chronobits

After a week of waiting, my MacBook Pro is finally here. It has been five years since I last plunked down some change to get a G4 Powerbook. The G4’s hard drive had less than a gigabyte in space, the lower RAM slot was fried, and the warped case would pop out the power adapter every five minutes. What’s funny is the MacBook Pro looks almost identical. The real differences are under the hood. Compare this to the old laptop:

• 2.6 GHz processor vs. 1.5 GHz
• 2 GB of RAM (I’ll be upgrading to 4 GB soon) vs. 512 GB
• 230 GB of Hard disk space (about 214 GB is usable) vs. 80 GB

With all these additional features, I am debating loading my laptop with some additional software. In particular, I’m wondering if I should upgrade the Microsoft Office and Adobe Design Suites. Both software suites cost a fair bit money. I also tend to find them a bit bloated for my needs. I’m debating whether I can dodge Adobe by using Pixelmator and VectorDesigner. I think I’ll be able to get by with Bean and iWork instead of Office. I know iWork is a bit bloated, but its integration with iLife and lower price give it some clear advantages. I’m beginning to question each application and document I put on my hard drive. Like any diet, the trouble isn’t losing the weight, it’s keeping it off.

photo credit: Francois Schnell

I just dropped $1750 on 5 Asus EeePC laptops. I’m hoping to get some bang for my buck with this purchase. I’ll be distributing these in my seventh grade classroom. The laptops will primarily be used for web browsing and document editing. Since I’ve been making more resources web-based, these laptops should be able to handle most of the computer work in class. This is my first attempt using Linux with the kids. I’ve used on Linux on and off for a few years now, however, its never been my primary operating system. I wonder how the students will do with the switch. I’m hoping that they pick up the UI pretty quickly. With any luck, I’ll be able convince several other classrooms to make the switch as well.

I’ll most likely be installing the Eeexubuntu operating system instead on the pre-installed Xandros OS. Eeexubuntu is the low-power variant of the Linux OS Ubuntu. I’m more familiar with this flavor of Linux. The EeeUser Forums have been an invaluable resource for mucking around the EeePC.

Well, I got a little blowback from the teachers. Apparently they didn’t like competing against each other for classroom laptops. One teacher replied that she maintained her website because it was part of her job, not because of the laptop reward. It was interesting that the grade level website were maintained more frequently over the course of the contest. Maybe direct competition isn’t the way to go.

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I’ve always tempted students with external rewards to encourage participation. While the idealist in me believes in learning being its own reward, I think I would be foolish not to appeal to more basic instincts.

I’m starting the same tact with our teachers. I’m starting the laptop of the month program. This month the teacher who updates their site with timely information. I’ll be throwing bonus points for additional media (pics and movie) as well. The the games begin.

As the new year rolls in, I’m again reworking our technology plan in the face of paltry budget. The folks in our Tech Task Force smile at the $15,000 for our yearly budget. For some of their businesses, they couldn’t get through the day on those funds. In that sense, I’m upset at the peanuts I have this year.

In my disjointed way, I do revel in the having so little to work with. It forces me to be creative, recycle, breakdown, swap out, repurpose, and salvage. Without this limited budget, probably wouldn’t have even given the Asus eeePC a second glance. I might have ignored open source software with cheery distain as I eyed more shiny and proprietary software. For these reason, I am thankful for limited budget.

Futuriness is kinda like truthiness, but completely different. I’ll define futuriness as:

An event that has revolutionary qualities but could just be filled with hype and hot air.

Students 2.0 launched today. I can’t tell if this is an Alice-through-the-looking-glass moment or another blip on the radar screen. I’m hoping it’s the former. Part of my Irish-Catholic upbringing bristles at this open learning environment. The other 98% of me is waiting with bated breath to see this site catch fire. Sure it has the opportunity to fall flat on its face. But what genuine learning experience doesn’t have face-falling-flat quality to it.

I wonder if I can replicate this for my own students, within the walls of our school.

I give up. I thought that I could some how manage it, but the flood of emails is crushing my soul.

There was a time I plowed through my email with reckless abandon, sending replies and forwards peppered with insight and wit. A bad week saw my inbox rise to 10 emails, and even those emails inspired some OCD-induced anxiety.

Now I deal with email on a triage system. Those emails that are life and death get a response. The rest linger in inbox purgatory not knowing the salvation of a response nor the damnation of a deletion. Merlin Mann’s inbox zero seems like some cruel joke.

The pundits of the pipes have already declared for the next generation that email is already dead. They do their communication not only through IM, but Facebook and MySpace. Maybe I was born a generation too early.

I’ve come to bury blogspot, not to praise it.

Well I finally made the transition away from blog at blogspot. This site will be a sandbox to experiment with web design and other good stuff. Until next time.