InfoTeacher

If  this link is true, I’m already one of these guys . . .

From the E Magazine, Foreign Policy, at the end of 1999 we thought . . .

Lou Dobbs was a respected, middle-of-the-road journalist.

The prospect of achieving Middle East peace seemed imminent.

Beltway pundits believed Al Gore and George W. Bush were centrists who would govern similarly.

You could meet your loved ones at their arrival gate.

There were more than 2 million Christians living in Iraq.

Osama bin Laden was living with his family in a compound in Kandahar.

China’s GDP was $1.4 trillion, half of Germany’s.

Israel still had troops in Lebanon.

Nobody had ever heard of Somali pirates.

Something called Inktomi was the world’s largest search engine.

Everybody was clamoring for the new file-sharing program Napster.

We worried Y2K would bring the global banking infrastructure to its knees.

Illinois State Senator Barack Obama campaigned for a spot in the House of Representatives.

First Lady Hillary Clinton campaigned for a spot in the Senate.

Wasilla, Alaska, Mayor Sarah Palin considered running for state-wide office.

India had fewer than a billion citizens.

Strongman Slobodan Milosevic still ruled in Yugoslavia.

The human genome had not yet been mapped.

The Concorde flew between Paris and New York.

Alan Greenspan was widely heralded as the world’s greatest financial thinker.

Boris Yeltsin was preparing to step down and make way for the young pragmatist Vladimir Putin.

The Dow Jones closed at 11,484. (Today, it’s at 10,545.)

The United States had a record federal budget surplus.

Foreign Policy looked like this.

Most educators have probably not heard of Chuck Warnock. I don’t know him, but because of a former life, I frequent a blog that often links to him. What I’ve read is interesting.

Don’t let the profession fool you, his insights on “The E Book Revolution” are timely and insightful (better understanding of 21st Century than most teachers I know and quite a few info teachers).

Some especially insightful thoughts:

Print publishing and print publishers are going away. Just like newspapers, it’s not the content people don’t want, it’s the format (print) and the super slow delivery system….

New epublishers who do not think “print” will offer new perspectives on the whole publishing industry.

It’s all going mobile soon. Back to my fascination with mobile phones.  Obviously the iPhone was the game-changer that set a new paradigm of multiple uses for a mobile phone.  Tomi Ahonen had a piece last week citing stats that Americans now use their phones more for texting than for voice calls.  The transition has already started of mobile devices as total communication tools — voice, text, data, reader, video, photos, music, internet, pda, etc, etc.  Depending on what Apple does with its iTablet, if it exists, this could be another game changer.  However, the new, rumored Google Phone (bigger screen than the iPhone), which is set to work seamlessly with Google Books is really the future.  One device, that fits in your pocket, that does everything you want to do.

These are excerpts from 3 of his 8 salient thoughts about the future of books and book publishing.  Worth a read.

Seems like old news it’s been discussed so much, but Slate’s Nicholas Bramble has a piece entitled “Fifth Period is Facebook.”  The basic premise is, that blocking Facebook (and other Social media),

is shortsighted. Educators should stop thinking about how to repress the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media and start thinking about how to channel that energy away from causing trouble and toward getting more out of their classes.

Bramble is a fellow at Yale’s Information Society Project. He makes a pretty good case for USING Social Networking rather than blocking it. We block it because we are afraid that we can control everything kids will do (which is indeed true).

If we went were he says we should go, teachers would have to change how they do things to be sure!.  Schools may change how they look and even radically remake themselves into something completely unrecognizable. But I think it’s time. The bottom line seems to be that kids are using social media with or without us. We can’t control everything they do there, but we should at least have a presence that helps shape their thinking and behavior. Our presence in their world can help bridge the gap that exists and provide multiple “teachable moments.”

If (when) we get brave enough to go there, then these will become exciting times to teach. Hold on for a wild ride.

It seems to me that much of what is  NEW in today’s Information Age Digital Age (i.e. the vast Web 2.0 modalities) takes away traditionalists ability to be in control. When we want to control what we can’t control, we doom ourselves to mediocrity at best and possibly complete irrelevance.

I just signed up for file sharing at www.4Shared.com. I am constantly working on the same files on different computers. I have a desktop at home and a laptop at home and a desktop on my desk at work as well as a teaching station in the lab and/or many other computers in the library or school on which I may work. At work all my files are on the network, but sometimes I need that file I worked on at home. So, I use a flash drive. and try to keep the files I’m working on current.

Now I am in school and go from home desktop to laptop with assignments which I will also work on using my school computer(s).  So I use a system of always backing up to a flash drive and then using that flash to bring current files to the next computer I”m going to work on. I try to always have the current copy of my class assignment on the flash.  But I’m thinking of using the 4shared site to try this (and use the flash as a backup).

4Shared offers a lot of features and 10 gig for for free. It is the way to send large files to another person (instead of the email method which always presents problems with large files or multiple large files. Just recently I had to get ten pictures to my sister for a project. I emailed them to her (and sent her a link to a folder on Picassa), but thought I’d look for another file sharing opportunity (Picassa/Flick’r/etc are great for pictures — everyone should have an account!) — sometimes I need to transfer large files that are not pictures. Sometimes I need to transfer an executable which is almost always blocked in any email.

With 4shared you can create folders, and choose which folder you share (non shared folders are secure). You can sent links to folders/files you are sharing and even create a page on which the files “resides” and send the link to the page.

I’ll be experimenting to see if this is as promising as it looks.

The new geography is already here. More and more people work (virtually) in a different place than they live. Often they work time zones or sometimes a half a world away.

Since that is the case, John (a board member at St. Vrain Public Schools), says:

Parents are going to think about their children’s education more as an experience than a place. There will always be demand for physical schools so that children learn how to build relationships with peers. But, increasingly, parents will think of the physical school buildings as just one piece of a larger experience.

Insightful and forward thinking. Is your school/library ready for the “New Geography”?

Read Rebooting the Book (One Apple iPad Tablet at a Time) on the blog http://radar.oreilly.com/. It’s an interesting read. The basic premise is that Apple is positioned to enter an eBook market, and if they do, they have the technology, the user/consumer understanding, and the marketing know-how to revolutionize eBooks and the eBook market.

If Apple gets into the eBook market, will Amazon Kindle suffer? Right now Amazon dominates the market (they have the ONLY workable product that has features people want). Sony has just entered the market with their own EReader (their entry into the market is a sign of something big!). Standardization of eBook/eReader Formats would help more people move toward electronic formats.  Perhaps e Books are right now where MP3 players were, say, 5 to 7 years ago (time flies, doesn’t it?).   At that time, MP3 players were around, many people knew about them, were interested in them, or most people who were tech savvy even owned one, but they hadn’t yet revolutionized the music industry (one difference is that Apple has already entered and even owned that music market whereas today they haven’t even entered eBooks yet — the whole premise of the link above is that they may enter the market). In the music business today, CD sales have gone DOWN for two solid years! while music downloads have become the main way people buy music (and this trend is so set, that many in the music business are counting down the life of the CD and CD player).  Note – when iPods go away (with cloud accounts being he major way be access music), more changes are coming, but that is fodder for a different post.

Despite the weakness of my music player/eBook analogy, think about eBooks today compared to the music business five to seven years ago.  When those kinds of changes happen to books the way they did with music (I’ve already written about how fast that time is coming with a reference to a publisher’s prognostication) – then libraries, schools, information driven institutions/information oriented individuals — anyone who makes their living DISTRIBUTING INFORMATION TO OTHERS — will be in for a major wake up call. I’m looking forward to it. (By the way, I’m looking forward to it because that is NOT the major calling of schools.  We do NOT just distribute information to kids and anyone who thinks that is their job should not be in the teaching business).  Schools do have an information distribution role — but that role is secondary to developing competence (proficiency) in students. We develop proficiency in and through the use of information tools such as reading and writing using books, media, creativity, production, and most especially THINKING SKILLS. Schools that change and prepare students for the future, will become more important ( but many teachers may not).  The teachers who may not survive are those who don’t decide that their job is to use of technology  with a new, broad understanding of 21st Century literacy. Students need to learn how to use, evaluate, think and survive in the age of instant, abundant information (some of which is good, and some which isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on – bad metaphor in an electronic age).

These are exciting times. But we had better be ready to CHANGE WHAT WE DO AND HOW WE DO IT.

I’m seriously thinking of removing all copies of The Very Hungry Caterpillar from my school’s library. Apparently there are serious inaccuracies.  Colorado State University professor Whitney Cranshaw is quite concerned.  The major problem is that in the book the caterpillar spins a cocoon and emerges as a butterfly.  However, only moth caterpillars spin cocoons! Butterflies emerge from a chrysalis.

Slate’s Farhad Manjoo writes about the next version of Office, Office 2010. The provocotive title, Microsoft Office’s Last Stand, alludes to the coming revolution.  If 2010 has something to offer beyond what one can get online, it will continue to dominate as it does now. If cloud computing, long predicted by forward thinkers but lagging in implementation and practicality for full function users, does become more and more dominant, why would you pay to get what you can get for free. Why would you pay when free and online offers more?

I’m a user of Google Docs (I use them just to be current. At this point, I don’t really have projects I work on that need to be shared/collaborated on in the way that really makes Docs superior). I use Google calendars. I think the cloud councept is amazing (not necessarily for everything – for some things I want control right here in my reach). True, one needs an app for the times when broadband is not available (a problem that is becoming less of a problem all the time). To me, Open Office would fill that void just fine.  Now in reality, Office 2007 is on every computer I use. I bought a laptop for personal/school use. I have a computer at school and a school laptop that I also use. All of these have MS Ofc 2007. My desktop has ‘03 (it’s the oldest computer in my house).  Yet, I wonder. . . How much of Office’s market dominance is because “it’s just what everyone has to have?” Will that kind of motivattion continue when the cloud becomes dominant?  What will computing look like in ten years?

Farhad Manjoo, Slate’s technology writer, writes an article entitled, “Fix Your Terrible, Insecure Passwords in Five Minutes.”  Most of us have bad security habits (this is going to come back and bite many, many Americans in a bad way — possibly soon).  I’ve written earlier about the password keeper I use (which is always out of date on at least one password,  is often out of reach when I need it, and doesn’t serve me as quickly as I’d like — but in general does funtion ok). I use the same password for many apps/sites — which is ok for the less security necessary ones, but I confess less than secure behavior (better than most people I observe, however — except for some areas where I know I routinely follow clear no-no’s, but there are in areas where I choose my level of risk).

Back to the article — interesting trick. Create a sentence you’ll remember related to the site — make it a mnemnonic, tweak it, and you have a unique password that is untraceable, yet related to the specific site. This gets one past two cardinal security rules – (1) use a different password for each secure site; and (2) don’t use a dictionary word at all. For the third cardinal rule (use special characters and mix up numbers and capitals in random ways), that comes in the Teak it step, above.

I’ve read this somewhere before (though there is no reference to an earlier version on the magazine’s site!), and have one very important (non-school) password that I created with this same technique. I may expand my use of this. The sentence one creates just has to be something you relate to a site and can remember.  This also allows you to remember very long passwords which are much more secure than short ones (the level of security goes up exponentially after you get past 10 digits).

Bottom line — password security doesn’t have to be hard. Be systematic and follow true secure procedures. Using your memory is important, too.  Teachers often complain about having to remember so many, but in this day and age what profession wouldn’t have to remember several different passwords?