And He Blogs

Image by Andrew Feinberg via Flickr

How’s that title for an attention grabber? It basically translates to saying, unless you’re a bad parent, you should drop what you’re doing and pay attention. In blogs, newscasts, and almost everywhere else that you turn we hear the warnings. Scary warnings about food, travel, drugs, and now the de rigueur warning about the hazards of the Internet and [insert dramatic music here] Internet Predators. The latest example is by way of Will Richardson who points to an incident that happened in a Wyoming high school. An officer from the nearby Cheyenne Police Department came to the school and spoke to students about the dangers of predators on the Internet. He used MySpace as an example of where students post their personal pictures and therefore leave themselves vulnerable to those bad people watching out there. Now, while there is some debate about what the officer actually said. Richardson’s point that it is the absolutely wrong approach is right on. He has a suggestion:

Go to your principal or superintendent right now and ask her/him this: Would you really rather have your students learn about safety online from some “authority” figure who drops in and attempts to make them fearful, or from people who they know and trust and see every day in their classrooms who over the course of time in appropriate and balanced ways can educate them instead?

Now I know a few police officers, good men and women all, but I know that their perspective is somewhat clouded by the fact that they see the end result of the "bad Internet". To them it must look mostly bad. So this fear approach to Internet safety doesn’t work any better than other types of "scared straight" education. This results in nothing more than articles like this one from 2003, which starts out like a bad novel. "Christina Long’s life was full of promise." I mean for cripes sake, what purpose does this serve? Christina Long was indeed the victim of a crime, but the Internet was no more of a perpetrator than violent TV, or slash and burn video games. Another example is this pitiful article from Katherine Ramsland.  After referencing the story about Christina Long, she refers to a June 2006 article in Science News:

[The] article reports that nine in ten adolescents utilized Internet resources in 2004, and at least fifty percent went online every day. A lot of them are contacted by predators seeking a viable contact whom they can draw into their net. Most predators have a number of fetishes and paraphilias, so for some, almost any kid who responds will do.

Guess which part of that paragraph were Ms. Ramsland’s words (hint, they’re in bold), because they are, in fact, wrong. Watch the PBS Frontline program Growing Up Online and see how the teenagers talk much more rationally about online life than the adults. Maybe we need to correct some of their laissez faire attitudes, but for the most part they know where the good Internet ends and the bad one begins.

So what is a good source of information that is easily digestible and dispels the myths of online predators? Well, start with the Crimes Against Children Research Center’s fact sheet from the University of New Hampshire. A quick read of this resource will demonstrate loud and clear how much hype there is when it comes to Internet dangers. Kids know when they’re being lied to, especially when we try to scare the crap out of them.

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I just got done re-watching Sir Ken Robinson’s terrific TED Talk on creativity in education. Here is an update that expands upon creativity by talking about the power of innovation, and how we systematically suppress it in our classrooms. There IS an education revolution taking place and it is what makes my job one that gets me excited to go to work on Monday mornings. I’ll have more on these ideas of creativity and innovation soon (with thoughts of the neonatal EDUPUNK movement), but I wanted this video to make the rounds as soon as possible.

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A project I just finished almost requires me to blog about a few of the workflow issues. Even if no one reads this it will go down in the archives as a “reference post”, so here goes. A faculty member here at UMW wanted to put speeches that his students recorded, on YouTube, and then create posts on a UMW Blogs site. Some of the speeches were recorded in the class, and some of them were recorded in DTLT’s “studio” (in quotes because you wouldn’t call it a studio if you saw it). The faculty member’s camcorder was a digital 8mm camera (with FireWire), so those were easily captured onto “The Beast” (our PC editing station). We used a Sony wireless lavaliere microphone setup to get good audio, as opposed to the standard noisy on-board mic that camcorders have. I set up a similar scene to the classroom in our “studio”.

So my first scare was the horrible crackling sound on the audio track for the videos shot in the classroom. Thankfully it was only on a couple of videos, and only on the right audio track, so it was easily muted in Adobe Audition. I’m using Adobe Premiere CS2 so it easily integrates with Audition, and switching out audio is simple. So a couple of tips to come away with:

• Use an external microphone.
• Use headphones connected to the camcorder to monitor the sound from the external microphone.

The “studio” setup was, as I said, similar to the classroom, though I did use a different camcorder (Canon HV-20) with a less noisy microphone jack and with the ability to manually change the audio levels (couldn’t find that on the faculty’s camcorder). Things were streamlined by recording directly to the hard drive (thereby skipping the video capture step) with a piece of software called DV Rack. Formerly a Serious Magic product, now known as On Location from Adobe, it records as standard DV (.avi) files. It did a basically flawless job, though it did provide another scare as some students talked louder and horrible clipping noises were present, but only when played back within DV Rack. The noises weren’t present when I played back the video in other media players.

I was very conscious of keeping the look of the classroom when I shot the video of the students in the “studio”, so I set the camera to auto white balance. We shot the videos in a very confined space. Despite giving the students directions to look straight into the camera, there were times when a few of them looked off camera at me at the end of their video.

Once I was done editing the videos, each clip was sent through the DivX Converter program to make smaller MPEG-4 versions of the videos to upload to YouTube. With these short videos, it is no longer a requirement to get them to smaller files as YouTube now accepts up to 1GB files. From a practical standpoint, unless you have a blazing fast Internet tube, you’re better off converting to smaller files and uploading those. The CS2 version of Premiere doesn’t allow me to save out as DivX (grrr!). The CS3 version does. Hence the use of DivX Converter, a $20 program that does batch conversion and is (now) quite stable.

Finally, it’s time to upload the videos. I had prior to this only uploaded videos one at a time. Was there a multiple video uploader for YouTube like there is for Flickr? Yep! It is PC only at this point, a Mac version is announced as on its way. YouTube is well known for sucking when it comes to video quality, but it adds other flexibilities that still make it a desirable place to serve your videos. Supposedly higher quality is coming in the near future. It’s the only thing left keeping from the title of super-uber-video-sharing site of all time.

All in all, it was a valuable education in using the popular video sharing site. Nothing like shooting 9 videos, adding to that another 6 shot in the classroom, and then 2 more that were self produced, all uploaded to YouTube to give you a real world test of the pros and cons of a service. Valuable lessons were learned, or reinforced.

Next!

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One last time I’ll attempt to turn you on to the significance of what Michael Wesch from Kansas State University is trying to do. His talk at ELI 2008 in San Antonio is titled "Human Futures for Technology and Education", and his subtitle is "The Crisis of Significance". As the facilitator notes, Michael is famous for his "The Machine is Us/ing Us" video, and he continues to challenge us with more recent productions from his Digital Ethnography students.

It’s hard to summarize all of the goods points that were made in his presentation, but his central point revolves around how the classroom, and the nature of education, needs to change. If the top questions faculty are getting in their classes are "How many points is this worth?", "How long does this paper need to be?", and "What do we need to know for this test?", then that is a crisis of significance. "All learning starts with good questions" states Wesch, and if the only thing that the students are worrying about are what grade they are going to receive then there is a problem.

In fact there is so much here, and we all have so little time, I should just let you get to it right away and listen/watch for yourself.

UPDATE: None of the ELI sessions are available. Sure hope this is temporary.

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The Global Warming debate is, needless to say (but I’m saying it anyway to further this blog post), a contentious one. As Greg the Science Teacher Guy says, a more accurate term is Global Climate Destabilization. So whether you think humans are causing the planet to warm or not, or whether you even believe that the planet is even warming, this video gets a potentially important conversation going. It also frames the debate properly, not in whether the problem does or does not exist, but what are the costs or benefits to acting or not.

This video, entitled "How It All Ends" (hyperbole . . . or not?), is important not only from the global implications of the debate itself, but also because of the educational importance of science and the scientific process. This debate is what science is all about - a theory, presentation of data, peer review, skepticism, finding holes in the theory, lather, rinse, repeat.

Greg’s video makes me want to investigate more and see all the arguments for and against. I can form my opinions from people presenting evidence, but I always have more questions and I usually ask "what if they’re wrong?" Take for instance this video by the world renowned and well respected Sir David Attenborough:

Entitled "The Truth About Climate Change", it lays out (literally) the graph of the warming that’s occurring, but I’m left feeling like "that’s it, but I have so many questions?" Don’t just tell me it’s THE truth. So here’s another question. Can scientists possibly present ALL the arguments and evidence for ALL of us to be convinced one way or the other? I think this is an admirable attempt (though, as I write this I haven’t watched anywhere near all the videos) to open this debate to the public in an intelligent and scientific way. I think it’s worth my time.

Hat tip to Karl Fisch.

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Two more great videos from the Digital Ethnography crew at Kansas State University . . .

A Vision of Students Today

Information R/evolution

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Being a veteran flyer now, I have come to know that there is a wonderful game of hurry-up-and-wait played whilst waiting for a given flight. So we do things like load up our iPods with podcasts, music, etc. to while away the hours, or in some cases, days. While waiting for my flight back home from the NMC conference, I found it was a good time to clear some junk from my laptop hard drive. I got rid of most of the stray icons off my desktop, which I hate, but I still keep saving stuff that I download there.

Amongst the flotsam and jetsam that I came across, was a video file that came recommended from a couple of blogs I read. I proceeded to load it on the iPod and wondered if it would live up to its billing. It wasn’t like I needed more inspiration because NMC already had me buzzing. Listening to Sir Kenneth Robinson from the 2006 TED Conference speaking of the need to inject creativity into the educational process set me on fire. The story of Gillian Lynne, who couldn’t sit still in class as a child, and the perceptive doctor who told her mother to enroll her in dance school, is worth the price of admission. Lynne, for those who don’t know was the choreographer for Cats. It’s a recognition that some people have to move to think.

I’m still digesting this talk, and it’s good in so many ways. It injects quite a bit of humor into a serious subject, the idea that there needs to be a major restructuring in our approach to education. In addition, I discovered this interview that provides exquisite details of Robinson’s ideas. I’m not much of a reader of books, but I look forward to his book Epihany. Now I know why Gardner is thinking so much about dancing lately.

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