M-Powered Sisterhood

Greetings from A Spanish Medieval Palace, where 200 technologists, humanists and teachers are gathered from 29 countries for the 2011 International Association for Development of the Information Society (IADIS) Mobile Learning Conference. Keynote presenter Marcus Specht of the Open University of the Netherlands shared research confirming that students with handheld devices showed greater engagement during fieldwork/fieldtrips because of the mobile devices multiple channels for responding (text, image, audio and video) He is particularly interested in the mobile device as a channel for sensory data, creative artifacts, communication, and synchronization (with other technologies). For example, if your mobile device senses that you are watching a soccer game on tv, it could send you inside information on particular players, the history of both teams, invite your friends to watch the game,…. Not sure I find this example enriching, but can imagine incredibly rich educational applications, some of which I hope to learn about during the next 3 days.

I remember helping my mother at her office at NIH thread punch cards on metal stalks - hundreds of them at a time - no way did I think this drudgery might eventually lead to the instantaneous multisensory experience of today.

Being invited to add to the collaborative poetic reflection on the wonders of the web and its evolution rekindled the excitement I  felt when AOL first announced I had mail.  Recalling the following  vignettes reminded me how quirkily rich the web has made my life

In 1994, my 7 year old son got the email address of a Hopi elder in New Mexico, sent her a message asking her to call him – which she did, not collect, and they talked for more than an hour.  His 4th grade teacher was blown away when he turned in a complete guide to Hopi homeopathy for his social studies project.In 2008, I built the internet when I downloaded a speaking Chinese phrase book to my cellphone and used it to speak (literally – it did the talking) to taxicab drivers in Beijing.   In 2009, my deeply depressed dog was brought  out of his gloom by the sight and sound on Skype of my husband   in Austria.   Today, I spend more time talking with my sons in China than I did when they were in college in the US – thanks to G-chat.

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I just added the first tag and story for Vietnam

Thanks to Thomas for clueing me into Mapskip – a nice combination of geotagging, blogging and photosharing.  It helped me recapture a wonderful memory that was threatening to fade – the summer of 2008 when I worked (and played) with a group of Duke students and their Vietnamese university roommates in a service learning project in a beautiful ancient village outside Hanoi.  Through Mapskip I was able to find and tag a remote location, tell a story, upload photos and embed a Youtube video  (a young Vietnamese boy showing and reading an illustrated story about his younger twin brothers)

What was incredible about that summer was how enthusiastic the children were to learn English under  conditions most American students and teachers would find unbearable – 3 hour classes in 90 degree heat with no electricity in a room packed with more than a hundred classmates of different ages.

Here is the link to the story on Mapskip:   http://www.mapskip.com/stories.php?story=1697

Photos from the Lizzie Borden murder investigation

Photosynth  is the ultimate mash-up tool –  a Microsoft application that creates a 3-D composite out of innumerable individual photographs that can be taken by anyone at any time with any camera device.

Photosynth was originally intended as a new and creative means of presenting photographs, what makes it technically appealing is that it can solve for the relative spatial relationships between photographs without knowing anything about the camera that took the photograph, and it does it relatively quickly.  The potential for teachers of history, art, and science are extraordinary  as they have the abiity to bring to their classrooms (or even create) 3-D  models of a famous battle, a cathedral, or even an entire ecosystem.

Another intriguing potential use of Photsynch is forensics. Imagine if first responders, forensic technicians, and investigators had the means of combining  a large number of overlapping photographs taken throughout the investigation of a crime scene.

What if, for example, old photos from the unsolved Lizzy Borden murder case were retrieved and Photosynched –  would we possibly know whether Lizzy did indeed take an axe and “give her mother forty whacks and, when she saw what she had done,  give her  father forty-one?”

But why is there no Mac version?

Planning my conference presentation with my colleague Theo/Anthony

Now that I am on the other side of planning delivering  presentation on Mlearning at the UNC TLT Conference, it’s time to reflect.  I came away from the experience convinced that Second Life has extraordinary potential for collaborative learning and working.  For me, it’s appeal as a social milieu was weak, but having gone through the process of preparing a presentation, interacting with colleagues, and making new professional contacts, I’m convinced of its potential for education.

The downside is the rather steep learning curve – particularly for those who may, like me, be somewhat spatially challenged.  Will teachers and students have the time to invest in navigating a new world and mastering a whole new set of tools?

Still needing improvement is the search function which intermingles uninteresting commercial, pornographic, and academic content in a frustratingly random way.  Shopping also has a way to go to combine the convenience of the online experience with the fun of live shopping.  If avatars could be created that more nearly replicated their real-life selves, we could try on clothes and get a sense of how they looked before buying – and we could buy real clothes as well as virtual ones.

But other features are truly exciting – such as videoplayers that allow easy importing of Youtube videos, simulated mobile phones, and a near – instantaneous translation tool for chat.   During the presentations, the presence of chat and talk allowed for two non-competing channels of communication, fostering a greater level of exchange than I’ve found at most conferences ,

What was most striking about the experience was the messianic attitude of Second Life natives – the willingness to teach, help , encourage and befriend made the entire experience both pleasurable and educational.

Mobility and Ubiquity: It appears that we are going to be accessing the internet much more from the objects that travel with us through our daily life.  Nokia projects a wearable mobile phone-computer .  Other predictions suggest that the internet will come to us through more rather than fewer media – with connections imbedded in the objects we interact with as we go through our day – kitchen appliances, cars, apparel, ….  At the extreme end of futurist thinking are cyborgians who suggest that our bodies will actually contain the means to access the internet through implants  - but that’s probably Web 10.0.

Intelligence: Where phrases like “data integration” and “semantics” may seem too abstract to get anyone’s juices flowing, what they suggest really is exciting.   For example, instead of being able to go to a website and get crime statistics for your city – a Web 2.0 innovation – you could instantly find out how your city’s child molestation incidents compared with those of  any city in the world from Roman times to the present day – at a single click.   Instead of spending hours conducting a literature search for a research paper, one click would deliver that background nicely packaged, cited and summarized so you could get onto the interesting work of your own research.  The class that wanted to do a collaborative music project would not have to go through the cumbersome work of collecting data on song preferences – the web would know its members well enough to be able to suggest the perfect song automatically.

Reality Enhancement:  Perhaps the most innovative and enriching dimensions of Web 3.0 will be its power to bring virtual and real worlds together.  One aspect of this is the creation of virtual worlds that more closely resemble our real ones – witness the movie Avatar, 3-D realms like Second Life,  and the increasingly sophisticated use of simulation in worlds as diverse as medicine and the military.  All of these  presage even more ambitious  and encompassing verisimilitudes to come.  The flipside of more realistic virtual worlds is more virtual real worlds.  I love the idea presented in the picture to the left – a visit to a graveyard becomes a an interaction with the departed – your own loved ones or historical figures.   Some fear that the ability to enhance reality may result in serious invasions of privacy, as individuals could be assigned all kinds of visible tags as pictured below.

The entire archive content can be read and saved online, and/or downloaded in several different formats (from text and pdf to MP3, and other multimedia files). Access is free and open, and users can also directly upload their own material and/or other content not copyrighted (after a free registration). A special section, the WayBack Machine, includes the URL of 85 billion web-pages archived from 1996 on, and it is aimed at capturing 2 billion pages from around the world.

One  delightful feature of the Archive are featured videos with short reviews. A tour of these was as entertaining and informative as attending a documentary film festival. One of my favorites, “American Dream” would be a wonderful introduction to a creative writing assignment.  This 7 minute film captures the winner of a 1924 contest run by a San Francisco theater and newspaper, inviting contestants to submit narratives of interesting dreams.

The winner, Mrs. L. L. Nicholson was invited to star in a film portrayal of her dream, a delightfully surrealistic vignette about a lost infant, some fish, and a runaway Model T. So for research, remixing, or a Saturday night at home – the Internet Archive is it.

Ann Michaelson, a Norwegian Engllish teacher

Having just completed my “gap analysis”  I realize how much I still need to do for what I’ve learned to become part of my daily practice.  I still feel very much as though I’ve been to the store and purchased a lot of shiny new gadgets that are still sitting on the shelf waiting to be used. 

So I’ve just set about looking for role models.  And lo and behold I’ve found one – an English teacher who has thoroughly embraced Web 2.0.  Her name is Ann Michaelson and she teaches high school English in Sandvika, Norway.  Her blog  Teaching English using web 2.0 is a masterful annmic.wordpress.com.

What makes Ann’s blog so effective? -  A quick look at her unit on Hamlet – shows how she’s harnessed the rich interactivity of Web 2.0 to engage her students.  Not only does she include the full text of the original play, but she includes a link to a simplified English version designed especially for ESL students.  Enter the Simpsons with their own take on the classic, courtesy of Youtube – but lest we lose the power of the original, Youtube also brings us John Gielgud’s incredible performance.  Thanks to GoogleEarth, we can see exactly where Shakespeare lived in Statford Upon Avon.  Like all busy teachers, she’s happy to save time by having her students take g the excellent tests created by the BBC.  Through Flickr and Wikipedia, she brings us artworks that provides a visual perspective.  The proof of an effective teacher is ultimately what her/his students can accomplish – and if Ann’s students’ blogs – included on her site – are impressive – as are her full and frequent comments on them.   Well-organized links complement Ann’s own lesson plans and resources, including a short list of her “go-to” web 2.0 tools including a few new to me - glogster.com, a free app for making posters, forvo, all the words in the world, pronounced, and Zamzar, an online video download, file conversion site.