Welcome IPT 286 students!

For the next 4-8 months, this blog will be dedicated to my Instructional Psychology and Technology 286 classes. I will be using this blog to discuss ideas related to the integration of technology in grades 9-12 with my students.

If you are one of these students, welcome! Feel free to look around and try out the blogging technology if you've never used it. Post a comment if you like to this post and tell me about yourself so I can get to know you! There are helpful links to the right for starting your own weblog (blog) as well as some links to helpful educational technology links. There is also my "blogroll," which is a list of some of the blogs I read often. You may start by checking these out. I know we have about a dozen English majors in our class. You should especially look at Will Richardson's Weblogged and Barbara Ganley's bgblogging. These are a couple of great teachers who use blogs to teach high school writing. Those of you in other disciplines, try searching for some great educational weblogs in your area and let us know when you find some!

GETTING STARTED: If blogs are new to you, get started by making your own blog at blogger.com. They have pretty easy directions, but if you get lost, let me know. You'll need to sign up for a free Bloglines aggregator, too. An aggregator is what allows you to read the blogs that you "subscribe" to. It's like getting a daily newspaper of the stuff you want to read, and none of the stuff you don't. You subscribe to your favorite blogs, and the aggregator compiles the stuff from these blogs so you can read them all at once. It's very helpful.

You might also read up about blogs on the Wikipedia site. It might help you understand this technology. You can also download this short article by Dave Wiley of USU. He's one of the current leaders in educational uses of blogs.

NEW TUTORIAL! I just barely created a tutorial to walk you through how to set up a blog for our class. Enjoy!

Have fun exploring! If you are on campus and would like to meet with me and get your blog started before class gets going, email me when you would like to meet. I'm here almost every day, all day.

Why people react differently to technology

A post on commoncraft.com quotes Douglas Adams' theory on why people react differently to technology. So funny, so true.

• Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.
• Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.
• Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

Security tips for kids and blogs

I know my top concern, and the top concern of many other educators I know, with using blogging in schools is the security issues. How do we protect the kids if we just throw them out onto the Internet? The answer is not to just throw them out on the Internet, but have a protective framework set up and monitor their blogs closely. Here's some tips from Weblogged about what works for them:

1. Inform parents and get their ok

2. When students use their Weblogs, limit identification to first name only.
   

3. <>If you need an e-mail address to set up the account, either use bogus e-mails or rely on a feature in Manila (the software we use) to hide the address when it is legitimate.
   
4. Talk to kids about what to do if they are contacted by "strangers," that they should never give out personal information or start on line conversations with those not vetted by the teacher.
5. Teachers are asked to subscribe to the feeds of their student Weblogs which include any comments that might be left. "While some are more vigilant than others, I do think most teachers are able to monitor activity on the sites to a satisfactory degree."
   
6. Finally, both the teacher and administrator are "managing editors" of the student sites, so if things break or if there is abuse, they can deal with it in short order.
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7. For some classes like Creative Writing, where students are writing about more personal issues, they close the entire site to the public.
   
   

I'd be interested in hearing any other tips because the security of the kids must come first. But we shouldn't be scared of a new technology, just cautious. I think we can find ways to take advantage of the blogging technology and still be safe about it.

IPods for learning?

According to canada.com Duke University is going to distribute over 1,000 IPods to the ipcoming frosh class as an experiment to see how well an infusion of this technology influences the students' experiences. Kind of sounds like an IPod-version of the famous ACOTT study, and I'm sure Apple was excited to comply. The students' IPods will have campus maps, orientation info, the school fight song, and (I'm sure) much more. This raises some questions:

1. What does Canada care about Duke anyway?
2. Do we really think students will use these for much more than listening to rap during Fine Arts 100?
3. How are they going to allow students to always have their IPods with them and keep them from being distracted?
4. Why not just give them PDAs instead?

And the most important question:
Why isn't my school giving out IPods? I want one!

Seriously, I am all for innovative uses of new technologies and looking for educational purposes for technologies that already exist. However, this seems to be a lot of research money down the drain. But who knows? Maybe I'll be surprised. At the least, it's an interesting project that I hope to hear more about after they have completed it.

Weblogs and two major problems in education

In his blog, David Carreher of Harvard believes there are two problems with education:

1. Constraints on Students As Active Producers of Knowledge
   1. in most schools students have little access to
      • primary sources of information (NY Times, Diário de Pernambuco, meteorological data, museum artifacts) and to
      • multiple interpretations of complex events (history and current events are typically presented from a single view posing as factual)
      • simulations
   2. students' expressions of their understanding and beliefs are chanelled through the "test and essay grinder" (assignments given to them by teachers); Drawbacks include:
      • stultification: students feel their contributions are given exclusively in response to course requirements, to doing the teacher's assignments;
      • isolation: students' ideas do not benefit from the considered reflections of others.
      • devaluing of emergent ideas: students are discouraged from registering their thoughts before being polished or in final form.
2. There is a firewall around the classroom
   1. Research about learning and teaching in classrooms is not built into the present system. Researchers are viewed as intruders into schools. At best researchers encounter the benign tolerance of administration and staff.
   2. Curriculum developers are shut out of the system. They occasionally gain restricted access in order to field test curriculum materials.
   3. Teacher education has little access to everyday learning and teaching (This is somewhat improving as teacher education courses draw increasingly upon video taped classroom episodes.)

He believes blogging can help solve these problems by doing the following:

1. Allow students to keep track of their thinking over time, to pose issues, to receive comments by others.

2. Teacher weblogs could allow teachers to keep track of their own ideas over time. Certain sections could be open to students, others to teachers, some to both.

3. Researchers would find a treasure trove of things to study in weblogs and online discussions. They wouldn't have to physically enter classrooms and disrupt ongoing discussions. Researcher weblogs would let researchers document the evolution of their research over time and to share their thoughts with others.

4. Curriculum Developers could access examples of student's, teachers, and researchers' thinking. A developer weblog would serve the developer, but it would allow researchers to understand how developers think and make decisions over time.

5. Teacher educators could discuss examples from actual classrooms. Teacher educator weblogs would document the evolution of their thinking over time. Teacher education itself becomes a documented field subject to study and analysis.

I don't know if blogging is the cure-all for these educational difficulties. In fact, I know it isn't. But he does bring up some good positives of using blogs in schools ...

Weblogs as eportfolios

Interesting discussion on Weblogged about the possible use of weblogs as eportfolios, with the ability to mark which posts and documents are public and which are for mentors and supervisors, and which are private.

When readers become writers

There's an interesting post on Web-logged about a newspaper that is basically staffed, edited, and run by its readers. The readers write the paper, and so far the paper's readership is strong and growing. With the exploding popularity of blogging, chatting, email, and other CSCL mediums that facilitate writing, it seems that we are moving away from the idea that some people are our "writers" and the rest of us read what they have written, and we're moving towards a society where everyone is a writer, a teacher, a participator, a collaborator. Web-logged's writer muses that this could have big implications for education, where students are not consumers of knowledge, but producers of it. He writes that students are starting to expect this of the educational system.

And they should expect it. Every teacher knows they learn more about a subject by teaching it then they do by "learning" it. If we truly want students to learn, they need to all be teachers and producers.

Open Text and the new literacy

Are you literate? Maybe not if we're talking about the new literacy emerging. I've been blogging with some people today about the idea that wikis, blogs, and other computer-mediated forms of communication allow for a new type of literacy, something much more collaborated that Jeff Vice calls "open text" where authorships blurs away and the written piece is owned by the community. This is quite a departure from the old model of writing something, printing it, and it's mine to turn in.
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Anyway, this is something I'm going to have to think about some more, but Web-logged has a good post on this topic.

Furl it! The next new verb

I've read a lot lately about Furl.net. It's a free downloadable bookmark that creates a button in your browser that when pushed saves and categorizes any website you are on. Here are the benefits that I see:
- Save your useful websites on an OUTSIDE server that can be accessed from any computer and will be there even if your hard drive crashed
- You can rate, sort, filter and organize your saved websites for easy recal later
- You can search through your saved websites to find the one you're looking for. Your own personal google through stuff you already know to be valuable!
- Furl links to the URL but also saves the website in case the URL goes dead in a few months
- You can receive rss feeds of your friends' new furled links or you can email them yours.

A blog I read called Furl the best thing since Google. He may be right. The ability to store and categorize my Net learning so it can be more easily retrieved will be phenomenally useful for me. I will never bookmark again. I will now be a furler!

I do think the way they promote the "furl it" button is funny. After "google" became a verb, I hope not every new tool and company will try to create their own verbs to add to our sometimes ridiculous "e-language."

Bloglines gets really cool

Well, the buzz is all over the blogosphere about Bloglines. Not only is it a great aggregator because it's free, but it has been easier to use for me these last few months than other aggregators I tried. Now it's a year old, and Bloglines is really partying with some new features. So if you like to experiment with new technology, check out Bloglines and try some of their new toys! I'm experimenting with publishing my list of feeds as my own personal blogroll on this blog, and so far it hasn't been working.

Are we missing the boat?

I just read an old article, with some very fresh ideas. It was Paul Michael Privateer's (1999) article called Academic Technology and the Future of Higher Education. I liked many of his ideas about how technology should create a new pedagogy, but I especially liked the following analogy, borrowed from Hickey, Ouimette, and Venegoni (1996)

"The railroads died not because of interstate highways, airplanes, trucks or buses, but because the people who ran them really liked "choo-choos." Those people forgot they were in the transportation business.... By analogy, hospitals are operated by people who are fascinated with huge white buildings ... (having) forgotten that they are in the healthcare business and not in the business of building and expanding more impressive hospitals. (1996, pp. 12-13)"

I think he's right on. In education, we've forgotten that we're about preparing students for careers and life, not creating smarter, wiser faculty and the "university experience." Perhaps higher ed isn't the sacred cow it thinks it is and should refocus its efforts on better preparing students for a new world.

But the eternal question is how?

Redesigning how we train teachers to use technology

I had this thought this morning about what might be a more ideal way of training preservice teachers to use technology. First, there should be a digital literacy prerequisite to enter the program so students in the program already have a specified amount of comfort using basic forms of technology. Second, there should still be a technology for teachers course as we have here at BYU, but the course should not focus on basic technologies, but on newer technologies, those technologies that will be impacting education in the near future even if they are not there yet. This class should overview several technologies and allow students to pick the ones that interest them and then according to these choices organize the students into learning communities to learn and master these technologies and then brainstorm how to apply them in education. The class should teach generally how to master unfamiliar technologies, because the teachers will always be up against new technologies in this ever-changing technological world. Finally, the methods instructors should model at least a basic form of technology integration, showing how technology can leverage proven teaching methods.

The problem with compatibility

I am a big believer in the importance of collaborative learning, and in today’s age, computer-supported collaborative learning. But I think the biggest hurdle to better online collaboration is compatibility issues. There are ways around these issues, but nobody wants the trouble of converting files or buying virtual pc or something like that. For collaboration to succeed, the participants need to be able to exchange ideas quickly, without technological hang-ups. Hopefully computer designers will key into this idea of layers and build computers and programs in layers so that a particular layer can easily be moved and adapted to many different situations, platforms, and computers. If the layers of software design each had their own interface, the layer itself could be moved to a new situation and the interface would allow the layer to still work. Think legos. A lego can be used in many different designs because the interface allows it to be part of a ship, plane, or anything else. This would really help online education and learning, I believe.

Dr. Andy Gibbons of BYU has been talking recently about computer and instructional design layers, and I think he presented at AECT last year on this subject.

Computer language transparency

I appreciated the discussion on computer languages, and how a GUI works itself down tot he basic machine language of 1s and 0s. These underlying languages do become transparent in modern software applications that allow non-computer science people to program computers to do powerful things. I think within a few years this trend will continue to the point that manipulating and managing websites will be as easy as manipulating Word documents. What I mean is that anybody, even 90-year-olds who can’t program a VCR can use Word, and in a couple of years I think making websites will be that easy with much less programming bugs then we currently get. In fact, I think word processing documents will cease to exist and we will do all of our composition, collaboration, and publishing in web-based documents. This is starting to happen already with Word web pages, and even Dreamweaver, which to some degree can work like a word processor. However, there are still too many bugs that are introduced through these programs, and if you don’t know web languages, you’re sunk. I think these programs will improve and the bugs will be eliminated until writing HTML is as transparent as writing in Word.

We’re moving in that direction a little bit already with Blogs, which allow non-web designers to create web pages. However, they’re not very powerful yet, and the technology needs to be improved before it can become universally used

Teaching by offsetting a student's equilibrium

I talked recently with Dr. Andy Gibbons about how a building is the right balance between forces pushing up (from the ground) and forces pushing down (gravity), and how teachers and instructional developers should also be aware of forces acting upon their audience or upon the instruction itself. These forces must be accounted for if the instruction is to be effective. We talked about how sometimes a teacher will push a student emotionally or mentally “off balance” so that they will be motivated to learn how to “right themselves.” For example asking a question that engages the student puts the student off balance intellectually and prompts a desire to know the answer so the student can be intellectually “at equilibrium” again. Teachers also put students emotionally off balance through use of humor, tears, etc. to motivate and engage students to learn. I believe morally, God does the same thing in his effort to instruct us.

How technology supports active learning

Something I'm thinking about this week ...

How technology supports active learning
- CMD
- Writing
- Simulated real life
- Subject-specific tools (CAD, etc.)
- Creating multimedia (chitwood, gale, others)
- Research and inquiry (internet)
- Problem-solving tools (robotics toy, finale,
- Reflection (pedagogy lab)

Chickering and Ehrmann got me thinking along this line, but they only offered three choices: asynch, liveChat, learning by doing. (That last one’s too broad – isn’t “doing” what we mean by active learning?)

Any other ideas??

Using technology to reflect

I have been talking lately with the chair of our PE dept. here and he has an interesting idea. He's somehow found the funding for an entire lab of beefy G5s with huge processors and a terabyte of server storage. He plans to have PE teachers in his program videotape themselves teaching, code the different segments of their classes into specific teaching techniques, and then be able to search, aggregate, compare, etc. these short coded segments with old videos of their own teaching, or with clips from other teachers. This, I feel, is an improvement on the old "video tape your entire lesson and then reflect on the entire lesson" form of teacher reflection. This way, they reflect on specific skills, and the evidence is there in video.

Has anyone ever heard of anything similar to this. Let me know!

This blog is something of an experiment. I have listened to David Wiley and Trey Martindale preach the educational benefits of blogs, and I'm sure there could be some benefits, so I want to try the technology myself. If you have ideas about how to blog effectively, use blogs in teaching, etc., reply to this post!

Just recently I found an article in this month's issue of THE Journal about blogs in education. You might check it out.