I’ve never done a post like this before, but I figured it’s another way to get the word out.
I’m looking for a Service Desk Manager to fill out my staff at the district office. I’ve posted the details on Craigslist, but you can also find it and apply on the school district site here. If you’re in the central Minnesota/Twin Cities area (or would like to be), please have a look and consider applying.
I was doing my GTD weekly review today and ran across the following notes I made in during a meeting a while ago:
What skills do successful, creative adults have?
We need less individual assessment of student work.
There you have it. A random brain dump posted here mostly so I can go back later and find it easily.
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?
Today was the first day of school in Minnesota. We nearly always start the Tuesday after Labor Day just as the first hint of fall color starts to appear. I suppose one advantage of my one-hour commute out into the country every morning is the chance to watch the changing of the seasons from a slightly closer perspective. The farm kid in me enjoyed seeing the soybeans turning brown in the fields today.
I sent an email to my staff this morning and the rest of the district’s tech support group. After I sent it I decided that I would post it here because I’ve been pondering these issues lately. Follow the link to the article that prompted the post.
Good morning techs,
I’m enclosing an article that I saw recently entitled “What users hate about IT pros.” It was a good reminder to me that every interaction I have with a staff person about an IT issue presents a wonderful opportunity to be a teacher and to encourage each staff member to view technology as a positive addition to his or her working toolset.
You’ll get tired of hearing me say it, but we have an enormous responsibility to ensure that the district’s technology resources complement and never hinder instruction. Think back to a time when you felt ill-equipped to fix a problem. (Was it a leaky drain? A flat tire? A relationship problem with a loved one?) That’s how many of our staff members feel when they are presented with a technology challenge. They don’t approach those problems the same way we do. They don’t find any enjoyment or satisfaction at all in working through the host of possible solutions. They just want things to work.
Every technology challenge we face, even the ones that look insignificant, ultimately affects an individual student. When a teacher chooses not to use technology because he or she doesn’t feel confident in his or her ability or because the equipment or network aren’t reliable, that’s a lost opportunity. We must to do everything we can to eliminate those lost opportunities and deliver a level of service that encourages staff members to take a chance and try something new. Our students deserve nothing less.
The first day of school represents a wonderful new beginning. May all of us work hard, work smart, and work joyfully.
It’s so easy to erect an artificial barrier between the IT staff and the teachers and students as though the geeks were engaged in a different business. We’ve got to get beyond that.
I’ve been running quite a bit lately in an effort to shed some weight and improve my fitness. My old heart rate monitor just gave out so I picked up a new Timex Bodylink on eBay. It’s got a GPS receiver that straps to your arm and tracks distance and speed as well as heart rate. I also signed up for a trial with a cool fitness tracking Web site called FitnessJournal. One of the features of the site is a map that gets updated with every workout and shows your progress in a mythical cross-country journey. You can see my progress here.
This really doesn’t have anything to do with education technology, of course, but if nothing else the FitnessJournal site is one more example of a Web application that replaces what would have been a normal application just a few years ago.
On the Media from May 19, 2006 had a segment entitled “Fair Use Follies” that attempted to highlight some of the challenges faced by documentary filmmakers who are finding it increasingly difficult to decide when their use of copyrighted work constitutes fair use. It was an interesting discussion, and one of the speakers led me to the Duke University Center for the Study of the Public Domain.
The CSPD produced a comic book called “Tales from the Public Domain: BOUND BY LAW?” that makes a great introduction to the fair use doctrine. It’s focused mostly on filmmaking, but the principles will apply to a variety of creative works. I made copies for the media specialists in my district. (The comic is Creative Commons-licensed of course.)
It’s official as of tonight’s school board meeting. My job search is over.
Starting July 1st I will be Director of Technology for the Buffalo-Hanover-Montrose Schools. Buffalo is a growing school district of almost 5,000 students just to the west of the Twin Cities metro area. As Director, I’ll be responsible for all aspects of technology in the district.
This is a slight move toward the IT world for me, but there will be plenty of opportunities to stay connected to what goes on in the classrooms too. I’m really excited to get started. My current position in Hopkins ends June 30 so I won’t have much of a break before jumping into my new role. I’ll have a bunch more to say in the future to be sure. Regular readers may see some additional focus on school IT topics here, but I will keep looking for cool classroom applications for this technology that continues to capture my imagination.
A big thanks to everyone who sent words of encouragement and even job leads. I appreciate the support.
I took a walk down Michigan Avenue to the Apple Store tonight. My hotel doesn’t have wireless so I decided to pick up an AirPort Express to create my own wireless network in my room. Why is it that the nicer the hotel, the worse their network seems to be?
The Apple Store in Chicago is impressive. What’s more amazing is that the place was packed at 8:30 on a Thursday night. Most of the people there were just hanging out and playing around with the products. The store has a large theater area, but unfortunately I’d just missed a Final Cut Pro demonstration. The atmosphere at one of these stores couldn’t be more different than Microcenter, Fry’s, or any of the other large computer/technology retailers. But then it’s pretty obvious that the Apple Stores aren’t selling technology. They’re selling a geek chic lifestyle, and from the looks of it a lot of people in Chicago are buying.