Acer acing ultra mobility...

   
A press release for the new Acer Aspire One came across my desk recently. It's a really brilliantly designed little unit that would be great in schools, K12 or even college level. As an Ultra Mobile PC, it's a miniature laptop that still has a full keyboard, just 9.8x6.7x1.14 inches and 2.17 pounds. The tradeoff of course is computing power, storage, your options as far as software and operating systems go. But all of these things have gotten smaller as they've gotten more powerful, so going ultra mobile ain't what it used to be. The Aspire has options for a NAND 8GB flash module or a 120GB hard drive, can read five types of memory cards, uses an Intel Atom 1.6 GHz processor, has up to 1 GB of memory, and a choice of Linux Lite or Windows XP. It's designed for almost exclusive use on the Internet, which is where school computing is heading, of course. Built in wireless, built in webcam, built in mic. Very cool. And the price? The best part. $379 and up. 

Playing "Guitar Hero" in the school library...

This local newscast from Tucson uses the rather ridiculous headline "Do videogames make kids smarter?" It's like asking "Can television make kids smarter?" Videogames, like television, are simply vehicles of content, folks. So their educational value, or lack thereof, simply depends on the content. Kids can watch American Idol, or the History Channel, on the same television. Asking if TV is educational, a topic probably covered in newscasts 40 years ago, would be silly today. It depends on what you're watching! And asking that question about gaming is rapidly becoming silly as well.  Dimension M's Tabula Digita math video game is a great example, and even in this news story, here you have an 11 year old organizing a gaming club at school, producing a video about it, talking to reporters about what he's learned in the process. I'd say he's probably gotten a bit smarter.

Game Design is appearing as a major at universities now... Film & Television Studies would have been a laughable idea decades ago. I could go on and on... maybe I'll write a piece in the magazine about it!

Free, open source... curricula?

One of the characteristics of Web 2.0 is this concept of collaborative, user-created content. Wikipedia is a prime example of the popularity--and controversy--of the concept. If users are entering and editing this info, who says it's accurate? How do we know? Such sites become vulnerable to rumor, politics, smear campaigns, all kinds of motivations. Just ask John Edwards. 
Yesterday I had an interesting conference call with a software company (that will remain unnamed since I singed an NDA), touting the collaborative features of their new graphic design software being released in a couple months. Users can share and collaborate on work more than ever before, creating their own experiences rather than just taking what is handed to them.
On that note, Curriki is, like it sounds, a new collaborative Web site for teachers to collaborate and gather free, open source curricula. This could be a great resource for many educators... or could it be risky? Could it include the same advantages and pitfalls of any other site with user created content?  Who's qualified to enter this content? How can we trust them? I haven't yet heard of any controversy surrounding Curriki, there may not yet be any since it is a new site, released in July '08. But I'm betting there will be at some point. Just off the top of my head, I can imagine this being a prime battleground for education culture wars: evolution, sex education, political history, military history, gender, race, you name it. What's to prevent anyone from uploading their own "lesson plans" about how the Earth is flat? Your thoughts?

Desktop PCs for $70!!

Now before you get ready to rush out and load up your car with 70 dollar PCs to use as holiday gifts, let me explain what NComputing is actually referring to: the actual cost per PC when you use their virtualization software. I wrote about virtualization in the September '07 issue of the magazine, it's one of those technologies that solve universal challenges and will probably become the norm for big business and district applications. How can you have hundreds or thousands of PCs in a district and keep them all up to date? Is one-to-one computing even possible at this point? Virtualizing your desktops provides an answer. With software/hardware packages like Ncomputing's new  X300, multiple users can split up the power of one computer. Instead of four computers, you get essentially 8, 12, 16, up to 24 by virtualizing, and connecting monitors, keyboards and mice to each of these access devices. So it can work out to adding tons and tons of new "desktops" to your district at a fraction of the cost, and upgrading is easier because replacing one machine actually replaces multiple "machines." I'm imagining a day when unlimited machines work off of a single unit, so "upgrading" your entire district's computer fleet of thousands takes 5 minutes, by switching out just one Queen Mother of All District Computers. What will you do with all that extra time?

Looks like fried chicken. Tastes like fried chicken. It IS fried chicken! But with half the fat!

I love food, eating, cooking, reading about either one. As products editor of a national education magazine, however, rarely do I write professionally about food. Unless there happens to be a dramatic development in food technology, relevant to school districts. And that's what we have here.
Food chemistry company Proteus Industries literally made headlines just a couple years ago when they developed a patented process to reduce the fat in fried foods, called Nutrilean. It's a process of coating chicken, fish sticks or whatever else you want to fry with its own proteins, creating a barrier that blocks fat absorption by up to 50%-70%. But it still tastes much the same.
Just over a week ago Proteus announced at the School Nutrition Association's Annual National Conference their corporate partnership with Sunrise Foods, school lunch poultry company, to target the school foodservice sector, which is in the middle of a sea change towards healthier fare due to public outcry and federal mandates. American schools serve as many meals as McDonald's every year, so that's a big market.
The way I see it, there are two approaches to approaching healthier food for your district: attempt to change students' eating habits, or change the food they want to eat anyway. Nutrilean is obviously the latter. And perhaps the best approach of all is to cover all your bases and do them both simultaneously. Now here's the tough question: do you tell them it's healthier, possibly convincing them it doesn't taste as good, and losing the placebo effect? In other words...are you lying about your frying?