Why robots make the best students

I am not sure if this will make the new book, but it was fun to re-read...

Why Robots Make the Best Students (a riff on Kathy Sierra's Why Robots Make the Best Employees)

• They don't challenge the teacher's authority or subject expertise.
• They don't ask questions that might not have a right or wrong answer.
• They all learn in the same way, at the same pace.
• They stay in their seats with eyes straight ahead.
• They don't go on vacations with their families during school time or skip school.
• They don't need to learn to work in cooperative groups. Or need social skills. Or need conflict resolution abilities.
• They don't need sex education, multicultural education, or physical education. The arts and literature are wasted on them. No field trips, no fire drills, no hot lunch.
• They never make the principal or teacher look bad (e.g. stupid, incompetent, clueless…).
• They follow the school dress code and never swear.
• They have no strongly held opinions or passions for which to fight.
• They always pass the state tests and they all read at grade level.
• They are always willing to do the homework no matter how meaningless.
• They don't complain when lectured or given worksheets. Endlessly.
• They can all use the same textbook and they are all always on the same chapter.
• They make good robot employees.

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BFTP: Life-long learning

A Saturday Blue Skunk "feature" will be a revision of an old post. I'm calling this BFTP: Blast from the Past. Original post, December 31, 2005

I still have a big lump in my throat after waving good-bye this morning to my daughter and her family who have spent the week with us. They are heading back to Fargo which is located exactly four and a half hours too far away from Mankato, MN.

As a last hurrah, we spent yesterday at the Minnesota Zoo, where I was left with 3-month-old grandson Miles Benjamin while the rest of the group trooped off to see some exhibits for about half an hour. While the others looked at exotic critters, I took a very close look at this baby. One of Miles's major tasks right now seems to be figuring out what these two strange things are that sometimes appear in front of his face and give him a great deal of comfort when inserted in the mouth. During the week he was with us, his hand-to-mouth accuracy rate seemed to go from about 30% to about 60%. He is learning. (At right, Miles is enjoying either the dophin show or his toes.)

With much less patience, Grandpa Doug has been trying to learn as well. While I've had the fingers-in-the-mouth thing down pat for a few years,  I'm on a steep learning curve with Moodle. Current frustration involves inserted graphic files going into the summary field instead of the contents area. Like Miles and his fingers, I will get it eventually. I hope.

What is more than a little scary is reading a posting like this one from the Thinking Out Loud blog about MoodleBug:

The Elgg gang have recently announced their collaboration with Catalyst IT to develop “seamless interaction between Moodle and Elgg”. How cool is that? I’m a big fan of both platforms, and I really think there’s a huge strategic advantage for both in this, since there’s currently both resurgence of interest in Open Source learning platforms and the political imperative for institutions to start considering their e-portfolio options.Catalyst IT is already a Moodle Partner, and hopefully the iron-clad FOSS credentials of the team behind them - NZOSVLE, will calm the Open Source communities concerns about previously small Elgg team. 

I have almost NO idea what this means or if it should be important to me.

I only hope I can demonstrate half of Miles's perseverance, optimism, and patience when it comes to learning. 

The death of Delicious and speculating on tech longevity

Crap. Or even something stronger.

Yahoo announced that Delicious, my favorite, much used and long promoted social bookmarking tool is going away. (Or maybe not.) Yeah, I know there is always Diigo and Google Bookmarks, but Delicious was both simple and powerful enough for most of us.

And I now may need to already re-write a small section of the draft of my book.

Writing a book about technology is a tricky business. Can it be specific enough to be useful, but not so specific that it is dated before it hits the shelves? (My goal is that the book can get to be 5-7 years old before it becomes embarrassing. Because of datedness, not the writing that is.)

One thing I have been doing is using the generic terms for technology tools. For example:

• Social bookmarking sites, not Delicious
• Word processing software, not Word
• Online productivity tools, not GoogleDocs

and then just giving a couple examples of specific products. One can hope readers five years down the road can make a leap from the generic term to current product. (Or maybe everything will just be owned by Google - Googlicious?)

I've also been attempting to predict which tools are more than a flash-in-the-pan. I've been using word processing software for 30 years. I think it is safe to say that in some form or another it will be around for the next 10. It would really honk me off as a time-stressed teacher to put a lot of time into a tool that won't serve me for a very long time.

I'm curious to know what technologies and applications the brilliant readers of the Blue Skunk predict will still be a part of the educational scene in, say, 2016, in some version. In addition to the tools I listed above, my bets are on:

• Social networking tools
• Course management software
• E-mail
• Blogs and wikis
• Spreasheets, presentation and drawing programs
• Digital cameras, still and video - perhaps merged - and editing software
• Portable computing devices (netbooks, laptops, tablets, smartphones)

What do you see in your crystal ball?