That was my first thought this morning, waking up around 5:30. I could have seen the planet Mars as large as the moon last night.

I learned about it yesterday, just after finishing my contemporary literacy keynote (what does it mean to be literate in a networked, digital and information-abundant environment) at the NOEL Literacy Conference in Thunder Bay, Ontario. We were all enjoying a delicious buffet of roasted vegetables, sausages and chicken (of course), and a teacher stood and asked for our attention. By the time I was able to focus my hearing on her, she was reading something to the effect of,

Earth is catching up with Mars in an encounter that will culminate in the closest approach between the two planets in recorded history. The next time Mars may come this close is in 2287. …It will attain a magnitude of -2.9 and will appear 25.11 arc seconds wide at a modest 75-power magnification. Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye. Mars will be easy to spot. …Mars will rise at nightfall and reach its highest point in the sky at 12:30 a.m. …NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN

I know now, after looking for photos of this planetary alignment that hasn’t happened in 60,000 years, that the whole thing is a hoax. It is an email message that has been circulated every year since 2005, and originates from an authentic message calling attention to the actual close encounter that occurred in August 2003, when the planet Mars can within
55 million miles of us. But even at that, it appeared to be just a bright star.

Astronomers, seeking to debunk the hoax, say that if Mars came close enough to the Earth that it appeared to be the size of the Moon, life on our planet would end. The gravitational influences of both planets would hurl us into new elliptical orbits, dramatically altering our climates and causing devastating tides.¹

It was likely not a malicious hoax, resulting more from an awkwardly worded sentence and a lack of understanding of Planetary science. The sentence originally read,

At a modest 75-power magnification Mars will look as large as the full moon to the naked eye.

Looking through a 75-power telescope, the moon would appear as large as the moon. Even after having giving that speech and saying several times, “Being literate today means asking questions about the answers that you find,” I was taken in and considered staying up. She was a teacher, after all.

When, as a child, I sat before my teachers in the 1950s and ’60s, I had no Internet. There was no fact-checking. I was not encouraged to question what I read or heard. Education was based on the assumed authority of the teacher, the textbook, and what was available in the school library.

I think that the issue here is not about that teacher (and the rest of us ooh’ing and aah’ing) were taken in. The issue is, Will we admit it to our learners tomorrow that we made a mistake and use the mistake as a learning opportunity?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

One of the most persistently vexing barriers that we face is the lack of awareness realized outside the education community about strains that change is having on schooling and the challenges to keep up. This lack of vision owes itself to several factors, but getting the message out — especially to other message makers — is essential to expanding the education conversation.

One of the most passionate and hard to ignore voices is Gary Stager, and Gary is trying to expand the audience for his passion by proposing a presentation at the next South by Southwest Conference (SXSW) to be held in March.  SXSW selects its speaker by crowdsourcing the activities of potential attendees, asking people to vote on the presenters they want to hear.  Gary is asking that we go and give him a vote.  He writes about in a blog post, Help Me Change People’s Minds!, and includes instructions for voting.  I’m including them here for your convenience.

In order for me to be invited to speak at South-by-Southwest, (SXSW), I need for you and your colleagues, friends, relatives and students to spend a few minutes voting for my session. I apologize for how clumsy the web site is. That’s why I’ve included the following step-by-step instructions below:

1. Go to: http://bit.ly/cxq78J
2. Follow the instructions for creating an account
3. An email will be sent to you containing a link to click that will return you to the voting site
4. Click the link in the email
5. Login using the email address and password you just created
6. Click on the Explore the Interactive Proposals » link (http://bit.ly/bk31Hl)
7. Type Stager into the Organizer field
8. Click the SEARCH PANELS button
9. My session, The Best Educational Ideas in the World, should appear
10. Click the icon of the THUMBS UP to vote for my session.
11. If you wish, click on the title of the session, scroll to the bottom of the page and leave a message of support. Every bit helps!

I am really grateful to each and every one of you who takes the time to follow the steps outlined above and votes for my session. Reaching multiple and varied audiences is the most effective way I can influence public opinion and help kids.

Great luck to Gary Stager!

New York Times app on iPad at launch at San Francisco Apple Store 141 by Steve Rhodes

I’ve been enjoying some time off last week, mostly just knocking around in my office, filing some old cables away (found two parallel printer cables and an Appletalk adaptor), changing the template on my blog (trying out a three column look), and experimenting with BuddyPress as a replacement for the soon to expire Classblogmeister Ning.

In the process, I’ve been playing around with my old Acer Aspire One (ZG5) netbook — and feel almost sacrilegious in saying this, but I’m finding it to be refreshingly delightful to use, especially for some functions that I have been (admittedly) pushing my iPad to fill.  Many have complained that although the iPad would be an excellent consumption device (much better than a textbook), you cannot use it for information production. Others have challenged this suggestion, saying that, “My grandchildren love drawing in my iPad.” I’ve seen some interesting drawing tools for the device with some amazing results.  There are many clever and well executed educational games and applications, and with an external keyboard, the iPad makes a descent writing tool.  I am, after all, sitting on a sofa and writing (thumbing) this blog post on my iPad.

But the question we have to ask is, “What is the iPad really great at — best at?”  My answer, from my experience with the device, is that it is a “great” device to watch.

Of course, if that was all we were going to do with it, we’d have been satisfied with the Kindle. I think that the iPad, as a platform, is amazing, and we certainly haven’t seen the end of its capabilities.  I’ve written before that what truly interests me about the device is that “we” will be the ones who discover and invent its place in helping us accomplish our goals.  But from an educational point of view, I think that we have to continue to ask, “What is the best technology for the learning experiences we want to craft?”

What’s weak about the iPad, from my point of view, is the OS. It is a wonderful consumer electronic product.  It looks good in Best Buy.  But I see little indication that formal education was one of the aims in its design.  They didn’t build a literacy tool.

So what is a literacy tool. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time, considering how information has changed (as a result of technology) and what that means in terms of essential literacy skills (Redefining Literacy 2.0).  I usually describe contemporary literacy by expanding the three “Rs” in a way that accounts for the networked, digital, and abundant (overwhelming) nature of today’s information landscape.

A literacy machine not only enables us to find and read information. But it also facilitates a deeper examination of the information, uncovering the evidence of it’s value, utilizing elements of what Alan November has called “web grammar.” A literacy  machine assures that the learner develops the habit of “asking questions about the answers that he finds.”

A literacy machine is also designed to help us work the information, to process not only the massive amounts of digital data that we have access to and need, to make important decisions, but also to be able to process the ones and zeros that now defines almost all information — text, images, sound, video, and animation.  A literacy machine empowers, by helping us to realize that content is a raw material, ready to be remixed, shaped, and assembled into the answers of questions, solutions of problems, and the means to accomplish our goals.

Today, communicating requires far more than the ability to write.  To compete for the attention of your audience, you must be able to produce a message that effectively conveys your ideas and compellingly draw attention.  A literacy machine enables us to communicate, not merely with words, but with pictures, sound, and motion.  It enables us to get the attention of those who can help us accomplish our goals.

As I’ve said already, I think that the iPad is an amazing device.  It is an information slab with seemingly mystical abilities.  And it is exactly the sort of instructional tool that I would like to see all children carrying into their classrooms.  But what I would like to see and what is truly the best personal learning device for helping our children to become information artisans, may be two entirely different things.

I would expand yesterday’s final question by asking:

What ICT is going to help my children learn by helping them to become literate, resourceful, and habitual learners — engaged in a learning lifestyle?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Edited on an iMac using MarsEdit

Just another … on your back? A Compillation of (cc) Flickr photos from Seeit_Snapit and Alan HL performed with Pixelmator on an iMac

This will be a two-part entry owing to some comments that I’ve heard over the past few weeks at conferences I have been working. The comments are simple and they go something like this. It’s a computer administrator, coordinator (starting to dislike the term “integrationist”), a principal or head of school, who in conversation about 21st century education mentions that, “We are implementing a 1:1 initiative, handing out Apple iPads to our 8th graders at the beginning of the year.”

To be perfectly fair, this rant could have more to do with a short bout of insomnia I am experiencing right now, but “21st century leaning has nothing to do with iPads, iPod Touches, or any piece of technology.  The only thing that is one to one that we should be concerned with is equitable access to rigorous, relevant, and irresistible learning experiences that reflect and harness the times, environment, and ultimate goals of the learning.

• The times, “..they are a changing,” exceedingly beyond the imagination of the prophet, Bob Dylan, when he wrote the song almost fifty years ago.
• The environment we are preparing our children for and preparing them within is one of challenges.  It is also an environment of opportunities.  Another characteristic of our environment is an emerging new information environment, where information and communication are networked, digital, and abundant.
• And our goal is to give our children a good start on the next 50, 70, or 100 years of their lives.

21st century learning is about the experience, not about the tools you are using. The experience defines the tools, not the other way around. Any statement about handing out iPads (or netbooks or laptops) should begin with the word “So…”

“We want to facilitate … learning experiences for our students, ’so’ we are handing out iPads (or netbooks, or laptops) in September.”

So what kind of experience is it that we want to facilitate? What is 21st century learning? How might our children spend the first years of their lives?  What can learners do that reflects and harness the times, environment, and goals?

To use the verbiage I have been sharing with educators over the past few months, it is an experience that is responsive. Learners are not simply passive vessels to be filled.  They are players within a game that plays back.  It is inquiry fueled. It provokes conversations that factor in the learner’s identity and measures his standing. It inspires the personal investment of time and skill.  ..and it is guided by safely made mistakes.

When the conversation finally comes down to the appropriate information and communication technologies (ICT), then the question should become, “Which ICT best channels these experiences?”

In my opinion, if that question strings like this, “Does the technology help me to teach?” then you haven’t had that first conversation yet, or you still don’t get it.

But if it strings like this, “What ICT is going to help my children learn by helping them to become resourceful and habitual learners — engaged in a learning lifestyle?” then you’re well on your way.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Edited on an iMac…

A Compilation from several photos on Flickr

Brenda and I had dinner last night with some dear friends from my teaching days, back in the 1970s and ’80s. Frank and Karen Braswell both graduated from college around the same time that we did, majoring in technology education at Appalachian State University (archrival of mine and Brenda’s alma mater, Western Carolina University — “Go Catamounts”).

Karen was a graphic artist for an ad agency in Charlotte, where Brenda worked as a bookkeeper. We drifted apart when Brenda and I moved to Roxboro and to Raleigh. Meanwhile, Frank built up an innovative printing company and Karen joined Bojangles as art director (I think that was the title). After many years Karen burned out on the corporate world and was recently hired by an innovative middle school principal. He seems to have been looking for an outside the box approach to teaching the school’s technology course.

Karen and I have had numerous conversations about her teaching, specifically how she should rely on her experience as an art department director more than her notions of what a teacher is supposed to be/do. Some pretty interesting ideas have resulted from these conversations usually about making her classroom operate more like a workplace than a traditional classroom, where her learners engage in a more “on-the-job” fashion of learning.

Last night, we built up the following idea, in response to her principals desire for a digital yearbook.

Rather than establishing a class or club as responsible for collection, selection, laying out and publishing of the yearbook, based on some Josten supplied template, they would set up a social network for the school. It would be designed as a place where student interaction would generate the content that they would need for the yearbook. Students would create and maintain their own profiles, with pictures, favorite classes, etc, and then comment on each other’s profile. They would then select the content and comments to be included in the yearbook.

Students would earn points (coin, gold, permissions, whatever) by contributing to each other profiles, earn even more points when their contributions are chosen by the profile owner for inclusion in the yearbook.

The students in Karen’s class would manage the social network like a company, setting policy, policing the site, adding and removing features.  At the end of the year, they would extract student flagged elements from the profiles and combine them in a digital yearbook, which would be burned to a CD, or DVD (with optional print versions, available through an on-demand book printing service).

So what do you think?

Click the image to link over to the YouTube video

These things are like lightning bugs on summer evenings. You wonder at them initially, but soon they are just background noise. But Jeff Whipple, who is facilitating a conference in a couple of weeks for teachers who will soon be working in 1:1 classrooms in New Brunswick, shared this one with me and others who will be contributing to the conference virtually.

First of all, it is fresh, and not just a remake of Karl Fisch’s landmark Did You Know (now at over five million views). It was also produced by the New Brunswick Department of Education, and it is polished, professional, and not overdone. Their stated purpose is to,

..stimulate discussion among educators and other stakeholders in public education in the province of New Brunswick. The 21st Century presents unique challenges for education worldwide. In order to keep pace with global change we must focus on 21st Century Skills and public education must adapt to keep students engaged. Rigor and relevance are key.

You can get a pdf of their plan here.

The only fault I have with the video is its length, five and a half minutes. Like many of these things, we tend to go too long with them. I don’t know how long they should be, but there is a point in many of these promotional videos that I watch, where I think, it should stop here.

But that’s the only constructive criticism I have. I am thrilled at what New Brunswick is doing, and having worked with and come to know many of the people involved, I feel a bit of comradely pride as well. Great luck to Nouveau Brunswick.

Être…ici on le peut!

Flickr photo by Ya-Ko of a young person looking for meteors during the Orionid Shower

My neighbor and self-educated space exploration authority, Paul Gilster, wrote a blog entry today about the Perseids meteor shower, which reaches its peek on the evening of August 12. Debris from the comet Swift-Tuttle, Perseids gets its name from its origin — from our visual perspective — the constellation Perseus.

Even though this is a fairly prominent meteor shower, there has never been a spatial analysis of the Perseid meteor stream, according to Chris Crawford. He (she) asks, via his e-mail to Gilster,

what if we had hundreds or thousands of people all over North America and Europe observing Perseids and somebody collected and collated all their observations? This is crowd-sourcing applied to meteor astronomy.

Apparently a person with a fairly eclectic set of interests, Crawford has developed software that can be downloaded from his project web site. He asks that people download the program to their laptops and then carry them out Wednesday and Thursday nights (Aug 11-12) and watch for meteors.  As one comes into view, we click the mouse button on our computers.  The software records the time of the event into a log file.  Afterward, we enter our latitude and longitude into the program and then send off the file.

Presumably, the data will be used to assemble a three dimensional map of the debris stream.  Gilster closes his entry with…

Usually I write about celestial debris in the context of the clues it can offer up to astrobiology, or as examples of the need to develop the technologies to fend off larger objects like asteroids. But a fascinating outgrowth of our ever more powerful desktop technologies is the ability to put in just a small amount of time to achieve a widely distributed result, one that looks at a natural phenomenon in a new way. Here’s to the success of the Perseid Project, with the hope that it’s a forerunner of future skywatch collaborations.

I watched a little bit of Fox News — “know thine enemy.” I try not to vent my political views here, but I’m tired, my judgement is probably diminished, and I’m getting worried.

I report all of my income to the government. They get a lot of it and I wish that it wasn’t so much. But I’m not complaining. I am lucky to be in a position to be able to pay a lot of taxes. I am proud to pay it. It is my patriotic duty.

America does not come cheap, and its costs are more than the blood that we so eagerly celebrate. It’s our work, our dedication to a great experiment, and our patriotic willingness to invest in that experiment — to invest in this country. It is my opinion that those who seek offices of power by promising lower taxes are selling out the country.

The government is not perfect. It is far from perfect. ..and this country is very sick. But anyone who says that the medicine should not taste bad, that the cure is simple and cheap, that it’s the doctor who is responsible and not the disease — is actually trying to sell you something else!

(CC) Photo by Enoch Lai

I’ve been struggling for quite a few days with a question that has actually been on my mind (and tongue) for quite some time. The question emerged most recently a couple of weeks ago when I was sitting in the only session at the Laptop Institute that I had a chance to actually attend. It was Convincing Your Constituencies by Fort Worth Academy head of school, William Broderick. He skillfully outlined the DOs of selling a 1:1 initiative to teachers, parents and boards — and the DON’Ts.

One of the DON’Ts that Broderick shared, and one of the mistakes he said that his team had made in their initial campaign to promote a 1:1 program at their school, was selling the technology instead of the learning. “Technology” was actually a fairly easy sale. Most people equate computer technology and the Internet with the future and consider technology skills to be synonymous with 21st century skills. The problem came when they started implementing the program. The approach was to teach teachers how to use the computers rather than helping them learn to use this new connective environment to craft and manage effective and relevant learning experiences.

So we say to each other, “Its not about the technology. It’s about the learning.” But even that is not good enough, in my opinion. It Does not sufficiently answer the question, “If it’s not about the technology, then what is it about?”

Certainly, it’s the learning. But what kind of learning? How is the learning different? What is fundamentally new about learning with a computer in front of you, instead of a textbook? ..and perhaps an even more practical question is what does the “teaching” look like?

To answer these questions, I think that it is far more useful to take an approach that I shared today with a group of school administrators from across East Texas. I suggested that rather than wondering how learning might be accomplished with technology, we might, as I often urge people, think about the information. Rather than focusing on the machine, we should explore the new potentials of learning with, and within, an environment of networked, digital and abundant information.

What does learning look like when networking enables us to facility multiple channels of conversation that transcend classroom walls, school campuses, and bell schedules? What does the learning look like when digital information has less to do with something to be taught,and more to do with providing learners with information raw materials that the can shape, mix and remix to construct their own learning? And what does learning look like — for that matter, what does it mean to be educated — when we have increasingly ubiquitous access to increasingly abundant amounts information? The technology is simply the window.

As for the teaching? Well a simple way of expressing this might be the vision of the textbook equipped classroom, with the teacher in the front of the class, leading the way. In a classroom that is equipped with networked, digital, and abundant information, well the teacher stands behind the learner, looking over his shoulder, suggesting questions, provoking conversations, rewarding success and celebrating mistakes, and, expressing the wonder that new learning causes — because she, perhaps, might be learning something new as well.

Taken over North Carolina, July 29, 2010

It’s like dreaming — so real, until you’re back on your feet and navigating your terrestrial world. But when I’m in the air, flying above the clouds, it is a different place, so removed and foreign from the environment that nurtured by growing. I’ve mentioned before that I was already middle-aged the first time I flew in an airplane.

But I was reminded of the magnificence and beauty this morning, when I slide my pocket Canon’s SD card into my MacBook Pro, and downloaded about 40 shots of Chris Lehmann’s keynote yesterday (I find I can get at least one good picture when I just lay down on the shutter button and let it go, click, click, click, click…)

I took several pictures of the cloud, from the plane window yesterday as we’d started our initial descent into Raleigh. It was a thunder boomer and there were lots of other thunder boomers in the area, though we had a conveniently clear corridor into RDU.

The sun, which had already passed beneath the horizon was evidently still high enough that it still shown directly on the very top of the cloud, producing this gold crown.

Sometimes I just have to shake my head at what molecules, atoms, and subatomic particles can shape themselves into. It’s magic!