03.20.06
Posted in General at 6:24 pm by Norm Garrett
I ran across this link and ended up spending a lot of time browsing this collection. Librarians and archivists at the University of California at Santa Barbara have been collecting wax cylinder recordings and have managed to digitize thousands of them in their Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project. All of these recordings are public domain and can be freely downloaded in either original format (unedited WAV file) or in MP3 format files. They can also be played with a handy player that is built into the web page. The era is 1900 to about 1920 and you can listen to political speeches by Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and others, or music by a variety of individuals. There are thousands of recordings on the site.
If you have an interest in history and some time to burn, check out this site. It has a good search engine and gives you complete library references on the recordings you are listening to.
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03.08.06
Posted in General, Society and Technology at 9:28 am by Norm Garrett
David Shenk, in his book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, speaks of the “2×4 effect,” the idea that we are so overloaded with information that in order to get someone’s attention, you (figuratively) have to hit them over the head with a 2×4. An interesting article on the CNet blog talks about an O’Reilly tech conference (the O’Reilly conferences are generally premium conferences in the tech world) pondering the idea of getting one’s message across when everyone is already overloaded with information. In fact, the attendees are generally so overloaded that sessions at this conference lasted no longer than 15 minutes, mostly to appease their “continuous partial attention.”
What is happening to our attention spans with our attempts at multitasking and our severely overloaded senses? One of the speakers, Linda Stone, a former Microsoft vice-president said:
“… technology can’t exist for technology’s sake. It needs to answer the question, ‘Does this product improve my quality of life?’ Wikis might be best for brainstorming, while cell phones are ideal for crisis management. Do you really need to access a Wiki on your cell phone? Only if you’re brainstorming about a crisis.”
How’s your attention span?
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02.27.06
Posted in General at 12:15 pm by Norm Garrett
I posted an extensive message in my technical website (Professor Geek) regarding an experience one of my students reported to me regarding his wireless router. In essence, he caught someone stealing his connection by sitting outside his house in a car surfing the Internet on a laptop while connected to his Internet connection via his wireless router (which was not secured). If they are going to sell these things to the general public at Wal-Mart, we need to teach people how to simply and quickly take some minimal security precautions.
I have given my networking students a project to do wherein they wardrive, an activity that involves detecting secured and unsecured wireless networks and mapping them. The rules of legitimate wardriving are never to connect to one of the networks you detect … just detect and map. The purpose of wardriving is to determine the level of security in a given area. I have driven our small town and have found hundreds of hotspots (wireless network access points). 68% of those are not secured at all, allowing anyone who wants to do it to connect to the network. At best, they just steal bandwidth. At worst, they can get into your computer and cause harm, steal identities, etc.. Basic computer skills ought to include essential security practices and best practices with regard to networking.
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02.21.06
Posted in General, Blended Learning at 9:27 am by Norm Garrett
I gave a presentation last week at the ELearning 2006 conference in Savannah, Georgia, in which I made the statement (taken from a variety of futurists) that in the year 2020, 70% of the jobs that will be available do not exist today because 80% of the technologies that will exist and that will create those jobs do not exist today. If you question the reality of those figures, or at least the spirit of them, then just look back 15 years to 1991. In 1991:
- The Internet was not accessible to the public
- The Web had not been invented yet
- There was no such thing as a web browser or web server because the web hadn’t been invented
- Nobody had ever heard of TCP/IP outside the halls of academia and the scientific community
- We were transitioning from MS-DOS to Windows
- Local area networking was only marginally functional
- Company that nobody had heard of: Cisco
- Companies that hadn’t been invented yet: Google, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon
- Virtually nobody had ever heard of email, much less used it, unless they were in academia
- Gopher was the best source of documents on the Internet
- Newsgroups was where most interaction took place
- There was no such thing as .COM. There were only .GOV and .EDU
- The term ISP (Internet Service Provider) hadn’t been coined yet as none existed
- The best way to collaborate was dialing in to CompuServe with a 2400 baud modem
- The term eCommerce would not be coined for several more years
- Although computer viruses existed, they were spread by trading floppy disks
- Trojans, spyware, spam, and bots did not exist and wouldn’t for several years
- The typical PC had 32 mb of RAM (if you were cutting edge) and a 40 mb hard drive
- A normal PC, not especially cutting edge, cost in the neighborhood of $3,000
- The cutting edge processor was the Intel 386
Now, if you think of all the jobs that exist today because of the Internet alone (which didn’t exist back then, at least in a form the public had access to), you get the idea of how much things have changed over the past 15 years. Since the pace of change has increased, the difference between our world now and the world of 2020 will be even more pronounced.
We need to educate our students to live in that world, a world of which we have absolutely no knowledge. The skills we give them will need to be skills that allow them to adapt, to self-teach, and project. Are we moving in that direction or are we cruising along teaching the same way we did 40 years ago, for a world that our students will never know?
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02.01.06
Posted in General at 8:52 am by Norm Garrett
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, outlines some things we can do immediately to restore our competitive position in the world in the area of information technologies. His ideas are good ones. As some of the analysts said last night, we aren’t in danger of losing our position, we have lost it already. The problem is not retaining our leadership, it is restoring our leadership position. This means not only an across the board (i.e. all levels of education) revamping of technical/math/science education, but an economy wherein graduating students can find jobs in these important creative areas, something that has been severely lacking over the past 5 years as many IT jobs have gone overseas.
What bears close watching is what the politicians, on both sides of the aisle, decide to do with the opportunity. It could easily be lost if the discussion deteriorates to petty squabbling, as it often does. Those who don’t get around much may think that we are still the world leader in technology. Guess again. I’m not even sure we are in the top 5 when it comes to things like cell phone use, application of wireless technologies, building of IT infrastructure, and the proper integration of technology into education. Let’s pay attention to what Chambers and other industry leaders are saying and get behind any bipartisan efforts to move us forward.
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01.04.06
Posted in General at 5:20 pm by Norm Garrett
I have just finished reading several reports and speeches by some of the movers and shakers in higher education. These people operate at the policy and strategic planning level and are concerned with the current model of higher education and its longevity if some important reforms are not introduced.
In the first artcile, Geri H. Malandra, of the University of Texas System, discusses accountability in higher education.
In the second article, Charles Miller, Chairman of The Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, talks more globally about the current paradigm and how drastic changes must be made in order for our system to keep pace with competetive forces.
Probably the best of the three is the article entitled Four Questions on the Labor Economics of Higher Education, by Daniel S. Hamermesh, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin. In this paper, he addresses the issue of the actual value to the economy of a college education. It is a very thought-provoking report.
All three articles are well worth your time if you are interested in strategic viewpoints, particularly those of current policymakers.
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11.18.05
Posted in General at 9:37 pm by Norm Garrett
Welcome to the edProgress blog. Hopefully, this site can become a forum for discussing all things educational. All ideas are welcome. We’ll be setting the stage during the coming weeks with some posts here as well as the development of our new web site. Enjoy.
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