Wow. This is an amazing video of a presentation at TED by Temple Grandin, who is an autistic scientist and the subject of an HBO movie.
Here’s one from the “Seriously, you didn’t think this was a bad idea?” files: the Lower Merion School District of Ardmore, Pennsylvania, has been accused of remotely activating the webcams in its students’ laptops issued through their 1:1 program without the students’ knowledge or consent. While the case has yet to see a courtroom, it looks to be ugly for the school district and potentially detrimental to other 1:1 programs nationwide.
via Webcams gone wrong: School sued for remote activation | Education IT | ZDNet.com.
This video is a little slow and repetitive … but in 3 minutes it gets the message across: online learning is not correspondence learning on a computer.
(Or … it should not be!)
ScrollMotion’s been tapped to transmogrify textbooks published by McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and every standardized test-taking student’s favorite, Kaplan.
. . .
If you’ve over-analyzed the iPad keynote as much as we have, by now you’ve probably gotten the distinct sense that something felt like it was missing. One of those things, apparently, were Apple’s ideas about re-inventing the textbook.
via A Peek at Apple’s Plans to Re-invent Textbooks – ipad – Gizmodo.
“Most eBook readers, for whatever reason, are priced at about the level of a low-end netbook, which proves to be a significant barrier,” Mitchell said. “A tablet that is both an eBook reader and a netbook-like device would make it much more attractive to your everyday user. Plus, interactivity will bring new content and media that hasn’t been imagined yet.”
Washington state high-school students can now opt out of certain traditional elective classes at their schools, instead taking a limited number of online courses in game design, 3-D animation, video production and other technology subjects.
The for-credit classes, free to most students, supplement normal core courses, allowing students to stay enrolled in their high schools while taking some elective classes their schools do not offer.
It's all possible through a new partnership, announced earlier this month, between the White Salmon Valley School District and Giant Campus, a national online technology-education company.
via Education | High-tech electives go online for teens | Seattle Times Newspaper.
C.S.H.B. 4294 amends the Education Code to authorize use of the state textbook fund for the purchase of technological equipment. The bill requires the commissioner of education to adopt a list of electronic textbooks and instructional material that conveys information to the student or otherwise contributes to the learning process. The bill authorizes a school district to select an electronic textbook or instructional material on the commissioner's list to be funded by the state textbook fund.
via 81(R) HB 4294 – Committee Report (Substituted) version – Bill Analysis.
Very smart idea from Charlene Li for all those school sign-up sheets we get bombarding our home:
I recently met Doru Ilasi at eLiberatica 2009. He’s the executive manager of Aplix Software, and we chatted about open source and education for a few minutes.
He had mentioned a TED presentation on creative commons educational material, and just today passed on a link to the movie. It didn’t click for me when we were chatting, but when I watched Richard Baraniuk give the presentation, I remembered checking out the Connexions website a few years ago.
Here’s the video – it’s well worth a few minutes. Inspiring!
Note:
This is a cross-post from the e-folio that I’ve been maintaining as part of my latest graduate course, ETEC 533, in the Master of Educational Technology program at UBC.
Maine is planning to expand its seven year old 1:1 computing initiative to 100,000 students.
Currently, the state provides 37,000 Apple MacBooks for students in grades 7 through 12, plus 10,000 teachers and administrators. Now they’re looking to expand to serve an additional 53,000 high school students.
This is one of the largest 1:1 computing experiments in education, though it could pale in comparison to the 1,000,000 Classmate PCs Venezuela has ordered. So, what’s the cost to the state of Maine? According to Ars Technica …
The state would like to pay $242 per year for each MacBook, for a grand total of $25 million per year, or about twice what Maine is currently paying for 37,000 notebooks.
More details at Ars Technica and the AP on Google.
I’m in Victoria, BC today, right by the beautiful Inner Harbour:
It’s beautiful but cold – about 4 or 5 Celsius. Later today I have a meeting with James Shypitka, the CIO of the BC Ministry of Education. Hoping to learn more about what BC is doing in terms of educational technology.
This is a 2700-word paper for ETEC 533, a course in my Master of Educational Technology program at UBC.
Excerpt:
But when just about anything anyone wants to know is a simple search away, what, specifically, constitutes education in the age of Google? And, is it enough to know about, without knowing how, or why?
This paper is inspired by Nicholas Carr’s widely read Is Google Making Us Stupid? That being the case, of course, I have absolutely no expectation that any of you will actually read the entire thing.
But you may wish to skim …
This is a cross-post from my ETEC 533 blog, Technology in Math & Science Classes.
For me, a central concern in technology and teaching today should be: what does intelligence mean?
Of course, questions of what intelligence is have been with us for decades if not centuries. And the answer is very likely: there’s different kinds of smart.
But what do school optimize for?
Do they optimize for retention? For synthesis? For investigative skill? Or for sheer intellectual horsepower that powers through tough learning challenges? And, of course, we haven’t even talked about any of Gardner’s physical or musicla intelligences yet, or Goleman’s emotional.
None of this is clear.
What is clear is that teaching someone to be smart in a networked 21st century is a different proposition than teaching someone to be smart in a paper 18th century … just as that was different than teaching someone to be smart in an oral 5th century AD.
But sheer intelligence … has that changed at all?
Going to the oracle of Delphi, as a teacher I interviewed referred to Google, doesn’t make someone smart. And blind reliance on canned answers might be as dangerous and prehistorical obedience to cryptic priestly incantations. But distributed memory and cognition is surely an aide to the wise.
It strikes me that we don’t understand these issues as well as we should.
Chinook school district in southern Saskatchewan just doled out $200K worth of payola to the Business Software Alliance.
The problem? Some drafting software that was accidentally copied on to all computers in a lab during an upgrade.
The BSA came calling – rather like the RIAA – and demanded more than twice the MSRP … almost $650,000. It’s almost like the local “business protection association” run by burly men with bent noses and Italian accents.
But here’s the kicker:
Because the incident was not a budgeted item, the school division has to identify areas of cost savings in its system. In particular, Choo-Foo said the division is looking at some of its licensing agreements. “We’re moving more into the direction of freeware and shareware that’s available, and finding products that still meet our needs.”
The BSA won this battle. But it’s likely going to lose the war …
Welcome to Sparkplug 9, John Koetsier's blog on technology and social media.
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