This post will offer a brief intro to open, free ways to acquire and read ebooks, with a focus on tools for doing this on tablets (read: the iPads your school has but doesn’t know what to do with) and mobile devices (read: the smartphones your students just use for Facebook, txting, and Angry Birds).

Fortunately, there are millions of books available in open, non-proprietary formats, and the most ubiquitous of those at the moment is the ePub format. Without going into the technical details, an ePub book is just all the words in a book (and maybe some images) wrapped up in a little file with standard instructions on where the chapters start and stop and info on the title, author, and publisher.

Lots of books that are no longer protected by copyright are available for free in epub format. Alas, as excited as I am to have downloaded free copies of Dracula and Moby Dick, I might have a tough time selling those to my 7th graders. To dive right in, go download Cory Doctorow’s Little Brother (description here). The YA book is about teenagers in San Francisco using their hacker skillz to thwart a Department of Homeland Security that has curtailed civil liberties to an unacceptable extreme in the wake of an imagined terrorist attack. Doctorow takes a very open stance on copyright protection, and would therefore rather have more copies of his books in readers’ hands than worry that he earned a few bucks off every copy in circulation. I whole-heartedly embrace his mindset when it comes to getting high-interest texts into the hands of reluctant readers.

So now you have a file sitting on your computer called “CoryDoctorow-LittleBrother.epub”. What do you do with it?

There are a bunch of different epub readers available for Windows and Mac; some are nifty little extensions that run in Firefox or Chrome. If your goal is to develop and manage a collection of ebooks (something I’ll aim to cover in the future), then you want the heavyweight Calibre software. If you just want to get your kids reading books on their computers or mobile devices, here are a few better solutions:

bookworm

http://bookworm.oreilly.com/

Just discovered this and wish I had seen it earlier. Bookwork allows you to create an account, then upload epub books online and read them in a web browser. The interface is utilitarian, but it offers a simple mobile reading format that is very readable on mobile devices and iPads.

The learning curve here is pretty low. You upload the files; they live in your account; you login and read them. I’ll be uploading several sets of books this weekend and adding the link to the class bookworm account to my Moodle site for students to access Monday.

booki.sh

http://booki.sh/

Booki.sh is a very cute indie ebook reader built by some clever Australian developers. It has a more polished interface than bookworm, but you can also upload epub files, sort them into your library, and they read them in a browser. The interface is optimized for iPads, so if you’re taking it for a spin, don’t just go by what it looks like on your laptop. This is actually how I do a lot of personal reading, because the site syncs bookmarks in the cloud: if I read a few pages on my iPhone, then I can open up my iPad later and go right to the spot where I stopped.

Booki.sh can also add books to your library directly from feedbooks.com, a major repository of public domain (free) books. But again, Pride and Prejudice may not appeal to all your students.

Amazon Cloud Reader

http://read.amazon.com

Okay, so I said earlier that Kindle wasn’t the best way to go, but Amazon currently dominates this market and has a well-designed browser reader. I asked a few friends to donate Kindle books through an Amazon Wishlist, so my scholars have access to a few books in the class library. Amazon also provides access to troves of public domain books.

There are many other apps for reading epub files on your devices, and your iPad has doubtless prompted you to download one of them: iBooks. But here’s the rub: moving books into iBooks requires going through a book-buying process similar to a Kindle, or else requires that you manage your files through iTunes. If you, as a classroom teacher, don’t have administrative access to move files or apps on and off your iPads, iBooks will be of limited use. If you do get ebook readers like Stanza installed on your tablets, you still have to manage moving files onto the devices.

When I think about optimal teaching tools for iPads or other class-room based technology, I usually want to see a solution that works in a browser. Because as locked down as a set of iPads may be, or as impossible as it may be to get new software onto computers in a school lab, you can almost always access the web.

Around 2000, I volunteered at a GoodWill book sale in Atlanta. The offerings of donated books were pretty extensive and the prices were rock-bottom. While I sorted shelves and helped folks checkout, I watched a man spend 90 minutes combing the sale floor and pulling each each and every copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. He probably found 50 copies of various editions. When he checked out, he told us he was a high school English teacher and needed the texts for his class. Now, given the right hardware, he could get the same text for free in 60 seconds.

At the moment, the publishing world is in a state of flux as ebooks grow in popularity and reading devices become more affordable and available. The formats may change (VHS beat Betamax; Blu-Ray beat HD-DVD), but the bottom line is this: your kids need books, and ebooks are a powerful way to get them reading.

This is my pitch, created along with my colleague Jordyn Sims, for the TFA Social Innovation Award competition.

Textlab.org

Literacy is a technology. Technology is a literacy.
Andrew Plemmons Pratt (TFA DC Region ’10, 7th grade English in PGCPS)
Jordyn Sims (TFA DC Region ’10, 8th grade English in PGCPS)

Download the full pitch as a .pdf | Visit our profile on vator.tv for the TFA Social Innovation Award competition.

Innovation: Textlab Will Accelerate Literacy

Teaching students literacy skills in a digital environment requires better software. We need a laboratory for reading and writing the way college students and professionals read and write: efficiently, collaboratively, and on the Internet. We need a Textlab.

Textlab is a lightweight Learning Management System, or LMS, built specifically for middle and high school literacy instruction. It allows students to practice critical reading and writing skills and to create portfolios of digital work. It also allows instructors to provide targeted, differentiated assignments and materials to students and to offer feedback in a secure online format. It is a platform-independent web application, optimized for desktop, laptop, tablet, and mobile access.

Social, political, and economic power rests in no small part on the ability to share engaging ideas over the Internet. Closing the achievement gap will require bridging the digital divide while improving literacy skills. We can better prepare students for success as thought-workers in the modern economy and accelerate their academic achievement by building specialized tools that meet their literacy instruction needs in the classroom.

Middle and high school students are savvy consumers of new media—regardless of their family income. But low-income students frequently experience these tools only in the context of entertainment and not education. The paper-based classroom makes it hard for them to see literacy within the modern digital environment, which is where they will have to continue honing their critical thinking skills throughout their lives. As teacher/researcher Jim Harmon noted in his study of iPads in his English classes, teaching with these digital tools, “met his learners where they were in ways in which they were already literate.”

Teaching literacy in a digital medium also allows educators to seamlessly offer differentiated texts and practice work on class-specific topics. A single digital classroom can meet each individual student’s learning needs without dividing the teacher’s attention, isolating students and publicly highlighting their differences, and requiring mountains of photocopies.

Research has already demonstrated that bridging the gap between “the traditional print-based literacy focus of most classrooms and the quotidian electronic lives of many of today’s teenagers” can engage students and help them succeed academically (“Teaching with Blogs: A Case Study of Technologically Mediated Literacy,” Lapadat, et al.). This same research also suggests that reading students who collaborate, investigate, and share information through digital channels are engaged and successful at mastering the content.

Core Textlab features include:

• Tools for managing digital text at a variety of reading levels
• The ability to assign differentiated text and activities to students according to their current reading levels
• Tools for teachers to provide rapid feedback on student work
• Media management for audio recordings of text and supplemental video materials
• Modules for capturing and storing student work online such as journals, collaborative blogs, digital graphic organizers, selected-response questions, and other formats that correspond to familiar print-based alternatives
• Intuitive functions for submitting digital drawings, photos, and graphics; video and audio responses; and webpages built within the Textlab platform

Innovation: Engaging Students Through Digital Literacy

Twenty-first century literacy instruction is largely wedded to 19th-century technologies. Our students are daily surrounded by a flood of digital text, yet we often teach them literacy skills with worksheets, composition books, broken pencils, and outdated and low-interest texts.

A variety of entrepreneurs are leveraging digital platforms to reimagine mathematics instruction, among them the wildly successful Khan Academy, along with projects such as TenMarks.com and LearnZillion.com. Yet we have hardly begun to utilize similar tools for teaching critical literacy skills.

Many of the existing Learning Management Systems are designed for college settings rather than the literacy instruction secondary students need. The open-source LMS Moodle includes some features that effective literacy teachers need, but takes a kitchen-sink approach and includes tools and modules for everything from Department of Defense-designed training protocols to college science courses. And it is not optimized for the small-screen iPad tablets available in some lucky, low-income schools. It is also not user-friendly or practical for teachers adjusting to the influx of technology into the classroom.

We need a powerful set of tools to accelerate literacy skills for students who are arriving in middle or high school reading two to four years behind grade level. Textlab will enable critical productivity gains for students and teachers to maximize instructional time and outcomes.

Textlab will also help crystalize the utility of using iPads in at-risk settings. There is widespread enthusiasm for adopting iPads in schools, but that excitement often outstrips the attention paid to effective instructional use. Early research already indicates that students working in English classrooms where iPads have been effectively integrated into the curriculum can emerge from one year of instruction reading and writing more than a full year ahead of their peers in a control group (“Unlocking Literacy With the iPad,” Jim Harmon).

The same study surveyed students with and without access to iPads in their English classes. Only 32 percent of students without access to iPads and digital literacy tools identified “thinking about my future” as a reason for caring about and attending English class. Yet 63 percent of students with iPads and digital literacy tools said they were invested in English class because they were “thinking about my future.” Properly tailored digital tools helped students make a clear connection between their progress as readers and writers and their future prospects.

Leadership Skills: The Textlab Team

Our team has a proven track record of effective teaching and educational technology leadership. We teach and train other educators and command the respect and attention of school and district officials.

Andrew Plemmons Pratt spent two and a half years managing the start-up phase of ScienceProgress.org, a magazine of progressive science and technology policy published by the Center for American Progress. Editing technical jargon into accessible prose and building websites led him to the simple conclusion that working in the current economy requires students to develop their literacy skills in a digital context. He saw successful lawyers, scientists, journalists, and other professionals leverage online communication tools to change the world around them. The young minds in our nation’s schools deserve to wield that same power.

Andrew decided to leave Science Progress in 2010 and take his web development, writing, and editing skills into the classroom through Teach For America. During his first year of teaching, Andrew and colleague Matt McCrea won the first annual Prince George’s County Public Schools / Teach For America Innovation Challenge for their suite of “On-Demand Professional Development” training tools for data-driven instruction (beta project site; overview).

As a second-year teacher, Andrew is currently piloting a new model for teaching 7^th-grade English using a class set of iPads. These provide his students with access to high-interest ebooks, digital graphic novels, and a customized installation of the Moodle LMS that offers online classwork and multimedia tools for accessing aligned texts, audio, and video content. This new experiment in teaching literacy is essentially a year-long research and testing phase for the core Textlab features.

Andrew also serves as the 7^th grade academic lead on the leadership team for his school, which is a model turnaround school in Prince George’s County. He co-edits the educational technology blog, EdTech 101, on TFA’s internal social network TFANet.org.

Jordyn Sims is a Silicon Valley, California native who grew up seeing first-hand the power of technology—and its benefits in the classroom. She learned to type in first grade, had computers available throughout her elementary, middle school, and high school career, and found herself above and beyond her peers in terms of computer literacy when she reached college.

Jordyn teaches at a Title I school in Prince George’s County as a second-year Teach For America corps member, where her students have a vastly different experience with technology. Many cannot even type, much less view technology as a tool to be wielded in their educational development. Her students made major gains in their reading levels during her first year of teaching—even without access to significant amounts of technology. The Scholastic Reading Inventory showed that her students made 1.8 years of reading growth on average, and one class grew an average of 2.5 years in reading.

This year, her students are using their iPads to access differentiated lesson materials based on reading ability and their experience with English as a first, second, or third language, and to submit classwork and formative assessments using Google Forms. She also created a class website to host this information and that also serves as an outlet for students and parents to access all of the work done during class, all class forms, and all homework in order to ensure that students are on track for success.

As the only Teach For America teacher at her school, Jordyn integrated herself into the staff community and in her first year started the first student-produced newspaper and literary magazine in the school’s history. She also serves as the Vanguard Reading Teacher on the Transforming Education through Digital Learning council at her school, a program enabling and supporting a one-to-one iPad initiative, provided through Title I funding. Additionally, the Prince George’s County Chairwoman invited her to submit a proposal to present on producing school newspapers and literary magazines at the State of Maryland International Reading Association Council (SoMIRAC) Conference. In September 2011, fellow staff members nominated her for the honor of Riverdale Teacher of the Month.

Jordyn also serves as a Content Team Leader for the TFA DC Region Literacy teachers, supporting other corps members with their literacy instruction.

Transformative Impact and Sustainability for Textlab

Properly implemented, Textlab will help skillful literacy teachers produce measurable gains in their students’ reading and writing skills. Harmon’s research suggesting that well-designed tools for digital literacy can accelerate reading gains by more than a year is just the beginning. Textlab will also accelerate these shifts:

• Measureable gains in reading scores will place students using Textlab effectively at least a year ahead of their peers without access to a Learning Management System.
• Textlab will prepare students for college and careers. By engaging young learners in a digital context for literacy instruction, their education will grow more connected to the college work and careers for which we say we are training them.
• Students using Textlab will practice and grow their literacy skills while working at their own pace, and in appropriate learning modalities.
• Students will see themselves not merely as consumers, but as creators of digital media.

The first step is to continue the yearlong experiment of integrating iPads and custom Learning Management System tools in Andrew and Jordyn’s English classrooms. During the remainder of this school year, we will distill observations, data, and experience into core Textlab features, and will then analyze data on those results to reveal trends hidden from informal observation. Preliminary findings will support school-level professional development for other teachers, and will provide valuable feedback for district implementation of the Title I iPad program.

We will then use that knowledge and data to hire one or more seasoned developers with experience building Content Management Systems to support construction of the Textlab prototype over the summer. Beginning with well-known development frameworks such as Ruby on Rails or Django will set the project on sound footing and allow us to tap into experienced developer communities. Key development work will still be in the hands of team members, who combine computer-programming experience with proven pedagogy.

During summer 2012, we will also recruit a cohort of ELA teachers to integrate Textlab into their classrooms. Beta-testers will likely first be recruited from the TFA DC Region corps, regional charter networks, and the DCPS and PGCPS teaching forces. They will provide feedback in a tight loop that will inform updates to the software on a week-to-week basis throughout the 2012-2013 school year.

During that year, we will open the software to a wider beta testing base, tracking user metrics and connecting them to reading diagnostic scores and summative tests of objective mastery.

Leveraging connections in the DC Region, regional charter networks, and the TFA national team, we will attract a user base of at least 1,000 teachers in the 2012-2013 school year. During the summer of 2013, we will work with a high-performing charter network or school district to integrate Textlab into their existing curricular framework, leveraging existing users to train new teachers in how to utilize the software effectively.

Yet even the best software is useless without appropriate computer hardware. In order to deploy Textlab effectively, classrooms must have one tablet, laptop, or desktop terminal for each student. There are already programs providing one-to-one access to iPads for students in many high-need schools around the DC Region. We will recruit beta-testing teachers at schools that already have access to the appropriate hardware in order to demonstrate the utility of the platform. This will also catalyze grants for tablet or laptop sets to expand the pilot into classrooms that currently lack the technology.

But even the best computer hardware is of limited use without consistent, reliable Internet access. Again, we can leverage existing connections in districts such as Prince George’s County and DC to ensure that pilot classrooms have adequate networking hardware and bandwidth to ensure seamless access.

Resistance to adoption is also a major hurdle for any education technology solution. To prove the power of our platform, we will focus on recruiting beta testers who are both effective instructors and early technology adopters. We can clearly demonstrate Textlab’s power by measuring the productivity gains that successful teachers achieve with the tool.

Idea Development: Next Steps

Textlab is currently emerging from the back-of-a-napkin phase into a focused period of research and planning. The customized LMS implementations Andrew Pratt and Jordyn Sims are already using in their classrooms this year are the testing ground for features that will become the Textlab core.

Unless it receives seed funding, Textlab will most likely remain a side project, which would significantly limit the speed of its production. The funding, recognition—and most importantly—the mentoring and connections that would accompany the Social Innovation Award would be catalytic. It would provide the resources to work with a large cohort of instructors on requirements, hire knowledgeable CMS developers, and begin a rapid cycle of prototype development. Most importantly, it would accelerate literacy skills for thousands of secondary scholars.

Got it? Okay. You’ve now turned classroom management into a video game. 

ClassDojo is a a "real-time behavior management system" that allows you to track on and off-task behavior for your students online. The interface is clever: each student gets a little icon or "avatar" that, by default, is a cartoonish little monster. Click on an avatar and you’re offered six choices of positive behaviors (participation, helping others, creativity, great insight, hard work, and presentation) and six negative behaviors (disruption, late, no homework, disrespect, talking, and out of chair). Click the behavior to track and a message pops up on screen "Angalina +1 for Hard work!", accompanied by a ringing sound familiar to anyone who’s ever directed a Mario brother to grab a golden coin. 

The system tracks points (positive, negative, or both) on the screen, which you can leave up on your LCD projector or hide and return to as needed. This way, students can see instantly how on- or off-tack that they have been. At the end of the class, you can run an instant report that shows a pie chart summarizing pluses and minuses for the class. Further options let you aggregate data from any time period, or drill down to individual students to create personalized reports.

But here’s where your iPad (or smartphone) comes in. The system also has a "remote control" interface that runs on mobile devices. Just go to http://mobile.classdojo.com (and if you’re on an iPad, "Tap to install" on your homescreen). Login and you now get a streamlined class list allowing you to track behaviors right from your device instead of having to use the website. 

Once my students got used to the +1 sound that accompanies a new point, I started leaving the website window open behind my instructional slideshow and moved around the room with the remote open on my iPad. Just the sound of classmates earning points is often enough to quiet talkative students. 

ClassDojo is one of a new breed of highly refined education technology tools currently in the start-up phase. Founders Liam Don and Sam Chaudry just won top honors at the Education Nation conference for the innovation. But they’re still hungry for feedback. I chatted with Sam about features a few weeks ago and they made ungrades based on my suggestions literally overnight. Point being: this is a tool you can help shape, and that can help shape positive management in your classroom. +1

Cross-posted from EdTech 101 at TFANet.org.

Above: A selection of the Kindle books for my scholars to read on their iPads, available in Kindle Cloud Reader.

As the bio box to the right says, I’m Andrew Pratt. I’m a 2010 corps member in the DC Region, currently teaching 7th-grade Reading/English/Language Arts in Prince George’s County, Maryland. Before I signed on with TFA, I helped edit a web-based magazine about public policy for science and technology at a think tank here in the nation’s capital.

A few years editing technical jargon into accessible prose and building websites led me to a simple conclusion: to be prepared for the current economy, young students need to develop their literacy skills in a digital context. I saw successful and powerful lawyers, scientists, journalists, and other professionals leverage online communications to change the world around them. I want the young minds in our capital region to have the same power.

That’s part of what I mean by saying that “Technology is a Literacy.” To shape public policy, influence coalitions, and communicate scientific discoveries, mastery of the English language is just a prerequisite. You also have to know the tools that launch ideas into orbit.

With that vision in mind, I decided last spring that my English classroom needed to move beyond pencils, worksheets, and composition books. Just a month into my 2nd year of teaching, my scholars are taking strides in that direction.

Starting with a proposal submitted to my principals in May, I was able to secure a class set of iPad 2 tablets. One of my goals as a teacher this year is to experiment with these powerful computers as much as I can. I want to figure out how they can accelerate literacy in a middle-school ELA classroom. But also I want to keep my lab notebook in public. Namely, right here. With that, I’ll share a few highlights from this week:

Wednesday
Most of my scholars took their first vocabulary quiz of the year… online. I built the quiz in Moodle, the open-source “Learning Management System” I’m using for our class website. There were nine multiple-choice questions, and as soon as the students submitted their final answers, they could immediately see what they got right, what they got wrong, and their final score. On my end, I had nearly instantaneous data on how the students performed. Sobering, but a good start.

Thursday
One of the common differentiation recommendations for lower-level readers is to let them listen to an audio recording of the text as they read along. Fortunately, we have nice new textbooks from Holt McDougal that come with some killer teacher CDs/DVDs, including professional audio recordings of most texts in the book. In addition to snagging the .pdf version of the text and making that accessible, I uploaded the audio recording to our Moodle site. Students who needed the audio support could listen along on their iPads while simultaneously reading a digital version of the article.

Friday
Maryland standardized tests emphasize a short response format called the “Brief Constructed Response,” or BCR. A BCR demonstrates that a scholar has read the text, can identify and explain a detail from the text, and can show evidence of inferring, or “reading between the lines” to figure out what is unstated in the text, but still important. A majority of the students in class today submitted their practice BCR online through Moodle. Now, I have an archive of that work and can easily score it and write feedback online.

So that’s my (long-winded) introduction. I’ll close with a question: if you could move one part of your classroom workflow from paper to a computer, what would that be? Would love to see your ideas in the comments.

Have a great weekend!
—Andrew Plemmons Pratt (@appratt on twitter.)

So one of the pieces of TFA pre-school work that I find really exciting is the “vision” we’re expected to lay out for the year. This is your classroom manifesto, your big call-to-arms for what you want your students to achieve, accomplish, think, or feel about learning. This is your inaugural address, except the only people who will likely ever see it are you and your Manager of Teacher Leadership Development. I am probably a little behind in that I’m only just creating this now, but I’m off to a training tomorrow and wanted to be able to share this with folks, so here’s my first draft. Over the top, starry-eyed, and wordy, but that’s par for the course:

We will understand language as a toolkit that provides pathways to freedom and power. “Those who have the command of language have more might than those with the command of armies,” writes Ernest Morrell, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles. We will also understand that being a powerful communicator means never being satisfied with your current skills. It means always pushing forward.

We will examine literacy as freedom and as power. Throughout history, the easiest way to physically or psychologically enslave groups of people against their will has been to prevent them from becoming literate. We are going to become great readers to ensure that we always control our own destiny and have the right to work hard and become powerful people in our society.

We will understand that growing as communicators will help us become better versions of ourselves and allow us to shape a better version of the world around us. Strong communication skills are fundamental to success in business, law, science, engineering, health care, policy, or myriad other disciplines where our ideas matter.

We will accept that language is complex, slippery, and at times difficult, and that being an effective communicator requires taking risks, asking questions, and thinking critically. It also requires commitment and determination.

By working hard, we will build our communications kit with the tools to persuade others, the tools to express ourselves, and the tools educate ourselves throughout life.

To do this, we will read widely in a variety of genres. We will practice writing and editing in a variety of genres. We will study ideas in a variety of media and create media that expresses our ideas. We will investigate literacy within the context of the Internet and new media, and we will practice using our tools in digital contexts. Through these channels, we will project our command of language and ensure that we always have the right tools for the job.

Image: flickr.com/jrhode

But according to one study, when it comes to Donors, they Choose middle school less often. As in, more than one third less often than high school. According to Tiffany Bergin, who tied for top honors in the “Data Analysis” category,

Projects for students in Grades 6-8 were 36 percent less likely to receive full funding than those for students in Grades 9-12 (Data -> Knowledge -> Insight)

Projects for grades 3-5 were 32% less likely to see full funding compared to 9-12; pre-k through 2 were 27% less likely. These are not insignificant gaps, and what surprised me the most is that for the grades where catching up is most critical—middle school—the additional dollars for additional resources just weren’t what the donors community supported.

Now there could be any number of reasons for this—fewer projects, projects of differing quality, more urban high school teachers asking for money, etc., etc. This doesn’t tell us anything about causes. But in terms of need for resources to make up lost ground and accelerate students on to high school and beyond, I want to figure out how to get more great middle school projects funded.

(More background on the Hacking Education data crunching competition, which gave analysis and hackers access to 10 years of DonorsChoose.org project funding data, is available here. )

Kids at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory 2009 LBL Daughters & Sons to Work Day (flickr/berkeleylab)

Perhaps I’ll follow through in the future on collaborating with some science educators to design a hybrid course on the history of science for middle or high schoolers. But that’s a post for another time.

This creative project might seem a little self-serving, but it allows me to revisit some work that I’m proud of, and which made me a better writer and editor, which in turn made me a better and more committed English teacher. Moreover, it allows me to explore and reinforce connections between what I used to spend my time on, what I’ve been reading, and what I do now. And in the recent words of Steven Johnson, speaking about where good ideas come from, “Chance favors the connected mind” (emphasis added).

Without further ado, then, here’s a list of some Science Progress Greatest Hits authored, in whole, or in part, by your humble editor, arranged in chronological order (cross-posted under Portfolio):

04-15-10 | The Weathermen Know Which Way the Wind Blows
A recent survey demonstrates that many forecasters embrace their role as informal science educators. Ed Maibach says it’s an opportunity to boost public understanding of global warming.

03-30-10 | Court Rules that DNA Is Information, Not Intellectual Property
A lawsuit argued that patents owned by Myriad Genetics on two genes connected to breast and ovarian cancer stunt genetic research and limit access to health care for women. The ruling said that genes can’t be patented.

03-23-10 | Energy for Regional Innovation
We can ensure that scientists, engineers, and taxpayers alike get the most out of federal support for basic research and development by taking what researchers know about moving ideas from the lab to the market and linking universities, business, and the government in an effort to grow regional economies.

03-05-10 | How Science Sparked Democracy
There are intimate connections between the scientific advances that expanded the frontiers of human knowledge and the democratic experiments that expanded the frontiers of human liberty.

02-02-10 | A First-Place Budget for Science
The budget request for fiscal year 2011 that the Obama administration released on Monday includes foundational investments that will help the United States remain the leader among innovative nations.

12-04-09 | Reason is a Casualty in the Ongoing War on Climate Science
In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal editorial section, Daniel Henninger took exaggeration of the scandal over emails stolen from scientists at the University of East Anglia to new heights, arguing that the incident undermines the entire centuries-old scientific enterprise. But the column ignores both the current observable impact of climate change and scientific history, and is merely the latest volley in the ongoing conservative war on science.

11-10-09 | Time for Family, Time for Science
A significant proportion of American women leave scientific careers between earning their Ph.D. and winning tenure-track positions. Many of these “leaks” in the pipeline are the result of decisions to start families. Changes to federal and university policy can stem the losses, say the authors of a new report.

10-21-09 | Tools for Truth Telling
Given the Obama administration’s positive approach to science and to human rights, a new CAP report argues that now is the time to craft policies that support collaborations between researchers and advocates that stop atrocities.

09-24-09 | The Coolest Platform Raises the Hardest Questions
So who is speaking here, an ethicist, a scientist, or a policymaker? Real talk on the ethics of synthetic biology.

06-23-09 | NIH Funding is Good for Your Health, and It’s Good for the Economy
Federal funding for biomedical research saves lives. Not only that, but investment in research through the National Institutes of Health stimulates the economy by helping people stay healthy and productive. So says a new report published yesterday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (open access).

06-23-09 | Personal Profiling
Will access to our own genetic information make us healthier? That’s the idea, but there’s a lot to learn as we share and interpret it. Meanwhile, questions remain about proper oversight of an industry that blurs the line between consumer and research participant.

06-16-09 | The Worn Grooves of Disciplinary Research
Is pathbreaking science the product of interdisciplinary groups or the interdisciplinary thinking of foresighted individuals? In a commentary in PLoS Computational Biology, Sean Eddy, a Howard Hughes investigator, argues that “roadmap” thinking from the National Institutes of Health for building teams of specialists to tackle complex problems in modern research is flawed, because it encourages work in the worn grooves of existing, and perhaps outmoded, disciplines.

03-27-09 | Bush’s Council on Bioethics Makes Toothless Attack on New Stem Cell Policy<
Yesterday, the Hastings Center, a bioethics research institute, released a statement authored by members of the President’s Council on Bioethics critiquing the Obama administration’s stem cell policy. What the authors failed to explain in either the statement or the accompanying press release is that the current members of the President’s Council on Bioethics were appointed by George W. Bush, and will serve until the charter for the council expires in September. The critique, in effect, is an echo from the past.

Coda

The eponymous title of this post is drawn from the title of one of my favorite SP articles (“The Areas of Our Expertise”)—favorite because it’s a great bioethics/policy/history of science think-piece, and because I took a speech written for a talk at the Library of Alexandria and edited it into a real article. The author, Eric Meslin, is also a great guy (and incidentally the former Executive Director of President Clinton’s National Bioethics Advisory Council). Plus how often do you get to write about ideas with names like “Non-Overlapping Magisteria”?

(Obviously copyright infringement…leave a comment record company, if you’d like a take down…)

Update below

Teaching With Cloud Storage

So since the very beginning of TFA Summer Institute, the hands-down most important web tool for me as a teacher (aside from email) has been Dropbox. Dropbox is a feature-rich, cross-platform file-syncing service. If you don’t use it to store your lesson plans, collaborate with co-teachers and other colleagues, as well as store your most vital files in a secure, accessible place, then I really don’t know how you’re working on the Internet these days.

The problem with Dropbox is that the free storage is limited, and when you’re sharing folders with 6+ colleagues who are all generating 5-10 MB of files every week, your 2 GB of free space fills up fast. For each successful invite you generate, getting another user to install the software on a unique computer, you each get another 250 MB. But the pricing scheme for ramping beyond that just isn’t competitive: 50 GB of storage is $99 a year.

Having access to the lessons, assessments, and worksheets created by my fellow PGCPS TFA colleagues has been absolutely crucial, and much of what we generated this year will be useful next year. There’s just not enough free space in our respective Dropboxes to archive it all—and what’s more, searching within those folders, even on OS X which has Spotlight, is imprecise. What do do?

What Features Do I Need for Collaborative Storage?

I started thinking about this around mid-year, and made a list of several possible solutions that needed to meet as many of these criteria as possible:

• shared, syncing cloud storage space
• 10+ GB, accessible to at least 4 or more users
• the ability to upload existing folders of material currently stored locally
• effective searchibility of folder contents and within documents
• lowest possible cost
• scalable

Lifehacker did a nice side-by-side comparison of three competing services that provide most of this functionality: Cloud Storage Faceoff: Windows Live SkyDrive vs. Dropbox vs. Amazon Cloud Drive. Their verdict:

But aside from Dropbox, none of the colleagues I was working with had accounts on these services. Moreover, while there are things I like about SkyDrive, the OS X application for syncing files, Windows Live Mesh, requires that you tell the service when to initiate a sync, so I see it more as an archive-every-once-in-awhile tool. Finally, the syncable storage is limited to 5 of your total 25 GB on SkyDrive.

There’s also SugarSync, an early competitor to Dropbox with 5 GB free storage and a focus on syncing across platforms, PCs, and mobile devices. But going this direction would effectively mean running another syncing serving in parallel to Dropbox, and I’m wary of doing that since anything that has to stay switched on will eat valuable RAM.

Forget All of the Above: Google to the Rescue

Around the beginning of April, Google unveiled a new feature in Docs: the ability to upload and share folders. This might be the solution I’ve been waiting for, I thought. Here’s how the features add up for Google Docs:

• YES shared, syncing cloud storage space
• YES 10+ GB, accessible to at least 4 or more users
• YES the ability to upload existing folders of material currently stored locally
• YES effective searchibility of folder contents and within documents (really the only service that does this—PLUS Google Docs now features “Descriptions” which add additional metadata to files, something not really possible in the other services)
• YES lowest possible cost ($0.25 per 1GB, compared with $2 per 1 GB for Dropbox)
• YES scalable (you can buy many terabytes of Google space if you need it)

So here’s what we’re doing. I just set up a new shared “Collection” in my personal Google Docs account and shared it with the appropriate people. There are two top-level folders within an encompassing “pgcps-ela” folder: “2010-2011″ and “2011-2012.” In these, we’ll upload and archive the folders of unit plans, lessons, and materials we have accumulated over the year. That will clear out our Dropboxes, allowing use to start using those for day-to-day backup and sharing next year. But now anything in the shared Docs collection will be searchable, previewable in-browser, and as soon as we get close to the 1 GB personal limits, I’m going to throw down $5 for an additional 20 GB a year.

I’ll update on the successes and bumps in this project as we start archiving. If anyone else has other effective ways that you share and archive teaching materials, leave a comment.

Update 1: Cyberduck Connects to Google Docs

So I’d messed around with this a little bit previously, but hadn’t gotten the settings right. The newest version of Cyberduck, the open-source file transfer software, interfaces with Google Docs, meaning that you can upload and download files from your storage area without even having to use the browser interface. Huge (Mac & Windows, too!):