Monthly Archives: September 2006

Digication

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This week’s Inside the Net with Leo Laporte and Megan Morrone featured Digication, a new online learning site. The main product is Digication Campus which the creator describes as:

… a web-based classroom for teachers and students. You can post assignments. Share ideas. Talk. Listen. Learn collaboratively. Get and give help. Post articles. Record grades. Collaborate online. And digitally archive the entire educational experience.

The site looks interesting. It’s much more basic than Moodle, which the creators acknowledge, but their “simple by design” motto has some merit for educators that don’t have a tech department that is willing or able to install Moodle. The site is free for the first 1,000 users at any one school.

Second Life feature on OTM

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Last weekend’s On the Media on NPR had an interesting feature on Second Life, the online virtual world that is all the rage these days. The largest portion of the piece was devoted to describing how former Virginia governor and likely presidential candidate Mark Warner held a news conference in Second Life recently. Just when you thought you were safe from candidate blogs…

The Second Life phenomenon is really fascinating. I’ve never been much of a gamer, but I think it’s crucial for teachers to understand the gaming world as much as possible. The point from the report that hit home most with me was from one of the guests who suggested that elements of our “first lives” (the real world) will need to become more game-like as more people become comfortable with artificial worlds. In other words, we begin to relate to real-world situations through the lens of video games and virtual worlds.

I guess I’ll reserve judgement for now on whether or not that would be a good thing. I do know that we should be using games and game-like simulations more effectively for teaching and learning. My recent experience as a student in the ITIL class is a perfect example. We sat for over two days paging through PowerPoint slides trying to absorb material. It would have been so much more interesting to learn the ITIL processes in a simulated environment where the “player” has to manage an IT department and his or her success depends on the extent to which the ITIL processes are implemented correctly. Will we ever get to the point that using immersive simulations is the norm?

I can think of a million other examples of learning through games and simulations. (And I’m sure many of these have been done.) Some examples: learn about the election process by managing a candidate’s campaign or being a candidate in a virtual world yourself; learn ecology by managing a virtual national park and ensuring that animal and plant populations remain viable; learn French by teleporting to a French-speaking world (need better speech recognition for this one); lean about viruses by becoming one and figuring out how to defeat a body’s immune system. Here’s something you can take to the bank: tomorrow’s technology will be cheaper and faster than today’s. Within ten years we will have cheap virtual reality technology that will allow students to enter these simulations in ways that we can barely imagine now.

Are teachers ready for this change? Can you imagine the professional development challenges that await us?

second life, otm, on the media, mark warner, gaming, npr, simulations

Technology nostalgia: The hard drive turns 50

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Western Digital My Book 500-GB hard drive

Every once in a while I’m overtaken by a bout of technology nostalgia. Although I’m not old enough to have any real experience with the ancient stuff I enjoy reading about it. (No punch cards for me. My first computer was an Apple ][e that my family bought when I was in junior high.) I was listening to the most recent version of TWiT when I heard about the recent 50th anniversary of the hard drive at the Computer History Museum. This really clicked with me because I’d just purchased a new 500-GB external hard drive for my PowerBook.

PC World has an article that describes that first hard drive, the IBM RAMAC 305. It weighed a ton (literally) and held 5 MB of data. The cost per MB of storage (inflation adjusted) was $70,000. Isn’t that amazing? The 500-GB drive I just purchased comes in at $0.00054/MB. In other words, storage in 1956 cost nearly 130,000,000× more than it does now.

Can you imagine what things will be like 10 years from now? According to the PC World article we can expect:

Wickersham outlines what he expects for 3.5-inch drives: “In 2005, for a three-platter drive, 500GB was standard. By 2009, that will be a 2TB drive. And if we continue for 2013, using Heat Assisted Magnetic Recording technology, we’ll have 8TB drives.” Wickersham throws out similar numbers for 1-inch drives: From a standard of 8GB in 2005, he expects we’ll see 30GB in 2009, and 100GB in 2013.

Inexpensive, nearly unlimited storage will change the way we think about information. Privacy concerns aside for the moment, consider what it would be like to have a complete digital archive of everything you’ve ever done on a thumbdrive in your pocket. Will we still be assessing students on their factual knowledge in 10 years? And how will we prepare our teachers for the change?

ITIL Foundations, Day 2

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We talked a lot about disaster recovery, monitoring system availability, and financial accounting for IT services on day #2.

Does your school district (or other organization) have a disaster recovery plan in place that lists each IT service and how fast you plan to recover back to full operation? Have you had a conversation with other leaders in your district to prioritize your systems and the data they contain? Updating that plan is one of my top priorities for the next few months.

I appreciate Michaels’ comment on my previous ITIL post about the applicability of business principles to educational environments. I’m not put off by business world comparisons for a couple reasons:

  1. Most of the best thinking in IT management has been in the corporate context. ITIL, Six Sigma, TQM, and a host of other quality frameworks have proven records of improving efficiency and effectiveness. We need to take that seriously.
  2. Is IT Service Management really that different in the corporate context than it is in my education world? Isn’t the goal in both cases to help the organization meet its “business objectives”? (The business objectives are obviously quite different.) There wasn’t much in the ITIL processes that I couldn’t connect with something in my world.

I’m going to continue thinking about the financial stuff too. I have no idea at this point what it actually costs to deliver specific IT services in my district. How much do we pay to maintain our GroupWise system (considering software, hardware, and people costs)? I don’t have a very good idea. Would we save money by switching to Exchange? (I doubt it.) How can I decide if I don’t know what I’m paying now? I don’t think it has to be complicated to make some reasonable cost estimates.

This ITIL stuff is good. I should find out if I passed the test in a few weeks.

itil, itsm, it service management, disaster planning, it accounting

ITIL Foundations, Day 1

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Whew! That’s a lot of material. I walked into class this morning and had a thick binder full of detailed ITIL info waiting for me. The terminology is dense and there are a lot of new concepts to absorb. There are only six of us in the class, and I’m the only one from the K–12 world. I asked a lot of questions, most of which seemed fairly intelligent sounding at the time.

I continue to wonder how best to map these IT service management concepts from the corporate culture to the work I do in a school district. There’s so much that is common between all of us who do this work, but there are some key differences. Our instructor works for Northwest Airlines. If their IT systems fail they might lose huge money in lost reservations. (I don’t think he worries much about planes falling out of the sky.) If mine fail I might have hundreds of students and teachers whose activities are ruined for a period of time. Those are both high stakes, but the way to measure them seems quite different to me.

Measuring performance is very important in the ITIL processes. My stack of materials has key performance indicators (KPIs) for each process. Here are a few examples from the Incident Management process (IM in ITIL-speak refers to what most people recognize as a traditional help desk/tech support request):

  • total number of incidents
  • mean cost per incident
  • incidents processed per service desk workstation
  • number and percentage of incidents resolved remotely, without an on-site visit

Does your school district’s IT department measure their performance like that? Mine doesn’t…yet. ;-) My ITIL book stresses the importance of collecting baseline data and measuring performance against it. I don’t have any baseline data. It’s never been collected.

I’ve been thinking a lot about what metrics make sense in a school setting. Something like “number of students and teachers affected per incident” or “instructional time lost per incident” perhaps. I need to find a way to incorporate metrics like that. It will make them more relevant to our “business” and communicate more clearly to teachers and administrators than the geekier alternatives.

What other metrics would make sense for a school IT department? I’d love to hear some suggestions. I’ll keep posting on this, but for now I need to dig in and do some studying. I’ve got the exam on Friday.

itsm, tech support

Aquafied NeoOffice now available

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NeoOffice logoThose of us using OS X haven’t had the easiest time with OpenOffice.org. Running that open source office suite has always required additional (but free) software that isn’t usually installed by default on OS X systems. Once installed, the software never really fit in with the rest of my system since it wasn’t a native “Aqua” application. Thanks to NeoOffice 2.0 I finally have a native Aqua version of OpenOffice.org for my PowerBook. MS Word and Excel import and export work great too. Give it a try and you may find that it does the job for you. There must be a lot of computer labs in schools where this software would come in very handy.

openoffice, openoffice.org, neooffice, office suite

Buzzword alert: Virtualization

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Virtualization is one of the hottest technology topics these days. Most people have probably heard about it in the context of Apple’s switch to Intel processors and the release of Parallels Desktop for Mac. Parallels allows you to run Windows applications on an Intel Mac by starting up a full copy of Windows within a window. You can run Windows in full-screen mode and even put Windows and OS X on separate screens if you have two displays. I’ve been waiting patiently (OK, not that patiently) for the Core 2 Duo upgrade before ordering a new MacBook Pro for work, and since there are a couple Windows apps I need to run I’ll be ordering a copy of Windows XP and Parallels to go with that new laptop.

It’s called virtualization because software like Parallels creates a “virtual machine” (VM) on top of which runs a “guest” operating system. Any guest OS that runs on PC-compatible hardware (e.g., Intel, AMD) can run in a Parallels VM. So my MacBook Pro will probably ended up running OS X, Windows, and Ubuntu Linux—maybe even simultaneously. I won’t go into any technical details because that’s been done many times. [1] [2]

The king of virtualization in modern times is VMware. The VMware software was built originally for virtualization on the desktop, but the really interesting stuff has been happening on the server side. If you’ve installed any Windows server software lately you know that a lot of those programs don’t play nicely together. Many IT departments end up buying separate servers for each application, and the result is that those servers go underutilized from a processor and memory standpoint. That’s where virtualization comes in. The benefits are pretty clear when you look at a simple example:

Let’s say I’ve got four separate Windows application that would normally require separate servers. It’s hard to buy a “real” server these days for less than $5,000 so let’s use that as a baseline. By utilizing VMware I could buy a beefier server for $10,000 and install my Windows applications in separate VMs on that server. The newest, high-end version of VMware isn’t free, but even with a $2,000 VMware license I’m still way ahead.

(4 × $5,000) − ($10,000 + $2,000) = $8,000!

That’s way oversimplified (and probably overly optimistic), but it doesn’t take into account additional savings in rack space, cooling requirements, and electricity use.

That’s it for now. I’ll post soon about some free virtualization products.

References:

  1. Virtualization, Wikipedia.
  2. Virtual Machine History & Technology, Security Now podcast.

vmware, virtualization, parallels

Back to class

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Starting tomorrow morning I’ll be in three days of classes at the U. of MN working toward an ITIL foundation certificate. The foundation course will cover all the basics of ITIL, and I’m hoping it will help me as I continue to rethink how we deliver IT services in my school district. I discovered ITIL in December, 2005 and I’ve been looking forward to implementing some of the key processes ever since.

I’ll do my best to post some reflections and notes about the class here.

itil, itsm, tech support, umn