Emerging Technologies Consulting

I managed to look at three social software sites/applications this morning.  As I suspected, some of the sites are just not that useful or are defunct.  Of the sites that I looked at, at least one seems like it would be useful, but not for education.  The other two inspired some ideas for assignments using social media, proving that even not so useful sites can be inspiring.  Here’s the lowdown:

1. The first site I looked at was 1000 Words, a site where users can post pictures along with 1000 word essay about the significance of the picture.  There are some interesting photos there and some of the essays are quite moving.  I read one about the death of a son that was quite poignant.  Nothing has been posted to the site since December of 2008 so I think it’s safe to say it’s essentially defunct, but the idea behind the site is really interesting.  I could definitely imagine an assignment where students are required to take a photograph (or use an older photo) and then write a corresponding essay, create a story around that.  If the site is still around over the years, it would certainly serve as a good model.
2. Next up is 12 Seconds, a video sharing site for videos that are, you guessed it, 12 seconds long.  A perusal of some of the videos, however, leads me to the idea that this is where most of the bad stuff on the Internet goes to die.  12 seconds isn’t a lot of time and unfortunately, most people don’t quite know what to do with that constraint.  Again, constraining students to 12 seconds of video might make an interesting assignment, but please have them do some editing first.
3. Finally, there’s 14 Days, a time-tracking/project management site.  This site looks quite useful for tracking the amount of time spent on a project and by multiple individuals.  There’s even a real-time timer so that as you start working on something, say a section of programming, you can see automatically how much time you’ve spent.  No more guess work!  The project manager can see all time spent on a project by several different people and doesn’t have to manually calculate anything.  The site offers both free and paid versions of the product, depending on the number of projects you need to manage.  It looks like a really slick application, but except at the administrative level, it has very little use in education.

Three down, 1997 to go!

Over the last few days, I’ve been working on putting together a video to be presented at a conference on language learning.  My experience with language learning goes back to my first days of reading.  My mother taught high school French and eventually Spanish and Latin.  When I was around 6 or 7, I remember finding her books and started trying to read them.  The conversations presented in them were stilted and old-fashioned even for the 70s.  It would go (in English) something like this:

Girl: Hello.

Boy: Hello.

Girl: My name is Maria.

Boy: My name is John.

Girl: I live in a blue house.

Boy: I live in a red house.

As Eddie Izzard points out, most of the phrases one learns in language class can never be used in a real conversation.  You never seem to learn how to ask where the bathroom is or how to order a meal properly.  Despite the stilted conversations, I continued studying French through college, almost majoring in it.  Of course, majoring in French meant reading Proust in his native tongue, not actually speaking to French people.  I tried that in the summer of 1989, when an opportunity arose to spend time with a friend in France prior to a summer program in England.  I found out that the average French person hasn’t actually read Proust or Zola.  Further, the people I was staying with were all American and tired of speaking French all the time.  I managed to be able to ask the time (and tell someone the time), order food and ask when the next train was, but beyond that, could not carry on a decent conversation.  As far as I can tell, languages are still taught with a focus on literature rather than on having actual conversations.

In making the video, I was trying to make the point that language learning offers an opportunity to open students up to a larger global community, but only if language teachers allow that to happen.  Sitting in booths and memorizing vocabulary and phrases like “The mouse is under the table” isn’t going to help much.  Yes, students need to learn vocabulary, but they also need to talk to real people in that language.  They can do so quite easily now via the Internet.  They can have blogs, participate in Skype calls or IM chats, record podcasts, or participate in virtual worlds such as Second Life or World of Warcraft.  Unfortunately, many teachers aren’t taking advantage of what’s out there instead using the same old rote memorization and stilted conversation methods.  My experience with language teachers has been similar to my experience with other teachers.  There is a small minority experimenting with having their students keep blogs or even have conversations with students who speak the language natively, but most teachers are relying on 20 year old textbooks and recorded material.

My French is rusty now, and most people think of French as an elite language that lets you travel to France and order fancy meals and wine.  However, when I was in high school, some immigrants from Laos showed up in our town and besides the Laotian language, they spoke French.  My mother ended up being the only one who could talk to them.  French is spoken in many countries in Africa as well.  So, even though we think of many European languages as being limited to Europe, thanks to a long history of colonization, these languages are spoken in many countries around the world, opening up an opportunity for students to connect with developing countries and to understand the history of colonization and its impact–on the language, yes–and also on the people and the economy.

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In addition to thinking about the possibilities of language learning beyond where my own classes took me, in looking for video and images to include in my video, I learned quite a bit.  I wanted to find factory photos to represent the idea of industrial education and narrowed it down to child labor photos.  That led me to a set of photos related to a textile plant in Birmingham.  Later, I ended up at a set of postcards about mining in Pennsylvania.  I was fascinated by both sets of images and it really brought the whole child labor issue into sharp relief.  (Despite reading Zola, it’s hard to imagine what child labor was really like).  I also found my way to these Lewis Hines photos, many of which are on Flickr.  As I kept exploring, I watched two different talks, one on kids teaching kids and one on Global Citizen Year.  The first showed up in my feed reader.  The second one I found via photos from Flickr.  My collaborators introduced me to the Life photos hosted by Google, which was a treasure trove of images of classrooms past.

It never ceases to amaze me how much information is available on the Internet.  And the more amazing thing is that it’s only a drop in the bucket.  It’s easy to get lost in the pathways, but it’s also just as easy to make really amazing discoveries.  I wonder if I could brush up on my French using similar pathways, by forcing myself to read French blogs, for example.  Seems like a definite possibility.