EduGeek Journal

I’ve been pondering an article called “Future Ed: Remote learning, 3D screens” for a few days now.  While this article covers some interesting geeky stuff (such as ocular implants and 3-D screens), there are also some great nuggets of wisdom in there about how what we teach needs to change –   along with our technologies:

Barker pointed out that with more tech-savvy learning, the curriculum will have to change, too. He and his wife funded a five-year experiment in Chattanooga, Tenn., to create a 21st-century curriculum founded not just on learning the ABCs, but also the “EFGs”: Eco ed (“How do we interact with the planet?”), Futures ed (“How do I shape my future?”), and Global ed (“What is my relationship with other human beings?”).

Each student had to learn a 500-word vocabulary in six languages and, in sixth grade, choose one in which to be fluent, including cultural knowledge. Physical fitness focused on lifelong sports such as tennis and golf, not team activities. Grade levels were kindergarten “through competence” — that is, when students accomplished all of the program’s lofty goals, they graduated.

Personally, I get more excited about these approaches to changing education than others.  The “death to the university” concept is too much “baby and bathwater” to me, and the open education movement is too caught up in hopeless romanticism (or unhealthy bitterness) for my taste. I don’t think people in either one of these movements have really thought about what would happen if they got their way.

Think about it – you don’t want to drive across a bridge designed by someone that learned engineering through following an engineering blog do you? Or, for that matter, get operated on by a surgeon that learned surgery by watching a bunch of YouTube videos.  After Universities die and education goes free and open, people will begin to realize that we need to be able to prove that people learned what they needed to in order to do certain things. Then we will need to hire people to track who learned what, and those people will need a place to work and store records. We’ll go out and buy the empty college buildings, which will cost money, so we will start charging for education again. We’ll just end up right back where we started.

Or, we could listen to the people that want to reform what we have and end up in a better place overall in the end.

Anyways, the article I mentioned above covers a lot of ground in 4 pages, so give the whole thing a read with an open mind. Assessment, socialization, and realistic school reform (i.e. ideas for change that involve educators keeping their jobs) are all covered.

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Much has been written about the new Apple  iPad recently. I wanted to avoid getting in to the discussion until I actually got to try one out, but realized I was spending too much time tweeting and commenting other places about it. So here is my take on the worst-named device in the history of Apple products:

• The biggest reason not to buy one: no Flash support. I’m no Flash lover, but how on Earth can you expect to surf the web without it? Even if Flash dies, it will be years before you can get around without it. Can someone please tell Steve Jobs to get over himself?  His anti-Flash rants are just sounding silly.
• Multi-tasking is pointless on an iPhone (or any smart phone).  I mean really – why would you want to do multiple things on a tiny screen? So what that you can’t listen to Pandora and write an email. Just turn on iTunes (you’ll get a better song selection, anyways). But on the iPad – kind of impossible to think of really using something that large without it. Another big gaping feature hole. Right next to where the camera should be.
• For that matter, why not just go with a regular OS instead of iPhone OS?  Well, one reason really – $$$$$. Can’t make money in an app store if people are free to install whatever program they want.
• Everyone keeps asking why get an iPad instead of a full featured laptop. My question with full featured laptops has always been “why do I have to buy all of these features I don’t use?”  Full featured laptops are usually overkill. And bulky at that. Get me the features I need in an easy to use interface like the iPad has, and you have a winner there. I can see the iPad becoming a laptop replacement for people that don’t want everything and the kitchen sink.

Will I get one? Probably not. I will probably wait for the Google Chrome OS to come out in a multi-touch pad device. The combination of an iPad experience with the openness of a fuller OS sounds killer to me. Not to mention cheaper.

So, a note to all educators pondering Kindles, Nooks, or even iPads for their schools/classes/etc: wait for the followers to come out with better ideas. Just because they haven’t been able to do that with iPhone doesn’t mean they won’t succeed here.

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Chalk up another victory up for the Society to Halt All Innovation and Change in Education. Someone said that teachers using videos in online classes at UCLA was illegal, so they had to shut all videos down.  Even though these videos were used the exact same way that they were being legally used in face-to-face courses. So I ask: why is the same video clip and the same usage legal in face-to-face classes, but illegal in the same online course? Well, I now have to print one of the saddest, most ignorant quotes I have heard in a long while:

the trade group is arguing that a password-protected space on the Web is not a classroom

Give me a second to remove my palm from my forehead. Welcome to the 1800’s folks. We can’t grow or change our definitions of anything. Online classes: learning takes place there, students are there, instructors are there, content is there, but by golly…. it is not a classroom because there isn’t a door or even a single brick!

I can probably go online and find a free, illegal copy of any movie in the theaters now in about 5 minutes or so and the sites that would help me do that will still be here next week. But an instructor tries to use a clip of an old movie to teach (and inspires a few students to go out and buy that movie from my experience)… and they are clamped down on brutally.

I dream of a day when we get the idiots out of education and legal policy and make it actually desirable to be a teacher.

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I admit: I have grown bored with Google Wave. Oh, I still think it could have potential. My boredom stems not from how it works, but rather from who is not on there. Namely, pretty much anyone that I interact with on a daily basis.

Oh, I sent out invites to my wife and some friends and several colleges, but most of them never got an invite.  The few that did are the ones that are too busy to really kick the tires around. So it pretty much sits in my Google account, lonely and unused.

What worries me is the relative silence coming from Google about Wave.  Anybody remember Lively? Google released it with as much fanfare as Wave a few years ago. People were pretty excited about Lively. Many articles were written on how it was the future of educational virtual worlds.  Then came an uncomfortable, prolonged silence from Google.  And finally, out of no where… Google pulled the plug.

Let’s face it, Google Google has no problems hyping their priorities.  Why the silence about Wave? Every other educational article seems to be about Wave, but Google seems to be mum.  The momentum is starting to die for Wave. Google needs to build some fresh momentum soon….

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Despite my last rant, I know that most people in education know that we still need instructors of some sort.  We all know that the “sage on the stage” concept has never proven to be effective. Technology is finally giving us a way to do something more effective… if not a swift kick in the pants. The big question is: how can an instructor avoid being a long-winded talking head by taking advantage of experts on the social web, but also contribute something to their student’s educational endeavors?

Harriet and I were meeting with our uber-boss Pete Smith the other day (who will probably read this and “comment” on it by walking past my office and telling me his comment :) to discuss our “New Vision for the LMS” concept. When you get Pete talking about cutting edge stuff, he will truly make your head spin. He was envisioning the role of an educator taking on more of mentoring slant… but wondering how that can work with online asynchronous courses.  His idea was to use something like Google Reader to guide students through weekly readings by sharing what you think students in a particular class should be reading (out of all of the vast amounts of data out there).

An interesting idea. Maybe there are people out there doing this already? The basic idea is that students would follow a instructors on a service  – something that operates like Digg or Google Reader, where you share certain things you read and then tag them with a class tag (#engl101).  That would then be the students “content” for the week. Their projects and blog posts would have to reflect that they read this week’s shared content.

The interesting thing about this idea is that it allows the instructor to take advantage of many sites, many experts, and many voices… while still contributing overall to class learning.  In fact, instructors could still keep their own blog and add content to the stream of shared content. Or add notes to what they are sharing (at least in Google Reader).

I don’t think there is a tool out there that would be as robust as it would need to be for educational purposes – without creating multiple accounts. Students will just need to see the content for their class – so if a teacher has multiple classes, most sharing tools would require some kind of separate account to handle all classes without confusion.  It would be nice to have a function that works like Digg or Delicious with browser plug-ins. But once you “digg” something, you have the ability to tag it with a class tag and that sends it to every student in that class. If you see something else for another class, then you tag it with that class and then only those students see it.

Other features that would be nice would be the ability to add notes to your “diggs” as well as the ability to turn a specific digg in to a class discussion.  One of those discussions I blogged about last week that is not contained in the LMS box.

Just one of many new ideas we are working in to the NEW “New Vision for the LMS” concept….

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School and universities are going to go away, students are going to teach themselves, the planets will align, we’ll all sing a happy song, and peace on earth will reign. Or so I’m told.

Or maybe a bunch of our so-called “educational leaders” will get finally get some counseling for their childhood conflicts they had with teachers and grow up. Then we can get rid of all of this weird stuff we are debating now and get to some real educational reform. You know – stop throwing out the baby with the bathwater?

Look, I get that there are problems out there and we need to change things. But students as co-teachers and teachers and co-students? Are we getting so egotistical as a species that we can’t even stand to admit that we might need to learn from someone else? That it is okay to have a hierarchy in class, as long as we teach those on the top to be open and non-abusive?

If students teach themselves, with teachers as co-students, where will they get their knowledge from? They will go out and read blogs or books or Tweets by experts.  So, if a person has the title of “teacher” or “professor,” students couldn’t just learn from them. But this person happens to, say, go out and start a Google Wave… then it is okay for other students in other schools to then learn from them?

I am all for active learning and students getting to participate in their learning…. but let’s not forget that the instructor is also a valuable resource.

A few people say we don’t need teachers and BAAAA!!! “we don’t need teachers any more” they all say.

Someone says “schools will be obsolete by 2010 and BAAAAA!!! “schools will be obsolete by…”

Oh, wait… what year is it now?

And no one has still explained how people who work in education are going to put food on the table in an open learning new world order future. Every class everywhere in the world is going to learn from a billion experts putting a bunch of free resources out there in their spare time? Yeah, right….

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As the new year rolls on, I’ve been pondering Learning Management Systems more. I know – not a big shock there.  I’ve been examining some of the weaknesses of our New Vision SLE (Social Learning Environment – our new term for the LMS) idea, and might have stumbled upon some interesting ideas. I need to work on some of these some more, but here is what I have been pondering:

• Why do we have to turn in assignments any more? Why can’t technology be used to detect our work on class projects on other sites and automatically submit these for us?
• Why are class discussion so hard to grade? Why can’t we make them easier to grade?
• In fact – why do class discussions have to be so contained? Why can’t they happen anywhere we want them to online? Why can’t the SLE just pull it in for us?

I’ve been pondering many of the ideas of Jim Groom that they use at UMW Blogs… and I might have come up with a pretty wicked way to combine those ideas with the New Vision SLE.

But I need to bounce these off of my partner in crime Harriet first – she always comes up with good ideas to sort out the problems with my ideas.

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I have talked to many people that have taken a class online entirely through FaceBook. I can honestly say that none of them liked it.  They found it really hard to go back and read things they missed, or to keep track of what was said in the class group. FaceBook groups and pages are good ideas that are poorly implemented in the overall program, so I can see their points. But I think the core of FaceBook’s success rests squarely on good, old-fashioned educational theory… and most educational software companies are missing that and still missing the boat on how to really engage learners online.

Whether you follow Dewey or social constructivism or connetivism, the main thread to most educational theories is that we learn best when we are sharing what we have learned with others (or when we are teaching others, or making social connections, or whatever your particular slant is… they all say the same basic thing).  We also know that we humans are curious creatures at our core that like to learn.

What if FaceBook (and Twitter and blogging for that matter) is not about narcissism…. but about us sharing what we have learned? What if the whole genre of “Web 2.0″ is really just the best implementation of educational theory that we have observed so far (and is popular not because it is cool, but because it is helping us to learn)?

“Okay,” you might be saying “I see how sharing links to current events and fighting for our political beliefs might be learning… but what about all of those posts that are just about our lunch? How is that learning? That has got to be pure narcissism, right?”

Don’t we need to learn as much about ourselves as we can? How can we understand the world around us, if we can’t even figure out ourselves? What if all of those so-called narcissistic status updates and tweets and blog posts are just us learning about ourselves…. in the best way possible, by sharing what we have learned with others?

The more I think about it, the more I think that is mostly what it is. As many times I have read someone’s update about brushing their teeth, I have also seen the profound update where that same person has made a major self-discovery. And this profound experience helps me learn about myself… making all of the mundane updates that I read worth it.

To be sure, FaceBook is really just a mirror that reflects more of our true personality than we would like… the part that we hide behind masks when we are in face-to-face communication.  So, if you are a very narcissistic person, then your status updates will be narcissistic in nature. But if you are a learner at heart (as I believe most people are), then FaceBook is just reflection of your desire to learn – both about the world around you and yourself. And about how to brush your teeth. Learning is not always pretty :)

Of course, FaceBook is missing some keys administrative details that make it difficult for the focused learning that needs to happen in a true class setting. If only ed tech companies would catch on to this and take their tools in a different direction, I think we could have some truly great tools created.

That is exactly what Harriet and I are trying to do with the “New Vision for the LMS” series that we are pushing for. Hopefully, there will be more on this in the new year. For now, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

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For the few that haven’t heard yet – Blackboard and Desire2Learn have both reached an agreement to stop all legal activities against each other. And that is about all we know about it, because both sides are not revealing any reason or motive for this move. Many are happy to hear this and are proclaiming that we can finally move on in the educational world, instead of worrying about the future apocalypse.

Of course, there are those that see something ominous brewing in this decision, while others are just down right concerned.  Count me in the concerned camp.  Can we really move on, when we have no idea why we are moving on?  I am sure there are always a few lemmings that question where the group is heading, only to be shushed by the others. “Just be quiet and be glad we are getting such a great view of the scenery off of this…..”

I could be happier about this if I actually knew why it was over (even if I didn’t agree with the reasons). Did Desire2Learn just run out of funding for further action? Did Blackboard realize they were losing the battle and decide to get out before the P.R. nightmare got worse? Did Blackboard finally get a clue and realize their patent was bogus? Or maybe even realize what they were doing was hurting the educational community more than helping, and decide to do the right thing?

(had to pause for a second…. tough to ROTFL and type at the same time…)

But as many have pointed out, this settlement is probably going to be worse than any possible final outcome of the original legal action. Is Blackboard going to sue others now? Are they going to file more patents and claim to invent stuff that they really didn’t?  We have no idea.  What if you want to start a new company, with a fresh idea? Will you find yourself in the cross hairs of a massive legal team, just because you used an obvious idea that they claimed to have invented? If we don’t know why this process was stopped, we can’t even possibly know where to move forward. Too many land mines hidden out there now.

Anyways…. The biggest problem is that we see a clear example of Blackboard breaking a vow. They vowed to appeal this to the Supreme Court and then didn’t.  What does that say about their vows to not hit open-source companies like Moodle and Sakai with lawsuits? Better start watching your back some more, Martin Dougiamas!

Of course, Desire2Learn valso broke a vow: to fight this to the end. I guess it is just the Blackboard Effect. Heck, they even got the CEO of the once-rebellious Angel LMS to turn into a boring corporate suck-up, so I guess they can turn Desire2Learn into complacent zombies.  Who will probably get bought soon.  Blackborg indeed.

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Digital Natives are better at multitasking than older generations? Please.  My generation (Gen X) practically perfected multi-tasking.  Let’s take a look back to the 80s for a second:

• Our multitasking was in the form of listening to a Walkman while sitting in front of the TV and doing homework – none of which were made for multitasking. So you can do_______ and ______ and _________ with a computer and iPhone and all that. Yawn. Computers and iPhones and all that are practically designed for multi-tasking. Next I guess you want a cookie for learning to drive a car on a road.
• Social networking happened online back then too – it was just over a telephone party line instead of an Internet line.
• We always had to have a phone with us back then, too – but for us it meant a pocket full of quarters to hit every available pay phone there was. Which was hard to do in public because of the crowds of teenagers standing around them.
• Texting happened all the time in the 80s. Back then, it was done with a piece of paper (we probably went through a tree a day sending short pointless messages back and forth).
• In fact, we pretty much did everything you can now do on a cell phone just using a pencil and piece of paper.
• Twitter? Please. We could get short updates about life to an entire school in the span of two class periods just using paper and no electricity. And that still worked even if your cell battery went dead.
• Writing on FaceBook walls? Too temporary for us. We had this thing called a bathroom wall. Much more interesting and permanent. Well, at least until the school budget allowed for a new can of paint.

Still think I am wrong? Still convinced that digital natives are totally different than older generations? Then here you go: a recent report from Forrester has been tearing down a few stereotypes about the so-called “digital natives.” Turns out, they aren’t necessarily as different from past generations as some would make them seem:

The results, published this month, portray a generation that, in some ways, is more traditional than some media executives might fear. And it seems that Morgan Stanley’s intern, Matthew Robson, is out of sync with the mainstream of European teenagers in a few of his media preferences.

Who is Matthew Robson? Well, he is 15-year old intern for Morgan Stanley that created a stir recently by publishing a report that some said proved the stereotypes about digital natives are true.  Like, for example, digital natives watch less traditional television because they are watching online video sites like YouTube.  Not true, according to actual research: they still spend more time watching television than they spend online.  Wow – what a novel concept. Research people’s statements, rather than take them as Gospel truth.

And this statement is really going to rock your boat if you blindly listen to the Marc Prensky’s of the world:

Instead, wrote Nick Thomas, an analyst at Forrester, “real-world social interaction with friends remains important for online teens.”

Of course, none of this is any surprise to those of us that know any real teenagers.

You can read the New York Times summary of this story here.

I’ve told this story before, but this report reminds me of the time I went up to actual teenager and told them that I heard that “email is for old people.”  That person’s response? “What idiot said that? I hate it when people my age just say stupid things to get attention, and then old people run with it like it is the truth or something.”

It is about time that someone did some actual research.

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