Monthly Archives: January 2013

Education

Reinventing Education

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Seems to me that a couple of (related) factors are likely to create some major changes to post-secondary, and maybe also secondary, eduction. Those factors being cost and technology.

On cost, between 1986 and 2011 the cost of college tuition increased by 498%, more than 4x the 115% increase in CPI over the same time period (http://bit.ly/RaYciE). Likely this can be largely attributed to some combination of too much easy money and poor management. Bugs me enough that I am unlikely to give more than token gifts to my ivy league alma mater. I do not think they should be rewarded for creating a bubble, never mind increasing the size of the bubble, a bad thing that will eventually burst.

On technology, online learning is now ready for prime time. Video, testing, project, and collaboration tools are excellent. Given the choice between learning in person from the 278th best teacher in a field or in an online setting from the best teacher in the same field I might choose the online setting before even considering cost, which is another compelling factor. I get the arguments for needing “live” teaching and classes, but I think the arguments get weaker as you move down the educational institution food chain.

I have been poking around in and taking advantage of some of the online offerings, and they are pretty neat:

Coursera is maybe my favorite of the offerings, platform seems solid, and there is a good mix of subject matters, from technical to liberal arts and other.

Udacity is also a very slick platform, but the subject offerings are more limited and mainly of a technical nature.

edX has limited offerings right now, but a good mix of topics, and is backed by MIT and Harvard and a few other forward thinking powerhouses, I’ll keep an eye on this one.

 iTunes U has the largest and broadest set of offerings, but does not have any of the slick interactive and collaborative features of the other sites.

Computers

Gibberish Printer Output (ASCII Text) with Mac OS

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Setting up a new small office and landlord said we could have/use an old Ricoh Aficio MP2000 multifunction printer that was in the space. Figured it probably had something wrong with it that would make it unusable, but gave it a try. Figured out that Ricohs (at least this model) have a default user administration username of “supervisor” with null (not the word null, a blank) for the password, and was able to set up an admin user to log in and get to the settings via a web browser.

But when I printed a test page from my MacBook Pro I got many many pages of ASCII gibberish. I think I have seen this problem before, but not sure I remember ever sorting it out. I tried looking at settings in CUPS (Common Unix Operating System, first enable in Terminal, with “cupsctl Webinterface=yes”, then go to 127.0.0.1:631), but no joy there.

Turns out the Ricoh printer drivers are Postscript printer drivers, and apparently many fancier printers only have Postscript as an expensive option, which this particular printer did not have. But after poking around a bit I found that The Linux Foundation has PCL drivers for many of these “high end” printers, the PPDs are in a package called pxlmono, and a couple of other packages need to be installed for the pxlmono drivers to work (Foomatic-RIP and Ghostscript, details at http://bit.ly/XhbhJE). I uninstalled the Ricoh Postscript drivers, installed the pxlomo drivers, and off to the races!

Computers

Burning Blue-ray Discs on Mac Pro

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Some time ago I installed a Blue-ray burner in my Mac Pro (early 2008 model, MacPro3,1), did the homework at the time and selected and installed a LG WH12LS38 in the bay below the factory installed drive (a Pioneer DVR-112D hooked up to to the ATA bus). I found some instructions online and the install is pretty simple. You need to pull some fans out to get at things, and the drive hooks up to one of the two spare SATA ports on the motherboard. Take the faceplate off the drive, put it in the bay, hook up power and SATA cables, and the drive shows right up.

I had no problem burning CDs and DVDs with the new drive, but recently I tried to burn some files to a BD-R and I do not appear to be able to do this from the Mac OS (running the latest version of Mountain Lion now, 10.8.2), I get a message along the lines of not enough room on the disc, even though there is plenty of room. I was about to give up, but then figured I might see if I could burn a BD disc from Windows 7 running in Parallels. My Parallels setup defaults to the upper/factory optical drive, but it was simple to point it at the BD drive by changing the CD/DVD 1 setting in the device configuration window. Drag the files to the disc, right mouse click on the drive icon to select burn, and off to the races! I am using Phillips 6x BD-R discs and I set the burn speed to the lowest setting, 2x (based on my experience burning DVD DLs I get no coasters when I use low burn speeds). And once the disc has been burned I can also access/use the files from the Mac OS (after quitting Parallels, which when running ties up the BD drive).

PS – Might be that Toast would work from Mac OS, but Toast is expensive and I don’t really like it, the install puts files all over the place.