This was created from the transcripts released at whitehouse.gov on June 4, 2009. I removed the title and all references to “(Applause)” as I just wanted it to represent the words spoken by President Obama. Do you have any interesting reflections or observations? Here is one. If you look at the word cloud and the full transcript, you will not find the words “terrorism” or “terrorist.” Instead, President Obama opted for the word “extremist” and he used it 18 times.
Jan 23
As of this month you can view a summary of the findings from the 2008 Digital Future Report. Check out information on the Center for the Digital Future web site for details on how to obtain a full copy of the report.
I want to highlight one aspect of the findings. According to the report there is a large increase in online communities. But these are not simply friends networking in MySpace and face book. The report notes a growing number of people involved in online communities with a social purpose or cause. People are connecting virtually in order to support, be informed, inform, and unite around social causes. And directly from the summary, “…a large and growing percentage of members — now 55 percent — say they feel as strongly about their online communities as they do about their real-world communities.”
This information blends nicely with my post from yesterday. With the most recent Frontline episode on Kids Growing Up Online, we also see a social networking established around the site. Perhaps this is a temporary network, but you can certainly find vibrant networks of parents and concerned citizens drawn together by this same cause.
While I am probably preaching to the choir, this is one more proof that it is time for us to move beyond thinking about the Internet as technology and start recognizing that it is a place with rich diverse cultures. It is as real as New York City, but far more diverse. The Internet is full of actual people who find deep meaning in their relationships with others in this place.
Jan 23
Growing Up Online, a FRONTLINE special, is an outstanding look into digital culture, providing important information about safety, ethics, and morality in the digital world. Anyone interested in better understanding the youth culture online would benefit from watching it, but be prepared for some heart wrenching accounts. While it was on PBS tonight, you can view the entire show at the web site. In addition, they have put together a myriad of sources: interviews with the producers, an online discussion, a live chat session this Wednesday, tips for parents to keep kids safe, a downloadable transcript of the show, opportunity to purchase a DVD of it, and even a teacher’s guide.
While the show was/is an outstanding resource, potentially opening eyes to important issues in digital culture, the resources on the following site is equally impressive. Five years ago this would have been a show with a few commercials, made a short-term impression, and then disappeared. Today it is a show, but that is just the start. It also comes rich with learning resources and even seeks to build a learning community around the theme of the show. This is a great example of how digital culture is transforming more traditional technologies like television.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline/
The timing could not have been better. I just started teaching a graduate class on critical issues in educational technology on Monday. So, with a little last minute planning, this video and the related resources will be part of an upcoming unit in the course.
Dec 22
Technology helps us see. Glasses as we tend to think of them today first arrived in the 13th century, and the telescope a few hundred years later. Long before that there is evidence of people using magnifying glass or lenses for a variety of purposes. So, for thousands of years humans have used a technology to see things that were otherwise blurry or out of sight. Rather than simply using the mind’s eye, these lenses have become extensions of the human eye.
Now think about the power of visual representations as learning aids for subjects like engineering and math. These representations are also possible because of technology, even if we are talking about technologies like pen and paper. But what about those who are legally blind? Can they benefit from visual representations? Mabye so.
Learn more about the technology being used for this at livescribe.com.
Dec 22
My favorite quote for the week comes from an article published today by Sabrina Laine at Education Week (You may need to register first to read the article).
“Generation Y teachers want to create, not conform. They want to color off the page, but are told to teach to the test. They want to work in small groups, but are given unmanageable numbers of students. They want to commune with colleagues online and across the school, but they are confined to their classrooms and limited to one-on-one teacher mentoring.”
The author is director of the National Comprehensive Center for Teacher Quality, a site that I checked out after reading the article- like the article, it is worth a few minutes of your time.
There was a day when I was a conference junky. I took copious notes and sought every opportunity to touch base with speakers who captured my imagination. Being a teacher, I also got easily frustrated with colleagues. Our school would pay for us to attend the conference and then some would skip out to go golfing with a group of friends. While I never fell into the golfing group, my interest did begin to dwindle over time, to the point where I would sneak out half or two thirds of the way through a given conference day.
But my favorite conference, the Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning hosted in Madison, Wisconsin is always different. While I have stumbled across a few less than interesting talks, the quality and practicality of speakers is consistently high. So, it was odd for me to skip out of the final presentation at the conference this year. Chris Dede, Professor of Education at Harvard, was giving a talk on Evolving Emerging Models of Learning and Teaching via “Cyberinfrastucture.” Instead of listening to the talk, I had a great lunch with a former colleague who now works in Madison.
But I didn’t miss the presentation. I postponed it a few weeks until the video was put online. Then, over lunch, I opened up the presentation on one monitor and my digital notepad on the other. I expected a great talk, but I didn’t expect to find a quote in the first two minutes that was so engaging, so provocative, that I could even hear a room full of forward-thinking distance learning leaders mumble or possibly engage in a little nervous laughter.
On Chris’s first slide he explained that we are moving from a position where people ask “Can distance education be comparable in quality with face-to-face instruction?” to a time where we instead ask, “Is pure face-to-face instruction professional malpractice? “ He briefly explained his point, but not much, so while I eventually listened to the rest of the talk, I had to pause it and spend some time on that last part. Professional malpractice? I wasn’t even sure what he meant, but I intuitively knew that he had spoken something very important. So, I typed the quote and printed it out as a poster that still sticks to the bookshelf in front of my desk, occasionally evoking a confused, surprised, or inquisitive response from visitors.
I look at the quote several times a week. The more I think about it, the more I agree with it. Some may disagree with it on different levels. Some might argue that technology is simply a tool. But is it an optional tool? What if you hired a handyman by the hour who insisted upon not using power tools to get the job done? Or how about a doctor who preferred to bypass modern medical tools for those used a century ago? According to Dede, this is what people will think of educators today who are resistant to the use of current and emerging educational technologies.
While I agree with the spirit of Dede’s comment, I’m not sure if the research supports him quite yet. There are still plenty of highly effective educators who use little to no current technology. But the truth behind his statement begins to appear as we think about preparing people for 21st century living. What if I am preparing someone for a vocation that requires strong Internet research skills, digital communication expertise, the ability to effectively collaborate at a distance, and an understanding of the ethical issues in the digital world? If I refuse to model and explore these elements with my students on some neo-luddite ground, then perhaps I am venturing into a type of malpractice. As explained by people at The Partnership for 21st Century Skills, we are obligated to prepare students for life in the world of the present and the future, not the world of the 19th and 20th cenutury.
I was delighted to learn about the announcement of Amazon’s Kindle in the past month or so. This wireless reading device uses electronic paper supposedly as easy on the eye as traditional paper. But with it comes the ability to connect to Amazon wirelessly to purchase your next book. You also get the ability to earmark pages, search for keywords, and most of what you would expect from digital text. I first got the news from Slashdot and clicked my way over to Amazon to learn more about it. If it were not for the $400.00 price tag, I would have ordered one that day. Why not sell it to me for $50, knowing that you have a captive audience who will be buying books for years to come? Either Amazon expected many people like me or there are plenty who think that $400.00 is reasonable, because the product is currently out of stock, selling out within six hours of the release.
Whatever the case, it is an impressive development, not simply because of the technology (there are similar products on the market) but because of the connectivity and access to 90,000 books that come with it. The idea isn’t new either. I remember earlier versions of digital book readers back in 1999- almost ten years ago people were already prophesying the demise of the book. Earlier readers were equally expensive, harder on the eyes, and much more bulky than the Kindle. And even with those versions there were schools considering purchasing sets for students, pondering implications for the future of education.
I fully expect that electronic paper will transform the way that we deal with the written word, but I figured that I would use the development of the Kindle to muse about reading in general. Neil Postman’s Technopoly had a section that recounted The Egyptian myth, The Judgment of Thamus. In it, the God Theuth presented a present to the wise King Thamus, the gift of writing. Rather than accepting the gift openly he expressed several reservations:
““Theuth, my paragon of inventors, the discoverer of an art is not the best judge of the good or harm which will accrue to those who practice it. So it is in this; you, who are the father of writing, have out of fondness for your off-spring attributed to it quite the opposite of its real function. Those who acquire it will cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful; they will rely on writing to bring things to their remembrance by external signs instead of by their own internal resources. What you have discovered is a receipt for recollection, not for memory. And as for wisdom, your pupils will have the reputation for it without the reality: they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society.”
I add that quote to my blog as I think about the thousands of books on my shelves, in boxes in my garage and basement, and the dozens that I check out from the library monthly. I consider the truth of Thamus’s predictions in my own development and I think about how often I am compelled to finish a book, even more than to understand it, learn from it, grow in knowledge or wisdom from it. I love books. I love the smell and feel of old books. I love the sensation of turning the pages, the joy of highlighting them and the satisfaction of quiet debates that I have with the authors in the margins, sometimes with the thought of a great grandchild coming across it and learning a bit about his deceased relative. In fact, I love books so much that, when I was reading a book about hobbies, I found myself drawn to a web site called http://www.bookcrossing.com/ ,where people leave books at places around the world and post a note on the site for others to find them. I quickly subscribed and, while I’ve yet to pick up or drop off a book, it is on my “to do” list.
Despite my love of the traditional book, the majority of my reading today is done online: emails, blogs, online journals, wikis, research reports and web sites. And I fully embrace the world of digital text, seeing many benefits to it, especially when reading for information, networking, collaborating and in an educational setting. The ability to search, cut, paste, reorganize, share, hyperlink, and mashup affords opportunities impossible with a traditional book. Despite all of those features, there is a flatness to digital text. The 1000 year old book looks just like the 10 day old book in the digital world. Besides that, there is no smell to digital books and spilt coffee risks doing more than leaving a stain or being a nostalgic footprint of your conquest.
I could go on about the differences between digital and paper books, but what I am ultimately describing is a cultural phenomenon. I have the perspective that I describe because of how I grew up, in a world of paper books (although I really didn’t start reading them until college). Books and their creators inspired me to love learning more than any class or school. But the world changed; with many people reading fewer and fewer paper sources, and more digital sources. There are plenty who are inclined to print out articles before reading them, but many more who have adapted to reading on the screen, despite what the research does or doesn’t tell us about the average attention span for reading on a screen. So, if I am right, Amazon is on to something. Despite the warnings of wise King Thamus, writing is here to stay, but the book may be less than a century away from the museums.
Since it is slightly on topic, I’ll finish this post with one of my favorite Youtube videos.
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