Jim Shawley's High School American Government Blog: April 2015

Thursday, April 30, 2015

Blog #5: Technology Action Plan

Overview

"We specialize in all makes, in all models, and in all years." My dad dun tol' me, never trust a mechanic with a sign like that over his shop. Why? Simple: Nobody is that skilled or smart or capable or intelligent or tech-savvy. That brings us to Scott Steinberg's March 5, 2013 article in the Huffington Post.

There Steinberg advocates that teachers be fluent in ten spheres of "tech": Knowing how to operate the latest and greatest popular apps, gadgets (whatever those are), and online services; being capable of doing basic troubleshooting of hardware; finding and accessing help resources (that's easy--contact the IT department!); speaking "the lingo" (sorry, ain't gonna happen with me); understanding how to provide bulletproof security; being in tune with the latest technology; social networking (and get in trouble for the appearance of impropriety?!); recognizing and evaluating the pros and cons of technology (now this I'm good at--really good), caring for and properly using hardware; and conversing with and listening to parents about technology issues (this, I suspect, is one of my fortes also--given my qualification as a parent/grandparent, and my ambivalence toward the fad of adopting all things technological). So. What to acknowledge? I will never be fluent in all makes, model, and years of technological advances or trends or languages. But I can be fluent in finding information for my students.

Am I opposed to technology? Not at all. For years, as a metrology technician, I pleaded with the chain of supervision at the investor-owned electric utility nuclear power plant to purchase some of the newest, most advanced digital technology available. Example: The photo to the right is the venerable Fluke 7105 DC Calibration system. This set of boxes, coupled with a saturated standard cell, cold provide very accurate DC volts, by means of ratio division. However, it required some skill and much care to fully exploit its capabilities. It cost approximately $10,000.00 in the 1980s.

Compare that to the Fluke's premier digital AV/DV/AC/DC/Resistance Calibrator and a 10V(dc) Zener standard we purchased:

Above and to the left is the $40,000.00 Fluke 5720A, and below it is the $4,000.00 Fluke 732A 10V(dc) Zener standard. This calibrator, coupled with the 732A and two calibrated resistors (a 1Ω and a 10k Ω standard), gave us millivolts(dc) to 1,000V(dc), as well as the same in AC volts; additionally, we also had DC and AC current; further, we had decade and 1.9X decade resistances; All of these functions were now orders of magnitude more accurate than before, all in one unit, and with nowhere near the number of connections needing to be made. Plus, with more advanced digital multimeters that had IEEE-488 protocol, we could merely make some connections, and push "ENTER". A few minutes later, all "As Found" data were recorded and printed.

However, when a technician was transferred into the Met Lab, I always insisted he or she learn using the old components first! Why? So that they would learn the principles of metrology, as well as learn to think critically.

Recognizing that 90% of what I wrote above is in a "foreign language," I did so to make an important (at least to me) point: Technology advocates (perhaps acolytes is a better descriptor?), in their eagerness and zeal, often tout their wares too enthusiasticly, and also using too technical a jargon, leaving us potential customers/users befuddled. And we nod our heads dumbly, and don't get a chance to think through the entire panoply of consequences... Still, used correctly technology can indeed enhance learning Example: Ruben Puentadura, Ph.D., developed the "SAMR" concept. explained very aptly by the Digital Learning Team of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Essentially, Puentadura, asserts, technology can be used either to enhance, or to transform the learning process: Two stages enhance; two stages transform. Clicking on the "Digital Team" link, you will see a very nice graphic, wherein Google Earth is used as an example. I had no idea, when I used Panoramio and 360 cities when showing the ruins of the Palace of Knossos on Crete, during the study of the ancient Greeks that I had jumped

from Enhancement:

Substitution: Technology acts as a direct tool substitute, with no functional change/use Google Earth instead of an Atlas to locate a place; and

Augmentation: Technology acts as direct tool substitute, with functional improvement/use Google Earth rulers to measure the distance between two places...

to Augmentation:

Modification: Technology allows for significant task redesign/use Google Earth layers such as panoramio and 360 cities to research locations; and

Redefinition: Technology allows for the creation of new tasks, previously inconceivable/create a narrated Google Earth guided tour and share this online.

I wholeheartedly agree with using this kind of technology, provided the mental and cognitive tools are developed beforehand. Let's see how Common Sense Media explained the SAMR in the YouTube video below:

Note the classroom task Common Sense Media uses: The simple "creative writing" task. Rather than taking pencil or pen to paper, they suggest Substituting a simple word processor, and a little bit of productivity enhancement occurs. To further improve productivity, they propose the teacher Augment the task by directing the students to exploit the word processor's spell check, grammar check, and other tools. This is good so that their knot mixing up the three there homonyms they're on the paper. (Carefully re-read that previous sentence. A spelling checker would not have caught any error.) This will relieve the students of any overloading their long-term memory with spelling or math rules and formulae.

Common Sense then proposes the transition from Enhancement to Transformation by Modification is effected by means of using, rather than Word, Google Docs instead, sharing with fellow students, and collaborating with a finished product that excels in its quality and creativity. Finally, they Redefine the task, to be a collaboration with fellow students--not to write creatively, but to video creatively.

This would be an excellent exercise--for an advanced placement class. It would not enhance learning, much less transform learning at all to do a creative writing assignment in primary or even intermediate school; indeed, I would hesitate to even use this in middle school/junior high school. Too much brain development--too much cognitive development is at stake to not drill young scholars in the fundamentals, including the mathematical and writing/cursive penmanship skills. The science of cognitive development is settled: Cursive writing drills enhance neurological interconnections. In my next blog posting, I will address this more extensively. But permit me to address the idea of our youngest scholars using keyboards and monitors to do academic work rather than paper, pencils/pens, and real books, is tantamount to training various primates to avoid shocks, as was done in the 1950s by the space race nations, except instead of shock avoidance, the young scholars are rewarded with whooshes and zzzings and bubble pop sounds and vivid animated graphics. The questions to be asked are: Did real learning occur? Was the brain's development enhanced? Was the mind honed a little more to prepare it to really learn to engage in critical thinking?

I reiterate: Technology, properly used, and used within context, is good. It does enhance learning, if used properly. Consider how Mike Christiansen of Kent, Washington, has used YouTube in his ninth grade social studies class:

Kent Meridian High school has a student population which encompasses at least fifty different cultural backgrounds, so Mr. Christiansen has utilized individualized watching of YouTube videos as a means of reaching his students. Depending on the specific locale and school district, this may very well be a valid alternative.

The bottom line, however, is what Jose Bowen, the Dean of Southern Methodist University's Meadows School of the Arts, calls "teaching naked"--teaching from one's heart, and utilizing one's strengths. The following quotations from his video below spoke to me: "If you're a good lecturer, great; if you're not a good lecturer, then stop lecturing. Because now the market for lecturing is global.... [U]se that podcast from Yale or from MIT." "Residential education is all about interactions, all about dialogue." "...[T]he best use of technology is outside of the classroom."

Well. Dr. Bowen may have a point. I doubt I could ever rival the famous Stephen Hawking in terms of lecturing. He appeared April 26, 2015 at the Sydney Opera House. Here is a little preview:

And now, the closing remarks of Stephen Hawking's lecture:

Resources

Blog # 4: Responding to Changes

Professional Goals

The world has changed. It once was some 25,000 statute miles in circumference; now it is about ninety minutes from Cape Canaveral to Cape Canaveral. As a senior in high school, and as a cadet in the Civil Air Patrol, I was afforded the opportunity to spend a week at the now defunct Richards-Gebaur Air Force Base, a part of the Air Defense Command. Among other activities, we cadets were able to tour the base's computer room--one room, as large as three or more basketball courts, vacuum tube-driven hardware, loud and cold environment. Later, data punch cards became the standard means of remembering information--ROM. Each card had this caveat: "Do not fold, spindle, or mutilate."

Later, in the early 1980s, after separating from the Navy, I purchased a Radio Shack "Tandy Color Computer 128". Think of that: One hundred twenty-eight kilobytes of RAM! No hard drive (what was that?), and programs were on either audio cassettes or little plug-in modules.

In Basic Training, Spring of 1975, I watched a 16mm film featuring the 1969 flight line fire aboard the USS Forrestal, a paradigm-shifting event in the Navy; recently, I found it online, downloaded it, and can now watch it using Windows Media Player.

We learned the old-fashioned way, back then. We earned it. Well, those of us who actually tried. We listened to lecture, we read, we dissected frogs and tortoises and earthworms. We did lab experiments in physics and chemistry. And we had to remember what we had learned. We had no choice. Tests were not open book, and neither was life. We did not have access to an internet, or a world wide web--or, for that matter, even a well-stocked library.

Not so today. Not so, the 21^st Century. The teaching model, as explained in this Prezi YouTube video uploaded by mathipedia, has changed. For the better, or for the worse--the jury is still out, but I do have my opinion. Some of the assertions made therein, I agree with; others, I do not. I am forced, based on empirical evidence, to agree with the assertion that teachers are no longer the sole source of information in the classroom. However, I am a little queasy about calling teachers filters of information. What I disagree with, however, is the notion about apparently starting with the upper levels of Bloom's taxonomy first: Creating, evaluating, analyzing; meanwhile, we are neglecting the fundamentals: Remembering, understanding, and applying.

My concern is perhaps better explained by the car repair analogy. One cannot be expected to understand the more complex fuel management systems or ignition management systems of a newer car unless one has a basic, fundamental understanding of the four-stroke cycle engine's combustion process.

Well. Enough of that, before I get in trouble, and find myself fired before being hired. As Bob Dylan so eloquently said so many millennia ago, "The times, they are a changin'." And respond I must. In the "old days," teachers had to concern themselves with only content knowledge (CK) and, to a lesser degree, pedagogical knowledge (PK). (See Shulman, here.) Now, however, as the Prezi above states, there is more: There is technical knowledge (TK) which must be gained by the teacher also.

Reading the literature about them, I get the sense that, based on my education--both in my baccalaureate majors and also in my graduate training--that I employed TPCK during my student teaching semester. I just didn't call it that. Blending the three together has been the mission of the people at TPACK Academy. There they have striven to help educators find that "sweet spot" where PK, CK, and TK all intersect--TPCK. Ideally, that intersection will be broad-based; but they must now intersect.

Leading up to the next bit of discussion, we need to watch the two following videos one concerning the demise of the traditional, or legacy college education, and then a video which is a hypothetical account of the demise of traditional, or legacy news media. Now let us analyze something which the voice-over narrator says in the second video: "For too many, EPIC is merely a collection of trivia much of it untrue, all of it narrow, shallow, and sensational. But EPIC was what we wanted. It is what we chose, and its commercial success preempted any discussions of media and democracy, or journalistic ethics."

Both videos paint incredible pictures of the future, but both imply that there is a fine line between a progressive society, and a dystopian society. Technological shifts often outrun society.

Free Online Instructional Videos for K-12

"KHAAANNNN!" Also sprach Kirk, in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. But that was then, this is now, and it is a whole different Khan: Sal Khan, former hedge fund analyst, who began by helping, via YouTube, his niece. Since then, over 41 million students have clicked on his website, taking in lessons in all the STEM subjects. He intends to carry his online "academy" into history, according to this 60 Minutes video, produced in March, 2012. His video lessons are being incorporated into the curriculum in the Los Altos school district near San Francisco and, at least per the video, has garnered nothing but praise from faculty and students alike. indeed, as Google's Eric Schmidt noted, "...Innovation never comes from the established institutions; it's always a graduate student or some crazy person or somebody with a great vision...."

Coupled with such resources as Educanon, which can be used to make the videos even more interactive, teachers can engage students even more thoroughly.

Kahn appears to want to include such subjects as history in his repertoire; as a social studies teacher, I am cautiously skeptical. I would have to carefully vet his lessons before placing my (rather insignificant) seal of approval upon them.

Free Online University Classes and MOOCs

What is a MOOC? Based on this video from Educause, I interpret it as a new twist on the old "continuing education" credit classes. Some key words used in the video included "connectivity" and "analytics."

Are you interested in a better understanding of our founding document, the United States Constitution and its 27 Amendments? Hillsdale College has offered, and will again, I am sure, this free course, known as Constitution 101.

Plans for Free Online Degrees

Dr. Daphne Koller, Stanford, gave a TED talk in 2012 concerning online education--specifically free classes. In it she revealed that at least by the time of her lecture, college tuition had increased by 556%! One might be tempted to ask the universal question, "why", but methinks it is quite self-evident: Government interference. When the federal government decided to interpose itself into the free marked of education in the form of taking over the student loan system, a new bubble was formed, just like the savings & loan, dot.com, housing, and healthcare financing bubbles were formed. But that is a discussion for another time.

The problem with "free" degrees is, they are free. Although the principle of TANSTAAFL plays in--"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch." And the notion that everybody getting an online education will make 98% of them "above average" is just a bit more than misleading. There is no "Lake Woebegone".

That said, education is vital. But as one correspondent cautioned in the replies, too many potential employers still demand not a certificate, but a diploma--be it associate's, baccalaureate, or master's degree. And Dr. Koller, et. al. must make that leap. That is a daunting challenge, fraught with many hidden dangers, such as security of the data--be it academic, or personal user data, cultural and language barriers, grading biases (not every answer is binary), and other factors. It may yet be done. and it may yet be successful. But we must ask at what cost. Professors still have wives and children to feed; they have student loans of their own to discharge. There is the infrastructure, the technical personnel to maintain it; there are a plethora of other overhead costs which must be absorbed by someone: And it is not fair to the legacy students at a university such as Dr. Koller's Stanford. This is analogous to a transportation infrastructure issue which is rearing its head. Highways are built and maintained by being financed with revenues from road use taxes. These taxes are collected at the gasoline and Diesel fuel pumps. But with the latest hybrids and electric vehicles, not to mention the more efficient typical cars, tax revenues are not keeping pace with the wear and tear on our transportation infrastructure.

"Free online degrees" cannot ever be entirely free.

New Writers and Sources of Textbooks

It was the Autumn and Winter of 1975/76. Common Core had not been invented. Or had it? Writing one's own textbook? Pshaw. Permit me to introduce to you the US Naval Nuclear Power School, then located at the Mare Island Naval Shipyard, Vallejo, CA. Each student wrote his own textbook based on the curriculum that did not deviate one iota from that prescribed by NAVEDTRA. This applied to such courses as General Chemistry, Heat Transfer/Fluid Flow, Nuclear Physics, and others. Only in the second semester's course work were we subjected to pre-published texts. And those were classified documents, unlike the self-written ones, so they were permitted only in the classroom or the barracks. I still have those hand-written textbooks.

But this is a new phenomenon, and it may be the salvation, at least in part, of legacy universities, where textbooks require their own student loans. One source of "open-source" textbooks, OpenStax, is free; however the Rice University non-profit organization requests students submit their homework via WebAssign, which charges up to $25.00/semester--still a far cry from the cost of some textbooks. Whereas OpenStax is donor-funded, Flat World Knowledge is not; they charge for their textbooks.

Teach Thought, a "progressive learning brand dedicated to supporting educators in evolving learning for a 21st century audience," has proffered the idea that textbooks be modified by teachers as they see fit; Toss in a different textbook's paragraph, cut/copy/paste. The secret (and the danger, in my opinion) is the concept of "open-source educational resources," or OERs, which have no copyright restrictions. This means anyone may change the document and publish it. However, the danger is, that digital textbook turns into a sort of Wikipedia, with no accountability for accuracy. Teachers emphasize multiple times each school year the importance of realizing Wikipedia is not to be treated as a reliable source, primarily because of this reason--it is open source. Should any teacher use an "open source" textbook?

Resources

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Blog #3: Message and Copyright Information

So begins, or ends, almost everything written except, perhaps billets-doux between sailors and their wives. And so it is, that more academic time is being shunted away from the subject matter to deal with something else that is pressing--in this case, plagiarism and copyright violation.

I confess frustration here. Not with the concept of copyright, but with the practice as it is evolving. No, I am not advocating that people--students included (perhaps students especially)--go willynilly out and start cutting and pasting. Not at all. When I was in school, I couldn't cut and paste--primarily, because the abacus was not conducive to cutting and pasting! We had to hand-write everything, except in typing class, where I learned to double-space after a sentence-ending period or question mark or exclamation mark. (And APA notwithstanding, I shall evermore continue to do just that.)

What frustrated me is the reality that lawyers have hijacked common-sense language. I just got in trouble there. Someone posted a reply to a Facebook posting several years back, and I could not--not even if I were to be water-boarded--ever remember who that person was, nor even the exact context of the posting; but the phrase has stuck with me, because of its veracity. And that is what I am talking about. Example: A clear (not really--I had to Google "mirroring on the internet") explanation of copyright laws written by an unknown author who does not, apparently, live in the United States, can be found at whatiscopyright.org. However, I cannot even explain, according to his terms of use, what it is about, because of the wording of those terms. I cannot use even one of the words in this person's website, at all in this discourse; I can, however, if you will give me your mailing address, copy the whole thing on to paper using ink, provided I tell you where it came from by writing his URL on every page.

I remember the big debates over Darwinism and Creationism back when I was a mere slip of a boy. And one of the arguments posited was that, yes, given enough time, an army of monkeys could indeed type out Hamlet. Well. I am still not too sure about that, but I do know this: There are seven billion or more people on this little blue planet. And sooner or later, two of them will coincidentally type four or five words exactly identical, down to the font style and size, and post them at exactly the same time. This will, hopefully, make all the lawyers' heads explode all at once. The world will immediately become a much better, and more peaceful place in which to live.

The above thought comes about because of this topic: Plagiarism. A big word, the meaning of which can be found at this website, operated by Noah Webster's own intellectual progeny. This site, designed primarily for authors (of whatever), provides vital information on how to detect if one's work is being plagiarized; well and good, but what about the high school student who is trying to be proactive? There is a level of frustration here. Sooner or later, those monkeys and two of those seven billion people will mesh.

I myself have run into this. In one class, I put in quotation marks, the phrase, "perception is reality." This phrase is a truism. It has bee around for decades, if not longer, and is a dictum to follow in advertising and in politics, as well as in law. Yet, just as my late brother used to say, "Sometimes you eat the bear, and sometimes the bear eats you," can not be attributed to him, neither can the former phrase. Yet! There I was, having to search high and low to find someone to whom I could attribute it. Finally, I found that the late Lee Atwater, Republican strategist and political consultant, was fond of quoting it. If I remember right, I found it in an archived news article. That sufficed. And this exemplifies the extreme paranoia which we have arrived at, in our fear of being brought before the bar by someone who decides to lay claim to what we actually wrote ourselves.

So that brings us to the present. What to do with students who, thanks to the world wide web, are able to create, from the whole cloth of the digital information age, a research paper of which any doctoral candidate would be proud? Sadly, be proactive, and take even more academic time away from the subject matter, and discuss ethics (can I--dare I--say "morals"?), the Bomb, and copyright/plagiarism issues with them.

Resources

Definitions of various terms used in the copyrighting community: http://www.whatiscopyright.org/
The Webster Dictionary website: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plagiarize
Luigi Canali de Rossi's website curation of all things pertaining to protecting your intellectual property: http://www.masternewmedia.org/online-plagiarism-how-to-detect-fight-and-report-the-unlicensed-republication-of-your-content/Luigi

Thursday, April 2, 2015

Blog #2: Utilizing Different Types of Media

In the previous post, we discussed how methodology in pedagogy has been undergoing a change thanks in no small measure to the changes in information technology. In this post, we will look at different ways to utilize the six forms of media, integrating as many as practicable forming multimedia--interactive content, animation, audio, visual, still image, and text.

A question to be asked might, and indeed ought, to be, where does one gain all the "stuff"--the hardware, the software, the resources (and can those resources be trusted--both in terms of security, yet also in accuracy and bias?) to accomplish all this?

BYOD

Let us first analyze this idea: Bring Your Own Device, or BYOD. In a video produced by the Peel District School Board, Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, Tony Pontes, Director of Education, asserted that "it's a well-accepted point of view that only schools that normalize the use of technology in everyday teaching will be able to meet society's ever growing and more sophisticated expectations." This was driven home personally while student teaching, as I would on occasion be discussing interactively among the students some concept, and would use (quite deliberately) a new term. I would stop, hop up from my stool, repair to the marker board, and call out "Table 3! Smartphone! Look this up, and tell us what it means." After a couple times of that, I only needed to call out the table number. Of course I would pick a random number from 1 to 7. The good part? The scholars enjoyed doing it! Of course, students at other tables were already looking, trying to beat the assigned table. In other words, active learning is occurring, at least for some of the students, as they are interacting.

There is, at least to this author, a little discomfort concerning BYOD: How does one control content? As Paul Muller of Hewlett-Packard's HP Enterprise Business "Discover Performance Weekly" E-zine and his guests ask the question (albeit from a business, rather than an educational, perspective), "does BYOD mean 'Bring your own device', or does it mean 'Bring your own disaster'?" It's worth a look-see. Questions regarding ownership and security are worth addressing. Of course, to eliminate the concerns that BYOD might create, a district need merely go to 1:1.

Curation

Hollywood's computer graphics capabilities have simply exploded, such that all too often, movies are all about the CGI skills, and not about the plot. But nothing beats the real thing, and this includes ancient Greek triremes. With but one real trireme at their disposal, the special effects firms can digitally "build" hundreds, and then enact battles on film that are as close to reality as the human mind can imagine. But where to find such a ship? On the internet, of course. And there, I found, compliments of funding from The Trireme Trust of the United Kingdom, a fully constructed, totally seaworthy trireme, built and launched by the Hellenic Navy. While student teaching about Ancient Greece, the rather boring subjects of the Battle of the Artemesium Strait and the Strait of Salamis were inevitable. It is one thing to stand at the board and ask, "Anyone know what a trireme is? Anyone? Anyone?"; it is another to see a video of a real, seaworthy, manned trireme in action, complete with a bronze ram mounted on the prow. And thus we were able to see how the H.N. Olympias performed with an amateur crew. From that we could reasonably speculate how a trireme, manned with professionals, would perform in a battle situation.

I discovered Olympias on a website, written by one "lakodaemon". While the site was a virtual mother lode of information on ancient Greece, all the way back to the Mycenaean civilization, I could not copy or save any of the pictures; I could, however, "pin" the pictures onto Pinterest--and so I did.

What I didn't realize I was doing was engaging in "the act of discovering, gathering, and presenting digital content that relates to a specific subject..." as described in THE Journal's December 18, 2012 edition. While I did not carry the curation as far as the article recommends, providing for boards, accessible to students, I still began the curation journey. We shall see where it goes, once my teaching career begins in earnest.

In all this, whether BYOD or 1:1, and with curation of visuals and with videos as shown above, students can interact more deeply than the "Ferris Bueller" economics instructor character's students. Therein lies the rub. This is the 21st century. And this is the 21st century classroom.