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I had gotten as far as installing Drupal 7 a couple of times in the past year, but over the holiday, I tried to actually set up a Drupal 7 site for the first time. I was surprised to find that the ecosystem still doesn't quite feel ready for prime time.

At first, I thought it was just that stuff had been moved or reorganized. I spent a surprising amount of time searching for how to do stuff. The interface is quite different. But then I realized that some things that I have come to count on are simply missing, like not being able to select an alternate theme while logged in as a particular user. I still haven't figured out how to get the system to rebuild cached images.

Many D7 modules are also not ready for prime time. The new LDAP module is still unfinished. The ImageMagick ImageAPI Module doesn't seem to work. I saw comments that Themekey and others weren't really usable.

I don't mean any of this to be a criticism of Drupal in general or even Drupal 7 in particular. There are a bunch of aspects to Drupal 7 that show fundamental restructuring the makes the whole enterprise more robust. The Field UI, in particular, is a huge improvement that generalizes how to build forms. Still, I wonder when (or if) Drupal 7 will reach the same level of functionality/stability that Drupal 6 seems to have.

We talked a bit about these issues at our local Drupal users group meeting and the challenge at trying to choose whether to adopt a module for special purpose functionality or cobble together something from the basic underlying components. Calendaring has always been a bit of a challenge. Most people now seem to build calendaring functions using CCK, but if you look for a "calendar" project, there really isn't one. And setting up a calendar with CCK is still a lot of work. It's often hard to know how to do something that won't leave you in a cul-de-sac when the next version comes out. It's a fast moving target.

Being an optimist, I would choose a slightly different title for Morris Berman's book Why American Failed: The roots of imperial decline, although this would undoubtedly be over his strenuous objections. The book presents two essential visions for society: one driven by doing what is right versus one focused solely on self-interest and argues that America turned away from the former. A bitter paean to any grander vision for America, Berman denies any hope that the country might choose a different path. It's all over but the shouting.

He begins with the transition from colonialism to early capitalism: when people moved from building functional communities to industrialization and acquisitiveness. He argues that Jimmy Carter represented the last time a president really tried to shift the country from one path to the other, and then recounts the disastrous results of Reaganism and the steps that led to the collapse of 2008 and the subsequent failure to effect meaningful change.

Berman weaves a narrative drawing upon Vance Packard, Lewis Mumford, Marshall McLuhan, and others, to draw a picture of modern life as meaningless and empty as it is cluttered with junk. He sees Americanism primarily as a hoax, a scam, with everyone hustling to find an angle where they can extract wealth for themselves out of the system.

Technology has failed us, he argues, replacing genuine human relationships with shallow and relatively worthless electronic contacts. Furthermore, as human life is increasingly organized around the needs of the technology, it increasingly fails to deliver what people actually need.

Berman sees the pursuit of this civilization as Ahab in Moby Dick, leading to the destruction of everything. It's hopeless. Americans are losers. Just give up:

[...] most of American society is wallowing in trash; it has no interest in questions of this sort, doesn't even know they exist. The culmination of a hustling, laissez-faire capitalist culture is that everything gets dumbed down; that all significant questions are ignored, and that every human activity is turned into a commodity, and anything goes if it sells.

Personally, he's decided to abandon the United States (if not America), but takes a few minutes to give us an eschatological preview of what we can expect as America collapses. He holds out some home for a "monastic option": voluntary simplicity and reorganizing at a local level, but sees it as just rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

I don't disagree with most of his fundamental conclusions, but think that much more modest adjustments can be made to our society that could make it a lot better. And that his extremely negative take on current cultural products is belied by his use of them in a half-dozen instances to capture or describe particular insights.

He finishes by saying "collapse could be a good thing, if not exactly fun to live through. The entire premise of America was a mistake from the beginning." This reminds me again of the false dichotomy of leavers and takers. It's not yet clear whether the enterprise of human civilization was entirely folly, but I would still submit that the overall path was the right one, because the alternative absolutely invites extinction anyway. Only a taker society could possibly be in a position to protect the Earth from the next catastrophic meteor impact, which we can be reasonably sure would otherwise extinguish human life. Civilization may yet fail, but let's try some adjustments first, rather than just chucking the whole thing.

Several weeks ago, I went to whitehouse.gov and dashed off a quick note to the President asking to reconsider his support for the indefinite detention of American citizens. This evening, I got a form-letter response in which his handlers presented a formulaic response, which included this statement:

As Commander in Chief, I have no greater responsibility than keeping the American people safe.

Really? Let's review the Oath of the President which I think sums up the issue quite succinctly:

I, Barack Obama, do solemnly swear that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.

Please, Mr. President. Don't just seek to protect us, like children, from harm while stripping our supposedly inalienable rights. Protect our Freedom as your oath calls upon you to do. Please don't sign the NDAA.

Today, I took Daniel and my daughter-out-law to the Bookmill. There is asbestos abatement happening in the room adjacent to my office and noise drove me out yesterday, so I figured today was likely to be a waste if I went in.

It was a rather dreary day that started raining just as we left. We arrived and found that the tables along the windows (and power outlets) were all taken. Luckily, I had the forethought to bring an extension cord, so we took a table in the middle and, fortified by coffee, we got ourselves all set up and set to work.

We spent the day working, writing, and drawing. I worked on a few work things, but spent a fair amount of time working on a haibun I've been trying to finish for months. Daniel worked on writing a new story: I'm trying to get him to finish a story and actually submit it for publication by the end of the holidays. Emilie worked on several drawings, one of which I hope to use for our holiday cards.

We stayed for several hours and eventually packed up and headed back. We stopped briefly in a store with locally produced artwork. I particularly liked several oil paintings of local scenes, including a panorama of the pioneer valley as seen from the top of mount sugarloaf. In any case, it was a nice way to spend the solstice.

Western Mass Drupal Camp will return to the Integrated Science Building at UMass Amherst on January, 21st 2012 (with Jan 28 reserved in case of snow). Anyone interested in learning more about Drupal should plan to attend. Registration and attendance is free to the public. There will be presentations and sessions throughout the day appropriate for people at every level of expertise, from beginners to experts. Mark your calendar!

Interested participants may now register to announce their intention to attend, to propose sessions they could present, and/or to suggest sessions that they would like to attend. We are also seeking sponsorships for bringing an outstanding keynote speaker and to provide refreshments and other amenities.

Details are still emerging about the schedule of events. We hope to offer a keynote presentation in the ISB auditorium (ISB135). A welcome-center and exhibition is planned for the atrium. We hope to offer tracks of presentations for beginners, themers and site designers, developers and site-builders, and goal-oriented drupal users. Two innovative environments will be a "Showcase Bazaar" where people can demonstrate tricks and innovatations and a "Code-Sprint Bazaar" where developers can show work-in-progress and encourage participants to get involved. A "Genius Bar" will also be available for people with problems and questions to get expert assistance.

Drupal is the world's leading content-management platform, selected by UMass Amherst to for web-development on campus, that powers millions of websites and applications worldwide. It's free software built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world. Visit http://drupal.org/ for more information about Drupal.

Last spring, I spent a lot of time thinking about what kind of contribution I might make to the teaching at North Star. I suggested several possibilities and they chose to invite me to offer a course on building a computer. We met for an hour a week starting in September.

The first class attracted a lot of initial interest: more than 20 students came. I led a discussion where we started with what kinds of computers are there and it was great! Students started listing brands of computers (Apple, Dell, HP, etc) and, then we moved to form factors (laptops, desktops, towers, etc), and then purposes (workstations, servers, thin-clients, etc), and eventually came to architecture (RISC, CISC, and different processor families). We established our mission as trying to define the components, purchase, and assemble the components to build a server computer.

The next class, fewer students came, and even fewer came after that . In the end, there were only three who came every week. It may be that the others were imagining I would come in with boxes of parts and have everyone build their own. It was more work to try to figure out everything and buy it first. But we persevered.

We discussed the kinds of services we thought we might want. We agreed that it should be a file server and probably have a webserver. There we a lot of interest in having something that might be able to improve wireless performance in the building. And I suggested that we could also run a Minecraft server. And Daniel very much would like to run a MUX or MOO server as well. We talked about the other ubiquitous services like DHCP and DNS, that make the internet work.

We looked briefly at operating systems. We looked at and rejected Windows (which, if you try to buy the server version, is fantastically expensive). We considered Open Indiana and the various flavors of BSD, but settled on Ubuntu 10.04 LTS as probably the way to go.

By now, the fall was disappearing quickly. We identified some sources for components and began looking at the cheaper components, looking for something that would be most appropriate for a server (making sure there were drivers for linux) without breaking my wallet. We selected a processor/motherboard combo and picked out a DIMM. The first case we wanted was too expensive and didn't include a power supply, so we went with a cheaper case. When we first looked at hard-drives, they were quite cheap, but due to the flooding in Thailand, prices tripled, so we ended up getting a smaller hard-drive than we'd initially hoped. It took an extra day to find a wireless card that looked like it would support the HostAP stuff that (hopefully) will make it easy to build a captive portal.

Today, in class, we started building. George had teased me good-naturedly regarding whether I'd be able to let the students actually do the work, but I think my photographs provide testimony that I let them actually do almost everything. We got the motherboard installed and installed the CPU, CPU fan, and DIMM. Next week, we'll hopefully install the hard-drive and wireless card and hook up all the internal cables. Then we should be good to try to boot it up and install gnu/linux.

Next semester, we'll continue with sysadmin training and actually setting up all the services.

Gaye Tuchman, the author of Wannabe U (here's a review), visited UMass and met with a group of faculty and administrators. Based on comments I made at the chancellor's search committee, I got invited to the meeting. There was a far-ranging discussion of the situation in which public higher education finds itself and an exploration of avenues for trying to move forward.

I think the short answer is that public higher education is f***ed. We have allowed the plutocracy to brand education as a private good and have allowed the entire system to be reconstructed around a model of high tuition and self-funded high aid. Unless we can reach a new social contract that reconsiders that arrangement, public universities will go away. Several are only receiving 5-10% of their funding from the state anymore and are, for all intents and purposes, already private. And all are headed in that direction.

I suggested that our best hope was for PHENOM to build a coalition based on parents of high-school students, aiming at juniors. These are the folks who haven't yet figured out how to pay for college and who stand to benefit the most from solving the problem. Unfortunately, PHENOM has been just organizing college students. College students are a much more selective group: they're the ones who've already solved the problem of how to pay for college in some way. I should probably try to get more involved with PHENOM, but since they never seem to listen to anything I tell them, I've felt too discouraged to get involved.

One interesting part of the discussion was related to the circumstances that led to the current chancellor getting canned. We were talking about the institution's goal of being an AAU campus and Gaye said, "Not unless you have a medical school..." And, of course, that's exactly what led to the chancellor getting the axe: he set up a committee to explore the idea of creating a medical school in Springfield that could be part of the Amherst campus. It is about the only way for Amherst to achieve AAU status and it would have fleshed out the Amherst/Springfield collaboration, which has been largely skeletal. But proposing either a medical school or law school associated with the Amherst campus is the third rail in Massachusetts politics.

I see the chancellor as a somewhat tragic figure -- especially given his speech to the faculty senate yesterday, where he all but pleaded with faculty to get behind his plan. But it's hard to feel sorry for him. I've always wondered that he seemed to make no effort to build bridges with the faculty. Even the secretary of the faculty senate, who has always been an unapologetic supporter of the chancellor described his style as "management by fait accompli". That was exactly it: he never consulted in any public way and when consultation was forced upon him, he would issue his decision just before the committee was due to report. And the performance yesterday, where the deans were trotted into the Faculty Senate and made to stand to demonstrate the administration's opposition to the will of the faculty? Truly pathetic.

Unfortunately, Gaye didn't really have any answers. "Maybe the Occupy movement will save us," she said. "I think in my book I managed to understand one side of one institution, but to fix public higher education is going to require reforming the whole economy." But recognizing the scope of the problem is the first step toward building a solution.

When I arrived at the faculty senate today, there were students holding signs protesting. Some of the messages were typical (about fees and costs), but some were about something I didn't understand.

The focus of the meeting was a panel discussion about the University's change to FBS (big time) football. The business case argues that, although the costs will go up, revenues will go up as well and more than offset the increased costs. The faculty made a presentation that this is false: that experience shows that revenues do not increase enough to offset the costs.

The lame-duck chancellor rose to defend the switch, arguing that his administration did do the proper consultation and pleading with the campus to support the endeavor. I was stunned -- I think it's the first time I've heard the chancellor actually ask for support for his goals. But it's way too late: his tenure has been characterized by governance through fait accompli: rather than asking people to get onboard at the ground level, he mainly has preempted every committee that was ever charged to examine what he proposed to do. It was sad and pathetic.

The students waited quietly and patiently for more than an hour to have a few minutes to make their case. It turned out that the university administration sent email to a bunch of undergraduate employees telling them they were fired and that they had lost their room-and-board waivers for next semester (resulting in a $1200 increase in their costs). Many students expressed their frustration and rage with an administration that gave students no input into the decision-making process.

The only serious business was a motion that calls on the administration to raise the money to renovate the stadium from private donors, rather than putting the costs on the backs of students. For a stadium that essentially won't be used anymore, but which, although old, needs to be renovated solely due to the change in status. The administration brought in the deans as shills to vote on their side of the issue, but lost the vote by a 3/1 margin. It was embarrassing to see the deans being used that way. I hope I never so completely lose my self-esteem as to let myself be used that way.

One of the last students to speak, described her experience trying to communicate with the administration: how whenever she or her parents had a question, it was a nightmare dealing with the administration. No-one knew the answer and it was always unpleasant. I've made it a personal mission that I never let students bounce off me: if I can't fix it, I make sure the issue gets fixed -- personally. But I'm lucky to be in circumstances where I can do that. My guess is that many employees aren't so empowered. It's a problem that needs real leadership to fix -- and a commitment to focus on fixing the issues on the ground, rather than just trying to enhance the brand.

The parts have started to arrive for the North Star computer we're building. So far, we've only gotten the wireless card, but I expect the rest of the parts to arrive soon. The first thing the students want to work on is the connectivity in the building, so Step 1 will be to set up our own wireless access-point/NAT Gateway. So today we did an intro to networking.

We mainly looked at the output of ifconfig. We talked about packets and their structure (with a header containing address information and a payload) and about the differences between TCP and UDP and what an MTU is . We looked at hexidecimal digits and talked about translating between hex and base-10 and binary. We looked at the IP address, broadcast, and netmask and briefly discussed what they do. We talked about NAT and DHCP and why the 192.x.x.x address space is used inside and why you sometimes see 169.x.x.x addresses. We did some thought puzzles: why would adding one to the last octet still work and adding one to the first octet not work?

One bit I didn't think to talk about was to close the circle in terms of how processors load and manipulate data in registers and why netmasks work the way they do. That's not something I actually understand all that well myself -- just enough to wave my hand at it and say XOR or something. We can take that up next week, if we're not too busy actually putting parts together.

In Phil's post about Children and Power, he describes a typical worksheet and the kind of mental trickery that these exercises often embody. The exercise he describes is a type example of tedious busy work: it's "make work" for students constructed in a particular style to make it easy to correct.

The biggest problem to good assessment is our society's assumptions that answers can be "right or wrong". This simpleminded attitude has nothing to do with learning or judgement and everything to do with making tasks that are cheap and simple to evaluate. There are no questions that have simple answers: even "What's 1+1?" can lead to a whole discussion about the nature of integers or the literary origin of using 1+1=3 to talk about emergence (the sum being more than the whole of its parts) -- and that's just scratching the surface.

The most evil outcome of this system, is giving machines the task of evaluating human productions. For meaningful learning, human productions need to be evaluated by humans that can appropriate a statement (ie, put into the context of the larger conversation) and then help the student see how their production fits -- or does not fit -- what the teacher had in mind. There was a school of thought in cybernetics called "Programmed Instruction" that tried to create systems that could do this, but it runs into the fact that domains cannot be fully specified. Programmed instruction went out with behaviorism, although you still see people every few years, ignorant of the history, who assume it should be easy to do.

I did some freelance work for a text book one time and one of the things they wanted desperately was for everything to have some kind of "assessment" associated with it. Every chapter, every section needed to have assessments. When they ran out of space in the book, and wanted to add these random grab-bags of facts online, they even wanted those to have assessments. And that was when I made the realization: when I pointed out that it was meaningless to have assessments of random collections of facts, which had no underlying conceptual dimension, they just hired someone who was desperate enough for the money to write a bunch of questions. That's the lowest common denominator here: these assessments get designed as cheaply as possible, no matter how meaningless and pointless they are.

For students to be engaged in tasks, the tasks need to have some purpose. They need to be things the students think are worth doing and part of a larger effort that's going somewhere interesting. Schoolwork that is pointless and a waste of time encourages students to be cynical about the whole enterprise and encourages cheating.

It's possible to have students to real work -- work that matters -- that requires the same kinds of skills. And there's no reason not to do this, except that it requires three things. It requires teachers have (1) the freedom to let students go in different directions, (2) the wherewithal in terms of time and imagination to not just grab the first worksheet that comes to hand and co-construct interesting tasks with students, and (3) the time to provide meaningful mentorship and evaluation to students as their projects develop. Unfortunately, as budgets are cut and teaching profession becomes increasingly deprofessionalized, none of these are likely to happen in public education anytime soon.