Evolution or Devolution?

Some random thoughts and links that I want to return to later, and maybe you will too!
I find it ironic that I am getting the most efficient updates on the newer media from one of the oldest, newpapers.
Case in point: the Kindle, an e-book reader. The Wall Street Journal (4 December 2008) reported that Kindles are sold out again this holiday season as an "it" gift. According to the article, e-book sales of 80 participating publishers in September rose 77.8% from a year earlier. This has some interesting long-range implications for education. The Kindle's adaptability includes adjustment of type size (perfect for the vision-impaired). Other wireless e-book devices are also in the works.
While the MPS and other districts still do not authorize the site use of You Tube, clip surfing is getting more sophisticated by the day, and we educators cannot keep up. Now, companies like VideoSurf (test version @ http://www.videosurf.com/) and Digitalsmiths allow viewers to quickly find favorite scenes with a panel of thumbnails. A kind of popular Cliff's notes for the digital age. And we thought students' attention spans were bad before!
What kind of challenge will this be for educators who want to help students develop enough concentration to examine sustained narratives in literature or history without benefit of preconceived imagery? Who does the editing and for what audience? How do we keep up?
The weekly New York Times magazine feature on newer media, "The Medium," offers advice on staying mentally flexible, and recommends the following sites to explore: http://www.newser.org/ (allows setting news preferences from serious to fluff, and one that is very promising to educators, http://www.newsworldmap.com/ from Google, which shows news breaking out all over the globe--a potential bonanza for World Language teachers. I've already posted this link on my Webpage.
There is also what the columnist terms a "brilliant" experiment in reporting breaking news at http://www.livenewscameras.com/. All worth a few minutes of time.
Now, if I can just find a block of time to set up my Spanish language-learning Wiki!

Brain Scans or Scatterbrains?

Dr. Gary Small of UCLA has been in the news quite a bit regarding his studies on impact of technology use on brain patterns. In another life, I might have become a neurologist, (if only I had had physics with a teacher like John Rozeboom before I left high school!). Small has a website with many different articles. His latest work suggests young people who spend inordinate amounts of time interacting with technology rather than humans may alter their ability to relate well to others. (Many educators have already amassed lots of anecdotal evidence of that!). On the other hand, older people may benefit from the mental stimulation of Internet use (I am living proof). Here is the link: http://www.drgarysmall.com/newsappears.htm#news.

Viva el Wiki ("Cosa 6")

Establishing a PBWiki is not an "Impossible Dream" worthy of Don Quixote--it is surprisingly easy, as I discovered today. The hard part appears to be making it interesting and managing it well. That is the next phase for my Wiki, "hispanismo" and I welcome ideas from any and all readers.
My goal is have student contributors both create and edit content on topics related to Spanish study, especially topics of value to AP Spanish students. Any ideas for refining this concept?
A student contributed a link for a Wiki site for statewide debate that may be of interest to you: http://wiki.debatecoaches.org/index.php?title=Main_Page. I plan to try and model my Wiki on this.

Gagged by Google?

In a previous post (October 29), I mentioned my concerns about the content editing of search engines, especially Google's. Here is another take on the recent censorship of You Tube (owned by Google) sites that were deemed offensive to Turkish government authorities: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/magazine/30google-t.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Google&st=cse
Near the end of the article, the author quotes Internet scholar Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School: "If your whole game is to increase market share, it's hard to do good, and to gather data in ways that don't raise privacy concerns or that might help repressive governments to block controversial content."
This would make a great topic for social studies / economics teachers to explore at the high school level, and is even more appropriate to college courses on business ethics. How quickly idealism and transparency can be thwarted!

It Just Keeps Getting Better...(Thing 6)

Now, we may no longer have to search alone--there is a new collaborative tool for group searching, "Search Together." It has features such as a drop-down menu to see (con)current collaborators, and enables a group's members to work together online simultaneously. Another great feature for the average person is allowing users to save their results to share with others in the future.

Rather than recapitulate the recent New York Times article (Sunday, November 23, 2008) where I first learned about this, I suggest that that you take a look for yourself: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/business/23novelties.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=The%20Online%20Search%20Party&st=cse. "Search Together," is in a free test version at http://research.microsoft.com/searchtogether. I am going to try and think of an application that my students could use. The only potential catch is that it is designed to work within the Internet Explorer 7 browser, so that may be an issue for some users. Talk about productivity plus! Now, it's time to get back to the real world of student projects.

I have succeeded in creating an iGoogle home page that I enjoy for personal communications but prefer to maintain my current school webpage and email for professional communications. In many other countries, especially those in Europe and Latin America, people prefer some degree of separation between work and personal life. That is an approach that has served me well. North Americans tend to conflate jobs and personal identity. My job is what I do, not who I am.

Google docs may eventually help to improve my productivity--it would be ideal if I only taught two classes a day and had time to play around with it to the extent that I would like. I plan to create a Spanish-language wiki in the near future to encourage communication among students and between students and me. I think that it would encourage a degree of candor and greater freedom to share ideas at one's convenience, rather than in a context governed by schoool schedules.

Into the Stacks (Thing 5)

How could anyone who values the pursuit of knowledge not love conventional libraries? They are far more than dusty repositories. Here is a wonderful link for a student poem about libraries and what they can mean to our students:

http://poetryforchildren.blogspot.com/2006_10_01_archive.html. If you prefer, here is one in Spanish:

http://www.poemasde.net/la-biblioteca-de-beardsley-domingo-f-failde/

I have constantly used the public library to support my teaching and my own learning, although, as a library patron with advanced research skills in some domains, I generally prefer specialized libraries.

Among the resources that secondary World Language teachers can exploit are: books in other languages at all levels of difficulty; multicultural recorded media; multicultural events; and best of all, "real people" to help with inquiries and to guide our fledgling scholars!

Now that I have an OCD projector in my room, I have been able to demonstrate the resources available to students through local libraries and MnLINK. My experiences with MnLINK have always been extremely positive. I credit my colleagues in other fields, especially those in Social Studies, for their excellent work in orienting students to the treasures that await them, including the use of ILL for the most advanced.

Customizing Transparency (Thing 4)

Customizing home pages: increased productivity or "one more thing to do"? The concept of a customized homepage is exciting in theory. The site Are You Making Your Life Easier...?http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/2008/05/15/are-you-making-your-life-easier-by-using-a-personalized-start-page/ is visually chaotic, and overloaded with choices lacking concrete models for applications. The best summary was on the Online Education Database: http://oedb.org/library/beginning-online-learning/top-25-web20-productivity-apps.

Online calendars are wonderful for people who enjoy planning and attending lots of meetings, and they have obvious applications for media specialists who need to maintain schedules for lab and equipment use. They would also be useful for math and science teachers who can assign bookwork and lab reports weeks in advance. They are somewhat less useful for languages, where the communicative outcomes of daily work are less tangible--at least at the lower levels of instruction. As a regular list-maker, I already have the habit of making lists, and model that habit to students in the classroom all the time. The issue is finding the time to update every day. Maybe when these tools evolve a little more and accounts do not get wiped away after two weeks of inactivity (per information posted on that site)?

The MPS network would not let me access a couple of the customizable homepage sites at school, but they certainly are an improvement over the matrix currently in place. They are a constructive tool for teachers to develop a personal "signature" that will attract students and other interested parties to view their practice and to make it more transparent.

Speaking of plagiarism...

Today's New York Times reports on the major settlement that Google reached in court regarding the scanning of entire books: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/29/technology/internet/29google.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=Google&st=cse&oref=slogin

While it will make wonderful things available to the world, Google will also make massive amounts of money on the project. The settlement still does not make clear whether Google's prior unauthorized scanning was permissible under copyright law. Hmmmm...

Worming around: Delicious, Google Scholar, RPC (Thing 3)

Time is precious--you can't buy it or ever get it back!

That is why Delicious is a tasty tool: it increases mobility and saves time and redundancy. It would enhance just about any work domain that relies on frequent Internet searches. It also offers the user some power to edit and categorize, just as regular bookmarking.

Google Scholar is an interesting tool that has many potential applications in World Languages, particularly at the advanced levels. Like other search tools, it is important to alert students to the fact that there is no transparency in search ratings, and what the implications of that fact are. But, to be able to access full texts is a great "democratizer"--the reader, in effect, gets to extract what s/he deems important from a text, rather than an unknown anthology editor. I can imagine this being terribly exciting to social studies teachers who want to encourage the use of primary sources. I anticipate that it will be extremely useful for my projects in which language and cultural studies overlap, but of less relevance to other aspects of language learning that do not lend themselves to "project-based learning." (For a more detailed look at this "pb" phenomenon, of which MILI is also a part, readers may want to check out an essay by Steve Lohr in the New York Times, August 17, 2008: "At School, Technology Starts to Turn a Corner" http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/technology/17essay.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=Steve%20Lohr%20/%20School&st=cse&oref=slogin).

Like most other tools, search engines and project calculators are only as good as the people who use them. The clearer the goals are stated from the outset by an instructor, the better the outcomes are likely to be. The RPC is a solid insurance policy for good outcomes. It forces instructors to be very specific about developmentally appropriate goal setting, access to information, applications of information and "product" evaluation. In fact, I prefer the term "outcome" in the medical sense to "product"-- "outcome" suggests a fluid, ongoing process, rather than a termination.

There are only so many hours in the "real world" day of an educator. By training, American teachers often lack serious research experience of any kind. They also suffer from very weak content-area preparation compared to professional peers in other industrialized countries. Teachers' academic and on-the-job "training" (an unsettling term if ever there were one) favors reliance on gimmicky "one-size fits all" methodologies. That is one reason why these technology and research tools are just as important to teachers as to students; putting them to good use compels teachers to maintain their own skills in knowledge acquisition and use. That can only serve to improve the generally low regard that most other professionals have for educators.

One-Trick Pony

One-Trick Pony - "Thing 2":

500 blogs a day? Why?

Why would I want to read 500 personal diaries of anything, even if they were "filtered" for content, until I had the reading skills to isolate what mattered, or unless I were doing specialized research?

Who and what does the filtering? Am I the only one troubled by the illusion of "open" information that this creates and the potential for mind- and content-control on a massive scale? Science fiction will surely catch up with this eventually...

Our students are not "there" yet--they just get the illusion that they are from this type of superficial experience (see the recent Atlantic Monthly article about why Google is distorting reading habits). Reading pedagogy will also have to evolve to accommodate the addiction to self-revelation at any cost.

I assigned a Spanish "Wordle" for the first time, at the suggestion of a MILI Blogger colleague. It appears to be a "one-trick pony"--amusing but quickly exhausted, even by my lower-level students, who were already asking the following: "How do I do accents?" and "How come I can't put in pictures?" and "Is that ALL there is to it?"

Indeed.

This suggests that "Wordle" is a self-limited tool--a one-bite experience, a one-trick pony, however entertaining it maybe.

Blogging applications? More to come...

Ambient "Intimacy"

The September 7, 2008 New York Times magazine section offered an article by Clive Thompson (http://nytimes.com/magazine) about how Twitter and other communication based on a continuous stream of "bit" entries is creating a "brave new world of ambient intimacy." I am both fascinated and repelled by the further fragmentation of message composition into miniscule units of self-reportage. The appeal of such media appear to be that they offer a lifestyle extension of the "helicopter parent"/"self-esteem boosting at any cost" formative years of many young people today. Does imagining a pedagogical application for these media give them tacit endorsement? Or is it just being realisitic about the realities of modern attention spans? The direct application to my field would be for students to "twitter" in Spanish rather than English.

Applications of Blogging and Google Docs

Following a MILI presentation on blogging and Google docs, I am still looking for a concise summary of efficient ways to constructively use these tools in the context of second-language learning with large classes and unequal student access to e-resources.
So far, I can clearly see the wisdom of my colleagues' ideas for applications:
- group work, such as collaborative science projects where ongoing dialogue from multiple unconnected sites is a critical part of the process (Rozeboom and others);
- community projects, such as student council communications (Hodge);
- adult and student book club dialogues (Blohm and Snell).
These text-based tools are fine for communicating in a common language, but less applicable to students in the process of acquiring written language, when the emphasis in high school second-language instruction is on oral proficiency.
Another concern is the trivialization of written production and the need for guidelines regarding intellectual property. With plagiarism already rampant, "group" authorship blurs the borders of
intellectual propriety even further. It is not by chance that many colleges have banned citations of Wikipedia in term papers. Out in the real world, the law is running far behind the technology.
I welcome feedback on these points!

New Beginnings

More talk does not necessarily mean better talk. In starting this blog as part of a course, I am hoping to learn how to use this medium efficiently. Time-efficient blogging appears to be a global challenge, as it was the topic of a BBC broadcast this morning. Academics from several countries who maintain blogs for the benefit of their university students were interviewed about the challenges they face in managing blogging time well. The old programming adage "Garbage in, garbage out" still seems to appply to some of the commercially popular blogs that I have visited, but I will try to keep an open mind as I explore.

The ACRL Guidelines are an excellent foundation for both beginners and those skilled in the applications of the newer technologies.