Monthly Archives: February 2005

College students going wireless

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MSNBC is running an article that describes how wired phones are increasingly irrelevant to today’s college students. Some colleges are considering getting rid of land lines in campus housing all together with some surprisingly financial implications. At American University:

Five years ago, the school made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on long-distance service, said Carl Whitman, executive director of the Office of Information Technology. Last semester, the school made $1,109.

That’s a pretty dramatic turnaround and it points to the increasingly digital and mobile lifestyle of today’s young people. (Seen on Slashdot.)

Syndicating wiki content with RSS

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Jeremy Zawodny asks Why do Wiki RSS Feeds Suck?

Jeremy’s comment notwithstanding, providing an RSS feed to track changes in a wiki is a great idea, and judging from the comments to Jeremy’s post there are a lot of wiki engines that provide that feature. Some wikis include the full text of the wiki page in the feed, but most seem to show diffs (the “differences” between the original and changed pages). I have noticed that some wikis don’t advertise the presence of the RSS feeds very well (e.g., MediaWiki) so some of you might be missing out on that handy feature. I do wish that there were more RSS feeds available. With MediaWiki, for example, there seems to be a single feed for the entire wiki. I’d like to have a separate feed available for each page or, at the very least, a feed for all of the pages that I’m “watching.”

Wiki shopping guide

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I posted last July about the canonical list of wiki engines that is available. The choices are so vast that choosing one can make your head spin. Here’s a little more help for you if you’re shopping for a wiki. The Wiki Choicetree, found at the original wiki site, goes one step further and breaks the list down according to the features of each wiki. This list should help clear up the options a bit.

I’m using MediaWiki (amazing features) and Instiki (dead simple to use) and am liking both of them. You won’t go wrong with either one.

WordPress upgrade

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I bit the bullet last night and upgraded The Savvy Technologist to the development version of WordPress. It’s always a bit risky to run on the “bleeding edge,” but in this case there were some great new features that I really wanted. Chief among them is the ability to manage static Web pages from within the blog. I’m using this feature for the tech support section of our one-to-one computing project blog.

I’ve been really pleased with WordPress since I switched from MovableType last fall. The comment and trackback spam control features are certainly far superior to the old MovableType 2.6 series. So I stayed up until 4 a.m. last night doing the upgrade and working on the graphics. What’s sleep compared to some good old geek fun.

The risks of teachers blogging

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After prodding by Tom, Will has picked up the gauntlet and started a discussion on the risks of teachers blogging at work.

I moved my blog to my own server and domain some months ago for many of the reasons Will mentions. I’ve also had the support of my employer and consider most of my blogging to be work-related. I have a separate blog for personal use which I don’t link to from this space. It’s not exactly anonymous, but it gives me an outlet for things that are definitely not work-related. Nothing revolutionary, mind you, just personal.

So I guess I’ll just keep posting and trying to find interesting things to write about.

Google may come to Wikipedia’s aid

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Just saw this on Slashot. Google is interested in hosting some of the Wikimedia projects. This will be a great boon for Wikipedia, the largest wiki in the world and a frequent victim of its own success. I talk to educators often about wikis and have been frustrated many times by the obvious overloading of the Wikipedia servers. What a great way for Google to give back to the community.

Gmail for everybody

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I’ve had a Gmail account for a while now, and I think it’s the best web-based email service around. Besides the 1 GB of storage space, the Gmail user interface is excellent and actually harkens back to some of my favorite, old-school email clients. Gmail is still officially in its beta testing phase and new accounts are by invitation only. Invitations were pretty hard to come by early on, but now that the beta has been going on for a while there are plenty of invitations to go around.

So if you’re looking for a way for all of your students to have an email account, Gmail may be just the ticket. The isnoop.net gmail invite spooler has all the invites you’ll ever need:

Welcome to isnoop.net’s gmail invite spooler. This page offers a place for people with Gmail invites and those who want them to come together with minimal effort and fuss. Currently, we have 1,505,401 invites available to share. Thanks to the generosity of folks like you, we’ve distributed 243,246 invites since this page went up on Sep 13, 2004.

Both of my kids now have their own gmail accounts.

Bush budget unkind to ed tech programs

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President Bush’s proposed 2006 budget includes large cuts in some important educational technology programs. According to this email from the American Library Association:

Overall, the President’s FY 2006 budget would cut education funding by $530 million, or 0.9%, for a total of $56.0 billion. Despite proposed increases for Title I, Striving Readers Initiative, and special education, the budget would cut or eliminate more than 150 programs, 48 of which are education programs. Some of those programs proposed for elimination include Even Start ($225 million) and the Enhancing Education Through Technology program ($496 million). The President also proposes cutting funding for Adult Education by $369.7 million, or 63%, from $585.4 million in FY 2005 to $215.7 million.

Some library programs fare a bit better:

Despite the extremely tight fiscal environment, the President’s Budget requests $262,240,000 for the Institute of Museum and Library Services, an increase of $21,565,000. For the Library Services and Technology Act, the budget includes $221,325,000, an increase of $15,374,000 from FY 2005. Within that total is almost $171 million for Grants to State Library Agencies, $26 million for Librarians for the 21st Century program, $14 million for National Leadership Grants for libraries, and $3.675 million for Improving Library Service to Native Americans. For school libraries, the President’s Budget proposes $19,683,264 for the Improving Literacy Through School Libraries program, the same level as fiscal year 2005 and slightly below fiscal year 2004.

It’s anyone’s guess how the President’s proposals will hold up in Congress. It seems likely that these and other proposed cuts will be challenged by the Democrats and some Republicans. My school district has applied for a number of Enhancing Education Through Technology (E2T2) grants in the past. Losing that program will make it more difficult for states to support innovative technology projects.