Research

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.

Dangerously Irrelevant has a piece called $2,000 pencils where he links to a piece about a a "Laptop Lashback". It seems that throwing laptops in schools doesn't really change things and that what we have are $2,000 pencils.

TechTrends came today. The cover says: "Also in this issue: Open Source Software," and it's my article: "It's Time to Consider Open Source Software." Before I post a copy online, I suppose I need to re-read the thing I signed to see how many of my rights I gave away to them.

Update

And this is interesting. The thing has been picked up by LinuxInsider. It's in Two parts and they provided links for everything. The electronic version of the original TechTrends article is now available to subscribers or to UT people..

Now I really am on the cover of the Rolling Stone

So I submitted the article to Slashdot, "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." My article is on the front page. Since the article's not on my server, I don't suppose I'll get Slashdotted, but I do suspect I'll get a bit more traffic tomorrow than I usually do.

This article from the Washington Post (may require registration) says something about multitasking being harmful. I guess. I don't really know. I was listening to Steve Earle at the time, so I really couldn't concentrate on it.

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.

eSchool News has linked to a National Teacher Survey published by CDW-G. It's a little interesting that it's funded by a computer products vendor. It says that more teachers are interested in and comfortable with technology and that 31% of teachers have received no technology training in the past year. I'm still on my Technology Training is a Waste kick, so I'm wondering how many non-teachers have had technology training in the past year. My wager is that more of them haven't had training since they have computers that work. (I think that teachers need training, but that technology should be a means rather than an end.)

Well, it's not exactly "news" since it's from 2002, but it's a bit more recent than Becker's Internet Use survey. This report shows that, according to students, students use the Internet fairly effectively, but it's almost in spite of their teachers and technology leaders. Connectivity is bad, filters keep them from going to legitimate sites, teachers and administrators put up restrictions, teachers are afraid to really take advantage of the Internet for homework assignments for fear that it's unfair to those who do not have access.