Room With A View

I’m reading Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture. In it he refers to John Seely Brown who was the Chief Scientist Xerox. Brown believes that we learn by tinkering. People have learned about engines by taking apart lawnmowers or motorcycles.  People learned about electronics by building radios. Open source software gives people the opportunity to learn about software. People can learn about music or video through remixing. Tinkering is learning.

I like the idea. It makes sense to me. It explains my preferred method of learning. Generally, I don’t like courses. I much prefer to learn a new piece of software through trial and error. I learned iMovie by editing videos of my kids. The first “movie” I made was of my son and his friends doing bike stunts.

I learned Wordpress and Drupal by installing them on an old computer at home. I read a lot of on-line manuals and watched tutorials but not before I’d mucked around with each program first. I do read manuals but only once I’ve mucked around first. By playing with something first it gives the manual the context I need to understand it. 

We need to give kids more time to tinker. In the current standards driven climate in which we practice, it’s not easy.

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

This looks like a good use of Google Forms in a PE class. Personally, I find opportunities for enhancing instruction with ict limited. I think I’ll follow this blog for a while to see what other good ideas float to the surface.

I’ve been thinking about the audio school folks that all talked about the need to be entrepreneurial. The days of working one’s way up in the hierarchy of record companies is gone. The life of an audio engineer is now about business and contracts. In short they need to be self-employed. I imagine it’s the same for people working in the movie industry too.

My concern is that I don’t see schools–at least international schools–preparing kids to be self-employed. Schools should not follow business models. Nor do I think the role of schools is just to prepare kids to be good employees but I do think they should have enough business savvy at the end of high school that they have the confidence and skills that they can start the process of becoming self-employed. I suspect that most teachers–myself included–do not have the skills or the knowledge to teach this but it still needs to be done.

Regarding music and video in schools many of my discussions with kids seem to be about what they can’t do. They can’t copy music because it’s illegal. They can’t use a video or music clip in a podcast project because we don’t have rights to re-broadcast the media. It’s extrememly limitting and for many teachers it means they don’t publish students’ media projects on our website or through other channels i.e. YouTube.

Rip: A Remix Manifesto takes a different view. Instead it suggests that culture has always been built by building on the work of others. It’s just been in the last 30 years or so that copyright laws have made it illegal.

Food for thought.

Several weeks back Google announced job cuts and cuts to some of its on-line apps. Among others it announced that Google Notebook will no longer accept new users and Google Video will no longer accept user-uploaded content. I use Google Notebook with my classes.

I’m not surprised it’s getting shut down. Of all the apps I use with students and teachers it’s the least understood. Many people are happy just to make their notes in Google Docs. Though Docs and Notebooks are similar I like the ability to right click on content and have it saved to a notebook. Regardless of how one feels about Google Notebook it points out the potential downside of cloud computing.

Cloud computing put users at the mercy of others. Other than more traditional websites that schools control, cloud based sites can be shuttered quickly and with no guaranteed input from users.

I find the concept of cloud computing very attractive. Someone else has to worry about the cost of storage and data backup. Also, it makes client software support easy because it’s browser based. But as attractive as I find it, the fact that someone else controls accessibility makes it not a viable option for schools as a primary solution. Anyone who suggests otherwise has their head in the clouds

Stinto looks like an interesting tool. It’s a quick easy way to set up a chat room. No email addresses or passwords are necessary for users. The whole thing disappears after a short period of inactivity. It might be useful in classroom situations when a teacher needs a quick and short term chat solution. It could be easily set up on the spur of the moment.

The BBC reports on a study that states, “A major review of the curriculum for England’s primary schools
suggests that six broad “areas of learning” could replace individual
subjects.”

The areas of learning are:

I spent some time this morning reading and thinking about Brian Lamb’s post Content. I agree with most if not all that he says on an individual level. I’m just not sure how to move an institutional, like the one in which I work, toward the ideas he expresses. Like one commenter said, I agree philosophically but I’m not sure how to make it work practically.

Perhaps it’s not a matter of making it work completely but more we need to move institutions in the directions he suggests. We need to trend them in the direction of syndication, PLE’s, openness, or re-use.

Stephen Downe’s and Tom Hoffman’s posts about an e-learning project called Kusasa that is being shut down are more than a little disconcerting.

“Lesson? If a project depends on teacher training, it will likely fail.”

An article in the NY Times asks this question and points to the difficulties in having so many web services. There’s only so much time in a day.

As a tech coordinator, I’m very careful when recommending sites or tools to teachers. They’re busy. I see my role as doing some of the leg work–finding worthwhile tools and helping them see ways to apply them to their teaching.