Latter-day Village Square

Why does the Internet have to be so hard?

I may have reached the point where my brain functionality has reached a peak with respect to what it takes to master the internet.  To tell you how I reached the conclusion, I have to go back a few days.

Recently our dedicated web server saw in increase in attacks from malicious internet sources. They could be the Russian Mafia, Romanian teenage cyber-thugs, or just a rogue internet thief looking to score some personal data.  Whatever the source, the attacks were giving our old security setup fits.  (NOTE: If you don’t believe your computer is under attack when it is connected to the internet, you are WRONG.  Look at your software firewall log and you will be SHOCKED at everyone trying to compromise your computer. Imagine how much harder they try to get into known internet web servers.)

We experienced this once before; our Linux web server was compromised, however, no personal data was stolen or damaged; the perps simply used it to send out gobs of spam.  At that time we elected to place our dedicated web server behind a hardware firewall, a device that filters and traps only allowed internet traffic through to the actual server machine itself.  This really helped, but even then we had configuration issues in getting all of the services to run correctly behind the firewall.

So dejavu all over again; we asked our data center staff to ‘harden’ our web server to increase data security.  Linux servers by default only have login password security; some have software firewalls running at installation, ours does not.  Hardening increases web server data integrity by decreasing the ways and methods of getting to that data. This protects the system from hostile network traffic, Denial of Service (DDOS) attacks, and security breeches. It includes many steps that we will not outline here; why give you enemies your game plan?  The hardening was done by our data center staff, but was not 100% error free the first run through.

I am only going to list here two problems we encountered along with their results. I do this to inform our users about times they were not able to take full advantage of our services. Of course we would have preferred a 100% error free procedure, but the long-term server hardening benefits we gained will far outweigh these short term disruptions.

1.      After a reboot, the server did not load the correct IP information. Internet traffic getting through our firewall did not reach the server as it did not have the correct configuration. This resulted in a several hour ‘outage’ very early Friday morning. After I reported this to the data center, they fixed the problem and all of our web sites were again operational.

2.      Email service for latter-dayvillage.com was down beginning at this same time.  New security measures meant that name addresses (DNS) information for LDV’s email server was not updated properly. This is really a good thing, meaning a hacker should be able to maliciously change these settings.  It took our data center staff a while to pinpoint and fix the problem (I provide mail server log information).  Late Friday afternoon our assigned system administrator realized what the problem was and fixed it.  Email service into LDV, including our email lists, was down for about eight hours on Friday.

There. Debra and I are feeling much more confident in our system security, and I have much more faith in our data center staff; they were very responsive and provided the information I needed to understand this upgrade process and its effects.

Yes, the internet is hard sometimes; harder than you would think to run an internet business. We are learning and getting better at it every day!

FYI: if you would like some technical details on Linux server hardening, see this list for an idea of the changes required.

I recently read an interesting blog post about BYU football (I am kinda nuts about football, mostly college football, primarily BYU or Wyoming football [OK I confess, I also cheer for anyone playing the U of U]). But at least I immediately recognized the article as having an application for seminary teachers. The writer, Dick Harmon, sports columnist for the Deseret News, is a longtime friend of mine, from when we both lived in the same Orem, UT ward. We both had very young families, were very interested in sports (he professionally) and so we hit if off as friends. I later wrote a weekly college football prognostication column for the Provo Daily Herald where Dick was the sports editor. I used a home-written computer program to predict college football games and spent many Saturday nights in the Herald office watching the college football statistics come across the sports wire. I also did some stringing for the Herald, covering high school basketball games in Utah County. But I digress.

As I read Dick’s blog about BYU football coach Bronco Mendenhall and his use of memory techniques (found here http://deseretnews.com/blogs/monthly/1,5553,19,00.html?bD=20080809&sc=dmn),

I could not help but think how the same principles applied to teaching seminary.

Dick had noted behavioral scientist Paul Gustavson comment on Coach Mendenhall’s technique for impressing principles on the minds of his football players. He wrote;

“Dick,

Research indicates that the three strongest facilitators of long term memory are:

1. Emotional experiences (e.g. running to the top of the Y and then Bronco talking about goals. Like the first year he said that the view from the top is different from the view from the bottom. Being in LaVell Edward stadium watching the last 12 home victories etc., many that you have written about)
2. Music The use of music is powerful. Many of our children learn their alphabet by singing the ABC song. At Bronco’s fireside the team sings the Sons of Helaman song (I know that it goes by another name) the Haka is a war chant (type of song).
3. A metaphor is the third strongest facilitator of long term memory. Christ taught in parables and all parables are metaphors. Bronco uses lots of metaphors such as being flag bearers and the flag with everyone’s signature on it.
   

I believe that this coin and its symbolism/metaphor is about being a flag bearers and who they represent. I believe that the coin was to be given at a significant emotional experience point (run up the mountain to begin camp. I don’t know if it was at the top of the “Y” or somewhere else that he told me that he was going to give this to the players. I think that they might be like dog tags that members of the services have signifying who they are and who they represent.

Hope this background helps. Bronco does the best job of any leader that I know leveraging these three facilitators of long term memory. “

So how can these three facilitators be applied in a seminary setting and will they be effective. Since it has been a couple of years since I taught seminary, here are my thoughts organized around what I should have done better then or what I might do better if the opportunity ever comes again.

1. Spiritual experiences. Make sure students and teacher have daily spiritual experiences. Follow the spirit in preparing and leading your learning discussions. Share you r testimony frequently and personalize your students learning environment by using spiritual experiences from your own life or theirs. If you are in tune, spiritual experiences will happen; those will tend to stay with your students longer than anything else. Leverage them; get your students to record their thoughts and impressions in student journals.
2. Music – use soothing prelude music to set a proper learning atmosphere. Sing hymns frequently, even if acapella, especially those that directly correlate to a scripture passage. Use music to teach and practice scripture mastery; if you get those verses into memory with music, they do not leave nearly so fast.
3. Metaphors. Use object lessons to bind learning to specific memories in your students minds. As a fifty-something, I still remember object lessons learned in my first 9^th grade seminary class. Yearly themes can be metaphors you reinforce with every lesson. Objects students take home become a visible library of learning and application.

So there you have it; football and seminary. I hope my observation makes some sense for you as you guide your young charges through their spiritual discovery of the New Testament.

A competitor of ours in the LDS resources market makes this claim on their website:

“[domain name] is now the largest collection of helps anywhere online.”

Here’s another one: “Welcome to [domain name]: the largest repository of LDS-related content on the internet.”

We beg to differ. It is a given that lds.org is the single largest collection of LDS helps on the planet. Who can really compare with the resources the church provides; e.g., years and years of magazines, music downloads, images? This is a very good application of our tithing dollars in my estimation.

Who then comes in second? I believe that position probably goes to one of the online LDS libraries; LDS Library or Gospelink, both of whom boast thousands of book titles indexed. LDS Library, my favorite, even indexes much of the lds.org material; Gospelink advertises the same.

Latter-dayVillage.com is not even in the same volume league with those sites; however, we specialize in focused content in certain areas. For those markets, we have some impressive resources (counts as of 7/1/2008):

We continue to expand our online store product line, with the latest additions from our new line of Zazzle products. Our product line includes 885 products now with more on the way. We are working with several new vinyl products vendors and will add their products shortly.

So perhaps we will just claim to be a ‘pretty good LDS resource’.

*General articles are free with a membership registration and include everything from FHE, homeschooling, and Relief Society to Young Women.

** Includes more than just LDS specific clipart. A large majority of our clipart collection comes from open source image repositories that we have formatted in more industry accepted file types.

We are now adding the last set of seminary lesson plans from MarGene Von Forell. If you are unfamiliar with MarGene and her lesson plans, visit her bio page here. MarGene’s years of teaching experience, coupled with her vast collection of quotes, stories, games, and activities, provide seminary teachers with many valuable teaching tools.

Coordinated with the current teacher’s manual, she adds additional teaching opportunities to any lesson. Where applicable, she includes resources collected by her father, a career full-time Seminary/Institute teacher (now retired). Every teacher should read her MarGene Von Forell’s New Testament Summer Preparation Outline and New Testament’s First Lesson; get the year started off right with the correct preparation, classroom organization, and student management strategies.

We intend of completing the addition of MarGene’s New Testament lessons by the end of October. Watch the New Articles list to see where we are.

As I was speaking to a seminary teacher of the phone, trying to resolve a download problem, she let it ship that the Old Testament was her first year teaching and that we had experienced discipline problems with several of her male students. I could relate to her; my first year of teaching was as a Thanksgiving replacement for a teacher (former bishop and high counselor) who threw in the towel on a rowdy bunch of seniors. Seniors who had their way all fours years and were not about to change for me or anyone else.

I did the only thing I knew how to do; Norm Setting. Read this article (Norm Setting, Making Expectations Clear)to see how it’s done. It worked for me; granted, we did have to review the agreements several times that first week, but eventually, even the other students helped me reign in several of the most disruptive ones. Norm setting really works if you stick with it.

When is the ideal time to do norm setting? In your parents meeting that kicks off the school year! Then everyone invested in your students success; they themselves, their parents, and you are there to establish what is acceptable behavior, what is not, and what appropriate consequences should follow. Then there are no surprises during the school year if you have to call in a parent or priesthood leader for help. Read this article (Conducting a Successful Parent Meeting) for how to conduct a good parent meeting, inserting a step for norm setting following the outline in that article.

For some time now, we have not been able to get our knowledgebases indexed by the major search engines. Due to our membership management system, which restricts access to our subscription areas, anyone or anything (e.g., a search engine-indexing spider) without a login password cannot view the knowledgebase content. That software company tried to provide a programmatic fix, but it has never really worked. With no access to the article pages, the major search engines do not know of all the wonderful content we have available.

As we became increasingly aware of the importance of keywords and search engine placement as part of our site marketing efforts, I finally worked out a solution. Our membership system has a protection method designed specifically for PHP files, which powers our knowledgebases. I finally figured in during one night of tossing and turning over this issue, that I had enough PHP troubleshooting (very different from actually writing code) experience to give the method a go.

I was finally able to make the change work, although there is one hiccup. The first time a registered member visits a newly configured knowledgebase (KB; e.g., Seminary, Primary, Primary Music, Sampler) they will see an obscure error message. This is due to the new handling of the information in their login cookie. If the member hits backup and tries the article link again, they should get a good response. I have not been able to find a solution for this; however, the workaround is easy enough to figure out; Go back, retry.

The result of this change is that non-registered users can traverse the category trees of the KBs mentioned above, where they can view up to 400 characters of the article contents. Previously, they could not even see the KB home page. These same article previews (almost 7000 counting all KBs) should now eventually appear in the major search engines, increasing our visibility and search page ranking accordingly.

Today, April 1 (this is NOT a joke) we switched to a new online store and shopping cart system based on Zen Cart, a popular open source product. After an exhaustive search we determined that Zen Cart’s flexibility, extensibility, and feature set made it our best choice, even better than some system was evaluated that cost thousands of dollars. One of our main criteria was the ability to support and even expand our drop- ship and download sales capability. We believe Zen Cart fills the bill.

NOTE: the new cart system requires that every shopper create an account. Rather than integrate this cart with our membership management system and create a login for all of our members, we chose to keep them separate. Why? Simple, we have many store customers that never register for our other site features. We felt it was not necessary for them to create a full site membership simply to shop in our store.

However, creating a store account does have some advantages over our old cart system:

1. Customers can log into their store account and check that status of any order.
2. Customer who purchase download products can login and re-download a product, up to five times or for 14 days, whichever comes first.
3. We will offer account holders special discounts and can transfer gift certificate values to their store account.

Some additional Zen Cart benefits.

• Better classification of products. We revamped the store category system to make it easer for shoppers to find what they need. You can find most products using more than one category.
• A list of Artists / Brands allows shoppers easy viewing all of the products that we offer for a particular vendor.
• We display specials and reduced items on the main page, in the side boxes, and with every category page displayed. We are committed to aggressive pricing and this new interface allows shoppers to more easily find our bargains.
• Email lists – we can inform you of specials and discounts based on your purchase history. We promise not to constantly fill your email inbox, and you can always unsubscribe.
• Gift Certificates - we will be offering gift certificates, which we believe will expand our sales opportunities.
• Permanent Cart - Any products added to your online cart remain there until you remove them, or check them out.
• Address Book - We can now deliver your products to another address other than yours! This is perfect to send birthday gifts direct to the birthday-person themselves.
• Order History - View your history of purchases that you have made with us.
• Products Reviews - Share your opinions on products with our other customers.

Finally, we will be expanding our product lines by adding more and more manufacturers. There are also many other Amazon like features (e.g. others bought this and similar items, purchase items together and save) we will be adding as soon as we have the cart tweaked for maximum performance.

I hope you take a look around.

http://latter-dayvillage.com/store/

Warning, this is still a work in progress, so you may see missing images and a few warts/knots here and there. Do not hesitate to write us about your impressions and with any questions you may have.

This is a bit late in the season, but we are still getting snow storms here in Wyoming.

Are you struggling with colder weather, morning darkness, and lack of student attention? It’s the wintertime blahs. Warmer weather and sunlight always help to solve these problems, but what co you do in the mean time. We present just a few teaching strategies here that can shake things up enough in your class to re-stimulate those young minds you are nurturing, and help both you and your students have meaningful teaching moments.

Remember, telling is not teaching. Teaching is ‘presiding’ over learning. You preside and are charged with orchestrating learning classroom situations. Here a few suggestions to change up your normal teaching routine; in essence shed to bright light on what can be learned and taught at such an early hour.

SEMINARY HIGH SCHOOL

Seminary High School is a method of presenting your lesson concepts using a rotating class schedule, based on ‘subjects’ that you students might be studying during their regular school coursework. E.g., teach a mini class in History, going over the historical settings and happenings in your lesson block. Then teach another mini class in English, reviewing the writing techniques employed by the author in several verses. Get into the meaning of words, any similes, metaphors, etc. Give a vocabulary quiz. Teach another mini class – PE. Go to the gym for a short session of Sm Messy Basketball or SM Broom Hockey.

Well maybe you get the idea. Yes,this takes lots of prep time, but spring it on a Monday and your students will be engaged differently for the rest of the week. Follow up with mini-high school class sessions for the remainder of the years.

Here are several example outlines to help you plan your Seminary High School:

1. Isaiah 36-47 Seminary High School
2. Seminary High School - Sections 129 and 130
3. Isaiah 48 - 52 Seminary High School

SILENT LESSON

Can you teach an entire lesson without uttering a word? Silence is golden, especially as a change up from the sometimes normal boisterous seminary classroom. Key to this type of lesson; you NEVER utter a word, but give directions to your students through overheads, flashcards, or a PowerPoint presentation. But NEVER SAY A WORD. E.g., create flashcards with pre-printed questions and answers, such as “Read Verse :12 and tell me what Joseph was instructed to do.” The silent lesson is most effective if you maintain the silence throughout the class period. Here are a couple of examples:

1. PowerPoint: Gethsemane Silent Lesson
2. Silent Lesson

Be sure and close with your written testimony, perhaps in a handout or card that they students can take with them.

I can tell you from personal experience that this technique can also work with a group of stodgy old High Priests. After I once taught a silent lesson to our HP group, several came up afterwards and thanked me for the most spiritual lesson in years. This can really work!

OUTSIDE TEACHER

Students tire of the same droning voice day after day (did I really write that? You don’t drone on do you? Remember, telling isn’t teaching, in many cases it is droning). Well change the voice at the head of the class. If you have a special topic and there is a spiritual giant or giantess in your midst, get them to each your lesson for one day. You could use your Bishop or a bishopric member, a member of the Stake Presidency, a Relief Society president, a Ward Mission leader, or even full time missionaries. The most important points are to

• Select the topic well in advance.
• Provide lesson materials, even photocopy the manual pages if necessary,
• Announce for several days prior that a special teacher is coming on (insert day).
• Make sure you are there to introduce the guest teacher and to help with class discipline (chances are there will no problems out of respect to the new teacher).
• Follow up in the days following the lesson with quizzes and quotes from the presentation.

STUDENTS TEACH THE LESSON

Assigning a student to teach a particular lesson has multiple benefits. Your students will pay different attention to a peer who is teaching, you can get a small break, and the student assigned will gain more from preparation and teaching than will ever get from just being a student. It is a proven fact that teaching a subject dramatically increases retention. If you have a student who might be struggling with a topic, assigning them to teach is a perfect opportunity to gain special knowledge.

Lots of advance preparation is required; you must provide a full set of lesson materials and lots of follow up as the student prepares to teach. You must also be there to provide classroom help and reinforcement. Any student who acts up during the presentation is a perfect candidate for the next student presentation, which is something you might announce to a more rambunctious class…

Lots of praise in front of the other students is very positive, as well as a private ‘atta boy or atta girl.’

Here’s how I solved a problem using this strategy. I had a particular female in one of my classes who was so bright, articulate, and dynamic, that she could frequently hijack an entire class period. She reveled in asking obscure questions that lead the class into off-subject discussions. She was a handful. I asked her to teach a lesson. She accepted the challenge with the look on her face of “this will be a piece of cake.” It was, until I asked her patented kind of obscure, off-topic question from the back of the room. In an instant I could tell from the look on her face that she got it. Her actions were causing chaos in the classroom and disrupting my efforts to lead her class though teaching moments. She now felt it. In the simple turn of the tables, and without a word being spoken between us, she changed completely and never again did lead us off the path. She turned out to be a wonderful contributor from that point forward and her lesson was pretty great too!

Examples:
Outline: Helping Students Teach Lessons
Students Teach Prophets
Student Taught Object Lesson

You can use this method to bring out some of your shy students as well as give your prospective missionaries a taste of teaching the gospel. It works!

MARCH MADNESS

If you have not started already, March Madness is a scripture mastery activity from Linda Harper, a master teacher in South Carolina. I will not take the time here to explain all of the rules, but here is a link to the Old Testament version: OT SM March Madness Scripture Chase. I will say that the March Madness theme plays on the NCAA (and high school to some point) basketball tournament and the way that some Cinderella teams can make it through the bracket.

Classes that I used March Madness with got so caught up in learning the scripture masteries and their subjects in general, that is was like a shot of nitrous oxide into our classroom (that’s NOS in student language). NOS supercharges are engine for a short powerful burst: March Madness can do the same for scripture mastery in your classroom.

The most important things I have learned in using March Madness:

• Make it a reward. It is so fun and chaotic that I used it as an end of day activity when the class was engaged and cooperative. If they weren’t, no MM.
• The more Madness the better; nothing causes more fun and confusion than outrageous consequences. If you class is super competitive, MM is ideal, teams are so much in flux that strong students are always paired with weaker students. Make them participate together.
• Use a nerf basketball and something to shoot into. It has to be real, the basketball portion. I had a basketball team starter that could NOT get that nerf ball into the waste basket from three feet. He could hit three pointers on the court all day long, but was completely inept with the nerf ball. That just added to the madness and thrilled non-athletic kids who could outshoot the star, in a good natured way. It is all in how you handle the class.
• Have a good reward for the winning team. I usually hosted the wining team for breakfast at my house, with mini-candy bars for everyone else. Of course that winning team and it’s members was not decided until the very last shot and question, so everyone stayed in engaged.

Well, that’s it enough for now. I hope these ideas will give you something to try with your classes and that you will have some special experiences in the coming months!

2:35an: My best window for site maintenance is after most folks are in bed; midnight to 5am.  US East coasters start logging on at 3 AM, but my nightly backup routine kicks in at 5 AM so I need to have all file activity on my computer stopped by then. That is also a signal to me that my best online hours are over.  Yes, I can still work on the site during the day, but to do that is to risk our customers’ experience. I am used to a graveyard shift; it just comes with the territory.  I can also sleep during the day while my wife and son are working, or when my son is on night shifts, he’s sleeping too. That is as long as our neighbors do not run their ATVs around our apartment building…

My work week usually start just after midnight Sunday, very early Monday morning.  But his morning I am in some kind of withdrawal; a driver hit a pole tonight and knocked out all of our cable service; no internet.  Normally I would just go back to bed, but tonight I have lots to get done and no way to do it.  Yes, I’m writing this offline, hoping the repair crews will have my internet connection restored shortly.

I rely on the internet so much it’s like I’m in some kind of withdrawal; at every turn I want to do something, but then the realization hits me; that activity requires an active connection.  How did I ever get along before the Internet? Well my livelihood did not depend on it back in those days, but my leisure activities were different.  My children were young and mostly all at home; so there was always plenty to do; you parents of young children understand.  Now, I can’t even text message my kids or grandkids (a few are old enough to have their own cell phones) at this hour.  So I’ll just jabber on my blogs, work on our shopping cart conversion (building a monster spreadsheet to import all of our product listings into a new system), and whatever other activities that do not require a connection. Sigh.

Update: At 5am, my internet connection returned.  Yawn.  Now it is time for bed.

I had the server maintenance all worked out for very early this morning. Our data center staff was going to install a secondary hard drive in our server to give us more backup room. We are selling so many digital downloads that the hard drive space required for the site on the web server has grown exponentially. We now have over 10GB of files in Latter-dayvillage.com alone. All of the sites running on our server, e.g. our personal sites and some others we host, are backed up nightly to a separate location on the hard drive. From there, they are backed up to a secure disk storage array in the data center. But those 10GB of files are so much larger than we ever anticipated, that we decided to install a secondary hard drive just for backup.

After the data center staff installed the new hard drive, they started up the server again, around 3 am Mountain Time this morning, but did not check to see if the web services were running, only if the box could be pinged and accessed via secure shell. Later this afternoon, I pointed out to the tech I was chatting with that the box was a web server, how could they do maintenance and not ensure that it fulfilled its main purpose? I have not received an answer for that one yet. This is the first time our data center staff has really let us down; however, the problem would not have been as bad had I checked everything earlier.

Why didn’t I check the server earlier this morning? Well I had my own problems where at home. I live in lovely wind-swept Wyoming. We had another cold snap last night, the wind chill was down to -13 and our building pipes froze again for the second time this winter. I heard water running hard at from somewhere outside out apartment at 7:45am. We had very low water pressure and water was coming into our kitchen (we live on the ground floor right next to the utilities closet. It also came into the room where I have all of my computer gear, soaking the carpets and making a general mess of things. At 4:30pm now we still have no water.

So I must admit I was not even thinking about the server. Finally someone sent me a text message asking if the site was down, when I discovered the problem.

I certainly apologize for any inconvenience the outage caused. It is not something we planned or could even imagine. Now where is the bottled water we stored…