Taking control of your Calendars: Part 2
Ok, hopefully you're read Part 1 of this article and you now have your calendars all set up in Google Calendar instead of iCal.. Now let's get that all synced up to your phone.
One of the biggest benefits of Apple's MobileMe service it the way it keeps your iCal calendars in sync with your iPhone. Unfortunately MobileMe costs $129/year here in Australia (even though it's only $99 in the US and our dollar is almost 1:1 at the moment... don't get me started on that!) The good news is that you can get exactly the same sort of synchronization at no cost by using Google Calendar instead of Apple's iCal, plus you get all the extra benefits of sharing calendars that only Google's cloud can offer.
If you're a Google user then you've probably set up Gmail on your iPhone. The trouble is, when you set that up you probably did the obvious thing and went to Settings, selected Mail, Contacts, Calendars and then chose the Gmail option. That seems kind of obvious, but there's a much better way to do it. When you choose the iPhone's Gmail option you get the option to set up Mail, Calendars and Notes. Notes? What about your Contacts? Wouldn't you rather have those?
Instead of choosing the Gmail option, you should choose the Exchange option. You'll still use it to set up your Gmail, but by using the Exchange protocols it actually does two important things. One, it allows you to set up Mail, Calendars and Contacts - much more useful than notes. And secondly, it opens up the option to use Google's Sync Services.
On your iPhone, get started by going to Setting and selecting Mail, Contacts,Calendars. Tap the Add Account... option. Tap on Microsoft Exchange (I know, I know... you're using Microsoft Exchange to set up Google's Gmail on an Apple iPhone... how weird is that?)
In the Email field, enter you full Gmail address. You can skip the Domain field. In Username, enter your full Gmail address again. Enter your Gmail password in the password field. For Description, give it a meaningful name, like, oh, I don't know... Gmail? Finally, I'd suggest you make sure that SSL is set to On. Tap the Next button.
The phone will take a few seconds to verify your account, and then the screen will expand to reveal a field for Server. In here, enter m.google.com, and then press done.
You'll probably want to turn on all three options for Mail, Contacts and Calendars. Mail Days to sync can be set to whatever you like... I have mine set to 1 Week. The Mail Folders to Push should probably be set to Inbox. That's it.
If you now check your iPhone's Calendar you'll see that you now have a Gmail calender in the list. Awesome. If you've previously had Gmail set up on your phone the regular way you can (should) delete it, or you'll have two copies of everything.
But wait a minute... your Google Calendar has all those lovely layered calendars, and the iPhone is only showing one of them. What's going on? Where are the others?
By default, the only calendar that you see is the Primary one. If you've set up your work Exchange account, your primary calendar will be set to sync with your Exchange account since that's a limitation of Google Calendar Sync with Exchange. To see the others you'll need to do a couple of extra steps.
On your iPhone's mobile browser, go to http://m.google.com/sync and select your device (you can set up multiple devices, such as your iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad) On this page you'll see all the secondary calendars you've set up on your GCal. Just tick the one's you'd like to appear on your iPhone (up to 25 of them) and then tap the Save button at the bottom of the page. Done.
Now if you go back to your iPhone's Calendar app, you'll see all the secondary calendars in the list! Make sure there's a tick next to all the ones you'd like to appear in your calendar list and you're good to go. You now have perfect realtime syncing of calendars between your Google Calendars and your iPhone. Just like MobileMe gives you, but without the cost. You also get your Gmail Contact list showing up on your phone's address book too.
Speaking of contacts, once I decided that this Gmail mail/calendar solution was a clear winner, I also exported all of my contacts out of Apple's Address Book on my Mac, then imported them into Gmail's Contact list. It was silly maintaining two lists of contacts, and although there was a fair bit of overlap of the same people in my cloud-based Gmail Contacts list and my Mac-based Address Book, they were still two different sets of data, which used to drive me crazy. A single list of contacts makes much more sense, so by importing everything into the Gmail contacts and enabling that as my iPhone's primary address book, it combines everything into one place. Of course, there were duplicate entries, but that was easily fixed in Gmail but going to the Contact list and from the More Actions menu selecting Find and Merge Duplicates. Too easy. I now have one single list of contacts, stored in the cloud, always up to date, and accessible from anywhere.
So far, I've got my school Outlook calendar feeding into my Google Calendar, aggregating it all into a single cloud-based calendar, and syncing it all back to my iPhone and iPad (as well as every computer I use). Perfect!
But what about iCal? I do still find iCal handy as there are occasionally times when I'm not actually connected to the web. Google Calendar doesn't have an offline mode (yet!) so it would still be useful to have access to my calendar via iCal. If only iCal could pull its calendar data directly off the Google cloud...
It can. Here's how.
Back on your Mac, open up iCal's Preferences. Go to the Accounts tab and click the + button to make a new account. Under Account Type choose Google, then enter your gmail address and password. Give it a moment to validate that, then go to the Delegation tab. As long as you've set your secondary calendars up at http://m.google.com/sync, you should see all your secondary calendars in the list. Tick the ones you want to appear in iCal and close the Prefs panel.
The secondary calendars will appear momentarily in iCal under a Delegates fold-down triangle. Each delegated calendar will be hidden one level down under an alias to itself, but just click the small triangle to reveal it and make sure it's ticked. You now have a fully synced iCal calendar, including secondary (delegated) calendars, that all emanate from your single, source-of-truth Google Calendar. The best of all possible worlds! The only thing you might want to do now (for both iCal and GCal) is spend some time picking better colours for your calendar layers. (It's a bit annoying that the colour schemes don't carry across, but hey...)
One last thing. I actually have my school email set up directly on my iPhone by creating an Exchange account and hooking it directly to our Exchange server at work. This means I actually duplicate my work calendar, getting two copies of it in my iPhone calendar list - once via the direct connection to the Exchange Server, and once by the indirect connection through Google Calendar Sync and via the Gmail setup. However, I deliberately do this because having the direct connection to Exchange gives me near realtime syncing to the school mail/calendaring system, whereas the via-Gmail connection often has a lag time of up to 15 minutes or more. But its an easy fix to go into the iPhone's calendar list and untick the GCal copy of the calendar leaving only the direct connection, and now I really do have a calendar system that works perfectly and all without spending a cent on MobileMe.
Hope this helps some of you... If you use any of this, let me know how it works out for you!
Popularity: 52% [?]
Inventing the Wheel
Rob is a music teacher friend of mine who works in the NSW Southern Highlands, and he dropped me an email this afternoon asking if I knew of any schools who were thinking about using iPads. His school is moving forward with an iPad trial and he was wondering what resources might exist that would help them avoid "reinventing the wheel".
As it turns out, I've been seeing a lot of iPad related information lately so I thought I'd post a reply here on the blog rather than just reply to Rob in an email, just in case some of the information is of some use to others.
I'll preface it by saying that I think there are a lot of things in education that could certainly use some reinventing, and maybe this is a good chance to do it. There seem to be a lot of schools looking at how iPads might fit in so it may be a little early to avoid the reinventing and instead take advantage of the opportunity to do some inventing. While there are plenty of lessons about 1:1 learning to be gained from the last 20 years of laptop use in schools (and we should leverage everything we've learned from that history) the iPad is a different enough device that it's causing us many of us to stop and think about how we might do some reinventing of what it means for learners. I remarked to someone recently that it's interesting that nearly every school implementing iPads is still referring to it as an "iPad trial". We're all trying to figure this out. With it's unique form factor, light weight and slim design, the touch interface and thousands of apps to explore, the iPad seems like such an obvious fit in education, it's just a matter of fitting where. It's a classic "solution in search of a problem". It seems apparent that it ought to be an ideal device for educational use, but nearly everyone is still hedging about with a "trial", rather than just biting the bullet and going ahead with full scale iPad implementations. This "reinventing" isn't a bad thing, because it means we're thinking outside the box, looking for the right niche, trying to figure out how this clearly amazing little device will find the right fit in schools. Sometimes new wheels need to be invented.
We run a laptop program at my school and we had a meeting a few days ago to evaluate the progress of it. We all agree that students having their own device has caused some fundamental shifts in the way our kids learn, create and interact with content as well as the way teachers think about designing learning tasks. There's no doubt that it's a good - no, a great - thing and has opened doors to a different kind of learning for many of our students. Many students have remarked to me that the couldn't imagine going back to the non-laptop days. It's great to hear that, although I still don't think we've really begun to leverage the full advantages of being 1:1. We're still learning too.
But there are downsides to carrying technology around. The added weight of carrying laptops and textbooks (yes I know we should be able to get rid of textbooks altogether, and we will eventually, but change can be painful and we are still in transition on some of this stuff). The fragility of having a computer in your bag and the inevitable damage and breakages can be a problem. Laptop battery life is fine when the machines are new but gets steadily worse over time, which then opens a whole can of worms regarding charging once they can no longer get through a whole day on a single charge. Traditional laptops are fine, but if only they were lighter, thiner, more compact, more durable, with less moving parts and good battery life. Sound familiar? No wonder the iPad strikes so many people as an obvious solution in schools. It's has so much of what we're looking for in a device!
I love my Gen 1 iPad, but until the release of the iPad 2 I wouldn't have entertained the original iPad as a serious contender in education. It was the classic debate between it being a "content consumption device" versus being a "content creation device". I want kids to do far more than just consume content, I want them to create it, and iPad 1 lacked far too much in this area for me to take it seriously. However, with the recent addition of cameras, enough grunt to handle tasks like video editing and multitrack audio recording, display port mirroring and a number of other big improvements, it's getting to the stage where it could be a contender for a student's main computing device. Maybe.
I'm still hedging a little and saying "could be" a contender, because I think it still depends what you want to do with them. With an iPad as your primary computing device you'd still need to be able to live without Flash (which admittedly is becoming less and less of an issue thanks to HTML 5) and the limitations of mobile Safari and the very ordinary way it renders some pages. Safari doesn't play nicely with our Moodle LMS because, being Webkit based,the browser don't show the toolbar buttons in Moodle 1.x. I'm sure 2.0 fixes this, but right now, it's a problem for us. I also find Safari does some weird things with forms and text fields. Overall, I'd really struggle with it as my main browser.
There are some issues with the way some third party iPad apps interact with school firewalls and, unless your school runs a transparent proxy, there are likely to be many apps that simply cant get through to the web. This is likely to be a problem. I also have doubts as to whether the pseudo-multitasking is really good enough to be used as your primary computing device, and there are plenty of time when I feel very unproductive because of it. Sometimes, I just want a "real" computer.
There's also licensing issues to consider as Apple haven't been very clear about just how apps can be shared and deployed on a school basis, as well as a lack of what you might call enterprise-level imaging tools. There are quite a few nuts and bolts issues like this that need to be thought through if they are to be used on a school-wide basis. Apple's own view seems to be that iPads are not really an enterprise device, they are a personal device and they aren't designed to be "managed" in the same way that laptops would be.
However, all that aside, there are still enough intriguing things about the iPad, and enough potential advantages, that I totally understand why schools are running "trials" to try and figure out just where the real limitations lie and just how they might be made to fit into a school situation.
So, with that little preamble of thoughts about the iPad, here are a few resources for Rob. Hope you find them useful, mate...
- Kerry Smith's blog provides a list of schools running iPad trials in Australia - http://smik.posterous.com/ipad-trials-in-australia
- iPads for Learning, a website run by the Victorian government with information about iPad trials in Victorian schools - http://www.ipadsforeducation.vic.edu.au/
- Slide2Learn, a grassroots conference held in April for educators interested in sharing ideas about learning with iDevices - http://slidetolearn.ning.com/
- In Their Hands, an online document full of suggestions, ideas, app recommendations, as well as pedagogical models, and implementation advice. Seems like a worthwhile document to use as a starting point - http://asp-uk.secure-zone.net/v2/indexMobile.html?id=639/684/1619&lng=en#1
- There's An App For That, a Virtual Staffroom Podcast episode I recorded with three teachers in schools running iPad trials. I think it's worth a listen - http://virtualstaffroom.net/2011/02/vsr40-theres-an-app-for-that/
- A post by Ronnie Burt on The Edublogger about what can be learned from an exemplary iPad program - http://theedublogger.com/2011/03/11/what-we-can-learn-from-an-exemplary-1-to-1-ipad-program/
- There was a really interesting thread on the OzTeachers List earlier this month about iPads. It was started by Brett Clark (zedman350) and raised a great deal of passionate debate about what we should be looking for in school computing devices - http://lists.rite.ed.qut.edu.au/pipermail/oz-teachers/2011-March/thread.html (scroll down the page a little)
- I also hear that Trinity Grammar is running a fairly significant iPad project too, with all of their senior students now carrying the devices. Might be worth chatting to the Director of IT at the school... I think you know him. ;-) (For other readers, this just happens to be Rob's brother)
Hope that helps a little. Let me know how it pans out for your school, and how that wheel gets invented. You might let Kerry Smith know too, and she can add you to that list of schools running trials.
CC Image: 'iPad with Dandelion'
http://www.flickr.com/photos/68217628@N00/4675262184
Popularity: 12% [?]
ADE is No Go
Ok, I'm a bit greedy I know... I applied for both the Sydney Google Teacher Academy and the Australian Apple Distinguished Educator Program. It would have been nice to be part of both. I was thrilled to bits to find out that I got into the GTA program last week, and then was full of anticipation to hear back about the ADE program this week.
Unfortunately, I missed out on getting into the 2011 ADE Program. I mean, I know it's really competitive and all, and I'm not for one moment trying to take anything away from those that got into it - my hearty congratulations go out to all of you who made it, including friends like Helen Otway and Allanah King. They are absolutely deserving of their place in the program. Well done to you both, and to everyone else who was accepted.
But I'll be honest with you... I was quite frankly a little surprised when I read the email. As brash as it might sound to say so, I thought I had a pretty reasonable chance of being accepted into the ADE program. Perhaps my optimism was buoyed a little too much after having being asked to keynote at all 5 of the Apple ITSC events last year, or having the Australian ADE Program manager suggest to me that I "should definitely apply". Maybe I had unrealistic expectations. Maybe I was being just a wee bit too cocky about the whole thing. I'm not sure.
Just like the App Store approval process, there is no transparency to the ADE selections. There is a list of criteria, and a rubric to assess your own application - both of which I thought I would do ok on - but you never find out the reasons why you did or didn't get in.
At first I thought perhaps that it was because my school is primarily a PC school (although we just handed out 70+ MacBook Airs to our Year 6 kids for their 1:1 program... the thin edge of the wedge?) But then I heard of several other new ADEs who work in non-Mac schools, so maybe that's not it at all.
Someone suggested that being accepted into the Google Teacher Academy the week before might have played a part. The rivalry between Apple and Google has been getting more and more intense over the last year or so, so maybe Apple would prefer to keep their distance from anyone associated with Google. But then, I'm sure I know other Google Certified Teachers who are also ADEs so maybe that's not it at all either. (However, note to self - and others - if you ever apply for both programs again, perhaps don't blog about it until you hear back about your applications. In hindsight I wish I didn't post my application videos until after I'd heard back from both Apple and Google. Just in case.)
The email from Apple said "we hope you will apply again for the ADE intake in 2012". I might. I might not. I'm not sure. I'm not sure exactly what would be different with next year's application. I can't imagine being any more pro-Apple, any more passionate about education and technology, any more active in the online space. I just honestly don't know what else I'd add to this year's application, which was apparently not enough.
Anyway, I'm not upset, I'm not bitter and I'm not annoyed. Just a little perplexed, and I'll admit, a little disappointed. Although I thought briefly about installing Linux on my MacBook Pro, I probably won't. Probably. 
However, now I'm really looking forward to the GTA.
Popularity: 17% [?]
To be an ADE
I've always aspired to be an Apple Distinguished Educator, but I've never actually done anything about applying for it. As far as my own personal computer use goes, anyone who knows me knows that I am most definitely a Mac guy, but I assumed that I wouldn't be able to apply to be an ADE because most of the schools I've worked in have been primarily Windows schools. As they say, one should never assume.
While it's true that many - probably most - ADEs work exclusively in Apple schools, apparently it's not always the case. While chatting with someone from Apple a while ago I mentioned this, and they replied that the ADE program is aimed at recognising teachers, and does not necessarily focus on the type of computers used in the school that teacher works at.
To become an ADE you obviously need to be active in certain ways that help spread the message about technology and it's value for education. You need to be passionate about the ways that digital technology (and pretty obviously, Apple digital technology in particular) can make students more engaged and creative. You need to demonstrate some degree of innovative practice and a reasonable level of experience in the classroom. I hope I can do all these things. And you need to fill in the appropriate forms. I'm pretty sure I can do that part.
Oh, and you also need to make a short 2 minute video that gives a bit of an insight into who you are and what you do and what you might bring to the party. Apparently the video is pretty important. I gave it my best shot.
Anyway, I finally got my ADE application in for this next intake of teachers (a few days before the deadline too! Woohoo!) so my fingers are crossed. If you're interested, here's the video.
Popularity: 9% [?]
A Little More Scratch
Towards the end of the 20 minute video I made for K12 Online, Teaching Kids To Think Using Scratch, I very briefly mentioned two other things that I would have liked to say more about but simply didn't have enough time in the time allowed.
The first thing was the use of Scratch on the iPad and the iPhone. I mentioned that there was a Scratch iOS app, but didn't have time to elaborate. Since then, a few people contacted me about this app and wanted to know more, telling me that the couldn't find it in the Apple App Store. The reason you can't find it is unfortunately quite simple... it's been removed from the App Store and is no longer available so unless you got a copy of it prior to it being removed, you're out of luck I'm afraid.
So if you missed out, sorry... but if it's any consolation, the Scratch app only allowed you to browse the Scratch website and then execute existing Scratch projects. You couldn't actually manipulate code or use it as a tool for creating programs, so all those schools implementing iPad programs and getting all excited about the possibility of doing Scratch on the iPads... sorry, it was never a possibility anyway.
But the main thing I wanted to follow up on was the PicoBoards. I was put onto the PicoBoards by my buddy Martin Levins, and they are proving to be a fabulous extension to what you can do with Scratch. Essentially they are a circuit board with a bunch of sensors on them that you connect to your computer via USB so that Scratch can directly address the sensors on the board. With a rheostat (voltage slider), microphone, light sensor, button, and four resistance circuits, the Picoboards open up all sorts of possibilities for creating software based programs that interact directly with the real world.
Anyway, blah, blah, blah... there's lots more I could say about them, but just watch the video. And then go buy a few. Your kids will really like them. Trust me.
Popularity: 5% [?]
You’ve come a long way!
I remember back in the mid 90s I started to hear more and more about this upstart operating system for computers called Linux. It was an alternative to Windows and Mac, and was based on an open source project started in 1991 by a student in Helsinki named Linus Torvalds. I thought it sounded like a fascinating project and I liked the sound of it, since any alternative to Windows had to be a good thing. In about 1997 there was lots of talk about this new OS and its potential so I wanted to give it a shot. I originally tried to install it on my trusty old Thinkpad using a copy of Redhat Linux that came free on the cover of a computer magazine, but I didn't have much luck so abandoned it at the time.
Not long after that I heard the infamous John "Mad dog" Hall speak at a computer show in Sydney, where he passionately and logically espoused the virtues of open source software as a legitimate alternative to commercial software such as Windows and Office. I recall he made some really compelling arguments because I came away from that talk determined to get this Linux thing working so I could try it. I stumbled across a set of SuSE Linux CDs and tried again to install it, but again without success. At about that time, one of my Year 10 students mentioned that his dad worked with Unix and so volunteered his dad to come give me a hand. Despite the fact that this guy knew Unix (and by extension, knew a lot about Linux, since that's where Linux evolved from) we still could not get it working. We kinda, sorta got it working, but the screen was all weird and there was no sound and definitely no networking. There were all sorts of driver issues, and since I was a relative n00b at using the Linux command line, I really didn't get very far with it. However, I did at least try to learn some Linux commands which, although I'm hardly an expert, have come in very handy at various times in my career working with computers and networks.
I really wanted to like Linux. I principle, I really like the concept of an open source operating system, built by a community of users and freely released to the world. I like the ideology behind Linux, for much the same reason that I like the ideology behind Wikipedia. The world is a better place when we openly share with each other and together we are better than any single one of us. But no matter how much I wanted to like Linux, the fact remained that I just simply could not get it working with any degree of satisfaction on any hardware I owned. Either the network wouldn't work, or the sound wouldn't work, or the screen would only show at 640x480... but I never seemed to be able to get a fully functional system that presented a credible threat to the commercial OSes.
Gradually though, things began to change, and I watched Linux take a big hold in the server space. I ran a school network for a few years and we had a number of Linux servers running various parts of the network. These servers were doing backend webserver work and ran without the need for a GUI... they were ridiculously hard for me to work with (I guess I'm just not that geeky!) but they were totally bulletproof as servers. They often ran for months without any issues and really showed me that Linux was a powerful, stable OS, even if I did find it quite unfriendly to work with. I just found that terminal a little too intimidating and hard to use, and although I could work out the commands to type in when I needed to, it was clear that I was just not ready for Linux in my day to day desktop existence.
Things really started to change when I saw Ubuntu. The wonderful Pia Waugh showed me Ubuntu in a workshop and it was a massive improvement over any previous Linux distribution I'd seen. It had a drop-dead simple installation process, lots of apps included and had a GUI that was quite intuitive to use. I installed it on a few machines and it was almost, nearly, but not quite there. I still had minor issues with getting wireless to work, and a few other little things, but mostly it was clear that it was a massive step forward in ease of use. By this stage, I'd dumped Windows from my day to day computing existence and had moved back to a Mac. The Mac's ease of use, reliability, speed and performance was like a breath of fresh air... everything, as the ads say, just worked.
I still love my Macs, and along with the iPhone and iPad, Apple are obviously producing some very impressive, game changing technologies these days. But the more I hear and see about the closed world that Apple operates in, the more I'm feeling troubled. I get it, I understand what Uncle Steve is trying to do, and really I don't think there is any intention to be evil about it. I realise that Apple's thinking is to produce a platform that just works and is as reliable, stable and functional as possible, and I get that the only way they can truly do that is to control the experience from end to end. When you make the hardware, and the software, and the services and the content... well you get total control over the user experience. That's the genius of Apple's approach. They can give you an elegant, robust, delightful usability experience because every piece is designed to work with every other piece. It is the reason why I found Linux so damn difficult to use back in the early days, because the environment of Linux was a complete free-for-all, and there was never any guarantee that any hardware or software would play nicely together. It explains why all that early Linux experience was just a painful series of missing drivers, incompatible hardware, a confusing array of software choices, and lots and lots of of frustration.
Having said that, Apple's approach does bother me a little because it conflicts with my core philosophy of openness and my belief that there should be certain freedoms in what I use and how I work. Despite the incredibly good user experience that OSX provides, I do sometimes feel the frustration of working within the limitations (or is that the safety?) of the Apple cocoon. The world grew very sick of Microsoft when it tried to own the entire game. Apple may be working on a much smaller scale than Microsoft was, but it is more aggressive at the same tactic. Unless they soften their approach a little I'm concerned that here could be a real backlash against Apple as their market share grows.
Overall, I'll probably stay with my beloved Macs for a while yet since they I still think they are the best overall choice of computing platform.
But back to Linux for a moment. Maybe it's old news to some people, but I've just lately discovered and have become quite impressed with a Linux distribution called Jolicloud. Jolicloud is a project started by Tariq Krim, the original founder of Netvibes, and is a Ubuntu Linux-based OS made especially for netbook computers. Jolicloud is completely optimised for netwooks and just goes to show that those underpowered little laptops can actually be useful little computers when they have the right operating system software on them. I'm running it at the moment on my Lenovo S10 netbook, which until recently was running Windows 7. Jolicloud seems much better suited to the purpose, and runs faster and snappier than 7 did. The user interface is based on the Netbook Remix Project, but is tweaked in all sorts of added ways for better performance. I particularly like the "cloud" concept behind it, with the Jolicloud App Directory playing a key role in the overall ease of use. You can browse the App Directory for extra software (there are hundreds to choose from!) and with a single click they are added to your computer. All the updates are automatically taken care of through the cloud service too.
The installation was super easy, just download the Jolicloud ISO file, along with a small USB key creator file. Although the ISO took a while to download (it's about 690MB), once you've got it the bootable USB key is made within minutes. Insert it into the netbook, restart and boot from the USB key and the system is installed in less than 15 minutes. Best of all, every device on the computer works like a charm... sound, screen, network, webcam... everything just worked right out of the box. I added a few apps (well, ok, over a hundred so far) and it's turned my netbook from being a device that was easy to carry but painful to use, into a computer that could competently become my regular travel buddy. There are even two different modes, a Netbook Remix interface, along with a more traditional desktop menu interface. I think it has great potential. And of course, it's 100% free. Free as in beer AND free as in speech.
It's really shown me just how far Linux has come as a computer for the average person. My mum doesn't know much about how to use a computer, but I think if she was interested in having one, I would probably give her a Linux based Jolicloud computer in preference to a Windows machine. She's probably find it more intuitive, more stable, and overall much easier to use than Windows. And that is a claim that I don't think I could have made 10, or even 5, years ago.
Linux, you've come a long way baby!
Popularity: 4% [?]
Reshaping Conferences
<understatement>I've been to a lot of conferences lately.</understatement>
The Champion Schools Conference in Wellington. ACEC in Mebourne. ITSC on the Gold Coast, then Adelaide, Sydney and Perth. They've all been very good and I've gotten something from all of them. They've all had slightly different angles and focuses, but it's pretty clear that any worthwhile education-based conference these days tends to have the same consistent underlying message, one that most active members of the edtech community would have heard many times before... The world is changing, technology is helping drive that change, and schools need to move with that change if they are to remain relevant. That's it in a nutshell. Of course, there are many much deeper conversations we need to keep having about the how, why, what, when and where of enabling these changes, and we need to keep pushing the message out to those teachers still unaware that these fundamental changes are shifting the ground beneath them.
I have a friend who used to work in the newsroom of a major television station. He once explained to me how, when a really big story broke, the newsroom's job would be to tell that story over and over for the next few hours or even days. There would be the initial newsbreak, but then it would get spot coverage each hour, followed by continuous newsbreaks, a piece in the nightly news and then again in the late news, and so on. I once asked my friend why they saturated the media so much with news stories like that, and questioned whether it was overkill to keep reporting the story ad nauseum, to which his reply was "In a newsroom, we know that when we are thoroughly sick of hearing about a particular story, the general public is only just starting to understand what it's all about."
So, as much as I might keep hearing the same fundamental messages being relayed over and over at most of these conferences, it's still true that there are lots of regular classroom teachers for whom many of these ideas are quite a revelation. The impact that digital technologies are having on our students, the need for a shift in the way we approach the design of learning tasks, the imperative for offering students choices and options as a means of maintaining engagement, and the general idea of teaching less so students can learn more... these are still totally new ideas for many educators.
While conferences might try to promote these ideas through the lens of educational technologies, the true importance of them is firmly rooted in pedagogy, not technology. While we talk a lot about how digital technologies are a useful tool for "21st century learning", technology just happens to be a powerful enabler for these new pedagogical approaches. It may appear that we edtech types are constantly promoting the use of technology just because we happen to like technology, but it runs deeper than that. We promote the importance of technology because, if you have been embedding technology into your teaching for any length of time now, you've seen first hand just how effectively it can start to shift the way your classroom operates. You know it can increase engagement, raise the quality of the work, make the learning more authentic, more on-demand, because you've seen it. And while you might value the role of technology in enabling all these things, you also realise that it's not really about the technology, but rather the learning.
One of the great frustrations for those of us "in the echo chamber" of edtech is that, while we can see the value that technology brings to our work with kids in classrooms, we sometimes appear to just be enthusiastic about technology for the sake of it. We implore our colleagues to try blogging with their students, or to give wikis a go, or consider allowing that boring essay task to be submitted as a podcast. And so often our enthusiasm for the power of these tools is all too easily perceived as technological zealotry, and the promotion of technology as a solution to every problem.
So, back to these conferences, and their intended purpose of shifting the participants understanding of 21st century education. It's been really interesting to see the lights come on with many of the participants. It's really gratifying to hear teachers say things like "I've never even considered many of these ideas before, but I'm going to take them back to classroom and give them a serious go". For at least some of the people I've been meeting at these conferences over the last few months, they left excited about the possibilities and felt inspired to learn more and to apply their newly discovered ideas back in the classroom.
One of the ironies of most conferences is that they are so often based on the idea of having someone stand on the stage or at the front of a workshop and simply talk at the participants... ironic because that's usually the very model of teaching that the speakers are saying we shouldn't be perpetuating. (For the record, I stand accused... as someone who has delivered some of these talks, I'm as guilty as the next person) In slight defense of this sage-on-the-stage model though, in some circumstances it's still the most efficient way to share ideas with a large group. It's just ironic that we still design conferences to help us learn what a 21st century classroom should look like by doing exactly the opposite.
It's not all like that though. One of the standout conferences I've attended is the Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple. While it still has some elements of people standing in front of the whole group and talking at them, it also has a significant "unconference" component, where teachers work in small organic groups on passion projects that deeply engage them as learners. It's been great to see a conference attempt to model itself on the principles of open discussion; of offering choices, options and highly personalised learning pathways; of forming groups based on the interests of the participants; of giving the necessary time to allow participants to create and change. And of course, of enabling all of this with the rich use of technology. In short, of treating the conference participants as actual 21st century learners rather than just attendees. The ITSC event stands out to me because it tries to actually BE the way it claims education should be, and in doing so it offers the participants a chance to actually "walk the walk", rather than just "talk the talk". Quite a few participants remarked to me that the penny finally dropped about the way education could be different because of the way the ITSC conference itself modeled how that change might actually look.
There was also a real focus on the creation of an appropriate learning space for participants. Rather than the typical conference situation of having rows of chairs all facing the front, ITSC had a range of flexible seating and working arrangements, with lots of round tables, leather couches and beanbags. It had large plasma TV screens around the room where groups could gather and share. It had powerboards on every table, reliable open wifi, and a wiki server for participants to create collaborative digital workspaces on demand. These are the sorts of things that we know 21st century classrooms should look like, and can really help create an environment where the learning really hums along.
Importantly, participants were also asked to actually make something during this conference that they could both share with the group and also take away with them. Even more importantly, they chose what they made based on their unique interests and what would be useful to them. They chose who they teamed up and worked with. They decided what they needed to learn to complete their task and they learned it on the fly. They used technology in authentic ways to enable the process. It was genuine 21st century learning in action, and it was quite a powerful conference experience.
There are lessons in the ITSC events for all conference organisers.
Popularity: 5% [?]
ITSC 2010. It all begins.
So, here I am on the beautiful (but currently rainy) Gold Coast.
I arrived this evening to spend the weekend at Gold Coast ITSC 2010, the annual Innovative Technology in Schools Conference run by Apple. It certainly sounds like it will be fun, and I'm rather humbled to have been asked to give the keynote address. What's more surprising to me is that Apple asked if I'd do not only this one, but the entire Australian ITSC series, so over the next month or so I'll also be at the Adelaide, Sydney, Perth and Melbourne events as well. It came as a complete surprise to be asked, but I'm really thrilled to be able to be a part of them.
Apple is using a different approach to the ITSC events this year that sounds like it will be really good. It's all very unconferencey. Beyond the keynote, there will be lots of opportunity to mix and share and socialise and learn together. I think that's great, and it's certainly the best part of most conferences I've been to, so it's cool that we are seeing more conferences these days that try to focus on the conversations and encouraging the serendipitous aspects of this kind of learning. I like it. There is also going to be a focus at ITSC on actually making something, creating something to take away back to our schools that will help drive the shift. It sounds pretty cool.
Anyway I better get back to putting the finishing touches on this preso. It's an honour to have been asked to present, and I'd like to do a good job of it, although I'm always concerned about what I can actually add to the conversation. It's a bit daunting, but I'm looking forward to it.
If you happen to be going to any of the ITSC events over the next month or so, please come and say hi!
Popularity: 6% [?]
iPhone – A Garden of Pure Ideology?
There are moments when I really like my iPhone, yet others that frustrate the heck out of me. I finally got one a couple of months ago when my carrier, 3 Mobile, finally got the iPhone, long after nearly every other Australian mobile telco. This surprised me, since 3 Mobile were the first carrier to bring 3G services to the Australian marketplace about 8 years ago, so I was expecting that when the iPhone 3G was released in Australia that 3 Mobile would be one of the first to carry it. Not so.
Until the iPhone, I was a relatively happy user of a Nokia N95 8Gb. As phones go, the N95 was a pretty impressive piece of hardware... it did a lot of things well, including an excellent 5MP camera, decent voice recorder, VGA quality video, GPS and the ability to install a reasonably impressive number of third party apps - nothing like the thousands of apps in Apple's AppStore - but it had quite a few that I found useful, including Gravity, and excellent Twitter client, and Geocache Navigator, an app for geocaching. The turn by turn voice navigation of the Nokia Maps app was also very impressive, although relatively expensive to enable. the downside was that although the N95 had an reasonable music player in it, it was a bit of a joke compared to an iPod, and syncing with a music library of any sort was way harder than it should have been. This meant that, although I liked the phone quite a lot, it required me to still need to carry two devices - the N95 and an iPod Touch - most places I went. The other downside was the text input method - that silly little numeric keypad and predictive text thing was a pain to use and really marred the overall user experience of entering text on the phone. On the whole though, the N95 was a decent phone with great functionality for most purposes.
It wasn't until the recent release of the iPhone 3G S that 3 Mobile finally announced they would be carrying it, and with much fanfare they offered a bunch of special deals to existing customers, including the ability to move to an iPhone without any real penalty for early termination of my existing contract. After much mental "should I or shouldn't I", I decided to move "up" to an iPhone. Actually getting one from them was a whole other story, and was such a huge customer service debacle that it deserves it's own story some other time.
So am I happy with it? Well, sort of. As I mentioned, there are things I really like about the iPhone, and others that make me a little frustrated and annoyed with it.
The positives are pretty obvious... it's a beautifully designed piece of hardware, nice to hold, pretty to look at. The interface is intuitive, easy to use and once you get past its modal nature and the lack of real multitasking, it is extremely functional. The extensibility through the apps store is, quite simply, amazing. "There's an App for that" may be an Apple advertising catchphrase, but there truly does seem to be an app for just about anything you can think of, and this ability to customise the phone into a true mobile computing device that runs pretty much any task, utility or game is really quite a defining moment in the history of computing devices. To their credit, Apple has redefined an entire market with the iPhone, producing a device that was unlike anything before it and that most other manufacturers are now scrambling to keep up with. There is no doubt that the iPhone will go down in history as a device that reshaped the entire mobile computing and communication platform.
The fact that the iPhone is basically all screen means that it can morph into almost any device a developer can think of. This is part of the iPhone's genius. From a user perspective, the device is just as good at being a camera, as a GPS, as an iPod, as a notebook, as a you-name-it. The interface for any of these applications can be purpose built without being limited to a tiny screen, a hardware keyboard and the existing hardware buttons. Developers can build the ideal interface, the keyboard appears and disappears on demand, and a "new phone" is only a software update away. Pretty clever really.
So, with all of those positives, why does the iPhone frustrate me? Well, perhaps it's just a case of the way I like to use mobile devices, but I find the lack of Bluetooth support really annoying (and more importantly, it symbolises a much bigger problem with the whole iPhone ecosystem). With my N95, I would often send files back and forth between my phone and my computer using Bluetooth networking. On the iPhone, I just can't do that - Apple don't allow it. Because Bluetooth file transfer capability is such a standard function of every other mobile phone on the market, I never thought to check whether the iPhone could do this... having to check whether a modern phone can do Bluetooth file transfers would seem to be like buying a car and needing to check whether it has a steering wheel - it's just assumed that it does. I never realised this was a missing function until, not long after I got the iPhone, my daughter wanted to send me a file from her phone so she initiated a transfer over Bluetooth, only to discover that I was unable to receive it.
Surely I was just missing something obvious? Every other mobile phone on the planet can do this, even very basic ones, but not the iPhone, supposedly one of the world's most advanced phones ? More research online and chatting to the folk at several Apple Stores revealed that this was indeed a design "feature". Apple does not allow Bluetooth file transfer, with the commonly stated reason being that, in order for Apple to get the kinds of deals with music publishers it needs for the iTunes Store, the ability to share songs via Bluetooth had to be disabled. Sorry Apple, but that's nonsense. If you need to protect purchased music from being shared illegally then surely some form of specific DRM could solve that? If you must, you could disable the ability to transfer only purchased songs over Bluetooth, but to just shut Bluetooth off completely? Come on Apple! Are you serious?
And what about photos I take myself? Or sharing a contact from my address book? Or a calendar item? Why should I not be able to share these things back to my own computer, or even to another phone, if I wish to? As it stands, I cannot get a photo from my iPhone to my MacBook without the need to use a transfer cable, as there is no direct way to get a photo to another phone via Bluetooth. Yes, I know I could use email to send it, but that presumes that, a) I'm in a wifi zone, or, b) I have enough bandwidth on my mobile plan to allow it. Here in Australia, mobile plans for phones are relatively limited, so using your data to send large files via email is a nuisance, and the thought of transferring lots of files is just not practical this way. Same deal for MMS or uploading it to MobileMe... it's a slow, time and bandwidth consuming solution to a problem that is not a problem for every other phone on the market. If I'm sitting next to someone on a bus and I want to share my contact details with them, there's no easy simple way to do that without connecting to an external network of some kind. That's ridiculous.
The Bluetooth problem might seem to be relatively minor, and perhaps I just feel affected by it more because this was something I used to do a lot with previous phones. It just feels like a really backward step to own a phone that prohibits something that was so useful and usable on my last few phones. And I use the word "prohibits" very deliberately. Apple could allow Bluetooth on the iPhone... there are no real technical issues that prevent it. The Bluetooth stack is there, and it works for other things, such as the handsfree speakerphone in my car. No, the hardware is there, the functionality is there, but Apple have just decided to switch it off on purpose, and I'm starting to find the whole "it's the Apple way, or no way" attitude gratingly arrogant. I'm also seeing this attitude play out in the App Store's rather opaque approval process, where apps are refused access to the store seemingly on Apple's whims.
What all of this has really highlighted to me is just what a closed platform the iPhone is. As someone who believes in the basic principles of openness, it's annoying to see the level of interference that Apple is exercising over what it decides should be allowed or not. Yes, the iPhone is nicely designed, and yes it has tons of very cool apps, and yes it is light years ahead of the devices that came before it. On balance, it's still one of the best phones on the market and I still think that if I have to own just one device, the iPhone is currently the one to have. I'll tolerate the added inconveniences of the missing Bluetooth functions and the very average camera quality, because the iPhone's many other advantages make up for it.
However, I'm really coming to think that in the long run openness will probably be the better strategy. In hindsight, I'm wondering whether I should have hung onto the old Nokia N95 for another 12 months and then taken a good look at what the Android platform is offering by then. Android is moving so fast at the moment, that many are predicting it to ultimately overshadow the iPhone's dominance. Certainly, in the history of the computer business, open platforms nearly always succeed over closed platforms, and you would think that Apple, moreso than any other company, understands that.
I'm really hoping that Apple use that massive advantage they have - the software extensibility of the iPhone platform to become whatever it needs to become - to bring back some openness. The missing Bluetooth may just be one small thing, but I think it symbolises a much bigger thing - the willingness of Apple to play the role of Big Brother by telling us what we can and can't do with our devices. I'm very much feeling that Apple is dictating to me how I should be using my phone, not based on how I want to use it, but on how they think I should be using it.
The irony is that back in the pre-Macintosh days, in Apple's now-famous "1984" advertisement, they portrayed computer users as a group of mindless, soul-less followers, marching lockstep and being dictated to by Big Brother. Those early days of Apple were focused on building a computing experience that enabled people to break free of the imposed limitations of "closed-ness" and to work in ways that made personal sense. Turning off basic phone features simply because Apple doesn't think they are needed is just arrogant and insulting to the user.
Just be careful Apple. Over the next few years, the competition in the Smartphone market is going to heat up and get a whole lot tougher. Users will have many more choices than we currently do. The iPhone is a revolutionary device to be sure, but Android, Nokia and many others will match or better the features of the iPhone and users will want phones that work the way they want them to work, not just how you think they should work. As you say in the video, "We shall prevail".
Apples 1984 Commercial
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Ah, Nostalgia!
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