Learning Aloud

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.

I am going to try and sneak this post past my wife. She gets upset every time I have something to say about keyboarding. She is not against keyboarding. Her position is pragmatic. She works in schools and nearly all schools have limited technology resources. She feels keyboarding instruction and related drills simply eat up too much of the time available for the instructional use of technology. Without getting into all of the related issues, I will just summarize her observation as keyboarding time ends up being subtracted from the time technology might be used in other ways.

This “issue” and a more general discussion of keyboarding instruction is discussed in a technology article provided by Education World. To me, some of the relevant questions include – How bad are the keyboarding skills of students who have received less than optimal instruction and what are the consequences of such differences? Are we wasting time teaching a motor skill that may soon be unnecessary (note Tablet PCs, interest in voice control)?

A new report from the PEW Internet and American Life Project (Teens and Technology: Youth are Leading the Transition to a Fully Wired and Mobile Nation) concludes that adolescent use of the Internet continues to rise. IM is possibly the area of heavy use that most drastically differentiates adolescent and adult users.

Some data were surprising to me. For example, 97% of girls 15-17 have used instant messaging, compared to 89% of younger boys and girls and 87% of older boys. While technology use and programming are clearly different activities (see yesterday’s post), the impression that males dominate ALL computer use is clearly false. The authors argue “Girls ages 15-17-year-old are the power users of the online teen cohort.”

The Microsoft Research Summit may not be of great interest to educators, but some presentations are worth a listen (link to Gates and Klawe). The discussion of what appears to be a declining interest in computer science research and a decline in interest in computer science (particularly among women) are relevant to education and the economy.

I have written before about Friedman’s book “The World is Flat”. I think Friedman’s take on education within an international context should be considered by politicians and educators.

MIT streams a presentation by Friedman that is very interesting. MITworld provides access – enter “World is Flat” in the video finder.

[Minnesota NPR has an earlier program on the same topic].

One of my favorite tech sources used to be TechTV. As things seem to go in the world of business, the TechTV programming was purchased by G4TV (a gamers’ channel) and some of my favorite hosts (Leo LaPorte) disappeared (previous post).

I have found Leo and the boys (Patrick, et al) again via blogs and podcasts (TWiT). If you have not explored the resources available via iTunes podcasts, it is time to take a look.

Note: This piece is not intended to be consistent with the theme of this blog. The following comments provide a summary of our Alaska trip. In this case, I am using my blog as a personal record and an access point for those who may find our travels of some interest. My trips do not have the exotic or international appeal of other educational bloggers (e.g., Andy Carvin, Bernie Dodge) but may be of interest to some. The unreliability of my server saved visitors more frequent entries.

Time and Distance

The typical ALCAN traveler is younger or older. The length and related time requirements of the trip encourage interest from these groups. You can???t be in a hurry and you have to be willing to accept unaccepted obstacles (e.g., ruined tires, bad weather). Keeping to an absolute schedule or to the time constraints of the typical two-week summer vacation will not work. Actually the size of our group has varied ??? Cindy and I, Cindy???s sister-in-law and daughter have made the entire trip, Cindy???s brother and our daughter Kim have flown in to join us for some part of the journey.

Our van has a special feature that records trip statistics. The total trip covered 6850 miles and we spent 160 hours in the car. A trip to Alaska takes a great deal of time because of the distance and because of the quality of the roads. Many roads are two lane and seem to be always under repair. I assume the constant construction is due to permafrost which prevents the creation of a firm base and results in heaving and break up. You end up constantly driving on gravel through the middle of long stretches of construction. I grew up driving on gravel country roads, but they were nothing like this. These roads are rough, filled with holes and ruts, muddy, and very hard on vehicles. We had to change two camper tires and the camper aged considerably.

Photography

I bought a Canon Rebel XT digital camera for this trip. We have always taken a lot of pictures and video on our vacations and the trip was as good an excuse as any. There are now 513 images in iPhoto and I will probably end up saving about half. I tried to dump the images from the camera each evening and labeled each collection by location. Still not good enough ??? the mountains and lakes end up looking a lot alike. Looking through all of the pictures I realize I concentrate too much on scenery and wildlife. At the time these images are most spectacular, but collectively do not tell enough of a story. One would think by now I would have figured this out.

A small sample of our collection.

Wildlife

I find photographing wildlife in the wild a great challenge. This may have been one of our best experiences viewing animals. I even saw, but was unable to successfully photograph, wolves.

If you have read our books, you probably have noticed that we use wildlife images and video as frequent examples. We do this for two reasons; 1) we have many examples and lots of personal experience, and 2) outdoor images and technology seem contradictory to some – there is useful shock value in starting from a point that some assume does not exist. Technology is an important part of the way we explore and appreciate nature. Exploring nature has also ended up being a way that we have learned about technology and developed some of our ideas related to student field-based projects.

Scenery

People

Along the way we met many interesting people. I tended to approach people I saw collecting images, connecting to the Internet from a campground, etc. For example, we met a couple of couples at a photo op riding cycles. One guy was listening to an iPod and turned out to be retired school administrator from Minnesota (seemed like we ran into lots of Minnesotans). Turns out he is creating a blog – so check out Two Kept Men. [To the two kept men – thanks for mentioning Denise from Hinckley, MN, in your blog. ;)]

One small complaint. What is the deal with camping in a Walmart lot? The image below (our car and popup in the middle just for fun) was taken in Whitehorse, Yukon. What reasoning causes people to drive a camper that is worth more than my house thousands of miles at 4 mpg and then save a few bucks by camping at Walmart.

It was a great trip! Back to work.