Emerging Technology Reflections

After two days of learning and working with several emerging technologies (blogs, wikis, del.icio.us, furl, and flickr) I've come to a few tentative conclusions. First, the possibilities are exciting. I can find and share information much more easily than before. I can piggyback on the work and views of others as I try to formulate my own opinions on how these tools can be used. I don’t have to find a convenient time and be sitting in the same room with a group of people to collaborate.

The fact that information can be pushed and pulled in these new ways from so many sources that were not available until recently presents a new set of challenges to educators. My students really are growing up in a world that is connected differently than the one I did. One of the things we strive to do is make connections between what we do in the classroom and the “real world”. I wonder if the real world that many of us teachers are connecting to is a different one than the real world our students are growing up in.

I also wonder what kind of convergence we can expect to see in these tools and services. I’ve got flickr for pictures and del.icio.us for bookmarks and a separate set of tags for both. I’ve got a blog to express my ideas and opinions and wikis to collaborate with others. I’ve got RSS to tie it all together. It’s not hard to use them, but it should be easier.

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Wikis and Blogs - Ideas and Questions

Here are some ideas and questions about the resources we discussed today:

Wikis:

There is an obvious application here for students to write collaboratively. When we assign reports for group projects the students often divide up the labor, each doing a separate section. When I get the final copy it is often disjointed and obviously just copied and pasted together. Doing the report in a wiki wouldn’t necessarily prevent this, but I think it would make it much more likely that students would actually collaborate with the huge benefit that they could do it anytime from anywhere.

Another obvious application is peer editing of essays. The history feature would be a great way for a student to see how others viewed their work.

What about having students write their own text for the course? Maybe I could provide an outline and have them fill in the content.

A big question for me with wikis is how to evaluate them. Wouldn’t it be nice if the text could be color coded so that I could tell in a glance who had contributed what. Something like what turnitin.com does.

Also how does this work when the content is more opinion oriented? Wikipedia is factual. In most cases facts that are wrong get corrected and then stick. If something is more opinionated then couldn’t it just keep going back and forth as users change what others have said. Maybe wikis aren’t the right tool in that case.

Blogs:

Blogs are an incredible professional resource for me. As Dave mentioned today, I now have weak ties to people whose ideas I would never have been exposed to otherwise.

I am having a much harder time figuring out how I would use a blog with my students. I don’t yet see the added value in my context (chemistry). I’ve seen examples of schools that are beginning to use blogs to communicate with parents. I know I get tons of paper from my young son’s teachers describing what they did each day. I’d much rather subscribe to a RSS feed and save a few trees.

Maybe I just need more time to consider how this tool could be used.

What about RSS?

RSS and aggregators allow me to spend less time staying connected with sources of information that I think are important. It's an important shift from me going out to look for information to the information flowing the other way. I've chosen the sources that I think are valuable and now they let me know whenever they have something new to say.

It is important to realize that not all of the information that I might like are available. I can find great sources about instructional technology, computer hardware, and programming - three topics that I find interesting. I have a much harder time finding sources concerned specifically with teaching science.

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The Changing Nature of Information

As a chemistry teacher that seeks to use technology to help my students learn I try to keep up with as much instructional technology news as I can. One theme that jumps out at me from recent readings is the changing nature of information and the difficulty that our schools have adapting. Information is changing from facts that are delivered from experts in a very few outlets (newspapers, journals) to a more fluid, evolving dialog that can added to by anyone.

I try to help students understand a world that they will never see. A world of atoms and molecules interacting to make the everyday items around us behave the way that they do. I continually hear and read about the importance of teaching our students the skills they need to evaluate information because it is increasingly not coming from the historically respected sources. Where does the basic content that we teach fit into this? Not all information is fluid and changing. Most of the information I teach is not going to change. The Law of Conservation of Mass is called a law because in recorded human history it has never been violated. It is in the application of this basic content that things begin to become murky. Real world chemistry if often very messy. It never quite works like the general chemistry texts say. Throw in decisions that often have to be based on opinion and it gets murkier still.

How do I strike a balance between helping students learn the basic facts that they need to be informed consumers of information and teaching them the skills they need evaluate and process information? Isn't part of my responsibility to help provide them with a context? There are certainly times that I can teach the two together. There are other times when I can't.

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