TechIntersect

The last thing that educators need on the first day of school is a big, hairy brouhaha but that is exactly what many started the year with this year.

Hurry on over and check out how the Obama speech debacle proves Arne Duncan does not know how schools work by Edward Hayes, it’s a great read. (I heard about it via Larry Ferlazzo on Twitter)

Personally, I never saw what the big deal was anyhow. This is a snippet of a Facebook conversation we had earlier in the week:

Me: Don’t see what all the flap was about in the first place. As if my kids can come home and change my political opinions based on what they heard in a speech at school.

Robert: Or, as if what your kids hear one day in school when they are seven or ten is going to have any impact on them at all tomorrow–if you don’t want it to.

Audrey: Another example of parents getting hysterical over nothing.Just concerned about their own politcal views. I assure you, kids would not have thought twice about listening to the president speak, if not for all this bickering.

In President Obama’s health care speech last night, he compared a public health insurance option to the way public colleges & universities are funded and operated.

I’ve insisted that like any private insurance company, the public insurance option would have to be self-sufficient and rely on the premiums it collects.

…it could provide a good deal for consumers, and would also keep pressure on private insurers to keep their policies affordable and treat their customers better, the same way public colleges and universities provide additional choice and competition to students without in any way inhibiting a vibrant system of private colleges and universities.

This is an interesting notion. Indeed, each year public higher education institutions are moving more and more towards self-sufficiency, with ever diminishing support from governmental sources. We have to pick up the slack through higher tuition rates, research grants, and also stepping up fund-raising efforts- that is through charitable donations.

Unlike with colleges & universities, in the president’s scenario for a public health care plan I don’t really see any potential for income through research grants or charitable donations. Am I missing something or does this leave the public health care option relying solely on premiums? And wouldn’t the public option be for people who can’t already get insurance in the current system (a higher risk demographic)?

What does establishing an unsubsidized public health insurance option that is self-sufficient through premiums accomplish? President Obama suggests that it could avoid

…some of the overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits and excessive administrative costs and executive salaries

If you compare public & private institutions of higher learning, you will nearly always find lower salaries and administrative costs at the private institutions, as a matter of their survival. If you don’t believe it, here is an example for which I have some data— Student Information Systems. In 2004, I did a study of the student information systems used by the community colleges in Kansas. There are 19 community colleges in Kansas and they run eight different brands of student information systems. Each school purchases and operates it’s own stand-alone database independently. Now compare this approach to the private Associated Colleges of Central Kansas approach. Six private universities in Kansas, that is six private schools that directly compete with one another, formed a consortium to share a single, centralized student information system that saves about half a million dollars a year for these schools.

Sorry President Obama, I think the public & private college analogy isn’t helpful for making your case. If you think a public health insurance option that receives no government subsidies can be completely self sufficient by insuring the segment of the population that cannot already obtain private insurance, you are out of touch with how the real world works.

Over the years, I’ve developed a love of art and visual communication. When I am able, I love spending time viewing art in galleries and even creating my own small works of art. Yesterday I attended the opening of a new show at the Salina Art Center. I will write more about that in a separate post when I have more information to share, but let me just say that the current show has lots of kinetic sculptures with motors and electronics incorporated into the work. Very worth checking out.

I haven’t always paid attention to art. When I was in the Navy, I visited some of the most amazing cities in the world, but I was primarily interested in checking out the pubs, not the galleries. In fact, the only gallery I ever set foot in was in Hobart, Australia, and that was by accident. I was eating a nice Italian meal with some shipmates. I mentioned to them that I would really enjoy going fishing while we were in Tasmania. A gentleman at the next table spoke up, telling me that he knew of a young man who might like to take me fishing.

Over the course of the next couple of days, the gentleman (I’ve forgotten his name, this was back in 1991) introduced me to Josh Nester who at the time was around 14 and an avid fisherman. He also took us on a tour of the art gallery he owned. I’m sorry to say that I remember more about the fishing than I do the art. Josh & I each caught a nice lake trout at the Great Lake after freezing our bums off in the highlands of Tasmania.

Of course I took Josh & his family on a tour of my ship, the USS Missouri. Over the years, I had lost track of Josh and his family but I had never forgotten their hospitality. That is until recently, I reconnected with Josh through Facebook. Think whatever you like about the pros & cons of Facebook, some people are fleeing it, but for me it has been an amazing way to reconnect with people I have known in my life that I have lost touch with.

Even though I was only there a few days, Josh and his family provided me with an unforgettable experience in Australia through their kind hospitality. That is why I was pleased to reconnect with Penny, the mother of Josh who drove us to the lake where we caught those fish. I was especially intrigued to learn that she now operates an art gallery in Hobart called Detached. What is even more interesting is that the gallery currently has an interactive exhibit called 8 Months of War by Australian artist Brook Andrew. It is ironic that the 1991 Persian Gulf War was what brought me to Hobart in the first place.

I am continually amazed at this communications-based world in which we live. I was able to reconnect with people I met only briefly eighteen years ago through the power of the Internet, and now I am also able to interact with a new media artist half a world away. You can too. Why not check out 8 Months of War today?

I just learned that one of my students died. Sarah Corbett. It’s been a few years since I had her in class, but she was unforgettable. Always smiling. Full of life & spreading joy everywhere she went. That’s just how she was.

I didn’t sleep well last night thinking about it. How can someone so young be called home so soon?

I am reminded of a quote by Og Mandino, the author of “The Greatest Salesman in the World” and an entire series of books related to successful living.

Beginning today, treat everyone you meet as if they were going to be dead by midnight. Extend to them all the care, kindness and understanding you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.

I read those words many years ago. I think they are from “A Better Way To Live”. Sometimes I try to do it that way, but much of the time I forget & focus too much on myself. When you lose a student you look back and wonder if there was anything you could have done differently. With Sarah, I could have gotten to know her better, she was so obviously such an amazing person. She touched the lives of many people around our campus.

I think that God permits evil & tragedy in the world because it can bring out the best in people affected by it. Note I said it can bring out the best, not that it always does. Sometimes we are so wounded & hurt that we miss out on opportunities. Opportunities for doing good.

If you teach long enough, tragedy is bound to happen. Sarah is the second student that I am aware of. Mark was my first, shortly after I first began teaching.

Mark took every ounce of patience and kindness that I could muster. He showed up in my class one day with an interpreter because he was deaf. He was a wonderful guy, but he took ten times the amount of effort that every other student took, not necessarily because he was deaf, but because he wasn’t really academically ready for what we were trying to do. Still, he was in my class and I worked with him. He was so proud when he was able to purchase the necessary parts and build his very own PC. I took this picture:

After I heard about his passing, I was so glad that I was patient with him and kept any frustrations I might have had to myself.

Mark & Sarah will serve as a reminder to me to treat each person I meet as if I knew they weren’t going to be here tomorrow because sadly, sometimes it comes true.

A strong effort is being made to raise the standard of teaching in our public schools.

Wow, does that ever sound familiar? The more things change, the more they stay the same. And get a load of the teaching certificate requirements in Kansas in 1911. They had three levels of certification back then. They were starting to crack down on teachers that hadn’t completed high school.

Sometimes I take it for granted that colleagues and friends know about most of the same technology tools that I know and use, but it just ain’t so! Likewise, they know about things that I don’t know about, so I am taking it upon myself to write a post compiling a list of  the tech tools that I use on a regular basis and hoping that other folks will do the same. (If you do, please comment here with a link to your list.)

These aren’t tools that I’ve heard about and dinked around with a bit; these are things I have discovered that have enough value that I keep returning to them. I will post my list here and I’m hoping you will comment with tools you frequently use as well.

• Google the reigning king of all search engines. I frequently use Google Image Search as well.
• Wikipedia Online Encyclopedia (everyone uses this now, right?)
• Wikimedia Commons is a great place to find Creative Commons licensed images.
• Magnatune is an excellent repository of low cost and Creative Commons licensed music.
• Firefox Web browser extraordinaire. Love it for the 3rd party add-on tools
• Stumble Upon use it to find a random website that matches your interests or to drive traffic to sites you like. I use it’s Firefox plugin
• Diigo has all but replaced my browser favorite bookmarks. Save sites you like online, share with others, highlight & comment right on webpages.
• Camstudio is a free screen capture tool that saves AVI and SWF video files.
• Tinyurl is a web address shortening tool. If you send URLs to people shorten ‘em up with Tinyurl
• Edublogs is where I do my education blogging. Free blogs have ads, but paid supporters are ad free.
• Twitter is becoming my communication tool of choice. Love the conversations, and I can still block spammers there.
• Tweetdeck is an awesome program I use to do most of my Twittering.
• Facebook is how I keep up with students, family & friends.
• YouTube is where I post videos
• Flickr is a place I store & share digital photos online.
• ShrinkPictures is a cool little website to “webify” your digital photos too big to e-mail or post online
• Alice is 3-D virtual software that teaches the basics of computer programming, and also lets you make fun, interactive stories
• Scintilla is a text editor that highlights computer programming and html code. I make most of my web pages with it.
• Google Docs is a great way to create online documents you can share & collaborate with. Online surveys are surprisingly easy to create. Includes word processing, spreadsheet, slideshows as well.
• Audacity is an excellent audio editor I love to use.

One tool I would use if I didn’t have Photoshop is Gimp. Gimp is a free photo editing program that is quite popular.

I am sure there are many others I haven’t thought of, but these are the free tools that I use most often. When I need a piece of software and I want to see if there is something free, the first place I look is Sourceforge which is where open source programmers share their work with the world. Check it out, you might find something there you really use and like.

On my wish list is a free non-linear video editor and a free vector drawing tool. Do you know any?

You may be familiar with the famous “Last Lecture” which spread around the internet last year. It was given by Randy Pausch who passed away last summer. If you haven’t seen it, you really should take a look at it.

What you may not be familiar with is the work he did in computer science. The project of his that I am most familiar with is called “Alice.” I had heard about Alice several years before I actually took the time to check it out, and after I did, I regretted taking so long.

This software is amazingly cool, and simple to use – even a middle school kid can master it. It was designed as a tool to teach the fundamentals of object oriented programming, but kids can also use it to tell interactive, digital stories in a 3-D virtual world. It can be downloaded for free from http://www.alice.org and it works on Macs or PC’s.

I have posted two tutorial pages on my website. One is an overview of basic computer operations such as input/output, storage memory, loops, decisions, and math calculations. Another is an example of how to calculate distance using the distance formula with Alice. Both can be downloaded from http://www.billgx.com/alice/

I recommend that you work through the built-in tutorials on Alice before you try to work through my tutorials. The built-in tutorials will explain the basics of the Alice interface, as will as some of the operations that Alice can do. If you are hungry for more, I highly recommend Dick Baldwin’s free Alice tutorials. It is where I went when I was first learning about the software. They can be accessed here: http://www.dickbaldwin.com/tocalice.htm

I want to encourage everyone to TRY THIS SOFTWARE! If you have even modest computer skills, you will be able to figure this out. I would love to hear how you have used this software with your students!

These YouTube videos give you an idea of what can be accomplished with Alice. If you want to record your own videos, be aware that Alice doesn’t have a built-in ability to save video. Simply download the free CamStudio software (sorry it’s for PC’s only), which can record your Alice movie from your screen, and you will be set to share your work with the world as well.

Yesterday was the fall kickoff at the K-State at Salina campus. I was pleased to see evidence of our school’s progress in social media. K-State at Salina is now on Twitter and on Facebook. I like to think, although I can’t back it up with any hard evidence, that my own involvement in Web 2.0 tools & talking about it around campus had a little bit to do with our moving forward in this area.

I was particularly impressed with K-State’s new president Kirk Schulz, who dropped by for a few minutes to welcome us back for the fall semester. He blogs. In fact, he blogs about K-State at Salina. We are really pleased to have a leader who acknowledges and values the good work we do in Salina.

President Schulz also tweets on Twitter and is on Facebook, easily making him the most Web 2.0 saavy CEO in the Big 12 Conference. Check out the contact pages for the various Big 12 presidents & chancellors listed below. Some give phone numbers or e-mail addresses, others don’t even give that much, preferring to use the US Postal Service for their correspondence.

Big 12 Leadership Contact Information

Colorado
http://www.colorado.edu/chancellor/

Iowa State
http://www.president.iastate.edu/homepage.shtml

Kansas
http://chancellor.ku.edu/index.shtml

Kansas State
http://www.k-state.edu/president/

Missouri
http://chancellor.missouri.edu/

Nebraska
http://www.unl.edu/ucomm/chancllr/

Baylor
http://www.baylor.edu/president/index.php?id=57010

Oklahoma State
http://president.okstate.edu/index.php/administration

Texas A & M
http://www.tamu.edu/president/contact.html

Texas Tech
http://www.ttu.edu/administration/president/staff.php

Oklahoma
http://www.ou.edu/president/contact.html

Texas
http://www.utexas.edu/president/

Welcome to K-State Kirk Schulz! Your efforts at running a transparent administration are welcome and appreciated. You have set the bar high for university presidents everywhere.

For a while now, I have been pondering the notion of literacies beyond that of the written word, particularly that of visual and new media literacies. In the fascinating article “Expanding the Concept of Literacy” Elizabeth Daley goes so far to propose that multimedia and the language of the screen is the current vernacular; a true new literacy equal in importance to traditional literacy of the printed word. It seems to me that educational institutions have a long way to go towards recognition of non-traditional literacy, however I have observed some progress on occasion.

For example, Daniel Pink recently wrote about how the University of Pennsylvania, which normally assigns a book to the incoming freshmen class to study and analyze, this year has assigned a famous painting for study and consideration. I find the story interesting because it suggests a broad recognition of visual literacy as a valid and important field of study at that institution.

Intrigued, yesterday I tweeted the story out, seeking thoughts on the idea and unfortunately have been away from my computer for a day and wasn’t able to reply to anyone who responded. Some things are ill-suited for discussion on twitter anyhow, and this story and its accompanying ideas seems too big for 140 characters, so I wrote this quick post to continue the discussion. Here are some of the ideas that were suggested:

Chris wants to open a can of copyright worms…

Chris, I know we are in a mash-up world, but I’m going to have to learn a whole bunch more about copyright before I could effectively lead such a discussion. And it seems like the more I learn about it, the more confused I get. Still, it would certainly be interesting! How much is fair-use? How much can you expect to use before you get into legal trouble, etc.?

Jeff gets right to the heart of the matter with a suggestion of turning it into an explicit lesson in visual literacy…

Most of my students are definitely left-brain oriented, and this suggestion would certainly lead to some lively debates and discussions. What do you think of doing this debate-style and just randomly having people argue for and against? I would love to get some engineering technology students arguing for visual literacy because I certainly more often hear arguments against needing this kind of knowledge.

Then we have Dr. Taylor confusing the heck out of me…

This is why I think some things are better discussed somewhere other than twitter. When we abbreviate to the point that the message becomes confusing, maybe it’s time to take it to the blog? Rel ` icons? Is that religious icons? Ren ` ports to Cubists & Bacon? Not sure what ren ` ports is either.

I’m liking your postcard idea, but would like some further clarification on this before I comment further. I hope you can take my gentle ribbing, but either I’m just too tired or too thick-headed to decode that last tweet.

We have some terrific ideas starting us out here, I’m wondering if anyone else would like to weigh in?

At my school, we have a freshman experience class, although I am not directly involved with it. I’m not sure if they have an assigned reading assignment, but something that the incoming freshmen could do together to start developing critical thinking skills I think would be awesome. Why not a painting? Congratulations Penn, I think this is a fabulous idea for welcoming new students to college, and getting their feet wet in the world of literacy. Perhaps a video lesson might be great as well. Show them an indie or foreign film that none of the students are likely to see.

What do you think of using a film for developing visual literacy? Video is definitely a part of this generation’s lives, the trick is finding a film that they haven’t seen yet.

One film I have shown past groups of students is the French film Amélie. It is full of complementary colors and stunning visual imagery. I have yet to have a student who has seen it before I have shown it to them. Most are skeptical that they can watch and enjoy a non-English film with subtitles, yet most are surprised at how well they can follow the story.

If you have more ideas & suggestions on developing visual & new media literacies, I would love to hear them! I’m particularly interested in seeing detailed plans on how these literacies are being taught.

I’m also interested in hearing what you think about the whole notion of alternative, non-printed literacy.

I awoke early this morning because today is the 2nd Annual Fun With Science Day in Clyde, KS. Last year, on the Saturday before the kids started back to school, we held the first  science fun day in the park and it was a big hit. In our town of 500 people, we had more than 40 kids show up for the event, and I suspect we will have as many or more today.

I think this is a great time of year for an event like this because the kids are getting bored and ready to get back to school. Our event is geared for K-6 grade children, but anyone who’s a kid at heart will have a good time.

This year I am particularly excited because I’ve managed to convince a real research scientist to join us for the event. Dr. Sundeep Rayat from K-State’s Chemistry Department is coming to show the kids some cool chemistry stuff. (Check out her web-page to see how super-smart this lady is!) The cool thing is that I didn’t really know anyone from the Chemistry department until I met Dr. Rayat at the Wakonse Conference on College Teaching. Through that common experience, we have developed a friendship that ultimately has enabled the kids in tiny & very rural Clyde to rub elbows with a world-class scientist this weekend. How cool is that?!?

Recently I uploaded some never before seen videos from last year’s Fun With Science Day. This first one shows the kids experiencing conservation of angular momentum. This is the same rule of physics that allows an ice skater to speed up while spinning by raising their arms and bringing their mass towards the center.

This video shows the kids playing with “Oobleck” or “Cornstarch Goo” which is a non-Newtonian liquid. Isaac Newton described the basic properties of a liquid, which most liquids do posess, but this liquid defies the rules. It is part liquid and part solid, depending on its environment. A strong impact aligns the molecules letting it behave like a solid, while a gentle touch releases the molecules and it behaves like a liquid. Isn’t that weird? And the kids love it! You just mix enough water into cornstarch to make a batter, and this is what you get!

The weather calls for a chance of showers today, but I’m hoping we can pull this event off without getting soaked. I just looked at the radar map and everything is north of us right now, but some cells are firing up out west of us, which means we could catch some rain later today.( It’s been an unusually wet and cooler summer. Normally in the 90’s & 100’s and bone dry this time of year, but yesterday was pleasant, only 88 degrees.) But I’m keeping my fingers crossed. A lot of people have put in a lot of work to make this event happen, so hopefully we’ll make this one happen today without any bad weather.