Thursday, June 29. 2006
Was Leonardo da Vinci a critical thinker?
Summer Institute for Faculty Development (with participants from Hudson County Community College, New Jeresy City University, Passaic County Community College) - June 21, 2005
My framework for this full day seminar was the seven principles that guided Leonardo da Vinci's own learning. For example, what da Vinci may have called connessione (connections), we might call "systems thinking." Leonardo's blending of arte and scienza could be compared to whole brain activities or interdisciplinary studies etc.
Within that frame, there were interactive exercises that require critical and creative thinking both for classroom use and for professional growth. The activities are based in different disciplines and address topics that include evaluating materials on the Internet, creativity vs. creative thinking, abstract language and problem solving strategies. The day was originally inspired by ideas presented by Michael Gelb in his book How to Think Like da Vinci.
If there's interest, I'll post more about the sessions later.
Tuesday, June 27. 2006
Reach students - teach students
I read two unrelated articles today that just connected right together for me.
The first is from emarketer.com and it's entitled "The Net:Teens Gotta Have It"
The piece collects a lot of statistics about teens online and how they are multitasking or, as BurstMedia says: these "uber-taskers" are "simultaneously using various consumer technologies and media types; and using these technologies as complements to one another - producing an effect often greater than if consumed alone."
Now remember, these people are interested in marketing to teens, not teaching them.Look at the chart for details, but here's the quick version - these teens say they spend three or more hours per day online and that 80% of all US teens are online at least an hour every day.
We know they're not just doing research - though 48.9% say they work on homework while online, 33.8% say they watch TV or a movie and 40% say they text or talk with friends on the phone while online.
(Related Reading: eMarketer report, Kids and Teens: Blurring the Line Between Online and Offline)
Sound addicted to online? When asked, "What impact would having no Internet access outside school have on your day?" , 28.9% said it would "ruin" their day, 39.8% said their day would be "not as good, but not ruined," and 31.2% said they "would be just fine" without online access.
I'm really surprised by another stat from the NPD Group that found that 94% of households with children ages 4 to 14 had a computer beating out even television at slightly less than 90%. And remember when it was TV that would ruin a generation (mine, by the way) of kids?
OK, now article #2
From a Mississippi newspaper The Clarion Ledger, an article titled "Online courses take heat out of summer school" by Cathy Hayden.
The state has a Department of Education Virtual School that offers summer school classes online. Last year they got 26 takers. This year more than 600 students have signed up for one of 12 free online courses offered. (The most popular classes are English 3 and Advanced Placement American government.)
Not only is it cost-effective, it probably a lot more desirable to their students because it gives them the ability to time-shift that study that normally would cut into their possible working hours or sun worshipping.
Nothing too unusual about the courses - students are assigned all their reading and writing lessons and have deadlines throughout the course to keep them on track. They use discussion forums.
Their only limitation seems to be that actual Mississippi teachers who were specially trained for six weeks are the ones interacting with students through e-mail and online chats, and that pool of trained teachers is small.
And this is $weet - the free Web-based classes were paid for with a $2.5 million grant from the BellSouth Foundation and $1 million from the state.
Courses are monitored by the local school's counselor, including giving the exams. They find that most of the kids are working from 10pm to 3am.
So, you see the connection, right?
Marketers are locked into how to reach teens online. Many schools have the technology in place to teach online.
Are we educational institutions doing as good a job at selling? Are colleges missing a big market by not offering to be the training and technology partners to K12 districts?
I'm always beating the K20 drum at meetings and conferences, but it must be a different drummer that people are hearing because I just don't see higher ed making enough connections. It's another point on the tally column for why I believe should be checking into using free software like Moodle to create online learning environments for their courses during the year and in summer.
I remember having to give those dreaded summer readings & assignments (and it's the best students - AP and honors - that usually get stuck with them) and I recall my own sons having to do them and doing anything they could to get around them. It's possible that kids might actually enjoy doing a few things online over the summer (rather than in a classroom or on their own) and there could be discussion, feedback and time management built into the curriculum. Probably be a lot less of it crammed into the last weeks of summer. And teachers could have quizzes and assignments checked/graded (in some cases by the software) before school started and then pick up from there on day one in the classroom.
Yes, you would have to give the teachers some training and pay them some summer stipend, but I would have jumped at it in those years when I taught "summer school" from 8:30 - 12:30 in an un-air-conditioned classroom to 25 kids who didn't want to be there.
I'll be curious to see if I can find any other places that are doing this already. If you are, or know of examples, please comment below.
Reach students and teach students - tough to succeed as an educator without both.
Monday, June 26. 2006
Reading Our Own Statistics
Sunday, June 25. 2006
Blikis and phlogs?
I have now accepted the entry of words like blog, bloggers and wiki into the dictionary.
I'm getting used to the term "blogroll" to mean either that part of a blog that lists links to other blogs, or when someone posts their personal list of blog favorites publically (using Bloglines etc.)
BUT I'm not willing (yet) to give in to: webophobes, blikis, bloki, blogdom, blogosphere, blogworld, blogorrhea, phlog or moblog.
I can't even bear to define them for you - but if you want to sound more tuned in than me, check out what the Oxford Dictionaries online have to say about the meanings.
Saturday, June 24. 2006
Ken, how do you read all those blogs?
A friend asked me the other day how many blogs I read regularly. I wasn't sure, so I checked my Bloglines account. As of today, it's 37.
How do I read so many? (Don't ask me why I read so many.) I use a service that aggregates all of them in one place. That's what Bloglines does for me. I log in and it pulls the RSS feeds from blogs that I have subscribed to and gives me the new entries that I haven't read. I can have it show a summary of the entries or the complete entry.
Don't know what blogs to subscribe to? You can browse their directories in different categories and see what is popular. All it takes to add a site is a click or if you know the site's RSS feed address.
For example, you can subscribe to this blog by pasting in the address http://devel2.njit.edu/serendipity/index.php?/feeds/index.rss2 or you can click a button if it's on the site like this one:
You'll notice that we have a whole set of RSS feeds on this site in the right side column on the home page. when you see one of these images 
you don't need to click them.You want to right click and "copy the link location." That's the code you need to subscribe. Bloglines is not the only game in town.
Another popular service is Feedburner. Clicking one of their icons will take to that blog's Feedburner page (blog's have to register with Feedburner). So, if you click on our Feedburner image it goes to http://feeds.feedburner.com/serendipity35 If you have a Feedburner account, this would allow you to subscribe, otherwise it will show you the latest entries reformatted by Feedburner. Go ahead and click to see - no obligation!
Do I "read" every entry in all 37 blogs? Not really. I scan most the way I scan headlines in the newspaper. I read what interests me. There's no way I have the time to even click on 37 links to see those sites and even if I did I would have to rely on my memory to know which entries I hadn't already read. I gave up on my memory for that sort of thing a few years ago.
You can mark blogs and other web sites that you subscribe to as public or private and then make your public items really public so that others can see them in your "blogroll."
Friday, June 23. 2006
Don't trust that domain name
I did a workshop this week and part of the content was about helping faculty/students evaluate materials on the Internet. One thing that was clear is that many people make assumptions about sites based on domain names. That's an iffy proposition. Yeah, most .com sites are commercial, and .gov sites are from the U.S. government. But having a .org at the end of a domain tells you almost nothing. It may have been intended for non-profit sites (and that sounds noble) but anyone can get a .org domain that's not taken. No one is checking your tax status. Here are a few items we discussed.
An example I used in the workshop is the martinlutherking.org site. It looks like an educational website about the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. that you'd want students to use ( or that you'd expect on a bibliography) but it's definitely not. It's a smear site produced by Stormfront, a white supremacist group.
Stormfront's home site is also a .org. They're not hiding who they are or what they believe. It's right there. But their MLK site is trying to pass itself off on first glance as something else, and I'm sure it works for many students, especially our youngest ones.
That site comes out on top when you do a Google search on Martin Luther King. Out of more than 46 million hits, they are at the top. Many of you probably know that Google results are in some way a popularity contest. The more people who link to a site, the higher it goes in search results. That's why I haven't linked to the site or its owner here.
A situation that's less clear in teaching research: Which site would you or your students trust more for information about global warming - an .edu (college) site or a .gov site? Thankfully, the teachers in my workshop were distrustful of both, knowing that each could have an agenda.
We need to teach the "re" in research and have students use more than just Google or Wikipedia. Both of those are good places to use and banning Wikipedia from being a source of research (which apparently many teachers are doing) is putting your head in the sand, because it will still be used - it just won't appear on the sources cited.
One last (and lighter) example is the domain .tv. Assumption: they are associated with the television or video industry. Actually, .tv is the Internet country code top-level domain (ccTLD) for the island nation of Tuvalu. (The domain is currently operated by “The .tv Corporationâ€, a VeriSign company.)
Any person in the world can register a .tv domain for a fee, part of the income goes to the government and people of Tuvalu. The domain name is popular since it's the abbreviation of the word "television." Japan's .jp doesn't have that appeal, but .fm, .am, .cd and .dj have potential. Domain names used this way are sometimes called domain hacks.
Many of the websites with .tv URLs are pornographic or otherwise sexually explicit sites. Apparently this has caused some controversy on Tuvalu which has a large conservative Christian population that feels that revenue from those sources is immoral. (Trivia: I do think it's interesting that the Tuvalu government's web site is a wiki, see http://www.gov.tv)It is worth educating yourself about domain names for your own research as well as passing that information on to your students.
Sunday, June 18. 2006
NYNJA STAR Conf on Interoperability at Princeton University
NYNJA STAR is the New York/New Jersey Association Supporting Teaching and Research (that's way too many letters!) - a consortium of colleges that use Blackboard products (they were formerly the NY/NJ Blackboard Users Group). I'm at their Second Annual Conference on June 19 at Princeton University. The conference theme is "interoperability."
Although NJIT is a WebCT campus, since the two companies have recently merged, at some point in the next few years, if we stay with that CMS,we will be using a Blackboard product. Pprobably user groups will also merge - currently we are active in the Northeast WebCT User Group (NEWUG).
Here is some general information on my session - I'll update this entry or add additional at/after the conference.
Recently, 200 officials who are responsible for software selection at a range of higher education institutions were surveyed about OSS. Two-thirds of these CIOs said they have “considered or are actively considering†using open source products, while about 25% of institutions are implementing higher education-specific open source software.
Many colleges are considering using open source software as a way of taking control of both the design and cost of supporting instruction and administration. It takes only cursory exploration into this area to discover that issues of support are critical and perhaps overwhelming for some institutions.
While interoperability is used to describe the capability of different programs to exchange data via a common set of procedures, that definition focuses on the technical side and interoperability can often be an organizational issue. Some have described the higher ed approach to OSS as “affirmative ambivalence†because of the wait-and-see approach that is being taken.At NJIT, we have created Moodle and Sakai sandbox environments to experiment with, but our earlier entry into open source software was using OSS blogs (like this one) and wikis (see http://devel2.njit.edu/mediawiki/ as an example). Blog and wiki installations require many of the same considerations as a CMS, but on a much smaller scale.
So my conference session looks at starting out with an open source project using a wiki or blog.
- what they look like
- obtaining the software & a bit on installation
- uses for educators
- user training & support issues
- lack of commercial vendor support for schools that require it (as with Red Hat's enterprise version of the "free" OSS Linux)
- need for software developers to support the product on campus
- fear that the university will consider OSS as just a way to save money (and therefore not support the implementation with staff & funding) Many schools realize that at least a portion of the savings from software licensing costs will need to be shifted to IT support. The Sakai pilot at Rutgers is an example of that.
Saturday, June 17. 2006
What happened to just plain watching TV?
On June 20th, ABC Family is launching it’s new TV series Kyle XY, on the iTunes Music Store for free. Users will be able to download the pilot for 6 days at no charge, until June 27 when the show makes it’s television debut. After the show launches on TV, each episode will be the available for download at the normal rate of $1.99 on the iTunes Music Store.
OK, it's not free HBO. And it's really a promotional gimmick rather than a new distribution method. But it's an indicator of another giant industry reacting to the changing consumption of media online. Big media moves like a big dinosaur. If TV is T-Rex, then the record and film biz moves like an ultrasaurus. And they'd better move, or it will be time for another extinction.
The video game industry, despite many Americans (like myself) who ignore it, is now overtaking the movie industry in profits. Think about that.
Americans' viewing habits are changing rapidly. A decade ago, broadcasters held their breath when they saw that digital television threatened to wipe out ordinary commercial TV. It didn't happen, or at least not as quickly as predicted, and the industry had a chance to react and make some changes.
Digital video recorders (DVRs) have only managed to penetrate around 8% of American homes and some studies show that despite industry fears they have actually created a small increase in the total numbers viewing the top primetime broadcast shows
Video on demand (you pay to see the same "free" top network shows) also has potential - people want shows when they want them, where they want them and seem to be willing to pay a reasonable price to get it. Despite rumors, not everyone in the U.S. is downloading movies using BitTorrent.
The video iPod and full motion video cell phones are also here. Personally, I can't imagine wanting to watch TV on either for more than a few minutes, but, gadget-hound that I am, I seem to be part of a shrinking group of viewers.
The adoption rate is slower for technologies that require people to make a purchase every month, i.e. services, but tech toys and appliances have always had a market. 25% of American households had no one employed during the Depression, yet radio sales were tremendous. And despite the high price of early televisions, post-war baby boomers bought a lot of TV'sAnd in the 1980's video games, cable TV, VCRs, home satellite receivers, modems, answering machines and PCs all found huge audiences and altered our viewing habits.
Radio was going to kill newspapers; TV would kill radio and movie theaters; VCRs would kill film (again) and TV; DVDs would kill film (again) and videotape... and yet we STILL have good old radio (albeit with satellite and podcasts), TV and movie theaters.
We know that these technologies have changed our students and their expectations for how they get content and there is no reason we shouldn't expect that trend to continue.
As NJIT prepares to launch its own iTunes U site in the iTunes Music Store this July, we are all trying to guess what will be in there by the summer of 2007.
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