Kids.us, the domain promising content appropriate for a young audience, is online. NeuStar, the company responsible for registering sites wanting to use this domain, requires registrants to submit their content for review prior to website activation. The only link I found was to the Smithsonian so we will have to see whether companies make the effort or see any advantage in this approach.
Ran into a couple of interesting policy issues today. The Grand Forks schools no longer allow students or teachers to bring their own laptops to school. It turns out the schools have major problems with the recent viruses even though protected by a firewall and are guessing that a teacher brought the virus inside the protected system on a personal machine. The school has no way to control the virus protection on personal machines like they can on the machines owned by the district. As you might expect, teachers who have invested in laptops expecting to use the machines at home and in their classrooms are not pleased.
I am also confronting unexpected policy issues related to wireless networks. I thought wireless was the answer and I have been frustrated with tech administrators who are holding up access in local educational buildings because appropriate security is not in place. I am starting to learn that there more security issues than I realized. I understand that once within range, an unprotected wireless network could be accessed by anyone with a wireless laptop. Somehow, this did not bother me. I can also sit down at any computer on campus and access the network without identifying myself. It just seemed allowing open access to desktop machines and worrying about laptops was out of balance. Perhaps people working on hard connected computers are more visible?
The idea that someone outside my building (or home) might be using my network seemed impossible. I can’t even gain access from certain locations within my house. It turns out you can build an antenna to improve your range – see the story of the Pringle antenna. I guess that guy pointing the potato chip can at my house was not as strange as I thought.
Gallup has completed the annual poll on public attitudes toward public schools.
Some conclusions included in the executive summary:
1. The public has high regard for the public schools, wants needed improvement to come through those schools, and has little interest in seeking alternatives.
2. The public sees itself as uninformed on the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) Act, with 69% saying they lack the information needed to say whether their impression of the act is favorable or unfavorable.
3. Responses to questions related to strategies associated with NCLB suggest that greater familiarity with the law is unlikely to lead to greater public support.
4. The public is concerned about getting and keeping good teachers, thinks teacher salaries are too low, and is willing to see higher salaries paid to teachers teaching in more challenging situations.
5. The public continues to believe that closing the achievement gap between white students and black and Hispanic students is important but blames the gap on factors unrelated to the quality of schooling.
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.