EduGeek Journal

I am glad to see that I am not the only one feeling a bit… uneasy?… about how ed tech is going.  Brian Lamb and Jim Groom do a good job of articulating some of my concerns and growing fears in this article: Never Mind the Edupunks; or, The Great Web 2.0 Swindle:

We dream of higher education that embraces its role as a guardian of knowledge, that energetically creates and zealously protects publicly-minded spaces promoting enlightenment and the exchange of ideas. We need green spaces for conviviality on the web.

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Created at Make Beliefs Comix

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You just can’t make this stuff up.  Here is the name of a recent article on The Chronicle:

College 2.0: Teachers Without Technology Strike Back

The first thing that any decent intro to educational technology course teaches you is that technology is not just a computer.  Chalk boards are technology.  Books are technology.  “Technology can refer to material objects of use to humanity.” This also includes over head projectors and calculators.

In fact, we have probably all read the quotes from people that were opposed to books way back in the day.  I even remember once reading a quote that talked about how writing on bark was better than chalkboards or something like that.

So how did the professor strike back at technology? But forcing students to use a blue book.  Which is technically also technology.  Confused? So are the students in these courses I would bet. The professor also used an overhead at some point I would be willing to bet, or at least turned on the air conditioning if it got hot.

Worst quote of the article?

“tech-based learning feels more like IKEA—a lower-price, build-it-yourself option.”

Sad. Really sad.  Just taking out technology and talking at students doesn’t make a class high quality.  In fact, I have been in many face-to-face courses that would be a K-mart Blue Light Special if this metaphor is continued.

“In that way, some professors see emphasizing the benefits of chalk-and-talk methods as defending their craft against pressures to cheapen it.”

That is great – I see great value in face-to-face learning.  Just don’t defend your side by cheapening technology-based learning.  Lower-price, do-it-yourself? Give me a break.

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Google has a fairly inconsistent record of development when it comes to innovative products.  Remember Lively? They pulled the plug on that fast – even though they probably had enough interest and users to keep it going.  Now it seems Wave is going the way of Lively.

Or something like that – the official announcement was a bit unclear, especially since some of the code has already been released open-source. The basic gist of it is that Wave will no longer be standalone… but somehow integrated into other products. And the website will go away by the end of the year. The main reason given was that “Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked.”

That is probably going to be the closest Google will ever get to admitting failure.  It wasn’t that long ago that they were predicting the death of email, that email was obsolete, that Wave would forever change the way we communicate on the web, etc.  I like Google, but they aren’t exactly that great at eating humble pie.

The hard part for me and millions of others is that we still never figured out what exactly Google Wave is…

I wasn’t the biggest fan of Google Wave, but I did recognize that it was innovative. I know that I predicted that it wouldn’t make it, but I would have liked to have been wrong just to see where it could have gone.

I guess we will never know now.

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Created at Make Beliefs Comix

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Two new patent applications by Apple reveal the possibility that future iPhones will actually record “video or photos and use the information to render an object or location in 3D.” In other words, three-dimensional recording of places and objects. Once you can start recording places and objects on an Internet-enabled device, there will be virtually no barriers between the physical and virtual.  These recordings could be mashed together with digital information, and then ported out to any device – from the iPhone itself to a heads-up display on a car windshield or even to a special pair of virtual reality glasses.  Imagine what could happen if cars start coming equipped with this recording method?  Or think about what student reports on field trips would be like if they had this on an Internet-enabled device?

The possibilities are endless.  Neil Hughes of AppleInsider had this thought: “If enabled on millions of devices, this sort of 3D mapping could be uploaded over the Internet and then shared with other users, allowing a sort of “hive mind” functionality in generating comprehensive and up-to-date real-world renderings.”

So, will we go to the matrix, or will the matrix come to us?

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Click on the image to see the bigger version. Next week we meet Jim the EduPunk.

Created at Make Beliefs Comix

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I have been chewing over the brief article at The Chronicle about how a study found “No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance.”

Eszter Hargittai, associate professor of communication studies and sociology at Northwestern, suggests that the benefits of social-networking sites may cancel out the distractions they pose.

Here is a newsflash people: the benefits of reading can also cancel out the distractions it poses. Do you really think spending hours each day devouring the National Enquirer improves academic performance? Nope.  Spending time on a social network is about as broad a category as reading now – with good and bad examples of both existing out there.

Someday… just maybe academics will figure out it is not the tool itself that matters but how it is used.  Until then we will have to continue performing studies that tell us the obvious.

But I fully recommend that you bookmark the study – it will save you time and energy the next time you have to respond to “I heard that students are failing because of Facebook” for the millionth time.

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The Borg has struck again: this time Elluminate and Wimba are being assimilated. I can’t say that this makes me sad for either of those two companies. I have long held the position that synchronous tools destroys the killer aspect of online learning – it removes the ANY from “any time, any where learning.”  But I can’t say I see this as a positive for the overall education community.

This article on Inside Higher Ed examines some of the problems this acquisition makes: specifically, what does this mean for Blackboard competitors that are licensing either products? Considering Blackboard’s history of suing competitors that they think are encroaching on their territory – I am guessing that doesn’t mean very good things.  Blackboard is saying that they want to sustain those relationships – but who really believes that? No one that has kept up with Blackboard’s dismal record on doing that with past assimilations.

Even worse is Blackboard’s ability to integrate purchased products into their existing software.  Blackboard 9.1 is mess of mish-mashed concepts held together with a rather questionable string of logic.  Even their own trainers make fun of how little sense many things make in the control panel.

And this has all been mostly with integrating one LMS with another. Elluminate and Wimba are entirely different categories of tools than what they have been dealing with so far. How big of a mess is that going to be?

At one time I though monopolies were illegal in this country. Guess I just dreamed that chapter of poli-sci.  Even if legal, they are still bad ideas and even worse for a field like educational technology that needs innovation right now rather than one company that controls everything.

It is like the ancient educators created different tools to accomplish different aspects of learning, but in the secret Sauron created one master ring to eventually enslave them all:

One LMS to rule them all,
One LMS to find them,
One LMS to buy them all
and in the ‘borg bind them.

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This quote nails a thought I have been having on the head.  Sherry Turkle quoted by Net Gen Skeptic from an interview with Digital Nation:

“I don’t really care what technology wants. It’s up to people to develop technologies, see what affordances the technology has. Very often these affordances tap into our vulnerabilities. I would feel bereft if, because technology wants us to read short, simple stories, we bequeath to our children a world of short, simple stories. What technology makes easy is not always what nurtures the human spirit.”

In other words, Technology is not like dancing with the bear (the bear tells you when to stop or how to dance). Humans have learned how to train bears. We need to realize that we are in control of technology. We need to stop sitting around worshiping what technology tells us is happening, and start making things happen ourselves.  Too many adults sitting around drooling over youth that we are forgetting that we need to actual be adults. As Bono once said “Many people die at 17 and put the funeral off until they are 77.”

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