Watching this video from the NBC evening news will help you understand the post that follows.

Yesterday, we had the privilege to visit the founder and board of the IGNITE program in Fredericksburg, Texas. The high school rocketry program, founded by teacher Brett Williams in the mid-nineties, has spread across the state and is moving across the borders.  TSTC is looking for ways to partner with the IGNITE/SystemsGo program as it grows.

The learning is entirely project-based.  Students work in teams to design working  hybrid rockets that meet the specifications for each part of the curriculum.  It has been very successful.  To quote Mr. Williams:

This is a whole new way of teaching. We really are working on not just educating our students, but developing them for the workforce. Coming out of this high school program, these students will understand design and development, testing, analysis, and program management - all things the industry needs in the workforce of tomorrow.

Here are some pictures from our trip (warning - low quality iPhone snaps ahead):

Brett Williams (right) in his classroom discussing rocket science with TSTC System Chancellor Dr. Bill Segura.

Another view of the Fredericksburg High School “rocket room.” TSTC Waco President Elton Stuckly is pictured facing the camera next to Dr. Segura. You can see from here that the room is part of an old auditorium which has been divided into rooms.

Redbird 10, designed by high school students,  which will be launched at White Sands.  They are hoping for 100,000 feet.

Redbird 10 fin detail. The legs behind give you an idea of scale.  This a big metal bird.

The nosecone, designed and built by the students, will likely carry a university research payload.

Access to valve area where the N2O (nitrous oxide) oxidizer will be released to facilitate the burning of the otherwise inert solid fuel.  This system is much safer than a standard solid fuel rocket in which the fuel and oxidizer are permanently mixed together.

Failure IS an option!  These are the remains of a rocket that crashed at White Sands, possibly due to a failure in the system which releases the oxidizer.  The students have been doing a failure analysis.

All of the technologies required to build a rocket are vital to the United States as a world power.  Here we see an increasingly rare sight - a real machine shop in a high school.  A consortium of local machine shops also help the students with their projects.

Some thoughts about the program:

• It works.  The students involved are going on to study engineering and engineering technologies in college
• There was a lot of inspiration and determination to do the impossible on the part of Brett Williams
• The Fredericksburg Independent School District and the entire community had great courage and confidence to make this possible
• It can be, and is being replicated

As Mark Long of TSTC Publishing said while we were there, “It would have been a good idea anywhere, but it happened here first for a reason.”  Kudos to those visionaries who were willing to put hard work behind their visions.  Lives are being changed because of it.

*STEM is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math

I have to agree with this editorial by Michael Gartenberg - two strikes is out for the Kindle.  I have the Kindle App on my iPhone and I was one of the users who had my copy of Orwell’s ‘1984′ deleted from my device without notification.  It was the only book I actually purchased for the app.  All my other content consists of sample chapters for books I was considering for Dead Tree format. I read ‘1984′ on my iPhone as an experiment.  Now the book is gone.

My other strike involved getting my hands on a Kindle DX.  I just wasn’t that impressed.  The Kindle DX is bulky, has a clunky interface, and doesn’t have the color to make many educational graphs and illustrations usable. It was easy on the eyes for reading, but so is paper.

I think that there is a future for ebooks, but that future is multi-platform and doesn’t involve getting your materials deleted without permission or notice. When the world goes into electronic textbooks in a bigger way, we shouldn’t lock anyone into a particular device.

UPDATE: The New Yorker takes on the Kindle and the future of reading in this article.  Nicholson Baker doesn’t like the Kindle either.

I had the opportunity to visit the VEX Robotics World Championship in Dallas on Saturday.  It was a great day with hundreds of teams of intelligent and motivated kids.  I saw teams from Colombia, Puerto Rico, Brazil, Canada, New Zealand, The United Kingdom, China, Hong Kong, and all across the USA.  I snapped some pictures with my iPhone.

The results of the competition can be found HERE.  Congratulations to the team from Greenville, TX listed at the top.  (Innovation First/VEX is also headquartered in Greenville).

Banner at the door of the Dallas Convention Center

Note that the competition got support from names like Autodesk, EMC, and NASA.

The main competition floor for middle and high school students

The main competition that I watched involved both autonomous and controlled operation to stack blue or red cubes in designated areas, scoring for the respective team.  Defense was also practiced and a solid “blue” goal didn’t always stay that way for long.

One of the many Chinese teams attending the competition

A Colombian post-secondary team

The competition is piloting post-secondary competition to give engineering students some hands-on experience.  There were far fewer teams than on the secondary side, but they were from all over (including Rice University here in Texas).

The Syntax Error team "mascot" costume

Zany hats, t-shirts, and costumes helped to show team spirit.

Repair work with Dremel in the pits

A lot of schools use these robots and the curriculum built around them to teach science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) disciplines.  Check out the link above for more information.  I really wish that I had taken my Flip video camera to this one!

UPDATE: I note that the Mythbusters tested the VEX system and came away favorably impressed.  Go HERE to read the story. (NOTE: The VEX system is no longer sold at Radio Shack).

Check out the post over at TSTC Publishing Blog about the Issuu web app.  It is a great way to view or preview published materials.  I found it visually compelling and very easy to use (and basic is free).  It might be very useful for a variety of educational uses.

Read the post and try it out.

From CIO Insight.

Over at the College Affordability and Productivity blog Richard Vedder writes about the “open source” university.  Read the whole thing.  He also gets into the Baylor “gaming” of the U.S. News ratings.  I am more forgiving because gaming is the unfortunate and predictable result of the game college rating has become.

The game itself must end.  I would go along with Vedder’s idea of letting employers judge the quality of education, although it would be anathema to the academy.  Since we are in the “icky” profession of workforce or technical education (’vocational’ having become a bad word), we spend a great deal of our time trying to meet the needs of employers.  As a result, we do meet their expectations and consistently receive high marks from them.  Interestingly, as we strive to meet the needs of industry, our graduates seem to attract more interest from universities seeking to articulate them into four-year degrees.  Perhaps our interests do not diverge as much as some believe.

An open-source university is an interesting idea.  I hear more employers than ever say, “I don’t care what degree they have - I only care about what they can do.”  Their practice and profession do not always match, though, and HR departments can be frightfully conservative regarding paper qualifications.  If the change does come about, it will be driven by sheer desperation for capable employees.  Some companies have already reached that stage.

Over at Infinite Thinking Machine, there is a good post about the ‘K12 Open Minds Conference.’  It is a good read.  There is also a link to another Linux Terminal Server Project (K12LTSP) that is something like the Edubuntu project I posted about here.  This one is based on CentOS 5 and includes instructions to set up Moodle

BTW: I am pretty happy with my dual-boot Ubuntu 8.04 so far, but I am looking forward to the release of 8.10 for the advertised 3G improvements.  ATT does not support any platform but Windows.

The FSC/MEC Blog Class Fall 08 has given me a link on the blogroll (FSC apparently stands for Fitchburg State College).  It took a few moments of digging to find a link to the Merrimack Education Center.  My best wishes to the educators learning about using blogs as teaching tools!

Since the blog seems to be ad hoc, I won’t be adding it to my blogroll, but I did want to acknowledge the link.  I also wanted to note what a wonderful and ‘organic’ thing the Internet is.  You never know where the connections will happen next.

I have been ‘wasting time’ today playing around with the latest version of Ubuntu (8.04) on a Sun VirtualBox VM on my laptop.  It has been a lot of geeky fun figuring it out and I am very impressed by the free Sun virtual machine software.  The laptop is a Dell Precision M6300 with an Intel Core 2 T7250 and 4 GB of RAM running Windows Vista Business.  I have installed many other distros and I like Ubuntu’s latest enough to consider setting up a dual boot on this machine.

I had not previously been familiar with Edubuntu, though.  That is the version of Ubuntu with educational software pre-installed, including teaching and management software.  It is available in workstation and server versions.  It has a lot of potential to extend the educational life of older hardware.  The server version is set up for terminal sessions.  The terminals can be really old computers with sub GHz processors and less than 128 MB of RAM.

Over at Danny Thompson’s ‘CoachDANNY’s Blog’ there is a good post on using an Edubuntu terminal server setup as a Network+ class project.  Coach Danny includes links to lots of good documentation.  This would be a great combination of learning and service assignment for any high school or college networking class.  It could really benefit some cash-strapped elementary, middle, and secondary schools, too.

Edubuntu Terminal Server Installation

If you teach computer/network support classes, give it a try.

Our local paper - the Waco Tribune-Herald, had a FRONT PAGE ARTICLE with a big color picture about TSTC’s coming digital media certificate and associate degree in Second Life (go read it - the picture is not online.  eLearning Pundit noticed and gave us a little write-up, too.

Here is a link to the vTSTC campus website, which eLearning Pundit points out is a work in progress.

We recently had a visit from representatives of Datatel (makers of Colleague - our student information system).  One of them, Dr. Susan Hallenbeck, has a blog called Refracted Higher Education.  She viewed a presentation of TSTC efforts in Second Life.  She posted about the presentation here.

TSTC Waco was featured on this local news story about increasing numbers of distance learning students.  The cost of gasoline was suggested as one explanation.  The video (here) notes that we had 713 students enrolled in DL courses this summer, up around 300 from last summer.

The reporter interviewed a student named Elisabeth Sandifar out on the campus mall.   She is a dual credit student.  Karen Norman, an instructor in Computer Networking & Systems Administration who is continuing her education online from UT Tyler, was also interviewed for the piece.

TechYes Blog has a post on an addition to the TechYES Student Literacy Certification Program. Science is the new module. The whole set is available on the website and looks like it is reasonably priced. As I have said before, we should not assume they know how to use technology wisely and efficiently just because they are called ‘digital natives’.

The picture above is the XO-1, but Popular Mechanics says that the new One Laptop Per Child laptop (XO-2) projected for 2010 release will not have a keyboard but will use a touch screen keyboard (picture at link). OLPC is projecting a cost of $75 per machine, but there are doubters. The touchscreen would provide a lot of reconfigurability to the input and couldn’t be any worse than the rubbery keyboard on the current model.

I have blogged about the OLPC project before here & here, and a good Wikipedia article is here.

Is it possible that a business model hundreds of years old could be outdated? There is an article at “The Chronicle of Higher Education” that suggests that higher ed must change to respond to the market. The examples presented are the recording and newspaper industries. As usual with these kinds of articles, the comments make even more interesting reading. There is a lot of back-and-forth and the arguments are instructive.

Unfortunately, the comments eventually devolve into the perennial argument over whether students are customers. Of course students are customers. They fit every definition of the word of which I am aware. One of the most important distinctives of a true customer is freedom of choice regarding a product or service. If your students can take their money (or federal aid) and go elsewhere, you better start determining how you can serve them better.

For the record, I agree that the higher ed business model must change. It will change because the customers (including the organizations that employ the graduates) will no longer support it. It won’t all be online, but a lot more will be. Flexibility of many kinds will be demanded and provided. The growth of the for-profit sector is an indication of the desire that education consumers have for that service-oriented approach. In the end, our perception of what is really important in education will change.

For a technical school or program, the issues surrounding online courses are even more difficult. There are some skills that absolutely require students to have their hands on the equipment. We can’t just hide and hope the changes pass us by, though. Technology can be utilized to prepare a student to be more productive in a lab environment and increase the efficiency of the the learning process. Much of this technology can be delivered via the Internet along with the theory elements of a course. Improved technology will continue to make that delivery even more effective.

I agree with everything in this article from Inside Higher Ed. It is very much worth reading the whole thing. We are going to need a completely new way for funding and organizing post-secondary education in this country. Our system of technical colleges is already moving in the direction of greater efficiency in equipping students with truly marketable skills. This society can no longer afford the ‘college experience’ as it currently exists for these reasons:

1. It does not serve the students
2. It does not meet the needs of the economy
3. It wastes huge amounts of taxpayer money
4. It leaves higher ed customers under a heavy load of debt

Right now, public post-secondary technical education already represents an exceptional deal. When you remember that five of the top first year earnings degrees were the AAS variety (see here), you realize that ROI is much better from a technical college degree.

Read the article. Like all bubbles, this one will leave winners and losers when it pops.

UPDATE: I can’t agree with everything I read in this post. Connecting career choice solely with IQ is ridiculous. I’ve known too many Ph.D types that weren’t very smart, and a lot of technicians that were brilliant. I think it has more to do with choice than IQ.

I do agree with this bit, though:

Many go to University who ought to have learned their career skills in high school — or at least in junior college. It is not necessary for all the citizens of a republic to have gone to university and learned French Narrative Theory. One need not know know anything at all about Foucault or Deconstruction to be a good citizen, vote in elections, pay taxes; and indeed I put it to you that being without debt is probably preferable to knowing French Narrative Theory.

Don’t just sit there - make a comment!

There is a very interesting post from Sylvia at Generation Yes blog on the financial viability of educational video games in K-12. The reasoning is financial and ending is provocative:

So the next time someone says, “hey, I hear kids like the video games, why don’t they make an educational one” look them straight in the eye and ask them what they are smoking.

The comments are very lively and interesting, too. It is a good discussion.

Read the whole thing.

Ezra over at Rants, Raves and Rhetoric V4 has a great post that compares some of your favorite Learning Management Systems to ships. If you use an LMS for distance learning or to enhance your face-to-face classes, you should check it out and add your thoughts.

We are running Blackboard Vista (formerly WebCT Vista) at TSTC Waco (aircraft carrier).

According to the BBC, some users are still going to the Paypal site with IE 3, released 10 years ago and completely inadequate for modern security needs.

Paypal said it supported the use of Extended Validation SSL Certificates. Browsers which support the technology highlight the address bar in green when users are on a site that has been deemed legitimate.

The latest versions of Internet Explorer and Firefox support EV SSL certificates, but Apple’s Safari browser for Mac and PCs does not.

Come on folks, updated browsers are free! I switched from IE to Firefox a few years ago. I like the plugins. It also seems to work better with “The Learning Management System Formerly Known As WebCT Vista” - which is now known as Blackboard Vista. That is really important for me since I am in the education business. I don’t get involved in browser wars though. If you really believe in freedom of choice, then let people use what they want. For the sake of security, though, please use the latest version with all patches.

Paypal is planning blocking those unsafe browsers. I think that they have to do so for their users’ safety.

This looks pretty cool to me - here is a note over in Liberal Education Today about using the content aggregation tool, Netvibes, as a teaching tool.

It used to take a LOT of work to make a page like this. Now the work has been done for you. Just pick the content you want to aggregate and share with others!

I haven’t tried out Twitter. I already have too many other communication and social networking tools to track. Academhack has an good post on using Twitter to teach, though.

If you found my earlier post on One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) interesting, you might want to read the Laptopmag blog. They have an interview with OLPC’s founder, Nicholas Negroponte. The questions are about Intel’s Classmate 2 and and other new low-cost laptops. One interesting observation that I missed in my last post on the subject:

I am surprised—read: astonished—that Intel is entering the domestic laptop market. I cannot imagine that Dell, HP, Lenovo and others will keep any allegiance to a supplier that competes with them.

That is a very good point. It appears, though, that most of the competitors to OLPC are now aiming at wealthier consumers looking for easily-toted UMPCs (Ultra-Mobile Portable Computer). OLPC is still aimed squarely at the world-wide education market.

Searching for more ways to interact with your online students?

CATEC Blog suggests that you try TalkShoe - “a service that enables anyone to easily create, join, or listen to Live Interactive Discussions, Conversations, Podcasts and Audioblogs.” Up to 250 participants can talk without the overhead of video or animation.

Infinite Thinking Machine has a great post on wikis - what they are and how to get one.

These excellent posts are full of bloggy goodness.

UPDATE: Cool Cat Teacher Blog has this post “the art of using wiki pages to teach.” (via Career and Technical Education Update)

According to this article from Inside Higher Ed, distance education is booming at Community Colleges. What are we doing to keep up in technical education? Much of what we do cannot be packaged online. You can’t solder resistors on a circuit board online, but you can prepare students for the lab? Many of our subjects could be taught in “hybrid” or “blended” courses. Theory and some lab could be done online, while the meat of the labs could be done in less time with more flexible schedules on campus.

What about secondary school CTE? Are we utilizing the same tools that our students will see in college. All courses at TSTC Waco are now required to a least have a syllabus, schedule, and grade book online. Many are going much further with tests, handouts, activities, chat sessions, discussion boards, recorded lectures, podcasting, etc. It is (past) time to get on board with a newer and more flexible learning environment.

Maybe one day - but I’m not worried enough about the end of the education business to go looking for another job just yet. Check out this article on “hacking and patching” the hardware and software between your ears.