Recently in Work Category

This evening I went to a presentation / discussion about the Online School for Girls.  The OSG is a first of its kind all girls independent online school.  There have been previous online schools built as for-profit, charter, public or co-ed schools.  The idea behind the OSG is to offer similar experiences to those at single sex independent schools like the one I work at.  Many of the schools similar to mine in the area all already either Consortium or Charter members of this new venture.  The member schools include both religiously affiliated and non-religion based schools.

Over five years ago a colleague from another school told me at a conference about his thoughts on a potential future.  In this future he described students having the ability to pick and choose what classes they wanted to take, but not in the traditional sense.  The students would be able to decide the school, teacher, timing, pace and price of these classes.  This choice would be facilitated by something like the OSG.

There are many competitors in some respects to the OSG on the market.  One type of competition is from universities offering high school diplomas like Stanford’s EPGY OHS, where professors teach there existing often lecture heavy style.  Another type of competitor is for-profit institutions such as Kaplan or K12 International Academy, these schools offer varying services for different prices.  The last type of competition is from state sponsored virtual schools either setup as a public school or some type of charter school.  Often these are available for free to residents of the state or district.

Right now OSG is still very small at 150 enrolled students and only 1 section of each class offered.  OSG is primarily seen currently as supplemental offerings to existing classes offered at schools like mine.  These offerings are classes that most schools can’t offer due to limited enrollment.  The most common are high level math or science and foreign languages where there might only be 1-5 students at a given school wanting to take a class.  Via OSG those students from various member schools can be brought together into a virtual classroom of 12-16 students for a normal class size.  My school accomplishes some of these goals via coordinated classes with sister schools, but many schools don’t have that luxury.

During the presentation two students taking an OSG class came into to answer questions.  When answering questions the girls highlighted some of the benefits for them.  The first was simply the ability to take a class they were really interested in that they previously wouldn’t have been able to take.  Next, was having the flexibility of time management.  Both girls had numerous extra curricular activities and the online class allowed them to work on classwork when it fit their schedule in between these activities.  Lastly, they seemed to really enjoy the fact that they had classmates from all over the country and all over the world in their virtual class that they could work with and interact with.

The girls were asked what the downsides of the class were.  They couldn’t really come up with any at first.  Then they said that it makes them like there other classes less since they aren’t as flexible.  I asked about self motivation and procrastination and one girl admitted that in the first unit / assignment she did have that problem.  However due to the frequent check-up / check-ins and teacher interaction she quickly realized that she couldn’t allow herself to do that anymore if she wanted to pass the class.

This brings up an issue that I think will be a big concern.  If there is a student that needs constant reminding / hounding to turn work in or stay on task how will that work in the online / virtual classroom world.  I think the answer is the school environment / support structure that exists today.  While there are 100% online schools I don’t think schools like mine will go that way rapidly.  Rather I think virtual / online classes will be supplemented by traditional classes as well as the rest of the school community.  This means that an advisor will still be there to try and help the student and possibly be a go between for the virtual teacher and student.

With all that being said I think that options like OSG will allow students (and families) to choose how they want to pace and pay for their education while still getting the environment offered today by independent schools.

The big questions now looming in my head is what does this mean to schools like mine, the teachers in them and heck to me?  For schools in the short term I think it will allow them to expand their offerings as a value add to potential students which is definitely a positive.  In the long term I think it may cause a shift in daily life for students as well as cost structures.  It is unclear to me exactly what the financial details of OSG are.  Do the member schools get anything back from OSG or is it simply the ability to have input into its development along with reduced fees.  The schools can potentially realize some cost savings by changing the utilization of teachers and reducing the per student cost for some classes.  These are questions though for head masters and boards not for me to answer, and it will take many years I think to answer them.

For teachers this could be an opportunity.  Many teachers currently do outside work in the form of tutoring or teaching at college level.  OSG offers teachers another venue to utilize their skills.  In listening to the presentation it is obvious that OSG has some very high standards for curriculum and teachers, but if a teacher is good enough they can share their skill and knowledge with even more students potentially.  However in some cases I think schools may reallocate funding and head count which could adversely affect teachers, this also is unclear in the short term however.

For me and others like me in technology support it will likely shift our responsibilities.  The entire OSG is based on hosted services in the cloud.  This allows it to be run with very limited technical support from OSG.  During the presentation it was mentioned less than an hour a week in server management.  At the beginning of the year there is startup tech support but that is quickly wrapped up in the first few weeks.  After that it is up the teacher to maintain their own site and students to maintain their own access.  For both teachers and students all that is needed is an Internet connection and computer with a microphone / video camera for discussion or chat purposes.

One of the main points that really hit me was just what is possible and how it is going to change things.  A main driver of this change is going to be money.  Right now to attend a school like mine it costs $20-30K a year.  Stanford’s online school costs $14K, K12 is $7K and OSG is $6.5K.  That is some amazing costs differences.  The question is how do you merge the cost savings of OSG with a school like mine to lower the cost but keep the community?  Just like 1-1 laptop programs before I think online / virtual classes will cause a shift in how schools operate except those working in a very traditional sense.

I mentioned I was in a dorm at La Salle for the week, the reason for this is I am learning to teach AP Computer Science.  Yes you heard that right I am going to be molding the minds of America's youth.  Since my school was unable to hire a replacement in time for the previous computer science teacher who left I was drafted into the position.  On one hand I am the most qualified (other than my boss maybe) to teach the AP CS class due to programming experience and other experience related to computer.  On the other hand I probably have the least teaching experience (at least with children) of anyone, even first year teachers have had student teaching.

The class I am taking this week is to help prepare teachers to teach AP CS to the required AP curriculum.  It is to help introduce the methods for teaching AP CS and some other ideas for getting the material across.  The class is based on Java, which I have never programmed in.  I have had programming experience with other object oriented languages and have helped others learn them.  If nothing else I will call on Rob who has forgotten more about OO methods than I have ever learned.

Wish my students and I luck this school year.  Oh and a couple of questions I have heard that I thought I would mention since they are somewhat funny.  Are my other responsibilities at the school being reduced? Not that I know of.  Am I getting a raise?  Since the teachers probably make less than me (I honestly don't know, just anecdotal) I should really be getting a pay cut, somehow I don't think that would have been a good selling point.  The one perk I am getting is I will for the first time in my career is a really office.  Four walls, a desk, a door and no servers.

In October of 2003 we got a new Dell PowerVault 775 NAS server. This server was essentially a PowerEdge 2650 running Windows Storage Server 2003, which is a slightly tweaked version of Windows Server 2003. The server originally shipped with a pair of 18 GB drives in a mirror set for the OS and a trio of 147 GB drives in a RAID 5 for data storage. The first problem the server had was almost daily bluescreens. It was found that these were caused by the Dell OpenManage software. After we removed the software the server stabilized.

The next problem to show up shortly was a small amount of corruption on the data drive. A few files would get corrupted each week or so. I would run CHKDSK on the weekend and it would fix the corruption, usually with no data loss. The corruption was never large but it was consistent. I created many cases with Dell to attempt to resolve this problem. I tried to check consistency on RAID set, rebuilt the drive and tried many other similar fixes. Nothing worked long term however.

Eventually we added a PV220S to the PV775. When we did this we moved the data drives from the internal slots to the external enclosure. After doing this magically any data corruption on the data drive stopped. The news isn't all good however. The OS drives started having problems then. The server started having weird memory errors and would just generally stop responding.

I again called Dell to try and trouble shoot this new but related problem. The first thing they had me do was update drivers and firmware on RAID controllers and SCSI drives. After that they began taking dumps of drive issues using a modified version of CHKDSK. Eventually they determined there was a flaw in the RAID controller. Dell did not make the controller and thus were waiting on a fix from the ODM. As time dragged on they gave me other options. Most of the options involved removing or disabling the RAID controller. The problem with this solution was they I would need to rebuild the OS. Further I would no longer be able to use Storage Server since it was built assuming that RAID was there. I didn't think this was a good solution and decided to give them a bit longer to come up with a fix for hardware.

About a week ago Dell called and said they couldn't find a fix for the problem. As a result they would be swapping the hardware out. This brings up a whole new suite of problems. The main problem was that Dell no longer made an equivalent NAS server. We cannot get a new box running Windows Storage Server 2003 R2, which is what I really wanted. Instead we will be getting a PowerEdge 2850 running Windows Server 2003 R2. The base server will be considerably faster than the older server since it is three years newer. As a bonus we also get a new three year warranty for free.

It is still going to be a bit of a hassle for me since I will have to transition the data drives to new server as well as all the share definitions. Also I have to switch around some drives so I can send back the ones the server originally came with. Fun Fun. At least Dell followed through and resolved the issue.

Update: Woo-Hoo, well today was my lucky day it seems. Dell announced the PowerEdge 2950 with Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 today. This is the exact server I was hoping to get. Dell has cancelled the order for the 2850 that was previously discussed and will instead begin the order for a 2950. It isn't really out yet so we will have to wait a little while, but it will be worth it. This server has the latest dual core Xeon's and all the other newest technologies. Awesome.

Update 2: My Dell support person got me exactly what I wanted, it is an awesome server. Dell has a very happy customer now. Even if Dell did make me suffer for a while along the way, they made it right in the end.

I saw this story on Om's site. While working for Qwest backing in early 2000 the executive mentioned in this story gave myself and about 50 others a pep talk at Dave and Buster's. Somehow that is funny to me. Of course the group I worked for was closed down shortly after I left, but that is a story for another day.

I was reading this posting and also the story it references in the Boston Globe. There were similar concerns raised in the last two weeks at my school. While the reactions were quick I am glad that they weren't so over the top as the ones in the Boston Globe story. As Mr. Thompson advocates we used the occasion more as a teaching opportunity rather than a punishment. We found that in many cases the blogs were being used for nothing more than relationship building. However in some cases they had gone farther than one would like. This is where the teaching came in. Hopefully we helped instruct the students in what should and shouldn't be put online.

Even if Scoble puts his cell number on his blog, it might not be the best idea for a <18 year old girl.

Also the idea that a school can tell students what and where to post online is a little dubious. Trying to enforce such a rule is a near impossibility. There is just no way to police every possible location on the web for posting, and further the students will simply become more anonymous.

This week was the first week of school where I work. Usually the last week of August and first week of September are nuts for me. This year was different but not too much. I had hopes for this summer being easier since over 50% of our laptop/tablet fleet would be identical from a hardware/software platform. On top of that there were no major upgrades software wise. I litereally pulled down last year's image applied a year's worth of windows/office (now microsoft) updates and a few other updated software programs and I was done.

This gave me the hope that this summer I wouldn't be quite so freaked out. However I seemed to be more stressed and got less done for some reason. Part of it was outside of work, buying a new house. The other part was turnover inside of work. This summer we transitioned in a new laptop support person as well as a new technology teacher. Both have turned out better than I would have hoped, but there is still a learning curve.

I have high hopes for the year though. We don't have any major hardware issues looming. One big problem will hopefully be resolved in a month or so. The other we have a plan of action for. Both of these problems bother me usually more than others, since I take it personally when stuff doesn't work. Hard not to, it is my job afterall.

Sometime this weekend the power went out at my school. We know it was 3:05 becuase one of the clocks stopped, however it might have been 3 PM sunday or 3 am Monday. Either way as of now it is still down. Whenever it does come back up I get to go bring everything back online. Lucky me, woo hoo.

Update 9 PM : Still no power. No I get to sleep with my phones since I am effectively on call for whenever the power does come on. Yeah me.

I am continuing to Beta test a new software version at work. In testing it I must upgrade it and run some conversion processes. It is at least a two step process and maybe three or four. The problem is that part one took 22.5 hours. This is on a desktop machine running Windows 2003 Server and SQL Server 2000. This is a P4 2.4 GHz with HT, 512 MB and 40 GB ATA 5400 RPM. The process seems to definitely be memory and then disk bound. Hopefully when it is done on our production server which is a 2.4 GHz Xeon (almost identical to the P4), 1024 GB and 36 GB RAID 15000 RPM SCSI array.

The second part was a merge process of the data with another system that had already been upgraded last year. This step takes roughly 1 minute per user. Which is ok since I could run it over night. The problem here is after running for about 5 hours the system ran out of virtual memory, which was set at 2 GB. The client shell that was doing the merge was using 300 MB of RAM and 1.5 GB of Virtual Memory. I think they might have a bit of a memory leak problem.

Hopefully this gets better before I have to deploy it in production. If not it might be tough to finish it over a weekend even.

Today my school hosted another tablet training day. We had another 30 or so people there and it went quite well. Lots of information given out by our team and our teachers. Many great questions. Hopefully the people in attendance will take the info and share it with others.

Last night I did some maintenance on both our Bluecoat Web Cache and our Nokia / Checkpoint firewall. The bluecoat was a very straightforward upgrade, they have made the process almost painless other than a few minute reboot.

The Nokia / Checkpoint upgrade isn't hard, just harder relatively. Some of you may be saying I thought Nokia only makes phones, well no they make some of the best hardened firewall boxes out there. You then layer on top Checkpoint's Firewall-1 product and you are set. The main reason I bring this up is prior to the upgrade the firewall had an uptime of 337 days. Which is pretty damn amazing I must say. In these days of daily security exploits to have a box not need upgrading for a year and not have problems.

Anyway back to the upgrade. It is a couple step process. First, you must download the latest IPSO (Nokia Operating System) and the latest Checkpoint software and hotfixes. Next, it is a good idea to clean up the logs and such since if you don't you will run out of hard drive space, which I learned the hard way last time. Then, you upgrade the IPSO. At this point you have to console in usually since FW-1 doesn't start and the box is totally locked down from a network standpoint. After you gain access again you then run the checkpoint package (install), these needs to be run from a command line. Reboot the box once more and if necessary apply checkpoint hotfixes. Took maybe an hour at most. An hours downtime a year isn't bad.

Also I must thank Dan who has forgotten more about Nokia and Checkpoint than I will ever know. He gave me a couple of quick pointers. Also Nokia's tech support is great, they even support Checkpoint so one call does it all. The Nokia / Checkpoint combo isn't cheap either intially or yearly but you get what you pay for. Highly recommended.