Adobe Education Leaders Blog Goes Live

If you work with students and teachers in using Adobe products, or really any digital creative tools, you'll want to add the new Adobe Education Leaders blog to your aggregator.

This is a team blog provided by Adobe and things are just kicking off, but already there are some fun postings from members of the group with much more to come from the incredibly energetic, enthusiastic, and accomplished educators who make up this group.

Thanks to Johann for getting permission for Adobe to host a blog where the entries are written by folks outside the employ of the company. That can be a pretty scary thing to some in a big company like Adobe, but through Johann's persistence this service is finally available. I'm really looking forward to hearing more about what my colleagues in education are doing, and the fact that we now have a vehicle for sharing outside our internal group is a very, very good thing.

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Adobe Education Leaders Camp Day 1

There really hasn't been any time for reflection on our first chock-full-of-activities day at Adobe Camp but let's just say that it's been more fun than a geek could ever ask for. My preso on Web 2.0 in education went well, and it was especially timely because of the context added by Kathy Schrock and Simon Hayhurst and David Wadhawani of Adobe who gave us some deep background on some of the big ideas that are driving Adobe development.

Brenda Frisk was live blogging throughout the day and has a great summary of the first day's activities at her blog. Awesome job Brenda! But just remember that you're not the only one with a camera here. :-)



I'm not sure if I'll have time to document much more of the days activities today as we're heavily into hands-on classes today. This afternoon we'll be heading back over to Adobe's offices for lots of face time with product managers and others at the company that are interested in how they can support out efforts in schools. Can't wait for that one either!

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Off To Adobe San Francisco. w00t!

I'll be spending all of next week out in San Francisco at Adobe's offices at the second annual Adobe Education Leaders camp. Let's just say I'm a little bit psyched.

The camp this year promises to be even bigger and better than last year's trip to San Jose. With 125+ teachers and curriculum specialists and trainers and etc. coming from all over the world it's sure to be an awesome ride. There's just so much energy in a room full of teachers like this that the ideas and conversations flow at an amazing clip. Things start moving so fast that I can almost keep up with the hyper-kinetic Megan. (You all know it's true.)

And of course there are the old friends from Macromedia days and the many great new friends from the Adobe side to catch up with. The melding of the two education advisory groups after the merger has gone incredibly well, and it was immediately evident that we were all joined by the same sort of passion for teaching that bridged the gap that might have existed in our technology use.

Other things I'm looking forward to are seeing the "new" offices on Townsend street. Last time I was at the Macromedia mother ship they hadn't even bought the historic building that was later renovated into what I hear is a gorgeous space. As a fan of architecture I'm looking forward to that.

And of course there are the classes we'll attend, presentations and conversations with Adobe product managers, another panel discussion on Web 2.0 in education, and lots of hanging out with laptops open looking at the work we all do with our kids. It's an incredible experience and very cool that Adobe is providing this opportunity for teachers from the US, Canada, New Zealand, the UK, Australia, and even Indonesia to get together and get excited about the kinds of thinking we can promote in students using design and publication tools.

Oh yeah, also on my list is another drop-in on John Dowdell. Don't you owe me a burrito JD?

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Six Consecutive A Grades for This Failing School

A nicely written editorial in the Daytona News-Journal points out the absurdity of conflicting measurements of "student progress" and how one school, despite 6 years of receiving the highest possible grade under Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT), is facing restructuring because enough progress hasn't been made year to year.

The team (at Longstreet Elementary School) adjusted to the silliness of the FCAT requirements and its narrow band of basic skills to be taught. It was obvious to the team that many skills and other areas of the wider education range would now be ignored as focus would center on the FCAT. The teachers taught the pupils well. But, ironically, the pupils' scores were so high that when the federal act came into existence those scores would be Longstreet's downfall.

The Adequate Yearly Progress part of the act would make it impossible for Longstreet to pass. How do you improve an "A" grade? The federal act requires improvement! So Longstreet has failed the federal measure for years and has been under corrective actions and sanctions, has had administrator changes and is in the position of being "restructured." According to the federal act, the school could even be dismantled and its teachers farmed out to other schools or dismissed if not meeting the act's "highly qualified teacher" requirements.

There's actually some logic behind the requirement to make Adequate Yearly Progress or AYP (yeah, we've got all sorts of acronyms for assessing kids these days). The intent is to insure that in schools where most students are doing well the ones who aren't progressing don't get left behind.

But in typical bureaucratic fashion, school systems--along with their masters in the state and federal education offices--have attempted to define processes and procedures to force adequate progress on those students and the school by changing principals and teachers and applying relentless pressure to get those scores up. Education gets flipped on its head and test scores become the single driving purpose behind the school's existence.

The problem with this approach is that it presumes that the measurement systems themselves are flawless, and that improving performance is a simple metric of aligning operation A with requirements B then getting result C.

Too bad humans don't work that way.

Too bad that money that ought to go into the training and paychecks of teachers gets diverted into ever more expensive processes, manuals, software programs, remedial this and that, and other bureaucratic bright ideas and internal empire building.

Too bad that the public doesn't have an attention span capable of seeing what's happening in their schools and demand that it stop.

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More Web 2.0 Kool-Aid

You know, I get the whole idea of tagging content and organizing information based on context, but really folks. Isn't there a practical limit to what all of this inter-connectedness means? Not so much in terms of the technology, but in the practical and appropriate use of these methods. This, from TechConsumer--Why Web 2.0 Isn't Enough, makes me think that we're fundamentally missing something.

Think of the last time you were at a national park. It’s a very good possibility that the only information you had about the park fit on a tri-fold paper that you picked up at the visitor’s station. In the information age, how is this acceptable? Instead, imagine visiting the park where hundreds of visitors have linked information to specific locations. You have the architect of the visitor’s center who tells you the history of the building. As you move around the park you access information provided by geologists, geographers, botanists, biologists, environmental scientists, conservationists, hiking enthusiasts, bikers, etc. etc. etc. The information is useful because it’s relevant to the location. And it becomes manageable in the same way that the 10s of millions of pictures on flickr have become manageable, through tagging.

The last national park I was in was Muir Woods last summer, and if there was one thing that would have shattered the cathedral-like experience of standing among these ancient trees it would have been some damned device that I had to refer to in order to fully enjoy my experience. Technology sure has its place in this world, but please! Let's not lose sight of the experience of slowing down and taking in the beauty and wonder all around us every day. I don't need no stinking tags or Web 2.0 widget to do that. Just an open mind and the capacity to slow down and appreciate the real, tangible things all around me.

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Interview: Geoffrey Smidgen of MoLekULr, a New Web 2.0 Startup

(Caution. Satire ahead. The products and people in this "interview" are purely drawn from the author's imagination and any resemblance to real Web 2.0 companies is merely accidentally intentional.)

*******************

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Geoffrey Smidgen, CEO of Virtual Absurdities LLC, a company that has just received its first round of venture capital funding for its Web 2.0 startup know as MoLekULr. The service has just completed its initial round of beta testing and will be launching a wide-scale public beta in the near future. Geoffrey and his engineers have devised an entirely unique approach to the concept of social networking that he discusses in this interview


Brainfrieze: Geoffrey, welcome. This is a pretty exciting time for your company isn't it?

Geoffrey Smidgen: Boy it sure is. Lots of late nights and.......................time spent at the computer. But things have really................................come together and I believe we've really nailed the entire................................essence of Web 2.0 with our product.

BF: Right. Tell us a little about the concept behind MoLekULR and what you hope to accomplish with your service.

GS: Well, it's a pretty radical idea, but let's start with the entire definition of.........................what Web 2.0 is really all about. You see, what we've learned over the last 10 or 20 years of social networking, going all the way back to the early..................................message boards and newsgroups is that people really love staying connected to a circle of people electronically. They find others with like interests.................................and then they use their computers to communicate with each other. Some even get a little addicted.......................to staying connected.

BF: Boy, I know what you mean. I've had some serious issues with newsgroup addiction myself. You know you're in too deep when you catch yourself logging in to your favorite group when you're on vacation, just to see what's going on and who's saying what.

GS: Right, and all Web 2.0 does is take that urge..............................that we all feel and makes it even easier to consume and produce and stay in touch. So now you can spend time doing things like................................uploading photos to Flickr, making your own videos for YouTube, share a calendar on Google, and on and on. People.................................love this stuff.

BF: So tell us about MoLekULr. What does it do that's different?

GS: Well, we took that basic concept, and then we saw the explosion....................of even more immediate social tools like Twitter, and we thought, what if we could take that fundamental.......................idea of staying connected all the time to its logical conclusion? What if we could reduce the idea of social networking........................to its most basic components and then connect people in that manner? At a molecular level..............................? Hence the name.

BF: So how does this work?

GS: The first thing we need is information about you. During the registration process we provide a tool..................that will scan your computer, record the IP address, and follow your online activities. This real-time feedback allows us to build a network for you on the fly, so that we know who in our network is pursuing similar activities. But that's just.........................the first layer. We also track all of the applications..........................that you run on your computer. So for instance, we know if you're making lots of videos or listening to lots of music. We want to gain a deep understanding of everything you do on your computer.

BF: Interesting, if you can get people to surrender their privacy that way.

GS: We can reliably prove that you have no................................privacy anyway, so you might as well use it to your advantage. Right?

BF. I suppose so. Then what happens?

GS: Then a few days later a sample kit.................will arrive from our company. Our users will take a small blood...........................sample and return it to us. From that we'll gather even more information about you. Your eating habits, sex and weight, age.......you'd be amazed at what our algorithms can do.............................with that information.

BF: Wow. This is really in-depth. And then I understand that users get some kind of biometric device?

GS: Right. Our MoLekULr Feedback Device is attached to your computer's USB port and from that we can feed....................................you a steady stream of information from your social network. You'll know all sorts of things about the people that you're matched with......................where they are, what they're doing, if they're happy or mad or sad..................all through a series of micro-bursts delivered by our device. When one of those bursts warrants further attention.......................on your part you can immediately bounce over to the full web-enabled version of MoLekULr and send a note to your friend, post to your blog, respond to someone via a comment, upload a video, or crank out a podcast. When you do any of those things...................everyone on your network is immediately notified through a MoLekULr Microburst. Then they can respond......................if they choose to do so. It's a completely closed loop.

BF: Whoa. Well, it seems that someone might be a little distracted in that kind of environment where they're always connected and always consuming information. Do you.....sorry. Geoffrey?

GS: No worries. I was posting something..............what were we saying?

BF: I was saying that it might be hard to concentrate when you're connected all the time.

GS: We actually.........................don't find that to be the case. Sure, there are brief moments when the device is sending you................................................information, but it doesn't get in the way of other..............things you're doing.

BF: I've been noticing a lot of pauses in our conversation. Are you getting microbursts during those times?

GS: Sorry. What were you.........................saying?

BF: The pauses Geoff. You sort of drop away right in the middle of a sentence.

GS: Oh, well, yes, it does take a second to consume the information about everyone in my network................................and then decide how I want to respond. Sorry, pardon me, there's a bit of a dustup in my Second Life chat room. Be right back.

BF: Do you worry that this sort of communication might make people a little too superficial? They won't ever have time to focus on anything but the immediate. How do you promote social networking tools as a way to.....Geoff, are you there?

GS: Wait please........................................wait............

wait...............

wait.............

Uh oh. Sorry, I really have to run now. I've got some serious issues to deal with and only 14 seconds to do so. I better..........................run. It was great talking to you Susan.

BF: Um, I'm not Susan. Geoff? Are you there?

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The Joy of Seeing Construction Progress

We turned a major corner at Casa de Cavanaugh this week when the drywall finally went up and the finishers began the process of making the inside of our house look habitable again. We still have weeks of work to go, but I thought it would be fun to document where we were back when we started this project last fall and where we are now.

So, here's a few photos to show how things have moved along. All of these pictures were taken from roughly the same vantage point.

First, we moved out last October and cleared the exterior of the house away in preparation. Here's the house just before demolittion began.



Next up was the demolition of the kitchen and the interior walls in that part of the house:



Next was the demolition of the concrete walls that formed the outside of the house. We had those cut away in order to attach the addition to the existing structure.



Then the new framing was put into place to bring the addition into the existing house. This was in March of this year.



Then 3 plus months went by while the electrical, plumbing, and air conditioning systems were put into place, inspected, re-inspected, and finally into a condition where we could hang the drywall.



Then finally. Finally! Our drywall is up and the first coat of the finishing compound has been applied.



Woot! We're getting close baby!

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Adobe Releases Free Year-Long Curriculum for Creative Suite 3

I'm really delighted to announce that Adobe Systems has just released an entirely free, year long curriculum package for courses that cover three primary uses of their products--visual design, web design, and video production.

An excerpt of the announcement is below, but on a personal level I want to thank the team that put this all together.

This effort started simultaneously at Macromedia and Adobe before the merger, and it's pretty remarkable that despite the merging of the two companies they maintained their focus and got the job completed. I played a small humble part here and there, but the real kudos go to a certain few people at Adobe who maintained their vision, pulled together classroom experts from around the world to assist and advise, and then delivered on their promises to provide a curriculum package, complete with supporting files, presentations, outlines, and structured lessons that a teacher could follow to deliver the kind of course on digital skills that has a real impact in the lives of kids. Never mind that they'll make a few bucks selling software.

This curriculum is free and, oh, by the way, also aligned with ISTE and NETS standards. Combine the course work with the new certification exams that the company has developed and for the first time schools have a complete package that allows a student to progress through a design program that leads to something they can present to prospective employers. That's a pretty big deal.

Did I mention this was free? Completely? Did I mention that it probably wouldn't be free without the ceaseless advocate for these programs who works at Adobe? I'm sure she wouldn't want me calling her name out (Megan), so I'll just have to assure those of you who are teaching with Adobe design tools that you have someone at the company (Megan) who's really looking out for you. You can see her influence here, and that of the others who work so hard (Johann) to keep education a priority within Adobe Systems.

OK, enough gushing over my nameless pals (Anuja) who pulled this off (Kirsti.) Here's the important stuff--links to locations where you can download the PDFs and other support materials for these courses:

Visual Design: Foundations of Design and Print Production

Visual Design is a yearlong, project-based curriculum that develops career and communication skills in print production and graphic design, using Adobe tools.


Digital Design: Foundations of Web Design

Digital Design: Foundations of Web Design is a yearlong, project-based curriculum that develops IT career skills in web design and production, using Adobe tools.


Digital Video: Foundations of Video Design and Production

Digital Video curriculum is a yearlong, project-based curriculum that develops career and
communication skills in digital video production, using Adobe tools.

Congratulations to the Adobe team one more time! I know this has been years in the making and I hope you appreciate what a difference you're making by continuing to push your company to provide support, and by helping teachers get excited about teaching with design tools.

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A Little Bit of My Soul Dies...

...every time I have to use Excel.

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My Prayer for Tomorrow: Let There Be Drywall

The home construction project that ate my life is still moving along. It's now been 9 months since we moved out to do a major demolition and remodeling project. To say that it's been an ordeal wouldn't really do justice to the incredible amount of work it takes to pull off something like this as your own general contractor, while maintaining a sometimes-stressful day job.

But tomorrow! Tomorrow there will be drywall covering the framing on the interior and we will finally have real, honest to goodness walls. To commemorate the last night that our house sits with all of its innards showing, I've updated my Flickr photo-set that sort of documents our progress.

True, it's been an awful lot of work, but I'm looking forward to some of the architectural details that we slaved over to come into better focus. The porthole window that acts as a pass through from the kitchen to the family room, the arched opening going into the dining room with built-in bookcases, and the other little touches that we might not have gotten had we contracted the job out. And of course there are lots of little things that won't show, like the 6 hours I spent caulking and insulating window frames to get a nice tight seal from the heat and wet.

At any rate, tomorrow let their be drywall. Because after 7 weeks of delays caused by silly bureaucratic rules imposed by our local building department, contractors who don't show when they say they will, a plumbing supply house that just can't seem to get things right (and won't return your phone calls to boot), and imperious utility companies who will get around to your job when they darn well feel like it, tomorrow may be the day we finally turn the corner on this beast and head towards the day when we can actually go home again.

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A Healthy Dose of Skepticism in the World of Educational Technology

Maybe it's just summer time and folks are feeling reflective, but over the course of the last week I've seen a few posts that call into question some of the "prevailing wisdom" that has been sweeping the educational technology world these last few years.

Kids are "digital natives" goes our mantra, and we need to teach differently as a result. Blogs, wikis, podcasts, vodcasts, laptops for all, broadband for all, using Twitter, using Open Source, using Google apps, and on and on and on. The problem is that sometimes we fail to take a step back, evaluate exactly how effective these tools are, look hard at what processes they are allegedly improving/replacing, and think practically about how a teacher might use specific technologies to enhance learning and motivation in the classroom.

Cindy Barnsley summarizes some of the current discussion in Dissenting Voices post, pointing to some of the discussion about the accuracy of the famous Did You Know! presentation that Karl Fisch produced for teachers at his school.

Cindy came to her own conclusions and posted her own questions after reading Dean Shareski's The Honeymoon's Over where you can find some of Dean's thoughts on the maturing of the conversation among edu-bloggers. Dean point's to some conversations that have taken place in comments to other blogs, including my personal favorite posted by Terry Freedman when the subject of using Twitter in the classroom and projecting the conversations onto a white board in front of the room.

OK, at the risk of having to endure a barrage of shrieks about how I don't get it, why is your idea of having the students tweeting any better than my incredibly radical idea, which I have used successfully for over 30 years, of allowing them to talk to each other?

And that's really the point isn't it? Are those of us who plan and program and promote technology in the classroom sometimes guilty of choosing the latest new technology toy to do things instead of a tried and true method?

Finally, over at the Generation Yes blog, Sylvia Martinez discusses Facility Vs. Fluency and makes the case that for many of the so-called digital natives, technology is simply something that you dabble in to make your life easier. Are students in the current generation really fundamentally different than kids of 20 or 30 or 40 years ago? Or is the problem that we hang onto 40 year old methods and try to jazz them up with a little technology on the side.

There's good eats in all of those posts above. Dig in and question authority a little, won't you?

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iPhone Phoolery

Gosh, did the planets realign over a new technology device this week or what? I was flummoxed by all the very interesting theories that popped up this week regarding Apple's ultimate plans with the iPhone. Ultimate plans? Don't they just want to sell a whole spit-load of these things, make a good healthy profit for their shareholders like every large public corporation, and look long-range at how the device will allow them to leverage greater market share down the road?

I bow to no man (or woman) in my admiration for the new phone from Apple. It's gorgeous and absolutely nails the whole concept of user experience in ways that the very best Apple products have always done. I've only had a few minutes with the iPhone, but its obvious that it is going to push some new technologies into the hands of consumers. I would hope that if noting else it gets more public WiFi out there for all of those little gems to connect to in the grocery store, coffee shops, libraries, and just about anyplace else you might want to sit down with a tiny little device that allows you to load web sites that look remarkably good. As long as you have WiFi the iPod is a beautiful thing.

Of course, there is that little problem that the current Safari browser on the iPhone doesn't play Flash movies or games or the myriad other things that Flash does to make the Web even more engaging.

Let's put this in perspective shall we? Why no Flash Player? My guess is it's all about battery life. Apple wanted to get the best phone that it could into the hands of the consumers, one that would have a decent talk time. What kind of reviews would we have heard that, as once rumored, if the iPhone had only an hour or so of talk time and was constantly going dead? Instead of talking about how the keyboard is hard to use there'd be a relentless flood of complaints about battery life. Personally I'd rather take a poke in the eye with a sharp stick than use the keyboard on my Treo, so I don't really get all of that, but whatever.

So, the grown ups had to make some business decisions. Apple has to make a profit, and the iPhone needs to be phenomenal in version 1.0, and the core competencies have to be rock solid. Phone, music, movies, web, in that order. And if the device can't support the current version of the Flash Player, let's see if Adobe won't make their own business decision and build out a version of Flash that will work on the iPhone without killing battery life, pronto.

Likewise, Microsoft and Sun and others will make their own business decisions based on how they might make a buck out of the iPhone and similar devices that will ultimately follow now that the rest of the manufacturers can actually see the right way to build a phone.

But all the froo-fra and wild theories about how Apple is trying to push QuickTime to replace Flash, how the web in your hand will finally bring Microsoft to its knees, and all of the overly macho, and yet juvenile, theories about who the winners will be in the new battle that Apple has kicked off by releasing a new phone is just, well, sort of silly.

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Terms of Service for an RSS Feed?

Just making note of this here, as I'm not sure I've ever seen a Terms of Service agreement for an RSS feed. Of course, I can't say that I've looked before. But sure enough, my local newspaper has one.

Here's an example of the lovely legalese they employ:

THE HEADLINE SERVICE AND ALL MATERIALS, INFORMATION AND SERVICES AVAILABLE THROUGH IT, ARE PROVIDED TO YOU "AS IS," "WITH ALL FAULTS," AND "AS AVAILABLE." WE, OUR AFFILIATES, AGENTS AND LICENSORS CANNOT AND DO NOT WARRANT THE ACCURACY, COMPLETENESS, CURRENTNESS, NONINFRINGEMENT, MERCHANTABILITY OR FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE OF THE MATERIALS, INFORMATION AND SERVICES AVAILABLE THROUGH THE HEADLINE SERVICE, NOR DO WE GUARANTEE THAT THE MATERIALS, INFORMATION OR SERVICES WILL BE ERROR-FREE, OR CONTINUOUSLY AVAILABLE, OR FREE OF VIRUSES OR OTHER HARMFUL COMPONENTS.

Gosh, if the Palm Beach Post spent as much energy on actually categorizing their feeds more thoroughly and accurately as they did on that kind of legalese their service might actually be pretty useful.

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iLust

I think there's something fundamentally wrong with a co-worker who shows up with a new iPhone in his hand.

Enough to make me briefly consider knocking him to the ground, grabbing the shining diadem of my desire, running from the building and finding a happy quiet place where I can be alone with my love.

But no, instead I had to share the experience with others as they crowded around. When what I truly desired was to marvel at how small and deliciously compact it was. To stroke its gleaming surface. Feel the smooth, silky interface as my fingers glide across the velvety surface. Enjoy the sensuousness of its gently warming battery as it bends itself to my desires, performing beneath my digital ministrations in anticipation of my needs. Showing me things I'd only dreamed of in my most secret dreams.

Yes, it's true. The iPhone is everything you have heard, and then some. And despite the few minor flaws and the inevitable compromises that were made, I want one down to the core of my being. Having held one in my hands I will never be able to look at another woma.......I mean cell phone in quite the same way.

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Did You Know: In Ten Years the Number One English Speaking Country Will Be China?

Last summer, Karl Fisch, a technology coordinator in Aurora Colorado created a thought-provoking PowerPoint presentation that he shared with his staff, and later, shared on his blog.

Did You Know has now been viewed over 5 million times as a result of the simple act of asking people in the education community to comment on the presentation.

Karl's back with version 2.0 of the presentation, and is once again sharing through a number of outlets.

(The version below, by the way, is running on TeacherTube, an alternative to YouTube that seeks to get around the automatic filtering policies that block YouTube in many schools.

Knowing that part of my audience comes from outside the education world I thought I'd post this here for those who might want to do a little thinking about the education their children--and the children in their community--are receiving. With what we know about globalization of the economy and the uncertainty of where tomorrow's jobs may lie, is your school doing a good job in preparing students for what's ahead of them?

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