DD Shift

I am hearing the song “Whistling in the Dark” by TMBG.

So, from my NewTeeVee feed, I followed a little story about ISPs in Europe. Apparently somewhere there is proposed legislation that would require ISPs to spy on their customers to determine whether or not the customers are breaking copyright law by using P2P tools. The article refers to this as “Europe’s Fight for Net Neutrality“.

I don’t see this as a net neutrality issue as much as I see it as a privacy issue. I don’t want some network administrator sniffing my packets. Trust me, I do not (intentionally) break copyright law. In fact, I’m a teacher who teaches about this in the classroom. But, I still don’t find it ok to monitor what I send from my computer out into the internet and what I download all in the name of copyright protection. And, I don’t want to have to go through extensive encryption methods to help “ensure” my own privacy.

This concept is not new. The article makes reference to France’s 3-strikes and your out policy. This isn’t much different from Virgin Media’s new policy. Is this a trend that will sweep Europe? Does it make sense to put this legislation into practice when courts are already overwhelmed with cases over these issues? Who will enforce it? How will the additional monitoring and maintenance be funded? Does the benefits of catching copyright-law-breakers really balance out the loss of privacy, additional red-tape litigation and technological administrative overhead? Or, is it time that we rethought the structure of copyright. Where do we go from here?

I am hearing the song “Circle of Friends” by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians.

I have just reviewed a very cool tool called Ta-Da List.  Ok… This is the coolest little online tool I have seen in a while.  It does one thing– but it does it well.

Ta-da List allows you to create a checklist of things.  It could be things that you have to pick up at the grocery store.  It could also be things that students should be doing in the classroom… You can share the lists.  You can view the lists online– including mobile devices!

Think about it:  you are the yearbook teacher.  You have a student editor who “manages” the yearbook team members.  While the yearbook is hard work, there is a great deal of individual work on the part of the students; students working on different parts of the yearbook at the same time.  How do you keep track?

1. Have an overall high level plan- perhaps create the “mega”-ta-da list.
2. Then, have the student editor who breaks out that list into to miniature ta-da lists for each of the students on the team.
3. As students finish their tasks, they check-off that they are done.
4. As major components of the yearbook are completed, the editor checks those off the mega-ta-da list.
5. As time goes on, you, your student and anyone else that you invite (parents, school administrators) can see exactly how much has been contributed over the course of the semester by each student.

In the past I have had students keep track of their progess in a forum in our Moodle site.  But, this is simpler both to access and to read through.  Excellent!

For other cool online tools for the classroom and some quick reviews, see “Web 2.0 Tool Reviews“.

I am hearing the song “Die Moldau” by Smetana.

This week I listened several archive sessions from the K-12 Online Conference in 2007.  The sesson that stuck with me was one titled, “Starting from Scratch:  Framing Change for Stakeholders” by Ben Wilkoff.

I suspected, from the title, that Mr. Wilkoff would be working with the idea of cognitive frames which I have encountered in “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, and I was pleasantly surprised that this was indeed the case.  Here is an interview, “Inside the Frame“,  with Lakoff where he gives an example of a cognitive frame.

What was particularly useful for me is that Wilkoff steps through the process of reframing the way we talk about technology in education so that when people discuss it, it is not in terms of “fearing” technological change or playing technological “catch-up”.  Instead, his “Academy of Discovery” instead frames the debate in such a way that if you try to contradict the frame, you are contradicting “authentic learning”.

I am currently heading up a committee that will help me redefine the direction of technology use in the school.  I have a dynamic group of people who have volunteered for this committee, and I’m continuously looking for different ways to help assimilate new ways of thinking about how we do things.  This will simply add one more tool to my tool belt.

At this point and time, I am a bit fuzzy about the exact frame that Wilkoff has employed and how he promoted that frame throughout his community.  There seem to be a number of intertwining frames in his presentation.  I will spend more time looking at this.  But, already I have found additional value in the supporting documentation.  Already I see that he provides links to studies to support the frame, examples of authentic learning in his own school, and documents that he used for communication.  Here is a link to the actually “Academy of Discovery” which is not linked on the main page of the conference session.