Change “Music” to “Schools” and…

It’s no secret that the music industry has played hardball with users of filesharing networks. Leaders in the field worked hard to ignore the fact that those who swapped files via BitTorrent were also the greatest purchasers of music. Now it seems that Big Music may be crumbing just like the Berlin Wall. It seems Edgar Bronfman, head of Warner Music has signaled a change of heart:

“We used to fool ourselves,’ he said. “We used to think our content was perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course, consumers won.”

Although I work with many creative and innovative teachers, capital E Education doesn’t seem to get that the last couple years has witnessed a transformation: schools are now islands of resource impoverishment whereas homes, Starbucks and McDonald’s - with their broadband WiFi access - can be a better place for the motivated learner to get on with what they love. A great quotation from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi points toward a better response for Education than fighting to maintain a crumbling status quo:

The claim is that if educators invested a fraction of the energy on stimulating the students' enjoyment of learning that they now spend in trying to transmit information we could achieve much better results. Literacy, numeracy, or indeed any other subject matter will be mastered more readily and more thoroughly when the student becomes able to derive intrinsic rewards from learning. At present, however, lamentably few students would recognize the idea that learning can be enjoyable.

Thus, the abiding truth: although not everyone loves school, the joy of learning is universal. Now is a good time to lead with this strength.

Critical Thinking & YouTube? You Bet!

"Critical thinking" has been part of the buzz for decades. Many have attempted to "teach" critical thinking with step-by-step procedures. Others, like myself, have used constructivist activities like WebQuests as both immersion and scaffolding to prompt and guide critical thinking. Most of the research these days recognizes that success in critical thinking is less a process to teach than a disposition to cultivate. A study we're conducting attempts to foster this disposition through a practice called Thinking Routines, developed by the Visible Thinking group at Harvard's Project Zero. The practice uses the power of repeated routines to make wonder, hypothesis and questioning integral to the daily life of the classroom. Examples are:

SEE-THINK-WONDER

1. What do you see?
2. What do you think about that?
3. What does it make you wonder?

CLAIM-SUPPORT-QUESTION

1. Make a claim about the topic
2. Identify support for your claim
3. Ask a question related to your claim

WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?

1. What’s going on here?
2. What do you see that makes you say that?

In the past I have referred to these activities as "Learning to Look " or "Looking Tasks." They typically require a computer and data projector so that the looking is a shared experience. What's great is that the Web now abounds in rich multimedia resources that can be used to engage Thinking Routines in ways that couple critical thinking with compelling content. Here four of my favorite examples this week:

• Affluenza (Striking down Melbourne adolescents)
• Fence Plowing (YouTube Craze)
• iPhone Guided Tour (especially the section on "Maps")
• Running the Numbers (an American Self Portrait)
  

Ironically, these days YouTube and other rich sites are commonly blocked in schools, so you may need to download a video yourself at home and bring it in to play offline. In case you aren't aware, there are any number of utilities to help you out. The approach I usually use is as follows:

1. Find a cool video at YouTube
2. Copy its Web address, go to YouTube Downloader and paste.
3. "Save the link as" or "download to disk," taking the opportunity to name the file appropriately and change the file extension to .flv .
4. Download a free .flv & .swf video player (Mac / PC) or use something like EasyWMV (Mac / PC) to convert the .flv files into mp4s that you can import to a slide presentation or show with video player software that surely comes pre-installed on your computer.
   

Our current research uses an online personal learning environment called "MyPlace" (MySpace contrast intended ;-) ) to which we regularly feed Thinking Routines related to the social and environmental changes people expect will shape our children's lives. You are all invited to use and share these activities. The latest one is a three minute presentation from the TED conference that raises the question, "Does Globalization have to mean adopting an unhealthy diet?" Take a look and feel free to comment.

Clipmarks - skim the best from blogs

You might not think we need an easier way to access information these days -- what with cool RSS feed readers like Pageflakes -- but how often do you really "read the feeds?" If it's not as often as you'd like, join the club (and congratulations on "having a life!").

Welcome to Clipmarks. Besides having a slick Web 2.0 interface, Clipmarks is like a combination of Deli.cio.us and Digg. In less Web 2 teminology, Clipmarks allows users to grab snippets clipped from the news or blogs and catalog them like a social bookmarking site. Like Digg, you can "Pop" others' clipmarks to raise them to reach more peoples' attention.

If you want to quickly explore the tool, here are two suggestions

1. Clip on Today's Top Clips to see what's popping to the top. Because this is a "real" Web site, there's no guarantee that the clips will be appropriate.
2. Use the Search field to access quick takes on subjects like "Climate Change," nanotech," or "outsourcing." You could go one step farther and ask students to skim results like these and formulate an opinion (or blog post) on the subject. Because a range of opinions and sources appear, synthesis is required over copy and paste.
   

If you want to get started adding your own clipped sections of the Web to Clipmarks, download the Firefox (or Explorer) extension.

Please let us know what you think.
Thanks,
Tom

The 'i's" Have it!

Some people call them "Webtops," others "start pages" and still more "personal homepages." The latter is what Google called its until last week when it officially launched "iGoogle ."

Let's begin with a (very) little Web 2.0 mumbo-jumbo jargon: RSS, AJAX and Y-O-U.

RSS
Most know RSS as "Really Simple Syndication" and fellow Infinite Thinking Machine blogger Mark Wagner has written a great intro on the subject of RSS. Suffice it to say that RSS feeds the latest content from news sources and blogs directly to you. Many of us use Bloglines as a feedreader but this requires a separate browser window with log-in. Wouldn't it be cool if you could simply surf your RSS feeds right from the place you do most of your online work? Hold that thought until we chat about...

AJAX
"AJAX" stands for "Asynchronous JavaScript and XML" which can be translated as "hunh?" Let's just say that two cool bits (JavaScript and XML) have combined to make what can happen in a Web browser much more interactive and powerful. To quickly "get" this, try to remember life before Google Maps. To navigate beyond the edge of the current map or to zoom in or out on a location, you had to wait for the next image to reload. Wasn't it amazing the first time you could simply drag or scroll across the map and have it happen immediately? This is thanks to AJAX. To get a feel, take these for a quick spin:

• ZohoWriter
• Grazr
• Periodic Table
  

Y-O-U
No, this isn't some Web 2 nomenclature, it's "you!" What iGoogle and its many brethren do is combine RSS feeds into very slick interfaces that bring YOU everything you love. Go ahead, them a try:

• iGoogle
• Netvibes
• Pageflakes

Now let's take these great applications and integrate them into the classroom to create what I see as the next revolution in supporting Real, Rich and Relevant learning. Anyone who has seen one of my presentations in the last ten years is likely to have heard me heap praise on the Child Slave Labor News Web site. For over a decade Miss Fantina's students have posted their exposés of multinationals' mistreatment of children in the workforce. A Google search on the key words "child slave labor" will show you how much the world appreciates these students' efforts. Because they finally launched their own site after years on geocities, you'll see that the top three results point to the efforts of these New Jersey high school students. What if every class chose a topic and made it their own? If this interests you, read Why ClassAct Portals? How could students easily begin building expertise on their chosen subject? How could we facilitate this growing knowledgebase? How about a Webtop, startpage or personal homepage?

Here's a quick shared page of RSS feeds I made for our MyPlace Project using PageFlakes. The best thing about iGoogle and Pageflakes is that both are very smart applications that you and your students will really have fun using. Now, connect these RSS AJAX pages to your Class Blog and...

Big Brother or "Big Mother"

A few years ago Coca-Cola ran a promotion called "The Unexpected Summer." In it a combo cellphone GPS device was rigged to look like a can of Coke and placed in over a hundred 12-packs around the country. A companion Web site allowed people to watch the blips as satellites tracked the lucky winners within 50 feet of anywhere the US.

Recently a few news items reminded me of this and the role of technology in keeping track of our whereabouts. Hitachi has developed a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) "powder." The chip measures .05 millimeters square and 5 microns thick, about the size of a grain of sand. Another interesting development in the world of RFID was a patent taken out in February by Kodak for an edible RFID chip. Among other potential uses is for nurses to know if you've taken your medicine.

Less invasive might be the GPS sneakers now on sale from Isaac Daniel. The sneakers work when the wearer presses a button on the shoe to activate the GPS. In some emergencies -- such as lost child or Alzheimer's patient -- a parent, spouse or guardian can call the monitoring service, and operators can activate the GPS remotely.

We could add to this list the cell phone services and GPS car units designed to let parents know where their children are - out of harms way, one hopes. What will be very interesting as these technological developments continue is who monitors them and for what purpose.

In 1984, Orwell invoked a Fascist "Big Brother," representing the power and interests of the state. In "Big Brother - the TV series," a house and voyeuristic citizens take the role of omniscient observer of our every move. As Web 2.0 technologies converge with mobile communications, multi-nationals and corporate marketers anticipate the day when our physical location and long tail of previous purchases unite in an endless stream of opportunities to "impulse buy."

Stopping this movement isn't within our means. What might be - for those of us who are parents and teachers - is to advocate and champion a human side to this potential. In other words, demand educational applications that side-step Big Brother in favor of "Big Mother."

• We know what people surf for, but do we have an algorithm to help us match students' learning to their interests?
• Databases keep track of what we buy online, but can teachers access a similar tool that provides information about an individual's knowledge, skills and attitudes?
• Social networking sites match us up with thousands of "friends," but can the software also help us reflect on the wisdom of our choices?

2006's Top 5 Interesting Bits for School 2.0

G'Day fellow Year-End Revellers,

In the spirit of re-capping 2006, I'm weighing in with quirky twists that I think portend the end of "school-as-we-know-it." Certainly the biggest story of 2006 is the emergence of Web 2.0 (audio discussion) and the flourishing that followed Tim O'Reilly's What Is Web 2.0.

But I like to get a feel for the littler moments within the grander sweep to sense which way the wind might be blowing for education. With that in mind here are my top five interesting bits for 2006.

1) Early in the year the Wikipedia vs. Britannica battles began. The skirmish was well-documented with a little fudging room on either side of the debate, but the key point for me was not the 162 versus 123 flaws in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively, but that within a week, Wikipedia's errors had been corrected. How long before the next edition of EB?

2) Biting the hand that feeds them... When a UK security firm discovered a high frequency tone that drove away teen-aged loiterers, the teens turned the annoying sound into the Mosquitone, a ringtone that only youths can hear. When asked what schools should do about the scenario of kids phones going off in class and teachers not being able to hear it, one said, "hire more young teachers." Ouch, but true?

3) Corruption as a sign of maturity... Most commentators are anointing You Tube as the big story of 2006. I'd point to a sign of its maturity even within its short lifetime. As Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth gained traction world-wide, a PR firm working for energy producers got caught when they used YouTube for “Astro Turf”, the false presentation of what appears to be a "grassroots" up-rising. To me this is just one more padlock on the gates of the Factory School. Inquiry always trumps "information."

4) Mashup as Art... Another popular sensation this year has been the emergence of Mashups. The most well-known examples often include Google Maps and other databases (wikis, classified ads, etc.). One that is close to my sensibility is Jonathan Coulton’s “Flickr”, a song that seems to begin like any other alternative folk song and then morphs into a post-modern collage of images drawn from people's Flickr galleries. Here's the kicker for education: what grade would you give this song if a student turned it in?


5) The New WWW & addiction... Finally, I've been predicting / watching the development of new forms of addiction as we enter into an era of the New WWW (Whatever, Whenever, Wherever). An archetypal example this year wasn't when a hardcore World of Warcraft leader abdicated, but the 234 pages of heart-wrenching comments that followed the post. No wonder some call it “World of WarCrack”. Our task isn't to bemoan, but to model what it means to be happily human. Not always easy, is it?

That's it for me. I hope you all have a great holiday season and a terrific 2007.

Tom

Taking the School Out of Learning

G'Day,

I've written and thought a lot about "School" and "Learning" over the years. A recent article from the UK's Times Online serves as just one more example of the clash between assembly line schooling and digital learning. Here we have the typical "Hacker" versus "The Establishment" confrontation (jamming phone signals to prevent cheating on national exams).

I suggest we're in a transition between schools modeled on factories and the personal learning available through the Web and social networking / Web 2.0 applications. With the Web came easy plagiarism, then came Turnitin.com. With "Web 2.0" came Wikipedia, RSS feeds & podcasts. How does education respond? Monitor student mouse-clicks or do something radical like change homework assignments? A bit too snide, sorry about that.

But the point is clear: when do we stop putting energy into the "Clamp-down" and invest it in the "Ramp-Up?" You might guess I have a lot of opinions about this, but here's a quick quotation for an article currently in press. It suggests considering the "open source community" as a model for schools in place of the top-down, factory model:

Although the contrasts are many, the most significant demands stating at the outset: an open source community is built on the premise that people want to create and contribute and that they can be trusted. With this foundation of trust, good things emerge. Shouldn’t education expect the best from people, as a matter of efficiency, if not out of principle?

I'd love to see what people think. As digital technologies undermine the "one-size-fits-all" approach, what aspects of "schooling" can we leave behind as rust-belt remnants, artifacts related to the logistics of a mass production model, not pedagogy, cognition or human development? And what elements do we need to add to make personal learning scale?


Please add your comments to this post.


Cheers, Tom

Consider the Simple English Wikipedia

G'Day all,

Wikipedia has certainly altered the world in the last few years. It seems people have a love / hate relationship with the upstart encyclopedia. I'm not going to try to change anyone's mind, but to point to a few sites that contribute to the discussion and then share an activity.

Background & Reading

• Two great articles: from The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.
• The hullaballoo fom Nature magazine.com: Internet encyclopaedias go head to head, including the list of the peer-reviewed encyclopedia entries revealing 162 and 123 flaws in Wikipedia and Britannica, respectively.
• Some fun - Colbert has a go at “Wikiality” and Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence from The Onion

Class Activity for Middle - High School
Of course everyone knows about the main Wikipedia site. It's the one that always comes up in Google when you search for just about anything these days. Most people also know that Wikipedia is translated into heaps of different languages (see the bottom of this page).

What a lot of people don't know about is the Simple English Wikipedia. Designed for people with different needs: students, children, and adults with learning difficulties or of limited English ability. Take a look at some sample topics with links to both the regular Wikipedia and the same topic in the Simple English version:

• Steve Irwin in Wikipedia & in the Simple English Wikipedia
• Thanksgiving in Wikipedia & in the Simple English Wikipedia
• Culture in Wikipedia & in the Simple English Wikipedia
  

The clever viewer will notice that the only difference in the Web addresses is "en" or "simple" as the sub-domain (the first bit of the URL). So here are two ideas:

1. When studying a topic, either model or have students compare the "en" and "simple" pages. This is a good way to represent the range of learning possible on the topic. Also, reading the Simple version can help students set up their cognitive schema, to see the "big picture" of the subject, before getting into the details.
2. The real problem - as I see it- with Wikipedia is that students and schools largely see it as a source to learn from, not a knowledgebase to add to. How about having your students contribute to the Simple English Wikipedia? Simplifying a complex topic can be a good exercise. Especially when trying to stick to the Basic English. Why not give it a go?

Carbon Trading in Wikipedia & you can create it in Simple English Wikipedia

Stumble Upon

G'Day,

I've made the case that the shift of getting broadband speeds through our phones will change WWW from "World Wide Web" to "Whatever, Whenever, Wherever" because if we're into music, video, gaming, gambling, chatting, buying, trading, etc. we'll get access to whatever we want wherever and whenever. Neil Postman's title then comes immediately to mind, what's to stop us from "amusing ourselves to death?" This has been one of my soapboxes for a couple years - especially as it relates to children whom I believe are even more vulnerable than we are (because they know that getting what they want will make then happy ;-).

Now I have to change tact. A couple days ago, I downloaded the new version of Firefox and checked out a few of the extensions. You have to give Stumble Upon a try. Follow the directions on the last link and you'll get a new browser toolbar installed that looks something like this:

Do the registration thing and start clicking on the "Stumble!" button. This little browser extension is like PopUrls, Delicious, MySpace, YouTube, Messenger, etc. rolled into one ridiculously easy and fun interface.

Remember how cool Random URL was in the early days of the Web? Tripping over to some other country with the click of a button, not knowing what you'd come across. Now warp that early experience with the social networking and AJAX applications of Web 2.0.

So I have to revise my use of Postman. We now face a greater threat to actually getting any work or learning done. We could spend the rest of our lives "intriguing ourselves to death."

Let us know what you think. To whet your appetite, here are a couple sites I stumbled upon: Drawtoy and Transparent Screens.

Gallant 2006 Update: Jawed Karim

G'Day folks,

Those of you in the US might remember a magazine that all dentists seemed to have in their waiting rooms: Highlights for Children. A popular feature of this was the Goofus and Gallant cartoon where two boys were used to illustrate basic good behavior ("At the department store, Goofus runs on the escalator" while "Gallant stands still on the escalator as it goes up to the second floor." - see the cartoon).

One of the things I sometimes do during keynotes is engage the audience by pondering who today's "Gallants" might be. I like to nominate Matt Mullenweg (of Wordpress) and Blake Ross (Firefox), both apparently nice guys and in their very early 20s. The past few days, the blogs and media have been abuzz with another: Jawed Karim. Mr. Karim is the third member of the YouTube team celebrating their company's aquisition for $1.65 Billion. What's really nice about Mr. Karim - from a teacher's perspective - is that after doing the part of the Tech start-up process that he enjoys, he opted not to work for YouTube, but to pursue a Masters degree at Stanford University. Mr. Karim describes himself as:

a nerd who gets excited about learning.

"Good on him," as we say down here in Australia. The son of a Bangladeshi father and German mother, Karim displays the quiet confidence and unshakeable values that make a true Gallant.

As technology empowers learners, those who are self-motivated can achieve extraordinary dreams. One thing that most Gallants of 2006 have in common is that they take time out from their formal schooling to pursue these dreams. Isn't that interesting... I suggest that the opting out of formal education has more to do with assembly line learning approaches than it does with technologically impoverished learning environments. What do you think?

Filamentality - the educators' online friend

G'day all,

'Though old news to some, a site that's helpful to teachers is Filamentality. The goofy name is a made up word that combines the "filaments" of the Web with the "mentality" of thinking, thus a tool for making thinking applications from the Web. The reason I mention it is that when you want to find useful Internet links, the first place to go isn't always Google (although I always end up going there eventually). If you're looking for links on a subject that another educator might have already thought of, chances are you'll find something quickly at Filamentality. Let's try some examples:

How about some links on Global Warming? or World War I? or even Web 2.0?

Each of the above lists was found in less than one minute. Are they the best links known to the universe on their topics? Are they totally free from Link Rot? Are they absolutely "spot-on" for your students' reading level? Of course not, not, not. But as one busy educator to another, wouldn't you rather get a hand from a mate than start from scratch?

Go ahead, try it yourself, use the text field below to type in a search term, then hit enter/return. (hint: the more basic, less boolean the keywords, the better).

How did you go? To best succeed, look for files larger than 4 KB and with a fairly recent timestamp. Hotlists are lists of links whereas WebQuests and Samplers are Web-based learning activities.

My experience is that Filamentality is a good first place to go to quickly find links because another educator has already put in time compiling them. If I'm gathering links for a WebQuest, then I'll spend more time to get really great sites - ones that have that "only on the Web" quality. But in the day-to-day of classroom / library learning, sometimes just getting students pointed in the right direction is a help. See what you think.

Cheers, Tom --