Multi-faceted Refractions

In the next session that I am going to sit, Laptops, Libraries, and Collaboration, I am going to run the new tablet pc I am using through its paces. I am going to handwrite my notes, the old fashioned way, and then post them after I convert them to text.

How cool will that be?

Jim Heynderickx

What age do you start a laptop program? Jane Healy suggested 7th grade, since are ready to make a better leap to symbolic understanding.

Classroom size? Early results suggest 15.

What type of Demographics is best? Do laptops address digital divide issues for all students?

Does it level the playing field? if so, then want to have a great opportunity?

Early adopters are girls sections

What type of campus would be best for this brand new school? Early adopter in rural setting to support remote learning experiences.

What type of funding would you have in the new school of the future? May not be able to answer until other decisions are made.

What type of School Workspaces would you want? Laptop represents a virtual workspace that does not limit spaces.

What type of classroom design, what type of furniture? Don’t want it to be comfortable in the classroom. Would they be more home like, business like, or school like?
It would be nice to have choices for different environments. Would be helpful. Not enough research to deal with ergonomic issues. A school has built ergo-nomic educational.

What is in the classrooms? Outlets, projectors, SMARTBoards, scanners, cameras, printers.
Some schools do not allow adapters, and have a charge during the course of the day. Reduce cable clutter. Wireless projectors with IP. Cleaning supplies for keyboards and screens. Should there be external mice and keyboards.

Does a laptop school have a media center, or in classrooms.

How does the library change? What would be the role of the librarian? What kind of support would there be.

XThink for tablets – mathematical equation building.

Kids today are different. (Referenced two new Time magazine articles.)

Evidence is emerging that screens are not for passive dysfunction. Students are native and wired differently. We are immigrants, we speak digital as a second language. We retain some kind of an accent.

Children’s brains are chemically and neurologically different. They process in parallel, not sequential like us.

Used to be assumption that by age of 3, we all had fixed memory and intellegence. What you had, you were stuck with.

Long standing assumptions are changing with research over last 3 years. Highly adaptive and malliable brain. This is huge. Brain reorganizing and restructuring based upon inputs and intensity of the inputs.

IQ raises and falls based upon the simulation we are exposed to. There is neuroplasticity, brain is creating new thinking patterns throughout our lives. It doesn’t do it by itself, requires intensive, progressively more intense, over an extended period of time.

Watching TV over several hours a day, 7 days a week, will reprogram the brain’s wiring. The impact of technology, via social networking and gaming. Now games have moved from solo experiences to networked experiences. Students pay to play (Everquest, WOW) to compete against each other. Xbox and PS3 are trying to develop this.

Brain is like a tree, early, a flury of growth. The pruning keeps fresh. Use it or lose it. Pruning, not raging hormones make teenagers what they are.

Mylian boost transmission speeds in the brain and bandwidth. If only doing one thing (academics, arts, athletics) these are the ones most developed. Argument for teaching the whole child and having regular exposure to these experiences, including technology, is crucial.

Students have greater visual processing, doing it differently.

Referenced the Human Brian Project. Neuroinformatics. Using FMRIs, researchers can research which paths are used in brain.

How different parts of the brain do simple tasks and processes information. Done more in past two years than previous 100 years.

Scientific American – The Teen Brain. (need to review)

If take different generations do same task, different pathways are used. For many tasks, different pathways, especially in visual cortex, 15% larger in the last 20 years.

Game takes 40 hours to master. Visual processing increase with 10 hours of gameplay.

3M Study- 100 photographs, digital natives will remember 90%, we would remember 60%, dinosaurs (text and audio) will only remember 10%

Eye processes images 60000x faster than text. Visual 30%, touch 8%, hearing 3%.

Eyes of students move differently, Immigrants -1/3 down and 1/3 in, the goldn mean, with a z curve, left to right.

Natives – bottom, then the sides, the the upper left hand side of the page (new layout). Unless motivated, will ignore lower right if motivated. What is the impact to the teaching of reading.

Immigrants – black on white background. Colors are not.
Natives – Blood Red, Lime Green, then burnt orange. Black least favorite.

87% of students are not auditory or text learning. Because of digital bombardment, they are digital kinestetic learners. Most exams are based on text and vocabulary.

Prensky – when reaches 21, will have played 10,000 hours of games, 20,000 hours of tv, 250,000 text or emails. These are not experiences that we have had.

How will this impact students learning? Less than 9000 hours of school, 4000 hours of reading, most of it unengaged. What need to acknowledge, think and process differently.

With younger children (teens, tweens, and younger) there is an acceleration in this process between these groups. Will help explain why they do what they do and differences in generations. Almost nothing is being applied in classrooms today.

What are the implications for schools. Talking and teaching is not the correct model. Need more inductive and constructivist methods.

Four items that need to be done:
1. New information must connect new idea to what they know, otherwise will only stay with student for 10 seconds.

2. Previous knowledge and experience defines what they learn, where they learn, and why the learn. Most school work does not interest the students. Good at real-life examples, may have problems with theoretical. Learning is personal to learner, not hte teacher.

3. Learners have to be given repeated, differentiated learning experiences. Have to practice and exposure to materials, from different perspectives and in different contexts.

4. Have to have consistent feedback and need reinforcement. Has to tell what is doing right, and then what can be done to improve.

Information without context is only like having one side of the velco. Can only occur when can make significant connections. Edgar Dales’s learning cone. After two weeks, 10 % of what read, 20% of hear, 50% of hear and see, 70% of discussion, 90% if teach to someone else, immediate application of that skill in a real-world or simulated experience. Not that ADD or ADHD, not interested and tuning us out.

Not short for interest, but the way we teach and learn.

Don’t understand how different students are. Not learners for the way the space has been built and the way we learned to teach. Who has learning problem? Not the kids.

50% of population is under 25 year old. What percentage of teachers are under 25? Part of the problem we are facing. Slow and dumb down interactions with teachers.

If we want kids to be successful, need to go beyond theory towards application. No way that we will be able to go back to basics.

Have to get involved, twit, blog, podcast, check out mySpace, faceBook, etc.

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[This session is being live blogged. Ignore the misspellings and awkward wordings]
[This post is simul-blogged at Multi-faceted Refractions]

The Read/Write Web – Conference Handout (willrichardson.wikispaces.com)

Refer’s to Karl Fisch’s Did You Know presentation.

It is about teaching children to become life-long learners.

Connectivity and transparency will become more acute, not going away.

Other entities reacting to the change – Election 2008 is beginning to change how politics is changing – used Obama Social Networking site. Don’t need physical space, limits connection of passionate individuals like never before.

Went to mySpace – but it was blocked. Every candidate has a page on mySpace – first caucus will be on mySpace in January 2008.

Journalism and media is changing. 70% of traffic is file sharing. Digital Rights management is dead.

Every story on USA Today online is a blog post and can be commented.

Business is going to change. IBM has 20,000 wikis, 400,000 are using a social networking networking.

Refers to Wikinomics and Cluetrain Manifesto. Not about the product, but conversations around the product. Everyone changing, but education is stuck. Not responding quick enough.

15% of attendees have mySpace or Facebook, nearly 75% of students have accounts.

Expectation is that we share. Students don’t look at privacy the way we do. Creates a disconnect. 1:1 schools have more opportunities.

Last few years, students have diverged from the teacher’s paths and they are not coming back.

How do we bridge the gap?

What has transformed Will’s learning is his ability to connect and create networked of passionate learners. Need to create personal learning networks which will sustain and help them make sense of the world, help them forge new ideas.

Huge shift in number of bloggers. What is disconcerning to Will is that teachers simply publish them in a different way and not understand the shift of pedagogy. It is a lack of understanding of how networks work. Used current post about raw food to show example. Currently, there are 30 comments, to help push and shape the message. Look at thread, there is a huge amount of learning.

Will is findable, which is extremely important for his learning. Six on Google search of “Will”. Students are building networks on their own. Shows Fan Fiction site. They are figuring things out, while we are not. Learning is 24/7/365, if you want it to be.

Showed a mySpace page and then Meg Cabot’s mySpace. Can connect, but we block hese sites. The upside is not being recognized by teachers, they are not going away.

Showed Clarence Fisher’s class blogs (had to play imagine that) Did a post on the Nata Village in Africa and she got comments from the villagers.

It is not about what is in the texts, but who is in their networks and how they constuct them.

Nowhere in curriculum are students learning how to access information via cellular technology. How to find using a variety of different tools.

Showed OpenCourseware at MIT and the $100 laptop program. Need to find mentors (teachers) and make them smart consumers. They will learn about subjects not just in our classroom, but now have many different approaches.

Wikipedia is one of the most important web site in Will’s mind, but most don’t visit the history tab and discussion tab, where the conversation is occurring.

Shared the Google doc example – plagiarism is a conversation we are going to have to again and again. Showed wikipedia changes – 500 changes in last 3 minutes. Have to figure out how to teach.

More and more of what we read has not been edited in the same way as before? Who edits the blog? Everyone needs to edit everyone. We need to model editing and be skeptical consumers of information.

Need to teach to read and write in hypertext rich environments. How do you teach this literacy and do it well. The world is linked. If students are not writing with links, connecting with conversations, they will not be prepared for the future.

We have to change our practice of teaching. If you have an Internet connection, job shifts to connecting students to the smartest people, may not be you.

We can connect our students to mentor who can motivate and engage our students in ways which we cannot. This can be powerful. Showed example of the Flat Classroom Project.

Can’t deliver curriculum, teach how to create networks to support life-long learning. Connections are the transformation. It is not what I know, but what I learn. Need to teach the literacy so that they are not duped and misled.

Most examples are digital replication of analog practices. This is very different. Need to talk about these tools with the adults. What is stopping you from bringing this into your practice? Who are your teachers? Are you a life-long learners? How are you connecting? How are you growing your networks? You have to become a participant. How are you modeling your learning?

This morning, while rubbing the sleep out of my eyes, I realized the why the laptop conference was made to be held in Memphis. More later

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