A Burt's Eye View of the World

CTO Mentor Project Kickoff

burtlo — Sun, 21 Feb 2010 20:49:06 +0000

This weekend I began an eight month journey towards becoming a Certified Chief Technology Officer through the CTO Mentor Project organized by CETPA, FCMAT, CCSESA, and the CDE. As a sign of good kickoff, the opening sessions completely changed my expectations of the project. During the project, I expected to discuss with the other candidates how educational technology personnel and the IT staff could develop working relationships to successfully integrate technology into the classroom. (And I was please to notice that over half of the candidates have classroom teaching experience in addition to their technical background.)

However, from the opening presentation “So You Want to be a CTO,” it was made clear that a successful CTO is involved at the cabinet level of an organization and works to fulfill the mission of the organization. This means that a CTO must be able to see how technology can assist with an organization’s mission, communicate to all stakeholders how technology can be an asset, and lead a team to successfully implement the technology for all members of the organization. As a result, a large part of the curriculum for the CTO Mentor Project will focus on leadership skills.

A conversation about leadership that is still rolling around in my head resulted from a presentation about “The Twenty Habits That Hold You Back From The Top” as taken from the book What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. The ineffective skill that was being discussed was “clinging to the past.” One of the candidates made the generalization that certificated staff tended to cling to the past and not utilize new technologies as they were introduced. Another candidate took issue with the generalization and pointed out that this trait could easily apply to IT staff as well. I thought the example provided was very appropriate, IT staff could be seen as clinging to past if they displayed a tendency to only allow one platform (eg. PC vs Mac) or stick with one software system (eg. Exchange vs Google) in their organization.

A few candidates protested that these examples reflected other issues besides clinging to the past, including the need to understanding new systems in order to be able to manage them effectively or the simple lack of time to learn new system options. In my opinion if these explanations excuse IT staff then they should also apply to certificated staff who also have numerous demands on their time and don’t fully understand all of the options of the technology tools presented to them.

I hope that this discussion demonstrates how this project will continue to provide many points of view for these future CTOs to consider as they work with their teams to fulfill the missions of their current and future organizations.

Image: Leadership courtesy of pedrosimoes7

Traveling With A Netbook, Part I

burtlo — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 17:53:41 +0000

Sadly it has been about two months since I last posted to this blog. Hopefully the next two weeks will see a flurry of activity as I blog about my impressions of traveling with a netbook. I am spending my Christmas break traveling around China with my family.

Despite my best efforts, I’m sure that I’ve packed too much for the trip. However, one way that I tried to lighten my load was to pack my Acer AspireOne (10.1” screen) netbook for my computing needs rather than the MacBook Pro that I usually use. The next couple of posts will combine some highlights of my trip along with a list of the tasks that I try to accomplish on the netbook and how successful I feel that the netbook completed the tasks. During my trip I will have to get reacquainted with the Windows Operating System as this netbook runs Windows XP.

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Unfortunately (or fortunately for the sake of my wireless bill) the netbook that I am traveling with does not have a built-in broadband card. Thus, I will be very dependent upon finding wireless hotspots to get the maximum benefit of the netbook. As I waited at the gate prior to my flight I was easily able to connect to the wireless network.

Prior to boarding my flight, I also fired up Audacity to try editing a podcast on a netbook-sized screen, keyboard, and mouse. I did not notice a slower response time using Audacity on the netbook for either importing or editing audio, but it did seem a bit slower than I was accustomed to at generating the final MP3 file. Also, there were some errors with opening saved Audacity projects that required a couple of program restarts.

Due to my long flight, I really appreciated the long battery life of the netbook (the standard battery for the AspireOne lasted over five hours) as I continued editing podcasts and using the word processor. The other netbook feature that I really appreciated was its size and footprint on the seatback table. Even when the person in front of me pushed their chair back, I was able to work on the netbook with the screen fully open. Although I had a scary moment when a drink on the same tray spilled, which makes the option of a spill-proof keyboard a great idea if airline travel will be one of your main venues for using your netbook.

Would you like some video with that iPod nano?

burtlo — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 04:35:17 +0000

As everyone in Apple’s sphere of influence knows, the recently released 5th generation iPod nano now records video. In addition to video, the new iPod nano is a voice recorder, and has a built-in microphone. This makes it a very compelling educational tool. Students equipped with an iPod nano have a self-contained podcasting or video creation tool. Of course I thought it would be fun to try out the video and see if it would be easy enough to use in a classroom setting. I wanted to compare the video quality and try out both the Windows and Mac sides of this equation.

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It is easy enough to record video on the iPod nano. However, Apple managed to put the video camera in probably the most inconvenient place possible. I wanted to see how easy it would be to use the video from the nano on a Windows machine and almost immediately ran into issues. Neither Windows XP Movie Maker or Media Player would recognize the video from the nano. The only way I could view the video on my Windows machine (the Aspire One netbook with XP Home Edition) was to view it with QuickTime player. I did a few Google searches for some video editing software that would accept MPEG 4 video and came across Pinnacle’s VideoSpin software. While not free, a final cost of $15 is not too bad.

I’ve provided links to an iPod nano video edited on a Windows machine and the same video shot with an iPhone 3GS edited with iMovie 09 for comparison. (Although shooting video with an iPhone is pretty easy I forgot to switch to landscape mode while shooting with the iPhone, sorry.) As an added bonus, the Animoto video that starts this blog post includes the video from the iPod nano as a demonstration of the new video feature.

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Bargaining Through Social Media

burtlo — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 22:30:31 +0000

Today I tasted my first experience of researching and bargaining for services through social media. My promotional package with Charter Cable is coming to a close and I’d like to keep my bill at about the same rate for the same bundle of services (expanded basic cable and high-speed Internet). I’m not interested in premium packages, such as movie channels or sports packages. I would just like to have access to basic services for under $100/month. Of course, during the weeks leading up to the end of the promotion period, I received a variety of confusing calls from different Charter customer service representatives with a variety of offers to continue my service. Unfortunately, none of the offers caught my attention, although since one of them was a 2-year contract for high-speed Internet at $29.99/month, I didn’t think that expanded basic should cost me more than another $30/month. ?????? ????? ????

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I decided to use poll my PLN and social network to consider options than Charter for TV and high-speed Internet. I posted a request for feedback to alternatives to Charter Cable on both Twitter and Facebook. I was happy to receive opinions from colleagues and friends about their experiences with DirecTV, Dish Network, and others (for some reason I value the opinions of people I know more than epinions, etc.) However, the feedback that surprised me was that I was contacted through Twitter by Umatter2ChtrR. It intrigued me to find out that Charter was assigning people to monitor social networking to try and resolve issues. It was interesting to see the variety of customer issues that this particular Charter twit was attempting to solve.

This contact by Charter brought me some hope that a back channel might provide me with a deal that would fit my criteria. Unfortunately, the Twitter rep was only able to restate an offer that I had previously been provided over the phone. So, I continued my online research for alternatives. Judging from my social network feedback, I associate with a large DirecTV audience. A final technology note from my research, I was also interested with what happened during my visit to the DirecTV website. Apparently, there must be some sort of timer on web visitors, because after I had been browsing for a while, a customer representative chat field appeared to ask me if I had any questions and provide me with additional information. I thought that was a nice touch.

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Web 2.0 Hype: Focusing On What Really Matters

burtlo — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 16:26:30 +0000


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Had the opportunity to attend the CoSN-CETPA CTO Clinic for School District Technology Leaders. David Jakes was the opening keynote speaker. He started with some interesting statistics, such as Flickr is approaching 4 billion uploaded pictures, YouTube receives 4 years worth of content every day, 6 million children on Webkinz, and 75 million children between the age of 5 and 10 on Poptropica. This was followed by a trip down memory lane as he mentioned some technologies (ditto machine, opaque projector) that were used by teachers 25 years ago.

David then started talking about emerging technologies that he sees as game changers. Among the items on his list are netbooks, mobile projectors, and the iPhone/iPod touch. In terms of school and classroom application of these emerging technologies, he mentioned the need for an appropriate technology policy along with potential educational tools such as an iPhone Ocarina music class, an iPhone programming class, and opening learning opportunities such as Academic Earth, MIT OpenCourseWare, Second Life (and something I’ve never heard of) Augmented Reality. David then displayed some collaborative activities that are now possible with these new technologies, such as One Million Monkeys Typing

D3: The Mighty Ducks movie download , BookGlutton, and CCMixter. A very neat example of a Web 2.0 instruction displayed was Zon, a MMOG (Massively Multi-player Online Game) for learning Mandarin Chinese.

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