remember the bushfires

netbooks and schools: an evolution

I am presenting on this topic at Computer Education Group of South Australia (CEGSA) in July

I have finished my slides and notes. If you want a copy then leave a comment or send me an email (billkerr at gmail dot com) and I'll organise something.

Synopsis:
The presentation consists of a review of some modern technologies and attitudes towards technologies.

Technologies reviewed: smart phones, ebook readers, (educationally customised) handhelds, enhanced screen (Mary Lou Jepson), Cloud computing, OLPC and netbooks.

Attitudes reviewed: Just a tool, Them and us (damnation, salvation), Us as them (augmentation), The pencil metaphor (Seymour Papert), Misuse of computers (Larry Cuban), Disruptive innovation (Clayton Christensen), Software as medium, The historical analogy of the printing press, Personal dynamic medium (Alan Kay, Adele Goldberg)

It is only intended to be a broad introductory document to the interaction between these technologies and attitudes. Hopefully it will lead to further discussion

Update (15th June): I now have the presentation uploaded to my website: netbooks and schools: an evolution

Arrrr ...

Great news!

The Swedish Pirate Party has gathered enough votes to be guaranteed a seat in the European Parliament... the Pirates have 7.1 percent of the votes ... This means that the Pirate Party will get at least one, but most likely two of the 18 (+2) available seats Sweden has at the European Parliament

Pirate Party leader Rick Falkvinge:

"Together, we have today changed the landscape of European politics. No matter how this night ends, we have changed it. This feels wonderful. The citizens have understood it’s time to make a difference. The older politicians have taken apart young peoples’ lifestyle, bit by bit. We do not accept the authorities’ mass-surveillance"

Related:
Just a little corruption in Sweden
Swedes Demonstrate in support of Pirate Bay

editing 20 year old memories

A couple of things that I remember from this massacre. Elements of the so called "peoples army" were called in from remote provinces to crush the protest. They didn't know what they were crushing. As they fired into the unarmed crowd, sections of the crowd responded by singing The Internationale, the communist anthem. Notice that many of the protesters are carrying red flags. Mao warned that this sort of thing could happen before he died in 1976, if his supporters (the "Gang of Four") were defeated. I can dig up the quotes.

It's good to point out how ruthlessly the Chinese government is still editing this massacre. Nevertheless, our western press also edits our memory of what really happened, albeit more subtly.

It wouldn't do to be too critical of a government on which we now apparently depend for saving capitalist economies from total collapse.

amusing ourselves to death cartoon

This serious cartoon is a well rendered depiction of some aspects of the final chapter of Neil Postman's book Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business

Although nothing beats reading the whole book, the final sentence of Postman's book is a fine summary:

For in the end, he was trying to tell us that what afflicted the people in Brave New World was not that they were laughing instead of thinking, but that they did not know what they were laughing about and why they had stopped thinking

Some more extensive earlier discussion notes about the question of whether technology is making us dumber or smarter: our intelligence

firsts

These things have happened in the course of my classroom teaching for the first time recently

• Two students brought their own laptops to school which ran a linux OS (Year 11)
• I asked a technical question in class ("What does GIF stand for?"). Within seconds a student has retrieved the answer from wikipedia (Year 9)
• I ask students to update their internet money so we can use the internet next lesson. Next lesson a student brings her iphone and mac laptop to class. She has setup her phone as a modem which blue tooth's to her laptop. She explains that she is not going to waste her money on the heavily filtered school internet (Year 11)
• A student asks me if we can do a particular science experiment as part of the electricity / magnetism topic. I haven't heard of this experiment before and ask him where he has heard of it. He replied, "Youtube" (Year 9). Actually I think I have just found the video that he was talking about:

how do you sleep, Peter Garrett, when your bed is burning?

In the words of Peter Garrett, entertainer:

The time has come
To say fairs fair
To pay the rent
To pay our share

The time has come
A facts a fact
It belongs to them
Lets give it back

But now we have Peter Garrett, Federal Labour Minister for Environment, Heritage and the Arts, who won't take a stand for aboriginal rights. And we have Anna Bligh, Labour Premier of Queensland who did a deal with the urban Greenies of the Wilderness Society about the misnamed "wild rivers" to lock out aboriginal people from their own land.

These days, it is far easier to put the straightforward words of Noel Pearson to song than the gobbledygook of former fabulous entertainer turned Labour politician, Peter Garrett.

Noel Pearson:

"As for Peter Garrett's acquiescence to this, Peter Garrett hasn't been up here in two years"

"He has not had one conversation with the organisations or representatives up here. I've not as much as shaken hands with him, and yet 15 years prior to that you couldn't stop the bugger wanting to meet you.

"He would be up here saying he was a great friend of Aboriginal people and so on at the drop of a hat, and in two years of being a minister he has never darkened our doorway.

"And the commitment that I make to him is that he will join the long list of failed environment ministers who have grand schemes about trying to stuff Aboriginal people over who will never succeed."
- World Heritage Listing Plan Fires Anger on Cape York

Some background articles about the "wild rivers" Labour Party sellout:

Indigenous-Green Alliance Cracks
Mr Pearson says any number of environmentalists are "running around in koala suits" trying to save Cape York (about the changing relationship between aboriginal and environmental groups over time, not only in Cape York)

Pearson to sue on wild rivers threat to jobs
ABORIGINAL leader Noel Pearson will launch legal action against the Queensland Government over its declaration of three waterways in Cape York as "wild rivers", claiming the protected status would ruin the future of a generation

Why they're wild about wild rivers
27 issues listed re wild rivers dispute in Queensland: #16. Indigenous people regard the use of the term “wild” as insulting; it infers that the land is uninhabited and “terra nullius”. The Government has treated indigenous people as if the land is “terra nullius”

Bligh's callous land grab
It is a white-settler tradition in Queensland to expropriate Aboriginal land and marginalise Aboriginal people ... If Bligh persists, then all the good work by Pearson and many others to enable Aboriginal people to participate in the economy and improve their education and health will fail. There are lives at stake in this equation. If Cape York traditional owners blockade the cape, as Michael Ross, Olkolo leader and chairman of the Cape York Land Council, has suggested, the trust and partnership painstakingly built up over the past 20 years will vanish. If Bligh thinks this is acceptable, she too has been severely misled by the so-called greens and the party apparatchiks who would sacrifice all this for their deal.

Noel Pearson quits institute to fight wild rivers battle
ABORIGINAL leader Noel Pearson has resigned as director of the Cape York Institute - a think tank that has led the national debate on welfare reform and provided educational programs for young people - to focus on a land rights battle with the Queensland Government

update (24th May): En passant has done a more comprehensive dissection of Oily lyrics

maths weeps

Imagine a situation where maths classes are streamed or set for ability and maths is compulsory until year 11

Students who are not good at maths and have little interest and sometimes active dislike for maths are concentrated together into classes where these negative attitudes reinforce each other

Imagine what it is like for a teacher trying to teach maths to these students who are mainly interested in pursuing social conversation

If the teacher insists they do maths then he might get comments like, "Why are you so serious?" or "Chill out". If the teacher persists then the students at that table might do a little maths while the teacher stands over them but other students in the class will break into social conversation. This sort of transaction is repeated over and over.

Imagine if parents or politicians were aware of this situation happening throughout the country in hundreds or thousands of classrooms. I wonder what they would think or say or do.

PS. the late Garth Boomer did some in depth studies of language skills comparing year six and year tens about 20 years ago and found that in many cases the year sixes demonstrated better skills than the year tens - subsequently he gave his famous "slash my wrists" speech to Principals which was then leaked to the press and became front page news

Inkscape

Inkscape is a very good Open Source vector graphics editor

I've been using it with my year 10s recently. I wanted to give them a solid rationale for learning inkscape so here is what I said:

• Inkscape is a free, open source SVG graphics editor
• Scalable - ability to scale without pixelation
• Small file size compared with bitmaps
• Cool animations are possible (although not with inkscape, )
• potential for use on mobile phones

A huge bonus for teachers is that the resources are excellent as well. I learnt inkscape myself through the tutorials that go with it: Help > Tutorials.

For my more advanced students I've downloaded some videos from the screencasters site going back to the start of the archive there

Here are some screenshots of student work after just a few days of using the program:
Last year I did some SVG using XML. I'll probably do some more of this again later this year so as to be able to demonstrate the animations with SMIL, Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language

computers as transformational media

I remember this quote or part of it from years ago but then lost it. Eugene Wallingford quotes it in a recent blog entry, Computer as Medium, and his comments about it are worth reading too.

I've been looking for a clear expression of this idea for my netbooks in schools presentation. Because of the way computers are often used in schools (as instrumental tools to support a paper and ink derived curriculum) their potential revolutionary or transformational significance is often lost sight of. The virtue of this quote is that it clearly and concisely compares the difference between the computer medium and other media.

"Devices" which variously store, retrieve, or manipulate information in the form of messages embedded in a medium have been in existence for thousands of years. People use them to communicate ideas and feelings both to others and back to themselves. Although thinking goes on in one's head, external media serve to materialize thoughts and, through feedback, to augment the actual paths the thinking follows. Methods discovered in one medium provide metaphors which contribute new ways to think about notions in other media.

For most of recorded history, the interactions of humans with their media have been primarily nonconversational and passive in the sense that marks on paper, paint on walls, even "motion" pictures and television, do not change in response to the viewer's wishes. A mathematical formulation -- which may symbolize the essence of an entire universe -- once put down on paper, remains static and requires the reader to expand its possibilities.

Every message is, in one sense or another, a simulation of some idea. It may be representational or abstract. The essence of a medium is very much dependent on the way messages are embedded, changed, and viewed. Although digital computers were originally designed to do arithmetic computation, the ability to simulate the details of any descriptive model means that the computer, viewed as a medium itself, can be all other media if the embedding and viewing methods are sufficiently well provided. Moreover, this new "metamedium" is active -- it can respond to queries and experiments -- so that the messages may involve the learner in a two-way conversation. This property has never been available before except through the medium of an individual teacher. We think the implications are vast and compelling.

Update (6th June 2009): There is a copy of the Kay / Goldberg paper, Personal Dynamic Media here

Tim Geithner interview

In his own words under Geithner the best we can hope for is a long, slow recovery with high unemployment well into the future

One key question is whether the Banks are really solvent. This will eventually emerge but I don't have any faith in the stress tests, they have the appearance of being carefully orchestrated. It would be worth while to research further the contradiction between the IMF and Fed figures that Judy Woodruff referred to and which Geithner argued against.

Tim Geithner interviewed by Judy Woodruff
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/?cc=1234
streaming video (or download the audio)

He starts off apologetic about half a million new unemployed last month, that long term unemployment is growing, 5.7 million americans have lost jobs since the recession began including 2.7 million in the past four months

Even as growth recovers unemployment will keep rising for a while

Evades question about GM sending jobs overseas

Q. ... the recovery may take several years?
A recession that occurs because people have borrowed too much requires a slow, long recovery ... takes a long time for people to reduce debt and save more

Acknowledges that many people who planned to retire won't be able to because their benefits have been devalued

The Banks stress tests were a very exacting and tough set of standards (repeated several times during the interview)

Stress tests bring an unprecedented level of transparency to bank balance sheets, which helps create confidence in the future

Q. IMF worst case scenarios are worse than the US governments worst case scenarios?

Geithner responds to that, says eventually that the Fed numbers are close to IMF estimates

We did the stress tests so that people would have more confidence in the system!! (I interpret this an unintentional candor, that the result of the stress tests were carefully orchestrated including negotiations with banks for two weeks before they were released)

Q. Why not nationalise the Banks or let some of them fail?
The banks are solvent, there is not a tenable case for nationalisation. Nationalisation would end up more expensive and riskier (his tone of voice becomes more assertive and less apologetic here, conveys the feeling that nationalisation is a ridiculous option)

He rejects criticism that he is too close to Wall Street, he would never do anything that would benefit some piece of the financial system and harm the people, seems hurt that anyone might suggest that


ps. I am involved in a long discussion about the economic situation on this comment thread at the Strange Times site.

what lies behind spatial ability and computer ability?

Great comment from alan kay about spatial learning in response to mark guzdial's geek gene post:

Several things to think and read about here. First, Hadamard's "Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field" (amazon books link) is one of several non-optional prerequisites for any discussion of these ideas. (These and other careful studies from the past can cut out a lot of mere opinions if people would just read them -- "mere opinions" are the fatal disease of the web ...).

Second, it's worth trying to be a little more subtle in thinking about this issue. For example, is it "spatial ability" that is the actual correlate or is it what *lies behind* "spatial ability" *and* "computer ability". Quite a few of the best minds of the past (including Hadamard, Jerry Bruner, etc.) would say that "a feeling for cause and effect" and "an increased ability to use abstractions for ideas" actually come out of what can be learned first via manual manipulation and visual and other figurative modes of thought. Many of the tests for "spatial ability" are actually as much about "fitting together" as they are relative locations of things.

The notion of "variation" seems non-democratic and even politically incorrect to some, but nature doesn't care about our opinions on anything (this is why it is psychologically difficult to be a scientist). Significant variation exists, even for the most common human traits (like learning language). It would be astoundingly unusual if every child had the same propensities for learning computing. And at a deeper level, it would be astounding if every child had the same propensities for grokking cause and effect relationships and chains of reasoning.

I think a better ploy for general education is to embrace variation by having different strategies for different propensities. For subject x, it's a lucky child who has a lot of pre-wiring for it. But there's no shame for those who don't, to do enough extra skill learning to artificially build scaffolding that wasn't there. I think pedagogy is largely about how to help those who aren't blessed with supreme talents. (And for "great unusual inventions" -- like modern science, math, equal rights, etc. -- almost no humans have a lot of built-in skills (this is why it took thousands of years for them to be invented in the first place!)).

Every musician knows what I'm talking about (because music requires lots of different abilities and it is an extremely rare bird who is pre-wired for all of them -- instead when musicians talk with each other, they will exchange stories of what they had to work at and what came more naturally -- and the areas mentioned as being easy and hard are different for each musician -- but in the end they can all play with each other and create beauty together -- this is not just a metaphor, but a real analogy).

This is generally true for any highly developed field, whether in sports, the arts, or the mathematical sciences. And trying to do a good job with what this really means for pedagogy and curriculum, is certainly one of the most important yet most neglected processes in education.

Notes:

(1) The Hadamard book (google books link) was first published in 1945. Minsky mentions it in The Emotion Machine p. 240 stating that other authors have proposed similar models of thinking (Poincare, Koestler, Miller and Newell and Simon)

(2) Bruner: "doing with images makes symbols" provides a hint as to how to develop an honest children's version of powerful ideas. For instance, etoys (visual programming) is software developed around this concept. Children manipulate icons in a rich virtual environment, one idea is that this might lead to better symbolic or abstract understanding of how the simulations work.

How do we know what a "powerful idea" is apart from subjective assertion? For some ideas about this see non universals

Digital infancy

Mark Guzdial's blog: Does "There's an App for That" Hurt or Help Computing Education?

Apple's shallow consumerist thinking: "There's an app for that"

A deeper position: "There is or ought to be an argument going on about that" (but still mainly confined to oral or textual form)

Regret that the future has stalled: "There is a more powerful medium available now to express and argue with but we haven't learnt how to use it properly yet"

Read the whole comment thread of the above blog

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable man persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
(quoted by Ian Piumarta in a paper advocating widespread unreasonable behaviour)

from painting to programming, with Leonardo

Mark Guzdial quotes Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) about painting and then makes an imaginative leap to transfer this to an argument in support of programming, (with typos corrected):

"He who despises painting loves neither philosophy or nature. If you despise painting, which is the sole imitator of all the visible works of nature, you will be certainly despising a subtle invention which brings philosophy and subtle speculation to bear upon the nature of all forms- sea and land, plants and animals, grasses and flowers…"(the da Vinci quote)

If programming, especially object-oriented programming, is about creating a simulation of the world in silico, then what da Vinci says about is also true about programming. Programming really is about creating an imitation of nature. It really is a philosophical reflection on the nature of forms and behavior. To program is to paint a working model of the world, in silicon.(Guzdial's reflection)
- A DaVinci argument for programming

This is good philosophical sweep but could be even better. Programming is not just about imitating nature but also extending nature to new worlds.

I looked up the Leonardo quote and think a fuller version is better still:

HE WHO DESPISES PAINTING LOVES NEITHER PHILOSOPHY NOR NATURE.

If you condemn painting, which is the only imitator of all visible works of nature, you will certainly despise a subtle invention which brings philosophy and subtle speculation to the consideration of the nature of all forms—seas and plains, trees, animals, plants and flowers—which are surrounded by shade and light. And this is true knowledge and the legitimate issue of nature; for painting is born of nature—or, to speak more correctly, we will say it is the grandchild of nature; for all visible things are produced by nature, and these her children have given birth to painting. Hence we may justly call it the grandchild of nature and related to God.

Taken from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci edited by Jean Paul Richter, 1880

So, as well as a simulation of nature, programming is a grandchild of nature itself. In our modern Darwinian view, Turing's brain and all the other brains that have dreamed up programming languages are a grandchild of nature along with the physical materials that make up a computer. And in this generation we have moved from visible things to invisible things as well (the bits or electrons which underlay modern day virtual tools). This medium is more powerful than painting.

Just a slight edit of Mark Guzdial's imaginative leap. He has done the hard work here.

OLPC Nepal Project overview

Randal Schwartz interviews Bryan Berry, of Open Learning Exchange Nepal, the NGO implementing the OLPC project in Nepal
http://twit.tv/floss66

I've transcribed a substantial portion of this interview below, rough notes only, without comment at this stage. Numbering is just for id purposes if people want to discuss particular points.

Skip to 12:45 minutes to avoid the chatter and google summer of code adverts at the start

1) Bryan Berry, CTO Open Learning Exchange, Nepal

2) Describes geography, weather, population

3) 6 million kids in Nepal need education – how can we do it? Education makes all the difference

4) Literacy about 45%, young people 80%

5) There are hardly any libraries, even in Kathmandu (the largest city in Nepal) – most peoples parents are illiterate or barely educated, there aren't any books at home

6) teaching method is that teacher speaks and the kids repeat – one teacher for 50 kids – teachers are doing their best but they have almost no resources

7) problem with rote learning
example of a kid knowing that 2+1 = 3 but not knowing what 1+2 equals ...

8) OLPC project provides opportunity of putting a lot more resources into the hands of kids and teachers

9) xo described, I skipped this bit

10) Open Source software critical to high quality education – education has to be very customised, to the kids, the teacher, the environment and the country – not something you can design in New York city and will fit another country

11) In the OS community we know that through the iterative process of other people looking at your code / work they can make it better – and that's true for education as well

Q) What kind of customization had to happen to the software for your particular project?

12) Problem of rendering Nepali properly – very little support across different applications

13) Had to conform to the Nepali national student curriculum – absolutely critical

14) 99% of teachers care about their kids, want them to learn and don't want their kids to fail their exams at the end of the year – if their kids fail they are set back a year – they have to make sure their kids don't fail that exam – it is a standards based curriculum

15) So we created a whole set of learning activities which conform to the national curriculum

16) transitions in what program to use to develop curriculum content and the reasons why (etoys --> flash --> HTML5 + javascript)

17) etoys
started off doing the curriculum in etoys / squeak – first 6 months
problems:

• performance
• very small community doing what we were doing
• squeak programmers are smart people who tend to move onto something else, eg. PhD

18) flash
flash is a great technology but run time is proprietary, unfortunately (considered using gnash but that created some stability and performance issues) – we release our code under the mit license

19) HTML5 + javascript
Way to go because there are a lot of community people who use those tools, there is a lot of momentum in that area - proprietary code is really baked into education but if you use javascript and HTML you almost can't keep your stuff proprietary – it creates a virtuous feedback cycle as in the AJAX community where releasing your source is good for the whole community

20) Open Learning Exchange (OLE) Nepal
Nepali led organisation, led by Rabi Karmacharya; 30 people - full time some part time; non profit; team of developers; teachers working together with developers; teachers are creative, know how to engage the children

21) Once we showed the teachers learning activities then they welcomed it with open arms; Nepali government is very supportive

Q) How has this changed the classroom from the teacher speaks, student repeats?

22) The xo frees up the teacher to interact more individually with kids

23) Sugar UI has collaboration baked in

24) History of xo in Nepal
Started with 150 laptops to two poor schools in April 2008 just outside Kathmandu to 7th Graders and 2nd Graders (?). Worries about misuse did not eventuate, the kids treated their laptops like gold (they don't have possession of their own)

25) 1:1 ratio critical; take home (core principles)

26) Cultural difference with USA, Nepal kids want to become engineers and doctors, not pop stars and baseball players; they don't say maths sucks or maths is boring; they are excited about learning

27) Internet connection issues discussed (skipped this)

28) Email can only be done with web mail such as gmail. More needs to be done on the server side, hard to complete everything in such a complex project

29) We can always find someone to fix the hardware but training someone to master the linux command line is harder

30) The server has to be as simple as possible

31) If there is a problem with the xo there is a firmware tool called testall which can test all the hardware

Q) Do you have objective numbers on performance?

32) If we teach to the test then test results will improve. Walter Bender has said that the hard part about education is that you have to wait 20 years. However, assessment is important in terms of justifying the expense of what we are doing.

33) Expanding this year to 2500 laptops (cf. 150 laptops last year) to geographically dispersed settlements representing the breadth of life in Nepal

34) The huge challenge is to grow the support organisation to support the deployment

35) Running a grassroots volunteer organisation is very hard. You have to find the people who are really serious as distinct from those who are curious but temporary supporters – people who want to chat and visit but who are not prepared to do the hard grunt work

36) It is not like online FOSS which has an automatic barrier to entry which filters out those who are not really interested

37) Parents want books – digital books! They equate education with books

38) There is enthusiasm for FLOSS in Nepal – Nepal won best software freedom day 2 years in a row from FSF. But there is not much open source software being developed.

39) Those who could be developers have little free time. Kids here have to study hard and have extensive family commitments (far more so than we have in the west)

40) Main funding for the project came from the Danish Embassy

41) OLPCs were donated by Swift organisation, a Banking co-operative (European Banks)

42) Raising money for the laptops, although the largest cost, is the easiest part of the funding

43) The hardest part is building the support organisation and developing curriculum content

44) Kids keep the laptops at the end of the year

45) Wade Brainerd has developed a great typing tutor, called typing turtle

46) etoys is a fantastic environment but requires a high degree of dexterity with the touch pad, the drag and drop features – the teachers really struggled with that

47) A key thing we need to do is to tie lesson plans into working with programs like etoys and turtle art – teachers are busy if it's not part of the curriculum then its likely to not happen

48) Education is the central thing for poor countries to move out of poverty – but it takes a long time to build up

Q) What was the biggest hurdle or hurdles?

49) You have to create a firewall between the local company (OLENepal) and the FOSS community. Early on some people saw it as their personal project and that was very detrimental – once money becomes involved – it was ugly – this is why we formed OLENepal as a separate organisation

50) Create local content first – before the flyers, before government meeting – develop local content in their own language

51) Linux supports Nepali, Microsoft doesn't

52) If Bryan had more money he would focus on building digital content (K-12) before laptops – once there was this content then everyone would buy laptops

rudd's broadband: could be good

Internode's Simon Hackett identifies the real broadband priorities in this order:

1. coverage
2. price
3. competition
4. innovation
5. speed

ie. speed as the last of five not the first

He recommends building the new fibre to the home network "outside in" fixing the blackspots first and installing where ADSL2+ is already present later

He also recommends retaining the existing copper in parallel to the new system so people have the option to retain the slower ADSL2+ if they want

There is a pdf and video on this page explaining his plan in more detail

At the start there are maps of Sydney and Adelaide showing many blackspots with unacceptably slow speeds

The fibre will be completely independent of Telstra's copper network. It's fair because every carrier will have equal access to the new network.

Of course it’s possible the government will find a way to get it wrong but if they stick with the Hackett plan then I’m in favour

the TARP song

What exactly is a "troubled asset"? One response is to laugh at this voodoo talk.

Peter Schiff takes on the voodoo doctors

I've been working on a primer about the economic crisis which I hope to publish here soon. In the meantime, I have found some good video clips on youtube.

This one (thanks to steve) shows Peter Schiff arguing two or three years ago that we were heading for a crisis. It's great the way he sticks to his guns while being rubbished and laughed at by 5 or 6 other "expert financial advisers" = voodoo doctors

Just a little corruption in Sweden

It turns out that the judge who passed the verdict in the Pirate Bay case is:

"... a signed up member of Svenska föreningen för upphovsrätt ('the Swedish Copyright Association'), where he is joined by Henrik Pontén, Peter Danowsky and Monique Wadsted, all of whom represented the entertainment industry in the case against file sharing site The Pirate Bay.

The judge also sits on the board of Svenska föreningen för industriellt rättsskydd (Swedish Association for the Protection of Industrial Property), a group actively advocating for more stringent copyright laws."
http://www.thelocal.se/19028/20090423/

The judgment was rather extreme:

The four defendants in the case, Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström, were each sentenced to one year in prison and ordered to pay 30 million kronor ($3.56 million) in damages

One of the lawyers has called for a mistrial

Just a little corruption in Sweden, who would have imagined such a thing?

More at torrent freak

notes on cloud computing

QUESTIONS
What is cloud computing?
What are the differences between cloud computing, web2.0 and the internet?


EVOLUTION – TECHNICAL AND FINANCIAL

Prerequisite: Cheap broadband
Software as a service (SaaS): remotely accessing software from someone elses data centre using a web browser
Virtualisation: initially apps were difficult to deploy but then came virtualisation, the packaging of applications with everything else they need to run. Virtual apps can run anywhere (ie. in the cloud)
Financial model is PAYG, more economical than alternatives

This video explains the basic concepts:


THE NETWORK WILL EAT THE PC

... data management and computational processing is moving away from personal computing frameworks into a collaborative workspace that is managed in the network
- Cloud computing, Science2.0 and the Social Web

INEVITABLE TREND

It is an inevitable trend in computing, because of the need to reduce complexity and data-management/computation-management costs. It's clear that, in the near future, the backup storage and computation will continue to evolve into collaborative workspaces that you never have to administer
- Cloud computing, Science2.0 and the Social Web

HELPFUL METAPHORS AND EXPLANATION
from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6PNuQHUiV3Q:

Dan Farber, Editor and Chief CNET News:

We currently have three platforms: the desktop, mobile devices and the cloud ... increasingly things will start to lean towards the cloud ... when there is enough bandwidth, reliability, security and so on then there will no longer be a notion of a cloud ...it will be just like serving up electricity, serving up data, applications and even writing those applications directly to the cloud

Tim O'Reilly, quoting from a Clay Shirky presentation:

Thomas Watson once famously said (allegedly) that there is no need for more than five computers in the world

We now know that he was wrong

He overstated the number by four!

Everything we think of as a computer today is just a device for connecting to this one big computer that we are all building

EXAMPLES
Google docs

Zoho: It includes tools for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, databases, note-taking, wikis, CRM, project management, invoicing and other applications

SOME OF THE CONCEPTS DEFINED

Software as a Service
Software as a Service (SaaS, typically pronounced 'sass') is a model of software deployment whereby a provider licenses an application to customers for use as a service on demand

Virtualisation
Virtualization is the creation of a virtual (rather than actual) version of something, such as an operating system, a server, a storage device or network resources

Utility Computing
Utility computing is the packaging of computing resources, such as computation and storage, as a metered service similar to a traditional public utility (such as electricity, water, natural gas, or telephone network). This system has the advantage of a low or no initial cost to acquire hardware; instead, computational resources are essentially rented. Customers with very large computations or a sudden peak in demand can also avoid the delays that would result from physically acquiring and assembling a large number of computers
(traced back to a john mccarthy, 1961 quotation)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility_computing

Grid computing
The application of several computers to a single problem at the same time – usually to a scientific or technical problem that requires a great number of computer processing cycles or access to large amounts of data.

amazing bike video

This is why reddit is my home page. Breathtaking:

Swedes Demonstrate in Support of Pirate Bay

Following the prosecution of the Pirate Bay torrent site it will be interesting to see how the Pirate Party goes in the next European parliamentary elections (June 7th)

Swedes Demonstrate in Support of Pirate Bay

The Pirate Party organized demonstrations against the convictions at several cities across Sweden on Saturday. More than 1,000 people turned out in Stockholm to show support for The Pirate Bay defendents and the practice of file sharing ...

Since the Stockholm district court passed judgment on April 17th the Pirate Party confirmed on Saturday afternoon that its membership has swelled to 21,000.

The party's youth league is now, with its 10,000 members, larger than all of the parliamentary party youth organizations.

But the tigers come at night ... And they turn your dream to shame

Candidate #4321 Susan Boyle, nearly 48yo, currently unemployed but still looking

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lp0IWv8QZY

The YouTube embedding has been disabled by request but make sure you check this one out if you haven't seen it yet.

I Dreamed a Dream
From Les Miserables
[Fantine is left alone, unemployed and destitute]

[FANTINE]
There was a time when men were kind
When their voices were soft
And their words inviting
There was a time when love was blind
And the world was a song
And the song was exciting
There was a time
Then it all went wrong

I dreamed a dream in time gone by
When hope was high
And life worth living
I dreamed that love would never die
I dreamed that God would be forgiving
Then I was young and unafraid
And dreams were made and used and wasted
There was no ransom to be paid
No song unsung, no wine untasted

But the tigers come at night
With their voices soft as thunder
As they tear your hope apart
And they turn your dream to shame

He slept a summer by my side
He filled my days with endless wonder
He took my childhood in his stride
But he was gone when autumn came

And still I dream he'll come to me
That we will live the years together
But there are dreams that cannot be
And there are storms we cannot weather

I had a dream my life would be
So different from this hell I'm living
So different now from what it seemed
Now life has killed the dream I dreamed.
- lyrics source

the singularity man

Here are some video interviews for a fascinating introduction to Ray Kurzweil's ideas about where the exponential growth of technology will lead. There are four shortish videos, just follow the sidebar after viewing the first one.

One aspect of the video medium I like is that you pick up clues to the author's personality far more so than through the writing medium. His flippant comment about the current recession / depression reveals some intellectual detachment from important current issues. Nevertheless, without question he is very smart guy and the testimony from Stevie Wonder indicates a person of compassion, also.

Predicting the future is a very hard thing to do. The exponential growth of technology and nanotechnology is fascinating. Where will it lead us?

Rodney Brooks has some critical thoughts about Kurzweil's ideas in an Edge discussion about Biocomputation:

"A long time ago the brain was a hydrodynamic system. Then the brain became a steam engine. When I was a kid, the brain was a telephone switching network. Then it became a digital computer. And then the brain became a massively parallel digital computer. About two or three years ago I was giving a talk and someone got up in the audience and asked a question I'd been waiting for — he said, "but isn't the brain just like the World Wide Web?"

The brain is always — has always been — modeled after our most complex technology. We weren't right when we thought it was a steam engine. I suspect we're still not right in thinking of it in purely computational terms, because my gut feeling is there's going to be another way of talking about things which will subsume computation, but which will also subsume a lot of other physical stuff that happens"

netbooks in schools: unstoppable force versus immovable object

1:1 netbooks in schools, summary of my analysis so far

unstoppable force:
a device which can be used educationally which has become -

• cheaper
• lighter
• take home 24/7
• personal ownership
• robust
• world wide communication and collaboration
• cloud computing
  
• free software and hardware (the latter linked to communication plans)
• pressure on schools to be up to date, cutting edge (update 11th April)

immovable object:

• teachers as gatekeepers of standards
• historically packaged curriculum which eschews diversions
• resistance to unguided youthful exuberance
• technology is everything invented since you were born
• the disturbing aspect of young people being generally quicker learners of new technology than older people
  
• teachers overworked, don't have time
• incredibly diverse nature of teachers work
• available teacher time is small chunks not large chunks required for paradigm shift

Larry Cuban's critique of computers in school: a discussion we have to have

Computers only work well in schools when there is a high degree of access and teachers who are enthusiasts

At the moment in most schools computers are stuck in labs and students on the average obtain 35 minutes per week access, or something like that (figure from excellent Steve Hargadon interview of Larry Cuban, reference at bottom)

By my reading Larry Cuban is not a Luddite, far from it - he acknowledges that 10% of teachers do wonderful things with computers in schools - but a realist who is aware of and sympathetic to the enormous pressures on teachers. His description of pressure on high school teachers is spot on:

Although information technologies have transformed most corporate workplaces, our teacher's schedule and working conditions have changed very little. She teaches five classes a day, each 50 minutes long. Her five classes contain at least three different preparations. She has two classes of Introductory Algebra, two of Geometry, and one Calculus class. In those five classes, she sees 140 students a day. She has one period a day set aside for planning lessons, seeing students, marking papers, making phone calls to parents or vendors, previewing videos, securing a VCR or other equipment, and using the school's copy machines for producing student materials. Our math teacher, like most of her colleagues elsewhere is a very busy person who could use rollerblades as she tries to meet all of her obligations...

In addition to these daily tasks, our math teacher is expected to know the subject inside and out; she is expected to maintain order in their classrooms; she is expected to be both friendly and demanding of each and every student; finally, with higher academic standards and the mandate to take tests that can spell the difference between graduating high school or staying in school longer, she is held accountable for her students doing well on high-stakes tests. So teaching high school, besides knowing one's subject-matter thoroughly, requires the grit of a long-distance runner, the stamina of a boxer going 15-rounds, the temperament of a juggler, and the street-smarts of a three-card monte dealer...
- SO MUCH HIGH-TECH MONEY INVESTED, SO LITTLE USE: HOW COME?

Putting 10,000 netbook computers into primary schools in Northern Victoria (see here) will change the readiness of access issue but how is it going to transform teachers who are not currently computer enthusiasts into effective teachers of computer rich classrooms? It will provide far more opportunity but it's not going to happen overnight and in some or many cases it won't happen at all.

I've always been against this approach. I argue for computer saturation at schools but if and only if there is a computer enthusiast teacher on the job. There we have it. I want computer saturation in my classes because I have done the hard work of figuring out how to make it work. But I don't think it should happen in classrooms where teachers, often for legitimate reasons, have not done that work.

This 2006 audio interview by Steve Hargadon interview of Larry Cuban critically discusses a range of important issues. Go to this page and search for "Cuban" and download the mp3 or ogg version (46 minutes)

"And keep your eyes wide; The chance won't come again"

How can I reconcile the irony that the lyrics of Bob Dylan's The Times They Are A-Changin' seem just as relevant in 2009 as when they were first written in the 1960s?

The Times They Are A-Changin'

Come gather 'round people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone.
If your time to you
Is worth savin'
Then you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'.
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside
And it is ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is
Rapidly agin'.
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'.

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is
Rapidly fadin'.
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'.

Mary Lou Jepson: it is about the screen

Some extracts from Mary Lou Jepson's Pixel Qi [pronounciation : chee] Mission Statment:

In 2009 we are on the cusp of "cloud computing". 3G wireless services, WiFi and mesh networking are widely deployed. Ebook readers, digital photoframes, and richly-featured touch-screen phones abound. Mini-notebook computers – netbooks – are growing rapidly in adoption ...

Pixel Qi has a belief on the future of the computing - it's not about the CPU or the OS - It is about the screen ...

We see the future of the portable electronics as simply the display - with embedded electronics eventually right in the display glass itself. This is the future laptop, the future cell phone and the future PDA. Instead of focusing on higher speed (more MHz) and larger memory (more GBytes), we work toward new device designs by focusing on displays that we can read, as easily as paper - indoors and out - with battery life measured in days not hours ...

Displays for computers need to be optimized to crisply display text, they need to be optimized for a reader just 30 centimeters from the screen; they need to allow for widespread variations in ambient lighting; they need to support lowering the overall power consumption of the entire device

The display is the most expensive component in a modern laptop, and the most power hungry, and it's uncomfortable to read when compared with paper. We aim to fix this ... The battery is the second most expensive component in the laptop or portable. We propose to massively lower the power consumption of the screen and thus also slash the cost of the battery and dramatically boost how long your machine can run on it before you have re-charge it

We will do all of this while making LCD screens lower cost, higher resolution, easier to read and sunlight readable. We've already shown the first step of this at One Laptop per Child by creating a display that is 5X the resolution, 1/3 the cost, 1/10th the power consumption ...

brief listing of arguments that support radical educational change due to technological innovation

Which is the best way to argue for the necessity for radical educational change based on underlying technological innovation?

1. The pencil analogy (Seymour Papert)
2. Point of view is worth 80 IQ points (Alan Kay)
3. Disruptive innovation and Creative Destruction (Clayton Christensen)
4. Four funerals and a wedding (Damian Conway)
5. How the printing press changed the world (historical analogy)
6. The medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan)
7. In all of history there are only 5 media for storing knowledge: DNA, Brains, Hardware, Books, Software (Philip Armour)
8. The Singularity (Raymond Kurzweil)
9. A new literacy (James Gee, Andy diSessa)

Change is happening anyway but we also need philosophers of change who can articulate some meaning in these changes. The arguments I like best are those to do with new and powerful ways in which knowledge can be represented. Here is a sample from alan kay, who combines a few of the above threads:

Another guess I made long ago—that does not yet have a body of evidence to support it—is that what is special about the computer is analogous to and an advance on what was special about writing and then printing. It's not about automating past forms that has the big impact, but as McLuhan pointed out, when you are able to change the nature of representation and argumentation, those who learn these new ways will wind up to be qualitatively different and better thinkers, and this will (usually) help advance our limited conceptions of civilization.
- http://www.edge.org/q2005/q05_8.html#kay

I forgot to mention "21st Century skills"

10,000 netbook trial in victorian primary schools

There is a big netbook rollout underway in primary schools in Northern Victoria. The support wiki is netbook trial:

• 10,000 netbooks for 1:1 use in Year 5 and 6 classes (in Victoria Year 6 is the final year of Primary school)
  
• software is a mixture of proprietary (Microsoft, Adobe) and FLOSS (see list below)
• running Vista operating system (hard to figure since most netbooks are sold with XP)
  
• cost of each netbook is $550 - computer $480, bag $30, software $40 - this includes insurance
• costs are shared by the families, school and government; families end up paying a dollar a week, spread over 3 years
• Anywhere Anytime Learning has been involved in the consultation process. Their 21 steps to 1:1 success presentation is available from this page of the wiki.
  
• the netbooks are Acer Aspire One and Lenovo S9, detailed specifications here

Here is a list of the software on the machines:

Adobe Flash Player
Create and view animated content

Adobe Reader 8
Provides options for basic PDF viewing and comment-making

Adobe Shockwave Player
Displays web content that has been created by Adobe

Apple Quicktime
A multimedia framework capable of handling various formats of digital video, media clips, sound, text, animation, music and interactive panoramic images

Audacity
Open source software for recording and editing sounds

Blender
Open source, cross-platform suite of tools for 3D creation

CD Burner XP
Application to burn CDs and DVDs, including Blu-Ray and HD-DVDs

Cute PDF Writer
Create PDF files from any printable document, save PDF forms using Acrobat Reader, make PDF booklets, impose, rearrange pages and more

Debut
A simple, easy-to-use video recorder program that lets you capture files directly

DEECD Fonts Victorian Cursive
Downloadable electronic font of Victorian Modern Cursive script to make handwriting exercises, posters, crosswords, flashcards and other classroom resources on your netbook

DVD Flick
A simple DVD authoring tool

Free Mind
A Mind Mapping application

Gamemaker
www.yoyogames.com
Make exciting computer games, without the need to write a single line of code

GIMP
Stands for the GNU Image Manipulation Program and is a raster graphics editor used to process digital graphics and photographs

Google Picasa 3
Helps you organise, edit and share your photos

Google Sketchup
Create, modify and share 3D models

Irfan View
An image viewer and convertor that opens and edit images, as well as multiple media formats

Jahshaka
An open source video editing and effects application

Java runtime environment
Run Java applications

Kahootz V2
Create, explore and invent in 3D (V3 upgrade available soon)

Microsoft Internet Explorer
Web browser

Microsoft Office 2007
Word, Excel and PowerPoint

Microsoft Office Media Content
Includes the Microsoft Clip Organiser and a library of clip art and other media files that users can insert into Office documents

Microsoft PhotoDraw 2.0
Graphic software

Microsoft PhotoStory 3
Create multimedia video presentations using still images

Microsoft Producer for PowerPoint
Provides users with many powerful new features that make it easier to synchronise audio, video, slides and images to create engaging and effective rich-media presentations

Microsoft Silverlight
Delivers high-quality, interactive video across the web and mobile devices.

Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium
Encyclopaedia software

Microsoft Windows Media Player
Store and play music, video and pictures

Microsoft Windows Vista Enterprise
Operating system

MonkeyJam
Create stop-motion movies

MSW Logo
Logo is a computer programming language used for functional programming

NVU
Create web pages with a program that does not require previous web editing knowledge

Paint.NET
Image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows

Scratch
Create your own interactive stories, animations, games, music and art

Symantec Client Security (anti-virus)
Anti-virus software

Tuxmath
Educational maths tutor for children starring Tux, the Linux Penguin

Tuxtyping
Educational typing tutor game starring Tux, the Linux Penguin

VLC Player
VideoLAN Client is a portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats