Spiders and miracles

Gary Cziko's Without Miracles spends a lot of time explaining the many ways "fit" is evident in our world. What is "fit" and how do we know it when we see it? According to Cziko, the thing "must appear that it was designed for some purpose and is able to achieve this purpose by functioning in a way that takes into account important, relevant aspects of its environment. A structure or behavior is fit only insofar as it is adapted to its environment and contributes in some useful way to the organism or system that created it or of which it is a part. We recognize such fit when we observe any system composed of many interacting parts where the details of the parts' structure and arrangement suggest design to fulfill some function."

Darwin explained fit in relation to living organisms, but no comparable explanation, however, is generally accepted for all other puzzles of fit like spiders, antibodies, and airplanes. The purpose of this book is to present a rational explanation for all observed examples of fit in our world - without recourse to miracles.


A chapter that stood out to me as an educator was chapter 5 on brain evolution and development. The human brain has 11 billion specialized nerve cells, or neurons, and there are 10,000 or so synapses connecting to cortical neurons alone. That's a lot of wiring. Cziko's research, that shows that we overproduce synapses and then eliminate the ones that we don't need, gave more support to the notion that teens brains are wired differently these days.

Another interesting part of the chapter was the discussion on how the mature brain learns. I often hear people say you can't learn a foreign language as an adult, or that we continue to lose brain cells throughout our life, or that the human brain goes through a steady decline as we age. I always felt those descriptions were too simplistic. I mean, how do you account for people who keep learning throughout their lives. One possible explanation is that the brain continues to overproduce and eliminate newly formed synapses in the adult brain in response to environmental changes. Although there haven't been many studies on it, the author poses a compelling research question: how is the mature brain "able to rewire itself to learn from and adapt to changes in its environment."

Cziko's ideas are relevant to the field of education in many ways. John Dewey is cited early in the book in his critique of behavioral education theories when Dewey says that learning is a "circuit," that behavior determines stimulus just as much as stimulus determines behavior. Observations like Dewey's anticipated the formation of perceptual control theory, the view that sees behavior as controlling perception through the organism's control of its environment.

In the chapter on education, Cziko points out the fault of the instructionist view of education, which currently dominates American schools:

1. The teacher and textbooks are unquestioned authorities
2. It puts the blame on students for failure to learn
3. The usual test is if the student can reproduce the transmitted information in spoken or written form.

Instead he favors the selectionist view of education and invokes people like Jean Piaget, who believed that knowledge is constructed, and Maria Montessori, who believed that natural curiosity is the prime motivator of learning. The selectionist view must consider error to be an essential part of educational growth. The teacher's primary role is to assist the student in discovering the ways in which the student's current knowledge is inadequate. "In short, students should be eager to encounter their mistakes and will, it is hoped, find themselves in an environment that encourages them to revise their thinking and actions to arrive at better solutions to their problems."

Henry Perkinson offers some five suggestions for educators that might move teachers more toward a hybrid approach. The two most relevant to me:

• It is possible to view critical encounters with the subject matter as a selection procedure of trial-and-error elimination wherein knowledge grows
• it is possible for teachers to reconceptualize the aim of schooling as an attempt to develop concerned critics who can and will facilitate the growth of our culture.

The most promising part of the book is the recognition that mistakes are a natural part of learning, and that in this sense we need to make more room in our curriculum for reflecting on failure.

at Huntsville cemetery. Photo by Joe Sloan

The part of the book that keeps gnawing at me, though, is the title. I agree with Cziko in his afterword about the "trouble with miracles." In every chapter of the book he illustrates how relying on the irrational in the past has limited our progress and has eventually given way to more productive ways of thinking about our world. But when he cites David Hume, who doesn't deny the existence of miracles, just that they can't be proven, I have to pause to consider the following: for such an intelligent species, we continue to do incredibly stupid things. So the limits of what our rational minds can explain seem to fall short.

For instance, I've spent the last few days in Eden, Utah. No kidding, my family and I have been in Eden.  So the irony of finishing a book named Without Miracles here hasn't been lost on me.  Perhaps because of the book, it seems all kinds of spiders have been displaying their variations of fit for me. My son took a photo of a spider at the Huntsville Cemetery; on the Green Pond trail by Snow Basin with my wife, I'm awed by a spider that jumped on to the path right in front of me and marvel at the last fall colors hanging on before the first snow – a yellow, brown, red, green palette.  I understand how the oaks, and maples, and aspens all have developed fit for high altitude, south-facing slopes; I have a pretty good grasp of how water and light and chlorophyll have colored this palette.  But to me, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. As I stop to gape at individual leaves on my way down the trail at sunset, aware of all the rational explanations for the beauty around me, at every turn I feel like I'm surrounded by miracles.

Fantastic (fanatical?) numbers

I just finished reading Play Money: How I Quit Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot by Julian Dibbell.  While I'm not about to quit my day job, the book reinforced a point that's becoming more clear with each passing day: the virtual is real.  A lot of people scoff at this notion, or roll their eyes when they hear about the business side of MMO's.

But it really shouldn't be that far-fetched for millions of Americans. This morning I saw that my son was watching ESPN's Fanatsy Football Now, where a pigskin pundit breaks down how many points individuals will get for their respective "owners" this Sunday.  It's been estimated that anywhere from 14 million to 27 million people currently play fantasy football for an average of nine hours a week.  If the U.S. population is about 300 million, that means that anywhere from 5-9% of the population participates in the pastime.

Dibbell's book and the fantasy football industry say a few things about us – among other things, that we're increasingly becoming a data-driven people, that individual performances can trump team play, and that there's a fine line between work and play.

Effective?

Something about this makes sense, but it also leaves me a little unsettled.  I could easily see this vision of hybrid learning hurting our students:

the researchers seem more excited by a hybrid application of the open-learning program that, instead of replacing professors, tries to use them more effectively. By combining the open-learning software with two weekly 50-minute class sessions in an intro-level statistics course, they found that they could get students to learn the same amount of material in half the time.
"Hybrid Learning 2.0" - Inside Higher Ed

Disrupting Class & Oversold and Underused

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns and Oversold and Underused: Computers in the Classroom have a lot in common. Christensen and Cuban agree that American schools should be more than just about more than just preparing future workers to be economically competitive. Both feel that the billions of dollars spent on computers have resulted in little change in how students learn. Both call for restructuring schools and how teachers are prepared. And both argue that poverty needs to be addressed in any discussion of school reform.

Christensen’s arguments are based on his experience with business; in this book he turns his attention to education while looking at education reform through the lens of business innovation. I have to admit that I was a little put-off by some of the generalities that open Disrupting Class. For instance, Christensen begins his discussion of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation with a reference to the Japanese economy. His assertion that the post-World War II Japanese economy flourished solely because of intrinsic motivation, and then failed once the country became prosperous (hence, according to his theory, its citizens are no longer motivated intrinsically), seems an overgeneralization.

Additionally, given the fact that Christensen warns against the current view that schools function primarily to prepare a competitive workforce, I was leery of his reliance on so many business examples to illustrate his ideas for what’s needed in education reform. However the book takes off once the author describes the concept of disruptive innovation, “a process by which a product or service takes root initially in simple applications at the bottom of a market and then relentlessly moves ‘up market’, eventually displacing established competitors.” http://www.claytonchristensen.com/disruptive_innovation.html. The theory makes sense in the business world – Sony transistor radio, Ford Model T, Southwest Airlines, and the Toyota Prius are all businesses that illustrate his theory.

Despite my reservations, much of his business theory does make sense with regard to school reform, and what I’ve personally experienced as successful pedagogy. For example, I’ve been involved in the development of an educational social network called Youth Voices for a number of years now. Youth Voices fits at least some of the description of disruptive innovation in the sense that it wasn’t developed in my school or within my existing school structure, and that since it’s built on a Drupal CMS it’s pretty simple. (I suppose it would be at the “invention” level of integration using Cuban’s terms). It seems to be an example of a user network that’s student-centered and fosters interdisciplinary connections.

However, Youth Voices isn’t the complete separation that Christensen advocates. The composing that my students do in Youth Voices still originates out of a traditional face to face structure. Christensen instead seems to be arguing for separation, most notably in the form of a charter school. I like Christensen’s point that the charter school can serve as a R&D lab and that the lessons learned can be taken back to mainstream public schools to understand how to best meet the needs of our diverse learner population. I think it’s important to note that he says that the goal of the charter movement is not to create permanent replacements or competitors for public schools. To fit his model, charters have to be temporary from the outset. That flies in the face of the present charter school movement in Utah, where I live. To me it looks like much of the charter movement in my state is about segregating public schools, and entrenching or even further exacerbating the class distinctions.

Cuban also mentions the need to alleviate the effects of poverty as one of his solutions that we need in order to address the ecology of schooling; among other things he writes, “the special needs of urban schools and low-income communities would require sustained attention to the links between economic, social, housing, and political structures of the neighborhood and schooling.”

Both Cuban and Christensen call for a drastic restructuring of schools before any technology can bring about change. Cuban concludes his book with this thought: “Without a critical examination of the assumptions of techno-promoters, a return to the historic civic and social mission of schooling in America, and a rebuilding of social capital in our schools, our passion for school-based technology, driven by dreams of increased economic productivity and the demands of the workplace, will remain an expensive, narrowly conceived innovation.”

While Christensen draws on his business experience, Cuban draws his conclusions from observations of what goes on in Silicon Valley schools. His descriptions of the unintended outcomes of computers in schools corroborates much of Christensen’s conclusions: Cuban finds no evidence of academic achievement as a result of vast expenditures on computers, he sees a sustaining of existing patterns of teaching, and very little evidence of student-centered, project-based, or interdisciplinary learning. Cuban offers a few plausible explanations for these unintended outcomes – the “slow revolution” and “history and context” explanations – but neither can explain the early adopter teachers that he profiles. What he learns from these “mavericks” is that in order to successfully integrate computers and education, teachers need to change their pedagogy.

Both authors realize the numerous obstacles in the way of this kind of reform. One such obstacle is the apparent lack of faith in teachers. Christensen suggests, “Don’t place artificial limits on what students can take online or what teachers can build online either... if they want to create content and lessons, let them do what they need to do, what they want, and what works best for them.” Cuban argues that schools need to rethink how time is allocated for teachers, that software needs to be developed specifically for teachers and students, and that products need to be tested by teachers and students before being sold to districts.

Both authors agree that teacher education needs to change as well.
Christensen says that we should stop training teachers them for a “world of monolithic, teacher-led content delivery, where the key skills are in holding students attention to subjects that are being taught to the dominant learner in each subject, trains teachers for the past.” I too agree that “future teachers will need the skills to work one on one with different types of learners as the study in student-centric ways. The tools that teachers build and distribute in the user networks of the future will play a key role in making learning student-centric. The next generation of teachers needs to learn how to build these tools for different types of learners.” However, to me it’s not an either-or. Future teachers and students need to master both skills – they need to be the guide by the side AND the sage on the stage.

Additionally Christensen’s agenda for graduate school research hit home as well, when he says that we need to “progress beyond doing descriptive research that seeks average tendencies.” His call to study anomalies and outliers and to understand why an action worked in one circumstance but not in another seems like pretty good advice to me. His definition of descriptive research made me realize that I’ve got to carefully consider my own research methodologies.

Ultimately though, Cuban’s conclusion spoke to me most. His discussion of social capital, the building trust and cooperation in society to keeping democracy vital, made a lot of sense to me. In the end he reminds us why we need reform done right. “Without a broader vision of the social and civic role that schools perform in a democratic society, our current excessive focus on technology use in schools runs the danger of trivializing our nation’s core ideals.” That philosophy needs to underpin all our efforts.

Guns, Germs ... and Human Natures

In order to see where we’re going, we need to understand where we’ve been; this is a central message in the two books by Jared Diamond and Paul Ehrlich. Guns, Germs, and Steel examines human history and explains how different societies from around the world progressed in different places at different paces. Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect takes a long evolutionary view and seeks to steer us on to a more earth-friendly course to the future.

Guns, Germs, and Steel is framed around the questions of a New Zealander acquaintance of author Jared Diamond. Yali wants to know why Diamond’s culture has so much more cargo: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?” Diamond’s book is devoted to answering Yali’s question. Early in the book he states: “the strongest argument for writing the book is to combat racism.” Diamond has great respect for the native New Guineans, and even gives reasons why he considers them a more intelligent people than Western culture. By answering Yali’s question he is refuting racist arguments and assumptions that are still common in our society today.

A long time ago environmental factors influenced whether humans would be farmers or herders. It turned out that this distinction accounted for a big difference. Farmers developed agriculture, which supported more people per acre. This in turn led to food surpluses which then allowed for specialization in society – some members of the population could be artisans, others warriors, weapons makers, or scribes. Additionally domestication of animals allowed for eventual immunity to the germs that would wipe out entire nations of indigenous peoples in many areas that we now refer to as Third World countries. All of this explains, for example, how Pizarro’s band of 168 Spaniards conquered a foe 500 times its size. They had the advantage of steel, germs, and writing. Diamond concludes: “The striking differences in the long-term histories of peoples is not due to innate differences in the people themselves but to differences in their environments.”

Two of the most significant reasons explaining the ability of some cultures to conquer other peoples are attributed to the continental differences in the wild plant and animal species available for domestication, and the rates of continental diffusion, which facilitated the dissemination of important innovations like technology and writing. The factors that allowed for successful domestication led to denser populations, which in turn allowed for innovation and diffusion of new technologies and ideas. Throughout history societies that had these advantages have conquered those that didn’t. In the end Diamond shows that there’s not racial superiority in human cultures, just that more fortuitous circumstances for some led to domination over others.

The most personally relevant point in Diamond’s book is his belief that native peoples are actually more intelligent than Westerners. What that means for me as an educator is that the more my students and I connect with people from other cultures via the Internet, the more we have to learn from all peoples, not just those from the West. It’s optimistic but my hope is that the Internet can foster learning exchanges from all peoples of the world, since it’s clear from both books that we as a species have a lot to learn.

While Diamond’s point is an important one, I actually found many more points in Ehrlich’s book that are personally relevant to my role as an educator and as a human. All these connections are ultimately due to one cause – the difficulty of humans as small-group animals to come to grips to the global impact of our actions.

Ehrlich is also interested in the large sweep of the human enterprise, and begins in a similar vein. In fact both writers rail against the evils of racism; Diamond to refute racial superiority theories and Ehrlich to cite racism as one of the hurdles facing our cultural evolution. Ehrlich begins his book by stating that there is no such thing as just one “human nature.” The skills and adaptations needed to navigate the savanna, for instance, differed from those needed to be successful in a deciduous forest. Still Ehrlich notes that despite our many differences in our genetic evolution, all humans share the common similarity of being small-group animals. The author asserts that this background hinders our progress as we increasingly impact the world: “We have barely begun to solve the problem with which cultural evolution has presented us: how to live in large groups, perpetually intensifying our activities, creating technologies few of us can understand and even fewer can control, without sowing the seeds of our own destruction.”

Ehrlich’s warnings are clear about the ways humans are negatively impacting the world: “There’s no controversy about the damage modern states are inflicting on the environment... Multinational corporations seldom have any strong connection to a particular nation ... their interest is above all in global profitability ... the UN and IPCC have not gained significant regulatory control over the way human beings treat one another and their rapidly deteriorating life support systems....” The ever-increasing power of multinational corporations and the inability to regulate them has been made clear in recent movies like Food Inc. and Tapped that detail how corporations are taking control of our food sources and our water with very little governmental oversight.

This scenario could portend a depressing future if Ehrlich had ended there. But he does provide hope. He argues that since we’ve solved imposing social problems in the past, we can do it again. “The potential for conscious evolution exists,” he says, “is patent in the great social movements that societies have already experienced: the abolition of slavery, the trend toward democratic governments and individual expression, innovation over position, the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the environmental movement.”

So how do we get there? How do we as educators facilitate this “conscious evolution”? One key is how we teach our students to use technology wisely and for the common good: “The capacity to develop ethics is a product of biological evolution, the ability to anticipate the consequences of one’s actions, a critical capacity for empathy, a capability to internalize the moral standards of society and make value judgments, and free will. The products of that ethical capacity – the ethics, morals, and norms of a society – are the result of cultural evolution.”

Ultimately it’s about how we help our students foster empathy by cultivating the conscious evolution from a small group animal to one with a global consciousness is through establishing relationships with other cultures via the world wide web. Ehrlich states that “human beings have evolved some limits to the arousal of empathy.... the urge is particularly strong when the victims are depicted as individuals with whom one can identify rather than as anonymous individuals....”

Clearly one way is to help students forge connections with other cultures, so that the youth of these cultures can engage in meaningful and productive ways. Once students aren’t anonymous to each other, empathy soon follows. For example, I’ve personally seen this happen when my students collaborated with Inuit students in the Marshall School on the Yukon river in Alaska (here’s a link to a podcast that documents the teachers’ collaboration and here’s a link to our shared WikiSpaces page). My students learned how climate change is profoundly affecting the lives of their peers in Alaska, and came away with a much more personal view of this global issue. Meaningful connections like these can go a long way toward a conscious evolution.

Yet just making these connections doesn’t necessarily lead to changes in behavior. Ehrlich warns that repeated exposure to global issues, without opportunities to take action, can also lead to habituation. For instance, I’ve been involved in a collaboration with other teachers this fall on the site Voices on the Gulf. In an except from a recent dialogue on the site, Emily, one of my students responds to a post:

However, now that we're after the fact, we can all make conscious decisions to rehabilitate and renew the Gulf. What those actions would be, I don't know--I'm in agreement with the author on this post that BP has failed to offer any real specifics as to what they're doing to fix the situation. But give me something to do in order to help, and I will do it.

Our students know that there are problems of a global scale out there and they have the ability to connect with their peers from around the globe, but they also need to learn how to critically examine information so that they can act on knowledge and facts. This call to action by Ehrlich, coupled with Diamond’s belief in the underappreciated wisdom of native peoples makes a compelling case for fostering inclusive world-wide learning networks to deal with the global problems we’ve created.

Two good documentaries you may not have heard of

I've seen a couple of films through the Salt Lake City Public Library's Film Series that are both worth seeing. Recently I saw Fresh, which critiques our current food distribution network and presents some possibilities for more local food.  Both the movies Fresh and Food Inc., and the book The Omnivore's Dilemma profile Virginia farmer Joel Salatin, someone more people need to listen to.

From Salatin's website: "Today the farm arguably represents America’s premier non-industrial food production oasis.  Believing that the Creator’s design is still the best pattern for the biological world, the Salatin family invites like-minded folks to join in the farm’s mission:  to develop emotionally, economically, environmentally enhancing agricultural enterprises and facilitate their duplication throughout the world."

Tapped, was a movie about the bottled water industry, including the practice of "water farming" which I hadn't heard of before.  The films probably aren't going to come to your neighborhood Cineplex anytime soon, but if you get a chance to see them, check them out.

From the movie's website: "Is access to clean drinking water a basic human right, or a commodity that should be bought and sold like any other article of commerce? Stephanie Soechtig's debut feature is an unflinching examination of the big business of bottled water.

From the producers of Who Killed the Electric Car and I.O.U.S.A., this timely documentary is a behind-the-scenes look into the unregulated and unseen world of an industry that aims to privatize and sell back the one resource that ought never to become a commodity: our water.

From the plastic production to the ocean in which so many of these bottles end up, this inspiring documentary trails the path of the bottled water industry and the communities which were the unwitting chips on the table. A powerful portrait of the lives affected by the bottled water industry, this revelatory film features those caught at the intersection of big business and the public's right to water.

Storyboarding my research

Another way to think of what I'm studying in my doctoral program in EPET at Michigan State is not only through writing text but also through composing video.  I attempted to explain the general idea of some research I'd like to do and to make the research compelling.  The act of storyboarding and editing the video actually helped me to refine my topic.  Usually when I think about ideas through different media it helps me think about it more clearly.  I think the video mode helped me do that.

Motivation to learn

I've been reading a lot lately about what motivates us to learn.  Recently I got together with some of my extended family at Jordanelle reservoir in Utah and asked them to reflect on what motivates them.  Here's a link to the audio.

Reading Lists

Maybe it's a function of being an English teacher, but the subject of "what are you reading?" comes up quite often.  For a long time this conversation took place in face to face conversations.  And that usually leads to further conversation about interests, which can lead to a way to get to know someone.  But this has changed with the virtual bookshelf.

As a way to begin, here are some newer books I've read recently that I'd recommend: Outliers, A Whole New Mind, Birth Day (by my brother Mark), Wikinomics, The Road.

I can't always remember the books I've read though.  For instance for this list, a couple of books came to mind, but then I thought, "what have I been reading?" and couldn't readily remember.  Then as I went through the process of linking to the first one on the list, I went to one of my virtual bookshelves (in this case my Google Books library).  But then I remembered my Shelfari library, and when I went there, I realized that there were a lot of good books that I'd forgotten about: Mountains Beyond Mountains, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Wicked, Nickel and Dimed, etc.

Shelfari: Book reviews on your book blog

When I started these virtual bookshelves, I thought of them primarily as book marks, as a way to remind me of things I'd read since my memory's not so good.  But even as I set them up, collaborations began.  And now I see the many ways that the conversation around reading books has expanded. The teachers I collaborate with on Youth Voices and EdTechTalk have their own bookshelves, Shelfari lets me see all members who have similar books on their bookshelves, Amazon has the "Frequently bought together" and the "Customer who bought this item also bought" features, Google Books has the "All related books" feature, etc.

We're answering the question "what are you reading" in different ways now – depending on who's asking and whether we've actually ever even met.

Elevator Pitch

Google Me, Google You

I took about a year off from blogging in this space, instead writing/composing in everything from open and closed online communities to the private confines my Moleskin journal.  But when I was recently prompted to Google me (there's probably an Amanda Palmer sequel in here somewhere), I was struck by my scattered online selves.

I think there's a lot of that going around.  The more we create online, and the more information that gets published about us without our knowledge, the more our lives are archived.  We're everywhere.

Which seems different than before.  For a number of years, I've been collecting stories about my dad and digitizing them. I do this partly because when my siblings and I compare my dad's WWII stories, for instance, we often find gaps and inconsistencies in our collective memory. This video below is one attempt to create an archive of my own parents for my own kids, and their kids, etc.




A colleague expressed concerns about all the information we freely post on the Internet, that we're giving up too much of our privacy.  But I told her the same thing I tell my students – remember that grandpa can read anything you put online.  But now I'm thinking of a broader audience.

I need to remember that my grandkids may be reading this – even though I don't have any yet.

Hyperlocal hybrid

Interesting developments in journalism these days. On the one hand media moguls are trying to consolidate and monetize traditional media streams via subscriptions:

A trio of media executives that includes Court TV and Brill's Content founder Steven Brill, former Wall Street Journal publisher Gordon Crovitz, and Leo Hindery, Jr., managing partner of private equity fund InterMedia Partners, on Tuesday announced the launch of a Journalism Online, a new venture that aims to help monetize online news publishing. The venture plans to create a distributable system that will allow publishers to charge annual or monthly subscriptions to view their content, as well as a portal where consumers could pay a single fee to access content from multiple participating publications.

Media Executives Brill, Crovitz Debut "Journalism Online" Venture | Digital Media Wire

Good luck with the subscription model. On the other hand, the hyperlocal trend shows more promise:

A number of Web start-up companies are creating so-called hyperlocal news sites that let people zoom in on what is happening closest to them, often without involving traditional journalists. The sites, like EveryBlock, Outside.in, Placeblogger and Patch, collect links to articles and blogs and often supplement them with data from local governments and other sources. They might let a visitor know about an arrest a block away, the sale of a home down the street and reviews of nearby restaurants.

‘Hyperlocal’ Web Sites Deliver News Without Newspapers - NYTimes.com

My money is on traditional media teaming up with hypermedia.

Warning: Franger Danger

I'm not that unsociable, after all. After months of fretting about a paucity of my tweets, and what a rotten Facebook friend I am, it just so happens that I'm not alone. Turns out there's a name for my malady – I'm what's known as an "ambivalent networker."

A recent survey from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that 45 percent of Americans in all age groups are enthusiastic about socializing via computer and mobile devices. Meanwhile, 48 percent are indifferent to Internet social networks, overwhelmed by gadgets or often avoiding Internet use altogether. Perhaps most surprising was the presence of a group that fell in between - the remaining 7 percent of the survey. These people, who had a median age of 29, are savvy about social networks and always carry mobile devices - and yet they feel conflicted about staying in constant contact. Pew called them "ambivalent networkers."

RGJ.com National News

When my son was living in England, it was always a chore for him to send me photos of his travels. He told me that if I wanted to see them sooner, I should just get a Facebook account. So I registered at Facebook for the sole purpose of seeing my son's photos. As a result I might have the lamest Facebook presence out there. It consists of a minimal amount of personal info and a picture of some tomatoes from my backyard. But then when I made my Facebook profile, I got a few friend requests, which I in time approved, but it leaves me in a quandary – when I accept a friend request, don't some responsibilities come with it? And if I don't accept a friend request, isn't that rude? As of now, I'm what I might call a "franger" – a friend who, due to minimal social contact, might as well be a stranger.

And Twitter is another thing. I made my first Tweet on August 26, 2007 and in those 592 days I've composed 47 updates – not exactly a tweeting frenzy. Originally I began twittering as a way to collaborate with a couple of like-minded teachers from the National Writing Project. It worked well at the time, but now we collaborate via our classroom work on Youth Voices, Skype, Teachers Teaching Teachers podcasts on the Ed Tech Talk webcast community, or via phone calls or Google chats, to name but a few.

So it comes as no surprise to me that people are dropping out of Facebook and Twitter. Online social networks tend to ebb and flow. I join Nings when I'm about to attend conferences or participate in some event like a reunion, but then virtually drop out of them after the conversation around that event wanes.

Our participation in online social networks change, just like our old-fashioned human relationships. Maybe I should update my profile....

UCET 2009 presentation

I recently presented at the Utah Coalition for Educational Technology conference, sharing my thoughts on how teachers and students can best present themselves online.

Endow newspapers to save them?

By endowing our most valued sources of news we would free them from the strictures of an obsolete business model and offer them a permanent place in society, like that of America’s colleges and universities. Endowments would transform newspapers into unshakable fixtures of American life, with greater stability and enhanced independence that would allow them to serve the public good more effectively.

Op-Ed Contributor - News You Can Endow - NYTimes.com

on commenting

Comments are currency. I learned this first from Liz Strauss. They are the ultimate in social proof, because if we’re all supposed to be about joining the conversation, and yet you aren’t getting a lot of back and forth in the media you’re making, it might be time to look at this a bit more. If comments matter to you, read on. Here are some thoughts to help improve your back and forth.

A Crash Course in Comments | chrisbrogan.com

Google Presentation vs. Powerpoint

A lot of people turn to PowerPoint when they have to do group presentations. Google's Docs has a presentation feature. I asked my students to compare the two applications. Here's a video about what they said.

Inquiry composition

I use Google News and Reader in my classroom. We let our inquiry guide our online composition. Here's a video I put together that explains my approach.

Obama in Chicago

A student of mine just happened to be in Chicago on November 4. She convinced her mom to take her to Grant Park, and here's what she had to say about it:

Yes, Chicago. I was there (coincidentally) on election day - November 4, 2008. This wasn't just any election in any city, though. This was THE election in THE city. It was the election that will forever make history. Obama was elected the first African-American president of the United States and I was there at Grant Park where he gave his acceptance speech. It was truly one of the most moving experiences of my life.

YES WE CAN: my experience in Grant Park on election day | Youth Voices

seeing information

Thinking a lot lately about multimodal literacies and how many times I've seen interesting people (like Edward Tufte's "Naploleon's March" featured above) combine data and narrative. The work of Tim Harrower in the '90s first brought my attention to infographics, but the form has been around a lot longer.

Ryan Greenberg shared his chart of Films by Ratings with me. In many ways it's easier to see the concept rather than reading it through traditional text story.

Then I came across Swivel who's mission is to "make data useful," and it helps me to see how information and images can be combined effectively. It seems like it's getting easier and more necessary to interpret information visually. And I'm thinking a lot about how I can bring this into my teaching.

print and online writing

I've been talking with my high school newspaper staff lately about the difference between print and online writing. We're doing a good job of the monthly newspaper and putting out weekly video shows and the occasional podcast. Jakob Nielson of AlertBox says more eloquently what I'd like my students to consider:

Print publications — from newspaper articles to marketing brochures — contain linear content that's often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use. In print, you can spice up linear narrative with anecdotes and individual examples that support a storytelling approach to exposition. On the Web, such content often feels like filler; it slows down users and stands in the way of their getting to the point.

Web content must be brief and get to the point quickly, because users are likely to be on a specific mission. In many cases, they've pulled up the page through search. Web users want actionable content; they don't want to fritter away their time on (otherwise enjoyable) stories that are tangential to their current goals.

Writing Style for Print vs. Web (Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox)

So I was intrigued by an editorial in my local newspaper earlier this week by a University of Utah communication professor about the future of newspapers. In the op-ed piece Kimberly Mangun spends the first half of the article discussing how groups like Nomad News are revolutionizing the way we gather and disseminate news, and the next part of the article outlining cutbacks in local newspapers. So by the end, I was a little surprised by her enthusiasm for the future of the print newspaper in its current form:

Newspapers, in one format or another, have been published in the United States for more than 300 years. They have weathered censorship, newsprint shortages, union battles, mergers and competition from "new media" - magazines, radio and television. But papers may be facing their biggest challenge yet: a triple whammy of rising newsprint costs, plunging advertising revenue and online journalism.

21st century journalism: The best of times and the worst of times - Salt Lake Tribune

Her conclusion? "Like the phoenix rising from the ashes, newspapers will emerge stronger and better than ever. But journalists and readers alike will need to take a collective deep breath and ride out the storm." With all due respect to the author (and to the print editor who chose to publish it), there's scant evidence in the piece to support her claim.

A lot of what is happening in information dissemination now is analogous to the rise of the wire services in the late 19th century– only now it's happening at the individual level. In effect, the feeds we construct in our news aggregators are our wire service. The only difference is that we don't have trustworthy, professional editors filtering content. That leaves us with the conundrum of information overload ... Enter the newsmaster.

... you and I are under a tsunami of information coming at us. It increases day by day and shows no signs of stopping. The number of interesting sources and blogs we like to follow increases daily and so the time required then to separate what is relevant to us from what is not. The newsmaster plays a vital role in this information economy. It saves you from having to go out and check all of the relevant news sources that publish news that may interest you. SHe acts as a filter

What Is Newsmastering And What Are Newsradars? RSS News Aggregation And Re-Publishing For Beginners - Robin Good's Latest News

Image from Flickr/sloanpix

GTA reflection

On September 24 I attended the Google Teacher Academy in Chicago. The agenda speaks to the scope of the experience. Of course there were a lot of things that were noteworthy, but here are some things that stand out now that I've reflected on the event.

As a teacher who still incorporates both digital tools and traditional language arts tools (like books, pens, and paper), I was intrigued by the search function of the Books project. For example, suppose I can't quite locate a quote from the book, 1984, by George Orwell; I remember that there was a part where the character Syme is predicting the imminent demise of books, but I can't find the quote when I need it. I do a quick book search, and within seconds I've got it:



Whoever thought up the idea for the Books project has definitely done Orwell proud.... There are a lot of noble digital endeavors devoted to the book these days, like Project Gutenberg and Shelfari to name a couple, but as of this writing no one does book search better than Google.

Another area of interest is Google Forms, which I've only been using for a little while. I'd like to know how other teachers are using them. Certainly Thomas Barrett is someone who's doing some amazing things with that application now.

Suggestions for future GTA's? I could have spent a lot more time learning about advanced searches, and also how I can turn better manage the wealth (glut?) of information that can appear in my Reader on a daily basis.

My dad in World War II, part three

My dad's unit goes to New Guinea on Christmas, 1943.

The Drill Bit

Although the "Drill, Baby, Drill" mantra first burst on to the scene on September 3 at the Republican National Convention, it seems to be gaining force lately. Wired Science is even sponsoring a "Drill, Baby, Drill" remix contest.

On September 8, I surveyed my 70 of my freshmen and AP English students about some of the election-year issues using Google Forms. When asked "Should the United States drill for oil in protected offshore waters?" 65% said no, 30% said yes, while 5% were undecided. It should be interesting to see if their opinions change as both sides try to steer the energy debate and my students research the issue.

My dad in World War II, part two

My dad ships out for Australia in the summer of 1943. Gen. Douglas MacArthur pays his unit a visit.

My dad in World War II, part one

My dad talks about his enlistment, basic training, and how he went from horse buyer to the First Cavalry in WWII.

Watch your language

When I first became aware of the Typo Eradication Advancement League, it warmed this English teacher's heart. Now it seems that even the war on inexact language is getting dangerous.

WAVY-TV reported that the brains behind the operation -- Jeff Deck of Somerville, Massachusetts, and his cohort Benjamin Herson of Virginia Beach -- admitted to their conspiracy and complicity to deface a historic marker because it contained a typographical error. Restitution and probation were ordered, and in addition the dynamic duo of grammarians with a purpose is banned for one year from national parks.

Typo Eradication Advancement League Stamped Out? - Associated Content

I'm not prudish about a lot of the errors I see, but sometimes I get a kick out of the many typos that jump out at me. Here's a photo from a realtor's listing in Red Lodge, Montana.



It may be the finest ranch in the county, but I'm not sure I'd like that view.

Stevie Nicks went to my school?

My students and I have been researching our school's history for a few years now. I've heard rumors (no pun intended) that Stevie Nicks (of Fleetwood Mac fame) lived in Salt Lake for a time and attended Judge Memorial, the high school where I teach. This morning I came across an interesting tidbit from an article that appears to have come from the Salt Lake Tribune, although I haven't found the original.

The world came to know Nicks as the whirling songstress whose dramatic lyrics about a Welsh witch named "Rhiannon" helped bring her to the eye of the hurricane that became Fleetwood Mac in the 1970s. Her Utah friends say that her icon status and stage antics can be directly traced to the one month she spent studying at Salt Lake City's Judge Memorial Catholic High School. For the record, Nicks attended eighth and ninth grades at Wasatch Junior High before a bad math grade prompted her parents to send her to Judge. "Because she had gone to a private school, we would get together after school and talk about our different classes," said Karen Thornhill, who remembers Nicks when she went by Stephanie Lynn Nicks and twirled the baton at junior-high football games. "I distinctly remember her waving these capes around, imitating the nuns who taught her classes."

Salt Lake Tribune 9-12-97

This is one rumor about Judge that's apparently true.

Peace in the goodness of time

Tonight was one of those nights when being a teacher is so rewarding.

Ross Chambless, a former student of mine, has put together an impressive traveling exhibit called "Ceremonies, A Tale of Sister Cities: Matsumoto and Salt Lake." Ross just finished teaching English in Japan for four years in Matsumoto, Salt Lake's sister city. In his spare time he did some work for NPR and started collecting oral histories from the citizens of Matsumoto, which is detailed on his Ceremonies Exhibit blog. Those histories became the basis of the traveling exhibit done in conjunction with the Center for Documentary Arts that's at the Salt Lake City downtown library until August 8. (Photo courtesy of Ross Chambless, http://tinyurl.com/55omyd)

August 6 is the anniversary of the atom bomb being dropped on Hiroshima. Takashi Hiraoka, mayor of Hiroshima from 1991-1999 addressed a rapt audience at a commemoration at the Salt Lake library this evening. I'm reading John Hersey's Hiroshima with my seniors and now see the event from yet another perspective. And as Mr. Hiraoka spoke, I thought of Roy Okamoto, a former custodian at our school, who lost everything when he was sent to the internment camps in Topaz, Utah. We've come a long way in our relations with the Japanese people. As I later listened to the Amarume Japanese boys and girls choir, I couldn't help thinking of another international peace project that I've been involved with for years, The Ulster Project.

As I finished my conversation with Ross, I was filled with hope about our world. Ross feels like the Sister Cities program helped diminish stereotypes Utahns had about Japanese people; and I feel like things are improving in Northern Ireland because of programs like the Ulster Project. Here's hoping more educational exchanges like these continue.

Finally, a lasting impression from the evening was the legacy of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who I've come to respect even more after I watched Why We Fight. He started the Sister Cities International Program, and his granddaughter, Mary Jean Eisenhower, incidentally is following in his footsteps as president of People to People International. I now think of Eisenhower as one of our greatest presidents. A seasoned military man, here was the tone of his last days in the Oval Office.

Before he left office in January 1961, for his farm in Gettysburg, he urged the necessity of maintaining an adequate military strength, but cautioned that vast, long-continued military expenditures could breed potential dangers to our way of life. He concluded with a prayer for peace "in the goodness of time."

Biography of Dwight D. Eisenhower

Visualizing presentations

I'm trying to pay more attention to design these days, both in my personal life and in my teaching/learning.



And when it comes to information designa recent infographic from XPLANE does a nice job of graphically representing the complex idea of how Obama has reinvented campaign finance by leveraging the power of online social networks. And this post by Ewan McIntosh is one of the best explanations of what makes for a good presentation.

When we experience a presentation we experience it in two ways - through the auditory nerves (ears) and the optical nerves (eyes). The brain is geared up to seeing above all else: 30% of the cortex is devoted to visual processing, only 8% for touch and 3% for hearing. So, biology tells us that our presentations must be, above all, visual.

edublogs

Another quote I like: "PowerPoint doesn't kill presentations, bullet points do."

Is the Internet making us stupid?

In the latest issue of the Atlantic, Nicholas Carr writes a thought-provoking piece about how the Internet may be changing the very way we think.

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. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

As a teacher who incorporates a number of Web 2.0 tools, the article gives me pause. Since I also taught a couple of decades without the Internet in my classroom, however, some of what he writes seems a bit too simplistic. My classes start with 10-15 minutes of sustained reading (of books) or writing (in journals); there is a collective calm that ensues as the students and I engage in what one of Carr's sources might call "rich mental connections" with traditional texts and tools. Sometimes that involves writing on paper what we've been learning from online sources.



To use Carr's own metaphor, isn't it possible to be a person who enjoys both jet skiing and scuba diving? Just because I now jet ski, does that mean I can no longer scuba dive? That's silly. What this all means to me as an educator is that I've got to be more explicit in my teaching about the "rules" that govern reading and writing in traditional vs. digital composition. We don't need to unplug (as he seems to imply), rather we need to become fluent in the various media.

ScribeFire tests

I'm always on the lookout for the easiest way to publish online, especially in my classroom. I've been using Flock because of the web snippet/clipboard capability. Now that Firefox has added the ScribeFire extension, I've been testing it.

I can't get the "Add an image" button to integrate with my Picasa gallery very easily.



I had to drag and drop the embed code into the source editing panel; when I pasted the code of this picture I took into the "Add an Image" popup window, I just got an unattractive little box like this one

It doesn't automatically format text that I pull from a source like Flock does, I had to manually make a block quote:

you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

And I could only get out of the block quote formatting by going to the source editing tab, not from the rich editing tab that most users would prefer using. Maybe I'm missing something, but ScribeFire needs a lot of work if I'm going to bring it into my classroom (or into my own online publishing habits).

Online offerings

The administration at my school is thinking about the future of our online offerings. I came across this today.

Enrollment in online classes last year reached the 1 million mark, growing 22 times the level seen in 2000, according to the North American Council for Online Learning. That's just the start, says a new paper by the Hoover Institute, a conservative think tank at Stanford University. Its authors predict that by 2019 half of courses in Grades 9 to 12 will be delivered online. The efficiency of online learning accounts for this growth. But there's little research assessing the quality of these programs, which some experts say don't have enough official oversight.

Virtual schools see strong growth, calls for more oversight | csmonitor.com

Obviously online course content delivery is coming soon, but "half" of all courses by 2019? Part of me says that's actually low. I think more than half will be offered a lot sooner.

Living Archives

I've been following the development of the Living Archives Project because it's an authentic way to teach writing and because for years my students have been doing some local ethnography as well. The blend of traditional and Web 2.0 tools that Dave Cormier and the rest of the people on Price Edward Island are using is impressive. So as teachers start to wind down this school year and begin to think about the next academic year, this is an inspirational place to start.


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Earth Hour and Climate Savers

Did you miss yesterday's Earth Hour?

On Saturday, March 29, 2008, Earth Hour invites people around the world to turn off their lights for one hour – from 8:00pm to 9:00pm in their local time zone.

Google

Climate Savers, mentioned in the Google news release, is advocating some painless, attainable ways to save energy.

The fight against global warming starts with you! Did you know that the average PC wastes nearly half the energy it consumes?

Climate Savers Computing - Individuals

Story crisis

Steve Jobs talks about a "story crisis," which should be refreshing for all writers. Sometimes we come across a really well written story and never think about the roadblocks that the story tellers encountered and what they did to overcome the 'crisis.' It's about being honest with yourself and listening to your heart.

"At Pixar when we were making Toy Story, there came a time when we were forced to admit that the story wasn't great. It just wasn't great. We stopped production for five months.... We paid them all to twiddle their thumbs while the team perfected the story into what became Toy Story. And if they hadn't had the courage to stop, there would have never been a Toy Story the way it is, and there probably would have never been a Pixar. "We called that the 'story crisis,' and we never expected to have another one. But you know what? There's been one on every film ... there always seems to come a moment where it's just not working, and it's so easy to fool yourself - to convince yourself that it is when you know in your heart that it isn't.

Steve Jobs speaks out - On dealing with roadblocks (10) - FORTUNE

More Brit kids prefer reading over TV

The Independent reports that fewer British 11-year-olds prefer watching TV over reading. A telling sentence in the story:

The report, published to coincide with World Book Day, concludes there can be "cautious optimism" over the survey's findings and says that government encouragement of more flexibility and creativity in the curriculum could have helped foster more of a love of reading.

Children turn off the TV and open a book instead - Education News, Education - Independent.co.uk

It would be interesting to see how the attitude of American children toward reading has changed over the same time period. Are we fostering a love of reading as a society?

Photo by Judge photog

Smart students

I came across this article about how smart Finnish teenagers are, based on a test adminstered by the OECD. Of course the causes are complex, but a couple of ideas struck me.

Finnish teenagers are among the smartest in the world. They earned some of the top scores by 15-year-old students who were tested in 57 countries. American teens finished among the world's C students even as U.S. educators piled on more homework, standards and rules.

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? - WSJ.com

The article interested me for a number of reasons, one of which is the fact that the English Department at my school is currently having discussions about what students should read next year. This part of the article speaks volumes about the Finnish students' success:

Finnish teachers pick books and customize lessons as they shape students to national standards. "In most countries, education feels like a car factory. In Finland, the teachers are the entrepreneurs," says Mr. Schleicher, of the Paris-based OECD, which began the international student test in 2000. One explanation for the Finns' success is their love of reading.

What Makes Finnish Kids So Smart? - WSJ.com

Another key idea comes out when a Finn student discusses her foreign exchange experience in an American school: "The rare essay question, she says, allowed very little space in which to write." The article doesn't oversimplify the differences in the two nation's education system, but I still couldn't help but notice that a curriculum that fosters reading and writing produces successful results.

Aritstotle and authenticity

A lot of the teachers I’ve been listening to lately have been distraught over plagiarism in their students’ writing. I try to sympathize, but I can’t relate. I’m not having those issues. When writing begins with inquiry, makes connections to the self’s place in the world, and sourcing is transparent, there doesn’t seem to be much of a problem.

At the same time I’ve been reading about Aristotle’s rhetorical triangle – the connections and interdependence of speaker, audience, subject; the appeals to logos, ethos, pathos; and the added elements of context and purpose. When we compose from that framework, plagiarism is an awfully alien concept.

Painting by Raffaello Sanzio from Wikimedia Commons and is a public domain image

Heart candy & literacy

Has anyone else noticed that heart candy just ain't what it used to be. While I was crunching on my Necco Sweathearts that my valentine gave to me this morning, I was a little puzzled by some of the messages on the candy, so I just had to snap a couple of photos as evidence. Since when is "and" an appropriate message to put on a candy heart?



And what does this say, "Lap Dog"? Does Necco need more proofreaders?



At any rate, one of my enduring memories of Valentine's Day present and past is opening up a box from my valentine and seeing a candy like the one below.

Seeing Through

This last week my students wrote an essay taking a position on whether television has had a positive effect on presidential elections. I came across this post by Roy Peter Clark from the Poynter Institute that speaks to this well. In it he cites Edward R. Murrow, Aldous Huxley, and Thomas Jefferson among others. It's amazing how timely these thoughts are as we are bombarded with stories about image and our current presidential candidates:

Here's Murrow: "A society of the wise does not need television. Democracy, I suggest, cannot do its work well without it. Supposing that freedom is more important than safety, then the tyranny of the wise is only less objectionable than the tyranny of the unwise. The choice we face is between a despotism of the ruthlessly ambitious, not of the wise, and of an intelligent democracy." In other words, citizens need to develop a form of critical literacy that allows them to encounter the political words and images on the television screen and not just see them, but see through them.

Poynter Online - Writing Tools

It's not television, per se, that's the problem. It's what we do with it ... or rather what we don't do with it, that we won't often take the time to be critical consumers. That's the same for technology in general. I'm trying not to be skeptical, but it looks as if tomorrow's Frontline (Growing Up Online) might be another doom and gloom look at new media tools. Hopefully there will be a range of opinions.

As in so many things, education is the answer.

Original image from "Wikimedia Commons" of Edward R. Murrow

Good Educational Blogging

Here's my take on what educational blogging can be, with examples from youthvoices.net

Bigger and Better?

Although there are some obvious exceptions, bigger doesn't always mean better.

The more I work with computers in the classroom and incorporate technology in my own life, the more I get concerned about my own consumption habits but also about our consumption as a society. Consider the trend toward bigger TV's:

According the National Research Defense Council as told to The Christian Science Monitor, by 2009, when half of all new TV sales are expected to be extended- or high-definition digital sets with big screens, TV energy use will reach about 70 billion kilowatt-hours per year nationwide—about 50 percent higher than at present.

Big TV = Big Electric Bill : Robin Raskin : Yahoo! Tech

After watching cars get bulkier up to the gas shortages and oil embargo of the 1970's, and then witnessing our collective amnesia as we again bought larger and larger personal vehicles, culminating in the tank-like Hummer, I'm concerned with the proliferation of computers that require more energy. As a teacher I'm pretty sure that there will be more computers in classrooms next year than there were last year. And I don't see that trend changing. But what are institutions and businesses doing about this increase in comsumption. Is there much talk of conservation where you work?

Kudos to Tufts University in the late-1990's for at least trying to address the issue as an institution:

The average desktop computer uses about 120 Watts (the monitor uses 75 Watts, and the CPU uses 45 Watts.) Laptops use considerably less, around 30 Watts total. 4,300 Tufts-owned computers X 0.12 kW X 250 workdays X 8 hours = The university uses 1,032,000 kWh per year to run all of Tufts computers just during business hours.

This amounts to: 1,032,000 kWh X 11 cents = $113,500 per year in electricity costs. Greenhouse gas emissions for this electricity amount to: 1,032,000 kWh X 1.45 lbs of CO2 per kWh / 2,000 = 748 tons of CO2 per year. 100,000 - 500,000 trees are needed to offset these yearly emissions of CO2! (A tree absorbs between 3-15 lbs of CO2 per year.)

TCI Computers

Tufts has made it a point to raise awareness of their institutional energy consumption. There should be more of that happening, even from an economic standpoint, let alone an enviornmental one.

So one thing on my list of New Year's resolutions is to become more aware on a personal level about Energy Star ratings and the data behind them, on a professional level as a classroom teacher to think more about when and how to best use the computers available (and when to shut them off), and to raise awareness of my school's consumption habits as a whole.

NCTE 2007

I'm doing a session at the National Council of Teachers of English in New York City on Sunday, 11/18. Here's a link to the presentation slides. and another link to additional resources mentioned at the presentation.

Since 1911, NCTE has worked to advance teaching, research, and student achievement in English language arts at all scholastic levels.

NCTE - about

notebooks & blogs, part 1

I'm not in a one-to-one computer classroom, so my students don't always have access to Web 2.0 tools. This quarter I've had my students do both the traditional writer's notebook (pen on paper) and blogging when we can. As I have them write their reflections on the two different media, I'm interested in what kind of differences they see. My commentary can be heard by clicking "writer's notebook reflections" on the audio player on the lefthand side of this page or on my GCast channel. Photo by Rosalie Sloan.

learning something new every day

It is nice to see someone be willing to end their show before it jumps the shark and begins losing its fans.

All blogs

I came across this on one of my student's posts today, so I asked him about it since I admit I've never heard the term "Jump the shark" before. This image and the accompanying article from Wikipedia enlightened me.

Evidently the phrase dates back to the '70s when The Fonz jumped a shark while waterskiing in an attempt to revive the show's ratings. Funny I'd never heard that before. I guess I would have been one of those viewers who had abandoned the show.

one-to-one computing

I've been using laptops in my classroom at least once a week this year. I think they've been useful for the educational blogging we've been doing. But I came across this article about how one district in New York is getting rid of their laptops.

“After seven years, there was literally no evidence it had any impact on student achievement — none,” said Mark Lawson, the school board president here in Liverpool, one of the first districts in New York State to experiment with putting technology directly into students’ hands. “The teachers were telling us when there’s a one-to-one relationship between the student and the laptop, the box gets in the way. It’s a distraction to the educational process.”

Seeing No Progress, Some Schools Drop Laptops - New York Times

It's always good to think about whether what we're doing in the classroom is actually helping our students learn. But upon closer examination, this reversal of the one-to-one computing trend may not be all that surprising. Here are a couple of reasons, (followed by excerpts from the same article cited above):

1. Whenever hardware is brought into the classroom without adequate training for the teachers, it flops.

Such disappointments are the latest example of how technology is often embraced by philanthropists and political leaders as a quick fix, only to leave teachers flummoxed about how best to integrate the new gadgets into curriculums.

2. Therefore, introducing the technology isn't going to increase standardized test scores, which unfortunately is the litmus test.

Yet school officials here and in several other places said laptops had been abused by students, did not fit into lesson plans, and showed little, if any, measurable effect on grades and test scores at a time of increased pressure to meet state standards.

The pressures are real and there's a lot of money involved, so school communities should proceed with caution. Later in the article math teachers said that they prefer pencil & paper, and graphing calculators because those are more efficient tools. That makes perfect sense.

Laptops work in my classroom because they allow students to read online (with Google Reader), conduct inquiry, and then comment on their reading in blog posts that are properly cited. That then initiates a conversation with others who might be interested in their inquiry.

For this type of learning, one-to-one computing isn't the best tool, it's the only tool.

Social Networking in the classroom

Teachers can introduce social networking and educational blogging into the classroom, but will our students ever value it?

“They’re using social networking sites like crazy, but they don’t necessarily think those have a place in the classroom,” said Gail Salaway, one of the primary authors and a fellow at ECAR.

Jobs, News and Views for All of Higher Education - Inside Higher Ed :: Students' 'Evolving' Use of Technology

It does give me pause. Part of me thinks it's a turf war of sorts. Some members of the milennial generation are possessive of their MySpace/Facebook territory. Once, when my students were talking about an adult's MySpace profile, some of them questioned whether adults had any place in that social network. So another part of me thinks that the thinking cited above comes from a limited view of social networking and its implications. Social networks already are proliferating in the adult world - by April 2007 there were already 10 million LinkedIn users.

In my opinion, not only to social networks have a place in today's classroom, they're soon to become commonplace.

Information Reputation

A lot of people have problems citing Wikipedia as a source for academic research. A UC Santa Cruz professor has developed software that flags questionable entries. The idea is that the source of the most reliable information on Wikipedia doesn't need to be edited. So if those trustworthy sources can be identified, then users would know if the information can be trusted:

"The idea is very simple," de Alfaro said. "If your contribution lasts, you gain reputation. If your contribution is reverted [to the previous version], your reputation falls."

UC Santa Cruz - Press Release

I don't know if this software will stick, but I think the idea has implications for educational blogging. For instance in the future more news will be user generated, so the question will be whether our information is trustworthy. One litmus test will be our information reputation. If one blogger has a history of only making social posts on MySpace and another has a history of posts filled with associative links to reliable sources, who will you trust?

If you haven't already, it's time to start thinking about the information trail you're leaving behind.