Category: Technology

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Some version of justice

From MSNBC (via my Google account though, actually) comes this news, “Teachers’ porn conviction overturned.”

A substitute teacher was granted a new trial Wednesday after her conviction for failing to prevent students from viewing pornography on her computer raised thorny questions about who is ultimately responsible for screening unsavory online material.

The woman, Julie Amero, 40, of Windham, Conn., adamantly denied clicking on pornographic Web sites that appeared on her classroom’s computer screen in October 2004 while she was teaching seventh-graders at Kelly Middle School in Norwich.

Amero was convicted in January on four counts of risk of injury to a minor, but computer security experts and bloggers across the political spectrum rallied to Amero’s defense when evidence later emerged that her computer had been infected with spyware that caused pop-up ads to take over the screen.

First off, I don’t quite understand the way the law worked in this case– was this thrown out on appeal? Did a judge look at the jury’s decision and say “oh, this is just stupid,” and call for a new trial? It kind of sounds like the second one happened.

But second, I’m glad that someone came to their senses. I’m too lazy to go back and look at those articles now, but the level of dumb bunny -ness demonstrated by the jurors and other participants in the last trial on all this was startling. So Amero is getting a version of justice here for sure, but jeez, what an awful year or so it has been for her.

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No, this blog is not about…

I’m actually afraid to fill in the rest of that for fear that I will attract more “beyond spam” spam. Here’s what I’m getting at:

I’ve been actively ignoring my blog for the last few days simply because I am completely swamped with school right now. I was going/probably still will post something on EMUtalk.org about this, but I kind of feel like I have what I like to refer to as the spring/summer term blues. Here at EMU, we have fall term and winter term (what most folks call spring term), each of which are 15 weeks long, and two summer school terms called spring term and summer term. And actually, the naming makes sense since these are the seasons when these terms take place. It sure is heck not “spring” around here until April at the earliest.

But I digress.

The bad thing about spring/summer terms is that they are 7.5 weeks long, which means that everything moves twice as fast as a “normal” term. Thankfully, there aren’t as many meetings and the administrative load drops off in the spring and summer. But the teaching is very intense. Students taking these classes (as often as not in a mad dash to finish their college careers) do not always know what it is they’re getting themselves into, and are thus sometimes kind of crabby. And even though I’ve done this many times before (actually, I haven’t taken a whole spring or summer off in I don’t know how long), I am always surprised at how the work of the courses creeps up on me. Going to computers and writing, working on an article (I promise, I actually am working on it!), gardening, golfing, and just living my life has put me sadly and woefully behind.

Thus my blues, thus my purposeful ignoring of the blog. Again, I digress.

Anyway, I got an email from a colleague of mine who said that I had some spam of a male enhancement/performance nature on my site. I assumed it was of the typical sort of comment spam. But no, this was different; this spam was one where somehow the attack came on the header information of the blog itself. So, instead of seeing “Steven D. Krause’s Official Blog,” readers saw some information on various enhancement products beginning with a “v.”

I’m not sure this self-censorship is necessary, but I think it’s interesting….

So, if you come across this space and see that kind of message, rest assured, I didn’t do it. And I promise to return and be more vigilant about blog security soon. Really.

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The end of the 17 inch iMac?

From something called Think Secret comes this story, “Death knell tolls for 17-inch iMac.” This actually has something potentially to do with the world I work and teach in at EMU, as the last paragraph of this piece points out:

The omission of a 17-inch iMac means customers looking for a more affordable Mac or one with a smaller display, especially in the education market, will have to hang their hat on the Mac mini and buy a separate display.

We are (supposedly) going to get a computer refresh in on of the labs in the English department, and the original plan was to get the 17-inch iMacs. I don’t know if the powers-that-be are going to opt for the very stealable Mac minis or if they are going to bump us up to 20 inch machines, but I am hoping for 20 inchers, obviously.

At home, I have a 20 inch iMac (and a second 19 inch display, actually). It is true that the price difference was such that it didn’t seem “worth it” to me to get the 17 incher, especially given that the 20 inch iMac also came with a faster processor. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit there is a big part of me who thinks I should I have spent just a wee-bit more money and gone with the 24 incher….

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Might be a good book; might not

Technicity, edited by Louis Armand and Arthur Bradley. The blurb says (in part) “In this collection, a group of internationally-known figures within the fields of philosophy, linguistics and cultural studies come together to consider the meaning of “technicity” at the beginning of the 21st century.” So it might be interesting. But one of the things I think is weird is the table of contents. (pdf) It has the authors’ names in big and bold letters, and the title of their essays in harder to read and smaller italics. It’s almost as if it’s saying “pay no attention to what I’m saying; pay attention to who I am.” Hmm….

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Laptops alone don't save K-12 schools. Shocking!

There has been much talk/buzz lately about different school districts cutting laptop programs because, basically, they didn’t work. Or at least it turns out that they don’t work like pixie dust; it turns out that if you sprinkle a few laptops into K-12 classrooms, “magic” doesn’t happen.

The kick-off for all this was this New York Times article, “Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops.” Given that dropping laptops is likely to cause breakage, maybe this was not the right solution. Anyway, this was followed up in a variety of different places, but I think my favorite and potentially most teachable “text” on this was on NPR’s “Talk of the Nation” show. The show in question and some commentary is available here on their “Blog of the Nation.” There’s some good links on this site, including to the school district that was the subject of the NYT piece, to this article by Andy Carvin on PBS Teachers learning.now called “Schools drop laptop programs– but are they dropping the ball as well?” and something he runs called The Digital Divide Network.

On the show, they interviewed Larry Cuban and Nicolas Neglopante. I heard a bit from Cuban, and while I have a lot of respect for his work, I think he was pretty wrong. I contemplated calling the show myself when I heard some caller who more or less asked my question/made my point: of course laptops in and of themselves won’t do anything if teachers don’t know how to use them and if they aren’t willing or able to use them in their teaching. Schools simply haven’t provided the necessary training or motivation for teachers to make good use of the technology. I’ve heard this again and again from my own graduate students who are secondary school teachers, and I have read it again and again in the scholarship. But despite this being the most obvious of observations about what might have gone “wrong” with these laptops, Cuban simply had no decent answer or response. He even suggested that K-12 teachers are and always have been technologically literate and innovative.

I don’t want to make any sort of blanket statement about K-12 teachers of course, and I wouldn’t want to compare K-12 teachers as a group with higher ed teachers or whatever. But I’ve had lots and lots of secondary school teachers in our MA program in the Teaching of Writing over the years in my Computers and Writing, Theory and Practice, and I can say without a doubt that these students are not usually on the “cutting edge” in terms of technology. Many of them are down-right technophobes. And why should they be techno-literate? They typically teach in schools with crappy computer access, with bad tech support, and with little flexibility for integrating the technology into their classrooms. I mean, I’m not trying to dump on K-12 teachers, but for Cuban to say (as he did, more or less) that 98% of the teachers he worked with were technically savvy is just not true.

I did agree with one thing he said though: laptop programs are an easy thing to cut because they’re expensive, they are “the source” of students doing (quasi)illegal things like downloading music, they enable things like the all-evil MySpace, and they don’t show up as a data point on standardized tests. In that sense, one could argue it’s remarkable that many laptop programs will continue.

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Automatic WordPress Generator (e.g., time to update around here)

I looked at my blog this morning with quite the fright, let me tell ya. I went to it with the intention of posting about an article I found on the tech divide between teachers and students in European schools (that will come later) and I just had a series of bizarre errors. It was before I had finished my first cup of coffee, so there was a little, um, nervousness on my part.

Well, long story short, I managed to update to the latest version of WordPress, and that in turn updated the database and now all is well. This all makes me realize that one of my (growing list of) summer projects around here is to update/clean things up around here. And I discovered today a new toy to help me do that: from a blog called “A Problem Must Be Solved, Resolved, or Dissolved” and written by a guy in Rotterdam comes the WordPress Theme Generator. I have no idea if it works or not, but I do know I’ll be playing around with it. If I ever get my spring term classes planned, that is….

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Some interesting Second Life Links

Both of these came from the tech-rhet mailing list, and they are both things I might have to contemplate including in English 516 next year:

“Angel Learning Island and Second Life”

sloodle, which I guess is some kind of combination between moodle and Second Life.

I have to say that my limited experiences with Second Life so far have suggested to me that it is, um, kinda goofy. But then again, I was not a big fan of MOOs either.