Computer Education

Usability guru Jakob Nilsen has posted a brief essay on Life-Long Computer Skills that I would love to see taught here in Tuolumne County. As a technology provider, I often see people frustrated by a lack of understanding of how their computer works below the surface of the desktop. There are many computer classes available locally which focus on the use of a particular program or tool, but none that I know of that provide the broader picture that Mr. Nilsen suggests:

Teaching life-long computer skills in our schools offers further benefit in that it gives students insights that they're unlikely to pick up on their own. In contrast, as software gets steadily easier to use, anyone will be able to figure out how to draw a pie chart. People will learn how to use features on their own, when they need them -- and thus have the motivation to hunt for them. It's the conceptual things that get endlessly deferred without the impetus of formal education.

Picking and choosing from the article's list of course topics, almost every computer user that I know would benefit from a better understanding of:

• Search Strategies
• Information Credibility
  
• Information Overload
• Writing for Online Readers
• Computerized Presentation Skills
• Workspace Ergonomics

Notice that none of these topics are tied to any particular program or operating system. Rather, they teach strategies for working more easily and successfully with any computer, particularly one that is online. With a grounding in skills such as these, students can branch into more technical subjects such as debugging or user testing and usability issues.

To use military jargon, these skills are strategic, rather than tactical. Understanding them is a necessary step to being successful in today's information economy. Again, Jakob Nilsen:

In their book, The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market, Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane highlight three key skills that are less likely to be offshored or automated in the future. Those skills are problem solving, understanding the relation between concepts, and interpersonal communication. The life-long computer skills I've outlined here can similarly prepare students for the type of careers that will be sustainable as globalization intensifies.

Read all of Life-Long Computer Skills.

Broadband Speed Test

The design may be a little over the top but check out this cool new Broadband Speed Text tool.

Remarks To the Board of Supervisors

The following remarks (well, most of them) were made to the Board of Supervisors, as part of the public discussion on economic development:

Good morning. My name is Greg Falken. I'm a partner in webdancers, a web development company in Twain Harte. I'm also a member of an ad hoc group of citizens called Network Sierra, who are advocating for broadband Internet access in all parts of Tuolumne County.

I don't think I need to go into the many benefits to business that broadband Internet access provides, because I know that this information has been brought to you many times before. In the context of business development however, I would point out that few businesses would even consider establishing themselves in Tuolumne County without access to broadband. And for businesses that are already here, lack of broadband access makes them less competitive. As you know, our broadband coverage is spotty and there is currently no publicly available plan to bring this critical service to all parts of the county.

I'd like to tell you about another county, similar to ours, that has looked forward and taken action.

Henry County, Ohio is a rural county in the Northwest corner of the state, in an area once known as The Great Black Swamp. They have a population of about 30,000 and a median household income of $44,200 a year. Henry County's telephone company is currently spending over $6 million dollars in funding from the USDA Rural Development Broadband Access and Telecommunications Program to build a broadband system known as Fiber To the Home. These folks in Ohio will soon have access to the Internet at speeds more than 1000 times faster than DSL or cable can provide. They are thinking for the future. They are investing in technology that will allow them to connect with the rest of the world, where in many countries DSL-type speeds have simply been leapfrogged. This is the difference between running a business using computers, or on pocket calculators.

Would the technology that's being installed today in rural Ohio be viable here in Tuolumne County? I really don't know the answer to that. I do, however, have a suggestion for finding out. This Board should create a County Commission for Communication Technologies. This commission would have the mandate to research, recommend and implement broadband access throughout the County. There are smart, willing people available today to serve on such a commission and many sources of funding available to pay for it. I ask you to give this your serious consideration.

Thank you.

More Online Applications - Gmail

Can an online email application really compete with the best desktop applications? Prior to using Gmail I would have said no. I've had a Yahoo Mail account for many years, which I found useful for testing purposes but never considered using as a primary email application. I still use Outlook for my business emails, mainly because of the archive of messages in it, going back to 2002. About a year ago, I set up a Gmail account to receive personal mail sent to my falken.name domain. It has worked well enough that I have since recommended it to several people and businesses for use as their primary email application.

Gmail was designed from the ground up to be an online application and the programmers at Google have played to their strengths. They came up with the first usable interface for grouping threaded emails together (Outlook 2003 is horrible at this), which they call Conversations. The screenshot below shows 5 messages received today that belong to the same thread. I can easily move between them and respond to any one or all of them.

Yes, those are ads on the right and you know what, I don't even notice them any more. It's actually kind of interesting to note the ads that Google thinks are relevant to my messages.

In another example of their clean-slate approach, Gmail doesn't use folders for organizing mail. Instead, you define and attach "labels" to mail messages, which are then used to group similar messages together and to aid in searching.

In the Gmail system, there is only a single copy of each message (which is actually stored in "All Mail"). Labels are simply a convenient way of referencing messages. Of course, being Google, you can search your mail six ways from Sunday.

A common refrain among Gmail users is, "it's hard to explain; you just have to try it". An early review at A Whole Lotta Nothing put it this way:

I can say that after using gmail for a few days I finally get what everyone is raving about. On first glance there's nothing impressive there. To see what it is capable of doing well, you have to use it: get a few email discussions going with folks and the more you use it the more obvious the benefits become. I bet you could say the same thing about blogging. Show a blog or the Blogger.com app to someone that has never seen it or heard of blogging. I'm sure they'd dismiss it as nothing special, one page being some sort of boring public diary, while the app itself is just a giant form and a button marked "post and publish", whatever that means.

Gmail is pretty incredible about tracking discussions. I've tried several email packages that offer threading and gmail's is simpler and more straightforward. It automatically trims replies and shows email threads as top-down discussions, so it's easy to keep track of where people are in a discussion. Replying to email is really easy, you just start typing in the textarea below a message and it automatically starts a response.

Here are a few Gmail tricks that I've learned in the past year:

• If you have forwarded your mail to Gmail from another account, you can add that account under "send mail as..." in Gmail. When you respond to these messages, they will show the return address of the account from which they were forwarded.
• You can create a local archive of your Gmail messages by installing Google Desktop and indexing the mail in your Gmail account. This will also allow you to read your Gmail messages offline.
• There are several "notifier" utilities that will alert you when new mail arrives at Gmail. I use two: Gmail Notifier for Firefox (on my laptop) and GmailGeiger for Yahoo Widgets (on my desktop). There is also one available from Google but I haven't tried it.
• You can display cute little quotes of the day, news tickers, etc. above your inbox but more importantly, you can turn them off. Look in Settings under Web Clips.

Email is one of the must-have applications on any modern computer and I do not hesitate recommending Gmail. It even works surprisingly well over a dial-up connection (when doing so, I'd suggest either the "Standard Without Chat" or "Basic HTML" settings). However, to take full advantage of Gmail's integration with other Google applications, you're going to want a broadband connection. More on those in another post.

And it was always thus

Medieval help desk:

David Weinberger über Cluetrain

Nice video interview with David Weinberger, co-author of The Cluetrain Manifesto. As David writes on his own blog:

I blather on about Cluetrainy stuff, plus how to explain Net neutrality to "Aunt Tilly." And because there are German subtitles, you can have the illusion that you are now fluent in that language.

Note: the first minute or so of the video is in German but the interview itself is in English.

Grassroots Broadband

Does the following drill sound familiar to you?

"You want broadband where? Just give me your phone prefix and I'll see if it is available"
...
"Oh I guess its not available there yet. Would you like to leave your info so I can let you know when it becomes available? If enough people in your area are interested it will happen.

Most of my neighbors say they'd sign up for DSL, cable, or wireless broadband if it were available. This got me on a mission to ask providers what formula they use to decide when it becomes worthwhile for them to invest in the necessary infrastructure. Noboby is willing to give a formula that might get quoted but I have been able to get a sense of the ballpark.

If you can find a place to put up an antenna that has access to T1 and a line of sight to 25 people willing to sign up as customers, any of the local ISP's would be interested. In fact, you could be your own neighborhood ISP if you wanted to. It would cost about $300 per installation and the monthly cost per customer would be $40 or more. T1 speeds are comparable to DSL and your individual speed would depend on how many are online at the same time.

If this sounds like a solution for your neighborhood, don't assume that you can find an ISP to jump at the opportunity to set this up for you. The scenario I described can break even but will not cover the cost of proving that the customers will be there. But if you and your neighbors take the grassroots initiative you can lead the way rather than waiting years for the infrastructure to find its way to you.