Cindy and I spent the evening in Abbot Hospital is Minneapolis waiting for our first grandchild. Addison Tanner (girl) was born at 9:57 this morning. Mom and daughter are doing well. Mark and Cindy are tired.
I am writing from the computer in the waiting room. A picture will follow.
Pretty cool! I would now like to be known as elder Grabe.
Cindy and Addison
Miguel Guhlin, in an techLearning article (registration may be required for free access), proposes that knowledge workers will need to develop new skills to be competitive in a read/write world. This is an interesting article because of the effort to argue for the development of specific skills (a combination of higher order thinking and design skills in my opinion) and links to open source and free options for developing/applying these aptitudes. I tend to focus on Mac multimedia tools so those who follow this blog may appreciate the attendtion to Windows apps (e.g., Photostory and MovieMaker).
Note to semi-techie-types – this article ends with suggestions for adding MySQL and PHP capabilities to both Mac (MAMP) and Windows (WAMP) platforms. Over the years, I have found that setting up a new server with PHP and MySQL capabilities (actually it is mostly MySQL that causes me problems) requires that I relearn a bunch of things that I then promptly forget until the next time. Efforts to automate such installations is worth a look.
I have run into a number of issues within the last couple of weeks that have reminded me of the concept of disruptive technology.
These issues include:
What these issues have in common is a perceived threat from new capabilities of technology. Internet users may use VOIP rather than the phone because VOIP is less expensive than long distance. Kids in schools may access inappropriate web content or take pictures and use them inappropriately.
Will attempting to block these “opportunities” be productive?
Technologies with wide appeal have a way of surviving.
Mary Pilon, USA Today, describes developments in antiplagiarism software. This appears to be a case of “where there is a problem there is a business opportunity” and companies are creating services offered to educational institutions very much like the sale of antivirus software.
I ran into several cases of plagiarism in my own classes this last year and the issue of student ethics is starting to really bother me. We did not have to use specialized commercial software to identify the problems – searching for phrases within Google was enough. Even after students acknowledged material they handed in was not entirely their words, it seemed difficult to get them to understand that the matter was more than a misunderstanding or a mistake. Either they claimed to be operating within what I would describe as “fair use” guidelines (they typically had some general notion that they could lift material as long as a citation appeared somewhere) or they claimed to have made a “simple” mistake (they patched together a paper using cut and paste techniques and then forgot to paraphrase). It is difficult to tell the difference between students who are manipulative and those who were poorly prepared for the expectations of higher education. This topic will be another thing I will have to add to my syllabus – you should read the book, you should come to class, you should write your own papers, etc.
My wife claims I am becoming a curmudgeon. Maybe so.
Representative Pomeroy:
I am writing to indicate my opposition to the “Deleting Online Predators Act” or DOPA. To me this proposal seems a misguided overreaction to a legitimate problem. Blocking social network sites will remove many significant learning opportunities without addressing the core problem. Students need to learn about the infrequent, but real dangers of the Internet. Blocking access to a wide collection of sites – many of great value – will not increase student understanding or eliminate the problem once students are outside of the relatively well-monitored environment of the classroom or library.
In my opinion, the opportunity to turn access to specific sites on and off is not a realistic compromise and is seldom actually used. Many small schools in North Dakota receive service through Edutech – a state supported provider. I believe if you check you will learn that it is impractical for this provider to manipulate access for individual web sites for individual schools.
Several weeks ago, I reported on an issue of Developmental Psychology focused on children and the Internet. The article I highlighted suggested a possible relationship between Internet Use and Achievement. In response to my post, a comment was submitted noting the difficulty of properly attributing a causal relationship (it was reported that use led to improved achievement) based on nonmanipulated environments (i.e., correlational research). In other words, it would seem just as possible that “bright” kids read more online as that reading more online leads to changes in reading skill.
I finally had time to read the paper more carefully (Jackson, et al, 2006) and the causality issue favoring the influence of online experience on achievement is more solid than might be assumed from my original sketchy report.
One technique developmental researchers sometimes employ to address the “causality issue” when variables cannot be manipulated is to take advantage of the passage of time (longitudinal research). If experiences and characteristics (Internet use and reading skill) can be measured at multiple points in time and the correlation of the experience to later measurement of the skill is greater than the correlation of the skill to a later measurement of the experience, the argument for use causing changes in achievement is stronger. This is what the paper in Dev. Psych reports.
I think the research on out of school use of the Internet is potentially of great significance because the experiences of children vary greatly and potential consequences may be easier to observe. Schools would not in good conscience allow the differences in experience that exist in the “real world” and are thus in a weaker position to demonstrate the benefits of technology. It is somewhat ironic that educators must on one hand demonstrate that value of the methods they employ and on the other avoid not providing all students pretty much the same “opportunities”. If methodological challenges can be addressed, the use of these naturalistic data may be quite convincing.
John Palfrey offers a model of how digital natives process the news. The idea is to describe the difference between those of us who get up in the morning and read the Times (or Grand Forks Herald) cover to cover and those of us who go online and take a different approach. I really like the model (graze, dive, talk back) and I would really like to think it was true of high school and college students today.
However, I would really like to see the data on this one. I think the way Palfrey describes the habits of 21st century learners (if present high school and college students are considered 21st century learners) is idealistic and probably inaccurate. My students are more likely to IM and use a cell phone that I am, but I would bet very few of them followed up on what I could consider a legit news story today. I did – this is how I located the link used in this post. So, I am saying I think educators are more likely to at least “dive” and possibly “talk back” than their students. What I would like to see is educators extending this practice to include their students. As I read the research on teacher technology skills, the most frequent limitation that characterizes new teachers is that they apply skills to benefit their own learning and do not extend these same advantages to their students. So, I think a more appropriate criticism, since this piece seems to be about who is out of date, out of touch, etc., is that educators don’t involve their students in the practices they employ for their own information needs.