Blogs: Vitacora y Edgeek

Después de mucho trabajo y con mucha ayuda de Alejandro (el ingeniero) y algunos estudiantes del colegio, especialmente Camilo Garzón, salió al aire una primera versión del nuevo portal web del Gimnasio La Montaña. La curva de aprendizaje para usar Drupal es bastante empinada y me ha tomado tiempo entender cómo funciona, pero estoy muy contento con las posibilidades de la plataforma. Aún hay mucho por hacer, pero los invito a conocer el sitio en www.glm.edu.co y enviarme sus comentarios, especialmente sobre la facilidad de navegación.

After a lot of work and a lot of help from Alejandro (the server-guy) and some students, especially Camilo Garzón, the first version of Gimnasio La Montaña's new web portal. Drupal's learning curve is pretty steep and it has taken time to understand how it works, but I'm happy withe the platform's possibilities. There's still a lot of work to be done, but I invite my readers to check it out (at www.glm.edu.co) and send me their feedback, especially in relation to the ease of navigation (usability). Thanks!

Through Stephen Downe's olDaily I got interested in an article about educational uses of peer to peer file transfer.BitTorrent: An Educational Autopsy of the Hydra by bavtuesdays. It has a good explanation of what bit-torrents is and how it works, as well as an explanation of the debates around it. I also got directed to check out a project at Harvard School of Engineering... Tribler, a p2p system that, as far as I can tell, uses bandwidth as currency (to give incentives to users who "seed"). I am about to download it and try it out. You can find it here: http://tv.seas.harvard.edu/. I have to options to download a client: Minimize upload to others and maximize download 15% or simetrical download/upload, normal speed download. I don't know what to pick. Seems weird. I get better download if I don't reciprocate? I think I'm not getting it. The FAQ says:

"If you select the right download version, the Tribler client will upload as much as it downloads. This version is "balanced" in the sense that for every piece that you want to download you also have to upload a piece of the same size. If you select the left download version, the Tribler client will optimize the file sharing algorithm to speed up your downloads, minimizing your upload to others. While this improves the speed of your personal video downloads, other users will not be able to benefit from your videos as much as with the right version which then consequently reduces their download speed."

But then it also says:

"Obviously, the upload/download ratio averaged over the whole file sharing network has to be 1:1. Thus, it is a serious problem that many users have an asymmetric Internet connection. This is one of the biggest problems with the BitTorrent protocol, where most trades happen with a tit-for-tat mechanism. Thus, even though you might have 1Mbit of download bandwidth, your 125kbit upload bandwidth prevents you from fast downloads. With virtual credits, we want to alleviate this problem. The idea is that when you leave your computer on (over night, during vacation, when you are working,...) you can earn credits such that when you actually want to download a video (or watch something on demand) you will get get the full download speed."

I have an asymmetric connection, of course. Nevertheless, I'll go for the symmetrical version of the client and upload more. I guess this decision is part of their research. I choose to share more in order to get, in the end, faster download speeds. Am I reasoning this right? Finally here's a video on Tribler:

We'd had some trouble installing Knowledge Forum on the Windows 2003 r2 server at school. Granted, the school engineer and me aren't the best qualified to do it (I've never managed a server), but we couldn't manage yesterday. Today, Alejandro, one of our contract programmers (who does know about Windows servers and pretty much administers the one at school) managed pretty quickly. Even enhanced mode worked well. I haven't been able to run lite mode, but that's another problem. I can't even run it from the KF site!

Hopefully it will be up online in about a week, as well as the new school website using Drupal. Right now both run locally. That makes me happy. I still have a lot of work to do on the website and the students who were to help me on vacation haven't come through... we'll see how much we manage to get ready for the the first week of August, when the teachers come in.

As some of my readers may know, I recently started a new job as educational technology director at Gimnasio La Montaña, a private school in Bogotá. One of the innovations we are going to start next year is the use of Knowledge Forum for two Knowledge Building (KB) projects (one Social Studies, one Science), in some areas (Religion, Philosophy, Language Arts...) and in teacher lesson study. KB is one of the most interesting and powerful ideas about education I have come across (thanks to Kate Bielaczyc at HGSE) and I love what KF can do.

I have been preparing a professional development course for the initial group of teachers and came across something I hadn't seen before. The Institute for Knowledge Innovation and Technology at the University of Toronto, where Marlene Scardamalia and Carl Bereiter work, holds a yearly institute on KB. We couldn't attend this year, but I found some great resource from previous institutes at the IKIT site. Last year, a group of teachers presented their research on lesson study. I wish there were a video of the presentation, but I found the slides and the videos of them teaching and discussing lessons. Awesome resources for my course! There's a lot more video available. Thanks IKIT for making that available! I wish you could do this year's Institute live (or link to participants' blogging or live-blogging) or publish everything pretty quickly.

IKIT Video site: http://video.ikit.org/si2007/slides

Edit: I'm desperately looking for professional development materials in Spanish for some of my teachers, especially translations of articles by Scardamalia and Bereiter like "Collective Cognitive Responsibility" and the article in "Encyclopedia of Education". Found a little in the COMConeixer site, but no more... any pointers will be appreciated.

Edit: Proofread and linked to Kate's profile at NIE.

A través del blog de Diego (ya no sé cómo se llama, creo que educoblog) me encontré uno de esos tests-quizzes que uno hace como medio por diversión... aquí está el resultado. Algunos de las preguntas me confundieron y no sabía cuál opción de respuesta escoger... pero bueno... divertido hacerlo.