Month: July 2004

I made the trip with Cindy to Chicago. She is attending a conference on digital portfolios sponsored by LiveText.

We walked by Millenium Park last night and I went back on my own today to take some pictures.

The main exhibit featured the a collection of photographs by Uwe Ommer titled “Family Album.”

Ommer has traveled the world to photograph families in context. Four years using nearly every from of transportation imaginable.

Uwe made it to South Dakota.

Learn more about Uwe Ommer at the Family Album Chicago web site.

I wonder if there would be a way to approximate this project virtually. Students from different locations could contribute images of their own families and a descriptive paragraph.

The July issue of eSchoolNews contains a headline article “Copyright: Can it hold knowledge hostage?” The articles takes its direction from an Annenberg School of Communication conference entitled Knowledge Held Hostage.

We emphasize student created multimedia products as a way for students to explore and process course content. When these projects were based in a physical location (e.g., a classroom, a school), existing “fair use” guidelines apply. You can use “small amounts” of material (text, music, images) within an educational multimedia product stored on a classroom computer. However, posting that same product to the Internet changes the rules. Works on the Internet are regarded as “publications” and are governed by the same rules that apply to commercial publication. This changed to some extent with the “TEACH Act.” The TEACH Act was enacted to allow on-line classes to provide similar experiences to face-to-face classes. For example, as a classroom instructor, I can take a small amount of material (e.g., a graph from the textbook) and display this material in class as part of a lecture. An on-line instructor would probably now be allowed to scan a graph from the textbook and post the image with comments on the web as long as access was limited to students from the instructor’s class.

The focus of the TEACH Act leaves unclear what students are allowed to create and post and whom would be allowed to review this material (e.g., parents).

Crews and Law analysis of the TEACH Act.

Indiana University – Purdue checklist of TEACH Act compliance.

Writing about legal matters is tricky. The best advice is probably to understand the punch line from the joke about the baseball umpire – “it ain’t nothing until I call it.” Laws are vague and comments about laws are closer to “opinions” than anything else. Court action often ends up defining what laws mean.

I am very interested in those willing to give their “opinion” regarding what content students are allowed to post.

Windows users – have you secretly lusted (in your heart) after the really cool digital media tools Mac users take for granted. Here is an opportunity to approximate iPhoto on your machine.

“Picasa works with the digital photo files on your PC to create a better, more organized viewing and editing experience. Picasa will not delete or move the location of pictures saved on your PC.”

Picasa has also been purchased by Google (like blogger.com) and is currently free.

Thanks to Craig Nansen for this suggestion.

CNN reports that an email hoax is circulating reporting that CNN has claimed Osama bin Laden has committed suicide. The email contains an image file that is actually a virus.

Beware

I was online recently with an acquaintance at Houghton Mifflin and she said she was taking this week off to avoid complications of the convention. Houghton Miffilin is located in Boston.

This election year seems extremely important in setting the future path for the country. Differences of opinion regarding the war in Iraq and how it should now be resolved will likely be quite influential. Fundamental goals for education will also be important to many of us.

I was curious about how the Internet might be involved in this process. Each party has a convention site – Democratic Convention; Republican Convention. The same is true for the candidates – George Bush; John Kerry.

The democrats promise a gavel to gavel webcast and blogs. The Republicans will likely provide the same sources.

Washington Post comment on this phenomenon.

I am Mark Grabe and I approve of this blog.

Cindy is in California at Apple Camp. She sent an email this morning saying I should connect to watch. It seems some of the sessions are being streamed. However, the stream is intended for ADEs only (which would also exclude me) so I cannot share.

Here is an early morning view from a session room.

When the room filled up I had Cindy stand up so I could find her. I later captured this image – she is the circled woman in the second row.

I have spent the last two days attempting to backup this server. Two days of my life! Things should not be this complicated, but security comes at a price. I have had very good luck throughout my career with technology, but bad luck catches up with everyone from time to time (recent problem).

Two situations cause me problems.
1) I purchase a lot of software and upgrades that I download. I tend to get excited about any new toy and if it works I forget to make a backup of the download. If I have a disk problem, there is no box on my shelf with the CD I need to reinstall.
2) I am now using software that is beyond my level of technical understanding. The MySQL database supporting this blog is a good example. I can write scripts to query a database, but I am not certain I even know where the data in the database is stored.

My solution is to backup the entire hard drive. I purchased a 160 Gigabyte LaCie drive for $160. One dollar for a gigabyte of storage! Back in the old days I purchased a box of 10 Elephant brand 5.25″ floppies for $25 and felt I had received a bargain. Each would hold approx 360 K.

Anyway, the idea was to back up the 5 gigabytes on this server on the new external hard drive. Should be simple. It takes several hours to transfer 5 gigs using the free software that came with the drive. I also figured out I had to log in as “root” or the copy program would ask me to certify that some system files could be copied. After a couple of hours of playing around, the drive crashed and hence the need for a second day.

MacMall was great about sending me a new drive and when I return the one that no longer works for not charging me twice. However, the salesman offered my a two year warranty for $40. Cindy says I have this very annoying habit of being very logical and having to discuss the logic of different situations with people who really are not interested. It took me about 15 minutes to explain to the salesperson that a $40 guarantee on a $160 product was stupid. What I could not afford to lose was the potentially hundreds of hours of labor it took to create the content stored on the drive. A new drive would be of limited value should the first drive crash because the costly component would be gone. Given this reality, I explained to the salesperson that it did not instill confidence to offer a guarantee that was such a high percentage of the product cost under such circumstances. Insurance rates are based on the frequency of bad events and it appeared the company either expected many bad events or was trying to make too much money. I could have just said “No thanks”, but what fun would that have been.

He was a nice guy and I hope was paid by the hour. Perhaps someone was actually monitoring my call as they claim is possible and was impressed with the employee’s tolerance.