Thinking Inside the Box

By Steve Eskow
Editor, Hybrid vs. Virtual Issues

In the United States the box is often 20′ by 30′, 600 square feet. It is furnished with 30 tablet arm chairs that encourage the sitting students to write. In front of the box there may be a lectern, which encourages the standing instructor to say things which the students can write.

There are other boxes in the building. One is called the “lecture hall.” The “campus” is a collection of such boxes, boxes of different sizes and configurations which allow and encourage variations in the kind of speaking and writing that goes on within them.

Some of the boxes have the new communication technologies. It is the dream of innovating teachers and administrators and educational agencies that these new tools can “blend” with the old tools of talk and books and thus transform education.

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‘Computer Science’ Contains Little or No Science

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

[Note: The following article was originally posted by Harry Keller on 30 July 2010 as a reply to Robert Plants‘s “Computer Science – A Field of Dreams.” -js]

The statement, “Our faculty in the schools of education have the expertise to continue to produce the same teachers for the same curricula, but they lack any expertise to produce teachers for STEM related subjects…” rings true. An insufficient number of science teachers understand science. It’s not really their fault for they haven’t had the opportunities to develop that understanding. Continue reading

Ning’s Self-Contradictions

Claude AlmansiBy Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)

About Ning’s decision to scrap free networks and for alternatives to Ning, see End of Free Ning Networks: Live Online Discussion: Apr. 20th.

Three plans

Ning sent an e-mail entitled “Important news about your Ning Network” to Ning network owners on July 28, 2010, telling them about three choices that will remain available to them until August 20, 2010: Mini, Plus and Pro.

Actually, the Mini plan also comes in a for-free version sponsored by Pearson — but only for eligible North American K-12 and Higher-Ed Ning Networks — in spite of all Pearson’s boasting about being Continue reading

Computer Science – A Field of Dreams

By Robert Plants

[Editor’s Note: This article was written in response to Bonnie Bracey Sutton‘s call for submissions from selected writers. Bonnie is ETCJ’s editor of policy issues, and the focus of her call was Erik W. Robelen’s “Schools Fall Behind in Offering Computer Science” (Education Week, 7.14.10); WebCite version. -js]

You can’t build it and expect people to come. We cite statistics on what is and what isn’t but fail to dig into the symptoms. We point out initiatives that may influence supply and demand but don’t go on to look at what influences K-12 education that results in the dearth of interest in computer science. In most states, the emphasis lies in producing enough teachers to staff the education that we have. We have an educational system focused on a standardized curriculum, rote memorization, nationalized testing, curriculum standards. Dig a little deeper and you will find that the structure of schooling is about the little red brick building we have always known, grades, classrooms, curriculum, teaching strategies – one size fits all. In many ways, our system of schooling has not changed in 100 years. Continue reading

For Educational Change — Teachers Are the Key

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

This article is in response to the challenge that prompted John Adsit‘s “What Is Needed for Educational Change“: What is the one most important factor in making change work? John highlighted leadership, and Harry Keller, in “Leaders Must Be Visionary Risk-takers to Change Our Schools,” added qualities that the leader must have.

I’d be inclined to agree with John and Harry if the campus were still the center of the academic world. But it’s not. The center has been shifting to the world’s digital infrastructure, to the internet, where classrooms, schools, and colleges are being reconstructed in virtual bits rather than cement, creating “a world of ubiquitous connectivity” (Hagel, Brown, and Davison, The 2009 Shift Index: Measuring the Forces of Long-term Change, p. 11).

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Leaders Must Be Visionary Risk-takers to Change Our Schools

By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

[Note: The following article was originally posted by Harry Keller on 26 July 2010 as a reply to John Adsit’s What Is Needed for Educational Change. -js]

Educational change. What is it? Would we really like to have it?

In better times, things were allowed to move along without too much worry about education, except for some of the poor and minority areas.

Now, with headlines screaming at us about changing education, what’s wrong? John Adsit has provided us all with a cogent analysis of what doesn’t work and a suggestion as to why we aren’t doing what does.

Is change necessary? I have personal experience with a large urban school in a poor neighborhood (60% poverty). Despite hiring the best possible science teachers, they still had a 50% failure rate on the Regents science tests. Some of these teachers had PhDs in science. They were all excellent communicators and, as far as I could tell, excellent teachers. The science department was tearing its hair out. So, yes, change is necessary. This story repeats itself too many times across our country. Continue reading

What Is Needed for Educational Change

adsit80By John Adsit
Editor, Curriculum & Instruction

This article springs from an exchange of opinions on what is needed to effect change, and I was challenged to start a new discussion on the most important factors in making change work. In that original exchange, I argued that the most important factor is leadership, and I will start this new discussion with that premise. I believe skilled leadership is the most important factor in making change happen.

A couple of decades ago I spent some very painful years when the opposite was believed to be true. There was a belief, spurred in large part by the Annenberg Institute’s Re:Learning project, that the change leaders in education had to come from within the faculty. Change had to at least appear to be a grassroots effort, and school administrators sought to develop teacher leaders for reform efforts. The theory was that teacher leaders would initiate a reform, it would work, and the idea would slowly progress through the ranks until it had taken over. The administrators would intentionally fade into the background and let this magic work. Continue reading

‘Emerging Technologies in Distance Education’ ed. by George Veletsianos

Claude AlmansiBy Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

Emerging Technologies in Distance Education, edited by George Veletsianos, has just been published by Athabasca University Press, a Canadian publisher of Open Access, peer-reviewed, scholarly publications. The book, under an Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 Canada  Creative Commons License, can be bought in print or downloaded (at no cost) as PDF from aupress.ca/index.php/books/120177.

Cover of Emerging Technologies in Distance Education, ed. by George Veletsianos Continue reading

Faculty and Students Need Training to Succeed in Online Classes

adsit80By John Adsit
Editor, Curriculum & Instruction

[Note: This article was first posted by John on 23 July 2010 as a reply to a comment by Jim, in the discussion on “We Need an Eco-Smart Model for Online Learning.” Also see John’s earlier comment on that article. -js]

For the student, a major difference is that she can’t sit back and expect to be taught. She has to actively navigate the virtual environment to learn. -Jim S

In my experience, therein lies the problem.

You describe a “guide on the side” ideal of learning, a style I endorse. When I first started an online school, we set up all our courses like this, from the start, and immediately ran into significant problems with student failure. It led me to do a presentation at a national conference I called “The Trap of Best Practice.”

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HOT@ Emerging Tech San Jose – July 20-23

By Jessica Knott
Editor, Twitter

So far, this conference is really interesting, with much diversity in interest. The thing today that’s standing out to me most (probably due to my fascination with the LMS) was the session on LMS futures. This blog post really sums up the discussion, highlighting an interesting disconnect between LMS vendors and users.

I’m not getting to as many sessions as I’d hoped, but I’m editing a ton of recordings, so see a lot about what’s being discussed. :)

Added 26 July 2010: If you would like to read up on the Twitter back channel (which I highly recommend), please search for the hash tag #et4online to see first hand responses from conference attendees. Continue reading

We Need an Eco-Smart Model for Online Learning

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

Two articles that appeared in my Google alerts today (7.17.10) grabbed my attention. Both were out of California. One was a San Francisco Chronicle editorial blasting the University of California’s vision of an internet-delivered bachelor’s degree program.

The other was an op-ed by James Fay and Jane Sjogren, sharing their vision of a hypothetical Golden State Online, or GSO, a “stand-alone online community college campus.”

On the surface, the visions seem to be quite different, and the viewpoints are obviously different. However, below the surface, both visions share a common flaw — they’re based on models of online learning that are, in my opinion, simply not sustainable.

This got me thinking about an alternative model that would be infinitely sustainable. After a few starts and stops, I came up with an eco-smart model for online learning, or E-SMOL. Continue reading

Recreating an Online Class for Greater Student Participation and Retention

Judith McDanielBy Judith McDaniel
Editor, Web-based Course Design

I am core faculty for the M.A. program in Literature and Writing at Vermont College. In the last decade, Vermont College was bought by Union Institute and University in Cincinnati, Ohio. I live full time in Tucson, Arizona. I attend faculty meetings in Ohio and Vermont by conference call, and nearly half of the participants in any meeting are phoning in from all parts of the United States.

Last semester, two days before classes started, I took over a course that a colleague had developed; he was unable to teach for health reasons, and so I had no choice but to use the syllabus and the course site that he had developed. I went through the semester following the syllabus he had created and the discussion prompts that engaged the students each week in a conversation about the materials. I scrambled to keep up with the reading each week; I have a Ph.D. in literature, but my specialty is nineteenth century poetry and fiction, while his was drama and postmodern literature and theory. Reading even a part of what he had assigned was enough to stretch me, and I could only imagine how the students who were attempting their first graduate work might have felt. Continue reading

JRTE Spring 2010 Issue – A Sacrilegious Review

Jim ShimabukuroBy Jim Shimabukuro
Editor

Three of the four articles that make up the spring 2010 issue (v42n3) of Journal of Research on Technology in Education caught my attention more for their assumptions than their stated purposes. These assumptions highlight, for me, some of the weaknesses inherent in efforts to introduce technology into schools and colleges.

In “Technology’s Achilles Heel: Achieving High-Quality Implementation,” the “heel” for Gene E. Hall is school and college administrators. According to Hall, “Education technology scholars and practitioners are engaged with some of the most promising and interesting innovations.” However, these innovations don’t find their way into classrooms because of the failure of administrators to implement them. Thus, our enlightened ed tech guiding lights are “confronted first hand with the challenges associated with disappointing implementation efforts and failures to go to scale.” Continue reading

HOT@ ETAI – Day 2: English Teachers Association of Israel

Lynn ZimmermannBy Lynn Zimmerman
Editor, Teacher Education

I am presently attending the ETAI (English Teachers Association of Israel) “Linking Through Language” conference in Jerusalem. (Click here to see the first-day report.) One of the keynote speakers was David Crystal, a renowned linguist. His keynote plenary lecture was called “Myths and Realities of English on the Internet.” As an educator interested in both language and technology issues in education, I found his talk engaging and interesting.

Since the theme of the conference is “Linking Through Language,” Crystal opened up his remarks by referring to the Internet as “the language linker par excellence.” After hearing his talk, I think he would agree with Tom Preskett’s article from April 8, 2010, Social Media Doesn’t Threaten Literacy! Among other things Crystal pointed out that in order to text using abbreviated words, one needs to know how to spell the word to start with so you can leave out the proper letters. He also cited anecdotal evidence from teachers showing that students do not carry over these habits into formal writing to a large degree. Continue reading

A Response to Marc Prensky’s ‘Simple Changes’

keller80By Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

It is with some humility that I undertake to comment on Mr. Prensky’s article, “Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools.” It touches on many ideas in which I have an interest, beginning with the oil spill as learning opportunity on which I provided an earlier comment (see “Opportunities to Learn from Oil Spills“). His idea is much more bold than mine, and I bow to his audaciousness.

I concur in the concept that the words “relevant’ and “authentic” have become overused and have lost meaning. They also represent a long-ago era of education that didn’t work then. Like so much in education, moderation and balance make things work. I believe that there’s nothing wrong with injecting some relevancy and authenticity into a classroom as long as you don’t base your entire curriculum on those concepts. I’m not so sure that “real” has any more meaning than those words, however. Continue reading

Italy: Teachers’ Manifesto

Claude AlmansiBy Claude Almansi
Editor, Accessibility Issues

The Italian teachers of the la scuola che funziona (the school that works)  project have launched the Manifesto degli insegnanti (Teachers’ manifesto), which converges interestingly with Marc Prensky‘s Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools.

Licenza Creative Commons BY-NC-ND
The original Italian manifesto is published under a Creative Commons License. It is translated here by permission of the authors, who can be contacted via la scuola che funziona. Here is its English translation by Luciana Guido:): Continue reading

HOT@ ETAI – English Teachers Association of Israel

Lynn ZimmermannBy Lynn Zimmerman
Editor, Teacher Education

I am presently attending the ETAI (English Teachers Association of Israel) “Linking Through Language” conference in Jerusalem. (Click here to see the day two report.) This evening’s opening presentation, sponsored by the British Council, UK, was interesting and had an unexpected element. David Crystal, a renowned linguist, and his wife had prepared a presentation/performance called “Speaking Shakespeare: Fact and Fiction,” described in the program as “a light-hearted romp through Shakespeare.” Continue reading

Simple Changes in Current Practices May Save Our Schools

Marc PrenskyBy Marc Prensky

Here’s an idea to get at least something positive out of the Gulf oil spill. What if volunteers (or BP, under presidential order) collected samples of the tar balls on the beaches, sealed them in plastic bags, and then shipped them to every school in America for all students to analyze in their science classes. We could even throw in some oil-covered sand and feathers for good measure.

Doing this would involve every school kid (and science teacher) firsthand in the problem. They would see and smell, for themselves, just what the spill is actually producing, rather than just hearing about it on TV. Their awareness, as citizens and scientists, would be greatly enhanced. Continue reading

Computers in Low-income Households = Little or No Educational Benefit?

Here’s an article with a generalization that goes against the grain of everything most educators believe about access to computers for children from low-income homes. Randall Stross, in “Computers at Home: Educational Hope vs. Teenage Reality“* (New York Times, 7.9.10), says that studies by economists indicate “little or no educational benefit” is gained.

Stross writes, “Economists are trying to measure a home computer’s educational impact on schoolchildren in low-income households. Taking widely varying routes, they are arriving at similar conclusions: little or no educational benefit is found. Worse, computers seem to have further separated children in low-income households, whose test scores often decline after the machine arrives, from their more privileged counterparts.” Continue reading

Morgan Sims

[Posted on 7.10.13; revised 7.11.13]
Morgan Sims160

Morgan Sims, a recent graduate of the University of South Florida, is a writer and social media consultant who loves all things tech and social media. She works indirectly with companies such as InternetServiceProvider. She spends most of her free time with her puppy, cooking, and staying active.

ETC Publications

Mobile Technology Finding a Place in the Classroom

Computational Thinking – What Is It?

Bonnie BraceyBy Bonnie Bracey Sutton
Editor, Policy Issues

I attended the first CS4HS High School Teacher Workshop: Computational Thinking and Computational Doing from June 25-27, 2010, at the ATLAS Institute on the University of Colorado at Boulder campus. (The conference was featured in the Boulder DailyCamera.)

First, a bit of background. I have been working in advocacy for STEM and related technologies, lurking around the edges of computational science for some time thinking about ways in which to incorporate new kinds of thinking for students in our schools. I have attended the leading Supercomputing Conferences and brought teams to the events to try to change teaching and learning so that computational thinking, with games and simulations, could find a prominent place in the forefront of those inserting STEM into the curriculum. However, I am not sure the conference is always happy with the outcomes of teacher participation since it’s difficult to gauge the longterm effects of what happens in the classroom and some presenters don’t have a very high regard for the ability of teachers to work with technology.

But this CS4HS workshop in Boulder was different. Its focus was on teachers, and it was par excellence! Continue reading

‘Solar Impulse’ – Could Very Well Be Educational

John SenerBy John Sener

[Note: This article is a response to Harry Keller and John Adsit‘s articles in Flight of the ‘Solar Impulse’ – Educationally Relevant? All were prompted by Claude Almansi‘s Online in RealTime announcement. -js]

OK, this takes the discussion even further away from its original topic, but I found myself fascinated by several aspects.

First: Why do science projects essentially have to be labs? If science is fundamentally a way of thinking, why not also do projects that teach students how to think scientifically without having to use a lab? Field work? Conceptual work? Thought experiments?

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Flight of the ‘Solar Impulse’ – Educationally Relevant?

[Note: This post contains two articles, by Harry Keller and John Adsit, that were written in response to the Online Live in RealTime article by Claude Almansi. Also see John Sener‘s response to this article. -js]
Picture of Harry Keller and John AdsitBy Harry Keller
Editor, Science Education

The flight of the Solar Impulse is truly a technological tour de force. I was very impressed by the charts and virtual cockpit with the map of the plane’s progress. I didn’t even know that this amazing flight was taking place until Claude‘s note. Then I saw the headline in the NYT, “Solar-Powered Plane Flies for 26 Hours.” I have to wonder how many people see that headline and realize immediately the remarkable fact that such a flight requires flying a solar-powered plane for hours in the dark.

We see plenty of emphasis on STEM education in the U.S. these days. I am very biased toward the S (science) part of the acronym but see the importance of technology as a means of engagement. Mathematics gets enough attention on its own and can be better taught, IMO, in conjunction with science, technology, and engineering until students have enough sophistication to study things like group theory that are much more abstract. But I’m biased, as I said. Continue reading

Levels of Learning: The Creative Process

Tom PreskettBy Tom Preskett

I’m doing a lot of consultancy this month in various contexts under various titles designated by my clients. These include etutoring and master class in blended learning. The latter of these is good for my ego but is perhaps a bit grandiose. The content is never exactly the same since different emphases are required as the contexts change. As long as my overall message is the same, I am happy.

Titling is an issue I need to get to grips with. I haven’t hit upon a one that I’m fantastically happy with. I’ve been using Web2.0Learning a lot, but I don’t want to be totally web 2.0 tool focused, and the content often reflects this now. Continue reading

e-Book Readers: Attempting to Bugger the Blind Is Bad for Business

Accessibility 4 All by Claude Almansi

DoJ’s and DoE’s letter to college and university presidents on e-book readers

On June 29, 2010,  Thomas E. Perez (Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, U.S. Department of Justice) and Russlynn Ali (Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, U.S. Department of Education) sent a joint letter on electronic book readers:

Dear College or University President:

We write to express concern on the part of the Department of Justice and the Department of Education that colleges and universities are using electronic book readers that are not accessible to students who are blind or have low vision and to seek your help in ensuring that this emerging technology is used in classroom settings in a manner that is permissible under federal law.  A serious problem with some of these devices is that they lack an accessible text-to-speech function.  Requiring use of an emerging technology in a classroom environment when the technology is inaccessible to an entire population of individuals with disabilities–individuals with visual disabilities–is discrimination prohibited by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 (ADA) and Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 (Section 504) unless those individuals are provided accommodations or modifications that permit them to receive all the educational benefits provided by the technology in an equally effective and equally integrated manner.(…)

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