03.20.06
Posted in General at 6:24 pm by Norm Garrett
I ran across this link and ended up spending a lot of time browsing this collection. Librarians and archivists at the University of California at Santa Barbara have been collecting wax cylinder recordings and have managed to digitize thousands of them in their Cylinder Digitization and Preservation Project. All of these recordings are public domain and can be freely downloaded in either original format (unedited WAV file) or in MP3 format files. They can also be played with a handy player that is built into the web page. The era is 1900 to about 1920 and you can listen to political speeches by Teddy Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and others, or music by a variety of individuals. There are thousands of recordings on the site.
If you have an interest in history and some time to burn, check out this site. It has a good search engine and gives you complete library references on the recordings you are listening to.
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03.10.06
Posted in Conferences, Future at 11:06 am by Norm Garrett
If you are looking for a good conference that lets you do some real interacting with your colleagues, try the Faculty Summer Institute at the University of Illinois. It’s an informal conference aimed at educators who are interested in distance learning, online courses, etc.. It is mainly organized by ION (the Illinois Online Network) at the University of Illinois. I have worked with ION for a number of years and they really are pioneers in the area of online learning.
I have spoken with the organizers about the format and topics for this year and it looks better than ever. It will not only have the usual presentations on timely topics, but will have some tracks and groupwork in those tracks, so there will be an opportunity for hands-on collaboration. In addition, the collaborative technologies we like to talk about will be used (conference blogs, wikis, etc.) in the conference itself. I highly recommend attendance if you are interested in online learning.
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03.08.06
Posted in General, Society and Technology at 9:28 am by Norm Garrett
David Shenk, in his book Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut, speaks of the “2×4 effect,” the idea that we are so overloaded with information that in order to get someone’s attention, you (figuratively) have to hit them over the head with a 2×4. An interesting article on the CNet blog talks about an O’Reilly tech conference (the O’Reilly conferences are generally premium conferences in the tech world) pondering the idea of getting one’s message across when everyone is already overloaded with information. In fact, the attendees are generally so overloaded that sessions at this conference lasted no longer than 15 minutes, mostly to appease their “continuous partial attention.”
What is happening to our attention spans with our attempts at multitasking and our severely overloaded senses? One of the speakers, Linda Stone, a former Microsoft vice-president said:
“… technology can’t exist for technology’s sake. It needs to answer the question, ‘Does this product improve my quality of life?’ Wikis might be best for brainstorming, while cell phones are ideal for crisis management. Do you really need to access a Wiki on your cell phone? Only if you’re brainstorming about a crisis.”
How’s your attention span?
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02.27.06
Posted in General at 12:15 pm by Norm Garrett
I posted an extensive message in my technical website (Professor Geek) regarding an experience one of my students reported to me regarding his wireless router. In essence, he caught someone stealing his connection by sitting outside his house in a car surfing the Internet on a laptop while connected to his Internet connection via his wireless router (which was not secured). If they are going to sell these things to the general public at Wal-Mart, we need to teach people how to simply and quickly take some minimal security precautions.
I have given my networking students a project to do wherein they wardrive, an activity that involves detecting secured and unsecured wireless networks and mapping them. The rules of legitimate wardriving are never to connect to one of the networks you detect … just detect and map. The purpose of wardriving is to determine the level of security in a given area. I have driven our small town and have found hundreds of hotspots (wireless network access points). 68% of those are not secured at all, allowing anyone who wants to do it to connect to the network. At best, they just steal bandwidth. At worst, they can get into your computer and cause harm, steal identities, etc.. Basic computer skills ought to include essential security practices and best practices with regard to networking.
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02.21.06
Posted in General, Blended Learning at 9:27 am by Norm Garrett
I gave a presentation last week at the ELearning 2006 conference in Savannah, Georgia, in which I made the statement (taken from a variety of futurists) that in the year 2020, 70% of the jobs that will be available do not exist today because 80% of the technologies that will exist and that will create those jobs do not exist today. If you question the reality of those figures, or at least the spirit of them, then just look back 15 years to 1991. In 1991:
- The Internet was not accessible to the public
- The Web had not been invented yet
- There was no such thing as a web browser or web server because the web hadn’t been invented
- Nobody had ever heard of TCP/IP outside the halls of academia and the scientific community
- We were transitioning from MS-DOS to Windows
- Local area networking was only marginally functional
- Company that nobody had heard of: Cisco
- Companies that hadn’t been invented yet: Google, eBay, Yahoo, Amazon
- Virtually nobody had ever heard of email, much less used it, unless they were in academia
- Gopher was the best source of documents on the Internet
- Newsgroups was where most interaction took place
- There was no such thing as .COM. There were only .GOV and .EDU
- The term ISP (Internet Service Provider) hadn’t been coined yet as none existed
- The best way to collaborate was dialing in to CompuServe with a 2400 baud modem
- The term eCommerce would not be coined for several more years
- Although computer viruses existed, they were spread by trading floppy disks
- Trojans, spyware, spam, and bots did not exist and wouldn’t for several years
- The typical PC had 32 mb of RAM (if you were cutting edge) and a 40 mb hard drive
- A normal PC, not especially cutting edge, cost in the neighborhood of $3,000
- The cutting edge processor was the Intel 386
Now, if you think of all the jobs that exist today because of the Internet alone (which didn’t exist back then, at least in a form the public had access to), you get the idea of how much things have changed over the past 15 years. Since the pace of change has increased, the difference between our world now and the world of 2020 will be even more pronounced.
We need to educate our students to live in that world, a world of which we have absolutely no knowledge. The skills we give them will need to be skills that allow them to adapt, to self-teach, and project. Are we moving in that direction or are we cruising along teaching the same way we did 40 years ago, for a world that our students will never know?
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02.14.06
Posted in Future, Blended Learning, Learning Theory, Learning Styles at 9:18 am by Norm Garrett
After my post about push vs. pull learning, I flew to Savannah, Georgia, to make a presentation at the ELearning 2006 conference. On Monday, February 13th, we listened to keynote speaker Marc Prensky, noted author and futurist, speak about “Engage Me or Enrage Me,” emphasizing how we need to deal with the wired generation as they come through the school system. If you say that the wired generation is everyone born after the Internet went public then we shall say, for purposes of argument, that it’s everyone born in 1994 or later. That means that the front of the wired generation is now in 7th grade. In higher education, we’ll get them in about 6 or 7 years. Given the speed of curricular change in higher education, that’s the blink of an eye.
Marc gave several keys to dealing with these students and be able to glimpse their world. One of the main keys he discussed is the idea that learning can’t be push (predominantly the current model), but must be pull. He then went on to talk about engagement of learners, which is a prerequisite to pull learning. If you are interested in Marc’s ideas, you can visit his website.
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02.09.06
Posted in Future, Blended Learning, Learning Theory, Learning Styles at 10:43 am by Norm Garrett
I spent much of the morning today learning to use a new Java IDE (Eclipse) that I will need to be teaching in a year or so. As I progressed through the tutorials (which are excellent), it dawned on me that I was very much engaged in what I would term pull learning. In pull learning, I decide what I want to know about and pursue it. It is what I spent much of graduate school doing (once I got past the required doctoral courses). It is what original research is all about. In fact, it is clearly the model that most of us follow in our personal lives and is the foundation for what has often been termed life-long learning.
So why do we insist on using the push model 90% of the time in higher education? We attempt to stuff our students’ heads full of what we think is important and then check on them to make sure the stuffing hasn’t fallen out. If that’s not the model we use to learn, then why do we use that model to teach our students? If our students are to learn to think at higher levels, as I discussed in my previous post, then why aren’t we more engaged in pull learning? I think our fear of pull learning stems from several things:
- We are afraid they will “get off track” and not pursue what we think is important
- We think they will be wasting time and effort on superfluous material or content
- We don’t trust them to think for themselves
- We don’t think they know enough to know what to pursue
- We don’t think they will do any work at all if they are just “turned loose to pursue their own course”
- We don’t think they have the skills to engage in independent learning
- How will we test them on what they are supposed to learn?
- How will we fit unstructured learning into a structured syllabus and curriculum?
- How can we be assured they will know enough to progress to the next course in the sequence?
Well, you get the idea. This is the tail wagging the dog. The structure of the curriculum and the traditional methods of instruction are dictating how we move forward. Can’t we think in other terms, ignore current structures and come up with some new ways of doing things? Maybe we need to use a bottom-up approach where we decide how best to communicate content, then build an entirely new curricular structure around that. Maybe the Carnegie system is outdated. After all, if the structure is so rigid that we have lost all true flexibility, what does the future hold?
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02.08.06
Posted in Blended Learning, Learning Styles at 5:59 pm by Norm Garrett
I was reading the website of the North Central Regional Educational Laboratory in the area of higher-order thinking and sound reasoning and was particularly focused on five identifiers they list for students who are higher-order thinkers. While this site is aimed at K-12, this is equally as applicable to higher education.
Reading the identifiers made me wonder how many of my students (seniors and graduate students) have these abilities (paraphrased from the original list … use the link to see them in their entirety):
- Ability to identify the “essential elements in a problem as well as the interaction between those elements”
- Ability to “assign relative values to essential elements of a problem and use those values to rank elements in meaningful ways”
- Ability to “construct relationships between the essential elements of a problem that provide insight into it”
- Ability to “create and apply criteria to gauge the strengths, limitations, and value of information, data, and solutions”
- Ability to “build new solutions through novel combinations of existing information”
It has been my observation in over 30 years as an educator that undergraduate education often falls short of developing these characteristics in students. I think that we begin to build them at the graduate level, but don’t think “outside the box” enough to develop them in undergraduates. Of course, that is a generalization that doesn’t always apply, and where it does apply, it might be somewhat discipline-specific. Still, it is clear that we need to make an effort to do better at active learning concepts (where these characteristics are typically developed) and begin to remove some of our dependence on doing things the way we were taught decades ago. Just because it worked for me doesn’t mean it will work for my grandchildren, who are working their way through the school system now. My 2 year old granddaughter can use the computer. She can’t read, but she can use the mouse, point to icons, and click on them. I know plenty of 70 year olds who can’t do that. We have an inversion when it comes to technology. The younger they are, the more comfortable they are with it. Todays students demand (and deserve) a better approach to learning and one that is more in synch with the way they have grown up.
We can begin to solve the problem if we will opt for interactive approaches to our teaching. There is still a place for the synchronous/non-interactive activity (i.e. lecture), but its use should be significantly curtailed in favor of both synchronous and asynchronous interactive activities. Let’s not shortchange the future.
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02.01.06
Posted in General at 8:52 am by Norm Garrett
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco Systems, outlines some things we can do immediately to restore our competitive position in the world in the area of information technologies. His ideas are good ones. As some of the analysts said last night, we aren’t in danger of losing our position, we have lost it already. The problem is not retaining our leadership, it is restoring our leadership position. This means not only an across the board (i.e. all levels of education) revamping of technical/math/science education, but an economy wherein graduating students can find jobs in these important creative areas, something that has been severely lacking over the past 5 years as many IT jobs have gone overseas.
What bears close watching is what the politicians, on both sides of the aisle, decide to do with the opportunity. It could easily be lost if the discussion deteriorates to petty squabbling, as it often does. Those who don’t get around much may think that we are still the world leader in technology. Guess again. I’m not even sure we are in the top 5 when it comes to things like cell phone use, application of wireless technologies, building of IT infrastructure, and the proper integration of technology into education. Let’s pay attention to what Chambers and other industry leaders are saying and get behind any bipartisan efforts to move us forward.
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01.21.06
Posted in Uncategorized, Learning Styles at 11:25 pm by Norm Garrett
The study of learning styles is one in which you tend to see numerous models, with a great deal of disagreement as to what really constitutes learning style, how it relates to personality, and how you can determine one’s learning style. That said, here is an interesting site that I ran into on Merlot. The site uses a particular learning style model that utilizes four distinct continuums: Visual/Verbal, Active/Reflective, Sensing/Intuitive, and Sequential/Global. This model differs from many others, but works just as well as any.
The point is not to determine which of the numerous models is correct. Rather, the object is to illustrate that any given classroom probably has a very ecclectic collection of learning types. You can use any model to do this. These professors, at North Carolina State University, have posted an online instrument you can take. More illustratively, you can have your students take it and then take a look at the diversity in learning styles that they exhibit. The 44 question survey is easy to take, doesn’t take long, and is scored immediately. The result can be printed. I’m going to ask my students to take the survey and I’ll put the results here. As for me, I was in the middle of the continuum on two of the scales and at the extreme end of the other two. Kudos to these faculty for posting this … it’s a great tool.
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