Category: Commentary

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Imperialists in Flying Cars: Envisioning a Presidential Inauguration

With the 2013 inauguration nearly upon us, it’s interesting to look at the Official Souvenir program of President McKinley’s inauguration in 1901. Full document here 

Especially interesting is the two-page prediction of the Presidential Inauguration of 2001. The unnamed writer was caught up in visions of Manifest Destiny and technology – mechanical bands, a president from the state of Ontario, a flying parade of aerialautos, altering the flow of the Gulf Stream to effect climate chance, and an expanded US with 118 states and 91 territories extending into South America. Quite a contrast to the program ad claiming to provide  ”Fresh Air – No Cinders! No Smoke!” for rail cars of 1901.

Here are some excerpts from the program (see full pages below)

“George McKinly Barrington, of the State of Ontario, was today at high noon invested with the office of President of the United States of the Americas. … President Barrington is the tenth Chief Magistrate to be elected to the new term of eight years, and he was accorded such a reception as has never before been witnessed in this city.

The anti-trust law prohibiting any corporation from making profits in excess of 6%, per year, should be strictly enforced.

The inaugural parade was thirty-six miles in length, and despite the fact that those participating were carried in aeroplanes, aerialautos, and other conveyances from the Mansion of Executives to the Capitol, the line occupied more than three hours in passing the State aerialtrans, and slightly delayed the programme as originally proposed. The State aerialtrans left the Mansion of Executives at 9 o’clock, and was stationed at the head of the Avenue of the Americas, down which, at an altitude of about 300 feet from the pavement, the parade approached.

… Every city in the Union was represented in the parade by one or more conveyances, and the decorations were unique and beautiful. Among the finer displays were those of clubs from Sitka, Santaigo de Chile, Montreal, Rio de Janerio, Mexico City, Havana, Manila, Honolulu, Quebec, St. Thomas, Chicago, and New York.

… It was a distinguished throng— the forty members of the passing Cabinet, the Supreme and Vice Supreme Courts, the 336 Senators, 860 Representatives, 99 Territorial Delegates and scores of statesmen, and Army and Navy officials being present.

Escorted by hundreds of statesmen, the new and the old Presidents made their way to the platform facing the Crystal Auditorium The four great mechanical bands struck up the national anthem and the vast gathering cheered itself hoarse. As the candidate of the American party and the choice of all three Houses of Congress, Mr. Barrington is very popular…

His speech was remarkable for its brevity, and yet for the numerous recommendations made. Among these is the suggestion that the work of turning the Arctic current aside, off the coast of Labrador, so as to enable the Gulf Stream to change the climate, be begun at once, and that the anti-trust law prohibiting any corporation from making profits in excess of six per cent, per year, be strictly enforced.

At the close of his address. President Barrington was escorted to the Mansion of the States by the Governors of the 118 States and 91 Territories.

… The programme included a parade of the President’s Guard (foot) and the crews of the naval submarine and aerial vessels Hector, Dewey, Schley, Sampson, Buenos Ayres and Holland. The evolution of the aerial forces with the new meteorite guns were deservedly applauded, and the great tubes were raised and lowered by the Operation of the gas in the jackets. The Pneumatic street railway lines were stopped on all surface tracks and the avenues kept clear.

Later, at 16 o’clock, and lasting until 18 o’clock, an Old Century” parade was made the feature, and created much merriment In the grotesque line were ancient vehicles known as “automobiles,” “locomobiles” and “glides.” Other features were “bicycles” from the Museum of the Americas, and an electric street car from the New York State Museum. Ancient steam engines found in the States of Manitoba and Assiniboia were conveyed oil pneumatic drags.

Page 84
Page 85

Hat tip to Politico for pointing me to this document.

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Podcast: Reflections on Teaching Strategies That Work

I had a great time recording a podcast with Mark Hofer and David Carpenter for their series Ed Tech Co-Op. Go to show 26: Peter Pappas (Dec 9, 2012) via Web | iTunes 

If the art teacher taught art, the way I taught history, his students would be sitting there watching him paint.

Mark led off by asking me to reflect back on my some of the driving themes in my career. I confessed that as a novice teacher, I mimicked my experience as a high school student and taught primarily via lecture mixed with an occasional “guess what the teacher is thinking” whole-group discussion.

But I recalled an “aha” moment after repeated visits to the art class in the classroom next door. I realized that if the art teacher taught art, the way I taught history, his students would be sitting there watching him paint. I remember that got me thinking …

Our podcast continued with a lively discussion about what works in the classroom. Below are a few of the prompts they tossed at me. No ed theory or brain research in my responses. Just my candid and unrehearsed thoughts ranging from “why teaching should be the opposite of magic” to “how schools are not teaching good digital hygiene.”

  • Can you talk a bit about how you shift responsibility for the learning to the students. 
  • How did you support a constructivist model is information-laden, high stakes courses like AP / IB?
  • Did you get much push-back from your students and how did you deal with it? How do you deal with parents and administrators?
  • What do you say when teachers tell you “I’ve got so much to cover, I don’t have time for more student-based approach?”
  • Tell us more about your post “Why Johnny Can’t Search?” and how librarians and instructional technologists can partner to improve student information skills.
  • How is the analytic process different in different subjects – say science vs history?

See these posts for more on subjects raised in the podcast:

Stay tuned to Ed Tech Co-Op – a collaborative effort between the College of William & Mary, Alexandria Country Day School, and other educators interested in technology integration in K-12 classrooms.

Image credit flickr/ visual.dichotomy

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Animated Guide to 8 Essentials For Learning

This clever and fast-paced 6-minute animation provides insights into how teenagers learn. An “insider’s guide” to the teenage brain, it answers the question – “If you were a teenage speaker brought in to address a crowd of teachers on the subject of how you and your peers learn best . . . what would you say?”

Done in hand-drawn whiteboard / voiceover format it sets out eight essentials for learning, including my favorite – reflection. Share it with your students and see if they concur or use it as a discussion starter for your next faculty meeting.

  1. I feel okay.
  2. It matters.
  3. It’s active.
  4. It stretches me.
  5. I have a coach.
  6. I have to use it.
  7. I think back on it.
  8. I plan my next steps.

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Read This Before You Upgrade to iBooks Author 2.0

Note: Since I first publishing this post, I took the leap and updated to iBA 2.0. (Of course, I had to because iTunes only accepts new books created in iBA 2.) I published three books in the new software and was also able to successfully open iBA 1.0 files in 2.0 and even copy widgets and other content from 1.0 to 2.0.

I recently published my first iBook Why We Fight: WWII and the Art of Public Persuasion.
It features over a dozen historic propaganda videos. I used iBooks Author 1.0 (iBA) to create the iBook, and with lots of advice from experts, I managed to create good quality videos of manageable file size.

Before I upgraded to iBA 2.0, I thought I’d do some research.
I’m glad I did, because it appears that the new iBA 2.0 “Media Optimization” feature has mixed reviews in video management. That early analysis comes from Dr. Frank Lowney, Projects Coordinator, Digital Innovation Group @ Georgia College. Frank spent many hours online answering my questions about importing videos into iBA 1.0 and I owe him a big thanks.

Here’s some of what Frank wrote about iBA 2.0 in his comment to a recent MacWorld review.

IBAv1 was terribly finicky about video. It rejected videos that played perfectly well in the Videos.app on iPad. The current optimization routine is an apparently a well intentioned correction of that finickiness.

… If you are writing a textbook or any kind of book containing video that requires providing soft subtitle tracks to address accessibility and other important goals or alternate audio tracks to reach a wider, multi-lingual audience, be aware that this optimizer will strip out those valuable assets without notice. Of concern to a wider group of authors is the violence done to certain videos by this “optimization” routine. Although it works quickly and does a reasonably good job on video that is already close to optimal, it wreaks havoc on video that is not. 

…The worst part is that you cannot revert to the old regime.

For more a detailed analysis see this thread in the Apple Support Communities Preventing iBooks Author Media Optimization where Frank comments: 

The optimization routine in iBooks Author 2.0 is well intentioned but the execution of those intentions is quite poor. In addition to bloating the size of your videos and, hence, your iBook, it can also degrade visual quality in dramatic fashion.
… With iBooks Author 1.x, I had figured out how to create very efficient and highly capable video that IBA will accept. This “feature” throws me and a lot of other capable people into a ditch.

I asked Frank if I can use his comments and he agreed, while noting he hasn’t had time “to do full range of tests and documentation that I prefer to do.” But his early reviews suggest that I’ll wait to upgrade. Who needs bloated files, lost subtitled tracks and poor video quality?

Read Nov 30th update

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Nov 9 Update from Frank Lowney:

Peter,

As you’ll recall, the caveat was that my findings re video in IBA 2 were preliminary and, therefore, subject to revision as I conduct more rigorous tests. I may well have to eat some of those earlier words. I’m still nowhere near a definitive opinion but I did manage to do a comparison between videos submitted to IBA and what they looked like after the “optimizer” got through with them.

The way to do that is to change the suffix of an *.ibooks file to zip and then use something like the free Stuffit Expander to expand the archive and reveal its folder structure and enable examining the contents. Video files are all in /OPS/assets/media/.

So I created five new videos for my iBook, loaded them into IBA, let the optimizer have at them and then compared the file size of the originals with what I found inside the *.ibooks file. I was surprised and pleased to find that four out of five were pretty much the same as the originals in both file size and quality. The odd one was 7.6 MB in the original and 8.2 MB in the *.ibooks file which is not huge. IBA apparently jacked up the data rate a little.

Of course this was a “soft ball” since the source came out of the recently released ScreenFlow 4 using a custom settings designed to be optimal for iPad (a multi-pass encode at 1024×768 using H.264 in a MOV container). Except for changing the container from .mov to .m4v, everything was the same in the *.ibooks file: bit-rate, frame rate, height, width, etc. So if you give IBA something that it expects and respects, it does no harm.

I’ll start throwing hard balls in the coming days and we’ll see what happens.

I’m sticking to what I said about soft subtitle tracks and alternate audio tracks. These are incredibly important in an educational environment in terms of Section 508 and 504 compliance. As well, being able to offer multi-lingual access is critical to the success of on-line learning. What IBA’s “optimizer” does to them is indefensible. There seems to be a contingent at Apple who think that Closed Captions, a throwback to analog TV broadcasting, is sufficient but they are dead wrong. It relies on a binary format that can only be created by expensive and difficult to use software (go ahead and price MacCaptioner) as contrasted with SRT, ASS, etc. that anyone can create with a simple text editor.

So, for people who aren’t concerned about subtitles and alternate audio tracks, the upgrade to IBA 2.0 appears to me to be a good move. The new widgets are awesome, especially the scrolling sidebar which looks a lot like what I described in an enhancement request that I submitted. The only people for whom this is a show stopper are the folks that are prepping video for iBooks and working for institutions and corporations that simply must address these accessibility issues. Indies like you and I can ignore these issues for the time being. The stuff I do at work is another story altogether.

More later and thanks for being a great sounding board.

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Textbooks Are Dead – Here’s 3 Reasons to Write Your Own

For years progressive educators have known the textbook was dead. Apple’s latest iPad Mini / iBooks Author event (October 23, 2012) suggests we are closing in on the tipping point that should hasten its demise.

I’ll let others critique the viability of the iPad as a textbook replacement in this era of shrinking budgets. Instead I’ll focus on how teaming iBooks Author (iBA) with the iPad can turn students from passive consumers of information, into active researchers, thinkers, designers and writers.

Since it’s release this spring, I’ve been working with iBA and networking with other educators doing the same. I’ve seen great examples of student-produced work such as this iBook by 5th graders.
I just published my first multi-touch iBook, Why We Fight: WWII and the Art of Public Persuasion which gives students a chance to work with historic films and poster art to critically evaluate the US government’s public relations effort during the war. I’ve already blogged about my reactions to using iBA, but let me use this post to offer three arguments for using iBA with students.

Crowdsourced Production
 iBA (a free program) requires a Mac running OS X 10.7.2 or later, but that doesn’t mean that every student needs a Mac to contribute to the iBook project. All the classroom needs is access to one computer running iBA to create an iBook. (Use somebodies new Mac Mini?)

iBA accepts text from Microsoft Word and other text editors. Teams of student writers can do research and writing on a variety of computers (and devices) and send finished copy to the iBA production team. Images, audio and video files collected by researchers can be added to the eBook project with a simple drag and drop. If students have access to multiple Macs running iBA, it’s easy to consolidate iBA projects by copy / pasting chapters (or sections of chapters). Research, writing, and design can even be sequenced into a “flipped classroom” production model.

Broadcasting Your iBook
Terms of use for iBA require that iBA-created iBook that are offered for sale can only be sold through the iBookstore. But there’s no restriction on “free” iBA-created iBooks – circulate them any way you want.

While the iBookstore does provide accounts for producers of “free” iBooks, there’s a simpler way to distribute an iBook. Connect an iPad to the computer running iBA, click Preview, and the iBook is pushed to the attached iPad. Do the same on as many iPads as you choose. It’s also easy to export the finished iBooks file from the iBA program to an external drive or network and distribute the iBook to multiple iPads.

The ease of distribution means students can communicate with a broader, and more authentic audience than just their teacher and class peers. They can even bring their iBooks files home on thumb drives to be shared with families and friends that have iPads.

Design Thinking Meet CCSS Skills
Researching, writing, and designing an iBook provides an opportunity for students to hone a wide range of skills. Common Core State Standards require a host of literacy, critical thinking and writing skills that are essential to production. Project based learning (PBL) engages students with the opportunity to think like professionals while solving real-world problems. While the iBook qualifies as a project goal, don’t forget that the subject of the iBook could also give students a platform to tackle community-based issues.

Collaborating on an iBook draws from a wide range of creative skills – creating audio clips, producing illustrations, shooting and editing video. Because a variety of media can be included in an iBook, there are numerous opportunities for students of all ability levels and language proficiencies to be active contributors.

Digital technologies have put students in charge of the information they access, store, analyze and share. Most importantly the digital era has given them an expectation of informational choice. Creating an iBook harnesses all those motivational factors into an engaging learning experience. When students get to collaborate and work as adult professional do, we relinquish responsibility for learning to the student and provide them a valuable opportunity to reflect on both their process and product. That’s the foundation for a lifetime of learning.

Image credit/ author