I was sitting in one of Ewan McIntosh‘s sessions at BLC08 and couldn’t help noticing how much delight he took in disputing the digital native/digital immigrant distinction. The native/immigrant comparison may not be accurate (so Ewan says), but it sure is useful. I’ve used those terms many times since reading Prensky’s original article (PDF, 132kB) to bring the issue of relating to today’s kids more sharply into focus with groups of educators. So if there’s no such thing as a digital immigrant or native, is there any useful distinction to be made between today’s students and their teachers?
There are a couple others that I’ve used at various times. The first is a sort of attribution theory I read about some time ago whose reference I’ve misplaced. The basic message was that when adult learners encounter a technological obstacle such as a button that doesn’t do what they expected it would, they often respond by attributing their failure to their own lack of technology savvy. Kids, on the other hand, usually assume that the technology is poorly designed and try to identify a workaround. Ewan hinted at this when he talked about how kids will just press buttons to see what happens. I don’t see adults do that very often.
The other comparison I like is one that became clear to me when I was in the classroom teaching physics. We were talking about Newtonian mechanics, and the story of Isaac Newton and the falling apple came up in our class discussion. The classic story of the apple falling on Newton’s head is a myth; the actual story involved Newton observing the moon rise in the distance as an apple fell from a tree across the yard. When Newton witnessed those events he realized that the same force that caused the apple to fall must also be affecting the moon. He surmised that the moon is actually falling just like the apple. Of all the people who had ever witnessed a similar scene, what was different about Newton? Oh, I don’t know… how ’bout genius? 
Geniuses see connections that regular people miss entirely. I think the same difference applies to experts and novices. How long does it take you to learn a new word processor? Not very long I’d guess because you’ve probably used a bunch of different word processors in the past, and you realize that all word processors work pretty much the same. Technology novices tend to get hung up on the small differences.
I don’t know if either of those are as immediately useful as the immigrant/native comparison. I’d sure like to know if anyone has any proven techniques to accelerate the move along the novice-expert continuum.
At the most recent meeting of the Minnesota Education Media Organization Technology Special Interest Division (I couldn’t resist writing that out) I learned about a cool professional development opportunity called 23 Things On a Stick. Curious about the name? If you’ve visited the Minnesota State Fair you’d know how we in Minnesota love things on a stick.
The 23 Things… program is a largely self-paced set of tutorials intended for teachers and library folks in Minnesota who want to learn more about Web 2.0 tools. The “Things” include RSS, photosharing, collaboration, social media, online productivity, online gaming, podcasts, video, and social networking. Each participant is required to maintain a blog for the duration of the project to foster reflection and interaction with other participants.
I’d like to see someone turn the 23 Things program into a Moodle course that can be distributed to any school that is using Moodle for professional development. (“23 Things On a Stick” is made available under an Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike Creative Commons license.) Any takers?
Here’s a little tweak that should make Twitterator just a bit more useful. You can now pass the URL for the list of people to follow in the link to Twitterator itself. For example, let’s say you’ve collected a list of Twitter usernames in a text file at http://mytwitternames.com/lsdf28sdf. A link like this:
http://twitterator.org/?url=http://mytwitternames.com/lsdf28sdf
will take you to Twitterator and pre-populate the URL field. This should make it even easier to help a group of people get subscribed to a bunch of other Twitterers. Have fun with it.
The Lake Minnetonka Half Marathon was my first try at the 13.1-mile distance, and I was bound and determined not to repeat the rookie mistakes I’ve made in previous races. In last year’s Run For Oromia 10k and Twin Cities Marathon, I felt good at the beginning and started way too fast. With my Timex Bodylink GPS system I knew that I would be able to monitor my pace often, and I hoped that I could stick with my race plan and avoid flaming out.
Conditions were perfect today. It was just under 50°F at the start and almost 60°F by the end. It was just cold enough at the start that everyone kept their outer layers on until the last minute. Since the race goes point-to-point, I appreciated the fact that they transported our warmups to the finish for us. The course ran along Lake Minnetonka (go figure from the name of the race) and was hillier than I’d expected. Nothing too steep or long, but lots of them.
My plan was to do the first couple miles at 9:00 pace, 8:45 pace until 10k, 8:30 pace until 10 miles, and then empty the tank in the final 5k.
From the looks of the graph, I’d say my game plan went quite well. The two slower miles at 6 and 11 were due to a combination of slowing for water stops and some hills. I’m definitely happy with the trend line. I’ve never been able to do negative splits before.
The official results haven’t been posted yet, but the time on my watch was 1:53:40. I would have been disappointed if I hadn’t broken two hours, and I was hoping to go under 1:55. According to the Running Times Race Time Equivalent calculator, that puts my projected marathon time at 4:01:34. I’d really like to break four hours at Grandma’s Marathon on June 21, so I guess I’m going to need to get my lazy butt out of bed a little earlier and log some more miles.
Update: The results are in. I finished officially in 1:53:42 placing 472 out of 1449 overall and 103/192 in my age group. (One nice thing about turning 40 later this year is that I get to start competing against guys who are older than I am.) My knees are a bit sore tonight, but it’s a good kind of sore.
Big news in my world this week. Starting on July 1st I will be changing school districts to become the Chief Technology Officer in the Osseo Area Schools. It’s a really exciting opportunity to work in a large metro district (22,000 students in 31 schools) with a great leadership team and a history of innovation with technology. Check out the TICT Initiative for an example of a successful teacher coaching model. (I blogged about TICT at the 2006 TIES Conference.)
One of my first tasks will be merging the existing Technology Management and Instructional Media & Technology departments into a new Technology Division. It’s going to be a wild ride!
I’ve made a few tweaks to Twitterator over the last couple days, the most significant of which is a measure of compatibility with DabbleDB. If you create a basic DabbleDB database with a single column of twitter usernames, you can specify the URL to the .txt or .csv versions of your database and Twitterator will add them to your list of Twitter friends.
This new feature should really help if you want to provide an easy way for a bunch of people to subscribe to a set of twitter users all at once. You could maintain, for example, a list of K-12 science teacher twitter users. Make as many groups as you want and simply provide the URLs in a blog post, on a wiki page, or in a Google Docs document.
Leave a comment if there’s another feature you’d like. I’ll see what I can do to put it in. Please let me know if you find a bug.
I may attract the trademark police for this, but so be it.
It seemed like an innocent enough question at the time, but when Steve Dembo (teach42) posted a tweet last week looking for a way to import a list of Twitter names to follow I decided to run with it. It seemed like a straightforward programming challenge, and after a little twittering back and forth with Dave Briccetti I had it pretty much worked out in my head.
Twitterator, then, is a really simple web application that takes a list of twitter usernames and allows you to follow them in one fell swoop. Take a look and see what you think. I have to warn you though. This is a pretty basic CGI script, and it’s not going to be particularly fast. It depends on Twitter.com’s servers being available which can be a bit of a crapshoot. Using Twitterator may cause dizziness, shortness of breath, locusts, giant meteors, and (wait for it) sexual dysfunction. Tell you doctor if you’re using Twitterator. Don’t taunt Twitterator!
I think this could be pretty useful for training sessions. For example, you could keep a list of twitter usernames in a file on the Internet somewhere and use that URL to follow those people. You could keep lists organized by academic subject or whatever else works for you. Once the file exists at a certain URL, a bunch of people could start following those people within minutes of creating their Twitter accounts. You can also paste in a bunch of usernames manually from a blog post, wiki page, or some other source. I tried to make it as bulletproof as reasonably possible, but you’ll have to ensure that the usernames are listed one per line.
Feel free to leave suggestions for improvements or creative uses in the comments. I hope everyone finds Twitterator useful. It’s fun to exercise my programming chops once in a while, and if this brings Dembo one step closer to world domination then it’s all been worth it.
Update: All Twitterator links have been updated to point to the new URL.
Seen on TechCrunch:
Heads up YouTube, Flickr announced today that it has added video capabilities. Note that for now only Pro subscribers can upload video. This was just in time for me, because I was trying to decide how I was going to share a short video that I took on my recent Hawaii vacation of the “Sensitive plant” (Mimosa pudica). Problem solved! I just uploaded it and added it to the collection of my vacation photos. The video plays seamlessly alongside my photos and integrates really well with the whole Flickr experience.
I’ve never felt like jumping into YouTube in a big way because I just don’t shoot that much video. This new Flickr feature is perfect for me. I’ll be really curious to see if it takes off. By the way, I shot this video with my new Canon G9 digital camera. It takes amazing still pictures, and the video is really impressive too.
