Dr. Annette Lamb gave an overview of technology integration in education during her presentation at NECC 2008 this afternoon. (I should say “one of her presentations” — she did several, back-to-back.)

1980s — It was all about the software.
We tended to see computers as tutors (what could kids learn from applications like Oregon Trail?), as tools (word processing, database, spreadsheets), or as “tutees” with students doing Logo programming.

1990s — It was all about problem-solving.
We were building infrastructure and getting our schools wired. We established hotlists, scavenger hunts, and WebQuests. We used tools like Hyperstudio, Inspiration, and Timeliner.

Early 00s — It was all about projects.
We expected students to work with primary sources, to look at things from multiple perspectives, to use web cams and simulations. Teachers spent a lot of time not planning lessons but “designing learning experiences.” (Jargon always seems more realistic at the time.)

Now — it’s all about Web 2.0,
We’re working with blogs, wikis, social networking, and other collaborative technologies. Lamb pointed out that the most recent standards include digital equity and digital ethics.

Each period had strengths. Her point was simple: don’t abandon the old just because the new comes along. Keep the best of the old as you transition to the new.

I’m blogging this week from NECC 2008 in San Antonio.

David Warlick opened his presentation at NECC in a manner that will probably become standard in the 21st century: he told his audience how to tag their blog posts and Tweets so that the RSS feed would pick them up.

He spoke of how students in his (and my) generation were well prepared to work in straight rows performing repetitive tasks under close supervision. To be more precise, they finished school ready to go work in a mill for 30 years, raise families, retire with a pension, and enjoy their grandchildren. He paused and said quietly, “Things changed.”

Now our job is to prepare our children for a future we can’t describe. And our children must not just survive in that world, he pointed out, they need to prosper.

Here are his three bullet points. (I want to mention them so I can do justice to his presentation and then talk about the other things that also captured my attention.)

1. The future is unpredictable.
2. Students are networked.
3. The new information landscape is flat, less authority (teacher)-driven.

Warlick redefined the Digital Divide for me. I had always considered it to be the difference between the “haves” and the “have nots,” between those who could afford a computer (and access and occasional repairs), and those who could maybe get a used computer but had to give it up once the power supply or monitor went out. How shortsighted of me! The “haves” are networked; they know, as Warlick put it, “how to find the people who can help you learn how to do what you want to do.” Those who are networked are powerful. Those who aren’t, are alone.

Warlick believes it is in our national interest for everyone to have free Web access. He pointed to Macedonia and other countries that have already made that commitment.

I had to think about that one. In my rural community, the “haves” can choose: cable, DSL, or if you live out in the county, dial-up. The “have nots” will tell me they have a computer at home, but they will add that it has picked up a virus. Or the printer is out of ink. Or the disk drive is jammed. Always some polite fiction. The point is, they don’t get to choose. Their ability to do schoolwork is affected, but we can level that playing field to some extent. Their ability to network, though, is postponed.

I have to wonder if that means that their ability to prosper is also postponed. In the coming economy, it sure looks that way right now.

This is an example of why I come to NECC. People share ideas that disturb and challenge and stick around.

The blog is ended, but the pondering continues …

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Dr. Trina Davis, President of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) welcomed more than 18,000 educators from more than 50 countries to the opening of the 2008 National Educational Computer Conference (NECC) in San Antonio last night. The keynote session was Texas-sized, filling the ballroom and broadcast throughout the Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center.

Special thanks to the Southwest High School Mariachi Band. If they were at all nervous about performing in front of that large an audience, it didn’t show. Music, singing, and a little dancing got things off to a lively start.

In keeping with the conference theme of convene-connect-transform, Davis encouraged teachers to be “powerful advocates for change.” She encouraged us to share our passion, to showcase student work, and to dream big.

Keynote speaker James Surowiecki, author of The Wisdom of Crowds, outlined conditions needed to make the kind of smart groups described in his book. He acknowledged the potential of technology in providing a way to aggregate the individual opinions of a group (95% of which will be wrong) into a collective judgment (which can be amazingly accurate).

He discussed the value of encouraging diversity with in a group, calling it “the most important component.” He stressed that, while socioeconomic diversity can be valuable, cognitive diversity will best provide the variety of perspectives needed to form a “smart group.” Homogeneous groups are easier to work in, but, Surowiecki stated, “The more they talk, the dumber they become.”

The third quality Surowiecki mentioned was independence. For a smart group to develop, people need to be able to think for themselves. They need a small amount of support to move beyond imitating others, and they need to be open to the kind of healthy disagreement that leads to seeing things from a different point of view.

The next couple of days are going to be fun. I’ll keep you posted!

News flash: multitasking in the workplace began in the 19th century. (Parents, of course, have always multitasked.) Researcher Maggie Jackson, author of Distracted, says, “We can’t just blame the Blackberry” for the fact that the average office worker is interrupted about every 3 minutes and then needs about 30 minutes to get back on task. The resulting cost to business has been estimated at $650 billion per year.

“You can’t produce deeply in a distractable environment — we have to stop kidding ourselves about that,” she says. “We’re existing on snippets and glimpses of each other.”

Researchers are sure people can learn to focus better. Even just talking with children about how to pay attention, Jackson says, has led to some gains.

My high school students like to say they work better when they are watching TV and doing homework at the same time. This practice does not lead to their best writing. Sadly, it probably *does* help prepare them for the work world.

Read Jackson’s article at Business Week: May We Have Your Attention, Please?

If you teach a unit on mythology — or even if you don’t — you have GOT to visit Zak Hamby’s Nixa Mythology site and click on Teacher Resources. This is a terrific example of what happens when you get out of the way and let a creative teacher explore the possibilities!

My personal favorite — based on sheer creativity — is the Trojan Find-it. Think “the Iliad meets Where’s Waldo?” Mythological Barbie is a very close second, though.

I suggested to Mr. Hamby that his obvious talent could earn him some extra gas money if he were to offer these resources at a reasonable price. He responded, “My intent is … to make those resources available for free. Since I worked so hard on them, I just want them to be used!”

Give the man his wish — visit the site, bookmark it, add it to your Del.icio.us collection, and spread the word. Summer school is coming for some of us, and August is just 9 weeks away for the rest of us.

Wikipedia, the upstart Internet encyclopedia that most universities forbid students to use, has suddenly become a teaching tool for professors.

Recently, university teachers have swapped student term papers for assignments to write entries for the free online encyclopedia.

Wikipedia is an “open-source” web site, which means that entries can be started or edited by anyone in the world with an Internet connection.

Writing for Wikipedia “seems like a much larger stage, more of a challenge,” than a term paper, said professor Jon Beasley-Murray, who teaches Latin American literature at the University of British Columbia in this western Canadian city.

“The vast majority of Wikipedia entries aren’t very good,” said Beasley-Murray, but said the site aims to be academically sound.

To reach its goal of academic standards, said Wikipedia’s web site, it set up an assessment scale on its English-language site. The best encyclopedia entries are ranked as “Featured Articles,” and run each day on the home page at www.wikipedia.com.

To be ranked as a “Featured Article,” Wikipedia said an entry must “provide thorough, well-written coverage of their topic, supported by many references to peer-reviewed publications.”

Of more than 10 million articles in 253 languages, only about 2,000 have reached “Featured Article” status, it said.

As an experiment, last January Beasley-Murray promised his students a rare A+ grade if they got their projects for his literature course, called “Murder, Madness and Mayhem,” accepted as a Wikipedia Featured Article.”

Read the entire article.

This parable offers some wisdom for dealing with the stress that often comes with the end of the school year:

I hopped in a taxi and we took off for the airport. We were driving in the right lane when suddenly a black car jumped out of a parking space right in front of us. My taxi driver slammed on his breaks, skidded, and missed the other car by just inches! The driver of the other car whipped his head around and started yelling at us. My taxi driver just smiled and waved at the guy.

And, I mean, he was really friendly.

So I asked, “Why did you just do that? This guy almost ruined your car and sent us to the hospital!”

This is when my taxi driver taught me what I now call “The Law of the Garbage Truck.”

He explained that many people are like garbage trucks. They run around full of garbage, full of frustration, anger, and disappointment. As their garbage piles up, they need a place to dump it, and sometimes they’ll dump it on you.

Don’t take it personally.

Just smile, wave, wish them well, and move on. Don’t take their garbage and spread it to other people at work, at home, or on the streets.

Successful people do not let garbage trucks take over their day.

Special thanks to Nancy!

On this date in 1937, the German zeppelin Hindenberg caught fire while attempting to moor in New Jersey. The mooring was experiencing some difficulty, and newsreel cameramen had focused on the efforts of the ground crew. As a result, they missed the beginning of the fire, recording only the end. The tragic event is also recorded in still photographs and in the famous account by radio journalist Herbert Morrison, whose words were later added to newsreel footage.

Morrison, recognizing almost immediately the full implications of the fire, uttered the famous phrase, “Oh, the humanity!” as the burning craft crashed to the ground, killing everyone aboard.

The phrase became famous partly as the voice of a journalist who is helpless to stop the tragedy unfolding before him. It is echoed, though, by the radio audience and later movie audiences, recognizing the enormity of what they’re seeing.

That authentic voice is the same quality we ask our students to bring to their writing.

Reading a transcript of Morrison’s words as they watch the clip can help students understand what Morrison is reporting. It might be a good exercise in information literacy to ask students how hearing Morrison say the words affects their understanding of the events, as opposed to just reading them.

It might also be a good activity to ask them how they might edit his words. What is gained and lost by the changes?

They can then apply those insights to modern media: what are the strengths of text alone? When a journalist has strong video footage, what value is added by narration? What does this tell us about the importance of old-fashioned writing in a digital media age?

Update 6-29-08: I stand corrected. As Alpha comments, not all passengers aboard The Hindenberg died in the fire and crash.

He was 19 or 20, and as he served my iced tea and took my food order, he asked what brought me to town. I explained that I was doing a workshop on integrating technology into the classroom.

“Computers are the WORST thing that ever happened to education!” he said.

Surprised, I asked why. He spoke of having to take a remedial math class in order to graduate from high school. He said that a room full of students spent the whole period every day working problems on computer using a program whose name I recognized. He had a teacher if there were any questions, but, he said, the teacher would just point to information on the screen and tell him to figure it out. He eventually graduated because he got his girlfriend to explain the lessons to him. Now he’s waiting tables to make ends meet as he pursues his first love: acting.

Allowing for a little hyperbole in his story and a little frustration with a teacher who probably just wanted him to think for himself, my waiter had a valid point. Computer remediation was a really bad idea FOR HIM. He’s a very interpersonal guy — he spent 10 minutes talking to a total stranger (me) as if we’d known each other for a long time. He would have excelled had he been in a small class where he could talk things through with his teacher and his peers. In fact, that’s what happened, informally, when his girlfriend tutored him. That’s how he passed.

Last week the Department of Education released a report that its gold-plated program, Reading First, isn’t living up to its hype. Students enrolled in the program score no higher on standardized tests (on average) than students who aren’t enrolled in it. Ironically, Margaret Spellings, Secretary of the Department, recently compared Reading First to the cure for cancer in its effectiveness. Last week’s report leaves the current administration with some ’splainin’ to do.

More revealing, though, were comments left by teachers on the Washington Post site. Many of them defend the program from the gut, saying those schools that haven’t excelled are probably not well trained or are doing it wrong. They see their own students making progress. The program works for them.

I couldn’t help thinking of my waiter. The Reading First Report demonstrates a simple, obvious principle: a program that works well for one student could be a disaster for another. Schools insist, however, on a rush to conformity, with every student in every class doing the same thing. This does not put student needs first.

We’ve already spent $6 billion (yes, “b”) on Reading First. Wouldn’t it be great if we could keep that program and use it with the kids who respond to it, but also provide training and materials for 2 or 3 other programs that focus on other learning styles? Students could learn using the approach that would be most successful for them.

Let me say that again, because it may appear to be a radical proposal: let’s put students first.