Learning to Change

But the statement that really struck me was the first one, delivered by Keith Krueger, CEO of CoSN. He said that…

The U.S. Department of Commerce Ranked 55 industry sectors by their level of IT intensiveness. Education was ranked number 55 — below coal mining.

The first thing I want to do, when I hear something like this is to go find it — the source. It didn’t take very long. I added some key words from the statement, and hyphened out some words that were getting in the way, and came up with a PDF, Digital Economy 2002, from the Economics and Statistics Administration (http://esa.doc.gov/). Page 50 features the list of 55 by IT-intensity, ranking by the ratio of individual industry ITEQ/FTE compared to the overall ITEQ/FTE.

ITEQ/FTE = information technology equipment/full-time equivalent (worker)¹

Also among the folks sharing their wisdom in this video are Yong Zhao, Cheryl Lemke, Susan Patrick, Chris Dede, Daniel Pink, Ken Kay, etc.

I worried over this blog post during our drive to the mountains yesterday, thinking about the emotional impact of Krueger’s statement. It delivers, I think, the right message and it does so compellingly. However, as I think about the 54 industries that rank higher than Education Services in their level of technology intensity, I asked my self whether I thought that education should be using more technology (includes machinery) than coal mining. I’m pretty happy, for the sake of those coal miners, that they have sophisticated and powerful technologies to assist them. For the sake of our goals to provide an education that is relevant to our children and their future, it’s probably an effective statement.  But our job is to find and then facilitate the appropriate technologies to help prepare our children for the future they will create.

1. Bergsten, C. Fred. The United States and the World Economy: Foreign Economic Policy for the Next Decade. Peterson Institute, 2005.

Image from the C|Net article, of a press conference, staged in Second Life last year, by California Democrat George Miller.

It’s SecondLife, and Illinois congressman, Mark Kirk (up for re-election), held a press conference on Tuesday, in front of a library, where he highlighted the “dangers” of the virtual world…. ¹

I’m not surprised. History has shown that this kind of fear-mongering can be quite successful in getting elected. SecondLife is certainly no place for kids, and I do not believe that I have encountered a single school that doesn’t block the service — except where there are well moderated instructional programs in place that utilize the MUSE.

But Kirk’s approach is to protect children from danger by further walling up their classrooms, and I just don’t see the logic, especially when children spend most of their online time at home.

Perhaps Linden Labs should do more to assure that kids stay out-world. MySpace recently announced, with Washington State Attorney General, Rob McKenna, that they would institute new procedures and resources to further protect children while working their social networks. Among the actions, MySpace promises…

…to respond within 72 hours to complaints about inappropriate content and commit more staff and/or resources to review and classify photographs and discussion groups.

In the press release, Attorney General McKenna said,

Every day, around 50,000 sex offenders are on the Internet, lurking in chat rooms and on sites where kids and teens congregate.”²

Does anybody know where he got those numbers?

1. Broache, Anne. “Ban ‘Second Life’ in Schools and Libraries, Republican Congressman Says.” [Weblog NewsBlog] 7 May 2008. C|Net Networks, Inc. 8 May 2008 <http://www.news.com/8301-10784_3-9937956-7.html>.
2. Washington State Office of the Attorney General. (14 Jan 2008). Attorney General McKenna announces nationwide agreement with MySpace to protect kids online (18786). Olympia. http://www.atg.wa.gov/pressrelease.aspx?id=18786.

Pagers, laser pointers, cell phones, or other electronic devices not part of the instructional program will not be allowed in school.

Students are not allowed to use, wear, possess or store in their locker: cellular telephones, communication beepers, other electronic communication devices, including all ‘look alikes,’ at school during the regular school day or at school-sponsored events.

The board prohibits possession of laser pointers and attachments, cellular telephones, and telephone paging devices by students on school grounds, on buses and other vehicles provided by the district, and at school-sponsored events.

Then, taking a minute to thumb through the April issue of Technology & Learning Magazine (Welcome Kevin Hogan), I ran across six schools in Brooklyn who have given cell phones to their students — a total of about 2,500. Each phone is preloaded with with 130 minutes of talk time. Students can be rewarded with additional minutes for good behavior, attendance, homework, and test scores.

Teachers are using the phones to send text messages about assignments and upcoming exams. All of this within a school district (New York City Department of Education) that has banned cell-phones and other personal ICTs from schools. [Image¹]

Go for it!

1. Albert. “What’s in my bag? / Que hay en mi mochila?.” Albert!’s Photostream. 30 Jul 2007. 8 May 2008 <http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1394/954372092_04d968917f_m.jpg>.

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Here Comes Everybody:

I started telling her (Television Producer) about the Wikipedia article on Pluto. You may remember that Pluto got kicked out of the planet club a couple of years ago, so all of a sudden there was all of this activity on Wikipedia. The talk pages light up, people are editing the article like mad, and the whole community is in an ruckus–”How should we characterize this change in Pluto’s status?” And a little bit at a time they move the article–fighting offstage all the while–from, “Pluto is the ninth planet,” to “Pluto is an odd-shaped rock with an odd-shaped orbit at the edge of the solar system.”

So I tell her all this stuff, and I think, “Okay, we’re going to have a conversation about authority or social construction or whatever.” That wasn’t her question. She heard this story and she shook her head and said, “Where do people find the time?” That was her question. And I just kind of snapped. And I said, “No one who works in TV gets to ask that question. You know where the time comes from. It comes from the cognitive surplus you’ve been masking for 50 years.”

Thanks to Jeff Utecht, whose Twitter post pointed his followers to this story (Gin, Television, and Social Surplus) — about how the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.  The sudden and dramatic changes that many people experienced in moving from agricultural to industrial economy was, according to Shirky’s source, a generation of people pickled with gin.

He suggests in this very interesting piece, that the sitcom, and in a broader sense, Television, served the same purpose during our shift to an information economy.  The critical question is, “What do we do with the surplus of social capital, as we wake up from the television binge.”  He describes some intriguing examples, but…

My question is, “What would we, educators, find ourselves with a surplus of, if we were to suddenly be able to rid our selves of the constraints that cost our time and efforts?“

Page from Flypmedia (click to enlarge)

Here’s another one from the category of learnable media.  Shared by David Weinberger, via Twitter¹ this afternoon,  Flypmedia is a slick and highly interactive magazine.  Leafing pages, as old as the technique is, still makes me yearn for the perfect e-reader device.  It just makes my laptop feel so behind the times.

But this tool goes much further with interactive content, such as the map to the right that changes red to blue before your eyes, with the click of the appropriate 2008 Democratic Candidate (see right).

There are numerous content drawers that can be drawn down and then tucked back away, and the are almost all used quite practically, without overdoing the motion.  I am especially impressed with the responsiveness of the videos that are liberally scattered throughout the publication without crowding out the text.

Another sign of things to come, folks!

1. Weinberger, David. “Status.” Twitter. May 6 2008. 6 May 2008 <http://twitter.com/dweinberger/statuses/804916791>.

Two books have had me almost totally engrossed over the past several weeks, preventing me from spending the time I should with more professional explorations.  They are both fairly dramatic departures from the author’s usual themes of mystery and international intrigue.  Ken Follet spent more than three years writing the first of these books, Pillars of the Earth, finally published in 1989.  The book covers the lives of several families in the town of Kingsbridge, England, and the building of a great cathedral.  The fictitious characters become wrapped up in some of the historic events of the 12th century, including the assassination of Thomas Beckett.

The second book I’d like to suggest is the sequel, World Without End, published in 2007.  The second novel carries the story on, two centuries later, with descendants from the first book.  The historic context is the Hundred Years War and the Black Death (morte grande). 

These two books eloquently describe the economic workings of the town, the impressive engineering that was known, discovered, or invented, and the iron control exercised by the nobility and the church over the affairs and aspirations of common folk.

Both of these books are difficult to put down and can ruin your chances of getting anything else done during the day.

Have a great summer!

The latest was brought to my attention in one of Stephen Downes’ daily jewels entitled iCue.  It describes a new product (iCue), resulting from a partnership between NBC and MIT.  From Stephen’s post:

This free online platform is targeted to students and lifelong learners ages 13 and up and features patented technology to engage students in collective, problem-solving gaming oriented to core curriculum (U.S. History, Government and Politics and Language Arts).

The basis of this site (according to the tour page) is the Cue Card, which houses an assortment of searchable and organizable video clips from the NBC News Archives regarding the current and past campaigns.  Each clip is housed in an interesting tool that wraps around it: discussion, note-taking, personal tagging, video transcript, and background information, including description, source, and keywords.  Snagged video cards are stored in a personal archive, and archives can be shared with friends.

Timeline Game

Connection Game

There is a lot of Social Network in this tool with a fairly facebook-modeled profile page and discussion forums for “safe” online conversations.  The site also provides daily “thought starters” aimed at what is currently in the news.

There are also some interesting games integrated into iCue.  Timeline asks you to select from a bin of video cards, arranging them in chronological order.  There is also a classic, Concentration.  But the twist is that the player must match videos with other videos that are related through with similar keywords.

The most interesting game, to me, is Connection.  You are given two unrelated video cards, and must connect them by selecting related cards from a bin, working your way to a connection.

It is a very cool tool related to what has become a wholly uninspiring topic.  The first video that I selected featured an interview with one of the presidential candidates, conducted by an interviewer who seemed to think that we’re all hard-of-hearing.  The questions consisted of repeated accusations regarding the candidates character, after the interviewer had expressed regret over the campaign’s inability to get to the issues.  It all seems aimed toward people who would rather act emotionally than intelligently.  ..and I’m not knocking emotion.  But I’ve also not been drawn to pay a lot of attention to this years campaigns.

I have to confess that as I started researching the candidates (at 2:15AM) for today’s North Carolina Primary, I felt more confident in the coverage by Wikipedia than just about anything else I looked at — and I’m not sure why.  Perhaps it’s because, of all of the sources I found, Wikipedia was the only site that was juried in some way.

I’m waiting here for a Skype call from a client who wants me to talk with their art and music teachers about 21st century skills and the creative arts. While waiting, decided to scan through my aggregator and ran across this reference from Smart Mobs about two recent video blogs by Howard Rheingold, including interviews from The WELL, circa 1989. It’s a reminder that social networking goes much further back than MySpace and Facebook, that people have inhabited the digital networks for many years — since before I had even heard of the Internet (1990).

Enjoy, and please forgive me if I’m the 20th person in your social network to suggest these videos:

From the WELL:

• First set of Interviews
• Second set of Interviews

From the Report

The table to the right (click to enlarge) compares the ranking that employers (business executives) and superintendents give to various aspects of creativity.  Yet it is not the ranking that concerns me the most.  It is the list.

Certainly this is a complex issue, provoking conversations that we have not had before — at lease during the thirty years that I have been an educator.  ..and there is value in analyzing and deconstructing something that we need to teach into component skills and observable behaviors.  It is our nature.  I do it all the time. 

However, it is also our tendency to teach a topic or skill by breaking it down and teaching its component elements.  Although this is useful, we often lose the overall message of the topic or intent and spirit of the skill by focusing in on its parts.  I hope that this does not happen as we start to pay explicit attention to student (and teacher) creativity.

One statement in the report resonated strongly with me.

Educators and employers both feel they have a responsibility for instilling creativity in the U.S. workforce (85% Superintendents, 61% employers).¹

It seems to me that one of the best ways that we can promote creativity in our learners is by demonstrating it as educators and as master learners.  Although there is value in lessons about problem identification and articulation and tolerance of ambiguity, I think that producing a generation of creative citizens will not come from lessons about creativity, but from a different kind of lesson that makes room for, invites, and values creativity.

2¢ Worth!

1. The Conference Board, Corporate Voices for Working Families, Partnership for 21st Century Skills, Society for Human Resource Management. Are They Really Ready to Work? Employers’ Perspectives on the Basic Knowledge and Applied Skills of New Entrants to the 21st Century U.S. Workforce. Research Report BED-06, 2006.

Screen Shot of Hitchhikr

It’s sure been nice to be at home for the past week.  With only a few virtual events on my calendar last week, I’ve been retiring to and rising from my own bed for the past seven days — and this trend will continue, as May is always a slow month for travel.

I have spent a good part of the past week recoding much of Hitchhikr, my conference aggregator.  The main part of the upgrade has been inserting the features of Hitchhikr into a Wordpress theme, and  it has worked out very well.  In the process I’ve fixed a few things, added a few things, and just spruced it up a bit.

One substancial change that I made is the ability to add your own conference tags.  These are not blogging tags, which are specific to a given event, but more general tags that describe the conference (i.e., education, technology, media).  Registered users (free) can also add tags to their profile, and Hitchhikr will list all of the conferences that have similar tag descriptors.

As with the old Hitchhikr, a list of blogs is generated from tag- and string-searches.  The default is a Google Blog Search, but you can click into a Technorati search or a Bloglines listing.  Flickr photos tagged for the event, are also displayed.  I installed the FancyZoom javascript so that photos can be clicked out into enlarged versions.  I love this tool.

For ed tech’ers who are interested in NECC events, NECC08 and the EduBloggerCon have just been registered.  You can visit their Hitchhikr page at:

• NECC08 — http://hitchhikr.com/?id=310
• EduBloggerCon — http://hitchhikr.com/?id=370

Happy hitching!

ThinkQuest inspires students to think, connect, create, and share. Students work in teams to build innovative and educational websites to share with the world. Along the way, they learn research, writing, teamwork, and technology skills and compete for exciting prizes.¹

I was involved in this project during its earliest years, and what I learned from that experience did much to form many of the education philosophies that I have today.  It is about empowering learners.

The student web site entries are due in tomorrow (April 2) for the 2008 competition, and ThinkQuest needs people to judge these entries.  To be a judge, you must be employed as a teacher or have a minimum of five years experience in the field of education; be proficient in the English language; and be able to, and have the time to evaluate and score websites based on the provided criteria.

The judging criteria include:

• Content
• Writing & Organization
• Originality
• Educational Relevance
• Global Impact
• Citations
• Collaboration
• Team Diversity
• Website Structure, Appearance and Function
• Media Use

To learn more about being a ThinkQuest judge, listen to my April 13 podcast interview with master judge, Bill McGrath.  If the intrinsic joy of judging the work of students around the world is not enough, Judges who score a minimum of fifteen sites will qualify for a drawing to receive an iPhone.  The top-performing judge will go to the ThinkQuest Live event, held each year in San Francisco.

This PDF file will help you learn more about being a ThinkQuest Judge and you can submit an application here.

1. “Home Page.” ThinkQuest. Oracle Education Foundation. 1 May 2008 http://thinkquest.org/.

Screen shot of Measuring Informational Distance

I’m not sure what value it would be to your daily classroom or school management task.  The term, Google Platonic Distance, is an invention of a Barcelona group called bestiario.  They use a combination of art, design, and scientific computation to generate useful visualizations of vast information sets and complex systems. 

I learned about this example of their work from a Smart Mobs article¹ by Judy Breck.  The site measures and illustrates the information distance between cities, the apparent degree to which major cities are linked through the World Wide Web.  They calculate the informational distance by comparing the number of web pages that include the names of two cities close to each other, to the number of pages that include only one of the city names (gracias a Google).  The result is called the “Google Proximity,” and this number is divided by the geographic distance between the cities.  There is a much more detailed explanation on the web page.

Again, I’m not sure of the practical applications of this kind of visualization, except that it is another, among many examples of how today’s globally networked and digital information landscape can be “worked.”  This particular visualization strikes in my brain a sense that the world is not so much becoming smaller as it is becoming twisted and puckered, like a potato that’s gone bad.  Parts of the planet have come closer together informationally and culturally (Europe, North America, Southern Asia, and an incredibly conversational Australia), while informational distances in other parts of the inhabited world remain vast (South America and Africa).

Instructionally, I believe that it is important to show students this sort of thing — and often.  It can give them a sense that the networked, digital, and overwhelming content around us is workable in ways that produces value.  It is literacy (skills involved in using information to accomplish goals) as well.  The visualization of global connections is one more illustration of how arithmetic is no longer simply the ability to process numbers on a piece of paper — that it is a range of skills involved in employing information — working the binary numbers that define nearly all content today — to answer questions, solve problems, and accomplish goals.

Now this does not mean that every student (or teacher) should know how to produce this type of visualization.  But I think that a literate person today should be confident that if he or she need to be able to produce this kind of visualization, then we could use our learning-literacy skills to teach ourselves how to do it.

2¢ Worth

1. Breck, Judy. “Smart Mobs Measure Informational Distance.” [Weblog SmartMobs] 29 Apr 2008. 1 May 2008 http://www.smartmobs.com/2008/04/29/smart-mobs-measure-informational-distance/.

The BBC News, as a commemoration of the occasion, conducted interviews with several of the key players in the early web (and others), and published comments in Luminaries look to the Future Web².  Comments from the following are shared:

• Sir Tim Berners-Lee
• Professor Nigel Shadbolt
• Professor Wendy Hall
• Kai-Fu Lee, Google China
• Dr. David Belanger, AT&T
• Mitchell Baker, Mozilla
• Mark Bernstein, PARC
• Robert Cailliau, CERN
• Robert Scoble, blogger
• Tim O’Reilly

1. Prometheos, “Searchology-Web-Graph.” Prometheos’ Photostream. 7 Jun 2008. 30 Apr 2008 http://flickr.com/photos/23351126@N00/534201098/.
2. “Luminaries Look to the Future Web.” BBC NEWS 30 Apr 2008 30 Apr 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7373717.stm.

Mostly, I have been stingily using my days at home to work on a programming project, trying to build a web site inside of Wordpress.  I am rebuilding Hitchhikr and the project seems to be progressing very well.  Look for Hitchhikr 2.0 to arise in the coming days.  You can give me a mountain of legos or an interesting problem to solve with computer code.  It’s the same joy.

I have been wanting to share a summary of a study I read about from Stephen Abram’s Lighthouse (Who Blogs) the other day, while Brenda drove me to Charlotte.  I read it on my iPhone, so couldn’t blog about it immediately, and you may well have already read about this from other bloggers, on the very thin chance that you aren’t already scanning Stephen’s Lighthouse everyday.

It’s a bi-annual study, conducted by the consumer intelligence firm, BIGresearch, called the Simultaneous Media Survey, or SIMM.  The focus of this report (BIGresearch’s SIMM 11 Profiles Bloggers¹ ) is bloggers, indicating in the subheading that they are younger and that a higher percentage of Hispanics and African Americans are blogging than the “general population.” The following table illustrates the ethnic breakdown:

It was also interesting to see the fairly significant differences between regular and occassional bloggers’ use of New Media applications compared to the general (18+) population. The  article labels the applications as “Top 5,” though I’m not sure what that means. See the table to the right.

Is is possible that these five applications exceed the usage of e-mail.  I doubt it, but does anyone know?

I’m not sure how useful these numbers may be to educators, unless a case might be made about one of the last findings reported in the article.  It says that:

More Bloggers regularly seek advice from others before purchasing products or services (21.3% vs. 16.8% of adults 18+). 

They are also more likely to give advice. 

But this begs the age-old statistics question, are the bloggers because they are more likely to ask questions, or are they more likely to ask questions because they blog.  It seems that a logical case might be made either way.

What do you think?

1. Wissinger, Chrissy. “BIGresearch’s SIMM 11 Profiles Bloggers.” Simultaneous Media Survey. 12 Feb 2008. BIGresearch. 30 Apr 2008 http://www.bigresearch.com/news/big021208.htm.

Web Tools 4 U 2 Use Wiki Site

Marlene Woo-Lun just forwarded to me a post from LM-Net (about 9 million librarians online), apparently posted by Donna (taglines) Baumbach, of University of Central Florida.¹ The message is thanking more than 600 LM-Net members (school librarians) who contributed information for a giant wiki site on Web 2.0 tools — Web Tools 4 U 2 Use.  This is possibly the largest and best organized new-web resources site I’ve seen, and I’ve del.icio.us’ed it already.

The headings include:

• Audio & Podcasting
• Blogs
• Calendars, Task Management, & ToDo Lists
• Drawing
• Photo & Photo Sharing
• Portal & WebPage starting tools
• Presentaiton Tools
• Quiz & Polling tools
• RSS & Aggregators
• Social Bookmarking
• Social Networks, and others.

This amazing resource site was created for the Florida Library Media Supervisors’ Conference (couldn’t find URL) in May 2008.  I hope that it continues to be available to us.

Thanks Donna!

1. Baumbach, Donna. “Web 2.0 Tools - Need Your Input.” E-mail to LM_NET Mailing List.25 Apr 2008.

…looking for individuals or groups to collaborate … in discussing the NETS-S and how the refreshed standards are being represented in lesson plans and classrooms around the nation and world through a collaborative wiki. (They) are also interested in how states, schools, and organizations are adopting or adapting the refreshed standards.

You can join the conversation at:

•  http://nets-implementation.iste.wikispaces.net/

Select [Edit This Page] to add your idea or comment regarding the implementation of a specific standard or a grade level range.

I like that this appears to be an attendee driven event, but Stager suggests that among the possible topics will be:

• Creativity and learning
• Constructivism and constructionism
• Project-based learning
• 1:1 Computing
• Problem solving across the curriculum
• Student leadership and empowerment
• Reinventing mathematics education
• Computer science as a basic skill
• Storytelling
• School reform
• Tinkering
• Effective professional development
• Sustaining innovation

This is a typical avatar, and this is a typical user…funny, picture of Keith Richards. First game that was in any way immersive was Stellar. Compare that to Crysis, a new, nearly photographic quality virtual world game. Avatars! Exploring & Building Virtual Worlds on the Internet by Bruce Damer is a book about the history of virtual worlds. The top players are:

1. Active Worlds
2. There.Com
3. SecondLife

The Wannabee’s

1. UnrealEngine2 Runtime
2. 3B
3. Multiverse

Keep your Eyes on

1. OpenSim - Open Source Software
2. Croquet
3. Cobalt
4. Project Wonderland

Multiverse is working on a concept related to pear to pear sharing, where you can move easily from world to world with one avatar.

Educationally?

• Mark designed a vritual expo to promote cross-cultural understand of students from around the world.  It’s a wheel looking thing where each spoke goes out to a pavilion of a country, with teleportation doors that take you to regions of, say Canada.
• Also created a virtual art gallery with mockups of famous art work, clickable to web paes about the works of art.
• MarsBase 2021 is a quest about the first scouting mission to Mars with problems to be solved, by students who are working together.
• SciCenter/BioLearn is also in Active Worlds where student can conduct experiments.
• River City Project has been very successful, a simulation of a small town with some health issues, and students study the environemnt to find the cause.
• Quest Atlantis has students working to recapture the wisdom of ancient Atlantis.
• Global Kids Project has students in SecondLife in the Teen Grid.

Now Mark is showing a video of a possible project a student might do about Van Gogh’s Stary Starry Night, with Don Mclain playing in the back ground.  It’s a Machinima of the building of something.  One wall, copied to another wall and another.  Now various shapes are being made, but evidiently he’s put an affect on the video to make it look paint-brushed — amazing.  It’s becoming a village — perhaps the villae from the painting.  Trees are now being makde, and a back drop.

Excellent presentation!

David Gratton, of Danat, is doing a session now called, Implementing Social Networks for Efficient Capture and Generation of Knowledge.  His company built TOOD, which was a pre iTunes media delivery system.  Gratton is talking about himself and what he’s accomplished.  He says, “This is important to you today,” or “This is not important to you.”  I think he’s leading up to talking about profiles.

Gratton, has just quoted Stephen Downes,

         “How you use content is much more important than how you describe content.”

He’s talking about building social networks around repositories of content.  The repositories capture people who capture content — for better knowledge sharing. Capture fo the communitis IP.  The content may be conversations, or it may be something we want to share.

Anywone heard of Web 2.0? ;-)    You really need to be about Web 2.0.  The Internet has be about community all along, Usenet, forums, chat rooms, geocities Home page and webring and e-mail.  To say that things have changed is wrong.  What’s changed is that the barriers are gone.  What’s changed is the syndication process — RSS.  I understand what he’s saying.

We shouldnt be talking about the features of social networks.  They’re all different.  But they’re about:

• Identity,
• Presence,
• Relationships,
• Conversations,
• Groups,
• Reputation, and
• Sharing, [diagram]¹

Linked in is about Identity.  Wither, Bebo are about presence.  Relationships are in many of the tools and conversations — Twitter is entirly about conversations.  Groups is a major part of Facebook and Basecamp.  Reputation comes out of forums.  The number of posts, replies and ranking.  Crowdtrust is a new one out of Vancouver.

So how do you apply this stuff?

Gratton is now describing the social network that his company built.  It appears to be an interface for conversation, that is designed to automatically generate metadata about the content, so that the back and forth is not just for the sake of the immediate problem, but it is generating, organizing, and storing content.

Hmmm! what might this look like as a tool for capturing content through the conversations of teaching and learning.  Students and teachers ask questions and give directions, other students and teachers respond.  The whole thing turns into content.  turning discussion into content.

1. Smith, Gene. “Social Software Building Blocks.” [Weblog nForm] 4 Apr 2007. nForm User Experience. 23 Apr 2008 http://nform.ca/publications/social-software-building-block.

I’m sitting, at this moment, at the VSS conference in Vancouver, with the whole day to learn and converse. I’m a consumer today, Ian Jukes hits the stage in just a minute, but it was serendipitous to see Kevin McCluskey as I walked in. Kevin is with the New Brunswick DOE, and I’ve worked with him before in Fredericton — he’s traveled just about as far to be here as I have.

At breakfast, I sat with two educators who are DL (distributed learning) educators. They live about 300 Kilometers from Vancouver, and many of their students simply live too far away from any town to regularly attend class. So they have students using online curriculum, resources, and guidance — K-12.

Watching a video now from the association, but no audio. Perfect. These folks understand ;-)

Ian Jukes is a master of visuals. He said it! These kids are “Digital Natives.” They speak digital as their first language. Again, as I’ve said so many times before, what worries me about the native/immigrants distinction is that some teachers may find this to be an excuse not to adopt the new information landscape. “I can’t learn this. I’m an immigrant.”

Jukes is make the point very well, though — leading into brain stuff. Our kids brains are different because of their information experience.

The very first thing to understand is that when we come into the world, only 50% of our brain wiring is done, that 50% is developed as a result of our experiences. I read something about this the other day, about plasticity, I think was the word. Over the last four years, we’ve found that almost everything that we thought we knew about the brain was wrong. We know that we can not change our memory capacities (this is good news). Ah! Neuro Plasticity. That’s the word. Wikipedia calls it Synaptic Plasticity.

Daniel Pink now, right versus the left. I’m seeing my keynote slides crumbling away ;-)

So how do you reprogram your brain, “It takes several hours a day, seven days a week.” It’s what’s happening to kids. It’s “digital bombardment,” and it’s changing their brains.

Ian gives a minute of rest every eight minutes or so to share with each other what we’ve heard. This is very brain oriented activity. Some people are struggling with some of this stuff. Is this the first time that our brains have changed. I don’t think so. The difference is that now we know it.

Now he’s showing different MRIs of kids pathways compared to adult pathways, based on the same activity. Kids brains are wired differently. “Game play is reshaping our children’s brains.”

Jukes is sharing some very interesting information about reading, that we (oldsters) typical read in a “Z” pattern. Our youngsters read in an “F” pattern. You can read about this from info design guru, Jakob Nielson, F-Shaped Pattern for Reading Web Content.

Jukes is closing down now. The key question is, “How does this information affect how and what we teach?