Linux on Netbooks and Whiskers on Kittens

This is going to be a long post, but I think (hope?) it will be worth it to many of you.

I’ve blogged previously about the Inspired Writing project that began this summer in my school district. Briefly, all 5th grade classrooms, all 6th grade Language Arts classrooms, and all 9th grade Language Arts classrooms now have ASUS EeePC 1000 netbook computers. (We hope to expand it to grades 5-12 eventually.) Those teachers also went through staff development this summer based around improving reading and writing skills through the use of technology.

At Arapahoe this means that we have 198 new EeePC 1000’s this fall. This gives us a 1:1 ratio in our 9th grade Language Arts classrooms (we have a few sections using Dell laptops that we had previously purchased with grant money), plus we purchased an additional twelve for our Special Services Department, four for our Study Center, and twenty-four for our media center for student check out. (For now, students can check out a EeePC for use in the media center for a class period at a time. Once we get settled in, we’re hoping to expand that for longer time periods and not restrict it to the media center.)

Our district settled on the EeePC’s for many reasons, two of which were licensing costs and imaging issues. We ordered EeePC’s with Xandros Linux, and they utilize our PODnet wireless network to connect to the Internet, meaning that we don’t have to worry about Microsoft licensing costs (they’re running Open Office). And the Eee’s have a built-in restore mechanism that will reset them back to factory condition, thereby minimizing technical support issues (which is critical as my district, like most these days, has had to cut positions).

So one of my self-assigned jobs this summer was to learn more about Linux in order to both support and hopefully improve the implementation of this project. So at NECC I approached Steve Hargadon, who is my go-to person in my PLN for all things open source. For those of you who know Steve, you won’t be surprised that when I finally tracked him down he was running from one presentation to another, but he kindly gave me several names to contact that he thought could help me out. They all did, but one in particular ended up helping me out more than I could’ve expected.

Jim Klein is the Director of Information Services and Technology for the Saugus Union School District in the Santa Clarity Valley in Northern Los Angeles County. When I contacted Jim with some questions, he answered them, but then also mentioned that he had an imaging process I might want to take a look at. Well, not only did he have an imaging process, but he had extensive, step-by-step documentation for how to do it. This documentation is so good that even I, pretty much completely new to Linux, could figure it out. (Jim and I did end up trading well over fifty emails over a variety of questions, which was way above and beyond the call of duty on Jim’s part, but that was mostly due to one typo on the documentation that we eventually figured out and my apparently inexhaustible capability for asking questions.)

So why am I blogging about this? Because I think this is a process that many of you should take a look at for your schools. Basically, here is why I think this image is so good:

1. Jim (and his team) have created a custom Ubuntu Netbook Remix image that's optimized for battery life and made it available for anyone to download and use (with step by step directions). You can use their image or modify it for your own needs. (For my school, this included customizing the launcher to add the apps and shortcuts we wanted available to students on the main screen, changing the default save settings in Open Office, changing the homepage and security settings in Firefox, adding the Diigo toolbar to Firefox as well as the Compact Firefox extension, adding the right printer, and running a script at startup to change the keyboard settings – more on that below.)
   
   
2. This image installs from a flash drive in about six minutes.
   
   
3. It uses open source software, so less of your limited dollars are going to licensing costs. Linux is also a relatively "thin" OS, so it runs pretty well on netbooks even though they have less horsepower.
   
   
4. The image has a built-in, 10-second system recovery option on reboot (adds 10 seconds to the normal reboot time). Yep, I said 10 seconds. Wait, it gets better. The recovery preserves user documents. (You can also choose to wipe out user docs, but that process takes a little longer.) And, unlike the built-in recovery option in the ASUS Xandros distribution, this doesn’t restore to factory settings, but to your image – with all changes, settings, and printers preserved. This is also a recovery process that a teacher can do, without having to track down a tech support person or wait until they have time to troubleshoot it – they can restore on the fly in the classroom (assuming it’s not a hardware issue), so it minimizes impact on instructional time.
   
   
5. It uses the Netbook Launcher interface, which I think is more productive for students and also looks nicer. (IMO, the Xandros interface doesn’t look as professional, which I think makes a difference for high school students, and also requires more clicks to get to what you want.)
   
   
6. It doesn’t lock things down (although you could if you really wanted to) – students can make modifications as they need to. And the beauty is that if students make a modification that causes a problem, you’ve got that 10-second restore option. To paraphrase something Jim said to me, instead of trying to lock everything down, let’s allow students the flexibility to do creative things with their devices. We protect our servers and infrastructure with solid security, but instead of locking down their devices we focus on quick recoverability. (This fits in well with my school’s overall philosophy of having high expectations of students and trusting them to do the right thing most of the time.)

So, what did this mean at my school? After tweaking Jim’s image I then put that image on sixteen 4 GB flash drives (the image would actually fit on a 2 GB drive). Creating that initial set of flash drives did take several hours, but now they are ready for any subsequent image I want to put on them. (And you can quickly add two files that Jim calls “Simple Updates” that I used for adding the printer I wanted for each cart.) We have 32 in each of our carts, so I then imaged half of the cart in about 10 minutes, then the other half in another 10. After about 20 minutes, I had a cart of 32 done, with all the apps, shortcuts, printer and settings I wanted, and with a built-in recovery option. Compare this to the Xandros distribution, where I was looking at 30-45 minutes per machine out of the box to get them ready to go, and without a recovery option that kept my settings. (Plus the Xandros by default doesn’t have things like Audacity or Gimp that are part of my image.) When I went to the next cart all I had to do was replace two small files on each flash drive to add a different printer to the image. I was able to have all 198 netbooks ready on day one with students, with the apps, interface and settings we needed.

Here are some screenshots:







Now, full disclosure, it did take me longer than twenty minutes per cart, but that’s because I decided to do one more thing – switch the functionality of the right-shift key and the up-arrow key. On the Eee 1000’s the up-arrow key is in the place where you naturally press when you try to shift with your right hand. During our staff development, that meant that every time someone tried to capitalize something on the left side of the keyboard, they ended up arrowing up instead of capitalizing. So I went out and found a script on the web, figured out how to modify it for the Eee 1000, and that’s now part of my image. It runs at startup and switches the functionality of those two keys. The reason it took me more than twenty minutes per cart is that after I imaged them, I also took the time to physically switch the right-shift and up-arrow keys on the keyboard. This is not difficult, but it is a pain, and about every ninth or tenth one I messed up the little connector and it would take me anywhere from two to twenty minutes to get it fixed. But, if you chose not to do this, it’s about twenty minutes a cart.

If you have netbook computers in your district, or are considering them, I would urge you – or your tech folks – to take a look at the wiki documentation Jim and his team have created (which includes a ready-to-go image you can download). Also, keep in mind that his image should work on most netbooks, not just Eee’s, although you may have to do a little tweaking. Thanks Jim and team, for making a difference for the teachers and students at my school (not to mention for me personally), and for being willing to share your hard work.

With apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein . . .

Linux on netbooks and my great P-L-N;
Jim Klein, his wiki and Steve Hargadon;
Meaningful learning tied up with (virtual) string;
These are a few of my favorite things.

When NCLB bites,
When the filter stings,
When I’m feeling sad,
I simply remember my favorite things,
And then I don’t feel so bad.

More Than a Passing Trend Part II

On the heels of my previous post I came across this video by Erik Qualman - some interesting observations in the comments to his post. I'll present it here without comment of my own, other than I think there are some interesting ideas to consider here.



Oh, one more thing. I believe this falls into the category of "D'oh!" Any chance you think they'll do retroactive revenue sharing?

How Many People in Your Family?

This post is more of just an extended tweet than it is a blog post, but I thought it might be interesting to share.

My daughter had a math assignment where she was supposed to gather data on how many people were in people's families, then graph it and determine things like median, mode, range, maximum and minimum (interestingly, not the mean, although they've done that for other problems - which is probably good since median makes much more sense for this problem). Just for fun I created a quick Google Form and tweeted it out.



The only required question was "How Many People in Your Family?" with some directions on how to define that for this problem, but then I also asked (just because I was curious) two optional questions: your location and your age.

Well, that quick tweet generated 95 responses (so far). Since Abby is at the point where it's still really hands-on with the data and you generate graphs by hand (to get a better understanding of the concept), that was a little more than she needed, so she decided to just use the first thirty-two. Here are her results:










In case you're curious, here are the results for all 95 data points:

The median and the mode were both 4 and the standard deviation was 1.54.

For those of you curious about the ages of the respondents, the mean was 40.37, the median and mode were both 39, and the standard deviation was 10.96. (It might be interesting for someone to do a more randomized survey of educational tweeters to see if anything could be deduced from the results - both age and family size data.) We had responses from all over the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia and Thailand.

So, nothing profound here, but I just thought it was interesting in several respects. First, how many folks responded to a tweet that obviously was not going to have much benefit for/impact on them. Second, how easy it was to generate data via a tweet and a Google Form (not randomized, I realize, but still interesting). Finally, I found the age and family size of the folks who responded interesting, even if I can't draw any major conclusions from it. (Perhaps: The mostly educational twitterers who follow me and responded to this tweet are typically between the ages of 30 and 50 and have two to five people in their immediate family - not a huge surprise.)

Thanks to everyone that helped Abby with this assignment and, if you have anything more profound you can generate from this, feel free to leave it in the comments.

More Than a Passing Trend

I wrote an email to an editor at the Denver Post last Sunday in response to an editorial titled, Twitter: A Medium without a Message (please read it before reading the rest of this post).

Now, this is somewhat ironic because, while I certainly use Twitter, I'm not a frequent user compared to many folks and I don't necessarily think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. But I truly felt like he was missing the point somewhat, and he generally seems like a thoughtful guy (even if I don't always agree with him), so I dashed off a quick email in about eight minutes or so.

I then tweeted about it (of course) and wondered a couple of things. First, I wondered:



Why did I feel like email was a more "personal" way to connect with Dan Haley?

Then I wondered this:



And:





Why would I give less thought and care writing an email to an editor of the Denver Post then I would to a blog post? Perhaps Jenny Nash got it right that it's due to the perceived audience:


In any event, I've obviously decided to repost it here, with the caveat that, again, I'm not sure it really does justice to the argument I was trying to make. So, I'm counting on you guys to add to it in the comments or link to posts that are already created about the value of Twitter, just in case Dan Haley stops by.

So, here's the email I sent (unaltered, much as I would like to refine it before posting it here)

Dan,

I read your editorial today about Twitter and wanted to share a few thoughts. While I'm not a huge Twitter user, and I won't argue that it's the greatest thing ever, I think one of the reasons you're not finding it valuable is that you're following the wrong people. Part of that you can't help, as you said politicians are "the people you 'follow' for a living." The problem is that most politicians use Twitter in one of two ways. As you indicated, they either use them as glorified press releases, or as a way to appear "folksy" to their constituents. There's nothing wrong with that, but it's not all that interesting and, as politicians, they're somewhat constrained from being "real" on Twitter because it could come back to haunt them. You also mentioned celebrities and, well, unless you're really interested in a particular celebrity, most of them aren't that interesting either.

I would suggest that if you want to see the real power in Twitter, you need to follow people that are passionate about the same things you are passionate about. Since politicians are interesting to you, but are somewhat constrained as indicated above, then find some folks that are writing about politics and follow them on Twitter. Then find some folks that are passionate about journalism (I'm assuming you are) and follow them. And then find some folks that are passionate about some hobby of yours and follow them. If you do that, I think you'll find more value in Twitter.

As an example, I'm an educator that's passionate about trying to meet the needs of our students in a world that is vastly different than the one that most educators grew up in. So I mostly follow other educators who are thinking and writing and linking and tweeting about education. There is a bias toward tech using educators, partially because that's my role in my school - technology coordinator, but also because those folks have a higher presence on Twitter. But I also follow interesting folks that aren't specifically educators writing about teaching and learning but are always finding interesting and relevant ideas and information that help me do my job as an educator - and as a citizen. Every time I dip into Twitter I always find a relevant resource or tool I can share with the teachers in my building, or a link to a blog post or a website or a podcast or a video that helps my thinking around what education should look like. I have teachers on six continents - most of whom I've never met face-to-face - but I learn from them every day.They are part of my own Personal Learning Network, an extended network of people around the world that I can not only learn from every day, but that I can connect teachers and students in my building with to help them teach and learn in a rapidly changing, technology-rich, globally-interconnected world.

Yes, I also find many tweets that aren't along those lines, that are more "personal" if you will, but that's a huge part of community building. Just as in face-to-face communication, folks that establish trust and some personal connection have a much better chance of connecting around more significant issues as well. I would guess that at the Post, teams of people that have some personal relationship and connection are more productive in the long run, particularly around big issues or projects, because they have a relationship that's more than "just" business, and they have some common frame of reference. It's the same on Twitter, and some of those "this is what I'm doing" type tweets help establish that.

So, while I agree that there is a lot of hype about Twitter right now, I would ask you to take a closer look at it. I would ask you to get beyond the press releases and the celebrity gossip, and talk with some folks that were using it before the hype and that find tremendous value in it. (I can connect you with some very thoughtful folks using Twitter if you'd like.) It doesn't matter if Twitter is the particular tool that has staying power, or whether something else comes along to replace it. What matters, and what should be interesting to you as a journalist, is how thoughtful folks are using it to help them learn, grow and be more productive. Surely that is more than simply a "passing trend."

Thanks for reading.