Digital Connections course

We’re looking at ways to attract more students into computing courses here at Lovett. We have a course that’s currently called eLife which is kind of a survey course in various applications, but it tends to have a small enrollment. I thought of refocusing it as a course based on some of the 21st century learning practices we’re discussing here. Here’s the blurb that I wrote with a colleague:

Digital Connections
This course is an exploration of our contemporary digital, networked, media-saturated world, incorporating blogs, wikis, social networks, podcasting and more. Students will work with digital media and forge connections with a global community of interest in a topic area of their choosing. The first part of the course addresses skills and techniques related to digital publishing, networking, and media production, and legal and ethical issues related to information sharing in the age of the internet. In the second part, each student builds a cumulative digital connections portfolio, engaging in research, media production and online dialogue related to their chosen topic.

The basic idea is that the kids (high school age) will create a blog to chronicle their explorations, seek out conversation with other bloggers and communities online, and create original work that expresses their interest in and opinion of something that they’re passionate about.

I’d like to solicit thoughts and comments on this. Do you see potential pitfalls? How might we approach the nuts-and-bolts teaching? How will we assess the learning, and how do we build the students’ portfolios? Are there specific tools, practices or communities that will be important to leverage?

Multitouch Part 1: iPhone

It’s interesting how profound an impact well-designed and innovative technology can have. There have been just a few moments in my life when I was affected in such a way: my first real exposure to a programmable computer, my first experience with a Mac, my introduction to NCSA Mosaic, and my purchase of an iPhone.

My middle school had an Apple IIe, and to me the amazing thing about that computer was how accessible the programming environment was. It was my first real experience with programming of any kind. Turn the thing on and you could start typing BASIC commands without any preamble, as if your faithful assistant were there, head cocked, pen in hand, ready to take meticulous notes right as you walked into your office, before you’d even taken off your coat and sat at your desk. Programming a IIe turned me on to the world of computer science, and it was a pivotal moment in my life.

Also in middle school, I had my first exposure to a GUI. My friends Jamie and Ethan lived in a relatively affluent part of town and had a psychologist father who could afford the early Mac 512. I have vivid memories of staying up late, using MacPaint to express myself in a way that felt intuitive, powerful, and brand-new. Using that interface felt natural and easy. I instincively felt that all computers would work that way one day; how could they not? It was so well-designed that the computer melted away and I was directly connected: my creative impulse flowed straight to a tool and medium that offered possibilities I hadn’t dreamt of until that moment.

In my senior year of college (‘94-’95) I used a web browser for the first time. Being able to navigate hyperlinked pages has become such a routine activity that it’s hard to remember that it was once a novel experience. I do remember that it was the first time I could clearly see the potential of the Internet for communication, information exchange and entrepreneurship. *

The only other time I’ve had a similar experience was when I got my iPhone some two decades later. Right away I felt that all computers would one day work like this. The interface is, to me, the first quantum leap beyond the mouse-based GUI since it supplanted the command-line interface. I find myself wanting to poke, pinch, squeeze, grab, flick, and swipe things on computer screens. It’s the kind of paradigm shift that makes you realize just how narrow a channel of communication you’re using by controlling a single point on the screen and using a monotonic gesture like clicking.

So I’m sold on multi-touch, gesture-based interfaces as the future of human-computer interaction. There’s lots of research in this area, and products are just beginning to arrive. Think of the iPhone as the original Mac 128K, with its tiny black and white screen, limited memory and slow processor, and you’ll start to realize where things can go from here. I can’t wait to see the upcoming GUI revolution. I hope that engineers everywhere see this as an opportunity to truly innovate and discard some of the tired old conventions that modern technology has outgrown, but that are grandfathered into new systems in the name of backward compatibility and learning curves. More on that in upcoming posts.

A disclaimer and final thought… Is it a coincidence three of these experiences have involved Apple products? I try not to be a fanboy, and I didn’t intend to write an Apple post. The Mac and iPhone happen to be characterized by superlative design, and Apple excels at design when it’s firing on all cylinders. They can take groundbreaking research and existing products and craft them into a very polished and compelling package.

* My friend Randy and I had the idea to create an internet café where you could get coffee and a sandwich and buy internet access by the hour at installed computer terminals. Had we quit college then and gone into the business, we would have been at the leading edge; I don’t recall many existing back then, if any.

OLPC!

I received my new XO as part of the give one, get one program! I can’t believe it arrived this early. I opened my apartment door on Saturday a couple weeks ago to do some errands and there it was. I haven’t been that excited to see a package in I don’t know how long. I donated on November 20, and so I was expecting to have it by sometime in January, according to their published shipping schedule. I hope that priority has not been focused on shipping G1G1 machines to the exclusion of the developing countries, but I’m delighted to have mine. I showed it to Laura Deisley and she turned about as green as the laptop. (She participated in G1G1 as well, around the same time as I did, but she hasn’t received hers yet.)

For those of you that have no idea what an XO is, allow me to introduce you to the OLPC Foundation. (OLPC stands for One Laptop Per Child.) Their goal is to produce a laptop that sells for $100 to developing nations. The machine is designed to be owned and used by children—it’s deliberately kid-sized (I have average-sized hands and the width of the laptop is almost exactly the size of my handspan) and brightly colored. All of the software is free and designed from the ground up with children’s education in mind.

My initial impressions of the XO have been almost completely positive. The machine itself feels well constructed and sturdy. Lots of details have been thought out, like the latching action of the “ears” as they rotate. The boot screen and login process was well done, and the user interface feels discoverable and inviting. I’m very impressed with the overall polish of the user experience. The activities that I’ve tried have worked well. The only negatives I’ve encountered have been the boot time and lack of sleep mode and WPA wireless connectivity, all of which are going to be addressed in the next software release.

So why am I so excited about OLPC and the XO, and why did I want one of my own? I already have a MacBook. I can do more with it than I can with the XO, and I can type on it without cramping my hands.

I’m excited about OLPC because I believe the XO is a revolutionary idea made manifest. Here are some of the things they’ve done that make me admire the project from top to bottom.

User interface

The UI of the XO is refreshingly simple and free from a lot of the cruft that’s part of every other WIMP (Windows, Icons, Menus and Pointer) interface. The developers of the Sugar interface seized an opportunity that’s exceedingly rare in the world of software development: the chance to build a system from the ground up. They have put a lot of thought into the workings of the XO, and it shows. It would have been much easier for the team to take an existing product like GTK/Gnome and tweak it. Instead, they questioned all the assumptions that people bring into traditional GUI programming, and then developed a system that works very well to reduce the amount of complexity that a rural kid would have to contend with when learning to use a computer for the very first time. Notice that they didn’t trash paradigms for the sake of trashing them; lots of familiar conventions have been kept. Overall I think it’s a triumph in user interface design given the limitations in hardware that they were dealing with—one might even argue that it’s an unqualified triumph.

Open source

The OLPC project is built completely on open-source software, starting from the custom drivers and core OS based on Redhat Linux, through the Sugar UI, up to the individual Activities. I’ve always had a thing for open source software, and I think it’s a real strength for this project. For instance, it means that the OS and applications can be tweaked by anybody, even the kids that own the machines.

Constructivism

The very idea of handing a laptop to a child who is statistically likely not to have running water or electricity or access to books, and who statistically unlikely to complete school beyond the sixth grade, is a radical one in lots of ways. Nobody’s sure how this will all work in practice, but initial signs seem to be positive. I definitely have an idealistic bent, and so I’m really excited to think about kids suddenly being able to connect to each other (and the rest of the world) and learn in a way that would otherwise be completely impossible. The power to reflect and explore is inherent in everyone, and this laptop can act like an amplifier cranked up to 11.

Ownership

I love that the attitude is personal and deep involvement in technology. This isn’t about donating computers to classrooms, or families. This is about the transformation that can occur when a child truly owns a device, using it for play and school and everything else, too.

I could have supported the project any number of ways; here’s why I wanted one of my own.

Pure geeky gadget lust

This is one cool piece of technology! Ever since I heard about the project a few years ago I’ve been following it with great interest. As I’ve said before, this is well-designed hardware and software. Experiencing it firsthand has been a lot of fun.

Educational technology

Talk about something that’s right up my alley. This is my job title, my chosen career. In some ways I count this as professional development. It’s also a great tool for evangelism (bring this to a coffee shop and watch what happens).

Programming

I’m a computer scientist by training, and I think it would be lots of fun to develop software for this system. I’ve never really dived into the open source community, but this seems like a great opportunity to do so.

I’m sure this’ll be the first of many OLPC posts. I look forward to sharing this machine with people and finding out what it can do, and I hope the project continues to build momentum.

The Website Project

So, one of the projects I inherited when I took my job at Lovett was the Create-Your-Own-Website assignment. In brief, students create websites using Mozilla Seamonkey—an open-source WYSIWYG* HTML editor—in the context of science and geography classes. The question that I’ve been asking myself for about a year is whether I ought to switch from this traditional Web1.0 way of creating sites to teaching wikis instead. What is lost, and what is gained in the process? Read on for my reflections.

The way I teach this is to give a couple days of instruction to all the students on how to create a website using Seamonkey. It’s a pretty involved process. I take some time to explain how websites are different from Word documents, and I show them some sample content. We start by creating page templates and creating links between them, and then once they learn how to insert images and create external links, they’re off to the races.

Well, except for one more thing. File management. Every year I’m betting better at nipping more problems in the bud, but it’s a bear of an issue no matter how much effort I put into teaching it.

Up to this point in their digital lives, many of the kids have never had to manage and coordinate lots of files. Most things they turn in are single files, and here we are asking them to set up a hierarchy of folders. Because of the way our server works, they can’t work directly from their mounted server folder (nor would it be a good idea anyway, since they need to keep backup copies). So they download a copy from the server, work on the local copy, and then upload it when they’re done working.

Folders get dragged inside folders. Students work on the server copy without realizing it. Backups get lost. Files get moved away from their “home” locations (e.g. out of the website folder onto the desktop) and links are broken. This causes student and teacher frustration, as focus is diverted away from geography and science content (and even web technology content) towards management.

Enter wikis. I’ve been aware of them ever since Wikipedia started… But it was the first time that I saw an AJAX-alicous WYSIWYG editor that the lights really went on.** I believe wikis will completely replace creating and uploading a hierarchy of HTML and media files—at least for everyone who’s not a professional web designer.

I’ve pretty much decided to ditch Seamonkey in favor of a wiki-based project for next year, because when you get down to it, learning file management skills is, though not completely unproductive, certainly a side effect of learning to digitally publish information. So now I’m just trying to shift my perspective and figure out how to carry over the web publishing DNA from the original project while taking advantage of the wiki paradigm. I have a feeling that it will become a lot more connective and less isolated.

My real questions are related to the pedagogy. What do I want the students to learn? How do I effectively teach web publishing using this tool? Is there anything (apart from file-management skills) that I’m going to lose in the process?

I’m looking forward to finding answers to these questions.

* What You See Is What You Get.

** What I’m really waiting for, of course, is an open-source wiki that includes a WYSIWYG editor. This is the final barrier between lots of teachers and students and effective, time-efficient web publishing that you can host locally and avoid problems with externally hosted sites (such as inappropriate advertisements).

In Which I Belatedly Gain Full Citizenship in the Online World

 

I’m an educational technologist at The Lovett School. My job is fascinating—I’m learning new things all the time. I teach computer science to students from ages 11 to 18, and I teach teachers about technology as well. I’m also involved in keeping the technology on our campus running and fixing problems when they happen.

 

I came to educational technology without really knowing about the field at all. I found Computer Science as a major in college in a similar way. I knew that CS existed, and had even spent time as a kid programming computers, but for some reason I never put two and two together—even though my dad did (he wasn’t surprised at all when I declared my major in my sophomore year). I originally thought I’d get a PhD but realized that I liked the practical side of programming too much, so I stopped at a Master’s and programmed for three years. That was valuable experience, but eventually I felt pulled back towards education.

 

I needed to find a way to satisfy the teacher in me, so I taught for a couple years in the Peace Corps (also a valuable experience, and one that couldn’t possibly be summed up in a blog post). When I came back home I had no clue what I was going to do next. Luckily I met somebody at a party who connected me to this job, everything clicked into place, and I’ve been at Lovett for almost five years now. I don’t think there’s any chance of feeling stagnant or unchallenged in such a dynamic and thought-provoking environment.

 

I will be writing about lots of different things that relate to education and technology in this space. I’d like to be able to connect with other people (educators at all levels and in all subject areas; people who create, use, or follow technology) who can offer perspectives, encouragement, criticism, resources… I feel like I tend to try to do too much on my own, and I really want to get connected to the larger community that I know is there.

 

So that’s my greeting. More to come soon…