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.

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.

Today, there are more than 3.3 billion mobile-phone subscriptions worldwide, which means that there are at least three billion people who don’t own cellphones, the bulk of them to be found in Africa and Asia.

And when will the other three billion be networked?

According to statistics from the market database Wireless Intelligence, it took about 20 years for the first billion mobile phones to sell worldwide. The second billion sold in four years, and the third billion sold in two. Eighty percent of the world’s population now lives within range of a cellular network[.]

But it is the sheer economic possibilities for people in rural, isolated places that the cell phones bring. Poor (making a few dollars a day) know the investment in a cell phone brings ICT to their existence and with it opportunities for increased profit margins. Information is power, especially when your advantage is just-in-time commuication vs no communication.

Read the article. And read Future Perfect, Jan’s blog.

Wesley Fryer was kind enough to podcast the talk and post it to his blog. I’ve posted the Powerpoint at Slideshare here. Here are some of the concepts I’ve been working through:

1. I believe technology can greatly assist learning by scaffolding learning at different levels. Kids, as much as NCLB would like to have you believe, do not all learn at the same level. I brought this up by going back to the Herrnstein and Murray’s The Bell Curve. It’s not that I like what the book concludes, but I do see statistical facts for what they are. And to force a common testing paradigm on kids across all intelligence levels is simply criminal. As mentioned in a previous post, kids with high intelligence need the opportunities to excel, and kids with low intelligence need proper scaffolding and support the the smarter kids can offer. In the adult world, we work together as a community, finding a place for everyone at all levels (at least we should). We collaborate in order to bring out the strengths in everyone. And we don’t compare each through test taking (except the few weirdos who get into Mensa . I never even got to the considerations of multiple intelligences, such as the very important topic of how Emotional Intelligence factors into learning. More posts on how technology can help in that arena later.

2. Engagement is key. Kids today have found technology engages and they are going to great lengths to get their hands on it. During a visit to EA Games in California a couple of years ago, A question was asked about the increasing incidence of Attention Deficit Disorder and computer gaming. The response from one gaming programmer: “We don’t really see that as an issue. A kid will sit and concentrate on a game for 17 hours in a week.” Technology has tremendous power to engage students. A wonderful report recently released by the National School Boards Association (I will post in further detail later) makes a fundamental shift in U.S. education thinking about online social networking: this is not something to be ignored. Kids are using it, learning from it, and schools need to be thinking of ways to engage students with it. Online social networking tools can be summed up in one word: participation. Participation through creative activities online. Students are engaged when they participate and technology makes it happen.

3. How do we move away from our current paradigm of teaching that increasingly ignores differences in how students learn and fails to keep up with emerging technologies that are capturing the undivided attention of kids today? Change must take place in our schools. Change is not an easy process in educational reform, but the K20 Center has found a way that can move a school in the right direction. Development of Professional Learning Communities has found student achievement increases as well as reforms in teaching practice. This is a school-wide cultural change that brings action research into the classrooms, leading to adoption of new pedagogies. But here’s the icing on the cake: technology makes a wonderful catalyst for change. The year-long work of the K20 Center in schools, using technology as a catalyst for change, has proven to be highly effective. And all this without adding content or pushing for more test preparation.

I only take issue with one aspect of the OK-ACTS program: the technology going into the schools has one wonders to engage students, but it has been primarily by taking existing curriculum and presenting it in new and engaging ways. Instead of a lecture, the teachers are making Powerpoint presentations and showing them on Smartboards. They are getting feedback using student response systems. This is not across the board. Some teachers are increasing student participation in the learning process by having the students create the Powerpoints, but it still fails to engage them at their level.

I’m working on it. But I need to find more research on how creativity can raise student achievement. Yuck. I hate having to revert to finding methods that increase test scores, but until NLCB leaves the learning alone, I’ll work with the system. Kudos to Marco Torres for bucking the system. I wish it were so easy for the majority of teachers.

First of all, Dimitri A. Christakis, MD, writes a thought provoking editorial in the same journal as the paper entitled, “What to Do About the New and Growing Digital Divide?” Christakis writes:

We may be alarmed by the fact that 1 in 3 children report having friends that they have never met in person. This simple statistic reveals just how the Internet has changed children’s social networks.

We also may be alarmed that the majority of children shared personal information online including their real name, phone number, and address. We may be alarmed that 20% of children reported unwanted interpersonal victimization online.

Should we be alarmed? Perhaps. In an earlier post I describe being online is like being in a big city with the red light district just around the corner. Kids will peek down those streets. Some will even venture onto them. And some will try to slip in the doors. The world is changing. There have always been kids that have lived in big cities with red light districts. As parents, many of us have avoided those neighborhoods for a reason. But today, the neighborhoods are coming to us. It’s time we teach our kids responsible street behavior, just like parents and teachers do in big cities. Christakis continues:

Online victimization appears to be about as prevalent as in-person bullying, suggesting that it is not a new or added harassment but rather uses a different format.

The most salient risk factors for victimization found in the study by Ybarra et. al. are just what parents might expect: talking about sex with someone known only online and being rude or nasty oneself. The ways children put themselves at risk in the virtual world appears to mirror the ways they do in the real one.

So, if a door swings open and a child gets an “unintentional” peek at the dark side of bedroom behavior, what happens? What emotional trauma occurs? Well, actually, no one really knows. The Ybarra summary report admits:

There is still no research that sheds light on whether, how, or under what circumstances involuntary exposure to pornography may trigger adverse responses in youth. Clearly the extent of exposure is great enough that even if adverse effects occur to only a small fraction of youth, the numbers in absolute terms could be fairly large. Researchers in the field of sexual development do not know whether there are important “primacy effects” relating to early exposure of youth to sexual material or what the effects of such exposures might be on
anxieties, normative standards, or patterns of arousal in some youth (Escobar-Chaves, et al., 2005; Rich, 2005).

Hmm …interesting, especially since research does show lack of sexual knowledge has been shown to lead to sexual dysfunction. I’m not advocating children intentionally be exposed to pornography, but I do think we should be taking into account our own cultural bias towards sexuality when we begin wondering what harm unintentional exposure might cause. Much of Europe, for example, is very open-minded when it comes to sexuality.

The summary report concludes to say:

Obviously we need to look more closely at this problem to identify additional tools to decrease unwanted exposures.

I’m going to disagree. Pouring money into ineffective software solutions (i.e. “tools”), threats to ISPs, and mandates into public institutions to protect our children perpetuates the fear-based strategies we’ve been following since the first YISS. We need to shift strategies and teach responsible use and street smarts as kids venture out into the internet. Take a clue from Europe.

Can I have my *french* fries now?

The scores of students who had taken economics courses were not necessarily higher than those who had not. On average, students who had taken Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate or an honors course in economics scored marginally higher than students who had taken no economics at all, but students who had taken “consumer economics” or business courses scored lower.

In particular, look at the very last comment. How is it that taking “consumer economics” is a detriment to knowledge of economics? Where, in fact, they are learning economics? Parents? Peers? Keeping copies of the Wall Street Journal under their beds?

Parents are a factor:I’m going to take a wild guess at the other source: social participative media and online networks.

Economics forces are heavily tied to media and the internet. Kids are using online communities to share knowledge of products and companies are targeting the online market heavily. These kids are not just passive audiences. They share and communicate about what would be cool to have, compare products, and what it takes to get there hands on products that are easily out of their economic range. Companies quiz teens about market trends and buying patterns.

They are thinking economics. But no one ever calls it “economics” online or in school hallways. This is authentic learning at its best.

This has been a hot topic at our center. Some educators feel kids today just know how to do it, and seem to exemplify they can. But I wonder. Are they really capable of higher order processing when so much demands their cognitive attention?

Monica Luciana and others conducted some experiments with adolescents at the University of Minnesota. The test weren’t specifically related to multitasking per se, but from the results you can draw some conclusions.

She had a sample size of 135 nine to twenty year olds. Test and results (age related differences in performance) show: Nonverbal face recognition memory (no significant difference), spatial delayed response (better performance with age), spatial memory test and spatial memory span (performance increases up to age thirteen then holds steady), spatial self-ordered search (similar to previous results where performance increases up to age thirteen, then holds steady).

So what does all of this mean? In the context of previous findings which are detailed in the paper, the authors were able to come to a few significant (if not expected) conclusions:

As compared to 14-year-olds, 20-year-olds exhibited more accurate performance on all delayed response trials. The two groups did not differ in their performance on no-delay trials.

That is, when you’ve got to hold a bit of information in your head, who do it significantly better the older you get.

The most demanding task described here is the spatial self-ordered search task, which requires response selection, memory, continuous updating of information, and a high degree of executive control…The development of these skills, when demanded simultaneously, shows a protracted and extended course up to age 16.

Combined with a previously sited study, 16-29 y/o’s perform similarly. So, complex task management sets in around age 16.

Here’s the gist: Yea, you can do complex problem solving pretty well by age 16, but you’re ability to concentrate with increasing distractions only grows with age. Nancy Willard does a pretty good job of spelling out how this should be handled: no multitasking while doing homework. I’m glad she made this simple.

We are in an age when media demands are rapidly increasing. Brain evolution is not. In fact, it’s quite surprising how little our brains have evolved. We still function best when concentrating on a single task. So why is it we feel external stimuli can sometimes help us think? Perhaps it’s because we are not actually using our full mental capacity to engage the problem at hand and a little external stimuli keeps our mind from disengaging. Let’s go back to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and flow. When we are really into the game, a little external stimuli is moot. You’d never even notice it. But you would notice if your phone buzzed you. The flow would be broken and re-engaging is not as simple as you might think.

In the classroom, I suspect kids rarely engage in a stage similar to flow. Plugging an iPod in one ear might actually help them pay attention. But homework, and any singular isolated activity, should be acted upon with full concentration. As always, more on this later.

I don’t care how good you are at multitasking. It’s time to do your homework.

Citation: Monica Luciana, Heather M. Conklin, Catalina J. Hooper, Rebecca S. Yarger (2005)
The Development of Nonverbal Working Memory and Executive Control Processes in Adolescents Child Development 76 (3), 697–712.

Image taken from UCLA Magazine.