Coachella!

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

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

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

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

Sweet!

Multimedia message

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

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.