2020 vision

Who could have imagined even just ten years ago how much our world would change? Even three years ago was an entirely different reality.


The Greenland Ice-Sheet Breakup and Melt

While the scientific community and a handful of eco-activist types warned it would happen, the vast majority of earth’s human population never anticipated the rate with which ocean levels would rise once the Greenland Ice-Sheet broke off, broke up, and began to melt in late 2013 and early 2014. The 1.5 meters worldwide ocean levels rose in the first months of 2014 caused worldwide panic and havoc, and more than a few doomsday prophets. The crisis grew as the icebergs began to melt, raising ocean levels an additional 2.5 meters by the close of 2014.

In human terms, 2014 marked the year that nearly all of Amsterdam, Venice, Tripoli, Dakar, and Hong Kong; most of Caracas, Miami, Atlantic City & Barcelona; and portions of Beirut, Taipei and San Francisco became uninhabitable. 2014 was the beginning of a worldwide migration of more than 20 million. Governments around the world that were able to avoid declarations of martial law were nonetheless convulsed to the core.

2015 saw 2 more dreaded meters added to the greedy sea, and the subsequent fall of Rotterdam, Pisa, Odessa, Lagos, Cape Town, Dar Es Salaam, Cape Coral, St. Petersburg, representative government in Greece, Italy, and South Africa, and the two party system in the U.S.

Spring of 2016 gave 2.5 more meters, and took Mumbai, Ho Chi Minh City, Shanghai, Vancouver, and Buenos Aires, Fort Lauderdale, and 60 percent of the islands of Micronesia.

By the close of 2016, ocean levels were 7 meters higher than they were just three years earlier. What has come to be called the ‘highland migration;’ the insanely rapid movement of more than 93 million refugees worldwide in less than 1000 days has undoubtedly been the defining event not only of our time.

While corporate lawyers tried in vain to portray the loss of the Greenland Ice-Sheet as an unpredictable act of an angry God, the newly-formed Global Green Party gave voice to an enraged public, who overwhelmingly understood the loss to be directly linked to global warming and corresponding activities of corporate and institutional greed and waste. The backlash against institutions seen as ‘corporate polluters’ was violent and swift; with automakers and energy producers feeling the brunt of the vigilante ‘OVeR’ (Overdue Verdant Reply) attacks carried out by disturbingly sophisticated zealots. 

The Green party in the U.S. needed to control it’s violently radicalized members, or risk loosing it’s ascendency to one of the former great parties, the Democrats or Republicans, which continued to cull a few members from the tatters of their once strong base. A concerned and competent core of local and national leaders came to the fore, and reasserted rule of law, cut off the rabid vigilantes among their ranks, and consolidated power as a tough, no-nonsense party dedicated to the social welfare of all Americans and to environmentally restorative principals.

Even as societies and governments convulsed, neo-luddite tendencies were quelled in the vast majority of the population with the realization that while industrial technologies in the service of limitless capitalist greed caused the calamity in the first place; other technologies: networked, engineering, educational, and medical technologies were both a lifeline to millions, and the tenuous, tenacious threads upon which civil society precariously rested.

Lincoln-Saywire Virtual Middle School 

By 20th century standards our class of 120 would be enormous, but we’re fortunate to have two teachers for it. Lincoln-Saywire Virtual Middle School allows our students to login to class from any location at any time, which serves our dense and shifting population well. The online distribution and collection of assignments, together with grading algorithms are invaluable for managing workload, but the mandatory civil reconstruction corps apprenticeships (CiRCA) written into federal law last year go a long way to provide mentoring in the trades and plastic arts, while instilling a sense of civic duty and common purpose altogether absent from the youth of even just 6 or 7 years ago.

 The OLPAC Mark III

When OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) formed it’s OLPAC (One Laptop Per American Child) branch with federal support, all American children were promised to be equipped with simple, solar/handcrank laptops. They’ve begun to make good on their promise, but the backlog and need is enormous. Here at Lincoln-Saywire we’re fortunate enough to be fully stocked, with each of our 4,500 students in possession of an OLPAC Mark III tablet. It’s significantly less feature rich than the laptops of even just 5 years ago, but the reduction of bleeding edge features has allowed for the price point to fall below $40. And the basics it does provide, it does well, namely:

1. Integrated speakers, webcam, mic & speakers
2. Access to the GoogleSuite of business and creative tools (enabling word processing, database creation, spreadsheet production, multimedia presentations, image, audio and video capture and processing, and networked communications)

The Mark III is built to take abuse, and has a drop-rating of an amazing 20 feet. Innovation is not the hallmark of the Mark III, but durability and sustainability certainly is. In fact, it’s the first C2C (cradle to cradle) computer of it’s time; eschewing planned obsolescence, and designed to last 100 years.

Of course, none of this would matter without the internet, which has made it through these years of rapid change, and in fact, whose decentralized model has inspired other design projects of the Highland Migration. CiRCA continues to reinforce IT infrastructure with it’s project to convert rural U.S. post-offices to Wi Fi Max base stations, which is invaluable for connectivity saturation. In fact, it’s the ubiquitous availability of internet connectivity that permits virtual schools like ours to exist, with in the field learning occurring anywhere the student happens to be. As brick and mortar classrooms literally and figuratively disintegrated, virtual schools like ours have formed to address the changed realities of our time.

At Lincoln-Saywire we are proud to be a part of the growing Media Literacy movement, and expect our students to graduate with a comprehensive understanding not only of traditional language arts, but also visual and moving image literacy, interpretation, and development, and historical and contemporary methods of cross marketing and youth marketing. Students especially like using the media equipment – the mics, video and still cameras in their Mark III tablets to compose their work and responses. Our ‘citizen journalism’ class is a particularly proud curricular achievement.

All in all, it’s been a rough 7 years. Rough on all of us. And it’s likely to stay rough for the foreseeable future – certainly for our lifetimes. But it hasn’t been the end of the world, or even the end of civilization, although it has looked and felt like it at times. Our role as educators is more important than ever before, in sustaining and growing young minds and keeping the kindled flame of hope alive.

References:

• http://wiki.answers.com/Q/How_much_would_the_sea_level_rise_if_all_of_the_Arctic_ice_melted
   
• http://flood.firetree.net/
  
• http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=Amsterdam+population+%2B++Venice+population+%2B++Tripoli+population+%2B++Dakar+population+%2B++Hong+Kong+population+%2B++Caracas+population+%2B++Miami+population+%2B++Atlantic+City+population+%2B++Barcelona+population
  
• http://www.sustainabilitydictionary.com/c/cradletocradle.php

Free & Open Web App

Evernote - online personal organizer

I use Evernote personally, and would recommend it to students and colleagues alike. 

Evernote allows one to store 'notes' - little text files - online.  Easily accessible from home, work & cell phone.  Notes can be tagged and categorized for easy sorting.  In addition to text files, one can also record audio notes, or take photo notes with the camera on your cellphone.  What's more, Evernote has OCR built in, so a snapshot note can be searched as text just like any other text note.  All free.

For teachers, it's an extraordinary organizing tool - recording and categorizing the many tasks one has to manage and plan throughout the day.

For students it can serve a similar purpose, as a place to stow reminders on what to bring to school the following day, hints or tips on solving a particular math problem, or even a record of the current working draft of a writing piece.

Paperless Classes

Considering a 'paperless' class like the one described in the General studies program Columbia University is intriguing.

I already work to make much of my class paperless: I use the network to distribute lessons and materials, and also to collect assignments; however currently students save their work to a shared drive where all users have full read and write access.  There have been problems with inadvertent deletions, and occasionally plagiarism.  We are looking at a solution like saywire to provide drop-box like features for each student to securely submit their work.

Marc Meyer at Columbia says that the paperless classroom he's got going helps students "develop an emotional attachment to the work."  I see similar things in my classroom, but am wary; I think the technology could also work to decrease emotional attachment to what is being studied if not employed in a thoughtful, student-centered manner.  The technology alone does not foster emotional attachment to any given material - a well-crafted lesson (using technology or not) does.

Big Shifts

I'd like to take a moment to reflect on one of the 'big shifts' suggested by the emergence of web2.0 technologies and their ramifications for classroom practice.  The notion that schools (or really any traditionally structured, hierarchical institution) no longer 'own' knowledge to be parceled out to students is hugely transformative to the nature of what transpires in the classroom.

In a collectively-negotiated environment, knowledge becomes democratized.  And democracy has always been a loud and messy process.  Our old bastions of certainty are eroding, and it behooves us to shift our weight to a new platform, to a new paradigm, lest we erode along with them.  But it's no small thing to shift a paradigm; it happens in fits and starts and not all at once.  What fascinating times we live in!

Videoconferencing in the Classroom

While I haven't used Skype professionally yet, I suspect I will soon. I already use it fairly extensively for personal communication, and am part of the tech team at our school testing the functionality and practicality of a new Polycom videoconferencing lab. I believe that while it uses Internet2 instead of ISDN, a Skype connection can be made with the unit.
I'm exploring the resources at CILC and MAGPI  to arrange a visit with a classroom of 4th graders in another country. Language, time zone, and school bell schedule considerations are some things to account for, Along for back up plans if the connection should drop. I suspect that the work I've done in the past with bringing in guest speakers, and having students prepare questions for them will transfer into this activity.  Extensive pre-visit planning is part of this, too: I plan on having my students ready with a set of questions they have generated, be well-versed on basic background and cultural expectations of the other country (and be on their best behavior!) for the event.
I hope that by using this technology, I'll acheive greater relevance, to foster an appreciation for cultural differences, and hit on the NETS standards, particularly 2A & 2C:


Communication and Collaboration
Students use digital media and environments to communicate and work collaboratively, including at a distance, to support individual learning and contribute to the learning of others. Students:


a. interact, collaborate, and publish with peers, experts, or others employing a variety of digital environments and media.


c. develop cultural understanding and global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures.

Responding to Connectivism: Theories of Learning in a Digitally Mediated Age

 

How do theories of learning address or answer key questions of the digital age?

1. How are learning theories impacted when knowledge is no longer acquired in the linear manner?
2. What adjustments need to made with learning theories when technology performs many of the cognitive operations previously performed by learners (information storage and retrieval).
3. How can we continue to stay current in a rapidly evolving information ecology?
4. How do learning theories address moments where performance is needed in the absence of complete understanding?
5. What is the impact of networks and complexity theories on learning?
6. What is the impact of chaos as a complex pattern recognition process on learning?
7. With increased recognition of interconnections in differing fields of knowledge, how are systems and ecology theories perceived in light of learning tasks?

George Seimens, in his 2004 article Connectivism: A Learning Theory for the Digital Age, proposes a theory of learning which acknowledges and incorporates the realities of a deeply mediated and digitally networked culture. 

In it, he states that the existing theories of learning, including Behaviorism, Cognitivism, & Constructivism are all ill equiped to address the changed learning landscape.

The natural attempt of theorists is to continue to revise and evolve theories as conditions change. At some point, however, the underlying conditions have altered so significantly, that further modification is no longer sensible. An entirely new approach is needed.1

There are many interesting and engaging elements to his theory, but the one I'd like to reflect briefly on here is his premise that learning now sometimes resides outside of human beings; for instance, computers frequently do the work of information storage and retrieval, tasks formerly only possible by a human learner.
There is a counterargument that this type of learning and data storage is nothing new, indeed, it's been true for as long as books and the wirtten word have been part of the human toolkit.

But it is interesting to explore the idea that the vehicle of data storage may not simply hold the data, nor retreive it on command, but perform a rudimentary type of learning itself.  This begins to enter the realm of artificial intelligence.  It is as if a book didn't just hold data, but held it and learned it.  Itself. 

I agree with my colleagues that Connectivism is in fact a leaning theory, and not a pedagogy.  Non-human learning is a thrilling topic to explore, and I'm grateful for Seimens' insights into these areas.

Podcasting in the Classroom

I've begun looking into the prospect of using podcasting & vodcasting in the classroom.  There are any number of excellent uses for these technologies, and I'd like to highlight one such use.

Students at Woodlands Academy in Castle Rock, Colorado use podcasting to produce 'Owl Bytes'; a weekly student-produced show chronicling the history of technology.


It's actually more of a video podcast, or vodcast, because it displays images and links in sync with the audio narrative that plays.  It demonstrates student ownership over a project, and could obviously be extrapolated into other areas. 

I chose this podcast because it focused on technology, and I am the technology education teacher at our school.  I am considering using this podcast in my classroom to introduce my students to the idea of student-generated content in podcasts, and also to suggest the serial format as one that we can also employ - episodes in a series, rather than one huge master work.

I learned a thing or two about the history of technology from this podcast, and comment both the teacher and students on a job well done!

Robust Visual Literacy: Flikr in the Classroom

I'm just now becoming aware of the possibilities of using Flikr.com in the classroom.

I do a project with my 4th graders titled 'Globally Connected', where they look at the lives of children their age growing up in a country other than our own.

I don't allow students to choose the same country. This usually produces some angst, as most Jewish kids want to do Israel, the Irish kids Ireland, etc. The Korean kids routinely choose South Korea first, and choose North Korea as a distant second place selection only if they have to.

The information sites I direct them to for their research have sparse details about North Korea generally. and even less about the daily lives of kids. But with Flikr...

http://www.flickr.com/photos/yeowatzup/ / CC BY 2.0
Retrieved October 12, 2009

Simply typing the country's name and the additional tag 'children' yielded an array of compelling, relevant images utterly different than what Google Images yields.

There are additional classroom benefits to using Flikr:

• The annotation tool offers the prospect of running commentary about given images.  I wonder if an email address (which many of my young students don't have yet) is the price of admission...
• There is a great opportunity to discuss intellectual property & source citation via the commons.

I'm sure there are others, but these are my initial thoughts.  What a resource!

Consider the Wiki

This past week has gone by in a whirlwind!  While I have been a Wikipedia user for a while, and had a passing understanding of what a wiki was and even how it worked, I've never integrated them into my practice.  Once again,  I find myself on the brink of applying what I believe to be a revolutionary new technology to my professional life.

I sit on various committees at my school, all broken into sub-committees.  Information is all passed via e-mail along the line, until it eventually gets to the poor principal, whose inbox is perpetually bulging.  I suggested using a wiki to offset the burden of organizing all of that information from one person to the entire group.  Balanced and equitable.  I hope my principal loves it.

In the classroom with my students, I'm beginning to think about using wikis too.  I've begun to rollout the 5th grade environmental project I blogged about earlier, and have students working in teams of 4.  I'm thinking of setting up a wiki for them to hold their collected knowledge on the various topics I've assigned each group.  I think it will be new and exciting for them - and possibly a little frustrating.  But the collaborative paradigm is one I would like to introduce them to early, to build on in future years.
Actually contributing to a wiki with a group myself this past week has been informative too.  It's highlighted some of the possible pitfalls I should be aware of for my young students, including:

• Time Management: if one team member is holding up the rest due to a lack of participation, the whole project suffers.
  
  
• Inventing an organizational structure out of nothing was a bit of a challenge for me.  I imagine that they will also struggle with how to order their thoughts and research.  they will need some pointers on this.
  
  
• This isn't one I felt personally, but I suspect that it will rear up for my students: a sense of possessiveness or individual ownership.  Or maybe it will be a sense of indignation that  some contribute more than others, or contribute more thoughtful and substantive content than others.  I will need to learn how to assess the various products produced, but I'm not quite sure how yet.

I'd like to mention a word about Wikipedia.  I've always been a fan, and have thought that it's detractors were old sticks-in-the-mud.  Reading about Wikipedia and exploring the safeguards that have been recently put in place make me all the more excited.  I'll confess that I'm in a bit of disagreement with the school librarian on this!  I don't believe that Wikipedia can be used blindly or uncritically, but to ban it's use outright seems like throwing the baby out with the bath-water.  I feel compelled to expose my student to this tool in a structured and supervised way; rather than have them encounter and interact with it in their own time, unsupervised, unguided, and likely less critical.

Network Them Bookmarks!

I've been using Delicious for a while now, but not it's 'social' functions.

(To add me to your Delicious network: cheefinspector)

I started using it a few years back, whe I was a substitute teacher.
I would be in a different classroom everyday.  I never had my favorites with me, and was frequently encountering cool new resources that I wanted to add.  I used Delicious as a portable (and essentially private) favorites list.  It was way more awesome than writing things on post-its and scraps of paper, to be keyed in later when I got home.

Over time, I've added a small handful of people to my delicious network, but rarely if ever go check their tagged content.  I mostly just keep adding to my list from my own surfing.

But now I'm thinking: Perhaps rather than hunt for answers via search engines, I should explore the possibility of growing and establishing my delicious network.  I see some immediate, obvious advantages:

1. There will be no paid placements / skewed rankings.
   
   
2. Some one - likely someone I know personally - will have thought enough of the resource to tag it.  This effectively lets other people act as pre-screeners for any content I may want to explore.
   
   
3. I will get to know the tagging protocols of the people in my network.  I will likely change and modify the way I tag to take best advantage of the shared information, rather than continue to impose my own (private) taxonomy on the entire content of the web.

I'll need to explore this possibility, and post my findings.

Playin' with Pageflakes

I've been experimenting with pageflakes, a customizable web content aggregator, with the ability to make pages public for others to see!

There are probably more targeted ways to populate one of these pagecasts with content, but here is my first crack at it.  It's a page for renewable energy resources:

http://www.pageflakes.com/stevekelly04/27921836

Save the Earth, My 5th Graders!

So I've got a real, genuine quandry.  This is not a made-up 'doing-it-for-the-class' type of post.

I need to flesh out a rough idea I have for my fifth graders this marking period.  I'm their technology education teacher, and have had the idea that they could get into a project that focuses on environmentalism, but which hits on the ISTE standards at the same time.

I've got my plans set for my 4th graders.  6th, 7th, & 8th grades are all dialed in.  But I'm totally hitting a roadblock with 5th. 


Here's what I've got so far:

• I'm about to do two lessons on internet research, focusing on how to determine the relability of an information source. 
  
  
  
  Thoughts on this topic would be great, expecially in light of our ongoing discussion about the read/write web.  In the era of citizen journalism, how to determine veracity?
  
  
  
  
  
• I'm calling the project 'Earth 2060', and asking my 5th graders to imagine the earth in 50 years - within their lifetimes.  It's a place where non-renewable energy sources have been depleated, and new sources of energy have needed to be instituted. 
  
  
  
  
  
• I want them to work in small groups (I'm thinking groups of 3) to research select energy resources, including:
  
  
  
  
  
  • Wind
  • Solar
  • Geothermal
  • Nuclear
  • Hydroelectric
  • Coal
  • Natural Gas/Oil
  • Biomass
    
    
    
    
    
  
  
• At the end of the project, I'm anticipating that they will be able to:
• Pros and Cons of their energy source
• Defend the energy source they
  
  
  
  
  
• So, I'm asking myself:
  
  
  
  
  
  • What will my students be able to do at the end of this unit?
  • PowerPoint basics
  • Internet research basics
  • MS Word basics (table, list, insert picture, footnotes/endnotes)
  • Use citations
  • Articulate pros and cons for different types of energy
  • Read charts and analyze data!
  • Understand unfamiliar units of measurement (ex: Kwh)
    
    
    
    
    
  • What will student know at the end of this unit?
  • How different energy sources actually work.
  • Energy needs are projected to increase
  • There are tradeoffs for any type of energy (pros and cons)
  • Different websites and information sources have different agendas and points of view.
    
    
    
    
    
  • What will students produce to demonstrate their understanding?
  • A PowerPoint presentation about THEIR selected source of energy, it’s pros and cons, and the ability to argue for it in the face of other alternatives.
  • An accompanying paper articulating their main points.
  • Possible: Research the history of a given energy source, and be able to articulate the positive and hopeful discoveries, along with the discoveries of it’s dangers and negative attributes.
    
    
    
    
    
  
  

Here's what I need help with:

• The PowerPoint & Word skills are ones that I think are necessary at this stage - foundational skills that they can build and expand on in other classes and later in their academic career.  But they feel stultifying and dry.  How to pep them up?  (I'm thinking maybe of using voicestream as an extention for the PowerPoint - you can load a presentation right up in there...)
  
• Any one know of age appropriate resources for students to find this data?  I've been hunting, and so many resources are over their heads.

Something about this whole project feels incomplete.  I'm hoping by posting what I've got here, some of you might help me see what's missing.

Thanks, hive mind!

Dipping my toe into RSS

I'll confess that years have gone by, and I never looked into RSS or clicked on the 'RSS Feed' icon.  I always assumed that it was one more technology that I likely didn't need, would take valuable time to learn, and was ultimately unnecessary.

I write this post on the brink of rethinking all of that.

 Yes, it is taking valuable time to learn how to use RSS.  Or perhaps to put it more accurately, to learn all of the related permutations of how one can use RSS.

But I'm coming to understand it as a potentially HUGE time saver.  In the past, I've marveled at the pace and quantity of content generated by educators like Victoria Davis on her blog.  It seemed humanly impossible.  


Now, with RSS, rapid responses and staying abreast of select current events seems manageable.  


I'm unsure of all of the ways this technology will change my life's habits but feel sure that it will.  


I do have a concern however - one that resonates with classroom experiences: I can introduce this tool to my students, and ask them to use it to stay current on a specific topic.  Fine.   But I know that they will likely also search for content that is of their own interest, that addresses the things that they think about.  Once our class is over, I hope and anticipate that they will continue to use this technology.  Might not my tweeny students restrict their online media consumption to very narrow, very specific interests?  I fear a loss of common interests, a lingua franca.  I get that this is the read/write web, and user generated content is paramount, but I can see how one could fill their entire world with up to the minute minutia, and think that they are well-informed and aware of current events.

Globally Connected; Finding Answers

After a little digging, I found answers to some of the questions I had:

1. Question: Where to find blogs specifically from other places around the planet?
2. Question: Do I pre-screen the blog for age-appropriate content?

• Answer: http://comments4kids.wikispaces.com/ - A wiki established to post links to kid-created content worth commenting on.

Details of the origins of #Comments4Kids from Twitter conversations between a group of like-minded educators can be found at:

• http://attheteachersdesk.blogspot.com/2009/04/comments4kids-wednesdays.html?showComment=1254015322109#c4730878677880691336 - 

The question of assessing my student's posts is still an open one...

Globally Connected

I’ve been thinking about ways I can incorporate blogging into some of my student’s lessons, and came across what I thought was a great example. 

• http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/2009/09/dear-kaia-voicethread-and-video.html
• http://mrcsclassblog.blogspot.com/

Mr. C teaches at Noel Elementary, and holds a session called ‘Comments4Kids’ once a week, where his students:

 “…have the privilege of reading blog posts from around the world and leaving comments.”

For instance on one day, his students looked at blog posts from both Qatar and Iowa.

I thought this was an excellent introduction to blogging, in that it permitted students to interact, collaborate, and publish with their peers, and encouraged cultural understandings and a global awareness by engaging with learners of other cultures. 

I’d love to incorporate this type of lesson into some work I do with my 4^th graders, who currently are at work on a long term project titled “Globally Connected”, in which they look at similarities and differences between their lives growing up in the U.S., and the lives of same-age students in other countries. 

I do have some questions about implementation, however.  In particular:

• Where to find blogs specifically from other places around the planet?
• Do I pre-screen the blog for age-appropriate content?
• How to assess my students’ posts?

Rest Less: Managing Time, Resources, and Pace of Change

Consider, if you haven't already, some of the following web2.0 resources:

• gliffy - flowcharts
• animoto - slideshows and movies
• audacity - sound editing
• paint.net - image processing
• voicethread - communal digital storytelling
• blogger - blogs
• zotero - new media reference tool

Web 2.0 tools are plentiful and cool.  I'm giddy with the prospects they hold.  Restless.

But the quantity of new tools is overwhelming, to say nothing of learning how to use them effectively.  The resistance some teachers have to learning web 2.0 tools feels familiar:  I, too, am reticient; fearing my already tightly allocated time may be all together obliterated by adapting 'always on' technologies.  How could I possibly attend to them all?  I'd need to rest less.

So add time management and resource management to the list of essential 21st century skills.

And honestly, by time-management, I'm not wanting to wring more out of my minute.  I want to breathe, and quiet my frenetic mind.  I see value both in making effecient, effective use of my working hours, and also in taking my non-working hours to myself; to recooperate, reflect, and rest.  I want a balanced life, and a life well lived. 

How to strike this balance?