Yet another major launch has occurred in the area of educational video and this time it's intended for free educative content in the form of online lectures to citizens of local communities and beyond.
PBS, NPR and WGBH have announced the launch of the redesigned Forum Network (forum-network.org), a national digital media lecture service and website. As they state in their press release about it, "Public stations across the country are working in collaboration with local mission-driven community organizations, and cultural and educational institutions to produce free online lectures that educate, inform and engage people in ideas, cultural diversity, and compelling issues of our time."
Describing the content they state, "The updated Forum Network site features thousands of high quality lecture videos and audio downloads by some of the world’s leading thinkers, scientists, policymakers, artists, authors, and community leaders. It incorporates social networking elements that enable audiences to exchange ideas and content through time-coded commenting, discussion threads, media rating, and sharing tools. Closed Captioning, transcripts, and slides are also available for select videos on the Forum Network."
Laudable effort and I'm a sucker for this stuff. In fact, there is so much free, substantive and amazing educational content available on the 'net right now that I could easily spend eight hours a day doing nothing but watching internet video and listening to great podcasts.
Here's a prime example of content I'm interested in (as you should be as an educator) and has several key thought leaders in one venue, hosted by New York Times personal technology columnist David Pogue, who takes a look at how reading and books will be experienced in the future. Steve Haber of Sony, Neil Jones of Interead, and Mary Lou Jepsen, founder of Pixel Qi, showcase new technology. Digital librarian Brewster Kahle and Jon Orwant of Google add a big picture perspective on how digitization may change everything. This session also features a musical interlude by Pogue.
In a past leadership role I hired a smart young man fresh out of law school for a key position. During various discussions about his experiences there, we went off on a tangent about the rigors of study and the sorts of things he went through to stay near the top of his class, keep his young marriage alive, and work a part time job.
Much to my surprise he told me, "I couldn't have done it without Ritalin. None of us could."
I consider myself to be pretty savvy about what's going on with each generation, but it wasn't until this particular conversation several years ago that I woke up to the realities of "mind hacking" and its pervasiveness in the halls of academia. He honestly saw zero difference in using a methylphenidate to enhance his cognitive function than if he'd been downing a pot of coffee at 10pm at night.
Ethical questions about fair play abounds due to steroid use and blood doping in professional sports to controversies over prosthetic limbs and whether these "modified" humans should be allowed to compete with "non-augmented" athletes. Perhaps it's because these body modifications are visually obvious -- and mind hacks are not -- that it is seen by many as easier to make a judgement call about whether they should be "allowed" in a given sport or profession.
But what if enhancements end up being invisible? What would you do if you were competing with someone for a job who was enhancing their cognitive function with neuropharmaceuticals and you had no idea? Or what if there was a new technology which enabled you to connect to the internet and, with only "thought searches," were able to have results instantly displayed as fast as you could think about them?
Huge questions with no easy answers and, depending on the grade level, ones that should be explored now in order to prepare those who will be directly confronting these (and many other) mind and body enhancement technologies and will need to decide on their use.
How you and I interact with technology all comes down to the user interface. Whether it's the knobs on a car radio to a website interface and even how the icons on a mobile phone are arranged, the usability, approachability and our ability to be productive all comes down to the thought and care that went in to the design of the that user interface.
Every choice you make with your communications in your website, blog, email, presentations, and even printed materials, all comes down to how approachable you make it. If design, layout and user interface didn't matter, I often joke that we'd all be reading our newspapers and magazines on white paper with 12 point Geneva font and no columns, graphics or photos.
When I went to work for a manufacturer's rep group in 1981 at the "dawn of the personal computer age," as many marketers so aptly put it just a few years later, computers were operated with typed in commands and I remember being incredibly frustrated with the need to memorize obscure command sets just to get some work done.
Then the upstart computer company we sold for, Apple Computer, introduced a $9,995 business computer called the Lisa in 1983 (which, by the way, would cost >$21,000 in today's dollars). Told by our systems engineer (Doug) to, "No matter what Borsch, do NOT touch it since I've got it set up perfectly," I couldn't resist and snuck in to the training room after everyone else had gone home.
Doug had given me a five minute walk-through of how Lisa operated and I was confident I could put things back and not break it. I moved this thingy called a "mouse" and did what he'd done: double-clicked to open the word processor LisaWrite and proceeded to type a short paragraph which I then printed by going to "File > Print" and it printed. I then "Saved" the document in to a "Folder" on the "Desktop" and later "Trashed" it and it all worked!
Light bulbs burst forth over my head, glowing brightly, and I remember sitting there in the darkened training room thinking, "Oh my God. This thing Doug called a "user interface" is going to change how we all use computers" and boy did it ever as well as setting me on multi-decade path to understand world-class user interface design and leading thoughts on the matter.
I can see the future of TV and it's internet delivered. The promise of global, on-demand access to video content means that every one of us, and specifically every classroom teacher, will be able to call up and show virtually any video desired and instantly augment whatever is being taught.
Case in point: as a lay student of physics, I've always been fascinated by physicists focused on the quantum realm and often find myself laboring over passages in their books trying to fully understand concepts being laid out. Finally feeling confident in my understanding of the potential implications of the double slit experiment, I was explaining it to my sophomore son who said, "Dad, I know that since we watched a Dr. Quantum video that explains it."
He then explained the concept and subsequently showed me the animated video on YouTube and I was stunned how, in five minutes, the concept was explained so well that even I, someone who'd thought he fully understood it for many years, reset my own understanding of this concept and subsequent explanations!
It's hard not to take for granted the rapidly increasing innovations in internet TV coming to market, but even I am surprised by how quickly the internet TV space is changing. I'm closely watching internet TV technologies and business models since video delivered on-demand in this way holds major promise for education and the future of learning.
Having guidelines and rules for public dissemination of information, photographs, video and even text is something every organization needs to do in some fashion. But if the obstacles you put in place for self-publishing and communication are so formidable, the normal human reaction is to do nothing or the resulting content is so bland and vanilla that no one consumes it, and I'm afraid that the latter is most often the case in the K-12 websites and external communications I, and others I know, have reviewed.
In the spring of this year I took several hours over multiple weeks to review the websites of the top 100 school districts. After having reviewed thousands of "Web 2.0" sites over the last 3+ years, I've developed a keen sense of what it takes to deliver a robust, easy to navigate, and communicative website that's intuitive and simple to use, and wanted to see what they looked like and offered.
For the most part, most of these districts delivered content well and with good navigation. What I was stunned by was the lack of any conversational tone in the writing or of the use of blogs as any kind of primary communication mechanism. If the latter was available (and a few sites did link to blogs) in every case I found the link I clicked jumped out to a Blogger, Wordpress.com or Edublogs hosted blog. They were not integrated within the site itself which, of course, says two things to me:
1) Blogs are not important enough to be integrated in to the website or core to district communication
2) These districts are still rooted in yesterday's communication paradigm: anything published has to be vetted, well scrubbed, and delivered in a mostly static way.
In conversations I've had with district operational and instructional technology leaders, the one thing that pops out over and over again is the necessity to limit and severely restrict the ability for teachers and staff to self-publish.
The private sector has already dealt with that problem and is well past that paradigm and on a way to a new one: trust in employees coupled with an absolute minimum amount of guidelines, rules or regulations.
One refrain runs through every single discussion I have with teachers in K-12: "I just can't keep up with all the changes and introductions in technology." Sound familiar?
Guess what? Neither can I and I pride myself on knowing 10x more than most people my age (53 years old). Since my level of tech savvy allows me to straddle generations and have one foot in the Millenials (i.e., Generation "Y") camp and the other in a camp that demands an executive-business level and strategic perspective, I'm constantly iterating my technology knowledge and skills but truly feel like I'm metaphorically drinking from the firehose of information in order to do so.
It's far too much effort.
So how do I keep up? By connecting and collaborating with people I know who are considerably more experienced in a technology category than I am. Sometimes it's a direct asking for information and occasionally I just read their blog or listen to their podcast. Usually much more learning occurs in a discussion about some area which I seem to understand but don't yet feel competent about such as, "How do you deliver ecommerce in your Wordpress installation?" and I listen, learn, ask questions another way and learn some more.
How do you teach teachers tech? Leave it up to them to figure out? Host classroom sessions or encourage them to attend technology in-service workshops? Or perhaps you have a district-wide teach-the-teacher technology coaching initiative?
Apple has found that one-to-one personal teaching (or coaching) is most effective and they sell a $99/year One to One program so people can learn whatever they're interested in or are trying to accomplish on their computers. It's effective, minimizes Apple's need for theater-style seating in the Apple Stores, but one-on-one doesn't scale with faculty sizes enjoyed by most districts.
I have, however, seen several models of teaching teachers technology skills and have settled on a perspective of a best-practice that has emerged: a combination of classroom-style overviews with either a set number of staff just for teacher technology learning or an ongoing and formalized cooperative learning model (as either an adjunct to the classroom training or as standalone and ongoing group assistance). Though one-on-one support is preferred by teachers, it doesn't scale and collaborative learning seems to be the one that enables the quickest path to mastery and, surprisingly, sparks innovative thinking as teachers collectively discover technologies (or their use) that makes a meaningful impact on student outcomes, budget pressures and personal satisfaction.
Especially since technology as a category is changing faster than any other.
Fortunately in every school system I've been in there are an increasing number of tech-savvy teachers who have developed a competency or mastery in a given technology or approach. The sad part is few of them are formally engaged in collaborative learning activities or groups (ad hoc and informal is the norm. Formally collaborating -- with systemic infrastructure to support it like open source software for collaboration -- can be a strong positive for those savvy teachers as well as for the teachers who have not yet learned a specific technology or approach.
Tools abound from collaborative and internal blogs or forums (e.g., phpBB), to Yammer which allows teachers to ask a question, the person answering to do so when he/she is able, and it's trivial to do a quick screenshot or tell someone what to do next when time allows. The point is to be a catalyst for methods that will motivate teachers to become more collaborative as it pertains to learning technology.
Every now-and-then a video comes along that touches me. Not in an emotional way, but in the sense that the message is so right, the focus so clear and the need being discussed so great, that I'm compelled to share it with others. Since you're in the education camp who would find it compelling to know the need Google sees for the types of people they (and, frankly, the world) needs going forward, might spark thoughts about how you nurture budding computer scientists.
Google is all about scale or, as they term it, "internet scale". While many of us tease them in posts about how "my Grandma could design web graphics better than Google", when they deliver a technology it's used by tens of millions of people and has to massively scale from the get-go. The scope of the problems they're trying to solve are so huge, that the sorts of big thinkers and educated technologists they'll need in the future is clearly driving them to take action now.
Though you clearly need to focus on the foundational elements of educating students in science and math, I would argue that discovering and sparking their passion about the future is right alongside it. Are you doing enough to show your students the sort of technologically saturated world they'll inherit? The trends in the web, social media, computing, mobile, and virtual worlds that they'll be living in but at an internet scale?
If not, you should be since that is where the job, lifelong learning and human connection opportunities will be when they leave college or enter the working world and there are some great thoughts and information in this video:
This presentation is delivered by Maggie Johnson, Google Director of Education and University Relations, and was given at the NSF Computer Science Education Leadership Summit.
Microsoft's web browser, Internet Explorer 6, is today's equivalent of relying on rotary dial telephones for your telecommunication needs but with one key exception: those old rotary dial phones (though a bit slow in dialing) still work just fine for making phone calls, but just try responding to an interactive voice response system that says, "To listen to your voicemail, please press 1" with that rotary dial.
IE6 kinda, sorta works for today's web in much that same way. Introduced on August 27, 2001 -- ancient history in the rapidly changing and accelerating world wide web -- it was the default browser included in most deliveries of Windows XP, an operating system still in use by the lion's share of Windows desktops globally.
The problem is that IE6 doesn't adhere to modern web standards. Using this browser, now more than eight years old (and for perspective it came out weeks before 9/11 and before the first iPod shipped) means that your teachers and staff are using a tool akin to your delivering a district, school or teacher communication website or portal like this one called the most amazing website on the internet.
Unless your I.T. staff has been diligent, IE6 is also not secure. Using it means you can't view the image standard for the web (what many argue, including me, is the best) called Portable Network Graphics (PNG) or "ping" images, since these are rapidly becoming the most widely used types on websites due to their capability of having transparent backgrounds, better clarity than a JPG image, and typically a much smaller filesize than alternatives.
IE6 doesn't handle Cascading Style Sheets well (CSS is the code that tells the browser how to render a webpage MUCH more efficiently than with huge graphics and cumbersome table layouts). Also, many of the attributes in CSS that make a web developer or designers life simple and easy when creating your websites or web assets isn't supported by IE6 so these folks have to do a bunch of workarounds to make sure that IE6 can still render a page as intended.
In fact, there are so many web designers, developers, thought leaders, and frustrated website creators who HATE the IE6 browser and all of its shortcomings -- and that so many organizations and individuals are STILL using it -- that an internet meme has emerged around the rallying cry that IE 6 Must Die!
Profound changes always bring with them differing perspectives on their impact and whether the new is the enemy of the old or simply something different. The explosion in the use of social networking, social media, mobile phones and smartphones, online gaming and more, has seen no shortage of people offering up differing perspectives on whether these changes are positive or negative, and the only shortage has seemed to be a lack of solid research and good data.
I've witnessed, and been engaged in, vigorous debates about whether the "always on, always connected" lifestyle is driving those who use these online social services toward a life that isolates them from others. Those in the Luddite camp lament the loss of in-person connections while those holding progressive views see technologies as simply augmenting and enhancing human relationships in ways never before possible.
What if the reality showed that our use of mobile phones and the internet is increasing our social connections and engagement with other people?
The Pew Internet & American Life Project just released a study which finds that, "...Americans are not as isolated as has been previously reported. People’s use of the mobile phone and the internet is associated with larger and more diverse discussion networks. And, when we examine people’s full personal network – their strong and weak ties – internet use in general and use of social networking services such as Facebook in particular are associated with more diverse social networks."
This report (PDF) is filled with nuggets to satisfy the Luddites and hand-wringers such as, "In-person contact remains the dominant means of communication with core network members. On average, there is face‐to‐face contact with each tie on 210 out of 365 days per year" or for the progressive among us "Social media activities are associated with several beneficial social activities, including having discussion networks that are more likely to contain people from different backgrounds. For instance, frequent internet users, and those who maintain a blog are much more likely to confide in someone who is of another race. Those who share photos online are more likely to report that they discuss important matters with someone who is a member of another political party."
It's worth a read to help you deepen your understanding about the accelerating change toward social engagement online and what it means for those whom you're teaching and preparing for a connected and lifelong learning life.
How to budget for computers is always an issue for districts and it doesn't help when there are critical applications you need to run for various tasks (or for teaching) and these applications require a Windows, Mac or Linux operating system and you're using, or have access to, only one of them.
Most districts choose a computer operating system direction and put on blinders when it comes to advances down a different path. It makes perfect sense since you have to maximize your budget expenditures, but you're limiting student experiences and fluency when it comes to interacting with the breadth and depth of applications running on multiple operating systems.
But what if you could choose a path that would provide you with both maximum flexibility and some amazing replication and backup strategies?
You can do both with virtual machine software and I'd like to give you a perspective on using them that has little to do with any sort of "religious" or "fanboy" point of view, but rather looks at virtual machine use in as pragmatic a way as possible.
This post today was sparked by the release of a virtual machine software I've used for quite some time, Parallels, and their new version 5.0 and you'll see why using something like this is a great way to maximize your lab infrastructure and quite possibly in select media center, teacher or staff areas.
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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in Accelerating Change are strictly those of the author and do not reflect the opinions or endorsement of Scholastic, Inc.
