:Connecting the Dots

I’ve always been a fan of Google Earth.  Who isn’t?  And even before Google Earth (heck, before Google) there was the CIA World Factbook, one of the first truly useful sites in the history of the web.  The Factbook first came online in 1994 and it was truly a forward-looking project in terms of its scope, its reliance on database technology (remember that back then, most web content was static HTML), and its organization.  I’ve been recommending it to colleagues for almost 15 years now!

So I was overjoyed to discover a few days ago that someone had created kmlfactbook.org, a site that allows you to overlay data from the factbook onto 2D maps or the 3D Google Earth globe (you must have the Google Earth browser plug-in installed to see the 3D renderings).  You load the site, select a data set (population, GDP, infant mortality…), set details on how the data should be rendered and click “Preview.”  You can even download the data as a KML file for Google Earth.  And though I haven’t tried it yet, the site says that you can upload your own country data to create custom maps and graphs.

What a great way for kids (and adults) to understand the ideas behind the statistics.  This is an indispensible tool that belongs in any teacher’s technology toolbox.

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Will Richardson is blogging about once per week now.  In April, he wrote a totlal of 6 posts.  In April of 2007, he wrote 27.  Andy Carvin wrote 1 post in February, 2009 and 7 in February of 2007.  David Jakes went from 8 (April, 2007) to 2 (April, 2009).  What happened?  Where have all the bloggers gone?

I suppose the answer is Twitter.  And that upsets me, because in the course of that transition, what has happened to the conversation?  We’ve gone from expansive, probing reflection to 140-character platitudes, from the symposium to the water cooler.  This is definitely the English teacher in me speaking, but I fear that Twitter is robbing us of a great opportunity to think through writing, a shift which will most harm students, who stand to learn a great deal through blogging.  I think there is a synergy between the higher-order thinking skills that educators so value and desire and blogging; I just don’t see that same synergy with tweets.

It’s not that there’s no place for the kind of rapid fire, conversational interchange that Twitter supports; there most definitely is.  But I hate to see it elbowing the kind of rich discourse that blogs engender out of the way.  Seeing this happen only proves what the most fervent critics of educational innovations complain about: we run to the “next big thing” before we’ve had a chance to master the last one and before it has taken hold in a systemic way in classrooms.

I hope that maybe when the excitement over Twitter dies down, some of our best bloggers – and our developing bloggers, too – get back to the longer stuff.  We need it!

Image Source: DigitalParadox, http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalparadox/16900939/sizes/s/#cc_license

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