Serendipity35

What Facebook Quizzes Really Know About You

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:19:19 -0400

I came across this in Facebook. A quiz authored by the ACLU of Northern California that will give you a scare or at least make you pause before you take one of those Facebook quizzes.

You know - these are the ones that will tell you what writer you resemble, or what your mermaid name is, challenge you to try to beat your friend's score on the name the drunk celebrity quiz.

The surprise that the ACLU is trying to give you is about how much of your personal information these quizzes can access.

And it doesn't matter if your profile is "private." When you take one of those quizzes some unknown quiz developer can access almost everything in your profile. Depending on what you have there, it might mean religion, sexual orientation, political affiliation, pictures, and groups.

These quizzes also have access to most of the info on your friends' profiles, so, even if YOU avoid taking the quizzes, friends could be giving away your personal information.

So, the ACLU created a Facebook quiz that you can take that will show you just what they can see about you.
It's at http://apps.facebook.com/aclunc_privacy_quiz/?ref=nf

Of course, the irony is that they are warning you about Facebook quizzes by asking you to take a Facebook quiz. As they say at the start of the quiz, "at least you know who we are and that we have a real privacy policy that we're committed to upholding. Can you say the same for every unknown author of every quiz you or your friends take?"

Symposium for the Future

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 00:29:00 -0400

The NMC Symposium for the Future is a special 2-day, live online event October 27-29, 2009. They commissioned a few "thought pieces" to get folks thinking before the event about technology and the future. help us to all think about the topic broadly and deeply.

One is from Danah Boyd, Microsoft Research and Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society,called "It is easy to fall in love with technology." Gardner Campbell, Baylor University, contributed "The Stars our Destination" and Holly Willis, The Institute for Multimedia Literacy at USC, wrote "Tactics and Haptics and a Future That’s Now."

The symposium tries to look at technologies and practices that are just beginning to show promise in an educational or social context, and the applicability of technology to the social, environmental, and educational challenges we face today.

The Symposium is an outgrowth of the NMC’s Emerging Technologies Initiative, which seeks to answer the question of how to keep abreast of emerging technologies that may be important to our collective work as educators. At the core of this initiative is a focus on emerging technologies and the ways they can be applied in the service of teaching, learning, research, and creative inquiry. A major goal is to stimulate systematic thinking about our society and the future of education.

This Symposium is designed as a forum for discussion of the real challenges that face our world and our society, and in particular, how emerging technologies might be applied to solve them.

Share Google Docs on Slideshare

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 08:15:00 -0400

Slideshare, the site that allows you to share online your slide presentations, has now added the ability to import your Google Docs (documents, presentations, pdfs) to SlideShare and share them too.

See their blog post for details
http://blog.slideshare.net/2009/06/26/new-feature-how-to-import-your-google-documents-to-slideshare

Guidelines For Educators Using Social Networking Sites

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 18:24:00 -0400

This month I have had four queries from teachers asking advice for about using technology and Web 2.0 and social networking. Two of them were from brand new rookie high school teachers asking about what tools and services online they "should be using." Another one was from a former colleague who has taken 5 years off from teaching and is reentering education and she wanted to now what she should be looking at and reading "to catch up" on educational technology. The fourth one was from a department chair who was told to get her department "more up to date" in teaching technology.

It's a bit like being asked to update Rip Van Winkle after he wakes up - less years to cover, but so much more has happened.

While combing my bookmarks and making links, I came across "Guidelines for Educators Using Social Networking Sites" by Jen Hegna from the Byron (MN) schools. She is developing this set of guidelines for the staff in her own district. Before I even finished this post (which has been queued for a few weeks in the land of drafts), the guidelines had already been revised.

You can read the suggestions on her site, but I was glad to see that we were headed down some of the same paths of advice. She also references two other blog posts. The title of one, "Don't confuse social networking with educational networking" gives you a good idea of its message. The other post is on "friending" students that was part of my advice to the new high school teachers.

Which of these social tools would you advise a teacher to try using?
Facebook
MySpace
Blogger (or Wordpress, Xanga or other blog tools)
Moodle
wikis
YouTube
Twitter or FriendFeed
professional online communities (like Classroom2.0 on Ning)
Google Apps

Let's look at just one aspect of using socnets. Social networks work because you can “friend” or "follow" other people and thereby create a group of fellow users that share your interests and so will share your online information and posted content. My own recommendation is that teachers try Facebook which continues to grow in numbers and in its applications. But, if you plan to use it to connect with your students, I suggest you create a "professional" account and keep that separate from your "personal" account (if you plan to have one of those too).

From Jen's recommendations:

On Friends and friending
-Do not accept students as friends on personal social networking sites. Decline any student-initiated friend requests.
-Do not initiate friendships with students
-Remember that people classified as “friends” have the ability to download and share your information with others.
-If you wish to use networking protocols as a part of the educational process, please work with your administrators and technology staff to identify and use a restricted, school-endorsed networking platforms.

Content
-Post only what you want the world to see. Imagine your students, their parents, your administrator, visiting your site. It is not like posting something to your web site or blog and then realizing that a story or photo should be taken down. On a social networking site, basically once you post something it may be available, even after it is removed from the site.
-Do not discuss students or coworkers or publicly criticize school polcies or personnel.
-Do not post images that include students.
-Visit your profile’s security and privacy settings.
-At a minimum, educators should have all privacy settings set to “only friends”. “Friends of friends” and “Networks and Friends” opens your content to a large group of unknown people.

What tools, networks and services would you recommend that a teacher try using to move themselves and their teaching into Educational Technology 2.0?

What guidelines would you set for the use of social networks by teachers?

Your comments below are welcome!

Jen Hegna also lists the following resources:
-Should Students and Teachers be Online Friends? http://www.education.com/magazine/article/Students_Teachers_Social_Networking/
-A Teachers Guide to Using Facebook http://www.scribd.com/doc/16957158/Teachers-Guide-to-Using-Facebook-Read-Fullscreen
-Social Networking Best Practices for Educators http://www.willard.k12.mo.us/co/tech/Document/SocialNetworkBestPractices.pdf

Online Students Performed Better

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 18:38:00 -0400

According to a new study commissioned by the US Dept of Education titled "Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies," students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.

Giving students control of the learning process appears to make them learn better, and it can be further enhanced by giving learners control of their interactions with media and prompting learner reflection.

Of course, these things can also be done in a face-to-face course too, but I do hear these things attached more frequently to online learning for some reason.

The study is 92 pages. Here's the abstract:

A systematic search of the research literature from 1996 through July 2008 identified more than a thousand empirical studies of online learning. Analysts screened these studies to find those that (a) contrasted an online to a face-to-face condition, (b) measured student learning outcomes, (c) used a rigorous research design, and (d) provided adequate information to calculate an effect size. As a result of this screening, 51 independent effects were identified that could be subjected to meta-analysis. The meta-analysis found that, on average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction. The difference between student outcomes for online and face-to-face classes—measured as the difference between treatment and control means, divided by the pooled standard deviation—was larger in those studies contrasting conditions that blended elements of online and face-to-face instruction with conditions taught entirely face-to-face. Analysts noted that these blended conditions often included additional learning time and instructional elements not received by students in control conditions. This finding suggests that the positive effects associated with blended learning should not be attributed to the media, per se. An unexpected finding was the small number of rigorous published studies contrasting online and face-to-face learning conditions for K–12 students. In light of this small corpus, caution is required in generalizing to the K–12 population because the results are derived for the most part from studies in other settings (e.g., medical training, higher education).

Read the study http://www.ed.gov/rschstat/eval/tech/evidence-based-practices/finalreport.pdf

Informal Learning and Learnscapes

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 00:09:00 -0400

We had a discussion at our writing center about how to define formal and informal writing. Both are part of our writing-intensive courses, but we had some disagreements with faculty about our definitions. That's a topic for another post. But, while I was searching online this weekend for more information from other schools, I came across some information about a book by Jay Cross called Informal Learning: Rediscovering the Natural Pathways That Inspire Innovation and Performance.

That led me to an article on Informal Learning 2.0 on his blog. In the article (which also appears in the August 2009 edition of Chief Learning Officer magazine), he also writes about his concept of learnscapes:

Learnscapes are the factory floor of knowledge organizations. The “scape” part underscores the need to deal at the level of the learning environment or ecology. The old focus on events such as workshops won’t cut it in the ever-changing swirl produced by networks. The “learn” part highlights the importance of baking the principles of sound learning into that environment rather than leaving it to chance.

I thought that perhaps his definitions of formal and informal learning might help me define the same in academic writing.

Learning is formal when someone other than the learner sets curriculum. Typically, it’s an event, on a schedule and completion is generally recognized with a symbol, such as a grade, gold star, certificate or check mark in a learning management system. Formal learning is pushed on learners.

By contrast, informal learners usually set their own learning objectives. They learn when they feel a need to know. The proof of their learning is their ability to do something they could not do before. Informal learning often is a pastiche of small chunks of observing how others do things, asking questions, trial and error, sharing stories with others and casual conversation. Learners are pulled to informal learning.

I don't think very much informal writing goes on in courses by his definition. Taking notes during a class and writing drafts (that weren't required) are the ones that come to mind. It seems to me that almost all writing done in a course is formal (and graded) by his definitions. That seems rather sad.

And I'm not sure how happy colleges would be with his "fewer instructors" idea.

Industrial-age training required flocks of instructional designers to develop training programs and instructors to deliver them. In a networked learning environment, self-service learning replaces many programs, so fewer instructors are required. The pull approach provides more bang for the buck, enabling corporations to get more results while simultaneously cutting costs.

I would be curious to hear your own definitions of formal and informal learning or reactions to what Cross has written. And before I wrote a post about my own definitions of formal & informal writing, I would love your comments.

Jay Cross on YouTube

Feel like I'm Dying to Learn Rag

nospam@example.com (Tim Kellers) — Sat, 22 Aug 2009 10:17:00 -0400

C'mon all of you high school grads
Uncle Sam needs your help real bad
Got himself a terrible jam
In someplace called Afghanistan
Pack up your books and load up a gun
We're gonna have a whole lot of fun

And its one, two, three "What are we fightin' for"?
Don't ask me, I don't give a damn
Just want that Federal Grant.
And its five, six, seven... Open up those Pearly Gates!
Ain't no time to wave Good Bye
Whoopee! We're all gonna die.

C'mon Congressmen let's move fast
Your one chance has come at last
Gotta blow smoke about the Meds
Cause the only cheap patient is one that's dead
You know that seats just can't be won
When we've taxxed them all to Kingdom Come.

And it's one, two three, "What are we voting for?"
Don't ask me, I know its a sham
Just want that Federal Grant
And it's five, six, seven... What the hell was WaterGate?
Ain't no time to wonder why.
Whoopee! We're all gonna die

C'mon Bankers don't lend slow
The Stimulus is go go go
Plenty of money to be made
Selling bad loans the Feds have saved.
Next time you go and kite a bond
Back it with the Taliban!

And its one, two, three "What am I spending on?"
Don't ask me, It's way too hard
To pay my credit card
And its five, six seven... Gotta get a lower rate!
Ain't no time to save a dime
Whoopee! We're all gonna die!

C'mon Scientists now confess
Your techniques have caused a mess
The ice is melting and the earth is mad
The C O 2 is just plain bad
When the labs get flooded and you need a boat
Be glad the Greeks taught you all how to float.

And its one, two, three... "What am I living for?"
Don't ask me I don't have a Plan
Just doing the best I can
And it's five, six, seven.. Hopin' for those Pearly Gates
Ain't no rhyme or reason why,
Whoopee! We're all gonna die.

With thanks, and apologies, to Country Joe MacDonald --forty years too late.

Microsoft Redefines Free For Life

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 00:19:00 -0400

This is the kind of move that makes Microsoft continue to have a reputation as a bad guy in tech. Every teacher and parent knows that you don't make promises (or threats) that you don't intend to keep because users, students and your children will hold you to them.

Microsoft offered a free custom domain (that web address) for life and hosting space to anyone back in 2006. So, following my explorer's quest to claim my digital space, I took http://ronkowitz.com. I never did much with the site. It required me to use templates and I never did figure out if it was possible for me to upload via FTP my own pages. But I did use it as a "landing page" that, if found, would send folks in the right directions to my other blogs and sites.

A lot of people took advantage of the free offer, particularly small business owners who wanted a web presence. Microsoft's business plan seemed to be clear - give people a free starting place and then sell them additional services as they expanded.

Now, they have notified users that "As of October 1, 2009, Microsoft Office Live Small Business will no longer offer free domain name renewals. We’ve made the decision to begin charging all customers for custom domains to standardize our pricing and bring it in line with our competitors."

It has gotten a lot of digital ink and complaints. So, how does one continue to use the service?

We’ve made a policy change and will start charging customers who signed up [from 2006-2008] the annual domain name renewal fee. Why is Office Live changing its policy on custom domains? The domain renewal fee you are being asked to pay is the same price that all other customers are currently paying. We feel that this price is very competitive in the marketplace, especially given that Office Live Small Business will continue to provide several other free services.

So, if I want to continue to use my ronkowitz.com site and domain, it will require an annual domain renewal fee of $14.95 per year due at the time of the domain renewal date.

Free for life apparently actually means free for the life of the offer.

You can still have a free web site without renewing your custom domain (much like the Geocities and other services from the early days of the web and many blogging platforms of today) but ronkowitz.com would become the http://ronkowitz.web.officelive.com. Your other alternative is to try to move your domain name to a different provider by canceling your custom domain name. Of course, if you move it to some service (like godaddy.com), you will have to pay them. Probably less than the $14.95 Microsoft wants for the domain, but add in hosting and paying even more.

Would you expect Google to start charging for your Gmail, Documents, Blogger blog site or other services? No. If they did, I would expect even great outrage because the services are used more than Microsoft's service. It's one thing to offer a free service with the caveat that there will also be additional premium services for a fee, quite another to offer free for life and then pull it back.

Challenging the Whole Child

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 00:21:00 -0400

It seems so obvious that we would want to educate the whole child.

ASCD published last spring the start to a series of e-books on the “Whole Child”. The first one issued was free for a time and is now for sale (an interesting and noble model).

I first became aware of them in a post on the Generation Yes blog by Sylvia Martinez who has an article called "Working with Tech-Savvy Kids" in that first issue.

ASCD's newest e-book, Challenging the Whole Child: Reflections on Best Practices in Learning, Teaching, and Leadership, was also free for a short time, but I didn't catch the August 16 deadline. I downloaded it and have been reading.

Of course, "child" makes us think K-12, so I have been looking for ways to apply this to the higher education world.

The whole child concept looks at making sure that students enter school healthy and learn about a healthy lifestyle. It strives for students learning in intellectually challenging environment and that the learning space be physically and emotionally safe for the students and adults. It looks at community - that each student is actively engaged in learning and is connected to the school and broader community. It aims for graduates who are challenged by a well-balanced curriculum and are prepared for success in their further study or for employment in a global environment.

The School of Athens, fresco by Raphael (1509–1510), of an idealized Academy.

How to adapt this to higher education? Not very difficult. Change whole child to whole student. I don't think our objectives are so different. What is different is that in higher education teachers very much see their classroom as its own community and often don't consider the larger community or concerns beyond the teaching of their own content. I find that to be less true the further you move down the grade levels. And K-12 schools are much more concerned with their school as a community (and the actual community around them) than colleges. Obviously, most colleges are much larger and it's more difficult to foster community, and there are efforts from freshman orientation, learning communities and even sports to create a sense of comunity.

How often do professors take into account the whole student when they create a course syllabus or (if they do such a thing at all outside assessments) when they think about the goals, objectives and learning outcomes for their course?

I hear a few chuckles from the academy. It does sound idealized - especially if you have worked in the less han idealized world of academia for awhile.

It might be a good idea to check out their site and monitor the ASCD site for the next installment. (You have to go through their shopping cart and order page to download them even when they are free.) If you want to get a better idea about this, take a look a some sample chapters (PDF). There is also a companion study guide for sale and their free Whole Child Blog. Both will give you a sense of their goals.

Not (just) for your iPhone

nospam@example.com (Tim Kellers) — Wed, 19 Aug 2009 00:19:00 -0400

The Research and Development Team at Serendipity35 has developed (and is announcing) new support for you Smart Phone users out there that don't use an Apple iPhone.

The new mobile site for Serendipity35 is www.s35.org. The content remains the same, but there will be less graphics to clog up your Edge or 3G pipeline to the internet. Pages will load faster and the formatting will still be readable on device's smaller screens. Also, if you happen to have an iPhone and want to see Serendipity35 in a regulation browser (like Safari) without being automatically tossed into the WebApp version of Serendipity35, www.s35.org just might be the format for you.

The development of a micro-site version of Serendipity35 comes directly from the work I've done with making a portable version of Moodle.Though it remains to be seen what kinds of classes, instructions, FAQs and micro-information fit into a portable device, the platform is just about ready to begin delivering content even though very few people (if anyone) know what that content should or will be.

I don't envision anyone studying graduate courses on their Smartphone, but if you need to change a tire, reset your dashboard clock, or (safely) jump your car's battery, there may be a portable Moodle class in your future and it may be delivered by the same engine that runs the new www.s35.org

There's An App For That (If We Say So)

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 00:03:00 -0400

Friends with iPhones keeping telling me about something they downloaded. And those commercials are on all the time telling me there's an app for that. An app to solve all problems.

I saw a list of the 100 Best iPhone Apps for Serious Self-Learners. There's even an iPhone app for the complete works of Shakespeare.Almost all the ones folks are downloading are free. And me without a smartphone...

One bug in all this free app talk has been the recent Google Voice application for the iPhone that was shot down by Apple. According to Google, "Apple did not approve the Google Voice application we submitted six weeks ago to the Apple App Store. We will continue to work to bring our services to iPhone users--for example, by taking advantage of advances in mobile browsers."

All third-party applications that use Google Voice have also been pulled by Apple. There were varying explanations about why this was done - the apps duplicate features that come with the iPhone etc.

But most of the buzz online about this centered on the theory that AT&T, the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in the U.S., wanted it killed. Google Voice is a free application that some say is an "end run" around wireless carriers because it allows for free texts and international calls for a few pennies (users do still use minutes on their AT&T phone plan).

Of course, Apple has its own reasons too. They probably don't want Google's Android operating system, which is a big competitor to the iPhone OS, to gain any extra ground, especially from within their own app store.

Corporate intrigue abounds... The Federal Communications Commission is checking out things and sending letters
to Apple, AT&T and Google. Google's chief executive stepped down from Apple's board.

Text messages are big moneymakers for the carriers - 20 cents for you, basically no cost to them. International calls? They didn't block Skype, so why block Google? Oh, that's right - because they are GOOGLE.

Google says they can work around the ban with a specialized, iPhone-shaped web page that will behave the same as the app. Would Apple dare to block a web page?

Socialnomics and the Business of Social Media

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 17 Aug 2009 00:16:00 -0400

There are a number of videos and presentations I have seen online and at conferences that hit you with stats about the penetration of Web 2.0 applications and social media.

For example, it took radio 38 years to reach 50 millions users - for TV it was only 13 Years - the Internet did it in 4 Years and the iPod only needed 3 Years.

Facebook added double that with 100 million users in less than 9 months, and there were 1 billion iPhone applications in 9 months.

This new book, Socialnomics: How social media transforms the way we live and do business is described as "a research–based look at the impact of social media on businesses and consumers around the world, and what?s in store for the future".

I took a look at the Socialnomics blog which has plenty of statistics to show that social media is bigger than you think.

You can see why business people are paying attention:
- 25% of search results for the World’s Top 20 largest brands are links to user-generated content
- 34% of bloggers post opinions about products & brands
- 78% of consumers trust peer recommendations while only 14% trust advertisements
- Only 18% of traditional TV campaigns generate a positive ROI
- 90% of people that can skip (as in TiVo) commercials do so

With social media, word of mouth now becomes world of mouth. Your review on a site like Amazon carries weight.

Where does education come in with social media? Beyond the selling of schools (private schools and higher education admissions), how can we use social media most effectively?

Here are a few more choice stats - you can find more in the video at the bottom of this post.
- By 2010 Gen Y will outnumber Baby Boomers….96% of them have joined a social network
- Social Media has overtaken porn as the #1 activity on the Web
- 1 out of 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met via social media
- If Facebook were a country it would be the world’s 4th largest between the United States and Indonesia
- 2009 US Department of Education study revealed that on average,online students out performed those receiving face-to-face instruction
- 1 in 6 higher education students are enrolled in online curriculum
- 80% of companies use LinkedIn as a primary tool to find employees
- Wikipedia has over 13 million articles; some studies show it’s more accurate than Encyclopedia Britannica; 78% of these articles are non-English
- There are over 200,000,000 Blogs and 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily.

Qualman says in the book/blog that successful companies in social media act more like Dale Carnegie and less like David Ogilvy. That is, they are listening first, and acting like ad agencies and selling second. These successful companies using social media act more like party planners, aggregators, and content providers than traditional advertisers.

Those don't sound like roles most educators or schools would be eager to take on. If socialnomics is a way to use social media to increase sales, cut marketing costs, and communicate directly with consumers, only that last item should have real interest with those of us in the classroom.

Is it all business? Erik Qualman is the Global Vice President of Online Marketing for EF Education who list themselves as "the world’s largest private educator." They offer international language learning courses, tours etc. They are part of the growing number of private education organizations that continue to grow (like University of Phoenix), and that don't seem to frighten higher education as much as you would expect. Did someone say smug?

Maybe this goes back to my earlier posts about redefining universities and using 2.0 to do it. Schools continue to lag behind in finding ways to make use of the new tools, while the business world seems to be far bolder about experimenting.

School on the Screen

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 00:15:00 -0400

If you are an educator, there are numerous opportunities for you to cringe when you see a classroom depicted on television or in a movie.

Blackboard Jungle probably started its own genre of the good and idealistic teacher who battles students and administration, race and class. Most of the films are set in high schools rather than colleges. In that film festival we can include To Sir, with Love, Class of 1984, The Principal, Stand and Deliver, Lean on Me, Dead Poets Society, Class of 1999, Dangerous Minds, The Substitute, One Eight Seven, The Emperor's Club, Freedom Writers, Hamlet 2. The classrooms are not only American. Last year's French film, Entre les murs (The Class) fits right in with the others.
Have any of these films accurately depicted the classrooms I taught in for many years? Not really. I was lucky to generally not be battling with my students and administration. I'd like to think there were some days, class periods or moments that were as dramatic as some scenes in a few of those films, but no one can sustain that two hours of school on the screen for very long. I actually found the absurdities of a film like Teachers to be more accurate than films like Dangerous Minds.

Schools on the TV screen have probably been more comic than dramatic. Our Miss Brooks ran from 1948-1957 and they may have never completed a single lesson in all those years. But, there have been TV series that fit in with the film festival selections above too.

I recall watching Room 222 in the 1970s which was full of topical issues, and Boston Public addressed hard issues 30 years later. You may know from another post of mine that I was a fan of The Wonder Years which was not a school series, but had a good number of school scenes. It might be that I wanted to see teachers and students actually learning something and enjoying it without knives, drugs, gangs and teen pregnancies.

I can laugh at the school scenes on The Simpsons which are probably more accurate than those on Saved By The Bell.

I started on this post because for the past few weeks I have been seeing promos for a new fall sitcom on NBC called Community. After the promos ran past me a bunch of times, I caught on that it is about a community college. Being that I work at a CC myself, I paid a little more attention and looked at the NBC site.

It's a new fall sitcom. It seems like the show will focus on some new students who form a study group at Greendale Community College. Now, it's a comedy from Dan Harmon (The Sarah Silverman Program) and directors Joe and Anthony Russo (Arrested Development) which is pretty interesting parentage. Community colleges are hot right now with President Obama's attention and big money going to hem to retrain the workforce. But I don't expect too many issues to make their way into the scripts.

You can even check out the faux college website for the college at greendalecommunitycollege.com (which may end looking better than some real CC sites). Here's what I found there:

Welcome to Greendale Community College, located right in the heart of Greendale, Colorado. We are here for you, and the great people of our city, county and state!
You might ask yourself,"What I can expect from Greendale Community College?" And to that, we say "What can't you expect?" We pride ourselves on giving you, the community college student, more than you expect. We give you what you deserve.
And we do so by sticking to the Straight A's of Greendale: Accessibility, Affordability, Air Conditioning, Awesome New Friends, A Lot of Classes.
Remember here at Greendale Community College, you're already accepted!

Their tuition policy is not much off the mark. (At Passaic County Community College, ours is $66 a credit.)

Your desire for a higher education should not be tied money, especially in this economy. And that's why here at GCC we have adopted the "No More Than $64" Promise. You'll never pay more than $64 per credit hour, allowing you the flexibility to get an education and still afford to go to the movies on a Saturday night. We believe in a strong school-to-life balance here at GCC and affordability is one way we give it to you.

Most schools have their "promotional" websites too. PCCC has its 100 Reasons site and GCC has their their "Campus Connect." You can see that they have the CC mix of students. There is the traditional student like 18 year old Annie who sees GCC as a stepping stone to an Ivy school. There are also those returning students like Britta who "joined the Peace Corps, did some foot modeling, got tear gassed at a world trade rally, went to Africa, woke up one day and realized I was almost thirty and flat broke. So... I got my G.E.D. and here I am: crawling back to society."

I'm sure we'll be meeting faculty and administration too. On the promos, I like Spanish professor, Señor Chang (Ken Jeong from The Hangover) who rants about the stereotypes he faces. (Why is an Asian teaching Spanish instead of karate?)

I hope the show has some laughs, and it would be nice if it didn't portray all the teachers as idiots.

Have there been classroom moments on the screen that you connected with as actually being what you have experienced as a teacher, administrator or student? Share a comment below.

Peer 2 Peer University Launches

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 14 Aug 2009 15:27:00 -0400

I first wrote about (P2PU) back in 2008. It has take them longer than originally planned to actually launch the project, but they are now ready and offering offering enrollment for the first courses.

Peer 2 Peer University is an “online community of open study groups for short university-level courses”. They use the Internet, social applications, open educational resources (OER) with structured courses. The hope is to offer high quality courses at low or no cost. The model is similar to OpenLearn’s LabSpace allowing users to remix and reuse Open University (OU) course materials. P2PU will be using for the pilot a pbworks site but may transition to another platform. (OU uses a combination of Moodle and Drupal as its platform.)

These first courses are free but P2PU plans to have a pricing model including a fee for sign-up after the pilot.They also plan to seek accreditation for coursework.

The pilot "semester" has registration through August 26 and the courses will start on September 9. The semester is 6 weeks.

These classes are small groups chaired by a volunteer who organizes and disseminates the syllabus, study materials and schedule.

The courses being offered are: Introduction to Concepts in Behavioral Economics and Decision Making--Copyright for Educators--Introduction to Cyberpunk Literature--Land Restoration and Afforestation--Open Creative Nonfiction - Take Away Narratives--Poker and strategic thinking

P2PU is currently run by volunteers and is supported by the Hewlett Foundation and the Shuttleworth Foundation for basic start-up costs and receives administrative and legal support from the University of California at Irvine.

Teaching Naked

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 00:03:00 -0400

So, I read this article during my lunch soup yesterday about a dean at Southern Methodist University who is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. He is a dean for their school of the arts and challenges his colleagues to "teach naked." What he means by that is to teach without "machines" such as computers.

Reading into the story, you find that it's also another "PowerPoint is Evil" type of movement. I agree that slides (We might as well blame Keynote along with PowerPoint - it's not like fancier transitions make a slideshow more educational either) can be used badly, but a slideshow does not guarantee a bad class session.

Dean Bowen believes that when students reflect on their college years later in life, they won't remember media presentations but will recall the interactions they had with their professors.

The Chronicle article points to other anti-ppt studies like one in the British Educational Research Journal that found that 59% of students said that at least half of their lectures were boring, and that PowerPoint was one of the dullest methods they saw. I'll bet that if you had surveyed my fellow undergrads 40 years ago, we would have said that at least half of the lectures were boring, and there were no computers to blame. Could it be that lectures, with or without slides, are boring? Is it possible that the professor is boring?

And it's not just PowerPoint that gets low marks. Other technology-assisted activities, like interactive exercises in computer labs, also get the boring stamp. That report listed seminars, practice sessions, demonstrations and group discussions as less boring. [insert Bloom's taxonomy, engagement theory and learning pyramid slides here]

So, are tech-free classrooms the most engaging classrooms? Would it be that simple - to strip the "smart classrooms" of their technology right down to the dusty overhead projector in the corner?

How would most teachers react to teaching naked in this revised learning space?
A) They would become highly innovative and creative in their approaches to presenting material.
B) They would call their union rep.
C) They would bring in their own laptop and CD player and ask media services where they are storing the DVD players and 16mm projectors these days.
D) They would lecture for the full time.

It simplistic to say that teaching without tech equals just lecturing. In fact, the effect has been in some cases that students don't like having to be "more engaged." After all, the lecture model is very comfortable and doesn't ask for much from them. It can be like watching [bad] TV - not exciting, but relaxing.

Back to Dean Bowen. I'll give him credit for giving a presentation about the no-tech teaching naked approach at the techie conference on "Emerging Technology Applications for Online Learning" offered by the Sloan Consortium. Talking to a crowd that encourages technology in education, he suggested that the "lecture" can be recorded and delivered to students as podcasts/online videos before class, and use the valuable class time to introduce issues of debate and have discussions.

That particular approach has been proposed and used before. At Miami University, Glenn Platt, along with his colleague Maureen Lage, coined the phrase “inverted classroom” back in 2000. They proposed using technology to move
active learning into the classroom and lectures outside of class.

I guess naked teachers are not really naked of technology. They use it, but in a limited way. Read the comments on that Chronicle article and I suspect you will agree with most of them - technology is not the problem OR the solution.

Some other thoughts on
- Naked Teaching http://tomprofblog.mit.edu/?p=194
- Inverted Classroom http://www.eric.ed.gov

Using Multimedia Without Copyright Issues

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 17:06:12 -0400

Getting ready for the fall semester? You might want to avoid breaking any copyright laws by checking out the Baruch College's interactive guide to using multimedia in courses.

It has some computer animation where you follow a NYC-styled “Copyright Metro” to determine what materials can be used in courses legally. Choose the right metro line (easier than the real NYC system) depending on if how the materials will be used - face-to-face or online - or if you actually have copyright-holder permission to use the material.

More information online:
at Reed College
University of Maryland University College

The Internet of Things

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 00:11:00 -0400

It has been five years since Tim O'Reilly pitched the idea of Web 2.0. The term caught on in a big way. In fact, almost everything seems to be labeled 2.0 these days.

Recently, O'Reilly and John Battelle (they run the Web 2.0 conference - now a Web 2.0 Summit - together along with TechWeb) released a white paper called " Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On."

One thing the paper examines is how the social web might intersect with the Internet of Things. Not familiar with that? Don't feel badly. It hasn't caught popular fire yet, so there's still time for you to read up and be able to chat about it at the first faculty meeting.

The Internet of Things is concerned with real world objects that are connected to the Internet. The concept of the internet of things is associated with the Auto-ID Labs. The real world objects that are connected to the Net might be household appliances, cars, books or any electronic, "smart," or RFID-enabled object.

If this sounds like something from The Jetsons, you're on the right track. Here's what was said recently on ReadWriteWeb about one smart appliance.

The Internet fridge is probably the most oft-quoted example of what the Internet of Things - when everyday objects are connected to the Internet - will enable. Imagine a refrigerator (so the story goes) that monitors the food inside it and notifies you when you're low on, for example, milk. It also perhaps monitors all of the best food websites, gathering recipes for your dinners and adding the ingredients automatically to your shopping list. This fridge knows what kinds of foods you like to eat, based on the ratings you have given to your dinners. Indeed the fridge helps you take care of your health, because it knows which foods are good for you and which clash with medical
conditions you have. And that's just part of the sci-fi story of the Internet fridge.

Okay, so my home gets smarter and more connected. What about schools?

The O'Reilly paper defines "web squared" as "web meets world." (Also the idea that the web is growing exponentially.) Something that still holds over from that Web 2.0 concept from 2004 is the belief that this new web would be harnessing
collective intelligence. In 2009, that now includes mobile and internet-connected objects.

Smartphones with a microphone, camera, motion sensor, proximity sensor, and location sensor (GPS) are powerful "things" that can be used in the classroom but can be taken home and into the field.

Sure, RFID tags can keep track of books in the bookstore or storeroom, but, hopefully, educators and students will come up with more than a supermarket approach to the Internet of Things.

Aren't classrooms supposed to be about collective intelligence? Isn’t intelligence, at least partially, the characteristic that allows an organism to learn from and respond to its environment?

I doubt that I will have the money to make it out to the Summit in San Francisco this October (it's by invitation), but I hope there are some educators attending (and presenting?). Schools can't afford to be left on the beach just watching another technology wave crest.

By the way, the Internet of Things is not the Web of Things. It's a very tangled web we are weaving...

Download the Web Squared White Paper (PDF, 1.3MB)

Watch the Web Squared Webcast

Where the Girls Are

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 14:44:00 -0400

Women have been a bigger percentage of the Facebook user base than men, and the latest Facebook stats show a continuing increase. For U.S. users, there are 1.35 women for each male.

Though many people associate Facebook with students, over 60% of Facebook users are now over the age of 25. Last year, 18-25 users made up over 50% of the total Facebook population.

There are over 77 million monthly active users in the U.S. That means more than 25% of the population is logging on to Facebook every month.

And here come the ladies...

Amongst users 26-54, the women outnumber men by over 2 million at each year in that range. 10 million American women 26-34 are active every month, Almost 8 million women 35-44 are active compared to about 5.7 million men in that range. And amongst users 45-54, women outnumber men 5.3 million to 3.3 million. Nearly twice as many US women 26-34 joined Facebook in the last month than men did – a staggering difference.

If you are more interested in where the "boys" are, you'll have to look to those over 55 who are growing at a faster rate than their female counterparts. (The slowest growing group currently is men 18-25 at 5% month over month growth.)

Tangential Links - Watch the trailer to the 1960 movie hit, Where the Boys Are

Facebook t-shirt via crookedmonkey.com

Jamming With T-Shaped Students

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 00:03:00 -0400

IBM held something called the Smarter Planet University Jam this past April. Nearly 2,000 students, faculty, IBM business leaders,technologists, governmental officials, and industry partners from 40 countries around the globe took part in the Jam. They were five theme areas: smart skills and education, smart water management and green planet, smart grid, smarter healthcare, and smart cities.

The Jam Report they have released says that 80% of the students want universities to revamp traditional learning environments. 90% want to join or start a Green Advocacy group at their campus. 60% believe that education and efficient transportation offer the best hope for sustainability of our cities. <

“The Smarter Planet University Jam was the first time that so many university-aged students came together in an online forum to brainstorm ideas to better our world,” said Jai Menon, vice president of technical strategy and university programs, IBM. “Students are confident that their future will be a smarter place – a world where they will drive cars that get 100 miles per gallon, learn in virtual classrooms connected with students across the globe, and where they can run their businesses on a secure, energy-efficient and interconnected grid. They are boldly challenging the industry to transform that vision into their reality, and IBM is committed to meeting that challenge.”

"Jammers" also discussed that success in the services-based global economy requires academia, government, and industry to work together to create “T-shaped” people. Those are people with deep knowledge in one discipline and broader knowledge in other areas.

IBM has created an interdisciplinary curriculum called Service Science, Management and Engineering (SSME), and is currently working with 250 universities around the globe.

If educators haven't picked up on the idea yet, business people have. Tim Brown, CEO and president of Ideo, writes in Fast Company:

We look for people who are so inquisitive about the world that they're willing to try to do what you do. We call them "T-shaped people." They have a principal skill that describes the vertical leg of the T -- they're mechanical engineers or industrial designers. But they are so empathetic that they can branch out into other skills, such as anthropology, and do them as well. They are able to explore insights from many different perspectives and recognize patterns of behavior that point to a universal human need. That's what you're after at this point -- patterns that yield ideas.

In Business Week, Bill Buxton, writes about t-shaped people:

When you slide multiple Ts together, their cross bars all overlap, indicating that the various Ts have a common language, and, ideally, their combined base can be broad enough to cover the domain of the problem that you are addressing. At Microsoft (MSFT), we try to make sure that in looking at new product or services ideas, we have at least three Ts, which we call BXT, reflecting equal levels of competence and creativity in three domains: business, experience (in design), and technology. These are three interdependent and interwoven pillars we see as the foundation for what we do.

But Buxton also suggests a variation of his own - "I-shaped people" - thinkers who have their feet firmly planted in the practical world, but can stretch their heads to the clouds, and simultaneously span all of the space in between.

Bill Gillies, writing on the Grown Up Digital blog about the Jam Report, focuses on the Jammers' ideas about changing universities. They questioned the traditional role and model of university systems, as Internet-based applications begin to provide more course
content and we shift to a system of global and service based economies.

Some of their suggestions:
- Adopting learning methods that are student-led versus instructor-led, with professors playing a mentor role in the learning process.
- Adopting videoconferencing as a means to accomplish distance learning without sacrificing interaction.
- Broader use of virtual environments to enhance learning, interaction, networking and communication.
- Implementing team-based projects across geographical, disciplinary and institutional boundaries.

IBM also promotes Open Education as part of the solution to the problems it sees in education:

Despite billions of dollars in spending, technology has produced inconsistent results for educational institutions. Ad hoc technology implementations. Difficulty getting devices into the hands of all constituents. Resistance to adapting teaching and learning as technology has become available. All have been barriers to success.
In addition, increasing enrollments and decreasing funding are realities for many academic institutions. And student expectations are changing—their technical requirements are high. K-12 schools struggle with high dropout rates and accountability mandates. For higher education, the challenges include institutional differentiation and an emerging focus on student outcomes.

Whether you call our students "T-shaped" or "I-shaped" or even "O-shaped" (well rounded), the questions remain: Are we providing what the work world wants in its employees? Is the purpose of schools, particularly secondary and universities, to create workers?

IBM Open source Information
White Paper: The power of the open approach to transform K–12 schools
White Paper: Solving the integration issue - Service-oriented architecture (SOA)
White Paper: Vision 2010 – The future of business software applications
Video: Open technologies in education

What Is Your Learning Footprint?

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 00:05:00 -0400

In case you don't already feel guilty enough about your personal carbon footprint, here's a site that helps you calculate the "learning footprint" of your school or business.

Learning Footprint is a website dedicated to helping you minimize the environmental impact of their programs. You start by using their free calculator to find out your "learning emissions." They offer you a download of a PDF report of the calculation to include in your next business case.

What can your organization do to help the situation? It starts with actually realizing what you do that is increasing the size of your footprint and then changing the ways in which you operate. As with other industries, there will be some emissions you cannot avoid, but can offset. That can be a dangerous approach to all your "emissions" because it leads some some organizations (and individuals) into believing that we can simply add up its emissions and "offset" them all. Buying that hybrid car doesn't make it okay to waste fuel in heating or cooling your home. That's a zero-sum, no winners game that will not improve the situation. So, the real objective is an active reduction in the emissions produced.

The site lists the Carbon Neutral Protocol steps in the process to becoming Carbon Neutral: 1. Owning the problem 2. Quantifying the impact 3. Reducing emissions wherever possible 4. Offsetting the remainder 5. Communicating effectively.

This site comes from HT2. It is a company that has an interest in promoting E-Learning. They develop multimedia E-Learning, for software training, Web 2.0 websites,Communities of Practice and have developed their own framework, KnowledgePortal, to help create these communities quickly and effectively. Logically, one of their suggestions for businesses is to reduce or eliminate the need to travel for staff training to see a dramatic reduction in your carbon emissions.

When I first entered the world of online learning in 2000, no one really talked about it as being environmentally-friendly or "green." Today, I see that on the promotional materials.

Using the Learning Footprint site could also be a good classroom lesson that crosses disciplines (science, math, communications and social studies for sure) for students to look at their school's emissions and suggest a plan to help reduce the school's impact.

Facebook and Education

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 00:08:00 -0400

I can't imagine that any majority of educators - even those who are actual Facebook users - would say that Facebook is a "learning platform." Still, in the Educause report "7 Things You should Know About Facebook," they say that:

“Facebook’s structure encourages users to view relationships in a broad context of learning, even as affiliations change—from high school to college to graduate school to the workplace. By opening itself to virtually anyone, Facebook has become a model for how communities—of learners, of workers, of any group with a common interest—can come together, define standards for interaction, and collaboratively create an environment that suits the needs of the members.”

And, I came across a page from the American Society for Training & Development (ASTD) lists tools (a few below) as ones Facebook has to offer online learning. Is your school looking at or using any Facebook tools or Facebook itself for learning? I know of schools using it for promotion, but learning...

BookTag:

Webinaria Screencast Recorder

Also talking about this topic:
http://q-ontech.blogspot.com/2009/05/facebook-and-grades.html
http://www.miltonramirez.com/2009/05/facebook-pros-and-cons-of-using-it-in.html

Language and Technology Blogs

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 03 Aug 2009 00:07:00 -0400

The results of the poll for the Top Language Blogs (which I wrote about in more detail earlier) have been posted. The ones that interest me the most are the Top Ten Language Blogs for "Language Technology" which focuses on blogs discussing technology as part of the language learning process.

No, Serendipity35 did not make the list, but I checked out the top 10 and found a few familiar bloggers and a few new ones to add to my reader. Most of the blogs are not hardcore language blogs but EdTech blogs that discuss language learning at times.

The list reinforces my perception that there are just many more teachers in the K-12 world blogging, creating their own social networks etc. than there are in the higher education world.

Blogosphere Meets Twittersphere

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 10:48:00 -0400

Twittorati has launched from the folks who run Technorati.

Twittorati is billed as being where the blogosphere meets the Twittersphere - a way to see what top bloggers are tweeting about, and how these trends compare to blogosphere trends. You can filter tweets by topic, see the most tweeted blog posts, and compare leading blogosphere and Twitter trends.

For the launch, Twittorati is featuring the Technorati Top 100 Bloggers but will expand to include other authors in the active blogosphere. One disappointing trend in blogging, in my opinion, is the dominance of large blogging conglomerates at the top of the rankings. The individual blogger has almost no chance to find an audience via rankings like this.

It might be useful - even if you are not a blogger or Titter user - to use this just to monitor what is relevant to you, compare the day’s top blog and hash tags to see the hottest topics in both spheres, as well as see the most popular links that are being tweeted and which blogs are linking to them. Writer pages display each tweeter’s blogs and Twitter information and their Technorati Authority.

Early College

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 00:03:00 -0400

President Barack Obama referenced Bard High School Early College last week in a speech. It's one example of the "early college" programs that I wrote about earlier this year.

BHSEC is a joint venture by the New York City Board of Education and Bard College. Designed for students who are ready and willing to do college work at age 16, they can cover in four years high school and the first two years of college. At graduation, they will earn an associate of arts (A.A.) degree as well as their high school diploma.

At EarlyColleges.org, you can find out more about the partner organizations of the Early College High School Initiative (Bard is not one of them). They have started or redesigned more than 200 U.S. schools.

I find the idea of the early college very appealing. But, I agree with BHSEC graduate Kesi Augustine, who wrote a piece on the Huffington Post about her experiences there, that it won't work for all students.

"Not every student could learn this way. A few dropped out over the four years despite the supportive network of teachers and faculty available. However, those students did not cop out. BHSEC was emotionally demanding. Those students simply realized that their destiny was in their own hands, as Obama said, and that BHSEC's accelerated method of learning, while it stimulates the mind, requires a sense of maturity some teenagers do not yet have while in high school."

These early colleges are public institutions and charge no tuition. The student populations are generally diverse ethnically and economically. The design of the schools is to offer low-income youth, first-generation college goers, English language learners, students of color, and other young people underrepresented in higher education opportunities.

At BHSEC, there are about 500 students with an average student-to-teacher ration is 20:1. Admissions receives about 4,000 applications for 135 available spaces. Admissions is based on the student’s academic record, teacher recommendations, writing and math assessments, and an interview which should show evidence of the student's ambition and intellectual curiosity.

I don't know how unique Kesi might be as a Bard graduate, (She is now at Williams College.) but her description of her academic life there sounds encouraging to me.

The typical night of homework included musing over the implications of W.E.B. DuBois' theory of double consciousness, calculating anti-derivatives, and writing about the similarities between Toni Morrison and William Faulkner. During our junior and senior years, the professors expected everyone to read works by writers like Sophocles, Plato, Dante, Darwin, Marx, and Kafka. Those texts were our repertoire--we discussed them together and wrote about their relevance during their time period as well as our own. After taking a contemporary architecture class, my friends and I would walk the streets of Manhattan and jokingly remark, "That is so post-modern."

Blackboard Loses on Appeal

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 10:49:00 -0400

"This week, a federal appeals court invalidated Blackboard Inc.'s 1999 patent for its learning management software, overturning a lower court's decision last year finding that the Blackboard competitor Desire2Learn had infringed the giant's intellectual property.

Blackboard officials expressed disappointment but played down the significance of the ruling by the three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit, saying that new patents gained by the company -- which Blackboard has again accused Desire2Learn of infringing -- essentially make moot the issues present in the lawsuit in question.

But Blackboard has already initiated another lawsuit against Desire2Learn, accusing the Canadian firm in April of infringing new U.S. patents that the company received on its software. So while company officials continue to reassure higher education technology officials and others that Blackboard has no intention of asserting its patent rights against "open source or home-grown course management systems that are not bundled with proprietary software," they show no signs of retreating in the wake of Monday's stinging defeat."

Source: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2009/07/28/blackboard

All The News That Fits Your Screen

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 11:00:00 -0400

beeldbank.nationaalarchief.nl

There is no shortage of stories about the death of the print newspaper. For many of us, newspapers are still the main source of local news, arts and entertainment guides, community information, sports, and shopping. Now, that may include a local newspaper's online services. And if the news is across the country or the world, THAT local paper may be the best source. And, for those of us at colleges, our campus newspaper is certainly the only source for much of our "local" news. So, here is a post about how to read more of those newspapers online.

NewsVoyager.com is a "newspaper portal" to newspaper sites around the world. NewsVoyager.com provides links to U.S. daily and weekly newspaper home pages and sections, Canadian and international daily newspapers, newspaper groups, associations and other media organizations. I found 61 daily and weekly papers here in New Jersey.

They also provide a link to other sites with links to college newspapers and newspaper archives. This site is a service of the Newspaper Association of America, a nonprofit organization representing the newspaper industry and more than 2,000 newspapers in the U.S. and Canada.

A Digital Bloom

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Mon, 27 Jul 2009 14:16:00 -0400

You can never be sure what reaction you will get if you bring up Bloom's taxonomy with a teacher. Though it is fairly ubiquitous in the K-12 world, it is equally unheard of with higher ed faculty. That's a bit odd, since it came from higher education research, but not so odd because K-12 faculty are the ones who take the education courses. A school district that I worked in for many years used it so much for a few years that it would illicit groans when it was brought up.

If you are familiar with Bloom's taxonomy, you can skip down to the Going Digital section. A group of colleges, led by Benjamin Bloom (1956), found that there is more than one type of learning. They identified three domains of educational activities: Cognitive (mental skills or knowledge), Affective (growth in feelings or emotional areas or attitude) and Psychomotor (manual or physical skills). If you want to think of that taxonomy as helping to set your educational goals, then learners should have acquired new skills, knowledge, and/or attitudes when the activity is completed.

Though they produced a framework for the cognitive and affective domains, they did far less with the psychomotor domain which was seen as "manual skills" which was not seen as the purview of college courses. The three domains are subdivided and classified from simplest behavior to the most complex. Though other systems and hierarchies have emerged since Bloom's work, his taxonomy is still probably the most widely used way to categorize and order thinking skills and objectives. It's logical and follows the thinking process. You can't understand something you don't remember, and you can't apply them if you don't understand them.

The original taxonomy (above left) was revised in the 1990's by a student of Bloom (Lorin Anderson) using actions/verbs rather than nouns for the categories and changing the hierarchy at the top.

Many people have done variations on the taxonomy (such as the Bloom rose) to explain what types of lessons or activities address lower and higher level skills.

GOING DIGITAL

More recent revisions and additions have often focused on addressing digital skills. Where "remembering" always included activities like having learners recognizing, listing, describing, identifying, retrieving, naming, locating, finding etc., now people are adding ones they feel students do or need to do in a digital world. They are not so much new skills as they are additional ways of doing things.

For example, "listing" might include being able to do bullet-pointing. Identifying could include highlighting. We often do bookmarking/favoriting online as part of our way of remembering sites of information. (Getting into "social bookmarking" probably jumps you up to a somewhat higher order because of the collaborative aspect.)

Think about that most natural of online tasks for students today - search. Depending on the student's grade level, you can easily imagine a hierarchy of search skills from the simple enter a keyword to the higher order skills of understanding how to do a Boolean search, what the results mean, analyzing the validity of information sources and creating something new and original from what is found.

Where do we place things like creating a podcast, writing a blog, creating a mashup or playing an educational game?

Some possibilities in the category of "understanding/comprehension" (going beyond the recall of knowledge) might include commenting and annotating web pages and documents online or categorizing materials or sites and setting up a folder or organizational tree.

Moving up to "applying" that understood knowledge, you will typically use actions such as comparing, organizing, outlining, mind-mapping and integrating. Turning digital, you could use mashing, linking, reverse-engineering, cracking, and tagging. Mashups, for example, take pre-existing digital elements and combine them to apply to a new problem or use. As student using Google Maps to plot the journey of the protagonist in a literary work would be using knowledge, comprehension, application and probably higher skills in the taxonomy to complete the work.

The more you work with the taxonomy, the more you realize that there is a lot of overlap and that the best activities bridge several levels. It's also important that you not think of "lower level" activities as a negative. The higher level work never gets done without the knowledge base and understanding. But, a course that remains only in those lower levels is doing learners a disservice. I have had instructors tell me that, "It's a 101 course and I just have to dump a lot of knowledge into those kids." That's painful to hear - though less painful than actually being a student in that class.

Think about having students reverse-engineer or deconstruct something like an iPhone application, evaluate its effectiveness and then build their own app. You couldn't keep that type of activity into one level no matter how hard you tried. It runs up all the levels.

And the use of a digital taxonomy is not limited to "technology class" assignments. For example, most of the work being done with digital storytelling addresses all the levels.

On top of the taxonomy are the students who are filming, animating, podcasting, mixing and remixing, directing or producing a product, performance or production and "publishing" (via the web, or in text, media or digital formats) it on a wiki, YouTube, their own e-portfolio or a school site.

Taxonomy is the practice and science of classification. Its Greek root is in taxis, meaning "order" or "arrangement," and it is one way to bring order to the process of learning and creating learning situations.

More

Bloom's Taxonomy Blooms Digitally

Bloom and Technology Tools for Instruction

http://www.skagitwatershed.org/~donclark/hrd/bloom.html

Intro to Benjamin Bloom http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Bloom

Government Says Firefox Is Not Free (Laughter)

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:00:00 -0400

One for the weekend.

Here's a great example of how our government works - or at least how it moves forward (or backwards) in the area of information technology and the Internet.

This transcript excerpt comes to us from a Town Hall Meeting to Announce the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) with Hillary Rodham Clinton, Secretary of State in Washington, DC on July 10, 2009

MS. GREENBERG: Okay. Our next question comes from Jim Finkle:

Can you please let the staff use an alternative web browser called Firefox? I just – (applause) – I just moved to the State Department from the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency and was surprised that State doesn’t use this browser. It was approved for the entire intelligence community, so I don’t understand why State can’t use it. It’s a much safer program. Thank you. (Applause.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, apparently, there’s a lot of support for this suggestion. (Laughter.) I don’t know the answer. Pat, do you know the answer? (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: The answer is at the moment, it’s an expense question. We can --

QUESTION: It’s free. (Laughter.)

UNDER SECRETARY KENNEDY: Nothing is free. (Laughter.) It’s a question of the resources to manage multiple systems. It is something we’re looking at. And thanks to the Secretary, there is a significant increase in the 2010 budget request that’s pending for what is called the Capital Investment Fund, by which we fund our information technology operations. With the Secretary’s continuing pushing, we’re hoping to get that increase in the Capital Investment Fund. And with those additional resources, we will be able to add multiple programs to it.

Yes, you’re correct; it’s free, but it has to be administered, the patches have to be loaded. It may seem small, but when you’re running a worldwide operation and trying to push, as the Secretary rightly said, out FOBs and other devices, you’re caught in the terrible bind of triage of trying to get the most out that you can, but knowing you can’t do everything at once.

There's some humor in that portion of the meeting as shown by the (Laughter), but like most humor, it also contains some truth. Even free applications require support.

If it's you using Firefox or Chrome, Moodle, Ning or Twitter, Linux or any other open program, the cost is probably your time. You need to download, install, run updates etc. But if it's your school or company and there are fifty or hundreds or thousands of users, that time is money. Though I am certainly an advocate of open everything, one fear I do have when schools look at "free" products, they avoid looking at support.

For example, downloading Moodle is free, which compares very favorably with a commercial product like Blackboard. But if you're on the team that is going to support faculty and students using it, you know there is a lot more to it.

Transcript (and video!): http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/july/125949.htm

More Wonder Years

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:20:00 -0400

For my more personal take on The Wonder Years, check out "I Love You, Winnie Cooper"

Wonder Years Math

nospam@example.com (Ken Ronkowitz) — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:15:00 -0400

Let me be honest right up front. In 1988, I had a crush on Winnie Cooper. Understand that she was not real, but a character on the TV show The Wonder Years. She was a student in seventh grade. I was teaching seventh grade English that year. (Psych majors, feel free to analyze.)

The 1988 episodes were set in 1968 (all the episodes took place 20 years before and were narrated by the grown Kevin). When the series opened, Kevin, Paul, and Winnie were just starting junior high school. In 1968, I was just exiting junior high school. If I had attended R.F.K Jr. High with Kevin, I would definitely have been competing for Winnie's attention. (There are enough connections for me, that I wrote another post about my less educational take on the show.)

Winnie Cooper will never grow up.

But, the actress who played Winnie, Danica McKellar, is all grown up.

And she studied mathematics at the UCLA and graduated summa cum laude. She coauthored the Chayes-McKellar-Winn theorem, which concerns how temperature affects magnetism. Winnie's algebra teacher, Mr. Collins, would have been very pleased.

Danica is on a mission these days to convince junior high students, especially girls, that math doesn't suck. Research has long shown that those are the years when you lose kids, especially girls, from the science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) curriculum.

In fact, that's one of her books - Math Doesn't Suck: How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail.

Her second book is Kiss My Math: Showing Pre-Algebra Who's Boss. They both hit the New York Times best sellers list.

Her website, DanicaMcKellar.com covers Danica the actress and Danica the writer - and contains math solutions for her books.

In an April 2009 interview with Edutopia magazine, she said:

In the seventh grade, I was a really stressed-out kid. One day, I totally panicked on a math quiz, and even though I had studied really hard, the quiz was blank when the bell rang. Blank! I wanted to cry. My teacher, Ms. Jacobson, let me have a few extra minutes during recess to relax and keep working on it. I'll never forget that gift. It was a turning point for me; my grades and confidence began to really improve.

If you could change one thing about education in America, what would it be? That schools would stop trying to push hard math concepts earlier and earlier -- it just makes math seem that much scarier, and it doesn't have to be.

What should they teach that they don’t teach now? More creativity in the classroom - we need more music and art, and also more silliness and fun in math and science. Why shouldn't all classes feel a little bit like kindergarten?

I also heard Danica interviewed on NPR's Science Friday about keeping kids interested in math over the summer break. Being that I was an English major and my wife (the French major) and I were both a bit math-phobic, we tried really hard not to pass that trait on to our sons. We tried to make math fun and a natural part of things we did with the boys without being the two teachers that we both are in "real life." It turned out pretty well. Both boys did the math A.P. route in high school. One ended up an engineer with a math minor, and the other just graduated as a finance major with a real gift for numbers.

Those middle school years are wonder years in several ways. There is a sense of wonder in those students that will be gone when they are at the high school or beyond. If you can catch that part of them as a teacher, you can get some incredible results. If you can leave them with memories of your classroom and your subject that are full of that wonder - as are the adult Kevin's narrated memories in The Wonder Years - I think you may have done the best work a teacher can do.