Greentown School Kindergarden iPads

Earlier this year, I was a bit surprised to see that a school is planning to buy iPads for its entire Kindergarden. I’m interested to know how that went and how they’re using those devices. The school dipped into it’s long-term savings to buy those iPads, and to me that sounds risky. If I were a parent at that school I don’t think I would approve of the school risking long-term security to provide technology to kindergarden kids. The article I link to states that the iPads are bought because it aims to improve reading skills. I’m pretty confident that it would make at least some difference, but I’m also confident that it doesn’t justify the price and risk associated with it. Also, how does the school manage the apps installed? Are there tools for that (I’m honestly asking)? Can educators monitor scores? The child’s progress? Do the educators receive sufficient training on these tools? Who helps when things go wrong? The cost of iPads doesn’t end with just the price of the devices and the direct maintenance costs. Educators have to change the way they teach. They have to learn how to provide education via a new medium and redevelop some of their materials. When I first read that article I was thinking of all these things and wondering if that school could really justify buying them.

$18.2m Fort Bend Independent School District iPads

Today I stumbled across a website for students who are against their school board spending $18.2m for an iPad roll-out. The school board is rolling out iPads while their traditional computing IT infrastructure is aging, reportedly the school still has some outdated technology in place, such as Windows 98 machines. The students are making the case that money would be better spent upgrading their current infrastructure, like upgrading all their machines to Windows 7 and deprecating all the old hardware that can’t run it. I agree with them, it would indeed be an improvement on buying a bunch if iPads, and that investment is likely to also last a lot longer than the iPads will.

While $18.2m is a lot of money, I think it’s the tip of the iceberg of what’s being spent on iPads in schools and I can’t help wondering if it’s the best way for schools to be spending their money, especially considering the doubt of whether the use of technology actually increases grades. In my experience educators tend to think of computers as magical devices that will do a lot of the teaching for them and give them more time to focus on other things, but the reality is that it’s rarely the case.

The Case Against Technology in Schools?

I suppose it’s starting to sound like I’m trying to build a case against technology in education. I’m not.  However I do believe that spending that kind of money, especially for very young kids is a waste. They have much more important things to do, like playing. I can’t imagine how learning to read and do basic algebra can possibly be better for kids on iPads than interacting with your real life teacher and your classmates around you. These kids have several years ahead of them where they can learn how to be office drones and good little consumers, why put that on them now?  I’ve come across teachers and parents who believe that their kids need to start as early as possible in order to give them a competitive edge and to get them “in early”. I can’t predict the future, but I’m pretty confident that your kids will be completely fine if they learn about computers a bit later.

So why am I bringing all of this up?

Well, I’m not really trying to convince anyone of anything in particular, but I do think people should be aware of some of the current trends that are at least somewhat concerning. I also think that people should think about this, because I remember being in school and getting angry myself when I came across things in the system that just completely sucked and wondering… “isn’t there anyone out there who really cares about this!?”.

Edubuntu

I’m also thinking of solutions, because I can’t help doing that. I’m wondering of ways we could make Edubuntu a *lot* more better for schools. So far we’ve been pushing out a collection of the best available free software we could find every release and as a project it’s getting quite stable and we’re getting quite good at doing what we do. I also think it’s time we step it up, have an official, supported Edubuntu device. Have good management software where you can choose which software, ebooks, courseware and other tools are installed on which device. Have testing tools and feedback tools that are easy and secure to use. Make better use of the Ubuntu Software Center’s support for additional add-on applications and build an eco-system for people who develop software for education, free software and not.  We’re a small project and just keeping our current work going is already just about as much as we can carry, but we’re going to have to grow the project drastically if we’re going to develop something that is an appealing and interesting alternative to these iPads that people are so happily sinking money in to, often money that they don’t really have. I also want to see a good alternative that provides a solution using free software.  I have some more details on all of this to follow, but I thought I’d keep this blog entry shorter so that I can at least get it out.

I’m going to be presenting some cases for big changes in Edubuntu to the Edubuntu Council soon and I’m going to try to get us a lot of help for this. If you’d like to get involved in any way, please get in touch! More details will follow soon.

The Principles Meme

This morning I read the following in a blog entry: “I applaud him for sticking to his principles, and not compromising“. The person who wrote it didn’t even agree with the person he was referring too, and yet he was congratulating him for sticking to his principles. I’ve seen a bunch of similar statements recently. There’s also a similar, more self-congratulating meme where people are very proud that they are unwaveringly sticking to their principles no matter what.

I’m not sure where this comes from, perhaps it stems from religious roots? Perhaps from people who are afraid to admit that they are flawed in any way? Perhaps they have some agenda that they want to push?

What if no one ever compromised on their principles? What if, in South Africa during the Apartheid years no white person were willing to consider that anyone with a different skin colour could be considered an equal? What if people could never see women as equals and they could never get voting rights or other equal rights? There are many, many more concepts in the past that were rooted as moral principles and with the hindsight we have now, we can see that they were clearly wrong. Sticking to those principles would have been harmful. The sad thing is that today still, many concepts in society is flawed. So why do we choose to applaud people who are inflexible, unscientific and in my opinion, irrational?

The Scientists

I applaud the scientist types, the ones who are able to look at new information or evidence and are able to take a step back and say “Hey, maybe I should re-think this!”. I respect those who are willing to say “Perhaps I was wrong” and share they’re experiences with others to get wider feedback rather than the person who will relentlessly defend their position, typically using some absolutes to try to prove their point.

“Damage Control”

I just read an article on CNN about Americans complaining that their bank fees are too high. It’s not unique to them, the same thing is happening here in Canada. Last week I got notification from Bank of Montreal about their price increases. The ad on the Internet banking site made it sound very pleasant, so much so that I decided to take a peek at the PDF to see what’s actually changing. The details were shocking, they are implementing a heavy increase in banking fees in December. I don’t have many services at BMO so the debit card fees will affect me most. I decided to innocently tweet something about it…

I didn’t give it much thought again after that. Today I received this tweet reply from BMO:

“please feel free to DM me your questions and concerns”

Really? What kind of half-assed reply is that?  I’ve put my concern out clearly and concisely in my tweet. What exactly do you want me to direct message you? I doubt they really have any intention of addressing my concerns. I highly doubt they’ll actually reduce any fees just for me. It seems that all they want is for me to DM them anything I have to say about their pricing instead of publicly saying it. Perhaps they should’ve read today’s Seth Godin before composing their tweet.

Come on, you can afford it

For the kind of money the banks charge us, I’m kind of disappointed at how cheapskate their marketing is. I would at least expect some creativity or some form of trying to win people over, or maybe even some kind of decent justification (I guess they just don’t have any and they know it). Instead all we get is “We have a right to make profit too” (Bank of America). How lame is that?

Every time there’s an Ubuntu release or pre-release is tested, it is logged on the Ubuntu QA team ISO tracker.

Every time it draws some pictures that changes as images are rebuilt and as bugs are added and removed. Especially smiley faces.

Am I really the only one who notices it!?

PS: I bet when you read the title you expected something a bit more controversial :)

I just read Sense’s post on retiring from the Ubuntu Community. I was going to leave a comment, but decided to write an entry about it since it affects a lot of other people too.

What is it I’m talking about? It’s called burnout, and it affects most people who strive for big things in their life at least at some point.

What is burnout!?

Wikipedia sums it up very nicely in one sentence:

“Burnout is a psychological term for the experience of long-term exhaustion and diminished interest.”

Burnout happens when you lose your steam and you don’t know why you’re doing what you’re doing anymore. It often comes with feelings of worthlessness and just not feeling good enough. A quote from Sense’s blog entry also describes what burnout feels like:

“Often I sit behind the computer, feeling bad about myself because I feel I ought to be contributing to Ubuntu, while I’m not. This makes me associate feelings of guilt and dissatisfaction with Ubuntu.”

Burnout very often includes the following phases (which are expanded on the Ubuntu Wiki):

1. A compulsion to prove oneself
2. Working harder
3. Neglecting one’s own needs
4. Displacement of conflicts
5. Revision of values
6. Denial of emerging problems
7. Withdrawal
8. Obvious behavioral changes
9. Depersonalization
10. Inner emptiness
11. Depression
12. Burnout syndrome

I can see a few of these represented in Sense’s blog entry, and I think it’s possible that he may suffer from burnout. I’m no psychologist and I haven’t spoken to him, so it’s in no way any kind of diagnosis, but the circle of wanting to prove yourself and working harder to do so, while neglecting your own needs is a vicious circle that we still see happening too much, and it usually ends up in some form of depression and withdrawal, which is usually a waste because it’s the people that usually care so much that we need to keep around.

Don’t be so hard on yourself

Sense, I think it’s great that you’re taking the time that you need for other things, but I don’t think you should feel compelled to resign from the Ubuntu community. Why not just take a leave of absence? Some of the best community contributors have been away for months or even more than a year at a time, and when they were ready they returned to with more energy and confidence than ever before.

I just want you to know that people appreciate what you’ve done, and the great example you’ve set in the Netherlands for other LoCo members and the great work you’ve done representing Ubuntu everywhere else. I liked Jorge’s comment where he said:

“Concentrate on school and life, it’s not like we’re going anywhere, and we’ll keep the light on for ya…”

He’s right, the Ubuntu community will still be here whenever you’re ready to come back, and your favourite problems will probably still need solving (and if they don’t, there’ll probably be more interesting problems to work on!). I’m not the best person with words and if I was Paul McCartney I’d write a Hey Jude type of song for you, but all I can say is don’t feel too bad about it, no one is holding anything against you, there’s no resentment or grudges when someone needs time for themselves. One of my favourite sayings is “If you want to fix the world, you should start with yourself”. In Ubuntu we should be supportive of that. Also, burnout isn’t permanent, things do get better again!

Losing Touch

In a few months I’ll be turning 29. That’s old. I don’t care though, I like growing older. I don’t want to be back in school without money to buy new computers, etc. If you’re doing things right, things should generally get better as you get older, in my opinion. But growing older sometimes makes it harder to stay current with how things work. Last week I put a new MP3 disc together to listen to in my car and realised that it’s pretty much the same stuff I’ve been listening too… forever. I also realised that besides the same old stuff they play on the radio, I don’t really know any new music or artists from 2010. How did this happen? Having seen so many people grow more stale and clueless as they get older, I promised myself that it would never happen to me. I decided to do some investigation.

Last.fm

This is the first site I turned to. I’m not a very active user on the site, but I know it has a big community and lots of people scrobble their songs to it. They have a top 40 of most scrobbled artists of 2010. Out of that top 40 list I only know 12 or so of the artists well or well enough to recognise them, and around 7 of them I either have just heard of or know that I don’t particularly like them. That means that that I know less than half of the music that people have been listening to this year. Eek. I went ahead and downloaded the latest albums I’ve never heard of via bittorrent. If I’ll like it I’ll go buy the album, if not I’ll just delete it. That’s how I roll, deal with it you stupid Americans.

Last.fm playground also has a list of the most unwanted scrobbles for the year. It was amusing to see how dominated it is by Lady Gaga. I don’t mind her though, while I admit that she is often over the top, I’m not afraid to say that I listen to her and enjoy some of her music. She’s one of the few artists today not ashamed to fly the freak flag and she has some very good ideas.

The playground also has a chart that lists whether the music you’re listening to is closer to what males or females would typically listen to and the age range that you fall into. This isn’t entirely accurate since I haven’t been scrobbling all my devices (some, like my car CD player, doesn’t have the capability). My results lean to the male side (shew that’s close), I was quite surprised that The Beatles, Good Charlotte and Panic! At The Disco and Violent Femmes have more female listeners, but that’s not at all a bad thing and I’m not complaining. My scrobbled music puts me in an age group of around 22 years old and I’m ok with that. The chart range is from 22-30, I guess you also have to take the average last.fm user age into account.

There are many tools available on that site, some more useful than others. I’ll certainly be making more use of Last.fm in the future. It might be interesting being able to compare my musical tastes with past versions of myself as I get older.

And then?

Well, I already found more music that I could listen to over the next 2-3 months, and have looked at a bunch of blog posts with titles such as “Top 25 Albums of 2010“, etc to see if there’s something that I missed, but the problem with those kind of lists are that they usually just list all the stuff that’s being over-marketed and played on every radio station anyway. That’s also not a great way to get to know music, because you’ll only discover artists way after they’ve become popular. Nothing wrong with being on the trailing edge though, it’s just not where I want to be, and besides, I want to get to know a lot of lesser-know artists that are really good too.

So if anyone’s reading this and have some tips that they can share, please do so!

Too Much Noise

I’ve taken a lot of time recently to think about my future and what I want to do with my life. Part of the process in refocusing and doing what I really want to do is cutting back on distractions and some things that just take up too much time.

I unsubscribed from a bunch of mailing lists (down from hundreds to dozens), quit from a lot of IRC channels (down from more than 50 to 16) and unsubscribed from a big bunch of blueprints, bug reports and other stuff that sends out email in Launchpad.net. The reason for all of this isn’t because I’ve lost interest in those things I unsubscribed from, but more a case of getting back to basics. So if anyone is wondering, it’s certainly not because I got angry or bored or anything like that, I just really needed to cut down!

More Work and More Fun

At my French classes on Mondays we usually spend some time speaking about what we did the last weekend. I usually get stuck there and can’t think of much that I did besides work. I’ve spent entire weekends before just thinking or worrying about stuff that I need to do. I’m going to change that. I put together a *really* big mindmap in freemind mapping out some ideas that I’ve had that spans career choices, hobbies, stuff just for fun, financial targets, training and education and more. It’s big and I’ll probably not be able to do everything on there in my lifetime (which is actually fucking scary), but I certainly want to make the most of it and prioritize my time better. I’m going to have to learn to rely on other people much more in the future and learn to let go a bit more, which is hard, but I think doable!

Specifics will follow in more blog entries… or if things go well you’ll read about it on digg/slashdot/etc

The Silicon Cape in a nutshell

Cape Town is Africa’s own little Silicon Valley, or in some way at least, becoming that. We have many locals who are passionate about technology and what it can do for our country and our continent who are also completely willing to share their knowledge and help and teach others while at the same time, growing local industry. We have user groups such as the Cape Town Linux Users Group (CLUG) who provide regular talks on technical and beginner Linux topics twice a month. We also have the Cape Town Python Users Group (CTPUG), the Cape Town Ruby Brigade and the Cape Town Wireless Users Group (CTWUG) on which I’ll expand later. These are just a few of the local technology volunteer support groups we have and there are much more. There are also many technology companies that have development offices here, such as Amazon.com, Yola and Thawte (which was also founded in Cape Town). There’s always new technology and software startups all the time and there’s a few local venture capital firms that focus specifically on technology funding. A group of people who are passionate about making Cape Town more of a local Silicon Valley created the organisation called Silicon Cape, which aims to bring together local entrepreneurs and geeks to help make the Silicon Cape vision a realA large, free and open network that connects the city could do wonders for our local technology development.ity. Silicon Cape has also attracted interest from our former mayor and now the premier of our province, Helen Zille who realises how important technology is to our local economical development.

Cape Town Wireless Users Group

I joined CTWUG around 4 years ago, it used to be just small pockets of people connecting to each other, later these smaller groups were connected and today, CTWUG covers large parts of Cape Town where you can reach any part of the network from any node. It has even extended outside of the larger Cape Town area into areas such as Stellenbosch and there’s also a vibrant community in Paarl that are connected to each other and hopefully some day, directly to the rest of the WUG.

Many are quick to dismiss Wireless User Groups as networks where people just share files and pirate content. There is certainly a lot of file sharing happening on the WUG, and in some cases there will be some piracy, but as with any big network it’s almost impossible to police. The WUG does provide a lot more than file-sharing though. Across South Africa, Internet is quite expensive and in many cases, prohibitively so. We have many users that don’t have any Internet connection at home, and we don’t explicitly provide any Internet access on the network. Instead, some users run Internet-like services on the WUG. So some users who do have an Internet connection will do things like run an email server that allows users to send and receive e-mail to the rest of the WUG as well as the rest of the world. There’s also a Jabber server that federates with other Jabber servers on the Internet. I run a few services myself. There’s CTWUG Statusnet which is a Statusnet installation that brings microblogging to the WUG, there’s Wugtube which hosts user uploaded video content and also a Big Blue Button installation for video conferencing and chatting. Besides the 3 services I host there’s lots of other services hosted on the network which includes a Facebook clone, a Teamspeak server, many gaming servers, personal wug sites and repositories and CD images for many Linux distributions as well as Windows and OSX updates.

The wug certainly can’t replace an Internet connection completely, but it works great as a secondary network to the Internet and also for people who simply can’t afford an Internet connection. Even for those who do have an Internet connection, there’s still a lot of benefit to getting connected. By installing system updates, for example, you would only get about 419 KB/s on DSL (or at least, that’s what I get on my 4mbps line which is Telkom’s current fastest offering) while installing from the WUG would typically give you up to 1.2 MB/s (and even more) depending one your location and the mirror you’re using. Currently we only have around 500 people actively using the WUG. One of my personal goals is to get schools involved. We have a few hundred schools in Cape Town and most of them have no Internet or often, they have to share a 3GB monthly package among the whole school that typically only the admin staff and some teachers will have access too. Hosting mirrors of Wikipedia, Wikinews and other useful sites, along with the usual WUG services could have great impact for these schools in my opinion. There’s a seperate project for connecting schools together called Schoolwan that connected 35 schools to each other and to a centralised server for content, mail, etc. Even though it’s a really, really cool project, I believe that it would’ve been a lot better if it had decent funding and if the benefits of using a network such as this could be properly introduced with some good cultivation. With CTWUG schools could gain some benefit of connecting to an existing network with existing infrastructure and a large volunteer community. CTWUG has strict rules about pornography and adult content and users who share any such content publicly on the networked are disconnected without any warning.

There’s also a local project called Wizzy Digital Courier which started off as a Sneakernet e-mail service where schools could carry around their e-mail on USB disks and sync up using UUCP. With the Wizzy project also came the concept of a Wizzy server, which would dial-up after 19:00 when phone calls are cheaper and gets the content requested during the day and stores it in a wwwoffle proxy so that users could visit the websites they have requested the previous day. Many Schoolwan schools also had a Wizzy server. One idea is that some of the more resourced schools who have uncapped DSL could share their off-peak bandwidth to get and cache some data for the less-privileged schools using something like a Wizzy server.

There’s a lot I’d like to say on the topic and I’ve only touched a few things here, the point that I’d like to get to is that wide-area wireless networks can be extremely useful in areas where Internet is either slow or expensive, and probably too even so when a good Internet connection is available.

Cape Town to get City-wide Wireless

ITweb reports that there are plans to roll out fiber-backed wireless throughout the city. A R400m (about €41.2m) plan to roll out this fiber network was planned when Helen Zille was still the mayor of Cape Town. This alone will save the city about R90m a year in costs to Telkom and other operators to our municipalities.

There’s little information available on who will be able to access the network or with which networks it will peer with, but it has great potential and I hope that it will grow in to a network that will add value to as many people in the city as possible.

Tuesday evening I attended Geekdinner Cape Town again, the food was good and it was a nice crowd.

Antifeatures

I did a mini-talk on Anti-features. It’s something that I’ve been aware of for a long time but never quite put a label on it. Benjamin “Mako” Hill coined the phrase anti-features and presented it at LinuxConf Australia 2010, I watched the video and thought that it would be a great topic for a Geekdinner.  Geekdinner talks are supposed to be only 5 minutes long, so I tried to get Mako’s ~45 minute talk down to about 6 minutes for the talk. I think it was a bit longer, I went first instead of last so I don’t think it was much of a problem. I haven’t given a talk in ages so I’m quite out of practice, but everyone who talked to me about it afterwards said that they enjoyed it and that it was interesting, so I feel good about it. It’s also one of the few Geekdinner talks that didn’t have any mention of Facebook or Twitter, so I gave myself another 50 points for that

You can get Mako’s slides and slide notes from his website, and also the video (which I recommend watching). You can get my slides right here. Stefano took video footage, I’ll paste a link to it once it’s processed.

TrustFabric

Joe Botha talked about TrustFabric, his joint-venture with Jonathan Endersby and I believe someone else too where they want to change the way everyone works with personal information. More information on that in these two blog posts.

How to ruin people’s lives on-line

We still needed a 3rd talk so Ben Steenhuizen threw together a talk on how bad people (which he protests heavily that he’s not) can abuse your public data and can make things very difficult for you.

Overall one of my favourite geekdinners, I’ll probably go to the Montreal Geekdinners when I get over to Canada (still waiting on Visa), but I’ll probably be back to catch one of the last Cape Town Geekdinners again towards the end of this year.

Last night I attended the Quarrelsome Quince Geekdinner (wow it’s the end of November already!?). It was ok. The talks were good, Adrianna Pinska (aka confluence) did very well on the kareoke slideshow which was titled something like “The Winners of Safety at Work” which was a bunch of funny slides of people improvising at work mostly doing dangerous things. She did a great job since the slides were almost too easy since they were funny on their own, but she managed to be really quick on her feet and make up some really good stuff.

The food at Cafe Max were great and Delheim sponsored the wine. Even though the food and wine was good, I go to the geekdinners more for the geek part than the dinner part. I spent some time catching up with Andy about everything from off-line Wikipedia, tuXlabs, Ubuntu-NGO, Quebec, Canada and the French. I also got some mini-photography lessons from Joe and played with his nice Canon camera (which is why I haven’t took too many shots) but I’m sure he’ll have them up soon. After the geekdinner was officially finished I sat with Jeremy, Simon, Adrianna and Michael a bit, we looked through Jeremy’s xkcd book which was quite cool, besides having all the strips from the xkcd site, it also has lots of cool little puzzles that all fit together. Not sure what happens when you solve them all, but I want one of those books too now! They also talked about some of the problems in their Pyweek game called Rinkhals and somehow listening to them talking about problems in Python is always interesting even when I don’t completely understand. I have a lot going on this weekend but I’ll try to get to the CTPUG meeting tomorrow, I’ve only been to two of the CTPUG meetings before but I’ve always wanted to get more involved.

Oops, drifting a bit off-topic there, the next Geekdinner is at the end of January and if you’re interested you can subscribe to the announce mailing list where the details will be announced. Thanks to all the people who organised it!