Bill MacKenty

Technology strengthens, deepens, and broadens our learning...

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The US Department of education has published a big-ass meta analysis entitled Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies. Looks like online learning works best in a blended environment. However there is no research-based evidence in K-12 that online learning is “effective”, and the report specifically warns us:

As it happened, the initial search of the literature published between 1996 and 2006 found no
studies contrasting K - 12 online learning with face-to-face instruction that met methodological
quality criteria. By performing a second literature search with an expanded time frame (through July 2008),
the team was able to greatly expand the corpus of studies with controlled designs and to identify
five controlled studies of K- 12 online learning with seven contrasts between online and face-to-face
conditions. This expanded corpus still comprises a very small number of studies, especially
considering the extent to which secondary schools are using online courses and the rapid growth
of online instruction in K- 12 education as a whole.

My quibble with online learning really boils down to “is it about learning or what is cost effective?“. Why is “affordable” always appended to every argument in support of online learning? My sense is online learning makes great fiscal sense for an organization, but what about learning?

Mirrored from here. This is posted for archival purposes.

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Just discovered ksplice (via slashdot).  This is perfect. My only concern is the flow of updates stays strong. As I understand ksplice (from here), the ubuntu community fixes a bug and then the ksplice guys turn it into a a rebootless update.

How fast does /that/ process happen, and can I rely on it?

I’ll throw this on my ubuntu test server at work and play with it.

Thank you ksplice people!!!

Learning games network has this really cool contest - from the horses mouth:

(I) My “Aha” Moment
What’s an “aha” moment, you ask? Have you ever played a game and unexpectedly made a connection with something you learned someplace else? Something that made you think, “Aha!“ If you’ve experienced that spark of realization, that moment of epiphany between an idea from a game and something you learned - at school, at home, or anywhere else - tell us about it in your video.

What game were you playing? How did you connect it to something else you had learned? When and where were you when you made the connection — re-playing the game, studying for a test, reading a textbook, doing your homework, crossing the street? We want to know!

(II) My Dream Assignment
Imagine you’re a teacher or coach assigning homework or a class activity that requires students to play a game in a favorite class, in one they’re having trouble with, or in a subject area where they just want to do better. Do you have an idea for a great game for learning?

I cannot begin to tell you how many times I have connected in-game experiences with real-world stuff. And I see this happening with my students all the time.  The neat thing is, as kids get very excited about games, they also connect that excitement with classroom content. I have told this story many times, one of my 8th grade students (a low achieving student) had been playing Age of Empires and during social studies class excitedly starting talking about his experience in the game with his class (this from a kid who normally “laid low” in class).

Actually, this is how games work in education. The kids play the game, and then refelct on the experience to create tangible (measurable) learning outcomes).  I know many (many) gamers who said civilization got them through world history.

I can’t wait to see the results of this competition, and send major kudos to the folks at learning games network for this idea. If you haven’t joined this contest, please do - and pass the word!

Summer time!

Pretty normal summer plan:

1. Setup a new server. Finally, we will be able to do network image installs on our laptops.
2. Update and add some new professional development materials.
3. Get ready for our school transition to powerschool.
4. Arrange faculty best practices section for our website.
5. Move the elementary school website to a content management system .

6. Continue to learn code igniter.
7. Do relaxing fun stuff with my new family.
8. Prepare an after-school course for text based games.
9. Blog frequently and often about issues of earth-shattering importance.
10. Update, advertise, and build balanced gaming, my consulting business.

My half-brothers (ages 16 and 18) have had bad luck with their laptops. The laptops are regularly infected with crap, they don’t work the way they need to, and down time is greater than uptime.

So about a month ago, I installed ubuntu on them and now everything works like a charm.

Their songs? check.
Games? check. (using wine).
Website browsing? check.
Word processing? check.

Everything works as it should - I love linux.

She didn’t sleep at all last night. Mommy fed her, she got sleepy, daddy put her in crib, she made cute little cooing sounds for about 15 minutes and then cried.  That pattern continued until 6:30 this morning. I am going to turn into a zombie.

My current favorite word is instantiate - kind of rolls off the tongue, no?

Finally, I am learning code igniter.

part one here

An astute reader recently commented “It is just so dangerous to allow students to invade or break the professional relationship that an educator has with his or her students.“. As a teacher of ten years, I heartily agree. Our school has a policy that all teachers should only use school email for communication with students. I’ve seen teachers run into trouble on facebook - when they post pictures or stories meant for friends, and not for students! I think this could be solved by setting up groups for friends on facebook, so if I post a picture or notice, I can decide which groups get to see that particular item. 

Personally, I use facebook for light-weight, personal announcements to friends and colleagues. I use twitter as a personal learning tool. It bears saying, though, that social networks are glomming together - the “always on, always present, always connected” world isn’t far away. Neal Stephenson coined a nice word for this: the metaverse.

As a last point, I was teaching some teachers about blackboard.  I mentioned one advantage of online learning is teachers can respond to student queries over the weekend or in the evening. A teacher became frustrated, and said they liked their weekends to themselves! Hard to argue with the idea of free time.

I started this blog so many years ago to share my experience with other teachers.  I usually share my lesson plans, classroom experiences, and thoughts about games in education.  I’d like to share a rather different story with the same aim; to help folks.

Our labor wasn’t difficult, but it also wasn’t a breeze, and as I encountered each strange term, I googled and read stories from people who had similar experiences. It helped. I understand every labor is different, and as I read the different stories, it just helped me.So here’s ours: 

The Echogenic Bowel Experience (note to self: make suggestion to Disney for theme park ride)

Our baby was diagnosed with an echogenic bowel (pdf here). Echogenic bowel can be a soft marker (pdf here) for all sorts of nasty stuff like downs syndrome and cystic fibrosis.  We had to get some additional genetic tests (which came back negative). We also went for a second opinion - something I have never done in my entire life - and the second doctor agreed - yup, the baby has echogenisis.  The result?  We worried, but we also got ultrasounds and non stress tests every other week.  As we later learned, echogenic bowel can mean induction - our doctors told us babies with echogenic bowels can have slightly higher than average of stillbirth (but the risk is still pretty low).

The Induction

Dagmara was due on April 28th 2009.  The doctor told us she would be scheduled for induction on the 28th.  Along came the 28th, and against the minor objections of my wife, we went to the hospital. My wife’s said “look, if I’m fine, and the baby is fine, why am I going?“ The doctor talked about slightly increased risk, and we decided be be careful and go. After admittance, they gave us Cervidil - and we waited.

...and waited…

...and waited…

Three days later and one more cervadil later, my wife was crying asking “why am I here?“ I had to agree with her reasoning. She was fine, the baby was fine - let’s go home and wait. The nurses were sympathetic to our cause and somehow the “chief baby guy” (a Romanian) told us we could go home for three days.  So we went home and tried every damned technique on planet earth to induce baby:

Spicy food? Check.
Exercise? Check.
Intimacy?  Check.
Pineapple? Check
Castor oil? No. We didn’t use this one.
Pre-natal yoga? Check.
More exercise? Check.
More pineapple? Check. She ate almost 2 whole pineapples.

Then we went back into the hospital (at 40 weeks, 5 days) and got admitted again. We were getting close to that 41 week period, and we began to accept that the potential risks were growing. This time, we got a small little pill that didn’t work. Finally, we got a foley catheter with a balloon on one end. Basically, the doctors used the catheter to crank open Dagmara’s cervix. They also gave her some pitocin.

About 17 hours later, and with very little pain, the foley catheter kind of came out…this was supposed to happen. They checked Dagmara, and she was 4cm dilated.  An hour later, she was 9.5cm dilated, and about 40 minutes after that, Jana was born.  We didn’t have time for an epidural or other pain medication - Dagmara pushed out the baby without any drugs at all! Very impressive!!

I saw one of my students facebook post “my father joined facebook today - and the answer is no” on their wall.

Hilarious, and a perfect example of how things have changed with regards to privacy, private-space, and the idea of public space. I call this the blur. The standard definitions and understandings of privacy aren’t the same as they were in 1990. In schools, we normally encounter the blur when a student writes something inappropriate at home about something in school. But as we craft AUP’s, and think about how kids use technology, we need to remember things aren’t the same as they once were.

As I think about how kids communicate, and the transparent, interconnected, and ever-linked nature of their connections, I realize how the blur touches everything. Things stick around, media is easy to share, hard to forget, and also strangely impermanent.

I will write more on this later.

I work at a school for gifted kids.  One of my great joys is having long, highly detailed technical talks with the kids.  When I first started working at this school, I was shocked when I engaged in a 45 minute debate about cross-side scripting with a 7th grader (13 years old).  I mean, this kid REALLY understood his stuff.

Yesterday I had another such conversation. One of our students is just eons ahead of his peers as a programmer and geek. He generally likes to frolic with low-level code, device drivers, and small servers.  He has a well-reasoned philosophy that light-weight, locally compiled code connected to the cloud is better than scripting languages and monolithic programs.  Really neat stuff.  We don’t see eye-to-eye about everything, but from a geek point of view, he is a delight. He is, in every sense, an implementor.

So, part of discussion yesterday was around “what to do” with a program. Like, what direction to take.  After a few seconds thought, I told him to write a game! As I reflect, almost all of my programming knowledge and experience came from designing games, hacking games, and rolling my own game. Even now, I occasionally hack at a multiplayer text-based game and continue to learn. Time and complexity be damned! I’m sure he will write something really fun, and I can’t wait to play with it.

This is the magic I see in computer games - observe the time, enthusiasm, and energy they spend with computers. It really is intriguing.

Now. A Practical Note (tm) - Making / modding a game takes a long long time in my opinion, not for in-class work. However, as long as there are good guidelines for outcomes (so the kid doesn’t spend 10 hours making a flaming sword with an accurate heat ratio) hacking at a game is a delightful way to learn.

Got a comment question I wanted to respond to here:

Just curious, what are your thoughts about incorporating Twitter into the curriculum.

Don’t use a piece of technology just because you can. Edward Tufte spoke about this very eloquently. Just because we have (insert new technology here) doesn’t mean we should try to cram it into our curriculum.  This is why we need to be very careful about powerpoint - think about what you need to teach, and THEN think about the best way to teach your material.

However, part of my passion in life is looking at new technologies, and wondering about them . Ever since I figured out what twitter was, I’ve been rolling this question around in my mind.  I don’t have an answer, but I have some initial ideas.

How would you approach that?

I’ve been reading about the backchannel lately, and I really like the idea - for kids over 18.  I think twitter (and google chat) are like passing notes in class - that kids (under age 18) can’t really focus on a teacher AND a side conversation. I think if I asked a group of 16 year old kids to create a back channel, they wouldn’t be able to stay focused. I think if we twittered during class, we would need to review the twits before class ended.

How would you use it to help kids learn? Especially elementary school kids.

Well, I would think of twitter as a reflective device.  So as I’m teaching (or reading) something, I would ask them to take notes via twitter. With about 15 minutes left of class, I would review the twits, and have a discussion. Or, I might review the twits for the next class (what great feedback for a teacher).

I’m afraid that this Twitter thing is just going to take up a lot of the kids time and stuff instead of having some real evidence that it’ll help kids learn.

I share your fear.  The thing is, twitter doesn’t try to be anything BUT a 140 character update thingy. I see twitter mainly as a tool to reflect on a back channel conversation. But is back-channel reflective communication a useful thing for young kids? I’m not so sure.

I mean Twitter is a great idea, but I’m just not sure of it’s educational value.

I agree. I think the REAL value of twitter comes in from teachers learning / sharing with each other. I’ve already picked up some very useful information from twitter, and I’d like to add more people to follow (this is why I’m looking for a way to categorize / read) twits.

Great question

Fantastic article by Dion Hinchcliffe’s about emerging software architectures (PDF here).

The most interesting thing to me? Non-relational databases - which I know NOTHING about. I mean, I’ve played with trivial flat file databases before, and XML, but what else is there? Here’s a quote:

Non-relational databases.  Tony Bain over at Read/Write Web recently asked “Is The Relational Database Doomed?“  While it’s far too soon to declare the demise of the workhorse relational database that’s the bedrock of so many application stacks, there a large number of promising alternatives emerging. Why get rid of the traditional relational database?  Certain application designs can greatly benefit from the advantages of document or resource-centric storage approaches.  Performance in particular can be much higher with non-relational databases; there are often surprisingly low ceilings to the scale of relational databases, even with clustering and grid computing.  And then there is abstraction impedance, which not only can create a lot more overhead when programming but also hurts run-time performance by maintaining several different representations of the data at one time during a service request.  Promising non-relational solutions include CouchDB, which I’m starting to see in more and more products, as well as Amazon SimpleDB, Drizzle (from the MySql folks), Mongo, and Scalaris.  While many applications will continue to get along just fine with relational databases and object-relational mapping, this is the first time that mainstream database alternatives are readily available for those that are increasingly in need of them.

I wrote about twitter here. In a nutshell, I think twitter is human rss. Cool. But useless unless I can incorporate it into my rss reader. Twitter isn’t just about me regurgitating my trip to a coffee store, it’s also about learning what friends are doing.

I’m currently following 127 people, and being followed by 40. I’ve got 60 updates.  What I would love is a web-based program where I could categorize my twitter follows like my RSS feeds:

1. friends
2. ed tech
3. geeks
4. gamers
5. NYC

You get the idea.  I dislike clients - the more I can keep on the web, the better. Does anyone know anything I can try?

More talk about potential solutions here. But as things stand, I hate link-rot (which is why I try to host everything locally).