A conference is a kind of competitive environment. I tend to be drawn to sessions that I have found beneficial in the past. Because I assume many folks operate in this fashion you have sessions that draw hundreds of people and some that draw much less. The organizers know this and schedule some sessions in very large rooms and others in smaller rooms. I wonder who makes such decisions and if presenters are aware of relative room size.
Bernie Dodge is one of those large room people and an individual I have followed over the years. I have listened to Bernie present on several themes, but the topic that made his reputation (in my opinion) and continues to be a major focus of his work is the WebQuest. Bernie has a sense of humor regarding his “claim to fame” and has titled his personal blog One Trick Pony.
I think I can trace the evolution of the WebQuest phenomenon – first there was the concept, then there was the online WebQuest directory, then there was the attempt to promote design patterns, and finally QuestGarden.
Today’s presentation was a one-year review of the QuestGarden project. I would describe QuestGarden as an example of a more socially-based site – users have accounts, WebQuests are built with the aid of specialized design tools and design guidelines, and participants have the opportunity to repurpose/extend WebQuests developed by others.
Turning an idea free and seeing it grow must be very gratifying. It also seems to lead to some frustration – a kind of “that is not what I meant” feeling. The issue that seems to generate the frustration involves the type of thinking activities promoted through WebQuests. The goal is to encourage analysis and above (Bloom’s taxonomy). Bernie would prefer other tasks based on the general model to be called web exercises.
QuestGarden will require a subscription fee as of Sept. 1. The fee ($20 for two years) is low and intended to defray server and bandwidth costs. Access to WebQuests will continue at no cost and a brief no cost experience will be available to support college courses intended to introduce future teachers to WebQuests.
Details! Details! We made it to San Diego for NECC without problems. I paid my ISTE dues. I reserved a hotel room. I even made it to the plane on time. I forgot one small thing. I forget to register. It turns out that early bird registration for ISTE members is $140. On-site registration is $298.
It is really OK. I do not mind supporting the financial needs of the organization. It is just that I now have provided Cindy another example of my organizational skills and I am likely to hear about this again.
Happy Independence Day (before attending digital photography session)
The topic of evaluating blog entries has surfaced. If you are an educator and intend to involve your students in “blogging to learn”, the suggestions that have emerged in this strand are interesting.
However, I would probably not hold myself to these standards. Some expectations, for example, involve cross-checking multiple sources to create a well reasoned post. This is great expectation if one is blogging to learn or if one wants to position his/her blog as a source of perspective for others. What if one “blogs to remember” (a personal goal) or “blogs to stimulate” (a social goal)? Perhaps we need to tag our entries by purpose rather than by topic.
“We’ve been sitting on the top of the pile for so long that we’ve grown complacent. The attitude is we’ll never be knocked off the top of the perch. People are dangerously naïve and uninformed about what’s going on in other parts of the globe.”
The article appears to call for a tighter integration of business and education. Not sure I agree – the mantra used to be “prepare students to be learners and thinkers – preparing students for the jobs of today results in outdated workers”. While I agree that educational institutions need to change, moving occupational training into the K-12 environment, not matter what the focus, is not going to prepare a generation capable of the type of innovation needed for a competitive world. I do agree with the concern that our education system exists within an environment of conformity – too few options to develop local strengths and take advantage of local opportunities.
The Senate Commerce Committee moves on with a proposal that would offer providers new opportunities without the assurance of net neutrality (eSchool News source).
The attempt to assure net neutrality was an attempt to address the following issue (quote from linked article):
Supporters of the amendment argued that service providers could give preferential treatment to business partners or use pricing and access limits to discriminate between web sites and other internet users. Phone companies have talked about creating a “two-tiered” system in which users of their networks–including schools and other web site operators–desiring faster service for the delivery of broadband or voice-over-IP applications would have to pay more. Those who couldn’t pay would be relegated to the internet “slow lane.”
The neutrality issue is not about setting a price point for connection, it is about providers ability to alter download speed of categories of data in support of provider self interest. For example, a telephone company may degrate VOIP speeds to encourage traditional phone use. A cable company might degrade video downloads to encourage pay per view or the purchase of additional channels. The provider would not be “neutral” with respect to the content one could effectively download from the Internet. The potential problem would seem to be most dangerous in locations where real competition does not exist (perhaps less populated areas without alternative providers) and users could not switch to a different provider offering more competitive services.
Technology is not perfect and sooner or later when working with technology one will face obstacles that must be overcome. I think I have noticed something about the approach people take in attempting to solve such problems. When working in a new or unmastered area, people first assume that they must be doing something wrong when they encounter problems. Sometimes this lack of creative thinking makes solving the problem impossible.
I encountered one such problem today. I operate a wiki on one of my servers for students in my summer graduate class. My tech skills are developed out of necessity and I always feel like I am operating right at the edge of my capabilities. Not a very confident feeling.
An interesting theoretical position taken by some who design wiki software (in my opinion) is that the forces of good will always overcome the forces of evil. In other words, one can allow all comers to post and edit each others posts and the final product will improve rather than disintegrate. I am not as confident and so I want to impose some access limits on the wiki I operate for my students. The system that mediawiki (the software I use) has available for addressing such issues combines login and email authentication. As system administrator, I can decide to allow a person access to the wiki and I provide that person access by using the wiki to send that person an email with a randomly generated password. If the person is who he/she claims to be (the email address belongs to the person), the person will receive the email and then use the password provided to login to the wiki (and then create a personalized password). Anyway, the system is about providing a reasonable amount of security.
This system was working until last night. A student emailed me and said she forgot her password and needed to create a new account (passwords are encrypted so creating a new account is one solution). I connected to the wiki program as administrator and had the system send her a password. She contacted me today and said the email never arrived. My first reaction was that she must have made a mistake (the wiki said it send the email). After trying a couple of more times without any luck, I began to try my standard debug strategies for such situations. I attempted to enroll myself as a student user and have the system send an email to an account I know works – my own. Still nothing. This is the point at which doubt takes over. Some mysterious config or preference file in Apache, MySQL, or MediaWiki (or some combination) must have gone bad. I had no idea where to begin looking or what I would do about the wiki requirement I had established for me course. I was feeling very helpless.
Then I remembered Port 25. What are the odds a 50+ year old educational psychologists would know what ports are and what port 25 is used for? A better question would be should I have to know what ports are so that I can run a wiki?
I called the computer help desk. “Is the university blocking port 25?”, I asked. “Yes we are” was the reply. From this point on I will have to approximate my comments a bit. “It would have been nice if you would have taken the time to contact those of us who run servers before you did that” I suggested. “I spent a lot of time assuming something had gone wrong with my server.” “We did not know how to find all the servers that are out there” was the justification for noting letting me know that my server would stop sending email without notice.
Port 25 is used for email (80 is for http, 21,22 for ftp, etc.). The university decided that by blocking port 25 those servers responsible for unknown email spam could be eliminated. Sure enough blocking port 25 eliminates email spam should my server have been sending spam. Blocking port 25 also prevented students from gaining access to the wiki to complete course assignments.
Since I am still in a problem solving mode, how would I locate servers so that those individuals responsible might be contacted? I would probably scan for machines on the net with port 80 open, I would use the server names to identify the department associated with the IP address hosting the server (grabe.psych.und.nodak.edu is as one might guess in the Psych department), and I would call or email the chairs of such departments and ask them to inform anyone in the department running a server that the email port would be blocked.
I am feeling better now. Thanks for reading. Remember, if something goes wrong, it may not be your fault. 😉
I encountered an interesting tutorial on generating “pencil sketches” from photos on the Graphics Reporter (Lesa King) web site (this was the feature and will not likely be what you see if you wait to connect). The tutorial explained the technique in Photoshop (which I don’t use), but a little experimentation with Photoshop Elements produced a reasonable result.
Addison and me
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