Probably a Good Sign the Book Sucks

I just uploaded to Eduforge the second release of TinyZIS, the open source SIF Zone Integration Server written in Python< which I maintain. Doug Daniels did all the heavy lifting in this release, and I’m deeply in his debt.

This is somewhat of a transitional release for TinyZIS. Doug added one of the last essential pieces, client authentication, via the m2crypto library. We were able to do this without fundamentally changing the basic architecture of TinyZIS, using the ZODB and the HTTP server from the Python standard library.

What we really want to do is to shift over to mod_python and Apache for more tried and trusted web service and SSL handling, but we ran into a hitch because while the ZODB handles multiple threads from one process easily, it only likes to connect to one process, and mod_python spawns multiple processes. So we’re probably going to switch to BerkeleyDB (aka the Oracle Embedded Database, how’s that for enterprisey?) in the next release, along with Apache/mod_python.

Anyhow, that’s way more than you wanted to know. The most important thing is that there is real interest in pushing this project forward, and people actually contributing good code.

I’ve been painfully quiet about planning for SchoolTool development in 2007, mostly because I wanted to be extra-sure this year that I had done everything I could to make sure what I say is going to happen will actually happen.

This year we’re working more formally and more closely with just two schools to complete, test and deploy SchoolTool in the fall. At both schools we’ve got signed agreements with the school leadership, and a commitment from an individual paid developer to work specifically with that school, on site and in person as much as is practical (with incentives to finish the job by October). In terms of functionality, we’re looking at the basic pieces we worked on in 2006: a core student information system plus calendaring and resource scheduling.

The two sites are:

• Vilnius Lyceum, an International Baccalaureate secondary school in Vilnius, Lithuania. They are working with Ignas Mikalajūnas from Programmers of Vilnius.
• Lycée Emile Jacqmain, a secondary school in Brussels, Belgium, working with developer Jean-François Roche with additional support from Nicolas Pettiaux.

We are confident that we’ve got the foundation in code and organizational structures in place to have SchoolTool running in production in these two schools during 2007. A firm toehold in reality to start pushing SchoolTool out to the wider world.

This is the main thrust of our funded work this year, but there are other interesting threads I’ll describe in subsequent posts.

Konrad:

Limited by institutional restrictions and convinced that every class needs to start with a blank slate, I chose not to allow my former students to continue as members of the online community even though their presence would have given my new students a community with a sense of history. So, my new grade eight students are now building a new community. I know that, much like all the grade eight students that preceded them, they will develop their own history. This time, however, when the students graduate in June, the community, for the first time in years, will not be purged. Even if the students do not show any interest in staying online, I will leave the content that they will have generated for the next group to see and interact with. I want that next group to enter a community that is already pervaded by voices. I do not want them to enter an empty online space that they will have to define from scratch. Instead, they will enter a space that has a deep sense of history. It will have a strong impact on their own sense of community and their attempts to continue to build that community for themselves. I know that instead of being intimidated by what had gone on before, they will be influenced and inspired by the work of their predecessors.

This is right on, and makes me think that this idea might be less obvious to other people than it has been to me. In particular, it has a big implication for how you think of a “walled garden.” In some blogs, and, more importantly, in just about all learning management systems (Blackboard, Moodle, etc) the scope of the garden is very limited in both size and lifespan. One class for one semester or year. When I think of a “walled garden” for blogging, photo sharing, etc., I’m thinking of a school, or district, or region maintaining a space in perpetuity, with interaction between students and teachers in different classes and schools and archives stretching back years, open to everyone in the school community.

Presumably, you all read apophenia anyhow, but danah’s predictions today seem particularly spot-on:

For me, the question is: “are teenagers tiring of the highly-visible social network sites?” and the answer is both yes and no. The level of emotional enthusiasm i hear has dramatically faded over the last six months. It’s taken for granted that it’s the way to reach people, but folks have seen the pros and cons and are no longer slurping it up without thinking. The perceived presence of people who hold power over teens (parents, teachers, etc.) and those who want to prey on them (marketers, pedophiles, etc.) has done unbelievable damage in general teen perception. I’m astounded by how many teens i’m running into who are “scared” to go on MySpace because they’ve been told horror stories by everyone. It doesn’t matter that the stories they repeat back to me are inaccurate - it’s clear that mainstream news coverage had a huge role in shaping social network sites in 2006. I want to scream every time a teen tells me the story of the two alexes or about how Dateline “proved” that predators are going to stalk them. (Instead, i listen patiently and politely.)

More significantly, MySpace has turned into a massive zit full of marketing puss. Most teens don’t mind advertising but when things look more like spam than advertising, you’re in deep shit. Every PR organization and marketing arm is leeching onto MySpace like a blood thirsty vampire. Problem is that vampires kill their prey. Teens who wanna hang with friends are mostly protecting themselves by privatizing their profile (more cuz of the marketing predators than the sexual ones) but this quickly loses the luster, particularly when it’s fundamentally hard to do what you want to communicate with your friends. (Simple things like friend management and better messaging tools would go a long way.) I’m very worried about how, unregulated, spamming and over-advertising will kill even the coolest social hangouts. I keep wondering what the regulation solution will have to be. (Is it law or code cuz it ain’t gonna be market or social norms?)

I believe that teenagers are the reason that mobile will happen sooner than we think. I don’t believe that the first explosion will be US-based. I am very hopeful about Blyk because i think that they stand a very decent chance of getting cluster effects working. (Note: the anti-corporate voice in me screams in horror at the idea of a free mobile service built on ads but there’s no one i trust more in mobile than Marko Ahtisaari. I have much respect for the whole team and i think that a free phone will be extremely popular so long as they get a few things right.) I think that mobile social network-driven systems will look very different than web-based ones but the fundamentals of “friends” and “messages” and some form of presence-conveying “profile” will be core to the system.

Having kids’ social networking move onto their phones would be good for schools. Students not using school computers and the school network for this stuff will cut liability concerns and filtering paranoia. Plus it just seems like a better fit for the role cellphones play in kids’ lives. I’m not saying it is a panacea, but think of it as the difference between kids selling drugs on the corner versus moving them through the school store (not that social networking == selling drugs, but just in terms of liability/culpability).

I guess the way I’m looking at this runs counter to a lot of the teaching the net gen argument. I don’t think we should be chasing whatever tech kids are using. I think we should use what makes sense pedagogically, but in particular, there are real advantages to having a platform for schools that is somewhat distinct from what kids are using socially.

What worries me most is that my gut says that 2007 will involve far too many hyper-visible examples of bad-teen-behavior. You think Nicole and Paris’ fight is public? Wait until every teen in America videotapes their cat-scratching, hair-pulling, nut-kicking, all-out brawls and uploads them to YouTube. Those who hold power over teens are primed to obsessively stalk their behaviors and i don’t think it’s gonna be pretty. Forget dirty laundry, we’re talking a full inversion of the house. (Personally, i can’t wait until kids start videotaping their parents’ fights or otherwise disrupting the power dynamics - that’s going to make things super messy. ::shudder::)

Yes, it is going to get pretty scary.

Following a long-standing tradition of procrastination in the Hoffman family (half-stuffed bears were common under the tree, but teachers have more time to sew after Christmas than before…), my new 80 gig iPod arrived today. For most of the year my music listening has centered around my iPod Shuffle, and not really being able to listen to an album in sequence was finally getting to be a drag. Also, I can actually listen to some of Steve’s fine podcasts while taking my daily constitutional to post office (to mail the previous evening’s Netflix selection…).

I also undertook a daring plan to replace our sole television, a dinky little thing that gave up the ghost last month. I bought a WinTV-PVR-150 ($140 at the local CompUSA), stuck that in one of my Ubuntu desktop’s pci slot, plugged the ole bunny ears into it, and typed sudo apt-get install mythtv. OK, then I typed many more things, but overall, the two hours of work that followed weren’t too painful for someone who knows where to find the error messages and how to type them into Google.

And now, not only can I watch tv on my computer monitor, which is bigger than my old tv anyhow, but I’ve also got, essentially a free TiVo. If the disk activity monitor is any indication, tonight’s Late Show is being recorded to my hard drive as I type. It is a bit astonishing, actually. And baffling. I keep wondering if pulling in this video is going to strain my network in some way, until I remember it’s all frickin’ analog broadcast (which, I suppose they’re going to turn off completely in the next few years and only broadcast high def, or something, but I wasn’t ready to bet I’d be able to figure out HD in my first video for Linux project).

If you’ve been afraid to try setting up a homebrew MythTV PVR, I say, give it a shot. It is a fun project for the hobbyist geek, especially if your computer already has a bigger screen and better speakers than you TV.

Now I’m ready for the playoffs…

Rob Darrow’s got a post on how the Fairfax County Library is aggressively weeding their collection of infrequently circulated books, but I don’t get the connection he’s trying to make toThe Long Tail:

The direction of the Fairfax County Library System seems consistent with what Chris Anderson has written about libraries in his book, The Long Tail.  He writes about how the challenge of the 21st century library is to “make stacks of books fit into a search-engine culture.”  Anderson talks about how the Seattle Public Library was built to accommodate the “relative balance between computer and books” in a changing world.  The library stacks are arranged on rails in a spiral so they can expand or contract based on the demand (I’ve been there and it is a wonderful, inviting public library!).  Obviously, if local communities are not (or have not) checked out a book for a certain period of time, then they should be discarded.  After all, libraries are a business that have to survive in times when library budgets are shrinking.

Whether or not you agree with aggressive weeding of books (I don’t, generally), this is not “long tail” thinking, in fact, it is pretty much the opposite. What the libraries are doing is focusing on the hits, because they can’t afford the costs of stocking less popular works. Long tail economics is based on:

• low costs for stocking each item;
• a large enough pool of customers that even very unpopular works are purchased sometimes (as opposed to never);

Local libraries will never have both of these properties.

Traditionally, libraries’ long tail has come from inter-library loan (ILL). The library of the 21st century would have extremely efficient ILL. Whether or not the existing ILL system, which is essentially peer-to-peer, I believe, could run efficiently enough, I don’t know. More likely, the true 21st century long tail library would be essentially a publically funded Netflix for books. You need the cost savings of a modern, nationally centralized order fufillment system. I’d vote to fund that that. Of course, it would probably mean also closing your local branch, but if you want to swing with the long tail, that’s the price.

Via Slashdot, we see an AP piece on the OLPC XO laptop’s UI:

For example, students who turn on the small green-and-white computers will be greeted by a basic home screen with a stick-figure icon at the center, surrounded by a white ring. The entire desktop has a black frame with more icons.

This runic setup signifies the student at the middle. The ring contains programs the student is running, which can be launched by clicking the appropriate icon in the black frame.

When the student opts to view the entire “neighborhood” — the XO’s preferred term instead of “desktop” — other stick figures in different colors might appear on the screen. Those indicate schoolmates who are nearby, as detected by the computers’ built-in wireless networking capability.

Moving the PC’s cursor over the classmates’ icons will pull up their names or photos. With further clicks the students can chat with each other or collaborate on things — an art project, say, or a music program on the computer, which has built-in speakers.

But the main design motive was the project’s goal of stimulating education better than previous computer endeavors have. Nicholas Negroponte, who launched the project at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Media Lab two years ago before spinning One Laptop into a separate nonprofit, said he deliberately wanted to avoid giving children computers they might someday use in an office.

“In fact, one of the saddest but most common conditions in elementary school computer labs (when they exist in the developing world), is the children are being trained to use Word, Excel and PowerPoint,” Negroponte wrote in an e-mail interview. “I consider that criminal, because children should be making things, communicating, exploring, sharing, not running office automation tools.”

To that end, folders are not the organizing metaphor on these machines, unlike most computers since Apple Computer Inc. launched the first Mac in 1984. The knock on folders is that they force users to remember where they stored their information rather than what they used it for.

Instead, the XO machines are organized around a “journal,” an automatically generated log of everything the user has done on the laptop. Students can review their journals to see their work and retrieve files created or altered in those sessions.

Keeping up with the software side of the “$100 laptop” project is going to be a very exciting challenge in 2007. Even better, gaining some overlap between the experience of the existing K-12 ed-tech community in the US and the hackers at OLPC would be great. It is easy enough to emulate an XO laptop on any platform, and really, it should be possible to run the Sugar environment directly on Windows or a Mac as well, since it is written in Python, although porting some of the underlying architecture, like DBus, might be hard (well, I see there is a WinDBus already… here are some very incomplete notes to get started doing development on Windows).

Anyhow, what I’m saying is that in a sane world, by this fall people who wanted to experiment with, say, online chat-augmented classroom discussion would be installing Sugar on their Windows laptops rather than Skype. The problem is, it is nobody’s job to package the Windows port (certainly not OLPC’s), and there are just too few people in ed-tech with the motivation, chops and time to do it.

What I do know, however, is that if I was someone who traveled around showing off new technologies to teachers, I’d get really familiar with Sugar, because it’ll be a great demo that’ll really get teachers’ synapses popping like nothing that’s come out since Hypercard.

I’ve tried to avoid saying anything about John Pederson’s little “rate of change” graph, but as it seems to be showing up other places now, I can’t contain it any longer.

Of course, the graph is sufficiently vague (Change in what? Technology? Social structures?) to make any sustained critique not worth the bother. The part that bugs me is the implication in the “outside of schools” line that we’re sitting on the steep part of a geometric increase that takes off around 1970. The fact of the matter is that the last 150 years have seen rapid technological and social change. Is there greater change between 1980 and 2010 than 1850 - 1880? 1870-1900? 1930 - 1960? 1950 - 1980? Are Skype and YouTube bigger changes than the invention of the telephone and television?

This isn’t just a little gotcha point, because there is a big difference between someone who rejects change because they and their parents and grandparents have lived in a stable unchanging world, like classical, Confucian China, and someone who rejects modernity after exposure over several generations of social, political and technological upheaval, like al-Qaeda or Focus on the Family. John’s graph implies that we’re entering a period of rapid change after a long period of stability, and that’s not at all the case.

This is also tricky because it is likely that we will hit that Ray Kurzweil inflection point sometime in the next century or so where things really start to change quickly, and people will suddenly be living to 150 years old, their organs augmented by implanted nano-bots, downloading their consciousness in to computers, the material world being tended by self-replicating, self-programming robots, etc. Exactly if and when that upward turn occurs is a key question of ours and our children’s (and grandchildren’s) lifetimes, and I think this graph obscures that point.