Wednesday, November 09, 2011

 

TPACKs insufficient transitional model

The currently popular TPACK model separates technology knowledge from pedagogy and content, viewing technology as a set of basic operational skills with a thing or things. This might be useful if it will be seen as the insufficient perspective that it provides. It is the equivalent to saying that writing is the basic operational skill with pencils, pens, books and paper, with skill in using and safely storing and organizing the data put on them, with skill in installing and removing books and articles and switching out procedures for different writing sequences and using the postal service. Yes, we needed to know those things to think with text for the last several centuries, and we need to know basic digital skills for the 21st century but this perspective loses sight of the forest for the trees.

TPACK is a transitional digital immigrant perspective forced on education by its low socio-economic status in our culture. Education’s SES has long prevented digital technologies from becoming ubiquitous for its primary constituents (educators and students) in contrast to the way that digital utilization has evolved in every other major industry of our culture. The TPACK model is akin to someone learning that new language, a learner focused on its underlying structure, not yet fluent, not dreaming in the new language yet.

To the digital natives steeped in the new tools, literacy has been transformed by the digital page. There are two overlapping circles, not three. Digital literacy is content. It is one of the major content areas; software (not hardware) is king; information is valued for its distribution not its possession; technology is the invisible infrastructure that makes it all happen but never the focus of the scene. The new literacy is the particular content that deals with expression and problem solving in the minute-to-minute digital happenings of their lives. These “expressive arts” are the new language arts. The words language, reading and writing are now but a subset of the larger means of expression, understanding and composing.

Digital literacy is so much more than the expression of words, having made significant progress towards having a means for editing, mixing, archiving and transmitting the full range of human senses and unique capacities. The software that holds the ideas for digital understanding and composing has major categories of many variations with a rich history of practice prior to and on the Web: text, still image, video, audio, 2D animation, 3D animation, sensors/robotics, and social interaction. I take literacy to be the capacity to compose and understand what goes on a page (or frame). Arguably within a decade these fundamental elements of digital literacy made most of the former literate world illiterate or functionally illiterate with these newer means of digital expression on screens and Web pages. This takes time for cultural digestion and transition.

This cultural transition should also be seen within a much larger scene. The current economic malaise that so impacts world educational progress can also be seen as a holding action, an impasse between the forces of information and those of wealth and force. Our setting is caused in part by our current culture’s deep misunderstanding of the unique economic and cultural power of information and its current dominating digital nature (over 94% digital), which contrasts to our long practiced history with the cultural powers of wealth and physical power/force (manufacturing, military, agriculture) (Toffler, 1990). The political process of putting the digital natives in positions of significant leadership and authority is going to take some time.


Friday, August 26, 2011

 

Freedom Box


It's hard to see freedom and its ally of privacy disappearing, until they're gone. Nice software project underway to get it back using off the shelf hardware.

To play the CBS News story, click the next link: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=7358702n

http://www.sdtimes.com/blog/post/2011/08/24/Taking-Control-of-User-Data.aspx

http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

Original outing of the idea, 57 minute lecture, http://www.law.columbia.edu/magazine/interactive/5848/view-more-professor-eben-moglens-2010-internet-society-speech



Tuesday, March 08, 2011

 

The knowledge society: How can teachers surf its data tsunamis?


Properly sifted and mixed, data becomes knowledge and occasionally wisdom. The ongoing explosion of information, represented by the graph on the left, has challenged our cultural capacity in the extreme. Your comments and reactions to a much larger article, The Knowledge Society, are encouraged.


Saturday, February 19, 2011

 

Info Age Against Industrial-Military Complex

The revolutionary struggles in the Middle East, facilitated by the social networking tools of the Web, are one more sign of the titanic struggle between the growing power of Net collaborating and the heterarchical nature of the information versus the Web and the centralized power of the hierarchical forces that President Dwight D. Eisenhower (also commander in-chief of the free-world military in WWII) saw and warned about in his closing address to the nation in 1960 in regard to the industrial-military complex (and in his 1953 Chance for Peace speech). In the United States the next election might be defined as information systems vs. money and weapons systems, the Web vs Wall Street.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

 

Exponential Gaps

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The rapid growth of information provides a constant source of change and new opportunity. Information management can be divided into 3 major divisions, each evolving at their own unique pace: storing information (reaching across time, 23% growth per year); communicating iniformation (reaching across space, 28% growth per year); and computing information (composing or processing, 58% growth per year) (Hilbert & Lopez, 2011). The impact of that growth is continually revealed in a number of cultural changes whose implications are still being analyzed. One sign of the information age transformation from 1950 to 1980 was that manufacturing goods had been eclipsed by information management as the dominant economic activity in the world. The tipping point in information storage occurred in 2002 when more information was stored digitally than in analog format. In 2000, 75% of the world's information was still in analog format (paper, videotape, etc.) but by 2007, 94% was preserved digitally (Hilbert & Lopez, 2011).

Interesting details, by why is pondering the increasing deluge of data important? See the related multimedia composition that addresses the exponential and growing gaps in information storage, analysis, composition and access (the digital divide) that cause problems for all of us. And data is just one of many exponential challenges. How should we deal with them all?



Friday, February 04, 2011

 

Digital Divide as the new "Iron Curtain"




The digital divide is becoming the new "Iron Curtain" of the 21st century. That is, there is a significant group of citizens even in the United States that are walled off from access to the rapidly growing Net by lack of knowledge and wealth to the technology and software of the 21st century. They are increasingly as restricted from participation in the economically and politically viable part of world culture as those left behind the Iron Curtain in the 20th century (left photo). The new digital wall is invisible. It is not created by powerful, nationally centralized and impersonal control from individuals, but by powerful globally decentralized and impersonal networks. In democracies, our vote on policies control access. To move national and global culture forward, citizens are re-examining the nature of the universal rights of citizenship and the value of questioning and communicating that digital access promotes.

The digital divide, though the most significant, is just one of the many information age gaps brought about by the data explosion.

Finland (Pictet, 2010) is the first to recognize that the creation of a fully functional information society requires access to high speed broadband as a legal right. The cost of the Net access device, some form of computer, is increasingly a minor to trivial cost. The more major barrier is the monthly cost of access to the Net. Many countries are edging towards joining Finland in the world's new liberation zone. Japan, South Korea and Sweden have moved the cost down to under a dollar a month for very high speed services at many times the national average speed in the United States. Other policies such as Britain's Race Online 2012, currently provide cheap refurbished PCs with subsidized Net connections seeking to "make the UK the first nation in the world where everyone can use the Web" (HM Government, 2011).

The flipside of this issue is the cost of not having or losing Net services and not educating and digitally liberating citizens. The current disturbances within Egypt (February, 2011) that shut down that small country's access to the Net cost the country over $90 million dollars in just 5 days (Bryant, 2011). The digital divide shuts down far more at a cost that researchers are just beginning to analyze (Delgado, 2010), but by implication a high multiple of the cost to Egypt.

It is time to tear down that wall. The wall must go.

Sunday, December 12, 2010

 

Open311: another model for questions & solutions

The story on What a Hundred Million Calls to 311 Reveal About New York in the Nov 2010 issue of Wired explores 311 applications, and puts an accent on Open311. The growing set of 311 applications help citizens report problems such as open manhole covers, graffiti and broken water mains. It was discussed that they also might evolve to collect ideas for areas of need for a community and to direct citizen volunteers to assist in various projects. I see 311 type projects as one more class of question systems, but a type which provides a more substantive focus on real world solutions. Both types provide schools with a ready source of problems that can be used for real problems that can used in different curriculum content areas such as science and language arts.


Sunday, November 14, 2010

 

Adobe's Rome for Education


Ah, the promise of Rome - no, not sparkling fountains. Sorry. The goal is an application suite for the full range of the digital palette for 21st century composition and problem solving (see graphic for elements). That would certainly make our fountains of creativity sparkle. Adobe's decided to leave the rarified air of professional design and come after the home/small business/school market with a highly integrated media suite called Rome.

The Rome app includes composition editors for text, graphics, images and animation. A simplified animation editor is huge. I can also see a way to insert video and audio, but there is no evidence that I can yet see that it includes an audio editor (features from their Soundbooth would be nice). So it doesn't offer a challenge to GarageBand. I see nothing yet for a video editor (features from their Premiere would be nice). So, no challenge for iMovie. Or have I just not found those Rome tools yet? It does not include live collaboration tools (features from Adobe's Connect 8 would be nice). So, no challenge for FaceTime and iChat. There is no 3D app. But if this startup gambit is successful, they clearly have the audio, video and collaboration apps to trim down and insert into Rome. The game has gotten more interesting but Rome does not yet offer the full range the 21st century digital palette.


Friday, October 15, 2010

 

E-readers - Kindles and more


The university library at Western Carolina University has been swamped by requests to checkout its Kindle e-readers. Schools, such as the Standish-Sterling Community Schools in Michigan have started limited pilot projects with just selected classes so far. But it has them thinking. As part of their 3 year technology plans they are exploring 1 for each student.

Let's help them out. The ereader market is just part of the mobile digital literacy scene. Is it too soon to buy in big? How would you use them in your classroom? What educational challenges would these devices help solve?

Join the online discussion. Click the Comments link below.

Monday, May 31, 2010

 

Defining the Web

Curt Hopkins wrote a neat posting titled Our Network is Alive seeking a new name for the Net or Web. Fun! The comments from responders so far have included these names: The Culture, emergence, noosphere, consciousness of Gaia, noocortex, metamind, knot, fabric, mesh, nodes, network, iweb, awakening, enlightenment, overmind, reflexive, 
intervines,
the collective,
 exchangeable,
 avastent ,
avast, 
pangeant, media maze, slice, VALIS-Vast Artificial Living Intelligence System, flambango, metaverse, global digital brain, cellular neural technical network, anti-singularity, rhizome, now-now, flutternet, thinkhammer.

Go add your own.

"The Web" seems in a slight lead among these options. Should the name define how it is structured or what it does?

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