Category: General

Inputs and Outputs

We are pretty much stranded today because of heavy snow. The Super Bowl will occupy my time later this afternoon, but I took the time this morning to read the most recent Kaiser Foundation Generation M study. The national survey study has been conducted every 5 years to track media use among 8-18 year olds.

There are interesting data about just how much media young people consume, but I was most interested in the relationships between media consumption, academic performance, and psychopathology. The categories are crude (heavy, moderate, light media consumers; % earning mostly As and Bs), but those who consume more media tended to have lower grades and to exhibit more psychopathology. Certainly, one must be careful in jumping to conclusions about causal relationships (I tell my students this all of the time), but the relationships would be difficult to describe as desirable no matter what the direction or what additional variables were included as part of the explanation.

The authors generated these relationships for different media and the one media type showing a positive relationship was print. Young people who engage in more recreational reading seem to do better academically. The opposite appeared to be the case for television viewing, games, etc.

One of the other “hidden” issues in this study is the decline of recreational exposure to print media. In the ten years since the first study was conducted print media consumption has dropped from 43 to 38 minutes per day. Online print consumption does not make up for the decline in newspaper, magazine and book reading.

These trends and the relationship to academic performance parallel many of the issues raised in Bauerlein’s Dumbest Generation.

I see such findings as a challenge. For those who argue the benefits of games (e.g., Gee, Prensky), what is the counter argument? Hours on new media are increasing and the totals accumulated relate negatively to academic performance.

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Student generated multimedia – what about a justification?

My academic upbringing left a residual of guilt. I think that was the idea. I don’t feel quite right when I advocate for something without being able to offer references and the references are much more heavily weighted if they contain a methods and results section. Else, how does one avoid the tendency of falling into the fanboy trap of advocating for the latest fad and falling for the attention that comes with promoting the new and exciting?

So, I struggle with what I should say about classroom use of participatory web tools. I look and I look and I find little that involves applied research. By the way, I don’t buy the excuse that technology moves so fast that research cannot keep up. This represents a position taken by those trying to quiet their own guilt. Try explaining such an argument to those grad school mentors who trained you. Try testing this position against the best practices of other fields. Think the medics you visit when feeling ill would suggest that you try a new, but untested therapy explaining that there simply hasn’t been time to evaluate whether the treatment actually works?

So, without convincing research offering evaluations of specific uses of participatory web activities, just what can I offer. My most recent focus has been on the literature evaluating the benefits of peer tutoring FOR THE TUTOR. Consider that classroom applications of certain tech tools might be represented as teaching others.

I think that “mature research” offers some interesting characteristics. Often, initial studies that hope to identify simple generalizations give way to studies that offer more sophisticated analysis. I link to think about the big idea studies and the follow-up nit pickers. Sometimes the sophistication seems annoying if you are seeking clear guidelines or simple recommendations, but sometimes the details are important. In this case, consider that teaching may be helpful in benefiting the teacher for several different reasons – e.g., knowing that you must explain something to others might influence your preparation, teaching others may provide feedback that leads to deeper understanding. My initial investigation of studies in this area leads me to the conclusion that “preparation to teach” offers fairly reliable benefits. I think this is helpful. As “assignment givers”, we might then consider what tasks involve the preparation to teach. There are questions to consider. For example, is a task that involves summarization the same as a task that involves explanation? What if explanation sets a standard for understanding that only some within a typical group can meet? Perhaps such questions give us a place to begin.

Coleman, E.B., Brown, A.L. & Rivkin, I.D. (1997). The effect of instructional explanations on learning from scientific texts. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 6, 347-365.

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Time for subsidized wifi

Topics I write about often seem to coalesce from active themes. I can kind of identify the sources for this post – iPad announcement, reaction to health care reform, and reading the first chapter of “Rethinking education in the age of technology”. The topic that emerged is – Time for subsidized wifi.

Components:
1) From Collins and Halverson – the claim that the education that occurs outside of school is changing and the related concern that those most likely to benefit are those who can afford the toys and the access
2) From the iPad – this appears to be a great tool (although pricey) for exploring and participating online
3) from health care reform – are citizens of the U.S. capable of getting beyond what they can do for themselves to consider what might be best to do for the country

I do think that learning outside of school offers significant possibilities, but the notion that “hand held” devices as they presently exist will change much ignores the cost of access. I always wonder when I listen to presentations about hand held devices why no mention is made regarding the monthly cost for a data plan. Sure, a proportion of kids of all backgrounds may carry a cell phone, but SMS is not going to get it done. Schools might provide the devices (see below – Cindy working in our kitchen), but who will provide the access.

I like the idea of public wifi as a government subsidized option (hence the reference to health care and what we are willing to do for each other).

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GigaOM on wifi renaissance

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Acknowledge your perspective

One of the down sides of social media is that we have control over the connections we make. We tend to select sources that fit our own biases and while we assume the inputs we process are making us more knowledgeable, we may simply be becoming more entrenched in flawed positions.

I have summarized the comments of others on this topic in previous posts (e.g., Keen) and proposed that we all force ourselves to read different positions before we consider ourselves informed (e.g., Bauerlein). I still like the mental image of simultaneously watching Fox and CNN news.

I cannot remember exactly how I came by this resource, but I recently visited Political Compass and completed the instrument supposedly designed to reveal my political “leanings”. The concluding representation was pretty much how I would describe myself without going through the process. A bit of a liberal supporting individual choice. Still, not that far off center. Hence, this blog originates from such a perspective.

Maybe all bloggers should provide such information on “personal perspectives”.

I do think it a concern if online services could connect such data (and responses to individual items) with any individual. I am willing to share, but the instruments asks some specific questions in order to arrive at this more global representation. As a university affiliated researcher, I know the safe guards institutions require before they will let a research collect data. The Political Compass claims that no personal data are retained (no login is required, but an IP could potentially be stored), but does warn that a Facebook app collecting similar data does not offer the same assurance.

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Google Docs to WordPress

[gdocs id=’0ARA4QeFVmMb3YWg0cGp3cGh2emQ5XzI2OWdxeG1nM2Z0′ type=’document’]

This technique involves the inclusion of special markup that is called by the plugin (see above with last part of the document ID obscured for security). The technique works, but after experimenting, I now consider it more appropriate to WordPress pages more so than blog posts. The one situation I can think of that might relate to blog posts would involve making groups responsible for posts to a protected blog. The blog administrator could share a Google doc with specific individuals and establish a link from different docs to a post in WordPress using the unique document IDs. This still would seem a more likely page than post technique.

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A Kid and her Dora Cam

I was taking pictures as my grand kids opened their Christmas presents. Our two and one-half year old granddaughter received a Dora camera. My son gave a quick tutorial on taking pics and off she went. Maybe she just liked the flash. She aimed her camera at me and I reciprocated. My son must have off-loaded her pictures, because the following image arrived today.

The following was my perspective.

There is always a debate regarding when children should be exposed to technology and how much time they should spend. Wouldn’t it be cool to just let young kids take pictures of their world. I wonder what they find interesting? They may wonder the same thing about us.

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Hobby Coder

I enjoy writing code. I have developed the tools I use in my research and I have created some other products I think are useful. The problem I have is keeping up.

Back in 2006, I took an open source, social bookmarking product and added my own modifications. I wanted to create a service that prioritized search suggestions. So, I extended the social bookmarking product by adding a system that counted the number of times suggested links were followed and also allowed users to rate the value of sites they visited. These data were saved and search results were ranked by a combination of these data. My little project continues to be used by those who find it and I was even asked for my code.

Time passes and technology projects age. The original Scuttle was upgraded to Scuttle Plus. I have no idea if any of my code ended up in this project. One of the problems with making your own modifications, especially to projects that involve a database, is that you cannot easily take advantage of upgrades to the “official” project. When improvements have been made by others, merging your modifications with an improved product means you have to carefully go through the new product and understand how the code has changed, determine if the modifications you made can be inserted in the same way, and consider whether changes in database structure require some other modifications. To tell the truth, I forget where in the code my changes even are. So, I am stuck with my 2006 era code.

One thing I came to realize is that my ranking scheme is confounded with time. Some records have been in this database for four years and have accumulated more hits (on average) simply because they have been available longer. This confounding increases in severity because older records are then displayed first and the suggested links followed more frequently. This results in suggestions that may not be suited to current interests. The ratings feature worked great and could potentially counter balance the time confounding problem, but I had to protect the opportunities to rate sites behind a password system. Scuttle was fairly open as I guess a social bookmarking site should be and I began to encounter trouble makers who added inappropriate content. Can’t have that if you hope to offer a service to educators. By limiting inputs behind a password system, you seem to discourage raters. Works great, but too much trouble to use.

Counting the number of times a link to a recommended site is followed does not create security problems and I am attempting to generate a system that would weight popularity by time. I suppose I could create a variable that continually divides the number of hits by the number of years a link has been available. There must be a way to make use of the information in the tens of thousands of times links have been explored from this site.

Maybe I will just wait until summer and then take a look at modifying the official upgrade.

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