Terry MacIsaac has been the Principal at Prince Street Elementary School for Oliver’s entire 6 year stint there, and over that period I’ve come to know him as a smart, engaged, caring educator. Not only has he served us well personally with Oliver, but he’s served the school community well by being open to new ideas, welcoming of newcomers, and passionate about literacy, numeracy and the arts.

Which is why I was so happy to find out today that Terry has been named one of Canada’s Outstanding Principals.

I know that Terry will use this opportunity to shine light on the excellent work being done by the teachers and staff on his team, and as parents we’ll do our best to accentuate this next week during national Teacher-Staff Appreciation Week.

Yesterday I saw this tweet, about a teach-yourself-Norwegian audiobook available from the Public Library Service:

As I do want to learn Norwegian, at least in theory, I followed the link, which led me to a page on the Prince Edward Island-branded Overdrive.com website. To “borrow” this audiobook I needed to enter my library card number, put the audiobook in my “cart” (thus starting us, forebodingly, down the road toward ecommerce language), then “checkout” (ibid), select a 7, 14 or 21 day “lending period,” download a XML wrapper file for the audiobook, download the “Overdrive Media Console” software for my Mac, and then open the XML wrapper inside the Media Console to actually download what, in the end, was simply 3 non-DRMed MP3 files.

After listening to the first 5 minutes of the first MP3 file, I decided that I didn’t really have any interest at all in learning Norwegian, so I tried to “return” the audiobook, but found no way to do so. Apparently there isn’t one, at least in the Mac version of the Media Console. So not only am I stuck with this MP3 file for the next 21 days (I’m only allowed 10 digital “loans” at a time), but, worse yet, nobody else in Prince Edward Island can learn Norwegian for the next 21 days because there are, as you can see in the screen shot from Overdrive’s website below, “Available copies: 0.” Because of me.

As near as I have been able to determine, I may be the only person who thinks this is an absolutely crazy system for the public library-mediated circulation of digital objects.

Libraries have hundreds of years of experience in managing the circulation of physical objects, and one of the defining characteristics of physical objects is that there are only so many of them to go around. And so, for example, there only 10 copies of The Casual Vacancy in the library system and 47 people who want to read it:

But Learn Norwegian - Level 1: Introduction to Norwegian, being simply a collection of MP3 files, isn’t shackled to this physical reality: there can be an infinite number copies of these MP3 files created so that, in theory, should the Premier decide that everyone in PEI should learn Norwegian, it would be trivial to pass a copy out to every citizen.

And yet, for some reason, we’ve opted to acquiesce to a system that takes the regular old model we’re all used to for managing and circulating physical objects and, absurdly, applies it to digital objects.  So I’ve now “checked out” the Norwegian book for the next 21 days (even though, in truth, I’ve deleted all trace of the MP3 files from my computer).

I’m not arguing against digital rights management here (I’ll argue about that elsewhere; it too is crazy, but a harder crazy to fight): it’s worth noting that the MP3 files that I am technically “borrowing” right now have no restriction on copying them. While it would likely be a contravention of the terms I agreed to at some point in the process, there’s no technical reason why I couldn’t be running off copies for every Islander right now. Indeed there’s no technical reason that, despite the Overdrive Media Console’s insistence to the contrary (“All copies of this title, including those transferred to portable devices and other media, must be deleted/destroyed upon expiration.”), I couldn’t hang on to the MP3 files for the rest of my life.

So what I have “borrowed,” then, is really just a flag in an Overdrive database that says, in essence, “don’t let anyone else in Prince Edward Island learn Norwegian for the next 21 days.”

This is crazy, and we must demand better, more rational systems from our library, if only because we’re making up systems and processes here that will be with us for generations.

I’ve been working out various ways of printing a paragraph of Anaïs Nin’s diary and finally settled on a tiny 4-page book. Which means that I needed to again get my head around the geography of imposition. Transforming physical spaces in my mind is not a strong suit for me, so this took a lot of experimenting, but I finally figured it out:

This is set up for “work and turn” printing, meaning that I’ve set all four pages to be printed at once, set up so that pages 1 and 4 for one copy of the book, and pages 2 and 3 for another copy are printed, and then the paper is turned over and printing on the other side, completing each copy of the book with the other set of pages.

I’ve still got some work to do fixing everything in place for printing so that everything ends up where it should, but I made good progress today, and might be ready for printing this afternoon.

I’ve been driving around a Nokia Lumia 800 phone for the last year. Given that everyone else I know carries either an iPhone (80%) or an Android phone (15%) or no phone at all (5%), you might think this marks me as a contrarian. And it does. But it’s actually more about being cheap: Nokia sent me the phone because, through a series of happenstances, I am nominally a “Nokia developer,” and they were actively seeding devices to developers last year, presumably in an effort to encourage Windows Phone app development.

So, despite the many little frustrations of the phone (sub-par camera, jangly scrolling, etc.), I’ve held onto it because it’s just good enough to get by with. That, and I have a soft spot in my heart for it’s typographic user interface, which I admire for its moxie and, of course, for its typographicness.

Given all this, I was excited to read this morning that a bold new update to the phone, Windows Phone 7.8. The word came via the Nokia Conversations blog, with its expected snazzy video, a video that proudly proclaimed Your Update is Waiting For You / Get it and Enjoy!

Great. Except that my update wasn’t waiting for me when I checked. And, reading the fine print at the bottom of that blog post, I found why:

Delivery of the update is operator dependent, meaning you will receive a notification in the coming weeks if you have an unlocked phone or if your operator has approved the update. If you don’t receive the update notification within the next three weeks, please contact your operator for more information.

I reconciled myself to waiting. And then I remembered that the last time an update for Windows Phone was released, there was a hack, dubbed “the cable trick” that was reported to allow the anxious to update their phones sooner than later by fooling the Zune software into thinking their Lumia’s time had come. I decided to give it a try, which required the following comedically bizarre series of steps:

1. Start Windows XP in Parallels on my MacBook Air.
2. Try to install the Zune software.
3. Find out I can’t install the Zune software until I update Windows XP to Service Pack 3.
4. Try to update to Windows XP Service Pack 3, but am told I don’t have enough disk space.
5. Shut down Windows XP, increase the size of the virtual hard drive by a few GB and start up again.
6. Insatll Windows XP Service Pack 3.
7. Install the Zune software.
8. Check Zune for an update for my Lumia – nothing found.
9. Try the cable trick: start checking for an update in Zune software, then, after a few seconds, turn off the wifi on my MacBook Air. No luck: no update found.
10. Try again. And again. And again. Each time waiting a few seconds more or less.
11. Success! Zune tells me an update is found.
12. Install the update: wait for it to download, install, and for the phone to restart.
13. Find, despite the update, my phone is still Windows Phone 7.5.
14. Repeated the entire process; Zune reported another update. Installed it. Still at Windows Phone 7.5.
15. Repeated the entire process; Zune reported another update. Installed it. Presto! Now I have a Windows Phone 7.8 Lumia.

Eileen Higginbotham, Resource Teacher at Prince Street Elementary, has been doing very interesting work at the school with dogs and children, and she’s started to write about this “Prince Street Puppy Project” on a new blog. Eileen’s dogs are very much a part of Oliver’s school day, and have been for several years; it’s fascinating to watch how these animals have become an important part of the school. Here’s a sample:

A few weeks back, I was with a couple of the older girls who train and I wanted KaBoom to do the leg weaving that Kannon does.  It was easy to figure out how to get her to run through the legs but having her come around to start back through the legs was just not something I could get.  The girls watched me try and watched me fail a couple of times.  Then I stopped and asked them for ideas.  We knew what we wanted the behavior to look like but we just weren’t being clear enough for KaBoom to get it.  One of the girls stepped forward, saying she had an idea.  We watched her work and, just by changing some body movements, she got the weave!!  JACKPOT!!  Then, she taught the moves to us. Soon after that, we all had a reliable weave.  Now, we have to start stringing them together!!