Ed Jenkins and some perspective...

Catching up on some reading after a three-day trip I ran into a tweet (a post on Twitter for all you non-twittering folk) from Dan French pointing to the video below. The fellow speaking in the vid is Ed Jenkins, a professor of social media at USC.

Good vid!

After prowling around a bit I found that the speech is an excerpt called "The Tech Fix" from a relatively new PBS FrontLine series called: Digital Nation: Life on the virtual frontier. Digital Nation is followup to a series we've viewed in the Lab here and discussed over the last two years called Growing Up Online. The two series appear to be hashed together on this new site.

I didn't see a place where you could view this new program in it's entirety... which I sort of like. Great material for our recent discussions in the Lab lately on our discussions on the differences between generations, how it applies to learning and technology. Here's an ditty on what we've been discussing:

Generations: Summary from Don Tapscott, Grown Up Digital

Baby Boom:

January 1946 - December 1964: 19 years, producing 77.2 million children, 23% of the US population

Generation X:

January 1965 to December 1976: 12 years, producing 44.9 million children, 15% of the US population. Also called the "Baby Bust."

The Net Generation:

January 1977 to December 1997: 21 years, producing 81.1 million children, 27% of the US population. Also called "Millenials," and "Generation Y."

Generation Next:

January 1998 to present: 10 years, producing 40.1 million children, 13.4% of the US population. Also called "Generation Z.

Some introductory statements that have spurred on discussion:

• "Gen Next" is using technology differently: Cell phone: it's a music player, alarm clock, camera and obtw, it's a phone too.
• Broadcast: Up to about 1997. TV as thee source of news, weather, sports. Listen to what was being told to you. Very little participation by letters to the editor, etc.
• Collaborative Era: 1997-present. Participatory era. Multiple sources for news. Multiple ways to collaborate. Most in the collaborative era don't have a "land line" phone (traditional house phone).
• Writing less, less effective... or differently? Dramatic increase in writing from the broadcast to collaborative era. Online writing via blogs, wikis, facebook, texting.
• The average "boomer" watched roughly 22.4 hours of tv per week.
• TV now as background noise?
• Customization and conversation instead of a lecture.

I skimmed through the Digital Nation site to see if Jenkins had other contributions and I clipped out links (11) that I could find and pasted them below. I'll use these clips as discussion points... probably tomorrow and over the next few days.

Future shock and information overload:

Skill of the Future:

Human 2.0

Socializing:

Is it an addiction:

Mom vs the Computer:

The Human behind the avatar:

Your kids on social media:

The tech fix: This is the one that made it to YouTube that you saw above.

Defenders of the book:

Educational games already at play:

After, well, many years at this... and the journey from music student to consultant (all the way through), lab aide, network administrator, tech coordinator, on through classroom teacher - I still land on the same themes:

• Denial of service is no way to educate people.

• It may not be about "right" and "wrong."

• It's called a "personal computer" not an "institutionalized computer" so lets treat it as such.

• We're close to a tipping point... and always will be so let's keep moving forward.

• What we teach now should be relevant and thought provoking for today... and especially for the future.

• Let's get a computer in every student hands to address the issues of opportunity, equity.

Time to cook dinner! That's a theme I land on frequently too ; P

Mobile post test

How 'bout that.

Sent from batphone.

Help Desk 2.0: Proposing a New Direction for Technology Training and Support on Campus

In the business world a technology support department typically services a similar group of users, hardware and a core group of applications. Workstations in the business environment are often locked down, only certain applications are allowed to run and strict policies govern user activity.

In education though, administration and some classrooms need business class information terminals while some others demand flexibility, the kind of access that allows creative exploration and use.

Further, traditional support structures rarely incorporate anything more than reactionary training initiatives on core support programs (grading, school databases, office applications). As a result most schools have no training programs, sporadic dog and pony shows, or very expensive models that involve IT integration specialists who most often are often not infrastructure literate and train users only on systematic approaches.

With all those variables, IT support departments in education typically structure themselves in a business model. This rigidity often results in stifled educational opportunities.

Education often focuses on training adults and expecting the results to trickle down to students. The cold, hard facts are that students are often more technically literate than adults. Rarely are students provided advanced access, a venue to interact or collaborate in training initiatives or participate in technical support beyond the traditional classroom setting. Incredible opportunities exist if we shift these traditional philosophies.

Building off two years of success with the IT Internship Program, we unrolled this new Help Desk Proposal this Fall. This new model has students and adults working to create a Help Desk for their peers... everyone on campus. Another step in putting the "personal" back in personal computing. Our final round of discussions on this new proposal continue this week. We'll post our detailed plan shortly.

PBS Frontline: Growing Up Online

We queued up the PBS Frontline Documentary called 'Growing Up Online' that aired on January 22nd, 2008 and have been discussing it in the lab. You can view the show online at: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/kidsonline

The documentary stirs up many points on the subject and it's well worth a look... and a good chat.

Lab Prep Underway

Posted the new web site today and made a few modifications. Likely will make some changes over the next few weeks, tweaking here and there. The new web site was built in DreamWeaver and Photoshop. We created a blog on blogger.com and syndicated it to FeedBurner which sports some new tools to include feeds in web pages (FeedBurner was recently bought by Google). Including the new feeds here into this web page with these tools was not difficult at all. Blogger also has some new features that allow users to sign up to the blog and have updates delivered via email. We'll be looking at the improvements to the mobile blogging technology more as the year goes on too.


2 Mac Pros Appear in the Lab:
Configured two Mac Pro workstations in the lab today that should help us out with video, sound and animation explorations. These stations are a lot more powerful than the previous models.

Fired up the old lab music server today. This station takes a licking but keep on ticking. These workstations were not only works of art but they keep running! We have a few more of these stations running in and around the lab still for our server tests, networking lab configurations other experiments.




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Hardware and Networking Lab and the Technology Refurb Program

"If we followed the same logic with

textbooks, we’d have one classroom

set and everyone would share. Here's

one textbook; you have five kids who

have to share it, [and each] gets to

take it one day a week. Obviously, you

limit the options that you have."

Dr Seymour Papert, MIT

Change

Building off a student internship and computer refurbishing program that I ran with comrades where I used to work, we took off in a new direction with a Hardware and Networking course at at BBA in 2005. I took in donations from a University and a handful of businesses and created a workbench style lab for the course: Good old hands on hardware configuration and testing. I brought in some hubs, switches, a wireless router and some cable and we started creating closed testing loops and wired up workstations.

The needs of the Hardware and Networking course quickly moved discussions on the schools Acceptable Use Policy to create more student opportunities. We needed to access the Internet for practical projects beyond what the restrictions at the school could provide. Experiments with Open Source software, virus and spyware/malware work and browser tests to name a few. After some lobbying with the IT Department, the Hardware and Networking Lab was shifted over to it's own cable modem for internet access where routing, workstation and network security, and advanced networking tests took off. Shortly thereafter the IT Staff at BBA was brought into class first as guest speakers and then as regulars to mentor diverse interests and projects. This was the precursor to more advanced Student Internships / Independent Studies at BBA with the IT Department and a shift toward students being included in professional development initiatives on campus.

With continued donations in the first year we established a larger bank of hardware than we could use for testing. We began to refurbish these computers and sent 15 of them on home with students in the first year. Having a computer to learn with rather than one just to access information brings on all sorts of opportunities. Word quickly spread and demands for machines grew.

After the first year the RLab course (Tech Research) was taking flight. I moved into teaching three full section of the RLab and passed the Hardware and Networking course notes and brainstorming from the first innovative group of students (J Lapointe, L Annunziata, M Naples, Z Greene, L Spencer, R Vandelinder, R Lane, P Buckley, C Fries, C Walker and A Tinker) on to Mr. Morrison and the IT Department. Mr Morrison, the IT Department, the Hardware and Networking courses and many IT Internship students continue to expand the refurbishing program.

We still seek donations for this refurbishing program. PCs and Macs are cleaned, loaded with an OS (operating system), updated, software packages are installed and then it's shipped out for use and experiments.

Phase II of this program?

Phase II will look to take in iPods, refurbish them and reallocate them to students for academic projects and experiments.

No doubt this will lead on to other interesting opportunities on campus.

If you would like to donate hardware to this program, contact Kevin Morrison (kmorrison@burrburton.org) or us in the Lab.

Thanks for tuning in, AP