Retrospection

This is my major feeling about tech in ed. I think it's great. It has huge potential to give student writing and reading a more relavent connection to reality, to a real audience, and to the culture that they already perscribe to. The problem is, sometimes I feel like it can become a severely time consuming, expensive, misleading tangent. (To tech in ed's credit, just about anything can become a time consuming, expensive, misleading tangent.) Here's what technology won't do for education: It won't do the work for us. It's not a magic fix. It won't make kids smarter in and of itself. It won't make learning easier or faster.

In one last tribute to David Warlick, a compliment he received from a conference attendee really struck a chord with me:

he kept saying how right my address was, that it wasn’t about the stuff, it wasn’t about the technology, that it was about the information, that the kids figure out the technology for themselves. They need us to teach them how to work the information.

I don't entirely understand what this individual was talking about, because I did not hear the talk myself, but I certainly think he's on to something.

I think good use of technology need to enhance teacher goals that should exist without technology. Technology should be a tool to do what we already would have done without it. In the English classroom, technology can serve as a great tool for student creativity and composition. They have easy access to endless information, images, music and video. They have a real potential audience for work that they publish. It opens up a whole new world of possibilities for student voices to be heard and for students to feel that their opinion and their critical thought matters.

As a high school teacher, I'm excited to use some of the technology tools that I have learned about while writing this blog. The problem that I know I will face however, is consideration for the first world's time contraints and social demands. This blog assignment, for instance was very benefical. I learned a lot from it. I feel that I have developed in many ways as a writer through it. I do think that asking high school students to find media articles relavent to a pre-chosen topic would be very cumbersome, time consuming, frusterating, and posibly madenning to even their parents. Perhaps the best way to look at something like this is "all things in moderation." It will also help imensly if the students are given a large amount of freedom to write about whatever it is they would like to write about. In this way they can pick something that is more relevant to current media (the war in Iraq) as opposed to something academic which the media is not entirely interested in (how should we teach lit to adolecents?)

Personal Validation
November 17, 2006 at 10:58 am
by David Warlick
Complete Article

Second Life

I've been reading about Second life in a variety of places. I find myself meeting the idea with a variety of facination, hope, suspision and aprehension. Yes... indeed all of those things at once. I think this has to do with the fact that none of us really know what kind of effect Second Life will have on us all, but we're pretty sure it is only going to become more prominent. All the more reason to stake a spot for education in a fast growing medium I supose.

A recent CNN article by Grace Wong explored the excitement of educators stirred up by Second Life classrooms. Wong describes the birth and rapid fire of online classrooms:

A growing number of educators are getting caught up in the wave. More than 60 schools and educational organizations have set up shop in the virtual world and are exploring ways it can be used to promote learning. The three-dimensional virtual world makes it possible for students taking a distance course to develop a real sense of community, said Rebecca Nesson, who leads a class jointly offered by Harvard Law School and Harvard Extension School in the world of "Second Life." "Students interact with each other and there's a regular sense of classroom interaction. It feels like a college campus," she said. She holds class discussions in "Second Life" as well as office hours for extension students. Some class-related events are also open to the public -- or basically anyone with a broadband connection.

Andy Carvin gives an even more vivid description of what this first Second Life Harvard classroom is like:

Second Life is home to pretty much everything you can imagine in real life, both good or bad, and thanks to CyberOne, it’s now home to the first accredited course from a major university. Each time students gather at Harvard for the class, virtual participants gather on Berkman Island, a virtual representation of Harvard’s law campus. It’s complete with buildings, trees and paths that exist on the real campus, but it’s populated with fanciful avatars of all shapes and sizes, from purple humanoids to Mr. PotatoHead. But each of these avatars is a real human being, somewhere in cyberspace, attending the course online, accessing live streaming video of the lecture and chatting with other students.

While a somewhat realistic representation of the real world in vertual space strikes many as exciting, Wong points out that, some are skeptical about how much of an impact "Second Life" will have on the educational landscape. "'Second Life' on its own doesn't force anyone to do anything," said Marc Prensky, a leading expert on education and learning. "It's a blank slate, and whether it develops into a useful tool depends on what sort of structures are created within it."

Wong also briefly mentioned some conserns with possible distractions in the Second Life classroom environment, but gave a promising testimony from Schmidt, who learned about "Second Life" from her teenage son, integrated the virtual world into a course she teaches on digital communication to give students a new avenue for collaboration.

While Andy Carvin, my professor and many others are extreamly excited about the possibilities Second Life has to offer education, other tech in ed bloggers are reluctant. Even David Warlick admitted in responce to the CNN article, I’m going to say something really grumpy and old, but “What’s wrong with the first life?” I know that there are many instances where distance learning solves some vexing and opportunity-constraining problems. But are the problems ubiquitous. Let’s get these empowering technologies and opportunities into our classrooms!

I certainly agree with Warlick in the sense that school would lose something if the only classes were in Second Life, but I do think that sharing content in an on line class room can create colaboration that would not be physically possible otherwise.

A commentor on Warlick's blog, David Truss asked some similar questions in a related blog: How will we use the community building aspects of the internet to foster learning in schools?How do we make schools into 'modern day' learning communities? How do we get students to engage rather than escape?

I think Trus brings an important focus back to the discussion of not only Second Life in education, but technology for education in general. Technology should always be promoted in schools as a way to enhance the first life and engage students in it. The possibility of technology promoting escape has already been realized. It occures every time I hear about someone procrstinating homework to play a video game, I see it when kids are messaging their friends instead of talking to their family members, I'm feeling it right now as I spend way too many hours in my opinion on line instead of interacting in face to face conversation with another intelectual. I think this is something we have to consider as we get excited about a Second Life or second school or second identity. Perhaps I too, like David Warlick, am old and grumpy.

Educators explore 'Second Life' online
November 14, 2006 5:45 p.m. EST
By Grace Wong Special to CNN
Complete Article

CyberOne: A Glimpse of the Future Classroom?
October 3, 2006 8:02PM
by Andy Carvin
Complete Article

My Avatar's Smarter than Me!
November 14, 2006 at 7:30 pm
by David Warlick
Complete Article

A Story About A Tree
November 09, 2006
by David Truss
Complete Article

Semantic Web

Has anyone else started to notice words underlined in blue popping up all over the place? Call it tagging, call it tangent provoking, call it Semantic Webbing, whatever you call it, it brings exciting prospects. As Andy Carvin writes,

The decentralized nature of the Web makes it very difficult for any of us, including researchers, to understand how it all fits together. There’s no single repository of all Web content, nor is there one search engine that makes it possible for us to find everything we might wish to find. Even the biggest search engines like Google only manage to capture a fraction of everything that’s actually out there.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the physicist who developed the web 17 years ago as a way of sharing knowledge with his colleagues... has spent the last several years trying to improve our ability to search the Internet and find the information we need through an ongoing initiative called the Semantic Web. Essentially, the Semantic Web seeks to add more meaning to the knowledge we put online, so that knowledge can be better understood by machines: search engines, online social networks, software, etc. If machines can understand it better, than we can put it all to better use.

Basically, as it stands the internet is organized in a sort of dictionary or encyclopedia fashion at best. The thought of organizing and linking web content by meaning is actually much more exciting than some may think. Current models in Cognitive Psychology show that the human lexicon and memory in general are organized semantically. For example, when you hear the word "spider," the words "web, charlot, black, widow, spin" and many others are automatically activated in memory. The problem is, unlike your human brain and understanding, a computer doesn't actually know what a spider is or that a spider has anything to do with a web, the name Charlot, or spinning. That's why semantic tagging, webbing, organizing, and searching will be so useful. Instead of searching for key words, titles, quotations, we will be able to search with actual meaning.

Making an argument that this will be of service to education almost seems like a mute point. Point taken, it will make the internet's information more searchable, more accessable and more useful. More searchable, accessable, useful information will certainly be of great service to students and teachers of all educational levels. It won't be the ultimate fix or euphoria, (the junk content that we always have to sort through will still be in the mix) but it certainly will make search critera more "meaningful"... sorry about the pun.

The Semantic Web and the Online Educational Experience
November 3, 2006
by Andy Carvin, 11:12AM
Complete Article

Public Student Work and Copyright Issues? Oh yeah...

Yet another useful tip from Andy Carvin will follow my last post quite nicely. Copyright questions become ever more important as the technologically blessed classroom that David Warlick has suggested becomes more and more of a reality. As students publish more and more work to the web, they may want to copyright their own work, and they may also want to use work that is copyrighted by others. Carvin explains the dilema and a possible solution:

Young people need to learn that incorporating other people’s original work is fine for personal use, but the moment they put content online, it’s a whole new ballgame. And since I’m not aware of any school having a line item in their budget for students to license commercial music and video clips, they need to find other sources of content that won’t cost them any money. That’s where Creative Commons enters the picture.

Carvin explains that before creative commons licences, content producers only had two options for sharing their work. One option was to declare their work “public domain,” allowing anyone in the world to use it - and profit off of it. The other option was to declare it “All Rights Reserved” - which is a simple way of saying, “If anyone wants to use this content for any reason whatsoever, you need to negotiate with me first.” Neither of these options was ideal for millions of people who simply wanted to have their original content used by others without getting exploited in the process.

This whole issue is something I didn't really think about when I was "Posibility Thinking" about tech in the classroom. I think that copyright issues are certainly important to be aware of however. I certainly don't want to be responcible for encouraging or requireing students to break the law. I know that these things are usually done unintentionally, but as educators we should be proactive about them. I spent some time searching with the Creative Common's search engines. There are a lot of pictures and even songs I found that could be very useful in student projects. I think the potential for using this type of search for educational purposes will improve as content continues to be available and people continue to tag their creative works. Ultimately the biggest downfall is time, like anything else. Mainstream art and music which is under "all rights reserved" copyright may still have more appeal. It takes more time to search for songs you're not familiar with for instance, that you would want to use in a podcast for a school project. Still, I think creative commons the best solution to the copyright problem that many of us simply ignore.

Encouraging Student Creativity with Creative Commons
August 1, 2006
by Andy Carvin, 10:41AM
Complete Article

Possibility Thinking

In response to the common question, "what does this actually look like in schools?" David Warlick has constructed his many ideas and visions for Web 2.0 technology in public schools into the format of an entertaining story entitled, "A Day in the Life of Web 2.0." In his blog, 2 Cents Worth, he describes his article as "a miandering tour of a handful of applications of read/write tools in the culture of a school."

I found Warlick's story and vision very impressive. The way he displayed teachers, students, administrators and parents all using the technology made education much more public than it often is. Teachers and administrators were not only reading each other's blogs to gather ideas from each other and to incorporate units across different subjects, students and parents were also enjoying a more public nature of education. A great example about how regular podcasts could serve to make what happens in the classroom more public follows:

Mr. P begins adjusting the volume on the microphone that hangs from his classroom ceiling. Today's discussion about The Grapes of Wrath will be recorded and posted in an audio file as a class podcast, as are all significant class presentations and discussions. Students, parents, community members, and other educators subscribe to his podcast programs. In fact, on the other side of town, Mrs. B, the parent of one of Mr. P's students, is listening to a podcast classroom conversation about a science fiction short story the students recently read. She and other parents subscribe to the podcasts so they can more easily engage their children in conversations about school.

It's very exciting to think how this kind of exchange could solve the problem of parents feeling out of the loop or uninvolved in the children's' education. I think it also brings a greater sense of value to the work that students do for class and the discussions that they have. Recording student work and broadcasting it automatically gives the connotation that this dialogue is worthy of other people listening to it. It intrinsically encourages a higher caliber of student thoughts and input.

What I'm moving into now, is not only a sense that education is more public, but also that the purpose and audience of student work is more authentic and realized. "All assignments in Ms. L's class are turned in via blogs because she finds that their conversational nature encourages students to think and write in more depth than traditional formal essays or short answer assignments. Another advantage of receiving assignments in blog format is that both she and her students can subscribe, which means all of the kids' blogs appear in her aggregator, and students can reap the benefits of seeing each other's work." Clearly the awareness of other students reading a student's work will give that student a better audience awareness. The "conversational nature" of the writing is just what students may need to feel that their writing, their reading, their critical ideas have purpose and have a real audience.

I think this story of what technology in the classroom could look like is brilliant. It did not strike me as a bells and whistle dance wherein educators were getting excited about technology as a magic fix. I really felt that Warlick relied on good pedagogy and used the technology available to support good teaching and communication efforts. This is the kind of implementation of technology that could really be useful to improving the kind of critical thinking and literacy development that English educators should already be striving towards.

A Day in the Life of Web 2.0
October 15, 2006
by David Warlick
Complete Article

A Day in the Life of Web 2.0
October 16, 2006 at 2:05 pm
by David Warlick
Complete Article

Google for Teachers proves a disappointment so far...

Andy Carvin's October 13th article, "What's Up With Google For Teachers?" in PBS teacher sources' learning.com caught my attention today. Apparently Carvin is not the only one who thinks that Google for Educators is a disappointment. He discusses several people in his article who feel that the new Google site is superficial in its educational context and does not provide adequate opportunities for collaboration or discussion. While an Educational site at Google may have some exciting potential, at this point it is more of a re-packaging of tools that have already been offered. In the site's current state, Carvin writes,

"Google for Educators seems more like a promotional stunt, lacking in any new resources tailored for educators. Given Google’s superpower strength in the Web 2.0 universe, one might expect them to focus their resources a bit more on developing tools and services that teachers and students could really use. I’m holding out hope that these projects will evolve into something bigger, more meaningful and more engaging. Until then, I wonder if educators will see this as more as a half-hearted dog-and-pony show rather than a leap forward for interactive learning.-andy"

Some of the responce comments painted the problem in a little less sinister light. Jeremiah McNicoles, for instance, explained "I honestly think Google starts most of their Google Labs projects off in this way." In a second post, Steve Hargadon praised Google's user friendly yet cutting edge qualities and exclaimed that "they don’t have to start out providing the best of all services, because they have the resources to stick around and keep working at it until they do."

Point taken on both sides. Google for Educators probably can't even hold a match to other teacher resorce sites out there currently, but they're just starting out. All things considered, I'm glad Google is explicitly considering teachers, even if their efforts translate into a repackaging of current material for the time being. I do agree with Steve Hargadon's comment that Google's "products are generally simple to use. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist to use them, but you feel that you are on the cutting edge. Teachers have so much that they have to juggle already that it must feel great to find technology that helps in practical ways and is simple to use." Hargadon is right. I don't have a ton of time to be on the cutting edge of technology, but Google does a great job of giving educators tools that empower us for free. I'm sure "Google for Educators" will progress in many capacities even if it will take sometime.

What’s Up With Google For Teachers?

October 13, 2006 2:12PM

by Andy Carvin

Complete Article

Henry Louis Gates; a long over-due post

Certainly not current news, but still bouncing around in my mind, is the Academic Lecture on September 14th at GVSU which Henry Louis Gates gave. I have to admit, the lecture was not what I expected. In preparation for hearing him speak, my classmates and I read the 2nd and 3rd chapters ("Barriers to Equity" by Kathleen Fulton and Robert Sibley, and "Factors of the Divide by Karin M. Wiburg") of Toward Digital Equity ed. Gwen Solomon and others.

Expecting to hear a talk all about the digital divide, perhaps right to the point of it, I waited with the rest of the people gathered for Gates. When he arrived, he started right off with the story of why he was so late. The story included surgery the previous day, several plane delays, and a show and tell session wherein he displayed his cast and knee brace to the audience and then exclaimed that it was a "Chick Magnet." At this point I realized that the night was going to be a bit more humorous than I had expected. Gates effectively sprinkled his impressive speech with humor for the rest of the evening.

He spent most of his time telling the story of how he had worked to make W.E.B. DuBois' dream of the Encyclopedia Africana Project come true. I found the way that he always responded with the determination of "I can do it" even when faced with tasks he knew nothing about or which required more money than most people would dare to try to raise. I also was struck in awe by the way that Gates talked about pursuing education. He displayed DuBois' and his own life as a sort of pursuit of collegiate degrees from all over the world. The way he talked about the rewarding experience of earning an educational degree, (W.E.B DuBois being a "hero even though he was broke," and achieving educational honors in spite of a past full of discrimination toward African Americans in higher education systems) made these achievements seem more powerful, more envious, and worth more human effort than any amount of money which people normally chase after. This is much different than the usual obligatory sense of resistance many students feel toward education. Gates left me inspired to look at education in a more valuable way.

Henry Louis Gates also talked about his disappointment with young black people equating valuing education with being "white." He discussed how it is truly sad that young black individuals believe that their only chance at making it in life is to play for the NBA. He proclaimed that this is simply a lie and gave the anecdote that there are more African American neural surgeons than there are African American players for the NBA. "If we would study as hard as we practice basketball, there'd be no holdin' us back!" said Gates.

According to Gates, Dubois believed that if people were only educated, they wouldn't be racist any more. This provided his drive to publish the Encyclopedia Africana to educate the world about Black people in order to eliminate racism. Later in life he realized that it was not such an easy fix, but Gates still holds to a tempered version of this dream in some ways. Now the Encyclopedia Africana is published in digital form. Gates talked about the content of it possibly luring young Black people onto the Internet and into an opportunity for education. He also talked about Google's mission to make writing from all over the world available on line as a way to educate people about the intellect of the African people.

In "Barriers to Equity," Fulton and Sibley discuss barriers to connectivity, hardware, software, and relevant content as major problems in the digital divide (Fulton 15-16). On a possibly hopeful note, in "Factors of the Divide," Wiburg explains that "Some Indigenous groups are using technology to their cultural advantage through projects such as language preservation" (Wilburg 33). Gates addressed similar issues as he talked about making scholarship easier in third world countries in Africa. He explained how there are great scholars in colleges in Africa who simply do not have access to the current flow of publications and information that the rest of the world takes for granted. It is simply too expensive for these colleges to buy and house all of the books, magazine and journal publications that we do here. He sees digitization as an answer to this problem. While recognizing that it will take some time to "democratize access to these schools" and to make sure that appropriate resources and connectivity are in place, Google is now working on making the content available. Gates talked about how he is currently negotiating with Google to digitize 5,000 books written in Arabic by Black men which now can only be accessed by traveling to a library in Timbuktu. He explained that racist intellectual minds believe that the African people do not write, that they are not intelligent and that they are lesser humans because of this. Here is proof that the African intellectual exists and thrives.

I found this very exciting. When thinking about helping third world countries, I never even imagined this kind of project but it seems so hopeful and beneficial. I realize that it will certainly take some work to make technology readily available to 3rd World educational institutions, but I am now seeing that this is actually a more feasible and possibly more affordable solution than housing books in a library. I enjoyed Gates' lecture at GVSU and I still view it as an opportunity to possibility think. It's important to be a believer in the hope that the world will be a better place and that we have the know-how to make it so. It also is so beneficial to see how vital and valuable education and literacy is to people who have been the brunt of afflictions. It makes me realize how much I should be thankful for, and that I should more ambitiously use the technology and educational opportunities which are already available to me and my future students.

Democratizing access to schools Google is making the content available. In Negotiations with google about Africa Series to Timbuktu. "Africans can't write" Black men who wrote books in Arabic 5,000 books written in Arabic