I’ll post my slides here after my talk, but for now you can follow this links to learn more about ITIL:

• ITIL homepage
• Wikipedia article on ITIL
• ITIL Community Forum
• I did my ITIL certification at the U. of MN, but I think the ITIL program at New Horizons of Minnesota is better.

Update: Here’s a link to my slides from this talk. I think most of them will make sense on their own, but anyone who looks at them will obviously miss some key things that were discussed in my talk at the conference.

Blogging

• The Savvy Technologist
• Lewis Elementary School (Principal Tim Lauer)
• Getting started with blogging: WordPress.com, Blogger

Google Maps mashups

• Housing Maps
• Chicago Crime

Tag searching

• IL-TCE postings
• Blog posts tagged “iltce2007″
• Flickr photos tagged “erosion”

Wikipedia

• Darfur conflict
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

Other

• Twitter
• Ohmynews
• Google Docs and Spreadsheet
• Craigslist
• Creative Commons-licensed photos at Flickr
• Creative Commons

Update: I popped into Steve Dembo’s presentation to hear what Web 2.0 apps he’s using these days. Here is his top10freesites wiki.

Amber asked how Jimmy would respond to people who say that Wikipedia can’t be trusted (at 31:41 of the recording). He replied:

People do need to approach Wikipedia with some understanding of where it comes from and how to use it. Certainly if you’re a regular user of Wikipedia and you’ve tested it against your other knowledge and against other sources, most people will report it’s actually really pretty good overall. At the same time because it is live editing and anything can be changed at any time you have to be a little cautious. If you read something a little crazy or suspicious you should always check it out. And there are a lot of techniques as an advanced user. You can look in the history. You can look at the discussion page to see if some point has been debated. Check the references at the bottom. You can always tag something. If it sounds suspicious to you, tag it with a tag that says this fact needs a cite or something.

One of Leo’s interns who happens to be a sophomore in high school asked how Jimmy would recommend convincing schools to accept Wikipedia as a trusted source (at 53:02 of the recording). Jimmy’s advice:

Be careful how you use Wikipedia. It really isn’t a trusted source. It really is edited real-time and it could be full of mistakes. That really isn’t the right role for an encyclopedia in the educational process. I think it basically should be fine in schools, it should be acceptable, to add a footnote saying I did a lot of my preliminary research in Wikipedia just to acknowledge where you got a lot of knowledge. But in terms of citing specific facts, you really should go to the sources and look it up there. Because that’s what you’re supposed to be doing. The encyclopedia is supposed to give you the broad overview not be a primary research tool.

This is exactly the advice I give when asked. Perhaps having the quote right from the horse’s mouth will be useful.

Blogging

• Mabryonline.org with Dr. Tim Tyson
• Lewis Elementary School (Principal Tim Lauer)

Google Maps mashups

• Housing Maps
• Chicago Crime
• Google Sketchup examples

Technorati searching

• TIES postings
• Blog posts tagged “ties2006″
• Flickr photos tagged “holidazzle”

Wikipedia

• Darfur conflict
• The Giver by Lois Lowry
• The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo

Other

• Google Docs and Spreadsheet
• Craigs list

ties, ties2006, web2.0

• Moodle, online learning management system
• Audacity, audio editing
• Inkscape, vector drawing
• Scribus, desktop publishing
• OpenOffice.org, office suite
• NeoOffice, Mac version of OpenOffice.org
• Linux, free Unix-like OS
• Creative Commons
• Open Source
• Flickr, online photo sharing
• Wikipedia, world’s biggest encyclopedia
• VLC, media player
• Drupal, content management system
• Joomla, content management system
• WordPress, blogging platform
• GIMPShop, Photoshop-like image editing
• Edubuntu, Linux distribution targeted for K–12
• Request Tracker, trouble ticketing system

Update: Here are a few more links to products that came up during the session.

• Jahshaka, video editing and effects
• Loudblog, audio blogging and podcasting
• dirCaster, easy podcasting
• Stellarium, awesome astronomy software
• Clam Antivirus, server-based virus scanning

ties, ties2006

Doug’s been in the business long enough to be able to reflect on the changing role of the library media specialist in our schools. He’s not afraid to challenge conventional wisdom either. We talked about media programs, Wikipedia, and a few other topics in this interview recorded via Skype last summer.

Download: STP-DougJohnson (12.3 MB, 26:50)

doug johnson, podcast, media specialist, library, media, wikipedia

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

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

In a nutshell, Blackboard has apparently received a broad patent that seems to cover almost all learning management system concepts in current use. As a big Moodle fan you might think that I would be concerned by this. I’m not particularly worried. There’s a great effort underway to document all sorts of prior art to demonstrate that Blackboard hasn’t really invented anything new and isn’t worthy of patent protection. Let’s just say that I’m not going to hold off installing Moodle on a new server in my new job.

Most educators and professionals do not consider it appropriate to use tertiary sources such as encyclopedias as a sole source for any information — citing an encyclopedia as an important reference in footnotes or bibiliographies may result in censure or a failing grade. Wikipedia articles should be used for background information, as a reference for correct terminology and search terms, and as a starting point for further research.

Here’s an example citation page for the Wikipedia article about basenjis. (I’m a proud basenji owner.)