Fear of Wikipedia
Wikipedia is the greatest democratizing force in the world right now. If you are afraid of letting your students peruse it, it’s time you get with the times.
The 21st century is customizable. In ten years, the teacher who hasn’t yet figured out how to use tech to personalize learning will be the teacher out of a job. Differentiation won’t make you ‘distinguished’; it’ll just be a natural part of your work.
It’s not really a matter of whether teachers will become obsolete; it’s a matter of whether the institutions that currently support learning will become obsolete.
School need to become Centralized Institutions, ‘homebases’ of learning… not the institutions where all learning happens. Buildings will get smaller and greener, student and teacher schedules will change to allow less people on campus at any one time, and more teachers and students will be going out into their communities to engage in experiential learning.
“The new technologies have highlighted the ENORMOUS importance of human interaction in teaching/learning processes”
Sarah Guri-Rosenblit, Education and Psychology Department, Open University of Isreal
My sister in-law, Melody Whitehead, ran the torch in Woodstock on Dec 27, 2009. It was very exciting and she looked great.
My sister in-law and my nephews at the relay
Everyone at the relay got a big kick out of my dog, Katie-Kate wearing my hockey jersey.
Many people took her picture and then the official video guy came around. Once Katie walked toward the camera, my sister Linda commented that action would get her on TV. Well close enough, it got her on the official Olympic Torch Relay site. Visit the official site here.
Check it out. She appears around the 1 minute mark. about 2 seconds of fame… I love it!
Keeping up isn’t easy but the best way to start is by participating. Personal use is a pre-condition for any kind of comprehension or competency with educational technology.
Try a new digital tool
Play with it
Read about it
Talk about it
Watch it being done
‘Show and Tell” it with peers
You don’t need to go out and implement fresh strategy every time you read a new blog post or editorial, but just integrate yourself into the conversation. You don’t need to read the whole instruction manual (unless you are a type A personality). Well designed and programed technology is user friendly and easy to pick up… the digital generation demands it. You know this generation; they have a strong tendency to just jump right in as if they were a kid jumping into water. Maybe we should approach this digital stuff like a kid.
Just this past week, I was playing soccer with my 5 yr old nephew. He has great skills on the ball but he has never taken a shot from a pass. So I gave him a pass to kick into the net. He missed the ball and landed on his butt. He bounced right back up and tried again. On only his second try he put it in the net with perfect form. Watch the little ones learn with eyes and minds wide open. The little ones make mistakes all the time without fear and learn from them. Their first step is to participate.
I personally have resisted cell phones. I find them very disruptive but… the smartphones has become the Swiss Army knives of the digital age thanks in large part to the iPhone, introduced in 2007, and the App Store, which opened its doors last year. With 90,000 apps available and a lot of them free or a small fee, how can you not participate and stay connected.
We live in a subject truth based on our cultural narratives.
Devdutt Pattanai does a wonderful job discussing the cultural narratives through our mythologies. He uses mythology to explain the different business practices of India and the West but this can also help us understand the many other practices of our cultures. Can we use this understanding to help the communication between cultures on a global stage.
We are becoming a global society with more informal conversations between cultures, we can create a new narrative that could include the preservation the planet. Our Western culture is all about concur and take what you need NOW before your death. Other cultures, like India, belief in multiple lives therefore you have to preserve the earth for your next life. (I might be wrong here)… but it is exciting to learn about how other cultures view ‘the world’.
Technology can help facilitate the communication between cultures. Social media and social networking allows all voices to be heard. Educational Technology can connect students from differently countries to discuss and learn from each other.
Will we transform/change our Western narrative if we listen to other narratives? We will become a melting pot or a tossed salad of cultures. It may be our digital generation that moves our cultures together to create a new narrative.
Social media (the sharing web) is growing at a exponential growth. Gary Hayes decided to put together this little Flash app (which is in constant development) showing how active & dynamic the Social Web is.
Below are some of the key data points that the ‘Gary’s Social Media Count’ is based on (many will be updated!).
20 hours of video uploaded every minute onto YouTube (source YouTube blog Aug 09)
Facebook 600k new members per day, and photos, videos per month, 700mill & 4 mill respectively (source Inside Facebook Feb 09)
Twitter 18 million new users per year & 4 million tweets sent daily (source TechCrunch Apr 09)
iPolicy UK – SMS messaging has a bright future (Aug 09)
900 000 blogs posts put up every day (source Technorati State of the Blogosphere 2008)
UPDATE: YouTube 1Billion watched per day SMH (2009)- counter updated!
Second Life 250k virtual goods made daily, text messages 1250 per second (source Linden Lab release Sep 09)
Money – $5.5 billion on virtual goods (casual & game worlds) even Facebooks gifts make $70 million annually (source Viximo Aug 09)
Flickr has 73 million visitors a month who upload 700 million photos (source Yahoo Mar 09)
Mobile social network subscribers – 92.5 million at the end of 2008, by end of 2013 rising to between 641.6-873.1 million or 132 mill annually (source Informa PDF)
SMS – Over 2.3 trillion messages will be sent across major markets worldwide in 2008 (source Everysingleoneofus sms statistics)
Thank-you to all faculty who have been working with students to create a flexible, but fair approach during the H1N1 situation and the bus strike.
We thank those professors who are:
• posting course notes,
• presentations and
• weblinks to other resources
on their FOL course websites. This will help student stay with the course or catch up. Some teachers are even using Elluminate sessions to assist with missed material.
We encourage the other professors to consider posting materials you have prepared for your classes and any additional material on your FOL course websites.
You may also want to encourage students to form study groups and/or share their course notes. This can be done individually via e-mail or more systematically through the scanning of notes into PDF files and depositing them in a discussion forum on FOL. Of course, students should understand that the notes of other students may vary in quality and quantity of information, so they should evaluate those notes accordingly.
You may have other ideas and suggestions which would be helpful for students who need to catch up, we encourage you to share these ideas with your colleagues. Please add your ideas in the “Leave a comment” section on this blog. Scroll down
A TED video on the physical world interacting with the world of digital data. No longer will we need desktop computes or laptops. No longer will we have to sit for hours in front of a machine interacting with a machine (computer). We can get information while interacting with our physical world.
Pranav Mistry, an MIT graduate student has created a device called the SixthSense that uses our physical gestures and interactions with real-world objects and integrates/combines them with data (digital information) for ‘just in time” knowledge building.
He hopes that this will solve the digital divide. All equipment needed is extremely cheap and the software is open source. You only need a wireless connection to the internet.
Near the end of the video he shows how his device makes working with digital data the same as working with information in a physical form (on paper)
I love it. I can hardly wait until it becomes the norm.
We will still need digital literacy, like what is a pixel, but the confinements of desktop and laptop will no longer exist.
I am also working on a paper on Digital Literacy for Higher Education Educators. I am using this public arena to get my thoughts together and hopefully get some feed back.
Web 2.0 is a new era where, unlike web1.0 where we only took in information, we now have a 2-way system:
take in
push out
(also known as communication)
We take in, transform, remix, remodel, refine from our point of view (our cultural point of view) and then push out to social media like blogs, wikis, 2nd life ect.
In this new era, we need a digital grammar and syntax of media -> mechanics of using media as well as the critical eye.
Defining Digital Literacy:
Tabatha Newman defines Digital literacy = digital tool knowledge + critical thinking + social awareness
Josie Fraser defines Digital literacy = digital tool knowledge + critical thinking + social engagement
Howard Rheingold defines Digital literacy = attention + participation + collaboration + network savy + critical assumption (dealing with the crap)
Howard feels it is no longer a question of ‘growing up digital’ or the ‘digital divide’ but it is now the ‘can’ and ‘cannots’. We currently make assumptions about the students that aren’t necessarily true. Since they grow up digital, then they must already know the ‘how to use tech” and must be helped with the critical thinking. But that is not always the truth.
I have come a cross many college students that don’t know how to sign up for google online apps like google docs or why you would use it. I only know of a hand full that know about wikis of blogs. Using a simple online tool like gliffy.com stumps them.
We need to teach
how to use tech tools effectively with teaching and learning
how to transfer the skills learned in one tool to another – teach user interface transferable skills
how to build learning communities with these tools
how to participate
how to recognize authenticity (no crap please)
how to use knowledge to define the new ways of working
Howard Rheingold
Digital divide is no longer have and have not but can and cannot
