Bookmarking Old School January 31, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Tools.add a comment
Sticking with a sort of retro theme, here is a new tool called Instapaper. Not to be confused with ePaper, Instapaper is an online tool that lets you save web pages like you would bookmarks. It doesn’t share the items, nor does it connect you to a community of instapaperers. It just lets you collect pages for later review.
How it works
- You find something you want to read, but you don’t have time now. You click
.
- When you have time to read, you come here on your computer or phone and get whatever you wanted to read.
Teach an Old Dog January 31, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Opinion.add a comment
Pete Reilly, on Ed Tech Journeys, explores the preconception many of us (myself included) that older teachers are less likely to integrate technology into their teaching practices. Turns out that veteran teachers are actually more likely to say that technology has changed the way they teach. This reminds me of two teachers I met my first year of teaching.
One of them actually taught my cousin (who is older than I am) when he was in first grade. She was a wonderful teacher who spent time learning about this new computer thing even though she was going to retire in a few years.
The other teacher, who retired about the same time and had about the same experience, did not want to use the computer and insisted that we were wasting our time and resources with something this expensive that could be better taught in the workforce in about two weeks. She had a point actually. Teaching ‘computer’ was and still is short-sided. Leveraging technology to teach and learn is not.
http://preilly.wordpress.com/2008/01/27/fact-or-fiction-are-older-teachers-slow-to-adopt-technology/
Netscape Is Dead! Long Live Netscape… er Firefox! January 31, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in History.add a comment
In case you hadn’t heard yet, the Netscape browser will officially pass away February 1, 2008. I remember it well, and even remember the earlier Mosaic browser. While this momentous event could provide the opportunity to wax nostalgic for the ‘good old days’ of Gopher or Archie, lets not forget that good code never dies, it just gets forked. In other words, check under the hood of Firefox, which apparently as many as 30% of you are using, and you’ll find more than a little Netscape under the hood. Any way, in honor of the passing of Netscape, let’s all roll our browsers back to gray time, when bookmarks were precious, and to ability to write html code made it seem like the world could be your audience.
http://blog.wired.com/monkeybites/2008/01/netscape-the-br.html
The Sky Is Falling January 31, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos.add a comment
I’m sure it’s just a coincidence…. Right?
- Yahoo News: AT&T data network fails
- Wired Blog Network: Fiber Optic Cable Cuts Isolate Millions From Internet
Free Knowledge January 26, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos, Fair Use, Opinion.add a comment
One of the issues I advocate for in this blog is free access to information. I’m not advocating that educators disregard copyright laws, but I do believe that those laws currently run counter to the original intent of the founding fathers and framers of the US Constitution. Virtually limitless protection of access to and use of information to the extent now codified is limiting creativity and innovation, not encouraging it.
Steve Borsch (Connecting the Dots) expresses some of what I’m trying to say in a much clearer way than I can. In his post ‘What if all human knowledge was free and accessible?’ he draws a parallel between the current trend of “Internet-centric knowledge repositories” and the distribution of food. What was once complicated and difficult has become (in the case of food) simple. That simplicity allows us to focus on something more important.
NOW imagine a world where “content and knowledge calories” are cheap and you can access baseline knowledge for some given subject or topic while having easy, shrink-wrapped-like access to the high value knowledge, presented in an easy to use and learn way.
I’m not completely sold on the idea that information and calories provide us with a good analogy (at one point Steve points out how we’re all getting fat — what does that look like for information?) but I do agree that Web 2.0 trends are simplifying access and use of information. Mashups and widgets are good examples of early Web 2.0 end-user tool building. I doubt that the person who first started using a wheel envisioned our global system of roads and rails for transportation.
Recognize that the Internet is making the inefficient, efficient and that’s the primary reason an initiative like an open education resource vision will get traction. Supply chains, processes, methods, collaboration, communication and a multitude of other key areas are being poked-n-prodded with new startups or approaches as people try to figure out how to leverage the Internet to get rid of the inefficient and allow us all to jump to the next level of creativity, innovation and human cognition.
What will be the end result of “Internet-centric” tools of today? What are the implications for the classroom?
We are on the cusp of a global revolution in teaching and learning. Educators worldwide are developing a vast pool of educational resources on the Internet, open and free for all to use. These educators are creating a world where each and every person on earth can access and contribute to the sum of all human knowledge. They are also planting the seeds of a new pedagogy where educators and learners create, shape and evolve knowledge together, deepening their skills and understanding as they go.
Educating the world’s children is the right thing to do and is key to enabling and assisting them to achieve self sustaining status. But it also ensures that we have a hope the world’s knowledge will achieve equilibrium and thus higher standards of living, creativity and innovation will emerge everywhere.
Connecting the Dots: What if all human knowledge was free and accessible?
Blogged with Flock
The Art of Interviewing January 26, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos.add a comment
Excellent post on “I’d Rather Be Writing” about 10 tips for interviewing. While the focus is on podcasting, these tips can be used for any sort of classroom communication such as school news, and digital story telling.
1. Do research beforehand.
2. Ask questions based on the interviewee’s responses.
3. Find people who have something to say.
4. Pick topics you’re interested in learning about.
5. Don’t be afraid to ask tough questions.
6. Let the interviewee speak most of the time.
7. Give the interviewee 10 questions to prepare, but don’t limit yourself to those questions, nor the order.
8. Avoid commenting on their answers.
9. If interviewing in person, don’t let the interviewee hold the microphone.
10. Keep everything informal.
The Art of Interviewing — 10 Tips for Perfecting the Most Important Element of Podcasting
Blogged with Flock
Twittering? January 26, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Opinion, Tools.add a comment
I still think there can be too much connectedness, and I’m not sold on Twitter, but Vicki Davis (Cool Cat Teacher) has posted how she uses Twitter, and also how to Twitter effectively. If you are curious, or just want to start tweeting, check out her post.
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/2008/01/twitter-tips-from-1-tweeterboarder-uh.html
Blogged with Flock
Necessary Ingredients Part 4 - Identity January 22, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Opinion.add a comment
Successful technology in a networked environment, is highly dependent on the identity of the individual users. Identity is difficult to establish when the computer doesn’t know who you are, only what you click.
Authenticity is also connected to identity. Trust is a measure of how well you know someone.Online, OpenID is one online effort to help establish identity. Chris Harris, on Digital Reshift, posted a short piece on OpenID, what it is, and a few examples of how it is used. If OpenID is a new concept for you, head on over to Digital Reshift and find out more.
http://www.schoollibraryjournal.com/blog/840000284/post/1150020515.html?nid=3367
Exams 2.0 January 21, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos.add a comment
Clarence Fisher on his Remote Access blog has posted some interesting characteristics of what a evaluation might look like for a classroom 2.0 school. He makes a great point about how much attention everyone has been giving to teaching 2.0 and not so much to evaluations 2.0. Below is a selection of ideas from the post:
- posting the exams online and letting the kids work things out over a few days
- letting students gather information from any source: library books, textbooks, their personal learning network
- the exams would include both knowledge and skills components for each subject area
- exams that are multi disciplinary and problem based or focused
- students may be required to post something online or use a tool such as ustream and feedback might be collected from various sources
- this feedback might offer the students an opportunity to revise and improve the work they have completed before calling something a “final draft”
- the students themselves might be involved in designing the assessments, giving them an opportunity to have input regarding what they feel are the big issues and important learnings they have worked with so far in the school year
My personal favorite is the last one. I think there is a lot to be learned by having the students design the assessments. You have to know a lot about a specific topic to know what is important enough to assess. To this list I might add group work. Evaluations can be made for the team and the contributions of individual members. What would you do if you could redesign assessments from the ground up in your classroom?
http://remoteaccess.typepad.com/remote_access/2008/01/exams-20-1.html
Google Generation January 19, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Data, Opinion.add a comment
Ars Technica has posted a review of a study by the British Library and the Joint Information Systems Committee that provides some interesting insights into the habits of kids born since 1993. Here is an excerpt:
So what’s true about the Google generation?
- They like to cut-and-paste. ”There is a lot of anecdotal evidence and plagiarism is a serious issue.”
- They prefer visual information over text. “But text is still important… For library interfaces, there is evidence that multimedia can quickly lose its appeal, providing short-term novelty.”
- They multitask all the time. ”It is likely that being exposed to online media early in life may help to develop good parallel processing skills.”
Not surprising to me is the observation that young students are not experts at searching, especially when it comes to choosing good search terms. Vocabulary, and life experience, play a role in knowing what terms to use when searching. Both of those qualities are in short supply for the youngest students. I can remember creating my own chart of words and how they were related to each other at a very young age. I did this for my own information, to help in constructing my own world view. I knew then that words played a big part in how I understood and interacted with the world. I’m not confident that many young people would see any benefit to constructing their own diagram of connections for the concepts or words that comprise their personal cosmology.
The challenge in the classroom hasn’t changed from the time I was a child. We still need to open doors and show our students that they do indeed have a brain, that they can make up their own mind, and apply various tools (rationality, artistry, intuition, spirituality, compassion, passion, etc.) to that end. The sources of information may be changing from printed material to digital, but the challenge remains the same.
Wikia January 19, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Tools.add a comment
Would you like to get in on the ground floor of a new user-driven information-focused community? Sarah Houghton-Jan has posted a quick review of Wikia on her LibrarianInBlack blog. Wikia is a search engine that relies on the end users, those who are searching, to determine the validity of the results. Authority and trust will play a major role in the success of failure of this searching community effort. It has a long way to go before it becomes a serious alternative to something like Yahoo or Google, but it is a good example of what can happen when the users decide for themselves how technology will be used and what value it has. The more value the Wikia users place in the system, the better the system becomes, much like del.icio.us. Will you Wikia? If there is enough return on your investment, I’m sure we all will.
http://librarianinblack.typepad.com/librarianinblack/2008/01/wikias-baby-ste.html
2007 Crunchies January 19, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Link Collections.add a comment
The Crunchies are awarded by TechCrunch for the best of 2007. These awards cover web 2.0 and other innovative technologies. If you want to know the best of 2007, and the glimpse such awards give us for 2008, take a look at the list of award winners.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/18/2007-crunchies-the-winners/
Power to the Doctors January 18, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos, Opinion.add a comment
The New York Times published a story about a group of doctors who were concerned about an email that is making the rounds that includes questionable medical advice. They could have deleted the email as spam like we all do, or they could try to do something about it. So they crafted their own response to the original email with clarifying information.
Now Dr. Parker has decided to wage his own Internet campaign. He and two colleagues have crafted their own missive and released it onto the Internet. Their hope is that the same forces that propelled the first message to popularity can also be used to debunk it.
The idea here isn’t that we should be teaching our students the correct information (a good idea) but that we should be empowering them to make a difference in the world. There are limits to what each of us can do, but those limits are greatly diminished when we help our students find their voice and forum to join in the ongoing conversation. By engaging them at the level of their own passions, we provide them with the opportunity to persuade, dissuade, convince, and to be convinced by others. That’s when education makes a difference.
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/18/doctors-take-on-a-notorious-e-mail/
Google Skepticism January 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Data, Opinion.1 comment so far
TechCrunch is reporting that a study from the University of Southern California Center for the Digital Future shows that only 51% of people trust the information returned by search engines. This is down from 62% a year ago. In addition, Internet users see online sources of information to be more important than other media like TV and newspapers.
I’m not ready to make too much of the numbers, but if these statistics are accurate, I think it is healthy to be skeptical of all information sources, especially ones we use the most. I see this as good news for education as it stresses the point that all facts and media (including text books) should only be trusted to the extent they can be verified.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/01/17/search-atheism-on-the-rise/
Inspiration January 17, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos.add a comment
I find myself being inspired more and more by Silvia Tolisano’s Langwitches blog. She has a terrific post today called “We Have Come a Long Way” which details several wonderful examples of how technology integration is making a difference in the lives of teachers and students. I was very impressed with the embedded Google presentation, “Kitty Cat, Kitty Cat What Do You See in Egypt?” If you are wondering if technology integration is making a difference, this post is well worth the read.
http://www.langwitches.org/blog/2008/01/17/we-have-come-a-long-way/
