Category — Technology

Across the pond, Dr. Tanya Byron, a Consultant Clinical Psychologist, recently released an important set of E-safety recommendations for children. Her report, “Safer Children in a Digital World,” was commissioned by British Prime Minister Gordon Brown in 2007 in response to growing concerns about the dangers of the Internet.

Ms. Byron’s recommendations appear, dare we say it, “spot on.” She calls on all parties; the tech industry, government agencies (education, legal), and most importantly, parents and families, to work collaboratively on the issue of E-safety.

Perhaps the most compelling aspect of her research as well as her recommendations is her sophisticated and global approach to the issue. Noting the inherent risk/reward nature of both the Internet and video gaming, Byron properly refrains from oversimplifying the matter.

Today we begin with a review of her research and the recommendations she makes regarding Internet safety. In a follow-up post, we will take a look at her research regarding video games.

Calls Parents To Task
In her report, Byron certainly is not afraid of upsetting parents, calling to attention the fact that many parents simply are not doing due diligence in regards to E-safety. “Many parents seem to believe that when their child is online it is similar to them watching television,” states Byron. “In fact it is more like opening the front door and letting your child go outside to play unsupervised.”

At the same time, the clinical psychologist recognizes the need for children to take risks, that it is an important aspect of their development as young people. One key aspect “of today’s risk-averse culture” notes Byron is that parents are “more inclined to keep children ‘indoors’ despite their developmental needs to socialize and take risks.”

But with a clear understanding of the typical behavior of youngsters the researcher states, “Children will be children – pushing boundaries and taking risks. As we increasingly keep our children at home because of fears for their safety outside” our children will tend to “play out their developmental drives to socialize” with the Internet and “take risks in the digital world.”

As with the recent Grand Theft Childhood study, Byron notes the complexities parents face with both the Internet and the current gaming culture. “Findings from the evidence show that the potential risks online are closely correlated with potential benefits.” Therefore, Byron strongly suggests a collaborative effort to minimize risks without removing the potential benefits of online access.

What Can Be Done to Increase E-Safety
According to Byron, “Everyone has a role to play in empowering children to stay safe while they enjoy these new technologies, just as it is everyone’s responsibility to keep children safe in the non-digital world. This new culture of responsibility spans parents, children and young people supported by Government, industry and the public.”

In regards to the Internet, Byron proposes a three prong approach to improve child safety when online. The three specific areas seek first to reduce the availability of improper materials, second, restrict access to such materials, and third, increase the resilience of children to harmful and inappropriate online material.

The first area could prove more controversial as it in essence creates possible regulations though Byron seeks to have these regulations come in the form of voluntary codes of practice for the industry. In this arena, Byron seeks a reduction in availability of harmful and inappropriate material “in the most popular part of the internet.” Byron recommends that search providers such as Google and Yahoo incorporate a ’safe search’ button that is prominently displayed on the search engine page. In addition, users should have the option of a “lock button” to ensure safe search options. Along with the button, Byron recommends that every search engine offer clear links “to child safety information and safe search settings on the front page of their website.”

In addition to seeking assistance from the search engine giants, Byron recommends that all home computers sold in the UK be equipped with standard parental control software specifically designed with clear prompts and explanations to help engage the parental control options. At the same time, Byron adds that all Internet Service Providers should prominently offer parental control options during the set up of any Internet connection.

From there, Byron turns to the appropriate education of parents and all adults who work with children. The notion is one of education as her recommended focus is on raising the “knowledge, skills and understanding around e-safety of children, parents and other responsible adults.” Essentially, Byron properly notes that parents also have a key role to play in managing a child’s proper Internet usage.

In her research, the consultant often found that higher Internet skill levels in children gave these youngsters greater confidence regarding Internet use. Yet, many of those same youngsters did not have either the maturity or have sufficient awareness to ensure they are actually safe online. Byron throws this issue into the lap of parents stating, “Parents either underestimate or do not realize how often children and young people come across potentially harmful and inappropriate material on the internet and are often unsure about what they would do about it.” For Byron, it is time parents became fully aware of the risks, learn what steps they should take to ensure greater E-safety, and then subsequently implement those steps.

Next Byron turns to schools and other child service providers to play a key role in helping children and their parents stay safe online. The consultant indicates that schools should deliver e-safety through the standard school curriculum. Byron indicates it is essential that children learn how to protect themselves (distributing private information, giving out contact details online, etc.). Here she seeks to build children’s resilience to any material to which they may be exposed. Youngsters need to have both the confidence and the skills to ensure their own online safety.

In regards to these extensive education programs, Byron refers to an “authoritative ‘one stop shop’ for child internet safety” based on extensive research regarding what different groups of users want.

Conclusion
In regards to E-safety on the Internet, Byron provides a compelling case for a collaborative approach to protecting children. The writer properly notes that “restricting children’s access to harmful and inappropriate material is not just a question of what industry can do to protect children.”

Such E-safety is the responsibility of parents, teachers, government officials and the technology industry collectively. Only when these groups seek to work in concert will we be able to truly protect our most vulnerable assets, our children.

Internet safety photo by Bionic teaching.

We have noted in several posts the role technology could have in enhancing education. Today we offer an interview with elementary teacher Tim Thompson, an educator who has indeed utilized technology to bring his second grade classroom to life.

Mr. Thompson recently received the Patience Norman Prize, an award presented annually to recognize an outstanding teacher within School Administrative District #52. Mr. Thompson’s principal, Thomas Martellone, notes in glowing terms this teacher’s innovative techniques. Notes Principal Martellone, “Tim has a thirst for using technology, both in and out of the classroom.”

A thirst indeed!!

In his classroom, Mr. Thompson has been using blogs to communicate class activities to parents and SMARTboard technology to have students create powerpoint presentations. In addition, Mr. Thompson utilizes movie technology for both classroom lessons and student products. This caring and dedicated teacher even provides “Podcasts” on his web page that give verbally recorded instructions for parents on how to help children with their math and reading instruction.

Below we present our interview Mr. Thompson in question and answer format. We have included numerous links to his classroom materials including “The Morning Work Show,” “The Literacy Fastbreak,” and his classroom web page.

We think teachers will find a wealth of classroom ideas as well as an inspirational dose of optimism.

Congratulations on winning the Patience Norman Prize for Teacher Excellence in your school district - my understanding is that you received a $5,000 cash prize in the process? That had to be pretty sweet?

Thanks. It’s certainly been a wild ride so far. When you’re a regular guy, who leaves a small island community to study elementary education, you’d never dream of winning an award for your everyday teaching efforts. I’m still awe struck, to tell the truth.

Can you give our readers a sense of what it felt like to be selected? Were you even aware that you had been nominated?

It has been an unparalleled honor and an extremely humbling experience to win an award like this. There are so many truly gifted educators, especially here in MSAD #52 and to be counted among some of them is unbelievable! When our Superintendent of schools announced my name as the winner, in front our entire student body it felt like I’d won an Oscar! I told my mother and father that this was the first standing ovation I had ever received. I honestly just stood and basked in the glow as long as I could. It took about a week to wipe the grin off my face. So many educators work so hard and to actually receive this kind affirmation for all the hours of preparation and planning is more than I could ever hope for.

What did your students have to say when they found out you had been selected? How about your colleagues?

My students were so proud! A young gentleman in classroom actually came up to me afterward and very formally offered me his hand and congratulated me. I also had one little girl who was so overwhelmed she burst out in tears saying, “I’m just so happy for you!” My favorite moment of celebration with my students came in the form of a phone message. After my wife and I arrived home, on the night of my award I had a message from a parent of one of my students. She related to me that her son had come home all excited telling her, “My teacher won five thousand dollars for being the best teacher in the world!” This parent, obviously very emotional, told me she was “So proud” to have me as her son’s teacher. Needless to say, that phone message has been saved!

According to Principal Martellone, you utilize a wealth of technology in your classroom - blogs, SMARTboards, and podcasts among other things. Could you give our readers some concrete examples of some of the technology you do use and how it relates to the second grade classroom curriculum? And are there some links our readers can check out to get some ideas of the products your students have produced?

It seems I’ve tried so many different possibilities in the realm of technology it’s so hard to know where to start. One of my most favorite is a new initiative into video production. I’ve found that my students respond so well to anything presented in a visual medium. Early on this year I created a daily show called “The Morning Work Show.” My students would come into the classroom first thing in the morning and gather at the white board with paper and pencil in hand. I would create a three to eight minute show that practiced skills previously taught in class. Students would watch the show and respond to written activities while it played.

The Morning Work Show has since evolved into “The Literacy Fast-Break.” Students work daily at our classroom computers with headphones to watch and practice literacy skills. These shows are also available for students to review online and often are sent home on video compilation discs I share with the parents.

My own passion for making movies has taken root in my students as well. The students love to create movies based on the content they are learning. We take small steps with these types of projects. But before long students are writing, creating slides, and voicing their own productions. Often these videos relate to a content area such as science or social studies. We began the year by studying the solar system in science. Students did basic research related to their space topic and made slides for a simple space movie. Students worked with me to create digital photo stories to exhibit their work. It is extremely gratifying to see enthusiasm spring up in students as they explore new frontiers and learn new skills.

Students are now working on cloud movies. We are using video clips from Discovery Education’s United Streaming web site. Many of these Discovery videos contain editable clips. Students are using these clips to write “voice-over” scripts that can be added to professionally produced videos. I have asked students to apply what they are learning in science class about weather and then produce a quality written script to show what they know. Their digital recordings will become mp3 files and we will work with the Windows Movie Maker program to produce student made movies. I’ve gone on and on about videos, but that’s my passion at this moment. I do still use blogs, wiki pages and other web 2.0 tools in the classroom. But the greatest spark lately has come in the form of multimedia education.

Engagement of students has been the driving force in this area for me. I desperately desire the percentages of actively engaged students to increase day-by-day… hour-by-hour… moment-by-moment… Once a former Superintendent of mine inspired us to reach not just student number one, two, and three on our class-lists… but all students… numbers seventeen… eighteen… right down to the bottom of the roster. This charge has stuck with me. Having all student’s senses fully engaged has begun to achieve this end.

When most people think of the second grade I am not sure they would immediately think of using technology to such an extent with students. Where did you come up with your ideas?

I’ve found that the most beneficial strategy in finding and choosing new classroom technological initiatives is to try them myself. Whenever the opportunity arises I sit in on our school district’s technology seminars and classes. Without fail I always hear of something new to try. After I first give it a try I am much more apt to give it a go with my own students. As educators, we ourselves never want to lose that sense of wonder. When we are open to new ideas and processes our students will be too. There’s nothing wrong with getting wrapped up in a new technique or web-tool and letting our imagination run with it.

When I start asking myself questions like, “How can I use this with my students?”… “What can my students do with this tool?”… “What are the possibilities?” Then and only then do we really get rolling.

I think a key issue at this age has to be how to assess the process of learning and manage to keep the final product from being the key focus of your assessment. How do you manage to do that?

These words constantly come to mind: explicitly model, guide, practice, support and modify. It is so true, the process is of vital importance with younger students. I have found that when students undertake a project like research and movie making. I save piles and piles on work from each student, this document, that document, all their work along the way. Students love to look back on notes, templates, organizers, and drafts they have done throughout the course of a project. These little pieces really exhibit to me just what students are able to do. The final product pales in comparison to the mountain of work the students did in preparation for that product. I do consider myself like an editor at a publishing house. And any polish or surface work students were not able to do on their own comes from work the student and I do together.

I remember some animal reports and movies my students made last year. At the end of the project I put together a manila envelope for each of my students. Their envelope contained every piece of work they completed as they made their final movie. My assessment of their work was a narrative letter with my observations of their strengths and needs. My hope is that students and parents will take the time to reflect on and celebrate all the effort their children put into their learning.

A topic that is being raised more and more in education is the teaching and fostering of creativity in the classroom. The idea is that there is no way for any of us to truly know what the world will be like for our children in the near future so creativity is now a critical component of the teaching process today. Do you agree with that notion and if so how do you go about fostering creativity in your students?

I agree whole-heartedly that creativity should be a major ingredient in any learning project we undertake. Creativity can take so many forms for so many different people. It can be flashy and glitzy. Or it can be quiet and consistent. As long as the product shows a little piece of who you are and what you care about I think creativity shines through. When students are invested in and excited about what they are learning they can’t help but be creative.

Two themes run constantly in my classroom: This activity matters and you can do anything you set your mind to. When we show students what we expect them to do, and then guide them in the steps of how to do it… They can do whatever we ask them to do. It doesn’t matter how young or disadvantaged they appear to be… all students can participate and achieve. I remember dreaming as kid of making a TV show or starring in a movie or a concert. My friends used to pretend to do this and have a great time doing it. The amazing thing is that today students have access to simple technology to actually put together a product on par with Hollywood. Instilling kids with a “Can-do” attitude goes a long way in today’s day and age. Because we all have access to the tools to help them do just that!

My sense is that your approach to teaching is enormously time consuming - how much time do you spend each week preparing instructional materials, teaching students, and assessing their progress?

Doing justice to the amount of time I put in is hard. The hours are many, let’s just say that. Teaching is not a nine to five job. Most of us know that. It is an all-consuming lifestyle. It’s all about commitment. How committed are you to providing your students with quality learning experiences? You can do that without technology, but using technology makes it a whole lot of fun. My wife is an educator as well, so we constantly talk-shop and bounce ideas off of one another. Our lives are wrapped up in our classrooms and for us that’s okay.

Being on the cutting edge obviously involves taking risks - was there ever a time when you tried to implement an idea that simply flopped? If so how did you handle that with the kids? From you experiences, is there some general advice you would give to other teachers about implementing technology in the classroom to protect them from possible failures?

Try to get over the fear of failing. I’ve learned that when you try something new in technology you more than likely will fail at one time or another. And that failing isn’t because of you necessarily, it is more than likely because of the quickly paced, very fluid, constantly evolving learning curve related to technology. I have a Garfield poster on the front of my desk at school. It says, “We must all learn to laugh at ourselves.” Letting students know that failure isn’t actually a bad thing but a great opportunity to learn is paramount. This is especially true when it comes to using technology. I’ve found that it’s great for myself and students to make a mistake, learn how to work our ways back from it and then discuss how it will help us in the future. My hope is that this approach and class attitude permeates all that we do as we set out to learn together.

For teachers interested in greater technology implementation in their classrooms yet not feeling fully confident of their own technology knowledge, what suggestions do you have for them?

Get out there and explore! Visit your building and school district technology leaders ask them what they are using. Find out what programs and web 2.0 tools your school is using. And give them all a try. I find that educational web sites like TeacherTube and EduHound are especially interesting. Seeing what others are doing can really peak your interest and inspire new ideas. I love the web 2.0 features that Google is implementing and have often used one of their tools to drive my own technology work. Google labs is a wonderful place to see what’s out on the cutting edge for web tools. Blogger has been another excellent tool for my classroom. The key is to stay aware of what’s going on online. If you hear a techie buzz word being used a lot or something new you’ve never heard of check it out. You never know exactly what might be of use to you down the road.

Grant Wiggins, author of Schooling by Design, has brought forth some very interesting points on a couple of topics in a recent post on his Authentic Education Big Ideas site.

First, Wiggins takes a look at the current “Just in Case” philosophy that dominates the American educational system then discusses the more appropriate notion of a “Just in Time” system. However, Wiggins notes that the “Just in Time” concept can only come about through a complete redefining of our current school curriculum. In regards to the “Just in Time” notion, he states, “You learn what you need in order to handle increasingly demanding performance requirements” then adds “we already do this in business, law, medicine, as well as sports and the arts.”

His point by omission: it just does not happen in education.

And as for the current educational system, Wiggins is unequivocating. He states, “Most people in schools do not believe the system is broken.”

He pulls no punches as to common items he hears from teachers, “Just listen to their excuses – they endlessly talk about what they cannot control instead of working passionately on what they can control.”

In conclusion, Wiggins states, “We still confuse teaching with learning, we still confuse short-term with long-term goals of learning, we still think that school need not have anything to do with preparing children for the future, and we still think that good intentions are the same as results.”

Not exactly easy on the ears, the eyes, or the public school psyche.

Outraged HomeSchoolers

The fallout from a February 28th ruling by Judge H. Walter Croskey of the Second District Court of Appeals in Los Angeles still has most of California buzzing. The Judge essentially cast a ruling that children ages six to 18 must be taught by credentialed teachers no matter the location. That means certified teachers in public schools, in private schools and even at home when the teaching is done by Mom and Dad.

In making the ruling, the Judge cited state law from the early 1950s. Apparently, in 1953 an appellate court had ruled against homeschooling parents who sought a way around California’s compulsory education laws. Adding major fuel to the fire is that the judge went on to stipulate that if instructors (home schooling parents) teach without credentials they will be subject to criminal action.

Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joined the homeschooling parents in the outrage of the ruling. Noted the Governor, “Parents should not be penalized for acting in the best interests of their children’s education. This outrageous ruling must be overturned by the courts and if the courts don’t protect parents’ rights then, as elected officials, we will.”

The whole debate came as a result of a potential child abuse lawsuit. Ironically, that suit did not seek such a ruling regarding the home schooling issue.

Since there are an estimated 150,000 to 200,000 students homeschooled in California currently, there certainly is a significant number of angry citizens. According to most research, very few home schooling parents possess teaching credentials.

Yes, Boys and Girls Are Different

I must say I knew it all along.

Researchers have noted for quite some time that girls have superior language abilities than boys. But until the release of recent data, a biological basis for that difference has never been presented.

However, a recent study from Northwestern University and the University of Haifa, deemed to be unambiguous, reveals that the areas of the brain associated with language work harder in girls than in boys during language tasks. In addition, the findings of the researchers indicates that boys and girls rely on different parts of the brain when performing these tasks.

In the study, tasks were delivered in different formats, one a visual task, one an auditory task. The findings indicated that boys’ used a more sensory approach while girls used a more abstract approach.

One amazing suggestion is that this could all be a result of the fact that girls develop faster than boys. If such is the case, then would expect the differences between boys and girls would essentially disappear in adulthood.

And as for the longstanding question on the whole notion of giving directions, when we ask a woman how to get to a certain location, a man will perceive he is getting extraneous information yet for women all information is relevant due to the abstract nature of the thinking process in females. However, according to the study, men require only one cue, and in turn, may be distracted when provided additional information.

The study could have incredible ramifications for the classroom, particularly the idea of a return to male and female segregated classrooms. Science Daily has a synopsis of the findings while the entire study was published in the March issue of the journal Neuropsychologia.

Arnold Schwarzenegger photo by
Schumachergirl1956.

This Tuesday and Wednesday prospective college students and their parents would do well to find some time to check out CollegeWeekLive’s (CWL) second ever two-day virtual college fair. More than 200 colleges have signed on to help connect prospective students to higher education in a live, interactive environment.

The free, innovative, virtual fair will offer a wealth of live streaming video keynote presentations from college admission experts. Among the topics to be addressed will be financial aid, standardized tests (SAT, ACT), college admissions trends, and scholarship options. Registered users will have access to real-time, interactive Q&A sessions with admissions officials and current college students.

The fair will also offer a Virtual Exhibit Hall and College Booths for more than 100 colleges. Touring the conference area virtually on their computers, students will be able to click on a booth for immediate access to electronic brochures, videos, webinars, and podcasts. Once again, at each virtual booth, prospective students will be able to instant message and/or video chat in real-time with admissions counselors and students.

Several Informative Keynotes to Be Offered
Registered users will also have access to a number of live keynote addresses from admission experts that will be broadcast over the web from 4 studios across the United States. Among the confirmed speakers are Howard and Matthew Greene, of Howard Greene Associates, admission consultants; Marty O’Connell, Executive Director, Colleges That Change Lives (CTCL); Ira Wolf, President of PowerPrep and Author of “How To Prepare for the New SAT;” Dr. Katherine Cohen, CEO, Founder, and Admissions Counselor, IvyWise and Applywise; Ronald Johnson, Director of Financial Aid, UCLA; Peter van Buskirk, Author of “Winning the College Admission Game; Strategies for Students and Parents;” Karan Goel, CEO and Co-Founder of PrepMe; and Jaye J. Fenderson, Author, Seventeen’s Guide To Getting Into College.

One of the more interesting presentations will be delivered by Mike Marriner, the founder of Road Trip Nation. Marriner’s story is a very interesting one and contradicts the oft view that one must give up his or her passion and individuality in the quest for a career. Marriner and two buddies traveled the roadways and interviewed people who defined their own paths in life. Marriner interviewed the likes of the founders of Starbucks and of Barnes and Noble, the CEO of National Geographic Ventures, the scientist who decoded the human genome, the CEO of Dell Computers, as well as individual truck drivers, filmmakers, social activists, and self-employed lobstermen.

Ongoing Agenda Development
The current AGENDA is posted but it will be updated continuously right up until the fair begins. The site notes that all speaker times are subject to change so interested students should monitor the agenda throughout.

Students may register at any time and the site offers links for interested Sponsors, Parents and Counselors. CollegeWeekLive takes place from 12:00 PM EST to 11:00 PM EST on March 25th and 26th.

Once registered, users may participate in a number of scholarship competitions including a Video Essay Contest. CollegeWeekLive is looking for creative videos about the college search process and will award the creator of the video receiving the most page views a $2,500 college scholarship.

This free, innovative approach to the college admission/selection process represents a cost effective method for students to learn about key aspects of college as well as gain information from a wealth of schools. The virtual fair should prove to be very informative to any student interested in higher education.

Most importantly, this wealth of information will be available to students from the comforts of their own homes.

We found that trying to concoct one list of the digital commons success stories was simply beyond the scope of our small site. The number of truly noteworthy developments is large and growing more substantial by the day, each new venture seemingly offering yet additional opportunities for further growth.

In fact, it is precisely as Larry Lessig writes in The Future of Ideas, “Philosophically, if the Web was to be a universal resource, it had to be able to grow in an unlimited way. Technically, if there was any centralized point of control, it would rapidly become a bottleneck that restricted the Web’s growth, and the Web would never scale up. Its being ‘out of control’ was very important.”

Out of control it has been and here are at least some broad categories and central themes that represent a partial list of the commons success stories. We have called it an endless array because of the sheer volume and the interconnectivity and layering that occurs over the numerous developments.

Online Resources/Collections
One could not create a list without the mention of the Wiki concept and the top Wiki dog, Wikipedia. We understand the issues that user editing can create. But the user editing feature is precisely why this online encyclopedia offers its immense depth and breadth in more than 15 languages. And yes, we understand that too many students rely on Wikipedia exclusively despite the fact that every teacher in America tells students the site is only a starting point.
When it comes to Wikipedia, we think that Bill Van Loo of billvanloo.com states it best. “Wikipedia is one of the most successful proofs of an open, community-contributed way of building a base of knowledge and ideas. Even with its drawbacks and critics, it’s hard to overlook the sheer size and breadth of the information contained there. The fact that a student can type in almost any historical name, place, event, invention, theory, or person and get back at least some information almost instantly is pretty remarkable, especially looking back 10 years.”

We have to agree - as we prepared our work for the digital commons series, we researched the likes of Garret Hardin, Daniel McFadden, and Larry Lessig. We researched more technical concepts like php and MySQL. We challenge anyone to find one existing tome or web site that could give novice folks information on as many disparate categories as the Wikipedia site.

The concept has spawned Wikiversity, Citizendium, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), eXtension, Rice University’s Connexions and countless others. The difference may be a focus, it may be possible contributors, but the concept is always similar. The movement has lead to another generation of sites, examples such as Ref Desk.com with a devotion to fact checking and Intute for those who want to research the truly technical with citations (now you can get real insight into php and MySQL).

For pure collections,there are those sites like the Yale University Art Gallery, Picture History, the University of Michigan’s Mother of All Art History, and the Picasso Exhibit from Texas A&M. Want to visit an anatomy collection, go to the University of Michigan’s Medical School site; for a biodiversity exhibit head to Louisiana State University’s Herbarium. For the physical sciences try the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Arizona University’s Themis (Mars spacecraft data), the University of Arizona’s Phoenix Mars Mission and HiRise. For history, how about the Talking History from the University of Albany, a collection of audio documentaries, speeches, debates, oral histories, conference sessions, and commentaries, or Historical Voices which seeks to create a fully searchable online database of spoken word collections spanning the 20th century.
How about Project Gutenberg which will eventually fall by the way side considering sites such as Google Scholar Beta though the site still reportedly sees over two million downloads per month. The Internet Archive provides open access to anyone while the Directory of Open Access Journals is a free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journal search engine.

Then there is the popular, How Stuff Works, the Merriam Webster Dictionary site and Metafilter, a “community weblog” featuring all fields including politics, art, culture, and technology. The Ask Metafilter is a standby for many.

Transforming Teaching and Learning
For transforming education at the elementary level, the possibilities are so endless that teachers may likely find the options overwhelming. Perhaps here we must bring in McFadden’s notion of the need for greater cataloging. That said, teachers can now turn to wikis, blogs and a host of sites that enhance reading and writing while possibly reintroducing the age-old stalwart, storytelling.

The site Voicethread.com offers a service where students can now post a photo or video and then proceed to add narration to it. As a key component, students may of course share them with other students via the net. There are sites like Blabberize, Bubbleshare and Joomla - all of these allow for student collaboration, bringing potential teamwork discussions to the academic classrooms.

There is YouTube and TeacherTube along with sites like Open Culture that then point readers towards the best such videos available. There is site called pageflakes where each student in the classroom could have their own blog. One site can contain a class and house all blog. Melanie Lewis, the Instructional Technology Resource Teacher for Amherst County Public Schools offers, “Just think, as a teacher, you could see instantly who had updated an assignment!”

Transforming Education, Secondary, Post Secondary
Moving up the ladder teachers can turn not to educational podcasts at UC Berkeley or Stanford. There is the amazing Scratch which is “designed to help young people (ages 8 and up) develop 21st century learning skills” as well as Carnegie Mellon’s Alice, the free 3D interactive programming environment for teaching introductory computing.

The so-called Open Educational Resources (OER) movement continues to be one of the major success stories of the open digital commons. Thanks to one of the premiere universities in America, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) there is a movement to make college level materials free to anyone signing on to the Internet. MIT began this movement when Provost Robert A. Brown asked a committee of MIT faculty, students, and administrators how to best serve “the nation and the world in the 21st century.”

MIT began providing open access to class syllabi, lecture notes, exams, reading lists, and some video of lectures. Since the movement by MIT, other U.S. colleges have followed suit. Schools such as Johns Hopkins, Tufts University, the University of California, and Notre Dame have since followed suit. Unlike the online college concept, these materials do not carry college credits or degrees. But they do provide the materials to help other professors design courses as well as the material that would accompany a course at one of the premier institutions of learning. Current workers who want to brush up on a course taken years ago find these offerings perfect, conveniently accessible and legitimate in their depth of academic rigor.

Operating Systems/Software
The Linux story has been well told but according to the experts we will soon see Ubuntu and Edubuntu as analogous up-and-coming success stories. These packages have served to wean users from the very costly proprietary systems (Microsoft Windows or Mac OS). On the software side, we turn to OpenOffice.org and NeoOffice.org as enormous steps in a similar direction. Given the enormous costs associated with proprietary site license expenses, many schools have struggled to maintain both up-to-date hardware and software on limited budgets. However, the software and operating platforms transition easily from education to business applications. There is, of course Mozilla, Sunbird, Thunderbird and another project called the Sakai Project (educational oriented software).

We also have Moodle, the free software e-learning platform designed to help educators create online courses. Moodle transformed the initially stale online educational environment by allowing for much richer interaction. ZaidLearning lists the New Zealand OER Project as a Moodle site worthy of mention to readers. And there is the blog WordPress, a publishing system written in php and backed by a MySQL database, that is taking the blogging world by storm.

Social Networking
The area of the future may well be the various social networking sites. We have Facebook, MySpace, and the latest social interaction sites like Twitter or Tumblr. Schools currently block all of these sites insisting they have no learning value whatsoever. Technology teachers think otherwise and see the sites as potentially revamping how schools provide homework help as well as opportunity for group learning to extend outside the school building and school hours. Throw in the newer ideas like LiveMocha that combine the social networking with learning a language and we begin to scratch the surface of what such sites may do down the road.

We know that this list is non-exhaustive. We found that trying to create a list of successes within the open culture would actually be a relentless task; no list could stand for more than a day or two before a shift in the importance of one site versus another is followed immediately by a new idea pushing aside a prior top dog.

In fact, it was in trying to create a finite list of success stories that we realized just how right Lessig and the Creative Commons folks are on this issue.

In our last post we expressed our strong support for a free and open web. To try to get to the heart of the Creative Commons movement, we were fortunate to be able to interview Ahrash N. Bissell, Ph.D., the Executive Director of ccLearn (the educational division within the Creative Commons).

Dr. Bissell previously served as the Assistant Director of the Academic Resource Center at Duke University after spending time as a Research Associate in the Department of Biology at the school. Dr. Bissell also worked on data-sharing issues for interdisciplinary research and served a lead adviser for a program to bring science education opportunities to underprivileged middle-school kids.

Though Dr. Bissell began his work with the Creative Commons just last summer, he is already immersed in a variety of projects. As to ccLearn, Bissell notes that his branch of the commons organization seeks to “educate people about copyright” as well as “advocate for open education and the adoption of open educational resources.” As a means to accomplish those ends, Dr. Bissell indicates that ccLearn is also is concerned with “improving the interoperability of present and future resources in a globally interconnected world.”

As is our usual custom, we present the interview in question and answer format.

What were your personal reasons for leaving Duke University to become involved with the Creative Commons organization?
There were several personal reasons why the position at CC was attractive to me. First, I believe that CC licenses, or something like them, are the way of the future, especially in fields where the economies are based on something other than money (e.g., in academics, the economy is based on citations and exposure more than the $$ made). Second, I have always been frustrated by the fact that the tools exist to make data and information sharing extremely easy, which is a necessary prerequisite for synthetic and interdisciplinary research, and yet we are a long way from fully taking advantage of these technologies. The problems are mostly legal and cultural, and organizations like CC are at the forefront of pushing for change. Third, most of my prior work centered on the premise that education is about more than the content. In other words, students don’t sign up for classes to get access to a textbook; rather, they sign up to get access to the environment, the expertise embodied by their teachers, and to get tangible credit for their learning accomplishments. Decades of good pedagogical research have shown that our current “memorize-and-regurgitate” system of formal education is broken and is failing to achieve our national educational goals, yet changing the system is nearly impossible as long as people insist that learning is nothing more than exposure to more information. CC-licensed education materials offer a possible way to break this logjam, since by definition they are free and open to anyone. I believe this should cause educators, administrators, and learners to more carefully consider what added value is obtained by sitting in a classroom. I think there is substantial added value to classrooms, in numerous dimensions, but only if the lessons and indeed whole courses that are designed and taught thoughtfully, ever mindful about the fact that the education should be about more than the content. So my position at CC affords me the opportunity to test out these thoughts and see where they take us.

Can you briefly summarize the Creative Commons philosophy?
For the Creative Commons as a whole, the philosophy essentially boils down to empowering creators to clearly and easily enable their works to be accessed and used by others in myriad, often unforeseen, ways. The CC licenses were inspired by the sense that the current system of copyright is essentially broken, or at least quite inappropriate for modern, digitized, web-based content. But more interesting is the fact that many, many people create things that they want others to share, adapt, and otherwise engage with beyond looking at them. The simple fact is that people really should not be putting their IP on the web unless they want people to share them, and CC makes this both easy and legal. CC licenses have since spawned all sorts of creativity around a platform of sharing: new business models, different ways of communicating, community-generated media, and so on. We cannot predict what will happen with these ideas in the future, nor do we want to be in the position of dictating best or worst examples of using CC licenses. For us, the highest purpose is to allow for creative expression to proceed unfettered by the arbitrary limits of the law when people do not actually desire those limits. There are many who believe that CC is somehow anti-creator (i.e., the licenses only benefit consumers of content), but that is incorrect. First of all, all creators are also consumers, for nothing is created out of thin air. And second of all, we have never said that we believe that all things should be CC licensed; there are some ways in which CC licenses work well, and other situations in which standard copyright is likely to be more appropriate. Fortunately, creators enjoy complete autonomy in deciding what to do.

Can you give readers some sense of what the organization is hoping to accomplish and the impact it is having on the key issues related to copyright laws as well as maintaining an open digital commons accessible to all?

Clearly, in order for this capacity for creativity to be fully realized, a fully open digital commons is crucial. We are fundamentally opposed to any form of top-down control over internet usage and rights. In cases where certain types of content might need to be blocked or controlled (e.g., adult sites when kids have access to machines), those decisions and blocks should be made locally by the affected consumers, not by the media companies, the government, or anyone else. One problem with the current copyright system is that it outlaws most of the social applications of the web, which basically makes criminals of anyone who goes online. Clearly, this is silly, which is why we often point out that CC is copyright, and moreover that CC licenses strengthen respect for copyright since they enable people to do the things they believe they should be able to do anyway, thus clarifying the distinctions between those rights and the lack thereof for all-rights-reserved works.

When people talk about the concept of the Creative Commons, the issue of net neutrality comes up a great deal. In your mind, where do these concepts differ and where do they overlap?

Well, they are definitely related, as I stated above, but not otherwise fully overlapping, though this is now stepping some distance from my expertise. To me, net neutrality is usually focused on ensuring equal treatment of both file types and contents. CC simplify clarifies the conditions under which those file types and contents are made available. So, even in a non-net-neutral world, it is not clear how this would or would not affect CC-licensed materials. On the other hand, CC licenses, like the internet itself, threaten some of the businesses that make a living on distributing materials of limited quantities. These businesses still have a lot of money and tend to throw their weight around in DC (and elsewhere), so CC-licensed materials could be subject to attack if ISPs were in the position of essentially taking bids for the content that is or is not allowed into peoples’ homes. This scary thought has far greater ramifications than anything about CC per se.

In his book, Professor Lessig writes: If the resource is rivalrous, then a system of control is needed to assure that the resource is not depleted-which means the system must assure the resource is both produced and not overused. If the resource is nonrivalrous, then a system of control is needed simply to assure the resource is created—a provisioning problem, as Professor Elinor Ostrom describes it. Once it is created, there is no danger that the resource will be depleted. By definition, a nonrivalrous resource cannot be used up.

Would you take the position that the Internet (specifically, the fiber that connects the world) is rivalrous or nonrivalrous? Some argue that without regulations the Internet arteries will become more clogged than the New Jersey Turnpike during rush hour. In summary, could you address the argument that it would be better to regulate the Internet now before it gets overwhelmed?

This is definitely outside of my area of expertise, but I’ll take a stab anyway. The internet (the fiber) is a physical object, and as such it is rivalrous. However, it is more accurate to think of it, as you did, like a highway, which is understood to be a public good and is therefore built and maintained by public funds, subject not to the rules of economics (in the strictest business sense), but rather to the rules of meeting some basic benchmarks for functionality. There is no question that there is a real danger that the internet will start to clog up as net traffic increases (some would say we’re already there), but I would not agree that regulation of different types of traffic is the answer. There are many clever ways to manage the flow of information so that peoples’ experiences with the internet are seamless, and of course we can always lay more lines. One of the nice things about the internet at the moment is that fact that everyone involved feels some responsibility for making it function as well as possible. I would worry that if we got the government involved, people would have less incentive to be creative about that aspect of the internet’s development and we would see the pace of technological innovation slow down.

Given the pressure from the Tel-coms, et al, to begin regulating the web, could you describe some potential scenarios of a regulated web? What specific applications might general users lose as a result of regulations? What potential options would those who seek to create new business opportunities through the web lose as a result of regulation?

I can only speculate in the most general of terms, though I have already experienced some frustrations in this regard with Comcast, which has already been accused of violating net neutrality. TelCom regulation is likely to result in greatly reduced capacity to view and share video and other band-width hogging file types (I experienced this myself, as I just mentioned). With restrictions on such content, some sort of bidding or backroom dealing will automatically emerge so that certain sites can avoid the restrictions. Clearly, this cannot be a neutral process, thus undermining some of the most fundamental and democratic aspects of the web. One set of regulations will spawn others, as the government will probably have to force certain network providers to provide unfettered access at certain times, but that’s fraught with uncertainties, and so on. And of course once the regulations kick in for the high-bandwidth files, the lower bandwidth files will almost certainly follow. I would expect the regulatory mindset to quickly assert control over the content as well, so that content from certain sites, countries, cultures, languages, etc., will be banned according the whims of the day. Some of this obviously happens already in places like China, and we have always railed against those policies as being profoundly undemocratic. I would hate to see us go the same route.

Can you give us a concrete example of what has happened in China?
One example is how the same Google search performed in China and in the US returns radically different results, even accounting for language and other regional differences. An obvious example that was shared was a search for “Tienanmen Square”, where a search here shows images of the protests and Chinese tanks that squashed them, whereas the same search in China reveals historical documents about the square and tourist images. Clearly, the Chinese government is not interested in net neutrality in terms of content. I doubt they are the only ones who engage in this practice, and I also doubt that such interventions are limited to the content only. It’s a slippery slope once you start imposing these top down regulations on the types of information (format or content) that can flow through the web.

Could you specify some of the greatest developments to date given a neutral web and flexible copyrights and can you suggest of some applications not yet in place that could come about if the net remains as it is right now?
I definitely do not have a good enough sense of the overall development of the web to give you a decent list. But sites like YouTube, Wikipedia, and most of the social networking (Web 2.0) sites are phenomena that were pipe dreams only a very short time ago. All of these sites depend on an unrestricted flow of data and ideas. As to somewhat related yet at the same time different forms of growth are the business and informational models that have emerged from unfettered access to copyright-free data. Examples such as weather-satellite info, DNA sequences, and so on. And while I am a skeptical of the potential of virtual environments (e.g., Second Life) to supplant real-world experiences, I believe that there is a bold future in virtual environments for training through the exposure to “forbidden” or otherwise impossible experiences. Here again, the capacity for these innovations to be truly transformative depends on a neutral web and flexible copyrights.

Would you make a different list if we did not add to the list the concept of more flexible copyrights but instead focused only on neutral web?
A neutral web seems to me to be crucial for the ongoing generation of novel technologies that leverage the capacities of the web. For example, better, faster web-based platforms for content (docs, videos, songs, etc) creation will probably become the rule rather than the exception, freeing us from our desktops. Truly mobile technologies, using mesh networks and always-on accessibility will transform the ways in which we communicate, and the types of information we presume to always have access to. Novel forms of dissent would be powerful areas of development, but almost certainly impossible if the web is not neutral. There is a lot of activity around the development of products and practices that is apart from copyright, and most of these activities would suffer in some way if the web is not neutral.

Thanks to JimFrazier for traffic photo. Text edited for clarity.

We have heard many express concerns over the future of the Internet. One group postulates that an unattended digital commons is destined for the same troubles facing our over-fished oceans and our clogged highways. Others insist that without regulations the behemoths of the industry like Google and Microsoft will simply take control of the world-wide web, perhaps creating bottlenecks and other insidious or onerous forms of control.

On the other hand, we find we very much like what we see today. We are enthralled by the creativity that is demonstrated daily on a site like YouTube and enjoy the incredible breadth of opinion displayed by a new generation of writers called bloggers. We like the fact that no one controls what content is available to us and we love hearing the rags to riches stories of another successful entrepreneur who used their Internet connection, a computer and their own garage to create a world-wide business.

Are we simply in the Internet golden age? Is our current unfettered optimism of the net similar to the feelings of those who came to America to settle a new world? Most importantly, when we sit down with pleasure at the computer today are we doing so with blinders on as to what is to come?

The Tragedy of the Commons
In his famed 1968 piece, “The Tragedy of the Commons,” Garrett Hardin took the time to address a class of issues he called “no technical solution problems.” For Hardin, that constituted the group of problems that could not be solved with technological advances alone but would need moral clarifications as well (population control).

Hardin also explicitly discussed the noble goal of creating “the greatest good for the greatest number.” However, Hardin acknowledged the obvious, what is considered the optimum for one person might be “nothing but wilderness” while for another the optimum would “constitute ski lodges for thousands.”

Those two discussion points formed a critical aspect of what Hardin called the “Tragedy of the Commons.” To remedy the issue, Hardin discussed a concept of “mutual coercion that was mutually agreed upon,” i.e. a set of agreed upon regulations with consensus as to how to properly enforce them.

The Town Commons
Hardin explains his “Tragedy of the Commons in the following way. “Picture a pasture open to all. It is to be expected that each herdsman will try to keep as many cattle as possible on the commons.

“As a rational being, each herdsman seeks to maximize his gain. The rational herdsman concludes that the only sensible course for him to pursue is to add another animal to his herd. And another….

“But this is the conclusion reached by each and every rational herdsman sharing a commons. Therein is the tragedy.

“Each man is locked into a system that compels him to increase his herd without limit — in a world that is limited. Ruin is the destination toward which all men rush, each pursuing his own best interest in a society that believes in the freedom of the commons.

“The individual benefits as an individual from his ability to deny the truth even though society as a whole, of which he is a part, suffers. Education can counteract the natural tendency to do the wrong thing, but the inexorable succession of generations requires that the basis for this knowledge be constantly refreshed.

In 1968 Hardin was able to articulate the following example, one that we face today. Our “National Parks present another instance of the working out of the tragedy of the commons. At present, they are open to all, without limit” but “the parks themselves are limited in extent whereas population seems to grow without limit. The values that visitors seek in the parks are steadily eroded. Plainly, we must soon cease to treat the parks as commons or they will be of no value to anyone.”

The Digital Commons
Does the digital commons mirror this physical world? Many seem to think so.

Daniel McFadden, the winner of the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2000, writes in “The Tragedy of the Commons”that “the commons that is likely to have the greatest impact on our lives in the new century is the digital commons.” And for that new commons, according to McFadden, we now face the same issues with the digital information that our early settlers faced with the town commons and our natural parks currently face from too many visitors.

McFadden notes that “information is costly to generate and organize, but its value to individual consumers is too dispersed and small to establish an effective market.” Furthermore, “the information that is provided is inadequately catalogued and organized” meaning the Internet “tends to fill with low-value information.”

He concludes by providing four models as to how the digital commons might operate in the future so as to avoid a tragedy similar to that of the town commons. McFadden further insists that the “management of the digital commons is perhaps the most critical issue of market design that our society faces.”

But all of his suggestions leave us feeling hollow. Are we destined to have such poor options as a pay for connect ISP that controls content much like a newspaper of magazine of today? Can we not do better than an array of services that mirror the channel structure of cable television? And can’t we do better than a pay as you go system, however small, and instead give everyone access to the great equalizer, knowledge?

McFadden does acknowledge that “one of the enchanting features of the Internet over the past decade has been unabashed, free-wheeling innovation.” But he seems convinced that the digital commons is on a path similar to that of the town commons depicted by Hardin.

Perhaps to use Hardin’s analogy, McFadden seems to believe that the problems that the digital commons faces could in fact be an issue without a technical solution. Furthermore, McFadden seems to see the digital commons issues as mirroring the difficult Hardin discussions surrounding the greatest good for the greatest number. In the end, McFadden sees the concept of mutual coercion that is mutually agreed upon as a necessary step for the digital commons.

He does give some hope with the following: “The solutions that resolve the problem of the digital commons are likely to be ingenious ways to collect money from consumers with little noticeable pain, and these should facilitate the operation of the Internet as a market for goods and services. Just don’t expect it to be free.”

Maintaining a Free Digital Commons
In direct contrast, the Committee on Economic Development’s report, Open Standards, Open Source, and Open Innovation: Harnessing the Benefits of Openness, touts the success of the “commons” approach: The report notes the “benefits of openness” and insists that continued openness is critical for further growth. Perhaps most importantly, the report challenges the thinking of those who view the digital world in the same manner as that of the physical world.

Certainly consumers have to be pleased with the current digital commons. Today, when we sign on to the Internet we are able to access any information we want at the fastest available speed. Essentially we are also able to use any service we want at virtually whatever time we want to access it.

This fact is dubbed Net Neutrality and it forms the underlying basis of a free and open Internet system. The concept of Net Neutrality is deemed by many as the epitome of democracy because it is so consistent with anti-discrimination laws. Internet providers may not speed up the net for one class of citizens nor slow it for some other class. Content cannot be discriminated against based on who is the owner, the sender or the receiver.

Most importantly, under the current structure, it is the consumer who is in complete control. It is the consumer that decides what content they are interested in and what applications they wish to use. Because of the free and open Internet, it is the consumer that decides the merit of a web site or a service, not some corporation.

At OpenEducation.net, we believe the current openness of the Internet is precisely why consumers find an explosion of applications and content. While some fear the clogging of the physical Internet arteries, the continued development of the Internet appears to point to the free digital commons as providing greater good for more people.

Larry Lessig and the Creative Commons
The work Larry Lessig, author of “Free Culture” and founder of the Creative Commons seeks not only the continued push for such openness, but to break down the very barriers that limit the current innovations commons from growing even further. In particular, Lessig has begun a push that seeks to rethink copyright laws as they exist today.

Lessig notes, “Free content is crucial to building and supporting new content. The free content among the ‘wired’ is just a particular example of a more general point. Commons may be rare. They may evoke tragedies. But commons also produce something of value. They are a resource for decentralized innovation. They create the opportunity for individuals to draw upon resources without connections, permission, or access granted by others.”

Lessig insists the current concerns surrounding copyright is not one about artistic freedom and protection. It is instead about control. Lessig wants to move to a world where content authors have the ability to choose how their work is to be used. Detractors insist the current copyright law prevents piracy of an individuals work.

The Tragedy of the Digital Commons
For Lessig, the viewpoint is entirely contradictory to the views of the Tel Coms, McFadden, and the legal teams representing the corporate music giants. For Lessig, the true tragedy of the digital commons would be any move to stifle or to legislate.

In “The Future of Ideas,” Lessig refers to the creation of the web thus: “If the Web was to be a universal resource, it had to be able to grow in an unlimited way. Technically, if there was any centralized point of control, it would rapidly become a bottleneck that restricted the Web’s growth, and the Web would never scale up. Its being “out of control” was very important.”

Of the Web developers, Lessig states: “They were extremely talented; no one was more expert. But with talent comes humility. And the original network architects knew more than anything that they didn’t know what this network would be used for.”

In addition, the last thing Lessig wants to hear about is the notion of legislating because some are uncertain as to where the future of the Internet will take us. The Stanford Professor insists on just the opposite.

“In particular, when the future is uncertain—or more precisely, when future uses of a technology cannot be predicted—then leaving the technology uncontrolled is a better way of helping it find the right sort of innovation. Plasticity—the ability of a system to evolve easily in a number of ways—is optimal in a world of uncertainty.

For Lessig there is no doubt that the open digital commons is the right way to proceed. “This strategy is an attitude. It says to the world, I don’t know what functions this system, or network, will perform. It is based in the idea of uncertainty. When we don’t know which way a system will develop, we build the system to allow the broadest range of development. This was a key motivation of the original Internet architects.”

We agree with Lessig’s optimism and see the digital commons as an intellectual commons not a physical one. Keeping open access means that all of the great minds, those so-called great by society as well as those without the credentials, can tackle these issues in an intellectual manner.

And as for the potential tragedy that others insist is awaiting the out-of-control Internet, Lessig says simply:

“There is a tragedy of the commons that we will identify here; it is the tragedy of losing the innovation commons that the Internet is, through the changes that are being rendered on it.”

We could not agree more.

Next up we take the time to interview Dr. Ahrash Bissell of the Creative Commons.

A new web site is changing the meaning of being published. SciVee Televisionis a new site designed by scientists for scientists. The concept is simple, SciVee allows scientists to make their research available on the net by combining a published scientific article with a video to create an online presentation. Once posted, other scientists can view the presentation and engage in virtual discussions about that research. A cursory glance reveals two distinct areas, pubcasts that are connected to a published paper and another video section for those without published research. One nice feature is that with each video a simple scan over with the mouse reveals two options, a preview of the video or the full video. That allows the user to get a snippet first to determine if they do want to see the full product.

An article of great interest to us involves the notion of play. The New York Times Magazine article Taking Play Seriously offers some very interesting thoughts about the need for play. We are not talking about just kids here; the focus is on adults as well. As we prescribe more and more medications for mental health issues in children and adults alike the piece resonated with us. Take the time to read the entire article, it is lengthy but it likely has some aspect that will resonate with everyone else as well.

A web page getting bookmarked at a phenomenal rate is a site called LiveMocha. According to the site, “LiveMocha blends self-paced lessons, a vibrant community, and interactive tools to help you talk to the world.” It offers a combined social interaction concept with that of learning a language.

We wrote recently about America’s falling college degree attainment level when rates are compared to other nations. We see where James Altucher has penned a provocative piece entitled College: A Waste of Time and Money. Altucher writes, I have “no intention of sending my kids to college. I find the thought of college abhorrent, particularly for 18- to 20-year-olds. Kids have a lot of energy at that point, and to deaden it with a forced, unsupervised diversity of random topics taught by mostly mediocre professors is a waste of that energy.” Seems that business is the only way to go in his view.

And lastly, readers should check out 9 (More) Useful Web Sites You Should Know About But Probably Don’t. How about Chegg.com, a site that rents college textbooks and plants one tree for every textbook rented. There are explanations of Yelp.com, a site that provides local reviews in some of the bigger cities, Woot.com which sells one electronic product per day, and Google’s GrandCentral.com that allows the consolidation of phone numbers to one location.

While traditional, campus-based colleges continue to see flat enrollments, online universities are seeing steady up-ticks in student numbers. The primary reason for that growth is due to the flexibility online programs offer. However, two recent innovations by two different national online schools also demonstrate why these institutions continue to be so popular; they are simply the trend setters for higher education.

Capella University Offers New Blog
The traditional image of a college student is that “of an 18- to 22-year-old who goes full time to college directly from high school and lives on an ivy-covered campus.” That image is fallacious in the extreme since only about 15% of college students fit that profile. The other 85% “are part-time students, or are over the age of 22, and increasingly participate in programs that don’t require being on a campus at all.”
That fact has lead to the creation of a blog devoted to improving education for the majority of college students, “The Other 85 Percent.” The blog’s editor is Michael J. Offerman, EdD, the former president of Capella University and now vice chairman of external university initiatives for the college. Offerman has an extensive background in both adult and distance learning, and he recently led the new Transparency by Design initiative.

According to Offerman, the intent of the blog is “to explore the current state of adult higher education delivered at a distance” with a focus on online schools. Offerman sees the adult focused, online option as a “tremendous opportunity for creativity and innovation.” In a nutshell, his interest is particular to learning outcomes or the specific knowledge that “a person will learn in college precisely what they need to know to succeed in their careers.”

In addition, Offerman seeks to provide a forum for discussion of the following critical questions:

Why do we need adult-serving colleges and universities?
Is online learning effective?
Is online education valued?
How can you convince people that it should be?
Why is it that colleges and universities serving adults
at a distance are leaders
in the reporting of real learning outcomes?

By being university-based, the blog has initial credibility. It also collects into one place the many key discussion points that must be addressed to further help the majority of college students continue their college education. Most importantly, it uses current technology yet does not rest on the fact that online education is the format already doing the moving and shaking.

A quick scan of page one reveals snippets and links to some of the very articles that should form the focus of the discussion. In particular, the site references the report on America’s falling degree attainment status that formed the basis of one our of recent posts, Real Economic Stimulus Needs a Long-Range, Educational Approach.

This blog concept is precisely why online colleges are currently setting the educational pace.

American InterContinental University Online (AIU Online) Launches AIU Mobile
Another online university taking critical steps towards innovations is the web-based campus of American InterContinental University. In recent days the school has announced the launch of an all new branch of the school, AIU Mobile.

The new concept is touted as “an easy-to-use mobile education delivery channel that truly defines the word ‘portability. While delivering many of the same elements that AIU online provides students, AIU Mobile takes the step of allowing students to access online educational programming as well as the necessary support systems in place for those program through web-enabled cell phones and other wireless devices.

We wrote about the difference between e-learning and mobile learning in our post Mobile Learning vs. E-Learning, Is There a Difference? AIU Mobile is precisely the mobile learning format that brings the classroom to a mobile phones or PDA. The result is to potentially tailor the educational opportunities to an even greater extent, introducing the two concepts of “just-in-time” and “just-for-me.”

AIU Mobile appears to meet the critical components of this next generation of learning. It provides live access technology with the ability to access all critical school (class assignments, instructor directories, campus email, grades, and video technology). Simply stated, a lack of a computer is simply not a problem anymore.

It is great to see this continued push to the edge of technology by AIU, a school that has regained its footing with the recent elimination of its prior accreditation issues.

Todd Ritter has authored an excellent piece over at DownLoadSquad.com entitled Five Ways to Improve Technology in Education. Ritter begins by describing the response of teachers during the David Pogue keynote at the Pennsylvania Educational Technology Expo and Conference. He writes about the many ooohs and aaahs emanating from the audience and rightfully comes to the realization that many educators are not up on all the groundbreaking developments occurring in technology these days.

He then writes, actually quite gently, that it is very important for educators to “understand and adapt new technologies so that students can benefit from read/write instruction instead of a stale, read-only education.” Directly after his assertion, he offers up his “five ways to improve technology in education.”

The Recommendations
Ritter begins with the obvious, the need to keep up to date with the rapid-fire changes. He then does an exceptional job reviewing the process educators can use to stay in touch with the many developments occurring. He then moves on to a second key component, the need to always focus on the process of learning and not the end product. Though this valid point is often missed by educators, this recommendation is enormously important as teachers begin utilizing video and storyboarding techniques with students.

He then moves to the need for a close connection between the IT folks within education and the teachers in the classroom. Perhaps here we find a slight misstep based on an assumption that every district and every school currently employs a person who understands the educational technology piece (many districts still only have nuts and bolts techies who keep the system running).

In wrapping up, his last two recommendations are exceptionally dead on. First to learn technology teachers need to be users themselves. Ritter suggests Facebooking or using Skype with other teachers to create a social network of educators who are both active users of technology as well as sharers of the latest info available. He then finishes with a great concept. His idea, to “Go on Creating,” is modestly detailed yet lies at the heart of the entire issue in our mind. In other words, teachers need to be explorers and creative beasts who constantly create new learning options for students. Not only will children respond positively to teachers who do so, teachers will find their energy and commitment to education growing as they feed off the creative juices the come with such a motto.

One Key Problem
Unfortunately, in many schools and for many teachers, the above five suggestions simply are not happening on a regular basis. But the reason that most teachers are not up-to-date on technology is that they are simply too overwhelmed by the day-to-day responsibilities of their existing schedule to be able to stay up with the technological advances that are occurring.

To get a sense, we turn to a comment we received a while back from Mark Riffey, a businessman and the husband of an elementary teacher. In commenting on an article regarding some recommendations we made about improving teacher quality, “Improving Education, It Won’t Happen Until…”, Mr. Riffey wrote,

“Even if teacher pay is doubled, that doesn’t change
the fact that 65 hours is probably the mean.
I know the 6th grade teacher at my house
works substantially more hours than that per
week. Don’t get me wrong, the extra cash
would be nice, but do I see her able
to work 70-80 hours a week for the next
15-20 years? Not really.”

Therein lies the basis of the problem for teachers. While students in other countries spend more time at school than American children do, most teachers in other countries do not have additional instructional responsibilities during that extra time. Instead, time is built into the school day for teachers to collaborate, to prepare lesson materials, and to receive professional development.

For teachers to be able to consistently implement the five recommendations that Ritter makes, there will need to be a massive overhaul of the current expectations for teachers. There will also need to be a massive overhaul of the school schedule, both in terms of the school day and the school year.

It is time that schools offer technological tutorials and professional development opportunities during the school day when the teachers are scheduled for work time. Likewise, there needs to be staff devoted to ongoing professional development, teacher leaders who practice the very recommendations that Ritter espouses, but who are freed up to help others learn to utilize some of these technological advances in their classrooms.

As but one example, in reading Ritter’s piece, he makes reference to the application Joomla and the possibility for teachers to create their own classroom newspaper. In reading that recommendation, we could not help but wonder how many teachers had actually heard of the application. And of those who had heard of it, we could not help but wonder how many teachers could find the time to preview then teach themselves how to utilize the application.

Ritter’s recommendations are solid. But it must be noted that a technologically out-of-date teaching staff is not a function of a lack of interest or effort. Instead, it is a reflection of an out-of-date educational structure and a system that simply does not provide educators reasonable work expectations.

If we are truly committed to improving education, we do need to look at how to help keep teachers on the cutting edge of technology. But to do so, we then must take a look at how we can reasonably implement these suggestions with our teachers.

Photos by malthe and YahooTeachers.