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.

Here at Robertson Library there is significant work being done on building tools to manage digital repositories. One of the challenges with this work is that, outside of the world of those who organize and archive for a living, this is an uncommon term: “Mildred, where did I put the deed for the house? It’s not in the repository” isn’t something you’re every likely to hear. (And, of course, there are all the negative associations with the word depository; they mean the same thing: “a place where things are stored.”)

Digital work is so ephemeral, so malleable, that those of us working deep within its mines rarely have cause to think about issues of preservation; we worried about “where things are stored,” but only for the moment.

But as the digital world ages and evolves, we need to start thinking harder about permanent storage, about a kind of “digital safety deposit box” where we can put things and have some confidence that they’ll be there in 25 years when we go looking for them.

This point was driven home for me this week right here on the University of PEI campus. Last week I discovered a cache of useful PDF files of campus floor plans. I used the floor plans of Robertson Library to build a digital model of the building in OpenStreetMap, and planned to return to the well to do the same for other campus buildings. When I repeated last week’s Google Search this week, though, all the links to the PDF files of floor plans were broken and returned an “Page not found” error.

Digging a little deeper I found that, rather than being a technical bug, the reason for this was that the Facilities Management section of the UPEI website had been reorganized and, while the result is much easier to use, it also meant that much of the useful reference content under the hood – everything from floor plans to campus design guidelines to maintenance manuals and procedures – disappeared.

This is why repositories are important.

Documents like building floor plans for a university campus should have a permanent, inviolable address, a digital safety deposit box where they can always be found, no matter the web design flavour of the day.

Fortunately, it is exactly that challenge that Robertson Library’s repository toolset, chiefly Islandora, is designed to solve.

Islandora, and the Fedora Commons repository software it manages, gives digital things – PDF files of floor plans, and anything else digital – a permanent, secure place to sit. With an address that doesn’t change. And a storage system designed intentionally to outlive any particular storage technology (under the hood it’s all just XML).

Ironically, given the library’s leadership as a repository tool builder, it suffers from the same tendency to use “a folder on a webserver” as a repository for its own internal documents. The archive of minutes of Library Council – core documents to the management of the library, and a vital historical resource – don’t have a home in a repository, for example, and they should.

Indeed, the history of the library itself – Robertson Library : the first twenty-five years – is just a PDF file squirreled away on a webserver. Last week when I went look for it, I found the link was broken – it pointed to a PDF file on an old version of the library website – and the only reason you can read it today is that I pointed this out to library staff and they helpfully corrected it.  But the library website itself is due for a redesign, and it’s likely that once this happens this link will break again.

And that is why repositories are important.

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!!

If you’re creating many similar objects in OpenStreetMap using the JOSM editor – in my case it was rooms inside the library building, but it could be streets or buildings or parking meters – it can be handy to set up a “tagging preset,” a template that lets you automatically fill in some tags for the objects you’re creating, and prompt you for others. There’s out of date documentation for this in the JOSM wiki, but the concept hasn’t changed much, and the defaultpresets.xml file is well-commented and a good model to follow.

New tagging presets are created by crafting an XML file; mine looks like this:

When I install this preset, and then use it to tag an object, it presents me with a dialog that looks like this:

The buildingpart and indoor tags are filled automatically, I’m prompted for a required ref tag, and an optional name tag.

To install a new tagging preset XML file, in the JOSM preferences, select Map Settings and then Tagging Presets and click on the plus (+) sign beside “Active Presets” and select the XML file you saved. Once added, you’ll need to restart JOSM for it to take effect.

Once the new tagging preset file is installed, just select an object on your map and then Presets on the JOSM menu and select the name of the preset you created, like this:

By setting up a tagging preset like this, I was able to quickly make work of drawing and tagging the rooms and corridors of the main level of Robertson Library, to the point where it now looks like this:

While waiting for the Ethernet jack to go live in my office on campus (which it has, now), I’ve been working from my downtown office, doing some more experimenting with the IndoorOSM tagging scheme for OpenStreetMap, work I started last week. Along the way I’ve taken a short detour to look at BuildingLayer, a purpose-built web-based indoor mapping tool built on top of OpenStreetMap. BuildingLayer shows some promise, as it shelters the user from the complexities (and the flexibilities) of the standalone JOSM editor; it’s not ready for primetime, and it’s not currently possible to use it to edit indoor mapping data that will become part of the OpenStreetMap base layer, but I’ll keep an eye out as it matures.

In the meantime, I’ve been trying my hand at mapping the interior spaces of Robertson Library. I’ve become much more comfortable with using JOSM – a much improved tool since I first used it in its much-earlier incarnations – and I’ve got it pretty well tuned now. My first task was to georeference the PDF map of the main level, and then to use that to improve the existing building shape of the l library on the OpenStreetMap base layer; this transformed a simple polygon that looked like this:

Into a much more detailed set outline that looks like this (which is what you’ll see now if you look at OpenStreetMap

I also took the opportunity to enhance the OpenStreetMap tagging for the building itself:

With this more-accurate building shape in place, and the floor plan georeferenced under it, I was set up to start drawing rooms:

Looking at other similar projects, like the excellent work in this University of Heidelberg project, it seemed like the best approach to take for drawing room shapes was to draw discrete “ways” for each room inside the building polygon itself, rather than trying to latch on to and extend the building “way” itself, so that’s what I did, beginning with the administrative areas on the main level:

When I was finished with this area, I had this:

I’ve now uploaded all of the detail to OpenStreetMap, meaning that if you edit the UPEI campus in the web-based Potlatch editor you’ll see the shapes I created, and the associated tags:

There’s still a lot of the library left to map, and issues about corridors, doorways and windows and how to properly tag them, but I think I’ve found a good model for proceeding.

I’ve been thinking a lot about technology in education over the past several years prompted, in part, by [Oliver]’s experiences as a public school student, and, in part, by my work on behalf of the PEI Home and School Federation on the technology file. I have become convinced that, despite having smart, imaginative people throughout the system, we are missing tremendous opportunities to leverage education technology, not only in the practical application of hardware and software tools, but as an overarching educational philosophy that sees Prince Edward Island as a member of a global community.

I was fortunate to encounter JP Rangaswami at reboot several years ago, and since then his thinking on privacy, technology and education has been a great influence on me. A recent post of his, Singin’ In The Rain, struck a chord with me, and summed up my own feelings about what he calls the “digital revolution” more succinctly than I could myself:

The ability to observe. The ability to imitate. The ability to try it out for yourself. The ability to get quick feedback. Four critical requirements for learning.

We’re in the midst of a digital revolution. Everything that happens can be observed by more people than has ever been possible before. The internet is a copy machine, the ability to share and to imitate has never been cheaper. Tools continue to be invented to make it possible for all of us to be able to try more things for ourselves than we could ever do before.

This digital revolution is a learning revolution. As long as we don’t waste it. Waste happens when we constrain the ability to observe, to imitate, to try out, to get feedback. Particularly when we have the opportunity to make it all affordable, ubiquitous.

Education drives the solution to so many of our perceived problems. Education is so incredibly accelerated, assisted, augmented by digital infrastructure. If we let it.

We who are here on earth today can make a difference to that earth by ensuring that we don’t waste this incredible opportunity, of using digital infrastructure to enfranchise everyone, to provide the opportunity for all to learn.

Since becoming a digital citizen — and I’ve been one for more of my life than almost anyone — I’ve been as much a skeptic and contrarian about the societal ramifications of digital technology, but when I think about the trajectory of my own life, and what digital technology has allowed me to be, to do, to express, to participate, to engage, I can’t help but agreeing with JP.

I’ve come to believe that the challenges standing in the way of this transformation are not money nor resources, for, with motiviation and creativity, these are easily obtained or obviated: what’s standing in our way is fear and ignorance.

Those with the power to unleash the digital revolution, to take the chains off and allow us to truly explore its potential and its boundaries, are not themselves digital citizens, and so they tend to regard education technology, at worst, as an extension of typing class, and, at best, as a non-essential supplement to the outdated core education metaphors.

I go to meetings of bureaucrats and educators, well-meaning, smart people all, and come away flummoxed by how discussions get consumed with bureaucratic minutiae, with trying to keep the Internet genie in the bottle, and with a benign resignation toward lack of funding and license on a political level.

I truly believe, in my heart of hearts, that marginal jurisdictions like Prince Edward Island have the chance to most leverage the positive potential a digital revolution can beget. We have the raw materials — people, technologies, connections to networks. What we lack is determination, leadership, and the imagination and courage to look beyond our own fears of change and power rebalancing to the positive outcome that lies ahead.

Like JP says, If we let it.

I borrowed the third volume of Anaïs Nin’s diaries, on interlibrary loan, from the public library; it covers the period 1939 to 1944 in New York City, a period where, in part, she and Gonzalo Moré ran a print shop. Early in the book is this passage about confronting social life in New York City after years in Paris; it seemed only appropriate to give a go and print the passage on my letterpress.

Here’s an early draft pulled from the roughly-set type; still pondering the best way to justify this before printing.

The paragraph continues:

The faces reveal no interest, no responsiveness.

Unfortunately, in the 24 pt. Futura I’ve set this in, I needed 23 lower-case letter o and I only had 22. So I had to stop short. Perhaps I’ll set that sentence later, in an uninteresting nonresponsive colour.