AssortedStuff

When Amazon first released the Kindle late in 2007, it was supposed to save the publishing industry by having us all reading everything from periodicals to textbooks on them.  A few years later, that claim was made for the iPad.

Instead of physically delivering information on paper, these and the many other “coming soon” tablet devices would provide the material, with enhancements, in an easily distributed digital format.

Of course, I’ve been around long enough to remember when similar statements were made for laptops and before them personal computers. Anyone remember the paperless office? Anyone work in one?

While it certainly hasn’t yet replaced paper in my life*, I’ve been making a concerted effort to read more material on my iPad since it arrived six months ago.

That effort would be going much better if it wasn’t for a few obstacles placed in the way by someone. Apple? The app makers? Publishers?

The two most visible reading apps are Apple’s iBook and Amazon’s Kindle, and as I mentioned in an earlier post, I’ve only paid for a couple of ebooks due to the rather obstructionist DRM attached to most files.

Another annoying functionality road block is that neither app will allow me to copy a selection of text and paste it into an email or blog post, again limiting the usefulness of the format.

Sure, I can’t do copy and paste with an analog publication either, but wasn’t switching to a digital format supposed to make the material more useful than paper could? I seem to remember some visionary making that promise.

Anyway, if I had to make a choice between the two, iBook is the better reading app, both in terms of it’s features and the fact that it’s possible to add material other than what you buy from the attached store, a feature that’s not easily available with the Kindle app.

If you’re buying books, on the other hand, Kindle has the advantage since their store features a much bigger selection, slightly lower prices, and the ability to sync your digital files on multiple instances of the app (computer, phone, iPad, Kindle).

However, the reading app I use most often, and the one with the best overall functionality, is GoodReader.

Although sold (it’s only 99 cents) as a pdf reader, this app is a whole lot more. I get way too much stuff as Word documents and GoodReader will let me view (but not edit) them as well, generally doing a great job of retaining the original format.

The app also makes it very easy to copy materials from any computer over a wifi connection, download directly from web URLs, and get files from online storage services like Dropbox or Apple’s Mobile Me.

And the best will be getting better since the GoodReader developers say that they will be adding pdf annotations in the next version.

As to the growing collection of other iPad newspaper/magazine replacements, I’ve found very few worth raving about.

Like Flipboard, the most recent hot app. Very pretty, very slick, not especially useful.

*For some reason, there seems to be more paper, not less, although that might be due to heightened awareness of how much stuff is needlessly printed.

books, ipad, paper, reading

Following up on the previous post about leadership, during the interview with Steve Jobs he discussed Apple’s approach to business.

And he made this observation about the difference between producing computing devices for consumers, in which Apple has been very successful over the past decade, and the business market.

What I love about the consumer market that I always hated about the enterprise market is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person decides for themselves.  They vote yes or no.  And if enough of them say yes, we get to come to work tomorrow.  That’s how it works.  It’s really simple.

As for the enterprise market, it’s not so simple.  The people who use the products don’t decide for themselves.  And the people who make those decisions sometimes are confused.

Confused indeed!

Here in the overly-large school district, we are regularly reminded that we are not really a school system.

We work for an “enterprise” (and that we are all “clients”).

And that last part of Jobs’ remarks may offer a clue as to why the use of instructional technology is not what it should be here in the overly-large enterprise.

apple, olsd, steve jobs, technology

In this morning’s Post, more examples of the conflict between photographers and security people who don’t understand that yes, they can take pictures here.

The situation is especially bad here in the DC area where we have a higher than average number of the paranoid who also don’t know what they’re talking about.

However, one specific sentence in the story pretty much says it all.

Photographers say police need to be told explicitly not to prohibit photography, because officers often don’t respond well to impromptu citizen lectures on constitutional law.

Ain’t that the truth!

dc, paranoia, photography, security

I’ve never liked the whole “digital native/digital immigrant” meme, and an administrator at the University of Kansas seems to agree we need to look at how people understand “technology” in new ways.

She says that many of those digital natives we call students, in both K12 schools and colleges, are actually technologically illiterate, at least under what she says should be an updated definition of “tech literacy”.

The assumption that today’s student are computer-literate because they are “digital natives” is a pernicious one, Zvacek said. “Our students are task-specific tech savvy: they know how to do many things,” she said. “What we need is for them to be tech-skeptical.”

Zvacek was careful to make clear that by tech-skeptical, she did not mean tech-negative. The skepticism she advocates is not a knee-jerk aversion to new technology tools, but rather the critical capacity to glean the implications, and limitations, of technologies as they emerge and become woven into the students’ lives. In a campus environment, that means knowing why not to trust Google to turn up the best sources for a research paper in its top returns, or appreciating the implications of surrendering personal data — including the propensities of one’s bladder — to third parties on the Web.

I think I like the idea of teaching tech “skepticism” instead of “literacy”, for adults as well as kids.

It ties right into helping people develop their crap detector, a concept Neil Postman wrote about in the 70′s and that Howard Rheingold is discussing now.

Thanks to Shaun Johnson for the link.

literacy, skepticism, students

While I’ve written a little about each of the seven cities we visited on the big trip (the posts are here if you want to catch up), there’s still some time unaccounted for.

Because it takes a while to move a huge ship between ports and down relatively narrow channels (that’s our boat in the picture, waiting at the pier in Tallinn), two days of the cruise were spent “at sea”.

This was the part I was least anticipating, mostly because I don’t do well with the kind of organized fun that I’ve often seen as part of the cruising cliche.*

However, if you think of the ship as a huge resort complex (with many of the associated options) that some genius engineer managed to make float, it’s not so bad.

Although they said we had 2600 passengers on board (plus about half that many crew), it rarely seemed crowded, other than the last minute lines returning from shore excursions.

Most spaces were very comfortable and surprisingly open, decorated in a style reminiscent of most of the upper middle priced chain hotels I’ve visited (think Hyatt/Mariott/Westin). Pleasant, but not worth taking pictures of.

Onboard activities, of which there were many, ran the spectrum from standard Vegas lounge acts (and a casino, of course) to an interesting showing of a documentary on moving and preserving a New York theater presented by the filmmaker.  And shopping, of course.

The ship also had plenty of outdoor activities and spaces available, although they didn’t seem to get much use due to the cool, windy weather on the two at-sea days.  But some of those spaces did offer wonderful vantage points for pictures.

Of course, you could always find a quiet corner to sit, read, and watch the ocean go by. Or eat yourself silly at the buffet that was open 24/7 (with some surprisingly good items).

All in all, large-ship cruising is not necessarily my favorite way to travel (the last time we cruised was somewhere back in the 90′s and many things have changed for the better since then) but this experience was still very enjoyable.

If you’d like to see a small collection of pictures of the ship and views from it, visit the At Sea set on my Flickr page.

I’ll be posting more pictures to Flickr as I review everything I shot second time, but this will probably be my last post about the trip here.  The normal stream of irrational rants will resume. :-)

*I’m old enough to remember that height of 70′s TV cheese, The Love Boat, which set a standard for cruising cliches for two decades or more.

cruise, ship, travel

So, we arrive at the final port of our cruise and it was clear as soon as we docked that this visit was going to be something special.

After all, it’s not every day that you get a close-up view of a medieval castle from your balcony. How cool is that?

The picture below is one of those shots, showing one tower of the Akershus Fortress, built starting in the 1200′s to defend the city and gradually enlarged over the years as the population grew.

Our 100% walking tour (yeah!, no bus) began with our guide leading us across the street and through the grounds of the Fortress, which now include several museums and monuments.

From there we spent the rest of our very short time in Oslo wandering around the beautiful downtown area.  As in almost all our other stops on this trip, we were again fortunate to have gorgeous weather and many people were out in the parks and cafes enjoying it.

The centerpiece of our tour, and of the port area of the city, was the massive City Hall building which dominates the port area.

Although the exterior is somewhat bland and boxy*, the inside is something else.  Brightly colored murals detailing Norwegian history and life by native artists cover many of the walls

The ceremony awarding the Nobel Peace Prize is held each December in the central atrium of the Hall and it’s a very impressive space, although I thought it actually looks smaller in pictures and on video.

And after another far too brief day in port, it was time to leave.  Add Oslo to that list of cities visited on this trip that we will definitely be returning to in the future, possibly at the top of it.

If you’re interested, there’s a small collection of pictures with commentary from our time in Oslo in my flickr photostream.

Overnight we sailed back to our starting point and the big trip we had planned for and anticipated for months was over.  Almost appropriately, it was raining in Copenhagen as the bus took us to the airport, just as it had been the day we left.

Anyway, I’ll have a couple more posts about our experiences on the cruise coming soon, not to mention a bunch more pictures, and then it’s time to move on to something else.

Like planning where in the world to go next.

*Our port lecturer said the building has been included on a list of the ten ugliest building in the world. That’s rather harsh since we have at least ten in DC that are worse. :-)  See what you think.

cruise, norway, oslo, port, travel

I know that for most of the world, we just passed the calendar’s halfway point with the days getting shorter and warmer at the same time, at least in the Northern Hemisphere.

But no matter how you measure it, this school year is done and no one I know is sorry to see it go. Not that the one just beginning is shaping up to be a winner either.

It’s all about the budget, of course.  Two years worth of a crappy economy has resulted in no raises for everyone, contract cuts for some, larger class sizes and reduced support for teachers.

Despite all that (and more) the big bosses here in the overly-large school district are sending the message that none of this is supposed to affect what we do.  Everyone is supposed to provide the same level of service – more, actually – with less time, people, and resources.

In other words, nothing changes.

And that attitude is probably our biggest problem.

Even without the economic mess, the education system in this country should be changing, drastically, and this crisis should have been an ideal catalyst to force that process.

We should be using this opportunity to seriously reassess our traditional concept of “school” and what students need to know and be able to do when leave the formal educational process.

Instead our “leaders” work overtime (and expect us to do the same) to maintain the status quo, expecting that when the financial storm ends everything will go back to “normal”.

Failing to understand (or acknowledge) that “normal” was not working for an increasing number of students even before our money problems started, and will serve the needs of an even smaller percentage after the crisis has passed.

I still believe we need public schools in this country.  Places, whether physical or virtual, where educators organize communities to help students learn essential skills, those that can’t be assessed using multiple choices.

However, if a strong, relevant system for public education is a serious national goal*, it’s going to take a conscious, determined effort.

It won’t happen by paddling in place waiting for the rescue boat to come by.

Ok, now that I have that rant down in electrons, I can focus my attention on the rest of the month.

I will be working during July but it’s a relatively quiet period around here as most of the people I work with are away, allowing me some time for bigger picture thinking, working on longer term projects, and reading stuff by people I’ve never met.

And, at the end of the month, I get to spend most of a week advancing my own learning with some folks from Google, immersed in their Earth and Sketchup programs.

Whatever your summer break looks like, make it a good one.

*And I’m not entirely sure support for the concept in the general public is particularly high, and is likely declining.

change, crisis, economy, olsd, schools

This sixth stop on our grand tour of the Baltics was my least favorite and on the bottom of the list of places from this trip to revisit.

Which is not to say we didn’t have a good time touring the area and learning something of the history and culture.

Part of my dissatisfaction was due to the amount of time we spent on a bus in workday traffic traveling between Gydinia, the port where our ship was docked, and the old town section of Gdansk.

Blame part of it also on amber.

It seems the stuff was everywhere (including “incredible bargains” on the ship :-) and the excursion we took started by touring a small workshop turning out almost every type of amber trinket possible.

And, of course, we had lots of time to shop for their products in the company store after the tour. Not my choice or my thing.

Anyway, after that came the ride to Gdansk and the view from the bus displayed an area with a very industrial face, not surprising because of their long history of shipbuilding and shipping.

It also had a look reflective of more than four decades of centralized planning under Russian-dominated Communist control.

We passed one immense, blandly colored apartment complex that the guide said was over one kilometer long and at least ten stories high.  There were several similar structures in the same area.

At the end of the ride we arrived at the old town section of Gdansk, an area that beginning in the 15th century was a busy trading center.

While the city was heavily damaged during World War II, most of the structures in this historic area, some with very ornate decorations, have been restored in the years since the iron curtain lifted.

As you can see from the picture, the streets were very busy, likely due to the arrival of some beautiful summer weather.

This view is of the Dlugi Targ (Long Market), the main road (now a pedestrian area) through the old town section.  Shops and restaurants line either side, leading up to the prison tower in the background.

After a far too brief walking tour (maybe I do want to return), the bus headed back to the boat, taking an historical swing past the Gdansk shipyards, where the Solidarity movement that lead to Poland’s independence began in the 1980′s, and the monument to the workers killed during conflicts with the government.

However, I never did see the “very popular beaches” that were somewhere over there on our left (and then on our right).

If you’re interested, more pictures from Gdansk and the port city of Gdynia are in this set on my Flickr page.

Just one more stop on the big trip, headed to the Norwegian capital of Oslo.

cruise, gdansk, poland, port, travel

Our fifth stop on the big trip was a little different since it’s probably the only city of the seven we visited that is not well known in the US.

Indeed, my only experience with Tallinn prior researching the cruise, was the episode of the Amazing Race 15 in which the teams spent about as much time as we did (as in, not much) running around the old town.

Anyway, Tallinn was a very nice surprise. The lower old town section we explored, considered to be one best preserved in Europe, has a Disney-designed medieval feel, although populated with much friendlier and more genuine people.

In the picture, those towers were on either side of the Viru gate at which we started our walking tour and are part of a defensive wall build in the the 1500s, most of which still stands (largely restored, of course).

A town has been in existence on the same location since the 1150s but despite that long history, Estonia has only been an independent country since 1993 when they were cut loose from the former Soviet Union. Before that the area was claimed at various times by the Danes, Swedes and Germans.

However, in the past 17 years the people have been working hard to bring their nation into the modern age, establishing both dynamic tourism and high technology industries. Interesting fact: Skype was created by a trio of Estonian developers.

The day we visited Tallinn was near the start of the annual Old Town Days, a two-week music and arts festival that seemed to have attracted lots of visitors besides those from our ship.

And there were plenty of restaurants, all with patio seating, waiting to serve them on a sunny and relatively warm early summer day.

The charm and atmosphere of old town Tallinn is hard to explain in words so take a look at some of the pictures I took in this Flickr set.

Once again, this was another city I would like to return to explore in more depth and, since it’s only a three hour ferry ride from Helsinki, it should be easy to combine the two for another Scandinavian vacation.

But for this one, we have two more ports and the next stop is Gdynia and Gdansk, Poland.

cruise, estonia, port, tallinn, travel

Our fourth stop on the big trip was yet another new experience for me but for my wife, it was a chance to return to a city she had visited 17 years before.

Way back in 1993, when the Soviet Union had collapsed and Boris Yeltsin was the embattled president of the new Russian Federation, the choir in which she sings traveled to Moscow and St. Petersburg to perform with the National Symphony Orchestra and their Russian-born conductor Mstislav Rostropovich.

I bet, however, that there have been few physical changes in that time since the first thing that struck me as our bus drove around is that there is nothing subtle about this city.

From the huge blocks of apartments around the harbor area to the imposing former palaces seemingly on every corner, it’s clear that Peter the Great right up through the Communist leaders certainly didn’t believe in building and decorating on a small scale.

A prime example was this view we had over lunch.  While we enjoyed a very relaxing meal in a charming little cafe on the second floor of a bookstore, the large windows were filled by the Kazan Cathedral across the street.

Built in the early 1800′s, it’s clear the builders were going for something resembling the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome.

St. Petersburg is the only port on the cruise where we stayed overnight (a requirement of the Russians according to one of the pursers) and I found the second day even more interesting since we got a small glimpse of “average” life.

Early on that Sunday morning, we got to take a short ride on their subway system, beginning and ending in stations that make those of the Washington Metro look like wooden shacks.

I was surprised that there were so many people at that hour on a weekend (a reaction based on my western sensibilities) and our guide cautioned us about getting lost and being thrown in “KGB prison”.  I think he was only half kidding.

That excursion was followed by a visit to what he said was a “middle class” food market, although I’m still not clear what defines that part of society in that area.

On both days we also had plenty of time to walk around parts of the city to discover things on our own, which I find the most enjoyable part of these visits.

It also added a great deal to this trip when the tour guides were willing to tell us something about the social, economic, and political life in the country.

The young man who lead us on the second day was very open about those factors.  Among other aspects, he told us that economically things in St. Petersburg are certainly better in 2010 than a decade ago.

But, despite the fact that he and some friends are able to write a blog criticizing many government policies, those same politicians are very quick to suppress open demonstrations of dissent.

So, maybe there have been some big changes in Russia since my wife’s last visit.  At least this time the border guards didn’t try to extort her on the way out of the country. :-)

More pictures from our two days in St. Petersburg are in this set on my Flickr pages.

Next, we were off to another part of the former Soviet Union, Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia.

cruise, port, russia, saint petersburg, travel