Sunday, August 30, 2009
Blog Posting #7 -Second Life
As a massive virtual world there are a few immediate thoughts on how Second Life could be used in education. Just the ability to create a meeting space for people separated by distance is a huge boon for education. As more and more online classes are created the problem of how to maintain a human touch in our learning grows. The ability to create virtual classrooms were students can interact and use familiar symbols like chairs and tables give us a better feeling of community. We can all see the same things and discuss them even though we are separated by distance.
We can use a virtual world to go to places and things that we could not afford to in real life. You may not be able to take your class to the Statue of Liberty in real life but in a virtual world it could be easily done. Famous landmarks, world culture, historical settings, or maybe a walking tour of the inside of a living cell could all be done in the virtual world for practically nothing, once they are built.
And there comes the major drawback to a virtual education experience. Sure you can see the Eiffel Tower once it is built but what if it is not there? It would be a lot cheaper to build a virtual Statue of Liberty then a real one but remember that everything has to be built. Building the virtual desks and chairs to sit in could be just as hard. I saw an estimate of about $15,000 to have engineers build your plot of land up. So while it may be cheaper then flying all of your French students to France it is not that cheap for a public school system that is already strapped for cash. As Mr. Linden himself explains in the TED video below the whole virtual world process is still very young. In an almost Wild West type growth and rules system. The Linden Dollar is king and people are buying and selling anything they can. I think that this technology will have a profound impact on education but I do not see it for at least 5 to 10 years from now. Until then it will be like the earlier days of the internet where if teachers find something useful they will of course use it but who would have ever thought of teaching completely online in those days.
Saturday, August 15, 2009
Blog #6 -Communities of Practice
Social Networking brings to mind the giants of MySpace and Facebook and the ability to see the friends of friends and branch out your circle of influence. Unfortunately while these sites do allow you to keep connected to a circle of friends even if they are not local and it allows these circles to intertwine it does not really have a good system set up for Communities of Practice. Sure the doctors of a particular small field of expertise might be able to find each other in these systems but does it allow them to share the information and resources that are unique to their practices?
So beyond just meeting other people and saying hello we would love to have community centers were the people inside are all interested in similar goals and have a shared language for those goals. After all does not a community over time build its own language to deal with the problems and solutions that community has? If I told you that cast B needed to meet at the MPR for a run-though would you know what I meant? My Drama students would. Therefore just posting that to my FaceBook would help those in that community but might confuse my mother who also reads it. Enter NING.
Ning is a social networking site that allows its members to create their own sub-networks. Each network has the features of the big players but can be specialized for the task that this sub-community will be facing. I have created one for my Drama students that we will use to keep all of the needed information and conversations as we work on this year’s musical and plays. Ning allows you to create your own unique social network for your specific Community of Practice without it being diluted by all the other communities.
http://www.stevehargadon.com/2008/11/thoughts-on-social-networking-in.html
http://www.google.com/search?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=social+networking+education&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8
Blog #5 -Social Media
Welcome to the new age of Social Media. Where we will all be producers and consumers of any media we want. You will be able to produce text, audio and video to share with all of the people of the world and participate in a global community. Your creations can be viewed, rated, tagged shared and commented on and we will be able to create a network of information. Does this sound familiar to anyone? Wasn’t e-mail supposed to do this? Or Myspace? Or the Printing Press?
Sure each of them have made powerful changes to the world but I think that people get to focused on the tool rather then on the solutions the tool can solve. Remember that each of these inventions were just that a tool, and their success was in how they were used to solve a problem. Not only that but remember that these tools get used up and passed over when they are no longer needed. Think the printing press prints much anymore? Even Myspace is probably on its way out now that it has become more of a marketing tool then a social networking site. Isn’t YouTube a Social Media site? Yet how much of YouTube is really adding to human knowledge and how much is videos of people getting hurt, music videos and comedy. Even with tags and ratings there is still so much information that some sort of filter systems need to be created. Isn’t that why peer reviewed journals are well… peer reviewed? Why do you think Wikipedia is still so strong? It’s the few thousand peer reviewers they have for the site. Volunteers who know about the subjects and how to function in Wikipedia’s community rules. Real people made these rules not by the collective intelligence of ratings and tags.
Be wary of the people touting Social Media’s ability to create a collective consciousness of human knowledge. Remember that the fist spam e-mail was sent May 3, 1978 at the very dawn of the e-mail age, even though there was rule to only use it for education and research. People will abuse any unmanaged network to promote their financial livelihood. Google is an amazing tool to find information unless you are searching about something that is sold or made money from, and then the information is buried under tons of links that are really advertisements. People even create pages with the knowledge of how Google works in order to trick you into visiting. How long before we see companies manipulating tags and reviews to drum up business? Oh wait that already has happened.
http://www.toprankblog.com/2008/03/social-media-advertising/
Blog #4 -21st Century Skills & Lifelong Learning
Personal Learning Networks
There is a great push about these Personal Learning Networks. We can build an online network of people interested in a subject or range of subjects. We can then build a community discussion about these subjects in our online environments. That community can help itself learn new information and create new ideas or solutions. It is a community of learners.
It sounds magical until you realize that it is just talking about placing online what good teachers have been doing in their classrooms for decades. Promoting good discussions, engaging the class with new ideas, creating solutions and building a community are all things I have seen in my classrooms both as a student and a teacher. So what problem are these Personal Learning Networks trying to solve.
Well if your field of study is small so that large distances separate the people interested, then using the Internet to connect virtually is an excellent solution. It also allows people to connect that do not have a similar time schedule. Since you can read and post at any time it means that anyone can do it even if they could not meet people at a specific time. So PLNs can help connect people across space and time but if you can be in the same place at the same time would your discourse be any less valid then if we were in a PLN? I am sure there are people who will argue about text and its longevity or its ability to promote critical thinking but I have to admit I think it is also because they are people who learn and think well in the written word.
For those of use who are slow readers and pained writers these PLNs seem like the most horrid beast from the underworld. Remove the lectures and interaction with the teacher? Force us to read through page after page of loosely related material in order to find the few gems of new concepts in our PLNs? The idea frankly scares me and makes me think that if that was how education had been growing up for me I would probably have dropped out of school.
http://ltc.umanitoba.ca/connectivism/?p=61
http://kwhobbes.wordpress.com/2009/02/17/professionalpersonal-learning-networks/
Blog #3: Media Literacy
Distributed Cognition
As the amount of information that human society has discovered grows faster and faster it becomes more and more impossible for any person to know everything. People are starting to turn towards the Internet as a sort of secondary mind, and I do not see that there is any problem with that. Why should we be memorizing data just in case it may be useful one day? Would it not be better to teach people how to find data if they need it? If that data becomes useful to know internally then it will be memorized so that the process of looking it up every time can be avoided. I know my social security number and my credit card numbers by heart, but that is not because I memorized them when I got them. I learned them as I used them.
Distributed Cognition is part of the cognitive sciences and is a theory that the “mind” is not 100% in the body. Take a process as simple as a really long math problem. To finish the problem takes many steps and we use a system on paper to work one step at a time. Therefore the cognition is both inside our mind and on the paper. Sure the paper is just a storage device but think about how much harder you would have had to work if you had no paper at all to do the problem. The paper helped you remember so it was part of your mental processes. It may not be smart, but with the paper we are smarter.
Getting Things Done is basically a time management system so that you can keep all your tasks in line, but the philosophy at the heart of it is to basically extend your cognition of tasks into a system of paper or software. When you start on the system you write down all of the tasks, promises, deadlines and other to-dos and get them into one big pile. Then you sort though that pile adding dates due, resources needed and projects they are a part of. Then you create filters so that you are working on what you need to be working on. This part is all pretty typical of time management but it’s the other part that I find fascinating. As you are working on anything, if your mind presents you with an interesting side idea or something that you need to do then you are to immediately create a new item in your system and place it in your inbox. This combined with the regular sorting of the inbox means that you will never lose track of your ideas and obligations. That you have created a system to extend the memory capacity of the human brain.
http://www.learning-theories.com/distributed-cognition-dcog.html
http://www.davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php
Sunday, August 9, 2009
Blog #2: Learning 2.0
Well I assume that I will lose points for this particular Blog, but that is irony in itself. I watched the videos on the blog page and found myself getting more and more upset. Here once again I have catchy videos with sad looking children explaining to me how I am a horrible person for not doing whatever the author of the video thinks should be done. Why is it that teachers are vilified for not saving the world? It seems to me that some people think that if teachers do not devote every second of their waking lives to their students we are failing our communities and our students. I wonder why people do not protest doctors or businessmen playing golf instead of working 24/7?
On top of that frustration the ideas presented here are things that an average teacher has no control of. So we should be using Blogs, Wikis, Cell phones and other interactive tools in our classes? How long do they think that will last till we are fired? Or even if we are not fired right away you know as soon as someone says something sexual using one of these tools who do you think will get thrown to the wolves of lawsuits and scandal? These sort of tools will not be fully available until the looming giant of Liability is removed from the backs of schools. For example, my own school has recently purchased a piece of software called FCAT Explorer. This is a sequence on online lessons and quizzes designed to help our students prepare for the FCAT.As part of the software package it has an internal e-mail system. Teachers can e-mail students and students can e-mail teachers and each other. I was listening in to the in-service training for this and overheard talk on how the students e-mail will be turned off so that no inappropriate messages are passed. When they are turning off the only Web 2.0 feature in software they bought and own what makes people think that I will have any ability to drag my school into the collaborative age?
All these tech tools are cool but technology is not useful until it solves a problem. Sure we can use these tools to interact, share ideas, collaborate and create, but my question is what? If we are only going to use these tools to put a new coat of wax on decades old teaching methodologies then we are not solving any problems. Take this assignment for example. How is this any different forcing us to keep a journal of what we have learned in class because, “Everybody learns better when they write about it.” (I actually had a masters level education teacher tell me this before.)
Tell me when we are going to solve problems like removing slow to publish and expensive textbooks from school and use creative commons licensed material that can exist online and in print. Wait that is already happening… but we can’t use it in our schools more then likely.
Or better yet if these tools are so good and kids are being held back by their backwater old-fashioned teachers then why are we not scraping everything and teaching our children only with well-crafted toys like in “Mimzy were the Borogoves.” I mean if they are all ready to take their future and this much information is out there then why do they even need schools?
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/richard_baraniuk_on_open_source_learning.html
