The webinar is an hour long. Richardson describes his work aimed at making schools better. The discussion between these two at the end of the hour is frank. They agree and agonized over this reality: The system for conveying knowledge to students in the schools we now have is not working and it is changing very little if at all.
I know, from having been her student in several contexts, that Lynda is a great teacher. I feel sure Richardson is as well. Lynda is a major leader of digital education — essentially the supra-teacher of digital arts. Richardson has been immersed in the school mess for 20+ years — and is a father of young teenagers, and proposes ways for teachers to improve their classes against the system. These two hands-on experts do not have answers for how really to change the schools methodologies so that the kids can get a decent education at school.
From their discussion in the webinar I picked up this new word for how education could change: untethered. It implies for me the concept of handschooling: an individual student engaging knowledge by using a mobile that she owns and controls, providing her with a 24/7 web browser.
I suggest that untethering a student’s access to what is known — cutting access loose from standardized curricula, grades, and tests — is a specific, simple step. Connect a kid: let him engage is mind on his own with algebra, history, ecology and the rest of the subjects that are now for him tethered to the academic (school) brick and mortar world.
With individual wireless access on a tablet or smartphone, a student can while away boring times in school:
Until mobile browsers existed, there has NEVER been a way to proved equal schooling to all children. The usual situation is for elite kids to have better schools. The effect of that is for the highest achieving kids in worse schools often to get a worse education than the low end achievers in the best schools.
For decades in the United States there has been hue and cry to give equal opportunity to minority kids by providing them with equal education. Today a high percentage of minority kids are in relatively bad schools, where the top students are learning at a level far below that of their elite contemporaries in schools across town.
Across the world there are many places where children receive rudimentary education, or none at all. There is simply no realistic hope that each of the world’s kids will ever attend an excellent school. At best only some will; those who do will tend to be the children of the powerful and wealthy. Intelligent individual students from poverty and upwardly ambitious environments will mostly attend poor schools or none at all.
For a student to own a mobile with a web browser changes everything by making each child’s access to online knowledge equal with all mobile-equipped students. Take for example this website:
Led by E.O. Wilson, a team of scientists, educators, science writers, and wildlife biology students is working in Gorongosa National Park, Mozambique until the second week in August to document a story of transformation in this “Lost Eden” of Africa. The expedition is gathering the lessons to be learned from Gorongosa about ecology and evolution, and will present Gorongosa as model biosystem in the upcoming online text book “E.O. Wilson’s Life on Earth.”
Granted, students would need to read English to use this website, but the translations to many languages are coming. The fundamental point is this: Because it is on the web, this exploration of Gorongosa is exactly the same for everyone who learns from it. Every student who looks at it is on literally the same page as all the others who do so. This is true for:
The valedictorian of a top Seattle high school
A sophomore at a poor South Chicago high school
A college freshman in Kenya
A sixth-grader in Mongolia
A young teenager an India slum
… you get the idea ….
In the mid-20th century the USA tried busing kids from their home neighborhoods to balance school equality. Affirmative action attempts to create more opportunity by admitting students who do not qualify for supposedly better schools. Civil rights have been advanced little by these kinds of measures.
Providing individual mobile access to the web to every student makes real the right of each to equality.
1. “‘Webphone’, a device that uses the Internet, a la Skype, as its transmission medium and thus escaping forever the tyranny of the phone companies.” Malone does not think Google will do the Webphone in its new Nexus. If/when it does arrive, he says such a device will “stun the tech world.” When the Webphone does arrive, it will stun the education world by ending establishment control of learning content. A student with a Webphone will have individual, free access to the internet in his or her pocket. Here are some opportunities educators should be preparing for in the coming Webphone era:
Only open educational resources (OER) will be findable online by Webphones doing searches.
Because educational resources will move to the cloud, they become globally within reach.
Connecting to any education resource can only happen via a single url (node) making it necessary to optimize nodes for findability (or, for sure, they will not be found)
You may think of others . . .
2. Apple’s new “‘category-buster,’ . . . think of an oversized iPod Touch, but no doubt with much of the functionality of a personal computer (not to mention all of those iPhone apps). It will also no doubt, have one or two very cool and unexpected new features . . . .” Of course, the iPod Touch is already a wireless way to access the internet without phone company control. Webphone changes for education again come into play. Other factors educator might anticipate in mulling how to teach toward students interacting with stuff to learn through their Apple tablet that is interfacing the internet:
Should, and how should, curricula and pedagogy in general intrude into the natural patterning of knowledge subjects in the open internet?
Can, and should, education standards writers impose grade levels upon learning resources being directly accessed by students? Here, for example, are expertly curated learning resources online; what is education’s remaining role in standardizing them, if any?
How else should educators anticipate the handschooling era that is fast upon us?
As this image from the Molecule of the Week reminds us, patterns of networking nodes emerge to create much of the real and virtual worlds. Educators need capture this emergent abundance from within OER. To do so education must focus on two kinds of nodes: the ones online that form OER (not the just the bundled pedagogy) and the nodes that each are a student toting 24/7 access to the internet cloud.
NEXUS ONE AND THE TABLET by Michael S. Malone
. . . But if any could stun the phone world it would be Google. It too [like Apple] is full of smart, arrogant people, the company has lots of dough, and because phones are outside its core business it can in theory take a big risk without worrying about legacy issues. For example, as many industry insiders have suggested, Google could stun the tech world – and hit Apple at its weakest point – by coming out with a “Webphone”, a device that uses the Internet, a la Skype, as its transmission medium and thus escaping forever the tyranny of the phone companies. There’s a lot of problems with that strategy, of course, but it would certainly shock the world, and put Apple on the defense.
Unfortunately, the early reports suggest that what Google will introduce next week, the Nexus One, will be a largely conventional smartphone. That’s a pity, because I suspect Google will never get this chance again.
Meanwhile, strong on momentum and flush with cash, Apple isn’t waiting around for the world to catch up with it. Two weeks from now, the company is expected to introduce yet another category-buster: this time it’s rumored to be a tablet device – think of an oversized iPod Touch, but no doubt with much of the functionality of a personal computer (not to mention all of those iPhone apps). It will also no doubt, have one or two very cool and unexpected new features that will make it a gotta-have for Apple fanatics everywhere. Once again, Apple will have a new product that challenges convention, seemingly obsoletes an entire multi-billion dollar industry (in this case, handheld computers) while overwhelming a second, newer industry (netbooks, such as the Kindle) and yet is still stunning to look at.
The thesis of golden swamp is that what we learn and know emerges in network patterns from little pieces — and that can happen in the idea ecosystem of the open internet as it does in our minds. Big, static structures like curricula do not work well in the open ecology, and need to be unbundled into small pieces that can interact freely.
The two marvelous videos embedded above and below show the dynamics of small pieces emerging into music and molecules. That is very similar to what happens when you or I think. That is also what happens online when a learner connects interlinkable bits of knowledge.
The narrator of the molecule video says that, “Ribosomes can make any kind of protein. It just depends on what kind of genetic message you feed it on the RNA.” The music machine is also being fed a string of information code which it follows to activate the balls. Future curricula will include strings of information to activate online patterns of virtual bits of what is known by humankind.
It is stunning that this first of its kind image and description of how it was taken can be studied by anyone with an internet browser — almost immediately upon its discovery. It will be many months at least before this new insight into and picture of molecules will be delivered to students in a printed textbook.
The machine in the illustration is an Atomic Force Microscope (AFM) explained by physicist Ethan Siegel at his StartsWithABang blog. Siegel describes how the AFM works: “Basically, you make a tiny, sharp, atomic needle that you move over the top of a molecule. When you approach different atoms in a molecule, the electric forces either attract or repel the needle. As the needle moves up and down, the handle that it’s attached to feels forces and torque. So, all you have to do is measure these tiny changes in force and torque, and you can image the molecule beneath it.”
The gray inset image is what the AFM let’s us see. Siegel comments that: “You can even see that the electrons like to live on the outside edges of the carbon rings, and that there are fourteen tiny hydrogen atoms bonded to the carbon atoms at various points. What an amazing picture; the entire molecule is only 1.4 nanometers across!”
The inset image is from BBC’s report of 8/28/09 titled “Single molecule’s stunning image.” Several developing concepts are highlighted in the BBC report, each of them offering potential for nano technologies where work will be done at the molecular level. A post at Gizmodo by Jack Loftus explains why what is displayed in the inset images is a stunning breakthrough: “That B&W structure is an actual image of a molecule and its atomic bonds. The first of its kind, in fact, and a breakthrough for the crazy IBM scientists in Zurich who spent 20 straight hours staring at the ’specimen’—which in this case was a 1.4 nanometer-long pentacene molecule comprised of 22 carbon atoms and 14 hydrogen atoms.”
These snow leopard kittens from the Seattle Zoo were are featured today on ZooBorns.com. The exciting world they are exploring is made richer for us all by being able to wander more and more through our wonderful world, virtually.
This 8-minute video on iridescence in squid contains nuggets of insight into several scientific topics: cells, visible spectrum, animal behavior, and more. As you watch the sketches, you listen in as two biologists, Sophia Tintori and Alison Sweeney, discuss how and why squid use iridescence.
In my last post I wrote that incoming content from the internet is key to education. This video from CreatureCast.org is a way to let a shining squid into the studies at a school or on an individual student’s mobile device — offering interesting and enlightening knowledge.
Making microscopy portable is the vision of CellScope developer Associate Professor Daniel Fletcher and his colleagues at UC Berkeley. He explains in the video posted here that the ability to take images wherever you happen to be and transmit them to a clinician has major potential for improving health care in developing countries where to a large extent microscopes are not available. The medical uses of the CellScope are described this week in a SEED Magazine report that is based on a PLoS One article titled Mobile Phone Based Clinical Microscopy for Global Health Applications.
CellScope also swings doors open to a new virtual science hall for learning! The student with a CellScope on her mobile can explore and learn the microscopic world in the same manner as a medical worker can, for example as the PLoS article describes: image “P. falciparum-infected and sickle red blood cells in brightfield and M. tuberculosis-infected sputum samples in fluorescence with LED excitation.” There are educational applications in biology, geology, ecology, forensic science, health, and many other subjects.
For learning, there is profound parallel potential to the distance-microscopy described by Professor Fletcher in the video. The CellScope can take student science into rich real world venues. A student with a CellScope can do remote fieldwork, sending images to teachers and laboratories for instruction about what she has captured from the microscopic real world.
Don’t you think it will not be long before the mobile manufacturers will include magnifying lenses in their cams?
A potent advantage of the internet over analog input to students for subjects they are learning is that what is online will always be at least as up-to-date as any analog medium. Often what is online is significantly more current. Today’s flu concerns are an example: there is an outbreak online of new articles, animations, and follow-along news. This means that at the time students are worried about the flu, information is emergent for that teachable moment.
This video is narrated by Drew Berry, who created it. The video is part of SeedMagazine’s new feature on science education called The Interpreters. Just watching the video is enough said about the opportunities to put learning into classrooms and student hands by using the visualization tools and the internet.
Vampire walking from Carl Zimmer on Vimeo.
Carl Zimmer’s new Discover article about How To Be a Bat [Life in Motion] includes six videos of bats in action. It is time to get over idea that learning something is boring. Such foolishness is so very 20th century! To “fix” education and catch it up with the other sectors of our time we need to put the cascade of excellent knowledge online — like the walking vampires you will see in the video above — into the handschooling now possible with mobile phones.
You can ask the Library of Congress. The LOC Everyday Mysteries service has a page devoted to the question about the strongest human muscle, explaining for starters that there is no one answer because there are three different ways to measure strength. That said, three different types of muscles are described for the human body: cardiac, smooth, and skeletal.
With lots of illustrations, the question about the strength of muscles in the human body is answered in interesting detail, in an excellent article packed with information and insight. At the end there are links to related websites chosen by the librarians, and a list they have selected for further reading.
Trusting the Library of Congress to authenticate information
The Everyday Mysteries service of the Library of Congress is an example of an internet source that can be fully trusted for student research. Not only are essays and illustrations provided. The librarian recommended web sites expand into a network of authenticated knowledge about human muscles — and for the many other subjects of the Everyday Mysteries.
The Cell Migration Gateway is an open resource from Nature.com, where each gate that opens for non-subscribers is laudable progress toward the global interactive science of the future.
This video illustrating blood clotting in a wound is from the new online Medpedia. The welcome page explains that Medpedia “is applying a new collaborative model to the collection, sharing and advancement of medical knowledge that, over time, will produce the world’s most comprehensive resource.” Having watched new learning content come online since 1997, I can claim some authority when I say this is the right way to do a very important thing that will profoundly benefit humankind! Wow! By networking medical knowledge among all the medical experts, this resource will be superior, comprehensive, and self-vetting. Again, wow!
The following is from the Wired Campus announcement today: Collaborative Online Medical Encyclopedia Goes Live
Medpedia, a new online medical encyclopedia relying on user-generated content from anyone with an M.D. or a Ph.D. in a biomedical field, officially became available today. The venture, which has the backing of numerous leading medical schools, was explored in an earlier Chronicle article that takes a detailed look at issues for contributors and users of the site. –David Shieh
