This is Where we are with Edtech These Days?

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Last week I picked on Google for promoting Classroom, a service that makes it easier for students and teachers to organize their worksheets.

Not to be outdone, this week, Microsoft is changing the education world:

test

We always need to remember Seymour Papert telling us in 1971 that technology should help us reach (pdf) to do things differently in education. It should help us to be more creative in our classrooms and with the knowledge that we have access to.

Potenzmittel cialis kaufen in der apotheke ohne rezept.

It’s (Always) Complicated

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Last night I finished reading Danah Boyd’s book “It’s Complicated.”

If you’ve spent any time with teenagers, or have teenagers of your own, much of this book will be familiar territory for you. She looks deeply at online spaces such as Facebook, MySpace and Snapchat. She talks about texting and Instagram.

We know this stuff.

But the book is worth reading because Boyd looks past what we think we know. She has interviewed a lot of kids and looked beyond the headlines into uncovering statistics and root causes of things.

Some people might be offended by this book since Boyd delves deeply into topics such as cyberbullying, inequality and online sexual predation, often rejecting conventional wisdom and the knee jerk political reactions we see around these topics. She doesn’t in any way dismiss any of these topics, but she does tell us that all is not as it might seem at first glance. These topics, well, they’re complicated and require some time and honesty to understand.

If you work with teens, I’d add this book to your list. It might give you another window into their lives and we all need that.

“My Worksheets are There…”

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Google has debuted a new …..

product?

service?

servuct? (I’m looking for a word that combines product and service in one, but his word sounds like it could be a German swear word of some kind)

If you haven’t seen the video, take two minutes and watch this:

Besides being a nice commercial for Chromebooks, let me know if you see anything new here. Google has taken their apps, Drive and Gmail and wrapped them ever more tightly together.

My favourite quotes comes from the student who says:

“My worksheets are there….”

or from the teacher who says:

“It definitely helped me to be a much better teacher.”

Really?

Here we have one of the world’s largest technology companies embarking on a major new education and classroom initiative – and it’s a place where students can find their worksheets.

No wonder we can’t get the concept of educational change to meet the needs of a changing society into public perception.

 

To Give Away: Data About Every Student in the UK

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Geez, that didn’t take long. I should maybe go out and buy some lottery tickets.

On April 20th I published a post called “Selling our Kids’ Data.”

Five days later, April 25th there was an article published on UK Wired called “Government offers school pupil data to private companies.”

“The National Pupil Database (NPD) contains detailed information about pupils in schools and colleges in England, including test and exam results, progression at each key stage, gender, ethnicity, pupil absence and exclusions, special educational needs, first language.

The data have been collected since around 2002 and is now one of the richest education datasets in the world, holding what the government says is “a wide range of information about pupils and students” at different phases.”

The UK government is offering this data up in a way that neither parents or students can opt out of. How long will it be until this includes data on internet usage, accounts, surfing habits, etc so that marketing can be targeted at specific students.

On Whose Terms?

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The biggest lie on the internet is clicking “I have read and I agree to the terms of service….”

No wonder no one reads them, a new study has looked at the size of the terms of service of a few different companies:

terms of service

Remember, a typed page averages approximately 500 words. This makes Soundcloud’s terms of service agreement almost 16 pages of legalese long!

I’m also wondering about this quote taken from Facebook’s agreement:

“You grant us a nonexclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, royalty-free, worldwide license to use any IP content that you post on or in connection with Facebook.”

If I am reading this right, this means that even if I post something on my own webspace, but I link to it using Facebook, they own the intellectual property rights in a nonexclusive, transferable, sub-licensable sort of way.

Need to know more about this topic? Read this blog for all of the scary stuff you are agreeing to.

“Sharecropping in a Silo”

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I picked up the title for this post while rummaging through a set of links and comments that took me from one post to the next.

I started at “I Miss the Old Blogosphere.” From there I travelled to “The Web We Lost” and then back in time to Dave Winer’s post “Corporate Blogging Silos.” Each of these writers have been thinking about the loss of individual voices and spaces among the cacaphony of a web where we write and think in spaces other people create for us. (Read The Circle by Dave Eggers? Thought about deleting every social media account you have because of it?)

One of the first reasons that we brought kids online was to help them grow their own voice. We didn’t bring them online to develop a “presence” or an “audience.” We brought them online to help them see the world through globalized eyes, seeking out diverse opinion and experience as something to value. We gave them a space, helped them to plant and water it with writing and pictures and comments from around the world. We worried about helping them get their content out at the end of the school year or helping them to establish a space they could build on and maintain year after year.
So, what to do?

1.) Teach your students to use social media sites and apps safely and responsibly. Don’t scare them away from these places. They are great places to connect with others

but…

2.) Help them to grow a space online that will be their homestead. Important pictures, ideas and content will go here. Teach them to look after it and maintain it. Help them to build a community of readers, writers and thinkers.

3.) Teach them about technology like RSS that will help them to find others and grow a reader and a community.

For about $100 / student a school could help all of their students to establish an independent domain and space at some place like Reclaim for their entire middle and high school career. At the end, burn them a DVD of all of their work and give them the choice of continuing their space if they want to.

Overall, help them to grow and build a space online that is their own. Give them the basic technical skills they need to maintain it. The great thing about the digital land rush is that there is room enough for everyone.

 

 

Coding is just Storytelling

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About 10 years ago I learned enough  javacript and html to be dangerous. Of course, the first lessons that I had were from a 16 year old high school kid in our building who wrote his own html by hand the old school way. (Unsurprisingly, we weren’t teaching that stuff in our building, he had learned it all on his own.)

From there I picked up enough knowledge to hack together a few different things. Jeff Utecht gave me enough WordPress knowledge to modify a theme and work in a database. Alan Levine’s stuff dropped me a little deeper into the web. People like Jim Groom have shown me what I can do if I manage to learn a little bit more. I’ve completed tutorials, watched videos and worked with a Raspberry Pi to pick up some Python, and a little bit of Linux, all the time being amazed at the amount of information that is out there for people who want to learn these skills.

I’ve thought a lot about coding and kids and classrooms as I’ve worked my way through this experience. Coding is becoming more central in edtech curricula in schools. Using technology is becoming a bit more “computer science” in places ranging from China, Estonia, and the UK. As far as I know, this movement has not really moved into North America in an organized way yet except for in a few places like Chicago.

Lately, I’ve started on a more linear approach. I’ve started taking a Programming for Everybody course through Coursera. This is the first MOOC I’ve signed up for and I’m enjoying it quite a bit. (I’m also enjoying seeing the net achieve some of its democratization of information potential, but that’s another story).

My strongest impression is not of coding as a difficult, arcane science. But instead, as a language with words and a grammar that lets us tell a story in a different way. The language lets you accomplish tasks any number of ways by organizing your code in different ways. For example, I wrote a small program in Python that is a script to compare two numbers. This script asks a person for a number, asks them for a second number, and then tells you which one is larger. Simple. My first attempt is here:

comparing numbers

While this works, I did a little more reading and learned a little more about how Python works with integers, floats and strings. My second attempt at this same script looks like this:

comparingnumbers2

Both of these simple scripts do the same thing. But, like telling any other story, they are organized in different ways and use words and the rules of grammar in different ways. My second attempt is a more effective, more efficient story.

Learning to code in classrooms shouldn’t be about memorizing lists of commands and functions. Instead, it should be about creating interaction, about helping kids to tell stories in new and different ways. After all, they call them programming “languages” for a reason.

Much, much more to learn.

 

Edtech is a Gangly Teenager

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Edtech in schools seems to be going through a difficult phase right now. It’s kind of like an awkward, gangly teenager and no one is sure what it is going to look like in the end.

On one hand, we’ve got the typing, presentation and spreadsheet skills curricula and people.

We’ve got app people.

We’ve got coders and programmers.

We’ve got makers.

We’ve got skype-in-the-classroom, work-with-others-and-collaborate people.

But I’ve seen few classrooms, curricula or advocates for a balanced program that pulls these pieces together.

Is this a phase? Are we there yet? (do we even know where “there” is?)

Like working with teenagers, “it’s complicated” might be the most realistic response.

 

Software for Learning: Shopping Malls or Public Spaces?

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Matt Mullenwag and Doug Belshaw gave me a one – two punch last night.

Matt Mullenwag, who invented WordPress, scared the hell out of me with this:

“As Marc Andreessen says, software is eating the world. It’s a creative gale of destruction that irreversibly changes every industry it touches, and if you don’t control the software, the software controls you.”

Re-read that last part: “if you don’t control the software, the software controls you.”

The software decides who you can connect with and how you can connect with them. It decides how (or even if) information can be brought into the platform or can be exported out. Take a look at the platforms that you are building on. Compare them to things like Moodle and WordPress. Can you add features? Can you get information in and out easily? Who owns what you and your students are creating?

I followed this up with Doug Belshaw’s latest post:

“I’m increasingly leaning away from using software that has shareholders and leaning towards alternatives.”

Doug compares online private public spaces to shopping areas. They are open and seem to be public, until something controversial happens. Then suddenly we begin see how these platforms aren’t really public at all. The concept of “software with shareholders”is one worth considering. Who is reaping most of the benefits in the relationship that your school has with ICT vendors and services? How much control do you have over how you can use their products and services?

We are paying increasing attention to the design and structure of learning spaces in the real world, believing they have an effect on the kind of learning that can happen. What we believe about online learning spaces is just as important.

It’s hard to believe sometimes that cyberspace was started mostly be hippies who wanted independence and freedom.

Edtech Basics #3 – Create

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In June of 1971 Seymour Papert published a paper at MIT called “Twenty Things to do with a Computer.” (pdf) This short essay outlined an argument that computers should be an important part of education. Two of my favourite quotes from this article are:

“When people talk about computers in education, they do not all have the same image in mind. Some think about using the computer to program the kid; others think of using the kid to program the computer.”

and

“There is no better reason (not to include computers in education) than the intellectual timidity of the computers-in-education community, which seems remarkably reluctant to use computers for any purpose which fails to look very much like something that has been taught in schools for the past centuries.”

Ouch. Remember, that was written in 1971…

Interestingly, all of the examples that Papert outlined involved creating things. (If you’ve never taken a look at this article, you really need to). While I don’t know enough of the history of edtech, somewhere between the mid 1970s and the mid 1990s, we gained the mindset that technology in schools should be almost solely about documents and slideshows and lost the idea of a computer as a truly creative tool.

I think it’s Clippy’s fault.

Well, only partly. I also think the wizard is to blame.

Clippy and the wizard convinced us that technology is deep and mysterious and confusing to work with. Crashes and blue screens of death made us see computers as black boxes that we don’t understand. This made them something that we use and work with, but not comfortably enough to see as creative tools. A computer was not a pencil.

I’m glad to say that I think this is changing, but we need to keep pushing.

Audacity let us edit audio files. It didn’t hurt. Nothing crashed. We didn’t destroy hard drives or break the internet. We moved from there to video. Youtube let us be publishers and share with the world. Now, we’ve got access to tools that will let us do almost anything. Certainly I’m fortunate to have access to the technology I do in my classroom, but we can:

- create and edit audio
- create and edit video
- make and program robots
- create stuff using our 3D printer
- take and edit photos
- write code
- publish blog posts and host conversations on our own discussion boards

and on and on…

I still love paint brushes and clay and potato stamps and colouring. I insist that kids work offline and get their hands dirty. We carve things and make things and get outside when we can. But we also edit photos and write code and create robots.

Makerspaces are popping up in schools and Invent to Learn (another must read) has given the maker movement in education a rallying point.

I believe one of the cornerstones of the creative movement using technology is open source software and hardware. A kid who wants to try on being a podcaster can simply download audacity and give it a shot. A budding writer or photographer can work with WordPress to set up a space to highlight and share their work with the world. Low cost Raspberry Pi and Arduino boards let us become designers and programmers. Expensive software and tools close off the creative world to many people and make the price of entrance too high. Open source hardware and software erases the entrance barriers. There is no reason schools and classrooms do not have stables filled with tools for kids to work with. I have DVDs filled with open source software that I hand out to kids when they are looking for something.

So that leaves us with our beliefs about education. If classrooms and learning spaces are centred around standardized tests and exams, there is no importance attached to student creativity. On the other hand, if classrooms are studios filled with burgeoning architects and engineers and programmers and artists, we see the effects of this reflected in curriculum and learning opportunities.

Our globalized world and digital economy doesn’t need more button pushers. It needs people who can create, question and build. It needs problem solvers. This is why creativity deserves a place as an edtech basic.