What will we lose when books die?

I’ve been struggling with what might be the long-term implications of focusing too much on digital books, and less and less on the those made from dead trees. We know, how for practical reasons, libraries have been looking away from book stacks and into what e-books could offer.

I also noted recently my disappointment at one aspect of the ‘death of print’ –  the news that Britannica is ceasing to go into print. Some of my friends thought it was a good thing. One said it was cumbersome to have to dig into journals for knowledge he needed fast.  I was interested not in what it meant for us in the now, as to what it meant for present younger (and future) generations, who automatically think that search engines index and reveal everything there is to know on a particular subject.

So I was glad to stumble on Matthew G. Kirschenbaum’s point of view. He is the associate professor of English at the University of Maryland, and author of “Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination.”

Walking the stacks, following a footnote or checking out what’s on the shelf above P96.T42K567 2007 is a bit like getting a glimpse at the ducts and plumbing behind the drywall. Or the Web site’s source code.

He goes on to say that books teach us to ask the key questions “Who wrote that? Where are the competing voices? How is it organized? By what (and whose) terms is it indexed? Does it have pictures? Can I write in it myself?”

Libraries are wonderful content gardens that rejuvenate the mind. I have a few that I love, and one that really irks me, but I still go back! I always wondered why they draw me and my children.After all, aren’t they gravitating to all things digital?

Kirschenbaum’s explanation is so apt: “Even the grossest physical failings of books and libraries, the maddening frustration of the book that is lost or checked out just when you need it most can instill an important lesson: knowledge is proximate.“

Indeed!  It’s hard to accept that not everything is a click away!

 

“Trends of the future? I don’t have a clue!” – Fareed Zakaria

“I honestly don’t know what the great trends of the future or industries of the future will be,” noted Fareed Zakaria in his commencement speech at Harvard.

But he did had some very unusual observations (such as “The world we live in is…profoundly at peace”) of how smart people can and continue to make a difference.

 

‘Face time’ with NASA brings science to life

The fourth rock from the sun is a great place to take students –even if it’s a virtual field trip.

Mars Day turned out to be quite an event last week. With a little help from a remarkable piece of engineering, called a Robonaut to talk about. More about this in a moment.

The Mars event came about after some serendipitous discussions with NASA. I asked them out of the blue if we could have someone from the Space Station call in to my class. (Yes, I entertain big, hairy audacious goals!) I thought the folks with more Ph.ds than you could shake a stick at would never get back to me, but within a few days, someone did. Cassie Bowman must be accustomed to such calls, and quickly began to connect the dots.

Turns out the Mars Space Flight Facility, at Arizona State University, has researchers working on the Curiosity Rover. Cool stuff involving software that lets that SUV-sized robot communicate with earthlings.

A robot was great point of focus.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, ASU loaned me the wheel of the elder rover, Opportunity, which we displayed in a bed of red rocks, in the library. In my classes, sprinkled with space science and robotics, there’s nothing like a titanium wheel to get children to ask questions.

As for the day itself, we planned it around a series of hands-on sessions with three groups of students – fourth, fifth and sixth graders. Sheri Klug-Boonstra who set up the activity asked students to identify a mystery planet from boxes of artifacts brought back from a hypothetical team of explorers. They analyzed rocks, slivers of fur, shards of metal-like substances, and twigs. Teams were asked to predict what kind of planet this was, and what kind of life it must have sustained. Results were collected on Post-It notes and reviewed.

If this seemed like a great way to see science as a series of discoveries, it was book-ended by two other events:

• A poster competition that we launched ten days ahead.

• A video-conference with Kody Ensley.

Never heard of Kody? He’s a young Native American who was recently hired by NASA. Kody works on the Robonaut project at the Johnson Space Center, designing a humanoid robot that can work side-by-side with astronauts.

Something magical happens when students who tend to see a planet, and the space station, as way out of their reach, connect with a “real” scientist, in the middle of this fascinating science. They asked him about why he took to science, and what planet he would send the next robot to, if he had a chance.

We used FaceTime, an iPad app that lived up to its name, making the distance between Houston, Texas, and Scottsdale, Arizona disappear. It could have easily been a downlink from the space station.

This story, cross-posted from my education blog, Voices On!

 

And then life threw me a lesson plan

For more than a year, I have been making a transition from corporate communications to education. I have been given an opportunity to be a computer teacher at an elementary school in Scottsdale, Arizona.

It’s an amazing time to be joining a profession that’s getting lots of attention. And scrutiny. From the recent schoolteachers’ walkout in Chicago, to the just out Nations Report Card, among others, the story is not exactly cheerful.

Meanwhile, as knowledge acquisition is moving an 120 miles-per-hour, pedagogy is ambling along.  I can see this through the lens of our two children, as new engagement tools emerge, and curricula change. Analog classrooms are trying to adapt to digital natives. Britannica now has an app for the iPad and other tablets. Classrooms are being ‘flipped.’ We can’t continue to do the same old, same old.

If there’s a simple lesson plan for my career, it’s this: push students to the edges. Focusing on ‘core’ areas, but also widen the aperture. Knowledge of ‘computers’ without context of where they are used, is meaningless. Often it’s the topical things we introduce in class that make planned (not canned) lessons relevant. One study last year found that students who did “science-related activities that are not for schoolwork” performed higher.

TO KICK OFF, I re-positioned the computer class as a Technology and Computer Lab, in which students will engage in subjects from space exploration to search engines.

Being the school’s robotics coach helps. This is a program established by the FIRST Lego League. Students can step out of their comfort zone and take risks, even while engaging their math and design skills.

Each day, the lens zooms in and widens…

 

 

Curating Content With Glogster

I’ve been experimenting with Glogster recently, and plan to use this in my teaching.

It’s like a more multi-media version of Pinterest.  The interface still needs more work, but I could see how it could definitely become a tool in the any presentation, or classroom.

Check this out.

 

Searching for context, more than keyword dumpster diving

It’s frustrating to hear people say “I researched that” when they simply mean “I looked it up on Google.”

I believe we have diluted the word ‘research’ by equating it to a one-click action. I’m not trying to say that every topic under the sun needs a deep dive. I’m not suggesting that we turn fact-finding into some geeky task. I’m suggesting that we ought to train our brains to think that knowing something is contextual. There is no pat answer.

Google must know this. It stepped up to the late with the release of what it calls the ‘knowledge graph.’ (I am not a big fan of the term. It has a hint of Zuckerberg;s ‘social graph,’ doesn’t it?) Nevertheless, if you haven’t noticed the contextual info showing up on Google, take a look.

If you’re into the deep dive thing, Google does have a few tricks it tends to hide from the general public.  But there are more. Try these:

Google Scholar - http://scholar.google.com
It provides pages from books, PDFs, scholarly literature, peer-reviewed journals, material found via Google books, and even court opinions. Duke University encourages students to use it!

Patent Search - http://www.google.com/patents?hl=en

Lexis Nexis - http://www.lexisnexis.com
This is not a free service, but it combines information from legal, academic, and corporate knowledge databases.

 

Wikis to books worth experimenting

I often make the point that we spend too much time clicking on links, rather than spending time on the meaning of what we read.

So I thought of experimenting with PediaPress, a service that lets you convert Wikipedia pages into a book.

The book? On Clark University - for my son’s graduation today.

Knowing fully well that information on the university will change, did not bother me. In fact, that’s precisely why I wanted to do it. After all, Wikipedia content is not exactly writ in stone, could be considered as relevant for a moment in time.

(If you’ve been watching how pages get edited, and the edit wars that ensue over single words or phrases, you’ll know that this ‘moment’ sometimes changes several times an hour as a result of furious edit wars!) I want the book to be a sort of  time capsule that he could one day look back on.

PediaPress is basically offering a print on demand (POD) service, but the beauty of this is how simple they have made the steps. There’s very limited customization (the cover and title, plus a preface), but the layout of pages and sections are very clean.

I would have liked a bit more customization, such as:

• The ability to move photographs and charts into separate pages
• Uploading my own photograph for the cover, and a few others for other pages
• An acknowledgment or title page
• Adding text to back cover

But as this was an experiment, I was willing to take the risk.

Other risks. For a different project, say trying to compile a short compendium of knowledge on a breaking news event, or a current topic, using Wikipedia as the source of content is more risky. While the Creative Commons license gives anyone permission to use and re-purpose content, one has to me meticulous about accuracy.

I began to wonder of there are other similar services that let you blend knowledge from multiple sources, and let you add chapters to the book. I’ve looked at Blurb, which offers a Blog-to-Book option. Lulu also has a great service. a cookbook/ A book of poetry/ Wikipedia has a rich selection.

Give it a try!

 

Learning through customization and personalization

Would you be ok to have your child interviewed to be admitted to Kindergarten?

I know  of parents who have prepped their children for that face-to-face admission evaluation process widely used today by Charter schools. Hard to argue with this if we really want a revolution in education.

So, what if students are required to qualify to be admitted to school? Many schools resort to a lottery system, since there are a few hundred openings but a few thousand applications! But in addition to this, there’s the student interview. It’s a bit like applying for a job. One Pennsylvania charter school, Tacony Academy, has this requirement:

“each student must complete an Independent Research Presentation and present the results to a panel of teachers and administrators.

 The Independent Research Presentation should be science related and either follows Scientific Method, the Question-Answer model, or the Problem-Solution model.”

This kind of motivation tells a school how to better customize a program to the student.

Speaking of which, Ken Robinson makes a great observation as to why education should not be served like fast food.

 

Since students are digital, are classrooms too analog?

I just spoke to a parent of a student, frustrated that the standard in a so-called ‘high achievement’ school seems to be dropping. The unspoken question seems to be “why are schools still stuck in the Reading, Writing, “Rithmetic rut?” Or, as some wonder, why are schools not educating the whole child?

A reports earlier this month in TIME magazine, Why it’s time to Replace ‘No Child Left Behind’ is enough to make one agitated!

Many studies say that rut in question, is an obsessive exam mentality that needs an overhaul. School systems have become fixated with preparing children to pass exams, but don’t have the resources to prepare them for the other exam out there –the exam known as Life! Which is exactly what that parent was anxious about.

US policymakers have been alerted to this. A recent Harvard study of student achievement on global perspective (EducationNext.Org) found that unless we fix math and reading skills, the outlook in the global economy looks grim.

Not that this is exclusively an US problem.

Europeans, too are worried. A recent study on how education and training is meeting the needs of the digital world and the European economy (‘The Future of Learning: Preparing For Change’) say that schools need to make a fundamental shift if Europe is to remain competitive.  Students will need to be competent in “problem solving, reflection, creativity, critical thinking, learning to learn, risk-taking, collaboration, entrepreneurship.”

Should we take our curriculum back to the drawing board?  Should we redesign the classroom?

Yes, but... If there are is one thing I am frustrated about, it is the rush to plunk computers in front of students, and think this will solve all our problems. The argument goes like this. Our kids are digital natives, so getting them to take down notes on ruled paper, and listen to a teacher is not the best way to engage them.

I work in digital and analog environments, and have been a big advocate of bridging the gap between these two realms. That does not mean replacing one with the other. A tablet will not automatically make a child collaborative and yearn for deeper knowledge, just as (to paraphrase an old saying) owning a library card will not automatically make a person well read. Preparing students for a 21st century workforce requires us to make them much more than just digital. The European JRC European Commission study calls for education to be more “personalized, collaborative, and informalized.” One could write an entire paper on these three areas.

Sure let’s redesign the classroom, but let’s not discount the importance of a value added teacher who brings extra-curricular knowledge into his/her material. In fact, the term ‘High Value Added Teacher’ is now being used by one Harvard study –see video below.

Also, on a more optimistic note, there’s a great experiment about  ’Active Learning Classrooms’ worth watching. I like how it is not just the students, but the teacher who is adapting to the new learning classroom as well. Inspiring video!

 

Will tablets and smart phones kill conversations?

A few weeks back, I passed a sad tableau of an Asian family: a dad and two sons waiting for Mum outside a Chinese grocery store. All three of them were silently thumbing away on their iPhones. In cars, in waiting rooms, the tablet and the smart phone has become the new baby sitter.

Over the past five years, having reported social media’s many benefits I often have to step back and wonder about what it means to be too much digital.

We have become so used to being ignored while having a conversation with someone with a Blackberry that we sometimes take it for granted.

It’s not just an etiquette problem as some have alerted us to in the past few years. It’s a social problem that will have deeper ramifications -too much ‘media’ perhaps - as we marvel at how connected we are.

It generates caricatures such as this and this.

• Smart phones don’t automatically make us smarter. (Perfectly captured in that Geico commercial that poses that rhetorical question.)
• Likewise one more screen in the home won’t make us better informed. While we do see attempts to engage students better using tablets, social media and other digital platforms, parents and educators need to add some caveats. Teaching children media literacy would be a start.

There is a connection between learning to have ‘conversations’ and learning how to learn by deconstructing information presented –a.k.a. discourse analysis. I am planning to connect my Robotics class with a class in Thailand, soon, and have given much thought to the balance of a traditional class with a digital experience where students will talk to each other with and without digital devices. More on this later.

I will leave you with two great pieces :

• “Tablets are good, content is better, and teachers are the best.”
• How the iPad2 will revolutionize education – Fast Company‘s feature from last year

Enjoy! And do send me your thoughts, comments.