Category: General

We made a trip to Madison, WI, over the weekend to take our college daughter some stuff for her apartment. On Sunday, we happened to purchase a copy of the Wisconsin State Journal and Cindy made the following observations about the way teachers were portrayed while reading the comics section during the drive home.

“Back to school” apeared to be a theme of many of the offerings.
a) “Frazz” shows a teacher complaining that the start of school is tough because the students forget so much over the summer. A student is shown talking to the custodian and asks if that is why he turns the pictures of the presidents upside down in their frames and the custodian replies that last year the teacher did not notice until November.
b) “Real life” shows a woman talking with an unpictured individual. The unseen individual says that the start of school is tough because he/she is laughed at and picked on. In the next frame, the unseen individual is shown as a man sitting in a chair holding his head and the woman says – “I told you not to become a teacher.”
c) “Hi and Lois” address why they call it labor day. It turns out that Labor Day began in 1882 when the Knights of Labor held a parade in New York. Chip (the adolescent) thought it should serve as a day of mourning by the suffering students about to be condemned to ten months of academic servitude.
d) “Luann” offers a poem:
I learned a lot this summer
like how to wax the car
how to jump the battery
and how to change a tire
etc. etc.

But now my summer’s over
and school’s about tp start
It’s time to study calculus,geography and art.
So what will serve me better
when life is hard and cruel …
This things I learned this summer nor the stuff I learn in school.

Welcome back teachers and future teachers.

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.