Sunday, October 5, 2014

Server Side Includes

I have a fantastic group of students in my afternoon Advanced Topics in Information Technology class this year.  Its been a long time since I've had a group with this level of skill, self-motivation, and interest.  It is going to be a fun year!

Two students are studying web page design.  They have already completed both the GDW HTML and GDW CSS tutorials, and now they are working on projects to apply what they have learned to their own website.  One of the two students, Jack, has been working on a menu bar that highlights the current page using CSS.  This led us to a discussion of the need to be able to dynamically include standard parts your website (headers, footers, etc.) across multiple pages, so that changes to these cross page components can be made in only one place. This was a great time to introduce the DRY principal in software development.

Another student in the class, Sam, who is studying The C Programming Language this semester, is also interested in system administration, and on overhearing Jack and me discussing the problem, pointed out Server Side Includes to us. I'm surprised that I've never heard of this technology before, since it provides just the kind of solution I'm looking for in terms of motivating a deeper understanding of web technologies step-by-step.  I don't want to jump into a Python web framework (even a micro framework like bottle) at this point.  I'm not a fan of PHP, though I realize that it is not a bad fit for what I'm looking for. SSI looks to be better.

Sam volunteered to explore setting up and documenting SSI.  I told him to setup an Ubuntu server with VirtualBox.  He will be delayed in doing that because he only has 32 bit Ubuntu on his laptop, so while we wait for Sam to reinstall with 64 bit Ubuntu this weekend, I decided to go ahead and document as much of this process as I could.

Setting Up Ubuntu Server in VirtualBox

Here is a screen shot showing the first stage of the Ubuntu server setup using VirtualBox:


I used 1 Gig of RAM and a 20 Gig virtual hard drive (the first option in the menu of virtual hard drive choices, VDI). I then changed the network setting to use a "Bridged Adapter", which gives the virtual machine its own network address on the host network, instead of putting it behind NAT on a 10.x.x.x. network. This makes it easy for me to ssh into the virtual server from my desktop, and for others (students, say, in a classroom setting), to ssh into it from their machines.

During the installation of Ubuntu Server, the only software package option I picked was "Open SSH Server".  I plan to install everything else I want piece by piece.

The next task is to install apache on the server:
$ sudo aptitude install apache2
As soon as that completes, I can point the browser from my desktop at the IP address of the server running inside a virtual machine that it is hosting (I don't care how many times I've done this, I always think it is cool! ;-)


 
My host machine (desktop) in this case has IP address 192.168.1.4, and the server running inside the virtualbox has IP address 192.168.1.11, so my the browser running on my desktop is connecting to the web server running on the virtual machine.

Enabling SSI

Now to get server side includes working, I followed Sam's instructions:
# a2enmod userdir
# a2enmod include
# vi /etc/apache2/mods-availiable/userdir.conf
   change "IncludesNoExec" to "Includes"
# vi /etc/apache2/mods-available/dir.conf
   add "index.shtml" (immediately after "DirectoryIndex"
     and before "index.html")
# service apache2 restart
We now have user local directories and SSI enabled (we hope ;-).  Let's try it out. I created a public_html subdirectory in my home directory, and put two files in it, index.shtml:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<title>SSI Test Page</title>
</head>
<body>
<h1>SSI Test Page</h1>

<!--#include file="success_message.inc" -->

</body>
</html>
and success_message.inc:
<p>
If you are reading this message, SSI is working... Yeah!
</p>
Now I point my web browser at: 192.168.1.11/~jelkner and:

One last thing to note is that the SSI_PSPserver.vdi virtual hard drive file can easily be copied from machine to machine, bringing all the setup with it.

I talked to Sam about what my educational motivation was for wanting to use SSI.  He quoted Nietzsche on his blog post for that day to let me know he totally understood what I was getting at:
"He who would learn to fly one day must first learn to stand and walk and run and climb and dance; one cannot fly into flying."
-Friedrich Nietzsche
I'll say it again, this is going to be a fun year!
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Tuesday, May 6, 2014

Python 3 Django 1.7 on Ubuntu 14.04 - Day 1

It's time to dive into learning Django.  I've been waiting until I could use Django with Python 3, and that time has now come. I'll be working on Ubuntu 14.04.  There is no python3-django package yet, so I'll give pip a try.  I also want to start with Django 1.7, so that I can learn the new built-in migrations instead of using South to update the data model.

Here is what I did to get started:
  • $ sudo aptitude install python3-pip
  • $ pip3 install --user https://www.djangoproject.com/download/1.7b3/tarball/
This created .local/lib/python3.4/site-packages and .local/bin directories in my $HOME and installed the Django egg in the .local site-packages directory and django-admin and django-admin.py in the .local/bin directory (see PEP 370).

Next I did:
  • $ python3
  • >>> import django
  • >>> print(django.get_version())
When the last statement returned 1.7b3 I knew I was in business. Trying to run django-admin, I realized that .local/bin was not in my PATH, so I added the following to the bottom of my .bashrc file:

PATH=$HOME/.local/bin:$PATH

 export PATH

 I also added the following to my .bash_aliases:

alias python='python3'

since Python 3 is what I use all the time now.

Starting a Django Project 

  • $ django-admin startproject checkitout
  • $ cd checkitout 
  • $ python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080
Running this last step created a db.sqlite3 file in the checkitout directory - something new in Django 1.7 I believe.

At this point I created a bzr repository of this so that each step in the process from here on out can be easily rewound.  Each of these commands were run inside the top level checkitout directory:
  • bzr init
  • bzr add *
  • bzr ci -m "initial commit"
Next I setup a project on launchpad: https://launchpad.net/checkitout, and pushed up the initial commit:
  • bzr push lp:~jelkner/checkitout/trunk

Next Steps

  • $ django-admin startapp cioapp
  • edit cioapp/models.py
  • bzr add *
  • bzr ci -m "added app and first models"
  • bzr push lp:checkitout
  • edit checkitout/settings.py and added cioapp to INSTALLED_APPS
  • edit cioapp/admin.py and import and register models
  •  python3 manage.py migrate
This created the database tables and setup a superuser. I started the server again with:
  •  $ python3 manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8080
pointed my browser at localhost:8080/admin and was able to login and see the tables. This brought me back to the point where my Django tutor, Chris Hedrick, left me off this afternoon, only now I've got Django 1.7 instead of the 1.6 we used earlier and I ran migrate instead of the syncdb from South. I'll finish by checking these last changes in, but I wonder what needs to get ignored by bzr to keep the database superuser info from being part of the repo? I'll have to start by asking Chris that tomorrow. A fine and productive day!
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Wednesday, April 30, 2014

End of Course Reflection

Throughout my Higher Education in the Digital Age course I have maintained that a useful evaluation of the role technology plays in higher education can not be removed from the broader social and political context in which the technology is used. Without critical evaluation of the goals behind introducing any new technology into what we call "Higher Ed", no meaningful conclusions can be drawn as to the new technology's effectiveness and social impact.  At its root, this is a discussion about what role higher education plays in our society.  Who is it for and what are its aims? I see two contrasting goals for higher education with very different uses for new technologies associated with each.  In one view, associated with quest for a more egalitarian society with a broader and deeper role for democratic participation of its members, the World Wide Web offers a promise of greatly expanded access to information, communication, and participation.  In an opposing view, the new technologies will be used as a weapon by the Corporatocracy for increased social control and enforcement of labor discipline in the service of maximizing corporate profits. The outcome of the struggle between these two positions is no small matter, since only the former offers humanity a way out of the self-destructive morass in which it finds itself in the 21st century.

A dear friend of mine from Porto Alegre, who is involved in progressive politics with me, related recently what brought her "into the struggle".  In Brazil the national public universities are free.  Students who attend them don't pay tuition, but entrance into the universities requires scoring high on a competitive entrance exam.  In practice, this means the available seats in the public universities are mostly taken up by the well-to-do, who have the resources to out compete their lower income compatriots in preparing for the exam.  This leads to the ironic situation where the free, public, and highest quality opportunities for higher education go to the rich, while the poor are limited to paying for private, lower quality education.  When my friend was in high school, Porto Alegre was engaged in pioneering a wonderful new "technology" - a participatory budgeting process through which the members of her community worked to create a new, public university that was specifically targetted at and open to local community folks with limited access to financial resources.  My friend attended this new unversity and became active in the struggle to defend it from continual right wing attack.  The new technology in this story, the participatory budgeting process, has since been taken away from the citizens of Porto Alegre, but the educational institution that it birthed is still in existance and still serving those who would not otherwise be served.

So, what about the many new technologies we studied this semester -- the moocs, games, social networking apps, etc.?  Which of the two futures for higher education do they serve? While I optimistically like to imagine that the massive peer-to-peer communication enabled by the Internet points toward participation and democracy, nothing inherent in any of the new tech tools leads inevitably that way.  Instead, it will depend on the outcomes of the struggles for social control of our collective future, and whether the decisions about that future are going to be made by the many or the few.
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Tuesday, April 22, 2014

Khan Academy Promotes Women in Computer Programming

I have been using Khan Academy with my math students with limited success for the past three years.  The videos on Khan Academy are not useful with my English language learner (ELL) students, and the frequent inclusion of word problems in the practice exercises is likewise inappropriate for my students. So while I saw promise in Khan Academy and was delighted that the materials on it were free to use and modify in an educational setting, I did not think it appropriate to use extensively in my classroom.

All that changed on March 18, 2014, when I received an email from Khan Academy that began with the following:
Dear jeff.elkner,

Did you know that just 18% of computer science college graduates are women? That's crazy when you consider that by 2020, the demand for graduates in computer science will be double the available workforce.

But together we can introduce all our students to coding and ensure that female students don't get left behind.

Thanks to Google, U.S. public high school teachers can now earn over $1,000 in DonorsChoose.org funding when their female students complete our Khan Academy coding lesson.
...
For every female U.S. public high school student that completes the tutorial, DonorsChoose.org will send you a $100 giftcode for your classroom. As an extra bonus, they’ll also send you a $500 gift code when four of them are done!
Excited by the generous offer, I logged into Khan Academy to explore the new curriculum (Intro to JS, 2014). I found a new introductory programming course that is interactive, visual, and multilingual, available in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. The videos that accompany the tutorial are narrated by young, hip sounding female voices, a plesant change from the old white men that have almost exclusively been the faces of programming education in the past.

I had one student in my afternoon web application development class who was the obvious choice to begin exploring the curriculum, since she was already studying the JavaScript that was the focus of the Khan course.  I wanted to go for the $500 bonus, so I still needed to find three other female students willing to do the course.  Asking around, I found the three students - one independent study student, one student aid, and one geometry student willing to come in during lunch to work on the curriculum.

This afternoon, Mayra, the web development student, will complete the curriculum. Yanina and Daniela, the independent study student and student aid, are working together each day as they make their way forward. They are each about half way finished. Carmen, my geometry student, will take longer, since she doesn't have regular class time to work on it.

I've been watching the conversations, and laughs (like when Daniela used JavaScript to put a cat on her plate for breakfast) that Yanina and Daniela have each day as the work through the material.  It is apparent they are enjoying it, and from the quality of the questions they ask me I can tell they are learning. Daniela and Carmen are doing the course in Spanish.  Without this language support, they would not be able to complete it.

Well aware of the disparity between male and female students in computer programming, I've made conscious effort to take affirmative action to get more women into our web development program.  This has resulted in some success, with a dual-enrolled college program the Summer before last with half female students. Last Summer, with less sustained effort, the percentage of women in the Summer program dropped. The difficulties women have in getting into this field are well documented (Margolis, J., & Fisher, A., 2002), and I am committed to doing whatever I can to help make my computer programming classes available and welcoming to underrepresented students.

It is great to see Khan Academy developing what appears to me to be a very successful strategy to begin addressing the issue head on. Our school will now have a group of four female students who have been made to feel special because they introduced themselves to computer programming.  The are quick becoming a "team", sharing stories and supporting each other in learning. I am truly grateful to Khan Academy for making this happen!

References

Intro to JS: Drawing & Animation. (2014). Khan Academy. Retrieved April 22, 2014, from https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/cs/programming

Margolis, J., & Fisher, A. (2002). Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing. Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Sunday, April 20, 2014

How to Think Like a Computer Scientist

In this blog post I want to explore the value of sharing educational resources by looking at the continuing benefits each of the contributors to "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist" have received from their efforts.

Fifteen years ago I began work on an open textbook called "How to Think Like a Computer Scientist".  Having worked on Summer curriculum projects in 1993 and 1994 organized by the visionary supervisor of Mathematics in Prince George's County Public Schools, Dr. Martha A. Brown, I had already seen both the power of collaborative educational materials creation as well as the show stopping limitations caused by the inability to effectively reproduce and distribute the end products of such effort. The World Wide Web was just beginning to appear at that time, and I began dreaming of the day when educators would be able to use it to create and share educational resources. The non-hierarchical nature of such collaboration would be liberating, I imagined, freeing the creative spirit within teachers who participated and providing direct educational benefits to the whole world. About 6 years later I had the opportunity to test this idea in practice, and now about 15 years after that I can look back and describe how it worked. 

I've just returned from Pycon 2014, the 12th annual community sponsored conference of the international Python community.  I attended the the 2nd annual education summit this year, and inspired by both the summit and the graduate class I'm taking this semester, I spent some time online researching the availability of open textbooks and other open educational resources, which appear to be proliferating at a sizable rate of late (Open educational resources, n.d.). 

While poking around these materials I came across a new interactive version of How to Think Like a Computer Scientist (Miller, B., Ranum, D., Elkner, J., Wentworth, P., Downey, A., & Meyers, C. 2013). I was aware this existed since Brad Miller emailed me when he started working on it back in May of 2011.  Unfortunately, I haven't been teaching Python during the regular school day for the last 5 years, so I didn't have time to get involved with this project, and it slipped from my mind. Rediscovering it now, I was amazed. As the overview page for the tools that Brad and David are developing illustrates, they are extending the document publishing tool we use in the Python community to include sophisticated assessment item types as well as visualization tools (Miller, B., & Ranum, D., 2013). They have packaged their work into a project called The Runestone Interactive Library (2014), and have a collection of books already using their tools. With the prospect of the STEM program for which I changed jobs 5 years ago finally emerging, it is time for me to get back into working on Python resources, and I am delighted to see how much progress has been made developing and enhancing the free tools to do this while I was away.

Looking back, I am struck by how much I have benefited from contributing to How to Think Like a Computer Scientist. I suspect that most of the other contributors would echo this sentiment. Here are some of the different versions of the book together with the people who worked on them:

1998: Original Java version by Allen Downey

1999 - 2002: First edition of the Python version translated from Java to Python by Jeff Elkner.  Professional Python programmer Chris Meyers joined shortly thereafter. Allen published this version of the book through Green Tea Press  (Downey, A., Elkner, J., & Meyer, C., 2002).

2002 - 2012: 2nd edition of the Python version, rewritten to be more "Pythonic" by Jeff and Chris (Elkner, J., Downey, A., & Meyers, C., 2012, April 12).

2012: Prof. Peter Wentworth creates the third edition of the Python book using Python 3.   (Wentworth, P., Elkner, J., Downey, A., & Meyers, C., 2012, October 1). He has since created a version of the text using C#  (Wentworth, P., 2014, March 7).

2013 - Present: Brad Miller and David Ranum create tools to make an interactive version of the book (Miller, B., Ranum, D., Elkner, J., Wentworth, P., Downey, A., & Meyers, C., 2013).

Without Allen Downey's original version of the book using Java, I would not have been able to make the switch to Python in my classroom back in 1999.  Because I did, Allen was introduced to Python (by "reading his own book" as he said in a preface to a later work).  Allen is now a regular author of books published by O'Reilly but still available as free textbooks, including his "Think" series.  Several of the books in this series, including Think Python, Think Complexity, and Think Bayes, use Python. When Peter Wentworth wanted to try Python in 2012, he benefitted by having a free book to start with together with the right to modify it to suit his purposes and the tools to make it easy for him to do this.  When he wanted a C# book a few years later, he could use these same tools and his own early book as a foundation to start from. When Brad Miller and David Ranum wanted to experiment with building new tools to make textbooks more interactive, they were aided by having a free textbook to which they could apply their work.

As I prepare to return to teaching computer programming and start working on a new textbook aimed at aspiring web developers (2014) , I will borrow from and build on the work and ideas of each of the other contributors to this project.  This blog post has actually only scratched the surface of documenting how and where this book has been used. It has been translated into many other languages, both natural and programming.  It has been read by people all over the world. I've received emails from people as far away as Korea telling me how much they appreciate this book being available to them online.  I'm glad for this opportunity to write some of this history down, and wish I had the time to dig further, but it is more important now to get back to work on the book.

References

Downey, A., Elkner, J., & Meyer, C. (2002). How to think like a computer scientist: learning with Python. Wellsley, Mass.: Green Tea Press.

Elkner, J., Downey, A., & Meyers, C. (2012, April 12). How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python 2nd Edition. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english2e/

Elkner, J. (2014). Beginning Python Programming for Aspiring Web Developers. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://www.openbookproject.net/books/bpp4awd/

Miller, B., & Ranum, D. (2013). An Overview of Runestone Interactive. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://interactivepython.org/runestone/static/overview/overview.html

Miller, B., Ranum, D., Elkner, J., Wentworth, P., Downey, A., & Meyers, C. (2013). How to Think like a Computer Scientist: Interactive Edition. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://interactivepython.org/courselib/static/thinkcspy/index.html

Open educational resources. (n.d.). Wikipedia. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_educational_resources

The Runestone Interactive Library. (2014). Runestone Interactive. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://runestoneinteractive.org/

Wentworth, P., Elkner, J., Downey, A., & Meyers, C. (2012, October 1). How to Think Like a Computer Scientist: Learning with Python 3. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://openbookproject.net/thinkcs/python/english3e/

Wentworth, P. (2014, March 7). Think Sharply with C#: How to Think like a Computer Scientist. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://www.ict.ru.ac.za/Resources/ThinkSharply/ThinkSharply/index.html
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Friday, April 18, 2014

Senate Support for Free Textbooks

In a blog post on the Care2 website, Kevin Matthews writes about a bill introduced in the U.S. Senate last November which would help fund the creation of open textbooks (2013). The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by Senators Dick Durbin and Al Franken, aims to help address the skyrocketing cost of education by greatly reducing the amount that students have to pay for textbooks (Bill Text, 2013).

This bill strikes at the heart of the key question facing our society as we move through the 21st century - will we as a species be able to transition from the self-destructive organization of society around production for exchange toward the more rational and hopefully planet saving organization around production for use based on need?  It will not be easy even in this simple case to make the transition. As Mr. Matthews correctly points out,
Inevitably, the Affordable College Textbook Act will face criticism from people asking whether the government should get into the textbook industry at all and to leave the cost up to the "free market" (2013). 
The textbook industry will certainly use whatever lobbying power it can muster to make this argument, but as Mr. Matthews also points out, lack of student choice in which textbook to purchase make textbooks a very poor example of a "free market". Mr. Matthews also describes the process that textbook publishers have traditionally used to keep the used textbook market from providing any solution to the skyrocketing textbook costs - releasing new editions every few years to keep used textbooks from being usable.

Open textbooks can be read for free on the Internet or printed for a tiny fraction of the cost of traditional textbooks.This makes open textbooks a pretty compelling case of openly shared resources being of direct benefit to society.

By making the reproduction and distribution of open textbooks so inexpensive, the Internet opens the possibility of global access to educational resources on a scale never before imagined in human history. The only thing standing in the way of this access is the insuppressible urge on the part of the greedy to accumulate ever more at the expense of everyone else and regardless of the broader consequences. In his keynote address at Pycon 2014 in Montreal this past week, "Internet elder" John Perry Barlow summed up both the promise and the threat this way:
I felt there was something so naturally liberating about the Internet. That it was about connection; it wasn't about separation, which broadcast media obviously were. It was about a conversation, it wasn't about the channel. It wasn't about content, which is a word only recently derived when the containers went away. Note that. It's a code word for "We're a large corporation and we own all human expression and we call it content" (2014, 6:02).

References

Barlow, J. P. (2014, April 12). Keynote. pyvideo.org - Keynote - John Perry Barlow. Retrieved April 17, 2014, from http://pyvideo.org/video/2587/keynote-john-perry-barlow

Bill Text 113th Congress (2013-2014)S.1704.IS. (2013, November 4). Bill Text. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c113:S.1704:

Matthews, K. (2013, November 30). Will Congress Make College Textbooks Free?. Care2. Retrieved April 18, 2014, from http://www.care2.com/causes/will-congress-make-college-textbooks-free.html
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Monday, April 14, 2014

eLearning 1

For the last several weeks of my Higher Education in the Digital Age course, I have been tasked with investigating and writing about a current topic (or a set of current topics) within the course purview. As a math / information and communication technology (ICT) teacher, I wanted to chose a topic that would be directly relevant to what I do in the classroom. Inspired by our investigations in class, I've been using several online resources this Spring with my students, including Code Academy and Khan Academy. I've also been maintaining my own online educational resources on ibiblio.org since 1999. Since the start of school this year, I have been hearing about flipped classrooms in professional development and staff meetings at work. At the Education Summit I attended at Pycon last Thursday, I learned that the MOOC platform edX runs on a completely free software stack, which has been released as a project called Open edX. This greatly increases my level of interest in exploring MOOCs, since I can do so without violating my commitment to software freedom.

My goal for our end of course investigations will be to some how tie all these things together, to look at how they relate to each other, and to develop a short to medium term plan for how to use these tools in my work as a teacher.  I'll also use this opportunity to jot down some thoughts on what a longer term plan might look like.

The first thing to do is to figure out if there is a single term that can be used to refer to all these differing tools and technologies, which have in common only that they make use of the World Wide Web. After poking around on Wikipedia, it seems that the best fit is the term eLearning.  Specifically, what I'm interested in is web eLearning. So for my current topics investigation I plan to explore how I can use web eLearning in my teaching.
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Sunday, March 23, 2014

The Future of Higher Education

We were asked this week in my Higher Education in the Digital Age class to consider the question "What will the university of the future look like?" and to address the role technology will play in changing the relationship between producers and consumers in higher education.  We shouldn’t limit ourselves to just considering what future universities will look like, however, as if we are only passive observers who are not part of the very society and the very historical processes that will determine what they are to become.

I've become a huge fan of Cathy Davidson since first being exposed to her work in the readings for our class. In a blog post only a few days back, Dr. Davidson asks the question, What If the Goal of Higher Education Was to Make World Changers? The title of a blog from the University of Texas's History program, "Designing History's Future", conveys the same idea, and as the post titled Duke21C’s Field Notes illustrates, there is a sharing of ideas going on between Texas and North Carolina. We should not consider the question of what future universities will become without simulateously considering what they should become, and what role we can and should play in making them become what we want them to be.

Our readings and viewings this past week made it amply clear that big changes are already underway in higher education, but these changes are often contradictory and their futher development could lead to very different futures.  Frontline's, "College, Inc", showed us a world of rapidly growing for profit colleges backed by powerful Wall Street lobbyists able to setup rules that enable them to get rich on Federally backed student loans and avoid the consequences when the poor and working class recipients of these loans are unable to pay them back. Continued hegemony by the neoliberal ideology behind this explosive growth in for profit schools will in short order lay waste to the very society on which it insatiably feeds (in the words of the late environmentalist Edward Abbey, "Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell").

Steven Johnson's TED Talk, Where Do Good Ideas Come From?, points us toward a very different and hopeful future. "An idea is a network", he says, and to create an optimal environment for good ideas we need to spend time "connecting" rather than "protecting" them. He ends with the statement, "chance favors the connected mind." This was definitely my favorite assigned "reading" of the week, and one I will think about and re-watch again and again.

Returning to the work of Cathy Davidson, I've continued reading a chapter a week of Field Notes for 21st Century Literacies, the collaborative, creative commons licensed "text book" she and a class of graduate students put together during a semester course at Duke called 21st Century Literacies: Digital Knowledge, Digital Humanities. The book closely parallels the topics we are studying in class (coincidence?  I think not, but rather the clear result of connected thinking ;-)  It is a throughly enjoyable read.  I'm inspired by the way it effectively puts into practice the approach that Steven Johnson is talking about, and points us toward a future in which we can work together to solve the deep challenges that confront us.
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Saturday, March 22, 2014

A Satisfied Student

When I enrolled in the Doctor of Arts program in Community College Education at George Mason University, I hoped to organically combine formal study with the practical work I do in the classroom each day.  Midway through my second course in the program, I have not been disappointed.

The course I am taking this semester, titled Higher Education in the Digital Age, is proving to be just as relevant to my work as a classroom teacher in Arlington Public Schools as was last semester's course,  The Community College.

Last semester I wrote a final paper, Dual Enrollment in a High School Career and Technical Center as a Strategy to Address the Achievement Gap, that gave me the background I needed to make a post in a local community forum, Oppose Institutional Racism in the APS Budget Survey, which helped kick off a community effort to protect educational opportunity for adult immigrant members of our community. This effort appears to have been successful, and I have no doubt that my GMU study made me a more effective participant.

This semester we are looking into the future of higher education in the 21st century, and in particular the impact of educational games, flipped classrooms, MOOCs, Open Educational Resources, and other current technological innovations on education. This study motived me to start using Khan Academy with my students this year, which in turn led me to receive an invitation for a Google sponsored program to encourage female students to study computer programming using Khan Academy's new Intro to JS: Drawing and Animation course.

In addition to the Khan Academy programming course, I have also been making extensive use of the JavaScript and jQuery course materials on Codeacademy. Both of these resources are of the highest quality, and represent the effective use of online, interactive tools to enhance student learning.

In my current course at GMU, I am studying the broader context in which the new educational resources I am using in my classroom reside. This combination of theory and practice helps me make better use of both.

I am definitely and satisfied student with my GMU graduate program thus far.
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Sunday, February 23, 2014

Can We Teach Students How Not to Multitask?

This week in my Higher Education in the Digital Age class we read, listened to, and watched several articles, blogs, interviews, and presentations on the topic of multitasking. We were asked to respond to this information in the following writing prompt:

 What are the most compelling arguments for and against multitasking? How does technology change our ability and/or inclination to multitask? What are the implications for higher education?

The case against media multitasking was laid out most clearly by Clifford Nass, the recently deceased professor of communication at Stanford University who studied the effects of media multitasking on information processing ability.  His published paper is available here. In an interview with Science Friday's Ira Flatow, titled The Myth of Multitasking, he said that,

"The research is almost unanimous, which is very rare in social science, and it says that people who chronically multitask show an enormous range of deficits. They're basically terrible at all sorts of cognitive tasks, including multitasking."

Professor Nass's words resonated with me. I've found myself talking a lot lately with both my students and my colleagues about how to handle the ubiquitous smart phones that almost all of my students have and by which many of them seem to be perpetually distracted. The task of learning mathematics requires sustained focus on a single activity.  Having unrelated media available only distracts students and limits their ability to learn.

Nothing in our readings contradicted Professor Nass.  Instead, there were several arguments in favor of using 21st century media like smart phones to access and share information. In "Once Sideshows, Colleges' Mobile Apps Move to Center Stage", Megan O'Neil describes how Georgetown, Duke, and other universities are integrating smart phone apps into their business operations, doing things like having students register for classes and soon pay their bills from their phones.  Other articles reported on how teachers are using social media, with Pearson's "Social Media for Teaching and Learning" reporting on how faculty used social media at home, in professional communication, and in their classrooms. Non of these publications claimed that increased media multitasking helped students learn more or learn better.

My sense as a classroom teacher is that to help students navigate the multimedia bombardment in which they are now immersed, we will have to find ways to teach them how to limit their multitasking when the task at hand requires it in order to achieve the focus needed for sustained concentration of thought. Self awareness of how media multitasking effects a student's learning may very well become a critical tool for student success.  Teaching students how not to multitask may be the real skill necessary for achieving in the 21st century.

University of Washington Professor David M. Levy is working on this very idea.  The Chronical of Higher Education article, Your Distracted, This Professor Can Help, describes how Professor Levy runs a class called "Information and Contemplation" that specifically focuses on teaching students how to still their mind and focus their attention as a way to gain mastery over the distractions caused by media multitasking.
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Friday, February 14, 2014

Teaching in the 21st Century

Here is this week's blog prompt for Higher Education in the Digital Age:

Is the role of educators changing in the 21st century? If so, how? Is the role of the university changing in the 21st century? If so, how? What role does technology play? How does this connect to learning?

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 There is no such thing as a neutral educational process. Education either functions as an instrument that is used to facilitate the integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity to it, or it becomes "the practice of freedom," the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.  -- Richard Shaull

The struggle between the two kinds of education described by Richard Shaull in the quote above is not a new one.  Because of the power that any entrenched system of social relations has to reproduce itself, education as the practice of conformity continues to be the norm. It will continue to be so, as long as the social relations responsible for the present system continue to exist.

Where there is oppression, however, there will be resistance. Efforts toward education as the practice of freedom go back at least as far as the progressive education movement, which began in the late 19th century. During the 1930's, at a high point in the struggle for working class democracy, the largest longitudinal educational study of its kind was conducted -- the Eight-Year Study of thirty high schools given the opportunity to experiment with progressive approaches to pedagogy and assessment of student learning. The study demonstrated the efficacy of humanizing educational approaches in high school as they related to student success in college. This study could have been part of a broader effort for educational reform, but only in the context the struggle for democracy in general. Unfortunately, WWII and then the right wing backlash of the McCarthy era buried this research away for over half a century.

The technological revolution offers tools and possibilities to the movement for democracy that have never before existed. Nothing illustrates this better than Field Notes for 21st Century Literacy, a collaboratively produced educational resource created in an intentionally democratic, non-hierarchical classroom. Like the free software movement from which it draws inspiration, Field Notes offers a glimpse of the possibility of a society of freely associated producers.

Ultimately, whether the role of educators and universities in the 21st century is changing or not will depend more on campaign finance reform, the voting rights struggle, and the struggle for openness in government than it will on the existence of any particular technology, though information technology does offer the democratic movement a powerful tool with which to potentially impact each of these other struggles.


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Monday, February 10, 2014

Reflections on Online Learning Experiences

This week in Higher Education in the Digital Age we were assigned the task of spending at least an hour in each of two online learning courses and then reflecting on these experiences using the following prompt:

Write a critical reflection of your 2 online learning experiences. What was engaging? What promoted learning? What was not engaging or did not promote learning? How would you improve one or both of these online learning environments?

The first of the online learning experiences was to complete at least one learning module from Hidden in Plain Sight, a course on historical thinking for high school history teachers.  For my second online learning experience, I used the first four modules from Codeacademy's JavaScript course.

I'm a huge fan of of online learning resources.  Even before I began the Open Book Project back in 1999, I had starting fantasizing that one day educational resources would be ubiquitous, high quality, interactive, and free. Both of the learning modules I looked at this week were indeed high quality and interactive. Neither one, however, was free (as in speech -- see Gratis vs. Libre).

At present you can use the Codeacademy materials without charge.  I'm using the JavaScript course with my Web Design and Development students this year. It is high quality, interactive, and allows students to move through the material at their own pace with continuous automated feedback.  Computer programming lends itself to automated feedback of this kind.  Still, since the materials are not Open Educational Resources, I can't make a copy of them, so I have to use them with caution, understanding that they could change or disappear without warning and I would have to immediately seek an alternative resource.

The Hidden in Plain Sight resource was far more restrictive.  You need to pay $40.00 to use the materials, which are unreachable without a user name and password.  It's a shame, too.  Hidden in Plain Sight makes history come alive in a way my high school history courses never did.  It is designed to help teachers learn to teach historical thinking as a core component of their history classes. I would venture to say that the authors of this high quality educational resource care about this approach to teaching history, and would like to spread the word about it, reaching as many high school history teachers as they possibly could.

That's where the contradiction comes in.  The requirement that this educational resource have an exchange value prevents it from reaching its full potential as a use value.  It has always rubbed me the wrong way to see large expenditures of human creativity and resources essentially spent making things worse.  Digital resources cost almost nothing to reproduce, so vast amounts of human energy are spent making it more difficult to access and reproduce them, so that they can be withheld from anyone who has not paid the required fee to access them.

It's a loosing battle in the long run, because this kind of information wants to be free. Until our society comes to terms with the outmoded ways it produces educational resources, however, we will be stuck with this contradiction. Until the day when the educational value of human development becomes more valued by our society than exchange value, we will continue to be held back by the efforts to turn knowledge into a commodity rather than a shared human resource.




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Saturday, February 1, 2014

Higher Education in the Digital Age

I haven't written anything here since last June, not because I haven't been busy with free software and free education projects, but because I have. I've been working on the following projects / initiatives, some on-going, and some new:
  • writing Open Book Project resources for Web Application Development, specifically HTML, CSS, SVG, and JavaScript resources
  • collaborating with Activity Central on a small XO-4 deployment with my beginning ELL students
  • collaborating with the SchoolTool project to develop SchoolTool Quiz
  • participating in Arlington Code Shop meetups at the National Science Foundation each Thursday evening
  • collaborating with my dear friend Khady Lusby on her Open International sponsored school in Senegal
  • working to create a student enterprise called NOVA Web Development that will offer aspiring young web application developers their first work experience
  • exploring data science as an area of study which we should be incorporating into our IT program at the Arlington Career Center
  • participating in the planning effort around a new STEM program at my school
So it's not that I haven't written because I have nothing to say, but rather that I've had no time at all to say it.

Oh, I forgot to mention that I'm in grad school at George Mason University (GMU) in a Doctor of Arts program in Community College Education. It is this last point that will compel me to be a much more active blogger over the next few months.  I'm taking a course called Higher Education in the Digital Age, and regular blogging is going to be a requirement for the course.

I haven't cleared it yet with our professor, but I want to make these blog posts serve double duty, to both meet the requirements of the course and to get back to documenting the free software and education projects on which I'm working. Let's see how it goes...

Here is our first weekly prompt:
"Describe a memorable experience (positive, negative, or somewhere in between) related to higher education in the digital age." 
Last semester I had my first experience with higher education in the digital age.  I took my first graduate class at GMU, a course titled "The Community College". The course was taught as a hybrid class.  We actually met in the classroom only twice - on the first day of class and the last.  The rest of the time we met either on-line using Blackboard's Connect features, or together on two field trips we took to Washington DC and Richmond.

I've been using Google Hangouts for meetings with folks around the world (SchoolTool meetings often had participants from Providence, Rhode Island, USA, San Salvador, El Salvador, Vilnius, Lithuania, and Arlington, Virginia, USA) and found Blackboard Connect to work similarly.  I loved being able to attend class and engage in lively discussions with my classmates while sitting in bed.  Given the over hour commute each way from Arlington to GMU, it was wonderful to have that 2+ hours back by participating in the class remotely.

Utilizing this same technology, we were able to meet with three guest speakers from remote places in the country.  The whole experience definitely struck me as an effective use of technology to eliminate the obstacle of location on the ability of a group of learners to share in a learning experience.

Given the difficulties of parking at GMU, it is an institution that can greatly benefit from this kind of use of technology.

I'm active in my local community, and I definitely prefer to attend gathering with my fellow community members at a shared location in real space rather than cyberspace. When long distances and inadequate public transportation make getting together in person difficult, however, these on-line real time collaboration tools are a good substitute for being there.

On a final note, it is my duty as a free software activist to complain that neither Google Hangouts or Blackboard Connect are free software.  I'm confident that as these technologies become more common place, free software tools to do this kind of collaboration will emerge.


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