2¢ WorthPreconference Conversation #2
I just backed out of Second Life for the second Preconference conversation, precursoring the Learning 2.008 conference in Shanghai later this month. The two invited speakers this time were myself, Suriawang, and Scottish educator, Ewan McIntosh (Learning Loon). The first bit of disappointing news was that Marco Torrez and George Siemens will not be able to join us. This is a huge disappointment, because each of them would have added so much to my experience.
The good news was that the conference sessions will be available the first of the week, so I’ll know how to prepare. Half of the sessions will be formal presentation and the other half will be unconference sessions. Again, I’m looking forward to the learning that I will certainly be doing as a result of all those conversations.
Our conversations got deeper today, with questions about education in other countries. McIntosh took exception to my comment that Scotland has an advantage over the U.S. by virtue of its size. It’s easier to affect change in a small place than a large one. But the issues are certainly far more complex than that and with many exceptions. It is one of the questions I heard several times, though, when I was in his country several years ago. “How does the U.S. do what it does, as huge as it is?”
McIntosh also took exception to the emphasis that we, many of us, are placing on collaboration — and I agree with his notion that we shouldn’t throw out the value of individual insight and creativity, to follow the trumpet call to collaboration. I think it is one of the weaknesses of todays digital conversation, that our statements tend to be chirps about this and chirps about that — and as a reader reads one blog post about the importance of the creative arts, it can sounds in opposition to science and math.
This is probably a good thing, in the long run, because it has us constantly struggling to find the middle ground, the blend between collaboration and individual, science and art, lecture and self-directed learning, and all of the other spectrums.
After the formal conversation was over, Chris Smith, one of the moderators and the architect of International School Island, took us over to a device called the Opinionator. Please correct me, Chris, if I got the title wrong. In a circle, there are five containers that a person/avatar can walk into. They are labled agree, strongly aggree, disagree, and so on. The question is asked, and the participants walk into the container that corresponds with their answer. The pie chart in the middle rebuilds itself in real time, to reflect the percentage of users who are of each answer.
I find this terribly exciting, that we are in a place where we are inventing new tools, capitalizing on new environments. Terribly exciting.
September 5, 2008
Survey of Long Island Teachers
I’m home for six days, sixteen hours, and some change, and I’m so switched off that I just can’t get to some serious things that I’d shoved over to this seemingly mythical time at home. Mostly, I’ve been playing. Yesterday I replaced the theme of my blog, because when I saw it pulled up on a PC the other day, it looked nasty. So I started simple, with the Wordpress “classic” theme, and then fleshed out the CSS file. What do you think?
Today, I’m hunting for a wiki engine to replace PMWiki. I’m still very happy with PM, but its wiki-style code editing intimidates audiences when I demonstrate how my handouts are editable. So I’m looking for a new engine with WYSIWYG editing, will aggregate RSS feeds, and has an editable skin. So far no luck. I’ve played with Dokuwiki, and Wikiwig, and am currently uploading WackoWiki. If this doesn’t work, I’ll take another look at Wikispaces and WetPaint.
One interesting thing came across my desk yesterday. While at Elwood, NY earlier this week (seems like weeks ago), Patti Novy, of eInstruction? brought in about 300 clickers for teachers to use during the convocation. The superintendent posed some questions during his part, and then I added some questions as a lead-in to my presentation. Patti sent me the data yesterday, and some of the results were quite interesting to me, now having time to reflect on them.
Do you play video games?
| 31% | Yes |
| 69% | No |
No real surprise here. A lot of the educators in my audiences are young, and I continually run into more experienced teachers who are enthusiastic gamers.
Do you text message with your phone?
| 56% | Yes |
| 44% | No |
This is one of those Twitter type questions. People who do it can’t see how they got along with out it. Those who don’t, can’t see any reason to start.
Do you have a Facebook or MySpace page?
| 20% | Yes |
| 80% | No |
I wonder if the response would have been different if I’d asked for a show of hands.
Where do you go first to find information?
| 96% | |
| 1% | Wikipedia |
| 0% | Technorati |
| 3% | Encyclopedia (book) |
Now that I see these results, I wish I’d asked something like, “How often do you go to…”
Which do you learn more from on a daily basis?
| 64% | Newspaper |
| 32% | Online news |
| 0% | RSS Aggregator |
| 0% | |
| 4% | Telephone |
Again, no surprises here, though it would be interesting to get an age breakdown — or perhaps a breakdown by discipline taught.
Of the following, which do you think is most important to success in the 21st century work place?
| 26% | Ethics |
| 29% | Oral Communication |
| 12% | Reading Comprehension |
| 27% | Collaboration |
| 6% | English Language Arts |
Probably another poor question, but this was the biggest surprise to me, in terms of what I expected to get from a group of teachers. Yet, I think that it is clear to us all that the expections of today’s and the future workplace are deeper and far more interesting than what I was prepared for. I was very happy to see ethics up there with Oral Communication and “Collaboration.”
September 4, 2008
Justifying Blogging
I just received an e-mail message from a teacher who would like to introduce blogging in his classroom — student blogging. He says…
I asked my supervisor if i could get the techno guy at my school to unblock a website so my kids can use blogs in my language arts class. I was told I need to write a letter to the superintendent to explain my justification for using blogs in the classroom.
Surprisingly, this is the first time I’ve received this kind of e-mail, and from certain perspectives it actually makes a lot of sense. Rather than just sending him my 2¢ Worth, I thought I would open it up to my readers. [[image1]]
- So why should students be blogging in the classroom?
- Are your students blogging?
- What’s the benefit?
- What’s the down-side?
- Are there other surprise impacts?
Please keep it short and sweet, as he’s only been asked for one letter.
Thanks from me!
- Penn, Christopher. "Ted Demopoulos' book Finally Arrives." Financial Aid Podcast's Photostream. 18 Jan 2007. 4 Sep 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/financialaidpodcast/361533467/>. [↩]
September 3, 2008
A National Innovation Deficit
This is what Judy Estrin calls the United States’ decline in fostering innovation. A former CTO for Cisco Systems, founder of four other technology companies, and auther of Closing the Innovation Gap, Estrin is quoted in an August 31 New York Times article,
I am generally not an alarmist, but I have become more and more concerned about the state of our country and its innovation … that the united states as a whole, no longer fosters the kinds of innovation necessary to develop groundbreaking technologies and sustain economic growth.1
The article, which also gives voice to some who disagree with Estrin, quotes another of other reports, reminding us that:
..federal financing of research in the physical sciences was 45 percent less in 2004 than in 1976 and that 93 percent of students in grades five through eight learn science from teachers who do not hold degrees or certifications in the topics.2
Engineer, venture capitalists and entrepreneur, Robert Compton says, according to the aritcle,
that the United States is losing its innovation edge to China and India. Chinese and Indian children are required to take more science courses than students in the United States, said Mr. Compton. … Of college graduates, 30 percent to 45 percent in India and China have engineering degrees, compared with 5 percent in the United States. Venture financing and patent applications are falling in Europe and the United States and rising in China and India.
He continues that 60% of engineering doctorates from U.S. universities are granted to foreign nationals, who are no longer staying in the U.S. “The American economy is not as exciting as China and India, and a lot of them are going back home,” he said.
Also worthy of note is that Compton also created, produced, and financed Two Million Minutes, which I’m sure many of you have seen (though I haven’t).
My Take:
Although science, technology, engineering, and mathematics are important/essential, I’m not sure that innovation is the same thing. I think that you can learn to be innovative in English class, history, health, and certainly creative arts.
I know I’ve said this before, but to me, and my own limited vocabulary, I think that innovation and creativity are a problem for us, in that they are both much too vague to really wrap instructional/learning activity around. I like the term inventiveness much better, because inventing something attaches the word, invent, to the thing or process that was invented. There’s a hard connection here, that is more difficult to make with innovation and creativity.
You can attack problems in virtually all disciplines inventively, and its inventiveness can be judged.
Again, STEM subjects are important, but without the ability to apply them within a social, cultural, and physical context leads to knowledge, but not necessarily innovation. And without the skills to talk about them compellingly leaves STEM fairly sterile — to me.
2? Worth
- Miller. Claire Cain. “Another Voice Warns of an Innovation Slowdown,” The New York Times 31 Aug 2008. 3 Sep 2008 <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/01/technology/01estrin.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin> [↩]
- Committee on Prospering in the Global Economy of the 21st Century, Rising Above the Gathering Storm. 2007. <http://books.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11463> [↩]
Things to Come
Every once in a while, I go back, in my head, to earlier times, and I try to think forward. Maybe we all do this. Maybe it’s the years I spent as a history teacher. But I try to put myself in my earlier head and rethink what I might have thought back then.
I saw it again, this morning when I ran across this HP commercial for their Touchsmart PC. Here’s another one. What I realize now, is that what we’re seeing today, and even what we’re imagining today — well, it’s just not the same future we use to know. The future will be happening long “LONG” before your first graders graduate in 2020.
Will they be learning on one of these..
..before the graduate.
Interestingly, I ran across this video, while scratching through the new features in PicLens, a 3D image browser. See a video demo here.
Of course…
“Anything I can do with my finger, I can still do with my mouse!” — conference booth representative
September 2, 2008
Is This Something We Should be Paying More Attention To?
Geek Index: about 8
It’s one of my favorite blogs, John Musser’s ProgrammableWeb. But his site is much more than that. It is a directory of mashups (3,331) and APIs (907), the DNA that makes them work.
API stands for Application Programming Interface, and it is a function or procedure that can be used to extract or otherwise work the content of a web site. For instance, Technorati, the blog search engine, has a number of APIs for tying into their search engine. Their Tag Query API provides a URL that reads:
http://api.technorati.com/tag?key=[apikey]&tag=[tag]&format=rss
Many APIs require a key, which is a string of characters that represent and label your web site to serving site. You can register for and receive your own Technorati API key here.
So your key would replace the [apikey]. Then you might type the blog tag you are looking for, say, “learn2cn,” the tag for the Learning 2.008 conference. In your own web page, the Technorati API address below would result in an RSS feed
http://api.technorati.com/tag?key=[myapikey]&tag=learn2cn&format=rss
Plugged into Alan Levine’s very useful Feed2JS tool, you get a java script that can be plugged into many different kinds of web environments, such as a Moodle block, producing something like this:
…a list of the latest 10 blog posts tagged for the Learning 2.008 Conference in Shanghai this month.
This is not rocket science. But it’s also not using a word processor. But, I think that we are increasingly realizing that literacy today is much more than just reading, writing, and basic math — that its the ability to work information to accomplish goals. If this is true, then thinking about things like APIs might be something that we, some of us, should be doing, and introducing to students, some of them.
What do you think?
August 31, 2008
Learning 2.008 Pre-Conference
It was great fun with a lot of conversation about RSS, tags, social networks, and new learning. I’m even more excited about the upcoming Shanghai event than before.
August 30, 2008
CreateDebate — Making Arguments
The other day, I received an e-mailed announcement for a new social network.
E-Gads~ Another one!
But as I read through it I became increasingly intrigued by CreateDebate. It works like this:
- A debate question is introduced by a registered user.
- People write compelling arguments supporting one side of the question or the other.
- People vote on the arguments, pointing up or pointing down.
- The graph to the right indicates the voting on the arguments, rather than a simple yes or no.
Those are the steps that I sent back to founder, Bryan Orme, to check my understanding, and he responded…
Here is another blurb from Bryan’s initial e-mail.
You can read the formal press release at http://www.createdebate.com/about/newsletters.
Where Students Develop Their Skills
There’s nothing like waking up at home.
..Nothing like getting a full seven hours of sleep.
..Nothing like walking out into my own neighborhood and dropping into the mail box the one NetFlix I had time to watch nearly all of while working across Connecticut and Maine this week.
I wrote the above yesterday morning when I first started composing this entry. It was an incredible week. I have to admit, though, that the most amazing part was that my stamina held up until that final 43 minute drive from Stonington, CT to the Providence Airport on Thursday afternoon. I hit the wall and could barely keep my brain working.
The last several weeks have had me mostly working K12 and college convocations and staff development institutes — several of them here in North Carolina. But the most interesting was Thursday in Stonington. We’d had several conversations prior to the event, as the district leadership was using the day to initiate a meta-processes model that had been developed in-house several years ago. I’ll not publish it here, as I’ve not gotten permission to do so. But it is probably one of the best and most comprehensive 21st century skills documents I’ve seen.
What made the event so interesting was the leadership’s insisted on including students. Two young men, both rising juniors (I believe), had interviewed over 200 area students about their learning and the future. The two youngsters then compiled their findings into a 7 minute video that was both informative and funny. The morning kicked off with the video. Then I weighed in with my standard “it isn’t the technology, it’s the future, networked learners, and a new information landscape” pitch.
This was followed by a fairly uninspiring set of questions from me to the two young men and two young women who joined them on stage. The most interesting thing to come out of that was that their answers to, “What are the most important things you’re learning in school?” and “What are the most important things you’re learning outside of school?” were essentially identical, — how to work and get along with other people.
I wanted to explore more deeply the differences between their classroom learning and their outside the classroom learning, and it occurred to me that we might use the district’s new meta-processes document as a pivot point. So after my questions, I asked each student, using their laptops and a web app I’d made (and was still debugging in the Marriott breakfast room that morning) to rate (1-10) how much they used the individual skills in a typical school day or assignment. Then they were asked to rate each skill based on their gaming and social network activities outside of the school.
Of course this was not nearly scientific, but as they were clicking up their numbers, the graph on the big screen updated every two seconds. Admittedly, I was hoping it would be more riveting that it was, but it eventually grew into a realization that students’ outside-the-classroom information experiences were often more intellectually demanding than their typical classroom experiences. This was obviously noticed by some teachers through the questions they asked the student panel at the end of the morning.
I’d have to say, though, that the most interesting question that came from one of the teachers was something like, “If I gave you an assignment to make a video, would it bother you that I don’t know how to make a video and can’t teach you how?” The students glanced at each other and then shrugged in unison, each saying, “We’d just ask each other.” One of the boys said, “I’d probably ask someone else anyway.”
The district’s superintendent, Michael McKee, has his own blog — and they’re looking for a new director of technology ;-)
An Hour In-World
I’d stepped in world and teleported over to the site of the event, on International Schools Island — and I suddently found myself completely black (except for my flowing gray hair). I was completely at a loss as to why or how to fix it. Searching through my menus, I found nothing about rebooting my avatar. No matter what cloths I put on, it didn’t help. I would have been happy donning some dreadlocks, except that I didn’t look so much like a Rastafarian than some Hindu devil.
Anyway, just as I was about to give up, I saw the tell-tell signs of another person on the island. Flying over, I found Chris Smith, who I suspect is responsible for fitting the place out. He immediately averted his eyes, until he realized that I was not naked, just completely black. So we tried several things, even taking off all of the clothes that my inventory indicated I was wearing. Fortunately there were some bushes near by. Nothing helped.
So Chris then took me back to orientation island to seek out help from one of the guides. I have to confess that my memories of Orientation Island (the starting place for all Second Life residents) are not all pleasant. Learning to walk in a straight line was a special challenge for me, and I kept falling off the cliff.
Anyway, there were several very knowledgeable helpers there, if also rather scantily clad — and they tried everything, to no avail. My rather scruffy gray jacket would appear for a moment, and then turn to black again. They finally gave up and sent me to Help Island.
I’d never been there before, and wasn’t sure that Chris hadn’t slipped me the wrong landmark when I arrived. But he suddenly materialized beside me, and suggested that I just ask out loud if anyone knew why I was completely black. I hesitated more because no one was speaking English (mostly languages I didn’t even recognize) than bashfulness. But finally I asked the question, mentioning that I was from New Zealand, which accounted for the accent. They didn’t buy that one. But immediately, someone walked up and asked, “Are you using two monitors?”
I nodded my head and said, “Yes!” into my microphone.
“Is Second Life running in the secondary monitor?”
Again, I nodded my head and said, “Yes!”
Then he explained that there was something in the programming of SL that prevents the textures of clothes and skin textures from rezing when the window is in a secondary monitor. I moved the window back over to my laptop monitor and then rebaked my textures. That did tickle a bit.
Finally, back to my same old self. Now that I’m back at home, typing into my blog, I’m thinking that this is similar to conversations that my children have all the time, where they have a problem or a goal, and go someplace virtual miles away, to find someone who can help them.
I still don’t know why folks want to dress so flamboyantly in Second Life. Glad Brenda wasn’t looking over my shoulder.
Hope to see you at the Learning 2.008 Preconference event at 9:00 east coase time on August 31 (tomorrow). Interestingly Chris’ wife called him to dinner at the same time that Brenda called me down to breakfast. You see, Chris lives in Thailand.
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