Acceptable Use Policy Advice... and a Good Dose of Common Sense

A friend called me recently for advice. He works in a school district and they have been hammering out a revised Acceptable Use Policy (AUP). He described that the discussions on this new AUP been going on for over a year, meetings were now bi-monthly, in complete gridlock and the current draft they were working on had expanded to 11 pages.

I told him a quote from Phillip K. Howard's TED speech: "The constitution is only 16 pages long."

As you might imagine, the AUP draft he sent was loaded with restrictions on web access, programs, hardware, personal devices, restrictions on the use of social media and a long list of resulting penalties.

I told him I felt the document would lead to paralysis and that it was educationally irresponsible for the needs of modern students and educators. The perspective of out of sight, out of mind won't help. Denial of service on such issues is not educational... it's avoidance.

I encouraged him to pass on a series of drafts from other districts to the committee to help them gain some perspective on where neighboring schools were headed educationally. I also recommended that the AUP should be no more than 3 pages, preferably 1. The final that they decide on should be discussed with teachers across the school, and with parents. It should be made part of professional development initiatives to help folks understand the potential pitfalls and strengths. It should not lead to business as usual.

I also offered up that it would be a healthy shift to discuss what they wanted to do educationally rather than simply what they will prevent people from doing.

In sent him the link to Howard's speech below to watch and to pass on to the committee. Howard's speech speaks volumes about refining general principles and goals.

What do you think?

The Fringe Benefits of Failure

I was prowling the web recently and stumbled on this Harvard Commencement speech by JK Rowling on the subject of failure. I spent the rest of the day mulling it over after watching, thinking about where I've been and how I've done things along the way.

When we do fail... we have to learn to pick ourselves up. I've failed many times in my life. There are times when I've picked myself up quickly and moved on and some others where it has taken me some time to regroup and get moving again.

Rowling touches on another theme that hit home for me. When it does take some time to get moving again I often think of something my father told me many moons ago: 'Surround yourself with good people and good things happen." Years later he added some more wisdom: "There are a lot of fair weather friends out there. Spend more time with the people who truly look to help you when the chips are down."

Rowling's speech conjures up a good deal of other thoughts too. What thoughts will it conjure up for you?

J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.

Social Media: Participation in billions... except in schools?

This morning I had a chat with a teacher from Northern Vermont who explained that all social media access was banned at the school where they work. Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, AllTop, Delicious. Run down the list and it was blocked. I was a bit surprised to hear that all blogs and wikis were blocked as well, but this one I'd never heard of before: Amazon.com. The rationale was "some people here don't feel students should be able to access book reviews or view comments." I stopped asking what else was blocked.

I was asked how we approached/proposed changes to filtering practices here at BBA. I said the first step was to start talking about education and not about filtering.

After we finished our chat I took to the web for a few minutes to see what folks were publishing on 'social media in education' lately.

There are a bunch of 'Social Media Statistic' videos out there like the one below I found embedded in a post from UCLA from a Social Media and Marketing class. The participation statistics are staggering as usual. Give this a peek:

There's a slide in the video about Apple reaching 1 billion downloads in their App Store in just 9 months. One billion sales in 9 months! I remembered reading a few days ago in the NY Times that the Apple Apps Store (via iTunes) has just surpassed 2 billion downloads. The second billion took five months. We'll see how long it takes them to reach three billion.

Now, I'm not saying we should teach 'social media' in schools simply because of Apple's success.

What I am saying is that it'd be difficult to debate that we are not in one of the most collaborative times in the history of civilization. Participation in billions, revolutionary times in how we communicate. I can't count the number of times I've used this phrase on topics around technology: "Building skills using these tools seems a better way to go than 'denial of service' don't you think?"

Collaboration shifts

Had another group of visitors in the lab today, this time from Southern Vermont Supervisory Union to discuss Google Apps. Nice group of folks. We discussed how we proposed the shift here, why we did, how we moved both educationally and technically, the increase in usage and collaboration, cost savings and the like. Looks like we'll be heading down to do a presentation in October.

Taking it all in

Our discussions about the news in class leads down a number of paths. I rarely watch a conventional newscast anymore. Aggregation, the ability to bring data to you rather than search for it page by page, is the direction I take and work with students to do as well.

Sadly the use of aggregation tools is not commonplace in many education circles. Many tools to aggregate data on the web are blocked in too many schools. Proposals in the Lab have moved a good bit forward here on our campus and we're headed for some more discussions throughout this school year I'm sure.

I get asked a lot out and about how I keep up on things, how to manage loads of information, what we work on with students in the Lab, etc. The logos in the pic above are a few of the major information tools we work with in the Lab. At the center of the activity is iGoogle. If you're not familiar with it, iGoogle pulls in feeds you subscribe to from all over the web into a 'newspaper sytle' format. Each site below appears in a small window or 'widget' on the page. Here's a link to a picture of my blog tab/page in iGoogle that may help if you've never seen it.

The advantage to using iGoogle? If it didn't make sense above, here's another way to dish it up: All this information appears in one page. Rather than visiting each site individually the stories all come to me. Again, it's a bit like creating my own newspaper really. See something I'm interested in on my page, I just click on a head line and it brings me to the site to read the article.

Here are a few I subscribe to: In the main tab (or window) I pull in my personal email, calendar and the following news sources: NY Times, AP Newswire, CNN, BBC, Boston Globe, Wall Street Journal, Digg and the Huffington Post. I grab more tech centric news sites as well in: Slashdot, Wired, Gizmodo, Google blog, Google Docs blog, Google Operating system blog and Mashable.com. I add in ESPN for some sports headlines.

I also have a TwitterFeed which pulls messages from my personal Twitter account. With Twitter, once you get past the "why would I do this" question, subscribe to a few folks and try out a few posts it's easier to see why Twitter can be very useful. Dedicating some time searching out folks who will inspire you and subscribing to them, then things take off. I pull the TED website posts into iGoogle as well for updates on what's been posted along with a TED Fellows blog. We use a number of TED speeches as conversations starters here in the Lab. If you haven't checked out TED.com do yourself a favor and give it a try.

All the headlines from the sites above, all visible on one page.

On another tab/page in iGoogle I subscribe to a number of blogs: Guy Kawasaki (he has a few), Will Richardson, Seth Godin, David Warlik, Chris Lehmann, Liz Davis, Carl Fisch, Samba blog, ReadWriteWeb, PresentationZen and a handful of others. These blogs offer up insights on education, business, technology, collaboration, some good common sense and the like.

Three other tabs I have open in the web browser itself are Alltop, HootSuite and Delicious. AllTop gives me a snapshot of loads of things cooking on on the web, top stories or groupings of things by interest. We've used it quite a bit on research projects in the Lab and the more I use it the more I like it.

HootSuite is a web based Twitter client that has proven quite useful. Subscribe to a large number of folks in Twitter and it can get pretty unruly to keep track of. That's the point though with Twitter... you don't need to see and read everything! Seeing who responds to you directly, what you send and what you receive in separate columns has proven very valuable. HootSuite offers a bunch of other functionality as well but I won't go into it now.

I use Delicious to tag and search web articles all the time. The real strength of Delicious though I think is to see who else 'tagged' the same article you did. Finding people with like interests aka researching similar subjects, well, it's a bit like having a research assistant... without paying for one.

That's a snapshot of what I use personally and what we work on with students here to branch out in their projects. I've been at this since iGoogle first came out. I've tried others. I use Google Reader frequently as well.

Why do this? I feel like I get an incredible snapshot of the world, my interests and my functional tools in a few pages. I feel more connected and informed. It's promoted me to read more... the list could go on and on. Helping people become more informed, to find inspiration, to become better researchers, to promote reading... that's what we aspire to do isn't it? At one point we felt like libraries were inventive.

I can't say I feel this is innovative by any means at this point. Many individuals and schools are doing this in some fashion. The danger I think is that too few students are using these tools in education. We've made some great strides here at BBA changing perspectives on the value of these aggregation tools and keep having discussions on how folks can use them. I've always said we'll get a lot further by promoting sophisticated use rather than pretending it doesn't exist.

Thanks for tuning in, AP

Inspiration

Inspiration is a funny business. Exciting place to be, yes?

-- Posted from batphone

Oh the times they are a changin'

I just finished up a few hours work porting the RLab web site over to this new blog. The old site was a hybrid effort of some dreamweaver, Photoshop and a blog. There were a few reasons for the change:

Let's face it, blogger.com is more reliable than any service we can put up in a business or a school.

Blogger and other similar web sites have all the issues figured out with serving up the info on multiple browsers, especially those on mobile phones.

It's free.

Students wanted to make the site more compatible with rss feed readers.

Students wanted to include the ability to have readers comment on posts.

Foremost, though listed last, students will be adding a significant amount of content here this year.

While I'll miss regular dreamweaver sessions, Photoshop tinkering and such, it's more the nostalgia I'll miss than anything. I started out creating web pages back in the day writing HTML code with notepad. Focusing on content will be a gas as will posting from this phone during class. Blogger has many custom layout options, like the ones at pyzam.com for instance, that make it very easy to make changes as well as many other templates and custom build options. We'll see what happens.

Mission accomplished.

As I mentioned before, I picked up an iPhone this summer. I've spent some time with it as a reader... using it to soak up books, blogs, podcasts and journals out there that I used to read on a computer. The result? I'm reading more. It's been stellar. I still enjoy the feel of a book, the pages, etc but... This has been more convenient for me, easier on the eyes - hey I read a lot and the text size on the phone is adjustable, as is brightness, portait or landscape layout etc. Podcasts in particular have been great to have more readily available on the go. An iPod aint just about music ya know! As I mentioned on another post earlier, having an iPod, a phone, web access and apps like this all on one device has been just the ticket.

That gets us onto a few other similar threads.

I dove into facebook this summer. Many thanks to some former and current students for showing me the ropes. I've discovered I should have jumped in long ago. Now, I'm not advocating that it beats a good sit down chat, but let's face it, it sure beats conventional mail, email and smoke signals. I stayed away from it for so long only because I felt I had no time to dive in and not because of the fact I teach and coach. I've always felt and still advocate that you shouldn't post things online you don't want people to see. It's really that simple.

That brings up the concept of "friending" in facebook. When I jumped in I was surprised how many friend requests I recieved. Many folks have contacted me to be friends who I barely know. Some of those requests are still waiting in the confirm or ignore space. Well discuss this in the Lab quite a bit this year. In all, facebook has been a stellar communication tool an I'm looking forward to using it more. Go figure.

After a summer of wailing on an iPhone and all it's mobile connectivity and literacy power, facebook and a slew of reading, I've come to the same conclusion: mobile computers are still no substitute for a laptop. While its convenient and there are numerous opportunities for creativity, collaboration and literacy, a laptop has far greater creative potential. Two things pull to the surface as I sit here: 1. Folks that don't have this sort of access are really missing something. 2. Students in particular are at a distinct disadvantage if they don't have access to a computer... Because school is supposed to be a creative place rather than just a place to access information isn't it? Therein lies the discussion on "institutional vs personal" computing." Putting the personal back in personal computing makes the most sense.

Now, it's not to say that iPhones in education or netbooks for that matter are not worth their salt. It's just that a computer, with all it's potential and power to create, program, edit sound and video, to draw, etc is better. I don't believe waiting for devices to evolve further will get us closer... Otherwise we will never stop waiting.

We've been discussing laptops here for education for four years and I'm hoping the discussions move forward in this coming school year.

Yes, I'm interested to see how the Apple tablet computer rumors sugar out.

We switched to Google Apps this past year and the results have been stellar. We increased reliability, ease of use, the number and depth of tools available and the training material, shifted IT support staff time away from hardware and configuration time to working with people and... It was all free. We have more money to direct toward bandwidth and other educational needs. We've also participated in many Statewide discussions and chats with other schools. Mission accomplished. Well, almost...

One last item remains with Google Apps here and that is in the functionality of the Google desktop, commonly known as iGoogle. The functionality was disabled last year due to the fact that some controversial material could be added... Swimsuit flashcard style shows sort of stuff. What were hoping to bring forth this year is that we'll gain far more by talking about creative use than denial of service. The aggregation of data, the ability to essentially "create your own newspaper" far outweighs the other concerns. Building user sophistication will get us further. In just two days of tinkering with folks on iGoogle in the Lab we made some great strides and then it was shut off. Discussions should resume soon.

This lends me toward another thought though. As tools get more integrated will we need instituitional email any longer? We are already seeing sites integrate with each other. I use Twitter and now it's possible to send my "tweets" (posts on Twitter) to facebook and delicious (delicious.com). It's pretty common for folks to forward mail from seperate accounts to one they routinely use. Many folks I know forward mail from multiple accounts to one single one and then sign the note with the appropriate "from" signature. Google Voice is headed in this direction on the phone side, giving you the tools to be your own phone hub... ring all your phones at once, route certain callers to certain phones... for free. How long will it be before academic institutions are challenged to abandon their email systems? We shall see. For now, the tools are not integrated well enough and there's great power in having access to lots of tools (we could go back to the laptop for students thread here but I'll move on... you get the idea).

Writing this on a phone while I sit on the deck overlooking the water on Lake Champlain still seems surreal to me in a way. So does sending it to the new RLab blog on this phone and having it publish to the web. So does using the same device to check the start time and pitching matchups for the upcoming Red Sox game, moving over to check my email... All while I take a picture of my sandals for this post... all while I listen to big band music on earphones.

Hey... I was riding my bike the other day and I answered the phone, talked, hung up and used voice control to switch playlists on this "phone" all without touching the device itself, just a little control pad on the head phones. The song that came up? The Times They Are a Changin' by Bob Dylan...

... They are... thankfully...

... And I love it. It's one of the most exciting times in the history if the world, in education and in the quest for literacy and knowledge. I'm in. Are you?

Sent from batphone.

Porch thinkin' at days end

I've gotta say, carrying a phone, iPod, camera with a web browser and all these info aggregation tools in one device has been a great ticket thus far. I'm capturing more spontaneous photos, accessing info on the fly, and automating some routine tasks. Take one event today as an example.

A few days ago I installed an app called ReQall. I was standing in line for a coffee yesterday and called ReQall to experiment. I told ReQall to "send a (coworker) a note tomorrow asking when the new projectors are coming in." ReQall sent out the note the following am and I received a response from my coworker today with an answer. A digital secretary service. Sure, I could have sent the note myself but it's pretty convenient to call a service, have it transcribe your voice to text, decipher the command words in the note of "send" and "tomorrow" and have it actually do it! Thus far I've setup ReQall to add things to my Google calendar, send me text reminders, send email for me and remind me of tasks I have floating about. It's also free. Thus far, it's been a great experiment. There's a delay when you call ReQall, while it transcribes your voice but thus far a delay of 5 to as long as 30 minutes has not been a factor. Texting the service provides quicker results. The trick here is that it writes it to my calendar, sends me reminders via txt messages, etc all from spoken words or style (verbal or written) sentences. Going to run more experiments.

In the last week I've attempted to move away from the computer more for my reading, email and writing. Thus far, the iPhone has fit the bill. With these new capabilities I've been reading more, jotting down notes in a variety of places and taking far more spontaneous photos I otherwise wouldn't shoot because I rarely dragged around a camera. I've been on the mobile version of facebook, tossing out some txts with friends I used to speak to once a month. Ideas are flowing, I'm storing info in places where I can access it later in a much more seamless fashion. Great stuff.

My dog, Otis, has had enough though of me on this phone over the last hour. Picture of Otis shot, cropped and dropped the blurbs you see on the pic using the phone in about two mins. Editing photos on a phone... amazing. More later. Time to play fetch. Good dog.

Diving back into the mobile connectivity world

It's been ages since I have carried a cell phone. While it's been a nice break I'll say there are times when it's damned inconvenient. The new iPhone packs a lot of integration features that can replace a large portion of my information based desktop activity aka reading blogs, quick emails, news, calendar tinkering etc. So... I dove back in. Bit like eating ice cream I guess. If you don't follow that then try having some ice cream (a large bowl definately helps) and give it another think.

I've Been Thinking...

A good friend of mine uses the title "I've Been Thinking" as the title of one of his blogs... and it seems fitting for this post.

Here's what I had been reading before this last school break:

Two books:
Disrupting Class

Grown Up Digital

Going through regular blog updates by:

David Warlik, Seth Godin , Jeff Jarvis and Will Richardson

I read through the New Horizons Report and one from the Web Use Project.

All of these the titles and bloggers above are worth multiple entries here themselves. But that's what's got me thinking... about taking a break. These books, reports and bloggers continue to share a common theme in that education is moving altogether too slowly and so often in the wrong direction on the technology front. Collaboration, creation, exploration and advanced use are too infrequently in place. Technology in many school settings is limited to how many computers the school has and most of those are used for general access. While a word processor is certainly easier to use than a manual typewriter it does not explore the potential of the machine. Add in limited web research opportunities, to say nothing of collaboration opportunities. Too many collaboration tools are restricted from use. Too many signs that prohibit or severely limit the use of technology use are still visible. Lots of potential slipping by I think. A Vermont education / technology listserv at UVM discussions reflect the wide scope of themes and discussions and the thoughts of the participants on these subjects.

It's not the first time my mind was buzzing and I was a bit frustrated with the same old debates on whether technology had a place in education, if students were too plugged in. So I took a theme that was running through the many of these blog posts on "what is education for" and decided to give it a good think on a trip I was taking to Disney in Orlando, Florida with family and friends for the break. A perfect time to unplug, separate from reading, take a ton of photos, get some sun and let my mind wander.

Here's a bit of what caught my eye.

It had been just over a year since I had been in an airport. Wireless access, plugin stations for power, laptop, cell phone, and pda use were, well, everywhere. I decided to sit back and just watch it all for a bit. Then I got the itch to talk to some folks about what they were doing. Here are a few quotes I jotted down.

"It's so much easier to stay in touch."

"If you don't collaborate, if you don't network in my business you're done."

"Ebooks, video and podcasts are how I educate myself now. I have access to everything I need and more ways than ever to find new things."

A lady I spoke with reading on a Kindle (the old version) tossed out a gem:

" It's hard to unplug sometimes. I get used to the connectivity, used to the stream of information coming in. I used to feel the same way with books though and in college. Learning how to manage it, how to separate from work is more important than ever. This is better for me now though. I can access what I want and it's easier for me to find information, to find something new."

Here was another beauty:

"Our company just got these blackberry's. For a bit honestly I was thinking it was time for me to get another job. Now that I'm getting used to it it's saving me a lot of time and I've been thinking more and more about how I work and keep in touch with people."

At Disney, cell phones and, as you'd expect, digital cameras were everywhere. I spoke to a few folks on how they used digital photos:

"I can capture everything I want. I used to be worried about the cost of taking photos. Not anymore."

"I snap everything I can now to capture our time together. My parents lost all our family albums in a fire. Almost 30 years later I lost all my photos to a failed hard drive. Now I back everything up and I'm snapping photos like crazy."

"We all have cameras, my three children, my wife. I decided to do this because my Father only appears in a handful of our old pictures because he was the one behind the camera all the time. I want my wife and kids to have photos of me too. It's also been great to see the world through the eyes of my children. Seeing what they feel is important is an eye opener. We take less formal pose pictures now and we're getting more shots of how we act, how we live."

I have relayed this theme to folks for many years. My own Father appears in about 20 photos in our family albums. This gent and I chatted for about 20 minutes on the subject and shared some ideas about how we talk to our own children about taking photos. I split use of a camera between two children to this point but plan on adding another so they can both take photos at the same time after this chat we had. We both seemed to agree in this conversation that folks in our generation and those earlier seemed to take a lot of photos of places we've been. Now these places and scenes are readily available on the web. I told this chap about the projects with SeaDragon and Photosynth , geo-tagging and the like and it led the conversation further down this path. Capturing family members in those scenes and the emotions, the nuances of our families and the people around us we agreed was easier than ever before. We also agreed that our children seemed to take to this shift naturally.

I took tons of photos, video clips and enjoyed the time away from reading on education, the sun and the change of scenery and close family time away from all our household lives. Disney is an interesting place. It's like stepping into my childhood imagination at times and one hell of a high quality theme park. It's also overrun with expense and commercialism. It's inevitable though to provide a scene of that high quality it seems. Walt Disney would have been a fascinating person to chat with while he was building the idea and beginning construction of it all. Selling that idea to investors had it's trials I'll bet. Perhaps it would provide insight into selling one-to-one computing locally and in the State. Walking around in t-shirts and shorts in the sun in the afternoon and returning home to shovel 10 inches of snow from the walkway sticks in my mind. Traveling the world is certainly something we should all do more of if we can.

The time away also reinforced once again that we're on the right track here in the Lab. Diverse challenges, loads of debate and discussion on all these issues in education and the role and use of these technology tools will get us closer to seeing it's potential. Ditto for the continuing quest to fire up innovative programs.

The trip also got me thinking about how this blog is used for the Lab. More posting, more discussion and.. we'll see what else is on the horizon.

On the horizon: Great work with students this semester will happily consume much of my time. Baseball starts up soon and there my continuing quest to leave the realm of general manager and dedicate more time to coaching. Burlington High School is coming to see the inner workings of the Lab and our scope of courses at BBA in March. Various presentations on what we're doing here at conferences and at other schools, foundation work on a State laptop pilot, further discussion on the shift in education and opportunities at hand will take place. Foundation work to improve local fields and instructional programs will certainly take some time. Whipping up a great local baseball clinic, that's definitely needed and in the works. We'll continue to refine our Help Desk program and direct people onto the potential of a one-to-one computing program here and the countless opportunities it can present to students to take part in education and skills in the changing world. Exploring creativity, the world and your role in it. A fine goal for what education means I think.

One of the blogs read today just pointed me toward Yale University's entry into the OpenCourseWare movement. Another point that giving folks access to technology and then modeling and promoting sophisticated use can lead down great paths.

... and Heath Ledger just won the best supporting actor award for his role as the Joker in the Dark Knight. Not to be bias as a Batman fan, but it's well deserved. The tragic death of a brilliant actor.

Lots to give a think. Lots of lobbying to do. Some good pizza will help I think.

Look "SEE"

"Stanford Engineering Everywhere" hit the web yesterday. Building on the OpenCourseWare (OCW) philosophy, "SEE" adds more instructor content, video and collaborative work into the free information mix. It's easy to get inspired when you see the quality of this content being given away. There are more resources available on OCW too if you are new... or old at it:

http://ocw.mit.edu

MIT has a lens for high schools too:
http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/hs/home/home/index.htm

http://www.ocwconsortium.org



http://ocwfinder.com

Toss in OLPC, other one to one laptop initiatives and the evolving use and functions of cell phones (Google Android phones are due out soon and here's a post from them on "The Future of Mobile Phones")... gourmet stuff.

Creating opportunities and inspiring a passion for learning are as important as ever don't you think ?

Changing Landscape

Fred Vogelstein whipped up an article for Wired Magazine Online on how the iPhone changed the cellular business landscape. A good read! The iPhone and the Google 'Andriod' project have already brought sweeping changes to the industry. Just imagine what this will look like five years from now.