Cornerstone Tech Blog

Staff Development Workshop: Tech Value & Bubbl.us

2009-03-26T08:47:00.000-07:00

Below is an example of the sort of mind-map one can create using the tool at www.bubbl.us. It summarizes my view of how to measure the value contributed to student learning by any given piece of technology.

Ubuntu Project: The Final Briefing

2009-01-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

What I Learned:

After several months of consultation and troubleshooting with Max, the student who volunteered to live on an Ubuntu laptop (see intro), I'm going to pronounce the Ubuntu project a qualified failure -- and by qualified, I mean that this is a failure out of which we both learned a lot.

Ubuntu failed to meet Max's day-to-day needs without extensive intervention which, owing to both of our schedules, we didn't always have room for. Here are the particulars:

If any college student is going to switch to Ubuntu, they'll need intensive, hands-on introduction at the beginning and professional support throughout the early stages.
Ubuntu does not integrate seamlessly (or sometimes at all) with the mobile devices on which Max's generation relies (as do plenty of his elders), and that's a huge drawback.
On a campus in which desktops running Microsoft Windows and Office are everywhere and freely available, most college students will not use an Ubuntu laptop, even if it's free. Microsoft has an abiding commercial interest in making sure of this.

Here are some more particulars from Max:

Last year, I didn't have a functioning living place. I was using public space a lot more. This year, I have a very organized house; I came back early from break. I can sit and study in my house instead of driving to the library every day.

I also wasn't as comfortable with Ubuntu, so when I really, really needed to get stuff done, I went to a public computer so I wouldn't have to worry about losing documents or not being able to do stuff. I hate doing stuff over again.

But I made a conscious decision back in November. I realized that I really wished I used the computer for everything, so over the break, I decided to organize my folders so that I could do literally everything through the computer. I also had problems with my old computer and so I was forced to use the Ubuntu machine. I took some time to get more comfortable with it, and now I am.

I've been taking all of my notes on the laptop, so at the end of the semester, I can just go and print out all of my notes for every single course. I made a template that has terms, concepts, everything I need.

Word documents and PowerPoint slides work really well on OpenOffice. I haven't encountered anything like formatting issues or stuff not displaying properly.

The problem with peripherals...

The only problem is that anything that isn't online has been difficult to put in here. I thought it would be a breeze to get a handout that the instructor didn't put on Telesis. The problem is that when I tried to hook the laptop up to a scanner, it wouldn't retrieve the scan. I ended up going to the ArtSci lab to scan stuff and putting it on a zip drive or e-mailing it to myself.

I've also never been able to get my Lexmark printer to work with Ubuntu. On campus, I put it on my zip drive or e-mail it to myself, but that's the same for people with Windows laptops, at least in the ArtSci lab.

Here are some of Max's observations on his reliance on mobile devices:

I figured out a way to get my music collection to work the way I wanted to, but I haven't gotten around to it. I also don't have a way to synch it with my phone.

My Sprint phone has stopped working twice now. They've had to reset the phone and that leads to me losing my contacts. If I had a Windows machine, I'd have all my contacts and could just synch them onto the phone, so if I wanted to do that, I'd have to save them onto some other Windows computer.

I don't use the calendar on here. I use my phone and my planner.

Thank you, Max, for your patience, forbearance, and willingness to try out new things that might (eventually, maybe!) benefit other students.

It's unclear what the next step in this exploration should be. I think I'll just keep it in the oven on warm...

Project Ubuntu: Report #3 - A Star Is Born

2008-11-03T08:57:00.000-08:00

Here's the latest report from Max, which shows a common pattern in the experiences of Ubuntu users.

For people who aren't afraid of a command-line interface -- where you actually type in a command that, in the usual graphic interface, would be a point-and-click of some kind -- Ubuntu is a dream.

Here' is Max's report:

This past week has been full of linux learning. In an effort to download tersus I learned that
.deb files are the default file that linux uses for efficient installation. furthermore I learned how to use the terminal, I used the terminal to update gimp the linux photoshop equivalent, I typed sudo get update, then used the command prompt for the password then added the gimp update that would allow me to save pictures in the "png" format. I have been thinking about installing another browser in case mozilla ever disfunctions, so I will be researching which other internet browsers work best on linux/ubuntu.

For clarity, here's is what Wikipedia has to say about "sudo" ...

The sudo (super user do, officially pronounced /ˈsuːduː/,^[2] though /ˈsuːdoʊ/ is also common) command is a program for Unix-like computer operating systems that allows users to run programs with the security privileges of another user (normally the superuser, aka. root). It is much like the "Administrator" status on Windows systems. By default, sudo will prompt for a user password but it may be configured to require the root password or no password at all.^[3] sudo is able to log each command run and in some cases has completely supplanted the superuser login for administrative tasks, most notably in Ubuntu Linux and Apple's Mac OS X

I'm not sure what Max's experiences so far tell us about how well the strictly point-and-click crowd would take to an Ubuntu-centered world. More to follow!

Project Ubuntu: Report #2 - Bumps in the Road

2008-10-28T07:50:00.000-07:00

So it seems our intrepid explorer, who I'll start calling "Max," spent the first full week of Project Ubuntu hobbled by software glitches.

In last week's episode, we learned that the system upgrades Max undertook to be able to listen to his music collection killed off his sound playback entirely.

The root of the issue turns out to be that because of legal restrictions, Ubuntu can't play common media formats out of the box. Max and I didn't know this starting out; if we had, we could have avoided the situation entirely by installing a third-party freeware player like VLC media player.

As it was, it seems like there was a conflict between the Ubuntu installation that came with the laptop, courtesy of Dell, and the device drivers Max downloaded in the course of trying to solve his music playback issue.

I asked Max to leave the laptop with me, and I resolved the issue, but I'm not sure how. I found some reports of Max's issue and attempted a fix other people had tried. The fix was only partially successful, but when, in a semi-desperate moment, I had the system perform another upgrade, the sound suddently started working again. Maybe the partial fix was enough, maybe today's kernel fixed the bug at the root of the problem. I just don't know.

In the end, it seems, all is well, but Max lost a lot of time to the issue, which was not one of the goals of this enterprise. And it took about an hour away from a technology support specialist and his knowledge of Linux, such as it is, to resolve.

I had known that for all its virtues, Ubuntu lacks the seamlessness of, say, Mac OSX, and I suppose that'll be out of reach for a while in the jumble of hardware and software from so many different sources.

Project Ubuntu: Report #1 - 48 hours

2008-10-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

Here's the first field report from our intrepid Ubuntu explorer:

I immediately tried to import all of my files from my zip drive onto the computer, as soon as o put the zip drive in the computer recognized the extra drive and I moved my documents to the desktop. My music mp3 files however did not work on the new ubuntu system. I connected the wireless network at the loop lofts and played music on youtube to ensure that media played, which it did. So the volume was audible, however the new computer was unable to play my music files.

I decided to update the computer and ubuntu recommended over 800 updates most of which were language translation tools I did not need. The interface did not have a fast way to only install the tools I wanted, so I had to unclick all of the tools I did not need and then press install list, in the end I installed 225 items, and it took about an hour.

After the new updates however, the volume stopped working and when I tried to open up the volume control, a pop up appeared notifying me that the gstreamer volume device and or plugin was missing. I looked for the plugin online and on the ubuntu website, but I couldn't find a credible enough location to download from. So I called the 1800 number and the associate directed me to the terminal where we searched for the missing gstreamer volume plugin, the terminal could not find it, which was weird because the volume was definitely working earlier when I was listening to youtube. The associate then advised me to re install ubuntu using the cd package, I am currently in the process of completing that task.

The organization of the ubuntu is actually much more succinct than both Macintosh and windows. The security options are more extending as well. I also like the fact that ubuntu brings a lot of the best savvy addons and plugins right to the desktop right with the add/erase applications bar.

Ubuntu has a lot more applications for database storage and web development which especially excites me, and specifically the control the user has is either greater tan the control on a pc or much more transparent. For example I changed the size of the cursor from average size to biggest in a matter of seconds, I have never experienced that degree of control on other computers. The computer is really nice, just seems as if this particular one did not have ubuntu installed on it properly at buildup, but I'll reprogram it afresh and give it another try.

The run option that is available on windows the start menu is not available on ubuntu.
Nothing I have used this far works less efficiently than it would on windows but as I begin to work more with open office and programming capabilities of the computer through jedit and gedit I am sure I will see more discrepancies.

Project Ubuntu is Afoot!

2008-10-15T12:09:00.000-07:00

An enterprising young TRiO student has agreed to undertake a run of using a laptop running Ubuntu to meet all his computing needs for the next six months.

I'll be getting regular reports on the qustionnaire below, weekly at first and then monthly, and will post them here:

1. What new tasks did you try to perform with the Ubuntu laptop this week/month, and what was the outcome? Please give as much in the way of detail as possible along the following lines

a) Description of Task
b) Comments on the experience, outcome, issues that arose

2a. What, if anything, has worked better than on a Windows PC?

2b. Have you discovered any capabilities you never experienced on a Windows PC?

3a. What, if anything, works less well than on a Windows PC?

3b. Have you discovered any capabilities you are used to on a Windows PC that are unavailable on Ubuntu?

LISTEN2READ: Text-to-Speech Tools for Accessibility and Enrichment

2008-09-30T12:26:00.000-07:00

For all its power, the printed word can be a barrier -- sometimes a large one -- for lots and lots of people. With ever more weight being put on reading and writing performance in higher ed, the pressure on people with language challenges has never been greater.

But even aside from limited vision or dyslexia and other language-specific issues, many of us come to the task of reading with cognitive traits that make for moments more difficult than people face.

For lots of people, in other words, the spoken word just sticks better. And for pretty much everyone, having the same text delivered by print and through our ears is bound to increase our capacity to understand and remember over print-only consumption.

Cornerstone has resources for any student who wants more than ink on a page or pixels on a screen.

We have Kurzweil 3000 running in the Tech Lab, which can take in text that's already in electronic form or, with a handy scanner, turn just about anything electronic. It has some really sophisticated character recognition and image cleanup capabilities that can take a lot of manual labor out of turning letters into bits.

Kurzweil is very expensive, about $1000, and only runs on one dedicated PC in the Lab.

But it also has the ability to output audio not just live to the person sitting in front of it but as high-quality MP3 files, which one can then save onto a portable media player such as the ubiquitous iPod.

Freeware Alternatives

The ability to read from formats like PDF or Word is pretty much limited to expensive desktop applications like Kurzweil. But there are some free applications out there that each offer a piece of Kurzweil's capability.

Adobe Reader 9, the ubiquitous PDF reader, has a live text-to-speech reader that serves well if you're sitting in front of a computer. The voice and pronunciation qualities have been getting better and better -- it's a perfect tool for the multitasker who wants to listen to a printed text while doing the laundry, say.

Text2Speech is a freeware application available via SourceForge that can take raw text -- in other words, anything you can select, copy, and paste -- and read live or export a WAV file. The sound and pronunciation are a bit rough.

VozMe is a web-based text-to-speech product if you need something truly on the go. It does what Text2Speech does minus the desktop application. Just paste text into the blank at vozme.com, and the page will spit out an MP3 file -- though with much lower quality than Kurzweil, Adobe, or even Text2Speech.

Come by the Cornerstone Tech Lab to try out any of these tools. Dr. Getty or any of the Tech Lab Assistants would be happy to give you the cook's tour.

Becoming an Ubuntu Evangelist

2008-08-30T13:34:00.001-07:00

This summer, which is now totally over, left a little room for experimentation. I used what room I had -- and a little more -- to take a hand-me-down laptop from Larry Handlin, Cornerstone's evaluation expert, and turn it into an Ubuntu machine.

Ubuntu, for those new to the topic, is a flavor of the Linux operating system, which is what you might call the third rail of computing.

Everybody knows Windows, most people know that Macs have a system of their own, but lots of people have no idea that there's a third, perfectly fine system out there, and that most of the time, it costs nothing. It's the fruit of a vast, collaborative community, open to everyone, that has worked across years, continents, and languages -- part of the so-called "open source" movement.

I chose Ubuntu because of its reputation for ease of installation and usability, and I have to say, it lives up to both. Plus, it comes with slick new versions of OpenOffice, another perfectly good, open-source package that offers us all the functionality of Microsoft Office at zero cost.

With Ubuntu 8.04, Larry's laptop -- which was a sluggish, quirky, cantankerous thing under Windows XP -- has been reborn. Fast, stable, quick to start and shut down. It's now running the slideshow that plays on the plasma screen at Cornerstone.

The only drawback so far is that you need a solid understanding of Linux in order to find and install new software. Until that changes, and until Linux takes more of the consumer desktop market, Ubuntu users will always be in a parallel world, more or less stuck with what the community supports.

But is that so bad? Most people I know only ever need a browser and an office suite.

So picture this. You're a student for whom every last penny has to count. You need a laptop because it seems like more and more of your professors expect you to have one. You need an office suite for writing papers, crunching numbers, and making flyers for the groups you belong to.

You can easily blow over $1000 for such a device if you go with, say, Dell + Microsoft Office, or over $1500 for the equivalent Mac setup. But with a used, high-end laptop off Craig's List and Ubuntu, you could be up and running for about $500.

It's hard to beat that kind of math, or the freedom that comes with it.

UPDATE: A very enterprising young TRiO student has agreed to a six-month trial run, using a laptop running Ubuntu 8.2 to meet all his needs. The experiment begins mid-October, and he will be posting updates on this blog!

Landmark Wrap-Up

2008-04-26T12:35:00.000-07:00

Earlier:
Intro
UDI Broken Down
Arrival
Day 1: Inspiration
Landmark by the Numbers

A half-day session Friday, having mostly to do with matters facing faculty and staff: curriculum design, professional training, and programs that Landmark has in place to reach out to students, faculty, and staff outside little Putney, Vermont.

I spent a good deal of time brainstorming about tech directions, especially after spending time on Friday with Steve Fadden taking a cook's tour of Landmarks' Usability Lab.

The lab is just big enough for one workstation and a desk with audio production equipment, but the gem inside is the eyetracker...

It's hard to make out in this shot, but you sit in front of a computer screen and put your chin on a little cup, see, and these big metal rings sit in front of your eyeballs while a digital imaging device helps the computer figure out what you're looking at.

It looks a little Clockwork Orange, or like that awful Schwarzenegger movie about clones, but what it does is really compelling.

Here are images, used with Steve's permission, of eyetracking data from two people reading a passage from War of the Worlds.

Here's the legend:

Red lines = Path of the eyes from point to point
Blue dots = Places where the eyes dwell for more than about 0.1 second; the larger the dot, the longer the stay.

The difference? The reader of the bottom passage is dyslexic. The larger dots mean about 1.5 seconds spent looking at the same spot on the page.

Is this not heart-rending? It certainly puts the standard sort of LD-accommodation for reading-intensive tests -- "time-and-a-half" -- in a new light, and it tells me that one of my priorities back home will be making Kurzweil, or screen reading of one variety or another, available for testing needs.

With people like Steve Fadden and Ben Mitchell on staff, Landmark is a national leader in pushing usability and accessibility of learning resources for people with learning and executive function disabilities. And the word from both of them is that it's a young, wide-open field with lots of roads leading to collaboration and grant money.

Even on a smaller scale, I think an eyetracker would be a fantastic thing to have around. Eye movement is like breath and heartrate -- we can control it consciously, but only up to a point -- a good deal of what goes on is involuntary or deeply conditioned. For instance, notice how neither of the two readers in the example above looks at the far left or right edges of each line? Turns out we use our near-peripheral vision for that.

Landmark's approach to learning is all about making the implicit explicit, about drilling self-understanding down to the finest grain from which you can squeeze out practical value. Would it be remarkable -- for LD and non-LD populations alike -- to understand what our eyeballs are up to when we read?

Landmark by the Numbers

2008-04-25T04:32:00.000-07:00

Number of students in 1987: About 50
Number of students today: About 450
Female students: About 25%
Students with executive function (EF) challenges: About 75%
Students at 4-year institutions who persist to graduation -- nationally: About 50%
Students with LD/ADHD who persist -- nationally: About 40%
Students who leave Landmark for 4-year institutions and persist to graduation: About 80%
Annual tuition: About $50,000

Earlier:
Intro
UDI Broken Down
Arrival
Day 1: Inspiration

Landmark College Day 1: Inspiration by the Bucketful

2008-04-24T14:45:00.001-07:00

Think of it as the Little College That Does It All. Teaching, Research, Advocacy, Outreach -- oh, and changing lives.

I've been to many academic gatherings in my time. This is the first one where I've gone all day and not gotten tired.

Earlier:
Intro
UDI Broken Down
Arrival

Heard from several Landmark people today -- Steve Fadden on Universal Design for Instruction (UDI), Mac Gander on the cognitive science underpinning the Landmark model, Karen Boutelle on coaching students with executive function challenges, John Nissen on Landmark students transferring to 4-year institutions.

The most memorable presentations were from Landmark students themselves, who spoke after lunch to the fifty or so academics and support staff who've come here -- chatty, outgoing people all, kibbitzing and slurping our way into the afternoon.

But when the students started talking, you could hear a pin drop. No one stirred.

"I Don't Know How to Teach Your Kind"

We heard stories from five students. All of them struggled through high school, squeaking by -- or sometimes coasting by -- after black-and-white diagnoses of dyslexia, ADHD, mood disorders, then hitting college and feeling the ground drop out beneath them. Flunking out, sometimes multiple times at multiple institutions, their paths lined with misdiagnoses and blank incomprehension on the part of people charged with their education.

"'I don't know how to teach your kind,'" one student reported hearing from an instructor.

"All my life," the same student told us, "all I'd heard was 'you're crazy' or 'you're retarded,' but then I came here and they just got me."

"I came into my own," she said.

Story after story. I have never felt such depth so quickly in people so young.

From Disability ... to Understanding

"From the time I was diagnosed in third grade," another student related, "all I'd seen were lists. This is what's wrong with you. This is what you can't do. This, and this, and this, and this."

I'll admit, when I heard about Landmark College, the uninvited image that first came into my head was of a bunch of little buildings staffed by people who knew how to handle kids with LD/ADHD. Remedial education in a resort-like setting.

The heart of it all, instead, is understanding. Understanding -- at a guts-and-nuts-and-bolts level -- how people learn with atypical brains. And it goes way beyond "oh, ADHD kids don't take well to x, so we'll give them y."

In essence, students take classes on their own brains, starting day one with the faculty passing along what they know from research. If that isn't self-empowerment, what is?

The Technology Trinity

Several people asked the students who spoke to us what the key to it all was. What one thing, they asked, made the biggest difference?

With all that I'd learned about the philosophy and science of Landmark, I was surprised when most of the five replied with two magic words: assistive technology.

Three programs in particular: Kurzweil 3000, a text-to-speech reader with interactive graphics. Dragon Naturally Speaking, a speech-to-text tool. Inspiration, a graphical idea-mapping program.

Here's a short demo of Kurzweil 3000, for instance:

None of this software is on the burning forefront of Web 2.0 or anything -- just solid, practical 'ware used all over the place for years. And for these kids, totally liberating.

"I can write a 10-page paper in an hour as long as I don't have to type it," said one student.

"If I had to type a 10-page paper," he explained, "I'd still be working on it, and I've been here for two years."

Cornerstone has all three programs in various states of use, but you can bet that when I get back, I'll be fired up to become their local evangelist.

More to follow...

Landmark College Visit: Arrival in Brattleboro

2008-04-23T17:52:00.000-07:00

I think there's a divide of sorts at WashU. By and large, students tends to be insulated from the culture of St. Louis, faculty a little more or less so, depending on the individual, while staff tend to be more embedded.

Wherever we fall on the spectrum, there's nothing like an out-of-town trip to teach us how embedded we are. It's been about four years since I left St. Louis for someplace new, and without leaving the States, it would be hard to find a more arresting departure point than where I am now.

I seem to be in a place with an embarassment of riches -- quirky little locally owned shops, local organic produce, bicycles, and interesting people from far-flung places. St. Louis makes much ado about displaying half the diversity one sees in this little Vermont town.

Flickr Slideshowgreat free widgetsWidgetbox

Universal Design for Instruction ... Broken Down

2008-04-16T08:13:00.000-07:00

Since starting at Cornerstone, I've been working closely with Dr. David Parker, Learning Specialist, on developing online tools for enriching student learning.

Dr. Parker re-introduced me to the idea of "UDI," or Universal Design for Instruction, which I'd heard about in passing before but never gotten into deeply.

There are links on the subject, but not many, and a few settled-on statements of principle, including this one from a team at the University of Connecticut.

The principles boil down things that are, at heart, matters of common sense. But like most common-sensical matters, they gain a lot when you put them into words.

What you see down below is yet another boiling down, no doubt a dreadful simplification but one I found easier to keep in my head.

The Principals for Universal Design for Instruction
Original language is (c) 2002 by the Center on Postsecondary Education and Disability, University of Connecticut
"Equitable Use"

Try to make things useful and easy to get at for people with all kinds of different abilities.

"Flexibility in Use"

Try to give people choices in how they use things so they can pick what's best for them.

"Simplicity"

Speaks for itself.

"Perceptibility"

Try to get your point across in ways that won't be undercut by what's going on around you. Think about noise levels and visual clutter.

"Tolerance for Error"

Try to show people that when you're learning something, it's really okay to make mistakes or not get things right off the bat.

"Low Physical Effort"

If there's any way around it, try to not make people move around or use their hands.

"Size and Space for Approach and Use"

Try to keep it easy for people to reach and handle things no matter what they can or can't do using their bodies.

"A Community of Learners"

Try to keep people working and learning together.

"Instructional Climate"

Try to get people to feel at home and at ease while making sure they know you expect a lot out of them.

Maybe easier to understand, but probably no less difficult to get right!

I'm starting to understand that the real power of these principles is the "universal" part. They're things that make good teaching sense no matter who you're working with, making short work of any fences there might be between "people with disabilities" and whoever that phrase happens to not include.

Heading to Landmark College April 24-25

2008-04-13T06:15:00.001-07:00

Later this month, I'll be going to little Putney, Vermont, spending two days visiting Landmark College, which describes itself this way:

While many colleges offer special programs for students with learning difficulties, Landmark College is one of the only accredited colleges in the United States designed exclusively for students with dyslexia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (AD/HD), or other specific learning disabilities.

Why does Landmark's approach succeed? Because we take a different path. We teach the skills and strategies necessary for success in college and the workforce. Here at Landmark, you learn how to learn, and this knowledge helps you become more confident and independent.

Students at Landmark get far more personal, directed assistance than at other colleges. Each student receives individualized attention from classroom instructors — in courses tailored to meet your educational needs.

We have courses for skills development, college credit, and an Associate Degree Program for individuals who have average — to superior — intellectual potential. Our experienced advisors meet frequently with you to review and guide your progress. All instructors are trained professional educators, not teaching assistants or peer tutors.

I'll be "liveblogging" about how Landmark uses technology to support students with LD/ADHD and to report back more generally about their approach, methods, successes, and challenges.