Entries tagged with education - Channel 10

Cluster computing for the classroom

Jon Udell — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:35:00 GMT

Kyril Faenov is the General Manager of the Windows HPC product unit. Before founding the HPC team in 2004, Kyril worked on a broad set of projects across Microsoft, including running the planning process for Windows Server 2008, co-founding a distributed systems project in the office of the CTO, and developing scale-out technology in Windows 2000. Kyril joined Microsoft in 1998 as the result of acquisition of Valence Research, an Internet server clustering startup he co-founded and grew to profitability by securing MSN, Microsoft.com and some of the world's other largest web sites as its clients.

Rich Ciapala is a program manager in Microsoft HPC++ Labs, an incubation team within the Windows HPC Server product unit. Rich joined Microsoft in 1992 and has held a number of different positions in technical sales, Microsoft Consulting Services, the Windows Customer Advisory team and the Visual Studio product team.

Links

Microsoft HPC++ CompFin Lab

Kyril Faenov and Rich Ciapala discuss a new HPC++ Labs project that enables students to run computation-intensive experiments involving large amounts of financial data.

JU: What Rich just demoed, which we'll show in a screencast, is how a financial model can be deployed to a server that acts as a front-end to a compute cluster. It's a nice easy way for students to use a model developed by a professor, select a basket of securities, run a very intensive computation on them against large chunks of data, and get answers back in an Excel spreadsheet. The bottom line is that the students can run an experiment using a level of computing power that was never before so easily accessible.

KF: Yeah, because of the complexity involved in deploying systems like that, acquiring the data, and curating it, a lot of universities don't have this kind of infrastructure in place. So for a number of students who haven't done this before, this will make it available for the first time. For others who have, it will make it quite a bit easier.

JU: Now these are not computer science students who are learning about high performance computing, and about writing programs for parallel machines, these are students who are learning about financial modeling, and this just makes a tool available to them that can accelerate that.

KF: Precisely. Most of our HPC customers are scientists, or engineers, or business analysts, not computer scientists. They're folks who use mathematics, statistics, differential equations ... sometimes not even math directly, but applications that encode these mathematical models to do research, or engineering, or risk modeling, or decision making. To them it's just a tool, and they want to use it in the way they use PCs today, as transparently and straightforwardly as possible.

JU: What's the situation today for most people? In the case of the covariance model Rich showed in the demo, if it weren't being done like that, how would it be done?a

KF: You can do it in Excel, or MATLAB, or SAS, on the workstation. So you'd acquire the data, and use your preferred tool ...

JU: ... and wait a long time ...

KF: ... and wait a long time. And if you want to do a significant amount of data -- like a year's worth, for a large number of stocks -- it might not even be possible at all.

Or you might load it up into a server, but then you have to figure out how to write an application, how to deploy it out to the server, then figure out how to submit the data to the model, pull it back, integrate into the visual analytic process.

This multi-step process is exactly what our HPC customers are running into. They're expressing the models and doing the design on the workstation, using any number of tools. They do the analysis of the results, and visualization, on the workstation. But large-scale computation runs somewhere else. It might be in their organization, it might be out on the Internet, but it's a very disjointed process.

JU: There are clusters out there in academia, and there are people doing these kinds of things, but the point is that hasn't been woven together yet.

KF: That's right. In 2004 the U.S. government published an assessment of U.S. competitiveness in high performance computing. The first recommendation was, and I'm quoting:

Make high performance computing easier to use. Emphasis should be placed on time to solution, the major metric of value. A common software environment that spans desktop to high-end systems will enhance productivity gains.

That's what we're starting to see in the HPC community. Not just getting the systems running as fast as possible, but figuring out how the workflow, the creative element of the scientific process, can be optimized.

JU: So, Rich and I talked about the particular model used in his demo is in a class called parameter sweep, which he distinguishes from the more distributed and chatty kinds of applications. In this case, you can send a batch of data down to a node, it can think about it for a while then give back an answer, and there doesn't need to be much communication. Is that the optimal scenario for this architecture?

KF: Actually, it's optimized for a broad range of HPC applications. In fact, the major goal of the first release of the product, Compute Cluster 2003, was MPI-style [message passing interface] applications. There are a lot of these in engineering and in the environmental space. You're modeling some kind of physical process, and you build a mesh or grid that takes a large physical process or body, partitions it, does computations on local areas, but then has to frequently exchange data across the partitions. Think about a car crash simulation. You might partition the hood of the car into a lot of pieces, every one computed separately, but as the deformation is happening the forces need to be exchanged. Or weather modeling, where heat exchange happens across partitions.

JU: There's a high degree of data interdependence.

KF: Exactly. When you you have an interdependent problem, you use MPI for that. We worked with the team at Argonne National Labs that releases the open source reference implementation of MPI, and we've adopted that in our product, optimized the performance and security on Windows, and integrated it into the stack.

JU: Right, I knew about the MPI layer in the cluster product. But it seems that the system we're looking at here, for professors to enable students to experiment with financial modeling -- that one is targeting the other class of application

KF: Right. There is a large class of what we call embarrassingly parallel problems, a lot of statistical analysis falls into that category, and media rendering, where you have a lot of independent tasks. And that's what we have here, because every pair of instruments that needs to be compared is an indepdendent task. What you need to do is spray those tasks across a cluster. We have a solution that makes that much more approachable.

JU: So in this case, that entails mapping the input parameters to a set of work items.

KF: Correct.

JU: OK. And outside the financial domain, where else will this style be popular?

KF: We'll see this in a range of disciplines. This particular example uses data from an external source -- in this case, the stock market -- and it's looking for patterns of correlations between different signals. This paradigm is broadly applicable. If you think about, for example, clinical research, where you have data coming in from hundreds of patients, where the data includes many parameters about their health condition, and you're looking for disease markers or drug reactions -- you're doing correlation analysis among the diffeerent signals.

Or you might have data coming in from sensors deployed in oil and gas pipelines for safety monitoring, or environmental sensors, everywhere you have instruments producing high volumes of data, where you need to find patterns in data, and optimize the scientific process of developing models that produce insight into the data.

JU: Would you say that these embarassingly parallel problems are low-hanging fruit?

KF: Very much so. And there's another class, Monte Carlo simulation, a method used very effectively across a range of industries to statistically explore different scenarios, for risk analysis and predictive model. It's used in financial services, like insurance, but things like process management in factories can also use it, or logistics chains.

JU: So for the current example, give us a sense of what skill set is required of the professor in order to create the model and make it available to students. There's some .NET programming involved, right?a

KF: Rich, do you want to take this?

RC: Well, you pick your .NET language of choice, and your development environment, which may be Visual Studio. We're making the data available in terms of LINQ, so you need some understanding of that, although for the queries typical of these applications it's fairly basic. And in fact, since it's integrated into the language and you get things like syntax completion, it's probably easier than writing SQL.

JU: There's a framework provided, what does that include?

RC: It does two things. First, it forces you to define the interface for your model in such a way that you can easily build, for example, an Excel front-end to send input and retrieve output. Second, it shows you exactly where you need to do the splitting of the tasks into work items, where you do the spraying of work items to the cluster, and where you put the code that does the covariance and correlation calculations.

KF: The professor focuses on writing the analytics parts, and doesn't have to worry about the fairly complex workflow skeleton that submits the data to the cluster, partitions the work, accessing the results, and then performing the final reduction.

JU: So can focus on creating the pivot table, or using MATLAB, which is where I'd rather be spending my time.

KF: Yes, in a domain you're expert in.

JU: So, who are the guinea pigs for this system?

RC: Our first two are the University of Washington, which did the model we demonstrated, and the University of North Carolina in Charlotte.

JU: Kyril, I know you have big ideas about where this can go. Why don't you paint the picture?

KF: When we started the HPC team at Microsft, we realized it's an actively evolving space. But Microsoft is fairly new to it. Without the benefit of 20 or 30 years of experience, we felt we needed to do something that would help us develop expertise and build up an understanding of not just the technology, but also the usage patterns. So we worked with, and funded, 10 universities worldwide, and that's been very helpful.

We've also created an internal team whose mission is to do incubation. The goal of this team is threefold. First, to prototype and demonstrate the end-to-end solutions that our HPC customers will find beneficial, and what Rich has demonstrated is an example of that.

Second, to help us explore the trend that we see as HPC becomes more and more data-driven. There's still the world where you run simulations, of car crashes or weather. But a lot of new applications are mining data for insight, and doing it in a computationally intensive way. That changes the formula for how HPC is used. In many cases it's becoming impractical to put clusters in customer locations, if you have to ship terabytes or petabytes of data around. Data repositories are starting to act like black holes, if you will, that are pulling computation towards them.

JU: I'm sure that's true in the climate area...

KF: Climate, biology, astronomy, geosciences, everywhere that you start accumulating tremendous data sets. We think there's going to be way that Microsoft can help customers optimize how these services are built, because there's no established architecture today.

JU: Jim Gray was always talking about how it's becoming necessary to Fedex hard disks around the world because there's no other way to move the data to the computation. But instead you're proposing to move the computation to the data.

KF: That's right. We want to incubate a few of these high-value data-centric services, and demonstrate the best practices for doing that while providing free access to academic institutions. That'll help us understand what's involved in operating these services, and potentially we might imagine Microsoft running a few of them.

Then the third goal for the incubation team is to flow the requirements for doing these things into software, so that customers can do this as easily as possible themselves. One of the challenges today is that there's a dichotomy between these very large-scale Internet services being built -- by Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and others -- but they're in their own world. Customers can't take a slice of that infrastructure and deploy it in their environments.

At the same time, we keep on building off-the-shelf software that people install on their infrastructure, and we're just now learning what it takes to run HPC services using that software. So we want to make sure there's a tight coupling between the team that builds the prototypes and runs the services, and the team that implements off-the-shelf software, such that we run our services using the products that we build. And at same time, we want to make it a turnkey operation for customers to stand up these services themselves.

JU: That's a key point, so let's underscore it. We're seeing the emergence of a small set of what I call intergalactic clusters, which are one-of-a-kind things, and they are not replicable. They do interesting and powerful things, but you can only do things with them on their terms.

Your notion is that you want to maintain parity, and ensure that you can always replicate what's happening in the cloud if you need to.

KF: Exactly. For example we just talked about the gravitational pull of data. Imagine you have an astronomy site that accumulates a petabyte. You can try to put it on one of these intergalactic clusters, but that's maybe not what you want. Maybe the most optimal thing is for you to stand up a 1000-node cluster with each node having a terabyte of disk. We want to enable that. We want to be able to tell our customers: Here's how we run this large-scale data-driven HPC applications, and here's how, within a day or two, you can stand up one of these yourself.

JU: So you even see some potential consumer applications for this, don't you?

KF: Sure. Think about search. We can only find answers to questions that have already been answered. But imagine if your questions require novel insight to data. For example, Microsoft HealthVault is starting to accumulate a lot of health data.

JU: Right, so what are my cancer survival prospects given the specifics of my case, and in light of a large body of data about other people?

KF: Or help me do a predictive analysis on my risk of flood or hurricane damage, not for the region in general, but for my house, given the weather and geographical information that's available, and maybe given a few sensors that report data specifically for my house.

To enable these applications, you have to create a platform that makes it possible to curate data, and develop applications that run on top of it. What you see in the service we just demonstrated is a first example of that.

JU: OK, thanks guys.

A demonstration of cluster computing for the classroom

Jon Udell — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 11:33:00 GMT

In this screencast, Rich Ciapala demonstrates Microsoft HPC++ CompFin Lab, which integrates Microsoft HPC Server, a central market data database, and Microsoft productivity products to provide university courses with an online service to publish, execute and manage computational finance models.

Be a Certified HTPC Pro

Larry Larsen — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 17:22:00 GMT

Sure you know your component from your composite and your CardSpace from your CableCard, who doesn't, right? But if your day gig is setting up A/V equipment, how does a potential employer or customer know that? And you probably thought that Microsoft Certified Professional exams were for those monad scripters on Channel 9, well - not so. Microsoft has MCP exams for technologists too.

Right now you can register to take the beta of the Windows Vista Connected Experience: Home Theater for Technologists exam and get a professional accredidation that shows you know how to design and build a solution for home theater systems based on the Windows Vista platform. The cost for these exams is normally $125 and can be taken at any Prometric testing center like other certifications, but since this is a beta you can take it for free. Yes, you will get a certificate if you pass, but because this is a beta you won't know right away if you passed or not. It's a great deal and you have nothing to lose so give it a try.

To take the test, just use this code: PAGHT.

Jon Udell and Matt MacLaurin on Boku

Larry Larsen — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 21:52:00 GMT

Boku is a programming development "game" for children that comes out of Microsoft Research (we took a look at Boku at TechFest '07.) It allows children, ages 5 and up, to apply programming elements and rudimentary scripts to characters in the Boku world.

Jon Udell spoke with Matt MacLaurin from Microsoft's Creative Systems Group and discusses more about Boku, the challenges of the project, how it works, and the importance of providing children with an expression tool for the critical thought required for programming. Read more about this interview on JonUdell.com or jump over to IT Conversations to listen to the full podcast (37 min, 17MB).

Where Are The Men (in education)

Alfred Thompson — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 21:45:00 GMT

I'm from an education family. My mother was a teacher and my wife is a teacher. But in my family teaching is not just a women thing. I have a male cousin who is a kindergarten teacher. My son teaches special education students in an elementary school. And while I taught high school for 8 years I also taught in a couple of middle/elementary schools for a year. In one school I was the only adult male in the building. Many of my students had never seen a male teacher before.
So I can relate to this article. The number of male teachers is at a 40 year low. The last time the numbers went up at all there was a draft on and some men entered teaching to escape going to war. No such luck today. Why is this a problem?
In part this is a problem because young boys need role models. With so many children growing up in single parent homes many young men, especially in poor areas where education is most needed and least appreciated, do not have an adult male showing them by example that education is important. To many young men education and learning is "a girl thing."
In an ideal world kids and adults alike would be gender blind. Let me know if you find a world like that.
There article points out some of the problems. Low starting pay is one of course. But there are other systemic problems. We have a society that looks funny at male teachers. Trust me I have seen that first hand. A male teacher has to watch himself every second of the day in ways that women do not.
When a little first grader runs up to a teacher to give them a hug a male teacher knows from day one to look around to make sure someone can see that they are doing nothing improper. While you may want to return the hug your first thought is "how will it look if I touch a child?" It takes a lot of the joy out of the experience.
Now to be sure there have been men (and women too) who have taken advantage of children. But all the data shows that kids are at many times the risk of abuse at home than at school. But, well, no one wants to think about that. Better to beware the stranger.
We need more teachers but especially we need more male teachers. I'm not sure many understand that there is a problem though.

Teaching to Learn

Alfred Thompson — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:11:00 GMT

I read a very interesting take on the Teach For America program today. (Article here) Briefly Teach for America recruits some of the top US university graduates and gets them to make a 2 year commitment to teaching in resource poor schools. Most of them do rather well but leave teaching after two years. While some see this as a failure others see the two years not as an attempt to recruit career teachers but to allow these "best and brightest" to learn about education from the inside so that they can and will better support it as they go on to other careers. I see some real merit to this idea.
As someone who have been in industry and been in the classroom one thing I have noticed is that a lot of people in industry have no real idea of how education works. Oh they value it a great deal and they are well aware of the problems with the education's systems output. But they have little understanding of the process itself. That does not stop them for making suggestions of course. This goes in spades for elected officials, most of whom have legal not education backgrounds.
Business people tend to think that all organizations are the same. If one can manage a soft drink company one can manage a computer company. If one can manage a company or a military organization one can manage a school system. Well that isn't as true as people would like to think. It is less true, much less, that one can transfer business knowledge to running a school as a business.
Having more people in business and government who have actually spent time in the front lines of education can only help in the long run. As more and more Teach For America "corp members" move up through government and industry we may well see changes in how they interact with education. This seems like a good thing to me.

Department of Learning Prevention

Alfred Thompson — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 00:05:00 GMT

Earlier today (on my Computer Science Education blog) I reported on a teacher who was seeing some interesting and positive results by letting students use tools (computer software tools) that are often blocked or banned in schools. As the day wore on though I heard about the other side of this coin.

Ben Chun reports in his blog how his attempt to demonstrate how DNS works to translate domain names to IP addresses was foiled by the fact that his students are locked out of the command prompt. This is a pretty typical lock down I have found. Anyone know "a DNS/reverse-DNS lookup utility that is free, doesn’t require administrative privileges to install (and preferably doesn’t need to be installed), and can do both forward and reverse DNS lookups." If so drop by his blog and leave him a comment.

On a related note a friend of mine told me about a school local to him where they are using very old software to teach C++ programming. The tech people are afraid that if they allow students to learn how to program on the modern computers that are attached to the network students will "hack into the OS core and do evil things." Yeah, sure, ok. Can I get their resumes? Thanks!

What has happened that we are so afraid to teach students things that are useful and powerful? Are schools dropping machine shop out of fear that students will make knives and zip guns? Are we dropping baseball out of fear that students will use the bats to beat each other senseless? Are we dropping chemistry for fear that kids will open their own Meth labs?

And yet somehow schools feel the need to place a governor on the learning of technology. I have to wonder - who is the problem? Is it the students who want to learn or is it adults who don't want to learn?

Getting Kids to Think About Their Internet Identity

Alfred Thompson — Wed, 15 Aug 2007 13:44:00 GMT

The job of schools, in my opinion, is to educate and to enable. So I don't like a lot of rules especially when they consist largely of lists of things not to do. Rules all too often prevent thinking. Telling students "don't do" is the opposite of enabling them to actually do things. Unfortunately a lot of what passes for Internet Safety training is all lists of "don't do this." So I struggle with how to do it right.

Yesterday I read a post by Vinnie Vrotny, the Director of Academic Technology at a small private preK-12 school in Winnetka, Illinois, that seems like a huge step in the right direction.

Vinnie struggles with some of the same issues I have and has decided to try a new tactic this year. Explaining the Internet user policy and talking about Internet safety falls in his lap at his school and he is tired of focusing on the negative messages. So he is going to talk to students about how they appear on the Internet.

What will people find when they look up the student in a search engine for example. And he is going to talk about consequences and try to get the students to think about what they are doing. As Vinnie says:

I am hoping that this gets students understand that everything that they do has a consequence. Some are trivial, but others may be more long term and potentially damaging to their reputations and meeting goals that they have set for themselves. I am trying to develop a message that is sticky, that students will hear and remember, and hopefully take seriously.

Explaining things to students and trying to get them to think! Sounds like a great idea to me.

Note: Crossposted from my personal blog at MSN Spaces

Arkansas Children's Hospital: IT Innovations Enhancing the Care of Hospitalized Children

Bill Crounse, MD — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 18:26:00 GMT

Every so often we do a program in my House Calls for Healthcare Professionals series of audio and video-casts that really seems to hit the mark in demonstrating the value of Microsoft technologies in the healthcare industry. I want to draw your attention to one such program.

Arkansas Children’s Hospital is cutting edge when it comes to developing solutions on Microsoft technology. First, take a look at my Blog entry on this topic to get some background and then download or listen to our audio-cast with ACH to learn more about CarePoint and other solutions. This program is especially compelling because one of my guests is a patient at the hospital; a 16 year-old boy who has cystic fibrosis and has spent more time in the hospital than most of us can ever imagine. Find out how Microsoft technologies including Xbox 360, Media Center, Visual Studio, IE, and many others have come together to make hospital stays a whole lot more enjoyable for patients, their friends, and family at Arkansas Children’s Hospital.

Here is where you can stream the audio-cast or download it to your MP3 device

Arkansas Children's Hospital: IT Innovations Enhancing the Care of Hospitalized Children
This program is also available in MP3 for download.

Program Guests:

David Higginson is chief information technology officer at Arkansas Children's Hospital (ACH). He earned a degree in accounting/finance from Liverpool University and qualified as a Chartered Management Accountant. He began developing computer systems at the age of 10 and later combined his computer and financial expertise when he began developing systems for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the British Post Office. Since moving to ACH in 1996, Mr. Higginson has developed numerous award-winning computer systems with the help of his team of 14 developers, who have created more than 400 systems in less than five years.

Penny Ward is a registered nurse who joined Arkansas Children's Hospital in 1993. Since 2002 she has been a Nursing Director for the Adolescent and General Medicine units and for the Dialysis and IV teams at the hospital.

Christopher Holstead is 16 years old and has cystic fibrosis. He has been admitted to Arkansas Children's Hospital many times and has seen how the hospital has improved the patient care experience.

Additional resources

Healthblog - additional information and screenshots of ACH CarePoint patient entertainment/education solution

Arkansas Children's Hospital

Windows XP Media Center

Xbox

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft Corporation

Schmall Science

Laura Foy — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 13:15:00 GMT

They may be called Schmall Science but it's definitely a big idea. This group has decided to make science and learning hands on and fun for everybody. Honestly it made me want to be a kid again just so I could take apart my brothers broken down Chevy sitting out in the back yard and put it back together. Check out this clip and see where you just might be able to find the next Schmall Science workshop.

Microsoft's Unlimited Potential program lands in India

Tina Wood — Fri, 29 Jun 2007 00:36:00 GMT

Microsoft is going to start testing a new education PC called IQPC as well as launching an education channel on its MSN Portal. They will be testing the PC in India sometime next month. This is all part of Microsoft's "Unlimited Potential" program that Bill Gates announced in April. The program aims to use technology to increase the awareness and the reach of education to those previously left behind. The education channel will be accessible through the IQPC and internet cafes. Microsoft hopes to have the program implemented country-wide this November. For more information check out InfoWorld.com. Here's another article on the Unlimited Potential program.

A Pediatric Hospital Bedside Patient Entertainment & Education System: Microsoft Media Center + Xbox

Bill Crounse, MD — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 20:54:00 GMT

Arkansas Children’s Hospital

Every so often I come across organizations and people that truly blow me away. Pediatric hospitals have always been known for innovative ideas in the care of their young patients. So, it comes as no surprise that a pediatric hospital would rise to the occasion to better meet the entertainment and education needs of their "customers". But you just have to love it when a truly dedicated clinical and IT staff put their heads together and come up with a solution that is truly best in class.

That is exactly what has happened at Arkansas Children’s Hospital. ACH is based in Little Rock. It is the only full-service children's hospital in the state. The staff at ACH decided it was time to replace the hospital's aging in-room television system with something a little more contemporary. At first, they looked at systems that might typically be found in good hotels. However, they soon discovered that these systems were too expensive, too inflexible, and too limiting for what they really wanted to accomplish. They wanted a system that would provide their young patients with a full spectrum of on-demand movies, television, Internet, video gaming, and patient education. They also wanted a highly flexible platform on which they could provide other services now and well into the future. Finally, they wanted complete control over the system and its attributes that could be fine-tuned to meet the age-appropriate needs of patients, their friends and family. When they didn't find what they needed on the open market at a price they could afford, they decided to build it themselves.

The solution they came up with uses Microsoft Media Center, Xbox 360, and SQL Server. It extends the hospital's IT infrastructure out to the patient's bedside. Patients access the system through a custom designed interface on a 15-inch flat screen monitor next to the bed. This set-up lends itself to easy cleaning between patients. The monitor also becomes a kind of "command-central" for doctors and nurses who want to access a patient's electronic record or review x-rays and other data with the patient in his or her room. Movies, games, educational videos, Internet access, e-mail, messaging, etc. are viewed on a 32-inch LCD screen mounted on the wall across from the bed.

Home screen to the bedside entertainment and education system at Arkansas Children's Hospital based on Microsoft Media Center

Yesterday, I recorded one of my House Calls audio-casts with the staff at ACH. That program will be posted on my House Call's site on Microsoft.com within the next few days. In the meantime, I just couldn't wait to tell you about this. Although the solution has just finished a limited pilot, the decision has already been made to roll it out hospital-wide. One of the highlights of my audio-cast was interviewing a 16 year-old young man who is a frequent patient at ACH. To hear his excitement about using the new bedside entertainment and education system at ACH was reward in itself. He said the system is totally awesome in helping him stay in touch with school, friends and family during extended hospital stays. His doctor has used the bedside monitor to review test results with him. And the TV, movies and Xbox games are way cool!

Custom user interface that controls entertainment and education options as displayed on a 15-inch flatscreen monitor at the patient's bedside

Congratulations to ACH Chief Technology Officer, David Higginson, and his staff. This is just one of more than 400 clinical and business solutions this team has built at Arkansas Children's Hospital in the last five years alone. I met David a while back when he visited us here at Microsoft in Redmond. It was evident then that he and his team were up to some amazing work. My thanks also are extended to Penny Ward, RN, for sharing her enthusiasm about the bedside solution at ACH. And, my very special thanks go to Christopher Holstead, the 16 year-old patient at ACH, for sharing his thoughts about the new bedside entertainment and education system.

Be watching here on HealthBlog for more information when my House Calls’ audio-cast with Arkansas Children’s Hospital goes live on the Net.

Bill Crounse, MD Worldwide Health Director Microsoft

The Line Between Play and Learning

Alfred Thompson — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 14:37:00 GMT

At this morning's NECC keynote discussion Elizabeth Streb noted that students who come to her workshops have time to play before the lessons start but that the line between when play ends and learning begins is very often blurred.
Mitchel Resnick at the MIT Media Lab's Lifelong Kindergarten talks about the same thing - for example what kindergarten children learn playing with blocks.
And yet it seems as though all too often we try to suck all the fun and play out of education. We act as if learning only happens when we are serious and that it is almost better if "learning" is painful and boring. And then we wonder why kids just can't wait to get out of school. Am I one of the few who sees a problem here?

Technorati tags: necc, n07s755, education, necc07, necc2007

what goes on in school stays in school

Alfred Thompson — Sat, 23 Jun 2007 23:03:00 GMT

I spent today at EduBloggerCon - a pre-unconference at NECC. At one of the sessions I made that comment that "what goes on in school stays in school”. What I mean by that is that students think that what they learn (or at least what teachers are teaching) doesn't matter outside of school.That may be the reason that so many students object to homework - they don't want to bring school home.

This is part of a bigger problem in that too many students are in school, not to learn, but to pass on to the next level. Elementary school students want to get into middle school, middle school into high school, high school into college and college into work. They don't see the connection between acquaring knowledge in the process. All they see is moving through steps.

The trick is getting students to see that they need the knowledge and that the knowledge matters outside of school.

Technorati Tags: technology education necc07 edubloggercon07 ebc07fs

Maker Faire: Lightning straight to the brain

Laura Foy — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 16:54:00 GMT

Back in my college days (last year) nothing inspired me more than a teacher who really got hands on, and especially if they let me electricute them! Well UC Santa Cruz is experimenting with particle physics and taking their findings on the orad to enlighten other schools and excite little pyro's like me. Check out this demonstration of power and electricity from this years Maker Faire. And yes, there's a real live person in that metal suit.

The Geek Stories: Studying Gaming at College

Nick Hodge — Wed, 06 Jun 2007 05:28:00 GMT

Gaming is a large business world-wide, employing many thousands of talented engineers, designers and producers. Where do these people learn their trade? In College!

Queensland University of Technology (QuT) has nearly completed the first semester of their Bachelor of Games and Information Entertainment.

On a recent trip to Brisbane, I interviewed Dr Ross Brown (aka Dr Groove) and Penny Drennan.

Studying gaming is more than the coding: it encompasses the process of creating storylines, working in teams, programming and design. Penny and Ross talk through what students are learning, and the job prospects (good!) at the end of the course. With a combination of software engineering, business and creative industries - working in gaming is cross disciplinary. And will use all your brain.

In the interview, we also take a quick visit to their offices, sneak a peek at Elvis and find out how to fill your office with Xboxes.

... and of course, I also find out both of their geek stories.

We are not here to entertain, but to teach

Alfred Thompson — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 03:18:00 GMT

The title of this post is a statement I have heard from teachers, in one form or another, more often than I can count. Often times it feels like people say it to justify boring students out of their minds. Not always of course. And just as often those same teachers do use entertaining techniques, projects and tools in their class. It is just that they resist new methods or techniques that are different or that appear to be somehow too entertaining. One almost wonders if some teachers feel "it was hard (or boring) for me to learn it should be hard (or boring) for my students."

I've always found that I learn the most from teachers who love what they teach. I would also have to say that most of the teachers who love their subject and love teaching it are almost by definition entertaining. They communicate their enthusiasm in a way that is, as a side product, entertaining. These are the teachers who have the best (most interesting, most amusing, most relevant) stories to use as examples. These are the teachers who bounce around the room getting kids excited. And most of all these are the teachers who get creative and find ways to make the subject interesting to their students.

Is making the material interesting the same as entertainment? If not I am not sure what the difference is. Of course the priority is teaching. Even if not every student finds the material or the teacher interesting the student still has to learn. At the same time to more students are interested and the more interested they are the more they learn. Is a teaching technique that presents the material in a stale and boring fashion somehow better, more pure that a technique that entertains as it teaches the same material? Please tell me no. Isn't the picking between entertaining and teaching a false dichotomy to some extent? Shouldn't a teacher who loves teaching their subject at least be animated and interesting?

My opinion is that a teacher should be judged on their results. Do their students enjoy learning more? Do more students continue on to advanced classes? Do more sign up for a class and stick with it? Do the students learn as much or more with the more "entertaining" class/course format? If the answer is "yes" then where is the bad in students being a bit "entertained?"

Maker Faire : The Crucible sets the sky ablaze!

Laura Foy — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 17:33:00 GMT

The Crucible is an arts education center that fosters the collaboration of art, industry and community. Through training in the fine and industrial arts, they promote creative expression, reuse of materials and innovative design while serving as an accessible arts venue for the public. But even more importantly, they let me shoot their flame thrower :)

Educational Uses for Microsoft Surface

Alfred Thompson — Wed, 30 May 2007 17:10:00 GMT

You know every so often someone writes a simple blog post that when you read it makes you want to hit your head and say "how in the world did I not think of that?" Vicki A Davis did that today in her Cool Cat Teacher blog. No wonder she is one of the most linked to education blogs around. Vicki talks about the educational potential of Microsoft Surface. As Vicki says

The applications here for education are incredible! How about a word wall that changes depending on the class that is in your room. Think about the manipulatives potentials -- use them but NO clean up -- just a little Windex and wipe off the fingerprints!

Think about collaborative work as several students sort objects. Very little children sorting letters or words or images of shapes. Older students organizing individual images to create storyboards. OR maybe taking note cards and placing them in order for a presentation or the outline for a paper. Or perhaps interactively drawing lines to show relationships. Or annotating geometric shapes. Sure you can do some of that with a Tablet PC today but working collaboratively is going to be so much easier with these Surface devices.

I'm thinking that the potential in special education is also going to be interesting. Lots of special education students have either physical or processing differences that make traditional devices difficult. This new tool should allow them to visualize and manipulate things in powerful ways.

While the initial costs are high for educational uses that will change over time and then watch out.

Celebrating Smarts

Alfred Thompson — Tue, 29 May 2007 01:45:00 GMT

The other week I attended a good sized programming competition at St Joseph's College in Patchogue New York. It was a great event and very well run. There were over 100 high school students in 34 teams representing about 16-18 high schools. I'd love to point you to an online news article about it but guess what? There aren't any. The event "wasn't news worthy" according to all of the news companies who were invited.

Now can you picture a sporting event of that size not being "news worthy?" Of course not. That many kids? Rival high schools in the same town? High tension over if the school that won the previous year could repeat with a new "coach?" Come on as a sporting event that would all be high drama and grist not only for news articles but for columnist musings. You know it would. But that was programming. It was students competing with their minds! Who cares about students who can think? No, we're all about students who can bash a baseball with a bat, toss a ball down field to be whipped into a net by a lacrosse stick, or perhaps tennis balls back and forth until someone missing one.

There are high school and college level programming competitions held all the time. TCEA in Texas runs a huge state-wide programming competition on a scale that matches any state-wide sporting event in the country. I suspect you'd be hard pressed to find out how a local school did in it from the local newspaper, TV or radio news broadcast though.

One of the things the FIRST organization does so well is to bring the sports metaphor into their robotics competition in a way that pretty much demands attention from the media. They create an event that is almost as much a show, good theatre, as it is a true competition. And competition it is - make no mistake about that! They have a great model and it gets some media attention. Still not enough though.

Why is it that the media doesn't care about students competing in "smarts?" Could that be part of the problem with the educational system? That society doesn't appreciate it when it works? A society gets what they reward. Where are the rewards (grades don't count) for the incremental improvements and demonstrations of educational success?

[Note: Cross posted from http://blogs.msdn.com/alfredth/archive/2007/05/29/celebrating-smarts.aspx]

Are smaller schools really the answer?

Alfred Thompson — Wed, 09 May 2007 20:23:00 GMT

A couple of posts by Cal Teacher (here, here and here) have gotten me moved me to write about something I have been thinking about for a while - making high schools smaller either by a school within a school model or splitting them up. The Gates Foundation among other groups have been pushing this idea for a while. It sounds good to a lot of people but I'm not so sure about it.

Oh I agree that it many of today's large high schools it is easy to lose students. But small schools are too limited in their options for students. What do you do if there is a poor fit between a student and teacher (it happens) but there is no choice but for that student to have that teacher for a course they need or are interested in? What do you do if a student wants to try something, stretch themselves a bit, but that course is not offered at the school they are at? Transfer? Not always an option.

I went to a very large (over 5000 students) high school a long time ago in a city far far away. But I was never lost even though I was painfully shy and quiet. Why? Because the school had majors or concentrations. I traveled to some key courses (shop, drawing, and science courses tuned to my major) with a smaller cohort. I was at an engineering magnet so we all had shop and drawing classes but they were specific to out major course of studies after our second year. We split up, to some extent but not completely, for other courses like math, English and social studies. So we were a part of the wider school community while maintaining a membership in a smaller community of interest. It worked and worked well.

I think this model could be made to work in schools that are not magnets or special purpose schools as well. Perhaps the focus could be around sports? Or maybe vocational technical programs? Vo-tech students today need and take largely the same math, English and social studies courses other students take. They need to math for example. Perhaps music or performing arts could be a focus. Perhaps, as Cal Teacher suggests, they could be special advisory classes that keep the same students and teacher together for four years. There must be many more ways to build community in a school. The key is to make sure that everyone gets to be a part of a community that knows and values them. Somewhere where as the song goes "everyone knows your name."

Mt. Logan Tech Summit Begins

Larry Larsen — Fri, 04 May 2007 07:35:00 GMT

A dozen technology enthusiasts led by James Coleridge have left Vancouver International Airport to begin a 30-day summit of Mount Logan in the Yukon, checking 822 pounds of gear across 14 bags. I will be flying out in five hours to meet up with them at the basecamp this weekend. It's been an amazing challenge for everyone involved.

We will be watching their progress during the month of May on Channel 10, with interviews, pictures, and phone calls as James and crew make the trek, connecting to schools along the way real-time video chats. Starting next week you can follow the climb with Live GPS tracking on a Windows Live Map.

Teacher Review Boards

Alfred Thompson — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 13:18:00 GMT

Sometimes, all too often it seems, school administrators and teachers act too much like the children they are supposed to be mentoring. The worst of it is when the rush to judge students harshly. One expects children to jump to conclusions, do inadequate "research" and judge people based on what they want to believe about a person (stereotypes) rather than on their actions. One sees a lot of kids who get into trouble all time because the adults "know" those are the kids who do what ever wrong is done. Likewise one sees other kids get away with things because after all everyone "knows" they are good kids.

I have heard a teacher say things like "they are a B student just give them a B." without any real consideration for the work the student actually did. Likewise I have seem students get detention without any evidence other than that they were in the room when something happened. It's really embarrassing to be part of those situations. Well I found it embarrassing. Others apparently do not.

The worst jumping to conclusions I have heard about recently is the case of Cody Webb who was suspended and jailed for 12 days for making a bomb threat that he didn't make. The principal didn't bother to take the switch to daylight savings time into account and "determined" that Cody's call into an information line was at the same time a bomb threat came into the school. Having determined that Cody was guilty any explanations he made were clearly lies because he was "a criminal."

I wish I was surprised by any of this but I am not. While there are many outstanding administrators who are open-minded, thorough and fair there are always a few who make the rest look bad. I'm not sure what we do about it though. Privacy laws designed to protect children generally prevent independent review of administrative punishments. Appeal is generally limited to going to the school board and boards have a vested interest in protecting their administrators.

I wonder if an independent review board might not be a good idea. Perhaps these boards could be regional in areas where school districts are small. It is unlikely that ever decision or even many decisions would need a review. But for those potentially high profile or very serious incidents and those cases where one student seems to be punished much more than the average these review boards would be useful. I don't actually expect most or even many decisions to be overturned. What I do expect is that an appeal to an independent body would increase the credibility of decisions, increase the perception of fairness, and that students who are truly getting a raw deal would have a reasonable outlet for justice.

What are they teaching teachers?

Alfred Thompson — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 19:17:00 GMT

Chris Higgins has a great post about all the things he is learning during his first year of teaching that they didn't teach him when he was studying to become a teacher. One of the things he doesn't talk about but that I hear a lot about is that teachers are not taught to use technology. They are not taught about how to use it for personal productivity and they are not taught how to use it as a teaching tool.
Oh I am sure there are some education programs that do this (please allow me to believe that) but as far as I can tell those programs/courses are few and far between. I have heard of a few university programs that train professors to use various tools, including technology, to teach at the university level. That's great as far as it goes. But honestly there are a lot of departments who pay little more than lipservice to quality of teaching and put a lot more on quality of research.
For K-12 teachers there is some in-service training going on but the quantity and quality of that training seems to be hit or miss. Given how our students are growing up in a computer and media driven world this seems like a real problem. Schools can't fix it themselves. Schools of education can't fix it themselves either because there has to be local support for new teachers. But you'd think they'd at least include some technology training as a required part of the curriculum. Perhaps if states started requiring a bit more training in technology for certification and accrediting agencies started requiring a demonstration that technology was being used it would help.
But really it has to start somewhere and training new teachers seems like the best way to me.

Keeping Languages Around

Alfred Thompson — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 18:14:00 GMT

I ran into an interesting article today about struggles keeping the Romansch language alive in Switzerland. Romansch is one of the four official languages of that country but the population of native speakers is on a decline. One of the problems is that there are several written dialects and that causes educational problems. For example which dialect do you write your textbook in?
The solution is to standardize the language and in fact that is what is happening. They are standardizing around the version that is built into Microsoft Office. What? Yes, that's right. Microsoft has worked with linguists from Switzerland to incorporate a stardard dialect of Romansch into the spellchecker and dictionary for Office.
Microsoft CEO Steve Balmer is the son of a man born and raised in Switzerland and no doubt family tied feed into this process. But what ever the reason it is clear that having computer tools in a language can go a long way towards reductingthe need to move away from a language with a rich cultural history. The article notes that Google has a Romansch translation for their search engine as well. Large companies have the resources to make this kind of support available in their products even though there is not money to be made doing so. Sometimes contributing to the culture in which they operate is just the right thing to do.