Teachnology

Scarcity versus Glut

2010-03-14T09:28:00.003-04:00

No posts yet in March?

I found this article in New Republic interesting. The author proposes the NEW library. He explains that libraries were established thousands of years ago as repositories of rare information, and they've changed little since that time. Nowadays information is far from rare, we're drowning in it. This leads him to ask "what should become of the library?". He proposes an amalgamation (sort of) of Google books & Internet Archive & the New York Public Library - with everything online, appendable and immediately at-hand.

Interesting fact from the article - 80% of college students start a research project by going to Google, while 1% begin with their college library catalogue...jr

Get with the times, man....

2010-02-23T00:30:00.002-05:00

It seems an old broadcast model just doesn't satisfy a twittering, texting, blogging audience:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/02/nbcs_olympic_coverage_manages.html

Digital Nation

2010-02-19T08:21:00.007-05:00

Very interesting program from Frontline:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation

The discussions about distraction and multi-tasking, and the "Internet Rescue School" in South Korea are fascinating.

Remembrance of things past...

2010-02-14T09:20:00.004-05:00

Here's an interesting discussion on the age-old problems of generational differences, educational hand-wringing, literacy and peanut butter (peanut butter gets mentioned in the comments :) ).

Two points struck me as particularly relevant:

1. Every older generation thinks the upcoming generation is: "declining, less well-educated, sloppier, etc." than their own generation was. What's relevant about this point (for me) is that the decline is in the eyes of the older generation, not in the performance of the younger generation. It's a bias of viewpoint. Sociologists even have a name for this tendency to view the present as not living up to the glories of the past - "pessimistic bias".

2. There's a significant difference between the purpose of literacy - which I think is "the ability to communicate and understand" - and the formal teaching and assessment of Literacy. What I find relevant about this is the time lag between media fluency and educational assessments. We educators focus on measuring students' skills in using traditional media, and ignore their skills in using new media.

Special Delivery

2010-02-09T12:48:00.000-05:00

Here's a very interesting blog post from Dangerously Irrelevant. It discusses providing students with delivery options for their work. The idea being that students shouldn't always have to write a paper or give an oral presentation - they could choose to create web sites, make videos, create animations, etc. This reminds me a lot of Aimee's & Phil's Career Growth work, where they are offering students a great deal of choice. JR

Allure or aversion?

2010-02-07T07:17:00.000-05:00

Here's a thought-provoking article on the benefits/costs of multi-media & multi-tasking. A sampling:

"One of the deepest questions in this field is whether media multitasking is driven by a desire for new information or by an avoidance of existing information. Are people in these settings multitasking because the other media are alluring—that is, they're really dying to play Freecell or read Facebook or shop on eBay—or is it just an aversion to the task at hand?"

Are iPad's Limitations Design Decisions?

2010-02-03T21:06:00.000-05:00

This guy suggests that many of the iPad's so-called limitations are deliberate design decisions made to ensure that the future of computing is not weighed down by issues from the past.

2010-02-02T20:26:00.000-05:00

As the 2010 Olympics are just a few days away, I'd like to embed this Olympic Widget here for giggles and information.
I'll post it on the SHS Wellness Blog as well so that it will be in a place that students may access it!

Changed forever?

2010-01-29T05:19:00.000-05:00

How does the iPad change things? What is its impact on public education? H ere's one take (and an excerpt):

"The nature of personal computing has changed. Until recently, we mainly used our computers to run software programs (Microsoft Word, Quicken) installed on our hard drives. Now, we use them mainly to connect to the vast databases of the Internet—to “the cloud,” as the geeks say. And as the Internet has absorbed the traditional products of media—songs, TV shows, movies, games, the printed word—we’ve begun to look to our computers to act as multifunctional media players. The computer business and the media business are now the same business..."

If We Hear Only a Single Story, We Risk Critical Misunderstanding

2010-01-26T19:57:00.000-05:00

Another great site that I sometimes visit ikiw.org offered this TED talk from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a Nigerian author who offers this incredible piece of perspective for us all. Well worth spending the 19 minutes viewing, even if it isn't totally related to our blog.

The kids are online

2010-01-21T08:13:00.001-05:00

According to a new Kaiser media habits study, kids are spending 7 1/2 hours (yup!) with media every day. You can read more about it in the NY Times here.

Interesting to note that the cell phone is growing in importance as the default media device.

What does this mean for us as educators? How many hours a day do we adults spend online?

McLeod's Blog "Dangerously Irrelevant"

2010-01-20T15:14:00.000-05:00

Before I get on to comment on some of the other fine posts, I felt it necessary to post Scott McLeod's blog post entitled "13 Technologies I can't live Without."

Enjoy!

ISTE Priorities

2010-01-19T07:13:00.000-05:00

The ISTE* has posted a "Top 10" list of priorities for Technology in Education. You can read them here. What do you think, do we agree with these at Souhegan? JR

* (description of the ISTE from their web site) "The International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE®) is the premier membership association for educators and education leaders engaged in improving teaching and learning by advancing the effective use of technology in PK-12 and teacher education. Home of NETS and ISTE's annual conference and exposition (formerly NECC), ISTE represents more than 100,000 professionals worldwide."

Jenkins & Chaplin

2010-01-12T11:06:00.001-05:00

Thanks to a reminder from Jenny, I spent some time this week reading Henry Jenkins' blog. He's an MIT guy we've mentioned here before as one of the thought-leaders in "new media" education, and that I've referenced in my Career Growth work. He recently posted a 2-part interview with Heather Chaplin, who makes a lot of idealistic (but worthy) points about "new media" education in public schools. I posted a reply to her interview in the Comments section of Henry Jenkins' blog, if y'all are interested. JR

How is the Internet changing the way we think?

2010-01-09T10:23:00.000-05:00

The Edge has just published the responses to its annual question - which is the title of this post. I have just managed to read through the first dozen essays (you can find them here), and found two that I think are particularly interesting for we teachnologists, one by Jonas Mekas and one by Kevin Kelly. As a teaser, here's an excerpt from Kelly's essay:

"(The internet) is one thing now, an intermedia with 2 billion screens peering into it. The whole ball of connections — including all its books, all its pages, all its tweets, all its movies, all its games, all its posts, all its streams — is like one vast global book (or movie, etc.), and we are only beginning to learn how to read it. Knowing that this large thing is there, and that I am in constant communication with it, has changed how I think."

Enjoy! JR

Free Documentaries!

2010-01-08T10:24:00.000-05:00

Check this out:
"At freedocumentaries.org we strongly believe that in order to have a true democracy, there has to be a free flow of easily accessible information. Unfortunately, many important perspectives, opinions, and facts never make it to our televisions or cinemas (you can watch movies in our media category if you want to know why)."

http://freedocumentaries.org/

Online Technology Workshops

2010-01-07T09:33:00.000-05:00

Simmons Library School: Continuing Education

A great selection of (mostly) online technology and information-related courses offered through Simmons' grad. program:

http://www.simmons.edu/gslis/careers/continuing-education/workshops/index.php

Verizon Math

2010-01-06T19:02:00.000-05:00

I couldn't resist posting this video, and if you'd like to follow the whole story you could follow the link to this story:
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/2010/01/importance-of-proper-mathematics.html

Enjoy!

2010-01-04T10:37:00.000-05:00

I was celebrating the holidays with some friends, and was really digging the diverse selection of Christmas music playing in their home. As it turns out, they were tuned into Pandora Internet Radio, an amazing customizable internet radio station.

Here's the link:

http://www.pandora.com

From their website:

Since we started back in 2000, we have been hard at work on the Music Genome Project. It's the most comprehensive analysis of music ever undertaken. Together our team of fifty musician-analysts has been listening to music, one song at a time, studying and collecting literally hundreds of musical details on every song. It takes 20-30 minutes per song to capture all of the little details that give each recording its magical sound - melody, harmony, instrumentation, rhythm, vocals, lyrics ... and more - close to 400 attributes! We continue this work every day to keep up with the incredible flow of great new music coming from studios, stadiums and garages around the country.

With Pandora you can explore this vast trove of music to your heart's content. Just drop the name of one of your favorite songs or artists into Pandora and let the Genome Project go. It will quickly scan its entire world of analyzed music, almost a century of popular recordings - new and old, well known and completely obscure - to find songs with interesting musical similarities to your choice. Then sit back and enjoy as it creates a listening experience full of current and soon-to-be favorite songs for you.

You can create up to 100 unique "stations." And you can even refine them. If it's not quite right you can tell it so and it will get better for you.

The Music Genome Project was founded by musicians and music-lovers. We believe in the value of music and have a profound respect for those who create it. We like all kinds of music, from the most obtuse bebop, to the most tripped-out drum n bass, to the simplest catchy pop tune. Our mission is to help you connect with the music YOU like.

We hope you enjoy the experience!

There's more to publishing than meets the screen....

2010-01-03T11:34:00.001-05:00

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/03/opinion/03galassi.html?hp

21st Century Skills: Hedge Fund Honcho to Youtube video producer

2009-12-31T00:09:00.000-05:00

This article on NPR jumped out at me. This hedge fund manager established the Khan Academy Channel, producing numerous academic tutorial videos on Youtube.

"The evolution to online videos came, Khan says, when it became difficult logistically to manage his work and the kids' soccer practice. He began recording videos and putting them on YouTube. He began with Microsoft Paint and a piece of $20 software called Screen Video Recorder, which let him capture his screen and record it at the same time.

"I just did it because I thought it was the cheapest and fastest way to make a decent quality video," Khan says. "Since then, one of the viewers actually donated a $300 piece of software called Camtasia Recorder for the screen capture, and now I use another piece of shareware called SmoothDraw 2.0 ... I just use that to draw, and I just have a little Wacom graphic pen tablet to do the writing."

Khan's videos cover math, chemistry and biology, but they also cover finance and economics, subjects that came out of last year's financial crisis. He says it began with him reading the Federal Reserve Act."

Salman Khan took his skills to the web, and made available fantastic tutorials for all to see. Hail open source!

What does Google make us?

2009-12-30T07:46:00.000-05:00

I know everyone is impatient for vacation to be over, so we can get back to school. I thought it might be time for a new post, to get us thinking teachnologically, in the meantime...

NPR ran a story this morning with Nicholas Carr (who wrote "Is Google Making Us Stupid" published in the Atlantic last summer). NPR and Carr examine the ways that writers are adapting to the new digital platforms readers are using - and how their writing styles change when they are writing for cell phones or Twitter or the Kindle. NPR interviews writers who are now creating tweet and cell phone stories, and those writers describe how they have to write more poetically (one writer says "writing for 140 character tweets is like writing haiku") and with more punch and impact. This in itself is worthy of a teachnology discussion.

For background, you can read the original "Is Google Making Us Stupid" and several rebuttals here, at The Edge (a great blog, that by its very existence shows how new media can expand and broaden intellectual discussions on various topics).

Here's a sampling of Carr's thesis: "For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they've been widely described and duly applauded. "The perfect recall of silicon memory," Wired's Clive Thompson has written, "can be an enormous boon to thinking." But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles..."

Here's a sampling from Clay Shirky's rebuttal to Carr's view of the internet: "...the anxiety at the heart of “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” doesn’t actually seem to be about thinking, or even reading, but culture. Despite the sweep of the title, it’s focused on a very particular kind of reading, literary reading, as a metonym for a whole way of life. You can see this in Carr’s polling of “literary types,” in his quoting of Wolf and the playwright Richard Foreman, and in the reference to War and Peace, the only work mentioned by name. Now War and Peace isn’t just any piece of writing, of course; it is one of the longest novels in the canon, and symbolizes the height of literary ambition and of readerly devotion. But here’s the thing: it’s not just Carr’s friend, and it’s not just because of the web—no one reads War and Peace. It’s too long, and not so interesting."

NY Times Digital Books Commentary

2009-12-18T15:11:00.000-05:00

From the NY Times JR

Wary Book Publishers Are Fighting the Future
By NICK BILTON
Students with ebook readersNorm Betts/Bloomberg Students with their school-issued Sony Reader devices.

Last week, a host of book publishers, led by Simon & Schuster, said they will delay publication of e-reader versions of many books because they were afraid the electronic copies were cannibalizing sales of more expensive hardcover editions.

As Carolyn Reidy, chief executive of Simon & Schuster, told The Associated Press, “We believe that a large portion of the people who have bought e-readers are from the most devoted reading population. And if they like the e-readers, they are naturally going to convert because the e-books are so significantly less expensive.”

I own both an Amazon Kindle and a Sony Reader, and I can tell you that I didn’t buy them to save money. I know a lot of other avid bookworms, and I can’t recall a single one citing “to save money on books” as their reason to purchase one of these fancy new devices.

How can e-books represent saving money when an individual spends between $250 to $300 on a device and about $10 for each book?

No, these are people who love books so much that they want to carry a collection of them around on a single device and want to interact more deeply with them (such as looking up words in a built-in dictionary, sharing content with others and taking notes about what they’re reading).

Most importantly, e-reader users want instant access to books — if you hear about a new book that sounds interesting, you can start reading it a couple of minutes later.

Publishers are understandably worried about their changing business model, as they face new pressures from authors as well as readers. But do they really believe that they will boost their bottom lines by making it harder for these devoted readers to buy books?

Let’s say you unwrap your holiday presents and see a fancy new Kindle, Sony Reader or Barnes & Noble Nook. Just what you’ve always wanted! You turn on your new device, navigate to the wireless bookstore of your choice and search for Don DeLillo’s new novel. Instead of a simple click and download right from your armchair, you’re told it’s only available in hardcover for the next four months.

Are you really going to put down your new book reader, get in your car, drive to the store, and buy the hardcover? Probably not. Instead, you’ll click the ‘back’ button and search for something else to read in the digital bookstore.

The consumer understands that digital means immediate and infinite, and the limits imposed by paper no longer exist. As Amazon’s chief executive, Jeffrey Bezos, noted in a recent interview with The New York Times, “For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books.”

Yet some publishers are trying to do everything they can to look the other way and pretend the new products and delivery pathways haven’t changed old business models.

There’s one other important factor to swirl into this discussion: the next generation of book buyers won’t understand why they can’t access any information they want in a digital format. They have grown up in a world where everything, from movies to magazines, is basically just a collection of digital bytes.

And the economics of bytes aren’t the same as the economics of atoms. Infinite digital bits don’t have to deal with the supply-and-demand business models that existed in the past. You create one version and can disseminate it everywhere, instantly, at virtually no distribution cost. (Can you imagine if the digital camera you just purchased gave you this warning: “We’re sorry. You won’t be able to e-mail this photo to your friend for another four months. Instead, why don’t you print a copy and mail it through or on-demand printing service!”)

The publishers seem to be picking a fight with the wrong team: their customer. They are punishing the people who buy their content instead of making it as simple as possible for those customers to hand over their money, instantly, from any location in the world.

I can tell you one thing: When I’m looking for a new book on my Kindle and told I have to wait four months for the e-book version, I won’t be heading to the bookstore. Instead, I’ll click the back button and buy one of the 360,000 other e-books available now.

Petrie & Ranta respond 12/7/09

2009-12-18T15:10:00.000-05:00

I don't think of it in such black & white terms. In the multi-media world, everyone needs basic competencies in all media. I'd agree with you if we edited it to say the following:

"Leslie loves to write. Leslie is an outstanding writer. As a matter of fact, she's wanted to be an author since she was ten years old. Since we have clearly identified that writing is Leslie's strength, she gets to spend the majority of her time reading and writing, once she has a command of the basic skills of video, powerpoint, podcast, etc., because we've already identified that these are not her media strengths."

I've had students with serious reading and writing problems, even disabilities, who were quite talented at video production, or web design, or animation. Unfortunately, these students struggled in their core classes, because so much emphasis was placed on reading and writing. From a differentiated instruction standpoint, we'd have been helping these kids to be successful if we had let them create their essays/reports/stories in the media forms with which they are most comfortable and adept. Phil & Aimee have been discovering the same thing in their classes, and have broadened the list of media in which kids can work for particular assignments. So a student is no longer constrained to a 5 page written report for the Immigration unit (for example) - that student can choose to write a report, or a web site, or a video. Phil & Aimee have worked out the rubrics so that the effort and standards are similar across the board, no matter which media the student chooses.

In my opinion, for option #2, multi-media in such a school would be taught the way we teach art today. Every student needs to take some art classes, even those who are lousy (as I am) at drawing and painting. This is because all students need to have a basic understanding of image and graphical composition. I think the same would be true of multi-media - all students would need a basic understanding and set of skills in each media, because they are going to come across all forms of media in our culture. But we would not expect, or require, a student to have master's level skills in all media.

But hey (disclaimer here), these are ideas that I am just starting to form as part of my Career Growth, they're still in the embryonic stages...

-----Original Message-----
From: Lisa Petrie
Sent: Mon 12/7/2009 1:32 PM
To: John Ranta; Frank Gallo; David Saxe; Susan Carr
Cc: Tom Sawyer; Bernard D'Amours
Subject: RE: 21st Century schools videos

If we chose option #2, that means we would allow this:

Leslie loves to write. Leslie is an outstanding writer. As a matter of fact, she's wanted to be an author since she was ten years old. If we have clearly identified that writing is Leslie's strength, she would never have to create a video, powerpoint, podcast, etc., because we've already identified that these are not her media strengths.

Right...?

L.

Ranta's 12/7/09 Commentary

2009-12-18T15:08:00.001-05:00

Here goes nothing – an email on the jranta theory of information ecosystems (I’m a Darwinist, I think).

I like to think about the natural ways for human beings to absorb information and digest stories. How are we built, as information digesters? What works best for us? I also like to think of the natural forms for various kinds of information. What is the natural habitat for a particular story, or a recipe? Does it always belong in a book, or do some stories, some forms of information, more naturally fit in a video, a podcast, a pictogram, etc?

“Proust and the Squid” by Maryanne Wolf is a great book on how human beings had to adapt to books (it’s all that damn Gutenberg’s fault  ). Wolf became a researcher of reading after working with kids with dyslexia. She’s done a lot of brain research, and found that reading is an unnatural act. Our brains have to be rewired to learn to read – we have to do a lot of work to build the synapses that interpret collections of ideographic symbols to determine their meaning, and then to put them together to make sense of them as a story or description. Some of us are quite good at that, and we become adept readers. Many of us do not complete the rewiring, and never become facile readers. Many are labeled dyslexic. Wolf is not anti-reading, she wrote her book so that we’d understand more about the process of reading. But she wanted us to understand that dyslexia is a natural state.

Becoming adept at reading & writing mattered a great deal for the past several hundred years, because the primary means of accessing and conveying information was reading and writing. Reading and writing was the only game in town. If you were one of the many whose brain never managed the rewiring, you were hosed, so to speak.

Some information, and some stories, lend themselves nicely to books. Many other kinds of info do not. If the story or information doesn’t fit easily on the printed page, it was too bad. Up until very recently, it didn’t matter if you had the perfect story for a movie form, or a radio broadcast. The means of production were only available to a very few, and the skills to utilize those media were not widely taught. Since only the wealthy and powerful had access to a printing press, a movie studio, a theater or a radio station, we didn’t bother to train people to use those media. We only taught people to read & write.

In the past 10 years we've seen a tremendous democratization of media, brought on by the wide availability of high speed internet connections, inexpensive personal computers, video cameras and editing software. No longer do the high priests of media control broadcasting & production. No longer are we mere consumers of media. And no longer is reading and writing the only game in town. Each of us can become a reporter, a director, an author, a commentator, etc. - and millions of us are training ourselves to do that. Granted, we are all new to this, and we're still making mistakes. But it’s very cool that we now we can create stories in any form we choose, in the form that best suits our abilities and our style, and share them with the world.

In my humble opinion, reading and writing (and books) are not going away, but I think they are becoming less prominent in our information ecosystem. And other media can now grow to take their natural places. In the information ecosystem, each media form is finding a niche, where it is best suited both to the individual communicator, and to the information itself.

I can see us (educators) going in one of two directions with literacy education:

1. One is to expand our definition, and teach a broader media literacy as opposed to a narrow text literacy. In other words, teaching each student to become a generalist in media production and digestion. That means including video, animation, audio along with reading and writing in our curricula.
2. The other is to attempt to identify each student’s media strengths and abilities, and map individual education plans to their strengths. That would mean understanding which student is the adept reader and writer, and focusing their work in that area, while enabling and supporting the videographer or animator or audiographer equally, in the classroom.

JR

Prensky & Digital Natives

2009-12-18T15:08:00.000-05:00

From: David Saxe

Sent: Thursday, December 17, 2009 11:00 AM

Just to clarify, this term "digital native," is not mine. I stole it from Mark Prensky, who coined the phrase in this 2001 paper: http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part1.pdf

Great reading if you care to check it out. Many since have followed his ideas and of course that has lead us into using many other technologies that our current "millennial" students use daily.

About the electronic publishing pieces, I just have hard time with the interface. On my ipod, or on the kindle, looking at the electronic letters doesn't suit my aging eyes. I much prefer the printed text on paper for my eyes, but the other physical pieces of enjoying reading or even reading for work is improved if it is on paper. There is a physical difference for me, and sometimes there is even some difference in comprehension!

From: Lisa Petrie

Thanks for the link, Dave!

I appreciate Prensky's historical viewpoint, but I would challenge much of what he's saying. I feel he makes many generalizations, displays a clear bias as a software developer & company owner, and shows no solid evidence to back up his theories. I can't get past his premise. He says:

"… the single biggest problem facing education today is that our Digital Immigrant instructors, who speak an outdated language (that of the pre-digital age), are struggling to teach a population that speaks an entirely new language.”

Really...? :)

There's definitely a growing body of evidence to suggest that the single biggest factor in determining a kid's success in the classroom is the quality of his teacher. (Actually, a few of the videos that you sent to us in your last link illustrate that point quite clearly.) But never have I seen evidence to suggest that this has anything to do with a teacher's ability to use digital technology. There are folks here at school who use zero digital technology in the classroom; I think they're fabulous teachers.

So, I'm not so sure...? Just like I'm not sure that having access to GarageBand, and the ability to post one's music online, makes our students better musicians....? It's quite likely those students would benefit more from having an hour every day in school to get instruction from a teacher, and play music together. And though I'm sure it's thrilling for them to post their music online, it doesn't give them the same bona fides as a "published" artist. Much of the self-published stuff online is nothing most of us would ever pay for.

I absolutely appreciate how technology can enhance what we do. (I have no plans to give up my salad spinner any time soon!) But subject-area knowledge, classroom management skills, interpersonal skills, passion & committment, creativity, attitude, etc., are much better indicators of what make a teacher great.

From: John Ranta
Sent: Fri 12/18/2009 7:04 AM

Dave, thanks for the link! Much of what Prensky says makes sense to me, and fits with other research I’ve been doing for my Career Growth. Henry Jenkins, at MIT (http://web.mit.edu/cms/People/henry3/) has been doing similar research into how kids today (Prensky’s “digital natives”) are developing different skills and learning styles than those of us who grew up in previous generations.

Prensky goes on in Chapter 2 to present his evidence (http://www.marcprensky.com/writing/Prensky%20-%20Digital%20Natives,%20Digital%20Immigrants%20-%20Part2.pdf). He covers the research into “digital” brain development in much the same way that Maryanne Wolf does for reading brains in “Proust & the Squid”. His work is consistent with other brain development research.

I think that, if all other things are equal, a good teacher that is facile with digital media is a more effective teacher than a good teacher who is not.

From: Lisa Petrie
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 8:29 AM

Maryanne Wolf is a neuroscientist, and speaks in terms of evolutionary biology. Prensky is a game developer, looking to sell his software to schools, and is speaking more in terms of social behavior. Their work is not consistent. Just sayin'. :)

But yes, I think I could agree that a teacher who is "facile with digital media" is probably more effective than a teacher who is not. I think we need to be really careful in the way we approach this, though. Many teachers here observe that some of our new technological tools are distractions. Is this because our teachers are "digital immigrants", and just don't understand those pesky teenagers...? Or, is it because some of these new technologies are actually impediments to learning...?

I think it's fair to be open-minded about the latter.

From: David Saxe
Sent: Fri 12/18/2009 10:40 AM

I think that it remains to be seen if the new technologies are actually impediments to learning. I’m kind of interested in learning new things all the time, and the new technologies fit the bill for me along with lots of reading (books in print, scholarly articles, etc.). I clearly don’t have a deep understanding of millennial students and pesky teenagers, but using technologies for teaching just seems like the right thing to do now. Students almost willingly accept the technological challenges, and I’m sneaking in some content that I think is important and relevant to their long term health.

For instance, I’m learning more about google maps, planning on having students create digital google maps to use for our programs. Sounds like fun for the students, fun for me, and getting some important content and fitness in the process of creating the maps!

From: Lisa Petrie
Sent: Friday, December 18, 2009 11:30 AM

I absolutely agree with you, Dave -- teaching with technology can be very powerful. I'm just one of those folks who feels very strongly that, when we do that, the instructional focus should be the content (mountain biking, yoga, Shakespeare, etc.), and not the technology itself.

I think we all know and believe this. But I also think that it's really, really easy to fall into the trap of letting the technology itself be the star of the show. For instance, we are the "Technology" Open Space group. Maybe we should be the "Best Practice in Curriculum Delivery" Open Space group, or something like that...? :)

This argument becomes particularly relevant when introducing "digital immigrants" to new classroom teaching tools. There will definitely be more interest and by-in if we focus on their curriculum and teaching, than on that scary technology stuff.

From: Dave Saxe

I think that there is a bit of give and take. Like teaching writing for instance, Chris Herold looks carefully at the writing skills themselves in addition to the content of the subject matter (Middle East Peace debates, European Union, etc.). Just an example of our ?obligation? to teach more than just content.

First Entries, get working!

2009-12-18T11:20:00.000-05:00

Just to get this started, we'll begin to have an online discussion here. Maybe some people outside our building will subscribe to our RSS feed, and they can then comment as well. Is this risky or just 21st Century?

What began as an informal discussion about using Wikipedia as a qualified source for High School level student research, has continued to a few wider ranging topics in the area of technology in education here at this school and beyond.