I got to thinking about this as the culmination of a few things that happened in a short space of time. Firstly, I went to see the movie Iron Man. Now this is a great movie, but if you are a real fan, you should stay to the very end of the credits after the movie. Unfortunately, I didn’t find this out until after I’d seen the movie (and left before the end of the credits. But it was OK – I just went to YouTube and did a search and saw what I had missed.

Then I read Will Richardson’s latest blog post – where he talks about how he brought his son home a boomerang from Australia and the first place Tucker goes to find out how to throw it ... is YouTube.
Then Paul Reid, who is trying to cure my Mac aversion (I actually don’t have a Mac aversion – I just don’t use one) responded to a post I made to Echalk about using 2 screens, telling me about Spaces and Expose .... and of course he added a couple of links to videos. Not on YouTube, but after watching the Apple video, guess where I went.

So, if a picture is worth a thousand words, what is a video worth? Obviously, we need the same sorts of critical literacies that we apply to print-based resources or even other web-based resources. But that aside, just how useful is YouTube? Well, as far as I can see, it’s incredibly useful. From a school perspective, it just has to be one of the most amazing resources available. I set myself some tasks at random to see if YouTube could help a student who was struggling conceptually or needed extension and found the following.

English : See how different actors have portrayed Shakespeare’s Richard III soliloquy. I found versions by Sir Ian McKellen, Al Pacino, Sir Laurence Olivier, John Barrymore and also a version with vegetables.

Maths : Pythagoras’ Theorem. 125 movie demonstrations on this – everything from rap songs, cartoons, live demos to working it out on paper.

Chemistry : Aromatic substitution reactions: Only 5 results here. But all were animated and explained the phenomenon far better than I could on a whiteboard.

Engineering : Damped Oscillations. Physics as applied to everyday objects including swings and rollercoasters.

Geography : Plate tectonics. Again, many cartoons and animations. Ideas for school projects.

I could go on.

In every case I was able to find a host of videos that were relevant and useful.

Of course, I’m being facetious when I say “All you need is YouTube”. There are many problems associated with its use – authentication, contradiction, confusion, inappropriate comments to name but a few. It can be a huge timewaster. When I get a few spare minutes, I’ll sometimes browse through YouTube, using search terms like cool, incredible, amazing, etc. Minutes can turn into hours quite easily. Those are probably the main reasons many schools ban the site. I’ve never been a fan of banning things, only of education and accountability.

 

I did something quite cool today.

My mum had a problem with her printer so I popped over and fixed it for her. This is worthy of note on a couple of levels. Firstly, my mum is in her seventies and has just bought her first computer. She doesn’t know the difference between a file and a folder. I had to slow down her double-click speed almost to the minimum before it would react to her double-clicks. She has to get me to do stuff for her like burn her photos onto CD and install her printer. She watches and listens. I talk her through things and watch as she does them for herself. She's learning - slowly - but she's learning.


                        My mum the technophile

What’s really cool however, is that mum is in the UK and I’m in Australia. I got her to install one of the many (free) remote connection tools and now I am able to take over her computer from here and fix her printer. The next step is to install Skype and freak her out with video and audio at the same time.

The technology itself is not that new or even that complex (I don’t think), but it got me wondering.

*****Digression Warning*****

It actually got me thinking about the planet Echronedal in the novel “The player of Games” by Ian Banks.



I went a writer’s workshop conducted by Ian Banks in Edinburgh in the early 90’s. Someone asked him about where he gets his inspiration. After a hilarious story about a journalist being convinced that an author would have to be on drugs to write a novel like “The Wasp Factory”, he said that most of his ideas were mundane observations that he extrapolated beyond the ordinary. He was driving down the motorway one day and there was a fire on the median strip. The fire was travelling down the strip unchecked. Presumably it would continue to do so until it ran out of fuel or someone put it out. He wondered what would happen to a fire on a long strip of land and developed it into the planet Echronedal, which has an equatorial belt-like continent with a fire that has raged for centuries and travels around the planet, driving the population in front of it. The land regenerates after the fire has passed over it. It’s a pretty neat idea from a simple premise and a pretty good read to boot.

*****Digression Over*****

So, I got to thinking about what remote desktop technologies could develop into if we extrapolated them beyond the ordinary. Jimmy Wales is famous for thinking “What if we could take the sum of human knowledge and make it available to everyone?” Well, what if we could, in real time, take a peek at anyone’s desktop? Wouldn’t it be interesting to look at, say, Stephen Hawking’s desktop, watch the screen as he went about his writing and research. Or, keep an eye on Peter Gabriel as he produces his new album. You could have different levels of interaction – observers, contributors, authors, etc. And you could have multiple desktops with varying levels of privacy.

So, if you could keep an eye on someone’s desktop, whose would it be?

DrJim

Image citations
My mum  :o)
The Players of Games - www.amazon.com

Every so often, I go back to my roots. When I was teaching, I learned pretty quickly that being reflective was a great way to look ahead. Even today, I like to revisit the articles, websites and stories that got me into the Learning Technologies in Education field in the first place. People like Marc Prensky, Alan November, David Warlick and Jamie MacKenzie, among others. Many of the messages don’t change, but obviously a lot do.

I also find that looking at citations of people like these takes me to other interesting places too. I’m reminded of how, when Dirk Gently was lost, he would find someone who looked as though they knew where they were going and follow them. This would sometimes get him to his destination, but more often take him somewhere that was far more interesting.



So I was looking for some research material to back up Prensky’s claim that often “students have to power down when they come to school”. This led me to an article by Kathy Fredrickson, who was talking to her students about work and was told “I would prefer to have a job where I can listen to music, instant message and work at the same time.” She goes on to ask how many employers would allow that.



I must admit I found it quite thought-provoking. If the nature of learning has been changed by digital technologies, what about the nature of work? In many ways, the changes in the workplace due to ICT infiltration are more pronounced than in schools. My good friend Leah Vogler tells a great story about her dad. He was a Haulpak engineer. When he was close to retirement he was given a laptop,  as the engine diagnostics interfaced directly onto a computer.



Computers are so prevalent in the workplace now, but their use is generally task-driven and quite specific. Is that what makes them so commonplace? In many cases the computers in our schools seem to be there because someone thought it would be a good idea to have them there. I couldn’t see many businesses buying stacks of hardware and networking gear without a really clear idea of what the benefits would be .... but that’s a post for another day.

In the meantime, what are your views on how the workplace might change as the next generation of workers comes through?

DrJim


Image Citations
Haulpak - http://www.flickr.com/photos/subiyurek/1369200793/
Multitasking - http://www.flickr.com/photos/thomaspurves/361807318/
Dirk Gently - http://www.audioeditions.com/showauthors.cfm?author_tex=Douglas%20Adams

Everyone’s talking (and blogging) about Diigo, the new best thing.



Now, I’m not very big on new best things. They rarely live up to their promises. I’m particularly wary of tools that are replacements for other tools. In this Web 2.0 world of the perpetual beta, I find it difficult to keep up and am reluctant to invest time in new technologies that look like they are just tweaks of old technologies. On top of that, when something novel does come along I find I’m no longer the enthusiastic early adopter I used to be. I take more convincing now than I used to about the value of the next new best thing. I often wonder if these technologies are just like Rube Goldberg Machines - complex ways of doing something that's actually quite simple





As for Diigo. Well, I got an friend invitation from good old Alex Hayes. I normally listen to what he has to say, so I went and had a look. My first impression was “Oh dear .... it kinda looks like Facebook”. My next impression was “Oh-oh... they want to install a toolbar on my browser”. I don’t like toolbars. Admittedly, you don’t have to install the toolbar, but it makes using the app easier. Ok, so what does it do?

Well the first thing I found is the old social bookmarking thing. I’ve never quite got into social bookmarking – I have a del.icio.us account but never really use it. I always have my laptop which has all my bookmarks on it. I can usually google pretty much any site I’ve visited in the past without any trouble. But I do know that social bookmarking is used by lots of people and has many school-based uses.

With Diigo, you can have lists, watchlists, you can even make a slideshow out of your favourites (although I’m not sure why you would want to). Nothing too novel.

It’s also a contact manager, has little applets like a comment wall, etc and has the ability to create groups like Ning does. Nothing new there either.

I was impressed, however, by the ability to annotate web pages live (sort of) and share them – that is cool and I can see me having a use for that. Or at least I did up until it crashed my browser on my desktop under XP and my notebook under Vista. Before anyone suggests I change my browser to opera or firefox or safari or mosaic  - I don’t want to and I shouldn’t have to. But that’s another post.



In short, my jury is still out on Diigo – watch this space.

DrJim

Image Citations
Diigo Logo - www.diigo.com
Rube Goldberg Machine - http://www.flickr.com/photos/madstillz/511517972/

I came across something interesting last week in the fallout of the draconian closure of Al Upton’s Mini-Legends blog. (We're all behind you, Al!!!)

It was a link to a research paper in the journal “American Psychologist” which has the following citation:

Online "predators" and their victims: Myths, realities, and implications for prevention and treatment.
By Wolak, Janis; Finkelhor, David; Mitchell, Kimberly J.; Ybarra, Michele L.
American Psychologist. 2008 Feb-Mar Vol 63(2) 111-128

Link here

Unfortunately, it is a subscription article. If you want to read it, you have to pay for it. LiveScience has a synopsis here.

It’s important to realise that the paper was written by researchers at the University of New Hampshire's Crimes Against Children Research Centre, rather than some journo at A Current Affair and uses real research methods and real statistics to draw its conclusions. Some of the conclusions may surprise you. For instance ...

“From 1990 to 2005, the number of sex abuse cases substantiated by child protective
authorities declined 51%”

That seems very different to what the media would have us believe.

or

“In the year covered by the N-JOV Study, more online molesters were arrested for soliciting undercover investigators posing online as adolescents than were arrested for soliciting actual youths”

Maybe our youths are more able to spot the dangers than the police undercover officers.
 
or

“Posting personal information online does not, by itself, appear to be a particularly risky behaviour”

There are many more conclusions, or myths as they are referred to in the LiveScience article.

   

Before I open the discussion of the article, I want to state my position here. I recognise that the dangers posed by communicating with strangers using ICT are real. There have been cases of kids being abducted, raped and murdered by strangers they met on the Internet – just not very many. Research (real research, that is) shows that the overwhelming majority of child abuse of all kinds occurs in the family home with a trusted adult. Yet according to the media, there seem to be no paedophiles out there – only Internet paedophiles. At least they are the only ones who seem to get media coverage.

I smile and shake my head when I watch the news. Whenever anyone gets arrested – for anything – the footage always seems to be of the police carrying their computer out into the van. Technology gets a raw deal from the press – technology sells. But is it another case of us looking in the wrong place again?

And it carries into the classroom. The vast majority of student “technology” issues I am asked to deal with aren’t really technology-based. Mostly, they’re caused by ineffective classroom management or poor pedagogy. Construct rich curriculum that is engaging and relevant using technology and you won’t have to worry about kids playing games and visiting inappropriate websites. Have a proper policy with clear goals and appropriate consequences (and enforce it rigorously) and you can allow students to grow and develop their skills in a supportive environment.

DrJim

Image citation : http://www.flickr.com/photos/marice/157762586/

I was thinking about the fact that many teachers find using ICT in the classroom quite difficult and looking for reasons as to why this might be. In previous discussions at conferences, etc, it has been suggested that part of the problem lies with the “locus of control”.
We have gone from a situation where a student’s knowledge was a subset of the teacher’s knowledge. The teacher “taught” this and the students (sometimes) “learned” it. In this model the teacher’s knowledge is static, and the student’s knowledge grows.

    becomes

       
But when we introduce ICT, the model has to change. In many cases we see the teacher’s skillset as being less than and different to the student’s.


 
The bit that is shared between the 2 tends to be mundane, applications-based material – using office products, internet “research”, etc – not the stuff that many students find interesting and engaging. Because of the prevalence of the first model, many teachers are reluctant to move into the realm of the unknown. They restrict the use of ICT to the things that they know and understand.

To think of it in terms of Papert’s Jet-Powered Stagecoach, they turn down the power of the engines until it stops shaking the stagecoach. No wonder many kids hate using ICT at school but love using it outside. (As an aside – thanks to Paul Reid for the analogy of the QANTAS model of education – we sit in rows, face the front, strap ourselves in so we can’t move and turn off all our technology).

Upon trying to rationalise this, I was put in mind of the image of the teacher as the one-man band. I have to know how to play the accordion, the drum, the harmonica and guitar in order to make my music. I am in control of everything and the music is only created using instruments I know how to play.
 


I propose that teachers try to move away from that model and think of themselves as orchestral conductors. The conductor doesn’t have to be able to play all of the instruments to create beautiful music, but she knows how the music is made, she knows about tempo, dynamics, pitch. She can tell when the piccolo player isn’t paying attention or when the bassoon player is out of time. The skills of the conductor are different to the skills of the musicians. Teachers should concentrate on where their skills are – curriculum, pedagogy, engagement, learning and let the students make their beautiful music.



DrJim

Image credits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/rwr/296388301/
http://www.flickr.com/photos/larigan/2207115811/

I love it when things just work.

My son got a Playstation 3 for Christmas. This is cool for a number of reasons, some of which may surprise you. Firstly, you can play games on it. (Yes, really!). But games have changed with the advent of the latest generation of graphics processors. Playing a game like Assassin’s Creed is more like watching (and taking part in) a movie – the graphics are just so good.



It’s also a Blu-Ray Disc player. When you first watch a Blu-Ray disc on a high definition (I mean a real Hi-Def – 1080p) screen, you should prepare to be impressed. I wasn’t prepared and it caught me off guard. I didn’t realise how low the graphics level was on standard DVDs until I saw a Blu-Ray.

It also plays standard DVDs, burnt DVDs (of your own video, of course), CDs and almost any shiny round plastic thing you may have lying around.

But none of that is surprising. What surprised me was how easy it connected to my home network and just started doing everything. It plays my music, shows my photos and all the video I have on my main media server (well, not everything .... but almost). The latest firmware includes DivX decoding, so most things play straight off. For those that don’t, the free media server software I use (TVersity) transcodes on the server and streams to the PS3. That is what I found surprising.



However, my kids didn’t. They didn’t know explicitly that the PS3 could do all of those things, but they weren’t surprised to learn that it did. There was an expectation that it would do everything. When I pointed out that there wasn’t a TV tuner, I was told that this year there would be. When that happens, I’ll probably retire the Home Theatre PC that took me months to build and configure – I simply won’t need it. My wife will stand there shaking her head (again) as another project that took so much of my time and effort is superseded by mainstream technology.

Good job I can use it for the Airbus cockpit Joe and I are building  :o)

DrJim


Image citations
PS3 : http://www.flickr.com/photos/trojandan/14870383/
TVersity Logo : www.tversity.com

 

I’m constantly amazed by not only the volume of information available for free on the Web, but the sheer diversity of it. One of the true powers of modern ICTs is their ability to unite people with common interests – even if that interest is highly specialised.

My son Joe is training to be a commercial pilot. I’ve always been interested in aviation too, so we’ve had some great fun with Microsoft Flight Simulator X. He bought a Saitek Pro52 Joystick and throttle kit and then a set of rudder pedals. Every so often, we lug all the gear from his room into the home theatre and fly using the projector – it’s pretty cool.

One of the neat things about FSX is the ability to support multiple monitors for different displays, so we tinkered with that. I was looking for some information about how to configure them when I came across the Simpit community – a group of people engaged in building a replica cockpit, complete with realistic displays and controls. Example. We looked at each other and decided it might be fun to try. I got in contact with a couple of schools who were getting rid of CRT monitors and got a stack of those and we have started building. You can follow our progress on the Echalk Ning.

What’s interesting is that there are perhaps 200 or so people in the world who are doing the same thing as us. Through forums, blogs and wikis we have the facility to contact with most, if not all of them. I can’t imagine tackling such a specialised project without the expertise of these people – pilots, flight engineers, instructors, software developers and amateurs like us. Everyone has something to offer and seems only too glad to help.

It’s not just us, people are making music, software, hardware, electronics, video, film and TV, joined by technology to a community of practice that couldn’t have existed a few years ago. Every day I get tweets from people doing workshops for teachers around the world asking for people to say “Hi” via Twitter and noting the amazing responses that happen almost instantly.

What are we doing to harness the power of these connections?

What are you doing?

J

Image citation : http://www.flickr.com/photos/paas/565935526/  Christian Paas photostream

A strange thing happened to me this week.

I was delivering a workshop on motivation and communication skills for a school. A couple of the things I spoke  about was Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and the path to self-actualisation. I also spoke about the Facebook Friends Wheel application. I was using it as a metaphor for personal and professional relationship webs, to highlight the importance of developing a strong set of relationships in and out of the workplace. During one of the discussions, someone made the point that they didn’t “get” Facebook or MySpace or any social networking and could I help them see the value in it. A couple of others murmured agreement and so I tried to explain why it’s so popular – communication, common values, instant feedback, etc. Although they understood it, they still didn’t “get” it. They weren’t being rude or obstructive or anything. In fact I think that they actually wanted to “get” it, but couldn’t.

In the ensuing discussion, someone started to draw parallels between Maslow esteem/relationship phase and the need for personal affirmation. Maybe this was why many younger people found Facebook so powerful – it met their need for the respect of others.  When I asked this person where she found herself on the hierarchy, she indicated she was pretty close to self-actualisation and her needs insofar as respect from others was concerned were being met both personally and professionally.



I used this information in another session at another school the next day. I lined the teachers up by age and asked all  those with Facebook accounts to put their hands up. As I expected, Facebook accounts were held by mostly younger teachers. I then asked them to think about Maslow’s Hierarchy and where they stood. Almost all of the Facebookers were operating at either the Love/Belonging or Esteem phases.

I just wondered if that may be one of the reasons that Social Networking is so popular.

J

Image ref : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Maslow

I remember as a child going to the Christmas pantomime (Peter Pan)  at the King’s Theatre in Glasgow. In particular, I recall my frustration when the crocodile appeared and Captain Hook couldn’t see it. I kept on shouting “It’s behind you!!!” but he would never look in the right place. I thought he was really stupid- you can never find what you are looking for if you look in the wrong places.

In the past week or so, many Australian lists have been discussing the latest MCEETYA report.
National Assessment Program - ICT Literacy Years 6 and 10 Report.

MCEETYA is the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs – big league stuff!!!.
From the Executive Summary of the report –

“Australia’s national goals for schooling assert that when students leave school they should be: confident, creative and productive users of new technologies, particularly information and communication technologies, and understand the impact of those technologies on society (MCEETYA, 1999: Goal 1.6). The Australian National Assessment Program includes the systematic assessment of the extent to which this goal is being achieved through triennial sample surveys of students in Years 6 and 10.”

From what I can see, the report documents the assessment of tasks students in years 6 and 10 were asked to complete that measured how good they were at
a) Using graphics software to make a flag and a photo album
b) Finding information from a closed web environment
c) Using Microsoft office to make documents and powerpoints

The results showed that nationally, 49% of year 6 students and 61% of year 10 students met some arbitrary proficiency standard. None of the tasks had any real communications focus (remember the C in ICT). There was no mention of any Web 2.0 technologies. It looks like a computer applications competency test.
I wonder how many of the year 10 students who couldn’t make a photo album using the software provided have albums in Flickr, MySpace or Facebook. Of those, I wonder how many learnt how to do it without any adult intervention.

But that’s Australia .... I went looking to see what the US was doing. Admittedly, I didn’t look very hard and what I found may be unrepresentative. Someone’s blog mentioned the State Educational Technology Directors Association.  SETDA is the principal association representing the state directors for educational technology. They have a suite of tools for determining educational technology effectiveness called Profiling Educational Technology Integration (PETI): Resources for Assessing Readiness & Use. Guess what the suite of tools is – a bunch of surveys that are Microsoft Word documents. These ask questions about how students find information and use PowerPoint, etc. Not a single mention of any Web 2.0 technology.



Part of the problem of course is that technologies change rapidly and bureaucracies lumber along, getting further and further behind. That then begs the question – are their findings relevant or useful? Are they looking in the right places? How will we ever be able to judge the effectiveness of current educational technology practice if we are always looking at what we were doing years ago? Is it even worth the  effort?