Educational Technology and Change Journal

By Bonnie Bracey Sutton

Two Americas? Are we marginalizing people of diversity by not including them in the conversations? Research? Advisory Boards? Are we the New Invisible Man? I don’t know what it was like during slavery. I do know what it was like during the days of segregation that were a big part of my life. We were an invisible part of the society. We had to follow all the rules, but we were like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man.

Now I think there is integration, but I think people in the U.S. live in two worlds, and if the world that they live in is good, they don’t include those from the other world who need to be a part of the ongoing conversation to make the whole continue to work. Most of the reports that we receive in journals and at conferences are well written and researched. However, very little involves those people who are not connected, whose schools are not the best, and whose teachers are not a part of the conversations. I am not talking about the media mavens with one minute pronouncements that dot our television stations. I am talking about the thought changers and the people who guide new ways of thinking, learning, politics, and all. A sustained exposure of diversity issues is critical because technology takes a longer time to dribble down than those twenty year old books that used to come to my community.

I am a member of ISTE. This year’s conference was great, like a moving train. I know how to negotiate it, network. I try to select the ideas that I am interested in and to see the rock stars of education. I notice that there are not that many people of diversity in the mix. A token or two. I watch the crowds to see who of broadening engagement is a part of our groups. Not many. I think ISTE is not making it happen because many people cannot afford the costs of the conference, membership, and travel.

ISTE is no longer a teacher organization per se. It has changed. You can get updated on the latest technology, see this year’s trends, and meet and greet people. One highlight for me this year was to see that Elliot Soloway and Chris Dede‘s ideas of mobile technology have taken off. And then I thought of this article from MindShift. No one was talking about the lack of broadband or permissions to use technology in the schools or the way to negotiate that move. Digital equity seems to have died a quiet death. We did have an SIGDE workshop in the conference. Maybe it is our fault — we have no sponsors. I suppose that lets us know that we are not a real part of the mix. Or does it mean something else? Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

By Frank B. Withrow

At this time of year I always wonder at our slavish adherence to an agrarian schedule for schools. Million dollar plants are closed for the summer. Well, not completely. We often have the athletic departments active with team sports.

Staff, from teachers to principals, find summer jobs. I once had a principal who had a summer company to paint houses. He hired his male teachers, and they had a good business. Some of his teachers made more on their summer jobs than they did teaching.

We know that students lose much of what they have learned during this down time and that much of the first two months of the fall semester is spent relearning what they have lost.

If Walmart and others can serve their customers 24 hours a day year round, why do schools continue to tie themselves into a rigid and ill-conceived obsolete schedule?

What if we had a year-round, open schedule school system designed for modern families? For example, the schedule follows the family’s schedule. The students are in school from 8 to 5 each day or from 10 to 6 or even assigned as it fits their individual learning plan (ILP). The school is open from 7 in the morning to 7 in the evening. Students are assigned based upon their ILPs. Teaching staff schedules are also flexible in order to cover the entire day.

In this projected school system, there are traditional classes as well as virtual learning at home and at school through social media. All year long students engage in special learning experiences built around project based learning where learners, working in teams, experiment with such things as actually constructing a robot to serve disabled individuals.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

It’s hard to disagree with John Eger’s[1] take on the significance of the UVA president’s resignation and reinstatement. The message is change — or else. But this is precisely the problem — a definition of change that everyone agrees with is nice, but is it useful?

In my mind, change, per se, is not the issue. In fact, every leader in higher ed has embraced change via technology. Teresa Sullivan is no exception. However, in her case, the pace of change at the University of Virginia[2] seems to have been the thorn.

Still, in Sullivan’s case, I’m not sure if speeding up the incremental pace would produce the kind of change that edX and Coursera represent. These MIT/Harvard and Stanford MOOCs (massive open online courses) have apparently set a new standard for change that is a radical departure from the incremental. The incremental model is appealing because it seems to satisfy the majority of professors[3]. Those who want to change while maintaining business as usual can have their cake and eat it, too. They can go blended, which is another way of saying that they can change without really having to change. They can continue to base their instruction in F2F (face-to-face) pedagogy and satisfy the demand for change by adding bits and pieces of the latest rage in technology. Post your syllabus and course schedule online, add a whiteboard to your F2F lectures, replace a percentage of your lectures with online activities, allow students to contact you via email — and, presto, you’ve changed.

But the question remains: Is this enough, and, perhaps more importantly, what exactly is “enough”?

Do we attain “enough” by placing a greater percentage of course work online? Adding more whiteboards? iPads? Clickers? Incorporating mobile devices into the instructional mix? Using more social media such as blogs, Facebook, Twitter? Expanding learning and teaching media to include teacher- and student-generated videos?

Herein lies the problem. No. All of these and more of it — even at a faster pace — doesn’t move us any closer to enough. Classrooms overflowing with the latest gadgets and online activities can come close, but they can never be enough. Change demands something more. Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

For nearly 150 years since Darwin first published The Origin of Species in 1859, the controversy has continued. Despite mountains of evidence collected from many branches of science, some still fight vigorously against teaching evolution in our school science classes.

I maintain that those fighting against this teaching are harming our society but may just be helping out science education. I refer here to what’s happening in the United States, which seems to be the country most affected by this controversy as well as being the one in which I live.

Answering why the anti-evolution forces are harming our society and how they might end up helping improve science education requires some digging. Society depends on technology to support our standard of living and on the creation of new technologies for export to fund our ability to buy technology. More and more of these technologies are biological in nature. Research into biology and medicine moves forward best when we understand the underlying principles of life. A framework upon which to set ideas and to imagine new ideas helps immensely in both research and development of new technologies and new products.

If you study well the advances in biology and medicine in recent decades, you will see that the concepts inherent in evolution have played an important role. If our students leave school without this important framework, then they are ill-prepared to participate in the advancement of science. If, even worse, they leave school opposing science and its precepts, then they may work to retard scientific advances. Evolution, as a concept and framework, has become the underpinning, tying together previously disparate aspects in all of our life sciences.

Right now, the world is on the verge of eradicating polio. One of three strains has already been destroyed, and only a few countries still harbor reservoirs of the remaining two and possibly only one. While this effort has been largely one of vaccinating everyone, development of new vaccines rests on medical research that depends on understanding how life works. Evolution is a crucial component. The speed with which we find cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s disease, and Parkinson’s disease are likely to depend on scientists who use evolutionary theory in their work.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

By Frank B. Withrow

In ancient times young people were trained in apprenticeships. A few were lucky enough to sit at the feet of great scholars. For the most part young people learned by imitating skilled seniors. Only a few scholars and scribes were literate. Great events were often recorded in paintings by master artist and carried forth by storytellers and ballad singers.

The invention of the printing press slowly changed society. Books and libraries became storehouses of history, science and mathematics. Eventually textbooks gave rise to schools, as we know them today. Historical events were recorded in print, and it became essential that people become literate. In the 1850s there was an argument as to whether textbooks for learners should include pictures and illustrations. Books allowed the master scholars, scientists and historians to store and distribute their wisdom and knowledge.

Until about five thousand years ago society used a strictly oral-aural system of communications. Once writing became available, mankind could store information and knowledge over time and space. Ideas that were printed could travel over land from one place to the next. Printed materials could be handed down one generation to the next. The users had to be literate in the language used. Literacy became the doorway to self-learning.

Mankind took a major step forward when we learned to transcribe speech and language into a stable code called writing. When the printing press was invented new ideas of schooling were possible. A mediator, that is, teachers, could transfer the writings of scholars to the masses. No longer did the learner need to be in the presence of the master scholar.

Today, technology allows us to go far beyond the printed word. Digitization of information is as significant a change as the printing press. We are at a major shift because we have the ability to bring live living color and enhanced graphics to any learning event. If our students are learning about John Glenn’s first space flight (20 Feb. 1962), they can see the actual footage of his orbits. Moreover they can see and hear him talk about the event and what he thinks it meant to the world. In fact, with social media we have the potential to create a Facebook page where he answers learners’ questions. Technology through social media allows us to practice team learning. Through social media, team members can be in the same classroom or even in different countries around the world.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

By Judith McDaniel
Editor, Web-based Course Design

[Note: This is the last in a three-part series by Judith McDaniel. Read part 1 and part 2. – Editor]

If we define learning as content delivery, much that we now “know” about education follows from that premise. Freire calls it the “banking” method of education where the instructor deposits knowledge in the head of the willing “learner.” When that is what it means to learn, what could be wrong with standardized tests that measure content knowledge? If the transfer of knowledge is what it means to learn, then WHAT is transmitted takes on importance and HOW it is transmitted can be fairly standardized. This basically describes education today.

But if the cyberization of knowledge has produced “an unknowable body of knowledge,” how can anyone maintain that learning is about content, about knowing what has been known in the past? Not that we don’t need to know history and government and science and math, but that we need to know them differently?

I asked Sener, “If learning is NOT about content delivery/transfer/absorption, how should we define it?”

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

By Judith McDaniel
Editor, Web-based Course Design

[Note: This is the second in a three-part series by Judith McDaniel. Read part 1 and part 3. – Editor]

I asked Sener, “How can we improve education, using all of the knowledge and resources available to us?” In Seven Futures, he provides data indicating “that at least 70 percent of American jobs now require specialized skills and knowledge, and that students need education that will help prepare them for jobs which haven’t even been invented yet” (29). It seems obvious to me that our entire educational system needs a jump start and that teachers trained in the old methods of teaching the old knowledge don’t have any chance at all of meeting that challenge.

Imagine what teaching today’s students for tomorrow’s needs might entail — “Realigning Education with Redefined Knowledge.” Simply put, old knowledge isn’t enough. What we know is changing, changing quickly, and it’s not just the sciences. Yes, the number and definition of the planets has changed, but so has every branch of knowledge. I talked with a discouraged college student who recently graduated from a prestigious university in journalism. His last course in college had consisted of an advanced journalism class that exclusively included information on working in print media. The professor was a woman in mid career who seemed not to know that these students had a very small chance of working on a newspaper or magazine.  They were not even being prepared for the careers that have been invented in information production on the internet. Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

By Judith McDaniel
Editor, Web-based Course Design

[Note: This is the first in a three-part series by Judith McDaniel. Read part 2 and part 3. – Editor]

So much about John Sener’s new book, The Seven Futures of American Education: Improving Learning and Teaching in a Screen-Captured World (CreateSpace, 21 March 2012), strikes me as right on and important that my first impulse is akin to wanting to take education by its figurative neck and shake it. He says things I have thought or intuited for years — and he says some things I need to argue with. He says things that educators and parents and well-intentioned politicians need to hear. Capturing the arguments of the book in one short conversation was not possible so I asked him three basic questions:

1. In a world of surplus information, a surfeit of easily accessed data and analysis, is there anything at all that “everyone” needs to know?
2. How can we improve education, using all of the knowledge and resources available to us?
3. If learning is NOT about content delivery/transfer/absorption, how should we define it?

When I was in graduate school (long before the internet), I remember being impressed when I read in one of John Keats’s letters that he was going to spend his summer rereading all of Greek literature. He was going to read it in Greek, of course, but that wasn’t what impressed me. What astonished me was that the amount of Greek literature was so small, only 100+ years before, that anyone could read it all in a summer. My job as a Ph.D. student was to read and read and read and then to select an area or two that I would focus on. In that general area, say Victorian literature, I would again select a smaller area that I would become an “expert” in.

Graduate school hasn’t changed that much since I was there; students in literature are still required to read the classics. There is a sense that “core knowledge” is important and every graduate student in literature needs to have read certain texts which we then have in common. Those texts become the basis for scholarly conversations.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 8 Comments »

By Lynn Zimmerman
Editor, Teacher Education

“Friend Your Students? New York City Schools Say No“* focuses on the new social media policy put in place by the New York City Department of Education. The policy, which establishes guidelines for teacher use of social media, allows educators to use it to enhance their students’ educational experiences and to be more accessible to them. However, this policy and others like it raise concerns about the potential for social media to blur boundaries that should not be crossed in teacher-student interactions.

As I was reading this article, I found a link to another All Things Considered post related to a new technology segment that began in May 2012. It is a social media advice column, and the plan is for pros to answer listeners’ questions. This in itself is a 21^st century approach to advice columns. Listeners can email their questions or post them to the site’s blog.

The first column addresses the question Should You Friend Your Boss on Facebook?, and two experts on social media offer their opinions. One issue is that social media uses a different meaning for the word “friend” and the types of boundaries that word implies. In a workplace relationship, you may ask yourself, “Are there items that I would normally share with a friend that I really don’t want the boss to see or know about?” One expert suggests putting the boss in the “safe zone” to create specific boundaries for your social network. In that way you still come across as a team player without opening up your personal life in a way that may be uncomfortable for you.

However, one cannot ignore that there are power issues inherent in any boss-employee relationship. Depending on the situation, some of your actions can be misinterpreted or used against you. Linking to a competitor’s website, for instance, may be interpreted as a lack of company loyalty or as possible interest in moving on. If the boss links to a site that lists donations and learns that you haven’t donated, how will s/he interpret it? What happens if the boss finds that you have linked to a site with political views that he opposes? In my opinion, this issue is a minefield, better to be avoided.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

Why all the flap over the flip? On the surface, it seems nothing more than an ancient idea resuscitated by a hip metaphor. Ever since the first school bell rang, this has been the model for many disciplines, especially the ones that emphasize performance. Study, practice, and learn at home, alone; perform under the teacher’s watchful eye in the classroom. In other words, students prepare at home and demonstrate what they’ve learned in the classroom. Teachers use their performance to identify shortcomings and devote class time to coaching, guiding, and shaping.

However, as long as the paper medium held sway, the flip remained a good idea that was simply too cumbersome and labor intensive for both teachers and students. Back then as now, the medium is the message. Teachers could do little more than assign readings in outdated and often irrelevant textbooks, and if they made the time to compose and photocopy instructions and information, they soon learned that the effort to prepare handouts is extremely labor intensive. They could leave additional learning resources at the school library, but the number of copies available and the library hours made this alternative impractical for students.

The flip, sad to say, was mere lip until the arrival of smartphones, those bright little appendages that students reconnect as soon as they leave the classroom. Sit outside a classroom building when students, en masse, are emerging or entering. You’ll quickly notice the choreography: those entering are reluctantly shutting down and stowing their cellphones, waiting until the threshold before doing so, and those emerging are reaching into their pockets and bags for their cells, reconnecting with the world and reviving their lifelines.

We’ve passed the point, I think, where the classroom is the hub of learning. The hub is moving ever outward, and this transition has enormous implications for schools and colleges. One is that the classroom is quickly becoming a place for restricting rather than facilitating the information flow that’s vital to learning. And another is the flip. With smart phones and the web, a good idea is now sustainable best practice.

In two Illinois schools, Pekin Community High School and Havana High School, enlightened educators are head over heels for the flip, and at the forefront is Havana School District 126 Superintendent Mark Twomey. Hat’s off to Twomey, a leader for the 21st century who demonstrates that imagination, creativity, guts, and plain old-fashioned common sense can do far more than dollars when it comes to using the latest technology to improve learning. The formula is a simple one: Use the tools that are becoming readily available and accessible to leverage a practice that makes sense.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

Midway through 2012, I can’t help but feel that the toughest job in higher education is that of president. With stakes so high and change so rampant, chaotic, and divisive, it must be close to impossible to please everyone. Thus, those who take on the challenge and actually thrive have become masters at tiptoeing around the edges of controversy. Perhaps the most active sinkhole on college campuses is technology, where presidents are damned if they do and damned if they don’t. Thus, I take little pleasure in spotlighting Adam F. Falk, president of Williams, for a presentation* at a recent conference, defending the traditional practices that have defined liberal arts colleges against the onslaught of the latest technology. However, I feel that the issues are important and that discussing them openly, even if it’s in the context of an outstanding educational leader, is necessary.

Falk defines the core values of a liberal arts education as a learning environment

• that is “personal, intimate, collaborative”
• in which students “will know the faculty and their fellow students, and the community will know them”
• “that will prepare them best to be purposeful in their lives and effective in the world”
• in which “education is still as much about human interaction as about delivering content”

He says “that the great potential of the new technologies is not to upend these core values, but to allow us to fulfill our existing educational mission more effectively, especially by giving us new strategies to transcend our limitations of scale and location.” He cites distance education in particular, which, “if thoughtfully deployed, [extends] our curricula into areas not covered by our relatively small faculties.”

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

Education is sometimes such a dance. There are so many ingredients that affect what we do and so many groups that influence it. A small child (a friend’s child) in Africa told his mother that he did not need to go to school any more. I laughed. My brother made the same pronouncement years earlier.

Jack Taub used to say that what we consider time out is exactly what we do in school. We sit them in a corner and don’t let them talk. Technology and well trained teaching professionals change that. But everyone is not ready for change. What is sad is that there are so many layers of bureaucracy between teachers and the latest technology and innovative practices. Not quite like slavery, but there are many overlapping levels of management.

The first several years of teaching can drive a person mad. There is never enough time, enough ways to get the job done, and it is a grueling task. Then one day, one day, you get it, and you feel like the teacher you wanted to be.

I loved learning from Project Tomorrow what I had discovered in my early years of technology use. There were two projects that led me to understand the value of technology in learning. One was the National Geographic, which offered a series of science projects for kids. So exciting.

It was science right on, a different kind of citizen science at the elementary level. It was called Kids Network. We had a PI in various areas, and we reported data to the group. We were placed in teams, some national and a couple international.

The project was about water or trash or pets or soil, but what really happened was that the learning became joyous because we were using math and science in a research way, and we plotted graphs and shared our sense of the place that we were in. But we also communicated with groups from various places in the world. Every child wanted to be a part of it. The other thing is that I was moved from the center of the room to the role of facilitator. I was the mailman — that was because we only had one printer. The folders of letters and information were so important to the children. Children who told me that they hated to write were sharing ideas and information with people from all around the US and the world. I had such joy in watching them share their information on a personal level. The learning was not incidental. We used math tools, graphs and pictographs, and we understood them well. We learned to use maps and charts. We were citizen scientists.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

By Frank B. Withrow

In the USA every child is entitled to a free and appropriate education regardless of ethnic background, disabling condition, or socioeconomic level. In the last part of the 20th Century, federal legislation ensured that all disabled children had a right to a free and appropriate public education. The contributions of disabled people in America have been tremendous. From Thomas Edison, Franklin Roosevelt, and Stephen Hawking to Ray Charles, Stevie Wonder, and Helen Keller, disabled people have enriched our society. Deaf people, blind people, cerebral palsied people, and mentally challenged people have made our lives better though their accomplishments.

Many of these young people have done well in regular classrooms with average learners. Others have had to have special programs and may from time to time be in separate classes or even individual tutoring. Learning comes through our sensory input, especially our sight and hearing. However the human mind is a marvelous thing that can compensate for distortions in our sensory inputs. Think with me for a moment about how we might reach a deaf blind infant. True, there are cochlear implants that might give the child a form of hearing. There have been experiments with ocular implants, but these have not been practical to date. How then will a deaf blind infant know his or her world? They must know their world primarily through the sense of touch, taste, and smell. Unlike sight and hearing, these three are near senses.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

By John Sener

As everyone knows, college has become less demanding, students don’t learn much in college, and students spend much less time studying in college than they used to. At least that’s what most everyone thinks they know — thanks to the unfortunate residue of the study Academically Adrift, whose legacy has endured long after the storm of attention and controversy which accompanied its initial publication in early 2011 has faded.

An article by New York Times columnist David Brooks about this “landmark study” is our latest reminder of what happens when important opinion makers trade in the currency of catchy memes as received truth. As Brooks asserts in his recent NYT article (based on Academically Adrift’s findings, e.g., p.69):

Colleges today are certainly less demanding. In 1961, students spent an average of 24 hours a week studying. Today’s students spend a little more than half that time…

“Certainly”?? It’s understandable that informed laymen such as Brooks equate time spent studying with level of intellectual demand, since professional educational organizations such as ASCD do the same — but that doesn’t make it any less specious.

The real problem is that the destructive memes which Academically Adrift has spawned are based on a seriously outdated perspective about what constitutes a “demanding” college education. For starters, nothing says “welcome to the 20th century” quite like equating rigor or effectiveness with time spent studying. In almost any other endeavor, spending less time to accomplish a task would be called “improved productivity.” Back when students spent an average of 24 hours a week studying, a lot of that “study time” involved sifting through card catalogs, browsing book stacks, writing papers by hand or on typewriters, and doing many other tasks which can be done much more efficiently now via other means. But instead of giving higher education any credit for this, critics both inside and outside higher education persist in treating the act of studying as if it were analogous to punching a time clock. Study time is work; socializing time is play and doesn’t count, which is not surprising since Academically Adrift reflects an almost total lack of regard for the value of student time, and the notion of optimizing student time is nowhere to be found in its memes.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 2 Comments »

By Jessica Knott
Associate Editor
Editor, Twitter

Thanks to the generosity of Bert Kimura of the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I was able to sit in on the 2012 Technology, Colleges and Community Worldwide Online Conference (TCC).  This was not my first online conference, but it was the first I’ve encountered that incorporated a badging system so intrinsically into its programming.

Badges are by no means new to conference programming, though different environments lend themselves to different applications. For example, the first thing I do at Educause events is find the ribbon table and procure a “runs with scissors” ribbon for my badge.  In some ways, I find this ribbon more important than the one labeling me as a presenter, as it gives those I meet an insight into who I am. Active in social media? Yes. Blogger? Yes. Instructional designer? Yes. The one in any given presentation most likely to say something a little crazy? Maybe. At Educause, badges are used as conversation starters, or ways to connect with those you meet to build richer dialogues and perhaps expand your personal learning network.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 7 Comments »

By Stefanie Panke
Editor, Social Software in Education

The Technology, Colleges and Community Worldwide Online Conference is an annual professional development event organized by the University of Hawaii at Manoa. The online conference invites faculty, staff, administrators and students worldwide to share their expertise and engage in discussions about innovative practices in the use of educational technology.

I was invited to attend and review this year’s event on behalf of ETC Journal. TCC 2012 took place from April 17-19. Over 500 participants gathered online for three days of online presentations and discussions. The conference schedule featured 2 keynotes, 50 general presentations, 40 student presentation and 7 peer-reviewed contributions in two parallel tracks.

Though many sessions were outside my time zone, I enjoyed several inspiring talks and was particularly impressed by the conference organization’s innovative technology use. “We are pilot testing ‘badgification’ in this year’s conference,” explained conference organizer Bert Kimura. Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »

By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

(Note: This is the second of two reports on the iFacilitate 2012 online workshop. I participated as a student and opted for the certificate option to make sure that I stayed the course. I created a temporary blog for the coursework, and the excerpts below link to posts in that blog. Click here to see the first report. -js)

The five-week workshop ended last Thursday. It was an exhausting yet exhilarating experience. Greg Walker and his team put together an event that challenged and inspired all of us to address key issues in online teaching and learning with an emphasis on facilitating discussions. As expected, I emerged from the experience with far more questions than answers, and I’ll be addressing some of these in future ETCJ articles. One that remains sticky for me concerns lurking.

The common wisdom is that the ratio for active participants to lurkers is 1 to 10, i.e., only 10 percent of participants actively engage in posting and commenting in online forums. This means that the vast majority, 90 percent, lurk. Is this simply a given, a natural phenomenon that can’t be changed? If yes, then why do we expend so much energy trying to get all our students to become active participants? It seems we’re swimming against a current with no expectation of success.

If, however, lurking is a problem, then what are the implications when educators themselves are lurkers?

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 4 Comments »

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

There’s much truth in what Prof. Diane Ravitch says in “The Pattern on the Rug” (Ed Week, 3.27.12) and some exaggeration. She tars every single effort at improving our educational system with the same brush. However, education is not so simple.

The budget cuts have been devastating. Some even seem to believe that our education “deserves” this treatment. Right here at the beginning, everyone should recognize that we will not be able to survive as the preeminent nation in the world with a poor education system. Everyone should also understand that universal public education will not become 100% private in any believable scenario. Our K-12 public schools and community colleges are a bulwark of our free nation. Competition in schooling with a profit motive attached would spell disaster for schools. It’s just too difficult to measure success for a business except for gross revenues, profit, and market capitalization.

Ravitch turns the Race to the Top into white hats and black hats. I have some disagreements with this program, especially its definition of the “Top.” However, such programs can be a stimulus for our schools. As for NCLB, our problems lie not with the intentions but with the execution.

She lashes into the multiple foundations that fund education initiatives. Again, although I don’t agree with all of these, we have to try something to evaluate it. The effort by the Gates Foundation to make many small schools out of one big one had an obvious flaw before it even started, but the foundation did realize its error and withdraw its support.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

By Michael Hurwitz

[Note: This series is being brought to you by ETCJ associate editor Lynn Zimmerman. See Part I: “Technology Is a Game Changer” and Part II: “Technology Makes English the Global Language.” -Editor]

It’s an oft-discussed topic in the media that Chinese, specifically the Mandarin Chinese form that has become the official language of Mainland China, is the “language of the future.” This might sound a bit odd because Chinese is in fact one of the oldest languages in the world, but it’s pretty irrefutable that it’s also one of the fastest-rising languages in terms of global prominence. Learning to speak, read and write Chinese is becoming increasingly popular around the world, but as such an old and unusual language, Chinese presents a lot of problems for learners. Technology, however, is beginning to alleviate this on many fronts.

Chinese is a unique language and can be very difficult for Westerners who are native Romance or Germanic language speakers. Even Japanese speakers, whose native language has a lot in common with Mandarin (including some characters), can struggle mightily with learning it. That’s part of why it helps to approach Mandarin more methodically and tactically than one might a language that’s closer to their native tongue. For instance, while exposure and listening practice are still very important, it’s much more difficult to simply “pick up” Chinese than it would be to pick up Spanish for, say, a native English or French speaker. Much of this has to do with Mandarin’s tonal nature, with different pronunciations of the same syllable taking on (often wildly) different meanings. Without careful instruction and practice in differentiating the five tones, it’s tough to get going in the learning process. This hurdle is especially problematic for adult learners not only because they’ve spent decades in non-tonal or semi-tonal language environments but because they often don’t have the big blocks of time necessary to devote to language learning.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment »

By Samantha Peters

Digital textbooks are all the rage these days as students and school districts clamor to get the iPad, download and fill it with $15 textbooks, and rid themselves of the heavy traditional versions once and for all. But digital textbooks are not the present – or even the future – of education. Here’s why:

1. School districts still save money by using textbooks.

Yes, digital textbooks are far cheaper than the physical variety. But various other costs – chief among them the price of an iPad and the need to periodically repurchase digital versions – drive the digital price far higher. One study found that an average school would spend $215 per student per year when following a digital textbook strategy. This compares with a far lower cost of $90 per student when only traditional textbooks are used. Although some schools with sufficient resources will surely still jump at the chance to make backpacks lighter and lessons more interactive, the significant costs associated with a digital program will prevent most districts from following this course.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

By Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

(Note: This is the first of two reports on the iFacilitate 2012 online workshop. I participated as a student and opted for the certificate option to make sure that I stayed the course. I created a temporary blog for the coursework, and the excerpts below link to posts in that blog. Click here to see the second report. -js)

In early February, when I found an invitation from Greg Walker, Leeward Community College (University of Hawaii System) Distance Education Coordinator, in my emailbox, I decided to go for it. Some of my ETCJ colleagues have written about their MOOCing experiences, and I wanted to see, firsthand, what it was like. In the following weeks, I’ll be sharing some observations and comments that I’m posting in my workshop blog.

The invitation was for a five-week online faculty workshop, iFacilitate:

Aloha mai e. Are you an adventurous “life long learner” who is interested in experiencing the future of online learning? iFacilitate is …. FREE and open. It does not consist of a body of content you are supposed to remember. Rather, the learning in the course results from the activities you undertake, and will be different for each person. In addition, this course is …. distributed across the web….Your active participation in this workshop will help you to acquire the skills needed to function in this type of course. iFacilitate is a 5 week open workshop [beginning 2.27.12] that introduces a variety of facilitation skills to help participants engage learners across a range of conversational spaces, including online discussion forums, web conferencing rooms, and wikis and blogs. This workshop explores building online learning communities and communities of practice …. Online learning communities develop through interaction among participants. Participation is open to everyone …. Your level of participation is up to you. [One of the options is a letter of completion.]

My First ‘Week 1 Online Learning Communities’ Post

Feb. 27 – I haven’t done the readings yet, but here are some preliminary thoughts and concerns. I’ve found that both a challenge and an advantage is the openness of online learning communities. In other words, as a teacher, I can’t and shouldn’t want to control the networks that students naturally create with classmates — individually and in small groups — as well as with me and course spaces I’ve created. In the students’ personal  [click here to read the rest of the post]

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »

Report from SITE2012 AACE in Austin, Texas.

Social Justice and Digital Equity SIG has, with Mike Searson, created a project in Digital Citizenship that is funded by Facebook. We will hold our first meeting tomorrow to iron out details. We are at the SITE.org Conference in Austin, Texas.

Digital Citizenship is a concept which helps teachers, technology leaders and parents understand what students/children/technology users should know to use technology appropriately. Digital Citizenship is more than just a teaching tool; it is a way to prepare students/technology users for a society full of technology. Too often we are seeing students as well as adults misusing and abusing technology but aren’t not sure what we can do. The issue is more than what the users do not know but what is considered appropriate technology usage.

You have probably heard about the parent who shot his child’s computer. There was an interview with the student and parent on NBC to explore the incident.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

By Melissa A. Venable

[Note: ETCJ’s Twitter editor, Jessica Knott, has been working with Melissa to develop this series. See Part 1: Getting Started, Part 2: Channeling the Streams, and Part 4: Participating in a Live Event. -Editor]

In part one of this series we covered many of the fundamental tasks of Twitter, and in part two we addresed basic techniques and workflow management. As you gain more experience with Twitter and grow more confortable using it as a platform for sharing and conversation, you may find you need better organization techniques and more advanced tools. Dashboard applications present linear, chronological streams. If you prefer a more reader-friendly format in terms of information browsing, you should consider other options.

Reader-Friendly Formats

Paper.li, Zite, Twylah, Summify, and The Tweeted Times are all applications with easy to read interfaces featuring the most popular items of the day, as shared by members of your social network. These tools aggregate links in one place, display images, and categorize the information for easy scanning.

Establishing an account includes opening a link to your Twitter feed (or other social media account, as applicable) and configuring the customization options in terms of categories, keywords, screen layout, color, etc. The result is a custom user interface crafted to your specifications. You’ll find headlines, article snippets or previews, links, and navigation menus that cycle through periodic updates (e.g., every 24 hours).

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 6 Comments »

By Frank B. Withrow

Our technology has led the way to thinking of new and efficient ways to distribute videos and computer learning experiences. The entertainment fields with programs such as NetFlix have set the stage for a new format for marketing learning resources. The streaming of video or transmedia distribution can make thousands of lessons available to learners when needed. For an inexpensive monthly service fee, we can make vast libraries of lessons universally available in the home, the library, the classroom and the workplace.

While we are in an economic slow down, we are at the same time faced with the most productively efficient period of American industry. With a high rate of unemployment we are faced with increased individual productivity based upon technical applications of digital technologies. The retooling of the auto industry is an example of this increased efficiency. We are manufacturing better and more efficient automobiles with fewer people and more computer driven machines than ever before.This is true not only in the auto industry but in many manufacturing industries. As new and more complicated machines come on line, we need fewer but smarter workers.

Continue reading →

Filed under: Uncategorized | 3 Comments »