Month: April 2006

I spoke, yesterday, at the TechForum conference in Chicago. You probably know that already, since I blogged the keynote by Hall Davidson. As an additional note, it is evidence of blogging’s conversational quality, that Ewan Mcintosh posted a comment, with links to a web site where people can explore using The SIMS as a foreign language strategy, a concept that I mentioned in that blog entry. Too cool!

During one of the breaks, I was visiting the exhibitors and I ran across one that I would normally glance over. They sold projectors and presentation carts, and since I don’t have, nor support a classroom, I have little interest. But there was no one there at the moment, and to be polite, I asked the young man what was “Big”. He pointed me to a computer with a piece of software running….

Now I work a good deal in distance learning rooms where they have these little touch sensitive displays that allow you to control various audio/visual devices, the projectors and what’s projecting through them, volume, etc. They are usually pretty clunky and they’re all different, so I have to figure out each one — and I usually don’t! 😉

The software that this company representative was showing me was the same sort of thing, only it ran on a teacher’s computer, and it controlled all of the audio visuals of the classroom. Now this is assuming that the classroom as a DVD, VCR, ceiling-mounted projector, wall-mounted speakers, you name it — and folks, THIS IS EXACTLY THE KIND OF CLASSROOM OUR CHILDREN DESERVE TO BE LEARNING IN. Isn’t it?

But the image that came to me as I was considering the implimentation of such a tool was the the computer just got a lot bigger, not smaller. The classroom just became a computer. I sit, now, at my laptop and have access to video, audio, text, a global digital library, tools to process and add value to the content that I have. I have an information/learning engine under my finger tips. Shouldn’t we be thinking of our classrooms in exactly the same way, as information/learning engines where students are learning the new information/literacy skills from the new information environment.

My apologies for forgetting the name of the company, but I’ve written to Judy Salpeter, and when she tells me who the vendor was, I’ll add it here.

Way bigger than 2¢!!!

I’m at the SRTTC conference in Greenville, North Carolina, the home of East Carolina University. I attended this very fine school in the 1970’s when it was known as the biggest party school in America — not that that has any pertinence to any thing. My administrators presentation on Web 2.0 yesterday was followed by some very good sessions about data driven decision making, surveillance cameras in schools, school safety — the last two being pretty depressing, though important. I’ll probably share more on that later, but for now…

As I was sitting with my wireless connected laptop out in the audience, I got an e-mail from my hosting company saying that they were getting ready to shut off my site. Citation Machine (being the end of the semester) was pushing right at double the CPU load that they allow for their customers. I wrote back immediately pleading for patience, and describing what I had done to share the load across two servers, and that it would take a few hours before the traffic gets separated.

The folks a Dreamhost, my hosting company, know what the service is about, and are going to keep it running for the time being — unless it starts crashing other customer sites. I must say that they have been heroically helpful.

At 3:00 AM, this morning, I woke up with a brainstorm, lightening and everything. I figured out a way to cut down, dramatically on the number of page loads. Citation Machine now remembers the last type of information source that you cited and puts that form back up. this way, if students are doing all of their citations for the bibliography, and they are citing lots of books, or lots of articles, then they do not have to click to reload the form each time. That should be a lot of reloads that will not need to happen and, hopefully, less CPU load. Keep your fingers crossed.

I also figured out a way to offer easier to use multiple author forms. I’ve implemented it for Books in MLA, but did not have time to do the same for APA and for other citations. That took a long time, and I do have to prepare for today’s presentations.

Just thought I’d say something, and this also gives me something to post today, as I demonstrate Blogging to Eastern North Carolina educators.

2¢ Worth

I think that if curiosity, an intrinsic need to communicate, and future orientation are sources of energy that we can depend on to power flat classroom learning engines, then to some degree, the fuel that powers that energy is heritage. I mean this in the broadest terms possible, not merely the historical and cultural foundations of our lives, but also our environmental, economic, and media experiences.

It’s possible that a better term for this is context, and I often use the term context to structure learning objectives. However, context is a container, and I’m looking for fuel, a spring board, and heritage makes more sense. Simply said, the fuel comes from the time in which we live, in relation to past times; our geographic location and how it influences us; who we live with locally and globally and how we live with them; and a lot of “why!”

Millennials have something of a disadvantage, compared to my generation. The baby boomers were perhaps the most heritage grounded generation ever, because we grew up with Television. This is especially true of folks who are at least in their 50s. Our culture suddenly had a rich new way to broadcast information, and a sudden desperate need for information to express. We also had centuries of stories, both fact and fiction, documentary and literary, to be converted into sound and motion, to be shared with the developed world. I suspect that I saw more true pictures of my world, my time, my culture, my heritage, than any previous generation in history, and I also believe that this heritage provided me with enormous fuel to power my sometimes overactive imagination.

I could be wrong, but I believe that my children have not seen so much of their world. Their experience has revolved more around the fantasies of their video games or the local and narrow concerns of their IM communities. There’s only so much that you can say about The Battle of Gettysburg, The Third Reich, The invention of the Steam Engine, Napoleon, etc. and there are only so many ways that we can portray The Taming of the Shrew (Ten Things I Hate about You).

The stories are not dead. They remain valuable and even entertaining. But to drill into this fuel, we need to think more about the perpetual engine of learning, and engine that generates fuel through the energy of its own action. Use students curiosity and intrinsic need to communicate to inspire interest in history, science, literature, and health. Rather than playing a movie for the class about the age of exploration, ask teams of students to find, select, and mix a variety of digital content together into their own stories. Ask students to present their stories, and respond and discuss their work and their insights. In other words, use curiosity and communication to turn learning into a conversation. Conversations are powerhouses of energy that can drive learning in a flat classroom.

Since I put my last Larry response out as a blog entry, I’ll give equal coverage to this one. You can read the entire conversation at First the Bad News and A Response for La Larry of 52. At any rate, we are all on the same side:

Larry,

Thanks again for the continuing conversation. I have suspected all along that we are very much on the same vein with education. I was honestly reluctant to submit that post, because I did believe that although we were speaking from opposite sides of the fence, we are probably sitting fairly close together.

I do believe that testing is important and that it is essential that we assure that all children know how to read, perform math, and write. I think, also, that there are other levels of learning that we need to assure, that can not be measured by standardized tests. We need to start having confidence again in our teachers to be able to teach and evaluate learning in these higher order competencies.

But the bottom line measure happens ten, twenty, and thirty years from now. Will the children who are in our classrooms now, be economically viable and personally successful in their adulthood, and able to support us oldsters as we have retired? That’s the question and that’s the goal. I believe that at this point, we need to be rewriting our curriculums with an unpredictable future in mind, figure out how to teach that curriculum, and then figure out how to measure its learning.

Again, I honestly thank you for this conversation. As you indicate, there is probably very little that either of us have said that both of us do not believe.

Joseph Poletti, my good friend, and Ed Tech Director in beautiful and historic Carteret County, wrote a wonderful blog entry this morning in Haulin’ ‘Net 2006. He talks about content filters and the classroom and who controls the content. This is a very good read and very well expressed.

• Keeping Genies in Bottles