On Wednesday, February 10, 2010, Dr. Pamela Gay (StarStyder) gave a talk entitled Citizen Science: From Cosmos to Cornflowers sponsored by the St. Louis Zoo and the St. Louis Academy of Science.  Dr. Gay started her talk addressing the stereotypical view of a scientist:  a white, socially-dysfunctional male in a lab full of obscure equipment.  Science wasn’t always like that, nor is it currently like that.  Citizen science is all about ordinary people, you and me, observing, collecting and sharing data.

Professor Gay presenting at the St. Louis Zoo

Dr. Gay discussed the history of citizen science.  The earliest and longest running program involves observing and recording weather data.  The National Weather Service has been conducting a Cooperative Weather Statue Program formally since 1890, but weather data was collected by non-scientist citizens as far back as the original colonists and the Founding Fathers.  Apart from this example, in the past, the majority of scientists gathered data and spent their whole lives analyzing it, while jealously guarding it from other researchers.

Science and how we do science is changing.  It used to be difficult to get data in some areas like astronomy.  Now astronomers are inundated with data.  There is so much data, they can’t possibly analyze it all and look for patterns in the data.  The opposite problem is occurring in biology.  Birds and bugs are changing their habitats and behaviors and cover such wide range of geographical space, that a single research term can not possibly hope to keep track or observe them all.   There has been much discussion lately of global climate change.  Without having enough climate data taken by scientist all over the world, it is impossible to construct accurate models.  With the advent of the Internet, it is now possible for scientists and others to connect from all over the world.  Science is becoming more collaborative.  This is were the citizen scientist enters the picture.

There are many different roles for the citizen scientist.  Perhaps the most simple is to allow a scientists to use your computer to process data while you aren’t using it.  The most famous of these is SETI@Home.  By allowing scientists to use your computer, they can boost their data processing capabilities without investing more money.

Another way the citizen scientist can do science is by helping to classify data or observing what is going on in a video feed.  The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) took images of one third of the night sky.  There are so many images that would be impossible for a single research group to classify everything found on the images or to even look for specific things in the images.  The need to find identifiable galaxies in the SDSS lead to the creation of GalaxyZoo.  With GalaxyZoo, ordinary people can go to the website and help astronomers classify galaxies.  So far over 50 million galaxies have been classified using GalaxyZoo as well as over 2o articles in peer-reviewed journals.  Additionally, as people click around and discuss, new discoveries are being made.  Ordinary people, the citizen scientist, found a new class of galaxies.  The volunteers helping to classify galaxies noticed these green pea-like objects, which led astronomers to start focusing on discovering what they were.  These green pea-like objects turned out to be dwarf galaxies with an incredible amount of star formation occurring.  Ordinary people can help do real science!

Another interesting example of the citizen scientists are those volunteers that use their “work” skills to play around and create new images and algorithms.  A computer scientist, Doug Ellison, took all of the images the Spirit rover on Mars collected and turned them into a flyover movie of the Martian surface.  A graphic designer took the original images of Mercury taken by Mariner 10, smoothed them out and created a much more useful image for planetary scientists.

Perhaps the most direct impact citizen scientist can have on science is to carefully observe and record data.  It is impossible for a scientist to be everywhere at once.  Ordinary citizen scientists are everywhere.  They have found a variety of ladybug that hadn’t been seen in 14 years.  Additionally, one day of observation can have a significant impact.  International Migratory Bird Day asks people to spend one day tracking migratory birds, identifying and counting them.

To get started, a citizen scientist only needs passion to explore the world around her and share the results of those explorations.

The Citizen Scientist in Education

How can these citizen scientist projects be used in education?  First, these projects help expose students to how science is really conducted.  Science is not something that happens in a 90 minute lab period.  Science doesn’t always work.  By working with real data, some of which they may have had a hand in collecting, students get a clearer picture of how science works.  Second, these citizen science projects allow students to work with data they may not be able to collect. This enables them to design and conduct inquiry and science projects about things that have meaning for them.  Students will be able to go beyond “I’m doing this project because it is the only thing I have equipment or data for.”  Third, students can practice observing the world around them as well as learning how to accurately collect and record data.   Finally, participating in citizen science projects enable students to take part in something much larger than themselves.  It can help them see connections and how things are related.  Citizen science can help students become better citizens.

Resources:

Projects That Need Your Computer:

Seti@Home:  Help in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence by processing radio telescope data.

Rosetta@Home:  Help find proteins to fight diseases

climateprediction.net:  Help model and then predict Earth’s climate to the year 2080.

Boinc at Berkeley lists various projects

Online Projects:

GalaxyZoo:  Help classify galaxies.  (Soon MoonZoo will be launched and you will be able to count craters!)

Solar Storm Watch:  Help find and track solar explosions.

Observing and Collecting Data:

Great Sunflower Project:  Hunt for Bees.

Lost Ladybug Project:  Find and count ladybugs

Project Squirrel:  Observe squirrels

Citizen Sky:  Observe epsilon Aurigae

Lists of Projects:

Bird Projects from Cornell Lab of Ornithology:  Count birds, watch nestcams, or participate in conservation efforts.

Physics and Astronomy Projects: Various projects listed by Dr. Gay

Many teachers in my professional learning  community are participating in what is called a 365 Challenge. A 365 Challenge is a commitment of a blogger to post daily on his or her blog. The most common approach involves taking a picture everyday for an entire year and uploading it to a blog, Flickr, or similar photo sharing website.  Weekly photography challenges are also popular ways to meet one’s goals. The Daily Shoot offers daily assignments and the blog Written, Inc. offers weekly themes.

Seeing how cool and awesome other people’s 365 challenges turned out, I decided to start one. As I have been doing this, I have been thinking about how a 365 challenge, modified in some way, could work in the classroom.

I know what you are saying. Digital cameras are expensive. Not necessarily. A decent digital camera can be found for $100. However, there is no need to purchase new equipment. Many students have cameras built-in to their cell phones and could use them. My GPS Camera Phone is an example of a photography blog in which the author publishes pictures he has captured with his GPS camera cell phone.

There are several connections to a host of learning objectives. Obviously, there is the art aspect. Photography is an art after all. Students can practice all those art terms like perspective and composition. Uploading the pictures to the internet incorporates technology, as well. Students can learn how to edit their photos and format web pages. What other subjects can benefit from a photography challenge?

Math

Two recent assignments at The Daily Shoot involved converging lines and intersecting lines, both topics covered in geometry. Students could be sent out to take pictures of various geometrical shapes, such as octagons and rectangular prisms. Upper level students could be sent out to find pictures of conic sections which could then be used to help students practice writing equations. Younger students could take pictures of numbers or x number of things in an image.

Barnes Library illustrates both parallel and perpendicular lines

Part of the Thomas Jefferson Library is a regular pyramid

Language Arts

Students could use the pictures they take as a starting point to creative or expository writing. They could also take pictures that illustrate a scene from literature. Alternatively, photographs could be used as a writing prompt. Especially for teachers that may not yet be ready to manage the technology of a photoblog, using pictures found on existing blogs could be a creative way to get students thinking and writing. Students can practice prose, poetry, persuasive and humorous speeches. Writing competitions often present students with interesting photographs to interpret.

Social Studies

Students could take pictures of local landmarks, historical and geographical markers. For history, students could take pictures of things that represent local history and write about it, connecting it to global or national history. They could also look at how the region has changed throughout the years. Incorporate a scavenger hunt and now students can work in teams to learn more about local people, places and history in a fun and dynamic way.

How has the ability to travel from one place to another impacted society and the availability of goods? In this shot, you have the Mississippi River, an ancient way of traveling, combined with a railroad bridge and a bridge for cars.

Lewis and Clark are two significant figures in American history. Students can discuss why as well as tracing their voyage.

Science

Students could take pictures of wildlife and nature. For example, they could spend the weekend taking pictures of trees, leaves, seeds and flowers or finding signs of wildlife such as bird nests, feathers, or dens. This can then be followed up with classroom lessons about environmental science, ecology, zoology or biology. Students could do a series of photos on how a certain feature, such as a river bank, changes throughout the year. This could make a perfect independent study project for ambitious students.

Wildlife can be found in city parks. Students can discuss the habitats and behaviors of local wildlife such as this possum.

This is a photo showing the effects of a river. Students can discuss the water cycle, erosion and benefits and challenges of living alongside a river.

There are a variety of ways to use digital cameras in education and a variety of ways to challenge the students to take pictures. Plus, let us not forget the community aspects. There are several blog communities that cover these topics and more. With proper adult supervision, students can connect to experts and find a mentor. The key is to find a challenge that is meaningful to students that also helps them construct knowledge and still meet a variety of learning objectives.

Online Resources

• Snup’s Photos: Tina Fanetti’s 365 Photo Challenge Blog
• Nature Blog Network: List of nature photography blogs
• Vanishing STL: Chronicles the loss of architecture and changing urban landscape in St. Louis
• Online Writing Challenges

Let’s say you’re the parent/mentor/teacher/tutor/friend of a kid super-excited about some aspect of science, technology, engineering or math (STEM). You want to nurture that interest and keep that child engaged, especially during the dull times of school breaks, after-school and perhaps even for school-related projects. Whether you’re an educator or not, sometimes an adult needs reinforcements to help a child or teen find his/her own interest path.

Fostering science, math, and engineering interests in young people is the goal of several organizations, including many of our nation’s publicly funded agencies like NASA and NSF. Informal science education programs and institutions run the range. Some supplement traditional K-12 education lessons. Some provide opportunities for families to spend time together, learning, exploring, and having fun. And still there are some that specifically target under-served audiences to introduce them to pioneers and exciting career opportunities.

STEM Outreach Programs that Rock!

2009 was definitely the year science initiatives! It was hailed as the:

• Year of Science – with each month focusing on a different science topic;
• Year of the Gorilla – to raise awareness of the threat of extinction to this beautiful primate;
• Darwin Year – to celebrate the 200th year of Charles Darwin’s birth and 150th anniversary of the publication of his book; and
• International Year of Astronomy – to celebrate one of the oldest fields of science

To help spread the word of these science initiatives, Science Cafes really took off, especially here in the United States. Often hosted at fun meeting places like restaurants where pizza and beverages are served, people can meet local scientists and learn about interesting topics. Since local communities organize these events, the topics might be related to science initiatives or any other hot topic in the news like sports, herbal medicine, love or health.

But my absolute favorite science outreach efforts are the hands-on organically-grown science and nature outreach programs in individual communities. Here in St. Louis, Missouri, I’ve been involved in a few. My most recent experience was this past summer in the Forest Park Summer Youth Program with Boys & Girls Club kids.

Ocean Discovery Institute of San Diego, California, (formerly Aquatic Adventures) is an awesome program! Diverse young people from this very urban community are engaged in science exploration marine research, and environmental conservation education. This happens to be one of my dream jobs.

Plus, the 2010 San Diego Science Festival sounds like it will be the most anticipated science showcase of greater San Diego. Offering a wide variety of programs and events inspire all ages, “with a special focus on building a pipeline of future scientists and STEM thought-leaders” – festivities include supplemental K-12 Programs, Scientist Speakers series at local schools, a science exposition, and Scientists in Residence Program. College student scientists represented from disciplines such as Bio-medicine, Pharmacology, Engineering, Green Technology, Oceanography, and Astrophysics will work in partnership with San Diego county schools for 6 weeks and create joint project that will be showcased in the 2010 Festival.

Science Chicago hosted the world’s largest science celebration. Being the home of several private businesses like Alberto-Culver and institutions like the Shedd Aquarium, all of Chicago had a chance to get a closer look into how science impacts our lives and our health.

I recently discovered Multidisciplinary Education for the Environment (ME4E) also out of the Chicago, Illinois. This organization provides outdoor hands-on activities for schools, scouts, and public groups to learn more about ecology and local wildlife. They seem to have a full calendar of events such as bird counts, wildlife watching, making cast of animal tracks, wetlands and woodlands lesson plans, and urban gardening programs.

ExxonMobil Bernard Harris Summer Science Camp sponsored by The Harris Foundation is a free, academic program offered in over 20 different cities in the United Sates. Middle school students participate in a variety of recreational, social, and STEM educational activities at local college campuses. Founded by Dr. Bernard Harris, it is designed to support historically under-served and under-represented students with limited opportunities.

Finally, no matter where you live, here is a program for any student in 3rd- 6th grade. Pulse of the Planet Kid’s Science Challenge is a nationwide competition for kids to submit experiments and problems for REAL scientists and engineers to solve. The website is also a fun place to play science games, watch videos, and enter to win awesome prizes and trips! Plus, the site also offers educator resources for teachers and parents, such as podcasts and download-able curricula.

7 handles deployment quite gracefully. We can literally just run Sysprep and deploy the image, and 7 will figure it out. Now, this isn’t the most effective way to Sysprep a machine, but if you need a quick image for something and you don’t mind sitting through the setup process, it works. Just like my article for XP, I want to say that  I don’t know if the methods here are the “right” way to go about sysprep-ing machines, but it works, and I think that’s what counts.

Sysprep is located in C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep by default (yes, it actually just comes with the OS).  Just run it as Administrator, select Enter System Out-of-Box Experience(OOBE) and check Generalize. After the machine shuts down, take an image and deploy it.

You’ll then be taken through the normal setup routine (setting up an administrator, license key, etc). If the machine is connected to the Internet, 7 will try to find updates and proper drivers.

Deployment Using Windows System Image Manager (WSIM)

If you plan on deploying Windows 7, you definitely need to create an unattended installation answer file. Unlike XP, where the answer file was just a text file with some fields, 7’s is a more complicated XML file. Microsoft has put out some tools to aid in the creation of these files, namely the Windows System Image Manager. This is part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (AIK), a rather hefty download (1.6 GB iso), but something you need.

Using WSIM

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the kit, you need to grab some files from your Windows 7 installation disk. Explore the disk, go to the sources folder, and look for a file called install.wim, it’s about 2.5 GB in size. Copy that to your computer somewhere (I put mine in C:\Sysprep, but it doesn’t really matter where you put it). Now go ahead and open the Windows System Image Manager.

A new Windows System Image Manager window

It looks kind of ugly, but once you get used to it it’s not bad. The window is split into a few different sections, we only need the Windows Image, Answer File, and Properties sections. Right click where it says Create or Open an Answer File and hit New Answer File.

Blank Answer File

So now we have a blank answer file. The seven different options under the Components section correspond to the different passes that Sysprep makes. I’m not going into too much detail now; you don’t need to know a whole lot about the passes in order to get this to work. So for now, right-click where it says Select a Windows image or catalog file and click Select. Go to the install.wim file you copied earlier, and hit Open. It will probably tell you that it can’t find the catalog file, and ask if you’d like to make one; click Yes. This will “take a few minutes.”

Components are added to your answers file

Now you should see a tree with two options, Components and Packages. Expand the Components and you’ll see a long list of odd names. These components are the possible settings you can add to your answer file. Yeah, it’s weird. Anyway, if you highlight a component, the Properties pane will show you some of the available settings. You can then highlight a setting, and you’ll get a little more information; usually it just shows you the type of setting it is (boolean, string, etc), but it will warn you if a setting has been deprecated.

WSIM Properties Pane

Right click on a component and you’ll see Add Setting to Pass… 1 through 7, corresponding to the seven passes in the answer file. Some of them are grayed out, but more often than not you’ve got more than one choice. How do you figure out which to choose? Well, it depends on what you want it to do. For instance, putting amd64_Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup into pass 4 gives me different settings than if I put it into pass 7.

That’s the basics of WSIM. Microsoft’s TechNet has a more in-depth information about it if you’re interested.

Alright, so what are the Passes?

There are seven configuration passes: WindowsPE, offlineServicing, generalize, specialize, auditSystem, auditUser, and oobeSystem. Each is designed to take care of different parts of the setup process. Microsoft has a nice little table to explain what they do, go ahead and skim through it if you want. What we really need to know is this:

Generalize runs when we run Sysprep /generalize

Specialize runs on the next boot after running /generalize

AuditSystem and AuditUser run when we run Sysprep /audit

WindowsPE runs when Windows PE boots (it’s the setup environment, like what you’d see when you’re first installing Windows)

Making Sense of the Components

You’ve probably noticed that all of the components have very similar names. They all begin with AMD64, x86, or wow64, then Microsoft-Windows, and THEN the name of whatever the component controls. The beginning specifies the architecture that the component is designed for; AMD64 is for 64 bit machines (both Intel and AMD) and x86 is for any 32 bit hardware. WoW64 is short of Windows-on-Windows 64, it’s a subsystem that runs 32 bit programs on 64 bit OS’s (I’m not really sure when their use would ever be needed).

Most of the components have multiple versions, one for each architecture, so make sure to choose the right ones. For this article, I’m using only AMD64 components, but the 32 bit ones are very similar.

Okay, Now Let’s Make an Answer File

So once you’re familiar with using WSIM, all that’s left to do is build the answer file by adding the components you wish to add.

Building a Basic Answer File

To create a basic unattended installation answer file, we need two components: amd64_Microsoft-Windows-International-Core_neutral and amd64_Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup_neutral. The two of these take care of the basic questions during setup. Add International-Core_neutral to pass 7, and Shell-Setup_neutral to both 4 and 7.

In Shell-Setup_neutral for pass 4, set:

• Computer Name: * (this is a wildcard, it will create a random computer name)
• Copy Profile: false (this doesn’t work right now, so set it to false)
• Time Zone: full name of your time zone (ie Central Standard Time, Saint Pierre and Miquelon Standard Time)

Leave RegisteredOrganization and RegisteredOwner alone, we’ll change those in Pass 7¹

In Pass 7, you can change the RegisteredOrganization and RegisteredOwner settings. Also notice that you can expand this component in Pass 7, and you’ll see a sub-component named OOBE.  Here, you can set:

• HideEULAPage: true
• HideWirelessSetupInOOBE: true
• NetworkLocation: Work/Home/Other
• ProtectYourPC: 1,2, or 3

Do NOT set SkipMachineOOBE or SkipUserOOBE. SkipMachineOOBE is for “testing purposes only”, and SkipUserOOBE is deprecated; SkipUserOOBE is referring to the sort of Welcome screen that you’d typically get in previous versions of Windows the first time you log in, but there isn’t anything of the sort in Windows 7, so that setting doesn’t do anything.

On the ProtectYourPC setting, you can set it to be 1,2, or 3. When running setup, you’re asked to choose what sorts of updates you want your computer to automatically download. 1 is equivalent to the recommended setting (all updates), 2 is only important updates, and 3 is none.

For International-Core_neutral, there are five settings:

• InputLocale: Specifies the system input locale and the keyboard layout
• SystemLocale: Specifies the language for non-Unicode programs
• UILanguage: Specifies the system default user interface (UI) language
• UILanguageFallback: Specifies the fallback language if the system default UI language is only partially localized
• UserLocale: Specifies the per-user settings used for formatting dates, times, currency and numbers

The values are a string that specifies language and country. The naming scheme follows ISO 639-1 (language codes) and ISO 3166-1 (country code) standards. For example, if you want everything to be in English and you’re in the United States, you’d use en-us. And if you live at the Vatican and speak Esperanto, it’d be eo-va.

Once all this is added, your answer file should look something like this:

Answer file with basic information

At this point, you could save the file to your Sysprep directory, and run Sysprep by going to commandline and typing:

cd C:\Sysprep
Sysprep /generalize /unattend:<unattendfilename>

Once the machine shuts down, take an image, and it’s ready to deploy.

Adding Other Components

Those two components are really all you need to get the unattended installation process rolling, but Sysprep allows for much greater customization during setup. Looking at the components list, if we expand Shell-Setup_neutral, you’ll notice there are a ton of extra sub-components that weren’t listed in the answer file. To add them, just right click and choose what pass you want them in. For example, you can create new user accounts during setup, run logon commands, set display settings, etc.

There are tons of different components, and what each does isn’t very obvious in WSIM. As of writing this, Microsoft doesn’t have a breakdown of the components on their website for 7, but they do have one for Vista. Unless something has been deprecated, it should behave pretty similarly to how it did in Vista’s unattended setup, so it’s a good resource for figuring out how a component works.

Add Device Drivers

Adding new device drivers is now a lot easier than in XP. First, get all the drivers you’ll need all nice and organized somewhere you can get to easily. At the top of WSIM, click Insert, then Driver Path. Choose Pass 5 AuditSystem, because we can’t run the WinPE or offlineServicing passes in Sysprep. Select the folder that you’ve got all of your drivers in, and a new component will be added to the AuditSystem pass: PnpCustomizationsNonWinPE_neutral. Expand the component down to the Credentials sub-component, and provide a user name and password that has access to your drivers folder.

Note that if you do this, you must run Sysprep /Audit /Unattend:<filename> to run the AuditSystem pass. Once this is done, you then need to run Sysprep /OOBE /Unattend:<filename> to perform the remaining passes.

Other Things That Are Worth Noting

Creating Default User Profile

To change the Default User profile, you’ve basically got to manually replace the folder. However, using the Copy To… button in the User Profiles doesn’t work as it did in XP and Vista.  The Copy Profile setting in the answer file doesn’t work either.

To get around this problem, first, get your profile setup the way you like it then go to C:\Users.  Make a copy of the current Default folder (name it Default.back or something).² Next, delete the Default folder and rename the profile you just setup to Default.

To test it simply login with another account to be certain that you get the settings you expect. If it doesn’t have the same settings as the one you setup, there might be a permissions error with the new Default folder.

One thing you’ll probably notice is that the desktop background changes when you do this. This is because by default, the background image is stored in a C:\Users\<profilename>\Roaming\Microsoft\Windows\Themes\TranscodedWallpaper.jpg, and for whatever reason, this doesn’t seem to get copied over.

If you want to persist the same background across all new profiles, you just need to change one registry setting: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Control Panel\Desktop\Wallpaper. Just put your background image somewhere that it won’t be messed with, and point that setting to the new picture. Then, of course, copy this profile back over the Default profile again.

Customize the Login Background

Windows 7 allows you to change the login background without the need to use third-party software like Vista (or maybe I just never figured it out?).

Go to %windir%\System32\oobe. Create a new folder called info. Then, inside info, create a new folder called backgrounds. Inside this folder, you can put your images, at least one named backgroundDefault.jpg. You can add others, named background<resolution>.jpg For instance, I have background1280×1024.jpg and background1680×1050.jpg. Windows will automatically pick the proper image, depending on the screen resolution. If it doesn’t find an appropriate one, it will default to backgroundDefault.

Now, go back to \oobe. Notice there is another background.bmp here. We need to change this too, but it’s considered a system file, so we’ve got take ownership of it first. Type cmd into the Start menu search box, and press Ctrl + Shift + Enter to open an Administrator command prompt.

Now, type takeown /f c:\Windows\system32\oobe\background.bmp

If it gives you a Success! message, then you’ve got control of the file. However, you still must change the permissions to allow yourself access to the file. Once that’s done, rename the file something else, and then create a new background.bmp with your login background.

Finally, there’s one Registry key to change: HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Authentication\LogonUI\Background\OEMBackground. Set its value to 1, and that’s it.

Good Reading

TechNet: Windows 7 Desktop Deployment – a lot of articles about various aspects of Windows 7 deployment. Not the most user friendly setup, but the information is good.

Footnotes

1. some even claim that you MUST leave these at their default values of “Microsoft” and “AutoBVT”. [↩]
2. If you do not see a Default folder, you may have to Show Hidden files/folders in Windows Explorer options [↩]

Converting an Original File to PDF

If you already have a digital document (Word, PowerPoint, email, webpage, etc) or image (JPEG, TIFF, or even another PDF) and all you need is to quickly turn it into a PDF, there is no need to purchase a proprietary solution such as Adobe Acrobat. There are free solutions for both major platforms (Mac/Windows):

In Windows

We highly recommend for Windows’ users a free open source solution developed by pdfforge.org called PDFCreator. Be careful, don’t be fooled by knock-offs that go by similar titles.²

Your new PDFCreator virtual printer will appear like any other printer you have installed.

1. Download and install PDFCreator, just accept the default settings during the installation process³
2. Once installed, open any document that you’d like to convert to a PDF and click on File > Print…
3. Now, instead of using your default printer, select the PDFCreator virtual printer instead, now select Print
4. You will now see a dialog asking for you to approve metadata about the document, click Save
5. Finally, you’ll be asked to give the document a name, click Save
6. Your new document will open in your preferred PDF viewer

HELPFUL TIP: You can also perform this exact process with another PDF as your source document if you’d like to optimize it to a standard resolution and file size. This is especially useful for documents that you’ve scanned at a high resolution but do not wish to rescan.

In Macintosh

Macintosh users are in luck. Every version since 10.1 of the Mac OS has had the ability to convert documents into a PDF as a built-in feature of its operating system.

Often ignored, the PDF dropdown in the print dialog has many options

1. Open any document that you’d like to convert to a PDF and click on File > Print…
2. In the resulting dialog box, pop down the PDF drop-down menu (typically at the lower left), select Save as PDF …
3. It will now ask you for a name and location to save the PDF (I recommend using the Desktop for easy retrieval) along with some metadata, select Save when finished.

Scanning Documents to PDF using VueScan

There are, of course, many scanners available out there in the world and each one of those has their own way of handling this process, but here at UM Saint Louis we use a program called VueScan in all of our computer labs.

Select the appropriate options for your task, here we are creating a multi-page PDF.

1. Click on the Output tab
2. Change Default Folder to your Desktop for easy access using the @ button
3. Select the check box for PDF file (uncheck the other image files if need be). If making a multi-page PDF, check PDF multi page as well
4. Place page on scanner, align as indicated on the device, click Scan. If necessary, repeat for each page of the document, select File > Last Page when finished
5. Document will open in your PDF viewer for your inspection

High Speed Scanning using the TLC Document Centre

When needing to convert larger documents from hard copy to a PDF, placing one page after another on a flatbed scanner (especially when in the 100s) is simply not a good option.  The TLC maintains a high-speed document scanner that allows you to convert –within minutes– documents 50 to 60 pages long into a PDF delivered directly to your UM Saint Louis inbox.⁴

High-speed scanning can save students and instructors valuable hours of work

1. From the main console menu, select Scan
2. Select Scan to File
3. From the resulting menu, select either PDF_Search or PDF_Image from the templates menu⁵
4. Select the Filing Options > Document Management Fields
5. Select the SSO ID button. Input your UM Saint Louis SSO ID.  Use More Characters to get to numbers and special characters⁶
6. Load the document into the top feeder, press START

Please be certain that your inbox has enough room to accommodate its new addition, otherwise it will be bounced to nowhere and you’ll have to repeat this all over again.

TIPS:

• For two sided or reduced size documents, select Scan Setups
• To name a document or set metadata before the document is scanned, select Filing Setups > Document Management Fields
• For a customized workflow, talk to your systems administrator
• Longer documents take longer to process. Please be patient and do not overload

Footnotes

1. $80 at educational prices, several times more for regular consumers [↩]
2. Knock-off titles such as PDF-creator, Solid PDF Creator, Cute PDF, etc. Some of these knockoffs use PDFCreator’s code but build-in prompts to get you to buy it. PDFCreator should only be downloaded either through the pdfforge.org site or their project page on sourceforge.net [↩]
3. I do recommend that you do not install the PDFCreator Browser Add On which is essentially just a Yahoo! toolbar. This isn’t so much of a problem as it is annoying. [↩]
4. Larger documents can also be handled but will need to be broken down into 50 page sections and appended one to the other.  However, this requires special TLC staff assistance.  Please ask at the front desk. [↩]
5. PDF_Search to make the text within the document searchable or PDF_Image for just the image of the document, smaller file size [↩]
6. Sometimes referred to as a GatewayID, the same username you use to log into MyGateway and your email [↩]

President Obama has announced a campaign to enlist companies and nonprofit groups to spend money, time and volunteer effort to encourage students, especially in middle and high school, to pursue science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The campaign, Educate to Innovate Campaign will primarily focus on informal education opportunities such as after-school activities, mentoring opportunities with scientists and researchers, plus quality science and math promotion television. So far, Elmo and Big Bird have signed up and the MacArthur Foundation is sweetening the pot to encourage video game designers to create educational gaming software. In addition to Sesame Street and many professional science societies signing on, big media outlets and stepping in also, donating money, equipment, and television time.

President Obama launched “Educate to Innovate” Campaign for Excellence in Science, Technology, Engineering & Math Education, a nationwide effort which includes over $260 million in public-private investments to move American students to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade.

President Obama visiting with New Orleans Science Students in October 2009

From the White House Office of the Press Secretary, Official Press Release:

President Obama today launched the  “Educate to Innovate” a nationwide effort to help reach the administration’s goal of moving American students from the middle to the top of the pack in science and math achievement over the next decade.

Speaking to key leaders of the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering & Math) community and local students, President Obama announced a series of high-powered partnerships involving leading companies, foundations, non-profits, and science and engineering societies dedicated to motivating and inspiring young people across America to excel in science and math.

Among the initiatives announced by the President are:

• Five public-private partnerships that harness the power of media, interactive games, hands-on learning, and 100,000 volunteers to reach more than 10 million students over the next four years, inspiring them to be the next generation of makers, discoverers, and innovators. These partnerships represent a combined commitment of over $260 million in financial and in-kind support.
• An annual science fair at the White House, showcasing the student winners of national competitions in areas such as science, technology, and robotics.

President Obama has identified three overarching priorities for STEM education:

1. increasing STEM literacy so all students can think critically in science, math, engineering and technology;
2. improving the quality of math and science teaching so American students are no longer outperformed by those in other nations; and
3. expanding STEM education and career opportunities for underrepresented groups, including women and minorities.

Okay Mr. President and Secretary Duncan, I take this as your official submission to the upcoming Diversity in Science Carnival. The Diversity in Science Carnival (DiS) is a collection of blog post about topics related to increasing diversity in the fields of science and engineering. Each month the theme changes and usually relates to a larger theme. The upcoming carnival is focuses on programs to attract, prepare and retain pre-college students and the public in general to STEM. Broader Impacts II: Programs to promote STEM Diversity among K-12 students and general audiences. I’ll take interpret the White House press release as an official endorsement of the awesomeness of the science outreach and accept their submission in the upcoming DiS Carnival.

Philosophically similar to the White House “Educate to Innovate” campaign, the DiS Carnival and its participants include scientists, educators, and community members who care about STEM education and blog about its importance.
Check out the most recent DiS Carnival – Broader Impacts I: Programs to promote STEM Diversity among the college ranks – to enrich racial, gender and ability diversity at every level, (undergraduate, graduate students, postdoctoral and faculty).

LiveScribe Pen

There are so many options for technology in the classroom in our society.   Since technology is constantly changing, companies are coming out with newer technology all of the time.   From new SMART software to using Web 2.0 in the classroom, all of the technology is being used to move education forward.   If students have many options and avenues to collaborate, find information, and ask questions of students and staff, it will really teach them more than content.  This will also help move them toward furthering their social skills both in person and online.  Towards the end of the school year,  I became aware of a new technology.  I was having a meeting about my concepts class with one of our reading specialists at Clayton High School.  She told me about the Smartpen from Livescribe recommending I test it out for potential use in my classroom next year.   After this conversation, I went to the Livescribe Smartpen website and read all about it.  I  purchased the pen and the special notebooks. The cost for the  2GB pen was $199.00.

The Livescribe Pulse Smartpen can be purchased online through their website at Livescribe.   According to the Livescribe site, the Pulse Smartpen “records and links audio to what you write.”  The pen works by infrared camera and the Pulse dot positioning system, DPS. This is why the special notebooks are required; the pages of these notebooks have “navigation buttons” to start and stop recording and navigate through the audio. One can also print their own dot paper off of the Livescribe website. Al the pen writes, the infrared camera tracks the dots and links the audio to the smartpen charges on the USB docking station and while it charges the user can also upload its contents to the Livescribe desktop. From the desktop, the user can upload the contents to the livescribe website and share it with anyone they choose, in addition to making it a completely public upload.  From here, the students can listen to the presentation, print out a PDF copy of the notes, and take ownership of their own learning. The OLED display on the pen is great because you can really see the menu screen and it is easy to navigate the menus using the Navigation button at the bottom of the dot paper. The pen also comes with some fun too, such as a piano, movies, and a translator tool.  When you write a word and tap it while in translator mode, it will translate that English word into any number of languages. The best news about the pen and its software is that it is both Mac and PC friendly!

I purchased this pen for multiple reasons.  First of all, it is a great way for students all being responsible for taking good notes and putting the responsibility of the learning from the teacher onto the students.  Each day’s notes are taken in class and a student is responsible for taking the notes with the pen and the Pulse notebook.

Afterwards, they can take the notebook copy and place it in their binder. This way, the student taking notes with the Smartpen does not miss out on their own copy of the notes for the day.  After class, I will take the pen back and upload its contents to my computer.  Once uploaded on the Livescribe desktop, I can then upload it to the Livescribe server.  After entering all of the students’ email addresses, they all have access to my site on Livescribe online.  Students can view a movie of the notes with audio or they can download and print a PDF copy of the notes taken that day.  Another great reason for the pen is that since it links audio and what you write, it does not only just work with words, but you can draw diagrams and pictures too!  You can label different parts of a picture and add your own audio that is recorded right along with the lesson.   Since the audio and the writing go together, then one can draw a picture and the lecture describing the drawing will go right along with it. This adds a great way for a student to study for a quiz, test, or just better understand the knowledge imparted to them.

This type of access is great for numerous reasons.  First and foremost, it improves accessibility to class notes and course information.  I already use my website to update PDFs of worksheets and class information, but not notes.  In my class, we take a great deal of notes and many times, success in chemistry is hard for students who have trouble taking notes or who do not take notes for whatever reason.  When a student is gone or when someone needs to check their notes, it is hard to ensure that they got everything covered in class on a particular day without an actual recording. By posting my notes with the audio online, it makes it easier to access for students.

In conducting research about this technology, I did run into some cons. One of the obvious cons is that in order for the pen to link to audio, the pen needs to be used with the dot paper. But if you have your own color printer, you can print the dot paper for free. Another con that I have yet to solve is how to link the PDF to the audio file. The audio files can be converted into aac files, but I have yet to try to download the audio files from classes into iTunes as mp3 files. Even with these cons, the Smartpen is still a good investment into the classes that you teach!

Resources:

• Pulse Smartpen – Never Miss a Word
• MacWorld Expo Best of Show – Pulse Smartpen
• PC World – Livescribe Pulse Smartpen

Please remember to put on your calendar the Faculty Book Reception on December 7 from 3-5 p.m. in the MSC Rotunda, 3rd Floor. COE Faculty have penned 25 books over the past three years! Come join everyone for this most important event.

Enjoy refreshments and visit with our authors. Some books will be available for immediate sale. Others can be ordered through the UMSL Bookstore.

For Info: Lisa Kite at 314-516-5004

Counseling & Family Therapy

Counseling Ethics and Decision Making

By: R. Rocco Cottone and Villi Tarvydas  | Buy at Amazon.com
Counseling & Family Therapy | Merrill/Prentice-Hall | January, 2007

This book guides helping professionals, using the theme of decision-making as an anchor for the discussion of ethics in professional practice. Providing a thorough presentation of ethical principles and standards, the authors conscientiously examine ethical issues as they manifest themselves within several specialty areas (couple and family, school, mental health, career, group, rehab, additions, etc.) and use compelling case studies to illustrate the connection between ethical decision-making models and ethical practice. This revision includes additional coverage of multicultural issues, references the new 2005 American Counseling Association (ACA) Code of Ethics, and includes the highly-praised compendium of ethical codes.

Handbook for Counseling International Students in United States

By: Mark Pope and Hemla Singaravelu | Buy at Amazon.com
Counseling & Family Therapy | American Counseling Association | January, 2007

A unique contribution to the professional literature at the nexus of counseling and international studies.

Professional Counseling 101: Building a Strong Professional Identity

By: Mark Pope | Buy at Amazon.com
Counseling & Family Therapy | American Counseling Association | January, 2006

A collection of essays from Dr. Pope’s term as American Counseling Association President

Golden Anniversaries: The Seven Secrets of Successful Marriage

By: Charles D. Schmitz and Elizabeth A. Schmitz | Buy at Amazon.com
Counseling & Family Therapy | Briarcliff Publishing | February, 2008

As a candid glimpse into the lives of successfully married couples, this book provides a uniquely positive perspective on what makes marriages survive and thrive. What you learn from this wonderfully unique and powerful book is that you can save, improve or enhance your marriage if you listen to the advice of couples with 15,000 years of collective wisdom. Using poignant, real life stories to uncover the Seven Secrets for Successful Marriage, this book captures the essence of more than 25 years of interviews with successfully married couples in the U.S.A. and around the world. And you will love the results!

The central point of their research is that successful love and relationships are an accumulation of the little things. The little things matter! It isn t enough to just think about the little things or just talk about the little things. You have to just DO the little things every day! That’s what makes love and relationships last! If you understand and implement the simple ideas presented in this book, you will be well on your way to having a successful and long-lasting marriage.

You cannot learn or understand success by studying failure. That s a fact! Drs. Charles and Elizabeth Schmitz understood this notion more than 25 years ago when they began their research. By interviewing couples with successful marriages lasting from 30 to 60 years they learned a lot about successful marriage. They discovered the Seven Secrets of Successful Marriage by gathering data from hundreds of interviews with long-time happily married couples and their own extraordinarily successful 41-year marriage.

When you read their exceptional book you will understand that studying successful marriage is a prerequisite to understanding why most marriages succeed and some fail! This book gives you the power to make your marriage a success so you can celebrate your Golden Anniversaries together. Love well!

Simple Things Matter in Love and Marriage

By: Charles D. Schmitz and Elizabeth A. Schmitz | Buy at Amazon.com
Counseling & Family Therapy | Briarcliff Publishing | October, 2009

Capturing the essence of over 26 years of interviews with successfully married couples in the USA and around the world, Simple Things Matter in Love and Marriage demonstrates that first and foremost no love has blossomed or been sustained without doing the simple things. Big things don t matter until you have mastered the art of doing the simple things day in and day out in your relationship.

This powerful book answers the seven most often asked questions about love and marriage. It provides readers with practical advice about making love last for a lifetime from the multiple award-winning authors, Drs. Charles and Elizabeth Schmitz of Golden Anniversaries: The Seven Secrets of Successful Marriage.

Building a Love that Lasts: The Seven Surprising Secrets of Successful Marriage

By: Charles D. Schmitz and Elizabeth A. Schmitz  | Buy at Amazon.com
Counseling & Family Therapy | Jossey-Bass/Wiley | In Press – Release 1/11/2010

Drs. Charles and Elizabeth Schmitz’s award-winning book reveals how to sustain a long-term loving marriage. In addition to exploring the seven key ingredients that define a successful marriage—togetherness, truthfulness, respect and kindness, staying fit, joint finances, tactile communication, and surprise and unpredictability—the authors have included hundreds of insightful and practical interviews with happy couples.

Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Educational Roots of Political Crises in Egypt

By: Judith L. Cochran | Buy at Amazon.com
Educational Leadership and Policy Studies | Lexington Books | June, 2008

This new book treats an issue of vital importance to Egypt’s future and offers a trenchant critique of the educational policies and procedures of the Egyptian government and the oversight role played up to now by the U. S. government… Arthur Goldschmidt, Pennsylvania State University

Contemporary Egypt and its connections to antiquity are not always well understood. This book explores Egypt’s political, economic, social and cultural leadership from the remarkable civilization of the past to the unique socialistic/capitalistic educational conglomerate of today. Judith Cochran details the outcomes of more than thirty years of enormous foreign aid allocated to education particularly from the World Bank and the United States, in never-before-documented descriptions. Foreign and Egyptian developments of education enables readers familiar with some aspects of politics of the Middle East to make predictions about the future of the region.

Fight-Free Schools: Creating a School Culture that Promotes Achievement

By: Margaret R. Dolan | Buy at Amazon.com
Educational Leadership and Policy Studies | Rising Sun Publishers | January, 2007

Highlights importance of a positive and safe school environment for promoting achievement.

Leadership As Service: A New Model for Higher Education in a New Century

By: Kent Farnsworth | Buy at Amazon.com
Educational Leadership and Policy Studies | Praeger/The American Council on Education | January, 2007

This provocative and readable discussion of leadership in higher education argues that leadership is essentially an act of service; that the more responsible the leadership position, the greater the responsibility to serve. Weaving together the Servant Leadership philosophy of Robert Greenleaf with the management principles of Mary Parker Follett, Farnsworth presents a model for 21st-century educational leadership that calls upon college administrators to see themselves as “servants first.” He argues that the voices and interests of many of education’s key stakeholders–students, employers, and society as a whole–have been marginalized by a consolidation of power in the faculty, requiring a bold new approach to leadership that refocuses service to these important, but underrepresented constituents.

Farnsworth argues that colleges and universities have yielded too much power to special interests within the academy. The result has been a shift in resources to elaborate facilities and overblown graduate and research agendas, eroding the rigor and integrity of the undergraduate curriculum. “Leadership as Service” outlines a new, service-driven agenda of higher education and describes the characteristics of those who will successfully lead in the new century.

Fieldbook for Community College Online Instructors

By: Kent Farnsworth | Buy at Amazon.com
Educational Leadership and Policy Studies | American Association of Community Colleges | January, 2006

In this practical, user-friendly, and comprehensive guide, two experienced online instructors explain the history and methodology of distance learning and cover everything an online instructor needs to know—from designing a course, to using technology, to assessing students. Throughout the book, the authors demonstrate how to use Web-based instruction to motivate students and produce exciting learning outcomes and offer teaching tips from seasoned online instructors, Internet resources, and numerous sample teaching materials. The Fieldbook is designed as a primer for instructors already teaching online, as well as those interested in pursuing online teaching.

Teaching and Learning/Educational Leadership and Policy Studies

Teaching Children Who Struggle with Mathematics: A Systematic Approach to Analysis and Correction

By: Helene Sherman, Llyod Richardson and George Yard | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning/Educational Leadership and Policy Studies | Pearson/Prentice Hall | January, 2009

Supplement for Mathematics Methods courses. Rich with case studies and assorted examples, this brief, targeted text is dedicated to helping future teachers address the cognitive needs of children in Grades 1-6 who do not understand mathematical concepts and/or are not as skillful as they should be with those concepts. The authors present a systematic, three-step approach to assess students’ math strengths and weaknesses and plan instruction accordingly. This involves: 1) using the Data Analysis Sheet (DAS) to assess and record learners’ skills and error patterns; 2) complete a Mathematics Improvement Plan (MIP) with specific instructional approaches to improve skills students need; and, 3) set up the activities and intervention strategies to improve student performance. This approach allows teachers to meet individual needs.

Teaching Learners Who Struggle with Mathematics: Systematic Intervention and Remediation

By: Helene Sherman, Llyod Richardson and George Yard | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning/Educational Leadership and Policy Studies | Pearson/Prentice Hall | January, 2009

Rich with case studies and assorted examples, this brief, targeted book is dedicated to the cognitive needs of children in Grades 1-6 who do not understand mathematical concepts and/or are not as skillful as they should be with those concepts. Covering place value, addition and subtraction of whole numbers, multiplication, division, rational numbers, decimal fractions, and problem solving, the book presents a systematic, three-step approach to assess students’ math strengths and weaknesses and plan instruction accordingly. For elementary school educators, special education teachers and counselors.

Teaching and Learning

Lyndon B. Johnson and Modern America

By: Kevin Fernlund | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | University of Oklahoma Press | 2009

Born in a farmhouse in the Texas Hill Country, Lyndon Baines Johnson brought a western sensibility to the White House. Building on recent studies that have delved into Johnson’s Texas roots, Kevin J. Fernlund has written a brief, lively biography of the thirty-sixth president that better shows how his home state molded his early years–and how the one-time Houston schoolteacher eventually became a Texas tornado twisting across the state’s and soon the nation’s political landscape.

Lyndon B. Johnson and Modern America offers a concise look at LBJ that shows how his career coincided with the ascendancy of American liberalism within a Cold War context. In particular, Fernlund extends recent observations regarding Johnson’s important role in regional transformation at a time when the South and West became full partners in the American economy. In examining LBJ’s promotion of the space program and his disastrous decision to escalate the war in Vietnam, Fernlund shows how these and other Johnson administration policies affected the American West. He describes how Johnson’s liberal agenda for the West became subverted by illiberal wars with enemies foreign and domestic, exposing the limits of liberalism and fostering the region’s nascent conservatism. He also compares Johnson’s commitment to social justice with that of his arch nemesis Ho Chi Minh, providing new insight for readers and an intriguing springboard for classroom discussion.

Although subsequent presidents also hailed from the West, Fernlund argues that Johnson was our last truly western chief executive. This new approach to LBJ offers a novel reading of an important Texan, his huge circles of influence, and his lasting impact on the American scene.

Archery: Steps to Success (3rd edition)

By: Kathleen Haywood and Catherine Lewis | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | Human Kinetics | 2006

Master all of the archery skills essential to shooting straight and true. Archery: Steps to Success provides in-depth, progressive instruction with accompanying illustrations for each phase of the shot—sighting and aiming, shooting form, and anchoring—for all forms of archery.

Build a solid skill base; learn the details of choosing, fitting, and tuning equipment; and then refine your technique and sharpen your mental skills. By practicing the 91 drills and using the scoring systems to gauge your progress, you’ll develop consistent technique and shot patterns in no time.

Whatever the target, this manual will help you hit the mark. As part of the popular Steps to Success Sports Series (more than 1 million copies sold!), Archery: Steps to Success hits the bull’s-eye when it comes to expert instruction on the sport.

Life Span Motor Development (5th edition)

By: Kathleen Haywood and Nancy Getchell | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | Human Kinetics | 2009

Life Span Motor Development, Fifth Edition, is the only introductory textbook to use the model of constraints (or dynamical systems) approach in discussing reasons for changes in movement throughout the life span. This fully updated edition encourages students to observe and examine how the interactions of the individual, environment, and task affect changes in a person’s movements. The principles of motor development are presented in a clear and accessible manner so that even readers with minimal movement science background will comprehend the material. Life Span Motor Development, Fifth Edition, will give readers the foundation for continued study and real-world practice.

Comprehensive Urban Education

By: Patricia B. Kopetz, Anthony Lease and Bonnie Warren-Kring | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | Pearson/Allyn & Bacon, Boston, MA | 2006

This text presents a compassionate view of teaching in an urban setting with practical suggestions, recommendations, and examples for powerful and effective teaching aimed at improving student academic performance. Each chapter explores major considerations related to educating students of diverse cultures typical of urban classroom settings. Preservice teachers are able to better understand the complex social, academic, emotional, and economic factors that define today’s urban classrooms. The needs of urban schools–their students, teachers, community supporters, and stakeholders–are identified and various strategies are explored.

Designing Socially Just Learning Communities: Critical Literacy Education Across the Lifespan

By: Rebecca Rogers and Mary Ann Kramer |  Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | Routledge | 2009

Designing Socially Just Learning Communities models an innovative form of professional development for educators and researchers who are seeking ways to transform educational practices. The teachers- practices and actions in their classrooms and as members of the teacher research group will speak loudly to policy-makers, researchers, and activists who wish to work alongside them.

Adult Education Teachers: Developing Critical Literacy Practice

By: Rebecca Rogers and Mary Ann Kramer | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | Lawrence Erlbaum Associates | 2008

This book examines the literacy practices of exemplary adult education teachers working within critical literacy frameworks. It provides an in-depth look at the complexity of adult literacy education through the lenses of these teachers. An understanding of this complexity helps teachers design literacy practices in classrooms on a daily basis. This is an important book for there is considerable pedagogical and political attention focused on adult literacy education at this time. As the field of adult education continues to grapple with issues of teacher professionalization/certification, it adds a much needed teacher perspective.

A Beginning Teaching Portfolio Handbook: Documenting and Reflecting on Your Professional Growth and Abilities

By: Kim Hyunsook Song, Bill R. Foster and Michael L. Walker | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | Merrill-Prentice Hall | 2006

A Beginning Teaching Portfolio Handbook is a practical, how-to guide to building a convincing teaching portfolio from collection to submission. . This book is developed to help teachers and pre-service teachers develop portfolios that align with and demonstrate INTASC principles. Each INTASC principle receives its own chapter, and particular attention is given to helping teachers articulate how specific artifacts demonstrate mastery of each INTASC principle. K-12 In-service and Pre-Service Teachers.

A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform

By: Laura M. Westhoff | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | The Ohio State University Press | 2007

The eyes of the country frequently turned to Chicago during the 1890s as the Windy City struggled with the promises and challenges of urban democracy. Americans of all classes feared the social dislocations and economic divisions of urbanization and industrialization, and the effects of political corruption and massive immigration on democratic politics. Yet many reformers were hopeful that new forms of social knowledge and urban reform could reinvigorate democracy. They saw the moment as one of great possibility.

A Fatal Drifting Apart: Democratic Social Knowledge and Chicago Reform explores the efforts of diverse groups within Chicago during the Progressive Era. This backdrop of industrialization, emerging classes, and ethnic and racial pluralism frequently riven with class conflict set the stage on which Chicago reformers took up the seemingly impossible challenge of enacting democracy. Laura M. Westhoff examines historic events and well-known individuals of the period and brings them together in an unusual framework that offers a new perspective on the reorientation of knowledge, civic identity, and democratic culture at the dawn of the twentieth century, which she terms democratic social knowledge. The book raises important questions that continue to resonate: In a democracy, who has the power to define social problems and offer solutions, and whose experience and knowledge are seen as legitimate?

True Competition: Guide to Pursuing Excellence in Sport & Society

By: David Shields and Brenda Bredemeier | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | Human Kinetics | February, 2009

True Competition: A Guide to Pursuing Excellence in Sport and Society offers a blueprint for maximizing the potential of competition to foster excellence and enjoyment. It provides a novel perspective on competition that challenges traditional beliefs through a research-backed defense that–up until now–has been lacking. With this text, readers will learn the differences between positive and negative competition, and they will discover how to implement change in their organizations, teams, and individual practices.

Becoming a Middle Level Teacher: The Student Focused Teaching of Early Adolescents

By: Cathy Vatterott | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | McGraw-Hill | August 15, 2006

Becoming A Middle Level Teacher outlines an approach to student focused instruction that can provide greater academic success for the most students, and at the same time, assist early adolescents in navigating the difficult transition of puberty. The text revolves around four recurring themes:

• A critical link exists between developmental needs and learning.
• Relationships are key to motivation, which is key to learning.
• Middle school students are entitled to be involved in decisions that affect their learning.
• Implementing student focused instruction is both challenging and rewarding for teachers.

With over 50 successful learning activities in language arts, social studies, science, math, art, music, and physical education from 20 practicing middle school teachers, the text is rich with examples of actual programs and practices from several outstanding middle schools.

Rethinking Homework: Best Practices That Support Diverse Needs

By: Cathy Vatterott | Buy at Amazon.com
Teaching and Learning | Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) | July 20, 2009

At last, a book that forever solves the debate over whether homework is an essential component of rigorous schooling or a harmful practice. Veteran teacher, trainer, professor, consultant, and author Cathy Vatterott distills her years of experience with all kinds of schools into a balanced approach that ensures homework leads to more opportunities for learning and teaching without turning off parents and students.

Educational Psychology, Research and Evaluation

The Course Syllabus: A Learning-Centered Approach

By: Margaret W. Cohen, Judith Grunert O’Brien, Barbara J. Millis and Robert M. Diamond | Buy at Amazon.com
Educational Psychology, Research and Evaluation | Jossey-Bass | March 1, 2008

When it was first published in 1997, The Course Syllabus became the gold standard reference for both new and experienced college faculty. Like the first edition, this book is based on a learner-centered approach. Because faculty members are now deeply committed to engaging students in learning, the syllabus has evolved into a useful, if lengthy, document. Today’s syllabus provides details about course objectives, requirements and expectations, and also includes information about teaching philosophies, specific activities and the rationale for their use, and tools essential to student success.

Lawrence Kohlberg: Die Psychologie der Lebensspanne [Psychology of Life-span Development]

Edited by: Wolfgang Althof, D. Garz as co-Editor
Educational Psychology, Research and Evaluation | Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp | 2007

A collection of Dr. Lawrence Kohlberg’s articles regarding Moral Development that were never published in English.

We try to keep the images for our machines up to date, but sometimes it’s just best to start from a fresh installation. But, until recently, “fresh installation” meant using our site license for XP SP1, and spending 2 hours running updates. And unless I could find an external floppy drive, I could forget about installing Windows on a SATA machine. But with nLite, none of this is a problem. nLite is a freeware program that allows you to create a customized installation disk for Windows. You can add updates and service packs, custom drivers and patches, and even remove Windows components that you don’t want. Also, you can create an unattended setup, which means Windows will automatically fill out the necessary information (license string, admin user/pass, etc) while installing.

Overview of nLite

Before you can use nLite, you need to make a copy of a Windows XP disk onto your computer. Just stick in the drive, right click it and hit Explore, and copy everything into a folder somewhere. Then go and grab nLite from http://nliteos.com/download.html. Once you’ve installed/unpacked it, run nLite. The first screen you come across will ask for your language preference. On the next screen, you need to point the program towards the folder you just made:

Selecting the folder with your XP installation files.

It’ll bring up information about the install disk you used, double check that it’s all correct (it should be).

Next comes the task selection screen. This is where you decide what you want to do to this installation. There are eight tasks broken down into four sections: Integrate, Remove, Setup, and Create. Some of them may be more useful than others, depending on what you need to do. Mouse over any of the selections to see a brief description. Obviously, the green dot means it’s selected, and the red dot means it’s not.

Click the big buttons to select/unselect whole sections.

nLite does its best to make this whole process as painless as possible. You simply work step by step through each task; nLite will ask you questions when it needs to, and provides you with information when it can. At the end of the process, it creates you new installation disk (overwriting the original Windows files you pulled from the CD). From within nLite, you can create a bootable disk, either in the form of an iso or burned directly to the disk.

But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Let’s look at the different tasks in more depth.

Integration Tasks

To put it simply, the Integration tasks allow you to integrate files into your installation disk. There are three different tasks: service packs, hotfixes and add-ons, and drivers. Service Packs nLite allows you to slipstream Service Packs into your installation disc. If you’re as unlucky as I am, you’re probably still using an SP1 base install, so slipstreaming SP2 and SP3 right into your installation can save a lot of time and hassle. If you don’t already have them, nLite provides links to download the Service packs from Microsoft. So download the SP you need, and choose it using the Select button. You then should see the all-too-familiar Windows Service Pack installation window. When it’s finished, you should get an “Integrated install has completed successfully” popup.

Slipstreaming Service Packs

Hotfixes and Add-ons This task lets you add other updates not included in the service packs, like IE7 and its updates. nLite recommends only using official Microsoft hotfixes (they should be named KB*.exe).  The files are integrated from the top of the list down, so make sure they’re in the proper order; you can click on the Build Date column to sort them from oldest to newest.

Adding Windows Hotfixes

Unfortunately, nLite doesn’t provide a link for downloading updates. I’ve found the Microsoft Update Catalog (IE only), but I’m sure there’s other unofficial sites that are even easier to use. The advanced button in the lower left corner brings up the Hotfix Integration Info window. It has four options you can enable/disable: Direct Hotfix Integration, Display Reports, Remove Catalog files, and ASMS Compression. By default, the only one enabled is Direct Hotfix Integration. Drivers You can integrate third party drivers right into your installation, cutting down on work you have to do afterwords. Much like an install disk you’d get from Dell or HP, once you install Windows, the machine will be more or less ready to use. nLite lets you either add drivers one by one, or point it to a folder containing multiple drivers. I personally just grab all of the drivers I need and extract them into one folder, and point nLite towards that. A prompt to select the drivers you want then pops up. Make sure to only include the drivers you need for your installation; for instance, some Dell drivers come with Win98/2k or XP 64-bit drivers, and you probably don’t need those.

Choosing what drivers to include in your installation.

One of the big reasons why I started this project was because I wanted to add SATA drivers into my installation. If you get your drivers from Dell, their SATA drivers come as floppy disk images. That’s great and all, but I don’t have a floppy drive (or I wouldn’t be in this problem to begin with). Fortunately, I was able to find a virtual floppy drive that works a lot like a virtual CD drive would; you can mount the disk images and grab the drivers that way.

Remove Tasks

Well, okay, there’s just one task in the Remove section, Components. From this, you can remove different applications and drivers, so they’re never installed. Before you start deleting all willy-nilly, nLite prompts you with a window labeled Compatability. From here you can select the functionality you know you need, and the program will prevent you from accidentally removing needed components.

Removing unneeded Windows Components

The components are broken into ten catagories: Applications, Drivers, Hardware Support, Keyboards, Languages, Multimedia, Network, Operating System Options, Services, and Directories. Each of these expand out to specific components. Some of them will be in red, and it’s recommended that you not remove them, as it may cause system instability.

Setup Tasks

These tasks primarily focus on setting up and tweaking Windows before installation, rather than making the changes manually afterwords. It’s all about automating as much as you can, to save yourself the work.

Unattended This task makes the installation Unattended, meaning once you start the installation, it doesn’t ask you anything until it finishes. It covers all of the basic information you’d expect it to (user info, product key, etc), but it also includes a lot of other options you can preset if you want. It’s broken into ten tabs, and all of the options are pretty self-explanatory. nLite provides information on most of the choices if you need help.

Setting various settings

Options This section has various options which can be enabled or disabled. The General tab has a small collections of different options. You can, for instance, change the profiles path from %SystemDrive%Documents and Settings, or turn off the “Press Any Key” boot message. None of these options seem terribly important, but they’re there. The patches tab has four different patches which you can choose to include in your installation if you wish.

Various system options, if you're feeling a little adventurous

Tweaks The Tweaks task has two tabs, General and Services. The General tab has a lot of different options, mostly user-interface related. If you check the Advanced box, more options will appear in red. It sort of makes me think of a more powerful TweakUI. Most of the options you can find in Windows, they’ve just been put into one convenient, easier to use task.

Tweaking different aspects of Windows.

The Services tab looks and behaves a lot like Services.msc; from it you can set various services to be on, either automatically or manually, or disable it altogether. Processing This task doesn’t appear on the beginning page, but it happens here, before you get to the Create stage. All of the changes you’ve made in the previous tasks are committed to your Windows image here. If there are any problems, you’ll get pop-ups about them.  They give you a nice progress bar (not in the picture) to let you know how it’s going. At the end, you’re given some information about the installation size.

Processing your changes

Create

The Bootable ISO task lets you make a usable disk out of your installation. There are four modes to choose from. Direct Burn burns the files directly to disk. Burn Image burns an image you’ve already made to disk. Create Image makes a bootable ISO from your installation. And finally, Erase RW will erase the data on a CD/DVD-RW. Just like any other burning program, you can choose which drive to use, the burn speed, the Label on the disk. It also has Verify and Test Write options.

Burn to disk or create an image.

nlite recommends you test your new installation on a virtual machine before installing it on a real one, especially if you’ve made some potentially unstable changes. Once you’ve burnt the disk, stick it in a machine and boot it up. The installation process runs almost exactly the same, the only difference you should notice is that it won’t bother you with questions.

Further Reading

I recommend you check out nLite’s faq if you have any minor questions. Their forums are also a good resource, if you’re having trouble.

(Title image courtesy of twasa, from Stock.xchng.)

NetBooting can be an extremely useful tool for imaging your Macs. Unfortunately, it’s only officially supported in the server editions of OS X. And, considering we only manage six or seven laptops right now, we can’t justify the $500 price tag. Fortunately for us, all of the functionality is still in the regular version of OS X, we just have to make it work.

If you’re reading this article, you probably already have an idea of what NetBoot is. Simply, NetBoot allows your Mac to boot over the network, from an external image stored elsewhere. While this technology certainly has other uses, it’s quite useful for imaging machines because it frees up the internal harddrive to be written to/from, without having to either boot the machine into Target mode or otherwise physically move the machine.

Normally, all of the configuration needed to get NetBoot going smoothly is taken care of by the Server. I’m sure there’s more to it, but I just like to imagine a nice button that says “Enable NetBoot” right there in System Preferences. If you’re using the client version of OS X, it’s a little trickier; we’ve got files and folders to make, services to start and configure.

I’ve included two shell scripts that will setup your machine more or less effortlessly, but I’m going to take the rest of this article to outline what’s being done (thanks to Adam Knight at Mac Geekery, as well as Armagon, who wrote the 10.5 script).

As with anything you download from the internet, be careful with these scripts. I’ve tested them both and they work to my knowledge, but they are provided free and as-is. If you experience any trouble with them (or even if you don’t), let me know:

netboot 10.5 script

netboot 10.4 script

To run these scripts, first make sure they’re executable:

From Terminal, CD to the directory you’ve saved the script to, and type chmod 777 netboot105.sh (or netboot104.sh)

Next, you need to run the script as root:

sudo ./netboot105.sh

And then the script should execute.

Testing your NetBoot Setup

Once you’ve run the script, you need to create a NetBoot image to test it with. The easiest way (especially if you plan on using it for imaging) would be to download DeployStudio, and follow the instructions on making a netboot image. You can also create one from a bootable disk (like your OS X install disk). This image, if it’s not already there, belongs in /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0.

Now go to a computer on the same subnet as your NetBoot machine (we’ll call this one the Client). Open up System Preferences, and choose Startup Disk. In place of the Network Startup icon should be the name of your NetBoot image. Back on your NetBoot machine, open up the Console, and select system.log,  you should have something like this it:

bootpd[379]: re-reading /etc/bootptab
bootpd[379]: Loaded 0 entries from bootptab (0 bad)
bootpd[379]: server name Mothra.local
bootpd[379]: interface en0: ip 192.168.1.100 mask 255.255.255.0
bootpd[379]: bsdpd: re-reading configuration
bootpd[379]: bsdpd: shadow file size will be set to 48 megabytes
bootpd[379]: bsdpd: age time 00:15:00
bootpd[379]: BSDP INFORM [en0] 1,0:16:cb:9c:a4:a NetBoot003 arch=i386 sysid=MacBookPro1,1
bootpd[379]: NetBoot: [1,0:16:cb:9c:a4:a] BSDP ACK[LIST] sent 192.168.1.108 pktsize 300
bootpd[379]: DHCP INFORM [en0]: 1,0:16:cb:9c:a4:a
bootpd[379]: ACK sent  192.168.1.108 pktsize 300
bootpd[379]: BSDP INFORM [en0] 1,0:16:cb:9c:a4:a NetBoot003 arch=i386 sysid=MacBookPro1,1
bootpd[379]: NetBoot: [1,0:16:cb:9c:a4:a] BSDP ACK[LIST] sent 192.168.1.108 pktsize 300
bootpd[379]: DHCP INFORM [en0]: 1,0:16:cb:9c:a4:a
bootpd[379]: ACK sent  192.168.1.108 pktsize 300

The logs in this article are taken from a Leopard machine, but they should be extremely similar on Tiger. If you’re not getting this, first rule out dumb things like cable/network problems before you begin digging through help pages (it’s happened to me). Like I said earlier, if you run into problems because of these scripts, let me know, and I’ll try to help.

So assuming you’ve come this far with no problems, the next test is to try to actually boot the machine. On the client machine, select your NetBoot image, and press Restart (alternatively, just restart the computer and hold N while it boots). You should then see a big gray globe instead of the normal Apple logo. Back at your NetBoot machine, your console should read a repeat of above followed by:

tftpd[403]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/booter
tftpd[405]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/booter
tftpd[407]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/mach.macosx
tftpd[409]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/mach.macosx
tftpd[411]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/mach.macosx.mkext
tftpd[413]: adding RRQ to cache: 192.168.1.108,/private/tftpboot/NetBoot/NetBootSP0/
NetRestore Test.nbi/i386/mach.macosx.mkext

If you get something like this interspersed through your log:

Jan 14 13:04:58 Mothra com.apple.launchd[1] (com.apple.tftpd[413]): Stray process with
PGID equal to this dead job: PID 414 PPID 1 tftpd+

it’s probably okay. From what I’ve seen, it’s mostly harmless. If you can still netboot fine, then it’s probably not worth trying to fix. At this point, your client machine should be booted into your netboot image.

Boring details about NetBoot

NetBoot uses a combination of different protocols (NFS, TFTP, DHCP, and BSDP) to get the job done. I don’t want to go into gross detail because, frankly, it’s kind of boring and unnecessary. If you want a really good look at what’s going on, Mike Bombich has written a good article.

The beginning of the NetBoot processs is a series of DHCP and BSDP calls. The client finds the NetBoot server, and they exchange information. Once the server knows what architecture the client is (i386 or ppc) and what image it wants, it begins transfering the necessary files over TFTP. It sends the booter, followed by mach.macosx, followed by mach.macosx.mkext. These files take care of booting the basic OS X kernel. You can verify these are being transfered by the system log (see the above tftp log). From here, the machine mounts your netboot image via NFS, and finishes the boot process.

BSDP (Boot Service Discovery Protocol) relies on the .clients and .sharepoint files (located in /Library/NetBoot) to know where to find NetBootSP0 and NetBootClients0. Since these folders aren’t hard-coded, you could really put your NetBoot images anywhere; you just have to make .sharepoint point to the right folder. A few other options must be enabled so bootpd knows it’s supposed to be netbooting. In Tiger, this is all taken care of under NetInfo Manager, but in Leopard, this is handled by the file /etc/bootpd.plist.

TFTP (Trivial FTP) only seems to need one file, /private/tftpboot/NetBoot, to do what it needs. This file is a symlink, like .clients or .sharepoint, and it points to /Library/NetBoot.

NFS (Network File System) needs to know what folders it’s sharing, and what permissions to give these folders. In our case, it needs to export /Library/NetBoot/NetBootSP0 with read-only capabilities. In Tiger, this is tied (like BSDP) to NetInfo Manager. However, in Leopard, it uses an exports file (/etc/exports), which seems to be more like how the rest of the Unix world works.

And that’s the basics of NetBooting.

Resources

Mike Bombich: Troubleshooting the Netboot Process

Mac Geekery: Make any Mac a NetBoot Server

(title image courtesy of Beho, of Stock.xchng)

We’d like to thank all for dropping by the TLC for Inauguration, truly making it a memorable event. Our thanks again to the Center of Excellence n Urban Education, the Dean of the College of Education, and the Technology and Learning Center for sponsoring the event.

The TLC would like to recommend keeping up to date on the Obama presidency at WhiteHouse.gov (of course) and Hulu’s the Obama Presidency.

Gallery of the Event

Channel 4 News dropped by during the viewing and we made the news! Not hard when we look this good : )

Original Post Follows:

If you can’t make the trip to Washington, D.C., for Tuesday’s presidential inauguration, Hulu has just the ticket. Hulu will be offering a live stream of the inaugural events for the Obama Presidency, courtesy of Fox. Also remember all are welcome to a viewing of the inauguration in the Learning Studio of the Technology and Learning Center between 9am and 2pm courtesy of the Center of Excellence n Urban Education, the Dean of the College of Education, and the Technology and Leaarning Center. Snacks provided.

• Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies
• Presidential Inauguration Committee (PIC): Inauguration Broadcast using Microsoft’s Silverlight
• CBS: CBS News Inauguration Simulcast
• CNN: The 44th President Transition to Power page
• MSNBC: The Inauguration

Please enjoy the attached photos taken by our colleague Mike Butler (TLC) and video by videographer Phil Betts (YEA) of President Gary Forsee’s visit to the College of Education today. We had a terrific turnout (50+) in the Technology and Learning Center.

The President received an overview of the COE, engaged in some Q and A with the COE faculty and staff, and got a tour of the TLC. I must say, I was proud of the wonderful turnout, proud of the respect shown to the President, and proud that Chancellor Tom George chose the COE for one of President Forsee’s visits to campus today.

Photos of Forsee Visit

Courtesy of Mike Bulter

Video of the Event

Courtesy of Phil Betts – Unfortunately, we were unable to mic up the presentation so you may need to turn up your volume to hear the audio properly.

See also

• Slides that accompanied Dean Schmitz’ Presentation, click here
• President Forsee delivers State of the University address, UM System’s Spectrum

Charles Murray, author and fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and educational psychologist David Berliner debated their contrary views of school reform today in an event sponsored by the College of Education and the F.A. Hayek Professorship of Economic History at UMSL. Entitled “The Great Debate:the failure of school reform-whose fault is it, anyway?” featured the opposing views of these two scholars followed by a brief Q & A by the audience. Kiara Breland, staff writer with UM Saint Louis’ The Current Online framed the debate in her article:

[Berliner] suggests public school problems are caused by societal and economic disadvantages. “A child’s ability to learn is based on their surroundings and not their intellectual ability. … Lack of nutrition, domestic abuse, air pollution, all can contribute to a child’s ability to learn and succeed, or not,” Berliner said at the debate. Murray countered that Berliner, like many others, lives in a “fantasy land” and that school administrators and teachers are misleading students when they tell them that they can be anything they want if they try hard enough. He said, “Level of ability is not something we can pretend is equal.”

Photos of the Event:

Video of the Debate

The “school to prison pipeline” that overwhelmingly affects students of color concerns an increasing number of citizens. (Kim, 2009) Academicians, as well as activist organizations, raise critical objection to this growing phenomenon, claiming that, at the very least, structural racism persists as strong as ever. Alternatively, routine public rhetoric assigns blame to the child’s home environment and community for the rising rates of incarcerated youth, particularly those of color. Critical scholars suggest that through such rhetoric, inflected by the ravages of systemic racism, many citizens outside of the racialized school to prison pipeline, find it is easy to blame the victim or the victim’s parents or community for creating hardened criminals that society “must” incarcerate as the only solution.

Scene from Robben Island Prison: Apartheid era prison of Nelson Mandela

To these critical scholars, school non-violence policies such as zero-tolerance and the Safe Schools Act that arose during late 20th century rise of neo-liberal national politics are coated in racism and a strong desire to maintain the wealth of the status quo. The ACLU, participating with critical scholars in the academy, has taken the stance to these policies are violating the civil rights of students within their own school environment.¹

I now count myself among these concerned scholars and activists. From my years of teaching students with emotional disturbance, conduct disorder and juvenile delinquents, they are correct. Especially for this population, these students are labeled as “problems” or “at-risk” youth. These labels come with a set of prejudicial attitudes that interfere with the education of these students and have shifted into an attitude of the housing of these students until they are placed inside the correctional system. Few educators teaching this population hold any conception that the students may achieve their potential. Instead, it is a common philosophy that we are a stopping block on the path to jail.

To be sure, this sort of professional identity reflects active collusion with the school to prison pipeline. Examples of this common attitude include the intrusion of increased security in our public schools. Metal detectors, the searching of students, police presence, secure observation rooms (padded rooms) and isolating students into suspension rooms are a few of the interventions used for student discipline problems. Off-duty police officers (school resource officer- SRO) in the schools are placed with the intention of assisting the school administrators and faculty in intervening with student discipline issues. However, these police officers in the schools often take over discipline and, too often abuse their power and, violate the rights of students. Police officers will handcuff, physically restrain students, or use tasers on students for discipline issues of non-compliance, verbal aggression or threats, and physical aggression in the forms of fighting or throwing objects. None of these issues are atypical of the students in this population. These students also have professionally designed behavior intervention plans in place that are to be utilized in times of disruption. For the most part, these intervention plans are utilized. However, if a teacher calls for the crisis team, the team responds and behavior management is taken out of the classroom and away from teacher control. The crisis team consists of chosen faculty for each school. In my current placement, the team consists of administrators, social workers, designated staff (mostly male), a crisis interventionist who remains on-call within the building and an off-duty police officer. The crisis team routinely handles such behavior in accordance with the set policy of the school district. However, when the police officers perceive a threat or interprets that a law is being broken or may be broken, they intervene. Once the police officer intervenes, the situation becomes a state solution and is removed from the hands of the local school district.

There are many concerns with this policy. First, the police officers are at liberty to treat the students as they would any suspected offender on the street. This means they may handcuff, physical restrain, tase, use nightsticks, mace or any other object in their possession. Secondly, students are not “technically” arrested during these interventions. This allows for no accountability on part of the police department because there is no paperwork formulated at these interventions on part of the police. This also means that the rights of the student are not protected. Parents are not informed at the time that the police officer was used, they have no attorney present at any verbal communication and they are not read their Miranda rights. If a teacher has been assaulted and decides to press charges or the assigned officer believes an arrest should be taken place then, the on-duty police of that city or town are called and an official arrest is made. Finally, only as a witness to these violations against students was I ever made aware of these situations. It is my concern that society believes that these police officers are “getting tough” on crime. Unfortunately, they are “getting tough” on civil rights of students that have not committed a crime, but have been perceived as a threat to commit crime.

Distressingly, our state lawmakers have recently passed measures that fortify the school to prison pipeline. In this month, several important policy decisions have been made in Missouri. On the 13th of February, the Missouri Legislature passed House Bill 96 that

(1) Expands employee immunity from correctly following discipline policies to following all policies;
(2) Adds the use of force to protect persons or property to the provisions regarding spanking and requires that spanking be administered by certificated personnel, while use of force is permissible by any school personnel as long as it is within the school’s policy guidelines. These incidents are not to be regarded as child abuse as long as no allegation of sexual misconduct arises and another employee witnesses the spanking;
[…]
(9) Allows the Blue Springs school board to commission certified law officers under specified conditions;
[…]
(11) Expands the reporting of acts of violence to all teachers at the student’s school building and other employees who need to know;
[…]
(14) Requires a notice of a student’s reportable offenses to be provided to any school district to which a student transfers or enrolls. The required content of the notice depends on whether the student has been certified for trial as an adult or if the student is under the jurisdiction of the juvenile court.²

I have pulled only certain sections of this bill’s summary for analysis. In evaluating the first quoted part of the bill, the state has given more freedom to school districts and its’ employees for liability from following discipline policies. This includes Safe School Acts and zero-tolerance, in which, far too numerous civil rights abuse already occurs towards students. In section 2, the state allows spanking as a proper punishment as well as the “use of force” in order to protect persons or property in the schools. At this time, there appears to be no limit on the term “use of force.” Furthermore, these ‘‘incidents” are not to be categorized as child abuse or sexual misconduct. Item 9 gives a single school district (but not others in the state) the authority to use certified officers in the school. Item 11 violates the confidentiality rights of students for past or current crimes under which they are investigated. This section allows all school personnel access to the criminal background of the students they serve. These juveniles should have protected records until age 17 and then their file maybe expunged by law. Item 14 continues this violation to include any school district the student moves to may have access to this student’s criminal background.

Concurrently, the media has covered the complaints of a mother in a local school district for the schools use of secure observation rooms.³ This mother did not see the use of a padded room with locked doors a proper intervention for disruptive behavior. She claimed the use of these rooms were “cruel and unusual punishment” against students. In her opinion, this is clearly a violation of her child and every other students’ civil rights. Missouri upheld their use and did not agree with this concerned parent.

My largest area of concern in regards to the implementation of these policies is the lack of accountability on part of the police officers. Without a paper trail or any record of their interventions in student discipline there is no way to monitor techniques that are being used. Without monitoring devices how do we protect students’ civil rights within the school building? Are we continuing to disenfranchise students’ in their educational settings? Clear data and research has shown that school to prison pipeline targets students of a racialized group i.e., African American and Latino.⁴ African American males are now one-third of our prison population in adult and juvenile facilities. An important concern to note is the collateral consequences caused within these communities that continue to inform racialized policies and perpetuate systemic racism.

Footnotes

1. Kim, Catherine (2009) SchooltoPrison.org [↩]
2. Missouri House Bill 96 (2009). 95th General Assembly. [↩]
3. KSDK website (2009). Missouri school children placed in padded room [↩]
4. Hyman, Irwin A. Ed.D and Pamela A. Snook, RN, MSN.(1999) Dangerous Schools: What We can Do About Physical and Emotional Abuse of Our Children. Jossey-Bass, Inc [↩]

The E. Desmond Lee Technology and Learning Center (TLC) has been supporting Livetext Training Sessions for students, faculty and staff since Fall 2004 up to the present time. LiveText is being used to create, develop and assess students’ learning in the form of professional portfolios. Livetext as a tool allows to measure and assess students’ continuous improvement in education. A successful timely Livetext portfolio submission is a graduation requirement.

Olena Zhadko, GRA of the COE's Technology and Learning Center, has been teaching Livetext since 2005, introducing hundreds of preservice teachers, faculty and staff to the technology.

Training Sessions

All Livetext training is coordinated by Olena Zhadko.  For all questions concerning Livetext use and concepts, contact her at tlcstaff@umsl.edu or by calling 314-516-4800.  All Livetext training sessions will be held in the TLC unless otherwise stated.  You can get directions here.

• February 5th, 10 (Friday) 12:00-1: 00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext for Nancy Singer Class (Nikia)
• February 8th, 2010 (Monday) 4:00-5:00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext (John)
• February 17th, 2010 (Wednesday) 12:00-1:00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext (Rachel)
• February 18th, 2010 (Thursday) 11:00-12:00, Creating and Working with Livetext for Joan Storey class (Olena)
• February 18th, 2010 (Thursday) 1:00-2:00, Creating and Working with Livetext for Joan Storey Class (Nikia)
• February 26th, 2010 (Friday) 1:00-2:00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext (Madison)
• March 3rd, 2010 (Wednesday) 12:00-1:00 p.m., Creating and Working with Livetext (Rachel)
• March 8th, 2010 (Monday) 4:00-5:00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext (Alicia)
• March 16th, 2010 (Tuesday) 2:00-3:00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext (Nikia)
• March 24th, 2010 (Wednesday) 4:00-5:00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext (Olena)
• April 9th, 2010 (Friday) 1:00-2:00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext( Madison)
• April 12th, 2010 (Monday) 4:00-5:00 pm, Creating and Working with Livetext (John)
• April 22nd, 2010 (Thursday) 5:30-6:30, Creating and Working with Livetext for Gayle Wilkinson Class (Olena)
• April 28th, 2010 (Wednesday) PORTFOLIOS DUE : Graduation Requirement

After attending a training session you’ll be asked to take 5 minutes to fill in the online survey:
Livetext Training Experience Survey

Support Documents

1. Student Overview of the LiveText Electronic Portfolio: HTML
2. Faculty In-Progress Evaluation of LiveText Portfolios: HTML
3. Faculty Final Evaluation of LiveText Portfolios: HTML
4. MoSTEP Rubric: PDF
5. LiveText TLC Trainer Checklist: PDF

Artifacts Workshop

Artifacts workshop is coordinated and conducted by Stephanie Koscielski, Clinical Experiences Coordinator. For further questions regarding artifact use, contact her at koscielskis@umsl.edu. The artificats workshop takes place once this semester:

• February 17th, 2010 (Wednesday) 4:30-6:00 pm, Marillac Auditorium

If you happen to miss it, please refer to the following documents:

Support Documents

1. Guidelines for Creating the Professional Portfolio: PDF
2. Portfolio Plan Sheet: PDF
3. Portfolio Collection Grid (Student-Generated Artifacts): PDF
4. 10 Suggestions for Writing Reflective Statements: PDF
5. Portfolio Collection Grid (Teacher-Generated Artifacts): PDF

Microsoft supplies a set of deployment tools for system administrators, to help make their lives a little easier. In particular, they provide us with a handy little program called SysPrep; it allows us to prepare any system (hence the name) for deployment onto any other machine. So instead of having to update 70 images (or, more likely, letting 70 images get incredibly out of date), you only need to deal with one.

So what is it?

As mentioned before, Sysprep lets us use a single image for multiple different machines. Essentially, it re-runs the installation process. So while it certainly cuts down on time spent updating multiple images, the actual deployment takes longer, probably an extra fifteen to twenty minutes. The image itself is also larger than normal, because it’s including all the drivers needed for the machines you manage.

Initially setting up Sysprep can be quite troublesome (I’ve spent a number of months finding many different ways that Sysprep doesn’t work), but once you’ve got an image working properlly, you only need to keep the one updated. Compared to the alternative, it’s incredibly efficient.

This method of Sysprepping a machine is probably not “proper”, but it works well, and is pretty simple.

Gathering necessary components

We’ll be using a couple different programs to get the image setup for sysprepping:

-Sysprep (duh). Microsoft has a set of deployment tools, among them being Sysprep. Note that the link provide is for SP3. If for some reason you need SP2 or earlier, just Google it.

-Sysprep Driver Scanner. Provided by VernAlex.com, this free program scans your Drivers folder, and sets up the Registry properly, so Sysprep can find them.

Besides those, you also need to get the drivers for all the machines you plan on using this imaging. This is probably the most tedious, time consuming part of the process. Save them somewhere like C:\Drivers\, or C:\Sysprep\Drivers\ if you want them to be removed once Sysprep is finished.

Organization is important. Some people break their folders into different driver types (Video, chipset, audio, etc). Personally, I broke mine down into different model series (Latitude D6 Series, Precision 300 series, etc). I chose this for two reasons: I want to easily see what model machines my image currently supports, and I wanted to cut down on redundant drivers. The idea here is that similar model machines probably share some components, so why have the drivers twice? I also created a “Common” folder, for drivers shared by different series machines. Using a freeware program called WinMerge, you can easily compare the contents of two folders, and find files that they both share.

Chances are, the drivers will come in executables. You can, in most cases, extract these using something like 7-zip, or your preferred archiving program. If you run into any floppy disk images (SATA drivers seem to come as them), you can mount these with a virtual floppy drive. It works a lot like a virtual CD drive would; you can mount the disk images and grab the drivers that way.

Configuring Sysprep

So once all that is prepared, we need to configure Sysprep.  If you haven’t already, download Sysprep from Microsoft; it comes as a file named deploy.cab. Extract its contents to C:\Sysprep. We’re interested in two programs: setupmgr and sysprep.

Open up Setupmgr. This program allows us to configure most of the options you would normally choose during installation. Once you’re past the Welcome screen, select Create New. The next screen gives us three options: Unattended, Sysprep, and Remote Installation Services. Choose Sysprep Setup for now. On the following screen, choose the Windows product you’re sysprepping. And finally, you’re given a choice between automating the installation or not. Once you’re more comfortable, you can probably automate the setup, but for now, select No, do not fully automate the installation. That window will close, revealing a larger window behind it, titled Setup Manager. 

Use the Setup Manager to configure Sysprep.inf

This is pretty self-explanatory; you just step through each category, filling out the information as needed (much like during Windows installation). Here I must note: if you don’t have a site license for Windows XP, leave the license key blank, otherwise it will attempt to use the same key for every installation. Once this is finished, it will save the configuration to C:\Sysprep\Sysprep.inf. Once you’ve completed this, click Cancel (I know, it’s a problem that Microsoft hasn’t fixed).

We need to make one addition to Sysprep.inf; we need to tell it to build a list of Mass Storage Devices. Open it up, and add:

[Sysprep]
BuildMassStorageSection=yes

[SysprepMassStorage]

at the end. Sysprep builds a list of Mass Storage (ie harddrive) drivers to load when the computer restarts. Without this, it’s likely that the image won’t load properly on other machines.

Configuring Sysprep Driver Scanner

Next, we need to prepare the list of drivers. We could do this ourselves, by adding a OemPnPDriversPath= section, but that would be painfully tedious. One of the major drawbacks of Sysprep is that it doesn’t search beyond the initial directories you point it to for drivers; we can’t just point it at C:\Drivers, and expect to search through all subfolders. So you either have to point it to a lot of different folders, or lump them all in one. Either way, it’s messy.

Instead of having to manually add every folder to Sysprep.inf or to the Registry, Sysprep Driver Scanner takes care of all of that for us. We just need to point it at the folders we want, and it searches them for drivers. This is a pretty simple 6-step process, as shown on the six buttons to the lefthand side.

Configuring Sysprep Driver Scanner

So click 1. Default, this will add the system driver path. Next, set the Search Path to the Driver folder we set up earlier, and click 2. Scan. This will populate the list with all the drivers it finds, and you should get a Success window. Step 3, we add C:\windows\inf and C:\winnt\inf manually to the list, as the program recommended.  Step 4, highlight the drivers you don’t want added (for example, some of them are Windows 2000/98 drivers), and click 4. Remove. Again, you should get a Success window. Then click Save, and finally, Done.

Final Preparations

Before we can successfully Sysprep this machine, there are a few more things we need to change. We need to change both the  HAL (hardware abstraction layer) and the Harddrive controllers to generic drivers, in order to ensure that the image will boot on (almost) any machine.

Both of these can be done through the Device Manager. Open it up (right click My Computer, click Manage, then select the Device Manager) and open the Computer section, as shown:

Selecting the Computer's HAL

This shows you the current HAL running on this machine. Right click on it, and select Update Driver. This opens the Hardware Update Wizard. Our goal is to set the HAL to Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC, as it’s most likely to run on any hardware. So select No, not this time. On the next screen, select Install from  a list or specific location. We can’t have Windows search for the driver itself, so next select Don’t Search. I will  choose the driver to install. You should then see a list of available drivers:

Select Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC

Select the HAL, and click Next. It will then install the new drivers and finish. Don’t restart, because we need to do the same for the IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers. Here we want to change the controllers to the most generic possible. Expand that section, and if any of them don’t say something like Primary Channel, Secondary Channel, or anything with Standard in it, repeat the process above and choose something like Standard PCI IDE Channel. You may have to uncheck Show Compatible Hardware in order to get to it.

Select a Generic IDE Controller

Changing the HAL

The most important step is to make sure Sysprep will update the HAL correctly. As in the previous section, we’ve set the HAL to ACPI PC. This HAL will run on pretty much anything you cast it onto, but it doesn’t take advantage of multiple cores or hyper-threading, so it’s really not the best choice to run a machine on. VernAlex has a rather in-depth article about HALs, if you’re interested.

Although there are a number of different HALs out there for Windows, only a few are regularly used: Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC, ACPI Uniprocessor PC, and ACPI Multiprocessor PC. If you’re running a relatively new Intel or AMD processor, you’re most likely using one of these three. You can check what HAL a machine runs by looking in the Device Manager.

Because Sysprep can’t figure it out on its own, we’ve got to help. So we need to change Sysprep.inf a bit before we run Reseal. It’s pretty simple, really. If the machine you’re imaging normally runs the ACPI PC HAL, you don’t need to change anything. If it runs the ACPI Multiprocessor PC, add UpdateUPHAL=”ACPI APIC_MP,%windir%\inf\hal.inf” under the [Unattended] section. And if it runs the Uniprocessor, add 
UpdateUPHAL=”ACPI APIC_UP,%windir%\inf\hal.inf” instead.

If you’re looking at other Sysprep articles (which I’d recommend), you’ll probably notice that the UpdateHAL entry might be used differently. From what I’ve read, people seem to disagree on how and when UpdateHAL should be used versus UpdateUPHAL. The difference between the two is that one is used for Uniprocessor (hence the UP) and one is for Multiprocessor. But does that refer to the HAL currently installed, or the one you want to change to? From my personal experience, I use UpdateUPHAL whenever I’m changing from a uniprocessor HAL to something else, regardless if the new one is multiprocessor or not, and so far it seems to work fine. Ultimately, I don’t know who’s right or wrong (or if there is a right or wrong), but this works for me.

So anyway, changing this one line isn’t so bad, but what if you’ve got a lot of different machines? You could just keep a text file explaining what machine types use what HAL, but with a little work, this too could be automated. There’s a program called Mysysprep, a freeware program written by  J. Tsay, that adds some customization options to Sysprep.

It works like this: Mysysprep runs before Sysprep, and checks things like the processor type, manufacturer, model name, serial number, and asset tag of your machine. It then compares these with values in a file called MySysprep.inf, and if any match, it inserts a section of code into Sysprep.inf.

 Within MySysprep.inf, there are five sections: [CPU], [Manufacturer], [Model], [SerialNo], and[Asset Tag]. And within each section, you list possible values you want it to find, and the corresponding .inf file you want it to insert into Sysprep.inf. For instance, if you want to load specific settings for model name Precision Workstation 370, you would put:

[Model]
Precision Workstation 370=Precision370.inf

and within Precision370.inf, you put the information you want inserted into Sysprep.inf. I’m not going to go into too much detail about this, because I only want to show you how to setup Mysysprep to handle changing the HAL. More information about Mysysprep in general can be found on its website.

You can see what MySysprep grabs from any machine’s bios by running MySysprep.exe /smbios from command line. You’ll then see a box pop up like this:

Machine information from MySysprep

Notice that the information matches up with the different sections of MySysprep.inf; everything but the CPU information is there. The CPU type can be found by running Mysysprep.exe /cpu :

CPU type, according to MySysprep

By default, MySysprep.inf comes with sample entries, commented out with semicolons. It also comes with two other inf files: MP.inf and UP.inf. These contain entries for changing the HAL, similar to what I’ve written earlier. In MySysprep.inf, remove the semicolon before the line GenuineIntel.MP=mp.inf, so any machine that is multiprocessor will use the multiprocessor HAL. However, I would not recommend doing the same for uniprocessor machines. For instance, MySysprep recognizes the CPU for my D800 as a GenuineIntel.UP, but it shouldn’t be running the ACPI UP HAL (in fact, I can’t even get it to boot with it), it should stay with the default ACPI PC. 

Instead, use the Model name to differentiate between the different uniprocessor machines. If a machine needs to use the Uniprocesssor HAL, include it’s model under the [Model] section. And with this, we’ve coverd all of our bases; anything with a multiprocessor CPU will use the multiprocessor HAL, certain models listed under the [Model] section will use the uniprocessor, and everything else will just be left alone.

So once all that has been taken care of, launch MySysprep. Looks an awful lot like Sysprep, right? That’s because it’s really just a hacked version of Sysprep. You’ll first see a warning:

Click OK, and it will bring us to Sysprep’s main window. As you can see, there are three main choices: Factory, Audit, and Reseal. The Factory setting is used first, to install new drivers and configure the OS for the new computer. Once it’s setup, you use Reseal to clean out everything used by Sysprep (basically, it deletes C:\Sysprep, any registry information it leaves, and clears the Events Log). Audit mode is used to test the installation while in Factory mode.

So for now, choose Factory, and select Use Mini-Setup. Also, make sure the Shutdown mode is on Shut Down. 

Select Factory Mode.

The first time you run Sysprep, it will probably take a while (I timed it at a little over 20 minutes). It has to build the Mass Storage section, which takes a surprisingly long time. As long as the little hour glass keeps going, your machine is still working. Once it’s finished, the machine shuts down. It’s then ready to be imaged for use on other machines.

Resealing

So you’ve taken an image of the machine, and cast it onto a new model. When you first boot it up, you should see the blue “Please wait while Windows prepares to start…” and then you’ll be taken back to your desktop, with Sysprep open again. Right now you’re still in Factory mode. If there are any changes that need to be made, make them. For instance, it would be right now that you change the UpdateUPHal settings.

If you’re using the MySysprep approach, close the Sysprep window and open MySysprep (otherwise just leave it). Check “Use Mini-Setup” and click Reseal.

Reseal the machine

Sysprep will do it’s thing, you’ll see the little hour glass spinning around again. Once it’s done, it’ll shut off. When you restart the computer, after seeing the “Please wait” screen again, you’ll get a Windows XP Setup window. If you’re running MySysprep, you should see a picture in the top-right corner that says “MySysprep”.

This works just like Windows Setup, except it pulls the information from Sysprep.inf. If you’ve filled out all the information, the setup process will be more or less automatic.

Once it finishes, the machine restarts, and takes you to the login screen. When you login, your machine will probably spend a while finding new hardware. Once it’s done, go to the Device Manager, and make sure that the HAL and harddrive controllers are correct. Also notice that the Sysprep folder is automatically deleted. If you have any now unneeded folders (like the drivers) you can delete those too.

After a couple restarts, make sure all the hardware is found correctly, and your computer is ready to be used.

Odds and Ends

This isn’t always a perfect process, and it might take a couple tries to get it right. I spent months practically beating my head against a wall, trying to figure out how on earth Sysprep works. This section is just a list of common problems I’ve run into, and how to alleviate them.

Sysprepped image gives you a Blue Screen of Death, or worse, doesn’t do anything

This is most likely a HAL issue. If you have your S ysprep Image set to Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI) PC, it will boot on most “normal” machines. It is possible that the machine you’re trying to Sysprep requires a very different HAL. You can find out what HAL is needed easily, by checking the Device Manager on a machine of the same model.

It could also be a problem with the harddrive controller. If, for instance, you’r moving from an IDE drive to SATA, you must make sure the controllers are set to the generic Standard controllers, otherwise it’ll never boot.

Computer won’t shut down properly/gets stuck at Logging Off

Again, this is probably a HAL issue. It’s possible that the computer is using the wrong HAL, but it’s also very likely that the HAL’s drivers just haven’t been properly loaded. Open Device Manager, right click the HAL, and select Update Driver. Let Windows automatically pick the best one. Restart (it might still get stuck), then try to shut down again. It should, ideally, shut down properly.

If it still doesn’t, its possible that you’re using the wrong HAL. Find out what the proper HAL is, then grab a program called HALu (HAL Updater). This program provides an easy way to manually change your HAL, without having to deal with changing drivers by hand.

Keyboard and Mouse don’t work after Resealing

If you built your original image on a laptop, trying to push it to a desktop can cause this problem. It’s because Windows doesn’t load new hardware until after it goes through the Setup routine, so things like USB keyboards and mice don’t work. One easy way around this is just to plug in a USB mouse and/or keyboard in to the laptop and make sure they work before taking the image.

Resources

Vernalex.com: Sysprep Guide
I found a lot of good information from here concerning HALs, as well as the Sysprep Driver Scanner program. The whole website in general has a lot of good information.

Answers that Work: How to Sysprep a Windows XP corporate PC setup (PDF)
This is a very straightforward how-to on Sysprepping a machine.

Microsoft TechNet:  Choosing Sysprep Settings
 A good article about the various settings in Sysprep and what they do.

Tsaysoft.com: MySysprep
This is really a wonderful tool to enhance the automation of Sysprep.

We invited Ericka Kranitz to make a presentation on the Roles and Responsibilities of the PI to the COE faculty on Wednesday, February 11, in the Partnership Conference Center of the Regional Center for Education and Work (RCEW). This was a REQUIRED meeting for all COE faculty (irrespective of previous experience) who are currently PI’s and/or co-PI’s on a grant or who plan to serve in either or both roles sometime in the near future. The training is also required of all members of the Dean’s Cabinet, including myself. Please use the videos and content provided here to refresh your memory and revisit topics of interest. Your cooperation regarding this critical compliance issue is greatly appreciated.

Please note, effective March 1st, no one will be allowed to serve as a PI or co-PI in the College of Education without having completed this training.

Resources

• Ericka Kranitz, CPA Bio at UM System
• UM System: Financial Compliance Home
• UM System: Financial Compliance: Roles and Responsibilities: Principle Investigator
• PI Roles and Responsibilities Presentation Slides (Requires Powerpoint 2007 or Powerpoint Viewer)
• Allowability Presentation Slides (Requires Powerpoint 2007 or Powerpoint Viewer)

PI Roles and Responsibilities Video

Ericka Kranitz here continues her financial compliance series on the topic of Allowability. This presentation to the COE faculty was filmed on Friday, March 6th in the Partnership Conference Center of the Regional Center for Education and Work (RCEW). This was a REQUIRED meeting for all COE faculty (irrespective of previous experience) who are currently PI’s and/or co-PI’s on a grant or who plan to serve in either or both roles sometime in the near future. The training is also required of all members of the Dean’s Cabinet, including myself. Please use the videos and content provided here to refresh your memory and revisit topics of interest. Your cooperation regarding this critical compliance issue is greatly appreciated.

Resources

• Ericka Kranitz, CPA Bio at UM System
• UM System: Financial Compliance Home
• Allowability Presentation Slides (Requires Powerpoint 2007 or Powerpoint Viewer)

Allowability Video

Overview

IrfanView (pronounced Ear-Fan-View) is a freeware program (for non-commercial use) developed by Irfan Skiljan, a Bosnian developer presently residing in Austria. ‘Simple enough for beginners and powerful enough for professionals,’ this program supports tasks and formats that not even many commercially available image viewers can.¹ If you’d like to download or simply learn more about this program, visit www.irfanview.com. That said, IrfanView is deployed across campus for the purpose of viewing, manipulating and optimizing images and other media.

Using the Interface

Perhaps one of the best features about this program is its deceptive simplicity. Unlike other image viewers that overload the beginner with controls and effects, IrfanView instead assumes its users have a familiarity with other Windows-based programs and tries to match that skill set without sacrificing functionality. Take a look at the interface featured below:

Irfanview attempts to keep its interface clean and functional hiding advanced features under the menu bar and in keyboard shortcuts.

• Title bar: Includes the title on the viewed image and the zoom factor (if any) in parentheses.
• Menu bar: Here you’ll find all functions and tasks available specifically to the program. Pop through these to get a sense of where to find what you will need.
• Toolbar: Hover you mouse over each in turn to get information on the purpose of the button. A few of special interest:

  Image Information: Useful when you are interested in the properties and meta-data of any given file.

  Zoom Tool: Use these to zoom in and out from the image. Your level of zoom will be indicated in pixels in the title bar.  Alternately use Ctrl + Mouse Wheel

  Navigation Tool: Use to navigate from one image to the next in a directory. The neighboring up and down arrows serve a similar function with multi-page images such as TIFF files. Alternately use your left and right arrow keys.

Irfanview's status bar offers useful info about the current image and how it is being viewed.

• Status bar: Shown above, the status bar is a common and often ignored component of most Windows-based applications. Here it is useful to get an idea of what type of image your are working with before manipulating it:
  Resolution (3504 x 2336 x 24 BPP): This means the image is optimally displayed at 3504 pixels in width, 2336 pixels in height at 24 bits per pixel (8 bits x 3 color channels) This is about the size and pixel depth of a standard computer monitor.
  Image Index (5/6): Image 5 of 6 in your working directory.
  Zoom (17%): Image is presently 17% of its optimal size.
  Disk Size to Memory (6.53 MB/23.42 MB): This indicator helps to explain compression. What we see here is that the image has a size of about 6.5 megabytes on the disk but is taking up about 23.5 megabytes in machine memory to display. The difference is due to the compression method used.
  Time & Date (3/11/2009 09:40:09): This tells us when the image was last modified, not when it was taken.

Common Tasks

Cropping

Cropping, shown right, is the process of discarding the area outside of an given rectangular portion of an image while keeping the resolution of the original.

1. Holding down your left mouse button, draw a rectangle around the portion of the image that you want to keep. Release when satisfied.
2. You may need to redraw the rectangle or resize the edges of the selection using the double-ended arrow mouse cursors (↔) if you are not satisfied with the results.  You can also hold down the right-click on your mouse to drag the cropping box around.
3. Edit → Crop Selection or simply use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Y

If you are still not satisfied, do not despair. You can Undo any action by using the Undo button in the toolbar (alternately Edit → Undo or Ctrl + Z) or simply Reopen the image: File → Reopen.²

Orientation (Flip and Rotate)

When scanning images or working with photos taken in in portrait orientation, it is sometimes necessary to rotate the image before inserting it into your work. Similarly, you might have reason to invert or otherwise flip an image horizontally or vertically.³

1. Open the image you’d like to re-orient
2. Image → Rotate Right (Note the other options)
   This essentially moves the image 90° clockwise. Similarly, flipping essentially turns the image over horizontally (mirror-effect) or vertically (inversion).

Remove Imperfections with Cloning

Nothing worse than taking a great photo and having a piece of trash or blemish ruining the whole thing. With IrfanPaint, a new plugin for Irfanview, you have access to some Photoshop-esque tools.  For our interests, the so called clone tool [ ] allows you to arbitrarily copy one portion of a photo over another portion.  The usefulness of this is obvious by demonstration:

1. Bring up IrfanPaint by pressing F12 or Edit → Show Paint dialog
2. Select the clone tool [ ]
3. Right-click over the area that you wish to clone from
4. Left-click and drag over the area that you want to copy to

The clone tool is useful for all sorts of garbage that maligns our planet

Applying Image Effects

IrfanView offers a variety of effects that can be used to manipulate the appearance of your images. While detailing each would outstrip the scope of this help sheet, I’ve taken some liberty in listing some of those your likely to have use for:

• Increase/Decrease Color Depth: IrfanView has the ability to adjust your color depth (See more about color depth below in Concepts & Topics). Now why would you want to do this? At times it is useful for aesthetic reasons such as decreasing a figure to 2 colors (ie. B/W) to achieve a silhouette.
• Convert to Grayscale: I know what your thinking, but this is NOT black and white. For all intents and purposes, this is a color mode in that it contains just as much color depth information, only the information is nominalized into shades of gray.
• Enhance Colors: There are several options here but you’re most likely to use the Gamma Correction option. When you think of correcting gamma, imagine your adjusting the amount of sunshine in your picture. This is useful for pictures that are just a little bit too bright or dark.
• Redeye Reduction(selection): Select the area around the eye with you mouse and use this utility to suck the red right out. ⁴

Irfanview features a rich and ever growing collection of effects or filters that can be applied to images for stylistic and cosmetic purposes

You’ll find several other effects under Effects including what is called the Effects Browser (Image → Effects → Effects browser …). This handy tool (shown above) allows you to preview the results of an effect before applying it to your image.

Resize/Resample

Some images displayed at their optimal dimensions are too big for your purposes. For example, an image that is 1024 pixels in length and 768 pixels in height is approximately the size of a standard computer screen. To use it in a word processing document, you will want to resize the image to something more suited to your purposes. Otherwise, when you come to print the paper, it will take an excruciating amount of time to render.

1. Click Image → Resize/Resample.
2. In the resulting dialog box, insure that the Preserve aspect ratio option is selected. If not, your image will be distorted or otherwise stretched.
3. Unless you know the exact dimensions you’d like, use the Set size as percentage of original option for a more intuitive resizing.
4. Keep an eye on the New Size in the upper left of the dialog box as you make your changes
5. Click OK.

If you are not satisfied with the resize for whatever reason, click Edit → Undo.

Conversion/Compression

Often when working with images you’ll find that the image is far too big to utilize effectively in your work. By ‘too big’ I do not mean just length and height but rather that it takes up too much space on your disk. This is when you’ll start hearing terms such as optimization and conversion thrown about by lab consultants (as if you’re supposed to know what these mean!) For more information on these and many other terms, see Concepts and Topics below. Till then, here’s what to do:

1. First be certain you have your image looking the way you want it to appear in your work. The best image quality is achieved when optimization and/or conversion is the last process performed on the image before it is inserted into your work.
2. File → Save as…
3. Select which compression method you’d like from the Save as type pop-down menu. We’ll be using the JPEG format. If you are changing file types; for example, the original was an uncompressed Bitmap (BMP) and you want the more manageable JPEG format, this process is known as conversion.
4. Click the Options button. This will open the tabbed dialog shown to the right. Your interest here is the JPEG Save Quality. The higher the quality, the larger the file and visa versa. JPEG’s are already fairly well compressed so we’ll leave it at its default of 77. Be certain the other JPEG options are as shown unless you prefer otherwise. Ignore the other tabs in that they will not factor into this compression type. When finished, click OK.
5. Back at the Save as dialog, check that your file name and location are as you’d like and click Save. When working with images, it is usually best NOT to overwrite your originals… Just in case, always save with a different file name.

Concepts and Topics

It is all well and good to have the procedural knowledge detailed above, but it is critical if you are going to spend anytime around technology in your career to develop a competence in its terminology and concepts. What follows should help serve that end:

Compression

Data compression and its mysterious cousin, encryption are considered high art among information theorists and other mathematicians, however, for our purposes we can simply say that compression is the process of making a file smaller by predicting its most frequent information and storing it in less space. Using the figure shown right as an example, I’ve developed an algorithm that replaces common character sequences with a unique placeholder (here I used numbers). Applying this compressor I have effectively shrunk the file by approximately 28%.

As you might imagine, if I want to read this file after it has been compressed, I’m going to need the compressor to reverse the process. It is for this reason that all compressed images include information on its compressor, typically in the form of a file extension. (*.gif, *.jpg, *.png …)

This is an example of a lossless compressor. Lossy would drop some info each time it is compressed.

A compressor can be lossy or lossless. With a lossless compressor the original and decompressed files are identical bit per bit. With some data we can have big benefits in compression efficiency by throwing away most of it, without however losing much quality. We use lossless compression for text or binary data, and lossy for data like signals: audio, image or video.

Image Formats

Images come in a variety of formats each with their own advatages and disadvantages. Each of these are easily identified with a file extension such as mypicture.jpg that tells your operating system what format it is in and therefore, how to open it properly. Listed here are some of the more widely known formats in a variety of categories:

BMP:(Bitmap) | Uncompressed Editing Format
BMPs, Windows’ bitmap format, like other bitmaps are formed from pixels-a matrix of dots with different colors. Bitmap images are defined by their dimension in pixels as well as by the number of colors they represent. For example, a 640 x 480 image contains 640 pixels and 480 pixels in horizontal and vertical direction respectively. If you enlarge a small area of a bit-mapped image, you can clearly see the pixels that are used to create it. When viewed normally, the small pixels merge into continuous tones much as do the dots used to create newspaper photographs. Each of the small pixels can be a shade of gray or a color (see right). Using 24-bit color, each pixel can be set to any one of 16 million colors. All digital photographs and paintings are bitmapped, and any other kind of image can be saved or exported into a bitmap format. In fact, when you print any kind of image on a laser or ink-jet printer, it is first converted (rasterized) by either the computer or printer into a bitmap form so it can be printed with the dots the printer uses. To edit or modify these bitmapped images you use a program such as IrfanView or Microsoft’s Paint. Bitmap images are widely used but they suffer from a few unavoidable problems.

• They must be printed or displayed at a size determined by the number of pixels in the image. Printing or displaying one at any other size can create unwanted patterns in the image.
• Bitmap images also have large file sizes that are determined by the image’s dimensions in pixels and its color depth.

JPEG: jay-peg (Joint Photographic Experts Group) | Digital Camera Format
By far the most popular format for displaying of photographic images on the Web. The format is optimized for the display of photographs and doesn’t work as well as GIF for type or line drawings. JPEG images have two distinctive features:

• You can vary the amount of compression and hence trade off file size for image quality.
• JPEG supports 24-bit color. GIF, the other format widely used on the Web supports only 8-bits.

NOTE: Don’t use JPEG to save original images you expect to modify later. Every time you open one of these files, and then save it again, the image is compressed. As you go through a series of saves, the image become more and more degraded. Be sure your originals are in a loss-free format such as TIFF or BMP at maximum color depth. Also, when you save an image as a JPEG, the image on the screen won’t reflect the compression unless you load the saved version.

GIF: jif or gif (Graphics Interchange Format) | Web Format
Developed in 1987 by CompuServe to store multiple images into one file, GIF’s are the oldest graphic format on the Web. Unlike JPEG’s which can store 24-bit color, GIF can manage only 8-bits (256 colors) making them well suited for graphs and line art but not for photos and the like. Examine the gradients shown right. At relative file sizes you can easily see GIF’s inability to appropriately render the gradient. So why, you may ask, is GIF still around?

• File Size: When representing line art, graphs, text and the like, GIFs can achieve optimal quality at a smaller file size than JPEGs
• Transparency: Image backgrounds can be made transparent. To do so, you specify which color in the table is to be transparent. When viewed with a Web browser, the browser replaces every pixel in the image that is this color with a pixel from the web page’s background. This allows the background to show through the image in those areas. You have to choose the transparent color carefully. If you select one that occurs anywhere in the image besides the background, your image will appear to have “holes” in it.
• Animation: Since GIFs can store multiple images in one file, an images can be animated by rapidly flipping through a series of images much as a movie simulates motion.

Optimal Image Resolution & Dimensions

The optimal resolution of an image is based on three factors: Image Resolution, Color Depth, and its Optimal Dimension. What is best or optimal for your purposes will vary with your intended means of display: print or computer monitor. This again is further limited by the quality of these devices.

• Image Resolution: the density of pixels per inch (ppi). Although there is variation between monitors, the rule of thumb is that screen resolution is 72 ppi. This means that all images used for the Web should have an image resolution of 72 ppi. Why not use higher resolution? More pixels per inch means a higher quality image, right? Well, only if your are displaying your images on something that can show all those extra pixels. On the Web, your reader’s monitor is the limiting factor. You could send more pixels to display, but they’d just be ignored. If, however, you intend to print the image, rather than display it on a Web page, printers typically produce from 300 to 600 dots per inch, or dpi. (Dots and pixels are the same concept, different terms.)
• Color Depth: the number of bits of data used to store information about the color of each pixel in an image. This is also known as bit depth or color resolution. The higher the color depth, the greater range of possible colors in the image, and the larger the file size. (Typical bit depths are 8-bit, 16-bit, or 32-bit, although others are possible.
• Optimal Dimensions: the length and height measured in pixels. An image displayed optimally on your monitor will have a 1:1 pixel ratio. That is, one image pixel for one screen pixel. If you were then to enlarge the picture beyond optimal, each image pixel will then need to span two or more monitor pixels. In a similar manner, shrinking an image below optimal will require some pixels to be ignored, causing distortions or sacrificing quality.

FAQ

Q: I’m trying to open an image I got from a friend (or that I can view from home) but Windows keeps telling me it can’t read the format.

A: This could be do to a variety of things. One of the most common is that the image was created in a Macintosh machine and does not have a file extension to tell a Window’s machine what format it is in. Macintosh OS 9.x historically stored that information in what is called a data fork. Solution, find out what format it is in and append the proper extension.  Sometimes you just have to guess and see what works.

Q: What’s the deal with only being able to undo ONE action? I constantly have to start over if I don’t catch a mistake immediately.

A: I know. I don’t care much for this limitation either, but since IrfanView is not intended for large scale image manipulation (not to mention it being free) I can’t complain too much. All I can recommend is to work carefully.

Q: I’d like to be able to browse through thumbnails of my images. Other image viewers can do this. Can IrfanView?

A: Certainly. Either press t on your keyboard with IrfanView as the active window or File → Thumbnails. This will open a thumbnail browser excellently suited for getting a birds eye view of your images.

Footnotes

1. See Wikipedia’s Comparison of image viewers for more details on what and what is not offered in other image viewers. [↩]
2. One of Irfanview’s more irritating limitations is the inability to undo more than one action. [↩]
3. NOTE: When rotating JPEG images, it is better to use the JPG Lossless Rotation plugin utility (Options → JPG Lossless Rotation). This will preserve a greater degree of the JPEG’s quality. [↩]
4. As if this writing, this is one of the worst features of the program.  The results are simply not as good as what you’d get with Google’s Picasa or Apple’s iPhoto [↩]

Overview

This guide is intended for faculty and staff evaluating a student’s ongoing progress developing their LiveText e-portfolio.  If you are interested in the guide for final evaluation, it can be found in this article.  Collected here are the bare bones procedures for getting things done.  This is not meant to replace our training sessions but rather as an aid to recall procedures after you have had training.  You will need your own LiveText account in order to proceed.  If you do not have an account, contact me though our TLC staff email, call the TLC’s front desk (314-516-4800), or try to catch me in the TLC.

Important Dates for Fall Semester Final Evaluations:

April 28th | Students submit their portfolios
May 6th | Faculty has the portfolios graded and may request resubmission if necessary
May 9th | Students resubmit portfolios if required
May 12th | Faculty regrades the portfolios that were resubmitted

For a full schedule of LiveText and artifact training, refer to this article.

Getting Started

Please instruct your students to send their work for your review throughout a semester.

LiveText, of course, is a web-based application so it is highly recommended that you use a high-speed Internet connection (DSL/Cable/T1). Both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (6.0 or greater), Mozilla’s Firefox (1.0 or greater) are fully supported. However, while Apple’s Safari (2.0 or greater) is supported, some document formatting capabilities are limited.

The Dashboard

To the upper right of your dashboard you’ll see details of your session: your name along with the current date and handy links to My Account, the Forum, and of course Help which has great PDF, Word, and animated demo tutorials.

Reviewing

1. To start reviewing your students’ work go to Reviews tab at the top, once you click on it you will see a list of your students’ portfolios.
2. Hovering your cursor over the portfolio will pop-up a window with details stating the status of your review (whether you have started or have not started reviewing this portfolio, as well as the time the student has submitted their work, and the number of times the student has submitted it). To start the review click on the name of the portfolio.

Grading Portfolios

• You can start with looking through student’s portfolio by using the Table of Contents in the sidebar
• Use Add comment to annotate documents
• Use Save & Exit if you need to interrupt the process of assessment

Adding your comments as you go

Then go to a specific standard you want to review and start adding comments as you go

Now see the results of your work!

Do not forget to hit Send Review button once you are finished!

Advice to Students

Make certain your students are clear on how to submit documents for review:

1. Students should open their portfolio
2. Click on Send for Review tool
3. Type instructor’s name in search field
4. Finally, click Submit for Review

After submitting your comments on documents, remind students to review these comments under their account by going to the Reviews tab.

FAQ

Q: How does a new faculty member get a Livetext membership? Does the faculty members have to pay for it?
A: A new faculty member will need to contact Olena Zhadko in the TLC office by emailing her at tlcstaff@umsl.edu or by calling (314) 516-4800. Faculty members currently can receive a membership free of charge, courtesy of the TLC.

Q: Where do the training workshops take place?
A: The training sessions take place at the TLC on UMSL’s south campus.  If you are not familiar how to get there, use our directions to Marillac and through Marillac at tlc.umsl.edu.

Q: Where do I find the information about the workshops?
A: The information can be found on the College of Education Exchange: coe.umsl.edu/exchange.  Search for the term, ‘livetext’  You’ll find the most up-to-date schedules, guides, and other helpful documents.

Q: Do I need to register for the workshops?
A: Students and Faculty need to register by emailing the TLC office at tlcstaff@umsl.edu or by calling at (314) 516-4800.

Q: How long is the membership valid for a student/faculty?
A: Student memberships will for 5 years after activation. Faculty memberships will last for the duration of their employment.

Q: Which Livetext workshops do I need to attend?
A: All of the sessions throughout the semester are of the same level of difficulty, so it is your choice on which one to attend. These sessions focus on getting used to the layout of the website, and how to do basic operations. The Q&A session, the last session offered for the semester, is to answer any last minute questions pertaining to your portfolio. The Artifacts workshops focus on the required content for your portfolio.

Q: Will there be any more Artifact Workshops?
A: There are 2 scheduled workshops to focus on artifacts. If you cannot make those, please contact Stephanie D. Koscielski at koscielskis@umsl.edu or call her at
(314) 516-6741 to inquire about addition workshops.

Overview

This guide is intended for faculty and staff evaluating a student’s final official LiveText e-portfolio.  If you are interested in the guide for ongoing evaluation, it can be found in this article.  Collected here are the bare bones procedures for getting things done.  This is not meant to replace our training sessions but rather as an aid to recall procedures after you have had training.  You will need your own LiveText account in order to proceed.  If you do not have an account, contact me though our TLC staff email, call the TLC’s front desk (314-516-4800), or try to catch me in the TLC.

Important Dates for Spring Semester Final Evaluations:

April 28th | Students submit their portfolios
May 6th | Faculty has the portfolios graded and may request resubmission if necessary
May 9th | Students resubmit portfolios if required
May 12th | Faculty regrades the portfolios that were resubmitted

For a full schedule of LiveText and artifact training, refer to this article.

Grading Portfolios

The progress bar gives you a simple overview of all of your student's progress.

Click on the progress bar to get a detailed overview of which students that you’ve completed assessment, those awaiting assessment, and those that have yet to submit their profile for review.

Monitor student progress at a glance

To start your assessment, in the second column, Awaiting Assessment, put a check mark next to a student’s name and click Assess Selected Students

It is always useful to comment student work with as much detail as possible

After reviewing and commenting a document, proceed by clicking Assessment Rubric

The Assessment Rubric is elegantly simple, making assessment relatively painless. Simply click on the appropriate valuation for each criteria.

• Click Save if you need to interrupt the process of assessment
• If a student receives a score of 1-Fail-Not Progressing then you must click REQUEST RESUBMISSION in order for a student to remediate and resubmit the portfolio. If you have requested resubmission please remember that you must regrade the portfolio by the deadline stated above.
• Otherwise, when finished, select Submit Assessment

Tips

You can see a description of each valuation by either hovering your mouse cursor over the cell or by click on Show/Hide Rubric Descriptions to the left of the rubric.

Hovering over the cell will produce a popup description of what this valuation 'means'.

Alternately, you may choose to see all valuation 'meanings' in their appropriate cells by clicking on Show Rubric Descriptions

FAQ

Q: How does a new faculty member get a Livetext membership? Does the faculty members have to pay for it?
A: A new faculty member will need to contact Olena Zhadko in the TLC office by emailing her at tlcstaff@umsl.edu or by calling (314) 516-4800. Faculty members currently can receive a membership free of charge, courtesy of the TLC.

Q: Where do the training workshops take place?
A: The training sessions take place at the TLC on UMSL’s south campus.  If you are not familiar how to get there, use our directions to Marillac and through Marillac at tlc.umsl.edu.

Q: Where do I find the information about the workshops?
A: The information can be found on the College of Education Exchange: coe.umsl.edu/exchange.  Search for the term, ‘livetext’  You’ll find the most up-to-date schedules, guides, and other helpful documents.

Q: Do I need to register for the workshops?
A: Students and Faculty need to register by emailing the TLC office at tlcstaff@umsl.edu or by calling at (314) 516-4800.

Q: How long is the membership valid for a student/faculty?
A: Student memberships will for 5 years after activation. Faculty memberships will last for the duration of their employment.

Q: Which Livetext workshops do I need to attend?
A: All of the sessions throughout the semester are of the same level of difficulty, so it is your choice on which one to attend. These sessions focus on getting used to the layout of the website, and how to do basic operations. The Q&A session, the last session offered for the semester, is to answer any last minute questions pertaining to your portfolio. The Artifacts workshops focus on the required content for your portfolio.

Q: Will there be any more Artifact Workshops?
A: There are 2 scheduled workshops to focus on artifacts. If you cannot make those, please contact Stephanie D. Koscielski at koscielskis@umsl.edu or call her at
(314) 516-6741 to inquire about addition workshops.

Overview

This guide is intended for students starting to develop their LiveText e-portfolio.  If you are interested in the faculty guide for  evaluation,  can be found in this article.  Collected here are the bare bones procedures for getting things done.  This is not meant to replace our training sessions but rather as an aid to recall procedures after you have had training.  You will need your own LiveText account in order to proceed.  If you do not have an account, contact me though our TLC staff email, call the TLC’s front desk (314-516-4800), or try to catch me in the TLC.

Important Dates for Spring Semester Final Evaluations:

April 28th | Students submit their portfolios
May 6th | Faculty has the portfolios graded and may request resubmission if necessary
May 9th | Students resubmit portfolios if required
May 12th | Faculty regrades the portfolios that were resubmitted

For a full schedule of LiveText and artifact training, refer to this article.

Getting Started

LiveText, of course, is a web-based application so it is highly recommended that you use a high-speed Internet connection (DSL/Cable/T1). Both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (6.0 or greater), Mozilla’s Firefox (1.0 or greater) are fully supported. However, while Apple’s Safari (2.0 or greater) is supported, some document formatting capabilities are limited.

Remember, if you forgot your password then click 'Forgot Username/Password?' to have it reset. Be certain to have your email and security Q&A handy.

The Dashboard

The dashboard attempts to give you a clear overview of current assessment activity. Take time to explore the different tools LiveText provides here.

To the upper right of your dashboard you’ll see details of your session: your name along with the current date and handy links to My Account, the Forum, and of course Help which has great PDF, Word, and animated demo tutorials.

If you are graduating this semester, your dashboard will look similar to the screen shot below.

Setup Your Portfolio

If you are graduating this semester …

Those that are graduating this semester will have an assignment listed under Active Assignments in the dashboard.  This is merely a template of a portfolio.  You are in no way obliged to use this, it is only offered to help you get started.  If you have already started or you are not planing on using this template, please proceed to the next section.

You'll see a view similar to this if you are slated to graduate this semester.

Lets begin then:

Dashboard → Active Assignments → For assignment details and template(s) click here

If graduating this semester, you should have this portfolio template assigned to you.

1. To view the rubric that will be used to evaluate your final work click View
2. To use the portfolio template click Use this template

Creating a new portfolio …

If you are not graduating this semester and/or you want to get started without using the assigned template you’ll need to go to the Documents tab and create a new portfolio.

After click 'New', be patient. It takes a bit sometimes.

1. Click New…
2. Select Choose a Folder … → University of Missouri – St Louis :  Portfolios
3. Choose a Template … → UMSL Teacher Certification Portfolio
4. Insert a Title (e.g. Selma Nottingshire’s portfolio)
5. Click Multiple Page for your Layout
6. Click Save as New Document

You’ll then see something similar to the screen shot below.  It is up to you to jazz it up.

You'll want to begin navigating and customizing you portfolio as soon as possible

1. Use the Table of Contents to navigate quickly to the various sections of your portfolio
2. Switch from View mode to Edit using this tool
3. Use Manage Sections to edit the entire portfolio

Editing Your Portfolio

The editing tools are similar to tools that you'd see in Microsoft Word or just about any other word processing program.

1. Highlight and change any text in this text box by using the editing tools provided.
2. You can only upload one (1) image per section to be used as an Inserted Image within the document
3. However, you can use up to ten (10) attachments … useful for artifacts.

Adding Images

IMPORTANT: Remember you can only put (1) ONE picture per section in your portfolio, that will be displayed.
You can put 3 different pictures under each section
1. one in the standard section;
2. one in the Artifact section; and
3. one in the Reflective Essay section

Or you can create a Word/PDF document with all the pictures

Typical dialog for adding an image to a section

1. Click on the Insert Image tab or Edit for Inserted Image
2. Select an image from the File Manager by using the radio buttons
   Or select Upload New Image… to add an image to the collection
3. Use the Insert Image dialog (above) to optionally add a caption, change its display size, and placement
4. Save & Finish
5. Your image will appear at the top of the section once you save your section and return to View mode

Adding Documents

Use the checkboxes to add and remove file attachments. A Remove button is also provided for documents already attached.

1. Click on the File Attachments tab or Edit for File Attachments
   
2. Select document(s) from the File Manager by using the checkboxes to the left of the file
   Or select Upload New File… to add a file to your collection
3. Use the checkboxes to add and remove documents.  Remember you are limited to 10 file attachments per section
4. Save & Finish

Adding Hyperlinks

Basic hyperlinking to a web address using the Hyperlink tool

NOTE: In the above example, we’ve only added the URL (here www.webelements.com).  LiveText insists on specifying the protocol (here http://) on its own.  Be certain to remove this protocol declaration from any URL that you cut and paste into this field, otherwise your link will not work.

We recommend taking one extra step so that when your portfolio is being reviewed, the reviewer can follow your link, close the resulting page and return to your portfolio.

1. In the Link dialog, click on the Target tab
2. For the Target dropdown field, select New Window (_blank)
3. Leave Target Frame Name as _blank
4. Finally select OK

You’re hyperlink will now open in a new window that when closed will not also close your portfolio.

Adding Hyperlinks to Existing Artifacts

You can add hyperlinks to artifacts that you’ve already attached to your section to enhance readibility of your portfolio.

Right click over one of your attached documents and select Copy Link Location (Firefox) or Copy Shortcut (Internet Explorer)

1. While in the Edit view, click on the File Attachment(s) tab
2. Right click over one of your attached documents to bring up its context menu
3. Select Copy Link Location (Firefox) or Copy Shortcut (Internet Explorer) to copy the URL to your clipboard
4. Return to the Section Editor, highlight the text you want to serve for the link
5. Click on the Hyperlink tool
6. Right click in the URL field, select Paste
7. Proceed as you would with any other hyperlink (see above)

Common Portfolio Tasks

Send For Review

At anytime during the semester, you are able to submit portions of your portfolio to instructors for review:

1. Open the target document
2. Click the Send for Review button
3. Begin typing your instructors last name, suggestions should appear within moments
4. Select the appropriate instructor, they will be immediately added under Selected Reviewer(s)
5. Repeat for each instructor you’d like to review your work
6. Finally, click Submit for Review

Sharing

Sharing a section from your portfolio allows other LiveText users to view and/or edit your work (e.g. classmates).  You decide.  Remember users that you add to the editors list will be able to change your work.

1. Open the target document
2. Click Share
3. Begin typing the last name of the individual you’d like to share your work with in the appropriate text field (Viewer or Editor)
4. Select the appropriate LiveText user; their name will appear just below the text field
5. Finally, click Add to Share

Use the Advanced sharing options… to modify user access, add sharing right in bulk, and manage visitors.  It is here as well that you can use can click on Advanced Access Options… to switch to either Private (Only creator can see or modify) or Public (Anyone can see. Only editors can modify).

Revising Reviewed Documents

Note that sections that have comments will be highlighted in the Table of Contents

1. Click on the Reviews tab to get a listing of documents you’ve submitted for review
2. Documents that have finished reviews will have the Review Completed
3. Select the document you’d like to view
4. Use the highlighted sections in the Table of Contents to navigate through comments
5. Click on Revise in the top left corner, this will take you to the original document to begin revisions
6. When finished click Send for Review (see above)

Final Submission

If you are in your final semester, eventually the time will come to do your final submission:

When you are ready to submit for portfolio for an assignment, begin by clicking on Submit Assignment

1. Open your portfolio from the Documents tab
2. Of course, review your portfolio to be certain it is in the best shape possible
3. Click Submit Assignment
4. In the Choose an Assignment for Submission dialog, select the radio button for your portfolio assignment (there likely will only be one)
5. Confirm submission by returning to the Dashboard tab to see that your Active Assignments section now shows the status of Awaiting Assessment

Return to the Dashboard to monitor the status of your portfolio review.

Creating Visitor Passes

To allow non-LiveText users access to your portfolio, use the Visitor Pass tool

LiveText attempts to make it as easy as possible for non-LiveText users (i.e. potential employers) to view your portfolio by using the Visitor Pass tool:

1. Tools → Visitor Passes
2. New…
3. Provide the visitor’s name and optionally a description, then Save
4. Once you save the newly created pass shows up and it is now accompanied by a alphanumeric code
5. DO NOT FORGET: Use the Share tool (see above section) to give the visitor View permissions for your portfolio
6. Finally, send this code  and LiveText URL (http://college.livetext.com) to non-LiveText users who you want to see your work

You can return to this tool to monitor when visitors have viewed your portfolio by selecting Visits for each visitor.

Printing your Portfolio

Printing your portfolio gives you the ability to distribute your work the 'old fashion way' but will not include your artifacts, streaming video, etc.

1. Open the document you want to print under the Documents tab
2. Click Print
3. Click on the titles of pages or sections to prevent them from printing
4. Use the Hide non-printable toggle to the upper right to hide artifacts, etc
5. Finally, click Print (in the upper right of the page)

Exporting your Portfolio

Say that you’d like to share your work with someone that doesn’t have (or cares to need) an Internet connection.  LiveText provides an Export tool so that you can burn your portfolio to a CD-ROM to send along with your resumé:

1. Open the document you want to export under the Documents tab
2. Click Export
3. A pop-up dialog will appear, select a location (e.g. Desktop), then Save
   
4. Open the downloaded ZIP file, select Extract all files
5. Burn the resulting files to a CD-R

FAQ

Q: I have not yet purchased Livetext, nor do I know anything about it. Where do I need to start?
A: You will need to purchase a Livetext membership either at the UMSL bookstore ($110 with tax) or online ($98). To familiarize yourself with Livetext, which is recommended before coming to an information session, please go to the Livetext home page at www.livetext.com and also read … well, this article : )

Q: Where do the training workshops take place?
A: The training sessions take place at the TLC on UMSL’s south campus.  If you are not familiar how to get there, use our directions to Marillac and through Marillac at tlc.umsl.edu.

Q: Where do I find the information about the workshops?
A: The information can be found on the College of Education Exchange: coe.umsl.edu/exchange.  Search for the term, ‘livetext’  You’ll find the most up-to-date schedules, guides, and other helpful documents.

Q: Do I need to register for the workshops?
A: Students and Faculty need to register by emailing the TLC office at tlcstaff@umsl.edu or by calling at (314) 516-4800.

Q: How long is the membership valid for a student/faculty?
A: Student memberships will for 5 years after activation. Faculty memberships will last for the duration of their employment.

Q: What is the price and length of a renewed student’s membership for Livetext?
A: Student subscriptions can be renewed for $38.00 per year by calling the Livetext accounting department at (866) 548-3839 x707.

Q: Which Livetext workshops do I need to attend?
A: All of the sessions throughout the semester are of the same level of difficulty, so it is your choice on which one to attend. These sessions focus on getting used to the layout of the website, and how to do basic operations. The Q&A session, the last session offered for the semester, is to answer any last minute questions pertaining to your portfolio. The Artifacts workshops focus on the required content for your portfolio.

Q: Will there be any more Artifact Workshops?
A: There are 2 scheduled workshops to focus on artifacts. If you cannot make those, please contact Stephanie D. Koscielski at koscielskis@umsl.edu or call her at
(314) 516-6741 to inquire about addition workshops.

Q: How does a new faculty member get a Livetext membership? Does the faculty members have to pay for it?
A: A new faculty member will need to contact Olena Zhadko in the TLC office by emailing her at tlcstaff@umsl.edu or by calling (314) 516-4800. Faculty members currently can receive a membership free of charge, courtesy of the TLC.

Q: After my instructor comments on my portfolio, where do I find their comments?
A: To access the comments made on the portfolio, log in and click on the Review tab at the top of the page. Click on your portfolio from the list of documents. On the right hand side, in the Table of Contents, the pages that have comments to review will be highlighted in blue. Simply click on that page to view the comment.

Q: Are videos in on Discovery Education streaming downloadable? Or are they meant just for streaming?
A: Discovery Education streaming videos have both kinds of videos available, although most can only be streamed. When you are viewing a video, a play button next to the name means that it is only for streaming, and a mini floppy disk button (universal for save) means that the video can be downloaded.

Q: How do I export my Livetext portfolio to view it offline?
A: See the Exporting your Portfolio in this article.

Q: How do I insert videos from the Discovery Education streaming site?
A: Any page that you would like to contain a video directly from Discovery Education has to have a Resources section. To add this section, go to the standard’s page and ensure that it does not have Resources section already. If it does not, select ‘Manage Sections’ from the top. On the next screen, select Create Section, then Resources. Verify the title of this section and press OK. Now click on the Resources line. Click on the ‘Add Discovery Education streaming’ tab, then Go. This will take you to the Discovery Education website, where you can search for videos. Once you find a video that you would like to insert into your portfolio, click on the ‘add [video title] to my Livetext Document’ that is located right below the streaming video box. This will take you back to your portfolio, where you can edit the description of the particular video before you attach it. Once you are finished, click on the Save button at the bottom, then Save & Finish on the next page. Remember that a Resources section has to be added to all the pages that you would like to attach videos in. For example, if you would like videos to go with Standards 1,2, and 3, you will have to add a Resources section to each Standards’ page.

Duplicating CDs & DVDs

If you have the money, pickup Roxio Toast for all of your optical media needs.  Copying and authoring CDs and DVDs is made incredibly easy using their simple and intuitive interface.  Unfortunately, UM Saint Louis doesn’t provide this app on its standard Macintosh lab workstation.  In truth, however, it isn’t required. Most of your needs will be answered using OS X’s built-in application, Disk Utility.  While certainly not as intuitive as Toast, Disk Utility makes disk duplication a relatively painless process once you know what you’re doing … which just so happens to be the purpose of this section.

NOTE: Disk Utility is useless for copy-protected DVDs that use Content Scramble System (CSS) encryption or a similar method of Digital Rights Management (DRM).  Don’t even try and certainly do not expect support from University lab consultants.

Create CD/DVD Master Image

We need to begin by creating a disk image that we can use later to make as many copies as we’ll need:

Be certain to select DVD/CD master for Image Format

1. Insert your master CD or DVD
2. Wait for the operating system to recognize the disk and perform its default action.  Quit DVD Player if it is launched for DVD playback.
3. Go → Utilities → Disk Utility
4. Select the optical drive where your CD/DVD master is from the left-hand pane (here 624.4 MB MATSHITADVD-R)
5. From the Apple Menu: File → New → Disk image from (MyDVD)
6. In the Convert Image dialog (above):
   Save As: Name the image the way you’d like it to appear on your copied DVD/CD
   Where: I recommend saving to the Desktop, but anywhere is fine
   Image Format: select DVD/CD master
   Encryption: none
7. Save

Be patient, this is going to take awhile depending on the size of the disc.  Full CD-Rs with about 700 MB of data will take maybe about 10-15 minutes, DVD-Rs using 4.7 GB will take up to 45-60 minutes, and DVD-R DLs using 8.5 GB will nearly double that time. ¹

Burning the CD/DVD Master to a Blank Disk

A new section will appear in the in the Disk Utility listing your new disc image

By comparison, this part is easy!

1. Insert a blank DVD/CD of equivalent size
2. Typically, OS X’s will open a dialog were you can choose to open iDVD, iTunes, Disk Utility, etc.  We already have Disk Utility open so click Ignore if it does pop up
3. Highlight your disc image in Disk Utility by clicking on it
4. Click Burn to the upper left of Disk Utility
5. That’s it, now Be patient : )

Again, this is going to take a long while. So proceed with other work while you wait.  Good news is if you need to burn multiple copies, simple repeat the steps above.

Convert DVD Chapters to Quicktime Format

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you have a DRM-free DVD that you have permission (for academic purposes) to duplicate in whole or part, a TLC Floor Staff member will be happy to assist you.  Please note, however, that illegally duplicating copyrighted material with University resources is a violation of UM Saint Louis’ Acceptable Use Policy (AUP) and can serve as grounds for disciplinary action on the part of the University or greater governing body.

There are many legitimate reasons to convert portions of a DRM-free DVD to a portable file format such as Quicktime:  Self-authored DVDs needing to be converted into a streamable format (i.e. for a student e-portfolio), a fair-use sampling of proprietary work, or even a copyright holder approved duplication.

Typically, this is a job for iMovie; creating either a montage and/or several sample slices.  Unfortunately, iMovie does not make it easy to import anything even from DRM-free DVDs … frustrating!

Enter HandBrake.  Handbrake is free software licensed under the GNU GPL that is able to re-encode DVD VOB files into just about any file format.  For our iMovie interests, however, our target format is Quicktime.

Handbrake is not installed on any campus machines.  Luckily, Handbrake for OS X is considered portable.  That is, it doesn’t need to be installed by an administrator to be used.  Merely download the correct version of the application and launch it from its disk image.²  If this seems confusing, just ask a floor staff member to give you a hand.

Handbrake, as you can see, has a daunting interface. Make use of the presets window to the right of the interface to select common conversion settings.

1. Insert the DVD that you’d like to convert from (Quit Apple’s DVD Player application once/if it launches)
2. Open Handbrake
3. Handbrake will automatically scroll out the Select Source dialog, click on the Source tool if it doesn’t
4. Select your DVD from the left-hand pane of that dialog, click Open
5. Select the desired Title and Chapters you’d like to export, use the duration notation to assist for DVDs with multiple titles
6. Select QuickTime from the Presets drawer
7. Change the Destination folder and filename if desired
8. Click on the Start tool

Depending on the length of your selection, this can take a LONG time.  My 1 hour title took over an hour to transcode. Unfortunately, it going to take several times longer to import this re-encoded into iMovie.  Maybe a day or more!!

Import DVD using iMovie ‘08 +

A far faster method (suggested by this thread) to import a DRM-free DVD than the method suggested above is available to users using iMovie ‘08 and above. iMovie ‘09, however, would be the best choice in that iMovie ‘08 has profound limitations with this method in that it can only import from DVD having less than 1.9 GB of video content.  Users attempting to import any more than this amount will cause iMovie to crash.  iMovie 09, reportedly, has remedied this limitation.

After making a Apple disk image of a DVD (and mounting that image), iMovie 08 and above sees it as camera and will ask if you want to import its contents.

1. Insert your DRM-free DVD
2. Wait for the operating system to recognize the disk and perform its default action.  Quit DVD Player if it is launched for DVD playback.
3. Go → Utilities → Disk Utility
4. Select the optical drive where your DVD was inserted from the left-hand pane
5. Click on the New Image tool
6. Using the Convert Image dialog, name the image whatever you’d like, Where: Desktop, Image Format: Compressed, Encryption: none, click Save
   
7. Once Disk Utility finishes, double click on the resulting disk image to mount it
8. Launch iMovie (this will not work with iMovie HD and below)
9. iMovie will see the mounted disk image as it would see any other HDD based camcorder and will ask if you’d like to import from it
10. By default, iMovie is set up to import the entire contents. If you’d like only certain sections, switch the toogle at the lower left from Automatic to Manual, place a checkmark next to the clips you want, and finally click Import All (or Import Checked)

I think you’ll notice that this is not only faster than importing real-time, as you would with a DV based camcorder; it is far far faster than the previous method.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Little can impress friends and peers more than knowing the right keyboard commands to get things done more efficiently and effectively. Though most of the following actions can be accomplished using the Finder’s interface, these commands will certainly improve your experience with the Mac OS by adding functionality and saving you from some of the more mundane tasks associated with regular use. For a complete list of keyboard shortcuts, be certain to visit this Apple Knowledgebase article.

⌘+a Select all items or text in active window
⌘+c Copy selected item or text to clipboard
⌘+x Cut selected item or text to clipboard
⌘+v Paste contents of clipboard to location
⌘+z Undo last action(s)
⌘+i Get info on selected item such as file size
⌘+shift+a Open the Application folder
⌘+⌥+Esc Brings up the Force Quit Applications menu to kill a frozen application
⌥+drag Copy an item instead of moving it.
⌘+shift+3 Creates a picture of the entire screen (Sends .png file to your Desktop)
⌘+shift+4 Creates a picture of a rectangular portion of the screen by dragging a box around it with your mouse after releasing keys
⌘+shift+4, then spacebar Creates a picture of a selected window or element

Footnotes

1. Times will vary depending on the speed of the machines processor and the read rate of the optical drive [↩]
2. Note that at the time of this writing, you’ll need to use a previous version of Handbrake (0.9.1) for Mac OS X 10.4, which is what the UMSL currently runs [↩]

By exploring the Naturalistic Education Theory (NET) as a strategy to engineer an appropriate sequence of topics, it can be demonstrated how to produce a pedagogically-sound curriculum and more efficient instruction. There has been a vast discrepancy between the demand for effective and efficient curriculum materials and the framework and guidelines to fulfill that need. Without a major change in our fundamental approach to pedagogy we will not be able to increase the low percent science literacy rate by an order of magnitude that is needed to serve a technology-based society. NET acknowledges the brain’s rules for meaningful and lasting learning and demands organizing the processes of pedagogy based on these rules. NET is a historical-based, natural sequencing theory that proposes that information should be arranged and taught in the same order in which it was originally discovered. This historically-based sequence sets up a learning spiral symbolizing the continuity of concepts and their systematic linking together, web style, for meaningful, multi-dimensional association; in other words, a four-dimensional, dynamically-expanded cognitive map creating a continuous association of concepts. It is a mental construction process fueled by natural curiosity and developmentally-based need-to-know. The structure and function relationships of the knowledge and skills we would like to develop in the mental construct of the student flow naturally as if the concepts were their own architects and their revelation engineered by their own processes of evolution.

Introduction

Exploring the Naturalistic Education Theory (NET) as a strategy to engineer an appropriate sequence of topics it can be demonstrated how to produce a pedagogically sound curriculum and more efficient instruction.  There has been a vast discrepancy between the demand for effective and efficient curriculum materials and the framework and guidelines to fulfill that need (McKenna, 1976; Granger, 1992).   Without a major change in our fundamental approach to pedagogy we will not be able to increase the low percent science literacy rate by an order of magnitude that is needed to serve a technology-based society (Granger, 1998).

Rules and Guidelines of the Game

The mind, as well as all of the other components of the universe, must obey the rules of physics, chemistry, and physiology. This sounds obvious and simple, yet some psychologists, educators, and theologians have historically continued to offer more esoteric explanations for how the mind works, forsaking the mechanical and supporting the mystical. Assuming a mechanistic phenomenon, the recording and processing mechanisms of the mind must be based upon on off, present absent, high low, flip flop, excited nonexcited, or similar phenomena. The “astonishing hypothesis” espoused by Francis Crick (1994) and the neuronal group selection theory developed by Gerald Edelman (1992) are two of the more progressive explanations of the mechanisms of brain functioning. Both explanations are chemically based at the neuron mass level and offer exciting understandings for shaping and directing learning environments. Although critically important for establishing the complete picture and assuring optimal efficacy, knowledge of the exact biochemical physical mechanism is not critical to the application and manipulation of the traditional sensory input and processing procedures. However, the propositions offered in this thesis are congruent with the hypotheses of both Crick and Edelman.

If the mind is electro physical and not parapsychological, then there must be an instructional method that would be the most effective and efficient strategy for learning. Based on other physiological phenomena derived from basic genetics, one can assume that the mechanical variation in the internalizing system allows for either no function or function with some degree of variability in rate. As we know, there is some variability with respect to efficiency of the sensory input mechanism from person to person, but the biochemistry/biophysics for recording, retrieval, filing, and processing would be essentially the same and it would either work or not work.

Therefore, learning can be facilitated by providing stimuli that enhance the effectiveness of the input mechanisms and that are congruent with the recording, filing, retrieval, and processing mechanisms of the brain. It is generally agreed, if not always practiced, that every possible input stimulus should be utilized for instruction of every concept or informational byte and that this should be made as individualistic as possible. Tinkering with this aspect of teaching can be very creative and rewarding. The theoretical basis for the operation and effectiveness of these techniques is known well enough for proper utilization. However, no matter how well this is done, in and of itself, it will not produce the needed increase in instructional efficiency to bring the rate of learning and knowledge base to a satisfactory level (Granger, 1994).

On the other hand, the process of internalization and utilization of information is not understood and proposed theories on enhancing learning are somewhat inconsistent and incongruent, certainly not holistic. Because of this lack of solid foundation, we see the curriculum engineers fall into the same trap of doing the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Perhaps write another, a little more detailed, textbook…perhaps a purple version. Let’s develop one more curriculum. Maybe we could put together a national list of concepts to be learned. Let’s add more body parts to the pedagogy–hands on, heads on, heart on, and feet on experiences are the ticket. Question our questions. Wait a little longer. Let’s break down the concept into smaller and smaller components. Perhaps a little more discerning evaluation instrument. History convinces us that all of this effort is doomed. How long did humanity pursue the dream of flight? How many people attempted to fly only to find themselves kissing the ground hard, crashing headlong into a wall or worse dropping like a rock off a cliff? When did flight really begin to take off? It was the discovery of the Bernoulli effect by Daniel Bernoulli (1700-1782) that led to a major principle of physics and opened the door for Wilbur and Orville Wright (1871-1948) to successfully attack human flight from a principled, scientific approach. Major advances in teaching and learning are no different. First must come the philosophical underpinning that account for our observations on cognition. Then the strategies can be developed to address the enhancement of cognition. What approach can be employed that takes into account the physics, physiology, and chemistry of the brain and is in harmony with observations of what appears to be effective instructional strategies and learning behavior?

An Instructional Theory Hypothesis

Philosophers of education have attempted to develop comprehensive theories of education that lead to pragmatic methods of efficient instruction. The first recorded, inclusive, systematic approach was espoused by John Amos Comenius in 1623. He stated that:

“We are so bold as to promise a Great Didactic…a complete treatise on how to teach all subjects to all men, and how to teach them in such a way that the result will be certain…. We shall show that all this is done a priori, that is to say, deriving from the immutable nature of things…and that a universal system is thus established which is valid for the institution of universal schools.” (Comenius, 1623)

Although the underlying theme in Comenius’ theory was clouded by religion, moral, and sometimes mystic perspectives, his concept, that there is a natural index of instruction derived from experiential interactions with nature, forms the foundation for many subsequent theories. The work of Comenius was never widely implemented and restricted to some individual attempts on his part to start schools based on his philosophy of education.

In the early part of the 20th century, John Dewey (1933) led the progressive education movement following Comenius’ lead. Although “progressive schools” sprang up here and there in name, few were practitioners of Deweyism in the true sense. David S. Ausubel’s (1968) work stressed the significance of sequence and the critical nature of the association and interrelationship of concepts. Jean Piaget (1972) proposed that the cognitive level of the concept must be appropriate for the cognitive skills of the learner and that the educational experience be made real in the sense of direct student involvement through exploration. These learning theories have common ground that form the foundation for current thinking by the constructivists.

However, something seems to be lost in the translation of the learning theories of these philosophers into the pragmatic setting of the classroom. What is missing? Perhaps what we have not been able to derive from these proposals is a straight forward mechanistic learning theory, one that makes biological and pedagogical sense, is easily interpreted, and leads to pragmatic postulates and reasonable mechanisms of implementation in the classroom. What is the unifying theory that can be used to tie these ideas together in a holistic approach to the science of education?

One of the beauties of nature is that it appears so complex but yet is governed by simple principles–a complex structure with non random rules and basic elements. The Naturalistic Education Theory (NET) is a unified learning theory of instructional methodology and tactical education. NET originates with the melding together of the propositions of Comenius (1623), Ausubel (1968), Benjamin S. Bloom (1976), Jerome S. Bruner (1960), Robert M. Gagne and L.J. Briggs (1979), and Piaget (1972) into a neo constructivistic approach. The mechanical classroom manifestation of Ausubel’s learning theory materializes in the form of concept map based lesson designs as presented by Joseph D. Novak and D. Bob Gowan (1984). Implementation of Piagetian learning theory into the classroom takes the form of the Robert Karplus, et. al. (1977) learning cycle.

In the NET, the philosophical bases of these strategies are amplified and extended to incorporate a learning spiral (Granger, 1987) rather than a cycle, and a historical, natural sequencing of concepts rather than a two dimensional, somewhat spontaneous knowledge Vee (Novak, Gowin & Johnanon, 1983) association of terms. NET, a historical-based natural sequencing theory (Granger, 1989), proposes that information consists of bytes which should be arranged and taught in the same order in which they were originally discovered, disregarding artificial categorization by traditional academic disciplines. This historically based sequence sets up a learning spiral symbolizing the continuity of information bytes and their systematic linking together, web style, for a meaningful, multi-dimensional concept structure and continuous association; in other words, a four-dimensional, dynamically expanding cognitive map creating a continuous association of concepts. It is a mental construction process fueled by natural curiosity and a developmentally-based need to know. The total mental construct will continue to expand and become more complex if intellectual energy is expended to form interconnections between existing mental constructs and new experiences. This latticed association is engineered by design, not stumbled upon by pragmatic trial and error or the artificial selection process that seems to be prevalent in the pedagogy of today. The structure and function relationships of the construct flow naturally as if the discoveries were their own architects and their revelation engineered by their own processes of evolution. Together these broad principles form the NET (Granger, 1996).

If we assume the universe of knowledge is, at present, in a continuing state of expansion and development, then just as the components of the physical universe have become more complex and interrelated, but more flexible and open, so does the mind and its contents over time. In both cases, time is the fourth dimension (really should be called the first dimension, for without it there are no other dimensions) that limits the complexity of form and format of the universe and the development and incorporation of knowledge constructs in the mind.

One cannot develop a holistic view of the universe by snipping out a time segment, say 10^-10 seconds after the initiation of the universe, a.k.a. the “Big Bang,” and studying leptons, for example. Likewise, to snip out a segment from the continuum of the development of human knowledge also produces only a stand alone phenomenon that makes little sense in the context of the holistic understanding of the human experience and the universe in which it occurs.

This is not to say we cannot do it; we can do both. We can indirectly see traces or inferences of muons and we can indirectly identify DNA, for example, as a cloud of information floating in the mind, in its own space. Neither conceptualization is useful or explanative in its own right, even though each may exist and can be seen, albeit indirectly, that is, symbolically, because these single bytes of information will not be tied to a meaningful mental construct representing the known portion of the universe as we currently understand it.

Concepts developed about our universe that form our mental pictures can be likened to a jigsaw puzzle, where a single, isolated piece (byte) is not very useful in and of itself in solving the overall puzzle or yielding an accurate image of a concept or series of concepts that lead to an illustrative principle. Some pieces are more useful than others, depending on the quality and quantity of information riding on them and the relatedness that information has to previous experience of the puzzle solver. However, assuming uniqueness, the piece could be oriented in a multitude of positions and spatially anywhere within the framework (parameters of which we might not even know) of the picture or concept to be developed. With no external clues for orientation, random choice of position could lead to a multitude of resulting perceptions and meanings of the picture, including, perhaps, an upside down misconception. Our idea of the concept could not only be upside down, but backward and out of context, if we were working with a four-dimensional phenomenon.

If you are lucky to start the puzzle with a corner piece and you have gained some operational or process skills, you have limited your outcomes to only four possible positions in context of the picture, however, overall orientation could still be highly varied. If however, the corner piece fits against or was attached to an existing, correctly oriented set of pictures, then everything would work out okay and reflect the reality of the situation, at least in the context of the existing cognitive structure. The correct position in time and place for a picture would be fixed. How the original piece is laid down has a great effect on how the whole will look.

“A small error in the beginning leads to a large error in the end.”
Aristotle

There is a reason why puzzle manufacturers have developed a continuous line of puzzles from the simplest forms to those so complex that it appears only the creator can figure out the solution. In order to capture young minds in the joys of puzzle solving the makers start with puzzles of few pieces, say three to four with easy fit connections. The pieces are large and easily handled. They have designs or pictures that are universally recognizable and the pieces fit into a frame with preformed border, usually with a continuation of the picture or design. Unless manufacturers never want to sell another puzzle, they do not give the unskilled puzzle solver a 10,000 piece puzzle printed on both sides with a vague, low resolution picture. Of course this is a simplistic analogy, but there is a useful lesson here. To gain meaningful understandings, concepts must be learned in a sequence that moves over time from simple to complex. The learning spiral as symbolic representation of the NET can be thought of as a four dimensional puzzle. By taking the time dimension into account, the NET based engineering of the learning experience can allow for a temporal and spatial sequence of curriculum development that incorporates the natural orientation, interrelationship, and interaction of concepts and thought and helps to build a meaningful cognitive structure in the mind of the learner.

We believe quarks preceded leptons, that in turn preceded hadrons, that preceded nuclei, etc., for systematic reasons. We also know why the discovery of the cell theory preceded the understanding of mitochondria, that preceded DNA, etc. As we as organisms move through stages of understanding based on experiences, the historical sequence of instruction follow the pattern of our developmental ability to understand, coupled with the sequence of our exposure to phenomena in a need to know as we go hierarchy. The instructional exposures are revealed in sequence based on the chronology of the original discovery experiences. Thus our growing knowledge spiral establishes our propensity and perceptiveness to recognize and internalize the existence of the next experience in sequence. Psychogenesis recapitulates chronology. The history of intellectual development is the natural architect for individual cognitive development. Natural curiosity and the need to know is the engineer for designing the curriculum of life.

“For effective learning, students need an orderly and ordered set of activities that can result in the completion of a learning process.”
- John Dewey

Starting at the beginning of cognitive time (t_c), the origin of the individual, where t_c=0, it follows that the origin or nucleation site of the learning spiral would be an informational byte that would be described as science.

Figure 1. The Axis of Content Outlining the Cognitive Development Playing Field.

Inquiry and science are natural phenomenon, genetically based, they provide both the origin and backbone for the lattice of the learning spiral. They become the tools of acquisition.

“A new education from birth onward must be built up.”
- Maria Montessori

The highly developed natural curiosity of the human being, honed by natural selection, is the centerpiece for intellectual development and the mechanistic base for the philosophy of science. Unlike the man made constructs of mathematics, language, theology, etc., science is a natural behavior, essential to survival and therefore the engine for other mental constructs. Science, in its broadest definition, is the essence of our cognitive structure–both knowledge and process.

“Education must be reconstructed and based on the laws of nature and not on preconceived notions and prejudices of adult society.”
-Maria Montessori

The central axis or regression line of mental tendency of each individual would be defined as a line in four dimensions with (x,y,z,t) coordinates, radiating from the same origin. The perfect state of this line representing the center of mental gravity might be expressed by the two points with coordinates (0,0,0,0), (0,∞,0,∞). The coordinates of the line can be altered by the systematic addition of knowledge in the various quadrants within which the spiral lattice exists (X_n,Y_n,Z_n,t_n).

As the knowledge base grows and the cognitive structure develops the possibility of intercommunications between concepts increases and the interface between the known (experienced) and unknown increases. The more experiences you have the more experience you are able to have.

Figure 2. The Learning Spiral Imposed on Temporal and Spatial Sequencing by the Naturalistic Education Theory.

This does not mean that everyone’s learning spiral would or should look identical. In actuality, identical learning spirals would be rare, a perfect one improbable.

“The direction in which education starts a person will determine their future.”
- Plato

Only in the perfect state would the resulting construct be a complete, symmetrical, radiating spiral lattice. This idealized or all knowing structure would be unlikely to exist in the human condition given our mental limitations and or temporal restrictions. Affective factors open or close the possibilities of additions to the construct, in some instances causing deviation from the idealized coordinates to the extreme point of rendering the individual inoperative in typical environmental contexts. However, society and the educational system it produces should shoulder the responsibility for providing each individual with the most comprehensive experiences for the development of a complete, basic mental framework, particularly during the critical, early formative years.

“The solution which I am urging is to eradicate the fatal disconnection of subjects which kills the vitality of our modern curriculum. There is only one subject matter for education and that is life in all its manifestations.”
- Alfred North Whitehead

Cognitive Degradation

The complex structure of the cognitive spiral lattice labors under the second law of thermodynamics as do other constructs of nature. There is a natural degradation of organization and systematic processes of the cognitive structure. According to the NET, the total construct will continue to become more complex if intellectual energy is expended to form interconnections between existing mental constructs and new experiences. Use and maintenance of existing constructs are essential for concept integrity. Reversal of the learning process or rate of decay (R_CD) is a function of the same parameters as construction, time (t) and space (P), thus R_CD=f(t,P).

The outermost bytes of the cognitive structure are liable to erosion to the highest degree since there are fewer interconnections or stabilizing factors associated with them. Those innermost bytes which form the cognitive core of the spiral lattice are saturated with interconnecting ideas and processes and therefore the most stable.

Distorted cognitive structures that branch singularly from the idealized center of mental gravity enhance the possibility of erosion of other, not so well developed constructs in other quadrants. Spatially separated multiple lines or unconnected branches of the cognitive structure are more unstable than contiguous lattice structures that approach the idealized, complete cognitive spiral.

Concepts and processes have a half life in which decay is a function of chronological origin and subsequent renewal or maintenance. The older the concept in the mental construct and therefore the more interconnections there are, the most stable the byte. In general, last on, first off. The decay rate of concept 1 compared to concept 2 is a function of time where t_C1<t_C2 and therefore R_CDC1>R_CDC2. The more frequent and current the reinforcement the more resistant to decay. Since time, in the case of NET, dictates position and position indicates time, R_CD=f[t(P)], we can devise a mental picture for an index of cognitive decay by R_CD=k₁t + k2P_(xn,yn,zn).

The principles of cognitive degradation do not preclude internal or point erosion of lattice components. Without energy expenditures for lattice maintenance, the lattice could become permeated with hollow sections or regress to multiple linear or branch structures and therefore are more liable to decay. This erosion could be initiated by lack of maintenance, electro physical factors, aging, the incorporation of misconceptions, or a combination of these factors.

Misconceptions are a problem in building the lattice in that they, just as puzzle pieces, may be incorrectly placed and yet may partially fit and interconnect with some existing cognitive structures. However, they cannot make additional interconnections and form a completed harmonious cognitive element. They may even distort the whole web and influence the spatial and temporal acquisition of additional knowledge and processes. Although misconceptions are natural phenomena and are operative constructs at certain levels of human need and cognitive development, they substantially reduce the efficiency and effectiveness of the overall learning process and speed up the processes of cognitive decay.

Implications of NET

What pragmatic meaning does NET have for the classroom teacher? How can it facilitate the construction of an effective and efficient curriculum? NET has many implications associated with its premises and they can be categorized into two sets, theoretical postulates and pragmatic propositions. The mechanisms of the operation of the brain are not fully understood. However, NET is based on several postulates that are consistent with behavioral, physiological, and psychological observations.

Theoretical Postulates of the NET

• The mechanisms of the brain are electro physical/chemical.
• Mental development in human beings is predictably sequential, albeit multi dimensional and varied in rate.
• Science, its processes and concepts, is the natural and fundamental mechanism from which knowledge and cognitive skills grow and develop.
• A byte of information has specific coordinates that define its place in time and space in the cognitive structure and this coordinate is critical to its effective and efficient translation and establishment in a mental niche.
• Sequencing of the individual learning experience parallels the cognitive, affective and psychomotor development of the evolution of human understanding over time.
• The potential for the rate and breadth of concept incorporation and process skill development increases over time with development and expansion of the learning spiral lattice of the mind.
• Meaningful interconnections that are formed through temporal and spatial relations exist among all subject matter concepts and process skills.
• Motivation and curiosity flows naturally from need and understanding.
• Mastery learning is an achievable goal as learners progress along chronologically based concept/skill paths.
• The cognitive decay sequence is inverse to temporal acquisition and maintenance, and related to spatial position, and rate is inversely proportional to maintenance frequency and directly related to distance from the central core of the cognitive spiral lattice.

Assuming the theoretical postulates to be true, the adoption of NET would lead to a set of inescapable propositions needed to be taken into consideration by the curriculum designer and teacher when engineering an educational experience for prospective learners.

Pragmatic Propositions in the Use of NET

• Curriculum engineering should be founded on a discovery based chronological sequencing and spatial continuity of concepts and process skills.
• Learning experiences for specific concepts and associated process skills should be engineered, within the boundaries of accuracy and efficacy, analogous to the original discovery process.
• Science should form the nucleus as the underlying theme for curriculum construction.
• The whole of the educational experience should be integrated, throughout the body of knowledge.
• Learning experiences should be developed, sequenced, grouped, and delivered according to the cognitive developmental stages of the learners.
• Instructional programs should be built on the existing cognitive structure of the individual, taking into account missing, incomplete, or incorrect components of the knowledge/process spiral lattice.
• Rate of exposure to concepts and process skills should coincide with the construction incorporation rate of the individual and should not exceed this pace.
• Curriculum engineering and associated activities should review and utilize prior knowledge and processes in a comprehensive and systematic manner.
• Student evaluation and progress should be charted according to the position of the learner on the cognitive learning spiral of the human experience.
• Teacher education should focus on developing expertise at various chronological stages of cognitive development, rather than separate disciplines, as circumscribed by the physiology and experiential base of the learner and in synchrony with the chronological development of the body of knowledge and the processes associated with its acquisition.
• Learning experiences should be available that are engineered coherently from birth to death.

Conclusion

Without a major change in our fundamental approach to pedagogy, we will not be able to increase the current seven percent science literacy rate in our population by an order of magnitude. To achieve this desired level of understanding in the general populace, we have to abandon our trial and error approach to instructional strategies in favor of a science based learning theory that dictates a systematic approach to education.

The NET acknowledges the brain’s rules for meaningful and lasting learning and demands organizing the processes of pedagogy based on those rules. The NET provides an integrated, holistic explanation of the recording, filing, retrieval and processing mechanisms of the brain in so far as they relate to pedagogy. Based on mechanistic premises, it provides a theoretical foundation on which sound instructional engineering can begin.

References

Ausubel, D.S.: 1968, Educational Psychology: A Cognitive View, Holt, Rinehart & Winston. New York.

Bloom, B.S.: 1976, Human Characteristics and School Learning, McGraw-Hill. New York.

Bruner, J.S.: 1960, The Process of Education, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA.

Comenius, J.A. (Jan Amos Komensky): 1623, The Great Didactic, in Classics in Education, No. 33, Teachers College Press, 1967, New York.

Crick, F.: 1994, The Astonishing Hypothesis: The Scientific Search for the Soul, Scribner, New York.

Dewey, J.: 1933, How We Think, Health, Boston, MA.

Edelman, G.M.: 1942, Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind, Basic Books, New York.

Gagne, R.M. & Briggs, L.J.: 1979, Principles of Instructional Design, 2nd Ed. Holt, Rinehart and Winston, New York.

Granger, C.R.: 1987, Curricular Materials for Teaching Core Competencies and Key Skills in the Life Sciences, University of Missouri-St. Louis Printing Services, St. Louis, MO.

Granger, C.R.: 1989, The Corner Science Store, University of Missouri St. Louis Printing Services, St. Louis, MO.

Granger, C.R.: 1992, The Partnership for Increasing Scientific Literacy – A Proposal by the Academy of Science of St. Louis, Academy of Science of St. Louis, St. Louis, MO.

Granger, C.R.: 1994, Reform in Science Education Part I Is There an Echo in Here? Missouri Science News, Spring April,14.

Granger, C.R.: 1994, Reform Science Education Part II What’s Wrong With This Picture? Missouri Science News, Fall September, 14.

Granger, C.R.: 1995, Reform in Science Education Part II A Unified Learning Theory for Instructional Methodology and Tactical Education. Missouri Science News, February, 9-10.

Granger, C.R.: 1995, Reform in Science Education Part IV Implications of the Naturalistic Education Theory, Missouri Science News, Fall, 5-7.

Granger, C.R.: 1996, The Naturalistic Education Theory: In Search of a Unified Learning Theory for Instructional Methodology and Tactical Education, Journal of Thought 31(2), 85-96.

Granger, C.R.: 1998, Editor-Author. Defining and Assessing Scientific Literacy for the 21st Century – A Partnership Initiative for Increasing Scientific Literacy, Academy of Science of St. Louis, St. Louis, MO.

Karplus, R., Lawson, A.E., Wollman, W., Appel, M., Bernoff, R., Howe, A., Rusch, J.J., & Sullivan, F.: 1977, Science Teaching and the Development of Reasoning–General Science, Lawrence Hall of Science, Berkeley, CA.

McKenna, R.R.: 1976, Piaget’s Complaint–and Mine: Why Is There No Science of Education? Phi Delta Kappan 57(6), 406-409.

Novak, J.D. & Gowin, D.B.: 1984. Learning How to Learn, Cambridge University Press, New York.

Piaget, J.: 1970a, Psychology and Epistemology, The Viking Press, New York.

Piaget, J.: 1970b, Science of Education and the Psychology of the Child, Grossman Publishing, New York.

Piaget, J.: 1972, Intellectual Evolution from Adolescence to Adulthood, Human Development (15), 1-12.

A casual Google search isn’t much of a help. Depending on your search terms, you’ll be funneled to web sites that specialize in some fairly advanced transcription devices and software more suited to professionals than the basic academic needs of transcribing interviews for coding.  You need to get fairly specific to get a low cost solution.  This is what we came up with:

The Gear

A base level digital voice recorder, USB foot pedal, and NCH's Express Scribe is all you really need unless you really want to get cutting edge features.

• Olympus WS-311M Voice Recorder – (approx $80) Easily record in high-quality stereo sound with this compact USB digital recorder. Store and organize your files on the unit, and transfer them to your PC with the easy-to-use “USB Direct” design. Simply plug the recorder into a computer, with no USB cable necessary. Also can be used as a USB storage device to save and transport other documents, images and etc.
• VEC USB Foot Pedal Control - (approx $40) High quality, rugged USB foot pedals connect to your Windows PC or MAC OS X to control dictation player software. There are three pedal controls for rewind (right), play/pause (center) and fast-forward (left).  Use these foot controls to manipulate playback while keeping your hands on the keyboard.
• NCH Software’s Express Scribe Transcription Playback Software – ($0 or shareware) Express Scribe works with the foot pedal to control the playback of just about any digital audio file format including wav, mp3, au, aif, wma, dss, and many more.  NCH Software offers this product free in the hopes that you will later purchase among their many other software titles.

In total, this comes to a little over $120.  A far cry from the $600 we’ve spent on previous transcription solutions here at the TLC. Speaking of which, the TLC has a small supply of transcription gear including standard analog (tape cassette) transcribers, highend digital recorders/transcribers, and of course, all the gear mentioned above.  You can check out the availability of these assets by viewing  our Sound/Audio Capture category under the TLC Resourses page.

Using a Portable Digital Voice Recorder

For the purposes of this article, we are going to be looking at the Olympus WS-311M Voice Recorder, which we believe is pretty representative of this class of voice recorders.  It is also the one that we have available for checkout.

Recording

Aside from the ability to switch folders in which to place your recordings, it is pretty much as you would expect using any other recording equipment

1. Be certain that the recorder is in VOICE mode; this model allows the device to dual as an MP3 player
2. Press the FOLDER button to choose a folder in which to make a recording.  You’ll likely not be interested in dividing up your recordings in this manner, but it is important to point out so that later you can find your recordings if you happen to switch folders for some reason
3. When ready, press the REC button, the record/play indicator light will glow red
4. The display here indicates (a) current recording mode is HQ, (b) elapsed time into the recording is 35M12S, (c) memory remaining is almost FULL, (d) level meter display L/R input
5. Press REC again to pause recording, press yet again to resume
6. Press STOP to end this recording session

Playback

Once you know what you are looking at, you'll feel in complete command of the device

1. If necessary, press the FOLDER button to select the location where your recording was stored
2. Use the +/- buttons to scroll up and down your recorded sessions
3. Press OK or PLAY to begin playback, press either again to pause and/or resume
4. The display here indicates (a) play position bar indicator, (b) current playback time 05M 10S, (c) total file length 22M 41S
5. Use the +/- buttons to adjust the volume
6. Press STOP or OK to end playback

Be sure to get used to using the the Forward  and Rewind  controls to navigate through your recording.

Connecting to your Computer (Mac/PC)

The Olympus 311M is has one really cool feature: It can plug directly into your computer, just like any other USB Flash drive, without the need of a special cable or some complicated docking system. Olympus calls this, appropriately, USB Direct design.  Whatever its name, it is very handy for a laptop user (such as myself) who doesn’t want to carry around cables for every device I use.  However, all devices like this will have a basic solution to connect it to your Mac or PC.¹

This device, when connected to your computer (Mac or PC) will function just like any other USB flash memory device.

1. While the recorder is stopped, slide the HOLD switch upward to turn the recorder off
2. Detach the battery compartment by pressing the RELEASE button on the back of the device
3. Connect the USB terminal to the USB port of your Mac or PC; Remote will display on the recorder’s display screen  once it has successfully connected with your computer
4. Mac users will see the drive appear on their desktop, PC users will see a new removable drive under My Computer
5. Be certain to follow your operating system’s safe removal instructions before removing the recorder from your USB port!

Once connected to your Mac or PC, this voice recorder, like many, will behave much as would any other USB Flash device.

• The 5 voice folders of this recorder are displayed as: DSS_FLDA, DSS_FLDB, DSS_FLDC, DSS_FLDD, and DSS_FLDE. Corresponing, of course, to the folders we talked about earlier. Recorded voice files are saved as WMA files.
• Drill into the folder(s) where you stored your recordings and copy the files to any folder on your computer. While transmitting data, Busy is displayed, and the record/play indicator light and USB access indicator light will flash red.

Menu Functions

Access the recorder’s menu by holding down the OK/MENU button for over a second.²

In this section we’ll not get into any step-by-step instructions, but it is important to at least point out the functionality  in case you have special needs.  All devices of this type will have similar if not identical functionality.

Use this chart as I guide for special needs, but likely you will be happy with the default HQ setting

• Rec Menu > Rec Menu: Select the appropriate recording quality for your session.
• Rec Menu > Mic Sense: Select the microphone sensitivity between conference (conf) and dictation (dict)
• Rec Menu > VCVA: Variable Control Voice Actuator.  Simply, do you want the digital recorder to cut out the silences from your sessions?
• Rec Menu > Low Cut Filter: Minimizes air conditioner noise and other similar noises while recording.
• Sub Menu > Time & Date: Make certain you are getting the right time stamp on your recordings
• Rec Menu > Format: Returns the recorder to its original state except for date and time.  Erases everything!

This, of course,  isn’t everything in the MENU.  I’ve only pointed out settings I think you might be interested in.

Using your Laptop Computer

While slightly more complicated, if you have a laptop computer, there is no reason not to use its built-in recording capabilities instead of using a digital voice recorder.  However, do yourself a favor and install Audacity to handle the recording instead of using your computers software. Audacity is free, open source software available for Mac OS X, Windows, GNU/Linux, and other operating systems.

Installing Audacity

While installing Audacity is trivial, some get intimidated adding support for MP3 export (saving).  Audacity uses LAME’s MP3 encoder to handle this and for relatively obscure legal reasons cannot bundle it into its installation package.  However, let’s make it as simple as possible:

1. Download Audacity from their download page.  As of this writing they are currently offering a stable (1.2) and beta version (1.3).  This article is going to use the beta in that I prefer some of its newer features and have yet to have a problem with its functionality
2. Install it with all of its defaults unless you have an opinion otherwise.
3. Launch the app and follow the resulting dialog boxes (mainly asking your preferred language)
4. From the Menu Bar select: Edit > Preferences > Import/Export
5. In the section MP3 Export Library click on Download for the LAME MP3 Library, select the appropriate download based on your operating system
6. Open the ZIP archive and copy and paste the lame_enc.dll to your Program FilesAudacityPlug-Ins folder
7. Return now to your Audacity Import/Export settings and select Find Library under MP3 Export Library and browse back to Program FilesAudacityPlug-Ins
   and select lame_enc.dll. Close out the dialogs with OK and that’s it.

Not really that bad.  You are now ready to begin.

Recording

Now it’s time to use the microphone. You can either use built-in recording capabilities of your laptop or connect an external microphone.

If you use an in-built mic make sure the settings are set correctly. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Sounds and Audio Devices. Go to Voice tab > Voice Recording > Volume

Make sure that Microphone is check marked and the volume is set high.

If you decide to use an external mic, you can check out a Sound Grabber microphone by Crown , or an M-Audio Classroom Studio Mic at the E. Desmond Lee Technology and Learning Center. Once you connect the microphones and ready to record open Audacity. To start recording hit the red Record button.

If the microphone works properly once you hit the record button you will see something similar to these wave forms

Once you finish your recording hit the stop button. Go to File> Save Project. Then go to File > Export as MP3. Now you have your file ready to go and can move to the next section.

Transcription

Of course, you could just use your media player (iTunes, Windows Media Player, WinAmp, etc) to playback your recordings, but unless you are a really fast typist or you’re good at short-hand, you’ll be spending a lot of time clicking play, pause, and rewind.  What you need is some way to control playback without needing to keep taking your hands away from the keyboard.  Unless you’ve developed your powers of telekenesis, you’ll need need to use another appendage. Luckily, you’ve two extras doing nothing under your desk.

Assuming that you’ve already installed Express Scribe and have purchased your foot pedal, let’s begin.

Foot Pedal Setup

You'll want to be certain that the foot pedal is setup properly before you begin.

1. Plug the foot pedal into any USB port of your computer, if this is the first time that you’ve plugged it in, Windows will need to look for the driver for it.  No worries, XP and above will have no problem recognizing it
2. Launch Express Scribe
3. Options → Pedal and Hot Keys…
4. Check Use foot pedal payback control under the Foot Pedal Control section
5. For Port, select VEC Infinity USB Pedals and Handheld
6. Number of Pedals: 3 Pedals
7. Click Foot Pedal Control Setup Wizard and follow the on screen instructions
8. Once finished, click OK

Transcribing

To get started, the easiest thing to do is to drag and drop your recordings onto Express Sribes dictation listing

1. Click on the Load tool to browse for your recordings or merely drag and drop your recording to the dictation listing on the application.
2. Select the recording that you would like to transcribe, then click on the word processor tool
3. This will open Word with Express Scribe’s default template³
4. Press on PLAY on the foot pedal, PLAY again to pause/resume⁴
5. Type your little heart out using the REW pedal to jog back in the playback

When you go to save your document, Express Scribe will now remember where you saved it.  When you return to do more transcription, right click on the recording and select Open Attachment List.  Here you can open your previous work and/or associate other documents with it as well.

While there is great deal more functionality in this program, this should be enough to get you rolling.  Please refer to Express Scribes full documentation by pressing F1 or Help → Help Contents.

Using Voice Recognition Software

Instead of typing the text yourself you can dictate it to your computer. Windows Vista and above (not available in XP) has a program called Windows Speech Recognition that comes with the operating system that is remarkably accurate converting your speech to text with only about a 5% failure rate (even with Olena’s Ukrainian accent).  While it was originally designed to allow the user to control the computer by giving specific voice commands, one of the functions of the program is dictation of text.  It takes about 5 minutes to set it up but can save you hours in transcription time.

Currently there is no low cost and easy to use software where you can directly import an audio file and get a text file.   Instead, you will need to listen to the audio file and reiterate it clearly into the microphone.

Without much setup, this utility works very well and is remarkably intuitive

The utility can be found by either going to the Start Menu and typing in ’speech recognition’ or Start > All Programs > Accessories > Ease of Access > Speech Recognition.  If this is the first time you have launched the program you’ll need to run through the setup wizard.  We highly recommend that you have a good quality microphone headset.  This will dramatically improve the program’s success rate.

Be certain to visit the Speech Recognition Options (Start > Control Panel > Speech Recognition Options) to take a look at the Speech Reference Card to get ideas of how else to improve your repertoire of dictation commands and how else to use this very handy utility.  It here, as well, you can go to help train your computer to understand your voice better.

Transcription Services

So what if you have the money and/or you are desperate enough that you are willing to spend the money anyway?  Here are a few recommendations:

• Verbalink.com: Beginning at $1.50/minute for one speaker with a 3-5 day turnaround time.  See their rates for more speakers and faster turnaround times.
• GMR Transcription: Beginning at $1.25/minute for academic with up to 2 speakers with a 3-4 week turnaround time for at least 15 audio uploads at one time. GMR also advertises Spanish, Medical, and Legal transcription services.  See their rates for more speakers and faster and discount turnaround times
• Caption Midwest: A local company with rates starting as low as $1.50 a minute for standard transcription and only slightly higher for more difficult subject matter. Rush rates and Spanish translation available.
• Googling transcription services, of course, will provide a healthy up-to-date listing to browse through.

Footnotes

1. Some devices, however,  might require that you use a special cable, docking system, drivers, or all the above.  If you buy your own digital recorder, be certain to ask how easy it is to connect to your Mac or PC. [↩]
2. Be certain to check out all the details in the Olympus documentation for this model [↩]
3. Be certain to read Express Scribe’s full documentation if you’d like to customize this template or add special templates [↩]
4. Might be handy (no pun intended) to take your shoes off for this [↩]

I’ve always believed that people usually live up to the expectations we place on them. Many children seem to succeed, often, based upon the support their parents and community give them. However, when the larger community around them closes ranks and lowers expectations,that, too, also seems to determine a great deal-both about what they will do, and how society perceives their successes or failures.

According to international migration information (Terrazas & Batalova, 2008) in 2007, 22.9% of school-age children had at least one immigrant parent, 47.5% of which reported their background to be Hispanic or Latino. In 35 years, white students will be a minority in every category of public education as it is conceived today, while the non-English proficient student population will expand exponentially (Garcia & Cuéllar, 2006). This reality is one that seems to scare many Americans, driving research into somewhat xenophobic territory, and reflecting an attitude of exclusion.

While government policies may often change, many Americans are leery of immigrants, and few of the schools in areas of new immigration (suburbs and rural areas) are able and/or willing to help children conquer economic and social obstacles posed by being an outsider (Wortham et al., 2002). These are difficulties wholly different and separate from their immigrant identities, but seem often to appear in research as assumed correlations. In other words, when we speak about ‘immigrants,’ it is often taken for granted that we are talking about those with less mastery of the English language, those who are ‘poor,’ ‘lazy,’ and less educated.

Little has been done to change this stigma toward today’s immigrants, but that is the direction research seemed to be moving. Some intrepid researchers (Dorner, Orellana, & Li-Grining, 2007), however, are attempting to conquer this negative drift. With growing numbers of immigrants in our schools, researchers like Rubin (2007) have set out to explore what it means to be a minority student, learning about civic engagement in school, and how the way we teach it tells us something about how society and educators especially view them as part of the community. Rubin (2007) claims that while students from diverse backgrounds are taught civics and civic engagement in school, most studies that investigate how civics are taught are carried out so in such a way as to examine the civic knowledge and participation of students from groups outside of the white, middle-class upbringing only from a deficit perspective. In other words, when addressing the needs of immigrants and children of immigrants, their background serves as a problem, serving only to hold them back.

I thought that studies like this, and the focus now on global citizenship (where everyone is seen as a citizen of the world, interdependent, with some valuable knowledge to contribute to the way we understand each other– www.globalcitizens.org) would indicate progress in terms of how we thought about immigrants. I thought it would move educators and researchers and possibly even our society to think about the benefits of having multiple cultures and languages represented in our schools and communities. After all, it cannot be denied that America is a nation of immigrants, with most of its citizens’ ancestors arriving here in the last 400 years or so. I was deeply disappointed this week, then, when I read Hernandez, Denton & Macartney’s (2009) article on immigrant children in schools. I had high hopes for the special edition of the Teachers College Record on immigrants, but, instead, I found a strong perpetuation of stereotypes, not even necessarily supported by their own census data.

As discussed by O’Connor, Lewis & Mueller (2007), it seems that when it comes to minority children, statistical data is given far more weight than it should. In other words, while we can show correlation, it’s not the same thing as causation-but is being interpreted that way.

For instance, Hernandez, Denton & Macartney focus in on the fact that 26% of the children in immigrant families have “limited proficiency in English,” they fail to realize within their own findings that this means MOST of the children are learning English rapidly–or come in with some understanding of English. They focus in on how many immigrant families from Central and South America as well as Mexico have parents with lower levels of education and often live in poverty in the US. Bradley Levinson and others insist that these immigrant parents were allowed limited schooling in their former homes to warrant such expectation that they would have very little ability to help the children with their homework and claim they have little resources to help them. However, they do make brief mention (somewhat obscurely) that many of these parents are interested in their children’s education, in the hopes of their betterment (pp.633-634).

The one light at the end of the tunnel here is that they DO focus on how bilingual education could enhance not only our school system, but provide immigrant children with the ability to compete in the global market (pp.629-630; 642), but then fail to highlight how many immigrants are already bilingual — and that it’s American children who are not asked to meet foreign language requirements until high school.

The perception of immigrant inadequacies in research rhetoric is constantly fed by the larger public rhetoric. Literally hours after I finished reading the Hernandez et al (2009), I heard about the shooting in Binghamton, NY. At first, news sources reported it was “A man believed to be in his 20s, just walked into an immigration office and just started shooting people.” Later, as I watched the story develop both in the British press and in the American press, I noticed two very analytic frameworks pursued in relation to this tragic event. When it was discovered that his name was Jiverly Wong and his sister was contacted, she immediately informed the press that he was a US citizen and had been living in the United States for nearly 30 years, after emigrating from Vietnam. The US press continued to refer to him as “a Vietnamese man,” and later went so far as to say that he was “of Chinese decent, but had immigrated from Vietnam.” The British press referred to him as “Vietnamese-American.” A small difference, but it had a huge impact in the public perception.

I was walking around the Botanical Gardens the next day, and overheard two women talking about the event and discussing their desire to keep “people like them from taking over our country,” and effectively believing that it was his background and perspective that led to this terrible incident. We may never know why he committed this crime, but some have said he’d just lost his job, and had been taunted for his accent and troubles in English pronunciation.

I honestly must wonder how Wong would have felt reading these reports-did he think of himself as “Vietnamese-American,” or “Vietnamese?” Did he feel as if he was constantly being identified as “Vietnamese” when he believed he was “Vietnamese-American?” To me, it seems, correlation of events has again led to assumed causation and educational research has done little to stop these stereotypes. I believe it’s time once again to remember that people are not statistics; it is time for research, especially in the area of exploring what it means to be an immigrant and minority in America, to focus more on assets children may bring with them to the class, rather than their struggles. Otherwise, we as educators are no better than the bullies standing at the fence, making fun of a child for their accent.

References

Dorner, L., Orellana, M., & Li-Grining, C. (May 2007).  ” ‘I helped my mom,’ and it helped me: Translating the skills of language brokers into improved standardized test scores.”  American Journal of Education. 113(3), pp. 451-478.

Garcia, E. & Cuéllar, D. (November 2006).  “Who are these linguistically and culturally diverse students?”  Teachers College Record. 108 (11),pp.  2220-2246.

Hernandez, D.J., Denton, N.A., & Macartney, S. (2009).  “School-age children in immigrant families: Challenges and opportunities for America’s schools.”   Teachers College Record 111(3), pp. 616-658.

O’Connor, C., Lewis, A., & Mueller, J. (December 2007).  “Researching ‘Black’ educational experiences and outcomes: Theoretical and methodological considerations.”  Educational Researcher. 36(9), pp. 541-552.

Rubin, B.C. (2007).  “‘There’s still not justice’: Youth civic identity development amid distinct school and community contexts.”  Teachers College Record, 109 (2), pp. 449-481.Retrieved from  www.tcrecord.org on 2/25/2009

Terrazas, A. & Batalova, J. (2008, December).  The most up-to-date frequently requested statistics on immigrants in the United States. Retrieved December 30, 2008 from www.migrationinformation.org/USfocus/display.cfm?id=714

Wortham, S., Murillo Jr., E. G., & Hamann, E. T. (Eds.). (2002). Education in the new Latino diaspora: Policy and the politics of identity (Vol. 2). Westport, CT: Ablex Publishing.

Review of Charles E. McCrary Sr., Urban School Security from Behind the Scenes: Views from a Retired Urban School Security Director Shawnee Mission, Kansas: Colonel Publishing 2007.

Educational policies such as Zero-Tolerance and Safe Schools Act have created punitive and criminal consequences to students in our public schools.  The terrifying trend of mass incarceration of African American males and other people of color has impacted our society in a detrimental way; crippling communities and dissolving families in our urban centers, and continued impact to people of color.  These punitive policies stemming from Lyndon Johnson’s War on Crime and continuing with Reagan’s War on Drugs has impacted urban communities for over five decades creating the alarming statistic of one in three African American males being incarcerated.

The onset of Zero-Tolerance rules and the Safe Schools Act have now brought this punitive discipline of people of color into our schools.¹ Public schools have now become a “pipeline” for students of color into the criminal justice system.  In researching this phenomenon of institutional racism, I came across a personal narrative from Lieutenant Colonel Charles E. McCrary, Sr. titled; Urban School Security from Behind the Scenes: Views from a Retired Urban school Security Director. Lt. Colonel McCrary was the Urban School Security Director for St. Louis City Public Schools from 1997-2006.  He was appointed by the Superintendent, Cleveland Hammonds, in 1997 after retiring from the St. Louis Police Department. The superintendent and Lt. Colonel McCrary first met after a student was murdered at one of the city’s public high schools.  The superintendent reportedly was impressed with his calm manner, professionalism and ability to recognize chaos.

This personal narrative is insight into the minds of the security personnel within our public schools.  Lt. Colonel McCrary offers the reader personal anecdotal stories and his philosophies for running a “safe school.” He begins his narrative with discussion of living parallel lives.   He frames his actions and the actions of his security officers as “masked heroes” that protect while students are clueless to the threats around them.  In his introduction (xiii) he admits to apprehending three students on their way to the bus stop because they may have planted a weapon.  By 9:00am that school day, security (not police) officers have searched lockers and found drugs.  At 11:00am, police notify school security that there is gang activity in the neighborhood around the school and security officers begin to investigate a student that might possibly been involved during lunch.

Lt. Colonel McCrary sees his role as a mentor to children and a builder of trust relationships. He (6) states that “Urban School Security operations are based on the notion that whatever dangers facing the communities surrounding my schools stayed in the community and not in my schools.”

It is important to note that school security officers in this narrative are not police officers.  They are hand picked by Lt. Colonel McCrary and trained by him.  They have not been trained as police officers or hold the authority of police officers of the state.  However, they are given the power to arrest, search and interrogate students in public schools.  Lt. Colonel McCrary also admits to working with St. Louis Metropolitan Police Units such as the Gang Unit, Narcotics Unit, and Juvenile Officers to apprehend students possibly involved in crimes inside and outside the school building. McCrary (8) makes the claim that “My urban school security team did whatever was necessary to protect youth to and from school, no matter how dangerous the community elements may have been during any given point in-time.”

Lt. Colonel McCrary takes the position that his security personnel allowed the superintendent and teaching staff the opportunity to lay out plans “within their span of control to create educational programs.” (9) His success philosophy includes five parts to securing the school for students:

1. Proactivity prevents problems: This philosophy includes zero complacency. He trains his security officers to always be searching for potential crimes, unannounced locker searches, and monitoring gang activity and juvenile crime with collaborating police units.  He gives an anecdotal story of monitoring the events on the weekends and outside school hours, then interrogating students in the principal’s office the next morning asking for names and details.  Any information given is shared with juvenile detectives at a later date, while students are interrogated, lockers, backpacks and vehicles are searched.  Reportedly, parents are not notified, lawyers are not present and there are no warrants attained for searches of student vehicles. All of these police procedures would address the civil rights of the person if the interrogated individuals were adults. In this anecdotal narrative, he admits to finding nine guns on school property in nine years.  Five were found because students told officers and four were found because staff told officers.  He does not state whether they were told during interrogation or if the information was given freely.
2. Financial Innovation: Grants were given from the Office of Safe and Drug Free Schools (OSDFS) and from the U.S. Department of Education under school crisis planning. These monetary stipends were not enough so Lt. Colonel McCrary advises other Security officers attempting to implement his plan in schools to work with superintendents and school boards to create some funding by manipulating their budgets to pay security personnel and monitoring equipment such as cameras, metal detectors, and surveillance.  Unfortunately, urban public schools look more like lock down facilities in juvenile detention and alternative public schools.
3. Ethics and Accountability: Security officers must enforce zero-tolerance policies for hostile work environments, sexual harassment, and discrimination of any kind, according to Lt. Colonel McCrary. Security officers must be random drug tested to maintain credibility and limit corruption. The security officers support in-house suspension for minor disciplinary offenses because students too often enjoy the vacation out-of-school suspension offers.  According to the author, in-school suspension is a positive alternative that keeps students in school under structured and supervised environment.  One point the author leaves out is in-school suspension is usually in an isolated room with out instruction.  Students are given worksheets and school work to complete in isolation with no access to educators.  Even students with high abilities have difficulty completing assignments without access to having questions answered, special needs students often shut down under instructional circumstances.  McCrary also uses but rarely defines “minor disruptions.”  This could be very subjective to isolate students from the educational setting.  The author continues to support out-of-school suspension for students who did not respond to in-school suspension. After not responding to in-school interventions, these students are placed in an alternative setting that evolve better students and prefer to remain at the alternative school site.  What the author fails to mention is that these alternative settings are designed for students with disabilities and  these students have an Individualized Education Plan (IEP) or for juvenile delinquents that are court ordered to attend school. Finally, expulsion should not be taken lightly, according to the author, but it must be done in situation where it is warranted. Again, these situations are not defined specifically which leaves educators and administrators to subjectively decide who receives an education and who does not.
4. We’re All in this Together: he advises school security to become connected with all the “players” in the school system.  He suggests that all employees be subjected to background checks and continuous monitoring of any criminal activity.  Consequently, students and staff are now subject to punitive searches and monitoring without reason or accusation.
5. Anatomy of a School Safety Officer: Lt. Colonel McCrary advises how to pick the “right” type of person for a school security position.  He believes that it is not always law enforcement.  Schools need figures that command respect and reward good behavior with warm and caring response. It is necessary to build positive relationships.  Students must respect, fear and trust all at the same time. How does a person respect, fear, and trust all at the same time? These students have met obstacles to resources at every step of their education and their surroundings.  They have been targets of racism, discrimination, and humiliation by state officials like police all of their lives.  If they have not been targeted, someone in their family has or is incarcerated. Many of them as well have faced jail. 1 in 4 urban students have currently incarcerated parents.  Therefore, McCrary’s suggestion of relationship building by security personnel seems unrealistic. The mere suggestion of this is a testament to how little McCrary knows about the population he is supposed to be protecting.

Another section of the book explains how superintendents and other administrators should place a security staff within their public schools.   He offers an action plan for those interested in securing their schools from students.  This plan includes:

1. On-Line Safety Survey for Principals: This defines individual safety needs for each school.
2. Change Security Team Image: Pattern school security after the St. Louis Police Department; create uniforms, patrol cars that look like law enforcement, and create units on-site and mobile to patrol schools and surrounding areas. This way students will think that these people hold the power of state officials, however this is a cruel hoax. Students are fooled into believing they may actually be incarcerated for legal infractions at school.
3. Hire the Best Security Officers: The “best” is defined as tough, trainable, and  full of compassion for kids. These descriptors are highly subjective and crudely defined by the author.
4. First Team Meeting: Set expectations of your team at the first meeting. Expectations, however, must be left for subjective interpretation by individual school administrators.
5. Training Security Team: The author’s training plan consists of teaching defensive tactics, cultural diversity, and other programs that pertain to their jobs.  He briefly mentions disruptive student behavior, school policies, and rules of arrest.  All of these topics are written in general terms.  None are defined and there is a little under a complete page describing the training.  Defensive tactics used in school for students with disabilities include Crisis Intervention and Prevention Training known as CPI.  This is the Missouri approved system for physical restraint.  There is no reference to this training in McCrary’s narrative.  Cultural diversity is not defined.  The author does not state what cultures or what he means by diversity.  The loose term of other programs pertaining to the job is extremely vague and has no real meaning.  He briefly mentions student behavior as disruptive but does not define.  He also mentions school policy but does not define what policy and if it is a discipline policy developed by the school or his own? Lastly, he states training security officers on the rules of arrest.  What rules are there for ordinary citizens to arrest juveniles?  Are there any?
6. Morale Boosts and Motivation: Lt. Colonel McCrary supports giving awards for perfect attendance and total number of arrests made.  He also holds a Christmas Party for his security team and invites the Police Department, the Gang unit, Narcotics Unit, and Juvenile Officers to support his security team and to thank the police units for their help in arresting students. Thus, these groups are praised for their complicity in violating the civil rights of students. Does this build the trust relationship with the students or just fear?
7. Student Safety Concern Groups: These are student groups developed in the school.  These groups include good and bad students, according to Lt. Colonel McCrary.  His rationale is that this puts “bad” students in roles of leadership.  Consequently, the group of students are labeled narcs by their peers.  If he is referring to students in qualifiers such as “good” and “bad”, should he really be in public schools?
8. Develop a Crisis Manual: The author suggests that each school develop a crisis manual.  He suggests that the manual contain a plan for terrorist attacks, poisonous gas released in the atmosphere, anthrax attacks and an internal crisis team that will consist of faculty if any of these things should happen.  This suggestion is a paranoid reaction to post-September 11th attacks.  There is no documentation that any of these things are a concern for American public schools.  He does not address any of the current-all too real- concerns facing the urban communities of these schools.  He wants a plan for schools to react if an alien invader commits terrorist attacks on American Schools.
9. Back-to- School Security Planning: This action plan addresses how to secure schools in the summer with no attendees.  He recommends mobile units to patrol the school for vandalism as well as any “staff that may consider breaking into vacant school buildings.”  He also recommends patrolling bus and walking routes for students looking for potential problems and notifying the Public Safety Department of  high trees to be cut down, bushes trimmed, and to board up vacant buildings.

The third section of Urban School Security is a three page evaluation of handling student behavior. In this three page chapter his suggestions for dealing with urban city school’s student population and misbehavior includes (1) place a foreign-born officer in foreign majority schools, (2) the Gang Unit to hold “tough love” sessions with male only student populations, and (3) strong, positive interventions from social workers and counselors with the female students since recent data shows an increase of knife possession and aggressive behaviors. This three-page diatribe is evidence that urban school security officers in the St. Louis City Public Schools have no insight into student behaviors, child development models, educational models, or basic common sense when dealing with social issues of injustice, crime, poverty, or disenfranchisement.

Our author concludes his narrative with a “Day in the Life” of a school security officer.  In his narrative, he admits to patrolling bus stops, collaborating with local gang units and interrogating students for possible retaliation. A student makes death threat to another student which results in a search of personal belongings, locker and notifying the juvenile officers on duty who then go to the student’s home and search his room (with parent permission) and find no weapon. Verbal reports of a possible fight at that evening basketball game results in tightened security for the sporting event. Finally, angry parents are planning to attend the board meeting, so security is tightened to deal with the angry parents.

This 187 page narrative complete with note pages and invitations to workshops offered by the author is a morbid look into the minds of the School Safety Team in St. Louis City Public Schools.  In his narrative, Lt. Colonel McCrary smugly brags about interrogating students without the parents knowledge and no lawyer present, searching vehicles without warrants, tightening security on staff and parent-involved board meetings, modeling his team after police departments and collaborating with local law enforcement to arrest students at school for possible crimes committed away from school. This mentality of punitive discipline procedures has turned our public schools into a prison.  Students are presumed guilty and must prove innocence.  Students are targeted at school and identified to law enforcement as a “bad” kid for profiling and possible arrests.  This system uses intimidation on students and parents in the name of securing our schools. Authorities, thus, exploit the reasonable “racial paranoia” that has arisen from historical injustices.² The actions by Lt. Colonel McCrary and his School Security Team serve to advance institutional agendas of prejudice in ways that are potentially harmful to the very communities they are mandated to serve. The policies and procedures of the School Security Teams, therefore, are a volatile mix of intention and systemic obstructions.  Lt. Colonel McCrary and his School Security Teams believe they are the unspoken heroes for these children.  However, they are catalysts of systemic racism that is bars students from educational opportunities and perpetuates the collateral damage of incarceration.

Footnotes

1. Jennifer Hernandez, “Educators’ and Lawmakers’ Collusion over the Expanding School to Prison Pipeline“, COE Exchange  (Blog of UMSL’s College of Education), March 14, 2009.  http://coeexchange.com/?p=1852 [↩]
2. John L. Jackson, Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness (New York: Basic Books, 2008). [↩]

Vanessa Van Petten, a teenager and author of a popular parenting book written from the teen’s perspective, explains in a YouTube video why she uses she uses social networking sites:

Teenagers participate in social networking sites for a variety of reasons.  It is a way to keep in contact with friends, to exchange pictures or to engage in a wide range of other social activities. The Pew Internet & American Life Project estimates that approximately 65% of US teenagers are participating in social networks.  MySpace has approximately 124 million monthly visitors and Facebook has 276 million visitors a month.

Concerns that schools and parents seem to have about social networking is that students will engage in inappropriate behavior or that social networking sites are dangerous. All of the popular sites attempt to stop inappropriate behavior, but they cannot guarantee complete safety. Recently there have been a couple of sensational cases about predators on the social networks. Because of such cases and because the schools apparently do not value the work students do on social networks, the response of the schools has been to block the social networking sites from students in schools.  Thus, students go to these sites outside of school time or secretly on hand held devices during school hours. Most students go to the sites without the advice or oversight of the teachers.

If the purpose of education is to produce citizens as argued by Eleanor Roosevelt in 1930, shouldn’t we address issues in society that are central to the activities of our children? Nancy Willard cites three concerns about teens
being involved in social networking sites:

1. the sites are attracting many teens, some of whom are not making good choices.
2. many parents are not paying attention to what their children are posting on the sites.
3. sexual predators — and likely other dangerous strangers — are attracted to places where teens are not making good choices and adults are not paying attention.

In the Tech Wag blog on Social Networking in the Schools, the author wonders why schools do not use the social networking sites to connect to the students.  With approximately 65 percent of our students using social networking sites, communicating to our students and educating them about the use of social networks seems like a given.   The federal government has even gotten into the fray. In 2006 the US House passed a bill to restrict schools from using social network ing sites.  Actually, a recent study shows that social networking sites are safer than chat room and instant messaging.

So the question becomes, what should schools do about social networking. At a minimum, schools can develop their own social networking sites by using such software as Elgg.  While this social networking solution is an excellent solution for younger children who obviously should not be on public social networking sites with adults, it does not address the issues of high school students who need to learn about all of the issues of more popular social networking sites.  If schools are to do their jobs, students need the guidance of a teacher as opposed to leaving the exploration of social networking without adult guidance.

Certainly teachers can address some of the issues that students may engage in such as cyber-bullying or disclosing inappropriate information or associating with inappropriate communities.  Teachers currently advise students about this information in a non-cyber environment.  Why do we deny teachers the ability to educate students about problems they will encounter in a cyber environment?  We cannot shield our students from social networking by denying students access in schools to these sites.

The questions become:

1. how do we get schools to recognize the need to educate students about social networking,
2. should schools continue to block social networking sites,
3. and how do we educate teachers about social networking sites?

The College of Education is blessed with many outstanding faculty, staff, and students. Towards this end, each year in the Spring we recognize those faculty and staff that have had an especially good year. In addition, we recognize our students, both graduate and undergraduate, for their overall accomplishments in terms of their academic achievement and in terms of their contributions to our graduate and undergraduate programs. We had an especially stellar class of awardees this year and I must say, I am always proud of the wonderful faculty, staff, and students we have been able to attract to the College of Education at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Enjoy these photos of the celebration reception for 2009. It is obvious that we had another great year!

Photos of the Event

Full Award Listing

Extraordinary Academic Achievement

• Amy Arneson
• Nicholas Brockman
• Laura Bruner
• Kristin Cooper
• Alice Fletcher
• Reyna Hamlin
• Ashley Kraeuter
• Margaret Norris
• Eryn Lebaube
• Courtney Rockamann
• Kimberly Rudd
• Melissa Schniedermeyer
• Teresa Smith
• Rachel Zerkel

Outstanding Graduate Awars-B.S. in Ed.

• Katherine Reavey – Fall 08
• Amy Arneson – Spring 09

Outstanding Graduate Award – Career Transition

• Dawn Riske-Hoy

Outstanding Student Teacher

• Jennifer Scales – Fall 08
• Patrick Luecke – Spring 09

Outstanding Student Teacher-Post Bac

• Matthew Stumpf – Fall 08
• Tiffany Parker – Spring 09

Outstanding Gradaute – Masters

• Sara Tehan
• Amy Doyle
• Ellen Dillon
• Michelle Rubin
• Sara Elizabeth Luesse
• Brenda Hollrah
• Dena Winkler

Outstanding Graduate-International Graduate

• Larisa Selimovic-Milosavljevic

Outstanding Education Specialist

• Randy Carter
• Karen Harris
• Maria Daesch

Outstanding Doctoral Student – Ph.D.

• Erika Nash
• Dongying Wei
• Jennifer McAfee
• Maria E. Paredes

Outstanding Doctoral Student – Ed.D.

• Danielle Tormala
• Cynthia Billman

Outstanding Staff

• Evon Luckey

Outstanding Faculty

• Angela Coker
• Wendy Saul

Screen capture of Newsweek's May 4th, 2009 article "The Principle and the Paddle"

A student in my doctoral seminar this semester alerted me a few days ago of the bald, unadulterated hatred on full display in the current issue (May 4, 2009) of Newsweek magazine (http://www.newsweek.com). Of course, I thought: public media regularly parades vitriolic rhetoric about and frightening images of various individuals, particularly those of color.¹ Yes, I had to admit, the magazine sported a terror-inducing photograph of a neo-Nazi child wearing the face of an acculturated racist.² What I was less prepared for, however, was an article about a white principal at a southern U.S. school who was a celebrated, if reluctant, spanker of recalcitrant children.³

True, the article revealed little about the racial composition of the principal’s school.  Still, the photo beside the title was filled with five young students of color (who, strikingly, were all holding their arms close to their bodies in guarded position).⁴  And the principal’s quizzical, perhaps embarrassed, mug with a buzz haircut was plastered on the SMART Board behind the students.

The school led by this white male principal and, supposedly, shelters these schoolchildren carries the name John C. Calhoun Elementary School.  Yes, the very name of the infamous nineteenth century U.S. Senator from South Carolina who proclaimed that slavery was a “positive good.”⁵ Wouldn’t the original John C. be proud?  His name-sake school utilizes a white overseer in the 21^st century to punish African Americans who dare to affront white sensibilities!

To be fair, David Nixon, the school principal who carried admittedly little administrative training, felt just awful about the force necessary to bring order to a school full of “chaos.” (42)  “I would…burn that paddle…if I could,” Nixon laments to the article’s author (42).  Some readers, instead, may suggest a burning resting point for Principal Nixon himself.

Other readers of this Newsweek article will be impressed by the rise in academic test scores that Principal Nixon has fostered at Calhoun in recent years through the draconian measures that include his spankings.  Nixon’s “fix-all” (44) for success has others concerned.  Nadine Block, an expert on school discipline, views Nixon’s tactics as improper policy, at the very least.   ”This is not a practice for the 21^st century,” she asserts.  Moreover, for scholar Block, “an atmosphere of fear…over time…does not work” (42).

Principal Nixon’s predecessors in South Carolina during the slavery era would strongly disagree with expert Block.  Fear works, even brilliantly, they would trumpet.  And those in the Jim Crow era might also suggest concern with this expert’s opinion – didn’t the Orangeburg Massacre in that state leave a decisive racialized message?⁶ Step out of line and you will be punished!  Principal Nixon, however regrettably, follows in very large footprints of generations of white South Carolinians to confront and squelch supposed African-American misbehavior.⁷

Left unsaid in the Newsweek article, tragically but predictably, is that this sort of racialized school discipline is altogether too prevalent in contemporary American urban schools.⁸  The school-to-prison pipeline originates in elementary classrooms like those at John C. Calhoun School (if not earlier in preschool settings).⁹ To a staggeringly perverse degree, American students of color receive extraordinarily harsh and disproportionate discipline in public schools.¹⁰ And this sort of criminalized targeting follows, even pre-conditions, the consequences of America’s horrendous, racially dichotomous, incarcerated demographics.¹¹

Astoundingly, as the Newsweek article contends, “corporal punishment is still legal in portions of 21 states” (42).  Perhaps, any mapping of this circumstance that might be accomplished would find a certain pattern of deeply racialized, concerted action.  Scholars have overlaid maps of late 20^th century legal execution sites with similar ones of early 20^th century lynchings; a near perfect match of geographical lethal harm to African Americans is revealed.¹² Might future research show similar spaces of school punishment meant for African American students?

Finally, as well, I must ask: when might we rid our schools of such racially tragic practices?  Sadly, but surely, I must answer, it won’t be soon enough for Principal Nixon’s students at the John C. Calhoun Elementary School in Calhoun Hills, South Carolina.

Footnotes

1. See, for example, Emily Hager, “Bullying Immigrants – Even in the Research Literature,” The Exchange (Blog of UMSL’s College of Education), April 9, 2009.  (http://coeexchange.com/?p=2363) [↩]
2. This photo accompanies the following article: Eve Conant, “Rebranding Hate in the Age of Obama,” Newsweek (May 4, 2009), 30. (http://www.newsweek.com/id/195085) [↩]
3. Eric Adelson, “The Principal and the Paddle,” Newsweek (May 4, 2009), 42-44.  (http://www.newsweek.com/id/195119) [↩]
4. Ibid. [↩]
5. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_C._Calhoun [↩]
6. http://www.orangeburgmassacre1968.com [↩]
7. This sentence shouldco not be read to only indict white South Carolinians but also, more generally, most whites in the U.S. [↩]
8. See, for example, Jennifer Hernandez, “Urban School Security: Student Safety or Abuse of Power,” The Exchange, April 16, 2009.  (http://coeexchange.com/?p=2460) [↩]
9. See, for example, Jennifer Hernandez, “Educators’ and Lawmakers’ Collusion over the Expanding School to Prison Pipeline,” The Exchange, March 4, 2009.  (http://coeexchange.com/?p=1852) [↩]
10. See, for example, Jennifer Hernandez, “Review Essay: Urban School Policies and the Creation of Public Enemies,” unpublished ms, UMSL, 2009. [↩]
11. See, for example, Marc Mauer, .2003. “Comparative International Rates of Incarceration: An Examination of Causes and Trends.” The Sentencing Project: Presented to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. [↩]
12. Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, Race Course Against White Supremacy (Chicago: Third World Press, 2009), 60. [↩]

Black Paper #1: Clery Report as Symptom of Student Surveillance in Amerikkkan¹ Schools

Note: The Social Justice Section of The COE Exchange welcomes commentary from a variety of perspectives. To date, the essays have focused upon racial oppression. In continuation of this spirit of resistance to racial oppression in schooling, this essay begins a new series of writing here at The Exchange. For far too long, an “authoritative report” from governmental or commercial sources has been labeled a “White Paper.”² Here at this corner of The Exchange, voices that resist the altogether too common authoritative power of white privilege will be labeled a “Black Paper.” Come back often to read words that will challenge consensus and provoke serious dialogue.

- Matthew D. Davis, Coordinator of the COE Exchange’ Social Justice Section

University of Missouri-St. Louis Police Department released a Clery Report 09-1 on May 14, 2009 indicated that a young woman had been assaulted on the Metrolink platform close to UMSL. ³ The description of the assailants stated that “The perpetrators are described only as Black/Males, possibly 18-25 years of age.” This Clery Report troubles us. When looking at the description, we noticed that the words “black” and “male” begin with capital letters unlike the rest of the description. Also, the possibility of age of the assailants is a span of 7 years and a very difficult age grouping to determine by someone at night during an assault. However if one were to watch popular media at any time or any night of the week and on any channel, one would recognize these assailants. Popular media has provided society the image of what assailants should look like and they fit the description in the above report. Simply, Americans are persistently and persuasively taught that young black males are violent.⁴

Institutions such as schools, law enforcement, government agencies and popular media have colluded to portray crime to fit this picture of assailants. In his essay titled “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” Loic Wacquant explains that historically American society utilized prisons as a tool for “replacing the carceral institution in the full arc of ethno racial division and domination in the U.S.”⁵

The University of Missouri is located in the northern (inner-ring) suburban area of St. Louis. To some who travel next to the campus, the area immediately surrounding UMSL is viewed as an urban environment filled with poverty. The UMSL campus, on the other hand, is populated with aesthetically pleasing buildings home to a mostly commuting student population. However, in a variety of St. Louis area communities, UMSL is spoken of as a “black college” in the heart of the ghetto. To these observers, UMSL is the ghetto.

(We must note this characterization is blatantly absurd and racist. UMSL remains a Predominately White Institution [PWI]; moreover, a PWI with a perpetual chilly relationship with many area African Americans.)

In the height of the mass incarceration of poverty-mired whites and people of color in the United States, Wacquant made a case for a close connection between prisons and ghettos. In his book, Wacquant states:

The astounding upsurge in black incarceration in the past three decades as a result of the obsolescence of the ghetto as a devise for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for keeping (unskilled) African Americans ‘in their place’ i.e. in a subordinate and confined position in physical, social, and symbolic space.⁶

St. Louis has a long history of gentrification, segregation, and racialized policing policies. For many area residents and their network of friends across the nation, St. Louis continues to hold the reputation for an unfriendly and intolerant place for people of color. People of color have experienced a steady stream of racist residential housing policies in the region throughout the 20th century. ⁷ The expansion of the suburban areas to West County and South County make it abundantly clear that people of color are not welcome. To be sure, many African Americans remain confined to an “iron ring” within the city⁸ in fear of harassment by law enforcement and other state agencies. This racialized urban setting has been organized in extreme poverty and degenerative housing. Moreover, this housing stock can often be confused for prisons due to their architectural design, surveillance and police involvement.

The St. Louis Public Schools have often been complicit in the continued segregation of St. Louis⁹ and also been a pipeline to incarceration for many black males in the area.¹⁰ This combustible mixture of hyper-segregation and school-to-prison consequences has resulted in the blurring of the line between the ghetto and the prison. According to Wacquant,

This resulting symbiosis between the ghetto and the prison not only enforces and perpetuates the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic taint of the urban black sub proletariat and feeding the runaway growth of the penal system – this also plays a pivotal role in re-making of “race” and the redefinition of the citizenry the production of a racialized public via culture of vilification of criminals.¹¹

Public Schools in urban areas such as St. Louis have deteriorated into institutions of internment with a function to ensure custody and control. The schools lack resources for educating; thus their purpose degenerates into the regulation of conduct in order to preserve order and reduce violent incidents. School buildings look like prisons with armed security forces that conduct spot checks and surveillance between buildings. Wacquant extends this line of analysis by asserting that the singular purpose of these schools is to “neutralize” youth considered unworthy and unruly by holding them for the day so they do not commit crimes in the community.¹²

Erica Meiners in her book Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies, concurs with Wacquant, claiming that public schools have institutionalized a culture of punitive policies against students, mainly in urban settings.¹³ The idea of keeping people of color out of “white space” is highlighted in the Clery report mentioned at the first of this essay. The description on the assailants implies that two African American males of arbitrary age assaulted an assumed student on the platform of the Metrolink on the UMSL campus.

The inference of this report is that UMSL police are now utilizing racialized policies to create a secure space for the students of UMSL. However, their report exacerbates the already problematic race and class division in the community of St. Louis and university campus. This report highlights a popular media-created idea of who criminals are that terrorize communities. These publicly circulated ideas over who are criminals have led to punitive policies in schools that result in subjective discipline practices for students of color. African American students are disciplined for behaviors like disrespect, excessive noise, threats, and loitering.¹⁴ In urban communities, African American youth are harassed by local state agencies like law enforcement for these behaviors. Numerous studies indicate that white and black youth have the same occurrences for weapons’ offenses but white youth have larger number of charges for drug-related offenses. This criminal reality remains hidden behind routine popular media imagery of drug dealers and users who are African American males and welfare moms. This imagery is reflected in the Clery report and remains a prevalent perception of the UMSL campus atmosphere.

This Clery report, moreover, is an example of the intertwining of state agencies in creation and enforcement of racialized policing policies. The report reinforces the pernicious perpetuation of popular media’s iconography of criminals as well as the racialized and divided atmosphere of St. Louis. The location of UMSL in the perceived ghetto of North St. Louis City and the attitudes of community residents commuting to the school is highlighted in the description of the assailants. As a doctoral student and a faculty member at UMSL, we were shocked by this report. We remain hopeful, if not optimistic, that our institution will act as better neighbors with all in St. Louis. True respect and human dignity must become a more visible part of the actions and words of the UMSL community.

Footnotes

1. Marcyyliena Morgan asserts that “…when writing about America’s negative treatment of urban youth, it is common [in hiphop] to find it spelled Amerikkka, using the initials for the white supremacist group the Ku Klux Klan (KKK).”  Morgan, The Real Hiphop: Battling for Knowledge, Power, and Respect in the LA Underground (Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2009), 80-81. [↩]
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_paper [↩]
3. Clery Report 09-1, University of Missouri St. Louis Police Department, May 14, 2009. [↩]
4. A backdrop to this education over the race, gender, and age of violent individuals remains the stark, cruel reality of the racialized American judicial system.  As scholar Todd R. Clear states, “The concentration of imprisonment among young black urban males is so extreme today that many of us [whites] simply assume that, when we encounter a young black man, he has a criminal record…”  See his Imprisoning Communities: How Mass Incarceration Makes Disadvantaged Neighborhoods Worse (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2007), 4. [↩]
5. Loic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh,” in David W. Garland, Ed.,  Mass Imprisonment: Social Causes and Consequences (London: Sage Publications, 2001), 83. [↩]
6. Ibid. [↩]
7. Colin Gordon, Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). [↩]
8. Ibid. [↩]
9. See, for example, Daniel L. Schafly, 28 Years on the St. Louis School Board, 1953-1981: Rooting Out Corruption, Desegregating Schools in a Segregated Society, Coping with Massive Shifts of Population and Wealth (St. Louis: Author, 1995). [↩]
10. Jennifer Hernandez, “Urban School Security: Student Safety or Abuse of Power?,” COE Exchange, April 16, 2009. [↩]
11. Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis…,” 84. [↩]
12. Ibid. [↩]
13. Erica Meiners, Right to be Hostile: Schools, Prisons, and the Making of Public Enemies (New York: Routledge. 2007. [↩]
14. Ibid. [↩]