Educators should make the effort to familiarize themselves with the offerings made available through iTunes U. I say this as a suggestion to you and to myself. Even if you presently have several feeds coming in, it is worth the effort to see what is new. I was reminded of this when I read a short post from MacWorld concerning new material from PBS. Before I could locate the PBS material, I noticed that MITOpenCourseware has just posted a new “World is Flat” piece by Thomas Friedman. You do need iTunes (which is free), but you don’t need a Mac.
BTW – regarding the PBS material, check out the KQED series on digital storytelling.
This just in – digital natives may not have magical techno powers. Mark Baurlein, Emory University, points to an ETS study conducted with a very large samples of college students demonstrating that web search skills and the critical thinking skills necessary to evaluate the quality of information located through web searches were often not sufficient to complete college level assignments. I agree that too much has been made of the general technical sophistication and applied capabilities of college students.However, like unwarranted assumptions regarding the breadth of tech skills those who walk onto our campuses might possess, I also think it inappropriate to assume technology offers little of academic value.
The report is part of a body of discouraging findings and outcomes regarding the academic benefits of technology. Unfortunately, those reports are pretty much swamped by the flood of enthusiasm (and money) pouring over newly-wired classrooms and campuses. Given the enormous cost of technology, we should pay more attention to actual results and give less credence to airy predictions.
While I deal with students and understand the limitations as described, my wife works directly to help future teachers develop skills necessary to integrate technology when they move on to classrooms of their own. I like how she describes the situation. Her students seldom have the technical skills or pedagogical insights she attempts to develop, but they come with sophisticated technical expertise in other areas that has transfer value in taking on these somewhat different goals and they typically (but not always) see the value in making the effort.Search skills can be learned. Naive assumptions that all information is created equal can be overcome. Given some general guidelines and heightened awareness, critical thinking tends to be applied when we value the consequences of decisions we make.
Saturday at the office. Cindy is out of town. Time for a “project”.
This morning while browsing LifeHacker, I read a description of a flickr tool called 1001. 1001 is a Mac only application that performs several tasks in conjunction with flickr. The one task that seemed kind of interesting was the monitoring of flickr to identify new uploads fitting user defined characteristics. This capability seemed like it might have possible classroom implications so I thought I would give it a try.
I created three streams – democrats (today is primary day in S. Carolina), North Dakota (just to see if anything is happening), and trld (Cindy is presently attending a conference titled Teaching, Reading and Learning Difficulties). I then entered tags associated with each stream (e.g., democrats – obama, clinton, edwards). Every 15 minutes (the setting I am using), 1001 scans flickr for new images relevant to my streams. See image below for the images/links from the democrats stream located in a little over an hour.
There must be some interesting things you could do with this tool in a classroom setting. Wouldn’t it be cool to leave the 1001 tool open on an interactive whote board. The most obvious application would be to set up streams associated with topics being discussed (especially if the topic is associated with an active issue) and see what pops up. I wonder if frequency of flickr images predicts election outcomes?
BTW – I know you are curious about the North Dakota stream. Did the 12 people in North Dakota with digital cameras take any pictures today? Absolutely – there were several very nice images. 😉
I have followed the blog if:book for some time. I have another life as a writer and the ideas about publishing expressed in the blog interest me. BTW – interest is not the same as agree.
If:book has supported the development of a theme for WordPress and it now appears the capability of the original theme have been expanded. I was aware of CommentPress before, but it seems from the If:book post that CommentPress has been transformed into a plugin for WordPress.
Here is what this change is to enable. This is WordPress blog. It uses a theme (Blog.txt) developed by Scott Wallick that controls the general appearance of the site and several plugins (e.g. Add Meta Tags) that add specific features (e.g., the tag cloud you see in the right margin). CommentPress as a theme offers the opportunity to add comments to a post on a paragraph by paragraph basis. A “button” in the margin opens a dialog box allowing comments to be added and read. WordPress is a flexible tool allowing both blog posts and also pages. The paragraph by paragraph commentary (annotation is one phrase in:Book uses to describe the opportunity) probably makes the most sense with the pages.
I think the concept with the plugin is to allow blog hosts to control when the commenting is allowed. You may not want to offer commenting for most posts, but you may want to offer a specific document and invite detailed and paragraph specific comments. This would represent a nice technique for inviting interaction and I hope I have interpreted the if:book post accurately.
I have had issues with comments. It is not the negative comments that concern me, it is the irrelevant spam that you risk spreading if you host a blog using a popular blog engine such as WordPress. It is possible to seriously limit spam, but in doing so you also make it inconvenient for anyone to add comments to your site. I assume that CommentPress would take advantage of the spam inhibitors that can be applied. This would seem to be the case with a theme, but I am less certain about how the plugin will work. I think the strategy here is to let the more adventurous give the technique a go and see what happens.
This post has nothing to do with education. It does consider changes in social networking and the profit potential in new ideas.
I have been a fan of lastfm for more than a year. Lastfm is free (with ads I suppose), but I pay $4 a month. I don’t use most of the features because I am older and not that interested in the social networking opportunities. The technology on the back end interests me a great deal – I like the way the service accumulates data about my habits and attempts to identify what these habits might mean about my taste in music. BTW – the little widget that appears at the end of this blog page is a feed from lastfm.Lastfm was recently sold to CBS and there have been some interesting changes. The most noticeable is the opportunity to play entire tracks (rather than the standard 30 second track offered as a preview by services such as iTunes). There is a limit on how many times you can do this for a given song (3 I think). The idea is to give you a better opportunity to make decisions about purchases.
Frontline (PBS) had an hour program entitled “Growing Up Online” that aired this evening. The program explores a wide variety of topics (cheating, social networking dangers, generational differences). You can view the program and related material at the PBS site. These resources would be quite useful in a pre-service teacher ed tech class.
I learned of this program from other blogs and it appeared some felt the program would play up negative issues and this would result in an overly negative public reaction to services that have value. While the focus was probably more on “concerns” than opportunities, in areas in which I have read some of the research (e.g., danger from online predators), I thought the program raised the issues I felt were necessary to present an accurate picture (e.g., level of solicitation from strangers is rare, adolescents are aware of dangers, risky behavior has multiple causes). I did not feel the program focused on fear mongering.
ABC saw fit to run a spot on the evening news defending North Dakota against the dark, but supposedly artistic portrayal offered by National Geographic (remember that the short days of winter are offset by longer days in summer). Pretty funny stuff – the ABC video I mean.
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