My new favorite survey tool

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I’ve been using a variety of online survey tools for quite a few years now including Zoomerang, SurveyMonday, and KeySurvey. My new favorite is SurveyGizmo.

We’ve been increasing the use of online surveys greatly in my district this year. We love how easy it is to gather feedback following a staff meeting, from parents and others during a curriculum adoption, or as a customer satisfaction instrument for my technology department. Here’s what I really like about SurveyGizmo:

  • The SurveyGizmo interface is full of tasty Web 2.0 goodness. Various options and settings open without a full page reload which makes building a survey much more like a desktop application. The look and feel overall is clean and modern in contrast to many of the online tools which look a bit clunky to me.
  • The SurveyGizmo enterprise account provides 20 separate survey users. This will enable each school and district office department to have their own account.
  • Here’s a huge one for me: they have a full API! In particular, I’m excited to see that you can pass information into a SurveyGizmo survey from another web form or via a web link. I’ve been looking for a way to use an online survey to collect customer satisfaction data as my tech department resolves trouble tickets for staff members. The API would really make that easier.
  • Other features of note: full support for branching surveys with really complex logic (can even use regular expression matching for full geek compatibility), tons of built-in question types including some I haven’t seen anywhere else, private domain name, and many more really cool advanced features.

So I’d say give it a try. Full disclosure: the SurveyGizmo links in this post are affiliate links.

Comcast rolls out fatter pipes

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According to USA Today, Comcast is planning to spread a little broadband love to its customers in Minneapolis/St. Paul this year. In an effort to compete with Verizon and its FiOS service, Comcast will roll out 50 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload service. They say they’re planning to go to 100 Mbps over the next two years and 160 Mbps after that.

The most obvious application for all that bandwidth is downloading all manner of media files. But what about online learning? With that much bandwidth, full-screen, full-motion videoconferencing is a gimme. 3D multiuser virtual worlds? Yep. Facebook 24×7? Probably. How much bandwidth does your entire district have?

Cringely on the search economy

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Love him or hate him, Robert X. Cringely’s column on PBS.org is often provocative. He addressed the American education system is a recent post, and I found a couple points pretty interesting. First, the comparison between knowledge and search:

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I’m sure today Dave wouldn’t bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we’re moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what’s wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

I’ve posted about that before. I’m thinking about getting an iPhone when version 2.0 comes out, and I can’t wait to see what it’s like to have a real web browser in my pocket 24×7.

I’ve written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

I don’t know if Cringely is on track with this point, but it makes a bit of sense. He goes on to consider what it would be like if there was an ISO certification process for students. In other words, what if students could demonstrate their knowledge and skills outside of the context of the traditional school? Cringely contends that the whole system would come crashing down if that were possible.

I’ve been saying for years that one of the things holding our K-12 system together is the fact that colleges and universities don’t routinely accept students who don’t have high school diplomas. If the high school diploma ever loses its value as a credential, things will get really interesting.

Getting serious about backing up (Part II)

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Earlier in the month I posted about the strategy I’ve been employing to back up my 24″ home computer. Using SuperDuper! and a 500-GB external drive attached to my Airport Extreme works great, but it doesn’t really solve the my-house-burned-down-and-now-I-lost-all-of-the-embarrassing-pictures-of-my-kids problem. To address that glaring deficiency I needed a way to move my backups offsite.

Enter Amazon S3. In their own words:

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

In other words, when I utilize S3 I rent a tiny little slice of Amazon’s massive infrastructure. The price is certainly right too. The storage is unlimited and costs $0.15/GB per month. Transferring the files to S3 costs $0.10/GB and from S3 $0.18/GB for the first 10 TB. My monthly cost is about $4.

As extensive as it is, S3 is designed to be technically simple. Unfortunately, technically simple doesn’t mean simple for the end user. To really use S3 most people are going to want a front-end tool. I chose Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk runs on OS X, Linux and Windows and costs only $20. When I start the Jungle Disk software, it appears just like any other drive on my OS X desktop. I can browse files and move things back and forth just like any other disk. I can also install Jungle Disk on all of my computers with one license which makes it ideal for storing files that you might need to access from work and home. If you’re concerned about Amazon snooping through your files, Jungle Disk will encrypt all of your data before it gets sent to S3.

I decided to spring for Jungle Disk Plus for another $1/month because I wanted to take advantage of block-level file updates and resumable uploads. Both of these features reduce the total amount of traffic that gets transferred.

All in all, I feel pretty safe at this point. I’ve got regular full-system backups that can be used to restore my system from scratch if I have a major hard drive crash, and I’ve got some insurance for my irreplaceable files. The next step will be increasing the amount of storage available at home. That 500-GB drive is pretty much full. I’m thinking Drobo.

The iPod just got more interesting

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Apple’s announcement yesterday of a full software development kit (SDK) for the iPhone exceeded my expectations. As I followed along with Engadget’s coverage, I had two thoughts: Apple is making a serious play for the corporate enterprise, and we are going to see some seriously amazing mobile apps. They also announced that all of the iPhone goodies will run on the iPod Touch too.

I don’t have an iPhone (or iPod Touch), but I’ve toyed with one enough to know that Safari on the iPhone rocks. Once Google has its apps running fully, the iPhone will be awesome with the browser alone. Now with the SDK in the works we could have iPhone versions of Inspiration, all of the Omni apps, MarsEdit, iChat, Skype, and practically any other cool app you can think of.

Consider for a moment what a classroom full of iPhone/iPod-wielding students could do. I’d like to see that.

Rant on: vendor presentations

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I’ve got budget codes and that makes me a prime target for all kinds of vendors who have just what my school district needs. Between the cold call invitations to online demos, meetings with vendors sales reps I actually want to talk to, and various conferences, I see a lot of vendor presentations. If you are a sales rep, here are some suggestions:

  • Your Powerpoint presentations are pretty awful. Visit and read the Presentation Zen blog by Garr Reynolds. While you’re at it, buy Garr’s book of the same name. It’s excellent.
  • If you have more questions about presenting quantitative information, check out Edward Tufte’s work. His books aren’t cheap and neither are his seminars, but they’re worth it.
  • If you’re coming to present to a group in my district, please make sure you know your product well and can answer basic questions. You have no idea how much a clumsy demonstration hurts your chances of making a sale.
  • Before you make a pitch to me, take some time to understand what I might actually need.
  • If I’ve never heard of your company there’s almost no chance I’m going to agree to meet with you after a single cold call. I get a dozen vendors calls a day.

I really don’t mean this to come off too snarky. It’s just that I lost three hours of my life today that I’ll never get back.