Twitpic along on astronaut ride

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Posted on 21st February 2010 by Judy Breck in Next

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Select images of earth from the Space Station are being been chosen by Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi and tweeted using twitpic to his twitter followers. Immediate, engaging knowledge of science, art, and geography can be enjoyed by anyone dropping by Astro_Soichi where there are today 83,822 followers.

For the handschooling that lies ahead, we can think of an astronaut conducting themed lessons from space, using twitpics of photos taken in real time from the space station as slides to illustrate topics he or she is teaching such as mountains, lakes, urban sprawl — whatever.  In fact, what Astronaut Soichi is doing now is wonderful learning content that can do handschooling right now and is probably being engaged by a sprinkle of students here and there. But we know some math on that: there are a million students just in the New York City public schools, and not yet 100,000 followers of the twitpics. Millions of kids around the world are not seeing them, we know for sure.

If you will check out this url — http://twitpic.com/142zn3 — on your mobile browser, you will see that the delivery of the twitpics into your hand is already awesome. What is missing:
1. Letting students use mobiles to browse the internet.
2. Letting lessons emerge outside of the school box.
3. Realizing that the freshest most authoritative knowledge is now in the global online commons.

It may be that the deepest positive of handschooling will prove to be the cooperation and understanding that develops in a young generation that experiences learning from the same page. In the astronaut / twitpic example here, the same lesson and same images could be simultaneously studied by students across the world. We can make this next schooling happen by putting mobiles in the hands of youngsters everywhere.

Internet in hand is the cognitive denominator

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Posted on 30th January 2010 by Judy Breck in Equality | Mobiles

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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.