Taste of Tech

I started blogging in late December, 2005. Initially, I was looking for a replacement for the monthly technology newsletters I used to write. Each month, I would create a two-page newsletter and distribute it to all of my staff members. It included 4-7 short items about current technology happenings in the school district, online resources, technology tips for teachers, and other short, useful bits of information that applied to teaching and learning with technology in our schools.

The problem with the newsletter was that it took too long. I was spending about two full days per month putting it together. Most of that time was spent working on formatting and editing, to make sure it looked nice. In the end, I had a very nice-looking, useful print document. That was great in the sense that my teachers liked it, but it was pretty limited. Even with emailing it out, I couldn’t really follow up on anything, solicit comments, or break format with more - or less - text.

So the blog was initially intended to replace the newsletter. I would post 2-3 items per week for teachers. They could sign up for the email notifications, and Wordpress would send the posts to them as I posted them. We wouldn’t need to have a monthly newsletter, people could comment on and link to specific items, I could easily point people to old items that I’d already posted, and I could include an audience beyond the school district in which I work. I could also target specific posts at different audiences, which led me to create categories for students and parents, even though I’d never really targeted those groups with the newsletters. I started the year with the fairly ambitious goal of posting 100 items before the end of 2006.

Here, on the last day of 2006, I’m posting the 100th item. My audience isn’t really as large as I’d like, and I think I’ve strayed a bit from the original intention, but I still think this experiment has been a success. A few statistics on the last year:

• I have posted 100 items. The most popular categories (besides “Front Page,” in which almost everything goes) have been Teachers (64), Online Resources (49), and Opinions (41).
• During the year, I have had 28 comments, though most of those came from me when referring to earlier posts in later ones.
• I have 15 registered users (you have to be registered to post comments).
• I have four people on the mailing list, counting me.

A few things have surprised me about how this has worked out. Among them:

• I think I have more readers from outside the district than inside. My initial intention was to write for my teachers. If others found what I had to say useful, that’s fine. But they weren’t the target audience. In the end, I think I’ve written a lot of items that are of more interest to technology people than teachers, which may explain some of this.
• I only have four mailing list subscribers. I initially saw this as the best way for people to sign up. It didn’t require them to know anything about RSS. It’s a push technology, so they don’t have to “check back frequently for updates.” Essentially, it replicated the newsletter format, emailing the information out. With the amount of spam people are getting now, maybe they’re reluctant to sign up for anything. Perhaps the audience I’ve attracted just uses RSS. But this one surprised me.
• I’m more opinionated than I used to be. With the newsletter, especially, I stayed as neutral as possible. I’m no longer as reluctant to voice opinions, especially since I’m not pushing it into eveyone’s inbox.

Last night, I read through a lot of the old posts, and noticed a number of trends as the year went on. The posts I’m making now are a lot different from those early ones. Here are some of the things that changed:

• The posts are longer. I started out by writing a hundred words or so. Over the last few months, I’ve increased that significantly. The original point was to make posting easy — to allow me to put a tiny bit of information out there in a few minutes. Over the year, I’ve started writing more, thinking more, reading more, and linking more. This may be a bit counterproductive, because I’m spending more time on the blog than I intended. But I think it’s creating a better product.
• I’m not as local-centric. There are several posts at the beginning which assume that the readers are working for the same school district I am. The default audience has changed from my local colleagues to the broader audience of people working with technology in education. In September, I caught a little flack for posting a BBH-centric Wordpress Getting Started Guide, because it only applied to my teachers. It’s interesting how much that has changed.
• I’m using graphics now. Every post since school started in August has included at least one graphic. I think this makes the blog more visually interesting, and it’s not that much more work.
• I write more about issues and less about resources. I think I’m becoming a part of the educational technology discourse, and not pointing teachers to as many useful ideas and resources. While these things are important, I think it makes the blog less useful for the classroom teacher.

So where do I go from here? I’m happy with how the blog is working. I’m pleased with the audience I’ve attracted, small as it may be. I think I need to do more work to write useful things for classroom teachers. I also need to promote the blog more with my own staff. And now that 2007 is starting, I need another hundred posts.

What do you think? How could I improve what I’m doing here? Feel free to leave comments.

I had an interesting conversation earlier today with Jeff Lebow and Doug Symington as part of the traditional Wordbridges end-of-year webcastathon. Among lots of other things, we discussed professional development for teachers. In our case, we have half a day, twice a year, for professional development. In those two half-days, we have to teach our teachers everything they need to know. That includes instruction on new approaches to teaching various subject areas, legal updates on new legislation affecting schools, techniques for differentiating instruction and better meeting the needs of all students, crisis procedures including security lockdowns, CPR training, and AED use, and occasionally, technology. The half-day we had in March devoted entirely to technology was a major coup, and would have been quite a success if it hadn’t been for the power failure. And the fire alarm.

It looks like next year, we’re going to get two additional days for staff development. Those days are sorely needed, but they’re really not going to make a substantive difference, especially in technology. As Jeff pointed out, we have to have some sustained professional development. A single two-hour class without any followup leaves teachers frustrated because there’s no place to go for help. What if we used the webcasting technology for professional development? Teachers could interact with one another, and build kind of a support group. They could ask questions and follow along with what the “instructor” is doing. I suggested that this is technologically complex for most of our teachers. I’m really impressed when people are in a webcast, and at the same time participating in the chat room. I have a really hard time doing it. I’m pretty sure most of our teachers would be lost if they tried it.

I do see value in podcasts. I really like audio. It’s easy to produce. It can be listened to in the car on the way to work. If there were a way to deliver instruction that way, in small, easily-digestible pieces, teachers might be interested. Because it would be episodic, there’d be certain tasks to be completed between the episodes, so teachers can try out what they’ve learned, and come back with questions. It wouldn’t necessarily need to be a webcast, though that would be a possibility. It might make sense to have the instruction piece as a podcast, with a webcast going along with it. People could skype in to the webcast, which would be an ongoing support group for the podcast. Of course, this would require the teachers to have the necessarily skills to participate in a webcast.

If we were going to do this, what would we teach? I suggested starting with the NETS Standards for Teachers. Developed by the International Society for Technology in Education, they outline what every teacher should know and be able to do with technology. They start with technology skills, and then proceed to designing instruction with technology, delivering that instruction, and assessing and evaluating that instruction. The Productivity and Professional Practice strand could largely be met simply by participating in this program. Social, Ethical, Legal, and Human issues are far too rarely addressed, and should be incorporated as well.

We also talked about building a knowledgebase, where teachers could share the projects and activities they’ve done with their students. This would allow teachers to quickly implement new projects by drawing on the experience of others.

So, how do we get started?

CNN reported this week that the youth of today couldn’t care less about space exploration. “Young Americans have high levels of apathy about NASA’s new vision of sending astronauts back to the moon by 2017 and eventually on to Mars, recent surveys show.” I wonder why.

Let’s take a couple huge leaps back in space time. On October 4, 1957, Sputnik 1 was launched by the Soviets. The Americans were rudely awakened to find that they were losing a race they didn’t know they were in. The implications were enormous. Space exploration was fast-tracked in America with the launching of several U.S. Satellites. DARPA and NASA were quickly created. A new emphasis on science and mathematics education was advanced. Major funding initiatives grew up overnight for scientific research, including a tripling of National Science Foundation money. In 1961, President Kennedy announced the goal of landing a human on the moon and returning him safely to the earth by the end of the decade. That gave us nine years. The race was on.

In backyards across America, kids were wrapping aluminum foil around cardboard boxes and blasting off into space. Support for space exploration was far from overwhelming, but with national pride and national security at stake, there was a lot of interest in seeing this program succeed and a lot of money backing it up.
So, we landed on the moon in 1969. We continued the Apollo missions until 1975. We beat the Soviets, and eventually made peace. We had accomplished the objective. It was no longer politically possible to spend these enormous amounts of money on space exploration. So the goals changed. As early as 1969, work began on a reusable spacecraft. If we didn’t have to build a new space vehicle for each launch, we could keep costs down. The idea was brilliant. Make a rocket that blasts off into space, and then returns like a glider. The spacecraft can be used again and again. The rocket boosters can be rebuilt and reused. Only the large external tank must be replaced with each launch.

By the time astronauts Young and Crippen buckled themselves into Columbia in 1981, the nation was once again excited about space exploration. This reusable spacecraft was going to make space exploration commonplace. In today’s dollars, the space shuttle was originally expected to cost about $36 million per flight. In reality, it has cost $1.3 billion per flight ($150 billion for 115 flights) — almost 40 times the projected cost. That’s hardly the kind of inexpensive space travel that the American public was led to believe was right around the corner.

So what are we doing with this program? What’s the objective? Well, we’re building a space station. That’s nice. We probably do need one. But it’s been done before (more than once). And we’ve been building it since 1998, with designs going back at least a decade before that. We’re now more than five years behind schedule on construction, and plans for the station have been significantly scaled back as resources have become more and more limited. Even if it is ever finished, it’s not the kind of spectacular “one giant leap for mankind” kind of accomplishment. Is it any wonder we’ve lost interest?

Still, my wife and I are part of GenX. We still like the shuttle, and are still interested in the space program. So, last week, we tuned in to NASA TV to watch Discovery’s STS-116 landing. I don’t know if you’ve ever watched NASA TV. It’s available on some cable TV and satellite systems, and you can watch it online. But even during a shuttle landing, NASA TV is like watching paint dry. It makes CSPAN look like the Super Bowl. This is rocket science, for crying out loud. But you wouldn’t know it from watching.

How do we get kids interested in human spaceflight again? I’m not sure we can, or should. While it may be technologically possible to go to mars by 2017, the benefits of such a program may not be worth the enormous expense. The prospect of commonplace spaceflight is at least two generations away. Scientifically, we’re already collecting far more data with the current program than we can analyze. Smaller programs like the Mars Rover have shown that space exploration can be done with unmanned vehicles at a fraction of the cost of human spaceflight, and without the enormous risks.

The Constellation project, currently slated to replace the space shuttle in 2010, isn’t going to restore the interest in the space program that’s currently waning. While it will probably take advantage of the handful of advances in space technology we’ve seen in the last three decades, it’s basically a return to the Apollo program. We’re going to stuff people into capsules and blast them off into space, a la 1969. We’ll probably all watch the first mission on our ten-inch black and white TVs. No wonder the kids aren’t interested.

A necessary component of critical thinking is the ability to draw logical conclusions. Our students have to be able to draw logical conclusions given a set of rules and circumstances.

For example, take this rule: “If it’s raining, then it’s cloudy.” Which of the following conclusions are valid?

• It’s cloudy outside, therefore it must be raining.
• It’s not cloudy outside, therefore it must not be raining.
• It’s raining outside, therefore it must be cloudy.
• It’s not raining outside, therefore it must not be cloudy.

Look at it this way: for it to be raining, it must first be cloudy. It could be cloudy without raining, but it could not be raining without it being cloudy. If it’s not cloudy, it could not possibly be raining. It’s also just as true that if the conclusion is not true, then the condition is also not true. That is, if it has to be cloudy to be raining, and it’s not cloudy, then it can’t be raining.
Unfortunately, a lot of people have trouble with this, and explanations like the one I just provided make it even more confusing.

In 1966, Peter Wason devised the Wason Selection Test to test logical reasoning. The test works like this:

You are shown a set of four cards placed on a table each of which has a number on one side and a colored patch on the other side. The visible faces of the cards show 3, 8, red and brown. Which cards should you turn over in order to test the truth of the proposition that if a card shows an even number, then its opposite face shows a primary color?

Given a logical statement in the standard “if p, then q” format, the cards show p, not p, q, and not q. In order to check the validity of the proposition, it is necessary to test the p and not q cases.

The Philosophers Magazine has an online version of this test, which you can use to test your ability to draw logical conclusions. While the test statistics appear to be broken, the text states that 75-80% of test-takers get the answers wrong. Here’s how the site interprets these results:

There are a number of important implications of the fact that we tend to be bad at the Wason selection task One has to do with the notion of justified belief. If a belief is recognized to be based on defective reasoning, then to continue to believe it is not justified. But if we systematically, and unconsciously, reason badly, then the extent to which reason actually acts as a constraint on belief is a moot point.

Another implication has to do with what these tests tell us about the way that the human mind has evolved. According to Leda Cosmides & John Tooby, the results of the Wason selection task demonstrate that the human mind has not evolved reasoning procedures that are specialized for detecting logical violations of conditional rules. Moreover, they claim that this is the case even when these rules deal with familiar content drawn from everyday life. However, they argue that the human mind has evolved to detect violations of conditional rules, when these violations involve cheating on a social exchange. This is a situation where a person is entitled to some kind of reward only if they have fulfilled a particular requirement. Cheating involves taking the benefit, without fulfilling the condition for the benefit. It is Cosmides’s and Tooby’s finding that when the Wason selection task is constructed to reflect a cheating scenario, subjects perform considerably better than they do with the standard test. And moreover, they found additionally that this is not simply to do with the familiarity of cheating scenarios - subjects do better with an unfamiliar cheating scenario than they do with a familiar standard scenario.

Fascinating… 

A recent study at the University of Liverpool has determined that reading Shakespeare excites positive brain activity. Shakespeare’s writing uses functional shifts, where words are used as different parts of speech. “Thou losest here, a better where to find,” declares Kent to Cordelia in King Lear. In this case “where” becomes a noun. In the Tempest, Caliban protests at being treated like an animal with the lines “Here you sty with me/ In this hard rock.” Sty, here, is used as a verb. Such liberties with the parts of speech are common in Shakespeare’s writing.
When encountering something like this, the brain constructs meaning by putting together pieces of a puzzle. The brain is surprised when it finds words in odd places, and works harder to discern meaning from the words. The result is a burst in brain activity.

Researchers studied this by putting EEG sensors on the heads of 20 participants and measuring the effects as the participants read selected lines from Shakespeare’s plays. When the brain encounters something that doesn’t make semantic sense, it registers a negative wave modulation. When it reads a grammatically incorrect sentence, it registers a positive wave modulation. When reading lines with functional shifts, the tests measure a positive modulation, indicating excitement as the problems are solved and the text is understood.

Of course, there are two ways to interpret this. On one hand, it has been shown that reading Shakespeare results in positive brain activity. We do want to promote positive brain activity among our students, don’t we? On the other hand, though, literature is meant to be read, not solved. Even the most forgiving creative writing teachers have a problem with functional shifts. It took Google a decade to become accepted as a verb, and “disrespect” has yet to gain widespread acceptance as the verb “dis”, more than 15 years after its entry into our language in that context. If Shakespeare is so wonderful, why couldn’t (or wouldn’t) he write in a way that people could understand? His audiences were probably as lost as our students are.