Category Archives: Emerging Technologies

Alan November challenges the ADEs

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The keynote for Tuesday’s session at the Summer Institute was Alan November. This was my first opportunity to hear him, and I was especially interested since so many others had found him thought provoking and inspiring.

After talking a bit about Wikipedia, Flickr, blogs, RSS, and Creative Commons, he turned to the meat of his talk and gave us four challenges under the topic “Fearless learners and courageous leaders.”

  • How do you know if your students are globally competitive? November painted a pretty bleak picture of the current state of our students’ readiness in a world where jobs can be moved to where the people are much more easily than people can be moved to where the jobs are.
  • How can we build the learning capacity of every family? He suggested that all students, teachers, and families should have blogs that are connected via RSS.
  • Children should be producing learning objects. All of the work that our kids are doing should be sharable with the rest of the world.
  • Innovation management: the capacity to take an idea and innovate. November suggested that this was a leadership challenge and that American schools are ill-prepared to handle it.

Alan really challenged the ADEs in the room to push the envelope. I overheard more than a couple attendees talking about whether they were inspired or mad following the session. My sense is that Alan likes to push buttons, and I enjoy that kind of talk. I wish I had more time right now to reflect a bit and post more about the talk, but it’s the middle of one of our sessions and I need to start paying attention now.

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Craig’s keynote

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The final session at this year’s TNT Conference is a keynote by Craig Nansen, Technology Coordinator for Minot Public Schools. Here’s my best attempt to capture his talk. Craig has published much of the materials from his talk today at his homepage.

Learn technology on your own time by personalizing it and by having fun, taking risks (don’t be afraid to be embarrassed), and learning from kids. Too many teachers feel like they have to wait until they understand the technology completely before they use it with their students. Give up! Embrace the opportunity to empower students to be teachers. Be willing to laugh at yourself.

Craig’s talking about digital natives and how they think differently. He told a story about his son who got home from hockey practice and called his buddy’s pager. His friend was out riding his snowmobile, got the page, and called him back on his cellphone. Craig’s son took off on his snowmobile and met him out in the country. What an amazing change from just a few years ago.

“Just in time” training is more important than ever. Teach just enough so the teachers can get the job done. They are most engaged in learning when they see the immediate use. You can engage with those teachers later and teach more as they see more and more uses. (We’re hoping to use some more online learning resources for this in Hopkins.)

There was a ton of other information, but there’s no way I can type fast enough to capture it all. Craig’s talk was a wild ride through some of the best materials he’s collected over many years of leading the technology charge in Minot.

A report from WWDC

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My colleague Siddhartha Chadda is out at Apple’s WWDC this week and has this “man on the street” report:

The gasp of the audience when Steve Jobs said “it’s true” with the “e” hanging down to mimic Intel’s logo was a seminal event in computing. This is really the third major transition for Apple. And my opinion is that Steve Jobs made a compelling case for this transition. This time it is when Macintosh as a platform is very strong. Most people don’t change much if they are strong and it really is a bold new direction for Apple to do at this particular time and space.

One can make the case for a race between Longhorn and Mac OS X (Leopard) on Intel by late 2006.

Going to some of the labs at WWDC and seeing stock Intel motherboards in a G5 powermac chassis is so freaky not because of the Frankenstein aspect but how matter of fact the developer community has embraced this new path.

There are labs with 75 G5′s with each alternative row of computers with nice shiny brass combination locks in the back. These are the only hints that you are running OS X on a Pentium motherboard.

People want stuff to work. They don’t care about what CPU is in there. This announcement is absent from Apple home page as a major link because they still want to sell Power PCs. And frankly a person looking to surf the web, write an email and store photographs can’t care about endianess and other technological hurdles and developers just care about solving technical problems on a platform that allows them limitless possibilities.

It’s going to be a very interesting two years for Apple.

It’s true

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I’m sitting here at the Apple booth at the Technology and Learning Conference in Grand Forks and just got the word that all the rumors are true: Apple is switching to Intel-based processors. It turns out that Apple has secretly been running OS X for Intel hardware for years now. (That was widely rumored.) The Apple guys here are stunned and are unsure of the implications. I’m sure everyone associated with Mac hardware and software will be debating the wisdom of this decision vigorously over the coming months. I would have preferred AMD over Intel, but Steve never called me to ask my opinion.

On the “pro” side of the ledger, Apple gets arguably high performance processors in larger volumes at lower prices. This will let them sell their hardware more cheaply. Millions of consumers get more choices. That’s a good thing. Many people fed up with viruses and spyware have undoubtedly been considering a jump to to OS X. Now they can do it without buying new hardware. Jobs told the crowd at his keynote that a developer release of OS 10.4.1 for Intel would be available immediately with a consumer version to follow in about a year. Wow.

On the “con” side, Apple may have trouble selling hardware this year in the transition. Some people may choose to wait for the Intel boxes before making a big purchase. (On the other hand, some may be suspicious of first generation OS X on Intel and buy now.) Apple’s tech support nightmares just magnified 100× with this announcement. One of the things that has made Mac hardware “just work” has been that the environment was so tightly controlled. Will Apple commit to making OS X work on every cheap NIC and video card on the market?

It’s going to be a very interesting few weeks in geekdom as this decision gets played out in every conceivable way. And you thought Monday morning quarterbacks were tough on football teams? This is going to be interesting.

Buzzword alert: AJAX

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It’s impossible to keep up with the acronyms that appear on the Web these days. One of the latest to show up on my radar screen is AJAX which stands for “Asynchronous Javascript and XML.” In a nutshell, AJAX describes a technique for building web applications that don’t necessarily act like web applications. If you’ve used the keyboard navigation in Gmail or the smooth map scrolling at Google Maps then you know what I’m talking about. Instead of continually loading entire Web pages like traditional Web-based applications (e.g., most online stores), AJAX apps usually fetch information in the background and respond more like desktop applications. If you’d like more geeky details, you might find the Wikipedia entry interesting.

So the next time a software vendor comes calling and advertises his application’s AJAX-compliance, you can be suitably unimpressed by his buzzword-compliance.

Update: Kottke’s got a post about how he’s using AJAX on the main page of his blog. More details about the technology if you’re interested.

10 cool things from MacWorld

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In our morning session at the NCLB Showcase, Apple employee Janet Hill shared her top 10 list of cool things she saw at MacWorld Expo. Here’s her list with some links:

  • iStopMotion and iVeZeen from Boinx Software are used for stop motion animation, time lapse recording, and recording movie clips with an iSight camera.
  • 3D Weather Globe & Atlas from MacKiev incorporates NASA maps and real-time satellite data. You can also overlay current weather on the maps.
  • iGuitar makes guitars that can be interfaced directly to your computer.
  • XtremeMac Airplay is a FM transmitter for an iPod
  • The Solio is a solar charger for your iPod, cell phone, or other small electronic device.
  • Macally sells iPod accessories.
  • Podcasting. I’ve posted on this before.
  • If you’ve got some song writing talent, maybe you should give the John Lennon Bus Tour a try. Participants may get a chance to record a song and video in a mobile recording studio.
  • Grokker takes a different tack on search with a graphical interface that attempts a non-linear approach to communicating results. You need to register to try it, but there are some screen shots.
  • The Griffin iTalk makes it easy to record audio directly to your iPod. I only wish the iPod wasn’t such a crappy voice recording device (e.g., preset, low bitrate encoding)

Looks like some cool stuff here. You can sure see that Apple is pinning their hopes on the iPod.

6 million Americans have listened to podcasts

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The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report that describes some current statistics on use of iPods and other portable MP3 players. Some results:

  • 22 million American adults own iPods or MP3 players
  • 6 million American adults have listened to podcasts
  • 19% of those aged 18-28 have iPods/MP3 players
  • More men than women have them
  • More minorities than whites have them
  • Bandwidth matters. The more bandwidth you’ve got, the more likely you are to own an iPod/MP3 player

They didn’t survey adolescents, but my “walk around school” survey finds a lot of white earbuds in the ears of our students. How long before teachers start giving listening assignments to go along with reading assignments?

Update:NewsFactor Network has got a story in which Pew research director Mary Madden backtracks a bit on their recent conclusion that 6 million American have listened to podcasts:

Pew research director Mary Madden believes the numbers of people actually using the Internet to broadcast and/or download pods is smaller than the 6 million figure cited in the organization’s latest study, however.

“Our question to the survey respondents on this was very broad. We asked if they had ever downloaded a podcast or radio Internet program,” she says. In other words, the survey also netted affirmatives from people who may have listened to an NPR program on the radio, for example, and then gone to the NPR site to download it.

Last update: The Pew folks have addressed reports of exaggerated podcasting statistics here. They’re standing by their numbers and explaining their rationale.