eCROP Blog

Very inexpensive mobile computers ($100 laptop project) and free software still need the steady progress of free wireless to complete the digital commons. Once done, the CROP education needed to free the economy from the ball and chain of the digital divide has a chance of being effective. Slow but steady progress can be seen. Maine's Governor is moving aggressively to be the first state to build a state wireless network for its citizens. ( New York Times ) San Francisco has an RFP (request for proposals) to make it a wireless city. Google is is just one of the companies that is in line for the opportunity. ( sfgate.com ) Philadelphia, long past the proposal stage, is confident that the wireless work will be done by the end of 2006 by a company from Atlanta, Georgia. ( Daily Pennsylvanian ) Other interesting wireless developments are being tracked as well. ( New York Times )

A major factor in the digital divide is the issue of cost. The October 2005 Census Bureau report shows that only 30% of those earning less than $25,000 a year have a computer with Internet access at home versus 80-90% above $50,000. One of the problems of computer integration has been the high cost of the most basic computer applications, such as word processors and spreadsheets. For computer integration to be effective this means that homes and public school systems must also buy the same applications and many families are more challenged than school systems to come up money to buy the hardware and software. The retail price of the dominant Microsoft Office suite of applications can cost $500 or more , which is more than a low cost computer. The open source community has a pair of options called OpenOffice and StarOffice that changes this price from free to $30 to $100 depending on how much direct telephone support is needed. This does not solve the problem of getting a low cost com...

Updated January 2, 2006 It is exciting to work on so many new ways to solve problems with new technology. It is also easy for this excitement to come at the expense of putting time into addressing a giant local AND global problem, the digital divide. The biggest global Information Technology issue is solving the problem of how to radically grow the base of the cyberspace literate, to reduce the drag on the economy by increasing the number of participants in the global digital economy. One solution is now past mirage status. Negroponte's project to get the MIT $100 laptop out the manufacturing door is looking great (see and click pictures on left or right for more pictures and information, credit to MIT Labs for pictures). What can we do to help evangelize? Know and tell. The story first broke into major news feeds with the September 28, 2005 Emerging Technology Conference at MIT. A physical model was shown at the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) took place in Tunis,...

Nora Carr has followed our audiocasting experimentation covered in earlier postings with a fine eSchoolNews article that provides some important extensions to the value of podcasting in educational settings. See the piece " Try 'podcasting' to broaden your PR reach " http://eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=5850

Does your phone have a Conference button? I'm realizing that I've been under-utilizing this feature and have recently begun to take better advantage of its capacity to get consensus or collect team ideas without making multiple one-on-one calls. Advances in the blogging movement however transform my phone and conference button into something almost unimagineable. With a couple of keytaps, my phone transforms into a recording studio with up to six guests for an attached web-based radio station with global syndication! Whew, sounds like a real whopper, doesn't it. It isn't. Listen. This is an audio blog, and making this show with Norr Carr, columnist with eSchoolNews , couldn't have been more simple. The current buzz phrase for these things is podcast, named after the ubiquitous audio and music players called iPods which grab audio from computers for mobile listening. Yet desktop media players and other computer mobile products and even cell phones can all play the p...

Learning, understanding and problem solving have a very high visual component. GIS stands for Geographic Information Systems, applications which compose maps of relationships as easily as one would compose a paragraph. These relationships are as basic as the above map of schools in western North Carolina or a state highway map and as complex as multiple layers of a community’s infrastructure of pipes, wires, roads and buildings. Deeper understanding of GIS begins with learning more examples of applications and the elements of a GIS map. GIS plays a significant role in problem solving at both the Look and Evoke stage of the LEAP model . GIS software enables a user to build maps in layers and to search data which can be displayed as relationships among the data on the map. Applications range from desktop computer tools such as ArcView by ESRI to web server map systems such as provided by maps.google.com , earth.google.com/ , maps.yahoo.com and http://www.mapquest.com/ , terraserver.mi...

How many revolutions were ever completed and no one noticed? I can give you at least one example. Podcasting capacity to link audio with images using quicktime web tracks or other technology will transform public use of television, not radio. The discussion of podcasting appears blinded by the box of radio thinking. How does one use blog systems (podcasting) to duplicate or top what can be done with transmitter based radio? Rob Griffiths's lament in Macworld that podcasting is just more noise in the system is a case in point. His question seeking what folks like and do with podcasting now frames discussion within the early development potential based on existing knowledge of radio. Short term innovation is always overhyped and long term is undervisioned, but holds the real value. Application capacity for synching images with audio is as old as quicktime ( 1991 ) and with iPhoto 4.03 has been around since August 5, 2004 in a linked but not in a form that allows the author to choose...

My study of the wiki phenomena seems headed for a one word summary, leadership. If leadership is about getting teamwork done, of drawing others into effective action, then wiki work is a fine training ground for the needed attitudes, habits and practices. My review of key wiki developments can be found at 123 Wiki . Wikis are just one part of an overall vision for problem processing, but they provide a unique application for collaborative work at the Evoke stage. Their different perspectives serve each of the LEAP stages. Many wiki projects have advanced to the point of having respected information for the Look stage, which grows their perception as outlets for the Publish stage. Their edit history tracking and comments provide feedback for the Assess stage.

To outline means to organize the relationships between the main and subordinate points of an idea, activity, project or argument. Digital outlining adds the ability to move, minimize or hide less important details. Though the paper-based use of outlining had fallen into disfavor in writing classes, its fluid digital reincarnation brought it back to life in school classrooms and adult planning activities. The announcements of free tools with strong or complete online operations have brought it roaring back into action. Check out the recent announcements of Cmap and Inspiration (for handhelds and Smartboards) as well as management organizers such as Backpack and Basecamp for new ways to think about the concept of outlining. Outlines provide concise visual ways to organize knowledge in order to create meaningful change in the world. Outlines create an organized bridge of prioritized steps between the Look and Evoke stages of problem solving. Such tools adress the overwhelming mass of i...

Click above to listen. Only a single phone is needed to create a podcast. But both the speakerphone and the cell phone shown in the picture below are needed if someone at a distance needs to participate. If your phone services do not offer conferencing, this is a simple workaround; otherwise the audio will be higher quality if phone conferencing is used to make a three party call, with the third party being the blogger.com audio service.. To start an audio conference with the design in the picture, I begin holding the cell phone next to my head for some initial comments, then set it on the speaker phone. The picture shows what this setup looks like. Blog audio conference set up. Here's the transcription of this 3 minute 17 second podcast. "This is another podcast in the Blogosphere Show with Bob Houghton speaking. Welcome to this podcast on simple podcasting systems. This is a test of using my cell phone for automated podcasting. I'm using my cell phone as a microphone to...

A "partner" blogsites parallels a standard web page so that sections of a web page essay can have a place that allows commentary and feedback on its sub-sections. Consider the similarities. Blogs are generally thought of as a collection of periodic postings organized by date, each posting its own topic that does not necessarily directly relate to the last. An essay or any large document is also a collection of headings or sub-topics but organized by sequence so that each sub-topic follows from the last to form a coherent whole. Here's an example of a blog organized as large document or essay. http://blog-study.blogspot.com/ See the sidebar link in the above blog site which connects to its parallel as a web page. The web page in turn has a link to its blog site. At the blog site readers can use the comments link to discuss each section. The author or authors of both sites having the passwords to both would keep these two parallel, building on the feedback and re-weaving it...

Blogging remains the fastest way to generate a web site for addressing community problem solving. In comparing the top three free blog creation services, Walter Mossberg's excellent Wall Street Journal column on blog creation (2005, June 15, D4) found that blogger.com's approach to photos was a hassle. There are points to quibble with in his review. Mr. Mossberg was most kind to respond quickly to my email which complained that he had his facts wrong in noting that one cannot quickly and easily add narration to a photo in Blogger. I retract the "facts wrong" thought and leave his paragraph as misleading. He intended his critique to knock Hello which works with Picasa to upload selected and edited images. He wanted to be able to add the narration or description to the photo while in Hello during the upload process. I prefer the editing to be done back in the back in the blog. Why add the duplication of editing in Hello when it is already quite adequate in the blog edi...

A critical factor in community problem solving is listening and remediating ideas. Remediating? Habermas would call it harmonizing. Humans have an amazing capacity to hear and see what they expect, not adjust to what really is. Stereotype thinking infects us all. Nora Carr makes a career of dealing with this as a publication relations (PR) specialist, who keeps a column going in eSchool News, with one eye focused on the "dark side" of media. She recently mentioned this blog and other work of mine as part of her column that can be found here: http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/showStory.cfm?ArticleID=5711 For those following the CROP perspective of this blog, Nora makes a key point. "The key to building an effective blog is to view it as a relationship-building tool that will help you engage your stakeholders in new and important ways." Solutions to real problems have to begin and end with mutual agreement and understanding about many things.

Audio FAQ It is hard to match the socializing and harmonizing potential of sharing a meal with someone. What is there about the clink of silverware and dishes that stimulates conversation and a little problem-solving. Are blog sites just a weak substitute for good mealtime conversation? Unless videoconference pricing drop off a cliff, it is hard to imagine replacing blog sites any time soon with doing a videoconference lunch with multiple points around the globe. Now there's something to look forward to. A meal seems such a perfect image for communicative action theory. Given global social customs, one could conjecture that brains and stomachs take particular pleasure in doing their digesting together. Habermas's Communicative Action Theory (1984) provides a deeper perspective from which to examine the nova-like explosion of blogging. Who would have known there was such an additional pent-up life-force needing further social discourse? What was so limiting about phones, email,...

I have not found an overview of developments in the Web Logs or Blogs that has adequately covered the range of developments underway. So, I have been composing my own. Visit this page titled Blog Thinking for the latest edition. http://ceap.wcu.edu/houghton/EDELCompEduc/Ch1/blogthinking.html Somehow blogs seem like a one legged stool. They help people clarify and refine their personal voices. Important, necessary, but missing something. I've included some information on wiki's in this piece because I think they are another leg of this stool but I'm missing the perspective yet on what overarching concept and system will pull these and other communication elements together. Blogs are a step to a higher level, but what will the next level look like?

- Latvia (Wikipedia) Dr. Artur Puga, head of FSU (Forward Studies Unit, Latvian Union of Scientists), offered a most thoughtful reply to my blog post titled "Beyond Computer Literacy" Revisited. A link to FSU is provided above. This appears to be a current summary of Dr. Puga's area of interest. http://www.knowledgeboard.com/cgi-site/whoswho.cgi?action=detail&id=102392&authorid=701916 More details into his thinking can be found in this Powerpoint presentation. http://www.innovation.lv/baltdyn04/ presentations/Session4_Universities/15-15_Puga.ppt I will share some of my response here. It is so humbling to have people reach out to me in my own language when I cannot respond in theirs and delightful that cyberspace makes such interaction so easy. Dr. Puga and I share an understanding of the word community as a highly scalable term, from the interactions of the community of ideas within our heads, to teams, departments, organizations and nations. He wrote in his Powe...

Click the title of this posting to see Stephen Ehrmann's essay to which I am reacting. Let's try another perspective. Once there were two highly competent professors, Socrates and Plato, the former rejecting the invention of writing, the radical new transforming technology of his day, and the latter, reinventing it for his thinking. Staying with the tried and true did not harm the wisdom or the values of the thinking of Socrates. However, Plato did have to speak for him by writing some of his ideas in ways that would reach us across time. Digital technology also offers new ways to reach across time and reach across space in ways more relevant to the highly interactive nature of human beings. On that I think Ehrmann and I would agree. My first disagreement is with his college level perspective; the digital desert of the public school desktop would also greatly benefit from computer literacy. My second is with Ehrmann making the case for change by leading with examples of wha...