Making Connections

by Clarence Fisher Leave a comment

Yesterday in my classroom we did some work with this website. My own kids had found this site and had been fooling around with it at home. It lets you make things like this:

and this:

When I saw my own kids at home working on these kinds of creations, it made me wonder about the code that it is at work behind a site like this. It made me think about fractals and advanced kinds of algebraic graphing. Since we are currently finishing up some work on algebraic graphing in our math class, I made the decision to use this in a lesson.

A totally silent classroom as my students worked on this.

But beyond that, this activity became even more interesting when students started taking about other similar patterns that they has seen in the past.

We talked about fractals:

and diatoms:

and even about massive clouds of gas in space

It was interesting to see the connections that they drew behind the tiny diatoms and the massive clouds of gas in space. It was a fairly fascinating crossing subject area boundaries moment and well worth the investment of some time in a math class.

The End of the Techno – Utopia

by Clarence Fisher 5 Comments

There has been a great deal of talk about the beginning of the fallout from the Prism / Verizon / surveillance scandal that has been breaking loose this weekend. There is a lot to sort out and it will probably be months and the fallout will cross a number of national borders before any sense is made out of what we are beginning to know.

Personally, I am taking the time to examine what I am doing online and the software that I am using. While I was not naive enough to believe in the past that what I was doing online was anonymous, it is completely another thing to know things like: “During 30 days in March 2013, Boundless Informant documents show the NSA collected nearly 3 billion pieces of intelligence within the US alone.”

I’ve been online a fair amount this weekend, reading news from around the world. I’ve also spent a fair amount of time on twitter. People around the globe are outraged. I think they have the right to be.

But will this change things? Are average technology users going to care or change what they are doing online?

Possibly not. But I think that people who have the skills to do so, or are in positions of responsibility over networks, do need to think about the services that we use. I’ve seen a number of conversations online this weekend where people are beginning to re-examine the services and accounts that they have. I’ve seen people searching for alternatives to Dropbox and Google Docs. People dropping Evernote and changing to Firefox from Google Chrome.

Is this scandal bringing us to the end of an age in technology and education? Is it the end of the techno – utopia?

The Homebrew Computer Club was one of the first places where computer technology advanced and the potential for computers for regular people began to be examined. When this club met, the members worked on both hardware and software projects. In January 1976, Bill Gates wrote an “open letter to hobbyists” complaining about software patent infringement. Up to this point in computer technology history, most software would have been considered open source and people who had the skills to write software often did so and then traded it amongst themselves. Bill Gates and Paul Allen changed this model and the software industry was born. Billions of dollars of wealth were created and software became a complex, specialized, industry selling very expensive products.

This model of computing continued until around the year 2000 when the concept of web 2.0 came around. Soon after, the online services industry exploded along with a variety of new economic models. We were encouraged to sign up and connect with others. The numbers of people using social media sites increased exponentially. Accounts were free and we didn’t mind handing over our email addresses and relinquishing a tiny bit of our data in order to use a service. Companies tracked us with cookies to help us shop in ways that met our preferences and now it turns out, our own governments were trolling in enormous amounts of data and meta data at the same time.

Where does it end?

I’m not a paranoid, tin-foil hat wearing kind of guy. I consider myself to be the owner of a healthy dose of common sense. But I’m beginning to think that the era of the free lunch is coming to an end. We have for years given up bits and pieces of our data and information to have access to a smorgasbord of unbelievably shiny free online services that seemed capable of doing almost anything for us. Now we are learning the cost of that. It is like we have for years ate what we wanted when we wanted. Now, we’ve had a scare with our health and it is time to re-examine what we’ve been up to for all of that time. Of course, free online services are not going to disappear. The economics of cloud computing are simply too huge. But it is important to recognize that we do have choices. The free, open source software (FOSS) world has never been more healthy. Using online documents and tutorials, it isn’t that hard to set up your own website and control your own email. Shelling out a few dollars for webspace that is your own may be worth the price. This will mean the responsibility for software upgrades and backups will fall on us again. But in the end, this is a choice that we are going to have to make. As a CIO or a Technology Director, how are your going to answer parental and student concerns about data safety and transparency? How are you going to justify giving up the privacy of others to make your own job easier?

This isn’t a step backwards, but rather, I believe it is a step forward. It is a step where we recognize the health and value of our networks and the nodes within them. It is a step towards responsibility.

Looking at Education Through a New Prism.

by Clarence Fisher Leave a comment

This blog has sat here quietly for a few months and I haven’t posted anything new on it. Quite honestly, I’ve thought about deleting it since I thought I was out of things to say.

Then over the past few days all of the news about Prism and other surveillance programs in the US have broke loose in the news. Although it is only beginning to come to light, I will not be surprised in the end to know that the Canadian government was complicit in this work too.

I talked to the students in my class on Friday about this news. I even gave them some time to surf and read online the news they could find about this. They were not impressed. In their words, this makes them feel “creeped out.” But will they change anything? Will they be angry or “creeped out” enough to delete their Facebook account? I’m not sure, but I have my doubts.

This news has a long ways to go before we get any true sense of what has been happening in our societies. There will be hearings and editorials and debates and probably even some protests. The Funny Monkey blog has a post thinking about the implications of this scandal for education. A few questions they are asking:

“Schools that went all in with iPads – how are you explaining to parents that your 21st Century Learning enrolled their children in 21st Century Surveillance?
Schools that went all-in with Google Apps or Microsoft EDU – how are you explaining that the benefits of cost savings appear to be offset by passive monitoring of the work within the school?
Schools that put a lot of time into building your Facebook presence – how will you explain that, by joining the school community on Facebook, you are also throwing your data into NSA servers?”

I think these are valid and valuable questions to be thinking about. As educators, what is our moral and ethical responsibility now that we are gaining some understanding of the extent of the surveillance our tech usage is under? Does this give a whole new meaning about teaching our students internet safety? Does this become instead a time to talk about internet (and societal) freedoms?

There is so much more to think about. Convenience. Balance. Trade offs. The move to cloud computing. Open source software. Open and transparent government. Control of our data.

Danah Boyd is wondering who this information is going to impact and what they are going to do about it:

“I’m glad that my friends are energized and determined to fight harder to make a more just world. And I understand why they’re scared and angry by the potential of what’s being revealed. We’re all easy targets to watch because we’re loudspoken and we extensively use technology to coordinate our change-making efforts. And our networks are full of people who are politically suspect. Particularly activists, hackers, and foreign nationals from problematic nations. In many ways, we’re more the targets of the panopticon than so-called terrorists. Because destabilizing our privilege and belief in justice means that we can be controlled by fear. And so while I suspect that my friends will continue to speak of civil liberties and marginalized peoples, I can’t help but wonder if these kinds of revelations have more implications for activists than for anyone else. And if that’s the case, then what?”

I hope that all of us do some thinking about this and are willing to have a discussion about the implications for us as educators.

“The Wizards of the Future”

by Clarence Fisher

I know this has been making the rounds on twitter and other places, but I thought it was worth reposting if you haven’t seen it.

Is it marketing? Absolutely. Is this a bad thing? I don’t think so.

I showed this in my class today and the kids were pretty interested. Funny; they knew who Mark Zuckerberg was as soon as he came up on the video. Bill Gates on screen elicited a “who’s that?” Changing times.

Most interesting comments in the video:

“You don’t have to be a genius to code. Do you have to be a genius to read?” (1:55 in)

and

“The programmers of tomorrow are the wizards of the future. You know, you are going to look like you have magic powers compared to everybody else.” (4:54 in)

That got the attention of a whole room full of teenagers.

Code . Create . Communicate

by Clarence Fisher

My ideas about teaching teaching and learning are changing. They are becoming broader and including more room for coding and creating in all sorts of ways.

That doesn’t mean I’m throwing away everything I’ve learned over the past years. But it does mean that I want to look a little more broadly about what education can become with the tools that we have access to.

I gave the keynote session at the BYTE conference last week and I heard myself say something that I’ve said many times at conferences before:

“Computers in classroom are not meant to be just fancy typewriters. Computers need to allow us to do completely new things. Completely different things.”

I’ve said this before. Other people have said this before. But this time it really got me thinking about what “different” means. I’ve been thinking about transforming classrooms. About rereading curriculum documents through a twenty first century lens. I’ve been thinking about science and math, but also about reading and writing and art. How do these things look? How should they look?

For the past few years my classroom has been based around the Idea Hive, a collaborative hybrid online space. That isn’t going away. But I’m thinking about “new” and “different.” I’m thinking about a new focus on innovation, on creativity, on communication. I’m wondering what a classroom might look like that has a real focus on doing things that we couldn’t do without the technology.

That’s led me to design this new logo tonight that will be going up in my classroom as soon as I can get a full size version made:

The 15 Minute Keynote

by Clarence Fisher 1 Comment

I’ve given a number of keynote adresses at conferences over the past few years. While it is always an honour to be able to share your work with others, my experience at the BYTE conference in Neepawa Manitoba was unique. More of a focus session than a full keynote address, the 15 – 20 minutes I had to start the day with approximately 300 educators was interesting.

Short, fast paced and a challenging thing to do, I thought it was worth sharing. (scroll up to the 6:00 mark for the sound and the keynote to actually begin)

As well that morning the folks from BYTE asked @Tyler_JL, a pre-service teacher who doodles a la Gulia Forsythe to capture a representation of my short talk. This is what he came up with:

My first time at BYTE. A great gathering of people and a group of interested educators trying to push the edges of possibility.

Dispelling the Magic

by Clarence Fisher 2 Comments

Do you remember this commercial?

When it came out a few years ago it caused quite a stir because it laid bare the dramatic changes to reality that the advertising industry was causing. It brought to light how “Photoshopped” images were. I remember showing this in my classroom and watching the shocked and amazed faces of my students.

More interesting, I used this in my classroom as the basis of a number of projects. We made our own images and photoshopped the heck out of them, producing pictures that in many ways had no connection to reality.

But I had a larger purpose behind this. I wanted to dispel the magic behind these types of ads which can do so much damage to kids. I thought that if I could teach kids to make pictures like these of their own, it would allow them to see behind these ads and be more critical of what they were viewing.

By and large, I am glad to say that this worked. It led to conversations between students where they questioned and wondered about the reality behind the images they were consuming.

This same argument applies to teaching kids how to code.

I used to argue against teaching coding. I used to argue that I wasn’t interested in teaching kids how to make lights blink.

My mind is changing on this issue. But it’s not changing because I want to turn every kid into a computer programmer. It’s changing because I want to dispel the magic that happens every time a student clicks a button or uses a new website or web service. Right now, for most of them, when they click their mouse to open a new web service, magic happens. They have no idea how the service works or why it happens. They simply know it works.

I no longer believe this is enough.

I don’t know how to make or design a car. I don’t know how to completely rebuild the engine in my truck. But I do know how to change my oil, change a tire or a belt. While I don’t know the entire process or designing and building a vehicle, I do know many of the basics. This is the same argument that I am applying to coding. I don’t believe that every student needs to be a full blown hardcore coder, I do think that they should have some information about how all of this works. We don’t just teach kids to read books, but we give them the skills to write their own.

We are intense users of technology and our students are often even more so. Yet most of them (and us for that matter) have little idea how all of this stuff works. As I heard a comedian say one time. “If I dropped you off in the bush with just an axe, how long would it be until you could send me an email?”

This is why initiatives like Raspberry Pi and Scratch are important. This is why Estonia is teaching first graders to code.

It’s technology …. not magic. We need to break through these barriers. And I’m not sure in North America if this is even on our radar.

Ipads, Apps and NCLB?

by Clarence Fisher 3 Comments

We’ve learned over the past few years that separating our learning and thinking into silos is not an effective way to problem solve and push the limits of real learning.

Real world problems are multi disciplinary, crossing the boundaries of many people, their expertise, places and time. We need a variety of people, with different skill sets to pull together as collaborative teams in order to deeply understand and think about real world issues.

Knowing that I wonder what’s up with the popularity of Ipads and apps in classrooms?

Most apps, generally speaking, are focussed on a single task. Multiplication tables. Continents and countries. A single game. Most of these apps allow the user to focus on a single task or skill. They don’t generally reach for higher order thinking such as synthesis and evaluation. Of course there are exceptions. Calendar apps that allow people to work together. Evernote allowing us to collect information about topics and share that with other people. But overall, I don’t think it would take an indepth evaluation to see how most apps are structured.

This has left me wondering lately if the Ipad the “ultimate” NCLB machine? Is it proving to be so popular in classrooms and districts not because it is the best device for learning, but because it is the best device for focussing on small, discrete skills that are in turn the focus of standardized tests?

Are these locked down, easy to manage devices the best, easy to use computing device, or are they simply the best device for promoting a certain kind of learning at the expense of a much more open possibility?

Mail Call

by Clarence Fisher

When I went to pick up my mail the other day, there were two little white boxes waiting for me inside of an envelope.

They looked like this:

When I opened them up, this is what I found:

A Raspberry Pi. Two of them actually. At $35 each I ordered two of them. That’s a teaspoon above the board to give you some sense of scale. I knew they were small, but I didn’t know they were as small as they are.

These little machines have a lot of potential. Google is giving out 15000 of them to kids in the UK.

I’ve told the kids in my class about them. I’ve told them that they are coming. I honestly think they are more excited about them then they were about the new imacs that we started the year with.

Coding, computer programming and global connections in classrooms aren’t new. But at $35 each, these little machines just might open up this world to a few more people.