A Place to Consider Technology

A little while ago I posted about Lifestreams in an entry entitled “My Digital Life”. In that post I explored the digital footprint we leave behind and how our lifestream unfolds online.

Since then I have come to believe that we all have multiple lifestreams that unfold in parallel. Sometimes these various stream cross in unexpected ways and sometimes they may even merge. But are there times that we want these streams to stay as far apart as possible? I see some of my own streams as being a university instructor, elementary school parent, retired military officer, educational blogger, and even online gamer. Someone may view one of these “streams” and have no idea that the other exists. Very few of my “elementary school parent” friends even fully know what I do for a living. Even fewer know that I am a Persian Gulf War veteran.

Are you a closet World of Warcraft gamer? Does your family know that you are a level 58 dwarf named Grisworthty? Should they know this about you? Obviously by these references I know nothing about WOW.

Recently some teacher have discovered what the consequences might be when your public lifestream collides with your shadow lifestream. One teacher in Brooklyn was fired when she vented about student behavior on her FaceBook page. Another teacher in Pennsylvania was fired over comments she posted to her personal blog.

I wonder if this is fair. Should teacher or police officer or politician be held to a different level of accountability for their personal life? Do we have a different set of obligation as role models than other professions?

What do your lifestreams say about you?

We have the pleasure of hearing from Jennifer Walters, Superintendent of the Escondido Union School District and doctoral student in the EDS Educational Leadership program. She will be talking about handheld technology in the K12 classroom.

If you have any questions for Jennifer please post them here.

Her research title is “English Language Learners’ Reading Self-Efficacy and Achievement Using Individual Mobile Learning Device”

Abstract: Handheld technology devices allow users to be mobile and access the Internet, personal data, and third-party content applications in many different environments and at the users’ convenience.  The explosion of these mobile learning devices around the globe has led adults to value them for productivity and learning.  Outside of the school setting, many adolescents and children have access to or own mobile devices.  The use of these individual devices by children on a daily basis in schools is a relatively new phenomenon, with just four percent of elementary students doing so within classrooms in 2010.  This mixed methods study proposes to study a one-to-one implementation of iPod TouchTM devices in elementary classrooms.  The focus is to understand the mobile learning device’s relationship to English language learner students’ reading self-efficacy, to understand the relationship to English language learners’ reading achievement, and to understand benefits and limitations of the devices as perceived by fourth- and fifth grade-English Language learner students.  The theory of action of this study is that the practice of reading and related literacy activities on mobile learning devices may augment English learners’ vicarious learning experiences, and thereby effect student cognitive engagement, reading self-efficacy, and reading academic performance.

Often we would like to make our blog entries more exciting and personal by adding a podcast to them. I like the idea of podcasts since we can often make connections to someone when we hear and see them. Maybe posting a podcast of ourselves along with a photo will make our audience feel as if we are talking right to them.

So here is my attempt at this.

Chris

Here is my Podcast

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, we have done it. We have run out of Internet addresses. We exhausted the inexhaustible source of IP addresses used to identify servers on the Internet. The International Committee that controls these addresses gave out the last block of numbers Thursday, February 2, 2011. So does that mean no more websites?

Who knew thirty years ago when we created a numerical address system that could support 4.3 billion addresses that we would runout.

But do not worry. This is the death if IPv4. Welcome to IPv6, the new Internet addressing system that can handle 340 undecillion addresses. So now we have the new and improved inexhaustible system.

Isn’t it great how technology can both hinder and aid us in our daily lives? So how long now before we run out of addresses for the Internet?

Why does it seem that we are hearing more and more about technology being capable of supporting real learning? Why is the feeling of these stories different than it was in the 1990’s, or the 1980’s, 1970’s, or even the 1960’s?

It may be as simple as the fact the technology has become accessible and personal.

The spread of technology into learning environments can be mapped onto my own experiences with technology as I progressed through school. Well, it can almost be mapped. The storyline may not be a perfect match, but it does provide some interesting insights.

When I was in middle school, way back in the late 1970’s, computers were good for one thing – to get me out of the PE requirement. There were only two choices in what we could do with a computer; keyboarding or programming. As I made my way through high school in the early 1980’s computers had not progressed much. You rarely saw one and the only people who really worked with them were seldom seen out in public. Even in college most computer classes still revolved around programming. I can recall my first big programming g success – it was all on about 300 punch cards that had to be fed into the computer to work.

Then something began to happen. As I started my teaching career a group of very smart college kids at the University of Illinois freed us from the text only world of computers and brought multimedia to the world through the Mosaic web browser. The World Wide Web was born, or at least discovered by the masses. Prior to Mosaic, the web was the private playground of college kids and the military.

A Vision of Students Today

In 2000 as I was teaching technology courses to aspiring classroom teachers we were focused on the wonders of word processing and email. My advanced students even tried their hand at html and web page creation.

Something else happened in 2000. The digital natives, see the writings of Marc Prensky, were born. Technology was beginning to become a ubiquitous feature in home across the US, Europe, and much of Asia. A new sort of learner was on the way to classrooms. Unlike many of us they would not know a time when the computer was not in their house and technology was considered an everyday tool and not some magical box.

A Vision of K12 Students Today

Shortly after this we had a change in the structure of the Internet. Web 2.0 was starting to be talked about. The web was changing from merely a consumption media into a two-way dialogue. The average person could fully participate in the conversation. This was the early days of social media. Can we even imagine just surfing the web and not being able to interact with one another?

Could Thomas Friedman have imagined just how flat the world would become? In the summer of 2009 East Africa received its first broadband cable connecting it to the rest of the world. Some have speculated that this would do more for the development of Africa than the building of roads. By the summer of 2011 you will be able to sent email and micro-blog from the summit of Mount Everest thanks to a new 3G wireless station. What this really means is that people in the remote regions of Nepal are now connected to the rest of us on the web.

The game has changed. So where do we want to go now?