My Brain Hurts

My last post on this topic mentioned the origins of this term. There are many educators that take issue with Prensky’s use of the digital native / digital immigrant concept. Jamie McKenzie http://fno.org/nov07/nativism.html takes a severe swipe at Prensky. McKenzie’s comments are both logical and valid and well worth a read. Labelling an entire generation with sweeping statements seems to be what has raised the ire of many. However Prensky’s terms, and the term digital tourist (visits technology occasionally) still have merit.

I don’t view these as derogatory terms but rather as loose generalisations. Today’s youth are more digitally aware than previous generations. I base this purely on observation and experience. Each generation is different, society changes, people grow up with different experiences. This is why teaching methods must evolve to cater for new learning needs. Note: cater for not pander to. Educations must create meaningful learning experiences and an understanding of digital technologies and their usage is fundamental to 21st century schooling.

To come back to McKenzies thinking though, any lesson needs to be delivered using the appropriate context – sometimes that may be using digital tools and sometimes it may not.

At NECC a person from the Microsoft School of the Future in Philadelphia was part of a keynote panel discussion. It sounded like lots of good goals were being set within an interesting project with the aim of promoting digital learning. As a result I was keen to find out more about this project.

Just watched a Jim Lehrer “News Hour” report on YouTube. What a disappointment, in ten minutes there was not one remotely futuristic educational task being undertaken at this school. It was a $65m school with lots of techno whistles and bells but in the classrooms . . .

Students sitting in rows with teacher out the front demonstrating.

Every laptop screen view revealed screens full of text.

Student: “Now I can type up assignments at home”

The Principal was quoted as stating that “the real innovation is creating a kind of Microsoft corporate culture in the school” YIKES !

Sure the infrastructure was great but the rest was very unimpressive, unless it’s time warped and this is a school of the future from 1987.

After 10 minutes my only thought was “these people just don’t get it”. It included a clip of Bill Gates saying that American high schools are obsolete and not teaching kids what they need – so their solution is this????

I hope tht the narrow focus in this program was due to it being a “news” item and thus focused more on the technology than the learning, even though it should not have been. Otherwise this is a prime example of how to spend lots of money on technology and get it wrong.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Mug66WnoSk

Another ITSC has come and gone, round 2 for the new location at UTS Sydney. Having everyone in the same location this year worked well as did utilising the cafe area for food time. Wollongong Uni was a great location but UTS is far more convenient to get to and accessible to more accommodation and entertainment options. I thought bowling was going to be real dud but it was a great night, thoroughly enjoyed by all. Cocktails the following night was scrumptious with a great band but a little too loud (am I getting old here?).

It is easy to come away enthused and fired up to change the world, hopefully people will be returning to school environments receptive to the new knowledge returning.

Stephanie Hamilton’s opening keynote again provided much food for thought. Her student’s analogy that school was like an airline flight was very apt “Sit down, face forward, buckle up and turn off all electronic devices” and “if you are lucky the trip may be relevant”. Blitto’s blog has a detailed description of her main points. iTunes U is now up and running, although it is very University oriented. Browse over to the University of Florida’s Teacher Education section where they have some excellent K-12 podcasts available.

The feedback on the workshops was very positive as they catered well for the needs of the participants. It was great just getting to know people and picking up little ideas by talking to them about how their school operates.

The keynote to close the 3 day section was by Peter Sheahan, this bloke could talk under water for 10 minutes – even after he had already drowned. Very energetic and coming from teh business sector he provided an interesting point of view. He gave his view of the requirements of the classroom of the future – relevant, interactive, expansive and connected. Students need boundaries but their education needs freedom within those boundaries. He told an interesting tale of a confrontation he had with an employee, neither would give because both were right leading to a poor result for both sides. It is not a case of who is right or wrong but what is the most useful solution to the situation. That thought could apply a lot to our daily school existence.

The one day event was opened by Mike Anderson from NZ who entertained the crowd with his interesting perspective on ICT curriculum integration. His final points about overreacting by banning technology were quite interesting. If children verbally abuse others in the playground we don’t ban talking. We don’t put padlocks and passwords on books and desks. Yet we ban and limit access to highly useful digital tools.

In all a very stimulating conference, great to catch up with old acquaintances and puts some names to faces from the MacEd list. Also good to see Blitto do something besides FCP – perhaps a leopard can change its spots?

Following on from my last post, this was the title of an article in today’s Australian newspaper on film producer turned British politician David Puttnam’s comments regarding digital natives and the chasm opening up between students and teachers over ICT usage. As he has a number of educational credentials and was addressing the Curriculum Corporation conference in Sydney I will assume that he knows the correct meaning of digital native and digital immigrant, I’m therefore assuming that the reporter messed up the quotes on that matter.

There is nothing wrong with being a digital immigrant, indeed it is what we who are not digital natives should aspire to be.

I was impressed that he made the exact point that is a catchcry of mine, namely: teachers (and schools) that fail to embrace digital technologies will be viewed by students as irrelevant.

He made an interesting point by comparing “the standoff between education and technology to the plight of the British clergy in the 17th century, who greeted with furore the first publication of the bible. It meant they were no longer the old fount of knowledge because people started to read the Bible for themselves and challenged the orthodoxies.”

He may be branding teacher too widely here for most teachers at least recognise the value of technology as a teaching and learning tool, they are just not sure how to best utilise it. The main problem is that there has never been enough funding for PD. There is a strange assumption that teachers will know or find out what to do – not so.

What really irks me is teachers (and schools) who think that browsing the web and typing in Word (with the odd Powerpoint thrown in for creativity) is utilising ICT. Rather, this is merely utilising technology at a very low level and something I’ll address in greater detail later.

The article ended with another interesting Lord Putnam quote “Steal the technology, steal the ideas, use the energy and inventiveness but protect the values you are teaching.”

Food for thought . . . . . . . . .

This term was coined by Marc Prensky several years ago to describe the great majority of today’s students who are growing up in homes and a society where technology is embedded in the fabric of that environment. In Prensky’s words “Our students today are all ‘native speakers’ of the digital language of computers, video games and the Internet. ” (http://www.marcprensky.com)

This makes a lot of sense to me and is reflected by the behaviour I have observed in today’s students. I am surprised by the number of educators who have still not heard of this term, but when I explain it (and the term digitial immigrants) to them they do understand and agree with the point. A Wikipedia article on Digital Natives makes an interesting point that it was actually digital immigrants who built the Internet, but then continues to make some statements that appear to miss the point Prensky was making. The article is open for editing so it will be interesting to watch how it evolves.

This week, five 5th Grade students on a television show were asked “What type of software are Internet Explorer and Firefox examples of?” Now these were intelligent students and prime examples of what a digital native is supposed to be, however, only one student gave the correct answer Web Browser and one other gave an answer that was close but not quite correct. Only one in five digital natives knows what a web browser is? Later in the same program they were asked “What is a graphical representation of a person?” and they all gave the correct answer Avatar. Hmmm, now this would appear to be a much more technical question than to identify a web browser.

Here we have an example that supports the digital native concept. If the students were asked to describe the functionality of Firefox et al then no doubt they would have done so easily. All you do is click on an icon and browse the web, nothing actually comes up to say You are using a web browser, so the term is logically not familiar to them.

You don’t just click on an icon and get an avatar, they need to be created. Progams where you create an Avatar would use that term repeatedly therefore the terminology becomes known.

It seems to be becoming fairly common for student groups touring another country to include a short home stay with a local family. Last year we hosted a 17 year old lad from Chicago for three days. It was a great experience as we were able to find out much out each other’s country. Our view of Chicago had been tainted by too many gangster movies so it was good to hear what the city is really like. Apparently the title “windy city” is well earned. Google Earth was a great tool to use to add meaning to some of those explanations.

Last week we had the opportunity to host two 16 year old boys from Nara, Japan on a cultural exchange. Nara is a sister city to our own Canberra. The boys were again wonderful ambassadors for their country but a big difference this time was a langauge barrier – they spoke very little English and we spoke zero Japanese. A lot of pointing, hand gestures, showing of pictures, nodding and smiling seemed to work. We avoided speaking louder and slower.

An information sheet we received prior to their arrival stated that they were both allergic to vegetables????? Oh well we could indulge that for a couple of days – the wide eyes and smiles as some fairly large steaks went on the BBQ indicated that they approved of our meal choice. Come dessert time though neither of them liked chocolate . . . vegetables I can understand but chocolate?? All our limited stock of dessert items contained chocolate. However, we managed to feed them some carefully selected ice cream that had only a little chocolate in it – reminding me of the old Monty Python Spam sketch.

Google Earth was again very helpful and despite the languge barrier we managed to pass on a lot of information to each other. So if the opportunity to host some overseas visitors comes your way I encourage you to do it, with the promise that it will be a very rewarding experience.

The lure of blogging has been calling for some time but the abilty to answer it has been a somewhat rocky road. Having had two blogspot blogs go west at blogger and not been able to resolve the problem I decided to up anchor and give edublogs a go. All was well for the first month and I really liked the way the blog can be customised to suit the look you want. However then the same problem I had with Blogger followed me here – suddenly my password and username were not recognised even though they were being entered correctly. Throw in some time off for a holiday and I was off cyber air for about a month. Upon my return, no amount of fiddling seemed to work so it was time to seek some technical assistance.

Unlike my Blogger experience I requested a new password which still didn’t work but it appeared to actually come from a person rather than from an automated response system so I wrote to that person detailing my tail of woe. The next day there was a reply email with new login details that again appeared to be from a real person. OK, things are looking hopeful. Tentatively the new details were entered into the login page and holding my breathe, the magic go button was pressed. Nothing much happened straight away, but then that is a good thing – no error message. Then the page loaded and voila my blog was back.

I am so impressed that a site that now hosts 100 000 blogs was able to give human attention to my problem. Well done edublogs and mant happy returns. I’m looking forward to getting back into the blogging seat.

This wonderful little utility is a DVD to mpeg-4 converter. I’m yet to find any DVD it does not work with. Really useful to convert to iPod format. It gets a giant thumbs up and should be an essentail part of your ulility cupboard. Runs on Mac, Linux and Windows.

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

These words were uttered to me today by a friend who only uses PCs. For a long time I have used both a Mac and a PC, nowdays its an Intel Macbook that runs both so at least I only need one computer. I really wouldn’t like to be without both as each has its own advantages, but if I had to make a choice the wonderful creativeness of the Mac and it’s associated software wins hands down. But this is not about me.

My friend’s statement referred to his wife who also has a PC only background but was issued with a Mac by her school earlier this year. He stated that “She had put it in the cupboard and left it there, having only used it about twice. So much for the user friendliness of the Mac”.

The Mac vs PC thing is really boring so let’s not go there as this is not about that.

The real issue here however is an all to familiar one in education. Lots of money spent on the technology and precious little on staff training.

I know that she has had bugger all PD on how to use her new Mac. Teachers are incredibly busy so unless they have a real techno drive they are not going to invest the necessary time required to learn something new. A person can not become an instant expert on a new machine after only limited exposure.

Has she been shown the basics of using it? Has she been shown the way it uses Word, Powerpoint, Excel and the Internet exactly the same way her PC does? Has she been shown the highly creative iLife suite of programs preloaded on it? Has anyone shown her how simple it is to create and publish really high quality podcasts with GarageBand? Widgets anyone? Or how easily a class lesson can come alive using Comic Life? The inbuilt camera, ichat, webcams or downloading podcasts and organising audio and video content via iTunes? How to download a file from uTube to use in class, converting video formats with iSquint? Has she been exposed to the wonders of Google Earth? How easily files can be dragged and dropped into other applications or the wonderful level of interactivity between various programs? What about the use of virtual worlds? etc, etc, etc

I doubt that she has been made aware of any of this.

In reality she has been given a Ferrari and all she has been shown how to do is to put on the parking brake. Given the above situation I’d probably put it in the cupboard as well.

It’s been stated by many people many times over that for every $ spent on technology a $ needs to be spent on training. Some schools and districts have wonderfully supportive PD networks, but some others . . . . . .

Some Year 10 students today were telling me about their web site where they post short movies they have created which also appear on YouTube. They have 5 “movies” posted and were rightfully proud of their small site. They were using MovieMaker and agreed with me that it is a toy program and that they would love to update to some real software like Final Cut Pro. Seems like they need part time jobs. At least the school uses FCP so if they enrol in the correct unit next year they can fuel their movie passion with some real tools.

This does show how creative students want to be and their willingnes to take on new learning to fulfil a desire. The instant success of YouTube is the end result of that. Also makes you wonder what these students have to put up with if these creative spirits are not encouraged in a pencil and paper school system.