The Social Life of Information

I just finished John Seeley Brown & Paul Duguid's 2000 book The Social Life of Information over the weekend... (I know I should have read it 10 years ago...). It is interesting to read "future looking" books 10 years too late, however, as you have the advantage of 20-20 hindsight. (Try it with an Alvin Toffler book... read any of his books and it is scary how accurate his predictions were!)

Th most interesting chapter to me was their last on on education. Although the focus was on higher education and they recommended caution when approaching for profit distance education higher education (and the news of the last year suggests they were right), I did leave the chapter with the conclusion that we who work in brick-and-mortar schools whose students actually come in the classroom and sit in the chairs and whose school and technology leaders have seen fit to create reliable and robust information technology infrastructure and engaging curriculum really can have our cake and eat it to.

We can build community and enjoy the benefits of safe, reliable, and easy informal interaction between and among students and adults, and we can access ICT-based information and interaction to expand our classrooms and to manage those redundant tasks.

Tablet Computers

You have to admire Apple Computer... they can get in the news (which translates to free marketing) just by announcing they are going to make an announcement!

The recent buzz is that Apple will release its new iPad next week. Although tablets had a bad rap for several years, the iPad is changing that; we see these devices all over the place (in classrooms and in libraries and in kids' backpacks). The buzz has also been that the iPad was the only real tablet--all of the competitors were inferior and would never gain any market share. (I even read a prediction that all other tablets would be off the market by the end of 2011!)

A recent report on NPR's Marketplace suggests that the tablet market, contrary to the prediction I mentioned above, is going to heat up and consumers are going to have many choices in the coming year.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2011/02/25/tech-report-new-tablets-to-ponder/

What does this have to do with education? Well, I have mentioned BYOT (bring your own tool) which is the idea that educators should start to leverage the technology in students' packets and backpacks. It seem these devices are going to be in that milieu in increasing numbers. It also seems that we have a responsibility to model our information technology use after what is common in society--after all our job is to prepare youngsters to be full participants in the communication world of the future.

The more things change, the more they stay the same...

I've been following the lead of my students and spending too much time on YouTube recently, but there are many creative people that make interesting and insightful points on those silly videos:

This will make you smile... and think

I am not sure what the product is... but it is worth taking 2 minutes to watch...

Creative Commons

Copyright is an idea that we need to continue to be thinking about and talking about.

I find it amazing to still find teachers who react with surprise when I tell them that:

1. They do not own any materials they produce for their classroom when they are at school.
2. They do own any materials they produce for their classroom at home.
3. Their students own all of the assignments they produce. (You should be securing students' permission prior to displaying their work at open houses!)
4. They are probably violating copyright when they show a video in class.

Many educators are beginning to assign Creative Commons licenses to their work. This is a really great short video to introduce you and your students to CC licensing:

A Collection of Calculators

As I have mentioned in previous posts... I sometimes find tools that make me want to go back to teaching math and science... here is one:

http://www.calcresult.com/sitemap.html

A large collection of online (free, except for some ads) calculators.

Evidence of the Straightening S-Curve in Recent Events?

One of the trends in society that has been well-documented in recent decades that has been associated with the spread of information technology is the straightening of the s-curve. This refers to the graph that shows the the number of users of a technology on the y-axis and time on the x-axis. When electronic information technologies were first available, these graphs were elongated horizontally which illustrates the long time necessary for the technologies to reach deep penetration into the consumer market. As technologies matured, the time necessary for a technology to reach large number of users has shortened, resulting in the s-curves being straighter.

This week, I heard an interview with journalist Christiane Amanpourin which she suggested the recent political changes in Egypt which took days from beginning to end would have taken years just a few decades ago. (OK, I admit the interview was on Comedy Central's Colbert Report, but still, she made the point.) Perhaps we are beginning to see the long-predicted democratization of world politics because of access to information networks.

Facebook Causes Stress?

I listened with intent this morning to the BBC's story about the study conducted at Edinburgh Napier University that concluded that Facebook can cause stress for users, and that stress exceeds the social benefits for typical users.

In interviews with almost 200 users, the researchers found the stress comes from concern over rejecting friend requests and other actions that could offend other users. It appears also, that the more time one had spent on Facebook, the greater the stress users feel.

Technology Acceptance Model

Back in November, I posted a link to a tool that I have developed for measuring technology acceptance in populations of educators. As the school year starts to end (we are almost 5/8 of the way through this year... the 2011-12 school calendar is being developed... the job sites contain positions for the 2011-2012 school year), thoughts are turning to planning for next year. Below, you will find a second presentation that focuses on the technology acceptance model. This presentation takes a more general approach to TAM than I took in November and may be more useful for those thinking about steps to make technology a more relevant part of curriculum and instruction in your school:

A shameless plug-- Tech in Your Classroom

For the last several years, I have been writing short books in which I point out the "things" that computer-savvy teachers should be able to use or "things" with which they should be familiar. Colleagues have found these to be very useful, and they like the fact that I upload them to Lulu (one of the online self-publishing sites) so they can get a printed copy that has a spiral binding. They also like the fact that I leave space for them to write in the books, so they can keep their own notes to use these "things" independently later.

Here is the link to the companion pages on my web site:

• Technology in Your Classroom (2011)

Here is the Lulu gadget to get a print copy:

An old Jerome Bruner quote...

I was looking through a Jerome Bruner's Towards a Theory of Instruction recently and I found on page 22, a line I had highlighted some years ago...

Each generation must define afresh the the nature, direction, and aims of education to assure [that] freedom and rationality can be attained for a future generation.

Those words still ring true, but the work of refreshing education has become far more complex than Bruner could have imagined when he wrote (that book was published in the year I turned one!). Today, we have students who enter school with more experience using the dominant information technology than the teachers. Today, we have anyone and everyone able to publish with no editorial oversight. Today, we have the ability to access information in our pockets, and the ability to contact anyone in our pockets, and the ability to perform unbelievably complex math... in our pockets.

Yet, today, many teachers proceed in much the same way that previous generations did... makes me wonder how long we can expect to be relevant.

WordNet

In today's world of Flash and YouTube and the many other distractions when using computers and the Internet, it is so nice to find a resource that is plain. Simply a useful function and a plain interface. WordNet is just such a site. The Princeton community that maintains it cal it a lexical database; the rest of us will call it a dictionary/ thesaurus. Key in your word, click the SearchWordNet button and your results show up. Nice. Simple. Easy.

Digital Nation

A recent episode of the PBS series Frontline focused on life in the 21st century. It addressed some of the important issues educators deal with: multitasking, the effects of technology on our brains, and gaming cultures. If you missed it, you can watch the episode on the PBS web site; a great feature of the web content is available in segments, so you can watch only the segment that interests you.

Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier

Communities of Practice: Education and Mind in the Knoweldge Age- Part II

More thoughts on the ideas presented by Bereiter:

Many are familiar with the idea of a Community of Practice (we educators all face a similar problem in trying to help middle schoolers learn what they need to learn and we all participate in generating our collective understanding of how to do that at NELMS conferences for example). Bereiter takes the idea a step further with CoP in education as he recognizes the special circumstances of education:

1. Educators work in unique social circumstances that affect our practice (and unlike other CoP we have no control over these social circumstances).
2. As we seek to become technology-rich CoP the tools that we have available will affect what we can (or cannot) do.
3. Educational CoP have unusually deep and embedded divisions of labor and norms regulating behavior (many of which are informal).

Through Bereiter's nuanced lens of CoP, we can more clearly see the challenges of reinventing schooling for the 21st century.

Wikimedia Commons

Just a quick post for this morning...

If you are in search of images in the public domain or that have been published under Creative Commons or other licenses to encourage sharing, check out Wikimedia Commons.

Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age

I just finished an amazing book over the weekend. Carl Bereiter's Education and Mind in the Knowledge Age which was published in 2002 is a must-read for anyone interested in education today. Please do be warned that it is almost 500 pages of text... not something you are going to read in a weekend!

Throughout the book, Bereiter brings excellent metaphors to our attention to explain complex ideas in simple terms, and then once we get the idea, he bring excellent scholarship to illustrate the point and ground the message in the research.

Early on, he introduces the idea of folk theories and gives familiar examples from science (folk theories of astronomy and botany) to show how these theories can be useful for some applications (knowing when to plant and how to plant), but that when the need gets more complicated, the folk theory begins to fail. Bereiter argues that the folk psychology that holds that the human brain is a container is a folk theory that was useful for engineering schools in the previous century, but that it is no longer helpful.

It is disconcerting to read that all of the educational practices used in the recent past (that includes both those based on behaviorist and Constructivist psychologies!) are based on the assumption that the mind is a container. He points out that the only difference is how the container is filled: for the behaviorist the brain is filled from an expert outside and for the Constructuvist the brain is filled by the learner.

Bereiter points out that human knowledge is far more complex. True understanding depends on the relationship between the knower and what is known and that we understanding occurs when a learner develops the ability and the disposition to behave intelligently.

ScreenToaster

If you ever find it necessary to demonstrate how to use a piece of software or a web site, a recording of a desktop session is very helpful. (This means you are going to record everything that happens on your screen... mouse movements, clicks, and all.) There are several options available for doing this, but ScreenToaster is one of my favorites.

Sign up (requires an email account... I have had an account for several years and do not appear to have gotten on any junk mail lists because of it), and start toasting. Videos can be uploaded to YouTube, downloaded in several formats, and best of all, videos can include narrations from your microphone.

A Plug for the Annual Conference

It is hard to believe that spring will be here soon (I walked past several snow piles taller than my six foot frame as I walked to work this morning), but NELMS Annual Conference is coming up in April. I was unable to attend last year (the first one I missed in about 10 years!), and so I was excited when I was able to accept the invitation to present this year.

Pardon the shameless plug, but I am going to be presenting a half-day session on Friday (Technology in Schools: A Wicked Problem) and  two 75-minute sessions on Saturday (That Light is a Train: Emerging Technology Trends & Digital Learners: The First Generation was Just Practice).

More details (including registration information is here in the NELMS site.

Bring Your Own Tools (BYOT)

The history of educational computing can be broken into several easily recognizable phases:

1) The Age of Obtaining Computers lasted into the mid 1990's and was marked by school and technology leaders buying computers to makes sure that students could be in front of screens.

2) The Age of Connecting Computers lasted from the mid-1990's (when the World Wide Web became the-next-big-thing) until the early 2000's when we reached nearly 100% of classrooms with high speed Internet connections in US schools.

3) The Ages of Integrating Computers and The Age of Chasing One-to-One followed the Age of Connecting Computers and those were concurrent. The Age of Integration marked educators' focus on using technology in the classroom, and I have suggested that integration is a term that is no longer meaningful, so we should abandon it (check here for more details-- also look up my presentations at the NELMS Annual Conference in April 2011). The Age of Chasing One-to-One includes recent efforts (for example by our friends in Maine) to make sure each student has a computer.

As I watch One-to-One initiatives, I am seeing school purchase netbooks. I understand the decision (the devices are cheap compared to full computers), but I have seen several initiatives struggle because educators misunderstand the nature of netbooks. (In a particular instance, I saw a teacher struggle to create a 45-minute video on her netbook. She grew frustrated as the demands of processing the data to render the video overwhelmed the machine. School leaders planned to purchase netbooks with larger hard drives to avoid the problem again... they really did not understand what they were trying to do and why they could not be successful!)

There is rumblings on the web sites and in the magazines read by school techies that we are fast approaching the Age of Bring Your Own Tool in schools. Students are coming into our schools with far greater computing power than we can provide them. There is talk of using that computing power for teaching.