April 12, 2008
Social Networking and Education: My Keynote at the UMB School of Nursing
This week I gave a talk at the University of Maryland/Baltimore's School of Networking Nursing on the role of social networking in education. I took a look at the history of online communities and the role educators have played in their development, as well as what tools are being used by teachers today - in particular, do-it-yourself social networking tools like Ning. I also talked a bit about new tools like Twitter, Qik and Utterz. Here's the Powerpoint:
You can also download an MP3 of the audio.
Tags: Cleveland Freenet | community networks | education | Ning | Qik | social media | social networking | Utterz
Posted by acarvin at 8:29 AM
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March 11, 2008
Live-Tweeting SXSW: Should Video Games Replace College?
For those of you following my Twitter posts from SXSW, you know I've been trying to live-tweet the sessions I'm attending. So I thought I'd pull together all of my tweets for each session and make them available as a transcript on my blog, so they can be read more easily.
Here's the transcript for the session "Should Video Games Replace College?" Michael Anderson of the University of Texas System TeleCampus moderated the panel, and it also featured Aliza Gold of the UT/Austin Digital Media Collaborative, high school student Karen Lin and game developer Mike McShaffry.
Notes:
Someone just turned on the lights in room 8. People groaned. @pistachio: Yes, this is definitely the 8am college class.
Karen Lin: I think that video games can offer a new opportunity to learn. My AP classes are like 30 pages of reading a night, small print.
Lin: And if anyone gave me an opportunity to learn but not have to read, I would take it.
Mike Anderson: Imagine sitting in a class, you're inside a game & actually living it. And you're making decisions & seeing the ramifications
Anderson: Instead of taking a 100 question multiple choice test, you've leveled up.
Anderson: And instead of asking your instructor for answers, you ask your fellow gamers.
Anderson: Imagine having a game about how to not start wars, rather than starting battles.
Gold: NASA recently put out an RFP for the creation MMORPGs that teach math and science.
Eliza Gold: As engaging as videogames are, it makes sense to apply some of it to schools and learning.
Gold: Part of what makes it hard for students to be motivated is because what's taught is taught out of context...
Gold: It's harder to learn material than way than when it's applied in an actual real-world situation.
Gold: Trig is much more interesting when you're trying to build a bridge.
Gold: It's possible that videogames could be used to help people learn curriculum in a real world sort of way.
Gold: The only thing that's standing in the way is attitudes. The structure of teaching methods hasn't really changed since medieval times.
NASA MMORPG RFP. @geosteph, were you involved in this? http://tinyurl.com/29d7xk
McShaffry: I recognized how games changed my behavior in the real world.
McShaffry: Kids playing Guitar Hero now have an appreciation for classic rock and now have a connection to you as parents.
McShaffry: College is going to be around for a long time. If they're lucky they'll incorporate games but games will _never_ replace them.
Anderson: Sometimes the learning is going on with the players in the game, not with the faculty. How will universities react?
Gold: They won't react well because that's not how universities are set up. But change is coming.
Gold: It's becoming less about what we have in our heads & more about who we know, & how we go about using our networks to find information.
High school student Karen on faculty talking like gamers: I don't think it'll be creepy. I'd be shocked at first.
Karen: Are they really trying to incorporate something fun into the curric?
Karen: I think people who are skeptical about using games in education it would spark something in them.
McShaffry: Games puts something into a fun and engaging environment. It may be quirky, but it's not stupid and annoying.
McShaffry: It actually functions as a learning piece.
McShaffry: And that's the big mistake that often in edusoftware: they try to force a square peg into a round hole...
McShaffry: and kids say that's the dumbest thing I've ever seen, so you've just wasted a lot of everyone's time.
Gold: Creating games that aren't about achieving points but interacting with the environment and having to pry info from it and other users.
Anderson: if we've got content access in Wikipedia etc, we need to be teaching kids about how to evaluate that content...
rather than teaching just the content itself.
This is a really great panel. Anderson's moderating it well...
Anderson: Games don't punish you for playing. McShaffry: Ultima certainly did. LOL
McS: You want to feel that it's just beyond your skill but that you can make it.
McS: In big classes, not everyone learns at the same pace; just the thin slice of kids in the middle.
McS: That's why our education system fails, because we don't have a system for kids to learn at their right level.
McS: But that's where games help, because they can measure a person's skill level and adjust accordingly.
Gold: A potentially huge advantage of games is their scale. A Halo multiplayer context.
Gold: Not necessarily 500 students to one teacher, but small groups of students working together within multiple instances of the same game.
Gold: One of the challenges, though, is the assessment of learning. That's a big part of school, and it's a big part of instruction.
Gold: How do you know that the student's you've taught have learned anything. The whole NCLB movement was about that.
Gold: Video games, of course, address that by assessing players as they play the game...
...but it's boiled down to pretty simple behaviors in the game, and that might be more akin to a multiple choice test.
Gold: So it's still out there as a challenge to develop interactive games that are more subtle, complex and rich.
Gold: When I talk to middle school students, do you learn anything from playing these games?
Gold: In their minds, they're like, well, yeah, I can play the game better, race better...
Gold: In their minds they weren't seeing the underlining skills that they were picking up in the game.
Gold: I think that that's another aspect of our challenge. When you teach someone, you want them to know that they've learned it.
Anderson: I think if they learned but didn't realize it, that'd be okay. It took me a year at NewsCorp to realize I didn't know anything.
Gold quotes Twain: Don't let school get in the way of your education.
McS: The only serious game that I ever got to work on was a navy game called 24 Blue, an aircraft carrier sim.
McS: They flew us out to the USS Truman, and we got to land on the carrier, spend four days there during flight ops.
McS: The Discovery Channel doesn't do it justice.
McS: When you feel the heat of the F-15 tomcat on your face and someone pulls you down and saves your life, that's when it hits you.
We were developing a game to capture the physical size and space, the hand signals used, who does what. It was all critical to human life.
McS: Can playing the game replace the experience? No, it's different....
McS: But it can show you more about what's going there so when you get there, you brain won't be as frazzled and terrified.
McS: If I'd played the game before going I would have known what to expect.
Gold: Games have a set of rules in order to win. Sims are more like a toy, a set of processes you can interact with.
Gold: There are rules, of course, but there isn't necessarily a way to win the simulation.
Gold: Games can be complex systems, and sims make that complexity a bit more transparent and available for the user.
Gold: Sims can help learners understand better complex systems, like running a city.
I'm so glad Anderson had a high school student on the panel offering perspectives with the game designers.
McS: In a few decades, we won't be interacting with hardware anymore, we're just gonna jack in, be in a virtual world ourselves.
McS: At that point, it becomes a matter of the sim industry being at a point where you can scan something in a matter of seconds...
...and having it become an instant simulation.
McS: That particular environment may mean you can learn and fail without horrific consequences.
McS: Guitar hero - one string, five frets. Can you learn guitar on it? No, but it teaches you something about the music.
Just asked a question about when students will be able to create their own games/sims in the classroom.
McS said the opening of MS's XNA game studio will democratize game development and distribution.
Tags: Aliza Gold | games | gaming | Karen Lin | learning | Michael Anderson | Mike McShaffry | schools | SXSW
Posted by acarvin at 4:47 PM
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November 10, 2007
Classroom Documentaries and the Mechanics of Storytelling
Right now I'm at PodCamp EDU, a teach-in at American University for teachers to learn about podcasting and video blogging. There are around 80 people in attendance, most of whom are new to media production. I just finished a 90-minute workshop about taking documentary film techniques and translating it into a K-12 environment. This includes taking the many roles associated with production, like researchers, producers, writers, camerapeople, etc, and distilling them into small teams of students; the production process; interviewing and shooting techniques; editing tricks like music and pacing, etc. I've posted a PowerPoint of my presentation, and hope to do the same of the audio once I get a hold of it.
Tags: documentaries | podcamp | podcampedu2007 | podcasts | schools | students | teachers | video blogging
Posted by acarvin at 12:20 PM
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July 18, 2007
Presenting at the JFK Presidential Library
Tomorrow morning I'll be heading to the airport at the crack of dawn for a quick daytrip to Boston. I'll be giving a speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library on the impact of Web 2.0 and social media on journalism, particularly coverage of election 2008. Here's a draft of the powerpoint presentation I plan to share with the audience. I wish I could stay longer, particularly because the Open Society Institute is convening a forum on youth media in Cambridge, with some of my favorite people and thinkers, including Ethan Zuckerman, Dina Mehta, Jennifer Corriero and Danah Boyd. Unfortunately, as soon as my speech is done, I need to bury my head in proposal writing and related meetings. Such is life.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 7:43 PM
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June 29, 2007
Democratic Presidential Candidates Discuss the Digital Divide
Tags: Bill Richardson | Christopher Dodd | debates | Dennis Kucinich | digital divide | education technology | election 2008 | Mike Gravel | policy | politics
Posted by acarvin at 7:25 PM
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June 6, 2007
Julie Amero Granted New Trial
Breaking news from Connecticut, reported by the Norwich Bulletin:
Judge Hillary Strackbein this morning granted a motion for a new trial for Julie Amero. The judge's decision is based on evidence that shows some of the computer evidence shown at court was inaccurate. A new trail date has not been set. Amero has entered a not guilty plea.
Amero was convicted last January of exposing minors to pornography when she was a substitute teacher for a classroom in October 2004. Prosecutors convinced a jury she did it on purpose, but subsequent analysis by Internet security experts suggested she was a victim of malware. Yesterday, Amero's attorney, William Dow, put forth a motion for a new trial:
The state and the defense now possess additional forensic evidence concerning the history of the computer's use both before and after the alleged incident. Had that information been available to the state at the time of the trial, the state ... would not have urged the jury to reach certain inaccurate conclusions regarding ... the alleged purposeful access to offensive Web sites. In the interests of justice, the jury's verdict must be set aside.
With the new trial, Amero will have a chance to present the new evidence. The saga continues.... -andy
UPDATE 1: Prosecutor admitted "some erroneous information" may have been presented at trial. The judge added that the possibility of inaccurate evidence, "entitles to a new trial in the interest of justice." Smiling with her attorney, Amero told reporters, "I feel very comfortable with the decision."
UPDATE 2: I've written more about today's decision on my PBS blog. The local Fox affiliate has
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January 22, 2007
DOPA's First Hatchling Begins to Crack Its Shell
It didn't take long for at least one member of Congress to reintroduce legislation aimed at further restricting Internet access at schools and libraries. As reported by ZDNet and Linda Braun of the ALA, Sen. Ted Stevens of Alaska has introduced what they describe as "identical language" to DOPA, the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006. If DOPA had become law, it would have forced schools and libraries receiving E-Rate subsidies to block access to commercial interactive services, including online social networks and blogging tools. But the bill expired when the Dems took over Congress.
Stevens re-introduced the bill the first day of the new session, and he added some new twists to it, according to ZDNet:
Stevens didn't stop there, packaging his reincarnation of DOPA with another failed proposal that would require all sexually explicit sites to be labeled as such, according to a copy of the bill obtained by CNET News.com. Although it has encountered opposition from civil libertarians, the idea gained bipartisan support within Congress, passing unanimously as an amendment to a massive communications bill that ultimately died.
From what I can tell, DOPA Jr. doesn't have a title yet, nor any cosponsors, though it's referenced as Senate Bill 49, or S. 49. The Library of Congress hasn't posted the text of the bill yet, but it has this brief summary:
Title: A bill to amend the Communications Act of 1934 to prevent the carriage of child pornography by video service providers, to protect children from online predators, and to restrict the sale or purchase of children's personal information in interstate commerce.
I'll blog about it as soon as I hear more. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 4:31 PM
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January 10, 2007
Brits Propose Bridging Home-School Digital Divide
At the British Education Technology Show today, UK schools minister Jim Knight announced a new goverment goal of bringing Internet access to all students who don't already have it at home. Outlining a series of education technology initiatives, Knight stated he was launching a multi-stakeholder taskforce to develop a sustainable strategy for bridging this home-school digital divide.
Quoting from Knight's speech:
The so-called digital divide cannot be allowed to create and reinforce social and academic divisions.... With more than 800,000 children and young people still restricted to access at school, we run the risk that they could be isolated and left behind. There is no sense in asking every school to provide a learning platform to support children at home if some - likely to be the ones who might most benefit - are cut off from that platform.Today, I not only want to reinforce that commitment, but to talk further about our aspiration for universal home access and how that might be made a reality. The way to achieve this is by thinking both innovatively and practically, and to use the wisdom of those who really know what they are talking about. That's why we are relying on industry to help with this - and many thanks to Intel, RM and Dell who already doing just that. We need to come up with a sustainable solution which will work for future generations as well as this one, building on existing good practice rather than looking for a quick fix....
I am setting up a Home Access Taskforce which I will personally chair. I want this to bring together key industry players, the voluntary sector, and education representatives to look at the issues. Because ICT at every child's fingertips is not the be-all and end-all of our ambitions. We need to make sure that schools and teachers can take full advantage, and parents too can play a significant role.
So classroom practice will have to adapt to the knowledge that children can access resources at home. It will also mean advice to parents so that they can help their children get the most out of their resources. Let's not forget that the extended family too will benefit....
To conclude, I am committed to ensuring that we will be far-sighted enough to shape the strategic context through policies that make sense for schools and the industry. That we will be proactive in seizing the opportunities technologies offers rather than being overwhelmed by the pace of change. That we will support our workforce to ensure that those opportunities are understood and accepted in the classroom. And most importantly, I am committed to ensuring that we get it right for all learners.
It's a bold idea, but so far is lacking much detail. For example, I can't tell if they're considering some sort of universal service fund akin to the US e-rate program, tax credits for low-income households or some other strategy. Either way, I'd love to be a fly on the wall of those taskforce meetings to see if they can work it out. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:53 PM
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December 29, 2006
Updates on Seymour Papert
The MIT Media Lab has started to post updates about Seymour Papert online. Papert, you may recall, was injured when he was struck by a motorbike in Hanoi. Here's the updated dated Dec 27:
While still in Intensive Care, Seymour is making progress every day. He has opened his eyes and sees the people around him, but has not yet spoken. He is also able to move his arms, legs, and head. His doctors hope that he will be able to be moved out of Intensive Care soon, but for now, is still not receiving visitors.
Sounds like positive news. Too bad they don't have an RSS feed for the updates, though. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:07 PM
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December 7, 2006
Prayers for Seymour Papert
I've just heard the terrible news that educator and artificial intelligence pioneer Seymour Papert has been gravely injured in a motorbike accident. He was attending a conference in Hanoi when he was hit by the motorbike.
I received an email forwarded from a colleague in Hanoi:
i am in still in vietnam at the ICMI conference. i have to just tell people the news, at least those i think will be interested. On tuesday afternoon, Seymour Papert got run over. He hit his head, and has had to undergo emergency neurosurgery. We are deluged here with well-wishers, and people flying in, so forgive me if this is very terse. His chances of a full recovery are not good but they are not zero. Everyone here is doing what they can - the local people here are just marvellous. Everything that can be done is being done.
Seymour is one of the founding fathers of education technology. A protege of Jean Piaget, he was one of the first proponents of constructionist learning, the notion that students learn best through the act of creating things. My first website, EdWeb, was heavily influenced by Seymour, as I talked about the role of the Web in education. This was 1994, when almost no schools had Web access, but Seymour's work made perfect sense to me, envisioning a world where students would have the tools and skills to become publishers of knowledge as part of their learning experience.
Seymour's list of accomplishments is staggering. He was the co-developer of the LOGO programming language, and was one of the leading players behind MIT's Media Lab, its artificial intelligence lab and the $100 laptop. He also was a driving force behind Maine's pioneering laptop initiative, which distributed free laptops to every middle school student in the state. Earlier this summer, I heard former Maine governor Angus King recount the meeting with Seymour that caused the idea to click into place:
I said to him we have five kids for every computer. What if we could have three kids per computer? Seymour shook his head. What about two kids per computer? "Wouldn't matter," Seymour said. Then he said, "It is only when it is one to one that the power occurs."
I've met Seymour on several occasions, but I cannot say that I know him personally. But my experiences with him are seared into my consciousness. I remember when my friend Patsy helped organize an education technology conference about 10 years ago, and Seymour was invited to be the keynote speaker. When the session was done, he had the opportunity to wander the conference and see other presenters. Instead, he wanted to go to the playroom where a group of kids were playing with toys, both high-tech and low-tech. In a matter of moments, Seymour dropped to the floor and got on his hands and needs. He then passed his time by playing with the toys while masterfully getting the kids to talk about what play means to them. I sat down against the wall, legs crossed, and watched him work his magic. I learned more about education from observing him construct legos buildings with these kids than any book I've ever read on epistemology.
My thoughts and prayers are with Seymour and his family. The world can't afford to lose him. -andy
photo credit: Seymour Papert, as seen earlier this year at a telecentre in Uruguay. Photograph courtesy of Telecentre.org, used in accordance with their Creative Commons license.
Posted by acarvin at 5:20 PM
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September 8, 2006
Measuring The School-Home Digital Divide
The National Center for Education Statistics has just released a new report on the school-home digital divide. It's been a while since the US government has released a report about the digital divide, let alone use the term "digital divide," so it's interesting to see them paint such a stark picture of the technology gap that exists between well-to-do and underprivileged students. On the plus side, the research suggests that Internet access in school is indeed equitable, with little difference among students in terms of gender, race, disability. The same thing applies to the income and education levels of their parents - low-income children with poorly educated parents are just about as likely to use the Internet in school as high-income peers with well-educated parents.
Unfortunately, this equity vanishes the moment you leave the schoolhouse gate. I blogged about the statistics in detail over at PBS learning.now, so here are some of the highlights:
At home, 78% of white students have Internet access, which isn't enormously different than the percentage with access at school. In comparison, only 46% of African American students, 48% of Latinos and 43% of Native Americans had access at home; Asian-Americans and mixed ethnicity students fared better at 74% apiece. Regarding disability, 68% of non-disabled students and 55% of disabled students had home access.Parental education and income levels also reveal a stark divide at home. While a whopping 88% kids whose parents achieved a graduate-level of education had home Net access, the same was true of only 55% of kids whose parents completed high school - and only 35% of kids whose parents didn't. If parents speak just Spanish at home, only 32% of kids had home Internet access, compared with 69% of kids whose parents spoke English. Lastly, 88% of kids whose parents earned more than $75,000 a year had home access, compared to just 37% of kids whose parents earned less than $20,000 a year.
I'm still struck by the fact that the report uses the term "digital divide" so freely - more than a dozen times in the whole report. By using phrases like "There is a ‘digital divide,'" the report seems to go against the last five years of federal government officials not using the term. Does it signal a sea change? My guess is probably not. Perhaps the Secretary of Education may pepper it into a speech but that'll probably be the end of it, unless the media and the blogosphere rally around the report's findings and make a big deal about it. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:15 PM
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July 27, 2006
Introducing DOPA Watch
In light of the US House of Representative's overwhelming vote in support of the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA), I've set up an online news digest called DOPA Watch. The page automatically aggregates the latest blog entries and news stories referencing DOPA, courtesy of the blog search engine Technorati and Google News. It also includes legislative updates generated by GovTrack. You can also subscribe to the news feed via email, or via RSS. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:56 PM
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House Overwhelmingly Passes DOPA
Last night, the US House of Representatives passed the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA) with an overwhelming majority - so overwhelming, in fact, that only 15 members voted against it. This means that 435 members voted in favor of it - in favor of hysteria, panic, misinformation, while against media literacy, local control, Web 2.0 and common sense. Assuming the Senate passes the act and it gets signed by the president, DOPA would force schools to filter out all interactive websites if they wish to receive federal Internet subsidies. There's a loophole for interactive sites that are educational in nature, but we know how that works - teachers usually don't have control over the Internet filters so they can't unblock sites that are legitimately educational. So every blog, bulletin board, e-list and online community that you currently value in the classroom, be prepared to say bye-bye to it.
I had a feeling the bill would pass the House, but I'm stunned by the overwhelming nature of the majority. It just goes to show you that if you allow news outlets to whip up hysteria over a problem that's actually a small fraction of what it appears to be, Congress is going to find a way to capitalize on it. And our students and teachers will suffer because of it. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:24 AM
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July 25, 2006
Call Your Representative TODAY and Say No to DOPA
The American Library Association's Washington office is reporting that the House of Representatives will likely vote on the so-called DOPA Act tomorrow. DOPA, the Deleting Online Predators Act, would force schools and libraries receiving federal Internet subsidies to block all interactive websites, including blogs, bulletin boards, email lists and online social network. It's an absurd reaction to the anti-MySpace hype that's been dominating the media in recent months, and threatens to make the Internet completely useless as an educational tool. Schools already have the ability to block inappropriate websites, and they should be the ones determining which sites are educationally relevant.
Please call your congressional representative today and tell them that you are against HR 5319, as it's officially known. The House switchboard is 202-224-3121 - just give them the name of your representative. If you don't know your representative, you can contact them online - just supply your address and it will be directed to your representative. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 4:02 PM
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July 20, 2006
Embracing Web 2.0 in an Education 1.0 Universe
Yesterday I had the honor of delivering the keynote at the ThinkBright Summer Digital Institute, hosted by WNED public television in Buffalo, New York. The speech, "Embracing Web 2.0 in an Education 1.0 Universe," was a variation of one I've done previously this year, but with a greater emphasis on education. For those of you who are interested, here's a podcast of the speech, along with the accompanying Powerpoint. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 7:25 PM
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July 19, 2006
City Voices, City Visions: This is Their World
Right now I'm at the ThinkBright Summer Digital Institute at WNED Television in Buffalo, NY, where I gave a keynote this morning about the role of Web 2.0 in education. (I'll upload a podcast and powerpoint of it later.) One of the highlights of the day was learning about an uber-cool project here in Buffalo called City Voices, City Visions (CVCV). The program teaches secondary school educators how to integrate video production into the curriculum. So far, dozens of educators have received training, and their students are producing videos on a wide range of subjects, from social studies to poetry. They've put together a video FAQ about the project, addressing questions that educators often have about the initiative. There are also several dozen student videos online at the CVCV website.
My favorite, video, by far, was a project called In Our World Today. The five-minute video is a montage of images from around the world, with minimalist shots of students staring into the camera. It was produced by the students of Joel Malley, a high school English teacher at Buffalo's P.S. 305 Mckinley Vocational High School. The students offer a homeric list of the world's ills, from animal cruelty to mesothelioma to human rights abuses, and address the fact that these problems are everyone's problems - problems that must be solved together. It's a shattering, unflinching look at social injustice. When talking about girls who practice self-mutilation, you see the scars. When talking about animal cruelty, you see the dead baby seals. It's an ugly portrait of our world today, yet equally bold in its portrayal of students acknowledging that they are the ones who will have to work together to pick up the pieces and build a better future. No, it's not always easy to watch, and the production values could be improved, but that doesn't take away from its power. The main hall at the conference was stunned into silence from watching it. You could hear a few people sniffling and wiping away tears. I've never seen educators react that way to a student media project. -andy
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Posted by acarvin at 4:27 PM
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July 11, 2006
Taking Questions at PBS Parents
I've just been invited to answer questions at PBS Parents. The site is soliciting questions for me about the Web, blogging, online social networks and kids, among other related topics. Feel free to ask a question if you'd like. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:45 PM
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July 10, 2006
Podcast: Angus King on the Maine Laptop Program
Last month while I was attending the AALF conference here in Boston I mentioned I'd recorded a podcast of Angus King, former governor of Maine, talking about the state's groundbreaking laptop initiative. I didn't want to post it without getting his permission, and earlier today I received an email from him giving me the thumbs up. So here's the podcast. It's about 50 minutes long and around 43 megabytes. As always, sorry about the audio quality but it gets a little crackly when I compress it. For those of you who would prefer a text version, here are my notes from his speech. -andy
Tags: Angus King | digital divide | education technology | laptops | Maine | policy | Seymour Papert | students
Posted by acarvin at 6:30 PM
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June 23, 2006
Tim Magner: Laptops and Edge Devices are the Tip of the Iceberg
One last podcast from the AALF conference. This one comes from Tim Magner, director of the US Department of Education's Office of Education Technology. Tim talks about the role of emerging technologies in transforming education and educational management. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:08 PM
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Ben Shneiderman on Making Education Ecstatic
Here's a podcast of Ben Schneiderman, computer scientist and author of Leonardo's Laptop: Human Needs and the New Computing Technologies, speaking at the AALF conference. He talked about his work developing interactive visualization tools and learning experiences that result in positive real-world change.
He also offered a great quote from George Leonard on the purpose of education: "A large part of the answer may be what men (and women) of this civilization have longest feared and most desired: the achievement of moments of ecstasy."
Unfortunately, when was the last time most students had a learning experience that was truly ecstatic? -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:11 AM
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June 22, 2006
Angus King: A Brief History of Maine's Laptop Program
Here are my notes from former Maine Governor Angus King's AALF keynote about the Maine middle school laptop initiative. The notes aren't verbatim, but I tried to capture some of his more colorful and entertaining remarks word-for-word. I also hope to have a podcast online soon, but I'm waiting for the governor's permission to post it since I didn't get permission before recording it.
How did Maine's middle school laptop program happen? It started with a data point, three insights and a lunch.The data point: Maine was stuck in 37th place for per-capita income. We hadn't been able to break out of this rut.
First insight: I don't know where the hell the economy is going. Tom Friedman talks about teaching Indians how to speak with a Minnesotan accent to provide better service at India's call centers. We don't know where the jobs are gonna come from or be like, but they'll probably involve two things: more education and technology. That's the only thing you can predict about the jobs of 20 years from now.
Insight number two: We're all chasing the same thing, we governors. We all want more jobs, better jobs. And everybody thinks they know the formula: cut taxes, encourage R&D, international trade, etc. But if we're all doing the same thing, how are we ever going to get out of 37th place? That was a scary insight, because I thought I was pretty good. We couldn't win that race. You don't get ahead of the competition by merely keeping up.
Insight number three: I realized that everything we did was incremental. Everything was baby steps. Like giving a teachers a half-percent raise. One year we paved 820 miles of road, compared to 780 miles the previous year, and we treat it like a major accomplishment. We act like these are big deals but they're just incremental.
The Lunch: with Seymour Papert of MIT. I said to him we have five kids for every computer. What if we could have three kids per computer? Seymour shook his head. What about two kids per computer? Wouldn't matter, Seymour said. Then he said, "It is only when it is one to one that the power occurs." But this was 1996 and we didn't have money to do this.
By 2000, our finance people said we'd have a $70 mil surplus in the state budget that no one anticipated. It hadn't been earmarked for anything. So I put these insights together and said I want to do something that helps people compete, isn't incremental, and should involve edtech. We could have used the money for anything, but I wanted to do this. My chief of staff said that we could create an endowment to give laptops to every 7th grader forever. And I said, wow.
We worked on this idea and announced it six weeks later. Other people plan projects like this for more than a year - that's better. But if we had waited, the legislature would have spent the money. If we didn't get our mitts on that money, it would get parceled out and been used incrementally.
A reporter then asked a question we hadn't thought of - will the kids or the schools own the laptops? I had no idea. I could have said I don't know, but I blurted out, "the kids." Wrong answer. Huge political mistake. People hated the idea that the govt would give these tools to kids. Seventh graders became the most hated minority in the state. So that was a big mistake. It was referred to as Governor King's Laptop Giveaway. Why don't more politicians try projects like this? It's because I got the shit kicked out of me. Ten to one of all emails were against it. "Governor, what were you smoking?" "Governor, we are a poor state, let someone else lead." Yes, and they will still lead. One guy even suggested it would be better to give kids chainsaws.
(The governor's Bill Gates joke. I was on the way to meet him the first time, and was talking with a trooper about what I should say to him. The trooper said, "How about, 'Dad, don't you recognize me?'")
So people hated the project, but I knew it was still the right thing to be doing. We had a two-prong strategy: deal with the legislature, and deal with the public. I had the legislators come in and see a mock classroom with laptop. Finally, one of my allies in the legislature - and as an independent, I don't have many - came down and said we're not going to be able to get this through. Instead we should put the money in a fund and create a taskforce. I said "sold" - because I knew that was the only way to keep the money. After a year of taskforcing, they came back with a recommendation - stick with one-to-one computing.
We then built whatever alliances we could. But people were against it simply because it was my idea. Welcome to the world of politics. Then I went on a teaching tour, to help people understand what we were talking about. We had a dog and pony show, working with Apple, handing out iBooks, then I'd come in and teach US history. And all the cameras would be rolling in the background. So I taught the Battle of Gettysburg and Pickett's Charge, using a website that had a collection of relevant sites and source materials, including the Gettysburg Address, in Lincoln's own handwriting. The depth of content blew away anything you could find in a textbook. Really deep stuff. I did this routine all over the state.
Then a crucial thing happened. I was talking with a business group, and they said, "Let's just do this in our own town of Guilford, and not wait for the government." So in this poor, rural town, we suddenly had a pilot project. Instead of arguing with people, I'd tell people to go to Guilford and watch how engaged the students are. And that probably sold it as much as anything else.
The legislature, meanwhile, insisted on funding more pilots. We'd still have only pilots today if we had stuck with that. I said we'd do it now, state wide, because of equity. This is an incredibly powerful tool for equity.
Then comes the Constitution - God bless the Constitution. In the end, they needed a budget, and guess who had to sign the budget? Me. I said, if you want to have a state budget, you know what had to be in it. It was simple as that. Pretty straightforward. You've got persuasion, but then you've got power.
Now the laptop program is finishing its fourth year. The endowment got spent in that time. It's hard to hold that money when you're also cutting Medicaid. But now it's being renewed for another four years, because it's proved itself. It's worked. The teachers, parents, students, convinced the legislature that it was successful and should be continued.
What did we learn? If you're thinking of doing something like this, go to one vendor. Don't spread it around - you want one throat to choke. When something goes wrong, you don't want the computer company blaming the network company. Get one vendor who can deal with the whole issue and be your partner. For us, Apple was a real partner. They moved people to Maine, were fantastic with repairs, a real partner.
Things also have to work. If you're gonna do this, the damn things have to work. If something doesn't work more than once or twice, the teachers will fold up the laptops and go back to the book. Reliability is a huge factor in this. A teacher just isn't going to put up with it otherwise.
Third - you can't spend too much time or money on professional development. The best thing we did was focus on professional development from the very beginning, starting with a grant from the Gates Foundation. This is not a hardware project. It's an educational project. This device is something that assists teachers, not replace them. So you need to help teachers integrate it into the curriculum. If all you're doing is buying hardware, it's going to be a failure, and I don't want that to happen because my name is associated with this kind of project.
Fourth - assessment. This obsession with testing is focused on rote knowledge. It's not capturing what these tools can really do. It's a tool that helps you solve problems, which is what life is all about. It's not for memorizing what year Columbus discover America. But the tests are testing that kind of knowledge. So do not - do not - promise your school board that one-to-one laptops will improve test scores, or you'll be out of a job. You can say they improve writing skills - all the research is showing this. But it's really about problem solving.
The model of education for 500 years has been a teacher becomes an expert and dumps data on kids. Thomas Jefferson could know everything, but now, no one can, because there is so much more knowledge out there today. We should look at law school as a model, because there's too much damn law. Nobody can learn all of it. Instead, you learn how to ask the right questions, identify the issues, and find the law. That's a much better model for kids to learn in a knowledge-rich society. It's a different kind of learning. Like they say, we've gone from the sage on the stage to the guide on the side. We're not going to beat the rest of the world on rote learning.
Innovation is the only thing America has. Natural resources and capital can go anywhere, technology can get zapped around the world. Innovation is something we have had historically - a confluence of experience, education and technology. Yet we as a country are frittering it away. Currently the federal govt has zero dollars budgeted for education technology. Zero. We're like England in 1900 - the most powerful country in the world, but for how much longer? We've had an incredible run for 60 years, but it's only going to continue if we're going to innovate.
My two favorite philosophers are Darwin and Gretsky. God said why, and Darwin said how. We all learned about survival of the fittest. I always used to think it was the ones with big claws who survived. But if that were true, the dinosaurs would be in charge. But the fittest are those who are most adaptable to change - and we're in a period of the most rapid change in human history. Those that change will survive. Resist and die. Then Wayne Gretsky - greatest scorer of all time, but he's not the biggest or fastest. How? "I skate to where the puck is going to be; everyone else skates to where it is." I don't think you have to be a genius to know where things are going to be in 10 years. It's going to involve technology, digital literacy - and that's where innovation will come. The next Bill Gates may be in a rural Maine town, but would have never had a chance if the state hadn't put a tool in his hands.
Final Thought: The Five Ps for Success:
Plan
Partnership
Perseverance
Persuasion
PassionThose of you who are trying this, know that this is the right thing to do - but you've got to have these five Ps for it to work.
(Another gubenatorial joke: What's a Canadian? A Canadian is an unarmed north American with health insurance.)
"Oh, and come to Maine," he said while leaving the conference. "It's really nice this time of year. I used to get five percent of everything spent there." :-) -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:25 PM
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John Bransford on Learning, Innovation and Expertise
Notes from this afternoon's keynote by John Bransford, professor of learning sciences at the University of Washington, at the AALF conference. Most of my notes are not exact quotes. -andy
Humans have always been learners - as a species, it's our strength.A turning point was the transatlantic cable that linked the british isles with Newfoundland. You no longer had to wait for ships to carry information across the ocean. But it was super expensive - a dollar a letter, payable in gold.
But people were still place-based; this affects visions of the possible.
The emergence of global connectivity is just a little blip in human history. But we live in a very different era.
Blogging has become an emerging political power, at least in the United States. Wifi is changing lives . Cell phones are reshaping Africa.
A question comes up for me - what do we do with these awesome new tools?
We can use them for web-based virtual environment collaborations. He shows photos of U of Washington students using Second Life to participate in a virtual lecture - shows clip of Ben Stein lecturing in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Not exactly collaborative.
Maybe Star Trek can provide a better vision? Shows clip of futuristic classroom where students turn on lightbulbs rather than raising their hands; otherwise the classroom pedagogy looks like it could have been from the 19th century. Not exactly futuristic.
How do we help people develop the ability to make wiser choices to life decisions? One way to approach this is as a learning issue. What can we do as educators to take advantage of this unique time in which we live?
How do we change learning stereotypes, things like boys are better at math and science than girls? How do we create experiences that let people behave their way into new identities?
The LIFE Center: to unlock the mysteries and powers of human learning as it occurs in formal and informal settings, from infancy to adulthood.
Developing expertise involves lots and lots of practice - and practice is more important than "pure abilities." Whenever we try something new, we go through a period of feeling klutzy. How we interpret that klutziness stage directly affects whether or not we give it up. Helping people become aware of this is important.
People must be able to develop schemas. Test prep companies do this all the time. You help the learner understand the way the tests are organized. Eventually you learn to recognize the type of problem being presented. Letting people demystify this can be an important thing.
Practicing something helps people understand and notice things. He shows a video of a colleague looking briefly at a brain scan and being able to spout all sorts of knowledge about what she's seeing, with great fluency and expertise. And it's not just a skill that scientists have - he shows a clip of a houseboat owner being able to spout all sorts of insights after glancing at a photo of a houseboat. His experience allows him to glean details very quickly. Expert teachers, chessmasters, architects, policemen, etc can all do this.
He then has the brain expert and the houseboat see each others' clips. They have no clue what's going on. "Expertise is more importance than intelligence," he suggests.
Another part of expertise involves change and adjustment. Adaptive expertise - researched by Hatano and Inagaki. Bransford sometimes works with Boeing employees. For a long time, the company was really good at making efficient, faster prop planes. But eventually, you hit a brick wall; you can't go any further. You have to innovate and go a different route - in this case, jet engines. But making this leap allows you to push the envelope even further. Now they're saying aluminum is too heavy, so they make the jump to composites. This is a part of expertise that isn't about getting better progressively with practice. It's being able to change thinking and innovate.
Anders Ericsson's work says that if you want to be super good at something, you have to continuously resist automatize your methods. Look at Tiger Woods. He was great for a while, then he dropped off for a bit, then recalibrated his swing. Because his body grew, the swing he used as a teenager no longer made sense. He could have chosen not to recalibrate, but instead he hires a coach, actually loses efficiency for a while, but then gets back on track. Recalibration lets you reach a higher level of performance.
Working with a group of teachers, he asked a group of teachers to divide up into different groups each with a different subject area. All of them chose to be in the history group, because they weren't comfortable with math and science. He pointed out that they've just stepped into the role of the student and the discomfort they feel in the classroom. So he encouraged them to think about themselves and encouraging them to adapt and take more risks, getting out of their comfort zones, as a way of becoming better teachers in the long run.
Making America more innovative requires us to take more risks and try new things. But the university system discourages professors from taking risks, and instead focus on their areas of expertise to achieve tenure. Meanwhile, grants tend to go out to senior-level researchers rather than the younger risk takers, again stifling innovation. You also have to be willing to learn, and admit when you're wrong. Overconfidence in one's expertise can stifle innovation.
Margaret Mead: Traditional societies were likely to use apprenticeships to prepare people for work. But now we're in a transformational society, where there's a constant transformation of new technologies. Since young people have more time to keep up, they end up becoming greater experts than adults. But most institutions aren't organized to capitalize on this. It's nothing new. Farmers resisted students from land grant colleges to help them improve their techniques. That's why 4H clubs were invented - to give the children of farmers the chance to learn agricultural research and new techniques. The county fair then served as a showcase for the community to see what the young people had accomplished. It's youth expertise guided by mentors.
Organizational effects on innovation. Giving people space to make mistakes. In the business world, if you don't provide support for innovation, most people would leave. Yet in schools kids often don't get the chance to innovate or make mistakes.
Formal education does not support self directed learning. We've trained students to expect to be told what they're going to learn, he says, quoting Peter Vaill.
There's also the overzealous application of current knowledge. Stan Wineburg of Stanford worked with AP history students in high school, then worked with professional historians. The AP students knew more facts, but couldn't complete tasks like analyzing archival documents for discrepancies. The students jumped right in, but also jumped to conclusions when interpreting the documents, unable to examine the documents through the context of the time in which they were created. They're applying knowledge willy-nilly, while the historians held their theories lightly and let the results fall where they may.
We need to understand ourselves as learners. A frog describes to a fish what different land animals look like, but in his mind, the fish can only picture animals that look somewhat like other fish. We have to learn to break out of that pond.
Posted by acarvin at 3:56 PM
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At the AALF Conference
I just arrived at the Anytime Anywhere Learning Foundation conference at Northeastern University in Boston, after spending the last 45 minutes wandering around like an idiot across campus, until I realized I was looking at the campus map upside down. (It's amazing how a lack of sleep can lead to a collapse of geographic literacy and spacial intelligence.) The conference is focusing on the role of ubiquitous Internet access and mobile computing devices in education. Former Maine governor Angus King will be speaking later today about Maine's middle school laptop program, while tomorrow we'll hear from Tim Magner of the US Department of Education and Mike Furdyk of TakingITGlobal. Should be an interesting conference. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:11 PM
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May 16, 2006
Low-Power Educational Radio in Scotland
I was going through the file folders of my handheld digital audio recorder throwing away some extraneous files when I found some audio I recorded for a podcast at the Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow last September. The audio included an interview with Brian Rowan of the broadcasting equipment manufacturer Clyde Broadcast Products. Clyde Broadcast has been working with a group of Scottish secondary schools to develop a network of low-power radio stations programmed by students. The interview, which is about six minutes long, was recorded in a very noisy expo hall with one of the student radio stations broadcasting in the background. Combine that with Brian's Scottish accent, the interview takes a bit of concentration to follow, so I'd recommend listening to it with headphones if possible.
Enjoy the podcast. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:23 PM
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May 11, 2006
For Schools & Libraries, Web 2.0 + Congress = 0
Earlier today I posted a blog entry at learning.now providing an overview of the new legislation known as the Deleting Online Predators Act (DOPA). If enacted into law, DOPA would effectively ban access by students to online communities using school or library computers. The bill is intended to block access to sites like MySpace, which 99% of the time don't have an appropriate place in the classroom. But the bill is written so broadly that it would require schools to filter almost all online communities and interactive discussions, effectively rendering Web 2.0 impotent as far as the classroom is concerned. My story even got picked up by BoingBoing (thanks, Cory!).
We've just started a discussion on the blog, and I'd encourage you to participate. Ironically, it's discussions like this that could be theoretically blocked by the legislation. Thankfully both of my blogs are hosted noncommercially, and there is a loophole for noncommercial services. But what about all the educators and students who've used commercial tools like Flickr or Blogger? Have the nascent days of Web 2.0 been nipped in the bud as far as schools and libraries are concerned? Will the promise of online constructivist learning be wiped out with the swish of a presidential pen? -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:55 PM
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May 1, 2006
Introducing my New PBS Blog, learning.now
I'm very excited to announce the launch of a new blog, learning.now. This blog, which I'll be writing and editing for PBS Online, will focus on the intersection of Internet culture and education. One of the primary goals is to help guide educators through the ins and outs of what's often referred to as "Web 2.0," including blogging, podcasting, vlogging, RSS, social software and community networks. I'm planning to explore some of the creative ways students and teachers are using interactive technologies to improve learning, as well as dissect the controversies that often occur when classroom culture and online culture collide.
The website officially kicks off Tuesday, but I wanted to give readers a sneak preview of the site. And please feel free to offer any suggestions on the types of subjects you'd like me to tackle on the blog. I'm hoping this will be an engaging discussion in which I can learn from all of you and share some of the exciting work that's going on in classrooms today.
For those of you visiting my blog because of learning.now, welcome to Andy Carvin's Waste of Bandwidth. This has been my personal homepage for the last 11 years, and I use it to discover a whole range of issues, not to mention share stories about life in general. I hope you enjoy the new blog, as well as my old one. :-) -andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:38 PM
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April 21, 2006
Some Edtech Questions Left Unanswered
At the Yale A2K conference today, I led a panel on peer production of educational content. The session featured Jennifer Corriero of TakingITGlobal, Jak Stienens and Saskia Harmsen of IICD and Steve Midgely of the Stupski Foundation. The audience had a lot of questions, so I deferred to them before asking my own. But a woman in the audience asked the question, "What questions would you have asked if you'd had time to ask them?" So, before the session ended, i read out my questions and encouraged participants to come to my blog and offer their own replies. I invite you to do the same.
In no particular order, here are the questions I would have asked my panelists:
Why is peer production important? What ever happened to relying on curricula of major educational publishers?How would you describe literacy in the 21st century? What skills do you need now that you might not have needed 20, 30, 50 years ago? And do these basic skills differ whether you are in a developed or developing country?
Where does open courseware fit in all of this?
What is the role of govt, private sector, civil society in fostering peer-produced educational content? The role of public media? What's the role of telecentres and other public access centers?
What's the impact of $100 laptop and other low-cost devices. How will they change education? Will they?
Where do wikis fit into all this? They make a lot of educators nervous.
What about when education technology is controlled by technologists rather than educators? Computer labs, filtering, etc.
How does learning change when the students know more about the technology than the teacher?
Any thoughts? Feel free to cherry pick from the list. -andy
update - here's a link to a liveblog of my session, courtesy of Yale's LawMeme.
Posted by acarvin at 10:59 PM
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Steve Midgely on Education, Ethnicity and Openness
Notes from the A2K conference session by Steve Midgely, Stupksi Foundation, on openness and education:
Literacy with an Attitude by Patrick Finn:3rd grade US classroom
1 state is Pakistani, no cultural context
African American student behind in reading, but good in mathBy eighth grade, Pakistani student is assimilated and proficient, eager
African American student is three grades below average reading level, disconnected educationallyFinn asks: Why?
There is nothing inherent about being one ethnicity or another.
Poor, minority students have access to learning, but are rejecting it - but don't blame the kids
Teachers resign themselves to students who don't want to learn, end up teaching around themPublic education is stuck in a cycle of negation; we try to teach using ineffective methods for many types of students; students' cultures see American culture as oppressive and unjust, making them more likely to be skeptical
Giving kids better access to knowledge isn't enough. So let's talk about open content.
Peer production of open content holds great promise, but availability or cost isn't the issue. Students are trapped in a rut where they don't feel the need to learn, and we don't engage them effectively.
Open content alone won't address the issues.
4th grade white students are competitive in math with the Netherlands. Minority students are competitive with Armenia.
Our education system is differentially broken; the achievement gap for minority students vs. white students is as high as 50 points in urban schools. They often work alone, with the door closed.
Even things as simple as electronic transfer of high school records to colleges aren't happening.
The primary barriers to organizational change are more about culture and systems than access and knowledge. It's about how they work as educators rather than the curriculum itself.
Antiquated data systems can make systemic cultural change next to impossible. It's easier to change systems than cultures, so I'm going after systems first.
Norfolk, VA and Sacramento, CA have had much success by creating better support systems for educators - and not necessarily using technology to do it. Old fashioned elbow grease. Now they're using technology to make this more efficient.
A teacher has to make as many as 400 choices a day in terms of how they deliver curriculum to all their students. Open content is only useful to them in an educational community that looks different from traditional school models.
I'm interested in how peer production and open content will change the markets within education.
Open communities of practice and support, for educators , administrators and students. Open support forums, better decisionmaking for selecting technology, vendors, curriculum, etc
Teachers aren't solely to blame for failures in achievement. They often work in isolation in a culture of failure and apathy. One almost has to be superhuman to succeed in these environments. They rely on their skills and dedication, despite the odds. These environments of learning and community don't exist in most schools, and we need these environments very badly. The dissonance between the changing culture and static systems within schools ends up holding everyone back.
Posted by acarvin at 10:57 PM
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April 20, 2006
Creating a Samizdat Bloggers Network Using SMS Text Messaging
Given all that's been written over the last few days about education bloggers being censored unnecessarily by school Internet filters, I'm beginning to wonder if it's time for a group of us to create a samizdat bloggers network.
Samizdat? Gesundheit.
Samizdat (самиздат) is a Russian word that essentially translates to "self publishing." During the Cold War, Russian free speech advocates created a samizdat network to disseminate government -censored information secretly to the public. Using techniques as basic as carbon paper, handwritten notes and crudely copied video tapes, the samizdat network allowed advocates of free speech and democracy to share their ideas under the radar of authorities. Similar techniques have been used in countries like Poland, the former Czechoslovakia, Iran and China to spread knowledge without government interference.
Today, we're finding ourselves in a situation where professional educators are being stifled and stymied by Internet filters installed in such a way that makes it impossible for all of us to use tools like blogging to share best practices and debate controversial issues. No other profession would tolerate having such a blunt instrument quashing professional discourse. Educators shouldn't tolerate it either.
On the one hand, I think there needs to be a broader public debate about the role of schools in controlling knowledge, restricting access for both students and teachers. As Will Richardson writes,
It may mean spending less time blogging and more time writing for print beyond the usual list of publications where the ideas may find a different audience. And it may mean being subversive. But I think it's crucial that we think hard about ways of bringing these ideas to the people who exert the most control over what happens in our classrooms, and that's not always the people inside the school building.
These types of public debates rarely begin overnight. It will take a lot of hard work: writing op-eds, inspiring journalists to cover the story, generating debate at real-world gatherings of educators, perhaps even complaining to our representatives in Congress. In the mean time, too many educators are stuck without access to important online materials - which brings me back to the idea of creating a blogger samizdat network.
The first step would be to create a brand new website that aggregates a group of education blogs that are being censored. For example, you could take the RSS feed of Miguel Guhlin's blog, my site, Will Richardson's, etc, and use a free RSS digest tool like Feeddigest to display them on another website. Feeddigest blends the RSS feeds together as if they were all being produced by the same blog, then lets you post them by adding a javascript to a website. Take a look at my site WSISBlogs.org and you'll see Feeddigest in action, displaying content from over two dozen blogs from around the world.
Ideally, what you would want to do is create a new website and buy a new domain name for it, so it would be unfamiliar to a school's Web filter. This wouldn't solve the Mysp@ce dilemma, though, in which filters block websites based on keywords on a site. That might take a bit of geekery to program a word scrubber that examines the RSS feeds, replaces blocked words with innocuous versions of them, then generates a new RSS feed that goes into the digest. But that's beyond my personal skill set. As long as a website is being blocked at the URL level rather than a keyword level, setting up a new website with a digest of blogs would work - for a little while, at least.
At some point, though, the technocrats who manage the web filter might end up catching on to the new website and start blocking it. First, you'd have to move the website again, with a new IP address and a new domain name. You'd then need a system in place that could notify supporters of the website that the site had moved elsewhere. Normally, an email list could serve this purpose, but some districts block access to list management tools like Yahoogroups, making it difficult for educators to receive emails from such a list.
This is where it gets interesting. Rather than use email to receive notifications of the site moving elsewhere, I'd use mobile phone text messaging instead. The vast majority of mobile phones today allow users to send and receive SMS text messages - short bursts of information that are transmitted over the phone network. I've been thinking a lot about SMS ever since the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami, when Taran Rampersad and others began experimenting with a relay system that would allow SMS messages to be sent to groups of first-responders involved in recovery efforts.
How does SMS fit into blogs and censorship? Schools may filter websites and email but as far as I know they haven't started filtering text messages. And as it turns out, it's not very difficult to set up your own SMS relay network that would distribute text messages to large groups of people. Last night, I got it to work using two free tools: Google Groups and TeleFlip.
Google Groups is one of the most popular email list hosting sites. Countless people use it to create their own discussion groups in which people subscribe their email address, sending and receiving messages to all other subscribers. Typically, subscribers receive messages the old-fashioned way - via email. But what's stopping us from using it to send messages to our mobile phones instead?
I'm not talking about mobile phones that have email capabilities. I'm taking about SMS. This is where TeleFlip comes in. TeleFlip is a cool service that lets you send emails to someone's phone via SMS using a very simple protocol. (It only works in the United States and Canada, though.) For example, let's say your mobile phone number is 555-888-2222. Teleflip acts as an email-to-SMS gateway so anyone can email you and have it appear as a text message on your phone. All you have to do is take the phone number and have that serve as the name of the email address, with teleflip.com as the domain name. So in the case of the telephone number 555-888-2222, you would send a short email to 5558882222 @ teleflip . com, and Teleflip will route your email to that phone's SMS account. Give it a try with your own mobile phone and see if it works. I was pleasantly surprised how fast it works. It probably will for you, too - though don't send anything that looks like spam because they're very sensitive about that sort of thing.
With tools like Teleflip, any mobile phone with SMS text messaging can receive short emails. In fact, it's quite possible your phone already lets you send and receive emails through SMS, even without Teleflip: for example, Cingular Wireless customers can get emails if they're sent to your phone number plus the domain "mmode.com." So if 555-888-2222 were a Cingular phone, you could send email to it by posting to 15558882222@mmode.com - just don't forget the number 1 at the beginning. Verizon, T-Mobile and other carriers have similar services. With Teleflip, though, you don't need to know which service a person subscribes to; as long as you've got their phone number, you can send an email to them as SMS.
So let's say you wanted to set up that samizdat bloggers network. First, you'd create a new group on Google Groups. Then you would invite people to subscribe to it. Users could either send you their phone numbers and you could subscribe them manually, using the Teleflip version of their phone numbers as their subscription address. Or they could go to the group's homepage and subscribe themselves. Either way, they would then get a confirmation message from Google Groups via SMS. By replying to that SMS, your subscription is then confirmed.
At this point, you'll now have an email list where the subscribers are actually mobile phones with SMS. As manager of the samizdate network, if it becomes necessary to move the blogs to a new URL, all you have to do is notify everyone by emailing the new URL to the Google Group. The message would then be sent as an SMS to all of your subscribers, bypassing the school's email system. That way, they would all get the warning that the website was moving to a new URL, without having the URL getting sent out through the school's email network.
Of course, this simple technique could be used in all sorts of other circumstances. It's sort of a crude version of the SMS relay network that Taran Rampersad and other bloggers talked about. So a group of first-responders, protesters, volunteers, etc, going into a situation where email access is impossible, a Google/Teleflip SMS relay might make a lot of sense - that is, unless Teleflip decides it's taking up too much of their bandwidth and shuts everyone down. Thankfully, though, there are lots of open source SMS tools being created, some of which might do exactly the same sort of thing, installable on your own server.
So perhaps with a little help from SMS and RSS digest tools, educators united in solidarność might be able to achieve their own form of online glasnost. Now wouldn't that be revolutionary? Da. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:59 PM
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Student Free Speech Rights on the Internet and the Ghosts of Columbine
Seven years ago today, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold gunned down 12 classmates and a teacher at Columbine High School in Colorado. On the first anniversary of the attack, I published an essay called Student Free Speech Rights on the Internet and the Ghosts of Columbine. The essay examines judicial precedent on student free speech, both offline and offline, and the balance schools must strike between appropriate action and restraint. The essay was written just as blogging was beginning to take off, before millions of students started to become online publishers. Here's a quick taste from the intro:
In the wake of the Columbine anniversary, schools administrators continue to be hypersensitive to the activities of students in cyberspace. While many schools have approached their awareness of student-generated online content as part of a greater strategy to assess their students' emotional states, others have apparently actualized their fears by cracking down on less-than-threatening student online activities that occur outside the classroom. In the year that has lapsed since the massacre, the American Civil Liberties Union has received hundreds of complaints from students who were summarily punished for producing Web site content from home that was deemed by school administrators as inappropriate or worrisome.In Brimfield, Ohio, for example, 11 students were suspended soon after the Columbine massacre for posting insensitive comments to their Goth-themed Web site. The students, who identified with the counter-culture Goth style of wearing black clothes and listening to groups like Marilyn Manson, made sarcastic online comments such as the following: "I wonder how long it'll be before we're not allowed to wear our trenchcoats anymore. You know those screwed up kids in Colorado were wearing them, so that means I will also kill someone, and so will all my friends." In light of Columbine, the school superintendent labeled the students' comments as "obscene" and immediately suspended them from school. In this case, as in the hundreds of others that have been reported across the country, the school district in question has been surprised to find itself in constitutional hot water, for the American judicial system is increasingly siding with young people when it comes students' right of expression on the Internet.
It's a long essay, but worth another look. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:18 PM
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April 19, 2006
Professional Discourse? What's That?
My post yesterday about school districts blocking access to edtech blogs struck a chord with Texas librarian Lisa Rose of B.F. Terry High School. Her district, Lamar CISD, is one of the districts filtering out the edtech blogs. She received a copy of the blog entry via email, since she's unable to access it from school. Lisa writes:
I wish we could have access to any blog sites...every one I try to access at school is blocked by our filter, citing web page hosting as the reason, among other things. You mention professional discourse... what's that? I'm surprised I'm allowed to get email from the listservs. I practically have to beg the technology dept. to open sites for me and most of the time they won't. We are at the mercy of people who sometimes aren't educators and our opinions as to what is educational counts for nothing. The noneducator technology person looks at the blocked website and denies access based on their knowledge of what we need in the classroom or library. It seems a little backward to me but I'm just a librarian and have no say in the matter.When giving me permission to post her message, Lisa said I could post it using her real name, since "obviously no one at school could access it anyway," as my blog is being blocked along with the others. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:23 AM
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April 18, 2006
The Word that Will Get Your Blog Censored by Texas Schools Districts
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The word that will get your blog banned in certain school districts, displayed as an image so that the filters won't be able to read it. |
Wes writes:
Are we living in the United States here, or totalitarian China? This is something we should be really concerned about as educators and citizens. I have titled this blog post "censored for relevance" because that is what I think is taking place here. Should educators be talking about social networking sites like MySp@ce? Of course. They should be reading blogs about MySp@ce, blogging themselves about MySp@ce, and even visiting MySp@ce. I think educators (even principals) should even create and maintain their own MySp@ce websites. I have started. [Me too, Wes.] Why?Simply put, because as educators we should strive to remain relevant to students and engaged in their development of literacy skills. Social networking websites are going to continue to grow FAST in the months and years to come. We need to help students make better decisions about the information they share about themselves online, in MySpace and elswhere. In some cases, it is hard to speak intelligently about something if you have little personal experience about it yourself. I am not talking about illegal drug use here-- I am talking about blogging and use of social networking sites. And blogging is not a short term trend. This is a world-changing phenomenon.
As Miguel notes on his blog, important educational blogs like Wesley's site and the techLEARNING blog are getting censored arbitrarily because they are trying to raise awareness about sites like MySp@ce, encouraging critical examinations by educators and a greater emphasis on media literacy. To engage in a constructive debate about sites like this, you have to mention them. And preferably link to them. And these acts are getting bloggers banned by schools.
While I strongly am against any form of censorship, I am thoroughly disgusted by school districts that allow their filters to prevent educators from engaging in professional discourse. I have lost track of the number of times that I've posted a message to my WWWEDU discussion list and received a bunch of autoreplies from school districts saying that teachers there won't be reading my post because they contain "inappropriate content." Usually, these posts have to do with cases of school filtering censorship, controversial sites like MySp@ce or other media literacy-related challenges faced by the modern educator. The filtering software used to supposedly protect children is preventing educators from taking an active role in understanding and discussing the complexities of Internet use in the classroom. Schools may claim "in loco parentis" when describing filters used to protect children. But what are they trying to protect teachers from? Being better users of technology? Being responsible, informed educators?
Miguel, meanwhile, has issued a call to arms against these practices. He's asking educational bloggers to deliberately put the word MySp@ce.com in their blog (with the correct spelling) so that more blogs will be blocked arbitrarily, thus raising the stakes against the school districts that have adopted these foolish filtering practices. Miguel writes:
I encourage you to ask EVERY one you know to put the word "MySp@ce.com" on EVERY web site of importance, from educational sites to mapping sites to critical resources teachers and administrators use. I hope that by doing so, the outcry against banning words--not just URLs--will be so great as to cause education leaders to reconsider their decision to censor words, not URLs. It is important that you take up the call and spread it as widely as possible. I am asking for your help. With this post, my blog will be banned from some Texas school districts. When I'm done editing my own web pages, none of the resources I have spent years collecting will be available to the thousands of educators who have used them in the past.I urge you to advocate this in every blog posting and web page you create. Add the word "MySp@ce" and/or "MySp@ce.com" to it. Get yourselves "censored" for it is better to be censored than to support authoritarian approaches to education in schools today.
You are powerful beyond measure. Subversion is no longer sufficient, if it ever was...we must tell the truth. We are Americans, and we must stand up against this, not angrily but in such a way that those who seek to censor come to understand the error of their ways.
I'm very happy to see Miguel, Wes and others standing up against inane filtering practices. I also support a campaign by educational bloggers to raise awareness for educators unfamiliar with this controversy. The question I have, though, is how do you spread a campaign when the very act of describing the campaign gets you censored? For example, any of the affected teachers trying to access Miguel's blog would be blocked. Undoubtedly, there are many other schools in the US using similar filtering parameters; educators there would also be unable to learn about the campaign, let alone participate. So that's why I've decided to spell the word in question with an "@" in it so there's a greater chance educators working behind the virtual iron curtain of filtering software will at least be aware of what's going on. That is, assuming they can access my site at all, since I've used the M-word on previous posts.
The whole thing reminds me of Those We Don't Speak Of, the mysterious creatures in M. Night Shyamalan's film, The Village. The parents of the village were so paranoid about their children coming to harm's way that they wouldn't even say the name of the creatures that were supposedly lurking in the local forest. We seem to have reached that point in education - where politicians and administrators are so paranoid that educators can't even speak the names of things that may lurk in the virtual forest, lest their students be corrupted by mere mention of them.
Miguel concludes:
It is not enough for us to sugarcoat or protect children, we must confront inappropriateness wherever we find it, serving as an example of what it means to be "appropriate" in the world.... This is our civic space, my space, your space, our space. We must, as Margot Stern Strom, president and executive director of Facing History and Ourselves, find ways to "engage adolescents in meaningful ways of how we learn to live together."
The Internet is indeed our civic space - my space, your space. Our space. How can educators educate our children to use the Internet as responsible 21st century citizens when we can't even speak about the things that might affect them? -andy
Posted by acarvin at 12:56 PM
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April 10, 2006
Getting a College Degree and the Impact of a Seven-Month Hiatus
Cliff Adelman of the US Department of Education is giving a presentation at CISOA right now. He just threw out a fascinating statistic: the longer you wait to enroll in college after completing high school, the less likely you are to complete a college degree. Specifically, those people who wait a mere seven months to enter college are 25% less likely to complete their degree. That's less than summer vacation and one semester combined. So taking time off to work or do something else can adversely affect one's college graduation. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:11 PM
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April 5, 2006
Talking About My New Book at the Harvard Berkman Center
On Thursday, April 6, I'm going to be giving a preview of my new book, "From the Ground Up: Evolution of the Telecentre Movement," at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society. Every Thursday, a group of local bloggers get together to discuss Internet issues, and I'll be talking about the book for this week's meeting.
The book, edited by me and Mark Surman of Telecentre.org, explores the diversity of public computing initiatives around the world, examining the common visions and goals that unite them. It's intended to inspire technology activists to realize that they're part of a worldwide movement to bridge the digital divide, rather than working in isolation. The book will be distributed this spring by IDRC in Canada, but for now you can review a very large PDF version (It's around 10 megabytes - a necessary evil given the hundreds of photographs in the book.)
If you happen to be in the Boston area, please feel free to join us Thursday evening at Berkman. It'll take place at 7 PM at Baker House, 1587 Massachusetts Ave. in Cambridge, north of Harvard Square. Hope to see some of you there!
Here are some screen shots of the book:
The book cover
Opening to the Hungary chapter
Opening to the USA chapter
Photo spread from the Ghana chapter
Page from the Chile chapter
Posted by acarvin at 2:15 PM
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March 28, 2006
Wikipedia Blocks School's Editing Privileges Due to Vandalism
There's been so much talk among educators on whether Wikipedia should be banned from school, that it may come as a surprise to some that a school has actually been banned from Wikipedia.
I discovered the situation this morning, when I was conducting my daily review of my Wikipedia watchlist. For those of you who aren't Wikipedians, a watchlist is a personalized collection of Wikipedia entries that you've selected for monitoring future edits, often because you're one of the editors of those pages. For example, my watchlist includes entries I've created, like Ksar Ouled Soltane and Hao Wu, as well as entries relevant to me personally, like Andy Carvin and Digital Divide Network.
As I perused my watch list, I saw there had been a change to the entry for the video blog Rocketboom. On a previous occasion I'd caught someone vandalizing that entry, so I added it to my watchlist. So it came as no huge surprise when I discovered that the entry had been vandalized again, using a word that I won't mention so this story won't get blocked arbitrarily by school district Web filters. Fixing it was easy - I simply reverted the entry to its pre-vandalized state. But the vandalism annoyed me enough that I felt it was important to post a warning on the vandal's user talk page, which is sort of a notice board that each Wikipedian has to dialogue with other Wikipedians.
Reviewing the page, it became clear that they had a long history of vandalism complaints - so much so that their IP address had been banned on several occasions, preventing users of that computer from making further edits. Throughout the talk page there are warnings from other Wikipedians saying they must cease vandalizing the website immediately. Most interestingly, though, there's a note at the bottom of the page from one of the people behind the IP address in question:
Hi, this IP adress is that of my schools. Please dont block us from wikipedia complety, but do go ahead to block us from editing.
As it turns out, the IP address is owned by a school in Canada, with many students and teachers sharing the same Internet access point. If you review the list of all edits made from the address, you'll find dozens of instances of vandalism going back to November 2002. They've managed to vandalize pages ranging from Gaia Theory to the 1995 Quebec Referendum to even the 2004 Indian Ocean Earthquake.
It's quite understandable for Wikipedians to want to block this IP address to prevent any more vandalism on the site. But it makes me wonder just what, if anything, about Wikipedia was being taught in the school where all of this took place. Since I didn't find any constructive edits made by the IP address in question, my guess is that there was no curricular activity in which students were encouraged to examine Wikipedia critically. In many ways, this incident should serve as a teachable moment for this school and others. Wikipedia is far from perfect, but that's what makes it such an interesting tool when it comes to teaching media literacy. By democratizing the role of editor, Wikipedia raises important questions regarding credibility, the wisdom of crowds vs the sovereignty of experts, trust and anonymity, among other topics.
Students and teachers should debate Wikipedia and even contribute to it; remember, it's a work-in-progress, not a finished body of work. But all too often, the debate over Wikipedia's merits is left among the educators only, with students left out of the conversation and operating on a simple directive: don't use it. By ignoring Wikipedia rather than teaching critical, responsible uses of it, schools are practically inviting students to edit Wikipedia at their own peril. We should be preparing students for constructive participation in the Read/Write Web; otherwise it might as well be the Read/Vandalize Web. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:42 AM
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March 22, 2006
Nancy Willard's MySpace Adventure
Online child safety advocate Nancy Willard recently had the opportunity to visit the headquarters of MySpace.com, the extraordinarily popular online community that's been a lightning rod for controversy in recent months. Nancy posted a summary of her visit to my WWWEDU discussion forum; she was kind enough to allow me and other list members to repost her report. Here's the full text of what she wrote.
On Monday, I had a personal visit to MySpace headquarters. They invited me for a meeting to seek my guidance on responding to Internet safety and responsible use issues. I want to report to you on what I saw and what I think. I think the members of these three discussion groups know that I am quite apt to speak my mind. ;-)I will tell you I was impressed by the efforts MySpace is taking to address the recognized Internet safety and responsible use concerns and believe in their sincerity.
Here is what I witnessed and was told:
When abuse complaints come in, they are sent to a special team of responders who have had specific training in addressing abuse issues. There is also some specialization within this team.
They have specific procedures to promptly respond to legal subpoenas. They showed me the chart of the numbers of subpoenas and it is increasing exponentially each month. Incredible chart.
They have one staff member, a young man, who is assigned to work with school discussion groups and school concerns. They have public groups associated with schools on their system. There are currently 25,000 +- They seek a student from the school to serve as a moderator and try to pick a student who appears to them to be a "school leader" based on an application. The moderator's job is to contact MySpace if any issues of concern arise. I think it will be very helpful for schools to find out whether there is a public group for the school and who the moderator is. It is likely that the public group will attract the school's "in-crowd" and that other groups of kids within the school may set up their own public or private groups. (This would be fascinating sociological research.) A staff person who has a good relationship with the student moderator could contact this student and simply offer any assistance, should the need arise. This needs to be done respectfully -- in support of this student's leadership potential. Reviewing the comments in this discussion group will provide insight into the school community from the eyes of some of the students.
This MySpace staff person also works with administrators and school resource officers if they contact MySpace about a school concern. I have spoken with a couple of school resource officers who have had dealings with MySpace and they told me they were very pleased with the quality of the response and service. This young man appeared to be very sincere and competent -- but also very young and without any actual school experience.
He and his supervisor reflected some concerns with the manner in which school officials were contacting them. One major concern -- which I am going to take some significant actions to address -- is that sometimes administrators contact the company for assistance but the administrator cannot tell them the specific location of the concerning material. Why? BECAUSE THE ADMINISTRATOR IS BLOCKED FROM ACCESSING THE SITE! This is outrageous folks and will have to be promptly addressed. A parent calls the school and reports "My child is being threatened." I saw some material that makes me concerned about possible suicide." or the like and the administrator, counselor, or school resource officer can't go to the site to make an assessment. This is unacceptable. I am going to try to work through the US Dept of Ed and other channels to alert schools to get this situation changed. These three staff positions in each school must have override rights and capabilities. This is essential. (And I am embarrassed that I did not detect this as a concern earlier.)
MySpace has a text monitoring system that they use to detect possible concerns, including under age members, gang text or symbols, threats, and the like. They remove 1800 to 2000 under age profiles per day that they have identified. They also review all of the images posted on the site soon after they are posted. This is a monumental task -- not a job I would want. The images are on a screen that the reviewer can control. That has the facility for the reviewer to indicate that the image or the profile of the person posting the image should be deleted. They review videos prior to posting -- taking miscellaneous screen shots from the video. This level of review is not going to take down provocative pictures (eg Britanny Spears-like press photos).
They have new instructions on their site that provide guidance for parents seeking to remove the profile of their child. http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/misc/RemovingChildProfiles.html. This situation presents some difficulties. If they responded to every request that appears to come from a parent to remove a profile, someone could impersonate a parent for the purpose of bullying. Or they could get into the middle of a custodial parent dispute. My assessment is that the way they are proceeding is the only possible way to address the concern.
The MySpace folks are very interested in the fact that I am working on a book for parents, because they really want to see more parents engaged in appropriate parenting. I think MySpace is really doing a lot to address the safety and responsible use concerns. But parents should not expect MySpace or any other web site to do their job for them!!! These sites are not babysitting operations.
MySpace staff appear to have a good understanding of the concerns and are reaching out to me and others to seek even better ways to address the concerns. The see increased education of parents and youth as the answer. The challenge will be to get parents and youth to pay attention.
There are some significant social issues involved with these kinds of online activities that will absolutely require education and parental involvement. Actually, they will also require massive social change to really work, but I am not holding my breath.
Teens are clearly using places like MySpace to establish social status. How do young males establish social status? By posting manly, daring images and information that demonstrate independence and bravery and by being listed as a friend on as many profiles of "hot girls" as possible. And how do girls establish social status? By posting sexually provocative pictures and titillating information that attracts the attention and friendship links of manly guys. How does any teen attract attention? By posting hot, intimate information. The teens who are into playing these games are the ones who are most likely playing these games on places like MySpace. These are the same kinds of games that are going on every day in the hallways of middle and high schools. Some of the students are really into playing these games and others are not. My hope is that we can find better ways to use these environments for more socially beneficial uses. How about getting online teens focused on tasks that would seek to alleviate problems associated with poverty in third world villages?
I am going to be working on a brief document for schools that addresses some of the things I think they should be doing in relation to these communities -- starting first with override privileges.
Thanks again to Nancy for allowing me to republish it.
Posted by acarvin at 3:33 PM
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February 22, 2006
Nancy Davenport's Keynote on Scholarly Communications
Some notes from the latest keynote. Didn't get everything but it captures the basics.
Nancy Davenport
President, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)
Scholarly Communications
What are the issues?
What are the options
What are the leadership issues?
Spent much of her professional life in research circles, not academic circles, but has focused more on academic POV in the last two years.
Library: the documentation of human endeavour; an unbroken line in the human record.
A portion of that documentation propels research and scholarship; supports learning.
A collection is the product of cultural movments
120,000 librarians involved in collection development for academic libraries. "A lot of us are collecting the same stuff.... But we have to figure out ways to become a bit smarter for things that are unique to our institutions."
Scholars are the supply and the demand. Research has to be distributed, through print, e-format, open access, repositories, self-publishing, even blogs.
Who is in the middle, mediating scholarly discussions? Societies, reviewers, publishers - for profit and nonprofit - aggregators, librarians, provosts, administrators, the Internet.
Peer review is what every scholar wants - to be judged as an exemplar by their colleagues.
Publishers started as printers only, but over time, they began to accrue some of the attributes of research societies. They took on the best scholars as reviewers. Later, aggregators came along - companies acting as distributing agents of scholarly work, as opposed to RSS aggregators. These traditional aggregators also do similar work online, customizing services for librarians. Meanwhile, the provosts control the purse strings while librarians ask for more.
Supply: scholars, researchers, reviewers, societies
Demand: scholars, researchers, societies, teacher, public, industry
Motivations:
Scholars have new knowledge to share; stature, impact, tenure, ego - journal as a branding device
Publishers: profit (or not); stature; impact; market share - journal also as a branding device
Libraries: Build collections, satisfy scholars, maximize buying power, institutional stature, personal stature, persistence
Digital scholarship: only way to integrate disparate content, allows new research and scholarship, encourages using material in new ways, creates new fields and communities of practice, creates new knowledge.
CLIR call to action: tells publishers that librarians want independent, third party preservation of your content
"The academic community is built upon a sham. More an more you don't own your content - you're paying rent."
What impedes open access?
The academic reward system. Tenure requires publishing in "the right journals."
Scientists can put open access fee into their budgets. But in the humanities, you don't get that kind of funding. PloS.org won't work for most humanities scholars.
Level of support outside the sciences.
Scholarly style; it took respect to make the Human Genome Project to work. Humanities has a different dynamic. Individual interpretation is valued more than collaborative interpretation. So working in a collaborative environment can be difficult in scholarly humanities research.
U of Virginia: Valley of the Shadow website. Examines two Shenandoah Valley towns before during and after the civil war. They've digitized every bit of data they can get their hands on.
Projects like this aren't easy. It takes stature and authority to make these kinds of changes happen.
Where are we now? We pay a lot of money. Most institutions are paying 24% for digital serial journals in their collections budget. Libraries each pay large fees to access the same material. Meanwhile, libraries are digitizing their own special, unique materials.
Search strategies are becoming even more important - recall and precision.
New research methods within disciplines
Share what is in common; focus on the local, the unique
Get it into the classroom!
Posted by acarvin at 12:44 PM
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January 18, 2006
Students Expose Sex Offender Through Wikipedia Research
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Mug shot of Joshua Gardner, AKA Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, 5th Duke of Cleveland. |
Here's what happened. A young man identifying himself as Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, 5th Duke of Cleveland, visited Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota three times trying to enroll as a transfer student. He had a "spot on" English accent and insisted on being called "your grace." Students at the school had their doubts, so they began researching him on the Internet. They found Wikipedia citations regarding the Duke of Cleveland had been edited on several occasions by an anonymous Wikipedian - edits that were promptly corrected by other Wikipedians but still viewable in this Wikipedia edit history. They also found that someone named Joshua Gardner had created an entry for Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the person who had visited the school. Subsequent student research exposed Gardner to be their so-called Duke of Cleveland; he also happened to be a 22-year-old registered sex offender.
This case offers a fascinating example of Wikipedia use in the classroom. While many educators may poo-poo Wikipedia, the checks and balances set up for the site allow visitors to explore the detailed history of how an article is created and edited over time; without this data, the students might never have uncovered Gardner's true identity.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:01 AM
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November 8, 2005
The First Student Video Blog from Atlantic City Rough Cuts
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Students from MLK Elementary School in Atlantic City, NJ interview school board members for their first video blog. |
Last July I went to Atlantic City to teach local school teachers how to video blog, and helped Art set up the blog. The teachers posted several short videos to the blog, but there weren't any videos produced by the students. Until yesterday, at least.
The video, entitled Witches, Aliens, and School Board Members, does the impossible: it makes a school board conference funny. A group of students went to a recent New Jersey state school board conference, where they got to shoot some video and interview board members. They went back to school and made comic strips about the meeting, which they gave to the board members. Now, several groups of students are making documentary shorts about the experience. They're basically using the same script, but the editing decisions will be their own. The first of these videos is available on the blog, and the others will soon follow.
I'm really excited about the video; it may indeed be the first video blog ever produced by elementary school students in a classroom environment. I can't wait to see what else they'll come up with over the course of the year.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:15 AM
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November 7, 2005
Refugees: The Liberians of Buduburam
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Video documentary of my July 2005 visit to the Liberian refugee camp in Buduburam, Ghana. I learn about the challenges faced by Liberians forced to flee their homeland, as well as some of the training programs available to them. I visit one of the camp's telecentres, as well as an women's literacy support group. Music used with permission of Alula Records.
Low-res version (20 megabytes): |
Posted by acarvin at 1:16 PM
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October 1, 2005
American Idol Comes Out of the Illiteracy Closet
Just saw this story on Yahoo:
"American Idol" winner Fantasia Barrino reveals in her memoirs that she is functionally illiterate and had to fake her way through some scripted portions the televised talent show, which she won in 2004."You're illiterate to just about everything. You don't want to misspell," Fantasia told ABC's "20/20." "So that, for me, kept me in a box and I didn't, wouldn't come out."
The 21-year-old R&B singer says she's signed record deals and contracts that she didn't read and couldn't understand. But the hardest part, she said, is not being able to read to Zion, her 4-year-old daughter.
Now that she's outed herself, as it were, wouldn't it be great to see her lead a campaign against functional illiteracy? We really could use someone that kids and young adults can look up to and relate to when it comes to battling illiteracy... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 5:51 PM
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September 27, 2005
Are Educators Hostile to Wikipedia?
Last July, I posted a blog entry about strategies teachers could use to incorporate Wikipedia into classroom practice. The post received a lot of commentary in the blogosphere, some positive, some negative, but all quite interesting.
I then received an email from Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, who noted one particular sentence I used in my essay:
On Wikipedia in particular, we talked about the hostility that many educators have towards the website, particularly their concerns that it can't be considered a reliable source.
Jimbo took issue with my use of the word hostility when describing how many educators felt about Wikipedia. In his experience, Jimbo felt that the majority of educators had quite the opposite feeling, being supportive of Wikipedia.
I found this surprising. From a purely anecdotal perspective, particularly among k-12 librarians, I'd heard a lot of complaints about Wikipedia being unreliable and inappropriate for students. At conferences I'd felt sometimes I was the only person in the room supportive of Wikipedia as a teaching tool. Perhaps one of us was just hearing from a vocal minority. Or perhaps one of us just had it wrong.
Jimbo and I then went through the archive of my WWWEDU list to see if we could find any instances of educators painting Wikipedia in a negative light, and at that particular time, we couldn't. So it was basically Jimbo's gut feeling versus my gut feeling, with no quotes to back it up decisively one way or another.
So I suggested to Jimbo that we make our conversation public and see what educators actually have to say about Wikipedia. For example, is Wikipedia something you'd want your students using in the classroom? Do you consider it an appropriate teaching tool? If so, how? If not, why not?
If you're a teacher and a blogger, we'd like to encourage you to respond by posting something on your blog. If you do, please tag the post with wikipedia in the classroom so it's easier for all of us to follow the discussion, no matter where the blog entries are being posted. If you're not a blogger, email me your comments and I'll compile them for posting on my blog.
Personally, I hope Jimbo's right, since I see lots of potential uses for Wikipedia in the classroom. It's just that my gut is still telling me something else. Either way, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 3:37 PM | Comments (17)
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September 21, 2005
The Confluence of Media Literacy and Multicultural Literacy
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Robin Blake of OFCOM, the UK telecom regulatory agency, talking about media literacy at the Scottish Learning Festival. |
Meanwhile, I just spent some time on the expo floor, which is jammed with several hundred exhibitors showing off their wares to countless educators. I particularly enjoyed observing a group of students recording a radio broadcast; they've spent the last few weeks learning the basics of radio broadcasting, and this morning was their first live recording session. I recorded interviews with a couple of the trainers - the students were preoccupied with the broadcast - and hope to edit them into a podcast later.
I'm still having problems with the Internet access here. If my computer sits idle for a few minutes, the wifi service logs me out and requires me to restart my computer to log in again. It's not just a matter of restarting the browser - it actually gives me an error message saying I need to reboot. What a pain.
Anyway, Robin is now giving the audience a media literacy quiz. His first question asked which of Britain's public service TV networks was most likely to begin their newscast with a story on crime. Only one person got the answer right - Channel Five, apparently. But what I found most interesting abou the question is that it demonstrates that media literacy and cultural literacy go hand-in-hand. I consider myself to be rather media literate, but I stood no chance against questions like that, simply because I lack the cultural context to know the difference between each UK broadcast network's programming style.
The reverse would be true if audience members here came to a presentation of mine in the US if I'd asked which of the US news channels has the reputation of being the most pro-Bush (Fox News). The most basic elements of media literacy boil down to whether or not a person has the ability to be a discerning consumer of content, recognizing truthfulness, bias, context, etc, as well as the ability to be a producer of content that reflects their personal needs. This requires technical skills, cognitive skills, self-reflection skills. But without multicultural literacy, all the media literacy skills in the world won't change anything if you're completely tone deaf as far as media is concerned when you're out of your cultural element.
The fact that I'm in Scotland right now makes it no surprise that I failed Robin's media literacy test miserably. But it really makes me think about the challenges each country faces in terms of its own cultural minorities. So much of the US media, both offline and online, assumes that you're a part of the "mainstream." And so much of what you see on TV and the Internet is developed for - and by - a white, middle class audience. Mainstream media continues to neglect people of color, immigrant populations, low-literate populations, etc. Even if you're able to work with disadvantaged groups and teach them basic media literacy skills, if you can't bridge cultural gaps, true media literacy will still be lacking. And the FCC's counter-productive media consolidation moves in recent years has just made it worse, limiting the diversity of minority voices in the public sphere, futhering the media/cultural diversity gap.
So the next time someone tells you that media literacy is a technical education challenge, think again. Without addressing multicultural literacy as well, you're liable to leave countless people in the dust, just because of their cultural background. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 7:11 AM
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September 20, 2005
Andy's Scottish Learning Festival Powerpoint
On September 21 I'm deliver a presentation at the Scottish Learning Festival entitled "Online Communities: From BBSes to Blogs and Beyond." Hopefully I'll be able to record a podcast of it; in the meantime, here's my powerpoint presentation. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 1:18 PM
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July 11, 2005
Turning Wikipedia into an Asset for Schools
Art Wolinsky and I went to dinner tonight just outside of Atlantic City, where I'll be leading a two-day workshop on documentary making for a group of elementary school teachers. During dinner, Art and I talked about what I'll be presenting tomorrow morning, as well as fun Internet topics such as video blogging, podcasting and Wikipedia.
On Wikipedia in particular, we talked about the hostility that many educators have towards the website, particularly their concerns that it can't be considered a reliable source. It's the classic dilemma of a wiki website - because wikis allow any site visitor to edit or add content, you raise the risk of getting content that isn't up to snuff. And the fact that young and old alike often go to Wikipedia and see that its name ends in -pedia, they assume it's just like any other encyclopedia and they should take its content as vetted, accurate information, which ain't always the case.
I explained to Art the community of Wikipedia volunteers known as Wikipedians who have created a system of checks and balances to improve the quality of content and avoid problems with virtual graffiti and inaccuracies. But it's not a perfect system, so it's not a huge surprise that a lot of educators just don't want their students utilizing the site.
I had a flashback; a group of us on the WWWEDU email list had tried to create a "Kidopedia" - an online encyclopedia written entirely by kids - back in 1996, hosted by St. John's University. It didn't get very far because all encyclopedia entries were being posted manually by real people; that, and the fact that it was hard to articulate a compelling case as to why kids should be doing this in the first place.
While I understand educators' concerns about directing kids towards "reliable" reference sources, the more I think about it, the more I think Wikipedia's flaws actually make it an ideal learning tool for students. That may sound counterintuitive, of course - how can you recommend a tool that you know may not be accurate? Well, that's precisely the point: when you go to Wikipedia, some entries are better referenced than others. That's just a basic fact. Some entries will have a scrupulous list of sources cited and a detailed talk page on which Wikipedians debate the accuracy of information presented in order to improve it. Others, though, will have no sources cited and no active talk pages. To me, this presents teachers with an excellent authentic learning activity in which students can demonstrate their skills as scholars.
Here's a quick scenario. Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups, with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic. Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.
Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they selected. Chances are, someone has already created a Wikipedia entry on that particular subject. The horse, for example, has an extensive entry on the website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it? Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed about horses on the page.
This is where it gets fun. The group of students breaks down the content on the page into manageable chunks, each with a certain amount of facts that need to be verified. The students then spend the necessary time to fact-check the content. As the students work their way through the list, they'll find themselves with two possible outcomes: either they'll verify that a particular factoid is correct, or they'll prove that it's not. Either way, they'll generate a paper trail, as it were, of sources proving the various claims one way or another.
Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates a Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry's talk page and present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections, with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry they've verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it. That way, each idea presented in the Wikipedia entry has been verified and referenced - hopefully with multiple sources.
Get enough classrooms doing this, you kill several birds with one stone: Wikipedia's information gets better, students help give back to the Net by improving the accuracy of an important online resource, and teachers have a way to make lemons into lemonade, turning Wikipedia from a questionable information source to a powerful tool for information literacy.
I can already see it now: an official K-12 Seal of Approval put on Wikipedia entries that have been vetted by students. Wish I were more handy in Photoshop. -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:14 PM | Comments (3)
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June 30, 2005
Deneen Frazier-Bowen's Funky NECC Keynote
I had to leave at the crack of dawn yesterday morning to catch my train to New York, which meant I didn't get to see Deneen Frazier-Bowen's NECC keynote at its scheduled time. But since she's my long-time edtech homegirl, she was sweet enough to let me sit in on one of her rehearsals this Tuesday.
Deneen's keynote wasn't your usual Powerpoint-Slides-and-a-Longwinded-Speech kinda keynote. Far from it. Instead, she basically pulled an Anna Deveare Smith and performed a series of characters to help paint a portrait of what it's like for today's kids to be growing up as digital natives. The keynote began with a stiff, know-nothing school administrator fumbling her way through a Powerpoint, talking about educating kids the old fashioned way and knowing what's best for today's kids. Eventually, she gets so flummoxed with her Powerpoint that she runs off the stage to argue with tech support.
While Old Miss Frumpmeister is doing her thing back stage, Deneen comes back on stage dressed as a young hip-hop lovin' teen. Her name is Eddy, and she's a smart, tough kid who loves technology but isn't trusted by her teachers. She tells a story about how she brought a palm pilot to class but gets busted for supposedly using it to cheat on a test, which wasn't the case. The school principal makes a capital case out of it and refuses to listen to Eddy's side of the story. So what does Eddy do? She posts it on her blog, which, of course, eventually gets back around to the principal. The principal orders her to remove the criticism of him from the blog, even though it's spot-on accurate, and Eddy refuses. She's then suspended from school, as people all over the world comment on her blog and rally to her cause.
Once Eddy exits the stage, we get to meet Maria. Maria's in late elementary school, and she's a bit hyper, but she's got great ideas about math and science. She likes to find science websites and hopes to use them in class, but not all her teachers seem to care about her opinion. But thanks to one teacher who values her opinion, Maria gets to talk about her idea about participating in Net Day Speak Up Day during a meeting of the school's teachers. She's never spoken in public before, so she uses the voice recorder on her smart phone to practice before giving her big speech, then puts it on her audio blog. Eventually, the school gets involved in the project, and she talks about the results.
Some of Maria's new-found courage comes from her older friend Joanna, an above average 11th grade student who likes to spend her free time playing online multiplayer games. At first her mother worries about the time she spends gaming, but then starts to notice how she takes charge whenever she's interacting with others online. Her mother talks to her about how she's learning leadership skills, a concept pretty much alien to Joanna, but eventually she decides to learn about youth leadership activities to see if she can channel her interests in a positive way. Enter TakingITGlobal: Joanna discovers the network and starts chatting with a girl in Egypt. She gets the idea of setting up a computer recycling program for African kids, approaching the company her mom works for in order to get the computers. Before she knows it, she's an active TIG member, getting lots of media attention in her community as she mobilizes local businesses to help bridge the digital divide.
Eventually, the obnoxious administrator returns to the stage. While trying to sort out her Powerpoint, she apparently overheard the kids' monologues. She's forced to rethink her attitudes towards kids and learning, while recognizing the way technology can be used to inspire and invigorate young people.
Following the performance, Deneen returns to the stage, no longer in character. She describes how she's spent time over the last few years interview countless young people, trying to get a handle on what it's like to be a digital native. The characters she introduced during her performance are not verbatim re-enactments of actual people a la Anna Deveare Smith, but are composites and creations inspired by the students she's interviewed. It was a whole new way to tell the story of education and youth media; I'm really glad I had the chance to see Deneen's performance before leaving the conference.
For those of you who missed it, here are some podcasts of her characters. Not all the performances are complete, but they'll give you a feel for what she did on stage at NECC. Special thanks to Deneen for letting me record them. -andy
Eddy
Maria
Joanna
The Administrator
Posted by acarvin at 7:03 PM | Comments (1)
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June 28, 2005
Powerpoints From My NECC Panel
I'll be convening a panel at the NECC conference in a couple of hours; the session will bring together a group of Web pioneering educators to talk about Web-based education's past, present and future. I'll post notes about it later; in the meantime, here are the powerpoints we plan to use.
Posted by acarvin at 12:15 PM
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Balkanized Wi-Fi at the NECC Conference
I'm pretty annoyed at the Philadelphia convention center's wireless policy. It seems that free wi-fi is available in public corridors, but not in the session rooms. When you try to go online during a session, you get a message informing vendors that it'll cost them 250 bucks a laptop to have public wifi in all meeting spaces. What a joke. Given all the sessions that NECC is finally having on blogging, podcasting, wi-fi, etc, it's an embarrassment that none of us can do this stuff in real-time in so many of the presentation rooms here, unless you're luck enough to have access to one of the few ethernet cables set up for the presenters themselves. So I'll have to step out of the session to post this message. What a pain....
Posted by acarvin at 9:25 AM | Comments (1)
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Don't Surf the Web, Serve the Web
Right now I'm sitting in on Tom March's NECC session. He's showing off some blogs created in classroom, with students having a more authentic learning experience by interacting with the online public. Quoting Al Rogers, he said, "Don't surf the Web, serve the Web." (Reminds me of Stephen Collins' old battle cry, Give Back to the Net.) Use Web tools to create student excitement alive, embracing authentic activities that can actually make a difference, like running an online news wire about child slavery or the extinction of frog species.
Tom's now showing how easy it was to buy a domain name for his son and setting up a space for him to create his own content. The site is scottyjensen.com - not sure if anything is live yet. Seems like a no, but maybe by the time you read this it'll be different.
It's a nice size crowd here - about 250 people. Not bad for a conference with more than 300 concurrent sessions over the next few days.
Posted by acarvin at 9:24 AM
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Post-Weinberger Chaos: The Annual Stampede for Free Food
As soon as David Weinberger finished his presentation, thousands of NECC attendees streamed out the ballroom to make a run for the buffet tables set up in the reception hall. The reception took place in a long, thin corridor, creating an ugly bottleneck of tote-bag-toting educators eager to scarf down free food laid out on some sponsor's dime. Meanwhile, a large group of brass-wielding mummers performed parade music, much of which was drowned out by numbers of people calling out to friends amidst the throng of hungry teachers. Sheer chaos. Welcome to yet another NECC.
Patsy and I looked around for a moment or two and decided to bolt. I've done nine other NECC receptions: the food quality varies, but it's usually greasy, and the last thing my jet-lagged stomach needed was an overdose of fried food. So off to the train station we went to head back out to the suburbs. Hobnobbing with friends and peers could wait.
Posted by acarvin at 9:23 AM
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Weinberger Keynote Brain Dump
The 2005 National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) kicked off in Philadelphia today with an opening keynote by David Weinberger. I haven't had a chance to write an article about what he said, so he's a brain dump of all the quotes and ideas I managed to capture. -andy
"I will never live philosopher in chief down - let that never leave this room."
His presentation, entitled "The Shape of Knowledge,"
"Darn bloggers, you can't say anything."
Knowledge is "in pretty rocky shape." He talked about Dan Rather's fall from grace; unfortunately the media portrays it as the result of a "blogger hit squad," he said the issue was that today's media doesn't have the authority it once did. "When the authorities don't even know they've lost authority, that's funny - that's comedy!"
Jon Stewart: "He's the only guy on TV capable of blurting out the truth."
Wikipedia: In a couple of hundred years, people will point to wikipedia as an "epochal event." If you want to understand what the Internet can be, you should point to Wikipedia. "By all rights it should be the world's biggest crap magnet.... But in fact, Jimbo Wales has done something remarkable."
The Greek agora: it's where affairs of state were decided. "that's where knowledge got started."
There's only one thing we can really know: I think, therefore I am. Descartes. A single sentence that even God couldn't fool with it.
Four aspects of knowledge. Two of them mirror the nature of reality, while the other measure the nature of political reality.
We assume there's onlyone knowledge we share. On reality, one knowledge.
Knowledge is neatly organized, like the way we organize things like laundry. Putting it in piles of things that make sense to us.
One of the consequences of this, is as with physical things, we assume that in a perfect knowledge structure that everything will have its place.
Because we doing these knowledge structures, we need experts to do it. "We need experts - it's tough to do this."
The experts are going to have a lot of power who help us what's the right knowledge, what's the best knowledge.
Dewey: creating a map of knowledge like a map of the local landscape. This ultra rationalism of his forces some constraints: English is put somewhere else than Latin or German or Portuguese or Ural-Altaic or Dravidian, while southeast Asian languages "don't even get an integer."
Religion: 88 dewey decimals assigned to Christianity, jews get one, Buddhists and muslims one, etc.
The point is, is that this is NOT a solvable problem. There is not one world so there is not one knowledge.
But digitizing changes everything a whole bunch.
First order: organizing physical things themselves, like photo archives with pencil metadata written on back
Second order: physically separating metadata from the physical objects themselves, like a card catalog representing the knowledge of books
Third order: everything is digital, both objects and metadata. So what can you do now?
Photographic equipment: One thing usually goes into one pile; now you can sort digital cameras in as many places on an e-commerce website as you want.
Messiness is a virtue: hyperlinks can be as messy as you want. If you can't even count them or follow them all, then you've succeeded.
Unknown order. Most of Macy's is noise: stuff that doesn't fit you. Imagine getting a wheelbarrow that pulls out everything you can use, you've got your own personal store. The owner of info no longer owns the organization of information.
Go to a website shopping for digital cameras and sort the search based on your parameters, not theirs. That's an enormous release of power, a transfer of power.
Users are contributors. Social labeling: allowing the public to contribute meaning to information, like labeling online photos
Externalized thought. Cites Andy Clark: human beings have always externalized thought, like a physicist requiring a white board in order to think. Now we're doing the same thing with google. How can you get your kids to memorize the state capitals when they can look it up easily?
If our scaffolding now is bits, what does that mean?
Wikipedia: wiki is not paper. It's obvious, but it's a good thing to keep in mind. It's size is infinite; it's not limited.
What's the size of a topic? According to Brittanica, you can only have 32 volumes of knowledge, not 33 - that'd break your back. Artificial constraints to what is considered shared knowledge.
Snip the paper chain, the connection to reality, and build an encyclopedia out of bits, and watch what happens. You get entries like Deep Fried Mars Bar and the Heavy Metal Umlaut. These are somewhat frivolous, perhaps, but we know the size of these topics, and shows what matters to us as a culture, as humans and individuals. This is much closer to the passion of knowledge than what brittanica is.
Linnaeus library: you had to physically have the species to make it official. It's a map of all species. Linnaeus created a stack of 3x5 cards, laid them out, then made physical maps of them. This makes it tempting to lump things in one category to make life easier.
We have a container model of the mind. It's an insane idea. We're doing an internal representation of the world based on what we can store in our heads, or in a book, but they're both finite.
He then shows Doc Searls' blog: one of 11 million known and tracked blogs, though I'd guess there are at least double that. Shows his blogroll - all the links he shows to others. Lots of entries, lots of links. Blogs get represented as people writing publicly; but they're really people in conversations linking to each other. Goes against commercial website philosophy of not linking to outside sources. When you put it all together you get a stinkin' pile of generosity.
The NY Times: lots of news, lots of links. Except all but for point internally, the rest point to ads. And they have the nerve to call the blogosphere an echo chamber.
Why should you believe Doc Searls? You shouldn't necessarily, but you should believe the world he lives in more than the NY Times' world.
Objectivity: the world that is
Subjectivity: the world that matters
Multisubjectivity: it's not just lots of viewpoints; it's that you get viewpoints in conversation with each other.
If you want to learn about open source, you won't find it in Brittanica; instead, go to Doc's site and follow the links. Go to technorati and see what bloggers are saying. An endless set of links of people conversing with each other. And with all of those people, you'll get a better sense of what the truth is than reading a single source.
Multi-dispute-ism: when you get into an argument in public, you get hyper rational and try to tear the other person a new one, getting them to admit they're wrong and you're right. On the Web, it's more typical you get a dialogue. It's a big web - there's lots of room to disagree and move on. The conversation is never going to be resolved.
When you want a beer, you don't look for a perfect beer, just a good one. With information gatekeepers, they want knowledge to be perfect, rather than just good enough. With good enough, we barely need gatekeepers. It's pragmatic: we want the beer. "Pragmatic, local and damn refreshing."
Knowledge in the age of connected abundance. The solution to the over-abundance of information is more information. Connected abundance. Should we shove content into our kids' heads? Should we test them as individuals even though they learn socially? Should we imply ambiguity is a failure? Should we insist on being right?
Knowledge is an unending conversation. I mean this absolutely literally. It's not content that we all decide on. It's the engagement in the conversation. So we need to understand the context of knowledge - it depends on the discipline. We need to learn how to listen, seek ambiguity. If they're being too precise, we need to muddy the waters. And we need to love the difference in things.
Conversation, by its very nature, is a paradox. We base differences on identifying what's common. The simple act of a conversation is miraculous.
Posted by acarvin at 9:21 AM
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June 27, 2005
In Philly for NECC
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Patsy Wang-Iverson hard at work at Research for Better Schools |
Right now I'm over at Research for Better Schools working out of Patsy Wang-Iverson's office; we'll head over to the conference center in just a few minutes to register and get our badges and tote bags. Later this afternoon, there will be a reception for international visitors and a first-timers orientation (this is my 10th NECC, so I'll pass on that one). David Weinberger is doing the opening keynote, which will be quite refreshing for NECC, and then an opening reception. I'm moderating a panel session tomorrow called Celebrating a Decade of the Web in Education; then on Wednesday I'll get to head home, by way of meetings in New York. Can't wait to sleep in my own bed again.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at 10:25 AM
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March 7, 2005
Orwell Comes to Nagpur: All Cameras, All the Time
Saturday's edition of the Times of India had a rather disturbing story about a school in Nagpur in which the principal has installed 180 webcams throughout the school to monitor students and teachers. The school, featured in the new documentary The Great Indian School Show, was wired by principal D. K. Bajaj, who felt the webcams would help enforce strict discipline.
Meanwhile, some parents and educators have begun to complain. "We do not need such Spartan discipline at school, especially in day school," said Uma Sharatchandra, another local principal. "They are just learning to become good human beings. They make mistakes, they learn from it."
School counselor Sadanand Ghaskadvi worries that parents won't understand the implications of the webcam practice. "In the last several decades I've seen several such attempts to enforce extreme discipline." Sanjyot Despande, another counselor, added, "It will come in the way of their personality development. It is especially wrong for teenage students, who will feel seriously offended by the cameras."
After viewing the documentary, a fourth grader was asked who the bad guy was in the film. "The villain is the one who wears all those gold rings and sits in his dark room, watching all the children on his TV, isn't it?" he said. "I don't ever want to go to his school."
Posted by acarvin at 5:07 PM
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March 4, 2005
Touring a Rural Indian Cybervan
I've just returned from a wonderful visit to a cyber van touring the Maharashtra countryside near Baramati, India. We spent an hour visiting with the students and teachers as they used the cybervan to learn MS Paint, and toured a classroom that was also teaching basic computer graphics to 5th graders. Meanwhile, across the road I met another group of village kids who never got to use the cybervan, so the contrast was quite striking.
I conducted interviews with several students and shot lots of video, so I plan to edit it into a video blog at some point. More later... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 11:02 PM
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What Makes Educational Content Educational?
In the last session earlier we saw a series of presentations on examples of educational content development here in India. Unfortunately I didn't see anything that seemed to be breaking new ground. One project developed a series of educational CD-ROMs that converted textbook curricula into multimedia modules that you could play, rewind, fast forward and stop like a video recorder. We saw a clip from an anatomy module in which there was an animation of a skeleton flexing its knee joint. Meanwhile, a voiceover explained how the joint worked. Once you were done viewing the clip, though, your only options were to replay it or to move on to the next clip. What does a student do if they don't understand the voiceover explanation? The module offers no ability for the student to manipulate the stimulation, ask rudimentary questions or demonstrate that they've gained any knowledge from viewing it.
It seems the problem here isn't a matter of programming skills; the animations were quite well done, and the interface was simple to use. But the curricular model simply takes the content once contained in a text book, and animate it with accompanying narration. The same teaching method could have been seen in the 1970s with film strips I saw when I was in school.
I don't want to belittle the enthusiasm seen here regarding the development of educational content, particularly in local languages. But it's such a shame that the multimedia content we've seen so far doesn't demonstrate any interactivity, real or imagined, nor does it give students the tools to demonstrate what they're learning or how it applies to the real world. In one case we did see how students were being asked to create Powerpoint presentations after surfing the Net for information on a particular task such as "Learn something about Russia," but again, all this demonstrates is a student's ability to search the Web and do a book report presentation with the Powerpoint substituting what might otherwise be a handwritten report.
The next session, though, seemed to offer some more compelling models. Ana Maria Raad of CDI Chile gave a presentation on charter school-like information technology citizenship schools in Chile that use community-centric authentic assessment to teach students. Their education model, inspired by the "social education" work of Paulo Friere, is based on the notion that every child can be a social actor within their community, and that they have the responsibility to transform the world around them into a better place.
"We understand that technology should only be a mean to do something and not a goal in itself," she said. "We use computers while discussing issues of particular interest to each community."
When students learn to use Excel, for example, they do it in the context of debating human rights, so their spreadsheets become a tool for engaging their classmates on what rights they believe they have and which ones they don't. And when they use Powerpoint or a desktop publishing program, it's in the context of communicating to the class certain policy goals they'd like to see advocated in their community. To date, more than half a million students have learned to use computers in the context of discussing social justice, citizens rights and civic engagement at nearly 1,000 citizenship schools across South America. These schools, she said, are giving students learning opportunities to liberate them and become civic actors in their community rather than restricting them to a limited, old-fashioned curriculum that doesn't educate students in a socially-relevant context.
Next, Shilpa Uttam of Enabling Dimensions conducted a demo of an Indian CD-ROM called SpellWell. The program, designed for the visually impaired, is a tool for improving English spelling proficiency. Because the blind experience greater problems with homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like sight and cite) and face other spelling proficiency challenge, the software is designed to teach visually impaired people better spelling and the ability to type. It's also seen as a tool for improving the job prospects of the blind, who statistically are more likely to face significant employment challenges. The interface is designed so that it can be used by people who cannot see a screen at all, as well as for individuals who have enough visual capacity to make out large words with strong screen contrast. The game features well-produced audio recordings with hip music and entertaining voice-overs, helping younger people with visual impairments stay interested in the software.
The CD-ROM is also trying to redefine pricing models for educational software, with a target price of less than 300 rupees (less than $8) per unit. The disc is distributed through educational institutions for the blind, advocacy organizations and other NGOs that work with the disabled. The packaging also incorporates Braille, so a visually impaired user can take it out of the box and find usable instructions on how to begin the software exercises. Interestingly, the developers of the software see non-impaired users as a target audience -- the audio content is compelling and the user interface simple, allowing anyone who is interested in approving their spelling ability to benefit from the software. They've even created an online community, EnableAll.org, to offer tech support with experts specialized in assistive technologies, as well as provide an online community for users to discuss their learning experiences and create new word lists.
The next challenge, she said, was making the software work with speech-recognition software. Not only would this open it up to a broader disabled audience, but to illiterate audiences as well.... - andy
Posted by acarvin at 7:18 AM
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Facts Facts on India Education
Some stats from the last panel at the conference:
- 35 million Indian kids under 16 are out of school
- one-third of fifth graders cannot read or write
The challenges here are staggering.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 5:02 AM
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Baramati Lunch Break
It's now 1pm in Baramati, India, and the group is wrapping up an informal lunch in an adjacent building. My lips are still burning from the chili I accidentally bit into, but otherwise lunch was a fine affair, with an assortment of curries, fresh tandoori breads and banana pudding for dessert.
Just prior to lunch, we had an engaging interactive session in which the audience got to ask questions of the CEO of Microsoft India and several other guests. The group was quite animating, speaking passionately on a range of topics, particularly the importance of creating computer software in local Indian languages, and the debate over whether children younger than six years old should be exposed to computers, whether for educational or entertainment purposes. Microsoft's Ravi Venkatesan assured one member of the audience that MS was working hard on releasing MS office in many Indian languages, including the local Marathi language, and that it would be priced at 25 to 30% less than the English-language version, as well as discounts for educational use.
There are several panel sessions this afternoon, though I don't have the program in front of me. I'll be speaking early tomorrow morning on US federal edtech initiatives, particularly the E-Rate. More from Baramati later.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 2:36 AM
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Achieving Sustainable Edtech Initiatives
During today's morning keynote at the Baramati conference in India, Microsoft India CEO Ravi Venkatesan offered his company's latest thinking on information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education.
India graduates two million students each year, he said, yet 60 million children don't even go to school, and overall literacy is below 60%. "Sixty million is roughly the entire enrollment of the US school system," he noted. There are also about 400 students per computer in Indian schools. "Only a small fraction of educators have basic ICT literacy," he added, noting there are approximately 250,000 trained teachers amongst a total of five million teachers. In the general popualation, there are also around 10 PCs per thousand people overall.
"I find this interesting because there's a remarkable thing in India going on today," he continued. "Middle class Indians now believe we can be an educated, developed nation." Indians are starting to view their nation's one billion people not as an obstacle, but as an asset, he said.
"It's the shortage of skilled teachers, high student to teacher ratios, teacher absenteeism, student absenteeism" that are among India's greatest educational challenges, he continued. However, there are ways ICT can combat these challenges. For example, Venkatesan admitted that despite his personal successes in business, he is illiterate in his own native tongue, Tamil, yet he has been amazed how much of the basics he was able to pick up by using multimedia training tools at an ICT kiosk he recently visited.
Beyond formal schooling, ICTs can help village women achieve financial independence.
"You take women from self-help groups and give them basic ICT skills, and you dramatically increase their opportunities," he said. In partnership with an NGO working with agricultural workers, ICT access helped women increase their salary from 500 rupees (USD $11.50) a month to 2000 rupees (USD$ 45) a month.
Unfortunately, no major breakthrough has been achieved on a large, replicable scale, he said. "I don't think anybody really knows; there is a remarkable lack of information on what drives success and sustainability."
"When you look across all these projects, there is always a visionary, passionate, committed leader," he continued. "Our problem is that we then become over-reliant on this small group of leaders." There is no substitute for this type of leadership, he said; how do we identify more people to fill these roles?
It's quite common for a project's funding to dry up before it reaches critical mass for sustainability, he pointed out. There are many well-intentioned efforts, some led by the government, some by NGOs or the private sector, but they're not coordinated. "I'm constantly surprised" when you look at the projects of major IT companies, running project that have very similar goals, in the same communities, "but we don't come together, so there is a tremendous missed opportunity."
When developing an ICT project, he said, very often you get consumed by a particular goal, like wiring every village, or putting a kiosk in all of them. But unless you put in all the building blocks, "things fall apart." He then identified some of these building blocks, including local connectivity and affordability. "It's the affordability of everything: hardware, software, the cost of connectivity," he said. "I don't think any one company can solve the issue," he added; Consortiums organized by government are a positive step in the right direction.
Language and illiteracy is also a major challenge, particularly when content isn't available in the local language. "It's incredibly important for us to make sure that the user interface is in the local languages." Microsoft is working to put its software into 14 Indian languages by the end of the year, he said, "but it's not enough.... because of the 40% of people who are illiterate."
A lack of content also stifles well-meaning initiatives. "There is a tremendous diversity in the kind of information needs that people have; it even varies from district to district." So just because you offer access doesn't mean you're given access to the local crop information that would be vital for a village's farmers.
He then noted the need for education and training. "It's training, training, training - it's the single biggest differentiator between success and failure." When looking at the success of kiosks, the most important factor is having kiosk managers who are well trained and able to train others. "We are very conscious of the fact that we are just beginning to scratch the surface."
"All of these building blocks must be in place if we are to have sustainability," he concluded.
Venkatesan then described a visit President Clinton paid to a village in Rajasthan that was using VSAT technology for Internet access. Many months later, journalists returned to see how they were maintaining the program. "It was quite sad," he said; the VSAT terminal wasn't working, no one else was trained. The project had collapsed.
To move forward, he said teachers and students must be at the center stage of ICT initiatives. "Putting them center stage and using ICT to solve real problems rather than perceived problems is an important step." Venkatesan also noted the importance of state government being involved, particularly since the majority of schools in India are state-run. You also must get the community involved. He described an experience working for a diesel company in the US during the 1980s. They worked there for three years, but as soon as they pulled out, the project collapsed. "We hadn't involved the workforce, they hadn't taken ownership," he said. "It's exactly the same as that village in Rajasthan; we really, really need to have local ownership of initiatives."
"I'm personally, passionately convinced that the reason people remain poor is because they lack information access," he said. So Microsoft India hopes to achieve the goal that all Indians have access to information though ICTs by 2010.
Quoting Margaret Mead, he closed his presentation: "Never doubt the ability of a small group of committed people to change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has."
Posted by acarvin at 12:59 AM
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Universal Literacy, Universal ICTs
Shri Suresh Dada Jain, Mararashtra's Higher Education Minister, spoke during the morning session of the Baramati conference. He talked about the need for spreading literacy "to the total masses of society."
However, literacy is only part of the process of achieving greater development. "Literacy [alone] will not solve the problem," he said. "The problem of poverty can only be transformed through technology use in day-to-day life."
"We are thinking that we will have entire network of education through universities, colleges, right to the primary education level, right to the village level. To have computer education in every primary school, starting in the first standard going all the way up to the seventh standard. [They are] the future citizens of this country, so this is the right place to tackle [the issue]."
"The government of Maharashtra would be happy to use more technology for education... which will ultimately enlighten farmers, help generate income with agriculture, knowledge about agriculture.... We believe all of this through the technology will certainly add value to their lives, and to poverty alleviation in this country."
Posted by acarvin at 12:46 AM
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February 16, 2005
School Kids Won't Be Subjected to RFID Tracking After All
Good news: Engadget reports that school kids in Sutter, CA won't have to wear RFID tags at school after all. As I reported not too long ago, the school's principal came up with the horrible idea of requiring all students to wear RFID tags, which are essentially digital homing beacons, that would allow school officials to track their movements on campus: in the hallway, the bathroom, you name it.
"I'm disappointed; that's about all I can say at this point," Principal Earnie Graham said in another article. "I think I let my staff down." The funny thing is that it seems that Graham believes he let his staff down because he dropped the anti-privacy measure, rather than letting them down by coming up with the civil liberties violation in the first place. So once again, I renew my suggestion that Principal Graham wear an RFID tag for a week and allow the public to track his movements over the Internet. Doesn't sound like fun, does it? -ac
Posted by acarvin at 2:46 PM
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February 10, 2005
School Requires Students to Wear RFID Tags; Orwell Rolls Over in Grave
Now here's a type of education technology that I pray will not catch on: a school in California is now requiring all of its students to wear RFID tags. These electronic radio tags can be used to track students' movements, whether they're in the hallways, in a classroom or in a bathroom. Outraged parents, who were not consulted prior to the decision, have already contacted the ACLU, which has begun filing complaints with the school.
Meanwhile, school principal Ernie Graham brushes off the parents' complaints, chalking it up to technophobia rather than the obvious privacy violation that it is. "Sometimes when you are on the cutting edge, you get caught," Graham said of the angry phone calls from parents.
Note to Principal Graham: sit in on one of your school's English classes and read Orwell. That is, assuming you haven't banned it or anything like that. Even better - volunteer to wear an RFID tag yourself and get one of your students to set up its software to automatically blog your whereabouts so the rest of us can keep tabs on you. You can't be too careful with these principals nowadays, right? -ac
Posted by acarvin at 12:50 PM
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October 4, 2004
2004 TOP Grants Announced, E-Rate Gets Bushwhacked
The U.S. Department of Commerce's NTIA has just announced the 27 winners of the 2004 TOP grants. TOP, the Technology Opportunities Program, is one of the last remaining federal government initiatives supporting community-based efforts to bridge the digital divide and use information and communications technologies for local development.
It's good news to see the list of the new winners, particularly on a day when the New York Times reported that the FCC has suspended the E-Rate program that funds schools and libraries so they may connect to the Internet. The program has suffered from a few cases of fraud that've consequently received some really bad press. So the FCC's performing surgery with a bureaucratic chainsaw, putting a moratorium on subsidies to all schools and libraries. Zero tolerance indeed.
One step forward, two steps back.... -ac
Posted by acarvin at 10:01 AM
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September 29, 2004
Live in Cambridge: Tim Berners-Lee on the Web in Education
Right now I'm blogging from the MIT Technology Review Emerging Tech
Conference in Cambridge, and we've just heard from Tim Berners-Lee,
inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim gave a rapid-fire 30-minute talk
about the semantic web, and then had a one-on-one conversation with Bob
Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and co-founder of 3Com. I'll post an
extended blog entry about Tim's presentation, but for now I wanted to
share a quote he gave on the role of the Web in education:
What I'd like to see happen: I'd like to see lots of curricula like the MIT open courseware initiative being picked up by K-12.... The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia, you really need to keep education materials sown together. So I'd love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things [like Wikipedia and the Open Courseware Project] up to date, and I'd like to see teachers help contribute to it....
Students can work together when they can interact with simulations, with
teachers, but particularly with each other. And for that we need lots of
tools, lots of standards, lots of technology… There's lots of work to do
out there.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 9:32 AM
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July 8, 2004
The ABCs of E-Education
This afternoon, I moderated a panel session on education technology, chaired by Evans Namanja, Director General of the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority. Matthew Chetty opened the session with a presentation on the NEPAD E-Schools Initiative. NEPAD developed a vision that the digital divide, in an African context, must be addressed from the perspectives of ICT skills, education and public health. "The digital divide is an issue that must be addressed as a matter of urgency…. as is the challenge of bringing ICT skills to your entire country," Chetty said. "Education is a necessary condition for sustainable development." The NEPAD E-Schools Initiative intends to provide Internet access and ICT skills to students, teachers, administrators and community members so they can "make every learner an active member of the knowledge society."
Over the next 10 years, they seek to convert all 600,000 schools in Africa into NEPAD e-schools. This means providing them with ICT tools and Internet access, technology professional development for teachers, technology-driven curricula that's locally relevant and appropriate, and establish a telecenter within the school focused on community health. The project will be deployed in three phases, with 15 to 20 countries participating in each phase.
"NEPAD provides a continental platform to solve shared problems together, thereby benefiting participating countries both individually and collectively," he said. And by developing the initiative as a continental network, it will provide policymakers and educators with a network for sharing best practices and avoid making mistakes. Chetty said there is also a lot of goodwill for the project, as it has been endorsed by leaders in each African country and embraced as a flagship project for the African Union.
From the UK, we then heard from David Beard of British Telecom and Neil Shaw of the British Council. Beard described BT's Academy Learning Center , a Web-based training for BT employees. The system can handle 90,000 learners in one week, as had been the case recently when all BT staff were required to take an online course in new changes enacted to Britain's telecom laws. Neil Shaw came to talk about a new initiative the British Council is developing with the British Department of Education and Skills called the Global Gateway. The site is striving to be an international education portal for students, parents, teachers and administrators. The site is designed to allow for collaborative projects and international partnership building.
Samer Halawi of Inmarsat and a team of colleagues then discussed an Inmarsat/ITU initiative to bridge the rural/urban digital divide. He presented a video of their project, launched initially in southern Lebanon. Their partner villages in Lebanon lacked the telecommunications infrastructure to connect schools to the Internet, so they gave the local high schools RBGAN satellite terminals, no larger than a laptop, which provides Internet access with download speeds up to 144 kbps. They hope to triple the download times by next year. Satellite access allowed students to become engaged in online science experiments and improve their English speaking skills, increasing their ICT skills across the board. Because it was also their communities' first exposure to the Internet, the program helped engage parents and increase their involvement in their children's education. The RBGAN satellite terminal, currently sells for USD $1500, though soon the price will come down to $700. Internet access costs $36 per month for 10 megabytes per month.
The video then showed a series of brief interviews with Lebanese students; the boys and girls discussed how the Internet had changed the way they viewed education and interacted with their teachers. "We are here in a region far away from any city, any library," said one teacher. " Now a whole world is in our reach because of the Internet." He also added that teachers are no longer forced to travel all the way to Beirut to track down particular educational materials that weren't physically available in the village. After the video, two of Halawi's colleagues talked about the satellite service. When one of them picked up the satellite terminal and started using it as a prop, one of the conference techies thought she was trying to connect it as if it were a laptop, so he unplugged her actual laptop and promptly shut down her Powerpoint presentation.
Following the presentations, I was given the opportunity to summarize the presentations and offer a personal perspective. I noted how the various panelists had discussed education technology from three different perspectives: access, basic training and curricular content - the ABCs of education technology. The challenge, I noted, is crafting initiatives that address all three of these perspectives; otherwise countries might find themselves in a situation like the US did, when we spent large sums of money on wiring schools and libraries to the Internet, but treated teacher training as an afterthought, leaving us with a lot of wired classrooms and a lot of unprepared teachers.
I also noted that projects like the BT online training program assume that learns have a certain level of ICT skills. While BT would certainly expect all of its employees to be ICT literate, least-develop countries are faced with major deficits in basic literacy, let alone ICT literacy. This means that literacy, in all its shapes and sizes, must be addressed in any national edtech or digital divide initiative. Lastly, I said that partnerships are key - governments, the private sector and civil society would never be able to bridge the digital divide on their own or make their efforts sustainable.
During the Q&A period, I also noted there are educational initiatives like IEARN and Global Schoolhouse that should be seen as important curricular assets for teachers, and that educators the developing world should be encouraged to tap into these resources.... -andy
Posted by acarvin at 10:52 AM
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April 15, 2004
Richard Florida: Fostering Creative Communities
Creativity expert Richard Florida opened the UCEA conference with a speech about the role of creative communities.The information economy is not organized around big industry anymore, but around communities with a critical mass of creativity, he explained.
"My father worked for the same company in Pittsburgh from age 11 to age 65," Florida said. "Today the average worker changes jobs every three years - and if you're 30 or younger, you change jobs after less than one year." Because of this constant career churn, people want to be where there is economic opportunity built around innovation and skills - creative communities. Today's information economy workers want to move to a place with "a thick labor force" - a place with energy and creative vibrancy.
Much of what he said reminded me of a speech I gave at NYU in 2000, in which I described the virtuous cycle of skilled communities. Towns that possess a critical mass of skilled, entrepreneurial people will help build new businesses and attract others from elsewhere. This, in turn, attracts more skilled workers, creating more economic opportunity. Unfortunately, the opposite was true as well - communities experiencing "brain drain" will find knowledge-economy businesses move elsewhere, leading to even fewer skilled local workers.
Florida recounted speaking at the National Governors Association. He said his presentation was made easier because it was preceded by a keynote from HP CEO Carly Fiorina. In essence, she told them, "Forget your tax breaks and other incentives to get the IT industry moving to your state;: we want to move into communities with a highly skilled, creative workforce, end of story."
A truly creative community embraces tolerance and diversity with the same vigor as it embraces innovation - a situation which explains why communities that have welcomed the gay community have also built strong cultural centers and economic innovation.
Silicon Valley, he said in his closing, is a direct result of San Francisco's creative openness. The PC was invented by "guys who looked like Jerry Garcia."
Creativity is a universal resource, "from the street musician to the capuccino drinking yuppy." Universities, he said, can help harness this creativeness, as well as encourage tolerance and openness, to help build the creative communities of tomorrow.
Posted by acarvin at 11:27 AM
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September 1, 1999
AOLification: A Metamorphosis from Community to Consumption?
Early this summer I received an email correspondence from an educator who had just spent several minutes exploring my website, EdWeb: Exploring Technology and School Reform (http://edwebproject.org). She said she had enjoyed perusing the website but was troubled that she hadn't found any lesson plans suitable for her classroom. (I'll refrain from naming the subject she taught in order to protect the innocent.) I explained to her that EdWeb was designed as an examination of the relationship between education reform and new technologies, and not a lesson plan website per se. A few minutes later I received a flustered reply. "But I'm looking for lesson plans," she said. "Can't I just get a little service? "
Can't I just get a little service? The seven words made me feel as if I had been transported back to high school, working my summer job at a small gift shop on the beach in Florida. Being the only employee who was ever in the store at any given moment the job usually gave me a sense of independence, but the flip side would be a feeling of helplessness as large buses of tourists would pillage the shop, with a dozen sunburned denizens of the Far Northern Territories all demanding simultaneous help finding the right t-shirt for their son/daughter/grandchild/dog.
Can't I just get a little service! - the universal cry of the frustrated customer.
I don't blame that teacher for the small riposte of angst thrust my way that day. It was late May, finals were approaching. Perhaps mine was the 10th website she had visited during her planning period, the 10th website to disappoint her, and her complaint was a cry against the whole lot of us. But her words also got me thinking back to another time: a summer day in 1995 when AOL announced it would create a connection to the Internet that would allow the customers their private network to visit the World Wide Web. Until that point in Internet history, web users were a rare breed who accessed websites at work, in their university, or through Internet service provider at home. The Internet was still a Western frontier outpost as far as most people were concerned, and until it became easier for people to access it would remain a land of pioneers, trailblazers and squatters.
Among those pioneers were intrepid educators and students from all walks of life who saw the Internet as something different - a place of community where people could exchange ideas and foster innovation. Because the web was universally under construction by these pioneers, people expected the typical bumps and dead ends of a work in progress. But that didn't deter anyone because there was a sense in the air (in the ether, perhaps) that something good would come out of online collaboration, that there was something to be gained by contributing to this effort. It mattered little whether you were a tenured professor, a high school student or an out-of-work welder killing time learning about his daughter's education. If you found a community of interest and were willing to chip in, you would reap the rewards produced by that community. Membership indeed had its privledges, yet membership was open to anyone with access to the Net.
On that fateful day in 1995, AOL, the king of user-friendly, packaged online services, swung open its doors to the World Wide Web. Those of us who were online at the time began to posit what this would mean for the future of the Internet. Would mass access to the Net lead to a goldrush of website publishing, a renaissance of creativity? Or would mass access somehow lower the level of discourse, making the technology a hypertextual equivalent of commercial vast-wasteland TV? None of us knew the answer, though the conventional wisdom seemed to be a smorgasboard-like all-of-the-above: a little bit of this, a little bit of that. If the Internet proved to be as big as some expected, there was plenty of room for all sorts of things to happen. So whatever the impact of this business decision in northern Virginia, the AOLification of the Internet had begun in earnest.
Roughly 45 months and 14 million AOL customers later, the Internet is indeed a different place. As many of us had hoped, Mainstream USA is going online at a fever pitch. With each passing month millions more people begin a new life online, including ever-increasing numbers of minorities, low-income families, and residents of rural and urban communities. The Net becomes more of a reflection of our human landscape with each new click. Dreams of a technology for the masses appear to be materializing.
Yet with the vast popularization and commercialization of the Internet, there's been perhaps a more subtle change of note. Instead of remaining a tight community of contributors, the Net has evolved into a metaverse of consumers. In the most common sense of the word, Internet consumers are people who read, interact, shop, browse through advertising, learn, and entertain themselves online. The Internet has become a market so large that a recent study by Cisco System's InternetIndicators.com concluded that the Net is currently generating $300 billion dollars in U.S. revenue. That's a heck of a lot of consumers, to put it mildly.
On another level, we've become consumers in the most basic sense of the word: an online culture that demands, seeks out and consumes resources. Now that we live in a world where we expect all our friends to have an email address and consider any company without a URL emblazoned on their logo as doomed, we see the Net as a high-gloss market that is designed to meet our needs, whatever they might be. The first-time Internet user expects this new market to be polished, perfected, pre-sorted, pre-fabricated. Hype breeds high expectations, and the hype surrounding today's Internet is high enough to induce nosebleeds. And expectations that are not met can only lead to frustration. Can't I just get a little service!
Assuming the E-Rate doesn't get sucked down an unforeseen political wormhole, we can look forward to having nearly three million educators and 46 million students online in the next couple of years. We've pitched the Net as a place where kids in Missoula can access documents at the Library of Congress and teachers can download the lesson plans of their dreams. In countless cases, these wonderful things do come true, but in an equal number of instances teachers are met with 404 Errors or search engine collections of 1001 Useless Hits. Let's not kid ourselves - if I were going online for the first time I'd probably become frustrated too. Considering Internet is literally too large and nebulous to be measured, the sense of isolation felt by a new user cannot be dismissed.
Everyone who's ever been online was an Internet newbie at one point, but the Welcome Wagon that greets these newbies has changed significantly over the years. Once I might have been one of a hundred or so educators from around the world creating a new listserv in order to discuss a particular teaching passion. Now I am but one in a million - one in 16 million in AOL's case - and it's all too easy to feel like I'm the only one out there, despite all of our similar needs and concerns. As more schools go online, we've got to work harder to make teachers feel like the Internet is a community of people, not a market of anarchy and wild goose chases. Each teacher who's forced to learn the ropes in isolation is another lost opportunity to create a producer of online resources and not just a consumer of them. Can't we just give them a little service?
Tags: AOL | customer service | education | k12
Posted by acarvin at 12:16 PM
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May 1, 1999
Talkin' About a Revolution: Education and the Moral of the Amazon.com Story
There's a revolution going on today in America's schools, a revolution that we are simultaneously aware of yet consistently ignore. And despite what you're probably thinking, I'm not going to tell you about the Internet. We all know that the Internet is rapidly impacting the classroom environment - as early as 2000, the National Center for Education Statistics predicts that over 95% of all U.S. schools will have some form of Internet connection. But the real revolution is more than just the Internet, more than computers per se. The real revolution overtaking our schools (and the rest of society, for that matter) is a Digital Revolution: a fundamental switch from transactions in a corporeal world to interactions in a virtual world.
I'm certainly not the first person to realize this (let's face it, I've probably got 10,000 other pundits in line ahead of me). Nicholas Negroponte of MIT's Media Lab has made much out of this Digital Revolution, our society's radical adjustment from atoms to bits. We can see the switch perhaps most readily in the Business section our of local paper. Amazon.com has become the darling of the stock market: in December of 1998 financial analysts predicted its stock could easily reach $400 per share, despite the fact that the online bookseller has yet to make a profit. Why has Amazon struck such a resonant chord among investors, consumers and (perhaps most ominously) its bookstore chain competitors? Because it's bought into the Digital Revolution with incredible success. In the bookselling days of old, people visited bookstores not necessarily because they wanted to visit, but because they wanted to read a book. The bookstore was simply a middleman to provide the reader with content. Enter Amazon: sit in front of your computer, visit a website, find a book, buy that book. The startup company made the boldest of claims to its competitors: you no longer needed physical booksellers to meet the end goal of selling books. No more middleman, no more bookstore.
When Amazon first appeared, I was more than a little skeptical: browsing a bookstore is half the pleasure of buying a book, right? As the months passed, I inevitably found myself wanting to purchase new books (As much as I adore libraries, I have the neurotic tendency of purchasing every book I read; a new work conquered and mounted on the mantle, Ex Libris Andy Carvin.). Sometimes I had no clue what I wanted to read next, so I would engage in the obligatory bibliophile field expedition to the local Borders. But every so often there would be times when I knew exactly what book I wanted. My life is busy enough as it is, I'd tell myself; Do I have time this week to pick up that book? Yet before my mind could answer the question my fingers began to type out those six letters into my web browser: A-M-A-Z-O-N, Dot Com. After a quick web search and online purchase my book was on its way to me, the shipping charges essentially deferred by tax free shopping and a nice discount.
Now that I'm halfway through this column, I should probably pause and give you the opportunity to ask yourself, "Where is this guy going with this bookstore stuff? Amazon.com has nothing to do with schools, right?" Let's look at it this way. If you ever wanted to buy a book, whether it was 1995 or 1895, you had to observe a physical ritual: go to bookseller, find book, buy book, go home, read book. But as we've seen here, Amazon.com has rewritten the rules: sit at your computer, visit website, find book, buy book, receive book, read book. Book purchasing no longer involves visiting a physical space. Browsing, reviewing, shopping and reading can all be done in the comfort of your own home. The same digital transaction process can be applied to other industries: purchasing a car, buying or selling a home, planning a vacation, getting an education.
Getting an education. It may be ackward to admit it, but in a systems processing sense, a school is nothing more than a middleman in an educational transaction. Whether it was 1995 or 1895, you had to follow the same ritual: send a child to school, teach that child, send her home; repeat 180 times before advancing to next level; repeat entire process 13 times until a diploma can be brought home with child. That's the way it worked, largely because that's the only way it could have worked. Few parents could afford the luxury of time to homeschool their children, so they sent their kids to where the teachers were: the schoolhouse. Another physical place, another transaction.
It would be somewhat spurious to carry the analogy literally and suggest that the kids of the Digital Revolution will receive their entire schooling in front of a PC at home. Schools provide important socialization and mentorship opportunities for our children. But the Amazon example should at least tell us that education no longer has to occur in the same four-walled spaces. As Kathy Rutkowski noted so eloquently in her Multimedia Schools essay this January, digital communications invite immeasurable opportunities for distributed virtual learning, connecting students with educators (and other students) at vast distances. It also allows for a reversal of the transaction process: digital technology empowers students to become teachers and creators as much as they are learners and observers. Transaction becomes Interaction.
And what of our libraries? They too must prepare for a fundamental shift in use.
Like it or not, education is going digital: a veritable world of 1's and 0's.
Posted by acarvin at 12:19 PM
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September 25, 1997
Shooting Craps in Cyberspace
UNLESS YOU'VE SPENT the last two years cryogenically frozen or stowed away on a Vogon garbage scow in the depths of space, there's no point in harping on what's become obvious to millions of folks: The Internet has arrived, resistance is futile.
Sure, the Net's been around for over 25 years, but thanks to the development of the World Wide Web, as well as the ever-falling cost of connectivity, millions of eager Internet newbies have now jumped head first into the World of the Wired, the Land of the LAN. Email addresses are becoming as ubiquitous as phone numbers. Companies are shelling out big bucks for online advertising, gambling on the sheer number of websurfers who might happen to pass by. And personal homepages have become the new status symbol of the tragically hip - acquiring one gives us the instant excuse to complain about those who haven't done the same.
I'm online, you're online, we're all online. So what do we do now?
Like it or not, but as a communications medium, the web is still in its formative years - lots of flash, fun and occasional utility, yet quite immature in terms of person-to-person interactivity. Because we've been able to whet our appetite with the web's high-bandwidth multimedia potential, many of us have begun to lose sight of the fact that compared to other means of online communication - namely, email, discussion lists, and usenet groups - the web is really a one-way street. While progress is being made in the area of web-based chatrooms and other meeting spaces, the Internet's greatest strength still lies in low-bandwidth, text-based interpersonal communication. How long that'll last, though, remains to be seen.
Additionally, many new web users are often shocked to find out that the World Wide Web is not an online encyclopaedia, where information on absolutely anything is available in an instant. The Web is simply a reflection of what we as an online community have chosen to put online, and not necessarily what we need to put online.
Considering that the general public has been online for a relatively short time, it's still amazing how much information there is out there. In terms of education, there's a wealth of resources online lying in wait for a great research project, assuming you can separate the occasional nuggets of informational gold from the ever-growing glut of cyberdebris. And now that web serving is becoming a viable option for many schools, students can publishing their own work online. Instead of existing solely as a place for kids to browse and observe, the Internet becomes an incredible tool for the construction of creative personal projects, both for school and for recreation.
If they build it, they will learn - a new pedagogical mantra for the cyber-informed? Perhaps. We've reached a point in the maturation of the Internet where everyone seems to agree that being online can be a good thing, but we're not really sure what to do after that. The web will continue to grow in terms of size and complexity: with the help of new applications such as Java and Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), web developers are starting to create exciting multimedia resources of all colors and creeds. And this is only the beginning.
Like it or not, the web is expanding faster than we can process its potential impact on us as teachers, as learners, as citizens. For all we know, it could devolve into a purely commercial medium - a digital, hypertextual cousin of modern television. Or it could become a Jeffersonian commons where ideas, issues and people come together in the hopes of bettering themselves. Perhaps neither, perhaps both. But the only way we'll ever get to where we want to go is by coming out now, staking our claim, and taking some chances to see what works and what doesn't.
The greater question can't be where the Internet will take us, technologically speaking. Instead, we need to decide where we as a collective of communities want to take it.
Originally published in THE Journal, 1997 special issue on the Internet and education technology.
Posted by acarvin at 12:09 PM
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June 15, 1996
Searching for Bobby Fisher (Or Anything Else, For That Matter)
When I first started using the World Wide Web in the spring of 1993, the whole notion of 'Searching the Web' had yet to make much sense. Back then, the total number of Websites was limited to several score at best, and since a significant number of them offered hypertext links to each other, it was easy to get caught in an online loop, wandering around in circles without ever bumping into anything new.
In the scant three years since then, the web community has exploded, having expanded exponentially to no less than 12 million known individual web pages. Whatever your interest, fancy, or obsession might be, chances are you'd be able to find something related to it on the Web.
Of course, the major dilemma that all WWW users must face is how to track down the right information in the first place. Currently, the most popular way to seek out online content is through what is known as a search engine. A search engine essentially is a computer program that a Web user accesses remotely by way of a special web site. For example, one of the largest search engines, Lycos (http://www.lycos.com), offers a small field on your screen in which you can type a word or a phrase. You then tell the computer to 'search' for that word or phrase, and the search engine responds accordingly by giving you a collection of links to pages that happen to contain the information requested.
In theory, it's a great service. Tens of thousands of Internauts access Lycos each day to track down everything from Unix tutorials to amateur erotica. Unfortunately, search engines are plagued by an inherent flaw: they're not very smart. For instance, let's say I'm a junior high student writing a research paper on dolphins and I decide to access a search engine like Lycos to help find online resources. After inputing the word dolphin, Lycos responds by presenting me with 7,351 references to marine biology pages, homepages of kids who like dolphins, football fanatics from Miami, recipes for Mahi Mahi, and Flipper fan clubs.
To Lycos, they're all the same thing: information related to the word 'dolphin,' with no delineation of context whatsoever. And I can't get always recognize what each page is about unless I search through descriptions of each page, site by site. As a junior high student with limited time and slow Internet access to boot, 7,351 references is a bit more than I'd be willing to deal with.
On the other hand, I could also search for 'dolphin' at a site like Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com). Though it's often referred to as a search engine, Yahoo is really an enormous hierarchical catalog of thousands of content-infused websites. It doesn't have the same gargantuan breadth as a site like Lycos, but Yahoo arranges its data in special subject areas so you always know what kind of Web page you're going to. So, as I look for dolphin at Yahoo, I get an annotated list of 53 websites, as well as two general indices, one for the marine mammal, the other for the football team. These annotations allow me to go directly to the known dolphin sites that are apropos to my work.
But again, the number of sites I find through Yahoo can be limited. Since Yahoo is a relatively smaller catalogue of web resources, for all I know there might be some great new dolphin sites that have yet to be archived - which means, unfortunately, I could only stumble on to them with the assistance of a general search engine like Lycos.
It's a Catch-22, to say the least. Currently, there are at no less than half a dozen large search engines available, including Yahoo and Lycos, as well as AltaVista (http://altavista.digital.com), Excite (http://www.excite.com) Inktomi (http://inktomi.berkeley.edu), Open Text (http://www.opentext.com) and several others. But as of yet, none of these sites successfully combines the sheer size of Lycos with the user-savvy organization of Yahoo. Perhaps more importantly, none of them is very adept at informing the user if any of the websites referred to are out-of-date, obsolete, or patently false. Just because it exists doesn't mean it's a worthy resource.
With hundreds of new websites coming online each day, it's becoming ever more imperative that users have access to smart search technology that accounts for individual needs, as well as accurate accountings of what content is available online. Inspiration for an intelligent search engine might come from an unusual source.
For instance, one might look at a free online service called Firefly (http://www.agents-inc.com/), formerly known as both HOMR and Ringo. With Firefly, users can learn more about certain bands or musicians by telling the computer about their personal taste in music. Firefly contains descriptions of hundreds of musical groups and CDs, from Martinu to Muddy Waters to Metallica. Users rate music on a scale of one to seven, thus giving Firefly a 'sense' of your musical taste. With this information, Firefly will recommend other music to you, which you can sample and even purchase online. And you can rate the music it recommends to you, which in turn increases Firefly's knowledge of your personal interests. In other words, the more you use it, the smarter it gets.
As for the next step in search engines, it would be most intriguing to see someone apply Firefly's intelligent agents to a searchable, annotated web directory. Not only would it let you search for information efficiently, it would also allow you to build a profile of your personal web tastes. This would prove especially useful for online research: as more content related to a given topic goes online, a smart directory would be able to 'refer' that information to the user, knowing that user's interest. Instead of having to waste time weeding out occasional good content from a surplus of online junk, an intelligent directory would help bring the content to you.
A common cry on the Internet has always been "Content is King." In a sense, that will always be true, because without good content, there's not much of a reason to go online in the first place. But as more and more self-proclaimed monarchs litter the Net with terabytes of content, it would seem that informational anarchy will continue to reign. That is, until someone sits down to build a better (and intelligent) search engine that makes content gathering efficient, enjoyable, and even profitable. Cybrarians of the Net, unite!, for there's still a lot of work to do.
Posted by acarvin at 12:36 PM
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May 5, 1996
Net Gain, Net Loss: A Questionable Future for Student Web Publishing?
Not too long ago on On The Horizon's Internet discussion group, Gary Chapman of the University of Texas/Austin was kind enough to offer a reprint of a recent editorial he composed for the Los Angeles Times. In it, he mourns the rise and fall of the World Wide Web as an open, public, and democratic medium.
Essentially, Chapman argues that the recent commercialization of the Internet has led to an online "tragedy of the commons," a metaphor originally coined by ecologist Garrett Hardin 30 years ago. This "tragedy" occurs when too many people find themselves in the same public space, each one of them pursuing his or her own personal gains. And as they succeed in conquering individual pieces of the communal pie, the commons is left balkanized and stratified, with little room left for use by the masses.
I was deeply struck by Chapman's thoughts, for his piece is one of the few essays I've seen in the mainstream press that actually paints a troublesome (yet realistic, in my eyes) view of the Internet. Usually, mass media rhetoric of the so-called Information Highway seems to bounce from one binary extreme to the other. We often see the 'Net portrayed as a divinely-inspired modern miracle that can be accessed by any American with a 14.4 modem. And sometimes, we also see it painted as an over-hyped playtoy of the elite that holds little hope of ever altering the status quo.
Ah, the Internet - saviour or snake oil to society? Probably both, probably neither, depending on who you ask and what mood they're in at the time. The Internet has become so gargantuan and ever-changing that pundits can argue either side til they're blue in the face, yet still come out without a solid answer. But as Chapman points out so eloquently in his essay, no matter what we all think of the Internet's place in the American myth, one thing is for sure:
It certainly ain't what it used to be.
For the last 18 months or so I've tried to do my best to put a positive spin on the exponential growth and mass demystification of the Internet. Sure, it's not as intimate and tightly knit as it was just a few years ago, but the more the merrier, right? For the most part, I think I believe that. Though the 'Net now has more than its fair share of billboards and cyberdreck, it's become more accessible to the average family. And because of the current fare wars among internet service providers, nearly any school, parent, or student with a computer can now afford to get wired and surf the Web. The axioms of Economy 101 come out on top, and old-fashioned competition brings the Internet to the commonfolk after all.
So what happens to that tragedy of the commons that Chapman warns of? Do we mourn the loss of an idyllic, Jeffersonian electronic village now that ad agencies have started to stake claim to cyberspace? Chapman is certainly justified in his attempt to keep us mindful of these metaphors, for it is all too easy for Internet users to become lost in the multimediated hype of the Web. Fortunately, thanks to the hard work of conscientious policymakers, public advocates, and local grass-root efforts, affordable Internet access to schools and disadvantaged communities is no longer a naive pipe dream. Over the next few years, the information highway will have enough off-ramps for nearly anyone who wants access to it.
Yet despite this new-found commitment to high quality telecommunications access, I must admit to another fear (one that I have yet to decide if it's justified or not): the inability for low-end users to produce online content without a high-end budget.
When the World Wide Web first began to appear in schools and homes in 1994, writers including myself lauded its publishing potential for students. In order to produce a website, all you needed to know was Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), the collection of standardized codes that allows anyone from software engineers to middle school students to develop online content. With HTML, you can create hypertext links and add pictures to your site with even the most basic computer skills. It was, in the eyes of many an amateur web developer, a level playing field: HTML was simple enough for young people to create high-quality, functional products, just as well as many adults could.
And for all of 1994 and a good part of 1995, Web publishing remained as this seemingly democratic medium, where anyone with access to a Web server had the opportunity to dazzle the online populace with their HTML skills. But as the months passed and more people got wired up to the Internet, the quality and number of professional websites increased geometrically. Competition begat better webwork, as well as new HTML standards. Clickable images were an early innovation, as were the use of tables and other tricks introduced by Netscape.
As the commercial side of the Internet continued to expand, the Web became more functional, more stylish, and more multimedia-like, just as the hype in the press suggested it would be. This desire to build a better website spawned powerful design innovations such as Java (miniature software applications that can produce anything from animations to individualized data processing), Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML, a form of hypertextual 3-D rendering), and Shockwave (interactive multimedia), all of which can turn a website into a complex and mesmerizing experience for the user.
Thanks to these multimedia innovations, the World Wide Web is fast becoming the interactive environment that so many folks in the online community have hoped for. Yet with every step forward in Web-based content design, there has been little to no effort to keep educational publishers up to speed. It's true that more schools than ever can now produce their own websites, but for the majority of these schools, web publishing has meant little more than a few picture scans, a message from the principal, and perhaps a nice home page from the resident Internet whiz kid lucky enough to have a 28.8 modem at home. The ability for many schools to publish on the Web is there, as is the desire. The quality of these websites, though, is another issue entirely....
Can school websites honestly compete with the quality of sites developed by commercial content providers? Of course not, and nor should they have to. But I still fear that we may begin to see a disturbing trend where the quality of online student publishing will fall further and further behind the rest of the 'Net as other web developing communities can afford to implement these exciting new innovations.
In any other media, such as television, radio, or print publishing, no one would ever expect a student-developed product to be able to stand up against something produced by professional media designers. But for a brief, yet wonderful time on the Internet, the distance between student-produced content and 'professional' content was much closer than we could have ever expected. The trend is shifting back to reality, it would seem, but only because we've let it go this way.
With each passing month, web developing tools, publishing kits, and designware in general become more affordable to the educational community. Teachers and administrators must do more to follow these advances, and even be willing to put parts of their technology budgets to obtaining them. Spending all of your districts funds on wiring the schools is the wrong approach, for without the ability to publish your own online content and to teach students how to do it, you end up missing more than half of the point. The Internet has become what it is because users can add to it just as easily as they can take from it. It's a two way street, folks.
Building the perfect website isn't as easy or cheap as it used to be. But now that our schools are beginning to demonstrate a commitment to high-quality Internet access, we need to see beyond having kids surfing the 'Net and doing little else. For surfing is merely riding the wave, a passive joyride where other forces take you for a spin. Students have the talent to _make waves_ just as well as anyone else, so why not try to find the means to give them that opportunity?
The online commons has certainly gotten crowded as of late, but that doesn't mean that there isn't enough room for lots of creative kids to carve out a corner and get noticed. If they only had the tools and support to get out there and shine.
Posted by acarvin at 12:34 PM
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January 10, 1996
You Say You Want A Revolution: An Educational Internet in a Commercial World
ON AN UNUSUALLY FRIGID morning this past December, nearly 2,000 of the world's leading World Wide Web entrepreneurs, content designers and programmers converged on Boston's Marriott Copley Place to consider the implications of "The Web Revolution." The event was the opening of the biennial International World Wide Web Conference, the fourth in a series which began in Geneva in May of 1994.
In the scant 18 months since that first conference, where several hundred academics gathered to discuss the web's architectural development and its potential as a research and publishing tool, the meeting had evolved into a who's who of commercial software giants, online service providers and programming whizzes, all of whom seemed to be focused on the Big Question of the Moment: How can we use the Web as a revolutionary, yet economically viable commercial tool?
It's a question that until recently was scoffed at by even the most maverick venture capitalists, for the Web was still a new and unpredictable world with questionable transaction security and a limited, though well-to-do, populace. But with the advent of graphical Web access through mainstream online services such as America Online and Prodigy, as well as the ever-plummeting price of direct 'Net access through other Internet service providers, entrepreneurs ranging from Bill Gates to college student online magazine publishers are lining up to take the leap into Web content development for the masses.
Scattered amongst this sizeable group of business folks and technology gurus, though, were a handful of educators interested in asking a different question: How can we use the Web as a tool that revolutionizes lifelong learning? For some time now, teachers have represented some of the most ardent proponents of Web publishing and online access, even though its use in academic settings has been somewhat limited, especially at the primary and secondary levels.
But at the Boston Conference, it was more apparent than ever that the cry for expanded Web use in education continues to fall on skeptical ears. For example, while attending the conference I hosted the one panel session which focused on the role of the Web in education. Though the discussion was well attended, with more than 100 conferees gathering to meet with our six panelists, there was an underlying tone of futility that seemed to permeate even the most optimistic of predictions.
Panelists, as well as audience members, told of numerous success stories where university professors have integrated web sites into their curricula, or where high school kids use the web for developing online projects with other students around the world. Yet, as 3Com founder and ethernet inventor Bob Metcalfe said at the conclusion of the conference, it seemed, sadly enough, that the discussion's participants were merely rearranging chairs on the deck of the Titanic. His point is well taken - as many conferees asked before, during, and after the education panel, is it worth the energy for us to push technology into the classrooms in environments where research conducted online still isn't considered 'scholarly' research, or where limited budgets force administrators to choose between PCs, textbooks and teachers' salaries, or even where kids bring guns to schools and anarchy is the common denominator from classroom to classroom?
For many of us, the short answer is yes. It is all too easy for leaders in education to develop a binary attitude towards technology, where access to computers and the Internet is often equated with the loss of other needed resources or the unnecessary addition of pressure on the educators themselves, who must spend precious time acclimating to the technology and integrating it into their personal teaching styles. One must only visit one of the many collections of educational web sites, such as the ones on Yahoo, EdWeb or Web66, to see and explore hundreds of examples of the private revolutions in educational web use that are occurring in classrooms around the globe. The power of the Internet as a publishing, researching, and communication tool is all too clear for formal (and informal, for that matter) institutions of learning to ignore.
Suffice it to say, it's impossible for anyone to predict accurately where this so-called Web Revolution will go next, despite the conference attendees' attempts to do just that. As conference keynote speaker Brian Ferren of Walt Disney's Imagineering Studio noted so eloquently, the early pioneers of new communications technology, whether it be the Web, radio, or even the printing press, rarely ever grasp the true future potential of that technology until years after its initial development. And though we may not know exactly what path this burgeoning technology will take, the posturing of industries and special interests to guide that path in certain directions has already begun in earnest. This fact could not have been more evident at the Boston conference.
With that in mind, we must now consider another question: What role can the education community play to help steer Internet development into positive and practical directions? Now that the Web is guided largely by commercial and private interests, some might argue that education's role is minute at best. In terms of actual dollar power, that's probably true. But at the same time, we must find a way to speak out and let industry leaders know that students of all ages, as well as teachers and administrators, have much to gain from an Internet that is both affordable to access and open to personal educational publishing. And beyond the basic pedagogical uses of the Internet, it is also in the best interest of those companies who are developing the network to prepare today's learners for an ever-more competitive, technology-oriented workplace.
Though the conferees in Boston represented a diverse range of backgrounds, industries, and interpretations of the Web Revolution, one idea above all others merited mass agreement - The World Wide Web, or perhaps its yet-unborn progeny, will dramatically change the way we all conduct business, gather and present information, even the way make money. It may also, perhaps, revolutionize education, or at least certain aspects of it. Then again, considering all of the other dilemmas that plague schools today, it may not. For many people, the jury is still out on this one. But unless we as educators take a leadership position among the major commercial developers and help articulate the Net's potential role in education and lifelong learning, we may never get the chance to find out who is right.
Now is the time to take that chance. For, as Wendell Phillips once said:
Revolutions never go backward.
Posted by acarvin at 12:30 PM
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December 15, 1995
More than Just Hype: The World Wide Web as a Tool for Education
Over the last two years, the World Wide Web has established itself as a primary means for informational exchange and multimedia presentation on the Internet. Developed in 1989, decades after early technology visionaries first articulated the notion of distributed hypertextual media, the Web now plays an integral part in many areas of modern telecommunications. Its educational uses, however, are only beginning to become apparent. The Web offers an excellent environment for interactive learning, publishing, exploring and discussion. Successful prototypes of these environments are now be found through the Internet.
Of all the recent developments in advanced computer networking, it is the World-Wide Web (WWW, or W3, or the Web) that has truly captured the imagination of millions of technophiles and information buffs. Since its first mass popularization in 1993, the Web has caught on like wildfire in business, research, and academia, and many users now tout it as the first real step in the establishment of an information superhighway. But for all of its profit-making and curiosity-seeking potential, the Web has largely been ignored as a powerful educational tool. As a whole, on-line classrooms are few and far between, with recent U.S. Department of Education reports suggesting that less that 3% of schools have useful Internet access.
Scattered throughout cyberspace, though, we are beginning to find more and more examples of educators, students and researchers experimenting with the Web as a way to teach and to empower classrooms with newfound creative ability. In the last year alone, the number of web sites maintained by American K-12 schools increased from several dozen to almost a thousand. Teachers now experiment with using WWW as a high-speed primary researching assistant, while students construct hypertextual multimedia portfolios and campus-wide information services.
And yet from a perspective of the majority of U.S. teachers who don't now have and who have never had the Internet or the Web in their classrooms, it can be somewhat difficult to fathom the potential impact of these new networking technologies on traditional learning environments. Historically speaking, the implementation of other media into the curriculum (such as classroom television and video viewing) has left much to be desired in the minds of many an educator.
Why has the Web become such an attractive tool to educators? How can it be used to enhance the learning process? In exploring Web fundamentals, including its history, structure, and uses in the classroom, this essay will also examine where this networking technology may lead in the not-too-distant future.
History: The Birth of On-Line Multimedia
Well before there was ever a notion of a Web, thousands of computer users began to navigate cyberspace on the world's largest computer network, the Internet. A global lattice of national, regional and local computer networks first developed in the late 1960s, the Internet rapidly gained in popularity outside of the scientific community in the late 1980s (largely due to the enormous number of university professors and students wanting access to electronic mail). But beyond the basic tools of e-mail and file transferring, the Internet remained incomprehensible to the vast majority of users. Based on a series of complex networking protocols, the Internet required an intimate knowledge of computers and Internet server-operating systems, a knowledge that most users had neither the time nor the interest to gather.
Essentially, the Internet had the technical capacity to handle a variety of complex applications, such downloading files from distant computers, or transferring digitized photos and sounds, but because it was designed by and for a scientific audience, general public use remained limited at best. Then, researchers at the University of Minnesota came up with gopher, a network standard that would automatically guide the user from one file to another, as well as from one computer to another. Gopher was a fairly simple idea: using the appropriate software, a person could point with a mouse to a piece of information (such as a title of an article in an on-line table of contents) and actually download that file merely by clicking it. Moreover, these clickable titles could act as links to other computers around the world, so any user could navigate online from site to site, scanning for and copying information in an easy-to-follow networked environment.
Gopher
Over the last four years, gopher has become one of the most popular ways of storing and presenting information over the Internet. But despite its success, gopher has some serious drawbacks. First, it is limited to presenting text files only. Because the gopher structure is based on a menu of textual items that contain even more text, the layout structure does not lend itself to the display of graphics. Second, because gophers are based on the same text-menu format, all gopher menus look pretty much the same. It's not unusual to get lost, and it's next to impossible to be creative with them. Finally, gopher links to menus and documents must be summarized in a few words. You can't fit an entire paragraph, let alone an image, into a gopher menu. Although it is certainly an excellent method of cataloguing large amounts of textual data, its inflexibility and meager aesthetic potential leave much to be desired for those who wish to craft their information more stylistically.
Enter the World Wide Web
In order to give Internet publishers the necessary tools to design complex online multimedia documents, an entirely new Internet publishing protocol had to be formulated. In 1989 at the European Particle Physics Laboratory (CERN) in Geneva, British computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee developed a protocol that he called the World-Wide Web. As the name suggests, the Web allows Internet publishers to intertwine information in multiple directions and layers. Though a similar lattice structure certainly applied to the gopher protocol, the Web offered some fascinating new features.
With the Web, text and links to other information could now be presented on the same screen. The Web environment also made it possible to highlight certain words within a paragraph as links to other Web pages. Selecting these words with either a mouse or by moving a cursor made it possible to link to any other document on the Internet. These pages, in turn, offered fast and easy links to even more specific informational nuggets. Beyond its general ease of navigation, the Web also allows for a publisher to present information in a multimedia context. In other words, while a Web page may present segments of text, it may also include graphics, audio, even video. Essentially, a Web site can easily look like a page of information of a multimedia CD ROM, yet with the ability to interconnect with millions of other computers around the world.
At first, the Web remained an experimental method of organizing Internet information, and only a handful of academic research sites around the world were capable of presenting it. In 1993, though, programmers at the University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign released Mosaic, an easy-to-use web browser which they freely distributed over the Internet. While copies of Mosaic spread like wildfire, other browsers such as Netscape also began to proliferate, making the Web more accessible to casual users than ever. By the fall of 1994, it was estimated that there were anywhere between 7,000 and 10,000 Web sites around the world, with upwards of 10 million users. The Web site at the White House, for example, is known to be receive hundreds of thousands of hits a day. Other sites, such as Wired Magazine's HotWired and the Rolling Stones Music Page, log equally impressive numbers. The Web, originally envisioned to allow researchers and computer enthusiasts better access to each other's information, has now turned into a powerful force on the Information Highway.
The Wonders of Hypertext: Non-Linear Informational Adventures
The key to the Web's success lies in its ability to present information in a non-linear format. Though a user may begin with a given starting point (often known as a home page), where to go from there is up to the whim of the user. Order becomes irrelevant, at least in the tradition sense of reading a book from one end to another. Because the Web allows you to click and choose your next subject, you can skip over entire sections of information while nesting through others in great depth. This ability to surf the 'Net, exploring the Internet with no defined end point or order, is known as hypernavigation, and the form in which it appears on the Web is commonly referred to as hypertext.
Hypertext was first conceived of nearly 50 years ago when futurist Vannevar Bush published his Atlantic Monthly article, "As We May Think" in the July 1945 issue, in which he discussed how society and technology must cope with the ever-increasing scientific advances in post-war America. Among other things, he predicted the invention of a curious device known as a Memex (or Memory Extender), a data storage device "in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility." Electronic "links" would allow the Memex user to connect different points of information together, so he or she could go from one page of a book to another, or from one page to an entirely different publication or subject. There would be no convention of linking subjects together; the user of the Memex could link together anything at will.
According to Bush:
- The process of tying two items together is the important thing. . . . When the user is building a trail, he names it, inserts the name in his code book, and taps it out on his keyboard. Before him are the two items to be joined, projected onto adjacent viewing positions. . . . Thereafter, at any time, when one of these items is in view, the other can be instantly recalled merely by tapping a button below the corresponding code space. Moreover, when numerous items have been thus joined together to form a trail, they can be reviewed in turn, rapidly or slowly, by deflecting a lever like that used for turning the pages of a book. It is exactly as though the physical items had been gathered together to form a new book. It is more than this, for any item can be joined into numerous trails. (Click here to go to the Bush's entire article.)
Though Bush's prediction of the actual technology involved isn't exactly as it turned out to be, his concepts of linking previously unassociated information was an intriguing idea. A Memex user could become the editor of a customized encyclopedia, a codex of knowledge presented in a customized fashion.
In the years that followed Vannevar Bush's seminal depiction of this non-linear world to come, computer visionaries such as Ted Nelson have led the charge into hypertextual exploration using computers. Ever since he coined the word hypertext in the early 1960s, Nelson has attempted to articulate a vision of a society where on-line, hypertext documents are as common as books or magazines are today. The advent of digital, high capacity data storage now allows us to house seemingly infinite amounts of information; hypertext, according to Nelson, is the key to how we access and present that information. As hypertext's non-linear architecture becomes more popular and mundane in non-scientific circles, as is now becoming the case with the Web - a whole new cultural attitude will develop in the worlds of reading, writing, and publishing. Says Nelson (1992):
First, there would be new documents, a new literary genre, of branching, non-sequential writings on the computer screen. Second, these branching documents would constitute a great new literature, but they would subsume the old, since all words, all literature would go online and extend to a new branching generality (46-47).
When Nelson first began to toss around his ideas 30 years ago, his prognostication of an entirely networked culture seemed far flung at best; computers were expensive and cumbersome while data capacity and bandwidth had yet to advance even into their Bronze Age. But with the growth of the PC market in the late 70s and early 80s, hardware development picked up speed, as did consumer purchases and software design. With more people buying more computers and storing more information, the need for a simple, yet efficient way of accessing that information was obvious. Pioneering the way, among others, was Apple Computer, with its Hypercard software. Essentially a primitive form of Nelson's (and Bush's) vision of hypertext, Hypercard allowed a user to create and organize the equivalent of digital 3x5 cards in a computer's memory. Hypercard was easy enough for all ages to use, and it offered a handy way to arrange segmented bits of information and link them together in any order, even in a continuous loop. Its greatest limitation, though, was its insular nature; a Hypercard stack can link you to the data on your computer, but it can't allow you to interact with other computer's data over a network. And by the mid- to late 1980s it was already clear that international networking was the next step into the Information Age. The Web provided the right solution at the right time-sophisticated hypertext interconnected by an enormous lattice of computers.
Beyond the Web's hypertextual architecture, it is the official standardization of hypertext publishing that has turned the Web into an international phenomenon. In order for the Web to work, all computers on the Web must be able to understand everyone else. If two computers each speak a different language, or more accurately, if one Web navigation software can't understand another computer's hypertext, garbage instead of useful information appears on the screen. To alleviate this problem of incompatibility, researchers led by teams at CERN and MIT have come up with what is called a standard generalized markup language for the Web. This standard, known as HyperText Markup Language (HTML), is a basic set of codes that can be added to any regular text. By including these codes, any computer on the Web can interpret that text as hypertext.
Here's an example of what HTML looks like: <HTML>
<TITLE>Andy's Home Page</TITLE>
<H1>Andy Carvin's Home Page</H1>
<body>
Welcome to Andy's home page.
If you'd like, you can go to the
<A HREF="http://www.cpb.org">Corporation for Public Broadcasting HomePage</A],
visit my web site<A HREF="http://k12.cnidr.org:90">EdWeb</A> or browse throughthe <A HREF="http://web66.coled.umn.edu">Web66</A> pages.
<P>
</body>
</html>When interpreted by a Web browser, such as Mosaic or Netscape, the HTML would appear on your screen something like this:
Andy Carvin's Home Page
Welcome to Andy's home page. If you'd like, you can go to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting Home PageEdWeb or browse through the
The various bracketed codes in the HTML document tell the computer how to present the information. Adding <H1> and </H1> around a phrase tells the computer to print it in a larger font. Similarly, the <A HREF> </A> codes inform the computer that any text between those codes should be links to other documents, and the information provided immediately after the <A HREF> code (see HTML above) designates an address on the Web to which the links should go.
HTML codes may seem a bit daunting to the uninitiated, but the total number of HTML commands is relatively limited, so after a few practice pages, even casual computer users usually get used to it. To make things even simpler, a variety of commercial and freeware HTML converters have hit the market, so converting a document to HTML becomes as simple as running text through the proper software. And once you've learned HTML, that's all there is to learn in terms of having your information accessible by any computer in the world. For the time being, the vast majority of HTML codes will be accepted by every computer on the Web.
A New Tool in the Education Arsenal: The Role of the Web in Curricular Reform
The advent and success of the Web comes at an exciting, yet controversial juncture in American education reform. Possibly the most important point that must be addressed is the current emphasis towards interactivity in the learning process. The term "interactivity" has become somewhat of a buzzword in American pop culture, education and commerce; it's not uncommon for some software packages to emphasize the product's "interactive" nature.
Yet beyond all the hype and rhetoric surrounding interactivity in education, there is a solid backdrop of empirical analysis to support the positive nature of interactive learning. Students of all ages understand concepts better when they are actively engaged in a learning process, whether that process comes in the form of a sophisticated multimedia package or a low-tech classroom debate on current events. Over the years, social scientists and education researchers have attempted with reasonable success to debunk the traditional notion of the passive classroom environment. It doesn't take a reformer with a Ph.D. in educational psychology to recognize that the old ways of teaching and learning need some serious reconsidering. In order for today's young people to become competitive in tomorrow's marketplace, yesterday's pedagogical methodology of emphasizing teaching over learning is out.
Many students have a hard time learning concepts in which they have no interest or real-world relationship. They must become more involved in the entire teaching and learning process. For example, producing an ecology experiment in which students actively collect data, examine their specimens, and debate their findings in addition to exploring ecology in a broader social and historical context has significantly more educational value than a situation where students do nothing but hear a lecture about how some scientist first attempted the same experiment many years ago.
Engaging students from a variety of angles and allowing them to feel a part of the subject matter will often commit them to examining that subject. When they invest more mental energy into the process, they automatically commit the concept to memory with a broad, comprehensive understanding of it. Roger Schank of Northwestern University's Institute of the Learning Sciences proposes that learning be attained through the use of goal-based scenarios; the teacher, with a set of learning goals in hand, allows the students to explore the subject from their own particular point of view. Students, when encouraged and given the proper opportunity, medium and tools, can uncover a wealth of ideas in nearly any subject area. And by giving them the chance to question, articulate and share their thoughts, they can grasp the meaning of the subject and thus understand it better.
In order to better explore the potential role of the Web in education and active learning, I would like to offer four essential roles the web takes on in relationship to education. These roles include the following: The Web as Tutor, The Web as Publishing House, The Web as Forum, and The Web as Navigator.
The Web as Tutor: Hypertextual Teaching Aids
The most basic element of using the Web as a pedagogical instrument is found in its ability to present information clearly, attractively and effectively. HTML standards dictate how a Web site is to be interpreted by a Web browser, so when one converts a text document into a Web document, its appearance as a user-friendly HTML document can be predicted with ease. Additionally, one can use hypertext to organize enormous amounts of data in a relatively lucid fashion, using menus, key word searches, even clickable graphics as a means to link the user to more and more information.
From a curricular point of view, the Web can be used to design tutorials and on-line lessons for a variety of subjects. For example, Roger Blumberg of the Institute for Brain and Neural Systems at Brown University has created an online tutorial on basic genetics known as MendelWeb. With MendelWeb, students are introduced to basic genetics and the writings of scientist/monk Gregor Mendel by reading a hypertext version of his seminal treatise, Experiments in Plant Hybridization (available in both English and German). The hypertext version of Mendel's writings contain links to a dictionary of terms, as well as annotated comments from other readers that can be added to by any user. (note: a new section of interactive on-linehomework sets will be added hopefully by the end of 1995.) In a sense, an automatic tutor is already built into the Web site; discussion and questions are presented as they would be in a live introduction to biology course; yet because the coursework is built into the Web, students may explore the subject to accommodate their own rate of comprehension.
One of the most established examples of using the Web as a teaching device is Engines for Education, a hyperbook written by Roger Schank and Chip Cleary of the Institute of the Learning Sciences(1994). Schank, a leader in artificial intelligence and education technology research, strongly believes that students should be allowed to learn according to their own interests and experiences. Instead of being forced to memorize the quadratic equation as an end in itself, for example, students should question how it may relate to their lives and only then come up with a good reason to learn it. Shank's methods are rather Socratic in nature; learning must be based on questions, not on answers that are offered as facts to be learned.
With this logic in mind, Schank and Cleary designed Engines,a discussion of the poor state of education today and how high technology could be used to solve many of its problems. When users first log onto Engines, they are offered a variety of ways to begin:
Just Curious ...
I have no specific agenda in viewing this book. Show me something interesting.
Media Maven ...
I enjoy finding out about the latest innovations in media.
Business Person ...
My concerns relate to business and industry.
Educator ...
I'm mainly interested in issues concerning education and learning.
These categories provide users with different angles from which to begin the hyperbook. Some users may be more interested in software development, and not the actual plight of American education; Engines lets them do that, and will only lead the discussion back into education when it fits into the context of the user's requests. Moreover, Schank and Cleary recognize an important, unavoidable fact: not every reader is going to care about or find useful every subject within a hyperbook, and others still will not have a strong enough grasp of the subject to know where to begin. For this reason, there is also an option for those who don't have a particular interest, and only wish to see something that may entertain them.
Upon entering a topic on Engines, the user is presented with an introductory paragraph, along with a comprehensive list of questions related to that paragraph. For example, the chapter on education will offer questions such as "How do students learn?," "Why are schools boring to so many kids?" and "How do computers fit into school reform?" Each question then leads to more information, which leads to more questions. There are scores of questions and answers available, and therefore thousands of different interpretations and uses of the hyperbook as a whole.
Engines for Education is an excellent example of an educational Web design because the authors of the hyperbook have carefully mapped out the possible outcomes of each nugget of information offered in the text. By making a statement such as "Computers will help students learn," Schank and Cleary have come up with as many conceivable questions as possible that might be raised from such a statement. And each answer to these questions will lead to more questions, and undoubtedly some of these will then connect directly with other subtopics within the book. In the end, a successful Web book such as Engines must be crafted with sometimes thousands of links and hundreds of pages. Yet with the proliferation of automatic HTML authoring programs, such linkages will no longer seem as daunting a task as this example might suggest. And to make hyperbook design even simpler, programmers at the Institute are working on what are known as ASK systems, automatic, intelligent computer programs that will analyze a document's content with inquisitive search agents in order to help formulate questions that might be raised by that content
In sum, the Web provides an excellent tool with which to design on-line curricula. The potential of Web tutorials has yet to be realized, largely because most Web books have been technically oriented, and in order for this technology to reach the mainstream, there need to be Web tutorials for history, music, language arts, and other less technical disciplines. There already exists on the Web carefully annotated and cross-referenced hypertexts of the complete works of Shakespeare. Such a site could easily include question and answer sessions, a la Engines for Education, as well as audio and video clips of each play and poem. The Web can transform a topic of choice into a living, breathing document that would be useful, educational, and above all, it would also be fun to explore.
The Web as Publishing House: Or, How Anyone with Internet Access can become an Educational Pamphleteer
With the recent expansion of the World-Wide Web into academia, students now have the opportunity not only to create their own complex learning environments; they have the ability to present that environment to other interested parties, whether they be students and a teacher in the same classroom, parents and friends at home, or professors at a university on the other side of the globe. The notion of the student as publisher has traditionally been seen in more conventional forms, such as book reports or class presentations. Teachers have usually assigned research projects for students to present in either a group or individualized form.
The Web offers a new twist. Instead of presenting information in a conventional, linear format, a student can use the web as a publishing tool to create in-depth "hyper-reports," on-line multimedia projects with links leading to numerous subtopics and network connections. For example, a high school student is asked to present a hyper-report on assisted suicide, a subject that clearly is both complex and multi-sided. The student begins with a basic structure in which to explore (the general question of assisted suicide), and then within that structure could link us with subtopics continued study, such as assisted-suicide legislation, Jack Kevorkian, the religious implications of euthanasia, etc. Or added links may take the reader to various bioethics departments at major universities, which in turn offer a wealth of materials to pursue and/or to share in group activity.
Granted, a major hyper-report presents us with numerous problems. For example, each subtopic may present an overwhelming choice of data. Students must step back and assess the multitude of angles from which to choose. Undoubtedly, the most difficult constraint at hand is that of time; the average student in the average class is rarely afforded the opportunity to work at length on a long-term, individual project. Yet some researchers, such as Harvard University's Howard Gardner, suggest that Americans schools must adapt to allow for such in-depth involvement. True assessment of a student's skills must be personal and intensive, not a periodic test gauged against the standard norm for similar students (Gardner, 1994).
For several years now, many teachers have used a form of assessment known as portfolio assessment, in which students collect all of their best classwork for presentation for grading at the end of the semester. Portfolios offer a simple and fairly effective way of assessing a student's work without the typical multiple choice, end of term tests. Howard Gardner takes this concept one step further and refines it into what he calls a processfolio, which includes every single creative step towards some particular goal. In the case of a major report, students would include all comments and criticisms made by the teacher and other students, plus their own personal interpretations of that criticism, in other words, a meta-assessment of their work-in-progress. In the end, the processfolio would demonstrate the student's growth, as well as completion of the work.
In addition, the Web is bringing new life to the world of classroom journalism. Students of all ages are publishing exciting on-line magazines and journals, using the Web as their international paperboy. MidLink Magazine, an electronic magazine created for and by middle school kids across the country, is just one excellent example [Can you insert the URL address here?]. Under the guidance of teacher Caroline McCullen, the students of Discovery Middle School in Orlando, Florida, produce a colorful monthly magazine on the University of Central Florida Web server. Receiving contributions from middle schoolers all over the world, MidLink is seen by many as the model on-line magazine for prospective publishers.
The Web presents an excellent medium for students to organize and publish their own projects, processfolios and journals. And because the Web allows documents to exist as dynamic texts (i.e., information can be formed and developed on-line), students can share their work as it grows and learn from the responses from other Web users, 24 hours a day, instead of once or twice a month during in-class project updates. And as older students become involved with more detailed and intensive work, the Web provides an excellent way to sift through enormous quantities of data.
The Web as Forum: It's Not Just for Surfing Anymore
Proponents of the Internet (and computer networking in general) have long touted its use as a forum for discussion and as a marketplace of ideas and information. The Web most certainly fits this claim, and in the education community, the Web can be a superb basis for virtual debate and discovery. File transfer protocol, e-mail, USENET news, and have now converged into a singular informational tool. Web browsers, interacting with the full suite of Internet protocols, can now interpret gopher, ftp and news commands, can send e-mail, and utilizing all of these services, can create a multimedia/hypermedia discussion on any given subject.
Many Internet users have traditionally used e-mail accounts for a service known as listserv, listprocessor, or simply as a list. Anyone who has access to a server and free listservingsoftware can form a discussion group. People join the discussion by sending a subscription message to the listserv computer. From that point on, they are able to receive and post information to the listserv, which then distributes the information to everyone on the list.
Listservs have been used in a variety of ways, from Peter Gabriel fan clubs to cancer recovery groups. Recently, some organizations have even used listservs to run virtual conferences, where literally thousands of people sign up to an on-line discussion and take part in a week-long forum, all without leaving their home or office. On a more local level, numerous college courses now require registration to a private listserv, so the professor and students may exchange questions and other information outside the classroom. Some people are now tying their Web sites into an on-line forum. Additionally, there are also public domain software packages that convert e-mail text to HTML and automatically add the text to a Web site (MailToHTML, Hypermail, etc.). So as webmasters add new sections to their sites and people begin to discuss these changes, the entire conversation can be automatically integrated into the sites.
The combined presentation of the Web and listserv e-mail can be used successfully in a variety of ways. A physics teacher may organize a Web site to include all class lectures, frequently asked questions, and multimedia presentations of utilizing text, graphics, even audio. With the inclusion of a listserv, students may automatically add information to that site (e.g., additional questions, project reports, essays). This arrangement efficiently stores important class information and organizes it to allow easy access.
Students using the web by way of a mail-to-www converter need not become experts in html; the converter software takes care of that for them. Additionally, a software authoring protocol known as Common Gateway Interface (CGI) is a protocol for writing programs to allow Web wanderers to fill out on-line forms and have their information processed in a variety of ways. For instance, some sites have developed scripts that are commonly referred to as graffiti walls or scrawl walls. Graffiti page users can fill out a form with their comments on whatever that Web page is about; the CGI program will then automatically tack their message onto the page itself for future site visitors to read.
Unfortunately, some of the best examples so far of grafitti sites are used as online soapboxes for obnoxious messages, but their potential for positives, rather than negatives cannot be ignored.
On an advanced academic level, presenting material on-line so that peers and instructors may discuss and critique it enhances critiquing skills, skills that are often slowly gained for many students, for it is rarely taught in any formal fashion. Yet if a teacher wishes to implement processfolio assessment into the classroom, students must become comfortable voicing their opinions, as well as accepting constructive criticism.
Recent research now suggests what many educators have claimed for years-some students just aren't comfortable with talking in class. On-line discussions, on the other hand, are easier for some, when the form of communication changes from interpersonal (live and in class) to cyberpersonal (e-mail, Web forms, etc.). And because conversation is on-line, it can be automatically catalogued and presented as part of students' processfolios. On-line class forums are not the be-all, but they are a plus for students who previously would not voluntarily open their mouths.
The Web as Navigator: Informational Cataloguing
Recent Internet surveys suggest that there are well over 10,000 registered Web sites available, with hundreds of new sites popping up each week. In education, knowing where to begin, what to look for, and what to ignore can be a daunting task. For example, Carnegie Mellon University's Lycos Server will literally search out every known document on the Web that uses whatever word you're looking for. The problem is knowing how to sort through the 1000+ responses the webworm might find in its initial search.
Intrepid Web explorers have begun to catalogue the enormous variety of educational resources available on-line in the form of on-line resource guides, some as hypertext lists of all known educational resources (some general, others topic-specific). For example, the database known as Yahoo has a substantial section on educational resources. The only problem with sites such as Yahoo, though, is that these resource lists are cumbersome and overloading. Yahoo has approximately 2500 educational sites listed, so the user is forced to wander from site to site just to see if it is worth visiting in the first place.
More recent cataloging are annotative resource guides, divided into subjects (e.g., the site's geographic location, primary school versus secondary, language arts versus mathematics) and then processed into HTML with a synopsis of the site. With the assistance of an automated searching program built into the Web site, a teacher may get on the resource, type in "history, middle school," and get a descriptive list. Informational supersaturation becomes less of a problem when resources are presented in this fashion. More importantly, for the average teacher time to search out on-line resources is cut.
A type of World-Wide Library Catalogue is evolving, unlike a traditional library, because the entries have been created by students, teachers, and anyone else who has something to say. Webworms and other agents are systematically organizing information for any subject at any grade level, so a third grader can create a Web project on dinosaurs, and once it is discovered by a search agent, it will be accessible by other kids who want to learn about triceratops and tyrannosaurus rex. As the World-Wide Web grows, so will our easy access to useful and interesting information.
What Next for the Web, Its Successors, and Education?
The Web is soon expected to pass file transfers as the highest user of bandwidth on the Internet. Commercial developers have recently adopted the Web as their new pet cybermedium, from the Star Trek: Voyager site to Time/Warner's Pathfinder. Increasing the profitability of these ventures are the planned inclusions of basic Web browsers in the operating systems for both Macintosh and Intel-based PCs, as well as Prodigy's and America On-Line's recent moves to make the Web accessible over its commercial subscription services to millions of users.
Assuming that the future of the Web is secure, at least for several years to come, what steps must be taken in order to further its development as an educational instrument? Above all else, institutional access to the Internet must increase dramatically. Though many schools are lucky enough to have formed partnerships with universities and local business in order to gain access (and still others have received networking grants or employ persistent technophiles as educators), the overwhelming majority of schools lack the hardware needed just to get connected in the first place
While policymakers and politicians argue how best to finance schools for technology development, it is still possible for many schools to get started. Ideally, more community networks and freenets must begin to offer Web access at reasonable rates, and more importantly, they must offer schools and classrooms server accounts so they may publish Web sites of their own. The educational corridors of the Web will grow only through the providing of easy access to potential developers. Additionally, members of the community who already have access and experience should offer their assistance to demonstrating to others what the Web can do and how simple it is to develop a new site and to expand the various offerings already available over the Web. But the numbers of volunteers must increase if we ever truly wish to see the Web expand significantly into education. And as new users begin to explore the Web and publish their own electronic products, the quality and creativity of Web sites will increase dramatically. As people access them, publishers are bound to get inundated with suggestions, criticism, and encouragement, which usually translate into further development of the sites.
What is bound to be most fascinating, though, is the integration of new Internet technologies into the world of the Web. For instance, Internet Relay Chats (real-time group discussions) and MUSE's (Multiple User Simulated Environments, essentially an IRC in an interesting setting) could provide users and designers with the ability to interact with each other live, instead of having to wait for a listserv to distribute the information as it is posted via e-mail. Similarly, webmasters may begin to integrate the use of CUSeeMe into Web sites. CUSeeMe, a teleconferencing program developed at Cornell, allows users to see and hear each other by converting data from a microphone and a video camera into an Internet-compatible format. Programmers are now experimenting with software that will allow easy access to these live discussions in a Web environment, combining them with the Web's audiovisual capabilities. We may only begin to imagine the possibilities for on-line education and enhancement.
And what of the next generation of hypermedia tools-is there a protocol that will be better than the Web? According to some Internauts, there already is. Hyper-G, from Austria, is a cross between the Web and gopher. Like the Web, Hyper-G is easily hypernavigatable and can access other Internet tools like FTP and e-mail. But unlike the Web, Hyper-G can handle enormous amounts of data and automatically process it into multiple subject areas. It can interpret Postscript files, which saves time and allows greater flexibility in terms of document layout. Perhaps most interesting is Hyper-G's ability to assign users access privileges, so users can get on and add their own documents to certain areas and thus become telecommuting co-publishers of a site.
For now, the Web will continue as the protocol of choice for many network users, and its growth as an education tool is assured. The Web is accepted internationally because of its relative ease of use and cross-compatibility; future changes in HTML standards (especially in layout design and in the integration of live communication protocols) will inevitably make it even more powerful. For the educational community, on-line hypermedia offers a simple way to design interactive lessons for local and distant use. And as the Web becomes more accessible to schools around the country, teachers and students alike will be able to explore cyberspace and design new resources for a multitude of purposes that have yet to be realized.
Written for High School Journal, January 1996.
Posted by acarvin at 12:45 PM
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November 20, 1995
The Electronic Fieldtrip: No Bag Lunch Required
As a group of scientists and researchers prepare for their next adventure into the heart of the Amazon, they pack the usual array of necessities for the trip: passports, photographic equipment, malaria medicine, maybe even a cellular phone. But thanks to recent advances in both telecommunications technology and curricular planning, these intrepid explorers may now include something that until recently would have been considered unheard of, if not bizarre: the e-mail addresses for several dozen middle school classes around North America.
Gone are the days when a class trip evoked images of parental consent forms, bumpy bus rides and ant bites - the electronic fieldtrip (sometimes referred to as a cybertrip) is now one of the hottest uses of computer networking in K-12 education today. The premise of the cybertrip is simple enough: scientists, teachers, and other experts go to a specified location equipped with portable computers, an Internet connection, sometimes a video camera for a satellite linkup. As they conduct experiments and observe their surroundings, the team interacts with young students by way of e-mail exchanges and other communicative means.
For example, Maryland Public Television and Geoff Haines-Stiles Productions, in conjunction with NASA's Ames Research Center, has begun a series of electronic fieldtrips know as Passport to Knowledge. The current adventure, Live from Antarctica, links classrooms in the U.S. with a team of scientists as they study the continent, from McMurdo Base to the South Pole. As the scientists examined polar climate, penguin feeding habits and other related subjects, the students conduct experiments tied to the work of the researchers. An automatic e-mail distribution system known as a listserv relays student queries to the team, while the researchers in turn respond with data. The teachers have their own listserv as well, in order to discuss possible new directions for the cybertrip. And to add additional flavor to the project, all the participants are united by way of regularly scheduled satellite telecasts, which are aired on close circuit TV, public television, and NASA's channel, NASA Select.
Cybertrips such as Live from Antarctica integrate two innovative trends in education: distance learning and collaborative learning. Assisted by a networked computer, a classroom may "take part" in a professional field experiment. The Internet, for example, is used to transmit text, audio, images, even video data to and from any part of the world. The students are able to talk with scientists, follow their research, and interject their own questions and concerns, while the scientists visit certain sites and discuss the students' theories. On-line interaction is blended with traditional lesson planning - each class may be required to keep journals, prepare similar experiments, etc. But no matter how a given cybertrip is arranged, one key component remains static - the students and the exploration team treat each other as colleagues. This mutual respect translates into a mutual gain of knowledge, so both sides are enhanced by this distant collaboration.
What is the future of student-researcher collaborations? Will they catch on, given that scientists are busy and may not have time to interact with young kids asking rudimentary questions? Won't a Stephen Hawking or a Roger Penrose grow weary from ever-increasing e-mails by 14-year-olds interested in black holes? Roger Schank, Director of Northwestern University's Institute for the Learning Sciences, noted this concern when he quipped "I, along with other professors I know, can't wait until there are hundreds of such questions a day" (Schank, 1994) Fortunately, the controlled environment of the cybertrip lessens redundancies. Discussions are moderated by teachers and project leaders and previously asked questions are catalogued onto the project server, so no researcher is swamped while trying to conduct scholarly work. In the end, intensive field research and student-scientist interaction can both be achieved in a well-planned project.
With each passing month, numerous organizations around the world sponsor new geographic cyberadventures for kids, but its potential goes beyond the mere exploration of the globe. Passport to Knowledge has definitive plans in the making for fieldtrips that are extraterrestrial (Live from the Stratosphere, Live From the Hubble Telescope), and they are even considering some that are chronological (Live From the Ice Age, Live from Pompeii). And as you can see from these titles, not all of these cybertrips are realistically possible, for no scientist can go back in time. But with the help of computers, they are beginning to create virtual cybertrips - instead of actually traveling to the Ice Age, project leaders run complex software and participate in role-playing scenarios that students can access in the classroom. From the students' point of view, virtual field trips mean new adventures across time and space, thanks to the creative implementation of virtual reality and telepresence. The students of today may not be able to thrive in this new environment just yet, but it is certainly around the corner, much sooner than we might think.
Posted by acarvin at 12:32 PM
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November 14, 1994
edweb and accidental hibernation
My apologies to those who attempted to access EdWeb last night
(http://198.187.60.80). My email was inundated with users worried that they had
either done something wrong or I had posted the wrong web address. Actually, we
had a network shutdown at work for 12 hours and I didn't know about it until I
came in this morning. Sorry for the inconvenience.
Posted by acarvin at 8:43 PM
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November 9, 1994
EdWeb art contest!
For all of you who have used EdWeb (http://198.187.60.80) and also happen to
teach budding young artists, EdWeb is looking for kids to design art which
will be featured throughout the web site. Here's the info I'm including within
EdWeb itself:
As you may have noticed by now, EdWeb is devoid of all graphics, great and
small. We'd like to change that, but our resources are somewhat limited.
Therefore, we invite you and your students to enter the EdWeb Artwork Contest.
We're looking for anything neat and exciting from kids all over the world -
people with art skills above the crayon level need not apply!
The best overall picture will become the official logo of the EdWeb Home Page.
Other pictures will be eligible for other pages as appropriate (for example,
the Information Highway home page, the resource guide page, the story page,
etc). Pictures will be judged for their creativity, humor and vitality. All
artists will be given full credit for their work with their own home page.
No purchase necessary- just send in your pictures postmarked by December 1,
1994. Mail them to:
Andy Carvin
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
901 E St. NW
Washington, DC 20004-2037
(202) 879-9824
The winners will be announced by December 15, 1994. Sorry, all artwork will be
non-returnable.
Have fun!
andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:40 PM
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October 14, 1994
RFC: Check out the EdWeb WWW!
Hi everyone. For the last several months I've been making posts concerning
an on-line education resource guide I'm writing. We'll, the prototype is
finally on-line. It's called EdWeb and it can be reached at:
http://198.187.60.80
This is a temporary site, so I'll repost in a week or so when it's
permanent.
I'd like as many people as possible to look around and send me feedback.
EdWeb is an on-line tutorial on education reform and the Information
Highway. It also has a large k12 online resource guide (a hypertext
version of the one I've posted). EdWeb is meant to be an evolving
hyperbook, so all comments will be taken seriously. I'm especially
interested in n comments on the reform sections - I want to include as
much info as possible (without taking any sides, of course), so any
additional info would be great.
Hope you enjoy EdWeb. I look forward to hearing from you.
cheers,
andy
Posted by acarvin at 8:38 PM
