Dave’s Whiteboard

From The Washington Post today, an opinion from Patrick Welsh: A School That’s Too High on Gizmos.

Welsh teaches at T. C. Williams high school in Alexandria, Virginia. He’s concerned about what a former school administrator calls technolust — the tendency (as Welsh sees it) for the school to apply technology for technology’s sake.

He mentions a $495 device called a school pad, which allows a teacher anywhere in a classroom to underline an image projected by the room’s LCD. This pad reminded one teacher of “the Magna Doodle pads we had as kids.”

Welsh talks about other technological problems — student laptops that can’t connect to the school’s wireless network, for example.

I suspect there’s a midpoint between technolust and teacher inertia. And I wonder whether Welsh or his colleagues are exploring ways to harness blogs, wikis, or other collaborative tools to foster learning. I think I’ll drop him a line and ask.

Ian Delaney’s post, 25/M/S or Maybe Not, introduced me to the Lift conference (and its website, which offers recorded talks in a TED-like fashion).

The post focused on a talk by Genevieve Bell, an anthropologist working for Intel. She discusses lying online, starting with her frustration when she couldn’t remember what date of birth she’d given to Flickr — meaning that she was locked out of her own account.

That remark alone hooked me, because I often manufacture dates of birth or ZIP codes. I realize that the Washington Post online site wants to have demographics; I just don’t see why they need to have mine. (For speedy retrieval, when a store asks my phone number, I give one from a job I left seven years ago.)

Here’s Bell’s talk:

I especially enjoyed Ian Delaney’s musing about transparency and online connection:

On Twitter, you are allegedly telling the world ‘what are you doing right now?’. But I did a little search on Twitter for ‘having a wank’ (sorry, mum) and the lack of any direct matches would seem to support Bell’s contention.

Bell points out (sensibly, I think) that technology changes far faster than people do. I read lots of opinions about technology transforming how we live and work; Bell reminds us that internal transformation can take a bit longer. As she says, deception and self-deception may be necessary parts of human survival.

Stephen Downes (of course) links to Mission to Learn, where Jeff Cobb makes available Learning 2.0 for Associations (link is to the post).

Here’s the 116-page document as a PDF (5 megabytes); the original SlideShare link is in the post.

Cobb writes in a clear, calm, non-technical style. He includes a host of examples (highway-safety podcasts that include interviews with truck drivers) . I particulary liked the “possibilities” boxes with a few bullets suggesting applications of each technology.

He also quotes Stephen Downes on differences between groups and networks, a distinction worth keeping in mind:

Groups require unity; networks require diversity.

Groups require coherence;
networks require autonomy.

Groups require privacy or segregation;
networks require openness.

Groups require focus of voice;
networks require interaction.

At Sharp Brains, Improving Driving Skills and Brain Functioning.

This interview with Dr. Jerri Edwards of the U. of South Florida discusses studies on the functional abilities of older adults, specifically in the area of “driving fitness.”

Edwards goes beyond the facile notion that any sort of activity can improve cognitive function.  Doing crossword puzzles, she says, has not been shown to improve specific cognitive skills (”other than the skill of doing crossword puzzles”).

…it is too early to say whether we can really reverse decline in a permanent way. There are many skills involved and the studies are not long enough to really compare different trajectories. What we can say is that by doing some exercises, one can improve cognitive speed of processing by 146-250%, and that a significant portion of that improvement stays even after 5 years. We cannot say more definitively.