Is “Cool” an Appropriate Consideration?

I’m struggling with something. I am struggling with the issue of the WOW factor. When it comes to educational handheld technology, is the “cool” factor even important? Opinions are going to differ on this point. Some will say that it is the functionality and only the functionality that matters. The choices we make about which handheld device to use with students should be based solely on it’s ability to help kids learn. Cool shouldn’t matter – only results matter.

I respect this opinion. If we in education are going to invest precious public funds, we need to make sure that there is an educational return on this investment. However, given two devices that both help meet learning goals, should the cool factor even come into play in the decision? Why can’t learning have the optics of being cool in the eyes of kids? We all know that for over a century, teachers have successfully fostered the idea that learning is not cool and not fun. I don’t know about you, but when I am learning something new in an area that I am interested in, I have lots of fun. Why can’t we use these tools to undo some of that damaged perception?

I’m going to take a risk and say that “cool” should play some role in the decision when selecting a device. I’m not sure yet that I am totally convinced, but after observing ELL students recently as they used the technology to creatively engage in language development and after noticing how motivated they were because they were using the iPod and iMacs, I’m becoming convinced. After all, even I would rather read a ebook on an iPod than on a clunky and ugly Amazon Kindle!

I’m going to admit my bias straight up and state that I love the Apple iPod. I have a 5G Video iPod and I love it. I would much rather watch a video on it or on an iPod Touch than on a clunky, ugly, Archos device. Now that this has been established, let me restate the question: “should schools be investing in iPods or other “cool” devices because they may potentially motivate students to learn and to help develop an image of coolness to learning?” My answer is that if the device achieves the stated learning goals, why not? I have had a number of conversations with colleagues who argue that marketing and image making has as much to do with the success of the iPod as a media player as the hardware itself. That may be the case but maybe we can learn a thing or two about this marketing strategy. Do we always have to maintain this utilitarian and frugal attitude about everything? We are human and we like nice things – can’t learning look cool as well as be cool?

Here’s a thought – we as teachers know that our students will come to our classes everyday – after all, it’s reinforced by law. As a result, we spend no time marketing ourselves. I wonder what the turnout would be like if there was some sort of alternative to out current school system?

I know what this sounds like – superficiality. Actually, I’m simply looking at the point of view of motivation. I know what the criticism is – what happens when the WOW factor wears off? What will happen is that this cool tool that everyone was avoiding because it was cool will become a ubiquitous learning tool.

What do you think?

Are Our Arguments Illogical? Have We Gone Through This Before?

During my undergraduate studies, I spent time looking at the past and thinking about ideas. No surprise here as I majored in history and philosophy. However, as I continue to apply my learning (despite what my friends at the time in the sciences and in business programs told me, it has been possible to apply my Arts degree in the real world), I discover that the paranoia in schools about technology is both illogical and something similar to what has happened before. Let me explain.

Part of my studies in philosophy included logic and a classical type of logic argument that I learned was the syllogism. Essentially, a syllogism is a three part argument that makes a major premise and a minor premise and from those two a conclusion is inferred. An example is:

Major premise: All mortal things die.

Minor premise: All men are mortal things.

Conclusion: All men die.

Let’s see if we can use logic to understand arguments made about technology. I’m sure most teachers would agree that cheating is unwanted. I also think that most would agree that sometimes, technology is involved in cheating. Let’s apply these two premises into a syllogism and let’s see what we get:

Major premise: Cheating is unwanted.

Minor premise: Some cheating involves technology

Conclusion: Some technology is unwanted

The logic holds here as it follows logically that some technology is, in fact, unwanted. Let’s continue with this train of thought by added a moral judgment to our logic statement. I’m sure most people in general would agree that cheating is bad. What happens when we add this to our logic statement?

Major premise: Cheating is bad.

Minor premise: Some cheating involves technology.

Conclusion: Some technology is bad.

Here our logic begins to break down. When we plug in the two most common arguments I hear about the use of mobile technology, namely that cheating is bad and that some of that cheating involves technology, into a logic statement, we get an illogical conclusion. After all, technology is simply a tool and no tool in and of itself is ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’. It is the way we use those tools that is ‘bad’, ‘wrong’ or ‘evil’. Outside of education, no one would call a cell phone or an iPod ‘bad’. We don’t ban pencils from the classroom despite the fact that kids do stab other kids with them. We simply teach students the proper uses of that technology. We need to do the same with digital technology.

If I apply my history background, our reaction to mobile digital technology in the classroom sounds awfully similar to the reaction of Luddites in the 19th century. The Luddites were textile artisans that engaged in a social movement against the Industrial Revolution as they felt that the machines were destroying their livelihood. They often protested by destroying property – in particular, the mechanized looms that were producing textiles at a far faster and cheater rate than the artisans. History shows that their resistance was futile as the mechanization of the textile industry was progress and no one today would argue that the introduction of mechanized manufacturing is a bad thing.

I believe that history will also show that education’s resistance to digitization is also futile. The Luddite response was to break the machine. Our response is to ban the equipment. At some point, we will come to terms with our fears and will be forced adapt much as the textile artisans were forced to adapt over 200 years ago.

iPod in Education Part 5: Presenter Tool

While preparing for my Mobile Learning presentation at the Leading Learning 2008 conference, I have been toying with the idea of projecting my slide show not from my computer, but from my iPod! I figured that this could add a tremendous effect if the audience were able to see first hand just how powerful the mobile tools are. In fact, this is quite useful for students as well in that while access to a computer is necessary for the student to put the slide show together, access to a computer is not necessary to present that slide show.

How can this be accomplished? Ultimately, it depends on the platform that students are using. For Windows users using PowerPoint, when saving their presentation, students can save their presentation as individual slides in JPG format.

When the images are saved onto the computer, the students can connect their iPod to iTunes and upload the the image slides to their iPod like they would any other image. Once on the iPod, the students can connect their iPod to the projector and present their slides using the scroll wheel (all iPods except the iPod Touch) or the on-screen controls (iPod Touch) to advance the slides. Please note that in order to connect the iPod to a projector, an Apple Composite AV cable or equivalent is required.

When using Macs, students have a number of options. If using PowerPoint Mac edition, the same steps stated above apply. If using Keynote, then students can either export their slide show as images, which is essentially the same as above, or they can export the presentation to iPod. Exporting the presentation to iPod turns the presentation into a Quicktime movie that can be paused and advanced at will. The benefit here is that any audio or video that is embedded in the slide will play from the iPod. If slides are saved as JPGs, only the image will be displayed but any embedded audio or video will not play from within the slide.

As an added bonus, the online office suite Thinkfree has an iPod edition that will allow students to save their presentation to their iPod, connect it to any computer for editing, and will export the slides as images as well.

If you school has some money to spend, the Viewsonic PJ258 video projector has a built in dock so that the iPod can be connected directly into the projector. This option would save lots of time and hassle but that convenience does come with a cost – currently a $1399 cost!

As a presentation tool, the iPod can make student presentations both dynamic and flexible. There is not need to set up a computer or to have a laptop available. Students simply have access to their presentation from their pockets.

Added March 25th – convert PowerPoint to iPod by creating a movie using Windows MovieMaker 

What Happens When Kids Come to School With iPhones – in JK!

Take a look at this and tell me that kids can’t learn using mobile devices! This is, by the way, a 2-year old! What will happen when Paige enters school in 2 years and is immersed into a traditional school system that frowns on using handheld technology!

Google: From Hate to Love/Hate…

OK, OK, I surrender. I’m announcing to the world that my resistance to Google is slowly beginning to fade! I have had this negative feeling toward Google for some time now. While I realize that they are the leader in Web 2.0 and web apps in general, the whole idea of one massive company having so much control and access to so many people’s personal information and browsing behaviour has always left a bad taste in my mouth. Smells too much like Microsoft. What’s made it worse is the fact that this information is being provided to Google by individuals freely! Not even Microsoft has been able to to this – they have had fight hard to invade the homes and workplaces of a high percentage of computer users – Google has accomplished this with a fraction of the effort.

Let it be known that this still bothers me!

However, there is so much good stuff coming out of Google that even I am beginning to bend. Quentin D’Souza has pointed out to me that Google has now placed Google Sky, Google Mars and Google Moon online as web apps. Here is a short video on the subject:

Add to this the presence of Google Maps online and we suddenly have massive amounts of high quality geography and astronomy available to everyone from anywhere. What is winning me over is not the applications themselves. After all, the software versions are often more robust than the web versions and there are plenty of alternative to to Google’s applications.  However, by placing these apps online, one no longer needs a computer with plenty of hard drive space in order to use the software. We can now access the software from any Wi-Fi enabled device. Being able to search the cosmos and learn about the constellations, planets, or any other known celestial object or phenomena with links to related podcasts, images, etc. from any mobile device on the go is just plain awesome.

OK Google, you’ve almost won me over. I’m still keeping my Yahoo! mail account and I’m still going to search the web using Yahoo! However, I won’t be as critical as I’ve been.

The Peter Principle: Interesting Concept

“Bureaucracy defends the status quo long past the time when the quo has lost its status.”

- Dr. Laurence J. Peter

I had never heard of Dr. Laurence J. Peter. I came across the above quote in the “Quote of the Day” flake in my PageFlakes feed reader. I looked up Dr. Laurence Peter in Wikipedia and it is here where I was introduced to the “Peter Principle“. According to Wikipedia, the Peter Principle states that “In a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence” meaning that in an organization, individuals who excel in their jobs are often promoted to positions that require skill sets that vary significantly from those used successfully in their previous jobs. This leads to incompetence as the promoted do not necessarily have the skill sets required for their new job. Another way of saying this is that just because individuals excelled in their previous job, this success will not automatically translate into success in their new jobs because the skills required are not the same.

Back to the quote, it seems obvious that a bureaucracy has a vested interest in the status quote but if, as Laurence Peter states, the quo has lost its status, then the effectiveness of the bureaucracy is lost as well. It appears to me that this quote connects quite well to other quotes I have heard. The first one is apparently attributed to Dr. Seuss (although I have never been able to find where Dr. Seuss used this line): “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always gotten.” The second one is a quote from Einstein: “You cannot solve problems using the same thinking that created them.” The connection to education and mobile learning is that if we want improvements, if we want students to excel in today’s world and engage them in a way that helps to develop 21st century skills, we can’t keep doing things the same way in our classrooms.

There are interesting implications for education here. I’ll have to look into this some more…

Two Steps Foward, One Step Back…

Three headlines really struck me this week. The first was “ACU first university in nation to provide iPhone or iPod touch to all incoming freshmen“. The second was “Cellphone college class opens in Japan“.

It appears that a change in mentality is finally taking place. It’s interesting to see the devices of choice as well. In the US, it’s the iPhone, in Japan, it is the highly used cell phone. Nevertheless, the education system, at least at the post secondary level, is beginning to embrace mobile technology as a learning tool. In the second instance, the title of the headline is a little misleading as the “cell phone course” made available by Cyber University in Japan is actually being offered in both an online format and a cell phone format. It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.

However, the picture is not all rosy as a third headline shows how this transition to the use of mobile and online tools in education will not be a smooth one. The headline, “Student Faces Facebook Consequences” demonstrates both how old attitudes do in fact die hard and the hypocrisy of a system that encourages students to collaborate but only when that collaboration is done face-to-face. With all this fear of cheating and academic misconduct, perhaps we need to stop using fact and information based evaluations and replace these evaluations with skills based evaluations. It’s much harder for students to cheat if they have to demonstrate an acquired skill vs. simple information regurgitation.

As an aside, fact and information based evaluations are important when access to information is difficult and the means to access information is available only to the privileged. However, in knowledge-based societies such as ours where facts and information is readily available, is it necessary to focus our evaluations on a student’s ability to memorize knowledge pieces? When information is easily available, the skills to find, and more importantly use, this information becomes much more important. Perhaps open book, or should I say open access, tests should become the norm and the tests evaluate not the information that students can remember, but how students use the information available to make arguments or prove ideas. This is, after all, what what working professionals do!

Twitter On The Go: Twitter on Mobile Phones

The the ability to access Twitter on mobile phone is causing the nature of communication to change again. While on the surface, instant messaging has allowed individuals to communicate through their mobile phones with others through brief text messages, the community features associated with Twitter bring that type of communication to a whole new level. While instant messaging is about communicating to an individual or to a small group, Twitter is about communicating to larger audiences and keeping up with contacts through Twitter is easy.

For those unfamiliar with Twitter, here is another commoncraft video describing what Twitter is an how it works.

Applications for education? Well there is a lot of discussion on the web right now about how Twitter can be utilized to help students learn. In this video, professor David Parry of the University of Texas discusses how the dynamics of the classrooms have changed and how the the walls of the classroom no longer apply. Using Twitter on mobiles helps to keep teachers and student better connected in the new global classroom. This article from the Read/Write Web discuss how Twitter is fast, is an excellent platform for providing instant updates and it provides for easy two- way communication. Accessing this on mobile phones provides all these benefits from any location on the globe.

In applying this to education, when students are connected with their peers, Twitter can allow study groups a way to communicate with each other or with other students all around the world. In the case of K-12 education, Twitter can even serve as a means to keep in contact with parents about important dates, school emergencies or school events. I have recently been involved in conversations where schools want to purchase a paid service that allows them to communicate with parents using instant messaging. The company providing the service would provide software allowing the school to send instant messages from a computer and maintain contact lists. Twitter already allows all of this and it’s free!

Twitter is changing education in another way as well. I’ve been reading about Twittories and I find the concept interesting. Twittories are collaborative stories where many users contribute 140 characters worth of text to create their group story. Here is a TechCrunch article about it. This may be an interesting way to get reluctant writers or students who have difficulty with writing involved in the writing process as they are participating in story writing but are doing so in small manageable chunks. Mobile twittories allow for students to contribute when their have their moments of inspiration, which may or may not coincide with the school day.

Using mobile web apps is definitely becoming more and more practical on mobile phones. The wide arsenal of tools available for teachers and students is ever growing. In an education system emphasizing differentiated instruction, Twitter is one way students who don’t learn in traditional setting and using traditional teaching techniques can be reached.

iPods in Education Part 4: Using Notes

I’ve recently learned a few interesting ways to utilize the Notes feature of the iPod and I though that I would share these ideas. It’s actually pretty interesting to see how a simple feature can be utilized to yield powerful results for learning.

Idea #1 – Accessing Text with Audio

I think I’ve mentioned this in a previous post but it is worth another mention. The Notes folder is essentially a folder found on the hard disk of an iPod and can only be accessed if the Enable Hard Disk mode is selected in iTunes. Once this feature is activated, the hard disk of the iPod can be accessed in Windows Explorer (Win) or in Finder (Mac). A simple use is to take the text of a book, say a novel take from the Gutenberg Project site, save the text in any word processor as a .txt file and moving that .txt file into the iPod’s Notes folder. Once in that folder, a student can find the text by navigating to Extras, Notes on the iPod. However, couple that with the audio version of the novel from LibriVox, and the student can listen and read at the same time.

Idea #2 – Making Interactive Tests or Other Types of Interactive Content

This is really super simple and really, really useful. A teacher can create interactive content (combining text, images, videos and sounds) by using text and a little html code. Here are the steps:

1. Type the text
2. Insert links to multimedia using the the following codes
3. Link to audio: <a href=”song=Song Name“>Name of the Hyperlink</a>
4. Link to Video: <a href=”video=Video Name“>Name of the Hyperlink</a>
5. Link to Photos – save the photo to the Notes folder and use this code to link to that photo: <a href=”Photo Name“>Name of the Hyperlink</a>
6. Save the file to the Notes folder on the iPod and use

When interactive content is made, students can use the iPod to access text, access audio files reading that text (whether the teacher records themselves reading or downloads the file from other places), access video related to the content, etc. without having to scroll through iPod. The only thing that the user has to remember is to click the menu button on the iPod to return to the text after accessing multimedia from a link.

Idea #3 – Converting Documents and Webpages into Notes File

Using web tools, such as iPod Notes Packager, teachers can take documents or web pages, upload the file or the web page’s url to the service, and the service will convert the data into linked Notes files. Keep in mind that Notes files are restricted to about 4000 characters per Notes file. However, you can save an unlimited number of Notes files so by linking individual Notes files together, whole documents can be saved and accessed. iPod Notes Packager does all this work for you – just upload the document in .txt format or insert the url and download the linked Notes files!

Once more thing…

If you want to ensure that students only see your Notes file on the iPod, try setting the iPod into notes only status (museum mode):

• Create a plain text file named “Preferences.txt”
• Add the following line: <meta name=”NotesOnly” content=”true”>
• Save the file and copy it into the Notes folder on iPod.