Category Archives: Emerging Technologies

Regulating iKids

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Besides introducing me to a very cool new term for today’s tech-savvy kids, Ravi Purushotma raises some interesting questions in his “Banning iKids” post at MIT’s Technology Review.com.

…at what price point do devices simply not belong in the world of children? What should the role of parents, school administrators and government be in shaping a child’s relationship to their media environment?

Most schools hold to an “only for educational use” policy to regulate their students’ use of technology at school. I think the line between educational and non-educational use may blurring a bit these days.

Video games as learning tools

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Did you know that the computer gaming industry made more money than Hollywood last year? All of us in the education business are surrounded by gamers who have been shaped by their gaming experiences and approach learning differently than most of their teachers. The cultural reach of gaming continues to grow. Have a listen to Video Games Setting Musical Trends from NPR’s All Things Considered for an example.

IT Conversations ran a couple interviews with gaming experts on Moira Gunn’s Tech Nation podcast recently. She interviewed
Dr. Henry Jenkins, director of the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, and talked about how games can be used as educational tools. He talked about how students engage more deeply with games than with traditional schoolwork and pointed out that gamers are often disappointed when games are too easy [clip]. When was the last time you had a student complain that an assignment was too easy?

Dr. Jenkins goes on to talk about two interesting examples of games being used in a history class setting. The first uses the commercial game Civilization III as a tool to teach about culture [clip]. The second is a simulation of Colonial Williamsburg at the dawn of the American Revolution that immerses students in the events that led up to the war. Students get a very different view than a traditional textbook can provide [clip].

Finally, Jenkins talks about the role of the teacher as a coach in an environment where gaming would be used [clip]. What he describes here would be good teaching in any context.

The second interview was with John Beck, Senior Research Fellow at USC’s Annenburg Center of the Digital Future. He talks about how businesses will have to adapt as more and more gamers move into the workforce. I think we can safely substitute “student” anywhere Beck describes “worker” or “employee.” Here are three important points that he makes:

  • Gamers bring different skills to the job including increased competitiveness and greater self-confidence [clip].
  • Gamers work more efficiently with many smaller tasks than they do with one large task. They are able to jump from task to task easily when they hit a roadblock [clip].
  • Bosses (read “teachers”) tend to be the villains in video games. Young employees do better with strategy coaches than they do with bosses, and they need to be allowed to fail and try again. [clip]

I’m old enough to have grown up on the leading edge of the gaming generation, but I never had any burning desire for an Atari 2600 console back in the day. I think I must have missed out on the gaming gene somewhere along the line. Most teachers are probably like I am in that respect, but I think it would be wise for all of us to spend a little time with a computer game if only to try to get a better understanding of our clientele.

Hacking Google Maps

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Saw this today on Jon Udell’s weblog. It seems that with enough knowledge of javascripting, Flash, and access to a handheld GPS unit, it’s possible to create semi-animated walking or driving tour using the new Google Maps service. Jon, inspired by Matt’s work, has created a five-minute guided tour of an area near his home complete with voiceover narration, zooming in and out of the map, still images, and short video clips. Amazing!

My first thought is that this could be a great addition to the “soundseeing tours” that have become pretty popular in the podcasting world. I haven’t investigated far enough to know how complicated it is to make one of these Google Maps animations, but wouldn’t it be a great multimedia project idea for students? The project ideas are endless:

  • Tours of the kids’ hometown with local landmarks and points of local history highlighted
  • Virtual tours of places the kids have visited or would like to visit
  • Recreations of historic trips

Jon’s blog appears to be thoroughly slashdotted at the moment. I’ll post an update as soon as I can get back to it.

Thinking about the semantic Web

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I saw a mention of mSpace on Slashdot today and it couldn’t have come at a more opportune time. My brain has been stewing for several weeks now trying to figure out a way that our Hopkins teachers could share the lesson plans that they’ve created with the rest of the staff. I’ve looked at some online curriculum mapping products that advertise their ability to drill all the way down to individual lesson plans. (More posts on that later.) And just yesterday I saw a demo of the Infinite Campus student information system that purports to support sharing (or at least storage) of teacher lesson plans. None of these products have me convinced yet.

mSpace seems like a totally different approach that is worth a look. I’ve already downloaded the 97-page technical report and will start reading that later, but the abstract gives me hope:

The mSpace interaction model describes a method of easily representing meaningful slices through these multidimensional spaces. This paper describes the design and creation of a system that implements the mSpace interaction model in a fashion that allows it to be applied across almost any set of RDF data with minimal reconfiguration. The system has no requirement for ontological support, but can make use of it if available. This allows the visualisation of existing non-semantic data with minimal cost, without sacrificing the ability to utilise the power that semantically-enabled data can provide.

I’m not going to lie and say that I understand all of this stuff. But I understand the problem I’m facing. I want teachers to be able to create lessons that might involve all sorts of media and make those available for searching for their colleagues who may want to search by subject, academic standard, or some other characteristic. Looks like I’ve got some light reading for tonight.

Minneapolis a top tech city?

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According to the current issue of Popular Science my fair city of Minneapolis is the nation’s “Top Tech City.”

What made Minneapolis our high-tech champ? It ranked first among U.S. cities in innovative transportation solutions, fourth in energy technology. The city fell above the 50th percentile in every category measured, a broad-based showing of tech savvy that set it apart from the competition. With everything averaged together, there is no city in America where a culture of high technology has a more pervasive presence.

I’m a little surprised. With the exception of our glitzy new light rail line, the public transportation system here is average at best. The examples cited in the article seem a bit trivial. Maybe I’m just too close to it to appreciate it.

College students going wireless

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MSNBC is running an article that describes how wired phones are increasingly irrelevant to today’s college students. Some colleges are considering getting rid of land lines in campus housing all together with some surprisingly financial implications. At American University:

Five years ago, the school made hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on long-distance service, said Carl Whitman, executive director of the Office of Information Technology. Last semester, the school made $1,109.

That’s a pretty dramatic turnaround and it points to the increasingly digital and mobile lifestyle of today’s young people. (Seen on Slashdot.)

Pew project reports on Internet evolution

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The Pew Internet & American Life Project has a new report that describes how Americans’ use of the Internet has changed in the last few years. The report concludes that “The Web has become the ‘new normal’ in the American way of life,” but I was most interested in their description of how Americans use the Internet differently depending on the bandwidth that’s available.

Now we are in the midst of yet another important change in the internet—the rapid switchover from dial-up access to high-speed broadband connections. More than half of Americans who go online now have access to always-on connections at home or work, and they are different kinds of users than those with dial-up connections. They spend more time online. They do more online activities, especially those that exploit bigger information “pipelines,” such as accessing streaming video. They are much more likely to create content and share it with the rest of the online population. And they report greater levels of satisfaction with the role of the internet in their lives.

I hinted at it in a previous post on the topic, but it bears repeating. Bandwidth is the new digital divide—or will be soon. I just did a quick check on my Smoothwall firewall network traffic graphs and discovered that over the last week I’ve been averaging 2.1 kB/sec. That doesn’t sound like much, and it’s been a pretty light week for Internet usage at home, but when you work out the math it amounts to over 1.2 GB of downloads. How did I do it? It’s mostly podcasts and other RSS traffic, a Daily Show episode via BitTorrent, some Internet radio listening via my SliMP3 player, and some miscellaneous Web browsing. Can we really expect students to “create content and share it with the rest of the online population” over a dial-up connection?

Ten-year time machine

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I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how computer technology might change in the next ten years and how that will affect schools. I did a little checking and discovered that the first Pentium processor was introduced ten years ago. PCs then typically came with 16 MB of memory and 1-GB hard drives. That original Pentium had just over 3 million transistors and could perform approximately 100 million instructions per second (MIPS). Today I can buy a PC based on a 3.6-GHz Pentium 4 processor with more than 1 GB of RAM and at least 100 GB of hard disk space. Of course, the computing power available on the average desktop has grown dramatically too. That new Pentium 4 can do approximately 7,000 MIPS and contains 125,000,000 transistors.

It’s interesting to consider Moore’s Law which predicts, depending on the particular formulation you read, that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 18 months. At that rate, ten years will produce almost seven doublings and you can see that Moore’s Law has held up pretty well over the last decade.

How will students and teachers be using technology in ten years? It’s a fool’s errand to speculate, but it seems like a pretty safe bet to say that the computing power available to them will be a couple orders of magnitude greatly than what we have now. Not merely faster, tomorrow’s computers will be smaller and cheaper too. All in all, I’d say that’s a pretty good deal.

But how will that powerful new technology change how students and teachers go about their business? I’m reminded of the maxim that says the effects of new technology are usually overestimated in the near term and underestimated in the long term. Despite the hype, most teachers will continue business as usual speaking in their thick digital immigrant accents. (See Prensky’s Overcoming Educators’ Digital Immigrant Accents: A Rebuttal.) In time, however, the digital natives will become the teachers and technology will dramatically change the teaching and learning process. In the meantime, it’s going to take a lot of work for all of us to lose our accents.