Posted on 30th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles
ipad, iphone, same_page, tablet, web_browser
What smartphones, tablets, netbooks now have in common is putting the open internet in your hand. For all the varieties of configs and features, it is the web browser that equalizes learning. This world-connecting, world-changing cognitive denominator is in the process of doing two fabulous things:
- Bringing everything know by humankind into the hands of each member of the young global generation,
- Bringing that knowledge to each of them equally — quite literally from the same virtual page.
Prompted by all the iPad chatter this week, Michael Malone has posted an interesting article today called “Tablet Dreams” in which he traces the techie decades old dream of creating hand held tablets. Malone muses as to why the dream has persisted:
Perhaps it’s because they harken back to the natural human tendency to write and draw on the nearest flat wall or stone or scrap of wood. Or maybe it’s a kind of cultural memory from the days of cuneiform writing on slabs of drying mud, or marking with chalk on a piece of slate in a one room schoolhouse. Whatever the reason, the dream of a smart, interactive tablet is almost as old as electronics itself.
As these techie dreamers diddled with digital chalk and chisels, something else — something wonderful — happened. The serendipity is something Stuart Kauffman might call an “adjacent possibility”: the array of dream tablets has in common that you can touch them to display, lo, nothing less than the accumulated knowledge of our species. That, folks, is quantum leaps beyond marking with your finger in a wet tablet of mud, or for that matter, with chalk on the boards in schools.
Posted on 28th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles
laboratory, science, smartphone, study
Will disruption bar smartphones from classrooms and school laboratories, or will the devices’ value for research make them indispensable for education? In real science labs, the same question is arising, as described in the new issue of Nature|Methods in an article titled “The scientist and the smartphone”:
. . . The computer became an indispensable tool in the laboratory while the phone developed into a mobile device that has disrupted countless lectures at scientific conferences. But recently researchers can be seen talking on their computer and using their cell phone for running fancy—and sometimes powerful—software programs.
This metamorphosis of the cell phone into a mobile computing platform with voice capabilities is epitomized by the iPhone—one of a new breed of smartphone that is not only popular among the general public but seemingly ubiquitous among scientists. . . .
If the smartphone becomes a primary tool for a research scientist, it follows that students should apprentice the use of mobiles.
Posted on 27th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles
apple, browsing, ipad, steve_jobs, web
In this New York Times photo, Apple CEO Steve Jobs has in his hands the latest and greatest mobile manifestation.
Today as Steve Jobs announced Apple’s new iPad, Geoffrey A. Fowler live-blogged the event from San Francisco for the Wall Street Journal. Early in Jobs’ presentation, Fowler posted:
1:10 | The bar is high
The bar is pretty high — those devices are going to have to be far better at doing some key tasks, he says. Better than the laptop and better than the smart phone. It needs to do browsing, email photos, video, music, games and e-books, he says.
I picked this quotation by Jobs because the first feature he mentions is “browsing.” The fact that the iPad browses the internet places the open global commons of what is known into the iPad owner’s hands. (The image to the right is from Apple’s new iPad video.)
Jobs said in his presentation that iPad’s virtual bookshelf is “a great reader, a great online bookstore…we think the iPad is going to make a terrific e-book reader not just for popular books but textbooks as well.”
As I write this post, Jobs’ presentation continues: Now being highlighted is Pages, Apple’s wordprocessor with which iPad is equipped.
The flurries of hype around the new iPad announcement have included speculation that it would make laptops obsolete. Perhaps so. For students who own them, iPads will make their backpacks obsolete. Maybe they should keep a backpack to carry their lunch, but in iPad they will have a mobile to transport them to online knowledge, display reading material, and connect them with notes and reports that they write and file.
Posted on 26th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability
Findability, link_love, open_access, seo, unbundle
“Suddenly people are talking about open access on campus in a way they hadn’t before,” says Susan Gibbons, vice provost and dean of River Campus Libraries at the University of Rochester. “And it’s going to push the need for repositories front and center again.”
Ms. Gibbons’ prediction is from an article today in WIRED CAMPUS that describes how and why the University of Rochester is creating new institutional repository software.
Included in what will be offered to authors to lure them to contribute their papers and dissertations are “collaborating with colleagues” and customized “researcher pages.” In findability terms, the collaborating (1) gives link love to the ideas that interest colleagues and (2) puts online customized landing pages. Thus, the Rochester is not only making knowledge in their depository open, it is giving the ideas that attract collaboration some highly merited findability.
What are these two findability principles? (more…)
Posted on 25th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Findability
knowledge, mind_mirror, mirror_mind, network, networks, organize
A recent GoldenSwamp.com post posits how knowledge for learning is growing as a superorganism from which everyone on earth can learn. That superorganism is a network that lives within the open internet. The first image (above) sketches how the learning mind, which is a network, can directly apprehend patterns of knowledge from the network that forms the superorganism online of what is known by humankind. That apprehending can be thought of as the mind mirroring patterns it encounters on the internet.
If the learning mind can apprehend knowledge patterns from the emergent knowledge online, why then is it that we spend $$ billions every year on systems of knowledge delivery to education that look something like the second image (below)? Would it not make more sense to curate the online knowledge nodes and network, refining them to signal among themselves to create cognitive patterns to mirror directly into learning minds?
The education establishment has assumed from the beginning of the internet era that it was they who should judge, select, and organize knowledge to be learned that is located on the internet. There is a fatal flaw in those assumptions: in the open internet, the knowledge self-judges, self-selects, and organizes itself better than those things can be done by educators because human knowledge is itself a network and obeys network laws. My statement here is radical, I know. It is also a fact of the internet that is morphing learning resources into the superorganism of what is known by humankind. It is a truth too beautiful not to be true and enormously hopeful for the global future.
The subject networks in the images above are from the Map of Science, which is described in PLoS One. The networking — linking — among subjects has occurred naturally. When you look at the map you are seeing real world online cognitive connectivity.
Posted on 23rd January 2010 by Judy Breck in Mobiles | Nurture
handschooling, learning, mobile, pakistan, schools
Every boy in the picture above (by Griff Witte/the Washington Post) can learn basic history, science, math and more — in spite of what was reported last week in a front page Washington Post story:
“ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN — With a curriculum that glorifies violence in the name of Islam and ignores basic history, science and math, Pakistan’s public education system has become a major barrier to U.S. efforts to defeat extremist groups here, U.S. and Pakistani officials say. . . .
“. . . according to education reform advocates here, any effort to improve the system faces the reality of intense institutional pressure to keep the schools exactly the way they are.”
How widespread is this intransigence toward changing schooling? This kind of stubbornness is not just found in Islamabad. Intense pressure to keep schools as they are ranges in different places and cultures from orthodoxy to tradition to profit issues by vested interests and control demands by unions and, most sadly, a panoply of corruption.
While we deal across the planet with the inertia and intransigence that promises to perpetuate failing schools for at least another generation or two of kids, why not let the kids trapped in these schools learn the basics with handschooling? To do that, we need to get a mobile that browses the internet to each kid, and focus more on sharpening the findability online of basic subjects. Every boy in the picture above could learn his algebra from a mobile friendly tutorial in Urdu, Punjabi – and one day the full range of local languages. My guess is that many Pakistanis of their generation are already doing some handschooling beyond their school walls — or when they have no school to attend.
Originally posted in GoldenSwamp.com
