Our Stories

I am intrigued by the newly announced web repository of "Our Stories": a collaboration between One Laptop per Child, UNICEF, Museum of the Person (Brazil) and Google. My understanding is that this site exists to share personal stories from around the world - hopefully getting 5 million individual stories. This sounds like a very engaging, illuminating resource for education.

What do you think of this? How about sharing your story or your student's stories or their interviews with significant people in their life. There is a guide for students and adults to assist in this process. The laptops from OLPC will have the capability to capture these stories digitally and then post them to the site. (this is still being implemented it seems).

Listen, Learn, Live... (seems to be their tagline) not a bad life philosophy!

Multiuser Google Earth mashup

I just ran across a mashup for GoogleEarth - "Unype" (pronounced 'unite') where you can interact with others in GoogleEarth. I have not tried this out yet but from the description it seems like you can talk (through Skype), chat, share videos, take others on a tour, mark locations, represent yourself as an avatar... ala SecondLife. (maybe the next generation) This might be a great way for your class to go on a virtual tour with someone guiding you in Google Earth. How about visiting with someone at their home (re-created in Google Sketchup) - practice speaking German, French, Spanish or exploring the universe with an astronomer (Google Sky). Seem all like interesting possibilities. What do you think?

Personal Learning GPS system

Traveling to Ohio this Thanksgiving gave me opportunities to muse (traffic was a mess) and interact with extended family members. Well my father-in-law just purchased a handheld GPS navigation system by Garmin that he was "showing off". Incidentally my father-in-law is 81 years of age - still has the gadget bug in him. At any rate we were playing around with it - exploring different routes and walking around where there were no roads and seeing what the readout was like.

Got me thinking about a device that would "map" my own learning and compare my "routes" with others who were wanting to arrive at a similar location. How would this unit function?

Say I want to find out more about alternative fuel options for powering automobiles? I pull out my personal learning GPS and enter the destination. Now this unit knows that I have particular learning preferences (I like to watch movies) and so it is biased toward locations with these characteristics. It also knows where I have been before and automatically makes "connections" to my explorations of wind turbines last year when I was traveling in Denmark and noting the many windmills around the country. Do some of my previous discoveries have any bearing on this new route.

Now I have some "friends" who I keep in touch with regarding their learning travels, so Sally has explored some issues with alternative energy and my GPS downloads her "route" and compares this with my travels. Where has she gone and does this give me any "stop overs" that pique my interest? I discover that she has looked into personal hovercrafts that use magnetic energy - fascinating! I decide to briefly look into this on a detour, but plan to return to other topics that include more common technologies of power cells, hybrid technologies, etc. which are more common travels for many (analogous to our Interstate road system).

I can save my learning route, share this with other friends, document this with tags, save it later (actually this is automatically done on my learning GPS system) and re-join the journey next week when I have more time.

Ok - what do you think? Does this tool have any potential for development? Again, just another musing along the way. (maybe there were too many traffic jams on the way home...)

Everyone get connected

This will not be a particularly new topic but it is my story today. Having meetings in the District of Columbia today, I had a break in my schedule of running around the city to look for a place to connect and de-compress. My first criteria was "free internet" access. (I believe the Starbucks charges - right?) Anyway I don't believe that I am unusual in that preference (at least I indicated on an online survey to the cafe that I would come back because of this service). This got me thinking about how we might end up choosing educational settings... parents choosing schools that provide one-to-one computing and free internet access to all homes in the school district. Lemon Grove school district may not be the only one but that is exactly what they are doing now. A low cost "e-pad" is given to students only after their homes have been configured to connect to the internet for free. This is particularly noteworthy and I if had school-aged children I would consider moving there!

How might your classroom activities change with this tool available at school and home for each of your students? It will be interesting to follow this (and others) district and see how they utilize these tools for learning.

Cell Phone rationale...

Recently I had to provide a rationale for a purchase of an iPhone for the ETMC. In my mind this was pretty obvious if I am to be up on emerging technologies for the College of Education. In my research for this rationale I discovered this web site listing the new cell phone subscriptions per minute around the world. Of interest to me is that North America (46/min) was not the leader in new subscriptions, rather it was behind Latin America, Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia/Pacific (whopping 388/min). This information was on the Forbes web site with credit being given to Gartner Research Group.

Another study that I perused was from the EDUCAUSE Center for Applied Research in a study titled “The ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2007". This survey included 27,846 students from 103 institutions. Some interesting tidbits that stood out for me was a chart listing what electronic devices students own. The items included: simple cell phones (86%), desktop computer (61%), Laptop computer (74%), electronic music/video device (76%), electronic game (56%), PDA (12%), Smartphone (12%). I was also intrigued with the findings regarding the number of the above listed devices owned per student – three devices (22%), four devices (39%) and five or more devices (29%).

Ok – this was a “duh” conclusion… we better recognize that these tools are ubiquitous among our learners so how are we to leverage these tools for learning? What are your thoughts? How many learners in your classroom(s) have these electronic devices at their disposal? You could use InspireData to collect this information pretty quickly among your class participants. It would be interesting to compare notes then…

Video design issues

I am going to be facilitating a six week session on video creation on Saturday's this spring and thought that Dean Sharenski (his blog) created a valuable video lesson on the importance of design in the video creation process. Take a look and see what you think.


The Flat Classroom Project 2007 Keynote Address from shareski on Vimeo.

Cell Phones as Classroom Learning Tools

I was impressed with the variety of ideas that Liz Kolb discussed in her presentation about uses for cell phones in the classroom. A couple of the ideas that piqued my interest were creating podcasts through your cell and creating a phone number that people can call and leave voice mail (if you don't want to give out your home phone). If you want to advocate for the use of cell phones in your school, this presentation is worth listening to.

Where does the time go?

Subtitled: It gets sucked up somewhere in cyberspace...

I am observing my own behavior while attending this online conference. First I subscribed to the feed with the intent of viewing these on my iPhone - worked for the pre-conference workshop. Now I am just syncing my iPhone everyday with new content and saying - "Oh I will get to this sometime, maybe I will have more time at home to look at these."

I have also observed that about 12 of these videos do not download to my iPhone - I don't know if this is unique to the iPhone or not. Does anyone have a video iPod to tell me that all the videos run perfectly well or not on this technology? So I find that some are on the iPhone and others are not.

I also find myself jumping in and out of presentations - while this technology lets me do this without bothering other participants or hurting the presenter's feelings, I find that I have not returned as frequently as I would have imagined. But then again there is always tomorrow.

Well to that end I decided to mess around with embedding a little bit, so I copied a widget listing all the video presentations from K12Online Conference and placed this on Blackboard in the course documents page. (After looking at a presentation "LMS 2.0" about moodle and embedding widgets, I thought why not try this in Bb). So it is there to remind me (anyone) that these presentations are still available for me to view later.

Well I hope that I get to view more of these presentations, but ... I will be on a trip to Iowa these next four days so "time get sucked up" in travel too!

Happy traveling to all and to all a good night!

K12Online Conference - going strong...

Well I have started to attend the presentations at the K12online conference - how about you?

The pre-conference keynote by David Warlick was a first for me. I listened to his presentation on my iPhone in my living room. It was noteworthy just because I was sitting in a comfortable locale and he was presenting from his office, an airport, a Starbucks, a bike/walking path, his deck and so time/place shifting was very evident. His style was very casual and engaging and made a good case for "the times they are a-changing" (certainly giving away my age...) His closing three points included:

1. Students are Info-savvy
2. New Information Landscape
3. Uncertain unknown future for our learners

I was not able to attend the live Elluminate gathering, but looking at the archive briefly it seems like there were around 100 participants online with him. You can image that the chat window was pretty crazy...

Will my iPhone is filling up with video podcasts so now on to more presentations...

Anyone attending any of the sessions? I will look for your posts...

They are comin' to get you...

It seems that the first litigation settlement in favor of music conglomerates was handed down last week. I guess you could have guessed this was coming, or at least should have since many college students have been issued warnings about sharing music online. I know a close relative of mine who shall remain nameless, got a threatening email mentioning something about illegal sharing of music. This turned out to be bogus, but was upsetting to say the least.

What I can't help musing about (OK maybe angry about) is that the "first" person who was successfully sued is a single mother with two children who is a Native American. Having lived on a reservation for two years, this "cracking down" on illegal activities by multiple giant corporations (look at the end of the article for the listing of record companies) continues a pattern of pathetic "punishments" to send out "the message". Who better to make an example out of than a single Ojibwe mother who now is saddled with a settlement of $222,000.

Now I am not one to take copyright lightly but I am afraid the well privileged person in our culture would have been a more imposing person to sue by these multi-national corporations than the one they chose to follow through with on this trial. Not much is done by accident, particularly by high powered corporate lawyers. To me this is a sad day in a line of many sad days that evidence continuing oppression on the powerless by the "powerful". (read the the powerful are feeling threatened by the digital music age and so need to make a statement)

Baseball and the classroom

I am not a real baseball fanatic but in this season of baseball playoffs, my mind went to Cooperstown and wondered about any educational resources they might have. Sure enough the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum has page called Enriching Education website that provides curricular integration ideas for schools. There are sixteen different online thematic units to explore for integration into the classroom. There are resources including field trips, video-conferences, podcasts, and blogs as well on their site.

So bringing baseball into the classroom might be something worth considering... there might be learners in your classroom who are already hooked on baseball and would be stimulated further with this classroom connection.

Partnership for 21st Century Skills

Rich Ingram's presentation to the class introduced the Partnership for 21st Century Skills so I thought that I would give you a website (click on post's title) for this initiative. We will again revisit this topic at the end of the semester.

One of the P21 frameworks is titled Information, Media and Technology Skills. Seems like we should look at these links and see what our take is to these skills. Are there missing categories? If so what would you add? How are we including these skills in our K-16 curriculum?

Virtual Museum

There are many museum sites to explore - too many to link to here, however I was intrigued by this new Smithsonian museum that "opened" yesterday. The intriguing parts for me is that the physical space will not open until 2015 but the virtual National Nuseum of African American Heritage and Culture is open now.

There are a couple of things that interest me right away:

• The museum is using the idea of social networking (software donated by IBM) to invite persons to contribute to the museum's collection.
  
• I like the web mapping right on the top part of the site - which allows someone to explore threads and visually see how concepts are linked to other concepts. People can then explore many different paths to learn - unlike the physical space of walking down a hallway or going to a room where someone else has decided what should be on display and "linked" together (think tagging...)!
• I have a sense that today's learners can jump onto this method of building a museum much more quickly than those of my generation. The older thought process goes something like:

1. A "curator" (think expert) decides what should go into a museum.
2. A building is built to house the artifacts.
3. It opens
4. The public is invited to come and "learn" about what the "experts" know about this topic.
5. We progress through the structure (maybe even have a guide) and soak up as much as we can. (there could be a test when we get back to the classroom...)
6. Maybe we come back next year since we really liked the way that the museum displayed the artifacts. Maybe "they" added some new artifacts or have a different display!
   

Notice that the above scenario did not mention a thought process something like: What could I contribute to the museum? How should I arrange or tag artifacts?

How about your classroom? Where do your thoughts go related to your classroom museum...?

Digital Storytelling

I was lured into an ebook on digital storytelling from Techlearning's website. I again was impressed with the ability to use video to tell a story. This ebook has listings of examples of videos as well as instructional guidelines for the creation and development of effective stories (after all it is 40+ half-pages!). We recognize that content still is "trump" (a metaphor from growing up playing Rook - a story that maybe I should tell...) but we now have multiple mediums to tell the story.

Do you know any teachers who are actively incorporating digital storytelling in their classrooms? What are your thoughts about digital storytelling (and I would include video, streaming video, podcasting, video podcasting ...)?

One Laptop per Child

You may have heard about OLPC founded by Nicolas Negroponte (MIT Media Lab) several years ago. This is a wonderful vision where technology may bring hope to children in developing countries. As it appears now, there have been less "takers" than Negroponte had hoped and now US and Canada natives can purchase one of these innovative laptops for $400 in a 1 for 2 option where your purchase will provide a laptop to another child somewhere else. Maybe a good seasonal gift for someone you love and someone you don't know but could love...

I am intrigued by this laptop for several reasons (actually knowing very little about them...)

• does not need electricity - or can be "charged up" by hand
• unique operating system (not windows based)
• original idea was to have this cost $100 - now it is $188
• Provides most of the productivity tools in this simple operating system

Now it turns out Intel has come up with their own option for low cost computers (windows based) that are around $200. Funny that now Intel can make a system cheaper if there is a tangible alternative - hum...

• How about cars who get 200 miles per gallon of fuel,
  
• Provide enough electricity from wind and sun for every home,
  
• the list could go on.

What are your wishes for technology advances that do not impact the world's resources at the current levels?

Social Networking - Language acquisition

Just discovered LiveMocha - a social network for learning languages. You can meet online and practice language with native speakers, enroll in courses (game like?), make friends, and other things that social network sites are good at. I like it - nice idea that has recently gone live and is still in beta.

It will be really interesting to see what happens with these tools in the next several years. I am also curious about how this effects formal structures of education. What do you think - is this a style that could work for you or learners that you interact with regularly?

Interface design example

Techlearning highlighted a site entitled Inside the Brain: An Interactive Tour. I thought the tour was informative and wondered what others reactions might be to the design (and the content) of this site. We are not spending time focusing on interface design during the class however this site reminded me of some of the issues we talked about as we focused on web site design. What audience do you think this tour is designed for? The end asks for donations for the Alzheimer's Association so that kind of flavors it, but could you use this in classroom settings as an introduction to brain functioning and stimulate increased learning on the topic?

Well I will tell you that one of the dreaded fears that I have is that others will have to take care of me in my later years. I hope that those close to me are not saddled with this. One of the earlier practices of the Blackfeet Nation (Jane and I lived in Browning Montana for 2 years - late 70s) is that older persons would go on a final vision quest to the mountains. They would end up in the "sand hills" - a place many of us white folks refer to as heaven. So I tell my children when I am too old, drop me off somewhere in the mountains with a small pack of essentials for my final vision quest - seems like a fitting last journey!

Social Networking Services

I ran across an article on the Journal of Educational Technology Systems called "Preparing for the Real Web Generation" (link may only work when you have access to JMU's databases) by Harry Pence (SUNY - Oneonta) that caught my attention. While this article mainly focuses on college students as a population of learners, it has import on what we might discuss further in our course.

Wikipedia uses the phrase Social Networking Service as the term that I was thinking of as I proposed this general topic for this week. Pence talks refers to globalization (one of our own speaks to this regularly) and agrees with Thomas Friedman that we need to be preparing our learners for a world that is "flat" in the sense that the potential access to information is much more level than in the past. Friedman's push for a USA audience is that we are "falling behind" and so we better look at our educational system with an attempt to update our schools to meet the needs of a changing world. (Don't get me going on the idea that fear is a good motivator...)

As I read these questions surfaced:

1. Knowledge - where is this housed, individually or socially? If communities are how we find knowledge, what does that say about how we view knowledge?
2. If every student in your class is on a social network, how should this phenomena be used (or not used) in the classroom?
3. Who are the most resistant (think afraid) to this new social networking world we live in? Why are they? (think gatekeepers, or one's in the middle from author to audience...)
   
4. Who are the "authors" in a collaborative endeavor?
5. What is trustworthy? - How do we build skills of our learners to distinguish between information of worth and those of less value?
6. What about the social networking user who believes this environment is safe to self-disclose personal or potentially embarrassing or damaging information?
7. Categorizing - Hence refers to a term folksonomy - one which was new to me, and suggests that tagging might be more user friendly in some circumstances rather than be limited by what others have created as correct tags.
8. How about wiki textbooks - students can create and update information in the text as they study in your classroom. Contribute to the field as 6th graders!?!
9. What is important in learning - product or process?

That is enough questions for one blog and one article! Looking forward to more discussions and your ideas!

Back to School (Bus 2.0)

There is a pilot program in (a) school bus in Arkansas where students are "given" video ipods or laptops on a bus that has a wireless router. Students can access podcasts and online instructional materials while riding the bus. It happens that there are students who ride up to 1.5 hours to and from school! The article goes on to talk more about other online resources that schools are using (think social networking), but I thought this "connected bus" was an example of a novel approach and opportunity for learning and discovery through technology.

At least the students are not driving the bus while downloading a UnitedStreaming video ! I wonder if the driver has online music streamed into the bus? (maybe satellite radio...) I can see students creating daily podcasts for the "ride home".

Web Design Guidelines

There are many sites that someone could point toward as examples and non-examples - Denise and Jeremy already pointed us toward some. Kevin speaks from current experience of building a site for his church.

One site that I found (actually I believe that some other site pointed me toward this - as is usually the case) is University of Texas at Austin's page on Web Guidelines. Much of this site is geared toward web publishing on UT-Austin servers, however it points toward many issues that seem important for web publishing. I particularly like the Site Architecture and Navigation page that points toward issues for every would-be designer.

Questions worth asking:

• Who is your audience? (might be the foundational question)
  
• What does your audience want to learn from your site?
• Can they get there from here?
• What kind of technology or capabilities does your audience possess (bandwidth, computing power, plug-ins, etc.)?
• Is the site consistent? (across pages, language, organization, page location, link actions)

Another thought that I have is about web Page Personality. Keeping it simple might appeal to certain designers or audience types, but maybe there is a web personality who likes as many links as possible on a page. Although information overload is certainly a term that many have associated with this point in time - maybe human cognitive abilities will evolve with increased abilities to process more information without becoming mired in a virtual quagmire.

Well, happy designing - or happy designing well - or happy well designing (now this is getting too deep)

Sharing tools and sites

OK - what are the most frequented Educational (technology) web sites that you find yourself going to? One of the listed intentions this semester is share our resources (along with ideas and experiences) regarding the discovery, design, development and implementation (evaluation is on-going) of educational technology in places of learning.

I already mentioned in class that I use netvibes as a place to aggregate RSS news feed sources. Some of the sites I read include:

• Edutopia
• eSchool News
• CNet News
• WIRED News
• TechLearning

All of these sites have RSS news feeds and so I can easily see current headlines using netvibes. What are some of the sites that you have found to be helpful?

Welcome to EDTC 611

I will be using this space for my reflections through this fall 2007 semester as it relates to EDTC 611. I will be posting a weekly summary of an article that I have read from various sources that focus on "educational technologies" (in the widest sense of this term!). Feel free to add any comments that you would like to something that you read here or anything related to our Thursday gatherings in Memorial Hall.

Looking forward to this semester... actually I don't really know what to expect but it should be good!

Phone that is a projector

Evidently Texas Instruments is developing a cell phone with the capability to be a DLP projector and display DVD quality video on a screen or a whiteboard. Ok, now schools may need to think about providing cell phones to all their teachers and forget about purchasing digital projectors for the classroom. I am guessing however that the students may have this technology before the teachers! Well all locations can now be a theatre... have video will travel (and project)

Read more here.

automobile rental wireless hotspot

Now Avis is going to have an option that you can have wireless access to the internet in your car. This service is going to cost $10+ a day but touts that 95% of the country will be covered - all urban centers. So driving down the road, passengers will be able to use their laptops, PDAs, or other surfing devices and stay connected. ubiquitous connectivity keeps progressing...

Read more at Wired:
http://blog.wired.com/cars/2007/01/wifi_kit_keeps_.html