Month: May 2006

I’ll be doing three half-day workshops and a keynote at a literacy conference in Tucson today and tomorrow.  New literacy is an old shtick for me, though I haven’t done the workshops in quite a while.  In fact, this is the first time since the Web 2.0 thing has become so ingrained in my thinking.  I’m going to let the workshops flow, and I suspect that blogging, podcasting, aggregators, and even flickr will likely work their way in.

The bottom line, I think, is that literacy encompasses the skills necessary to answer questions, solve problems, and accomplish goals with information.  Literacy changes as information changes, and that has certainly happened in the last 15 years, and again in the last 2 years.

Information, when I was taught, was a commodity.  It was something that you purchased, or borrowed, used, and shared.  Words were for reading, pictures were for looking at, audio was for listening to, and video was for watching.

Today, because of personal computers and the Internet, information has become a raw material.  It is not merely for consuming, but information becomes building materials with which we can invent new answers, solutions, and accomplish, hitherto, unimaginable goals.  Just what we needed for a rapidly changing world.

New skills!

Please forgive the use of the word, hitherto.  I’m old.  Cut me some slack!

General Orders No.11, WASHINGTON, D.C., May 5, 1868:

The 30th day of May, 1868, is designated for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion, and whose bodies now lie in almost every city, village, and hamlet church-yard in the land.

With these words, General John A. Logan,  of the Grand Army of the Republic, proclaimed the first Decoration Day, later to become Memorial Day, a day on which we, in the U.S. honor those who have died in battle.  The official national holiday was proclaimed in 1971 by President Richard Nixon, in the National Holiday Act of 1971 (Public Law 93-363), which established a number Mondays as national holidays, creating for three-day weekends.  My son will be home from school, today, though my daughter works for six hours at her summer job.

I wish I could say that I learned and remembered all of this in my history classes, or even as a history teacher.  But, alas, there is no need.  There’s Google.  A quick request from my Google textbook, put me in contact with the US Embassy in Moscow, where I found a large number of hyperlinks to other resources about the history and observances of Memorial Day.

To what degree has my laptop become an extension of my brain, and by result, of my actions?  To what degree have we as people and as a culture become dependent on the great inter-network, in our daily lives?  I suspect that the extent is somewhere between substantial and indispensable — closer to indispensable.  Yet we continue to base our investments in classroom technologies on the evidence that it helps students learn curriculum that, in most cases, is older than the Internet.

Another document that came to my attention this weekend was Home Broadband Adoption 2006, from the PEW Internet & American Life Project (Horrigan).  According to the report, 60 million U.S. citizens had access to broadband Internet in their homes in 2005.  Today, it is up to 84 million home broadband users, an increase of 40%.  A significant amount of this increase came from new Internet users who skipped dialup Internet, and went straight into high-speed.

Of particular interest were the demographics.  For instance, of the age groupings, the increase in broadband was greatest for people over 65, with a 63% increase.  The next was the 18-29 age groups with an increase of 45%.  Among African Americans, the increase was a whopping 121%.  Today 31% of blacks and 41% of English speaking hispanics have broadband at home, compared to 42% of whites.

Many of the percentage increases came from sectors that were previously on the lower end of broadband usage, where modest increases showed high percentage gains.  One exception was a comparison between urban, suburban, and rural citizens.  The increases were virtual identical, with nearly 50% penetration in our cities, and only 25% penetrating in the rest of the country.

In my opinion, this points to a trend powered solely by a market-place, rather than a recognition that equitable access to information is in the national interest.  This is why, according to TelecomPaper, an independent publishing and research firm, the U.S. has fallen to 19th in overall broadband penetration worldwide.  We will likely be passed by China in subscribership sometime in 2006 and by Slovenia in penetration by early 2007 (China will Pass US in Broadband).

2¢ Worth.

“China will Pass US in Broadband Lines by Lat 2006….” WebSiteOptimization.com. 23 Jan 2006. Website Optimization. 29 May 2006 <http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0601/>.

Some very good friends of mine aren’t going to like this, but my enthusiastic support of Linux is taking something of a hit. I’ve said it before. It isn’t my Mac, which is always there, ready to do what every I want to push it to do. But I have to confess that the amount of time I have spent tweaking my Linux machines (one 8 year old Dell desktop and one six year old Sony laptop), is really hard to justify, with everything else I have going on. The experience of installing and uninstalling software is never the same, and the maze that is the file directory continues to baffle me.

Admittedly, I’m going at this with almost no previous knowledge of Linux and no subsequent formal training. I’m sure there are easier ways to do the things I’m trying to do. But isn’t the tipping point for Linux in classrooms, not needing a Penguin Guy looking over your shoulder.

To be fair, almost no classroom teachers are allowed to tinker with their PCs or Macs, to the level that I’m experimenting. Someone sets it up, and it runs reliably for that teacher (most of the time). Linux could be set up with the software the teacher needs, and the machine would run reliably (most of the time). But it isn’t painless yet. They level of Linux knowledge required is probably not would it would have been five years ago, or perhaps even one year ago. But there will be a learning slope to climb. Of course, most techies enjoy mountain climbing, when it comes to learning new technology.

Anyway, I’m sitting here waiting for Ubuntu to reinstall on my Dell, because it finally became clear that its hard disk was too small to run KDE. It rendered FTP useless, and many of my SQL files are enormous. I just love that kind’a talk 😉

The other day, I wrote a rather heavy-handed entry, implying that with the increasing transparency of our classroom walls, there is no need for curriculum. This could have caused some confusion, not only because we all define curriculum in different ways, but also because the impression may have been read that with such rich access to the world outside the classroom, who needs pedagogy.

This is not at all what I meant, and I apologize if you took my words to literally. I tend to howl at the moon. It’s the different between, say, a math teacher (I was a lousy math teacher) and a history teacher (now that was my calling). In math, the point is made most effectively and eloquently by presenting the facts clearly and precisely and letting the logic speak for itself. History, on the other hand, makes its case with thunder, terror, and glory. Good history teachers really would rather perform history.

Anyway, the point is this. Education, defined by it limits, required a curriculum that was packaged into products that could be easily used in the classroom. We used textbooks with scope and sequence, pacing guides, and a teacher’s guide with the answers.

Education, defined by it’s lack of limits, requires no such packaging. It’s based on experiences, tied to real-world, real-time information that spans the entire spectrum of media — crafted an facilitated by skilled teachers, who become more like tour guides than assembly-line workers.

Certainly, some things have to be taught, and they may even be taught with the help of packaged curriculum. I would prefer to see something more along the lines of the Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (See What’s Left for the Classroom), than a basel reader. But, I suspect that learning to read, write, add, subtract, count, and measure, will become much less the predominant vision of teaching and learning that it is today, once students and teachers are empowered to participate with a universe that conspires to reveal its truth.

Technology & Learning Magazine’s Editor and Chief, Susan McLester, has joined the T&L Blogerati with a piece about a virtual night club in San Francisco.

Techlearning blog: When the Virtual Overlaps With the Real:

The San Francisco Chronicle headline “Going Safely Into the Night” described a new virtual space where teenagers can go to dance, listen to music, meet new friends, chat, take photos and generally just hang out. Yes, it is another one of those social networking environments like MySpace currently under fire— but I’m not heading in the “right or wrong” direction here. Instead, I’m more interested in the phenomenon from the perspective of a “digital immigrant” adult. When I visited the site (www.pcdmusiclounge.com), I saw kid-created avatars (characters that represent them) lounging in groups or out on the dance floor. The chat was mostly wise-cracking, comments about favorite music, and other regular kid stuff. Though the scene was a familiar club setup and not exotic in any way, the environment was immersive like those of the more richly-rendered videogames. In the article, Doppelganger CEO Andrew Littlefield was quoted as saying, “You’re stuck at home. Your parents won’t let you out… You can text your friends or you can hang out in a glamorous nightclub.”

Here is the text of my comment to her blog entry:

…as for your blog, I certainly identify with it.  As fascinated as I am with video games and the video game experience, I personally don’t get it.  I lost interest after Pong.  My son goes off to college this year, and I am curious as to which game system he’ll be leaving behind 😉

All that said, from an older than 50 perspective, I suspect that this is just another instance where the kids will ask, “Why are you obsessing over this?”  I think that they see no divider at all between the virtual and the real.  It’s all their experience.  Separating the two has no meaning and serves no purpose.

My son walks out of his room and announces that he’s going to a movie and then out for fried chicken afterward.  “Who’s picking you up?”  “Alex!”  “Who’s going with you?”  An asundry of names of band-geek friends.  “When will you be back…”   (you know the drill.)

But it is clear and understood that he’s been with his friends already today, that plans have been made, changed, adapted, through on-going online conversations.  They operate in group mode, in a way that few people do, because the group is always around.  My son turns 18 this Summer, and he has not yet gotten his drivers license.  He simply hasn’t needed one, because he lives in group mode.  Enough of his friends are driving.

I suspect that we do obsess about it too much, because we’re from the old country, and speak with an accent.  It will always be that way.

A few days ago, I was scanning through some old presentations, looking for a picture that I remembered using years ago. I ran across a particular slide with the following text:

In the 20th Century, education was defined by its limits!

In the 21st century, education must be defined, not by its limits, but by its lack of limits.

The classroom that I taught in, in rural South Carolina, was green. It offered a 1942 map of the world, a broken black board, a bulletin board, thirty-five student desks, and windows that let in the light and circulated warm air out near the ceiling. Through textbooks and what I could draw on the corners of the chalk board, I taught world history, earth science, and basic mathematics to 12 and 13 year-olds — from inside that room. The desktop computer, as we know it, had not been invented.

In the 20th century, our image of the classroom and the stories that we told about teaching and learning were all defined by what could be done within the walls of our rooms and between the covers of our textbooks. Curriculum was a road map or blueprint that defined what and how we could teach our children about the world that they lived in — from inside of a box — a classroom. Education had to be symbolized. Teaching and learning had to be mapped out, sequenced, prescribed, and measured against arbitrary standards of performance — and scientific research helped us to determine which symbols, sequences, and prescriptions worked best.

The windows of the 21st century classroom let in more than light and they are no longer a distraction. We can now make our classrooms transparent, bring the world that our children are learning about into their classrooms, help them to learn by dialoging with their world, give each child a lens on which they can telescope and microscope their past, present, future, their place and time, their culture, and society. Within the context of a world-connected education, students will learn what humans do, they will learn to think and they will learn to communicate. No need for curriculum. Just guides and the tools to help them examine and interact with their world.

My point? I’m getting tired of hearing people continue to ask for the evidence that technology helps students learn. It doesn’t matter. We know — that good teachers help students learn. We need technology in every classroom and in every student and teacher’s hand, because it is the pen and paper of our time, and it is the lens through which we experience much of our world.

2¢ worth.