Posted on 11th August 2011 by Judy Breck in Biology, Language, Literature, Mobile Learning, Schools We Have Now and Testing
mobile, untethered
Yesterday I watched and listened to a recording of Lynda Weinman interviewing Will Richardson. The title of this free Webinar: Personal Learning Networks Using the Power of Connections to Transform Education — which is the title of a new book by Richardson.
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:
Posted on 9th August 2009 by Judy Breck in Biography, Connective Expression, Emerging Online Knowledge, Literature, Networks and Schools We Have Now
curricula, open, texttbooks
In its front page article titled “As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks Are History,” the New York Times mentions in passing the fabulous opportunity to multiply the riches of education letting students access their subjects online. The reporter, Tamar Lewin, does a thorough job of hitting all of the key points from the traditional edu power players: the schools and the publishers. We learn that when classrooms go digital state standards are mapped and textbooks are online instead of printed. The school/publisher mindset is to serve up subjects in little boxes: standards, textbook chapters, curricula, etc. So, the challenge for the usual edu suspects has been to keep the stuff students use in those boxes while somehow making the tools youngsters use to access them digital.
The misfit here is that online knowledge resources are networks. When you put a piece of a network in a box, what you can learn from it shrivels. It is clipped away from its cognitive connections. We are left with kids who are connected on Facebook to dozens of friends and features — and for their “digital” study of a subject they are served up a little virtual box with a bit to learn in it that fits the standard of their grade and semester. Online networks of ideas are like critical thinking: they are in context and connect to related ideas. Here are a couple of samples; textbooks these are not; boxes they are not. They are networks:
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Trial of Zacarias Moussaoi
The Walt Whitman Archive
Posted on 5th June 2009 by Judy Breck in Literature and Networks
defoe, digital, mirrored_knowledge, network
A distinguished new offering in the digital humanities, Digital Defoe was reported on by Wired Campus yesterday in a review titled 18th-Century Literature Gets a Makeover on the Web. We learn in the report that: “The site was created by the Defoe Society, an international group that studies the work of Daniel Defoe, an 18th-century English writer most famous for his story of Robinson Crusoe, a man shipwrecked on an island. Defoe is considered by some to be the founder of the English novel.”
My contention that the internet can showcase educational content in powerful new ways, by mirroring the inherent network structure of learning, is directly confirmed by the approach the scholars have taken in building Digital Defoe. (more…)
Posted on 5th March 2009 by Judy Breck in Connective Expression, Emerging Online Knowledge, Golden Age of Learning, Literature, Mobile Learning and Open Content
app_store, Edgar_Allan_Poe, mobile, the_black_cat
The image here shows a highly readable text (clearer on the phone than in the photo) of The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe coming through the Safari browser of my iPhone. The text is from the comprehensive and authoritative collection of Poe works at the website of The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. The Society is an open source for reading Poe’s work on any mobile online browser.
Transitional reading through apps
The app store phase in which mobile content delivery now finds itself cannot be the comprehensive and authoritative venue for future mobile learning content. For one thing, there is no reason to duplicate the open collection at the Society of Baltimore for delivery by one or more app stores. There are thousands of content websites already available for academic topics ranging from the humanities and arts through the sciences and technologies, and essentially everything else studied in education. It is a huge and unnecessary effort to organize all of that again for one application and then another.
In the case of works like Poe’s, which are in the public domain, the adjustments to what is available already for larger screens for reading in a mobile browser are highly doable. We need to be perfectly clear that protecting copyrights and making money are the motivations for pushing reading matter through app stores. I am not saying that is not okay. I am only suggesting that long range, accessing reading material — and most other study subject collections — through browsers will prevail.
Posted on 19th January 2009 by Judy Breck in Golden Age of Learning, Literature, Open Content and Schools We Have Now
decameron, humanities, last_professor, stanley_fish
Stanley Fish is two years younger than I am. I hope he will accept this as a gentle nudge from an elder: he needs to grow up and look forward at the greatest ever human intellectual flourishing now beginning.
He concludes his Opinion piece in the New York Times this morning by looking back gratefully over his career as an institutional academic humanist, glad to have been born when he was (Wikipedia says in 1938): “Just lucky, I guess.” Me too (1936). Professor Fish and I have enjoyed many aspects of a world that is disappearing, and I also am grateful to have been there. But my core gratitude is to have our perspective of the past while we are experiencing one of the rare snippets of history when, something happens, as the saying goes that, “changes everything.” When Stanley Fish and I were children we had no computer; the internet did not expand until we were well into middle age. We know how things used to be done and can intimately appreciate what is better in what is new.
Professor Fish’s New York Times lament is prompted by a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the University.” The author Frank Donoghue writes: “healthy humanities departments populated by tenure-track professors who discuss books with adoring students in a cloistered setting – have largely vanished. . . ” Professor Fish groans that professors have just become “delivery people” for information.
What we have lost is much less than what we are gaining. For centuries, the cloistered setting where discussion took place between tenure-track professors and adoring students has been highly exclusive. The few who were included were not necessary the most talented. The cloistered setting was a bit of geography to which one had to travel and into which one had to be admitted. Everyone who could not make the trip or pay the tuition was excluded. There was not much direct communication between the cloisters of scattered universities.
These same geographical locations added skills instruction, which is making something of a transition to the internet. As explained in Professor Fish’s piece today: “John Sperling, founder of the group that gave us Phoenix University, is refreshingly blunt: ‘Coming here is not a rite of passage. We are not trying to develop value systems or go in for that “expand their minds” nonsense.’”
To understand why Professor Fish should not be glum, look only at his distinction between skills instruction and communities of humanities study. Yes, the exclusive cloistered geographical settings are disappearing, but it does not follow that the humanities will no longer be embraced in communities. Instead, the intellectual world that lies on the horizon admits all comers to humanist communities, led by those with the greatest expertise and elevating students for their growth in understanding.
John Seely Brown discusses how this works, and points to The Decameron Web for a glimpse of the future of humanities:
. . . the emphasis is on building a community of students and scholars as much as on providing access to educational content. The site’s developers note: “We fundamentally believe that the new electronic environment and its tools enable us to revive the humanistic spirit of communal and collaboratively ‘playful’ learning of which the Decameron itself is the utmost expression.”
Posted on 15th December 2008 by Judy Breck in Emerging Online Knowledge, Literature, Networks and Open Content
Learning Handbook, leaves_of_grass, literary, literature, walt_whitman
The Walt Whitman Archive feature on The Wired Campus Archive Watch is aptly titled: All Whitman, All Digital. The feature introduction (followed by an interview with Professor Folsom) gives its history. This is a leader project for literary migration to to internet:
In the mid-1990s, Ed Folsom, a professor of English at the University of Iowa, and another scholar, Kenneth M. Price, set out to create a digital scholarly edition of Walt Whitman’s works. The Walt Whitman Archive began life as a CD-ROM. Now housed at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln, where Mr. Price teaches, the archive contains thousands of digital facsimiles of Whitman’s poetry and letters as well as writings about Whitman, and it’s constantly growing. It averages more than 20,000 visits a day from scholars, students, and Whitmaniacs everywhere. Money to keep the archive afloat comes from the co-directors’ home institutions and a series of grants, and an endowment is in the works.
