Don't Eat the Marshmellows

Creative Commons: What every Educator needs to know

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Creative Commons: What every Educator needs to know

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What matters now

Here is an interesting use of Scribd by Seth Godin. "What Matters Now" presents a series of ideas using one page per idea.
What Matters Now

Training

Dilbert shows a lot of wisdom. It's a hard reality that tomorrow's workforce will demand fearless and independent learners. Self motivated people, who pick up new technologies, will have a definite advantage in the world job market. I constantly tell my students that they must be independent, self-motivated learners to survive. In fact, it's the main theme on my library web page. Some listen and some don't.

In a free market system, employers don't waste a lot of time with training. They just hire and keep those who know what they are doing, and like Dilbert's boss, they get rid of the rest. That's why the free market systems are still the only ones who succeed.

Government works in the opposite direction. How many government institutions and school districts spend hundreds of thousands of dollars every year on 'training'? When you analyze the new technology training, it has mostly been how to fill out forms on-line. I can't even sit through the classes any more. It's the bane of governments and organizations. I once sat through a mandatory two hour class on how to fill out on-line forms for inter-library loan. What's amazing is that the instructor and many of the students were actually excited about the class.

In the first Men in Black, there is a scene where Will Smith is applying to join the organization. The room is filled with super achievers from West Point, the Marines, NYPD, etc. When filling out the application, Smith is the only one with the common sense to use the coffee table in the center of the room as a writing table. Rip Torn then tells the other super achievers present: "Gentlemen, you are all we've come to expect from years of government training." Will Smith's only negative is his "conflict with authority." He is the epitome of a fearless, independent learner. He doesn't depend on 'training', he just jumps in.

Fearless, independent learners use coaches and instructors as needed, but they don't expect to be spoon fed. In fact, independent learners have a way of using an instructor to their maximum advantage. They quickly get to the heart of a question or issue.

My Argentine tango instructor, Walter Kane, is a fearless, independent learner. Our tango group recently set up a new web site using Google sites (Hudson Valley Tango). Walter has been able to pick up the on-line program with a minimum of instruction from me. In fact, he quickly grasped how to insert text and write in HTML (hypertext markup language) on the site. He lamented that it took him 3 and 1/2 hours to pick it up. It's that willingness to invest the time and effort on a task that separates the fearless, independent learner from the spoon feeder. A spoon feeder will sit through 3 hours of 'training' and come out with nothing. The Dilbert cartoon is right on target.

Web technology is about to change how we learn - Russell Moench, Venture Beat

Here is a post worth reading
Web technology is about to change how we learn - Russell Moench, Venture Beat

from Educational Technology by Ray
The education industry is on the cusp of being massively disrupted by innovation in Web technology. Like other industries prior, it would like to pretend that it can weather the storm and continues business as usual, with only minor tweaking. We all know how that story ends. It won’t happen immediately, and the path won’t be a direct one. Marketing giants such foreign-language instructor Rosetta

From Daniel Pink

This is from Daniel Pink's blog
Factoid of the day: Revenge of the nonspecialist
Published October 5th, 2009

Yesterday afternoon, I was reading Jerry de Jaager and Jim Ericson’s smart new book, See New Now, and came across this stunner:
“A study of the top fifty game-changing innovations over a hundred-year period showed that nearly 80 percent of those innovations were sparked by someone whose primary expertise was outside the field in which the innovation breakthrough took place.”

#IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline by Ben Parr

Ben Parr in "Mashable: The Social Media Guide" provides the most comprehensive history of the interaction of social media on the Iran election crisis: #IranElection Crisis: A Social Media Timeline. If it had not been for Twitter, YouTube and Flicker, we would have never known of the events in Iran. Certainly the mainstream media did not cover it.

Web 2.0 and the Iran Election

From Ben Parr's blog "Mashable: The Social Media Guide" we have these amazing statistics on the #Iranelection:
Twitter: 221,744 “Iran” Tweets in One Hour
The Blogosphere: 2,250,000 Blog Posts in 24 hours
YouTube: 184,500 Videos on Iran, 3000 in One Day
The photo below is from one of these blogs: "tehran 24: Daily Photos from Iran."http://tehranlive.org/2009/06/17/demonstration-and-protests-to-election-results-the-5th-day/

Iranian Revolution on Twitter

If you aren't following the Iranian revolution on Twitter, your missing out on one of the most important events of your lifetime. Here's a piece by Clay Shirkey on TED:

Library of Congress on Flicker

The Library of Congress has recently published some of its most popular Depression era photos on Flickr:

Microsoft offers free tools for high schoolers

Re-blog from Educational Technology, Microsoft Corporation is offering Visual Studio and XNA Game Studio for free as a service to high school students.  Will try to get it for my elementary students as they are very good at multimedia.

Become Really Good at Graphic Design

Seth Godin provides an excellent summary of graphic design materials on his blog site.

Click through to see the plexo

Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web

It's hard to imagine, but the World Wide Web just turned 20 today. For those under 30, it has been here forever. For those of us much older, it has changed our lives in dramatic fashion. At this moment, I am following dog teams on the Iditarod using live GPS readings on the web. I take something for granted that would not have been possible just a few years ago.

Another excellent TED presentation.

David Merrill on TED

Garr Reynoldsj just posted an interesting new idea from TED:

Stiffables are small computer blocks that can interact in amazing ways.  Watch the video. 

Liberal Arts

My best friend from high school, Rick Ward, professor and Associate  Dean at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, recently commented on the difficulty of recruiting students to a liberal arts education.  As a liberal arts graduate, I have spent some time reflecting on this issue.  There is no question that liberal arts has taken a pounding lately.  For example, Friedman in his book The World is Flat calls for a national commitment to science and engineering.   There is tremendous pressure toward "career" degrees.  Every where you look, you find the question, Can Liberal Arts be saved?

But if you take time to look at the reality of today's market place, you find a need for the broad education and skills that a liberal arts education can provide.  Consider a recent article in eSchool News by Dennis Carter "College web design courses fail with bosses" In this difficult economc climate, a study of web design employers finds they are looking for "broadly educated, open-minded, and self-motivated individuals" with a "general awareness of the web, social networking and culture, strong spoken and written language skills, [and] enthusiasm and commitment to life-long learning."  Doesn't this describe a liberal arts education?  

The skills needed to survive in this rapidly changing world are flexibility, life long learning, and self-motivation.  What better place to recieve them than a liberal arts college.  The problem, as my friend Rick states, is selling this to the college bound student.

Medieval Help Desk

This video has been around a while, but it's still great.

Storyboarding

Here's a useful short on the value of storyboarding in the creation of a multimedia presentation. Thanks to Garr Reynolds for the post on this.

Collaboration

 I am becoming more and more convinced that collaboration is the key not only to learning, but to the professional future of our students.  Guy Kawasaki  provides a great post about an article in Psychology Today by Carlin Flora called "Dream Teams," which is a study of collaboration in architecture, music, fashion, robotics. I spend a lot of time teaching collaboration to my students using Web 2.0 tools. 

For example, students in our school have collaborated on a wiki about the Inauguration.  Last year our 4th students, collaborated on a wiki about New York State.  That same group of students scored very well on this year's State Social Studies Assessment. 

I've learned a few techniques regarding wikis in the classroom. The most important is to establish a rule that students not add personal identification to wiki posts.  The emphasis is on the group's product, not the individual's product.  Students still gain satisfaction from recognizing their individual contributions on a wiki, and it's always possible to identify the editors through the history. That, of course, prevents bad behavior in the project.  The wiki method offers the ability for student's to learn individual responsibility and group learning.

Students get excited about a wiki.  One student, who often appears bored in my classes, got very excited after taking the state test.  She informed me that the DBQ portion of the exam had focused on Peter Stuyvesant, and she had written an entire piece on him for our wiki project.

From TED: 5 dangerous things you should let your kids do