...very little.
I'm continuing to follow up on my brilliant idea of a while back and investigating some of the factors that create resistance to technology implementation in the K-12 environment. In other words, why do teachers hate technology in their classroom and will avoid it like a plague.
When I started my digging, I checked out the C-TAP (California Technology Assistance Program) website and found a fair amount (4-5 articles) examining the digital divide between teachers and their students. A good start, but I need more (at least 8-10 articles) for a decent lit review. Additionally, none of these have been published, as far as I know, in the all-mighty peer-reviewed publications. Time to do some rooting around EBSCO.
EBSCO is the acronym for the Elton B. Stephens Co., Inc., a large conglomerate that has, as one of its holdings, one of the biggest subscription research databases on the Internet. A private subscription to the database, which contains about 4,000 professional journals, is horribly expensive, so most students access it through their university library; I gain access through Touro University's library website, so my access is from anywhere I can plug in my laptop.
EBSCO, surprisingly, didn't turn up much. My first search was with the words "k-12 teacher resistance technology implementation" and turned up nothing. Next I tried "technology implementation": too broad, with strange articles such as implementing computer-controlled hydroponic crop production. An additional filter with the word "education" turned up one article on implementation, published in 2004 in the magazine District Administration.
Back to the CTAP articles. Each article--unless it is based on primary data--has endnotes and/or a bibliography; the bibliography of an article can provide a wealth of additional sources. Some of the articles have extensive bibliographies, but again, there are obstacles: the authors' literature reviews are of papers prepared for private organizations, such as the Pew Foundation or the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, or the journals containing the articles are not available through Touro's library system. I'm now starting to dig down through these articles. It's slow work but occasionally I find a bit of gold to add to my little pile of research.
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
Saturday, March 13, 2010
More Incredibly Cool Stuff
OK, check it out...
Some incredibly clever people at the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center created a web page that shows the scale of everything from a coffee bean to a carbon atom. It's laid out so that when a slide bar is moved, the screen zooms in on progressively smaller and smaller objects. Once you get bored with zooming in on cells, nucleotides, and molecules, there's a nice explanation of how tiny microns, nanometers, angstroms, and picometers are, and some additional information on the size of cells and their components. I've included a link to the site in my Extremely Cool Links list, on the right side of the screen.
Some incredibly clever people at the University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center created a web page that shows the scale of everything from a coffee bean to a carbon atom. It's laid out so that when a slide bar is moved, the screen zooms in on progressively smaller and smaller objects. Once you get bored with zooming in on cells, nucleotides, and molecules, there's a nice explanation of how tiny microns, nanometers, angstroms, and picometers are, and some additional information on the size of cells and their components. I've included a link to the site in my Extremely Cool Links list, on the right side of the screen.
Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Twenty Sites, No Problems
I wasn't expecting this to be here, but once again, the electrons are not cooperating. I have an account on pbworks that allows quick and dirty construction of wikis, but their HTML editor is now having fits and refusing to accept the code from embedded widgets. As a result, I have been commanded to move everything over here to my blog.
Since a blog doesn't (under most circumstances) include tables, it isn't organized very well. The links were easy--they're listed on the right side of the page. The embedded "widgets" were a bit more complicated, which is why a few of them are in this post, and the rest are below the Extremely Cool Links. Here's one, a Flickr Slideshow of some of my historical reenacting photos:
Another is a PowerPoint presentation I created recently for my US History students on the Cold War in America:
I'm required to add a YouTube video. I haven't had time to create YouTube content of my own, but this is a rather nice example of what someone else (photographer SNJacobson), new to both video cameras and Windows MovieMaker, can create:
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a non-profit that puts on conferences full of interesting people talking about interesting things. These talks are recorded, then uploaded to their site for people to download, embed, or watch. This particular one is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the author of HTML, discussing the year open data went world-wide:
or some reason, HMTL editors and HTML code acts strangely on occasion, depending on the mood of the Internet. Things don't size themselves correctly, or embedded objects don't update as they should. That's life in the InterWebz.
Since a blog doesn't (under most circumstances) include tables, it isn't organized very well. The links were easy--they're listed on the right side of the page. The embedded "widgets" were a bit more complicated, which is why a few of them are in this post, and the rest are below the Extremely Cool Links. Here's one, a Flickr Slideshow of some of my historical reenacting photos:
Another is a PowerPoint presentation I created recently for my US History students on the Cold War in America:
I'm required to add a YouTube video. I haven't had time to create YouTube content of my own, but this is a rather nice example of what someone else (photographer SNJacobson), new to both video cameras and Windows MovieMaker, can create:
TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is a non-profit that puts on conferences full of interesting people talking about interesting things. These talks are recorded, then uploaded to their site for people to download, embed, or watch. This particular one is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the author of HTML, discussing the year open data went world-wide:
or some reason, HMTL editors and HTML code acts strangely on occasion, depending on the mood of the Internet. Things don't size themselves correctly, or embedded objects don't update as they should. That's life in the InterWebz.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Staring into the Abyss and Finding a Topic
A recent early-morning online conversation:
Me: What do the following things have in common: Open Source Software; programming languages (i.e., PHP, Drupal); the ISTE National Ed Tech Standards for teachers?
TechRiter: They all came from the military?
OxDon: You have to combine them in an interesting and scholarly way?
Me: Yes, I do. Hmmm...I like the military slant, but I don't think it will hold up. Most of the OSS is a reaction to the proprietary stuff that meets MilSpec (Military Specifications).
SciTeachr: All are considered way too complicated by your average teacher?
Hmmm...let's look at this for a minute. This is 2010. The Internet has been around, in some form or another, since 1969. Marc Andreessen unleashed Mosaic in 1993 and Netscape Navigator in 1994. Friendster--the first social networking website--has been in existence since 2002, and Twitter has been filling cell phones with inconsequential messages since 2006. With all this technology around us, why does it stop at the classroom door? Why do teachers who otherwise are completely wired in revert right back to the teaching strategies used by their teachers? The much talked-about "Digital Divide" seems to be between teachers and their wired-in students, and this divide is taking on the characteristics of an abyss. So why are teachers frightened by technology?
Some additional questions:
Me: What do the following things have in common: Open Source Software; programming languages (i.e., PHP, Drupal); the ISTE National Ed Tech Standards for teachers?
TechRiter: They all came from the military?
OxDon: You have to combine them in an interesting and scholarly way?
Me: Yes, I do. Hmmm...I like the military slant, but I don't think it will hold up. Most of the OSS is a reaction to the proprietary stuff that meets MilSpec (Military Specifications).
SciTeachr: All are considered way too complicated by your average teacher?
Hmmm...let's look at this for a minute. This is 2010. The Internet has been around, in some form or another, since 1969. Marc Andreessen unleashed Mosaic in 1993 and Netscape Navigator in 1994. Friendster--the first social networking website--has been in existence since 2002, and Twitter has been filling cell phones with inconsequential messages since 2006. With all this technology around us, why does it stop at the classroom door? Why do teachers who otherwise are completely wired in revert right back to the teaching strategies used by their teachers? The much talked-about "Digital Divide" seems to be between teachers and their wired-in students, and this divide is taking on the characteristics of an abyss. So why are teachers frightened by technology?
Some additional questions:
- Teacher age. In 2005, 42% of K-12 teachers were 50 or older. Only 22% of K-12 teachers were under the age of 30, putting them in the range of the "Digitals" (those born after 1982, considered the start of the Digital Age). Are teachers frightened of technology because it's new to them? Is tech too techy for them?
- Teacher training. Since new teachers are trained by older teachers not wise in the ways of technology, is this area being shortchanged by the system created to turn out classroom teachers?
- Time. Are teachers so overloaded with teaching "bell to bell" an ever-expanding content area and meeting increasingly rigorous standards that they simply don't have time to learn, much less develop, new digitally-based teaching strategies?
- Money. Are teachers resistant to adopting new technology because they know that once they return to their classrooms, they are working with marginal, obsolete equipment not capable of fully exploiting the new technology? Are certain content areas, such as English/Language Arts and Social Sciences, historically passed over in favor of adopting technology in Math and Science?
Saturday, February 27, 2010
Fifty (Dog) Years Ago...
Once upon a time, an anonymous wag at one of the tech companies compared Internet years to "dog years," as in "one year of working with tech is equivalent of seven human years." There's some truth to this. Tech is an area that runs 24/7, fueled by copious amounts of caffeinated beverages and the boundless energy of twenty-somethings that are fresh from all-night cram sessions and days spent focusing on nothing but the project at hand. In this high-speed world, the only constant is change, and skills that aren't used decay quicker than a head of organic lettuce left in the trunk of a Lexus.
Such is the case with my Web design skills. Not too many (human) years ago, I not only knew Web design, I taught Web design. HTML code was my second language, DreamWeaver was my toy. I was knowledgeable enough to write a manual for my students on using DreamWeaver in the class I taught in 2003. Oh, how things have change in the past "fifty" years.
Firstly, Macromedia--the company that created DreamWeaver--was acquired by Adobe (they of the incredibly powerful but complex programs) in 2005, for the purpose of adding DreamWeaver to the Adobe stable. It was a good move: Adobe got a couple powerful programs (Macromedia was also the source of Flash and ColdFusion) to compete against Microsoft, and the owners of Macromedia got a large chunk of Adobe stock. Adobe took DreamWeaver, tweaked it into the powerful tool it is today, and added it to their Design Suite, rounding out what was already an industry-standard graphics, multimedia, and design package.
The second thing to happen was the elimination of vocational education at many of the high schools, including my own. I was given a choice in 2005: give up the edugeek life and switch to teaching social studies or look for another job. As I'm accustomed to certain luxuries (eating, sleeping indoors, etc.) I regretfully closed up the lab, packed up and later disposed of my tech manuals, and switched to teaching history and geography with nothing more complex than an overhead projector. I maintained a cyber-presence, but since I didn't need a website, I didn't bother to keep my skills up to date.
How much my skills have atrophied in the interval was forcefully brought home when I decided to create a splash page for my domain. It needed one. I had reset the DNS pointers to my site weeks ago, but all that was appearing was the site map--not terribly professional, especially for an edugeek. I simply needed a simple page with a few links, and perhaps dressed up with a photograph. Everything was already on the hard drive, so I could knock it out quickly...or so I thought.
DreamWeaver has changed. A lot. I barely recognized it. Adobe has incorporated the "look and feel" of its other flagship programs (PhotoShop, PageMaker/inDesign, Illustrator) so many of the buttons, menus, and toolbars are approximately the same. Adobe, and the intervening advances in Web tech, have simplified other tasks; it's no longer a chore to title a page, and it's not essential to set up a site before creating a page. However, there are just enough differences, and I've forgotten enough, that I floundered about a bit before getting the basics laid out, the content added, and the page uploaded to the site.
The page is up and the links work. I think this old dog can still learn a few new tricks.
Such is the case with my Web design skills. Not too many (human) years ago, I not only knew Web design, I taught Web design. HTML code was my second language, DreamWeaver was my toy. I was knowledgeable enough to write a manual for my students on using DreamWeaver in the class I taught in 2003. Oh, how things have change in the past "fifty" years.
Firstly, Macromedia--the company that created DreamWeaver--was acquired by Adobe (they of the incredibly powerful but complex programs) in 2005, for the purpose of adding DreamWeaver to the Adobe stable. It was a good move: Adobe got a couple powerful programs (Macromedia was also the source of Flash and ColdFusion) to compete against Microsoft, and the owners of Macromedia got a large chunk of Adobe stock. Adobe took DreamWeaver, tweaked it into the powerful tool it is today, and added it to their Design Suite, rounding out what was already an industry-standard graphics, multimedia, and design package.
The second thing to happen was the elimination of vocational education at many of the high schools, including my own. I was given a choice in 2005: give up the edugeek life and switch to teaching social studies or look for another job. As I'm accustomed to certain luxuries (eating, sleeping indoors, etc.) I regretfully closed up the lab, packed up and later disposed of my tech manuals, and switched to teaching history and geography with nothing more complex than an overhead projector. I maintained a cyber-presence, but since I didn't need a website, I didn't bother to keep my skills up to date.
How much my skills have atrophied in the interval was forcefully brought home when I decided to create a splash page for my domain. It needed one. I had reset the DNS pointers to my site weeks ago, but all that was appearing was the site map--not terribly professional, especially for an edugeek. I simply needed a simple page with a few links, and perhaps dressed up with a photograph. Everything was already on the hard drive, so I could knock it out quickly...or so I thought.
DreamWeaver has changed. A lot. I barely recognized it. Adobe has incorporated the "look and feel" of its other flagship programs (PhotoShop, PageMaker/inDesign, Illustrator) so many of the buttons, menus, and toolbars are approximately the same. Adobe, and the intervening advances in Web tech, have simplified other tasks; it's no longer a chore to title a page, and it's not essential to set up a site before creating a page. However, there are just enough differences, and I've forgotten enough, that I floundered about a bit before getting the basics laid out, the content added, and the page uploaded to the site.
The page is up and the links work. I think this old dog can still learn a few new tricks.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Ignore that banging sound...
...it's just my head hitting the wall, repeatedly.
OK, I'll admit it--I have not been learning the intricacies of PHP (which stands for PHP Hypertext Processor) because I've been dealing with a major bug or two in the current release of Moodle (version 1.9.7). Ah, the joys of Free Open Source Software--something goes sideways and the search is on to discover if it's the computer, the operator, or the software. Add to this a Webhost server that is back in the very snowy Midwest, and hitting body parts against hard surfaces sounds reasonable.
Long story short: there is a bug in the install programming for Moodle that causes it to hang, lock up, or commit honorable seppuku when configuring the database where all the course files, assignments, tests, quizzes, student work, etc. are stored. The software is supposed to create the database automatically, then let the user create the database user and password. In actuality, it does none of those things, but mocks you with an evil red message that it can't connect to the database and you should check your settings. This destroyed the first Moodle last night. At that point, I did the only thing possible: Walk away. I took the time to remove everything from the site server, and left everything else for the morrow.
This morning I started with a fresh download from Moodle. One positive: I was able to check my instructions by using them for the download and installation. The software package uploaded and extracted, so I started the long process of configuration only to hang up at exactly the same point. This time there was a difference--the database wasn't locked, locking the entire program, possibly because I hadn't done any manual configuration to the program. It also meant I could eliminate most of the "operator errors." I systematically went through each part of the database creation process, and located the first bug: the program does not create the database automatically. That's an easy fix--simply use the "back office" tools (cPanel) to create the database and its user manually, using the names suggested by Moodle. No luck--the evil red message appeared again. That's when I found the second bug: the software will not recognize a database with the name "moodle" alone because it's the name used for a number of folders. Once that bug was identified, it was a simple matter to create an acceptable database and user and finish the configuration.
It feels very good to not be banging my head against a wall.
PHP UPDATE: I actually did get some reading on PHP done this week. There is a dandy little online tutorial on PHP at the PHP website, so I've started working my way through it. First step: download the necessary WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) tools, then install them. That's done.
OK, I'll admit it--I have not been learning the intricacies of PHP (which stands for PHP Hypertext Processor) because I've been dealing with a major bug or two in the current release of Moodle (version 1.9.7). Ah, the joys of Free Open Source Software--something goes sideways and the search is on to discover if it's the computer, the operator, or the software. Add to this a Webhost server that is back in the very snowy Midwest, and hitting body parts against hard surfaces sounds reasonable.
Long story short: there is a bug in the install programming for Moodle that causes it to hang, lock up, or commit honorable seppuku when configuring the database where all the course files, assignments, tests, quizzes, student work, etc. are stored. The software is supposed to create the database automatically, then let the user create the database user and password. In actuality, it does none of those things, but mocks you with an evil red message that it can't connect to the database and you should check your settings. This destroyed the first Moodle last night. At that point, I did the only thing possible: Walk away. I took the time to remove everything from the site server, and left everything else for the morrow.
This morning I started with a fresh download from Moodle. One positive: I was able to check my instructions by using them for the download and installation. The software package uploaded and extracted, so I started the long process of configuration only to hang up at exactly the same point. This time there was a difference--the database wasn't locked, locking the entire program, possibly because I hadn't done any manual configuration to the program. It also meant I could eliminate most of the "operator errors." I systematically went through each part of the database creation process, and located the first bug: the program does not create the database automatically. That's an easy fix--simply use the "back office" tools (cPanel) to create the database and its user manually, using the names suggested by Moodle. No luck--the evil red message appeared again. That's when I found the second bug: the software will not recognize a database with the name "moodle" alone because it's the name used for a number of folders. Once that bug was identified, it was a simple matter to create an acceptable database and user and finish the configuration.
It feels very good to not be banging my head against a wall.
PHP UPDATE: I actually did get some reading on PHP done this week. There is a dandy little online tutorial on PHP at the PHP website, so I've started working my way through it. First step: download the necessary WAMP (Windows-Apache-MySQL-PHP) tools, then install them. That's done.
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
...You named it what?!?
This is too good to not share.
In one of the greatest missteps in geekdom, the nearly infallible Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Inc. and demi-god to the Cult of the Apple, unveiled Apple's latest foray into the world of tablet computers: a dandy little tablet computer named...(wait for it)...the iPad.
We will now pause while everyone recovers from assorted snorts, giggles, chuckles, and guffaws.
Apple usually doesn't make this kind of mistake. The Macintosh computer and the iPod are in the Museum of Modern Art for their elegant design. Sometimes the technology doesn't live up to the hype (anyone remember the Newton?), but the design and packaging are always spot-on. Until now.
A highly anticipated launch means there will be nearly instantaneous feedback, and this was no exception. Within minutes, iTampon appeared on Twitter, and within two hours was trending higher than "iPad." The MadTV skit that revolved around Apple introducing a high-tech feminine hygiene product called the "iPad" was recycled for the masses. Jokes are now being made about the 32GB model as being the "MaxiPad."
Is Apple's new tablet computer fated to become this decade's Newton? Or will it be able to overcome an unfortunate christening to become as ubiquitous as the iPod? Only time can tell, but for right now, it's fodder for a lot of laughs.
In one of the greatest missteps in geekdom, the nearly infallible Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, Inc. and demi-god to the Cult of the Apple, unveiled Apple's latest foray into the world of tablet computers: a dandy little tablet computer named...(wait for it)...the iPad.
We will now pause while everyone recovers from assorted snorts, giggles, chuckles, and guffaws.
Apple usually doesn't make this kind of mistake. The Macintosh computer and the iPod are in the Museum of Modern Art for their elegant design. Sometimes the technology doesn't live up to the hype (anyone remember the Newton?), but the design and packaging are always spot-on. Until now.
A highly anticipated launch means there will be nearly instantaneous feedback, and this was no exception. Within minutes, iTampon appeared on Twitter, and within two hours was trending higher than "iPad." The MadTV skit that revolved around Apple introducing a high-tech feminine hygiene product called the "iPad" was recycled for the masses. Jokes are now being made about the 32GB model as being the "MaxiPad."
Is Apple's new tablet computer fated to become this decade's Newton? Or will it be able to overcome an unfortunate christening to become as ubiquitous as the iPod? Only time can tell, but for right now, it's fodder for a lot of laughs.
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