Blog Juice for Educational Technology

Sorry about the interruption of service. There was an issue with a corrupted database table connected with the page caching system.

Four Eyed Monsters has created a great documentary which explains why net neutrality in so important to the future of the Internet. Link courtesy of Lessig.

The first stage of the Kairosnews update is complete. The next state will involve moving it to an entirely new server. Expect that Kairosnews might be unavailable for 24-48 hours starting Friday or sometime over the weekend while DNS propogates for the new IP.

As some of you may have noticed, Kairosnews has been acting a little flaky in the last few weeks. In order to solve this problem, I’ll be doing some webhost configuration maintenance in preparation for upgrading to a faster account option. Expect that Kairosnews will experience service interruptions tomorrow while I complete the first stage of this process.

Over at CNN Money, Business 2.0 Magazine writer Owen Thomas discusses the hype concerning Vista and the excessive amount of time and money spent on its development. The conclusion?

So here’s a modest proposal: Boycott Vista. Keep your old Windows XP PC around. Don’t buy a new one. That’s the only way we have to let Microsoft know Vista is an overhyped, late, and pointless update to XP - a perfectly fine operating system.

I think this suggestion is knowingly unrealistic, but it does raise another issue. Isn’t it about time writing teachers boycott MS Office?

Don’t be a lemming. Consider the consequences of spending your own or your institution’s money just to have those one or two “must have” features that you did fine without 5 or 10 years ago. Don’t contribute to and perpetuate the millions of dollars spent on MS Office each year. After all, are there any difference between MS Office and OpenOffice really worth the Microsoft tax most of our society pays when it comes to word processing?

And let’s not forget the significant principles regarding knowledge sharing and strategies for collaboration behind open source development. It always amazes me that predominantly liberal higher education privileges capitalistic proprietary development of software and knowledge over open source. Think about the values you endorse when purchasing Microsoft Office instead of using OpenOffice. Microsoft may no longer regularly be described as Evil as it once was during antitrust legislation only a few years back, but that doesn’t mean that writing teachers shouldn’t join the good guys

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While writing my recent post this morning on Kairosnews, 8 Year Old a Pro Gamer in the Halo Universe, I was checking and responding to email–just generally taking my lesirurely time about it. All of a sudden the server had some kind of glitch, and the Kairosnews preview screen for my blog post blanked out. The post was lost.

This is pretty frustrating and has probably happened to many of us who reguarly write on the web. Thankfully, Google Desktop cached the input screen. I ran search for keywords from my post. The Kairosnews blog entry url showed up as a return, and within the cached pages was a recent snapshot of the full entry screen–form fields and all. Nice work, Google Desktop

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According to the September 2006 issue of Wired magazine, 8-year-old Victor De Leon is a pro gamer:

In the Halo universe, De Leon is known as Lil Poison, one of the world’s youngest pro gamers. At the age of five, while many of his peers were still eating paste, the pixel prodigy was smoking competitors at small gaming events hosted by his father. It wasn’t long before Major League Gaming – one of the premier videogame organizations – added Poison to its roster. And last year, the video­game site 1Up inked a sponsorship deal with the 4-foot fragger. When he’s not busy with SpongeBob and multiplication tables, De Leon plays up to six hours a day on Xbox Live.

My almost seven-year-old son is into Unreal Tournament 2004, and would probably play for 6 hours a day, too, if I let him. Maybe it’s time to discuss with him his long term career plans and see if professional video gamer is in his future? Perhaps if he started playing full time now, within a year or so he could be the poster boy for the new release of Unreal Tournament 2007? Obviously not any more than I want him practicing basketball, tennis, or soccer for 6 hours a day. Kids need to be more well-rounded than that.

But I do wonder if I’m biased toward the arts and sciences? As an academic, would I let a seven-year-old child prodigy practice piano as much, work on his painting, start acting full time if he showed talent, or work all day long on advanced level mathematics if he showed genius level potential? Maybe. Is it a cultural bias? Perhaps.

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This past week, I worked with a couple of other members of the Writing Department at GVSU to prepare a position statement on plagiarism detection software. GVSU only recently acquired a subscription to Turnitin, and myself and the other teachers were concerned that teachers in other disciplines would be unware of the issues surrounding plagiarism detection services. The following is the full text of the statement which has been distributed on our campus.

Note: CCCC-IP has begun a resource page on plagiarism detection services.

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From Slashdot today,

I’m working at a major university in the US, and have been charged with posting pod-casts of class lectures on the internet. The problem is whether or not posting the videos would allow students to skip class and just download the lecture, instead. I guess the problem is trying to strike the right balance between allowing good students to take advantage of this resource, but discourage bad students from staying at home all the time and watching all the lectures right before the exam.

Well, if the professor only lectures and does not invite any interaction from students, why would this make a student bad because they don’t attend class and decide to watch or listen to the podcast at home??? I had and did not attend a few of these classes in college. Notes from another student were enough, particularly when the lecturer only worked from the book and did not provide any additional information on the topic beyond what could be read on one’s own.

So I have to agree with a student who posted an insightful comment to the discussion of this post:

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Inside Higher Ed recently reported that language regarding open source has been removed from the report from the Commission on the Future of Higher Education. At the last minute, after the language in the report had already been approved by members of the Commission, the Microsoft representative pitched a fit and had all mention of open source removed from a key paragraph in the draft. While changing the language certainly serves the goals of Microsoft and Blackboard/WebCT in maintaining or solidifying their monopoly in education, removal of that language was not in the best interest of education. Open source should be an integral part of that report, the reasons for which are laid out in the Proposed NCTE/ CCCC Resolution on the Adoption and Use of Open-Source Software (2006). I would strongly encourage all educators to read this proposal and understand why open source is very important to education .

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Proposed NCTE/ CCCC Resolution on the Adoption and Use of Open-Source Software

Background

For teachers of English and composition working in colleges and universities across the country, the rising cost of computer software is becoming an increasingly intractable problem. The more innovative the instruction that teachers undertake in digital environments, the more software packages they need—packages which must be upgraded periodically at additional cost—and the more often these packages must be upgraded. Additionally, when the school’s technology use becomes more sophisticated, the need for a more sophisticated technology infrastructure arises as students and teachers connect with others beyond the classroom walls. Both high-level academic administrators and information technology leaders on campus are coming to realize that managing such escalating software and systems’ costs is fundamental to an institution’s fiscal health. Although many models for managing software costs have been tried in the past few years, the costs associated with mission-critical applications and software continue to increase and multiply.

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Johndan announced the end of Datacloud today. I’ve been reading Datacloud regularly, so I’ll be sad to see it go. Hopefully he’ll get back online with another incarnation so that we can continue to read his insightful thoughts.

In his post, Johndan mentions that he will “be keeping the archives online, at least for the near future.” I would encourage Johndan and everyone else who intends to stop writing on their blog to keep those archives available over the long term. Many of these are valuable resources and/or a good read that shouldn’t go into link rot oblivion.

However, one obviously does not want to keep up with installing security fixes and other updates for a software driven weblog for years; an old weblog can fall into disrepair or become a target for hackers. Here’s a sugestion for how to avoid that. Use HTTrack to create a static HTML mirror of your site and either replace the current location with it or put up the archive in a new spot. HTTRack is a GPL licensed software tool that spiders an existing site and creates a version of it as static HTML pages on your computer for offline viewing. In order for that to work, HTTrack rewrites all internal URL’s so that they are relative to the root location, then making the site suitable for posting elsewhere online.

This is a very easy process, and something even those with more limited technological skills can do. In addition to running the software and creating the mirror, I also recommend that the weblog owner prep the site initially by

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There’s plenty of commentary about the new propaganda educational video from the RIAA via Campus Downloading. I’m sure we’ll see much more. I love Cory Doctorow’s succinct and accurate overview and call to action:

The RIAA has just released a back-to-school propaganda video called “Campus Downloads” that is full of lies, half-truths, omissions, and intimidation aimed at convincing students to stay away from file-sharing.

This is such a steaming pile that it desperately needs to be remixed. Someone out there needs to make a version where every lie is interrupted with an explanation of the real story, to be shown alongside of it.

Sounds like a great class project to me

I don’t even want to comment on it any further–watch it for yourself–other than to point out the title screen of the video:

They’ve left out the indirect object in that first sentence. A more effective and truthful slide would read,

Protect Yourself from the RIAA. Do It Legally. An Educational Public Service Video from the People Who Will Sue You If You Don’t

Give me a break. The irony! To think that any university would be complicent in promoting a video which pretends to be a public service announcement but is more like a mafia-like strong arm tactic warning.

BTW: I’ve ordered a copy, and will probably show it. It’s an excellent tool for demonstrating the problems with our current intellectual property system. I’d encourage others to do the same.

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