TECHNOLOGY & EDUCATION DIGEST
Digest No. 14 -- July 11, 1997
A Moderated Mailing List
Steve Wildstrom (steve_wildstrom@businessweek.com), Moderator

Return to Technology & Education

Sorry for the length of this digest, but I wanted to clear the queue of all pending messages before departing for a couple weeks vacation. I'll be reading my mail while away from the office and, if traffic demands, I'll post a digest from the road. In any event I expect the volume of postings to drop now, especially for the rest of the summer.

I think Ron Bosse brought up a viable topic in his posting about problems in in getting funding for the wiring required for Internet access. A solution many school administrators haven't addressed is the option to go "wireless." I work with Wi-LAN, a maker of wireless ethernet bridges. The company currently has several ongoing, successful projects which entail connecting entire school districts to the Internet. A project just starting up at the Indianola school district in Iowa has been estimated to save the district $150,000 in additional hardware costs and telephone charges. Instead of purchasing 4 file servers, the district can run all WAN traffic through one file server. Wireless has been tested to provide T-1 like speed access and is a proven and reliable alternative to hard-wired solutions.

>Tony Mitchell (tjamitch@snet.net) wrote in Tech-Ed 3---
>Is it so far fetched to provide each teacher with a laptop computer they can
>use both in school and at home where they do about half their work? This
>practice is commonplace in business when staff expects to work at home.
>Traditionally, teachers do half of their work at home.

I must admit, we're in a better position: we're a private school with alumni who love technology and can get money readily approved. Yes, we have laptops teachers can check out overnight. No, at this point they cannot connect to the 'net from home (unless from a home computer)... However, many do have home computers with net access. From a purely working standpoint (not net access), the laptops are loaded with the grading package, MS Office, etc...

The obvious problem here is one almost fundamental to the public educational system: public high schools all too often are not thought of benefactors of successful individuals who may have graduated from the high school, where the private high schools have a finely tuned development staff to communicate with potential donors. Until the money becomes universally available, there will exist a gap between schools that can access this technology.

Kevin C. Miller

>Matt Mulder (mattville@aol.com) wrote: [ TECH-ED List , Number 4]:
>In your June 9 online edition, the Moderator...writes: "Perusal of
>school-run Web sites suggests that most of them serve mainly to give kids a
>chance to design Web pages, a useful, but hardly critical, skill."
>[Mr. Mulder goes on to argue] The misconception that Design (graphic,
>industrial, interior, architectural or otherwise) is mere window dressing
>and therefore is not a valuable or indeed critical skill needs to be changed in
>this country.
>..when confronted with the authorship of one's own ideas, critical thinking is
>taking place. Giving kids a chance to understand, author, and formulate their
>own ideas within a hyper media such as the world wide web helps them understand
>broader perspectives beyond their immediate boundaries and perhaps more
>importantly within themselves. ...designing on the web can [provoke critical
>thinking] ... within our children if our educators and policy makers don't
>undervalue their creative efforts.

*** Like Mr. Mulder, I also found the Moderators observation equally odd. Is it perhaps naive for us to have claimed book reading technology as superior to film or TV or computer technology. To do so would be to hold that Shakespeare's greater art lies in the printed text and not on the limelighted stage, or that James Whitcomb Riley's words leap to life best from a paper page and not in the cadence of a spoken - or recorded - voice. The interactive media of today, such as the WWW, is no less humanistic than the printing press machine of an earlier day. Our cultural literacy is no less critical in either.

Was Victor Hugo also anticipating the Web way back then at his young age of 29, when he wrote: "In its printed [electronic, virtual?] form, thought is more imperishable than ever; it is volatile, irresistible, and indestructible. It pervades the air. ...Now she is a flock of birds, flies abroad to all the four winds of heaven, and occupies at once all the points of air and of space."

Glenn Ralston
gralston@in.net

Lori Scribner
Cooper/Iverson Marketing
8334 Clairemont Mesa Blvd., Suite 214 San Diego, CA 92111
PH: 619/268-1995
FAX: 619/268-1994
E-MAIL: scribner@cts.com

There is free teacher training at a number of sites around the country this summer and coming fall and winter for k-12 teachers interested in an international enviromental science education program already linking kids in several thousand schools around the world in gathering and analyzing real data such as temperatures, precipitation, cloud type and cover, biomas, soil types, etc... check out http://www.globe.gov

I'd like to tell you a little bit about my school, Andrew Robinson Elementary in Jax, FL... We are a math/science magnet in the inner city. Our students and teachers use technology in a variety of ways for learning and especially for production of student work. we are very proud of our website, www.rockets.org, which was created by and for our students. Please take a look and let us know what you think.

deborah miller
4/5 teacher

High school educators and students who would like an award-winning starting point to enhance teaching and learning are invited to visit David Levin's Learning@Web.Sites. Just point your browser to http://www.ecnet.net/users/gdlevin/home.html . Organized by departments that may be found in a typical high school, visitors will be able to easily point and click on web sites that are highly valuable, useful, and some that are just plain cool. Let me know what you think!

David Levin

>Ross MacLeod (rmacleod@fsr.com) writes:
>>In Tech-Ed 3, Kevin Miller asked
>> [How do others handle the problem of providing open Internet access while >
>>keeping the kids out of harm's way? Suggestions welcome.-MOD]

>First, schools need to establish policies that provide for controlled Net
>access. Then, schools need implement those policies by
>monitoring usage at each
>computer, and blocking inappropriate sites. Industrial strength packages are
>WebSense from NetPartners, at http://www.netpartners.com., Net Access Manager
>from Sequel Technologies, at http://www.sequeltech.com, SurfWatch, at
>http://www.surfwatch.com. I'm sure there are other good packages as well.
>Companies like these will gain influence and market share from school districts
>buying large quantities of their software at discounted rates. I would
>encourage any school district technologists to inquire about volume discounts on
>software.

In my experience, school policy already covered many of the issues in allowing net access. We are allowing widespread access with no special policies.

I'm sure some of these options are much to expensive for many schools; just getting computers is difficult financially. There are many freeware and low-cost shareware options which do the same things. It might take a few extra minutes of creative construction, but I was able to implement a very robust system, including a PPro-200 server (64MB RAM, 3GB HD), NT Server, IIS, a relay/proxy server, and an SMTP/POP3/IMAP mailer server for under $2000, and this was in February. Recruit some good HS students who know what they're doing. I know I'm very different from most HS students in that I try to help secure the system through official channels and I'm generally the one closing holes and fixing problems exploited by my peers. Fortunately, many don't know who they're fighting. :)

Kevin

>In Tech-Ed 12, Michael Quinn (mmquinn1@mmm.com) writes:
>I would appreciate comments from those who might have read the article,
>"The Computer Delusion," by Todd Oppenheimer, which appeared in the
>July, 1997, issue of The Atlantic Monthly.
>For those who have not read it, I believe it to be
>worth the time, whether or not you agree with its contents.

The article is inflammatory, and must have been intended to be so! I thought that Oppenheimer used many examples to get close to discussing concerns, but then left the reader with an incomplete picture so that it's easy to draw an incorrect conclusion.

I base that on comparing what he wrote to my experience in my own classroom and in visiting classrooms around California as a technology consultant.

His grand conclusion is to cut Federal funding support for technology and require schools to use industry donations of hardware.

The biggest problem with this is that Federal funding is limited essentially (at least as I understand it) to grant support via the Technology Literacy Challenge--to encourage innovative and appropriate uses of technology to serve as models.

The second problem is that donated hardware usually brings a new menu of troubles--greater maintenance cost; frustration for newbies; no capacity for online work.

He suggests a solution to our current shortcomings when he reports that a California task force found that "More than any other single measure computers and network technologies, properly implemented, offer the greatest potential to right what's wrong with our public schools" (p. 53).

The key is PROPERLY IMPLEMENTED. To do this, we have to help school create a vision, plan thoughtfully, establish budget line-items for hardware and software purchases and upgrades, pc and network maintenance, and staff development. The use of technology MUST be supportive of curriculum standards and objectives, and not thrown in as an after-thought or separate item. Staff development has to emphasize curriculum and instructional strategies as well as technological skills.

Having an adequately funded federal department of education is the only way we can even hope to address these issues on a national level.

I've tried to summarize my real response, which I'm writing as a paper for a policy class at Pepperdine. If any of you want to see the whole 15 pages or so (I'm not done yet), contact me and I'll send it or put it online so you can see it.

Terrie

Terrie Gray, Director, ED's Oasis
tgray@pepperdine.edu
http://www.EDsOasis.org

Where you will find education treasures, share effective strategies, and build community...

>Michelle McQuaid (mdmcquaid@gov.pe.ca) writes:
>In February of 1997, Prince Edward Island began building a high-speed
>communications network which will connect all 66 Prince Edward Island Schools
>and 23 Public Libraries to one another and to the world. This network uses ATM
>technology, which allows graphics, audio, and video to be shared easily between
>users without excessive download time.

How did you decide to use ATM vs. Frame Relay vs. Switched [Fast] Ethernet? Our HS installed plain old hubbed Ethernet to share all this yet realized quickly it wouldn't be fast enough. Consequently we're building a 100Mbps backbone and a fully-switched network.

Kevin

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