Fewmets

I tried to find education-based blogs that involved science education, but with limited success. Perhaps that speaks ill of my research skills or suggests I am not very open-minded about these things. Here though, was what I chose and why.

Education Games Research sounded promising, as I have been funded several times to develop educational games and I love a wide range of games. I value the social interaction that comes through shared play. The blog, however, has yet to prove engaging or to yield up anything that will impact my teaching.

The eduFire blog was highly ranked somewhere in the lists were given. I signed up based on that, only later discovering that the most recent post was November of last year.

Being a parent and a science teacher, the Parenting Science Blog looked very promising, but perhaps I should have looked further. It is mostly about research supporting how to raise your child. I suppose it is nice to have a funded study that supports what I find intuitively clear.

I have been skeptical in general about Twitter so I signed up for an award winning tweeter: Darcy1968. I have yet to find anything of interest but have my skepticism validated on several fronts. This experience has left me grateful for the 140 character limit.

I added Geology News from Geology.com to my reader. That has been the most useful to date, especially in light of the Chilean earthquake. One neat thing that led me to is that IRIS (the Incorporated Research Institutions for Seismology) posts “teachable moments” materials for recent earthquakes. Another was a link to a pre-Haitian earthquake graphic in the New York Times that highlights earthquake risks associated with poor construction practices in major world cities.

Looking back through my starred items, I see that practically everyone is from Badastronomy.com. The one that probably has broadest appeal was The Scale of the Universe…well worth checking out.

I walk away from the Week 3 Things with a strong sense that following even this modest number of blogs is incredibly time consuming. If it weren’t for three snow days I never would have been able to do it.

I also find myself reflecting on the social phenomena around blogging Described in general terms we have one individual broadcasting what he or she likes and values and others generating a stream of predominantly affirming and supporting comments. The one probably judging self-worth (in part) based on comments. Dissenting opinions can be attacked by the supporters (I saw one supporter reply “How dare you!” to someone who asserted the post had been tedious). The supporters describe themselves as “followers”.

It seems like a fertile area for behavioral research: I can imagine a Master’s thesis exploring parallels among this and cults or middle school cliques. I do not mean to assert that his characterizes my entire experience, but it is telling that you do not have to look hard or far to find examples.

I read five blogs for five days. I can readily see there were points of interest for teachers of younger children and of the humanities. There was not much of use to a high school physical science teacher. I did keep a  piece on an infographics contest about the earthquake in Haiti. That, though, was with the thought of asking my geology students to assess the winning poster and see if they find the fallacies in it.

My usual blog reading led me to something in Phil Plait’s Bad Astronomy that moved me.

Until about 15 years ago I routinely told my students that the chemistry they studied applied everywhere in he universe. Since then we’ve discovered that dark energy and dark matter make up about 96% of everything.  Fermilab generated this elegant analogy for thinking about the 4% of  the universe that is made of protons, neutrons and electrons.

(Disclaimer 1: I’ve been putting way too many hours into crafting careful pieces of writing and am backing off from that. That means I am writing a blog that sometimes complains about bloggers not writing thoughtfully, while consciously pushing myself to do the same…so it goes.)

(Disclaimer 2: I am uncomfortable (being a novice to all this) offering thoughts and perspective that will automatically link to the comments sections of the blogs I am assessing, so I am not include URLs or exact blog names.)

The assignment started with “Blogging is reading, reflecting, questioning, researching, synthesizing, linking, conversing, teaching, sharing and expressing ideas.” I’m not really seeing that in the blogs I read. It seems much more to be a matter of one person making assertions and then leaving it at that. The writer responded minimally to the subsequent comments, and the majority of the comments seem to come down to saying “me too”.

I started with the blog about brevity in writing. Shelley identified the author as a 14-year old. The style was fairly engaging. The use of strikethrough text baffled me. I’ve seen it in other blogs where it was similar to complaining by speaking under one’s breath loud enough for everyone to hear. That didn’t seem to be the case here.

I found the frequency of links to be irritating. Some seemed gratuitous and broke the flow of the discussion. He could just as well have defined twittories, for example, and not made me disrupt the train of thought by going off to another page.

The tone of the comments was. I suspect they represent teachers speaking supportively to a student. I didn’t really notice that until I reread them with the context of the commentary of the other four blogs I looked for this assignment. The writer responded frequently to comments. It tended to be a point-by-point refutation/explanation/confirmation that I did not find especially enlightening.

(I offer a curious aside on the writer. Looking around the web a little led me to reconstruct the story that this fourteen year-old was presented as an icon of what students can achieve through blogging (being described once as “the poster boy of the Student 2.0 ‘movement’ ”. Just over a year after this blog, though, he posted saying he was giving it up. The post included allusions I found concerning and which suggested he had had some very bad experiences and had a very poor self-image. He linked to a blog arguing that teens don’t have the experience or perspective to be blogging about educational practices. Blogging was apparently not a healthy experience for him. He is probably the exception, but this might nonetheless be a cautionary tale to consider when encouraging students to post.)

I next read the blog from the list by a librarian working to improve student PowerPoint presentations. I was put off by the one and two sentence paragraphs. I was like reading the local Gannet newspaper. Perhaps it is out of vogue, but I like to see ideas be developed and supported, not simply asserted.

I understand and sympathize with the author’s point…I’ve rarely seen the spectrum of tools offered by PowerPoint used effectively to enhance a talk. It was interesting that she advocated banning bullets from PowerPoints, but over 80% of her text was in bullets.

The comments to the blog included an awful lot of “me-too” responses. And the comments were all very brief. They were not epitomizing the ideal we were given of “reflecting, questioning, researching, synthesizing, linking…”

Then I read the Rationale for writing blogs in education. I initially thought I would skip this one seeing how long it was. Then I noticed that she was writing in paragraphs and wanted to test my observations about the choppy writing of the previous blog.

I liked the excerpt from Donald Leu and the observation that changes are happening so fast that we are unable to evaluate them. I think that is at the heart of my concerns about the hype over using these web resources in teaching.

That point brought to mind something I learned in the environmental industry. Whenever you put gas in your car it comes from an underground storage tank. It was initially obvious that those should be made of steel, but a few decades later they are all rusting out. We’ve been replacing the steel tanks with fiberglass ones, secure in our knowledge they will not rust. We won’t know how good a choice this was for a few more decades. If the choice was sound, we are in good shape. It something unforeseen happens then we will face environmental damage at least as great as was cause by the leaking steel tanks.

If all the hype about web 2.0 is sound, we are being insightful and farseeing educators. If something unforeseen happens…

Many of the comments for this blog noted the good list of points. I don’t think any took issue with the claims or the absence of support for the claims. They were pretty much all saying “nice work”, like would be written at the top of a paper when the teacher doesn’t have opportunity to evaluate in detail.

The penultimate blog I read was a summary of what happened in a math class, written by a student for other students. The writer added discussion of the usage of the word “percent” that was taken nearly verbatim without citation from Wikipedia. I found troubling the juxtaposition between that and the blog being listed in the Scribe Post Hall of Fame. I understand that the concept of “restate in your own words” is rough for an eighth grader, bit to give an award a middle school student for something that could get him thrown out of college 5 years later gives me pause.

All the comments were of the “good job” variety, being affirming votes of classmates.

Finally I read a criticism of the digital native/digital immigrant dichotomy. It was written in sustained paragraphs and generated thoughtful and supported arguments. The comments were of a similar character. There was more dissention than in the comments of the other posts, but still a lot of “me-too” or “good post” responses. I wonder: is the goal of those to assure the writer that someone is reading? Are those posted by other bloggers who are sympathetic to wanting comments?

I further wonder: are these comments of similar flavor to the post because people who like this kind of argument are more inclined to read it and post in a similar style? Is there an element of self-fulfilling prophecy going on here?

I’ve got to say that elements of the first two videos gave me qualms (so much so that I did not watch the third one). Being in a private school I work with a largely economically privileged student body that has abundant access to online resources. I’ve seen the figure, though, that only about one in ten Americans have opportunity to go online. While some of the offline population will be the elderly, it seems likely that the lower economic classes make up a significant proportion. The excitement over teaching with these tools and the energy dedicated to exploring them feels uncomfortably elitist sometimes.

I liked the word “uncomfortable” there. I’ll use it again: The Machine is Us/ing Us left me uncomfortable an two fronts. I admire its cleverness, but cleverness is no guarantee of appropriateness or value. (I think of the number of poor-taste jokes I hear that I would never repeat but nonetheless by their creative word play).

I wonder about this as a means of effective communication: are there issues about a student that reads slower than the pace of the video? How about a student who is distracted visually by irrelevant peripheral imagery? I think I have students for whom this delivery would be extremely difficult.

I wonder about accessibility issues, but I am concerned about the intellectual integrity of things like The Machine is Us/ing Us and Shift Happens. Watching each through once, I come away from the former with the message that the world is changing is ways that make us need to reevaluate our most essential values. The latter tells me that there are huge and rapid changes occurring in the world and we need to educate children to be ready for it.

While I agree about the rapidity of change, I am troubled by the evidence offered in support of Wesch’s conclusion. I found much of the reasoning questionable if not outright specious. There is, for example, the assertion that HTML “elements defined how content could be formatted” and therefore “form and content became inseparable”. We are told that the notation <b> defines form while <title> defines content.  I have used HTML for over a decade and am not seeing finding this at all obvious. And I am pretty skeptical that there is a compelling line of argument that leads from that to the necessity to reevaluate ethics, privacy, family and love. (I’m onboard for rethinking copyright, however.)

Fisch presents lots of statistics. There is the comparison of number of college degrees in 2006 in the US, India and China. China and India had about 2.5 times more than us. But there is a substantial discrepancy in the size of those three countries…isn’t the percentage of the population with degrees more to the point?

I worked that out. (Did you know you can get past population figures with a Google search for something like “India population 2006”?). Dividing the given 1.3 million college degrees by the US population at the time, I got 1.0 %. That seemed awfully low, and made me wonder exactly what the 1.3 million represented…I think it must be degrees conferred that year. But no matter: the percentage for the US was four times greater than that of China and eight times greater than India’s. Is that evidence that a significant shift is occurring?

There is a similar argument to be made about the time to get an audience of 50 million. Isn’t that bound to be easier for the internet to do, given the dramatic population increase since radio was introduced? Shouldn’t we instead look at the time to reach 20% of the population?

We were also given the time a 21 year old spends on video games, the telephone and TV. Fisch was again fuzzy about just what the numbers represent. I took 10,000 hours to mean that much time since birth. Assuming 16 waking hours and that very young children have no time on the phone, the shocking 10,000 hours from Fisch come out to an average of 2.1 hours a day on the phone. Frankly, I find that suspiciously low rather than indicative of a change of technology use from the previous generation.

Figuring limited hours on video games for the very young, but television being a part of life since birth, the averages come out to 1.8 hours and 1.3 hours per day, respectively. I’m not sure those values tell us much, nor that they suggest a dramatic change in technology use.

I don’t think that I am unusual in valuing cogent arguments based on objective evidence just because I am a scientist. What Wesch and Fisch do is much more like “the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping” support a cause or an institution. (Merriam-Webster online). As George Orwell said, “All propaganda is a lie even when its telling the truth”.

But none of this addresses the Thing 3 assignment.

I often use online resources as supplements to text books. They are great for supporting tangents that student questions often lead us on. I send student kml and kmz files to use with Google Earth to let them rediscover plate tectonic theory through layering geologic data on the Earth. I also generate maps of geology field trips in Google Earth and use the Google Sky version to teach the constellations. We’ve watched the live feed from the International Space Station in the astronomy class. I use Chime for 3-D visualizations of molecules in chemistry and geology. I have experimented with using a wiki to let students collaborate on extensive lab reports. I recently have been assigning students to listen to episodes of Astronomy Cast. I have used blogs for research occasionally, but have not found many I seem worthwhile. I tried to get funding to develop a wiki for original student experimental research, but was turned down. I tried to use Second Life as a science educational tool, but was steered away from that as being inappropriate to high school. I have given thought to students generating blogs but have not found compelling ways to do so. I occasionally show blog entries to classes so they can identify scientific errors in them. I often use youtube videos.

I’d never much thought about what “life long learner” meant before. It seemed one of those bits of educational jargon I happily ignore and go on with the business of teaching. The 7 1/2 Habits, though, made me realize that this is something that had always been part of my life.

It’s why I taught myself guitar in 8th grade and to bake bread in high school. Why I taught myself ASL 15 years ago.  It drove me to learn Word on the secretary’s computer, to get myself hired to teach PowerPoint so I could learn it and to learn HTML. It pushed me to learn vocal arranging and take voice lessons. It’s why I want to take a course in quantum mechanics.

My life and my approach to education are so steeped valuing in this that I find it hard to think about which of the 7 1/2 Habits will be challenging, resonant or important.

The third point is the only one that stands out to me. It seems naive to say that all problems are challenges, or learning experiences. It is clearly true of some obstacles (like trying to find a name for this blog that was not already in use, or dealing recently with having most of a web site go offline after I had made if part of a homework assignment). If I look, though, at the list of problems I encountered today, the majority were things to efficiently get out of the way and get on with my teaching rather than reflectively make into lemonade.

I guess that means I will find it hard to do.