Brighter Flames Arrayed

There are lots of reasons why I don’t use graphing calculators in my classroom. Most of them are pedagogical (e.g., yes you really should know how to sketch a parabola without a calculator). A lot of them are logistical (i.e., do I want my students to spend 20 minutes typing in a large data set so they can make a graph that is too crappy to read, or do I want them to spend those 20 minutes analyzing the graph?).

Personally, though, there’s also the vanity angle.

This is a comparison between a cell phone from the 1980s and a cell phone today.

Okay, lets do the same thing with graphing calculators.

It pretty much still looks the same, except there are rounded corners. That’s it. At least when we went from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0 we got collaboration and pictures of cats in addition to rounded corners. Notice how the cell phone got, basically, a 100x increase in resolution on its screen? Not so for the graphing calculator. In fact, the $20 MP3 player I got for my mother has a better screen than the TI-84. And it’s in color.

Graphing calculators are really the only electronics items that don’t actually improve over the years—I think they even gave up on improving because my students are using the exact same calculators as I did when I was in high school. Even slide rules got better/prettier over time (hey guys look now we can shove 6 scales into the space of 4 with new plastic technology that is more durable and lighter). Graphing calculators? They not only don’t get better by much but they don’t even get shinier. XKCD has much more snark on this topic, which got posted as I was writing this so I may as well stop at this point and let them take over.

Wing :: Jul.19.2010 :: Posts :: 1 Comment »

I’m cleaning out my pile of old documents and I found… a stack of transparencies with problems written on them. Back in the old days I used to write problems that were long on transparencies and project them on a side screen while we worked on them on the board.

That was… 2006. Or maybe 2007? It wasn’t actually until 2008 that I had an LCD projector in every room I taught in. It’s kind of crazy that I’ve only actually been (able to be) using tablet PCs for two years and it feels like forever since I picked up a transparency marker.

There is actually a stack of transparencies sitting in the department office supply closet and several transparency pens and I have no idea what to do with them. Don’t say “make ’stained glass’ art”, though, because we have a real stained glass studio like 200 ft away from that same closet.

Wing :: Jun.18.2010 :: Posts :: No Comments »

At some point during a faculty discussion Farmville was brought up and it was immediately dismissed since it is not something that our students would want to play since the graphics looked like they were meant for small children. That really scares me. Farmville, when I think about it, is much more destructive (and much less constructive) than games like World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare 2, which many of our students do play. And when you think about it it is so much easier to dismiss Farmville since it doesn’t look like a game that so many people over the world—and so many students in our school—would play.

In four years (from 2004 to 2008), World of Warcraft managed to gather 11 million subscribers (according to the Wikipedia article and some math). The New York Times claims that Farmville has 22 million players playing daily four months after launch. I don’t have the hard numbers to prove it (yet) but I’m pretty sure many more of our students play Farmville over World of Warcraft. For one, we block WoW access on campus but since we do not block Facebook (many day schools do, but we are a boarding school and do not) Farmville is easily accessible. Also, Farmville is free and World of Warcraft involves money, therefore (possibly) parental approval and a credit card.

I can argue that many games our students play regularly (anecdotal evidence, since I haven’t had time to collect hard data) have educational “redeeming” qualities. World of Warcraft teaches teamwork. Call of Duty trains reflexes and hand-eye coordination. The Sims, if you consider it as a simulation in which your actions have determinable consequences on a closed system, teach programming and perhaps ethics. Starcraft (we have a lot of Oriental international students) does all three to a varying degree. Maybe I’m a video game apologist. But no matter how hard I try I can’t really say that Farmville teaches anything of significance.

Being billed as a social game Farmville sure has very few “social” features. The two main social aspects of Farmville is “bother other people to get things” and “visit others’ farms to get things”. The former makes Farmville something of a pyramid scheme (like almost all Facebook games) and the latter, until a recent update, did not actually accomplish anything cooperatively. Even now visiting another person’s farm does not provide actual “interaction” and “teamwork” means “if you click on my farm five times we both get a very, very, very small amount of extra stuff”. Farmville also allows you to “gift” others with trees, items and animals but once again there is no actual social interaction in the gifting process.

What annoys me is not that Farmville’s social features are lacking but that it is marginally more popular than other, similar games that encourage actual social interaction. For example, Farmtown is a similar game that allows you to hire others to plow your fields or harvest your crops and by going to a central chat room and hiring people the player spends less time clicking monotonously and possibly even learn something about labor supply and demand. In essence, Farmville’s teamwork component asks players to put in more time playing to obtain small amounts of in-game resource reward (which, I must add, is actually not worth the time) or put in time to send unsolicited mail to other people so those others can spend more time playing. Games like Farmtown (and World of Warcraft) reward players in both a reduced time necessary to reach a goal and in-game resources when they work as teams.

Do I really have to go into why clicking on rhombuses to plant crops repeatedly is not an exercise in hand-eye coordination for young people without disabilities and is more likely to help them develop health issues instead? I look forward to the day when someone posts an article or paper on using Farmville as a physical therapy tool but I’m not holding my breath.

You could argue that Farmville is a simulation of farming and is a modern iteration of old educational simulation games like SimFarm with new graphics. That would be true except that Farmville has almost no risk involved. This is the main reason why I think Farmville doesn’t actually teach anything. A real farmer has to gauge what to plant crops and when to plant crops or what animals to raise (a local farm sends out chicken pre-order forms so they can decide how many chickens to raise each season) and planning a farm is a real, complicated economics problem. Since there are no weather, no supply and no demand there are only two factors involved in choosing what to plant: which crop makes me the most money/experience points and will I be able to log in to harvest it when it is ready. The only possibility of failure in Farmville is to forget to log in to harvest your crops before they go bad. Basically, if you log in everyday (which many people do) you cannot lose.

Maybe that’s why my students are obsessed with Farmville. If you haven’t noticed from the top corner of this blog I teach at a school on a big ol’ farm. I’ve asked students why they don’t just walk over to the barn and milk real cows instead of milking fake ones on their computer screen and the answer has generally been “but I did that this morning!”. You can in fact screw up real farming really easily; and it’s hard! Farmville is an idealized form of farming that involves no risk, no physical work beyond sitting there and clicking on boxes. And it still gives the simulated satisfaction of producing “food”. Of course, it doesn’t actually produce anything of value; I’ll excuse a student who needs to go feed real cows from work, but I don’t think I’ll ever let “I needed to harvest my raspberries so I couldn’t do my math homework” be a valid excuse in the classroom.

Farmville is a much bigger problem, I feel, than any other game out there right now. And it really scares the crap out of me.

Postscript: There is one somewhat possible redeeming factor to Farmville: using Farmville as a medium for visual art. Just like real farmers cropping their crops to resemble a picture of someone and taking an aerial photo of it Farmville players are using the decorative items and crops in Farmville to make pictures. Decorating a farm is a real draw to Farmville and is an outlet for lots of creativity; it is also a steady revenue stream since buying decorative items cost money and one quick way to get all that in-game money is by spending real money.

Wing :: Feb.28.2010 :: Posts :: 3 Comments »

I’m not mad at Google Buzz because it wants to be another social network service that gathers stuff from me and splat it out all over the Internet. That’s awesome. My problem with it is that it may be a product launch that will actually reduce the amount of technological progress we make as a whole.

The immediate fallout of Buzz is that now we can no longer expect any part of a web based e-mail system to be private. It never really was; I don’t doubt that web based e-mail services have been selling information to spammers and we know that Google harvests message contents to show us ads. That’s fine. But to blatantly slap their power in all the users’ faces is not. Yeah, we know you can do this, but don’t rub it in our faces and call it a good thing.

From the parental/teacher standpoint a bigger problem with Buzz is that everything is automatic. With Facebook and Myspace there is a key component to a breach of privacy: you have to provide the information before it can be leaked to someone you do not want to see the information. Just like we teach our kids, if you don’t put it on your Facebook profile nobody will know about it but assume you will have no control over it once it’s there. Buzz is changing that game. Relevant data that you did not actively generate is now shared with others. The part that the Internet is focused on is that I can be “friends” (networked through a bi-directional edge) with someone simply because they harassed me and I replied telling them not to harass me. The most prominent case of this being that of a woman who gets harassed by men who think it’s cool to rape her suddenly having her entire contact list (including her mother’s e-mail address) exposed to all those people. When you have a software rollout that may result in facilitating capital crimes it’s a little more than an oops. It does immediate damage. Also, it kills trust.

This brings me to the reason that I absolutely hate Google Buzz is probably the same reason Google itself hates it at this point: it completely destroys trust in Google’s services. We’re on the verge of great technological innovation with what Google’s been doing. Google Apps is amazing. Google Docs is an exceptionally useful piece of technology. Many schools and non-profits have switched to or are switching to Google Apps from the traditional Novell/Lotus/Exchange/FirstClass/whatever models they’ve been using. But now that Google has demonstrated that it can and will create a gaping (physical) security hole for all 150 million plus of its users for the sake of a product that isn’t very good I wonder if sysadmins and administrators will continue to trust Google with Google Apps. I surely won’t; not to the degree that I currently do anyway. And that’s really, really sad because Google Apps is a great piece of technology.

Sure, not everything Google does was a hit. Take Wave. When Google rolled out Wave it was disappointing, but we can live with (or without) it. Some people liked it, some didn’t, the usual people whined about it, Google probably learned a lot from the launch. Nothing of significance happened. Great.

But when Buzz came about not only are people directly harmed by it but I’m afraid that progress itself will be slowed down because people who make decisions (and when you’re in the education sector, these decisions are about children) will now be less willing to take risks with Google. I doubt enough people will abandon Google’s innovations to actually make humanity as a whole go backwards in information technology, but some order of change down the line has just became negative and eventually we’ll feel its impact.

I’m not sure if any other company can have this kind of impact. Take Microsoft. If nobody trusts Windows 7 because it’s known that there’s some major privacy flaw built in we’ll just keep using XP. No big deal. The way Windows 7 handles everything isn’t completely revolutionary compared to XP. The same applies for software patches. Sometimes a new Office patch introduces a security flaw but, hey, just don’t download it and wait for the next one. It’s not like you really needed the patch to fix the garbled text in Turkish in the help file that nobody reads anyway.

Devindra reminded me of Cuil, which was described as the worst launch ever. Well, Cuil never did any damage. We poked at it, we laughed at it, and it was left to die. Some folks lost a lot of money and some folks lost a lot of time. But as a whole, society never lost anything except maybe for the ten minutes it took to make fun of Cuil displaying X-rated images for innocent searches. Buzz, that did real damage to both individuals and, in a less tangible sense, society, and it’s going to last.

Google is trying to change the game like it did with GMail and Apps and Voice and all the other stuff that I don’t use. When you say “I don’t trust Docs so I’ll just keep using Word and e-mail files back and forth” that’s a big step forwards not taken. I don’t think I can honestly defend Google anymore even when their software is the best for a situation because in applications like e-mail and document sharing privacy has a near-infinite utility value. And, well, I don’t like that.

Wing :: Feb.15.2010 :: Posts :: 4 Comments »

Right now, somewhat outside of work (basically, when I don’t need a tablet or the software I have installed on it) I use a 13″ ultraportable Acer Timeline laptop. The idea of having a low power consumption, exceptionally light yet powerful-enough-for-Photoshop laptop for the price of two netbooks is actually a really wonderful thing; kind of like having a MacBook Air for a third the price. But this post isn’t about the laptop itself. It’s about buying the laptop.

To be more precise, my laptop is an Acer Aspire Timeline AS3810TZ-4925. Every single one of those numbers is somehow important. If I wanted a 6415 I would need to pay a different price. The only difference, besides the model numbers, is that they come with slightly different processors, hard drives and memory and maybe some of them don’t have bluetooth. I’m not really sure. Some part of that model number governs the screen size as well. I’m not really sure which part it is because, frankly, I didn’t want to bother.

If someone who has two degrees in mathematics and a mild dose of OCD doesn’t want to make sense of patterns and numbers then I seriously doubt that your average consumer will.

It seems that Asian companies are all pretty guilty of this model number business. Lenovo offers nine different lines of laptops and netbooks, each with three to five different submodels. Acer boasts enough models to fill up my screen, and remember that each of those models have about 4 to 6 submodels. Toshiba and Asus were equally infuriating—even within one model line—during my laptop search. Dell is slightly less infuriating since it attaches names as opposed to numbers or, in the case of Lenovo, letters—and remember that these numbers and letters do not actually map in a reasonable way to function!—to the different laptop lines and first ask you if you’re a home or business user. Even with widescreen monitors it’s pretty much impossible to compare all the laptops within the scope a consumer may want from one company side to side.

Oh. Also. Don’t get me started on Oriental MP3 players and cameras. Once, in the electronic mecca of Hong Kong, I swore that I’ll never buy a Korean or Japanese or Chinese MP3 player since it was impossible to distinguish between all the models. Phones are equally absurd but at least phone companies in the US always tend to sell you some flagship models that you can easily choose from. I’m pretty sure that comparing forty different incomprehensible model numbers is a culturally acceptable thing to do across the Pacific but I think I’ve grown a little too impatient over the years to deal with things like this.

The thing about this whole experience is that it makes me miss buying Apple products. Not actually using Apple products, but the process of buying them. When you want an Apple laptop you go “I want the good white Macbook” and poof, there it is. It makes buying electronics actually rather easy as long as Apple makes that product and you want it. I’m pretty sure that it’s much easier to say “I want a black Macbook for Christmas” than to say “I want an Acer Aspire AS3810TZ-4925 for Christmas”. Of course, that clarity is part of the services provided by the Apple price tag. Given that I don’t mind the spelunking for a bargain I think I came out ahead. Of course, not everyone is like me.

The question then is why aren’t companies simplifying their product lines like Apple did? Dell is doing it and the result seems to be that every not-tech-savvy person I know who has a laptop either has a Macbook or a Dell Inspiron. (And every not-tech-savvy person I know who has a lot of money has a Macbook Pro or a Macbook Air.) The exception are students who bought their laptops in Asia. Like the student who showed our IT folks the first low cost ultraportable laptop they’ve seen: the Toshiba Satellite T135-S1307. One of the 13s stands for “13 inch screen”, and not-very-regrettably I have forgotten which one it is. If you want to know, you’ll have to do your own research.

Wing :: Dec.29.2009 :: Posts :: No Comments »