Month: June 2007

Report From the Frontier

“We’re not selling the iPhone in North Dakota,” said AT&T spokeswoman Natalie Bauer.

This makes it official. I live in an outpost on the frontier. The GFHerald (you will have to register to gain access, but it is free and you may enjoy the comments on frontier life) ran an article on the iphone. Unlike most the rest of the US, the message was – you can’t get it here.

The problem:

The iPhone the much-hyped new product from Apple and AT&T will only be available with wireless service from AT&T.

My personal problem:

Personally, I am not much of cell phone user. My wife threatened to cut off my account last month after I accumulated less than 5 minutes of phone calls (I have an unlimited plan so I can use the phone to check my email and do web browsing). She calculated what that amounted to per minute. I like to think of myself as the strong and very silent type.

My wife is very different in her use of a phone – any phone – and I have been using the promise of an iphone to cover my wife’s Christmas and birthday presents (from last year). I may have to go shopping after all.

😉

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NECC 2007 – Sharing

What is it that prompts individuals to share resources they have had to invest a great deal of time and expertise to create?

Today, I attended a session on the future of the book. While the general opinion appeared to be that the traditional book can no longer serve as the only source of information, there appears to be little consensus on what else should be available and how the development of these other resources should be financed. A teacher who relies on self-generated content was on the panel and presented samples of her materials. She contends that teachers are typically willing to share as long as other teachers reciprocate. I wonder. How many teachers would be willing to participate and how could it be assured that the requires types of content would be created. Can the open source model somehow be adapted to provide the content necessary for K-12 instruction?

The comment on sharing made me think of a session we attended yesterday. Mitchel Resnick from MIT was describing the work being done with Scratch. If you have not been exposed to Scratch, it is a visual environment within which the behavior of objects can be scripted (programmed). Programs are not developed using a language consisting of words, but rather objects. The objects are organized and interrelated by the programmer. The idea is to create a simple way to program that can produce impressive and thus motivating projects. Scratch is a free product. In addition to the software, the creators offer a site participants can use to upload completed projects.

The Scratch team has noticed something interesting about how the site has been used. Students download a project from the site, see how the project was coded, add an improvement of their own, and then upload the improved project back to the site. It is kind of a training ground for open source software developers. Put your project on the site and expect other people to modify your work. Maybe this is not only a way to reintroduce programming into the curriculum, but also a way to develop an appreciation of sharing.

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Roger and HyperStudio Are Back

This is kind of interesting. We happened by the MacKiev booth near the end of the day and stumbled into a presentation by Roger Wagner. Roger was the original developer of HyperStudio. After he sold HyperStudio (the details of why are a little vague), HyperStudio kind of faded. At one point, development ceased.

One of the reason we care personally is that HyperStudio was one of the main examples of a tool students could use for multimedia authoring in editions 2 – 4 in our book. The decline of the product required that we adjust our perspective. We changed over to eZedia products for our present edition. If we move on to another edition, we will probably try to provide examples of both.

While the competition must be tough in creating products for the education market, it is great to see a reasonable level of competition. A little competition pushes companies to continue to generate improved products and gives consumers greater choice to match specialized needs.

If I heard correctly, the upgraded product is to be available for an August release date. Welcome back Roger – good to see you at NECC again.

Roger Wagner

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NECC07 – Be the blogger

It appears that blogs are still in. Will Richardson’s session (webblog-ed) was filled to capacity. Presentation originated from a room offering participants the
opportunity to use refurbished old computers running a stripped down
open source operating system without a harddrive. Folks looking for
ways to contain costs and offer more equipment.

Blogging about blogging (metablogging) seems a little much and since I am assuming there will be 30-40 posts from this venue I will save my battery for another day (post).

Will did identify some wiki sites that he has worked on to offer information and resources related to educational blogging:

http://weblogged.wikispaces.com/Weblogs+in+Schools

http://webloggedlinks.pbwiki.com/

If there was one point from the presentation that I would regard as a kind of core message it was that you must be a participant before being an advocate.

Administrators feel blogs are just too much trouble – be a blogger and explain why this is helpful to you in your own professional development.

Want your students to learn from blogging – be a blogger and show then how.

Blogged with Flock

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NECC07 – Participate from afar

NECC (National Education Computing Conference) 2007 begins today. This has been one of the conferences I have attended consistently over the years. It is what I consider a K-12 educational practitioners conference and a great place for me to keep up on issues and practices. It also has possibly the best vendors area of any conference I have ever attended. The vendor area used to be where I searched for new hardware and software. With Web 2.0 apps and practices the vendor area is probably less important now than it used to be, but I still like to look.

If you don’t or can’t attend, you can follow many things that happen at this conference remotely. The ISTE NECC link provides access to many information sources (podcasts and some live video). Blogs are also a great way to learn what was presented in sessions and typically embedded in the blog entries are links to reosurces provided by the presenters. When I began blogging in 2002, my first series of posts were from the conference that year. It is actually interesting for me to review the posts from the June of each year since then to reread my comments on the conference.

Using blogs to follow conferences has become an organized process. David Warlick created a site called Hitchhikr to organize blog posts from many different educational conferences. I see there are now 1494 posts and the conferences intro keynote is not until this evening. NECC participants have recently been asked to tag posts (necc07). You can easily locate posts with this tag using an aggregator such as Technorati. I have created a watchlist for necc07 and I can watch as the posts role in (now mine among them).

BTW – I checked and it took about 5 minutes for this post to surface through Technorati and my watchlist so you can almost follow events in real time.

Blogged with Flock

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Small Pieces and the Big Picture

I came from work early today so I could mow the lawn. We are leaving for NECC tomorrow (5 AM for me) and I wanted to make sure the the house looked occupied for the next week. I like mowing the lawn. It is a time to put one foot in front of the other and to think.

The first topic to consider was what books I would take with me so my airport time would not be wasted. I worked on this topic for most of the back yard. There is a book with a nude woman on the cover (The Decency Wars) my youngest daughter gave me. I am not sure what this book is about, but reading it on the plane would make me self conscious. People would probably stare at the cover and wonder about what kind of person I am. There is Mensa Brain Bafflers my son-in-law gave me for Christmas. Way too tough for me and no need to make myself frustrated. I think I will bring one political book and one educational technology book.

Books On Desk

My wife and I have different approaches to professional development. She reads blogs and I read books. It is not that I object to blogs. I just don’t buy the small pieces approach to big issues. I want to understand someone’s entire model as it relates to some issue and compare it to me own. There are so many issues (e.g., blogs) that sound great when viewed from one perspective (e.g., active involvement), but the issue has many facets (e.g., safety, bullying, assessment) that must be considered in combination. A thought here and there leaves too many loose ends. So many things work as a system with pieces that interact. The more pieces of the system I can consider simultaneously, the better feel I get for whether I agree or disagree. A book author typically organizes and interrelates more ideas for me to consider.

(Time for the front yard).

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Read/Write by Age

A post on 21st Century Learning alerted me to some data reported in BusinessWeek concerning who is doing what online.

Chart of Data

I have pulled out the data for read and write activity (read is the higher value). The data are for blogs, web pages, and video. Social networking which some might suggest involves both read and write functions was another category with higher values. Age differences (I realize the numbers are small) show expected pattern and probably somewhat of an interaction (greater difference for production over consumption with increasing age). The raw data were generated by Forrester Research – I will have to see if a more complete account of the survey is available.

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