Based on the lack of a single person thinking that I needed to have the comment function returned, I won’t be turning on comments. You can always feel free to drop me an email at cmcquinn at psesd.org if you want to ask a question or make a suggestion. I’m always interested in more email!
Yes, I know. It’s a sickness.
Kathy Sierra got the jump on me in her weblog Creating Passionate Users. While this weblog is aimed at software developers, she has a lot to say that I find valuable from an educational perspective.
Her post today is called Brain Death by Cubicle, and it’s her take on a great article called The Reinvention of the Self in the February print issue of Seed Magazine. It’s unfortunately not available online yet, but should be next month. The article looks at the concept of mammalian brains (including ours) growing new cells, or neurogenesis. Up until the very recent past it has been a commonly accepted fact that mammalian brains do not grow new cells, and that as we age we just simply lose them a little each day. Gad, how depressing!
Well, it turns out this isn’t true. A researcher named Elizabeth Gould is profiled in the article, and she has demonstrated that we do indeed grow new brain cells - unless we are stressed, or kept in dull, boring settings. In the latter settings, brain cell growth ceases. (This is why earlier researchers never found evidence of neurogenesis - all of their lab animals were kept in sterile cages.) Play and active learning create increased brain cell growth.
Kathy looks at this from the perspective of the office worker stuck in a cubicle. What are we doing to employees when we prevent them from having visually stimulating workplaces?
And as far as education is concerned, I’m sure you see where I’m going with this. If we know that uninteresting settings inhibit brain cell growth, and active, engaging settings increase brain cell growth, we have another piece of evidence for the value of activity-based, technology-rich learning environments. The kind of intense engagement that students experience not only “entertains” them, it literally changes the physical structure of their brains for the better. (The flip side is that uninteresting, dull settings change the brain, too - for the worse.)
It’s always satisfying to have science demonstrate what we knew all along - play and active learning are good for you! Read Kathy’s full post for a more in-depth discussion of the article, and then try to track down the original as well. There’s a lot of implications of this research that are worth considering at great length.
BusinessWeek has an online article today about the possibility of electronic books finally breaking through. The most important factors seem to be the refinement of electronic ink (which makes a more legible, low-power display than LCD screens) and the success of the iPod and iTunes, showing that significant numbers of people will pay for downloadable digital content.
I can’t wait until we get to the point where we can replace the thirty pounds of textbooks kids pack around with digital equivalents. It will also make it easier to keep textbooks up to date, and allow publishers greater flexibility in adapting textbooks to regional needs. (It also would make it much easier to take advantage of open source textbooks or develop staff-written materials.) It also means that books can be “kept in print” essentially forever, which is great for the vast majority of books that don’t hit bestseller status.
But while I love where the technology is going, from what I’ve seen so far the mainstream publishing industry doesn’t seem to understand what they’re doing. All of the proposed pricing I’ve seen so far comes out to about at 30% discount over the cost of a printed book. Since the cost of actually printing a real book is quite high, and the advantages of a printed book over an ephemeral digital copy are also pretty high, I don’t see that price structure as workable, especially when the Amazon.com discount is about the same. If a non-geek reader is going to switch from using paper-based books to electronic ones, there has to be a significant motivation for the change of habit. That can be convenience, or price, or probably both. Most people using ebooks now do it for convenience, but I don’t think the average consumer will make the shift until the pricing is the major advantage. After all, when I’m done with a print book, I can shelve it, loan it out, or donate it to the local library. I won’t be able to do any of that with an electronic copy.
We’ll see if the publishers figure this out. If they insist on keeping the prices too high, the market may end up restricted to niches like textbooks and specialty publications where the convenience factor outweighs concerns about pricing. On the other hand, maybe it will provide an opening for new, aggressive small publishers to bring low-priced ebooks to the market that aren’t currently possible in a world dominated by a few giant publishing conglomerates. The only thing we know for sure is that we don’t know what will happen, and that’s what makes it so darned fun to watch.
I just received another heart-warming story forwarded to me through email. I’m always kind of skeptical about anything like this, so I go to a website called Snopes (I have no idea where the name comes from) to see if they’re real. They have a huge, well-researched and constantly-updated database of emailed stories, the vast majority of which are either hoaxes, misunderstandings, or just confused. I strongly recommend visiting the site before forwarding any message, picture, or alert that you receive in email. (By the way, if an email starts off with “This is not a hoax!!”, you can be 99.99% sure that it is.)
This story was in the database, and interestingly enough, it’s true. Sort of. The version I was sent had been edited from the original. In the actual story, the setting of the story is a Jewish school, and the boy profiled is named Shaya. In the version I received, all references to the nature of the school have been removed, and the boy’s name has been changed to Shay. There are a variety of other subtle changes as well. Apparently, somebody in the email chain somewhere decided to edit out all the “Jewishness” from the story. Oh, and they had the boy die in the end, which didn’t happen in real life, either.
Why was the story altered? Was it an innocent attempt to broaden the appeal of the story, or was it an anti-semitic alteration to avoid anything that smacked of Jews? Nobody knows, but it’s kind of disturbing, nonetheless.
We are working with eleven middle schools in our region that are using competitive Title IID/EETT grants to focus on improving math success. The goal is to use technology to leverage good instructional strategies. The project is called NO LIMIT (New Outcomes: Learning Improvement in Math by Integrating Technology), and is currently supporting over 200 teachers throughout the state. The standard set of technology that each classroom is using is a laptop, document camera, and LCD projector. We’re in our third phase of the project, and we’ve seen some pretty awesome work done by our participants over the five year history of the program.
Today I went and visited African-American Academy, one of our participating schools. They were trying out a new activity for the first time today, and it was a blast.
A little background first. Our state test here in Washington is called the WASL, and the staff at African-American Academy have their kids regularly practicing WASL-type tests in what they call “WASL Warriors.” The scholar (they don’t call kids students) that solves the problem the best is videotaped demonstrating the solution and broadcast to the entire school. It’s a K-8 school, and one week it was a kindergartner that was featured!
Today, Sandy Gady from here at the ESD supported the AAA staff as they took the WASL Warrior program to a different level. It was set up as a team-based activity. They divided the scholars into four age groups (K-2 at the young end and 6-8 at the high end), and then assigned students to cross-age teams within those groups. This is the 6-8 set of teams in the gym.
Once assigned to a team, a math problem was distributed and put up on the projection screen at the front of the room.
(The colored boxes across the bottom indicate which handhelds have submitted answers. It gives the teacher a quick visual to see how many have completed their work.)
The scholars first try to solve the problem on their own. At the end of the ten minutes, they entered the answer they have reached using a Qwizdom group response system handheld. The sets used for today were radio-frequency (RF) handhelds, rather than infra-red (IR). This allows users to enter mult-digit numbers, rather than pick a multiple-choice answer. (Also, they have better range and aren’t blocked by people’s heads.) The larger devices in the image below are the Qwizdom units.
Note that the scholars also have to show their work on the handout, which is eventually turned in. There’s more involved here than just getting the right number.
After the individual students - oops, scholars - have solved the question (or not - the problems were difficult intentionally), they then start discussions with their cross-grade team members, and work on a common answer to represent the team. When consensus is reached, one Qwizdom remote is used to enter the team’s answer, and one paper is selected to represent the entire team.
This is where it was really fun to walk around, and listen to a room full young people intensely discussing math. The images can’t really capture the feeling in the room as all of this whispered, animated work was going on. (It was whispered in the older grades, that it. The K-2 room was a different story!)
This was an exciting example of teachers and staff taking technology and using it in new, creative ways. Congratulations to the AAA team for a job well done! Qwizdom, which is a local company, stepped up and supported the project by loaning the school over 400 response units and staff time. The scholars had several opportunities to work with the system before today, so the technology was quite transparent.
When the staff sits down next week to go over the submitted work, they will have detailed data from the Qwizdom system on which individuals completed the problems and whether their answers were correct, and the same data for each team of scholars. The teachers can use that as baseline data as they look over the work of the scholars, and look for patterns of success and struggles. As the problems were correlated with state standards, they should be able to diagnose specific areas to address. All from a technology-facilitated, problem-oriented, collaborative learning activity. Too cool!
I feel like our weblog here is sort of a second-class effort because we don’t have a comments function. Sadly, we turned it off last year because we had an absolute flood of spam comments. Even more sadly, the ratio of real comments to spam was about 1 to 3,000. (I am not making this up!)
So, does it really matter for this weblog? If anyone reading these thinks it would be helpful to get comments up and running again, send me an email at cmcquinn (at) psesd.org. If I don’t hear anything from anyone, I won’t worry about it. Of course, I’ll also begin to worry that I’m talking to myself, and that my life is reflected in this delightful cartoon!
This may not be directly related to ed tech, but I sure think it’s relevant. ASCD had a link today to a fascinating article in the British online edition of The Independent. It describes a school where students are giving a great deal of authority in the teaching practices at the school, including observing and evaluating teachers and participating in the hiring process. (Now that’s taking student-centered instruction to a new height!)
Over a quarter of the students in the school participate as Making Learning Better (or MLB) consultants. The school has a very demographically mixed population, and has struggled with low test scores. The number of students getting five “good GCSEs” (their performance-based tests taken at around age 16) has more than doubled in two years, from 20% to 43%. Both teachers and students also report a dramatic change in the culture of the school. Contrary to cynical expectations, students who have ownership in the running of the school take on greater levels of work and set higher expectations for themselves.
What would our students tell us about the use of technology if they were given this level of trust and responsibility in our schools?
John Cleese (yes, that John Cleese) wrote an interesting column for the December issue of Edutopia magazine from the George Lucas Foundation. Called Hare Brain, Tortoise Mind, he talks about how creative thinking not only isn’t a quick process, it is almost necessarily a slow process. The conditions for it seem to run counter to our current business and educational models.
I worry about the role that technology plays in this as well. How many of us keep our mental time chock full of email, web pages, music, television, and other easy media distractions? Our brains really do need some down time, and not just when we’re asleep. I’ve made a habit over the last year of not reading or listening to any news stories in the morning getting ready or going to work. (I have been reading webcomics, but I’m trying to stop that, too.) I’m trying to have at least one period during the day when I cut down the too-available distractions and just let my mind have a chance to process.
Even my tech-savvy daughter mentioned the idea of buying a desktop next time she bought a computer, because she felt like the laptop’s portability was giving it too much control over her life. At least she’s thinking about it.
Hmmm. When the kids were little, we used to do something called “old-fashioned night.” Everything electrical but the refrigerator was shut off, and we built a fire in the fireplace and lit candles and kerosene lamps for light. We either read books or played board games. I think I’m going to try to do that again, even if just for myself. I need to let my tortoise mind out of the cage for awhile.
There is a new video that’s been posted at YouTube (among other places) that is a demonstration of a “multi-touch” screen interface. This is a huge leap from the kind of touch screen we’ve all used at ATMs or with Tablet PCs. Not only can the screen recognize and respond to up to ten different touch-points at one time, it also recognizes getures. The first minute or two of the video looks at messing around with cool, colorful graphics, but the real interesting stuff is further in. The section on labeling, rearranging and resizing a collection of images really shows what an interface like this could do for computing.
Yes, it’s just one more thing to break. However, it looks like a much more natural interface than anything I’ve ever seen before. I hope it makes it out of the lab sometime soon!
Ok, I’ve made my first videoblog. More than anything, just to be able to say that I did. (Got to keep up my geek cred. My son, when asked what his father did for a living, said “He’s a professional nerd.” I was so proud!)
I have to admit I’m still a bit skeptical of the video blog idea. Written text is still the most efficient method for transmitting information most of the time. You can quickly scan through it, print it out, and so on. Video can only be viewed in real time, and watching them can drive anyone within earshot crazy.
The software I used to create this is Sightspeed, which is primarily a cross-platform desktop videoconferencing product that I really like. (That will be pretty obvious if you view it, since it will be surrounded by info and links about Sightspeed. If I wasn’t in a hurry, I could download the video and post it in an ad-free location. You’re stuck with them today!) The latest version has added a videoblogging option to the videomail creation section. It’s simple, easy to use, and holds you to short messages (which is really helpful!) See what you think.