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Exactly 2 Cents Worth
3:48 AM
I travel today, and to be honest, I'm kinda looking forward to it. The glamor of airports, tiny coach seats with the back of the seat in front of me too close to my face to even hold a paperback book, and those delicious pretzels. I so savor all seven of them. It still has has the aroma of glamor to this man who was 40 years old the first time he rode in an airplane.
So I'm up early this morning, planning to move some of my web Blogmeister and EPN over to the web server on my laptop, so that I can demonstrate them to my audience of librarians tomorrow in upstate New York, without having to depend totally on a working network. "Assumption is the mother of all screw-ups," I always say.
 Still, I'm spending the first moments of my morning blogging, and today its a news story that was waiting in my aggregator, from The New York Times, A Town's Struggle in the Culture War. At issue is a book, The Buffalo Tree by Adam Rapp, and its removal from the schools. I see this struggle over culture and values in schools as extremely counter productive. While our classrooms languish in the industrial age and much of the rest of the world catches up and passes us by, what brings passion to those who govern education is the brief reading of a passage from the book by a 16-year-old student. Read completely out of context, the delivery still provoked the school board to unanimously vote to ban the book from the High School curriculum less than an hour later. (Two board members were not present.)
Now what's bad about this? Is it the exercise of political power over the curriculum experts -- their teachers? Is it the vast waste of time and effort that the controversy is costing? Is it a right/left thing as the number of challenged books rises 20% after the re-election of George Bush (a connection made by the American Library Association).
What woke me up this morning was the beginning of a new Podcast program, swirling around in my head (that's how ideas start for the A.D.D.). The concept is education as conversation. We traditionally think of education as being the delivery of skills and knowledge, depositing stuff into the heads of our students. What does education look like, if we start think of it as more of a conversation than a delivery?
How might the controversy above play out? Would controversial ideas be considered differently by the community if they thought of their classrooms as places where students consider, evaluate, adopt or reject, and build on knowledge; as opposed to a place where students are taught.
I've not read The Buffalo Tree, so I may be way off target here. But I still think there might be something to thinking about education as conversation. I think you might hear more about this from me, and I'll expect to hear from you.
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June 2nd, 2005 @ 4:30AM |
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5:48 AM
I'm trying to lighten up a bit here at the end of the school year, but my mind keeps getting drawn into these issues. I just looked at my vanity search that I have installed in my aggregator and found that the name of my podcast had been used by Chris Harris, a "Director of a School Library System in Western NY". He laments that he can't listen to my "excellent educational podcast" at school, because all media downloads at Archive.org are blocked. He continues to explain that resources at SourceForge are blocked because they are tagged as games, Google is tagged as a "loophole".
Yesterday, Will Richardson posted another entry about the alleged school newspaper closing in Georgia, referencing Steve Dembo's podcast where he predicted that...
| ...in a couple of years just about every school will have at least one student blogging away on his own time and space about what was going on at the school. |
I jumped in with a comment from my reading (years ago) of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the point being that people/customers are going to network, and as a result are going to know more about what's going on in your school than you do. My point was that information will find a way. Does it do us more good to try to control/block the network, or facilitate it?
Two other comments were posted, both missing my point completely, issuing in on blocks and filters on the school networks. Well it wasn't Bill and Bud who missed the point. It was me. I'm out here, way outside the box. Inside, it comes down to whether you can access that web page in the classroom that you selected at home last night, play that animation or video, access that open source wiki engine.
Bill pointed out that according to a recent survey at his school, less than 20% of students regularly use the technology provided in schools, where more than 80% have access at home, and that in most cases, the performance capabilities at home exceed those of the school computers and networks.
For the sake of protecting our "behinds", are we shoving learning out the doors of our schools?
I know that this is a serious and complex issue that concerns teachers, but also extends far beyond the classroom. It has to do with staffing resources, community sentimentalities, government regulation, and the presence of truly dangerous content on the net. But we must solve this problem and be willing to invest in solving this problem.
Because when the students see their network as a wall between them and information, then that school is no longer being a school. |
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June 1st, 2005 @ 6:18AM |
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5:55 AM
The World is Flat, by Thomas Friedman
Got Game, by John Beck
Oryx and Crate" by Margaret Atwood (well it's not professional development, but all about ethics in science)
La Vida Robot, a WIRED magazine article
I'll add a few more here, and please do comment with other professional readings.
The Tipping Point, by Malcolm Gladwell (keynoted NECC last year)
The Playful World: How Technology is Transforming Our Imagination, by Mark Pesce
As the Future Catches You, by Juan Enrriquez
Free Culture, by Lawrence Lessig
also consider my books:
Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century (2004)
Raw Materials for the Mind: 4th Edition (2005)
Classroom Blogging (2005)
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Media guru Doug Johnson started a thread the other day on WWWEDU, about suggested books for summer reading. The discussion there has centered around professional reading and include those listed to the right.
I thought I would start a similar list here, but with books that are more for enjoyment than professional development. Though I read very slowly, I usually have two or more books going at the same time. So here is my list. Please comment to this weblog any books that you think would be worth the while of educators who are taking a much deserved break.
- Enders Game, by Orson Scott Card (this is a must read, one of the best SciFi books ever)
- Night Fall, Nelson Demile (An excellent read and interesting scenario leading up to 9/11)
- Lost Boys, by Orson Scott Card (not an Enders Game, but the ending knocked my feet right out from under me)
- The Narrows, by Michael Connelly (One of my favorite mystery writers)
- City of Masks & Land of Echoes, Daniel Hecht (I enjoyed both of these mixes of mystery and the supernature and am looking forward to more from Hecht)
 - Pattern Recognition, by William Gibson (not an easy read which is typical Gibson, but possibly my favorite)
- Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand (if you want to fill up the entire summer with one book, this is a very good one -- politics aside)
- The Broker -- by John Grisham (Grisham's getting better and better. I liked the Euro flavor here)
- The Company -- by Robert Littell (I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this story that traces much of the history of the CIA)
- Runaway Jury -- by John Grisham (possibly my favorite book by Grisham, much better than the movie, and I loved the movie)
- Balance of Power -- by Richard North Patterson (Excellent about politics and the gun industry)
- The Lake House -- James Patterson (one of my favorite Patterson books)
I'm going to leave it there. Please do add to this list by commenting on this blog!
4:12 AM
Nancy Barbee, an eastern North Carolina educator posted a comment to yesterday's blog asking for instructions on how to produce a podcast. I responded with an answering comment, but thought I would post it here as well.
 First of all, I believe that one of the reasons why podcasting has caught on so well is that it is so easy to do. It's like so much else regarding technology, it's the content and design that are the hard part. Here is what you need to produce your own podcasts:
- A microphone -- most laptops have them built in (I use a Griffin iTalk attached to my iPod),
- Software -- most folks use Audacity, a free opensource program that can be downloaded from the net and is available for Macs, Windows, and Linux. (I use Audacity and Garageband),
- A place to upload your podcasts -- Archive.org hosts all types of media files for free (I use them), and
- A blog to attach the podcasts to that syndicates in RSS 2.0.
For more details, you can check out a web shelf of links related to podcasting that I keep in my PiNet library. Go to:
http://pinetlibrary.com/links.php?list=118714 |
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May 31st, 2005 @ 5:39AM |
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10:32 AM
This entry was a response that I wrote to the WWWEDU mailing list. The question regarded what school administrators should be learning about blogging.
I think that the real value of blogging, from a management standpoint, is in RSS and the aggregator -- it's the directions in which the communication flows. I'll be participating in an event for a school district in Illinois this summer, exploring exactly how these technologies (blogging, RSS, aggregators, Podcasting, syndicated/subscribed/sent content, etc.) might integrate into the teaching and learning environment. I'm very excited about the possibilities, but in five words, "it hasn't been invented yet!" We are so new into this stuff, that its place in the instructional environment is fuzzy, and its administrative application has barely been thought about.
I recently ran into an Ohio tech-ed leader with whom I've worked, who is working toward integrating RSS and aggregation into the backbone of how they communicate throughout the district. Again, they don't know exactly what that is going to look like, but they plan to have it up and running by the beginning of the school year.
So, hey, make it up ;-)
One interesting thing I learned recently at a Blogger-con was from an employee of a major technology corp, who had given permission to and even encourages all employees to begin blogging (internally) about their work. All blogs are syndicated so that they can be subscribed to by people with an interest. One of the surprises was that rather than workers overwhelmingly subscribing to their boss's blogs, the trend seemed to go in the other direction, aggregation going from bottom to top.
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May 30th, 2005 @ 10:26AM |
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I'd hoped to have this out long before now, but nursing my web sites back to life after a major server crash a few weeks ago, put this project on hold for some time.
 So now,
it is time,
To tell you about a new service of The Landmark Project...
The Education Podcast Network!
Ok, I learned a long time ago that titles that are description and to the point, are much better than clever titles.
EPN is a growing podcast directory that specifically targets education and educational podcast programming. There are three major categories.
- Education Podcasts, which comprise professional issues,
- Student & Class Podcasts, student produced podcast programs, and
- Subject Specific Podcasts, including computer/tech. skills, english language arts, information skills, music ed, etc.
This web site is still under development, but there are enough podcasts already linked for the tool to be useful to educators. Simply click the subcategory (professional), the name of the podcast you wish to (Waste of Bandwidth), and then...
- visit the podcast web site by clicking the program title in the page that appears in the right panel,
- listen to a single program online, by clicking the podcast icon (
 ),
- subscribe to the podcast using the feed address embedded in the RSS chicklet.
Please feel free to suggest any podcasts (click Suggest a Podcast) that you believe will be useful to educators. I'm sure I have missed many obvious ones.
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May 29th, 2005 @ 6:30AM |
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