Food for thought from my daily me (092109)

Facebook Data Mining: Truth in Association?

A data mining project out of MIT sheds light on the way data from your friends connects to you through social networks. There may be an illusion of control as you set your profile settings. The reality, you have little if any control when data mining programs can harvest and analyze data from friends in your network to “out you” based on the likelihood that you will be similar to your friends. This moves the potential of data mining far beyond those of marketing. Are there no more secrets? Today, we all leave digital trails behind. What to those trails say about us?

 

Dirty Little Secret About the “Wisdom of the Crowds”- There is No Crowd.

What happens when the crowds don’t show up? Vassilis Kostakos from CMU looked at several sites that use ratings as established by “crowds” only to find that the crowds consisted of a few individuals. So, where is the “Wisdom of Crowds” when there are no crowds? What implications does this have for sites such as Wikipedia, Yelp, Amazon etc.? This is not a new question but one that does need to be considered as we evaluate value and veracity of information in today’s information rich environment.

 

H.G. Wells: The Google Logo Mystery is Finally Solved

If you are a fan of H.G. Well, you might have connected with the spirit of the mystery as Google revealed clues to their latest collection of logos. As one who is exploring the use of Alternate Reality Games as a learning environment, I find this intriguing. This report indicates that some solved the mystery after the second logo when public while other (including me) did not even know there was “a game a foot”. I will have to go back over the logos to see how they put the puzzle together. Just another example of the creative fun that can be had by all.

 

Revised Draft of Common Core Standards Unveiled

OK. So I will have to take some time to digest this but wanted to pass this along. I do find it interesting that the teams working on this are largely from Achieve and the College Board. While standards are not a bad thing, the way we measure and implement have been greatly flawed in the past and with current implementation. How will this be different? What is the purpose of this approach? It does sound a lot like making sure “all parts are interchangeable” on an assembly line form of education. If that is the case, I have a real problem with this. Only time will tell. Here is a taste of the current thinking.

Lack of Risk Puts Nation at Risk

This short piece is a working thought and stems from personal experiences and mental musings over the past few months. I welcome your comments…

Lately, I have been frustrated by the lack of risk taking I see in the U.S. education. I am not talking about financial risk or personal risk; there are plenty of examples there. I am talking about intellectual risk taking. Our educational system has done a wonderful job of preparing students for more school. School leads to school which leads to more school. However, what happens when you run out of school? What happens when you get to the end of that educational path and you need to join what many refer to as the real world?

Students today are obsessed with finding the right answer, finding truth—“Will this be on the test?” Yet, there are so few right answers to be had. Or, there are many right answers, many truths. We see students and parents driven by grades rather than learning. It is as if a grade of “A” really means you have learning something, that you have knowledge, that you will go somewhere. That maybe true if you stay in school. But what happens when your problems are not bound by limitations set by the artificial environment we call school? What if there were no right answers? What if there were many right answers? What if the process was more important than the destination? How do you assign a grade then? This is the world of intellectual risk taking.

Students don’t risk today because intellectual risk often leads to results that run counter to the culture of success in school. With the obsession for right answers, there is no room to risk. We see this daily in classrooms across the United States. Right answers can be measured by tests and boy do our students know how to take tests. We prepare them with test taking strategies in school. There is an entire industry founded on preparing students for tests. Many of these tests, by design, limit the amount of risk a student is willing to take. When a student skips a question, they just don’t get the point but when they answer it and get it wrong- BAMMM! We sock them with a penalty- no reason to take risks here.

So why is the nation at risk with the lack of intellectual risk taking? I believe we have developed a generation of individuals who are lost when presented with real problems. Ill-defined problems without bounds frustrate students today. And it is not just the students; I have also seen this same frustration in teachers.  When faced with problems that are outside their immediate experience or area of expertise, there is often a desire for step by step instructions rather than a search for creative solutions. We have some incredibly creative teachers in the U.S. Yet, they are stifled and many fail to take those intellectual risks, venturing “outside the box”, because they are largely judged by the ability of their students to answer questions that are “inside the box”. So there the focus stays.

In many ways, traditional schooling has become a Darwinian way of reducing the number of creative problem solvers in our society. We penalize those (students and teachers) who risk on the outside rather than rewarding them for their willingness to take intellectual risks that could lead to new understandings.

And what is the risk for our country? What great discoveries do you know where the discoverer followed step by step instructions that lead them to new understandings or the big breakthrough?

Intellectual risk is at the heart of almost all intellectual discoveries. Just look at Edison. He had over 10,000 failed attempts to get a light bulb to work before he had his first successful illumination. He was quoted as saying (and I paraphrase) “Failures? No, I know 10,000 ways a light bulb will not work.” Look at the work surrounding the discovery of the molecular structure of DNA. There were some big intellectual mistakes there as well. Watson and Crick’s first model would have never worked; it was missing almost all of the water and the phosphates were in the center. Linus Pauling, already a Nobel prize winner made a huge mistake by proposing to the entire scientific world a three strand model with the phosphates on the inside. Talk about a mistake, and he made it before the entire scientific community! Nobel Prize winners are not supposed to be this wrong! Right? But that is not the end of the story. While Watson and Crick eventually figured out this mystery of life and won their Nobel’s, Pauling became the “graceful loser” then went on to win a second unshared Nobel Prize for additional work in Chemistry! All of this, a result of intellectual curiosity requiring the freedom for intellectual risk taking.

We have big problems and big problems require big answers. These answers will not be found in the safe little box of standardized testing and behaviorist schooling. We need to create schools where teachers and students can safely fail, where they can take intellectual and creative risks that develop the skills and habits of mind necessary for solving big problems. We need to move away from the illusion of truth and facts and focus on the process of discovery and refinement of our current truths. Our students need to learn that there are few right answers and that most things that are worthwhile and will have great impact, take hard work, determination and a willingness to be wrong before you can be right. We need to celebrate the risk taker. We need to help our students become “un-schooled” so they will be free to truly learn and discover. We need to help them see how they could be the next Edison, Watson, Crick, Pauling, Franklin, Wilkins. Lessons in “playing it safe” will not get us there. We need a nation of intellectual risk-takers.

Archive of ARG from Live Classroom 2.0

As many of you know, last year I created an Alternate Reality Game for a workshop in the Classroom of the Future at the NAIS Annual Conference. Since then I have had several opportunities to share this with others in 1 hour face-to-face workshops. However, last weekend I was able to share it with a larger group via the Internet through LiveClassroom2.0. As a result, the session was recorded. This means you can listen and watch the session as it was presented in Elluminate hosted by LiveClassroom2.0. You also have access to the Q&A section as well as chat and additional resources. While it is best to play the game to understand, a tour through the experience can be used to help you understand the game as you look at how it was constructed. Those who make it to the end received a “Pot of Gold”- A living collection of resources including the design documents for the game I called Shafted Enlightenment.

What is an Alternate Reality Game? (you ask). I have posted several links on my blog that should help you understand as well as take you to the archived version from last weekend. You will find that some of the slides for the backstory did not show up. I like to think it was A.I.R. that did that (You need to check out the game to understand what A.I.R. might have done). So, I am uploading the slides to slide share and will add them to this post for reference.

Full Archive information from Live Classroom 2.0

Slides for Playing the Game

Shafted Enlightenment as presented at NAIS

Here you will find several different ways to experience the game along with many resources and a way to play the game with the sequence of linked clues. Make sure you get to the Pot of Gold as it is a rich environment and will continue to grow so check back often.

There was interest in forming a group of educators interested in developing and teaching with Alternate Reality Games. Therefore, I am putting together a way, for those intereted in ARG’s for learning in K-12 and beyond, to connect and collaborate. I will post more information when it is ready.

An Hour at Diigo U. (Day 2)

These three sites were my latest discoveries at Diigo U (Diigo University- part of my experiment in social online learning).

 

100 Essential Web 2.0 Tools for Teachers

This site contains a nice collection of Web 2.0 tools for teachers (and students or anyone who is interested in these types of tools). There are some of the “usual suspects” but some interesting tools that I have never explored. Each tool has a short description next to it so you have some idea what the tool can do. Can’t wait to play! Careful though, you could be at this for the rest of the year exploring the possibilities of these sites. http://www.onlinedegree.net/100-essential-2-0-tools-for-teachers/

 

Supreme Decision

I have not tried this yet but saw this on a comment for a civics site. Students observe an argument for student rights at school as presented to the Supreme Court. The animated video that lays out the case provides text of the narrative for accessibility. Students hear the case, research findings, hear different perspectives then have to make a decision (I think- have not gotten that far). This looks like it has potential on its own as well as stimulus for further narrative based simulation/game development

http://www.ourcourts.org/play-games/supreme-decision Here is the main site that was originally posted on Diigo: http://www.ourcourts.org/.

 

Learning Theories

For those of you interested in learning theories that inform your practice, here is an interesting site. This is a large collection of links to introductory pages on different learning theories as well as theorists. If you are not familiar with these, you should take some time to explore the underpinnings of your practice. The more we as teachers understand how people learn, the greater our efficacy of our efforts. While I don’t believe we will ever get to a unified theory on learning, the ideas presented here are valuable and necessary to understand if we are to improve education. Some of the sites here are introductory while others go in great depth and are sponsored by some “big names” in the field of cognition and psychology. http://www.emtech.net/learning_theories.htm

Diigo University- Day 1

Today I went to class at Diigo University. Never heard of them? Well, it is amazing what you can learn through D.U. This is part of a small exercise I am going through to see how much I can learn  (or in this case, serve as a hunter-gatherer of useful and interesting information to pass along to others. The objective here is to see how different Internet information tools work for learning about new resources, ideas or just “good stuff”. The only requirement for me on this search has been to be able to link it back to education. For me, these links are in my head as I opened my mind and removed myself from the traditional box that surrounds many educators and educational institutions. I hope you will find something here in this list that will be useful as you practice your craft of shaping minds.

 

Google Public Domain E-books and EPUB

Google is now using EPUB, a free and open standard for electronic books to make over 1 million books public domain books available for download to readers. I tested this earlier with my new Sony Reader and it was amazing how quickly I could gather a collection of Classics for my Reader. Want Hamlet, Homer, London, Melville or one of many others? Check out the public domain books on Google and add some to a reader that supports EPUB or PDF.

 

More information at http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/08/more-books-in-more-places-public-domain.html or http://books.google.com/

 

 

100 Useful Online Calculators and Conversion Tools for Science

Need to convert something to new units, calculate a value for some function, access to a dynamic periodic table or one of many other calculators for math or science. Check out http://onlineengineeringdegree.com/?p=56

 

Food for Thought- Technology making so students can’t write?—NO

This is a short essay by Clive Thompson that does a nice job of laying out the current situation with a little help from Lunsford from Stanford.

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson

 

Stanford Study of Writing

The Stanford Study of Writing is a five year longitudinal study. This is the site for this study which includes the research questions, methods and preliminary findings. You will also find several parallel studies resulting in student theses and dissertations. http://ssw.stanford.edu/index.php

 

Do you like Music?

This site has several interesting tools where you can “dial up” and listen to virtually any song access their lyrics. Give it a try. Talk about a music collection at your fingertips. Also includes Free Play music and music under Creative Commons. http://cooltoolsforschools.wikispaces.com/Music+Tools

 

Looking for Interactive Applications for Teaching English to use on your IWB?

This site links to resources that can be used with IWB’s in English teaching classrooms. Most of these look to be for the younger students but there may be something here that would be interesting.

http://www.copacabana-p.schools.nsw.edu.au/Get_Smart_Pages/Get_Smart_English2.htm

 

A Portal to Media Literacy by Michael Wesch

This is a 1 hour lecture by Wesch that looks at teaching and learning in the Web 2.0 New Media world. He explores the nature of today’s classroom in regards to the message emerging from the physical structure and organization of the room and how that is in conflict with classrooms without wall as structured across the Internet. Wesch then digs into current research and some of his techniques. Some very interesting stuff here especially as he brings the online work back into the classroom for a very engaging in-class full class learning activity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s. You should also check out his Netvibes portal that was created for his mediated cultures: digital ethnography. This came from the video and can be accessed at: http://www.netvibes.com/wesch#Digital_Ethnography

 

The Great Idea Finder

Do you wonder about inventions and their inventors? How about the Karaoke Machine or the Kodak Camera? This site provides insight to many inventions and inventors. http://www.ideafinder.com/history/index.html

 

Failure is Not an Option…But It Should Be

A wonderful post that challenges us to look at school as a place where failure is acceptable, perhaps even celebrated. It is through these failures that we learn. Scientists and inventors are wrong far more than they are correct. Let students learn to learn. http://www.quisitivity.org/2009/08/failure-is-not-an-option-but-it-should-be/

 

Nine great reasons why teachers should use Twitter.

A nice collection of reasons to use Twitter. Collaboration, Global, Reflective, Professional Development and more. Check it out… http://mrslwalker.com/index.php/2009/03/29/nine-great-reasons-why-teachers-should-use-twitter

 

CK-12 Foundation- (Open Source Publishing)

The CK-12 Foundation is a not-profit organization that is working to reduce the cost of text books through the use of Open content and web collaboration. This is just one more step toward the new publishing model that textbook companies need to fear and fear it they do. http://about.ck12.org/

 

CLRN

This is an interesting follow-up of the post above. This is the California Learning Resource Network where they had a Free digital textbook initiative with review and results. Here you can see the entire report or look at the summary findings. Notice how many open content books made the list in competition with the big publishers. Yes, publishers need to look at the future as written on these pages. http://www.clrn.org/fdti/

Presenting in Live Classroom 2.0- ARG’s

Learning should be like a good book or an engaging game – you don’t want to stop! This presentation explores alternate reality gaming as an engaging, emerging learning environment that draws on the power of narrative and immerses students in collaborative, problem-based learning. Learn about this topic by personally playing an alternate reality game.

Date:
Saturday  August 29, 2009

Times:
9:00am Pacific/10:00am Mountain
11:00am Central/12:00pm Eastern

Location:
Online with Live Classroom 2.0

Join me at http://tinyurl.com/cr20live

For the curious…What will you be getting into when you attend this presentation on learning through ARG’s at Live Classroom 2.0?

Here are a few places to explore:

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Beast_(game)
2. Google the following term “Sentient Machine Therapist”. Anyone want to venture a guess as to why I would have you search this term? Ever see the movie A.I.? I hope you watched the credits! Check out ALL of the links from here- Welcome to the “rabbit hole”. The rabbit hole to what you ask? Hmm… Read on and all will be illuminated.
3. http://www.cloudmakers.org/

More info and clues to follow. The game is right around the corner. Learn about ARG’s as learning environments when you join me for a 1 hour game on Saturday August 29th (9:00am Pacific/10:00am Mountain 11:00am Central/12:00pm Eastern). Enter game/presentation through http://tinyurl.com/cr20live.

Inspirational Videos for Education- Direct Link

It appears that something has happened to the custom player for this video collection. I will have to check that tonight. So… Here is a direct link to the play list.

http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=BC472DAFD154885C

Something must have changed overnight at my host site an the script is not running correctly. Ah, the fun of maintaining a website on hosted services. Anyway, the link above should be good and is not dependent on any other services other than YouTube. Enjoy!

2 Full days of Live Blogging…

I have been involved in a “grand experiment” Live Blogging all the sessions from the Urban School’s Integrated Technology Symposium in San Francisco. While I have blogged for some time, this is my first real Live Blogging experience. This has been an amazon experience. I try to capture the gist of all that is going on in the presentations and discussions during the live blog then later complete what I call a roll up blog. I have been posting these on a blog site I created for this purpose and will eventually repost them here as well. However, I have found that as a participant in all aspects of this symposium, this has really helped me create meaning for myself. While trying to share the content with others in ways that may be meaningful for them, I have found myself far more engaged in the entire symposium. This is a good thing as I am also going to be their closing keynote speaker and am supposed to create the presentation based on what I have learned through the process, mix it with my own experience and research and hopefully, help the rest of the participants synthesize the three days and make meaning that they can take with them as they head back to their respective schools. To say that it is strange to know I am delivering a keynote tomorrow afternoon while not really knowing all I will be talking about (there is still one more day with three sessions that have not happened). This is very exciting for me. Who knows what I will say… I guess I will have to wait until tomorrow to see what bubbles to the surface. But to say my mind is racing with ideas is an understatement. This has been a very engaging experience for me. If you want to read about the first day’s sessions, they are all posted at http://citbigenhoc.wordpress.com/. I welcome comments and hope you enjoy. There will be additional “roll-up blogs that will be posted later today and/or tomorrow. Enjoy and I look forward to your comments.

My first experience with Claymation…

This short (very short) claymation was created in a hands on session at the Urban School’s Integrated Technology Symposium. I have never done claymation before and this little clip was a result of 45 mins work from concept to completion. This is more of a proof of concept than anything else. While I saw this used to have students explain their understanding of scientific concepts such as chemical bonding, molecular attraction and other abstract concepts, it could be used in any discipline. Here you can have students create and capture an artifact of understanding that can be shared with others- peers as well as students from other schools. This was created using iStopmotion and iMovie and Quicktime. There is also a PC solution for this process but I still need to get the links.

Day 1 of the Integrated Tech Symposium in San Francisco

Dawn will soon break in San Francisco or at least it has for me. I seem to be caught in some sort of time zone warp as I found myself wide awake at three in the morning. Too many different time zones in this past month… I believe I am caught somewhere between EDT and CDT while I find myself currently in PDT.

Today is the first day of the Center for Innovation in Teaching: Integrated Tech Symposium. This should be a great experience as a small group of educators from across the country will soon gather at The Urban school in the heart of San Francisco to explore teaching and learning in today’s technology rich environment. I am always excited to discuss with other educators and learn from the diversity of their experiences.

Today’s schedule starts at 9:00 am PDT and will wrap up around 3:30pm PDT. The menu includes…
*9-9:30a A Vision of Integrated Technology
*9:30-10:30a Language- Extending Oral Practice Within and Beyond the Classroom
*10:45-11:45a Math- Visual and Interactive
12:45-2:00p Hands-on Workshops
*2:15-3:30p Panel Discussion: Realities of Teaching in a Laptop School

. Today’s choices for the hands-on workshops include:
• Interactive White Board Techniques- Language Emphasis
• Exploring Math Software
• Exploring Science Software

I have not yet decided which session I will attend but I suspect I will spend some time exploring either the Math or Science software tracks today.

As you look at the schedule above, you will see a star next to many events. These are the events that I will be Live Blogging today and I invite you to join us on this through the Live Blog. This is very easy and you can find the information on how to participate and the appropriate Live Blog links on this blog.

You can also learn more about this symposium and invite others to join in the live blogging sessions through the symposium blog. Simply send out a link to the invitation page through e-mail, Twitter or any other means you know.

Finally, talking about Twitter, you can also follow along on Twitter by following @urbanschool_cit. Twitter seems to be taking the world by storm and I can see why. The symposium blog did not exist before yesterday yet its first day produced over 100 hits simply because of the social nature of tools like Twitter. So, if you have a twitter account, feel free to pass this information on and Tweet the world. I am looking forward to my journey and the new knowledge that will be constructed through this process.