The Dark Side of Technology
My favorite teaching assignment is a class titled “Teaching with Technology.” In this class, we examine not only how to teach with technology but also why to teach with it. We look at ubiquitous computing environments (“one to one programs”) as well as a variety of other models for the effective use of technology to increase student engagement and performance. We have some very thoughtful discussions on whether or not an over-reliance on technology is appropriate. Can too much technology be a bad thing?
According to a recent editorial from the Washington Post–A School That’s Too High on Gizmos–the answer may be yes. Patrick Walsh, reviewing the situation at T. C. Williams High School in Alexandria, VA, found that the school’s propensity to buy every latest tech toy and to force the teachers to use them is reducing moral among staff and even causing students to wonder whether or not technology is a useful tool. School administrators seem to thrive on headlines made by the acquisition of the latest and greatest technology, and that “technolust” appears to be driving educational decisions usually left up to classroom teachers.
Clearly, this situation has been brought about by a deep misunderstanding on the part of the school administration about what constitutes good teaching. Gadgets do not produce good teaching. In fact, they may have just the opposite effect if they are not employed properly. Providing tools that teachers need–and ask for–is critical to the success of any school. Case in point–The Denali Borough School District, headquartered in Healy, AK, has a very successful one to one laptop program. There are several factors that are critical to its success. They began by moving to a standards-based assessment system that essentially provided every student with an individualized academic program. They brought teachers in on the decision making process and provided (and continue to provide, in the fifth year of the one to one program) a half day of professional development per week during the academic year. They provide tech support that is oriented toward the needs of educators and not the needs of an IT department. And, they know when to ask their students to close their laptops.
The folks at T. C. Williams seem to have it backwards. They buy the technology and then try to figure out how to use it. Successful programs–and there are many–decide how technology can help them teach and then find ways to acquire it. There’s a huge difference between those two approaches.
Why Do American Kids Hate Books?
A recent ComputerWorld article by Mike Elgan–Will Cell Phones Save Books?–provides some thought-provoking ideas about the general decline of reading in the United States. Elgan quotes a recent article from the New Yorker magazine:
Americans are losing not just the will to read but even the ability. According to the Department of Education, between 1992 and 2003 the average adult’s skill in reading prose slipped one point on a 500-point scale, and the proportion who were proficient — capable of such tasks as “comparing viewpoints in two editorials” — declined from 15% to 13.
Why is this? An article referenced by Elgan–Is A New Dark Age At Hand?–suggests that the process began long before the Internet and the World Wide Web conditioned us to brief explanations, sound bites and video clips. Radio and television began the process; politicians and marketeers exacerbated it, and the Web has made it even easier to avoid the need to read to get information.
So, is the lack of interest in reading a result of technology? If that were the case, you’d expect that the more technology a society has available to it, the less interest there would be in reading. Most countries are experiencing the same decline in reading as the United States, except for one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world–Japan. But why?
It turns out that cell phone novels are very popular in Japan. Cell phone novels are composed on cell phones, downloaded to other cell phones, and read on cell phones. Everyone in Japan has a cell phone, so a potential good read is always with you. Who writes them? Everyone, apparently. The No. 5 best-selling print book in Japan last year, according to the Times, was written first on a cell phone by a girl during her senior year in high school. Mainstream publishers are courting cell phone authors due to the immense popularity of their works.
Elgan believes this is why reading remains a popular activity in Japan. It’s interactive. You’re not simply a consumer of mass media controlled by a few publishing houses trying to make as much money as they can. You can easily choose what you want to read and, more importantly, you can contribute your own work to the system. If you’re a good writer, you’ll probably find an audience. Additionally, you will understand the process of creating literature and what makes good and bad literature.
Switch back to the US for a minute. How do we teach children to love reading? Assign them all the same novel? Make them write a book report? Take a test on the contents?
Could we do it any worse?
Macintosh Graphics Software
Macintosh computers ship with an astonishing array of incredibly useful media software. The iLife suite (iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iTunes and iWeb, GarageBand) provides wonderful tools for creating and publishing media files across a variety of platforms. (Why a musician would buy any computer that did not ship with GarageBand is beyond me.) Intel-based laptops have been shipping with the incomparable Comic Life for quite some time. Even the viewer application Preview has excellent tools for cropping, resizing and adjusting photo a range of color parameters for photos.
It strikes me a strange, then, that Macintosh–the platform that included the wonderful MacPaint and MacDraw applications from its first incarnation–does not ship with simple drawing and painting software. This omission is particularly problematic in K-12 education. Kids love to draw, and their illustrations often form essential elements in their stories. Schools with limited budgets must often overlook drawing and painting applications in order to acquire word processing and spreadsheet software. What’s a third grader to do?
Fortunately, there are some solutions that fill the gap nicely. In this post, I’m going to concentrate on freeware applications that are usable by even elementary students. (I’m saving higher-end programs such as GIMP–a full-featured PhotoShop alternative–that are too complex for younger students for a future post.)
Seashore
Seashore is a free painting program with a surprisingly strong array of tools. All the expected tools are there–paint brush (with lots of options), eraser, pencil, fill bucket, magic wand (for selecting colors) and marquee tools for selecting areas of your painting. There’s also a smudge tool for blending colors and a PhotoShop-like clone (rubber stamp) tool. You can control the transparency of your paintings and even paint with a large variety of included textures. For more advanced artists, you can add layers and manage red, green, and blue color channels.
Tools are easy to select and understand even for younger students. It’s a fine all-around painting program that should be on every K-12 Mac.
Image Tricks
If your graphics needs run more toward the photo processing side, consider Image Tricks from BeLight Software. Image Tricks uses the Mac’s built-in Quartz imaging tools to create an easy and fun to use photo editing environment. You can open or paste in photos or scanned images from any source (a handy link to iPhoto is available) and alter them to your heart’s content. Apply filters, change colors, rotate and distort images, crop and resize photos, and save in jpg, png, tif, gif, and even pdf formats. The Masks feature lets you apply borders and frames to your images. All filters can be easily tweaked to create beautiful and unusual effects. The tools are easily accessible and encourage experimentation and exploration.
Mac users already have powerful photo editing tools in iPhoto and Preview. But Image Tricks has some new and exciting capabilities that expand the possibilities for working with photos. And–it’s tons of fun.
Digital Citizenship
Well, I seem to have managed to get through November without a single post. My bad. I’ve been on the verge a couple of times but other priorities have taken over.
It’s in that context that I’m glad that this post from Alec Couros came across my virtual desk this morning. I needed to be jolted out of my complacency, and Alec’s post did just that.
This is going to be a short entry, because what you really need to read is Alec’s post. In it, Alec poses some powerful questions about what it really means to be a good citizen in a world saturated with social networks, virtual acquaintances, viral videos, instant fame (or infamy), cyberbullying, large-scale hoaxes, and issues of personal privacy. It is one of the few articles I have ever seen on the responsibilities of digital citizens as opposed to their rights. There are many powerful ideas discussed here.
Enough said–read the article and make sure your colleagues and post-secondary students read it as well. And keep the discussion going. This is important.
Listen to Any Good Books Lately?
Today’s post points to a variety of free online audio resources. These resources can provide valuable primary and supplemental tools for teaching and review as well as links to research materials for students.
LibriVox
LibriVox is the mother-of-all free audiobook resources on the ‘Net. Nearly 1000 titles are available, all searchable by title, author, category, and genre. Most of the classics are here as well as many modern and contemporary essays. Files are available in mp3 or ogg vorbis formats. Where available, links are provided to text versions (e.g., from Project Gutenberg) of the material. All recorded books are in the public domain in the US, and all are read by human readers. There is an RSS feed available to alert you when new materials are added, and you can even volunteer to be a reader.
Project Gutenberg Audio Books
Known mostly for its vast array of public domain print books, Project Gutenberg also offers many of its titles as audiobooks. Entries are read by human readers (or by synthesized voices; see below) and are available in many different audio formats, including mp3, m4b (iTunes/iPod), and ogg vorbis. Project Gutenberg no longer adds synthesized books to its library, preferring instead to use human readers, but they are migrating to an “on demand” service for delivering synthesized text to visually-impaired individuals. My favorite feature of PG is the full-text search capabilities, allowing the reader to search for occurrences of words or phrases within the texts themselves. Of course, PG also supports searching by author, title, etc.
Free Classic Audiobooks
This site offers a limited range of titles (around 60), but the offerings are compelling–from Huckleberry Finn to Alice in Wonderland to Shakespeare’s Sonnets to Notes from the Underground to the 911 Commission Report. Roughly half are read by humans; the remaining titles using an “advanced” synthesized speech that is quite understandable. All titles are available in mp3 format and in m4b format for iPod or iTunes. Books are segmented into chapters for easier downloading or downloading of specific chapters (great for review purposes). I love throwing these on my iPod for long car rides. They also make great review items for high school British and American literature classes.
LearnOutLoud.com
This web site is a portal to thousands of online books, lectures, podcasts, and videos on a wide variety of topics. Some are for purchase, but LearnOutLoud offers a directory of hundreds of free audio and video resources arranged by topic, including Arts, Literature, Science, and Language. (Scroll down the page to find the free directory.) Items in a topic can be sorted in several ways, including alphabetically, by author, or by title popularity.
I Hear Voices
Three very interesting web sites came my way in the last few days, all dealing with the spoken word. Each is a fascinating resource with lots of potential for teaching and research.
The goal of Historical Voices is “to create a significant, fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century – the first large-scale repository of its kind. Historical Voices will both provide storage for these digital holdings and display public galleries that cover a variety of interests and topics.” The current galleries point to a wide variety of rich content, and the site features excellent Research and Education areas that include lesson plans, tips for creating aural resources, and example lessons. Historical Voices uses a Flash-based player for audio files stored on its own site, but you may find that you’ll need a variety of audio players (e.g., Real Player) for some of the off-site links.
Talking History takes a somewhat different approach to preserving and presenting aural history. Their mission–“to provide teachers, students, researchers and the general public with as broad and outstanding a collection of audio documentaries, speeches, debates, oral histories, conference sessions, commentaries, archival audio sources, and other aural history resources as is available anywhere”–is similar to that of Historical Voices (above). To implement their mission, Talking History produces a series of eponymous weekly radio/Internet broadcasts which are archived on the web site and are fully searchable. Other educational and production resources are available as well. Aural files are accessible through Real Player or may be listed to as mp3 files with QuickTime Player, iTunes, or virtually any media player.
Finally, there is the Speech Accent Archive. This site “uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed.” It provides a fascinating way to explore different accents. Speakers are categorized by biographical data (age, gender, birthplace, native language, age of English acquisition, etc.) and their speech is carefully transliterated into a native phonetic inventory which is thoroughly documented on the site. You can browse for speakers by language or region, and there is an excellent bibliography of language resources and links to related web sites. The audio files are in QuickTime (.mov) format.
The New Sputnik
I suspect many readers of this blog are not old enough to remember Sputnik (1957) and the massive changes that it brought to math and science education in our nation’s K-12 and post-secondary schools. But we are all beneficiaries of those changes. After Sputnik, the United States embarked on an extended emphasis on math and science that produced the technology that we use today, from computers to cell phones to GPS to the Internet. Sputnik was the wake-up call that jolted us out of our complacency and forced us to make some important changes to the way we educated our children.
In 50 Years Later, A New ‘Sputnik’ Crisis: The War of Minds, James Goodnight makes a very strong case for the need for a “new” Sputnik. The threat that concerns Goodnight–and most educators–isn’t as immediate or as obvious as Sputnik, but it’s potentially more pernicious. It’s the war for the minds of our children and the pressing need to use technology to reform education. Many countries that have invested significantly in education–China, India, Korea are cited–are producing more engineers and scientists than we are. Our students use a staggering array of technology, but very little of it gets used in school for learning activities. Where are the next technological innovations coming from–from a country of kids with iPods and cell phones or a country with advanced educational practices aided by technology?
And speaking of using technology in education, the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) initiative seems to be nearing fruition after three years of fits and starts. For those of you unfamiliar with OLPC, it’s an effort to design a rugged, self-powered wireless laptop that can be produced in massive quantities and used by poor children in developing and third world countries so that they can gain an educational advantage. David Pogue, technology reviewer for the New York Times, has an excellent review of the XO laptop in an article called Laptop With a Mission Widens Its Audience. The article includes a nice video that demonstrates the major features of the laptop, some of which are not available on any existing laptop. I love the networking features, for example.
Would you like to get your hands on one of the XO laptops? As it turns out, you can. OLPC is making the laptops available for purchase in the United States for two weeks only on November 12. For $399, you can buy one for yourself and donate one to a child in a developing country. You get a laptop, a tax deduction, and the ability to help a child in the third world. Pretty nice Christmas present…
