July 02, 2009

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July 02, 2009 11:57 PM

Mel: U of Kansas joins the “open by default” scholarly publications club

w00t - the University of Kansas is joining the list (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) of universities with open-by-default settings for their faculty’s scholarly articles. It is the first public American university to do so.

This is definitely my knee-jerk young-’un “hurrah open access!” response, though - as someone who isn’t (yet…) a publishing faculty member, journal editor, or school administrator, I’d love to hear the perspectives of those folks on initiatives like this. Maybe there’s a cost or downside that I’m just not aware of. What keeps this kind of thing from being more widespread?

July 02, 2009 04:15 PM

July 01, 2009

Gui: A Post Script

July 01, 2009 02:53 PM

Mel: Please thank your schools today.

In the middle of a conference on education, it would be remiss for me to not give thanks to the schools that got me here.

Willowbrook Elementary, where my kindergarten teacher said I’d learn anything I wanted through reading, where the librarians made a special exception to the book check-out limit when I began to max it out each day, and where I had my first taste of small nudges making big systems changes when the grown-ups implemented my solution to the bake sale product drought (give a one-free-goodie ticket to each kid who brought a plate of goodies from their parents). A much younger neighborhood kid came up to me years later when I was in high school. “Are you the one who had the idea for bake sale tickets? I heard the teachers mentioning your name about it yesterday.” I should go back and have breakfast there with some of my old teachers; I haven’t done that in a couple years.

Maple Middle School, where I learned to write my heart out and deliberately wear my geekhood on my sleeve. Where I learned that just because older kids said something was hard (reading Shakespeare, for instance) didn’t mean I couldn’t do it. Where I stumbled onto the idea of math concepts having proofs and fell in love with math before I could discover that preteen girls were supposed to think that math was hard. Where I began to throw myself into my work and pull allnighters at 11, sneaking into the bathroom past my bedtime to read textbooks and the most original source materials I knew of and could access (like the Origin of Species - I still hadn’t become aware of the concept of the “research journal”). When I graduated from 8th grade, my parents told me they were proud of me. That’s the first time I can really remember that happening. I’m pretty sure my teachers repeatedly reaching out to tell them about my somewhat ridiculous overachievement habits played a big role in that phrase coming out of my father’s mouth - he told me nearly a decade later that it’d been the first time in 14 years that he realized that I was actually doing really, really well.

IMSA, the first time I ever struggled to pass a class (Fogel’s legendary number theory elective), the first time I was surrounded by people smarter than me in every way, the first time I was adopted by a group of older kids who taught me, watched out for me, and were… my friends. It was the first place where I was marked more by my intellectual interests than by my hearing. This is where I learned to teach and improvise, where I started speaking up and making suggestions, where I started to see how I could grow up and perhaps even choose to live in a culture that differed from the one that I was raised in; where I had outlets for all my excess intellectual energy, where I discovered computers and Linux (though not yet the communities which made them), where I was stunned to find that I could adeptly participate in group discussions on the internet where I didn’t have to strain to lipread. My teachers pointed out to me that I was good at certain things I’d previously thought of things I “just did,” and coached me on creative writing, social science research, and curriculum development outside of class (though I didn’t realize that was what I was doing at the time - I thought I was being a class assistant for workstudy). There was the expectation that you would grow up to do great things - it took me a long time to believe that I could be included in a statement like that, but eventually the revelation came that not only could I be worth something in the distant future if I worked my butt off, I already was. And what a difference that made.

Olin gave me a place where the entire instutition was a home - all of campus rather than a corner and a nest of friends. It showed me (with great difficulty) that I could define my own goals rather than always finding my way to someone else’s. This is where I caught on fire for education, changing systems of schooling, making learning more self-directed. This is where I learned to work with whole communities, dancing between administrators, students, professors, visitors, having little conversations here and there, making tiny tools, catching others on fire for something so that it became our project instead of mine, relaying stories… until something shifted, quietly, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world that something should be a certain way. It’s where I became a hacker, where I started contributing to project communities (including open-source ones) because I thought it would be cool - to have doing something that I wanted to do even cross my mind as an option. I learned how to reflect on my own learning, how to embrace failure as a teacher, and how not to ask permission. How to see my heroes as human and established ways as socially constructed and therefore somehow hackable. And that I could get other folks to realize the same.

None of these schools were perfect; none of them are perfect. Still, I wouldn’t be the person that I am without those years - the good experiences encouraged me, the bad ones gave me empathy that drives me to improve things for the kids who follow.

I am ridiculously strapped for cashflow, but I need to put my money where my mouth is. The latter two ended their fiscal year 15 minutes ago; right before that, I made my donations for the year (IMSA and Olin students are known for pyrotechnically last-minute procrastination sometimes) and will circumvent the same thing happening next year by giving my 2009 donations tomorrow. I’m a public school kid and a scholarship kid; thanks to the generosity of many, many people, I’ve never had to pay tuition, never had to take out a student loan, was able to save some of the money that I earned from working all through college - enough to volunteer for things I loved straight after graduation instead of needing to take a job I didn’t want in order to get out of debt.

I’ve also emailed my old teachers to tell them thank you. (It’s easy to forget, my middle school teachers told me when I visited from college. Most kids never come back. Thank you for coming back.)

If a school or teacher - or most likely, schools or teachers - made a difference to you, please go back and tell them - and do more than tell them. Give them something - money, time, supplies, advice, introductions, whatever you can offer. Pay it forward so that they can do the same for other kids.

I’ll write an actual update on NECC-Tuesday tomorrow.

July 01, 2009 05:02 AM

Gui: An Open Letter to President Miller

President Miller,

This is Gui Cavalcanti, Class of 2009, on my personal email address.

I was very sad to read the news that Olin changed its fundamental precepts to drop the scholarship from full tuition to 50% tuition. I can tell you point blank that I would not have been able to attend.

The fundamental nature of the school has changed, in a very significant way that cannot easily be undone. The school has responded to this financial crisis in a very conservative, unimaginative, businesslike manner that does a great injustice to the fundamental spirit that I signed up for when I decided to attend Olin in the first place.

If you had sat me and my parents down and said "Folks, in order to make it through a few hard years while maintaining the principles of the college, we're going to need each alumni and their family to donate a couple thousand dollars a year," I can tell you I would've tried as hard as I could to make that donation. If you had asked me to take some of the burden before making a structure-defining decision, in order to avert the structure-defining consequences, I would've put as much money aside as I could. I could probably even have been convinced to look for some corporate sponsorship for the college, ala FIRST Robotics fund drives, or to think of other innovative fund-raising techniques to pursue throughout the years. I'm sure that if the alumni, students, faculty and staff all got together and brainstormed, we could think of hundreds of ways to raise hundreds of little bits of money at a time that would contribute to the greater good. How about a required internship for a junior year semester, where the students' wages went to the college and the college provided housing? How about an Olin/Babson venture capital cooperative for technological student entrepreneurs? How about an engineering services business run for Babson students working on startups, run by volunteer Olin students with profits going directly to the school? What about a Massachusetts-area mentoring service through SERV, whose fees went to Olin? We would not only raise money, but we would all raise awareness of a school that cares so fervently about its fundamental principles that every participant is hitting the streets to conserve those principles.

Unfortunately, now the decision has been made. Instead of asking me for help to conserve the fundamental values of the college, it almost felt as if I had to ask if I could offer my opinion on this decision. On top of that, instead of having to swallow the expected pill of a 25% scholarship decrease, I'm being surprised with a 50% scholarship decrease. All of a sudden the cost of Olin jumped from $12,000 (room and board) a year to over $37,000 all told. Sure, we're still cheaper than the Ivy League... by a few thousand dollars... if you don't get any merit-based scholarships. It's now in the order-of-magnitude range of price difference to in-state tuition. In one fell swoop, we have declared this aspect of the Olin experience "nothing special."

Let me get to the point of this letter. I'm writing you to let you know that I will not be supporting the college financially as an alumni until the full scholarship is reinstated. I have decided to tie my personal philosophy of philanthropy towards the college to the college's current attitude on philanthropy (as best I can divine). My perception of the college's current attitude is this: that philanthropy is optional, a mindset you allow yourself when circumstances are comfortable. When times get tough, however, philanthropy can be first on the chopping block.

And so, President Miller, I must say "sorry." I have bills to pay, a new apartment to move into, a car to take care of, a wedding to save up for. Please let me know when the college acknowledges its mistake and reverts back to the beautiful spirit that I once knew, and I might be able to squeeze a little and support my alma mater.

Thank you for your time,
-Gui Cavalcanti

July 01, 2009 01:51 AM

June 30, 2009

Mel: NECC Monday continued

NECC, Days 1-2 - photo slideshow, and then I’ll finish my notes for Monday (with the expectation that I’ll feel better enough afterwards to head to Tuesday’s NECC; I love my immune system.)

Many attendees here have flipcams and netbooks - simple, few-function devices that they do not mercilessly power-use. They  generally don’t have time to recompile their kernel, let alone know what one is; they need to email their students NOW. They don’t have time to debate the merits of .ogg vs .avi vs other video formats; their high school seniors are presenting NOW and they need to grab something off the shelf and hit a button and have a movie NOW and who has time to figure out licensing when you need to upload that movie for their parents NOW and we need a spreadsheet NOW so let’s use Excel because it’s on our computers anyway or maybe if we aren’t on dial-up) Google Spreadsheets is sufficiently handy to fulfill our need for NOW. Default settings are important.

I need to talk with more teachers to find out how they find about technologies to use, but my current hypothesis is “click first hit from a Google search that has a massive easy-setup download button and is free or very, very cheap.” By that metric, Fedora and Sugar have a long, long ways to go. The workshop on Google Apps, on the other hand, had a crowded line that stretched on down the hallway. The  workshop wasn’t run by Google; it was run by a teacher who had used the stuff. Same with the iPhone session.

Went by the Second Life pavilion. This was a master lesson on how to welcome newbies to a space in a way that makes them want to  come back again and again. No sooner had I sat down than a volunteer approached me and offered to help get me started - sat with me for a half-hour walking me through making an account and doing basic navigation, didn’t leave until I’d started talking with the remote welcome team in Second Life (who he enthusiastically described to me - “oh, she’s wonderful! One of my best friends in SL! Tell her I say hello!”). By starting as a message courier, I rapidly got drawn into the conversation; the online greeters were equally excited, people kept coming up to me and welcoming me and showing me small interesting things (multiple welcomers treating you as if you were already a key part of their community == good feeling), the on-site volunteer kept popping in and asking if everything was all right and going “oh, you’re doing X! That’s awesome! Check out that thing near X!”

The thing that most impressed me was how they encouraged me to experiment and explore while simultaneously putting “you won’t fail” fallbacks in place (”Mel, can you try to teleport and follow me? Don’t worry, I’ll teleport you if you get lost.”) I tend to be more reckless than the average in terms of launching from unfamiliar trapeezes and trusting that I’ll grab something to break my fall on the way down, but knowing exactly what safety net was in place was nevertheless comforting. They had scheduled tours; we walked around Genome, a world that a genetics professor had constructed (swim inside a cell! talk with chromosomes!) and then Biome (flying up to realize the globe of paramecium I’d been staring at was actually a water droplet in the lens of a gigantic microscope was a lovely moment) and were constantly encouraged to try things, play with things, come back and use the space anytime… Teachers sure do know how to make you feel comfortable taking risks in learning new things. We need to learn that.

Looking at ads like this, I wonder how computers ever got a reputation for making children into socially isolated beings.

Andy Pethan (engineer): “The focus on STEM! STEM! STEM! is driving me nuts!” (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.) “I think English teachers are the biggest untapped market for technology in education. They could do so much with it.” I pointed out to Andy that STEM teachers tend to be the ones that like the tech stuff - which he knew and acknowledged as obvious - and that sometimes English teachers became English teachers, or early childhood teachers, or… well, non-STEM teachers - not just because they loved English or small children or History or such, but also because they might be afraid of STEM. This is a blatant overgeneralization and there are tons of exceptions, but that’s something that’s been drilled into my head by my aunt (who teaches kindergarten) - the phrase “those who can’t, teach,” as untrue and unfair as we think it may be, actually did come from somewhere. Argh! Systems that don’t work!

Happy exception: an art teacher and a physical education (PE) teacher from Ohio had teamed up to get another HP grant - I talked with Julie Lustic, the PE teacher, and was amazed. These teachers started out with very little technical knowledge. Julie described how she had to figure out how to save video files, struggling on her own until she discovered “File > Save As,” and then how it was tough to figure out which folder it had just saved into - a reminder of how many computer skills I take for granted despite trying my best not to. I was awed by their tenacity; they’d obviously gotten far more digitally fluent on their own since.

Julie would film her students running, jumping, and skidding across the gym on scooters. “Kids love to watch themselves,” she said. This was particularly helpful for the very young children (kindergarten, first grade) who were still developing a lot of fine and gross motor skills. Kids go through a continuum of development; for jumping rope, a 4-year-old might start by trying to windmill her arms awkwardly around at the shoulder, arcing over the back of her head; then over the next year or so progress to flailing elbow movement until finally, at 6, she’s jumping rope fluidly with her hands down by her sides and the barest hint of wrist movement. By filming the kids, she was able to track who was in what development stage when, and convey that to the parents, who often would think “able to jump rope” was a binary “yes she can / no she can’t” switch, and profited greatly from seeing the stages of learning they could then help their kid through.

She showed videos of adult athletes doing the moves she was about to teach them. “None of these kids had ever seen somebody vault before. They thought it was something I had invented.” They got projectors so kids could see the videos closer to the scale of actual people. All three teachers also set a target of raising 4th grade math test scores; they did this by talking with the 4th grade classroom teachers to find out what vocabulary words they were using in their classrooms, then working those words into their lessons (”run around the perimeter of the gym, measure the circumference of your head…”). While Julie and I talked, Ida Bergson - the art teacher - played stop-motion videos of dancing geometric shapes that she and the kids had made. Ida and Julie were proud of how it had worked out, and also said it had taken an immense amount of extra effort to pull it off.

These were teachers clearly going above and beyond and having huge effects on their students. And they had to fight every step of the way. Nobody in their district took their grant application seriously, because “they thought we weren’t going to get it anyway, sure, apply.” When they got it, there was an uproar because “who gives a PE teacher a computer?” They were refused district tech support and told they were on their own, which is entirely reasonable. But when they tried to fix things on their own, they got in trouble for not going through the district tech support that had already said it wouldn’t help them. There was a long story about how they had to keep on fighting through administration to keep doing this - even after the results had been apparent and positive.

We talked about where that might come from. Politically, it is unusual for art/PE teachers to get technologies the classroom teachers don’t have themselves (then again, Julie and Ida put in the work to make the grant happen and succeed). It’s new. It’s scary. New things are scary. And if you barely have the resources to keep afloat, taking the energy to deal with scary new things is not high on your priority list; you kinda wish that it would go away. Another systems problem. It’s hard to fix. I’m glad that Ida and Julie are still determined to fight the good fight; those kids in Cleveland Heights are very, very lucky.

My cousin Audrey watches this TV show, so I had to take a picture with the SuperWhy! team.

Walking around the vendor exhibition area, I was reminded that I’m not really the type of person that’s attractive for a sales rep to talk with. For good reason. I look too old to be a K12 student but too young to be a teacher (though I’m old enough to be a brand-new one) or someone who actually makes or influences purchasing decisions (ok, wearing a t-shirt rather than business attire may have made a difference) so I wasn’t pegged in the “education” space, and as a young woman I usually don’t get pegged in the “technology” space, so educational technology vendors probably don’t see me as a fit for who they ought to talk with. (Many happy exceptions here, but compared to the response to my friend Evan, a 21-year-old asian male engineer a in collared shirt, it was a fascinating contrast.)

I actually like being invisible, since I can easily choose to make myself visible by turning on the SHEER ENTHUSIASM!!! switch. This let me quietly wander around and watch what people were doing; there was an overwhelming amount of marketing shiny - far more than I would usually think contributes to conveying the real value of a product or service. Does a salesman dressing up as Indiana Jones (complete with whip and cave-themed booth) make your product any more valuable? Can you be more specific than “RAISES STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT!” in terms of what you’ll do for me? Primary colors and exclamation points everywhere; buzzwords on every sign. There were a lot of mini-workshops where the presenter “taught” the audience something with their technology, be it a clicker response system or a smart whiteboard; they were very polished and energetic, but I felt like most of them were…. sort of manufactured. One booth had a film crew taping the presenter on a stage, elevated about 4 feet above an audience of roughly a dozen people - few enough to jump down and have a real conversation with, in any case.

I have very mixed feelings about branding and marketing and PR. (This means, of course, that if I ever get an MBA, it’ll probably be in one of those, since that’s the thing that makes me most uncomfortable. And I do realize the three are different things… the MBA interns at RH are trying to teach me the difference, but I don’t yet really understand it. Anyway.)

NCWIT did see me walking by, and went “oh! you need to go encourage young women to pursue technology careers!” That’s a paraphrase, but I got a packet of materials (…actually, with rather good statistics) and a howto on approaching a local school to volunteer to do a presentation or something with them. I’ve got mixed feelings about this too. I am female, and I do like technology (and education, for that matter), and… okay, so? I’m wearing sandals, and I like technology, and you don’t see campaigns crusading for more sandal-wearers to get into IT. I was amused by how they tried to persuade me to particularly target low-income schools to volunteer at, though. “You know first-hand that engineering is a way to not have a low income!” I’m fairly certain that if you tallied up my work hours and my income since graduation, I would be making way below minimum wage, but that’s what I chose when I decided that volunteering and working on interesting things to help people trumped getting a stable job with lots of monies immediately after getting my degree (which was certainly an option - and I can see that someone from a low-income background might be more motivated to pursue that route than a child of the middle class with backup savings, no student loans, and no family to support).

Apparently Joseph Schumpeter wrote about Disrupting Class 70 years before the book came out.

Generally speaking, I have not found the below photograph to be true.

As an open source geek, I find it interesting to see proprietary software vendors trumpet that their products give users the “freedom to create, share, and discover everywhere.” If you buy their product, you are free to use it to create non-interoperable files and share those files with other people who have purchased the exact same software, and thereby discover what they’ve done. You can take your laptop running this software with you, hence the “everywhere.” (Or maybe you can pay to make it work on your cell phone for a year.) I know this is a very biased view, but it makes me feel kind of like… “yes, cookies from a box are mighty tasty, but in comparison to cookies that my brother bakes from scratch - you really don’t know what you’re missing…”

Sat down next to two teachers (well, one is now a teacher trainer) for lunch. When I conveyed my mixed feelings about what I’d seen that morning, Sandy Scragg helped me sort it out by explaining that there were two tracks of thought in educational technology. The one we come from is the one that sees tech as a tool for creation, for enablement, for greater interaction between individuals. The other one is an entirely reasonable response to the current system which is full of high-pressure, high-stakes assignments and tests and unions and long hours and low pay and high turnover; it sees technology as a way to automate teaching, not to free teachers to be more creative, but to turn them into standardized automatons. “Can you believe, I actually heard them say, ‘with this, your teachers don’t even need to think!’ They give you these scripts, say ‘read this word for word,’ the idea is, since we have high turnover, with a script it doesn’t matter who’s in front of the kids.”

We talked about how K12 education in the US has had this huge “lectures are bad! we need to make things more interactive! no lectures!” thing going for quite some time, and when our most successful students from that system graduate and go to college as we hoped they would (the topic of whether college as The Desired Endpoint of K12 is another debate), where do they end up their freshman year but 200+ student lecture rooms. We also talked about standardized testing; Sandy differentiated between testing as a benchmark (”that’s okay”) vs high-stakes testing as The Thing that the futures of “students, teachers, entire districts” ride upon.

Later that afternoon, I sat with a teacher from the Bronx and another one from a tough part of Texas who were discussing the difficulties of dealing with parents. In the good ol’ days (long before I was born, according to their dates - they’re both veteran teachers), parents were More Involved; schools made an effort to reach them. They’d bus the parents in for meetings and workshops once a month after school, so they could teach the parents too. They had a place where non-working parents could go and study and learn in the library after they dropped off their kids in the morning. Nowadays they’re seeing far more teenage parents who don’t know how to raise their kids because they didn’t have a chance to finish growing up themselves, 24-year-old mothers with 10-year-old children. The mothers still want to go out and party all night because they missed prom, missed hanging out with friends, dropped out of school, etc. because they had a kid to take care of… both the child-rearing and the childhood-having can’t coexist, so both get done quite badly, in most cases. There was no mention of what happened with the dads.

That’s all for Monday. I’ll write about http://edtechfuture.org/ separately, since I hope to find out more about it today.

June 30, 2009 04:42 PM

Mel: NECC[1] = Monday

In the style of “release early release often” and “perfect == good.enemy()” we bring you this totally unedited, rapidly typed post, because I need sleep.

This was the late-night idea. Results forthcoming. Traffic not as good as hoped, but it did meet our primary criteria of “hey, we need a way to meet people!” (In other words, we were so busy talking to people that we didn’t have time to constantly man #neccwall. This is good.)

Manned the Sugar Labs booth for a bit; had a good conversation with Scott Bullock on how engineers interested in education tend to make things for the kids they used to be (a tiny minority) and the problem of how to reach the rest.

Stopped by and talked with teachers who had gotten HP tablet PC grants. An Arkansas school had children annotate photographs with geometric drawings (”This sunflower exhibits symmetry over this line! *drawdraw*”). I asked if it was far more engaging to do that than to print out the picture and hand the kid a marker. They said yes, but didn’t know why - I wonder how much “technology helps students!” is attributable to students being excited by shiny new things, how much is due to the self-selecting nature of teachers willing to experiment with new tech (they’d tend to be the more adventuresome, dynamic ones even without “technology”), and how much the design and enablements of technology actually chips in to “increased performance.”

Another note: as an engineer, I’m used to being able to think about the “perfect” solution and then take the time to build it. Most teachers can’t do that; they don’t have the skills or time to create much in the way of new things (said the Arkansas teachers). You look around and see what’s on the shelf and do something with it. You don’t waste time thinking of things to build from scratch because you’ll never have the resources.

Then there was the Mt. Vernon high school that had gotten tablet PCs for their teachers. They didn’t have them for students; maybe 50% of their students had computer access at home. One of the teachers mentioned that he’d done his student teaching in a neighborhood with much more computer access, where you could actually email the students files and expect all of them to be able to print them out and bring them in the next day - this was a very different situation. Computers are expensive.

They were so proud that they had moved to using Powerpoint for classes. “The students love it,” they said. “Some teachers don’t have good handwriting… and this way it’s clear what they have to study [by memorization]… if they’re absent, they can watch the video at home without having to come to class and talk with the teacher…”

I… have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand, they’re doing the best they can with a difficult situation. On the other hand, this is an incremental improvement down a road I don’t agree with (drill and kill, turning learners into automatons and using technology to script away human interaction). But to overturn such a difficult situation would be extremely difficult, so maybe this is the best that they can do.

Overheard amusing conversation: “Municipal wifi? Won’t that spread all sorts of viruses around?”

There is a film titled “Autism: The Musical.” It is a documentary of an acting teacher coaching 5 autistic children to perform a musical, and looks intriguing.

The exhibit hall is HUGE.

These notes take me nearly to lunchtime on Monday. I will have to finish them tomorrow.

If I were making NECC bingo cards, they would have the following words: collaboration, sharing, management (as in “classroom managment” - this bothers me, as if children were an industrial process that we need to keep in line), problem-solving, 21st century learners, integrative, accountability, standards, immersive, constructionist, community, reaching-outside-the-classroom-walls, rigorious, standards, innovate.

There’s power and honesty here. There’s also a lot of thin glossy washes of sounding-good - educators aren’t in particular positions of power, nor are the kids they teach, and both have (as people in those situations tend to do) become extremely good at giving the answers that those in power like to hear. You can see that gloss occasionally washing over someone’s passion - projects designed so that the outcome is in ready-made press-release format, obligatory scatterings of buzzwords (you know what? I will make that bingo card) but it gives me heart that oftentimes the fire will break through. The best thing I can do, I think, is be on fire myself these next two days so that nobody else will be the only one outside their comfort zone.

Speaking of fire, I’ve got a low-grade fever - my immune system has decided that DC is full of allergens that it must FIGHT! NOW! so I’m going to sleep and write the remainder of Monday’s notes tomorrow.

June 30, 2009 03:25 AM

Mel: NECC[0] = Sunday

Hypothesis: sometimes it is better to release crappy existent stuff rather than nonexistent perfect stuff. It is late, I am tired and quashing a mild fever, here we go.

Breakfast with Mike Lee while we picked up Sugar Labs flyers. Talked about the digital divide; seniors and the underprivileged are being left out; the interfaces we assume are also leaving people out (typing, reading, and able to carry 5lbs of laptop are big assumptions). Pointed Mike towards IIF’s session with Ezter Hargittai, who studies social inequity online.

Mike mentioned that the MIT Media Lab was working on a collaborative development environment. ACTION: find out what this is - it sounds neat!

Email discussions with Eric, Mikell, and Greg about FIRST robotics and open source, prompted by FIRST presence at NECC (yay!) Why aren’t teams producing open source robotics code? Why don’t they have code repositories, even? Some of this is in the works to being fixed, and there are certainly people interested in making it happen, but nobody’s stepped up to drive it yet. I am trying to plant as many seeds as possible this week because I know I don’t have the bandwidth to drive this (but I think I might have the bandwidth to help mentor and encourage someone who wants to). Should track down Denise Lewis tomorrow.

All For Good - another excellent Mike Lee conversation. The balance between shiny top-down endorsement/marketing from the big players and the grassroots movements they’re trying to start is fascinating. I admire the effort - aggregating and matching volunteers with opportunities is certainly not a new idea - at the same time, I wonder if it’s going to work.

There are serious signal-to-noise problems to overcome without bottlenecking at a single point of quality control; it’s hard to make sure organizations can actually handle the volunteers they ask for. Even the amazing Leslie Hawthorn puts in tons of effort filtering Summer of Code orgs and certainly doesn’t have a perfect hit rate. Compounding this problem is the divide between “traditional” volunteer coordinators (volunteer coordination as done, say, 20-30 years ago) and the kind of volunteer coordination folks like Mike and myself and the Red Hat CommArch team do (which is less coordination and more… the best word I know for it is Karsten’s “gardening” analogy). It’s always a problem when two people use the same word thinking they mean the same thing when that’s not actually the case. We tossed around the idea of content stamping before letting it rest as a wait-and-see.

And then we got to the convention center. This conference is freakin’ HUGE. I have never seen anything on this scale before. You stand in the entrance and look up and there are four stories of displays and then hallways that go back and back and back and then there is another building and it is LARGER THAN MY COLLEGE BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. (Granted, that’s not extraordinarily difficult.)

The keynote was Malcom Gladwell, who is a good speaker. I’ve watched him before, though, and he tends to rehash points from his books. (And sure enough, he did it again this time. Still a good speech.) I didn’t actually watch the keynote; I caught up with people on it afterwards, and read the written summary. Instead, I helped set up the 60 VMs in the Open Source Pavilion, hereafter referred to as the OSP. Thin clients are sweet. With the money one school saved by getting a thin client system, they got huge monitors, sound systems in every classroom… 

Mike has a video of every machine here simultaneously rebooting (with cheers from the crowd). It’s sweet.

Jeff Elkner arrived. I introduced him to April-Hope (one Sugar/OLPC chapter founder to another, with the “high school chapters are awesome” bonus shared category). And Luke Faraone and I have finally met face-to-face.

Talked with teachers from northeastern NC about BBQ until one of them started telling the story of how her (middle school) kids put on a film festival - “have you ever seen a room of middle school students fully engaged? They would cheer, and then whent the next video started, they would become absolutely quiet…” The same group of teachers pointed me towards animoto, which which I have attempted to produce a slideshow. I’ll post this when the pictures are done processing.

ISTE has a lot of SIGs. It’s a list worth looking at to see the topics and the language educators interested in technology are grouping into right now. Of note: there is no early childhood category here. In fact, they don’t even really have books on it. There is a huge debate on whether computers should even be used in early childhood - with “computer usage” meaning “sit the kids in front of a screen and have them type.” I don’t think that’s age-appropriate (these kids usually are learning how to read and don’t have much fine motor control for rapid typing) but also think that type of computing is just a tiny, tiny piece of what “technology” can mean. Teachers doing vlogs of their young students, for instance.

Then there’s #neccwall. It’s one of those “it’s 11pm and we have AN IDEA!” moments (3 people now, but we’re going to try to find other first-time attendees to help out). It will be… explained more when I don’t have to wake up in 4 hours to prepare for it. In the meantime, the best explanation I can give is this video.

Finally made the mile+ hike to my hotel, accompanied partway by a group of teachers (a retired edu prof and her former students, it turns out) who gave me a blackboard pointer (I am not sure what to do with this, but I can point at things with inpunity and 2 extra feet of reach now!) and once I mentioned I’d attended a math and science magnet high school, we talked about math and science training for teachers until our paths diverged.

Need sleep so badly.

June 30, 2009 03:20 AM

DJ: The Grass is Always Greener on the Other Side of Solstice

Summer in Boston. It drags and drags and drags its heels, denying you even the long-awaited extra hours of sunshine, and then after all that pussyfooting one day it up and slaps you with what feels like a warm towel to the face.

Today was one of those afternoons I regret feeling in such a hurry–to the gym, then the pharmacy, then home with some fresh books, so I can have food at a reasonable time. It would have been a glorious, if sweaty, commute by bicycle, had that been an option. A good afternoon to be outdoors. At the office, our air conditioning was on the fritz (half the building reported being too warm, the other was too cold), but I didn’t notice immediately like most of the office staff, probably because we’re pretty conservative with the climate controls at home.

Books! Books. I spent the last week detoxing from The Dragon Reborn, which is number 3 of 11 in the Wheel of Time series. The first two weren’t suspenseful all the way through, but that one was. I wanted to pause long enough to think about the hours I was giving to reading Jordan; and the thing is, while I’m pretty sure I could identify enough conventionally productive activities to fill those hours, I’m too lazy to do them. You could take this as me needing a kick in my lazy if well-toned bum, or, given that I haven’t had the funds or the inspiration to plan a summer vacation like everybody else in the office, you could call it sloth that I’ve earned.

At any rate, the detox failed to get it out of my head. Consequences for my sleep schedule aside, this may be for the best. Series with large numbers of important characters are a challenge for me, and WoT is notorious in that regard. Jordan’s metaphor of the wheel and the weave isn’t just a metaphysical characterization of his universe, it’s the way Jordan wrote. Little details come back in big ways.

Just the same, I grabbed Pynchon’s V., wondering if alternating books might help me pace myself. It may prove to have been a bad pairing–Pynchon’s supposed to be pretty thick in his own way–time will tell. I was going to try to work through them proportionally, which would mean about 3/4 as many pages at a time of V.

June 30, 2009 12:16 AM

June 29, 2009

A pair of birds built a nest in the shelves on my front porch. I didn't notice them until yesterday when I was trying to install a screen door. One bird stayed on the nest while the other one flew up to the clothesline and watched me anxiously. You can just see the mama bird peeking out of the nest:



The silk on my corn is turning brown, which means it's time to harvest. I've only harvested one so far. It was tiny, about 5 inches long, but it was pretty well filled out with kernels, so I'm happy:

June 29, 2009 09:17 AM

Mel: NECC[-1] = Saturday

The open-source-and-education fun at NECC started even before I hit the conference. On the shuttle from the airport, I sat in front of a bone marrow transplant delivery man and next to Randall Samstag, an environmental engineer from Seattle who (as it turns out) had some questions about OpenOffice.org. We quickly got into a discussion about sanitation systems, designing waste processing plants for the developing world, and the difficulties of breaking into the field of appropriate technology and the difficulties of changing a large-scale entrenched system when customers want to throw money at the problem and be done with it rather than taking the time to get involved with the design needs of the community they’re serving. This sounded pretty familiar.

A lot of sanitation projects are large-scale government-backed operations, and getting the technology in place was harder than inventing it - he told the story of his friend, the inventor of a 3-chamber sequential flow gravity-fed wastewater treatment system designed for Venezuela that was a huge improvement over the prior “dump ‘er in the lagoon and the bacteria will break it down” method (which works, but you need a lot of lagoon space for a lot of people; this system was much smaller). It worked like a charm. Then the Cubans came. They wanted sanitation everywhere (a noble goal) but didn’t understand this newfangled 3-chamber system - they knew lagoons. So the new tech sat unused and the lagoons got dumped in and the harmful effluents in the water supply increased by an order of magnitude… and there was no way to share the information, the design, the knowledge of how to use it, so there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.

I brought up the idea of open design repositories such as Appropedia (where Chris Watkins has been doing work on sanitation), and how they serve as knowledge bases and watering holes for projects like IDDS as well as ways for potential future sanitation engineers to get involved without the high entry barrier (”must have experience to get experience”) that makes it tough for folks like Liz and Chris to break into the field. Randal was intrigued.

What does this have to do with open source and education? (more below the fold, for the sanity of Planet aggregator readers…)

Talking with Randal immediately pre-NECC got me in the mindset of seeing this as more than just an education problem, more than a technology problem… the mindset and practices of open source communities are a system, and this system can cut across multiple disciplines on many, many scales to solve a ton of systems problems.

That stayed with me throughout the conversations later that evening - whenever someone mentioned a problem that they wished they could fix, instead of jumping (as I usually do) to “let us make $foo to solve that!” (technology == solution!) or “all we have to do is teach them X!” (training == solution!), I could pause and think about what the system was that, rationally proceeding, would result in problematic outcomes (like “you can complete your college CS homework without needing to think”). And how to find out what that system was when you didn’t know. And then what kinds of tiny things might start to tip that system over.

It was a good start.

The shuttle dropped me off at EduBloggerCon’s afterparty, where all the food had already been consumed by hungry teachers. Andy Pethan and Evan Morikawa came out to tell me that one of my high-school friends was here, and I was still completely mystified when April-Hope Wareham came flying out of the corner. April-Hope was one of the founders of the IMSA OLPC chapter; I first met her as a high school senior from my alma mater, and she’s gone on to study CS at university (sophomore at UIUC next year). So she’s quite well-versed in the “open source for K12 learning” space - but told me that now she wants to bloody well fix undergraduate engineering education too - we’ve both been spoiled by learning in open-source communities and filling out rote textbook problem sets has lost its appeal. I told her about POSSE and iFoundry and she started jumping up and down.

Then she took me to a table where people were making “education anarchy! subvert the system!” headbands (mine: “svn checkout anarchy” on the front, “iz in yr anarchy” on back, with picture of cat). And this is how I met Randy Orwin, who, with Steve Hargadon, is wrangling the Open Source Pavilion at NECC. But only for a moment. Because a photographer motioned to me, April-Hope, Andy, and another fellow named Tyler and told us to stand together and smile. We obediently mugged for the camera in our red bandana headbands.

“Do you know why I took a picture of you?” the photographer asked afterwards. We shook our heads. “Look around. You guys are the digital natives. Everybody else here-” and we realized with a start that most of the attendees were old enough to be our parents - “is a digital immigrant. You guys are natives.”

We looked at each other. “Wellll, we had computers,” Andy said. “But not so much the internet,” I said. “Oregon Trail!” April-Hope said. Everyone under age 25 nodded and started talking about hunting pixelated buffalo. I reckon I could be a digital native (or at least a digital very-young immigrant) - but a networked native… that’s more like my younger cousins - the kindergarten blogger, the (then) 12-year-old who decided that the best way to get classmates to lower their carbon emissions was through tracking them on a social networking site, the 3rd grader who taped her Girl Scout cookie pitch on YouTube… compared to them, my bahasa digital is the slightly more formal lexicon of someone who’s worked through grammar books to gain that last gasp of almost-native fluency.

The night had started to wind down (I’d come in an hour before closing). Met Jennifer Ashby and Lois Smethurst, two teachers from Australia who were blogging with kids as young as 5. I was enthralled by their stories of how excited the kids were to have their work be world-readable. They used it as a portfolio of sorts, Lois explained. But it was hard to keep track of because they had one blog for the entire school, so tracking individual kids was a tough manual process - they couldn’t keep separate blogs on a finer granularity than grade level, because kids within a grade would be redistributed among differnent classes for that grade each year. Could you have an individual blog for each kid and then a Planet aggregator for each class, and just redo the .planet configuration files once a year? I asked. Individual portfolios that could stay with each student throughout all 12 years of schooling, but easy access to everyone in Mr. Johnson’s class, or the 7th grade, or the entire school, with one click. “Wow,” said Lois. “That sounds perfect.” Now I need to see if there are Planet install instructions that can be followed by a non-technical person (like a teacher…)

Took Mike Lee to dinner (generic Chinese restaurant) where he obtained a very appropriate fortune cookie - Mike is the driving force behind the OLPC DC Learning Club, and he caught me up on the brand-spankin’-new Sugar Labs DC and a host of other things - like educational technology being a systems problem not just for kids in school, but also for seniors (Mike works for the AARP) and others on the far side of the digital divide. Almost nobody’s doing stuff for them. Kids with laptops look much cuter in press photos, maybe.

We were pretty exhausted. I didn’t even check my email when we got to Mike’s house (though I did, to his fascination, pull out and use all my anti-RSI equipment to unkink my arms). Just patted the dog, texted Luke, crawled onto his couch, and was out almost instantly.

June 29, 2009 05:24 AM

June 25, 2009

Liz: MacGyver Footbal (AfriGadget)

“Young boys are starting to realize their dreams and do what ever they can to make sure that those dreams come true even if they must get themselves dirty. [...] They don’t have money to buy a soccer ball….. they make it on their own. This how the ball is made: Firstly you look for old clothes or blankets. Then you put a few condoms around, which you blow up with your mouth, but not with too much air. Just so it’s the same size as a soccer ball. After this you put either a plastic bag or a piece of old clothing over the condom. Then to make it strong, you tear up the old clothing or blanket into long strips and tie the strips all around the condom to strengthen the shape of the ball and make it heavier. Once you can feel it bounces well, you take a strong plastic bag and wrap it around the ball. Lastly you reinforce it by wrapping strong rope or tire wire around it.”

Check out the full article at:
http://www.afrigadget.com/2009/06/15/football-handmade-in-south-africa/

June 25, 2009 11:29 PM

June 24, 2009

Liz: International Development Job Hunt

I have been receiving a lot of emails lately from friends looking for jobs in the international development field. I don’t know the magical formula or panacea (in fact, I’m quite sure neither exist). The most frustrating part is the catch22 of experience. Many employers only want to hire people who have X many years working in the developing world. It’s hard to get this experience to begin with when no one will hire a rookie in this field. I’ve been feeling it myself as I’m looking for a full-time job (just consulting now). I’ve talked to a lot of friends who do devworld work about this problem, and pretty much the unanimous answer is that you simply have to catch a break. Some of them got their first job by up and moving to a country they wanted to work and then started job hunting from there, others volunteered for a year or two with an NGO overseas and eventually got hired by them, there are also ones who simply had enough experience in something not in the dev-world (eg. product development, agriculture, sanitation) that they got hired based on their experience.

However after job-hunting for awhile now and meeting people who work in the field, I have collected quite the list of websites to start with the search. Here they are. Please add a comment if you have any further suggestions or comments! Feedback is very appreciated.

Posting Boards
DevEx
Ethical Careers
SocialEdge (Skoll Foundation)
Idealist
Next Billion
SciDev
Experience Development

Specific groups/companies/ngos/government groups
ARD Inc.
FSG
PATH
Practical Action
Water Aid
Practica Foundation
IDE
HIVOS
USAID
CARE
WFP
UNICEF
GTZ
UNDP
List of aid organizations in Afghanistan, but a pretty good overall list

June 24, 2009 10:41 PM

June 23, 2009

Laura: Looking glass

June 23, 2009 11:47 AM

June 22, 2009

My corn has corn on it!



If these ears turn out to be edible and tasty, I'm going to be really pleased with myself. I'm already getting edamame, cherry tomatoes, and basil from my garden, and there's a fennel bulb and a head of radicchio that are ready to be harvested. My Job's Tears are also looking promising:



I wish that I had more pictures of what work is like on the farm, but it's hard to carry a camera around with me and still keep it clean. I did bring my camera on Saturday and took a couple of pictures of vegetable prep. Here we have X and R washing cabbages (and removing bad leaves, caterpillars, and caterpillar poop):

June 22, 2009 12:39 PM

June 21, 2009

Mel: How to find a Gill

How I spent my time in college:

1. looking for my advisor
2. making a film about it

June 21, 2009 11:08 PM

Mel: I’m going to NECC!

I was originally going to wait for all my travel plans to finalize, but there’s no reason why I shouldn’t holler out right now that I’ll be at  NECC this year. If you are also coming, let me know!

NECC is the National Educational Computing Conference, and it is - from what I’ve heard - the stuff of legend and the place to be for people interested in teaching and technology. I say this based on two things: (1) 100% of the people I know who’ve been to NECC have emailed/called/found me immediately afterwards and bellowed “YOU HAVE TO GO TO NECC!” and (2) when asked to describe what NECC was like, their first reponse is to drop their jaw into a massive grin and flail their arms around in wordless happiness before they’re able to start describing it in English.

So when I found out I was going down to DC, I quietly and calmly finished up some time-sensitive morning tasks and then RAN AROUND THE OFFICE BUILDING IN EXCITEMENT! Until it started to rain - at which point I went inside and sped another half-mile on a treadmill before I had expended enough adrenaline to sit down and be productive again. (Otherwise all my coworkers would be wondering why someone was whooping and hollering through the hallways.)

Needless to say, I’m looking forward to this. I’m looking through the program and starting to loosely map out my time there. It’s a given that I’ll want to check out “open source in education” stuff, but I also want to examine the basis of my kool-aid drinking on it, since to most of the world, this is not obvious. In fact, I’ve heard brilliant people whom I admire and respect tell me that open source and education is a terrible idea. They have good reasons. I don’t know what those reasons are yet.

I want to understand where that comes from - not to argue or fight back against it, but because there’s certainly a lot that we can learn from it and use to make our own work better. The realities and presures of working in a classroom, in a lab with creaky old equipment, with a massive district to oversee, within the government, with an overloaded IT staff, with tests and rules and regulations, with a host of kids with challenging needs, with things I can’t even imagine… and the solutions and mistakes and triumphs and opportunities that other people are already finding - what is this world? I have a lot to listen to and learn.

I’ll post more plans here when I have them, but in the meantime… who should I meet? What should I go to? Are there questions I should ask, topics I should seek out, things I should watch for? General conference-attending tips I should heed?

I plan on documenting everything I can, primarily through abusing my typing speed for live transcriptions (if you’d like me to transcribe your talk, or any particular talk, please let me know) and collecting short one-question interviews, for which I need a good question to ask. Maybe “What is your biggest learning goal for the upcoming school year, and what would help you get there?” - but that’s awkwardly phrased. Any ideas for a better one?

June 21, 2009 02:31 PM

June 18, 2009

Gui: Wrecked

A dented, steel-clad figure stands tall; chest out, arms akimbo, head cocked to one side.

Without warning, it explodes forward in a gory shower of metal limbs.

The wrecking ball swings through the space where the torso once was, knocking pieces of the body onto the stone floor in a continuing shower of loud metallic clangs.

Slowly, ponderously, the ball swings away.

The pieces on the floor twitch.

Thin cords run between each piece of dented limb, keeping the disparate pieces in their original order. The cords grow tense, slowly dragging each piece back to the knee stumps which miraculously managed to remain standing.

Piece after piece clicks into the sockets they were meant to occupy. The figure doesn’t bother attempting its previous pose – wherever limbs decide to reconnect is where they stay. The head clicks back on, completing a pose of a man hunched over, about to fall forward. Small, new dents can be seen where the pieces met the wrecking ball, or the ground.

The instant it reassembles, the wrecking ball swings by again. Somehow the ball managed to find a new trajectory, and swings from left to right across the figures’ torso. Once again, the figure explodes into dozens of pieces, blown to the right off of the still-standing knees.

A brief second passes.

Slowly, painfully, grudgingly, the pieces drag themselves back into a recognizable whole.

On the third swing you pay enough attention to notice the outline of recognizable continents and oceans gently carved into the wrecking ball.

June 18, 2009 05:42 PM

June 16, 2009

Gui: The Contraption

A cracking sound announces the arrival of the contraption.

The man’s body is contorted by the position of the seat, curled around the handlebars in a small crescent. His feet are forced to be too close to the pedals, making each stroke short and awkward. Another crack announces the fall of the whip on the man’s back; he arches his back, grimaces, but stays quiet. He resumes pedaling – haltingly. The vehicle moves as slow as molasses, as if it were geared for the tallest of hills.

A monster grows out of the back of the contraption. If ostrich-sized birds built nests out of broken computers and discarded electronics, they would build the nest that sprouts from the back of the tricycle.

A figure rises from the pile of broken, discarded technology; a demon in constant motion, covered in glossy white plastic scales fashioned from the cases of broken appliances. Its body moves in time with the pedals; every so often a chink in its scales temporarily exposes the rattling chains within that gear it to the man’s feet.

The glossy white demon draws its arm back to the fullest.

The man pushes on pedals which suddenly resist, warning him of the danger.

He pushes through anyway; the pedals give.

The whip cracks down.

The man spasms, kicking his legs instinctively. He finds himself on his feet, curled back over the handlebars as his release dissipates. He manages enough energy to drag himself off of the device, and crumples into a motionless heap beside it.

The figure, no longer driven by either its master or its slave, remains motionless.

June 16, 2009 11:33 AM

Casey: Austin

Austin is awesome! Grady would love it here. I have had so many animal encounters. This is the most dog-friendly city I have ever been to.

Animal Encounters:
Dogs at leash-less park
Bats under the South Congress Bridge at dusk
Swans

I have really enjoyed this conference so far. I'm so glad that I decided to stay at a hostel - this has been so much more fun. I just found out that one of my roommates is also attending the ASEE conference. I also made a new friend today - he's also an undergraduate presenting at the conference without his adviser.

June 16, 2009 02:32 AM

June 14, 2009

Sarah: crimes of passion in the chicken coop!

This morning when I took my laundry down to the house, G and the girls were standing around watching Mack and Black and the five ducklings--wait, five? Yes, the sixth duckling was discovered dead in the coop this morning by M. Its head an neck were wet, leading G to infer that Mack is the culprit. He's been in a mating mood recently, and apparently last night, unable to fly up to the shelf with Black, he inflicted his personal version of courtship on one of the ducklings. This involves a little strangulation, which might work on an adult duck, but was too much for the teenage duck.

Earlier this week, Rebecca and I harvested the rest of the garlic scapes (the curly flower stalks), and we've been smelling like garlic ever since. It's kind of sickening after a while. I had to leave my shirt and pants outside. So I put a load of laundry in this morning, and now all of my clothes smell like garlic :-(.

June 14, 2009 10:21 AM

June 13, 2009

Casey: Travel Musings

Getting ready to go to the ASEE (American Society of Engineering Education) conference in Austin, TX. I'm staying at a hostel that is on a lake, 15min bus-ride from downtown. Suddenly inspired to spend time traveling cross-country after I graduate. I should see more places and kill my shyness.

June 13, 2009 11:48 PM

Kat: More Sloth Love

What is this sloth is pondering? Probably, how adorable he is. :)

June 13, 2009 10:59 PM

June 10, 2009

Casey: SEA Journal - Second Installment

4/2/09     2324
[...] After class, I hung around on deck. I helped shuck corn for dinner and throw the rotten fruit overboard. We store all of our fruit in nets and it's starting to smell over-ripe. We moved all the oranges to the reefer, preened the lemons and left the pineapple to deal with later.
Oh yeah, also during lunch, Kyle recounted the story of how he stole Devin's clothes. I was laughing so hard my stomach hurt. Devin dropped off one of his bags a couple days early and it ended up in gear adrift. Kyle and this other crewman who left were cleaning out gear adrift and thought they had found the jackpot when they went through Devin's bag. Kyle took all of Devin's clothes that fit him. Later, when we all arrived on the boat, Kyle started to notice something fishy. He was wearing one of our S-222 shirts and someone made a comment about it so he went and changed (into another one of Devin's shirts). When we went to the fish market, he was completely dressed in Devin's clothes and Devin noticed, but he felt awkward approaching Kyle about it. So Devin talked to Amy who talked to Kyle. Ever since then, whenever anyone is missing something (especially Devin) they go ask Kyle if he's seen it. [...]

4/3/09     1627
Sextants are so heavy. OMG. I took 3 sights today. One at 0900, LAN (Local Apparent Noon), and one at 1500 in hopes of completing a running fix. Unfortunately, I didn't swing enough so my LAN sight was inaccurate. Then the 1500 sight was too parallel to my 0900 sight to get a good fix. I'll have to try again tomorrow. [...]

4/4/09     0318
Maybe that whole me skipping my shower thing was a bad idea. Now that it's not raining anymore, it's gotten really humid and I'm starting to smell rank.
They did a meter tow at 2200 and caught a pyrosome - which was cool.
I was so uncomfortable all through watch because I sunburned my knees today and my salt-water soaked shorts kept scratching against it. I just put some aloe on. [...]
I'm glad that I'm finally starting to have fun. I've completely gotten over my seasickness (except for a short bout of nausea during lunch when I was overcome by the memory of puking up macaroni and cheese and feeling it get caught in my nose while I tried to avoid puking before getting above deck. I really regretted putting it on my plate but I ate it anyway). [...]

4/4/09     2107
[After Field Day] Everyone else got to take salt water showers w/ a fresh water rinse but A Watch had to wait since we were still on watch. We had a lovely rest of watch, gorgeous weather, lots of people lounging on the quarterdeck, a ukelele trio performing on the top of the main cabin. We even saw a rainbow.
After dinner, we were all planning to go up on deck for our salt water showers when we got word that we had been given special permission by the engineers to take fresh water showers below deck to avoid using the deck shower at night. It was very exciting. After I showered, I put on a clean dress and sat on deck w/ Katie for a bit. A couple stars were out and I saw Saturn. Then I read for a bit and now I am going to sleep!

4/5/09     0934
I've got the whole day off and nothing to do. Now if only it wasn't squally again. I got rained on a bunch during dawn watch. Welcome to the edge of the ITCZ.
The sun is going to be directly overhead in an hour. We calculated when the sun's declination would equal our expected latitude this morning. [...]

4/5/09     2309
What a sweaty watch. It rained all afternoon. The radar was a huge green blob of squalls. The entire 24nm range of the radar was squalls. So, I put on my neoprene booties and foulies - ready for the nasty weather. At the watch change, we struck the mains'l and raised the storm trys'l. It is on a track right next to the mains'l, but it is smaller and not attached to the boom. And then the squalls stopped.
It didn't rain a drop over our entire watch.
Meanwhile, I changed my shoes because my feet were overheating and continued to sweat in my foulie pants.
Now that we're at 5 degrees north, we're on the North Equatorial Counter Current and in the ITCZ. It's noticeably more hot and humid. It makes chips go stale really fast.
We had a lot of good food today. Afternoon snack was spinach and artichoke dip w/ crackers. Dinner was burritoes. Yum! Unfortunately, I ate too much snack to pig out on burritoes. [...]

4/6/09     1947
I feel like today is the first time I really realized that I'm in the middle of the ocean. It's such an isolating feeling to suddenly realize that you're in the remotest part of the remotest part of the world. [...]
I did laundry today w/ Ryan. I definitely could have brought more clothes. We washed our clothes in salt water. Then did a fresh water rinse and hung them on the leeward side to dry. I'm not sure if they're actually any cleaner (there are a lot of stains) but at least they don't smell anymore!
I'm so happy the weather has improved. I feel like my standard of living has increased tenfold. It was starting to smell pretty rank in Sleepy Hollow as the number of dirty, wet clothes increased. Today we were able to open the vents and air it out, which made a huge difference.
We're starting to move into Phase 2, which is exciting. I feel like I'm learning a lot. Now that all the basic stuff has sunk in, I feel like I'm ready to put all the pieces together.

4/7/09     0330
I saw the Southern Cross and Scorpio tonight! I need to learn more stars. [...]
I drew Christmas Island on the plotting chart - I was very proud of it. We're only 1 degree of latitude away! So exciting. We'll probably get there early and sail in circles for a bit. I got sunburned on the back of my leg. I also put my sleeping bag away because my bunk was getting too hot. [...]

4/7/09     2019
I have been sailing over 1000nm. Christmas Island showed up on the radar, so we are currently sailing in a box while we wait for morning. [...]
During class, we talked about sea level rise. It's really intense to think that tomorrow I will be visiting a place that probably won't exist in 100 years. Kirimati is only 2m above sea level and there is already too much global warming to stop it from disappearing. [...]
I also poked my head in the engine room this morning, McKenzie and James were taking apart the port generator to try and figure out what's wrong with it. On the first night, the high temperature alarm went off and it hasn't worked since. They eventually figured out that the exhaust was bleeding into the coolant, so they are inspecting and replacing parts to figure out the issue. I was there when they took off the exhaust manifold. There was an intense layer of carbon all the way through it. It was cool. [...]

GLOSSARY
reefer = refrigerator
Kyle = assistant steward
Devin = student
Amy = chief scientist
pyrosome = sweet gelatinous organism
Field Day = once a week, we do an in-depth cleaning of the ship and listen to music
ITCZ = inter-tropical convergence zone
Sleepy Hollow = name of hallway with student bunks in the aft (back) part of the ship, that's right - I wasn't in the fo'c'sle.
Christmas Island = Kirimati
McKenzie = assistant engineer
James = engineer

June 10, 2009 10:59 PM

Boris: Graduation Photo Gallery - now with better display

Click on a picture to see it larger. Use left and right arrows to move forward and back in the gallery.

June 10, 2009 03:53 PM

June 09, 2009

Mel: Upcoming Fedora education spin… with a twist.

The Fedora Education SIG is working on a new spin - an F11 POSSE spin for mid-July - with some interesting goals. Instead of the usual “this distribution is for children in classrooms!” tactic, we’ve chosen to go the “this distribution is for people who want children in classrooms to be their users” route.

The purpose of the current spin is to create a ready-to-go development environment for contributing to educational packages within the Fedora ecosystem… our target users are professors teaching classes (not necessarily education classes) who want their students to contribute to open-source education efforts as part of their coursework.

Please help us think of features that should be in there!

And also people who should use it once it’s done.

(And pass this on to the professors and students in your life as well - we particularly need their feedback, especially if they’re not already contributing to open-source projects.)

June 09, 2009 04:53 AM

June 08, 2009

Sarah: free in DC

This weekend I went into the city to experience two of DC's coolest free offerings: Artomatic and the drum circle. Artomatic is an art show that happens every year in an office building that is in the process of being constructed or remodeled. It's open to anyone who is willing to pay some reasonable fee for about 20' of wall space, so it's 9 glorious floors of everything from professional, high-quality work to portfolios of high school students or lawyers who like to doodle in their spare time. There's a tattoo parlor, stages with live music, food, and workshops. Almost everyone puts out a notebook for people to leave comments, and some artists incorporate visitors' words into their displays. One example is an artist who documented the long saga of a mouse infestation through collage and painting:



She then left out sticky notes and asked people to share their own mouse and rat experiences. There are notes reminiscing about a beloved class pet, as well as rodent horror stories:

(I Love Mice)

(In the office - he saw the mouse and dropped a phone book on it. We all screamed. One girl cried.)

One display that appears every year contains the dioramas from the Washington Post's Peeps diorama contest. They can be quite elaborate:



After Artomatic, I met up with Kaitlin and Rebecca at the weekly drum circle in Malcolm X Park. There was a loosely organized potluck going on, as well as the usual slacklines, juggling, hula-hooping, capoiera, dancing, and of course, drumming. This really has to be one of the best things going on in DC. It's a carnival atmosphere, but no one is charging money for anything. It's a diverse crowd, but unlike most "diverse areas" in DC, people here are actually interacting with each other. I know I've posted a video of the drum circle before, but here's another poorly-shot video, along with the recommendation that if you're in DC on a Sunday afternoon, go to Malcolm X (Meridian Hill) Park, and follow the sound of the drums:



Rebecca, who works for Heinz at the farmers market, is going to be joining us on the farm for three weeks, starting on Wednesday. She was asking me questions about bugs, mice, snakes, sun, poison ivy, and anything else that she should prepare for. I assured her that I had never found a snake in the house, so naturally, today when I was baking cookies, I sat down on the couch and discovered this guy:



I think it was about 4 feet long. I called Xochi and she bravely used a spatula to flush it out from behind the shelves where it was hiding. Once it was out on the open floor, it started moving surprisingly quickly, but with the aid of a broom and a pillowcase, we prevented it from going under the stove.

June 08, 2009 03:47 PM

Casey: SEA Journal - First Installment

I suppose I have to start somewhere:

DAWN WATCH               0300-0700
MORNING WATCH        0700-1300
AFTERNOON WATCH  1300-1900
CLASS                             1430
EVENING WATCH         1900-2300
MIDWATCH                     2300-0300

I was on A Watch, which took every third watch. We departed Honolulu at 1500 on 3/27/09. My first watch was evening watch.

3/28/09     1637
[...] We left Honolulu at approx 1500 and I was puking over the side by 1610. [...] I'm sunburned, worn-out, and can't use the head because something is messed up with the wastewater system. So I am going to take a nap. [...]

3/29/09     1932
[...] I have to concentrate so hard on staying upright that I haven't had much time to think. I feel like I'm in constant survival mode. [...]

3/30/09     1553
[...] Lunch was AWESOME today - falafel with baba ganoush and greek salad. There were even figs! I love figs. A flying fish landed in the scupper of the deck. I saw it before we threw it overboard. [...] Apparently the wind got up to 37 knots last night. So intense. [...]

3/30/09     2320
Squally conditions. Did my first bow watch in full foul weather gear. The jib blew out in the watch before me. Apparently there's a tear in the leach. Steering the boat feels like trying to ride a bucking bronco.

4/1/09       0316
Just got off watch. I feel sticky from the salt water spray. It's really difficult to identify clouds in the dark. [...]

4/1/09      2012
[...] After class, I went back on deck and found all the mates at the bow preparing to twist on a new jib in a window of decent weather. I stuck around in case they needed me to do anything and ended up on the bowsprit helping to haul the sail up. We did the whole thing in like 3 hours - from start to finish. [...] The weather maps finally caught up to the weather we've been experiencing. Apparently a low pressure zone is forming right above us and moving to the NE. So we're expecting squally conditions for the next two days. I kind of like the rain, it feels so nice compared to getting drenched by salt water. I almost forgot to mention that we caught a skipjack tuna at the end of dawn watch and had fresh sushi for lunch! Delicious.

4/2/09      0804
Just finished DC-love. Was squally all night - we got distracted reading about pelagic snails in lab.

GLOSSARY
head=bathroom
squally=stormy
jib=sail at the front of the boat
leach=hypotenuse of triangular sail
DC-love =dawn clean-up, when we wash the soles (floors) and heads and generally give the boat some love

June 08, 2009 03:52 AM

Casey: Oh Hi.

I keep meaning to do a post where I type up excerpts from my SEA journal . . . I suppose I'll get to that eventually.

I'm really enjoying working at the Wagner Power Station. I have my own hard hat! and work suit! and welding jacket! and flashlight! and hearing protection! and safety glasses! and gloves! I am very safe.

Anyways, I recently decided that I want to go to grad school for renewable energy stuff. I found a couple programs that I like:

1. Civil & Environmental Engineering: Atmosphere/Energy at Stanford University
2. Energy and Resources Group at University of California, Berkeley
3. Sustainable Urban Infrastructure at University of Colorado, Denver
4. Sustainable Energy from Solar Hydrogen at University of Delaware (this one is a little too specific)

I think I want to focus on electrical grid infrastructure (in terms of distributed generation with renewable sources, grid reliability etc.). But I might change my mind. I can't decide how I feel about the more policy-oriented programs (like Berkeley's). I'm slightly obsessed with Stanford's program. I would take renewable energy and weather classes! That's awesome!

Anyways, if anyone knows about other cool renewable energy graduate school programs or understands how fellowships work or knows anyone in any of the above programs ... let me know!

June 08, 2009 03:28 AM

Mel: Communications of the ACM: OLPC analysis

Via Steve Jacobs: The Communications of the ACM has an analysis of what happened to OLPC. It has a lot of generalized statements - I’d like to have seen it backed up by more specific stories - but it is a good summary, as far as I can understand it.

Information technologies are not standalone innovations but… socially embedded systems, the use of which cannot be isolated from the social and cultural environment or from local norms of practice… The fact that OLPC was much stronger in developing innovative technology than in understanding how to diffuse it may reflect the engineering orientation of the organization and its lack of understanding of the needs or interests of the nontechnical people who will ultimately buy and use the innovation.

I’d also like to see a similar thing written on Sugar Labs (now that it’s nearing its one-year anniversary) by someone with an MBA-like mentality who can step back and see more of an operational picture rather than just technology or education alone (though “learning” has to be the metric of success, somehow).

As an aside to the students and alumni of my alma mater: I’m deeply thankful for the education I got at Olin. It didn’t necessarily teach me everything about how to make innovative technologies or how to diffuse them (what academic program can?) but it did teach me that I needed to learn both, and gave me the tools to do so. I feel like I can absorb a lot more learning from experiences like working on OLPC because of the things my undergrad years gave me to reflect on. Working on these kinds of things definitely showed me why our profs tried to teach us the way they did.

Finally, I do agree with this comment from Julian Bass:

The OLPC appears to prioritise a technocratic solution to what is essentially a social problem. Large scale educational change requires a social movement.

…and I suppose that’s why I’ve moved into community work over the past few years, though I didn’t realize that was what I was doing for quite some time. Sometimes you need to do technology work because the tools that people need to change things don’t exist. Sometimes you need to do policy work because they’re not legally allowed to. Sometimes you need to do journalism and marketing because they don’t know about it. Sometimes you need to do education work so they can teach themselves to understand. Sometimes you need to move between them all (and more), busting bottlenecks in whatever disciplines they come up in.

It’s interesting to watch people and organizations adapt to better save the world.

June 08, 2009 01:07 AM