21apples

New Media in Education 2006

Posted by arvind s grover Fri, 27 Jan 2006 15:56:00 GMT

I am blogging from the New Media in Education 2006 conference sponsored by the Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning.

I have attended two workshops so far, “Blogging” and “Podcasting.” The blogging workshop was pretty cursory, and showed Blogger as a tool to publish your blog. They showed a couple of examples of what Columbia faculty members were doing with blogs including a popular mathematics blog, Not Even Wrong about string theory.

The podcasting workshop went into a little more detail, and was run by Steve Savera from Apple. As much as I love Apple products (I am writing from my Powerbook now), Apple seems to be growing more and more with each new product. They have QuickTime or GarageBand to edit your audio files, their new iLife suite for distributing the podcasts, .Mac to host your website/podcasts, and finally the iPods to listen to the podcasts. Is it me, or is Apple taking Microsoft’s approach and selling everything?

I will publish a list of all the resources I collect here today. Some very smart presenters and some very interesting technologies. Besides the resources, they are giving us educational examples being used here at Columbia. While they are higher-ed, they are quite helpful. I will share those as well.

Technorati Tags: .mac, Apple, college, conference, education, garage band, ilife, ipod, media, software, teaching

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Outsource Your Homework

Posted by arvind s grover Thu, 19 Jan 2006 03:09:00 GMT

Fascinating article today in the Wall Street Journal talking about computer science students in colleges outsourcing their programming assignments to Eastern Europe and India. Is this phenomena all that new though? Even in analog-only times some students have paid others to do homework. Even now, some people pay tutors to do students’ homework.

I have been doing a lot of thinking on plagiarism education recently. I want to make sure we hold students accountable only for what we have made clear and what we have taught them to be ethical and appropriate. For instance, if we don’t teach what plagiarism is and isn’t, how can we make sure students aren’t simply confused when we think they are cheating.

Many teachers give the “don’t cheat shpiel” at the beginning of the year, but is that really enough? Is a 50-page guidebook too much? What is just right when it comes to educating students on academic dishonesty?

• University of Michigan Academic Judiciary Manual of Procedures on Academic Integrity
• Yale Undergraduate Regulations on Cheating, Plagiarism, and Documentation
• University of Florida Academic Honesty Guidelines
• Drew University Standards of Academic Integrity
• University of Rochester Academic Honesty Policy

Technorati Tags: college, education, teaching, university, plagiarism

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Educational Blogger (and more) Conference

Posted by arvind s grover Tue, 17 Jan 2006 01:16:31 GMT

Exciting news comes out of a post from Will Richardson asking about a lower education blogger conference in response to the proposed Higher Ed BlogCon. A group of K-12 edubloggers has rallied around the idea, and a website and wiki have been formed. Please consider applying to present at this conference or “attending” (it will be an online conference).

You can also join the Edublogger Community group at upcoming.org. Upcoming.org (a Yahoo! company) provides community event calendaring, with nice RSS feeds and easy integration into your website.

Technorati Tags: college, conference, education, puppy, Shifted Learning, teaching, university, upcoming.org, web, wiki

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In Your Facebook.com

Posted by arvind s grover Sat, 14 Jan 2006 17:12:00 GMT

The New York Times has an article covering Facebook.com use on college campuses. In the article, a senior at George Washington University accuses campus police of snooping out his party by reading Facebook postings, and then showing up to bust the party. The students came up with a creative retaliation: post messages about a “beer blast” party all over Friendster. The police certainly showed up, and found a party with cakes and cookies all covered with the word beer, but no actual beer.

The article also pointed out that the University of New Mexico banned access to Facebook in October. This was startling to me. A university blocking access to a social-networking website? Universities are supposed to be places where students can explore the widest range of thoughts on literature, philosophy, science, mathematics, and yes, websites. It is one thing for a K-12 school to filter, but I can’t believe that higher education specialists came to that decision. The university apparently cited student safety as the rationale behind the decision.

As educators, we must realize that the only safety filtering gives us is personal safety. It provides a legal barrier at best, letting community members know that we do not facilitate student access to these websites. I don’t feel however, that it does anything to reduce use of these websites. The article shows that U. of New Mexico students simply found ways to work around the filters. Did the university actually protect student safety with its actions? Probably not. (note: U. of New Mexico plans to remove the filter next semester)

What can we do to protect student safety? We are educators, let’s use our most powerful tool: education. We must let student learn about the impact of their words, photos and actions. They are accountable, and will be forever. A comment left on Facebook is not the same as a comment passed in the hallway. Online commentary is here to stay forever. We must make this a reality for students, and then turn Facebook and the like into positive communities.

There were some tremendously powerful quotations from university educators. My favorites:

“It’s a fantastic tool for building community,” says Anita Farrington-Brathwaite, assistant dean for freshmen at New York University. “In a school like ours that doesn’t have an enclosed campus, it really gives people a way to find each other and connect.”

Harvard’s president, Lawrence H. Summers, gave kudos to Facebook in the opening lines of his address to freshmen in September, saying he had been browsing the site to get to know everyone. (This is certainly far ahead of where Mr. Summers last was spotted)

As part of freshman orientation at Rollins College in Florida, student coordinators will create Facebook groups for campus organizations like the Rollins Outdoor Club. “We cannot deny the impact of Facebook, but we believe that it’s the responsibility of the institution to find ways to create the most positive communities,” says Roger Casey, dean of faculty. “These communities can be positive or negative.”

“Facebook is part of an evolving dialogue,” he says. “One of the things that’s most fascinating about it is how it illuminates the changing nature of public and private identity. This is new ground on every level. What people in positions of power have to realize is that people my age have a completely different attitude about what is fair game.”—Mr. Stoneman of George Washington

Technorati Tags: article, college, education, net generation, university, web

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Learning Isn't Fun, Knowing Is Fun

Posted by arvind s grover Tue, 10 Jan 2006 23:18:00 GMT

As one of my wisest college professors said when students were grubmling about having to learn formal definitions for a mathematics class, “I don’t know where people get the idea that learning is supposed to be fun. Learning can be fun, but it can also be really tough—even downright miserable. Knowing is fun.”—Copid

This was specifically in response to a British study released which showed that students who “read” books on very animated CD-ROMS retained less than those who “read” the books on more text-driven CD-ROMS. The study to me came off as barely helpful because they were comparing the text-based CD-ROMS to those with content which was distracting and unrelated. Of course distracting and unrelated content will make students less likely to follow the material. Isn’t that obvious?

I love the quote though. I think there can be confusion when teachers see students as “engaged” when they are simply using laptops or other technologies. Teachers must create situations in which students can relish solving problems or wrestle with higher-order topics while utilizing more mechanical methods. Let us be careful of the edutainment trap which ends up using a lot of bells and whistles to create curricularly-shallow (yes I know curricularly is not a word) lessons. It should never be about the technology, but what can be accomplished with the technology. Teachers and administrators should be focused on learning objectives, and not how much time/energy students are willing to spend on laptops.

Technorati Tags: education, teaching

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LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT

Posted by arvind s grover Sat, 07 Jan 2006 15:49:23 GMT

Lego has just announced the new version of MINDSTORMS, the fantastic robotics programming package. The new version is called MINDSTORMS NXT. The main idea is for users to be able to build more interesting robots, more easily. A great article in Wired reviews the development process, and explains how the original MINDSTORMS kit has 70% adult users, and 30% young users. Lego hopes to reverse this trend by making a better user interface and programming language.

The old system will not be compatible with the new system, so all of us in the education market need to get ready for new expenses if we want to try the NXT system. From the pictures, the new brick (robot brain) is very elegant. Gone is the big yellow box, and here is the accessory-friendly, sleek new brick (click image for big close up). New and improved sensors include: ultrasonic (for “seeing”), sound, light, touch, rotation (inbuilt in motors). These open the doors to improved robot performance. One of the best new features is Mac version of the software.

The new brick is USB and Bluetooth compatible which may lead to some really neat interactions with devices like Bluetooth headsets, camera-phones and more. Gone is the difficult-to-use infrared tower that has been the bane of so many student and teacher programmers.

I think the idea of an easier to use Lego robotics kit is a valuable one and a dangerous one. Lego is excellent at building step by step instructions on how to build things (see Ikea for the opposite of good instructions). However, programming and computer science are not about following instructions to build products. Computer science is about problem solving, trial and error, debugging. I would rather see Lego build a better debugging interface than build more guides. Students already have ideas of what to build. We just need to enable them to be able to succeed. None of us as teachers are looking to make our students good instruction manual readers. We want them to be inventors. Since I haven’t seen NXT yet, I won’t comment on how well it facilitates this, but I can only hope it does.

Lego announced a new blog, nxtbot.com which will provide news on consumer electronics. So far, the blog only has 3 posts, but it just started. Add to the RSS readers and let’s see what they have to share.

Lego has also has an exciting developers program which will let 100 lucky people test out the new NXT system early. You will then be eligible for a reduced-priced NXT set when it releases. Throw your name in the hat, I already did (deadline: February 5).

Technorati Tags: computer science, education, hardware, blog, robotics, software, teaching

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