1. Get a GorillaPod for your iPhone and download GorillaCam (free) or iTimeLapse (paid).
2. Set it up somewhere to capture the “assembly zone” and start the capture.
3. Curse and swear at the IKEA parts and instructions for hours
4. Stop capture, assemble video and post to YouTube so everyone can make fun of you.

It’s that easy! Here’s the result:

We’ve heard amazing talks and ideas already in this first hour… Some that stood out for me were -

Ian Goldin, who presented “6 Things You Need to Know about 2030″ and talked about both the perils and amazing opportunities of continues growth in technology and globalization.

Rachel Pike, who presented “What makes a climate headline”, talked about the massive amount of work that is behind even the tiniest of publications for climate research.

Jim Walker unaided by visuals gave us a great imagining of the future of power controlled by intelligent application of information technology.

Julian Treasure, who presented “Sound Affects”, talked about the physiological and psychological effects of sound.

The list goes on and on…  but what I loved about their presentations is that many of them proposed a strong and viable solution to the problems they discussed.  Their ideas filled me with hope about the future.  So what really struck me was that our key to surviving and thriving as the human race will not be whether we can come up with solutions to problems in education, energy, climate change, globalization, etc…  Many solutions are already there.  The main question is:   Will we collectively listen and act?

So, will you listen?

Now, because of this inclination, I love minimalist interfaces and, of course, the iPhone which has tons of very simple apps that make your life easier, better or generally more fun with very little input.

Lately, I’ve spent a lot of time on my road bike.  I’ve been cycling since I was a teenager and never have I seen a sport so over techno-fied (except maybe golf).  Cycling computers can report all kinds of information these days:  your heart rate, speed (in a million different forms), cadence, power, elevation, grade, etc, etc…. it goes on and on.  This information is absolutely critical to professional cyclists riding in the Tour de France, but I’m definitely no Lance Armstrong.  I mostly enter races for fun and to have a goal to train towards.   I always want to get better but for me that usually just involves getting off my butt and riding more.   But of course I, like many others, just can’t help analyzing every ride to see whether I was a tiny fraction better than I was the last ride no matter how irrelevant that information actually is to my amateurish, squeeze-in-between-wife-3 kids-and-job workouts.  My problem is that if I have all that information constantly being reported to me, I obsess over it and forget about enjoying the ride.   But can I let go of that information?  It is useful and motivating in the long run to see where you were and how far you’ve come.

Enter my trusty iPhone and the app iMapMyFitness.  With this app, you press Start and put it away in your jersey pocket.  You can ride, run, mountain bike wherever and however you want, and it records everything:  how fast you went, what route you took, elevation gains, and all kinds of other tidbits.  This way, I can just ride, enjoy the fresh air, great scenery and general burning of my lungs and legs.   Once I get home, I hit Stop and my ride is uploaded to Mapmyfitness.com (a.k.a mapmyrun.com, mapmyride.com) and their legendary training analysis and fitness social networking service.  There I can obsess about it all I want when I’m back in front of my blinking, blipping computer.

2 buttons to press, TONS of value… my kind of technology.

I’m tired of hearing (mostly on Twitter) about amazing, progressive and innovative teachers having to do their work in spite of their school or district IT departments.  IT departments should be enablers of technology use in a school, not trying to prevent it from happening.

Control, in the sense of school-wide IT policies and restrictions, really means supportability and security. The only reason these policies are really placed is that the less variables you have in a technology infrastructure the less you have to support, maintain and secure. Homogeneous is good in this sense. However, control limits freedom, which limits creativity, and in a time when the world is focusing on how to improve education, is this really what we want to be doing?

In a school setting, locking down teacher and student laptops, filtering the internet, etc. simply means you will not get the net benefit out of your technology investments.  You will not see any improvement in the way teaching and learning happens.  There are amazing creative teachers out there that know far more about using technology in the classroom than IT professionals. 

Standards, supporting and security are definitely important so how do we strike the balance between supportability/security and freedom in a technology infrastructure?  Here are a few points I’ve learned:

• IT departments must understand that a little user freedom is not the end of the world.  Many colleagues are shocked at the level of freedom we give to our teachers and students at our school.  But they also are shocked that we actually don’t have tons of problems caused by it.
• Cater to the user’s that need the support and give freedom to those who don’t.  Have a set of applications that are official, supported and promoted but allow people to use others if they desire.
• If users constantly attempt to go around standards, perhaps the standards aren’t good enough. Solutions provided should provide enough value for people to want to use them. If not, then you need to question whether the value is there and respond accordingly.
• Use passive monitoring:  If you must, monitor Internet use and applications installed and deal with abusers individually and directly instead of restricting the whole community.  It probably takes less time overall than administering a tightly locked down environment.
• Instead of forcing, try convincing.  It’s more effort but it’s worth it in the long run.

I am well familiar with the complexities of supporting and maintaining any IT infrastructure.  Total user freedom while maintaining budget and availability is a difficult thing to achieve and many cases may not be desirable.  However, we must understand the negative implications of restrictive IT policies on creativity, innovation and adaptibility, especially in an educational context.

We need to collectively let the reins out.  I’ve been an IT Director in a school for the last decade.  750 students and 110 teachers all with laptops, all with full administrative rights and no Internet filtering.  It is FAR from the total anarchy you might imagine.  Sometimes it might be a little more work, but it’s worth the effort overall.

Thinking about this concept in relation to how technology is implemented in the curriculum, I wondered:  what are some common curriculum design patterns in the application of technology in education that would provide guidance to teachers trying to improve how subjects are taught?  Can we provide a common language to the different ways technology can be applied in order to simplify our conversations?  Perhaps abstracting things somewhat will give teachers a better way to discuss and improve upon technology in education much the same way developers have been able to do in software design.

Here are a few that I came up with.  There are many more I’m sure but think about the ways you see technology applied in the classroom.  Can they fall under one of these categories or do they need a pattern of their own?

• Alternative Media for projects / assignments: Using technology to provide students with alternative ways of communicating their knowledge and understanding.  Example:  Instead of an essay, a short video commercial,  a historical radio show, a graphical collage in Photoshop, a blog post.
• Assignment workflow: Using technology for the distribution, creation, submission, marking and returning of assignments.
• Information Front-loading information:  using videos, websites, or other engaging media to ensure students enter the class with background in order to make the face-to-face discussion more worthwhile.
• Skill front-loading: Best explained with an example.  Titration experiments in Chemistry take a lot of time before, during and after a class.  Using titration simulations, students can do many experiments quickly to “get the feel” for the experiment before actually performing the true physical lab.   With the prior understanding, they can garner more from the lap experience when they go to do it.   A similar example might be using software to experiment with mixing colours before entering an painting class in Art.
• Crowd sourcing knowledge to make topics more relevant / interesting.  For example, when discussing social issues, a teacher might leverage the students’ access to SMS on their cell phones or a social network to obtain “real world” statistics relevant to the topic.
• Visualization: Use of technology to allow students to visualize difficult concepts more effectively.  Tools like Wordle, Efofex’s FX MathPack, and many others. would fall into this category.
• Providing Context: Using technology to provide better context to what’s being discussed.  For example,  when discussing Gangis Khan’s conquest in History, Google Earth might be used to give students a better perspective of the regions affected.

In the original “Design Patterns” book, the authors known as the “Gang of Four” outlined 23 patterns in software development.  Now there are many more.  How many “patterns” are there for applying technology to bettering education?

• How do you balance innovation with standardization in a school?  You want to have and encourage innovative teachers but there does need to be a common experience for students both across sections and across courses within a school.
• Cloud services – huge wave hitting IT across industries…  where is it going and how will schools ultimately benefit from them?
• Google Apps For Education vs. Microsoft Live @ EDU – both are very attractive offerings for schools (especially considering the price tag).  What’s the better offering?  Will one win out?
• Frictionless collaboration – see this amazing post by Andy McAfee (a blog on Web 2.0 worth following) for more details
• Microblogging tools like Twitter and Yammer- how can these change / improve collaboration within an organization?

I have more questions than answers these days but hopefully over the next while I can post some thoughts and results from my ongoing research.

My goal as an IT Director for so long has been to “shield” the details and complexity of technology from the average user. “It just needs to work and they shouldn’t need to understand how”, was my mantra. When I entered into the field of IT 10 years, I felt this to be a good strategy and arguably it was. I found success and a decent degree of customer satisfaction in the solutions and services that myself and my IT department have provided. However, I believe times are changing and this article highlights it well. Applications, devices, websites… all technology is becoming increasing configurable. Office applications can really be bent and molded to do all kinds of tasks they weren’t originally intended for. Even newer programming languages are becoming more and more accessible to “non-programmers”. Having the necessary skills to make technology do what you want, should no longer lie in the hands of a few geeks like me. Those who are able to bend technology, whether it be your productivity software, your iPod or the applications you require at work, will ultimately be able to add more value and be more effective in their organizations and communities.

The strange thing is that, simultaneous to this increasing requirement to “programming” the tools around you, there is little emphasis on computer science in K-12 education (particularly as a requirement for post-secondary education) and an “enrollment crisis” in computer science at the post-secondary level. I do not suggest and, neither does the author of this article, that everyone in the world become professional programmers. However, the core skills of programming (such functions, logic, input/output, understanding the basic principles of computers etc.) are part of the necessary “literacy” one needs to remain effective and competitive in the world.

I’m becoming an advocate for mandatory early computer science education in K-12. Kids should be exposed to programming concepts at least at the grade 9 or 10 level if not much sooner. This will increase the digital literacy of our kids. It will also serve to encourage more kids into computer related studies and ultimately aid in solving the decreased enrollment in post secondary computer science.

Note: Although there are exceptions, F11 is a fairly standard hotkey for fullscreen in most applications. Not sure what the Mac equivalent is… anyone?