We’re Switching Over to a New Site

Wed, 22 Apr 2009 17:10:28 -0700

Sorry for the condition of the web site and especially the blog. We are in the process of switching everything over to a new and vastly improved web site designed and delivered by media guru Lee Crockett.

We’re still about a week away from starting it up, but I currently have more than 160 new postings to put up. Plus dozens of new videos, including the one of me speaking in front of 30,000 people awhile back in the Far East.

While I was in hospital for 5 months with the heel infection and the 7 operations, I read almost 60 books. I have book review for many of them including Don Tapscott’s latest “Grown Up Digital”, Gary Smalls amazing “iBrain”, and Gordon Dryden and Jeanette Vos’ “Learning Revolution:

Cursive, Foiled Again!!!

Mon, 2 Feb 2009 21:34:30 -0800

Source

My handwriting skills peaked sometime in my 12th year, shortly after I took a summer typing class. A few months later my parents bought a personal computer. Before long my writing life migrated to the keyboard, and my handwriting began its steady decline to the pained, barely legible scrawl that it is today.

A penmanship expert would look at that sorry trend and say, "What a disaster! The adoption of the personal computer has led to a marked deterioration of an important communication skill." But that assessment would be meaningless without factoring in all the benefits I've enjoyed from switching to the keyboard.

Not only can I put words together at 10 times the speed of using pen and paper, but I can also transfer those words to the digital realm, where they can be edited, spell-checked, e-mailed, quoted, blogged and Googled. In fact, the benefits so dramatically outweigh the costs that if I had to do away with either handwriting or typing for the rest of my life, I'd give up handwriting in a heartbeat. I suspect many others would do the same.

David Mehegan, from the Boston Globe, asks the following question: “We e-mail, we text, we Twitter - what will become of handwriting?

There are several other excellent articles about the place of handwriting in education in the archives of the Sardine blog.

"The moving finger writes," says the famous Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, "and, having writ, moves on." Nowadays, the finger more likely is hammering away on a computer keyboard, texting on a cellphone, or Twittering on a BlackBerry.

If you predate the computer age, you might remember a school subject called "penmanship," which trained your cursive handwriting, usually by the Palmer Method. The penmanship teacher would come by once a week to rate your work, and if your handwriting was bad, you'd hear about it. It's still taught, to be sure, but it's no longer emphasized. "There's been a decline in attention to all kinds of basic skills," said Louise Spear-Swerling, coordinator of the graduate program in learning disabilities at Southern Connecticut State University. "With handwriting, people think it's just not that important."
Some people are concerned, though, and one is Kitty Burns Florey, whose book "Script and Scribble: The Rise and Fall of Handwriting" comes out Friday - John Hancock's birthday and National Handwriting Day. Florey, author of nine novels and a book about sentence diagramming, became interested in the subject after reading that computer keyboarding has displaced handwriting in schools.
"My first reaction was horror," Florey said in an interview at her home, "then I thought, 'Why would anyone use handwriting in today's world?' I write my books on the computer. I discovered two schools of thought: One is that it wouldn't matter if nobody learned handwriting because we all have computers, and the other is that this is an interesting, historic, valuable, and beautiful skill that has been around for thousands of years, and we are just tossing it out."
Diane Desmond, who has taught fourth grade for 39 years at Fall River's Letourneau Elementary School, says pressure on teachers to improve test scores is partially to blame. "Cursive was always taught in the third grade," she said. "In the last four or five years, I've had more students who have trouble with it. This year, I have five or six. They have trouble reading it, too."
Victoria Munroe of Northampton, who taught for 10 years in the New Salem-Wendell district, said she had no training in college or the school system on the teaching of handwriting. "I walked in and they said, 'Here are some worksheets; see what you can do.' The kids couldn't write, they couldn't hold a pencil, they were tiring, and I was supposed to be moving them into words and sentences and paragraphs." Finally she took a workshop, on her own initiative, in the teaching of handwriting.
To previous generations, clear and speedy handwriting was essential to everything from public documents to personal letters to generals' orders in battle. As literacy became more widespread, various handwriting methods arose. There was italic, starting in the 15th century, and then in the 17th century came roundhand - called copperplate in the United States - seen in the Declaration of Independence and the script of Benjamin Franklin. In the 1820s, Platt Rogers Spencer developed the Spencerian script, which became the American standard in schools (it survives in the Coca-Cola logo).
Then came A.N. Palmer. While working as a clerk in Iowa in the 1880s, Palmer devised a way of writing that eliminated Spencer's fancy curlicues and purportedly minimized fatigue, too. He promoted his method in a book, "Palmer's Guide to Muscular Movement Writing," and by 1912 his method was dominant in American schools. Palmer and its offshoots featured the odd large number 2 for the capital Q, the capital D with the little forelock, and the M and N that start with a loop.
However much you studied your Palmer, though, your "hand" was distinctive - as personal as your voice or laugh. But as typewriters proliferated after World War II, handwriting gradually became less important. Authors typed their manuscripts and students typed their school papers. As telephones became universal, letter-writing virtually disappeared. In the e-mail age, most people seldom need to write more than a grocery list or a short note, or sign a check. It's not only kids; many who formerly wrote fluently and neatly have forgotten how.
"It's a very disturbing problem," said Kate Gladstone of Albany, N.Y., who has a website specializing in handwriting improvement. "I see people in their 20s and 30s who cannot read cursive. If you cannot read all types of handwriting, you might find your grandma's diary or something from 100 years ago, and not be able to read it." There are practical concerns as well. Sometimes we don't have a computer, or the professor won't let us bring it to class to take notes. Or sometimes, as happened in New Orleans hospitals during Hurricane Katrina, computers lose power and medical orders and records have to be written out by hand.
A 2007 national study funded by the US Department of Education found that nine out of 10 teachers reported that they were devoting an average of 70 minutes per week to the teaching of handwriting, but that only 12 percent said they were adequately trained to teach it. Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University, who led the study, cautioned that these were self-reported numbers, and added that in a separate study with direct observation of 22 teachers in one school system, far less time was devoted to handwriting.
Though he does not deny the importance of keyboard skills, Graham is worried by the decline of handwriting, especially the loss of "fluency and automaticity." He recalled that his daughter, now an adult, had severe difficulties in reading and handwriting in primary school. "We said to the teacher, 'Why aren't you teaching handwriting?', " Graham said. "The answer was, 'For handwriting and spelling, why worry? She'll be using the computer someday.' The problem was that she was developing a negative attitude toward writing because she didn't do handwriting well."
Kitty Florey is not so much worried about the educational damage as about loss of a direct connection with a loved or admired person of the past. Today we can see Mark Twain's or Charles Dickens's manuscripts or letters, she said, the marks they made with their own hands. "You can see where they dipped the pen, and the little drips of ink," she said. "My great-great grandchild may have my mother's letters to me; they will be nice artifacts, but she might not be able to read them."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.

Technology & the Death of Handwriting

Sun, 1 Feb 2009 14:34:55 -0800

Source

I originally posted this on March 9, 2008 - I thought it was relevant to the previous post...

I’ll admit straight out - I’m handwriting disabled. Since very early in my life I have been unable to hold a pen or pencil for more than a few minutes at a time without it becoming physically painful for me and my hand starts to seize up and my handwriting absolutely disintegrates.

In Grade 7 another teacher who will remain unnamed (you guessed it, Cornelius Hamm, who was actually a pretty good guy) stood up in front of my entire class and absolutely humiliated me over my handwriting – he actually stood in front of the class holding my composition up and had the entire class pointing and laughing at me about my Egyptian hieroglyphics.

To make it even worse, he then took the most powerful weapon in a teacher’s arsenal – a red pen – and Freddy Kruegered my entire composition from beginning end – spelling, punctuation, run on sentence, incomplete thought… - there wasn’t a single line that hadn’t been carved - and then he had the audacity to turn to me and say “now I need a good copy”.

I remember standing there in front of him, tears welling in my eyes, and blurted out “What do you think that was?” – I was devastated - I went back to my desk, did the absolute minimum that I had to and handed it in. And it literally took me until first year university to over come the trauma of that moment.

Despite the fact that I continue to be handwriting disabled, I’m now a professional writer – I’ve written several books, 9 educational series, a write monthly columns for magazines and help produce this blog which is read by thousands of people around the planet.

I would never have become a professional writer if it were not for computers, word processors and the Internet. With word processors, my words flow from my mind to the screen. Editing is a breeze, and I’m free to craft and re-craft my words as many times as I want without having to re-transcribe my thoughts. Writing anything of length by hand is inconceivable to me.

That said, a penmanship expert would look at that sorry trend away from handwriting and say, "What a disaster! The adoption of the personal computer has led to a marked deterioration of an important communication skill." But that assessment would be meaningless without factoring in all the benefits I and countless others have enjoyed from switching to the keyboard.

Not only can I put words together at 10 times the speed of using pen and paper, but I can also transfer those words to the digital realm, where they can be edited, spell-checked, e-mailed, quoted, blogged and Googled.

In fact, the benefits so dramatically outweigh the costs that if I had to do away with either handwriting or typing for the rest of my life, I'd give up handwriting in a heartbeat. I suspect many others would do the same.

But others don’t necessarily see it that way and are eager to blame digital culture in general, and computers in particular for where new technologies have taken us.

For example, here’s a recent article BBC article that does just that.

One in three children struggle with their handwriting and almost one in five slip into text message language when they do put pen to paper, according to a recent survey

Meanwhile, one in five parents surveyed for My Child magazine's Write a Letter Week said they last penned a letter more than a year ago.
If the figures are representative, this apparent demise of handwriting could have serious implications for educational achievement.
Currently, four out of 10 boys and 25% of girls, aged 11, fail to meet the required standards for writing in their national tests.
Although only 3% of the marks in this test are awarded for good writing and spelling skills, experts argue the child's ability to write and the quality of their text are inextricably linked.
Professor Rhona Stainthorp, who is conducting research into children's writing abilities, says there is growing evidence those who write faster and more legibly get better marks.
This is because poor handwriting itself is hampering a child's ability to express himself.

If you are a slow writer you have not automated your writing skills adequately - so much so that much more of your mental capacity is taken up by processing that text.
"This even affects undergraduates in a stressed situation like an examination, but has a much greater impact at the younger age group."
It is hardly surprising that many children growing up in an age where instant messages have replaced handwritten notes to friends, will struggle when they take up a pen.
With the arrival of chip and pin, even a person's signature has become obsolete as a means of identification.
It is not just children's over-reliance on computers and mobile phones for communication that is the problem, it is the way technology encroaches on leisure time too.
Chairman of the National Handwriting Association Angela Webb says children generally have far less physical play these days.
"Instead of going outside and doing handstands against the wall, they are playing computer games inside," she says.
This has an impact because while they were playing outside they were also fine-tuning the physical skills needed for writing.
But these days they are more likely to be wearing their thumbs out on games consoles.
Head teacher of Newcastle's Hadrian School Chris Rollings says: "It's not just the fine motor mobility skills of the finger and thumb, but the whole body that's important.
"The head has to be held still, as well as the trunk and the shoulders."
At his primary school for children with severe learning disabilities, they use PE and physical play to try to open the channels in the brain associated with both handwriting and wider learning.
Mr Rollings says experience shows children with developmental coordination problems improve if they practise certain types of exercise.
"If you give these youngsters access to 'deep pressure' activities like wheelbarrow walking - where a child is upside down with his hands on the ground and another child holds his legs - then you connect the motor perceptual pathways that are needed for handwriting."
Exercise can boost the physical skills needed for good writing. The same is true of other PE activities that involve hand-eye coordination, he says, and the benefits are just as rich for children without learning disabilities.

Information officer at the National Handwriting Association Suzanne Tibertius says children who have not had the chance to develop their fine motor skills before school often struggle with handwriting.
But can we blame the demise of handwriting wholly on children's increased reliance on technology and a lack of outside play?
Mrs Webb argues a lack of good teaching has a role to play too.
She says: "This generation of children has gone through school without being taught how to hand write properly because it wasn't a priority.
"And there's a generation of young teachers who were never taught how to teach handwriting."
Prof Stainthorp says schools are taking the issue of teaching handwriting seriously but agrees that many teachers lack the right training.
"One of the things that we have to face up to is that they are not necessarily thinking about how to move from writing legibly to writing quickly - that's one of the key issues," she says.
So should children with poor handwriting be pulled out of class and given remedial lessons?
This could be counterproductive, suggests Prof Stainthorp: "Handwriting is a very odd thing, when children move into adolescence criticising their handwriting is like criticising their core self."
What is really needed, she says, is a renewed focus on handwriting teaching in the early years of primary school.
So what do you think?

Gamers, Hospitals Have a Wii Problem

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 21:50:29 -0800

Source

This article, written by Sharon Kirkey was originally published in the Vancouver Sun on January 30, 2009.

Cecil Canavan, 84 uses the Nintendo Wii computer game console to video bowl at the Millennium Trail Manor retirement home, in Niagara Falls, Ont. Medical journals have warned doctors to be aware of 'multiple, possibly puzzling presentations of Wiiitis,' or Wii-related injuries.

First came Rubik’s cube tendinitis, then Nintendo thumb.

Now more reports are emerging of Wiiitis, from strained muscles and joints to people being accidentally smacked in the face with the remote.

British papers are running headlines warning of inflamed shoulders, wrists and “Wii knee,” from the virtual game. Pictures of gaming-related injuries are being posted on the Internet: the damage toll at www.wiihaveaproblem.com includes black eyes, scraped knuckles, smashed screens, broken windows and a Danish man who says he sliced his index finger to the bone on a glass ceiling lamp practising power serves on Wii tennis.

Meanwhile, medical journals have warned doctors to be aware of “multiple, possibly puzzling presentations of Wiiitis.”

Orthopedic surgeon and Canada’s top Olympics doctor Bob McCormack says he hasn’t personally seen a Wii-related injury, but “I know they’re out there.” The issue speaks to a broader problem, he says: People who don’t exercise regularly suddenly spending hours swinging the Wii controller around, leading to overuse injuries.

“If you do anything to excess, you’re running a risk,” says McCormack, head of the division of arthroscopic and athletic injuries at the University of B.C. and chief medical officer for the Canadian Olympic team.

“Your mechanisms may be off and that sets you up for everything from shoulder pain to a bad back, because you’re doing something you haven’t quite developed the expertise to do properly.”

Nintendo warns users in its safety instructions that playing video games “can make your muscles, joints, skin or eyes hurt,” to avoid excessive play and to take a 10- to 15-minute break every hour of play.

During “real” tennis as opposed to Wii tennis, “I can tell you that if you’re a beginner you’re probably not having rallies that are 20 or 30 strokes long,” says Dr. Mark Klion, an orthopedic surgeon specializing in sports medicine and clinical instructor at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York.

“You probably hit a few balls into the net, you have to go pick them up. When you compare the number . . . of swings that you get in an hour of real tennis to how many times in that same period that you are actually stroking a ball during Wii tennis, it’s exponential the difference.”

Then there are the traumatic injuries: hitting your opponent in the head or the nose with the remote, which controls the program on the screen. “We’ve seen kids that have taken big swings and hit their hand or knuckles on the back of furniture. We’ve seen fractured hands, fractured knuckles, finger dislocations from running into stuff,” says Dr. David Marshall, medical director of the sports medicine program at Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta.

“Ceiling fans have been a fairly common one. You take an overhead swing playing tennis and hit the ceiling fan.”

Experts recommend warming up before Wii to get blood flowing to muscles, increasing their core temperature and making them more tolerant of exercise. Marshall suggests jogging on the spot, stretching, and “maybe jumping rope.” Starting out cold before a high intensity activity increases the risks of strains, sprains and chronic tendinitis or bursitis.

“The key message is, there’s a lot of enthusiasm when you get anything new, and Wii would be a classic example,” McCormack says. “You play huge volumes because you’re excited about it. It’s a matter of saying, I’ve got to be sensible.”

It’s the same as suddenly deciding to run a marathon, he says. “Your first workout wouldn’t be 20 miles.”

The good news, according to Dr. Jane Aubin, scientific director of the Canadian Institute for Health Research’s Institute of Musculoskeletal Health and Arthritis, is Wii can motivate people to get more physically active, “and you don’t require great skill to start.”

An hour or two of Wii tennis won’t provide the same aerobic workout as real tennis, Marshall says, “but you can certainly work up a pretty good sweat, especially people that tend to be out of shape or aren’t very physically fit.”

For younger players, “children don’t move much,” says Cris Rowan.

“That isn’t what the Wii designers would have you to believe,” says Rowan, a pediatric occupational therapist and sensory specialist in Sechelt, B.C.

“Children get really, really good at Wii, really, really fast, and they find that they don’t have to move the big muscles anymore. They can just get the movement out of the wrist and the fingers.” That can increase the risk of pain and “cumulative trauma” in the smaller muscles in the wrists and hands in children who use video games a lot, she says.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no more than one or two hours per day of combined technology use.

Call for Reevaluation of Learning Environments

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:35:24 -0800

Source

The Partnership for 21st Century Skills released a new report Friday calling for a reevaluation of what we define as learning environment and advocating some sweeping changes in the spaces, tools, policies, and other aspects of education that the group characterized as urgently in need of reform.

The report, "21st Century Learning Environments," suggests that the learning environments of the 21st century need to move away from Industrial Age conceptions that "mimicked the industrial forms that had so sweepingly transformed the workplace." That is, learning environments need to move away from a model in which schools mimic factories with their fixed structures, inflexible schedules, and various barriers designed for uniformity as both a means and an end. Instead, education systems should embrace the concept of "whole environments for the whole child."

Specifically, the paper advocates (among other things):

• Flexible, shared, and sustainable learning spaces, rather than fixed, inflexible cookie-cutter school designs;

• Flexibility in time and schedules, including the length of class periods, seat time, and the length of an academic year;

• Full access to digital tools and media resources and a melding of online and face to face learning;

• Expanded teacher and student support for technology use; and

• A reconsideration of what makes a community of learners, including learning communities for education professionals.

"The term 'learning environment' suggests place and space--a school, a classroom, a library," according to the report. "And indeed, much 21st century learning takes place in physical locations like these. But in today’s interconnected and technology-driven world, a learning environment can be virtual, online, remote; in other words, it doesn't have to be a place at all.

Perhaps a better way to think of 21st century learning environments is as the support systems that organize the condition in which humans learn best--systems that accommodate the unique learning needs of every learner and support the positive human relationships needed for effective learning. Learning environments are the structures, tools, and communities that inspire students and educators to attain the knowledge and skills the 21st century demands of us all."

"It is critical that 21st century learning environments address the multiple and interconnected needs of the whole child," said Paige Kuni, chair of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills and worldwide manager of K-12 education for Intel, in a statement released to coincide with the report. "Learning supports are only valuable if they effectively reinforce human relationships, give relevance to learning and encourage student engagement. Schools must devote themselves to more than the mind-body connection to ensure student achievement."

The complete report is available now as a PDF on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills' site. Further information can be found The complete report is available now as a PDF on the Partnership for 21st Century Skills' site. Further information can be found here.

How Memories Form, Fade & Persist

Fri, 30 Jan 2009 12:18:02 -0800

Source

This is from a January 28th, 2009 CNN article that examines how memories form, fade and persist over time.

What was the name of that guy with that stuff in that place with those things? Don't you remember?

We all suffer occasional lapses in memory. Some people suffer severe neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's, that rob them of their ability to form memories or remember recent events.

Three new studies shed light on the way the brain forms, stores and retrieves memories. Experts say they could have implications for people with certain mental disorders.

When did it happen?
Newly born brain cells, thousands of which are generated each day, help "time stamp" memories, according to a computer simulation by scientists at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California, and the University of Queensland in Australia. The research was published in the journal Neuron.

These cells do not record an exact, absolute date -- such as January 28, 2009 -- but instead encode memories that occur around the same time similarly. In this way, the mind knows whether a memory happened before, after or alongside something else.

Neuroscientists believe that if the same neurons are active during two events, a memory linking the two may be formed.

For example, you might remember that, on a day a few years ago, you went to a restaurant and then went to a baseball game. Researchers think the same neurons are active during both events, which results in an association with each other when you remember them.

In fact, the same young neurons respond to everything that happens for several weeks, said two of the study's co-authors, professor Fred Gage and graduate student Brad Aimone from the Salk Institute. While associations are known to form based on sight, smell, and other senses -- you may remember last year's baseball game through the taste of a hot dog today, for example -- their computer model shows that the young brain cells also link through time.

"Even though these young cells are only a small percentage of the overall circuit, we believe that their effect may be enough to give people the sense of "this happened around the same time as" something else, Gage and Aimone wrote in an e-mail.

The findings could have promising implications for diseases that involve a neurogenesis deficit -- in other words, a lack of new brain cells being born -- which happens in conditions such as depression, Alzheimer's and Parkinson's, the authors said.

A therapy that boosts the creation of neurons may alleviate some memory problems. Potential therapies include medications, a special diet or even running, since previous research has shown that running increases the creation of neurons, Aimone said.

The computer simulation showing the time-stamp effect in the study is novel and original, said Joe Manns, assistant professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. It also explains why, for example, you recognize your car both when it's very dirty and very clean, and why you can remember where you parked your car today even though you had a different space yesterday.

Storing in the short-term
You may remember reading this exact sentence in a few minutes, but not in a few days. That's because our brains handle both long-term memory, which enables us to recall events from the distant past, and short-term memory, also called working memory, which encompasses the most transient, fleeting memories.

Research in mice published in the February issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience found that an individual nerve cell in the front part of the brain can hold traces of memories on its own for as long as a minute, possibly even longer.

This idea, that an individual nerve cell can hold a trace memory, is also related to drug addiction, the study found. By giving cocaine to mice in the laboratory, the researchers explained why the drug impairs short term memory: Cocaine causes a buildup of dopamine, a brain chemical that decreases the individual nerve cells' ability to hold moment-to-moment information.

The study is an important contribution to the field of working memory because it shows the molecular mechanisms involved in the process, said Michael Kuhar, professor of neuropharmacology at Emory University, who was not involved with the research.

One distant but possible implication is that medication focusing on the neuron receptors investigated in this study would help someone who has serious problems with attention and executive decisions, he said.

Although the study was conducted on mice, when speaking about individual nerve cells, it's reasonable to say that an isolated mouse nerve cell is the same as a human one, Kuhar said. The two differ more markedly in complicated neural pathways and circuits, he said.

Holding for the long term
So, what about remembering things in the long run?

Research in the Journal of Neuroscience this week supports the idea that different brain structures are involved in forming short-term and long-term memories.

The authors took brain images of participants as they answered questions about events that happened in the last 30 years. The hippocampus, a brain region known to be involved in short-term memory, and related structures were most active when participants recalled recent events. Activity in these regions declined for events older than one year, and remained low for events 13 to 30 years old.

Meanwhile, as memories got older activity increased in the frontal, temporal, and parietal cortices, located on the surface of the brain, researchers found. That means these regions may serve as long-term memory storage.

This model of memory structures make sense in the context of Alzheimer's disease, said study co-author Larry Squire, professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Diego. Alzheimer's patients often have trouble forming short-term memories, but less difficulty recalling older memories.

"It helps us understand that Alzheimer's disease begins with memory problems because the very same structures we're talking about here [the hippocampus and related structures] are the ones affected in the disease," he said.

Horizon Report Details Ed-tech Trends

Thu, 29 Jan 2009 02:51:34 -0800

Source

A higher-education study released this week highlighted six technologies that soon could change college campuses--including mobile devices with abundant applications, cloud computing that bolsters data accessibility, and web tools that could make campus-based research faster and more thorough.

The sixth annual Horizon Report, created and published by the New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative, profiles six technologies that will have a prominent role on college campuses in the next one to five years.

The six trends outlined in the 32-page 2009 report are smart objects, semantic-aware software, mobile devices, geotagging, the personal web, and cloud computing. Last year's emerging trends included data mashups, mobile broadband, collective intelligence, and social operating systems.

Identifying trends that could alter campus policy in the coming decade stimulates conversation among IT administrators and decision makers who control universities' purse strings, said officials responsible for the report.

"Campus leaders and practitioners alike use the report as a springboard for discussion around emerging technology," said Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium, an international nonprofit consisting of about 300 education organizations that focus on educational technology.

Mobile devices have become ubiquitous on college campuses, and the authors of the Horizon Report say IT departments should take advantage of this trend by making more varied applications available. For instance, math programs--such as QuickGraph or SpaceTime--for devices such as iPhones transform the phones into advanced calculators. These applications let students see graphs in three dimensions and allow for customized computation.

New musical instrument simulators also are available for students' mobile devices. These programs allow users to play guitar, drums, and other instruments virtually while composing musical arrangements. Music students can also mix and record tracks using loops and voice recordings, making the technology available outside of computer labs that were once the only place to use such software.

The Horizon Reports says mobile devices can be a critical tool for language learners, who can "practice listening, speaking, and writing" and comparing pronunciations of foreign languages. The report says this trend should become commonplace in the next year.

Applications for mobile devices also can help students become acquainted with their new surroundings. Programs focused on campus life often include suggestions for restaurants, movie theatres, and other nearby attractions where students can spend their free time. Abilene Christian University in Texas gave iPhones and iPods to 900 freshmen last fall, and a university official said a campus life application has helped new students adapt to life away from home.

"It definitely has helped them feel more comfortable," said Bill Rankin, Abilene's director of educational innovation. "It's been a help for them."

Cloud computing is not exclusive to higher education, but its advantages could help colleges and universities save space and money and operate more efficiently as budgets stagnate in a down economy. Cloud computing--expected to take hold on college campuses in the next year--refers to a network of computers that distributes software and applications instead of having them reside on a single computer or platform.

One cloud-computing project has helped scientific researchers in recent months. Science Clouds is a project launched in early 2008 that provides resources for researchers on a limited basis. The best known example of cloud computing is YouTube, which is used by Onondaga Community College in Syracuse, N.Y. to "host media that cannot be hosted using resources on campus," according to the Horizon Report. Media Culture professors at Pitzer College in Claremont, Calif., use YouTube to track the latest in cultural trends by viewing up-to-the-minute news clips from around the world.

"We are just beginning to see direct applications for teaching and learning other than the simple availability of platform-independent tools and scalable data storage," the report says. "This set of technologies has clear potential to … greatly reduce the overall cost of computing."

Tools that make "connections between concepts or people"--known as semantic-aware applications--are also outlined in the Horizon Report. These tools are in very early stages and are projected to impact higher education in four to five years, according to the report.

This technology eventually could aid campus-based research by using keywords on web sites to suggest what researchers should link to. A list of "highly relevant" results displayed on a researcher's computer screen could speed research by limiting the number of irrelevant links that steer a project off-course, even if it's for a few minutes.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign is one of several schools studying semantic-aware technologies, and researchers there have created prototypes that, for example, assembles contextual information for web-based photographs "based on text that appears near similar photographs," streamlining the research of such images.

Links:
2009 Horizon Report
Pitzer College
Onondaga Community College
EDUCAUSE
New Media Consortium

Is Tech Producing a Decline in Critical Thinking?

Wed, 28 Jan 2009 11:21:58 -0800

Source

A January 29, 2009 ScienceDaily article asks this question: is technology producing a decline in critical thinking and analysis?

As technology has played a bigger role in our lives, our skills in critical thinking and analysis have declined, while our visual skills have improved, according to research by Patricia Greenfield, UCLA distinguished professor of psychology and director of the Children's Digital Media Center, Los Angeles.

Learners have changed as a result of their exposure to technology, says Greenfield, who analyzed more than 50 studies on learning and technology, including research on multi-tasking and the use of computers, the Internet and video games. Her research was published this month in the journal Science.

Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.

How much should schools use new media, versus older techniques such as reading and classroom discussion?

"No one medium is good for everything," Greenfield said. "If we want to develop a variety of skills, we need a balanced media diet. Each medium has costs and benefits in terms of what skills each develops."

Schools should make more effort to test students using visual media, she said, by asking them to prepare PowerPoint presentations, for example.

"As students spend more time with visual media and less time with print, evaluation methods that include visual media will give a better picture of what they actually know," said Greenfield, who has been using films in her classes since the 1970s.

"By using more visual media, students will process information better," she said. "However, most visual media are real-time media that do not allow time for reflection, analysis or imagination — those do not get developed by real-time media such as television or video games. Technology is not a panacea in education, because of the skills that are being lost.

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

Parents should encourage their children to read and should read to their young children, she said.

Among the studies Greenfield analyzed was a classroom study showing that students who were given access to the Internet during class and were encouraged to use it during lectures did not process what the speaker said as well as students who did not have Internet access. When students were tested after class lectures, those who did not have Internet access performed better than those who did.

"Wiring classrooms for Internet access does not enhance learning," Greenfield said.

Another study Greenfield analyzed found that college students who watched "CNN Headline News" with just the news anchor on screen and without the "news crawl" across the bottom of the screen remembered significantly more facts from the televised broadcast than those who watched it with the distraction of the crawling text and with additional stock market and weather information on the screen.

These and other studies show that multi-tasking "prevents people from getting a deeper understanding of information," Greenfield said.

Yet, for certain tasks, divided attention is important, she added.

"If you're a pilot, you need to be able to monitor multiple instruments at the same time. If you're a cab driver, you need to pay attention to multiple events at the same time. If you're in the military, you need to multi-task too," she said. "On the other hand, if you're trying to solve a complex problem, you need sustained concentration. If you are doing a task that requires deep and sustained thought, multi-tasking is detrimental."

Do video games strengthen skill in multi-tasking?

New Zealand researcher Paul Kearney measured multi-tasking and found that people who played a realistic video game before engaging in a military computer simulation showed a significant improvement in their ability to multi-task, compared with people in a control group who did not play the video game. In the simulation, the player operates a weapons console, locates targets and reacts quickly to events.

Greenfield wonders, however, whether the tasks in the simulation could have been performed better if done alone.

More than 85 percent of video games contain violence, one study found, and multiple studies of violent media games have shown that they can produce many negative effects, including aggressive behavior and desensitization to real-life violence, Greenfield said in summarizing the findings.

In another study, video game skills were a better predictor of surgeons' success in performing laparoscopic surgery than actual laparoscopic surgery experience. In laparoscopic surgery, a surgeon makes a small incision in a patient and inserts a viewing tube with a small camera. The surgeon examines internal organs on a video monitor connected to the tube and can use the viewing tube to guide the surgery.

"Video game skill predicted laparoscopic surgery skills," Greenfield said. "The best video game players made 47 percent fewer errors and performed 39 percent faster in laparoscopic tasks than the worst video game players."

Visual intelligence has been rising globally for 50 years, Greenfield said. In 1942, people's visual performance, as measured by a visual intelligence test known as Raven's Progressive Matrices, went steadily down with age and declined substantially from age 25 to 65. By 1992, there was a much less significant age-related disparity in visual intelligence, Greenfield said.

"In a 1992 study, visual IQ stayed almost flat from age 25 to 65," she said.

Greenfield believes much of this change is related to our increased use of technology, as well as other factors, including increased levels of formal education, improved nutrition, smaller families and increased societal complexity.

Online R U Really Reading

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:10:28 -0800

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This July 27th, 2008 New York Times article written by Motoko Rich is a follow up to Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article Is Google Making Us Stupid. It asks the question, if you’re online are you really reading?

Books are not Nadia Konyk’s thing. Her mother, hoping to entice her, brings them home from the library, but Nadia rarely shows an interest.

Instead, like so many other teenagers, Nadia, 15, is addicted to the Internet. She regularly spends at least six hours a day in front of the computer here in this suburb southwest of Cleveland.

A slender, chatty blonde who wears black-framed plastic glasses, Nadia checks her e-mail and peruses myyearbook.com, a social networking site, reading messages or posting updates on her mood. She searches for music videos on YouTube and logs onto Gaia Online, a role-playing site where members fashion alternate identities as cutesy cartoon characters. But she spends most of her time on quizilla.com or fanfiction.net, reading and commenting on stories written by other users and based on books, television shows or movies.

Her mother, Deborah Konyk, would prefer that Nadia, who gets A’s and B’s at school, read books for a change. But at this point, Ms. Konyk said, “I’m just pleased that she reads something anymore.”

Children like Nadia lie at the heart of a passionate debate about just what it means to read in the digital age. The discussion is playing out among educational policy makers and reading experts around the world, and within groups like the National Council of Teachers of English and the International Reading Association.

As teenagers’ scores on standardized reading tests have declined or stagnated, some argue that the hours spent prowling the Internet are the enemy of reading — diminishing literacy, wrecking attention spans and destroying a precious common culture that exists only through the reading of books.

But others say the Internet has created a new kind of reading, one that schools and society should not discount. The Web inspires a teenager like Nadia, who might otherwise spend most of her leisure time watching television, to read and write.

Even accomplished book readers like Zachary Sims, 18, of Old Greenwich, Conn., crave the ability to quickly find different points of view on a subject and converse with others online. Some children with dyslexia or other learning difficulties, like Hunter Gaudet, 16, of Somers, Conn., have found it far more comfortable to search and read online.

At least since the invention of television, critics have warned that electronic media would destroy reading. What is different now, some literacy experts say, is that spending time on the Web, whether it is looking up something on Google or even britneyspears.org, entails some engagement with text.

Setting Expectations
Few who believe in the potential of the Web deny the value of books. But they argue that it is unrealistic to expect all children to read “To Kill a Mockingbird” or “Pride and Prejudice” for fun. And those who prefer staring at a television or mashing buttons on a game console, they say, can still benefit from reading on the Internet. In fact, some literacy experts say that online reading skills will help children fare better when they begin looking for digital-age jobs.

Some Web evangelists say children should be evaluated for their proficiency on the Internet just as they are tested on their print reading comprehension. Starting next year, some countries will participate in new international assessments of digital literacy, but the United States, for now, will not.

Clearly, reading in print and on the Internet are different. On paper, text has a predetermined beginning, middle and end, where readers focus for a sustained period on one author’s vision. On the Internet, readers skate through cyberspace at will and, in effect, compose their own beginnings, middles and ends.

Young people “aren’t as troubled as some of us older folks are by reading that doesn’t go in a line,” said Rand J. Spiro, a professor of educational psychology at Michigan State University who is studying reading practices on the Internet. “That’s a good thing because the world doesn’t go in a line, and the world isn’t organized into separate compartments or chapters.”

Some traditionalists warn that digital reading is the intellectual equivalent of empty calories. Often, they argue, writers on the Internet employ a cryptic argot that vexes teachers and parents. Zigzagging through a cornucopia of words, pictures, video and sounds, they say, distracts more than strengthens readers. And many youths spend most of their time on the Internet playing games or sending instant messages, activities that involve minimal reading at best.

Last fall the National Endowment for the Arts issued a sobering report linking flat or declining national reading test scores among teenagers with the slump in the proportion of adolescents who said they read for fun.

According to Department of Education data cited in the report, just over a fifth of 17-year-olds said they read almost every day for fun in 2004, down from nearly a third in 1984. Nineteen percent of 17-year-olds said they never or hardly ever read for fun in 2004, up from 9 percent in 1984. (It was unclear whether they thought of what they did on the Internet as “reading.”)

“Whatever the benefits of newer electronic media,” Dana Gioia, the chairman of the N.E.A., wrote in the report’s introduction, “they provide no measurable substitute for the intellectual and personal development initiated and sustained by frequent reading.”

Children are clearly spending more time on the Internet. In a study of 2,032 representative 8- to 18-year-olds, the Kaiser Family Foundation found that nearly half used the Internet on a typical day in 2004, up from just under a quarter in 1999. The average time these children spent online on a typical day rose to one hour and 41 minutes in 2004, from 46 minutes in 1999.

The question of how to value different kinds of reading is complicated because people read for many reasons. There is the level required of daily life — to follow the instructions in a manual or to analyze a mortgage contract. Then there is a more sophisticated level that opens the doors to elite education and professions. And, of course, people read for entertainment, as well as for intellectual or emotional rewards.

It is perhaps that final purpose that book champions emphasize the most.

“Learning is not to be found on a printout,” David McCullough, the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer, said in a commencement address at Boston College in May. “It’s not on call at the touch of the finger. Learning is acquired mainly from books, and most readily from great books.”

What’s Best for Nadia?
Deborah Konyk always believed it was essential for Nadia and her 8-year-old sister, Yashca, to read books. She regularly read aloud to the girls and took them to library story hours.

“Reading opens up doors to places that you probably will never get to visit in your lifetime, to cultures, to worlds, to people,” Ms. Konyk said.

Ms. Konyk, who took a part-time job at a dollar store chain a year and a half ago, said she did not have much time to read books herself. There are few books in the house. But after Yashca was born, Ms. Konyk spent the baby’s nap time reading the Harry Potter novels to Nadia, and she regularly brought home new titles from the library.

Despite these efforts, Nadia never became a big reader. Instead, she became obsessed with Japanese anime cartoons on television and comics like “Sailor Moon.” Then, when she was in the sixth grade, the family bought its first computer. When a friend introduced Nadia to fanfiction.net, she turned off the television and started reading online.

Now she regularly reads stories that run as long as 45 Web pages. Many of them have elliptical plots and are sprinkled with spelling and grammatical errors. One of her recent favorites was “My absolutely, perfect normal life ... ARE YOU CRAZY? NOT!,” a story based on the anime series “Beyblade.”

In one scene the narrator, Aries, hitches a ride with some masked men and one of them pulls a knife on her. “Just then I notice (Like finally) something sharp right in front of me,” Aries writes. “I gladly took it just like that until something terrible happen ....”

Nadia said she preferred reading stories online because “you could add your own character and twist it the way you want it to be.”

“So like in the book somebody could die,” she continued, “but you could make it so that person doesn’t die or make it so like somebody else dies who you don’t like.”

Nadia also writes her own stories. She posted “Dieing Isn’t Always Bad,” about a girl who comes back to life as half cat, half human, on both fanfiction.net and quizilla.com.

Nadia said she wanted to major in English at college and someday hopes to be published. She does not see a problem with reading few books. “No one’s ever said you should read more books to get into college,” she said.

The simplest argument for why children should read in their leisure time is that it makes them better readers. According to federal statistics, students who say they read for fun once a day score significantly higher on reading tests than those who say they never do.

Reading skills are also valued by employers. A 2006 survey by the Conference Board, which conducts research for business leaders, found that nearly 90 percent of employers rated “reading comprehension” as “very important” for workers with bachelor’s degrees. Department of Education statistics also show that those who score higher on reading tests tend to earn higher incomes.

Critics of reading on the Internet say they see no evidence that increased Web activity improves reading achievement. “What we are losing in this country and presumably around the world is the sustained, focused, linear attention developed by reading,” said Mr. Gioia of the N.E.A. “I would believe people who tell me that the Internet develops reading if I did not see such a universal decline in reading ability and reading comprehension on virtually all tests.”

Nicholas Carr sounded a similar note in “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” in the current issue of the Atlantic magazine. Warning that the Web was changing the way he — and others — think, he suggested that the effects of Internet reading extended beyond the falling test scores of adolescence. “What the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation,” he wrote, confessing that he now found it difficult to read long books.

Literacy specialists are just beginning to investigate how reading on the Internet affects reading skills. A recent study of more than 700 low-income, mostly Hispanic and black sixth through 10th graders in Detroit found that those students read more on the Web than in any other medium, though they also read books. The only kind of reading that related to higher academic performance was frequent novel reading, which predicted better grades in English class and higher overall grade point averages.

Elizabeth Birr Moje, a professor at the University of Michigan who led the study, said novel reading was similar to what schools demand already. But on the Internet, she said, students are developing new reading skills that are neither taught nor evaluated in school.

One early study showed that giving home Internet access to low-income students appeared to improve standardized reading test scores and school grades. “These were kids who would typically not be reading in their free time,” said Linda A. Jackson, a psychology professor at Michigan State who led the research. “Once they’re on the Internet, they’re reading.”

Neurological studies show that learning to read changes the brain’s circuitry. Scientists speculate that reading on the Internet may also affect the brain’s hard wiring in a way that is different from book reading.

“The question is, does it change your brain in some beneficial way?” said Guinevere F. Eden, director of the Center for the Study of Learning at Georgetown University. “The brain is malleable and adapts to its environment. Whatever the pressures are on us to succeed, our brain will try and deal with it.”

Some scientists worry that the fractured experience typical of the Internet could rob developing readers of crucial skills. “Reading a book, and taking the time to ruminate and make inferences and engage the imaginational processing, is more cognitively enriching, without doubt, than the short little bits that you might get if you’re into the 30-second digital mode,” said Ken Pugh, a cognitive neuroscientist at Yale who has studied brain scans of children reading.

But This Is Reading Too
Web proponents believe that strong readers on the Web may eventually surpass those who rely on books. Reading five Web sites, an op-ed article and a blog post or two, experts say, can be more enriching than reading one book.

“It takes a long time to read a 400-page book,” said Mr. Spiro of Michigan State. “In a tenth of the time,” he said, the Internet allows a reader to “cover a lot more of the topic from different points of view.”

Zachary Sims, the Old Greenwich, Conn., teenager, often stays awake until 2 or 3 in the morning reading articles about technology or politics — his current passions — on up to 100 Web sites.

“On the Internet, you can hear from a bunch of people,” said Zachary, who will attend Columbia University this fall. “They may not be pedigreed academics. They may be someone in their shed with a conspiracy theory. But you would weigh that.”

Though he also likes to read books (earlier this year he finished, and loved, “The Fountainhead” by Ayn Rand), Zachary craves interaction with fellow readers on the Internet. “The Web is more about a conversation,” he said. “Books are more one-way.”

The kinds of skills Zachary has developed — locating information quickly and accurately, corroborating findings on multiple sites — may seem obvious to heavy Web users. But the skills can be cognitively demanding.

Web readers are persistently weak at judging whether information is trustworthy. In one study, Donald J. Leu, who researches literacy and technology at theUniversity of Connecticut, asked 48 students to look at a spoof Web site (http://zapatopi.net/treeoctopus/) about a mythical species known as the “Pacific Northwest tree octopus.” Nearly 90 percent of them missed the joke and deemed the site a reliable source.

Some literacy experts say that reading itself should be redefined. Interpreting videos or pictures, they say, may be as important a skill as analyzing a novel or a poem.

“Kids are using sound and images so they have a world of ideas to put together that aren’t necessarily language oriented,” said Donna E. Alvermann, a professor of language and literacy education at the University of Georgia. “Books aren’t out of the picture, but they’re only one way of experiencing information in the world today.”

A Lifelong Struggle
In the case of Hunter Gaudet, the Internet has helped him feel more comfortable with a new kind of reading. A varsity lacrosse player in Somers, Conn., Hunter has struggled most of his life to read. After learning he was dyslexic in the second grade, he was placed in special education classes and a tutor came to his home three hours a week. When he entered high school, he dropped the special education classes, but he still reads books only when forced, he said.

In a book, “they go through a lot of details that aren’t really needed,” Hunter said. “Online just gives you what you need, nothing more or less.”

When researching the 19th-century Chief Justice Roger B. Taney for one class, he typed Taney’s name into Google and scanned the Wikipedia entry and other biographical sites. Instead of reading an entire page, he would type in a search word like “college” to find Taney’s alma mater, assembling his information nugget by nugget.

Experts on reading difficulties suggest that for struggling readers, the Web may be a better way to glean information. “When you read online there are always graphics,” said Sally Shaywitz, the author of “Overcoming Dyslexia” and a Yale professor. “I think it’s just more comfortable and — I hate to say easier — but it more meets the needs of somebody who might not be a fluent reader.”

Karen Gaudet, Hunter’s mother, a regional manager for a retail chain who said she read two or three business books a week, hopes Hunter will eventually discover a love for books. But she is confident that he has the reading skills he needs to succeed.

“Based on where technology is going and the world is going,” she said, “he’s going to be able to leverage it.”

When he was in seventh grade, Hunter was one of 89 students who participated in a study comparing performance on traditional state reading tests with a specially designed Internet reading test. Hunter, who scored in the lowest 10 percent on the traditional test, spent 12 weeks learning how to use the Web for a science class before taking the Internet test. It was composed of three sets of directions asking the students to search for information online, determine which sites were reliable and explain their reasoning.

Hunter scored in the top quartile. In fact, about a third of the students in the study, led by Professor Leu, scored below average on traditional reading tests but did well on the Internet assessment.

The Testing Debate
To date, there have been few large-scale appraisals of Web skills. The Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT, has developed a digital literacy test known as iSkills that requires students to solve informational problems by searching for answers on the Web. About 80 colleges and a handful of high schools have administered the test so far.

But according to Stephen Denis, product manager at ETS, of the more than 20,000 students who have taken the iSkills test since 2006, only 39 percent of four-year college freshmen achieved a score that represented “core functional levels” in Internet literacy.

Now some literacy experts want the federal tests known as the nation’s report card to include a digital reading component. So far, the traditionalists have held sway: The next round, to be administered to fourth and eighth graders in 2009, will test only print reading comprehension.

Mary Crovo of the National Assessment Governing Board, which creates policies for the national tests, said several members of a committee that sets guidelines for the reading tests believed large numbers of low-income and rural students might not have regular Internet access, rendering measurements of their online skills unfair.

Some simply argue that reading on the Internet is not something that needs to be tested — or taught.

“Nobody has taught a single kid to text message,” said Carol Jago of the National Council of Teachers of English and a member of the testing guidelines committee. “Kids are smart. When they want to do something, schools don’t have to get involved.”

Michael L. Kamil, a professor of education at Stanford who lobbied for an Internet component as chairman of the reading test guidelines committee, disagreed. Students “are going to grow up having to be highly competent on the Internet,” he said. “There’s no reason to make them discover how to be highly competent if we can teach them.”

The United States is diverging from the policies of some other countries. Next year, for the first time, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers reading, math and science tests to a sample of 15-year-old students in more than 50 countries, will add an electronic reading component. The United States, among other countries, will not participate. A spokeswoman for the Institute of Education Sciences, the research arm of the Department of Education, said an additional test would overburden schools.

Even those who are most concerned about the preservation of books acknowledge that children need a range of reading experiences. “Some of it is the informal reading they get in e-mails or on Web sites,” said Gay Ivey, a professor at James Madison University who focuses on adolescent literacy. “I think they need it all.”

Web junkies can occasionally be swept up in a book. After Nadia read Elie Wiesel’s Holocaust memoir “Night” in her freshman English class, Ms. Konyk brought home another Holocaust memoir, “I Have Lived a Thousand Years,” by Livia Bitton-Jackson.

Nadia was riveted by heartbreaking details of life in the concentration camps. “I was trying to imagine this and I was like, I can’t do this,” she said. “It was just so — wow.”

Hoping to keep up the momentum, Ms. Konyk brought home another book, “Silverboy,” a fantasy novel. Nadia made it through one chapter before she got engrossed in the Internet fan fiction again.

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 17:44:45 -0800

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This very thought provoking and lengthy article from the July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly written by Nicholas Carr, author of The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google asks what exposure to the Internet is doing to our brains. I absolutely identify with his observations about what chronic exposure to digital information does to concentration. What he has to say is worth a close read and then re-read.

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium, the conduit for most of the information that flows through my eyes and ears and into my mind. The advantages of having immediate access to such an incredibly rich store of information are many, and they’ve been widely described and duly applauded. “The perfect recall of silicon memory,” Wired’s Clive Thompson has written, “can be an enormous boon to thinking.” But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Some of the bloggers I follow have also begun mentioning the phenomenon. Scott Karp, who writes a blog about online media, recently confessed that he has stopped reading books altogether. “I was a lit major in college, and used to be [a] voracious book reader,” he wrote. “What happened?” He speculates on the answer: “What if I do all my reading on the web not so much because the way I read has changed, i.e. I’m just seeking convenience, but because the way I THINK has changed?”

Bruce Friedman, who blogs regularly about the use of computers in medicine, also has described how the Internet has altered his mental habits. “I now have almost totally lost the ability to read and absorb a longish article on the web or in print,” he wrote earlier this year. A pathologist who has long been on the faculty of the University of Michigan Medical School, Friedman elaborated on his comment in a telephone conversation with me. His thinking, he said, has taken on a “staccato” quality, reflecting the way he quickly scans short passages of text from many sources online. “I can’t read War and Peace anymore,” he admitted. “I’ve lost the ability to do that. Even a blog post of more than three or four paragraphs is too much to absorb. I skim it.”

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much. And we still await the long-term neurological and psychological experiments that will provide a definitive picture of how Internet use affects cognition. But a recently published study of online research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London, suggests that we may well be in the midst of a sea change in the way we read and think. As part of the five-year research program, the scholars examined computer logs documenting the behavior of visitors to two popular research sites, one operated by the British Library and one by a U.K. educational consortium, that provide access to journal articles, e-books, and other sources of written information. They found that people using the sites exhibited “a form of skimming activity,” hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they’d already visited. They typically read no more than one or two pages of an article or book before they would “bounce” out to another site. Sometimes they’d save a long article, but there’s no evidence that they ever went back and actually read it. The authors of the study report:

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse” horizontally through titles, contents pages and abstracts going for quick wins. It almost seems that they go online to avoid reading in the traditional sense.

Thanks to the ubiquity of text on the Internet, not to mention the popularity of text-messaging on cell phones, we may well be reading more today than we did in the 1970s or 1980s, when television was our medium of choice. But it’s a different kind of reading, and behind it lies a different kind of thinking—perhaps even a new sense of the self. “We are not only what we read,” says Maryanne Wolf, a developmental psychologist at Tufts University and the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. “We are how we read.” Wolf worries that the style of reading promoted by the Net, a style that puts “efficiency” and “immediacy” above all else, may be weakening our capacity for the kind of deep reading that emerged when an earlier technology, the printing press, made long and complex works of prose commonplace. When we read online, she says, we tend to become “mere decoders of information.” Our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged.

Reading, explains Wolf, is not an instinctive skill for human beings. It’s not etched into our genes the way speech is. We have to teach our minds how to translate the symbolic characters we see into the language we understand. And the media or other technologies we use in learning and practicing the craft of reading play an important part in shaping the neural circuits inside our brains. Experiments demonstrate that readers of ideograms, such as the Chinese, develop a mental circuitry for reading that is very different from the circuitry found in those of us whose written language employs an alphabet. The variations extend across many regions of the brain, including those that govern such essential cognitive functions as memory and the interpretation of visual and auditory stimuli. We can expect as well that the circuits woven by our use of the Net will be different from those woven by our reading of books and other printed works.

Sometime in 1882, Friedrich Nietzsche bought a typewriter—a Malling-Hansen Writing Ball, to be precise. His vision was failing, and keeping his eyes focused on a page had become exhausting and painful, often bringing on crushing headaches. He had been forced to curtail his writing, and he feared that he would soon have to give it up. The typewriter rescued him, at least for a time. Once he had mastered touch-typing, he was able to write with his eyes closed, using only the tips of his fingers. Words could once again flow from his mind to the page.

But the machine had a subtler effect on his work. One of Nietzsche’s friends, a composer, noticed a change in the style of his writing. His already terse prose had become even tighter, more telegraphic. “Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote in a letter, noting that, in his own work, his “‘thoughts’ in music and language often depend on the quality of pen and paper.”

"The process works this way. When I sit down to write a letter or start the first draft of an article, I simply type on the keyboard and the words appear on the screen..." By James Fallows

“You are right,” Nietzsche replied, “our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.” Under the sway of the machine, writes the German media scholar Friedrich A. Kittler, Nietzsche’s prose “changed from arguments to aphorisms, from thoughts to puns, from rhetoric to telegram style.”

The human brain is almost infinitely malleable. People used to think that our mental meshwork, the dense connections formed among the 100 billion or so neurons inside our skulls, was largely fixed by the time we reached adulthood. But brain researchers have discovered that that’s not the case. James Olds, a professor of neuroscience who directs the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study at George Mason University, says that even the adult mind “is very plastic.” Nerve cells routinely break old connections and form new ones. “The brain,” according to Olds, “has the ability to reprogram itself on the fly, altering the way it functions.”

As we use what the sociologist Daniel Bell has called our “intellectual technologies”—the tools that extend our mental rather than our physical capacities—we inevitably begin to take on the qualities of those technologies. The mechanical clock, which came into common use in the 14th century, provides a compelling example. In Technics and Civilization, the historian and cultural critic Lewis Mumford described how the clock “disassociated time from human events and helped create the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences.” The “abstract framework of divided time” became “the point of reference for both action and thought.”

The clock’s methodical ticking helped bring into being the scientific mind and the scientific man. But it also took something away. As the late MIT computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum observed in his 1976 book, Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation, the conception of the world that emerged from the widespread use of timekeeping instruments “remains an impoverished version of the older one, for it rests on a rejection of those direct experiences that formed the basis for, and indeed constituted, the old reality.” In deciding when to eat, to work, to sleep, to rise, we stopped listening to our senses and started obeying the clock.

The process of adapting to new intellectual technologies is reflected in the changing metaphors we use to explain ourselves to ourselves. When the mechanical clock arrived, people began thinking of their brains as operating “like clockwork.” Today, in the age of software, we have come to think of them as operating “like computers.” But the changes, neuroscience tells us, go much deeper than metaphor. Thanks to our brain’s plasticity, the adaptation occurs also at a biological level.

The Internet promises to have particularly far-reaching effects on cognition. In a paper published in 1936, the British mathematician Alan Turing proved that a digital computer, which at the time existed only as a theoretical machine, could be programmed to perform the function of any other information-processing device. And that’s what we’re seeing today. The Internet, an immeasurably powerful computing system, is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies. It’s becoming our map and our clock, our printing press and our typewriter, our calculator and our telephone, and our radio and TV.

When the Net absorbs a medium, that medium is re-created in the Net’s image. It injects the medium’s content with hyperlinks, blinking ads, and other digital gewgaws, and it surrounds the content with the content of all the other media it has absorbed. A new e-mail message, for instance, may announce its arrival as we’re glancing over the latest headlines at a newspaper’s site. The result is to scatter our attention and diffuse our concentration.

The Net’s influence doesn’t end at the edges of a computer screen, either. As people’s minds become attuned to the crazy quilt of Internet media, traditional media have to adapt to the audience’s new expectations. Television programs add text crawls and pop-up ads, and magazines and newspapers shorten their articles, introduce capsule summaries, and crowd their pages with easy-to-browse info-snippets. When, in March of this year, The New York Times decided to devote the second and third pages of every edition to article abstracts, its design director, Tom Bodkin, explained that the “shortcuts” would give harried readers a quick “taste” of the day’s news, sparing them the “less efficient” method of actually turning the pages and reading the articles. Old media have little choice but to play by the new-media rules.

Never has a communications system played so many roles in our lives—or exerted such broad influence over our thoughts—as the Internet does today. Yet, for all that’s been written about the Net, there’s been little consideration of how, exactly, it’s reprogramming us. The Net’s intellectual ethic remains obscure.

About the same time that Nietzsche started using his typewriter, an earnest young man named Frederick Winslow Taylor carried a stopwatch into the Midvale Steel plant in Philadelphia and began a historic series of experiments aimed at improving the efficiency of the plant’s machinists. With the approval of Midvale’s owners, he recruited a group of factory hands, set them to work on various metalworking machines, and recorded and timed their every movement as well as the operations of the machines. By breaking down every job into a sequence of small, discrete steps and then testing different ways of performing each one, Taylor created a set of precise instructions—an “algorithm,” we might say today—for how each worker should work. Midvale’s employees grumbled about the strict new regime, claiming that it turned them into little more than automatons, but the factory’s productivity soared.

More than a hundred years after the invention of the steam engine, the Industrial Revolution had at last found its philosophy and its philosopher. Taylor’s tight industrial choreography—his “system,” as he liked to call it—was embraced by manufacturers throughout the country and, in time, around the world. Seeking maximum speed, maximum efficiency, and maximum output, factory owners used time-and-motion studies to organize their work and configure the jobs of their workers. The goal, as Taylor defined it in his celebrated 1911 treatise, The Principles of Scientific Management, was to identify and adopt, for every job, the “one best method” of work and thereby to effect “the gradual substitution of science for rule of thumb throughout the mechanic arts.” Once his system was applied to all acts of manual labor, Taylor assured his followers, it would bring about a restructuring not only of industry but of society, creating a utopia of perfect efficiency. “In the past the man has been first,” he declared; “in the future the system must be first.”

Taylor’s system is still very much with us; it remains the ethic of industrial manufacturing. And now, thanks to the growing power that computer engineers and software coders wield over our intellectual lives, Taylor’s ethic is beginning to govern the realm of the mind as well. The Internet is a machine designed for the efficient and automated collection, transmission, and manipulation of information, and its legions of programmers are intent on finding the “one best method”—the perfect algorithm—to carry out every mental movement of what we’ve come to describe as “knowledge work.”

Google’s headquarters, in Mountain View, California—the Googleplex—is the Internet’s high church, and the religion practiced inside its walls is Taylorism. Google, says its chief executive, Eric Schmidt, is “a company that’s founded around the science of measurement,” and it is striving to “systematize everything” it does. Drawing on the terabytes of behavioral data it collects through its search engine and other sites, it carries out thousands of experiments a day, according to the Harvard Business Review, and it uses the results to refine the algorithms that increasingly control how people find information and extract meaning from it. What Taylor did for the work of the hand, Google is doing for the work of the mind.

The company has declared that its mission is “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” It seeks to develop “the perfect search engine,” which it defines as something that “understands exactly what you mean and gives you back exactly what you want.” In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

Where does it end? Sergey Brin and Larry Page, the gifted young men who founded Google while pursuing doctoral degrees in computer science at Stanford, speak frequently of their desire to turn their search engine into an artificial intelligence, a HAL-like machine that might be connected directly to our brains. “The ultimate search engine is something as smart as people—or smarter,” Page said in a speech a few years back. “For us, working on search is a way to work on artificial intelligence.” In a 2004 interview with Newsweek, Brin said, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” Last year, Page told a convention of scientists that Google is “really trying to build artificial intelligence and to do it on a large scale.”

Such an ambition is a natural one, even an admirable one, for a pair of math whizzes with vast quantities of cash at their disposal and a small army of computer scientists in their employ. A fundamentally scientific enterprise, Google is motivated by a desire to use technology, in Eric Schmidt’s words, “to solve problems that have never been solved before,” and artificial intelligence is the hardest problem out there. Why wouldn’t Brin and Page want to be the ones to crack it?

Still, their easy assumption that we’d all “be better off” if our brains were supplemented, or even replaced, by an artificial intelligence is unsettling. It suggests a belief that intelligence is the output of a mechanical process, a series of discrete steps that can be isolated, measured, and optimized. In Google’s world, the world we enter when we go online, there’s little place for the fuzziness of contemplation. Ambiguity is not an opening for insight but a bug to be fixed. The human brain is just an outdated computer that needs a faster processor and a bigger hard drive.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the Internet, it is the network’s reigning business model as well. The faster we surf across the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial Internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

Maybe I’m just a worrywart. Just as there’s a tendency to glorify technological progress, there’s a countertendency to expect the worst of every new tool or machine. In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.” And because they would be able to “receive a quantity of information without proper instruction,” they would “be thought very knowledgeable when they are for the most part quite ignorant.” They would be “filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom.” Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).

The arrival of Gutenberg’s printing press, in the 15th century, set off another round of teeth gnashing. The Italian humanist Hieronimo Squarciafico worried that the easy availability of books would lead to intellectual laziness, making men “less studious” and weakening their minds. Others argued that cheaply printed books and broadsheets would undermine religious authority, demean the work of scholars and scribes, and spread sedition and debauchery. As New York University professor Clay Shirky notes, “Most of the arguments made against the printing press were correct, even prescient.” But, again, the doomsayers were unable to imagine the myriad blessings that the printed word would deliver.

So, yes, you should be skeptical of my skepticism. Perhaps those who dismiss critics of the Internet as Luddites or nostalgists will be proved correct, and from our hyperactive, data-stoked minds will spring a golden age of intellectual discovery and universal wisdom. Then again, the Net isn’t the alphabet, and although it may replace the printing press, it produces something altogether different. The kind of deep reading that a sequence of printed pages promotes is valuable not just for the knowledge we acquire from the author’s words but for the intellectual vibrations those words set off within our own minds. In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture. In a recent essay, the playwright Richard Foreman eloquently described what’s at stake:

I come from a tradition of Western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and “cathedral-like” structure of the highly educated and articulate personality—a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West. [But now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self—evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the “instantly available.”

As we are drained of our “inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance,” Foreman concluded, we risk turning into “‘pancake people’—spread wide and thin as we connect with that vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.”

I’m haunted by that scene in 2001. What makes it so poignant, and so weird, is the computer’s emotional response to the disassembly of its mind: its despair as one circuit after another goes dark, its childlike pleading with the astronaut—“I can feel it. I can feel it. I’m afraid”—and its final reversion to what can only be called a state of innocence. HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: as we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Nicholas Carr’s most recent book, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, From Edison to Google, was published earlier this year

Highly Educated Useless People

Sun, 25 Jan 2009 08:23:47 -0800

I had just finished speaking at a recent international educational conference. What followed completely floored me. It was not only what was said but also who said it, and how they said it. The comment was as follows: “Our students are amongst the very best performers academically in the world on the TIMS (Third International Mathematics and Science Study)”. The speaker was describing students from his country. As he walked away, he calmly added, “The problem is that most of them [students] couldn’t think their way out of a wet paper bag if their life depended upon it. They’re nothing but highly educated useless people.”

The commentator: The Secretary of Education of a certain high profile country. I was speechless. Highly educated useless people? What was he really telling us? What he was saying was that his high-achieving students had school smarts and thus could excel at school-related activities - that they had developed special abilities that would allow them to move smoothly through the school system because they had developed the necessary skills to effectively cram for and write tests. What he was suggesting was that most academically successful students do well in large part because they have learned to play the game called school.

But in describing them as ‘highly educated useless people’, what he was also suggesting was that while many students in his country, particularly the brainy ones, had school smarts, they did not possess what is generally known as street smarts. For him, being street smart was about having the necessary higher-level thinking skills and competencies above and beyond being able to do well on a written exam that were needed to live and work in the real world beyond school, solving real world, real life problems in real time.

School Smart and Street Smart
We become curious. What were the distinctions between being school smart and street smart? How could so many of these students, who were good at school and able to do so well on the tests, at the same time be inadequately prepared for life? This answer is likely to be related to how we teach our students to learn and think.

When children first attend primary school, they are completely dependent upon their teachers to tell them what to do, how to do it, when to do it, where to sit, when they are doing it, and even for how long. The primary focus is on mastering content and learning through memorisation within a tightly controlled instructional environment. In this environment, mastery of content is valued over thinking critically about the content. The teachers tell the students what they need to do to pass the test, to pass the course, to pass the grade, to move to the next level, and finally to graduate.

All the answers are prearranged, preformatted and ready for absorption by those who are willing and able to play the game called school. These are the academically successful. These are students who are comfortable operating in a culture of dependency – dependent on the teacher, dependent on the textbook, dependent on the test. Then after graduation from school, having spent 13 or more years in the system, the educational infrastructure that has held the students up for all their years in education is suddenly removed. When this happens, many of the students fall flat on their faces as they enter the real world. And we can’t understand why. Even though it is we, the educators, who are responsible for creating this culture of dependency on the teacher, the textbooks, and the test, we feel confused.

In the real world of today, school success clearly does not guarantee success in life.
So what is the problem? The answer lies in our efforts to ensure compliance in our learners. Somewhere along the line, we have lost sight of the need to develop in our students the capacity to become independent thinkers and doers. If our students are to survive, let alone thrive, in the culture of the 21st century of technology-driven automation, abundance, and access to the global labour market world, independent thinking and its corollary, creative thinking, hold the highest currency.

If our students are to be successful in making the transition, our job as educators must be to move from demanding the compliance of our students to making ourselves progressively redundant. As we do this, we must shift the responsibility for learning from the teacher, where it has traditionally been, to the learners, where it belongs.

This shift sounds simple, but in fact, it is an incredibly complex task because for it to happen, it must occur in the hearts and minds of every single educational stakeholder – from the politician, to policy designer, to administrator, to teacher, parent, and even the student.

A New Teaching and Learning Paradigm
The new and different paradigm of teaching and learning is that of progressive withdrawal. Our responsibility must be to ensure that our students no longer need us by the time they graduate from school. This is no different than what we do as parents. Think back to the very first tentative steps of your child. They stood there wobbling and teetering. Inevitably they fell down. What did we do when this happened? Did we rush over, point at them and say, “39% – you fail, 28%, C minus, I’m sorry, you’ve had five chances, you don’t get any more?”

The answer is - of course not! What did we do? We clapped our hands, we helped them up, we brushed them off, we wiped away their tears and encouraged them to try again. We understood that our job as parents, as difficult and challenging as it might be, particularly during the teenage years, is to help our children to become independent people who could stand all on their own, as they began to make their way through life.

So, what should we do? Do we give up on helping our students to become school smart and simply focus on helping them become street smart? Absolutely not! We need them to be both school smart and street smart. This is not a matter of either/or. Beyond this, there is a deeper question we need to ask. What do we want our students to be, feel, think, and do that measurably demonstrates that they are prepared and willing to step up from school to the world in which they will work, live, and play?

This is not a simple thing to answer because our present day world is in constant and rapid flux and profoundly complex. And it’s not getting any simpler. We live in the dynamic world of “Info Whelm”, where content is growing exponentially in both quantity and complexity. In this shifting landscape, where digital content is readily available at our fingertips, learners must be able to move beyond simple mastery of content recall and must develop the capacity to interpret and apply old and new information alike to new situations, problems, and new environments.

Access to information by itself is not the issue. Rather, learning to become a discerning and creative consumer of information is. In this new digital reality, the application of higher-order independent cognitive skills, within the context of real world, real life, and real time tasks; and of being able to transfer previous learning to new, different situations and challenges is of critical importance.

We firmly believe that invoking progressive withdrawal and fostering street smarts in school smart students requires a major shift to the existing educational paradigm. To enable this shift demands that we rethink the design of our schools, our classrooms and other learning environments.

At the same time, we need to rethink our assumptions about instructional design, what constitutes learning and even our definitions of what it means to be intelligent. And ultimately we must also rethink how we assess and evaluate both effective instruction and effective learning.

Instructional Design, Learning and Intelligence
The exponentially growing body of content brought on by InfoWhelm has moved way beyond the content of traditional school subjects. The newer 21st century content areas include global awareness, financial, economic, business and entrepreneurial literacy, civic literacy, health and wellness awareness, leadership, ethics, accountability, and many others.

In particular, becoming an independent learner requires the development of two types of skills: those that emerge from the critical cognitive intelligences and those from the emotional intelligences. Cognitive intelligences involve primarily the rational higher order thinking skills. These include how to manage, interpret, validate, transform, communicate, and act upon information. These cognitive intelligences include abstract reasoning, problem solving, communications, creativity, innovation, contextualised learning, and technical, information and media literacy skills all used in the context of content areas.

Emotional intelligence competencies include four major skill sets – self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Today there is much evidence to show that significant leverage can be obtained by promoting learning strategies that utilise emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is particularly important in developing street smarts.

Then there is the matter related to not only what we assess, but also how we assess learning? Standardised tests can only measure the very narrow range of rational cognitive skills that can be measured by a bubble test, multiple choice, or fill-in-the-blanks exam. Real learning is about assessing much more than this. The bottom line is that schools must change drastically if we are to reverse the growing disconnect between being school smart and being street smart. If we are going to make schools more relevant to our students’ futures – if we are going to prepare students for the real world that awaits them, there are at least five fundamental changes that need to be made.

Five Fundamental Changes
1. We must acknowledge the new digital landscape
Schools must embrace the new digital reality of the online, computerised world described by Friedman’s (2005) The World is Flat. Outside of schools, the digital world has fundamentally and irrevocably altered the way things get done. This is not just the case for business but for many aspects of our lives. It must be stressed that this is not about schools having high-speed networks or students being able to use laptops or handhelds. Even when hi-tech resources are available, if the resources are only used to reinforce old mindsets about teaching and learning and how that learning is assessed, little will have changed. This is about developing the full spectrum of cognitive and emotional intelligences that are increasingly required in the culture of the 21st century. As such, this is primarily a headwear not a hardware issue.

2. Access but little guidance
The new digital landscape allows students access to information and learning experiences outside schools and classrooms. Learners can engage in experiences that have traditionally been the domain of teachers and the adult world. From home to shopping malls, whenever and wherever they are, students can access information, music, original sources and multi-media, full motion colour images from friends and acquaintances, as well as people who might have diametrically opposed perspectives.

Because of our current fixation on testing, we are unable to properly guide our students or help them develop the necessary skills that will empower them to effectively use these powerful resources. As a result, it is often the students, not the teachers, who define where they go, how they get there, and what they do when they arrive.

This is compounded by the fact that many adults, decision-makers, and educators are not in synch with the new digital reality of students. We don’t have the experience, skills or even the inclination to help them even if we have the time. Schools and teachers persist in using new technologies to reinforce old mindsets. These are issues well beyond computers and networks and way beyond traditional testing.

To understand the new digital landscape – to leverage their world, we must be willing to immerse ourselves in that world and embrace the new digital reality. If we can’t relate, if we don’t get it, we won’t be able to make schools relevant to the current and future needs of the digital generation.

3. Changing minds
We must address the shift in thinking patterns that are happening to digital students. They live and operate in a multimedia, online, multitask, random access, colour graphics, video, audio, visual literacy world. As Steven Johnson (2005) points out in Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, these new literacies are generally not acknowledged, valued, or addressed in our schools. This is because these emerging literacies do not generally reflect our traditional definitions of literacy, which were confined and defined by the technologies of the 19th and 20th century when PCs, Internet, cell phones, and other digital technologies were the stuff of science fiction.

We must acknowledge that because of this new digital landscape, our students not only think differently but also learn differently from the way we learn. Only by accepting this will we be able to begin to reconsider and redesign learning environments, instruction, and how we assess learning.

4. The whole learner
We must broaden evaluation to encompass activities that provide a complete picture of students’ learning. As management guru Tom Peters (1986 http://www.tompeters.com/col_entries.php?note=005143&year=1986) says “what get measured gets done” and conversely “what doesn’t get measured doesn’t get done” - it’s imperative that we begin to measure more than information recall.

In a speech at the 2003 CUE California Conference, digital guru Dave Masters (YEAR, PAGES) used this analogy: “You can get a good picture of a person’s health by taking their height and weight but would you go to a doctor who only took your height and weight and said ‘here’s a picture of your health’? The answer of course is no. It would require a battery of tests – urine analysis, blood tests, blood pressure, cholesterol, checking for lumps and so on - to get an accurate picture of your health.”

However, schools act like the doctor who only takes your height and weight and then says “here’s a complete picture of your health”. We test students using standardised instruments that primarily measure information recall and low level understanding, and then say here’s a complete picture of a student’s learning, which is absolutely not the case. It is extremely presumptuous for us to say that current test scores are a complete indicator of student learning. A complete picture of student learning needs to include portfolios of performance, demonstrations not just of recall of theoretical content but also the application of that theory used to solve real world problems.

5. Relevancy and connections
Last but not least, we must increase the connection between instruction in schools and the world outside if we hope to increase the relevancy of the learning that takes place. The key point here is that the students must perceive the relevancy of what they’re learning. They need to understand not just the content, but also the context of that content as it is applied to the world outside of schools.

For this to happen, schools need to become far less insular. We need to systematically work to bring the outside world into our schools while at the same time sending our schools out into the community. New technologies and an understanding of the new digital landscape can help us do both. The online world creates virtual highways and virtual hallways to both our local and global communities.

If we want to unfold the full intellectual and creative genius of all of our children; If we want to prepare them for the new world that awaits them; If we want to help them prepare for their future, not our past; If we are going to march through the 21st Century and maintain our tradition of success; If we want our children to have the relevant 21st century skills – then we must create a bridge between their world and ours so they can develop both street smarts and school smarts.

Conclusion
For all this to happen, there needs to be fundamental shift in how teaching and learning takes place in schools. We must look for alternatives to the traditional organisation of schools. We need to uncover our longstanding and unexamined assumptions about teaching and learning, about what a classroom looks like, where learning takes place and the resources that are needed to support it.

And we also need to re-examine the use of time – the length of the school day and school year, the school timetable, and the traditional methods used for instructional delivery. And we must consider the potential of online, web-based, virtual learning that can be used to augment, extend, and transform the role of the traditional classroom teachers.
In other words, we cannot foster street smarts in our students who are school smart unless we ask the powerful and relevant questions around our assumptions of what schools currently are and what they need to be.

References
Friedman, T. The World Is Flat 3.0: A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century, 2006=5

Johnson, S. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, 2005

Masters, D. as quoted in a speech at the 2003 CUE California Conference

Peters, T. 1986 http://www.tompeters.com/col_entries.php?note=005143&year=1986

He’s back!! Where’ve you been Ian?

Sat, 24 Jan 2009 10:40:40 -0800

Boy - that’s a long story. In a nutshell. Injured my Achilles tendon (for the third time) a year ago last November. That complicated problems I already had with my right foot due to multiple athletic injuries I had suffered over the years as a football-rugby-basketball-hockey-baseball player not to mention assorted damage I experienced training for marathons. Not to mention being a typical male. You know - if you’re injured, just ignore it and it will eventually go away...

So when I hurt my Achilles tendon my right leg became very swollen - at first I ignored it and the little crack I had on my right heel. Eventually I got treatment that didn’t really work that well. And I tried to continue with business as usual. Throughout the Spring and Summer I maintained my travel and work schedule. The swelling eventually went down (sort of) but the wound didn’t heal properly.

On August 18th, I took a bandage off my right foot and with the bandage came the entire back of my right heel. Serious infection, septic - you name it I had it. This resulted in 5 MONTHS in hospital, 7 surgeries, God knows how many needles and tests not to mention reading more than 40 books and coming THIS CLOSE to losing ny mind. They had to replace my right heel by transplanting major amounts of tissue, nerves and blood vessels from my left arm to what had previously been my right heel. After several months of trials and tribulations, I finally got out for good (I hope) on December 30th. I’m still carting around a serious cast on my right leg and will be for some time to come as it hasn’t and won’t heal. There’s a lot more to the story but enough for now - I’m tired to talking about my foot. I want to sincerely thank all of my friends and acquaintances who saw me through this. I can’t express how much I appreciate your encouragement and support.

Did I learn anything? Tons I hope. I’ve lost 50 pounds (I weigh less than I did in high school) and I think I have a bit more patience. Only time will tell. But I am VERY GLAD to be out and hopefully back!!! Now all I have to do is post the 140 articles I prepared when I was in the slammer.

And away we go...

The End of Schools As We Know It???

Thu, 24 Jul 2008 18:45:55 -0700

There was an interesting question asked on the Teacher Leaders Network Forum at TeacherMagazine.org related to Clay Shirky's new book, Here Comes Everybody. In the book, which was reviewed earlier on the blog, Shirky explores how technology is changing human interactions—and he shares an interesting example:

In 2007, several conservative parishes of the Episcopal Church in Virginia voted to break away from the American branch of their church. The parishes chose to align themselves with the Nigerian branch of the Episcopal Church—whose views aligned better with theirs.

Shirky argues that this shows a shift in our thinking about how we organize ourselves. Typically, humans have used geography as the primary factor when determining how to join together with others. Technology has made it possible to align with anyone, however distant, based on like-minded beliefs or other factors.

So the question asked on the Forum was this: Will we eventually see similar changes based on the ways people think about schools?

Right now, in the public school sector, most people send their students to schools based on geography. You go to the building that is closest to you, whether you are satisfied with that building or not.

Is it possible that technology may change all of that and allow families to select schools based on design and ideas that best represent their personal preferences and values instead of choosing schools based on physical location?

And if so, how will that change our work as teachers? What impact will it have on us as taxpayers? On our nation's guarantee of providing a sound basic education for all children? On any efforts at all to provide a uniform curriculum?

Food for thought.

Facebook: A Valid Educational Tool?

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 08:29:13 -0700

Source

A June 25th Guardian article by Anthea Lipsett about the value of social networking tools.

Teachers and lecturers are getting the lowdown on how to use social networking sites such as Facebook and Bebo in an educational way.

Most schools and colleges in the UK block access to the websites but they are missing out on their potential for education, a government-funded guide says.

The report for Childnet International and funded by Becta, the government body for technology in learning, says while teachers and lecturers may be using social networking services they may not recognise the educational potential for their students.

Schools could help students develop "e-portfolios" where learners can record their achievements and collect examples of their work, the guide suggests. Or teachers could use social networking services to set up groups that "semi-formalise" students' online communications and "document discussions and milestones as they go".

Young people are more likely to have learned their social networking skills from their friends or classmates than from any formal instruction or support from adults.

But as social networking spills over into the classroom, with students using sites to collaborate on homework projects or discuss lessons, they can provide many opportunities, the report says.

"In addition to providing a whole community with useful information about a school, college, organisation or event, a social network profile sends a clear message to learners that you are aware of the types of spaces they enjoy online.

"This is a good reminder that these spaces are public and are inhabited by people who may not necessarily be within their friendship network, encouraging them to look at issues around permissions and sharing personal information," the report finds.

It also includes an evaluation tool to walk teachers through key features of sites they may be considering using to support teaching and learning.
Stephen Carrick-Davies, the chief executive of Childnet International, said: "The phenomenal speed at which the internet is developing and the rapid take up of new web 2.0 services by young people can be challenging.

"However, it's vital that all of us really take the time to understand the way students are using the latest technology, the various features of these new services and appreciate how these new tools can aid good social interaction and learning."

Stephen Crowne, Becta's chief executive, said: "As technology increasingly becomes a key ingredient in classroom learning, broadening our knowledge of the technology used in school can really bring benefits, whether you are a parent, carer, governor or teacher."

Warning Raises New Cell-Phone Fears

Tue, 22 Jul 2008 19:19:53 -0700

Source

A warning from the head of a prominent cancer research institute has rekindled fears about the possible health risks associated with extensive cell-phone use, especially among children--and it comes as a growing number of children are using cell phones to communicate.

Dr. Ronald B. Herberman, director of the University of Pittsburgh Cancer Institute, issued an unprecedented warning to his faculty and staff on July 23: Limit cell-phone use because of the possible risk of cancer.

Herberman's warning is contrary to numerous studies that don't find a link between cancer and cell-phone use, as well as a public lack of worry by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Herberman is basing his alarm on early, unpublished data. He says it takes too long to get answers from science, and he believes people should take action now--especially when it comes to children.

"At the heart of my concern is that we shouldn't wait for a definitive study to come out, but err on the side of being safe rather than sorry later," Herberman said.

No other major academic cancer research institutions have sounded such an alarm about cell-phone use. But Herberman's advice is sure to raise concern among many cell-phone users--especially parents and educators.

Nearly one out of every two tweens (kids between 10 and 13 years old) and 83 percent of teens in the United States now own a cell phone, according to new data from Chicago-based C&R Research.

In the memo Herberman sent to about 3,000 faculty and staff, he says children should use cell phones only for emergencies, because their brains are still developing.

Adults should keep the phone away from their head and use the speakerphone feature or a wireless headset, he says. He even warns against using cell phones in public places such as a bus, because this exposes others to the phone's electromagnetic fields.

The issue that concerns some scientists--though nowhere near a consensus--is electromagnetic radiation, especially its possible effects on children. It is not a major topic in conferences of brain specialists.

A 2008 University of Utah analysis looked at nine studies, including some that Herberman cites, with thousands of brain tumor patients and concludes: "We found no overall increased risk of brain tumors among cellular phone users. The potential elevated risk of brain tumors after long-term cellular phone use awaits confirmation by future studies."

Studies last year in France and Norway concluded the same thing.

"If there is a risk from these products--and at this point, we do not know that there is--it is probably very small," the Food and Drug Administration says on an agency web site.

Still, Herberman cites a "growing body of literature linking long-term cell-phone use to possible adverse health effects, including cancer."

"Although the evidence is still controversial, I am convinced that there are sufficient data to warrant issuing an advisory to share some precautionary advice on cell-phone use," he wrote in his July 23 memo.

A driving force behind the memo was Devra Lee Davis, director of the university's center for environmental oncology.

"The question is, do you want to play Russian roulette with your brain?" she said in an interview with the Associated Press. "I don't know that cell phones are dangerous. But I don't know that they are safe."

Of concern are the still unknown effects of more than a decade of cell-phone use, with some studies raising alarms, said Davis, a former health adviser in the Clinton Administration.

She said 20 different groups have endorsed the advice the Pittsburgh cancer institute gave, and authorities in England, France, and India have cautioned against children's use of cell phones.

Herberman and Davis point to a massive, ongoing research project known as Interphone, involving scientists in 13 nations, mostly in Europe. Results already published in peer-reviewed journals from this project aren't so alarming, but Herberman is citing work not yet published.

The published research focuses on more than 5,000 cases of brain tumors. The U.S. National Research Council, which isn't participating in the Interphone project, reported in January that the brain tumor research had "selection bias." That means it relied on people with cancer to remember how often they used cell phones. It is not considered the most accurate research approach.

The largest published study, which appeared in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute in 2006, tracked 420,000 Danish cell-phone users, including thousands who had used the phones for more than 10 years. It found no increased risk of cancer among those using cell phones.

A French study based on Interphone research and published in 2007 concluded that regular cell-phone users had "no significant increased risk" for three major types of nervous system tumors. It did note, however, that there was "the possibility of an increased risk among the heaviest users" for one type of brain tumor, but that needs to be verified in future research.

Earlier research also has found no connection.

Joshua E. Muscat of Penn State University, who has studied cancer and cell phones in other research projects partly funded by the cell-phone industry, said there are at least a dozen studies that have found no cancer-cell-phone link. He said a Swedish study cited by Herberman as support for his warning was biased and flawed.

"We certainly don't know of any mechanism by which radiofrequency exposure would cause a cancerous effect in cells. We just don't know this might possibly occur," Muscat said.

Cell phones emit radiofrequency energy, a type of radiation that is a form of electromagnetic radiation, according to the National Cancer Institute. Though studies are being done to see if there is a link between it and tumors of the brain and central nervous system, there is no definitive link between the two, the institute says on its web site.

"If a person feels compelled [to] take precautions in reducing the amount of electromagnetic radio waves through [his body], by all means [he] should do so," said Dan Catena, a spokesman for the American Cancer Society. "But at the same time, we have to remember there's no conclusive evidence that links cell phones to cancer, whether it's brain tumors or other forms of cancer."

Joe Farren, a spokesman for CTIA-The Wireless Association, a trade group for the wireless industry, said the group believes there is a risk of misinforming the public if science isn't used as the ultimate guide on the issue.

"When you look at the overwhelming majority of studies that have been peer reviewed and published in scientific journals around the world, you'll find no relationship between wireless usage and adverse health affects," Farren said.

Frank Barnes, who chaired the January report from the National Research Council, said "the jury is out" on how hazardous long-term cell phone use might be.

Speaking from his cell phone July 23, the professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder said he takes no special precautions in his own phone use. And he offered no specific advice to people worried about the matter.

Barnes said it's up to each individual to decide what, if anything, to do. If people use a cell phone instead of having a land line, "that may very well be reasonable for them," he said.

Susan Juffe, a 58-year-old Pittsburgh special education teacher, heard about Herberman's cell-phone advice on the radio earlier in the day.

"Now, I'm worried. It's scary," she said.

She says she'll think twice about allowing her 10-year-old daughter Jayne to use a cell phone.

"I don't want to get [brain cancer], and I certainly don't want you to get it," she explained to her daughter.

Sara Loughran, a 24-year-old doctoral student at the University of Pittsburgh, sat in a bus stop July 23 chatting on her cell phone with her mother. She also had heard the news earlier in the day, but was not as concerned.

"I think if they gave me specific numbers and specific information and it was scary enough, I would be concerned," Loughran said, planning to call her mother again in a matter of minutes. "Without specific numbers, it's too vague to get me worked up.

We’re All Hooked on Opiods

Mon, 21 Jul 2008 19:36:03 -0700

Source
 An interesting op-ed piece sent on to me by Donna Tileston. It was written by Irving Biederman, published in the LA Times and then reprinted in the Houston Chronicle. It suggests humans are 'infovores' whose minds hunger for new information to assimilate

Crackberry. Only a metaphor for our addiction-like urge to check e-mail? Or does the term shed light on a deep biological truth about our hunger for information?

Human-motivation studies traditionally stress well-established needs: food, water, sex, avoidance of pain. In a culture like ours, most of these needs can be satisfied easily. Just open the refrigerator door, or blow on that spoonful of hot soup. (Satisfying the need for sex may require a bit more doing.)

What's been missing from this scientific research is humans' nonstop need for more information.

We are "infovores." The human eye makes three fixations a second on the world around it, and not at random. Our gaze is drawn to items we suspect have something new to tell us — posters, signs, windows, vistas, busy streets. Confined to a featureless physician's examination room, we desperately seek a magazine, lest we be reduced to counting the holes in the ceiling tiles. Cornered at a party in a banal conversation, we seek to freshen our drink.

Without new information to assimilate, we experience a highly unpleasant state. Boredom. Conversely, at one time or another, each of us has felt the joy of information-absorption — the conversation that lasts late into the night, the awe at a magnificent vista.

Cognitive neuroscience — the science that seeks to explain how mind emerges from brain — is beginning to unravel how this all works. At the University of Southern California, my students and I use brain scanning to specifically investigate the neuroscience behind the infovore phenomenon.

The explanation involves opioids, one of many neurotransmitters — which are molecules that the neurons in our brain release to activate or inhibit other neighboring neurons. The effect of opioids is pleasurable. The same neural receptors are involved in the high we get from opiate drugs, such as heroin or morphine.

In the past, these opioids were believed to exist primarily in the spinal cord and lower brain centers, where they reduced the sensation of pain. But more recently, a gradient of opioid receptors was discovered in a region of the cerebral cortex, humans' enormous outer brain layer that is largely responsible for perception and cognition.

In the areas of the cortex that initially receive visual or auditory information, opioids are sparse. But in "association areas," where the sensory information triggers memory and taps into previous knowledge, there is a high density of opioid receptors. So the more a new piece of information tickles that part of your brain where you interpret the scene or conversation, the bigger the opioid hit.

Staring at a blank wall will produce few, if any, mental associations, and thus standing in a corner is punishment. Looking at a random mass of objects will produce strong activation only in the initial stages, where there is little opioid activity to be had.

Gaze at something that leads to a novel interpretation, however, and that will spur higher levels of associative activity in opioid-dense areas. We are thus thrilled when new insights tap into what we have previously learned. We seek ways to feed our opioid desires; we are willing to endure the line at the movie theater in anticipation of the pleasure within. We pay more for a room with a view or a cup of coffee at a Parisian sidewalk cafe.

But if we get more opioids from making connections to our memories and knowledge, why do we then prefer the new? The first time our brains take in a new perception — a scene, a movie, a literary passage — there's a high level of activity in which a few neurons are strongly activated but the vast majority are only moderately or weakly activated. The strongly activated neurons inhibit the weak — so there's a net reduction of activity and less opioid pleasure when our brain is exposed to the same information again. (Don't feel sorry for the inhibited neurons, the losers in this instance of neural Darwinism. They are now freed up to code other experiences.)

No wonder we can't resist carrying a BlackBerry 24/7. Who knows what goodies it will deliver? A breaking news item. A piece of gossip. An e-mail from a long-ago girlfriend. Another wirelessly and instan-taneously delivered opioid hit.

I hope you got a few opioid hits, too, in learning about your inner infovore. As for me, I'm starting to feel separation anx-iety. Where's my BlackBerry?

Biederman directs the Image Understanding Laboratory at the University of Southern California, where he is a professor in the departments of psychology and computer science and the neuroscience program. This article originally appeared in the Los Angeles Times.

For Teens, the Future is Mobile

Sun, 20 Jul 2008 20:18:30 -0700

For teens, the future is mobile

Source

Marketers convened here this week to figure out how best to reach teens on the Internet. The answer: It's all about the mobile phone.

Advertisers are clamoring to reach teens in digital environments because that's where they're spending much of their time--either online, with cell phones or playing video games. What's more, teens wield an estimated $200 billion annually in discretionary spending.

Fuse, a marketing agency based in Vermont, talked in recent weeks to senior technology executives from companies such as Sony, MTV Networks, Yahoo, and Nokia to find out what the future of technology will look like for the teen market.

Among the predictions: Mobile phones in the United States will surpass the popularity of desktops for teens. Only an estimated 20 percent of teens currently own a smartphone such as the iPhone, but mobile phone and content companies are counting on the idea that smartphone adoption will spread fast among teens in middle America and other areas.

"The iPhone is just the beginning of the all-in-one device. Uses of mobile devices will expand to include all kinds of bar code applications and prepaid debit card payment methods," said Bill Carter, a partner at Fuse, who presented the findings here at the YPulse 2008 National Mashup, a two-day conference on teens and technology.

That's likely why geographic ad targeting to teens via the phone is expected to explode in the coming years. Right now, mobile phone providers analyze an estimated 4 billion Internet Protocol addresses to provide street-level targeting to consumers. Companies like U.K.-based Blyk, for example, are reaching teens through the phone with ads and information on nearby nightspots. Teens sign up for the service.

"When you combine this new technology with teens giving their permission to market to them, the growth could be exponential," Carter said.

But, he said, mobile phone providers likely won't succeed as the entertainment leaders for the phone, despite their efforts to sell ringtones, games, and music. Other companies like Apple, Google, and Yahoo will be more effective at "side-loading" the cell phone with services.

Case in point: Most teens download music to their iPod that's been ripped from a friend's collection as opposed to bought from the iTunes music store. "There's a natural gravitation to get content on a device that's different than the one the manufacturer intended," he said.

As a corollary, he said that most teens will eventually buy subscription-based music services, much like the cable TV model. He predicted that Apple's iTunes will offer an unlimited monthly download service for music. Mobile phone companies, too, will launch music subscriptions on the smartphone.

Another prognostication: Other technology platforms will save, not kill TV networks, Carter said. The analog-to-digital conversion will make it possible for teens to watch live TV on portable devices. The technology will help the television networks target programming to specific audiences, and that will buoy the cost of advertising, he said.

"The device is inconsequential compared to the content," he said.

Off to NECC

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:45:12 -0700

I’ll be taking a few days away from the CS blog and heading off to San Antonio, Texas for the annual NECC Conference. I have one workshops and three sessions to give.My schedule is:

Literacy Isn't Enough: Digital Fluency in the Age of InfoWhelm - Sunday, June 29th 8:30 AM to 3:30 PM - HGCC 001 B

Literacy Isn’t Enough - Monday, June 30th from 12:30 to 1:30 PM - Grand Hyatt Texas Ballroom D

Understanding Digital Kids - Tuesday, July 1st from 12:30 to 1:30 PM - Grand Hyatt Texas Ballroom D

No More Cookie Cutter Schools (with Frank Kelly) - Tuesday, July 1st 3:30 to 4:30 PM - HGCC 206 A

Come and say hello!

Doug Johnson - Damned by a Single Measure

Wed, 25 Jun 2008 03:57:04 -0700

Source

In his book Teaching For Tomorrow Ted McCain quotes digital guru Dave Masters as saying:

You can get a good picture of a person’s health by taking their height and weight but would you go to a doctor who only took your height and weight and said here’s a picture of your health. The answer of course is no. It would require a battery of tests - urinalysis, blood tests, blood pressure, cholesterol, checking for lumps and so on to get an accurate picture of your health.”

However schools act like the doctor who only takes your height and weight and then says here’s a complete picture of your health.

Ted goes on to write:
We test students using standardized instruments that primarily measure information recall and low level understanding, and then claim that it’s a complete picture of a student’s learning, which is absolutely not true. It’s presumptuous for us to say that current test scores are a complete indicator of student learning.

A complete picture of student learning needs to include portfolios of performance, demonstrations. This involves not just the recall of theoretical content, but also the application of that theory to solve real life, real world problems or to create innovative new products and ideas using real world tools.

Doug Johnson has written a great comment on America’s fixation on single measurement criteria for determining academic success by students and suggests five better ways to assess the quality of schools. Here’s what Doug has to say:

Anybody who goes in to see the doctor knows that the first thing you do is jump on the scale so that your weight can be determined. Wouldn't life be easy if the testing ended at stepping on the scale? Weight, after all, can be a pretty good indicator of general health. But a physician would be a quack if the physical exam did not include blood pressure checks, urine analysis, some prodding here, some thumping there, and at least one nasty bit involving a rubber glove and lube.

One's physical health certainly can't be determined by a single measurement. Attempting to do so would constitute malpractice.

Why then do schools let politicians require that they rely on a single measurement - test scores - to determine their health and effectiveness?

No one has ever been able to satisfactorily explain to me how a "5th grade reading level" is established. It seems if a reading level is either median or mean of all 10-year-olds' reading levels, by logic alone, one could conclude a sizable chunk of those tested would be lower than the norm. If not, the norm itself would be too low.

A school being labeled failing because all of its students don't read at grade level is like labeling a school failing because not all its students are at or above normal weight for their age group.

The testing game is rigged by NCLB. It is a plan designed not to improve public schools, but to discredit them, giving ammunition to those who want vouchers, charter schools and other financially motivated "improvement" plans that will keep poor schools poor thus keeping the poor people, poor.

Knowing that the deck is stacked, were I a school board member, superintendent or principal, I would be offering my community other means of evaluating the quality of the education my school(s) offers. And fast.

Five years ago I railed against our state's "report card," suggesting more informative ways parents can judge the value of their children's schools. Stars I suggested then, and still believe in, are:

Star One: School climate.
Funny how a person can sense the safety, friendliness, and sense of caring within minutes of walking into a school. Little things like cleanliness, displays of student work, open doors to classrooms, laughter, respectful talk, presence of volunteers, and genuine smiles from both adults and kids are the barometers of school climate. If a school doesn’t earn this star, a parent doesn’t need to bother looking at the other criteria. Get your kids out quickly.

Star Two: Individual teacher quality.
This is why total school rating systems aren’t very helpful. Five-star teachers are found in one-star schools and one-star teachers are found in five-star schools. Listen to what other parents have said about the teachers your children will have. Insist that your kids get the teachers that get good reviews.

Star Three: Libraries and technology.
The quality of the library is the clearest sign of how much a school values reading, teaching for independent thinking, and life-long learning. A trained librarian and a welcoming, well-used collection of current books, magazines and computers with Internet access tells a parent that the teachers and principal value more than the memorization of facts from a text book, that a diversity of ideas and opinions is important, and that reading is not just necessary, but pleasurable and important.

Star Four: Elective and extracurricular offerings.
What happens in class is important. But so is what happens during the other 18 hours of the day. I want elementary schools for my kids that offer after-school clubs and activities that develop social skills and interests. I want secondary schools that are rich with art, sports, tech ed., music and community service choices that develop individual talents, leadership, and pride in accomplishment.

Star Five: Commitment to staff development.
The amount of exciting scientifically-based research on effective teaching practices and schools is overwhelming. Brain-based research, reflective practice, systematic examination of student work, strategies for working with disadvantaged students are some of the latest findings that can have a positive impact on how to best teach children. But none of it does a lick of good if it stays in the universities or journals. Good schools give financial priority to teaching teachers how to improve their practice. Would you send your child to a doctor who doesn’t know the latest practice in his field?

With only a small amount of imagination and work, most of these qualities can be reported out empirically - through surveys, through comparisons with other districts, and simply through effective communication to the community of the achievement of students both in and out of school.

If test scores are to be used, schools should be reporting the percentage of students who make a year's progress as determined by a value-added test like the NWEA MAPS test. While it is unreasonable to expect every 5th grader to weigh 100 pounds, it is not unreasonable to expect that every child to put on a few pounds.

I hate seeing good public schools (and the good people in them) damned by a single measure. But it will happen where the leaders are timid and short-sighted.

Exam Failure Blamed on Wikipedia

Tue, 24 Jun 2008 09:01:11 -0700

Source

This Monday, June 23rd 2008 NEWS.Scotsman.com article written by Martyn McLaughlin made me laugh. This is like blaming a 7-11 for being robbed. Maybe the real issue here is students being given assignments that simply allowed them to go out and cut and paste materials from Wikipedia et al, rather than tasks that required them to triangulate information. It sounds like a strong dose of Information Fluency might be the answer. But it’s hard to become informationally fluent if the primary focus of schools is memorization and regurgitation of those facts within the context of high stakes testing. Anyway, take a deep breath and read this excerpt.

WIKIPEDIA and other online research sources were yesterday blamed for Scotland's falling exam pass rates.

The Scottish Parent Teacher Council (SPTC) said pupils are turning to websites and internet resources that contain inaccurate or deliberately misleading information before passing it off as their own work.

The group singled out online encyclopedia Wikipedia, which allows entries to be logged or updated by anyone and is not verified by researchers, as the main source of information.

Standard Grade pass rates were down for the first time in four years last year and the SPTC is now calling for pupils to be given lessons on using the internet appropriately for additional research purposes "before the problem gets out of hand".

Eleanor Coner, the SPTC's information officer, said: "Children are very IT-savvy, but they are rubbish at researching. The sad fact is most children these days use libraries for computers, not the books. We accept that as a sign of the times, but schools must teach pupils not to believe everything they read.

"It's dangerous when the internet is littered with opinion and inaccurate information which could be taken as fact.

"Internet plagiarism is a problem. Pupils think 'I'll nick that and nobody will notice', but the Scottish Qualifications Authority has robust ways of checking for plagiarism and parents are worried their children will fail their exams."

Ronnie Smith, the general secretary of the Educational Institute of Scotland, said there was a higher risk of inaccurate information on the internet than in books. He added: "We need to make sure youngsters don't take what they read online as fact."

Several further education institutions have already banned students from using the interactive encyclopaedia.

At one college in Vermont in the US, a history professor found several students repeated the same error in exam papers. On discovering the information came from Wikipedia, the college outlawed its future use.

Ms Coner said overuse of the internet also meant students did not develop interpretative skills.

She said: "Pupils are in danger of believing what they read. It's part of our short-cut culture, where we will do anything to pass a test, without properly engaging with the information or questions that are being asked.

"It's all very well to glance at a website for research, but you have to check what you are reading is correct.

Anything can be untrue. I can claim to be a world expert on anything if I set up a website on the internet."

Alan Johnson, the UK Education Secretary, was lambasted earlier this year for suggesting the website could be a positive educational tool for children.

He described the internet as "an incredible force for good in education", singling out Wikipedia for praise.

A disclaimer on Wikipedia states "it is important to note that fledgling, or less well monitored, articles may be susceptible to vandalism and insertion of false information".

Boasting over two million articles, Wikipedia is used by about 6 per cent of internet users, significantly more than the traffic to more authorised sites, such as those of newspapers. Its articles are mainly edited by a team of volunteers.

LAST week I heard the writer Colin Bateman describe how, on looking himself up on Wikipedia, he was dismayed to discover that his young son had gone online and added the sentence: "Mr Bateman is currently suffering from penile dysfunction." Fortunately his dad saw the funny side – and was proud his child could spell "dysfunction" correctly.

In common with students everywhere, I use Wikipedia as a research tool, and so does my son. Occasionally, I come across areas where there is academic dissent – for example on whether Homer was an individual poet, and this is usually clearly indicated.

There are subjects on which I wouldn't trust any open-edit web resource, because I've come across too many conspiracy theorists in my time. But generally I think the biggest risk of using any internet source is that it leads to plagiarism, intended or unintended.

It is so easy to cut and paste, meaning only to put together some useful notes, and then to draw on them too heavily without acknowledging the source. At the extreme it is all too easy to buy "off the peg" essays on any subject.

When I was studying public health, we were trained to test the reliability of health-related websites, because there is a great deal of subjective misinformation on the net which may appear reliable.

The great strength of the internet is that it means we can amass information very readily, but it is hard to distinguish between authoritative, scientifically tested information, and something more akin to rumour.

One topic in my son's Higher History course is the civil rights movement in the US. Starting from the simplest of internet queries, it wasn't long before he got into quite contentious issues, which were presented in very partial terms by organisations with vested interests.

It was hugely useful to him to develop the skill of challenging what was presented as "fact", but it is a skill that has to be learnt, and which many internet users won't have. Of course, that skill isn't just useful for assessing the reliability of the internet. Mr Bateman, for example, earns his living by making up stories.

The entire article can be found at this link.