This is the first of a three-post series focused on the potential of classroom gardens. I have had a long-standing interest in school gardens as a category of maker space with potential for learning outcomes across the curriculum. This interest has been rekindled because of a recent purchase intended to get me through the Minnesota winter.
Since retirement, we have been spending the worst part of midwest winters in a warmer climate. You may have viewed some of my pictures from Kauai or the Big Island on my travel blog. Because of the pandemic, we will not be spending time on the road this winter. Maybe next year.
Looking for interesting things to do while spending lots of time indoors, Cindy game me an indoor hydroponic garden as a present (birthday, Christmas, extra money set aside for Hawaii, etc.). As I got it set up, I started to connect the experience with my long term interest in school gardens.
This is a pretty fancy setup with sensors, wifi connection, timers, pumps, etc. There are less expensive versions and related products from other companies. The iPad is there because I am doing a time-lapse of plant growth which I will write about in a later post.
The system uses hydroponics which is the growing of plants without soil. The two tubs at the base of the garden contain water and nutrients with a motor to circulate the solution. You add water and fertilizer every couple of weeks and prune plants to keep them within whatever space you are willing to allocate. The first group consists of several varieties of lettuce, cherry tomatoes, and several different herbs. I may have too much going on for my first attempt, but this is about learning.
My experiences with hydroponics go way back – more than 50 years back. Members of my family get tired of hearing this story, but I will offer a short version because it is new to you. When I was a freshman in high school, a classmate and I placed third in a regional science fair with an experiment growing corn hydroponically. I had found some “recipes” for hydroponic solutions that provided plants a nutrient source weak in one of the three major macronutrients of fertilizer (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium). We grew corn in four mason jars with a control group and a group deficient in one of the macronutrients. We charted growth and displayed the actual plants as part of our booth for the competitions. I had no idea of the chemistry involved, but the visual display was impressive and we were only 9th graders. I have an old black and white photo of the display but I could not find it for this post.
I have come across hydroponics on other occasions. Some of you have probably seen the hydroponics display at EPCOT. You ride past in on one of those boat rides. We have visited a couple of times and paid the fee to get the behind the scenes tour. Here is a post with some pictures from our visit in 2014. I see I was thinking about the potential for school gardens in reaction to this visit. My present experience offers a more practical approach.
So, I see opportunities for having a unit such as this in classrooms. More on school gardens in my next post.
I have blogged since 2002 and since I have started I have written thousands of posts now organized into three blogs (Learning Aloud, Blurts, and Curmudgeon Speaks). The first two blogs are focused on educational topics and technology tutorials and the final on a range of topics unrelated to my professional interests. I have a sense that the personal blog is becoming less popular. Blogs and podcasts have come to be dominated by commercial backers. There is only so much reading/listening time and it is becoming difficult to keep an audience. Blogs also require more work (relative to social media services) and fewer and fewer folks seem to learn how to use an RSS reader to make the following of multiple blogs easy and efficient. Much of the traffic I get now comes from Twitter (all posts generate a tweet that provides a link), but if I am right about this method of alerting potential readers, the maximum possible readers would be limited to the size of my list of Twitter friends who are interested in education.
I am not going to abandon blogging mostly because I value having a place where the content I have generated is curated. I wrote regularly on Facebook during the Trump era, but there was always a sense that any effort directed at that outlet was “here today and gone tomorrow”. A service with such characteristics does not seem the place to store content such as tutorials intended to have some long term value.
Sites to which multiple individuals post and comment have obvious advantages for engagement even though the content submitted there eventually fades into the mists of time. Blogs do allow commenting, but the interaction on Facebook or Twitter is obviously far greater and more vigorous. This can be both good and bad, but ignoring the deserved negative attention of recent times, the opportunity to engage a group around a topic on such platforms offers clear advantages if the goal is interaction among participants.
I hope to increase the time I spend in such interaction now that I feel free from the hours I spend engaged in Political arguments on Facebook. I spent this time because I felt it important to the way I wanted to think about the future of this country. I have always been interested in argumentation and I certainly had the opportunity to explore both the positive and negative elements of argumentation in discussing my liberal political views. It is this interactivity I hope to experience around other topics.
I have several reasons to abandon Facebook despite the popularity of this platform. First, I just think the dominance of Facebook is not a good thing. Most folks don’t care, but I have what I consider a professional interest in the long view of online learning and I just don’t think it is a good thing when there is not healthy competition offering alternatives and driving innovation. Second, I disagree with some of Facebook’s methods. I understand the ad revenue model (see the comments that follow), but Facebook uses information collected from users to personalize ads (a useful thing in some circumstances) to tell users what they want to know and to prioritize emotion-provoking content. Being told what you want to hear is not the same as the best information available and encourages confirmation bias. Both promoting this bias and emotion-provoking content increase attention leading to the opportunity to sell more ads leading to the opportunity to collect more information, etc., etc.
Follow the money
I think it fair to argue that the big players in this space must generate a revenue stream to pay for their infrastructure and pay their employees. Of course, there is also the opportunity to make a great deal of money.
If one ignores open-source software which certainly exists and maybe fun to explore, the services that will be able to actually compete seem to fall into three categories (I offer an example for each).
Ads – Facebook
General contribution – WT:Social
Focused contribution – rent space – MeWe
With time to spend, I want to explore options to Facebook.
So, Facebook clearly dominates this space and relies on ad revenue which might be interpreted by users as free. If one does not mind viewing ads and we all certainly view ads all of the time, Facebook may seem free. What we are really spending is information about ourselves. Facebook collects this information which is valuable to companies wanting to target ads as effectively as possible.
We could pay for a social service and receive access without the collection of personal data or the need to view ads. I see two options here. In the first option, one pays a fee to gain access to the service. WT:Social is an example of this approach. You can use WT:Social for free, but the service wants you to subscribe. The second option would like you to rent space as a contributor. MeWe is my example of this approach. You can post a certain amount of content at no cost, but at some point you are expected to pay for additional storage and other services.
I am exploring both WT:Social and MeWe. Both offer opportunities to create or join groups and the feed you encounter then depends on those you friend or the groups you join. So, the experience in both cases resembles Facebook with a greater emphasis on groups and without the ads. Both services face challenges overcoming what is known as the network effect.
I have created groups on both platforms attempting to attract participants to a sharing of content associated with a theme of K12 use of technology. The links to these efforts are – https://wt.social/wt/k12-edtech, https://www.mewe.com/join/educationaltechnology-k12. The wt.social group has been active for the longest, but I would not regard this effort as successful. My observation of the wt.social content related to technology has mostly been that there are efforts with many posts by a single individual, but few group members (my example) or groups with many members and only a few posts. I have had far less time invested in MeWe, but I started a group on this site because there were no other groups under the education heading focused on general technology integration. What I can offer based on my experience to this point is that it is very difficult to organically create a group around a specific topic. Clearly, these groups are far smaller than Facebook, but the services argue they are growing. I worry that there is a perception that an individual attempting to create a group intends to use that group as a personal outlet very much in the tradition of a blog. This is not my intention and it is not consistent with the capabilities of social media groups. I will give my efforts a year or so and see what I think at that point.
On Wednesday (Nov. 11), I noticed an email from Google. It was a description of the changes to my Google Photos account. At present Google allows you to store as many “high quality” photos as you want for free. I am not certain what high quality is, but it is a compressed version of the original quality of a decent camera. High quality is still great quality. After June 1 of next year, free goes away. Any Google user has 15 gigabytes of storage (mail and drive). Photos added after June will count toward this limit. If you want more space you must pay for a Google One account.
I knew I paid a couple of dollars a month to Google for space and it turns out I already have a Google One account.
I purchased Google One because I was concerned about what I had stored in Google Drive. I was approaching 15 GB of Drive content. I must have the smallest account (100 gb), but I have lots of content stored.
Some thoughts on paying for stuff. In general, I think digital users should pay. The present ad supported model has resulted in problems concerning the collection and sharing of personal data and efforts by tech companies to attract more screen time from users. The mechanisms to increase screen time have manipulated our understanding of the world with the prioritization of attention grabbing mechanisms such as the prioritization of content suited to our personal interests and content more likely to generate an emotional response. Paying for a less manipulative service would probably be a good thing and the tech companies do need to way to generate revenue. The Google price model is reasonable.
From the other perspective, Google has employed typical big company tactics. Very much like Amazon, Google has undercut the price of competitors driving them out of business. I have no idea whether this was the long term intention, but it has worked out this way. Undercut competitors to close them down or buy them out and then raise prices. This is the type of thing the Commerce Department must address if we want to maintain the competition necessary for continued innovation.
I haven’t provided any additions to my “layering” posts for some time, but I have found another option that works very well. Just a review – layering is my way of describing tools that allow a user to add elements (annotations, highlights, questions, prompts) to existing web pages and videos. My Kindle book about this topic is focused on those services that work with online content without the user having to download and store this content. This capability has important copyright implications. I offer a description of several such services you can review without purchasing the Kindle book.
Here is the process for using YiNote. After connecting to a video source, you activate YiNote from the menubar. The combination is shown in the following image.
In this image, you see the video on the left and the YiNote window on the right. The WyNote window contains a space for taking and saving a note at the top (red box) and links to notes already taken beneath. The export icon (red box above note links) provides access to the full collection of notes and the tools for exporting these notes. The play icons to the left of note links (first one is enclosed in a red box) will return you to the time stamp associated with that note to replay the video from that point.
One suggestion for setting up YiNote (see settings icon which is the typical gear). Set the option that stops the video as soon as you click in the window to add a note. An advantage of taking notes with this tool instead of on paper or with another digital tool is this easy way of stopping the video so you can concentrate on adding a note. No need to dual task overloading working memory.
The page for exporting notes looks like this. At the top of this window are the icons for several different export options (red box).
The saved content includes a screen capture from the video, your note, and the time stamp. The time stamp is active (red box) and clicking this icon will return you to the video at this point. Note that typical behavior would involve taking a note AFTER you have heard material so the time stamp will get you to the approximate location in the video you want, but you would have to scrub back a bit to review.
One of the options for storage is a pdf. I probably wouldn’t store my notes as a pdf, but I included this file here so you can see what stored notes look like. Again, the pdf contains active time stamps that should allow you access to the video.
Back in April I started a project that I decided to conclude today. The project was an effort to experiment with solar energy and energy consumption. I promoted this project as an example of what educators might find a way to explore both electricity and clean energy.
Here is a brief overview. I have a gazebo outside my house and I like to read and write in this structure when the temperature in Minnesota permits. Some years ago I purchased a solar panel and the equipment necessary to save the power generated from this panel to a battery and convert the DC to AC for use. I did very little with the equipment, but in April I purchased a device allowing the recording of the amount of energy flowing through an outlet. I decided to make use of my solar equipment to power my laptop and Amazon Echo when spending time reading and writing in this gazebo. The details of the equipment are described in the initial post.
Today, I took the final readings to conclude the project. During the 187 hours I spent in the gazebo, I used 3.43 kilowatts of energy. The value of this electricity is about $.35. Laptops and the Echo are inexpensive to operate.
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