Comments are back

Blogger has a means of thwarting the bots that post comment spam so I am re-enabling comments for this blog. I hope that I can get back on track and actually post some new content, too.

Comment Spam

Owing to the sudden appearance of lots of comment spam, I am disabling comments on my blogs for the time being. This saddens me as the few comments I have received have had good things to say and this could be a good medium for discussion. But, owing to the self-centeredness of a few, the many lose out. Again.

If Blogger.com can get it together to stop this kind of behavior, then I will reinstate comments. In the meantime, please feel free to send me comments at markp(at)together.net. I will post the comments (non-spam!) if appropriate.

Eggs and Baskets

I've long been a believer in the adage, generally attributed to Mark Twain's Puddin' Head Wilson, "Put all your eggs in one basket and -- WATCH THAT BASKET." For example, given limited technical resources and great technical demands, we opt for a single supported standard desktop OS and a single standard server OS. Sure Linux is a great OS, and I've run it on both servers and desktops (and even continue to financially support Mandriva ), but we just don't have the resources to adequately support and reliably secure two or more OSes on our machines. We can, and have, done that with a Windows-only system.

Now I am not interested in fueling the religious OS war, and the OS is not the point of this posting, but it is an example of how I have chosen to operate. For the most part, that mode of operation has been pretty successful. I have recently had to reconsider exactly what is meant by "WATCH THAT BASKET", however.

The last few months at Vermont Academy have been terribly grueling owing largely to the failure of two other companies on whom we have depended heavily to perform in what I consider a satisfactory fashion. In both cases, they were a partner on whom we have counted to work with us and for us but who failed to do so. We are still trying to recover from the impact of these failures. (This is also the explanation for the lengthy dry spell in postings here.)

The first situation that caused us problems was with the vendor on whom we depended for our wireless network. They helped us design the network and were a vital partner in ongoing security work and extensions of the network. Their work had always been first-rate and was consistently done in a timely fashion. Late in the spring we requested their assistance with a significant change in the security settings and policies of our wireless system, one which required a good deal of planning and the reconfiguration of much of our networking equipment and all of our Tablet PCs. We planned the work to begin in June and to be completed mid-summer to give us ample time to work out any bugs in the system before the start of school.

At about this time, the company with whom we worked was acquired by a larger regionally well-known company with a good reputation. While some things about this acquisition and the policy changes that we saw implemented gave us concern, by and large we felt (and were assured) that business would generally continue as usual.

However, when June rolled around, we found that our project was to be somewhat delayed. Here is where I made my first mistake in not watching this basket carefully enough. I accepted this delay and didn't begin to think about finding an alternate vendor for this project. After all, I had worked with some members of this company for nearly 20 years and had never been let down. Plus we had ample time still to complete the project. So I waited for them.

By the time July came, we still had not seen any progress and were in fact not even receiving timely returns of phone calls. I did begin to be concerned at this time and we began to do some of the work on this project ourselves, spending precious time doing research and planning that we had expected to be doing in concert with the more knowledgeable folks from our vendor. We did in fact come up with a good plan for the project and one of my staff was doing good research on what would be required to make it happen.

Still, I would have been wiser to find another vendor to come in and work with us. The thought of paying someone to come in and learn our existing system and network before they would be able to help us deterred me and I still held out hope that this vendor would come through in the end.

They did not.

We ended up doing the lion's share of the work ourselves--at great cost of attention to other important jobs. In addition, the work, while completed, was completed too late to analyze all of the points of impact that were unforeseen. We spent the latter part of August finalizing the implementation and the first two weeks of September (after students had arrived) eliminating most of the bugs. We are still dealing with a few of them. We have had more than a few dissatisfied students and faculty when they had the inevitable connection difficulties.

One lesson I learned from this is that watching the basket may actually mean having a second basket handy in case the first one breaks. Or maybe this is a case where putting all the eggs in one basket doesn't work. Going forward, I hope to have at least two vendors on whom I can depend for such critical parts of our business. I don't know yet how I can do this, or who those vendors will be. (One disadvantage of being so rural is that our choices are limited.) I hope to find vendors any of whom could do all of what we need, but to use them in a more limited fashion so that we don't rely exclusively on any one of them for everything. Then if one lets us down, we will have another to whom we can turn on short notice.

The other major situation is a bit more problematic to resolve. We have a vendor to whom we don't have a realistic alternative--Microsoft.

Our plan for the start of the school year was to create a master image of our Tablet PCs and ghost that image onto both new and returning Tablets. We did this last year and the process worked flawlessly.

We usually go through a couple of iterations of the master image, to give us time to build it and test the process and to test the image itself and see what refinements we need to make. We started this process at the beginning of August, which left ample time for the iterative process to work and for us to then put that image on all of the new machines. Immediately after the first image was built we hit a wall.

As best I can determine, back in February of this year Microsoft made a change to the Windows Product Activation process that made it so that images made from OEM CDs could not be activated over the Internet. Since we built the image from the HP CDs that came with the Tablets, we ran into this problem.

Activating by phone was an option left open to us, but that is a time-intensive operation and we had in the vicinity of 150 machines that we would need to reimage and then activate by phone.

I spent much of my time over a two week period trying to find an adequate resolution to this. I suppose if we had been a bigger company, or perhaps a more prestigious school, we could have had more assistance from Microsoft, but we got precious little. The information offered online is sketchy at best and difficult to find. The best assistance we got was from the man at HP who has been so helpful with our hardware problems. He went above and beyond the call of his responsibility to us to help with the resolution of this problem.

From what I have been able to find out so far, MS appears to expect those in this situation to purchase a volume license for the machines and use the VL media to create the image. Images made in this fashion are exempt from the WPA process. Since we have already purchased a license for Windows for these machines, this is a less-than-satisfactory answer.

Without going into great detail, we did manage to resolve the problem and got the machines reimaged. We paid a price, however, in that we didn't have the time to test and refine the image as much as we would have liked and have seen the consequences of that omission. (The fact that this all occurred at the same time as the previous problem made matters worse still.)

I don't know what the long term answer to this one is. We can't drop Microsoft for someone else. There is no one else. Besides, their product is the one we want. The Tablet PC OS is one of the best operating systems around and does exactly what we want.

The real solution, I think, is for Microsoft to trust their customers and eliminate product activation from their whole product line. The only ones affected by it are those of us who try to do things legitimately. If I had been a bootlegger, this would have been an easy problem to resolve. But I'm not, and it wasn't, and we and our students are paying for it.

I'll continue to watch this basket as best I can and keep looking for a better solution for next year. I wish Puddin' Head Wilson had some counsel on this one.

The Importance of Partners

No matter how good your technical staff might be, supportive partners are critical to the success of a Tablet PC program. I have long thought that "partner" is an overused term as every salesman or manufacturer wants to "partner" with you, when too often all they really want to do is sell you stuff and then forget about you until your next order. What I mean by partner is someone who goes out of their way to make sure that you have what you need, that it works as expected, and is proactive in getting it made right when it doesn't work as expected. Sometimes these people will even go so far as to tell you that what they have isn't what you need.

I prefer to do business with people like this. I will even pay a somewhat higher price for products if it means I can work with someone I know I can count on to work for me and with whom I can develop a trusting relationship. (I understand that we deal with organizations, but it is the individuals that make or break the working relationship, though I do think institutional policies are critical in consistently getting the right people.)

In our Tablet program, we have several organizations that have worked with us to make this program a success. Two outstanding examples are The Top Floor, the vendor through whom we are buying our Tablets, and HP itself, the manufacturer of the Vermont Slate, better known as the TC1100.

Marcus, our rep at The Top Floor, has been the main force behind the exceptional pricing we've been able to get for our students, as well as the one who bird dogs our orders and shipments for us. He has gotten us demos even when he was aware up front that we likely might not end up purchasing the products we demo and even when the product was a hot commodity and hard to get.

HP has been outstanding in all of our dealings with them, as well. Their delivery times have been prompt (though they could be a bit more informative about ETAs). Their warranty support (handled locally by PC Connection, another important partner in this project) has been excellent with no hassles. Driver updates are appropriately frequent. Online support is decent-- as long as you know where to look.

We recently had an incident that tested these two companies and proved their value to us as business partners, reaffirming to me that we made good choices in choosing to work with them.

During the last year, we ordered several batches of TC1100s. Some earlier models of this computer were plagued with a fairly serious problem that would crop up from time to time. A large percentage of our systems had this problem and it was one for which we sent out a number of machines for repair, as it was not serviceable by end users. After tracking this, we realized that close to 40% of certain batches exhibited this problem.

I took my concerns about this problem first to Marcus. We had a spreadsheet showing the warranty repairs (as opposed to all repairs, which included the accidental damage covered work) which showed pretty clearly the prevalence of this one problem. Marcus took it from there, communicating with HP, setting up conference calls, and once again dogging this problem admirably. He sacrificed a lot of time on this issue, with no direct remuneration.

HP, while understandably initially reluctant to agree to my initial request (demand might be a better term) for satisfaction, kept a healthy dialogue going on it until we reached an agreeable solution. My request was that they come on site and replace all of the potentially defective parts on all of our machines, whether they had exhibited this problem or not. I knew that the program could not brook such a high failure rate and I was unwilling to risk another year with it. Especially not at this point, as we are now putting machines in the hands of all faculty, many of whom are much more tentative about this whole Tablet PC business than the students are.

I say that HP's initial reaction is understandable, because this is costing them a lot of money. So far, in any given day, a tech has been able to deal with about 7 machines. We have around 80. This is 11 days of a technician, sitting at our site doing nothing else. Each machine has expensive components to be replaced. HP is eating all of these costs. Not many companies would willingly bear all these costs, especially since we aren't ever going to be buying thousands of computers. At peak, we'll probably have slightly more than 300 at any given time.

But this has served to affirm for me that they stand behind their products and that they are committed to the Tablet PC. (In fact, I have enough confidence in them as a company that we are going to replace our Dell servers with HP.)

These are the kind of partners that I want to do business with. They work with and for me, even when they don't always stand to profit in a given instance. By these actions, they will be contributing to the success of our program in real, tangible ways.

As a last aside, some might argue that a problem affecting so many machines should make us look elsewhere, but I don't agree. The TC1100 is a bold and innovative design, unique among Tablet PCs. As if manufacturing problems didn't happen often enough anyway, this model had some new issues to worry about because of its unique design. The machines have been rock-solid otherwise. This particular problem has been fixed in newer systems and I am confident that we won't see issues like that again this year.

The Trouble with Two-Finger Typists

I've been doing some more thinking about the obstacles Tablet users face when confronted with the pen. I touched on this idea in Training I - Do your users think in ink? In that post, I suggested that a lot of folks had difficulty learning a set of skills different from, yet similar to, skills they already had mastered. Like a skier learning to snowboard, they found it frustrating to change gears with the new skills.

While it may appear to be splitting hairs, I think there is another similar, but distinct, phenomenon at work here, too.

I recently met with a group of student Tablet users and discussed with them how they were using the Tablets. This was a group identified by various faculty members as "good users" of the technology. I was very surprised to find that most of them claimed to not use the pen very much at all, even when taking notes in class. By their own estimates, they used the keyboard far more often than they used the pen, though they used the pen as a mouse even when in keyboard mode.

I suspect there are many reasons for this:

• Many programs are simply not readily usable with, let alone optimized for, the pen. They are keyboard-centric.
• Document composition, a big part of school life, is definitely a keyboard activity.
• With the Tablet in keyboard mode, the teacher can't see what they are actually doing, and most students spend a fair bit of time in IM even in class--if they can get away with it.

But aside from these reasons, I think there is something else going on.

When the students told me that they tended to use the keyboard even for notes in class, I asked how many of them were touch typists. Much to my surprise, none were. All used some variation of hunting and pecking, although they were practiced enough with this mode of working that there was more pecking than hunting.

As we discussed this, they acknowledged that they knew they could type faster by learning to type by "proper" methods. However, they weren't really much interested in doing so. They could type well enough to get by and weren't interested in trading what they already had to learn something that even they acknowledged is better. There was not enough motivation or perceived need to justify the hassle even with the expected gain in efficiency.

When I learned to type in high school, the method used was pretty stodgy, relying almost exclusively on drills to train my fingers where the keys were. It was drudgery of the highest order, especially for someone who has a hard time sitting still even when the subject is interesting. I had strong motivation to learn to type, though, so I suffered through it. (The fact that the teacher was a young, pretty, pleasant, charming woman helped, too. If I had had an old battleaxe of a drillmaster, I might not have stuck it out motivation or no.)

These days, there is Mavis Beacon and a legion of copycats that provide games and ease the pain of learning to type. (At least it appears so. Maybe not and that is why the students weren't interested.) The process of learning to type, front and center when I took my class, is now somewhat hidden behind the façade of play.

I wonder how much this same phenomenon is at work in the students' reluctance to learn to use the pen efficiently. And I do think that for note-taking, it is generally a much more efficient tool than the keyboard. Even though an accomplished typist, my notes are more meaningful when I write as opposed to type them. I usually don't capture more words, but I can demonstrate relationships between concepts more easily, I can draw arrows and pictures and diagrams, I can emphasize something quickly with a pen. While I could do all this with the pen and the keyboard together, the efficiency is greatest with the pen alone. But one needs to be willing to climb that learning curve to get to that point.

When I think about this situation from a training perspective, a couple of things come to mind. First, maybe we need some sort of Mavis Beacon for the pen. Certainly when I first began training people to use Microsoft Windows 2.0 I relied heavily on Solitaire to help them get comfortable with the mouse. Play can be a strong motivator, though obviously from the students' comments, not necessarily strong enough by itself.

Second, it may be that one reason I find the pen more efficient for taking notes is that I do know how to take good notes. I don't think a lot of students do, as I've indicated before. An approach I hope to pursue is to do the training in note-taking skills--but have the students do it all with the pen. They will be learning pen skills and (I hope) developing pen habits but in context of note-taking skills. This has something of the Mavis Beacon approach to it as well, as this particular skill set is rather hidden in a larger context.

One last aside: I asked one of the students if I could look at his class notes to see what I could see in them. To my surprise, most of them actually were hand-written and not typed. He did have one set of notes that were typed and were beautifully organized. It turns out, though, these were copied verbatim from the instructor's notes on the board. I'm not sure what this means, or whether it means anything at all, but it was an interesting surprise.

Important Tangents - II

Last time, I wrote about several important skills that need to be taught to our Tablet users, both students and faculty. Those skills mainly dealt with safety, either personal or of the system. All computer users need these skills, of course, but it becomes even more critical when the computer is ultra-portable and always connected as the Tablets are on our campus, and especially so in that they can connect freely off-site and away from any kind of protection.

This time I want to talk about a second set of skills that are important in a different way. These skills get short shrift in most cases in my experience. By giving students Tablets, we are giving them tools to help with their education. We also need to help them to learn the skills to make good use of those tools.

One skill that I don't see taught anywhere, except perhaps in a journalism class and our learning skills group, is how to take good notes. I once asked a returning alumnus (who was class valeditorian) what he wished we had taught him that he hadn't learned here. The thing at the top of his list was good note-taking techniques. He said he struggled in college lectures to get the right information down quickly, concisely, and completely.

Since note-taking is such a natural use of the Tablet, this ties in very nicely with training on Tablet use. My leaning at the moment, in fact, is to focus on this and subsume the Tablet usage specifics under this training at least as far as basic pen use goes. More on this in another post.

There are many techniques for note-taking and many resources on the Internet. Here are a few for starters:

Recovering the Lost Art of Note-Taking.

CalPoly article on notetaking systems.

Notetaking and summarizing skills grid from the University of Leeds.

Information from Dyslexia College-useful for everyone.

Notetaking page from York University.

Allen and Unwin eStudy Centre on notetaking-with some other good information, too.

Another useful skill, that the Tablet can support well with software like GoBinder or PlanPlus, is time and assignment management. Again, outside of learning skills, I don't think high schools do much to focus on this necessary skill. (This is another one I've heard from alums that they wished they had learned here.) Like note-taking, it can be a focus of training that incorporates the Tablet specifically in the skills being taught.

One skill that I think is very important, but might be non-intuitive, is good typing skills. I see so many students pecking out papers with two fingers. Writing papers is a critical component of high school and even more so of college. Even thought Tablets shine with the pen, they also are tools for typing and I think we do our students a disservice by not requiring them to develop this skill to at least a moderate level. I would like to advocate a minimum typing speed, say 30 wpm, as a prerequisite for graduation, or even better as a prerequisite for advancement beyond the freshman year.

Many students these days don't want to crack a book when doing research. While I think this is a sad trend, I do think it is a trend we will have to prepare students for. When all the books you use for a paper are recommended by a teacher or librarian, there is a certain amount of inherent vetting of the material that occurs. When your "librarian" is Google, there is none. We need to teach the skills of analyzing the likely validity of web sites that students consider for sources. A good starting point for thinking about this issue and developing a curriculum is this article by Technology & Learning.

Lastly, given the ease with which a "paper" can be created by cutting and pasting content from the Internet, we need to teach very carefully the skill and habit of proper source citation. Legitimate plagiarism is a big enough problem. We certainly don't want students to become accidental plagiarists.

Where this training happens is a good question. Some of it should be occuring in existing classes. Some of it should be specific to Tablet PC training and might, in fact, be the apparent focus of the training with the Tablet skills being learned as just part of the whole skill set. This is a question that deserves further discussion and thinking. I hope to address it soon for our own purposes and would be interested in hearing what others have to say.

Important Tangents - I

Along the lines of the topic of a previous post, Are We Empowering or Just Enabling?, there are a number of issues that will affect the success of a Tablet PC program that are not technical in nature and require education of our students and faculty to properly address. That article addressed the need for students to learn to deal with the ready distraction the Tablet provides them. Learning how, and at least as important, when to tune out or turn off the distractions is a key skill that all members of an always on, always connected society will need. But there are many other skills, several of which seem to me to get short shrift (if they are addressed at all) these days. I believe that these skills, properly addressed, will do much to support a successful program. Left unaddressed, they might well serve to undermine it.

First, I'd like to address some issues that do get discussed, but that become even more important in an environment of always (or usually) available networked computing where much of what happens does so away from any watchful eyes. In the same way that we don't let our children drive alone until they at least seem to have mastered the requisite skills, we ought to ground them in these skills for their own safety before we send them out to solo with the computer.

One of the most important of these is personal safety. We all know that the Internet is a dangerous place and one never really knows who is out there, just as the famous old cartoon says. It's not humorous, though, when the person on the other end of a connection is a pedophile or other person with criminal intent. We can have all the technical safeguards in the world in place--web filters, internet access logging, forced logoff times, whatever--but every single one of these measures is flawed and easy to circumvent. We need to consider that no matter how good a job we do with the technology, sooner or later our students will end up somewhere where they are likely to put themselves at risk. We need to prepare our students to face these risks wisely and to learn ways to minimize them. This kind of instruction, repeated often and in a variety of ways, needs to be an integral part of the Tablet PC curriculum. By the way, given the creativity of some of the phishers and other con artists out there, faculty need this training, too.

An issue that we techies are likely to have given more thought to is the safety of the computer itself--anti-virus, anti-spam, and anti-hacker measures. Even so, we need to think this through very clearly and look at all the variables. I thought we had a good handle on at least one aspect of this, applying security updates automatically, until I was working with a faculty member's Tablet last week. It was five months out of date with patches. All unapplied patches are supposed to be applied every week without fail so this machine had had over twenty chances to get some of these updates, but none of them had been installed. Since this faculty member lives off campus and he is always gone at the scheduled update time, his machine never got the message. Our model for this process was based on hardwired systems and failed when wireless, ultra-portable systems joined the mix. It was a mistake to assume that what worked in the past would continue to work with this new paradigm.

In the same way, we (okay, I) need to get over the rather smug feeling of security we have owing to our history of success in preventing and fighting viruses. We more or less have been able to quarantine our computers in the past. They were only on our network, we controlled the anti-virus software and what got installed. We supplied and controlled the Internet connection. These days, we refer to the Tablets as promiscuous computers because we never know where they've been connected. Once the students have full admin privileges, assuming they do, it will be even worse as we won't know what has been installed with high-level security privileges. I shudder to think how many students will take to doing everything as the administrator because certain games work only under that account. (Microsoft still has a lot of work to do getting vendors to ensure that their applications don't require administrator privileges.) Again, I expect that regular, consistent education will be the best thing we can do and it needs to be part of the Tablet program. In addition, we'll need to look much more seriously at various network monitoring systems, intrusion detection systems, etc.

Of course we will continue to work with centrally managed anti-virus, anti-spam, and machine firewall software, though we are still waiting for usable enterprise class systems to be ready--and economical. Currently, we use an antivirus system whose central management system we don't like, so each machine is manually configured. We don't really have a way of knowing when one is misconfigured or when the AV stops working. I know of only one enterprise class AS solution, and we will be evaluating it in a few weeks when a new beta version is ready. Windows firewall isn't a complete solution but the price is right and we can manage it from our Active Directory.

Another area we still need to address is general computer care. We have some students who have had their Tablets since the start of school and have never had a single problem. We have had others who have constant battles with scratched screens, breaking keyboard clips, and other minor annoyances that generally are caused by carelessness. Tablets are designed to be carried around and, of course, that is what the students do--often without any kind of protection at all. We can do some things, such as sourcing and offering more protective cases for the systems, but short of issuing ruggedized systems, we can only do so much. Ultimately, the care and feeding of the computer is up to the owner. Again, education will be key. That and the accidental damage policy we encourage everyone to buy.

All of these issues need to be addressed as part of our program. Failure to do so probably wouldn't doom the program, but in each case the nature of the program exacerbates an existing problem, so it is expedient to make the solution a part of the program, too. I'll continue this theme next time by looking at similar topics which are of a more academic orientation. I hope that, as we discover good ways of handling these issues, to share our experiences and solutions, too.