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 re