Blog Juice for Educational Technology

This summer, educators gathered in Seattle to reflect on the tenth anniversary of Anytime, Anywhere Learning, Microsoft’s initiative to put laptops into the hands of middle and high school students. The pioneers of this program, of which I was one, aimed

Ryan Kolp knows how to rally when he needs to. So if he blew off a few homework assignments during the semester, he never worried as long as he pulled up his grades by the time his report card came out. That was until last year, when his mother could look

Nicholas Negroponte and the MIT Media Lab have finished the design for the $100 laptop. Check out the images. Note that it can run on AC current, a battery, or be charged using a hand crank, a requirement for rural areas of developing nations. It has table writing capabilities, can be an ebook reader, and has a dual display that can run color or black and white (for use in sunlight). And of course it runs on Linux.

So far, five countries have expressed interest in the laptop. Notably absent in the announcement list is the US. While I agree this is a great innovation for developing nations, I’d like to see one distributed to every public school child in the US. Can’t we get rid of a few multi-million dollar figher planes for this?

So the good news blogs in the classroom articles just keep on coming.

The NEA has New Kids on the Blog which offers about as hip and upbeat assessment of the potential of blogs in schools as I’ve seen.

When Maeve, a Maine fifth-grader with a mammoth conscience, hears some troubling information about the Mars cocoa farms in West Africa, she doesn’t whisper it across the lunch table—she announces it on her blog. Within minutes, her classmates furiously respond, hunting for the M’s on their keyboard. “I am never going to buy M&M’s again!” types one young activist. “Thank you for this information,” writes another.

students working at computerJunk-food discourse, summer vacation advice, and Red Sox statistics all fly across the wires in Lisa Plourde’s writing workshop at the Connors-Emerson School in Bar Harbor, using fresh technology called Web logs or “blogs.” A blog is a Web site that allows its author to type, type, type, and then receive comments from readers in a sort of digital conversation.

Rosie O’Donnell has one, as does NBC weatherman Al Roker. But so do Ally, Emma, Amethyst, Nick, Rebecca, Hadley, and the rest of Maeve’s classmates in Bar Harbor, as well as thousands of teachers across the country.

Oh yeah. Uh-huh.

And then via Anne comes The Online Edge from District Administration magazine. It’s not quite as peppy, but it does give blogs a big nod in the potential department.

The use of Weblogs to share personal thoughts and opinions over the Internet is capturing the interest of students across the world. But because content can be irreverent and even offensive, administrators are justifiably wary about using blogs in school. With the right guidance, Weblogs can be one of the greatest online communications vehicles in K-12 education.

Someone pinch me…

Let’s be clear from the outset that the hard part is not getting the idea of creating a $100 laptop for students, nor is coming up with a nice design on paper. Obviously the hard part is getting the thing manufactured and into children’s hands on time and at your projected price point. Nonetheless, we should all be pleased with…

One of the things I really like about David Weinberger is his interesting, unique vision of what is happening to knowledge because of what is happening on the Web. That and the fact that he pushes my own thinking so much. HeÂ’s a perfect example of that whole “the teachers we find are better than the ones we are given” potential of the Read/Write Web. He (and a few select others which I mention here often) challenges me in ways that are relevant to me, to my passions, leading me to new insights and connecting me to new teachers.

Another example of this is his latest essay “The New Is.” ItÂ’s a further evolution of what he articulated at his NECC keynote in Philadelphia earlier this month, and itÂ’s a mind bender, at least for me. So this will be one of those scary “work through it in a blog post” type of posts. And maybe, the beginnings of a conversation.

Start with this:

We are entering the age where to understand something is to see how it isn’t what it is.

As opposed, I would guess, to an age where to understand something is to think we see what it is, right? An age in education when we teach by the “here it is and here is what it means” method based on a system of structured knowledge with absolute answers. An age in which, because weÂ’ve had limited access to other voices and other sources, there is an urge for everyone to conform to traditional understandings.

But on the Web, Weinberg asserts, structure is a problem because very few ideas fit so neatly into the traditional schemes. Most ideas, most understandings are nuanced in ways that make them more personal rather than one size fits all. In fact, meaning and knowledge is evolving through millions of conversations and interactions that were not possible before, with different people “tagging” similar ideas in dissimilar ways, creating a messiness that he says is a sign of “successful order.”

We don’t need perfect knowledge in an age of knowledge abundance. We just need pretty good knowledge, and that’s something we don’t need perfect gatekeepers for. To the gatekeepers what looks like chaos and the degradation of learning to Netizens looks like an exponential increase in intelligence.

And who are the gatekeepers, you think? I canÂ’t tell you how much angst this “exponential increase in intelligence” is causing in certain circles, and weÂ’ve all heard it, I know. “It can’t be trusted.” “What authority does the source have?” “How do you know that?” All legitimate questions in certain circumstances. But questions whose acceptable answers are not changing, as of yet, with the new realities of information and knowledge.

And then thereÂ’s this, one of my favorite Weinberger riffs:

The difference in views occurs in part because the Net explodes the old view of intelligence as the containing of lots of knowledge. This container model is reflected in how we talk about documents: We say they have contents even though print is as 2-dimensional as a shadow. On the Net, documents – pages – get their value to a large degree not from what they contain but from what they point to.

I just love that concept, and I love the way it relates back to George Siemens and Barbara Ganley who see that not only are their texts not simply containers any longer, neither are their students. And isn’t that how weÂ’ve thought about students, really, for a long time, ultimately as containers of the information we impart? But with the Web, they become much more than that, because, like pages and online texts, then can connect their own messy knowledge to the messy understandings of others and, in the process, exponentially increase their intelligence. I am so struck by how limiting I see the traditional classroom any more, the restrictive nature of it. (Much like what I think of paper anymore, btw.) So look at the last quote again and think students, not documents.

On the Net, [students] get their value to a large degree not from what they contain but from what they point to.

ThatÂ’s a bit of a shift, huh?

And so what does all of this mean for instruction? I think he starts to paint that picture as well.

If you want to know about an idea, you could go to an encyclopedia and read what an expert says about it. Or you could find a blog that talks about it and start following the web of links. You’ll not just see multiple points of view, you’ll hear those points of view in conversation. That’s new in the world. The old dream of finding a single knowledge for the entire world – having knowledge be like reality, in other words – is dying rapidly. The connectedness of the Net has made it too clear that the world is not going to come to agreement and be able to write its single encyclopedia, covering everything we need to know without dissentÂ… To understand now means to hear the multiplicity of meaning talked about across the world. The more of the world we get into the conversation, the more the world will mean.

And that then becomes the task, to get teachers and students to enter into the conversation, to get them connected (in more ways than one) to the idea that understanding and meaning and knowledge is no longer quite as easily defined, that we find them in negotiation and interaction, in the “continuousness of conversation” as he puts it.

How tough could that be?

Are Web sites that let students rate their professors useful guides or just repositories for venegance and snark? It depends on whom you ask. Kenneth Westhues, a professor of sociology at the University of Waterloo, argues that RateMyProfessors and its…

The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in MGM v. Grokster might be starting to pay real dividends for the entertainment industry: The company that owns eDonkey, a peer-to-peer network popular with campus file swappers, has announced that it will shut the…

1. Write a craptacular draft full of factual errors, incredible sources, and grammatical/mechanical mistakes.
2. Post it to Wikipedia.
3. Wait a few days and let the community clean it up for you.
4. Turn it in!

The open source development model at work, so the article says. Maybe something we can address in the Caucus come March.

Via Lifehacker.

Now that classes are back in session, the Recording Industry Association of America is once again suing college network users suspected of illegally swapping songs. Computer users at 17 different institutions were among the 757 people identified in this month’s…

Excerpts from a recent article in Keokuk’s Gate (IA) highlighting an NCLB Blue Ribbon School in Iowa.

Remarks by Secretary Spellings at National Association of Manufacturers Meeting in Washington, D.C.

In what is believed to be the first real evidence to support what is becoming a growing field of inquiry, the use of special computer games to “train” their brains improved the ability of healthy children to pay attentio…