This Space is NOT for Lease

After abandoning my blog due to overwhelming time constraints from holding down 3 jobs, I've decided to try to pick back up where I left off. The time away has been well spent. I've been reading the blogs of some of my peers and I've come up with some good questions to explore here in the future. So to keep me motivated and you interested I'd like to give you a quick sneak preview of what I have in store for you in the coming weeks:

1. Finish my 4 point evaluation criteria of cloud computing products with the last requirement: Security.
2. A case study of how I used google's web services to run my tutoring sideline business.
3. Start exploring some pedagogical issues that I have run into in my teaching.

I'll explain #3 a little better here because it's what I've been thinking about most recently. (Pop it off the stack!) So this is the 3rd semester that I've been teaching Quantitative Literacy and I've got the lecture and testing bits down pat. But my familiarity with the material improves my student's performance only so far. After the 2nd time teaching this I've found that I can now foresee the pitfalls that a lot of my students fall into and head them off at the pass before they go plunging down a cliff (just because dramatic metaphors are fun!).

But that doesn't necessarily solve the problem of students who have been trained by a lifetime of public schools to just study for the test and avoid independent thought at all costs. Which as a math teacher and critical-thought-enthusiast frustrates the crap out of me! So my next thought is this: "Do we really want a society FULL of critical thinkers?" (After all somebody has to take out the garbage). And that leads me down a whole laundry list of questions:

• Should we be preparing EVERY student for a college degree?
• What makes a successful student?
• What makes a successful teacher?
• What makes a failing student?
• What makes a failing teacher?
• What is success?
• What is failure?
  
• Which set of students is better to teach: straight A students, C/D borderline students, F students?
• Does teaching need technology to prepare the future student? Or does technology need more pedagogy applied to it to adapt the machines to the way humans think, work and live?

If you have any answers, good. If you just have more questions to add, Better. If you're just confused and think I'm a little crazy, Perfect! Let me know in the comments.

Requirement 3: Maximize Productivity

As much fun as it is to play with gadgets just for the fun (nerdiness) of it, the only gadgets worth mastering and using are obviously the ones that can actually "do" something. And really gadgets only exists to help you "do" something in your life. This is the effective definition of productivity. The cool thing is that you get to define just what that something is that you're doing. If you're a surfer, then a tide widget is actually useful to you. If you're living in landlocked suburbia, then you probably have less use for something like that. The good/bad/complicated part is that each individual has to define what is useful to them in their life. To help me evaluate different products I need to create a system that is both broad enough to accept every one's "working style/needs", yet still narrow enough for the evaluation to mean something. Luckily there are a few things that every gadget must fulfill for it to be useful to anybody.

Firstly, it needs to be user-friendly. Apple really latched on to this idea and leveraged it to create the immense popularity of their i-line of gadgets. There were many mp3 players on the market before the iPod, but Apple made it easy enough for my grandma to use. There were many multi-function cell phones on the market before the iPhone, but Apple made it fun enough to spend hours staring at that tiny little screen. Much as I loathe the plethora of "i-Gadgets" that have spawned since, I have to give credit to Apple for doing something really right. (Hey, even Hitler knew what he was doing some of the time ;P)

Secondly, it has to actually do all the things that you need it to do with minimal modifications. This doesn't mean that it has to be the slicing-dicing-julienne fry making-sledg-o-matic, fulfilling your every gadgetry need. But it should at least do the job that it was designed for. My recent failure with my Google Docs presentation is a prime example. I need a presentation tool that can insert equations for my math students including both subscripts and superscripts. Yet in all of my searching and piddling with the presentation tool I could not find the advanced text editing abilities or an appropriate equation editor add-in. I should not have to sacrifice quality or capabilities just to use the "cloud-computing" web app equivalent of an existing "offline" gadget. Additionally, it should foster creativity and inspire you to work in new and different ways. Despite all of our technological advances over the past century sometimes the most powerful tool we still have is a simple plain white sheet of paper and a pencil. While I don't normally advocate tree-killing paper consumption, the plain truth is nothing is as flexible or open as the tabula rasa. As a mathematician I'm constantly having to stop, draw a picture of the problem, then keep going with the equation. And while there are lots (well more than there used to be) of equation editing tools, nothing beats the feel of chalk on the blackboard or pencil on paper for feel and flexibility.

Thirdly, it should take less time to use the gadget than it does to complete the task "manually" (without the gadget). This is where productivity and cost intersect. Time is an asset just as much as money is. So I propose that the definition of a productive gadget is one that actually saves you time! Example: I have a rubric that I use to grade discussion board posts for my online math class. By posting that rubric on a published Google Doc I can update it once, and instantly all of my students have access to the latest version of the grading scale for their assignments. Sure I could save it as a PDF and upload it to each and every course and section that I'm teaching, and then have to replace it every time I make an edit, but good god why? This type of efficiency is unique to hyper-linked communication and is another one of the superpowers of cloud computing. Sometimes time savings comes from good design and usability. Just as sometimes time sinks come from excessive buttons (oh delicious, shiny buttons!), dials, and blinking lights. Much as it pains me to abandon tinkering with gadgets for the sheer fun of it, I'm not actually being productive unless I'm producing something, saving time, or keeping focused on my tasks.

So the three requirements for a "productive" gadget can be summarized as:

• Usable - "even grandma can figure this newfangled gadget out!"
  
• Functional - "hey look it actually works!"
• Efficient - it saves me time, but it's not distractingly fun to use
  

I'm open to other suggestions/definitions of productivity. I'll be honest, I'm no business major so I'm sure I'm missing something.

Interesting article from Mark (Thanks!)

Looks like ye olde federal government has noticed the cloud computing phenomenon too! Here's an aritcle from infoworld that starts what I'm sure will be many more debates in the future. So what do you think? Should Uncle Sam have the same rights to your data in the cloud as he does when it's on your personal computer?

My First Failure

So in my endeavors to become completely mobile I've decided to cast off the chains of Microsoft Office in favor of more portable and universal platform friendly Google Docs.

This week I began working on my lecture notes for the Business Calculus class that I'm teaching at the local community college. Google docs does have a PowerPoint equivalent gadget called Presentation. It's very handy and allows basic edits of any presentation with slides and comes with some snazzy design templates too. What it doesn't have is all the advanced editing that comes with PowerPoint. In fact I was absolutely appalled by the fact that it couldn't create subscript or superscript font. As a math teacher I was mortified and offended to be so gruesomely excluded from consideration of my needs!

So sadly I was forced back to the pallid quivering arms of Microsoft to complete my presentation. Of course once I arrived I was again offended by Microsoft's horrendous oversight in leaving the wonderful new equation editor out of PowerPoint! Instead I painstakingly created the equations I needed in Word, then copied and pasted them into PowerPoint as flattened pictures.

I must say this is a situation where everyone failed me, both Google and M$ to some degree. So I don't really feel like I can put this one in the win column for either of them. I did complete my work in PowerPoint (although it took twice as long as it should have) so I guess I'll give this one to the desktop apps...begrudgingly.

My First Success Story

So it looks like this cloud computing experiment is working for me so far. Case in point: I'm sitting at the car dealership right now blogging from the free e-mail computer they have setup for people who are waiting on their car repairs. I brought a book just in case I got bored, but instead have spent the past hour and a half checking e-mails and grading discussion board postings for my online class. I can't work on my syllabus for the calculus class as I was planning on doing today. Although I could be if I would just get off my butt and convert everything over to Google docs. This just goes to prove that you don't need to own or invest any money in a computer nowadays to be productive. Of course I'm lucky in that this computer isn't all that locked down, security-wise. It's using a generic login that has no password (as I just found out by accidentally locking the station). There aren't any restrictions on downloading files to the hard drive (as I discovered by having to download, then e-mail a syllabud to the dept). I haven't hit any blocks or restrictions to my browsing locations. It's equally open to gmail, hotmail, blogger (obviously), as it is to my school website. Either way I'm chalking this one into the win column.

Requirement 2: Minimize Cost

Since the purpose of this experiment is to discover the advantages of cloud computing I'm going tackle the most obvious advantage, the cost. Although cost usually refers to pure monetary investment, time is also one of the costs I'll be minimizing as well. My new job as a teacher severely limits my budget (especially since it pays about half as much as I made before). So I will be pinching every last penny I can get my grubby little hands on.

There are several ways that software applications pay for themselves. Micro$oft mastered the art of the software "license" that you have to keep paying for every time there is an upgrade. But they must still bow to the insidious dollar-milking ability of the "software-as-a-service" cash cow that is the monthly subscription fee (just ask Blizzard about their World of Warcraft profits). Since I, like most teachers, have at best a shoe-string budget to work with I'll be limiting my evaluations to gadgets that are either freeware or adware. Plus I'm just cheap. I may even expand my horizons to shareware if I'm feeling froggy. As long as the gadget only requests a donation to the author, and doesn't limit functionality, then I'll keep it in the list. Below is a ranked list of preferred licensing methods for cheapskates like me:

1. Open Source
   
2. Freeware
3. Adware
4. Shareware
5. One-time fee
6. Subscription Fee (monthly, yearly, etc.)
7. Pay-per-Use
   

The other sort of cost that's built in to any product is time. Fortunately this is a resource I now have in abundance. So for me personally, it will not weigh as heavily. But it still merits consideration when evaluating any gadget. This parameter bleeds into the productivity category a little, so I'll be talking about time use in both categories. The time "costs" include:

1. Setup/sign-up delays: Do I have to email you my first pet's mother's maiden name to verify my identity?
2. Usability delays: Do I need a Ph. D. in Photoshop to make a simple smiley face?
   
3. Site loading delays: Should I just get up and fix a cup of coffee while I wait to load your site's homepage?
4. Bandwidth delays: Are you hogging up the internet with your super snazzy 10 megapixel logo?

Requirement 1: Maximize Portability

No gadget is truly a part of the "cloud computing" phenomenon without gaining the obvious portability advantage. This is by far the most important reason that people use the cloud and nothing in my experiment will be successful unless I can successfully access my information from any internet-accessible computer. I'm limiting my experiences to just computers for ease of use, the fact that I sadly don't own an iPhone, and the fact that most of my productivity takes place on a full QWERTY keyboard.

1. The first condition of portability must be that the gadget is fully compatible with most major web browsers; namely Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari.
   
2. This also means that the gadget must be completely platform independent; so, fully compatible with MS Windows, Linux, and OSX.
3. Thirdly it must be "rights" independent. That is to say that I should be equally successful working at home on my personally add-on pimped-out version of Firefox as I am while forced to trudge away on the tightly locked-down, security paranoid Internet Explorer installed in my school's computer lab.

Step One: The Idea that kept me up all night

So, my recent change in employment has led me to abandon my previously adored and envied Alienware laptop. By giving up my full-time position at the university in favor of a part-time adjuncting gig. I wind up losing many benefits from health insurance, to higher pay, to most egregiously - exclusive access to my own personal computer (and sweet 22" monitor) at work. To help me adjust to this loss I've decided to embark upon a personal odyssey into the wonderful world of cloud computing that has been so touted in recent techie news circles.

To begin, I've decided to attempt a completely gypsy-like approach to my whole computing career. In short, no computer is mine to own, so I'll just take the whole internet instead >:D. I'll start by defining a few parameters that will help me to evaluate the tools and services (let's just call them all gadgets for both convenience and expressive nerdy-ness) that I'll encounter on my journey:

1. Maximize Portability
2. Minimize Cost
3. Maximize Productivity
4. Maximize Security

Oooh, I just noticed that I created the basic parameters for a differential equation to evaluate gadgets! Dr. G. would be so proud! In my next few posts I'll delve into each of these for more detailed definitions and eventually create a rubric to score my gadgets in each category.