October 30, 2004
Backchannels
Smartmobs has a particularly zany example of the use of new media in the classroom - live and in your face, not behind the scenes and after the class.BackchannelsJust inter active blog contains a post about "backchannel" systems being experimented with during college lectures. (Also, an interesting comment from Howard Rheingold in the comment section of a related TheFeature.com story about whether this type of "backchanneling" might be more of a bane than a boon without some kind of usage guidance).
Last night we ran an experimental "backchannel" during Julian Bleecker's talk in the Zemeckis Media Lab. Backchannel refers to making the crowd chatter public, the idea that the students or audience can discuss during a lecture in a way that becomes part of the shared intellectual space.I believe in backchannel, especially as a way to bring more people into the discussion. For more information on the roots of the technology-enhanced backchannel, see my article "Harnessing the Hacker's HeckleBot" from TheFeature.com.
The ZML, where Bleecker was giving his remarks, has 16 projectors that can be used for wrap-around surround-o-stimulation. We had 5 of those screens: three displaying a shared IRC chatroom, and two displaying EtherPEG output - a "sniffed" record of the JPEGs going by in people's web surfing on the local wireless.
The group feedback on this IRC/EtherPEG Backchannel experiment was varied but summarizable as follows:People remarked that the EtherPEG was sort of pleasant, as something to watch, a sort of media bath. A mood indicator perhaps. The pictures varied; some were related to Bleecker's work, some related to interactive media art overall, some were related to the Yankees/Red Sox game, some were random websurfing. People seemed to like to have something else to watch, and occasionally giggle at. Some students seemed to resent that they felt their ability to freely and privately surf the web during class was jeopardized by having their image data exposed.
We also had an IRC channel, #julian, that Josh - "Hoky" helped us set up. There was some useful stenocaptioning, provided by myself, and by Vince typing remarkable lines from Bleecker's talk. Also, dictionary definitions of some unusual words (elide, motility), and corroborating or contradicting ideas. Doox remarked that he really enjoyed having the URLs from Julian's talk posted in a way that he could click and browse them on his own.
But people also seemed to feel IRC was the source of the greatest distraction. The format itself is informal, people said, we're used to using chat to make quips and rejoinders, not produce focused text streams for public consumption. Some people posted ASCII art, some others making some crude jokes. Mostly people just seemed to be stymied by the presence of flowing text in the classroom. That the text was sometimes about violence towards fellow students with animals was not helpful. I'll post the chat log below; you can see for yourself how it went by.
Fortunately, Julian Bleecker, the speaker, was good humored about the moments of distraction. We're lucky for that. And that the department chair Scott Fisher found the experiment inspiring or amusing enough to encourage it to continue. I believe he enjoyed the casual note the backchannel injected into the otherwise somewhat formal Wednesday night seminar.
Moving forward, I plan to experiment with more structured backchannel experiences and other software. The mix of images and text could be supported by a live Flickr chatroom, for example. Multiple authors could develop a comprehensive set of lecture notes in SubEthaEdit. People might join in an AIM chat room on the topic. Some of these tools are new tools, and people might effectively approach them as means for knowledge production, rather than knee-slapping rejoinders. Hopefully, over time, through different applications, students might learn to use even IRC for more focused discussion, or at least learn to sit through a lecture with a lively text scroll going by, and be able to draw useful information from it without feeling overwhelmed or unduly distracted.
Fortunately, we have a media-rich room, and a room full of curious active minds, many toting laptops. Any of this work that we do will be posted publicly, during the seminars and afterwards - the most exciting aspect of this exercise involves the bridging of physical and virtual, giving audience members another place to speak, or at least a place for supplementary information.It's a very fertile area! It's obviously difficult to get interactive technologies up during speakers - it challenges the audience to pay attention, it challenges the speaker to hold attention; perhaps it pushes everyone to let go a little bit and interact together towards a shared goal. If there is a shared goal! Presumedly everyone is there to learn and converse. After this experiment, I believe that Backchannel is a learned skill, and I think the Interactive Media Division is a great place to see how people might learn to participate in productive Backchannel. Of course, defining "productive" is difficult, let alone defining "backchannel" - "backchannel" would seem to be the notes that students pass to one another; we're really proposing some kind of middle space, between the podium and the back row, a sort of a public note-passing system for the attentive students in the front row.
[viw Howard Rheingold's del.icio.us bookmarks]
There's also the idea of officially appointed "info jockeys" - people who pull up selected pictures and web pages during a lecture, giving another perspective on the remarks. Probably mostly corroborative, but perhaps usefully contradictory. But this is not Backchannel, per se, because it wouldn't necessarily incorporate the vibe in the room; rather it's like having someone unwittingly drive the speaker's PowerPoint.Fortunately, we have a media-rich room, and a room full of curious active minds, many toting laptops. Any of this work that we do will be posted publicly, during the seminars and afterwards - the most exciting aspect of this exercise involves the bridging of physical and virtual, giving audience members another place to speak, or at least a place for supplementary information.
It's a very fertile area! It's obviously difficult to get interactive technologies up during speakers - it challenges the audience to pay attention, it challenges the speaker to hold attention; perhaps it pushes everyone to let go a little bit and interact together towards a shared goal. If there is a shared goal! Presumedly everyone is there to learn and converse. After this experiment, I believe that Backchannel is a learned skill, and I think the Interactive Media Division is a great place to see how people might learn to participate in productive Backchannel. Of course, defining "productive" is difficult, let alone defining "backchannel" - "backchannel" would seem to be the notes that students pass to one another; we're really proposing some kind of middle space, between the podium and the back row, a sort of a public note-passing system for the attentive students in the front row.
Source: Smart Mobs
Posted by Richard Smith at 05:51 PM
October 28, 2004
The educated blogger
A First Monday article on using blogs in the classroom.The educated blogger
The educated blogger: Using weblogs to promote literacy in the classroom by David Huffaker This paper explores the role of weblogs or "blogs" in classroom settings. Blogs, which resemble personal journals or diaries and provide an online venue where self–expression and creativity is encouraged and online communities are built, provide an excellent opportunity for educators to advance literacy through storytelling and dialogue. This paper explores the importance of literacy and storytelling in learning, and then juxtaposes these concepts with the features of blogs. The paper also reviews examples of blogs in practice.
Posted by Richard Smith at 08:34 PM
The New York Times > Technology> Review> In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards
WebLogs are being used for teaching even at the 2nd grade level. An interesting story from the New York Times, in August.The New York Times > Technology> Review> In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards
In the Classroom, Web Logs Are the New Bulletin Boards By JEFFREY SELINGO Published: August 19, 2004 LAST spring, when Marisa L. Dudiak's second-grade class in Frederick County, Md., returned from a field trip to a Native American farm, all the students wanted to do was talk about what they saw. But instead of leading a discussion about the trip, Mrs. Dudiak had the students sign on to their classroom Web log. There they wrote about learning to use a bow and arrow, sitting inside a tepee and petting a buffalo. The short entries were typical of second-grade writing, with misspelled words and simple sentences. Still, for Mrs. Dudiak, the exercise proved more fruitful than a group discussion or a handwritten entry in a personal journal. ''It allowed them to interact with their peers more quickly than a journal,'' she said, ''and it evened the playing field.'' Mrs. Dudiak said she found that those who were quiet in class usually came alive online. Classroom Web logs, or blogs, many of which got their start in the last school year, are becoming increasingly popular with teachers like Mrs. Dudiak as a forum for expression for students as young as the second-grade level and in almost any subject. In the blogs, students write about how they attacked a tough math problem, post observations about their science experiments or display their latest art projects. For teachers, blogs are attractive because they require little effort to maintain, unlike more elaborate classroom Web sites, which were once heralded as a boon for teaching. Helped by templates found at sites like tblog.com and movabletype.org, teachers can build a blog or start a new topic in an existing blog by simply typing text into a box and clicking a button. Such ease of use is the primary reason that Peter Grunwald, an education consultant, predicts that blogs will eventually become a more successful teaching tool than Web sites. ''School Web sites are labor-intensive and are left up to administrators and teachers,'' said Mr. Grunwald, whose consulting firm in Washington focuses on the technology link between home and school. ''With blogging intended to be a vehicle for students, the labor is built in. The work that is required to refresh and maintain an interesting blog is being provided by students.'' One way teachers say they use blogs is to continue spirited discussions that were cut short or to prolong question-and-answer periods with guest speakers. ''With blogs, class doesn't have to end when the bell rings,'' said Will Richardson, supervisor of instructional technology and communications at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, N.J., who maintained blogs for two journalism classes he taught last year. Teachers say that the interactivity of blogs allowed them to give students feedback much more quickly than before. ''I used to have this stack of hard-copy journals on my desk waiting to be read,'' said Catherine Poling, an assistant principal at Kemptown Elementary School, also in Frederick County, Md., who ran a blog last year when she taught third grade at a nearby school. ''Now I can react to what they say immediately, and students can respond to each other.'' In one blog entry, for instance, Ms. Poling asked her students what qualities they looked for when rating books for a statewide award. When several students responded that a book has to be creative and grab their attention, she posted a follow-up question asking them if they used the same criteria for both fiction and nonfiction books. While such a question could have just as easily been posed during a classroom conversation, teachers who use blogs say that students put a lot more thought and effort into their blog writing, knowing that parents and others may read their work on the Web. ''They want to make sure that it's good enough to be read by more than just their teacher,'' said Christopher S. Wright, a third grade teacher at Wyman Elementary School in Rolla, Mo. Sometimes, the long reach of the Web has turned bloggers into modern-day pen pals, allowing students to collaborate easily with their peers in other classes or even other countries. Some social studies classes at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in Flemington, for instance, are using a blog to study the Holocaust with high school students in Krakow, Poland. One of the goals of classroom blogs, advocates say, is to get students to write more often. Even so, according to the time stamps on classroom blogs, they are most heavily used during the school day. Few entries seem to come after school hours, and some teachers who have tried to keep their blogs going during the summer say they have been disappointed by the results. ''I'm not getting a huge response,'' said Mrs. Dudiak, the second grade teacher in Frederick County. That has led some teachers who are critical of blogs to question wonder the technology has actually done anything to interest students in writing. Critics also worry that the casual nature of writing on the Web may encourage bad habits that are hard to break, like e-mail-style abbreviations, bad grammar and poor spelling. While some teachers who run blogs encourage students to write out their entries on paper first and then post them online as if they were publishing the work, others view blog writing as more free-flowing. ''Blogging is a different form of writing,'' Mrs. Dudiak said. ''They should proofread, but we are more concerned about the content, not grammar.'' It is unclear exactly how many teachers maintain blogs. Mr. Richardson estimates their numbers in the thousands. The Educational Bloggers Network, a loosely organized clearinghouse, lists only about 130 members at its Web site, www.ebn.weblogger.com. Whatever the number, the ranks of bloggers are likely to grow in the coming school year. In some cases, teachers may not have much of a choice. The Little Miami School District near Cincinnati plans to require teachers to maintain blogs for their classes once they are trained on the technology, which should be completed sometime in the 2005-6 school year. Debbi Contner, an assistant principal at one of the district's six schools, Hamilton-Maineville Elementary, who used a blog when she taught fourth grade at the school last year, said that teachers become receptive to blogs once they see how easy it is to set one up. ''If it gets kids excited about learning,'' Mrs. Contner said, ''we might as well try it.''
Posted by Richard Smith at 08:33 PM
Grand Text Auto » Teaching with Blogs
Grand Text Auto - a group blog that includes several new media scholars among its authors - has a posting from last August about using blogs in teaching. They, too, use MovableType (or did).Grand Text Auto » Teaching with Blogs
I used blogs with my students in Spring 2003 (I didn’t teach during 2003-04, instead opting for the carefree life of the “Traveling Scholar"). My approach to teaching with blogs was a bit different, organizing the class blogging around a mini-blogsphere (each student having an independent blog, for which the course might be one of many subjects blogged). I’ve never written it up before, but now have in preparation for the Blogging Tutorial that Matt Webb and I are doing in sunny Santa Cruz, CA next week.
Posted by Richard Smith at 08:26 PM
mamamusings: courseware Archives
Elizabeth Lane Lawley is an educator with a passion for blogs and treats blog software (movable type, in her case) as "courseware"mamamusings: courseware Archives
Posted by Richard Smith at 08:23 PM
Vlog 2.1: blogs and teaching
Adrian Miles, at MIT, talks about the use of blogs across the three year media studies program there.Vlog 2.1: blogs and teaching
I'd mentioned here that we've started using blogs throughout our Media Studies program. They are to be used throughout the three years of their program, and not just as an adjunct (or more) for one particular course. They've been introduced into the second semester, largely because first semester introduced across most of their subjects the practice and discipline of journal writing (traditional journals).
Posted by Richard Smith at 08:17 PM
Language Center - Elsie Speaks
A language teacher considers the role of blogs in teaching and especially language teaching.Language Center - Elsie SpeaksYou can also find an article in about.com here.
Blogs, or Web Logs, have been around since the early 1990s, and their use has increased significantly over the last few years. Today, there exist about 4.12 million blogs on hosted services, and this number is expected to increase to 10 million by the end of the year. Recently, educators have started to discover blogs for teaching purposes as well.
Posted by Richard Smith at 08:16 PM
October 27, 2004
Mobile cam sees through clothes
An accessory to your mobile phone that gives you X-Ray vision. Creepy to the max...Mobile cam sees through clothesCameraphone voyeurism reaches new heights!
A new mobile phone gadget has raised fears it will be a perverts' dream. The £100 add-on will turn camera phones into X-ray specs which can see through clothes, according to Scotland's Daily Record.
"It is said to be particularly effective on dark bikinis. Originally designed for taking pictures at night, it has quickly been exploited by voyeurs.
Night-filters are the latest device used by Japan's obsessive voyeur community.Made by Japanese company Yamada Denshi, it can be bought on the internet and fitted to high-end phones.
In particular, Vodafone's V602-SH handset, not yet available in the UK, is being used with the new gadget.
Vodafone say they are deeply unhappy about the device. It is not illegal in itself - but using it to film people's naked bodies would be.
The cameras effectively give users night vision by picking up on heat to create outline pictures. Because bodies are hotter than clothes, the pictures produce an image of the body without the clothes.
Vodafone deny responsibility and have condemned the abuse of camera-phone technology.
Picture from Advanced Intelligence.
Source: Smart Mobs
Posted by Richard Smith at 10:49 AM
Welcome to Sunnybank Preparatory School - We're watching you!
I have ranted in my blogs before about this, but I think I will just continue to do so for a while, while I build up my thinking on the subject... Essentially I am convinced that this watching of our children through technological means is a very risky behaviour. We risk alienating them as children from their parents and as citizens from their society. Why engage in this risky behaviour? Is it guilt for not being there in person?? Is it worries that they will be attacked in their school? Is it concern that they are misbehaving? All of these things have alternative solutions, I suspect, and to turn to the video camera as our first line of defence is unthinking and possibly dangerous. To reiterate, watching students via cameras inserts into our relationships with children an element of mistrust, and element of non-reciprocal watching, that is non-conducive to the creation of caring, creative, and constructive citizens. In my mind, if I am a student living under the gaze of a camera, the first thing in my mind is - if they don't trust me, then why should I trust them?Welcome to Sunnybank Preparatory School"A preparatory school in Lancashire has become the first in Britain to allow parents to watch their children's progress from the comfort of their homes or offices,"news.telegraph reports."Pupils at Sunnybank Preparatory School,Burnley,are filmed in their classrooms from the moment they start school to the moment they leave.Their parents can monitor their progress at any time of the day by logging on to a secure internet site.The system shows the school in real time,but recordings of specific events, good or bad, can be retrieved and saved on CDs".
Parents log on to watch pupils in the classroom
Source: Smart Mobs
Posted by Richard Smith at 10:48 AM
October 22, 2004
KSL News: No Clear Rules for Utah County Surveillance Equipment
One of the reasons people worry about surveillance technology is the potential for misuse of that technology. This story, about a police chief putting in publicly owned equipment that watched his own home (and caught his wife with another man) is just such an example.KSL News: No Clear Rules for Utah County Surveillance Equipment
No Clear Rules for Utah County Surveillance Equipment Oct. 22, 2004 SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- It now appears there was more than one unintended consequence when Utah County Attorney Kay Bryson had an off-duty deputy put surveillance equipment in his Salt Lake City condo. That was done supposedly to see if a burglar was around. But now, two separate law enforcement agencies are investigating after that equipment allegedly caught Bryson's then-estranged wife meeting another man. The Brysons were going through a bitter divorce at the time. Kathleen Bryson claims her ex-husband misused the county equipment. And now, reporters are digging into Utah County's policy on use of surveillance equipment. But they have found there is NO such policy. The Salt Lake Tribune reports today there is little sheriff's department oversight or clear-cut regulations to govern the use of surveillance equipment. The sheriff's department defends the program, saying it's been used to monitor suspected break-ins, and even catch an underwear thief and even someone stealing morphine from a doctor's office. (Copyright 2004 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)
Posted by Richard Smith at 12:38 PM
Something for our wireless book?
Seems a little self-serving, however, if the research is sponsored by Nokia.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Home phones face uncertain futureThe fixed line phone in your home could soon be an endangered species.
Research by handset maker Nokia shows that more and more people are using their mobile phone for every call they make or take.
According to the study, more than 45 million people in the UK, Germany, US and South Korea now only use a mobile.
It showed that people keep their fixed line phone because call charges are lower, but most of those questioned said the future was definitely mobile.
Cheaper calls
The Nokia-sponsored research showed that mobiles and fixed phones were used for different purposes.
Home phones were used for longer calls but conversations on mobiles tended to be shorter, between mobiles and to friends.
In the UK 69% of those questioned said they turned to their fixed phone because it was still cheaper to use than a mobile.
However, when pressed few could say with accuracy how tariffs on fixed and mobile phones compared.
In the US and Germany
Source: BBC
Posted by Richard Smith at 10:15 AM
October 17, 2004
Interview with Ray Kurzweil
If you ever wanted to read an example of someone preaching "stage 6" of the information society (we will become a new species), here it is in an interview with Ray Kurzweil: kurzweil.pdfPosted by Richard Smith at 01:02 AM