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.