There is no box

thinking out loud about technology, education and life

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K-12 Superintendent, reformed IT guy, educator, 1:1 evangelist, life long learner, father, husband, geek, ex self-propelled field artillery turret mechanic, GCT, CCTO, INFP

  • What the?

    One might look at my last two posts and ask, “What’s that stuff doing there?”  Well, I have decided to start posting my class objectives for the week on my blog as a way to capture them in time.  You see I post my objectives in Moodle at the top of my courses every day:

    class objectives for the week in Moodle
    class objectives for the week in Moodle

    Which is great.  I really like having this information right at the top of the Course.  The problem is that I am losing the previous information as soon as I update it.  I have seen teachers logging this information in binders and books.   I can’t quite bring myself to go analog on this.  Not with Moodle already there.  But I haven’t found a way to keep this information in Moodle (where I would really like to store it) and easily reference it in the Course Topic section.

    I have experimented with embedding Google Calendar and entering the information as an event for each day but it felt clunky.  I really like to have a database back end with a simple web front end that I could pre-load with objectives and assignments and have it populate automatically.  I just don’t have the time right now to do that.  So for now, I’ll capture the information in my blog.  At least I will be able to go back and find the information when I need to.

  • Objectives for Week 6

    Computer Systems

    Objective: Students will be introduced to microprocessors.

    • What is a microprocessor
    • Basic history of the microprocessor
    • Intel vs. AMD
    • Clock speed and bus speed
    • Sockets and Pins
    • Pairing a processor with a motherboard

    Computer Programming

    Objective: Students will learn about story-boarding and program design.

    • Scenarios and story-boarding
    • Visual story-boarding
    • Textual story-boarding
    • Story-board to program code
    • Intro to basic programming principles

  • Objectives for Week 5

    Computer Systems

    Objective: Students will be introduction to motherboards.

    • What is a motherboard
    • How does it work
    • The components of the motherboard

    Computer Programming

    Objective: Students will learn about Alice controls for objects and cameras.

    • Setting the stage
    • Posing Objects
    • Camera Controls
    • Modifying Object Properties

  • What’s in a Name?

    The heroes in the matrix all have cool names; the names they have chosen for themselves.  Tom Anderson is Neo, and you have  Morphius and Trinity too whose given names we never know.  Online I am anotherschwab, the name I chose for my first web based email account because I got tired of searching for an available  combination of Andrew and Schwab. I did not want to be aschwab73 or atschwab10 or even andrewschwab2.   After a dozen tries I finally said to myself, I guess I am just anotherschwab and that was the name I chose.  It is the name that has stuck with me online for over 15 years.

    Are we too becoming like the characters in the matrix, known online not by our given names but rather by our chosen names?  Google Andrew Schwab and you get a singer in the band Project 86 as the top hit.  Its not me.   Google anotherschwab and you get my profile on twitter right as the top result.  At this point I can’t even imagine using any other name online.

    And what does this mean for my daughter’s online life?  Should I be creating accounts for her now when she is three to be sure she gets the name given to her at birth or should I let her have the same experience of finding her own name?  Of choosing her identity on the net and so walking the same path as Neo, Morphius, Trinity and anotherschwab?

  • What is the value of an Online Degree?

    I overheard a University of California professor the other day discussing hiring.  He said he would never consider someone that had an online degree for a professor position.  His reason was simple, he didn’t think it was a real degree.  I found this a bit disheartening since I earned a Master’s degree through an online program and might someday like to teach at a four year university.  Not long after overhearing this I was introduced to the idea that the education system in the United States is currently very good at basically one thing; making University Professors (sorry I don’t recall where I heard this at the moment).  In that context, the professor’s position seems to make a lot of sense.  I mean we always hear how the education system isn’t preparing people for the real world.  Maybe my online degree did not prepare me for the university world.

    The program I attended was project oriented.  We worked in small groups, collaborated via chat and email and studied much of the material on our own.  Certainly my learning experience was no less real because I was sitting in front of my computer instead of in a seat in a giant lecture hall.  If I had to make a comparison, it was more similar to working in the real world than any of my undergraduate classes had been.  I feel that I received a real education in the subjects that we covered and found that I could begin applying the concepts I was learning immediately in my current job.  Was it the same experience as sitting in the lecture hall?  No.  It may have been even more relevant to a working professional than a full time student.  Maybe that is why some people view online degrees the way they do.

    As with all things Internet related, online degrees threaten the old ways of doing things.  It would make sense then that an online degree might not be received as an equal by the establishment that has been the gatekeeper of degrees for generations.  But the Internet is a game changer.  I received my online degree in 2003.  Since then the programs and the technology of online education have only continued to improve.  Online learning is entering the mainstream as prestigious universities open up their content on the Internet for all to see.  The relevance of online degrees is starting to change.  And while I do not expect every University Professor to accept online degrees overnight, I feel my online degree is no less real than any other degree I could have earned.

    And I have a Master’s sized degree to prove it (it is a physical piece of paper, not a PDF file).  Seriously, do the degrees get bigger the higher you go?  The High School diploma isn’t even 8.5X11, the Bachelors is about a full page and the Master’s is larger still.  I wonder is the PhD like poster size?

    But I digress and this leads me into my final thought.  I’ve come to realize on my path of life long learning that degrees do not represent learning or knowledge or ability.  I’ve met plenty of people, especially in the IT field that are incredibly knowledgeable and able and life long learners and yet do not have degrees.  I certainly think no less of them for that.  In education, sometimes I think this is forgotten.

    So maybe the question should be: What is the real purpose of our education system and is it time for a change?

  • So What is Twitter – Part Deux

    This tweet come across from Jason Calacanis today on my new favorite subject – what is twitter?:

    JasonCalacanis This quote “twitter is dial tone” from TWIT is really trending…  http://tinyurl.com/ce5v6n @ev @biz @leolaporte

    Which got me thinking about my last blog post “So what is twitter anyway?” in which I so eloquently compare twitter to the old party line service where several households shared the same phone line, (or did I?)

    If Google is the card catalog to the library then Twitter is the village party line.

    Well actually I started to, and then through the edit process ended up with this:

    If Google is the village library then Twitter is the village.

    So is twitter the dial tone, the party line or the village?

    Put simply Dial Tone is a connection waiting to happen.  In the 20th Century it was the dominate connection right up until the Internet hit in the late 90’s.  Since then we’ve been in a state of flux communications wise with the advent of email, Instant Messaging, Voice Over IP, Cell Phones, triple play voice/data/TV service, etc… Personally I think the Dial Tone of the 21st Century is more about the ubiquitous, always on connection to the Internet we keep hearing about and not so much about what we do once we make the connection.

    A party line on the other hand is something that comes after the dial tone fades away and a connection is made.  It connects multiple people simultaneously provided they pick up the phone and participate.  I think this gets us closer to what twitter looks like today.  But just as the party line evolved into the one to one and one to many traditional phone service we know today, so too will twitter.  Already people are finding ways to narrow the focus and bring twitter more in line with “mainstream” communications.  The use of # tags and search allow for a filtered experience of the party line, allowing a listener to hear only a subset of conversations.

    So perhaps Twitter is more like a party line than Dial Tone (sorry Jason) but what about the idea that it is a village?  Well this is where I was struggling a bit while writing my last post.  I wanted to make the point that Twitter is a tool, just like google, the World Wide Web or Skype.   They all allow me to access information and communicate in the old ways.  What twitter has done that Google and Skype have not is empower me to quickly and easily participate in a global conversation.  I don’t have to subscribe to a mailing list, belong to a forum or exist in a contact list to participate.  I don’t need to install any software or even know any of the other participants.  I can just open my browser and start posting and everyone watching the stream can see me.  It is as though all of us on twitter are sitting around a giant campfire and as we feel like it, we stand up, shout out into the blazing darkness and then sit back down again.  Twitter Founders Evan Willams and Biz Stone built the bond fire and invited us all to come out of our huts and share.  So in that sense I do feel like Twitter is more like a village than anything else.
    What do you think?

  • So what is twitter anyway?

    Yesterday I was using Google to search for a way to load balance more than one Edubuntu Server for an upcoming summer project.  Usually I can find what I am looking for on Google in the first page or two but this time all I could find was an old Linux Journal article from 2006 about a project called MILLE-XTERM.  I grew quite excited as I read through the article as the application was exactly what I needed.

    My excitement was short lived as I went to the MILLE-XTERM site only to find that the project hadn’t been updated since 2006!  A dead end.  I went back to Google to see if I could find something more current but failed miserably.  During this time, twhirl had been chiming away with twitter posts and suddenly a light bulb went off.  Why not ask the twitterverse?  So I posted this question:

    What ever happened to the MILLE-XTERM project – http://is.gd/ukpq? Load balanced LTSP thin clients, is there another way to do this?

    I then went back to searching Google not really expecting anything to come of it.  Not 2 minutes later this popped up in twhirl:

    AlexDLWS @anotherschwab Yup … LTSP-Cluster

    Bingo! And shortly thereafter more good news :

    bligneri @anotherschwab Hello. In fact, MILLE-XTERM has been integrated into LTSP and is now LTSP-Cluster. Same design, same team ;-) http://www. …

    bligneri @anotherschwab Blog of developer http://tinyurl.com/dxkx3f, Revolutoin Linux page : http://tinyurl.com/ltspcluster

    In less then 5 minutes, twitter had found the answer.  And then I realized what had happened.  This was the same feeling I got when I started using Google so many years ago.  The simple page with the little box you typed your terms into that magically revealed sites with the right answers.  The multiple search terms, having to use AND and OR, the quotes, re-arranging the terms.  No more.  Compared to what had come before google deserved to become a verb.  It just worked and the answers came.

    Starting out in my career, my technical knowledge was broad but not very deep.  No matter; Google had the depth.  Together we were unstoppable.  Not sure how to setup RAID5 on an HP, Google it.  Need to repair a corrupt Exchange Information Store, Google it.  Windows, Linux, Solaris, Mac.  It didn’t matter.  Google expanded my abilities in ways I could have only dreamed.  Knowing what to search for became more important than simply knowing how to fix something.  I have used the former skill for life long learning, the latter continues to expire as technology evolves.

    Google plugged me into a vast library of technical information and put it at my fingertips.  Now twitter has done something much the same; only it is not a library of information that is available, it is us.  We the people, the creators of the vast online forums and electronic documents, the blogs and the technets.  The authors are now on line and accessible.  But not just the authors.  As Google cataloged the digital knowledge of so many who took the time to contribute to the world wide web, now twitter makes it possible for the rest of us to participate.  The readers and the lurkers.  The admins too busy to write up a how-to or post a blog.  The teacher with 3o years experience that just learned how to get on the Internet yesterday.  We are now all just a tweet away.  Trying to find the best netbook to deploy in education, twitter it.  Need to load balance Edubuntu, twitter it. Don’t know how to follow the #educhat discussion on twitter, twitter it.

    And so a new verb is born.  Google was a boon to the sharing of knowledge, but in many ways it is now confined by its great success at such a single purpose.   If Google is the village library then Twitter is the village.  And so my ah ha moment came for twitter this week just as it did once upon a time for Google.

    People talk a lot about what twitter is or isn’t and how to use it.  Twitter is different, its disruptive, its new, its exciting, its the buzz.  Twitter is something for everyone.  For me it is a tool.  Where Google was the favorite tool in my tool bag, the big sledge hammer I could pull out and use to fix most any problem, twitter is my new shiny multi-tool, able to adapt and change to meet unexpected and challenging situations.  It can be search; it can be IM; it can be chat; it can be customer relations; it can be advertising; it can be collaboration in a classroom; it can be my PLN.  It can be whatever I need whenever I need it.

    Friday it was search, today it’s shameless self promotion and whatever tool twitter becomes for me next, one thing is certain it won’t be arriving in a box.

  • Food for thought

    I just finished reading an article by Lester R. Brown about an impending global food crisis entitled “Could Food Shortages Bring Down Civilization?”.  In the article Brown makes the case that the combination of global warming, population growth and declining fresh water aquifers is a recipe for a global disaster.  The prediction is pretty grim and completely feasible.  Nation states will fail as their food supplies disappear.  As more nations fail, the world will destabilize.  As Brown points out, ” It is not the concentration of power but its absence that puts us at risk.”

    Or to put it more bluntly, we can negotiate with a head of state or as we’ve shown ourselves capable in the past we can  bomb the state back to the stone age.  Try doing either to a failed state comprised of a bunch of warlord militias and starving mobs and suddenly our political and military advantages go right out the window.  As we have seen in places like Somalia, the old ways do not work anymore.  Has any great nation ever succeeded in keeping the barbarians at bay?

    An impending global food crisis is but one of many such global challenges we face.  Generations before us have also faced great challenges and as a result of their determination, creativity and effort, we stand here today confronting our own.  However here today in this age, we have something past generations could only have dreamed of.  We have global instantaneous communication.  We have mind share, the cloud, Skype and Google.   We can twitter a thought out loud and someone half a world away can hear us and join in on the conversation.   This is why I found the last paragraph of the story to be most striking.

    We desperately need a new way of thinking, a new mind-set. The thinking that got us into this bind will not get us out. When Elizabeth Kolbert, a writer for the New Yorker, asked energy guru Amory Lovins about thinking outside the box, Lovins responded: “There is no box.”

    There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if civilization is to survive.

    There is no box.  The title I chose for this blog over a month ago when I realized fundamental change was going to require a fundamental shift in how we look for solutions to the challenges we face.

    The time has come for us to stop defining ourselves, our actions, our responses by what was possible, but rather let us leap ahead and look to what is possible now.  Let us tear down the four walls that have defined us and confined us.  Let us take a step forward into a future that is connected and realize that there are new and better ways, together ways, to make a difference.  To live connected.  The time has come to think, not outside the box but about what we can do without the box.