Who Are You? Who? Who? August 21, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Data, Tools.add a comment
With apologies to The Who, MIT produced a new way to search for yourself online. Called Personas, you type in your first and last name (I’m guessing the more common your name, the less personally relevant) and after data-mining information about your name, produces a graph of how your name is perceived on the Internet. I’m not sure what the ‘Illegal” section is all about, but here’s my personagraph. From an article by Techcrunch.
Seems to work with screen names too.
I wonder what it says about me that my screen name and real name show different results.
The Personas Project From MIT Is All Kinds Of Cool
TIE 2009 – Education 2020 – Elizabeth Hubbell June 24, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Conference Sessions, Data.add a comment
http://tieconference.wikispaces.com/2111
Incoming 2nd graders are, if the graduate, are the class of 2020. What kind of skills do they need? What can we do in school to help prepare them for a future we can’t quite see? What has changed since 1990? Not much in schools. Can a 1990s education possibly prepare our students for a 2020 world?
What are the barriers to change?
- money
- effective teacher use of technology
- change is hard for someone who has taught for 20 years
- change in technology is mercurial
- technology is not reliable enough
- we are not testing the way we should be teaching
What is the ‘low-hanging fruit’ we haven’t picked? Based on data from ‘walkthroughs’ http://www.mcrel.org/powerwalkthrough
- teachers are not actually using the technology in their rooms
- students are not actually using the technology in their rooms
- students are not assessed using the technology in their rooms
- Design – moving beyond function to create something beautiful, whimsical, or to engage our emotions
- Story – narrative added to products and services – not just argument
- Symphony – adding invention and big picture thinking (not just the detail focus)
- Empathy – going beyond logic and engaging emotion and intuition
- Play – bringing humor and light-heartedness to business and products
- Meaning – immaterial feelings and values of products
- Make our work transparent
- Creativity is what we want our students to do
- Audience is important – students can and should self-evaluate
- Connect the lesson to something personal
- Break out of text books and work patterns
- Learn with your students
- Use real tools
- Students don’t have to go to school to get an education – MIT open courseware, University of the People, insight schools
- Average life expectancy from under 50 in 1900 to over 76 in 2000 – more time to learn new things, work in more areas – fewer younger people in the workforce supporting retirement group
- Migration trends – toward south and west, including Colorado
- Generational changes – millennials: teamwork, technology, structure, experienctial, entertainment – these are children of Gen X parents: pragmatic, few alliegences
- Economy – most of our money is spent from age 35 to 55 – greater concentration of population in urban areas
- Globalization – they have more top students than we have students, ‘did you know’
- Digital World – Moore’s law
- Education – movement toward charters, homeschool
- Too many directives working at cross-purposes
- Not enough self-control over my individual or department work
Hard Days Part 2 March 4, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Data, Opinion.add a comment
Today was a better day, even with the testing. The teacher was back and the fifth graders seemed more comfortable reading a passage and answering multiple choice questions or writing short constructed responses. The frustration of creating something from scratch as in the previous writing section was not so obvious today. However, it seems anything that can go wrong is likely to go wrong with this class.
First on the list, a new student. Second day of testing, and a new student is brought in, with the expectation that he will take the test. What a way to start out at a new school. It sort of made me wonder if his parents did that on purpose, but I can’t figure out any reason why.
Second item was the teacher’s phone. It rang as we started the test. Talk about timing. I can’t wait to see what happens tomorrow.
On a related note, the students were genuinely glad to see me even though I was responsible for inflicting such an ordeal on them the day before. Students seem to respond well to having someone new actually spend time with them, even if it is while doing something less than optimal. This was reinforced at another school where I have videotaped teachers for their National Board Certification process. Today, one of the students actually thanked me for the time I gave the class, even though my total interaction amounted to little more than standing behind a camera at the back of the room for about 15 minutes.
Hard Days @ Work March 3, 2009
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I end up doing a lot of different things in my job. This week I organized a vendor fair so schools can make better decisions about spending $10 million in bond funds. We had almost 200 people from schools come to see some of the technology options they will be able to choose to help meet their learning goals. Very cool.
Not so cool was the next morning proctoring our high-stakes state mandated test. First off, the teacher was absent, so instead of assisting, I ended up administering the test myself. I have to say this was probably the most discouraging experience I’ve had in a classroom, maybe ever.
Sixty minutes for a group of low academic students to plan and draft a written composition from a one sentence prompt. For this test, there is no opportunity to teach, help, or deviate in any way from the script. These students started out well, with different approaches to planning out what they wanted to write, then moving on to writing a draft.
All went well for about 15 or 20 minutes when students started saying they were done. Pretty soon they were all done. And they really were. They basically gave up after 30 minutes. Instead of going back and reviewing what they wrote, striving to do something better or more creative, they all stopped. They spent another 30 minutes dying for the clock to run faster. And there really wasn’t anything I could do to help them. Any intervention would potentially invalidate the test.
I came away from the experience angry, angry that the students don’t see themselves as having any reason to try, angry that high-stakes tests do nothing to inform teaching, and angry that I can’t make any difference about the whole thing. I’ve never been a big fan of standardized testing. It does nothing to foster a better learning environment. Today’s experience only reinforced that assumption.
One Billion and Counting January 23, 2009
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Data, History.add a comment
Depending on who’s statistics you want to believe, there are either 1,000,000,000 or nearly 1,500,000,000 Internet users. That is a lot of people, but not even a quarter of the world’s population. A few numbers stand out.
- China leads the way in terms of total numbers with 179.7 million, followed by the United States with 163.3 million.
- Canada has around 80% of its citizens connected.
- India had only around 3% of its citizens connected.
As underrepresented counties continue to develop their network infrastructure, we can all look forward to a different Internet in the future.
ComScore: Internet Population Passes One Billion; Top 15 Countries
2008: the Year of Online News Over Print, TV Still King December 24, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in 21st-Century, Articles/Videos, Data, History.add a comment
Pew Research released another survey, this time showing that the Internet is now more popular than newspapers for Americans as a source national and international news. TV holds the top spot. This news is being reported by several online sources, so I’ve only linked to the earliest source in my Google Reader collection. I haven’t been watching TV today, so I can’t say if the survey is getting much coverage there.
TitusOneNine – Americans prefer news from Web to newspapers: survey
Feeling Download – Faster November 16, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Data.add a comment
I know that broadband speeds in the US are slower than they should be, but I recently took advantage of upgrading my home connection speed that resulted in a net decrease in the cost at the same time. Win-win situations like that don’t come along every day, but if it has been a while since you’ve checked on your home networking service, take this as a friendly reminder to see what options you have available.
I put together a Google spreadsheet to see a chart of network speeds, and am pleased that the curve is heading back up after a long time of relatively small increases. The exact dates are only as accurate as my memory, so take this chart below with a grain of salt. I figure my download speeds will most likely plateau for a few years before making another jump. What will it jump to next time? 20 Mbps or something even higher?
How Much Do You Retain? November 8, 2008
Posted by Matthew Woolums in Articles/Videos, Data, Opinion.add a comment
There is a very interesting review of an oft cited set of statistics about how much information is retained based on the method of delivery. No need to go into great depth about the percentages here, we’ve all seen them before, about how little information is retained from lectures, a little more from reading, more from visual presentations, on up the list to teaching others. According to the blog post, the statistics have no basis in research. There is no data to back up the statistics.
Tell Me I forget, Show Me I remember, Involve Me I understand.
It is a funny thing about perceptions and what we hold to be true, especially when it relates to information we ‘retained’. Take the above quote for example. Sounds like a reasonable statement about how I view education. I’ve heard it many times. But where does it actually come from?
A cursory search through Google for the phrase resulted in 1,340 different links. Some links attribute its origins to an old Chinese saying while others point to Native American origins. If the origins of the saying are in doubt, should I also doubt the saying itself, or do I accept the quotation for what it reveals on its own merit and disregard the cloudiness of its inception? Is there even an indisputable truth to be found about its roots?
Putting on my teacher hat, I wonder how can we sift through the volumes of information to actually arrive at truth. Can we even hope to do so? How do we establish authenticity, or better yet, how do we teach our students to question enough to wonder about the truth when we (myself included) are so easily swayed?
I believe that, as we move toward data-driven classrooms, toward reliance on statistical models to illuminate student learning, we’d better make sure that our teachers are capable of questioning the statistics as they seek to inform their instruction. Taking those raw numbers at face value is likely to result in ‘retained’ information about student achievement rather than a transformational dialogue about learning.
Mea Culpa – Setting the Record Straight on Dale’s Cone/Pyramid — Open Education
