This is no different than any new technology. But I think the difference this time is that our students are immersed in it, usually with little or no guidance. They have cell phones, webkinz and yes, Google Accounts. That wasn’t true with cars or televisions. This is more than a questions of tech specs and how many gigs my server will hold, but what our kids are already putting out there and how we can teach them how to do it safely.

Yet, I think it is only a matter of time before the terms ‘storage’ and ‘mbps access speed’ will no longer be part of the vernacular. Storage and access speeds will not be an issue. It will no longer be a case of cloud computing. It will simply be an extension of our lives. A place out there somwehere that looks after our daily stuff.

But the coincidence is just too tempting to pass up (for me, anyways) — as this conversation is unfolding, we have a firsthand account of what happens when your cloud crashes: you wait and receive form emails, while your data remains out of reach.

As of this writing, Google’s “Enterprise” service has been failing this particular user for 12 hours and counting: http://cogdogblog.com/2008/08/06/google-cloud-shits/

And with that said, these types of outages are part of working with technology. They happen on systems at all levels. But the myth that the cloud will magically fix/erase system downtime needs some serious examination, cuz it just ain’t so.

The financial aspect you mentioned, Will, is a key factor in the district in which I work. Education budgets in general and technology budgets in particular in Texas are being seriously squeezed. Too often, decisions on software, storage, etc. are made based on an old idea of what constitutes a typical educational technology system. Ignorance of the available resources on the Internet is the biggest hurdle I face in my district, particularly among the administrators who make purchasing decisions. I agree with Gary that the hardware is very important, as the continuing growth in the power of the personal computer is allowing bigger, more powerful applications to run at faster and faster speeds, enabling our students to create, program, solve problems, and communicate in ways we could scarcely have imagined. However, how big is big enough? How fast is fast enough? We have laptops, for example, with hard drives capable of holding over 200 gigs, yet we forbid our students from storing their work on the computers themselves. How much money would we save if several thousand computers were purchased with half the storage space?

What I understand the least, however, is the fear of the reliability of the online tools available to our schools today. I have heard many times the question, “What happens if Google loses your documents?” or “What if your wiki site crashes?” My personal experience has proven to me, however, that such instances occur with much greater regularity with my teachers and students due to hardware issues (the blue screen of death) and a failure to backup important data or products. Web providers in general have a complex fail-safe system in place, particularly the more established ones, and while I still archive much of my online work offline, I don’t lose a moment’s sleep worrying about the work being lost by the hosts I’ve chosen. I’ve yet to have a single student or teacher blogger lose their work, even stored exclusively at a host site (I’m sure I’ll get my first panicked email tomorrow, now that I’ve said that.).

Looks like Google Apps for Enterprise didn’t work for the Dog.

Guess it’s raining in the cloud

http://twitter.com/cogdog/statuses/879836594

My Holy Grail at this point is an open source server side word processor. I have found an open source server side solution for everything else that I am looking for.

RE: “Now, when it comes to students and whether a system is mandating usage, we always use avatars for the students. Only the students and teacher knows which avatar links with which student.”

The ability to connect a student to a name/face is an important element to consider, but it is also a very small piece of what is looked at when companies mine data. For example, when a user is logged in to their Google account, and using Google’s services, their behavior is tracked to their user ID, which is generally tied to their IP address (and this was part of what was at stake in the recent Viacom vs Google lawsuit I referenced above). So, if you read an email, the content of that email is analyzed. Then, if you create a google doc, the content of that doc is analyzed. Let’s say you click on an outgoing link from that doc, or an email. That action is stored. Then, you perform 5 searches. Those strings are stored. If you follow a link from that search, it’s stored.

This all happens invisibly to you — you aren’t notified (except, of course, in the terms of service or the privacy policy, but hey, who reads those?) that your actions are being tracked.

Taken individually, these actions are pretty small. However, taken in aggregate, they begin to have some power and value: IP addresses can be tied to geographic locations (and arguably can be pinpointed to individuals) — so, this data can be mined to identify patterns of user behavior — people from region X who search for Y follow links to Z, except for people who read about subject A, who are more likely to follow links to B.

Marketers covet the 13-25 demographic. It’s why Facebook and Myspace have such inflated valuations. Even though the ads are limited in Google’s education editions, they still collect the data — and they say so in their terms of service/privacy policies. When a school or university uses Google apps, the resulting usage data is incredibly valuable, as it provides concrete information about the browsing habits of people within this demographic.

For some interesting info on what happens when data mining actually gets exposed to users, read up on Facebook’s Beacon debacle, or AOL’s release of search records. Fun stuff.

RE: CMS alternatives, and what we have set up — in the past year, we have set up systems for schools/learning organizations using Drupal, Mediawiki, Fedora (an open source document repository), and Moodle; when needed, we have set up targeted interoperability by using open standards. But really, this goes way beyond the CMS. Cloud computing requires virtualization, and there are several good open source virtualization platforms, including Xen, VirtualBox, and OpenVZ — Many Mac users probably know OpenVZ from Parallels, as Parallels is based on it.

Yes, of course you can, it’s the balance of both and how much one user accepts more risk, while another might balk. If you’re computer is online, there is some possible privacy risk period. That’s why there is no black and white answer. Ultimately the management of how much risk one is willing to take on comes back to the individual.

Now, when it comes to students and whether a system is mandating usage, we always use avatars for the students. Only the students and teacher knows which avatar links with which student. One of the benefits of this public concern for our students privacy is that they are much more aware of each others privacy (hopefully reaching beyond the classroom which is the whole idea.)

Bill, you talk about CMS alternatives, I know there are a ton out there, what do your students use?

No.

You can actually have both convenience and reasonable privacy. To pretend otherwise is just that: pretending.

RE: “The farce behind this question is it’s moot for so many of our students. If you’re worried that creating a Google Account opens your students to data mining? Ask how many of your students already have MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc.”

One key difference: students *choose* to create those accounts. They are not *required* to have one as a prerequisite for learning.

RE: “As educators I believe we HAVE to explain and show students how to manage these waters.”

Yes, absolutely. So for our first lesson, are you proposing we show them how their school-required accounts strip them of their privacy? To use your car-driving analogy, that’s comparable to showing them the brake after they’ve run off the road and crashed into the tree.

Schools are making the choice to save money at the expense of student and faculty privacy. I understand the reasons for it; budgets are tight, and these moves allow schools to preserve and re-allocate scarce resources.

We just shouldn’t pretend it’s a great idea, nor should we pretend that there aren’t alternatives.

Come on.

The farce behind this question is it’s moot for so many of our students. If you’re worried that creating a Google Account opens your students to data mining? Ask how many of your students already have MySpace, Facebook, Bebo, etc. http://tinyurl.com/2y29qb Ask how much personal information is on it and then double it. I’ve had teachers swear that their child didn’t use MySpace, then later when Mom was away the student showed me their MySpace page.

As educators I believe we HAVE to explain and show students how to manage these waters. If we don’t teach them at school, then where. They’ll get it at home? Doubtful.

And about the use of Google or someone else’s cloud. If you want to argue brands, I think Google is as appropriate as the others with similar privacy concerns, infrastructure, and backing up. http://tinyurl.com/yo6mcy

There’s no question that we have to be aware of what our students do online. The best analogy I can think of is driving a car. In the U.S. we don’t really concern ourselves with our kids driving until about 15 or 16. Then we send them to Drivers Education where they take written tests about rules and more importantly DRIVE A CAR. With guidance and someone sitting close with a foot hovering over the brake, but they are actually driving nonetheless.

The difference now is with the net, or kids are ‘driving’ as soon as they can wield a mouse. Without us, they’re on their own.