:Connecting the Dots

Thanks to Will Richardson for pointing out Michael Wesch’s Library of Congress presentation on YouTube.  I watched the whole thing.  The part that started my wheels turning comes at 22:30 or so:

When we started watching first vlogs and did first vlogs ourselves… it’s like this deep experience of context collapase.  The moment you look into a webcam for the first time and you try to start talking, you have this sense like you just don’t know who you’re talking to and therefore you just come out sounding all awkward.  Do a search for “first vlogs” on YouTube and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I think about all the attacks on YouTube by K-12 educators, the claims that it is worthless because of the boatloads of trite, childish content that it contains.  And make no mistake – it does contain boatloads of trite, childish content.  But Wesch’s comment made me consider the first time someone pointed a video camera at me – not a webcam but a VHS camcorder.  Even knowing that the audience for that video would most likely number fewer than a dozen or so family members and friends, I had absolutely nothing to say and so I made jokes, turned away, talked at the camera operator, not the audience on the other side of the screen, made peace signs, stuck out my tongue… you get the picture.  I was trite and childish.  And I know I’m not alone in having that reaction. 

How much greater then is our sense of dislocation and confusion – what Wesch calls “context collapse” – when we know that the audience on the other side of that screen could number in the millions when that video is on YouTube?  Is it reasonable to expect people to start churning out hard-hitting documentaries about pollution in the local lake and incisive one-act plays when we are still, as a culture, giggling and holding our hands up to the lens and trying to figure out what to say to that blinking red light on the front of the camera?  I guess that what I’m trying to say is that we need to make cave paintings before we can make Mona Lisas.  This is especially true given the fact that most mass media up to this point have pigeon-holed the vast majority of their participants in the limited role of consumers, not producers.  With YouTube, I think it’s fair to expect that with time – and education – we will become better able to express ourselves in powerful and creative ways through the moving image.  Right now, we are still infants learning to speak all over again.

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LifeHack has an interesting list of the 10 Skills You Need to Succeed at Almost Anything.  Lots of good stuff, but nothing about technology/computers.  Should there be?  Or does the development of those other skills (math, decision-making, networking, etc.) ensure that one will be able to succeed in our increasingly technology-rich world?  Is facility with technology a fundamental skill unto itself or does the development of other parts of our brains help us to conquer whatever new tools come down the pipe?  Many of the Digg commenters responding to the story indicated that #11 should be computers.  I must say that I certainly agree with the authors that the 10 skills they did identify are indeed necessary in our world; I’m just not sure that their list is complete…

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Will Richardson brought my attention to Nicholas Carr’s Atlantic Monthly article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” Carr poses the question: Is the internet re-wiring our brains? Noting that he and many of his friends can no longer concentrate deeply as they read for extended periods, Carr asks if the way we think is being shaped by this new medium of hyperlinks and infoglut. Obviously skeptical about the internet as a positive force in the evolution of our culture, Carr nevertheless makes some good points and raises some very valid concerns. I have two specific problems with his article, however:

1. I think his characterization of Google as the embodiment of Taylor’s principles of scientific management is way off:

In Google’s view, information is a kind of commodity, a utilitarian resource that can be mined and processed with industrial efficiency. The more pieces of information we can “access” and the faster we can extract their gist, the more productive we become as thinkers.

This is the company that tells its engineers to spend 20% of their time working on projects of their choosing not directly related to their core job function. They manipulate their corporate logo to commemorate significant dates in the progress of the arts and science.  There’s a lot about Google that scares me; but I think that overall their corporate culture is one that celebrates non-linear thinking and creativity.  In the same way that so many viewed the IBM of the 50’s and 60’s as a monolithic culture of conformity and order (in spite of their “Think” motto), I think Carr mis-characterizes Google’s attempt to make information manageable in the service of free thought as an attempt to mechanize thought. 

2. I have to assume that an editor titled the piece. I say this because in spite of all of his concerns about how the Internet is changing the way we think, Carr is very honest about his abivalence. He opens his conclusion noting, “Maybe I’m just a worrywort.” And while he offers a very convincing argument that the internet is changing how we process information, I don’t think he ever goes so far as to equate that new way of thinking with “stupidity.” Regardless of whether it is Carr or his editor who is to blame, I think we have to stop and consider not only what we have lost, but what we have gained. If we do indeed “think in hyperlinks,” then perhaps we are developing a new capacity to draw connections between disparate ideas, people, and works. Perhaps the structure of the internet reflects the way our culture has evovled into a postmodern one characterized by diversity and interconnectedness and if our brains our evolving in the same direction, they will serve us all the better in this new world. 

Carr shows that clearly the notion of what terms like “literacy” and “intelligence” is changing.  Will we stand by and let others define what’s important or will we play a role in re-interpreting these concepts?

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In preparing a lesson on internet research last week, I was reminded of just how important it is to try your searches in multiple search engines instead of just relying on one favorite. I was looking for a current topic to explore with the ninth graders with whom I would be working and decided to give the recent protests in Tibet a try. It was fascinating – and very scary – to see the differences between the list of sites returned by Google and Yahoo when I entered the search term “lhasa riot” (Lhasa is the capital of the Tibet Autonomous Region). Google’s results included a number of YouTube videos (who owns YouTube again?) and links to reports of the events on a number of western news outlets. The Yahoo results, in contrast, featured links to ChinaDaily and People’s Daily Online, both Chinese sites sponsored and controlled by the Chinese government.

A mistake? An anomaly in Yahoo’s search algorithm? Maybe not, considering Yahoo’s documented cooperation with the Chinese government in its efforts to censor search results to eliminate anti-Chinese content. Are students aware that these things are happening? Are they aware of the immense power that these search companies wield as gatekeepers to the internet? How many of our students – how many of us – actually bother to perform a search in two search engines instead of just relying on that first page of results from whichever one happens to be our favorite? We’ll drive across town from Best Buy to Circuit City to make sure we get the best TV at the best price but most of us (myself included) never take the time to shop around our important questions about what’s happening in our world. Perhaps we should…

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The Pew Internet and American Life Project just released a report on how American adults use the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. They tell us that 36% of adults use it. Perhaps the report’s most surprising finding is that Wikipedia users tend to be a well-educated group overall, with 50% having college degrees or better. The report also discusses the reasons behind Wikipedia’s popularity, and settles on two: its link structure results in high search rankings in Google (and hence it draws more search engine users to the site) and it is just plain convenient.

Interesting. Too bad they didn’t look at teens and children. I’d love to see how they stack up against the adults in terms of usage patterns and demographics. I’d also love to see some qualitative data (beyond my own experience) about how students use the site.  And how about some data on the people who contribute to and edit Wikipedia.  What do we know about them?

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The motto of Carmun is “students of the world unite!” This is not the kind of motto that is going to set teachers’ minds at ease as they click their way through the site. Too bad. The idea behind Carmun is a very noble one: offer students with similar academic interests a place to share ideas and sources.

Once you sign up for a free Carmun account, you can start or join groups focused on academic themes like Celtic Studies, Economics, and Feminism. Group members then have access to a threaded discussion forum where they can talk about the topic and where they share and manage a database of sources relating to it. Users can upload bibliographies of their projects, complete with ratings and reviews, for other members of the group to view. There is even a link to locate the work in your local library.

So basically, Carmun is a social networking site for study groups.  It’s MySpace for the late-night library set.  Its founder, Jonathan Edson, created the site when he found that life in graduate school was lonely compared to his experience in the corporate world, where “collaboration is necessary and expected.” Especially in the case of more esoteric topics, Carmun will give students the opportunity to connect with others who share their research interests and in the process, to unearth sources that they weren’t aware of before.

Yet in my mind I already hear the teachers complaining: “They need to do their own research! This is cheating! I want them to learn to do research in the library on their own! This is just like sharing term papers!” And perhaps there’s some validity to those concerns. At what point does collaboration become cheating? Especially in the primary and secondary grades, where the process of research is perhaps more important than the product, will a tool like Carmun become a crutch for the chronic procrastinator who has waited until the last minute and needs to circumvent the usual search routine – or worse, decides to use Carmun to pad a skimpy Works Cited page?

Does research have to be the lonely and isolating experience that it always has been in schools? Is that model still valid given the realities of our new, “flat” world? I don’t know. I like the idea behind Carmun but I’ve yet to mention it to the teachers in my district’s high school. “Students of the world unite!” may be a hard pill for them – and me – to swallow.

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Whether you’re an AP Statistics teacher or just trying to get your fourth graders ready for their state math assessment, most teachers will acknowledge that it is important for students to understand how to create and read graphs and charts.  Beyond passing tests, I feel this is an indispensible information literacy skill for students in the 21st Century who are constantly bombarded with data presented in diverse – and sometimes misleading – forms.  To be able to understand and critique these presentations of data, students need to not only see and discuss them; they must create them.  Again and again.  Until they see graphs and charts as tools for understanding and presenting complex data.

 Of course, any teacher who has tried to help students graph even the simplest data using Microsoft Excel will tell you that this is no easy task.  Even adults who have spent years making charts and graphs in Excel’s wizard (read: me) still struggle to create them at times.  I’ve been on the lookout for tools that would provide a simpler and/or more powerful solution than Excel.  Recently, my quest brought me to Swivel and NCES Create-A-Graph.

Swivel

Swivel is Web 2.0 to the core.  Users can upload data sets and then choose from a number of formats for presenting the data in visual form.  The data they upload and the graph(s) they create become accessible to all visitors to the site.  Additionally, students can view the data and graphs uploaded by others.

I found Swivel difficult to use.  To upload data, it must first be saved as an Excel spreadsheet or CSV file.  While there is an option to type data directly into the application, it must be formatted by hand in a single large text entry box.  Once the data have been uploaded, the user must tell Swivel which columns to use and what format the data are in (currency, dates, etc.)  Surprisingly, while I could view data and graphs created by other users, I couldn’t find a way to make my own graphs based on another user’s data.  On the plus side, you are required to cite a source for your data when you upload it, a nice reminder for students.

Once the data have been uploaded, Swivel creates a basic line graph of it.  You can then edit the graph to change to another form (pie chart, bar chart, etc.) or to change its appearance.  Of course, like any web 2.0 application, you tag your creation to help others find it.  There are options to permalink your graph or to embed it in a web page or blog.

Swivel is, potentially, a very powerful tool for creating visual representations of data.  Unfortunately, it is probably too difficult to use for most students who are looking to put together a quick graph or chart.  In Swivel’s defense, it was still in Beta at the time of this writing.  And while it is somewhat limited as a graph creation tool for the K-12 set, it could be an excellent place for students learning about graphs or doing research to find a treasure trove of examples based on real life data.

NCES Create-A-Graph

Did you know that the National Center for Education Statistics has a “Kids Zone” and that it’s coolest tool helps students create their own graphs?  Unlike Swivel, Create-A-Graph is geared squarely towards K-12 users and will be especially useful to students in elementary classrooms.  Its feature set is far more limited than Swivel’s and none of the sharing/tagging options are there but for a teacher looking for a simple but effective way to help students create appealing and accurate graphs of their data, it is just the ticket.

Create-A-Graph’s interface features five tabs which students work through as they develop their graph: Design, Data, Labels, Preview, Print/Save.  In the design phase, they select a format (line, bar, pie, area, X-Y) and colors for their graph.  In the data tab, they describe and then key in their data set, specifying the color and thickness of each line or region as they go.  There is no option to upload data entered into a spreadsheet or database.  They then add labels, preview their creation, and then output it in one of three formats: print, download (as a JPG or PDF file), or e-mail.   Unfortunately, you cannot save a graph and then come back to it later.  A graph must be created start-to-finish in a single session.

Create-A-Graph is simple enough for a third grader to master and powerful enough for the classroom teacher who wants to show parents the class’s progress on spelling quizzes over the course of the year.  It’s a real gem for teachers who want students to put down their rulers and graph paper and start putting the computer to work in presenting their data.

Together, Swivel and Create-A-Graph fill the yawning void between Tom Snyder’s Graph Club (which is a wonderful tool to introduce lower primary grades to graphing) and Excel.  If you want simple and friendly, try Create-A-Graph; the more adventurous and social among us might want to give Swivel a go.  Happy graphing!

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