The latest from dougbelshaw.com/blog
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Weekly Roundup (20 August 2006)
78 CommentsWell I’m back from my holidays in both Scotland and Dublin. The latter wasn’t as good second time around, although on the positive side it’s not a myth that the Guinness tastes better there. That made up for being searched at the airport rather thoroughly (must be the beard…) Whilst I’ve been away there’s been quite a lot of high-quality posts in the edublogosphere. Everyone seems fired up for the new school year! :D
Here’s the posts I’ve found interesting this week and may form part of this week’s roundup:
- Cool Cat Teacher Blog – The Value of Routine
- Creating Passionate Users – Give users a Hollywood ending
- Ideant – Video Games, Authority, and Problem-based Thinking
- 2 Cents Blog – Examples, You Say?
- Teachers Teaching Teachers – The Five New Literacies of Web 2.0
- The Thinking Stick – My 25% PD
- Techlearning – Flickr-ing OUT
- Techlearning – Flickr-ing IN?
- The Fischbowl – Did You Know?
- Teach42.com – The different between ‘cheating’ and cheating
Before I begin, however, I’d like to mention something which has interested me which is obliquely connected to education and educational technology. I’m sure it hasn’t escaped your attention that astronomers are proposing that the number of ‘planets’ classified as such in the Solar System should be raised to 12. Pluto, once threatened with a relegation in status, keeps its A-List status and Charon, UB313 and Ceres join it. For more information on this, go to BBC News.
The interesting thing from my point of view, though, is something which was picked up by Stephen Downes, Wes Fryer and Clarence Fisher. Wikipedia already reflects the proposed changes whereas even the newest textbooks will be out of date. Strike one for wikibooks! :D
Moving onto the roundup proper, my focus this week is going to be on things to get people thinking at the start of the new academic year. I don’t go back for another couple of weeks yet, but for some people this last week was either the first or second week into the new academic year. There’s been a few rather enthusiastic posts about going back, which is nice to see – although notably none were from UK-based teachers!
Karl Fisch, who rather wonderfully has set up a professional development blog for those at his school, has posted an interesting Powerpoint which he presented to teachers at a beginning of year faculty meeting. Entitled Did You Know?, it starts off with facts about new additions to that particular school (wireless networking, etc.) but quickly moves on to more general issues – some of which are startling:
- According to former US Secretary of Education Richard Riley the top 10 in-demand jobs in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004.
- The U.S. Department of Labor estimates that today’s learner will have 10-14 careers in their lifetime.
- 1 out of every 8 couples married in the U.S. last year met online.
- There are over 2.4 billion searches performed on Google each month. To whom were these questions addressed B.G.? (Before Google)
- It’s estimated that a week’s worth of New York Times contains more information than a person was likely to come across in a lifetime in the 18th century.
- Predictions are that by 2008 e-paper will be cheaper than real paper.
- Predictions are that by 2013 a supercomputer will be built that exceeds the computation capability of the Human Brain.
There’s other interesting facts in this 8-minute presentation – it’s worth watching. The main point he wants to get across is that we live in exponential times – i.e. the rate of change is increasing to such an extent that no-one is going to be able to keep up (but that’s not to say we should give up…) Please bear in mind that I haven’t checked the veracity of these statements, so don’t go blaming me if they’re made up – but it gets you thinking, doesn’t it? :s
One thing that’s certainly changing is what we mean by literacy. In the 21st century we cannot simply define a literate person as someone who is capable of handling text – we need either a broader scope or more precise definition. Ulises Mejias over at Ideant has posted on Video Games, Authority, and Problem-based Thinking in which he discusses a Harper’s Magazine article entitled Grand Theft Education: Literacy in the Age of Video Games. He cites an interesting comment worth reflecting upon by Raph Koster, a video-game designer:
To me, there’s a question hanging over our conversation, which is: What kind of writing do we hope to teach? We might like to teach kids to write like Proust, but no one writes like Proust anymore. Appropriation and annotation are becoming our new forms of literacy. Think of blogs, for example: most blog posts are reblogs, they’re parasitic on things other people have written. It’s a democratized writing, a democratized literacy. (p.39)
Whilst the rest of the article tends to focus on the US’s current fixation (understandable given DOPA) on social networking, the above comment in particular got me thinking. We cannot use old methods when new technologies are available just for the sake of tradition. For example, when I ‘write’ my Ed.D. thesis I’ll have to do around 60,000 words and have it bound, double-spaced, etc. in accordance with the University of Durham’s guidelines. Why? Because that’s what you do when you write a thesis. But wouldn’t a wiki be more valuable? Why can’t I get a doctorate through blogging?
The same thing carries through to students. Just what exactly is ‘cheating’ nowadays, anyway in a Googlised world? This is something picked up by Steve over at Teach42.com in his post The different between ‘cheating’ and cheating. He juxtaposes two different approaches which may be taken by students:
Cheater: When I get an assignement, the first thing I do is Google it. I mean, if the answers are all out there, I’d be foolish to waste my time figuring them out the old fashioned way, right? Somebody has a question, I provide an answer. Do they really care whether I thought of it or not? Of course they don’t, so long as they have their answer. It saves so much time when all i need to do is copy the solution and paste it into a Word document. Next problem.
‘Cheater’: I’m an research ninja. I have networking skills up the wazoo. People bring me problems dealing with issues that I can’t even spell. Often I get them their answers before they even leave my desk. Since I don’t understand what they asked me, or what the answer is, more often than not I usually just IM them a hyperlink. I may not have actually solved the problem, but I pass them along to the person who has. When somebody needs numbers, I find the reports that have them. When somebody needs creative solutions, I find creative people who think outside the box. Whatever you need, I can find it.
What’s the difference? One cites their sources whilst the other doesn’t. One gives credit where credit’s due whilst the other tries to pass off other’s work as his own. What Steve quite sensibly concludes is that instead of playing ever more elaborate and involved cat-and-mouse games with students, we should be teaching them that it’s fine to use other people’s work so long as it’s cited properly. I, for one, welcome the Creative Commons License and all that it offers in the way of allowing others to use your work without ripping it off. Perhaps we should be encouraging our students to publish their work under such a license? :)
Whatever we do, we have a duty to start teaching what Paul Allison has called The Five New Literacies of Web 2.0. These are, he believes:
- blogging (with images)
- writely and wikis
- podcasting, webcasting, video-conferencing
- social networking and aggregators (rss and tags)
- digital storytelling (e.g. mapping)
And these map onto Debbie Meier’s five Habits of Mind:
- The question of evidence, or “How do we know what we know?�
- The question of viewpoint in all its multiplicity, or “Who’s speaking?�
- The search for connection and patterns, or “What causes what?�
- Supposition, or “How might things have been different?�
- Why any of it matters, or “Who cares?�
The second list sounds great; the first I’m not so sure of. Do we really need to teach students how to blog? I’ve never had any formal computer training yet I have what I’d call an ‘approach’ to all things ICT which doesn’t really distinguish between various types of things. I suppose I’d call it my ‘digital self’ if I had to give it a name. It’s a way of doing things that doesn’t really need to be taught, it just evolves. This, of course, comes back to the digital natives and digital immigrants debate – those who have had to learn aspects of ‘being digital’ after developing analogue heuristics learn things in segments or chunks rather than abstracting and seeing how it all fits and meshes together. Perhaps I’m sounding a bit pretentious, but it’s like Neo seeing the Matrix out of lines of code…
Just one more thing and I’ll leave it there – my wife’s calling me for tea and cake. How very English! Dave Warlick in Examples, you say? cites Mr Chase, a teacher from Florida who bemoans the lack of actual examples of blogs, wikis, podcasts, etc. to actually make a difference in education. Dave’s responded by creating yet another blog entitled Best Practices in Blogging and by directing our attention once again to the Support Blogging wiki.
Apologies that I didn’t manage to fit in Jeff Utecht’s My 25% PD post (which is always worth a read), Vicki Davis’ discussion of The Value of Routine, Kathy Sierra’s plea to Give users a Hollywood ending, or Miguel Guhlin and David Jakes’ for and against regarding the use of Flickr and other Web 2.0 services in Flickring — OUT and Flickr-ing IN?
Published on August 20, 2006 · Filed under: Uncategorized;
78 Responses to “Weekly Roundup (20 August 2006)”
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I don’t think that I’ve read your blog before but I like it. However, I disagree with you a little. Yes, much blogging today is repetitive and building on other people’s good ideas. However, I certainly hope that this never becomes the whole blog. I for one am a little insulted when I interpret your writing to mean that just about everything is repetitive. Each morning I type my own ideas for lesson plans related to newspaper articles. I typically create these lessons from scratch and think that the creative process is a lot of fun. I hope that people can never get their Ph.D.s by writing wikis. People must remember their creative impulses or the world won’t develop much further than it already has developed, and that’s a very scary thought. Ok,I’ve got to be honest: I sense your own creativity even in this blog. You’ve added some of your own ideas and used other’s ideas to support your own. You’ll do the same thing in your dissertation when you cite other scholarly articles.
Andrew Pass
http://www.Pass-Ed.com/blogger.html -
Haydn said on August 24th, 2006 at 2:18 pm
Hi Doug,
I see that even your blog is out of date. The latest news on the Planets is that Pluto is out with the other three. Teaching clearly needs people who keep refreshing their understanding and awareness. See this afternoon’s BBC report – http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/5282440.stm
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Haydn said on August 24th, 2006 at 2:28 pm
I’m afraid I have to disagree with Andrew’s comment. In what sense is it possible to say Each morning I type my own ideas for lesson plans related to newspaper articles. What does ‘my own ideas’ mean in this context, where do they come from. Are they brand new knowledge created independent of other relationships and awareness or are they formed and informed in the social process of interaction with Blogs, wikis, podcasts, the press, past experience etc….
I guess by now you’ll realise that my epistemology leads me to believe that most new knowledge is created through interaction, synthesis and development, not from some kind of independent revelation. Thus blogs/wikis which draw on and reform knowledge are themselves evidence of creativity, as my own ideas are dependant on my interaction with the ideas of others.
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I think what Andrew was trying to say that he doesn’t build explicitly on other blog posts and I think he’d probably acknowledge that there’s ‘nothing new under the sun’. We’re all a bundle (although not just a bundle) of memes and genes at the end of the day… :D
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Haydn said on August 24th, 2006 at 4:19 pm
Yes Doug, you may be right in reframing Andrew’s point. But I’d still be inclined to maintain that explicit or implicit building is not significantly different in terms of the potential for creativity.
I’ll leave the not just a bundle for someone to take up in a Theology blog :-)
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Well, I didn’t make them up, but I can’t completely vouch for their veracity either – as I’m relying on others for the information. I did post a slightly updated version of the presentation as well as a list of my sources on The Fischbowl.
Nice post – lots of good stuff to consider here.
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Whenever i see the post like your’s i feel that there are helpful people who share information for the help of others, it must be helpful for other’s. thanx and good job.
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