Blogg-Ed Indetermination

As a committed environmentalist, I have often pondered the tension that exists between technology and global climate change. The frenetic pace in which new technologies are produced, consumed, and then discarded contribute to the exhaustion of the earth’s resources. The pollution and social justice problems associated with e-waste are well documented. Our server rooms become more and more crowded, consuming more and more power. Cloud computing simply moves the responsibility for unbridled technology conumption off-campus, where  “out-of-sight, out-of-mind” thinking may come into play.

And yet I recognize that technology also lies at the heart of many innovative solutions that can help address the energy crisis, lead to greater efficiencies, and create a more sustainable planet. Our children, perhaps the first generation in America in which there will be more scarcity of products and resources than in the past, and who certainly are inheriting a mountains of debt, and mountains stripped of their forests, minerals, and snow pack, must learn to use not only use new technologies but to invent them.

Living in the heart of Silicon Valley one is awash in the exultation regarding the latest Web 2.0 technology, server virtualization, and perhaps most of all, the optimism about a future in which technology can and will help us solve the most pressing issues of our time.

Thus it is that within this framework that I wonder if the current economic recession and its resulting slowdown in technology dollars and spending might cause all of us to become more thoughtful about our technology acquisitions. We’ll want to stretch out the useful life of existing equipment. We won’t necessarily go for the next software upgrade which consumes more CPU cycles and RAM than the last one. Perhaps we’ll even come to some understanding of that something does not have to be perfect to be good enough.

Slowing down. Becoming more thoughtful stewards of technology. Questioning “bigger, faster, stronger.” Perhaps this is not such a bad thing. And if it’s taken a recession to get us this point, then perhaps there’s something good amongst this otherwise awful news.

I’m worried that I may be getting addicted to iPhone apps. I am on to my fourth screen, and while I regularly delete ones I don’t use, there seems to be enough good ones coming along each week that the net effect is an ever expanding list of installed apps.

Two applications recently added voice functionality to my phone that I really like. Google now supports voice search. When it’s bad, it can be quite amusing, and when it’s good, you just think “wow!” The other application is Say Who, which brings voice dialing to the iPhone. I’ve used it to dial a couple of people in my contact list and it was perfect. Time will tell how well it works and if it retains a spot on my phone.

Two other favorites are really text oriented. The first is the New York Times, which is saving me from shelling our $5.00 every weekend for the Sunday Times. I’m mostly interested in the Time’s opinion columns and technology coverage. I do miss the Times Sunday magazine, but it’s a tough economy and sacrifices must be made. The other, yet to be fully tested on a plane ride, is Stanza. Stanza allows you to download copyright free books. If you’re in to classics with expired copyrights (not to mention expired authors) you’re all set. I’m currently reading Poe’s Fall of the House of Usher, and it’s not as bad as I thought it would be. Diverting when there’s nothing else hand to read and you’re not into iPhone games.

The last app I find myself using with frequency is i.TV. It will download TV and movie information for your area. Since my local cable TV station did away with its channel guide (I’m not a digital TV user), I find this to be useful when I’m looking for something worthwhile to watch and don’t want to waste time channel surfing.

If only everyone who sends me email would read Send: The Essential Guide to Email for Office and Home (Amazon citation) my life would be so much better.

Authors David Shipley and Will Schwalbe have created a witty and practical guide to that office terror known as email.

Email! So much like the weather in that we all complain about and don’t do much about it. Who hasn’t experienced things such as:

• the “reply all” carpet bomb?
• the reply without the original message head scratcher?
• the subject line that, after several volleys, is no longer relevant to the topic under discussion?
• the CYACC line to keep everyone (and the dog - because on the Intent know one knows your’re a dog) “keep you in the loop?”
• SHOUTING, poor spellyng, and annoying and impenetrable :+)!!

A short, pleasant read that will remnind you that the laws of common sense are not suspended whe it comes to email. You’ll want everyone to read this book, but you’ll want to keep your own copy so make them get their own.

By far the best education book I read this summer - and perhaps the best in the past five years - is Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns (Amazon citation) by Clayton M. Christensen (Wikipedia citation), Michael B. Horn, and Curtis W. Johnson.

This book challenges us to think very differently about education, and posits that disruptive innovation is coming to education faster than we think. “Disruptive innovation” holds special meaning for Christensen. His previous books, The Innovators Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution explored the role of disruptive innovations in industry, such as the transistor and the Internet. We’re talking huge disruptions which led to the demise of entire companies, made fortunes for others, and led to huge social and economic changes in society. Schools, which many would argue haven’t changed all that much in the last hundred years, are about to be similarly changed.

What’s behind this change is student centric technologies, including distance learning and adaptive computer assisted instruction, that changes the paradigm of education to make time to learn something a variable, instead of a constant, in the classroom. Students are typically taught content in a linear, lock-step fashion which is interrupted a certain intervals to assess comprehension and you either get it or you don’t. In order to “cover” a given curriculum, teachers are compelled to move to the next topic even when one or more students don’t comprehend the previous information.

The authors lay out compelling arguments for why schools seem to resist change, and how the disruptive innovations that are occurring can be used to propel schools forward into a more effective model of education. Based on their experience with other disruptive innovations, they predict that by 2019, just over ten years from now, about 50% of high school courses will be delivered online. This is not a linear progression in online learning, but the classic hockey stick curve. What are YOU doing to prepare for this?

The end notes in this book are much more than simply citations, but serve to elaborate ideas and are very readable. Don’t skip them.

Out of all the four books I read this summer, this is the one that I am most recommending to my colleagues to read. I’m already planning on a re-read for myself, and looking forward to discussing this with others.

Read this book. You won’t regret it.

Perhaps it’s a terrible conceit for me to declare “This really makes sense to me!” when discussing Louann Brizendine’s (wiki citation) The Female Brain (Amazon citation). After all, it’s dangerous territory for one to make - or agree with - generalizations about the other gender. Nonetheless, as an observer of women for 50+ years, I must say that in my opinion this book not only makes sense but lays out a compelling case for understanding the physical, chemical, and neurological differences between the brains of women and men that serves to enrich our understanding of human behavior.

As the father of a daughter (now in her early thirties), a husband of a menopausal spouse, the adoptive parent of a new mother, an employee whose bosses were almost always women, and now an educator in an all girls school, I have had the great pleasure of interacting with strong women of all ages. Brizendine’s book - with almost 80 pages of citations - attempts to add a scientific basis to help women and men better understand what’s really going on inside female heads, from birth to puberty, child bearing and rearing, and later adulthood. I wish she would write a similar volume on male brains.

Brain research is not without its skeptics, and it may well be that what “lights up” in one’s brain during an MRI is really bogus, hormones are overrated, and the whole field is a bunch of hooey. But I don’t think so. It feels intuitively right, and that’s good enough for me.

So now what? Assuming that female brains and male brains are different in some fndamental ways, what does that mean for education in general, and education at an all girls school in particular? The answer is: I don’t know. Honestly, it’s hard for me to tease out the implications of this without making it sound sexist. The predominant model of education in our schools is, I think, oriented towards a male-dominated model of education. Suggesting anything else might imply to some that women are less capable, which really is ludicrous. And perhaps I am shying away from the implications simply because I am male and think that it’s best to leave that hard work in the more capable hands of my female colleagues.

But I will say this: I welcome the conversation, male or female, about what it all means.

As a techhnology director at an all girls school (Castilleja) I am always on the lookout for new insights into educating young women in the STEM areas of science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Thus I was excited to learn about Lesley’s Farmer’s new book Teen Girls and Technology: What’s the Problem, What’s the Solution (Amazon citation).

Given her background in library programs (she coordinates the Librarianship Program and Cal State, Long Beach) it’s not surprising that Farmer has gathered an impressive amount of research studies which describes the past and current status of girls technology education.

Using the simple writing model of “what, so what, and now what” Farmer adequately addresses the “what” part of the model, citing study upon study and piles of statistics to give the reader a grounding in the disparate treatment girls receive from teachers, other adults, and peers of both genders which contribute to girls attitudes towards and facility with technology.

It’s in the areas of “so what, and now what” that I felt keenly disappointed. Farmer offers no fresh insights into what’s to be done to address the situation, but instead relies too much on previously published literature and broad platitudes about how to engage female teens through socially relevant topics and fun activities using topics such as entertainment, fashion and beauty, child care, and advice to the love lorn. In short, it read to me like applying gender-sterotypical solutions to a problem that does little to break the mold and truly inspire young women to lives of meaning and purpose in the technical arena.

Alan November (wiki citation) is a welcome fixture at educational conference around the world. I’ve heard him speak several times myself, and I’ve always come away with something new, so it was with great anticipation that I started his latest book, Web Literacy for Educators (Amazon citation).

After a few chapters, I began thinking “is this it? November has been talking about this stuff for years… There’s nothing new here!”

Granted, teachers with little or no knowledge of the web (for example, what are the elements of a URL) may find this to be a useful guide. And it is charming to find someone that still uses Alta Vista as a search engine. I had better hopes for Chapter 6 on Blogs, Wikis, Pods casts and Wikis, but these important tools are dismissed in a mere fifteen pages with little revelation aside from an anecdote or two describing how a teacher is using them.

Where this book may find an audience is with librarians who find themselves pushed to teach students about information literacy and using something other than a card catalog to search for resources. (I suppose a few are still around in remote parts of the earth.)

If you’d looking for something about Web 2.0 literacy for educators, look elsewhere, such as John Hendron’s RSS for Educators: Blogs, Newsfeeds, Podcasts, and Wikis in the Classroom (available from ISTE or Amazon.

Coming up next: Another disappointing read….

I recently returned from my busman’s holiday having read several books, which I will review in this space as time allows during the ramp-up to the start of school.

The books included:

The Female Brain, by Louann Brizendine.

Teen Girls and Technology: What’s the Problem, What’s the Solution?, by Lesley Farmer.

Web Literacy for Educators, by Alan November.

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation Will Change the Way the World Learns, by Clayton M. Christensen, Curtis W. Johnson, and Michael B. Horn.

One excellent, one very good, and two disappointing….

More to come.

When many of us were growing up we were very protective of our bedrooms. We didn’t want anyone coming in to our rooms uninvited; not siblings, not our parents. We posted “Keep out!!!!” or “Danger, Radioactive Materials” signs on our doors. We would, of course, grant access to our friends and then immediately shut the door for privacy. Woe to parents who cleaned our rooms accidentally discovered cigarettes, condoms, alcohol, marijuana, or other contraband. Oh the feelings of betrayal on both sides.

Some things never change. Many teens are still territorial about their private spaces, but these areas now extend to virtual worlds that many parents don’t realize exist. Even if they’ve heard of such things as FaceBook, MySpace, Xanga, or Blogger, they have no idea how much time their teen is spending there. As parents, how can you guide and protect your child when you don’t know where she is? You can not (and should not) be with her every minute of every day whether it is in the physical world or the virtual world. Because of your own familiarity with the risks inherent in the real world you teach her how to safely cross the street, exercise caution with strangers, and how to call for help when they need it. But are you as familiar with the risks in the virtual worlds that your daughter inhabits?

In a survey conducted of random sample of Castilleja upper school students conducted by the Tech Department last spring, 34% of students reported having a personal web site or blog My observation of behavior in the computer labs indicates that this percentage has increased remarkably, and that students in the middle school are also active participants. This is in keeping with national trends being reported as reported in recent articles in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times describing a the current generation of teens who have grown up in a digital world. Writers are having a field day inventing clever names for this generation: digital natives, generation M, iKids, the net generation, and screenagers.

What’s a parent to do? Here’s my advice:

1. Educate yourself. Go online and visit the web sites previously mentioned (MySpace, Xanga, Blogger). Google your child’s name and see what (if anything) comes up. Talk with other parents about what experiences they may have had with their children using such web sites. Once you have gathered some information, and your wits, you’re ready for step 2.
2. Talk with your daughter. Ask her if she has a blog, or if she has friends with blogs. (I assure you that at least one of the two answers will be yes.) Converse (this is a conversation, not an interrogation) about blogs: what she likes about them, what she doesn’t like. You may ask her to show you some blogs, including her own if she has one. Ask her who reads her blog (most blogs allow you to be available to the general public or only to invited readers.) This should be an easy conversation, not an awkward one.
3. In a very unscientific survey, I asked about twenty upper schoolers how many of them had blogs. Sixteen raised their hands. Then I asked how many of their parents know that they have a blog. About twelve hands went up. So the good news is that many of you may already know that your child has a blog, or in the very least their are other parents you can speak with who know that their child has a blog. Step three is to make sure that your child understands the attributes of cyberspace that, I find, they often overlook: context, openness, misrepresentation, and persistence.
   • Context. Written communication, the most common form of discourse in blogs, often do not fully convey the context for remarks that are made. Email users understand how easy it is for messages to be misconstrued. Managers have learned that email is NOT a good mechanism to communicate emotionally-laden messages. Teenagers don’t know that. They often write in a stream-of-consciousness mode with little regard for how something may sound to another. Sometimes their remarks can be very hurtful to the people they’re writing about, even when they believe that person is not reading their blog. Which brings us to…
   • Openness. Students, especially middle schoolers who are just getting into this, have no idea how powerful search engines like Google are. Information they think is private may be found by other computers. They may believe that only the friends that they have invited to read their blog are doing so—forgetting how much a social activity this is among friends who gather around a computer to read blogs with one another. I inadvertently caused a few raised eyebrows among some of our seniors in the computer lab the other day by suggesting that college recruiters might be looking at the blogs of applicants.
   • Misrepresentation. I have previously written about cyberbullying, and that a contributor to phenomenon this was the anonymity provided by virtual personas. In addition to anonymity, the web allows you one to create a completely false persona, which is exactly what online predators do. Children need a healthy skepticism of anyone they meet online who they do not know in the physical world.
   • Persistence. In some ways cyberspace seems so fleeting. But this is illusory. Information that is put on a blog may continue to live on even when the blog is “deleted” by the user. It’s been cached by search engines. Backed up on server tapes. Visitors may have downloaded files, examined the HTML code, or even taken screen shots. In short once it’s out there, it’s out there. Students have no idea!
4. Repeat steps 1-3. Keep educating yourself, stay in dialog with your daughter, and help her understand the characteristics of cyberspace that are so easily overlooked.

In conclusion the worse thing you can do is to try to forbid this activity. Many teens, who are already finding ways to assert their independence from their caregivers, will simply find it all the more attractive. And indeed, blogs can be a healthy and entertaining means of self-expression. The key is communication. After all, that’s what blogs are supposed to be all about.