Category: Technology Talk

Volunteer Technology Committee Work

The principal audience
of this blog entry is my English Education students–to give them a kind of
"behind the scenes" look at one type of professional involvement
and volunteer work. The entry also presents some leads on an educational administrative
technology system–the Centre system–which
students might find very useful, as a sample of the type of record-keeping
system they will need to employ in their student teaching and teaching. The
text below (in green and maroon)
is a letter I wrote in July 2004 to Principal Bill Donegan of St. Odilo School
and Paul Rau, the school’s Music Director and technology guru.

I think this entry also
shows some of the "sprawl" of professional/personal/community relations
that is inevitable if one wishes to be an effective, dedicated teacher. I
am or have been the parent of five St. Odilo schoolchildren; I’ve served on
the St. Odilo School Board as member and president; I’ve taught teacher in-services
at the school; I’ve conducted several clinical programs with the Language
Arts and Computers teachers–and I’ve served on the school’s technology committee
(Techcom), in which capacity the current letter was written. There’s been
a connectedness and trajectory to each of these roles, even if there wasn’t
a clear sense always of the purpose and direction and feasibility and worth
of each endeavor.

I think it’s important
for beginning teachers to know how "messy" it can be to get a foothold
in a school and build a professional role there. I confess that from the beginning
I always had ulterior motives for my contributions to St. Odilo School.
Those motives involved not only helping the school be the best it can be for
my children, but also finding a "partner" site where I could conduct
some of my clinical programs–which required a high level of technological
capacity and dependability. As I engaged in technological work at SXU, I knew
immediately that work could pay off in other contexts–everything could fall
into place neatly–but only after a lot of indirect setup and involvement.
Anyway, this blog is just an illustration of that…

Dear Bill
and Paul–The Centre School Information System (administrative school package)
is installed, upgraded, and ready for use. The current system is four upgrades
beyond the first system that was installed about a month ago. So the product
has had an intense development this summer by its creators. The current version,
1.02, seems to have most of the bugs worked out, and I think you can depend
on it in terms of data safety and security. (But there may be kinks lefts,
FOR EXAMPLE: On my Mac at home, I find that Internet Explorer doesn’t always
work for every feature (namely, for editing data); I haven’t been able to
test on a Windows machine yet, so if you experience a problem, and you’re
using Explorer, try switching to Mozilla or Netscape or some other browser
to see if the problem persists).

Bill–if
you intend to use this system, you’ll probably need some assistance in figuring
it out and finding all its uses. It took me a couple of hours of tinkering
to get the hang of it (once all the installation difficulties were overcome).
Some of the features are pretty obvious; some, however, I found counter-intuitive
or a little odd. Some of the features won’t be needed at all by St. Odilo,
but most seem pretty useful.

Everything
is editable from within an admin account, even though it often doesn’t look
so. If you see something you’d like to edit (e.g., a password), try clicking
on it, and you should get a text box or pop-up menu for editing. (Here’s where
I had the problem with Explorer. Explorer lets you change the data, but after
you click "Save" the change doesn’t stick.)

I’ve created
an Administrator account for each of you. One feature I don’t like is that
an administrator can see the password of every user (not just CHANGE the password,
as is the typical admin power with such systems). So I’m sending this message
with your password at the same time, since either of you could look at each
other’s passwords at any time. In fact, to keep things simple at this point,
I’ve given you each the same password: ******.

It’s important
to know that every administrator will always be able to view every password,
so you’d want to know who your admins are, of course, and you’d want to advise
users not to use a super-sensitive password (for instance, Paul, I don’t think
we should use our master Odilo password in this system).
Here’s the login info you need:

http://www.saintodilo.org/centre

Username:
**********
Password: **********

There
are some test accounts created for us to tinker with. Feel free to create
some new accounts.

Go ahead–log
in. You’ll see eight icons across the top. Click on "Users" ("Users"
are parents, teachers, and administrators; students are administered from
another icon). To see a list of all the current users, clck the "Submit"
button with all the search boxes left blank (this procedure for displaying
all the users is one of the less obvious features I referred to above). Try
to edit any of the users by clicking on their names, and then clicking on
the text you wish to edit.

There
are four types of accounts available in the Centre system: student, teacher,
parent, and administrator. To download a brief manual on each, go to:

http://www.saintodilo.org/centre/Docs

Do either
of you think it would be a bad idea to go to Techcom with some kind of call
for assistance in using/testing the system? I don’t think we should create
any "spare" administrator accounts on our system, but there is a
demo site set up for the general public to learn about and practice with the
system. If you decide to use Centre to handle the school’s record keeping,
you’ll want, eventually to get parents and students on board. First, of course,
are the teachers, but my hope is that it won’t be too difficult to give them
a start in using it. Perhaps Paul and I could prepare some type of in-service
for the start of the year?
But what do you think about sending Techcom something along these lines?

DRAFT
OF POSSIBLE ANNOUNCEMENT TO TECHCOM:

Dear Techcom–This
summer we’ve installed a new system on our server for managing record-keeping
and various administrative/communicative tasks for the school and school community.
The new system is call "Centre," and it is Open Source software
developed by the Miller Group (http://www.miller-group.net/). The Centre system
can be used for scheduling, record-keeping, turning in grades, making reports,
taking attendance, recording grades for assignments, quizzes, and quarters,
making mailings, determining sports eligibility, etc.

Since
an implementation of Centre would involve the whole St. Odilo community (there
are four types of log-in: parent, student, teacher, and administrator), Techcom
should probably lead the way in learning about the system and testing it out.
If we decide to go with a full implementation of Centre, Techcom could probably
best advise on how to announce and promote the system, as well as to educate
users–primarily teachers, but also parents and students.

A demo
site has been created for people who wish to get started in Centre:

http://demo.miller-group.net/index.php

You can
log in with one of four demo accounts (the different account levels carry
different permissions and functions):

•
Username: admin; Password: admin
• Username: teacher; Password: teacher
• Username: parent; Password: parent
• Username: student; Password: student

For user
manuals for each of the four types of login (Administrator, Parent, Teacher,
and Student), go to

http://www.saintodilo.org/centre/Docs

END OF
DRAFT OF POSSIBLE ANNOUNCEMENT TO TECHCOM


Bill–If you like this message, you may send it, or any version of it. Or
I would be happy to send it or something else, if you wish. Or Paul could
send something. Or, we don’t have to send anything. But getting the word out
might generate some interest and assistance….

Okay–that’s
it for now. Take care, Angelo

PHPQuickGallery–Tool for Image/Movie Collections

One of my summer technology projects was to install PHPQuickGallery
at my Web site and the Web site of at least one colleague (so far). The software
lets you easily organize photo collections for display at a Web site. The PHP-based
system allows the site owner to add comments to photos, and it provides
site visitors the opportunity to view images as thumbnails and also in various
sizes. I’ve initiatied my
PHPQuickGallery with photos of my family’s "Baseball Vacation"
and a few archived pictures of the kids.

Norm Boyer is the colleague collaborator/testor so far. He had some great
photos from the England Travels course he taught this summer. Norm helped
me identify a few glitches and workarounds, but most of all, he confirmed how
useful the system is for very quickly posting large collections of photos. I’m
wondering to what extent my colleagues in the Art Department might find PHPQuickGallery
relevant to their needs for organizing the large collections of slides they
use in their instruction.

I found out about this software from the August 6, 2004 Scout
Report. The program is free software, with an unusual but charming licensing
requirement. As the main license condition, developer Benjamin Meyer asks that users send him
a postcard for him to display on the door to his computer room.

Here is how the software is described at the PHPQuickGallery
site:

PHPQuickGallery

PHPQuickGallery is the solution for those who want
to have a simple, easy to manage web gallery. Adding new photos or galleries
is as simple as creating directories and copying in the files (You could keep
them there, but you do have backups of your photos right?). PHPQuickGallery
doesn’t require the user to add the photos to a database, go through some
web form, or have a script run to create new web pages. PHPQuickGallery will
automatically detect and display anything new that is added.

PHPQuickGallery includes the following features

  • First and formost PHPQuickGallery will check the
    comments for spelling when saving them.
  • Ability to have galleries with images and movies.
  • Galleries can have galleries within them.
  • Automatic image thumbnail creation. No scripts to
    run or import them into the gallery.
  • Ability to display comments about images and directories
    without the need of a database.
  • Uses the file system for storing the galleries,
    images, and comments. It is not stored in a database.
  • Ability to add/delete comments when logged in.
  • Gallery slideshow.
  • Scale images on the fly to any size.
  • Themes and user prefrences.
  • Automatic thumbnail cleanup.
  • Clean commented code.

The Evolution of the English Education Site

This has been my summer of Drupal (http://www.drupal.org). Never quite thought I’d ever say that.

I heard about Drupal some time ago, but I didn’t want to be bothered with it. “Another magical solution to X, Y, and Z…blah, blah, blah.” Drupal could make it easy for users to put up material on the Web quickly, collaboratively, and easily–that’s true, but lately, you see, I’ve been somewhat committed to the notion of “Web Literacy for All…” I’ve come to see courseware like Blackboard as ultimately disenfranchising users from full participation in Internet communication. It puts you on kinda a welfare state, alienates you from your content, mystifies you with its processes, forces you into ill-fitting templates, and ultimately discourages you from using the Web for your own and new, unforeseeable purposes. Over the years, I thought Ronan, from the TechRhet listserv, put it best in his quasi-Orphic pronouncement: “Courseware sucks.” And Drupal to me seemed to be yet another version of courseware–making powerful features “easy”–but still, somehow, mystifying, contorting, and disempowering users….

Then on TechRhet this summer, one colleague put out a query asking people what they might use for an information-sharing site for his whole department–a site where faculty could all post syllabi, assignments, etc.–for sharing, discussing, group authoring, etc. The colleague said he had started the project using Drupal–and he seemed happy with it–but he just wanted to know what others were doing for similar tasks. So, of course, I took a look at his site, http://monticello.bc.edu/fws/facultyresources/, which is a resource site for teachers of First-Year Composition–and I was intrigued.

So I downloaded Drupal, installed it on the English server, and started tinkering. And I was more intrigued. For I soon enough came to see a false “either-or” in my thinking: EITHER “Web Literacy for All” OR “Courseware.” Clearly, we need both. :)

What Drupal adds is powerful inter-activity and dynamic re-configurability of data and uploaded Web content. Here’s how they describe it at drupal.org:

Drupal is an open-source platform and content management system for building dynamic web sites offering a broad range of features and services including user administration, publishing workflow, discussion capabilities, news aggregation, metadata functionalities using controlled vocabularies and XML publishing for content sharing purposes. Equipped with a powerful blend of features and configurability, Drupal can support a diverse range of web projects ranging from personal weblogs to large community-driven sites.

Diversity (of projects) is the thing that most jumps out at me right now. At first I couldn’t quite figure out what the specific application of Drupal might be. Now that I’ve “lived with” the software for a few weeks, I’m beginning to see applications arising left and right.

[Minor rant:] This “emergence of purpose” phenomenon is another example of me pursuing a project without really knowing the goal. As Michael Fullan says, “vision and strategic planning come later”…. What I’m getting at is my old complaint against the ASSESSMENT CULTURE–which insists on measuring progress toward KNOWN GOALS, and doing so from the onset and regular intervals. That’s all well and good. But it misses the point of (or casts an aspersion on?) the indirectness of wondering/wandering–which is the source of so much of my best learning. Goal-directedness and benchmark measurement are fine and good–but they tend (kinda like the Five-Paragraph Essay in high school composition instruction) to TAKE OVER THE WHOLE WORLD once they are let loose. They’re good ideas run amuck. Keeping the things, and keeping them in trim–getting the proportion right–that’s the trick. [End rant]

More valuable to me than even “diversity of projects” are Drupal’s features of group authoring, searchability, re-configurability, and meta-data tagging. These features will make it possible to put the latest English Education news all online easily and consistently–and all gathered and organized in one place. I’m not sure it’ll work, but I’m going to give it a try. The prospect of managing a massive information site like an English Education site has always daunted me in the past. I knew our program needed such a site, but it needed a good one. I knew I could build a good one, but I never had confidence in my ability to maintain one. For those of you who have build Web sites can relate: Adjusting a complex site, like an information-rich program site, is much like renovating a house of cards…you know what the outcome should look like, but getting things there in one piece is quite another matter.

I’ve begun contemplating running my courses out of the EE site, or a different Drupal installation; I have to experiment more. But Drupal allows for the threaded discussion boards I use for my students’ reading journals. I just have some questions about privacy; does Drupal allow for private discussion boards? Even if it doesn’t, I should be able to password protect parts in the traditional Apache way. Anyway….

I would like to simplify the technology experience of my students, so I’m thinking I may not use Blackboard for the course sites. If I could centralize everything in Drupal–i.e., the EE site, my students would be sure to get all the relevant info posted there–and have, in essence, a “one-stop shop.” Drupal and their own Webfolios; that would be enough technology; none of it would conflict with Blackboard; in fact, we could provide useful links to Blackboard and other SXU academic sites. More to follow….(for example the actual address of the English Education Web Site, which is not quite ready for public viewing… :) )