The year in ed

I wanted to cap off this year's blogging with a good activity. So I decided to use Wesley Fryer's prompt to read the posts nominated for Most Influential of 2008 in the EduBlog Awards.

Chris of BetchaBlog posted on the New Digital Divide. Just more anecdotal proof that the education field is suffering from the same (digital?) malaise as the library field:

I think what often shocks me the most about teachers who don’t take technology very seriously, is just how far behind they really are. They don’t have any idea just how out of touch they are with the kids they teach each day… kids who in most cases are far too polite to say anything about their teachers’ lack of technology understanding. But trust me, they know who you are…

Some of the classic excuses for why some teachers don’t integrate technology might include the following… how many have you heard before?

• “Im retiring in a couple of years anyway” (yes, but your students are not)
• “I’m too old to learn this stuff”
• “I’m too busy, I don’t have the time”
• “I have too much content to get through” (this one is usually followed by “you just don’t know what it’s like”… ah, yes, I do.)
• “I don’t really like computers” (you don’t have to like them, you just have to use them)
• “I just don’t understand technology” (as though they think no one has noticed that yet)

Chris goes on to say he's most scared about the growing chasm between the "information-wills" and the "information-will-nots." I hear that! Honestly, this has nothing to do with age - I meet just as many younger folks who use these excuses as older ones.

Reading all the nominated posts was a pleasure - it was great to hear diverse voices in the field from all around the world! The international nature of online education dialogue is really what will help change the nature of "doing school" in the 21st century. It's not going to be just one school or one state/province/district or even one country - I now truly believe that the education revolution is going to be driven from a global perspective. Is there even any other? Thomas Friedman only said what was obvious: the world is flat, and we affect each other more than ever on a daily basis.

I can only hope that holds true and that this magnificent online educational community will grow, keep learning, and use their voice to speak for true change and authentic learning experiences for students the world over. This movement is more important than ever: if we're all too busy and cannot make the time to do the important work of our day, what sort of example will we set for youth?

The New Ownership

Today I read two very interesting items:

1) CC Learn reports that

the University of Michigan Library has adopted CC licensing for all of its own content. Any work that is produced by the library itself, and to which the University of Michigan holds the copyrights, will be released under the Creative Commons Attribution Noncommercial license (CC BY-NC).

2) Scott McLeod is blogging on his attempt to convince ISTE that they should ask their conference presenters to apply a CC license to their presentations for the benefit of the larger K-12 .edu community.

It really seems that a larger awareness of Creative Commons, at least among the .edu technorati, is brewing.  Instead of trying to protect and hide intellectual work behind the total wall of traditional copyright, the new conversation looks like it will revolve around how others should be permitted to use that intellectual work.  

This is a significant shift in the traditional ownership concept.  While U of M is purposefully moving forward in a unified direction with their CC licensing, the other side of the coin is seen in the vigorous discussion among the ISTE folks.  I also believe that this is shedding light on the changing nature of conferences in general.

While meeting in person is incredibly powerful and energizing, technology is making it more and more possible to participate in conferences (while not actually attending).  And the possibility of this is awesome, as it promises to break down distance and other barriers to learning.  However, not all conferences might be as open-minded as ISTE.  You want to get a good return on your investment when putting on a conference, and I can see other organizations afraid to even consider asking presenters to release their intellectual work freely.  To some, this may be seen as devaluing the conference experience and letting people "get all the benefits of attending for free!"  

Dedicated conference-goers know that's not the case.  Attending in person has a power that few other experiences can match.  However, restricting ideas to small groups of only a few does nothing to encourage the free flow of innovation.  If we really want to effect change within our professions, we have to think about throwing the doors wide open to see what happens.  

...and, for a whole other spin on this same topic, check out Will Richardson's post on Larry Lessig's new book, Remix.  

she got her head in the clouds (sharada sharada)

Ok, so the song isn't about cloud computing - but it's close :)

I'm glad I waited to blog on this, because I bumped into a great new book on this very topic. The Big Switch : Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google by Nicholas Carr is fascinating. Carr interweaves history with present-day computing by describing the first switch (from dynamos to electric utilities) alongside the second switch (from local hard drives to computing power in the cloud). Just as electric utilities proved to transform business and life in general, so will this trend towards large computing clusters accessible via the "cloud."

For example, check out Amazon S3. This concept promises to unleash computing power to the masses previously only accessible to large corporations. By eliminating investment in hardware and turning storage and processing into a pay-to-play model, anyone with a good idea and a little code can make their digital dreams a reality.

But unlike the electric utility, we are now trading intellectual property. What will Google, or Amazon, or Apple, or MS DO with your data? Will it be protected? Is your data safe? Should a business, for example, risk exposing customer data to the cloud? The ethics of cloud computing are a compelling reason for people to tread this new water carefully. Electricity is value-neutral. Data is not.

So the price may be right, but the true cost of maintaining off-site machinery is (currently) muddled in this electronic age. This may well be the new frontier: web 3.0, where your storage choice can be a game-changer.

NEKLS Tech Day reflections

If a small business owner comes in the door needing resources, web 2.0 tools may very well be the information that makes the difference for them.
(attribution needed; comment if you can remember who said it!)

This was one of the great revelations of NEKLS Tech Day! I feel as though we are all talking about instinctively knowing that these wonderful webby tools and new technological abilities can help our patrons, but in many ways we have to be prepared to draw lines and make connections for them. We need a broad knowledge of different topics, but also of the tools that harness and enhance knowledge for users. Y'know, power to the patron and all :)

I don't believe that we so-called "techie" librarians are really techie in the sense that we have some supernatural knowledge or abilities. I think you can consider yourself techie if you try to keep up with the flow of information evolution, if you try to tread water in this rapidly unfolding world of data storage, retrieval, and creation.

And that was the best part of tech day - getting to commune with other librarians who are trying to do this same thing. Sharon Moreland did a great job making the day possible, as did all the presenters :) Oh, and if you happened to be in my presentation and still want to hear the audio from the videos I've linked to them here.

Happy tech, y'all. I hope we can keep up the good work treading water together :)

P.S. I nearly forgot! The other awesome topic we covered was cloud computing... it nearly needs a post of its own so I will save that for later this month.

the long hot summer

While Scott McLeod notes that global changes are necessary for our American schools to break out of the old mold, our friends across the pond in England are also considering broad, sweeping edu-reform.

Via Schoolgate from the Times Online comes this report from the IPPR: Thursday's Child. A quote from the exec summary:


Besides this plan for a more continuous school year, they also indicate an intense discussion of the role socioeconomic disadvantages play in school readiness and motivation - I'd like to read the whole report one day! (It's behind a pay wall.)

Copyrights (& wrongs)

It's been a busy two months since my last post... besides ALA and some much-enjoyed vacation time, everything seems to have piled up! Off to the right you will see myself and Cory Doctorow, happy to meet briefly at a Tor event in Anaheim. I told him how rad we all found his new YA novel, Little Brother, and he was glad to hear it.

When I got home, I got my new issue of Knowledge Quest in the mail and read with interest the article called "Copyright and Portfolios" by Rebecca Butler. I found the ethical questions of the subject fascinating. It concerns electronic portfolios of graduating seniors where the students have used copyrighted materials such as music and film clips: fair use or infringement? Butler concurs that yes, it's fair use as long as the students were using said clips for public school curriculum and used them to "realize their specific learning objectives." She cites some sources (this was the only online one, sorry) and goes on to say that such "class-generated portfolios" can be used to demonstrate expertise in applications for jobs or higher ed. Butler adds that you should inform students that the portfolios should not be used for profit ("[don't] sell any of the pieces [...] or use them in a paid presentation.")

I was worried after reading this, because a quick scan of the article seems reassuring... if your students have "added entire popular songs to their projects, as well as large clips from movie CDs, DVDs, and videos" then maybe everything is just a-ok and kosher. It takes a close reading of this brief article and a little deep thought to conclude that A) you might need to do more research into fair use before you let students create portfolios with such egregious "sampling" (the last time I checked using a work in its entirety is not sampling) and B) you'll need to figure out how to break it to your students that a more-than-passing understanding of copyright may be the most important "technological skill" thy could have in the 21st century.

While I think it's imperative that students (and citizens) have the right to fair use of copyrighted intellectual work (especially in the cases of criticism and parody), I believe that it may be encouraging intellectual laziness to reach for the latest Coldplay song and pop it in as the musical backdrop to a PowerPoint report. Sure, it's popular culture; sure, it's handy; sure, it's easier in the short run than searching for music where the creators have given explicit permission for its use. I maintain that in the long run, using apparatuses such as Creative Commons can serve to build students' appreciation and understanding of copyright so that they may gradually build up to the use of commercially copyrighted works with full knowledge of the risks and benefits. By making the due consideration of copyright and fair use integral to the construction of such electronic portfolios, we can equip students with skills that they can put to good use in the workplace and/or academia.

Cited:

Rebecca P. Butler. (2008). Copyright and Portfolios. Knowledge Quest, 36(5), 74.

"It's the death of education, but the dawn of learning"

From Scott McLeod, via David Warlick:

"They will be doing work that calls on:
artistic abilities
abilities of synthesis
understanding [of] context
working in teams
the ability to be multidisciplinary, multilingual, multicultural..."

"So the coin of the realm is not memorizing the facts that they're going to need to know for the rest of their lives, the coin of the realm will be:

do you know how to find information?
do you know how to validate it?
do you know how to synthesize it?
do you know how to leverage it
do you know how to communicate it?
do you know how to collaborate with it?
do you know how to problem solve with it?

That's the new 21st century set of literacies, and it looks a lot different than the model that most of us were raised on."



And, predictably, I most noted the portion where the woman talks about student-centered learning, and "doing school" moves to the periphery - where school as a place is just one of the many places where students can engage in learning. Libraries and museums were mentioned, as was the community and home (and online!). This notion fundamentally challenges the idea of segregating youth in neatly labeled buildings for 8 hours a day, and creates the opportunity for more authentic learning experiences. "Just-in-time" learning will trump the traditional model of "just-in-case" learning.

My question is: we've been talking about this new and necessary way of educational thinking for quite a while now... what needs to be done to make the vision take hold? What could we do in our communities to take charge and create change? If this really is "the dawn of learning," what we need is a compass that points east and a map that will get us there.