Search results matching tags 'technology' and 'flat earth society'

Are you Sirious?

Anonymous — Sat, 24 Dec 2011 21:38:00 GMT

Tuesday I'll grab the clam rake for the last time this year. Late Tuesday afternoon I'll wander over to an exposed tidal flat, and pull food out of the muck.

I do not know who crafted the tines of my rake, but I know how it was done.
I do not know where the tree grew that gave me the handle, but I know how it was done.
I do know how the mead I'll drink was brewed--I watched it ferment for months.

***

Tomorrow a lot of people will get an iPhone 4S, and adopt Siri as their personal assistant. We have taken false idols to a higher level.

Our sophistication now dwarfs our humanity.

Talk to Siri as you would to a person. Say something like “Tell my wife I’m running late.”

The machine says she's not capable of love, but we are not capable of discernment. We create our own Sirens, who call us away from the world.

The world either matters, or it does not. We say that it does, but act as though it does not.

Owners of the iPhone 4S talk of how well it snuggles in the hand--perhaps it does, but I doubt it nestles quite as well as a quahog. Probably doesn't taste as good either.

Tell my wife I'm running late.

If I'm running late Tuesday, my wife will hear it directly from me. I may have to wander into the Firehouse Tavern to find a phone, but chances are pretty good she knows exactly where I am anyway. No need to wander too far on a clam bed, they don't move much.

The woman's voice I hear on the other side will be a voice I've known for 35 years. And unlike Siri, she is capable of love. We all are.

Merry Christmas!

If you're talking to a phone, you're using it wrong.

Unintended consequences: King Ludd was right

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Apr 2011 12:26:00 GMT

Natural science has a funny way of bumping up against high tech. While we are way past the point of rationally discussing whether we'd be better off without automobiles, industrialized agriculture, or Auto-Tune (I'd vote against all three), not all high tech gadgets are irreversibly entrenched in our culture.

King Ludd--waiting for rain to wash his hands

Hands-free sinks have always annoyed me--I like being able to alter the water temperature, and I have a bad habit of setting my papers down on the sink's edge, with predictable consequences. They make sense, though--less touching, more sanitary. The last thing a hand touches before turning on a bathroom sink may be a less-than-pristine orifice.

Hospitals have spent oodles of dollars installing the sinks for this reason. Nosocomial (hospital-acquired) infections are a huge expense, and despite occasional evidence to the contrary, hospitals want their patients to get better.

Alas, turns out the money may be wasted. A Johns Hopkins study shows that automatic faucets may increase risks of nosocomial infections; the fancy valves used in the high-tech sinks serve as breeding grounds for Legionella bacteria.

As a result, "hospital leadership elected to use traditional fixtures – some 1,080 of them – in all patient care areas in the new clinical buildings currently under construction at Johns Hopkins’ East Baltimore campus." Yep, they're removing the high-tech fancy doo-dad sinks and replacing them with, ahem, traditional fixtures. (How traditional they did not say....)

Maybe if they look at the morbidity from cars, they'll consider removing the parking lots, too.

On classroom technologies

Anonymous — Sat, 26 Feb 2011 18:03:00 GMT

“Young students and old thrive on the tactile experience of manipulating with their fingers. And I definitely appreciate being able to interact with the content – how could teaching and learning get any more hands-on?”

Katie Morrow, Technology Integration Specialist
From SMART Board brochure

Our fry are getting bigger--some have migrated to mini-aquariums set up by students in recycled milk and soda bottles. We have a few more wheat plants forming heads, and a student announced that her sow bugs had babies.

We got a lot going on in class.

There's been a huge push to get "technology" in classrooms--I'd argue that a recycled plastic milk bottle holding two tiny fish and a strand of elodea counts as technology, but no one gets rich selling used milk cartons.

***

I am not averse to new technologies. I have a class set of netbooks (thank you Roche/BEF/Home & School!), an interactive whiteboard, and a couple of remote devices, including a Mobi. We use them as well as pencils, paper, and cut shower boards. The students slide easily from one tool to the next, depending on the task at hand.

Most of our newer educational technologies involve recorded sight and sound--filtered views of the universe. I am inundated with catalogs that offer written words, videos, simulated labs, and models.

When a child "interacts" with a SMART Board, she is touching a flat piece of plastic, no matter what a specialist tells us.

The more I try to bring the world to my classroom, the more I realize the limitations of our various tools. Even words get in the way at times, especially when the words are designed to "teach." Words matter, of course, and sharing language gets us halfway there--but in science class, or in any interaction with the natural world, words fall incomplete. We forget this.

We do not live in a "knowledge economy," we live in the world. We eat other organisms, we breathe oxygen released by plants, we drink water that has passed through other critters. We need what our world provides; we are, literally, part of this world.

Our words are not.

I will continue to use our classroom tools, high tech and low, as scaffolds to the world that exists, but I will continue to remind my students, and myself, that our tools distort our views.

This past week a saw one child sticking his nose into our class bag of dirt, smelling the impossibly complex and living collection of stuff found in soil. He liked it, told another, and he took a good whiff as well.

Can't teach that. Not with words, with pictures, or even a new MacBook Pro with a 2.3GHz Core i5 dual-core processor and Thunderbolt technology. Unless, maybe, if you dunk it in mud first.

Photos from classroom.

Back to the future

Anonymous — Sat, 01 Jan 2011 15:45:00 GMT

With all the clitter clatter of folks rushing to toss out last week's toys for the new and improved 2.0 version, here are a few things now obsolete, but well worth bringing back:

1) Chalk

You cannot draw well with markers; it's even harder to draw with an interactive whiteboard. Subtlety matters. While a 256 color Powerpoint of a beating animated heart garners plenty of woo factor,

It's cheap! A dozen chalk sticks will run you less than a dollar; the same number of erasable markers costs a magnitude more.

It's therapeutic--snapping a piece of chalk in two satisfies the amygdala. Try breaking a marker in two. If things get really bad, you can eat the chalk as an emergency substitute for TUMS.

2) Overhear projectors

Using an overhead projector well requires a strong grasp of the material you are presenting. It has the added bonus of allowing you to face your students, your visage lit up eerily like a bad scary movie.

An overhead projector is a great source of light for biology teachers--I still dig one out when I want to show that chlorophyll fluoresces, or to test light's effects on oxygen production in plants.

(I won't even get into my talent for shadow puppets....)

3) Analog clocks

I still have no idea why they left--an analog clock gives more information than the digital variety, hands down. I guess you could argue that they cost a smidgen more--I do have to invest in a new battery every 3 or 4 years--but even I can spare a dollar or so a year.

I do not hold onto the old for old times' sake. I hold onto tools that work well, until replaced by something that works at least as well, everything else being equal.

Spending a lot on an interactive whiteboard does not make you smart, only your wallet.

Don't eat the chalk. Really.
Einstein photo from Seattle Weekly here.

A response to a technophile

Anonymous — Sat, 04 Dec 2010 15:13:00 GMT

Whenever I post about the ludicrousness of using tools at inappropriately young ages, I get animated responses with similar themes. These replies are often anonymous, and often thoughtless.

I got one from my previous post that was neither anonymous nor thoughtless, and I thought it was worth carrying the discussion out in the open. Thank you, David!

Computers are the most powerful tool we have at our disposal and you want our kids to be ignorant of how they are used?

"Computers are the most powerful we have at our disposal" is dubious at best--I'd argue that the power of the tool depends on the task at hand (try hammering a nail with a mouse--yes, I'm an idiot).

But let's suppose for a moment that the computer is indeed the most powerful tool we have. Is its innate "power" your argument for why young children should be taught how to use them?

My car is the most powerful way for me to get around, but I'd rather the children keep away from the wheel until they can peer over the dashboard.

Do you think kids' parents, most of them anyway, have any clue how to use a computer as a tool?

Yes, I do, insofar as they need them for what parents do day to day, which is to say, live.

To be fair, they use computers every time they drive, use a microwave, an elevator, a video game, or EZ Pass, each a different task.

Maybe I am misunderstanding the thrust of your question. I do that a lot.

If you mean more esoteric stuff, like designing a database from scratch, well, maybe not. We got high school for that. I'd rather teach the kids how to bake from scratch--as in here's a bag of seeds, bake me a pie in 9 months, but I tend to be a bit extreme.

We do spend too much time in front of computers, this I agree with.

How do we fix this? I cannot control what happens in the child's home. What is the damage done by this? Are we contributing to the damage by reinforcing the activity in school.

However, what's the difference in health between sitting with a computer in front of you, or sitting with some paper to take notes? In either case, you are sitting instead of moving.

A great question--there's a couple of distinct points there, and I'll take each in turn:

Neither has great risks aside from physical inactivity that we know of--I suppose you could stab yourself in the eye and get paper cuts with the pencil and paper, and there have been case reports of children causing damage to their thighs from prolonged contact with hot laptops, and more than a few visits to the ER after tripping over wires, but I know those are not what you mean.

Some real longterm concerns may exist--two big ones in the past, monitor radiation and carpal tunnel syndrome, have been ameliorated. Longterm exposure to light may be a subtle issue not adequately explored, but again, I know these are not what you mean either.

There is a difference, though--a child pursuing an activity on paper has only the paper to deal with. Paper is mostly quiet unless you rustle it, and doesn't have flash or sizzle or anything else except sit there. It has, alas, no bling.

A child, when not doing her paper homework, will get up and do something else wrestled to the ground by an adult, both of which expend energy. A child on a computer wanders away, too, to online games, to FaceBook, to ESPN, to a whole shiny digital world that distracts her like a magpie.

The real crime is the number of physical education programs which are being cut and the lack of outdoor education programs in most schools.

Here in New Jersey, physical education remains mandatory. Getting kids outside is, indeed, important. There are only so many hours in a day. If we both agree that children are spending too much time on computers and not enough time outdoors, well, it doesn't take a computer to mesh out a rational solution to that.

I agree completely, by the way, with Stephen Downes 10 things that you really need to learn. I work in a school where those 10 things are our primary curriculum and our content is secondary to them.

Do send a link to your school--while I am blessed to work in a great department in a wonderful school, we still have the state curriculum and an annual end of course here to contend with.

And yes, I accept emails.

That's King Ludd in the picture--I assume it's old enough to be PD.

Technology even a Luddite can love

Anonymous — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 00:16:00 GMT

Just a quick peek in--it's the beginning of the year, and things are lovely, with the exception of a very local, very sad loss that will remain both local and sad--Bloomfield is a true community. We miss you, Michael.

***

A few fish moved in this morning, a lot of roly polies will soon follow. I've brought back my wooden flute, seeds, a rattle back, a huge horseshoe crab shell, and a variety of other tchotchkes that make a science class a science home.

But that's not why I write.

Social media gets expensive--I buy this, I sign up for that, and before I know it I've frittered away both hours and money on shiny things that I will never use. My wife thinks I'm a magpie.

Even a stopped clock, however, is right twice a day. Some twit dude named @fnoschese tweeted something about using plain vanilla whiteboards in class. No batteries. No lights. No code.

And only $2.

I'm cheap. I'm a neo-Luddite. And I like shiny things.

When I tutor one-on-one, I love using scrap paper. I scribble, the student scribbles, I scribble some more, the student scribbles some more. When we're done, I offer the pile of scribbles to the student. Usually the pile is tossed.

I cut up two 4 x 8' white shower boards ($25.87 including tax) into twelve 24 x 32" white boards.

Best money I've spent on a classroom, and I've spent a lot.

Mistakes are no longer permanent red marks. A quick swoosh with an eraser or back of a hand, and the board is clear.

Mistakes do not simmer for a day or two; I walk around and we work together to fix misconceptions on the spot.

I know immediately where the students stand, a bit humbling when you realize maybe your brilliantly scripted lectures posed as directed discussions are no more effective than the textbook you sneered at with your fellow twits on late summer eves.

And (drum roll please....) the kids dare to think. I mean think as in "Look at me I'm coming up with solutions and I want to share them!" think.

I am not saying anything Frank Noschese doesn't already say more succinctly on his blog Action-Reaction.

The only downside? Fresh cut shower whiteboard smells like a wet dog for a day or two. I only had one student complain, but my wife made me keep the boards in the trunk until I got them to school.

Two freakin' dollars. My Smartboard could have paid for a thousand of them. My Smartboard isn't bad. My Luddite boards, though, are better.

Did I mention cheap, too?

Photo by Adrian Pingstone, released to public domain.

Get a horse!

Anonymous — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 16:34:00 GMT

Slide rules still work.

There are good reasons to prefer calculators to slide rules if you're using the tools for production. I get that. There are good reasons to prefer cars to horses if you're using them for transportation, or word processors to pencils if writing a novel. Pencils and horses and slide rules all still work, as good as ever.

Why on Earth would a child use a slide rule?

They're too hard!

No, but they do require some more work, some number sense, on the part of the student. You cannot use a slide rule well if you do not what numbers mean. And many of my students do not.

Slide rules force the user to approximate numbers, to grasp significant figures, to sense numbers.

They're not accurate!

Well, um, yes, they are. Perhaps not as precise, but precise enough to get folks across the ocean in jet planes.

Calculators give shiny numbers with all kinds of digits--the answers look smart and sophisticated.

2 divided by 7 is 0.2857142, according to my calculator, 0.29 according to my slide rule, or more accurately (if not more precisely) 0.3 if I give a fig about sig figs.

With calculators, kids do not get that "2.000" means something different than "2." They might not get that with a slide rule, either, but there's no place to hide.

They need to know how to use calculators "in real life."

How long, really, does it take to master the functions available on a calculator? Functions that look impressive, but are incomprehensible to most students I work with.

(Yes, I know they can "do" problems with them, but with enough time and enough treats, I could teach a pigeon to punch in the right steps...)

I truly believe calculators should be banned in public school. Let children use abaci in elementary school, then slide rules in high school.

Obviously a child who needs to use the tool should be allowed to use it.
Just don't pretend any real understanding is happening.