Moving at the Speed of Creativity

One of the delightful potentials we have today if we’re fortunate to be digitally connected to the Internet and own (or have access) to a mobile audio player (like an iPod) is to be influenced regularly by amazing people and their thought-provoking ideas. Several months ago I became aware of the power of “smart playlists” in iTunes to provide a random sampling of songs and podcasts on my iPhone, and that setup decision led to this morning’s learning events listening to Steven LeVine’s presentation from November 2007 at the University of Chicago about themes and issues raised in his book “The Oil and Glory: The Pursuit of Empire and Fortune on the Caspian Sea” during my commute to work. I’ll briefly address the technical aspects of my iPod/iPhone setup which led to this learning opportunity, and then reflect about about the content of Steven’s discussion as well as implications it suggests for students in our classrooms.

Before we get to technical issues, let’s not lose sight of how amazing and powerful the very opportunity to have this learning moment is. Because most of the people reading this post in 2008 received the majority of their formal educational experiences in 20th century face-to-face settings, I think a majority of people today undervalue of the learning potential latent in asynchronously accessed media files. Steven shared this presentation almost a year ago. I have no connection to him or the University of Chicago. I live in Oklahoma. However, because individuals at the University of Chicago’s Center for International Studies have chosen to share a variety of presentations on their “World Beyond the Headlines” podcast channel, and I subscribed to their podcast many months ago via PodNova and on my podcatcher and podcatching software (iPhone and iTunes) this learning opportunity was possible. For more info specifically related to PodNova, see my May 2007 post “The joy of Juice Receiver and PodNova.” (Also note I have abandoned Juice Receiver (at least for now) and am using my imported PodNova OPML in iTunes.)

I can’t say this learning opportunity was accidental, because I’ve taken steps in the past to intentionally position myself (or at least put digital audio resources at my fingertips) which enable learning moments like today’s to happen. The two key, intentional steps I took in the past which allowed today’s learning to happen were:

1. Subscribing to the “World Beyond the Headlines” podcast channel
2. Creating a random playlist in my iTunes for podcasts and syncing that playlist to my iPod.

My larger, 80 GB iPod was recently stolen out of my car, so I cannot currently take my entire iTunes collection of songs, podcasts and videos with me. I have just under 4000 music and audio files in my iTunes library currently, and these won’t all fit on my 8 GB iPhone. To be pleasantly surprised with new songs and podcasts that I haven’t heard before (or in the case of songs, in a long time) smart playlists are critical.

To create a smart playlist in iTunes, from the file menu choose “New Smart Playlist.”

iTunes will next present you with a dialog window in which you can specify multiple criteria for your smart playlist. A smart playlist is dynamic and can have complex criteria. In the following example, I first set the criteron: “Podcast is true.” This makes the smart playlist automatically “populate” with all the files on my iPhone (audio and video) which have been downloaded as podcasts. This is different than setting the “genre” to “podcast,” I think. Not all podcasts have their genre set to podcast, so that criteria might be less inclusive than the method I’ve highlighted here. I have too many audio and video podcasts to fit them all on my iPhone, however, so I checked the box to limit the playlist 50 random items meeting the specified criteria and only allow those files in the playlist.

Many, many other options are available to set for smart playlist query criteria.

That hopefully explains HOW a 40 minute audio recording of a lecture by Steven LeVine was available on my iPhone this morning. Next I’d like to address some of the ideas and topics he discussed.

I’ve had a fascination with Central Asia for many years. One of the first blog posts I ever wrote was in July 2003, titled “Photos from Baghdad, email from Central Asia.” My May 2004 post “Armenia and the Allure of Ararat” explains a bit of my historical interest in the region, which dates back to the late 1970s when our family become friends with several Iranian families in the United States for undergraduate pilot training in Columbus, Mississippi. My love of mountains also ties in here, along with my 1983 trip to Turkey with my grandmother and mother, as might my reading of James Michener’s book “Caravans” in college. I studied Central Asia for a semester as a geography major at the US Air Force Academy, and wrote a paper about the potential for religious revolution in light of the region’s minority Shia and majority Sunni Muslims. (My predictions in that paper turned out to be quite wrong, and I never published or shared it beyond my instructor’s desk. Perhaps that’s good!) To this day I remain fascinated by Central Asia, its people, history, geography and culture, and hope some day to travel there. Given that background, perhaps you can better understand my interest in Steven’s lecture today.

I have read about Baku previously and the oil fields in and around the Caspian Sea, but I had no idea oil had been (and still is) SO plentiful there. I read a biography of Alfred Nobel in high school and knew a little about how he invented dynamite and was the father of the Nobel Prizes, but had never heard of his brother Ludvig Nobel. According to the current WikiPedia article for Ludvig:

With his brother Robert, he operated Branobel, an oil company in Baku, which at one point produced 50% of the world’s oil. He is credited with creating the Russian oil industry.

Wow. Steven discussed some of the past history of Baku, including some of Ludvig’s achievements. At one point in world history he was personally responsible for the production of 9% of global oil production. What would that 9% amount to today, in both barrels of oil and oil value? There’s a good word problem for your students. Why did Steven say that Ludvig was at most responsible for 9% of global oil production, but the WikiPedia article (currently) says 50% of the world’s oil? There’s a discrepancy here. An opportunity for media literacy skill development: information validation, research and analysis.

Here’s a challenge: Ask a group of your students to research this discrepancy and post the answer here on this blog entry.

I found Steven’s tales of the “blue light” over Baku in the early days of the oil industry there intriguing. The oil was so close to the surface, local residents would dig a small hole by hand and then LIGHT the oil or natural gas which escaped directly, using it to cook food for their meals. No Coleman stoves required in that era of human history around Baku, apparently. I’ve never heard a story like that before.

I also was intrigued to learn about the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which is the lifeline of the western Caucasus region now.

Students in parts of the United States may be more familiar with the Trans-Alaska Pipeline System, since it is in North America. In both cases, these pipelines play important roles in the energy and economic dynamics of the countries and regions they cross.

I was fascinated to hear Steven recount the mid-20th century history of Baku and its oilfields. Joseph Stalin had concrete placed over the wells in the Baku oil fields to prevent Hitler from taking them in World War II. If Hitler had seized control of Baku, the balance of power in that global conflict could have shifted dramatically. As a result of Stalin’s decision to concrete over the Baku wells, the entire area was closed to international oil development until the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

I had no idea that “we,” as the United States, are the inheritors of the debt of the Soviet Union. That was one of a multitude of facts Steven shared in his lecture which amazed me. Wow. I wonder what that total bill was and is? As if the United States doesn’t have enough foreign debt already. Too much.

I’d never heard about Sheila Hesslen (spelling?) who worked for the US Department of State, served on the National Security Council for President Clinton, and coined the term “iron umbilical cord” for the the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline. She encouraged the United States to join a “battle for influence” in the Caucasus region, which continues to this day.

According to Steven LeVine in this lecture, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline is the key to understanding modern Russia, Vladamir Putin, and much of the geopolitics of the trans-Caucasus region. Russia was pushing (in late 2007) for a new pipeline that it wanted/wants Chevron and Exxon to pay for, which would link Bulgaria to Greece. There is a HUGE potential for ecological disasater in the
the Bosphorus as tankers (which were invented by Ludvig Nobel, incidentally) move oil across the Black Sea, through the Bosphorus and into the Mediterranean.

Why do I find this lecture and these ideas so interesting and engaging? I think a big reason is because of PRIOR CONNECTIONS and schema I have for these issues and topics. How can we help our students connect with and find meaning in topics like these: competition for oil resources in the early 20th century, the geopolitics of Central Asia and the larger world, the myriad of implications involved in the international oil industry, and others? I think one answer is THROUGH STORIES and through personal connections to people outside the classroom involved in these situations.

Wouldn’t it be interesting and worthwhile to involve your students in a videoconference with a an executive of BP who is knowledgeable about the current situation involving BP officials leaving Russia and going into hiding? Couldn’t you see your students getting interested in these issues if an exchange student from a central asian country like Kazakhstan came to visit with your class in-person, and explained the impact of NOT having an oil pipeline like Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan for countries east of the Caspian Sea?

Current events, history, economics, politics, mathematics, science and engineering are most interesting and impactful when we have PERSONAL CONNECTIONS to them and to people involved with them. This should be a key goal of our formal curriculum in schools: Helping students make personal connections with others located in different parts of the world, and who have traveled to or lived in different parts of the world. I am passionate about the global education agenda, which can be interpreted in various ways I suppose. In this context, I’m passionate about helping learners experience meaningful educational experiences related to global education issues because of and through personal connections.

If you are looking for specific ways and portals to get connected with other teachers and students in distant lands, join and participate in Lucy Gray’s Global Education Ning, join ePals and search for global projects as well as classroom partners, and plan to participate in the K-12 Online Conference this coming October. All of these websites offer superb opportunities to connect, collaborate, and inspire students around issues related to global education aims.

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Today on July 4, 2008, we celebrate our independence day in the United States. I saw part of a documentary this afternoon about Rocky Mountain News reporter Jim Sheeler’s book “The Final Salute.” In the book, Jim documents the moving stories of US servicemen and servicewomen who are the first to speak with and support the families of U.S. servicemen and servicewomen who have died in the line of duty.

At the end of this show, a brief, silent slideshow of most recent US casualties in the wars we continue to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan were shown. When I saw this show, I was struck by how important it is that we see the FACES and connect at a human level with the sacrifices of these servicemen and servicewomen, as well as their families. When I searched online for an image wall of recent US war dead, I found the AP article (republished by USA Today) “Index of U.S. troop deaths in Iraq.” The article includes the following image of five US soldiers who were recently killed:

At our community 4th of July parade this morning in Edmond, Oklahoma, several wives and family members were in the parade carrying pictures of their husbands and loved ones currently serving the US military at home and abroad. Some of these people are members of the group “Blue Star Mothers,” a nonprofit organization composed of “…mothers who now have, or have had, children honorably serving in the military… supporting each other and our children while promoting patriotism.”

I first heard about Blue Star Mothers when dining at our local Old Chicago restaurant a few weeks ago. Old Chicago has an ongoing support campaign for Blue Star Mothers, to help support and remember our servicemen and servicewomen serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’m not sure if these numbers are still accurate, but I would guess they are pretty close: The materials I read at Old Chicago said we have over 130,000 US soldiers serving in the Iraqi theater of operations and over 17,000 serving in Afghanistan. Of course there are thousands of others serving in other countries as well as here in the United States. Today, on July 4th, we need to remember all these military members and their families.

Someone needs to create a “Faces of the Fallen” website which can be used to share the photographs, names, home towns, and service information of U.S. soldiers who have given their lives in our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as in other locations around the world. Does anyone know if a website like this exists? Websites like “Iraq Body Count” keep track of statistics of estimated military and civilian war dead in Iraq, and that is very important, but bar graphs somehow dehumanize the reality of military members paying the ultimate price. The U.S. Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial in Washington D.C. has a similar effect, I think, listing rows upon rows of names without faces. The emotional impact of this memorial, which I have visited several times personally, is quite different than the emotional impact of the World War II Marine Corps War Memorial and others. The experiences of US servicemen and women as well as US citizens at home during the US war in Indochina and World War II were quite different, of course, so it is natural these memorials would evoke different emotions. In all conflicts, however, I think it is important to remember and connect with the human side of warfare and the sacrifices of those who serve. It is much more difficult to connect in this human way with textual names listed on a wall of stone or a computerized bar graph, compared to photographs or statues of real people.

If a website would be created (or already exists) sharing the “faces of the fallen” from our ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I’m sure the site would be controversial. As I wrote in my October 2004 post, “Kant’s perpetual peace and US war dead,” images of the coffins of US military men and women returning to the United States have been closely protected and very controversial in the past. While many would use a website of fallen servicemember images to pay tribute, say thanks, and share stories, others would likely use the site to campaign for an end to these costly conflicts which were both started and continue to be promulgated by our civilian leaders in the US government.

Irrespective of your personal views on the ongoing US wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I encourage you to remember the servicemen and servicewomen who continue to serve the United States on July 4th, as well as their families. Consider supporting your local military families through Blue Star Mothers or other similar organizations. Remember and pay tribute to those who have died and given their lives in the line of duty as US military service members.

As I wrote in my February 2007 post “Criticizing policies not people:”

…the line between criticizing a government policy and the perception that the person levying that criticism is simultaneously criticizing the people tasked to carry out the policy is a very thin one at best.

I have very strong feelings and thoughts about our continuing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather than share them in this post, I will close by reminding us that is is possible to criticize a policy while still supporting those ordered to carry it out. (This is true of NCLB as it is true of US foreign policy.) I would also like to encourage everyone in the United States who will be of legal voting age for our presidential election in November to get out and VOTE. We live in a republic in the United States, and it is both our right and our duty as citizens to vote. Let your voice be heard.

Today, on July 4th, remember those who have served and those who continue to serve our nation in the armed forces. Support them and support their families. The websites AnySoldier and Soldiers’ Angels are two other websites I recommend (as does my mother) to support US soldiers and families.

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These are my notes from David Thornburg’s NECC 2008 presentation “Open Minds: Open Education and Open Culture” on June 30, 2008. David has granted me permission to non-commercially record and share this presentation subsequently. MY THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS ARE IN ALL CAPS.

dthornburg [at] aol [dot] com

David has handouts not related to this session, related to a new project he’s started
- this session will include technology but it is a broader topic
- concerns the state of the WORLD right now
- I am an American expatriot, I am a resident of Brazil, I work both in the US and Brazil and commute back and forth

Have you noticed when you were outside the US you were able to think in a bigger way about some issues?
- we are in a point of new ages of discovery
- one of the questions I ask now, do PCs have the potential to be as transformative in our culture as the book
- what will it take to make this vision real?
- will this benefit the entire world?
- what about 1:1 computing

Indiana and Mr. Michael Huffman are pioneering the uses of open technologies for children
- open source software: see the Open Source pavilion that Steve Hargedon is running

challenge we face in education:
- pedagogical practices have not been standing still
- Gardner’s multiple intelligences, many other things
- the challenge isn’t that we aren’t taking advantage of new discoveries in pedagogies and taking advantage of them
- the challenge is that technology is changing faster than classroom practices

now our technologies let us do things that our pedagogical practices have not caught up with
- lots of sessions now are addressing issues:
– given current technology, how should classroom practices change?
– given current classroom practice, how should technology change

We marvel at current technologies, kids today just view it as normal
- kids are going to marvel some day that they didn’t have 3D holographic projectors when they were in school

problem with racing technology bandwagons is that sometimes we lose other things

Now, more than ever, we need access for every learner in the world
- before these tools, you couldn’t do these things AT ALL

Bringing tools to all children
- 1:1 projects must be scalable
- sustainable
- low cost hardware and open source OS and critical applications are the ONLY way the goal can be achieved
- this does not mean there is no room for some proprietary titles, but costs must be scalable and sustainable
- single platform software is anti-child

I DEFINITELY AGREE WITH THIS POINT ABOUT SINGLE PLATFORM SOFTWARE BEING ANTI-CHILD, AND HOW WE MUST PURSUE 1:1 IMPLEMENTATION PROJECTS AGGRESSIVELY

It is quite different kids you have in class may have very different computers at home
- children need to be able to use THE SAME SOFTWARE on any platform they have
- if you look at the number of vendors who are actually rising to that challenge, t

Tech4Learning is one of the companies leading the industry in this regard: Windows. Macintosh, and Linux versions

vendors who just publish on 1 platform are serving the platform and not the child
- I happen to believe in the children
- so I promote and support software that runs on everything

On the hardware side of things
- lots of talk about OLPC
- OLPC is definitely still around, has lots of management changes, not clear where it is going, they are continuing to go in the future

the OLPC has had a major impact on the industry
- before the XO was announced, you couldn’t buy a laptop for less than $1200
- now you can go to Tiger Direct and buy a powerful laptop for $350, without rebates and no limits on how many you can buy
- so hats off to MIT and this project

The Intel Classmate
- this machine is here at NECC]
- not as cute as some other machines
- can get your choice of OS: either Windows or Linux

Another machine in the One2OneMate: a Linux computer
- it looks like an AlphaSmart
- is a full blown laptop

Another example: koolu
- 10 watt power consumption

large hydroelectric dam is on the border of Brazil, Argentina, and Paraguay
- that dam generates all the electricity for all of Paraguay and half of brazil
- if the number of computers in the world doubled, we’d have to build 20 more dams of this capacity!

Another Example: N Computing Box
- idea is most personal computers have far more power than any individual student is using at one time
- the processor actually runs on just 1 box and is shared

lots of talk about the iPhone, but it was/is a closed platform

Our friends in Brazil who love the iPhone bought them in the US and have them working in Brazil
- but why have to do that

There is a completely open source phone: NEO1973
- you want to add new features to your cell phone, go right ahead! It’s open source.

An argument was started a few years ago that students don’t need a computer, they just need personal storage devices
- I’m more willing to accept this idea now
- if you have enough computers in your community, this is viable
- that is a BIG “if”

The price of flash drives is coming

booth 5260: you can get a 1 gig pen drive for free after you play a game
- if I had said that a few years ago, this room

new version of linux called Puppy Linux
- can put that entire OS on a flash drive

Why open source?
- do the math
- (number of computers) x $100/ year to just run the Windows OS
- 2/3rds of Indiana students do not know they are using Linux! (and they didn’t care. they just cared about their applications and data.)
- applications are robust
- service calls are minimized
- new applications are being created every day
- applications can be shared legally

In Africa: Freedom Toaster
- take a CD, choose the software you want, and you can take the software home
- you know how the principal makes money selling pencils? Try this at your school!

some African countries are letting people also upload files, like music (I am sharing this as some factual information, not as a recommendation)

Linux and Education
- finally easy to install and maintain
- reliable
- low total cost of ownership
- graphical user inferface
- applicable and usable by all grade levels

Now lets go back down to Brazil
- photo of “the digital port”

instead of going northeast and risking capture, some Dutch Brazilians went NW and were looking for an island with rivers on both sides
- came ashore
- the same Dutch from Brazil founded New York

consider Brazilian kids in our neighborhoods, who 20 years ago would not have been in school
- curriculum in Brazil is inquiry driven and project-based

President Lula was asked by Microsoft to please use Windows
- He asked Microsoft to charge them just $3 just like China is
- Microsoft refused and said they would change $100 per copy

we have to export 60 bags of soybeans then for every license of Windows

we think of Linux as an emerging market here in the US
- 36 million children in Brazil will be using Linux by December 2008
- 52 million by the end of 2009

some people in our country are viewing children as wallets, not as human beings

Computers for All: Brazilian governmental program
- stores in Brazil sell both food and technology
- special logo on machine means the government will give you a 24 month interest free loan
- sold 800,000 of these machines without any marketing at all (grass roots word of mouth)

some countries get serious about education and technology, and that is really cool

MLK quotation: 3-31-1968: “Through our scientific and technological genious, we have made of this world a neighborhood and yet we haev not had the ethical commitment to make of it a brotherhood.”

We can talk of web 2.0 and these technologies
- the bottom line is that we CAN make of our world a brotherhood

Minister of Culture for Brazil: Gilberto Gil (also a singer and songwriter)
- founder of the movement Tropicalismo
- idea is that you understand someone else’ culture not so you can appreciate it from afar, but rather use it yourself in your own life and culture [APPROPRIATE AND REMIX IT]

Brazilian filmmakers are generally located on the coast
Quotations from Gil:
- a global movement has risen up in affirmation of digital culture…
- the creative impluses of teh Brazilian people need access to the digital world…

Gil is setting up schools on filmmaking in the interior, teaching final cut pro, seeing what types of creativity and innovation come out of this

Look at some of the AFrican cultures
- corn rows have a very rich cultural history
- there is a mathematical pattern there which is a fractal
- you can create a logo procedure which replicates that
- so now a kid who knows about corn rows (goes back at least to the 1700s) can now understand the mathetmatics of that
- and maybe that becomes a pathway to get students interested in mathematics who might

how can we build bridges to understanding and learning
a lot of schools now are like the United Nations
Many things like this can be used as pathways to learning, which are not in any textbooks

Breaking borders with software: CMap
- kind of like an ugly version of Inspiration, but it is a collaborative tool
- the map can stay open to other people and it doesn’t matter which continent you’re on

noticed when kids get stuck making a contact map?
- in CMap click on the suggestions map
- the program looks at what you have done so far, compares it to other Cmaps made by others on the web, and then gives you words it “thinks” (DAVID IS BEING APPROPRIATELY ANTHROPOMORPHIC HERE) might help you
- the idea may have come from Zimbabwe, it doesn’t matter
- you have to be online to use this feature

CMap runs equally well on whatever platform you have
- this is about the children, not the vendors

If your school server wants to be visible to the rest of the world, you can set this up with your firewall
- then your folders become available to the entire world, if you want
- you can also keep them restricted
- each child can then decide if their files can be viewed, commented on, or fully edited (sets permissions)
- this is about empowerment

Copyright has a very important role in our socity
- the default assumption in this country is that even if you don’t put a copyright sign on your work, you own it
- this is problematic when you want to share rights
- the clearinghouse for this is Creative Commons
- we have some papers on this on our website
- when you see the CC mark, that means you can freely use this without any legal restrictions
[HE IS TALKING ABOUT CC-ATTRIBUTION HERE, FOLKS SHOULD REALIZE NOT ALL CC LICENSES PERMIT COMMERCIAL WORKS AND DERIVATIVE WORKS]

I think these are very powerful and good ideas

what happens when we go from liberty, equality and fraternity to rip, remix and burn?

The Berkman Center for Internet and Society: H20 Playlist

MIT has made the bulk of its courseware available online
- once you say it is NOT about the content, you have to be really clear WHAT it IS about?
- what is it that justififes your salary then? it’s not just this body of knowledge that you are trying to protect

Gilberto Gill quotation: “Together we might become the most powerful laboratory of culture mixture in the world. (If we are) isolated from one another we may no longer be able to achieve that, since there is an increasing international tendency toward a multi-cultural style that hinders mixture, trying to reinforce borders as a strategy for the preservation of differences.”

Tropicalia is about cultural mixing: building networks, not walls
- It is xenophilic, not xenophobic

I like salads: you can keep the different tastes!
- there are surprises in salads that you don’t find in a soup bowl
- elements of different cultures (in the metaphor) are preserved
- this is powerful
- how are we doing in that regard

There is a movement afoot to build a wall with Mexico
- this debate will continue for some time
- if McCain is elected he may not build it, he was born in Panama
- there is a constitutional issue with that, but who has cared about the US Constitution the past few years anyway?

There was a problem with illegal aliens being used to build walls on the border
- story of listing some of the famous, very successful immigrants who at one time were here in the U.S illegally and whether

What is your fear?
- is someone going to sneak onto your property at night and mow your lawn?
- do you fear them sneaking into your house during the day, making your bed and cleaning your toilet

Story of a PhD from Monterrey who worked on the GNOME desktop
- is on a waiting list for 16 years to get a visa
- that is an exclusion policy, not an immigration policy
- 150K envelopes for H1B visas last year

Picture of Norma, David’s wife, took a process of 7 years and $15,000 in legal fees for her normalization documents

the longest part of the process in getting a Brazilian visa was fingerprinting

Questions
- who built the infrastructure of this country? Railroads?
- East: Irish
- West: Chinese

the infrastructure of this country was built by foreigners
- today it is being
- we have negative immigration now: we have more Irish leaving the US now than are coming
- we have a big challenge in terms of cultural issues, in the world we are living in

as we become more isolated, that diminishes the entire planet
- I want our children to see what others have, and others to see what we have

picture of the statue of liberty
- quoting poem from statue

I am so proud to be a citizen of a country people still fight to get INTO not to get OUT

book recommendation: “The Flight of the Creative Class” by Richard Florida
- we are seeing more people becoming bi-nationals
- not just about Brazil
- through modern telecommunications, the market is not just our neighborhood, it is the entire blue ball

familiar with the Phoenix probe
- the found salt and ice: they are THIS close to a good margarita!
we are really making huge progress

Toh Friedman: “The way to keep good jobs in this country is not by building big walls, but by attracting people with big ideas.”

“Your people, your people….” When will you realize that your people are our people too! (Graffiti david

We are all each others’ people on this planet.

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The June 5, 2008, BusinessWeek article “One Laptop Meets Big Business: The big idea of giving PCs to poor children has been challenged by educators and business. Here, follow the misadventures of One Laptop per Child” includes a variety of updates about OLPC, which I regard as the most important educational technology initiative in the history of our planet.

Some key points I found interesting:

At least some of the educational leaders in India remain firmly rooted to “sit and get” / transmission-based pedagogical models. This isn’t a real surprise, it’s one of the educational messages which comes through most clearly in the documentary film Two Million Minutes. According to this BusinessWeek article:

While this philosophy [constructionism] is essential to the mission of OLPC, it’s also a source of tension. Current educational leaders in Peru embrace Constructionism, but most countries base their education systems on the idea that teachers pass their knowledge to receptive students. That was a problem for OLPC in China as well as India. India’s education department, for instance, calls the idea of giving each child a laptop “pedagogically suspect,” and, when asked about it recently, Education Secretary Arun Kumar Rath barked: “Our primary-school children need reading and writing habits, not expensive laptops.”

How does India’s Education Secretary, Arun Kumar Rath, think that students acquire proficient and lifelong reading and writing habits? By sitting quietly in a classroom watching a teacher lecture holding chalk in her/his hand?! Does Rath know about Open Content? Without affordable laptop computers, exactly how does he propose India’s teachers and students will be able to benefit from the open content digital curriculum revolution currently underway? His quotation, sadly, reveals about as much understanding of the digital learning revolution as many of our educational leaders in the United States do who continue to champion NCLB. Will the REAL educational leaders please step forward in both India and the United States? To date, we haven’t seen them in the seats of political power.

Why do news article authors assume every topic has to fit into a sharp if/them either/or dichotomy anyway? Why can’t we hear more about advocates for blended learning, which recognizes the importance of both content delivery/consumption as well as idea construction? Personally speaking, I think the learning process is a combination of both. We need, however, to place more emphasis than we have traditionally on the “content construction” side of the recipe, and that is certainly something the OLPC project aspires to do. Read the OLPC News blog post “Controversial Constructionism” from June 16th for more on these issues surrounding constructionism.

The authors of this article (Steve Hamm and Geri Smith) seem to suggest in an opening paragraph that OLPC founders have erroneously stuck to their guns when it comes to constructionist pedagogy. They write:

They [the struggles of OLPC] also show what happens when differing philosophies of education and beliefs in how software should be created go head-to-head. Values the group has promoted have met resistance in the marketplace, government bureaucracies, and classrooms. That Negroponte and his colleagues took on way more tasks than they could handle only complicates the situation further.

I think the suggestion that OLPC leaders have taken on “more tasks than they could handle” is poorly supported by the facts and ideas presented in this article. To support this point, the authors relate how several OLPC leaders have resigned (OLPC President Walter Bender and Software security leader Ivan Krstic) and some countries have backed out of the project. Those are problems to be sure, but I hardly think they support the contention of the authors that Negroponte and others have bitten off more than they could chew with the OLPC project. I also take issue with the overall critical tone of this article, which seems to suggest people should either want:

• Poor kids in developing countries to not have access to digital technologies, because providing it amounts to cultural imperialism, or…
• Commercial companies should OF COURSE receive our support in selling their wares to the students of the world, even when free, open source software alternatives are available which exceed basic learning requirements, or…
• Students everywhere should be condemned to the age-old, traditional “fill the pail” educational pedagogy which Paulo Freire and many other educational advocates for the economically disadvantaged in developing countries have ardently pressed to reform.

I’m guessing authors Hamm and Smith haven’t read Pedagogy of the Oppressed. If they would take time to read it and thoughtfully explore digital divide / digital equity issues, I wonder if their perspectives would change to more favorably view OLPC?

Here’s another interesting tidbit I gleaned from the article which I hadn’t read previously: Microsoft wooed Libya out of the OLPC project by offering to sell them Windows operating system licenses for $3 each:

Originally, rather than using Microsoft’s pricey Windows and ready-made commercial applications, they [OLPC leaders] chose the Linux open-source operating system and created a new user interface and applications designed specifically to aid in learning by doing. A key reason to support open source: It allows students to tinker directly with software. However, some countries, such as Libya, which initially agreed to buy more than 1 million laptops, backed out and chose a Windows-based alternative from Intel. One attraction: Microsoft cut the price of a software package for poor schools from $150 to $3.

Kudos go out to the Microsoft representatives for pulling off this national-level bribe in Libya. Had the Libyan political and educational leaders ever used open source software previously? Did the Microsoft lobbyists woo the Libyan leaders with a ridiculous assertion like, “Most of the world uses the Windows operating system, so all your students in your schools need to also!?” I’m not sure, I don’t have insider information on this. I do know, however, it is a shame so many leaders continue to misunderstand and undervalue open source software and technologies. (See my post from this weekend, “Praise for NeoOffice (OpenOffice) and SeaShore (GIMP)” for more on this topic.)

Since when does offering a low-cost laptop with tons of free software programs on it designed to help students become the self-directed architects of their own learning amount to cultural imperialism? Article authors write:

Some observers accuse OLPC of cultural imperialism. “It’s arrogant of them. You can’t just stampede into a country’s education system and say, Here’s the way to do it,’” says William Easterly, a professor at New York University and author of The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good.

So Dr. Easterly has published some books on cultural imperialism… What expertise does he have specifically on the OLPC project and the way it has been implemented in Peru and other participating countries? I agree human beings (and those with light melatonin in particular) have been ridiculously and horribly misinformed, misdirected, cruel, and destructive in the past in “the developing world.” I am no fan of colonialism past, present or future. I am, however, a big fan of projects and people which aspire to empower others to attain an educational and economic future far brighter than those of their predecessors. What is Dr. Easterly’s plan for effectively fighting poverty across our globe? Based on his book publications, it seems clear clear he is no fan of US foreign aid. Fine. OLPC is not a U.S. aid program. Did Hamm and Smith seek out a critic of OLPC who truly understand the program, what it aspires to and how it is being implemented, or did they just reach out and call someone for a fast sound byte who is an established critic of historical and traditional foreign aid programs? It seems likely they did the latter, and that is unfortunate. Making such a mistake is kind of like asking Carl Sagan (or letting him) pontificate on topics outside his narrow area of expertise, like theology, and treating his thoughts as “expert testimony.” Just because a professor has credentials in one field, critically thinking citizens shouldn’t permit news reporters to “authoritatively quote” that individual on a topic tangentially related to their field of expertise. Why didn’t Hamm and Smith ask their local building custodian about his/her opinion about OLPC? If Easterly does not have specific, in-depth knowledge about the OLPC project and implementation initiatives himself, then his opinion about the project should be valued equally with those of another observer unfamiliar with its specifics.

Nigeria has apparently also been wooed away from OLPC and instead has opted to purchase Intel’s Classmate PC. Again according to the article:

OLPC might not be in such turmoil if Kane had been promoted earlier. Nigeria had agreed to buy 1 million XOs, but after a competition among three alternatives, the country chose Intel’s Classmate PC instead. Why did OLPC lose out? Intel provided more support, writes Isa Muhammad Ari, director of administration for Nigeria’s Federal Capital Territory, in an e-mail.

Better support, hmmmm. Certainly it does sound like OLPC has a small full-time staff. I wonder if Nigerian leaders considered the support available from the OLPC community? Did one person from Intel “make the difference” by quickly returning phone calls from a school administrator or government official? What is the REAL reason Nigeria went with the Classmate PC rather than the XO? I’d like to hear more, I’m certain there is more to this tale than this simple sentence in the article, “Intel provided better support.”

How does the Classmate PC stack up against the XO, incidentally? How many people in the seats of leadership in countries considering the purchase of an affordable laptop for students are qualified to make that judgement call themselves? And are the implementation plans for the Classmate PC in Nigeria the same as they would have been for the OLPC: One computer for EVERY child? I hope that is the case, but I am not sure. I’ll be eager to examine and use the Classmate PC at NECC this summer in a few weeks. I’m sure Intel representatives will be there hawking it and touting its relative benefits over other alternatives. Perhaps it is fantastic. I’m still waiting for Apple to release a lower-priced but fully functional iBook for education that resembles more the 1st generation “clamshell” model. Is that coming? I have no idea, but I hope so.

A final news item I gleaned from this article is that OLPC may roll out in Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere:

Just getting started in Haiti will be a challenge. The group’s second trip there was delayed by riots over food shortages in April. The first shipment of laptops was held up in customs for weeks. Donors are paying for some laptops, but not all. Asked how Haiti can afford to pay for PCs when its citizens are starving, Guy Serge Pompi, the Haitian educator coordinating the project, answers: “You can’t just focus on the present. The starving is the present. The future is education. We need to train our students for better jobs and a better future.”

I have some close friends who served in the U.S. Foreign Service a few years ago in Haiti, and the stories they told were very eye opening. The Haitian educational coordinator for OLPC is absolutely correct, however, in noting that improving EDUCATIONAL OPPORTUNITIES is one of the most important and viable, long term economic development paths for nations as well as individuals. Can an OLPC implementation help the people of Haiti move forward into a brighter economic future? If it can help the people of Haiti, surely it can help the people of ANY nation.

Like other educational technology contexts, however, we must remember that a project implementation process has to do with MUCH more than simply the hardware and the software. Hardware and software is important, but people are primary. My high hopes as well as prayers continue to go out to all of those working hard at implementing OLPC around the world.

When will leaders in my own state of Oklahoma recognize that one to one learning is a PRESENT NEED for our students today? Will the leaders in other states and other nations see this “light” anytime soon?

Will the real educational leaders please step forward?

Technorati Tags:
education, olpc, laptop, peru, india, intel, classmatepc, 1to1, onetoone, xolaptop, leadership, reform, school

These are my notes from John Jones‘ presentation “Drupal for Education” at the TTT Conference in Wichita, Kansas, on 12 June 2008.

BEFORE THE SESSION JOHN TOLD ME SOME HISTORY: THE DEANSPACE SITE WAS BUILT WITH DRUPAL, THERE IS NOW A PROJECT CALLED CIVICSPACE WHICH IS A DRUPAL PROJECT FOCUSED ON POLITICAL SITES. JOHN DEVELOPED THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY WEBSITE FOR KANSAS BEFORE WORKING FOR ESSDACK. JOHN’S PERSONAL WEBSITE IS A GAMER SITE: radiatinggnome.com

Drupal is an open source content management system
- free for anyone to use, is a huge community of users

now you are stuck with…
- kid tied down and adults working on him with saws
- page of lots of complicated knots

many are tied to a proprietary package
- static pages created years ago
- very limited options for

What you need
- WD-40 image
- needs to be smooth
- can’t promise WD-40 right out of the gate
- are always challenges with getting people to use the website

what we are trying to do
- flexible, customizable design
- distributed content creation
- a site that grows with you
- a robust community of nerds (leveraging this, the Drupal Project)

Open Source idea
- now owners, no bosses, just community
- Lots of competing ideas and exploration
- never be alone
- no licensing fees

OpenOffice is now pushing Microsoft further

I do other things for fun, but many people working on these open source projects like Drupal don’t
- it is a worldwide community
- very passionate people who really care about what they are doing

idea of how to control access to certain pages
- how do you define user roles
- one solution is not intrinsically better
- depends on the context

Open source community provides you with a library of options that can be very customized

If I was a 1990s web designer, I have written thousands of lines of code and I am the only one who really understands it, even if there are hidden code
- open source reality is very different, there are many Drupal developers who could step in

Drupal background
- comes from English pronounciation of “druppel” - the Dutch word for Drop
-started in dorms at the Univ of Antwerp in 2000 as a way to share news, ideas, and an internet connection
- tens of thousands of monthly downloads
- very passionate and active community

Now flashing through different websites built with Drupal
- in a lot of open source packages (Joomla, Mambo, Plone, PHP Nuke) - with many of those you may feel more constrained in terms of look and feel
- AOL Corporate site
- Fast Company.com
- Imbee
- Savannah Morning News
- Warner Brothers music site
- Lullibot is a group now doing lots of drupal sites
- SonyBMG site is all driven by Drupal
- Jerry Garcia’s website

very different look and feel with all these websites

flexibility
- a wide variety of modules available
- variations to fit different use cases
- many themes available, and they can be customized

shared responsibilities
- the old way: News, calendar, classroom resources, and announcements all go to the webmaster who posts to the website (single gatekeeper, this turns into a big bottleneck)
- the drupal way: the one creating the content is putting it on the website (this is a big training issue)
- Ellinwood schools were our first Drupal school site
- it will be years before we get there with the teachers in terms of everyone doing something on the web…

Dynamic content
- show users something fresh (you always want to do this)
- promote your events and programs
- reward users for returning
- if info there on Monday is the same as we had on last Wednesday, I’m probably not coming back
- that is a lot of work if it all falls to 1 person

The ESSDACK Package
- robust functionality to start
- room for growth in the future
- customized to your needs
- training, videos, and documentation

we already have classrooms and classes setup, subgroups
- kids can subscribe to a class (then they can go to the main calendar on the site, kids will see main events as well as their own classroom assignment deadlines integrated into the same calendar)

school menu: what is the best way to make that available to the public
- if you are getting it as an excel file, is making a PDF the best way to share it?
- can train school lunch folks to provide that as a dynamic part of the site

core functionality: typical district site
- distinct look and feel for each building
- district and building home pages with calendar, news, etc..
- more…
- groups are a powerful tool
- public or private (most is public)
- image galleries
- contact forms
- breakfast and lunch menu
- email newsletters

THIS IS REALLY GOOD STUFF. ESSDACK IS VERY SMART TO OFFER THIS FUNCTIONALITY TO SCHOOLS.

marketing: problem with the web, it is a pull technology (you need people to want to come to your website)
- email is the best web-based push technology, reaching out to people
- trick is that everyone gets a ton of spam
- trick is we want to publish high quality content that drives people back to your website

can have specific

What to remember:
- drupal is flexible + our experience = WD-40

Ellinwood: USD 355 is an example Drupal site we have setup

position I dig in on: your school needs a professional space, a consistent interface that will be easily updatable
- use email newsletter to send out bulleted announcements
- kids can still create webpages and add to the web, students do need a place to create, design and publish
- Drupal gives you control over the “middle of the page” content
- menubars at top and sidebar form the template
- menus can change based on the content
- I encourage the school to have a separate website where kids can work with full HTML, a sandbox

demosite we use for newer school districts (to look at different options and customization choices)

I worked one summer with upward bound students and HTML
- had kids work with notepad instead of WYSIWYG, because there is nothing like trying to figure out what comma or quotation mark
- really emphasizes attention to detail which kids may not get other places

we can do wikis with drupal
- wikis mean different things to different people
- core idea is a page that multiple people can edit together, see revisions, have multiple

original wiki site links required CamelCase

are audio and video modules for Drupal

Drupal isn’t the prettiest CMS out of the box, but it is the best for a community that I have ever seen
- Mambo and Joomla are great for a news or magazine site, for that kind of publishing site
- Drupal’s real strength is community and shared content creation

I have a World of Warcraft Drupal site where we are collaborating together to create content

literacyleader.com is a professional learning community site that we have built and are supporting
- teachers involved are creating and sharing content together

for Drupal comment moderation, teachers would have site-wide comment moderation rights

I was a PC guy before coming to ESSDACK, when I got my Mac I discovered SnapZPro to create tutorial videos

it is hard to create a unified manual for Drupal because sites are so customized

I use SnazPro now to show tech support people exactly what a problem is with site… this is a GREAT benefit

St John, KS - www.usd350.com
- lends itself toward more centralized control over content (that is an individual choice for the school district, however)

Questions about text readers
- Drupal has been very ADA friendly historically
- most designs are CSS driven rather than table driven

I was at WSU when the state mandated ADA compliance (big issues were tables and images without alt tags)

tech support for Drupal in this case would be me, it is more about knowing where to go for help

JOHN ESTIMATES ABOUT HALF OF KANSAS SCHOOL DISTRICTS ARE NOW USING SOME SORT OF PROPRIETARY PACKAGE FOR A DYNAMIC WEBSITE, THAT SCALES WITH DISTRICT SIZE IN MANY CASES, WHAT ESSDACK IS DOING IS CREATING A MODEL WHERE SMALLER SCHOOLS CAN AFFORD AND HAVE THIS SORT OF FUNCTIONALITY.

Technorati Tags:
ttt08, ttt2008, drupal, website, school, education, essdack

Remember the ENIAC computer? (Well, I guess I’m not actually asking if you REMEMBER it– as in you SAW it in person– more if you read and learned about it in the past.)

According to the current WikiPedia entry, it was unveiled in 1946 and cost approximately $500,000.

ENIAC was designed and built to calculate artillery firing tables for the U.S. Army’s Ballistic Research Laboratory… ENIAC contained 17,468 vacuum tubes, 7,200 crystal diodes, 1,500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and around 5 million hand-soldered joints. It weighed 30 short tons (27 t), was roughly 8.5 feet by 3 feet by 80 feet (2.6 m by 0.9 m by 26 m), took up 680 square feet (63 m²), and consumed 150 kW of power… The ENIAC used four of the accumulators controlled by a special Multiplier unit and could perform 385 multiplication operations per second…..

I remember the ENIAC mainly for its size and relatively paltry computing capabilities compared to personal computers and supercomputers today. It was in “continuous operation” until 1955. When I think of the early days of computing, I immediately think of the ENIAC.

I mentioned in my post “The benefits of unplugging” that our family visited Los Alamos, New Mexico, last week. Los Alamos is home to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Each time we’ve driven through Los Alamos, I’ve wondered what millions of our tax dollars are up to there– paying scientists and engineers to continue developing new technologies for the US military and our weapons systems. This evening, reading the news on our Wii as I waited for my son to teach me how to play “Rayman Raving Rabbids,” I read today’s AP article “Scientists develop fastest computer.” For a total cost of $100 million, scientists and engineers worked six years to create a supercomputer reminiscent of the ENIAC but vastly greater in its physical size as well as computing capabilities. For the first time the computer has:

…performed 1,000 trillion calculations per second in a sustained exercise… To put the computer’s speed in perspective, it has roughly the computing power of 100,000 of today’s most powerful laptops stacked 1.5 miles high, according to IBM. Or, if each of the world’s 6 billion people worked on hand-held computers for 24 hours a day, it would take them 46 years to do what the Roadrunner computer can do in a single day.

So if everyone on the planet was using an iPhone 24/7, how many years would it take us to replicate a day’s work of “the Roadrunner?”

The size specifications of the Roadrunner dwarf the ENIAC as well. According to the same article:

The interconnecting system occupies 6,000 square feet with 57 miles of fiber optics and weighs 500,000 pounds. Although made from commercial parts, the computer consists of 6,948 dual-core computer chips and 12,960 cell engines, and it has 80 terabytes of memory housed in 288 connected refrigerator-sized racks.

80 terabytes of memory… Is that all? Will my kids have that much storage capacity in their handheld computers when they start attending college in about a decade? Quite possibly.

I don’t intend to trivialize this computing achievement with attempted levity. On a more serious note, I recognize the pivotal role funding by the US government for military computing applications continues to play in the development of computing and supercomputing capabilities. The ENIAC was originally designed to make more accurate and thorough calculations for the US Army’s artillery units. The Roadrunner is ostensibly being used “to assure the safety and security of our (weapons) stockpile.” Do we really need a supercomputer with petaflop performance capabilities to do that? I thought the nuclear football, developed during the administration of Eisenhower, did that for us? I think it’s fair to hypothesize the actual military uses of the Roadrunner are barely touched on in today’s AP article.

A petaflop is 10 to the 15th power “flops: FLoating point Operations Per Second.” Can I begin to comprehend a number that large? That challenge is similar to trying to understand the distance the Andromeda Galaxy (our closest neighbor galaxy) is away from our own Milky Way galaxy: Approximately 2.5 million light-years away. I can say that number, but I can I really comprehend it? I don’t think so.

The speed of change we are witnessing today, in our lifetimes, when it comes to information technologies and telecommunications truly IS staggering. An SR-71 was fast (when it was operational) but blog-powered communication is faster. At the speed of light, packets of data traverse our planet and magically permit our ideas and thoughts to interact and influence each other. Who could have dreamed of such a day?

$100 million for a petaflop of performance. Wow. What does that mean? Are we approaching the moment of technological singularity? We’re certainly moving in that direction.

Amidst such change, it is ludicrous and sad to see our political leaders in the United States continuing to emphasize a 19th century approach to education via standardized assessments which place zero value on digital literacy or 21st century skills. We can be frustrated with NCLB, we can be mad about high stakes testing, but more than anything else, I think we can justifiably be sad at the glaring lack of vision and understanding for the dynamic communications landscape of the 21st century which it reflects.

In a few months, citizens of the United States will have an opportunity to cast votes for a new chief executive. When the reins of power are transferred, I hope we’ll be pleased with new educational vision in the White House which supports the development of both traditional as well as digital literacies in the classrooms and homes of our nation. If we’re paying $100 million for a petaflop of performance today, we’ll probably be paying $1000 for that same performance capacity in a decade. Are we equipping our current generations of learners to thrive in an environment replete with such computational capacity? No. Sadly, we’re still arguing about whether or not cell phones should be permitted in schools at all. Are people of all ages going to continue making poor choices with the tools at their fingertips, including cell phones? Of course. The solution is not banning them and condemning students and teachers to a 19th century learning environment devoid of opportunities for digital interaction.

Is this “glass” half empty or half full? I prefer to see it as half full. We live in a day ripe with opportunity for visionary and inspired leadership. Let’s hope our next chief executive signs landmark educational legislation framed by an electronic whiteboard or at least a laptop computer, rather than a chalkboard.

Perhaps such an image will inspire educators around the world to stand up and cheer, rather than fall to their knees and weep.

Technorati Tags:
eniac, petaflop, computer, supercomputer, losalamos, election, obama, mccain, politics, school, education, reform

The headline of today’s AP article, “Violence no worse than usual in Ciudad Juarez” trivializes a ridiculous and unacceptably violent situation in the border town across from El Paso, Texas. The second paragraph in the article reads:

But violence did not appear to be worse than usual in Ciudad Juarez, home base of the powerful Juarez drug cartel and one of the hardest-hit cities in a surge of homicides across Mexico.

“Worse than usual?” Are readers of the AP and MSNBC expected to accept the following “as usual” for the citizens and residents of Juarez?

Security officials reported at least six homicides since Saturday, including two municipal police officers who were riddled with machine-gun fire as they were getting into a car. Several businesses were set on fire, but nobody was hurt. The weekend homicide figures were not especially alarming in a city where more than 200 people have been killed thus far this year. Eight people were killed on Friday alone, including five men whose bodies were dumped on a street corner wrapped in blankets. Two of the men had been decapitated.

“The weekend homicide figures were not especially alarming.” Who is this AP writer kidding?! Eight people were killed on Friday and two had their heads cut off… and that is not “alarming?” Goodness gracious.

Following my post and reflections on Friday (“Drug violence in Mexico is bad: VERY bad”) I wanted to check in today and see how the weekend went in Juarez. Despite this misleading AP headline, I would conclude the situation continues to be HORRIBLE in terms of out-of-control drug cartel related violence.

Today’s El Paso Times article, “25 slain during weekend in Juárez,” reports:

More than 33 people were killed this past week compared with 25 slayings the previous week.

If this is not a case of drug-related violence spinning out of control on the Mexico - U.S. border, what is?

According to the May 18, 2008 AP article, “Police chief resigns in Mexican border city of Ciudad Juarez amid wave of killings,” of twenty-two public officials threatened by the drug cartels this month, only ONE remains in office today. The rest are dead, injured, or (like the police chief of Juarez) have resigned:

As police chief of Ciudad Juarez, Prieto served during a period in which drug cartels grew increasingly bold, advertising for drug couriers, shooting it out with rivals in the streets and issuing a hit list threatening 22 top city police officials. Of those 22, seven have been killed, three more have been wounded in assassination attempts and the remainder, save one, have left their posts.

From an educational standpoint, I realize many (if not most) students and teachers in midwest U.S. schools are either out for the semester or will be soon. This current event would be a good one to track in the remaining days of the school year, however, both on Google News (a simple keyword search for “Juarez” turns up plenty of articles) as well as Technorati. Surprisingly, there have not been any recent articles on Global Voices Online about drug cartel violence in Mexico. The latest article I find there is from Eduardo Avila in January 2008: “Mexico: Drug-Related Violence in Tijuana.” Are Mexican bloggers reticent to speak up about this wave of crime and drug-cartel related killings? They may be wise to take such a position. Apparently all the authorities are bowing to the violence and threats of violence.

Do we, in the United States, living as many of us do in protected pockets of relative peace and tranquility, realize the violent and harsh reality lived daily by many of our fellow North Americans living just south of our border? Drug-related violence is certainly a reality in the United States as well, but similar situations to that in Juarez where city and police officials are silenced and forced from office by the drug-cartels are not happening in the U.S. as far as I know. But what do I know? Relatively little, but at least Internet websites and new media publication sources permit access to a much greater set of voices than would have been possible even a few years ago. Today’s Ciudad Juarez news article, “Bad Moon Rising: The Crisis in Ciudad Juarez” reports:

“Juarez has been lost to us,” shrugged Arturo Dominguez, president of the city public safety commission. “The crime rate comes from not paying attention. All of us, citizens, functionaries and businessmen, lost control of the city watching was happening on the corner but saying nothing. It is regrettable there is no order, but if we’ve lost control, we shouldn’t at least lose hope.”

From a documentation standpoint, I’ll point out that I was unable to find this article on what I think is the original source’s website. Tracking news events like this with search tools like Technorati is MESSY and can lead to many important discussions about information, credibility, validity, and sources. Certainly it is much easier to simply teach out of the textbook and from previously utilized blackline masters, but in our digital information age it is ESSENTIAL for students and teachers alike to grow adept at filtering and verifying information sources about different topics. Who is the source? How can we verify what they said? Do they have an obvious agenda or bias? If others disagree with their point, what reasons can we provide for those disparities? These are all good questions, and the issues at stake in this case are NOT trivial.

New media information fluency skills are needed by ALL learners, not simply those enrolled in technology applications courses. How will our students formally learn and practice these skills in school, if our teachers are not provided with sustained professional development opportunities to learn and practice them? As David Warlick exhorts us, literacy is EVERYONE’S business. We should strive to make the most of every learning opportunity each day, and this horrific situation in Juarez certainly provides many options for exploring and learning about new literacies.

Larry Lessig, The Sunlight Foundation, and others are fighting to curb corruption in U.S. politics via the Change Congress campaign. Who is fighting to end not only drug-cartel sponsored violence in northern Mexico, but the endemic and institutionalized corruption which permits it to flower? I don’t know. That would be a great question for your students to tackle in the weeks ahead.

Technorati Tags:
juarez, violence, border, killing, death, drug, cartel, assassinate, threat, corruption, police, resign, education, learning, technorati, globalvoicesonline

I spent a year living in Mexico City during 1992-1993 studying and writing about a variety of security issues including the U.S. led “war on drugs.” My longest paper from that research era, “US Drug Control in the Americas: Time for a Change,” reviewed historical and contemporary efforts (as of 1993) to combat the scourge of illegal drugs “at the source” in Latin America. Of course Latin American countries are certainly not the only sources of illegal drugs and never have been. The opportunity to make meth in labs has made many communities in the United States sources as well as distribution points for illegal drugs. The summative, negative impact of the drug trade on our society is HUGE. While living in Mexico and traveling not only in Mexico but also in parts of Central America (Panama, Guatemala and El Salvador) I became aware of the VERY strong role of Mexican drug cartels in the politics, economics, and overall social scene of Mexico.

I remember hearing about the potential “Colombianization” of Mexico and the US Mexican border back in 1992-93. My perception at that time was that IF the Mexican and US governments conducted strong police and military efforts to try and break the power of the drug cartels in Mexico, particularly in the northern states, the result would be an untenable war zone and political instability like that of Colombia. The 1985 assassination of US DEA agent Kiki Camarena was a dramatic example of the potential power of Mexican drug cartels in the 1980s. Friday’s Associated Press article, “E-mail warns of bloody weekend in Mexican border city,” confirms my perception of 15 years ago that the lawless state of some areas in Mexico make the regions ripe for Colombianization. The AP authors wrote:

The streets of Ciudad Juarez are empty after police became aware of an e-mail warning that this weekend will be “the bloodiest” in the Mexican border city. Ciudad Juarez police have been given assault rifles and instructed not to patrol the streets alone. The e-mail says that gunmen will open fire at malls, restaurants, nightclubs and other public places and that there will be “killings all over the city.” Ciudad Juarez Police Chief Roberto Orduna says the threats must be taken seriously and sought to reassure residents in a news release Thursday, saying police will be more vigilant. Officials say that more than 200 people have been killed in Ciudad Juarez, a city of 1.3 million people across from El Paso, Texas, as drug cartels fight for territory.

When many U.S. citizens think of lawlessness and war today, we likely think of our ongoing, bloody and costly war in Iraq– in both human lives of US combatants, Iraqi combatants, Iraqi non-combatants, and U.S. taxpayer dollars. We also SHOULD think of our (U.S.) ongoing war effort in Afghanistan. We should not lose sight, however, of the violence taking place just south of our border.

Growing up as I did in the United States, I took it for granted that if our family had a problem with criminals, we could call the police for help and they WOULD help. When I lived in Mexico, if you had a problem the LAST thing you wanted to do was call the police. Fortunately I was connected to the US Embassy at that time, and if needed I could call the Marine guard station at the embassy. I never had to do that, but I certainly remembered that option. People who ran into trouble in Mexico more often (if they didn’t have embassy connections) called friends for assistance rather than the police. Private bodyguards were VERY common among the wealthy and elite. The overall civil climate with respect to law and order was much different than what I was used to in the United States. Even with these realities, I LOVED living in Mexico City (except for the horrible pollution, of course) and wouldn’t trade my year there for anything. The relationships I built and cultivated in Mexico were life-changing and ones I still treasure. That said, however, I am certainly glad I do not live with the uncertainly and fear which can come from living in an environment where law enforcement officials have relatively little power over strong criminal elements and very little respect and confidence from the general public. This article about expected violence this weekend in Ciudad Juarez brings all these ideas to mind.

I hope this prediction of violence in Ciudad Juarez does not come to pass. I have not been to El Paso for a couple of years. The last time I was there, my breath was literally taken away at night by the expanse of lights at night which WAS Ciudad Juarez. If you haven’t spent time on the U.S. - Mexico border, I think your ability to form insightful and accurate perceptions about it is extremely limited. I’ve spent very little time on the border myself, but my time there has influenced my thinking in important ways. See my May 2007 post, “Humanizing discussions about immigration and borders” for more of my thoughts along these lines.

We need to help our students develop and cultivate more personal perceptions and understandings of our global society. The challenges faced by people just like us in other places and contexts would likely surprise and even shock many U.S. students. We are barely beginning to scratch the surface of opportunities we have for international education and collaboration via digital learning tools. I am dismayed by articles like this one from the AP about violence in Mexico and on the US/Mexican border, but I am motivated by it to further equip learners of all ages with the knowledge and skills to be constructive change agents in their local communities for important values like human rights and self determination. The WITNESS website is an example of a technology-powered initiative focused on political activism and change-making. Their steps are:

See it. Film it. Change it.

This type of message of empowerment for political change is certainly anathema (banished, exiled, excommunicated or denounced, sometimes accursed) in many contexts, including many of our schools where read/write websites and technology tools are completely banned from both teacher and student use. I am not naive enough to think simply arming people with Internet-connected laptops, blogs and digital camcorders is going to immediately change political realities like those in northern Mexico, where the power of drug cartels is enormous. I do think, however, that citizen journalism as well as more “traditional” journalism will continue to play a HUGE role in supporting movements for constructive political and social change around the world.

Renavatio Productions’ documentary “Drug Wars, The Colombianization of Mexico” is scheduled for release in fall 2008. The trailer for this film is very bloody and may not be appropriate for a student audience at school, but it certainly gives a stark, visible edge to these conversations about drug cartel power in our hemisphere. (Thanks to jnsampson for this link.) I have not seen this film and do not necessarily agree with its conclusions or political message, but the REALITIES it is highlighting in terms of drug-related violence and the potential for it to escalate in both the United States and Mexico is very real.

This weekend, if you are living in the United States and celebrating the Memorial Day holiday with family and friends, attending events like air shows, picnics and festivals like we are in Oklahoma, it would be good to keep the people of Ciudad Juarez in your thoughts and prayers. I certainly will be.

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mexico, juarez, drug, cartel, violence, war, technology, education, politics, humanrights

U.S. Presidential elections inevitably lead to interesting and thought provoking advertisements, but I am not sure previous elections generated as many opportunities to learn from effective electoral marketing ads as the 2008 campaign. The primary reason for this is user-created content: It continues to explode, and the variety as well as quantity of video content being created that relates to the election this year is amazing. The contest Obama in 30 Seconds is a case in point. Fifteen finalist videos have been selected from hundreds of submissions. My personal favorites are:

Imagine… (a very creative stop-motion video)

and

They Said He was Unprepared… (A surprising historical comparison)

The first video is a great example of applying reverse engineering techniques to stopmotion moviemaking I think: The final claymation objects were created and videotaped first, and then slowly smashed so that process could be shown in reverse as “growth” videos.

I like the second video because of the juxtaposition of historical parallels. Gets you thinking. All in 30 seconds!

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unitedstates, election, video, marketing, obama, president, presidential, moveon, politics, creativity

Christy Tvarok, in her post “Make Noise, Make Change,” encourages teachers around the United States to share their vision for educational change in our nation, particularly as it relates to digital literacy and technology integration. She is going to mail the aggregated responses directly to the current US candidates for President. Please add your perspectives and ideas as comments to her post. The following is my contribution.

Christy: Thank you for your willingness to extend these conversations beyond the blogosphere and directly advocate for constructive, sensible change in our educational institutions with our political candidates running for President in the United States. Clearly there is a great deal which can and needs to be said. I’ll try to be succinct.

1) We must cut down and reduce our curricular standards and instead focus on cultivating habits of mind in our schools. TIME is the number one obstacle we face for any type of proposed educational change. The elephant in the room, as Dr. Robert Marzano pointed out in his keynote at the Oklahoma state leadership conference in July 2007, is that we don’t have enough time TODAY to teach all the content standards and curriculum we are required to as teachers. In response to the demands of these mandates, high stakes testing, and mania continuing from “Nation at Risk” (2 Million Minutes is the latest example) we have people calling for simply more time in school. We don’t simply need a new wrapper on the same old “sandwich” of school learning. We don’t need food coloring, And we don’t need new flavoring added. We need a new sandwich. This begins with addressing the primary drivers of learning tasks in our schools today: Curriculum standards and high stakes testing.

2) Educational technology must play a fundamental role in this learning revolution. Every teacher and student in every school, from grade three on, needs to be equipped with a laptop computer capable of not only accessing content in various media formats (permitting media consumption) but also permitting media PRODUCTION and PUBLISHING. Creating and collaborating must become hallmarks of learning in the 21st century classroom. These tasks can be performed safety, respecting the privacy and rights of both students and parents. There are many choices and paths forward to advance these goals. Our vision of digitally infused learning in the 21st century must go beyond CAI (computer aided instruction) and using Microsoft Office. The 21st Century Skills our students require include media literacy, multimedia publication and communication, and collaboration with diverse team members separated by space and time. The OLPC costs $180 per unit today, but was