MrWoodleigh

Monday, July 17th, 2006

8:45: Keynote by David Warlick of the The Landmark Project
Raleigh, NC

A very good keynote by somebody who has thought a lot about the impact of new technology and other trends. His main point is that educators should stop working on technology integration (in the classroom) and start working on teaching and learning technology literacy. Technology literacy includes knowing how to find and authenticate information gathered over the web, how to process large volumes of data (click here to read how to put together a cool demonstration), and how to add information to the web through blogging, digital movies, etc.

He’s one of those people who gets you excited by the new possibilities, but he’s also thoughtful enough to understand the difficulties.

10:00: Vista Preview

This session was run by Scott Kennedy of Microsoft. He gave an overview of the new operating system in a lab filled with Gateway tablets running the newest (I think) beta version of Vista. Those machines had enough oomph to run the Aero interface, which is much more handsome than XP’s. PCs that lack memory and/or good graphics cards will sport a flatter-looking interface to Vista.

News to me: Vista will keep previous versions of files (currently, a feature only available on the server side), has a built-in search box for programs behind the start button (something I’ll use constantly).

Vista will add a lot of functionality already available to Mac Users: fast search (like Spotlight) and desktop gadgets (a la Dashboard). It’s a bit of a resource hog, but appears to add a lot of needed functionality.

Not that he mentioned this, but Paul Thurrott has thoroughly previewed Vista at his SuperSite for Windows web site. He’s good to read because he knows Mac OS X and Linux too, so has good a broad perspective on Operating Systems. He’s quite critical of Microsoft at times, but will defend them against unfounded attacks, often from Mac fanatics.

11:45: Linux on Laptops

This session was led by Alex Inman from the Whitfield School. He’s put together an interesting one-to-one laptop solution. The laptops all run Linux (Novell last year, SUSE this year) with a Citrix client for running Windows apps remotely. He’s got a big Citrix farm running Office, Photoshop, and other Windows applications. He says the Citrix performance is excellent. Alex spent most of his presentation time proving that you can save a lot of money using this solution over a Windows or Mac solution.

One of the interesting findings: the students are pretty comfortable on Linux and almost all know some shell commands.

Alex’s Linux Laptops blog

1pm: Web 2.0

This session was led by David Warlick, the keynote speaker.

Blogging: He has a blogging set-up for teachers called Class Blogmeister.

He explained with a mashup is. More on that another time, but here are two examples:

1. buzztracker.org: maps Google news stories.
2. hitchhikr.com: grabs blog entries describing a conference, allowing you to “hitchhike a ride there”.

RSS: He taught everybody what it is and how you do it. I’m a total RSS nut, as my readers know — couldn’t live without it. He’s the same way and probably won a few converts.

Del.icio.us: He taught us to drill down, see what others are reading, and to subscribe to other’s bookmarks, so that we can track what they are reading. It’s also a good way to find people with shared interests.

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