Technology As A Journey, Not a Destination

We have a lot of desktop computers that are past their prime.  At this moment, they are sitting unused, just waiting to be dealt with in some manner.  Some of them still have some life left in them in some capacity, but some of them are ready to move on to their next phase of life.  Whether that phase of life is an a new home, or into the great recycling center in the sky, the time is here.

So I was thinking about what a shame it was to have all of this aggregate computing power, but scattered on machines that are, by today’s standards, slow.  I started to seriously contemplate putting them together in some sort of cluster, but lack the free time or the technical expertise to get them going on my own.  Unfortunately, I don’t have a whole lot of time to just play, either.  It occurred to me that perhaps this would be a good project for some of our students.

I mentioned it on Friday, and over the weekend much research was done and yesterday they started finding the controller computer.  Yesterday, they managed to locate a good performing machine, get an extra hard drive, and find some memory too.  They are ready to go and are excited. As such, I am excited too.  Now there are drawings, plans and some buzz around.  The thought of La Junta, Colorado having a “supercomputer” is appealing on a variety of levels.  To me, having a supercomputer created and maintained by our students purely for discovery purposes is even better.

One of the important features of my job is making technology accessible to all of our students.  Most of our students use the computers for their work and creative projects.  We have so many resources that go unused, I am so pleased that some of it can possibly be put to some educational use.

Stay tuned for updates, it’s going to be an interesting few weeks.

There’s a lot of lip service paid to “the cloud” in the computer world nowadays.  It seems everyone is trying to get in on the action.  I admit, I personally like the cloud as a concept.  That does not mean that I love every salesperson’s product that sells their solution to my real or imagined problem.

I am one of those IT people that embraces the freedom that cloud based solutions give me – less servers to maintain.  Google Apps has been one of the greatest things that happened at my work.  The power of collaboration and its ease are unmatched by other off-the-shelf products that could be purchased and installed on our own servers.  Plus, there’s no way that most organizations could come close to the computing power of Google.  It’s just a phenomenal product.

Google’s flirting with evil aside, they do offer a fantastic product.  I also regularly use  Dropbox, SkyDrive, and Evernote.   These free applications have changed the way I store and access my information.  When I got my Mac, I paid for MobileMe because of what I wanted it to give me in terms of a central place where I could put files or resources that I wanted available wherever I may happen to be.  It has served that need well, but I see that it’s more targeted to those individuals who may want to share their photos, web site, e-mail, and those sorts of things.  Being in the IT world, I have no trouble publishing the things I want to publish, so a solution like Dropbox is more along the lines of what I had in mind.  Don’t get me wrong, MobileMe is a great product, but I probably won’t renew my membership when it’s up next year.

At a recent technology education event I attended, a comment was made that when the iPad becomes part of the cloud, it will be a gamechanger.  I have to agree with that completely.  What the Dropbox and Evernote app does for the iPad are amazing.  When there is read AND write access to Google Apps, watch out!  I find myself using my iPad almost as much as, or more than, my notebook when I am at home.  Once it’s untethered from its storage limitations, I think it will change the way we interact with the cloud.

One of the things that is my biggest pet peeve is the tried and true – “that’s what we’ve always done” mantra that some people roll out when the pseudo-4-letter-word CHANGE comes up.  I struggle to understand what causes some people to embrace change, while others fight it at every step of the way.  It’s not an age thing either, even though that’s what most “young” people will say.  On every side of the generational spectrum lies those people who are terrified of anything different.

I never really gave much thought to it until relatively recently, but it has been gnawing at my brain for the last few days.  In part, I want to understand the mentality behind it, and in part so I can figure out a way to possibly help some overcome it.

It’s been a long time since I posted, but no shortage of things happening.  In both personal and business lives, it has been an insane few months.

Over the summer I received approximately 200 Macbooks in addition to the 100+ I already had.  We also purchased some carts so they can be mobile.  I tried to incorporate them into our existing network infrastructure.  The previous Macbooks had been integrated into the Active Directory domain.  Over the summer, the AD server decided to randomly change all of the mobile account user ids to a string of numbers that did not correlate to anything.  If users could log in, they had no permission to view anything.  So as if there wasn’t enough work, add this to the mix, fixing every machine.

I researched this extensively, and had no logical explanation.  At ISTE I listed to a session by the Maine IT people that are behind the MLTI and they take  a completely serverless approach.  So since I was having to touch every machine to fix Microsoft’s epic failure, I decided this is a good approach for our district.  The model fits to the way our users use, and things like a down server no longer take the entire workforce with it.

Add printers into this mix, with local print queues and it was a big project.  As school started and I saw the ratio of macs to PC labs in our district, it occurred to me that we were going about it backwards.  We have almost 3 times as many macs as PCs yet we’re trying to force the macs to work with the haphazard configuration of the PC network.  I made the decision to make the PCs work with the Macs instead.  This has caused some stress and lots of work, but in the end it will be worth it.

During this I also had the opportunity to participate in some professional development sessions sponsored by Apple and it has certainly encouraged me for the year.  I am proud of the work we’ve done and I know we will continue to do more.

I’ve got notes from discussions and lectures I attended at ISTE, but not the energy to put them into a somewhat informative post.  I plan on making future posts from my notes.  So if you follow this, please stay tuned.

The first official day at ISTE was somewhat overwhelming.  We started our day with a tour that utilized QR codes to learn more about the art in downtown Denver.  We had two choices to choose from – modern art or western art.  We chose the modern art route and learned a little about the art around the convention center and downtown Denver.  This sounds like a great project and a neat way to explore and learn about your environment.  It was, but there’s a catch.  Not everyone has a phone capable of reading QR bar codes, downloading media via their phone and then posting a YouTube video about the process.  This would be an excellent project in a school that had access to this technology, but not so much for everyone else.   This may sound obvious, but for struggling school districts, it’s an impossible hurdle.

Public school is not exactly rolling in the dough, let alone has enough disposable income to invest in class sets of camera and data plan enabled smart phones.  I barely have the disposable income for my own one.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining about this tour, in fact it was very cool.  However, I don’t see a lot of relevance in my area.  Others may have the ability to take it and run with it, and I hope that they do.

After our morning excursion, we wandered around the vendor area for a while and explored there.  We then enjoyed a great lunch and conversation with Patrick Benko from Apple – one of the best sales/support vendor I have ever encountered.  We stayed out a little too long, walked a little too far, and I missed one of the sessions I was supposed to attend. Couple that with the fact that I was absolutely sure it was on Tuesday, and, well, there you go.

Our afternoon was spent mostly in the vendor exhibition area.  We saw lots of products that we had only seen on web pages or in slick full-color pages.  I also got to see, in person, some of the people that fill up my inbox with the solution to the ills of education.  I saw people I had hung up on repeatedly, when they won’t take no for an answer.  I saw very few interesting items, which was a little disappointing, but not totally unexpected.

What made me smile all day was the Microsoft exhibit for Worldwide Telescope.  Worldwide Telescope is an amazing tool, and I have recommended it in the past.  The funny part was the things you had to do to experience the portable planetarium they had constructed.  I will try to get some video tomorrow and post it, because there just aren’t the right words to describe it.  If you visited it, you know what I mean.  To sum up, it is an inflatable device, that has to shield the light from outside.  So, as it was so visually depicted to me by my colleague Chris Ludwig – picture the part in Ace Venture II when he is exiting the mechanical rhino (or whatever it is) and you’ll have a good visual.  Priceless.

I then enjoyed the evening over dinner with our group talking about a variety of topics from education technology to mosquitoes.  I know one of the perks to coming to a conference like this is to meet others and network, but it’s also important to discuss what you’ve learned and how it relates to your environment.  It was a great evening and I’m excited for tomorrow.

Today was our first day at ISTE wandering around the Colorado Convention Center.  I am traveling with several other members from our school district: Chris Ludwig, High School Science Teacher, Nancy Westfall, Technical Support Coach and Carol Noll, Superintendent.  There are so many events over the course of the next couple of days to choose from, it is very difficult to decide where to spend your time.

The opening kickoff was an entertaining event with Mario Armstrong giving a fun and lighthearted demonstration of what its like to be a new teacher with a great idea using technology.  While some were scoffing at his success in getting his pretend technology project up and running, I have found that it is very much the case if you are committed and present a clear and good case for your project.  The message in the drama was valuable – he didn’t give up, he didn’t get discouraged and he kept on going despite being shot down several times from various groups.

What I took away from that kickoff was a reinforcement of my belief that it is important to “know your stuff” when you want to do something totally different and change an old method of performing some task.  It’s important to have a clear definition of what exactly you want to do, why you want to do it, and even some examples of others that have done it and had success.  Most of the time, leadership is reasonable and will be willing to invest (emotionally or financially) in a project that looks like it has the potential for success.  Without sounding too much like a motivational speaker, you have to believe in your project and be excited about it.

One thing I found across so many of my experiences is that people spend a great amount of time working against the system, trying to fight it at every turn and change it, sometimes just for the sake of change.  What I have found as a more effective approach is to learn the system inside and out, find out how to use it, and go from there using the system that is already in place.  So much energy is spent fighting processes, policies and procedures that are entrenched and extremely resistant to change.  Some of these are not only resistant to change, but fortified against it.  To me, this is wasted energy and can be refocused and use the momentum of the system against itself.

On the flip side of that, just because something is new and exciting doesn’t  mean that it is better by default.  Sometimes tried and true methods are better.  They may be old and aged and designed by our grandparents, but it may be only a slight augmentation or adjustment is needed to bring them up to date.   I have encountered people that are pushing for change just for the sake of change.   Out of change can come amazing and innovative ideas and processes, but that is not always the case.  While I love changing ideas and moving forward, sometimes these things just need to be left as is and our energies focused on something that will benefit more from change.

Speaking of old methods, let’s talk about the keynote with Jean François Rischard. I am sure that somewhere in all of those  Power Point slides was a message.  However, I missed it because it was simply not at all engaging.  I was sitting at the Blogger area and I enjoyed the heckling from them much more than I enjoyed the presentation.  It was a strange thing to be sitting in a group of innovators and people who are working in the system, looking for ways to bring it into the 21st century, while the keynote speaker was droning on with an incomprehensible Power Point presentation.  It was an interesting irony, to have the keynote speaker at a conference that seems to showcase innovation and new technology tuned out because it was, well I’ll just say it, a boring presentation.

There are so many lessons that can be learned from that keynote presentation, it’s difficult to even find a place to start.  As I’ve said before, I’m not an educator by trade, but watching that was like watching an investor presentation, complete with graphs and flow charts and inappropriate clip art.  There was a great sense of disappointment (if that’s the right word) in the tweets about having the conference open on such an ironic note.  I fully expected someone to stop it in the middle and say, “just kidding, this is the exact wrong way to give a presentation,” and then the real keynote would begin.

I know, at least in the group I was sitting with, the keynote was not well received.  We will see what the mood is tomorrow, but from here they can only go up.  Mr. Rischard has my sympathies if he is a Twitter user and sees the tweets about his carefully prepared presentation.  I have a hunch, however, that he does not participate in the social web.

I will have the opportunity to attend the ISTE conference in Denver this month.  I’m excited about this opportunity to learn all I can about education technology, meet lots of people, and just immerse myself with people who I can learn from at every level.

I signed up to blog my days, so that will also be a new experience for me.  Watch this blog from June 27th-30th for information about the ISTE conference.

I have been thinking a lot about deleting my Facebook page and just using a special blog to update my friend and family on my life. The more I think about it, though, the more I realize that it doesn’t make much sense. At this point deleting my Facebook profile would be nothing more than a symbolic gesture because of my personal rule for posting online. It’s simple, but effective.

Never post anything online that I would be umcomfortable reading in the local paper.

That’s it. So even if Facebook decided to open my profile to the world, my privacy would not be compromised. I don’t do any of the Apps, I block every single one that shows up in my news feed hat friends use. My pictures are ones that anyone could see. I would prefer it only be friends but if the worst happened it would not be devastating to my privacy.

I see some of the things that people post on their pages – Facebook, Twitter or blogs – and I just can’t believe that they would make some of this information public. And yes, even though you can “control” the privacy settings, there is always the chance something will go wrong. After all, it is a resource connected to the internet.

If you absolutely must comment on something, or post something online as a means of stress management, it is crazy easy to invent an alter ego for those sorts of activities. Just keep the two separate in all regards and there you go. Would it be easy to connect the two I you were a private investigator? Probably. Just keep that in mind as you go along.

For all of these social networking sites, just assume that whatever you post could someday become public information and think before you hit that submit button.

For the longest time while a Mac user over a decade ago, there was a definite boundary of “stuff” that one could do with a Mac.  I’ve tried to pinpoint my switch to Windows and I think it was just by sheer lack of “stuff” to do on my computer.  Couple that with becoming part of the corporate world, and I suppose that’s just what happens.  During my time as a Mac user, I dabbled with various flavors of Linux and always ran into the same thing.  If you were not a programmer or hardcore computer “techie” there was not much for you in Linux.  Web browsing, e-mail, basic word processing, and that was about it as far as mainstream applications go on a desktop computer.  It never lost its value as a server, and has increased in that regard even more so.  For this discussion, however, I’m talking about the desktop computer that you check your bank account, check Facebook and share digital media.

Fast forward to now.  Since it’s release, I have upgraded two machines to Ubuntu 10.04 and I am just blown away in how far it has come.  Every release of Ubuntu Linux is better.  I’ve even got a few friends and family running Ubuntu exclusively, and they have never even noticed that Windows XP is gone.  In fact, you tend to notice the OS even less with Linux.  And really, that’s the way it should be.  I guess that’s why I’ve fallen in love with my Mac.  It just does what I want and stays out of my way.  A few software updates here and there, but otherwise the OS stays out of my way.

Ubuntu started out as a very polished and commercial-looking flavor of Linux.  I have been regularly using it since 5.10.  Each version brings us closer to even more freedom in our desktop computing needs.  I kept a virtualized copy of Windows XP and Windows 7, just in case.  Since leaving one of my customers that had a VPN that wouldn’t work in anything other than XP, I have not booted up those virtual machines since.

Where once I was dependent on the applications in Windows XP, I find that I no longer need it for anything.  I’m at a point where I’m surprised that Microsoft products are completely irrelevant in my personal life, and increasingly less relevant in my business role.  Do I love Office for Mac?  Not really, I could switch to something else if I had the ambition to learn it.  Could I live without it?  Absolutely.   That makes me happy.

If suddenly my Mac went away, I would have not trouble switching to Ubuntu exclusively.  The Mac is still obviously a commercial release and the hardware/software integration is second to none.  I doubt they have much to fear from Ubuntu, but the other player in this business sure does.  What I don’t understand is that probably significantly more development and resources went into Windows 7 and it wouldn’t even be a consideration for me if my Mac self-destructed.  If you haven’t yet, go get Ubuntu.  It’s free and easy.  You just might find yourself surprised.