I like the concept of Amazon’s Cloud player – player your own music from the cloud. However I have heavily invested my time in LastFM and it seemed there was now way to scrobble my plays from Cloud Player to LastFM. This make not seem like a big thing to most music enthusiasts, but I have sent data regarding nearly every song I have listened to since 2006 (scrobbled) and one gets invested in this process.
Yes, this is me. Cindy was fooling around with the camera feature on the new iPad2 and came up with this image. The quality of the image or of the subject of the image is not the issue here, but the fact that Cindy was exploring some new feature of the iPad is. Just a few seconds of experimentation and then it was on to something else.
I have watched Cindy interact with many educators over the years. When the interaction involves technology, the reaction to the interaction often results in a question. The question originates from random people who come up to her in some random coffee house and from academics most would regard as the elites in the ed tech field (we just returned from AERA and I heard the question asked several times). The question is some version of “How do you know all of this stuff?”
One of the topics I cover in my graduate ed psych course is “the nature of expertise”. You may have heard of the 10000 hour rule. From chess experts to cigar rollers, it appears that skill increases over an incredibly long period of time and 10000 hours is a useful standard for what it takes to acquire expertise. So, I am thinking many experts have actually not spent that much time with technology or teaching with technology. More and more, the individuals we too often consider experts spend most of their time talking about what they know rather than actually developing expertise. They tend to have a few “go to” concepts and a few favorite examples, but what they often cannot do well is generalize to the circumstances of another. You might call it transfer. This is what really impresses people – it is not the capacity to use your own world as the source of illustrations, it is the capacity to quickly understand someone else’s situation and show what is possible given those circumstances.
So, expertise is not for the faint of heart. You don’t acquire it by reading a few books, visiting a few classrooms, or even thinking deep and profound thoughts. It takes a life time in combination with focus and an active mind. This is kind of the interesting thing in considering the notion of the digital native – the combination of experience and knowledge is just not there. I have watched this phenomenon evolve over 20 years in my wife. Playing with this and that device and learning the features of this or that program – hour after hour after hour. This is just the beginning. Somehow, the technical skills seem cataloged against an awareness of forty years of classroom scenarios, the constant identification of “you could use this to do that” connections, and the capacity to search this mental database on command starting from either a device, application, or scenario.
So, what I have just described is how it is done. The question for any would be expert is whether you are willing to do it.
I was in New Orleans at AERA yesterday, but learned of one of the more interesting studies presented after returning home and reading through my blog list. This summary of the AERA paper by Donald J. Hernandez indicates that reading proficiency by the end of third grade offers remarkable predictions of differences in eventual graduation rates. I tell my class that 4th grade is the pivot between learning to read and reading to learn which turns out to be the same point made in this paper. Poor reading skills contribute to a general slide in performance as students are expected to learn from information sources. The detrimental effect of being behind in third grade is larger for the children of poverty. Put another way, as I understand the core argument of the paper – reading proficiency can negate other typical challenges to success.
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Cisco announced today that it plans to discontinue the company’s commitment to the Flip video camera (RRWeb). It is another of those situations in which the reason for the original acquisition was unclear and now the decision to drop support for the brand is frustrating.
The Flip was such a great camera for educational applications – inexpensive and intuitive with a reasonable level of video quality.
Perhaps the addition of video capabilities to smart phones and inexpensive digital cameras meant there were just too many alternatives for individual users and individual users represented the market sustaining this product. However, these sources of competition in the general market do not necessarily offer an obvious replacement for schools. I can record high quality video with my 7D but the use of a camera to capture video for extended periods of time is awkward. I don’t think we are at the point that we can rely on student smart phones. We would be faced with the awkward situation in which some students would have a device and others would not. Sharing a personal device would lead to additional complications.
So, I understand that this is the way that business goes and the educational market in this area is not significant. I guess I will be exploring similar products to see what is available.
GigaOm provides an interview with Flip Founder. The one unique insight from this interview was the speculation that the Flip is not an Internet-connected device and some may want connectivity even from single purpose devices.
P.S. – we also learned that the Kodak Zi8 was being discontinued. We found a great deal on a Zi8 at Best Buy and purchased one. You can add an external mike to the Zi8. So, we have a couple of cameras of this type we can use until an obvious replacement emerges.
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The Speak Up (2010) data are out and various bloggers are analyzing and offering comments. I like the data – so many folks make pronouncements and I would a little more in the way of evidence. BTW – I do think the Speak Up data should not be considered a representative sample and may over-estimate the value/importance of tech trends.
A couple of numbers immediately caught my attention – the % of students with a personal cell or smart phone. For the age group with the highest level of access, these values are 56% and 44%. If I read the chart correctly (a phone without Internet access and a phone with Internet access – these values would define mutually exclusive groups unless we assume some students have several phones), this would mean that 100% of high school students have a phone of some type. Not possible. This is what I mean by my concern that the data originates from a non-representative sample. I checked the original source and the ReadWrite Web post uses the table of data from the original.
I do think the 44% with a smart phone is useful to consider. I do not agree with those who consider any phone a useful educational tool. I understand you can do some cute things messaging, but these demonstrations are a novelty. A little novelty now and then can be interesting, but far more is needed before a tool has general utility. Understanding that less than half of students can provide a device with reasonable power and versatility probably implies that schools must assume responsibility for providing learning tools.
A recent Tech and Learning piece contrasted K-12 implementations of iPads and netbooks and concluded that the netbook was the clear winner. I reference it here because I am sensitive to the issue of individuals feeding their own biases with the content they view and promote. Personally, I find the conclusion astounding (with the exception of the cost issue and cost can be deceptive).
I understand the problems of arguing from individual anecdotes, but I have a fairly high-end Lenova netbook running Windows 7 which in fact costs more than my wifi only iPad. I very seldom use the netbook and annoyingly must recharge it and then run through all of the updates each time I think it might be interesting to give it another try. This tends to be a 10 minute process or so just to get it going. I understand this annoyance has something to with my lack of commitment to using a product I find annoying to use. An annoying experience compounded I guess by annoyance.
The truth – I really can’t write effectively on either, but I can write if necessary. The comment regarding the netbook may confuse some. Yes, it has a keyboard. However, the size of the physical keyboard is actually a little smaller than the length of the iPad. This forces a “pecking” style of text entry whether the device has a “real” keyboard or not. Of course, I am an adult – don’t hold that against me. The reality is that I have full size computers and am not forced to rely on either the netbook or the iPad. Once you take into account this reality (a real computer when I need one and a second device), the personal choice for me is easy. What I want to do on a small, mobile device is a far more pleasant, time efficient, and cost-effective experience on the iPad. When the article extends the cost analysis to include software I disagree on about any level I can think of unless the author assumes that the only use of the device is to access free online services. Really, have you purchased a copy of MicroSoft office or an Adobe Suite. There are simply little available in software available from big companies that is not a solve everyone’s problems with one costly package solution. The cost of apps, to me, seems to provide a financial advantage and not a disadvantage, for the iPad. After purchasing lots of software over the years, what you get for a dollar or four dollars seems astounding. BTW – my writing solution is not Pages, but Elements in combination with DropBox.
I am going to purchase a wifi-only Xoom because I do want to support a competing operating system. I have purchased two netbooks now and I have pretty much ended my experimentation with devices of that type.
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