2¢ Worth

Ewan Mcintosh is continuing a conversation, apparently begun by Andy Gibson, at School of Everything.  In A Teacher, by Any Other Name, Andy reported on a recent meeting about an online project they are developing, where they started questioning the use of the term teacher wondering that it might be considered a liability to the project.

..it’s pretty clear from the general feedback that the word “teacher” also puts off many people with skills and experience to share.

Ewan suggests that,

As adults we rarely refer to those who teach us how to work better as ‘teacher’.

He continues that we have incorporated in our conversations, new words to label teachers, words that we hope re-image our notions of the job.  We want to call ourselves mentor, coach, FACILITATOR

I would suggest that this is too easy.  Language is useful.  It helps us to form images, and sometimes, new images.  But the word, teacher, is not the problem.  It’s the cultural story that prevails and gets retold too often and in too many ways.  We need to re-tell that story, and as we continue to talk about compelling new information and communication technologies and new information (literacy) skills involved in accessing, working, and expressing information (messages) more compellingly, perhaps we educators need to use the same tools and skills to retell our story. 

Personally, I feel that the “us-and-them” aspect is still important in classrooms.  It is perfectly alright and important for teachers to act like learners, and for learners to act like teachers.  Part of teaching is learning, and visa-versa.  Yet, authority continues to be an important component of classroom learning, even if the classroom is a Moodle interface.  The point, from my perspective, is that the job of teaching has become much more complex and much more exciting in the past 25 years — and that’s the story we need to tell.

So, how about Teaching! in 30 Seconds.  You may be aware of a number of contests that have emerged over recent years, most notably, MoveOn’s political commercial contests, and Lafayette, Louisiana’s community campaign  to defeat local telco’s efforts to block community telecommunications initiatives.

What if someone (ISTE, ThinkQuest, etc.) were to organize a contest, asking schools to produce a 30 second commercial that compellingly illustrates what it is to be a 21st century teacher — honoring the traditional notion of expert conveyor of knowledge, but emphasizing all of the other activities that are necessary to being a successful educator today, planner, manager, collaborator, researcher, content developer, advocate, provocateur, master learner, to mention only a few.

We have to tools to do this.  If we don’t have the skills, here’s a good way to develop them. [Image¹]

Just a thought!

1. Alatorre, Israel. “Metafoto.” Israfel67’s Photostream. 29 Jun 2007. 16 May 2008 <http://flickr.com/photos/ixbarnix/662658636/>. [↩]

Live blogged — please excuse typos and awkward wording.

Kathleen Ferenz presenting about Calisphere

I’m back at CTAP 3 for their Coordinating Council Meeting, with various presentation during the morning.

Kathleen Ferenz, of California Region IV, is presenting about a media archive projected called HistoryCaliSphere.  She’s doing the presentation from an iPod Touch.

Kathleen makes the point that this is not just a clip art archive.  What they seek to do is to use the images as part of a connecting narrative of the state’s history.  It provides some fairly deep background information on the images and topics.

The team is holding some professional development events for the project, and are deliberately presenting the project with iPod touch, to model the idea that we can bring digital networked information into our classrooms without a full computer and ceiling-mounted projector –  Not that this is an excuse for not having a computer and ceiling-mounted projector in every classroom ;-)

Kathleen is now showing an Animoto video of one of their events.  It occurs to me that students might enjoy selecting Calisphere images, anotate them into some sort of specialized history text.  Then they could upload it to one of the self-publishing services (Lulu), and publish their own book.

Alan Phillips

Alan Phillips, of California’s K-12 High Speed Network, is presenting edZone, a palette of web tools for educators.  The site is set up for federated searching, so that a queries access resources from all aspects of the site.  It includes a My edZone page, where you can establish a profile page, set up multiple blogs, and other customizing features.  The interface is very simple and clearly laid out.

Resources (say blog posts) can be made available to the public, other edZone users (trusted community), to groups, or private.  Someone asked about who’s monitoring the content.  They are using a community approach, each piece of content is accompanied by a “Flag as inappropriate” linked, which can be clicked by anyone who judges the information needing consideration.

Other working features are videos, groups, podcasts, and docments.  In development are:

• Social Networking,
• Wikis,
• Messaging,
• Moodle,

Users can create albums of content, which can be images-only (for instance) or mixed media.  Other users can subscribe to the RSS feeds to receive the content from the albums.

Time for lunch now.  then… “It’s Showtime!”   :-)

I’ve spent most of my waking hours this morning catching up on e-mail. I ran into several things worthy of a blog, but, alas, no time left — except to comment on something I was reminded of yesterday.

I’m in Sacramento right now, presenting at a couple of staff development events by CTAP3. Yesterday’s was opened by Ben Anderson, and his very funny and insightful tour of the technologies we’ve seen arise in the past (un-disclosed number of) years since he graduated from high school. I loved his 1976 iPod.

Picture to come, I hope.

But during the afternoon, I did a two-hour session on Web 2.0 tools. How do you do that? So much to share. Anyway, a young school administrator in the back, raised his hand, just after I demonstrated how to run RSS feeds through your wiki page. He said that he had been looking at Web 2.0 tools for his teachers for some time, and was convinced of their benefit and appropriateness to the learning process. However, he hadn’t really understood one of the fundamental underpinnings of the concept, that these tools can connect together, be mixed and remixed to make new tools.

RSS is the glue of the new web.

Yesterday, a Los Angels court awarded MySpace $230 million dollars in its law suit against the so-called Spam King, Sanford Wallace and his partner Walter Rines. The suit involves the duo’s luring login ifnromation from MySpace users through various phishing sites, and then using their friends lists to to send gambling, pornography and ringtone span. They sent a total of 735,925 messages and racked in $500,000 dollars in the process.

The judge fined the partners the maximum amount under the CAN-SPAM law — $100 per message plus other various fines.¹

I wonder what MySpace is going to do with the money. The shame is that it takes a MySpace to bring the boom down — but thanks for swinging it.

Do your students know what spam is? ..how it works? ..how people make money from it? ..and what it costs us?

1. Spring, Tom. “MySpace Wins Record $230m in Case Against ‘Spam King’.” PCWorld 14 May 2008 14 May 2008 <http://blogs.pcworld.com/staffblog/archives/006956.html>. [↩]

I head back out to the airport this morning, after a couple of weeks at home. During my time here, I finished the biggest layer of a major writing project, re-wrote Hitchhikr, spent a little time in my favorite City, Asheville, with Brenda and my parents, and saw my daughter graduate from college — and move back home.

I spent all of yesterday afternoon shopping for luggage, downsizing to comply with the airlines’ recent clampdown on carry-on bags. My 22 inch rollaboard, it seems, is actually 23 inches long, when you factor in the wheels. I understand the airlines frustrations as delays result from late boarders not having room left in the overhead for their rollaboards, and having to check them through to their destination. It won’t work for me. I’ve had too many valuables disappear from checked luggage, items that all seemed to be exempt from the airlines reimbursement policies (don’t leave jewelry in your checked luggage).

But that’s not the point. I want to let you know about a new wiki site that I’ve been working on over the past couple of weeks. It’s not a topic that I have any real expertise in — which is why I made it a wiki, I guess. However, it is a topic that is coming up increasingly in conversations, and one that is related to the perennial discussions about inappropriate content and unsafe net practices.

We wrote Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs) in the mid-ninties, as schools added technology to their classrooms and connected themselves to the Internet (remember NetDay?). But many of those AUPs have not changed in more than 10 years, while the information landscape has grown enormously and evolved in some significant and impactful ways.

So I have established this wiki, School AUP 2.0 (sorry), to facilitate more conversation about AUPs, and to provide a watering hole for professional educators who are looking to cross the desert. The page features an overview, a notes page (for random jottings), a structure page (listing common structure elements), and an article about a layered approach to AUPs.

The wiki also includes a number of resource pages with RSS feeds from my own Diigo account and Del.icio.us sites tagged by anyone. There are listings for:

• AUP Guiding Documents (tagged “aup” & “guide”)
• Sample AUPs (tagged “aup” & “sample”)
• AUP Examples (tagged “aup” & “example”)
• Cell PHone Policies (tagged “aup” & “cellphone”)

There is also an RSS feed listing for blog entries that include school and AUP.

Some of the wiki pages are not editable. However, most of them can be commented. There is an RSS feed for the entire site as well as separate feeds for individual pages.

Jon Beasley-Murray is an Assistant Professor of French, Hispanic, and Italian Studies in the University of British Columbia (a magnificent campus, by the way).  Each year, he assigns term papers to his students, but this year’s languages and literature learners demonstrated their research and learning in another way — by contributing to Wikipedia.  In an Agence France-Presse (AFP) interview (published May 11), Beasley-Murrary, said that his students were now required to submit their research as Wikipedia articles, saying that the free online encyclopedia “..seems like a much larger stage, more of a challenge.” ¹

The Wikipedia Article Contributed by Eva Shiu

I have to confess that as I initially read about this, I was disturbed on several levels.  But the deeper I got and the more I thought about this assignment, the more it made perfect sense. 

I especially like the authenticity of the assignment, because a community of Wikipedians and casual readers alike have an opportunity to comment on the articles, and even make their own edits.  The students’ work must stand on its own two feet.  Beasley-Murray promised a rarely awarded A+ grade to any student whose article was distinguished as a “Wikipedia Featured Article.”

A third-year student, Eva Shiu said, “I was up nights until three or four a.m. in the morning working on it!”  I got addicted to it.”  Shiu and her co-authors contributed an article on Gabriel Garc Marquez’s book, “the General in his Labyrinth.”  It and one other article were published on the Wikipedia homepage on May 5, as Featured Articles.

The second article’s author, Monica Freudenreich, said that she was most excited by the fact that her efforts and contribution would survive online, and not end out in a bin under her bed.

Of course, logistics would prevent all of us from sending our students to write for Wikipedia.  But there are lots of other ways to make learners responsible, not only for learning something, but for doing something useful with it.

1. “Educational Wikipedia.” Islam Online 11 May 2008 12 May 2008 http://www.islamonline.com/news/newsfull.php?newid=117764. [↩]

Super-Fast Broadband Via the Sewer System : EcoWorldly:

As is so often the case, simple ideas seem to have manifest benefits and using sewer systems to lay fibre optic cables is a case in point.¹

Pem Charnley, through EcoWorldly, describesthe coastal town of Bournemouth, UK, as the seaside resort where many go to die.  Jack Dee quipps that shop windows are fitted with bi-focals.

Yet, it seems that these oldsters are kicking up their heels, on the Net.  While most of the rest of the U.K. struggles with slower consumer Internet speeds, the citizens of Bournemouth are going full fibre, and their going to do it fast — not buy digging up swathes of countryside.  They’re going to run it through the sewers.

According to SkyNews, more than 88,000 homes and businesses will be able to access the Internet at speeds up to 100Mbps under the scheme, considerably faster than the rates of other UK residents.  H2O, a fibre firm, is funding the project at £30 million.

There are fears that the UK is falling behind the rest of the world when it comes to broadband speeds, with three operators in France offering speeds of between 50 and 100Mbps.²

1. Charnley, Pem. “Super-Fast Broadband Via the Sewer System.” [Weblog EcoWorldly] 11 May 2008. Green Options Media Production. 12 May 2008 http://ecoworldly.com/2008/05/11/super-fast-broadband-via-the-sewer-system/. [↩]
2. “Online Via Sewers: First Town Unveiled.” Sky News 8 May 2008 12 May 2008 http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/0,,30000-1315371,00.html. [↩]

Learning to Change is from the DigitalArts Alliance, of Pearson Foundation, and CoSN. A lot of it, I’d heard, and I continue to be intrigued by Stephen Heppell’s concept of the “Nearly Now!”

But the statement that really struck me was the first one, delivered by Keith Krueger, CEO of CoSN. He said that…

The U.S. Department of Commerce Ranked 55 industry sectors by their level of IT intensiveness. Education was ranked number 55 — below coal mining.

The first thing I want to do, when I hear something like this is to go find it — the source. It didn’t take very long. I added some key words from the statement, and hyphened out some words that were getting in the way, and came up with a PDF, Digital Economy 2002, from the Economics and Statistics Administration (http://esa.doc.gov/). Page 50 features the list of 55 by IT-intensity, ranking by the ratio of individual industry ITEQ/FTE compared to the overall ITEQ/FTE.

ITEQ/FTE = information technology equipment/full-time equivalent (worker)¹

Also among the folks sharing their wisdom in this video are Yong Zhao, Cheryl Lemke, Susan Patrick, Chris Dede, Daniel Pink, Ken Kay, etc.

I worried over this blog post during our drive to the mountains yesterday, thinking about the emotional impact of Krueger’s statement. It delivers, I think, the right message and it does so compellingly. However, as I think about the 54 industries that rank higher than Education Services in their level of technology intensity, I asked my self whether I thought that education should be using more technology (includes machinery) than coal mining. I’m pretty happy, for the sake of those coal miners, that they have sophisticated and powerful technologies to assist them. For the sake of our goals to provide an education that is relevant to our children and their future, it’s probably an effective statement.  But our job is to find and then facilitate the appropriate technologies to help prepare our children for the future they will create.

1. Bergsten, C. Fred. The United States and the World Economy: Foreign Economic Policy for the Next Decade. Peterson Institute, 2005. [↩]

Image from the C|Net article, of a press conference, staged in Second Life last year, by California Democrat George Miller.

It’s SecondLife, and Illinois congressman, Mark Kirk (up for re-election), held a press conference on Tuesday, in front of a library, where he highlighted the “dangers” of the virtual world…. ¹

I’m not surprised. History has shown that this kind of fear-mongering can be quite successful in getting elected. SecondLife is certainly no place for kids, and I do not believe that I have encountered a single school that doesn’t block the service — except where there are well moderated instructional programs in place that utilize the MUSE.

But Kirk’s approach is to protect children from danger by further walling up their classrooms, and I just don’t see the logic, especially when children spend most of their online time at home.

Perhaps Linden Labs should do more to assure that kids stay out-world. MySpace recently announced, with Washington State Attorney General, Rob McKenna, that they would institute new procedures and resources to further protect children while working their social networks. Among the actions, MySpace promises…

…to respond within 72 hours to complaints about inappropriate content and commit more staff and/or resources to review and classify photographs and discussion groups.

In the press release, Attorney General McKenna said,

Every day, around 50,000 sex offenders are on the Internet, lurking in chat rooms and on sites where kids and teens congregate.”²

Does anybody know where he got those numbers?

1. Broache, Anne. “Ban ‘Second Life’ in Schools and Libraries, Republican Congressman Says.” [Weblog NewsBlog] 7 May 2008. C|Net Networks, Inc. 8 May 2008 <http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9937956-7.html>. [↩]
2. Washington State Office of the Attorney General. (14 Jan 2008). Attorney General McKenna announces nationwide agreement with MySpace to protect kids online (18786). Olympia. http://www.atg.wa.gov/pressrelease.aspx?id=18786. [↩]

I’m working on a little AUP project and have been going through various examples, reading things like:

Pagers, laser pointers, cell phones, or other electronic devices not part of the instructional program will not be allowed in school.

Students are not allowed to use, wear, possess or store in their locker: cellular telephones, communication beepers, other electronic communication devices, including all ‘look alikes,’ at school during the regular school day or at school-sponsored events.

The board prohibits possession of laser pointers and attachments, cellular telephones, and telephone paging devices by students on school grounds, on buses and other vehicles provided by the district, and at school-sponsored events.

Then, taking a minute to thumb through the April issue of Technology & Learning Magazine (Welcome Kevin Hogan), I ran across six schools in Brooklyn who have given cell phones to their students — a total of about 2,500. Each phone is preloaded with with 130 minutes of talk time. Students can be rewarded with additional minutes for good behavior, attendance, homework, and test scores.

Teachers are using the phones to send text messages about assignments and upcoming exams. All of this within a school district (New York City Department of Education) that has banned cell-phones and other personal ICTs from schools. [Image¹]

Go for it!

1. Albert. “What’s in my bag? / Que hay en mi mochila?.” Albert!’s Photostream. 30 Jul 2007. 8 May 2008 <http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1394/954372092_04d968917f_m.jpg>. [↩]