Can You Hear Me Now?

When you first try something out there’s always that uneasy terror that everything’s going to go horribly wrong and you’ll be scratching some body part wondering what to do and what will happen next.  I kinda felt like the gents in the above picture as we all scrambled to get onto the Skype conference today.  A cacophony of dings and clicks and echos and ironically a land phone in the background helping people get on board.

A sinking ship or voyage to a new land?  We should all be congratulated on our Skype conference.  We jumped on board to see where this adventure would take us next.

After a little fenegaling there we all were.  It was finally good to match voices to alias’s and finally to names although not seeing people when you’ve been communicating with them is still a bit strange.  As they say, most cues to communication are non-verbal.  Which was why there was often blank air in the conversation before we all got a “visual” of who was in the room.

Overall, it went well.  The most important aspect for me was finding a bit about people’s backgrounds and expectations with their own voice.  Its a much better way of getting their impression on things, that words cannot not alone express in blogs.

We talked a lot about paper topics.  My paper will likely concentrate on inclusion of technologies kids use already (cell phones, Facebook, etc.) into the classroom.  Other topics included how to create a community of learners and the impact of ICT in the classroom.

I will continue to share and borrow many of your resources and work on my to do list.  Keep on Teching everyone.

Technicalities

Ok.  So I’ve added my Picasa web album using my del.icio.us tags (which is cool), and the pictures are there, however, I have been having trouble adding captions to explain the process, which is how to save YouTube videos to your computer.  I hope you can follow it the way it is.  I’ve had to do most of my work for this class from my office computer because (gasp!) I still have dial-up at home.  The problem here is that our school has the internet filtered so that certain sites don’t go through to the students (a good feature right).  Unfortunately it seems the filters are blocking some features of the picasa web gallery.  So I will leave it like that for now and fix it later. 

That certainly can be another topic of discussion.  That is, with the use of more and more online tools, there seems to be more technical issues as well.  For Jing I had to install the .NET framework and that took a couple days to wrangle the problems.  If we expect an online learning environment for our students to be the norm, we are going to need a lot more technicians.

Playing with Toys

Now I’ve scowered the web completely and have seen all the blogs and I beleive I may have commented on them all.  It is definitely a learning experience to see others’ points of view and liberally steal their ideas for your own benefit.  But hey, nobody really expects teachers to respect copyright either now do they?  But seriously folks, of course that is the real point anyway.  Everyone has great ideas I’m looking forward to see more of them.  And now that I’ve got everyone’s RSS feeds I not be able to miss anything.  Some things just work so darn good.

I’ve added names to my Skype contacts and have set up a Picasa web gallery (which still needs to be tweeked).  I have set up Jing, however, I have not had quiet moment where I could narrate a demonstration.  That will be next. 

Hole in the Wall

I was quite intrigued by that piece.  It goes to show that kids are eager to learn and have a tremendous innate ability to learn what is presented to them.  It harkens the idea that “if you build it they will come.”

What will they learn when just given the tool with no guidance?  Does it matter?  As teachers we think it matters what they learn as much as what they learn from.  If presented with a hammer, does it matter if students build houses or beat each other to a bloody pulp with it.

I think the value of ICT is just as much (or more) of the point of using ICT.  The point of this course is of course to use as much technology as we can to develop a use.  But being teachers, and as I have commented on and others have commented on, we try to seek value in what we are doing.

In any case I am going to try to take off my philosophers hat for a while and concentrate only on the tools and the collaboration part as much as I can.  I think once the course is done we will have more time for reflection.  I found myself wondering why too much and not just gettin’ ‘er done.

Everything Bad is Good for You

The article:  “Everything Bad is Good for You” brought up some interesting points about the adoption of technology.  One is that it is the established technology that is deemed good until the new technology can prove its worth.  Print and written communication has been around for millennia and has proven its worth for generations.  It has been modified and changed to accommodate new materials and methods but has largely remained unchanged.

The point of the article was if another form of communication were first, paper would have to prove itself.  As humans had we discovered electronics and computers first, would electronic media be the defacto standard to be challenged by the newcomer.  (Of course how would we document and organize information about our electronic discoveries so we could improve technology?  But I digress.)  In terms of ICT adoption, a case could be made either way. 

The piecemeal approach to ICT and its tools leaves people hunting around for little bits here and there and has to be put together by the individual who becomes his own expert based on his own experiences.  And since everyone travels the path differently even though they get all the pieces have a different experience.  In this way one can argue that educational goals, even though met by each student can have vastly different cognitive impacts.

If perhaps all the information were presented in one place in a sequential manner, let’s say – a book, then every student and teacher could be clear that they are understanding in the same way as expected.   A so called expert would be the one to put together this book and understands all the ins and outs of the subjects matter and also how others should understand the subject matter.

ICT provides a great way for everyone to be experts by allowing them to put together pieces into a cohesive whole – to synthesize information to form an understanding.  Synthesis, according to one our educational founding experts, Benjamin Bloom, is a higher level thinking that is preceded by knowledge, comprehension and analysis.  Of course because we are graduate students, it is very likely that we do have enough understanding to take the lower level thinking as being adequate for our discussions.  However, I doubt most teenagers can fully grasp what they are discussing or writing in this cut and paste world.

This pseudo-understanding leads to a world of pseudo-experts who have all the pieces, can put them together, come to a conclusion but have no solid understanding of their topic to begin with.  Synthesis without comprehension is baseless literally because there is no foundation to support the higher level deductions or conclusions.

True understanding and true expertise leads to advances in society.  Experts and structured knowledge like in books and libraries concentrate knowledge and power.  This creates a hierarchical society based on those who know and those that don’t.  Those that know lead and those that don’t follow.  It is therefore the development of true expertise and the concentration of knowledge that gave rise to the modern world.  Ergo the book is the physical representation of our western civilization.

Now let’s turn the table and say the internet existed before the book.  Everyone would have access to all the bits (no pun intended) of information out there.  Everyone also has the opportunity to put the information together any way they want.  Since knowledge is power, power would be distributed and in thousands and thousands of places.  Everyone could draw slightly different conclusions and deductions about the information and fight amongst each other for the true interpretation of the information.  (Come to think about it, this is sort of how modern religions got started, but that is another story – or is it?)

Would any true consensus develop over time?  Would there be any experts or in-depth expertise about anything?  No structured knowledge means no structured power.  Without centralized power you would have nothing short of anarchy.

That’s right – I’m saying that if the internet were developed before books there would be no modern civilization as we know it.  In fact it is practically illogical to think you could have an internet without books before it because how could you possibly develop something as complex as the internet without expert knowledge and a knowledge hierarchy in place for many many years to develop the technology to begin with.  And you simply could not have an infrastructure put in place when there may thousands of differing viewpoints as to how to construct such a distributed system.

Is any system of communication bad or good?  Every system has its positives and negatives and certain aspects have been adopted and dropped over time.  We don’t write on cave walls anymore, although you can still get some top notch reading on a bathroom stall.  We don’t write with stone tablets, however we still inscribe headstones. 

Some of you may still remember the BBS system as our internet of the past or still have a 300 baud modem that hooks up to your Commadore 64.  We use chat rooms and DSL modems to get our tech fix now and it has become increasingly easy to use.

As ICT became easier, faster and cheaper, there seemed to develop competition between the old literacy and the new literacy.  I think what we are battling with still is – is it a completely new way of communicating that will supplant literacy or is it just a new form of literacy that will enhance traditional reading and learning?

Dusty haired librarians lament the disappearance of books from their shelves and curse the arrival of more and more of the noisy boxes in their spaces.  Twitchy eyed geeks wallow in the pixel glow of their screens as they google their way through torrents of information.

What the librarians may fail to grasp, is that their beloved books have not disappeared; they are just not on paper anymore.  Just like writing on cave walls, stone, leaves, papyrus and scrolls, the medium may be disappearing, but the information is still there.

What is going to happen to ICT in the next 50 years then?  Is ICT going to supplant literacy entirely and become a new monster entity of some sort?  Is it going to be a sibling to literacy, different but equal?  Or is literacy going to supplant ICT eventually, using ICT as merely a tool for literacy?

I really couldn’t tell you.  I’m just a pseudo-expert putting together pieces of the puzzle in this ICT course.  If you want I could help you get a hold of the guy who wrote some stirring poetry about a man from Nantucket in the men’s room.  I’m sure he’s got that and a whole lot more on his Facebook site.

Revenge of the Poultry!

               We eat turkey once a year, an annual ritual of gargantuan portions and pitiful willpower -  gorging ourselves on the flesh of the hapless turkey, who gobble-gobble their way through life waiting for their ultimate destiny.  Disemboweled, decapitated, naked and stuffed up the wasoo with all manner of bread, vegetables and spices the humiliated turkey awaits our drooling gob with only one saving grace – its dead!

Ahh, but the lowly turkey fights back from beyond the grave.  Tantalized by its heavenly smell and hypnotized by its tender juicy meat we eat.  And eat, and eat and eat.  A side of buttery mashed potatoes, a side of stuffing, a side of cranberries for variety.  Top it all off with the turkey’s secret weapon – gravy.  Luscious liquid fat emulsified to perfection with salt and pepper and thickened enough to coat it all, over and over again.  A gallon or two of love and culinary perfection forcing us to lose control and stuff our face – a perfect revenge.

A bloated carcass we become, flat out on the couch wondering if we’ll live to eat another meal.  Our stomach distended like a 12 month pregnancy, we beg for relief.  A tryptophan coma soon catches hold – a turkey’s chemical warfare.  We struggle to stay awake, unable to move, barely able to grab the remote.  We struggle but manage to find a football game, then, lights out.

We recover hours later to the sounds of screaming kids and a scowling wife, barely able to blink an eye at the chaos around us, forced to help clean up from the carnage.  The smell of cold turkey wafts past our noses and we tighten our throats, forced to hold back a hurl.  Barely able to get to the sink because of our new girth, we struggle to clean off the mixture of dried gravy, potatoes, crusty cranberry sauce and other unidentified bits of food off the mountains and mountains of dishes.

You sleep it off, almost forgetting the hardship the vengeful turkey had inflicted upon you the previous day.   Until lunchtime today and many many many days later.  LEFTOVERS!

Touché Turkey – until we meet again next year!

 

Hi Everyone

Welcome to my blog.

I am a Computer Science Department head (sometimes to my own detriment) and have taught Computer Science for over 10 years.  I am looking forward to exploring the many web tools for communication and hope to incorporate them into my teaching.