Month: August 2003

Wired Magazine reports that MIT Everyware (free course content from MIT for everyone) is up and running. For those of you who wanted to study at MIT and ended up at Moo U instead, here is your chance.

If you follow such things, National Telecommunications and Information Administration has released a report on the success of CIPA (Child Internet Protection Act). The report discusses the issue of filtering relevant to e-rate.

There is one area in which I feel technology is moving in the wrong direction. From my personal historical perspective, one of the great benefits of improvements in technology has been the distribution of computing power. The Internet has been part of this trend and so have powerful personal machines. Older folks (like me) remember days of walking to a computer center in order to submit “jobs” or work on a terminal. There were both political and technological limitations to the “old way.”

There is one area in which I felt the industry made great strides and is now back sliding. I am a fan of what might be called a “server on every desk.” I like the idea that each computer could function as a personal server connected to millions of other servers.

We were getting there. For a while, Microsoft had a product called personal web server that was free and allowed a Windows or Mac machine to function as a low capacity server. I still run this product on my desktop as a demo. This will have to change soon – Microsoft no longer is upgrading PWS and there has not been a version for the Mac platform for some time. As soon as I upgrade my operating system my little experiment will have to be terminated.

Desktop machines still offer this option. Microsoft has ISS for the Windows playform and OS X has a built-in version of Apache. ISS has to be installed separately and installation is not the easiest thing to accomplish. Web sharing on the Mac is easy to implement.

Even if you are willing there are barriers. Most direct connect systems are now dynamic (the IP is assigned each time you connect). With a dynamic connection, your server would work, but it would be impossible to locate you because your server would be a moving target with a changing address. I guess dynamic IPs are easier for system administrators somehow. There is also the security issue. Servers represent a security problem. It is more than your machine getting messed up by a hacker, it is the potential of your machine being turned against others without your knowledge. These problems can be addressed in the same way they must be addressed for any server, but the burden has to be taken on by each individual rather than by specialists responsible for a larger system.

I hope the idea of distributed computing in its most extreme implementation does not go away. Power to the people and all that – must be something I picked up in the 60s.

Business Week has a recent article arguing that Apple’s dominance in the school market is slipping? The reason as I understand it – mom and dad can’t understand why their kids use different machines in school than mom and dad use at home and work.

This is an interesting issue to me. Does it imply that educators have long perferred machines that are less productive for learning, that parents have less insight into how technology is used in education but feel the need to criticize anyway, that other factors are becoming dominant (cost), or what?

The author states it this way – it is ok to think different, as long as it is the same different as most everyone else.

The Washington Post just published an article prompted by recent virus attacks explaining why Windows machines are easy targets.

Shortly after the recent electical failures in the eastern US and Canada, the following image was circulated on several educational listservs.

Later, this image was reported to be a fake. Actual before and after images are available from Canadian Geographic and NOAA.

There is probably a good object lesson in this – things get faked on the net and knowledgeable people get taken in.

I have long been interested in the potential of computer games. My early experiences with computer-based technology originated from my research interest in the development of reading comprehension and comprehension monitoring skills. Students and I programmed text-based adventure games that we felt were appropriate for upper-elementary students. We studied how good and poor readers performed in “playing” these games, whether students would be motivated to play these games voluntarily, and how their game play improved with experience. I guess the logic of our efforts was basically that the more reading you do the better you get at reading and also that adventure games offered an authentic setting in which understanding has immediate consequences. I think these are still probably good ideas. At some point, my work with technology moved in a different direction and the standard for what would be regarded as an “interesting” game increased beyond my programming capabilities.

From time to time I have read articles related to “games.” For example, Tom Malone published a “theory of intrinsically motivating instruction” in Cognitive Science (1981) using examples from computer games (yes 1981 is not a typing error). I just finished a book by James Gee – What video games have to teach us about learning and literacy (Palgrave MacMillan, 2003) that I recommend. The book is an interesting combination of descriptions of Gee’s personal experiences in gaming and the “gaming community”, analysis of gaming experiences couched in learning theory, and contrasts between “school experiences” and gaming experiences in meeting ideal conditions for what I would call “meaningful learning.” Gee and I have different ways of explaining authentic or meaningful learning, but if you have read our book and then take my recommendation and read Gee, you will see substantial overlap in the work we cite. The book is organized around 36 learning principles that exist in good games and perhaps should exist in the classroom.

I was somewhat inspired by this book (the anecdotes about game play) and now own not only the book, but also Warcraft III and several other games. I think this area deserves serious consideration. The Gee book may be a little heavy for casual reading, but there is a great deal here to consider and discuss.

Prensky Review