2008 June Archive - Faculty Academy 2008

Archive for June, 2008

And He Blogs » Vista

Published

on June 30, 2008

. Closed

This is a post that I’ve been contemplating for a while and it will not just be a rant, but offer some advice for fixing issues with Windows Vista. I’ll also offer a little perspective to Microsoft’s new OS, something lacking in today’s blogospheric culture. It took an article in PC World to say enough is enough. That and the fact that today marks the last day you can purchase Windows XP in retail stores. In their latest issue, PC World declares Windows XP as one of their top products of 2008. OK, I get it. Very funny. XP is better than Vista - it’s “leaner, meaner and less bloated than Vista” says PC World. Let me give you one advantage that XP has over Vista. There weren’t any blogs around when XP was released. If there were, you would have seen the same gnashing of teeth that you see with Vista’s release. Today, what you have is a cacophony of users, mostly repeating the meme of Vista is a disaster/nightmare/abomination, the “worst version of Windows ever”. I’ve even heard the comparison to Windows ME. Meanwhile, a bizarre love affair with XP has begun.

Now I admit that I was ready to blame Vista for certain problems I was having. As I pointed out then, there were some audio issues that needed to be ironed out. There also was some weird behavior in the copying function, which has since been corrected with Service Pack 1. However, I have been mostly happy with Vista. I upgraded my Toshiba Tablet PC because XP was giving me fits. (I now believe, by the way, that the computer itself was a big part of the problem). So what’s so good about Vista? Well, let’s start with what was Windows XP’s biggest problem.

Security. It’s better in Vista. Have you read all the headlines about Vista being a security risk, and all of the people hacking Vista? Me neither. However, this has actually been turned into a complaint, with a generous amount of help from Apple with their “switching ads”.

<img src="http://andheblogs.andyrush.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/06/videof4086c1423a9.jpg" galleryimg="no" onload="var downlevelDiv = document.getElementById('a90cf9d4-5865-46e5-b161-febbf09fec1b'); downlevelDiv.innerHTML = "

";" alt=""/>

“Oh, this sucks. Now my computer is too secure.” Like it or not, more people are trying to hack Windows. More than 90% of the people using computers in the world are using Windows PCs. User Access Control (UAC) can be frustrating. It can, and possibly should be tweaked. But compare it to XP. For XP to be functional, with the need to install plug-ins for web browsers, and the need to do other system file manipulation, it’s almost essential that it be used in admin mode. Not a good idea. Vista forces you to use a computer in protected mode. The additional (and maybe excessive) prompts are the trade-off for more security.

There are lots of other good things about Vista, not the least of which addresses the complaint of XP’s “Fisher Price” interface (remember that one?). Vista looks good and it functions very well on a relatively new PC. Search and indexing are much improved in Vista. Partitions are easily resized. It has very good Tablet PC support with much better handwriting recognition. It has very good built-in voice recognition. It does a much better job of isolating programs that have crashed, so that they don’t freeze the computer. Vista Media Center is much improved. And so on.

What will happen to Vista from here on out? Well, it will grow on people. Drivers will be improved and programs will be updated to run better on Vista. A majority of problems with Vista lie in poorly written drivers and software, and not with Vista itself. Sure, I want Vista to work better. I want it to work great. So in that spirit, here are some tips to get you there:

Ed Bott’s “Fixing Windows Vista, one machine at a time“, and

Vista Tweaks Part 1 & Part 2.

And here is some nice perspective on the similarities to when Windows XP was the new kid on the block:

Hasta La Vista, Windows XP

There I feel better.

UPDATE: After I published this, I noticed that Ed Bott had posted an audio interview with Larry Magid of CBS News, talking about XP’s last day and whether Vista is a worthy upgrade.

And He Blogs » We’ll Get Right On That

Published

All Feeds

on June 29, 2008

in Uncategorized

. Closed

Fellow Virginian and IT person David Carter-Tod wrote a post that was spot-on about setting a tone for customer service at a Comcast office. It’s the kind of post that maybe we all imagine writing while we’re standing in line thinking about how things work, or don’t. Well, as you can see, David wrote, and it doesn’t look like it took too long for Comcast to read it and respond. I had heard that Comcast has been lurking around Twitter, looking for these kinds of issues and responding. I’m going to ask David if he can follow up and report the results. That would be Comcastic!

Learning In A Flat World » Catching Up With Old Friend

Published

All Feeds

on June 29, 2008

in Uncategorized

. Closed

An unexpected pleasure Friday night and Saturday - my old friend Perry Hidalgo and his son came through town and spent the night. I first met Perry 11 years ago when he was an adjunct at Herkimer County Community College in New York where I was a dean. I hired him as a full-time professor in computer science there and celebrated with him and his wife the birth of Graydon a year later. After I moved to Gwinnett Technical College in Georgia, I found the existing computer science chair there had a Radio Shack TRS-80 on his desk. So after a timely retirement, I asked Perry to apply for the job, which he did and which he got. Perry went on to take his second masters in sports management and start a sports management program at Gwinnett. Through the past eleven years, he has been one of my best friends, so I was delighted that he could swing through for a short visit. We both were up early Saturday and spent time on the deck with coffee talking of old times and education in general.

Perry and Graydon have been on a road trip this summer break to see historical sights (Mammoth Cave, Valley Forge, Niagra Falls…quite a list). So before they headed back to Georgia, we spent the morning at Petersburg Battlefield. I had not yet had the chance to visit this site in the two years I have lived in Richmond, and always wanted to. You may remember the beginning of the 2003 movie Cold Mountain starts with the Union army attempting to breach the Confederate fortifications by mining under the wall and packing it with explosions. The explosion was a big success but the follow-up attack was a miserable failure, and the Petersburg siege went on another 9 months.

Graydon - as any 9 year old - had a ton of questions, which Perry and I had fun answering.

It was a too short visit, but delighted it occurred!

Authored by Britt. Hosted by Edublogs. addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fbwatwood.edublogs.org%2F2008%2F06%2F29%2Fcatching-up-with-old-friend%2F'; addthis_title = 'Catching+Up+with+Old+Friend'; addthis_pub = '';

Loaded Learning » I’m Leaving For Camp, Or, They’ve Finally Sent Me To An Asylum

Published

All Feeds

on June 27, 2008

in Uncategorized

. Closed

“It was when I was happiest that I longed most…The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing…to find the place where all the beauty came from.”
- C.S. Lewis

I’m getting ready to start my month long disconnection from the internet and cell service. I will be serving on the kitchen summer staff at a camp in NY and without the outside distractions I’ll have the whole month to focus on the task at hand. I’m very excited about this opportunity to meet new people and form a community around a vision shared by all those who are serving.

It will also be a time to mull over many ideas and work out problems that have needed closer analysis for some time. I suppose I will be journaling the old-fashion way too, where is that pen and paper?

At this moment I know something is not right and the forces of the universe are nudging me to listen closely for an answer. It is not that I am not happy, in fact I am the happiest I’ve been in a long time and I am learning to find that deep abiding joy - “satisfaction is a lowly thing, how pure a thing is joy” - and I have many of you to thank for that.

So what is this post about? Well to be honest, I haven’t a clue and I hope its not just me wanting to hear myself blather on into the vast expanses of the internet. I feel like there are questions I am supposed to be asking, but I don’t even know what they are and that makes it very difficult to find the answers. Maybe I am making an odyssey that will bring me right back to where I started and at the end of the journey Ithaka will hold a different meaning for me. Maybe I’m finally just starting to lose it. In any case I’m about to embark on a month long excursion mentally, spiritually, and emotionally.

Now comes for the random part of the post where I ask a possibly unreasonable response that may lead many of you to believe I am losing it (which again may be true). Below I am going to put my address at camp and if you feel so inclined you can send me something and I will send something back. And while a well written letter is always appreciated I think it would be more fun receive letters that are outside the ordinary. Send pictures, poems, articles, or leaves I don’t really care! Maybe I’ll send you something back that someone sent to me, share the love, ya know? Make it crazy, fun, and playful - I want to see what if anything will come out of this experiment. Maybe it is stupid experiment, but I feel life needs to be more random and unpredictable.

“No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of the planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar to planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity,
obscurity is not uninteresting.”

Camp Address:
Shannon Hauser
Summer Staff
Young Life’s Lake Champion
247 Mohican Lake Road
Glen Spey, New York 12737

Loaded Learning » Student Syllabus

Published

All Feeds

on June 25, 2008

in Uncategorized

. Closed

I thought of a question the other day, why don’t students have their own syllabus? Not necessarily a syllabus in terms of deadlines, but a student’s goals for the semester. Perhaps evaluating at the beginning of the semester what they expect to learn and other academic goals (ideas about what other goals?). This would make students actually take a look at the syllabus and encourage professors to explicate their own personal goals for the course outside the basic clichéd lines students see on every professor’s syllabus. This has the possibility of taking students from passive learners who attempt to fit into a mold of a class to active learners who grab a hold of the learning inside the classroom. And if Jeff McClurken’s Digital History class is any indication, students will often set the bar higher for themselves than a professor would expect.

I think this question stems from my frustration over finding relevancy in the classroom. As Jerome Bruner states in his book The Process of Education:

“The first object of any act of learning, over and beyond the pleasure it may give, is that it should serve us in the future. Learning should not only take us somewhere; it should allow us later to go further more easily.”

One of the most common complaints I hear from students (and myself) is the lack of relevancy of what is learned in the classroom. This does not necessarily mean what is being taught is not relevant, but more likely students are unable to see it. This attitude is especially prevalent in gen-ed classes where students are often in courses that they have little interest in. Now I’m not asking professors to make their class pop-culture relevant, although props to you if you can throw in a Simpsons reference, there is pretty much relevancy in everything if you know what you are looking for. Let me throw another Bruner quote at you:

“Grasping the structure of a subject is understanding it in a way that permits many other things to be related to it meaningfully. To learn structure, in short, is to learn how things are related.”

Often I find myself losing sight of this structure or I am unsure of what it even is, so the class becomes “simply the mastery of facts and techniques”. At this stage of the game obviously I have come to learn structure of several disciplines, but I am honestly not sure I could tell you what exactly those structures are. I still need the help from professors, the experts in the classroom, to guide me. All too often people assume that students, both good and bad, have mastery or understanding of the basic underlying structure of a subject.

I think students (and maybe even professors) are afraid to admit this late in the game that they are unsure of the answers to some of these seemingly basic questions. Maybe if we just put embarrassment and pride aside we could talk about these glaring issues with honesty and maybe even reach some answers. And almost as equally important as finding the answers is iterating it again, and again, and again, and again.

Techfoot » Writing Strategically (part Two)

Published

All Feeds

on June 24, 2008

in Uncategorized

. Closed

This is a quick follow-up to my last post about choosing a writing strategy for your for your blog. In the last post, I talked about treating your blog as an a forum to explore all the interesting things that you learn about through the web, reading, conversations, and all the other sources of information that come into your personal information universe. Readers will seek out your blog as a way of entering into your world and of finding resources that they never would have found on their own.

Another strategy is to pick out a particular area of expertise and write deeply and extensively about issues within that area. Readers come to your site because you know more about this topic than almost anyone else in the world. (Or at least on the internet.) The goal of this type of blogging is summed up in this quote from Ron Gross’s book The Independent Scholar’s Handbook:

Max Schuster was not a man to mince words or to warm you up with small talk. His words were well honed; he obviously had delivered this message before and knew exactly what he wanted to say and how he wanted to say it. Fixing me with a firm eye over the glistening mahogany desktop he declared: “I have one bit of advice for you–not just for success in this business, but personally. Begin at once–not today or tomorrow or at some indefinite date, but right now, at this precise moment–to chose some subject, some concept, some great name or idea or idea in history on which you can eventually make yourselves the world’s supreme expert. Start a crash program immediately to qualify yourself for this self-assignment through reading, research and reflection. In his librarylike office, such a program did not seem impossible, as a generous slice of the world’s wisdom was within arms reach.

In a world defined by the long tail, just about every topic needs its experts. One of my favorite examples has been

43 Folders where Merlin Mann has turned his own inability to manage his time and his life into what appears to be a full-time job. If you have a passion, no matter how narrow, your blog can be a place to find others who share it.

Techfoot » Expanding Research Through Open Notebook Science

Published

All Feeds

on June 24, 2008

in Uncategorized

. Closed

IT Conversations | Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators | Jean-Claude Bradley

He believes that scientific research happens better and faster when the entire process is transparently narrated online.

New social tools can have a tremendous impact on teaching, learning and research. The emergence of Open Notebook Science has the potential of speeding up the diffusion of scientific discoveries and of helping students and others look into the nature of “real research with all it’s glitches.” In this interview, Jon Udell and chemist Jean-Claude Bradley talk about the real-world potential of blogs, wikis and other social software tools to encourage communication and speed up collaboration among scientists and students..