Taste of Tech

One of the primary principles of the American democracy is right of the people to know what our government is up to. Across history, as government operations become more secret, they also become more corrupt, and tend to deviate from the values and goals of the society.

There are reasons for the government to keep secrets. If we’re at war, we don’t want the enemy to know what we’re planning and what we’re doing. In some cases, the governement uses secrets to protect people and assets. But in the United States, a lot of information created and collected by the government is classified for other reasons. These reasons may include political strategy, the reluctance to disclose potentially embarassing information, and the unwillingness to admit mistakes and assume responsibility. Sometimes, classified information remains classified long after its relevance has diminished.

The National Security Archive is an effort at The George Washington University to declassifiy some of this information, and make it available in primary source form for the public. It includes many resources obtained through the Freedom of Information Act that are not as readily available from the U.S. Government.
For example, the site includes a collection of 77 documents relating to the use of the atomic bomb and the end of World War II. These include memos from Vannevar Bush and J. R. Oppenheimer, diary entries from Henry Lewis Stimson about discussions of the project with the president,several documents discussing potential targets, and the communications among military leaders about the bombing plans.

While many of the documents are of a histrorical nature, the site also includes a number of resources related to the September 11 attacks and the war on terrorism. There are also non-war-related items, including details of President Nixon’s meeting with Elvis Presley.

As we continue to get our news from more and more distilled, news-bite sources, we need to teach our students about the value of primary sources. Any account of an event or a situation can be interpreted and presented in a number of different ways. By using primary sources and considering the values, assumptions, and biases of the authors, our students can draw their own conclusions about history instead of relying on the textbooks to interpret the facts for them.

I’ve described podcasts, and given some examples of podcasts about education and technology. But technology is not an end unto itself. If these things are going to be useful for teachers, we have to use them to teach science and social studies and math. You can search the general podcasts repositories, but it’s hard to find things there. The categories are very broad, and there aren’t enough subcategories.

The Education Podcast Network has a directory of podcasts relating to education. There is an area that has podcasts about teaching, learning, and technology, but it goes beyond that. There is also a directory of podcasts produced by students as well as a directory of podcasts organized by subject.

Take science, for example. There are 25 podcasts listed related to teaching and learning science. Included are podcasts about the environment, space, current science news, and the impact science and technology have on society. The podcasts are produced by organizations all over the world. Similar directories exist for other subjects.

Among the school podcasts are dozens of podcasts produced by elementary, middle and high school students. The site also includes information about getting started with your own podcast, but I’ll address that another time.

What’s that song? You know, the one that’s playing in your head that you can’t remember the words to? It’s bothering you now, and you can’t quite put your finger on it. Sure, you could probably hum a few bars, but what good is that going to do?

Well, go over to The Song Tapper and see if you can find it. You have to have Flash for it to work, but basically, you just tap the beat of the song with your keyboard. It measures the keypresses and the length between them, and identifies the songs that fit the pattern.

You can also submit songs that fit a certain pattern, to add to the database.

It’s not perfect, but it does work. I tried several songs, and it found them all. There’s also a short video on how to use it. It looks like this site is getting a lot of attention, and it takes a long time to get the results back. Still, it’s pretty neat.

Educational uses? That might be a stretch. I can see using it to find songs that have similar beats in them. I tried tapping the Morse code for SOS in to see what it would do (I’m still waiting for search results). You could look at the works of different composers to see how they influence one another, though I think I’d recommend listening to the actual songs to do that. How else could it be used?

Basically, a wiki is an editable web page. Traditionally, a web page was created by one person (or entity) and viewed by many people. I could make a web page for my computer applications class, and the students and their parents could go to that page and read the information that’s there.

On a wiki, the web page essentially looks the same, except they can (maybe) edit it. The first wiki was developed by Ward Cunningham in 1995. The name comes from "wiki wiki", the "quick" shuttle busses at Honolulu airport.  The content of a wiki is very easy to supplement or correct.

This is a great application for collaboration. For example, I’m toying with the idea of putting tech documentation on a wiki. I can put the "BBHCSD Email User Guide" and the "Wordpress Getting Started Guide" and all of the other instruction sheets I’ve created into a wiki. Then, others can add their own documents, make links between ideas in them, make corrections to mistakes I’ve made, and build a genuine knowledge base.

I’ve been paying attention to a wiki project taking place over at WorldBridges. They’re talking about the possibility of using wikis as replacements for textbooks, and they’re interested in starting in northern Ohio. They could approach this in many different ways, and they’re currently trying to hash out the best way to use the technology. They’re hoping that they can provide a resource that is continually updated, allows teachers to share resources and ideas, and enables students to construct some of their own learning. It sounds like a promising project.

All right. Yes. You’ve heard about the whole Wikipedia/John Seigenthaler thing. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia created as a wiki. Anyone can contribute items, or make corrections to existing items. It’s free to use, and currently has 934,000 articles in English. The problem is that some of them contain errors. Take, for example, John Seigenthaler. An entry on Wikipedia was created in May, 2005 that falsely linked Seigenthaler with the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy. After four months unnoticed, Seigenthaler was alerted to the item, and a significant controversy ensued.

Ultimately, the person who made the changes to Seigenthaler’s entry lost his job and apologized for his prank. Wikipedia instituted new policies for updating content that provides greater accountability for contributors. And lots of people started questioning the reliability of wiki entries. Nature magazine determined that wikipedia is almost as accurate as Encyclopedia Britannica. In their sample of 42 scientific entries, Britannica had one mistake per 185 words, while Wikipedia had one mistake per 279 words. At the same time, Wikipedia provided more than twice as much information on the 42 items.

There have also been several informal studies of Wikipedia’s accuracy. Most conclude that Wikipedia is about as accurate as traditional print sources.

So…. we know what they are now. How do we use them in the schools? Are they a useful tool for students or teachers? I’ll probably be setting up a wiki sandbox on delta, if you’re interested. Let me know.

I was complaining (in Searching Audio and Found It) about not being able to search audio archives. I was looking for something I heard in a podcast, and couldn’t find it, and, since it was audio, I couldn’t Google it either.

Along comes PodZinger. This is a search engine for podcasts. I looks like they take the podcast audio, convert it to text, and make it searchable. In the search results, you can listen to the audio from the podcast that matches what you searched for.

For example, I searched for "digital immigrants" (with the quotes). It found three hits. The third one was the Bit by Bit episode I was looking for. Right next to the search result was a play button, which I could use to play that part of the audio from the show.

The site doesn’t say anything about it, but somewhere on the back end there has to be a complete transcript of each podcast in order for this to work. I’m guessing that they may offer this as a service in the future.