I’ve been reading the awesome “Pwning Tomorrow” speculative fiction anthology published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fantastic stories written by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and many others, exploring the implications of technology policies. They look at biology (hacking genomes etc.), privacy (internet-of-things writ large), communications, surveillance, and many others. Some are subtle. Some, less so. But every story has made me think.
It hit me – we need something like this, to explore issues in educational technology. We have scholarly publications, we have critique and commentary, but we need future-looking explorations of the implications of what this stuff may mean for teaching, learning, and society.
So. I have absolutely no idea how to do this, or what it might look like. But I’d be interesting in compiling an anthology of speculative fiction on educational technology – the tech itself, policies, funding, or any other area that an author wants to explore.
If you’re interested in contributing to an anthology (or know someone who would be able to make a contribution), let me know, and I’ll try to put something together.
I have a stack of old CD-ROMs from projects ranging from 1995-2003. I wanted to save a few of them to add to a portfolio of projects, before the projects were lost forever. It’s ironic – back in the olden days of multimedia, we burned fancy new CD-ROMs that were sold as “100 year archive medium” – costing $30 or more per disk back then, and we figured it was money well spent. Now, just 20 years later, most of those archival “green media” disks are completely unreadable, having degraded already. Thankfully, I have several projects that were commercially distributed, meaning I have actual pressed CD-ROMs rather than DIY burned disks. These disks read just fine – and should for decades to come.
But, none of the computers I use even have an optical drive. Back then, we figured the format would live forever – I mean, 650 MEGABYTES? That’s a LOT of data! We’ll always want to be able to read/write that kind of stuff. Now, GarageBand on my iPad takes more storage. So, while Evan’s now-ancient Macbook still runs, I decided to try to resurrect the CD-ROMs as screenshots or recordings.
Step 1. Convert the CD-ROM to a disk image. I used the nearly-decade-old Macbook just for the optical drive, running Disk Utility to create the .cdr disk image from each of the disks I wanted to save.
Step 2. Copy the disk images to a computer with enough horsepower to run VirtualBox. In my case, my 4-year-old MacBook Air. Not a fast computer, but it has enough horsepower to run VirtualBox if needed.
Step 3. Download the official Virtual PC Windows XP appliance from Microsoft.1 Microsoft offers legitimate virtual disk images of several flavours of Windows to allow for easy testing of Internet Explorer. But, they’re full copies of Windows, so you can also do things like run CD-ROMs…
Step 4. Set up a new virtual computer in VirtualBox. Import the appliance file downloaded in Step 3, and it will set up a new virtualized Windows XP system to run.
Step 5. Start it. I set mine to use 640×480 resolution so the CD-ROMs would play full-screen.
Step 6. Attach the .cdi disk image of the CD-ROM to the (virtual) optical drive. If the CD-ROM has auto start, it kicks in right away. If not, right-click on Start menu and Explore. Launch the installer or application on the CD-ROM.
Step 7. Revel at how horribly most CD-ROM interfaces look in 2015. Take screenshots. Use Camtasia etc. to record demos.
Step 8. Repeat as needed, with different CD-ROM disk images.
Some screenshots of the process:
Setting up the VirtualBox instance, after importing the appliance image from Microsoft.Windows desktop, with instructions provided by Microsoft for how to renew the license on the demo VM if needed.It’s a full version of Windows XP – Start menu and everything. So… install some CD-ROM retro goodness…Running the CD-ROM installer from the Windows Explore interface.Behold! Multimedia awesomeness from the year 2000!
It’s the same VirtualPC brand – Microsoft bought it a few years ago [↩]
I just completed my “2007/365” project, where I took at least one photograph per day for the entire year. I didn’t realize going in just how hard it would be, but it forced me to see things differently and I did learn to be a bit more proficient with the technical aspects of photography.
One of the tasks that’s been on my desk for awhile has been giving some love to CAREO. It sorta stopped working a few months ago, and nobody really cared enough for it to be a High Priority Urgent Fix. The hard drive started to corrupt, and services went from spotty to unavailable. And stayed that way.
Actually, I think it’s a pretty impressive statement about Institutional Repositories that something that was once trumpeted as The Next Big Thing can be out of action for 9 months without many people even noticing. Relevance of top-down, centrally ordained institutional Repositories?
Personally, I just kept feeding my stuff into del.icio.us, Flickr, and my blog, completely (and blissfully) unaffected by the crumbling of an aging prototype repository.
But, apparently, some people still wanted access, so I spent the day getting my head back into the code (mmm… spaghetti….) and realizing just how much I dislike Java (or, perhaps, all compiled languages). I spent SO much time wasted in compile-recompile-forcecompile-compile-deploy-launch-test-fix-repeat that it was way more frustrating than it needed to be. With an interpreted language, I could be modifying the code on the fly and seeing the changes in realtime. Much better for fixing and debugging stuff.
Anyway, CAREO is back on the air, with its library of 4145 contributed “learning objects” (of which, the vast majority don’t really provide much context for learning, but are rather simple assets or resources to be used in other contexts…
It’s now running on my old dual-800MHz-G4 desktop box, which would sound slow except that CAREO is now running on a box that has more than 4x the horsepower it did before The Fall From Grace. Pretty sure it won’t handle a Slashdotting, or even moderate use. But it should work well enough for people to refer to again.
My first reaction on seeing it again after over a year was “Blech! THIS was the best we could come up with?” – The interface is pretty hideous, especially by “modern” standards. And it’s so un-Web2.0 that it hurts. I did bolt on wiki and discussion features, but that’s what they are – bolted on grift.
Of course, it was pre-Web2.0, so it’s funny how perceptions change with experience.
ps. the CAREO Project Website, which was hosted by Athabasca, is unavailable for completely different reasons (they let the domain lapse and didn’t renew it. doh.)
One of the tasks that’s been on my desk for awhile has been giving some love to CAREO. It sorta stopped working a few months ago, and nobody really cared enough for it to be a High Priority Urgent Fix. The hard drive started to corrupt, and services went from spotty to unavailable. And stayed that way.
Actually, I think it’s a pretty impressive statement about Institutional Repositories that something that was once trumpeted as The Next Big Thing can be out of action for 9 months without many people even noticing. Relevance of top-down, centrally ordained institutional Repositories?
Personally, I just kept feeding my stuff into del.icio.us, Flickr, and my blog, completely (and blissfully) unaffected by the crumbling of an aging prototype repository.
But, apparently, some people still wanted access, so I spent the day getting my head back into the code (mmm… spaghetti….) and realizing just how much I dislike Java (or, perhaps, all compiled languages). I spent SO much time wasted in compile-recompile-forcecompile-compile-deploy-launch-test-fix-repeat that it was way more frustrating than it needed to be. With an interpreted language, I could be modifying the code on the fly and seeing the changes in realtime. Much better for fixing and debugging stuff.
Anyway, CAREO is back on the air, with its library of 4145 contributed “learning objects” (of which, the vast majority don’t really provide much context for learning, but are rather simple assets or resources to be used in other contexts…
It’s now running on my old dual-800MHz-G4 desktop box, which would sound slow except that CAREO is now running on a box that has more than 4x the horsepower it did before The Fall From Grace. Pretty sure it won’t handle a Slashdotting, or even moderate use. But it should work well enough for people to refer to again.
My first reaction on seeing it again after over a year was “Blech! THIS was the best we could come up with?” – The interface is pretty hideous, especially by “modern” standards. And it’s so un-Web2.0 that it hurts. I did bolt on wiki and discussion features, but that’s what they are – bolted on grift.
Of course, it was pre-Web2.0, so it’s funny how perceptions change with experience.
ps. the CAREO Project Website, which was hosted by Athabasca, is unavailable for completely different reasons (they let the domain lapse and didn’t renew it. doh.)
I've been involved with a shared Drupal hosting project with BCIT and BCCampus. Part of it is based on an easy way to create new Drupal sites via a web interface, complete with database creation and population, Drupal site directory creation and settings modification, symlink creation to make the site visible to Apache, and management of a Drupal Sites Manifest table to keep track of sites.
At first blush, it seems rather similar to both sympal_scripts and the Drupal 5 installer, except for the management of a sites manifest table, and creation of the symlink to expose the site to Apache in a shared setting.
I'm investigating ways to better integrate with either/both of those, but in the meantime, I've got a working Drupal module that will do the whole shooting match. Not everything is fully implemented yet, but I've got the various bits working as a Drupal module, and most of it working as a standalone PHP application.
Currently, it reads available database profile templates from a directory of .sql files created via mysqldump. It creates a new database on demand, and populates it with the contents of the specified profile.
Future versions will let you customize the admin user/pass, and create an additional user/pass at install time. I also need to add site decommissioning (freeze-dry to static html, delete database and site config directory, etc…)
Writing this module has been an interesting exercise in learning the Drupal forms API and module programming in general. I've had a few false starts on both fronts, but think I finally grokked it this time. This is the only real code I’ve written in something like 6 months. Yikes.
Provisionator (alpha)
Update: We’ve committed to sharing this openly, so I’ll be cleaning it up a bit and setting up a project on Drupal.org so others can play with it if they like. I’ll likely wait until after the Drupal.org project reorganization though.
I've been involved with a shared Drupal hosting project with BCIT and BCCampus. Part of it is based on an easy way to create new Drupal sites via a web interface, complete with database creation and population, Drupal site directory creation and settings modification, symlink creation to make the site visible to Apache, and management of a Drupal Sites Manifest table to keep track of sites.
At first blush, it seems rather similar to both sympal_scripts and the Drupal 5 installer, except for the management of a sites manifest table, and creation of the symlink to expose the site to Apache in a shared setting.
I'm investigating ways to better integrate with either/both of those, but in the meantime, I've got a working Drupal module that will do the whole shooting match. Not everything is fully implemented yet, but I've got the various bits working as a Drupal module, and most of it working as a standalone PHP application.
Currently, it reads available database profile templates from a directory of .sql files created via mysqldump. It creates a new database on demand, and populates it with the contents of the specified profile.
Future versions will let you customize the admin user/pass, and create an additional user/pass at install time. I also need to add site decommissioning (freeze-dry to static html, delete database and site config directory, etc…)
Writing this module has been an interesting exercise in learning the Drupal forms API and module programming in general. I've had a few false starts on both fronts, but think I finally grokked it this time. This is the only real code I’ve written in something like 6 months. Yikes.
Provisionator (alpha)
Update: We’ve committed to sharing this openly, so I’ll be cleaning it up a bit and setting up a project on Drupal.org so others can play with it if they like. I’ll likely wait until after the Drupal.org project reorganization though.
I’ve been given the opportunity to reflect some more on the nature of portfolios, and on the differences between “portfolios” and “dossiers”. I last wrote about ePortfolios vs. dossiers last month. This morning I got to see a presentation on a Very Important Project that is building a “Teaching Dossier” system as part of its offerings. I’m not going to name the project, because the exact implementation is irrelevant – it’s the concept of the dossier that is off the mark.
There has been a lot of effort into producing systems to facilitate the authoring and publishing of Teaching Dossiers – what appear to be a variation on the traditional CV, but with different headings and fields that get filled in. Essentially an online Word document template with some supporting documentation. It’s billed as a great way to document teaching philosophy, practices, successes, and history. Well, yeah. In the same way that Word can do that, too.
The system I saw this morning was literally a set of online forms that eventually spit out a single html file (no images, some links to external stuff though). No personal creativity – just fill in page after page of forms, and it will distill that info into a web page.
It just hit me that the process is just so, well, uninteresting – you get a web page, sure, and you’ve followed some guidelines about what to document and what to write about. But that’s no more than “Save as .html” It’s not even useful as an interchange format – if it was magically talking with various institutional systems, it might be cool, but it’s a proprietary silo of data, generating a simple web page. They could have just as easily created a Word template to do the same thing, and might have wound up with a better result. Or, a Dreamweaver template, or iWeb, or…
It’s also pedagogically uninteresting. It tells nothing of yourself as an individual. You can fill in a form on a web page. Goody. Now, can you communicate? Can you tell the story of your teaching (and learning)? Can you show video clips? Photos? It’s impossible for an individual’s personality to be captured through this process.
The dossier may have a place in an old-school paper-pushing regime, but we’re in a different century now, and the documentation of what we do (and how we do it) needs to reflect that. A simple text-only web page can’t possibly capture the various activities and media types.
The presentation I saw completely validated the approach we’re taking with our “ePortfolio” pilot project, where we’re essentially handing the students and professors a set of flexible tools (Drupal and Pachyderm) that will let them do what they want. There are no constraints or rigid boxes to fill in. Heck, Pachyderm doesn’t even have the concept of “ePortfolio” in the software – it’s being used because it’s a freeform generic authoring environment. And Drupal is being used because of the fluid nature of users and communities. Put the two together, and you have the antithesis of a “Teaching Dossier”.
I’ve been given the opportunity to reflect some more on the nature of portfolios, and on the differences between “portfolios” and “dossiers”. I last wrote about ePortfolios vs. dossiers last month. This morning I got to see a presentation on a Very Important Project that is building a “Teaching Dossier” system as part of its offerings. I’m not going to name the project, because the exact implementation is irrelevant – it’s the concept of the dossier that is off the mark.
There has been a lot of effort into producing systems to facilitate the authoring and publishing of Teaching Dossiers – what appear to be a variation on the traditional CV, but with different headings and fields that get filled in. Essentially an online Word document template with some supporting documentation. It’s billed as a great way to document teaching philosophy, practices, successes, and history. Well, yeah. In the same way that Word can do that, too.
The system I saw this morning was literally a set of online forms that eventually spit out a single html file (no images, some links to external stuff though). No personal creativity – just fill in page after page of forms, and it will distill that info into a web page.
It just hit me that the process is just so, well, uninteresting – you get a web page, sure, and you’ve followed some guidelines about what to document and what to write about. But that’s no more than “Save as .html” It’s not even useful as an interchange format – if it was magically talking with various institutional systems, it might be cool, but it’s a proprietary silo of data, generating a simple web page. They could have just as easily created a Word template to do the same thing, and might have wound up with a better result. Or, a Dreamweaver template, or iWeb, or…
It’s also pedagogically uninteresting. It tells nothing of yourself as an individual. You can fill in a form on a web page. Goody. Now, can you communicate? Can you tell the story of your teaching (and learning)? Can you show video clips? Photos? It’s impossible for an individual’s personality to be captured through this process.
The dossier may have a place in an old-school paper-pushing regime, but we’re in a different century now, and the documentation of what we do (and how we do it) needs to reflect that. A simple text-only web page can’t possibly capture the various activities and media types.
The presentation I saw completely validated the approach we’re taking with our “ePortfolio” pilot project, where we’re essentially handing the students and professors a set of flexible tools (Drupal and Pachyderm) that will let them do what they want. There are no constraints or rigid boxes to fill in. Heck, Pachyderm doesn’t even have the concept of “ePortfolio” in the software – it’s being used because it’s a freeform generic authoring environment. And Drupal is being used because of the fluid nature of users and communities. Put the two together, and you have the antithesis of a “Teaching Dossier”.
In the background thinking/planning for our own “ePortfolios” project (man, I hate that “e”) we realized that many/most of the off-the-shelf portfolio packages were really just simple fill-in-the-blanks templates. Not really a portfolio, at all. Essentially a simple dossier. A collection of standardized data about a person, with no real creative input required or allowed.
A portfolio (e- or otherwise) is about as far from a simple templated dossier as I can imagine. Ok. Flying monkeys with laser guns on their heads would be farther, but you get the point. Portfolios are a process of creative expression. Of reflecting on what you’ve done, how you did it, and hopefully, where you’d like to go. Every person’s portfolio should be different. Different content, different presentation, different context. Things that a dossier just can’t capture. Dossiers are good for comparing batches of nearly-identical things, and helping to highlight differences between them. I imagine a hiring committee sitting at a big table with a stack of 500 of these templated dossiers, sorting them by some criterion to get to the Right Person To Hire.
That’s not really what a portfolio should be – it’s best used as a showcase for an individual. I picture the portfolio as being closer to the job interview than the resume. It’s a creative proxy for an individual, not a standardized data transmission vector.
So, when we were deep in development of Pachyderm, and tossing ideas around about how it could be used academically, the idea of a dynamic, interactive, person-centric portfolio management tool seemed pretty cool. It’s totally not what Pachyderm was initially designed or intended to do, but because it’s basically content-agnostic, it doesn’t care how you use it. And that’s pretty much what we need from an “ePortfolio” authoring tool.
I’m very interested to see how the first batch of students use it, and what they come up with. Should be interesting…
In the background thinking/planning for our own “ePortfolios” project (man, I hate that “e”) we realized that many/most of the off-the-shelf portfolio packages were really just simple fill-in-the-blanks templates. Not really a portfolio, at all. Essentially a simple dossier. A collection of standardized data about a person, with no real creative input required or allowed.
A portfolio (e- or otherwise) is about as far from a simple templated dossier as I can imagine. Ok. Flying monkeys with laser guns on their heads would be farther, but you get the point. Portfolios are a process of creative expression. Of reflecting on what you’ve done, how you did it, and hopefully, where you’d like to go. Every person’s portfolio should be different. Different content, different presentation, different context. Things that a dossier just can’t capture. Dossiers are good for comparing batches of nearly-identical things, and helping to highlight differences between them. I imagine a hiring committee sitting at a big table with a stack of 500 of these templated dossiers, sorting them by some criterion to get to the Right Person To Hire.
That’s not really what a portfolio should be – it’s best used as a showcase for an individual. I picture the portfolio as being closer to the job interview than the resume. It’s a creative proxy for an individual, not a standardized data transmission vector.
So, when we were deep in development of Pachyderm, and tossing ideas around about how it could be used academically, the idea of a dynamic, interactive, person-centric portfolio management tool seemed pretty cool. It’s totally not what Pachyderm was initially designed or intended to do, but because it’s basically content-agnostic, it doesn’t care how you use it. And that’s pretty much what we need from an “ePortfolio” authoring tool.
I’m very interested to see how the first batch of students use it, and what they come up with. Should be interesting…
The Mavericks online exhibit went live on Wednesday. The event featured several of the Mavericks (or family members) attending to answer questions. I missed the event, but it sounded like a great one.
The project is really quite cool, presenting a history of the prominent figures in Alberta’s history from the 1700s to modern day. Themes such as settlement, ranching, Mounties, oil, politics, war, and immigration are covered in pretty impressive depth. There are over 1400 screens of content (images, text, audio, and video), as well as a full teacher’s resource for use as part of the curriculum.
The online exhibit was authored using the in-development versions of Pachyderm 2.0, and provided a pretty serious beta test suite for the software. The really impressive thing is that now that Pachyderm 2.0 is essentially “stable” enough to let people hammer at it, anyone can create online exhibits like this…
The Mavericks online exhibit went live on Wednesday. The event featured several of the Mavericks (or family members) attending to answer questions. I missed the event, but it sounded like a great one.
The project is really quite cool, presenting a history of the prominent figures in Alberta’s history from the 1700s to modern day. Themes such as settlement, ranching, Mounties, oil, politics, war, and immigration are covered in pretty impressive depth. There are over 1400 screens of content (images, text, audio, and video), as well as a full teacher’s resource for use as part of the curriculum.
The online exhibit was authored using the in-development versions of Pachyderm 2.0, and provided a pretty serious beta test suite for the software. The really impressive thing is that now that Pachyderm 2.0 is essentially “stable” enough to let people hammer at it, anyone can create online exhibits like this…
Had a really good first day of meetings. We had a quick lunch on the 36th floor of the Grand Hyatt, overlooking the awesome skyline of San Francisco. Then we got into the recap of the last 2 years, and touched base.
Then, we packed into a bunch of cars, and headed over to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. What a cool museum! We headed straight for the Education Tower, with a spectacular view of The City – from an angle I’d never seen before.
We then proceeded with a tour through the Education Tower offices, and got a brief introduction to their education resources collection. Wow. They’ve put together a series of excellent binders for K-12 (well, 4-9 now, K-12 in January) art education. And they’re providing it free to any teacher. This is some high end stuff, so if you are looking to integrate art into your classroom, give them a shout!
After the tour, we were unleashed into the galleries. We spent most of our time in The Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art – very interesting pieces. And the collection wasn’t just dropped into the gallery – it feels like the rooms were designed completely around and for the collection, providing an immersive and compelling experience.
As we moved through to the next gallery, the fire alarm sounded. Emergency doors slid down over every doorway and window. Metal rollers. I was expecting Halon gas to fill the gallery to protect the art, but apparently it was a false alarm. Thankfully so, since the security staff simply herded us into a group on the second floor and left us there with no apparent way to get out. We eventually were led downstairs and out of the building…
We ended the evening at Maya (2nd and Harrison) with a private dining room for the rowdy pachyderms. Some really good food (of course), and fun conversation with the folks on the project. We were also introduced to the new Pachyderm mascots – the iPachyderm. It plugs into an audio source (iPod, computer, whatever) and bops along dancing and barking and blinking and sitting and beeping and wagging and…
Had a really good first day of meetings. We had a quick lunch on the 36th floor of the Grand Hyatt, overlooking the awesome skyline of San Francisco. Then we got into the recap of the last 2 years, and touched base.
Then, we packed into a bunch of cars, and headed over to the De Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. What a cool museum! We headed straight for the Education Tower, with a spectacular view of The City – from an angle I’d never seen before.
We then proceeded with a tour through the Education Tower offices, and got a brief introduction to their education resources collection. Wow. They’ve put together a series of excellent binders for K-12 (well, 4-9 now, K-12 in January) art education. And they’re providing it free to any teacher. This is some high end stuff, so if you are looking to integrate art into your classroom, give them a shout!
After the tour, we were unleashed into the galleries. We spent most of our time in The Jolika Collection of New Guinea Art – very interesting pieces. And the collection wasn’t just dropped into the gallery – it feels like the rooms were designed completely around and for the collection, providing an immersive and compelling experience.
As we moved through to the next gallery, the fire alarm sounded. Emergency doors slid down over every doorway and window. Metal rollers. I was expecting Halon gas to fill the gallery to protect the art, but apparently it was a false alarm. Thankfully so, since the security staff simply herded us into a group on the second floor and left us there with no apparent way to get out. We eventually were led downstairs and out of the building…
We ended the evening at Maya (2nd and Harrison) with a private dining room for the rowdy pachyderms. Some really good food (of course), and fun conversation with the folks on the project. We were also introduced to the new Pachyderm mascots – the iPachyderm. It plugs into an audio source (iPod, computer, whatever) and bops along dancing and barking and blinking and sitting and beeping and wagging and…
I’ve been reading the awesome “Pwning Tomorrow” speculative fiction anthology published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Fantastic stories written by the likes of Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Bruce Sterling and many others, exploring the implications of technology policies. They look at biology (hacking genomes etc.), privacy (internet-of-things writ large), communications, surveillance, and many others. Some are subtle. Some, less so. But every story has made me think.
