Loon-y ideas sometimes work!

by mrplatts on June 15, 2013

An idea so crazy, it just might work

I admit to being a bit of a Google fanboy.  I love the technology, the suite of apps, Google’s growing commitment to the education market.  but that isn’t my favorite part about Google.  I have the utmost respect for their approach to innovation, the dedication to the talent that they have, and allowing “crazy” to take root and flourish into full-fledged projects (and sometimes to fail spectacularly).

Internet on . . . balloons! Why not?

esF91eUOne of Google’s newest “out there” projects is Project Loon, a balloon-based mesh network circling the earth on the high altitude air currents in the Stratosphere while beaming down internet connectivity to the billions of people on earth who don’t get internet connectivity. .  Google is thinking big.  These balloons will hoist solar powered platforms 20 kilometers into the sky, and deliver internet (not fast internet) to people who are too remote for traditional connectivity.

The takeaway?

Apart from the cool experimental technology that the rest of us get to ooh and ah over.  The lesson I take from Google, is first to hire people who will be creative and come up with new ideas and then to empower your people to try those ideas, even if they sometimes fail. Innovation, whether in education, or in business is not about succeeding every time, but having the guts to take calculated risks and then figure out best-practices, and share those experiences.

 

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Patent Troll Threatens Podcasting

by mrplatts on June 3, 2013

Save Podcasting!

PodcastingPodcasting, or the subscribed delivery of audio content to your portable electronic device, is under threat by a patent troll.  This weekend’s This American Life focused on Patent Trolls in general, and in particular the claim of a failed 1990′s company Personal Audio LLC that they own the rights to the entire concept of subscribed audio feeds, despite the fact that the closest they ever got to actually delivering audio was a failed audio cassette subscription service.

Now that podcasting is turning into a profitable industry, Personal Audio LLC is looking to shake down some of the medium’s most successful players for an unspecified amount of licensing fees.  A classic patent troll move.

Patent Troll

Patent troll is a pejorative term used for a person or company that enforces its patents against one or more alleged infringers in a manner considered unduly aggressive or opportunistic, often with no intention to manufacture or market the product.

Bad patents stifle innovation

The US Patent Office is meant to protect inventors and incentivize people to create new products.  When the Patent Office rubber stamps such broad patents as Patent 8112504, which claims to own the rights to the idea of  ”System for disseminating media content representing episodes in a serialized sequence”, innovation is stifled because of fear of costly lawsuits killing off the little guys.

An education angle?

Consider a school or educational institution inundated with legal threats, or charged steep fees to deliver course content.  Alternatively, what could come of many of the iTunes U courses that are, essentially podcasts that violate this patent.  This lawsuit could threaten any number of technologies commonly used in classrooms.

EFF to the rescue

Fortunately, there are some good guys fighting against the patent trolls.  In this case, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is crowd sourcing an effort to fight this claim at its source, by challenging the legitimacy of this patent.  There are heaps of prior art that show that this was not a “new” idea, even in 1996 when Personal Audio “invented” the podcast (or cassette tape delivery).

Save Podcasting! 

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Eye to Eye: Bringing International Cultural Experiences to Fort Couch (Haiti Speaker)

by mrplatts on May 29, 2013

Eye to Eye

photoOne of the most amazing parts about working in my middle school is the way that teachers, administration, parents, and students work together to extend our classrooms into our local community and beyond to inspire students to make a real tangible impact in their world.  It is more than making Fort Couch a great place to learn, but is about choosing to be great by actively making a difference in the world around them.  (to borrow from  a couple of Principal DeMar’s annual slogans.)  Today we got a great chance to bring in a guest speaker from Haiti, Chedlin, who is the director of Yahve-jire Children’s Foundation.  For the past 8 years Fort Couch Students have supported an orphanage in Croix de Boquet, Haiti (nine miles from Port-au-Prince).

Reach Out – Hope for Haiti

Screen shot 2013-05-29 at 10.46.49 AMEvery year Fort Couch runs a school-wide fund-drive called Reach Out, where students are encouraged to work for, and solicit donations that are used to make an impact in their local community, nationwide, and around the world.  Additionally, Ms. Lemon’s French classes organize a drive for Hygiene Kits (toothpastes, soaps, toothbrushes, etc) and small toys that are brought to the Orphanage in the Spring each year.  We have been supporting the Orphanage for some years now, but after the 2010 Earthquake the need became even more pressing.

Building Communities

Chedlin spent forty-five minutes sharing the impact that the student’s support had on the community that is being rebuilt, in-part, through the support that is provided by students at Fort Couch.  The Foundation provides Education, Accommodation, Health Care and Community development.

Screen shot 2013-05-29 at 10.47.14 AMOne of the most interesting parts of the discussion was around the innovative way that the foundation uses air-form-concrete to build the thirty foot diameter structures that will be the accommodation for the children who are attending school at the Foundation. The domes take about two weeks to construct, with an inflated air-form in place that supports the sprayed concrete shell.   Each 30 foot across dome houses 8-10 children in bunk beds and is quite affordable and resistant to earthquake damage.

Many great questions were asked by the students about the stability of such a building, about the education system of Haiti, and what it is like for these children to grow up in conditions that are so different from anything that they experience.

For more information about the Foundation’s efforts, or to learn about Giving Opportunities, visit: http://yj-haitiorphans.org/

 

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Open Learning & MOOCS – My Foray in to Open Learning

by mrplatts on May 22, 2013

Learn for learning’s sake

MOOC poster April 4, 2013 by Mathieu Plourde licensed CC-BY on Flickr,

On the secondary education front Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are the big point of discussion, innovation, disruption and controversy.  Basically, a MOOC gives the world access to a top-grade education via online resources, multimedia, recorded lectures, a community of learners that are organized around a particular course.   Many courses are available for free, at significantly lower cost than traditional attendance at a university.

MOOCs are available via many universities directly, you can join courses on iTunes U, or through providers like Coursera or Udacity.

How can schools use MOOCs?

This is a question that I have been asking recently.  The more that I work with students who are pursuing individual passions in fields that we simply don’t support, I wonder how important the notion of “getting credit” will be in the near future.  What is more valuable to a student (alternately: university admissions officer, employer) is it the credit, the grade, or some other demonstration of learning?

I haven’t examined all of the available courses yet, but the focus today is clearly on a university-level student.  Where is the niche for middle or high school friendly MOOCs that give kids an opportunity to form worldwide learning networks and drive students to collaborate and work with?

Eating my own dogfood.

open-learning-intiativeYou can’t really understand something fully without diving in, so I have chosen to undertake some Open Learning Courses of my own.  First, I’ll start with a local favorite, and my Grad School Alma Mater, Carnegie Mellon Univerity.  Today I registered for Principles of Computing, offered by CMU’s Open Learning Initiative.  The tagline is No Instructors, No Credits, No Charge.  This isn’t quite the definition of a MOOC, but CMU has been offering Open Courses since 2002, so I want to get a feel for a starting point.

Overview:

This course covers elementary principles of computing, including iteration, recursion, and binary representation of data. Additional topics on cellular automata, encryption, and the limits of computation are also introduced. The goal of this course is to introduce some of the techniques used in computer science to solve complex problems, with or without a computer. This course does not include a programming component, although the principles that are taught can be used in a programming context.

At first glance, the course seems pretty intuitive and interactive, with plenty of course material to work on for a couple of weeks.

What do I get when I am done?

That’s still up in the air.  Do I list these courses on my resume, or add them to my portfolio?  Do I even care about what I have to hang on the wall if I come away with a valuable skill from the work that I put in.  I’ll update as I discover the answers.

 

MOOC poster April 4, 2013 by Mathieu Plourde licensed CC-BY on Flickr,

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OK Google, Tea, Earl Grey, Hot!

by mrplatts on May 21, 2013

Alternate Title: OK Google, make me a sandwich.

OK-Google-Knowledge-Graph-and-Google-NowSadly, Google is not releasing some sort of food replicator system, but they are about to change the way that you work, or talk to your computer.  Google will soon be rolling out conversational search with auto-hot wording.  Just say “OK GOOGLE” and you will be able to have a conversation with your computer to interact with search results, and to pull data from the ever expanding Google Knowledge Graph.

Are they listening?

Of course, this means your microphone is always on, listening for the keyword, but I would suspect that no data is send back or recorded by Google.  They simply have too much to lose.  And this could be easily checked, as I am sure it has already been done.  A small piece of code runs on the browser, listening only for the OK Google hot word.

So what?

You have been able to speak your searches for some time now, so other than a quick shortcut to this interface, what’s new?   The demo at Google I/O was a knock your socks off moment, as they demonstrated, not only spoken conversational search results, but a contextual knowledge of what you are talking about.  When asked, “How far is it from here” ,  Google knew that the previous search was about Santa Cruz (IT) and used the current location to make a useful result (FROM HERE).

This changes the way that we thing about talking TO our computers (dictation) to conversing with our computers (interaction).  And is a massive obstacle to overcome in voice interaction (like in a Google Glass type environment).

What could possibly go wrong?

I am sure everything will be fine . . . Though, that red glowing google microphone logo looks awful familiar.

the-intellegent-robot-hal-9000

 

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If I had Glass . . . a Heads-Up Business Intelligence Display for Schools

by mrplatts on May 20, 2013

google-glass

Missed the Competition!

So, I missed out on the #IfIHadGlass competition a few weeks back.  But let’s be honest, my wife would have killed me if I had “won” the opportunity to drop $1500 on a Developer Preview Edition of Google Glass.  At the very least she would have shunned me in public when wearing Glass.  But at least Glass had come a long way since the prototype seen below.


Glass

How would I use Glass?

I am not usually the type to jump on every new technology and force it to fit the education market.  I am certain that the controversy surrounding head mounted always-on Heads Up Display (HUD) technology in schools is just around the corner as wearable computing becomes more and more of a reality.  But nonetheless, I am intrigued.

Recently, I have been thinking a lot about data in schools, and the way that we use data to make decisions about student performance.  Often we talk about Data Warehousing to give (on request) access to student data such as current performance data, but I think that this is the wrong metaphore.  We should be asking for Data Analytics to provide realtime data to make decisions about student learning and development.  Businesses call this level of computer assisted data analytics Business Intelligence, but I am yet to see anything that is quite that compelling in the education data market.

Enter Google Glass

Of course, to make a compelling Business Intelligence product in Education Google Glass is not mandatory, but it inspired me to think about what kind of information would be useful to a teacher or principal in a hands-free, automatic heads up display.  Possibly Glass could use facial recognition against a database of student information to release certain types of data to a HUD in a teacher’s eye, releasing only the type of data that various levels of user are privy to.

And as an added bonus, private screen access to otherwise sensitive HIPPA/FERPA protected info!

What Kinds of Data?

With screen (eye?) real estate at a premium, the kinds of data that are provided to a teacher should be relevant and real-time data that is actionable.  Data doesn’t just mean test scores.  A modern, analytical student information system should be tied in to many other kinds of data that help us to guide students in their development and learning.

  • Demographic Data
  • Student Discipline / At Risk notification
  • Attendance / Tardy information
  • Student Learning Profile — including student learning needs for all learners
  • IEP / GIEP information
  • Reading / Mathematics benchmarking profile
  • “high-stakes” assessment data
  • local  performance data
  • local cumulative assessments
  • guidance / developmental / relevant family issues
  • medical data as appropriate to the school environment

And the list could go on.  The trick is gathering the data and keeping it up to date by linking together the various systems through an analytics engine, parsing the actionable data, and then sharing this information out to the appropriate people who are cleared for that information.

 

 

 

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Google Makes It’s “Play” For The Education Market

May 20, 2013

Coming Soon: Google Play Store for Education Google seems to be dominating the education market in terms of its Google Apps for Education Suite of productivity Applications, including Gmail, Google Drive, Sites and so one.  I certainly can’t imagine doing without the collaboration and sharing that is built into the suite of apps.  See how Google is [...]

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Aw Snap — 3D Printer is in the shop!

May 15, 2013

We can rebuild it! I am not sure if the part pictured below sheared due to user error (me doing something silly) or if the part that we received was a sub-par print.  Either possibility is as likely as the other.  But, it is all part of the build experience.  Actually as I type this, one of [...]

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Awaiting Google I/O

May 15, 2013

Google’s Developers Conference Today I am trying to keep an eye on the coverage of the three-hour keynote that will begin around noon today.  Google I/O is really for the developers, but this is the place where they announce the newest developments in the Google Platform for the upcoming year.  I am looking forward to [...]

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Welcome Home Commander Hadfield!

May 14, 2013

The Canadian ISS Commander, Chris Hadfield and two crewmates returned safely to earth yesterday aboard a Soyuz capsule in Khazakstan after five months aboard the International Space Station.  Congratulations to Commander Hadfield and the crew of Expedition 35 for their commitment to science and technology and for sharing that passion with a whole new generation [...]

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