Alvin's Educational Technology Blog

I have eased into Vista over the last couple of months.  I had too many critical programs on my old system to risk an upgrade.  I had my data backed up, but I could not risk the chance of some of my applications would not be able to handle the upgrade.

I did a fresh install on a machine with 2 GB of RAM.  I moved my good video card over with both of my monitors.  So far I have had very few problems, but there is one thing I can’t solve.  I can’t get VNC to wake my machine up if the screen is locked.  I run VNC and Hamachi on all my computers.  The free version of RealVNC (my favorite flavor) isn’t compatible with Vista.  I tried Ultr@VNC and it worked until my password protected screen saver kicked in.  Once that happens, there is no response from Vista.  I don’t have hibernate turned on, but the screen password seems to kick the machine into a different video mode that cuts the VNC connection.

There are some huge positives in my short Vista experience.  I love the Start menu.  I click the Windows-Key and a letter or two of the program I want to start and Vista finds it.  It does the same with documents.  Actually, it works with anything.

I do a lot of file renaming.  F2 still does the trick, but Vista doesn’t automatically highlight the file extension.  If I rename a file, the OS assumes I still want those last three letters to remain the same.  It takes an extra click to highlight the extension to change it (which I rarely do).  This is more efficient for me about 99.44% of the time.

I use the Sidebar with a few widgets.  I like the quick loading calendar that pops up with Windows-Space Bar.

The snipping tool is great for quick screen captures. 

The user directories are much better.  Everything is in a folder called “users” instead of “documents and settings” (what a dumb name).  All the “my” prefixes are gone too.  Now it’s “Documents”, “Pictures” and “Videos” instead of “My Documents”, “My Pictures” and “My Videos”.  Vista also included a “Downloads” folder.  This is something I have manually created on all my computers for years.  Where else would anyone store downloaded programs?  Finally it is built in and pre-programmed to communicate with applications that download files.

The “User Access Control” isn’t nearly as bad as the Apple commercial would have you believe.  I get beeped once a day at most.  As I get my machine tweaked, I will hardly see it at all.

Last week I read several articles about this paper from  the New Commission on the Skills of the American Workforce.  A PowerPoint is here.  This reports says that the American standard of living is going to take a nasty dive if we cannot increase the number of people working in “creative” fields.  The chart below shows the three types of work defined by the report.

The areas are routine work done by people.  Routine work done by machines.  And finally, creative work.  Notice the triangle is split near the bottom of the creative diamond.  Only the top portion of the graph will be work done in the United States.  Almost all routine work will be completed in less developed countries.

Education (part of the creative diamond) will need to change drastically.  The commission recommends we begin to recruit teachers from the top third of all graduates.  Create an incentive for these students to go into education by offering a six-digit pay scale for the best teachers.  

We need to train students to solve problems.  One of the key points in the PowerPoint explains that our students must be creative, innovative and able to learn new things quickly.  That last point is a tough one.  It is one I stress in my classes all the time.  Being involved in technology requires me to continually learn new things because I have to teach them.  All educators need to do the same.

There was a time when the first computer course every educator took was programming in BASIC.  The computers we had in our classrooms didn’t do much more than BASIC.  I remember when Hypercard was the topic everyone needed to learn in education.  Now very few of my students have heard of the program.  In the mid-90’s we learned HTML.  At the start of the 21st century video editing was hot.  Now we have to manage web 2.0 applications.  Somewhere in there all our presentations switched to PowerPoint and we started taking all our pictures with digital cameras.

Students graduating from high school last spring had Microsoft Office available to them from kindergarten through twelfth grade.  Most of them will take a course in college that introduces them to this same set of tools.  Change takes time in education.  We need to speed things up if we want to stay ahead.