eCROP Blog

Literacy Lifted

2022-10-04T22:13:00.001-04:00

At its most basic, literacy remains the capacity to understand and compose what goes on a page, but literacy rides on the back of the information tools and abilities of each age. Today our digitally accented culture has shattered and reforged the idea of "page". At literacy's most basic new-normal, the shape of a page now glows on screens that range from watch size to smart phones to glasses to stadium walls and every size in-between, with each display capable of multiple smaller windows of pages. Far more significant is the digital page's capacity for simultaneous delivery, input and interaction. The ever so humble input command has enabled numerous new powers along with disruptive changes to past practices. Through its simple presence it elevates the most important input of human culture, the question, along with the most important result, the search for a truthful and understandable answer. A real question serves as the axle of a rotating ying-yang of understanding and composing towards that answer. These wheels of thinking in turn carries a special forces suite of media literacies that can be inserted across a set of pages or even within the same page: still image, 2D and 3D animation, video, audio, virtual reality, sensors, robotics and coding. The degree of knowledge required to use each at their fullest screams of the need for a team of players that cover the range of possibilities. Our challenge is to enable all of us to make the most and best use of this expansive and explosive expansion of human communication power to lift all our boats. What's the next step to take in making this happen?

The Alphabetical Maker Canon Reading List of Books

2017-11-27T22:56:00.003-05:00

The Maker Canon Reading List of Books:

An Alphabetical Beginning

See the Foundational Works of the Maker Movement for date ordered commentary on this list.

Aliverti, Paolo, Andrea Maietta, and Patrick Di Justo. The Maker's Manual: A Practical Guide to the New Industrial Revolution. Maker Media, Inc., 2015. no reviews.
Important related article Browder, R. E., Aldrich, H. E., & Bradley, S. W. (2016). Entrepreneurship Research, Makers, and the Maker Movement. Working Paper.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell_Browder/publication/312609426_Entrepreneurship_Research_Makers_and_the_Maker_Movement/links/588656e492851c21ff4d5ae6/Entrepreneurship-Research-Makers-and-the-Maker-Movement.pdf

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, 350 BCE. Ross translation (1908). Classics MIT. http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/aristotle/ethics.pdf

Anderson , Chris. Makers: The new industrial revolution. New York: Crown Business, 2012.
Review: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2189314  ; https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/04/chris-anderson-makers-revolution-review

Anderson, Chris. The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. Hachette Books, 2006. Review: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/books/10manly.html ; http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2006/07/the_wrong_tail.html

Bdeir, Ayah, and Matt Richardson. Getting Started with LittleBits: Prototyping and Inventing with Modular Electronics. Maker Media, Inc., 2015.

Brown, Henry T. 507 Mechanical Movements: Mechanisms and Devices. Courier Corporation, 2005.

Coleman, E. Gabriella. Coding freedom: The ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton University Press, 2013. Reviews: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1077699014554765j

Crawford, Matthew B. Shop class as soulcraft: An inquiry into the value of work. Penguin, 2009.
Reviews: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Fukuyama-t.html ; http://mtprof.msun.edu/Spr2011/shoprev.html “This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as 'knowledge work.' Perhaps most surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so." ; https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/soulcraft-an-inquiry-into-the-value-of-work

Davies, Sarah R. Hackerspaces: Making the Maker Movement.  John Wiley & Sons, 2017. Reviews: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/07/14/book-review-hackerspaces-making-the-maker-movement-by-sarah-r-davies/

Delfanti, Alessandro. Biohackers. The politics of open science. London: Pluto Press, 2013.

Dewey, John. Experience and education. New York: Macmillan, 1938

Dougherty, Dale, and Ariane Conrad, and Tim O' Reilly. Free to Make: How the Maker Movement is Changing Our Schools, Our Jobs, and Our Minds. North Atlantic Books, 2016. Reviews:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dale-dougherty/free-to-make/  ; https://www.npr.org/books/titles/501016525/free-to-make-how-the-maker-movement-is-changing-our-schools-our-jobs-and-our-min  ; https://www.nae.edu/19582/Bridge/174695/174820.aspx

Gauntlett , David. Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, 1st Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011. http://www.makingisconnecting.org ; Reviews: (pdf) https://tidsskrift.dk/mediekultur/article/download/6749/6778 ; https://inmedia.revues.org/715

Gershenfeld, Neil. When Things Start to Think: Integrating Digital Technology into the Fabric of Our Lives. Henry Holt and Co., 2014. Reviews: none, but a superb review of similar concepts is https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/embracing-digital-technology/

Gershenfeld, Neil. Fab: the coming revolution on your desktop--from personal computers to personal fabrication. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Reviews: https://make.works/blog/FAB-coming-revolution  ; “Yet, the important thing about this book is that it marked the beginning of a shift. A shift away from looking to large companies, institutions and governments to supplying citizens with products - and towards a more self reliant society. A place where we enjoy making the things that we need, in the quantities we need them in, for ourselves.”
https://bepl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/default/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:1635920/ada

Hatch, Mark. The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers, McGraw Hill Professional, 2013. No reviews.

Karvinen, Kimmo, and Tero Karvinen. Getting Started with Sensors: Measure the World with Electronics, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi. Maker Media, Inc., 2014. no reviews

Kroski, Ellyssa, ed. The Makerspace Librarian's Sourcebook. ALA Editions, 2017.
ISBN-13: 978-0838915042, ISBN-10: 0838915043 Also, Connor, Elizabeth. "The Makerspace Librarian’s Sourcebook." Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA 105.4 (2017): 422.
Reviews: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/06/22/book-review-the-makerspace-librarians-sourcebook-edited-by-ellyssa-kroski/  ; http://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/337
“—challenges remain about how to plan, fund, locate, implement, and sustain makerspace activities in an existing program that focuses on providing access to knowledge rather than creating it. Throughout this contributed work, the emphasis is on imagination, collaboration, and production rather than technology, but considerable attention is paid to specific tools for makers.”

Lang, David. Zero to Maker: Learn (Just Enough) to Make (Just About) Anything. Maker Media, Inc., 2013. Reviews: http://michaelcarnell.com/tech-book-review-zero-maker/

Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Review: https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2010/10/18/review-hackers-heroes-of-the-computer-revolution/

Lipson, Hod, Melba Kurman. Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing. Wiley, 2013.
-Reviews: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/book-review-fabricated-new-world-3d-printing-hod-lipson-and-melba-kurman ; http://geekbeat.tv/book-review-fabricated-the-new-world-of-3d-printing/

Martinez, Sylvia Libow, Gary Stager. Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, 2013. Reviews: https://www.edsurge.com/amp/news/2013-05-22-review-invent-to-learn-by-sylvia-libow-martinez-and-gary-stager  ; https://www.middleweb.com/10089/how-to-become-a-maker-school/

Moser, Helen. Transformative Innovation for International Development: Operationalizing Innovation Ecosystems and Smart Cities for Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction. CSIS/Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Review: https://www.csis.org/analysis/transformative-innovation-international-development

Oskay, Windell, and Raymond Barrett. The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory: Build Over 200 Pieces of Science Equipment!. Maker Media, Inc., 2015. Review: https://geekdad.com/2016/02/annotated-build-it-yourself-science-laboratory/  ; https://hackaday.com/2016/07/29/books-you-should-read-the-annotated-build-it-yourself-science-laboratory/  ; highly related article: http://arielwaldman.com/wp-content/2014/06/OP-7-2012-DemocratizedScienceInstrumentation-v1.pdf

Papert, Seymour. The children's machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Reviews: https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/papert.htm ; https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1993/08/01/book-review/861cdeac-480c-45a9-a4e5-d492360dc674/?utm_term=.13a697441c6d

Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic Books, Inc., 1980. This classic book has been referenced in articles and books over 11,000 times which includes many book reviews.

Papavlasopoulou, Sofia, Michail N.Giannakos, Letizia Jaccheri. (2017). Empirical studies on the Maker Movement, a promising approach to learning: A literature review. Entertainment Computing, 18, 57-78. This is available as a PDF file online. "Forty-three peer-reviewed articles were collected from a systematic literature search and analyzed.... The results of this survey show the direction of Maker Movement research during recent years and the most common technologies, subjects, evaluation methods, and ped- agogical designs." This article was part of special issue publication of the journal accompanied by 3 other articles on the maker movement. Reviews (none)

Roslund, Samantha; Fontichiaro, Kristin. Maker faire. Ann Arbor, Michigan : Cherry Lake Publishing. 2014. [Grades 4-7) Take a trip inside a Maker Faire to see the sharing of ideas and projects.

Scherz, Paul. Practical electronics for inventors,, 4th edition. McGraw-Hill, Inc., 2006. Review: https://geekdad.com/2016/04/practical-electronics-for-inventors-4th-edition-review/

Sobey, Ed. Unscrewed: Salvage and Reuse Motors, Gears, Switches, and More from Your Old Electronics. Chicago Review Press, 2011. Review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ed-sobey/unscrewed/

Turner, Fred. From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Reviews: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/243102/summary

Walter-Herrmann, Julia, and Corinne Büching, eds. FabLab: Of machines, makers and inventors. transcript Verlag, 2014. no reviews

Wehr, Kevin. DIY: The Search for Control and Self-reliance in the 21st Century. Routledge, 2013.

Wigginton, Eliot. The Foxfire Book: Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining, and Other Affairs of Plain Living. 1972 Anchor, 1972. ISBN-13: 978-0385073530, ISBN-10: 0385073534
Reviews: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/1219/5%284%29%20151-153.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y  ; https://thegeorgiareview.com/summer-1972/on-the-foxfire-book-by-b-eliot-wigginton/

Wilkinson, Karen, and Mike Petrich. The Art of Tinkering: Meet 150+ Makers Working at the Intersection of Art, Science & Technology. Weldon Owen, 2013. Reviews: https://www.wired.com/2014/03/book-review-art-tinkering/ ; http://renovatedlearning.com/2016/02/01/read-this-book-the-art-of-tinkering/

The Foundational Works of the Maker Movement

2017-11-23T23:16:00.002-05:00

8 Updates, last on December 12, 2017

Perhaps due to its long history of pioneering across a continental wide wilderness, America has always had a significant streak of the self-reliant, do-it-yourself (DIY) and entrepreneurial spirit. But just when the regimented factory life of the 20th century or the " digital cave" life of many or the smorgasbord of pre-made products appeared to be extinguishing that DIY streak, a counter-movement emerged. It began with small flickering flames representing those makers who are regular inhabitants of hardware, electronic parts and textile stores. That in turn led to a recent national and global rebirth in the concept of personal making. This has been further driven by a dramatic drop in the cost and capabilities of the technologies for making, composing, communicating, sharing, distributing and marketing things and ideas. But I wonder if it is not equally driven by a significantly repressed primordial instinct for a unique aspect of being human. As noted educator Maria Montessori commented about effective learning in her book The Absorbent Mind, "He does it with his hands, by experience, first in play and then through work. The hands are the instruments of man's intelligence" (p. 25). In turn, the foundational works of the maker movement in the booklist below provide direction for those hands.

Many attribute the more recent make-it-yourself awakening to Dale Dougherty's creation of Make Magazine in 2005 and its development of Maker Faires but it also has much deeper roots in the computer programming and robotics communities and the great digital palette of creative options brought on by the digital age. Collectively this has led to a broader renaissance and growing interest in all of the crafts from ancient as pottery to as cutting edge as coding and electronics. This has frequently led to hybrid products between all the forms, old and the new. In the last decade, the maker movement has held hundreds of maker faires attended by millions and built hundreds of shared community places with the tools for making things throughout the United States and the world. They are most commonly called makerspaces, and this term is largely synonymous with the terms hackerspace and fablabs.

There are two makerspaces in the North Carolina county in which I live, one in Smoky Mountain High School (http://smh.jcpsnc.org/makerspace/) and a portion of the concept in the university library just a few miles down the highway. It is curious that the high school is ahead of the university library in concept and resources, though the building houses the university's engineering program has ample maker technology for those in its programs. Unfortunately for me, the nearest functioning public maker space is a long drive away.

It is perhaps representative of the spotty localized nature of this maker revival that the town library and the 5 library regional library system ( http://www.fontanalib.org/) do not possess on their shelves any book on the topic. This is deeply ironic and a failure to build on the self-reliant history of our Appalachian mountain communities. However, those in the booklist below led by two hyphens can be obtained through the larger North Carolina library system. There are numerous books written on the themes of the movement, weaving together how-to-narratives for every technology, along with those with deeper philosophy and theory concerns. The "great books" list of the foundational and continuing major works of the maker movement is still a work in progress. Below, in full recognition of the hubris involved, I propose a list of some candidates for the maker canon, those works most important and influential in shaping its culture. As the list is a work in progress, what appears on it will change from time to time as it should. In spite of my attempt to be thorough, it is inevitable that there will be items of which I am not yet aware and argument for and against various titles. How-to titles for specific technologies from A to Z will wax and wane and are far too numerous for comprehensive inclusion here. Building social discussion and debate around this more refined list is part of its purpose. The blog posting format yields itself well to such text driven commentary. Post your thoughts!

Decades if not centuries before 2005, there were works that will have contributed to the maker and DIY spirit. To indicate the progression over time, the books are listed by year. Where available, the list includes up to two reviews of a book. Let me know of better reviews. Astute readers looking for the executive summaries of this content would find the reviews a place to start in gaining a sense of the scope and range of these ideas. However, they are hardly a substitute for reading the book itself.

The larger social and economic implications of significantly expanding our citizens' personal making capacity are still more hopeful than concrete. We are still at the infant stage of the maker movement, perhaps getting beyond some parallel to Ford's Model T stage. It took a very long time before the business community researchers saw any bottom line value to the emerging digital age and personal computers; it is likely for the same to be the case with this movement. Much has yet to be invented and written.

P.S. If the booklist below seems daunting and you need a single place to start, I'd recommend downloading Sarah Davies's 2017 book to your digital reader, Hackerspaces: Making the Maker Movement. Articles are too numerous to include. Google Scholar shows over 12,000 works as of this writing (related to hackerspace, makerspace and/or fablabs) but literature reviews are included under the separate heading of Article Literature Reviews.

The Maker Canon Reading List of Books:

A Date Ordered Beginning

Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, 350 BCE. Ross translation (1908). Classics MIT. http://www.efm.bris.ac.uk/het/aristotle/ethics.pdf
"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them".

Dewey, John. Experience and education. New York: Macmillan, 1938
The progressive education movement began in the late 19th century, lost the fight over control of the curriculum in public schools to the factory efficiency minimal-cost curriculum model of public schools in the latter 20th century. The progressive emphasis on hands-on learning by doing, centered in student interest and future-orientation remain the best alternative school philosophy to date in the 21st century. Dewey was its most brilliant advocate and critic. Its aura infuses the spirit of the maker movement and its adult community spaces today.

--Wigginton, Eliot. The Foxfire Book: Hog Dressing, Log Cabin Building, Mountain Crafts and Foods, Planting by the Signs, Snake Lore, Hunting Tales, Faith Healing, Moonshining, and Other Affairs of Plain Living. 1972 Anchor, 1972. ISBN-13: 978-0385073530, ISBN-10: 0385073534
Reviews: https://scholarworks.iu.edu/dspace/bitstream/handle/2022/1219/5%284%29%20151-153.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y ; https://thegeorgiareview.com/summer-1972/on-the-foxfire-book-by-b-eliot-wigginton/

Papert, Seymour. Mindstorms: Children, computers, and powerful ideas. Basic Books, Inc., 1980. This classic book has been referenced in articles and books over 11,000 times which includes many book reviews.

Levy, Steven. Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution. Garden City, NY: Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1984. Review: https://mastersofmedia.hum.uva.nl/blog/2010/10/18/review-hackers-heroes-of-the-computer-revolution/

--Papert, Seymour. The children's machine: rethinking school in the age of the computer. New York : Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1994. Reviews: https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/papert.htm ; https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1993/08/01/book-review/861cdeac-480c-45a9-a4e5-d492360dc674/?utm_term=.13a697441c6d

Brown, Henry T. 507 Mechanical Movements: Mechanisms and Devices. Courier Corporation, 2005.

--Gershenfeld, Neil. Fab: the coming revolution on your desktop--from personal computers to personal fabrication. New York: Basic Books, 2005. Reviews: https://make.works/blog/FAB-coming-revolution  ; “Yet, the important thing about this book is that it marked the beginning of a shift. A shift away from looking to large companies, institutions and governments to supplying citizens with products - and towards a more self reliant society. A place where we enjoy making the things that we need, in the quantities we need them in, for ourselves.”
https://bepl.ent.sirsi.net/client/en_US/default/search/detailnonmodal/ent:$002f$002fSD_ILS$002f0$002fSD_ILS:1635920/ada

--Anderson, Chris. The long tail: Why the future of business is selling less of more. Hachette Books, 2006. Review: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2006/08/10/books/10manly.html ; http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2006/07/the_wrong_tail.html

--Scherz, Paul. Practical electronics for inventors,, 4th edition. McGraw-Hill, Inc., 2006. Review: https://geekdad.com/2016/04/practical-electronics-for-inventors-4th-edition-review/

--Turner, Fred. From counterculture to cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the rise of digital utopianism. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Reviews: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/243102/summary

--Crawford, Matthew B. Shop class as soulcraft: An inquiry into the value of work. Penguin, 2009.
Reviews: https://mobile.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/books/review/Fukuyama-t.html ; http://mtprof.msun.edu/Spr2011/shoprev.html “This book grows out of an attempt to understand the greater sense of agency and competence I have always felt doing manual work, compared to other jobs that were officially recognized as 'knowledge work.' Perhaps most surprisingly, I often find manual work more engaging intellectually. This book is an attempt to understand why this should be so." ; https://spectrum.ieee.org/at-work/tech-careers/soulcraft-an-inquiry-into-the-value-of-work

--Sobey, Ed. Unscrewed: Salvage and Reuse Motors, Gears, Switches, and More from Your Old Electronics. Chicago Review Press, 2011. Review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/ed-sobey/unscrewed/

David Gauntlett (April 11, 2011). Making is Connecting: The Social Meaning of creativity, from DIY and knitting to YouTube and Web 2.0, 1st Edition. Cambridge: Polity Press. http://www.makingisconnecting.org ; Reviews: (pdf) https://tidsskrift.dk/mediekultur/article/download/6749/6778 ; https://inmedia.revues.org/715

--Anderson , Chris. Makers: The new industrial revolution. New York: Crown Business, 2012.
Review: https://m.huffpost.com/us/entry/2189314 ; https://amp.theguardian.com/books/2012/nov/04/chris-anderson-makers-revolution-review

Wehr, Kevin. DIY: The Search for Control and Self-reliance in the 21st Century. Routledge, 2013.

Coleman, E. Gabriella. Coding freedom: The ethics and aesthetics of hacking. Princeton University Press, 2013. Reviews: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1077699014554765j

--, Lang, David. Zero to Maker: Learn (Just Enough) to Make (Just About) Anything. Maker Media, Inc., 2013. Reviews: http://michaelcarnell.com/tech-book-review-zero-maker/ ;

Hatch, Mark. The Maker Movement Manifesto: Rules for Innovation in the New World of Crafters, Hackers, and Tinkerers, McGraw Hill Professional, 2013. No reviews.

Delfanti, Alessandro. Biohackers. The politics of open science. London: Pluto Press, 2013.

--Karvinen, Kimmo, and Tero Karvinen. Getting Started with Sensors: Measure the World with Electronics, Arduino, and Raspberry Pi. Maker Media, Inc., 2014. no reviews

--Martinez, Sylvia Libow, Gary Stager. Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom. Constructing Modern Knowledge Press, 2013. Reviews: https://www.edsurge.com/amp/news/2013-05-22-review-invent-to-learn-by-sylvia-libow-martinez-and-gary-stager ; https://www.middleweb.com/10089/how-to-become-a-maker-school/

Wilkinson, Karen, and Mike Petrich. The Art of Tinkering: Meet 150+ Makers Working at the Intersection of Art, Science & Technology. Weldon Owen, 2013. Reviews: https://www.wired.com/2014/03/book-review-art-tinkering/ ; http://renovatedlearning.com/2016/02/01/read-this-book-the-art-of-tinkering/

--Lipson, Hod, Melba Kurman. Fabricated: The New World of 3D Printing. Wiley, 2013.
-Reviews: https://www.sciencenews.org/article/book-review-fabricated-new-world-3d-printing-hod-lipson-and-melba-kurman ; http://geekbeat.tv/book-review-fabricated-the-new-world-of-3d-printing/

--Roslund, Samantha; Fontichiaro, Kristin. Maker faire. Ann Arbor, Michigan : Cherry Lake Publishing. 2014. [Grades 4-7) Take a trip inside a Maker Faire to see the sharing of ideas and projects.

Gershenfeld, Neil. When Things Start to Think: Integrating Digital Technology into the Fabric of Our Lives. Henry Holt and Co., 2014. Reviews: none, but a superb review of similar concepts is https://sloanreview.mit.edu/projects/embracing-digital-technology/

Walter-Herrmann, Julia, and Corinne Büching, eds. FabLab: Of machines, makers and inventors. transcript Verlag, 2014. no reviews

--Aliverti, Paolo, Andrea Maietta, and Patrick Di Justo. The Maker's Manual: A Practical Guide to the New Industrial Revolution. Maker Media, Inc., 2015. no reviews.
Important related article Browder, R. E., Aldrich, H. E., & Bradley, S. W. (2016). Entrepreneurship Research, Makers, and the Maker Movement. Working Paper.
https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Russell_Browder/publication/312609426_Entrepreneurship_Research_Makers_and_the_Maker_Movement/links/588656e492851c21ff4d5ae6/Entrepreneurship-Research-Makers-and-the-Maker-Movement.pdf

Oskay, Windell, and Raymond Barrett. The Annotated Build-It-Yourself Science Laboratory: Build Over 200 Pieces of Science Equipment!. Maker Media, Inc., 2015. Review: https://geekdad.com/2016/02/annotated-build-it-yourself-science-laboratory/ ; https://hackaday.com/2016/07/29/books-you-should-read-the-annotated-build-it-yourself-science-laboratory/ ; highly related article: http://arielwaldman.com/wp-content/2014/06/OP-7-2012-DemocratizedScienceInstrumentation-v1.pdf

--Bdeir, Ayah, and Matt Richardson. Getting Started with LittleBits: Prototyping and Inventing with Modular Electronics. Maker Media, Inc., 2015.

--Dougherty, Dale, and Ariane Conrad, and Tim O' Reilly. Free to Make: How the Maker Movement is Changing Our Schools, Our Jobs, and Our Minds. North Atlantic Books, 2016. Reviews:
https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/dale-dougherty/free-to-make/ ; https://www.npr.org/books/titles/501016525/free-to-make-how-the-maker-movement-is-changing-our-schools-our-jobs-and-our-min ; https://www.nae.edu/19582/Bridge/174695/174820.aspx

Moser, Helen. Transformative Innovation for International Development: Operationalizing Innovation Ecosystems and Smart Cities for Sustainable Development and Poverty Reduction. CSIS/Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Review: https://www.csis.org/analysis/transformative-innovation-international-development

Davies, Sarah R. Hackerspaces: Making the Maker Movement.  John Wiley & Sons, 2017. Reviews: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/07/14/book-review-hackerspaces-making-the-maker-movement-by-sarah-r-davies/

Kroski, Ellyssa, ed. The Makerspace Librarian's Sourcebook. ALA Editions, 2017.
ISBN-13: 978-0838915042, ISBN-10: 0838915043 Also, Connor, Elizabeth. "The Makerspace Librarian’s Sourcebook." Journal of the Medical Library Association: JMLA 105.4 (2017): 422.
Reviews: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2017/06/22/book-review-the-makerspace-librarians-sourcebook-edited-by-ellyssa-kroski/ ; http://jmla.pitt.edu/ojs/jmla/article/view/337
“—challenges remain about how to plan, fund, locate, implement, and sustain makerspace activities in an existing program that focuses on providing access to knowledge rather than creating it. Throughout this contributed work, the emphasis is on imagination, collaboration, and production rather than technology, but considerable attention is paid to specific tools for makers.”

Article Literature Reviews

Barrett, Thomas, et al. "A review of university maker spaces." Georgia Institute of Technology, in: 122nd ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition, June 14–17, Seattle, WA, 2015.

Papavlasopoulou, Sofia, Michail N. Giannakos, and Letizia Jaccheri. "Empirical studies on the Maker Movement, a promising approach to learning: A literature review." Entertainment Computing 18 (2017): 57-78. This is available as a PDF file online. "Forty-three peer-reviewed articles were collected from a systematic literature search and analyzed.... The results of this survey show the direction of Maker Movement research during recent years and the most common technologies, subjects, evaluation methods, and ped- agogical designs." This article was part of special issue publication of the journal accompanied by 3 other articles on the maker movement.

Smith, Adrian G, Social Innovation, Democracy and Makerspaces (June 14, 2017). SWPS 2017-10. Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2986245

Vossoughi, Shirin, and Bronwyn Bevan. "Making and tinkering: A review of the literature." National Research Council Committee on Out of School Time STEM, National Research Council, Washington, DC (2014): 1-55.

Alpabetically Ordered  list of the included books and literature reviews.

Other Lists

Emily Mitchell's 2013 list "Books for educators interested in starting a makerspace"
http://makerbridge.si.umich.edu/2013/09/books-for-educators-interested-in-starting-a-makerspace/

179 Best Makerspace books https://www.pinterest.com/dianalrendina/makerspace-books-to-get/

72 Best maker books. https://www.pinterest.com/KatieAlling13/maker-books/

Finland's Schools Push Digital Without Evidence - Yes!

2017-01-29T22:43:00.000-05:00

Finland's wrestling match over going digital in the classroom is a critical struggle by a world leading educational system. As Doyle (2016) notes: "Finland has launched an expensive, high-risk national push toward universal digitalization and tabletization of childhood education that has little basis in evidence and flies in the face of a recent major OECD study that found very little academic benefit for school children from most classroom technology" (http://hechingerreport.org/how-finland-broke-every-rule-and-created-a-top-school-system/).

Finland's schools have no reason to fear the digital age. There was a time as digitalization roared into U.S. work force in 1987 in which the economist Robert Solow famously observed: “You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics.” Yet, even by 2011 the Internet as a sector at 3.4% of GDP was more significant to the economy in the United States than agriculture or energy (http://www.mckinsey.com/industries/high-tech/our-insights/internet-matters). A 2016 report says the U.S. sector had jumped to 5.4% (top country was Britain, 12.4%). https://www.statista.com/statistics/250703/forecast-of-internet-economy-as-percentage-of-gdp-in-g-20-countries/

It is important for leadership to see that the Internet economy and society is a useful measure able proxy for digital literacy (e.g., digilit). Just as with the business experience in 1987, when digital technology fully enters the field of education in 1-to-1 ubiquitous usage, practitioners will have few mental models of what digital literacy makes possible, negligible experience, and little in success stories to use as models of best practice. Even those who are born into this age often have narrow and minimal digilit skills. Consequently, there will be little evidence of benefit. This too will pass. What should concern us though is that this Internet sector's expansion is severely limited by the talent pool that it can draw on. What our societies need is a full-court press by educational systems to keep the new digital talent growing their understanding of its potential.

Digilit is a multi-dimensional explosion of what text literacy first enabled. As a delivery vehicle for new ways for learners to learning by "reading" from a wide range of media, digilit may underwhelm. But, promoted as a rich digital palette for many kinds of interwoven creations and compositions, digilit will deliver a stronger creative culture. This is the foundation for the powerful Internet economy whose inherent interactivity and collaborative spirit will continue to transform society.

New York World MakerFaire spectacular!

2014-09-21T10:41:00.001-04:00

The September 21 World MakerFaire in New York had a spectacular Saturday and Sunday. As this posting only hints at its depth, do explore the link above. The Faire included acres of exhibits, booths, multiple stages with speakers and presentations, discounted and free books by presenting authors, circus atmosphere (Tic Toc Croc pedal power rides on the right)

crowds, perfect weather

and minds expanding with so many ideas, evolutionary combinatorial thinking everywhere.

It was a wonderful 'New York state of mind'. We stayed nearby in the Parc Hotel, 3 subways stops away in a wonderful mini-
Chinatown neighborhood.

To make or not to make-that is the question

2014-05-15T10:10:00.000-04:00

Makerspace asks certain intellectual, social and political questions. It begins very simply.

Intellectual

If I was not bound by the restrictions of some figure of authority, what might I make? If I could make anything I wanted to make out of any material or combination of materials, colors and textures, what would it be?

In the digital age the question easily moves to computer assisted empowerment. If I could design the object at a computer and have it manufactured, what would it be? How would it fit in with the world of non-digital objects?

More recently the questions goes further, if this design could include electrical conductivity, perhaps wires, and those wires could connect with other computer chips and some possible combination of an infinite arrays of sensors, power sources and gears and network transmitting capacity, what might it be or do?

And Social

And then if there is one of these objects and it can communicate, can it communicate with others of its kind? Can it communicate wirelessly? For what distance? For what purpose? Can, will, it communicate with more than its kind and if so what or who and how and why?

Am I willing to put this design in a public space and share it with anyone?

And Political

Politics is the allocation of resources. These resources include money, materials, the tools of creation and a person's time. In this making what resources will be consumed or reused and eventually discarded? What might be the impact of making a larger quantity, perhaps an almost infinite quantity be on the human social space and environment? If the impact is significant, then what regulates its creation?

Make it

If answers to the above questions are sufficiently interesting and supportive, then how do I make it? What learning resources, tools and experience do I need to make, compose or build it?

To make or not to make, that is the question.

The Maker Movement Manifesto

The Standards Driven School & Testing Monopoly - Multiple but Rightable Wrongs

2014-05-01T00:13:00.000-04:00

Updated/revised May 30, 2014

The standards driven school & testing monopoly is a systemic model for education within which school teachers must work and children must attend that veers towards obsolete, unethical, unprofessional and illegal. The Net and makerspace are modeling interesting alternatives. These are tall claims and hypotheses whose evidence is worth exploring.

Obsolete

There are so many ways to say that a system or design needs replacing: antiquated, out of date, outmoded, outworn, old, stale, behind the times, old-fashioned, anachronistic, old-fangled, antique, antediluvian, passé, démodé. Tony Wagner, Harvard Innovation Education Fellow says "The system has become obsolete". Wagner analyzed the nature of education's obsolescence in his books Global Achievement Gap (2010) and Creating Innovators: The Making of Young People Who Will Change The World (2012). They beg the question as to what is making the current education system obsolete, a thought to be considered further-on.

The never-ending teacher-driven authoritarian explicit-instruction of the test-driven state standards classroom is perfectly in sync with the skill set needed by a worker on the factory line or most non-autonomous lower middle and lower class jobs. It is very out of sync with the learner-driven, collaborative, international, project based, creative, entrepreneurial, exponentially-changing, and disruption-focused economic and social culture that has emerged as the greater producer of better jobs and wealth.

I find that a key element of the curriculum problem centers on the issue of redefining composition, the one traditional approved method of "making" for all school children. Over a decade ago this skill was defined as the Neglected ‘R” by the National Commission on Writing (2003). What has become more clear with the passage of time is the need to build competency in inventively creating and problem solving not just with text but all the other media and means in wide use in cyberspace and makerspace today.

This new cyberspace and makerspace culture continues to build a Digital Academy Fixing 21st Century Illiteracy, a digital academy of personal and collaborative learning networks that has broken away from the traditional standards-driven education system. This binary system for communicating and composing with both bits and atoms is the world's largest system for processing questions/problems, ideas, alternative solutions and for organizing multi-age collaborative teams leading to new organizations and businesses. With an opportunity to be a kind of service center for real questions that are local and global, instead public schools and increasingly higher education are starved for funds and mis-focused for the twenty-first century.

Unethical

An overriding professional ethic is to do no harm. To keep students "on-task" for the volumious numbers of standards requires year-by-year increase in the levels of soft and hard coercion skills to manage behavior. Conversely, there is a year by year decrease in engagement.

"The Gallup Student Poll surveyed nearly 500,000 students in grades five through 12 from more than 1,700 public schools in 37 states in 2012. Gallup measures three constructs, hope, engagement, and wellbeing, because our research shows these metrics account for one-third of the variance of student success. Hope, for example, is a better predictor of student success than SAT scores, ACT scores, or grade point average. The drop in student engagement for each year students are in school is our monumental, collective national failure" (Gallop, 2013). Such a system is harmful to the health and well-being of both children and educators.

Yong Zhao, Presidential Chair and Associate Dean for Global Education at the University of Oregon, finds that such a system drives out initiative, creativity and invention that are essential to the new economy and culture as noted in World Class Learners: Educating Creative and Entrepreneurial Students (Zhao, 2012). "We not only fail to embrace entrepreneurial students in our schools, we actually neutralize them" (Gallop, 2013). Unfortunately, the time needed for inventiveness is seen as an inefficient use of time and a subtraction from time needed to teach how to meet standards. This results in far too many indecisive, confidence-lacking, initiative-absent, teacher-dependent learners that are either disengaged or dropping out, an observation already obvious by 3rd grade.

When I meet with teachers amidst the love of their profession I find pain and hurt. The systemic requirements of enforcement and standards that are impossible to achieve for all students given the resources at hand also leads to too many frustrated and angry teachers who remain in their posts, along with too many disheartened and/or burned out teachers leaving the profession, many before they can pay off the college debt that was required to complete the degree to teach. As a university professor in a teacher education career, I confess that it took me far too long to conclude that the system was seriously outdated, and in turn the system was abusing and breaking students and teachers. I participated too long in facilitating the maintenance of a system that needs to go, waiting too long to confront and object, to lobby for alternatives.

Whether by conscious intent or not, the current system is designed to reinforce itself. Those with the most wealth are logically taxed the most, have the most wealth to influence the legislative system, and generally work to reduce taxes which reduces the funding available for public schooling. Greater income requires greater education. Poverty is a kind gravity in which poverty is a restraint on getting better health, better education and better jobs that provide the wealth of money and time to create a better education for their children. Poor families and their children generally cannot get the "escape velocity" needed to escape the gravity of poverty on their own. Beyond poor families, most of a child's education comes from their family, which can provide antidotes to the subservient fostering nature of classrooms. These antidotes enable them to gain positions of leadership and greater wealth. Without a stronger universal ethic to create a tide that lifts all boats which in turn lifts the entire community, it is difficult to see when this will end well within the economic system in place.

Unprofessional

To observe consistently poor results and avoid making changes until a remedy becomes actually effective is unprofessional. The standards driven school succeeds with a minority of students, some 1/3 graduate high school ready for college (Wagner, 2010). Data also argues for an even lower number, less than 25%. After 13 years in the educational system only 24% of high school senior scored proficient in the last national writing assessment; only 19% of high school freshman graduate from college in 4 years in an era of an astounding knowledge explosion and powerful cheap tools for adding value to analyzed knowledge.

The dominant model of education is perversely addicted to compelling young human beings to review, remember and follow orders. Computer science starts with a machine without an iota of curiosity, incapable of making decisions and inventing and then works very hard to make computers and their software ever better decision makers that can handle a growing range of challenges. By contrast we have an educational system that begins with a brain that is highly curious, a biological system designed to invent and make choices, and has conversely developed a set of standards which excludes those special abilities and fosters a methodology of explicit teacher driven orders. Such a system reduces these most unique characteristics of humanity in most and suffocates it many. Why do we allow such an educational system persist?

From Montessori Schools to the progressive education projects of John Dewey to Friere, Piaget and Papert, seminal educational and scientific thinkers have had their arms out pointing to a way beyond the social efficiency driven school system, an 1800's download and derivative of the powerful factory model for producing consistent, reliable, predictable widgets.

Einstein's thought is wonderfully concise on this issue.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift" (Samples, The Metaphoric Mind, 1976, p. 26). I believe in intuition and inspiration. … At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason. When the eclipse of 1919 confirmed my intuition, I was not in the least surprised. In fact I would have been astonished had it turned out otherwise. Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world, stimulating progress, giving birth to evolution. It is, strictly speaking, a real factor in scientific research" (Albert Einstein, 1931, Cosmic Religion: With Other Opinions and Aphorism. p. 97).

Have we simply failed to compare the differences in expectations that we should have between a thing and a brain or is it only with the digital age that there is a need for everyone's brain to be optimized for its distinct capacity?

An educational system that has a failed definition of learners and their capacity then creates problems for those who must implement it. Finding and retaining qualified teachers who will stay in such a tightly constrained and narrowly defined system of learning is a challenge that will only grow. "Teacher flight" begins with moves to states that pay better (Helms, 2014; Khrais, 2014), and then is followed by teachers recognizing their extraordinary skill sets and shifting to less stressful and more lucrative careers (Allen, 2014). As master teachers in the immediate years ahead become masters of one-to-one student-to-computer classroom settings, their value to the larger economy as skilled knowledge thinkers with great leadership abilities in coordinating the work of diverse and digital teams will be so great that having salaries at half of their professional peers will lead to a significant gutting of an already precarious teacher education workforce. In the near term, this will exacerbate the socio-economic divide between high and low wealth schools as some will be able to offer hiring bonuses and some not. Long term, it suggests a disabling of the nation's teacher corps. Being "first in teacher flight" is not the race for which states should be competing.

Illegal

Judge Manning has been the NC Supreme Court's legal monitor of a long standing legal struggle that began with a court battle in 1997 known as the Leandro Case. The struggle has continued to this day: "The state has abandoned its constitutional commitment to provide all North Carolina children with a sound, basic education, say lawyers for low-income school districts, who cite years of budget reductions, jettisoned programs and tens of thousands of low-scoring students" (Stancell, 2014). Judge Manning has issued multiple decisions that have concurred with that position (Court filings: Too many NC children aren't receiving adequate education). The court case appears to be caught in a constitutional gap in the state government system. The state Supreme Court has ruled that students have a state constitutional mandate to receive a free and equitable education and they concluded that with vast numbers of students in low wealth counties, that they are not. Given the separation of powers between the legal system and the legislative system, the Court has not been willing to rule that the state legislature must spend the money to fix the system, as it is the legislature's constitutional prerogative to decide how much to spend and on what. In short, the state legislature's policies are unethical at best and illegal at worst.

The larger issue is how this plays out across the other states of the United States. All state constitutions require a public education system, which implies an education for all of some given level of quality and equity. If the educational system is illegal in NC, then there is an implied issue of illegality in every state. In point of law, the legality of the equity a state's system resides in the rulings of its state supreme court. To date, I know of no comparative summary of the rulings of the other 49 state supreme courts.

Will putting more money into our system of high pressure, high stakes testing yield equitable results? If we accept that the command and control teacher centered system is obsolete for preparing even the best students for the collaborative and creative needs of the current culture and by it nature is demoralizing for most students and especially for poorer students who predominantly live in low wealth communities, then radical systemic reform is required before funding is applied.

Alternatives

If we finally repel from a system with the characteristics of obsolete, unethical, unprofessional and illegal, what characteristics are the positive pull of the alternative?

Other solutions to the problems above begins with significantly changing the model that is not only driving out teachers and pushing students to disengage or drop-out but drives down the reputation of teachers who remain and therefore the state's interest in paying them better. Addressing teacher salaries is a serious but second order problem. Those committed to the value of teaching and a great educational system have sufficient need and justification to collaborate in doing something distinctly different, something that abolishes the standards driven factory model. Historically, it was not that long ago that Child Labor Laws were passed (1938), legislation that is still insufficient for the ongoing abuse in the field of agriculture. Such legislation could be expanded to also include aspects of the standards driven testing system now abusing children and educators.

However, an actual revolution, one that produces radical change, does not come from mere rejection but with simultaneous hope provided by a tenable alternative. Some see hope in the map of 1:1 computing which shows the steady though glacially slow movement of digital power into the hands of every student, which is building nicely in North Carolina. What prevents that digital power from merely reinforcing the dismally functioning status quo is the more important ray of hope for a learning revolution, what I title "Dewey's revenge".

John Dewey, "the most significant educational thinker of his era and, many would argue, of the 20th century" (PBS) produced some of the world's most seminal educational thinking. One of his more relevant and elegant works to the topic at hand was titled Interest and Effort in Education, which proposed a rationale for alternative options to rote-learning focused and authorization models of schooling. In short, the degree of interest in a topic or project generates a proportionate effort. Are the too often lamentable efforts of American education and students an indication that today's learners are no longer so interested in learning or challenging problem solving?

There are at least two areas of development outside of the educational system that indicate there is an intense large scale self-motivated interest in learning: the Internet and makerspace. They raise further questions. Why is there such a contrast? Is it the same group of people that did well in school and are merely transferring from school to "after-school" and "after graduating" learning?

The Net

The Net allows researchers to put real numbers on self-motivated human activity. Hundreds of billions of online searches are conducted every day. Many are interested in much. More clear indication of ongoing persistent effort that is more equivalent of the hoped for intensity of classrooms can also be found in Mary Meeker's much acclaimed Internet Trends Report of 2014:

In an increasing global world the need to communicate across languages is significant and yet a difficult topic for most. Yet, over 25 million people, a 14 fold increase of the previous year, use Duolingo to learn a new language.
Khan Academy's heavily used YouTube channel of tutorials has achieved 70% growth with over 430 million views to date.
iTunes University has seen the downloading of over 65 million courses, over 59% growth from year to year.
The online coursework model of Coursera has attracted 7 million users, doubling growth in the last year.

Makerspace

The Web remains an ongoing global project about composing and designing and sharing many virtual things. Makerspace is the dawning global project-based makerspace movement focused on learning how to make things. It is in part in parallel to cyberspace world of the Web and yet it is also gradually subsuming or integrating the rich, powerful, still rapidly evolving and more mature virtual systems of cyberspace. Some of this development is explored nicely in Makers: The New Industrial Revolution (2012) by Chris Anderson, editor of Wired Magazine. (Don't forget the next Maker Faire in North Carolina in Raleigh, Saturday, June 7.)

One article that addresses such factors is found in the featured essay of ISTE's Leading and Learning with Technology magazine, The Maker Movement: A Learning Revolution, by Sylvia Libow Martinez and Gary Stager (Apr 18, 2014). A book-length treatise on the larger global cultural setting for such change can be found in Jeremy Rifkins 2014 published Zero Margin Cost Society: The Internet of Things, the Collaborative Commons, and the Eclipse of Capitalism (summary and GoogeTalks video of the author). The exploration of this hypothesis will expand faster if many will share ideas that support or refute these claims.

There are schools that have already moved on to full makerspace constructs (Bricolage Academy, New Orleans) or in advance stages of diluting the dominating yet obsolete system in place with makerspace project based learning (Albemarle Schools, Charlottesville, Virginia). These schools that are advancing cyberspace and makerspace ideals are so busy reinventing themselves that their stories are hard to find and thin in description for those who might follow or explore and expand on this leadership. They seldom have time to create the tweets, blog postings and chapters that explain and promote their story. These stories and case studies need to get told and told in sufficient depth and detail.

There is also a parallel development emerging. The Maker Education Initiative led by a Maker Ed Board appears to be in the early yet rapidly developing stages of a kind national "Maker Scouts" movement (my phrase not theirs), a kind of parallel to the Boy and Girl Scout movement. It operates outside of the national educational system, outside of the state's teacher education programs and outside of the professional development requirements of practicing teachers. Such effort is well intentioned and being effectively done. Is it sufficient?

Is it also time to ask the hard questions about the system of schooling that is currently in place? Is it time to ask the nation's colleges of teacher education for their alternatives to a broken system? Is it time to offer a different model of education for the approval of state legislatures? The progress of transformation will be glacial in comparison of having the force an entire state or nation behind it.

Will we measure progress in generations or years? What, exactly, if anything, should we be measuring?

We have arrived at an interesting trifecta of knowledge systems, two of which are steeped in digital knowledge and skills of the 21st century. They excel in supporting and facilitating the ideas and advice of numerous seminal education thinkers including and beyond Dewey. They conflict at fundamental points with the current public education system, a design that emerged in the 1800's, which does not support such seminal thinking.

The Web/Internet (the Net) and makerspace represent sites in which so much is being reimagined and hold so much potential for reimagining education. Our challenge it seems is to invent how to reimagine the entertwining of the Net, makerspace and our national systems of education around the globe.

There are many ways to proceed. I, for one, would like to see it begin with a curriculum of authentic questions and problems, a database that can be be sifted for problems from local to global in scale, a database that offers hooks to the numerous social Web options for assembling resources and teams to solve them.

Tap into the comments area below. What say you? What is your school system's story?

Where is the bibliography for further related thought? Please make me aware of more, but here are a couple of further places to start:
http://reinventingtheclassroom.com ; http://www.web20labs.com

Hashtags: #edchat #pbl #pln #makerspace #makeed #Teacherpreneurs #edreform #EducationNation

Shortened URL for this posting: http://ow.ly/wFD8Q

Updated May 30, 2014

Interwoven Social-multimedia-threaded-communication

2014-04-17T23:35:00.002-04:00

An emerging trend might be tagged as Social-multimedia-threaded-communication (SMTC); this interweaves the deeper ideas of multi-page web sites with the context of the tweet moment; it enables theory/research to dialog with practice, a long standing educational gap. SMTC is a simple expansion of current developments.

A tweet, a short comment, has been the mark of a more socially aware voice in educational and community circles. More experienced tweeters find that great starting point often leaves change on the table; their tweets expand the text with an image, a connection to visual thoughts that unpack the tweet further. Further, through hashtags, they connect the reader with other communities that inform the idea(s). Yet though a tweet comment has become an important dimension of 21st communication, it is just one dimension, yet one with great potential to lead to other dimensions, blogs and multipage sites.

The idea of Social-multimedia-threaded-communication (SMTC), provides a 3 dimensional framework for communication. Linking to other types of web pages provides a depth vs frequency dimension. Tweets, limited to 140 characters max (though often must shorter in terms of message), are easy to produce frequently. When a tweet posting includes a link to a multi-paragraph blog posting which in turn is linked to a longer form Web page essay or other long form media or chapter of material (which takes more time and space to produce), the social group has a chance to guide its members into deeper more nuanced discussions that are interwoven up and down the scales of communication depth and frequency.

A second dimension is multimedia. National Geographic Magazine has long gone to the bank on the knowledge that media can be sequenced to pull thinkers faster and deeper into ever greater levels of textual thought. Tweets, blog postings and Web pages all allow increasing levels of types of the common media of cyberspace: photo/graphic, audio, video, 2D animation, multiple forms of 3D, sensors/actuators/robotics.

Finally, a 3rd dimension is social extension. Hashtags and twitter handles in each of these levels of communication types have connected readers with people and communities of discussion, e.g., #edtech, #edchat, #pln (personal learning network), #pbl (project based learning). Social extension is also social process. The interest in better consensus building and decision making tools was highlighted recently by Loomio reaching their funding raising goal and still stretching for more.

These trends in social media and across cyberspace are clear: more links, more media, more hashtags. My experience with state and national conferences this year is that tweet action during the conferences has become very important even though the percent of attendees participating is still a small minority; I found tweeting to be as important if not more important than actual physical presence in terms of networking and learning about those interested in conference topics. Thought leaders are tweeting big time. SMTC makes tweeting so much more valuable. Will we see SMTC continue its growth in our communciation steams?

Of those using Twitter to date, most are only readers which provides great opportunity for even more contributing in the future. Recent research showed highly skewed distribution. While a tiny percent have posted thousands of tweets, only about 13% overall of the billion twitter accounts have posted a hundred tweets or more (Koh, 2014), though 130 million is not an insignificant number of active users.

Social media, including SMTC, like web conferencing software such as GoToMeeting or WebEx, is all a part of what my DigiAcademy table of contents graphic labels Team Workflow. Team workflow is critical to building out a Personal Learning Network or extending a PLN into a Collaborative Learning Network (PLN to CLN).

I primarily author and think across these 3 levels, each of which provides different ease of authoring and time to create factors.

* https://twitter.com/rshoughton (a sentence or phrase)
* http://ecrop.blogspot.com (paragraphs)
*http://www.wcu.edu/ceap/houghton/readings/Table_of_Contents.html (chapters and textbooks)

From a theoretical point of view this idea of threaded communication by social media users enables higher education faculty and others engaged in theory and research to more effectively approach a long standing problem in the field, the theory practice gap; the descriptor for this in ERIC (database of educational literature) is "theory practice relationship" (which used to be "research practice relationship"). A couple of well cited references indicate the long time concern of this idea.

Robinson, V. M. (1998). Methodology and the research-practice gap. Educational researcher, 27(1), 17-26.

Nuthall, G. (2004). Relating classroom teaching to student learning: A critical analysis of why research has failed to bridge the theory-practice gap. Harvard educational review, 74(3), 273-306.

In short, practitioners such as classroom teachers generally don’t have the access or the time to read the refereed works that get its authors promoted. They too often don’t find them relevant to their classroom practice when they do.

However, theretical ideas in 100 characters or less are far easier to approach and digest. Done properly SMTC authors can use links as threads to longer and deeper works from a context that practitioners can grip, and a practitioners find themselves in a setting in which they can frequently query and connect theorists with reality. This enables all stakeholders to find their mutual common ground. As Lincoln and Guba noted long ago in their heavily cited Fourth Generation Evaluation (1989), developing and sharing a wide range of facts among stakeholders leads to far better decision making.

Social media, and in particular the interwoven nature of social-multimedia-threaded-communication (SMTC) is the best concept to come along with the potential to help close the theory practice gap in education and in all fields, a rising tide that lifts all the boats.

Shortened URL: http://ow.ly/vUJfx
Related hashtags: #pln #pbl #edchat #edtech #ncmle #makers #DecisionMaking
Tweet: https://twitter.com/rshoughton/status/457001430142824448

Understanding the formation and the health problems of the knowledge society

2014-04-15T11:46:00.001-04:00

I'll get to cyberspace and the knowledge society, but first a little story. Let's imagine for a moment that you are extracting ore from a gold mine. You are studying some recent reports.

The good news

You are confronted with a report from the experts (geologists in this case) that the size of your gold mine will grow 40% a year forever, doubling every two years.

The amount of the best ore that converts more quickly into gold will increase from 22% to 37% in just the next few years, and will continue to improve (IDC, 2014). Using your techniques, there is not only a rapidly growing number of other gold mine sites that have high potential, but an astonishing number of other kinds of valuable ores that are appearing as well. There is a high amount of financial capital not currently in use that is interested in financing mine expansion.

The bad news

The investors need to see a higher level of actual gold (profit) before they will invest. Though you are highly automated, there are only two of you working this particular gold mine. The personnel report shows that the number of people finishing their education who have the skills at any pay grade to work gold mines or assess and prioritize the values of the other types of mine sites is at best 1 in four and is actually decreasing. The funding to produce more of the needed highly skilled workers and management is decreasing. Because of their low production rate, those who prepare skilled workers are being starved for resources to improve or punished and leaving the teaching field and the numbers to replace them are dropping. Anyone else available to work is already working in a gold mine.

Cyberspace - the Digital Universe

Now replace the word gold with data. In addition to data doubling every 2 years, the amount that is tagged and therefore more easily found and analyzed is growing significantly as well. This scene only begins to describe the current challenges and opportunities in the digital universe, cyberspace. There is an astounding amount "... of valuable data in the digital universe, but it will take determination and skilled workforce to find and put to use" (IDC, 2014).

How does the difference between digital data and actual gold change what it means to effectively use it? Just how rapidly is the amount of digital data growing and what problems is this creating? What do we do about it?

Doing something about it begins by understanding that the knowledge society is as different from the skills of finance and Wall Street society as Wall Street finance is from farms that grow food. They share much but the differences are critical in maximizing the best of each.

Some concentrated effort is needed to understand the formation and the health problems of the knowledge society.

http://ow.ly/vOz8J #ncmle #pbl #edchat #data #cosn #pln

Burlington MakerFaire

2014-04-12T07:14:00.002-04:00

The Burlington MakerFaire is scheduled for Saturday, April 12, 2014. They requested that Twitter and social networks work with the hashtag of #BMMF for sharing tweets related to this event. Ideas that emerge from those tweets and my own photos will appear later in this blog posting. Tweet on!

Sneak preview video below.

And use the comment box below to chime in with observations and ideas.

Ben Harris is the founder of the Burlington MakerFaire. His question for Steve Wozniak as Elon University's 2013 Fall Convocation notes the educational interests of the Alamance Maker Guild. This videoclip will require some patience with the audio echo.

The makerfaire movement helps answer an interesting question. Is the makerspace movement a passing fad or the revenge of progressive education (Paulo Blikstein, Feb. 3, 2014)?

Maker Schools and Makerspace

2014-04-02T15:27:00.000-04:00

"We learn by doing" Aristotle

"To understand is to invent" Piaget

"Constructing solidifies learning" Papert

Invent to learn" Martinez & Stager

"The Makerspace in the library is an oasis for student self-directed learning. It serves as a rejuvenation center for inspiring love of both formal and informal learning. In my opinion, a space like this should be a priority for all schools in the twenty-first century; and you do not have to break the bank to create one." Eric Sheninger, award-winning Principal at New Milford High School, Bergen County, NJ.

Maker Schools and Makerspace

For over 30 years the personal computer revolution has expanded cyberspace into our homes, businesses, government, the globe and our pockets and purses and ever so glacially slow into 1 to 1 computer-to-student-technology for our public school classrooms. Meanwhile, technology races on ahead, transforming and giving rebirth to long dormant ideas. Sprouting out of the advanced sensor and robotics areas of the cyberspace cloud, a makerspace uprising of 3D printers and more drives what many call a new industrial revolution. The maker movement is not just a digital transformation of our country's strong heritage of inventive making; it is also a potential trojan horse hiding deep intellectual, economic and school change (Brynjolfsson & McAfree, 2014; Rifkin, 2014).

To over-simplify, a makerspace (zoomable international map) is a room, often a community center, with tools and collaborative people that encourage making. There are other titles for the makerspace movement that are variations on this theme, titles like Fablab which come with slight distinctions. Makerfaires (zoomable international map) are events in which makers share the works and ideas that emerge in their makerspaces. At present the makerspace movement is a fertile mix of the interests of the arts and crafts, science, hobbyists, digital composers, the Internet of Things, sensors, citizen scientists, industrial designers and entrepreneurs.

As our North Carolina schools take advantage of their move to 1:1 computing to innovate further, they should look closely at makerspace developments. Many interesting discussions center around the #makered and #pbl hashtags. Readily visible for those who have ever read the seminal work of John Dewey is the reinvention by other names of his progressive education movement. His book on Interest and Effort in Education should be considered a primary supporting document to the makerspace movement manifesto. Unfortunately Dewey's hands-on, project based learning door to creativity and innovation did not quite match the needs of his 1900's factory centered time like they do of our exponential 21st century age. Early makerspace movers and shakers are surfacing that are revitalizing their communities and libraries and Dewey would not be surprised to note that they are beginning to re-imagine the methodology and curriculum of public schools as well.

Makerspace is just the latest phase of our evolutionary layered literacy. This new direction does not conceptually leave cyberspace skills behind, though in practice it is sometimes hard to see the rich digital heritage of compositions for computer screens being hailed in makerspace communities. At the same time its reweaving of digital tools with hands-on making and thought in building objects draws on the very earliest literacy, the hands-on composing and communication skills of the first signs of human intelligence that emerged in the stone age. Given the deep digital foundation that is already in place, makerspace advance will happen much faster and perhaps with even greater impact than any of the prior ages of literacy. A digitally inclusive makerspace cloud would have the opportunity to expand and integrate all that has gone on before it. As a new kind of space for community learning, makerspaces of physical tools in libraries or community centers also become 21st century role models for a new approach to the meaning and methodology of schools.

As librarian Jeff Sturges of Detroit’s Mt. Elliott Makerspace said "this is about creating creative people". MakerFaires show that creativity in events held all over the world. One was held just down my highways in Raleigh on June 7. One cannot help but feel the footsteps of Dewey's Chicago School in the 1890's and the project based learning and inquiry groups of today (#pbl, #pbi). Much more recently Papert's ideas about constructionism pulls together Piaget's "building knowledge structures" with Dewey's experiential "learning-by-making" (Wikipedia; Papert papers).

The desire to make is so universal that the makerspace movement also raises the question as to whether separately tracked college-bound courses and vocational courses involved with physical design, creating, building and maintaining should have ever been distinct tracks for students over our long educational history. The emerging digital fabrication palette of makerspace has re-ignited the deep American frontier spirit so thoughtfully described by the Pulitzer Prize winning work of Frederick Jackson Turner in 1933. It has also raised a storm of interest around the globe. There will be many competitors to American global leadership in manufacturing. For example, Barcelona, Spain (once home to Gaudi, Picasso and Dali) is revitalizing their spirit through plans for many makerspace centers around the city for public use. It is in this need for revitalization that makers and makerspace provide such an opportunity for everyone around the globe. In an age of rapid change and exploding knowledge, everyone in every culture has a need for what Sheninger called a "rejuvenation center for inspiring love of both formal and informal learning".

Exemplars

Many schools are at the forefront of establishing makerspace basecamps for further exploration, including equipment with specialized rooms, after school programs, library spaces and in-classroom time. These are school makerspaces within a school and classroom that tack such activity on to the current school model. Some are thinking about building a "maker school" and transforming the educational pedagogy from top to bottom. The "thinking about it" effort of West Michigan in Detroit has come to my attention. Another, the National Inventor Hall of Fame School in Cleveland, Ohio, was designed as a STEM school. It has been in operation for a couple of years beginning as a 5th - 8th grade school with nearly 300+ students and feeding the approximately 100 students in 9th & 10th grade at the National Inventors Hall of Fame® Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics High School. Their mission statements sound close to the goals of the makerspace effort but an analysis of their methodology and operation are not available at this time.

Only one (to my knowledge), Bricolage Academy of New Orleans has entirely erased the board and reimagined a school from scratch.

They've gone far beyond schools that are beginning to provide maker space in a library or spare room, tools, resources and time in the schedule; they've planned an entire multi-graded school from Kindergarten on up, building one year at a time. Bricolage has built an entire charter school around the thinking of the maker movement; they began with kindergarten in the fall of 2013. They are growing and moving to new space this fall (link to school below), expanding to include first grade. They also gave great leadership to New Orleans' first MakerFaire, held, Saturday, April 5. I took this photo of the the marble ramps their kindergarten classes invented, replete with QR code for each that showed a video of the "engineer/designer" talking about their work.

But change also occurs in other ways. Albamarle Schools in Virginia have spent more than a dozen years building project based learning, so makerspace was a natural progression. And moves to 1:1 computing only rev those engines further.

I would also claim that Montessori schools have had a similar mission since their inception in the late 1800's, but have not given sufficient leadership to digital age thinking using their methodology. So, who and where are the other Maker Schools that are in process or who have begun a "maker school"? Comment space below!

I was privileged to attend the entire day of this "first annual" event in NOLAland (New Orleans, LA), April 5, 2014. It was especially rewarding to also hear, meet and discuss why the maker revolution matters with Sylvia Libow Martinez, co-author with Dr. Gary Stager of Invent To Learn: Making, Tinkering, and Engineering in the Classroom, a book on my Kindle that has long been well "thumbed". She was presenting at the National School Board Conference (conference ; events ; #NSBAConf) there and made the extra effort to also present at this MakerFaire. Kudos to Sylvia for her talk on "Why Can't School Be More Like MakerFaire". Josh Denson, founder of Bricolage and the rest of the event team deserve a special Kudos for a highly successful first makerfaire and to the graciousness of so many in responding so thoughtfully to my queries throughout the day.

The third annual Burlington, NC maker faire that I also attended April 12 was impressive in that a much smaller city could provide a much larger and more significant set of exhibits from their community.

There is a difference between viewing a virtual object (e.g., computer screen, web compositions) and holding an object, whatever the composition is. Both are forms of composition are important. However, I've been concerned that maker movement efforts tends to leave cyberspace out of the focus of their thinking or at least underplay it. Compare this image on the left of the cyberspace digital literacy palette (click for an infographic loaded with clickable hotspots) with the makerspace palette above to see similarities and differences.

It was especially heartening to see that cyberspace for computer displays (image on left) was not excluded from maker exhibits at state and regional fairs; unfortunately this is not true of the world faires. Elements of this cyberspace palette that were in the exhibits of NOLA's and Burlington's MakerFaire include: cardboard marble ramps with QR code linked to digital video story telling; image capture manipulation to study plant photosynthesis; video/image/audio with visual dj software using Arena and remote video viewing and capturing with a camera mounted on a drone; sound composition and manipulation with made instruments; and digital animated story telling with a wide variety of props which certainly could be 3D designed. This is how it should go with makerspace, the creation of real world objects and events intimately integrated with the power of computer screen communication.

A final exemplar for now is the Maker Education Initiative which is busily and productively engaged in creating a national youth movement of maker activities and locations. Not directly engaging and challenging the system of schooling currently in place has enabled it to grow dramatically, not impeded by past practice. Unfortunately this also means that a large, capable and interested professional work force is not contributing at its scale to makerspace advance.

To gain a better idea of what he makerspace movement is producing in enthusiasm and learning, Google Search "maker faire OR makerfaire" for your state or country and attend some this year. For North Carolina folks, this means April 12 for the MakerFaire in Burlington and June 7 for Raleigh; otherwise, visit http://makerfaire.com/map/.

Educational Theory

It is interesting to watch the maker movement seek to invent from scratch some persistent but long marginalized educational ideas long promoted by Montessori, Dewey, Piaget, Freire and Papert, among others. For example, Piaget's thinking, To Understand Is To Invent (entire book online). It goes much deeper than that. For a great study of the real genius behind the invent to learn idea and the science on which it is based and practiced for a century, see A.S. Lillard's work, Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius, 2005, Oxford University Press. Her book and related thinking is a tour de force of Montessori's thinking and the research that continues to uphold the value of the key elements of her methodology. Perhaps at last the many disconnected yet historical allies of the maker movement can be networked to a tipping point that takes us beyond the obsolete notions of "the school as factory and the child as a blank slate" (Lillard) that "are firmly ensconced in the standard operating procedures of today's schools" (Lillard citing Resnick & Hall).

As Lillard has shown of Montessori's work, there is an effective evidence-based world of choice, personal interest, intrinsic reward, learner centered boundaries, inter-age grouping, context learning and order. Makerspace is redefining this evidence based world as both digital and physical constructivism and constructionism. Dewey made a good run at this with the Progressive Education movement at the beginning of the 20th century before its star was driven off the road after WWII by a growing national addiction for the promise of "measurement driven efficiency". That only 24% of high school seniors rated proficient in the last national writing assessment is one more indication that the current measurement efficiency model fails, in this case failing to sufficiently lift 3 of 4, 75% of our public school population. An even smaller percent graduate from college in four years. Too many see digital technology as the "at last" savior of what in reality has been revealed as a negligent and inhumane model for both teachers and students. Education has lingered long enough in trying to resuscitate this increasingly obsolete system.

Digital technology can be used to assist many causes. The makerspace movement is offering one more new-day alternative in the educational firmament of the 21st century. Which one do we choose? Will makerspace sustain itself over the long haul? Can it continue to transform the traditional school model? What allies might collectively work with it to do so? Will colleges of education lead or ignore such practices in the preparation of new teachers?

Resources

Below are some additional high interest resources for Makerspace developments in public libraries, school libraries and classrooms.

***Library concepts
http://www.ubmfuturecities.com/author.asp?doc_id=526566
http://www.alatechsource.org/blog/2012/12/what-is-a-makerspace-creativity-in-the-library.html
"the emphasis is on creating with technology ...teaching our patrons to think for themselves, to think creatively, and to look for do-it-yourself solutions before running off to the store."
Jeff Sturges of Detroit’s Mt. Elliott Makerspace said in ALA TechSource’s December 3 makerspace webinar, “Beyond engineering and STEM, this is about creating creative people.”

***Schools
-Bricolage Academy, charter school, New Orleans, founded 2013. http://www.bricolagenola.org
-Albamarle Schools in Virginia

***Public libraries
http://library-maker-culture.weebly.com/makerspaces-in-libraries.html
http://oedb.org/ilibrarian/a-librarians-guide-to-makerspaces/
http://www.ala.org/news/press-releases/2013/10/make-it-your-library-website-launches-connecting-librarians-makerspace

*** School Libraries
http://vanmeterlibraryvoice.blogspot.com/2014/03/thinking-about-our-new.html
http://www.pinterest.com/cari_young/library-makerspaces/
http://makezine.com/2013/09/17/school-library-to-makerspace/
Leslie B. Preddy ( ). School Library Makerspaces: Grades 6–12, $45.00. http://www.abc-clio.com/product.aspx?isbn=9781610694940

*** North Carolina Libraries (NC)
UNCG http://acrlny.org/newsletter/connections-winter-2014/adam-rogers-shaping-a-makerspace-in-an-academic-library/
NCState http://www.lib.ncsu.edu/spaces/makerspace

***School Classrooms
http://makezine.com/2014/01/10/makerspace-in-the-classroom/
http://www.edutopia.org/blog/classroom-makerspaces-transformative-learning-stephanie-west-puckett
http://k12makers.org
http://makerschool.blogspot.com/ after school
http://www.makered.org/about/
http://k12makers.org/makered-twitter-chat-archive/
http://educonphilly.org/conversations/MakerEd_Design_Sprint

***Makerspace design
http://makerspace.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/MakerspacePlaybook-Feb2013.pdf
http://library-maker-culture.weebly.com/makerspaces-in-libraries.html

***Resources
http://makezine.com
http://littlebits.cc
Curt Gabrielson, Tinkering: Kids Learn by Making Stuff, 2013.
Rifkin, J. (2014). The Zero Margin Cost Society.

Twitter tools and tags: #pbl #pbi #makerspace, #maker #makers #makered #inventToLearn

Shortened URL for this posting: http://ow.ly/vlZOb

Updated May 14, 2014

LMS vs Net? Deep decision time on budgeting types of learning software

2014-03-21T10:00:00.001-04:00

As schools move rapidly towards widespread rollout of 1:1 computer per student systems, educators and culture also stands at the cross-roads for critical decisions about the kinds of software and learning methodologies to be used. Following the money will indicate what choices are being made, as a great deal of it is going to change hands in going forward. Will instruction be authoritarian, top-down state competency, teacher centered instruction delivered to students as containers for holding and repeating information and directions using CMI/ILS/LMS software? Will it be democratic, bottom-up student-interest centered, envisioning students as generators, composing with the rich interactive multimedia of the age, learners as eduentrepreneurs of inventive solutions to interesting problems and participants whose independence and teamwork grow globally by constructing their own personal learning networks and learning products? Might it be blended? To what degree? How did we get to these choices? There is a history here worth a quick review.

For a century schools and teaching practices have been increasingly guided by the philosophy and psychology of Frederick W. Taylor (efficiency expertise for the industrial age) and B. F. Skinner (behavioral psychology). Taylor provided the foundation for the thinking that organized factories and later corporations with claims for greater efficiency leading to greater productivity. Such thinking lies behind a school division of labor separated by grades, subdivided into skills levels, and further separated into time segments and into tight sequences of curriculum. Having mastered the training of pigeons and other animals, the most influential psychologist of the 20^th century, B. F. Skinner, showed that even humans could be guided and directed to required behavior by reasonably frequent, properly timed offerings of high interest, followed by positive reinforcements of compliments and praise. Textbooks, teaching methodology, educational evaluation and assessment and coursework have long and often been beholden to this line of thought. This thinking was also foundational and reinforcing for the physicist Patrick Suppes at Stanford. His early work with instructional computing in the 1950’s led to books on Computer Managed Instruction which led to a string of growing companies (Computer Curriculum Corporation which was bought up by Pearson; RiverDeep, an effective competitor, was later bought by Houghton-Mifflin). Some of the struggle to determine future directions can be found in the Pearson report Impacts of the Digital Ocean on Education (DiCerbo & Behrens, 2014).The CMI label was later changed to the more palatable marketing labels of Integrated Learning Systems (ILS) and LMS (Learning Management Systems). Many similar companies also have been built up around the e-learning label.

Digital systems are excellent for delivering instructional content that is prescribed, measured, monitored, reported and managed, and content that can be delivered with edutainment’s high-interest state of the art multimedia and interactive response resources.

Others have taken a decidedly learner centered approach. For an even longer period of time, the seminal thinkers of education who have been most deeply involved as actual teachers, inventor of schools, participant observers and creators of instruction, including Montessori, Dewey, Piaget, Freire, Moore and Papert, have advised that learner centered was best. In their writing and practices they used and recommended community and learner motivated projects, student choice, personal planning and multi-age teamwork. The Internet and the Web have been built with exactly this type of social and inventive thinking and this type of productivity by adolescents and adults. The Web stands as a model of the most productive system yet devised by human capacity; the information explosion stimulated from this design yields results beyond any current capacity to contain it, demanding immense growth in personal knowledge in order to use it ever more wisely and productively. Standing on this foundation are a long list of companies inventing new practices, careers and jobs that are beyond the space to list here. They added further and immense creativity, value and efficiency to society and culture.

Digital applications are excellent for inventing, creating, exploring, discovering, assembling, analyzing, sharing, critiquing, posting, producing, composing, building and more, using a digital palette of at least 10 different categories of media: text, audio, still image, video, 2D animation, many forms of 3D composition; sensors/robotics, interaction and coding. The digital palette is also a hot-spot clickable cover page for the DigiAcademy Web site drilling down into elements of digital literacy and its implications.

In this digital palette infographic, shown on the right, there is a ring or collar around the inner circle of composing and understanding. It is titled team workflow, representing teamwork. That teamwork area represents an ocean of diverse Web apps, that are far too numerous to fit into that space. Most fortunately, they are wonderful charted in the infographic below by Brian Solis and JESS3. Will they are someone turn them all into a Web graphic of hotspots some day that link directly to the apps?

Web apps excel at using some combination of the digital palette media above to stimulate many different elements of teaming. This network nature of Web includes sharing, evaluation, critique, praise, collaboration, cooperation and more. Twitter is just 1 part of the ocean of local and global team conversations.

Click the image below for a larger view of the circle. Even Blogger and Twitter are just a part of a much larger ocean of the social media of teaming.

Visit Conversation Prism for choices of different much more readable sizes of the full circle of the teaming or social media chart that is above.

Dr. Young Zhao examined our current national and state efforts at standardization and school reform, along with views of education in China and India, and concluded that: "The only way to go is to liberate human beings so they can create their own space."

See some of his TEDx presentation below.

Which path will the software used in school practices of learning and teaching follow? Do we learn best by following decisions or making decisions? Will the major decisional power rest in the software system itself or in the minds of learners and teachers? What software and hardware will best support these path or paths? In which way should our money and our time go? At the moment, the centrality of the learner, the question of who has the decision making initiative, is not a factor in overall assessment of state educational systems: Digital Learning Now's http://reportcard.digitallearningnow.com/

What hashtags are engaged in hashing out these themes? A place to start would include:

#PLN #maker #makerspace #LMS #elearning #cosn14

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Keeping 21st Century Faith in Middle Level Educational Philosophy

2014-03-17T03:24:00.000-04:00

There are certain facts and questions that would be useful to serve as foundation for curriculum planning. New ones have emerged since I wrote, The Long View – Curriculum into the 21st Century, for the NC Middle School Journal (2014).

In short, the adult world is awash in the "new oil", digital information, the product of the silent, invisible and endlessly expanding information explosion; information dominates all other forms of capital, and the economy and culture use digital technology to build new businesses and new careers on it every day. Over 80% of the population in the United States uses the Net and the Web every day if not through most of its hours. Such a rapidly changing culture requires inquisitive, question-seeking, self-actualizing edupreneurs. To survive let alone thrive in such a current setting requires a learner centered, student centered educational system that graduates everyone with such skills.

Such thinking has long been central to stated Middle Level educational goals and this is reinforced by elements of the Common Core. These goals are further supported by a new movement that is helping to change community perspective about the value of open-ended project based learning. The makerspace movement (see part of global makerspace map below) has been creating community centers to share 3D printers and other digital fabrication devices for personal projects, and individuals, teams and families have begun to explore their potential.

The longer view then shows multiple forces at work pulling and pushing to build a learner centered question and project focused culture: the adult economy; middle school philosophy; the NC legislature requirement for 2017 to be the year in which all textbooks and instructional materials are digital; 1/3 of state schools (map and discussion) on the march by the fall of 2013 to having a digital device for every student in that (see map above); Common Core making higher order thinking skills a priority; and the new industrial revolution creating a new makerspace explosion on top of the cyberspace explosion still underway.

Against that background it is important to look at the resistance to such change. Have conditions changed in the last decade or if it is still the case that "intelligent inquiry is an illusion at this point in educational practice" (Graesser, Ozuru and Sullin, 1994, p. 122)? The evidence questions our progress: “State and national systems of so-called accountability have had a devastatingly negative effect on student-centered middle school programs” (George, 2014, p.3). Legislative action has treated students as excess labor at a time when we have run out of enough brains to bring in the harvest from the digital information frontier. This is also leading to one more surge to expand the H1B visa program to import talent from other countries. Such argument is being made without equal emphasis on refinancing schools at the level needed. Of equal concern, too many legislatures think finance invents all by itself and are thereby anxious to lower taxes under the theory that this produces jobs. Our state and the nation are left without any evidence that one day we can meet the demands of the digital age with our own citizens.

"We have met the enemy and it is us" (Pogo cartoon). What questions will continue to drive us in the right direction?

George, P. S. (2014). The struggle for middle school in North Carolina: Taking the long view. A speech to commemorate the life and work of John Van Hoose. North Carolina Middle School Journal, 28(1), 1 – 9.

Graesser, A.C., & Person, N.K. (Spring 1994). Question Asking During Tutoring. American Educational Research Journal, 31(1) 104-137.

Shortened Web address for this posting: http://bit.ly/PHAXkH. Hashtags: #50NCMLE14, #makerspace

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Finance builds, schools starve – stupid fixable equation

2014-03-08T10:58:00.000-05:00

Finance builds, schools starve – stupid equation. 50 characters

Finance builds, schools starve – stupid fixable equation. How many ways can we Tweet this? 88 characters

Finance builds economic & cultural capacity, our loaded digital buffet; growth’s nub, public schools, begs napkins. 118 characters

Fix! Finance builds economic & cultural capacity, our loaded digital buffet; our key growth lever, the public school, begs to eat napkins. 140 characters

The Truth

There are simple new truths we must comprehend about the divergent nature of the global digital buffet table. The current richness and depth of the World Wide Web is built on a little bit extra. The extra capacity of people’s homes, the garage, enabled individual creativity that led to personal computers; the extra capacity of people, government’s capital, taxes, founded the Internet and the Web. The extra capacity of people's time plus digital devices and the Web served as additional rocket fuel for the explosive growth of the data that fed the table. When you fertilize this information age data crop, when you pump its gas, it doubles. If you haven't experienced this, get Twitter literate. The fertile data wilderness that feeds this table of knowledge is the world’s first human-built permanent frontier, an infinitely expanding information and digital age explosion of ideas.

Private and public capital did its planning atop this digital table, wisely using this foundation to plan and execute numerous oil-rig style dot.com gushers of value and profit (try listing the companies). The smorgasbord of opportunities provided by what already sits atop the table of the Net extends over the horizon for everyone that we can seat next to it. Sadly, those seated next to it are accompanied by a sea of empty chairs.

There is also great misunderstanding about this information age table. The root of its wealth, the knowledge explosion, is silent, invisible and a dominant tsunami of power on a scale that spills over any containment that we have devised. The fundamental nature of the table's wealth, information, is non-rival, radically different than the world of physical possessions. As Thomas Jefferson marveled at our country's founding, non-rival information means that no one loses data and knowledge that they give to others. And we now know that in this process they create more. The empowering literacy of the digital age is now multi-multiheaded, the twin-hydras of cyberspace and makerspace. Its accessibility and its growth are spreading fastest through the least expensive digital devices that are finding their way into everyone's pocket on the planet. The tech tools are the means to the problem solving end. Note the rich collection of tools for composition and invention in its digital palette.

In spite of such opportunity, state schools and many families are starved for the resources to get to first base in the digital age, a computer with Net access. Students who don't have a personal digital device to take to and from school begin far behind the starting blocks. The map gives some idea of progress in North Carolina. Progress towards the first step in mining infinite information, 1:1 computing, is at a crawl. You will note that despite much desire to do so our major cities like Charlotte (Batten, 2014) and Raleigh (Hibbets, 2013) are not on board.

At the same time that financial interests are arguing for knocking down the door for H1B visa cards to import talent from abroad to drive our digital age; they are not knocking down the door to the funding for schools to support the digital literacy of the kids who are already here. Shouldn't we be making a deal to do both? The key ingredient, the key capital that is restraining future gushers and more economic and cultural wealth for everyone is more educated people that know how to leverage their digital tools. Public schools and universities are choking for the investment needed to exploit this opportunity.

A brain is a terrible thing to waste. Our culture wastes them when taxpayers conceptualize them as an excess resource on whom tax support is wasted and then teaching those that remain in classrooms as if they were containers instead of generators, using curriculum that is largely blind to to the empowering literacy of the age. It is time to end the stubborn persistence of the digital divide (Badger, 2014). In our age of infinite data, there is long term social and economic loss for every single person that is lost to the capacity of creatively working the digital frontier. It is not a case of someone else picking up the slack. There is no someone else. Everyone else that is digitally literate is already busy with their own little piece of the frontier, which continues to grow.

Politics is the allocation of resources. We have been squeezing state funds out of education based on the belief that freeing financial capital stimulates the most hiring. At a time in which anyone should be able to tap into the immense water tower of information wealth, this squeeze on schools now does more to perpetuate cycles of poverty than it does for business growth. Too many schools and communities across our nation cannot even provide sufficient safety (For one example, see ABC News report on Strawberry Hill High School. How many of our school principals in NC could produce an all too similar video?)

In the digital age it is the educated that can and must invent jobs; today it is invention that stimulates the most hiring. Unfortunately, the "finance first" framework is a now devastatingly backwards political policy. It has historically grown out of long experience with the logic of the possession of land, goods and finance. A new and non-rival logic has upset that fruit cart of possessions and created a new and very wild vineyard. Our digital age wine needs a new skin.

Let's do the math. Poverty is far too common (Frontline report on Poor Kids). How well can we solve the equity equation by Keeping Our Eyes on the Prize, (Uri Treisman giving the M. Carl Equity Address at NCTM, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J6VEyCA1pN0)?

Through dated logic our culture has misplaced priorities for how to create capacity and results in the digital age. Entrepreneurs emerge through the educated that build their own personal learning networks towards their own creative goals, their projects, not those designated by the state or educators. Why is this approach of project centered education best for preschoolers and adults and not those in-between? This is knowledge that the ideas of Montessori, Dewey, Freire, Piaget, Papert and many others have been trying to communicate for a very long time. It is in fact how the rapidly expanding value of the Web builds on itself today. Now that society is deep into the digital age, our culture needs a four-lane highway to their thinking. How quickly can we flip policy designed around problems of possession to policy designed for the new non-rival and infinite fuel of the knowledge society?

Once we comprehend that the prize ingredient for everyone thriving is everyone's opportunity to learn and create from our digital stockpile, then Treisman's data makes it clear that the greatest restraints on the education necessary for thriving are poverty and income inequality. Said another way, insufficient quality education fuels poverty. Poverty is not just a personal problem; in the digital age it is the albatross hanging around all our necks. To build finance by starving schools is an especially stupid design in a knowledge economy. Let's work on a smarter equation; finance schools as invention engines; build the knowledge society.

Let's change all the nouns to verbs, and change conditions to actions. Not finance builds, schools starve, but finance schools, starve poverty, build economy. Are you and your organizations building the bridges that will educate every elected official possible and the communities that vote for them?

Given sufficient people capital and a goldmine to work of infinite data, it is now not just reasonable to have a vision of the future without poverty, it is down-to-earth practical. Let's find the little bit extra. As with the Barclay's ad, "What's a vision without the capital to achieve it?"

Some related "Find your tribe" hashtags for possible allies in this effort - #ncties14 #policy #H1B #immigration reform #immigrationre #ConnectEd #edtech #edchat #edpolicy #edstem #digln

(50 Hashtags for connected educators)

Twitter: Follow @rshoughton

Updated - 3/20/2014

Who are the NC edtech bloggers?

2014-03-06T09:36:00.003-05:00

Who are the NC edtech bloggers? Great NCTIES question tweet! I've always wanted to know the answer to that question and those Tweeting at #NCTIES14 have provided us with some great answers. Using a TweetDeck (love this online app) search column for blog OR blogger OR blogging over the last 2 days of the NCTIES 2014 Conference in Raleigh led to this list.

I took this to mean the longer form of blogging beyond Tweeting but I've included everyone's Twitter link as well. Our university student teachers need these examples and role models. My thanks to everyone for this dedication and labor of love. This provides a wonderful cross-section of the digitally literate thinking going on in our state.

If more bloggers surface, send 'em my way. I've left them in time order to give a sense of the flow and progression as news and ideas emerge over a two day conference.

My first impression is that more of this group are more active as micro-bloggers, e.g., Twitter composers, than longer form blog sites. Only a few are also maintaining Web sites or least claiming such on their Twitter home page. I wonder how this will evolve in the years ahead.

Text Channels

http://iteachteacherstech.com 9:22 am 3/6 @BoucherLauren
http://loquaciouslibrary.com 9:27 am, 3/6 @susanrmyers
klickingwithkrista.blogspot.com 9:27 am, 3/6 @KristaBTeacher
http://ecrop.blogspot.com, 9:28 am, 3/6 @rshoughton
http://primaryteacherhood.blogspot.com @PrimaryTeachNC
tiny.cc/592acx 10:14 am 3/6 @curriculumblog
http://2cents.onlearning.us/ @davidwarlick
candidlibrarian.blogspot.com 3:25 pm 3/6 @candidlibrarian
http://mrfrye.weebly.com/ (not blog, class web site but he quoted blogging as essential so maybe one will emerge) 8:57 am 3/7 @mrjamesfrye
http://outputfilter.blogspot.com/ 8:59 am 3/7 @ericcole
http://techninjablog.blogspot.com/ 11:00 am 3/7 @Tech_Ninja_Blog
http://techloot.blogspot.com/ 1:31 pm 3/7 @techloot
http://socialjugg.com/ 1:46 pm 3/7 @Jovan367
http://www.librarygirl.net/ @jenniferlagarde
http://divastechnology.blogspot.com/ @mrhgaddis
http://mnrizzo.wordpress.com/ @mnrizzo
http://blog.web20classroom.org @web20classroom
http://kellyhines.wordpress.com @KellyHines
http://techtipsforteachersblog.blogspot.com/ @jaymelinton
http://kennycmckee.com/ @kennycmckee
http://sciencetoybox.com/wordpress/ @braveneutrino
http://edurealms.com/ @lucasgillispie

http://lhmiles2.wordpress.com/ @lhmiles2
http://transparentlearning.blogspot.com/ @bethanyvsmith
http://www.melissaedwards.org/ 9:49 am 3/8 @mwedwards

Out of state bloggers highlighted by Tar Heels educators

http://blog.discoveryeducation.com/ 8:36 am 3/7 @DiscoveryEd
http://lesliefisher.com/resources/blog/twitter-and-replies-did-you-know-this 9:54 am 3/7 @lesliefisher
http://coolcatteacher.blogspot.com/, Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Blog, Georgia.
http://larryferlazzo.edublogs.org, Larry Ferlazzo, English Language Learners, CA
http://primarytech.global2.vic.edu.au, Kathleen Morris, Primary Tech. Australia
http://gingerlewman.wordpress.com/ @GingerLewman
http://www.edtechchic.blogspot.com/ @edtechchic
http://www.thenerdyteacher.com/ @thenerdyteacher

Other Media Channels

I saw few examples among Tweeters that were promoting their link(s) to channels for the non-text rest of the digital palette.

Video podcasts - http://edurealms.com/edgeekcast/

Other examples might include (with an example of the genre): still image (Flickr), audio (Podcasts), video (YouTube), 2D animation, 3D animation (Minecraft, Second Life), 3D objects (TinkerCad), or sensor/robotics/Internet of Things projects (Plant Link). That may simply be something that was not mentioned or in the rapid flow I may have missed it. Whatever the reason, it will be hard to expect such work to emerge from student activities in teacher's classrooms until we do more modeling for our learners. We now have an infinite number of possibilities for invention and creation that are well within our educational grasp.

I'd love to add other channels that NC teachers are modeling so please send as you find them (or elsewhere that are valued).

Shortcut to this post - http://bit.ly/MQB37r

Twitter: Follow @rshoughton

Last updated March 7, 4:22 pm

Code Red As Brand-New Pedagogical Model

2014-03-04T10:46:00.000-05:00

"It’s not about matching traditional models with existing tools anymore; It’s about developing a brand-new pedagogical model and implementing the Next generation Web environment upon it." Antonio Fumero

Fumero, A. (2006). EDUWEB 2.0 - ICAMP & N-GEN Educational Web. In proceeding of: WEBIST 2006, Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Web Information Systems and Technologies: Society, e-Business and e-Government / e-Learning, Setúbal, Portugal, April 11-13, 2006.
= = = =

One can feel the pressure to leap into a fully formed new something and the global need for new pedagogical models is not immune. Many see that new facts have been and can be further arranged in new ways for fascinating purposes. Why? Why is such possibility in the air and does it require an antidote, scaffolding or simply the freedom to roll?

Everyone's doing it.

The university scene is excited about MOOCS. Educators unsatisfied with the results from lecture halls of hundreds are pushing for massive online courses of tens of thousands.

Public schools in the United States are close to the tipping point for a massive rollout of 1 digital device per student and North Carolina is an active leader in this effort.

The Federal planners also saw opportunity and planned the roll-out of a new online health care system of education, registration and management.

And with that last thought, we have an educational case study. The resulting national crisis of the health care Web site, its failure and its 6 week resurrection, is instructive. This story is told in some detail in Steven Brill's insightful article, Code Red (Time Magazine, March 10, 2014, pp. 26-36). Some of our cultural leaders have gained sufficient knowledge to talk the talk and dream and envision, but too often lack the operational knowledge and systems to walk the walk, and that's just part of the problem. Is there anyone familiar with IT who cannot tell similar stories just on a more local scale? There is aspirational; there is functional, and then there is useful. Or as has been quoted many times, the future is here, it's just not widely distributed.

An underlying cause of the vision of opportunity is a disturbingly silent and tragically invisible character, the explosion of knowledge (chapter length), giving us a smorgasbord of options (multiple textbooks). This invisible character may be THE cause. From this overloaded table of goodies of constantly new facts and new tools, inventive minds will create new forms and start to use them. Enter, stage left, invisible character two, chaos and self-organizational theory; better understand the former before attempting to understand the latter. It is important to understand that this is only going to accelerate, not settle out, level off or whatever hopeful term one might invent for the world reaching a point that it might be comprehendible, predictable and controllable. Code Red is the demonstrated new pedagogical model.

A further underlying cause is an educational system that has yet to face to facts of this new world and its new systems of communication and thinking. It is not about the haves and have-nots of hardware. It is about education. University systems have been marinating in a deep pool of the hardware stuff for 20 years and still seek to match traditional models with cyberspace. Such systems appear to continue to pass on the question of defining the actual elements of digital literacy. It is a debatable as to whether MOOCs are the tip of the old system or the tip of the new. Next up are public schools, which have been starved for full-scale digital funding. It is only with the rapid price drops of recent years that they have started taking steps for massive participation in the near future. Which continues to beg the question, participate in what?

It is hard to imagine what it will take for long standing institutions to recognize let alone accept the implications of what is standing in front of them in the digital era. There is a way out. Use models that are working. Edupunk, personal learning networks, social networks and makerspaces are the current most representative role models of the global cyberspace educational system. They form as seemingly the anti-particles of post-industrial culture. Physics appears to have made peace with the anti-particle conundrum; can our current institutions? A deeper examination than Brill's piece of the training, education and philosophies of the cast of characters that quickly saved the heath care site from cardiac arrest would be informative.

The first national Web catharsis provided some national lessons. I surmise there is no going back. There is no antidote to the knowledge explosion and its role as the fuel injector for ever more intense nonlinear chaos and self-organization, fundamental late 20th century concepts still greatly misunderstood. Green lighting new digital projects will only lead to endless Code Red unless the Geeks get further into the wheel house. They'd like to help and they are a little disappointed at their reception. If a crisis loop of Code Red in digital thinking continues, at some point that might provide just enough incentive for them to all drop out and form their own movement and systems. That may be the long term outcome.

Even as Code Red thinking has now reached recognition on a national political scale, let's stamp it out with the new models that are working. If it has become impossible to get our arms around the future, then what? Iterate. A revolution, with scaffolding and scaling, can become self-educating for those that will listen.

Twitter "find your tribe" hashtags: #edupunk #makerspace #pedagogy #pln

Updated with links, March 6.

Mapping and graphing a Personal Learning Network

2014-02-28T16:37:00.000-05:00

Geometries of space provide some useful ways to analyze and graph the participants and resources in a Personal Learning Network or PLN: intelligence of information pyramid; idea transfer speed graph; geographic distance.

* The Intelligence of Information Pyramid idea (Information Pyramid for short) is about the means by which information is stored. This is more than just a concept in information retrieval, it is a way to categorize thousands of possible Web tools, and these Web pages lay out some of the best of these tools/links in a fancy design, a series of tables, Brains, Shelves, Drives, with a separate work frame (when the site allows it). Try creating a bibliography of resources using each of the pyramid's headings. If you have a better link than mine, comment away below.

* The Idea Transfer Speed Graph and its concentric circles are about the time it takes to get to an idea, a way to think about the speed with which you can find and use an idea; this will require your input. Closer items do not necessarily get you a better idea; just an idea. A distant book may still be best. Make your own circles or copy and paste this one into a graphic editor (Powerpoint slide; Fireworks, etc.) and add initials for people, hashtag names, Twitter handles to follow, blog site addresses, virtual reality locations and so forth. How rich is your contact list? How fluent are you in using its tools? Which tools work best?

* The Geographic Distance Map is about physical distance, which can be a proxy for divergency. This will also require your input. Search Google Images for world map outline and copy/paste into graphic editor, then add dots and labels to pinpoint where your contacts are located, which can to a degree represent the divergent quality of those PLN contacts. For a real test of divergence, you'll have to consider the concept of how distant your sources are in terms of cultural, family and language similarities.

There is not just one set of maps for a person. Rather, it is more likely that there is a different set of maps for each area of study/inventing/problem solving/entrepreneurship in which one is engaged.

Consider yourself at the center of an expanding bubble-universe of information expanding far more rapidly than a single person can comprehend. It will take a knowledge society, overlapping networks of PLNs, to make the most of this infinite gusher of new oil. Information is the dominant fuel of current cultural and economic growth. Invent away!

Twitter "find your tribe" hashtags: #pln #searchtools

#Montessoripunk

2014-02-27T14:29:00.002-05:00

We talk the talk of our seminal thinkers such as Dewey, Piaget, Freire, Vygotsky and Papert and research the research of the classroom of tomorrow, but the end result remains students prepared and preparing for teaching the classroom of today. The gap between current cultural needs expressed by cyberspace, makerspace and entrepreneur type developments and common school practices yawns ever wider. The edupunk movement ( 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) is in part a reaction to and a means for bridging that gap. Of the available educational alternative models, Montessori was one of the contrarian seminal thinker that did not retreat to academe's writing shelter. She stayed the course in the children's classroom and built a global school system based on her deep observation of child behavior. She designed and constantly refined a very different model. I claim her to be the first edupunk teacher/administrator.

Lillard (2005) wrote Montessori: the science behind the genius, which is a marvelous analysis of the Montessori approach. It is an approach more attuned to 21st century opportunity then the dominant system in place today. Through this review it is not hard to see a classroom setting that encourages the learner to

"learn to regulate themselves, rather than being regulated largely by external forces" (p.326).

Whether those external forces be international corporations, national education enterprises or policy unsupported by facts, this is a mantra of both punk and edupunk thinking. Within her model, participants in the classroom, or students or learners, or however you label them, decide what to do and when and had long uninterrupted blocks of time to do so. Yet this was not a freedom from the development of real skill, but a setting that created an expectation and real support for mastery learning. Just as the punk band still had to play well, so did the classroom band member, but their choice played a large role in the self-motivation to get that growth, not grades, orders or behavior management slights. Montessori schools are often pigeonholed as early childhood centers, and many are, but a web search will turn up many schools that have extended that model through middle and high school.

This spirit lies at the heart of the Do It Yourself (DIY) spirit of the cyberspace and makerspace movement. However, DIY is really not a fully representative phrase of edupunk thinking. We need to coin another word here. It is not that its proponents want to be isolated; far from it. They build global personal learning networks to feel empowered to know that they can do "it" by themselves. With that local knowledge and personal creativity they then make their own unique contribution to thinking global.

Those with the spirit to be free see endless opportunity in the constantly emerging tools of the digital age and the Web. In that spirit I add to the Twitter hashtag, #montessoripunk and hope the study of her real achievement inspires and informs our own paths. Tweet on.

Twitter "find your tribe" hashtags: #DIY #Edupunk

Data based Decision Making for NC Schools

2014-02-27T00:11:00.003-05:00

Our first computer, the ENIAC, cost $6 million in 2014 dollars (photo on the right). It is a measure of our progress that the equivalent power of this "giant brain" of 1946 can now be found embedded in throw-away $5 animated sound-producing greeting cards. That’s over a million-fold improvement in the cost of decision making, management capacity and economy building in 7 decades. The immensity of such change can stagger the mind, but the future of our children requires us to show some grit. Let's work through it. We've got to get beyond "Wow!". What are the implications of such mind-numbing results?

This many fold improvement also added far more value than just cost reduction. Of equal interest but not number-crunched here is the shrinkage in computer size from a giant room to the thumbnail size bump in a greeting card. At the same time, the electrical power consumption of such a device plummeted to that which can be met and run for hours on a tiny watch battery. It might almost run forever with the energy harvesting of an equally small solar cell. It would be interesting to know if the size and power factors have also undergone million-fold improvements, but it is clear that tiny size and minimal power needs have also opened the door to endless new possibilities still being invented today. Oh, and about that $5 greeting card, that price has plenty of room to drop. Freescale Semiconductor announced a tear-drop sized microprocessor in 2014 that is vastly more powerful than the ENIAC and its greeting card prodigy. It is smaller than the dimple on a golfball and in commercial quantities (100,000), costs $0.75 cents (see image on right). Decades of impressive investment and research lead to such incredible scientific and manufacturing outcomes.

Such digital capacity hidden in greeting cards has a much wider range of application. It lies at the heart of the ground-swell for the rapidly emerging sensor driven Internet of Things, tiny sensor reporting intelligent devices embedded in nearly every physical thing we own and new ones being invented. The Chief Technology Officer of Cisco Canada says this technology will be “a key component in $14.4 trillion of economic activity within the next decade” (Seifert, 2014).

That payoff today from past investment has been considerable. To develop tomorrow's payoff, pause for a moment and brainstorm what is being done today with $6 million dollars worth of computer capacity then imagine the same shrinkage of size and power consumption of the last 70 years being applied to some point in the future. That $6 million just might buy you one of the D-Wave Two's first in the world quantum computers (1, 2, image of quantum chip on left, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons). This design and future quantum designs are as easily as experimental, challenging and as promising as the ENIAC in 1946 and potentially far more disruptive to current cultural patterns. Imagine that capacity on your watch band or tattooed on part of your body, for 75 cents.

Given the current pace of technical/scientific change one suspects that today’s $6 million dollars worth of computer capacity will be worth just $5 or 75 cents in much less than the next 70 year interval. Given the evolution of the ENIAC and the 18 month doubling pace of Moore’s law of computer capacity, that capacity at that $5 or 75 cent price would happen in about 37 years. I have grandchildren that will be 37 years old in 37 years. How do we develop curriculum, schools and resources to prepare our youngsters for the opportunities and challenges that such a world will bring?

The fact is that we aren't. Because 'the engine that could' is not generating the power we hope for, we punish it by starving it of gas. Yes, only 33% of 8th graders (8th, Salahu-Din, Persky, & Miller, 2008) and 24% of the nation's high school seniors (12th, Salahu-Din, Persky, & Miller, 2008) test at proficient for the ability to write (Kent, Wanzek,Petscher, Al Otaiba, & Kim, 2013), the foundational ability to make meaning, discover questions and compose solutions out of the substance of the world around them. "See, schools are not working." And the solution is starve the engine for gas? Brilliant. If we had the gas, under such circumstance we'd press down on the gas pedal. If a military unit in Afghanistan was losing a firefight, would we take their ammunition away? Welcome to North Carolina that invested in the future by not adding dollars to its educational gas tank. A mind is not just a terrible thing to waste; a wasted mind is not just another personal tragedy. In a time of unlimited wealth of information, the waste of a mind robs it from contributing to everyone's potential and wealth. We should not be coasting on fumes into the 21st century. Let's charge into it.

The potential challenges of today's technology make North Carolina's preparedness for the future look underwhelming. Readers can work out for themselves whether the budgets cuts lead to financial starvation for state schools and sufficient investment in the future or not (REP / DEM); it might be best to check with local school superintendents for the "on-the-ground" facts. Do they feel their schools are prepared and funded for even NC SL2013-11 and SL2013-12? Are their communities aware of the implications for teachers of just those two on-target and yet unfunded state laws?

Ultimately though, it is not about the hardware. It is what we can invent with it that counts, and that increasingly involves a giant dose of STEM and STEAM knowledge. What is clear is that human capacity building is critical in order to capitalize on the acceleration of science and technology that is provided today, let alone a decade or three away. Alvin Toffler spotted part of the problem over 40 years ago; his 1970 book was titled Future Shock. Without truly exceptional capacity building starting now, exponential growth in the future will not grow our children, it will overwhelm them. Ask our former textile workers how prepared they felt for the change of the last 20 years. As we stunt the growth of tomorrow's workforce, our children of today, we stunt the growth of everyone's tomorrow, of tomorrow’s economy and culture.

The ongoing knowledge explosion (2013) may be completely silent and it may be totally invisible, but it is one more factor that we can actually measure. The explosion of knowledge is so fast and so immense that even if every man, woman and child on the planet was a highly creative and able entrepreneur or a doctoral level researcher, we could not begin to wring all the potential out of today’s knowledge, let alone years into the future, and the future is steeped in accelerating change. “In 50 years, 90 percent of what we know will have been discovered in the last 50 years” (Seifert).

We must manage the future through a full 180 degree shift in perspective from the past centuries and face the future by facing forward. It has not been that long since millions of low-skilled manufacturing jobs evaporated from the United States while still remaining first in the world through advanced manufacturing. The pace of change suggests there will be many more. It is time to examine in depth what and how the disruptive denizens of cyberspace and makerspace are composing and inventing. It is time to aim our curriculum a few years ahead so that our students, our children, have a chance of finding a place somewhere within the target in their adulthood.

Perhaps the single most important power that we exercise in developing our future is our right to vote. Who can we find to vote for that will develop and direct the capacity building and investment in education that our culture needs?

Catching the cutting edge 60’s and O.K. Moore

2014-01-27T10:29:00.001-05:00

The evidence seems to be saying that there is something broken about the point of writing. In short, at a time of rapid digital change and critical need for creative and inventive composition of all kinds, our children are taught composing with just essay-type text. Within that particular medium, less than 1/4 of them are succeeding. At the same time, Cyberspace and Makerspace settings bring other communication options in which students might be motivated to find success, and curiously, eventually leverage their text writing skills as well.

Research Evidence

The research on writing instruction and the abilities of school age children is not particularly thick, but certainly sufficient to establish a kind of rough outline of a measuring stick on public school children’s numbers of words, sentences, paragraphs and pages across grade levels and to report a measurement of effective student progress.

The data indicates that at best students write some ten sentences a week in kindergarten (Kent, Wanzek,Petscher, Al Otaiba, & Kim, 2013; Puranik, Al Otaiba, Sidler & Greulich, 2014) progressing towards 5 paragraphs a week in middle school (Gilbert & Graham, 2010; Graham, Capizzi, Harris, Hebert& Morphy, 2013) and 3 pages a week in high school (Applebee & Langer, 2006; Applebee & Langer, 2011). But too many do almost none of even this; just 33% of 8th graders and 24% of high school seniors earn proficient writing scores (Kent, Wanzek,Petscher, Al Otaiba, & Kim, 2013; NASP, 2008; Salahu-Din, Persky, & Miller, 2008). That 24% are proficient helps explain why about 19% of high school freshman finish college. It is a curiously close percentage to "only 25 percent of U.S. public high school graduates have the skills needed to succeed academically in college, an important gateway to economic opportunity" (Gates Foundation, 2014). If not for the almost forgotten 1960’s work of O. K. Moore, there might be little reason for optimism about potential radical improvement.

Such school challenges play out against actual radical improvement in our adolescent and adult league, the Web. Trillions of new types of digital compositions from billions of creators now flood cyberspace. They accelerate the long running and transformational work of the information explosion (Houghton, 2013). In an era of richly varied and often free multimedia software, these compositions combine and re-combine in ever more intricate ways to play an ever more critical and creatively disruptive role in the new digital economy and culture. The basic building blocks of this renaissance are not hard to see on any Web, Facebook, Twitter and nearly any digital site. The fundamental units make up a digital palette defined by at least 10 major elements (Houghton, 2012). How do these elements move from building the digital adult economy that was center stage at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting (Sallis, 2014) to any kind of local place in the school curriculum? If integrated, will they further distract or permanently prevent us from reaching major educational goals of the last 100 years, such as proficiency in basic writing ability? Or can each leverage the other?

O. K. Moore’s work of over 20 years of development demonstrated that with adequate responsive devices, concepts and setting, enormous progress can be made from a very early age, work that complements not conflicts with the writing and other educational goals of the last century. Using a talking typewriter as a kind of puzzle, "Moore brought some pre-school children to the point where they were reading and writing first-grade stories and typing on an electric typewriter with correct fingering-and all in a matter of weeks" (Anderson & Moore, 1960). [My criticism of the educational value of this photo on the left, 1, Gilmore, 1965) is that with just a bit more effort in the placement of the hand and the colors of the fingernails would have been visible too.]

Unfortunately the expense of some of the elements of his experimental school settings, e.g, $30,000 to $35,000 for the talking typewriter (1, 2, 3, 4), eventually drained any support for expanding to widespread implementation.

His initiatives were ending in the 1980's just as the personal computers were first making their cultural appearance. Fortunately it was his concepts and designs that enabled his settings to sing, and the technologies of 40 years later (see photo on the right) can duplicate his learning strategies and tools for a 200^th of the cost.

As Moore would often indicate, it was not the technology that was critical, it was the vision of what drove his team's effort. But where's the software that is duplicating and expanding on his ideas with the far superior devices of 2014? We can watch and wait or start somewhere.

Goal Setting

Podcast - Models for Designing Motivation
If you cannot see the audio controls, listen/download the audio file here

Now that schools are beginning their move in North Carolina to 1 to 1 computer availability with technology significantly more sophisticated for a fraction of the price of the learning tools of Moore's era, Moore's work deserves a deep look and reinvention for meeting the new needs of the digital age (Moore, 1980). However, this may grate a bit against the top down culture dominating factory elements of secondary and higher education. His work meshes well with the deep educational thought of student centered Montessori, Dewey, Vygotsky, Friere, Piaget and Papert. It is as equally pointed and current as Psychologist Peter Gray's thoughts on natural learning settings for learning to read.

Some of the elements of autotelic software show below as selected examples in the spreadsheet table, designs that make new digital media composition accessible for even preschool and kindergarten. However, baseline data on measuring our progress with 21st century composition is nonexistent (graphic below). There is as of yet no way to make comparisons and measuring points for media across grade levels that is comparable with the data now available on written text. For example, for video composition, what is the kindergarten level equivalent of 10 sentences a week? The lack of this knowledge is hardly surprising; schools are just beginning to get the funding to fully join the other professions in going digital so that such instruction, achievement and measurement would be possible. The time to take such a baseline is now; much research needs to be done.

See the animated chart below. Do you have the knowledge to measure such abilities as effectively as we now measure writing? If not knowing is something that bothers you, how can we solve this problem?

If you were to graph your own literacy progress in digital composition, at what grade levels would you drag each of the column heights above? Grab an Excel spreadsheet version of this chart and define your own starting point for professional development. What will it take to create a "responsive environment" of such media for your own learning and those you teach?

To make a spreadsheet column graph of your current development with digital literacy, download the linked spreadsheet above, and follow the directions in the screencast on the left. (hosted at YouTube; click its full-screen button for best viewing).

[The video below is the same uploaded file as above, but uploaded through blogger.com's Video Upload button. Notice its markedly lower quality in comparison with the version above that was uploaded directly to YouTube. Where appropriate, go with YouTube.]

Makerspace

Obviously, the columns of this spreadsheet represent the digital ability to read and compose different kinds of media that appear on the cyberspace screens of digital devices, from smartphones to desktop computers. However, one aspect of these columns of digital literacy is hidden from recognition; there is a transition underway that is extending cyberspace to the physical world of "maker space", from creations that end up on display screens to a surge of digitally driven creations that are physical objects in the real world. These objects increasingly contain sensors and actuators that communicate with other objects for automation purposes or alert notices for manual direction by their owners and managers.

Such maker space designs do not have to involve "rocket science" creations. The framed example below shows live data from a set of sensors in series of small greenhouses for my year-round gardening in the mountains of North Carolina. The sensor data will be used to control actuators that manage temperature, light levels and watering, the beginnings of a greenhouse robotics system that is as relevant to home winter gardeners everywhere as to school gardens largely abandoned during the summer months.

Makerspace is not just a concept. Makerspaces are also physical places that range from manufacturing tools that have shrunk to fit on an office desktop to "community centers with tools", using computers and computerized manufacturing tools that continue to fall in cost and size while simplifying ease of use. An explosion of these neighborhood makerspaces (MakerMap; 2) from office spaces to libraries is underway in communities around the world.

These centers are as open to families and children's design groups as they are to adults. Makerspace participants use the columns of computer programming, robots, sensors and 3D CAD/CAM software and tools for fabrication such as laser cutters and 3D printers. The video below is one simple example.

Tinkercad creations could be fanciful (as above) or just as easily be highly practical (see below), as with the the high schoolers who used 3D printing to make a prosthetic hand for a 9 year old for under $10 or the gardening example of this next video below, posing a solution to standard seed starter containers.

Every bit as important as the emerging technology is the nature and design of the learning community within these centers. The vast depth of knowledge from the Web, the ready availability of digital devices for study and creation and a collection of learners who like to share is recreating the point of Moore's 'responsive environment' within which so many found success. This educational direction is but one of a long line of learning practices stretching back to the lights of Pestalozzi, Montessori, Dewey, Piaget and Papert. Makerspaces can create places within or outside of schools which provides a setting and alternate agenda where students and teachers can think differently about the educational process.

The Charge for Change

The learner-centered, learner-initiative nature of makerspace and cyberspace communities represents the seed, a break with current school practices, and the hopeful prototype for the inventive activity that communities will also expect someday of public schools.

Updated 2/18/2014 version 1.7

At the Heart of Creativity

2014-01-16T09:03:00.001-05:00

As financially starved public educational systems in the U.S. slowly turn to find culture's new digital direction, there is a deeper shift happening. There is a shift in the world's awareness, a shift from a linear (graph on left) to a nonlinear view of how things interact and develop. This shift requires an intuition about exponential behavior for which it has so far demonstrated considerable ineptitude (Bartlett, 2005). Why is it that nonlinearity tends to create surprise at the speed in which apparent slow growth becomes dramatically different? Surviving, let alone thriving, may be more connected to solving this problem of understanding than we yet appreciate.

So little of the patterns of this now well defined logic and mathematical knowledge (Houghton, 1989/2009) is widely known. In fact, such ideas are central to motivating the application of the public's newly found and growing interest and struggle with the teaching and practice of the pinnacle of higher order thinking, creativity (Hodgson, 2012; Bellanca, Fogarty & Pete, 2012). It is worth noting that creativity, does not stand in isolation; it requires the cumulative underpinnings of the other higher order skills.

A small step in the appreciation of exponential behavior might begin with a change in its iconic representation. Exponential thinking is often expressed as an upward rising curve, the classic hockey stick graphic of the population curve. Even that is often truncated, cutting off the long boring space-consuming reality of the slowly rising line of the graph. A mere 7 million prior years are missing in the graph on the left. Instead the more visually interesting is generally shown, the last sharply upturning few percent of a long period of development (graph on right). If we change the scale to show the full range of the horizontal 7 million years, the upturn of the graph looks insignificant.

The trunk of the elephant may be more interesting, but it is certainly not fair to cut off the elephant's trunk and present it as representative of the entire animal. We are too impressed by height and not enough by length. We can show one or the other well, but not both well in the limits of our display frames. Our bias leads us to just show the seemingly more dramatic curve (graph on the right). One result is that the intuitions that form from reading such graphs fail to appreciate how long significant change can take to happen.

Returning to the long hockey stick graph above, if one were positioned at the year 1700, and had accurate data for the previous several hundred years it would seem logical to conclude that the past tells the future. What mathematical education has apparently provided many is the idea that change is additive. If you add something this year, 2, to the number from last year, 8, the result is 10 and the pattern would continue, 12, 14, 16 etc. The result is a straight-line graph and simple prediction about a situation somewhere in the future. Exponential change multiplies not adds. What has become common in the faster paced 21st century is the idea of doubling. Multiple by 2 each year and the skips between numbers grow rapidly. If you multiple 2 x 4, you get 8, which times 2 is 16, which times 2 is 32, times 2 is 64. Each interval of change is significantly greater than before. This is still a simple math but one that leads to very different thinking about the future.

If given the choice of a million dollars, or doubling an initial dollar every day for a 31 day month (R x 2 or Rx2), choosing the million dollars would result in almost a billion less than the choice of starting small but multiplying it multiple times. Actually writing down the numbers to see their increasingly larger jumps in size is an educational event worthy of your time.

Beyond simple math, change also becomes radically different when an invention changes the multiples. When the right special thing happens, however seemingly minor it might be at the time, radical change quickly builds. In the case of the human population graph, human power is capable of .1 horse power (hp) almost indefinitely and 1.2 hp for very short bursts. James Watt's moment of creativity stretched the capacity of existing steam engines to a reliable 10 hp in 1771, opening door to further invention that would become 1,000 times greater in a century ("horse power", 2014). This change was a major factor in birthing the industrial age whose machines enabled one person to do the work of an increasingly larger number of workers. It was this result that enabled the creation of food and goods to supply a population explosion shown as the sharp turn in the graph. We have a problem of scale, and of needing to shift the scale to see the results from afar, a need to go beyond magnifying and framing just a portion.

Such exponential curves though are just a "slice of the pie", not the whole pie, they are a magnified segment of a larger scene. This can miscommunicate a certainty about unchecked growth and misrepresent the larger view of the reality of larger nature of nonlinear systems. The larger problem is that the smooth and simple exponential curves above are too misleading. Among sustained living systems, there is seemingly no real "end", just change. In reality, what goes up, must come down, and up, and down and the degree of change happens dependent on the degree of interaction in the system. The graph on left was created by the interesting properties of RX(1-X).

It is also possible and useful to change perspective once again and now see the red-lined graph on the left as if above a basketball floor, representing the movement of the ball across the floor. The behavioral patterns of creativity have more to do with the artful dodging of basketball players running the ball down the floor to a goal. The more interesting, creative and valuable the system, the more the concept of an average as useful data is a lie, a severe distortion of reality and largely devoid of predictable power.

Perhaps it is helpful to think of it in a very personal way. If we apply that linear logic to classroom grading, we've been misrepresenting our species for a very long time. Or looked at another way, to the extent that a grade average represents the reality of a person's performance, straight A's or straight F's both raise questions about learning and imply a failure to work within Vygotsky's optimal zones of learning. Such consistent scores should be read as the absence of a successful setting for the learner to reach the full capacity of what it means to be a creative human being. The middling C average amidst widely fluctuating grades may represent the most promising learner of all. Creativity requires quite of a bit of experimenting.

There are other intuitions and metaphors we could lift in praise. We say to skiers that if you have stopped falling down you have stopped learning. Edison required a long line of failures in order to find success with his lightbulb. Try finding value in calculating Edison's average.

Whether considering the optimal behavior of people or social and biological systems, or the physical universe around us, nonlinear behavior dominates. To better appreciate the many trends driving 21st century life (Houghton, 2013) , it will be to our long term benefit to give proper respect to the deep nonlinear and consequently unpredictable behavior that dominates our world.

With such respect comes a deep understanding of the value of creativity in responding to and adding value to such a culture.

Mapping 1 to 1 computing in North Carolina 2013

2013-12-14T14:09:00.001-05:00

As the embedded map above shows, 36% of the 115 public school districts in NC have major digital 1:1 programs extending across all students at some range of grade levels. (Please note any corrections needed in the Comments box below.) Some districts have gone K-12 (though most of those are intermediate grades and up); many have gone 6th grade and up; and more are just high school in implementation. As there is no choice but to look ahead, where should we focus in this turbulence between the paper-textbook past and the digital future?

North Carolina faces a double-whammy. On the one hand it struggles with the long standing issues of the last century stirred by the industrial age and factory manufacturing, improving student achievement against a range of challenges. More recently these challenges have included sinking teacher morale, sinking numbers of support staff, sinking recruitment and sinking budgets while facing accelerating teacher attrition (Bonner & Stancill, 2014). On the other hand it struggles in getting schools positioned for the creativity, inventiveness and entrepreneurship necessary for turbulent 21st century life, culture and economy. This includes the critical invention and rollout of effective 1 to 1 (e.g., 1to1, 1:1) programs where each child in the school district has a computing device of some kind (laptops, touch tablets, netbooks or ereaders); state schools are in a race against a deadline of 2017 when state legislation has mandated an end to paper, transitioning to digital access for all textbooks and instructional resources.

As a sign of the heroic efforts of educational leaders, the momentum for 1:1 is discernible. The exponential changes in the last couple of years are astonishing, perhaps nearing a tipping point. Will we tip as far as the statewide success of Maine? It wasn't but a couple of years ago there was just one county (Greene) and one city (Mooresville) that were 1:1 on my map with a scattering of small pilot projects elsewhere. Pulling against the progress shown by this map are the vast empty swaths of the still-all-white counties (with no widespread 1:1), a giant boat anchor that drags against state progress.

Can/does it mean anything when schools do go 1:1? The Mooresville superintendent was the national super of the year for 2013 as a result of his work since 2008 in making the transition educationally effective there. Yes, notice that it took their school district 5 years before this mark of achievement was possible and that almost everyone else in the state is just getting started with 1:1. Further, the batch of digital literacy legislation that was signed into law in the spring 2013 was the result of a legislative committee that did a state tour the prior summer and then was amazed by what they learned when they followed the path of many to visit Mooresville classrooms. This tour led to getting Neill Kimrey (DPI division chief for Digital Teaching and Learning, who was on the tour with them) to assist in drafting this legislation. Now that's impact.

Does leadership vision count? In a study done by NC State's Friday Institute of 18 NC high schools that went one to one (2008-2011), the results in year 2 were rather ho-hum.

"When focusing only on the 1:1 schools, results of multi-level modeling analyses showed there were no significant effects on students’ 2010 EOC scores based on the length of 1:1 implementation, the quality of 1:1 implementation, or teachers’ ratings of principal leadership" (Corn et al, 2011).

Yet these lagging if not seemingly stagnant results can be seen as consistent with the Mooresville experience; it takes not just years to develop the expertise for significant impact, but great resources as well. This is just as true for educational systems as for other organizational systems, including government and business. One research team analyzed over six hundred companies and found that

"it takes an average five to seven years before full productivity benefits are visible in the productivity of the firms making the investments. This reflects the time and effort required to make the other complementary investments that bring a computerization effort success. In fact, for every dollar of investment in computer hardware, companies need to invest up to another nine dollars in software, training and business process design" (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014).

As with any great transition, the shakedown cruise will have its challenges. One of those challenges will be recognizing that it is critical to find those other nine dollars for every dollar spent on the computer hardware present and arriving in state classrooms.

Becoming aware of what others have learned who have gone down the 1:1 path is also critical in making effective use of the dollars that do get spent. The One-to-One Institute reports research and distilled advice from the over 2,000 schools with 1:1 programs that have taken place in the United States over the past 12 years. See: showcase sites; 1:1 iPad deployment map. Portugal's 1:1 has been in implementation for its 1.7 million students since 2009. There are many recent and sometimes tragic stories from the national stage that can inform educational planning: Philadelphia SLA; Lewisville High School, outside of Dallas, Tx; Los Angeles, 1 , 2, ; Miami-Dade County Public Schools, 1; Guilford County, NC, 1; Fort Bend, TX, 1.

Let's watch for research on how our 1:1 schools are progressing not just in 2014 but for many years ahead; let's also watch for how the legislators and taxpayers support this capacity building process. If the support is not there, it will take much much longer if ever for the predicted transformations and progress to appear. And note again that it took Mooresville at least 5 years to get its national recognition.

Another capacity building problem is that outside the state of Maine I doubt if we have more than a handful of teacher education faculty members in the state or country who have ever taught even an hour, let alone a year in a fully 1:1 public school classroom and school. If you are in higher education and have had such experience, please give us a shout out in the comment area below. On what campus are you located? This absence of university professor capacity makes this transition (e.g., revolution) a real bootstrap operation for universities that are in theory prepared to guide and lead their citizens into the future. Now is the time in which we can really lament the loss of university campus experimental K-12 schools (lab schools) that could have been the preparatory seedbeds for such futures now storming into our present. Many of these one-to-one public schools have now charged far ahead of our faculty's experience for preparing our teacher education students for K-12 classrooms.

The NC legislative requirement (e.g., a mandated but not funded plan) that all state schools be completely digital textbook invested by 2017, which requires 1:1 everywhere, just adds fuel to the fire. India's planned 2014 introduction of their initially rather hamstrung $35 UbiSlate tablet to the U.S. market adds more fuel. Things are happening fast and faster. Moore's law will eventually make a $20 device a serious contender, but that may take years. We are likely to make the dream of 1:1 come true, but whether the year 2017 is possible remains a key question.

The map above is built off a one-time-only-funded Race to the Top survey done in May 2013 (with data projected thru June 2013). Only one district reported nothing on the survey and then shifted to an extensive one to one implementation in the fall of 2013. If the school districts haven't gone 1:1 in some way (the remaining white counties in the map above), they usually say in their strategic plan or technology plan that they can't afford to do so. For example, though Catawba County Schools (CCS) have added "more than 4,000 computers to its inventory over the past six years, the current level of funding will make it hard to move to universal, one-to-one access" (CCS Tech Plan, 2012). CCS has just over 17,000 students and a poverty level indicated by the over half of those students on free and reduced lunch service (DSS, 2012). Every plan of a school system without 1:1 that I have checked so far has stated such intentions and problems. When I or assisting graduate students have done that check I put a purple P in on the map in the county. You can think of the P as Pre (pre-21st century) or imPoverished funding (or simply just Poverty). All new tech plans for the next five years are now due that will stretch to the year 2017. Those will prove equally interesting to analyze once they are accessible.

I also see this map as a poverty vs. wealth map. Note that it is not just a rural issue. The state's biggest cities of Charlotte and Raleigh have not been able to make this leap. This is not just about the near billion dollar cut in state funding by the legislature (Erb, 2013). Local property tax makes up nearly 25% of school budgets in NC (DPI, 2011) (far higher in other states). Where property is worth more, more taxes can be raised. According to a Public School Forum study released January 13, 2014, "disparities have persisted over the years. The gap between the highest and lowest-spending counties is $2,280 per child" (Bonner, 2014) or over $50,000 per classroom per year. "The state picked up 62 percent of total public education costs in 2011-12, counties paid 24 percent, and the federal government paid 14 percent." Gene Arnold, Public School Forum board chairman noted that “Counties with fewer resources struggle to update classrooms with relevant technology and have a difficult time recruiting and retaining the best teachers.” Those concerns make this also a map of some of the outcomes of the role of the locally funded property tax. Some 64% of schools districts have yet to start the rollout of 1:1 programs and are saying in their technology plans that they do not have the funds to proceed. At the moment, school funding might be described as a starvation diet for those with insufficient property tax; that would be most of the state. Funded for growth they are not.

Does the property tax have to be totally replaced in the educational funding formula in order to deal with the terribly unjust and damaging inequities to children that this form of school finance causes our state (and many states)? The property tax arrangement appears to be a large rock in the stream of justice that even the Leandro case has not yet budged. It is not too difficult to examine the role of poverty on 21st century possibilities by examining the statistics and map of the percent of school students with free and reduced lunch participation in North Carolina and compare that data with the map above. Schools face twin threats, the poverty of our past and starting up curriculum for the new literacies of the technologies of our present and future. Politics is the allocation of resources. How do we move our political system to blast historically ancient forms of finance out of the way and level the playing field for everyone? How do we best communicate the real needs for 21st century capacity building?

Getting the 1:1 technology in place does not mean that anyone has really arrived any where; it is just getting to first base. One can conclude that even our most educated elite, higher education campuses, really haven't arrived anywhere either. Many campuses with university liberal studies programs have had 1:1 in place for almost twenty years without even the most basic mandated digital literacy graduation requirements to show for it. Unfortunately, recent statewide analysis showing the high percentage of digital-fluency challenged state PK-12 educators leaves out a parallel examination of higher education faculty (Spires & Bartlett, 2012).

There are a whole host of issues that follow once the new tools for learning are in student hands. Too many educational technology planning documents have thin vision statements making them read like they planned to jump thru a time warp and then say a prayer when they arrive (spray and pray tech). Too many of those that have made the jump seem to arrive facing backwards, promising and intending to use the technology to improve on the standardized tests for the standardized content areas that have been in use for the last century, without stated recognition of the new target that transforming digital technology has created. This past era has had a well practiced focus. What can you remember and comprehend? To arrive looking backwards is of course the normal trend for almost all innovation; work from the familiar to the unfamiliar. But the digital era requires the rest of the higher order thinking skills. Could we just move a little faster in turning around?

Eventually education and educators needs to be funded to face forward, to revamp education so that it prepares people for the next economy instead of the last one (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014). Improving teacher salaries (Robertson, 2014) is just the tiny tip of the iceberg of problems needing to be faced. The focus of the new era has its own central questions. What can you critique and create? These skills defy standardization. The former era focused on "remembering" skills is ending with an economy rapidly replacing less-skilled people with digitally driven machines, shifting those unprepared to the bottom rungs of the economic ladder. Further, when human beings are programmed to act on the orders of a computer algorithm (many service sector jobs) they are merely in the cross-hairs of future automation programs. The new "create" era has begun with growth of those who can drive the new machines and new systems, adding value by composing and coding them in increasingly interesting and novel ways. The new ethic might be defined as program or be programmed.

The new era requires capacity building digital education for educators, from PK thru the university. This requires learning the numerous options of the digital palette transition that accelerate the hyperdrive developments of cyberspace and makerspace. The next challenge is mapping educational progress beyond merely having the technology to having fluent literacy with the technology, with the elements of this digital palette. This knowledge will take students and education deep into the future of the new places that the "flatworld" invites them to invent and startup every hour they are online. "Becoming digitally literate is not an option. As a matter of economic development, North Carolina needs to ensure that learners of all ages have the skills needed to navigate in this new literacy landscape" (Spires & Bartlett, 2012).

Could we just move our preparation along a little faster? The digital palette below represents the major areas of today's digital composition skill sets. It is not rocket science to determine our school targets based on observation and study of what the billions in cyberspace and makerspace are currently doing with their 21st century digital literacy. Given the pace of change currently possible in public schools, it will apparently require some rocket science to thrive in making it through the disruptive digital transformation that is now underway.

http://digicademy.org

Version 1.21, Updated November 9, 2014

Mirroring iDevices - Group Comparing, Anywhere-In-Room Presentations

2013-10-29T19:07:00.001-04:00

Teaming and presentations are important functions of the digital palette in cyberspace. This is a draft version essay on the potential instructional uses for screen mirroring. This makes it easy to use mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to create mobile device screen demos, collaborate, and to use a projector to engage audiences in team/group activities up to an entire class from which a presenter could pick one or more mobile devices to display. It is worth considering how much this capacity can be used to replace the functionality of interactive whiteboards and large digital TV displays such as Apple TV. It clearly replaces the need for for a VGA connector and keeping the iDevice tethered a short distance from the projector's computer. This screen mirroring feature is built-in to more recent Macs as AirPlay and on for Nexus 10 and 7 devices is supported by Miracast. The features of AirPlay can be extended with Reflector or AirServer software in the $15 range but in larger quantities can enable every student in a classroom and more to display to the room projector for $4 ($3.00) a device. I don't have figures yet for Droid systems.

This raises a few questions. Which is better? Are there other better competitors? If you have other ideas, features and details that would add to these thoughts please contribute a comment below.

AirPlay began as a way to send audio to speakers and Apple TV and then expanded to enable touch tablets and smartphones to wirelessly stream many kinds of data between devices, including audio, video, photos and whatever is showing on the mobile device's display (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AirPlay). There are also apps using AirPlay that run in Linux and Windows systems. It also means, for example, that data could go from one iPad to another through the laptop.

Multi-View

This also means that if your computer is hooked up to a monitor it would be possible to display an iPad's display so that it is visible to an entire class or larger audience, and to continue to mix any displays up to a total of 4 devices simultaneously, a sort of 4 square of devices. Remember when the teacher would send 4 students the chalkboard to reveal their work procedures or alternative solutions like working out a division problem for a quick scan by all. There are many other instructional strategies that are possible for sharing examples and alternatives: comparing text passages with related media; team research results comparison; simultaneous sharing instead of one at a time, and so on. Multi-view provides another way to get that done without the chalk dust and makes it possible to record the entire event for later playback as a screen movie.

Reviews Comparing Reflector and AirServer

12:30 m/s Youtube clip, Reflector vs AirServer, presenter rating them as equal but for Reflector's built-in table screen movie capture feature. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogrI6mHpAnw , clear voice and screens.

Mirroring Multiple iOS Devices To A Mac: Comparing AirServer and Reflection, http://www.macstories.net/reviews/mirroring-multiple-ios-devices-to-a-mac-comparing-airserver-and-reflection/ the writer prefers AirServer. Many screens shots; no screen movies.

A Guide to iPad AirPlay Screen Mirroring http://www.classthink.com/2013/08/18/a-guide-to-ipad-airplay-screen-mirroring/ Seems to like both greatly but notes some problems with streaming HD video (August 18, 2013)

AirServer – 30 Apple TVs for the price of One (and instant sharing and engagement in the Classroom), http://mgleeson.edublogs.org/2013/03/04/airserver-in-the-classroom/ (March 4, 2013)

Reflector Reviews

http://blog.softtechnics.biz/review-seamless-airplay-mirroring-with-reflector-app/ includes 1:14 m/s commercial of its features. (April 16, 2013)

Nexus OS using at least Android 4.3

Screen mirroring in Android requires more than just software, needing either a dongle or set top box to handle Miracast software. There seem to be more complaints about getting to work consistently across devices than in the Mac ecology; it also reports that Mac's Airplay works only on Apple devices which is not correct (August 8, 2013)

Screen Mirroring Now Supported on Nexus 10, Nexus 7 (2013), and Nexus 4 with Miracast
http://www.classthink.com/2013/08/08/screen-mirroring-now-supported-on-nexus-10-nexus-7-2013-and-nexus-4-with-miracast/

Literacy's Paradigm Shifts: Let's Roll

2013-07-12T02:34:00.000-04:00

"Each paradigm will be shown to satisfy more or less the criteria that it dictates for itself and to fall short of a few of those dictated by its opponent." Thomas S. Kuhn

Updated October 1, 2014

Society finds ways to make certain models rather self-perpetuating because of the advantages they provide. A common approach to the idea of literacy is one of those models. Our schools teach a particular kind of literacy, text literacy, as one of the fundamental life skills because of its general importance to informed citizenship in a democracy, economic productivity and its value for every career path.

Consequently the formula emerged for text literacy education to begin early and last long because of the perception about how long it takes to teach its use to a high level. But like all models, paradigms, recipes and formulas of our culture, it is important to periodically ask some pointed questions about their use. In fact there are 3 other areas critical for human development that are largely eclipsed by it. It is beneficial then to put text in the context of the four thinking cultures of homo sapien experience as represented by the graph at the top of this posting. Let's explore.

At the base of human thinking, the purple cone, the evolution of the hand and its creative potential led the evolution of other key elements such as our brain, heel and shoulder. Anyone smirking at the skills of stone age thinkers should first try and hammer an arrowhead out of stone, an action that developed areas of the brain later colonized as our language centers. After millions of years of development, the acceleration rate picked up with oral culture, the yellow cone, (the very ideas of subject, verb, direct object) emerged from the foundations laid by work with the hand. Written culture, the green cone, followed from speech, leading to an exponential increase of words for potential use in speech. Cyberspace development, the orange cones, followed, taking mere decades to achieve global usage of some 10 forms of digital literacy. One of those forms, digitally driven construction of objects using sensors and robotics technology, the makerspace movement, has taken off in just the last couple of years. Each development not only led us forward, but reached back to expand the range of possibility for the prior stages. This brief overview needs some greater expansion starting with the present.

Cyberspace Culture

In fact, the degree of cultural change in recent history as well as predictive thinking for the near future is a bit staggering, a claim which deserves a quick review. In 1948 researchers at Bell Labs invented the transistor, the heart of the hardware of the computer revolution, and of greater importance, the concept of a bit, which established the foundation for software, for all information and directions for computers. With these developments, the age of cyberspace began, the topmost orange cones of the info graphic at the top.

The potential and the power of these ideas developed slowly yet exponentially. More recently the bit, the 1 or zero of computer design, is now seen by physicists and biologists as a fundamental element of all aspects of life and the universe (Gleick, 2011), which itself can be seen as dependent on information for development. Because of the expense of bringing computing ideas into general use, for some twenty years a relatively small number of computers were only available to large businesses and to governments. Yet advancements continually shrank the size and price until in 1975 the first personal computer appeared, the 1 to 4K RAM Altair 8800 (Altair 8800, 2013); this was soon followed by a stream of different models of personal computers of which led to an explosion of ever expanding capacity.

For years, many researchers were challenged to find short term or long term value in integrating personal computers into any organization. Now the economy depends on them. Almost 40 years later, a Nielson study in March 2012 showed that over 61%, a rapidly growing majority of Americans, carry a sophisticated Internet capable smartphone computer, a number near 80% for the young adult, early career population, 18-35 years of age (Wasserman, 2013). By 2017, trends indicate that many countries will be well over 90% (Rooney, 2013) of their population. And smartphones are just one of the ways our population accesses the Web. That is, having "anytime" personal access to a computing device is common everywhere (with the exception of public schools). During this time span, the quantity of information expanded over ten-thousand fold and the percentage of the world's information went from much less than 1% digital to well over 93% of the world's recorded knowledge in digital multimedia format today (Houghton, 2013). The word google, as in "google that" became a standard word, a verb, in the Oxford English dictionary in 2006 (Schwartz, 2006). This was a logical response to the 5 billion a day Google search avalanche in 2012 (Google Annual Search Statistics, 2013) for answers to so many questions. Looking back over the extensive change for this digital era, the theme song might be titled, "Surprise! Can you Handle it?"

At the same time the Net became a rich social environment for sharing questions that are forming and not yet answered; Facebook claims over 1 billion members, with a 23% growth in the last 12 months (Associated Press, 2013). From an economic perspective, my conversations with entrepreneurs from around the state would indicate that the majority of profit and nonprofit startups include digital technology as an important element of their startup idea and company operation; it is also widely understood that entrepreneurship skills and the social settings that they require are the greatest source of new jobs.

Finally, for this brief discussion, the current meaning of literacy can be judged by the common composition and use of different types of media information on the Web and the Net, that is, cyberspace. In just the last ten years the evidence of the Web shows that the meaning of literacy in our rich social setting has exploded manyfold for the creation of many types of composition and communication. These compositions are also central to ongoing developments in science, technology, engineering, art and math. Though common on the Web, schools do not teach them and are generally not prepared to teach them; curriculum state guidelines do not include them and schools too often do not have the resources to teach them even when teachers are seeking to gain the needed expertise. Consequently, a breakaway literacy movement has simply bypassed formal schooling and worked to meet this need through personal and community learning networks (PLN/CLN) scattered across the Net.

These compositions make up a wide ranging digital palette for digital composition (image on left): interactive text, audio, still images, video, animation, 3D design, robotics/sensors, coding (computer programming), interaction, and online teaming (Houghton, 2011).

Yet the newer and growing part of the economy is highly dependent on exploiting these media by forming businesses that understand them and can compose solutions to the problems the digital setting is raising, the portion of the population Richard Florida's extensive writings over several years have been addressing in regards to the "rise of the creative class" (2002, 2005, 2010). To date rather isolated educational areas have forged ahead with one-to-one technology settings. These schools have provided the hardware capacity but not the full digital palette curriculum of what so many have created in cyberspace. They include the state of Maine and a small percentage of school districts in North Carolina which would include Green County and Mooresville, home of the national superintendent of the year for 2013 (AASA, 2013). This much explosive cultural development is well documented and readily observable.

However, if you thought that the developments of this 6.5 decade time span were amazing, fasten your seatbelt. There is a parallel to the last 40 years of this period that is just beginning which suggests even greater and this time more readily visible change is upon us. The personal computer revolution is about to repeat itself in a new skin, metamorphisizing from the virtual to the physical.

The Makerspace Branch

Just as 1975 was a critical watershed year in moving from widespread corporate and government use of computing technology to personal computing technology, so was 2005 a critical watershed year for a different yet related set of technologies, makerspace. 3D printers were the first to gain widespread recognition. Introduced to the world in 1980 and patented by 3D systems, 3D printing gained widespread industrial and government use for specialized manufacturing purposes. The first personal (and self-replicating) personal 3D printer became publicly available in 2005 (RepRap, 2013), cheaper in actual price, let alone inflation adjusted price, of the first Apple computer in 1978. Googling "3D printing" provides millions of hits, with numerous and still growing numbers of articles in newspapers, television and magazines.

Though 3D printing "for the rest of us" is a significant development, this particular technology is too narrow a frame of reference. 3D printing should be seen as the poster-child for the broader concept of makerspace and digital fabrication, which are not so widely known. Digital fabrication includes laser cutters and other computer controlled 'make-it' technology (Anderson, 2012; Gershenfeld, 2005; Lipsum & Kurman, 2013; Martinez & Stager, 2013). Think of the current moment as parallel to the garage startup era of Steve Jobs (Apple) and Bill Gates (Microsoft) in the 1970's personal computing initiative. Today, as I write this, in similar public club workshops in cities across North Carolina, and literally now around the world, teams of people are gathering to study, explore and use, build and design 3D printers and then using them, along with other digital fabrication devices, to compose and create things. What kind of things? Look around you at any single thing; the odds are that someone has produced, is producing or is considering the creation of a digital file of that 3-dimensional object so that a digital fabrication device or sequence of devices can reproduce it, in infinite customized variations for whatever personal needs come to mind.

Beyond the everyday items around us, engineers are working on scaling up these digital fabrication devices to build engines, houses and office buildings and medical researchers are working downward in size to nanoscale medical devices. But the mere shaping of material is but one leg of the emerging digital fabrication stool. Inserted within the digital fabrication of any object will be the insertion of an endless variety of technology; think of it as inserting a tiny fingernail sized chip into your aquarium pump, a chip which already contains the equivalent of a 1975 Apple II+ computer yet includes modern wireless communication capacity and the potential for an endless variety of sensors. The third leg of the fab stool will be the software used internally and collectively in creating a swarm effect of our objects in communication with their owner and with each other on the owner's behalf (Wasik, 2013).

Digital fabrication will further accent the need for ability to compose with robotics/sensors, computer programming and interactive design and integrate these new tools and skills with the rest of the digital palette. Given the digital foundation already in place in our culture, this digital fabrication revolution is going to develop at a much faster pace, doing in years what took the computer revolution decades. Our personal composition reach consequently now includes both the world of ideas and the world of things. The promise of this development is that residents of cyberspace will go from problem to idea to solutions that will include the manufacture of any needed items, manufacturing that will take place in your personal desktop or nearby store, depending on the size of the object needed.

As public schools in the last 40 years largely missed student level impact of the personal computer revolution, will the yawning gap between schools and digital culture grow even further with the digital manufacturing revolution now upon us? If the first industrial revolution of the 1800's is any measure, the 21st century industrial revolution will provide significant opportunity for those prepared to seize it.

Today's kindergartener has 13 years in the public school system. Starting today, what can these children and their parents expect as an outcome years from now in preparation for the digital computing as well as the coming digital manufacturing revolution? What is in place? On what hook can educators hang their beginner hats and then advance from there? The North Carolina legislature passed legislation in 2013 requiring the Department of Public Instruction to develop new vocational education initiatives. Will they be able to see that digital fabrication knowledge is as important to the college bound as those not so inclined?

No one can work towards something that they are not aware of, and no one excels in the current literacies during this time of rapid cultural change without early and lengthy exposure to ever more knowledge about them and their changes. Schools need a starting place, a platform on which to attempt to build and keep up with the digital fabrication train that is preparing to leave the station as well as catch up with the former digital computing revolution and its already well exercised digital palette. One option neatly combines elements of the digital computing revolution with the digital fabrication revolution and with the movement towards greater STEM Education. That digital palette option is robotics, and through organizations such as FIRST and PLTW, participants have found effective connections with primary, intermediate, middle and high school students.

Watching a classroom of robots roll through student designed problem solving routines is a site to behold. Of the available curriculum options, none has better preparation and educational resources for much of the public school age population than the Lego robotics kits which have been central to the wildly successful FIRST Lego League competitions for 4th through 8th graders, though competitors are emerging.

Robotic devices by their digital nature can synthesize and integrate with the entire digital palette and provide a ready gateway to digital fabrication thinking. Most critically they provide an attractive way to introduce the heart of the computer revolution and the current digital economy (Rushkoff, 2011), computer programming, a topic unfortunately still a foreign reject from almost every K-12 scope and sequence chart. To program robotic devices to solve problems is to think and plan in 3 dimensions from interlocking gears to general movement (a particular forte of human intelligence and human hands). The Lego Robots come with sound recognition and audio generation capacity and their design and animation provide compelling viewing for still image and video composition. They come with a number of environmental interaction sensors with libraries of add-on sensors that are readily available. The Lego curriculum and the competitive robotics scene has also made team based engineering a fundamental social skill, which then contributes to aspects of online teaming for coordinating many team developments. Unfortunately, no current school content area including the STEM or STEAM agenda is yet prepared to own the full range of digital literacy that also includes computer programming and robotics, nor apparently wants to own it. Finding a curriculum home will be one more "bootstrap" operation for cyberspace revolutionaries.

Though they will appear and more will be done, scientific studies will really not prove the effectiveness of robotics or other digital curriculum any more than they have for the instructional technologies that preceded it; Clark (1983) established that point decades ago. But that perspective totally misses the point. Instead something more profound and much deeper has occurred and continues to develop. This is perhaps better understood by stepping back and looking at historical parallels to our present, to the last radical change in our forms of expression, shifting from oral culture to written culture in ancient Greece. Would it have made sense to seek a study in Plato's lifetime on the effectiveness of writing curriculum for advancing the prior oral culture of the day? Plato's own teacher/mentor, Socrates, was an opponent of writing and literacy. There was no arguing with the prior cultural paradigm of the then dominant Greek oral culture; as noted by both Havelock and Ong, the oral culture was its own unique and different state of consciousness (Gleick, 2011; McLuhan, 1969).

As then, educators today must simply use their good judgment in seeing charging opportunity when it presents itself as with Plato in 450 B.C. Plato did not wait until he had the approval and proof from Socrates and his educational system; he simply walked beyond the present moment of his culture and into the use of the new medium of the alphabet and writing, a new cultural competence that seemingly appeared out of nowhere. Would that one of our students could do so well with their new media; Alfred North Whitehead has noted that all Western philosophy since Plato's time can be seen as a series of footnotes to Plato's work (Whitehead, 1979). New components are formed in one era that when mixed become something entirely different, leading to new culture which can lead to significant new advancements. Thought of another way, by studying the elements of hydrogen and oxygen by themselves it is not possible to see that when they combine something radically different emerges; something with a property that was not there before, water. In Plato's time, multiple developments led not to water, but writing and then because of the advantages of writing for thinking and problem solving there was no going back. A new powerful culture and a new state of consciousness emerged.

In order to see the way forward, it is useful to see the way backwards.

Rethinking the Graph

As an example of the significant expansion of tools for thinking and problem solving provided by the shift from the oral paradigm to the text writing paradigm, oral cultures (the yellow cone in the graph on the right) average a vocabulary of a few thousand words. Today, written language (green cone), on which our reading and writing skills evolve, is at 1 million words and growing in just the English language (Gleick, 2011).

The chart of exploding conic graphs and the authors writing about the transition periods gives visual expression to this multi-step series of explosions across the expressive capacities to compose in human history, each a very lengthy volcanic explosion first measured in millennia, triggering yet another and even more powerful explosion. Human culture has skipped, hopped and built across the stone age, oral culture, written culture and now cyberspace culture. But this graphic is not just about a quantitative change, of simply having more; it is also significantly qualitative, a transition in state of consciousness for which there is not scientific measurement and proof (Pirsig, 1974). Each new paradigm created its own culture.

The straight expanding lines of the conic sections in the chart above however lack the long narrow slower developmental phase followed by the explosive nature of these cultural formations. In each age, accelerators appear to light sudden expansions. In the age of writing and text, two accelerants that exponentially extended the power of text were the printing press in the 1400's (Eisenstein, 1980) and then the industrial revolution's invention of ever faster printing presses that led to cheap paperback books, beginning with the "dime novels" of the 1860's and later the nickel weeklies which vastly increased readership. That is, Gutenberg's explosion led to an even greater explosion when it was empowered by the industrial age.

The shape of such cultural developments might be better expressed as a stem with a large exploding flower head.

The actual shape of each cones above would be better expressed by the geometries found in Reugels's high speed photos of water drop splash art (2012), used metaphorically in the graphic on the left.

The idea of applying the model of changes in a water drop to other phenomena is a nonlinear phenomena subject to intense research. Abstracted mathematical models have found novel application to everything from industrial settings (Korobkin, Ockendon, & Thoroddsen, 2013) to cancer growth (Guiot, Delsanto & Deisboeck, 2007). Here they are suggested as a model of evolutionary layered literacy and corresponding cultural change. Thomas and others (2005) have coined the term transliteracy to confront the need created by this broader view of literacy, the need to teach and use all literacy layers from all time, past and future, without prejudice.

The rapid flowering of each culture of literacy in the above charts after a long period of development produced the seeds or foundation of the next. It should also be emphasized that in each transition to a new state of development represented by the different colored phases in the graphs above, a new culture and a new level of consciousness builds around it. Each new stage carries the past forward, integrating much but definitely not all of the prior paradigm into the next. These gradual developments over a long period of time build the foundations for explosive leaps of progress. This idea about a series of explosions in thinking tools and cultural development bears comparison with the punctuated equilibrium models of linguists using long time scales for language histories (Dixon, 2002; Atkinson, Quentin, et al., 2008) and a similar pattern of growth in the extremely long timelines of the fossil record by biologists Eldredge and Gould (1972).

Darwin's idea of biological evolution through subtle variation then selection is a well established principle of science. However, this concept is inadequate to explain current developments in human culture. The evolution of tools, of technology, of technology applied to learning (educational technology) is led by the creative ability of the brain to use significant variation to combine and modify prior technologies to create something new. Some call this combinatorial evolution. It is this latter form of evolution that has led to the exponential changes now present at many levels in today's culture, changes that so challenge an educational system to keep up, let alone lead it.

Proof of the values of a new form of expression translated backwards into what the older paradigm knows is an enormous challenge as there is no common means of expression across the transition boundary; the new paradigm was invented because of the inability of the prior state of mind to express the new ideas. Cultural groups have a very hard time communicating across these transitions, with the first generation or so being immigrants to the new state of consciousness able to do this partially, then later generations born into the new paradigm require much effort to see the world through the prism of the prior culture's paradigm. Though there is not an equally simple measure of comparison as vocabulary words, I would claim that the rich range of composition tools of the digital palette now nourishing the knowledge explosion provides many times the expressive generating capacity of our text vocabulary. The point of a many-sided digital palette (interactive text, audio, still images, video, animation, 3D design, robotics/sensors, computer programming, interaction, and online teaming) that is accenting robotics curriculum is not to justify itself in advancing prior curriculum from a prior paradigm, though it will, but to advance its own knowledge in order to advance the next generation of thinkers.

The connection between robotics composition and 3D printing in particular and digital fabrication in general is less visible, but also compelling. With each advance in robotics design skill comes increasing need for customization and unique part replacement. Digital fabrication devices, that is personal manufacturing facilities that fit on desktops, are a natural extension of the 3D thinking and activities that robotics design curriculum facilitate. That such devices are relevant to our younger citizens may seem surprising, but signs of children and adolescents that are becoming part of a digital fabrication community through centers and workshops can be readily found by googling "hacker scouts", "DIY community", "maker studios", "maker faires" and related terms.

This leaves us with some rather practical operational questions for educational decision makers and parents about preparation for the cyberspace age. To the question of when, when you are already decades late, the answer is to start now. To the question of where to start, the answer is that there is an age appropriate opening for participation at any age level with any element of the digital palette and cyberspace. Just as educators learned by developing curriculum for text literacy, the sooner our students begin developing the wide ranging skills, the better. Story telling with picture books begins before the age of one but no one is expected them to read at that age. That is, beginning digital palette literacy in elementary schools and earlier is just as important as getting an early lead on reading and writing.

Many of the current leaders of cyberspace would not be leading if it had depended on just the education of their public schools. For example, the Google founders received their primary grade foundations for engineering in Montessori schools ("the hand is the foundation of man's intelligence") and in digitally intensive home settings. With similar opportunity a graduate of our local Smoky Mountain High School took an idea onward to build a digitally focused company of hundreds of employees over a handful of years, then sold it to begin another. The new and growing economy is being built by a rather narrow subset of the current population because the exposure to such knowledge has had to transmit outside of the scope of public schools.

Literacy has always been important, but the means for composing and problem solving need to be seen as having been transformed, again and again. A new paradigm takes time, knowledge and a social setting to succeed; however, the pace of change is providing precious little time for the preparation of our next generation of leaders and careers. Both Toffler's Future Shock (1970) and Rushkoff's Present Shock (2013) can be seen as describing the turbulence in working through this paradigm transition. This turbulence may be similar to the wild vibrations that jet travel had to overcome as it learned to cross the speed of sound barrier; it is worth noting that much greater calm appears once the sound barrier is breached. Just as Plato had to be willing to wring out the new possibilities of a new system of expression to reach new milestones, so does our current generation of thinkers and teachers.

A new rich range of possibilities for thinking and problem solving are at hand, a range the revitalizes all the paradigms that preceded it. The future paradigm is here now; the new consciousness is just not widely distributed.

Let's roll.

References

AASA (2013). Mark A. Edwards Named AASA 2013 Superintendent of the Year. http://www.aasa.org/content.aspx?id=27088

Altair 8800 (2013). Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Altair_8800

Anderson, C. (2012). Makers: The new industrial revolution.New York: Crown Business.

Associated Press. (2013, May 1). Number of active users at Facebook over the years. http://news.yahoo.com/number-active-users-facebook-over-230449748.html

Atkinson, Q. D., Meade, A., Venditti, C., Greenhill, S. J., & Pagel, M. (2008). Languages evolve in punctuational bursts. Science, 319(5863), 588-588. doi:10.1126/science.1149683. PMID 18239118.

Bell, D. J., Loader, B. D., Pleace, N., & Schuler, D. (2004). Cyberculture: The key concepts. Routledge.

Clark, Richard E. "Reconsidering research on learning from media." Review of educational research 53.4 (1983): 445-459.

Dixon, R. M. (1997). The rise and fall of languages. Cambridge University Press.

Eisenstein, E. L. (1980). The printing press as an agent of change (Vol. 1). Cambridge University Press.

Eldredge, N., & Gould, S. J. (1972). Punctuated equilibria: an alternative to phyletic gradualism. Models in paleobiology, 82, 115.

Florida, R. (2010). The Great Reset: How New Ways of Living and Working Drive Post-Crash Prosperity, New York: HarperCollins.

Florida, R. (2005). The Flight of the Creative Class. The New Global Competition for Talent, HarperBusiness, HarperCollins.

Florida, R. (2005). Cities and the Creative Class, Routledge.

Florida, R. (2002). The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It's Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life, New York: Basic Books.

Gershenfeld, (2005). Fab: The coming revolution on your desktop--from personal computers to personal fabrication. New York: Basic Books.

Guiot, C., Delsanto, P. P., & Deisboeck, T. S. (2007). Morphological instability and cancer invasion: a'splashing water drop'analogy. Theoretical Biology and Medical Modelling, 4(1), 4.

Gleick, J. (2011). The information: a history, a theory, a flood. New York: Pantheon Books.

Google Annual Search Statistics (2013). http://www.statisticbrain.com/google-searches/

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Houghton, R. S. (2011). Breakaway Literacies: New Composition Models and Challenges in the 21st Century. http://www.wcu.edu/ceap/houghton/readings/Ch7_Literacy_set.html

Houghton, R. S. (2013). The knowledge society: The impact of surfing its tsunamis in data storage, communication and processing. http://www.wcu.edu/ceap/houghton/readings/Ch4_Knowledge_set.html

Jaynes, J. (1990). The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Houghton-Mifflin.

Jaynes, J. (2006). Reflections on the dawn of consciousness: Julian Jaynes's bicameral mind theory revisited. M. Kuijsten (Ed.). Julian Jaynes Society.

Korobkin, A., Ockendon, J. & Thoroddsen, S. (2013, May 28-31). Mathematics of splashing. ICMS. Retrieved July 16, 2013 from http://www.icms.org.uk/workshops/splashing.

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Lipsum, H. & Kurman, M. (2013). Fabricated: the new world of 3D printing. Indianapolis, IN: Wiley & Sons.

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McLuhan, M. (1969). The Gutenberg galaxy; the making of typographic man. New York: The New American Library.

Ong, W. J., & Hartley, J. (2002). Orality and literacy: The technologizing of the word. Routledge.

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RepRap (2013). Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RepRap_Project

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Rushkoff, D. (2011). Program or Be Programmed. Soft Skull Press.

Rushkoff, D. (2013). Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. Current Hardcover.

Schwartz, B. (2006, June 29). Google Now A Verb In The Oxford English Dictionary. Search Engine Watch, http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2058373/Google-Now-A-Verb-In-The-Oxford-English-Dictionary

Thomas, S., Joseph, C., Laccetti, J., Mason, B., Mills, S., Perril, S., & Pullinger, K. (2007). Transliteracy: crossing divides. First Monday, 12(12). http://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2060/1908

Toffler, A. (1970). Future shock. New York: Random House.

Wasik, B. (2013, June 21). Welcome to the programmable world. Wired. http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/05/internet-of-things

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Whitehead, A. N. (1979). Process and Reality. Free Press, p. 39.

version 1.08

Exponential Curve Momentum and Global Threats

2013-05-03T13:23:00.000-04:00

The exponential curve (a math idea) and its implications are important ideas to teach across all content areas. Small amounts of accumulation over long enough periods of time can have radical impact, as the evolution of digital thinking and digital tools (Trends) of the digital palette constantly remind us.

I had recently shared a quote from a book I had just finished reading about the race between our depletion of natural resources and our rate of innovation, a book published this year, 2013, and just last month in April. Naturally the data supporting the author’s points will be based on data from some earlier point in time. Here’s an example, “Before the industrial revolution, CO2 made up 280 parts per million in the atmosphere. In November 2011 it stood at around 390 parts per million (or ppm).” [Naam, Ramez (2013-04-09). The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet (Kindle Locations 1118-1119). UPNE. Kindle Edition.”]

In checking the morning weather forecast, May 3, I was stunned to see this story at weather.com based on sensors in the Pacific,

http://www.weather.com/news/science/environment/carbon-dioxide-levels-rising-20130501, in which the field of science is reporting that “Recently, carbon dioxide levels above 400 ppm have been recorded, but those are only hourly averages. The total used for records is the daily average, which climbed as high as 399.72 ppm last week, according to a Guardian report. In Hawaii, the Mauna Loa station that measures carbon dioxide levels every day is distant enough from large cities that it is a reliable area for studying the air. When the observatory began taking measurements in 1958, carbon dioxide levels were at 316 ppm.”

Last night, May 10, MSNBC news reported that planet Earth had pushed past 400 ppm. In the time from when the author could find reliable data to cite for his book to the time it was published and reached me, CO2 levels have risen 10 ppm. The acceleration of melting ice will continue to accelerate rising sea levels.

Now on to the physics of exponential curves. When you have accelerating momentum in your car but then slam on the brakes, the car still keeps on moving. Depending on how able you are in keeping your foot on the brakes, the distance is still considerable. But if you don’t see the problem and have your gas pedal pressed to the floor (our current situation with CO2 production), you can count on a major problem coming with some pigs in the road around the bend, if you make it around the bend.

Those that you teach will, in their lifetimes, need to build teams that use the composition tools of the digital palette to communicate about and solve such problems. Significant developments on the digital palette occur every few months. So, we know our capability and our rate of innovation is high. But is our national team effort (a social studies issue) focused on our significant global problems?

I have two grandchildren born in November of last year. Teachers will need to help put them on a trajectory where they and their classmates can solve some significant issues. Let me give you just a tiny example of the social implications that are visible today.

“In the United States, nearly all of New Orleans, and large chunks of Miami, Tampa, Virginia Beach, and New York City are three feet above sea level or less. London, Bangkok, Tijuana, Lima, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro all have large chunks below three feet above sea level. On present course and speed, a child born this year is likely to live to see the day when some of those cities are just memories.” [Naam, Ramez (2013-04-09). The Infinite Resource: The Power of Ideas on a Finite Planet.]

The French Quarter, the heart of New Orleans life, where I stayed for a conference in March of 2013, along with much of New Orleans, will be gone without any hurricane needed to force water ashore.

And yet, the author, Naam, and I, believe that we can recognize the pigs in the road in time to do something about them, if we begin to act now to set incentives in place for encouraging innovation and a mindset to put on the brakes. We’ll need more authors communicating eloquently (language arts) in a wide range of media to convince others to find those brakes.

Naam’s book and its ideas for solutions to this problem and to a wide range of other pressing problems are an easy read that I hope you might get through soon, using the Kindle reader, or the Kindle software on your smart phone, touch tablet or laptop (or maybe even paper)! If you have a passion for actually solving real problems, encourage students to participate in Quest 2 Matter and explore the Choose2Matter site.

eCROP Blog

Literacy Lifted

The Alphabetical Maker Canon Reading List of Books

The Maker Canon Reading List of Books: An Alphabetical Beginning

The Foundational Works of the Maker Movement

The Maker Canon Reading List of Books:

A Date Ordered Beginning

Other Lists

Finland's Schools Push Digital Without Evidence - Yes!

New York World MakerFaire spectacular!

To make or not to make-that is the question

Intellectual

And Social

And Political

Make it

The Standards Driven School & Testing Monopoly - Multiple but Rightable Wrongs

Obsolete

Unethical

Unprofessional

Illegal

Alternatives

The Net

The Net

Makerspace

Interwoven Social-multimedia-threaded-communication

Understanding the formation and the health problems of the knowledge society

The good news

The bad news

Cyberspace - the Digital Universe

Burlington MakerFaire

Maker Schools and Makerspace

Maker Schools and Makerspace

Exemplars

LMS vs Net? Deep decision time on budgeting types of learning software

Keeping 21st Century Faith in Middle Level Educational Philosophy

Finance builds, schools starve – stupid fixable equation

Who are the NC edtech bloggers?

Text Channels

Other Media Channels

Code Red As Brand-New Pedagogical Model

Mapping and graphing a Personal Learning Network

#Montessoripunk

Data based Decision Making for NC Schools

Catching the cutting edge 60’s and O.K. Moore

Research Evidence

Goal Setting

Makerspace

The Charge for Change

At the Heart of Creativity

Mapping 1 to 1 computing in North Carolina 2013

Mirroring iDevices - Group Comparing, Anywhere-In-Room Presentations

Multi-View

Reviews Comparing Reflector and AirServer

Reflector Reviews

Nexus OS using at least Android 4.3

Literacy's Paradigm Shifts: Let's Roll

Cyberspace Culture

The Makerspace Branch

Rethinking the Graph

Exponential Curve Momentum and Global Threats

The Maker Canon Reading List of Books:

An Alphabetical Beginning