Many attendees here have flipcams and netbooks – simple, few-function devices that they do not mercilessly power-use. They  generally don’t have time to recompile their kernel, let alone know what one is; they need to email their students NOW. They don’t have time to debate the merits of .ogg vs .avi vs other video formats; their high school seniors are presenting NOW and they need to grab something off the shelf and hit a button and have a movie NOW and who has time to figure out licensing when you need to upload that movie for their parents NOW and we need a spreadsheet NOW so let’s use Excel because it’s on our computers anyway or maybe if we aren’t on dial-up) Google Spreadsheets is sufficiently handy to fulfill our need for NOW. Default settings are important.

I need to talk with more teachers to find out how they find about technologies to use, but my current hypothesis is “click first hit from a Google search that has a massive easy-setup download button and is free or very, very cheap.” By that metric, Fedora and Sugar have a long, long ways to go. The workshop on Google Apps, on the other hand, had a crowded line that stretched on down the hallway. The  workshop wasn’t run by Google; it was run by a teacher who had used the stuff. Same with the iPhone session.

Went by the Second Life pavilion. This was a master lesson on how to welcome newbies to a space in a way that makes them want to  come back again and again. No sooner had I sat down than a volunteer approached me and offered to help get me started – sat with me for a half-hour walking me through making an account and doing basic navigation, didn’t leave until I’d started talking with the remote welcome team in Second Life (who he enthusiastically described to me – “oh, she’s wonderful! One of my best friends in SL! Tell her I say hello!”). By starting as a message courier, I rapidly got drawn into the conversation; the online greeters were equally excited, people kept coming up to me and welcoming me and showing me small interesting things (multiple welcomers treating you as if you were already a key part of their community == good feeling), the on-site volunteer kept popping in and asking if everything was all right and going “oh, you’re doing X! That’s awesome! Check out that thing near X!”

The thing that most impressed me was how they encouraged me to experiment and explore while simultaneously putting “you won’t fail” fallbacks in place (“Mel, can you try to teleport and follow me? Don’t worry, I’ll teleport you if you get lost.”) I tend to be more reckless than the average in terms of launching from unfamiliar trapeezes and trusting that I’ll grab something to break my fall on the way down, but knowing exactly what safety net was in place was nevertheless comforting. They had scheduled tours; we walked around Genome, a world that a genetics professor had constructed (swim inside a cell! talk with chromosomes!) and then Biome (flying up to realize the globe of paramecium I’d been staring at was actually a water droplet in the lens of a gigantic microscope was a lovely moment) and were constantly encouraged to try things, play with things, come back and use the space anytime… Teachers sure do know how to make you feel comfortable taking risks in learning new things. We need to learn that.

Looking at ads like this, I wonder how computers ever got a reputation for making children into socially isolated beings.

Andy Pethan (engineer): “The focus on STEM! STEM! STEM! is driving me nuts!” (STEM = Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.) “I think English teachers are the biggest untapped market for technology in education. They could do so much with it.” I pointed out to Andy that STEM teachers tend to be the ones that like the tech stuff – which he knew and acknowledged as obvious – and that sometimes English teachers became English teachers, or early childhood teachers, or… well, non-STEM teachers – not just because they loved English or small children or History or such, but also because they might be afraid of STEM. This is a blatant overgeneralization and there are tons of exceptions, but that’s something that’s been drilled into my head by my aunt (who teaches kindergarten) – the phrase “those who can’t, teach,” as untrue and unfair as we think it may be, actually did come from somewhere. Argh! Systems that don’t work!

Happy exception: an art teacher and a physical education (PE) teacher from Ohio had teamed up to get another HP grant – I talked with Julie Lustic, the PE teacher, and was amazed. These teachers started out with very little technical knowledge. Julie described how she had to figure out how to save video files, struggling on her own until she discovered “File > Save As,” and then how it was tough to figure out which folder it had just saved into – a reminder of how many computer skills I take for granted despite trying my best not to. I was awed by their tenacity; they’d obviously gotten far more digitally fluent on their own since.

Julie would film her students running, jumping, and skidding across the gym on scooters. “Kids love to watch themselves,” she said. This was particularly helpful for the very young children (kindergarten, first grade) who were still developing a lot of fine and gross motor skills. Kids go through a continuum of development; for jumping rope, a 4-year-old might start by trying to windmill her arms awkwardly around at the shoulder, arcing over the back of her head; then over the next year or so progress to flailing elbow movement until finally, at 6, she’s jumping rope fluidly with her hands down by her sides and the barest hint of wrist movement. By filming the kids, she was able to track who was in what development stage when, and convey that to the parents, who often would think “able to jump rope” was a binary “yes she can / no she can’t” switch, and profited greatly from seeing the stages of learning they could then help their kid through.

She showed videos of adult athletes doing the moves she was about to teach them. “None of these kids had ever seen somebody vault before. They thought it was something I had invented.” They got projectors so kids could see the videos closer to the scale of actual people. All three teachers also set a target of raising 4th grade math test scores; they did this by talking with the 4th grade classroom teachers to find out what vocabulary words they were using in their classrooms, then working those words into their lessons (“run around the perimeter of the gym, measure the circumference of your head…”). While Julie and I talked, Ida Bergson – the art teacher – played stop-motion videos of dancing geometric shapes that she and the kids had made. Ida and Julie were proud of how it had worked out, and also said it had taken an immense amount of extra effort to pull it off.

These were teachers clearly going above and beyond and having huge effects on their students. And they had to fight every step of the way. Nobody in their district took their grant application seriously, because “they thought we weren’t going to get it anyway, sure, apply.” When they got it, there was an uproar because “who gives a PE teacher a computer?” They were refused district tech support and told they were on their own, which is entirely reasonable. But when they tried to fix things on their own, they got in trouble for not going through the district tech support that had already said it wouldn’t help them. There was a long story about how they had to keep on fighting through administration to keep doing this – even after the results had been apparent and positive.

We talked about where that might come from. Politically, it is unusual for art/PE teachers to get technologies the classroom teachers don’t have themselves (then again, Julie and Ida put in the work to make the grant happen and succeed). It’s new. It’s scary. New things are scary. And if you barely have the resources to keep afloat, taking the energy to deal with scary new things is not high on your priority list; you kinda wish that it would go away. Another systems problem. It’s hard to fix. I’m glad that Ida and Julie are still determined to fight the good fight; those kids in Cleveland Heights are very, very lucky.

My cousin Audrey watches this TV show, so I had to take a picture with the SuperWhy! team.

Walking around the vendor exhibition area, I was reminded that I’m not really the type of person that’s attractive for a sales rep to talk with. For good reason. I look too old to be a K12 student but too young to be a teacher (though I’m old enough to be a brand-new one) or someone who actually makes or influences purchasing decisions (ok, wearing a t-shirt rather than business attire may have made a difference) so I wasn’t pegged in the “education” space, and as a young woman I usually don’t get pegged in the “technology” space, so educational technology vendors probably don’t see me as a fit for who they ought to talk with. (Many happy exceptions here, but compared to the response to my friend Evan, a 21-year-old asian male engineer a in collared shirt, it was a fascinating contrast.)

I actually like being invisible, since I can easily choose to make myself visible by turning on the SHEER ENTHUSIASM!!! switch. This let me quietly wander around and watch what people were doing; there was an overwhelming amount of marketing shiny – far more than I would usually think contributes to conveying the real value of a product or service. Does a salesman dressing up as Indiana Jones (complete with whip and cave-themed booth) make your product any more valuable? Can you be more specific than “RAISES STUDENT ACHIEVEMENT!” in terms of what you’ll do for me? Primary colors and exclamation points everywhere; buzzwords on every sign. There were a lot of mini-workshops where the presenter “taught” the audience something with their technology, be it a clicker response system or a smart whiteboard; they were very polished and energetic, but I felt like most of them were…. sort of manufactured. One booth had a film crew taping the presenter on a stage, elevated about 4 feet above an audience of roughly a dozen people – few enough to jump down and have a real conversation with, in any case.

I have very mixed feelings about branding and marketing and PR. (This means, of course, that if I ever get an MBA, it’ll probably be in one of those, since that’s the thing that makes me most uncomfortable. And I do realize the three are different things… the MBA interns at RH are trying to teach me the difference, but I don’t yet really understand it. Anyway.)

NCWIT did see me walking by, and went “oh! you need to go encourage young women to pursue technology careers!” That’s a paraphrase, but I got a packet of materials (…actually, with rather good statistics) and a howto on approaching a local school to volunteer to do a presentation or something with them. I’ve got mixed feelings about this too. I am female, and I do like technology (and education, for that matter), and… okay, so? I’m wearing sandals, and I like technology, and you don’t see campaigns crusading for more sandal-wearers to get into IT. I was amused by how they tried to persuade me to particularly target low-income schools to volunteer at, though. “You know first-hand that engineering is a way to not have a low income!” I’m fairly certain that if you tallied up my work hours and my income since graduation, I would be making way below minimum wage, but that’s what I chose when I decided that volunteering and working on interesting things to help people trumped getting a stable job with lots of monies immediately after getting my degree (which was certainly an option – and I can see that someone from a low-income background might be more motivated to pursue that route than a child of the middle class with backup savings, no student loans, and no family to support).

Apparently Joseph Schumpeter wrote about Disrupting Class 70 years before the book came out.

Generally speaking, I have not found the below photograph to be true.

As an open source geek, I find it interesting to see proprietary software vendors trumpet that their products give users the “freedom to create, share, and discover everywhere.” If you buy their product, you are free to use it to create non-interoperable files and share those files with other people who have purchased the exact same software, and thereby discover what they’ve done. You can take your laptop running this software with you, hence the “everywhere.” (Or maybe you can pay to make it work on your cell phone for a year.) I know this is a very biased view, but it makes me feel kind of like… “yes, cookies from a box are mighty tasty, but in comparison to cookies that my brother bakes from scratch – you really don’t know what you’re missing…”

Sat down next to two teachers (well, one is now a teacher trainer) for lunch. When I conveyed my mixed feelings about what I’d seen that morning, Sandy Scragg helped me sort it out by explaining that there were two tracks of thought in educational technology. The one we come from is the one that sees tech as a tool for creation, for enablement, for greater interaction between individuals. The other one is an entirely reasonable response to the current system which is full of high-pressure, high-stakes assignments and tests and unions and long hours and low pay and high turnover; it sees technology as a way to automate teaching, not to free teachers to be more creative, but to turn them into standardized automatons. “Can you believe, I actually heard them say, ‘with this, your teachers don’t even need to think!’ They give you these scripts, say ‘read this word for word,’ the idea is, since we have high turnover, with a script it doesn’t matter who’s in front of the kids.”

We talked about how K12 education in the US has had this huge “lectures are bad! we need to make things more interactive! no lectures!” thing going for quite some time, and when our most successful students from that system graduate and go to college as we hoped they would (the topic of whether college as The Desired Endpoint of K12 is another debate), where do they end up their freshman year but 200+ student lecture rooms. We also talked about standardized testing; Sandy differentiated between testing as a benchmark (“that’s okay”) vs high-stakes testing as The Thing that the futures of “students, teachers, entire districts” ride upon.

Later that afternoon, I sat with a teacher from the Bronx and another one from a tough part of Texas who were discussing the difficulties of dealing with parents. In the good ol’ days (long before I was born, according to their dates – they’re both veteran teachers), parents were More Involved; schools made an effort to reach them. They’d bus the parents in for meetings and workshops once a month after school, so they could teach the parents too. They had a place where non-working parents could go and study and learn in the library after they dropped off their kids in the morning. Nowadays they’re seeing far more teenage parents who don’t know how to raise their kids because they didn’t have a chance to finish growing up themselves, 24-year-old mothers with 10-year-old children. The mothers still want to go out and party all night because they missed prom, missed hanging out with friends, dropped out of school, etc. because they had a kid to take care of… both the child-rearing and the childhood-having can’t coexist, so both get done quite badly, in most cases. There was no mention of what happened with the dads.

That’s all for Monday. I’ll write about http://edtechfuture.org/ separately, since I hope to find out more about it today.

This was the late-night idea. Results forthcoming. Traffic not as good as hoped, but it did meet our primary criteria of “hey, we need a way to meet people!” (In other words, we were so busy talking to people that we didn’t have time to constantly man #neccwall. This is good.)

Manned the Sugar Labs booth for a bit; had a good conversation with Scott Bullock on how engineers interested in education tend to make things for the kids they used to be (a tiny minority) and the problem of how to reach the rest.

Stopped by and talked with teachers who had gotten HP tablet PC grants. An Arkansas school had children annotate photographs with geometric drawings (“This sunflower exhibits symmetry over this line! *drawdraw*”). I asked if it was far more engaging to do that than to print out the picture and hand the kid a marker. They said yes, but didn’t know why – I wonder how much “technology helps students!” is attributable to students being excited by shiny new things, how much is due to the self-selecting nature of teachers willing to experiment with new tech (they’d tend to be the more adventuresome, dynamic ones even without “technology”), and how much the design and enablements of technology actually chips in to “increased performance.”

Another note: as an engineer, I’m used to being able to think about the “perfect” solution and then take the time to build it. Most teachers can’t do that; they don’t have the skills or time to create much in the way of new things (said the Arkansas teachers). You look around and see what’s on the shelf and do something with it. You don’t waste time thinking of things to build from scratch because you’ll never have the resources.

Then there was the Mt. Vernon high school that had gotten tablet PCs for their teachers. They didn’t have them for students; maybe 50% of their students had computer access at home. One of the teachers mentioned that he’d done his student teaching in a neighborhood with much more computer access, where you could actually email the students files and expect all of them to be able to print them out and bring them in the next day – this was a very different situation. Computers are expensive.

They were so proud that they had moved to using Powerpoint for classes. “The students love it,” they said. “Some teachers don’t have good handwriting… and this way it’s clear what they have to study [by memorization]… if they’re absent, they can watch the video at home without having to come to class and talk with the teacher…”

I… have conflicting feelings about this. On the one hand, they’re doing the best they can with a difficult situation. On the other hand, this is an incremental improvement down a road I don’t agree with (drill and kill, turning learners into automatons and using technology to script away human interaction). But to overturn such a difficult situation would be extremely difficult, so maybe this is the best that they can do.

Overheard amusing conversation: “Municipal wifi? Won’t that spread all sorts of viruses around?”

There is a film titled “Autism: The Musical.” It is a documentary of an acting teacher coaching 5 autistic children to perform a musical, and looks intriguing.

The exhibit hall is HUGE.

These notes take me nearly to lunchtime on Monday. I will have to finish them tomorrow.

If I were making NECC bingo cards, they would have the following words: collaboration, sharing, management (as in “classroom managment” – this bothers me, as if children were an industrial process that we need to keep in line), problem-solving, 21st century learners, integrative, accountability, standards, immersive, constructionist, community, reaching-outside-the-classroom-walls, rigorious, standards, innovate.

There’s power and honesty here. There’s also a lot of thin glossy washes of sounding-good – educators aren’t in particular positions of power, nor are the kids they teach, and both have (as people in those situations tend to do) become extremely good at giving the answers that those in power like to hear. You can see that gloss occasionally washing over someone’s passion – projects designed so that the outcome is in ready-made press-release format, obligatory scatterings of buzzwords (you know what? I will make that bingo card) but it gives me heart that oftentimes the fire will break through. The best thing I can do, I think, is be on fire myself these next two days so that nobody else will be the only one outside their comfort zone.

Speaking of fire, I’ve got a low-grade fever – my immune system has decided that DC is full of allergens that it must FIGHT! NOW! so I’m going to sleep and write the remainder of Monday’s notes tomorrow.

Breakfast with Mike Lee while we picked up Sugar Labs flyers. Talked about the digital divide; seniors and the underprivileged are being left out; the interfaces we assume are also leaving people out (typing, reading, and able to carry 5lbs of laptop are big assumptions). Pointed Mike towards IIF’s session with Ezter Hargittai, who studies social inequity online.

Mike mentioned that the MIT Media Lab was working on a collaborative development environment. ACTION: find out what this is – it sounds neat!

Email discussions with Eric, Mikell, and Greg about FIRST robotics and open source, prompted by FIRST presence at NECC (yay!) Why aren’t teams producing open source robotics code? Why don’t they have code repositories, even? Some of this is in the works to being fixed, and there are certainly people interested in making it happen, but nobody’s stepped up to drive it yet. I am trying to plant as many seeds as possible this week because I know I don’t have the bandwidth to drive this (but I think I might have the bandwidth to help mentor and encourage someone who wants to). Should track down Denise Lewis tomorrow.

All For Good – another excellent Mike Lee conversation. The balance between shiny top-down endorsement/marketing from the big players and the grassroots movements they’re trying to start is fascinating. I admire the effort – aggregating and matching volunteers with opportunities is certainly not a new idea – at the same time, I wonder if it’s going to work.

There are serious signal-to-noise problems to overcome without bottlenecking at a single point of quality control; it’s hard to make sure organizations can actually handle the volunteers they ask for. Even the amazing Leslie Hawthorn puts in tons of effort filtering Summer of Code orgs and certainly doesn’t have a perfect hit rate. Compounding this problem is the divide between “traditional” volunteer coordinators (volunteer coordination as done, say, 20-30 years ago) and the kind of volunteer coordination folks like Mike and myself and the Red Hat CommArch team do (which is less coordination and more… the best word I know for it is Karsten’s “gardening” analogy). It’s always a problem when two people use the same word thinking they mean the same thing when that’s not actually the case. We tossed around the idea of content stamping before letting it rest as a wait-and-see.

And then we got to the convention center. This conference is freakin’ HUGE. I have never seen anything on this scale before. You stand in the entrance and look up and there are four stories of displays and then hallways that go back and back and back and then there is another building and it is LARGER THAN MY COLLEGE BY ORDERS OF MAGNITUDE. (Granted, that’s not extraordinarily difficult.)

The keynote was Malcom Gladwell, who is a good speaker. I’ve watched him before, though, and he tends to rehash points from his books. (And sure enough, he did it again this time. Still a good speech.) I didn’t actually watch the keynote; I caught up with people on it afterwards, and read the written summary. Instead, I helped set up the 60 VMs in the Open Source Pavilion, hereafter referred to as the OSP. Thin clients are sweet. With the money one school saved by getting a thin client system, they got huge monitors, sound systems in every classroom… 

Mike has a video of every machine here simultaneously rebooting (with cheers from the crowd). It’s sweet.

Jeff Elkner arrived. I introduced him to April-Hope (one Sugar/OLPC chapter founder to another, with the “high school chapters are awesome” bonus shared category). And Luke Faraone and I have finally met face-to-face.

Talked with teachers from northeastern NC about BBQ until one of them started telling the story of how her (middle school) kids put on a film festival – “have you ever seen a room of middle school students fully engaged? They would cheer, and then whent the next video started, they would become absolutely quiet…” The same group of teachers pointed me towards animoto, which which I have attempted to produce a slideshow. I’ll post this when the pictures are done processing.

ISTE has a lot of SIGs. It’s a list worth looking at to see the topics and the language educators interested in technology are grouping into right now. Of note: there is no early childhood category here. In fact, they don’t even really have books on it. There is a huge debate on whether computers should even be used in early childhood – with “computer usage” meaning “sit the kids in front of a screen and have them type.” I don’t think that’s age-appropriate (these kids usually are learning how to read and don’t have much fine motor control for rapid typing) but also think that type of computing is just a tiny, tiny piece of what “technology” can mean. Teachers doing vlogs of their young students, for instance.

Then there’s #neccwall. It’s one of those “it’s 11pm and we have AN IDEA!” moments (3 people now, but we’re going to try to find other first-time attendees to help out). It will be… explained more when I don’t have to wake up in 4 hours to prepare for it. In the meantime, the best explanation I can give is this video.

Finally made the mile+ hike to my hotel, accompanied partway by a group of teachers (a retired edu prof and her former students, it turns out) who gave me a blackboard pointer (I am not sure what to do with this, but I can point at things with inpunity and 2 extra feet of reach now!) and once I mentioned I’d attended a math and science magnet high school, we talked about math and science training for teachers until our paths diverged.

Need sleep so badly.

A lot of sanitation projects are large-scale government-backed operations, and getting the technology in place was harder than inventing it – he told the story of his friend, the inventor of a 3-chamber sequential flow gravity-fed wastewater treatment system designed for Venezuela that was a huge improvement over the prior “dump ‘er in the lagoon and the bacteria will break it down” method (which works, but you need a lot of lagoon space for a lot of people; this system was much smaller). It worked like a charm. Then the Cubans came. They wanted sanitation everywhere (a noble goal) but didn’t understand this newfangled 3-chamber system – they knew lagoons. So the new tech sat unused and the lagoons got dumped in and the harmful effluents in the water supply increased by an order of magnitude… and there was no way to share the information, the design, the knowledge of how to use it, so there wasn’t much anyone could do about it.

I brought up the idea of open design repositories such as Appropedia (where Chris Watkins has been doing work on sanitation), and how they serve as knowledge bases and watering holes for projects like IDDS as well as ways for potential future sanitation engineers to get involved without the high entry barrier (“must have experience to get experience”) that makes it tough for folks like Liz and Chris to break into the field. Randal was intrigued.

What does this have to do with open source and education? (more below the fold, for the sanity of Planet aggregator readers…)

Talking with Randal immediately pre-NECC got me in the mindset of seeing this as more than just an education problem, more than a technology problem… the mindset and practices of open source communities are a system, and this system can cut across multiple disciplines on many, many scales to solve a ton of systems problems.

That stayed with me throughout the conversations later that evening – whenever someone mentioned a problem that they wished they could fix, instead of jumping (as I usually do) to “let us make $foo to solve that!” (technology == solution!) or “all we have to do is teach them X!” (training == solution!), I could pause and think about what the system was that, rationally proceeding, would result in problematic outcomes (like “you can complete your college CS homework without needing to think”). And how to find out what that system was when you didn’t know. And then what kinds of tiny things might start to tip that system over.

It was a good start.

The shuttle dropped me off at EduBloggerCon’s afterparty, where all the food had already been consumed by hungry teachers. Andy Pethan and Evan Morikawa came out to tell me that one of my high-school friends was here, and I was still completely mystified when April-Hope Wareham came flying out of the corner. April-Hope was one of the founders of the IMSA OLPC chapter; I first met her as a high school senior from my alma mater, and she’s gone on to study CS at university (sophomore at UIUC next year). So she’s quite well-versed in the “open source for K12 learning” space – but told me that now she wants to bloody well fix undergraduate engineering education too – we’ve both been spoiled by learning in open-source communities and filling out rote textbook problem sets has lost its appeal. I told her about POSSE and iFoundry and she started jumping up and down.

Then she took me to a table where people were making “education anarchy! subvert the system!” headbands (mine: “svn checkout anarchy” on the front, “iz in yr anarchy” on back, with picture of cat). And this is how I met Randy Orwin, who, with Steve Hargadon, is wrangling the Open Source Pavilion at NECC. But only for a moment. Because a photographer motioned to me, April-Hope, Andy, and another fellow named Tyler and told us to stand together and smile. We obediently mugged for the camera in our red bandana headbands.

“Do you know why I took a picture of you?” the photographer asked afterwards. We shook our heads. “Look around. You guys are the digital natives. Everybody else here-” and we realized with a start that most of the attendees were old enough to be our parents – “is a digital immigrant. You guys are natives.”

We looked at each other. “Wellll, we had computers,” Andy said. “But not so much the internet,” I said. “Oregon Trail!” April-Hope said. Everyone under age 25 nodded and started talking about hunting pixelated buffalo. I reckon I could be a digital native (or at least a digital very-young immigrant) – but a networked native… that’s more like my younger cousins – the kindergarten blogger, the (then) 12-year-old who decided that the best way to get classmates to lower their carbon emissions was through tracking them on a social networking site, the 3rd grader who taped her Girl Scout cookie pitch on YouTube… compared to them, my bahasa digital is the slightly more formal lexicon of someone who’s worked through grammar books to gain that last gasp of almost-native fluency.

The night had started to wind down (I’d come in an hour before closing). Met Jennifer Ashby and Lois Smethurst, two teachers from Australia who were blogging with kids as young as 5. I was enthralled by their stories of how excited the kids were to have their work be world-readable. They used it as a portfolio of sorts, Lois explained. But it was hard to keep track of because they had one blog for the entire school, so tracking individual kids was a tough manual process – they couldn’t keep separate blogs on a finer granularity than grade level, because kids within a grade would be redistributed among differnent classes for that grade each year. Could you have an individual blog for each kid and then a Planet aggregator for each class, and just redo the .planet configuration files once a year? I asked. Individual portfolios that could stay with each student throughout all 12 years of schooling, but easy access to everyone in Mr. Johnson’s class, or the 7th grade, or the entire school, with one click. “Wow,” said Lois. “That sounds perfect.” Now I need to see if there are Planet install instructions that can be followed by a non-technical person (like a teacher…)

Took Mike Lee to dinner (generic Chinese restaurant) where he obtained a very appropriate fortune cookie – Mike is the driving force behind the OLPC DC Learning Club, and he caught me up on the brand-spankin’-new Sugar Labs DC and a host of other things – like educational technology being a systems problem not just for kids in school, but also for seniors (Mike works for the AARP) and others on the far side of the digital divide. Almost nobody’s doing stuff for them. Kids with laptops look much cuter in press photos, maybe.

We were pretty exhausted. I didn’t even check my email when we got to Mike’s house (though I did, to his fascination, pull out and use all my anti-RSI equipment to unkink my arms). Just patted the dog, texted Luke, crawled onto his couch, and was out almost instantly.

Warm, humid morning. Woke up early without an alarm and switched the SIM cards on my phones so that I would have one this week (the one with the keyboard doesn’t ring loud enough for me to hear in my sleep, and vibrates punily, so I’m downgrading for more functionality). Ginneh came and climbed the tree and read sci-fi on the roof.

I packed, leaving a note for the TSA explaining the mysterious-looking anti-RSI gadgetry filling my bag. Cleaned my room, showered, ran through a few jazz standards, cleaned the (gross; fruit fies!) living room, sent paperwork to UNICEF, shipped the documents that will turn my brokerage account into a noncustodial one (which, technically, you should do on your 18th birthday), printed travel documents, arranged to meet Mike (and Andy and Evan) at the edublogger afterparty, chugged some vegan cake and soymilk, bought Ginneh pupusas and lengua (tongue) tacos for lunch, and slid into the airport in time to check baggage and grab two rounds of preflight hydration.

I’m getting used enough to travel to no longer feel shy and awkward making my way through long terminals – I can skim down corridors in a backpack, remove all electronics from my bags and pockets while running towards security, redeposit keys and shoes and coins while ambling towards the gate, have a keen enough sense of line-time to spend as much time as possible writing and as little time queuing up as possible. I love the feeling of hitting a foreign pavement in battered leather sandals, looking up at a new skyline in awe,  and racing towards it. Speaking of those sandals, they’ve lasted nearly a quarter of my life (since my shoesize stopped changing) and are mighty chewed up now; I may need new ones soon. Unfamiliar horizons make me thrilled instead of scared. It’s a big step. This didn’t use to happen.

Next: notes from NECC, Day -1.

And yet this has taken me over a week to do so far (and I haven’t even submitted my first package for review yet) Why is this taking me so long? Fear of the unknown, really. I don’t know what’s involved – how long it will take or how hard it will be – so I budget out time not knowing how close to finished I’ll be then, and need repetitive prodding to get started. As Ian Weller said, the first time is always the hardest – so I’m writing down what’s helpful and what’s confusing while I still have the privilege of considering this to be Mysterious And Hard.

Helpful: I aready had an idea of what packaging meant and what RPMs were. I was told this package needed to be made, and that I could and should do it, rendering me unable to use the “maybe you need some mysterious, undefined experience to be a packager, so I should stop trying to figure it out” excuse and giving me something concrete to deliver: I had a no-excuses target.

Confusing: Where do I find the how-to-make-an-RPM guide? A google search was not particularly helpful. To get from to the RPM howto, I had to take this path, starting at fedoraproject.org

1. “Packaging is participating, so I can click the little join-fedora sidebar.”
2. “Uh… shoot. Packaging doesn’t seem to exactly be OS development, but I’ll click OS Developer anyway.”
3. “Ah, that was the right place; Packaging is listed under the skills-you-want-to-learn here. And lo, there is a Packaging link to click on!”
4. “Now I’m on a page that shows me how to join the packaging crew. The first thing that it tells me to do is read the guidelines, and here’s a link to the Creating Packages HOWTO and the Building Packages Guide. Golly, they’re both huge. And the Packaging Guidelines. And the…
5. *** Too Much Information! buffer overflow detected ***: /usr/bin/mel-brain terminated

Helpful: Sebastian Dziallas pointed me towards astronomy-bookmarks, which is nearly identical to the RPM I was trying to make; I downloaded and unpacked it and poked around, noticing what files it contained – and that it did not, in fact, seem to have magic within it. Just files with some settings I didn’t yet understand. Presumably, somewhere in the oversupply of RPM-making-howtos, something would teach me how to make something similar.

Confusing: While lurking on another IRC channel, I overheard the RPM Guide being mentioned. It’s gorgeous and a helpful reference, but definitely not a walk-through for first-time packagers. Filed in my “good references to have around” section.

Helpful: The Creating Packages HOWTO referred to Christoph Wickert’s Building RPM packages tutorial, which was the first thing that really got my rear in gear as far as doing things that would create a package rather than researching how to create a package. It was good to be able to watch Christoph walk newbies through packaging, see what questions they had, and have a conversational stream to follow along.

Using Christoph’s chat as a guide, I installed all the necessary tools (rpmbuild and rpmdevtools), ran rpmdev-setuptree to make the appropriate folders in my homedir, put my source (a single bookmarks.html file, following the lead of astronomy-bookmarks) in the SOURCES folder, ran rpmdev-newspec to make a skeletal spec file, and took a first stab at filling it in. This file was my first attempt.

Confusing: According to the instructions, it was now time to run rpmbuild -ba edu-spin-bookmarks.spec. Experienced packagers who’ve glanced at my first spec might be able to guess the error I ran into. Here it is.


+ install -p -m 644 /home/mchua/rpmbuild/SOURCES /home/mchua/rpmbuild/BUILDROOT/edu-spin-bookmarks-0.0.1-1.fc10.i386/usr/share/bookmarks
install: omitting directory `/home/mchua/rpmbuild/SOURCES'
error: Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.x3Rq1M (%install)
RPM build errors:
Bad exit status from /var/tmp/rpm-tmp.x3Rq1M (%install)


Two fruitless hours of looking for documentation on %install followed before I realized I’d just spent 1 hour 50 minutes too many and should really just be asking for help.

Helpful: Sebastian, once again, came to the rescue.

<sdziallas> you'll need to specify the bookmarks.html in the source0 part
<sdziallas> mchua: because rpmbuild won't download the file
<sdziallas> mchua: basically, it doesn't know what to do, I guess. you can
            also put just the filename temporarily in the source0 argument.

Lo and behold. changing line 9 from

Source0: http://mchua.fedorapeople.org/edu-spin-bookmarks/

to

Source0: http://mchua.fedorapeople.org/edu-spin-bookmarks/bookmarks.html

did the trick. I had been looking in the wrong place for what turned out to be a trivially obvious answer. (If Sebastian had not been around, where should I have looked for the answer? What’s the ideal way for me to have found the fix?) Running rpmbuild now popped out an edu-spin-bookmarks-0.0.1-1.fc10.i386.rpm – and now I was ready for Phase II, making the RPM functional and ready for review… (stay tuned for our next installment!)

Yes, this is a slow and agonizing crawl through something very simple, and I’m sure I’m boring many people here to tears. ;-) Here’s the point: to the beginner, it is a slow and agonizing crawl, and we don’t see the “very simple” yet. Or at the very least, realizing that it’s simple and learning how to navigate the simplicity is not a trivial thing.

I’m actually quite impressed by how simple the process is, and how helpful the resources are – however, my baseline for “easy process!” is “it’s better than several weeks of blindly trying to install Linux for the first time via stacks of floppies in 2001!” so just because it’s “good enough” doesn’t mean it’s as good as it could be.

How can we improve this experience?

Thanks to the encouragement and support of a great many people and organizations (a huge thanks to Walter, Pia, Martin, David, Greg, Tabitha, Google, and multiple people named Chris) and recent events which caused a sudden lack of any schedule conflicts, I have acquired plane tickets (and learned how not to acquire plane tickets in the future), stuffed an eigenset of belongings into my brown backpack, and started to repeat the mantra “I am young and foolish,” because… really, how else do you describe the decision to spend your severance pay on a last-minute trip to a hemisphere you’ve never set foot in? (“Educational,” perhaps?)

I’m attending as a volunteer for two projects – OLPC and Sugar Labs. Last-minute plane tickets mean I’ll miss the miniconfs, but I still plan on, among other things, getting over my long-held (vague and irrational) “Here Be Dragons” fear of kernel hacking by finally mucking with my own. I’m also looking forward to meeting a good number of people (including many LinuxChix) in open-source whom I’ve admired for quite some time and asking them lots and lots of questions once I get excited enough to forget that I’m shy. And I will, for the second time (in 2 weeks, too) miss a keysigning. Oh well. I’ll make one someday, I’m sure.

Suggestions for things to do, people to meet, and events to document are very welcome – I’m playing most of this by ear, and my transcription skills* are open to anyone who needs ‘em.

*Old journalistic habits die hard; I type, sketch, record, or photograph everything I go to. As Ed McNierney said at FUDCON: “I’ve discovered a new form of communication. It’s called the Mel-a-gram. If you want to document something, you send Mel there, and then magically, you know everything.”