Matthew Daniel's List: Technology Rational and Philosophy

• Effective tech integration must happen across the curriculum in ways that research shows deepen and enhance the learning process. In particular, it must support four key components of learning: active engagement, participation in groups, frequent interaction and feedback, and connection to real-world experts
• And, as an added benefit, with technology tools and a project-learning approach, students are more likely to stay engaged and on task, reducing behavioral problems in the classroom.
• When technology is effectively integrated into subject areas, teachers grow into roles of adviser, content expert, and coac

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• Lynne Adrian (University of Alabama) started off investigating the role of personal response systems (“clickers”) in a large enrollment Humanities course to see if the use of concept questions would increase student engagement, but was soon led to reflect much more interestingly on the purpose of questions in class and the very nature of the questions she had been asking for more than twenty years. Similarly, Joe Ugoretz (Borough of Manhattan Community College), in an early inquiry, hoped to study the benefits of a free-form discussion space in an online literature course, but got frustrated because the students would frequently digress and stray off topic; finally it occurred to him that the really interesting inquiry lay in learning more about the nature of digressions themselves, considering which were productive and which were not.

• We  need, in short, to merge a culture of inquiry into teaching and  learning with a culture of experimentation around new media technologies
• Our ability to make the best use of any technologies to improve education  hinges ultimately on the reciprocal capacities to bring our powers of  inquiry to bear on educational technologies, as well as to bring the  power of new technologies to bear on our methods of inquiry and our  representation of knowledge about teaching practice.
• the continuity  of learning issues from Web 1.0 to 2.0 technologies, from online discussion  tools, hypertext and multimedia authoring to emergent forms of electronic  portfolios, blogs, social networking tools, and virtual reality environments.  We take these up in the context of a dual challenge: to understand better  the changing nature of learning in new media environments and the potential  of new media environments to make learning--and faculty insights into teaching--visible and usable.
• Nothing good will come of these technologies  if we do not first confront the crisis of significance and bring relevance  back into education. In some ways these technologies act as magnifiers. If we fail to address the crisis of significance, the technologies will  only magnify the problem by allowing students to tune out more easily  and completely.”
• Cathy  Davidson’s interview about “participatory learning and the new humanities,”  where her celebration of the potential for “Humanities 2.0” is counter  balanced by entrenched reluctance to rethink basic practices in our  fields, especially around the ways we recognize expertise, collaboration,  and creativity.
• guess part of me just  doesn’t understand why this isn’t the most exciting time for all  of us in our profession and why we aren’t figuring out ways that we  can use this to bolster our mission in the world, our methods in the  world, our reach in the world, our understanding of what we do and what  we have to offer our students in the world? It just feels like we’re  in an age where we educators should be the thought leaders and so many  of us are futzing around the edges, and I don’t get it.
• n this environment  it is especially important to flank classroom-based inquiry with  institutional learning, where we can put into practice wide-scale  views of learning outcomes as textured as those of faculty who look  at learning in their own classrooms.

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• Important Note: The ICT curriculum is not intended to stand alone, but rather to be infused within core courses and programs.

• A Way of Doing Things

  Technology is about the ways things are done; the processes, tools and techniques that alter human activity. ICT is about the new ways in which we can communicate, inquire, make decisions and solve problems. It is the processes, tools and techniques for:

  • gathering and identifying information
  • classifying and organizing
  • summarizing and synthesizing
  • analyzing and evaluating
  • speculating and predicting.

• Software Tools
  Appropriate computer-based software tools are:

  • word processing
  • database
  • spreadsheet
  • draw/paint/graphics applications
  • Internet browser
  • email
  • multimedia applications
  • clipart/media clips

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• Online social networks can be powerful amplifiers of collective action precisely because they augment and extend the power of ever-complexifying human sociality. To be sure, gossip, conflict, slander, fraud, greed and bigotry are part of human sociality, and those parts of human behavior can be amplified, too. But altruism, fun, community and curiosity are also parts of human sociality−and I propose that the Web is an existence proof that these capabilities can be amplified, as wel
• The alphabet did not cause the Roman Empire, but made it possible. Printing did not cause democracy or science, but literate populations, enabled by the printing press, devised systems for citizen governance and collective knowledge creation. The Internet did not cause open source production, Wikipedia or emergent collective responses to natural disasters, but it made it possible for people to act together in new ways, with people they weren't able to organize action with before, in places and at paces for which collective action had never been possible
• If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

• Participatory media include (but aren't limited to) blogs, wikis, RSS, tagging and social bookmarking, music-photo-video sharing, mashups, podcasts, digital storytelling, virtual communities, social network services, virtual environments, and videoblogs. These distinctly different media share three common, interrelated characteristics:

     
   
  • Many-to-many media now make it possible for every person connected to the network to broadcast as well as receive text, images, audio, video, software, data, discussions, transactions, computations, tags, or links to and from every other person. The asymmetry between broadcaster and audience that was dictated by the structure of pre-digital technologies has changed radically. This is a technical- structural characteristic.
     
  • Participatory media are social media whose value and power derives from the active participation of many people. Value derives not just from the size of the audience, but from their power to link to each other, to form a public as well as a market. This is a psychological and social characteristic.
     
  • Social networks, when amplified by information and communication networks, enable broader, faster, and lower cost coordination of activities. This is an economic and political characteristic.
• Increasingly, access to that infrastructure−the ability to upload a Macaca video or uncover a threat to democracy−has become economically accessible
• A population that knows what to do with the tools at hand stands a better chance of resisting enclosure
• The more people who know how to use participatory media to learn, inform, persuade, investigate, reveal, advocate and organize, the more likely the future infosphere will allow, enable and encourage liberty and participation. Such literacy can only make action possible, however−it is not in the technology, or even in the knowledge of how to use it, but in the ways people use knowledge and technology to create wealth, secure freedom, resist tyranny.

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• Computers have been around for two decades in schools.

   

  We have spent over $60 billion on them.

   

  Yet they have had little to no effect on learning in schools
• That’s because schools have done what every organization does when it sees an innovation. Its natural instinct is to cram the innovation into its existing model,

• ’d like to suggest that for the sake of our discussions around education that Web 2.0 is simply the use of the Internet as a two-way medium- - -that it is a platform upon which content is not only consumed but also created. For my generation, our use of the Web largely mirrored our experiences with print and broadcast media: we were the audience, and a select few were the creators (this would be Web 1.0, if you will).
• For my children and our students today, their use of the Web often entirely revolves around content that they and their friends have created, and within Web frameworks or scaffolding that facilitate that creativity rather than providing the content for them. They build profile pages, upload photos and videos, and interact with each other and that content through active commenting systems.
• The advent of printing press lowered the cost of producing written material, and Web 2.0 not only brings that cost now to essentially zero (anyone in this country can go to a public library and use a computer for free and with free software publish to the web), it is also bringing the nature of information publication as a conversation to the user who used to just be a part of “the audience.”
• While most of us watched those conversations taking place between trusted authorities or authors before in a world of broadcast media, we are often now immersed in them ourselves.
• eb 2.0 technologies for learning, students ages 11 - 16 were surveyed. 74% reported that they had at least one social networking site account and 78% reported having uploaded pictures, video, or music to the web–with 50% having done so in the previous week of being asked
• most youth are participating on the Web without the benefit of much guidance or mentoring from the adults who are most interested in their progress and well-being.
• So, if for no other reasons than we might muster to justify driver’s education in schools (learning to do something very important that carries some inherent and significant personal and social dangers), we can argue for the need to be teaching Web 2.0 as a part of K-12 education
• engagement of Web 2.0 is in the act of content creation
• Authenticity
• Students today are creating on the Web for very real audiences, and their writing or production has to pass a very real test:
• actually being a contributor to world’s body of knowledge
• Participation
• Openness and Access to Information.
• Web 2.0 is making obsolete many of the restrictions on access to information that were intended to protect the rights of creators, but instead mostly inhibited learning by others
• Collaboration.
• Creativity
• write, film, and edit a video which then can be uploaded to YouTube
• Passionate Interest and Personal Expression
• online portfolio
• Discussion
• provides an environment for learning how to actually talk about things
• contribute to discussions after class, or from home, provides a much broader opportunity for participation that the traditional class discussion. Students with different contribution styles, or who process information over time, are now more participative.
• Asynchronous Contribution
• Proactivity.
• ut the world has changed, and employers want and the world needs students who have learned to participate actively and independently
• The vast amount of data on the Web requires more critical thinking than was needed when I was growing up.
• Thinking
• Critical

• ABOUT CROWS
   by John Ciardi

   

  The old crow is getting slow;
   the young crow is not.
   Of what the young crow does not know,
   the old crow knows a lot.

   

  At knowing things, the old crow is still
   the young crow’s master.
   What does the old crow not know?
   How to go faster.

   

  The young crow flies above, below, and rings
   around the slow old crow.
   What does the fast young crow not know?
   WHERE TO GO.
• First: we’ve developed a negative cultural impression of social networking that comes out of the very power that will makes it such an effective tool for education. Fundamentally answering a human need to connect, create, and express ourselves,
• Third: Teachers will need time and training to learn to use these tools in the classroom,
• Fourth: the legal liabilities that schools face because of concerns about a) student exposure to inappropriate material and b) exposure of students to potential predators will not be easy to overcome.
• We’re long overdue for a really good discussion about the purpose of schools, and I believe that Web 2.0 will give us that opportunity

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• If print culture shaped the environment in which the Enlightenment blossomed and set the scene for the Industrial Revolution, participatory media might similarly shape the cognitive and social environments in which twenty first century life will take place (a shift in the way our culture operates). For this reason, participatory media literacy is not another subject to be shoehorned into the curriculum as job training for knowledge workers.

• outfitting students with smartphones, which provide basic computing functions and can cost as little as $100 a year per student. Keller's pilot will equip 55 students with smartphones featuring slide-out keyboards from Taiwanese vendor HTC, with data service supplied by Verizon Communications (VZ), according to Soloway, who's working with the district on its plan. In February, Detroit's University Preparatory Academy plans to start a similar smartphone test. "It's all going to be through the phone. That's where the opportunity is now," says Soloway.
• digital portfolio" of their work online, collecting writing, art, and other projects on the school's Web site, which is publicly available. The projects help kids produce "real products for a real audience,
• There's a sense of hope with the new Administration that there's opportunity for us to reclaim the kind of educational institutions we owe our children,
• But many of the programs have fallen short of expectations, say educators. A four-year study of math and reading software in 132 poor, urban schools, released by Mathematica Policy Research and SRI International last year, found that test scores weren't significantly higher in classrooms that used the products. A 2003 study by Soloway and another academic found that 65% of teachers said they used computers less than 15 minutes a week in their classes. "In many of these schools, computers are turned off in the back of the classroom," says Harvard's Wagner. At others, "I've been in schools with one-to-one laptop programs where kids are doing the equivalent of worksheets on their laptops," he says. "You don't need computers to do that—it's a big waste of resources."
• What's needed, say educators and technology advocates, is a 21st-century curriculum that harnesses PCs and the Internet to equip kids with skills needed in the modern workplace, like critical thinking, analysis, and communications
• Motivated students benefit simply from Web access, but most need guidance to get results from classroom computers, says Stan Litow, vice-president of corporate affairs at IBM. "That's why many of the computer labs didn't have a salutary effect on education," he says.

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• Rising IQ performance is attributable to multiple factors: increased levels of formal education, urbanization, societal complexity, improved nutrition, smaller family size, and technological development
• The changing balance of media technologies has led to losses as well as gains. For example, as verbal IQ has risen, verbal SATs have fallen. Paradoxically, omnipresent television may be responsible for the spread of the basic vocabulary (11) that drives verbal IQ scores, while simultaneously the decline in recreational reading may have led to the loss of the more abstract vocabulary driving verbal SAT scores
• Technology and Visual Intelligence
  
• The understanding of pictures or icons develops at an earlier age than the ability to read words (
• Technology and Multitasking: Benefits and Costs

  • videogames & tech have shown to improve multi-tasking skills dramatically, however, studies show that when students multi-task they show significantly lower mindfulness and recall less information
• Implications for Education and Training
  

  • laptops in class show significantly less recall and poorer test performance, however, for specific skills such as laparoscopic surgery or flying where the videogames skills correlate with the task, multi-tasking skills and videogames experience yields higher performance.
• Violent Games: Are the Costs Worth the Benefits?
  

  • higher non-verbal skills but are generally 'desensitized' and show increased aggressive behavior.
• reflection, inductive analysis, critical thinking, mindful thought, and imagination. We start with reflection and inductive analysis
• Over a 6-week period, an experimental reduction in television watching in a group of 6-year-olds decreased intellectual impulsivity, increased reflection, and increased time spent reading (50).
• Reading is also key to the development of critical thinking. The amount of out-of-class reading done during the college years is a statistically significant predictor of critical thinking skills (51). One reason for this may be that books are perceived as a "hard" medium, requiring mental effort (52).
• Here there is evidence that visual technology inhibits imaginative response. In controlled experimental studies, the audiovisual (television) presentation of stories, as compared with audio or print presentation of the same stories, led to better story recall and inferences

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• Digital   Natives, Digital Immigrants --   A   New Way To Look At Ourselves and Our Kids

   

  Digital   Natives, Digital Immigrants Part II: Do They REALLY Think Differently?   -- Neuroscience   Says Yes

  • Part 2 Outlines and provides evidence that digital native students' brains are neurologically different and have been rewired to adapt to this new environment. The author argues that teaching must adapt to this type of learning that is not linear or step by step, but parallel and almost random. He suggest video games as a means to instruction noting that a kid can easily remember 100 pokemon names so why not geographic regions. The digital native will willingly give hours of attention to video games but cannot in a non-interactive classroom.

  • Part 1 outlines differences in kids today and teachers as digital natives and immigrants. MTV, videogames and the net have fundamentally changed the way digital native kids think and learnLest this perspective appear radical, rather than just descriptive, let me highlight some of
    the issues. Digital Natives are used to receiving information really fast. They like to
    parallel process and multi-task. They prefer their graphics before their text rather than
    the opposite. They prefer random access (like hypertext). They function best when
    networked. They thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. They prefer games
    to “serious” work. (Does any of this sound familiar?)
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  • • p.2 par.5
• Backup   Education? -- Too many teachers see education   as preparing kids for the past, not the future (in Educational Technology,   Jan-Feb 2008)

  • Author argues that curriculum is filled with old information and skills that are quickly becoming outdated and obsolete. This 'old information' in inhibiting that induction of 21st century knowledge and skills. He notes that fallacy in the argument: what if the technology breaks down? Skills in programing and multimedia representation have become more valuable for future generations than traditional math and writing skills.

• In many schools, PCs have failed to aid students' learning or improve test scores, or equip them with the analysis and communications skills that today's workplace demands, according to studies. The problems include a reliance on paper lesson plans that don't factor in technology, and inadequate teacher training and technical support. Also at fault, say educators, is American classrooms' occupation with teaching kids strategies for raising standardized test scores to meet provisions of the No Child Left Behind Act.
• Other times, school boards buy computers to prove their technical savvy to politicians and parents, without thinking through how kids will actually use the machines.
• "Any school that focuses on putting more computers in the classroom as their core goal will undermine the transformation that technology can provide,"
• Giving more kids Internet access could compel teachers to switch from asking students to Google for answers to questions, to assigning more involved research projects, Soloway says.

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• • "Most hate school, but love learning, why is this? What's the problem here?"

  • Wesch discusses his frustrations with current educational practices, and how technology is not a problem but a tool to be used to engage students in meaningful inquiry. He describes the net as an infinite cloud of information that we must guide our students through, teaching them to navigate, analyze information and answer real problems.

• • Authenticity: kids now are bombarded with commercial media require people/info/activities to be authentic. This means transparency in motives, goals, and respect.

  • teach them how to find the right information, how to interpret it, how to problem solve with that information.
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  • • p.13 middle column

    • students growing up in 'clip culture' need fairly small bits of information with a choice following each bit, they need to be engaged and interact in their learning.
      This technology and information is now always going to be there, i.e. calculators, how do we prepare students for the future with skills in critical thinking and problem solving?