June 2004 Archives

I'm in Boulder for the Educause Leadership Institute this week, along with my colleagues Sara Gomez and Lori Stevens, and about 60 other participants.

So far there have been some really interesting sessions - most notably (for me, anyway) a session on emotional intelligence by Mark Sheehan from Montana State University. This was a new topic for me, and I liked the emphasis on how mood is a determining factor in leadership. Mark noted that while managers spend most of their time dealing with process, policy, and culture in organizations, leaders spend much time working with vision. That seemed like a deep insight to me.

Today there was a terrific session on IT policy in higher education from Tracy Mitrano from Cornell's Office of IT Policy , talking about all of the people that have to be involved in formulating institutional policies around IT and how having policies can be very advantageous.

That was followed by a talk by Brian Hawkins, President of Educause. Brian talked about what is necessary to be a CIO in higher education. He stressed the need to be more than an person knowledgable about IT - that it's necessary to be able to think and act knowledgeably in the interests of one's institution no matter whether it's in the realm of student recruitment and retention, faculty tenure matters, athletics or whatever.

And of course, we're taking advantage of Boulder to get out and do some professional team-building - here's some pictures of Sara, Lori and I taking a hike to to Boulder's Red Rocks this afternoon.

I realized that I've been carrying around some more impressions from the Sakai Educational Partners Program meeting last week in Denver without communicating them.

While it's still too early to assume that the Sakai effort to create an open source collaborative learning platform will be ultimately succesful, there is certainly a lot of momentum gathering behind the project. It seems like there is a fairly solid (though still evolving) technical architecture being created, a lot of smart people from major institutions around the country are thinking about how to contribute specific tools to the project, and (perhaps best of all) the community is forming around the project and learning how to express common concerns and work towards common goals.

While I still have some major concerns, most notably the thorny issue of how really good teaching/learning tools that have been created in languages other than Java (like our own Catalyst tools from the UW) can be integrated into this platform, I think that there's enough there there to warrant spending a considerable amount of time and effort with the Sakai folks.

Mara is a beekeeper, and she points out that her experience in listening to the level of the buzz is applicable to her work on the Sakai board ...

Berkeley is planning to use their new gradebook in pilot mode in Fall 2004, and then integrate it into Sakai. It has been developed as a Sakai application, but for the initial deployment they are wrapping the single tool with a "psuedo-Sakai" layer.

MIT is also developing a Sakai gradebook. MIT and Berkeley will look at possible convergence at some point.

Berkeley has a nice graphing option in the gradebook that shows a box-and-whisker graph of grade distributions. If you're only looking at a single student it shows you a bar graph instead.

The psuedo-sakai approach uses JSF, Hibernate, and Spring as basic technologies.

ETUDES is the course management system used at Foothill-DeAnza College, developed by a Computer Science professor in 1995. Foothill created the Etudes Alliance in 2002 to ensure long-term sustainability of ETUDES for community colleges, mostly in California. They began a redesign and redevelopment of the software in 2002.

They undertook a needs analysis among faculty, and identified a list of some 50 features that would be necessary in a CMS for community colleges - about 30 of those are present in the initial release of Sakai.

In 2003 Hewlett Foundation approached Foothill with an invitation to develop something equivalent to MIT's Open Courseware Initiative - they went back to Hewlett to say that in order to do this they need to have a common CMS platform for the content, at that point proposing developing ETUDES as an open source effort for community colleges.

They ended up with a scaled back program to create 20 sets of open courseware during 2004 - created an organization called SOFIA - (Sharing of Free Intellectual Assets). In addition they submitted a second proposal to extend Sakai to meet the needs of community colleges, which Hewlett funded. They are contributing two developers into the Sakai effort. Their priorities are designing/building a simple content authoring tool, migrating current ETUDES users to Sakai, and faculty training adn support.

Willie points out that there are pressures on the Sakai effort that need to be addressed. The formation of alliances with other areas is critical - e.g. bringing Educause more into the effort. It's more than just technology - there has to be a strong communication layer to this effort, both among the partners and outside - we need to work together to unify efforts to avoid unnecessary duplication.

Chris Coppola from the rSmart group is talking about the Open Source Portfolio Initiative

OSPI is currently at release 1.5 - was derived from U of Minnesota's software. It's a Java-based piece of software.

The big realization for me, about two minutes into Chris' talk is that an electronic portfolio is centered around an individual - not a course, not an institution. The portfolio will ideally persist throughout an individual's career and will want to move with the person as they wander through their life. Portability that would enable this kind of persistence is one of the visions for OSPI.

OSPI is up to about 1,200 members in 77 countries - mostly people looking at the demo, "kicking the tires". The reality is that they don't know a lot about what people are doing with the software.

Version 1.5 features an XML/XSLT presentation engine.

For version 2.0, schedfuled for Spring of 2005, they have received funding from Mellon, U of Indiana, and rSmart. One object is to make the development process more transparent to the community. Individuals will be able to subscribe to some number of "common interest groups" which will provide structures. Examples of "common interest groups" might be a chess club, or undergraduate biology majors, or (in Indiana's case) the set of common rubrics (large scale student learning objectives) used for undergraduate education.

The goal is to have the Portfolio as a Sakai tool.

SAMIGO is an assessment tool that uses an Asynchronous, Web-based Interaction model:
- instructor asks questions
-student responds; gets feedback (immediate or delayed)
- instructor grades and makes comments

A Sakai tool for creating, distributing, taking, and grading assessments. It grew out of previous work at Stanford and Indiana.

Features an item or question bank for instructors to keep their questions to pull from.

It allows for file upload and audio recording as types of question types (in addition to all the usual suspects).

They decided to support the IMS Question and Test Interoperability spec as their base data schema.

I'm at the first Sakai Educational Partners Program meeting in Denver.

Ken WIner is talking about uPortal and it's relationship with Sakai.

uPortal is the open source portal software that is a project born from the Java Architectures Special Interest Group (JA-SIG). uPortal began in December 1999 and has a lot of traction in the higher ed community (over 130 implementing organizations in at least 13 countries).

Two emerging standards for portlets (portal channels) - JSR168 (a java community process) and WSRP (a web services approach).

WSRP is a presentation-oriented web service - once you get the SOAP message back from the web service it already contains markup so it can be thrown right to the screen.

You can imagine uPortal acting as a WSRP consumer or producer. It allows the portal to communicate with other applications across heterogeneous technologies.

Pluto is the Apache project that is a portlet container, that is used in uPortal. In uPortal 2.3 (the current release) you have to use a "Portlet Adapter Channel" in uPortal.

SAKAI has thre different versions of interaction with uPortal:

- Embedded - Sakai runs as a portlet within a stock uPortal
- Injected - Sakai tools run as individual channels within a modified version of uPortal
- Integrated - Sakai tools able to run as inter-communicating processes within a future stock version of uPortal.

Paul Beard points out a new entry from Ed Felten about "The Future of Filesharing":

The best role for a university in the copyright wars is to do what a university does best: educate students. When I talk about education, I don't mean a five-minute lecture at freshman initiation. I don't mean adding three paragraphs on copyright to that rulebook that nobody reads. I don't mean scare tactics. What I do mean is a real, substantive discussion of the copyright system.

My experience is that students are eager to have serious, intellectual discussions about why we have the copyright system we have. They will take seriously the economic justification for copyright, if it
is explained to them in a non-hysterical way. They'll appreciate the wisdom of the limitations on copyright, such as fair use and the idea/expression dichotomy; and in so doing they'll realize why there are not exceptions for other things.

I'm not sure I agree that it will make a difference at this point - I think sharing music files has likely achieved too much of a lifestyle-as-usual status among students to be derailed by any talk about the legal or economic system.

Brian pointed me to this terrific talk that Cory Doctorow gave the other day to folks at Microsoft Research about why DRM does not and will not work. It's a great read.

The same thing happened to a lot of people I know who used to rip
their CDs to WMA. You guys sold them software that produced
smaller, better-sounding rips that the MP3 rippers, but you also
fixed it so that the songs you ripped were device-locked to their
PCs. What that meant is that when they backed up their music to
another hard-drive and reinstalled their OS (something that the
spyware and malware wars has made more common than ever), they
discovered that after they restored their music that they could
no longer play it. The player saw the new OS as a different
machine, and locked them out of their own music.

There is no market demand for this "feature." None of your
customers want you to make expensive modifications to your
products that make backing up and restoring even harder. And
there is no moment when your customers will be less forgiving
than the moment that they are recovering from catastrophic
technology failures.

I've got a Google mail account now (thanks, Liz!).

So far my minimal impressions are positive -

The signup process really impressed me - one very clean screen which hit on all the basics.

The web interface is clean and uncluttered. I like the fact that there are keyboard shortcuts available - that makes a mail client much more usable.

I'll have to start directing some list traffic into gmail to really get a feel for how it works with some volume.

For now, see Rafe Colburn's comments on the gmail interface.

More on gmail later.

Intel has developed the Wireless Technology Surfboard for the 2004 Intel sponsored GoldCoast Oceanfest at the North Devon free sports and music festival this weekend.
The tablet laptop based on Intel Centrino mobile technology allows a wireless Internet connection from the surfboard to a ‘hotspot’ on the beach. Intel has truly reinvented what we once thought was web surfing.

Check it out here and here.

Thanks, Wayne!

Our local alternative weekly, the Stranger, has a whole set of articles in the current issue completely nailing the Experience Music Project, Paul Allens' vanity project/museum here in Seattle. The section is titled "The Unbearable Suckiness of EMP".

Of the batch of articles, though I like the hyperbole of Erica Barnett:

EMP's failure as a music "experience," meanwhile, is simultaneously disappointing and utterly predictable. Did we really believe EMP would revolutionize museums with its shoulder-harness computers and really big digital video screens? Those vaunted Museum Exhibit Guides, clunky portable computers that play music and narration when visitors aim a laser at spots on certain exhibits, are distracting, heavy, and difficult to manipulate. In this age of iPods and handheld cell phone/computers, the MEG seems like a relic from the misty technological past. Worse, the guides now cost $3 each (or $5 for two), on top of the already steep $19.95 admission.

and appreciate the all-too-typical Seattle heartfelt angst of Emily Hall:

When a museum dies, it might be said that we get what we deserve. If the desperate, insecure-seeming new direction at EMP signals a kind of death, it is only the death of one more bloated, pandering cultural paradox for Seattleites to explain away.

I come closest to agreeing with Sean Nelson's view. Sean has the smarts to realize EMP's successes, which include funding KEXP radio (which operates in coordination with the University of Washington):

With webcasting, event promotion, an ambitious staff, and a great playlist, the broadcast wing of EMP is one of the leading forces in the current counterrevolution against the Clear Channeling of American music culture. Locally and nationally (and internationally), the station has basically invented an audience of intelligent, motivated listeners who actually make an effort to seek out and support new and important music.

the fact that EMP has done some good live music:

The sound in the room (to say nothing of on-stage) is so good that it can be alienating to people who think they prefer their PAs shitty. The towering video backdrop is an aesthetic choice. I like it because most rock bands aren't much to look at. More to the point, the Sky Church is the only venue of its kind in the Northwest. If you need a smoky, beer-stained den to make you feel more rock, you have no shortage of options.

and the success of EMP's stellar curatorial staff:

Founded on the seemingly contradictory goals of intellectual ambition and artistic transparency, the curatorial efforts of the EMP staffers have demonstrated significantly more success than the Funk Blast. The Pop Conference is a music nerd Valhalla. It's also the densest concentration of great arts thinkers and writers that Seattle has ready annual access to. The current SongCraft exhibit is full of interesting ideas and displays, and so, frankly, is the Beatlemania room. EMP's work with children, who are typically provided no musical education of any worth by public schools, more than justifies the existence of the organization.

One thing that nobody has commented on (as far as I've seen) is the fact that perhaps the most valuable asset of EMP is not the Frank Gehry building or any of the physical artifacts on display, but the thousands of hours of filmed and videotaped interviews and performances they have with a panoply of significant musicians from all walks of life. If EMP management had any sense at all of what is really worthwhile they would stop trying to realize a few bucks from outrageous admission prices and figure out how to make these materials available to the public. Imagine the value in inner city schools of being able to see the originators of hiphop talk about the dedication and work involved in giving birth to a new art form.

Unfortunately, in the rush to cut staffing and make EMP self-sufficient, this incredible body of work is likely to be devalued if not lost entirely. So much for entrusting culture to the local billionaires.

My colleague Frank Fujimoto points out this interesting interview with Scott Collins from Mozilla.org (by the way, if you haven't tried Firefox 0.9 yet you really should).

The interview with Scott makes me doubly sad that I cancelled my trip to Portland today, where I was supposed to attend the NWACC conference and have dinner with Mitchell Baker.

If time is nature's way of keeping everything from happening at once, it seems like it's doing a rather poor job of it in my life lately.

Anyway, back to Scott's interview - this part struck me, especially in light of Joel's article that I cited this morning:

The main thing we've been looking out for, is to not build our browser in a way that encourages special standards that no one can keep up with or features that encourage people to do things the wrong way, or something that blocks out another browser. I think that you can integrate deeply into the target platform without jeopardizing the web experience and building a non-compliant tool.

Joel on Software has a terrific article about the state of Windows programming. Give it a read.

Unfortunately, these Brave New Strategies, things like .NET and Longhorn and Avalon, trying to create a new API to lock people into, can't work very well if everybody is still using their good-enough computers from 1998. Even if Longhorn ships when it's supposed to, in 2006, which I don't believe for a minute, it will take a couple of years before enough people have it that it's even worth considering as a development platform. Developers, developers, developers, and developers are not buying into Microsoft's multiple-personality-disordered suggestions for how we should develop software.

Hyperlinkomatic - Doesn't that sound like the title to a Prince song?

Anyway, Cory points this out, and it looked cool enough for me to give it a whirl.

What Is This..?

After all, the net's bigger than a favorites list. And it's not getting any smaller...

This is too cool - as noted in the Creative Commons weblog:

Thanks to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics from Naropa University, you can hear hundreds of hours of lectures and readings by Burroughs, Ginsberg, Anne Waldman, Amiri Baraka and others all of which have been posted to the Archive as part of the Naropa Collection. As of this writing there are 147 (!) uploads to the stunning collection.

Available on the Internet Archive here.

Liz has a nice post noting how networks of blogs have made the "invisible colleges" (the links of colleagues not connected formally by institutional affiliation who share thoughts, writings, and professional gossip, and frequently play a major part in the advance of scholarship) visible, and wondering what that bodes for the future of both scholarship and the university. Worth reading and thinking about.

One thing I've noticed over the last ten years is that faculty tend to identify with their discipline and peers first, their departments second, and their institution last. This comes as a constant surprise to people who work in the central administration.

This socialization and learning who knows whom is a large part of what makes going to graduate school worthwhile. It's interesting to think about the effect that the visibility of networks made possible by all of this self-publishing and commenting might have on people entering a scholarly field.

...social-software-supported networks have become closer to the ideal of the faculty commons than anything on a real campus has ever been.

So, what happens to research and scholarship—what happens to the current concept of a university, in fact?—when these formerly invisible colleges become not only visible, but more important than the traditional, geographically and disciplinarily (not a word, I know, but there isn’t one for what I want) bound colleges we’re accustomed to?

Who knew that John Kerry had a band called the Electras in high school?

More on Kerry's rock and roll history, including some samples of tunes, at KerryRocks.com.

Thanks to Mark Frauenfelder of BoingBoing for pointing this one out.

Washington State is rolling out WiFi on some of the more heavily used ferry routes this summer. It's in the PI - here.

Interestingly enough, they didn't have any winning bidders on the food concessions on the ferries this spring. You can read your email, but don't expect to eat.

While not as amazing as these 400 micron wide versions of the Angel of the North and the Tyne Bridge, here's a not very good picture of the unix Pine email client running on one of our unix servers on my Nokia cell phone.

This is possible thanks to PuTTY for Symbian OS, a port of the very useful PuTTY terminal program. I'm sure I don't want to spend a whole lot of time reading email this way, but it's impressive that it works!

Now I'll have to check out the predictive typing capability on the cell phone, because trying to enter any amount of text on a telephone keypad really sucks.

and why the future security problems will be even worse. The article is here.

Witty represents a new chapter in malware. If it had used common Windows vulnerabilities to spread, it would have been the most damaging worm we have seen yet. Worm writers learn from each other, and we have to assume that other worm writers have seen the disassembled code and will reuse it in future worms. Even worse, Witty's author is still unknown and at large -- and we have to assume that he's going to do this kind of thing again.

John Gruber has written a new essay in his Daring Fireball blog speculating about the social (rather than technical) reasons that Macs have less security problems than Windows boxes. I'm not sure I buy the argument, which centers on a contention that Windows is a bad neighborhood (or as John puts it, "Mac users don’t tolerate shit"), but I did like this bit:

So, let’s concede the point, just for the sake of argument: OK, fine, if the Mac had the same market share as Windows, the tables would be turned and there’d be just as many Mac security exploits as there are Windows exploits today.

Now what? Given that the Mac is never going to attain a monopoly share of the operating systems market — that merely expanding its share to, say, 10 percent would be universally hailed as an almost-too-good-to-be-true success — isn’t it thus only logical to conclude that the Mac is forever “doomed” to be significantly more secure than Windows?.

Apple announced the release of the AirPort Express yesterday. This is a nifty looking little device that acts as a wireless streaming music hub, a wireless repeater, and a wireless print server, all for $129.

I've been pretty happy up till now with my Slim Devices Squeezebox for streaming music to my stereo over the wireless network. The one big problem with the Squeezebox has been that it hasn't been possible to play music purchased from the iTunes Music Store with it - that's due to the fact that those tracks are encoded with Apple's proprietary Digital Rights Management technology. There was a workaround for this using the iTunes LAME encoder, but Apple broke that with the release of iTunes 4.5.

I, along with others, have been assuming right along that the reason Apple used DRM in the iTMS tracks was a result of pressure from the music industry to do something about file sharing of purchased tunes. The DRM has been a pain in the behind for those of us who use music in multiple places - in addition to not supporting my Squeezebox, I haven't been able to put iTMS tracks onto my Rio flash-memory mp3 player, or move them freely about the many computers I use regularly (though with 4.5 Apple increased the number of computers you can authorize to play your iTMS tracks from three to five).

But now it becomes apparent that the proprietary DRM scheme is part of a strategy to keep people locked into buying Apple hardware. I think it's unfortunate that smaller innovators, like Slim Devices, will be forced out of competing in this market, and I think the strategy reflects poorly on Apple's claim for the hearts and minds of open-source developers and afficionados.

Having said that, I'll be picking up an AirPort Express to try it out myself.

CNET reports on a new study that shows that CD prices came down 4 percent in the first quarter of 2004 (to $13.29). It's about time the market reacts to the pressure of a new distribution mechanism.

I've been saying for years that if CD prices had been in the $5 range instead of three or four times that that Napster and the other file sharing services never would've been invented.

Last year one of the acts I was most looking forward to seeing at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival was Michael Franti and Spearhead.

Michael Franti was the moving force behind the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy back in the '80s and has done various projects since, but has been mostly playing with Spearhead in the last few years.

Unfortunately we had to skip the festival last year due to a death in my family, so we didn't get to see Spearhead. But just last week my friend Ed Lorah turned me on to some recordings of Spearhead, and I think I'm in love - playing 'em over and over again. Grooving, angry, yet hopeful hip-hop / roots music - what more could you ask for?

The official Michael Franti and Spearhead web site is here, including links to recorded shows that can be downloaded - check 'em out!

the party ain't started till the speaker's blown!

Jeff Reifman, a former Microsoft technology manager who currently works for Groundspring.org, has a good feature article in the current issue of the Seattle Weekly about the problems currently facing Microsoft. There's nothing really new in his analysis of the situation, but I think there are two unusual things about it:

1. Hearing this kind of talk from someone who spent eight years working at Microsoft and who considered himself a died-in-the-wool MS loyalist.

2. Seeing this kind of in-depth analysis in a publication for the general public, instead of just in trade rags or web sites that preach to the choir.

The article starts off:

Why are Microsoft products so endlessly frustrating to use? Even techno-geeks like me get annoyed by Windows. I’m tired of spending the first 10 minutes of my day rebooting just so I can get to work. Microsoft Outlook 2003, the latest version of the company’s e-mail and calendar software, hangs for me about once a day, requiring me to restart my PC. I also have a problem with Word 2003: Whenever I bullet a line of text, every line in the document gets a bullet. Asking Windows to shut down is more of a request than a command—it might, it might not. And recently, Internet Explorer stopped opening for me.

I know I’m not alone. If you’re like me, you’ve invested in technology to become more efficient and productive but mutter about the many frustrations of the digital lifestyle. Technology is my hobby as well as my job, so I regularly ponder why software giant Microsoft Corp., which has more than $56 billion in cash, hasn’t solved more of these problems.

And it concludes:

Meanwhile, Microsoft doesn’t evoke passion in me anymore. Its products don’t excite me anymore. I remember eagerly looking forward to Outlook 2003, only to be disappointed by how complex, buggy, and unimproved it was. “There’s kind of an angst,” says Andrews, the Seattle Times columnist and author. “Microsoft ought to matter to us. There ought to be more of an intellectual and emotional connection. There just isn’t.”

In an age when retailers hire consultants to analyze what hip kids do, you’d think Microsoft would care more about what the hip kids are doing. They’re running around with iPods, using Linux and OS X. A Groundspring intern e-mailed me recently about his new Apple PowerBook: “I think I may be smitten by a computer.” That’s the kind of passion I’m talking about. In its search for market share, dominance, and profits, Microsoft lost the ultimate battle for our hearts and minds. For now, though, it’s still laughing all the way to the bank.

I've been spending a good part of the day, when I really should be doing more important things, banging my head against Apple's iSync, with increasing frustration and decreasing clarity.

I updated some data in my Address Book on my iMac, and wanted to reflect those updates on my Nokia phone. Since I had originally populated the address book on the phone with iSync I didn't anticipate any problems.

But after syncing the new data was not reflected in the phone. And upon further investigation, it's not reflected in my .Mac account either.

After hours of screwing around with various iSync settings, including refreshing all devices, twice deleting all of my .Mac contacts, and trying everything I can think of, I still have not been able to get any of my iSync targets to look like my desktop address book - and there's no documentation of any such problems anywhere I've looked so far.

I give up for today...

I hope not, because here's the current state of my Mac desktop with an Expose view of all the open windows - and it's only Tuesday morning after an three-day weekend.