"An iPhone is practically and entry requirement for our school now."

- Undisclosed. And so true.
8:52 May 21st, 2010 | Notes
1:26 Oct 31st, 2009 | Notes

There is a point at which advertising crosses the line. Microsoft has passed that line by a mile.

I am generally a very liberal minded person when it comes to advertising. I believe advertising can be successfully and sensibly implemented within schools in order to balance out costs of expensive products like computers. While some may draw comparison between my ideas and Microsoft’s recent Bing campaign, there is one major difference. Mine would look like advertising. Thus lies the reason why Microsoft’s Bing campaign is so morally apprehensible.

Bing is Microsoft’s search engine, and search is easy money. Search engines make money through advertisements. Those advertisements are labeled for what they are: ads. Here’s why Microsoft’s campaign is morally wrong: they haven’t applied this same principle to their middle school campaign. Microsoft has gone into a middle school teaching young children a catchy (and frankly awful) song and dance about their search engine. While dancing around in their Bing T-shirts, watching videos about Bing and singing Bing songs, their minds are being moulded and shaped using techniques they don’t recognize as advertising. Their being fed ads that don’t look like, and aren’t labeled as, ads.

It’s using the plasticity of a child’s mind to shamelessly push a product. It’s clear that the children are oblivious to the tactics of the Redmond giant and that they are being brainwashed, which is what makes this so wrong. If you are going to advertise to children, do it in an honest and obvious way. Advertising could be used to lower education costs, to bring technology into the classrooms of children who otherwise couldn’t afford it and would live without it. What this has reinforced in the minds of those against advertising is that the industry can’t be trusted to be sensible when dealing with children, when with the proper oversights it could be.

Microsoft and the middle school have lowered the bar of advertising, and it will take a lot to raise it back up.

The Tough Decision

11:26 Aug 10th, 2009 | Notes

The economic crisis has had a huge impact on traditional journalism in Australia and across the world. Professional journalists from high end publications are being cut back in favor of gossipy, tabloid drivel machines. It’s a major sign that the economic problems we face are far reaching and that not even journalism, one of the key elements of a healthy democracy, is safe.

But you know that the world’s is in an even worse state when the editor in chief of your school paper is telling you to dumb down your content, that what you’re writing is too high brow and that you should shorten your articles because editing them gets to a stage where if anymore was cut out they would stop making sense. That’s right, the school newspaper is telling me to drop my standards.

It’s obvious to me why I’m being told this. None of my articles are anywhere near as popular as the “Caption Contest!” or the “Jokes of the Week!”. Yet my articles bring something resembling real journalism to our school publication, and that’s something I’m proud of. In the eyes of students it seams that articles on the future of technology in education, upcoming important changes to our electoral system, the place of privacy in schools and the importance of backing up school work pale in significance to the importance of what funny caption a picture of a guy falling off a bike should have.

It’s not like I’m being paid for these articles or receiving recognition for my work. I’m simply doing it because I think journalism is a vital aspect necessary to maintain a healthy community, and because I think every school should strive to engage, inform and entertain students in a way that makes them think about the world they live in instead of feeding them the lowest of the low. There is a place for “Caption Contests” and “Jokes of the Week” in our school paper, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of news and opinion that should matter to students. We shouldn’t be lowering ourselves to the lowest common denominator, we should be trying to bring the bottom up.

So now I’m faced with a decision: soldier on through this problem, lowing my tone and trying to continue as normal, or quit the publication as it’s top contributer. It’s a tough decision to make, but if my editors aren’t looking for what I have to offer, I might as well not bother.

First Day With The HP Mini 1109

8:07 Jun 15th, 2009 | Notes

If you’ve read my twitter recently, you’ll know I got an HP Mini 1109 on saturday!

Check my Flickr for random badly composed photos!

Well, after hours figuring out how to install Windows 7 (and then finding it was actually super simple) and finding the case I bought was too large, I finally got a chance to take it for a test drive!

I didn’t have much of a school day today, considering that my school orchestra was in an competition and we were away for four periods. But I can tell you that having the Mini with me for math, english and music (well maybe not math) was very promising!

First off, it’s by far the best looking netbook on the market at the moment. To me it’s very Apple-esque and goes great with my iPhone.

I forgot that I didn’t have a copy of Office before I walked off to school, which was somewhat annoying. I had to use the new WordPad in it’s place which was actually fine. I could do all the typing that I needed to do, considering I only needed to type out bullet points. I would seriously consider not buying Office and just downloading Star or Open Office as an alternative, because I’d rather not pay for software that is worth half the value of the entire computer.

I put it into hibernation when I wasn’t using it. With Windows 7, the days of waiting for three minutes for hibernation to set in are over! It takes just as long to hibernate as it does to sleep the machine, making it perfect for putting away for one or two periods before quickly booting it out of hibernation when you need it.

The Mini 1109 is very zippy. I didn’t ever find myself feeling like I was waiting for any lengthy amount of time for it to respond, something I was surprised about considering the slow Atom processor. The screen is great, everything fits well and I never felt in need of more space. Windows Aero UI works wonderfully, all the animations are smooth and fast. The small trackpad is calibrated to make it efficient enough for normal use. I’m still getting used to the track pad buttons being on the side, but that won’t take long. The keyboard is fantastic as well, I’m quickly getting used to it being 8% smaller that full size.

What does it need? I can say it needs to be a bit more energy efficient. The fan runs constantly after a while and I can’t imagine that being good for battery life. The speaker is also quite tinny, but that’s to be expected considering how tiny it is. On the sound devices front, Windows 7 doesn’t seem to recognize the inbuilt microphone. Again, just another little annoyance, but one I can live with. Other than that it work perfectly!

There you go, my brief review of the HP Mini 1109!

Next up, installing a Netbook OS! I’m thinking Moblin at the moment, at least until I can get my hands on Jolicloud.

Mobile Phones And How Schools Are Breaking The Law

5:43 Jun 15th, 2009 | Notes

By now you all know about the sweeping changes to the school’s mobile phone policy. If you have a phone, it can be confiscated and searched without question. Besides being a huge invasion of privacy it raises some interesting questions as to the place of schools within the law.

Are schools above the law? Can school ignore widely known laws for their own reasons? Should schools be as accountable to public laws as the rest of society?

The new cell phone policy have massive privacy implications for students and the school. We are all protective of our personal data and privacy. This comes in the form of making sure people don’t look through you SMS messages, emails, contacts, family photos etc. Many students would be reluctant to just hand their phone over to someone, fearing the consequences, for example, if that person starts sending rude SMS messages around to your contacts. It’s a natural human reaction to protect what is ours.

So what does the law say about privacy? It says that no one else has legal access to anything you own, hence the idea of private ownership and privacy. It protects your belongings. However, your possessions can be taken away from you by the police if their is sufficient reason that you are suspected of hiding illegal activity. To do this, police have to attain a warrant to take your possessions and they can only do so through the proper legal channels. You know all of this of course, but think of it in this way. What right do the school have to take your possessions away without proper justification? In one word; none.

Unfortunately for the school, our constitution doesn’t provide for vigilantism or citizens arrest. Therefore, they are as answerable to laws as everyone else. They legally have no right to take away your phone. It has just become the norm that schools can do what they like, ignoring any pre existing law. The fact is, schools are not above the law. Schools are answerable to the law and students shouldn’t have to oblige by rules that have no legal standing.

When first hearing about the new policy and it’s ability to confiscate mobiles on the grounds of absolutely nothing, should teachers feel so inclined, one thing immediately popped into my head. The anti-terrorism laws. There was a controversy a few years back about these laws that allowed to detain individuals for up to 90 days without charge if there were thought to be involved in terrorist activities. Why did this pop into my head? Because it’s essentially the same principle as the mobile policy. Person detained under suspicion, phone confiscated under suspicion. Civil liberty of right to fair trial removed, civil liberty of privacy removed. While on a totally different scale, it’s the same thing.

In the case of the school confiscating mobiles, your civil liberties are being infringed upon. The civil liberties which were created to, by law, protect you from interference. The privacy laws created to protect you and your property from unlawful prying eyes. This policy sweeps away all legalities and proceeds to take what is yours and punish you if you do not abide. This policy presumes your guilt and seeks to raise the school above the law regardless of what you may say or do. Above all, this policy places the school on a moral cliff edge, with the intention of using the policy the right way being away from the edge, and careless invasion of privacy a long, long way down.

iPhone 3G S > Teachers

6:30 Jun 13th, 2009 | Notes

With the announcement of the iPhone 3G S and the Find My iPhone for MobileMe, Apple has once again given school’s another curse.

Recently, our school has reprimanded the entire student body for the action of filming fights from their phones (naturally it was only a few people who actually filmed fights, but they wanted to talk to everyone). This comes after other Sydney schools have been caught out by the media having have found fight videos on Youtube containing student in uniform. What a fantastic way to promote you school!

So what it this curse? Well, our school’s policy has changed to “We’ll confiscate your phones and look at all your information. Because we can.” In my opinion, the school has now given teachers the power to confiscate anyone’s phone for any reason. It’s like the anti-terrorism laws, but not. The curse is the new iPhone 3G S and Find my iPhone.

Should your iPhone be confiscated for any reason (you could be an innocent responsible student or one with something to hide, it don’t really care) the first thing to do before you hand it over is make sure it’s switched off. That means that the teachers will be waiting at least a minute and a half before the phone turns back on. By then you’ll have been sent away. This gives you time to quickly rush to the library.

Why would you want to rush to the library? Because you’re about to wipe your iPhone of all it’s data. Using Find my iPhone, you can remotely wipe your entire iPhone from a web browser. If you have the iPhone 3G S, it’s wiped instantly unlike the iPhone 3G which has a two minute delay. There you have it. Whether you were trying to hide your fight videos or maybe just didn’t want teachers to scrounge through your entire library of private personal data, you can rest assured that they will get their hands on none of it.

Take that school! That ought to teach you to take my revolutionary mobile device away from me thinking I’m using it as a phone!

Should Our School Get Macs?

7:48 May 28th, 2009 | 0 notes

Here it is! My latest article for the school newspaper! Enjoy!

***

By now you all probably know that Macs are slowly making their way into more and more of the school. There are sleek, shiny iMacs creeping into computer labs in each of the campuses. This raises the question? Should the school get more Macs?

Personally, and from a completely bias perspective, I believe we should. Macs just work better than PCs in a school environment. Lets be honest, no body likes having to wait for all of the random pop ups to finish doing their thing and wait for firefox to open before they can start doing their work on the current PCs*. From my experience using the Macs in the music center, none of this stuff happens, allowing you to get down to work right away.

Macs also have features that save time when working. On a PC, if you have multiple web pages, documents and other files open, the task bar (the blue bar down the bottom) gets cluttered very quickly. This makes it hard for you to find the window you are looking for without dragging windows all over the screen to finally uncover the right one. On the Mac, there is a simple way to see all your windows at once and quickly select the one you were after. No hassles. All the Mac users will understand what I mean when I say “It’s the button on the keyboard that makes all the windows fly around”. Get what I mean? It’s features like this that make using a Mac very quick, painless and more efficient in getting you work done.

It’s also valuable to look at the trends in what computers students are buying. Last year the highest selling laptop in the high school and university student market was the MacBook. If computers are all about making life easier and simpler, the school’s buying habits reflect the students’ decision to move to a more user-friendly and painless computer. By that I mean the students recognize Macs are easier and are buying them, therefore the school should do the same for their own peace of mind. After all, peoples’ pockets don’t lie.

The computers at school are running a version of Windows that is getting close to eight years old. That’s decades in computer years. No matter what happens, in the next few years the school will have have to upgrade the computer as the life of Windows XP comes to an end.

What do you think? Should the school continue the trend of Mac purchases? Would you like to see Windows Vista in the library computer labs instead? Would you rather we wait for the release of Windows 7 before buying new computers?

***

*Note: Our school is using Novell which throws out tons of pop ups at login. Bleh!

Note: Article has been edited to maintain anonymity of my school! Yay civil liberties!

Note: Sorry for using so much italicized text.