Sunday, December 7, 2008
Evolution or Devolution?
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!
Friday, December 5, 2008
Brain Scans or Scatterbrains?
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Viva el Wiki ("Cosa 6")
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?
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!
Friday, November 28, 2008
It Just Keeps Getting Better...(Thing 6)
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.
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Into the Stacks (Thing 5)
Tuesday, November 4, 2008
Customizing Transparency (Thing 4)
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.
Wednesday, October 29, 2008
Speaking of plagiarism...
Sunday, October 26, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, September 25, 2008
One-Trick Pony
Monday, September 22, 2008
Ambient "Intimacy"
Saturday, September 20, 2008
Applications of Blogging and Google Docs
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!