Month: September 2005

I spent my last day in New Hampshire yesterday working in the most beautiful New England town of Exeter. I worked with Rick Chretien in the basement of a former hotel, converted to office building, at least 100 years old, of not older. I so loved being in New Hampshire.

They too are exploring and employing open source, and are furthering my excitement about the possibilities. We must continue to ask that question, “Why are we being made to prepare your children for a dynamic, exciting, and very challenging future, with little or no funding for contemporary information and communication technology?” “Why?”

That said, open source is appealing, if for no other reason than there seems to be very little trade off. The software and operating system are both rich and robust. Rick has a staff of several technicians whose job it is to take business donated computers, strip out the unneeded components, and install Linux, and dozens of open source software, including productivity tools (Open Office), graphics (Gimp), and sound processing software (Audacity), and many others.

I also had a supreme treat as a young many walked up to me near the beginning of the workshop and introduced himself, “David Warlick? I’m Bob Sprankle.” It hadn’t occurred to me that Wells Maine might be so close to Exeter, New Hampshire. We had two great sessions, one on ethics in the new information environment, and the afternoon on emerging ICT tools.

Once again, I missed a golden podcasting opportunity, but I forgive myself, because I was very tired after a long but lovely week in that beautiful state. This afternoon, I fly to Texas, some of my favorite people in the world.

I also want to mention the beautiful banquet hall where I spoke to members of the New Hampshire ed tech association and ISTE affiliate, NHISTE. The hall was part of the St. Paul School, and I felt like Albus Dumbledore, addressing the congregation of Hogwarts. It was a great evening, and I got to share some new ideas and resources. Thanks New Hampshire.

One of many things that I’m not very good at is recognizing a wonderful podcasting opportunity. Yesterday, I taught two workshops at a staff development center on Concord, (pronounced con-cerd) New Hampshire. After the workshops and my re-packing ritual, Kathy Malsbenden, a co-director of the center took me on a tour of their thin-client lab.

It was a surprisingly clean and lean looking computer lab, compared to its surrounding, a century-old school building. The work stations were set against the walls, fairly large tower machine boxes ($25 each from government surplus) set lengthwise against the wall in front of flat panel displays and keyboards. She booted one of the machines, which immediately accessed a Linux network server, providing an impressive windows looking interface and an AMAZING array of open-source software. Notable was Open Office, a rich and worthy competitor of MS Office. I sure wish that I could run Open Office on my Mac without having to go into X11 interface (I just love to talk like that!).

When we went into the folder labeled Graphics Software, more than 25 applications showed up, including Gimp, a more than worthy and free competitor to Photoshop.

But I didn’t even have the presence of mind to take a picture. It could have been the fact that I’d just taught six hours of workshop or that my A.D.D. medication had long worn off. I don’t know. But I just didn’t see the significance of what I was being shown, until early this morning.

The thing is that I’ve not been a fan of thin-client, for the same reason that I haven’t gotten excited about handhelds as a less costly substitute for laptop computers. You see, I think that we are trying to answer the wrong question. Handhelds are amazingly powerful little machines, and they belong in the education environment. I’m sold on thin-client now in the configuration that I saw yesterday.

But the question we are trying to answer shouldn’t be, “How do we prepare children for the 21st century with pocket change?” The question is “Why are we being asked to prepare our children with pocket change?”

OK, I know that this country spends a LOT of money on education. But we are not spend enough money or attention on:

1. Teaching children to “read” information that is networked, written by almost anyone for almost any reason.
2. Teaching children to process numbers, when virtually all information is digital, and therefore, all information is made of numbers.
3. Communicate effectively, when a storm of overwhelming information can filter out all but the most compelling messages.
4. To adopt a fully ethical approach to how and why we use information.

Tonight, I will be delivering, for the 2nd time, an address called “Telling the New Story“. It’s about the stories that still drive our education system in a backward direction, instead of going forward into a future that is already around us, and what the new stories are, and how we tell them. I hope that it’s fun, and that we all walk away with a new drive to go out and talk to people about what and how our children are not learning.

I hope this is going to be a big 2 bucks worth.

Yesterday, I talked briefly (by my standards) about the statistics that use to float around indicating the scandalous amount of time our children’s spent watching TV. Like me, I suspect that a lot of us teachers decried this state of affairs ignominiously, owning up only to ourselves the number of childhood hours we spent in front of our TVs, as Doug Johnson admitted yesterday in his comments on the blog.

Frankly, I suspect that the benefits of my time in front of the tube, outweighed the harm, by a large margin. I was probably more aware of the historic, cultural, societal, physical, and ecological world around me, at an earlier age, than would have been possible for my parent’s generation. Plus, I got to grow up with Timmy and Lassie, Captain Kangaroo, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and the advent of Rock & Roll.

But the second statistic that I shared, that a house hold with a 300 channel cable or satellite service has access to 7,000 hours of multimedia content a day. My first reaction is that so much of it is bad. Yet that reaction furthers the points that I will be suggesting to my audiences this week.

1. Multimedia information is a pervasive part of our information environment, certainly outweighing print by a long shot in volume, compellingness, and vicinity (with more an more computer-based signage around us). It can not be ignored that an enormous part of accessing information today involves media literacy, not just the ability to decode text.
2. Who’s going to fill all of those channels? There is an infinite web of knowledge, ideas, and stories out there, waiting for the telling. The mechanics of writing a coherent paragraph is a mere foundation to the skills that will be basic to our children’s future. We must help learn to tell stories, and tell them compellingly using the entire range of media.

These should be an explicit part not only of what we teach, but how we teach — and our students must be held responsible for demonstrating these skills.

What do you think?

I thought I was going to get through the entire day with nothing to talk about. I could say a lot about programming, but that would be really boring. Saving myself from interminable tedium, I took a break and thumbed through my latest print issue of WIRED. Quickly reading through an article about the future (like, a few months) of television, I ran across some interesting statistics.

Do you remember, a few years back, when people were reporting about how much time kids spend watching TV and what a shame that was? One set I ran across in a quick search comes from an article by Gentile and Walsh, in Applied Development Psychology. They reported (2002) that American children, ages 2-17, watched TV an average of 24 hours per week (that’s 3.5 hours a day). The article in WIRED comes at our television environment from a different direction, stating that

A household with 300 cable or satellite channels has access to 7,000 hours of programming a day…(That’s 49,000 hours a week)

I got to thinking about these two statistics, and started wondering which is more significant to our efforts in preparing children for their future. Which has more baring on what and how we teach our children?

Comments?

Gentile, D.A., Walsh, D. A. (2002, January 28). A normative study of family media habits. Applied Developmental Psychology, 23, 157-178.

McHugh, Josh. “The Super Network.” WIRED Magazine September 2005: 107-109.

Yesterday, I attended one of the last school open house events of this life time. My son is entering his senior year, and we’ll have one more open house at the beginning of the second semester.

First of all, I am overwhelmed at the (dare I say) rigor, of his work load. He’s taking AP Calculus, Honors English, Wind Ensemble (performing college and professional grade music), and AP Statistics. On top of that, he continues to practice his instrument in order to become one of the best musicians in the world — which is what it will take to make a living at it.

But what impressed me even more was the help that he will have in accomplishing these high standard of learning, his teachers. In what I do, speaking to educators about technology, the future, and new literacies, I typically see them as learners struggling with brand new ideas that simultaneously excite and threaten them. I easily forget how accomplished teachers are, their vast knowledge, their incredible creativity, and the joy they project in their jobs.

English was never my favorite subject. We read books, and our teachers told us what to think about them. My son’s English teacher, talked about the books that he is and will be reading, and the writing assignments he gets. I asked her to share some examples of the topics they were asked to write about. She went through about five, but what set my head to spinning was that every assignment was tied in some logical and intriguing way to another assignment, which was tied to three others. This teacher’s curriculum is a web of ideas linked to the great thinkers and writers of our history, to the world around us right now, and to the emerging ideas of these 17 and 18 year old students.

And you know what? She never mentioned technology. Well, that’s not entirely true. I learned a lot last night about the creative ways that you can integrate paper into the learning experience. 😉