Time to begin getting folks in a back to school mood. If you watch “Millionaire”, you are familiar with the “ask the audience” life line (previous post). Contestants seem to use this opportunity first and it is probably most helpful. Your fall classes may offer a similar technology (I know this is the case at my institution). Students will be asked to purchase a simple input device that allow large numbers of students to respond to simple question posed during a lecture. The version I am familiar with presents questions and reveals responses using a software that connects to PowerPoint. Textbook companies are bundling the “clickers” with a book (hard to buy a used book under this condition) and fund the classroom hardware/software as a perk for the adoption.
C|NET offers an article on clickers in classrooms.
Jimmy Wales, temporarily posting to Lawrence Lessig’s blog, is authoring a series of posts on “things that will be free.” He began with encyclopedias using his own work on wikipedia as an example. His second post (the link above) concerns curriculum – he means curriculum materials such as books.
I continue to think about this topic and keep coming up with abstract arguments that attempt to express my disagreement. I cannot disagree with the notion that “knowledge must be free.” Is this really what they mean. My knowledge is my knowledge and my knowledge only. It is something I have created for myself. If I try to explain it to you by talking or writing AT you, it is now my information. You may or may not use this information to create your own knowledge. The question should really be whether information should be free. I guess this will end up being an empirical question. Some, such as Wales, contend that some scholars will share information for free and it will then be impossible for others to receive a return on the information they want to share with the expectation that they be compensated.
Free is also a misrepresentation of what is proposed. Free television is really not free. The material is paid for by sponsors who expose us to ads and recoup their costs from the money we pay for the goods we are convinced to purchase. Google is not free – it is based on a model that recoups costs through ads. MIT pays the faculty members who generate the courseware on their site. The site functions as an ad for this institution and is a way to bolster institutional prestige which can be bartered for tuition and grant dollars. I make the assumption that academics will participate in projects that require them to share information to the extent they feel their contributions will be accepted as scholarship. I receive no compensation from readers for the scholarly articles I publish in journals. However, I am expected to be “productive” by my institution and scholarly publications are a sign of this productivity. Should academic institutions “respect” contributions to widipedia I would guess more “scholars” would spend their time attempting to generate such contributions.
Think I am wrong – I guarantee you that at this moment publishers are considering using ads as a way to reduce the cost of textbooks to consumers (Toronto Star). This is kind of an intermediate point on the perceived continuum of free — paid. The cost is reduced, but the content now includes ads. My point – little information is actually free, we simply misperceive how we pay for it.
I hope you do not regard me as cynical. I simply assume most human behavior is motivated. Now, I must go and contemplate why I took the time to write this comment.
In his Aug. 3 New York Times editorial (you will need to register to read), Thomas Friedman again confronts readers with the position that the U.S. is not as advanced in the use of technology as many may assume. Advanced technology is one of the pillars Friedman argues is necessary for competing in a “flat world” and part of the contribution comes through potential advances in educational practice.
MERLOT is an open source multimedia educational object outlet for higher education [see MERLOT (not the wine)]. MERLOT has now expanded to offer an online, peer-reviewed journal (Journal of Online Learning and Teaching – JOLT). Articles already “published” are available. Online journals are not new, but the association with an Open Source group implies this venture is different (see Case for Creative Commons Textbooks).
Technorati tracks the blogging scene and reports that interest in blogging continues (a new blog is created approximately every second). About 55% of blogs are considered active (at least one post in last three months). Only 13% of blogs are updated on a weekly basis. The activity level is about the same as when last assessed in 2004. One trend noted described ISPs offering access to blog software (such as the software used in this blog) as part of the service provided by the ISP.
eSchool News describes the departure of Susan Patrick as head of the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology (Aug 6). Patrick is associated with the development of the National Education Technology Plan.
I ran across a post from Weblogg-ed that got me thinking about school blogs. The topic now appears to be whether specialized blog environments are required for K-12 use. The issue is not whether free or inexpensive blog options are available to teachers (e.g., Blogger.com), but whether the popular alternatives for the general public present some security risks in the classroom (see previous post). The weblogg-ed post suggests some options for educators – David Warlick’s Blogmeister and Alan November’s Learning Communities.
The folks who have taken the trouble to create “educational blog sites” have done great work and I encourge interested educators to explore these sites.
I am interested in educational blogs and have written the software for an “educational blog” for research purposes. I started thinking about some of the security issues and whether or not special “educational blog sites” are needed. Here are some comments:
1) General purpose public sites (blogger.com) are intended to be noticed not to provide security. However, such sites do not necessarily require that attention for the site be encouraged. For example, this blog was predated by a blog I operated for more than a year on Blogger.com (I tried it and it still exists). I tried searching for my original blog (in Goggle) and decided that locating the blog by chance would be very unlikely. If one keeps personal information out of a blog, the odds of locating a blog are not great (try it – another Grabe blog).
2) One approach to specialized educational blogs centers on teachers approving posts before the posts are available to the general public. I assume this allows the teacher to make certain nothing inappropriate or personal appears in student posts. The software used to offer this blog (WordPress) has such a feature (user levels). Any user classified as “level 1” can create what are called drafts rather than posts. Drafts must be approved before they are available to the public. The downside of this software is that a school district would have to install the software on a school server and someone would have to function as blog administrator.
3) A core question is what is it that needs to be controlled – what is posted or who views what is posted? The research tool I wrote requires that any user (writer or reader) be registered. This design defeats the purpose of writing for the general web audience, but it was fairly easy to implement and it allows students to show their work to others (e.g., parents) by first connecting themselves. I took this approach because it seemed a way to focus on communicating for a fixed group in a way that allowed a high level of security (almost to the level of an intranet). I really believe that students would be more motivated by knowing that their work is available to the world, but this openness may not be acceptable to some educators, administrators or parents.
How schools work through the issues of educational value, motivation, and security will be interesting to follow.
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