Some things keep coming around and around. A perennial favourite is Marc Prensky’s Digital Native/Immigrant metaphor. It seems to drop in and out of favour with the people in my network and has been the seed of some interesting debate. Just last week, Chris Betcher wrote about his views and how in many cases, the model  didn’t hold true.

I used to think of it as a useful model, but one that could only go so far. But recently, I’ve started to think about it again, only this time in a new light. I think there are people who are at ease with technology, who “get” it. And conversely, there are people who find it confusing, bewildering even and who don’t get it. So, for me, there are Digital Natives and Immigrants, but the distinction has nothing to do with age. I regard myself as a Digital Native, and I’m almost 50!! I hear people say that the Natives have grown up surrounded by computers and technology. But I grew up with computers too. I got my first computer when I was a teenager. It plugged into the TV, had 1 kilobyte of RAM and a processor clock speed of 3.5MHz. No hard drive or even a floppy disk, just a 250 baud cassette interface. I spent hundreds of hours writing programs in BASIC.

 

My next computer was far more sophisticated, 16 colour display, 32Kb  RAM. My brother and I would spend hours each week painstakingly typing hundreds of lines of code from a magazine to run simple games (which never worked until the following week, when the magazine would correct the errors in last week’s code).

From about the age of 15, I have always owned, programmed, tinkered with and built computers. In my home at present there are 5 desktop computers, 4 laptops and 2 printers (not including the 5 computers that will eventually run the Airbus A320 simulator in the garage). I LOVE computers and technology!!!!

I have two sons – aged 20 and 17. Mr 20 is like me he constantly builds and tinkers. Mr 17, on the other hand is a user. When his internet stops working he comes to me or his brother. When the network shares move or get renamed (did I say I was a tinkerer?) he can’t re-map the drives. So I would say one of my sons is a native and the other is an immigrant. My wife and I are roughly the same age and one of us is a native and one is an immigrant. My 22 year old daughter lies somewhere in the middle – but I can’t think of how to extend the metaphor to suit her.

I have often wondered if perhaps there might be a “Technological Intelligence” in a Gardnerian sense. Some people (adults and children) just seem to have a natural way of working with digital tools whilst others struggle (again both adults and children).  Again, it’s not as simple as that. There aren’t 2 groups, there’s a spectrum of skills, use and mindset.

When I run teacher workshops, I often talk about cost/benefit analyses. With every tool, strategy, technology and resource (both analogue and digital) there is a cost to the teacher – in time, physical and intellectual effort and sometimes even money. There is also usually a benefit – to them personally or professionally, but most often to their students. If the benefits outweigh the costs, then it is more likely to be used than if the costs are higher than the benefits.

 

DrJim

Image Citations:
Sinclair ZX80 - www.flickr.com/photos/15491198@N00/401237441/
Dragon 32 - www.flickr.com/photos/anachrocomputer/2671476914/
Balance - www.flickr.com/photos/25547217@N07/2999091643/

I was a demanding child, or so I’m told. When I wanted something, I wouldn’t compromise easily. And I always wanted stuff ... I’m a gadget freak too :o). But my parents were good (it also helped that they were poor) and wouldn’t often give in to my demands. So I learned to balance and prioritise. I learned restraint ..... mostly.

But sometimes I still want it all. On e-chalk recently, there was a discussion about Media Centres. I was interested because I have run a media centre of one type or another for about 8 years now. It started with simple file sharing of music, photos and video across the home network to any computer. Then I got a nice new LCD TV and wanted to push the video to it. I did lots of research and ended up buying a network media player which could access the shares and stream their contents to the TV. At least that was the theory. In practise it was a bit flaky, needed constant rebooting, had a remote with a low WAF (Wife Approval Factor) and was very fussy about which video codecs it played, etc. It was a good start for an early adopter, but I could see much more potential than was actually offered.

Then I got a projector in the theatre room, and decided to cobble together a dedicated HTPC to run it. I used Media-Portal, which is free and well supported, as the media centre software. This was much better than the other hardware device in its output, but required almost constant tweaking to keep it running. It got so that if anyone wanted to use it, they would get me to fire it up, deal with any error messages, and fiddle around with it until it worked. Not an ideal situation – I still wanted more. Last Christmas my son received a Playstation3 and as a special treat, it was hooked up to the projector. The fact that it was also a networked media centre never entered my mind, honest. So the HTPC was sacked and we moved onto the Playstation 3  in the theatre room. This works really well, plays games, DVDs (upscaled) and Blu-Rays, I can watch and record HDTV (thanks to a PlayTV imported from the UK) as well as most of my shared media on the server. But it requires an application on the server which is fiddly, the library synchronises daily (which isn’t often enough), and still doesn’t play everything. But it’s a good enough solution until my son leaves home and takes it with him.
Back in the lounge, things became complicated. The media player doesn’t have a tuner. I had a little single tuner, hard-drive based, SD PVR. But it was a nightmare trying to get recordings off this, and meant another remote. What I wanted was ...... well, everything!!! I wanted to watch, record and pause HDTV, the ability to play all my CDs, DVDs, stored music, video and photos. It had to be robust, run everything off one remote and have a high WAF. There are devices that do just about everything, but I couldn’t find one that had everything that was affordable.

So I built another HTPC, this time using VMC - Vista Media Center (sic) and it’s almost the perfect media device. It does everything I wanted. But, guess what? I now want more functionality. I’ve discovered how to rip all my DVDs into folders that VMC can understand. It displays them as a wall of covers and when I select one, it fetches the metadata from IMDB and displays synopsis, cast, director, etc. That is very cool and with storage being so cheap, I can rip 200 DVDs onto a single 1Tb hard drive. The only thing I want now is for VMC to do the same with movies I have in AVI or DIVX format.



The point of all this? I guess it’s that I’ve come to expect that I can have it all. When it doesn’t happen, I get frustrated. As I consultant, I often get asked to evaluate new software for use in schools. I have a fairly simple yardstick. How long does it take before I find myself saying “Why doesn’t it do this?” or “Why can’t I do that?”. Normally it takes less than 15 minutes before I’m tearing my hair out trying to do something that the software should be able to do, but can’t.

My wife has an IWB in her classroom. I helped her install the software on her computer and had a play. The first thing I tried to do was open a word document and try to annotate it with ink. I couldn’t. I fiddled, I tinkered and in the end I called the IWB hotline. Apparently, if I want to annotate a document, I have to convert it to PDF, then import it into the software and can annotate it there. Of course, now I can’t edit the document. I expressed mild surprise at not having this basic functionality.

Traditionally, many teachers would make their classes into “mini-workplaces”. The chemistry lab was a scaled-down, safe version of the real thing. The media classroom was like a newspaper office, but smaller. It was manageable, but I think the main reason it was constrained was that we only had access to limited resources and small communities (often just the people in the classroom). But now ....

 So in this world of excess, the land of everything, how do we build or schools, our classrooms, our communities and our learning?

TTFN

DrJim

Image Citations
Home Theatre : www.flickr.com/photos/projectors/473634738/
Vista Media Center : www.microsoft.com

It seems to me that one of the dilemmas of living in an information age is how much do we share and how much do we keep private. I have always jokingly maintained that I am in the business of thievery. Most of the things I talk about aren’t mine. I am a good re-purposer, if there is such a word, but almost nothing I talk about or help teachers with has been created by me from the ground up. I am in a fortunate position on several counts professionally. I have a reasonable amount of time when I’m not “working” (at least, that’s how my wife sees it) and my Personal Learning Network is reasonably large. That gives me 2 very precious things – time and access to a large intellectual pool. What that means is that most of the cool stuff I know about, I learned about from someone else.

                                  

There are lots of tools which facilitate this, but they all depend on other people sharing. Whether it be answering a quick question on Twitter, imparting their wisdom through their blog, participating in the sharing of resources or contributing to professional discussion on Listservs. Who are these people? They’re educators mostly, in fact most of the people I listen to are still actively teaching. There are a few journalists, commentators, the odd business-person. I have tried to make it a diverse group, as there is a danger in ending up as a part of a mutual appreciation society. I like to listen to people who have the same ideas and values as me, but get just as much from those whose thinking is not directly aligned with mine.


But these people have one thing in common. They share. They share their ideas, their opinions, their time. They do it freely and unconditionally. I’ve had people I barely know consult their own networks to answer a question I have posed. People have sent me resources, lesson plans, ideas for free. I would imagine my ratio is poor – I have received far more than I have had the opportunity to give back – at least directly. I suppose my workshop and conference work redress the balance a little. I come across the odd soul who won’t share. They generally have a lot invested in their ideas and are reluctant to let them go.


I have wondered why people (myself included) write, blog, tweet, friendfeed. When I asked my network I got lots of reasons – altruism, vanity, therapy, karma.

Paul Reid came up a really elegant reply.
“(I share) ... to form links & understand others. Connectivism proposes I derive my competence from forming connections” and a link to his excellent blog post “I store my knowledge in my friends”


But whatever their reasons for sharing, I’m so glad they do. My world is certainly the richer for it – yours probably is too.



DrJim

Image citations
Sharing - www.flickr.com/photos/imagesbyk2/27263706/
My world - www.nasa.gov/images/content/124284main_image_feature_379_ys_full.jpg
    

Stuck in the middle with you



Sometimes I feel I’m caught in a kind of educational no man’s land. While I love to read and be inspired by the educational bloggerati, sometimes it seems so far away from my work with teachers. I read Mark Pesce’s “the human network” and find myself nodding in agreement and thinking this really is the future. But then I get sadly depressed as I read how Will Richardson comes up against the same problems I see in schools here. YouTube is blocked, Wikipedia is banned, no Google Docs for you. I see teachers struggling with plagiarism and shake my head that it is still an issue in the 21st century. And while I see pockets of brilliance, pilot projects and schemes about the future of schools and learning, I can’t really see the changes becoming mainstream anytime soon.



So I guess that in the meantime, all I can do is bridge the gap between the future and the now. To work with people where they are now and worry about the over-the-horizon stuff when it becomes obvious we need to. It’s good to have a compass bearing and a direction in which to head, but I can’t help feeling that there will be so many new technologies that come and go in the meantime that it is really difficult to predict what will happen. A couple of months ago, I was asked to chair a panel session at a ICT Integration conference run by a school as their main PD. The focus of the panel session was “What technologies will our classes be using in 5 years time?” or something similar. When I pointed out that 5 years ago, there was no YouTube, Wikipedia was not mainstream, there were (essentially) no Web 2.0 tools, no Edublogs, the list goes on. We eventually changed the focus to “What technologies should we be using in our classes today?” and it was a great success. What was worrying however, was the high percentage of teachers who hadn’t heard of tools like Twitter, Edublogs, Google Apps and who thought that Wikipedia and YouTube had no educational merit.

Martin Pluss (I think .... it was a tweet from a few weeks ago that I couldn'd find again) hit the nail on the head when he asked how many teachers at a PD session understood the following ...

@plu are you at #acec2008

Not many people did. Another literacy (sigh).

But it gets worse ..... when I have asked something similar I found the same as Martin. Not only that, trying to explain a platform like twitter ... I get comments like “I don’t have time” or “What’s the point?” or even “I tried it but all I got was what people had for breakfast”

So, if people don’t understand the tools, or even worse, understand them but can’t see the value in them, how do we make progress?


DrJim

Image citations
Flower - http://www.flickr.com/photos/victoriabush/39326554/
Forth Rail Bridge - http://www.flickr.com/photos/zzathras777/2122386189/

I’ve had a great deal of fun over the past few weeks working with Adrian Bruce. We ran a couple of workshops together in Sydney and Melbourne and also presented at the ELH2008 conference in Lorne, Victoria. Lorne was great fun for all sorts of reasons, but mostly it was great catching up with old friends and making new ones. It was also good to put some faces to names.



The workshops we ran were really successful in that the participants seemed to have great fun, learn a lot and have great discussions about ICT and its place in education. We talked about Personal Learning Networks, appropriate pedagogy, using technology to build meaningful curriculum and got to play with a nice variety of interesting tools – voicethreads, spore creature character, google applications and audacity to name a few.
But the thing that I get asked time after time is “Where do you get the time to find and learn how to use this stuff?” Adrian uses a great phrase to describe how he learns to use software – co-learning. We co-learn the software. What does that mean? Well, it means that we don’t know everything. In fact, sometimes we don’t know anything about the software. We have expectations about what it might do and how it might work, but really that’s about all. The fun part is then taking that software and using it.



There are lots of models for introducing new software, but they tend to focus on the technology itself rather on what it allows to happen in the classroom. So we turned that on its head and  looked at how we could use the tools in the classroom and used that to contextualise how we learned to use the software. So it became a discussion about how to create a piece of artwork in the style of Mondrian (lines, colours), rather than how to use Photoshop. What elements of a news broadcast do we want to re-create (music, sound effects, voices) and how do they fit together, rather than what are all the cool things about Audacity. When we don’t know how to achieve something, we look at strategies to get where we want to go. We might look at the menu options, go to YouTube or Google, we might ask our networks or even (gasp) click on the help menu!!




For instance, someone asked in a workshop how do we name the tracks on Audacity. I had never done that before and so didn’t know. It made sense that were would be a tool on the track itself for doing it, so I went looking there. Another teacher consulted the audacity wiki and yet another went to the help menu. We all got the solution round about the same time, but by very different means. As I said in an earlier post – there are many ways and they are all the right way!!

Toodle pip

DrJim

Image citations:
Adrian Bruce - www.adrianbruce.com
Mondrian art - by DrJim
Spore creature - www.flickr.com/photos/oxoc/2580453043/

It’s Dexter, at the moment.

Teenage kids always amaze me. I was talking to some recently about television. TV is an interesting phenomenon – it’s still the breakthrough technology of my generation. It seems as though it has been around forever and really hasn’t changed all that much in the past 25 years or so. We have more channels and a bit of interactivity (press the red button – that sort of thing) now, but the concept of TV as media hasn’t really changed. Bolt-on technologies, like VCRs, PVRs and even TiVo and Foxtel IQ haven’t made much of a difference either. TiVo is only just making inroads in Australia .... it’s not mainstream yet.



I could take a trip down memory lane here .... I remember when we got our first colour TV, etc ... but I won’t. I did mention that I remembered when TVs didn’t have a remote control and you had to get up and turn a clunk – clunk dial to change the channel. The kids looked at me as though I was from Mars!!


They were talking about Dexter, the US series about a forensic specialist who is also a serial-killer. He only kills other serial-killers, so is considered to be a good guy (go figure). I haven’t watched it, so I may have the details wrong. What is interesting is that the kids have all watched the second series and are eagerly awaiting the third. In Australia, we’re up to about half-way through season one on Free to Air TV. I assumed they had seen the rest on Foxtel, but no ..... they had downloaded all the episodes.



Using a fairly common p2p (that’s peer to peer, to you and me) technology - BitTorrent, they get access to these shows minutes after they have aired in the US – in High Definition. Before Dexter it was House MD, Scrubs, Lost, and so on.

It seems that the TV networks in Australia have woken up to what is going on. Until recently, we could wait months or even years for a popular US show to make it to Australian Free to Air. Recently, the networks have been making a big thing of broadcasting them only a week, a day, or sometimes only a few hours after they air in the US. But that’s too long for these kids to wait. The Instant Gratification Monster rears its ugly head once more and the Networks may end up a day late and a dollar short.

Another point the Networks here have missed is that these ripped versions have no commercials. The person who uploads it has usually gone to the trouble to remove the commercials. A program that lasts for an hour on Free to Air, is usually only 35 or 40 minutes long when you download it. That’s pretty cool, but has some pretty serious consequences if we don’t stop to take a medium-term view of this. If the general public begins to prefer downloading its television, and those downloads are commercial-free, it can only spell trouble. If advertisers begin to lose their audience, they’ll surely pull the rug from under the Networks. Without advertising revenue, who can afford to make quality programs?

So, being connected has ramifications that stretch across technologies (where have we seen that before?), even stable, mature technologies like television.



DrJim

Image citations :
Dexter - www.sho.com/site/dexter/downloads.do
Vuze - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dantaylor/494910276/

A few weeks ago, I facilitated a session at the ECAWA Unconference entitled “Is Google taking over the world?” I know I’ve blogged about Google before, but there are a couple of reasons I want to mention them again. Someone asked if I have any commercial arrangement with Google. If only!!! No, I simply look at the things they do and ask how they might translate into an educational context. Google make it easy by being up front about their intentions and also by producing great stuff. A quick example – type an arithmetic sum into Google’s main search bar with only the arithmetic operators and no parenthesis. Something like 2+5*3-18/6. When you hit search, Google Calculator kicks in and not only solves the problem, it also adds the appropriate parenthesis. From a teaching perspective, we now have a little maths tool that even little kids can use to generate problems involving logical operators. As aside, try typing something along the lines of “2 tsp in ml” and see what Google makes of that.



The main reason I mention Google again is that, at the Unconference, Mike Leishman and I had a chat about whether schools would ever adopt a Google end to end solution like Google Apps for Education. Letting Google handle mail, file serving, document and spreadsheet handling, the whole lot. It made so much sense to me as it would take the burden of the school’s network infrastructure and add the flexibility of document collaboration, etc. (For a great example of how this works, have a read of Tom Barrett’s ICT in my Classroom Blog). The consensus was that we were probably still a fair way away from that.


Well, this week the NSW Department of Education announced it was dropping Microsoft Outlook/Exchange in favour of a Gmail solution for students. (Link here). At present it only applies to student mail, but makes me wonder what might be next.

DrJim

Image citation : www.gmail.com

For one reason or another, I’ve been talking to a lot of people about Wikipedia recently. I keynoted the WA Librarian’s Conference on the weekend and as part of the address, I talked about critical literacy and Wikipedia and mentioned the Nature paper from 2005 that compared errors in articles from both sources. It is an interesting paper for a number of reasons – not the least of which is the high number of errors in both. When I was at school, it would never have occurred to me that an encyclopaedia could have errors in it. Wikipedia has also been mentioned in a number of blogs I subscribe to – especially in the context of what Clay Shirky spoke about  at the Web 2.0 Expo earlier this year. His talk was entitled “Where do people find the time?”, which is well worth a watch on its own merits. Here, Shirky talks about how the time taken to produce Wikipedia has probably been carved out of the enormous “cognitive surplus” of TV viewing. He quotes some very large numbers about that.


But I guess the main point of his argument is the growth of participatory media. That Web 2.0 tools take us from being consumers to being creators and collaborators. I have been talking about that for a while now, but only from an Internet perspective. It’s interesting to think of how the same may be becoming true of mass media.

My daughter is involved in a mammoth task at present. She is tagging all of her music. Like most people her age, she has a huge volume of music in digital form and accesses it from her MP3 player. It’s a combination of CDs she has ripped, music she has downloaded, tracks she has obtained from her friends and  other audio from goodness knows where. I too have a fair number of audio files. The main difference between my daughter and I is that all my music is sorted in folders alphabetically, by artist then year then album whereas Gemma doesn’t seem to have much of an organising strategy. So I was surprised when she told me that she wasn’t going to rename or arrange her music files, only the tags. She explained her logic like this.

It doesn’t matter what the files are called or where they are stored. The software and hardware she uses looks at the tags and allows her to sort and filter her music accordingly. So the more accurate the tagging, the easier it is for her to build playlists “No-one plays albums .... people make playlists”. When she builds her playlists, she can use the tags like artist and genre to find the music she wants. When I try to build a playlist it takes me a long time, as I have to navigate through my organised but convoluted folder structure to get to individual files. I can’t really apply any filtering to my files because of the lack of metadata.

This got me thinking about other media I create and use – images, video, web pages. At present, I don’t really tag anything. I know my camera adds metadata to my photographs – date and time, as well as the other standard EXIF tags. Newer cameras than mine also include GPS location data with the photographs. It only remains to implement some sort of facial recognition algorithm and the tagging is complete. Best of all – it is all done automatically. Once again, it doesn’t matter what you call the image or even where you store it. It’s the metadata that is key. In the age of information explosion, it’s likely that tagging will become more and more important. How do you tag yours?

DrJim

Image citation : http://www.flickr.com/photos/oceanflynn/367600665/

I grew up in a series world. It seemed that everything was linear. At school, there was usually only one way to do things – the teacher’s way!!! When I was very young, I was made to sit on my left hand so I would write with my right (I’m left-handed). But it didn’t work (funny that).  We learned lockstep, didn’t really question anything and we were told the right way to do stuff. How to spell, remember capital cities, perform simple arithmetic. Every problem had only one solution and everyone had to learn that way. There was a guy I remember from school – a really bright guy who argued with the teacher about the value of learning subtraction. His argument was that no-one subtracted. If we were asked to subtract, say, 176 from 221, we almost always perform an addition sum in our head. We say “What do I need to add to 176 to make 221?” rather than “If I start with 221, what do I need to take away from that in order to get 176?”. Needless to say, the teacher didn’t like it. It was even worse when he started squaring 2 digit numbers in his head. He wasn’t as good as Arthur Benjamin, but he was only 12 at the time.



He tried to teach me once, but I’m not a very number-savvy person, so I never really got the hang of it. When he did it in the maths classroom, the teacher forbade him to use his own method and made him use the method we had to learn in class – threatening to mark him with a zero unless he used the “proper” method.
 
I spend a lot of my time helping educators come to grips with the latest developments in ICT and their application to the classroom. Inevitably, a lot of it is applications-based (increasingly web-embedded applications-based - but that’s another blog post). Invariably, workshop participants want handouts and notes on how to do stuff. Yesterday, we were working with audacity in a workshop and I demonstrated some common features, including how to import audio we had created or downloaded outside of the program. When the teachers came to use the software, one of them asked me to show her again as she had missed it and it wasn’t in the notes. I showed her, but while I did so I asked her what a student would have done in that situation. She replied that the student would probably have fiddled around until they got it. I asked her to explain “fiddled around” and she said that she probably meant experimented. I then asked her why she didn’t experiment and she said it was “different” for adults.

Later on I was talking about editing sounds and cut a piece of voice from one track and pasted into another, using the toolbar buttons. While helping someone, I needed to do it again, but this time used CTRL-X and CTRL-V. This completely threw the teacher, as I used a different method of achieving the same thing. I explained that, depending on the operating system and the application, there could be up to 5 or 6 ways of cutting and pasting data.  The teacher asked me “What’s the best way?” and seemed a bit nonplussed when I told him that the best way for me might not be the best way for him. “Why can’t the software writers come up with just one way of doing things?” he replied. I think he went to the same teacher’s college as my old maths teacher.

Our world is a parallel world. Simultaneous multiple communication, p2p, hyperconnectivity. Everything happening at once, lots of ways to achieve the same goal, personalised learning – all these phenomena move us away from sequential living and serial learning. Teachers still talk about the low level of “technical skills” many of their students have in the classroom. “We were using program X and the students couldn’t understand it or figure out how to use it.” But give them a new phone or a handheld gaming device. Let them loose on a new gaming engine or social networking platform. Then you will see their problem-solving, investigation and goal-orientation skills. There is never “one correct way” for them. There are always many ways, and they are always the right way.

Image Citation : http://www.ted.com/speakers/view/id/177