Example

Let's say I'm a mathematics professional developer in an urban school district. A new superintendent comes in with a new math program which goes against everything I believe to be true and good in mathematics education. Given that I've got seven years until I get my pension and this super will surely be gone in three or less, I'm hardly going to resign in righteous protest, I just have to ride it out.

I'm a professional, so while I'm on the clock, I do what I'm told, and train teachers to use the crappy new curriculum just like I did the last one. When I go home, I work on my new professional blog, Mathematical Malpractice, explaining in great precision why this curriculum does a disservice to our kids.

Whether or not I have any legal protection from reprimand at work for doing this (I suspect the answer is, "sort of, but not really"), I at least have moral justification for expressing my concerns as a citizen outside of work time. But if I put a link to my blog in the footer of every email I send out, including, for example, those setting up PD for the math curriculum in question, is this any different than starting my presentation by saying "Today I'm going to introduce you to the new math curriculum, which is inferior to our current curriculum, but the superitendent says you have to use it." Can I be justifiably reprimanded for that?

I would argue that the DOE should provide professionals with blogs, but it should be clear that they are just as accountable for its contents as they are for any other email, memo, lesson, lecture or test they create. But blurring the line between personal and work expression really helps nobody. It is just a disaster waiting to happen.

Institutional Illiteracy

This kind of thing strikes me as being embarrassingly naive. How many large businesses would want their employees including links to personal websites in the footer of their official communications? Would a law firm? A hospital? A car dealership? The Department of Motor Vehicle? No. Why would you expect anyone who isn't a web startup to allow it?

If you work for an organization, you need to maintain a clear line between your work work and personal work, to avoid this kind of hair pulling.

Credit Where Credit is Due

I just randomly noticed that CPMP-Tools, software designed to be used in conjunction with the Core Plus math curriculum, has been released under the GNU GPL.

I'm no math expert, but I like Core Plus. In fact, it was a brouhaha over the proposed adoption of Core Plus at Coventry (CT) High School that led me to discover the Coalition of Essential Schools ten years ago, go to Brown, and in other words start me down the path to where I am today.

Someday, when the NSF gives out money for a project like Core Plus, it will be a stipulation that all the materials be released under a free content license, and then people like Dan Meyer will be able to take their lessons, which are probably about 80% of what he wants, add a little dy/dan sex appeal, redistribute his own version, customized for his local standards, yadda yadda yadda.

Someday. We're getting closer though. Inch by inch.

Also, we need a bridge between these US academic developers and Linux distributors. Open source in education advocates wonder where all the good software is, and when it is written and freely licensed, it is often kept secret.

Whither Sugar?

Greg DeKoenigsberg on the OLPC Devel list:

If we're just (badly) reinventing a new WM (window manager), what's the point?

This is, at the moment, the crucial question.

Liberating the Schoolhouse

I don't have time for a long post on this, but let me say that this TruthDig article, "Liberating the Schoolhouse," by Wellford Wilms, resonates very, very closely with both my firsthand experience of urban high school reform and my understanding of the theory and philosophy of education and management. Highly recommended.

This is the reality of 21st century school reform within a district structure.

Logins for 25 Kids

Chris and I were discussing single sign-on support as a priority for SchoolTool development, in particular, explaining to my developer that it is more crucial than he imagined. I just remembered a concrete example of why.

Back when I was teaching 7th grade English, I set up a Slashcode server in my classroom. Believe it or not, this seemed like the best classroom blogging option circa 2000. Anyhow, I quickly discovered that a whole 47 minute period was eaten up just getting the accounts set up for all the kids in a class, with, I think, 8 workstations in the room. Obviously, better classroom management would make that quicker, but probably not as much as you'd think. If kids are doing this over and over again for different systems in every class, it is a non-trivial waste of time, particularly when they forget their passwords, give the password to their friends who abuse them, etc.

Good IT integration increases learning time.

Aren't You Glad You Didn't Tell Your Librarian to Order from the MSN Music Store?

Mark Pilgrim explains the DRM mess.

Annotated Bibliography

Doug Johnson:

Here is my modest proposal... ADD the requirement that each citation include a sentence that argues for the authority of the source.

I don't know why this hasn't caught on already.

This is Exactly Right

Millot:

The problem of excess teachers is the interaction between managements' reasonable desire to control staff deployment and unions' understandable desire to protect senior members through collective bargaining agreements. It's complicated tangle, but arose from managements' decision in the 1970's to give unions more control over hours and working conditions, when the ability to offer higher wages was constrained by stagflation. It was a short-sighted decision.

The responsibility for individual competence lies with each teacher; the responsibility for incompetence at scale rests with school management. Administrators - from principals to superintendents - have failed to put up the resources required to pursue staff termination on performance grounds. (I suspect they have also failed to do an adequate job of screening candidates up front, or providing support to "improvable" staff.) The firing process itself isn't incredibly complicated, but it does take time and effort to put together a credible record that will support termination. In this regard, school systems are no different from any large organization; line managers are not incentivized to spend the time required to coach, counsel out or end the careers of poor employees - or punished for failing to do so, and so they don't.

Understanding those 70's decisions is important, particularly to understanding urban systems. I know teachers who were around then, and they did take those rights in lieu of real money.

Uninformative

Yglesias:

One of my new lines when print journalism types start fretting about the blogosphere is to remind people that the emerging media landscape can't possibly be worse than 24 hour cable news, which often seems to be going out of its way to be uninformative.

Ackerman:

Goldberg has misled The New Yorker's readers for years. Now he's misleading Slate's readers. And, when you think about it, why shouldn't he? After all, he rode his misrepresentations all the way to a great job at The Atlantic. All the incentives have aligned for him. Why stop now? It's not like 4,000 Americans have died or anything.

Open Screen Project

I'm not sure what all this means:

To support this mission, and as part of Adobe’s ongoing commitment to enable Web innovation, Adobe will continue to open access to Adobe Flash technology accelerating the deployment of content and rich Internet applications (RIAs). This work will include:

- Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
- Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
- Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
- Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free [...]

“Consumers always want more from their devices,” said Doug Fisher, Intel Vice President and General Manager, System Software Division. “Flash Player already reaches the vast majority of Internet-connected computers, and our deep technical collaboration with Adobe will optimize Flash technology and Adobe AIR across a broad range of devices, including a version of Adobe AIR for the Mobile and Internet Linux project, moblin.org. Intel’s broad and rich hardware and software ecosystem combined with Adobe’s Open Screen Project will help us deliver a full Internet experience, whether it be in your pocket, on your lap, at the office or in your living room.”

I mean, I suppose it is bad news if you're holding out hope that Flash will just go away. Otherwise, it is probably moderately positive news.

Note that the issues around Flash video are very complicated. In particular, as I understand it, and I don't understand it well, patents on the video codecs used are a big stumbling block, and it isn't clear to me one way or another how that comes into play here.

The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It

I'm not ready to sign my name to all the the solutions outlined by Jonathan Zittrain in The Future of the Internet and How to Stop It, but his clear explanations and definitions of the problems we're facing today, in schools' IT as much as anywhere, are more than enough to recommend the book to anyone working in ed-tech.

One key concept Zittrain lays out is "generativity:"

By design, the university workstations of 1988 were generative: their users could write new code for them or install code written by others. This generative design lives on in today’s personal computers. Networked PCs are able to retrieve and install code from each other. We need merely click on an icon or link to install new code from afar, whether to watch a video newscast embedded within a Web page, update our word processing or spreadsheet software, or browse satellite images.

Generative systems are powerful and valuable, not only because they foster the production of useful things like Web browsers, auction sites, and free encyclopedias, but also because they enable extraordinary numbers of people to devise new ways to express themselves in speech, art, or code and to work with other people. These characteristics can make generative systems very successful even though—perhaps especially because—they lack central coordination and control. That success attracts new participants to the generative system.

If you're reading this blog, that probably describes the technological world you want to live in. If you're in ed-tech, it is particularly important that you not read that excerpt as a metaphor for something you're experiencing, but literally describing your situation, or as in these comments, the lack or loss of generativity in your IT systems. It is tempting to see issues of control in school IT as simply extensions of ongoing power struggles in the school writ large. And to be sure, the two overlap. But it is also "about the technology" and its design as well.

Zittrain clearly prefers a generative environment, but much of the books are about the its challenges:

The flexibility and power that make generative systems so attractive are, however, not without risks. Such systems are built on the notion that they are never fully complete, that they have many uses yet to be conceived of, and that the public can be trusted to invent good uses and share them. Multiplying breaches of that trust can threaten the very foundations of the system.

Whether through a sneaky vector like the one Morris used, or through the front door, when a trusting user elects to install something that looks interesting without fully understanding it, opportunities for accidents and mischief abound. A hobbyist computer that crashes might be a curiosity, but when a home or office PC with years’ worth of vital correspondence and papers is compromised, it can be a crisis. And when thousands or millions of individual, business, research, and government computers are subject to attack, we may find ourselves faced with a fundamentally new and harrowing scenario. As the unsustainable nature of the current state of affairs becomes more apparent, we are left with a dilemma that cannot be ignored. How do we preserve the extraordinary benefits of generativity, while addressing the growing vulnerabilities that are innate to it?

"How do we preserve the extraordinary benefits of generativity, while addressing the growing vulnerabilities that are innate to it?" That is the essential question for school IT. It should be central to our conversation. It focuses the basis of my concerns about advocacy for cell phone use in schools at the expense of general purpose computers, for example. Like rms, I'd make the case more strongly than Zittrain does that software freedom and the creations of open source developers are the best tool we've got to deal with the problem.

One other key idea is what Zittrain calls the "'procrastination principle'—sending a technology out first and adjusting it (or letting others adjust it) later." This is an idea that flies in the face of the conventional wisdom about technology deployments in schools, and it is something I've advocated for without having a catchy name for it. Sure, it makes sense to have specific goals and metrics around big technology purchases, you don't want to just throw computers at a problem, but, we also have to recognize that we need to foster the innovations that we don't anticipate beforeforehand. It sometimes feels like what people really want is for teachers to innovate with their use of technology before we buy it for them and their students. That's obviously not going to happen.

Anyhow, this book should be required reading for anyone from district CIO to school IT guy to technology integrator.

One for Lauer

CSTB:

Sunday’s win put the Cubs in first place in the National League Central. Given that the White Sox are in first in the American League Central, I was wondering when the last time both Chicago teams simultaneously led their respective divisions.

– Tom B., Streator, Ill.

Tom — The Sox? Why do you care about them? You think Sox fans care about you? How often are the Cubs in first place at all? Next to never? We get to first and you bum my high out with a Sox question? Nice. As for our being number one at the same time as a team that’s managed to post only one more Series win than we have since 1908, and nowhere near our 16 pennants, I’d have to say not too often is the obvious answer. I think the Cubs in first at the same time as that 1-in-40 million giant asteroid hitting the earth is more likely. Don’t write mailbag with any more Sox questions. You’re banned from mailbag for a year.

Obligatory Future of Sugar Post

As everyone has been rending their garments over the future of Sugar and direction of OLPC, I might as well lay out my thoughts on the issue.

As I see it, Sugar is a set of tools for writing creative and collaborative activities for children. I think a lot of the confusion about, say, "porting" Sugar for Windows mis-places the reader's emphasis on Sugar as a window manager, rather than Sugar's potential advantages for the activities (née applications) which are built on it. Put another way, what's most important about Sugar is not what I see and do up to the point I launch an activity, it is how the activity works.

As an English teacher, here's what grabbed me about Sugar: it was designed to make it as easy to pass a copy of a student's work across the room electronically as it is to carry a piece of paper across the room. A close second in importance is automatic saves that don't use a hierarchical file system. Not using a hierarchy isn't such a big deal in high school, but if you've ever sat in the back of a room full of third graders while their teacher tries to make sure they've all saved their PowerPoints to the right folder in a networked drive, you'll understand the value (although the computer teachers tend to have internalized the idea that that teaching 9 year olds to use tools ill-suited to their needs is part of their job).

What is important is not just that the Sugar HIG requires that functionality, but that the Sugar libraries should make it easy for a developer to generate it. With mature Sugar, it should be possible to create a basic implementation of what I describe above by importing a Python-wrapped GTK rich text editing widget, doing import sugar and writing 100 lines of code or so to tie it all together.

In a sense, the whole OLPC project is designed to maximize the opportunity for kids to undertake collaborative Sugar activities. That's why you need a cheap laptop with great power consumption and mesh networking. In this context, porting Sugar to other platforms is simply furthering children's access to those activities.

As a teacher, if one kid fires up an OLPC running the full Sugar shell and clicks on the Write icon in the frame, and another kid double clicks on a icon on his desktop or selects Write from his Start menu, I don't care as long as they can easily collaborate. I don't really care if on Windows Write opens as a regular window, with a separate window for the neighborhood view. I can deal with that. I don't care if my Windows desktop running Write has any concept of mesh networking, because it is plugged into an ethernet jack anyhow. I just want my kids to be able to have writing circles with the least technical hurdles possible.

In a perfect world, Sugar would pre-date OLPC by about three years, and the relationship between hardware and software would be more apparent -- we've got this revolutionary learning software, now we just need to design a device to get it to as many kids as possible! Back in the real world, however, "Sugar" is the software written to run the OLPC, not vice versa, and it is all getting really confusing.

From where I sit, there has been a distinct lack of interest in Sugar from the "learning sciences" and other communities that are involved in research and development around software for kids. They have not seen Sugar for what it is, which is the one chance in this generation,and I'm talking human generations here, not technological ones, to create a common set of open source tools specifically for writing applications for kids. They don't seem to get that this is a singular opportunity to invest in the foundation of their discipline. I don't understand why, but one hope I hold out for Walter's software spin-off is that he can engage this community. However, I only see that happening if Sugar is not limited to OLPC or Linux. Also, it is certainly true that as long as Sugar is a subset of OLPC, OLPC doesn't have a strong motivation to dedicate resources to non-OLPC platforms. Sugar needs an home outside of OLPC that can look at the software in a broader context.

And if you think that "once in a generation" line is an exaggeration consider about the amount of attention around the world OLPC has gotten. Now think about the number of people actually working on Sugar (like, four). If OLPC can't make people care about solving this problem, nothing will, it simply won't be solved and everyone will just use Flash for the next 15 years.

I Want My Lovecraft

Andrew O'Hehir:

And I'm riding a major bummer if del Toro is shelving "3993" (the third of his Spanish history-fantasy trilogy, after "Pan's Labyrinth" and "The Devil's Backbone"), his adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" or his "Doctor Strange" blockbuster. All three of those projects are vastly better fits than the hairy-footed little guys and dragons.

Veal Stock

Carol Blymire (via Mark Bernstein):

There are those who believe veal stock is unnecessary. Those people are idiots.

I finally made some veal stock this winter, and it is amazing stuff. I used the rougher Les Halles technique than the more refined French Laundry process Carol outlines. I'm going to have to try that technique next time though.

It is a moral imperative to make something delicious out of every part of the poor little veal calf.

SchoolTool Spring 2008 (Hardy) Release Notes

The Spring 2008 release of SchoolTool is the final snapshot or "alpha" release of SchoolTool prior to SchoolTool 1.0, scheduled for April 2009. The next major release will be SchoolTool 1.0 beta, in October 2008. As an alpha snapshot, the Spring 2008 release is incomplete, but provides an update on the current status of the project.

Of particular note is the implementation of a complete build/package/distribution tool chain via Launchpad.net which allows non-technical users of Ubuntu Linux to have a running student information and calendaring system with a few simple commands, and which automatically builds and pushes software updates via Ubuntu's package manager.

This release includes:

Calendar -- SchoolTool's calendaring features have been further refined. SchoolTool provides web-based and iCalendar compliant calendaring services, including a school-wide shared calendar and individual calendars for persons, groups and resources, such as the library or a computer lab. We provide unique integration for a wide range of school timetables, including rotating schedules.

Resource Booking -- Integrated into our calendar are tools to find available shared resources within a school and manage reservations.

Journal -- An integrated gradebook and attendance log of the style used by classroom teachers in Eastern Europe. The journal allows a teacher to assign each student a score or indicate an absence for each meeting of a section. The journal uses AJAX to quickly update individual scores without refreshing the entire page. The Journal will be the basis of SchoolTool's attendance system.

Demographics -- By default, SchoolTool now tracks a small set of data about each student. We've worked on making this extensible and customizable, and future releases will have a more comprehensive default demographics schema.

Navigation -- SchoolTool's navigation paradigm has been redesigned for much greater ease of use.

Coming attractions: in addition to the above components, we are currently working with schools to develop and test an "American style" gradebook, a competency tracking system (CanDo), and an intervention tracking and narrative report system. These tools will appear in future "core" SchoolTool releases or as add-on components. We will also be creating many web and .pdf reports for all this data.

Administrative features:

• Installation and updating via Ubuntu package management.
• Proper init scripts for controlling startup/shutdown.
• Installation conforms to Debian practices; files are in standard locations.
• Custom access control policy for SchoolTool allocates permissions based on group membership or relationships.
• Access control partially customizable through the web.
• Automatic generation of large-scale sample data for testing.
• Data import through CSV files or custom Python scripts (LDAP and CAS single sign on support under development).
• Server control and database maintenance via the web.

Infrastructure:

• Uses Ubuntu package-managed Python 2.4, Zope 3.4 and Paste.
• Full i18n and unicode support throughout. Existing translations are out of date, but will be updated in coming months via Rosetta on Launchpad.net.
• SchoolTool is now a WSGI application, allowing the use of any WSGI-compliant web server, including Apache with mod_wsgi, and WSGI middleware.

Backward compatibility: Unfortunately, SchoolTool 2008 is NOT compatible with previous SchoolTool Calendar and SchoolBell releases. Given the long delay between releases, there were extensive internal changes not only to SchoolTool itself, but also to Zope 3, which rendered backward compatibility support quite expensive. Given our limited development resources and the small size of the legacy SchoolTool userbase, we reluctantly decided not to attempt to support backward compatibility.

Forward compatibility: Given that this is an alpha release, which should not be trusted in production use, we may not support full forward compatibility to October's beta release. We have to focus on completing the basic feature set. From that point on, we will support forward compatibility into production versions of SchoolTool 1.0.

Installation:

For the forseeable future we are only supporting deployment on Ubuntu Linux (currently, Gutsy and Hardy). Since we aim to support installation by school personnel, we need to require a relatively controlled environment that we understand intimately. In 2008, it is usually easier to install Ubuntu on a server or virual machine than to manually install and maintain the host of libraries required by SchoolTool on a system where they aren't under package management.

1) Add SchoolTool's Launchpad PPA to your Software Sources.

Either manually edit /etc/apt/sources.list or go to the System menu, select Software Sources and select the Third-Party Software tab.

Add these lines:

If you're running gutsy:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/schooltool-owners/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/schooltool-owners/ubuntu gutsy main

If you're running hardy:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/schooltool-owners/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/schooltool-owners/ubuntu hardy main

2) Update your software list.

Either type "sudo apt-get update" in a Terminal or, if you've got the Synaptic package manager installed, go to System > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager, launch it, and click "Reload."

3) Install schooltool-2008

Either type "sudo apt-get install schooltool-2008" in a terminal (and answer "y" to the subsequent questions), or in Synaptic search for "schooltool-2008", select it for installation, and hit "Apply."

If all goes well, many, many small Zope components will be installed and you'll have a SchoolTool server running on http://localhost:7080. The login is "manager" and the default password is "schooltool".

Polarization

You need no greater evidence of the deep polarization of the Democratic party than this simple fact: not one single person who voted for Hillary in a primary also cast a primary vote for Obama. The overlap is literally zero. Clearly, with this kind of division, the Democratic Party is doomed in November.

apt-get install schooltool-2008

Today, SchoolTool has its first easily installable release in, well, a while. Announcing it and documenting its many new features will keep me occupied for a few days, but if you want to be the first on your block to try it, and you've got an Ubuntu box, just add a couple lines to your apt sources.list. Either manually edit /etc/apt/sources.list or go to System > Software Sources and select the Third-Party Software tab and add these lines that way.

If you're running gutsy:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/schooltool-owners/ubuntu gutsy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/schooltool-owners/ubuntu gutsy main

If you're running hardy:

deb http://ppa.launchpad.net/schooltool-owners/ubuntu hardy main
deb-src http://ppa.launchpad.net/schooltool-owners/ubuntu hardy main

Then do sudo apt-get update and sudo apt-get install schooltool-2008, say "y" a couple times, and soon you'll have a SchoolTool server running on http://localhost:7080.

The really nice thing now is that using Launchpad's personal package archive feature, we've got an automated process to push out updates to schools less than two hours after we make an important fix.

At this point, SchoolTool is still "alpha." We've got a number of essential features to add before we go beta in October.

Much more to follow...

Reversing Agricultural Disinvestment

Andrew Leonard on the butter shortage in Japan:

The problem: You can pour milk down the drain in an instant, and kill off your herd of cows in a blink of eye. But you can't reverse the process so quickly. Building up a productive dairy herd takes years.

Unfortunately, I think it will also prove to have been easier to build exurban developments on farmland than to return the land to local agricultural production.

Decoupling OLPC

Walter Bender on leaving OLPC:

My personal interest is in helping build a community of developers, educators, and learners dedicated to advancing the quality of free and open source software for learning and the sharing of pedagogical approaches in this community by adopting the spirit and methodology of the open-source movement.

While my goal is to create a complementary effort to broaden the reach of the software and pedagogy--a free and open framework in support of "learning learning", I hope to continue working with the great team at OLPC as well as the various groups that have formed around the world in support of one-laptop-per-child deployments.

This statement leaves a lot of room for interpretation. If it means that Walter is going to build a community and or organization around continuing to develop Sugar, that's probably a good thing. Right now, I'd love to see either the hardware or software envisioned and created by OLPC survive. As long as they're both dependent on a tiny start-up-sized non-profit with no apparent plan for growth, each part is dependent on the success of the whole. Sugar is a long way from having enough momentum to survive if the OLPC Foundation would stop. If the software finds a second independent, complimentary home, and the hardware innovations live on in Pixel Qi, at least, we'll have a more robust ecosystem. Also, what kind of software and firmware Pixel Qi's products use, if they come to fruition, will be a big factor too.

Also, you should probably subscribe to this.

Future Problem Solving

I agree with Yglesias:

I really worry sometimes about things like The New York Times Magazine giving advice on how to reduce your carbon footprint. Not only are these kind of "personal virtue" efforts insufficient to tackling the challenge of global warming, I think talking about them too much is actually counterproductive.

Note to Bloggers and Billionares: This is Particularly True about Education

Krugman:

The general rule to remember is that if some discipline seems less developed than your own, it’s probably not because the researchers aren’t as smart as you are, it’s because the subject is harder.

Also, a bonus quote for the ed-tech bloggers:

How do the changes in the way we live between 1958 and 2008 compare with the changes between 1908 and 1958? I think the answer is obvious.

Reading Forums, Eve, etc...

I've managed to avoid reading web forums pretty much entirely. I just can't stand the interface. I never know where to look. I've finally accepted that I have to learn how to do it though to know what's going on with my alliance in Eve. Kind of annoying, but what are you going to do? There is lots of good info in there.

On the other hand, if you're looking for informative Eve blogging, you could read Jade Constantine for CSM, where the candidate lays out her platform to join the new player governance council. It is a good explanation of the appeal and current problems in the game, as if you care.

I'm trying not to explode my brain by thinking about spaceship combat and 19th century base ball at the same time, but this week I also discovered the skill training planner in the Eve-Mon utility. This is just geek crack. I might as well take up day trading.

So I know that sometime Sunday during my second double-header of the weekend, Tuttle SVC is going to finish completing his training for Gallente Frigate IV and nobody is going to be there to start him on a new skill, wasting 12 hours of training time! And delaying my purchase of a new Vexor! Agh!