Tag Archives: technology

Random Friday Round Up

A gloomy day here.  The rain brought down the leaves and it is starting to look like winter.  The dogs are sprawled around me, snoozing, and I can’t muster the energy for a thoughtful blog post.  But, I do have a few sites to share on several different topics so here’s the random Friday round up:

Miami Book Fair Celebrates 25 Years:  I heard this story on NPR yesterday as I drove back and forth across the state.  The founder of the fair is an independent book store owner in Miami and he reflects on how things have changed since 1983.  When asked about the challenge of selling analog books in an increasingly digital age, he comments that he is “selling the past.”

Guest Blogger on Eduwonk:  I credit Andrew Rotherman (aka Eduwonk) with helping me pass my comprehensive exams at William and Mary.  Today, his guest blogger is none other than Margaret Spellings, soon-to-be former Secretary of Education.  She writes about a new report from the Department of Education that details five areas in which federal, state and local goverments can collaborate to support the use of technology in education.

I Think I’m Musing My Mind:  I’m sorry that I can’t remember who steered me to this piece by Roger Ebert but I’ve read and re-read it several times since.  I found myself highlighting several of his key ideas that resonated with me in this thoughtful reflection on his writing:

The Muse visits during the process of creation, not before.

Of course I don’t think only about writing. I spend time with my wife, family and friends. I read a lot, watch a lot of politics on TV. But prose is beavering along beneath, writing itself. When it comes time to type it is an expression, not a process. My mind has improved so much at this that it’s become clearly apparent to me. The words, as e. e. cummings wrote, come out like a ribbon and lie flat on the brush. He wasn’t writing about toothpaste. In my fancy, I like to think he could have been writing about prose.

Collaborating with Diigo:  From jdtravers, an excellent video with practical tips for using Diigo to comment on student work.  My own experience with Diigo expanded this week.  I blogged about the Bauerlein article and then used the highlights from Ruben Van Havermaet to explore more about new media, including spending a few hours reading Andrew Plotkin’s interactive fiction game Shade.   And, Jeremy Douglass’s website made me think about what it means to be an English major in the 21st century as I approach the 25th anniversary of my own graduation.

21st Century Travel

Despite my techiness, I am, at heart, an English major.  And, after 46 years, I am finally making a trip to the mother land.  I’m spending 16 days traveling in England and Wales, and am just a little excited!

While I will be sending a few analog postcards, I’ll mostly be using online tools to stay connected with home, from posting photos to my flickr account and skyping with my husband and other friends and colleagues.   There may be some twittering, too.

The other 21st century addition to my trip is my Kindle. I have one analog book with me–a biography of Shakespeare–and then I’ve got the Kindle. I spent all of 99 cents for the complete poetical works of Wordsworth. I’ll be visiting Dove Cottage and wandering through Tintern Abbey. I spent just 5 dollars for the complete works of Shakespeare for the Kindle, too. We’ll be spending a day touring Stratford Upon Avon. Normally, books would be a problem for me: which to take along? But with the Kindle I’ve got lots of reading at my fingertips. I’m interested in seeing if the connection works in England.

I’m mostly excited about my Google map:


View Larger Map

I’ll be hoping to add photos and maybe a little video to it as I go along. So, feel free to follow along on the virtual tour.

Living in the Grey Area

There’s been a theme to my reading this week: technology is neither all good nor all bad.  In the midst of all the amazing discoveries with their potential to increase human knowledge, understanding and community, there are negative consequences that we must take into consideration.

It began with an article in Forbes about Technologies That Hurt Us.  The article draws on the work of David Friedman whose book Future Imperfect: Technology And Freedom In An Uncertain World discusses the potential dangers of a variety of technologies including biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.  The ultimate danger, according to Friedman, is human extinction.  Quite an unintended consequence, isn’t it?  The article also focused on more mundane negative physical consequences of technology such as the kid who spends the summer playing video games and then heads to the first day of football practice only to get hurt.  Or, the Wii tennis players who don’t get the breaks found in the “real” game so end up getting a much more difficult workout.  The recommendation from orthopedic surgeons is simple: warm up before you fire up the Wii and, if more sedentary video games are your style, be sure to move around now and then.  As for Friedman and his dire warnings, he says that the answer is not to stop technology:

The benefits of owning a smarter computer than the next guy, for example, are just too great. “This train doesn’t have brakes, and from my perspective at least, the main thing to do is not to say, ‘Should we encourage it, or should we stop it?’ ” Friedman says. Instead Friedman suggests two questions: “Where can we guess this technology will lead, and if we get there, what should we do?”

I was reminded of this article when I read Wes Fryer’s post about the end of his game of Travian.  He described an alliance member who spent so much time playing the game that it took a negative toll on his health.  In the end, he didn’t win but he did get a mention in the letter.  I guess only he can decide if it was worth it.

Then, there’s the whole question of whether the Internet is making us dumb.  Nicholas Carr’s lengthy article in The Atlantic described his concerns about how the Internet was changing his reading habits.  It’s something that Will Richardson has also discussed in response to Carr’s article.  Carr recognizes the grey areas in his argument as he describes the skeptics who accompanied every major technological development: Socrates worried about the effect of writing on memory and humanists worried that the printing press would lead to laziness and revolution.  Yet, these technologies have had amazingly positive influences on human knowledge and learning.  In the end, though, Carr comes down on the side of deep reading.  He writes, “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”  Yet, in a recent New York Times article, Damon Darlin defends the use of Google as a technology that actually frees our mind.  He writes, “Over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.” He comes down on the side of the optimists who believe in human improvement.

I am reminded once again that we are living in a grey area, trying to find a balance between the positive and negative effects of the technology that surrounds us.  And, as educators, we need to have these conversations with out students.

Since this post is probably already too long for most of you, I’ll write about my own reading experiences later but here’s a teaser: my own reading still involves books, although they are mostly fiction, and I find that I can still do lengthy reading as long as I can have a pencil, either analog or digital, in my hand.

Using Twitter in Education

From today’s ASCD SmartBrief, a link to an interesting piece on using Twitter in education by Ron Jones in Search Engine Watch.  It provides several examples of how Twitter was used to support teaching and learning, from fostering classroom discussion to writing collaborative books.   He links to several good blog entries and articles, including Educause’s 7 Things You Should Know About Twitter and a list of possible uses of Twitter in academia by David Parry that could easily be adapted to K-12.  If you’re considering the potential for Twitter in education, this is a good starting point.

I do get a little queasy when I hear someone say they gave a “Twitter” assignment since it takes a techno-centric approach, something with which I struggle myself.  The point isn’t to start with technology but to think about our instructional strategies and learning goals and then determining a tool that might help support them.  However, the techy part of me wonders that if we don’t occassionally start with the tool, we may never have an opportunity to explore its use.  And, for someone whose job is to help student teachers figure out how to use the tools in the classroom, I am constantly trying to balance concerns with technology, pedagogy and content.  Part of having my pre-service teachers becoming part of VSTE’s ning community is to give them a place to discuss these issues with practicing educators.

I have not included Twitter as part of my course and probably won’t any time soon.  But I’m interested in what others discover as they do incorporate this tool to support teaching and learning in their classrooms.

A Pragmatist In a Progressive World

This year, I have the opportunity to be part of an online professional learning community.  While I will be taking on the role of facilitator, I believe this will be as much a learning experience for me as well as for the other participants.  And, the opportunity has already gotten me thinking about where I fit into the sometimes confusing but always intriguing world of “educational technology.”

Here’s what I know:

Educational technology is about much more than just technology.  In a way, technology is the easy part.  It’s easy for me to show you how to use a flip camera to capture video or a digital microscope to find Abraham Lincoln on a penny.  It’s easy for me to post a link to a wonderful interactive website.  And while all these things may be cool, most teachers want more than just cool.  They want to know that the time and energy it is going to take them to set up microscopes or plug in projectors or to have them or their students create videos will have some positive influence on their students and their learning.  That’s the hard part: helping teachers figure out how to use these technologies in powerful ways in their classrooms.  So, while I may like to explore new technologies myself, my focus with others is on the educational part.  How/why/when to use those computers and gadgets and websites to improve teaching and learning.  This might seem like an elementary idea, but I still go to lots of “educational technology” presentations at conferences where the heavy emphasis is on the technology rather than the education.

Here’s what else I know:

I have a deeply held bias. I believe that technology offers ways to improve teaching and learning.  Even if it’s only because it engages the kids in ways that textbooks and lectures and worksheets do not.  And, most of the educators I talk to seem to share this two-part belief with me.  Part one: technology engages kids.  Part two: engaged kids are better learners.  But they also share a concern about doing it the right way.  They don’t want to just use technology for technology’s sake.  And, I find myself working with them in very practical ways.  Have you thought about using a smartboard to let your kids interact with a sentence?  Do you know that you can put a video in a powerpoint presentation to show to your kids?  Have you accessed the data from the student response system to better differentiate instruction? Have you considered having your students create a digital video or multimedia presentation as an alternative assessment?

I also use this practical approach when I work with technology coaches and school administrators in helping them to encourage technology use.  I’ve created a presentation called Strategies for the Non-Choir.  It draws from Rogers’ work in diffusions of innovations as well as Mishra and Koehler’s Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model to provide coaches with ideas for how to approach the early and late majority adopters who, according to Rogers, make up some 68% of the population.  I talk to the coaches about the need to consider the relative advantage of a technology as well as how compatible it is with what the strategies already used by a teacher.  In addition, as part of the workshop, we play the TPACK game where we match technologies, pedagogies, and content areas to come up with ideas for using technology in the classroom.

So, I am very much a pragmatist, trying to work with teachers where I find them, helping them use technologies in ways that support what they are doing in their classrooms.  This is a viewpoint that is often in direct opposition to the visionaries in the educational technology blogosphere.  They tend to be progressives who are looking past the current times to a different world where powerful technologies support student-centered, constructivist learning.  One of my favorites, Tim over at Assorted Stuff, summarizes the viewpoint quite nicely, I think:

The powerful tools we now have available make it possible to go way beyond simple reinforcing what we’re already doing. They provide communications links that enable teachers and students to connect with and learn from the world.

If all we do with the computers and networks put in our schools over the past decade is multiply the status quo, then we’ve wasted a lot of money, time and effort.

I know much of the crap I write is very idealistic, maybe even unrealistic. But while we are making small incremental changes, it would be nice to keep a vision of what education could and should be in the viewfinders.

I don’t disagree with Tim.  And I admire his idealism. I am also always inspired by Sheryl Nussbaum Beach. One of Sheryl’s most recent posts over at 21st Century Learning gives some great examples of how are kids are learning to learn on their own, and she calls to us to roll up our sleeves and get to work on creating a learning environment for them.  I try to keep her vision in my mind and for awhile I move into that progressive world.

But then I go to a school or talk to a teacher and hear about the sorts of barriers–time, access, not to mention high-stakes testing–that they face and how excited they get when someone gives them an interactive whiteboard or even just a projector and the pragmatist returns.   To borrow a phrase from Tyack and Cuban, we are “tinkering toward utopia.”  I think I’m more the tinkerer, standing with a wrench in my hand, rather than the utopian, envisioning the future.