Empirical Hexagon

I arrive at the end of my course, umb 611, with a post of reflection.  I suppose like all grad school courses it has been a whirlwind tour of copious amounts of information.  I entered the course thinking that I had a pretty good idea of what the web had to offer.  Google always gave me the information I wanted, I had discovered Google Docs, had blogged, and made a web page.  I felt pretty good about myself.

Umb 611 showed me that I’m falling behind despite my best efforts.  Web 2.0 tools are appearing like fruit flies in my 12th grade science project, (they came from seemingly no where and rendered the the back lab of my chemistry room off limits).  The range and overlap between wikis, Google docs, Google sites, blogs, web pages, and social networking sites is mind-numbing.    RSS feeds allow us to follow countless media streams without time lost searching.  Every image, sound, and video has the potential to be utilized in pretty any computer or internet presentation technique one could desire.  And on top of all of this potential, we explored copyright law and the creative commons.

It’s going to take me quite a while to digest and implement many of the lessons learned in umb 611,   I’m going to start with utilizing wikis much more, and using blogs/wikis/social networking sites to better increase communication with students and parents.  My sandbox unit for the course also focused heavily on using applets or physlets to teach physics concepts.  I was able to find more than I ever expected.  It will take some time to sift through these applets to find the most suitable ones for my students.

It was disheartening to find that I wasn’t keeping up with the net the way I thought I was, but it is good to know that I’m on the right track again and I’ve been given a lot of useful tools to stay on track.

Until a couple of hours ago, I had no idea what Ning was. Well it turns out that Ning is a social networking site for who want to be a little more specific about who they socialize with. I took a look at two great education sites within Ning. The more established of the two is Classroom 2.0. This site is a great place to be for all things internet related for education. It’s a really top notch site with a forum, videos, photos, and a resource wiki. It has a vibrant and knowledgeable community to pull ideas from and they make a good audience for your own ideas. The other Ning site I visited was Ning in Education. This is a sister site to Classroom 2.0. It doesn’t have as much of a following, but it seems a great resource for exploring the potential of Ning in education. It had many of the same features as Classroom 2.0, plus a note taking page, which I thought was a pretty good idea.

In Classroom 2.0 I stumbled upon a dialog about using the internet better in teaching physics. The originator of the conversation was eliciting ideas for using web 2.0, and found a grand contributor in a former physics teacher who now trains teachers. He presented strongly the usage of a wiki as a slate in which to add all things to through embedding (this is something I’ve come to see great value in as my umb 611 course comes to fruition). I’m quite certain that I will follow this path in future courses that I teach.

I don’t have a lot of experience with social networking sites. MySpace seems like a mecca for those with short attention spans who adore bad writing. I’m actually a member of Facebook since a few former students created a group for my class, and I wanted to see what they were up to. People my age are just beginning to hop on the bandwagon, but most of us still don’t know what to do with it. Ning seems to have some great value for me as an educator. Most importantly, it offers the option to make a private page. With this I can create sites and groups for my classes, groups within my classes and ease parent communication. It’s also really easy to use, and students have definitely shown themselves to like using social networking websites. Ning may not have the zing or MySpace or Facebook, but it has a lot of value as it is.

Google reader is great for distributing articles, posts, searches and videos on demand, so we don’t have to spend hours and hours searching. Unfortunately, when one doesn’t check often, he/she might find they have 400 feeds to look at. Fortunately, I don’t know anyone like that.

As I looked through the first half of my 400 article headlines I did stumble across a NY Times article, Literacy Debate: Online, R U Really Reading which does a great job at looking at the debate over the value of online reading compared to book reading. (Hopefully everyone can read this link.  I have an account, and I’m not sure if others need one too.)  The articles major focus is on how reading test results have dropped while internet usage has gone up.  Much of the article discusses internet reading, but truth be told, the students who are not performing well on reading tests don’t typically read much on the internet anyway.  Videos and music take away from their reading time.

I for one don’t fret over students not reading novels in their school years.  Sure I think it is great if they do.  They learn vocabulary, get great examples of composition, learn interpretation and inferencing, and learn a lot about linear modes of writing and thinking.  That said,  I never read a book I wasn’t forced to by a teacher until I was 20 years old, and didn’t read much independently until post college.  Now I’m a voracious reader, who also spends too much time on the computer.  Granted every student is not me, but I find it hard to believe that the internet is cursing students to reading failure.

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania.  The internet had not reached the masses when I graduated high school, but still almost none of my classmates were reading for pleasure.  Most of them likely never caught the internet wave and are likely unable to meet what I and likely readers of this blog would consider to be the needs of an able and informed populace.  Now, when I see all these students using computers, I at least feel like they have become proficient with the tool that will enable them to become lifelong learners, and they very much enjoy using that tool.

I’ve looked through a bunch of Web 2.0 tools and a few looked pretty interesting from an educational perspective. One that really excites me is the ToonDoo website. At this site students can create their own cartoons. It looks really fun to use and students can use it to present a variety of concepts in different subjects. They can then present their cartoons in displays or embed them into blogs, wikis, or PowerPoint presentations. Not only is the website fun to use, but even the worst artist in the classroom can create a cartoon that is aesthetically pleasing and get across the information or ideas assigned.

Not only can students create their cartoons, but they can also publish on the site and get feedback on their work. Here is one I created just to get the hang of the site. I hope you enjoy.

I just had a look through the K12 Online Conference for 2006 and viewed a presentation by Rob Lucas and Kevin Driscoll entitled Personal Professional Development “Toward a System of Online Curriculum Sharing.”

The presentation was done through PowerPoint slides with an accompanying audio podcast.  In the presentation they give an overview of websites already in existence for the purpose of sharing lesson plans.  Then they discuss problems with these websites and needs to overcome these problems.  Problems include, being difficult to gauge quality of materials, lack of community, vagueness to copyrights, lack of collaboration, and more.  Rob and Kevin were attempting to design a Wiki based site which could overcome these problems.  By being a Wiki site users have the power to change and make better the work of others.  To make this possible the site, TeachForward.org planned to use open source licensing from the Creative Commons.  Note:  Teach Forward has now become Developing Curriculum, Inc and is a content creation partner with Curriki.

It was interesting to look at that presentation which dates back nearly two years.  At the time their ideas were really cutting edge, but now many of their concerns have been adopted by curriculum resource websites or have been adapted to by online tools like highlight and comment that are present in social bookmarking sites like Diigo.

A concern that I have with all of these services is their failure to adapt to state and national standards.  It really isn’t acceptable anymore for teachers to go searching for one off lessons within content areas.  Curricula are becoming better designed within departments with specific focuses on standards.  These services need to better reference state and local standards, and use them as tags for easy searching.  This could be done in the Wiki format by users adding the appropriate references to standards present within the materials.

Still it is fun to see where this is going.  Teaching has become more complex of late, but it’s great to see tools developing which can simplify the processes needed to meet this growing complexity.

Well today I am a fan of something new.  As a part of umb 611 (my class in grad school) I used the social bookmarking site Diigo . Before, I was never really drawn toward these types of sites and services.  I thought haveing my bookmarks online might be handy as I switch back and forth between different computers, but I never really grasped the value of sharing bookmarks.  This assignment quickly taught me that value.  First one of my searches bought me to a worthwhile site to bookmark on physics.  There was one other person who had bookmarked that site.  I checked to see what other sites she was looking at and she brought me hours worth of searching in 3 seconds.  She had links to exactly the kind of sites I was looking for and a few that I wasn’t, but should have been.

After looking for physics related sites and tools it was time to explore links to technology related sites.  For this search I found the popularity feature in Diigo to be valuable.  I simply searched for popular bookmarks for tools and found a plethora of great sites.  This is one lesson that will definitely stick.

If you go to this link you can visit my little sandbox where I am developing a unit on Waves for physics.  Near the top of the page is a slide show I developed with pictures from Flickr’s Creative Commons using the website, Animoto.  It’s titled Waves and is set to the song, “The Winds of Change,” by Jap Jap.  Photo credits are given above the slide show.  The photos are simply attractive shots of waves, some natural and some man-made.  The idea behind the presentation is that waves are all around us.

In this post I’ll write about my foray into Flickr.  Flickr is an online photo sharing site.  I created an account at Flickr, then perused their photos in the Creative Commons section.  The Creative Commons means that I can publish what I find guilt free, so long as I say who did it and show where to find it.  The photo at the bottom of this post is the one I discovered.  Within the Creative commons section I searched for “waves,” “waves, physics,” “waves, physics, applets,” and “standing waves.”  Only the first search choice found me suitable pictures.  Apparently, not a lot of physics  types publish their  pictures in the Creative Commons section on Flickr.  I found Flickr to be very easy to use.  I had a little trouble getting the picture to publish in this blog post, but when I used the source web address for the photo rather than the web address you gen when you click on a photo in Flickr, I was able to post with no further concerns.

As I think of Flickr in the classroom, the Creative Commons section seems the most exciting.  Students tend to take whatever they want from online sources with little regard for copyright concerns.  Even getting them to cite legitimate sources can be difficult.  The beauty of the Creative Commons in Flickr is that there are people allowing open use of their work and it is easy to cite.  This takes care of two of my desires as a teacher without putting a large strain on my students.  It’s nice to see that doing the right thing is getting easier.

Here is a photo taken from the creative commons at Flickr by Ban Sidhe (syvwlch) at

http://www.flickr.com/photos/27164521@N00/284693258/

The creative commons has thus far in my life played a limited part, but as my public internet persona expands so does my use of the creative commons. Until the fall of this past year I had no idea that the creative commons existed. For a course I was taking I had to create a website. The website I created focused on WWII and the pictures I needed to spice things up had not yet had their copyrights expired. For this reason I found myself scouring Wikipedia commons for free and usable images. I explored other venues for images, but found that Wiki Commons had a far greater amount of images.

The whole idea of copy written material had very little importance to most people until the internet came into being. Musicians in the 60s and 70s used to be pleased to have other bands rework their songs. They didn’t much care about intellectual property because they only made their money through concerts. As the record industry expanded and collected more lawyers, copyrights became more important. Improvements in audio and visual copying technologies ensured that other media industries followed suit. Now with the internet it is easier than other to sample or copy another’s work and easier than ever to get caught doing it. Legal wars are being raged against internet sites, like YouTube, that enable people to display copy written material and media industries are attacking internet users who distribute material for free.

The Creative Commons is an exit strategy from the legal wars for intellectual property. Imagine if we had to ask permission from a publishing company to use the Pythagorean Theorem or the quadratic equation. These brilliant mathematical equations were once intellectual property, but fortunately the folks of antiquity had the sense to share ideas to create a better world rather than to try to make a couple of dollars and let the ideas eventually fall into obscurity due to a limited audience.

For a few of the internet courses I’ve taken so far at UMASS I’ve had need to purchase material from the internet. I’ve bought images for use in blog posts and I’ve most recently paid $30 for an article which wasn’t all that interesting just so I had semi-applicable material for a particular topic I was exploring. The author of that article likely made not a penny, but the publishing company made a cool profit simply by hosting it for a couple of pennies. Rather than build a following based on the importance of their journal they sought short term gains and made me averse to their product. Good for them. I hope they enjoy my $30. I hope they can use it to pay for their many lawyers during bankruptcy proceedings.

As for my work on the net, I hope people just give credit where it is due, spell my name right, and add the word guru when they reference me.

In part two of my podcast experimentation I discuss what can be done by teachers and students when they make their own podcasts. Enjoy!

podcast2