Thing 5: Continued...Pay for Play

Much of intellectual history is rife with theories that split people into two broad groups or perspectives. Rationalists v. Empiricists. Determinists v. Free Willists. Pragmatists v. Principal. Liberals v. Conservatives. Right Brain Thinkers v. Left Brain Thinkers. Isiah Berlin's famous Fox v. Hedgehog. Most of these are meant to be somewhat metaphorical and very little in real life falls cleanly into one group or the other (the Right/Left Brain distinction that is so popular today is particularly pernicious in that it is directly contradicted by virtually all we know about neurology).

Nonetheless, they provide useful frameworks to talk about value distinctions and differential philosophies. I would like to propose one of my own coining. That of the Engineering Perspective versus the Humanities perspective. Broadly, the Engineering perspective look at societal issues as problems to be solved dispassionately, with an eye to the most efficient, elegant solution. The Humanities perspective seeks to impute moral and ethical considerations into the mix. A solution that solves the problem while violating strongly held mores is not a solution worth having. Obviously this is in large part a reformulation of the Pragmatics v. Principal argument, and I don't believe either perspective is more valuable than the other. Both are needed and have much to speak for themselves. Nonetheless, occasionally an issue comes up that clarifies the distinction nicely.

Popping up in my Google Reader today from the Inside School Research blog on Edweek comes this article, highlighting a new research study from the UK in which evidence was found that a program that pays students for staying in school had positive results. From the article:

The program went national in 2004. But, in 1999, when it first began, it was available only to students in some urban school districts whose family incomes fell below a certain level. The weekly payments, which typically came to 30 to 40 British pounds, were about a third of what students would have earned had they been employed instead, according to the study.

The sums were apparently large enough to entice more students to stay in school, though. School participation rates in the nine experimental districts were 4.5 percentage points higher in the first year of the program than they were in nine demographically similar areas in which no payments were offered. In the second year of the program, participation rates were 6.7 percentage points higher. The bigger the weekly payment, the study also found, the greater was the impact.

My intention in highlighting this is not to comment on the shortcomings or validity of the study. It is probably too early to do that. Nonetheless, this seems to me a classic wedge issue that will deeply split those within education with Engineering perspectives versus those with Humanities leanings. If it turns out that cash incentives DO in fact result in greater student outcomes, those with an Engineers bent will likely push hard for similar programs on a large scale in the U.S. Why spend money on programs and support staff with little or no impact on learning when we can simply funnel that money directly to students and get (literally) more back for the buck? Those with Humanities perspective will likely blanch at an idea that throws out the cherished ideas of intrinsic motivation, learning for learning's sake, and edification based on knowledge into crude cash payments for finishing school. For many people the idea of paying students just feels deeply wrong if not outright immoral.

My point here is not to take sides or to give an opinion. There is far more research and debate that needs to happen before a program like this would see the light of day (if ever) on a large scale. But rest assured...this WILL be a debate soon (there have already been inklings of it here and there). And remembering the Engineer/Humanities distinction will be a useful tool in sorting through arguments when that time comes.

Thing 13: I try to leave but they pull me right back in...

Voila! After an interminable absence from posting I present to you Thing 13, my voice thread in which I discuss the ever fascinating topic of Regression to the Mean. Enjoy!

Thing 12: The Nameless Dread

Glogster struck me as one of those things that I thought was kind of neat, but fail to see many applications in my specific line of work. Since this was primarily play I chose to make a poster from my trip to Scotland in 2008. I used some photos I took while there along with the Thompson family crest (we are Scottish you know)and some graphics from the Glogster database that seemed to accentuate the theme. It came out rather nice and I like it, but I think overall the platform's utility is limited for me. Nonetheless, I found many of the glogster posters used by other classes to be excellent and as a splash page for a wiki I think it would be outstanding. Plus the interface was very user friendly and easy to manipulate. A somewhat limited tool, but a well made and fun one.

Thing 11 - Come and See the Violence Inherent in the System

Embedded is my Flikr Slideshow. The theme is Info-Graphics that actually impart information while remaining aesthetically meaningful. I've tried to highlight on several slides why I think they work. All slides were used under the "some rights reserved" tags that asked for attribution of the photos. All of them can be found along with owner under the Social Info-Graphics photo stream.

Create a Free Slideshow

Thing 10: A Nation Turns its Lonely Eyes to Flikr

After a brief hiatus that can only be explained by sloth rather than illness (this time anyway) I have returned from the netherworlds to explore the wonderful world of www.flikr.com. I knew I was going to be in trouble on this one. Caroline helpfully pointed out that even math teachers could find a lot of interesting things. Unfortunately Caroline underestimated the entire world's (including many math teachers) deep loathing of statistics and statisticians. Tellingly my first explorations looking to find tags related to statistics, normal distributions, bell curves, probabilities, standard deviations, standard errors, and other terms was met with a heaping helping of nothing.

Fortunately the whole world loves colorful info-graphics! After all, if they didn't how would U.S.A. Today even stay in business? I tend to find informational graphics to be fascinating and often aesthetically meaningful (and as the child of a Ph.D. in Art History mother I am quite prepared to defend this rigorously). When done well information graphics can be, well, beautiful. And Flikr provided some excellent examples that were available under creative commons. You'll see the whole bit in my shortly to be posted thing 11. But under CC licensing I was able to find one of my favorites. The following info-map displays lexical usage of generic terms for soda by county, all the way from Coke to Pop to "other" (seriously what's wrong with you western North Carolina? Pick a term for crying out loud). Fun and informative.

P.S. Click on the picture and enlarge your screen to see detail.

Thing 9: The Tragedy of the Commons

While I didn't learn any cool new web applications I found the discussion of copyright and fair use to be extremely illuminating and worthwhile. I think like most people I knew the basics of the idea, but the law is so murky and confusing (and often self-contradictory) that I often simply ignored the issue and just tried very hard to not do something to get sued. Unfortunately if you don't know what you're getting sued for... Anyway, Caroline's resources were very helpful and while the Disney video got annoying after a while (I now hear Buzz Lightyear bellow out "Copy!" every time I read or write the word copyright) it was VERY cool and well done. I don't think I've ever used "someone has too much time on their hands" as a compliment, but there you go. Additionally, Creative Commons was something I had heard of but never really knew what was. It is outstanding to actually know what it is AND have a website to refer to. On to the assignment.

Have you noticed the CC logo on any websites you visit? Did you wonder what it meant? No, but I'm not particularly observant (ask my wife!). I had heard of the term but didn't really know what it referred to.

Do you think CC will impact the way students learn and create projects? How?
Yes, it very well could. Assuming teachers know about and encourage use of CC. I think that fact that CC gives teachers confidence that the materials on the site are available for use and won't get them in trouble it could open up a lot of doors for creativity and engagement with the broader culture for students.

Do you use digital images, audio or video clips from the web in your teaching (or professional practice)? Occasionally. I don't teach, but I give a lot of multi-media PowerPoint presentations through the year and I use a lot of (probably copyrighted) pictures/music. My strategy before this was simply not to make eye contact with Caroline if she was in the audience, but now I feel I have the confidence to determine if what I am doing is fair use (not to mention using Creative Commons to find material).

Do you ever share content on the web? Not really. As an introverted curmudgeon I've never created a blog (before this), participated on message boards, facebook, diigo, or any other online communities. Now that I know a little more about them I'm happy to have an understanding of sharing content on the web is in case I choose to use them.

Who owns the materials that you produce for teaching / professional development purposes? Probably other people. I rip most of what I get from personal CD collections, itunes, or (primarily) google image searches. That was in the past of course. Now I'm on the side of angels Unites States Copyright Office! Really!

What are some potential negatives for using CC?
One that occurred to me was that even within CC there appeared (based on the materials I looked through) to be different levels of what the creators had given permission for. Given for the tendency for humanity to always grossly oversimplify anything subtle or complicated I could see people slip into bad habits and assume (well its on CC so it must be available for use?) without reading the fine print, as it were.

Thing 8: All the Cool Kids have a Wiki

In accordance with Thing 8 I now have a nook on the 23 things Sandbox Wiki. You can find it here (Scroll to the bottom). Read it and enjoy! Marvel at my ability to summarize my life in a mere 3 sentences! Gasp at my horrible taste in music, movies, and books! Wait in breathless anticipation for the wonders I will soon post in the Web 2.0: Garden of Earthly Delights! The Sandinistas Wiki nook, more exclamation points per capita than any other Wiki!

Thing 7: Death Rides a Pale Otter

It's been a while since I've updated my blog, mostly because I've was laid up on my back for about two weeks with swine flu/Pneumonia. But all of that is in the past. So back to the wonderful, terrifying world of Web 2.0. This week is Wiki's and I have to suggest a bit of skepticism about the enterprise that I had at the outset. I was familiar with some Wiki's, particularly Wikipedia which I use copiously. But in general my experience with Wiki's had been, less than (to me) impressive. Our curriculum department runs numerous Wiki's and to be honest (sorry Caroline) they had seemed to me at best to be a place where you could store a lot of documents, but they really had not made much of an impression on me.

I should probably explain WHY this was as the rest of the post is going to be me explaining why I was surprised how much I liked the Educational Wiki's on the 23 things page. By nature I am an introvert and a non-joiner. I don't typically join groups and I am probably an individualist to the point of unhealthiness at times. I don't join groups or clubs and when words like "collaborate" and "community" are thrown around like they are intrinsic goods my eyes tend to glaze over (for those of you into Myers-Briggs I am a hard INTJ which should explain a lot). This is a long way of saying that dispositionally the ability to share and collaborate isn't intrinsically a high priority for me unless it LEADS to something. That was the ledge that really allowed me to get into the Wiki's I looked at.

What impressed me most was the degree to which these Wiki's allowed the mustering of multiple Web 2.0 operations towards a single goal. Take for example the Educational Origami page that Caroline recommended. The page in many ways features the best elements of a blog, a message board, and a Diigo page into one seamless whole. You could literally spend hours perusing multiple elements of web 2.0 applications. The organization takes some getting used to but once I oriented myself I found it amazing how much was in the Wiki. I am not surprised Caroline finds this page so relevant for her job. I wish their was a wiki like this for assessment.

The next Wiki I checked out was the Civil War "Follow Me" Wiki. I picked this one because my wife (who is a kindergarten teacher) has a similar program she runs with her class where each child gets to take the class stuffed monkey (Walton) home with them and then has to write a short paper on what they did and provide photos. The "follow me" Wiki's are in many ways just a fun extension of this. On this Wiki a sixth grade student from Pennsylvania who is a civil war buff. As she travels around to battlefields she takes her Teddy Bear "Sallie Ann" with her. A helpful map shows all of the sites visited and links to places to learn more about them. A really simple concept applied in a neat way. This really seems like a way to tap into kids unique curiosity and creativity.

The concept behind the Civil War Wiki was very simple. On the more complex end was the Flat Classroom Project, the Wiki of numerous high school students around the globe organized around Thomas Friedman's "The World is Flat" book and concept. The Wiki is notable to me in the way it literally instantiates Friedman's hypothesis. Students from as far flung areas as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Georgia, Montana, Texas, & Australia all collaborate with one another. The idea of linking up individuals from across the globe is interesting, but what actually made it relevant to me was the degree to which the schools/students were working toward a singular goal, that of increasing communication between diverse students through web 2.0 technology. Given how long the site had been in place (at least 3 years by my count) it was impressive how much had been generated by the students involved.

Much as with Diigo, I was surprised at the degree I found myself liking the Wiki's in general. I don't know if I could say I am totally enamored (some of the Wiki's I looked at still seemed to much of a self-contained "how cool is it I made a wiki" rather than something that was actually useful. But the many examples of Wikis that did just that have swayed me that this is a medium that has a valuable role in the 21st century classroom. Now if you'll excuse me I have to get back to yelling at the kids to get off of my lawn. There that felt better.

Thing 6: Or How I Learned to stop Worrying and Love the Diigo

My first experiences with Diigo were not promising. I found it a barren, rocky land where my bookmarks could find no purchase. The layouts were poor, the instructions confusing, and for the life of me I could not figure out how to bookmark anything. I considered rending my clothes and despairing in dust and ashes. Then Caroline helpfully pointed out that I was actually on the site www.digg.com rather than Diigo. Once again my selective dyslexia betrayed me. After I actually found the correct site I began to see what the fuss was all about. And now you can see my super-fabulous museum of awesomeness on these here internets at the following site: http://www.diigo.com/user/psychodawg2000.

So now that I actually have a Diigo site and a chance to play around a bit I'll give my thoughts and the implications. First, i really like the site. I had been using google bookmarks as my primary online bookmarking site and while it was fine, it really couldn't touch the features and interactivity of diigo. The best feature for me is the ability to search for common tags or to browse the bookmarks of people who have saved common websites. This is critical because a lot of the websites I use for work are a bit, shall we say, esoteric. Websites on statistical analysis, databases of ed research, etc. As these are often hosted on university websites or otherwise obscure they often elude the Boolean engines of google and other search platforms. Being able to actually work through the bookmarks of people with similar interests and careers was immeasurably helpful. Within about 15 minutes of browsing I had bookmarked 5 new websites on stats that I had not been aware of. Very cool.

In a way, Diigo seems to operate like one of the classic research tricks anyone in the sciences is taught in grad school. Namely, if you are interested in a subject area, find a recent journal article. Work backwards through the references, find those articles, and then work through their references. Within a few hours you can pretty much have the entire corpus of that particular research field. Perhaps more interestingly, the Diigo model pretty accurately reflects the working of the brain's neural associational networks and the general model of memory. One memory datum (think tag) and it is associated with other bits of memory (think other users with the same tags and then the users who share their tags) and in the end those networks of associations are what create memory and consciousness. It's no wonder some philosophers are actively considering the question of whether the Internet itself could ever achieve consciousness.

That high falutin' thinking aside I did find some downsides. While I think Caroline is exactly correct in that having as many tags as possible is the key to making Diigo an effective social bookmarking tool, the sheer volume of how many bookmarks many individuals I visited had makes even multiple tags difficult to operate. When the user has 3,500 bookmarks (as some I visited had) even if they are providing 5-6 tags per bookmark it becomes tedious to slog trough 250 links per tag. I think I'd like to keep mine a bit more streamlined. Some users appear to simply bookmark anything they find remotely interesting. I think this detracts from the ability to communicate effectively the difference between a high quality and low quality link. In a way I guess this comes down to whether you wish Diigo to be a tool for you, or as a platform for social bookmarking. If you prefer the former 3,000 bookmarks is probably inevitable. If the latter, quality is (I think) preferable to quantity. To each their own.

Some things I have yet to have a chance to fully explore. Later today I'm going to upload some (I think) relevant bookmarks to our 23 things group and I'd like to find some like minded groups to join. I also have yet to find a use for the annotations feature (although this is probably a function of my staggering laziness rather than the utility of the annotations feature itself). I have to say I have been pleasantly surprised by Diigo. I imagine this will be a major tool I use for as long as we are all around. Which according to the Mayan Calendar is three more years. Maseltov!

Things 2, 3, 4...well you get the picture

I suppose a more rigid mind would expect (nay demand) that each thing in 2 - 5 have its own blog post. However I decided to apply my ability to synthesize information (Bloom's Taxonomy! Holla at ya boy!) and combine them into one epic post. In essence I don't think this is unreasonable as all three deal with the overarching concept of using blogs in education and feeding them through RSS Feeds into reader applications. Many things in this class will be new and foreign to me and thus cause me to curl up into the fetal position murmuring quietly to myself (which I normally do 3-4 times a day anyway). But in this case we have hit an application that I have been using for a long while so this should simply be an overview of what I already do.

I love blogs. I don't necessarily love blogging, but I love reading blogs. I subscribe to about 80 blogs on my google reader account organized in various categories. Here's a screenshot I took this morning of my account so you can see how they are organized.


I have my blogs organized into 9 discrete categories. I do subscribe to several blogs in the educational and educational psychology realm. Which can be seen below.




Among the sites I read regularly are Edutopia, Curriculum Matters, the SPED law blog, the flypaper (the in-house blog of the educational think tank the Fordham Foundation), and several blogs pertaining to psychological assessment. All of them are occasionally interesting, often brilliant, but most of time pure grade A filler with little utility. The beauty of Google Reader (and it is of course not the only application that will do this) is how easily and quickly it lets you filter through to find the wheat among the chaff.

I will say I have found precious few blogs that really fit my needs, and I certainly have looked. Their are any number of hundreds of blogs dealing with teaching, instructional strategies, and other global education topics. This is both appropriate and heartening. But I have struggled to find blogs that deal with my particular intersection of interests and skills, that being assessment, educational policy, educational research, and statistical analysis. Given that their appears to be a vacuum I may have to take my web 2.0 skills and simply fill that void myself with the ultimate testing/stats/research/education blog. After all, with those topics their must be literally TENS of people yearning to read that. Of course blogging is by nature a bit narcissistic (not that there is anything wrong with that) so perhaps that isn't a problem. So I'll leave you with the axiom of the day.

Blogging: Giving outlet to the voices in your head 24/7

Thing 1-B

As I read through the Web 2.0 materials that Caroline helpfully prepared for us I was struck by the consistent use two terms. Namely community and interactivity. I don't know that these terms were used in their absolute forms but any number of synonyms and related terms were deployed.

This put me in the mode of a fascinating book that came out by a political scientist named Robert Putnam a few years back entitled Bowling Alone: America's Declining Social Capital. Professor Putnam's thesis in a nutshell was that as America became increasingly more diverse and dynamic (which he feels is an almost unmitigated good) an unfortunate byproduct was the breakdown of traditional civic and social structures that had often nurtured ideas of civic good, Civic Pride, shared responsibility, and (their really is no other way to say it) a virtuous, community based life. Instead, what was replaced was an often isolated, cut off culture in which people withdraw from community. His title came from the observation that while the number of individuals who bowled had increased over the past 20 years, the number of league bowlers had shrank to almost nothing. Bowling in leagues versus bowling alone become a metaphor the whole book hinges on about the whole loss of community and social cohesion of American Society in the latter half of the 20th century.

This isn't a post designed to weight the merits and demerits of his argument (suffice it so say I disagree with some of his ideas, even as I find the basic thesis compelling), but instead to point out that in many ways Web 2.0 seems almost tailor made to serve as a fill-in, a kind of proxy community that has been lost. My mother finds twitter and facebook to be completely useless (why should I care if a friend of mine just watched a movie and for some reason wants to tell me about it?) and while I agree that much of social networking is utterly prosaic and banal, another part of me thinks that, trivial though it be, the need to share ones life with others is an important, and often overlooked, aspect of the human experience. Web communities allow individuals of similar likes and interests to network, communicate, share, and, yes, in many cases come to care for one another. They can nourish creativity, critiques of ideas, and opening up of new ideas to people who, without web 2.0 technology, would often never meet in real life. To use an overused cliche, it flattens the barriers of time and geography to create communities in ways that were never possible before.

It is true of course that much of what goes on in interactive communities and web 2.0 applications is, well, crap. But remember Sturgeon's Law (click link for more). 90% of everthing is crap, or at least nothing to get excited over. But their is no doubt for me that in that 10% where true quality lies Web 2.0 applications have at least the possiblity of allowing individuals to recapture that sense of community that was lost over much of the past decades.

P.S. My open mindedness ends at Twitter though. In twitter I am still a "get off of my lawn you kids" stick in the mud.

Thing 1-A

Well I don't believe anonymity is going to work here as my profile is a (pretty much) dead giveaway to those who know me. Oh well. About myself.

I work in the central office of a mid-sized school district. My official position is "Testing Specialist" but I do a lot more than just that. I've been at my current post for four years and have been in education for eight years. I obviously don't teach a class. My background is school psychology and my expertise, to the extent that I have any, is in assessment, statistics, data analysis, and general thinkery. I don't know if that is a real word or not but it is now as I have just coined it. BEHOLD THE POWER OF WEB 2.o!

My goal for this class is the gain a more solid understanding of new media and technological application in order to better do my job and communicate with those who I need to. I chose to take the course because many of the topics covered interest me and I hope to learn more about them.

And so it begins...

Well...here goes nothing. With this post I hereby initiate the "Moonlight Through the Pines" blog. See I kept any mention of 23 things out of the title. I can follow directions at at least a fourth grade level! Anyway I look forward to seeing what deeply Machiavellian purposes I can use this blog for in addition to the 23 things class.