Monthly Archives: August 2005

Flying Spaghetti Monster Makes Wikipedia

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A few days ago, I noticed the “Open Letter To Kansas School Board” written by Bobby Henderson which parodied the decision by the Kansas State Board of Education to allow the teaching of Intelligent Design in science class alongside Evolution Theory. In the open letter, Henderson demanded that the board give equal time in classrooms to the belief that the universe had been created by the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

Now, I’ve noticed that Wikipedia has an entry for the Flying Spaghetti Monster and its place in the Evolution vs. Intelligent Design in schools debate. While I am not going to comment on the politics on the issue, I must say I’m loving Wikipedia for being a mechanism for documenting such debates … these little events that are a part of our historical growth and ones that would likely have absolutely no mention in a Brittanica account.

Knoppix 4.0 Live CD/DVD Released

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For those who aren’t aware, Knoppix is a bootable live system distribution of Linux. In other words, a Knoppix Live CD or DVD allows you to run a distribution of Linux without having to install any software on your machine. While Knoppix isn’t the only distribution that runs live, it’s one of the more popular distros and ideal for education. Here are many other live distros.

And there’s plenty of open source software included with Knoppix.

Due to on-the-fly decompression, the CD can have up to 2 GB of executable software installed on it (over 8GB on the DVD “Maxi” edition).

If you are interested in giving Linux a try, or at least seeing what all the hype is about, this is a great place to start.

DTV: Internet TV On Your Mac

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Boing Boing just announced the launch of DTV Beta, “an open source video publishing/viewing/downloading tool”. This is the player component of the Broadcast Machine, a tool that enables users to create their own video channels. I suspect that DTV has been out since June, but I just haven’t had a chance to follow-up.

So far it looks great! DTV includes a channel guide and allows users to easily subscribe to video RSS feeds. Very slick, be sure to check it out.

“How Do You Like The Odds?”

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Here’s a rather gruesome public service commercial from the American Lung Association. It reminds me of the U.N landmine commercial that was popular earlier in the year. While there seems to be tons of research on the effect of videogame violence (mostly biased), I wonder if there are any recent studies on the effect of this type of shock-advertising on the viewing public. For instance, does watching an anti-smoking ad like the one linked above actually produce the desired effect on the targetted population?

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The Interface Without The Mouse-Click

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Don’tClickIt.com provides the interesting experience of a click-less interface. The site does well to make a point of how difficult it is to break the mouse-click habit, provides a brief history of the mouse-click in computer history and poses a few alternatives to mouse-click in practice. For me, it helped me consider how the GUI has been shaped by the mouse-click, and helped me contemplate an alternative history in my mind’s eye. Check it out … see if you can resist the click.

Google Fill-In-The-Blank

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Today, the Google Blog reported a search tip that is either new, or just something I wasn’t aware of. It appears that the * (wildcard) can be used in a method where Google will “fill in the blanks”. For instance, the query “Bill Gates is the*” will bring predictable results, while a search for “Linux is the *” will bring you to the phrase “Linux is the optimum choice to replace Windows NT Server.” Seems pretty accurate to me!

On a more pedagogical/practical note, it seems to me that this would be a good skill that students (or teachers) may use in the classroom, at least for low-level fact-checking queries such as “Edison invented the *“, or higher-level, critique-based activities on opinions such as “the greatest soccer players in the world come from *.” The latter should read ‘Greece’.

What Education Can Learn From Open Source

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Paul Graham recently offered the interesting essay, “What Business Can Learn From Open Source“. It’s a worthwhile read, and our educational institutions could easily adapt some of idea from the essay. I have taken the liberty of adapting this essay focused on business to suit the educational environment.

Re: school servers

At this point, anyone proposing to run Windows on servers should be prepared to explain what they know about servers that Google, Yahoo, and Amazon don’t.

While there are various excuses as to why schools continue to use Windows on the desktop (mostly due to perceived ‘hassle’ and the cost of re-training teachers to the Linux environment), I know of very few reasons as to why schools should continue to use the costly and inferior Windows server environment rather than a LAMP configuration. Schools are charged not only for the costly server software, but also the network client licenses (charged to every machine that connects to the server) AND server support. Sure, there are ‘deals’ but FREE is even a better deal. As for support, see the always available, free and helpful open source community.

Re: intrinsic motivation

I think the most important of the new principles business has to learn is that people work a lot harder on stuff they like…. There’s a name for people who work for the love of it: amateurs. The word now has such bad connotations that we forget its etymology, though it’s staring us in the face. “Amateur” was originally rather a complimentary word.

And the word amateur should still be seen as a virtuous pursuit, whether it is related to academics or sports (see death of the NHL). And to support amateurism in schools, teachers need to embrace and support opportunities for meaningful learning such as blogging. And I love the alternative term that Graham suggests to describe those that write online. Rather than the fad term ‘bloggers’, why not ‘writers’ instead?

Re: school/home divide

That is one of the key tenets of professionalism. Work and life are supposed to be separate. But that part, I’m convinced, is a mistake.

Being involved with open source programming, for most, is not a 9-5 job. It’s a passion, and the ideals of which extend well beyond the act of programming. Whether you are involved in open source programming, involved as a developer of open content or participate in other open publishing activities (e.g., blogging), it’s likely that values involved in such acts extend into your everyday life. Values expressed through sharing, cooperation and lifelong learning are sometimes characteristic of those that develop or publish shared content, and such values often extend into the ‘real’ lives of such individuals.

Re: knowledge is both constructed and fallible

The third big lesson we can learn from open source and blogging is that ideas can bubble up from the bottom, instead of flowing down from the top. Open source and blogging both work bottom-up: people make what they want, and the best stuff prevails. … open source software is more reliable precisely because it’s open source; anyone can find mistakes.

Teaching should not be based on an information transfer model. The Internet, and the emergence of Web 2.0, provides an extraordinary opportunity for students to research, analyze, critique and write new content … content that is transparent and available in formats that can invite further analyse, critique and republication. To add to this, a couple of famous quotes from the open movement should be noted as they help to describe knowledge creation as being largely reliant upon problem-solving via individual and social networks. First, Linus’ Law, “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow” denotes that given a wide-enough developer/tester base, problems are easy to characterize and solve. And directly related to this quote, but in the context of open content, is the lesser known Arnison’s Law which reads “given enough eyeballs, problematic content is shallow.”

Conclusion
These are just a few of the direct lessons that can be applied from the open source movement as derived from the Graham’s article. This is a question I am pondering to a much greater extent through my open source study, so feel free to extent any of these ideas or provide your own if the urge arises.

NY Times: Blogs, Podcasts & Virtual Classrooms

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There was an interesting article in the NY Times today titled New Tools: Blogs, Podcasts & Virtual Tools. The article featured “Room 208“, the podcast classroom project headed by teacher Bob Sprankle. Additionally, another classroom from Del Valle High School in Texas was touted for its recent use of VoIP (Skype) in their foreign language lab program. The article proceeds to go toward a conclusion that most of my readers already know well, standardized testing and quality learning are not usually parallel pursuits.

In relation to the VoIP project:

But Mr. Cunningham, himself a former principal, said that principals were rarely interested because the program’s impact on standardized testing was difficult to gauge. His own principal, he said, was hesitant to allow some students to participate in a 24-school virtual debate last year with the National Urban Debate League because the scheduling conflicted with a practice test for the statewide assessment exam.

“I think the testing model is working against education,” Mr. Cunningham said. “With Skype, you’re opening up the whole world to the student, and that can’t help but be good.”

I have to agree.

Presentation: Developing Networks Of Innovation

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I had a people contact me with interest in presentations I have done in the recent past. I am not sure if I ever posted these presentations to this blog, but in case I did miss them, here they are.

– Developing Networks of Innovation via Open & Social Technologies: Starting Points (May/05)
– Technologies to Support Qualitative Research (July/05)

I’ve just linked to PDF version, although the Apple Keynote files should be available on my presentations page (where I put all this ‘stuff’). I apologize for not having any audio or narration notes … obviously the presentations are a bit incomplete without these. As these were delivered live, I never bothered with the fine details, but should really think about recording audio during my presentations.

New MacTels Using “Trusted Computing”?

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Cory Doctorow of Boing Boing wrote this alarming post regarding the possibility of the new MacTel machines using Trusted Computing (TC) hardware for the new kernel. Doctorow, a devoted Mac user since 1979, reports that if Apple moves toward TC, the Macintosh will no longer be his primary machine. And I’d have to agree, as it will be the same situation for me. Here’s a good passage that helps to explain just what TC hardware does.

The point of Trusted Computing is to make it hard — impossible, if you believe the snake-oil salesmen from the Trusted Computing world — to open a document in a player other than the one that wrote it in the first place, unless the application vendor authorizes it. It’s like a blender that will only chop the food that Cuisinart says you’re allowed to chop. It’s like a car that will only take the brand of gas that Ford will let you fill it with. It’s like a web-site that you can only load in the browser that the author intended it to be seen in.

Yes, even more reason for people to seriously consider adopting Linux and other open source software.

For more information on Trusted Computing, check out the Wikipedia definition.