Remembering Seventh Street

I heard an interesting piece on NPR last night during my drive home. It was about a video game some journalism students are developing about the history of 7th Street, in Oakland, California. The game is called Remembering Seventh Street.
Paul Grabowicz is behind it and has an interesting post about it at MediaShift’s IdeaLab.
Seventh Street has a history as a blues music scene and Mr. Grabowicz writes:

I had been frustrated by the limitations of a print story to really give people a sense of what 7th Street was like. Creating a virtual world replica of 7th Street offered the opportunity for people to actually experience the music scene in a way that no other media form could approach.

I think this is a really cool idea. Our school’s experience with using Civilization III in classes has been very successful. Why not virtual experiences on all sorts of topics?
I think of my brother’s recent pilgrimage to Memphis and how it has moved him and given him a greater understanding of the music that he loves so much. Not everyone can travel there but a virtual world and game based on the history of Beale Street would be a wonderful thing…

Every community in America has a 7th Street - some aspect of its heritage or history that has been lost and could be brought back to life in a video game. Since we started the 7th Street project, we’ve learned about similar jazz and blues club scenes in cities all across the country - from Detroit and Houston to Newark and the Bronx.

A newspaper or other local news organization needs to be more than just a pipeline for informing people about current news and events. It also should provide context for people to understand their community and its history.

A video game can do that, by letting people re-live the history of their communities and understand not just what’s happening today but what came before.

Power Up The Game

From Technology News Daily comes Power Up The Game
a new multiplayer (or solo) game.

The game is part of IBM’s TryScience initiative and will be launched at Engineer’s Week 2008 opening on February 16 in Washington, D.C. The game, which can be played alone or together, features a planet in near ecological ruin where three exciting missions for solar, wind and water power must be solved before sandstorms, floods or SmogGobs thwart the rescue.

I’ve talked about KUA’s use of Civilization III in history classes before (see this video). Perhaps this might be good on the science side. I do see that:

Nearly 200 teens in the Connecticut Innovation Academy served as advisors to IBM researchers during the game development.

a hopeful note. I’ll download it and let my gaming consultant (Chris, age 17) give me a review.

Learning Communities

And more.. From the Thetford Academy Newsletter (via email)

SNAPSHOTS: In and around TA classrooms…

• Just before the break eighth-grade Computer Literacy students were
exploring the concept of “learning community” as it develops in
online formats, with classmates in the computer lab, and more
generally in the school at large. Here is a sampling of the
definitions they wrote, summarizing the idea in their own words:

“I feel that a learning community is a place where students come
together to the same conclusions after being together for some time.
They learn what the others think about a particular topic and combine
that with their own thinking.”

“:Learning Community (noun): a place where nobody is really in charge
of what people are learning, but instead are all learning together
and helping each other out.”

“To me, a learning community is a great way to hold a class. It’s
different from all my other classes where the teacher is basically
helping you along the way. Here, we are given our assignments with
the general knowledge given, and we sky rocket from there. We help
each other when we have computer problems and we also help each other
out when we have questions. The good thing about a learning community
is that the kids are teaching kids and the kids are learning from
other kids, but in more of a casual way rather than being “proper”,
like the way you would approach a teacher. Personally, I like being
part of a learning community because it’s a great way to interact
with other kids in the class and maybe even start new friendships
from communicating in class. “

“A learning community is a place where everyone learns. The teacher
is more of an instructor, and the students can teach the instructor
things too. I like being a part of a learning community because it
is a lot less stressful. It’s like we are a big group, all learning
and teaching from each other. Everyone in a learning community plays
an equal roll [sic] and respects each other, and I feel happy and
respected in a learning community.”

“A learning community is a place were you can learn and feel safe, so
you can get a good education and not be bullied. I like being part
of a learning community because I get to learn safely.”

“A learning community is an enviroment [sic] in which someone can
feel comfortable asking questions and discussing difficult topics
with their peers. At Thetford Academy, I am a part of a large
learning community. I like being part of such a community because it
provides a sense of comfort and makes me feel that I can accomplish
many things by myself and with my peers.”

For more on electronic learning communities, these students and their
teacher recommend visiting the online resource
center at creatinglearningcommunities.org

Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies

How apropos! Toward A Definition of 21st-Century Literacies from the NCTE (National Council of Teachers of English)

Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of
purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous
information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

digital literacy requirements

Digital Literacy:“The ability to use digital technology, communication tools and networks efficiently and ethically to locate, evaluate, use and create information.”

I’m still mulling over the digital literacy requirements that kids ought to have when they leave our school, but I’ve come up with a preliminary list.
First, the tools. I think everyone ought to know a little something about the tools they use. There’s no reason to think the computer as we know it will remain the main tool forever but it is now so kids should know:

Mechanical literacy

Relationship between hard drive, processor and memory.
Basic security: virus protection options, configuration of virus updates and scans
Basic maintenance: disk tools such as chkdsk (PC), disk utility(Mac)

Basic software literacy:

File types: should know some basic file extensions, such as .doc .jpg, .gif .xls .tif .txt and what they mean
Should know how to save a document in different file formats
Should know basic word processor formatting: page and section breaks, page numbering, headers and footers

Internet literacy:

Searching:
Basic search techniques - the use of quotation marks, Boolean operators
Should know how to read a URL
Should know how to validate a website and assess it for reliability (whois, wayback machine, external links, domain extensions
Ethics:
should have an understanding of copyright and the concept of fair use
Safety and Privacy:
should understand that content published to the web is not private and survives forever
should have basic training in recognizing and avoiding cyber bullying, trolls and predation
Publishing:
Should know the concepts of basic HTML code, enough to recognize it anyhow
Should know how to view the source code of any web site (this can also yield clues to the site’s validity)
Should know the strengths and weaknesses of blogs, wikis and other “2.0″ tools
Should know how to format graphics for the web - understanding of graphic file formats and file size

Doesn’t seem like a lot does it? Yet many, if not most, of our students don’t know these things.

Computer Lit

My son mentioned to me the other evening that Thetford Academy has a Computer Literacy class, something I never knew. It’s an elective, 1/2 hour daily. They cover search engines, some basic web design. He tells me there’s a larger unit on cyber-bullying.
Now, the school where I work has nothing like this. In fact we do not offer any computer classes per se. The enrollments for the programming classes were so small that they haven’t run since the first year I worked here. There used to be a basic Office applications course but no more.

Kids that I see often have no idea of very simple search techniques. They don’t know how to add page numbers to a term paper. They don’t know that taking a graphic off a web page, putting it into a poster and enlarging it by dragging the edges will result in pixelated mess when printed. When it does they have no idea why. They don’t know that memory is different from hard drive space. They don’t know how to set up their virus protection to update itself. (Many don’t know if they even have any virus protection.)

Most “computer course” are programming courses. What we need is a technology course. Do kids need to know how to program in order to use technology efficiently? No they don’t. I think they do need to know some things about computers. They need to know that deleting files from a hard drive isn’t going to improve general performance. They need to know how to protect their computer from viruses. Computers are tools and everybody needs to know how to maintain their tools.

And they need some kind of digital literacy, technology literacy, there needs to be some basic stuff that kids leave this school knowing.

The best definition I’ve found for digital literacy comes from a New Zealand government web site

“The ability to use digital technology, communication tools or networks to locate, evaluate, use and create information.”

but I’d tinker with it a little, I’d say

“The ability to use digital technology, communication tools and networks efficiently and ethically to locate, evaluate, use and create information.”

What are the basic skills that kids should graduate from high school knowing?

Let Them Eat Cake

Browsing my aggregator this morning I noticed a comment from mrsdurff on a post I had written awhile back concerning Vicki Davis’ blog, coolcatteacher. I had tried to read Vicki’s blog and had given up. With all the graphics, videos, and so forth she has on there now, it just takes too long over a dial-up connection and my exasperation had finally gotten the better of me.
MrsDurff commented rather snippily that I should perhaps think about “investing” in cable. She assumes I suppose that because she has broadband, everyone does and it is only my unwillingness (or inability) to pay for it.

It’s always that way. Some are quite unable to understand that the opportunities they have are not available to everyone.

I find this to be true with most of the “edu-bloggers” and to be honest with almost anyone who has broadband including my family. It’s taken me years to train my friends to avoid sending me giant attachments and even as recently as a month ago my sister out in Portland, Oregon called me to suggest a link to an internet radio site.

Governor Douglas has set a goal that broadband be universally accessible to Vermonters by 2010. It is a worthy goal but there does not seem to be much progress in that direction. In addition I think the state’s estimates may be a little skewed. For instance our town applied for a $50,000 grant from the state to assist with furthering wireless broadband throughout the town. We were told that our town was not eligible for the grant, that Thetford is considered to have broadband access already. That is because Thetford Elementary School. Thetford Academy and the Latham Library all have broadband access via fiber. This leaves the rest of the six square miles of the township and 95% of the households without it but the state considers that we have access.

And we do, if we want to drive the 20 minutes to town at a time that the library is open. Otherwise our access is a 40 minute drive down to a wifi hotspot in Hanover or Lebanon, NH, depending on the hour.

I have looked at satellite but with the hills around me that is not an option. Cable of course is absurd, what cable company will lay miles of cable to serve a few households? Verizon told us at a meeting with them a couple of years ago that it would be a cold day in hell before they invested the money in hardware to bring DSL to us.

I talked about a new initiative, a fiber network that folks in the area are working on in doing for ourselves. If all goes as planned the first households will be hooked up in 2009. But we will have invested a lot more than the piddley sums mrsdurff puts out every month. To get broadband we have to invest sweat as well as money.

Marie Antoinette’s notorious statement seems to fit.

FlipVideo

A few weeks ago, during one of our meetings with the student administrators of the school media sharing site, one of them mentioned that they had seen a fellow student using a little “thing that took video but was really small, I don’t know what it was but it was pretty cool looking.” What “it” was was a FlipVideo.
I ran across this post, read some reviews, checked the specs and ordered a FlipVideo Ultra, 30 minute version.

I’ve only had it for a week but some initial thoughts about it are:
This is a great camera for casual filming. It fits easily in a pants pocket, fires up and is ready to go in seconds. Where a full size camcorder causes people to “freeze up” (Omigod, are you filming me?) this is much less obtrusive.
The video is in .avi format. When you plug the USB connector into your computer the camera appears as another drive and one simply drags the files onto the hard drive or imports them into the editing software of choice. Super easy.
On a Mac you need to run an installer the first time you plug in the camera. On a PC the drivers install automatically, so quickly you might miss the process entirely if you aren’t watching for it.

As Ken says, the zoom is useless from more than 30 feet, I’d amend that to say that the zoom is useless from more than 15. The quality of the video just plain dies with the zoom.

I don’t use iMovie08, so I don’t know about problems with it, iMovieHD had no problem importing my clips and neither did Sony Vegas.

One problem that I seem to have with the Flip is that when I press the button to start filming with my thumb, I often press the outer navigational ring too. It took a little practice to learn to press with my thumbnail instead of the whole ball of my thumb. This is probably because I am not accustomed to the tiny buttons on most electronic gadgets such as cell phones.

I did not need a USB extender cable for it but I did find myself supporting the body of the camera when I had it connected to the computer. I can see that the USB connector will be the first thing to break on this thing.

We will be getting several of these for the students to use. They will not replace our full size camcorders but will be for, as I said, casual filming, those moments where you say to yourself “Oh, man I wish I had that on video!”. With the FlipVideo, you can.

enough is enough

That’s it. I am removing CoolCatTeacher from my blogroll. I just can’t spend the time to download her blog over my dial-up connection. The new format is just way too time-consuming no matter what she has to say.

Carmun

A blip at Educause this morning sent me to this post: Carmun - Social Networking for Writing School Papers

The cheeky YouTube video that explains Carmun describes the service as “Wikipedia meets Facebook”. But essentially its a social network for people who have to write term papers. There’s lots of tools for asking peers questions, managing bibliographies, and some del.icio.us-esque tools for saving online sources.

Hmm. So I signed up to see what is up. The bibliography formatting tool is good. Took a look through the questions in the technology discussions. Could be a pretty useful thing.

Now I have to take back what I wrote previously I suppose, or perhaps just amend it.
Amend:
Leveraging existing social networks for education can be a good thing, as long as it’s a social network built around education and not around socializing.