In ISB’s Main Library, we’ve always prided ourselves on being, if not on the “cutting edge” of new technology use in supporting school curricula, at least skating somewhere near that edge.  Five years ago, we began using wireless laptops as our primary computer platform in the main library, at the same time we adopted a “laptop cart” model of laptop access throughout ISB’s Middle and High Schools. We now house 72 laptops in 6 sets of 12 machines available for students to check out for use in the Main Library itself. Two sets live at the Circulation Desk, available for Drop-in student use on surrendering their ID card. Two set live in carts nominally assigned to MS and HS respectively, and provided without restriction (but on a 1st-come, 1st-served) basis, to classes booked into the library. The final two sets live in our “Webroom”, the attached Seminar Room which serves as HS Student Council homebase, preferred public meeting space, and occasional booked library class.

It’s not a perfect situation – by far. Too often, students arriving at the library somewhat into the period are told that all Circulation laptops are on loan and carts are being reserved for classes booked to arrive “soon”. Or ALL machines are on reserve in anticipation of three or more overlaping MS and HS classes arriving at some point in the period. Or finally, they arrive to find all Circulaition machines on charge, having been used for the full preceding period. Or, or. or…

The bottom line is that the average laptop in the Main LIbrary is circulated 6-7 times in a school day with an average use time of around 20 minutes  when short morning and lunch turnarounds are factored in – a total of  120 to 150 minutes of active use. That’s less than 3 hours of active use for each of the 72  laptops in the Main Library.

On the flip side, the 72 laptops in Main Library (buttressed by a dozen walkup Catalog and PowerSchool “Quick Reference” stations are available to only those students who actually avail themselves of the services of the Main Library. While we are pleased to serve more than 1200 visitors in an average day, the majority of these are repeat visitors; students, teachers – and even parents – who have “adopted” the library as their primary work, study, or simply “hangout” spot when not actively engaged in classes, sports or extracurricular activities.

So why is this a problem? Because there are – literally hundreds – of students, who in today’s “wired” teaching and learning environment, never receive any benefit from the significant investment in hardware and infrastructure that go into operating our Main Library – because, unless in a class booked into the library by their teacher, they seldom, or perhaps even never, come to the library.  At the same time, there are periods when up to a full 48 of our 72 laptops go unused in anticipation of classes who may not arrive, while reports of laptop shortages in classrooms looking for hardware are growing in number. It’s a situation with no clear resolution with the current model of shared laptop carts for “on-demand” use.

Compare this to the potential use if we were a 1:1 school, with a laptop assigned to each student.

• A recent report on the 1:1 laptop program at the Denver School of Science and Technology cites almost universal positive results for the program, with enhance frequency of use by students and teachers, and positive attitudes to these uses overwhelmingly reported
• A report on Henrico County Public Schools (Virginia) 1:1 laptop initiative through 2007-08 reports, “Students who made more use of laptops had higher scores in World History, Biology, Reading and Chemistry” and that ”Students say that because of the laptops, they are “learning more”. Virtually every student-reported application of their laptops is stronger this year last.  For example, students continue to believe that school is more fun and that they are more interested in school because of the laptops
• Dr. Peter Anthony of the Canadian Academy in Kobe, Japan, reports all of the above, as well as Broadening Learning Beyond the Classroom and Preparing for Tomorrow’s Workplace in a blog posting documenting his observations in the International School Setting.

***

There’s always the fear, in k-12 education, as in any front-weighted program with far-reaching implications, that a strategy that looks great on paper will translate poorly into practice, or worse, having taken 3-4 years to implement, will prove to have been actually counterproductive to the business at hand.

The business at hand? Supporting the Vision and Guiding principles of the school, of course. At ISB, our VaGP can be distilled down to the the ISB21′ group’s Vision for 21st Century Literacy and that vision can be shown to fit neatly within the context of the ISB Vision and Guiding Principles through this embedded diagram.

The fear? That the current mode of laptop use at ISB will turn out to have not best met the needs of the learners that have passed through our doors in the past 5 years. And the technology needs of a whole cohort of HS students, at least, have not been as effectively provided for as they should have been.

But then again, as our Peer Coaching instructor Dr. Jim Olivera used to tell us, the best we can offer is to never waver in the pursuit of “the best yet”.  The wireless laptop model we’ve used since 2004 was the “best-yet” we could come up with then. Perhaps 2010 will be the time to begin the move to 1:1…

For the record, from my perspective, standards are key to the development, implementation and continued growth and development of any quality program, whether it be home-building to an evolving set of environmental conditions or maintaining a robust and relevant teaching and learning program for a technologically evolving learner population.

I’m confident that the new NETs Standards are as as good as anything currently out there, although I’m impressed with the current work in Social Studies now known as technology, pedagogy, and content knowledge, or TPACK (cited in SUNY#2). Of course, I’m biased, and since both the new NETs Standards and the new AASL standards were rolled out in same year (2007), but then the AASL initial release was buttressed by the much more prescriptive 2008 Standards for the 21st Century Learner in Action (eg. Benchmarks to Achieve by Grade 10), I would have to say that while both are highly relevant to “being a good educator” in the shifting teaching/learning environment of this opening decade of the 21st century, if I were forced to choose one, it would be the AASL standards.

To be honest, I loved the simple, clean lines of the original NETs (2007) standards, and I thought the representative diagram for those to be by far superior.

Compare this;

to this;       

The NETs graphic looks just more “21st-century”: like the stylized Pioneer Plaque, it’s message is meant to be intuitive and for. By comaparison, the AASL cover is just too “20th century”, the title notwithstanding. Now why didn’t the two just put their heads together and create the best of both worlds?

Unfortunately, the NETs standards miss a key component of what I believe will turn today’s learner into tomorrow’s leader. That piece is (perhaps it’s the librarian in me) most of Standard #4; Pursue Personal and Aesthetic Growth.

At ISB, we have our own version of “blended” standards, based on the work of our “ISB21″ team over the past year, but for my money, nothing in the NETs standards speaks as eloquently to the need for students today to reclaim that “love of learning” that is so integral in the development of true scholarship as the  AASL Benchmarks to Standard #4.

As a school librarian, while I will support and promote “TAIL” standards we are developing at ISB, I will need to keep a close eye over the coming months, on how my colleagues in the library world are handling this. Be true to you school, the Beach Boys said in 1964 – and it’s still true –  Be True to your School - but to which school?

The simple answer might be to ensure accountability for meeting basic learning standards following a “Scope and Sequence” of appropriate skills. But, of course, it’s not that simple. For the sake of some simplification, I’ve focussed on the teaching (and learning) of “Social Studies” in the following observations. I’m confident, though, that I’d find the same story were I to research the “teaching” of English, Modern Languages, or Mathematics. And as for studying “Information Literacy” for its own sake? It’s better left unsaid…

But back to the infamous “Scope and Sequence” of skills – for any discipline. First of all, the term has been in and out of vogue forever. At the heart of it, it’s all about accountability – and like the proverbial bad penny, the term has turned up in the wake of progressive movements ever since I threw my hat in the ring in the early ’70s. Secondly, though, typical Scope and Sequence charts from “back in the day” were firmly rooted in Content, rather than Process and Information literacy was generally much too ill-defined to warrant much more than passing mention, whileTechnology, if mentioned at all, was all about the specific tools in the spotlight at the moment.

But finally, the main problem with the typical “Scope and Sequence” chart from the post-WWII era was that it was too prescriptive. Teachers objected to being dictated to, particularly when this involved “elective” skills appropriate at different stages, teachable using different instructional strategies, or using a variety of teaching tools. Not only that, but early on, people recognized that not every student would be successful in an environment where the sequence, pace and depth of skills taught were dictated by a set of set-in-stone bulleted items.

In the 70’s, when I got into the business, the  new educational panacea was “Open-Area education“. Students were encouraged to participate in the setting of their own educational goals. Our model to aspire to was Summerhill, a “student-centered” school in England where kids set their own educational agendas, and adults were truly just “guides on the side” to assist those on their journey. In this “student-centered” setting, Information Literacy was just a catch-phrase, and Technology usually not considered at all in the rush to meet individualized “student-generated” needs.

In a pendulum swing away from the prescriptiveness of the post-war scope and sequences, the Elephant in the Open (Class)Room was the lack of assurance that, left to their own devices, students would make wise choices about the scope or depth of studies in which they should engage. By the eighties, temporary, and then permanent walls were being erected in the many “Open-Area” schools built during the rush to that concept ten years earlier.

The blank concrete-block walls of these Free-choice factories still dot the landscape of Canadian small-towns today. The site my own first paid teaching post, where I made a last-stand attempt to promote “Open-Area” ideas to a team of traditionally trained educators, sits mutely beside my parents’ house in my hometown. The walls went up in the Eighties and never came down. In the end, it turned out, Open-Area education simply caved in to  ”a call for increased structure and formal accountability.”

Along with the walls came, in the Eighties, the “Back to Basics” movement in Canadian public-school education. Standardized testing reigned surpreme and Madeline Hunter’s “Instructional Theory into Practice” ruled the day. The catchphrase was “monitor and adjust”. Of course, what we were “adjusting” to was largely student achievement on the externally imposed Canadian Test of Basic Skills and several others whose name I mercifully forget. To effectively “deliver” the skills needed to meet these external imposed tests, Scope and Sequence charts of skills to be “taught” were surrepticiously dug out of the desk drawers where they had languished during the Open-Area years.

In 1988, the New York Times published an article with the banner headline, “Schools’ Back to Basics Movement Found to be Working in Math.” (I didn’t take the time to find if similar “reports” on the teaching of Social Studies, but I’m sure they’re out there). It was along about this time that I bailed out of the Canadian system and sought my fortune in the international schools network.

Of course, changing the setting didn’t really change  much. In 1991, the NCSS published a report entitled “Social Studies in the Middle School” in which one of the key tenets was – “Designing a Scope and Sequence for the 21st Century.” The Nineties was the decade of Peer Coaching and Individualized Instruction. Our mentor in the wilds of Thailand was an educational guru from California who brought us the  “Best-Yet”phrase to describe our efforts to meet the changing needs of an increasingly technologically sophisticated student population.

The Nineties was, of course, when the Internet arrived to change the face of education (and life, for that matter) for ever. The “best-yet” of 1995 quickly became the “been-there, done-that” of 1997 – and 2000 – and 2005 – but accountability’s still the holy grail of  “best-yet” educational practice. And accountability usually meant enabling students to achieve acceptably high (higher than world-average, of course, in an exclusive International college-prep day school) grades in an increasingly technology-based set of external assessments.

There appears to be hope. In in the 2009 article “Giving, Prompting, Making: Aligning Technology and Pedagogy Within TPACK for Social Studies Instruction” published in “Contemporary Issues in Technology and Social Studies Teacher Education”, there’s a wonderful graphic of the idealized process of Teaching Social Studies today;

But does it seem that this stylized “best-yet” model actually being put into practice? Well, unfortunately, perhpas not. Good Golly, Miss Molly, it’s 2009, and what do we see “turning up again”. Why, it’s an (otherwise unidentified, but likely representative of the field) Scope and Sequence – Eleventh Grad American History. Oddly, though, in the whole 5 page document, there’s no mention of Technology, or for that matter, of  Teaching Pedagogy or of Learning. There are just 5 pages of highly prescriptive, content-specific sequential events to be covered – and then tested.

How can teachers and schools ensure that their students are learning what they need when it comes to Technology and Information Literacy when the two are not even referenced together in the current guiding literature for the subject?

My apologies again to my Social Studies teaching colleague (and again, the disclaimer that the same is almost certainly true in every discipline), but how inconsistent with “Best Practice” is that?

Essential Question: Who’s job is it to teach the NETs and AASL standards to students?

It’s Everyone’s Responsibility (if we decide that NETs and AASL standards are what we aspire to, that is).

• Everyone
• Everyone teaching
• Everyone teaching kids
• Everyone teaching kids to standards
• Everyone teaching kids to online standards
• Everyone teaching kids to standards
• Everyone teaching kids
• Everyone teaching
• Everyone…

So who’s “everyone”? Everyone is;

• the classroom teacher who faces the kids day to day)
• the special-subject teacher (Health, PE, etc, who meet the kids at intervals)
• the support specialist (Technology, Information Literacy, who largely support teachers)
• the counsellors, who support the kids in meeting teachers’ expectations
• the administration (who oversee those who meet the kids f2f)
• the parents, who trust the schools to set “the standards”

And that, of course, begs the question, “Who’s job is it to SET the standards?”

But that’s a question for another day.

In a nutshell, the explosion of web-based video is literally ejecting the teaching and learning landscape into a whole new trajectory: and it’s like an unstoppable, solid-rocket boost rather than a jet’s vigorous thrust, a turboprob’s gentle urging, or a prop-engine’s noisycajoling its payload forward.

The new  teaching and learning environment, in which lessons, examples, experiments and speculative meanderings are all freely available, in equal measure, to both teacher and learner, puts education on a laissez-faire footing not seen since Socrates schooled his charges.

It may be that technology is finally able to help bridge the divide between the teacher and the learner. For the one billion lucky enough to have access to the tools that brought us web-based video who are truly interested in being learners, there is no limit to what they might achieve.

Frankly, though, at the real interface of teaching and learning, where 20th-century schooled and trained teachers still guide “digital-native” students, the story is a bit more mundane.

Examples?

United Streaming

Three years ago, we licensed United Streaming, just as is it was becoming Discovery Streaming.

The promise of Discovery Streaming was seductive. In 2007, The International Society for Technology in Education completed review of the Discovery Education unitedstreaming and determined that the program clearly supports the implementation of the ISTE National Educational Technology Standards (NETS) for Students.

Combined with the size of the video database (40,000 videos and clips), focussed content (short clips to full-length videos), and the ubiquity of access through the web, it seemed that streaming video would render DVD obsolete before it could ever becom a media standard.

Then, when some of its limitations, such as download issues regarding firewalls and bandwidth, began to become apparent just as YouTube was taking off, offering FREE content on almost any topic imaginable, the luster of a paid service like DS quickly waned.

When we declined to renew the license after two years to only a handful of almost wistful emails of concern, the handwriting was on the wall. Expensive subscription databases, whether for periodicals, fulltext reference services, or media, are an endangered species.

Enter YouTube

YouTube is the first, I suspect, of a whole new paradigm for personal expression. Where generations of scribblers once wrote for a tiny chosen readership, now everyone from aspiring academics and eclectic entrepreneurs to downy-eyed dreamers and silicone snake-oil salesmen can vomit out their beliefs, biases, and unpolished pitches to the cold Crystal Eye of the webcam. Every subject imaginable has been covered, with many points of view cleverly explored. There is truly something for everyone on the web, and now it’s available in full motion glory. For the truly committed, web-based video is the new Information El Dorado.

Model on display in the Gold Museum, Bogotá, Colombia

So what’s wrong with this Picture?

Sure, it’s distorted but more important is the signal-to-noise ratio. In an environment where so much is unpolished, unfinished, inaccurate, or deliberately misleading, how can a data-miner be sure he or she is following a true high-grade vein of information?

There is so much on YouTube truly not worth the time to access that it makes the paucity of  authoritative print material on the open web seem like the Mother Lode by comparison.

In a world where we are constantly bombarded with more conflicting information, more contradicting scientific conclusions, and much, much more raw data all the time, who has time to troll through the endless files of dross that make up the bulk of YouTube?

By the time you locate a promising file, download it so you can play it uninterrupted (for those  still in the “third-world” of information access speed) and then play to evaluate it for authority, bias, content and currency, you can often have just created something yourself of equal value.

Undeniable, however, has been streaming video’s  impact on the market for other media formats.  Three years after purchasing our first DVDs and now having “officialy” retired our VHS collection, we are already faced with the next generation media storage. We are still buying DVD’s, but at one time we owned 5,000 VHS titles, while after three years we still have only around 1,000 DVDs. Because of the need to migrate to both new media (BlueRay?) and compatible players, it is likely that HD-DVD will remain almost unused in the near future.

The reason? FREE streaming video. Aside from the the ubiquitous YouTube, free video content is available from everything from CNN and ESPN feeds to Indie developers to professional blogs. On the Environment, for example

YouTube (What’s the Worst that Can Happen? Greg Craven, Indepent teacher & author)

Democracy Now (Fracking and the Environment. Abrahm Lustgarten, ProPublica)

TED Talks (What’s Wrong with What we Eat? Mark Bittman, NYTimes Food Writer)

Of course, it’s important to not  limit oneself to one’s own personal favorites, be it the Age or Ted Talks. That way lies the same one-trick ponyism that many tech afficianados fall prey to (“Read these blogs and  you’ll never go wrong”).

The answer may be in a next-generation Google that can truly and “intelligently” sift through the mountain of visual verbiage (if a picture’s worth a thousand words, what’s a minute of 30fps video worth?). But until the new Google truly rises phoenixlike from the ashes of the best of the text-dependent search algorithm web-crawlers, web-based video will still be a poor-man’s information side-show, the domain of the “truly committed” or the “obsessed”. 

The Onion (Taco Bell’s New Green Menu takes no Ingredients from Nature) 

Hmmm…

During the current SUNY Technology class, at least three groups are wrestling with ISB’s Acceptable Use Policy. Two groups are redrafting existing divisional Acceptable Use Policies to bring improved currency and relevance to documents several years old.  This project is to attempt to forge a link between the somewhat subjective wording of the AUP’s as currently in development and the very objective requirements of applying principles of “acceptable use” in a real-world environment; in this case, ISB’s Main Library.

For the purposes of this reflection, I will concentrate on the work of the HS AUP and Main LIbrary
“Technology Use Agreement” teams, since the most significant disparities between policy and behavior appear at this level. By the time they reach high school, students are better equipped to both assess their own personal actions and to rationalize this behavior.

A surprising revelation as I have considered this project is that none of the related documents (from ISB) are currently (at least prominently) available on ISB’s website or 1st-generation linked pages. A Google search for “ISB Bangkok” along with “AUP” or “Acceptable Use Policy” does not turn up a working link to a current AUP at any division level. This fact alone suggests that ISB’s core relationship to an AUP needs to be rethought. The quickest way to ISB’s existing AUP’s is through the SUNY Technology Course currently in action, where the current AUP’s are offered as attachments (scroll to the bottom).

Neither is the laptop-loan-agreement we have used for the four years since we adopted wireless laptops in our Main LIbrary available online. In my search I came across Acceptable Use Policies, Laptop Loan Agreements, and Technology Use Agreements, but none from ISB.

Once again, kudos to our very own ISB SUNY instructors Jeff Utecht and Chad Bates, for finding some of the best summarties of current thinking on AUPs, posted as resources for this course from AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) For New Web Tools by Dr. Howie DeBlasi (His keynote address from the AzTEA Conference, January 31, 2009 is worth a view)

Meanwhile, while I believe in a review of the overarching guiding principles of acceptable technology use at ISB, in our Main LIbrary, we still need a tangible, quickly reviewable but relatively comprehensive set of guidelines which we will ask student patrons to sign off on. As we review our school webpages, whatever emerges as a full-blown new AUP will  be placed at the library pages. For now, here is the proposed  “isb-technology-use-agreement-final-090509” which will likely continue to be used as the “rubber-meets-road” working document to hold students accountable for acceptable technology use in Main LIbrary.

I’ll get to why this it. But first – In view of the “digital reality” of (our) students today, I’ve been seriously considering retiring one of the “soapbox speeches” I sometimes trot out when talking with a class that has that particular glazed-look attitude to actually looking in a book for information on their current assignment

“HEY! Check this out!” I tell them, once I’ve got their attention by jumping up on a chair, a table, or whatever is available that can give me a bit of a vantage (I’m only 5′8″ and shrinking…) and using my traveling evangelist voice.

“There’s a new technology you should know about for this assignment It’s the most amazing device ever invented for gathering, storing and providing quick answers to just about any question you might have. It’s compact, reasonably lightweight, instantly accessible, and infinitely retrievable. The information is logically organized in a way that’s easy to follow and convenient to reproduce for your own use. Setup is a snap, and there’s no tangle of cables and plugs drive you buggy. Best of all, it doesn’t even need electricity. Just grab it and GO!

I hold up a book, usually one measuring more than the 1 cm thick that I’ve noted as the limit of most teens’ interest (”if the answers aren’t in 64 pages, I’ll just Google it…”)

“This is it,” I tell them. It’s called a BOOK. And it’s a timeless example of “QUALITY“...

***

I spent the Songkran vacation upcountry (well, it’s looks like “downcountry” on a map, but it’s distinctly UPCountry).  This trip I decided to just go Cold Turkey. I packed a briefcase, the backpack I usually haul all my laptops bits around in, and, for good measure, the conference bag picked up at Learning 2.0 – with printed BOOKS, and every day I treated myself to a couple new titles.

It’s been a while since I spent any amount of real quality time reading for pleasure, and so many of the titles I had on this trip were fiction, and there area some great reads here. Check out my thoughts on these at “Reading for the Future“. Heading into this break, I figured I also would have some time on my hands (like during the 13 1/2 hour drive down) when I wouldn’t be able to read, but I could listen, so I downloaded several new titles to my phone (I don’t have an iphone, so need to list on my O2). I recently listened to “One Second After” and decided I wanted something along that line, so I had 12 hours of ”Apocalypse 2012″ by Lawrence E. Joseph to chew over. Joseph’s take on the many and varied ways in which events seem to be converging toward an inevitable collapse of society (and the technologies that underpin it) as we have come to expect them, is, in my view, a “must-read” for anyone in education, in the tech world, or just in the business of “getting on with life”.  While a true “apocalypse” may be not be inevitable, I believe that a rethink of our expectations for the future IS – and enduring quality figures prominently in whatever that future holds.

Because both “One Second After” and “Apocalypes 2012″ are pretty dark visions of the future, and to provide a bit of timeless food for thought, I also decided on this trip to try out one of our new MP3 CD audiobooks. This gave me another 9 hours of “Zen and Now” a recently published followup to the classic “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”. For anyone who has ever read and mulled over Robert Pirsig’s reflections on “Quality“, n “Zen and Now”, Mark Richardson offers up his own road-trip along with unique insights into Pirsig’s philosophy, and details of the Pirsig’s personal journey that, as a rider myself (with several motorcycling incidents detailed in my own book), I found absolutlely riveting. A “must-read” (or listen. Actually, this is one of those titles that I find huge pleasure in going back to again and again to listen while the miles spool by). Don’t miss it!

Of course, I didn’t ignore the non-fiction side either. To start out, I reviewed, skimmed, or otherwise perused a collection of new titles recently arrived for our library on environment/climate topics. All of these, now available in our Main Library, are worth checking out. If you aren’t yet convinced of the gravity of the situation facing the world today, or if you’re convinced, but uncertain of how you, as a single individual, can be “part of the solution rather than part of the problem”, check these out;

• Climate Chaos. Your Health at Risk. Cindy L. Parker & Stephen Shapiro. Praeger, 2008
Energy Supply and Renewable Resources. Regina Anne Kelly. Checkmark Books, 2008
• Going Global. Key Quest for the 21s Century. Michael Moynagh & Richard Worsley. A&C Black, 2008.
• Harnessing the Sun’s Energy. Why Science Matters. Heinemann, 2009.
• Plan C. Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change. Pat Murphy. New Society Publishers, 2008
• Seven Years to Save the Planet. Questions and Answers.  Bill McGuire. Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 2008

Better yet, I brought with me the print copy of “Born Digital. Understanding the First Generation of Digital Natives“, by John Palfrey and Urs Gasser (Basic Books, 2008).

I picked it up and glanced at the introduction, intending to skim it and summarize what I figured I already had a pretty good handle on. But then I found myself actually reading it fully, nodding at the examples that struck a chord, reflecting on the discussions we’ve already had on topics covered, and turning over in my head the things we haven’t discussed yet. I found myself going back to chapters that seemed particularly relevant and mulling over the salient points. The chapter on Quality was particularly of interest in view of my concurrent listening to “Zen and Now” and thinking back to Robert Pirsig’s theses on quality from 40 years ago. I even bookmarked several of the key points, and the book is beginning to develop a thumbed-through look even though I’m the first reader. If you’re one of the shrinking number of people who still love to read real books, get the book and spend some quality time with it.  For starters, chew on this (I’ve blogged about this on several occasions)

• p. 14 par.3 ”One of the most worrying things about all digital culture is the huge divide it’s opening up between the havs and have nots.”, and
• p. 14 par.4 “The vast majority of young people born in the world today are not growing up as Digital Natives.”

And don’t stint on Chapter 7. In the digital age, these points are more relevant than ever.  

• p. 161 – “Information quality goes directly to the heart of what it means to have a freer society. Unfortunately not all Digital Natives see it this way… In conversations with Digital Natives about information quality, questions like “So what?” and “Who Cares” are common refrains.”
• p. 163 – “It’s essential that all of us be able to differentiate good information from bad. By virtue of their age and education level Digital Natives are more susceptible  than adults to the threats posed by inaccurate information.”
• p. 165 – “When speaking about information quality, we always need to ask: “Quality” viewed from what perspective and in what context?”
• p. 166 – “…young people who access the Web, for instance, through computers in the library need to get the information very quickly and thus don’t have the time to evaluate their sources carefully.”
• p. 167 – “The ability to make quality judgements about information on the internet is not an innate skill.”

There’s more, much more. Get the hard copy and do yourself a favor. Spend some Quality time with “Born Digital” and in particular, with Chapter 7.

Back to the shop, to reality, tomorrow. I’ll be continuing to think, though, about quality – and I’m thinking that Robert Pirsig, Mark Richardson, and others, who worked, and still exist, almost exclusively in the world of print, may really have the answers (and the questions) that those “Born Digital” may never experience.

Perhaps, in the end, I consider myself lucky to be a “Digital Settler” (”Born Digital, p. 3). I like this designation better than the more commonly used “Digital Immigrant”. I’ve been there from the beginning. I worked on my first Commodore Vic20 program  (4 K of memory delivered straight to a tv monitor) for a travelling set of the new devices in Abbotsford School District in BC, Canada, in 1980. I have a collection of personal computers including one of those Vic20s, a Commodore PET, a Radio Shack TRS80, and each of the Macintosh models from the original Mac128 to the last of the all-in-one models (the Color Classic, in 1995). I appreciate quality – and I’ll keep striving for it as I move into the future – whatever it holds.

I’m a strong proponent of modernizing copyright laws to reflect changes in both technology AND in society, As part of this course, I added a Creative Commons Atttibution-Noncommercial-Share Alike License to this blog. I’m on track to become a truly 21st century “cyber-citizen”.

I still worry, however, about simply bowing to the inevitable: the inevitable, in this case, is the perhaps inescapable conclusion that technology is making digital “mashups” of content from a growing number of technically accessible sources the norm in the “cyber” world.

Should we just assign a Creative Commons license to everything out there and be done with it? Encourage our students to troll the web, grab a selection of keyword-linked bits, paste them up in an approximation of original thought (providing  web-link attribution where it’s obviously not our own material) and throw in a few pithy aphorisms to give the piece the illusion of depth? It’s the way of the future, it seems.

But then a piece; a well-researched, documented and carefully crafted written piece, comes across my desk that forces me to re-think my complacency at accepting yet another small chipping away of traditional standards of scholarly research and creative expression. Make no mistake; I believe that the current penchant for posting every whimsy and personal conceit to the cyber-world at large is morphing the global pool of informative thought and creative expression into a quagmire of personal opinion superfluity.

The piece that got me thinking along this line was was an article in the March 20, 2009 issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education. forwarded to me by Dr. Jeff Harper, a thoughtful and broadly-read HS Counselor at our school, the article reminds me to consider the possible logical conclusions if we continue down the path which has brought us;

The Globalization of Cheating

Image reproduced from “Cheating Goes Global as Essay Mills Multiply” The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 20, 2009

Do we, as a global society, need to rethink copyright laws?” Of course. With the exponential growth of data and knowledge, we need to find new ways of exploiting and sharing original thought, recombining disparate ideas, and creating original new theses to explain our world. These kinds of creative endeavors should not be hamstrung by archaic systems of citation or attribution.

What’s our role as educators in copyright usage in schools?

• To move past the “letter of the law” approach focusing on a minimalist “what we can get away with” attitude,  or “the world’s your oyster” approach promoting the tired rehashing of an ever-decreasing pool of original thought.
• To re-introduce a regard for intellectual property that seems to be slipping away, emphasizing, from our efforts at introducing students to scholarly research, the ethical consideration of using other people’s work in the service of our own.
• To consider the “logical conclusion” of promoting uncritical, smorgasbord-based information selection and regurgitation instead of meaningful data harvesting and thoughtful digestion leading to the synthesis of real new ideas.

I don’t believe that it’s possible to overstate the seriousness of this situation. We ignore the “globalization of cheating” at our, and our future decision-makers’, peril; perhaps at the peril of the very societies that have brought about this Information “Garden of Eden”.

How can I make such a broad, sweeping statement? I base this on Jared Diamond’s fifth core reason for societal collapse, which is “the political cultural, and social factors in a society which make it more or less likely that a society will succeed…”

I believe that our inability to retain certain core societal values truly does threaten our very future. Who will generate new Eureka experiences if we teach the next generation to just “borrow” without building on original ideas?  Will the breadth and depth of “scholarly” thought wither from the inevitable decline of original thought when everyone is continually rehashing the thoughts of a few renegade thinkers? Will our society truly Fail, as proposed by Jared Diamond, because, among other things, we do not address root social problems that threaten to destablilize that society – like the “globalization of cheating”.

All of Diamond’s arguments are compelling – and truly frightening for the future. Worth 18 minutes of your time if you haven’t read the book…

TED Talk “Why Societies Collapse”  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/jared_diamond_on_why_societies_collapse.html

‘,width:’100′,height:’100′” width=”100″ height=”100″ align=”" />

object>

Reduced to a few basic concepts as I’ve wrapped my head around them, and with apologies to John if I’ve misunderstood or misinterpreted his message, he has convinced me to seriously consider that;

• In addition to initiatives on carbon conservation and reduction and efforts to replace fossil fuels with renewables, we need to add a “third leg” to the global environmental recovery strategy, and that is to restore every degraded environment on the planet to its natural balance.
• This is not an insurmountable challenge. John’s documentation of the changes to 35,000 square kilometers of the Loess Plateau in China over just 10 years is an amazing affirmation of what can be done when political will is turned to practical implementation of real-world projects.
• The 21st century preoccupation with atmospheric CO2 reduction is a misplaced and overly complex approach to simple systemic global problem. The overarching problem is rooted in human activity planetwide which replaces natural ecosystems with subsistence agriculture.
• Replacing natural ecosystems with subsistence agriculture has one logical natural conclusion, which is the ultimate degradation of the environment resulting in barren, unproductive deserts.

Furthermore, John proposes, and makes a strong case that;

• ALL of the environmental issues we’ve been bombarded with over the past ten years can be addressed at some level with a simple fix involving rebuilding the land’s ability to retain available rainfall and so to recover its natural propensity toward biological diversity and equilibrium.
• Physical reclamation of biodiversity on a local level can have  global climatic impacts – and virutally all of these impacts are positive.
• integrated poverty eradication and large-scale ecosystem rehabilitation go together. Local biodiversity recovery projects lead to the reduction of poverty and overal raising of the standard of living, which in turn can lead to the reduction of negative ecological behaviors, which reinforces ecological recovery, which leads to regional weather modification, which ultimately can have global impact.

Further, in order to become globally effective;

• the movement has to be “organic” – “grass-roots”, if you will. It has to be furthered by the actions of committed individuals involved in local action with regional or global consequences.

The source material for the notes above are available in more detail at a post somewhat down the homepage on the Earth’s Hope blog but the very essence of what John presented can be seen in the before and after images at the Earth’s Hope website. If you find these images striking, be sure to download the “Lessons from the Loess Plateau” video and watch the entire amazing story unfold.

I’ve spent several hours with John over the past three days, listening to his vision, revelling in the imagry he has presented, and mulling over where to go from here. Although John argues vociferously against adopting a “ready, fire, aim” approach, cautioning that the first step is to seek to understand how the current state has been reached, and then to adopt sound ecological interventions around water retention and biodiversity reestablishment, at the simplest level, it seems to me, I need to do something…and so do you... You can start by reading John’s story, viewing some of the footage posted at the Earth’s Hope website, and then reviewing (and perhaps contributing to) the issues raised on the Earth’s Hope blog.

My personal memmonic for the second half of Buddhism’s Eight-Fold Path (Right “Livelihood” through Right “Effort, Mindfullness and Concentration”) is -”Live Every Moment Carefully”

“Earth’s Hope” is that each of us will do exactly that. It’s never too late to start.