I had planned to be attending sessions at ISTE today. We have made it to every conference since Minneapolis. The last few yars we have been driving combining a relaxing trip with the conference. We made it through the first part of the trip which landed us in Iowa to clear the furniture and possessions out my mother’s house. However, in the process of working on the house I evidently kinked my small intestine. This kind of messes you up. I ended up in the hospital and evidently I unkinked, but this situation may not be permanent so I am on my way back home to check with the docs and likely schedule a date with the surgeon.
So – we will see what we can learn from ISTE as remote participants. There are advantages to this approach. We will save several thousand dollars when you combine the cost of the hotel and the $400 registration fee, parking the car in Philadelphia, etc. I do think the cost of the conference is getting priced out of the range for those practicing teachers who would likely benefit the most from the opportunity. I think I will invest some of my savings in a chromebook. There will be no frustration attempting to get into sessions scheduled in rooms about half the needed capacity. All in all I tend not to really learn that much and most of what I do acquire is provided as side comments or interpretations provided by my wife. We have our own back channel communication. ISTE is not that data or research oriented and you soon learn that pretty much everyone has an opinion with a few constant individuals being asked to share their thoughts each year. There is evidently a need to keep the professional development and workshop circuit fed and ISTE seems the place some jockey for these opportunities.
Still, I would rather go than not. The atmosphere takes you away from “home” realities. The conference is probably nearly a perfect base of telling the already committed what they want to hear, but we all need a little of that from time to time. Hopefully, next year …
I get excited every time I encounter someone who remembers text-based adventure games especially if the individual is promoting an educational application. The most recent post I located was provided by Josh Caldwell.
Josh Caldwell, a middle school English teacher, argues for the creation of text-based games as a productive way to involve students as game authors and argues for the challenge of writing such games.
I became interested in text-based games in the mid-1980s. These were the days of the early Apples and to do research or create learning activities you pretty much had to become a programmer. So we did. My interest was in creating activities that would develop reading skills and adventure games when text only seemed a natural. So I was both playing adventure games and attempting to figure out how to create them at the same time. I had computers from Apple and this sometimes meant that students would find you just to learn with you. I met a couple of undergrads in a class I taught who became my research assistant. One, Mark Dossman, wrote an engine in Basic I used to create games. Amazing talent.
I had not thought about these guys in years. Both became physicians. The one whose name I cannot remember at this moment I have seen all too often because he is an emergency room doc in Grand Forks. Mark went to med school at Vanderbilt and according Google is not practicing in the Atlanta area.
We published a paper in 1988: Grabe, M., & Dosmann, M. (1988). The potential of adventure games for the development of reading and study skills: Journal of Computer-Based Instruction Vol 15(2) Spr 1988, 72-77.
You no longer have to write an engine from scratch to construct these games before you can move to writing games. The Caldwell post suggests that educators consider an engine to author adventures games called inform. You can download the software to explore.
It is possible that this post makes little sense to you because you have no idea what a text-based adventure game is. Here is a prevlous post that should provide some background.
I have been listening to Eli Pariser’s “The Filter Bubble”. I became interested in the book after listening to Pariser’s TED talk. I have become fascinated with the claims made in the talk and book.
Here is my take on a core claim of both. The claim might be described as a complaint about either how we use Google search or the system Google uses in proposing links we might explore. The original system, as I understand it, was based on the links among web sites. Linking to another site was thought to represent a vote of confidence in the content appearing on that site and those sites that are the target of many incoming links are regarding as more important in voting for sites they link to. As Google has sought to improve the links we ask for, Google has added data from our click histories. When possible, Google keeps track of what we like and adds our preferences to the criteria used in selecting and ordering the returns to our queries.
It is our personal preferences that seems to concern Pariser. The concern is that the system returns what we want to learn rather than what we need to know. In other words, our existing biases are maintained because we are likely to encounter new information consistent with these biases.
The book explains the basis for this concern which I would describe as a combination of social psychology and cognitive psychology (at least as I interpret the arguments). The cognitive psych component argues we use what we know to interpret new information and we prefer what fits easily (you may remember Piaget’s concepts of assimilation and accommodation from a developmental psychology course). There are important educational implications that describe the challenge of changing flawed ideas. The model is often argued as relevant to science education and is applied to situations in which we have developed faulty ideas based on our observation and misinterpretation of the world around us. The model proposes that we tend to protect our flawed existing models of the world and to create change, the educational system must find an effective way to activate and show the faults of existing ideas. Both activation and perceived inadequacy are important or the flawed ideas will be retained.
So, translated into the argument Pairser makes – if we have flawed ideas, we are likely to also have prioritized information sources that support these views and the history of the clicks then continues to feed these flawed ideas rather than present information that will lead to change.
Anyway, I have trying to evaluate the flawed search argument without much luck. Pariser describes a recent situation in which two acquaintances of his received different links when searching for Egypt (following the uprising). The claim was that these two individuals had different interests which may have resulted in different sites being prioritized. So, I have been trying to create my own method for generating different link lists.
My strategy to generate an equivalent demonstration has taken the following approach:
1) I use Google for many activities and log in (so it knows who I am and could connect this with my email content, my docs content, my musical preferences, and my searches). I assume that my content is heavily tech oriented and this could be considered a bias.
2) I have tried searches focused on the words “apple” and “chrome”. These are terms with multiple associates one of which involved technology.
3) I have tried signing in before search and comparing these results with the results generated when I do not sign in.
4) I have tried comparing the results from my Mac (used a lot) with results from a Windows machine (used very little).
5) I have tried comparing the results that can be identified with my local ISP with results through my mifi (not associated with my local ISP).
So, the strategies above are intended to include or not include data that can be linked to me.
None of the searches for either term seems to generate different results. All results are tech dominated. Nothing about apple pie or embellishments for hot rods.
This approach seems sound, but I need different search terms. I think I need terms for which my meaning would be in the minority when contrasted with what most people would be looking for. I am looking for suggestions.
Educators may have limited awareness of the patent battles that now plague technology industries. Everyone seems to be suing everyone. Educators are more likely to be aware of copyright. They tend to understand that the whole sale duplication of content generated by someone else (music, text, video, images) is prohibited. What you may also recognize is what you can do. Perhaps you have heard this described as you cannot copyright an idea. Hence, you cannot copy and distribute what I have written, but you can identify key ideas in what I write and express them in your own words.
The problem with patents appears that you can protect an idea and the idea can be expressed in vague terms. A great piece on this problem has been generated by This American Life (listen or read). The concern is that common functionality of most Internet and phone functionality is described in these general patents even though a general function can be accomplished in many different concrete ways (kind of the opposite of copyright). Supposed to be a breakthrough and not necessarily a common sense good idea. Supposed to be. In other words, an invention and a patent are not necessarily the same thing. For example you might be surprised to learn that a 2000 patent for thermal refreshing of a bread product could also be described as “toasting” or perhaps “microwaving” (an example provided the This American Life). Clearly, multiple ways for refreshing a bread product predated the patent.
That battles among major companies further complicate the patent problem in a different way. They did not necessarily contest a given patent but purchase a huge collection of patents themselves in order to attack any company willing to challenge what they are doing by claiming the complaining company violates a different patent that they hold. It is not even about attempting to get to the point of understanding true ownership, but a threatened battle of attrition that mostly benefits lawyers and mostly fought based on the patent portfolios of the various companies. This situation is sometimes referred to as “mutually assured destruction”. So, with many ambiguous patents that can be picked up by the thousands if you have billions, you can basically keep the other big companies at arm’s length, but threaten or force any small company out of business.
It is pretty difficult to interpret this situation as protecting the rights of inventors, bettering the economy, or assuring that consumers have access to the best products and services possible. Like the lack of regulation that led to the recent stock market and banking crisis, this seems to be a failure of oversight that would seem best placed under the control of the government. There appear to be secondary businesses that built on the need to protect the legitimate rights of inventors but rather function primarily to take advantage of broad patents to make money for the companies rather than the inventors.
The 2011 Horizon Report is out. The report selects 6 technologies that will have an impact on education in the next five years. The six technologies include:
Electronic Books
Mobiles
Augmented Reality
Game-based Learning
Gesture-based Computing
Learning Analytics
Quite the risk takers – these prognosticators.
My additions:
Micro-payments – I hate the term “business model” because so many people talk about it, but I am not sure I understand what it means. However, I think funding is key to whatever will come next – I don’t believe free gets you very far. I think the future is online and I think some system (see Readability) for paying content providers based on student use might work.
Individualized educational progress – one of the things that initially got me interested in technology was the potential to address individual needs. I think it is time to accept the reality that students are capable of advancing at different rates and develop systems that will recognize progress rather than time spent.
Public wifi – we seem to be in a time when the public good is ignored in political decisions. But I predict the limitations of this perspective will soon become evident and services that meet the needs of the public will be advanced over business interests. Health care reform is clearly the present poster child. I think universal access to affordable Internet access will become more and more of an equity issue.
This is a follow-up to my previous post on the “improvement in search” technology and the question of whether these improvements are actually beneficial.
I have read at least a half dozen books about Google or search (pretty much the same things now). The data-oriented approach Google uses to make decisions has always intrigued me. The origins of search and the Google way made some sense to me as an academic. Quality of publications are sometimes judged based on citation and citation indices – how often your are cited, prestige value of different journals, etc. This background offered the analogy by which I understood what Google was doing. I just finished a new book on Google (Steven Levy’s In the Plex) and this account offered some new tidbits concerning data Google uses. For example, if I submit a similar search following an initial review of top “hits” from a previous search I may not be pleased with the results of the previous search. What I came to understand was that my personal evaluation of the information Google prioritized for me was of interest to Google and Google would attempt to alter the suggestions I was given accordingly?
The problem with this (see previous post) is that Google and other companies have found ways to show us what we want to see and not what we should see. In some situations, this difference matters. By feeding our biases, Google offers us a way to “view only Fox News or MSNBC” as we seek information. We are likely accepting of what we find, but we are not encouraged to view challenging positions. Maybe we really need to worry if Google has made us stupid.
Could Google fix this? What if I wanted an option that would ignore my personal biases? I would think one solution would be to offer a search option that says “ignore my personal history”.
This TED Talk by Eli Pariser questions the present methods by which Google returns hits from search queries. I have read several books over the years describing the development of Google and thought I understood the process. The early technique using page rank returned hits that were referenced by influential others (so defined by being linked by influential others). This technique has been upgraded to reflect individual search histories. I did not realize this, but Pariser claims that the same search executed by different individuals from different locations will return different results. Why? Your interests and history will bias what you find.
I made a very similar observation months ago regarding how most individuals approach reading blogs. We follow writers we find interesting and with whom we share similar values. Not the best strategy gaining a broad perspective.
I would think this search issue would play out differently depending on the topic. With factual information search should work just fine. However, what about locating information related to what might be described as critical thinking. Wouldn’t you want to consider multiple perspectives rather than review several sites with a similar perspective? So, one way Google could advance the process of search would be to differentiate fact from perspective inquiries and ignore data on individual preferences when returning hits that would support critical thinking,
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