The Open EDge

ISTE (the International Society for Technology in Education) has posted a feature article from the February/March issue of Learning and Leading with Technology entitled "Social Networking for the K-12 Set," written by yours truly. In the article, I discuss the potential of social networking tools, the development of the SUSD Teacher and Student Community sites, (you're in the SUSD Teacher Community site now,) and the impact that their use has had on our education environment.
This article also offers an example of a successful open- source based education technology project in every respect. Not only did we leverage open-source resources and the community around them, but we also made modifications to the software necessary to fit our environment, and have made the new code available to the community at large, in true open-source fashion (you can find the latest version of the code here.)
There has been much talk of Web 2.0 in education these days, with social networking tools receiving much attention. I, for one, believe that social networking tools have the potential to change the way we think about education and community, by providing a platform upon which 21st century skills can be nurtured and developed in both students AND teachers. The trick is to figure out how to do it well, and to create a safe, effective, and comfortable environment for students and teachers to work in. (I discussed some of the reasons I believe social networking has yet to see wide educational acceptance/use in my post, "Why Hasn't Social Networking Taken Off in K-12 Education?" from last April - check it out, and let me know what you think.)
For more information on open technologies, visit the CoSN Open Technologies Initiative web site at http://k12opentech.org. There you will find a wealth of relevant information for K-20 educators on open-source, open standards, and open content.

Lawrence Lessig is perhaps the most prolific proponent of open content and copyright reform in the nation. He is the former CEO and continuing board member of the Creative Commons organization. His talks are always inspiring, thought provoking, and controversial, yet, in my view, foundational to our understanding of content and freedom in the digital age.

What a great session we had on Friday at the Georgia Education Technology Conference! As I demoed a dozen open source applications that are ready for use in the classroom, you could sense the excitement from attendees as they considered how they might apply them to their education environment. There was quite a clamor for OpenCDs and business cards at the end, so I think its safe to assume that the benefits of open technologies will be coming to fruition in classrooms all across Georgia in the coming year.

For those who were in attendance (and even those who weren't) a copy of the presentation is below. Feel free to contact me directly if you have any questions about any of the topics we discussed over three exciting days at GaETC!

GaETC Open Source Apps application/pdf

This week, I was fortunate enough to have been invited to speak at the Georgia Education Technology Conference (GaETC,) and I have to say, I've been thoroughly impressed. Georgia really knows how to put on a technology conference!
I'm giving a total of three talks on open technologies, the first of which had a great turnout - probably about 80! It has been a thrill to see interest in the education community continue to grow. I think a lot of eyes have been opened to the potential of open technologies in the K-12 space.
Several requested access to the slides and other resources, so I have posted them here:

GaETC Open Technologies in the Ed Enterprise application/pdf
Short List of Open Source Software application/pdf

Article after article and post after post have compared and contrasted Xen, VMWare, Veridian, and a host of other virtualization technologies, with opinions on performance, management tools, implementations, etc., etc. in abundant supply. Inevitably when it comes to Xen, the story comes full circle with some sort of declaration about "data center readiness." The definition of "ready for the data center" is quite subjective, of course, based largely on the author's personal experience, skills, and their opinion of the technical capabilities of those managing this vague "data center" to which they are referring.

It was my great pleasure on Jun 26 to be a part of the Network World IT Roadmap event in Santa Clara! For this event, I was interviewed in front of a live audience of about 60 CIOs for the Voice over IP (VoIP,) Convergence, and Collaboration track by Johna Till Johnson, president and chief research officer at Nemertes Research. For those who are interested, some highlights of our conversation are below:

You did a network overhaul that included a VOIP implementation a number of years ago, correct - 2003?
Yes, we were fairly early adopters of the technology. In fact, 802.3af (PoE) had just been finalized a few months prior to our first (pilot) implementation. We had the switches on order, but because of obvious delays in finalizing the switch hardware to meet the spec, we had to borrow some proprietary inline power injectors from 3Com to power our phones until the new switches came in. We probably received the first PoE switches off the line from 3Com.

How large is the implementation?
17 locations that are separated geographically. About 800 handsets now, a variety of hard sets, some softphones, wireless.

Jay Pfaffman, an instructional technology professor from the University of Tenessee recently wrote an excellent piece which appeared on the LinuxInsider site entitled, It's Time to Consider Open Source Software. As can be expected, this generated a fair amount of debate and comment on the CETPA (California Education Technology Professionals Association) listserv, which revealed a surprisingly prevalent perspective that using open source software somehow equates to "switching" or replacing existing applications only.

I believe it's important to emphasize to all education technology people (or anyone else, for that matter) that they should not view open source simply as a cheap replacement for something else. There is no need or requirement to switch any core application, business process, etc., if one's organization is unprepared to do so or finds it otherwise unnecessary. However, when an opportunity or initiative is in play, then open source should absolutely be in the mix for consideration. The arguments against doing so simply don't hold up to any sort of honest evaluation.