Technology In The Trenches!

Is Google Making Us Stupid is an article that was posted in the July/August 2008 edition of The Atlantic.

Nicholas Carr, the author, states that the internet makes him lazy. No longer can he read a book because he starts to drift and his mind begins to wander. He states that in the past decade his mind has started to want to receive information at the net's pace - which is a click away. He stated gone are the days of going through footnotes and such to look for quotes, now with a few simple clicks its easy to find what you need without having to spend hours searching. When he posed his problem to his friends he found he wasn't the only one feeling that way, many of his friends stated the more they use the web the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing. Many of his friends all together confessed that they have stopped reading books simply because they have used the internet so much they just don't have the attention span anymore to read any long passages.
Another one of his friends said he had even lost the ability to blog more than 3 or 4 paragraphs, simply because they knew someone would stop reading it and they got tired of writing it.

I really thought this was interesting, showing how much we rely on the internet and how its making us lazy as a whole. Do you think this is so for our students?

Here is the link to a video by ABC news on High-Tech cheating, these students have taken their 21st Century technology skills to new levels...

http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=6002101

Some interesting facts from the video:

-There are 3,000 videos on cheating posted to You Tube.

-Over 72% of students admit to cheating

-One of the kids featured in the video stated "It's not like I promote cheating, its the users fault if they follow my advice." Later she adds that "she hopes her teachers don't see the video."

In the end this is up to parents and educators to be on top of and to dislodge cheating. Like the reporter states at the end that this could be a teachable moment in ethics for parents, by sitting down with their children to view these videos - stating that when you cheat you're cheating yourself in the long run because you won't learn the information.

Wow...thats all I can say!

Well let's face it, this is not my first blog - I've kept a personal one on another service for about two years now. I password protect it, only because well I feel more protected. I've neglected that blog for the past few months so having to sit down and blog here is hard to remember to do because I'm on a blogger vacation of the sorts, but hey I don't get a grade for my other blog...so here's my topic this week - discuss it amongst your selves...

I've found a NEATO website that I would like to share in enhance your 21st century learning experiences and perhaps you can kick it back to your classroom for all you teachers out there. The site is ePals. ePals is the largest and fastest growing K-12 online community for meaningful learning. More than half a million educators and millions of learners across 200 countries and territories safely connect, collaborate and build community. Schools around the globe use their school-safe email and blog tools. Deep learning is catalyzed through collaborative learning projects and experiences such as In2Books (launching Fall' 08), ePals' research-based curriculum-aligned eMentoring program. They also have a partnership with National Geographic !

As part of the wide-ranging agreement, National Geographic has made a strategic investment in ePals. A representative of NGV and ePals will join the Boards of the other and the organizations have entered into a multiyear alliance and content agreement. Designed to revolutionize the way the Internet is used to foster safe and effective multicultural learning exchanges across media platforms, the first focus is to thread high quality digital content from Nationalgeographic.com throughout ePals.com to create unique learning experiences.

Initial topic areas of focus for the new alliance include maps & geography, habitats, global warming, natural disasters, people and culture, great leaders, water and weather. In each area, classrooms and teachers will be able to choose among projects that emphasize collaboration, 21^st century skill building, and the use of school-safe communication tools to seamlessly work with learners around the world or down the block. Users will be encouraged to get into the act by building and sharing their own projects for use broadly within the community. In addition, ePals will enable users in teacher and student forums, blogs and other community areas to "Explore More," delivering quality information in highly contextual ways, propelling learning forward.

So take a trip over to ePals and sign your kids up. I'm going to let my homeschool families in on this website if they haven't already heard, as many of them utilize the computer in their teaching.

Wow what a title right? Seriously I did not come up with that on my own. Matter of fact I will give you some background information on who did give me that catchy tongue twisting title. His name is Mark Federman, was Chief Strategist at the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at the University of Toronto, and continues his private consulting practice and he has written a book. I had a chance to hear Mark speak at the National Extension Technology Conference this past April.

Mark's work focuses in on Ubiquitously Connected and Pervasively Proximate - UCaPP - era, which means everything is always connected and just a click away. He stated in his talk (which you can hear on his blog) that we are facing a technology gap never seen in our time since 1844 with the invention of the telegraph; he stated that the technology transitions take about 300 years to complete. In 1995 the dot com bubble was signified by the Netscape IPO (Initial Public Offering) - now everyone notices the Internet - its all over the place. Now we have a really interesting situation were we have a break boundary that hasn't happened since the 1850s...right now we have a generation alive that was educated and socialized in the industrial and mechanical world. We also have a generation alive that was socialized beginning in the year 1995 that are now around 22 or younger who were socialized in a world in which they note they've never NOT known the internet. So we're at a point where we have two generations alive - one prior to the Internet and one has never known life without the Internet.

The younger generation lives in a world in which Google has not ever existed. They live in a world in which everyone that ever has mattered lives is a text message away, click away, or a posting on a social network away. All of which are all connection devices. Unlike the other generation who was socialized in an industrial era today's youth and tomorrow's adults live in a Ubiquitously Connected and Pervasive Proximity everyone is and soon will be connected to everyone else and all available information through simultaneous information.

Mark later goes into saying that the older generation has go connect and get on the bandwagon and told the group how to bridge the generation gap between the two. I thought it was one of the best speeches I've heard in a long time and I think he hits the nail on the head with why we're even taking a class on 21st Century Technology because lets face it - everything is only a click away!