Lightning in a Bottle

I just have to get this out of my system.  I know being a techie is actually really fun (the joy of nerdness is a little-known secret), but if we want other people to take our work seriously, we have to stop being so darn cute with how we name things.

Example number one is Moodle. Here is a great, powerful learning management system that is free and offers incredible opportunities for educators, but every time I introduce it the first part of the conversation always revolves around the name.There are the obligatory jokes about noodles, of course, and then the need to explain that it’s an acronym for Modular Object-Oriented Dynamic Learning Environment before finally getting into why it’s important and how it can be used. Unfortunately, I always end up feeling that the silly first impression sticks, and it undermines the credibility of the whole endeavor.

This is just one example, of course. There’s Drupal for content management, and the programs Yugma and Dim Dim for webconferencing, just to name a few. Ning. Twitter. Is it any wonder that non-techies think we’re just a bit weird? (Ok, so we are, but why make it so darned obvious?)

I’m not saying we need to become the modern equivalent of the 1960s stereotypical white-shirted computer operators. After all, if technology stops being fun, I’ll lose interest myself, and I love an inside joke just as much as the next nerd. But the next time we create something that’s supposed to reach out to the non-techies, let’s try to give it a name that has a touch more gravitas. Or at least something that doesn’t sound like a cartoon noise.

My big Christmas gift this year was getting to go out and purchase myself a flat-panel television.  I was able to get a pretty good deal in the post-holiday, depressed-economy sale, and by getting a last-year model to boot.  (I may be a techie and love gadgets, but I’m also pretty cheap when it comes to buying doodads.)  I chose a 42-inch model, and paid about what I was considering for a 37-inch model a few months ago. I am ridiculously pleased with it.

Last night we had planned on going out to the movies, but yet another round of snow hit us and we had to stay home.  Not a problem, my daughter says - she’d purchased WALL-E from the iTunes store, and had a new cable for her iPhone to hook it to the TV.  In two minutes’ time, she has her iPhone hooked into the TV, and we’re watching the opening credits to the movie in full-screen resolution.  It wasn’t HD sharp, but it was DVD quality, and very, very good.  From her iPhone!

This is not intended to be an advertisement for Apple products.  You can also access films from other online vendors, and there are other devices that can be hooked to your television.  But it’s just another illustration of the shift of media away from any sort of traditional storage or viewing.  There were no tapes or discs involved in watching the film; if I’d had the right device hooked up to the television, there wouldn’t even have been a cable involved - it could have been wireless.

We’re so close to being there in schools.  We need to get there as quickly as possible, because the rich visual media available now can be such a powerful aid to student learning, particularly for our visually-attuned students.  Many classrooms have the projectors now, which is a huge leap forward.   Some schools actually have the full setup for digital video completely in place, but many more are missing just one or two elements, such as good sound system, sufficient network capacity or access to a streaming video service.  But even when a classroom has the entire setup,  there’s still the need for time to preview media, figure out how to integrate it into instruction, and a place in the daily schedule to actually show it.  Back in the dark ages when I was in school, there were very few choices of 16 mm films that my teachers had to ponder (Hemo the Magnificent for human biology and The Restless Sea for oceanography seemed to be the ONLY choices in those content areas, based on how many times I saw them). Now teachers are faced with thousands of options, all correlated to state standards in one way or another.

Somebody told me recently that making changes is often just substituting a new set of problems for an old one.  I suppose having an embarrassment of  media riches is a good problem to have, but it wouldn’t even be a problem if we didn’t have the underlying problem of teachers simply not having enough time to plan and learn.  I think many of our issues of technology integration and improving instruction would largely vanish if we simply provided enough time for teachers to continuously develop their skills.  When people such as me can’t keep up with the change, and I work with technology full time, is it any wonder that our teachers struggle to be able to take full advantage of it.