Stuff about using computers to help people teach and learn better.

Frappr! EduBloggers

Posted Fri, 2005-10-28 11:58 by pfaffman

Check out this map of education bloggers. I intend to go through the list to find others to add to the feeds here.

SurfYourWork.com yields undergrad $1.25 million

Posted Wed, 2005-10-26 16:15 by pfaffman
This eSchool News story is about a student who developed SurfYourWork.com, a web site that sounds a little like an eportfolio site. From what I can tell it's mostly a way for people to keep their info on the web. It might be interesting to look at this site and how it compares to other portfolio sites or volspace or whatever.

IT 695 Special Topics: Computer Games and Learning (Summer 2006)

Posted Mon, 2005-10-24 13:41 by pfaffman

This course isn't fully planned yet (and won't be until I know whether it'll be taught, but I'll try to add readings here as I come up with them. There's also a nascent syllabus online.

Kentucky offers refurbished PCs to students

Posted Tue, 2005-10-18 11:50 by pfaffman

So Kentucky's giving old computers to their students. This seems like a pretty good idea to me, my 400Mhz/640MB laptop performs about as well as my dual 2.4Ghz/2GB workstation. I'm just mildly annoyed that Microsoft is given credit for being a "partner" in this project because they're providing $1.5 million dollars worth of software for these 2000 machines. That's means that a copy of XP and Office 2003 is worth $750. How generous. All of these machines had Windows installed on them to start with. Allowing people to install software doesn't actually cost Microsoft a penny. It's more generous that the state of Kentucky is training 2000 poor families to use XP and MS Office.

Lexmark is giving the project 800 color printers. You know, actual hardware. Stuff that costs money. I'd rant about how much I hate ink-jet printers because they're so expensive to run, but they're even giving away two replacement ink cartridges. This is valued at $88,000. Sure, that's probably an inflated retail price, but it's real stuff. And $88,000 to Lexmark is probably lot more than $1.5 million to Microsoft. Especially when you realize that Microsoft's gift cost them nothing.

UTNAA Outstanding Teacher Awards

Posted Mon, 2005-10-17 15:12 by pfaffman

Attached is a memo about the outstanding teacher awards. It says that a list of nominees is included, but that's a lie. Or at least an exaggeration. We should have that list Real Soon Now.

Computer on a Flash Drive

Posted Mon, 2005-10-10 10:21 by pfaffman

Slashdot points to this story about various ways to store one's computer desktop settings, files and browser bookmarks on a USB drive. For a long time, I've been complaining that most schools don't have personal computers, but only ones that make students itinerants. It's much more efficient to use your own computer than someone else's, and flash drives are increasingly convenient, but carry only your files around.

This is one of my explanations for why K12LTSP is such a good idea. It's not only cheaper than individual PCs, but also provides a better user experience. I say that given the choice between MS Office and Explorer and keeping their stuff on flash drives and having OpenOffice and Firefox with all of their files, bookmarks, and desktop settings available, folks will choose K12LTSP.

This flash-drive thing has potential, though.

Difficulties with Jargon

Posted Fri, 2005-09-23 15:47 by pfaffman
Jargon is difficult to understand opines this article. It provides statistics (that were probably made up on the spot) about how many folks are bewildered by terms like Javascript, JPEG and PDF. Kilobyte, Megabyte, and Gigabyte are apparently especially confusing since, to a Normal Person, they all represent arbitrarily large numbers.

WIMP Interface Considered Harmful

Posted Sat, 2005-09-17 07:49 by pfaffman
Last week in class I was waxing on and on about Open Source Software (OSS) and the issue of how difficult it is to learn a second application of a particular type. If you learned Wordstar back in the days of DOS learning WordPerfect was maddeningly frustrating. After Wordstar's commands, based on a brilliant combination of ergonomics and mnemonics, Wordperfect's function key commands were completely befuddling. Of course some people found Wordstar's control key commands difficult to remember and Wordperfect's keyboard template made sense. Even after using the One True Editor for nearly a decade, I remember all of Wordstar's basic cursor-movement commands and lots of the formatting ones. Until I started using Emacs I would coerce whatever other editor/word processor that I was using into using Wordstar's keyboard commands. Strange as it may seem, some people haven't given up. Now, however, things are different. Or, really, thanks to Apple's doing such a good job of making the most of what people at Xerox had done, and Microsoft's subsequent adoption of it, the WIMP interface is now ubiquitous. You don't have to wonder whether it's ^KS to save (Wordstar) or F10 (Wordperfect). Whether you're using a word processor, a spreadsheet or a statistics package, you know that you can pull down the File menu and choose Save, regardless of whether it's made by Microsoft, Apple, Wolfram Associates or some crazy OSS developer. This ease of use comes at a considerable cost, however. A startling number of people don't know that instead of (1) taking your hand off the keyboard, (2) moving the mouse to the file menu, (3) moving it down to "save", (4) clicking, and (5) moving your hand back to the keyboard you can type control-S (^S). Each of these 5 steps takes several times longer than pressing ^S. Typing ^S takes less than one tenth as long as using the mouse to save a file. This means either that people waste a whole lot of time saving or save far too infrequently and, hence, waste time because their work gets lost. A problem that I consider much bigger that fewer people recognize is that you can't move the cursor without taking your hands off of home row. I've started using Thunderbird a bit more lately. Because there are no cursor movement keys except the arrow keys, it's usually easier to delete and re-type text--even several words-than it is to move the cursor and fix a single typo. In Emacs, I can easily move the cursor a character, word, line or sentence at a time without leaving home row. I can even swap words or characters. How often to you type a character only to realize that the last two were backwards? You (probably) delete and then re-type them both. I type control-T and keep going. But the thing is that lots of people who use Emacs don't learn these commands. Do you know why not? Because it now has the same WIMP interface that most word processors do, so people are inclined to use it just like a word processor. One of Emacs's most useful commands is incremental search. Rather than typing a word that you're looking for and then starting the search, Emacs will let you start typing the word and move the cursor to the first place that has the sequence of characters you've typed. So if you're looking for the word "typed" you can probably get to it by typing just control-s "ty". It may not sound like much, but this method of moving the cursor is so easy that it's convenient to move it just a line or two away. So rather than hitting the up arrow a couple times and then left arrow 20 or so times (fewer if with control-arrow to move a word at a time), I can type Control-R and a few characters to move where I want to go. Maybe you're better off not knowing that. I am extremely frustrated when I have to use an editor other than Emacs.

Meeting first online

Posted Wed, 2005-09-14 12:33 by pfaffman

This eSchool news article talks about Freshmen getting to know each other online before going to school. I think that I remember people exchanging letters with roommates before going to school at some point in the past.

This first piqued my interest because it seems backward of the meet-face-to-face-first to make online learning work belief. Then, it occurred to me that this is more like a match.com intro to people that you're about to meet. One can only hope that they're interested in the same people face to face as they are online.