Good summary via Technology Review of rich web, map, podcast, and blog coverage of Hurricane Rita. Small pieces loosely joined means that resourceful hybrids can develop very quickly. Multiple transmit/receive nodes of information, routing around damaged parts, using redundancy for greater error tolerance … familiar design principles here.

Tom McHale’s article in Techlearning helpfully summarizes competing positions on Generation M (“media”), including recent work that suggests multitasking may not be an illusion after all. He also quotes one Generation M student on the usefulness of books: “I find that looking in a book first for research projects gives you more of a broad basis to start with,” says Liz Derr.

It’s refreshing that McHale avoids the typical all-or-nothing arguments about education and culture in which information technologies are either the answer or the devil. By the end, however, it’s clear that information technologies can be an answer, and a very powerful one at that. Meredith Fear, the “digital native” of the title, says of her Internet use for a research assignment that “[w]hat I make of it is entirely dependent on me and the effort I’m willing to put into it…. It’s a much, much more specialized and detailed level of thinking than I’ve been exposed to in any of the classes the school provides.”

Perhaps that specialized and detailed thinking could be done without information technologies. My own experience suggests it can be, and has been. The larger point, though, is that such thinking ought to be the rule in school and isn’t, and that information technologies allow digital natives access to the potential of real school no matter what obstacles the institution called “school” plants in their way.

Dan Karleen has received more information regarding the University of Michigan’s School of Dentistry and its private “podcasts.”

A U-M official confirmed to Dan that more such innovations are on the way, but she can’t tell us what they are. That announcement belongs to Apple. As does access to the innovations.

Think different, indeed.

Dan Karleen’s comment on the preceding blog entry is both intriguing and troubling. Mostly troubling. It appears that Apple is providing a private iTunes store to the University of Michigan dental school. Dan, who also has a dog in this fight, explains the basic setup in his blog entry: dental school lectures are recorded and made available for download by means of a “special iTunes Music Store interface from Apple Computer” (quoting from the Michigan press release). Access is therefore limited to users who can authenticate within the University of Michigan network. Plans for future collaboration between Apple and Michigan include even more types of downloadable content.

The arrangement is likely to expand beyond the School of Dentistry. The initial story in The Ann Arbor News reports that “James Hilton, associate provost for academic information technology, said this week two other U-M colleges have expressed interest in podcasting lectures.” I read that story yesterday with delight. Today, in the context of the press release Dan led me to, that delight has evaporated.

What do these developments mean?

1. More walled gardens, and a retrograde attitude toward intellectual property in higher education.

2. Apple is apparently getting into the course management / textbook business.

3. This distribution scheme apparently bypasses public RSS feeds. To get this content, students must use iTunes. Apple’s business plan is thus not to build the best directory, but to lock people into a proprietary system. This is not surprising, but it is disappointing, and antithetical to the spirit in which the podcasting movement began. I smell a hostile takeover–and the very openness of the community makes it peculiarly vulnerable.

4. Apple has simultaneously established a sweetheart deal with U-M for hardware purchases. From the press release:

The University of Michigan School of Dentistry’s partnership with Apple Computer extends beyond the classroom.

Apple is offering students, faculty, staff, and alumni discounted prices on its desktop and laptop computers, iPods, and other products. To take advantage of the discounted prices on Apple products, individuals will have to visit the School’s Web site, www.dent.umich.edu. At this site, they will click a special link that will take them to Apple’s Web site where they can then place an order using a valid credit card.

Apple will gift two percent of the proceeds of the sales to the U-M School of Dentistry Learning Technologies Fund that will be used to develop educational technology at the School.

Aside from the teeth-grinding use of “gift” as a verb, this part of the release makes the larger plan clear: Apple seeks to be a sole-source software, hardware, and content provider for the dentistry school (at least). Apple gets a captive market. The school gets a nice little “gift” in return for leasing part of its core mission to Apple by allowing Apple to control access to content.

Worst of all, from a soul’s point of view, is that the entire press release describes the process in terms near and dear to all of us who work in academic IT: bottom-up, user-driven innovation, 24/7 access to content anywhere, collaborative project management and development, and a hook into a major new communications phenomenon, in this case podcasting. The whole enterprise reads like a textbook example of doing things right.

So what’s the problem?

Something to do with being closed and commerce-driven instead of open and community-driven. Something to do with profits instead of principles. And to be fair, something to do with public schools desperate for revenue in an age in which cutting appropriations for higher education is Job One in many states.

The new “Courses and Lectures” category in the iTunes podcast directory (blogged on here by Amy Bellinger) looks a bit sinister in this light.

More to chew on (apologies–just trying to keep my spirits up):

This “dentistry to go” podcast features a chat “on Apple computers in dentistry,” specifically an OS X dental management application. This podcast, of course, is freely available.

EDIT: (almost typed EDIOT, which would be apt!): I fixed the link below. Apologies to all.

Hey folks, I’ll be here all week.

Dental students at the University of Michigan are listening to podcasts of their professors’ lectures. The initiative was led by a second-year student. The lectures are available through the iTunes music store.

Amazing. What students won’t do in their quest for knowledge.

That’s really only semi-facetious. Perhaps not facetious at all. Think about this quote: “I do walk (to class) often, and I will listen to the lectures 20 minutes there and 20 minutes back.” That’s Jared Van Ittersum, the student who started the project. His words demonstrate the false dichotomy between the “sage on the stage” and the “guide at the side.” The time-and-place constraints of the classroom (beautiful, necessary, misleading constraints) distort our understanding of learning. The classroom is one node of attention and focus, with ramifications we could imagine more creatively.

I think of Bernstein’s monologue in Citizen Kane about the girl on the ferry.

Thanks to eSchoolNews for the tip.

Distributed conversations, augmented intellects, networks of inquiry: though I’ve been blogging for over a year, it’s still a thrill to make contact and find new sources of wonder and wisdom.

Today’s case in point: “Blog of Proximal Development” author Konrad Glogowski responds to my response to his blog, thus teaching me and sharpening my thinking. Konrad then links to Joan Vinall-Cox’s lovely and deeply thoughtful College Quarterly piece on “Teaching Writing in the Age of Online Computers,” which also bowls me over. New horizons for thinking and conversation open up as a result.

I could get used to this.

Pull quote from Konrad’s blog:

This reminds me of what Prensky calls “legacy content” – students need to learn about great minds and the ideas they produced and not just what’s online. They also need good teachers, people who are experienced “connectors” – people who will help students discover that Copernicus, for example, connects to the geocentrism of Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy but also to the heliocentric view of the universe and to the notion of immanence, subjectivism, intellectual freedom, the Renaissance, and religion in general.

As the kids say in Peanuts, THAT’S IT!

Pull quote from Vinall-Cox’s article:

Now, in this new digital world, students are more comfortable producing writing and their prose is less constrained and constricted. Some may still have spelling errors or use the wrong words, some may research shallowly and show little evidence of critical thinking, and some may fail to structure their material for the reader, but they all can produce a flow of words. This is new, and, I believe, a direct result of their use of the online computer as a social tool.

Does it improve them as writers? In terms of the amount of their text output, it does. Does it make them good writers of academic papers? Yes and no. They still have to learn how to think critically, how to structure material, how to cite authorities, and how to use the capacities of the new writing tool, the online computer. Some will learn those skills, and some will have trouble learning them. All, however, now start out with the ability to link to their “inner speech” (Vygotsky, 1962, p 148) and that is a major difference.

Ditto the above.

I am grateful to both of these writers. I’m also grateful that the content was on the Web, not in a walled garden. I want to get used to this.

Interesting stuff, as always, from George Siemens and Konrad Glogowski. George’s discussion of meaning making merits a post all its own. Konrad’s blog today also inspires a few thoughts on my end. I hope he would agree, or at least find them useful or provocative extensions of his thinking:

Way leads on to way. Viva la link.

Fred Johnson links to my blog in his new blog “Stemwinder” (love the name). I’m gratified; I go to the blog; I read it; I look for the profile, of course; and like Alice confronted by her comestibles, I obey the implicit command in the “my web page” link and, well, click. Now I find a cabinet of wonders: a fascinating website full of interesting images that are just clever enough (not too clever by half), and a link to a blogroll featuring Fred’s students this term. They’re all blogging. I click on one. The writing is interesting, the prompts are clever, and the mental link to the “Phantom Professor on Voice” blog I just read (by following another of Fred’s links) starts to spark up interesting connections, like the one between a tortilla chip and the perfect strawberry cobbler cookie, as detailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the recent food edition of the New Yorker (blogged about in another context by Jon Udell).

I do not have time to read everything right now. I do have time to put Stemwinder and Phantom Professor on my Bloglines blogroll. All that said, here’s the heart of it, right now, for me: these links (traces of human attention and creativity that they are) encourage me and keep me pressing forward. Always time well spent when I get a bit of that good advice.

NB: don’t miss Fred’s Tell-A-Vision.

Over at Pedablogy, Steve Greenlaw reflects on the end of week two of his experiment in a thoroughly (aggressively? persistently? recurrently?) metacognitive classroom. I’m interested to see that Steve’s exceptionally thoughtful account ends with a student telling him “now I know what you’re looking for.”

My first thought is, “what else would any teacher be looking for?” Identifying major concepts, distinguishing them from minor concepts, and applying either or both to new contexts: these are real school skills of the highest order and greatest importance. My second thought is that the comment typifies intellectual laziness and a kind of cynical cost-benefit analysis, viz., “I’m not trying to get an education here; I’m trying to suss out the teacher’s expectations and take the path of least resistance to meeting them.” My third thought is that it’s an honest question, and that enough teachers (for whatever reasons) don’t ask for metacognition that students are genuinely puzzled about the “rules of engagement” when one teacher does.

Perhaps the truth is some combination of all three thoughts.

I’m still haunted by Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” in this regard: to say what you’re looking for (which I distinguish to some extent from clarifying the assignment, which is what Steve did) is to guarantee the student cannot find it. It’s interesting that institutionalized education hides this fact from itself, or seems to. Or maybe (probably!) I’m just being willful to say to students, “I’m looking for you to show me something I didn’t know I was looking for.” The catalyst for student discovery can be a lecture, an aside, a moment’s discussion outside class, an email, a clipping, a cartoon. In short, real school is built on such catalysis (footnote here to my IT boss, Chip German), and such catalysis can appear anywhere at any time. The trick is to surround students with sense, or potential sense, and to strengthen them with a persistent feeling of expectation, and with the tools of preparedness.

Steve’s obviously doing that, and in that way his “experiment” feels more like a reaffirmation to me. You go, Dr. Greenlaw.

EDIT: Konrad Glogowski’s aptly named “Blog of Proximal Development” also treats these issues here. I continue to wish for a stimulating synthesis of a) pylons and b) the thrill of the run. Seems to me a curriculum ought to have both (and will need both). Tennis, with a net.

Whoa. Didn’t Bryan Alexander blog about this recently? Or did I dream he did?