Building Understanding

If you haven’t seen Mike Wesch’s video on the information r/evolution, you really need to. It’s a terrific look at how tags are reshaping the way information is organized (or not organized, for that matter). I have written a detailed post on it on my Talking Tech blog which tries to demystify web 2.0 tools for teachers.

So I won’t write that post again here.

But this video really captures how the back end hierarchy of categorizing information is no longer happening or necessary. Tags and search capability have created a way for information to be available in lots of ways – so different than the old model of the book being in only one place on a shelf.

Check out the video:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/-4CV05HyAbM" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

Technorati Tags: tags mwesch information technology

It’s been a while since my last post.

What can I tell you? It’s been busy.

There always seems to be this guilt that hangs over me when I don’t post for extended periods of time. Like I am letting down subscribers…luckily I don’t have too many (thank you, those of you who are here!).

But not having posted does not mean that I haven’t been involved and getting stuck in. (I also post tech how-to’s on another blog, Talking Tech.)

I truly enjoyed a geek session with colleagues, listening to the Warlick keynote from the K12 Online Conference. We, like many, were active in the live chat which was very rewarding.

Even got a little mention on the 2 cents blog, which was pretty cool. Though, appropriately, it was for something a student said to me, rather than any epiphany I’ve offered.

Figures.

In that same chat online I shared a cool NYTimes opinion piece on Facebook from the students’ perspective. Paraphrasing:

We adults take this networking thing too seriously…it’s all supposed to be fun with our friends.

Definitely a good read.

Then working at home last week, I was twittering at the right time to catch Chris Lehmann’s invite to join his class at SLA in a UStream conversation – a terrific experience that Chris posted about. His students are articulate and offered the best description of the difference between a project assessment vs a test.

Paraphrasing:

Tests are what the teachers thinks you’ve learned based on what they covered, but a project is based on what you need to learn.

(Only more eloquent than that.)

The point was well-made. Students own the learning they do in authentic, open-ended projects. For tests they do what they need to, in order to get a good grade.

And all of this got me thinking…

I worry about getting too far removed from the classroom as an Ed Tech guy or as an administrator. Away from the classroom, we lose touch with the wisdom of our students – the insights into how they see the world and the openings for us to be their educators.

We concern ourselves with the big goals and forget the small goals. We don’t have, often enough, the conversations that allow students to connect with us and us with them. The conversations that show how much we value them and their thoughts.

I think that ALL educators in and out of the classroom need to remember and embrace that they are more than “content delivery devices” or even information facilitators. There is a human connection that must be made with students.

Years ago, I heard or read that so much of teen difficulties come from the fact that they are undervalued in society. In pre-Industrial Revolution days, they were working the farm, contributing to the family. Valued. But now, they have little to nothing to make them feel “of worth”. This was a main argument for Service Learning in schools and I am all for that.

I also think that educators have the power to make students feel valued and worthwhile EVERY DAY. In the way we treat them, the way we listen to them, and the way we ask them what they think.

Chris did this with the students on UStream for us, but I imagine he and the SLA faculty do this all the time with their students. When asked what they valued about being at SLA, these students did not speak of the technology or the technological prowess of their faculty. They spoke of the connectedness and self-worth they felt with their teachers, who genuinely cared about their learning and their well-being.

I can’t say it any better than that.

Technorati Tags: k12online07 warlick practicaltheory education ustream

Web 2.0 continues to just amaze. To think that we hardly had internet 15 years ago and now I learn, accept, use new tools constantly. How can education not embrace this? How can we not provide better learning for children (and adults) with what is at our disposal now.

Justin just showed off the amazing animoto over at Medagogy. A truly cool presentation tool.

And a social studies teachers just shared with me Hans Rosling’s videos on TEDtalk using his amazing Gapminder software (named after the saying, Mind the Gap heard hundreds of times on the London tube). Gapminder was recently acquired by Google, which is a good indicator that it’s about to take off.

[side note: for a very cool lesson in "new" visual literacy check out the home page of TEDtalk. They use visual cues of image size to demonstrate most recently updated. You can switch the views on the side and change the visual cues to represent most discussed, most emailed, etc. Now this is visual literacy. How can anyone argue that we need to talk about things like this with kids!?!]

Am I really late on all of this? Is this old news?

I feel like I should have known about Rosling’s work already, but it really blew me away seeing it. If you haven’t seen his presentation, watch that first to get a real sense of how powerful this statistical data animation software can be. He is pretty dynamic, but it’s his graphs that steal the show. Calling them graphs is almost unfair…like calling a Ferrari a car or an iPod a walkman.

He has brought together world data with design and animation to truly provide understanding of what’s happening in the world. In the video I linked to he debunks the myths many have of the Third World.

He does not tackle lack of knowledge, but rather pre-conception. And that’s pretty powerful.

Don’t our students have preconceptions?

Don’t we want to students to question them?

This data analysis truly promotes understanding. When was the last time you could honestly say that about the data analysis your students are doing?

Watch his videos, then check out the tool.

Really, if you don’t know it…you should really check it out.

Man, the tools are cool now. Makes me miss the classroom.

No dice for Second Life. Or at least IN Second Life. Washington Post ran this article saying that they have just made a decision to ban gambling in Second Life.

“Because there are a variety of conflicting gambling regulations around the world we have chosen to restrict gambling in Second Life,” Robin Harper, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Linden Research, which runs Second Life, wrote in a posting to the company’s blog July 25.

The announcement was posted under her virtual persona’s name, Robin Linden.

This was a decision made with sensitivity to cultures around the world for which gambling is taboo (a nice move). Additionally (and more likely the real motivation), they also needed to avoid the fact that it was illegal in many areas, before Congress came a-knocking.

The short article is a funny one though because they throw in some random other facts:

An Australian newspaper published an article this week stating that terrorist groups are training for attacks by practicing in the online world. In Italy, a priest writing in the religious journal La Civilta Cattolica urged missionaries to consider Second Life a new place to save souls.

Now you can’t tell me that’s not a sweet gig for the young, would-be missionary. You’ve been lazing around playing computer games all your life and now instead of heading off to isolated areas, war-torn nations, or impoverished villages to convert…ahhh…just stay in your pajamas, grab a bowl of cereal and go save some souls online.

Maybe you can get some e-mailing done while you’re at it.

Just keep an eye out for those terrorists.

In her high school track and field career, [Allison] Stokke had won a 2004 California state pole vaulting title, broken five national records and earned a scholarship to the University of California, yet only track devotees had noticed. Then, in early May, she received e-mails from friends who warned that a year-old picture of Stokke idly adjusting her hair at a track meet in New York had been plastered across the Internet. She had more than 1,000 new messages on her MySpace page. A three-minute video of Stokke standing against a wall and analyzing her performance at another meet had been posted on YouTube and viewed 150,000 times.

This is a quote from a Washington Post article on how a high school senior girl’s privacy and life has been turned upside down by the internet. A photo of her (that she didn’t even post) circulated and created “celebrity” status for her when she didn’t want it and didn’t ask for it.

We live in an age where celebrity life is scrutinized by paparazzi and Web 2.0 tools have allowed non-celebrities to actively seek their 15 minutes of fame through blogging, social networking, and YouTube.

But Allison Stokke didn’t actively seek anything. She is now living her own life, suffering the invasions of privacy, accepted by movie and rock stars, without any of the “perks” of that stardom.

Stokke has decided that control is essentially beyond her grasp. Instead, she said, she has learned a distressing lesson in the unruly momentum of the Internet. A fan on a Cal football message board posted a picture of the attractive, athletic pole vaulter. A popular sports blogger in New York found the picture and posted it on his site. Dozens of other bloggers picked up the same image and spread it. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Internet users had searched for Stokke’s picture and leered.

Creepy.

Now her father has to come home from work and scan message boards for potential stalkers!

Why am I blogging about this?

Because, to me, this emphasizes the overwhelming obligation educators have to teach responsible use of the internet.

We need to teach being safe alongside acting responsibly.

We already teach kids to drive safely.

We have health classes that teach students about eating healthy, sex, and drugs.

We teach them to be safe.

And we teach them to act responsibly for the safety of others.

Now we find our students living in a world where their own safety and the safety of others is global in the blink of an eye.

So how can we not teach them the same things as they apply to the Internet?

Image by Marshall Astor, found at Flikr Creative Commons

Know what a CAPTCHA is? I didn’t, or at least I didn’t know that’s what they were called. CAPTCHA stands for “completely automated public Turing tests to tell computers and humans apart.”

What are they?

There those little images that we have to translate into text in order to submit our orders or comment on a blog.

So what do they have to do with harnessing human power? This really interesting Washington Post article describes how the time spent doing that could be spent helping digitize thousands of books that are too difficult to scan using OCR.

Researchers estimate that about 60 million of those nonsensical jumbles are solved everyday around the world, taking an average of about 10 seconds each to decipher and type in.

Instead of wasting time typing in random letters and numbers, Carnegie Mellon researchers have come up with a way for people to type in snippets of books to put their time to good use, confirm they’re not machines and help speed up the process of getting searchable texts online.

“Humanity is wasting 150,000 hours every day on these,” said Luis von Ahn, an assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon. He helped develop the CAPTCHAs about seven years ago.

It’s a pretty phenomenal idea. Use the collective time and minimal effort of EVERYONE to do what otherwise would be a painfully tedious task for many. Is this the future of menial digital labor?

Already we have examples of how machines can work together in bit torrent and massive mathematical calculations (to name a couple). What about using humans the same way?

Concerning those 150,000 hours/per day (!) von Ahn goes on to ask, “Is there any way in which we can use this human time for something good for humanity, do 10 seconds of useful work for humanity?”

Von Ahn is working with the Internet Archive, which runs several book-scanning projects, to use CAPTCHAs for this instead. Internet Archive scans 12,000 books a month and sends von Ahn hundreds of thousands of files that are images that the computer doesn’t recognize. Those files are downloaded onto von Ahn’s server and split up into single words that can be used as CAPTCHAs at sites all over the Internet.

If enough users decipher the CAPTCHAs in the same way, the computer will recognize that as the correct answer.

How cool is this? I love that smart people are thinking about stuff like this. The plan would be to replace current CAPTCHAs with images from books that need digitizing. The name of the project…reCAPTCHA. That’s good.

Let’s share this idea with kids and teachers. Get them thinking about the power of so many people doing little things. Get them to see how collectively we can do so much. And then get them thinking about the possibilities of collective human intelligence for solving world problems.

Now that’s “harnessing human power in exactly the right way.”

A colleague of mine just passed this article on from the Associated Press (through the Post-Gazette). I recommend reading the short article, but in case you don’t, here’s the gist: Laptops in classrooms are engaging students and supported by teachers in Pennsylvania as part of their “Classrooms of the Future” program.

And why is it working in Red Land High School when the NY Times tells us it isn’t working in Liverpool, NY?

Pennsylvania’s program places special emphasis on training teachers to use the technology and know how to incorporate it into their lesson plans, Ballen said.

Note the focus on training teachers. I posted on this need just the other day in my response to the NY Times article.

“They have laptops at home, iPods, cell phones … and then we have them open up a social-studies textbook and ask them to outline a chapter,” [Superintendent] Frantz said. “They’re not learning the way they’re living.”

The same article goes on to say that conservative lawmakers are resisting growth of the program in order to further analyze results. Fair enough, but again, should they also look at what makes a common sense idea work, as well as judging a program on poor execution (like in Liverpool)?

I plan on writing more on the idea of laptops for school use, but not to take home the way they do in the 1:1 scheme. More on that in the next post. Just wanted to get this article out there.

So I am late chiming in on the NY Times laptop article. You know the one…the one that says one-to-one laptops are not showing any improvement in learning and schools are ditching their programs left and right. Justin wrote a great post on it over at Medagogy. Chris Lehmann chimed in over at Practical Theory. Warlick put in his 2 pennies. In the Ed Tech blogosphere, this article is everywhere.

Here’s the thing. Almost every complaint/dig/slam of the laptops in students’ hands came from the perspective of the teacher. Laptops “did not fit into lesson plans”… “It’s a distraction” … “The box gets in the way … “They are too hard to manage” …

Where laptops and Internet use make a difference are in innovation, creativity, autonomy and independent research…

[Oh, I get it, and we wouldn't want that? (where is that sarcastic font when I need it?)]

It could be that laptops in students’ hands are useless as the article suggests, but doesn’t that seem counter-intuitive? Doesn’t access to information and opportunities to engage, communicate, and think with students in a way that they use, interact, and enjoy in their own time sound like a good thing? And doesn’t providing students in a school setting with tools that they use regularly,outside of school, seem like a chance opportunity to engage them in discussion about responsible use, being safe, and the implications of their online behavior? I could go on.

Instead, I offer this question: is it not also likely that the teachers are not sure how to use the laptops with the kids in a proactive, educationally sound way?

Could it be that teachers are the very digital immigrants that we talk about as being so different from our digital native kids? And if that’s the case (it is) then isn’t it likely that if scores aren’t supporting improved learning then maybe it isn’t the technology failing, but rather the people entrusted with using them well who aren’t doing the job. (before you lynch me, it isn’t their fault…read on)

Often the most simple, logical answer is the right answer.

News media like to emphasize possibilities that surprise you. It’s not a secret that they like to sensationalize. Even the New York Times. Providing laptops and access to information to kids is a positive move for learning sounds right. It’s why so many people did it. It should be a good thing.

So why isn’t it?

Were we wrong? Maybe, but not likely. Ideas that are so intuitively sound are usually not wrong.

Instead, could it be that WE DID IT WRONG? Probably.

Most teachers are not social networking and blogging and thinking about the needs of 21st century learning. They are Math teachers and English teachers and Grade 2 teachers who were trained to be the kinds of teachers that we had when we were kids. Their ideas of best teaching practice come from a world before laptops in classrooms and probably before Internet access was possible (particularly for schools).

And I’ll be the first to say that good teaching is good teaching. That sharing passion and engaging students in subject matter and learning has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with a teacher.

But that’s not what we are talking about here. We are talking about the teachers for whom the technology was expected to solve less-than-good-teaching (or at least not inspirational teaching). And that wasn’t going to happen. It was unfair to teachers and to the technology to have expected it. (luckily, the technology’s feelings weren’t hurt)

What teachers need with technology is REAL professional development and REAL support. They need technology support people whose job is to make sure that they understand what good laptop classroom management looks like. It isn’t hard to keep kids off of mySpace during class. But if you’ve never had to think about it before, you might not know how to do it. These tech support facilitators need to be 100% devoted to the implementation of technology in their schools. They need to be available to team teach with teachers to model good laptop classroom management strategies and share integration ideas. It is their job to learn new technologies and figure out their implications on learning. Teachers are too busy to keep up with that stuff. (see Kim’s post on always learning)

The shame of it all is that the reaction of schools to abandon laptop programs is hurting the students. Once again, decisions are being made that are “most convenient for us, not best for them.” (Dangerously Irrelevant) Sure, in this case, the decision is couched behind scores that haven’t improved, but the causality is all wrong.

Do it right and it will work. Do it wrong and it won’t.

“A good craftsman never blames his tools.” (thanks, Keith Olbermann and ESPN Sportscenter!)

It’s worth noting that perhaps these schools and districts concede that they will never hire these support people or create a professional environment in which teachers have an opportunity to succeed. If they concede this, then they might as well abandon the laptops.

But if they really want kids to learn WHAT THEY NEED TO LEARN, then the cause of why it didn’t work must be looked at. And then they must bring the laptops back with an infrastructure in place (training, personnel, HELP) so that teachers aren’t pre-destined to fail, but rather are given a real and fair opportunity to succeed.

In the end, if teachers, schools or districts resist or deny this, then it is the students who suffer and who ultimately will not be prepared for their future. Our past is over. We must stop insisting that learning only happens when it matches the testing and models of that past.

Laptops are gateways to information. They can instigate real learning about ethics, communication, safety, responsibility, and high-order thinking. But they need a teacher to do that. A teacher supported and prepared and passionate to do that.

Our curricula of content mired in Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies is not preparing students for anything but further education focused on these same subjects.

What students learn needs to be different and how they learn needs to be different.

But that’s another post.