The Savvy Technologist

Learning on a stick Minnesota style

At the most recent meeting of the Minnesota Education Media Organization Technology Special Interest Division (I couldn’t resist writing that out) I learned about a cool professional development opportunity called 23 Things On a Stick. Curious about the name? If you’ve visited the Minnesota State Fair you’d know how we in Minnesota love things on a stick.

The 23 Things… program is a largely self-paced set of tutorials intended for teachers and library folks in Minnesota who want to learn more about Web 2.0 tools. The “Things” include RSS, photosharing, collaboration, social media, online productivity, online gaming, podcasts, video, and social networking. Each participant is required to maintain a blog for the duration of the project to foster reflection and interaction with other participants.

I’d like to see someone turn the 23 Things program into a Moodle course that can be distributed to any school that is using Moodle for professional development. (”23 Things On a Stick” is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license.) Any takers?

Tags: 23 things on a stick, moodle, Professional Development, web 2.0

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Twitterator gets a tiny bit smarter

Here’s a little tweak that should make Twitterator just a bit more useful. You can now pass the URL for the list of people to follow in the link to Twitterator itself. For example, let’s say you’ve collected a list of Twitter usernames in a text file at http://mytwitternames.com/lsdf28sdf. A link like this:

http://twitterator.org/?url=http://mytwitternames.com/lsdf28sdf

will take you to Twitterator and pre-populate the URL field. This should make it even easier to help a group of people get subscribed to a bunch of other Twitterers. Have fun with it.

Tags: twitterator

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Race report: Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon 2008

The Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon was my first try at the 13.1-mile distance, and I was bound and determined not to repeat the rookie mistakes I’ve made in previous races. In last year’s Run For Oromia 10k and Twin Cities Marathon, I felt good at the beginning and started way too fast. With my Timex Bodylink GPS system I knew that I would be able to monitor my pace often, and I hoped that I could stick with my race plan and avoid flaming out.

Conditions were perfect today. It was just under 50°F at the start and almost 60°F by the end. It was just cold enough at the start that everyone kept their outer layers on until the last minute. Since the race goes point-to-point, I appreciated the fact that they transported our warmups to the finish for us. The course ran along Lake Minnetonka (go figure from the name of the race) and was hillier than I’d expected. Nothing too steep or long, but lots of them.

My plan was to do the first couple miles at 9:00 pace, 8:45 pace until 10k, 8:30 pace until 10 miles, and then empty the tank in the final 5k.

From the looks of the graph, I’d say my game plan went quite well. The two slower miles at 6 and 11 were due to a combination of slowing for water stops and some hills. I’m definitely happy with the trend line. I’ve never been able to do negative splits before.

The official results haven’t been posted yet, but the time on my watch was 1:53:40. I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t broken two hours, and I was hoping to go under 1:55. According to the Running Times Race Time Equivalent calculator, that puts my projected marathon time at 4:01:34. I’d really like to break four hours at Grandma’s Marathon on June 21, so I guess I’m going to need to get my lazy butt out of bed a little earlier and log some more miles.

Update: The results are in. I finished officially in 1:53:42 placing 472 out of 1449 overall and 103/192 in my age group. (One nice thing about turning 40 later this year is that I get to start competing against guys who are older than I am.) My knees are a bit sore tonight, but it’s a good kind of sore.

Tags: flickr, half marathon, lake minnetonka half marathon, lake minnetonka half marathon 2008, race, running

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New Job: Osseo here I come

Big news in my world this week. Starting on July 1st I will be changing school districts to become the Chief Technology Officer in the Osseo Area Schools. It’s a really exciting opportunity to work in a large metro district (22,000 students in 31 schools) with a great leadership team and a history of innovation with technology. Check out the TICT Initiative for an example of a successful teacher coaching model. (I blogged about TICT at the 2006 TIES Conference.)

One of my first tasks will be merging the existing Technology Management and Instructional Media & Technology departments into a new Technology Division. It’s going to be a wild ride!

Tags: osseo

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Twitterator loves DabbleDB

I’ve made a few tweaks to Twitterator over the last couple days, the most significant of which is a measure of compatibility with DabbleDB. If you create a basic DabbleDB database with a single column of twitter usernames, you can specify the URL to the .txt or .csv versions of your database and Twitterator will add them to your list of Twitter friends.

This new feature should really help if you want to provide an easy way for a bunch of people to subscribe to a set of twitter users all at once. You could maintain, for example, a list of K-12 science teacher twitter users. Make as many groups as you want and simply provide the URLs in a blog post, on a wiki page, or in a Google Docs document.

Leave a comment if there’s another feature you’d like. I’ll see what I can do to put it in. Please let me know if you find a bug.

Tags: dabbledb, google, programming, python, twitter, twitterator, wiki

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Twitterator launched: Come and play

I may attract the trademark police for this, but so be it.

It seemed like an innocent enough question at the time, but when Steve Dembo (teach42) posted a tweet last week looking for a way to import a list of Twitter names to follow I decided to run with it. It seemed like a straightforward programming challenge, and after a little twittering back and forth with Dave Briccetti I had it pretty much worked out in my head.

Twitterator, then, is a really simple web application that takes a list of twitter usernames and allows you to follow them in one fell swoop. Take a look and see what you think. I have to warn you though. This is a pretty basic CGI script, and it’s not going to be particularly fast. It depends on Twitter.com’s servers being available which can be a bit of a crapshoot. Using Twitterator may cause dizziness, shortness of breath, locusts, giant meteors, and (wait for it) sexual dysfunction. Tell you doctor if you’re using Twitterator. Don’t taunt Twitterator!

I think this could be pretty useful for training sessions. For example, you could keep a list of twitter usernames in a file on the Internet somewhere and use that URL to follow those people. You could keep lists organized by academic subject or whatever else works for you. Once the file exists at a certain URL, a bunch of people could start following those people within minutes of creating their Twitter accounts. You can also paste in a bunch of usernames manually from a blog post, wiki page, or some other source. I tried to make it as bulletproof as reasonably possible, but you’ll have to ensure that the usernames are listed one per line.

Feel free to leave suggestions for improvements or creative uses in the comments. I hope everyone finds Twitterator useful. It’s fun to exercise my programming chops once in a while, and if this brings Dembo one step closer to world domination then it’s all been worth it.

Update: All Twitterator links have been updated to point to the new URL.

Tags: programming, python, twitter, twitterator, wiki

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Improved Flickr: Now with video!

Seen on TechCrunch:

Heads up YouTube, Flickr announced today that it has added video capabilities. Note that for now only Pro subscribers can upload video. This was just in time for me, because I was trying to decide how I was going to share a short video that I took on my recent Hawaii vacation of the “Sensitive plant” (Mimosa pudica). Problem solved! I just uploaded it and added it to the collection of my vacation photos. The video plays seamlessly alongside my photos and integrates really well with the whole Flickr experience.

I’ve never felt like jumping into YouTube in a big way because I just don’t shoot that much video. This new Flickr feature is perfect for me. I’ll be really curious to see if it takes off. By the way, I shot this video with my new Canon G9 digital camera. It takes amazing still pictures, and the video is really impressive too.

Tags: flickr, video, videosharing

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My new favorite survey tool

I’ve been using a variety of online survey tools for quite a few years now including Zoomerang, SurveyMonday, and KeySurvey. My new favorite is SurveyGizmo.

We’ve been increasing the use of online surveys greatly in my district this year. We love how easy it is to gather feedback following a staff meeting, from parents and others during a curriculum adoption, or as a customer satisfaction instrument for my technology department. Here’s what I really like about SurveyGizmo:

• The SurveyGizmo interface is full of tasty Web 2.0 goodness. Various options and settings open without a full page reload which makes building a survey much more like a desktop application. The look and feel overall is clean and modern in contrast to many of the online tools which look a bit clunky to me.
• The SurveyGizmo enterprise account provides 20 separate survey users. This will enable each school and district office department to have their own account.
• Here’s a huge one for me: they have a full API! In particular, I’m excited to see that you can pass information into a SurveyGizmo survey from another web form or via a web link. I’ve been looking for a way to use an online survey to collect customer satisfaction data as my tech department resolves trouble tickets for staff members. The API would really make that easier.
• Other features of note: full support for branching surveys with really complex logic (can even use regular expression matching for full geek compatibility), tons of built-in question types including some I haven’t seen anywhere else, private domain name, and many more really cool advanced features.

So I’d say give it a try. Full disclosure: the SurveyGizmo links in this post are affiliate links.

Tags: keysurvey, onlinesurvey, surveygizmo, surveymonkey, zoomerang

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Comcast rolls out fatter pipes

According to USA Today, Comcast is planning to spread a little broadband love to its customers in Minneapolis/St. Paul this year. In an effort to compete with Verizon and its FiOS service, Comcast will roll out 50 Mbps download/5 Mbps upload service. They say they’re planning to go to 100 Mbps over the next two years and 160 Mbps after that.

The most obvious application for all that bandwidth is downloading all manner of media files. But what about online learning? With that much bandwidth, full-screen, full-motion videoconferencing is a gimme. 3D multiuser virtual worlds? Yep. Facebook 24×7? Probably. How much bandwidth does your entire district have?

Tags: broadband, comcast, fios, verizon

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Treasure trove of Twitter links

Link courtesy of @briancaldwell:

This is the granddaddy of all blog posts about Twitter. With links to various Twitter software tools and some interesting Twitter use cases, that page is a great place to send someone who wants to get up to speed on the latest technocrack quickly.

Tags: twitter

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Cringely on the search economy

Love him or hate him, Robert X. Cringely’s column on PBS.org is often provocative. He addressed the American education system is a recent post, and I found a couple points pretty interesting. First, the comparison between knowledge and search:

Andy Hertzfeld said Google is the best tool for an aging programmer because it remembers when we cannot. Dave Winer, back in 1996, came to the conclusion that it was better to bookmark information than to cut and paste it. I’m sure today Dave wouldn’t bother with the bookmark and would simply search from scratch to get the most relevant result. Both men point to the idea that we’re moving from a knowledge economy to a search economy, from a kingdom of static values to those that are dynamic. Education still seems to define knowing as more important than being able to find, yet which do you do more of in your work? And what’s wrong with crimping a paragraph here or there from Cringely if it shows you understand the topic?

I’ve posted about that before. I’m thinking about getting an iPhone when version 2.0 comes out, and I can’t wait to see what it’s like to have a real web browser in my pocket 24×7.

I’ve written about this for years and nobody ever paid attention, but ISO certification is what destroyed the U.S. manufacturing economy. With ISO 9000 there was suddenly a way to claim with some justification that a factory in Malaysia was precisely comparable to an IBM plant on the Hudson. Prior to then it was all based on reputation, not statistics. And now that IBM plant is gone.

I don’t know if Cringely is on track with this point, but it makes a bit of sense. He goes on to consider what it would be like if there was an ISO certification process for students. In other words, what if students could demonstrate their knowledge and skills outside of the context of the traditional school? Cringely contends that the whole system would come crashing down if that were possible.

I’ve been saying for years that one of the things holding our K-12 system together is the fact that colleges and universities don’t routinely accept students who don’t have high school diplomas. If the high school diploma ever loses its value as a credential, things will get really interesting.

Tags: google, knowledge economy, robertxcringely, search economy

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Getting serious about backing up (Part II)

Earlier in the month I posted about the strategy I’ve been employing to back up my 24″ home computer. Using SuperDuper! and a 500-GB external drive attached to my Airport Extreme works great, but it doesn’t really solve the my-house-burned-down-and-now-I-lost-all-of-the-embarrassing-pictures-of-my-kids problem. To address that glaring deficiency I needed a way to move my backups offsite.

Enter Amazon S3. In their own words:

Amazon S3 provides a simple web services interface that can be used to store and retrieve any amount of data, at any time, from anywhere on the web. It gives any developer access to the same highly scalable, reliable, fast, inexpensive data storage infrastructure that Amazon uses to run its own global network of web sites. The service aims to maximize benefits of scale and to pass those benefits on to developers.

In other words, when I utilize S3 I rent a tiny little slice of Amazon’s massive infrastructure. The price is certainly right too. The storage is unlimited and costs $0.15/GB per month. Transferring the files to S3 costs $0.10/GB and from S3 $0.18/GB for the first 10 TB. My monthly cost is about $4.

As extensive as it is, S3 is designed to be technically simple. Unfortunately, technically simple doesn’t mean simple for the end user. To really use S3 most people are going to want a front-end tool. I chose Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk runs on OS X, Linux and Windows and costs only $20. When I start the Jungle Disk software, it appears just like any other drive on my OS X desktop. I can browse files and move things back and forth just like any other disk. I can also install Jungle Disk on all of my computers with one license which makes it ideal for storing files that you might need to access from work and home. If you’re concerned about Amazon snooping through your files, Jungle Disk will encrypt all of your data before it gets sent to S3.

I decided to spring for Jungle Disk Plus for another $1/month because I wanted to take advantage of block-level file updates and resumable uploads. Both of these features reduce the total amount of traffic that gets transferred.

All in all, I feel pretty safe at this point. I’ve got regular full-system backups that can be used to restore my system from scratch if I have a major hard drive crash, and I’ve got some insurance for my irreplaceable files. The next step will be increasing the amount of storage available at home. That 500-GB drive is pretty much full. I’m thinking Drobo.

Tags: amazon, backup, drobo, jungle disk, s3

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