troll

This is a great example of poetry and digital storytelling to share with your students, not to mention a subject worth discussing.

We Are Not Just Studying Human History, We Are Shaping It

Warning: Contains mature content and a few brief graphic images.

Update: There are some questions about the credibility of these folks. (And this.) Before my original post I did some brief checking and it seemed legit, and it still appears as though this is a real issue that we should take on, but perhaps the Invisible Children organization is not quite as straightforward as it first appeared.






Update 3-12-12: Invisible Children responds to critics with this video.

Update 3-14-12: And another critique. And more response.

Videos I'd Like My Future Principal to Watch: PBL at HTH

Let me start by freely admitting I don't know how to do this. Let me also admit that at the high school I think I'd like to create I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't hire myself as a teacher. Nevertheless, I'd like my future principal to watch the following video (yes, it's 15 minutes, but it's important to watch all of it).

I'd like my future principal to consider the ideas contained in this video and compare them to the more traditional view of what high school looks like that many of us have. I'd like them to lead a discussion around these two quotes from the video:

12:14 - We need to be evocative, we need to be midwives with teachers and find out how they learned in high school, what was their most memorable learning experiences. Draw that out of them and ask them to write it down on a piece of paper. It was a project, it had a mentor, it involved community, there was risk of failure, there was recognition of success, there was a public exhibition.

13:25 - I would argue that rigor is being in the company of a passionate adult who is rigorously pursuing inquiry in the area of their subject matter and is inviting students along as peers in that adult discourse. That's rigor.

Iowa, Did You Know?

Scott McLeod and XPLANE just released an Iowa-specific version of Did You Know?, premiering at the School Administrators of Iowa Conference yesterday. Even though it's somewhat Iowa-centric, I still think it is very useful as a conversation starter in your district, wherever that might be.

Nice job Scott, XPLANE and Iowa. Join the conversation at iowafuture.org (and, of course, at the Shift Happens wiki).

What Would You Do?

(Full Disclosure: Jose Antonio Vargas interviewed me when he was at the Washington Post, but never wrote that story when he was there. He interviewed me again when he was at The Huffington Post and did write a story.)

I tend not to blog about anything political here unless it's pretty focused on education, but I'm going to make an exception tonight because I found Jose Antonio Vargas's question pretty compelling:

What Would You Do?

• What would you do if you were a 12-year-old sent to America?
• What would you do if you were a 16-year-old and found out you were in America illegally?
• What would you do if you were a teacher/principal/superintendent of that 16-year-old and found out he was here illegally?
• What would you do if you got into college, graduated, and then had a chance to pursue the profession you fell in love with and make a meaningful contribution, but had to check a box on a form that wasn't true?

I don't intend to get into a discussion of immigration here on this blog for several reasons, not the least of which is it's a very complicated issue, my area of expertise (if I even have one) lies elsewhere, and nobody particularly cares about my political opinions. But I think as educators, and as human beings, it's worth our time to think deeply about this issue. Here are some resources about this particular part of the story:

My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant (New Yorker piece by Jose Antonio Vargas)

Define American  (Website created not necessarily to advocate, but to change the conversation around immigration)

Video currently featured on Define American







NPR Interview with Jose Antonio Vargas

Jack Shafer's Slate piece on the ethics of journalism

ABC Interview with Jose Antonio Vargas (longer version on Nightline but I'm not finding a link as of yet)

Update 6-25-11: Here's the longer Nightline piece:



So, again, I'm not interested in having an immigration debate on this blog, but I am interested in each of you thinking about how you define "American" and what actions you might take as an educator (or a citizen) if you discovered one of your students in this predicament.

What would you do?

Dear 16 Year Old Me

If you're 16 (or 14, or 17, or 11, or really any age), please watch this.

It Gets Better

Bullying is not okay.

Hate is not okay.

Neither is standing by and letting it happen.

Tell someone you trust. Or report it. Or tell me (720-ToFisch).

Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns tells a very personal, and very moving story. It happens to be about bullying and his sexuality, but it applies equally well to any kind of bullying, whether it be face-to-face or on the Internet. The heart of his message? It gets better.





Here are some helpful resources.

National Suicide Hotline: 1.800.273.8255
Suicide Prevention Hotline: 1.800.784.2433
Trevor (GLBT Youth): 1.888.488.7386
National Youth Crisis Helpline: 1.800.999.9999
National Teen Dating Abuse Helpline: 1.866.331.9474
Safe2Tell (Bullying): 1.877.542.7233
Comitis Crisis Center (Youth Shelter): 303.341.9160
Arapahoe Douglas Mental Health: 303.730.8858
Arapahoe House (Substance Abuse Counseling): 303.412.3701

Homecoming Pep Assembly

For those of you who don't work in a high school, you might enjoy this taste of a Homecoming Pep Assembly.

Cheering. Dancing. Singing. Tug-of-War. Centipede Race. The kids are alright.

Transparent Algebra: Homework

So, I’ve previously talked about going back in the classroom and about my initial thoughts on assessment (thanks for all the very helpful feedback), so in this post I’m going to talk about my plans for homework.

Homework is one of those crazy things that I’m completely for and completely against. (While that may sound a little nuts (or a lot nuts), I cling to this quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald: The sign of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.) On the one hand, I believe that students practicing their skills is helpful to their learning of Algebra. And, given the limited time I meet with my students, there’s the practical matter of fitting it all in. (As I noted in a comment on the assessment post, I’m estimating I’ll see my students for only about sixty periods – five of them shortened – in the fall semester.)

But on the other hand, I think homework is very problematic. I think the research is very mixed in terms of its effectiveness, and in my own experience I saw similar results. For a traditional homework assignment like I gave in my previous incarnation as a math teacher (perhaps 1-31 odd, or even a more thoughtfully picked selection of problems), I would typically see the following results:

A certain proportion of my class would be able to do all the homework with little or no problem. These were students that probably didn’t need the practice.

A second segment of my students wouldn’t even attempt the homework, for reasons ranging from they just didn’t want to, to not enough time, to not enough understanding. Some of these students still did well, others did miserably.

And the final group of my students in the middle would attempt the homework, but become very frustrated either because they couldn’t do it, or because they did it but did it incorrectly, so they effectively reinforced doing it wrong.

So one of the basic problems with homework (at least how I implemented it), was that the students too often weren’t reinforcing skills they already had, they were struggling with skills they had yet to master (at least for those last two groups). What they needed was to be able to work on those problems when I was available to help, or when others were available to help, but not on their own where if they were confused they just ended up frustrated or, worse, cementing incorrect procedures in their brains. (Note: I do think it’s a good thing for students to wrestle with complex problems, but I don’t feel like that was what was happening in my homework assignments.)

So my current thinking is to approach homework differently. I’m going to borrow an idea from a science teacher in my building, Brian Hatak (who, in turn, borrowed it from Jonathan Bergmann and Aaron Sams). My plan is to deliver the traditional lecture portion of an Algebra class as the homework, thus freeing up class time to explore the mathematics and pursue some interesting problems, as well as provide time for guided practice and collaborative work.

Since Algebra is very much skill based, my hope is to provide short (less than 10 minutes), targeted instructional videos that students can watch (and rewatch if necessary) that focus solely on the skills, one skill at a time. Now I want to be clear that these videos typically will come after inquiry and exploration in class. I want my students to, as much as possible, play with the mathematics and formulate their own approaches before seeing the formal procedure. (There will be times when I’m sure I won’t accomplish this inquiry first/video second plan, either due to time constraints or creativity constraints on my part, but I’m hopeful I’ll get better at this over time.) But if I’m going to provide the class time to do all that, then I still need them to have the opportunity to focus on the procedure and master the skill as well, which is where I’m hopeful the video will come in.

So, part of the feedback I’m asking for on this post is simply about that strategy. Is it a good one? Terribly flawed? Are there ways to improve it? But there’s a second reason for this post and it’s what I’m struggling the most with right now. Do I create these videos myself, or try to use resources that have already been created and are freely available online?

My initial thought (as you’ll see in a minute) was to create my own videos. That way I could make sure they were short - many of the resources online are much too long and teach more than one concept in a video, and part of my pitch to my students is going to be “give me 10 minutes.” My videos would also be targeted to the specific concepts that I want/need to convey at the time I want/need to convey them, and would fit in nicely with the rest of my course design. But as I discover more and more resources online, some of which have much higher production values than mine would, I wonder if it makes sense to make my own. (Especially when you figure in the considerable time investment necessary on my part – it takes much less time to build a set of links than to create my own videos, upload, and link.)

So, embedded below is a “proof of concept” video I created for solving two-step equations (view it full screen and HD, particularly if you’re close to my age or older). And here is a link to a video from the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education on essentially the same concept. (I haven’t looked carefully yet, but my guess is that they will have all or almost all of the concepts that I would create videos for as part of this series.) Should I create my own, or tap into theirs?

Before you watch my proof of concept video, let me briefly describe some of the thought process as I was creating it:

• A reminder that this comes after exploration/inquiry in class and is intended to solidify the Algebra procedure. Students will also have ample opportunity in class to practice, with help from me and other students (more on that in a future post). By shifting the "lecture" to outside of class, it allows me to maximize the effectiveness of the time I'm face-to-face with students.
  
  
• I was going for an “I do, we do, you do” approach in the video. That leaves off one step that I think is very important, “we do together,” but my hope is that is what will be happening in class.
  
  
• My goal was to make the video no longer than necessary, yet still have it be absolutely clear (which, of course, allows me to be my naturally overly wordy self). I wanted to keep it under 10 minutes, both because that’s the YouTube limit and because I think any longer and I’m likely to lose them (or the concept is too complex to convey in a video like this).
  
  
• I toyed with the idea of doing some post-recording enhancements in Camtasia (arrows, highlights, callouts, key words, etc.), but, at the moment, have decided against that both because it would add tremendously to my production time and because I’m not sure the enhancements wouldn’t end up being distracting instead of helpful. I also toyed with the idea of trying to make it more interactive, but eventually decided to keep it simple. It’s meant to be a resource, not the entire instructional plan.
  
  
• On average, students will have about two videos per week, although that will vary. On nights when they don't have a video they will likely have something else to do, but it will not be a big 'ole long problem set like I used to give. Perhaps some reflection or other writing assignment, or a few targeted problems or inquiry, or simply study/work time for retakes of the assessments.

So, here's the embed. (Again, full screen and HD will look better.) If you watch the video (and I hope you do), please watch the entire video (8:15, I'm hoping many end up shorter than this one) so that you can see all five parts (Learning Goal, Explanation/Examples, Guided Practice, Self-Check, and Closing) and see how they work together (or not).



Let me anticipate three tech-related questions before they arise.

• What if students don’t have net access at home? I’m in a school where almost all students do have access, and most of them broadband. I did a non-scientific, but presumably still reasonably valid survey of 332 students about a year ago, and 83% had broadband, 1% had dialup, 14% didn’t know the speed (so I’m thinking probably broadband or they would know), and 2% didn’t have Internet access at home. Even so, my plan is to call all of my students in June (once they’ve been scheduled into my class) and touch base with the parents to make sure they have access. If they do not, then we’ll change their schedule (plenty of other Algebra sections for them to be in without adversely affecting the rest of their schedule) and then move another student into my class (who I would then call and ask about access).
  
  
• Isn’t YouTube blocked at your school? While I anticipate most students accessing this from home, I do want them to be able to access it at school during their unscheduled hours or before or after school. I picked YouTube because students are familiar with it and there are no upload or bandwidth limits, but it is problematic because YouTube is blocked at my school (although staff can override that block). Thankfully, my crackerjack IT staff at the district found a way to whitelist a specific channel on YouTube. While there are still some kinks to work out, students will be able to view these videos as long as I link to them within the channel. If they try to go directly to the video URL outside of the channel, they would be blocked (although they could get a staff member to override that if necessary).
  
  
• What’s with the gold background? Our school colors are black and gold.

So, I’d love your thoughts on both the strategy and the implementation. Again, please keep in mind this is just one piece of the instructional puzzle, subsequent posts will focus more on what we do during class time.

Which Campaign is More Effective?

Both LG and MTV have current campaigns centered around CyberSafety/Bullying/Sexting/Ethics. Alec Couros tweeted about the LG Give It A Ponder Campaign which stars James Lipton from Inside the Actors Studio fame. Here’s one of the videos:



I like the spots, but tweeted back that I wondered if this campaign would be effective with the target audience – presumably pre-teens, teenagers and young adults. Did I like them because I know who James Lipton is and can appreciate the context?

Then a day or two later I came across MTV’s A Thin Line campaign. These videos are very, very different than the LG ones. I’m sharing one below, but fair warning that some folks might find these offensive and, if you plan on showing these in your school, you might want to clear it with whomever you typically clear controversial things with. Now, I think this is appropriate at least for high school students (otherwise I wouldn’t share it on this blog), but others might disagree.



My first thought was that the MTV videos would be much more effective at stimulating a class discussion, and also grab the target audience’s attention even if seen “in the wild.” But then I wondered if any public service campaign on this topic (or any topic, for that matter) can really make a difference. I certainly think that most high school students, if you sat down and talked to them about these issues, could tell you the perils of sexting or cyberbullying, yet obviously some of them are engaging in these activities anyway. If that’s the case, then can/will a PSA convince them otherwise?

What are your thoughts? Would you use these in a high school classroom? Do you think these videos can be effective – either on their own, or paired with classroom discussion? And, no matter your opinion on those questions, are you addressing this topic in some way in your school?

I Read (?) The News Today, Oh Boy

Just a quick post to share this concept video from Sports Illustrated (digital breadcrumbs: Scott McLeod, Judy O’Connell, Daniel Pink, Apple Insider, Peter Kafka).


More evidence that the way we interact with “text” is changing. To combine and paraphrase something I’ve heard David Warlick say more than once with something Jason Ohler says:

We need to stop paper training our students. We should spend less time training our students how to use paper, and more time helping them use digital tools to interact in meaningful and productive ways with the media forms of the day.

Also reminds me of this post:

Note that this is additive - no one is suggesting that words don't matter, that what we traditionally think of as "writing" is no longer important, but that the very nature of composition is more complex now, and that our instruction, our pedagogy, our learning spaces need to reflect that.

. . . Writing (composing) is no longer exclusively a solitary activity. And we need to expand our definition of composition beyond only text and beyond only a specific medium (book, research paper, academic journal).

"Text" is changing. Is your classroom?

Google Goggles: Why Didn’t I Think of That?

So, Google Goggles is now in beta in Google Labs and available on Android phones.

Humorous name aside, the product looks to be a huge leap forward in the field of visual search — by which I mean, you point a camera at something and Google figures out what it is.

Here’s a little video explanation.



As the Tech Crunch article mentions, it’s somewhat similar to ShopSavvy. I’ve used the ShopSavvy demo video in my last couple of presentations, replacing another video I had been using of an iPhone app called Bionic Eye. That made me think of an earlier post of mine where I said:

This is a nice little app for what it does, but imagine what it’s going to evolve into: a portable heads-up display for everything. Yes, right now it lists restaurants, subway stations (in certain cities), and wifi hotspots, but it’s not that hard to extrapolate a few years into the future where this app – or something like it – connects you to all the available information about whatever you’re looking at.

It doesn’t really matter whether it’s on an iPhone-type device, or whether it’s mounted on your eyeglasses, it’s going to be with you effectively 24/7/365 (only “effectively” because you can still choose to turn it off), have 99% uptime, and is going to get better every hour of every day as more information is added to it. Practically every urban location will be geotagged and infotagged (think Google Street View on steroids), extending further and further beyond urban areas with each passing year. In fact, I imagine the app will evolve into a two-way app, with users adding to the database as they go about their daily routines, constantly adding more locations and more data to the database.

Perhaps a few more years down the road artificial intelligence object-recognition software will be embedded, maybe even with some simple sensors to analyze the material it’s looking at, so that the app will be able to peer into just about any object and return information about it’s chemical composition, various useful facts about it, and ways the object can be used.

Huh. Maybe I shouldn't have changed my major.

Seriously, though, the truth is ending up stranger than fiction . . .

We Have the Technology

When I was growing up I liked watching the Six Million Dollar Man on television. Looking back, it was a pretty hokey show, but I really liked it at the time. In the opening for the show, there’s a line that says, “We have the technology.” I thought of that – for pretty obvious reasons if you’re familiar with the show - when viewing the video for the Bionic Eye iPhone application.



This is a nice little app for what it does, but imagine what it’s going to evolve into: a portable heads-up display for everything. Yes, right now it lists restaurants, subway stations (in certain cities), and wifi hotspots, but it’s not that hard to extrapolate a few years into the future where this app – or something like it – connects you to all the available information about whatever you’re looking at.

It doesn’t really matter whether it’s on an iPhone-type device, or whether it’s mounted on your eyeglasses, it’s going to be with you effectively 24/7/365 (only “effectively” because you can still choose to turn it off), have 99% uptime, and is going to get better every hour of every day as more information is added to it. Practically every urban location will be geotagged and infotagged (think Google Street View on steroids), extending further and further beyond urban areas with each passing year. In fact, I imagine the app will evolve into a two-way app, with users adding to the database as they go about their daily routines, constantly adding more locations and more data to the database.

Perhaps a few more years down the road artificial intelligence object-recognition software will be embedded, maybe even with some simple sensors to analyze the material it’s looking at, so that the app will be able to peer into just about any object and return information about it’s chemical composition, various useful facts about it, and ways the object can be used.

I know that scenario is frightening to a lot of folks, and certainly there are going to be more and more privacy/ethical issues we are going to have to figure out as a society. But, for the moment, let’s focus on the incredibly positive side of this – what kind of learning apps can be built on this platform? What will we be able to do as teachers and students that we can barely even conceive of today, but will be commonplace in the very near future? What happens when the sum total of the world’s knowledge – updated in real time - is available in a portable heads-up display?

Just imagine the possibilities. How many years is it going to be before we see something of this sophistication? I don’t know. My guess is more than three and less than thirty. So you’ve got to ask the question, does your school/district want to be ahead of the curve in figuring out best practices, or behind it?

Did You Know? 4.0: The Economist Media Convergence Remix

The Economist Magazine is hosting their third annual Media Convergence Forum in New York City on October 20th and 21st. Earlier this year they asked if they could remix Did You Know?/Shift Happens with a media convergence theme and use it for their conference. Scott McLeod and I said sure, they got XPLANE to create the presentation, and the result is farther down in this post. Unfortunately, I won’t be able to attend the Forum, as I’m already missing school a few days this fall and I just couldn’t justify missing a couple more (it was very kind of The Economist to invite Scott and me), but it looks like an interesting event.

A few anticipatory FAQ's about this version.

1. It’s the first one that I’ve been part of that does not have a specific education focus (although I certainly think the media convergence ideas discussed in the video have great relevance for education). The idea behind the original (and subsequent) presentations was to start/continue/advance the conversation around certain ideas, so I see this hopefully doing the same thing around media convergence (and, selfishly, it will hopefully get some of the folks attending The Economist’s Media Convergence Forum to perhaps focus on some of the education ideas in the previous DYK’s). And, given the Creative Commons license on the previous versions, folks are not limited to remixes that only talk about education.
   
   
2. They decided to designate it version 4.0 even though there have been only two previous “official” versions. But the Sony/BMG remix that is currently the hot version is typically referred to as version 3.0, so who are we to argue with the wisdom of the crowd?
   
   
3. I should not get much, if any, credit for this one. I sent along a fair amount of statistics for their consideration, and certainly provided some feedback along the way, but otherwise didn’t have nearly as much to do with this version. Laura Bestler, Scott McLeod’s graduate assistant, did most of the research for this one, and of course XPLANE did all the graphical work. (I should, however, still get most or all of the blame if you don’t like it, since I started this whole mess.)
   
   
4. Like the previous versions, this one is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 license, so you’re welcome to use/modify as you see fit, as long as you follow the terms of that license.

Finally, an observation. In a recent email Scott McLeod wrote, “It’s amazing, the legs this thing still has.” I would have to agree. The various versions have been viewed well over 20 millions times (my guess is that with downloaded versions and audience showings it’s probably closer to 30 million times, but 20 million would be the safe number). It’s been shown to audiences large and small, educational and corporate and everything in between. It's been shown to the leaders of our national defense and to incoming congressmen. It’s been shown by university presidents and kindergarten teachers, televangelists and politicians, folks just trying to make a buck and those trying to save the world. And this week it even made an appearance in Nancy Gibb’s essay in Time Magazine.

What does it all mean? (Well, besides the self-referential and now self-serving answer of “Shift Happens.”) I think the fact that a simple little PowerPoint (some folks would say simplistic and they would be right – it was meant to be the start of a conversation, not the entire conversation) can be viewed by so many folks and start so many conversations means that we live in a fundamentally different world than the one I (and most of you reading this) grew up in.

I know some folks would dispute that, and that’s an interesting conversation in and of itself, but if you buy that – if you buy that on so many levels the world is a fundamentally different place – then it just begs us to ask the question of whether schools have similarly transformed from when we grew up. If your answer to that question is no, as I think it probably is for a large majority of you, and if you see a problem with that, then what should we do? What is my responsibility, and your responsibility, for making the changes we believe are necessary? What are you willing to step up and do?

Here’s the presentation. Source files will be uploaded to the wiki shortly.

More Than a Passing Trend Part II

On the heels of my previous post I came across this video by Erik Qualman - some interesting observations in the comments to his post. I'll present it here without comment of my own, other than I think there are some interesting ideas to consider here.



Oh, one more thing. I believe this falls into the category of "D'oh!" Any chance you think they'll do retroactive revenue sharing?

We Can Do This. We Should Do It.

I'm way behind in my "personal professional development through RSS" (i.e., I have a lot of unread items in Google Reader), but luckily I took the time to read this post by Scott McLeod. Scott embeds two presentations given by Dr. Richard Miller, the Chair of the English Department at Rutgers University.

I'm also going to embed the two presentations below (the second one is in two parts), and I think it's well worth your time to watch both of them, particularly if you teach Language Arts, but really if you care about education at all. After each presentation I've pulled a few select quotes that really resonated with me.

The Future is Now: Presentation to the RU Board of Governors

We're living in the time of the most significant change in human expression in human history.

Do you agree? If so, what implications does that have for the way we teach Language Arts? What about other subject areas?

This is the room we're particularly proud of - the Collaboratory.

OK, when I build my school, I'm so going to have a Collaboratory. Actually, every room will be one. Perhaps that should be the name of the school?

To compose, and compose successfully in the 21st century, you have to not only excel at verbal expression, at written expression, you have to also excel in the use and manipulation of images. That's what it means to compose.

Shades of "The Yancey." Note that this is additive - no one is suggesting that words don't matter, that what we traditionally think of as "writing" is no longer important, but that the very nature of composition is more complex now, and that our instruction, our pedagogy, our learning spaces need to reflect that.

This is all building towards a larger vision of the humanities for the 21st century.

. . . In the New Humanities what we imagine at the center is this collective, collaborative kind of composition.

Social construction. Social composition.

The real function of the humanities is to engage in the art of creativity - moment by moment - to improve the quality of the world we live in.

I'm certainly not a linguist, but doesn't that get back to the root of "humanities?" And have perhaps some of our academic treatments of the humanities forgotten the human part that should be the center of our work?

That's writing in the 21st century. It's multiply authored, it's multiply produced, and that's where English is going.

Is that where English is going in your school?

---

This Is How We Dream (Part 1 and Part 2)

It has never been a more important moment for this profession, or for people who take reading and writing seriously.

Do you agree? If so, what implications does that have for your school? Your classroom?

I spent my time understanding writing as a solitary activity . . . I'm a person of the book.

Writing (composing) is no longer exclusively a solitary activity. And we need to expand our definition of composition beyond only text and beyond only a specific medium (book, research paper, academic journal).

An assignment for a class I taught for first year students called Creativity and Collaboration.

This is a class I'll be offering in my new school (The Collaboratory).

Ideas don't belong to us individually, but they belong to us as a culture. And that we as educators must be in the business of sharing ideas freely.

Shades of Pesce.

The limits and restrictions are largely ones we put on ourselves.

No excuses.

This is a way to push ideas into our culture. Why wouldn't we be at the front edge of that?

Yes, why wouldn't we?

We do not have a pedagogy on hand to teach the kind of writing I'm describing. It needs to be invented.

Alan Kay said the best way to predict the future is to invent it. The best way to figure out what composition should look like in the 21st century is to co-create it.

We can do this. We should do it.

We should get started.

Things Just Changed. Again.

Do you teach math? Science? Geography? Economics? Health? Business? Language Arts?

Wait, let me start over.

Do you teach?

Wait, let me start over again.

Are you alive, and curious?

Okay, that’s better. I think this is worth 13 minutes of your time. Go watch it, then come back.

I believe Wolfram Alpha is supposed to go live tomorrow. It’s obviously still very, very new (will they change its name to Wolfram Beta later? That will mess up the URL’s. Kidding.) It will be interesting to see what kinds of searches lend themselves to this more computational approach and what kinds don’t, but I still think this is another big step in how humans find, access, digest and repurpose information. Designed to “compute answers to your specific questions,” this once again should make us examine what we are doing in our classrooms, and how we should best prepare our students to be successful in an age with this much computational firepower.

What facts (discrete pieces of information?) do we need to know in order to develop deep understandings of important concepts, and what facts can we just google or wolfram (or will the verb be alpha)? What previously unknown relationships might be teased out of the data by the Wolfrom Alpha algorithms, or what will humans looking at this data in new and unique ways discover? What new questions will we learn to ask, or will we learn to ask old questions in new ways? (You can also view a much longer talk by Stephen Wolfram at the Berkman Center. No, I have not watched it all yet.)

Also note that Google is evolving as well. Joyce Valenza has a good summary post over at School Library Journal that discusses the new features. I also thought this quote she shared from a Google presenter was interesting,

If users can’t spell, it’s our problem. If they don’t know how to form the syntax, it’s our problem. If there’s not enough content, it’s our problem.

Hmm. I wonder whose problem it is if our students don’t know how to question, ask/search, find, evaluate, synthesize, repurpose, remix, and solve problems using tools like Google and Wolfrom Alpha?

World On Fire

Jeffrey Mordan pointed me to this video in the comments of this previous post. What choices could you make that would make a difference?

Consider joining Team Shift Happens on Kiva (or contributing to one of these fine organizations).

Briefing 2.0

To add on to my earlier Democracy 2.0 post, it turns out the U.S. State Department is already doing Briefing 2.0, allowing anyone to submit video questions via YouTube:

Good afternoon, everybody. I wanted to welcome you to the first edition of Briefing 2.0. Let me first start off by thanking everybody who submitted questions to us, who placed some trust in us, and the fact that we’re going to try to answer your questions. So here we are. We’re going to answer your questions.

I want to respond to one thing up front. In some of the write-ups about this, kind of in the run-up to this briefing, a couple folks remarked on, in my video I said, you know, this is going to be fun. And they said, well, you know, it’s foreign policy; there’s nothing fun about foreign policy. And I just wanted to explain what I meant.

It’s fun for me because this is part of something I started three years ago when I first came in here, and I have a great team that’s been working with me. And it’s one of the things that we want to do is use technology and its applications to try to change the way the State Department communicates, not only with the press but also with the public. And this is an opportunity for the public to directly ask me questions, and maybe somewhere on down the line other people questions, and for you to get answers back.

And I think this is part of a general trend in the way that government and its publics communicate with one another, and it’s going to change over time. I think, inevitably, there has to be more interaction. There can’t be all this change and ferment going on outside the walls of government, and then government kind of continuing to operate as it has for the past 200 years. So that has to change. It’ll change eventually, and hopefully this is one small part of that change.

I’ve brought in a piece of paper. I just want you to know, all it has is the names and the locations of the people asking questions. I don’t know what the questions are, so I’m going to see them for the first time along with you.

Here's the intro video from the U.S. Department of State's YouTube Channel:




And here's the first briefing:




Very, very interesting. They also have a blog.

Brings up a few questions:

1. Social Studies Teachers: Don't you think this gives you some ideas for some assignments? Shouldn't you have your students submitting questions to the State Department?
   
   
2. District Internet Filter Czars: If you're blocking YouTube, isn't this yet another argument why, if you don't unblock it altogether, you at least need teacher overrides for the filter?

Democracy 2.0

In the presentations I’ve been giving over the last six months or so there’s a part where I talk about how schools need to make these changes I’ve been blogging about not just so that students will be effective students and eventually employees in the 21st century, but also so that they can become effective citizens. I’ve pointed to the 2008 presidential election campaign as a prime example, comparing the resources I had available to me growing up to learn about the candidates and the issues with the resources available to students – and voters – today. I’ve talked about YouTube and how you can chart the rise and fall of various campaigns based on the current viral political video, and the plethora of websites where you can find detailed information (and misinformation) about candidates and issues, and the candidates own websites where you can read, hear and watch what the candidates themselves have to say. I’ve pointed out how both campaigns have used the Internet extensively, but that the Obama campaign took it to another level – not just with the unprecedented fundraising, but with the outreach and community building. And I always closed that part of the presentation by saying something like, “When the historians write the history of this election, how big a factor will they say the Internet was? And how are we preparing our students to be successful citizens in such a world?”

Well, that was before we knew the outcome of the election. Now that we do, it appears clear that the answer to the first question is, “Big. The Internet was a very, very big factor.”

From the Denver Post:

Barack Obama's Internet-based campaign has not only made history, it has forever changed the American political process.

. . . Over the past two years, Barack Obama carried Dean's pioneering techniques to an exponentially more sophisticated level. Realizing that America is really thousands of separate if often overlapping communities of interest, Obama used the power of the Internet to identify, organize and unite them. He raised probably more than $800 million when the final numbers come in, and that mostly in small sums from millions of donors. In turn, Obama used much of that cash to convert his virtual communities into a network of field offices and a get-out-the-vote team that brought millions of new voters to the polls.

From The Mercury News:

Former vice president Al Gore said Friday he was overwhelmed by Barack Obama's victory in the presidential election and credited the Internet for the campaign's success.

"The electrifying redemption of America's revolutionary declaration that all human beings are created equal would not have been possible without ... the Internet," Gore said.

From The Guardian:

While most pundits focused on the question of race, one largely overlooked factor was his powerful techno-demographic appeal. . . . It is no coincidence that one of Obama's key strategists was 24-year-old Chris Hughes, a Facebook co-founder. Hughes masterminded the Obama campaign's highly effective web blitzkrieg on everything from social networking sites to podcasting and mobile messaging.

From U.S. News and World Report:

A key turning point in the long and brutal presidential election involved a YouTube battle between dueling online videos.

It was primary season and Barack Obama was being battered in the press because of his relationship with controversial pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Some of Wright's more inflammatory sermons were captured on video and were flying around YouTube.

Instead of letting the clips fester online, the Obama campaign immediately posted on YouTube the candidate's full rebuttal, a 37-minute-long speech on race he delivered to an audience in Philadelphia.

The video clip helped calm the controversy and attracted around 5.3 million views on the video-viewing website, proving the popularity and impact of a medium that was first used widely this election cycle.

From the NYTimes:

One of the many ways that the election of Barack Obama as president has echoed that of John F. Kennedy is his use of a new medium that will forever change politics. For Mr. Kennedy, it was television. For Mr. Obama, it is the Internet.

. . . Mr. Obama used the Internet to organize his supporters in a way that would have in the past required an army of volunteers and paid organizers on the ground, Mr. Trippi said.

“The tools changed between 2004 and 2008. Barack Obama won every single caucus state that matters, and he did it because of those tools, because he was able to move thousands of people to organize.”

Mr. Obama’s campaign took advantage of YouTube for free advertising. Mr. Trippi argued that those videos were more effective than television ads because viewers chose to watch them or received them from a friend instead of having their television shows interrupted.

“The campaign’s official stuff they created for YouTube was watched for 14.5 million hours,” Mr. Trippi said. “To buy 14.5 million hours on broadcast TV is $47 million.”

There has also been a sea change in fact-checking, with citizens using the Internet to find past speeches that prove a politician wrong and then using the Web to alert their fellow citizens.

From Information Week:

And it's only the beginning, said Trippi. That kind of networking will likely transform the White House. Trippi anticipates Obama will create a similar social networking for his legislative initiatives and recruit supporters to lobby Congress to get his policies enacted into law.

That last quote is key, “It’s only the beginning.” We’ve already got Change.gov, a website for the “Office of the President-Elect,” where the not-campaign-but-not-yet-administration is not only keeping followers updated on what they’re doing, but they are also soliciting input under a section titled “Open Government” with a link titled “It’s Your America: Share Your Ideas.” Does anyone think for a moment that after building up this huge network of supporters that they aren’t going to try to leverage it to help them govern? That they aren’t going to use the incredible community they’ve built to help them drive the conversation and pass legislation? Not to mention, of course, keeping these folks involved so they’re ready, willing and able to going into motion four years from now for Obama-Biden 2.0.

Yes, the issues facing the soon-to-be Obama administration are huge and not quickly or easily solved, and changing governing and politics is a difficult task, but never before has an incoming President had the kind of network and tools at his fingertips that President-Elect Obama has, nor the people who apparently know how to use them well.

So, all this goes back to the second question in the opening paragraph above (and my previous post), how are you helping prepare our students to be successful citizens and participants in Democracy 2.0?

Update 11-14-08: President-Elect Obama is taking the weekly radio address to YouTube as well.