Do We Need National Technology Standards?

One of the more exciting ideas to surface at the ISTE Board meeting on September 24th was that ISTE should consider developing a set of “technology standards” that might serve as goals that E-Rate and other federal monies might help schools meet.

The original goals of E-Rate – that all schools be connected to the Internet – has by and large been accomplished nationally. But as we all know, connectivity alone does not an effective school make.

I believe it will be up to ISTE to create new national infrastructure goals if they are going to be created at all. The chance for creating a strong vision by the federal government was fumbled by the Department of Education with its National Education Technology Plan – a largely worthless document. See my ”Directionless Dictates” column from the May 2005 Teacher Magazine.

Well written national standards are both useful and necessary for a number of reasons, and given ISTE’s success with its student, teacher and administrative NETS standards, it is the logical organization to tackle this job.

From experience, I have found the ALA/AASL library program standards useful in helping educate other administrators about good library programs. (Actually our state affliate organization used the AASL goals as a model for writing state library program standards .) We have used ISTE’s NETS Standards for Students as a guide to writing both our state information literacy and technology student guidelines and our own local guidelines. In other words, good national standards for technology infrastructure would do more than simply provide a rationale for continued E-rate funding.

My experience is that few districts: 1) know how they compare to other districts in their technology implementation efforts; 2) can determine the direction they should be moving to improve technology utilization; or 3) can visualize a technology infrastructure that fully supports learning, teaching and managing. A good set of technology standards - simple, quantitative, and research-supported - could be an authoritative voice that would help remedy these shortcomings.

The standards I most appreciate tend to take a rubric-like approach. In multiple categories, a district might judge itself as minimum, standard or exemplary in each category. And if the rubrics are concretely written, it would be readily apparent how a district could move from, say, a minimum to standard level in any category.

I would find standards (after five minutes of thought) in the following areas extremely helpful as I try to evaluate our district’s technology infrastructure and plan for improvement :

1. Connectivity (LAN, WAN, and Internet I & II capacities)
2. Security (firewalls, filters, policies)
3. Tech support (technicians per computer, tech support response time, reliability rates, policies about technology replacement,)
4. Administrative applications (student information systems, transportation, personnel systems, payroll systems, data mining systems, home-school communication systems, online testing)
5. Information resources (e-mail, listservs, blogging software, online learning software, commercial databases, library automation systems)
6. Staff training resources, requirements and opportunities
7. Staff/computer rations and student/computer ratios (exemplary here might be the one-to-one initiatives)
8. Technology/content area curricula integration (articulated student technology skills embedded in the content areas, assessments)

Each rubric, of course, would need to be accompanied by the research/rationale that supports its inclusion.

What do you think ISTE? Are you up to the challenge? In what other areas might standards be written to help guide districts and power the argument for continued E-rate funding?

Is PowerPoint Evil?

Johnson’s Observation on Multimedia Content:
You can put all the pretty clothes on your dog you want, but he’s still a dog.

Yesterday’s e-mail brought the following question from ISTE’s editor, Jennifer Roland: Learning & Leading with Technology is looking for a few good editorialists to argue both sides of this question: Is PowerPoint Crippling Our Students? Some say that PowerPoint is an important tool in any classroom because of its real-world applications. Others say it is an unnecessary distraction that leads students to go for glitz over substance. Where do you stand on the issue?

Good question. Since it is unlikely I’d be considered a “good editorialist” in anyone’s book, I’ll just pipe up here.

(I’ve weighed in on this topic once already in a 1999 column Slideshow Safety. As with a frightening number of things I’ve written long ago, I’ve found that my thoughts haven’t changed much – which says more about my obstinacy than my prescience. You’ve been warned.)

Here are the main things I’d think about when looking at working with kids and PowerPoint:

1. PowerPoint doesn’t bore people: people bore people. As an old speech teacher, I have a bias that PowerPoint falls under the category of visual aid – with aid being the operative word. If we are teaching kids how to use this software, it needs to be within the context of good speaking skills, not in a computer class. (But then I think all technology skills should be taught within the content areas.) Yeah, the old stuff like eye contact, expression, and gestures are still important. Oh, so is having something worthwhile to say.

2. The sins of the overhead user shall be visited upon the computer user. Tufte, in his The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint (Graphics Press, 2003) makes a compelling case that complex information is not best shared using this software. He argues persuasively that PowerPoint makes it far to easy to reduce complex topics to simple bullet points. He argues that some graphic information is too detailed for the low-rez graphics of the computer screen. I’m just not sure choosing the wrong tool for the wrong job is the tool’s fault.

3. There are more visual learners than meet the eye. Cautions aside, good visuals are exceptionally powerful, and our kids need practice in harnessing this power. Too bad more teachers themselves don’t have at least a fundamental knowledge of good design principles, knowledge of typography, and photocomposition.

In the best of all possible worlds, an oral presentation accompanied by a well-designed slide show that helps inform or persuade the audience can be one the products of a good information literacy unit. I get the feeling a goodly number of our kids will be one giving these things as part of their jobs, They may as well do it skillfully.

Keep in mind Johnson’s Rule of Technology Neutrality: Technology is neither good nor bad. The same hammer can both break windows and build cathedrals.

Your thoughts on pitfalls or promises of PowerPoint? What to do you do to make sure the tool is being used well?

Go Google Yourself

September 15, 2005

Filed under: Navel gazing — dougj @ 4:12 pm Edit This
It’s been just a little bit of crazy around here with the start of school, so I didn’t get to check my Blogline feeds until just before bed last night. (That’s about 8:30 among us wild and crazy Minnesotans.) It was then I found a new delight!

I am a self-admitted Google addict and love all the tricky little things it can do (despite the Onion article claiming the search engine wants to destroy all information it can’t index). So I was happy to see in the Google Weblog that one can now just Google blogs using Google Blog Search.

Although my karma now may be seriously at risk, I Google Blogged myself. (Come on, admit it - you Google yourself now and then when you think you are alone.)

After wading through search results for far more illustrious “Doug Johnson’s” than myself, I found a few hits where some poor soul on his/her blog has linked to something I’ve written.

Now I have been writing for professional journals since the earth was cooling, so finding links to my articles was not too shocking. But I found links to entries in my blog which has been in existence less than two months!

There is a whole, big, whopping blogging sub-culture roaming about cyberspace that I didn’t even know about. It’s like finding a big bunch of elves in the backyard of a house you’ve lived in for 10 years. I’m amazed by the speed which thoughts now propagate in the blogosphere - even crackpot ideas like mine.

I’m going back to the NECC 2005 webast of David Weinberger’s keynote “The New Shape of Knowledge” in which he argues that knowledge is less static entity and more fluid conversation. I’ll be ordering his book too - despite the archaic, staid format.

Still trying to get my mind around this. Are you beginning to look at knowledge as not just facts, but dialog?
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2 Comments »
Yes - it is truly amazing. Here is what is rolling around in my mind… We have some very well established criteria for judging the reliability of web sites. What criteria should we add to evaluate blogs? I will be teaching evaluation skills to 9th and 10th graders over the next few months, and need some serious help with this issue!

Comment by Jacquie Henry — September 16, 2005 @ 5:49 am

Karen Schneider’s comment that “I do believe information is more of a conversation than it was in the past, and that librarians who fail to understand that are not coming along” still resonates; especially when we look at how new technologies are changing our whole perceptions of information-delivery. But critical thinking is still critical thinking, no matter what the format or framework, and that’s really what we need to concentrate on.

Comment by Alice Yucht — September 17, 2005 @ 1:46 pm