Lightning in a Bottle

I was reading an article by David Jakes at the TechLearning blogs site, and followed a link to an intriguing site called Digital Stories. If you’re interested in digital storytelling, check out this site. Students and teachers can submit stories to be hosted there, and it already has a small but good collection of student projects. It’s a great place to go to find examples to share with others to help them understand what digital storyelling is all about. (I had some problems with the streaming video from the site, but that may just be a problem with my older computer.)

And if you’re in the mood for looking at student work, check out the enhanced podcasts at Long Elementary School. The third-grade students are re-telling and illustrating a favorite book through a series of podcasts. It’s a great project!

Yet another article about online learning, this time in the Christian Science Monitor. There isn’t too much radically new, but it does reflect this continues to be an increasing trend. The Florida Virtual High School is growing at the phenomenal pace of 40-60% per year, and now Michigan is poised to be the first state to require that every student take at least one online course before graduating from high school.

There’s still some muddy thinking floating around out there, though. One expert is quoted as thinking that virtual classes “…could help ease the nationwide shortage of math and science teachers.” All of the online classes referred to in the story use real teachers, so I don’t see how that affects the overall shortage problem. Unless, of course, the online teacher supports more students than a face-to-face teacher - which they don’t in any (good) program I’ve seen.

I’ll be really happy when we have stamped out the notion that online learning somehow costs less than classroom learning.

The $100 OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) project headed by Nicholas Negroponte is having a ripple effect. For instance, it’s a pretty good sign as to how seriously the project is being taken by Microsoft that Bill Gates felt the need to disparage the project and suggest Microsoft is working on alternatives using cell phones.

The newest indication of the impact of this project is that Intel CEO Paul Otellini showed off a new $400 laptop they are developing called the Edu-Wise. The announcement was in Brazil (a hotbed of open source software and a partner in the OLPC project), so the only news article online about it right now is from S?o Paulo, and can be viewed in translated form here through Google. It’s projected to be available in 2007. Otellini is quite up front that the device is in direct response to the OLPC project. While it’s still just a proposal, it’s just more proof that access to inexpensive portable computing appropriate to schools is a matter of when, not if. We have to shake off the mindset of computers and expensive being inseparable. Our long-term challenge is not in how to afford computers; it’s how to change education to take full advantage of them.

[Thanks, Engadget!]

Andy Carvin has a good post today about schools being blocked from editing Wikipedia. Not blocked by their district, but blocked by Wikipedia itself. Apparently there was a long history of vandalism of articles from that school’s IP address, and so they cut them off. They can still visit the site and read the articles, but no longer make changes.

The posting itself gives a good overview of how the Wikipedia community works, too. I didn’t know about watchlists or user talk pages, for instance. Now I have a better grasp of how the Wikipedia works, and I also feel a need to go and find out more!

You know, we’re having enough trouble trying to get things like instant messaging (appropriately used, of course) into schools. It doesn’t help when everyone’s concerns are justifed by the companies making the programs or services we want.

I just upgraded my Microsoft instant message client yesterday at the behest of the program. What the heck, it will only take a minute, and it offers new functionality, right? (Ok, it was a cute animation function. It sounded fun!)

This is already a robust messenger, with screen sharing, voice, video, and document sharing. Potentially a very powerful tool in a collaborative online environment.

So what is the first thing I notice after the upgrade? The advertising inserted into my buddy list.

Maybe there were ads there before and I never noticed - I do tune these things out. But it was difficult not to notice the young woman clad only in a small, red bikini in the ad for a “sexy singles” dating service with the big caption Sometimes it’s nice to be naughty!

Great. I can just imagine that ad popping up while I’m doing a demonstration on the power of online collaborative tools with a room full of administrators or parents. I’m sure I’ll be doing the demo sometime, but it won’t be with MSN Messenger for Windows. (The Mac version is still ad-free.)

I’ve been spending a lot of time over the last few months thinking about the purpose of blogging for educators. I guess I should say purposes, since there are clearly many good reasons. For a while, though, I was beginning to feel like it was becoming just kind of an echo chamber. I post something, and Jeff Allen responds in his blog, or Glen Malone posts something and I refer to it in my blog. Weren’t we all just reinforcing each other in something we already believe?

The more time I’ve spent doing this, however, the more I’m starting to get the big picture. To some extent, the answer is yes, this is the choir preaching to itself (to mash the metaphor). That’s not a bad thing, however! I recently compared the blogging circles that I visit every day to one of those great conversations you have over dinner after a really interesting conference, the ones where you and your colleagues get ripping on great ideas and get really excited about education all over again. The blogosphere is becoming like that - just every day, not once or twice a year.

To take this to a school level, I read a great article today from the March 2006 issue of Educational Leadershiop called Improving Relationships Within the Schoolhouse. Two things made an impression on me from the article. First, the quality of relationships among the adults in a school is key to how effective the school is in teaching kids. Second, the steps listed as necessary to helping a school develop a Culture of Collegiality can almost all be supported more effectively through blogging, Moodles, or other forms of electronic community building. These steps are:

• Talking About Practice
• Sharing Craft Knowledge
• Rooting for One Another
• Observing One Another

The first three clearly lend themselves to online community. The fourth one really should be in person, but you can always record your observations and share them online!

This article appeals to me, because it emphasizes teachers as professionals and seeks to build on that basis. I also like it because it reinforces the importance of relationships. In the end, teaching and learning is based on relationships, not curriculum or standards or teaching models. The more technology can be used help us build and strengthen relationships, the more it will improve what educators and students can achieve.

We taught a workshop today called Weblogs, Wikis, and Podcasts, Oh My!, and it seemed to go really well. We had twenty people, and we spent the day visiting educational weblogs like Glen Malone’s, learning how to use Bloglines, creating Blogger accounts, making podcasts with Odeo, and messing around with a wiki in Wikispaces. Along the way we had a lot of interesting discussion about the differences betweens blogs, wikis, forums, what the heck all of this means in the lives of our students and how (or whether) we should be applying this in our classrooms.

It occurred to me after the class that most of what we talked about today was stuff I was completely unaware of twelve months ago. And I am, in the words of my son, a professional nerd. How on earth should we be expecting teachers to be coming to grips with the stuff yet? The main challenge in teaching the workshop was deciding on what information to share, and what not to share to keep from overwhelming everyone.

My observation from the workshop is that there was a lot of excitement and interest by the participants, but there still needs to be some streamlining of the technology. For instance, Blogger is cool, but you still need to mess around in html code if you want to customize your page to any degree. No normal person should ever have to mess with html code.

And, of course, virutally none of the example systems we used are school-friendly. I know, however, that there are more education-oriented products on the way (or in place, like David Warlick’s ClassBlogMeister, and once they are widely available, I think things may reallllly take off.

Kathy Sierra has another great blog entry today over at Creating Passionate Users. She starts off by sharing a discussion with her teenage daughter about MySpace, which leads to observations about what makes services like MySpace work. Part of it is what she refers to as lightning release cycles. Users constantly make suggestions for improvements, and the developers constantly upgrade the system, often daily. It’s come to be an expectation that the system will be in a constant state of change and growth.

Contrast that with schools for a minute. How often do we “upgrade” the textbooks? How often do we adjust the curriculum? The software environments that our kids are living in are in a continually evolving, but school probably looks pretty much the same as it did last year, or five years ago, or even twenty years ago. No wonder there is a sense of disconnect for many kids.

I suppose that the constant change may not be healthy. Kathy uses the term “code crack” to describe the need of the users for their latest dose of change. I certainly want more stability in school than we see in the software industry, but I would even more like to see an ability of schools to take on these new tools and put them to greater use.

This idea came up in a different manner in a podcast by Wesley Fryer yesterday. (It was an international discussion, but two northwesterners represented us well - Jeff Allen of Olympic ESD in Bremerton, and Mark Ahlness from Arbor Heights Elementary in Seattle.) One of his guests on the “Skypecast” was Ewan McIntosh, and he made a point that I really liked. Instead of following the lead of others in adopting new tools such as blogging or wikis, education should be taking the lead in developing new and creative uses of these tools. Yeah! That’s the attitude I want to see. I don’t want to sit around (or expect teachers to sit around) and wait for somebody from outside our profession to come and tell us which technologies we should be using and how we should be using them. Don’t get me wrong; I love and highly value the insights of outsiders (that’s why I linked to a blog from a software designer!), but I don’t want to give them the keys to the schoolhouse.

My son left on a band trip this afternoon. He spent the last two days packing and sorting, trying to make sure he had everything he needed.

About an hour before he was picked up to go to the airport, he was online chatting with his bandmates, and it turned out they had one whole chatroom going just on the topic of “What did you forget to pack?” As I looked over his shoulder, there were reminders flying back and forth about black socks, cellphone chargers, and other necessary elements of teenage life and band performances.

It was fun to watch how much this communication technology is integral to their school lives, even though the technology in question had nothing to do with school. Very often my son works on his homework projects with classmates using instant messaging. Sometimes it’s no more than checking what the assignment is, and sometimes it’s actually collaborating on team projects.

I wish we could stop being paranoid about messaging and similar technologies, and figure out how to harness their appeal and real power to the benefit of student learning. The district just passed a new bond, with a significant amount of money for technology. (The first ever!) I’m hoping we will see new communication tools in the district that will allow this kind of collaboration to take place within the school itself!

Every once in awhile, I see a new piece of technology that makes me wonder “How did they ever think of that?” I looked at a video demonstration of a new digital storytelling software package called MemoryMiner. It isn’t a software product for everyone (it could be a bit overwhelming), but appears to be a remarkably powerful tool for sorting and classifying images for creating digital stories. It’s easier to tell you to watch the video than to try and describe it. It just made my jaw drop!