Ryan Collins

🕹️ Do Something Great! 😄

Author: ryan

  • Quotes about progress

    As I am working on our district’s 1:1 plan, I have come across several quotes about progress that I liked (in no particular order):

    “If There Is No Struggle, There Is No Progress” — Frederick Douglass

    “Don’t be pushed by your problems. Be led by your dreams.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

    “There are many ways of going forward, but only one way of standing still.” — Franklin D. Roosevelt

    “Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” — George Bernard Shaw

    “Without deviation from the norm, progress is not possible.” — Frank Zappa

    “Never confuse movement with action.” — Ernest Hemingway

    “Those who do not move, do not notice their chains.” — Rosa Luxemburg

  • Classic literature boosts empathy and emotional intelligence

    For Better Social Skills, Scientists Recommend a Little Chekhov

    “It’s a really important result,” said Nicholas Humphrey, an evolutionary psychologist who has written extensively about human intelligence, and who was not involved in the research. “That they would have subjects read for three to five minutes and that they would get these results is astonishing.”

    Dr. Humphrey, an emeritus professor at Cambridge University’s Darwin College, said he would have expected that reading generally would make people more empathetic and understanding. “But to separate off literary fiction, and to demonstrate that it has different effects from the other forms of reading, is remarkable,” he said.

    Pretty amazing results from only 3-5 minutes of reading.

    Via: @PurplePenning

  • Behind the iPhone unveiling

    And Then Steve Said, ‘Let There Be an iPhone’

    It’s hard to overstate the gamble Jobs took when he decided to unveil the iPhone back in January 2007. Not only was he introducing a new kind of phone — something Apple had never made before — he was doing so with a prototype that barely worked.

    No matter what your opinion of Steve Jobs is, you can’t deny he had guts.

    via: Daring Fireball Linked List: Behind the Scenes of the Original iPhone Launch

  • Just like cameras, the best technology is what you have

    MOOCs don’t benefit developing countries. Phones do

    Parachuting in the ‘latest and greatest’ device or gadget may have strong political appeal, and fatten the bottom lines of certain firms, and may possibly even be effective in some cases, but it may be useful to ask, How can we innovate using what we already have?

    …

    Treat teachers like the problem … and they will be

    Some great snippets on integrating technology.

  • iPads and reluctant writers

    Around the Corner-MGuhlin.org: iPadifying the Writing Workshop – Part 1

    “One of my students,” shared the 5th grade teacher whom I was interviewing for a podcast, “has trouble filling up the page. He just can’t do it. It’s too much. But, when writing on the iPad, using the on-screen keyboard, he can. He can type a few words at a time in the small space and pretty soon, he’s written a page. That’s amazing.”

    There is a writing app called iA Writer for the iPad and iPhone/iPod touch that has a focus mode, where it only shows a few lines at a time. I wonder if that would help too?

    Are there applications for other devices that have a focus mode? (Besides iA Writer, which has a Mac version. 🙂

  • Technology and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

    The IT Value Hierarchy: Using Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs as a Metaphor for Gauging the Maturity Level of Information Technology Use within Competitive Organizations(PDF)

    Although information technology products and services may be equally available, the innovative use of IT to create competitive differentiation has clearly been achieved y many organizations. What IT executives often lack is a contextual framework in which to explain the path to increasing value for their firms. The authors believe that this framework can be explained through the use of a needs hierarchy based on a comparison to the human psychological needs hierarchy described by Abraham Maslow more than sixty years ago.

    The parallels to technology in education is uncanny. This paper provides a nice framework for the technology planning process. Just replace IT executives with staff, administration, BOE, and community. 🙂

  • Creating passwords

    From time to time, we all need to create a password. As a consequence of being human, we have a habit of picking really crappy passwords. Here are a couple of ways to generate passwords that should be more secure.

    pwgen

    You can use pwgen in Windows, OS X (install through Homebrew or MacPorts, or Linux. It is also available online, although the online versions may not give you all the features of the program.

    By default, pwgen attempts to create memorizable passwords that are somewhat random. Examples include In9taeme, Xo4eenet, and Riequig2. While not totally random, they are more secure than most methods of creating passwords. Using the program allows you to specify other requirements for the password and a more secure random mode.

    Keychain Assistant (OS X)

    Built into OS X, the Keychain Assistant handles secure password storage for the operating system. It also has a function to generate passwords. You can launch it from the application menu.

    KeepassX (Windows, OS X, Linux)

    I use KeePassX to store my passwords securely. There are other password wallets that you could use that would also generate passwords, such as 1Password and LastPass. I needed something that was cross platform though. It also has a feature to generate passwords.

  • Save and use old Mac fonts with fondu

    I recently received a help desk request to install a font that one of our schools had purchased back in the 90s. Not a problem, I thought. Copying the font to the machine would be easy. I went and mounted the disk image that contained the font, but when I tried to load it into puppet (software that manages our machines), the file was zero bytes. I thought that was odd, so I started looking. The font was a .suit file, which, for those unfamiliar with the Mac world, designates it as a suitcase file which contains a bunch of fonts. Unfortunately, the fonts are stored in the resource fork, not the data fork. What? Forks?

    Brief history of Mac OS file systems

    In the beginning, Mac files could consist of two parts. A data fork and a resource fork. On disk they are in one file, but the operating system uses them in different ways. The data fork stores unstructured data, such as the text in a word processing file. The resource fork stores structured data, like icons and embedded images. You know when you put a Windows formatted USB drive into a Mac and it creates an .AppleDouble folder? That’s there to store any resource forks for files. Although most things stored their data in the data fork (and this is the part that gets copied to media that doesn’t support resource forks), fonts are stored in the resource fork. When copied to a non-Mac formatted medium the resource fork and the font go off into never never land.

    Enter fondu

    Fondu is a commandline application that extracts fonts to TrueType font files which can be used with most systems. I installed it with Homebrew:

    brew install fondu

    Once installed, I navigated to the folder with my .suit file in it and ran fondu on it:

    fondu FONTFILE.suit

    And I was left with TrueType font files that I could easily distribute to the district’s machines.

  • Command line tool for Twitter

    sferik/t · GitHub

    A command-line power tool for Twitter.

    The CLI takes syntactic cues from the Twitter SMS commands, however it offers vastly more commands and capabilities than are available via SMS.

    I have been using TTYtter: an interactive console text-based command-line Twitter client and Perl platform (whew!) but t looks like it could be a pretty powerful tool in scripts.

  • Beware of pretty charts

    Study: Prettier Charts Can Be Harder for Students to Read

    Graphics are often intended to engage children in learning otherwise dry material, such as data on a chart. Yet new research from Ohio State University suggests increasing charts’ artistic appeal can interfere with students’ ability to comprehend the information they represent.

    What do you think?