Lightning in a Bottle

I’ve messed around with this technology stuff for a long time. When I started, there was a range of knowledge, with people that knew nothing about personal computers at one end of the range, and people that knew all the state-of-the-art stuff at the other end. Most people were clustered down at the “know nothing” end of the range, but that shifted over time.

The problem is, the other end of the range didn’t stay still. While many people were struggling to get some degree of understanding of personal computers, the top end of the range of knowledge kept moving away from them at a startling pace.

Look at where we are now. We have many teachers that are still off to the side of the curve that indicates some degree of knowledge, but not a lot. At the other end of the curve, we have teachers doing podcasts, running wikis, using classroom weblogs, and who know what else.

The gap between those teachers is gigantic compared to, say, teachers that have learned how to use email and those that haven’t. Frankly, even with my level of experience (messing with this stuff is my full time job, after all), I still haven’t gotten around to learning how to use an RSS feed, much less create my own podcast. (That’s coming, though, if for no other reason than a driving need to keep up. Peer pressure is an ugly thing.) If I think this stuff is arcane, I can understand why a normal person wouldn’t get too excited about it.

That doesn’t negate how exciting some of these new technologies are. I’m just wondering how we support both the normal teacher in using technology well, while still supporting those teachers that are out at the cutting edge. I certainly don’t think we should expect every teacher to create wikis or generate podcasts, at least not without a lot of technical and pedagogical support. Not unless we make the technology a lot easier to use. More on that next time.

Prolific weblogger Andy Carvin was in Tunisia at the conference where the MIT $100 laptop was formally introduced. While there have been many news reports discussing it over the last two days, he has posted a web video interview with MIT represenatives at the conference that is very informative.

I continue to be intrigued by the possibilities of this device, although there is still a long road between here and the actual rollout of the machine. I’ve seen many exciting technologies at this stage evaporate like morning dew, so I’ll reserve judgement until it hits the ground. Still, in the category of the United States competitiveness, it will really make for a new, flatter world (to quote Thomas Friedman) if suddenly huge numbers of kids in countries like Brazil, India, and China all have their own personal computers when here in the U.S. we’re still arguing over whether they’re important to education or not.

The Pew Internet and American Life project has released a report about how teens use the Internet. 57% of students surveyed are not passive browsers of information, but actually creating content through posting web pages, blogs, or uploading music and movies. The latter are often re-mixed media that they have created themselves.

I find this very encouraging. Realizing that the vast majority of what kids are creating may simply be drivel, it’s still better for them to create drivel than to be passive consumers of drivel that others create. If kids are already in frame of mind to be creators, it’s a lot easier to move them into creating worthwhile stuff.

This follows a pattern that I’ve noticed with technology over the many years I’ve been messing around with this stuff. The most enthusiastically adopted technologies are usually those that feed into our innate needs to communicate and build social connections (such as cell phones and email) and those that support our drive to create (such as word processors and digital cameras). The frustrating part is that it’s often really hard to get these technologies integrated into school use.

(By the way, the term “screenager” was used in a New York Times article from a week ago. I’d give you the link, but now you have to pay to see archived articles at the Times. Hrmph.)

The Seattle P-I wrote about the University of Washington experimenting with podcasting lectures. Several professors are using DAT recorders (which, from the Land of Confusing Acronyms, stands for “Digital Audio Tape,” notwithstanding the fact that current DATs are solid state and use no tape) to capture their lectures, which are uploaded to Apple iTunes. Students subscribe to the lectures, which means they are automatically downloaded to their iPods as soon as the students connect after the lecture is posted.

Of course, the UW is not the only place doing this. As a matter of fact, just go to news.google.com and type the terms student and podcasting, and you’ll find a boatload of articles about universities and colleges across the country that are even more active in using this technology.

What I was intrigued with was the comment in the PI article that the tech folks have, for the most part, automated the process. I’m curious what it would take to set up a system in a high-school classroom to automatically capture a lecture and post it to the web. And while I’m intrigued by that, I’m also wondering just how many privacy issues we would open up. Does every teacher want the whole world to be able to eavesdrop on their classes? Does every student want all their friends to be able to play back the dumb question they asked in third period?