eMining for Gold and Finding...

...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.

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.

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.

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:

• 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?

To swipe a line from Casablanca, "I think this is the beginning of a beautiful paper." It examines a different aspect of a Moodle adoption, and can dovetail into my main thesis.