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Images 08Ednetlogoweb2 0408EdNet turned 20 this year. EdNet 2008 is happening right now in Boston. A huge congratulations goes out to the whole EdNet team for forging one of the required stops for the Educati. Nelson Heller, Vicki Bigham, Anne Wujcik and the rest of the team continue to put on an outstanding event year after year.

I’ve been attending since the early 90’s and it is wonderful to see so many familiar faces and so many new ones every year. It is always a delicious tension to juggle attending sessions and spending time out in the hallway conducting business. More often than not business wins – but either way you come out ahead. You can learn valuable insights in the sessions or you can make valuable connections in the schmoozefest out by the coffee.

Ever since 9/11 EdNet has also been a somber reminder for me of the events that day. We were all in a general session when it happened and we retired en masse to the bar (not open) to watch in horror and sympathy as the grisly events unfolded. We could see the smoke at the Pentagon from our rooms in the hotel. I remember walking in the park a couple of days later and the unsettling silence because there were no planes weaving down the Potomac to National. Every 15 minutes a lone F18 would circle overhead.

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Barack Obama is proposing significant new investments in early childhood education. More attention has been focused on his drive to recruit an army of new teachers but I believe the early childhood focus is equally important.

Why? As students age the gap between low performers and even average performers gets so wide that it becomes much harder to bridge it. The chart below illustrates this concept.

The Learning Gap

[This chart is for illustrative purposes only]

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618869_glass_ballAs print and technology products in education blend together the distinctions between textbook publishers and ed-tech providers are blurring in some very interesting ways.

A recent report by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press on how on-line and traditional news media are blending together raises some provocative questions for how this will play out in education.

Several years ago schools bought technology and print products from completely different budgets and with very different purchase processes. As educators have become more sophisticated about what technology can do and what it can’t do they are demanding that providers blend the best of technology with the best of print.

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836863_sausage_2Hot sizzling education publishing and ed-tech related links here! Obama’s call for more teachers, kids media preferences, 2.0 de jour, and assessing 21st Century skills all get a nod in a short week.

Eduflack talks about Obama’s call for an army of teachers. I confess that I worry about federalizing education too much, we don’t need more Reading First scandals. Having 50 laboratories is better than 1. Another wag noted a contradiction on the right – if the free market knows best and if education is the foundation for economic growth why aren’t conservatives fighting to pay teachers more? That would bring higher quality candidates into the profession via market forces.

Kids 10-14 prefer the internet to TV. AHCI Lunch has commentary on a New York Times article that revealed this finding about teens media preferences. Here is my question – why didn’t TV take off in the classroom given the power it holds over our culture? One of the core arguments about why internet tools, social media, and virtual worlds should be in classrooms is that they are where the kids already are. The same could be said for TV at any time in the last 50 years.

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532497422_f925be50c4_oFresh hot blog links to education topics here. These are some of the posts that caught my attention recently – enjoy.

Facebook for Teachers. This article is sad – lots of promise and money invested by people who just don’t get it. One district can not support their own social network – it takes hundreds of thousands of users to make these communities vibrant. How about we look at what is actually happening on Facebook for teachers? I Am Teacher – a Facebook plugin from We Are Teachers – already has almost 10,000 active users and over registered 50,000 users.

Video Games Improve Cognitive Skills. The title says it all. Go read about it on Richard Carey’s blog.

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file0111313-1Videogames in the Library? Wouldn’t installing a Wii or an xBox bring a lot of unruly teenagers into a refuge of quiet and intellect? It turns out that putting computer games in a library brings in a huge wave of new patrons and dramatically increases circulation – of books!

Two recent items support the thesis that games can benefit libraries and patrons. The most interesting aspect to me is that it may move libraries from being relatively static storehouses of knowledge to dynamic studios where knowledge is crafted, shaped, and extended.

The American Library Association is sponsoring a study to gauge the impact of games on learning and literacy. Why? The gamer blog 1Up has the money quote from Dan Barlow:

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Death_By_PowerpointPowerpoint slides are “glance media” just like billboards. Today’s post by Garr Reynolds at Presentation Zen is an excellent synopsis of how billboards can inform slide design.

His post builds on Nancy Duarte’s Slide:ology where she sets the standard for glance media – “Ask yourself whether your message can be processed effectively within three seconds.”

In a marginally related segue I’ve been reading Daniel Gilbert’s “Stumbling on Happiness”. Today’s best insight:

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490819_ipod_videoInformation is expanding exponentially. Applying database concepts to your information diet can mean the difference between overload and sanity, chaos and productivity. Database fluency is mandatory in a digital world. Students and teachers should be practicing and refining this skill so that today’s learners can make the most of the sea of data they swim in.

Almost anything you encounter in digital format can be managed using database techniques. At their root Facebook (relationships), iTunes (music, movies, tv, books, etc.), del.icio.us (bookmarks), flickr (photos), Moodle (lesson plans, learning management), and We Are Teachers (referrals) share a common database DNA. Even blogs through their categories and tag clouds are databases.

Email is an example. Treat the sender’s address as a data point. Then set up rules (database queries) to have all your boss’s emails sent to a high priority folder and Aunt Mabel’s political ravings sent straight to the trash. This approach allows you to target the urgent items amidst a sea of dross.

The Education Need

Educators and educational publishers have a vital role to play in our move to a database driven world. Why?

  • Students need to develop database fluency if they are going to get the most out of their digital lives. Learning Management Systems (LMS), social networks, and on-line research are all core tools for 21st Century education. Database fluency should become part of the curriculum along with textual, numerical, and visual fluencies.
  • Teachers need access to networks of peers, experts, and content to be able to deliver on the promise of individualized instruction.
  • Administrators and Policy Makers need to measure results across groups and efficiently allocate resources.

Every one of these needs is best met by a database and fluent users.

The Goal

The end result should be personal growth, valued relationships, and effective organizations. But in the first flush of widespread adoption we are losing sight of this. Consider the statement “I “friended” 1,000 people on Facebook therefor I have 1,000 friends.” Wrong. Many people are confusing the database with their relationships.

A teacher could take the Facebook example above and build an interesting set of discussions around the meaning of friendship, how to find a small network of people who are interested in the same things you are, what you can do to contribute, and how to manage the relationships that emerge. It isn’t creating huge numbers of meaningless connections that matters – it is finding the needles in the haystack of humanity that you want to build bonds of friendship with.

Database Fluency

What is database fluency – what are the core skills proficient users need to master?

  • Ubiquity – See every digital file you touch as a potential data point. Emails, MP3 files, Word documents, student records, and your photos are all potential data points.
  • Searching – Understanding how to craft logical questions that return useful information takes ongoing practice (“and”, “or”, “greater than”, “before”, etc.). Learning to to harness the advanced search features almost all applications have is another part of this skill.
  • Homing – The ability to find what is meaningful and valuable in large data sets by asking the right questions at the right time. Is this a reliable source? How recent is the data? Does this address the question I set out to answer? Is it usable or a tangled mess? How does it compare with other results?
  • Tagging – Users tag data elements to personalize them. This can be through formal taxonomies provided by the database author (“Male, Female”) or informal folksonomies created on the fly by users (flickr tag clouds). Since tagging is so open-ended having some basic rules in place can help insure you are able to use the tag cloud later to search the data.
  • Cleaning – Any collection of data gets messy after a while – knowing how to clean your data just like you clean your room is an essential part of working with large data sets. Without maintenance your searching and tagging get bogged down.
  • Reporting – Creating clear usable reports that make the point you are after is an important part of turning data into information and eventually into wisdom. When is a table better than a bar chart? Should I focus on 5 or 500 names?

None of this involves database programming. That is a skill more akin to auto mechanics – I don’t need to know how to tune my engine to drive a car. I also don’t need to know SQL to use a social networking site. However, for driving and networking I do need to know the rules of the road and how navigate where I want to go.

How these elements appear in different applications varies widely – understanding the underlying dynamics helps harness their power across many environments.

RSS readers click through to see the full article – 3 detailed examples that bring these concepts to life and some suggestions on where to start.

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Overloaded carSchools are inundated with paper and instructional materials at this time of year. Those of us who build education products and create marketing collateral should be cognizant of is how wasteful so much of this is.

In our personal lives many of us go through the “more shelves or less stuff” debate all the time, and all too often we end up at Ikea with another Sbrorg shelving unit strapped to the top of the car.

Please stop.

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939604 Band Silhouette 4My prior post on iTunes and Textbooks started with this iMix. As I mulled the educational implications over I realized that this was exactly how teachers should be sharing instructional materials.

As a musician and music aficionado I listen to a lot of new music. My tastes range across genres – what draws my interest is solid musicianship, great lyrics, and a good tune. Over 2-3 months I probably listen to 200-300 new songs inspired by recommendations from friends, recommendations from iTunes and Pandora, and stuff I hear randomly. Oddly, I find some of the best stuff on political blogs (Juan Luis Guerra below). I rank the songs using iTunes and from the short list of 5 star songs I create a mix to share. I also toss in a couple of old favorites that I haven’t listened to in a while (like Cocker on this mix).

My musical adventures are not typical – but I hope that is why playlists like this are valuable to others. I’ve done the leg work of culling through a lot of new stuff to find the best (for my ears).

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