Odds and Ends - March 4

The Sunday papers are read, the e-mail checked, and the driveway is still clear. Life is good in snowy Minnesota and it's time to add a few odds and ends to the blog...

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I am ALREADY getting excited about NECC in Atlanta this June. Look at this from Peg Milam, SIGMS chair:

SIGMS Forum: The Changing Landscape of 21st Century School Information Centers 
Tuesday, 6/26/2007, 10:30am–12:30pm
The SIGMS forum will feature a discussion about the changing landscape of the 21st century school information center led by a panel of technology experts. These experts will include bloggers, wikiers, tech gurus, technology information specialists, school library media specialists and administrators. Nonmembers welcome!
*Brian Kenney, editor-in-chief of School Library Journal, will introduce the panel
Esteemed panelists: David Warlick, Will Richardson, Larry Johnson, Alice Yucht , Joyce Valenza, and Lisa Perez (AKA  SL's Elaine Tulip).
Other panelist: Doug Johnson   

Will this be cool or what? Worth the price of admission alone! 

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The 2007 Horizon report is now available. (I reported on the 2006 edition last November.) The New Media Consortium and the EDUCAUSE put this report together to analyze and predict the impact of emerging technologies on education. More when I get a chance to read it the report thoroughly. From the abstract:

The 2007 Horizon Report looks at six selected areas--"User-Created Content," "Social Networking," "Mobile Phones," "Virtual Worlds," "New Scholarship and Emerging Forms of Publication," and "Massively Multiplayer Educational Gaming"--the project draws on an ongoing discussion among knowledgeable individuals in business, industry, and education, as well as published resources, current research and practice, and the expertise of the NMC community itself. The Horizon Project's Advisory Board probes current trends and challenges in higher education, explores possible topics for the "Report," and ultimately directs the selection of the final technologies. 

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Just to torture myself, I decided to try out the Google Reader to view my RSS feeds. I have been a happy Bloglines subscriber, but I figured, what the heck. A few observations, keeping in mind that any may be the result of my own ignorance of the program and how it works:

• Google Reader makes it VERY easy to import all your feeds from Bloglines. It literally took five minutes before I was up and running with all my feeds. It even kept the public/private settings. Amazing.
• Google Reader feels slower than Bloglines.
• Google Readers lists all past posts of a blog, even if they have been read. This might be the feature that keeps me using Google Reader. I almost never go back to read comments to a post on another blog - even the ones I find really interesting - simply because I forget about them. Now I am reminded. Maybe Bloglines has this feature too and my settings are just wrong.
  
• I have to click on the "mark all  as read" in Google Reader in order to make any entries show they have been read instead of them automatically being counted as read after having opened them.
  
• Google Reader works so much like Bloglines, that the learning curve is very short.
  

While I am starting to get the feeling that by supporting Google that I am in league with the next technological Evil Empire (ala Microsoft), I will use it for a week or so and then go back to Bloglines for a while. It's tough when evaluating these products to separate functionality and familiarity.

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Speaking of reading follow-up comments, I went back and looked at some responses to the post "Discussing education with non-teachers" by Dennis Fermoyle over at his In the Trenches of Public Education blog. Wow - Dennis has his critics, and long winded ones at that. But what really amazes me is the generosity of spirit, patience, and respect Dennis shows in his responses to them. You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

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 I was delighted to see AASL put the draft of their new Student Learning Standard in a wiki and invite members to take a whack at editing them. Kudos to Gail Dickinson and AASL for this demonstration that AASL members, not just its leaders, have ideas worth offering.

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Jacob Nielsen's Life-Long Computer Skills post at Alertbox is worth a read. He makes the argument I am always trying to make to our curriculum people:

The problem, of course, is in tying education too tightly to specific software applications. Even if Microsoft hadn't turned Excel inside out this year, they would surely have done so eventually. Updating instructional materials to teach Office 2007 isn't the answer, because there will surely be another UI change before today's third graders enter the workforce in 10 or 15 years -- and even more before they retire in 2065.

Here is his interesting and eclectic list of "life-long" computer skills:

• Search strategies, like forming good queries and judging relevance of results
• Weighing the credibility of online information
• Techniques for dealing with information overload
• Writing hyperlinked online text
• Computer presentation skills (nip bad PowerPoint habits in the bud!)
• Workplace ergonomics
• Debugging -- not the heavy-duty stuff, but the logical process of tracking down errors
• Usability basics, for making informed decisions on a product's ease of use

 Hmmmm.

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I fussed in last Thursday's posting that ALA's Office of Intellectural Freedom has not responded to my requests for resources for setting web filtering/blocking policies in schools. In response, AASL president-elect, Sara Kelly Johns steered me toward  ALA's list of resources on its Intellectual Freedom page. While I still can't locate a document that speaks directly to developing a school selection/reconsideration policy for online resources, ALA has done more in this area than any other professional organization to my knowledge. Thanks, Sara, for the direction. And thanks to ALA for working to uphold the precepts of intellectual freedom.

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A Sunday quote for contemplation:

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.  -Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

 Will Richardson on his Weblogg-ed entry Stuck writes: "This whole School 2.0 thing is the crux of it. There’s this niggling feeling in my brain somewhere that at the end of the day, I’m totally missing the point. That for the most part, we’re all missing the point." What's our "endless immensity of the sea," Will?

 

Comments

[sfens]

Google Reader sounds very much like netvibes.com. I have debated whether I should switch to Bloglines, that I have heard so much about or Google Reader, but as you expressed have trouble with the next mega-empire. That said, I don't even know who owns netvibes. I like that I can set it as my home page and can have multiplepages. I love that I can get all kinds of content - access to my Googlemail, weather, Flickr...

If you are scanning around for a feed reader, it's worth a look.

Susan

[Ann]

I have been experimenting with both Google Reader and Bloglines as well (and trying to find a good one for my students to use)... until I discovered Netvibes. As a visual learner, I prefer the layout of Netvibes. I'd give it a try if I were you! So far it's the front runner of what I'll have my students try (if I ever get that far...)

[Mike Curtin]

I agree with the spirit of your comments about "lifelong computer skills" although I would argue that there is still some value in learning Excel 2007 even if it will soon be outdated. Having learned it, it becomes easier to learn newer programs. It's the same reason we teach classic novels: students are learning how to read material that is foreign to them, evaluate it, and integrate it with what they know. The content of those novels isn't AS important as the practice of making meaning from them. Even though I know longer program in BASIC, the fundamental logic and programming concepts that I learned way back when still apply.

Also, that list of skills doesn't include anything about using computers to calculate and sort data- spreadsheets and charts and graphs. Important stuff, I would submit.

As to newsreaders, I'm a big fan of Pageflakes (http://www.pageflakes.com). Similar to NetVibes, I think. I hate Bloglines. it gets very cluttered very quickly.

[Doug Johnson]

Hi Mike and Ann,

I looked at Netvibes and found it very "busy" at first glance, looking like it would take a long time to customize to suit my needs. (Looked like lots of unsubscribing!) That is very much a first impression and when I get a bit more time will look at it and PageFlakes again.

Mike, I hear what you are saying about skills learned using Excel being transferable. Great point. Many things, mainly concepts, I learned in Visicalc back in the Apple II days, I still use today.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts,

Doug

[Janice Friesen]

One of the most important things you have addressed here in my opinion is "life-long" computer skills. I am not sure this is complete, but this IS THE POINT! This is why I have not wasted my time learning all of this stuff for 10 years. It is really what learning is all about - Transfer - students (and teachers) need to be able to transfer their learning on to new ways of doing things. All of the skills listed are transferable, but teaching Excel 2007 is not. If all you do is memorize the menu items in that program you will be thrown by a program that is organized differently or looks different.

I want to add to this list questioning skills. I think that a life-long computer skill is the ability to ask meaningful questions. I think I will start a blog posting on this also!

Janice

RE:

Here is his interesting and eclectic list of "life-long" computer skills:

• Search strategies, like forming good queries and judging relevance of results
• Weighing the credibility of online information
• Techniques for dealing with information overload
• Writing hyperlinked online text
• Computer presentation skills (nip bad PowerPoint habits in the bud!)
• Workplace ergonomics
• Debugging -- not the heavy-duty stuff, but the logical process of tracking down errors
• Usability basics, for making informed decisions on a product's ease of use

[Jacquie Henry]

I have starred this article in my Google Reader account because I am very interested in your thoughts on life-long computer skills. I started a Google reader account ages ago - but promptly forgot about it. Oh look! A chicken! You motivated me to unearth it and experiment some more with it. I am liking it a lot. As a matter of fact - after about 45 minutes of messing with it - I now plan to stop using Bloglines. The ability to star articles and then pull them up quickly is one feature I like. I also like using the 'list view", which allows me to scan post titles quickly. All things that can be done in Bloglines I know - but somehow I am more likely to use these features in Google Reader. Yes - I know - we continue to give over our lives to Google. The GoogleZon of Epic 2014 is probably not far off. And here I am helping to build that particular road to hell!