i.shui.tech

In January, the New Media Consortium published its annual report on key emerging learning technologies, The Horizon Report. I’m a bit late reading it and it is by no means new news, but for those educators looking for summer reads, this should be at the top of the list.

A distillation of trends, the report list two major themes each for three time frames: one year or less, two to three years, and four to five years. Some of my thoughts on each:

1. One year or less: Grassroots Video. Basically, anyone can make and share videos today, with or without a computer. The barriers are dropping faster than they did for digital photographs. So the next step for the rest of us? Contribute. You and your students have no excuse not to be contributing to the emergence of video information. Every community should be creating video clips to document history and place. You may think no one is interested in your little corner of the world, but with the right tags, someone will find it and use it.
2. One year or less: Collaborative Webs. You have no reason not to use the web to collaborate (with the possible exception of a paranoid IT staff).  Start document collaboration in Google Docs. If you need the final version in Word, then one person can export it when all is done. Worried about losing your docs when they are kept online? Believe me, the hard disk on your computer will crash first.
3. Two to three years: Mobile Broadband. Yes, the iPhone as a trend setter is cliche’. But it’s true. The bottleneck in everyone moving to mobile broadband is not devices, but rather cell phone companies. As long as we pay for the added service, fewer people will see any real reason to use mobile applications. But when mobile broadband comes automatically with your service, the devices will change and the way we use, and our students use, the web will change. Don’t forget the mantra: bring learning to where your students are. And no, I don’t own an iPhone. Yet.
4. Two to three years: Data mashups. Data mashups are the combination of digital data into a unified tool. Much of what we’ve seen so far are Google Map mashups, combining geo data with other data, such as locations of people or census data. It used to take lots of programming to make this happen. This is changing rapidly, which web tools coming quickly on board to allow less-technically inclined people to view where data intersect. The educational impact of this is enormous.  I highly recommend encouraging tech-savvy students to explore this immediately.
5. Four to five years: Collective Intelligence. The billions of web pages, blog posts, tags, and other minutia of information of the web is about to find it’s way into coherent building blocks of information. Projects are busy working at ways to tag information that came before personal tags. Bots are tagging other objects with information. And the software is evolving to help us make sense of it all. Google and Amazon to this already to suggest products and ads for you. What if, as a high school teacher, you could take every assignment a student has completed in their school history and create a development portfolio of as they begin a new academic year. Sort of like going back in time to talk to every teacher a student has ever had. Wishful thinking? Start digitizing student portfolios now. Your students will never forgive you in five years if you don’t.
6. Four to five years: Social Operating Systems. Your desktop (the physical one) is like your desktop (the virtual one). It’s a private space you keep your stuff. But you also work in your virtual one, unlike most of your physical work. We come to schools and offices primarily because we need to work together: collaboration and relationship building. But what happens when your virtual workspace becomes as collaborative and an open venue for relationship building as your physical one? What happens when your virtual space becomes infused with all of the data we usually receive from others because we are actively collaborating with them? This is not about replacing our physical relationships, but rather intelligently enhancing our current work in the virtual world. It will literally be a bug in your ear that tells you what you need to know when you need it. Imagine an assistant Googling for you while you work and handing you tidbits of information relevant to what you are working on. And because of collective intelligence, we are closer to this than you may realize. It’s been the stuff of science fiction.

An NSF news release on the University of Oklahoma’s K20 Center Digital Game Based Learning project, McLarin Adventures. McLarin Adventures is a Massive Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG… like World of Warcraft) created as a research project into the effectiveness of multiplayer digital games as educational tools. The McLarin Adventures game engine was developed from the ground up at the K20 Center in order to incorporate the needs of educators in tracking educational objectives during game play. The game includes a state standards report generation component for teachers. The current game scenario had been created for 8th and 9th grades, with a focus on math, science, and literacy.

Does it work? Early student observations show the game is very engaging. We’ll have to wait for the final study to be released to show it’s educational effectiveness…2009 at the earliest, but more like 2010. When the results do come out, expect a study on a scale unheard of in educational research: 2400 students across over two dozen school districts!

Can I try? Not yet. The study is still in progress. Once completed, and assuming the results show positive educational efficacy,  the game will need to move to commercial prototyping. This could be another year or two. University technology transfer can be a complicated process… the technology either needs to be bought by an existing company (hey EA, are you listening!?), or the university will spin off a company that will need to find venture capital.

Considering the $14 billion market in educational technology, this could be the start of some awesome new educational tools that could make classrooms into LAN parties! Oh yea, they’ll be making better grades and gaining those 21st century skills as well.

Thanks to my friend Ewan McIntosh for his posting on Tag Galaxy. Tag Galaxy is…well, just too cool. It’s essentially a tag browser that pulls public Flickr photos by tags, organizes similar tags around them in space, or lets ou view sets of the pictures in a cool interactive globe. You’ve just got to see it.

But here’s the best part… this is one of the coolest things ever to play with on a Smartboard. Like Google Earth, it cries out to be tried on a large interactive touchable surface. I know it’s summer vacation for many, but bookmark this for when school starts up again.

In this day and age, it seems we expect medical and high tech innovations to come from academic or industry research laboratories. John Kanzius is a great example of backyard science and how innovation can happen when disciplines cross. His story has already been reported at Popular Science. While no formally trained as an engineer (much less a biologist or doctor), he has worked in radio and television. His familiarity with radio waves and electronics, along with a Leukemia diagnosis, sparked his ideas.

He knew low frequency radio waves could heat metals without heating surrounding materials (tissue). He also realized heat could destroy cancer cells. And as a self-described tinkerer, he brought it all together…in his garage. He’s know working with researchers to further refine the technology.

There are a facets to this story worth remembering. 1) He was a tinkerer. This provided early prototyping. And 2) (most important) He was willing to tell his story AND someone listened.

Oh… and he had time. Few great ideas develop in there entirety overnight. Creativity takes time. My personal experience has found being rushed and having a million things on my plate greatly hinders creativity.

Innovation is spurred by getting the right people together at the right time. Entrepreneurship is built on collective ideas and knowledge of bringing innovation to market. Rarely is it from a single mind working alone. The key is getting the right minds together.

We know a few things about what makes innovation and entrepreneurship successful. One important facet is to “get out of the box”. Bringing in novel ideas, especially those that question rather than concede, create opportunities for getting creative juices flowing. This often involves bringing together minds from often disparate places. Crossing disciplines and careers. Non-intentional networking needs to occur.

The convergence of technologies may create new structures to make this happen, and Twine could be one of the leaders. What we need is a way for ideas and interest to become digitized, then linked, and opportunities for discourse to be embedded in the structures. Then for the owners of the ideas to see the links, the other owners, and have the ability to continue the discourse.

It’s a complicated process, something that humans can accomplish on a small scale. But for it to work across organizations and wide physical boundaries, involving greater numbers of people and ideas, we really need machines.

I’d like to see how Twine evolves. In fact, I’d like to see what happens when you add it to a school that embraces cross-discipline project-based learning. Students could be given the opportunity to share their projects and interests, and allow Twine to facilitate the connections to students with similar interests.

Facebook has the potential to network, but it is intentional. Twine could facilitate non-intentional networking.

High school biology teachers, take note! This story from the New York Times is a great wrap up to the year. To really appreciate the “gross” factor, your students will need to know a little cell and/or cancer biology.

Laboratory mouse stem cells are usually grown in a petri dish, constantly bathed in a nutrient broth. The cells are constantly dividing and will crowd the plate if not kept thinned out. To keep the population under control, you have to occasionally wash the plate of most of the cells, keeping a few to continue their division and maintain the population.

With the proper substrate, the cells can grow on anything, provided they are continually fed. This modern art project, on display at the MoMA in New York City, has a matrix in the shape of a small coat, with nutrients constantly feeding the cells.

Apparently, no one is there to clear off the cells and keep the population at bay:

The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.

I’d be interested in knowing your students reactions, especially if they bring in ethics! Is this really art?

Ok… I’ll get this post going this time… Saturday late morning started with a call from my good friend Greg (meteorologist and programmer). Storms a-brewing in the east and the outlooking is favorable for isolated supercells… or something like that. I’m no meteorologist and my recollection of middle school earth science is practically nonexistent (I had one of those wonderful non-experiences in grade school of studying weather without once looking outside of a textbook), but, like anything natural, I find weather events utterly fascinating. In Oklahoma, how can you not be fascinated by the weather?

Well, perhaps most are not so fascinated to hop into a car and drive three hours to chase a storm, but I find the prospect just to tempting. Greg is a well known and seasoned chaser. He’s cautious and knows where to avoid getting pelted by baseball size hail or driving onto the path of wind sheer, much less a tornado. He’s also good at predicting where the storms might produce hooks and lower level rotations (I just love the lingo). Of course, he’s also human and the weather isn’t. We ended up after a storm that had all the right properties, but not enough to produce an actual tornado. Nonetheless, it was fascinating.

We chased into Arkansas and right up along highway 71 near Winslow. The storms were moving east. As the supercell approached, ground winds shifted west (cool), skies darkened, the we looked up to see scud clouds rotating just north of us (really cool). Later survey showed no damage. About two minutes after the storm passed, tornado sirens went off. Sadly ironic. Somebody wasn’t paying attention. Makes me wonder if those communities with fatalities had timely sirens… or sirens at all.

Disclaimer: two things…one, I’m out with an experienced meteorologist and chaser. I wouldn’t do it any other way (not counting my childhood habit of sitting on the roof when the tornado sirens went off… even Greg would consider that suicidal); and two, I have taken the spotter workshop put on by the Oklahoma Climatological Survey. The workshop is fascinating just to learn something about the tornados, wether or not you decide to barrel down the road after one.
If you have any interest in violent storms, check out the “Storms of 2007″ DVD. It actually has footage of my first tornado (even though I’ve lived over 30 years in Oklahoma and spent storm events on the roof of my house). The proceeds are always for a good cause, and the commentary very instructional.

This is actually an NSF news item that came out a couple of months ago. I’m not sure if it hit the main press, but as a parent and educator, I find it fascinating. Here’s the gist of the research by Valerie Reyna and Chuck Brainerd (both from Cornell University):

[C]hildren depend more heavily on a part of the mind that records, “what actually happened,” while adults depend more on another part of the mind that records, “the meaning of what happened.” As a result, they say, adults are more susceptible to false memories, which can be extremely problematic in court cases.

Interestingly, courts often will discredit the memories of children (in favor of those of adults). As a parent, I fall prey to the same misconception as I often assume my child will create “stories” that have little resemblance to the real world when ask to recall an event.

The researcher’s theory differentiates Verbatim memory from Gist memory:

Verbatim traces are memories of what actually happened. Gist traces are based on a person’s understanding of what happened, or what the event meant to him or her. Gist traces stimulate false memories because they store impressions of what an event meant, which can be inconsistent with what actually happened.

“Understanding” is dependent on development and therefore will be less of an influence in children. The key is an accurate recall technique that can separate any fear the child may have of recall to adults (I often feel like I’m pulling teeth to get my daughter to recall events after she gets in trouble… did she really forget or is it because I’m her dad??).

I have a theory on how this relates to education… the US lags behind Asia in rote performance measures (math, memorization), yet we are looked up to for our creativity and innovation. Verbatim vs. Gist. ‘Which is better’ is hotly debated, but I would say that my personal experience (being able to peer into the asian culture) would show that Asian families but greater emphasis on Verbatim (this is how it is) while American families focus on Gist (I want you to understand). I would contend the education systems follow suit.

So what does this mean for teaching and learning? I am open to suggestions.