Steven Johnson’s commentary in the Los Angeles Times answering Hillary Clinton’s charges against Grand Theft Auto is a good read for anyone living and working with teens.
My 17-year-old nephew made an interesting point about some of the video games that doesn’t have to do with violence and sex. His concern was with the stereotyping that takes place so that the gangsters tend to be from minority groups and perpetuate the image of poor urban youth as lawbreakers. From the mouths of babes?
I am spending the week in Glenns, VA, at Rappahannock Community College working with a great group of teachers, most of whom will be Instructional Technology Resource Teachers for their school divisions next year. This new position was created by the Virginia Department of Education as part of the Standards of Quality and requires each division in the state to have one ITRT for every 1000 students. The goal is to help the regular classroom teachers better integrate technology. I asked the participants to say a little something about their jobs or their ideas about technology and here’s the first…
Jon Udell’s very cool walking tour of Keene, NH along with directions for how to do it using various hacks and scripts created by various people. Here’s the important part, the same point that Tom Friedman makes quite a bit in The World Is Flat:
“There’s lots of stuff here to play with. Was this all just an unintended consequence, or does Google really get that the future is services co-created by the people who use them? The latter, I hope, but we’ll soon see.”
The users are creating the product…
From Ray Schroeder: An article by Edward J. Barboni, Senior Advisor, Council of Independent Colleges, and Independent Consultant decrying the poor preparation of teachers and undergraduates in general to cope with the demand for 21st century skills has really stuck with me because it has led to a personal conflict.
On the one hand, I have always used a student-centered approach to learning, from a reading workshop when I taught language arts to indivdual and group projects when I taught communication skills in the computer lab. I wanted students to take ownership of their work, and I tried to find ways to bring out their voices in the classroom and lab. In my heart, I know what the 21st century skills people are talking about and sympathize. I was often bored in school, rarely asked to write anything of any depth, and generally rewarded for my ability to recall information.
Yet, as someone who works with pre-service educators, I feel a little insulted. We are working very hard to open our students to new ways of thinking about teaching and learning. Barboni’s negative view of schools of education seems one-sided:
So, whether it?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s Microsoft, Masterfoods, or any of the thousands of other corporations in the country, the challenge they face is that the nation?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s high schools don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t produce enough graduates with 21st Century skills, our nation?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s teacher preparation programs don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t produce enough new teachers who know how to ensure that high school graduates have these skills, and our nation?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢s undergraduate programs don?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t produce enough graduates with these skills at high standards of performance.
Two questions immediately pop into my mind. I have 21st century skills. How did I get them? Especially since I graduated from college in 1984, nearly two decades before the 21st century? Certainly, if no one is teaching 21st century skills now, they weren’t doing it in 1987 when I got my teacher’s license! What about Mr. Barboni? Does he have 21st century skills? How did he get them? Continue reading
From Tim Stahmer, a link to an article in Technology Review about the socialization of the web. The story at the beginning of the reaction at the Wall Street Journal’s technology conference when the wireless was turned off in the lecture hall reminds me of the complaints at NECC about spotty wireless.
“Forbidding live blogging at a technology conference, he remarked, ‘seems a very retrograde move.’ Mossberg responded hours later. ‘It is untrue that Kara and I banned live blogging at D3, from the ballroom or anywhere else,” he explained. ‘We merely declined to provide Wi-Fi, to avoid the common phenomenon that has ruined too many tech conferences–near universal checking of e-mail and surfing of the Web during the program.'”
While I can’t imagine how checking my email as I listen to the speaker is going to “ruin” the conference, I do think we sometimes overestimate our ability to multi-task. So much for the Zen notion of concentrating on one thing at a time. (You know…when you do the laundry, DO the laundry.) Bob Hanny, a professor I work with, claims that we can’t really multi task at all and are just fooling ourselves into believing that we can do it. And I wonder, can we really watch a movie and give our full attention to driving? Are we really listening to the message of the speaker, turning it over in our minds, when we are checking email or blogging? I suppose you can make a case for taking notes during the talk, but notes don’t require wireless acess. And then the whole notion of “live” blogging goes out the window.
Cell phones, in particular, are on my list of annoying devices. I have watched people walk out of classes while the professor is talking to take a phone call! That would never have happened in my day at William and Mary. Yet, no one at NECC seemed to complain when they asked us to turn off our cell phones at the beginning of David Weinberger’s talk. We have voice mail; we knew those messages would be waiting when he finished. I guess reading your email or blogging are quiet, individual activities that don’t bother anyone else so why should they be restricted?
I have piles of books everywhere but brought Alvin Toffler‘s Future Shock home with me from campus. I can vaguely remember reading it in college (although that might have been The Third Wave). Somehow, I just knew it would yield interesting history. And I wasn’t wrong.
In the Introduction, Toffler discusses the difficulty of writing when “the whole world is a fast-breaking story” (p. 4). The changing shape of the world leads to the “perishability of fact,” and he admits that despite updates, some of his facts will be obsolete by the time the book gets published. And don’t forget that I’m reading it 35 years after it was first published. More than just the facts have changed. Rather it seems the whole world has changed, which is, ultimately, Toffler’s theme. He points out that the “obsolescence of data has a special significance here…serving as it does to verify the book’s own thesis about the rapidity of change.
He goes on to lament the lot of writers in such a furiously accelerating world: “Writers have a harder and harder time keeping up with reality. We have not yet learned to conceive, research, write and publish in ‘real time.’ Readers, therefore, must concern themselves more and more with general theme, rather than detail” (p. 5) Since Toffler’s alive (he runs Toffler Associates, which appears to be a business consulting firm), I suppose he knows about blogs. What could be more “real time”?
But that real time aspect can also lead to trouble. Will Richardson has several posts related to careful blogging. Richardson points to the story in the Chronicle of Higher Education about candidates being passed over because of their blogging past. (Oh dear, maybe I shouldn’t be posting this…) And, David Weinberger, from Harvard (who I just saw at NECC) talks about the problem of “taking it back” when he discovered that he had reacted incorrectly to a post by a conservative commentator.
Toffler, I think, would forgive Weinberger. We’re going to make mistakes in this world of fast-breaking news. It’s what we do after we’ve made the mistake that’s important. Weinberger has tried to make it right, and, in the end, his sense of the commentator’s comments were on the mark. It was an anti-French sentiment that was inappropriate and deserving of rebuff.
Saturday morning and I am cleaning out my Firefox Bookmarks list, deleting the temporaries (like the links to OBX hotels I used last Christmas) and getting the good ones into del.icio.us. Came upon this wired versus wireless debate from Design Share (not sure what they do). The debate took place in 1999, and one of the participants even comments that much of what they say will be irrelevant in five years. Certainly seems to be the case in this era of cell phone surfing. For me, however, the pertinent quote deals more generally with the issue of techology and education:
“There is a tendency to look for solutions that will work in all cases, but there isn?¢‚Ǩ‚Ñ¢t one – what works in Raleigh, North Carolina will not likely work in New York City, Chicago, Detroit or Los Angles.” Glenn Meeks
And the reason the solutions are going to be different is because the problems are different. Teachers’ needs and wants are different. The communities around the school are different. All this diversity means that the one of the first steps has to be to actually identify problems. We must help teachers reflect on their practice and locate those areas of difficulty that might be addressed by technology. I always use the example of the reading journals that were part of my class’s reading workshop. The handwritten journals, while quaint and simple to use, came with several problems that could be easily solved by blogs. But, I don’t think that my school’s access would have supported that use since my kids would have had to go to the lab or the media center to get on the web, and I wanted the writing to arise more naturally from their reading. I would have had to weigh the problems and solutions, and I’m not sure technology would have won. Maybe now with laptop carts available and several computers in the back of each classroom, it might have been possible.
This is the way technology integration should be done, in my mind. Not a techno-centric view that starts with a cool new technology and looks around for something to do with it. Instead, integration must start with students and teachers. The wired versus wireless debate never answers the fundamental question: why do students and teachers need computers and networks at all?
I kept claiming not to really care if the tags in the sidebar worked, but I really wanted to figure it out. So this morning I began experimenting with the htaccess file, and this FAQ from WordPress really helped. Eveytime I uploaded a blank htaccess file then went to the Options screen, wordpress stopped working and I would get an internal server error message. Adding the Options line to my htaccess that they suggest seemed to solve the problems. (Options +SymLinksIfOwnerMatch) Plus, I could see the technoratitagging rule in the htaccess file.
But, the technorati tags in the sidebar still went to a 404 not found. GRRR… Then it dawned on me that they were trying to be created in the root rather than the wordpress directory. A quick visit to the Options page for TechnoratiTagging solved it. And, they work!! Wish I had realized that two days ago, but I have learned more about htaccess so maybe the circuitous route was worth it.
Worked on the Four Rivers Moodle site for awhile but now it’s not responding. Wasted two hours or so discovering that Audacity no longer works with my iMic and I just HAD to digitize Joni Mitchell, Don Juan’s Reckless Daughter.
I started with Final Vinyl but didn’t have ny luck getting it to work. It recognized the input but would only record/output high screetchy noises. I experimented briefly with turning off the various preamps (on the turntable and the iMic) but couldn’t get it to work.
Settled on Peak LE. I’ve got the 14-day demo and after some tinkering, I am recording AND listening to the first side of the album (actually the third side but the first one I picked to record). I may tinker with Final Vinyl one more time although I ran into a discussion board in which several people said it was a terrible software program. Just divided up side three of Don Juan and am now recording side two, Paprika Plains. I think I’ll spend some of my summer money on Peak.
Now my only frustration is that I can’t seem to get WordPress to write to the htaccess file so my tags don’t link to anything. I can live with it. I think I may have to contact my host about turning on mod-rewrite. I chmod’ed and otherwise followed the directions with no luck.
After perusing all the menus in WordPress and missing that pesky Advanced Editing button on the Write Post page, I found help at the WordPress site. Voila! The tags worked beautifully. Of course, I’m planning on doing some re-tagging.
The Custom Fields feature also solves my other problem: I was going to add a “digitizing” field to show what album I’m listening to, but I just made it Listening to: And I’m going back to add a Currently Reading: I’m assuming I can make custom fields show up somewhere besides the write post page? I’d like them to be in the sidebar. I saw a website like that…now can I find it again?
