apple juice

the world of education is a slow moving beast, but watching the internet devour the newspaper might provide an interesting parallel to what could happen to “education” should we ever really unleash the internet on schools

“School was the big thing for a long time. School is tests and credits and notetaking and meeting standards. Learning, on the other hand, is ‘getting it’. It’s the conceptual breakthrough that permits the student to understand it then move on to something else. Learning doesn’t care about workbooks or long checklists.”

(Via Seth’s Blog: Education at the crossroads.)

Now we’re trying the same trick with collaborative social technology, applying digital socialism to a growing list of wishes—and occasionally to problems that the free market couldnt solve—to see if it works. So far, the results have been startling. At nearly every turn, the power of sharing, cooperation, collaboration, openness, free pricing, and transparency has proven to be more practical than we capitalists thought possible. Each time we try it, we find that the power of the new socialism is bigger than we imagined.

via The New Socialism: Global Collectivist Society Is Coming Online .

This article neatly ties up a lot of the thoughts I’ve been rolling around. The big question is, how do we apply this logic to education? What do your SAT scores matter if you can’t collaborate with others? I’d like to make the terms ‘project’, ‘paper’ and ‘test’ synonymous with ‘group’.

And, I think ‘digital socialism’ is a much nicer term than ‘dot-communism’.

This NYTimes article, Psst! Need the Answer to No. 7? Just Click Here. Hits on the same idea, from a different angle:

Course Hero offers three million student-submitted items from 400,000 courses at more than 3,500 institutions, including lecture notes, study guides, presentations, lab results, research papers, essays and homework assignments. Users who submit such items can navigate the site free of charge; others pay a monthly fee. Mr. Kim declined to say how many users had registered beyond “hundreds of thousands” and said they included more than 1,000 professors using the site to refresh their teaching materials.

The emphasis is mine, but these professors are the ones who are seeing value in the network, and using it to better their own work.

It will be a defining shift in the education system, when sharing and cooperation are the norm for students.

this is why I love my job. I get to promote things like this:

“to compose, and to compose successfully in the 21st century, you have to not only excel at verbal expression and written expression, but you also have to excel in the use and manipulation of images.”

Graduate school forces you to overinvest: It’s too high risk.

via Don’t try to dodge the recession with grad school | Penelope Trunk’s Brazen Careerist.

This was an interesting article to read as I occaisionally entertain the thought…

Readability is a simple tool that makes reading on the Web more enjoyable…

Sold!

Readability – An Arc90 Lab Experiment.

just attended my first session at necc2008, 1:1 Laptops and Seamless Integration: Peek into the Frontier presented by Howard Levin of Urban School in SF.  I visited his school two years ago, as we were preparing to roll out laptops for all of our students. the key message that we learned at the time was (in the words of mary) “it’s not about the technology“. it became our mantra, spoken with gusto and an undetermined east coast accent.

now, two years later, i was quite interested to hear about Urban’s thinking, now in their seventh year of integrated laptops. many of the messages are the same, “making the laptops disappear”, “enhancing writing is enhancing thinking”. i think the mantra holds true, it is really not about the technology.

i watched as questions were flying at Howard afterwards about this specific technology and that specific technology, and i remember how we must have sounded when we visited. probably asking many of the same questions.

there were a number of ideas presented, many were the same ideas as before, still as strong as ever for enhancing learning. using audio+email to enhance language learning and music. using video and still cameras as inspiration for art. using inspiration to brainstorm and outline. good ideas never get old. the challenge is simply doing it. getting teachers to shift their model. as i reflect on how far we’ve progressed in just the past two years, i am very excited about the next couple years. we’re not doing all of this yet, but we’re on the road.

two things that howard presented that were shifts for me. first was his statement that they were going 100% on their smartboards. he said that this represented a shift for them as a school, that he was a previous critic, and he has changed his mind. he showed a quick video of a math teacher using great use of her smartboard.

second was the voice recognition software. i wonder what the reaction would be if we outfitted some students with this technology? would the teachers or other students think differently about the work that was produced? personally, i don’t think that it should be viewed any differently, but i just wonder. I will have to discuss this with the others in my group and see what they think.

i had the great opportunity to see thomas friedman speak on friday in downtown mpls. a few of our students won an essay contest, giving them the opportunity to go, and i lucked out and got to go along for the ride. i figured that i had a pretty good angle in going, besides my admiration for mr. friedman‘s work, he has a lot of good and interesting things to say about education and the internet.

how do you live and act in a horizontal world? information, facts and opinions galore can be downloaded from the internet. what can’t be dowloaded though is your values and judgement. your “internal software” as mr. friedman puts it. that internal software is written by you and you alone. your parents, your teachers, and your spirtual leaders will help you write that software (and maybe even try and write it for you) but in the end, only you can write that software.

mr. friedman states this far more elegantly than my “grandma rule”, but I think the concept is the same. in the dark corner of the internet, what will you do? stripped of any external social, parental, or educational guidance, how will you act?

most people reading this will not jump up and down in unison at this moment and yell “like a numbskull! we’re going to act like numbskulls!” but that is in fact how a lot of people act when they get behind the false anonymity of the internet.

take a public space like the wikipedia. it is one of the greatest experiments of our time. but, hand a fifteen-year-old point a can of electronic spray paint and watch what happens. in a public, physical space, (the mall for example), teenagers are (mostly) able to keep themselves in check. head to the internet, get behind the screen and it’s not only teenagers that can’t keep it together.

so the internal software becomes more important. a closer relationship with your parents becomes more important. good teachers that teach the love of learning are more important. moral and ethical guidance is more important today than it ever was.

in the places where no one is watching, how will you act?