five minutes are given for each group to select one of the stories they just read and practice. When time is up, the class erupts with students loudly reenacting the characters and situations from their selected tale. They may do so for several minutes, referring back to the computer to remember their lines and get their pronunciation right. After an ample amount of time the teacher invites the groups to perform their story until class time ends. While there are many impressive aspects to this method of teaching, perhaps the most impressive is that all of this is accomplished with 40-50 students in the class.
I told myself that I would try to keep my posts short, and until today it seemed to have been going fairly well. Tomorrow though, I am going to try and post on a topic that has been on my mind since I got here: "Should America fear China?". I would be surprised if I were able to wrap it up in any less space than today's entry. Maybe you'll get lucky though, and I'll just post another picture or something. -joe

2005-06-22T01:51:00.000-07:00

Dr. Wang took me to a small university in Shanghai that has one of China's best E-Learning labs. This photo was taken while we were on our way. At the lab I met a couple of graduate students my age and talked about the rise of E-Learning in China and elsewhere. The technology they utilize is like nothing I've seen yet in the U.S. Instructors can broadcast lessons around the country, with software showing users the instructor's computer screen as well as their face via webcam. In addition, users can access past lessons from a database using a computer or, as one of the students proudly showed me, a properly equipped mobile phone. Currently the lab is working on software that will enable users to send feeback and questions to the instructor during live feeds, perhaps also over mobile phone. On the distant horizon are plans to design a machine, also potentially accessible by mobile phone, that will place a tack on your instructor's seat while they are in the restroom, although the exact timetable for that project is still a bit unclear.

2005-06-21T02:05:00.000-07:00

Minjie took this photo of me along the Huangpo river in Shanghai. Notice the beautiful skyscraper to the left of the lamp, the top floors of which are made to resemble a lotus blossom. This is the west (Pu Xi) side of the river that, until about ten years ago, represented the whole of Shanghai. Now the East (Pu Dong) side of the river is being developed at a rapid pace and represents the future of Shanghai. The Pu Xi side does however trump it's close neighbor in one important respect: the incredible wide walking boulevard seen behind me in this photograph that parallels the curvature of the river for what seems like miles.

Shanghello!

2005-06-17T20:02:00.000-07:00

Well, it's been a couple of days since I got into Shanghai, and I realized I haven't gotten around to posting an entry on my blog yet. Unfortunately, this one is going to have to be a bit shorter than I might have liked as I am to be shortly on my way to have lunch with my internship mentor in less than half an hour. Fortunately, while I haven't found the time to write any entries here, I have been e-mailing my family and Benita about my travels, so perhaps I can make use of that time spent by simply copying some of the content of my letters here. Shall we give it a go? Lets.

This entry is from a letter sent on my first day here to my family:
"Hey, I'm here at the Eastern China Normal University library. I arrived last night and was met at the airport by my professor's sister and a friend. We took a taxi back to the university where I have a nice room of my own on campus and where both of my greeters attend graduate school and live. Shangahai is incredible. It is like LasVegas, Los Angeles and New York combined. It's the largest city in China with 17 million residents, spans both banks of a dividing river and is expanding at a rapid pace, especially on the east (Pu Dong) side of the river which now houses the tallest hotel in the world. Enormous apartment buildings jut up everywhere and remind me of termite hills. I'm not used to seeing such tall buildings unless they are for business. And they are all grouped together in long rows of identical looking ones. Minjie says the average rent is 1000 per month. The freeway here is elevated and winds around the skyscrapers like a concrete river, and the lights on the commercial buildings are like Times Square. It was a surreal experience to skirt around the city at freeway speeds 50 feet above ground, taking turns and corners between 60 story buildings at night. I'll be touring the city for the next couple of days until I meet up with my professor tomorrow night for dinner. Then we're going to the airport on Monday and I'll leave for ShenZhen."

This is an excerpt from a letter sent on my second day here to Benita:
"Last night Minjie and I caught a cab to Nanjing road, a famous boulevard akin to the strip in Vegas. It was absolutely fantastic tosee and travel along. There are many tourists, mostly from other areasof China, and the sites are incredible. I took several photos and will try to send them to you soon. Anyway, back to Nanjing road. It runs perpendicular to the river here that divides the city, Huangpu River I think it is called. Traditionally the city has been built up along the West, or Pu Xi side of the river, and at the end of Nanjing Road and lining the river bank are several old buildings from the 50's or maybe earlier (a rarity around the city now), such as the famous Peace Hotel. These beautiful buildings provide an excellent juxtaposition against the other towering skyscrapers and make for excellent photograph opportunities. Crossing the road that runs along the river bank leads to a fantastic walking boulevard that runs for what seems like several miles along the Pu Xiside of the river. It is very wide and packed with sightseers all with their digital cameras. The best part of the river walk, aside from its inherent appeal of allowing one to walk alongside a beautiful river, is the view it provides of the Pu Dong, or East side, of the Huangpu. Minjie tells me that until about ten years ago, the Pu Dong side was virtually non existent, offering only a small fishing area and port. Now it is the most up and coming part of the city though, and features many of the best buildings, including an astoundingly colorful television tower, the Pearl Tower (the tallest hotel in the world) and other fantastic and modern buildings. This, along with theconstantly travelling river traffic make the river walk an engrossing experience, one of many I wish you could have shared with me. We then walked back along Nanjing road, bought Green Tea ice cream for 40 cents each and caught the subway to the Pu Dong side of the river. Because the area is so new, all the roads are well designed and very wide. The television tower is like the Eiffel Tower in that it offers tourists the opportunity to travel high up to the top for a price, but we elected instead to walk to the river bank again, unfortunately lacking in any sort of walk along it's bank akin to the Pu Xi side. Wecaught the subway and then a cab back to campus and now I'm preaparing to venture out again, only this time on my own."

Hope to write about more exciting adventures soon (and hopefully post some pictures as well) -joe

Hartman's Blogtastic Blog

2005-06-09T00:58:00.000-07:00

Hartman's Blogtastic Blog

All right! I think this actually might work! Now I'm attempting to use the "Blog This!" button for the first time. After searching extensively through the Blogger site and help menu I'm proud to say I have utterly no idea what the "Blog This!" button does. I suppose that's what I get for playing with robots instead of attending Bernie's class. Well, if history is any guide, I will succeed in posting this particular entry to a blog other than the one I intended. Let's see shall we? (this is so much fun).

2005-06-09T00:54:00.000-07:00

Okay...so I unfortunately published this the first time under the other blog I contribute to. The one set up by Bernie Dodge for the class mentioned in the intro paragraph for this blog. I'm sure my classmates will all appreciate this pic of Lopaz when they revisit the page. In any case, I think I've solved the problem now, and have only slightly more faith in just two (TWO!) programs being able to accomplish this most demanding of tasks. Following is my original message: "This is a good photo to set off my blogging resurgence. Lady Lopaz in a lovely black fedora (at least I think that's what it's called, and if so, I think that's how it's spelled). Taken earlier today, this represents my first attempt at photoblogging with not one, but two new programs. Why two you ask? Why not three? Or better yet four! Yes, four new programs to post pictures to my blog. Fan-tas-tic! I'm sorry, I just really doubt if only two programs will really be able to accomplish what I want. I suppose I'll know soon..."

EDTEC 700: Blogging in the Classroom

2005-03-24T20:21:00.000-08:00

EDTEC 700: Blogging in the Classroom
I hope this is the right way to post my idea for a classroom lesson...I guess I'll know shortly. I have only read a few pages of one of the articles so far, so maybe upon further reading I'll get some clarification and guidance about exactly how to structure my proposed project effectively for sixth grade middle school students. (I figure the six hour flight back to the mainland from Maui will provide the perfect opportunity to do so). In any case, the real struggle I went through in trying to figure out how to incorporate blogs into a project was actually finding a way to include them that would truly take advantage of their unique properties (globally accessible, instantaneously available). I came up with numerous projects that incorporated the use of blogs, but in nearly every case there did not seem to be any real reason to use a blog instead of any other medium, including old fashioned pencil and paper. Finally, after much revising, the idea of using a blog to track student progress on an experiment arose. When I added to this concept the component of recreating an existing scientific experiment (one of my first ideas as a middle school science teacher) there seemed to be some justification for using blogs rather than pencil and paper. So my idea is this:

Each student will sign up for their own blog on Blogger.com. They will be responsible for posting an entry of at least three sentences every day to their blog describing their progression throughout the project (including the proposal process).

Each student will submit a proposal for approval that outlines:
1. What scientific field their experiment is based in.
2. What their experiment will attempt to prove or disprove.
3. Who originally performed their experiment.
4. What the original outcome of the experiment was.
5. How they will reproduce the experiment.
6. How they will convey their final findings.
7. How long their experiment will take.
8. What supplies they will require for the experiment.

Upon proposal approval, each student will be allowed to undertake their experiment process. Because different experiments will require different lengths of time to complete, the deadline for each student will be determined by the student themselves (and graded according to how well they have allocated and managed their work time).

Upon experiment conclusion, the students will be expected to create a final write-up and reflection that details their findings and hypothesizes on errors, improvements, and areas for possible expansion for the experiment in the future.

The unique properties of blogs is thus taken advantage of by allowing the outside world to see exactly what steps each student has taken in their experiment recreation (not to mention the students themselves having access to this information) which enables the audience to then judge the validity of the recreation almost immediately after each step has been taken (rather than after the entire experiment has been concluded). Hopefully some interaction with the original experimenter could take place at some point in the project so that their input could be included in the final product, although that will depend greatly on the actual experiment each student decides to recreate. -joe

First Entry

2005-03-24T19:33:00.000-08:00

In the name of robots competing against one another, I had to miss my first Edtec 700 course, so I'm really starting out a day (or five) later than my colleagues, and I just hope the effort is appreciated. I am, after all, writing this while in Maui on my Spring Break. The opportunity cost for my doing this now is reaching more and more staggering levels as each minute passes. Thus, this initial entry will be brief, serving mostly to acquaint yours truly with the methods of posting a blog on blogger.com, and inform all of the existence of my own, previously created blog for my classroom which can be found by visiting hightechhigh.org, clicking on the high tech middle button, then clicking on the "digital portfolio" button, and scrolling down through teh drop down menu entitled, "HTM staff" until finding my name (Joseph Hartman). I've found the use of a blog professionally to be invaluable as a teacher. I try to make new entries every other day, but I think I'm averaging something closer to twice per week. Despite this, the use of my classroom blog has done so much in terms of keeping parents and students up to date with what is happening not only with respect to schoolwork and projects, but with my own life, so that personal meetings or concerns can be efficiently addressed at time of mutual convenience. Often, parent concerns that have come to my attention have been responded to in my blog. this not only gives an answer to the specific parent who raised the concern, but also provides it for any other parents who might have a similar concern or question. The feedback I've gotten from the use of a classroom blog has been incredibly positive, and I look forward to seeing what I can do with an exclusively personal one, as well as ones for my students for use in projects and schoolwork. -joe