Matt_dk writes "The Opportunity rover has eyed an odd-shaped, dark rock, about 0.6 meters (2 feet) across on the surface of Mars, which may be a meteorite. The team spotted the rock called 'Block Island,' on July 18, 2009, in the opposite direction from which it was driving. The rover then backtracked some 250 meters (820 feet) to study it closer. Scientists will be testing the rock with the alpha particle X-ray spectrometer to get composition measurements and to confirm if indeed it is a meteorite."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Like lots of you, we've been drawn into Twitter this year. After all, we're all about frequent updates ourselves, and there's lots happening around here that we want to share with you. Of course, we enjoy watching, and contributing to, the tweetstream (we hope you find our tweets useful, too). Because there are many programs and initiatives across the company, we've got a number of active accounts. Here's a list of the current ones. We'll update this list from time to time.

twitter.com/Google - our central account
twitter.com/Blogger - for Blogger fans
twitter.com/GoogleCalendar - user tips & updates
twitter.com/GoogleImages - news, tips, tricks on our visual image search
twitter.com/GoogleNews - latest headlines via Google News
twitter.com/GoogleReader - from our feed reader team
twitter.com/GoogleVoice - updates & info on Google Voice*
twitter.com/iGoogle - news & notes from Google's personalized homepage
twitter.com/GoogleStudents - news of interest to students using Google
twitter.com/YouTube - for YouTube fans
twitter.com/YouTubeES - en Espanol
twitter.com/GoogleAtWork - solutions for IT and workplace productivitytwitter.com/GoogleSites - Google Sites updates*

Geo-related
twitter.com/SketchUp - Google SketchUp news
twitter.com/3DWH - SketchUp's 3D Warehouse
twitter.com/Modelyourtown - 3D modeling to build your favorite places
twitter.com/EarthOutreach - Earth & Maps tools for nonprofits & orgs
twitter.com/GoogleEarth - updates from the Google Earth team*
twitter.com/GoogleMaps - uses, tips, mashups
twitter.com/GoogleSkyMap -Android app for the night sky

Ads-related
twitter.com/AdSense - for online publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsHelper - looking out for AdWords questions and tech issues
twitter.com/AdWordsProSarah - Google Guide for AdWords Help Forum
twitter.com/GoogleAnalytics - insights for website effectiveness
twitter.com/GoogleAdBuilder - re building display ads
twitter.com/GoogleAdManager - info on managing online ads & inventory*
twitter.com/GoogleAffiliate - info for publishers from Google network advertisers*
twitter.com/GoogleRetail - for retail advertisers
twitter.com/GoogleTVAds - info on our digital system for more measurable TV advertising*
twitter.com/TechnologyUK - for U.K. tech advertisers
twitter.com/UKretail - for U.K. retail advertisers
twitter.com/creativesandbox - for advertising agencies*
twitter.com/InsideAdWordsDE - for German AdWords customers
twitter.com/GoogleAgencyDE - for German ad agencies
twitter.com/AdSensePT - info for Portuguese-language publishers
twitter.com/AdWordsRussia - AdWords news & tips in Russian
twitter.com/DentroDeAdWords - Spanish updates from the Inside AdWords blog
twitter.com/AdWordsAPI - AdWords API tips

Developer & technical
twitter.com/GoogleResearch - from our research scientists
twitter.com/GoogleWMC - Google Webmaster Central
twitter.com/GoogleCode - latest updates for Google developer products
twitter.com/GoogleData - Data APIs provide a standard protocol for reading and writing web data
twitter.com/app_engine - web apps run on Google infrastructure
twitter.com/DataLiberation - our initiative for complete import/export of all data
twitter.com/GoogleMapsAPI - about using Google Maps embedded in websites
twitter.com/GoogleIO - Google's largest annual developer event

Culture, People
twitter.com/googletalks - notes from our @Google speaker series
twitter.com/googlejobs - the voice of Google recruiters

Country or Region
twitter.com/googlearabia - news from the Google Arabia Blog*
twitter.com/googledownunder - Google activities in Australia & New Zealand
twitter.com/googlebrasil - News & info for Brasil*
twitter.com/googlecanada - News & notes from Google Canada*
twitter.com/GoogleDE - Google in Germany
twitter.com/GoogleKorea - News & notes in Korean*twitter.com/GoogleLatAm - Latin America (en Espanol)
twitter.com/GooglePolicyIt - Notes on Google policy issues in Italy
Update: Additions indicated by *

Posted by Karen Wickre, Google Blog & Twitter Team

Gary Anderson’s text Advocacy Leadership is a thought-provoking treatise about the failure of educational reforms and the critical need for educators to advocate for authentic education for the least-served students. Reflecting on a lifetime of teaching, leading, and studying urban schools, he offers multiple examples of conservative ideologies and market forces driving educational reform throughout the last century. He supports his arguments by drawing on historical, cultural, and economic theories, demonstrating that, on one hand, reform efforts go back decades and are rooted in conflicting beliefs about the purpose of schooling. On the other hand, current reforms are more virulent and render education inauthentic to its core. Anderson argues that leading schools is necessarily a political act and that urban school leaders must be stalwart advocates for the most vulnerable students and families. Advocacy leaders must challenge reform initiatives that benefit private interests rather than truly educating all students for... (preview truncated at 150 words.)

Google has begun a new ad campaign for its enterprise services, but it isn't your typical Google venture—it's going oldschool. Starting today and running for the next four weeks in August, Google will be running a series of billboards—yes, real ones—in Boston, Chicago, New York, and San Francisco in order to showcase the benefits of "going Google" for business. The hope is that more business owners will ditch managing their own e-mail, calendaring, and doc sharing solutions in favor of Google Apps—especially now that they're out of beta.

For those who want to see the billboards for themselves, they will be placed along Highway 101 in San Francisco, the West Side Highway in New York, the Eisenhower Expressway in Chicago (and that's why we haven't rushed out to go see it yet), and the Mass Pike in Boston. Google says that the billboards will be changed every single weekday for the next month, but you environmentalists in the crowd should worry not—all vinyl used on the billboards will be recycled and turned into either computer bags or shopping bags.

Harry writes "Rumor has it that RadioShack is planning to re-brand itself as The Shack later this year, after eighty-eight years under the old name (most of them with a space in between 'Radio' and 'Shack'). I hope it's not true, because I don't think the move would do a thing to make the retailer a better, more successful business." Where will we go to buy soldering irons and those RCA to headphone jack adapters now?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[cross-posted at LeaderTalk]

As leaders, we often know what is the right thing to do. Just to pick a few examples…

• We know that ongoing, formative progress monitoring is more appropriate than ‘data days’ or ‘data retreats’ for yearly summative data, and yet many schools still only do the latter.
• When it comes to positive organizational and/or academic impact, we know that the ‘sit-and-get’ professional development model typically is a complete waste of participants’ time and organizational resources.
• Under any reasonable scenario planning forecast, it’s quite clear that the world is going to be quite technological and globally-interconnected, yet we continue to ignore that fact in most schools.
• Under any reasonable scenario planning forecast, it’s quite clear that schooling and/or learning and/or assessment are going to be much more personalized and invidividualized than they are now, and yet few school organizations are preparing themselves for these new ways of doing things.

We’re supposed to be leaders. We’re supposed to be out in front, leading the way. And yet the organizations that we supposedly ‘lead’ are so very far behind in so many areas. We like to point fingers; it’s easy for us to do so and ignore our own culpability.

As leaders, when are we going to own the fact that much (most?) of it is us? Why is it so hard for us to do the right thing?

I didn’t even see the guy looking at me, probably because my head was gazing down into my iPhone. We were in Concord, NH, last Thursday, having just watched Food, Inc. at a local indy theater, and I was pulling up the nearest geocaches (our new favorite sport) for my kids to peruse, hoping to set off on a hunt before heading back to our connectionless retreat on a hilltop in the woods.

“You’re a technoslave!” the guy yelled across the square, and I looked up to see him hurrying along with an angsty expression on his face. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my kids wheel around, too, Tucker stopping dead in his tracks. “It’ll ruin your life! Throw it away! Just throw it away!”

And he was gone, zipping around a hedgerow and then disappearing into a bookstore as my wife turned to me smiling and my kids gaped open-mouthed, struggled to figure out how to react. I, of course, just shrugged it off, saying something brilliant like “Yeah, whatever” while brushing him and the idea away with a half sweep of my hand, the one not holding the iPhone, of course.

But as we picked through a tick-infested field adjacent to a Dunkin Donuts parking lot to find our third ammo can cache of the day, the “technoslave” charge turned in my head. Am I a slave to all of this? And if so, is that necessarily a bad thing? This all on the heels of spending a week with bandwidth (I just typed “badwidth” which would have been appropriate) that maybe reached half a bar on my Verizon stick when the wind was blowing in the right direction and I held my computer at exactly 32 degrees. (Think aluminum foil and tv antenna if you’re old enough.) I think I Tweeted like three times, maybe, and even those were wistful dispatches from nature that felt almost strange in the making. (As in “Why am I Tweeting how nice it is to watch this thunderstorm roll in without all the usual distractions?” Hmmm…) I tried to answer a few e-mails, but I think I just managed to make people angry. And I did get to scan the front page of the New York Times site after the 30-minute or so download most mornings. But that was about it.

Except, of course, for my iPhone, which served us well as we crawled through the claustrophobia-inducing caves and caverns at Lost River Gorge, snapping decent pictures of our trek (though not of the point where I got stuck), or while being strafed by mosquitoes while watching the new Harry Potter movie at the local drive-in letting me sneak an update on the Cubs game. And, when we started finding those caches. In fact, that may have been the highlight of the trip in some ways, the “doing something fun out in nature with the family” aspect of going around trying to find these little hidden treasures while avoiding the eyes of curious “Muggle” onlookers, reading the logs of people who had found them before us and feeling this weird sense of connection to a community of people online AND in real space that we had little sense of before.  Facilitated solely by technology.

Go figure.

So, yeah, in many ways, I’m a slave to all of this. And I’m ok with that. I like being reminded how good it is to get away from the network from time to time; the world doesn’t end when the connection runs out. (Gasp!) But the connection is just a part of me now that at times may lead to distraction and a sense of overwhelmedness but on balance, adds a richness to my life that that angsty guy doesn’t get and probably never will.

The Des Moines Register reported today that the St. Ansgar (IA) Schools have given up on their proposal to purchase a device that would jam mobile phone signals after confirming that such equipment only can be used by federal agencies. The district had looked into the possibility of buying a jammer because it was struggling with inappropriate student mobile phone usage. One of the school board members said:

I don't think they have a place in the educational environment. The educational environment is supposed to be about students learning and teachers teaching and teachers can't teach over a cell phone. If a student is busy on the cell phone they aren't learning. It's a distraction ... and we need to minimize the distraction.

The interim superintendent also noted that he was concerned about students using mobile phones for cheating.

I e-mailed the interim superintendent a couple of days ago and asked him to consider a different, less hard-line approach, noting schools’ responsibility to prepare students for a digital, global era and that other districts have had success with more-accommodating strategies. Maybe I’ll hear from him sometime.

One of the comments to the Register’s article cracked me up:

Oh, For Crying-out-load. Just hang one of those shoe orginizers next to the door and require each student to check in thier phones on entering the classroom, then they can retrieve them after class. Just drop your phone in your slot and pick it up on the way out. Hey look, I solved the problem for less than $5.00

I don’t know if this is a fantastic idea or not, but it sure made me laugh. Sometimes easy solutions to our problems are staring us in the face if only we have the courage to think creatively. As we head into the new school year, who thinks their local school has an effective solution for inappropriate student use of mobile phones?

Both of my NECC 2009 presentations are now available!

As I noted earlier, my first presentation, Effective Leadership in an Era of Disruptive Innovation, is available at ISTEVision. My second presentation, Why Aren’t You Having a Bigger Impact?, was targeted specifically at technology coordinators and is now available from Learning.com.

I think Learning.com did a really nice job of highlighting some of the main points of my presentation. Two links on the left allow you to watch the first and second halves of the presentation. You also can download my slides and an audio podcast of the session. I thought the questions and conversations were quite lively given that the session was at 7 in the morning!

Here’s a quick quote from the presentation:

The tech coordinators [like you] that I meet are very dedicated and hard-working. They’re really trying their very best to do a great job for their school and make everything run smoothly. So why do I hear so many complaints about you?

Happy viewing!

Ulrich Rauch, Marvin Cohodas, and Tim Wang describe the Arts Metaverse, a Croquet-based virtual learning environment under development at the University of British Columbia. The Arts Metaverse allows three-dimensional virtual reconstruction of important artifacts and sites of classical, ancient, and indigenous American art, thereby allowing students access to places and works they would not otherwise be able to experience. The Arts Metaverse has been developed on the principle that engaging students in the construction of a virtual teaching and learning environment can facilitate collaboration between teachers and students and create a participative learning experience. In this spirit, the Arts Metaverse Project aims to make students and academics joint researchers creating and sharing knowledge beyond the walls of the university. While projects developed for the Arts Metaverse thus far have focused on art and architecture, the technology and process are entirely appropriate for a wide range of inquiries in the humanities and social sciences.

Mary Anne Clark describes the organization and uses of Genome Island, a virtual laboratory complex constructed in Second Life. Genome Island was created for teaching genetics to university undergraduates but also provides a public space where anyone interested in genetics can spend a few minutes, or a few hours, interacting with genetic objects—from simple experiments with peas to the organization of whole genomes. Each of the approximately four dozen activities available in the island's various areas includes background information, model objects with data sets, and suggestions for data analysis. The island also has a presentation theater, an indoor conference setting, and separate meeting spaces suitable for small group conversations. Clark describes some of the activities available on the island, offers advice for their use, and discusses the results of a pilot project that identified some pedagogical and technical challenges arising in this virtual setting.

Anne M. Hewitt, Susan Spencer, Danielle Mirliss, and Riad Twal report on a collaborative team initiative to create a virtual world emergency preparedness simulation that focuses on crisis and emergency risk communication (CERC). CERC is a key competency for students enrolled in Seton Hall University’s (SHU) Master of Healthcare Administration (MHA) on-campus and on-line programs. Historically, skill-building scenarios designed to teach emergency preparedness have used a tabletop exercise format but no virtual counterpart has been available for online students. Realizing a need to provide online students with the same learning opportunities offered to on-campus students, Hewitt, Spencer, Mirliss, and Twal designed and implemented a virtual tabletop exercise for online MHA students. Their work suggests that a virtual world can provide an engaging, learning-intensive alternative to face-to-face scenario exercises.

Effective collaboration is necessary for corporation-wide learning, knowledge exchange, and innovation. However, it is difficult to create a corporate culture that encourages collaboration; the complexity of such collaboration is increased substantially by the diverse and distributed nature of knowledge sources and decision makers in the global economy. Albert A. Angehrn and Katrina Maxwell describe a simulation-based learning experience intended to teach collaboration skills by providing participants with a safe environment in which to experience and discuss group collaboration in a business context. Called EagleRacing, this learning experience can be deployed with groups of distributed or co-located managers to help them better diagnose and address their own collaboration competencies and limitations. Using online videos to involve individuals and teams in a role-playing scenario, EagleRacing is an innovative simulation designed to help managers, decision makers, virtual teams, and online communities reflect on the challenges and opportunities of collaboration and group decision making.

With the rapid growth of online programs and courses at Fort Hays State University (FHSU), the university has faced the challenge of supporting faculty members as they transition to online teaching. Hong Wang, Lawrence V. Gould, and Dennis King share the comprehensive approach the university has developed, an approach that depends on effective cooperation among administrative, professional, and peer support systems. Wang, Gould, and King argue that a strong technical and organizational infrastructure, recognition and financial rewards for faculty, and an integrated approach to course design have allowed FHSU to create a collaborative course development process that provides faculty members with the support they need to design and administer high-quality online instruction.

In 2003, faced with increasing growth in technology-based and large-enrollment courses, the College of Business Administration at the University of Central Florida opened a computer-based testing lab to facilitate administration of course examinations. Patrick Moskal, Richard Caldwell, and Taylor Ellis describe the development and evolution of the lab, detail the lessons learned from their experiences in developing the lab and accommodating continued growth, and discuss plans for further development. The college's sound initial planning and continued responsiveness to faculty and student concerns may serve as an example for other institutions considering implementing computer-based assessment on a large scale.

In this edition of Innovate-Ideagora, Denise Easton and Alan McCord announce the consolidation of Innovate-Live, Innovate's venue for author webcasts, with Ideagora; webcasts will now be accessed from Ideagora, and archives will be made available through Ideagora. This change will simplify presentation and merge our multimedia presentations, hopefully fueling further growth for Ideagora, which now has over 500 active members. Easton and McCord also offer a list of core issues around which Ideagora discussions tend to coalesce and describe a number of active discussions currently engaging one or more of those issues.

Cross

While many see technology as potentially unlocking an entirely new learning environment, almost as many see it as a bane to education. In fact, it now seems that at least one college dean, regretfully, believes that technology is the root cause of a boring lecture hall.

Jeffrey Young, reporting for The Chronicle of Higher Education, notes Southern Methodist University Dean José A. Bowen has gone so far as to challenge professors to teach without any machinery. Young notes that Bowen uses a more provocative phrase to describe teaching without technology.

He wants his staff to “teach naked.”

Teaching Naked

Actually, while insisting he wants to pull the plug on all technology, it seems that Bowen is primarily trying to discourage professors from using PowerPoint. Apparently, far too many instructors are using the tool as nothing more than a slide display.

These professors appear to be using the “program as a crutch rather than using it as a creative tool” according to Young. More importantly, they are apparently boring their students to death.

Still, reading a little deeper, it does seem that Dean Bowen is requesting a tad more. He appears to be advocating for the removal of most technology from the classroom.

“Class time should be reserved for discussion,” the dean contends, “especially now that students can download lectures online and find libraries of information on the Web. When students reflect on their college years later in life, they’re going to remember challenging debates and talks with their professors.”

Is Technology the Issue?

While the idea of teaching naked initially appears focused on eliminating technology from the classroom, it is clear that the issue is not one related to machines. Instead, it is the lack of skill employed by the professor and the inability to use technology wisely.

Yet, according to Young, the “biggest resistance to Mr. Bowen’s ideas has come from students, some of whom have groused about taking a more active role during those 50-minute class periods.” Unfortunately, while the standard lecture model is generally less than riveting as an educational format, it is a model that “is pretty comfortable for both students and professors.”

In other words, a bored student is also not having any demands placed on him. That suits more than a few college attendees extremely well.

Poor Message

Ironically, while presenting his ideas at a conference that was attended by Young, Bowen offered “a philosophical argument about the best way to engage students.” In it he talked of “using podcasts and video games.”

And it also seems that when Bowen first began removing some technology from classrooms, that technology was quite old and in need of an upgrade to match today’s sophistication. Apparently, there was no funds to upgrade.

That leaves one troubled.

Dave Parry at Academhack tackles the silly assertion head on.

“…..any teaching practice requires technology. Are we to imagine that these luddite professors disallow paper and pen from class? ‘Students should not take notes in class, the technology gets in the way of discussion.’

“Are we to imagine that they do not allow books in class? ‘No books, they get in the way of discussion.’

“Books, paper, pen, desks, chalkboards, whiteboards, all of these are technologies.”

Parry goes on, leveling the fallacious notion presented by Bowen:

“Teaching without digital technology is an irresponsible pedagogy. Why? The future is digital, love it or hate it. We can argue later about whether or not this is a good or a bad thing.

“But to educate students, or to attempt to educate students without developing their digital literacy is to leave them ill prepared for their futures. You wouldn’t think of educating a student and not teaching them how to read, digital literacy is this crucial. In the future if you don’t know how to use this technology you will be ‘illiterate’.”

Furthermore,

“We can’t go back to ‘teaching the way it was,’ because this will produce a generation of students who don’t know how to critically engage with, leverage, use, resist, these very technologies. Eliminating technology produces not the affect of a more engaged literate student populous, rather it produces the reverse, an ill informed, uncritical, unengaged student populous who will become at the very best passive consumers of the technology being resisted, and at the worst its willing victims.”

We could not agree more. The idea of ‘Teaching Naked,’ either figuratively or literally, simply makes no sense.

I enjoyed listening to Jeff Bezos, founder, chairman of the board, and CEO of Amazon (who recently acquired Zappos), talk about his philosophy for a successful business. While I am not insisting on a one to one correlation here, I think educators can learn a lot from thinking about what Mr. Bezos says in relation to students, learning, and the community of stakeholders associated with schooling. If educators were as dedicated to students and learning as Amazon and Zappos are to customers, imagine the level of learning and understanding that could be possible for everyone involved. This formula requires us to reimagine schooling from the ground up (i.e., please erase the current industrial model immediately).

A fellow can have dreams, right? As Zappos Core Value #2 states: Embrace and Drive Change

 

Credit @jseelybrown and @marciamarcia for the tip