blog post: David Lankes

"Kristin Fontichiaro and R. David Lankes join Henry Jenkins as AASL 2012 Fall Forum facilitators"

Virtual Dave…Real Blog
News, thoughts, ideas, and more from R. David Lankes 

April 23, 2012

count: 1 page

This is one of the more compelling reasons I would want to attend AASL, in a perfect world.

* Fontichiaro working to deconstruct transliteracy so it is more comprehensible; attendees will build a definition of transliteracy

 * Lankes will share about the collaborative nature of transliteacy; how to advocate for it; how to highlight relevance of school librarians in this environment. 

 * "His more recent work involves how participatory concepts can reshape libraries and credibility."

A friend of mine serves as library consultant at ESC10 in the Dallas, Texas area, and her site will be one of those offering a satellite site for the program. Registration is still amazingly steep, though.

book: Inside view of Google

In the Plex: How Google thinks, works, and shapes our lives

Steven Levy

2011, Simon & Schuster

count: 69 pages (as of May 2: finished Part 1, 69 out of 432)

I've heard a steady stream of rumor and conjecture during the last decade about Sergey Brin and Larry Page and how they came to start Google.

And the day Google announced Google Drive, I happened to be in my public library and ran across this book.

It may be every doc student's dream to ditch the academics and go make a billion. And apparently, they helped a good number of other doc students do just that, by coming to work for Google.

This is an interesting read (and listen) because Levy was actually allowed access to many of the behind-the-scenes stories and events for this notoriously secretive corporation. 

As I'm reading through it, I keep coming across some nugget that I think I have to post on this blog.  But now I'm seeing just too many such gems to actually be able to share all.  Google truly does "shape our lives," and Levy makes his point that Brin and Page have indeed "changed the world."

So I'll keep reading -- sharing as relevant, and being amazed at this historically unique and prodigious event known as Google.  Wow.

online news article: New York and School Librarians

"NY Board of Regents Supports School Librarians in All Elementary Schools"

By Rocco Staino

School Library Journal online
April 30, 2012

count: 2 pages

A welcome move that makes New York look very wise and ahead of the game: the Board of Regents has backed the plan to have a certified librarian in every elementary, as it has already done at the middle and high school levels (though not enforced, the article shares).

Maribel Castro from Lubbock shared with the TLC listserv, ""I want our community to know that change can happen!"

We need such voices of encouragement right now, in Texas fer shure.

web news: Collaboration across library types

"It Takes Two: SLJ’s first public library spending survey uncovers an opportunity for tighter collaboration between school and public librarians"

By Rebecca T. Miller and Laura Girmscheid
May 1, 2012

count: 2 pages

 School Library Journal has published its first survey of public library spending habits for children’s and young adult services. The headline nugget from the report is that public and school libraries aren't collaborating to make purchasing more efficient and complementary.

The idea of working with a public library to coordinate book purchasing had never occurred to me. I obviously needed to be educated on this, particularly when the article explains the way such collaboration can support the curriculum and make students stronger. 

I can see why it would make great sense to give the Lackland Air Force Base Library a call every now and then, just to let them know what we have, what students are requesting, and to find out what they have and what they might want to buy. 

Unfortunately their purchasing is not done locally; it's done federally. But there are two local public branches that I could contact and try the same approach with. 

I also found it interesting that the SLJ report "Libraries that expect a drop in their kids’ and YA book circulation explain that it’s likely due to transient populations, as well as shrinking budgets and a market flooded with electronic devices." And they're not just speaking of Kindles or Nooks: they're also talking about gaming devices, TV, and mobile apps.

Recently I've been on the prowl for statistics on -books, and the article mentioned this topic as well:

Naturally, interest in ebooks is growing, but efforts are hampered by the limited offerings of big publishers. The main digital book suppliers are OverDrive and TumbleBooks. Two-thirds of libraries that don’t carry ebooks say they plan to do so or will consider doing so in the next year.

 In my earlier report for the course position paper, I did not even consider TumbleBooks. I'll need to check why: either we don't subscribe to downloadable books from TB, or else the report is speaking only of interactive rather than downloadable books.

If someone doesn't have time to read the entire news article, the infographic alone is worth the time to examine.

online Storage: Google Drive

This post points to a concrete example of Chris Anderson's thoughts in his second book, Free: The future of a radical price in which he discussed the inexorable tendency of prices for digital, electronic items (or bytes) to decrease to the point of "free." In this case, storage, lots of it, is now free.

"Introducing Google Drive... yes, really"

Official Gmail Blog, April 24, 2012

count: 2 pages

It hasn't been that long since Steve Jobs was one of the few individuals who could afford this much storage.With last week's Google announcment of Google Drive, its free online storage for all sorts of digital files, the world saw the first real competitor to DropBox. 

Similar to DropBox, Google provides 5 GB (gigabytes) of storage for free, and even more, this storage is posited in the online collaborative world of Google Docs, so as the Google blog post says, 

Store everything safely and access it anywhere (especially while on the go). All your stuff is just... there. You can access your stuff from anywhere—on the web, in your home, at the office, while running errands and from all of your devices.

This freemium service will be a real money-maker for Google, who is good at that sort of thing. Currently DropBox offers 2GB free, and then offers upgrades beginning at $9.99 monthly (this rate for up to 32GB if you refer lots of friends). 

With Google Drive, each customer begins with 5GB, with the least-expensive upgrade priced at $2.49 per month, for 25GB. I'm expecting some immediate changes in the DropBox business model if they are to remain viable.

Is it just me? Or are we indeed seeing amazing changes, innovations, trends, and shifts throughout the digital world, in an amazingly small period of time? It's enough to make one dizzy.

Oh, post-data: The interactive banner logo on the Google Blog linked above is a lot of fun to play with.

book: The Atlas of New Librarianship

The Atlas of New Librarianship
R. David Lankes

2011, The MIT Press

count: TBD  finished 23 pages

(408 pages, but I won't get them all thoroughly read)

An essential guide to a librarianship based not on books and artifacts but on knowledge and learning. Post to follow -- I'll work on this until our semester and reporting period end.

Update 5/2/2012

My reading in this text is the single regret for my supplemental reading this semester. I really wanted to get into this complex and amazingly rich resource, and I can only say that I honestly consumed only 23 pages. I spent lots of time examining and unraveling the infographics.

I would like to request a full course, doctoral level, on this text alone. It would take a full semester, and all the discussion and collaboration seen in a course to absorb all this.

book: "Being Indispensable"

Being Indispensable: A school librarian's guide to becoming an invaluable leader 

Ruth Toor and Hilda K. Weisburg

published 2011 by Amer Library Assn Editions

count: 184 pages when completed (I'll confirm completion with full post)  as of May 2, only 88 pages completed)

I'm still in the process of reading this book, but the purpose of the work: "to raise awareness that twenty-first-century learning requires school librarians to be leaders." (Introduction, p. ix) So far this is a powerful read.

news article: Dying Technologies

"15 Current Technologies My Newborn Son Won’t Use"

Avram Piltch

April 9, 2012    Gizmodo 

count: 1 page

Some of these technologies are obviously dying (land-line phones, fax machines) while others make sense, once I read about them (wired home Internet, dedicated cameras and camcorders, slow-booting computers). 

A few surprised me:

• hard-drives
• movie theatres
• 3-D glasses
• the mouse
• remote controls
• desktop computers
• optical disks

And a few shocked me:

• windowed operating systems
• phone numbers
• prime time television

An intriguing read!

web editorial: "Friction" and eBooks

“Friction” and Progress: ALA Pushes the Big Six Ebook Holdouts

By Francine Fialkoff
March 6, 2012
Library Journal news online

count: 1 page

This is a somewhat retro perspective after my prior post today. But I cite this article because it explains the term friction in reference to eBooks, and it also posits that use in an historical context. Good reading.

Friction refers to libraries lending eBooks with patrons having "no trips to pick up or return books." Macmillan’s Alison Lazarus put it this way: “We want to insure that customers who have typically been book buyers do not migrate their purchasing into borrowing.”

Heavens. Just how did Andrew Carnegie get past this obvious elephant in the room?

web news article: judicial ruling on ebook prices

"Huge Win for Citizens of Kindle Nation, and Amazon:  U.S. Justice Department Sues Apple and Five Big Publishers Over eBook Price Fixing; Three of Five Rush to Settle; Millions to be Paid Out to Customers "

by Steve Windwalker

Kindle Nation, April 11, 2012

count:2 pages (tangential research to discover the identities of the Big 6)

The US Justice Department has stepped into the eBook pricing world with both feet -- and appears to have dramatically impacted the pricing we should see on Kindle books (and thus, other eBooks) in the future.

With evidence of Jobs and Apple working with publishers to "create a real mainstream e-books market at $12.99 and $14.99," as opposed to the $9.99 average, the government will "vigorously pursue the suit against Apple and the two publishers that did not settle."

Of the Big 6 publishers (see list below), 5 were being sued, 3 settled, and 2 are holding out, along with Apple.

I've wondered for a long time why this obvious  monopoly was being allowed. I just needed to wait a bit longer for the slow wheels of justice. Let's just hope they are also inexorable.

Big 6 Publishers?
From what I can determine, these are

• Hachette (settled)
• HarperCollins (settled)
• Macmillan  (to fight the suit)
• Penguin Group (to fight the suit)
• Simon & Schuster (settled)
• Random House (not included in the JD suit)

5/2/2012
Post data: I learned through my e-books study that Random House is the only publisher cooperating with vendors to offer e-books for a lending model.

blog post: History of school library standards

"History of School Library Standards- A Timeline"

Cawood Cornelius, Library Media Specialist, NBCT

on Georgia Library Media Association, Feb. 6, 2008

count: 1 page (bibliography to be pearled later)

Sharing from his dissertation research, Cornelius shares the history of school library standards in this guest post on the GLMA blog site. It's interesting to note that the first formal report on school library standards was presented and adopted in 1917 at the Symposium of the North Central Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools, and these standards were adopted the following year.

This guest blog post does an excellent job of providing context to school library work and the understanding, as Mary Garver wrote in Every child needs a school library (1962), that the library is "the heart of the educational program."

textbook reading, continued: Part III

I completed the third and final section of the course textbook, and as before, have reviewed and responded to these pages on the Jimdo website.

This portion dealt with policies and safety issues for technology and education, and again, I found much to reflect on and to implement. 

Count: 56 pages

editorial and information source: INFOdocket

Not a new source, but new to me, and now with links to Library Journal news as well!

 

INFOdocket will continue to be the place to find hand-picked news, reports, and links related to the hot library and publishing topics of the day. But now it will also serve as something of a first-pass site, providing context and coverage that will feed into the full reporting coming from the LJ News team.

So now I'm wondering, is this my new, all-purpose, essential news source? I like Gary Parker's goal:

The maximum amount of relevant content in the minimum amount of time.

count: 1 page

State of America's Libraries Report 2012

State of America's Libraries Report 2012

American Library Association

released April 9, 2012

and

"ALA Releases State of American Libraries 2012 Report"

Gary Price

April 9, 2012

Infodocket  / Library Journal

count: 5 pages (1 for news release and 4 for executive summary)

It's never a good thing when the words draconian and libraries appear in the same sentence. But the Executive Summary begins with "2011 was a year of grim headlines." 

The news release concludes this year's SOAL report is that of "stagnating budgets, unsustainable costs, increased student enrollments and reduced staff" (Price, para. 5).

But there is no institution able to view the silver lining outlook than a library, and there were positive points as well.

• Use of libraries and their resources is way up!
• The library profession continues to work for minorities and under-represented groups
• Librarians continue to fight censorship
• Libraries and other First Amendment groups managed to rally effectively to oppose the SOPA and PIPA legistion
• ALA and sister library associations continue to advocate against and highlight the problem of "overly aggressive filtering of educational and social websites used by students and educators" (Ex. Summ, para 19).

Of note also is ALA's "Top Ten List of Frequently Challenged Books in 2011." I nodded at some of the titles, but groaned at a few as well. And, really: 50 years later and we're still challenging To Kill a Mockingbird??

 I hope to make it back to read beyond the Executive Summary -- rich stuff here, and SO MUCH INFORMATION!

 

online news article: Amazon, free Kindle books, and eBook growth

"One in four people end up buying an ebook after borrowing one for free"
by Public Libraries on April 4, 2012

The website of Public Libraries.Com (PLC) posted news from a recent Amazon news release sharing data on ebook lending and purchasing.

Amazon's statistics supported their previous statement that  "authors that participated in the program made more money and sold more ebooks." 

In fact, almost one in four (23%) of Amazon patrons who borrowed an ebook through Amazon's one-book-a-month lending program later purchased other books from the author.

Even lesser-known authors demonstrated increased sales when they allowwed their books to be loaned without charge.

"In March, each time Kindle owners borrowed a KDP (Kindle Direct Publishing) Select book from the lending library, the author received $2.18, leading to significant increases in income for independently-published authors."

The PLC post ends with the pointed wish that "book publishers ... wake up and start loaning out their ebooks at public libraries."

count: 1 page

wiki: Joyce Valenza and 21st Century librarians

From some time back, this exceptional post has me checking, verifying, confirming, and planning for activities in my library. This discussion is nexus of the threads of this course: library leadership and technology.

"You know you're a 21st century librarian if . . . :   Manifesto for 21st Century School Librarians"

Joyce Valenza, October 2010

Information Fluency wiki

count: 3 pages

This length and wide-ranging post came about in response to a new librarian's question to Valenza: "In the 21st century, what does a school librarian do?" 

Valenza's thoughts provide an excellent discussion about the incredible pace of change in our field of librarianship. In view of that dramatic change, she suggests aspects that she considers to be "nonnegotiable" emerging practices.

These aspects fall into distinct areas:

• Reading
• Information Landscape
• Communication and publishing and storytelling
• Collection development
• Facilities of the physical space
• Access, Equity, Advocacy
• Audience and collaboration
• Copyright, "Copyleft," and Information Ethics 
• New technology tools
• Professional development and professionalism
• Teaching and Learning and Reference
• Into the Future (acknowledging the best of the past)

Readers will also benefit from her closing 24-points about what a librarian should NOT be doing.

This would a great starting point for beginning librarians and library students. It's also a great self-check for the more experienced -- lest we begin to fade.

online news: Huffington Post on Pearson INC

"Cuomo, Common Core and Pearson-for-Profit"

Alan Singer, Social studies educator, Hofstra University


Huff Post Education
Posted: 02/28/2012 4:19 pm

count: 1 page

If it has its way, Pearson will soon be determining what gets taught in schools across the United States with little or no parental or educational oversight.

A scary and clearly biased statement. But the evidence to back up this statement is alarming.

Evidence such as:  

• Pearson reported revenues of approximately $9 billion in 2010 and generated approximately $3 billion on just digital revenues in 2011.
•  Pearson is already creating teacher certification exams for eighteen states including New York, organizing staff development workshops to promote Pearson products, and providing school district Pearson assessment tools.
• In New York, Pearson Education currently has a five-year, $32 million contract to administer state test and provides other "testing services" to the State Education Department.
• It also recently received a share of a federal Race to the Top grant to create what the company calls the "next-generation" of online assessments.
• Since 2008, state education officials have been treated to trips to London, Helsinki, Finland, Singapore, and Rio de Janeiro.

 I find these reports to be alarming, at best.

Pew research web page: eBooks and reading

Now that I have discovered the Pew Libraries source, I was immediately captured by a study released April 4, 2012:  "The Rise of EReading." I read the "Summary of findings," and hope to read more of the study in the coming days.

The Rise of EReading

by Lee Rainie, Kathryn Zickuhr, Kristen Purcell, Mary Madden and Joanna Brenner

count: 2 pages

In short, this study reports an amazing rise in both reading devices and those who now read from them. The article is abstracted in this blurb:

21% of Americans have read an e-book. The increasing availability of e-content is prompting some to read more than in the past and to prefer buying books to borrowing them.

The overwhelming impression from the summary is one of the amazing rate of growth in digital reading.

This news is somewhat dismaying: The business models providing access to those ebooks seems huge but chaotic as vendors strategize and move to position themselves for maximal profit and survival in the current market.

Amazon may be the only "safe" platform of choice, reasonable cost, purchase, and dependable delivery, of owned content, to a stable device.

web page: Pew Internet

It's serendipity, really.

I am growing amazed at the number of links to great information that I receive through my Twitter feed. I could never keep up with all the tweets, but when I do take some time to read through some, I am off on a safari for all kinds of intriguing information.

This afternoon I was reminded that my classmates and I had been encouraged to check out the Pew Research organization. So when I Michael Stephens' re-tweet about the Pew Internet's new libraries section of their site, I followed the trail.

"Libraries get a room of their own"
by Mary Madden

Released: March 30, 2012

count: 1 page

The post was merely a notice that the Libraries division (funded by the Bill and Melanie Gates Foundation) was getting its own website. This division is working on a multiyear study of the changing role of public libraries in the digital age. 

But the page itself was a portal to an amazing array of information, data, and presentations based on the Pew research and data sets.

My eyes have been opened!

online article and study: Boys and eReaders

Boys Value Reading More with Ereaders
The Digital Shift, April 6, 2012 By Lauren Barack 

and 

Middle school boys who are reluctant readers value reading more after using e-readers
Public release date: 27-Mar-2012
Margaret Allen (mallen@smu.edu)
Southern Methodist University
 

count: 2 pages

Using Kindles specifically, researchers from SMU in Dallas recently began a 3-part study examining e-readers with middle school students to determine if that use would affect state test scores in reading. There was no such effect, but the study did find that boys rated reading more valuable as an activity after two months of using an e-reader. 

Classroom time spent using e-readers produced a positive attitude in boys in reading improvement classes at an urban middle school. However, the researchers from Southern Methodist University (SMU) in Dallas found the opposite result in girls. 

The study was not intended to be gender-related, but "as the authors began to look through the results, they noted differences between how girls and boys responded to the Kindle experience." Researchers intend to follow up with the students to find out more about what might be influencing the shift in value.

In the study results, comments gathered from students indicated "they liked not having to carry a lot of books; they liked other students not knowing their reading level or choice of book; and they liked that the book they were reading was always available and hadn't been removed from the classroom."

wikipedia article: First-sale doctrine

"First-sale doctrine"
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

count: 3 pages (reading through links given beyond original page)

This week I participated in an ALA webinar by Sue Polanka about eBooks and the environment in which libraries are considering and using this medium for resources.

In the discussion, the phrase right of first sale came up, and I explored a little further. 

I have asked for years why libraries are legally able to do what they do: purchase and then loan materials. In today's atmosphere of strict copyright enforcement attempts and a general rule of "it's my intellectual / creative property and I'll sue if you use it," the background to library circulation was obscured.

Fortunately, this concept cleared that up for  me.

In short, first-sale doctrine has been recognized by court of law and codified by US statute:

It allows the purchaser to transfer (i.e., sell, lend or give away) a particular lawfully made copy of the copyrighted work without permission once it has been legally obtained. This means that the copyright holder's rights to control the change of ownership of a particular copy ends once ownership of that copy has passed to someone else, as long as the copy itself is not an infringing copy. This doctrine is also referred to as the "right of first sale," "first sale rule," or "exhaustion rule."

Now that I understand the legal concept, it seems striking that our digital society has gone so far in the other direction! Profit and corporate restrictions now seem out of balance and questionable: Obviously I have a lot more reading to do.

online magazine article: Testing and Poverty

"Stephen Krashen Pulls the Rug Out From Under the Standards Movement"
By Anthony Cody on April 3, 2012 1:33 PM
Some Comments on Paul Farhi's "Flunking the Test"
        Guest post by Stephen Krashen.

count: 1 page

Krashen continues to hammer at poverty as the issue in "failing" academics in the United States. 

While American students' scores on international tests are not as bad 

as critics say they are, they are even better when 

we control for the effects of poverty: 

Middle-class students in well-funded schools, 

in fact, score at or near the top of world.

And he reminds us of the data: "Only four percent of children in high-scoring Finland, for example, live in poverty. Our rate of poverty is over 21%."

The older I get, the less patience I have with ouro monolithic educational systems --financed by the public's tax dollars-- continuing to be indifferent to recognizing, and fixing, the true "issue."

blog: Youth and Media from Harvard blog

Thanks again to classmates sharing / reminding me of a valuable source of information!

Youth and Media: "From Credibility to Information Quality"

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/youthandmediaalpha/infoquality/

count: 1 page (additional posts will come from the tangential links)

Marty Rossi from ESC20 in San Antonio wrote in early March about The Berkman Center at Harvard  releasing results of a new study. The posting shared a useful infographic as well as these key findings:

1. Search shapes the quality of information that youth experience online.
2. Youth use cues and heuristics to evaluate quality, especially visual and interactive elements.
3. Content creation and dissemination foster digital fluencies that can feed back into search and evaluation behaviors.
4. Information skills acquired through personal and social activities can benefit learning in the academic context.

I am aware how much of my learning is due to professional networking and friends. Thanks, Ty and Marty.

jackpot: Online resource TRAILS

TRAILS: Tools for real-time assessment of information literacy skills 

A project of Kent State library

http://www.trails-9.org/index.php?page=home

accessed this date

count:  6 pages

Eureka! an online tool that allows K-12 students and librarians to easily assess research skills as compared to Ohio Academic Content Standards and the American Association of School Librarians' Information Power and Standards for the 21st-Century Learner.

This resource will allow me to utilize an educationally proven, consistent and quantifiable pre- and post-test for an experimental study in library instruction. 

And did I mention, it's free?? (funded by multiple organizations, including the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) and the U.S. Department of Education.

What did researchers do before the Internet? We should be SO much more efficient now, and SO much more productive.

online news article: Library Instruction pilot

This article, also in response to a search for help measuring student research skills, proved to be more current -- and a quicker read =) than the subject of the immediately previous post. I also found it to be more practical.

"Library instruction pilot improves research skills"

Posted on September 12, 2011 by Rebecca Starkey, Librarian for College Instruction and Outreach

University of Chicago Library News 

count: 1 page

Starkey reported on a pilot that measured the effectiveness of a pilot program integrating library search skills within specific courses at UC. Of value to my needs was a list of specific skills for which the program provided significant help:

• Finding Articles from Citations
• Identifying Materials at Other Libraries 
• Indexes vs. JSTOR

While the program was specific to the post-secondary environment, I believe I could modify specifics to create a simple rubric for high school work.

online document: Measuring research skills

As part of my reading for a possible dissertation study, I am reading about measuring high school students' skills in research and information literacy. (a bottomless pit for the unwary reader).

This particular post refers to a document I found online:

Measuring Student Knowledge and Skills: A new framework for assessment

OECD Programme For International Student Assessment, 2000

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/45/32/33693997.pdf  (accessed this date)

count: 32 pages

 The document itself is 85 pages, but I found the intro material and the section on Literacy to be relevant to my purpose.

The document is dated, but the concept of an international group, seeking a real-life assessment of skills our students need to succeed, was new to me. I found several of their definitions of literacy, and descriptors of specific literacy skills, to be possibly helpful for my learning and use. Pretty solid stuff that echoes much of what we are hearing about authentic assessment of skills.

web page: Using Pinterest

"How to Use Pinterest to Win Contests and Sweepstakes: Tips for Using Pinterest to Improve Your Chances to Win"

By Sandra Grauschopf, About.com Guide

count: 1 page

This seems an unlikely source, but the article tying Pinterest to a practical use caught my eye.

The article reports that vendors are targeting the use of Pinterest to (of course) market their wares. 

Additionally the author suggests using Pinterest as a visual, digital organizer that tracks what contests you've entered, which ones you have won, and so on.

Conclusion is, "In short, Pinterest is a fun way to improve your chances to win sweepstakes, both directly, by offering a new way to enter sweepstakes, and indirectly, by helping to keep you inspired to keep entering, even when you're suffering through dry spells."

Not a very meaty article: content seems pretty intuitively. Not recommended.

blog post: Multimedia Textbook

"Smart History – Multimedia Textbook for Art and History"

Lannon Heflin
ESC Region XIII

post dated March 26, 2012
 

count: 1 page

Lannon serves as the technology guru from Texas' Educational Service Center for Region 13. In that capacity he often posts and shares about issues and resources for K-12 teachers, including news, updates and instruction for the Texas Education Agency's (TEA) Project Share.
 

Today he touched on the same topic I have been reading about, the Khan Academy, whose resources Lannon considers "increasingly awesome."Today's focus is on the Academy's "SmartHistory," which Lannon describes as an "engaging ... multimedia alternative to Art History textbooks." 

I'm hearing more about the Khan Academy (and in particular, digital textbooks via iPads) than I can find time to share with the folks at my district. 

Wow. Maybe if there is smoke, ....

TED Video: Using video to reinvent education

Salman Khan: Let's use video to reinvent education

TED: Ideas worth spreading 

Filmed and posted March 2011

count: 20 pages (20:27 video)

A natural follow-up to the previous post about flipping the classroom, this video records Kahn (originator of the original scope-and-sequence math videos) presenting at TED.

He shares the free, online Kahn Academy website and the opportunity and resources it offers to reinvent the way we do education.

Some cogent take-aways:

• videos let folks learn at their own pace and time

• use the game learning strategy: we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept.
• Fundamental assessment: get 10 in a row and move on. Software automatically forwards you to more and more advanced modules. (Concepts are mapped.)
• Viewing the videos frees up time for the classroom, to make teacher-student interaction as productive as possible.
• Tremendous source of live data reflecting competencies and lacks thereof for the students.
• Goal is to humanize instruction.
• Not focusing on student to teacher ratio, but rather student to valuable-human-time-with-the-teacher ratio.

The Kahn Academy's goal: a global one-world classroom. 
The moderator, Bill Gates, closed with these words: "I think you've just seen the future of education."