Month: April 2007

I’ve spent a good number of hours lately wandering around in Second Life (SL).  For those of you who may not know, SL is a 3D virtual space where people can come, represent themselves with Avatars (kinda like a pupet), interact, build, do business, and have fun — in just about any way that you can imagine, and probably ways that I couldn’t imagine.  Some spaces, or islands have been purchased and dedicated to educational applications, and educators have started populating these islands — like crazy. 

I visited again this morning, and am sure that there are buildings there that weren’t there yesterday — big ones.  I must admit a real sense of space there, and I’ve already made some friends, most of whom I have no idea who they are in RL (that’s real life).  I did meet one guy (I guess) who admitted to being a principal in Vermont.  He wouldn’t share his name, however, for fear of my thinking that all principals in Vermont have nothing better to do than wonder around, zombie like, in Second Life. 

This is certainly not true, and no-one’s a zombie here.  We all knocking around, kicking the tires, pushing the envelope on possibilities of using this as a learning space.  I’ve learned to walk — fairly smoothly.  I can even navigate spiral stairs, a feat that would have been impossible only a few days ago.  I get a special pleasure from flying.  The sound of the air rushing by your ears (out of the computer’s speakers) is invigorating, and I can now find my way from the ISTE center to my home at about 200 feet above the ground.  I just turn left, take a right at the volcano, and then only a few more blocks.

The real pleasure (and instructional potential in my opinion) is the building.  There are a lot of buildings here, and everyone seems interested in keeping to a contemporary style of straight lines and lots of glass (makes me feel like a voyeur sometimes).  But what if we could have a place to really open things up, with caves where students could add cave drawings, neolithic villages, bronze-age cities, etc. — a continent, maybe where different sections are devoted to stuff from specific millennia — most of it built by learners. 

Science is wide open as well.  I found, at one point, a giant paramecium, floating above a lagoon.  I tried to find it again this morning, but without success.  So students making 3D single-celled organisms to demonstrate their knowledge of those plasm things would likely be a thrill.  But let’s take this up to Second Life 2.0 (sorry).  What if the teacher could define certain behaviors of an environment, setting laws of nature, so to speak.  And then ask students to invent organisms that interact and flourish in that environment, working within an ecosystem?

None of this is new, as many of you know.  Kids have been building worlds for more than a decade in MUDs and MOOs, and computer scientists have been creating ecosystems where organisms of programming code were designed to hunt, eat, and thrive.  What I find interesting is the potential to create such rich constructivist learning environments and make them this accessible to young (and old) learners.

More later!  It’s time to get to work — in RL!

Yesterday morning, I was working in my office, with my headphones on, and suddenly heard this loud echo’y crackle.  I pulled the phones off, and continued to listen, and heard only Brenda moving around upstairs.  Nothing there to indicate such a noise, but I continued working.  A minute later, she came down and asked, “Want to go see?”

The wind was blowing pretty ferociously.  The forecast had told us to expect high winds.  We have mostly tall pine trees in the back yard and they were blowing back and forth like blades of grass.  It’s OK!  They’re built for it. 

Oak trees, on the other hand, are not.  I paced it out — 90 feet, falling from the middle of our neighbor’s yard to the middle of ours.  Fortunately, it only took out one other tree, a Maple, on its way down.  It will take some equipment being brought down to our yards.  I doubt that the tree could be cut up into sizes small enough to be carried by one person, and the crater-sized hole left from the root system will need to be filled in.

James O’Hagan, over at 1 Laptop : 1 Student found a videoed (Google Video) presentation about the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) program from MIT.  It’s more of the technical side of the machine.  Click over to his blog for a view of the video.

1 Laptop : 1 Student:

Google recently hosted a tech talk at Google and I ran across this just by luck while looking up information on API. This looks like the meat and potatoes of the XO laptop created by OLPC. This is a fantastic tech side overview of the program and what the focus of technology in education should be… that is LEARNING! That is made very clear in the first 5 minutes of this presentation.

I’m sitting in JFK airport, just landed here, from Orlando.  Next I’ll hop on another flight for Raleigh.  I know!  I’m sure that somewhere, at some level, it makes sense.  I’ve wanted to try Jet Blue for a while, and it’s all true.  The seats where more comfortable, with more room, and each seat had a TV display, which played TV.  I mean it, Fox, NBC, CBS, History, at least five sports channels, and three pay movies ($5 with a card swipe there at the seat).  That was nice.  But it was TV.  I watched an old episode of The West Wing on my computer instead.  Here in the airport, Jet Blue does provide free WiFi.

Another slight problem was my security rating.  SSSS!  I don’t know what that means, but it raised some eye brows.  I was checked twice in Orlando, and then had to be patted down again here in New York.  Very weird.  It’s my first time with Jet Blue, but they assured me that that wasn’t it.  It could be that my neighbor is a pilot.  Or it could be my signing of an antiwar petition has finally caught up with me.  It was 1971.

It was a good conference yesterday!  The turnout was small, but the audience was excellent.  It was part technology teachers, part librarians, and part tech administrators.  I got a lot of URLs to check out when I get back to Raleigh, many of them being some rather interesting Google Maps and Google Earth hacks.  The keynote when well.  I think I was in the zone.  Then I participated in a panel discussion with Dan Schmit, from the University of Nebraska, and Ginny Jewell, Director of Technology Integration with Clarke County Schools in Georgia.  The panel was about emerging technologies, and they have, in the past, given each speaker about fifteen minutes to present their ideas about what’s coming.  They did it differently yesterday, identifying three themes and asking each of us to spend five minutes sharing our opinions and examples.  The themes were publishing technologies, collaboration technologies, and video games and simulations.

Live Blogged

I’m watching a very interesting thing.  At each TechForum, three or four of the sponsoring companies have about an hour to pitch their products.  In the past, they have each had a certain amount of time to present.  Some are very good presenters, and others are not.   Atamic Learning, Quizdom, and Net-Treker are doing something new.  Rather than each taking their turn, they have organized a much more integrated way to present their products, through surveies, working software, and looking up content.  After all, they don’t compete with each other, except for dollars.  But we know that it takes a mosaic of tools and activities to prepare children for an information-drive, technology-rich world.

I was sitting in the San Antonio airport with a real hankerin’ to go over and buy me a coonskin cap.  I was tired.  My talk started at 7:00AM in the morning.  Only librarians could be so awake and alert at 7:00, and so very gracious and hospitable.  I’d been awake since 1:30 because I was presenting the Redefining Literacy story at a breakfast, sponsored by Linworth, my publisher for Redefining Literacy and Thompson Gale at a great conference, TLA (Texas Library Association conference).  I finished speaking at 8:00 had some breakfast with the folks from Linworth and Thompson-Gale, and then off to the airport, on my way to Orlando and TechForum (hitchhikr).

There was a reason for being up at 1:30.  The topic for the presentation was the same (the nature of information has changed, and so, the basic skills that we consider literacy have also changed, or expanded).  However, the presentation is entirely different.  It’s pretty significantly updated with Web 2.0 stuff, some Wikipedia bashing (for the sake of realizing a need for new basic thinking skills),  a little flat classroom,  new stories, and some new interactivity.  It seemed to go well, but I’ll be rearranging slides once more before I do it again.

The high-point of the day was having dinner with David Jakes at this Italian restaurant that started with an “M” and ended with an “O”.  The food was great, but the best part was listening to David.  Having been up for 17 hours already, I didn’t talk very much.  But so many things that he said clicked.  The main impression that I remember was that Jakes gets communication.  That to teach, you have to approach an issue from all directions, and then push it up against all pressure points — text, sound, images, video.  Knowledge is a key, and the tumblers of the learners mind are nuanced.  It takes many grooves that are precisely machined, to align ideas into knowledge. 

We have to keep being reminded of this!

2¢ Worth!

Kurt Vonnegut, Novelist Who Caught the Imagination of His Age, Is Dead at 84 – New York Times:

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

When I was in college, and you ran across someone sitting cross-legged in a public place, reading a book, it was either A Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinlein, or anything by Kurt Vonnegut.   He taught us to laugh at what we saw that was sad, and to realize that what we laughed at, was often because of the sadness in it.

So let’s enjoy a laugh, because the world is a much less interesting place without him!

My pennies are covered for Kurt Vonnegut!

Am I somewhere over the rainbow

I slept late this morning, especially considering that I was leaving early for the airport, off to the Texas Library Association Conference in San Antonio.  It’s been so nice to be home for a week and watch the Azaleas bloom, and the temperatures range from the 70s to sub-freezing — gez.

I got up and wrote a quick blog entry about a conversation I had with a friend on the Raleigh Greenway yesterday.  She works for a highly respected professional development organization, here in North Carolina.  She talked about how they teach teachers to collaborate — so I asked her whether they used any Web 2.0 applications in their workshops.  She said that only half of the teachers they work with can even attach a file to an e-mail message.  No Web 2.0!

I set about whining over my blog about this, and caught myself just before hitting the submit button — because I don’t believe it.  I do not believe that most teachers are too far behind to start learning new tools.  They’re smart, resourceful, dedicated, and they are professional learners. 

I was flabergasted that a search for ruby slippers on flickr’s creative commons search page revealed 26 pictures.

I whined about recently being accused of living in an echo chamber, “..jet setting from technology conference to technology conference..” and I asked myself, “Is there much distance between the emerald city that I talk about, and the Kansas where teachers live?”

My answer?  There isn’t much distance at all.  It’s just a matter of looking down at the ruby slippers of learning that every teacher wears, clicking them together, and believing.  There is a very real wall between the classrooms of today, and the classrooms that our children deserve, but it’s a very thin wall.  It’s a matter of believing — making people believe.

Several days ago, the U.S. Department of Education published to Congress, the results of a recent study on the effects of computer software on reading and math test scores.  The report said…

– Report to Congress:

Test scores were not significantly higher in classrooms using the reading and mathematics software products than those in control classrooms. In each of the four groups of products-reading in first grade and in fourth grade, mathematics in sixth grade, and high school algebra-the evaluation found no significant differences in student achievement between the classrooms that used the technology products and classrooms that did not.

Many respected educators have already commented about this study, suggesting flaws in its design (read eSchoolNews for a fairly in depth report).  The designers of the study maintain that it, “..was a very well-done study, there are no flaws in it..”

I want to broaden the conversation a bit and post a survey question about scientific research in general.  Think back to those teachers who truly influenced your life, who’s teaching is actually a part of who you are and what you do now.  Think about what happened in those classrooms that influenced you so deeply and share with us the percentage of it that might have been measured with research, and what percentage could not be effectively measured.

    100% measurable – 0% not measurable
    75% measurable – 25% not measurable
    50% measurable – 50% not measurable
    25% measurable – 75% not measurable
    0% measurable – 100% not measurable

Now these surveys are not meant to be scientific.  They are, instead, meant to generate some conversation about teaching and learning in this time of rapid change.  So please do comment. 

What do you think?