Remote Access

Revising Wikpedia

Among everything else, I write a newspaper column for several small newspapers in Northern Manitoba. Not much, about 600 words or so each week focused on technology and culture. Not a geeky "how - to" column, I'll often write about ways that technology and culture are intersecting and changing each other. This week, in light of Google's announcement of Knol, I thought it would be a good week to write about Wikipedia, knowledge, and experts. I put a call out on Twitter looking for a page that shows "live" recent changes that have been made to WIkipedia pages. Within a few minutes I received a few replies from several different people, all highlighting this site. Exploring it a bit I found that if you click on the small "diff" tag on each change that is displayed, you are sent to a page that highlights the differences between the new version of the page and the old version like you would be able to see on a wikispaces history page. This live revision of knowledge fascinated me and I looked at a few different pages before I came upon this change that had been made to the Moon Landings page:                                                                  

Now this was even more interesting to me. Vandalism in action. While I am a fairly heavy user of Wikipedia and a strong supporter of their concept, I'll admit that I've made few edits to their pages. I do know that a dedicated team of people watch the millions of pages carefully looking for changes such as this one. But I was surprised to keep my eye on this page and see that it was corrected in under twenty minutes. I had though that "hot button" issues and topics would be watched carefully and corrected, but for a random historical page such as this to be fixed so quickly ensures my confidence of this site.

I encourage the students in my class to use Wikipedia. I encourage them to use it first and confirm what they find there by checking other sites. That being said, I encourage them to do the same at all other sites they find as well. Any site on the internet is just as apt to be incorrect and biased as any other, and with the huge community of users editing and improving Wikipedia, errors, omissions, and biases are apt to be caught and corrected.

Knowledge is out of the gate.    

Tags: wikipedia, vandalism, knowledge

Apparently I Work in a Filtered Environment

I was truly surprised last week to click on a link in twitter that had been posted by Alec Couros. It was a link to a copy of his Ph.D dissertation. I was absolutely shocked to find this come up:

I know this is a box that many people are familiar with and one that raises the ire and the blood pressure of many people. I've read for months people's rants about their battles with the filters in their systems and I have always taken great pride in the fact that in my building we had no system installed of any kind. It was great to be able to say to people that we believe in education and not censorship. The mode of operation in our building was always very simple. We first of all have students sign a relatively strict internet use policy. Second is that we go through it with students and outline the consequences to them, their grades, and their computer usage if they break this policy. Next, we enforce it. Kids who are places that are inappropriate or nasty are held to account. We check history files and keep an eye on our students expecting them to call us over if they accidentally run into something nasty. This has always worked fine and we have had extremely few cases of students who have needed us to call their parents in and meet with them, having the students explain why they have felt the need to surf porn sites in school.

And the fact is that I know that many nasty and inappropriate sites are not blocked at school. Just last week I inadvertently followed a link while I was checking out new twitter profiles and ended up someplace I should not have been. This is another reason why I was so absolutely floored to see this access denied notice show up on my screen.

I immediately took a screen shot of this notice using Jing, posted it to my flickr account and sent off a ranting email to my tech superintendent. Now this man is fairly new to his job but has embraced it with a sense of vision and interest. He quieted me down with a long explanation email talking about how light filters have been installed at the provincial level and offering to Skype with me about it further. He also told me that it had been in place for awhile and that it only says good things about our building and our students if we had never seen this notice before.

Now I understand all about due diligence and accountability. I understand all about online safety and keeping the focus on "educational" sites. But I have a terrible feeling that this is the end of Eden, the thin edge of a wedge.

And I am incredibly saddened to see it arrive.

Tags: internet, filtering, schools, yuck

New Laptops Coming!

Finally... After several years and wanting and advocating..... My classroom is getting ten brand new Asus eee pc laptops! These small machines have a seven inch screen and almost no harddrive space. But they do have enough power and enough expandability for dealing with probably over 90% of computing applications that are used in my classroom. They run on a Linux OS and have a very simply interface with direct links to the web, to Skype, to Google docs and to iGoogle. They come with Open office installed and they have plugs for both headphones and an external mic. They have a built in webcam, speakers and a mic also built in. I received one of these machines form my technology superintendent to test out this week and I have been constantly impressed with it. It has enough power to easily run voicethread, to watch videos on youtube, capture video from its camera and work with audio files. I had trouble with the touchpad and the mouse, but adding a small USB mouse solved this instantly. The only application that I would really like to see installed on this machine is Google Earth and I'm going to have to figure something out for that. I will have these ten laptops, the four desktops that are already in my room and I have another five students that regularly bring their own laptops to class. That puts us at nineteen total machines for twenty three students.... So close..... I've learned that some models of teaching and learning are very hard to move towards without this network capacity. This is not an issue of bandwidth, but of students having access to information and other learners around the globe at the point of instruction. We will have a lot of learning to do as a class to fully capitalize on these machines. While I have managed in the past to design a learning space that revolves around information, having this access is definitely a step I have been waiting for and advocating the move towards. This will push my ideas of studio and of teacher as network administrator further. I am considering making some changes to my classroom layout to allow more for small groups of students to work together with a few machines. I will need to find ways in both my classroom physical layout and my learning structures to make local and international collaboration more central to what I do. Ideas of incorporating white space into lessons as Dean Shareski talked about in his presentation on design loom large. Of course there is a "cost" to being the beta tester for these machines in my division. I've agreed to open my classroom to others who may want to come in and learn about using technology in classrooms. I've also agreed to write a manual of instruction or suggestion for the applications that are on these machines. A basic "how-to" for incorporating technology in the classroom and for these machines specifically. The idea of the division is to construct "plug and play" labs that will come with a set of these small pcs, a wireless access point, a tech manual, and my pedagogical manual. It will be a fair amount of work, but something I am willing to do to get these machines. By early next week I will have an arrival date for these machines. They may be here before Christmas, but with only two weeks left until the break, I would guess early January is more likely. Let the planning begin!    

 

UPDATE: Here are a few more pictures of the eee pc that I took on my kitchen table this morning.

Tags: assus, eee pc, dean shareski, design, classroom

Learning = Connecting

Just over a week ago, I wrote a post called Learning = Remembering? In it, I questioned the idea of learning being equated to simply being able to recall a bunch of facts. I had been to a presentation where the facilitator spent a lot of her day talking and demonstrating brain based learning strategies that were great for "improving recall" in her words. This worried me.

Over the past week, I've spent time thinking about this. If learning isn't remembering, what is it?

I've crawled up the side of the mountain slowly, and who did I find sitting there? George Siemens.

Although I am a great fan of George's work and have written about his ideas many other times, I am interested to begin to understand a bit more of the truth behind what he has been telling us: learning is about connections. Connections between people. Relationships between people and their information as well. Learning is an inherently risky, personal act. It involves changing our thoughts about an issue, our opinions, our understandings. Before this takes place, the relationships and the trust need to be there. Do I trust you enough to value what you are saying? Do I trust you enough to believe what you are saying?

This fall we've heard over and over again about the wonders of tools like Twitter and the power of the network of hyperconnected international educators we can now have almost instant access to. But I'm also realizing that this is moving my ideas beyond tools. The tools have changed and continue to change. We all have chased accounts, setting up at places like Voice Thread, Ustream, Operator 11, etc., etc. The tools will continue to change. So the tools are not important. What is important is that we realize the power of these tools and what they add to our classrooms. The tools let kids connect with each other on a personal level. This is not scary or creepy; this is life. We all connect to each other around us all the time, this is what relationships are about. We do it face to face and over the virtual learning networks we design and participate in. We cannot allow ourselves to be frightened of letting our kids getting to know others on a more personal level. We cannot expect them to delve deeply into academic issues under consideration without first allowing them to spend time with each other learning about others and their ideas and perspectives.

Today we have a third chat session scheduled with our partners at St. Elisabeth in Los Angeles. I guarantee that the first questions issued will be about the tragedy of the fires that are consuming southern California. This isn't what we have on the agenda for the chat session today, but this is about them and their connections to each other. They are humans, not unconcerned, unconnected robots. Last Friday they had a scheduled long weekend at St. Elisabeth's and it felt to me like half my class was missing. I missed talking to their teachers and their students. I wondered where they were and how they were spending their day.

These ideas of relationships between people, between information sources and about the power of the network are central to meaningful learning; much more than any tool will be.

Tags: georgesiemens, connectivism, relationships, learning, john pederson

Three Part Assignment

This reflection is several days old but I just have not had time this week to write anything lately. I've been tied up with too many other commitments. But this was interesting and worth some time.

Lucy Martin in LA and I organized a three part lesson with the kids in our class around ideas of power in society:

a) Define power

b) How does power affect personal relationships?

c) What role does power play in a person’s decision making process?

d) Why is having power important to a person?

These are the questions that we wanted our students to spend time with. With the help of their great tech coordinator at St. Elisabeth's, we set up 11 private chatrooms in Moodle, organized our students and set them loose. We battled through technical problems and the "lols" of the students. We organized a second chat so that the students could finish up their discussions. Each group of students needed a scribe for their group and they needed a reporter. Notes were posted by the scribe on their blogs and in a Moodle forum, and the reporters had to pick them up and organize a report which they gave back to the entire group over a video Skype call.

Here again, we battled mic settings and about 10 minutes of difficulty before we could get the video and the audio synced, clear, and loud enough for all in both places to be able to hear. In the end, it was a success and each groups' reporter was able to tell us all what their ideas were around these four questions.

Finally, part three.

Part three is personal reflection by the students. Each student between the two classes is having to write a blog post this weekend with their own synthesis of these two chats and the Skype call that has connected us.

This was our first attempt at a fully connected, several part assignment that brought the classrooms together live over an extended period of time. While we have had introductory Voice Thread assignments, blog posts and comments from the students as they have gotten to know each other, this was different. While we certainly had some difficulties, overall this was a very successful three part lesson and it has opened us up to further possibilities as we deepen our connection between classes.

Next up, a novel study of The Outsiders between our two classrooms.

technorati tags:st., elisabeth, skype, moodle, classroom, connection

A Successful Day? Partly.

Today was a big tech day in my classroom. We started off the morning by talking about what RSS is, and the benefits of having an account. I showed them my Bloglines account and had one of the students show her iGoogle homepage that I had her make up in advance.

Away we went.

Students had to construct a blogs tab that was 50% local students and 50% students from the school in Los Angeles that we are working with.  We also had to talk as a class about the pre - made widgets that iGoogle offers and what kinds of things were appropriate for school, useful, helpful, etc. They played with layouts, with tabs, with the themes and everything else they could find. Of course, most of their pages are only half finished and need an "under construction" sign hung on them. But then again, with the ease of revision and the number of changes they will possibly make over the year, these pages will never be completed. This is going to be interesting to watch. With 54 students in their "class" and a lot of pre - made widgets to choose from, how they choose to construct their pages will bear watching.

In the afternoon we had our first live chat session between our two schools using private Moodle chatrooms that we had set up in advance; eleven of them. Questions were posted in advance that students were to discuss. They also had to choose a person who was to capture the important concepts during their chat and choose another student who will be speaking to the entire group next Wednesday about their findings during a video Skype call.

So, using Skype as a backchannel between Snow Lake and Los Angeles, approximately 50 junior high students swamped a server with login requests and we spent twenty minutes getting Moodle stable enough to let everyone comfortably into their rooms. Reviewing the logs of the chats later, the next twenty minutes on average were spent by the groups trying to decide upon the role everyone would play. And that is how easy it is to get in trouble. I had called the person who was to take notes for their group a "scribe." The kids in LA called them a "reporter." I called the student who was to speak to the entire group of students next Wednesday a "reporter," while they were calling this person a "presenter." So between crashing chat rooms, sorting out confusion over groups, roles, and language an originally scheduled 45 minute chat turned into a successful 15 - 20 minutes for each group.

We learned a few things about the strength of our Internet service, the power of their server in LA, and the abilities of our students to juggle problems and questions.

At the end of the day we have half constructed RSS pages and chat sessions in which half of the time was productive and the other half was spent tackling all types of problems. This is what it is like working with technology in classrooms. Was it frustrating? Certainly. But most importantly we saw potential in several places. The potential of handling information in custom built ways that are efficient and meaningful for the user and give them a new tool. We also saw the potential of chat rooms for hooking up kids who are beginning to know each other as well as if they were in the same classroom instead of the 3 700 kms that Google Earth tells me it is from Snow Lake to Van Nuys.

technorati tags:st, elisabeth, school, skype, igoogle, moodle

Here We Go Again

Canadians have been through Captain Copyright and Fair - Share as well. Now, via Michael Geist and CNET, we hear about another plan coming our way to educate our kids about copyright issues.

"In the 15- to 24-year-old (range), reaching that demographic with morality-based messages is an impossible proposition...which is why we have really focused our efforts on elementary school children," said Ric Hirsch, the ESA's senior vice president of intellectual property enforcement. "At those ages, children are open to receiving messages, guidelines, rules of the road, if you will, with respect to intellectual property."

The ESA has gone so far as to develop a copyright education curriculum geared toward the kindergarten through fifth-grade set. Since 2005, the organization has been trying to find ways to get teachers to incorporate its tenets into their everyday lessons, although Hirsch did not say how successful that effort has been. The components, which include charts, teachers guides, lesson plans and a wall poster imploring students to "Join the © Team," are also now available online.

The reason for targeting youth at that age is that they're at an "inflection point" where they're just learning how to use computers and the Internet, and the classroom seems a perfect opportunity for delivering copyright education, Hirsch said. The ESA devised its own curriculum after finding "very little out there in the form of institutional education addressing this issue," he said."

I am completely in favour of copyright. I may not agree with some of the current laws we have and the structures behind them, but I do agree that artists and content creators of all types deserve protection. I have however seen some badly ham-fisted efforts produced by content creators in an attempt to ram ideas towards kids with no mention at all of efforts such as Creative Commons. A balanced perspective is what we are sorely lacking.

I'm still holding out hope for something good to come along. Maybe this will be it.

technorati tags:copyright, canada, cnet, michael, geist, education

Manitoba Edubloggercon

Live in Manitoba? (or going to be in Winnipeg?)

Are you an edublogger or an edublogger lurker?

A big province and a small community of bloggers.

Time for us to get together.

Many people are in Winnipeg for the SAG conferences (if you aren't from Manitoba, don't snicker, we didn't come up with the name) on November 23rd so we think that is a perfect time to get together.

A basically blank wiki has been set up here looking for ideas. These things we know:

- November 23rd

- Winnipeg

Do you have a suggestion for a place? Leave your thoughts.

What about a time? Do we want an afternoon or is happy hour / evening better? You decide.

The wiki has no password set so edit away and if you have any questions, concerns or thoughts, get in touch with me.

technorati tags:manitoba, education, bloggers, edubloggercon

Planning With Many Heads

One of the thing we've learned so far in our Snow Lake - Los Angeles collaboration doesn't even involve the 54 students we have joined together. It involves us, the teachers and those who are supporting us, figuring out how to work together, to collaborate, synchronize and plan our schedules from thousands of miles apart.

We tried email but it didn't work very well as we had no running record of what we were thinking about. We tried a wiki but it wasn't the place either. Skype works for problem solving and questions, but not for long - term work. What we've settled on is a simple Moodle discussion group. With great support on the St. Elisabeth end, we've set up several threaded discussion lists for planning our literature and out social studies collaborations. This takes care of the time zone difference, gives us a running record that we can refer back to as the ideas shoot back and forth, and is simple to use for everyone.

After a month of setting up blogs, a video Skype call, and an introductory Voice Thread assignment (54 of them posted on one account each student with their own identity), we are now moving into more curricular connections. We have an upcoming live chat in Moodle to be followed up by a video Skype call several days later where scribes from each team will report back to the group as a whole, followed by a long term wiki assignment for social studies. On the literature side, the students in our classrooms are reading "The Bet" by Anton Chekhov and "The Veldt" by Ray Bradbury between last week and this week, blogging about these pieces and them leaving comments for each focusing around concepts of power and relationships. Our next step is to plan a study of the novel The Outsiders.

Now that we are through our initial challenges, we are learning new things each day. Different from a short term project which is more like a sprint, this collaboration is about the entire school year and inventing new ways to bring classrooms together. As I've stated before, our goal is to bring kids together as much as possible every single day. We want to learn how to plan together, teach together, and learn together, breaking down the geographic and time barriers as much as we can and learning how to make global learning business as usual.

technorati tags:st, elisabeth, moodle, global, learning, classroom

Doesn't Look Like Much

Not that it would ever be allowed under Canadian privacy laws, but I've been thinking about what it might be like to have a video camera running in my classroom full time. As we prepare to do more video work between Snow Lake and Los Angeles, the next logical step would be to have a stream running all the time so that whoever wanted to could see what we are doing.

Some daycares I know manage to do this and I think it would be great for parents, kids sick at home and others who might be curious about what we are up to in my classroom. But when I take some time to think about it, I realized something; it wouldn't really look like much.

Sure, as do other teachers, I spend some time up at the front of my classroom lecturing and giving notes, and we have our whole class discussions as well. I like to tell stories about famous figures and events in history that relate to whatever we are studying, but watching my classroom wouldn't be very exciting as it certainly is not often about what I'm doing; it's about what the kids are doing. They spend a lot of time involved and working in my room. They read, the blog, they write, they talk, they draw and take pictures. We have busy days from almost the moment they set foot through the door until they leave my room at 3:30. Even then, their blogs work through the evenings, it's not unusual for me to get several emails from kids after school and if my MSN is open, the questions usually continue. These kids have learned fast (1month of school is up) that they should be able to access and continue their learning from wherever they are.

So as much as I would think having a full time video of my classroom running somewhere on the web would be an interesting experiment, I wouldn't like to be the one having to watch it.

technorati tags:video, learning, classroom, feed