Monthly Archives: December 2004

Ten-year time machine

Posted on by

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how computer technology might change in the next ten years and how that will affect schools. I did a little checking and discovered that the first Pentium processor was introduced ten years ago. PCs then typically came with 16 MB of memory and 1-GB hard drives. That original Pentium had just over 3 million transistors and could perform approximately 100 million instructions per second (MIPS). Today I can buy a PC based on a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor with more than 1 GB of RAM and at least 100 GB of hard disk space. Of course, the computing power available on the average desktop has grown dramatically too. That new Pentium 4 can do approximately 7,000 MIPS and contains 125,000,000 transistors.

It’s interesting to consider Moore’s Law which predicts, depending on the particular formulation you read, that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months. At that rate, ten years will produce almost seven doublings and you can see that Moore’s Law has held up pretty well over the last decade.

How will students and teachers be using technology in ten years? It’s a fool’s errand to speculate, but it seems like a pretty safe bet to say that the computing power available to them will be a couple orders of magnitude greatly than what we have now. Not merely faster, tomorrow’s computers will be smaller and cheaper too. All in all, I’d say that’s a pretty good deal.

But how will that powerful new technology change how students and teachers go about their business? I’m reminded of the maxim that says the effects of new technology are usually overestimated in the near term and underestimated in the long term. Despite the hype, most teachers will continue business as usual speaking in their thick digital immigrant accents. (See Prensky’s Overcoming Educators’ Digital Immigrant Accents: A Rebuttal.) In time, however, the digital natives will become the teachers and technology will dramatically change the teaching and learning process. In the meantime, it’s going to take a lot of work for all of us to lose our accents.

It’s a crispy Christmas Eve

Posted on by

The cold has really arrived here in Minnesota. It was −20°F this morning when I got up. The other cold season has arrived in force too with my wife, oldest son, and I all demonstrating various sniffles, scratchy throats, and fevers. ’Tis the season.

Merry Christmas to the thousands hundreds dozens three readers of The Savvy Technologist. May 2005 bring blessings to all of you.

School Technology Leadership blog debuts

Posted on by

The staff, assorted students, and associates of the School Technology Leadership Initiative have caught the blogging bug. The School Technology Leadership Blog covers data-driven decision making, law and policy, planning and funding, and other topics of interest to technology leaders. That’s a lot of ground to cover, but the blogging crew there is taking a divide and conquer approach with each blogger covering a particular “beat.” There’s an interesting parallel with old school journalism there, and it illustrates how a community of people can create their own online journal.

Wouldn’t it be interesting if a government or chemistry teacher took the same approach with his or her students? If I was still teaching high school physics, I’d have my students blog about real life applications of the topics we were covering in class or events in the news that had physics connections. What a great way to help students make connections between their academic work and the real world.

Big word processor in a small package

Posted on by

There’s nothing glamorous about a word processor, but it’s an indispensible tool. Although nearly every computer sold today has at least a rudimentary word processor, compatibility with Microsoft Word, the de facto standard, is hit and miss. Since the days of handwritten assignments are waning fast, students need a cheap and Word-compatible word processor.

AbiWord to the rescue. Version 2.2 of AbiWord was released earlier this month and now has a native OS X version to accompany the Linux and Windows versions that have been around since the early days. Lots of people know about OpenOffice.org, but AbiWord has some advantages. They’re both free and open source, but AbiWord is a much leaner application that will run well on an older machine. I’ve used OpenOffice.org on Linux and Windows in the past, and it’s a great set of applications. Unfortunately, the lack of a native OS X version of OpenOffice.org makes it a non-starter on my PowerBook.

With AbiWord’s ability to read and write all of the major word processing formats including Word and WordPerfect, it wouldn’t be a bad idea to keep a copy around just for file conversion purposes.

Let the imaging begin

Posted on by

Room full of iBooks ready for imaging

What a day! We had a bunch of people including two Apple system engineers at various times unpacking laptops and getting them ready to image. Hopefully you can get a sense of the setup from the picture. We will image about 50 laptops at a time starting first thing tomorrow morning. Assuming things go well, we should be able to do get almost halfway through the 650 machines. I’ll provide a little more info about the imaging recipe in a future post.

Update: No, the iMac in the picture is not the machine that is hosting the images for the iBooks. Just out of view sit a dual G5 PowerMac and a dual G5 Xserve that are doing the heavy lifting. The iMac is good for streaming iTunes, however.

Free ebooks from Project Gutenberg

Posted on by

I just finished downloading the Best of Project Gutenberg DVD, a collection of 9,400 eBooks from Project Gutenberg’s vast collection. Project Gutenberg, in case you are not aware of their work, has been around since 1971 and is commited to producing etexts of public domain works of literature, historical documents, and even sheet music. The DVD contains a wealth of resources for classroom teachers and students. If you want to learn more, the Top 100 eBooks listing is a great place to go to get an idea of the breadth of materials available.

The DVD weighs in at 3.85 GB, a download that taxes even a broadband Internet connection. Fortunately for the folks who have to pay the Project Gutenberg bandwidth bill, the DVD is available for download via BitTorrent. BitTorrent is worthy of its own post, but for now I will simply point out that Project Gutenberg and dozens of other online projects are proof that P2P applications can be used for good and not just for copyright infringement.

Seeking a lesson sharing tool

Posted on by

I’ll bet the teaching staff at your school is pretty much like our’s. There are a few teachers who really get technology and how to use it in their daily instructional practice, a few others who will never use technology no matter how hard people like me try, and a large group in the middle who would use technology if they could, but don’t feel confident in their ability to create technology-rich lessons from scratch. We need a way for the first group to share their expertise with that interested, but inexperienced, third group.

Does anyone know of a good tool to facilitate that kind of sharing? My inner geek prods me to create one from scratch, but reality kicks in to make me look around for an existing product. Bonus points for web-based solutions that are searchable, linked to district or state academic standards, and able to store multimedia content. I’m all ears.