The one thing that made Twitter reliable and usable for me was the chronological timeline, and the only way to get that was third party apps. Without that, the app is useless for me, and a lot of other people who rely on it for getting important updates. I'm expecting a mass exodus soon.
For local stuff, it can be fantastic. I was just involved with a large movement to get city council to vote to make municipal gigabit a thing, and we did a lot of networking, communication, and outreach via Facebook, and am now involved in a neighborhood watch group online. For larger stuff, can't say, but for local stuff it's really helpful.
This is sort of a weird scenario. We already had the fiber in the ground (It was supposed to support smart meters, internet was an afterthought), so it was a struggle to figure out what to do with it. Most other cities would have to install it fresh, which would cost hundreds of millions. We got lucky.
I fully agree, the Gamers films are what a D&D movie should be- focus on the people at the table, the funny storytelling, the stupid jokes, and make it just an awesome story. Have Joss Wheadon write it and just go crazy.
In many of the cases where you have one super successful model is that it's tied to the people driving it, not the model itself. This has happened countless times, where a model is pushed onto a school/classroom, but without the buy in and passion of the original innovators, it fails miserably.
I work up in Bellevue, (which means a crappy commute, but I can wfh a decent amount), and it's amazing how much cheaper Tacoma is than Seattle, where my brother who works for Amazon is stuck. Although that being said, it's also beginning to gentrify a lot, especially in the Hilltop area, which is really cleaning up from it's slum history. I bought a really nice three story house for under 200k in the winter, and it was recently valued at 250k. While Amazon probably won't be coming here, as transit options start to open up, (And they get that whole mess with the municipal fiber network fixed) I think Tacoma's going to start seeing a lot more tech. Also, a lot of smaller start ups are coming here, realizing they can get amazing prices on office space.
All in all, that makes me nervous. I grew up in Tacoma, then moved up to the Seattle area to find tech work, then once I was able to wfh a bit more, bought a house at the bottom of the market in Tacoma, but I'm worried about what will happen. Thus far Tacoma's kept a lot of it's gritty feel, which isn't for everyone but I've always liked, but more and more I'm seeing the signs of gentrification.
Back in the 90s, 5-10% of people had a computer, and that 5-10% of people knew how to use it. Now, everyone has some type of computing device, but the percentage of tech literacy hasn't gone up (especially with the boomer generation.) Dealing with a much larger, scarier, black boxy world is a hell of a lot more frustrating than it used to be.
It's still easier (cheaper) to go with a hiring company that hires H1Bs, so a lot of HR departments will go with that option (even if it costs them more in the long run.) There's also the issue with tech companies looking for unicorns instead of being willing to train people. It becomes an excuse to go after H1Bs who will in essence be indentured servants. The real issue here is corporate greed and HR stupidity.
The problem with this is the same problem that's happening with elearning. Administrators see a cool video by a vendor and decide that's going to be the magic bullet. Then, you have 3rd graders learning Java. Then in middle school, they switch to VB. Then, in high school, it's back to Java again. Teaching kids to code like this is going to make them hate everything. Furthermore, good luck finding teachers for this- there's already a massive teacher shortage, and far too few math and science teachers, much less anything else.
Instead, a better path would be to start teaching kids digital literacy. Sounds like a buzzword, but really what it comes down to is teaching kids how to use the internet and other technologies to learn. I saw a librarian who took a musty old high school library and turned it into a digital learning center, where he'd partner with teachers to add online components to their curriculum, so whenever kids felt a need to do so, they'd go to the library to do the curriculum there. All the computers faced his desk, so he could keep an eye on them. I saw something in that place I had never seen before- rows of teenagers at computers, and none of them were on youtube, facebook, twitter, etc. They were all looking at blogs, wikipedia, etc. Teaching kids that the internet is more than just facebook is far more powerful for the purpose of creating a stronger tech workforce than shoving prepackaged garbage coding plans down people's throats. (Furthermore, if you want to really ruin any subject for kids, make it common core.)
I did my Master's thesis on successful implementations of educational technology.
One of the most successful implementations in a library was done in a low income high school in the Tacoma area. I had the amazing opportunity to interview the guy who ran it, and his story went like this- When he inherited the library from a kindly old librarian, it had become a place where students took naps. What he did was he moved the bookshelves out of the way, created a circular desk in the middle, and had four rows of computers, monitors facing him. He could see what information students were interacting with and if need be, police it, but he rarely had to.
Normally when I go to a library, I see a bunch of teenagers on facebook, youtube, etc. These kids were looking up blogs, wikipedia, etc. He explained that the first thing he did was integrate with the teachers, and ask if they wanted web quests, or similar web integration. He had a real talent for coming up with all sorts of cool online activities that could be easily integrated into a curriculum, and teachers were constantly giving him material to work with- if a student was struggling or wanted to do work on their own, he'd take them. This did mean a lot of extra work on his end, but the implementation was worth it. Not only was he getting students engaged with the material, he was helping students gain digital literacy.
I don't know how much you could take away from this for an elementary school library, but there's a lot to be said about finding cool online integration for whatever the teachers are working with- and that's huge. If you are in alignment with the teacher's curriculum, you'll have a much better chance of being successful. Also, the big thing he said he owed everything on was administration support, so best of luck with that side.
I'd just like to see more offerings from the engine. It seems a bit similar to procedurally generated dungeons that have been around since Rogue, but with an interesting twist. Perhaps nothing groundbreaking, but kind of weird and interesting.
Another idea, train teachers on how to actually use technology for learning.
I remember being approached outside a local library by a middle schooler asking if I wanted to buy a laptop. It still had school stickers on it, and I declined. I'm expecting similar fates for these tablets.
So, the data says that yes, hybrid (GOOD Hybrid) classrooms do work pretty well.
The data also goes on to say that a lot of this is contextual, and really cannot be generalized. There's so much hype that forgets about entire populations of learners. I think the most important thing is to offer choice- learners will self determine what works best for them.
So, questions like this are interesting, but what I feel is more important is how effective is it going to be in the classroom? What most teachers and students are really concerned about is how can this better the student's learning and save the teacher time. Administrators care about the bottom line- the budget. If this, or any, technology meets those needs, questions about cloud privacy, and a lot of other things, go out the door.
But a very big thing to focus on is making sure the teachers know how to use the technology. That's true of any elearning solution. I've seen cases where a really robust technology was given to a school, but without sufficient professional development, it fell flat. But as more and more teachers retire, and a new generation of teachers in their 20s replaces them, technologies like these will become ubiquitous, and while questions about privacy are scary, I feel that the ability for teachers to connect with students on multiple channels is overall a positive thing.
So. Key findings.
OnlineTraditionalHybrid for attrition and performance.
Hybrid means much greater time investment.
For hybrid to succeed, you need a lot of factors working together.
Students need to know what they're doing.
Face to face classes need to be more student centered/fluid.
Faculty need to be given sufficient professional development.
LMS coherence is important.
Tenured faculty will want to stick with what they've been doing for years.
Student body makeup is important. CS students age ~20 will do much better than veterinary students age ~40.
Digital literacy matters, but can be taught.
I had a lot more findings, but this is not news. One of the biggest things is that many online courses are very poorly designed from a pedagogical point of view. It's almost like you asked some person who's been teaching face to face for 20 years to teach an online course with no experience or training.
So, there are a ton of issues here that I could comment on, but the bit about professors feeling administrators are being paternalistic and refusing it flat out for those reasons is particularly interesting. After having several interviews with a head of Instructional tech at my research college, they told me that the biggest frustration was the tenure system. Tenured professors would always teach they way they had always taught, while instructional technologists at private universities could leverage more control in getting a coherent LMS environment set up. It really seemed like one of the biggest roadblocks for getting cool instructional technology implemented was somewhat political and petty in nature.
In a similar vein to the bit on smaller colleges, I later interviewed a professor at a community college who was able to implement really awesome instructional tech, and the trick there was to implement it in such a way where it saved professors time and allowed for more functional instruction. Too often it seems like another loop for them to go through, but if they provide the correct scaffolding and support on the academic side, it can be done right. It just rarely is, but that's usually caused by a number of factors all working together to create a really awful e-learning experience.
What they really need to focus on is making sure the students and teachers have all the resources they need to make this work. What I'm afraid of is this giving the Khan Academy a black eye. Still, having used himself a lot, I think the kids will prefer KA over 19 year old textbooks alone.
This is really interesting, as there is some anxiety within the public university system about tenure and LMSes, and how with the private institutions you have the freedom to implement them, whereas with public universities, there is a lot more resistance to things the faculty sees as wasteful.
Also, to run a really good flipped class, the time investment is rather insane. You might be spending less time working on powerpoint or whatnot, but you've got an email queue to deal with.
I would check out the Edupunk's guide to DIY Education, and move forward from there. Khan Academy is good for math, because you can actually test your skills, but with science education, you need some way of actually showing the process skills. Until then, though, KA should be a good refresher.
I've been doing a Master's thesis on hybrid learning, and this story is incredibly misleading.
Hybrid learning doesn't equal machines teaching. It just means that the teacher is reframed as someone who has to use instructional technology more to save class time. In turn, they end up having to spend a lot more time troubleshooting course software issues, providing student tutoring, etc.
We're getting to a stage where most asynchronous learning can effectively be done online. But this doesn't invalidate the need for a human being involved, and the importance of some face to face time with the instructor. The research has backed this for a long time, and this is not new information at all. In fact, I've most research suggests that hybrid learning produces better achievement results than either online or traditional modes, although the push right now is for online courses due to the flexibility they offer.
I'm not saying kids like everything on the internet. They don't. In fact, they don't do much with 99.9% of the internet, because they have zero exposure to it. They don't know how to do research on scientific things online, they don't know about the opportunities to help with ongoing research, and they don't have any real sense of internet literacy outside of youtube and facebook. My goal with this post was to get a good sense of what was out there that could help bring science to them in multiple ways- A textbook based lecture with a cool science simulation I found online is likely far more effective than a textbook lecture alone.
Hey guys, thanks for your comments, I haven't had time to read them all, but will attempt to start sifting through them over the weekend. A few things I wanted to clarify:
I appreciate the plethora of worksheets, activities, etc. available online. That's very useful to a beginning teacher, since I don't have a very large library to choose from, and these things can save me the effort of trying to come up with one on my own. However, what I was looking for (and mind you, I haven't had time to sift through everything) is cool stuff that can really help them get involved in science that they can do online. If I'm teaching them a course on galaxies, and I break out galaxy zoo for a day, I think that would have a pretty cool impact. Plus, it's something that they can do on their own time if they want to. I also feel that kids should learn how to use the internet for more than facebook and youtube, but that's a whole new subject.
Also, someone called BS on me saying kids were into online stuff, saying that they wouldn't be into school related online stuff. To that, I reply that they were doing a demo of standardized testing software, and the class was silent, eyes glued to the screens. It might have been the novelty of having smartbooks in the classroom, but I felt that if I could perhaps offer some more online resources and additions to their standard fare of worksheets and labs, I could give them a more thorough education.
Thank you for everyone for posting. Some of the posts I've clicked on have been very insightful, and I deeply appreciate the time and effort you have put into them. If you have any suggestions, email me or stop by my blog. Thanks.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know- there isn't an alternative, but if it's unusable, I'll just leave.
The one thing that made Twitter reliable and usable for me was the chronological timeline, and the only way to get that was third party apps. Without that, the app is useless for me, and a lot of other people who rely on it for getting important updates. I'm expecting a mass exodus soon.
For local stuff, it can be fantastic. I was just involved with a large movement to get city council to vote to make municipal gigabit a thing, and we did a lot of networking, communication, and outreach via Facebook, and am now involved in a neighborhood watch group online. For larger stuff, can't say, but for local stuff it's really helpful.
This is sort of a weird scenario. We already had the fiber in the ground (It was supposed to support smart meters, internet was an afterthought), so it was a struggle to figure out what to do with it. Most other cities would have to install it fresh, which would cost hundreds of millions. We got lucky.
I fully agree, the Gamers films are what a D&D movie should be- focus on the people at the table, the funny storytelling, the stupid jokes, and make it just an awesome story. Have Joss Wheadon write it and just go crazy.
In many of the cases where you have one super successful model is that it's tied to the people driving it, not the model itself. This has happened countless times, where a model is pushed onto a school/classroom, but without the buy in and passion of the original innovators, it fails miserably.
All in all, that makes me nervous. I grew up in Tacoma, then moved up to the Seattle area to find tech work, then once I was able to wfh a bit more, bought a house at the bottom of the market in Tacoma, but I'm worried about what will happen. Thus far Tacoma's kept a lot of it's gritty feel, which isn't for everyone but I've always liked, but more and more I'm seeing the signs of gentrification.
Back in the 90s, 5-10% of people had a computer, and that 5-10% of people knew how to use it. Now, everyone has some type of computing device, but the percentage of tech literacy hasn't gone up (especially with the boomer generation.) Dealing with a much larger, scarier, black boxy world is a hell of a lot more frustrating than it used to be.
It's still easier (cheaper) to go with a hiring company that hires H1Bs, so a lot of HR departments will go with that option (even if it costs them more in the long run.) There's also the issue with tech companies looking for unicorns instead of being willing to train people. It becomes an excuse to go after H1Bs who will in essence be indentured servants. The real issue here is corporate greed and HR stupidity.
The problem with this is the same problem that's happening with elearning. Administrators see a cool video by a vendor and decide that's going to be the magic bullet. Then, you have 3rd graders learning Java. Then in middle school, they switch to VB. Then, in high school, it's back to Java again. Teaching kids to code like this is going to make them hate everything. Furthermore, good luck finding teachers for this- there's already a massive teacher shortage, and far too few math and science teachers, much less anything else. Instead, a better path would be to start teaching kids digital literacy. Sounds like a buzzword, but really what it comes down to is teaching kids how to use the internet and other technologies to learn. I saw a librarian who took a musty old high school library and turned it into a digital learning center, where he'd partner with teachers to add online components to their curriculum, so whenever kids felt a need to do so, they'd go to the library to do the curriculum there. All the computers faced his desk, so he could keep an eye on them. I saw something in that place I had never seen before- rows of teenagers at computers, and none of them were on youtube, facebook, twitter, etc. They were all looking at blogs, wikipedia, etc. Teaching kids that the internet is more than just facebook is far more powerful for the purpose of creating a stronger tech workforce than shoving prepackaged garbage coding plans down people's throats. (Furthermore, if you want to really ruin any subject for kids, make it common core.)
One of the most successful implementations in a library was done in a low income high school in the Tacoma area. I had the amazing opportunity to interview the guy who ran it, and his story went like this- When he inherited the library from a kindly old librarian, it had become a place where students took naps. What he did was he moved the bookshelves out of the way, created a circular desk in the middle, and had four rows of computers, monitors facing him. He could see what information students were interacting with and if need be, police it, but he rarely had to.
Normally when I go to a library, I see a bunch of teenagers on facebook, youtube, etc. These kids were looking up blogs, wikipedia, etc. He explained that the first thing he did was integrate with the teachers, and ask if they wanted web quests, or similar web integration. He had a real talent for coming up with all sorts of cool online activities that could be easily integrated into a curriculum, and teachers were constantly giving him material to work with- if a student was struggling or wanted to do work on their own, he'd take them. This did mean a lot of extra work on his end, but the implementation was worth it. Not only was he getting students engaged with the material, he was helping students gain digital literacy.
I don't know how much you could take away from this for an elementary school library, but there's a lot to be said about finding cool online integration for whatever the teachers are working with- and that's huge. If you are in alignment with the teacher's curriculum, you'll have a much better chance of being successful. Also, the big thing he said he owed everything on was administration support, so best of luck with that side.
I'd just like to see more offerings from the engine. It seems a bit similar to procedurally generated dungeons that have been around since Rogue, but with an interesting twist. Perhaps nothing groundbreaking, but kind of weird and interesting.
Same here. OCZ has been awful as far as failure rates. I've had three of them die on me. Never again.
Another idea, train teachers on how to actually use technology for learning. I remember being approached outside a local library by a middle schooler asking if I wanted to buy a laptop. It still had school stickers on it, and I declined. I'm expecting similar fates for these tablets.
So, the data says that yes, hybrid (GOOD Hybrid) classrooms do work pretty well. The data also goes on to say that a lot of this is contextual, and really cannot be generalized. There's so much hype that forgets about entire populations of learners. I think the most important thing is to offer choice- learners will self determine what works best for them.
So, questions like this are interesting, but what I feel is more important is how effective is it going to be in the classroom? What most teachers and students are really concerned about is how can this better the student's learning and save the teacher time. Administrators care about the bottom line- the budget. If this, or any, technology meets those needs, questions about cloud privacy, and a lot of other things, go out the door.
But a very big thing to focus on is making sure the teachers know how to use the technology. That's true of any elearning solution. I've seen cases where a really robust technology was given to a school, but without sufficient professional development, it fell flat. But as more and more teachers retire, and a new generation of teachers in their 20s replaces them, technologies like these will become ubiquitous, and while questions about privacy are scary, I feel that the ability for teachers to connect with students on multiple channels is overall a positive thing.
Dear god, that would be horrifying.
So. Key findings. OnlineTraditionalHybrid for attrition and performance. Hybrid means much greater time investment. For hybrid to succeed, you need a lot of factors working together. Students need to know what they're doing. Face to face classes need to be more student centered/fluid. Faculty need to be given sufficient professional development. LMS coherence is important. Tenured faculty will want to stick with what they've been doing for years. Student body makeup is important. CS students age ~20 will do much better than veterinary students age ~40. Digital literacy matters, but can be taught. I had a lot more findings, but this is not news. One of the biggest things is that many online courses are very poorly designed from a pedagogical point of view. It's almost like you asked some person who's been teaching face to face for 20 years to teach an online course with no experience or training.
In a similar vein to the bit on smaller colleges, I later interviewed a professor at a community college who was able to implement really awesome instructional tech, and the trick there was to implement it in such a way where it saved professors time and allowed for more functional instruction. Too often it seems like another loop for them to go through, but if they provide the correct scaffolding and support on the academic side, it can be done right. It just rarely is, but that's usually caused by a number of factors all working together to create a really awful e-learning experience.
What they really need to focus on is making sure the students and teachers have all the resources they need to make this work. What I'm afraid of is this giving the Khan Academy a black eye. Still, having used himself a lot, I think the kids will prefer KA over 19 year old textbooks alone.
This is really interesting, as there is some anxiety within the public university system about tenure and LMSes, and how with the private institutions you have the freedom to implement them, whereas with public universities, there is a lot more resistance to things the faculty sees as wasteful.
Also, to run a really good flipped class, the time investment is rather insane. You might be spending less time working on powerpoint or whatnot, but you've got an email queue to deal with.
I would check out the Edupunk's guide to DIY Education, and move forward from there. Khan Academy is good for math, because you can actually test your skills, but with science education, you need some way of actually showing the process skills. Until then, though, KA should be a good refresher.
I've been doing a Master's thesis on hybrid learning, and this story is incredibly misleading. Hybrid learning doesn't equal machines teaching. It just means that the teacher is reframed as someone who has to use instructional technology more to save class time. In turn, they end up having to spend a lot more time troubleshooting course software issues, providing student tutoring, etc. We're getting to a stage where most asynchronous learning can effectively be done online. But this doesn't invalidate the need for a human being involved, and the importance of some face to face time with the instructor. The research has backed this for a long time, and this is not new information at all. In fact, I've most research suggests that hybrid learning produces better achievement results than either online or traditional modes, although the push right now is for online courses due to the flexibility they offer.
I'm not saying kids like everything on the internet. They don't. In fact, they don't do much with 99.9% of the internet, because they have zero exposure to it. They don't know how to do research on scientific things online, they don't know about the opportunities to help with ongoing research, and they don't have any real sense of internet literacy outside of youtube and facebook. My goal with this post was to get a good sense of what was out there that could help bring science to them in multiple ways- A textbook based lecture with a cool science simulation I found online is likely far more effective than a textbook lecture alone.
Hey guys, thanks for your comments, I haven't had time to read them all, but will attempt to start sifting through them over the weekend. A few things I wanted to clarify: I appreciate the plethora of worksheets, activities, etc. available online. That's very useful to a beginning teacher, since I don't have a very large library to choose from, and these things can save me the effort of trying to come up with one on my own. However, what I was looking for (and mind you, I haven't had time to sift through everything) is cool stuff that can really help them get involved in science that they can do online. If I'm teaching them a course on galaxies, and I break out galaxy zoo for a day, I think that would have a pretty cool impact. Plus, it's something that they can do on their own time if they want to. I also feel that kids should learn how to use the internet for more than facebook and youtube, but that's a whole new subject. Also, someone called BS on me saying kids were into online stuff, saying that they wouldn't be into school related online stuff. To that, I reply that they were doing a demo of standardized testing software, and the class was silent, eyes glued to the screens. It might have been the novelty of having smartbooks in the classroom, but I felt that if I could perhaps offer some more online resources and additions to their standard fare of worksheets and labs, I could give them a more thorough education. Thank you for everyone for posting. Some of the posts I've clicked on have been very insightful, and I deeply appreciate the time and effort you have put into them. If you have any suggestions, email me or stop by my blog. Thanks.