Edubuntu LTSP

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

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

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

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!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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