From the desk of Mr. Walters

After fixing my screen resolution and solving my internet woes with Comcast (bad connector that took 5 months and 3 visits to discover whilst they tried to blame my modem, my router, and finally my operating system), I've begun the hard task of setting up my desktop environment, a home network for file and print sharing, and getting some entertainment necessities loaded. First of all, let's talk about desktop eye-candy.  After much pain and suffering, I decided to go with Beryl .  Compiz was buggy and crazy.  I really don't give a darn about cubes and desktop switchers.  I just wanted a transparent appearance for for my windows, which you can see below.

I recently read Dennis Southwood’s October article, “ It's Not Just a Game—It's Skills for Life” from Educators' eZine. I know, I’m a bit behind on my reading, but I have a three-month-old, which I consider an ample excuse. Southwood begins by posing the following question. Q: Your students are most likely to be learning the real-world skills that employers demand when they are: a) In the classroom, following the lessons in the textbook. b) At home, completing assigned homework. c) On line, playing World of Warcraft. d) On a class field trip, visiting the offices of a local corporation. The answer is, of course, WOW (World of Warcraft). More and more, educators, scientists, and business executives are apparently coming to believe that such games require players to master skills in demand by today's employers, such as critical thinking, team building, problem solving, and collaboration.

I'm sitting here sipping my coffee and eating a cheap danish, waiting for the keynote speaker. Laptops on the table are the rule rather than the exception. The woman to my right is video chatting with her 7 and 10 year-olds on her Mac book, while the woman to my left is checking email on her Blackberry. Bear in mind, these are the digital immigrants. We're all teachers and administrators in our 30's through 50's. If this is the norm for us, imagine what our students did before or during breakfast, this morning!

...and there was much rejoicing. After weeks of frustration, the first solution I had tried (typing "sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-intel" in the terminal) finally panned out.  I turned out that after installing the intel driver I had to manually edit my xorg.conf file, replacing the defaut "vesa" driver with the word "intel".  Below you can click on the thumbs to see my original 1024 x 768 layout and my new 1440 x 900 goodness.  Check out all of that desktop real estate I gained back!  Wide open spaces are wonderful, particularly when you're running a seperate OS on a virtual box!     Tune in next time for "The Noble Experiment, Part IV: The Perfect Desktop"

Okay, so I've been a little distracted lately, what with changing diapers and feeding and just plain enjoying the company of my 1-month-old son.  My distraction, however abruptly ended when, in one week, my Windoze Vista single-handedly: Destroyed my Flash Drive (not kidding... my Lexxar USB drive doesn't even open anymore.  It's just dead). Deleted files I was backing up to a CD on the CD and the HD because it "lost the connection" Wouln't record sound in Macromedia Captivate (perhaps the only program for which I keep windoze around).

I'm teaching Adobe Photoshop Elements to my eighth grade students for the first three cycles of Technology class this year, and I've been spending a lot of time examining the authentic career applications of such a product. Elements is essentially Photoshop without the Web Design and Graphic Design tools, which limits its practical application to photo enhancement and manipulation. Incidentally, I do have some moral qualms about the primary application of Photoshop in the world of publishing for photo enhancement and manipulation. This situation is nicely summed up by the " Evolution " film, available at Dove's "Campaign for Real Beauty" web site.   Obviously, this is a reality that I will be sharing with my students, but it begs the following questions: Do we, as educators, have a moral responsibility to equip students with the knowledge of the consequences of the technology we're training them to use? How is it that we are encouraged to teach...

As Roger the Shrubber once said, "There is a pestilence upon this land." That pestilence is Microsoft Windows, particularly Windows Vista, which came pre-loaded on my new Acer Aspire T-690. I've been fighting buying a new computer for about 6 years now, scraping by on used and surplus units. I kept Windows light by running Win2k Professional with no bells and whistles, allowing me to run Macromedia Studio 8 on Pentium III computers. Slowly, I've been eliminating Windows from my home computers in favor of Ubuntu & Xubuntu Linux. I've had to keep one Windows computer to do web design, as Studio is very limited in Ubuntu under Crossover Office. Three weeks ago, the day of judgement came when my only remaining Windows computer, a Dell Inspiron 4100, died, losing a lot of web design client data, I might add. This is one of those bad deaths that you can't recover from no matter what you do. There were missing drivers and damaged registry files. The bottom line, ...