Monday, June 30, 2008
A Methodological Approach to Action Research
What is Action Research?
Action research is known by many other names, including participatory research, collaborative inquiry, emancipatory research, action learning, and contextural action research, but all are variations on a theme. Put simply, action research is “learning by doing” - a group of people identify a problem, do something to resolve it, see how successful their efforts were, and if not satisfied, try again. While this is the essence of the approach, there are other key attributes of action research that differentiate it from common problem-solving activities that we all engage in every day. A more succinct definition is,
"Action research...aims to contribute both to the practical concerns of people in an immediate problematic situation and to further the goals of social science simultaneously. Thus, there is a dual commitment in action research to study a system and concurrently to collaborate with members of the system in changing it in what is together regarded as a desirable direction. Accomplishing this twin goal requires the active collaboration of researcher and client, and thus it stresses the importance of co-learning as a primary aspect of the research process."
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What Is Action Research?
Action research is one of those terms that we hear quite often in today’s educational circles. But just what does it mean? If you ask three people to define action research, you may find yourself with three different responses. Typically, action research is undertaken in a school setting.
It is a reflective process that allows for inquiry and discussion as components of the “research.” Often, action research is a collaborative activity among colleagues searching for solutions to everyday, real problems experienced in schools, or looking for ways to improve instruction and increase student achievement. Rather than dealing with the theoretical, action research allows practitioners to address those concerns that are closest to them, ones over which they can exhibit some influence and make change. Practitioners are responsible for making more and more decisions in the operations of schools, and they are being held publicly accountable for student achievement results. The process of action research assists educators in assessing needs, documenting the steps of inquiry, analyzing data, and making informed decisions that can lead to desired outcomes.
Action research is a process in which participants examine their own educational practice systematically and carefully, using the techniques of research. It is based on the following assumptions:
•Teachers and principals work best on problems they have identified for themselves
•Teachers and principals become more effective when encouraged to examine and assess their
own work and then consider ways of working differently
•Teachers and principals help each other by working collaboratively
•Working with colleagues helps teachers and principals in their professional development
(Watts, 1985, p. 118)
http://www.alliance.brown.edu/pubs/themes_ed/act_research.pdf
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
The Pale Blue Dot
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken by Voyager 1 in 1990 from a record distance of 4 billion miles. In this video, Carl Sagan relates his thoughts on a deeper meaning of the photograph.
"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known."
Review Keynote 08
Presentation software adds path motion, time-saving features
by Franklin N. Tessler
In the four-and-a-half years since its launch, Keynote has matured from a promising but flawed program into a strong performer that outshines Microsoft PowerPoint 2004 ( 
Smoother workflow
The new version of Keynote retains an uncluttered interface that makes it easy to put together polished presentations with a minimum of fuss, while introducing features that boost efficiency. For example, the Format Bar, an optional ribbon that appears just below the toolbar, lets you adjust fonts, color, shadows, opacity, and more. It’s a simple addition (and one that spans all three iWork programs), but it means less shuffling through Inspector tabs to tweak the look of objects on a slide.
The new Smart Build feature is another huge time-saver that lets you show a series of images without putting them on separate frames or using builds to display them one-by-one. When you set up a Smart Build, a resizable placeholder and a translucent overlay appear on the slide. The overlay, similar to Keynote’s image adjustment window, has a space for you to drag and drop the images that you want to present from the Media Browser or Finder, along with thumbnails of the ones that you’ve chosen so far. When you’re done, Keynote displays the pictures using one of ten special effects, including a turntable that rotates to bring succeeding images into view and another that shows pictures on a spinning cube.
Alas, although you can insert a Smart Build onto a master slide, it won’t function as a placeholder on slides that use that master—if you want to use the same Smart Build effect on several slides, you have to create the builds separately or design the first slide and then duplicate it.
New Auto Correction options, which you activate via Keynote’s preferences, also let you work more quickly by automatically capitalizing words at the beginning of sentences, building bulleted and numbered lists, and replacing text as you type. Although the last feature is mostly intended to perform character substitutions (such as replacing “(r)” with “®”), you can also customize the list of replacements to correct common mistakes (“the” for “hte”) or expand shortcuts into preferred phrases.
Another feature lets people with less than perfect vision choose from one of three magnification levels for the slide thumbnails in the Navigator and Light Table views. Although it’s not as flexible as the variable slider I would have preferred, it’s a welcome addition that saves time by letting you read slides without having to look at them in the Slide Only or Navigator view.
Objects in motion
Despite an impressive roster of motion builds and other effects, animation previously wasn’t Keynote’s strongest suit, requiring cumbersome workarounds or separate programs like Adobe Flash to simulate even simple actions like moving a ball across a floor. Keynote’s support for path-based animation puts an end to that by letting you define exactly how objects move. And that’s not all: in addition to controlling an object’s position, you can specify actions that change its size, rotation, or opacity at any point in time to, for example, simulate a spaceship that grows as it approaches the viewer from a distance.
You create animation paths by building them from straight lines or Bézier curves, one section at a time. Although this approach works well for many applications, plotting out motion along a circle or ellipse means stringing together several Bézier curves. It would be far simpler if you could designate circles and other graphic outlines as motion paths. And, because you have to use Keynote’s fixed-size build drawer to set up the order and timing of movements and other effects, it’s difficult to choreograph multiple objects. So, along with additional options for defining motion paths, a timeline for setting up builds and other effects tops my wish list for a future update to Keynote.
Picture perfect
Other enhancements build on Keynote’s considerable graphics prowess. Picture Frame, a new stroke option in the Graphic Inspector, draws a border around any text or graphic object. You have 12 frame styles to choose from, ranging from simple lines to shadowed borders that are similar to the picture cutouts in some of Keynote’s older themes. Unlike cutouts, which are challenging to produce, you can add or tweak frames with only a few mouse clicks. And, now that Keynote lets you define pictures on master slides as media placeholders, it’s easier than ever to design your own themes.
Another new feature, Instant Alpha, lets you make backgrounds transparent without having to use an external image editor, such as Photoshop. The process works best on pictures with foreground objects that stand out from the background, such as a red company logo set against a white backdrop. When you click on the background, contiguous pixels with similar colors turn purple. As you drag, the range of selected colors shrinks or grows. When you’re satisfied with your selection, press return and the background disappears, leaving the rest of the picture intact. Instant Alpha is no substitute for Photoshop masking, but it performs remarkably well with some images.
Of course, no Keynote update would be complete without a few cool themes and special effects. New build effects include Flame, which makes objects appear or disappear in a blaze, and Confetti, which makes objects self-assemble from or explode into a cloud of specks. (Confetti also makes an appearance as a new transition effect.) The new version also sports nine new themes.
Sight and sound: a mixed bag
Keynote’s support for video is improved, but it’s still imperfect. For example, Keynote no longer automatically begins to play movies the instant they appear, and you can adjust a movie’s start and stop points in the QuickTime Inspector. You can also publish Keynote presentations directly on YouTube. Another new export option lets you save your slideshow in an iPod- or iPhone-compatible format, but you’re limited to fixed or recorded timing, so it’s of limited value if you want to practice a presentation on the go. And Keynote still doesn’t let you interact with QuickTime VR movies during a presentation.
Keynote’s audio features, although better than before, also don’t go far enough. For the first time, you can record a narration for your presentation in Keynote as you watch the slideshow, and most audio remains intact when you export a presentation to Flash. But you still can’t add audio tracks that span only a subset of slides, a feature that makes it challenging to create background music tracks that include several songs.
Macworld’s buying advice
Despite a few rough edges, Keynote ’08 is more impressive than ever. With PowerPoint 2008 slated for release early next year, I’m hoping that the competition will compel Apple to address Keynote’s remaining shortcomings before then.
http://www.macworld.com/article/59529/2007/08/keynote08.html
Microsoft PowerPoint 2008
Presentation software edges closer to the competition
by Franklin N. Tessler
Few products enjoy the market dominance that PowerPoint for Windows does—for most of the world, the words “PowerPoint” and “presentation” are interchangeable. But Mac presenters have had an alternative since January of 2003, when Apple unveiled Keynote (
PowerPoint’s new look
Many changes to PowerPoint’s user interface are recognizable instantly. The standard toolbar is now built in, and you can opt to display all the toolbars docked or undocked— except the Drawing toolbar, which cannot be docked. When docked, the toolbars are integrated into the main window, resulting in a much cleaner appearance than in PowerPoint 2004. You can also customize any of the toolbars to suit your workflow by dragging commands into or out of them.
In PowerPoint 2008, the dedicated Slide and Outline views are gone, replaced by a three-part Normal View that shows the current slide on a light grey backdrop and speaker’s notes on the bottom. A new pane on the left replaces the old Outline view with a more versatile one that lets you toggle between outline and thumbnail representations of the presentation. Like Keynote’s Navigator, the Slide pane makes it easy to see the current slide in the context of the ones around it, and you can duplicate, delete, or rearrange selected slides. However, there’s no way to arrange the slides hierarchically or hide subgroups of slides the way you can with Keynote.
The Elements Gallery, another new feature, augments PowerPoint more than it does either of the other two Office applications that feature it. Gallery tabs let you insert or make changes to slide themes, layouts, transitions, table styles, charts, SmartArt Graphics, and WordArt. The Layouts gallery is especially helpful, since you can use it to either change the layout of an existing slide or add a new slide with the selected layout. SmartArt Graphics, which convert text bullets to eye-catching graphics, are an effective way to explain complex relationships, although they can detract from a presentation if they’re overused.
Your master’s slides
Nowhere is the difference in design philosophy between PowerPoint and Keynote more apparent than in each program’s implementation of themes, master slides, and layouts. Instead of separate title and slide masters, PowerPoint 2008 supports a single master slide that determines the appearance of background elements and placeholders on all the slide layouts. Set the title text on the master slide to Arial yellow bold, say, and the corresponding text on all the individual slide layouts changes too. Themes, on the other hand, let you specify the background and attributes of all the placeholders on any subset of slides, and provide a way to maintain design consistency.
Keynote, by contrast, doesn’t separate masters and layouts. You can have as many masters as you wish, each with its own background and arrangement of text, graphics elements, and placeholders. (As in PowerPoint, you can apply themes to change the look of an entire presentation in one step.) Although PowerPoint 2008’s model provides considerable flexibility, it’s not as straightforward as Keynote’s approach, and will probably confuse novices and experienced users alike.
A better Toolbox
PowerPoint 2004’s Formatting Palette simplified PowerPoint’s interface by consolidating many commands in one accessible location. In PowerPoint 2008, the revamped Toolbox continues along the same path by further centralizing functions and grouping them more logically. In addition to a Formatting palette with sections that change to let you adjust the attributes of the currently selected object, the Toolbox sports a separate Object palette that lets you insert shapes, symbols, clip art, or pictures onto a slide.
PowerPoint 2008’s clip art library includes the cheesy drawings that are a staple of bad presentations everywhere, but thankfully adds more than 100 photographs with transparent backgrounds. Animation controls get their own Toolbox palette, as do Reference Tools, which let you look up dictionary definitions, thesaurus entries, translations, and more. The remaining palettes let you access PowerPoint’s Scrapbook and Compatibility Report, which were housed separately in PowerPoint 2004’s Toolbox.
But Microsoft’s attempt to pack so many different commands into a relatively compact window results in an ever-changing interface, and the dynamic resizing that occurs as you switch between tabs is sometimes jarring. In addition, many Toolbox buttons—picture formatting and animation effects, for example—open separate dialog boxes with their own varied interfaces and quirks. In comparison, Keynote’s Inspector windows encompass a narrower range of functions but have a more consistent user interface, so they’re easier to deal with. And, in contrast with the Toolbox, you can open multiple instances of Keynote’s Inspector to work with different object attributes at the same time.
The Keynote look
It’s always been easy to spot Keynote slideshows—even if they don’t use Apple themes, presentations crafted with Keynote often have a distinctive look. PowerPoint 2008 narrows the gap by adopting more of the graphics capabilities built into OS X. In addition to adjustable soft drop shadows and object transparency, first introduced in Office 2004, PowerPoint 2008 supports reflections. Unlike Keynote’s reflection feature, which only works with images, PowerPoint lets you reflect any picture, shape, or text object onto whatever lies behind it on the slide. You can even alter the reflection’s vertical extent and adjust the separation between it and the original object.
PowerPoint also sports a greatly expanded repertoire of picture formatting options and special effects that go beyond Keynote’s image adjustments. The roster of 34 effects range from artistic (such as stained glass and bump distortion) to practical (unsharp mask and gamma correction). But, although it’s helpful to adjust images without having to launch an image editor, doing so can significantly increase the size of the presentation file, as is also true in Keynote.
Missed opportunities and glitches
Noteworthy additions in Keynote ‘08 included Smart Builds, which let you display a series of images using one of ten animation effects, and path motion, which lets you move slide objects from one point to another along defined paths. Alas, similar features are absent from PowerPoint 2008. Its lack of support for path animation is particularly disappointing, since this feature has been available in the last two versions of PowerPoint for Windows. I was especially surprised when I created a presentation that contained motion paths in PowerPoint 2007 and then tried to open it in PowerPoint 2008 on my Mac. I expected some sort of compatibility error, but the animations played perfectly, meaning that the engine for displaying path motion exists in the program.
Some PowerPoint 2008 omissions are especially odd: for example, you can interact with QuickTime VR movies in a slideshow (something that Keynote still doesn’t let you do), but you can’t pause and then scrub back and forth through a movie during a presentation the way you can with Keynote. Unfortunately, that limits PowerPoint’s suitability for some educational applications.
PowerPoint’s continued reliance on external applications (Microsoft Graph in PowerPoint 2004 and Excel in PowerPoint 2008) to create charts and graphs is also a bit of a letdown. While PowerPoint and Excel together provide a more comprehensive library of styles and options than Keynote’s integrated chart editor does, editing the source data in a separate program still feels awkward.
As if to prove that they’re not above borrowing a good idea when they see one, Microsoft’s programmers have implemented a few tricks from Keynote’s playbook. For example, in addition to fixed guides, PowerPoint now provides Dynamic Guides that pop up as you move objects around, making it easier to center them on the slide or position them in relation to neighboring items. But PowerPoint’s guides are finicky, sometimes not appearing when you expect them to or forcing you to move objects very slowly to make them come into view.
Macworld’s buying advice
Despite many improvements, PowerPoint 2008 doesn’t feel as well thought out as Keynote, a legacy of its long heritage and its close ties to other Office applications. While you can duplicate almost all of Keynote’s dazzling effects in PowerPoint, it’s still faster to whip up a top-notch slideshow in Keynote. But that doesn’t mean that Keynote is always the best choice, especially if you can’t use a Mac to deliver your presentations. In many corporate, educational, and scientific venues, presenters have no choice but to use PowerPoint. (You can create a slideshow in Keynote and export it in PowerPoint format, but many of Keynote’s best effects are lost in translation.) When you factor in the common requirement to exchange presentations with PowerPoint for Windows users, it often makes more sense to just use PowerPoint.
Whether you’re using PowerPoint by necessity or choice, the latest version’s new additions are useful, and produce attractive results. Unfortunately, Mac users still miss out on capabilities available to Windows users and the intuitive interface of Keynote.
http://www.macworld.com/article/131597/2008/01/powerpoint2008.html
User Discovers Office 2008 Problems
by Dan Frakes and Rob Griffiths
A pair of installation-related problems involving the new release of Microsoft’s Office 2008 won’t cause damage to your data or prevent the productivity suite from running. But the issues, discovered by a user, pose potential security and administrative headaches. Microsoft is vowing fixes for both.
Issue No. 1: UID 502
Office 2008’s installation problems first came to light thanks to Mac user Joel Bruner, who noted both issues in posts on his blog earlier this week. The first issue relates to file ownership, and requires some basic understanding of user accounts and installations in Mac OS X.
Every user account on your Mac has an associated user ID number (UID); Mac OS X uses these UIDs, rather than account names, to track which users have what access to various files and actions. When you initially set up your Mac, the first user account created is given UID 501 and has administrative access. The second account created gets UID 502 and whatever account status—admin, standard, or managed—the administrator gives the the account. The third user gets UID 503, and so on.
Normally, when you install software using Apple’s Installer utility, each installed file is owned by either the system, by a specific user account as determined by the developer and laid out in the installation package, or by the user account performing the installation.
However, as Bruner pointed out in one blog entry, the Office 2008 installation doesn’t do any of these things. Instead, the installation package installs almost all of its files—and their enclosing folders—with the owner set to user ID 502. This occurs regardless of which user account runs the installer, and regardless of the administrative status of UID 502.If UID 502 is an administrative account on your Mac, this may not be an issue, as you’ve presumably given that account admin status for a reason. However, if you set up the second account on your Mac without administrative privileges, that account will still end up with free rein over all of Office’s components, and thus the ability to delete or alter /Library/Fonts/Microsoft, /Library/Application Support/Microsoft, and /Applications/Microsoft Office 2008, as well as the contents of these folders. (The installation for the Special Media Edition of Office 2008 also creates the folder /Library/Automator if it didn’t already exist, and gives UID 502 ownership of that folder, as well.) For instance, the user could replace a legitimate file with something else and even make that file executable (see below).
Similarly, if you’ve set up the second account on your Mac as a non-admin account for your own everyday use—ostensibly to prevent yourself from accidentally screwing things up—this “safety” account will have the power to delete or otherwise alter the Office 2008 installation.
Many users won’t notice this situation, but it potentially poses a security issue, as it could provide a non-admin user the ability to modify files that would normally be accessible only to administrators.
Note that UID 502 will be set as the owner of Office 2008 files even if you’ve never created a second user account on your Mac—meaning your Office files will be owned by a user that doesn’t exist. This is actually a preferable scenario, as a user that doesn’t exist can’t modify files.
Issue No. 2: Execute!
Bruner also discovered a second problem: Every file in the Office 2008 installation is executable. This means, speaking generally, that files—even things such as clip art and help files—are seen by OS X as “programs” and, if a particular file has executable code, can be run.
This problem should not affect normal use of Office 2008, but security experts generally frown upon the idea of thousands of unnecessarily-executable support files sitting on a drive. Such a situation isn’t necessarily dangerous, but it opens up avenues for possible security exploits.
For example, if a security vulnerability were to be discovered in one of the more than 42,000 files installed by Office 2008, such a vulnerability could be easier to exploit if the file is executable. The only Office 2008 files that actually need to be executable are the actual programs, as well as folders.
What you can do
Although Office 2008 is the first major Microsoft product to use Apple’s Installer system, security experts were surprised by these mistakes. “It’s not good and a clear violation of Microsoft’s standards,” said analyst Rich Mogull, who writes about security issues for Securosis and TidBITS as well as Macworld. “This should not have occurred considering how rigid [Microsoft’s] Security Development Life Cycle is. By potentially allowing a non-privileged user to change system-wide files, it could allow an attacker to cross trust boundaries and execute code in another user’s context.”
Mogull notes, however, that the security implications are, for now, theoretical rather than immediate: “The combination of the two issues is problematic, but it’s one of those issues we need to bring to light, not panic about quite yet.”
For its part, Microsoft takes the two issues seriously, says Geoff Price, product unit manager for the company’s Macintosh Business Unit.
“The Mac BU team is aware of reports regarding Office 2008 installing to a folder that potentially allows a local non-Admin user access to program files,” Price said. “This issue should only affect machines that have a second local user account enabled; other scenarios should not be affected.”
Microsoft also acknowledged the second issue. The company will be providing a free, downloadable update that fixes both issues; in addition, future pressings of the Office 2008 installation disc will include an updated installation package that installs all files with the proper attributes. (A release date for the update wasn’t available at the time of publication; we’ll update this story once we get that information.)
In the meantime, Price provided a fix for the file-ownership issue:
- While logged in to an admin account, type the following command, as one line, and then press return: sudo chmod -R a-st "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008" "/Library/Fonts/Microsoft" "/Library/Application Support/Microsoft" "/Library/Automator" (If you don’t have the Special Media Edition of Office 2008, omit"/Library/Automator".)
- Enter your account password when prompted.
- Type the following command, as one line, and then press return: sudo chown -h -R root:admin "/Applications/Microsoft Office 2008" "/Library/Fonts/Microsoft" "/Library/Application Support/Microsoft" "/Library/Automator" (If you don’t have the Special Media Edition of Office 2008, omit"/Library/Automator".)
- Enter your account password if prompted.
This procedure properly assigns ownership of all Office 2008 components to the system. Unfortunately, there’s no simple fix for the issue of all Office 2008 files being executable. Because some files do indeed need to be executable, you can’t modify all the files en masse. Users will have to wait for the update from Microsoft to address this issue.
If you’re especially concerned about security and you decide to uninstall Office 2008, note that the included Uninstall utility doesn’t fully remove all components. It apparently moves only the Microsoft Office 2008 folder (in /Applications) to the Trash, leaving /Library/Fonts/Microsoft, /Library/Application Support/Microsoft, and all of Office’s included Automator actions in place.
http://www.macworld.com/article/131822/2008/01/office2008issues.html
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