Lightning in a Bottle

The American School Board Journal cover story for October is about differences in brain function and learning between genders. What is fascinating about the article is that it shows the direct lines connecting what we now know about gender, brain function, behavior, learning style, and instructional strategies. Researchers are now able to directly image how the brains of girls and boys operate differently while engaged in the same tasks, whether they are math, language arts, or other efforts. More importantly, researchers such as the author of the article have documented how to change teaching practice to apply this knowledge, with significant impact on student success.

While this is not about technology per se, it certainly has great implications for educational technology. If boys write better by creating a visual storyboard rather than an outline, what tools could we use to improve that process? (Suddenly digital photography takes on new instructional possibilities.) If girls do better in math when instructional materials emphasise verbal elements, would that influence your choices of technology-delivered supplementary math materials (such as Fizz and Martina, Math Mysteries, or PrimeTime Math from Tom Snyder Productions)?

Of course, this all appeals to me because I’m a science and research nerd. I love to see how our increasing knowledge and understanding of how the brain works can help us see the process of learning through new eyes. We no longer need to argue about or guess why girls and boys learn differently; we now know how and why. Now we can concentrate on how to apply this knowledge to help kids learn the best ways possible, and hopefully apply technology to enhance these new approaches.

And yet another interesting technology option popped up in web articles today. HP has announced the development of the “memory spot”, a tiny wireless memory chip that can be place on virtually anything. Only around one or two millimeters on a side, the chip is embedded on a small adhesive circle about the size of a paper punch. The prototype holds 512k, but in production they expect to increase that by at least three or four times. In quantities, they hope to get the cost down to around a dollar.

This is not simply a memory chip - it also has a processor. It’s really a tiny little computer. To put this in perspective, when I started in computers in 1982, an Apple ][e computer cost around $2,000. It had only 48k of memory! Adjusting for inflation, that Apple would cost $4,000 today. This tiny computer that HP has developed will cost 1/4000 of that, yet have more than ten times the memory storage.

And, as I said, it is wireless. What can you do with it? Imagine sending a picture of the beloved granddaughter playing soccer to Grandma and Grandpa, and in the corner is a small circle. They place their wireless reader over the dot, and in moments they hear the voice of their grandchild describing kicking her first goal. Or dots in textbooks that download video files to a handheld computer, or data files for experiments into a graphing calculator. A student-created guidebook of the local beach has audio files describing the sea life you can find at low tide.

That’s what we are imagining today. In fact, the question What can we do with it? will be answered again and again with innovative ideas we can’t even yet imagine. It’s our kids that will get to do that - and it would sure be cool if they were offered the chance develop those new ideas in school.

I just read an article about a new line of multimedia-equipped GPS units. Targeted at museums and historical sites, these weatherproofed devices have color screens and can store up to 4 gigabytes of audio and video files, and as you walk around they monitor your location and can display information about the the significant items nearby.

As a history buff, this sounds pretty cool. But what really intrigued me was the idea of putting the devices in kids’ hands. Not to learn from them (which would, of course, be pretty interesting), but to have the students actually create the content that plays back. I can’t imagine there’s enough of a market for the Historical Walking Tour of Burien to generate much investment, but a team of students could put something together that would be a very popular item at the local library and historical society. And of course, there could also be nature walks in the local parks, and many other ideas that creative students and teachers could develop.

I wonder if they send out evaluation units…

Infoworld has a great article on using browser-based productivy applications. (In other words, replacements for programs like Word or Excel that are run off the web and through Internet Explorer, Firefox, or whatever web browser you happen to use.) Many are free, and can do most of what the programs you currently use can do.

In addition to the advantage of not needing to install the software on your computer, many of the web-based applications have collaboration features, so that multiple people can share and edit the same documents.

The article found that there are many options available, and gives a pretty good overview of the ups and downs of working this way. The end opinion seems to be that there are a lot of possibilities in this approach, but it’s not quite ready for prime time yet. Knowing how much pressure already exists on the bandwidth in many school districts, I would think this is still and “out there” solution for a lot of schools, but it’s not that long until virtually everyone will have the network access to make this work.