March 22, 2006

Nancy Willard's MySpace Adventure

Online child safety advocate Nancy Willard recently had the opportunity to visit the headquarters of MySpace.com, the extraordinarily popular online community that's been a lightning rod for controversy in recent months. Nancy posted a summary of her visit to my WWWEDU discussion forum; she was kind enough to allow me and other list members to repost her report. Here's the full text of what she wrote.

On Monday, I had a personal visit to MySpace headquarters. They invited me for a meeting to seek my guidance on responding to Internet safety and responsible use issues. I want to report to you on what I saw and what I think. I think the members of these three discussion groups know that I am quite apt to speak my mind. ;-)

I will tell you I was impressed by the efforts MySpace is taking to address the recognized Internet safety and responsible use concerns and believe in their sincerity.

Here is what I witnessed and was told:

When abuse complaints come in, they are sent to a special team of responders who have had specific training in addressing abuse issues. There is also some specialization within this team.

They have specific procedures to promptly respond to legal subpoenas. They showed me the chart of the numbers of subpoenas and it is increasing exponentially each month. Incredible chart.

They have one staff member, a young man, who is assigned to work with school discussion groups and school concerns. They have public groups associated with schools on their system. There are currently 25,000 +- They seek a student from the school to serve as a moderator and try to pick a student who appears to them to be a "school leader" based on an application. The moderator's job is to contact MySpace if any issues of concern arise. I think it will be very helpful for schools to find out whether there is a public group for the school and who the moderator is. It is likely that the public group will attract the school's "in-crowd" and that other groups of kids within the school may set up their own public or private groups. (This would be fascinating sociological research.) A staff person who has a good relationship with the student moderator could contact this student and simply offer any assistance, should the need arise. This needs to be done respectfully -- in support of this student's leadership potential. Reviewing the comments in this discussion group will provide insight into the school community from the eyes of some of the students.

This MySpace staff person also works with administrators and school resource officers if they contact MySpace about a school concern. I have spoken with a couple of school resource officers who have had dealings with MySpace and they told me they were very pleased with the quality of the response and service. This young man appeared to be very sincere and competent -- but also very young and without any actual school experience.

He and his supervisor reflected some concerns with the manner in which school officials were contacting them. One major concern -- which I am going to take some significant actions to address -- is that sometimes administrators contact the company for assistance but the administrator cannot tell them the specific location of the concerning material. Why? BECAUSE THE ADMINISTRATOR IS BLOCKED FROM ACCESSING THE SITE! This is outrageous folks and will have to be promptly addressed. A parent calls the school and reports "My child is being threatened." I saw some material that makes me concerned about possible suicide." or the like and the administrator, counselor, or school resource officer can't go to the site to make an assessment. This is unacceptable. I am going to try to work through the US Dept of Ed and other channels to alert schools to get this situation changed. These three staff positions in each school must have override rights and capabilities. This is essential. (And I am embarrassed that I did not detect this as a concern earlier.)

MySpace has a text monitoring system that they use to detect possible concerns, including under age members, gang text or symbols, threats, and the like. They remove 1800 to 2000 under age profiles per day that they have identified. They also review all of the images posted on the site soon after they are posted. This is a monumental task -- not a job I would want. The images are on a screen that the reviewer can control. That has the facility for the reviewer to indicate that the image or the profile of the person posting the image should be deleted. They review videos prior to posting -- taking miscellaneous screen shots from the video. This level of review is not going to take down provocative pictures (eg Britanny Spears-like press photos).

They have new instructions on their site that provide guidance for parents seeking to remove the profile of their child. http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/misc/RemovingChildProfiles.html. This situation presents some difficulties. If they responded to every request that appears to come from a parent to remove a profile, someone could impersonate a parent for the purpose of bullying. Or they could get into the middle of a custodial parent dispute. My assessment is that the way they are proceeding is the only possible way to address the concern.

The MySpace folks are very interested in the fact that I am working on a book for parents, because they really want to see more parents engaged in appropriate parenting. I think MySpace is really doing a lot to address the safety and responsible use concerns. But parents should not expect MySpace or any other web site to do their job for them!!! These sites are not babysitting operations.

MySpace staff appear to have a good understanding of the concerns and are reaching out to me and others to seek even better ways to address the concerns. The see increased education of parents and youth as the answer. The challenge will be to get parents and youth to pay attention.

There are some significant social issues involved with these kinds of online activities that will absolutely require education and parental involvement. Actually, they will also require massive social change to really work, but I am not holding my breath. Teens are clearly using places like MySpace to establish social status. How do young males establish social status? By posting manly, daring images and information that demonstrate independence and bravery and by being listed as a friend on as many profiles of "hot girls" as possible. And how do girls establish social status? By posting sexually provocative pictures and titillating information that attracts the attention and friendship links of manly guys. How does any teen attract attention? By posting hot, intimate information. The teens who are into playing these games are the ones who are most likely playing these games on places like MySpace. These are the same kinds of games that are going on every day in the hallways of middle and high schools. Some of the students are really into playing these games and others are not.

My hope is that we can find better ways to use these environments for more socially beneficial uses. How about getting online teens focused on tasks that would seek to alleviate problems associated with poverty in third world villages?

I am going to be working on a brief document for schools that addresses some of the things I think they should be doing in relation to these communities -- starting first with override privileges.

Thanks again to Nancy for allowing me to republish it.

Posted by acarvin at 03:33 PM

February 22, 2006

Nancy Davenport's Keynote on Scholarly Communications

Some notes from the latest keynote. Didn't get everything but it captures the basics.

Nancy Davenport
President, Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR)

Scholarly Communications
What are the issues?
What are the options
What are the leadership issues?

Spent much of her professional life in research circles, not academic circles, but has focused more on academic POV in the last two years.

Library: the documentation of human endeavour; an unbroken line in the human record.

A portion of that documentation propels research and scholarship; supports learning.

A collection is the product of cultural movments

120,000 librarians involved in collection development for academic libraries. "A lot of us are collecting the same stuff.... But we have to figure out ways to become a bit smarter for things that are unique to our institutions."

Scholars are the supply and the demand. Research has to be distributed, through print, e-format, open access, repositories, self-publishing, even blogs.

Who is in the middle, mediating scholarly discussions? Societies, reviewers, publishers - for profit and nonprofit - aggregators, librarians, provosts, administrators, the Internet.

Peer review is what every scholar wants - to be judged as an exemplar by their colleagues.

Publishers started as printers only, but over time, they began to accrue some of the attributes of research societies. They took on the best scholars as reviewers. Later, aggregators came along - companies acting as distributing agents of scholarly work, as opposed to RSS aggregators. These traditional aggregators also do similar work online, customizing services for librarians. Meanwhile, the provosts control the purse strings while librarians ask for more.

Supply: scholars, researchers, reviewers, societies

Demand: scholars, researchers, societies, teacher, public, industry

Motivations:

Scholars have new knowledge to share; stature, impact, tenure, ego - journal as a branding device

Publishers: profit (or not); stature; impact; market share - journal also as a branding device

Libraries: Build collections, satisfy scholars, maximize buying power, institutional stature, personal stature, persistence

Digital scholarship: only way to integrate disparate content, allows new research and scholarship, encourages using material in new ways, creates new fields and communities of practice, creates new knowledge.

CLIR call to action: tells publishers that librarians want independent, third party preservation of your content

"The academic community is built upon a sham. More an more you don't own your content - you're paying rent."

What impedes open access?

The academic reward system. Tenure requires publishing in "the right journals."

Scientists can put open access fee into their budgets. But in the humanities, you don't get that kind of funding. PloS.org won't work for most humanities scholars.

Level of support outside the sciences.

Scholarly style; it took respect to make the Human Genome Project to work. Humanities has a different dynamic. Individual interpretation is valued more than collaborative interpretation. So working in a collaborative environment can be difficult in scholarly humanities research.

U of Virginia: Valley of the Shadow website. Examines two Shenandoah Valley towns before during and after the civil war. They've digitized every bit of data they can get their hands on.

Projects like this aren't easy. It takes stature and authority to make these kinds of changes happen.

Where are we now? We pay a lot of money. Most institutions are paying 24% for digital serial journals in their collections budget. Libraries each pay large fees to access the same material. Meanwhile, libraries are digitizing their own special, unique materials.

Search strategies are becoming even more important - recall and precision.

New research methods within disciplines

Share what is in common; focus on the local, the unique

Get it into the classroom!

Posted by acarvin at 12:44 PM

January 18, 2006

Students Expose Sex Offender Through Wikipedia Research

Joshua Gardner

Mug shot of Joshua Gardner, AKA Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, 5th Duke of Cleveland.

Just when you thought there wouldn't be any more national news stories about Wikipedia, here comes one right out of left field. As reported by ABC News, the WACK-a-Pedia blog and elsewhere. a group of high school students foiled attempts of a registered sex offender to enroll in their school by researching his background on Wikipedia.

Here's what happened. A young man identifying himself as Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, 5th Duke of Cleveland, visited Stillwater Area High School in Minnesota three times trying to enroll as a transfer student. He had a "spot on" English accent and insisted on being called "your grace." Students at the school had their doubts, so they began researching him on the Internet. They found Wikipedia citations regarding the Duke of Cleveland had been edited on several occasions by an anonymous Wikipedian - edits that were promptly corrected by other Wikipedians but still viewable in this Wikipedia edit history. They also found that someone named Joshua Gardner had created an entry for Caspian James Crichton-Stuart IV, the person who had visited the school. Subsequent student research exposed Gardner to be their so-called Duke of Cleveland; he also happened to be a 22-year-old registered sex offender.

This case offers a fascinating example of Wikipedia use in the classroom. While many educators may poo-poo Wikipedia, the checks and balances set up for the site allow visitors to explore the detailed history of how an article is created and edited over time; without this data, the students might never have uncovered Gardner's true identity.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:01 AM

November 08, 2005

The First Student Video Blog from Atlantic City Rough Cuts

title

Students from MLK Elementary School in Atlantic City, NJ interview school board members for their first video blog.

Yesterday after wrapping up a blogging workshop at UMass/Boston, I was giving a demonstration of Mozilla Thunderbird as an RSS news reader. Just as I was about to close my laptop, one of my news folders got a hit: a new blog entry had been posted somewhere. To my surprise, I discovered that the blog entry was the first student video blog posted to Atlantic City Rough Cuts, the elementary school video blogging project organized by Art Wolinsky.

Last July I went to Atlantic City to teach local school teachers how to video blog, and helped Art set up the blog. The teachers posted several short videos to the blog, but there weren't any videos produced by the students. Until yesterday, at least.

The video, entitled Witches, Aliens, and School Board Members, does the impossible: it makes a school board conference funny. A group of students went to a recent New Jersey state school board conference, where they got to shoot some video and interview board members. They went back to school and made comic strips about the meeting, which they gave to the board members. Now, several groups of students are making documentary shorts about the experience. They're basically using the same script, but the editing decisions will be their own. The first of these videos is available on the blog, and the others will soon follow.

I'm really excited about the video; it may indeed be the first video blog ever produced by elementary school students in a classroom environment. I can't wait to see what else they'll come up with over the course of the year.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:15 AM

October 01, 2005

American Idol Comes Out of the Illiteracy Closet

Just saw this story on Yahoo:

"American Idol" winner Fantasia Barrino reveals in her memoirs that she is functionally illiterate and had to fake her way through some scripted portions the televised talent show, which she won in 2004.

"You're illiterate to just about everything. You don't want to misspell," Fantasia told ABC's "20/20." "So that, for me, kept me in a box and I didn't, wouldn't come out."

The 21-year-old R&B; singer says she's signed record deals and contracts that she didn't read and couldn't understand. But the hardest part, she said, is not being able to read to Zion, her 4-year-old daughter.

Now that she's outed herself, as it were, wouldn't it be great to see her lead a campaign against functional illiteracy? We really could use someone that kids and young adults can look up to and relate to when it comes to battling illiteracy... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 05:51 PM

September 27, 2005

Are Educators Hostile to Wikipedia?

Last July, I posted a blog entry about strategies teachers could use to incorporate Wikipedia into classroom practice. The post received a lot of commentary in the blogosphere, some positive, some negative, but all quite interesting.

I then received an email from Jimmy Wales, the creator of Wikipedia, who noted one particular sentence I used in my essay:

On Wikipedia in particular, we talked about the hostility that many educators have towards the website, particularly their concerns that it can't be considered a reliable source.

Jimbo took issue with my use of the word hostility when describing how many educators felt about Wikipedia. In his experience, Jimbo felt that the majority of educators had quite the opposite feeling, being supportive of Wikipedia.

I found this surprising. From a purely anecdotal perspective, particularly among k-12 librarians, I'd heard a lot of complaints about Wikipedia being unreliable and inappropriate for students. At conferences I'd felt sometimes I was the only person in the room supportive of Wikipedia as a teaching tool. Perhaps one of us was just hearing from a vocal minority. Or perhaps one of us just had it wrong.

Jimbo and I then went through the archive of my WWWEDU list to see if we could find any instances of educators painting Wikipedia in a negative light, and at that particular time, we couldn't. So it was basically Jimbo's gut feeling versus my gut feeling, with no quotes to back it up decisively one way or another.

So I suggested to Jimbo that we make our conversation public and see what educators actually have to say about Wikipedia. For example, is Wikipedia something you'd want your students using in the classroom? Do you consider it an appropriate teaching tool? If so, how? If not, why not?

If you're a teacher and a blogger, we'd like to encourage you to respond by posting something on your blog. If you do, please tag the post with so it's easier for all of us to follow the discussion, no matter where the blog entries are being posted. If you're not a blogger, email me your comments and I'll compile them for posting on my blog.

Personally, I hope Jimbo's right, since I see lots of potential uses for Wikipedia in the classroom. It's just that my gut is still telling me something else. Either way, we'd love to hear your thoughts on the matter. -andy


Posted by acarvin at 03:37 PM | Comments (17)

September 21, 2005

The Confluence of Media Literacy and Multicultural Literacy

Robin Blake

Robin Blake of OFCOM, the UK telecom regulatory agency, talking about media literacy at the Scottish Learning Festival.

Right now I'm sitting in on a session by Robin Blake of OFCOM, the UK telecom regulatory agency, who's speaking about media literacy and education. I'm trying to record a podcast of the session but there's some audio interference in the room, so I'm not sure if the quality of the audio will be tolerable.

Meanwhile, I just spent some time on the expo floor, which is jammed with several hundred exhibitors showing off their wares to countless educators. I particularly enjoyed observing a group of students recording a radio broadcast; they've spent the last few weeks learning the basics of radio broadcasting, and this morning was their first live recording session. I recorded interviews with a couple of the trainers - the students were preoccupied with the broadcast - and hope to edit them into a podcast later.

I'm still having problems with the Internet access here. If my computer sits idle for a few minutes, the wifi service logs me out and requires me to restart my computer to log in again. It's not just a matter of restarting the browser - it actually gives me an error message saying I need to reboot. What a pain.

Anyway, Robin is now giving the audience a media literacy quiz. His first question asked which of Britain's public service TV networks was most likely to begin their newscast with a story on crime. Only one person got the answer right - Channel Five, apparently. But what I found most interesting abou the question is that it demonstrates that media literacy and cultural literacy go hand-in-hand. I consider myself to be rather media literate, but I stood no chance against questions like that, simply because I lack the cultural context to know the difference between each UK broadcast network's programming style.

The reverse would be true if audience members here came to a presentation of mine in the US if I'd asked which of the US news channels has the reputation of being the most pro-Bush (Fox News). The most basic elements of media literacy boil down to whether or not a person has the ability to be a discerning consumer of content, recognizing truthfulness, bias, context, etc, as well as the ability to be a producer of content that reflects their personal needs. This requires technical skills, cognitive skills, self-reflection skills. But without multicultural literacy, all the media literacy skills in the world won't change anything if you're completely tone deaf as far as media is concerned when you're out of your cultural element.

The fact that I'm in Scotland right now makes it no surprise that I failed Robin's media literacy test miserably. But it really makes me think about the challenges each country faces in terms of its own cultural minorities. So much of the US media, both offline and online, assumes that you're a part of the "mainstream." And so much of what you see on TV and the Internet is developed for - and by - a white, middle class audience. Mainstream media continues to neglect people of color, immigrant populations, low-literate populations, etc. Even if you're able to work with disadvantaged groups and teach them basic media literacy skills, if you can't bridge cultural gaps, true media literacy will still be lacking. And the FCC's counter-productive media consolidation moves in recent years has just made it worse, limiting the diversity of minority voices in the public sphere, futhering the media/cultural diversity gap.

So the next time someone tells you that media literacy is a technical education challenge, think again. Without addressing multicultural literacy as well, you're liable to leave countless people in the dust, just because of their cultural background. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 07:11 AM

September 20, 2005

Andy's Scottish Learning Festival Powerpoint

On September 21 I'm deliver a presentation at the Scottish Learning Festival entitled "Online Communities: From BBSes to Blogs and Beyond." Hopefully I'll be able to record a podcast of it; in the meantime, here's my powerpoint presentation. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 01:18 PM

July 11, 2005

Turning Wikipedia into an Asset for Schools

Art Wolinsky and I went to dinner tonight just outside of Atlantic City, where I'll be leading a two-day workshop on documentary making for a group of elementary school teachers. During dinner, Art and I talked about what I'll be presenting tomorrow morning, as well as fun Internet topics such as video blogging, podcasting and Wikipedia.

On Wikipedia in particular, we talked about the hostility that many educators have towards the website, particularly their concerns that it can't be considered a reliable source. It's the classic dilemma of a wiki website - because wikis allow any site visitor to edit or add content, you raise the risk of getting content that isn't up to snuff. And the fact that young and old alike often go to Wikipedia and see that its name ends in -pedia, they assume it's just like any other encyclopedia and they should take its content as vetted, accurate information, which ain't always the case.

I explained to Art the community of Wikipedia volunteers known as Wikipedians who have created a system of checks and balances to improve the quality of content and avoid problems with virtual graffiti and inaccuracies. But it's not a perfect system, so it's not a huge surprise that a lot of educators just don't want their students utilizing the site.

I had a flashback; a group of us on the WWWEDU email list had tried to create a "Kidopedia" - an online encyclopedia written entirely by kids - back in 1996, hosted by St. John's University. It didn't get very far because all encyclopedia entries were being posted manually by real people; that, and the fact that it was hard to articulate a compelling case as to why kids should be doing this in the first place.

While I understand educators' concerns about directing kids towards "reliable" reference sources, the more I think about it, the more I think Wikipedia's flaws actually make it an ideal learning tool for students. That may sound counterintuitive, of course - how can you recommend a tool that you know may not be accurate? Well, that's precisely the point: when you go to Wikipedia, some entries are better referenced than others. That's just a basic fact. Some entries will have a scrupulous list of sources cited and a detailed talk page on which Wikipedians debate the accuracy of information presented in order to improve it. Others, though, will have no sources cited and no active talk pages. To me, this presents teachers with an excellent authentic learning activity in which students can demonstrate their skills as scholars.

Here's a quick scenario. Take a group of fifth grade students and break them into groups, with each group picking a topic that interests them. Any topic. Dolphins, horses, hockey, you name it.

Next, send the groups of kids to Wikipedia to look up the topic they selected. Chances are, someone has already created a Wikipedia entry on that particular subject. The horse, for example, has an extensive entry on the website. It certainly looks accurate and informative, but is it? Unfortunately, there are no citations for any of the facts claimed about horses on the page.

This is where it gets fun. The group of students breaks down the content on the page into manageable chunks, each with a certain amount of facts that need to be verified. The students then spend the necessary time to fact-check the content. As the students work their way through the list, they'll find themselves with two possible outcomes: either they'll verify that a particular factoid is correct, or they'll prove that it's not. Either way, they'll generate a paper trail, as it were, of sources proving the various claims one way or another.

Once the Wikipedia entry has been fact-checked, the teacher creates a Wikipedia login for the class. They go to the entry's talk page and present their findings, laying out every idea that needs to be corrected. Then, they edit the actual entry to make the corrections, with all sources cited. Similarly, for all the parts of the entry they've verified as accurate, they list sources confirming it. That way, each idea presented in the Wikipedia entry has been verified and referenced - hopefully with multiple sources.

Get enough classrooms doing this, you kill several birds with one stone: Wikipedia's information gets better, students help give back to the Net by improving the accuracy of an important online resource, and teachers have a way to make lemons into lemonade, turning Wikipedia from a questionable information source to a powerful tool for information literacy.

I can already see it now: an official K-12 Seal of Approval put on Wikipedia entries that have been vetted by students. Wish I were more handy in Photoshop. -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:14 PM | Comments (3)

June 30, 2005

Deneen Frazier-Bowen's Funky NECC Keynote

Deneen Frazier-Bowen
I had to leave at the crack of dawn yesterday morning to catch my train to New York, which meant I didn't get to see Deneen Frazier-Bowen's keynote at its scheduled time. But since she's my long-time edtech homegirl, she was sweet enough to let me sit in on one of her rehearsals this Tuesday.

Deneen's keynote wasn't your usual Powerpoint-Slides-and-a-Longwinded-Speech kinda keynote. Far from it. Instead, she basically pulled an Anna Deveare Smith and performed a series of characters to help paint a portrait of what it's like for today's kids to be growing up as digital natives. The keynote began with a stiff, know-nothing school administrator fumbling her way through a Powerpoint, talking about educating kids the old fashioned way and knowing what's best for today's kids. Eventually, she gets so flummoxed with her Powerpoint that she runs off the stage to argue with tech support.

While Old Miss Frumpmeister is doing her thing back stage, Deneen comes back on stage dressed as a young hip-hop lovin' teen. Her name is Eddy, and she's a smart, tough kid who loves technology but isn't trusted by her teachers. She tells a story about how she brought a palm pilot to class but gets busted for supposedly using it to cheat on a test, which wasn't the case. The school principal makes a capital case out of it and refuses to listen to Eddy's side of the story. So what does Eddy do? She posts it on her blog, which, of course, eventually gets back around to the principal. The principal orders her to remove the criticism of him from the blog, even though it's spot-on accurate, and Eddy refuses. She's then suspended from school, as people all over the world comment on her blog and rally to her cause.

Once Eddy exits the stage, we get to meet Maria. Maria's in late elementary school, and she's a bit hyper, but she's got great ideas about math and science. She likes to find science websites and hopes to use them in class, but not all her teachers seem to care about her opinion. But thanks to one teacher who values her opinion, Maria gets to talk about her idea about participating in Net Day Speak Up Day during a meeting of the school's teachers. She's never spoken in public before, so she uses the voice recorder on her smart phone to practice before giving her big speech, then puts it on her audio blog. Eventually, the school gets involved in the project, and she talks about the results.

Some of Maria's new-found courage comes from her older friend Joanna, an above average 11th grade student who likes to spend her free time playing online multiplayer games. At first her mother worries about the time she spends gaming, but then starts to notice how she takes charge whenever she's interacting with others online. Her mother talks to her about how she's learning leadership skills, a concept pretty much alien to Joanna, but eventually she decides to learn about youth leadership activities to see if she can channel her interests in a positive way. Enter TakingITGlobal: Joanna discovers the network and starts chatting with a girl in Egypt. She gets the idea of setting up a computer recycling program for African kids, approaching the company her mom works for in order to get the computers. Before she knows it, she's an active TIG member, getting lots of media attention in her community as she mobilizes local businesses to help bridge the digital divide.

Eventually, the obnoxious administrator returns to the stage. While trying to sort out her Powerpoint, she apparently overheard the kids' monologues. She's forced to rethink her attitudes towards kids and learning, while recognizing the way technology can be used to inspire and invigorate young people.

Following the performance, Deneen returns to the stage, no longer in character. She describes how she's spent time over the last few years interview countless young people, trying to get a handle on what it's like to be a digital native. The characters she introduced during her performance are not verbatim re-enactments of actual people a la Anna Deveare Smith, but are composites and creations inspired by the students she's interviewed. It was a whole new way to tell the story of education and youth media; I'm really glad I had the chance to see Deneen's performance before leaving the conference.

For those of you who missed it, here are some podcasts of her characters. Not all the performances are complete, but they'll give you a feel for what she did on stage at NECC. Special thanks to Deneen for letting me record them. -andy

Eddy
Maria
Joanna
The Administrator

Posted by acarvin at 07:03 PM | Comments (1)

June 28, 2005

Powerpoints From My NECC Panel

I'll be convening a panel at the conference in a couple of hours; the session will bring together a group of Web pioneering educators to talk about Web-based education's past, present and future. I'll post notes about it later; in the meantime, here are the powerpoints we plan to use.

General Panel Powerpoint

Ed Gragert's Powerpoint

Yvonne Andres' Powerpoint

Posted by acarvin at 12:15 PM

Balkanized Wi-Fi at the NECC Conference

I'm pretty annoyed at the Philadelphia convention center's wireless policy. It seems that free wi-fi is available in public corridors, but not in the session rooms. When you try to go online during a session, you get a message informing vendors that it'll cost them 250 bucks a laptop to have public wifi in all meeting spaces. What a joke. Given all the sessions that is finally having on blogging, podcasting, wi-fi, etc, it's an embarrassment that none of us can do this stuff in real-time in so many of the presentation rooms here, unless you're luck enough to have access to one of the few ethernet cables set up for the presenters themselves. So I'll have to step out of the session to post this message. What a pain....

Posted by acarvin at 09:25 AM | Comments (1)

Don't Surf the Web, Serve the Web

Right now I'm sitting in on Tom March's session. He's showing off some blogs created in classroom, with students having a more authentic learning experience by interacting with the online public. Quoting Al Rogers, he said, "Don't surf the Web, serve the Web." (Reminds me of Stephen Collins' old battle cry, Give Back to the Net.) Use Web tools to create student excitement alive, embracing authentic activities that can actually make a difference, like running an online news wire about child slavery or the extinction of frog species.

Tom's now showing how easy it was to buy a domain name for his son and setting up a space for him to create his own content. The site is scottyjensen.com - not sure if anything is live yet. Seems like a no, but maybe by the time you read this it'll be different.

It's a nice size crowd here - about 250 people. Not bad for a conference with more than 300 concurrent sessions over the next few days.

Posted by acarvin at 09:24 AM

Post-Weinberger Chaos: The Annual Stampede for Free Food

As soon as David Weinberger finished his presentation, thousands of attendees streamed out the ballroom to make a run for the buffet tables set up in the reception hall. The reception took place in a long, thin corridor, creating an ugly bottleneck of tote-bag-toting educators eager to scarf down free food laid out on some sponsor's dime. Meanwhile, a large group of brass-wielding mummers performed parade music, much of which was drowned out by numbers of people calling out to friends amidst the throng of hungry teachers. Sheer chaos. Welcome to yet another NECC.

Patsy and I looked around for a moment or two and decided to bolt. I've done nine other NECC receptions: the food quality varies, but it's usually greasy, and the last thing my jet-lagged stomach needed was an overdose of fried food. So off to the train station we went to head back out to the suburbs. Hobnobbing with friends and peers could wait.

Posted by acarvin at 09:23 AM

Weinberger Keynote Brain Dump

The 2005 National Educational Computing Conference () kicked off in Philadelphia today with an opening keynote by David Weinberger. I haven't had a chance to write an article about what he said, so he's a brain dump of all the quotes and ideas I managed to capture. -andy

"I will never live philosopher in chief down - let that never leave this room."

His presentation, entitled "The Shape of Knowledge,"

"Darn bloggers, you can't say anything."

Knowledge is "in pretty rocky shape." He talked about Dan Rather's fall from grace; unfortunately the media portrays it as the result of a "blogger hit squad," he said the issue was that today's media doesn't have the authority it once did. "When the authorities don't even know they've lost authority, that's funny - that's comedy!"

Jon Stewart: "He's the only guy on TV capable of blurting out the truth."

Wikipedia: In a couple of hundred years, people will point to wikipedia as an "epochal event." If you want to understand what the Internet can be, you should point to Wikipedia. "By all rights it should be the world's biggest crap magnet.... But in fact, Jimbo Wales has done something remarkable."

The Greek agora: it's where affairs of state were decided. "that's where knowledge got started."

There's only one thing we can really know: I think, therefore I am. Descartes. A single sentence that even God couldn't fool with it.

Four aspects of knowledge. Two of them mirror the nature of reality, while the other measure the nature of political reality.

We assume there's onlyone knowledge we share. On reality, one knowledge.

Knowledge is neatly organized, like the way we organize things like laundry. Putting it in piles of things that make sense to us.

One of the consequences of this, is as with physical things, we assume that in a perfect knowledge structure that everything will have its place.

Because we doing these knowledge structures, we need experts to do it. "We need experts - it's tough to do this."

The experts are going to have a lot of power who help us what's the right knowledge, what's the best knowledge.

Dewey: creating a map of knowledge like a map of the local landscape. This ultra rationalism of his forces some constraints: English is put somewhere else than Latin or German or Portuguese or Ural-Altaic or Dravidian, while southeast Asian languages "don’t even get an integer."

Religion: 88 dewey decimals assigned to Christianity, jews get one, Buddhists and muslims one, etc.

The point is, is that this is NOT a solvable problem. There is not one world so there is not one knowledge.

But digitizing changes everything a whole bunch.

First order: organizing physical things themselves, like photo archives with pencil metadata written on back

Second order: physically separating metadata from the physical objects themselves, like a card catalog representing the knowledge of books

Third order: everything is digital, both objects and metadata. So what can you do now?

Photographic equipment: One thing usually goes into one pile; now you can sort digital cameras in as many places on an e-commerce website as you want.

Messiness is a virtue: hyperlinks can be as messy as you want. If you can't even count them or follow them all, then you've succeeded.

Unknown order. Most of Macy's is noise: stuff that doesn't fit you. Imagine getting a wheelbarrow that pulls out everything you can use, you've got your own personal store. The owner of info no longer owns the organization of information.

Go to a website shopping for digital cameras and sort the search based on your parameters, not theirs. That's an enormous release of power, a transfer of power.

Users are contributors. Social labeling: allowing the public to contribute meaning to information, like labeling online photos

Externalized thought. Cites Andy Clark: human beings have always externalized thought, like a physicist requiring a white board in order to think. Now we're doing the same thing with google. How can you get your kids to memorize the state capitals when they can look it up easily?

If our scaffolding now is bits, what does that mean?

Wikipedia: wiki is not paper. It's obvious, but it's a good thing to keep in mind. It's size is infinite; it's not limited.

What's the size of a topic? According to Brittanica, you can only have 32 volumes of knowledge, not 33 - that'd break your back. Artificial constraints to what is considered shared knowledge.

Snip the paper chain, the connection to reality, and build an encyclopedia out of bits, and watch what happens. You get entries like Deep Fried Mars Bar and the Heavy Metal Umlaut. These are somewhat frivolous, perhaps, but we know the size of these topics, and shows what matters to us as a culture, as humans and individuals. This is much closer to the passion of knowledge than what brittanica is.

Linnaeus library: you had to physically have the species to make it official. It's a map of all species. Linnaeus created a stack of 3x5 cards, laid them out, then made physical maps of them. This makes it tempting to lump things in one category to make life easier.

We have a container model of the mind. It's an insane idea. We're doing an internal representation of the world based on what we can store in our heads, or in a book, but they're both finite.

He then shows Doc Searls' blog: one of 11 million known and tracked blogs, though I'd guess there are at least double that. Shows his blogroll - all the links he shows to others. Lots of entries, lots of links. Blogs get represented as people writing publicly; but they're really people in conversations linking to each other. Goes against commercial website philosophy of not linking to outside sources. When you put it all together you get a stinkin' pile of generosity.

The NY Times: lots of news, lots of links. Except all but for point internally, the rest point to ads. And they have the nerve to call the blogosphere an echo chamber.

Why should you believe Doc Searls? You shouldn't necessarily, but you should believe the world he lives in more than the NY Times' world.

Objectivity: the world that is
Subjectivity: the world that matters
Multisubjectivity: it's not just lots of viewpoints; it's that you get viewpoints in conversation with each other.

If you want to learn about open source, you won't find it in Brittanica; instead, go to Doc's site and follow the links. Go to technorati and see what bloggers are saying. An endless set of links of people conversing with each other. And with all of those people, you'll get a better sense of what the truth is than reading a single source.

Multi-dispute-ism: when you get into an argument in public, you get hyper rational and try to tear the other person a new one, getting them to admit they're wrong and you're right. On the Web, it's more typical you get a dialogue. It's a big web - there's lots of room to disagree and move on. The conversation is never going to be resolved.

When you want a beer, you don't look for a perfect beer, just a good one. With information gatekeepers, they want knowledge to be perfect, rather than just good enough. With good enough, we barely need gatekeepers. It's pragmatic: we want the beer. "Pragmatic, local and damn refreshing."

Knowledge in the age of connected abundance. The solution to the over-abundance of information is more information. Connected abundance. Should we shove content into our kids' heads? Should we test them as individuals even though they learn socially? Should we imply ambiguity is a failure? Should we insist on being right?

Knowledge is an unending conversation. I mean this absolutely literally. It's not content that we all decide on. It's the engagement in the conversation. So we need to understand the context of knowledge - it depends on the discipline. We need to learn how to listen, seek ambiguity. If they're being too precise, we need to muddy the waters. And we need to love the difference in things.

Conversation, by its very nature, is a paradox. We base differences on identifying what's common. The simple act of a conversation is miraculous.

Posted by acarvin at 09:21 AM

June 27, 2005

In Philly for NECC

title

Patsy Wang-Iverson hard at work at Research for Better Schools

I'm back in the US after a long haul from Seoul. I flew overnight to San Francisco, where I spent the afternoon with Matthew Schaefer from Compumentor, then went back to the airport for yet another overnight flight to Atlanta. Finally, I caught a flight yesterday morning from Atlanta to Philadelphia for the NECC conference.

Right now I'm over at Research for Better Schools working out of Patsy Wang-Iverson's office; we'll head over to the conference center in just a few minutes to register and get our badges and tote bags. Later this afternoon, there will be a reception for international visitors and a first-timers orientation (this is my 10th NECC, so I'll pass on that one). David Weinberger is doing the opening keynote, which will be quite refreshing for NECC, and then an opening reception. I'm moderating a panel session tomorrow called Celebrating a Decade of the Web in Education; then on Wednesday I'll get to head home, by way of meetings in New York. Can't wait to sleep in my own bed again.... -ac

Posted by acarvin at 10:25 AM

March 07, 2005

Orwell Comes to Nagpur: All Cameras, All the Time

Saturday's edition of the Times of India had a rather disturbing story about a school in Nagpur in which the principal has installed 180 webcams throughout the school to monitor students and teachers. The school, featured in the new documentary The Great Indian School Show, was wired by principal D. K. Bajaj, who felt the webcams would help enforce strict discipline.

Meanwhile, some parents and educators have begun to complain. "We do not need such Spartan discipline at school, especially in day school," said Uma Sharatchandra, another local principal. "They are just learning to become good human beings. They make mistakes, they learn from it."

School counselor Sadanand Ghaskadvi worries that parents won't understand the implications of the webcam practice. "In the last several decades I've seen several such attempts to enforce extreme discipline." Sanjyot Despande, another counselor, added, "It will come in the way of their personality development. It is especially wrong for teenage students, who will feel seriously offended by the cameras."

After viewing the documentary, a fourth grader was asked who the bad guy was in the film. "The villain is the one who wears all those gold rings and sits in his dark room, watching all the children on his TV, isn't it?" he said. "I don't ever want to go to his school."

Posted by acarvin at 05:07 PM

March 04, 2005

Touring a Rural Indian Cybervan

I've just returned from a wonderful visit to a cyber van touring the Maharashtra countryside near Baramati, India. We spent an hour visiting with the students and teachers as they used the cybervan to learn MS Paint, and toured a classroom that was also teaching basic computer graphics to 5th graders. Meanwhile, across the road I met another group of village kids who never got to use the cybervan, so the contrast was quite striking.

I conducted interviews with several students and shot lots of video, so I plan to edit it into a video blog at some point. More later... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 11:02 PM

What Makes Educational Content Educational?

In the last session earlier we saw a series of presentations on examples of educational content development here in India. Unfortunately I didn't see anything that seemed to be breaking new ground. One project developed a series of educational CD-ROMs that converted textbook curricula into multimedia modules that you could play, rewind, fast forward and stop like a video recorder. We saw a clip from an anatomy module in which there was an animation of a skeleton flexing its knee joint. Meanwhile, a voiceover explained how the joint worked. Once you were done viewing the clip, though, your only options were to replay it or to move on to the next clip. What does a student do if they don't understand the voiceover explanation? The module offers no ability for the student to manipulate the stimulation, ask rudimentary questions or demonstrate that they've gained any knowledge from viewing it.

It seems the problem here isn't a matter of programming skills; the animations were quite well done, and the interface was simple to use. But the curricular model simply takes the content once contained in a text book, and animate it with accompanying narration. The same teaching method could have been seen in the 1970s with film strips I saw when I was in school.

I don't want to belittle the enthusiasm seen here regarding the development of educational content, particularly in local languages. But it's such a shame that the multimedia content we've seen so far doesn't demonstrate any interactivity, real or imagined, nor does it give students the tools to demonstrate what they're learning or how it applies to the real world. In one case we did see how students were being asked to create Powerpoint presentations after surfing the Net for information on a particular task such as "Learn something about Russia," but again, all this demonstrates is a student's ability to search the Web and do a book report presentation with the Powerpoint substituting what might otherwise be a handwritten report.

The next session, though, seemed to offer some more compelling models. Ana Maria Raad of CDI Chile gave a presentation on charter school-like information technology citizenship schools in Chile that use community-centric authentic assessment to teach students. Their education model, inspired by the "social education" work of Paulo Friere, is based on the notion that every child can be a social actor within their community, and that they have the responsibility to transform the world around them into a better place.

"We understand that technology should only be a mean to do something and not a goal in itself," she said. "We use computers while discussing issues of particular interest to each community."

When students learn to use Excel, for example, they do it in the context of debating human rights, so their spreadsheets become a tool for engaging their classmates on what rights they believe they have and which ones they don't. And when they use Powerpoint or a desktop publishing program, it's in the context of communicating to the class certain policy goals they'd like to see advocated in their community. To date, more than half a million students have learned to use computers in the context of discussing social justice, citizens rights and civic engagement at nearly 1,000 citizenship schools across South America. These schools, she said, are giving students learning opportunities to liberate them and become civic actors in their community rather than restricting them to a limited, old-fashioned curriculum that doesn't educate students in a socially-relevant context.

Next, Shilpa Uttam of Enabling Dimensions conducted a demo of an Indian CD-ROM called SpellWell. The program, designed for the visually impaired, is a tool for improving English spelling proficiency. Because the blind experience greater problems with homophones (words that sound the same but are spelled differently, like sight and cite) and face other spelling proficiency challenge, the software is designed to teach visually impaired people better spelling and the ability to type. It's also seen as a tool for improving the job prospects of the blind, who statistically are more likely to face significant employment challenges. The interface is designed so that it can be used by people who cannot see a screen at all, as well as for individuals who have enough visual capacity to make out large words with strong screen contrast. The game features well-produced audio recordings with hip music and entertaining voice-overs, helping younger people with visual impairments stay interested in the software.

The CD-ROM is also trying to redefine pricing models for educational software, with a target price of less than 300 rupees (less than $8) per unit. The disc is distributed through educational institutions for the blind, advocacy organizations and other NGOs that work with the disabled. The packaging also incorporates Braille, so a visually impaired user can take it out of the box and find usable instructions on how to begin the software exercises. Interestingly, the developers of the software see non-impaired users as a target audience -- the audio content is compelling and the user interface simple, allowing anyone who is interested in approving their spelling ability to benefit from the software. They've even created an online community, EnableAll.org, to offer tech support with experts specialized in assistive technologies, as well as provide an online community for users to discuss their learning experiences and create new word lists.

The next challenge, she said, was making the software work with speech-recognition software. Not only would this open it up to a broader disabled audience, but to illiterate audiences as well.... - andy

Posted by acarvin at 07:18 AM

Facts Facts on India Education

Some stats from the last panel at the conference:


The challenges here are staggering.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 05:02 AM

Baramati Lunch Break

It's now 1pm in Baramati, India, and the group is wrapping up an informal lunch in an adjacent building. My lips are still burning from the chili I accidentally bit into, but otherwise lunch was a fine affair, with an assortment of curries, fresh tandoori breads and banana pudding for dessert.

Just prior to lunch, we had an engaging interactive session in which the audience got to ask questions of the CEO of Microsoft India and several other guests. The group was quite animating, speaking passionately on a range of topics, particularly the importance of creating computer software in local Indian languages, and the debate over whether children younger than six years old should be exposed to computers, whether for educational or entertainment purposes. Microsoft's Ravi Venkatesan assured one member of the audience that MS was working hard on releasing MS office in many Indian languages, including the local Marathi language, and that it would be priced at 25 to 30% less than the English-language version, as well as discounts for educational use.

There are several panel sessions this afternoon, though I don't have the program in front of me. I'll be speaking early tomorrow morning on US federal edtech initiatives, particularly the E-Rate. More from Baramati later.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 02:36 AM

Achieving Sustainable Edtech Initiatives

During today's morning keynote at the Baramati conference in India, Microsoft India CEO Ravi Venkatesan offered his company's latest thinking on information and communication technologies (ICTs) in education.

India graduates two million students each year, he said, yet 60 million children don't even go to school, and overall literacy is below 60%. "Sixty million is roughly the entire enrollment of the US school system," he noted. There are also about 400 students per computer in Indian schools. "Only a small fraction of educators have basic ICT literacy," he added, noting there are approximately 250,000 trained teachers amongst a total of five million teachers. In the general popualation, there are also around 10 PCs per thousand people overall.

"I find this interesting because there's a remarkable thing in India going on today," he continued. "Middle class Indians now believe we can be an educated, developed nation." Indians are starting to view their nation's one billion people not as an obstacle, but as an asset, he said.

"It's the shortage of skilled teachers, high student to teacher ratios, teacher absenteeism, student absenteeism" that are among India's greatest educational challenges, he continued. However, there are ways ICT can combat these challenges. For example, Venkatesan admitted that despite his personal successes in business, he is illiterate in his own native tongue, Tamil, yet he has been amazed how much of the basics he was able to pick up by using multimedia training tools at an ICT kiosk he recently visited.

Beyond formal schooling, ICTs can help village women achieve financial independence.
"You take women from self-help groups and give them basic ICT skills, and you dramatically increase their opportunities," he said. In partnership with an NGO working with agricultural workers, ICT access helped women increase their salary from 500 rupees (USD $11.50) a month to 2000 rupees (USD$ 45) a month.

Unfortunately, no major breakthrough has been achieved on a large, replicable scale, he said. "I don't think anybody really knows; there is a remarkable lack of information on what drives success and sustainability."

"When you look across all these projects, there is always a visionary, passionate, committed leader," he continued. "Our problem is that we then become over-reliant on this small group of leaders." There is no substitute for this type of leadership, he said; how do we identify more people to fill these roles?

It's quite common for a project's funding to dry up before it reaches critical mass for sustainability, he pointed out. There are many well-intentioned efforts, some led by the government, some by NGOs or the private sector, but they're not coordinated. "I'm constantly surprised" when you look at the projects of major IT companies, running project that have very similar goals, in the same communities, "but we don't come together, so there is a tremendous missed opportunity."

When developing an ICT project, he said, very often you get consumed by a particular goal, like wiring every village, or putting a kiosk in all of them. But unless you put in all the building blocks, "things fall apart." He then identified some of these building blocks, including local connectivity and affordability. "It's the affordability of everything: hardware, software, the cost of connectivity," he said. "I don't think any one company can solve the issue," he added; Consortiums organized by government are a positive step in the right direction.

Language and illiteracy is also a major challenge, particularly when content isn't available in the local language. "It's incredibly important for us to make sure that the user interface is in the local languages." Microsoft is working to put its software into 14 Indian languages by the end of the year, he said, "but it's not enough.... because of the 40% of people who are illiterate."

A lack of content also stifles well-meaning initiatives. "There is a tremendous diversity in the kind of information needs that people have; it even varies from district to district." So just because you offer access doesn't mean you're given access to the local crop information that would be vital for a village's farmers.

He then noted the need for education and training. "It's training, training, training - it's the single biggest differentiator between success and failure." When looking at the success of kiosks, the most important factor is having kiosk managers who are well trained and able to train others. "We are very conscious of the fact that we are just beginning to scratch the surface."

"All of these building blocks must be in place if we are to have sustainability," he concluded.

Venkatesan then described a visit President Clinton paid to a village in Rajasthan that was using VSAT technology for Internet access. Many months later, journalists returned to see how they were maintaining the program. "It was quite sad," he said; the VSAT terminal wasn't working, no one else was trained. The project had collapsed.

To move forward, he said teachers and students must be at the center stage of ICT initiatives. "Putting them center stage and using ICT to solve real problems rather than perceived problems is an important step." Venkatesan also noted the importance of state government being involved, particularly since the majority of schools in India are state-run. You also must get the community involved. He described an experience working for a diesel company in the US during the 1980s. They worked there for three years, but as soon as they pulled out, the project collapsed. "We hadn't involved the workforce, they hadn't taken ownership," he said. "It's exactly the same as that village in Rajasthan; we really, really need to have local ownership of initiatives."

"I'm personally, passionately convinced that the reason people remain poor is because they lack information access," he said. So Microsoft India hopes to achieve the goal that all Indians have access to information though ICTs by 2010.

Quoting Margaret Mead, he closed his presentation: "Never doubt the ability of a small group of committed people to change the world; indeed it's the only thing that ever has."

Posted by acarvin at 12:59 AM

Universal Literacy, Universal ICTs

Shri Suresh Dada Jain, Mararashtra's Higher Education Minister, spoke during the morning session of the Baramati conference. He talked about the need for spreading literacy "to the total masses of society."

However, literacy is only part of the process of achieving greater development. "Literacy [alone] will not solve the problem," he said. "The problem of poverty can only be transformed through technology use in day-to-day life."

"We are thinking that we will have entire network of education through universities, colleges, right to the primary education level, right to the village level. To have computer education in every primary school, starting in the first standard going all the way up to the seventh standard. [They are] the future citizens of this country, so this is the right place to tackle [the issue]."

"The government of Maharashtra would be happy to use more technology for education... which will ultimately enlighten farmers, help generate income with agriculture, knowledge about agriculture.... We believe all of this through the technology will certainly add value to their lives, and to poverty alleviation in this country."

Posted by acarvin at 12:46 AM

February 16, 2005

School Kids Won't Be Subjected to RFID Tracking After All

Good news: Engadget reports that school kids in Sutter, CA won't have to wear RFID tags at school after all. As I reported not too long ago, the school's principal came up with the horrible idea of requiring all students to wear RFID tags, which are essentially digital homing beacons, that would allow school officials to track their movements on campus: in the hallway, the bathroom, you name it.

"I'm disappointed; that's about all I can say at this point," Principal Earnie Graham said in another article. "I think I let my staff down." The funny thing is that it seems that Graham believes he let his staff down because he dropped the anti-privacy measure, rather than letting them down by coming up with the civil liberties violation in the first place. So once again, I renew my suggestion that Principal Graham wear an RFID tag for a week and allow the public to track his movements over the Internet. Doesn't sound like fun, does it? -ac

Posted by acarvin at 02:46 PM

February 10, 2005

School Requires Students to Wear RFID Tags; Orwell Rolls Over in Grave

Now here's a type of education technology that I pray will not catch on: a school in California is now requiring all of its students to wear RFID tags. These electronic radio tags can be used to track students' movements, whether they're in the hallways, in a classroom or in a bathroom. Outraged parents, who were not consulted prior to the decision, have already contacted the ACLU, which has begun filing complaints with the school.

Meanwhile, school principal Ernie Graham brushes off the parents' complaints, chalking it up to technophobia rather than the obvious privacy violation that it is. "Sometimes when you are on the cutting edge, you get caught," Graham said of the angry phone calls from parents.

Note to Principal Graham: sit in on one of your school's English classes and read Orwell. That is, assuming you haven't banned it or anything like that. Even better - volunteer to wear an RFID tag yourself and get one of your students to set up its software to automatically blog your whereabouts so the rest of us can keep tabs on you. You can't be too careful with these principals nowadays, right? -ac

Posted by acarvin at 12:50 PM

October 04, 2004

2004 TOP Grants Announced, E-Rate Gets Bushwhacked

The U.S. Department of Commerce's NTIA has just announced the 27 winners of the 2004 TOP grants. TOP, the Technology Opportunities Program, is one of the last remaining federal government initiatives supporting community-based efforts to bridge the digital divide and use information and communications technologies for local development.

It's good news to see the list of the new winners, particularly on a day when the New York Times reported that the FCC has suspended the E-Rate program that funds schools and libraries so they may connect to the Internet. The program has suffered from a few cases of fraud that've consequently received some really bad press. So the FCC's performing surgery with a bureaucratic chainsaw, putting a moratorium on subsidies to all schools and libraries. Zero tolerance indeed.

One step forward, two steps back.... -ac

Posted by acarvin at 10:01 AM

September 29, 2004

Live in Cambridge: Tim Berners-Lee on the Web in Education

Right now I'm blogging from the MIT Technology Review Emerging Tech
Conference in Cambridge, and we've just heard from Tim Berners-Lee,
inventor of the World Wide Web. Tim gave a rapid-fire 30-minute talk
about the semantic web, and then had a one-on-one conversation with Bob
Metcalfe, inventor of Ethernet and co-founder of 3Com. I'll post an
extended blog entry about Tim's presentation, but for now I wanted to
share a quote he gave on the role of the Web in education:

What I’d like to see happen: I’d like to see lots of curricula like the MIT open courseware initiative being picked up by K-12.... The tricky thing is that when you try to put down things like encyclopedia articles, like Wikipedia, you really need to keep education materials sown together. So I’d love to see a student be able to fly through this courseware, maybe in 3-D, following his or her interests. I know it takes a huge amount of efforts to keep these things [like Wikipedia and the Open Courseware Project] up to date, and I’d like to see teachers help contribute to it....

Students can work together when they can interact with simulations, with
teachers, but particularly with each other. And for that we need lots of
tools, lots of standards, lots of technology… There’s lots of work to do
out there.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 09:32 AM

July 08, 2004

The ABCs of E-Education

This afternoon, I moderated a panel session on education technology, chaired by Evans Namanja, Director General of the Malawi Communications Regulatory Authority. Matthew Chetty opened the session with a presentation on the NEPAD E-Schools Initiative. NEPAD developed a vision that the digital divide, in an African context, must be addressed from the perspectives of ICT skills, education and public health. “The digital divide is an issue that must be addressed as a matter of urgency…. as is the challenge of bringing ICT skills to your entire country,” Chetty said. “Education is a necessary condition for sustainable development.” The NEPAD E-Schools Initiative intends to provide Internet access and ICT skills to students, teachers, administrators and community members so they can “make every learner an active member of the knowledge society.”

Over the next 10 years, they seek to convert all 600,000 schools in Africa into NEPAD e-schools. This means providing them with ICT tools and Internet access, technology professional development for teachers, technology-driven curricula that’s locally relevant and appropriate, and establish a telecenter within the school focused on community health. The project will be deployed in three phases, with 15 to 20 countries participating in each phase.

“NEPAD provides a continental platform to solve shared problems together, thereby benefiting participating countries both individually and collectively,” he said. And by developing the initiative as a continental network, it will provide policymakers and educators with a network for sharing best practices and avoid making mistakes. Chetty said there is also a lot of goodwill for the project, as it has been endorsed by leaders in each African country and embraced as a flagship project for the African Union.

From the UK, we then heard from David Beard of British Telecom and Neil Shaw of the British Council. Beard described BT’s Academy Learning Center , a Web-based training for BT employees. The system can handle 90,000 learners in one week, as had been the case recently when all BT staff were required to take an online course in new changes enacted to Britain’s telecom laws. Neil Shaw came to talk about a new initiative the British Council is developing with the British Department of Education and Skills called the Global Gateway. The site is striving to be an international education portal for students, parents, teachers and administrators. The site is designed to allow for collaborative projects and international partnership building.

Samer Halawi of Inmarsat and a team of colleagues then discussed an Inmarsat/ITU initiative to bridge the rural/urban digital divide. He presented a video of their project, launched initially in southern Lebanon. Their partner villages in Lebanon lacked the telecommunications infrastructure to connect schools to the Internet, so they gave the local high schools RBGAN satellite terminals, no larger than a laptop, which provides Internet access with download speeds up to 144 kbps. They hope to triple the download times by next year. Satellite access allowed students to become engaged in online science experiments and improve their English speaking skills, increasing their ICT skills across the board. Because it was also their communities’ first exposure to the Internet, the program helped engage parents and increase their involvement in their children’s education. The RBGAN satellite terminal, currently sells for USD $1500, though soon the price will come down to $700. Internet access costs $36 per month for 10 megabytes per month.

The video then showed a series of brief interviews with Lebanese students; the boys and girls discussed how the Internet had changed the way they viewed education and interacted with their teachers. “We are here in a region far away from any city, any library,” said one teacher. “ Now a whole world is in our reach because of the Internet.” He also added that teachers are no longer forced to travel all the way to Beirut to track down particular educational materials that weren’t physically available in the village. After the video, two of Halawi’s colleagues talked about the satellite service. When one of them picked up the satellite terminal and started using it as a prop, one of the conference techies thought she was trying to connect it as if it were a laptop, so he unplugged her actual laptop and promptly shut down her Powerpoint presentation.

Following the presentations, I was given the opportunity to summarize the presentations and offer a personal perspective. I noted how the various panelists had discussed education technology from three different perspectives: access, basic training and curricular content – the ABCs of education technology. The challenge, I noted, is crafting initiatives that address all three of these perspectives; otherwise countries might find themselves in a situation like the US did, when we spent large sums of money on wiring schools and libraries to the Internet, but treated teacher training as an afterthought, leaving us with a lot of wired classrooms and a lot of unprepared teachers.

I also noted that projects like the BT online training program assume that learns have a certain level of ICT skills. While BT would certainly expect all of its employees to be ICT literate, least-develop countries are faced with major deficits in basic literacy, let alone ICT literacy. This means that literacy, in all its shapes and sizes, must be addressed in any national edtech or digital divide initiative. Lastly, I said that partnerships are key – governments, the private sector and civil society would never be able to bridge the digital divide on their own or make their efforts sustainable.

During the Q&A; period, I also noted there are educational initiatives like IEARN and Global Schoolhouse that should be seen as important curricular assets for teachers, and that educators the developing world should be encouraged to tap into these resources.... -andy

Posted by acarvin at 10:52 AM

November 14, 1994

edweb and accidental hibernation

My apologies to those who attempted to access EdWeb last night
(http://198.187.60.80). My email was inundated with users worried that they had
either done something wrong or I had posted the wrong web address. Actually, we
had a network shutdown at work for 12 hours and I didn't know about it until I
came in this morning. Sorry for the inconvenience.

Posted by acarvin at 08:43 PM

November 09, 1994

EdWeb art contest!

For all of you who have used EdWeb (http://198.187.60.80) and also happen to
teach budding young artists, EdWeb is looking for kids to design art which
will be featured throughout the web site. Here's the info I'm including within
EdWeb itself:

As you may have noticed by now, EdWeb is devoid of all graphics, great and
small. We'd like to change that, but our resources are somewhat limited.
Therefore, we invite you and your students to enter the EdWeb Artwork Contest.
We're looking for anything neat and exciting from kids all over the world -
people with art skills above the crayon level need not apply!

The best overall picture will become the official logo of the EdWeb Home Page.
Other pictures will be eligible for other pages as appropriate (for example,
the Information Highway home page, the resource guide page, the story page,
etc). Pictures will be judged for their creativity, humor and vitality. All
artists will be given full credit for their work with their own home page.

No purchase necessary- just send in your pictures postmarked by December 1,
1994. Mail them to:

Andy Carvin
The Corporation for Public Broadcasting
901 E St. NW
Washington, DC 20004-2037
(202) 879-9824

The winners will be announced by December 15, 1994. Sorry, all artwork will be
non-returnable.


Have fun!

andy

Posted by acarvin at 08:40 PM

October 14, 1994

RFC: Check out the EdWeb WWW!

Hi everyone. For the last several months I've been making posts concerning
an on-line education resource guide I'm writing. We'll, the prototype is
finally on-line. It's called EdWeb and it can be reached at:

http://198.187.60.80

This is a temporary site, so I'll repost in a week or so when it's
permanent.

I'd like as many people as possible to look around and send me feedback.
EdWeb is an on-line tutorial on education reform and the Information
Highway. It also has a large k12 online resource guide (a hypertext
version of the one I've posted). EdWeb is meant to be an evolving
hyperbook, so all comments will be taken seriously. I'm especially
interested in n comments on the reform sections - I want to include as
much info as possible (without taking any sides, of course), so any
additional info would be great.

Hope you enjoy EdWeb. I look forward to hearing from you.

cheers,

andy

Posted by acarvin at 08:38 PM