Instant Results

A few days ago I was out and about and I needed to talk to someone in my family (why isn't really relevant to this story). They were all also out and about. I first tried calling my wife on her cell phone, but her line went straight to voice mail. I then tried my older daughter. Voice mail again.  Then I tried my younger daughter. Ditto.

My first reaction was one of anger. Why are we paying for all of these cell phones, I thought to myself,  if no one is going to have the darned things on when I need to get ahold of someone? Later,  when I had calmed down a little bit,  I realized how ridiculous that thought was. They all had their phones with them,  but no one has her phone up against her ear constantly,  and in a noisy situation it's easy to not hear your phone.

But that initial reaction did get me thinking. I EXPECTED to be able to communicate with my family instantly. I wanted instant results. And that is so different from just a few years ago. A decade ago,  if someone's family were away from home, that person would most likely have just waited for the family to get home to talk to them. Not today. Thanks to cellular technology,  he can expect to get ahold of his family at all times.

We live in an age of instant results,  and it impacts more than just my expectations about communicating with my family. It also affects the expectations surrounding the technology in schools. Eight years ago,  when I was still a classroom teacher,  I would estimate the reliability of our district network to have been about 90 percent. Most of the time our network was up and running,  but it wasn't uncommon for the Internet to go down for an hour or two once a week. This was especially likely on a Monday morning when the network had just had from Friday afternoon at 4 until Monday morning to croak out for one reason or another.

This was a real problem for me as I had a web design class that was taught as an "Early Bird" class from 7 A.M. until 7:50, but the district technology department didn't get into work until almost eight. It became such a common occurrence,  in fact,  that I structured my class in such a way that I didn't depend upon the network being up on Monday mornings.

That would never fly today in this era of Instant Results. The Internet is expected to be up. And it usually is. Thanks to a server that my district network admin setup, I found when I ran a report Friday that the WORST reliability any part of our network had was 98.4 percent. And for most of the network our reliability was above 99.5 percent! And that's good, because if the Internet weren't up tomorrow morning at 8 A.M., the district would ALREADY have had the following problems:

• The kitchen staff at each school who serve breakfast before the start of school would have been unable to use their cash registers and would have had to write transactions down on paper. This would have slowed the food service down and delayed the start of school. Which probably would have been a good thing because...
• ...We're MAP testing this week (an online,  formative assessment) and the test proctors w who get to school early and log into the computers and prepare them for the testing, would not have been able to setup the computers and would have had to delay the start of MAP testing.
• The district runs an alternative school that has an entirely computer based curriculum. Without the Internet,  that school would be unable to do ANYTHING. Speaking of which...
• ...That same Internet-based software is used in a credit recovery lab in the morning before school. That lab would have to close for the morning.
• Secretaries in the front offices of the schools would be unable to put into our Student Information System student absences as parents call in to say that a particular student will not be at school today. They'll have to jot it on paper until the system is back up.
• Teachers who wanted to enter some last minute grades into their gradebooks will be unable to do so.

And those are just the problems that would occur BEFORE school started. Starting at 8 A.M. that list would get much larger.

It's an era of Instant Communication,  an era when communication technologies are EXPECTED to work all the tome. And those expectations don't stop at the door of the school. And the expectations are only going to continue to grow as tome goes on. Teachers are going to want easy access to all of the tools they have at work at home. Students are going to want to be able to bring their personal technology into school and not have to just leave it in their lockers. An d EVERYONE is going to want wireless service that they can connect to without difficulty and they're going to want that wireless access everywhere. It's going to be my job to make sure all of this expectations are met.

Lucky me...

P.S. As I mentioned at the start of this blog entry,  I also suffer from an expectation of instant results. I couldn't wait until I was at a computer to write this entry,  so I wrote it on my Kindle Fire while sitting at a track meet.

Getting Away

Not my feet--Someone else's in my family

I haven't posted to this blog for a week and a half now. And I have a good reason why: I was on vacation.

From last Saturday until this Saturday, I was either travelling from my home to Florida, or I was actually in Florida, or I was on a cruise ship headed to the Bahamas, or I was actually IN the Bahamas, or I was on a cruise ship headed home from the Bahamas, or I was travelling from Florida back to my home. Or else I was sitting in traffic on the Spring Break-clogged Interstate 75.

You get the picture.

And while I was on vacation, I took a break, not only from writing this blog, but from focusing on technology at all.

I have my wife to thank for that.

As we were starting to pack for our trip the night before we left, she said to me, "You know, we're going to have a lot of time on the ship to just do nothing."

"I know," I said. "I'm looking forward to it?"

"What are you planning to do with it?"

"I'm going to read!" I said. "I'm going to grab a chair on the upper deck of the cruise ship, away from the noisy pool, and I'm going to turn the chair so that it faces the ocean, and I'm going to read."

"What are you going to read?"

"Well, I have 29 books and 12 magazines that I've downloaded to my Kindle, so I'll have a lot of options, but I'm planning to read three books: Ian Jukes' Living on the Future Edge, a book called What School Leaders Need to Know about Digital Technologies and Social Media, and finally, a book a friend recommended called Stop Stealing Dreams."

Before I had finished my description my wife was shaking her head pretty violently. "Uh uh," she said simply. "I forbid you to bring ANY of those books on the cruise."

"Why not?" I asked.

"Because you need a break," she said to me. "You haven't taken a REAL break for a long time. You need to get away from your work."

"But I will be away from work!" I pleaded. "It just so happens that these types of books bring me pleasure."

"Not this week. Leave them at home. I forbid it."

Which was a ridiculous thing to say. And--to be fair--it was said at least partly in jest. From years of living with me, my wife knows better than to try to order me around. That's not how you get me to respond. I brought the three books along with me despite what my wife said (doing otherwise would have meant deleting them off of my Kindle Fire and I didn't want to do that).

But I did listen to what she said. And it stuck with me maybe more than I thought it was going to. And when the first chance came for me to read on my Kindle, I didn't open any of those books. Instead, I started reading Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games, which is--thanks to the movie--enormously popular right now, and which I'd had sitting on my Kindle since November. And I enjoyed it.

I didn't mean to bore you with a long piece of dialogue, though. What I wanted to get at is this: It's good to get away from the technology for a while. From Monday, when we stepped on the cruise ship, until Friday, when we stepped off, I didn't get on the Internet once. I didn't update my Facebook status. I didn't check my work email. I didn't go online to see what was the app of the day or the Kindle book of the day at Amazon. And amazingly, the world didn't end as a result.

For a week I was able to leave most of the technology issues behind me. It was refreshing. I'm back at work now with renewed vigor, ready to really get some things done now.

So I'm writing mostly to implore others of you involved in EdTech: If you haven't already done so recently, find time to unplug and get away from the technology that is our jobs. And get completely away from it. If you have to, get on a big boat that doesn't have Internet access so that you CAN'T get online. You'll be glad later that you did.

Should We Teach Digital Citizenship?

Last week I had a conversation with a colleague of mine about the teaching of digital citizenship in school. This person asked me if I thought we NEEDED to teach digital citizenship and whether or not it was right for the state or federal government to FORCE local school districts to teach it.

I don't want to address the second issue at all (This blog isn't about politics and I don't want it to be), but as to the first question, whether or not we NEED to be teaching digital citizenship, the answer is absolutely!

And if you want proof that it's needed, I submit to you the following photograph, which I took while standing in line at a Subway sandwich shop:

We live in a world where people have to be TOLD to turn their cell phones off while placing an order! So yes, apparently we need to teach students the right way to act in the 21st century.

So that Subway Restaurants, Incorporated doesn't have to!

P.S. There's something ironic, though, to the fact that--while the Subway worker was standing behind the counter waiting for me to tell him what kind of cheese I wanted on my 6 inch Sub--I held up my hand and said, "Hang on! Let me get a picture of this!" and then proceeded to get out my phone and use it while placing my order so that I could write this blog post about how people had to be told not to use their phones while placing their orders.

The Proper Use of a Prezi Presentation

The first time I ever saw a Prezi presentation, I immediately saw the potential for the site. With its swooping movement and its ability to drill down further and further into the details of something, I saw that Prezi was perfect when you had connecting ideas that didn't fit on a PowerPoint presentation. It was just right for showing off complex relationships, especially when there were varying levels of detail.

Unfortunately, I've rarely seen that kind of Prezi. What I mostly see are presentations that could just as easily have been a PowerPoint but that were placed into a Prezi so that people in the audience could be ooh'ed and awed by the dizzying movement. And I guess it must have worked to that effect, because the site has caught on and now it seems like everyone is using the site, whether it makes any sense or not, and whether the ideas in the presentation are connected in a visual way or not.

And as a result, I'm about as frustrated by a Prezi presentation as I am by a boring PowerPoint presentation.

Over the weekend though, I stumbled upon the website below, which shows EXACTLY the kind of information for which the Prezi tool works best. It's absolutely worth your time to check it out, especially if you're a science teacher.

Before I post the link, though, a disclaimer--the site isn't constructed solely using Prezi. It does look like it's a Prezi that's been modified by people with a working knowledge of Flash, but it's not something that a typical user could create on his/her own. It's not THAT much more advanced, though, and--as I said--at least it demonstrates the kind of subject that really works with a Prezi.

Visit the site.

My Least Favorite Day

It's that time of year again! One of my least favorite days of the year.

Let me back up and explain...

More than a year ago, our local cable system made the switch from an analog/digital broadcast format to an all digital broadcast format. Once that switch was made, any TV without a digital tuner (i.e. any TV more than 3 or 4 years old) could no longer display the digital only signals getting pumped through the cable. In my school district, virtually every TV is more than four years old. As such, on that day a year and a half ago, ALL of those TV's went dark.

The cable company, though, is required by law to provide cable TV for free to classrooms, so they sent to every school an analog to digital converter, one for each TV in the building. Sounds like a great solution, right? Except for one thing: These digital tuners require a much stronger signal than do the tuners built into the analog TV's. And the cable signals in our buildings are infamously weak. In the new wing of the high school, each classroom cable is split by a signal amplifier, which attaches to the electrical power of the building and increases the gain of the signal, but in all of the rest of the high school and in all of the rest of the buildings, the cables are split with 22 cent coaxial splitters, and they're usually split time after time after time, making for a VERY weak signal.

If an analog TV has a weak signal, it will still display the picture. It will be snowy, sure, but it will still display the signal. With a digital tuner, though, a weak signal isn't shown AT ALL. And that's what happened in the majority of our classrooms throughout the district. Sure, we could have purchased signal amplifiers for each building at the cost of thousands upon thousands of dollars, but when I went to the building administrators with this possibility, they immediately nixed the issue.

"Who cares?" one of them said in our monthly administrators' meeting. "No one watches cable TV in class, anyway. Everything's United Streaming" [an educational streaming service that the state of Kentucky provides to every Kentucky public school] "or YouTube or something like that." The other administrators all agreed that this wasn't an issue worth worrying about. Some even said they were glad that the cable was gone from the classroom because now they didn't have to worry about walking in on teacher's in their classrooms on their planning periods who were watching soap operas. So everything was rosy.

Until.

Until the first day of the men's NCAA basketball tournament. On that day, the same principal who had said to me that no one watches cable TV anyway called me and said, "Bryan, can you do whatever your magic is so that we can watch basketball over here?" I had to inform him that--despite his apparent misconception that I was a supernatural creature--I did not, in fact, have any magic that could make a weak digital cable signal work on an analog TV. He was actually pretty angry with me. "You KNEW this was going to be a problem, didn't you?" he shouted. "Well, then, will you unblock the CBS website so that we can watch the games over the Internet?" (For the record, I don't have the CBS website blocked, just the part of the site that streams the video.)

"I can't do that," I said. "It would be a violation of our district AUP for staff or students to watch it. Besides, we don't have the available bandwidth to support bunches of people watching online video all at once."

"So what are my options?" he said in an irritated voice.

I wanted to tell him, Maybe you could forget about the games and actually do your job. But hey! The University of Kentucky was playing, and I've learned from a lifetime of living in the Bluegrass that you don't mess with a Wildcat fan. "You could purchase an over the air digital to analog converter at Wal-Mart and a cheap rabbit ears antennae, and you could hook them directly to a TV. It'll cost about $60."

"How much?"

"About $60," I said. "Six months ago you could have gotten a coupon from the federal government and gotten the converter for free, but that program's over now."

"No way I'm paying $60!" he said. "Forget it!" And he hung up.

I felt bad for the guy, but can I tell you a secret: I'm GLAD that the games can't be shown in the classrooms. It eliminates the temptation. When I was a teacher at the high school, I resented the other teachers in the building who played the games. Students would come trouncing into my afternoon classes and say, "Hey, Mr. Sweasy! Can we watch the games?"

"Nope," I told them. "We're here to learn English, not to watch basketball."

"But Mr. _______________ let us watch it last period!" someone would shout, and then I'd get a laundry list of other teachers who were letting their students watch. I would inevitably give in and hold the game like a carrot above their heads.

"Let's get _______________ done first," I'd say, "and then we'll turn the game on and watch it for five minutes--FIVE MINUTES--before coming back together and doing ______________. Once we finish that, we'll watch again for five minutes. Is that okay?" They would always say that no, that wasn't okay, that we should watch the game for the whole period, but when I told them that it was a take it or leave it proposition, they always took it.

So I'm actually glad to remove that whole argument on behalf of the teachers.

But still, this is the one or two days out of the year when everyone realizes that their cable TV doesn't work anymore.

KySTE Conference 2012--My Final Take

The last two posts I've made have focused on what I "got" out of the 2012 KySTE Conference. Since the final day of the conference included only three sesssion time slots, and I actively partipated in two of them, I "got" a little less out of the final day than I (hopefully) "gave." So instead of focusing on that, I'd like to focus this final post on the conference as a whole...

I thought the third KySTE Spring conference was fantastic! The board did a tremendous job of organizing and pulling off a very professional conference. And I don't just say that because I'm on the board! Actually, as Past President of the organization, I probably had the smallest role of all of the current board members. President Jeff Jones and Executive Director Gary Grant did most of the heavy lifting, and they did so successfully.

After the conference, after all of the attendees had headed for home (or for local pubs to watch the UK basketball game), after all of the donated computers had been packed away and sent back to their respective homes, after we'd cleared out of the registration area so that the United League of Pentecostal Women could come in and start registering people for THEIR conference (I'm not lying here--they had taken over half of the registration area in the East Galt House while we frantically worked to get our stuff out of the other half of the area, and believe me, I'm not getting a bunch of Pentecostals all worked up!), and while vendors disassembled their "intelligent" classrooms and the convention staff from George Fern started tearing down the vendor hall, those KySTE board members who hadn't made an early exit for home gathered in the Magnolia Cafe for a debriefing and (more importantly) late lunch.

While we ate, we discussed what went well, but--as always seems to be the case--spent most of our time focused on the problems that needed to be fixed. The Members Only reception at the Hard Rock Cafe Thursday night was one issue that needed to be resolved. We turned away about 50 people who didn't preorder tickets, but we ended up with about 100 no shows, meaning that we could have allowed all 50 of those people in. How to fix that for next year was a topic of discussion. Another topic: the raffle during the vendor grand opening. A number of the people who put their names in the raffle drawing either weren't there or had left before the drawing or couldn't hear their names being called over the loudspeakers. We talked about that and decided that we may have to come up with something similar to what we did this year at the closing--that is, have people turn a ticket in when they ARRIVE at the vendor grand opening so that at least we know they were there at some point. Another issue--the lack of effectiveness of our ETAN booth. If you don't know what an ETAN booth is, well, then that says about all there is to say about how effective it was this year. I'm sure that'll be addressed for next year as well.

But as we sat there listing ideas, I said to the table, "If our biggest problems are that we turned people away from an after hours event, and we couldn't give prizes away at a vendor hall opening, then I think we're doing pretty good." And I really believe that. This was only the third KySTE Conference to occur in the spring at the Galt House (Prior to that, the KySTE Conference was a summer affair held--usually--in the home district of the KySTE Vice-president), and each year we've had the conference at the Galt House, the problem list at the end of the day debriefing has gotten smaller and smaller. And more importantly, the importance of the problems have gotten smaller and smaller as well.

At the end of the first conference, the number one problem was the difficutly getting on the Galt House Internet. Whether attendees attached via the wired network or tried the nightmare that at the time was the Galt House wireless network, they usually found that--connect or not--there was no bandwidth available. That's because the Galt House had a whopping 10 MB of bandwidth at the time for EVERY guest, both those in their rooms and those in the meeting room spaces. So even if you COULD get on the network, the bandwidth was maxed out. Another problem at the time was the KySTE dinner, a catered meal at the Galt House attended by almost all attendees on the second night of the conference. The problems were that a) the dinner was VERY expensive for KySTE and b) NOT the right place to have an awards ceremony (No matter how polite people are, if you put them at a circular table with food they're going to talk to one another). A third big complaint was with the organization of the conference, which had been ported to the spring from our annual summer conference. At the time all three days of the conference were open session days (like Thursday and Friday were this year), and there was a complaint from some administrators that it was too hard to have teachers out of the district for three straight days when school was in session. Finally, several attendees complained that there was no continental breakfast for attendees--not even a cup of coffee! While none of these meant that the conference was a dud (It was actually a roaring success!), they were SERIOUS issues that needed to be addressed.

And they WERE addressed for the 2011 KySTE Conference. First, working with Insight and the Galt House, KySTE increased the available bandwidth during the conference from 10 MB to 100 MB. This fixed the network problems for session presenters, who could plug into the network with an Ethernet cable and get out to the Internet just fine. What it DIDN'T do, though, was fix the slow, 802.11b wireless network of the Galt House, so regular attendees without 3G cards had no hopes of getting any Internet access. Second, the dinner was scrapped and the awards ceremony moved to the closing session, where people would be sitting in straight lines and paying attention a little better. This created a new problem, though, which was that the closing ceremony became TOO long. A second problem was created when some of the money previously spent on the dinner was moved to providing hot food for attendees at a lunchtime vendor opening. KySTE wasn't prepared for how hungry people were going to be, and ended up spending more than twice as much as planned on the food for the vendor opening, and STILL people were dissatisfied with how much food there was. On the positive side, though, some of the money saved from the dinner was able to fund a continental breakfast on both the second and third day of the conference. Finally, a third major change LAST year was the reorganization of the conference schedule so that the first day was for non-teachers only (administrators, CIO/DTCs, TRT's, and technicians). Teachers only attended the last two days of the conference.

To address the new issues from last year, KySTE successfully put pressure on the Galt House to upgrade their wireless network, which they literally did days before the conference last week. The wireless wasn't perfect, but when is it ever? Personally, I was on it throughout the conference on my Kindle Fire, two different laptops, and my cell phone, and I rarely got kicked off. Also, the second keynote address was removed from the closing session of the conference, and the closing session itself was scheduled to occur earlier in the day so as to avoid Louisville afternoon traffic. In addition, the vendor grand opening was moved to the after dinner hours, which removed the need to have hot appetizers. Instead, 1,500 pieces of cheesecake were made available as dessert for attendees. And in lieu of a dinner, a Members Only reception was held at the Hard Rock Cafe, with the issues that we described above.

But as I said, the "large" issue at the conference has gotten smaller and smaller each year. We went from "You Guys have GOT to do something about the Internet access" after the first conference to "You guys have GOT to do something about the wireless access" after the second conference to "I didn't know I needed a ticket to get into the Members Only reception." That's quite an improvement each year, especially from last year to this year.

So I guess what I'm saying is, good job, Jeff and Gary. You've outdone yourselves.

I have three months left on the KySTE board, and though I know there'll be a couple more monthly con calls and a retreat in May when a bunch of important decisions will be made, for the most part, my work with the organization is done for now. And that's always bittersweet. But after the fantastic conference that I saw put on this year, I know that the organization is in good hands.

And I look forward to next year, when I get to attend the conference as a regular KySTE member, enjoying the fruits of labor of this new KySTE board.

KySTE Conference, Day Two--Renewed Urgency

Yesterday I posted about day one of the conference, summing up what I felt the overarching theme of the first day was. Today I want to post about what I've gotten out of the second day of the conference, and I have no such grand plans to try to do any summarizing.
The reason: I didn't get to nearly as many sessions today. I spent a great deal of time today behind the counter at the ISTE "bookstore" in the 2nd floor lobby of the Galt House. And in all of that time, most of what I learned can be broken down into three basic ideas: 1) If you put yourself in the middle of a lobby at a conference and sit behind a table and look official, lots of people will come up to you and ask you questions. Mostly about the locations of specific meeting rooms. 2) KySTE needs a point of service solution so that we can accept credit cards more easily. 3) The next year that I volunteer to work the KySTE Conference (and that won't be next year--I fully intend to take a year completely away from KySTE and get recharged before coming back for probably one more run through before retirement) I'm going to ask to do something other than the bookstore, because that's not my thing.

But I'm not here to talk about the bookstore. I want to talk, actually turn around in my own head for my own benefit, what I DID get out of the conference today. I attended two sessions, one on the uses of Microsoft OneNote, and another by KySTE 2012 Keynote speaker Scott McLeod about being an effective technology leader. From the OneNote session, I debated with the speaker about which is the better choice for Kentucky schools--OneNote or Evernote. We didn't really decide. On one hand, most teachers already have OneNote installed on their computers and don't even know it, and many student computers have it as well (In my district, virtually ALL PC's in the district have it installed). This would make a district wide implementation fairly easy to achieve. On the other hand, Evernote is free (OneNote is a pricey purchase, especially for the home) and it syncs across all devices more seamlessly than OneNote does. It's something I'll have to decide about, and to be honest, I've got time because I'm not planning to push this out to everyone in my district unless a need arises.

That's about all I got out of that session.

The other session, though, that was a different story. Dr. McLeod presented a number of interesting ideas for 10 ways to improve your technology leadership. He made a number of statements that I found really intriguing. So many, in fact, that I sometimes found myself hearing a great, thought provoking idea and thinking, "I need to write that down," and before I could he or his colleague said something ELSE intriguing and I started thinking about that and soon lost all memory of what it was he had said before (In fact, at one point I seriously considered raising my hand and asking him if he could repeat word for word everything he'd said over the last six minutes so that I could remember what that one really inspiring phrase was, but he seemed on a roll and I decided to let it go). But one thing stood out for me.

I don't remember exactly what the wording was, but as Dr. McLeod was talking about PD he said--simply as an aside--that we gave PD to teachers in the same way that we tried to teach students, with the one size fits all philosophy. And that really got me thinking. In my school district we have the same standard, four professional development days that everyone else in the state has, but we also have our students attend school longer than 6 hours a day in order to get the required 1,062 hours of instruction in 170 days rather than 175, and we use those additional five days also for professional development. That's nine full days of professional development, 54 hours. And what do we do with it? In all schools in the district, for the most part, you'll walk into the school building on PD days and the teachers are sitting in the library, all getting the same information drilled into them, as if every teacher in that building all had exactly the same professional need at exactly the same moment.

It's ludicrous.

And more than ludicrous, it's hypocritical. Because we tell our teachers all the time that they should be differentiating instruction, but here before those teachers' eyes are their leaders and they aren't differentiating ANYTHING.

I swear I was listening to the second half of Dr. McLeod's presentation. At least with half of my brain. But the other half of my brain was on a mission: This has to change, that half of my brain was saying to me. It doesn't matter how, but I have to go back to my district and somehow convince the other school and district administrators that this has to stop. We have to find a way to not only meet the students where they are with their learning (practically a mantra in my district), but to also meet the teachers where THEY are. And that means acknowledging first and foremost that they're not all in the same place.

Larger conferences like this KySTE conference are a great model for one kind of way that we can do that. The first time that I ever went to this conference, back when I was a teacher instead of a CIO and it was called the Kentucky Teaching and Learning Conference, I was blown away by the fact that there were so many possible sessions that I could go to, and that I had all of the freedom to go to the things that interested me and that I NEEDED. This was the kind of professional development I wanted and needed. I came back to my district thinking, THIS is what we need to be doing for PD in the district, and a couple of years later, when I was CIO, I convinced the district leadership to give it a try. The Erlanger-Elsmere Teaching and Learning Conference is what I called it (Okay, so maybe coming up with titles for stuff isn't my specialty--look at the title of this blog, for Pete's sake!), and we had the thing for three out of four years. You can see a website for the last version of it by clicking this link. Of all of the PD's we've ever had in the district, it was BY FAR the most enthusiastically received. As in 94% of all of the staff members ranked it as either very beneficial for their job or somewhat beneficial to their job. And 97% of the staff members in that final year wanted to see the EETLC continue from year to year.

So what happened? Senate Bill 1 / Unbridled Learning happened. Building principals pushed back against the conference--they said they couldn't "waste" an entire PD day letting teachers do whatever they wanted when there was all this work that had to be done for Unbridled Learning and the Common Core Standards and End of Course Assessment and everything else that occurred. So now teachers are sitting in the library learning about CIITS and common assessments and curriculum alignment. Because it's important that all of this stuff gets covered.

And I'm not knocking the principals. All of this stuff really is important.

But darn it, this has to change. It has to. We're never going to get effective PD assuming these teachers all need all of this. And I'm not sure what to do (though I have a few ideas I'm going to bat around with the central office administrators next week), but I have to do something.

Wow, having written all of this, I have to say, maybe I got more out of today than I thought I did. Maybe I got a renewed sense of urgency.

That's not a bad takeaway...

KySTE Conference, Day One--Pandora's Box

Today was the first day of the annual Kentucky Society for Technology in Education Conference, which is held every March in Louisville. The conference proper starts tomorrow, but today there were multiple pre-session meetings for district administrators, technology teachers, CIOs, and technicians. Unlike last year, when as KySTE President I was in charge of the conference and pretty much spent the entire three days standing behind the registration desk dealing with issues, this year I've actually gotten to go to about half of the first day's sessions. And here's what I got out of them:

People are nervous.

Specifically, people are worried about the influx of personal devices and 1:1 initiatives and what kinds of devices to purchase and how do we protect the network from all of these devices and who's gonna fix 'em when they break and how can we teach when 30 kids have a total of 11 different devices in the classroom and how are we ensuring that kids are doing what they're supposed to be doing on these devices instead of chatting with friends on Facebook and what if they look at porn and do we charge a technology fee and how does equity of access fit into this puzzle and what about the teachers who haven't figured out how to incorporate a regular old desktop computer into the classroom much less a tablet or an iPhone and lots of other stuff.

And all of those concerns point to one fact. All of us in the field of ed tech understand that the education technology landscape is changing. Rapidly. And portable computing devices are driving this change. With the price of the iPad 2 dropping in the next few days to just $399, and with high quality 7 inch Android tablets like the Kindle Fire selling for just $200, and with Android cell phones selling in the corner supermarket for less than $100, we're approaching a point in the VERY near future--much nearer than I think most people in education realize--when every child will be carrying around SOME kind of portable computing device.

I've seen both this change and these concerns coming for a while.

About six months ago my school district upgraded our core router, and when we did so we changed the way the router was setup so that devices that couldn't attach to our domain and connect to our proxy server could still get on the Internet. "Transparent proxy" is what it's called, and I described it for months to the administrators in my district as "The Panera Bread Experience." I told them, "IF we institute this transparent proxy" [and we wouldn't have done so without their knowledge and permission] "users will be able to attach to our network and get on the Internet from our network with the same ease that they can do so at Panera Bread." I have no idea why I chose Panera Bread over any other business that provides free wi-fi, but that's not the point. The point was what I said next. "Once that happens, everything changes in the district. Any guest, parent, student, teacher...anybody...can attach to our network and surf the web. It will make access to the web easier. But it's also going to bring problems." Despite my warnings, though, the administrators were all in favor of instituting this change. That Panera Bread Experience was too tempting to resist.

On the first district administrators meeting that we had following the change, I told them that we were up and running, and that true to my word, it was now as easy to get on the Internet in my school district as it was at Panera Bread (to my relief. I wasn't really sure if it would be exactly as easy, and it turns out that yep; it was exactly as easy). And I told them, "I am VERY, VERY excited about what this can mean for instruction and for learning in this district. But I've been saying this and I'll continue to say it--everything changes now."

One of the administrators who'd been listening to me for three months and being silent finally asked, "What do you mean?"

"Have you ever heard of the myth of Pandora and the box?" He nodded. "It's like that." He looked at me uncomprehendingly. "Do you remember the scene in GHOSTBUSTERS when the mean, bearded guy from the EPA made them turn off the power to the grid and all of the ghosts came out and that weird, 80's music started playing and the one ghost got sucked up into the tailpipe of the taxi and ended up in the driver's seat? That's exactly what's going to happen!"

That, of course, told him no more than the story of Pandora did, so I kind of started over. I decided to forgo the analogies and just give it to him straight. "Once you open up your network like that, you give up a lot of control. Yesterday we knew about every device on our network, what the computer name was, who was logged onto it, what it was doing. If the user logged on was a student who didn't have a signed AUP, they didn't get Internet access. Now ANYONE can sign on with their iPad from their house, and we have no idea if that person is a teacher or a guest of the district or a student who has lost his Internet privileges."

"But that doesn't matter," that principal said. "Most kids don't have an Internet capable device with them at school."

"They don't because yesterday they couldn't get on the network. Today they can. We're not announcing that, but how long do you think it will take before students figure this out on their own? And once they do, they'll start bringing their devices in. And even if students DON'T have a device today, they will soon. With the prices of devices falling all of the time, it's inevitable that every student will have a device."

And it is. Consider this: The original Kindle device was introduced in November of 2007. At the time it cost $400. Today the current Kindle closest in specs to that original device sells for $79. That's an 80% price drop in 4 years. Now think about the Kindle Fire. It currently sells for $200. If the Kindle Fire follows that same pattern, that means that in 2016 a device like the Kindle Fire will be on sale for $40. And when that happens, that device will no longer be behind glass in the electronics section of the store. It's going to be hanging from a J-hook at the checkout line. And once that happens, EVERY student is going to own one. My children's school supply lists include a TI-80 calculator. They are twice as expensive as that 2016 Kindle Fire is going to be. If in 2012 we can place a calculator on a school supply list, in 2016 we'll be placing a personal computing device--one that can take the place of that calculator and take the place of a textbook and take the place of an Internet research computer and a host of other devices--on that list.

This is the day we've been dreaming of, folks. The day when every child has access to a powerful personal computing device. The day when students and teachers can pull these devices out and use them in their classrooms as an integral part of having class. The day when the phrase "digital learning" disappears because it's become so embedded in instruction that it's just "learning." This is the day that we've been pining for and wishing for and imagining for years now. It's just beyond the horizon now, just a few years away. It's coming faster than we ever imagined it would.

And we're scared to death of it...

Over the next two days of the KySTE Conference there are going to be plenty of sessions, and many of them are going to be about this coming day in one way or the other. I hope they help prepare us for the coming tsunami. Because, to paraphrase what we said when we were kids playing hide and seek in the backyard, Ready or not, here it comes...



I can't see the video.

Windows 8: (Very) First Impressions

Last week Microsoft released a consumer Windows 8 preview. I downloaded it and installed it on one of the laptops here in my office.
Good news: Installation was very easy. Go here-- http://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows-8/iso --and download the ISO image and then burn to a DVD (You’ll need to select the option in your CD burning software to “Burn an image to a disc” or something like that). Then install. I set the thing to run overnight and came back in the morning and it was done. There are a couple of prompts at the beginning, but once the installation actually starts that aren’t any more.

 Bad News (or maybe not—maybe just “News”): Uh, it’s WAY different from Windows 7. I haven’t seen a change this big to Windows since the move from Windows 3.1 to Windows 95. It makes the change from Office 2003 to Office 2007 (the Ribbon) look like NOTHING! Frankly, I was lost at first. I am finding my way around it a little bit, but my first impulse is that I hate it.

 I know Microsoft is trying to create an operating system that not only runs on your desktop computer but can also run on a cell phone or tablet as well—one operating system for all devices. But frankly, I don’t want a cell phone operating system on my desktop computer—the icons are too big and even the graphics are weird—everyone else is going for flashy, 3-d graphics, and this looks amazingly flat.

I seem to be at odds with the rest of the computer world, though. Over the weekend I read story after story after story about how favorably everyone was regarding Windows 8. I feel like quite the outsider. Maybe the issue is that I think most people are viewing Windows 8 as Microsoft's first serious foray into the tablet world, and they're looking at the operating system as a tablet OS or a cell phone OS. And looked at that way, the OS is fine. But as I said above, I have it installed on a laptop computer, and I'm looking at it as a PC operating system. And viewed in that way, I think it has the potential to be a terrible failure.

Maybe my opinion will change. I've spent less than an hour hands on with the operating system. Maybe time will cause me to fall in love with it. But for now my feeling, I guess, is that it isn't always best to try to be all things for all people.

Education Technology and Poetry

As I've mentioned in a prior post, this is my 22nd year working in the field of education. For the first 14 of those years I was an English teacher, and for the last 12 years I've been working with education technology (You may notice that those numbers don't quite add up to 22; that's because for four years I was teaching English half time and teaching and working with education technology the other half of the time). And I was pretty excited today to see the two disparate parts of my work career intersect...

I was reading a book called Education Nation: Six Leading Edges of Innovation in our Schools by Milton Chen. I'd love to recommend the book, but to be honest I'm finding it a little simplistic. For instance, one of the six sections of the book is about technology (which is why I'm reading the book), but the technology section posits some pretty unsound technology educational ideas without paying any attention to real problems with the ideas. In fact, anyone who disagrees with the author is dismissed as a "naysayer," though the author never really says what's wrong with the nay that the people are saying.

But I'm not here to put down the book. I'm here to share an anonymous poem that's in the book. A poem about education technology! As George Costanza said, my world's are colliding!

I checked all over the Internet, and this truly does seem to be an anonymous work (Several blogs don't credit anyone for it, giving the impression that the blog writer himself is the poet, but there are plenty of other posts of the poem that pre-date those entries), so I feel safe sharing it here.

Competition

Let's have a little competition
     and get ready for the future.

I will use a laptop
     and you will use a paper and pencil. Are you ready?

I will access up-to-date information.
     You have a textbook that is five years old.

I will immediately know when I misspell a word.
     You will have to wait until it's graded.

I will learn how to care for technology by using it.
     You will read about it.

I will see math problems in 3-D.
     You will do the odd problems.

I will create artwork and poetry and share it with the world.
     You will share yours with the class.

I will have 24/7 access.
     You have the entire class period.

I will access the most dynamic information.
     Yours will be printed and photocopied.

I will communicate with leaders and experts using email.
     You will wait for Friday's speaker.

I will select my learning style.
     You will use the teacher's favorite learning style.

I will collaborate with my peers from around the world.
     You will collaborate with peers in your classroom.

I will take my learning as far as I want.
     You must wait for the rest of the class.

The cost of a laptop per year? $250

The cost of teacher training and student training? Expensive.

The cost of well-educated U.S Citizens and workforce? Priceless.

I have to admit--as a teacher and a lover of poetry, there's not a whole lot all that poetic in the work. And I could argue that many if not all of the stanzas would be better if they were reversed so that the paper and pen example was first. Still, the poem brings up some intriguing ideas.

Should you give in and buy an iPad?

iPads are the big thing right now, and I don't have a problem with people buying them. They're great devices, with long battery life, a bunch of apps, and they're lightweight and easy to carry around. There's currently no device on the market that can match them. So if you are (like me) one of the seemingly few Americans out there who doesn't already have one, you may be looking (like me) at the fact that it's three months until Christmas and considering purchasing one of these FAIRLY inexpensive devices as a Christmas present to yourself.

But you might want to hold on for a while. Two things are about to change.

First, Amazon is releasing an Android-based tablet sometime in the next eight weeks. Rumors are that the device is going to be about half the price of an iPad, which is great, but it also is going to be a fairly locked-down device, so that users will not be able to go out to the general Android marketplace to download apps but will instead be forced to use the Amazon marketplace. In addition, the Amazon tablet will be smaller and less powerful than the iPad. Still, it might be worth waiting for the debut of this before grabbing an iPad.

The other development you might want to wait for is the public release of Windows 8. Microsoft has seen the writing on the wall, and the new Windows operating system will be designed for touch/tablet use. The video below is one of several on the Internet that show off the new device. My only concern about the new OS is will hardware manufacturers be able to create a device that is powerful enough to run it but cheap enough to be a competitor to the iPad? Cheap PC-based netbooks and devices like the Dell Inspiron Duo have left much to be desired in the giddyup department. I've spent time with those devices and found myself saying things to people like, "Okay, watch this. This program is really cool...It's awesome...it'll load in just a couple of seconds...you're going to love it...I promise...any second now..." Meanwhile, I watch people with iPads and they hit the power button and they're off to the races.

Based on the video below, though, which isn't a Microsoft created video so it isn't a fairy tale device from Never Neverland, I'm impressed with the possibilities.

That, combined with the upcoming Amazon device, have convinced ME, anyway, to wait a while before jumping on the iPad bandwagon.

(I can't see the video.)

Is technology worth the expense?

I actually wrote the blog post below for my work blog, but after reading it there I thought it just as appropriate for THIS blog, so I'm including it in its entirety here as well. --bryan
 ------------------------

Here's a link to an article that you perhaps wouldn't expect to see on the front page of a technology department's blog. But please keep in mind that I'm an educator first and a technology-advocate second, and what I will always want is what is best for students, not what is best for technology.

The article, from the New York Times' September 3 edition, focuses on an Arizona school that has pumped more than 30 million dollars into the technology of the school district, turning the district's classrooms into models of "Next Generation" learning. Every classroom has projectors, interactive whiteboards, document cameras, student input devices, and ample computers for students so that students can learn at their own pace using software not unlike the Compass Odyssey, MAP, and Fast ForWord products used in this school district.

It sounds like a technology director's dream, and it certainly fits the idea of the "Future Classroom" that I've been a proponent of for years.

But here's the problem: This school district is not--as you might expect--leaping past all other schools in Arizona with this innovative approach. In fact, since the program began, the district has actually fallen BEHIND most other schools in the state, with their scores remaining stagnant while other districts are rising. Many proponents of increased technology in the classroom argue that state tests are measuring traditional 20th Century skills and are not able to measure the increased "Next Generation" learning that is taking place in these classrooms. These people may, indeed, have a point, but it is impossible to argue that--"Next Generation" learning or not--these students are not performing as well as their peers in reading and math.

According to the article, one of the reasons for this change may be budget cuts in other areas. In order to afford the gigantic technology bill, the district had to lay off teachers and staff and make other cuts. The increased classroom sizes may contribute to the poor performance of the students.

As I said above, this makes for a strange blog post for a technology website, but I wanted to remind teachers that--no matter what technology is in their classrooms--it's YOU the teacher who is going to really make a difference in whether or not your students learn. The technology is a tool designed to help you help your students. It will never replace good teaching, only supplement it.

Click here to read the article.

The Future of Technology

When it comes to future trends in technology, I have more than once been wrong. Very wrong. As a result, I've learned to never trust my own instinct when I hear about how technology is going to be in the future. I apparently can't see that far ahead.

I remember the first time I ever made such a mistake. It was in the fall of 1984, and I was taking a semester long computer programming course at my high school. Even way back then computers were something that interested me very much (Computers and the piano. I think anything that allowed my nervous fingers to move and create things.). During the last three weeks of the course, though, we moved away from computer programming, and I remember my instructor saying to us, "For the rest of the class we're going to work--not on computer programming--but on something called 'computer applications.' You see," he went on, "in the future, most people are NOT going to write their own programs. Other people will write the programs for them, and they'll just USE those programs written by someone else."

I didn't get it. Why would a person let someone else write a program for them? What was the fun in that? I understood it even less when we started working on a word processing program a few moments after that. I HATED the word processing program. I had been trained to type on a typewriter. I couldn't handle the idea that I didn't need to listen for the DING anymore to return the carriage to the left of the paper. I was sure I'd never get used to a word processing program, and even more sure that I wouldn't use a bunch of programs written by other people.

Utter nonsense, of course. I'm writing this blog entry on a word processing program of sorts, and I got used to the idea of not hitting the "Return" key long ago. And I haven't written a computer program since I left that class in 1984. The closest I've ever come to writing in computer code is writing in HTML and javascript on web pages. In 1984, though, I just couldn't see the future.

The same thing happened about 10 years ago when I read in a news magazine that the next big thing in computing was going to be Internet-based programs. "Cloud" programs they were called, because the software wasn't something you could physically touch or hold, wasn't on a CD or a floppy disk. Instead, consumers would pay a monthly or yearly fee to use this Internet-based service.

What a load of baloney, I remember thinking. Why would someone pay an ongoing fee to rent a program that runs over the Internet--which, mind you, was a pretty unreliable beast back in the year 2000--when they could purchase software on a CD and install it on their computers themselves? When you bought software you actually GOT something. When you purchased a cloud license you got...what? Nothing you could hold. It would NEVER catch on.

I know better now. At home, my email is entirely web based (Gmail), and I do my taxes and banking using online tools. At work, nearly every major system is now a cloud-based system, including our district email, student information system, and (coming in the next couple of weeks) our financial management / human resources system.

So don't ever ask me about the future trends of technology. I have no idea. I've learned to just trust the people who seem to know. 1 to 1 student computing using students' own devices that they bring to school? If you say so. Tablet PC's that are powerful and under $200 in price? You must know something I don't!

A Brave New World

A co-worker forwarded me the video below yesterday, along with the message, "Think we will live to witness this?" Here were my thoughts when I opened the video:

1. Oh, I've seen this before. My assistant-superintendent ALSO forwarded it to me about six months ago.
2. Of course we'll live to see SOMETHING like this. I'm actually not that blown away by this video. The see through glass monitor doesn't exist yet (at least, not in any consumer-affordable store I've ever been in), but as far as the other technology goes, there's very little in this video that isn't already possible today, if you were willing to purchase a giant touch screen TV with Microsoft Surface technology built into it. The video is guessing at the evolution of software (i.e. the ease with which the dad transfers the Skype-like video call from his cell phone to the computer built into the kitchen counter) and counting on some things that don't exist yet (such as, to go back to my prior example, what kind of camera on the kitchen counter is capturing the kids for the grandma to see???), but overall, there's really not much new here. We're living in this world already, and these advancements are going to come incrementally, so that you're hardly aware of them. Isn't 2011 Skype pretty darned cool? Or Facebook? Or the Internet on your cell phone? It's all the stuff of science fiction movies when I was growing up!
3. I don't want work emails popping up on my mirror while I'm trying to get ready in the morning. I don't know if Corning was trying to get me excited about this new future or ticked off at them because in this future I can't even go into the bathroom to get away from work. Jennifer should have pretended she didn't get the message and had another hour to enjoy the morning!

(I can't see the video.)

Foundational Change

We humans are undergoing a major cultural shift thanks to the proliferation of the mobile, network-connected device. When people refer to the Computer Age (or more correctly, I think, the "Information Age") I do truly believe that it is actually a new "Age" that we are moving into. We've left the Stone Age and the Bronze Age and the Industrial Age and moved into something completely different, and it will take a different kind of human being.

We'll adapt. We always do. But we're going to have to change.

The video below was forwarded to me yesterday. I thought it does a fantastic job of demonstrating this foundational change that is occurring. The video is specific to Iowa (I didn't even know they HAD computers in Iowa!), but the information in the first half of the video is about any state.



(I can't see the video.)

In defense of my phone

I made a post a few of months ago about how much nicer my wife's "cheap" 2011 smart phone is than my high end smart phone. And I haven't changed my mind about that post. Her phone is still better.

But I don't want to make it sound like my phone is a piece of garbage. Sometimes, when I can't get it to do exactly what I want it to do, I might say that, and I will admit that I don't like that its operating system, while extremely popular in Europe and Asia (where until just recently it was far and away the #1 mobile phone OS), is almost unheard of in the United States. No one I've met says, "Hey! Do you have a Symbian phone?" 

Still, I use my phone every day, and not just for the typical cell phone things. Sure, I do use it to check my email, and to keep up with my appointments, and as a calculator and simple note taker, and as a quick low resolution digital camera. And yes, I even make the occasional phone call with it. But so what? Everyone does those things!

Here are just a few of the other things that I use my cell phone for.

1. MP3 player. My cell phone, the Nokia 5800, was designed first and foremost to function as a cell phone/multimedia player, and I do use it as my primary music device. 
2. A Flashlight. My cell phone has an app I downloaded that, with the click of a virtual switch, sets the flash in the camera to on. It makes for a VERY effective flashlight (much more so than the cheap apps I've seen on other phones that just turn the regular view screen on). I use this function much more often than I thought I would. I never knew how often I'd use a flashlight if I had it always in my pocket. 
3. Exercise Tracker. I have an app called "Sports Tracker" that functions as a pedometer, a work out diary, and a GPS device that maps my runs for me in real time. At the end of each workout it will tell me how far I've run/walked, how many steps I've taken, and how many calories I've burned.
4. A GPS Navigator. I used "Waze," a free navigation tool, to help me get from place to place. Beats having to pay for and update a Garmin.
5. A UPC reader. I have a bar code reader that I can scan to get information on products, such as where is the cheapest place to buy the product I'm holding in my hand (which seldom is the store I'm standing in), or that can open up a link to a web browser where I can read more information.

And those are just the apps that I use on a daily basis. I also have a level, an anglemeter, a measurement converter, and a number of other apps that I have but don't use often. Something that's missing--a good eReader. There's no Kindle app for the Symbian system.

In any event, this is why I don't carry a Swiss Army Knife. I have the 21st Century Equivalent.

'Cause the Times

Technology changes so quickly....

I've had a "Smart" cell phone for about six years now. My latest smart phone was the top of the line Nokia phone from this time in 2009. I love the convenience of being able to check my email, download podcasts, browse the web, read books, and view my calendar wherever I am, as well as (as you other smart phone users know) thousands of other things I can do with my phone. My wife, though, has NOT had a smart phone. For years she had the same, plain old flip phone, not exactly like the one on the right, but darn close to it. It was the only cell phone she'd ever had, and it literally was at least eight years old. Finally, I went to make a call on it a few weeks ago and saw that the LCD screen was broken so that all of the liquid had leaked around the screen to the point that the screen looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, and I looked at my wife and said, "Honey! We have to get you a new phone!" So we did. And she agreed that--at long last--it was time to get a smart phone.

I did some research online, and the phone I ended up buying for her was an inexpensive Android smart phone called the Huwai Ascend. Many reviews, including the one linked to here, were not flattering of the phone, describing it as "a low end phone" or at best "a good introduction to the Android phone." But there were enough positive reviews, and the phone was cheap enough, so I decided I'd go ahead and buy it, and if it wasn't quite up to par to my top of the line 2009 model, my wife would never know the difference, since she'd never had a smart phone.

But apparently I am the one who never knew the difference, because her 2011 bottom of the line smart phone runs circles around my 2009 top of the line smart phone. Cell phones have changed that much in two years. Her phone is faster, more responsive, and with more applications. I'm not saying I'm jealous, because I'm satisfied with what I have (Also, since mine is paid for by my school district, I don't really have any reason to complain about it). What I am saying is that it's amazing how much cheaper and faster cell phones have gotten in just two years. My wife's phone was half the price of mine and is easily four or five times as fast.

There's a lot of talk in technology education circles about students using cell phones as their primary computing advice. The conversation goes something like this: We go to all of the trouble of forcing students to NOT bring their cell phones to school, or at least to put them in their lockers, and then we struggle to find funds for a 1 to 1 laptop initiative. Meanwhile, there's all of this computing power sitting unused in the students' lockers. Why don't we just let the students use their phones?

I thought that whole line of reasoning was hogwash back a month ago when I thought my top of the line 2009 smart phone was what cell phones could do today. Now that I've seen my wife's cheap prepaid cell phone, my mind has been changed.

A Look Back Through Time

A few posts ago I quoted J.C.R. Licklider, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, who--in 1968--correctly predicted many of the ways that we use computers today. I followed that post a few days later with a 1994 video clip that showed Today show correspondents Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble embarassingly wondering aloud how to say the "@" sign and what exactly this "Internet" thing was.

The two posts seem to be polar opposites of one another, the first showing a prescient prophet, the second showing some out of touch fools. But that contrast got me thinking: How much behind the times WERE Katie Couric and Bryant Gumble? Would I have known what the Internet was in January of 1994? Was the word "Internet" commonly used at that time?

To try to figure this out, I went to the archives of Time Magazine. Time has its entire archive of issues online and capable of being searched by keyword. I searched for every article from the beginning of Time (Ha! A pun!) until 1994 that contained the word "Internet" either as a word in the article or as a tagged "keyword" for the article. And the results? Katie and Bryant WEREN'T behind the times, at least not by much. While there were a lot of people going online prior to 1994, most writers weren't referring to the "Internet" nor to the "World Wide Web," which is how we refer to going online these days. Instead, writers tended to call the online world "cyberspace" or "The Information Superhighway." I think most of us would have blankly stared and wondered "What is Internet, anyway?" in 1994.

But you can read for yourself. Here are some of the more interesting articles I found. Just click the date to read them at Time's website.

Article One: February 25, 1985: Remember library card catalogs? The REAL ones? This article correctly predicts their inevitable death.

Favorite quote from Article One: "Libraries have to act fast," says David Nashelsky, senior librarian at the San Jose, Calif., public library. "In the future, a lot of information is going to be available only via computers."

Article Two: April 7, 1986: This is the earliest article I could find that talked about people going online. But this was LONG before the term "Internet" was used in conjunction with people doing this.

Favorite quote from Article Two: "Subscribers use the computer networks with one eye on the clock. Start-up fees are modest (generally less than $50), but hourly costs can vary from $6 at night to as high as $15 during business hours, plus a surcharge for some features." 

Article Three: October 30, 1989: This article isn't really about the Internet, but I found it interesting nonetheless. It's more closely related to the Kindle, I suppose, but I find it interesting that THIS was--in 1989--a piece of technology worth writing about. There are dozens of free websites today that will do what this device did then for $300.

Article Four: February 8, 1993: This essay, which borders on fear mongering, is the first I found that actually uses the word "Internet." Mostly, though, it refers to being online as "cyberspace," and it uses a bunch of made up words like "cyberpunk" that no one uses anymore. I'm sure the guy writing this article thought he was creating an article for the ages, but it's mostly just nonsense now.

My favorite quote from Article Four: Obsessed with technology, especially technology that is just beyond their reach (like BRAIN IMPLANTS), the cyberpunks are future oriented to a fault. 


Article Five: April 12, 1993: This article actually foresees a lot of what's coming on the Internet, but it wrongly assumes that most of it will be happening on our televisions rather than on our computers. A lot of what this article says is merely days away is just now, 18 years later, starting to become commonplace.

Favorite quote from Article Five, written with a tone of "Humph! This'll never happen!": "Vice President Gore talks about making it possible for a schoolchild in Arkansas to have access to a book stored on a computer in the Library of Congress or take a course at a distant college. Mitch Kapor, co- founder of a computer watchdog group called the Electronic Frontier Foundation, wants the superhighway to do for video what computer bulletin boards did for print — make it easy for everyone to publish ideas to an audience eager to respond in kind. He envisions a nation of leisure-time video broadcasters, each posting his creations on a huge nationwide video bulletin board."

Article Six: December 6, 1993: Here's the first article in Time to REALLY bring forth the idea of the Internet. It was published in December of 1993, a month before the Today show video. So maybe Katie and Bryant weren't all that far behind.

Favorite quote from Article Six: The Internet, however, will have to go through some radical changes before it can join the world of commerce. Subsidized for so long by the Federal Government, its culture is not geared to normal business activities. 

More on Bill Gates

A couple of posts ago I mentioned how excited I was about the upcoming movie The Social Network, and how much I'm looking forward to the dramatization of the founding of Facebook. On that post I also embedded a short clip from the 1999 movie Pirates of Silicon Valley, which was about the (now) early days of the Mac vs. PC wars. The specific clip dramatized the time in 1980/81 when Microsoft sold its operating system, DOS, to IBM.

Here's another clip from the film. This is near the very end of the film, and it dramatizes the Apple release of the Macintosh, which happened just a few months before Microsoft unveiled Windows, its graphical interface for DOS that looked VERY much like the Apple Macintosh operating system. VERY MUCH. So much so that Steve Jobs (played by Noah Wiley in the clip) is a little upset.

As with the first clip, here's another example of where being first or even being best isn't necessarily important in the computer industry--knowing how to leverage, promote, and sell a product IS. The actor playing Bill Gates says as much right at the end of the clip.

As far as I know, neither of the meetings in this clip actually happened, at least not the way they're portrayed here (Bill Gates, though, DID appear at the keynote address when the 1984 Macintosh Super Bowl ad aired). But that's okay--writers of docudramas often use a little bit of dramatic license, and I think that what's happened here, and I also think it doesn't necessarily hurt anything--the gist of everyone's feelings during the time is captured pretty well here.



(I can't see the video.)

Nothing New Under the Sun

I'm looking forward very much to the upcoming film The Social Network. It's been a long time since there was a  non-action or non-Disney movie that I wanted to see in the theaters, but this is it, for several reasons:
1) It was written by Aaron Sorkin, who wrote The West Wing, Sports Night, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and A Few Good Men. As with those works, I'm expecting a lot of fast paced, witty dialogue.
2) I like many of the actors in the film, including Justin Timberlake and Jesse Eisenberg.
3) It's about social networking! Going to see the movie is practically part of my job description.

I will say one thing, though. I'm surprised that many people are upset that the film is going to portray Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg in a negative light. According to a news article I was just reading, the director states that the film portrays Zuckerburg as "prickly and smarter than everybody else and makes no apologies for it." The film also portrays Zuckerburg not as the real creator of Facebook, but as someone who used his business savvy to profit from the work of others. Zuckerburg is portrayed more as a businessman than as a computer genius.

Huh. Kind of reminds me of another rich computer genius:



(I can't see the video.)