Personalized RSS

Steve Sloan has an interesting post today where he references a ZDNet article and talks about one-to-one, secure RSS feeds. Interesting concept and one I hadn’t heard of before. Steve argues that this could be a great way for teachers and students to exchange information. I can see some potential there, especially, as Steve suggests, in an online learning environment as a way of meting out content.

We’re looking at new student information systems in our district this spring. Wouldn’t it be cool if all the information that parents might expect to find if they visited the “parent portal” was available as a secure, personalized RSS feed? It would be quite a chore for individual teachers to generate all the information for each student’s feed individually. The real power is leveraging all the information that’s being generated automatically by the integrated student systems and sending it out via RSS to parents (and students). School events, discipline information, attendance, school menus, account balances, library overdue notices, changes in bus schedules, teacher communications, etc. would all be interesting to include.

ETS launches information literacy test

Everyone’s favorite test and stress producer, ETS, has developed a new exam that purports to measure students’ information and communication technology proficiency. According to a press release from November, 2004:

Unique among literacy assessments, the ETS ICT Literacy Assessment measures multiple aspects of ICT proficiency. Rather than pose multiple-choice questions, it requires test takers to use basic technology as a tool to arrive at solutions. In that way, the test demands that students use technology to perform information management tasks, such as extracting specific information from a database, developing a spreadsheet, or composing an e-mail summarizing research findings. Equipped with a PC in a proctored environment and pencil and paper for notes, students are challenged to respond to 16 tasks over the course of the two-hour online test.

I looked at the Flash demo of the test and it was pretty interesting. We’ve talked at work occasionally about finding ways to evaluate our students’ information literacy skills, but I doubt a test of this type would be supported by building administrators and teachers who have to put up with a lot of testing already. (The ETS ICT literacy test is designed for college students anyway.) It’s not sufficient to ask students if they know how to make PowerPoint presentations or manipulate a spreadsheet. That doesn’t mean they have sophisticated information literacy skills. Have you ever noticed that teachers are sometimes overly impressed by students who display advanced technology skills? Fair or not, kids who know how to push the right buttons on a computer probably skate by too easily when their work is graded. Too often, teachers, who may not be all that sophisticated with technology themselves, go for style over substance. But I digress…

Has anyone developed an information literacy assessment for pre-college students? I’d be really interested to know more about it and how it’s working to inform teachers and other school leaders in your organization about what your students can do with information and technology.

Hopkins one-to-one project Web site

I’m way behind posting about our Hopkins One-to-one Computing Initiative. I’ve got some more things to share, but I’ll just point to the project Web site for now. One thing to notice is that I decided to use a WordPress blog to host the site, specifically the alpha version that supports static Web pages within the blog site. You can see those static pages in the set of “Pages” links on the right side. It’s a handy feature to be able to add a few static pages and have them managed with the built-in content management system.

Check your accessibility

I usually recommend that Web designers use lynx to get an idea of how well their site will work for visitors who use screen readers. As a text-only browser, lynx quickly exposes overly complicated markup, images without alt tags, and other basic Web accessibility faux pas. Lynx is installed by default on most Linux distributions and Mac OS X, but Windows users will have to work a little harder to get it installed.

In a perfect world designers would use an actual screen reader to test their pages. Unfortunately, the software is pretty much Windows-only and quite expensive. JAWS for Windows, one of the most popular screen readers, costs almost $1,000 for the standard version. So what’s the budget-conscious Web designer to do? Install Firefox and the Fangs extension. When invoked from the browser’s context menu, Fangs “creates a textual representation of a web page similar to how the page would be read by a modern screen reader.” (View a screenshot.)

If you build Web pages for your school, add Fangs to your developer tool belt.

Stifling creativity with rewards

IT Conversations, my favorite source for geeky podcasts, has started running a new series called Tech Nation. Hosted by Dr. Moira Gunn, Tech Nation is a public radio show that’s new to me, but quickly becoming a regular on my iPod rotation. A recent Tech Nation podcast included an interview with Frans Johansson, author of a new book The Medici Effect. From the book’s Web site:

Johansson calls this proliferation of new ideas “the Medici effec,” referring to the remarkable burst of creativity enabled by the Medici banking family in Renaissance Italy. In this fascinating book, he reveals how we can find intersections in our own lives and turn the ideas we find there into pathbreaking innovations. Johansson explains that three driving forces, the movement of people, the convergence of scientific disciplines, and the leap in computational power, are increasing the number and types of intersections we can access.

I was particularly interested when Johansson spoke about creativity, innovation, and traditional extrinsic rewards. [listen] If that clip piques your interest, read Punished By Rewards by Alfie Kohn.

Johansson and Kohn both conclude that extrinsic reward systems can get people to behave in particular ways. You can make almost any kid sit still, be quiet, and even do his homework if you make the rewards big enough. But rewards will never make the child want to do those things. Dependence on extrinsic rewards actually makes students less creative, innovative, and less likely to take intellectual risks. One of my highest hopes for technology in education, whether it’s blogging, wikis, or a spreadsheet, is that it will promote the habits of mind that extrinsic rewards subvert.

Wikis go corporate

I just finished listening to Joe Kraus’s presentation at the Web 2.0 conference via the IT Conversations podcast. Joe’s new company, JotSpot, is taking wiki technology corporate by adding the ability to create web applications within the wiki environment. Listen to this clip from his talk where he describes what this new “application wiki” is all about.

Wiki purists will not like this. If you compare JotSpot with the original wiki, the differences are stark. The spirit of wiki is simplicity itself, but since I’m not a wiki purist I feel free to say that JotSpot looks really cool. We’re looking at various intranet solutions at work right now, and it’s going to be important to find the right balance between power and simplicity for our employees. I love the simplicity of a more traditional wiki engine like MediaWiki (which is really not all that traditional), but I know that we would feel constrained if we attempted to use it for our entire intranet. Plone has all kinds of bells and whistles, but building everything we would need would be no small task. Maybe JotSpot will hit the happy medium.

JotSpot doesn’t seem quite right for student work, although I haven’t seen the innards yet. I think the more organic, less flashy interface of a traditional wiki more properly focuses students on content and building knowledge collaboratively.

A primer on FOSS in education

The International Open Source Network (IOSN) has just released a primer on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) in education. The document highlights uses of open source software in the infrastructure, administration, and classroom work of schools, focusing on a number of high-profile projects such as the Linux Terminal Server Project (LTSP), OpenOffice.org, Koha, Moodle, MIT’s OpenCourseWare, and Wikipedia. Low cost isn’t the only reason to move toward open source software, and this document does an excellent job of providing important information to school leaders who want to learn more.

Using FOSS for real-life learning

Red Hat Magazine is running an article by Jeff Elkner where he describes his 10-year career using free and open source software (FOSS). He’s got a big dream:

I am motivated by a desire to live in a world in which democracy and social justice are the birthrights of all people, and convinced that the best way to bring this about is for people to have direct control over the economic and social forces that effect them. Since the world around us is increasingly dominated by information technology and the software that runs it, democracy and software freedom go hand in hand.

I got to know Jeff a few years ago when I was teaching Python as a computer science teacher at Henry Sibley High School. We were both using the same textbook, the freely available Python version of How To Think Like a Computer Scientist, and shared some student project ideas. He’s always done a masterful job of creating opportunities for his students to do real programming, not just the dreadfully boring assignments typical of most introductory programming classes.

This article shows how using open source software creates opportunities for students to explore and develop their skills. Jeff’s work illustrates one of my own long-held beliefs: students excel when they are given a chance to work on projects that expand their perspective beyond themselves.