This is Hendron’s Digest, a weblog devoted to the intersection of education & technology.
I’ve seen Scott McLeod online rallying support for CASTLE, an organization dedicated to technology leadership for school administrators.
There’s not terribly much there right now, but it appears to be a great gateway for an emerging tech-savvy administrator. Follow a few blog links, a few more, and you will have built yourself a nice collection of RSS feeds to stay on track with what others across the country (and world) are up to.
The other day, I was trying to explain to someone what a microblog was.
This example via Tumblr is a great example. A blog about puddles!
This week I’ve had some good interaction with two of our directors at work for planning a staff development session for the entire county.
It’s focus will be on 21st century literacies, and be a continuation of my presentation to the school division this past August on “Digital Kids.”
Not only will we be talking about some of the issues, we will also be doing some of the things that will help our students attain literacy and fluency with digital technologies.
The first part of this endeavor will be to ask each teacher to read an article and reflect upon it in their blogs; they will later have a discussion about it in an online space.
If you’d like, you can subscribe to my list of potential articles via RSS.
Reader Todd Neumann writes:
Can you explain to me the big deal about push vs pull email. I have read about the differences. But I really don’t see what the big deal about having your computer or phone “pull” or check your account every 5 minutes.
Todd - on my iPhone, I have three accounts setup. I have my work account, should I want to check on my work email on the go, my Gmail, personal account, and my Yahoo! account. The first two are IMAP-based, and I manually check them each time I launch the Mail application on iPhone.
The third account from Yahoo! is “push” enabled, meaning, the phone will buzz or vibrate the instant the message is sent. This way, even if I’m not in an e-mail checking mood, someone can still get a message to me, just the same as if they had sent a text message.
Some prefer the push method because they will be notified as soon as things arrive. I honestly don’t use the Yahoo! account much, so I can’t speak for its necessity. I prefer to get messages on my own schedule, so the IMAP-based account is preferable for my needs. I think the push-model is preferred for folks who don’t use, or don’t pay for SMS-based messaging services.
You mention just having the phone check, via the pull method, often. I’ve found this is not very good when your coverage is poor: you’ll get errors, etc., that it can’t reach the server. It also taxes the server, just the same aggressively-set RSS newsreaders do.
Today I once again got to see Mr. David Warlick at the Maggie Walker Governor’s School in Richmond as part of their staff development day.
Some notes for the presentation can be found on his wiki.
Most valuable for me were some new books that I had yet to read; I think they will be on my short list once I finish my current Prensky book.
Among the author(s) new to me was Richard Florida. I’m currently working on The Long Tail by Anderson, and I seemed to have found Wikinomics before anyone else (I liked the cover when it first came out). I have read some Daniel Pink, but his “Whole new mind” is a new one to me, I shall like to try that one too.
The most valuable thing about his presentation, I thought, was some of the dialog from Maggie Walker teachers. They challenged him on some points, and I would have liked to (at that point) diverted from the plan, and engaged them further (if I were Warlick).
My thanks go out to Patti Chappell for inviting us out two years now to share and hear Warlick during his visits.
Today was day 1 of the Randolph-Macon EdTech conference in Ashland. Tomorrow I have the opportunity to present on Moodle and digital learners. I’m looking forward to it.
Today, I had more of an opportunity to visit sessions as an “attendee,” and enjoyed a lot of what I heard and saw.
The keynote speaker Dr. Sara Armstong, VITAL guru Karen Richardson, and Dr. Larry Anderson all mentioned the George Lucas Foundation and their theme, basically, was project-based learning. That if you want to reach kids in the 21st century will skills that will be important, a project-based approach is the way to go.
I also was able to step-out and see some of our own Goochland folks present. Ms. Kuhns got up, and in her loud voice, professed to the attendees in the day’s last session that in her 19 years of teaching, she’d never had all the kids turn in a book report and finish their books on time. But with this lesson inspired by Mrs. Cantor, they had. The kids made mock MySpace pages for book characters. She was excited about it.
That passion folks have is really what’s important about experiencing at a conference. Sometimes we lose our passion. Sometimes we find it in unbeknownst places. In the session with Larry Anderson, he asked if I knew what Twitter was in front of everyone. Maybe I sounded too passionate.
I’ve had an odd relationship with Twitter. It was not that long ago that I actually began to use it. I even have written about it and how it could be used. Yes, this week, the blogging meme was “Twitter is unreliable and lets me down a lot.” And while I have never used it (or Pownce) enough to notice, there’s something I don’t like about it, too. I like the concept, but am not an active cheerleader. Ultimately, I find tweeting very distracting from other work I’m engaged in on the computer.
Sure, educators need to hear about tools like Twitter. I even think that using these tools isn’t a shabby idea. (Link lost, but I read a blog post by a college professor just recently that praised the use of Twitter in his classes to continue and promote discussion after the official class left). And so here is the rub:
To borrow Richardson’s term “pragmatist,” I think using a pre-rolled educational tool like Moodle is easier in today’s school climate. But I love the free, Web 2.0 stuff, too. The perfect medium might be a compromise, where plugins for learning management systems were of equal or similar quality/capability as the onslaught of Web 2.0 tools.
The one message that was clear today was that when you take some risks as an educator, you have the opportunity to really address the 21st century skill set, and that includes making things real, open, and available: student voices through blogs, etc.
I’m hoping other attendees got as much as I did from the experience. When I leave a conference, deeply set in philosophical thought, I know a worthy time was had.
This year on February 7, 2008 I will be delivering a presentation at EdTech 2008 in Ashland, Virginia at Randolph-Macon College.
Listen to a podcast interview I did earlier this year with a third-grade teacher using Moodle in Goochland County.
This version at Voice Thread includes my narration. You can also leave comments on each slide! Please do participate!
You may also wish to take a look at this whitepaper outlining a Goochland initiative to use both Moodle and iPods with teachers and students at the middle school level.
Being the catalyst to the thoughts of students is the most important role of a teacher, because, again, it is what changes the world.
An interesting read about the roles of a teacher, and what struggle I know many face in a time when many are calling for a transition in pedagogical models/techniques.
We got Forbes magazine at home this past week, and in it, their best 100 Companies to Work For. As I read through the columns on the chart, to see why these places were so great, I lamented the state of public education in America.
Things that made a difference for employees included gourmet meals, special employee incentives (such as extra vacations, or bonuses), and conveniences at work (gyms, laundry, car detailing). While a lot of these perks are financial, and can no doubt be ultimately attributed to the company’s success through capitalist practices, I’m saddened that a) teachers mean so little, b) get paid so little, and c) can’t compete in their system (our public schools) like folks in business.
As I gear up to attend several conferences this month and next, I’ll no doubt hear solutions to all sorts of educational problems presented by fellow educators. But I also know that what teachers do in the classroom in a given day is only a piece of the puzzle. And no one piece can solve the puzzle, or our educational concerns.
I have no doubt that our educational system is in need of serious reform. But so many of the things that could provide a catalyst for change are behind the red tapes of finances, politics, and parental involvement.
I know from experience that many of our teachers are overworked, are disrespected by students and their communities, and are asked to contribute more of their lives to their jobs than any teaching contract is ever honest enough to admit. While I have been following the online discussions about School 2.0, Classroom 2.0 and watching the blog Students 2.0, today I pessimistically feel that little of the wonderful ideas for change and improvement can take hold when there is so much else holding us back.
I recently restored my interest in “mapping-out” ideas for the benefit of myself and others, to see both the more intimate and “big picture” of things through a type of “mind map.”
Second Life inspired this renewal of interest. On Tuesday evening, a group hosted a Virtual Information Technologies: a 3D Mind Map presentation. What we saw were two interfaces, the more incredible, giant, maybe 100-storey tall mindmaps you could fly around and read!
Today, I installed Edubuntu on my MacBook Pro laptop.
Displayed above, you can see me using a Web 2.0 tool, VoiceThread just fine under Firefox in the Ubuntu-linux operating system. What makes Edubuntu unique is the educational software that comes with it, and the support for thin-clients running off a server.
This past October, the tech sites were ablaze with high hopes for the latest version of Ubuntu, named “Gutsy Gibbon.” Having used Linux before, it is even more polished and stable than I’ve noted in past forays. I doubt I could use this day-in and day-out as effectively as I use the Mac (in part due to my familiarity with Mac over Ubuntu linux), but the amount (and quality) of what’s there says a lot for what schools could do with inexpensive machines and this free software.
Incidentally, I had some issues getting Ubuntu installed on my Mac with Parallels 3. I took the advice I found elsewhere, and:
The only thing I had to do on my own was install Flash. Latest versions of OpenOffice, TuxPaint, GIMP, etc., are all ready and waiting. Thanks to some folks on the Edubuntu IRC channel for some advice in getting Edubuntu installed over Ubuntu.
Presentation Zen did a review of Jobs’ Keynote this past week at Macworld.
I agree with all the points made, the thing I liked best is something I try to do in my own presentations: tell people where I’m going; give them a roadmap.
Too many presentations… you’re not sure where you are going. I liked the idea of “four things.” I can sit here now and name off the four things: MacBook Air, Leopard and Time Capsule, iTunes and movie rentals, and the iPhone update.
In recent meetings I’ve had with colleagues in different school divisions, they keep reminding me (us) that the Web we are talking about “The Read/Write” and “2.0″ varieties, are not the ones that they use at work. When I suggested at a meeting to start a podcasting initiative with English teachers in our middle schools, the backlash hurt.
“It’s blocked!” said one.
What is? - I asked.
“Blogs!” cried one. “Wikis!” cried another.
“Wikis??” I asked. “Yes,” they confirmed.
I know I am not alone with disappointment. Blocking the Internet is safe and leaves no questions asked about loopholes or accidents (in a perfect world–the kind where proxy servers and leaked passwords and other methods never come into play).
But seriously–how do you address 21st century skills without access to the tools that are partly inspiring the revolution?
It’s disappointing to me that even our technology leaders are at odds with these policies–or unsure of them–and yet nothing is done.
Technorati Tags: education, rant, read/write, technology
In 1999, fresh out of graduate school, I took my first teaching job in Virginia, and that same year, my first article was published.
It was something I wrote not for an assignment, but out of a passion I had (and still do) for the somewhat elitist concept of authenticity. My angle, you see, was what type of music was best for study in school–historically authentic–or not?
It seems of late I cannot hold myself to writing things with such academic rigor, but I still admire those that do.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Last Friday, we noted the 5-year anniversary of Creative Commons. Today, the 10-year anniversary of the blog.
It was back in 1997 that I was in graduate school. I started my first webpage. Friends were telling me I ought to write a book of stories. (I had the uncanny ability to raise hilarity with my storytelling, not unlike the style in which my father can tell a story.) Instead, wanting instant gratification, I started a website to share my creative interests.
Soon after, and I use the year 1998, I naturally evolved my writing into a post-like format, mimicking other sites on the web. I wasn’t yet aware of the term weblog, but that’s what I had going. Soon enough, I had a Blogger account and it all went downhill (or up) from there.
I’m sad I haven’t had a continual, non-stop blog since 1998. That would have been interesting.
Currently, I (mis)manage to author five blogs. Among them are a music blog, my work blog, and a food blog. So, yes, I’ve been doing a lot of this since the dawn of the blog. It’s not surprising, perhaps, that I think blogging has a place in education.
Tonight I taught a class in blogging to some of our teachers. We call it “PowerBlogging,” as it teaches them how to go beyond mere text entries, and do links, pictures, podcasts, and whatever else we can cram-into a 2-hour session. I long for the more power-ful blogging platforms (like Wordpress, used here), so that the “power” is more evenly distributed, and available to all (without so much training). It seems hard to believe the HTML codes I was putting up on the interactive whiteboard have been a part of my active vocabulary for some 10 years.
Do I expect such rapid change in the future? I am not sure we’ll see it. I think in the next five years to be trends will be:
Hopefully, Hendron’s Digest will continue-on for at least another 5, to see if I’m right.
⇪ The content & design of johnhendron.net is © 2006-08 by John Hendron. Don’t steal. Ask.
