I have been thinking lately about how it is that it's very hard to recruit people to be teachers, scientists, and especially science teachers. When I talked to one of the most intelligent kids I taught some years after he graduated from college he explained that there was no reason to go into a technical field, there was no money in it. What did he do? Traded derivatives on Wall Street.

Yesterday I got a friend request from a student I taught in my first job (from 1987-1990). Here's what he wrote on my wall:

why shouldn't i seek you out? i graduated with a computer science degree. your classes at "perk" were awesome. to this day i will never forget you retrieving info from a hard drive. i wanted to know that stuff!!! unfortunately, i was a u.s. history major in college - then i switched to computers. i went on to graphics and finally got to edit corporate videos on an avid for a fortune 500 company. thank you for waking my mind up to that field! take care -

So it seems that something I did helped someone turn out OK. I'm not quite sure how these two stories are connected, besides they're both people that I taught. I guess it's good to know that when I was flying blind as a new teacher establishing a computer program where none had existed (something that I'm not sure I'd do again) I did some stuff right. I'm glad that Chris learned enough about computers to make it a career, I'm still worried, though, how our country is going to again convince people like Nimrod that contributing to knowledge and making stuff is a better career choice than manipulating numbers to "make" money and destroy our economy.

The Challenge

We in the field of educational technology need to pay more attention to finding ways to provide students in teachers with the tools that they need to increase identifiable learning outcomes. Too often we can be pulled in by the sirens of cool toys or be convinced that if only we could train teachers to understand how to use them, students would learn better. I posit that teachers and students now know quite well how to use computers to increase learning, but that the computers they have do not provide even the simplest supports that they need to do so.

The International Herald Tribune has a story about MIT's so-called $100 Laptop initiative. It's looking pretty cool, and I believe that there's not much that kids (or most adults, really) need to do that such a machine won't be able to do.

A couple places have stories about Indiana moving not only to OSS applications, but even to Linux. That's crazy. See School CIO and this piece. I mostly added this because some time ago I posted something about Linux in Indian schools and when I saw it just now I thought it was a typo.

Webliographer is, to the best of my knowledge, the first web-based application for managing and sharing bookmarks. The first usable version was in use in October of 1998. It replaced my home page, which consisted primarily as a set of categorized links. I was especially proud of the fact that it tracked the use of URLs, so when you clicked on a link a counter was updated in the database and links that got more hits were promoted to the front page of Webliographer's display. Though I used, and still use, Webliographer primarily for my own purposes an individual, my target audience for Webliographer was primarily teachers who wanted kids to use the web in their classrooms.