Dec 09, 2005
Throwing the Switch
OK, I'm going to try getting the current RSS feed for this blog to redirect to the new feed now, but really, you should just update to the new URL in your aggregator now. http://tuttlesvc.orgwill soon point to http://tuttlesvc.teacherhosting.com/wordpress. And if you're generally interested in what I have to say, you should also subscribe to Ed-Tech Insider, in case you haven't figured that out already.
Thank you for your patience.
Dec 01, 2005
The New Tuttle SVC (beta!)
I'm beginning the phase out of this iteration of Tuttle SVC. The new, improved Tuttle SVC is running on the same host but on WordPress, with a new theme under development. The artist I keep in my parlor and her dog are a bit under the weather, so we haven't finished the graphic design, but I'm going to start doing all my substantial (non Ed Tech Insider) writing on the new site. I'll continue throwing various switches on the transistion over the next week or so.
Most importantly, the new RSS feed is here.
Now, Gentle Reader, you may be thinking "Um... Tom hasn't been writing anything over here recently anyhow, so why should I even bother?" As a matter of fact, I am going to start doing a lot more blogging here again, focusing on SchoolTool development. Whether or not anyone else will find that interesting or useful remains to be seen.
Nov 13, 2005
Hollandaise
I just landed in Holland for the Open Source for Education in Europe: Research and Practice conference. This is the last conference I'm planning on attending until next summer, but it is one I've been looking forward to. I'm usually a half-outsider at conferences, the education guy at tech conferences, the open source hacker at the education conferences, etc. Hopefully this conference will fit me just right. I should have a chance to finally meet Stephen Downes. I'm hoping Scott Wilson, Wilbert Kraan and some of the other CETIS guys will be here too.
The trip got off to an interesting start in Boston. Elliot Washor and a group of students and teachers from The Met School were also on their way to Holland to do some training for teachers here. One of the cool things about The Met is the way they always take students with them on any kind of trip. It has been a few years since I've had a chance to talk to Elliot, who is one of the leading thinkers on school design in the world, so I took advantage of the opportunity.
So I'm waiting in the lobby of my hotel in Heerlen. It is rather bustling and jovial. Kind of weird. I'm worried that the panzers are going to roll over us at any moment.
Nov 04, 2005
User Innovation Toolkits
This bit from Jon Udell sums up the broadest goals of SchoolTool for school administration software:
How about Democratizing Innovation? That's the title of a recent book by MIT's Eric von Hippel , who notes that users of products and services -- and by users he means both individuals and companies -- often innovate on their own rather than relying on manufacturers to do it for them. And not just in the realm of IT; a survey of employees in 74 pipe-hanger installation companies found that 36 percent developed or modified pipe-hanger hardware for their own use.
There's no mystery why this should be. In general, we all share the same needs, but specific requirements vary in ways that motivate a shift from mass production to mass customization. The question is how to do mass customization economically.
Von Hippel advances the notion of user innovation toolkits. The Apache Web server, with its modular architecture, is an example of such a toolkit. In the hands of skilled programmers, Apache can be, and often is, tailored to specific needs. When such customizations are shared, other users benefit. But so do Apache's developers, who, by observing what's done with the toolkit, can more intelligently evolve the core product.
Substitute "SchoolTool" for "Apache" and remember that our "users" aren't just end users (teachers) but also governments, foundations and school administrators it should all fit together. The parallel shouldn't be surprising, considering SchoolTool was started by Mark, who has a long history with Apache. He was the first Debian maintainer for Apache, and it was a key element in his first, rather profitable enterprise.
Oct 31, 2005
Jots2Delicious.py
I put together a script today for Will to move his Jots bookmarks to del.icio.us. Getting them out of Jots using the XML-RPC API is easy peasy. Getting them into del.icio.us via its REST API took a bit more work, to get the date formatting and unicode issues straightened out.
Anyhow, here's the resulting script: jots2delicious.py. It requires delicious-py. It might barf if you have your default encoding for Python set to ASCII. You might also want to increase the timeout interval in delicious-py. It is 20 seconds by default, and if you have a bunch of bookmarks, it seems pretty likely that you'll exceed that at one point or another, at which point you'll have to start the script over again. Otherwise, it seems to work.
Oct 08, 2005
At Long Last, A New SchoolTool Website
The all-new schooltool.org finally went live this week. Under the hood, we've got:
- the Plone 2.1 content management system,
- constituent products are managed using the Plone Software Center,
- documentation by the Plone Help Center,
- news and blogs by Quills.
- All this runs atop Zope 2 web application server.
- Ubuntu Linux is the server operating system.
Brian Skahan did the design and other hard work.
This upgrade basically gives us the infrastructure for managing documentation and releases that is used at plone.org, which is a huge improvement, and should keep us going for a couple years, until we can move everything to LaunchPad. Just having the proper structure for making FAQ's and glossaries and manuals has inspired a burst of much needed documentation writing by me. Hopefully it will be contagious. The site is set up to allow users to write and submit documentation. It is more structured than just a bunch of wiki pages, and I think the results will be better.
Also, with the upgrade to Plone 2.1, we get some nice chrome, like the AJAX-y LiveSearch, which updates as you type, like Google Suggest.
The Kupu WISYWIG editor has a number of improvements, including a great little preview window for links, so you can double check to see if http://savvytechnologist.com actually takes you to The Savvy Technologist (it doesn't).
We'll have a couple more features soon. Forums for those that prefer them, and a proper demo site for the first time in a while. More importantly, we'll also have proper demo data. We'll be able to generate a full year's worth of classes and events for a fake school of 1000 kids, so you can see how SchoolTool works under more realistic circumstances.
Oct 06, 2005
First Nine Minutes of Serentiy Online, In Full Screen, and Legal
If you're not already planning on going to see Serenity this weekend, check this out.
It uses a Java applet to run the video fullscreen. Worked like a charm for me, directly from NetNewsWire even. Apparently this is a preview of the technology Universal is going to use to distribute movies online.
Oct 03, 2005
The Big Damn Movie
It is brief, but I think Mark Bernstein's review of Serenity is the most trenchant and accurate one I've read:
A good movie. See it. Probably the best science fiction movie since The Matrix. And, while you could still make a case for the original Star Wars if you wanted, this is probably the best space opera to date.
Actually, I think Serenity stands up pretty well against The Matrix, particularly if you look at Firefly plus Serentiy vs. the whole Matrix trilogy.
A lot of other review seem to get caught up on the fact that we'd all be even happier if Firefly was still a TV series, but the fact of the matter is that it isn't. There are lots of movies that would have been great TV series, at least great HBO TV series, but there's not much point in bringing that up.
Kevin Drum says likes it but says "...we aren't talking about Oscar caliber stuff here," but I think Serenity more than holds its own with similar best picture nominees from recent years that I've seen, like The Aviator(2004), Master and Commander(2003), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon(2000), Gladiator(winner, 2000), Braveheart(1995). Actually, while we're at it, Crouching Tiger and Master and Commander clearly would be better TV shows than movies. I don't know why nobody noticed that at the time.
Anyway, if you've got a couple days off this week for Rosh Hashana, consider a pleasant mid-week screening of Serenity. Otherwise, there's always next weekend.
Sep 23, 2005
Operation Eden
I'm very happy that Siege has put his stories and photos of his Mom's home town in the Louisiana gulf coast post-Katrina on the public internet. Check out Operation Eden. This is "digital storytelling" via blog at its best.
Sep 22, 2005
A Tip
Were I an actual reporter in the city of Providence, or the new superintendent of the Providence School Department, I would look into rumours that several mild/moderate special ed students had been jumped over the summer from seventh grade to ninth grade, thus thus ignoring their IEP's and conveniently skipping over their eighth grade state assessments.
If this is the case, it wouldn't exactly be a subtle move, so it should be easy enough to prove or disprove. From what I've heard, it is pretty much an open secret on Westminster Street.
Sep 14, 2005
Two New Eds
I want to give a shout-out to two new blogs on education policy/politics, EdWize and EdWahoo.
EdWize is a blog for the UFT, the NYC teachers' union. They blog like Jerome Bettis runs, looking to make contact, put their shoulder pads into the opposition and do some damage. But beyond that, a union blog gives us a unique perspective in how politics plays out city-wide and in individual schools and classrooms. CitySue's post "What'S The Real Agenda Here?" hit home for me in the way it explains the side effects of "common sense" management decisions:
Specifically, Klein complains about the contractual right of teachers who have been "excessed" to another position in their license area in the district. He wants to eliminate that right and force these excessed teachers, whose positions have disappeared through no fault of their own, to pound the streets and find their own jobs or be laid off.
So here is Klein’s message to teachers: "Come to the toughest schools where the kids really need you, and I’ll pay you more. But be warned, I’m closing many of those schools, and, no matter how good you are or how hard you try, you may be out on your ass very soon and out of a job because I’m getting rid of your contractual right to another position."On the other hand, in Providence, dear old FHS is suffering from the flip side of that problem. Hope High School has been once again reorganized, one step short of a full state takeover. I might be getting some details wrong, but I believe the teachers there had to either "opt-out" and take another job in the district or re-apply for their job at Hope. Many of them opted out or otherwise left, which meant that there was suddenly a big pool of teachers with seniority in a school district with a shrinking teaching staff due to a sequence of draconian budget cuts.
As a result, FHS, which as a "site-based" school can usually interview and hire outside of the district process, not only has to accept random teachers from elsewhere in the district to fill open slots, but highly qualified young teachers who were hired through the school's interview process were bumped out at the beginning of the school year.
Now, I suppose one might conclude from this kind of episode that unions are bad. My point (the correct one, I might add) is that these are complex systems and pulling on one thread causes changes in the weave of the fabric that aren't obvious to the outsider. A big failing school is a problem, but moving the teachers to other schools causes different problems, and firing the teachers causes another set of problems. Ultimately, in each case good decisions need to be made based on the facts on the ground. From a blogspheric perspective, voices like EdWize are necessary to create a more complete image of urban public schools and their problems.
Another fun group to caricature in the nascent world of ed policy blogs is pointy headed academics. Thus far I'm not aware of any substantial blogging by any prominent ed school leaders, so we have to settle for a sharp undergrad with the handle EdWahoo to act as their proxy. He's doing a good job thus far. It'll be interesting to see how long he can keep it up when the comments for each post fills up with the flotsam and jetsam of the Hooked on Phonics faction of the reading wars.
Sep 06, 2005
Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter
I wasn't able to find random coffeeshop wireless access in Vilnius, which was a pain in the butt and led me to break down and buy a keychain wireless detector. I went the deluxe route and got the Canary Wireless Digital Hotspotter, which runs about $50. The advantage of the canary is that it gives you a little more data than the ones that just have a little green LED to let you know when you're in range of an open access point. It has a LCD display (lacking backlight, the only drawback) that gives you the SSID of the access point, the strength of the signal, the encryption or lack thereof, and channel. It is much more interesting to get all that extra data, and makes the the thing actually useful for things like debugging problems with accesspoints. I quickly discovered, for example, that everyone on our street has their AP's set to channel 6, so I switched ours to a clearer channel.
I haven't done any wardriving for about three years, and I hadn't quite anticipated how much wifi has exploded, even here in the hood. In the three blocks between here and school, I was only out of range of an access point once. I think the Canary is more sensitive than my Aluminium PowerBook, so I would only have a usable signal a smaller fraction of the time. Also, despite all the scary stories you hear, a lot more people are running "secure" wireless networks than I thought. I'd guess I'm seeing around 40% secured networks.
It is also weird when you're driving through the country and click the button as you approach a lonely house and bingo! there's their access point.
Jenny D. Meets "Well-Spoken" Black Professor
She also lays her chip down on the "nothing could be done" argument about the post-Katrina response. We'll see how well that one holds up. I guess professionalism and accountablity are only necessary for teachers, not all public servants. We've certainly seen how well FEMA improved once it was able to free itself from the shackles of a unionized workforce as part of the Homeland Security department.
"They Don't Want Them Here"
As you've probably noticed, a lot of the news coming out of Louisiana makes no sense on its face. Vehicles with supplies being turned away from the city, busses sitting idle, checkpoints preventing people from leaving the city on foot. Sometimes these decisions are attributed to FEMA, sometimes to state and/or local authorities. This paragraph from an article in Salon put the situation in a little better focus for me:
"The people in Jefferson Parish," Thomas continued, referring to a mostly affluent and white area to the northwest of New Orleans, "have been very clear; they don't want (refugees from New Orleans) here." Jefferson and other neighboring parishes were also hit hard by Katrina, and many have no electricity and little or no water pressure. But while Thomas acknowledged that Jefferson had its own problems, "they wouldn't even allow their parish to be used as a staging area."
The standard post-disaster storyline, "Americans pulling together" is being disrupted in a way that the media has been unable to ignore. It took a truly bizarre circumstance that "trapped" thousands of people in the convention center, which was still completely accessible to reporters, camera men and Harry Connick Jr to knock the media off their stock script, but it has happened. The question now is, how long can they keep it up? How long will they continue to ask why things went down in New Orleans the way they did? There's a federal story, there's stories about planning done or not done at all levels, but there's also a story of dozens or hundreds of individual, uncoordinated decisions made based on fear of poor black Americans.
Sep 02, 2005
This Is What Dystopia Looks Like
The entire US educational technology world was gathered not much more than a year ago in the very convention center where people are dying from neglect by the dozens, if not hundreds, as I type this. For some reason I ended up on some kind of tour bus back to the airport. I guess it was a shuttle of some type. Regardless, the driver treated us to running commentary about the city, which mostly focused on the last big hurricane hit and the likely consequences of the next one. I'm not sure that his rap was approved by the chamber of commerce, but he got his point across, so on Saturday when I returned to the states and read that a category 5 hurricane was pointed at New Orleans, I walked downstairs and annonced that we might be looking at the greatest catastrophe in the US of our lifetimes. Maybe it would be a miss, but if it was going to be a hit, it would be the worst thing we've ever seen.
I am not going to assume that the actions of the executive branch, from the president on down, are from ignorance. Even they are not that ignorant. Everything this administration has done up to this point, for the past five years, has been a political calculation. To believe they stopped this week and simply became stupid or incompetent is to play into their hands.
Sep 01, 2005
Ka-Boom!
It appears that some kind of upgrade to this server has caused some bad things to happen, including losing Python entirely. I've switched over to the Perl blosxom script in the meantime. It seems to be mostly working, since I'm not really using many plug-ins at this point.
Aug 22, 2005
The Not-RDF Tax
People who don't want to use RDF often cite the idea of an "RDF tax," which is the amount of extra time you have to spend learning the somewhat abstract notions behind RDF and the additional pain of generating RDF/XML instead of plain old XML. On the other hand, there's also a price to be paid for not using RDF, or, more precisely, there's a cost to the fact that RDF is not widely used. Witness this recent post on Scott Willson's blog on marking up distributed conversations. This is an obvious use case for RDF, but in this age of RDF-doubting, Scott has to sift through nine inadequate XML-based alternatives, from OPML to IMS Enterprise, before concluding that the RDF-based FOAF vocabulary is probably the best foundation for this work. This is a waste of time. The Not-RDF Tax.
Same song, new verse: David Warlick has a take on using blogging architecture to collect lesson plans from teachers within schools. This is very much on the right track, but really is as much an RDF/triplestore application as an RSS/aggregator problem. The difference isn't really apparent until you get much further down the road and things stop making sense. Then you're paying the Not-RDF Tax.
Also, I'd note that if I was using blogging software to collect lesson plans, I wouldn't call it a blog or make it really look like a blog, unless I never wanted my teachers to warm up to actual blogging.
Aug 17, 2005
Safari Bookshelf: The Point Of This Is?
I've been carrying a subscription to the O'Reilly Safari Bookshelf for a few months. Basically for a set fee I can view up to five books online from O'Reilly or a number of other publishers. Overall, if this prevents me from buying one $30 book every few months, I break even, so I don't need to get much out of this service. But I was surprised today to notice that I can't get a copy of MacOS X Tiger for Unix Geeks on Safari. One of the main reasons Safari seemed like a good idea was so I wouldn't have to buy a new copy of a book like this every time the new version came out (admittedly, I could just nag Brian for a free copy every 18 months). On the other hand, it seemed like Mapping Hacks was available on Safari a few weeks prior to the print version, so I don't know what the pattern is. Also, it would be nice if Safari had what I needed when I'm in, say, Lithuania and can't just run over to Borders and/or Barnes and Noble whenever I feel like it.
There is No Escape
Some more Americans just moved into the apartment across the courtyard from us in Vilnius. We're still a little vague on exactly what the deal is with this little apartment complex, but it seems like a significant number of the units are sub-let to visitors like us. Also some seem to be small businesses. The wealthier Lithuanian residents may or may not primarily be coming in and out by the underground parking garage. It is all a little mysterious, but after two weeks seems safe, comfortable and convenient, so we're happy with it. Acoustically, it is a bit weird, because sound reflects around the courtyard very well.
So these new Americans must have more money than us, since they got the big terrace with the unobstructed view of the city, and, surprise, surprise, at least one of them is a raging conservative asshat, which we couldn't help but notice as our neighbor's late night bull session on Iraq, terrorism and the Islamic world came blasting through our windows from across the courtyard.
This caused a brief but enthusiastic gnashing of teeth and rending of garments here, as getting away from such people was one of the motivations for spending a month in Lithuania, although truthfully in Providence this is usually only a problem when we go out to dinner. In our neighborhood at home the only thing that blasts through our windows in the summer is a steady stream of salsa music, so I'm relatively safe there. However, I was about ready to start a fight in a tiny Thai restaurant on the East Side before we left, which (given that I haven't been in a fight since fifth grade) was probably a good sign that a long trip was in order.
The courtyard is quiet now, but I'm sufficiently wound up to try to catch you all up on recent events while finishing off my liter of Kalnapilis Grand.
I just got back from a day of meetings at the Canonical offices in London, primarily to get Shuttleworth Foundation staffer Helen King up to speed on the current status of and roadmap for SchoolTool development. Helen is in turn flying to San Francisco tomorrow to meet with some folks from one or more US foundations to talk about the particulars of creating and funding open source student information systems. I'm not sure whether or not the details of this meeting are supposed to be public or not, so I won't say more for the moment. Suffice to say that the backing of a US foundation would be a great boost to the project, and I'm satisfied that Helen will do a great job of representing our interests while I'm here, nine time zones away.
Last week started rainy, which coincided with Jennifer's birthday and our anniversary, and thus was supposed to be the more vacation parts of this working vacation. Then the rest of the week was quite busy, as I had meetings with our Programmers of Vilnius. I also got to spend some valuable time with Steve Alexander, who did the basic architectural design of SchoolTool and who now manages the LaunchPad project for Canonical. Steve has lots of great ideas and advice about handling distributed development projects. One thing that particularly struck me was how similar his structure for 45-minute weekly staff meetings on IRC is to the way we're taught to structure lessons in the Brown teacher education program.
Overall, we're having a pleasant and relaxing time. Only having a few hours with internet connectivity when I'm at the POV offices is a good change of pace, although it gets a little stressful when trying to catch up after being offline a few days. I've started paring down my list of blog subscriptions more aggressively. I'd like to get it down to 150, especially as the next eight months will be decisive for the project, and I'm going to have to, um, kick things up to the next level to get the project over the hump, or something like that.
In particular, I need to be ready to start doing some serious coding by New Year's. Right now, I still don't feel like I can write production-quality Zope 3 code, so I'm stuck in a passive mode when things don't turn out the way I've hoped or planned. When we are getting down to crunch time for our big spring 2006 releases, I need to be able to take the bull by the horns and fix things myself if necessary.
So one reason I haven't been blogging much lately is because I've been writing a game in Zope 3 as programming practice. Actually, the original plan was just to buy a game, since I knew I'd have spare time in the evening when I wasn't connected to the internet, but the Mac game market is so pathetic I decided I'd just have to write a game myself. To be more precise, I'm creating a computer version of Alexander at Tyre, an obscure and out of print but very well designed board game simulating Alexander's seven month siege of the Mediterranean Island. The gameplay is going to be mostly textual, with an emphasis on only limiting the information given to players to what their historical counterparts would have had access to. Sort of like a Zork/Infocom style wargame. Ideally, players would interact with the game through a Jabber chat interface, using the eventual integration of Twisted and Zope 3. In the meantime, I've learned a lot about Zope 3, but the game doesn't do much yet.
OK... time for bed. We need to get new versions of SchoolTool and SchoolBell out tomorrow.
Aug 12, 2005
Tom Hoffman: Voted Retard of the MIllenium
Apparently (surprisingly?), this doesn't actually refer to me.