Paul's Web Space 2.1

Open Source Makes a Splash at NECC

(This is a longer, unedited version of a my blog post "Open Source on the Agenda," which appeared earlier this month on Education Week's Digital Education blog.)

Open source technology displayed a growing presence at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2009. The Open Source Lab held popular sessions throughout the conference, while the Open Source Playground showcased various technologies and organizations – serving as a mini exhibit floor for the Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) movement. Nearby, NECC Unplugged held free-form sessions, and the Bloggers Café was a hub of spontaneous creativity. While still dwarfed by the exhibition floor downstairs, these features attracted sell-out audiences and an increasingly large and passionate fan base among NECC attendees.

Presentations and handouts touted numerous open source alternatives to traditional software, the best collected in a handout listing the Top 10 Free and Open Source Software in Education. Two speakers stood out among the many presenters who may be familiar to Digital Education readers:

• Steve Hargadon of Elluminate, CoSN, and Classroom 2.0, and organizer of open source and EduBloggerCon events at NECC 2009, presented tirelessly on educational applications for open source software, social networks, and Web 2.0.
  
• Award-winning Georgia educator and entrepreneur Vicki Davis gave presentations on educational use of wikis and social bookmarking groups, among other topics.

Ubuntu Linux was represented in both the Lab and the Playground, with a clustered distribution running 60 thin client workstations setup by Revolution Linux. Revolution’s Educational Services Director, Benoit St-Andre, led a session on avoiding common pitfalls of open source software deployments. He later told me of much larger thin client deployments they have carried out in school districts of up to 10,000 workstations and 40,000 students (which save both hardware and power costs). Local Ubuntu users group volunteers also highlighted for me custom distributions; such as the Netbook Remix (designed for small screens) and Edubuntu, which is targeted specifically at education users. The Wikipedia article on Ubuntu contains much more detail on the history and versions of this breakthrough version of Linux.

Curriki was well represented at NECC as well. Blogger and evangelist Anna Batchelder gave an NECC Unplugged talk on open education resources, covering Curriki and other offerings such as MIT OpenCourseWare, FreeReading, Connexions, and OER Commons — the latter can be searched directly from our Teacher Magazine home page. Executive Director Dr. Barbara “Bobbi” Kurshan touted the value and cost savings Curriki makes possible at a breakfast meeting that also featured Chicago Public Schools technology administrators outlining how open source infrastructure helped them leverage E-Rate funds to enjoy $1 million per year in network operations cost savings.

The other major “exhibitor” at the Open Source Playground was One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) and its operating software, the affiliated Sugar Learning Platform. The OLPC project experienced a rocky start, featuring a slower-than-expected adoption and a very public split between the hardware and software projects, but has made strides recently in Latin America. I spoke with the exhibit’s organizer, Mike Lee, manager of the DC-based OLPC Learning Club and a director of the team that operates AARP.org. Mike told me about OLPCorps Africa, an effort to spread 100 teams of volunteers across the continent to deploy at least 100 laptops per team; blog aggregator Planet OLPC provides news updates on this and related efforts. While the OLPC project isn’t officially directed at the United States, there are volunteer projects in cities such as Birmingham, Alabama, and Chicago featuring significant deployments, and local high school students are involved in Mike’s Sugar Labs DC project team as well. One Laptop Per Child really represents a disruptive technology in the truest sense — essentially inspiring from scratch the creation of an entirely new category of computers, known as netbooks, that is becoming increasingly popular and influential.

Labels: edtech, education, edweek, necc09, open source, technology

   Link: http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/DigitalEducation/2009/07/open_source_on_the_agenda.html

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Edweek.org Sponsors Teachers College Debate, Produces Election Multimedia

The web site I manage, edweek.org, cosponsored and facilitated the live Webcast of a debate Tuesday evening at Teachers College between the top education policy advisers to the Presidential campaigns — Linda Darling-Hammond, an adviser for Sen. Barack Obama, and Lisa Graham Keegan, Sen. John McCain's top education adviser. Education Week also organized a post-debate panel discussion featuring an array of education policy experts and moderated by Education Week reporter David Hoff, which we videotaped for later viewing.

In addition to the complete debate and panel discussion, we created several clips of discussions on policy issues of interest to our readers, and posted them to related blog. Our Teacher Beat blog discussed teacher preparation and motivation in At Ed Debate, Sparks Fly Over Merit Pay, TFA, and the Campaign K-12 blog posted their impressions of Keegan's and Darling-Hammond's answers to the question Who's Going to Be Education Secretary?. Finally, our producers performed a word cloud analysis of the debate text – In a Word, 'Teachers' Are Center of Debate – described in the blog NCLB Act II.

Elsewhere, our web team created a cool online trivia game – How Well Do you Know the Presidential Candidates? – where you try to guess which candidate uttered various statements about education policy. Also included is a Voter's Guide comparing and contrasting McCain and Obama's positions on various education policy issues. We've collected these features and more on our new Campaign 2008 Multimedia and Interactive Coverage page, along with running Twitter streams displaying "Tweets" about the campaign in general (we're Twittering as @edweek2008elect), and specifically about the Teachers College debate — we created the hashtag #tcdebate for the purpose, which actually spent much of Tuesday evening atop Twitter's Hot Election Topics. These presentations have enhanced our coverage of the election campaign, and exposed our work to new audiences.

Labels: education, edweek, politics, tcdebate, Teachers College, twitter

   Link: http://www.edweek.org/ew/collections/campaign08/mm_coverage.html

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My ONA08 Day One - Like Minds, Jeff Jarvis

As I walked up to the registration desk at the Online News Association Annual Conference (ONA08) at the Capital Hilton in DC, I received a warm greeting from conference co-chair Amy Webb (I helped out a little on the social media subcommittee).

I then walked into the Like Minds workshop, where Neil Budde of DailyMe.com was discussing the issues and ideas involved with editing a stand-alone news site (rather than one connected to an existing newspaper or broadcast media outlet). In reality a lot of the issues are the same, just dealing with different audiences (or entrenched editorial staff). He pointed out that our site, edweek.org, doesn't have to deal with the same sort of noise and invective as many media sites, partly due to the civility of our audience; this is starting to change, however, as we wade into the world of politics (but our readers are still more well behaved than many).

It can be difficult to impart ethical or journalistic standards to people in the technology world rather than journalists. It can help if you ask them to look at readers as users — strive to provide a satisfying user experience, and you will be doing good journalism. This actually sounds similar to my prior blogging that good SEO can lead to good usability.

He discussed the utility of measurement, page clicks vs. time on site/length of impression. It can be tough to convince advertisers that a lasting impression might be better than a fleeting click, but one way is to demonstrate the difference visually. Metrics can also help determine most valuable content/tasks based upon traffic/audience response; through a show of hands, we saw that some in attendance actually follow and react to metrics in real time.

Finally, it is the job of the editor to ensure that technologists help productivity, not make production/reporting staff jump through hoops to fit some software/technology imperative. At edweek.org, we operate much like this, with many of our projects aimed at labor saving and automating repetitive tasks.

Then Dale Steinke of KING5.com discussed the challenges facing ediotors of broadcast sites. In the area of video, he stated that raw video most popular, showing a funny clip they posted featuring ping-pong car crashes after an ice storm in Portland OR that was subsequently shared on YouTube many thousand times. Compelling produced video samples included a documentary of suffering in Africa, and a very funny video mash-up of the movie Election with Hillary Clinton produced by Andy Bowers & Bill Smee, guys I knew from Yale who are now with SlateV.

Hillary's Inner Tracy Flick


He then launched into a discussion of newsroom integration, for which I had submitted some comments that I was asked to relate. Here are some of the notes that I had sent in:

Newsroom integration – we have some successful strategies, mostly by involving editors and reporters in as much of our web operations as possible. Specifically, we introduced staff-written blogs a couple years ago, and over the past year, increased the pace of introductions, so that now a significant number of reporters and editors actually write (or lightly edit) blogs. Likewise, with our online chats, we have involved the newsroom in scheduling and moderating them, and our e-newsletters are edited by newsroom desk editors. Also, over the past year, we have assigned a rotating reporter to sit with the web editorial/production team for three months at a time, learning all the tools, and participating in production to the extent that is practical for such a temporary “producer.” Lastly, we sent two reporters to each political convention over the past two weeks, and they were equipped with laptops, smart phones, and flip video cameras, and trained in video shooting and in using our Twitter account. They were blogging, twittering, shooting video to post in their blogs, and even writing an occasional news article. Mojos if only just for special events (so far).

Going viral – we were plugged in to the C-SPAN convention coverage, our blogs were included, we used the hashtags so our tweets were included, but really, the biggest rush of traffic comes from our own e-newsletters. We also use Facebook, MySpace, Social Tagging, YouTube, etc, but with little payoff yet.

I also attended the J-School Entrepreneurship Bootcamp, and heard various people connected with schools of journalism discuss projects they have undertaken that involve more creative use of the web, which is a tremendous development. The dinner keynote speaker at this event was Jeff Jarvis, Directory of the Interactive Journalism Program at CUNY and author of the blog BuzzMachine. Jeff described his Entrepreneurial Journalism program, starting with why that is not an oxymoron. He rather believes that business thinking is becoming more and more important in the world of networked journalism, and the only way to create a "sustainable journalistic enterprise." He described an evolution of journalism that is necessary in today's business environment, including these steps and more:

1. Survival
2. Stewardship
3. Innovation
4. Good Management
5. Opportunity

Jeff described how the curriculum covers many business topics that are increasingly important for journalists to understand, from elevator pitches, to advertising models, to subscriber acquisition and churn, and the way that these projects eventually were pitched to real angel investors, and the winning ideas will eventually be tried as real businesses. He also briefly described some of the ideas, imploring us not to shear these ideas in our own blogs invoking the novel (to me) concept of "FrienDA" – a play in NDA, or non-disclosure agreement among friends – a seemingly risky concept in other contexts, but probalby low-risk in the world of journalists familiar with news embargoes.

Labels: education, internet, journalism, ona08

   Link: http://journalists.org/2008conference/archives/001203.php#thursday

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