Wiki Wiki Wiki What!!!

Here is my Wiki Hot Link 

I am amazed by Wikis. I had no idea! I created a Wiki for our Superbowl Party to organize food and drinks and to RSVP. I included a link to a map of our house. It was so easy. I really am excited about all that I am learning.

There are many possibilities for utilizing a Wiki in the classroom.  The obvious use is for a field trip or class party.  A Wiki makes organizing it a lot easier, like sign ups for food or car pooling for instance. 

Here is an idea for a creative writing assignment in English, or even a foreign language class.

The Never Ending Story. My kids love when we play this! The teacher creates a setting and a few characters to start off the story.  Then each student is assigned a number.  When their number comes up, each student has five sentences to continue the story and has freedom to change one aspect such as a character, setting, or plot.  The story doesn't have to make sense but it has to have some uniformity.  Creativity and freedom are encouraged!  When it is completed the teacher reads it out loud to much laughter.

Another idea for History Class is role playing the effect of written letters on ideas during the American Revolution.  Considering writers such as Adams, Washington, Hamilton, and Jefferson, the students are encouraged to thoughtfully debate the right of the colonies to through off the chains of tyranny.  The contrived experience of having to wait for someone's response, and write out thoughtful responses will help the students understand the role of letters in Colonial America.

It could work in a science lab with a Wiki devoted to one topic such as cell processes with each student assigned a different page which is linked to all the others.  Each page can contain a diagram, picture, or video and text.  

I never realized that Wikipedia was like this.  I heard that anyone could contribute but I really didn't understand how.  It is so intuitive.  It seems that a Wiki isn't intended for making money through advertising or selling something, but is it a possibility?  The O'Reilly article was fascinating in that way.  What will be the new ways of operating for profit?  He didn't even mention Facebook, which I kept waiting for.

Bloggy Blog and the RSS Funky Bunch

1.      1.   Google has made everything so easy.  It was a snap to create a blog and RSS reader.  I had confidence that I could do it because I have watched my wife create her blog on Blogger, but it was even easier than I imagined.  Even subscribing to my classmates blogs was intuitive.  The RSS Reader was incredibly easy as well and because I went there from my blog page, it automatically subscribed to the blogs I was following.  I like the RSS a lot and could see using it as a homepage, but I like iGoogle better because everything is right there:  Two emails, facebook, online banking, calendar, weather, scores, and blogs I am following.  In summary: Google rocks!  Unpleasantly speaking, I was disappointed with the add subscription search function for the RSS.  I entered Michigan Football, and many of the titles seemed to be only about Michigan Football, but after subscribing and using them, they really weren’t.  This brings up a common frustration with searching in general in the web:  It is overwhelming and hard to find exactly what you are looking for.  But after wading through the ones I didn’t want, I settled in and enjoyed the easy access to a variety of information relevant to me.  I am subscribed to about 24 blogs of interest.

2.      2.   I believe that both the Blog and the RSS lend themselves most to the tip of the cone in abstraction: Verbal Symbols, which are words, because most blogs and Readers are only words and some pictures.  The possibilities though are numerous.  Now the slope of concretion and abstraction in the cone will be contained in different degrees depending on the user’s prior experience with the material being discussed and the blogger’s use of media whether video of a dramatization, still pictures, graphs, coded message with the code decipher, or just words.  I really like the Cone and frankly am questioning why in all my Ed classes at CMU I was never introduced to this article.  The main question of when and how to introduce new concepts has always staggered me.  Why does student A get it right away and student B doesn’t?  How can I assure that I am building toward abstraction and not jumping over direct purposeful experiences?  Taking into consideration learning styles, student A probably has had an experience with the material to some degree and can connect them to words on the quiz, where student B is confused because the level of abstraction has not been founded on direct or contrived experience.  Oversimplified, I know, but this is helpful to me.  I instantly go to an Economics class which I taught.  Great concepts, but the majority of these Seniors never saw a checkbook before, except when they wanted something really badly and mom gave in and pulled it out.  Therefore in their experience, a checkbook was a cool unlimited resource for the things they want.  It was not connected to the experience of going to the bank, depositing a set amount of money, connecting that to a checkbook that MUST be balanced and budgeted.  That experience would have been paramount to grasping the verbal symbol of ‘checkbook’.  Anyone can learn to write a check; date on this line, spell out the amount on this line, etc.  So a Blog, I believe can be created in such a way as to incorporate many of the bands of the cone to help the learning build on concepts and interact with their own learning.

An RSS is a little trickier.  You can subscribe to some of these educational blogs and having them readily available and updated.

3.       3.   I suppose you can also use the RSS in this imaginative way with its inherent strengths: Compare and Contrast.  Subscribe to a Keith Olberman and Bill O’Reilly feed and assign reflection questions on differences and similarities and which one needs a bigger dose of humility. Then students post and respond to one another.  This undoubtedly incorporates all of the inherent strengths Siegel espoused.  The reality is that you could do this through editorials from the newspaper, so I don’t know that it solves a particular Postman problem.  To me it is supporting my objective of higher level thinking in analysis and evaluation.  It does solve problems of efficiency and relevancy, which are important issues.

Now a blog can move through the cone effectively and use many of its inherent strengths imaginatively.  In a single blog lesson on frogs, a student can click hypelinks of various frogs they want to learn about as well as watch a dissection video or life cycle video, complete with questions to answer in the comment section.  Instead of a simply double spaced typed one page paper on a three toad sloth, a student could be assigned a blog about the sloth, with links and pics and even a three toed theme background.  Wow!  This gets me excited about actually implementing such things in the classroom!

Week 1 Article Reflections

I read the Reigeluth/Joseph article first and my reaction along the way was to ask ‘why?’ and ‘at what cost?’ I like the idea of ‘quantum improvements in learning’ as I think most of us do, but a new way of doing things isn’t always best.  The vision and mission of education must be maintained or even improved through change, but it cannot be lost.  Could we have a viable education system if the electric grid crashed and we had no access to modern technologies?  We should be able to do this with obvious adjustments.  So many problems arise in education and so many solutions are proposed that it is hard to focus on the goal.  Standard of Learning tests are one example.  They were created by well meaning individuals to solve a problem.  Most teachers consider them a new problem, and the debate rages on.

Reigeluth quotes himself and appeals to our deeper thinking when he says, “When you really think about it, our current paradigm of education is not designed for learning; it is designed for sorting.”  He gives the founders of education too much credit.  A building was simply a way to gather groups of kids for learning.  As an educator, I never asked, “How can I advance my agenda of sorting kids today?”  But rather, “How can I effectively teach these kids today?”  So he starts off by striking a bad cord and does what Postman decries; creates a problem to be solved.

Obviously, my tendency is toward Postman.  As he says of technology: “They divert the intelligence and energy of talented people from addressing the issues we need most to confront.”  They mission, the goal, the vision of education is of utmost concern, and must be the first button on the shirt.  If that is wrong the whole shirt of education is wrong.  Now I like and appreciate technology and believe it is a wonderful tool.  It is not a question of whether or not to use technology, but how best to use it for our desired outcomes.  

A question that came to mind as I was scoping the Table 1 comparison chart in Reigeluth was, ‘who is our customer?’  My thoughts are; the parents, the students, and society, mostly in that order.  Sometimes situations arise that necessitate a change in order, like when the student is threatened at home, or a student threatens society.  I feel this is import because it helps define the role of education and educators.  I do not like the doctrine of in loco parentis.  I believe that educators are to supplement what is being taught in the home.  Unfortunately, we all know that sometimes the teachers are the only ones who give direction and affection to particular students.  Frankly it is a part of the job, most of us love.  Teachers we’ve had are probably a main reason we have become teachers.  But defining our role is vitally important. 

In the end, I liked postman’s questions and philosophy better, and found flaws with Reigeluth’s line of reasoning, but I think that the articles are actually compatible.  If we can keep technology within the boundary lines of the clearly defined goals of education, we should invest in finding new ways to improve education with technology, and a main reason I am in this class.  Both pointed to outcomes based, skills based, critical thinking based goals.  I love Postman’s use of Kay, stating he “likes to remind us that any problems the schools cannot solve without machines, they cannot solve with them. “

Kip's ode to Lafawnda

I love the final wedding scene of Napoleon Dynamite!  Kip has already checked out time travel on the World Wide Web so you know he is technologically advanced, and after failing at Ti Kwan Doe, he has realized that love for his bride and family is way more important than any other skill. 

In EDT 5410, I am excited to learn how to connect technology to teaching and making a real difference in the classroom.