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

Oh the times they are a changin'

I just finished up a few hours work porting the RLab web site over to this new blog. The old site was a hybrid effort of some dreamweaver, Photoshop and a blog. There were a few reasons for the change:

Let's face it, blogger.com is more reliable than any service we can put up in a business or a school.

Blogger and other similar web sites have all the issues figured out with serving up the info on multiple browsers, especially those on mobile phones.

It's free.

Students wanted to make the site more compatible with rss feed readers.

Students wanted to include the ability to have readers comment on posts.

Foremost, though listed last, students will be adding a significant amount of content here this year.

While I'll miss regular dreamweaver sessions, Photoshop tinkering and such, it's more the nostalgia I'll miss than anything. I started out creating web pages back in the day writing HTML code with notepad. Focusing on content will be a gas as will posting from this phone during class. Blogger has many custom layout options, like the ones at pyzam.com for instance, that make it very easy to make changes as well as many other templates and custom build options. We'll see what happens.

Mission accomplished.

As I mentioned before, I picked up an iPhone this summer. I've spent some time with it as a reader... using it to soak up books, blogs, podcasts and journals out there that I used to read on a computer. The result? I'm reading more. It's been stellar. I still enjoy the feel of a book, the pages, etc but... This has been more convenient for me, easier on the eyes - hey I read a lot and the text size on the phone is adjustable, as is brightness, portait or landscape layout etc. Podcasts in particular have been great to have more readily available on the go. An iPod aint just about music ya know! As I mentioned on another post earlier, having an iPod, a phone, web access and apps like this all on one device has been just the ticket.

That gets us onto a few other similar threads.

I dove into facebook this summer. Many thanks to some former and current students for showing me the ropes. I've discovered I should have jumped in long ago. Now, I'm not advocating that it beats a good sit down chat, but let's face it, it sure beats conventional mail, email and smoke signals. I stayed away from it for so long only because I felt I had no time to dive in and not because of the fact I teach and coach. I've always felt and still advocate that you shouldn't post things online you don't want people to see. It's really that simple.

That brings up the concept of "friending" in facebook. When I jumped in I was surprised how many friend requests I recieved. Many folks have contacted me to be friends who I barely know. Some of those requests are still waiting in the confirm or ignore space. Well discuss this in the Lab quite a bit this year. In all, facebook has been a stellar communication tool an I'm looking forward to using it more. Go figure.

After a summer of wailing on an iPhone and all it's mobile connectivity and literacy power, facebook and a slew of reading, I've come to the same conclusion: mobile computers are still no substitute for a laptop. While its convenient and there are numerous opportunities for creativity, collaboration and literacy, a laptop has far greater creative potential. Two things pull to the surface as I sit here: 1. Folks that don't have this sort of access are really missing something. 2. Students in particular are at a distinct disadvantage if they don't have access to a computer... Because school is supposed to be a creative place rather than just a place to access information isn't it? Therein lies the discussion on "institutional vs personal" computing." Putting the personal back in personal computing makes the most sense.

Now, it's not to say that iPhones in education or netbooks for that matter are not worth their salt. It's just that a computer, with all it's potential and power to create, program, edit sound and video, to draw, etc is better. I don't believe waiting for devices to evolve further will get us closer... Otherwise we will never stop waiting.

We've been discussing laptops here for education for four years and I'm hoping the discussions move forward in this coming school year.

Yes, I'm interested to see how the Apple tablet computer rumors sugar out.

We switched to Google Apps this past year and the results have been stellar. We increased reliability, ease of use, the number and depth of tools available and the training material, shifted IT support staff time away from hardware and configuration time to working with people and... It was all free. We have more money to direct toward bandwidth and other educational needs. We've also participated in many Statewide discussions and chats with other schools. Mission accomplished. Well, almost...

One last item remains with Google Apps here and that is in the functionality of the Google desktop, commonly known as iGoogle. The functionality was disabled last year due to the fact that some controversial material could be added... Swimsuit flashcard style shows sort of stuff. What were hoping to bring forth this year is that we'll gain far more by talking about creative use than denial of service. The aggregation of data, the ability to essentially "create your own newspaper" far outweighs the other concerns. Building user sophistication will get us further. In just two days of tinkering with folks on iGoogle in the Lab we made some great strides and then it was shut off. Discussions should resume soon.

This lends me toward another thought though. As tools get more integrated will we need instituitional email any longer? We are already seeing sites integrate with each other. I use Twitter and now it's possible to send my "tweets" (posts on Twitter) to facebook and delicious (delicious.com). It's pretty common for folks to forward mail from seperate accounts to one they routinely use. Many folks I know forward mail from multiple accounts to one single one and then sign the note with the appropriate "from" signature. Google Voice is headed in this direction on the phone side, giving you the tools to be your own phone hub... ring all your phones at once, route certain callers to certain phones... for free. How long will it be before academic institutions are challenged to abandon their email systems? We shall see. For now, the tools are not integrated well enough and there's great power in having access to lots of tools (we could go back to the laptop for students thread here but I'll move on... you get the idea).

Writing this on a phone while I sit on the deck overlooking the water on Lake Champlain still seems surreal to me in a way. So does sending it to the new RLab blog on this phone and having it publish to the web. So does using the same device to check the start time and pitching matchups for the upcoming Red Sox game, moving over to check my email... All while I take a picture of my sandals for this post... all while I listen to big band music on earphones.

Hey... I was riding my bike the other day and I answered the phone, talked, hung up and used voice control to switch playlists on this "phone" all without touching the device itself, just a little control pad on the head phones. The song that came up? The Times They Are a Changin' by Bob Dylan...

... They are... thankfully...

... And I love it. It's one of the most exciting times in the history if the world, in education and in the quest for literacy and knowledge. I'm in. Are you?

Sent from batphone.

Mobile post test

How 'bout that.

Sent from batphone.

Porch thinkin' at days end

I've gotta say, carrying a phone, iPod, camera with a web browser and all these info aggregation tools in one device has been a great ticket thus far. I'm capturing more spontaneous photos, accessing info on the fly, and automating some routine tasks. Take one event today as an example.

A few days ago I installed an app called ReQall. I was standing in line for a coffee yesterday and called ReQall to experiment. I told ReQall to "send a (coworker) a note tomorrow asking when the new projectors are coming in." ReQall sent out the note the following am and I received a response from my coworker today with an answer. A digital secretary service. Sure, I could have sent the note myself but it's pretty convenient to call a service, have it transcribe your voice to text, decipher the command words in the note of "send" and "tomorrow" and have it actually do it! Thus far I've setup ReQall to add things to my Google calendar, send me text reminders, send email for me and remind me of tasks I have floating about. It's also free. Thus far, it's been a great experiment. There's a delay when you call ReQall, while it transcribes your voice but thus far a delay of 5 to as long as 30 minutes has not been a factor. Texting the service provides quicker results. The trick here is that it writes it to my calendar, sends me reminders via txt messages, etc all from spoken words or style (verbal or written) sentences. Going to run more experiments.

In the last week I've attempted to move away from the computer more for my reading, email and writing. Thus far, the iPhone has fit the bill. With these new capabilities I've been reading more, jotting down notes in a variety of places and taking far more spontaneous photos I otherwise wouldn't shoot because I rarely dragged around a camera. I've been on the mobile version of facebook, tossing out some txts with friends I used to speak to once a month. Ideas are flowing, I'm storing info in places where I can access it later in a much more seamless fashion. Great stuff.

My dog, Otis, has had enough though of me on this phone over the last hour. Picture of Otis shot, cropped and dropped the blurbs you see on the pic using the phone in about two mins. Editing photos on a phone... amazing. More later. Time to play fetch. Good dog.

Diving back into the mobile connectivity world

It's been ages since I have carried a cell phone. While it's been a nice break I'll say there are times when it's damned inconvenient. The new iPhone packs a lot of integration features that can replace a large portion of my information based desktop activity aka reading blogs, quick emails, news, calendar tinkering etc. So... I dove back in. Bit like eating ice cream I guess. If you don't follow that then try having some ice cream (a large bowl definately helps) and give it another think.

I've Been Thinking...

A good friend of mine uses the title "I've Been Thinking" as the title of one of his blogs... and it seems fitting for this post.

Here's what I had been reading before this last school break:

Two books:
Disrupting Class

Grown Up Digital

Going through regular blog updates by:

David Warlik, Seth Godin , Jeff Jarvis and Will Richardson

I read through the New Horizons Report and one from the Web Use Project.

All of these the titles and bloggers above are worth multiple entries here themselves. But that's what's got me thinking... about taking a break. These books, reports and bloggers continue to share a common theme in that education is moving altogether too slowly and so often in the wrong direction on the technology front. Collaboration, creation, exploration and advanced use are too infrequently in place. Technology in many school settings is limited to how many computers the school has and most of those are used for general access. While a word processor is certainly easier to use than a manual typewriter it does not explore the potential of the machine. Add in limited web research opportunities, to say nothing of collaboration opportunities. Too many collaboration tools are restricted from use. Too many signs that prohibit or severely limit the use of technology use are still visible. Lots of potential slipping by I think. A Vermont education / technology listserv at UVM discussions reflect the wide scope of themes and discussions and the thoughts of the participants on these subjects.

It's not the first time my mind was buzzing and I was a bit frustrated with the same old debates on whether technology had a place in education, if students were too plugged in. So I took a theme that was running through the many of these blog posts on "what is education for" and decided to give it a good think on a trip I was taking to Disney in Orlando, Florida with family and friends for the break. A perfect time to unplug, separate from reading, take a ton of photos, get some sun and let my mind wander.

Here's a bit of what caught my eye.

It had been just over a year since I had been in an airport. Wireless access, plugin stations for power, laptop, cell phone, and pda use were, well, everywhere. I decided to sit back and just watch it all for a bit. Then I got the itch to talk to some folks about what they were doing. Here are a few quotes I jotted down.

"It's so much easier to stay in touch."

"If you don't collaborate, if you don't network in my business you're done."

"Ebooks, video and podcasts are how I educate myself now. I have access to everything I need and more ways than ever to find new things."

A lady I spoke with reading on a Kindle (the old version) tossed out a gem:

" It's hard to unplug sometimes. I get used to the connectivity, used to the stream of information coming in. I used to feel the same way with books though and in college. Learning how to manage it, how to separate from work is more important than ever. This is better for me now though. I can access what I want and it's easier for me to find information, to find something new."

Here was another beauty:

"Our company just got these blackberry's. For a bit honestly I was thinking it was time for me to get another job. Now that I'm getting used to it it's saving me a lot of time and I've been thinking more and more about how I work and keep in touch with people."

At Disney, cell phones and, as you'd expect, digital cameras were everywhere. I spoke to a few folks on how they used digital photos:

"I can capture everything I want. I used to be worried about the cost of taking photos. Not anymore."

"I snap everything I can now to capture our time together. My parents lost all our family albums in a fire. Almost 30 years later I lost all my photos to a failed hard drive. Now I back everything up and I'm snapping photos like crazy."

"We all have cameras, my three children, my wife. I decided to do this because my Father only appears in a handful of our old pictures because he was the one behind the camera all the time. I want my wife and kids to have photos of me too. It's also been great to see the world through the eyes of my children. Seeing what they feel is important is an eye opener. We take less formal pose pictures now and we're getting more shots of how we act, how we live."

I have relayed this theme to folks for many years. My own Father appears in about 20 photos in our family albums. This gent and I chatted for about 20 minutes on the subject and shared some ideas about how we talk to our own children about taking photos. I split use of a camera between two children to this point but plan on adding another so they can both take photos at the same time after this chat we had. We both seemed to agree in this conversation that folks in our generation and those earlier seemed to take a lot of photos of places we've been. Now these places and scenes are readily available on the web. I told this chap about the projects with SeaDragon and Photosynth , geo-tagging and the like and it led the conversation further down this path. Capturing family members in those scenes and the emotions, the nuances of our families and the people around us we agreed was easier than ever before. We also agreed that our children seemed to take to this shift naturally.

I took tons of photos, video clips and enjoyed the time away from reading on education, the sun and the change of scenery and close family time away from all our household lives. Disney is an interesting place. It's like stepping into my childhood imagination at times and one hell of a high quality theme park. It's also overrun with expense and commercialism. It's inevitable though to provide a scene of that high quality it seems. Walt Disney would have been a fascinating person to chat with while he was building the idea and beginning construction of it all. Selling that idea to investors had it's trials I'll bet. Perhaps it would provide insight into selling one-to-one computing locally and in the State. Walking around in t-shirts and shorts in the sun in the afternoon and returning home to shovel 10 inches of snow from the walkway sticks in my mind. Traveling the world is certainly something we should all do more of if we can.

The time away also reinforced once again that we're on the right track here in the Lab. Diverse challenges, loads of debate and discussion on all these issues in education and the role and use of these technology tools will get us closer to seeing it's potential. Ditto for the continuing quest to fire up innovative programs.

The trip also got me thinking about how this blog is used for the Lab. More posting, more discussion and.. we'll see what else is on the horizon.

On the horizon: Great work with students this semester will happily consume much of my time. Baseball starts up soon and there my continuing quest to leave the realm of general manager and dedicate more time to coaching. Burlington High School is coming to see the inner workings of the Lab and our scope of courses at BBA in March. Various presentations on what we're doing here at conferences and at other schools, foundation work on a State laptop pilot, further discussion on the shift in education and opportunities at hand will take place. Foundation work to improve local fields and instructional programs will certainly take some time. Whipping up a great local baseball clinic, that's definitely needed and in the works. We'll continue to refine our Help Desk program and direct people onto the potential of a one-to-one computing program here and the countless opportunities it can present to students to take part in education and skills in the changing world. Exploring creativity, the world and your role in it. A fine goal for what education means I think.

One of the blogs read today just pointed me toward Yale University's entry into the OpenCourseWare movement. Another point that giving folks access to technology and then modeling and promoting sophisticated use can lead down great paths.

... and Heath Ledger just won the best supporting actor award for his role as the Joker in the Dark Knight. Not to be bias as a Batman fan, but it's well deserved. The tragic death of a brilliant actor.

Lots to give a think. Lots of lobbying to do. Some good pizza will help I think.

Inauguration Day: January 20th, 2009

Opening a new semester on inauguration day presents pretty stellar opportunities for discussions. Introducing a new class takes a back seat to the scope of this day in the history of our country. I have many tales to tell from my college days, what this day means to me in history and hope to hear many from folks in the Lab here as well during our conversations. Each President seems to be measured historically to some extent by the motion of their first 100 days in office. Immeasurable challenges face our new President in this term and the motion and discussions I've heard thus far seem very promising. Here's hoping that party politics can be cast aside on some of these items and that the best solutions are sought out and implemented. It's a great moment in the history of our nation and of humanity.