johnhendron.net: hendron’s digest - a weblog

Neat post, with plenty of food for thought. Among my favorite quotes:

If this is going to change, school leaders must grow comfortable with ambiguity, rethink teacher assessment to foster risk-taking, and promote learning by doing, which all but ensures that failures will occur. However, the difference between an innovative culture and a stagnant one is whether these failures are embraced as paths to success or rejected as signs of incompetence.

Where I believe I’ve tried to be innovative in how we shape teaching and learning using technology, I have heard others warn: “But I don’t think everyone can do that.” I think these are the failures mentioned above.

And do leaders need to be using technology? It certainly helps!

This year I witnessed first-hand the power of modeling from several school leaders in my building that has sparked risk-taking and creativity throughout the building. Our principal began exploring various web 2.0 technologies for more effective and efficient communication. From these explorations, he began blogging and integrated RSS into the school website. This use of participatory media demonstrated a number of vital organizational beliefs to educators: a commitment to instructional technology, an understanding of the importance of the philosophy of web 2.0, a belief in life-long learning, the value of risk-taking, and the disdain for stagnation.

…Teachers began talking to me about blogging and web 2.0 and soon discovered curricular and instructional needs that would be met with these tools. No fear. No apprehension. Because of a leader’s model, there was already a belief that the organization believed in this…

Our approach wasn’t the same, but we got similar results. I look forward to the Ed Tech 2008 conference this year at Randolph-Macon college. There I will be brining a principal who is going to talk about how he uses technology at his school. And I definitely see a rub-off on the use of teachers there, as a result.

Watch the Michael Bierut interview about fonts and typefaces.

What I thought was humorous about this was the fact that the filming/camera work was so poor. I mean, why do video on the web, if you don’t know how to focus the camera? Where’s their production values placed? For those that don’t see it, the concrete “tube” behind Mr. Bierut is in focus, he is not; on the side-angle shot, it’s better, but the texture in the window shade tells me that’s what’s in focus the most.

Despite all of that, I liked the interview.

In a former life, I taught design to high school students (specifically, graphic design and web design). I recently read a blog post by ‘Digitalkarma’ discussing how she might change/construct her curriculum to accommodate fair and ethical practices with students who are designing their own work.

When I taught the graphical arts, I never really encountered this problem. It did creep-in by the time we got to web design a few years later. What I think is a bit different today is the “digital” culture, portrayed by many authors as one caught-up in a daily practice of mashups and re-mixes.

Part of that, I believe, is our easy grasp of so many things in a digital format via the Internet, that can be mixed, combined, and re-tooled using digital tools on the computer, at relatively low cost. Motion pictures made with free (iMovie) software? Sure, why not. Kids today have all the best tools to not only re-create, but re-mash digital copies of what they can find online.

I am not sure this re-hash, re-mix culture is ever going to go away.

But if it does, or not, we still have laws and ethical standards in place that say we cannot, in fact, just find content online and “use it” as we see fit. And this, I think, is her dilemma.

I personally see some difference in copying (tracing, copying from a poster on the wall) and webpage copy/paste. I think the ability to draw what you see elsewhere is an important skill. I think tracing the lines made by others with a new and unfamiliar tool can help you learn how to manipulate that tool.

I see two ways to combat this issue.

1. Take away the Internet. I’m serious, take away their ability to go online and copy.
2. Design the assignment so that each step requires an original contribution.

The second requires very careful distillation of the assignment: you start by going backwards; from the proposed finished project, step-by-step, to the project’s genesis. This takes a lot of time and effort on the instructor’s part, but I think you’ll end up with a profoundly more affective learning experience this way.

What still upsets me is to see teachers who do not understand this issue, as Digital/TechKarma does. They tell the kids to go steal using Google Images, etc. Likely, some of what she faces is the learned behavior (mis)taught by others in her school.

Tonight, I visited Marc Prensky’s blog, which opened with a post from last fall. Reflections on a National School Board Association Report.

I like some of his ideas, especially one I’ve heard before: keep the schools open for Internet access past school hours.

This is a suggestion I’ve made repeatedly where I work, but always gets little attention. Transforming a school into a community center takes a lot of change in attitude, funding, and support from all stakeholders.

It’s still a nice idea.

via Terry Freedman:

1. Open-ended tasks vs. closed tasks,
2. Problem-solving approach vs. skills-based approach,
3. Watch what students to in the lesson,
4. Avoid the temptation to atomise,
5. Assess what students say (about the work they’ve done).

I believe for educators in a standards-driven, testing-is-everything era, #4 will be difficult to overcome.

This past December, I went to visit my parents for Christmas. For as long as I can remember, we’ve been a computing family. They bought me the first programmable game console in 1980-81 called the Odessey 2. They later bought me a Texas Instruments TI-99A home computer. And in 1984, we got our first Apple, the Apple //e. Today they use an iMac at home.

Both of my parents, as it turned out, were heavily involved with computers in their work. My father had job titles including “programmer” and “systems analyst.” My mother, before she retired, was head of the technical services department in a public library, and among her duties, was to manage the computer system responsible for the library catalog and check-out of books. Despite this history, it seems, they are still digital immigrants.

When I got home, I wrote down a number of things that happened during my visit, and I wanted to talk about two of them here. To wit, the first.

“Look, mom, I have 400 photos here on my phone.” My mother, upon seeing the iPhone, wondered why we would want to carry so many digital photos around with us, on the phone.

Like a lot of cell phones, the iPhone lets you take pictures and they are stored on the phone. Connect the iPhone to your computer, and you can put them on the computer. This part, I am sure, she gets. But these 400-some photos were not pictures I took with the phone; these pictures were ones I had taken on vacations with my Canon camera.

It was just this morning that I was watching television that I saw an ad for a photo wallet. It was not precisely the same thing seen here at Brookstone, but it was the same idea… a small electronic device with a mini screen for displaying photos you load off of your computer, to carry around. All the folks in the commercial were at least 50 years old.

They proudly showed off friends (picture a senior citizen luncheon) pictures of their grand kids on this little device (two easy payments of $19.95). I wonder how they are selling.

I told my mother, politely: “Mom, why? Why not? If I’m sitting around and want to look through pictures, why carry around some big album? I can carry an impossibly-sized album around with me. If I talk about my trip to Hong Kong, Bam!, there they are…”

She retored: “Well, I wouldn’t want to carry around photos like that… what would I show?”

Granted, my mom basically takes pictures of flowers that she can find around the house. Nothing too interesting to show anyone. But certainly her drawers of photos could be digitized and used on such a device. But her disinterest in this way of dealing with photos revealed for me, part of her personal digital culture–something I have discussed before at conferences. A colleague of mine and I often talk about this as being a significant indicator on how teachers might use technology that we provide. It’s also a concept I hope to explore more, into the future.

During my visit, one of the things I did was gift the OS X Leopard operating system to my parents. Upon checking things out after the installation, I encountered my dad. We had another instance of him revealing his own personal digital culture.

“Dad–where are your documents? I think something is wrong here.” John, I don’t have any documents. I sat there, dumbfounded. I asked again. “No, you have to have documents… but your documents folder is empty. Was there nothing in there?” Nope.

Every morning I caught my dad online, at the same webpage, Morningstar, tracking his investments. But whatever he was tracking wasn’t done digitally; he used no spreadsheet, no text file, nothing digital. Instead, he printed the webpage, and wrote notes on the actual paper, about plans to change monies between accounts, or how much or how little the investments had bettered.

Later in the day, I wanted to sit on a seat that had a pile of papers on it. “Don’t move those, your dad will get upset,” my mom warned me. I asked what they were. “His financial print-outs; he prints everything out.”

So dad did have “documents,” they were simply all paper. My head started to hurt; I considered crying; I felt shame for our family name.

Of course, there was nothing to be ashamed of. Then Christmas came, and my mom received a “daily planner.” She had been using iCal to keep track of things, now she admitted to all of us, she was glad she could write on paper again to keep track of things. “This is so much better than trying to do things on the computer–I was printing so many pages out!”

Okay, that shame feeling came back. Here I was, with whatever labels that had been applied to me over the past 10 years (Mr. iPod, Mr. Podcast, Dr. Macintosh, technology guru, etc., etc.) and my poor parents were using the computer to make fancy, type-written pages.

I now realize there is nothing to be ashamed of. My parents are, for lack of a better term, digital immigrants. Things are easier for them in a world of paper and ballpoint pens. Sure, they e-mail, video iChat with me, and my dad even gets text messages on the cell phone.

The question becomes then, especially for me as someone who works with educators at their own various stages of advancement with their personal digital cultures: “How important is it to change one’s personal culture with regard to digital media to effectively teach students for preparation in a digitally-saturated world?”

The other day, I sat down with a colleague to plan future staff development courses. While my computer was booted and ready to go, some instinct told me to use paper and a pen to write-down some of these ideas. My mind flashed-back to my parents. I had this trait too, this instinct for paper and pen.

When I returned to call-up a webpage on my laptop, it was frozen. I rebooted and it wouldn’t let me log in. Later in the day, I discovered that the hard drive needed replacement.

Suddenly, I realized that a school with a diversity of digital personal cultures was likely a great thing.

I have been reading in the mainstream press and blogs now about the OLPC project, the so-called “one laptop per child” initiative. If you don’t know what it is, go read elsewhere.

What’s confusing, tonight I found, is how to get a laptop yourself. They’ll sell you two, you get one (the other is a donation). But their website does not make it clear on how to do this…

The reason I’m commenting on the OLPC project is that I have seen one, I have heard Negroponte talk about it, and I have been asked about obtaining these for our students (or purchasing one for a teacher’s home computer).

Yes, having read something about these; teachers want to buy these $400 machines for their own kids at home.

I feel honored that they’ve come to me for advice. But I am also somewhat disappointed that our teachers and my acquaintances aren’t reading about these things themselves. Do they know how to Google? Likely so, but how often do they “Google”? Are they just too lazy to wade through the commentary and what not, and just want to ask me? Or perhaps, they’ve done some research, but found the answers to their questions too difficult to find due to some poor marketing by OLPC?

I ask them several questions.

• What do you want this to do?
• What do you want your kids to be able to do with it?
• Where will you take it if it breaks?
• Do you want to print?
• How many do you plan to buy?
• Why does your kid need a computer?

No, I don’t ask each and every question, but these are in fact my talking points when the subject comes up.

I think there is a little laziness on the part of some folks not wanting to research this for themselves. Maybe 33%. I think the OLPC could do a much better job at presenting the concept and hardware to the public, and blame them for another 33%. You know, give or take; this is not scientific. I think the last third of inquiry I receive is because the product has weaknesses that people want confirmed by asking someone they think has expertise.

Now, I’m not an expert on the OLPC project or the computer itself. Read this blog for better insight than I alone could provide, but also know, it’s biased. You’ll find right now there’s a lot of controversy over the project. Spending that $400 with a lot of unanswered questions and an uncertain future doesn’t sound like a wise investment, to me.

So, here are some questions/answers I’ve prepared. In the future, if I receive inquiries about the OLPC, I might direct folks to this very post.

1. Would you buy an OLPC yourself? No. The operating system is available for PCs and to me, that is the most interesting component of the project. I have other uses for my $400.
2. Should I buy one for my kid? I don’t know, that is your choice. But before you make up your mind, figure out what it does.
3. What it does? It’s a computer, right?” Right… but it was designed for small hands, to be wireless, and to be used in a social context.
4. So, it just finds the Internet by itself? That might be good, we only have dial-up. Then don’t buy it.
5. Will our schools buy them? I can’t speak for the schools, per se, but at its current development, I wouldn’t recommend we do.
6. If the laptops have Internet, why not? The laptops do have a browser. But a good portion of the websites used by educators rely upon proprietary code that I’m not confident will work well in the OLPC system, i.e., Javascript, Flash, Shockwave, etc., etc.
7. Do you think this is a bad idea? I think we’re finding it’s difficult. The funding that was supposed to be behind this is not coming; the idea of Americans funding the project through donations bothers me; but the basic idea of putting an inexpensive piece of sociable technology in the hands of students, I believe, is awesome.
8. What might make it better? I think communication from the OLPC project could be more concrete and better presented. Look at Apple’s website; it’s easy to read, and you can quickly find-out every detail about their hardware and software. I think time will also make or break the project. The OLPC hardware has the potential to do some very interesting things for learning. I think OLPC can learn from Apple, Microsoft, and others who are fueling the home and business PC markets, but I also think educators and even the PC makers can learn from what comes out of OLPC. There are some very smart people involved in this project.
9. Will this work with my printer at home? It doesn’t appear so. You have to consider that this is not a “PC” in the typical sense.
10. What software does it run? The operating system is a highly customized version of Linux. This page outlines some of the software available for it.

For even more of a hands-on look, Kevin Lim takes a look at an OLPC. What I found interesting in his video was his distinction of the OLPC as an “education tool” rather than a “laptop.”

I do hope OLPC beats the odds and makes for some positive progress in the field of educational technology.

Technorati Tags: education, OLPC

I like the web, I do. I like Web 2.0 things, I do. But I began to think about the behaviors associated with the Webs today, and wanted to make a distinction.

In the educational world, we talk about natives vs. immigrants. Then exclusive of these titles, we have the techie educators. The geeks who write blogs, and ponder the importance of so-called 21st century skills. We each have Thomas Friedman’s book on our shelves, and we listen to Wikinomics while driving in our cars.

But is it enough to say we use “Web 2.0″ tools? Is there a distinction between last year’s Web 2.0 behaviors and this month’s?

Here’s my “case in point.”

We’ve got a guy at work who sends us e-mails. Cool and interesting stuff he reads. He’ll send it in an e-mail like this:

Good read… then list the URL.

He’s social, but he’s using e-mail. For the lack of better terms, let’s call this: Internet 1.0.

So, then there’s the big Web 2.0 revolution, and the Read/Write Web, and for convenience, I’ll call this Internet 2.0. He’d change his behavior for version 2.0:

He’d post this link on his blog, with some commentary. He might e-mail us about his linking to this, or else we’d find it via RSS.

So, then there’s even an evolution to this. He might “friend” it to use via del.icio.us. When I log-in to del.icio.us, there it is, a bookmark from a friend.

Peter has bookmarked this for you: URL.

What’s that? Internet 2.1?

Then, there’s microblogging. Come on, taking up a full blog post is so yesterday. Today, we have a new way to share links. It’s called a microblog, say, like our Twitter feed, or a page on Tumblr.

That’s so clearly Internet 2.5.

Likely, for Internet 3.0, we’ll wear garments that blink our favorite URLs on them for people to see… and maybe in 3.5, the webpages will actually be displayed on our garments instead of the pesky URLs. We can always dream, right?

In a semi-related vein, Jeffery Zeldman pontificates upon some of these levels I see between using the Web today.

What Internet version are you running?

Technorati Tags: technology, education, read/write, hendron, twitter, turmblr, microblogging