DrJim's Blog Take 2

Old Chestnuts

Dr Jim Mullaney — Thu, 15 Jan 2009 03:45:00 GMT

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 want it ALL!!!!!

Dr Jim Mullaney — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 02:22:00 GMT

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

Who Shares? Who Cares?

Dr Jim Mullaney — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 02:32:00 GMT

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

Dr Jim Mullaney — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 01:55:00 GMT

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/

Co-Learning

Dr Jim Mullaney — Thu, 18 Sep 2008 05:46:00 GMT

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

Dr Jim Mullaney — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 08:48:00 GMT

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/

Is Google Taking Over the World?

Dr Jim Mullaney — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 06:59:00 GMT

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

Wikipedia vs Gilligan's Island

Dr Jim Mullaney — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 01:56:00 GMT

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.

It's all about the TAGS

Dr Jim Mullaney — Mon, 02 Jun 2008 12:29:00 GMT

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/

Series vs Parallel Learning

Dr Jim Mullaney — Wed, 28 May 2008 05:10:00 GMT

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

All you need is YouTube

Dr Jim Mullaney — Fri, 16 May 2008 04:32:00 GMT

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.

Extrapolation beyond the ordinary

Dr Jim Mullaney — Tue, 06 May 2008 13:05:00 GMT

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

The Gen0 Workplace

Dr Jim Mullaney — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:45:00 GMT

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

Rube Goldberg meets Web 2.0

Dr Jim Mullaney — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 09:28:00 GMT

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/

Looking in the Wrong Place Again ...

Dr Jim Mullaney — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:29:00 GMT

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/

The One-Man Band and the Conductor

Dr Jim Mullaney — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 07:46:00 GMT

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/

When things just work

Dr Jim Mullaney — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 06:02:00 GMT

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

Ready for Take Off

Dr Jim Mullaney — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:41:00 GMT

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

Social Networking and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs

Dr Jim Mullaney — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 05:33:00 GMT

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

He's behind you!!!!!

Dr Jim Mullaney — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 02:21:00 GMT

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?