The Village Green

Okay, passwords are not really useless. Still, passwords are only as good as the security used to keep them private. In many cases, the weakest link isn’t the password, it is the people using the password. Great case in point about this story of the early days of computers and passwords. Note to self, don’t print out a list of all my passwords!

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/computer-password/

Okay, that may be a bit misleading, but I think the new iTunes U app from Apple for the iPad is probably going to be a bigger game-changer than text books in iBooks 2. While text books on the iPad challenge the publishing industry (at least for text books), iTunes U allows people to sign up for, and take courses, from anywhere. This is a serious challenge, not only to learning management systems like Blackboard, but to schools themselves. While online learning has been with us for a while (I even teach online) you still had to work through the individual school. Now you can negotiate directly with an individual teacher if you want. The good stuff will still be from larger institutions like MIT, but if you know something well enough, and can teach it effectively enough, you can set up your own little education coop. The potential is huge. Hang on, I think the future just got more interesting.

This post is written in black with a black highlighting to show solidarity for the effort to stop SOPA and PIPA. Highlighting the text may make it more legible. More information here: http://wordpress.org/news/2012/01/help-stop-sopa-pipa/

I’ve been ruminating on this idea for a long time, that ideas need a place for expression, but that not all ideas are treated with the same amount of opportunity. Here’s an illustration of what I mean. Erik Hersman presented a TED Talk about reporting crisis via texting. It is worth viewing the video, like nearly all TED Talk videos. The video actually inspired me to pen this blog post. This idea in the form of a video has been consumed over 160,000 times. TED provides a great platform for ideas that are worth spreading. My question, is how do we as educators provide a forum for our students?

Education isn’t just about ideas. If it were, all information could be conveyed through text alone. Simply reading something would be sufficient to transfer the content from one person to another. But we all know that communication is much more complicated. There is context to consider. There is background information that informs our understanding of content. There is the intent or bias of the author to consider, and much more. Education is very much about the student, the learner in the classroom. Each person, each student, in my classroom needs as much opportunity to express themselves as every other person. Which brings me back to the question of how to provide a forum?

Usually, in teacher circles, it seems like the ones who go first are the ones who get the credit, or attention, or forum for their ideas. I still give Kathy Schrock a great deal of respect and credit for being one of those early educator pioneers to see the potential for bringing the Internet into the classroom. More recently, Will Richardson‘s early work in blogging in the classroom provided him (and more importantly his students) with a forum for communicating ideas. The question remains though, how many current student bloggers, or teacher internauts, will ever be heard by anyone at all? Probably not many, if any at all, at least speaking statistically.

What about the classroom then? If it is a bit disingenuous to tell your students they should blog because they will gain a world-wide audience, what is to be done? For one, work to develop community. The expectation should be on connecting your students together first. Encourage community by encouraging participation. In the example of blogging, encourage commenting. Over time, this may grow to include the parent community as well. If it should grow beyond that to a world-wide audience, then wonderful. If not, there should be no disappointment that your classroom became more of a community of learners by engaging with each other in the discourse of ideas.

Anything else? Sure. Some classrooms have managed to branch out using video sharing sites like YouTube or SchoolTube. Not all, but again, think of the community you have first and build from there. Look into services like Edmodo or ePals. Try sharing documents online through Google Docs, or Evernote. The point for me isn’t which online tool you choose, the point is to choose to encourage community in your classroom by removing the reliance on dead tree technology and work with a more digital format. Who knows, you might learn something along the way too.

Do you have other ideas about providing a forum for ideas in your classroom? If so, I’d love for you to leave a comment so others may benefit from your experience. Time to spread your ideas.

SOPA, Stop Online Piracy Act, reads more like a land-grab than a benefit, makes the mistake of assuming that the content is the Internet. It is more accurate to understand the Internet as the collected activity of all the users of the Internet. We are the Internet. We don’t need legislation that is unenforceable and does nothing to actually protect the Internet and our access to it. I disagree with Vinton Cerf, I believe the Internet (access to each other) is a right. SOPA seeks to limit that access. SOPA is a bad idea, and we should do what we can to defeat it.

Moore’s Law, a description of the progress of technology (computing power gets faster or cheaper over time) apparently has a physical limit. IBM worked from the ground up to create a memory bit out of 12 atoms. Any smaller and quantum physics pops up its ghostly head. Current memory bits are as small as about a million atoms, so we still have a way to go, but Moore’s Law seems to have an end in site, at least as far as memory bits go.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16543497