Changing the Way We Look at the World

Most if not all of you reading this post will at least be familiar with Google Earth, which is a great tool to learn about the world today and hone your geography skills. However, for historical maps, I’ve yet to see a better site than the David Rumsey map collection. From the website’s intro:

The David Rumsey Historical Map Collection has over 13,600 maps online. The collection focuses on rare 18th and 19th century North and South America maps and other cartographic materials. Historic maps of the World, Europe, Asia and Africa are also represented. Collection categories include antique atlas, globe, school geography, maritime chart, state, county, city, pocket, wall, childrens and manuscript maps. The collection can be used to study history, genealogy and family history.

Read an article about the collection, take a Flash Tour of the collection (requires Flash), or view 360° panoramic images of the collection space. You can also view Japanese Historical Maps or fine art images from The AMICA Library.

This is an incredible collection of historical maps, available digitally and for free! Because they are digital, there are different ways to sort, aggregate, synthesize, and look at the maps. The About page states:

Presenting individual maps in a digital format literally breaks the boundaries of an atlas’s bookbinding, allowing the viewer to view single maps independent of their original encasing. With Luna Imaging’s Insight® software, the maps are experienced in a revolutionary way. Multiple maps from different time periods can be viewed side-by-side. Or, the end user can create their own collection of maps by saving groups of images that hold particular interest. Complete cataloging data accompanies every image, allowing for in-depth searches of the collection.

The collection’s owners really seem to get it, also because the collection is copyrighted under the Creative Commons License. 

I like this resource a lot, because it echoes what Judy Breck has been writing about recently, in that learning should occur online because current knowledge has moved there. She calls this the “global virtual knowledge ecology” (p. 44).  Breck argues for schools to adopt a new attitude toward the Internet, take advantage of a new access to information, and above all, benefit from the new aggregation of knowledge made possible by the Internet’s open content and “interconnectivity within and among subjects” (p. 46). Especially these last ideas of open content and interconnectivity are important and relevant for the map collection.

All in all, a great resource, so go check it out. Just make sure your pop-up blocker is off for this site, but it’s well worth it. A fast Internet connection is recommended as well.

Image Credit: the David Rumsey Collection: http://www.davidrumsey.com

Professors Take Heed… Teachers Should Too

Another great example I found on the web via the Dangerously Irrelevant blog, in this post. It’s a short video by  Consuelo Molina, UCLA student, videographer, and graduate of the San Fernando Education Technology Team (SFETT), called Digital Kids @ Analog Schools. Consuelo is but one of an increasing number of young people who really get it when it comes to using technology for learning, work, and life.

The content of the video is centered around the idea that colleges and universities are not preparing students for the world beyond because pedagogies are backward instead of forward looking. According to the video, what students want:

• more than just lectures, papers, and problem sets; no more teaching with yesterday’s tools
• to be able to connect with what they learn
• choices in the way they can express themselves, e.g. having control over how they represent what they’ve learned. The phrase “visual learner” comes up over and over again
• access to technology to personalize learning
• to be prepared for the jobs that our available NOW, jobs that require creativity, intellectual capital, communication skills, coming up with ideas
• to get value for their tuition
• to apply technology to learning
• for professors and instructors to listen to them
• colleges to break the norm, be different, and start looking to the future

Pay attention to the ending as well, it’s very cleverly done. However, as discussed in the video, a picture (or in this case a video) is worth a thousand words. If you like what you read here, watch the video, and you’ll really get the message.

Finally, this quote from the video sums up the feelings of more and more students these days, at all levels of education:

If this place isn’t perfecting my skills for the new business world, then why am I here?

Image credit: serafini:
http://flickr.com/photos/serafa/67922566/

True Convergence!

Great article from the BBC today: ‘Tower of Babel’ technology nears. The article discusses Software Defined Radio (SDR), which is able to translate and understand any kind of radio wave signal, such as 3G or wi-fi. As a result,

wireless devices that previously understood only one or a few languages, or standards, will suddenly be able to talk to each other freely regardless of frequency or conflicting protocols.

According to the article, widespread implementation of SDR will happen in the next 5-10 years. More information on this technology can be found in Technology Review and wikipedia.

Imagine the potential implications for education with mobile, connected tools! This is the type of thing I’ve been looking for for a long time, as it means that we can REALLY take advantage of existing technology for teaching and learning. This is especially the case because SDR is software driven, while “currently, most devices rely on hardware, rather than software, to get at the information in radio signals.” What it could mean for teaching and learning:

• No more worrying about tech budgets for schools, as students would be able to use their own devices, regardless of standard or protocol. And the fact that SDR is software-driven makes it even better (think upgrades, rather than replacements).
• True anywhere, anytime computing (especially anywhere).
• Collaboration across devices will be much easier, because it doesn’t matter if I have a smart phone and you have a handheld computer.
• SDR should make it much easier for mobile devices to interact with other technology, increasing the opportunities for the use of context-aware computing, and digital overlays on top of a physical environment.

The possibilities are almost endless…

Image credit: Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Brueghel-tower-of-babel.jpg

Another Cool Online Tool

           

And you thought flickr was great? Here is an excellent tool to do more with the pictures in your flickr account: fd’s Flickr Toys. You can make mosaics, posters, trading cards, collages….. etc. The tools are free, and I’m sure will be repurposed by many.

 BTW, this post is a great example of the power of the web. I ran across this site while scanning the 50 or so blogs I subscribe to. I found the Flickr Toys in a post by Ewan McGregor. Some reviews of the different toys can be found here.

Image credits: my own
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dutchboyinohio/215369406/ and http://flickr.com/photos/dutchboyinohio/254091607/

My Book Is Finally Published!!

It was two years in the making, but the edited book I’ve been working on with my colleague Karen Swan at RCET is finally in print! Here is the official citation:

van ‘t Hooft, M., & Swan, K. (2007). Ubiquitous computing in education: Invisible technology, visible impact. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

It’s odd how excited I was to actually hold the first paper copy in my hands, considering how much I work with digital sources. No matter how cool technology is, there is still something about reading a book…

Image credit: KSU RCET: http://www.rcet.org/ubicomp/images/ubicompbookcover.jpg

Kids Can Teach Us a Thing or Two…

Jeff Utecht is a teacher at the Shanghai American School whose students are doing some amazing things with technology. Here is the latest example: Teentek.com. Jeff describes the origins of this site in this blog post. The site is run by kids and is for kids. While I could go into great detail about how this is a great example of student-centered learning and technology as a tool to eliminate the barriers between school and world, what really struck me about Teentek is how some of the kids involved with it are talking about what technology means to them. For example (from Jeff’s post):

Once upon a time, technology was a way of using tools to solve problems. Now, in the 21st century, it’s way of communication and information gathering that is central in almost every part of our lives. Economy, entertainment, communication. Without technology, the rate at which these things happen would slow down to a snail’s pace. So what exactly IS technology, you ask? Technology is the way we use tools to communicate and gather information, at a basic level. These include cellphones, video games, and most importantly, computers.

Another example of technology use by kids for kids is Tony Vincent’s Our City Podcast, where kids (with some help from their teachers, as this one is more classroom-based) can submit podcasts about their hometowns.

It’s amazing what kids are capable of doing when we let them …

Image credit: One of Jeff Utecht’s students : http://www.flickr.com/photos/63444054@N00/246321151/

APEC Cyber Academy

I recently got involved in a very interesting project. It is called APEC Cyber Academy, and is funded by the Taiwanese government and APEC. A description of the program:

APEC Cyber Academy &
APEC 2006 International Online Contest

October 2, 2006 ~ December 3, 2006

The APEC Cyber Academy (ACA, http://linc.hinet.net/apec/) is an international networked learning environment designed specifically for K-12 students. The primary goal of ACA is to provide learner-centric, collaborative, ICT, and international learning experiences to K-12 students and teachers around the world. Launched in 2002, ACA is currently hosted by the APEC Digital Content Production Center (APEC CPC) under auspices of APEC/EDNET and the Ministry of Education of Chinese Taipei (Taiwan). With its outstanding networked learning environment and high quality digital content, ACA has already attracted many international users. As of December 2005, ACA has over ten thousands registered learners from various APEC member economies.

ACA has hosted an annual international online contest since 2002. The nine-week event for 2006 will start on the 2nd of October and conclude on the 3rd of December. The contest is composed of three programs: the APEC Networked Collaborative Learning Program, the APEC Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Cyber Camp, and the APEC Journalistic Kids. The former two programs are associated with team projects that only accept group entry. On the other hand, the APEC Journalist Kids is pertaining to personal efforts and only accepts individual entries.

• APEC Networked Collaborative Learning Program

The collaborative learning program consists of four independent learning projects: Money, Convenience Store, A Day in Our School, and Our Holidays. To participate in one of these projects, students have to form teams, take part in weekly learning activities, complete assignments collaboratively, and even communicate with their distant learning partners through ACA’s communication tools.

• APEC ICT Cyber Camp

The virtual summer camp focuses on both learning ICT skills and building up international learning communities. Participants have to pass two online computer games, APEC Challenger and APEC Traveler, before they are authorized to form teams of five including one teacher or parent. The ICT Cyber Camp is composed of a sequence of six correlated learning modules designed with advanced and interactive technologies.

• APEC Journalistic Kids

This is an activity in which students play the role of local correspondents of their classes or schools for ACA. After being authorized as a residential journalist, every participating kid is encouraged to try his/her best to do digital storytelling in ACA about his or her local community.

Awards and Prizes

For the APEC Networked Collaborative Learning Program and APEC ICT Cyber Camp, the performance of each team in these programs will be evaluated based on their respective evaluation rubrics. The winning teams will be awarded a group certificate of merit from Minister of Education, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan). Furthermore, the best team in each program will be awarded a personal computer (one computer per team).

As for the APEC Journalistic Kids, the performance of each journalist will be evaluated based on evaluation rubrics. The winning journalistic kids will be awarded a certificate of merit from Minister of Education, Chinese Taipei (Taiwan). Furthermore, the best journalist will also receive a personal computer.

PLEASE COME ON BOARD AND JOIN THE EXCITEMENT!

For more details about the online contests, please go to the APEC Cyber Academy at http://linc.hinet.net/apec/ or e-mail: apec@avatar.nutn.edu.tw.

I’m excited to be a part of this project and will be acting as an online tutor for the ICT Cyber Camp. What I like about this project are the collaboration and networking, and the fact that kids from all over the world get to interact with each other in an educational and safe environment online. As of right now, the project is especially looking for teams and individual participants from the United States and Europe, so if you’re interested, check it out and join the fun!!

Feel free to repost this information on your blog, website etc.

Image Credit: APEC (http://linc.hinet.net/apec/login/login.asp)

High Tech, Not So High Touch, or … ?

 

Sometimes people of my generation and older ones can get it wrong. Younger people who use a lot of technology do think about the consequences of being online and learn from their mistakes. Here is an editorial from yesterday’s Daily Kent Stater, our campus newspaper, that is very appropriately called “Don’t IM me, touch me.” I’m copying the entire editorial here, as it is an interesting take on ubiquitous and connected technology, through the eyes of a college student (I’m sure she won’t mind ):

When I was in sixth grade, I met my first boyfriend, Joe, online. I thought I was going to marry him and move to Disney World. Ever since then, the Internet has been nothing but a constant source of heartache, confusion and avoidance of the real world.A decade ago, people got to experience genuine interactions face-to-face, or at least over the telephone. Now that’s been exchanged for the addicting computer: AIM, AOL, Myspace, Facebook and the dreaded three-page midnight e-mail. Countless hours are wasted in front of the computer screen. Right click to “Get Buddy Info.” Jump on Facebook to stalk distant acquaintances. View “Friends with Updated Profiles.” Check to see if their profile says “In a Relationship.”

Look at so-and-so’s new picture. She looks like she’s having a great life of friends, smiles and beer bottles. Why does my life suck so much? Look at so-and-so from high school’s new boyfriend. God, he is unfortunate looking. Look at that band geek who just got married. Wow, she put on weight.

In middle school, I would spend days on the new, exciting America Online. I was so thrilled to meet people from the area and ask “A/S/L?” I vicariously lived a booming social life through the computer.

Then moving to high school, I used my computer to get acquainted with boys I liked. I would read their profiles and instant message them. I spent many nights smiling in front of a computer screen. I would talk to my classmates online and think it was the coolest thing ever.

If I could go back, I would have hung out with these people in person instead. It’s too easy to misunderstand people online. You can never tell when people are being sarcastic or if they’ve decided to stop talking to you, or simply need to get up to use the bathroom. You also miss out on everything else that comes with spending time with people in person.

Now that I’m in college, practically everyone I know experiences the vices of the Internet. It’s always disturbing to view someone’s profile and get that pain in your gut when you read something you just didn’t want to read, or when you see your old best friend’s pictures of her beautiful life. Then there are the oodles of people who write online journals so they can validate their existence by telling some fictional version of their lives.

The computer is the easy way out. That’s why it’s so attractive. You can express yourself without having to explain yourself. You can shout a message to the world and hope someone actually cares and will save you from yourself. You can vicariously live your life through IMs. You don’t even have to get to know any of your friends anymore – all you have to do is plop their name into Facebook and poof – instant research. A life defined in a page.

It’s time for people to go out and live like normal human beings. Go hang out with your friends. Don’t spend four hours saying “lol” to them through the computer. Go talk to that loser boyfriend of yours or the hot girl you’re lusting over. Go sing by someone’s window instead of posting some lame song lyric in your profile.

Life is too short to be spent on the computer.

Allison Pritchard is a senior electronic media production major and columnist for the Daily Kent Stater. Contact her at alpritch@kent.edu.

Daniel Pink and David Thornburg would concur with this editorial, I think. You can go high tech, but you can’t lose sight of high touch.

Image credit:  snakei, “Touch”
http://flickr.com/photos/snakei/107425801/

It Takes a Village …

 

I ran across this post on danah boyd’s blog today that fits in very well with a recent post I wrote about high concept and high touch. Increasing pressure on kids to perform, high stakes testing, and a continuing emphasis on left-brain types of skills is not just an American phenomenon, judging from this letter in the British newspaper the Telegraph.

The letter reads:

Sir – As professionals and academics from a range of backgrounds, we are deeply concerned at the escalating incidence of childhood depression and children’s behavioural and developmental conditions. We believe this is largely due to a lack of understanding, on the part of both politicians and the general public, of the realities and subtleties of child development.

Since children’s brains are still developing, they cannot adjust – as full-grown adults can – to the effects of ever more rapid technological and cultural change. They still need what developing human beings have always needed, including real food (as opposed to processed “junk”), real play (as opposed to sedentary, screen-based entertainment), first-hand experience of the world they live in and regular interaction with the real-life significant adults in their lives.

They also need time. In a fast-moving hyper-competitive culture, today’s children are expected to cope with an ever-earlier start to formal schoolwork and an overly academic test-driven primary curriculum. They are pushed by market forces to act and dress like mini-adults and exposed via the electronic media to material which would have been considered unsuitable for children even in the very recent past.

Our society rightly takes great pains to protect children from physical harm, but seems to have lost sight of their emotional and social needs. However, it’s now clear that the mental health of an unacceptable number of children is being unnecessarily compromised, and that this is almost certainly a key factor in the rise of substance abuse, violence and self-harm amongst our young people.

This is a complex socio-cultural problem to which there is no simple solution, but a sensible first step would be to encourage parents and policy-makers to start talking about ways of improving children’s well-being. We therefore propose as a matter of urgency that public debate be initiated on child-rearing in the 21st century this issue should be central to public policy-making in coming decades.

Like danah, I support this letter. I think it is yet another example that shows how children are being socialized into a society that is not theirs, but their parents’ and grandparents’.

The letter also illustrates how schools alone cannot remedy the problem, as it is not an educational one, but a social and cultural one. Current issues related to technology, such as the whole debate around MySpace and the subsequent DOPA legislation are merely trying to deal with the symptoms of deeper and pervasive problems such as youth alienation, pressure to perform academically, and bullying. And as danah argues, banning youngsters from using certain digital tools may actually worsen the problem:

By and large, technology is filling a gap and that gap is created by us – parents, educators, politicians, media, … society in general. TV is allowing children to have desperately-needed downtime, the Internet provides them with the a place to hang out amongst their friends when they are locked into their nuclear family residences.

It takes a village to raise a child … a saying that has been beaten to death but that sounds oh so true today, especially in the Western world. Or, as Garrison Keillor wrote in his “modest plan for saving the country“,

You have to advocate for young people, or else what are we here for?

 

Image credit: http://youth4change.com/images/fiars_4.gif (I should have started this a long time ago, and will go back and post image credits once I get a chance).

Free Wikis for Educators

 

Reposted from Weblogg-ed:

Adam Frey and the gang at Wikispaces want to give away 100,000 free wikis to educators and I think we should help them meet their goal, don’t you? You can create a public space that is open to anyone, a protected space where anyone can see the work but only members can edit, or a totally private space where only wiki members can work. in other words, there’s a flavor for every taste.

Great development if you ask me, free is always good. I hope some of the other social networking sites that only give you limited access for free (e.g. flickr) will follow suit. A wiki is a great tool for collaboration and knowledge building, and because it is online, it really blurs the boundaries between school and world when it comes to learning. Thank you WikiSpaces .

 

Image credit: http://www.wikispaces.com/site/for/teachers100K