The Stick-Shift Book

       My youngest son and I share a passion. We both celebrate cars that are fun to drive. More specifically, we both have more-or-less tried to draw a line in the sand, and only purchase personal cars that have traditional manual transmissions with clutches. I’ve managed to make that stick (oops, sorry ‘bout the double entendre!) over a 45 year driving history, but since my purchasing power has varied wildly over my adult life, it’s contributed to the selection of some pretty odd beasts, including two Fiats, two Renaults, two VWs (the old style ones), not to mention assorted American and Japanese “econo-boxes.” Part of my spin on all this, of course, was the knowledge that standard transmissions were more efficient in mileage and repairs.

My Triumph TR3 did NOT look like this one!

       Interspersed amongst all those purchases were a handful of true sports cars – two-seaters with rag tops. But, again, since I have never had the resources allowing me to have car “toys,” all but one (a 1957 Triumph TR3 of dubious quality) had to provide daily transportation as well. As a result, I’ve always owned vehicles which were neither current (I could never afford a new car), nor vintage. They’re just fun to drive.
       I’m now old enough that it’s probably possible for me to map out my vehicular purchases from here on out. My affection for operating a clutch and throwing a gearshift lever is probably going to be a casualty, since, in fact, the technology of power transmission from engine to wheels has changed radically over the years. Most new sporty cars these days have paddle-shifters, which provide for the manual control of an otherwise automatic transmission. And efficiency has been pretty much taken off the table as well. To hang onto a clutch/gearbox car, I’d probably have to go truly vintage, and, frankly, I have no interest in spending more money for less car, so that’s not a viable option either.
       But this essay is not about that. (You knew that was coming, right? ;-) )

     A few days ago, this L.A. Times article about a San Antonio public library system that had gone all virtual – no paper books at all, only e-reader loaners and e-books available digitally, with a card catalog delivered by touch screen – was posted in Facebook by a techie contact of mine. The reaction, predictably, was “Oh, no! That’s terrible!” And, of course, in my vigilant attempts to perturb the comfort zone of all educators everywhere (!), I nudged the discussion a bit with “perhaps we do ourselves and our interests a disservice by focusing on delivery technology – isn’t this about reading?” Immediately, several folks got on their soap boxes about the wonderful characteristics of paper books, and how terrible it would be to do without them. I was immediately reminded of manual transmissions…
       This is not to say (I assured the thread participants) that I dislike paper books. I actually prefer them, from a tactile and eye-fatigue perspective. Of course, I also truly love the e-book’s ability to instantly define words, allow for non-destructive mark-ups and dog-ears, simultaneous reading (my wife and I share e-books), and instant sharing of quotes and passages. So I’m fully aware of the trade-offs, good and bad, in comparing the technologies associated with delivering reading matter. But such discussions are almost moot. For better or worse, if we were to hand the responsibility of designing a library to a 20-year-old student, chances are it wouldn’t have any paper books in it. (I’m guessing a young person designed the San Antonio library, though the article doesn’t say.)
       Is this tragic? Probably not. Is it ill-advised? Probably so. Is it inevitable? I’d say so, but history will tell, and I know that that won’t be up to me. But in chasing this debate, we’re missing the true issue. What we want our students to do is READ! And we want them to read more than just articles, blogs, social media, emails, and texts – we want them to read long-form content: novels, historical books, books on thinking and philosophy, etc. If a student is already doing virtually all reading on a personal device of some sort, a focus on the paper vs. e-book issue will cause them to check out of the debate, and the more important battle will be lost.
       Yes, there are lots of paper book aficionados out there, even amongst young people. We most certainly need to continue to serve them. But as their numbers shrink (and they will), we need to make sure that we don’t distract ourselves from the true issue – the wealth of reading materials out there which demand book-length treatment, nuance, and reader attention.
       My next car will be an automatic. I’ll have a brief moment of silence as I sign the papers, but then, I’ll get on with my life knowing that driving can still be fun.

Preparing for BYOD -- presentation materials for KySTE Fall Event

Presentation resources

KySTE Fall Event, 1-1/BYOD Institute (Oct. 28, 2013). Contact me for details and feedback.

• AnticipatingBYOD_2013 (PPT) 
• Same title in PDF

Below is the text content of the PPT -- an outline of the talking points for the presentation.

The Technicals

1. Can we support it?

• Be prepared to help all platforms onto your wifi - buy them, and try them! 
• Write the limits of your support of, and liability for, personal devices into your AUP.

2.  Secure?

• CIPA-compliant? Student use of login accounts/email 
• Make sure your system can register and associate devices with login accounts. 
• Design AD groups to scale access based on training (“Digital Drivers License”)

3.  Will it connect and work? 

• Not just wifi capacity, but bandwidth all the way upstream. 
• “Transparent proxy” eliminates proxy dependency of apps and browsers 
• Encourage the selection of resources (tutorials, videos, etc.) which are “device neutral”

4.  FCPS Design and Use 

• EnteraSys hardware. 
• Full 1-1 coverage for high school, middle school classrooms (1 WAP/classroom, several in group spaces). 
• Elementary schools are “close.” 
• 40,000 students, 4,000 adults, 58 schools 44,000 registered devices. Most days show 7,000 active.

Fears 

1.  Student Monitoring, and Off-Task Behavior 

• Begin the discussion now about the impact of more autonomous student work on lesson plan design (more later). 
• Leverage a Learning Management System to manage links, and monitor student access to materials and activities.

2.  The Scary “Cloud” 

• Make teacher, school, and district online presences interactive. 
• Have teacher participation in crowdsourced knowledge construction and discussion a part of their professional responsibilities. Give PD credit for such. 
• Use online storage for teacher professional responsibilities and resources.

Instructional Practice 

1.  The disappearing lecture 

• Start the move away from the teacher role of information deliverer (“Sage on the Stage”), and towards facilitation (”Guide on the Side”). 
• Find and leverage online materials, media, and experts. 
• Examine the “Flipped” classroom concept.

2.  Differentiation 

• 
  
• Increase focus on project-based learning and collaborative learning. 
• Promote classroom practice which can support a variety of activities at once, including an increase in student autonomy.

3.  The “Cloud” 

• Select a student storage platform which works for you age group. Use it now, yourself! 
• SkyDrive, SkyDrive Pro, Google Drive, Dropbox, Learning Management Systems (Edmodo, Moodle, etc.)

4.  Assessment and Accountability 

• Increase the use of online and electronic assessments, especially formative. 
• Add changes in teacher’s instructional practice (rather than just student outcomes) to teacher accountability processes.

Fairness 

1.  Access to devices 

• Provide small numbers of student-use classroom computers for projects which require them. 
• Purchase and make available devices to take home for students who do not have them.

2.  The “Digital Divide” (broadband and 3g access outside of school)

• Expand alternative access through ESS/extended school library hours, and community partners such as city libraries and businesses. 
• Connect to parents through the AUP process.

Do We Really Even Still Need the Question Mark?

       Well, wasn’t that title just a little bit of irony?! But then, I just love such things. There’s a lot hiding behind the question, of course, and it involves the wonderful world of online discourse.

       It is always with some trepidation that I do what I’m about to do, ‘cause I’m painfully aware that a young perspective will be somewhat different than my own (which goes along with the fact that I am not, in fact, a young person). But I began this blog as an examination of the implications of new technologies for human behavior and communication, and that tradition will continue here.
       One of the first communications technologies with which I became acquainted was the LISTSERV, an email-based discussion list which provided archives and a feed to the old BitNet for bulletin board-style display. I’ve written about them here before, and have observed that all online communications platforms are a great deal more alike than they are different. But there has been a slow but profound shift in the style of discourse.
       I will now engage in some very unscientific data gathering. EDTECH, a LISTSERV I used to moderate, still maintains archives going back to 1989. It took a few years for it to pick up steam and become popular, so I picked an arbitrary month: January, 1995. Of the 48 posts that day, 9 originated threads. 2 of those were announcements, the remaining 7 were questions. All of the other 39 were in responses to questions by others. Hence, only 2 of the 48 posts were not associated with someone asking a question of the collected wisdom of the EDTECH list community. And that was just one day.
       For contrast, I fired up my Twitter account and searched the #EDTECH hashtag. Of the 23 recent tweets, two contained questions, but they were both rhetorical, answered later in the same tweet. None actually asked questions. All were announcements or links to resources elsewhere. There were also none on my Facebook feed, although I did not attempt to narrow that by any subject search.
       So here’s the question I’m really asking: What has happened? Maybe people didn’t know very much back in 1995. Or maybe people didn’t know as much about technology in 1995. A lot has happened since then, for sure, but I’m not buying that as an explanation for a behavior change. It’s a little like saying that it was a lot easier to teach US History in 1995, ‘cause there’s been nearly 20 years more history since then.
       Perhaps my study is flawed because the sample is of two radically different populations. Perhaps. The membership of the LISTSERV back in 1995 would have been probably equally divided between K-12 practitioners and higher-ed teacher educators and observes. That pretty much matches the few names I could pick out of the #EDTECH tweet list – I most certainly don’t know them all, hence the “unscientific” nature of my study. Probably the most significant aspect of the LISTSERV population is that these were all early adopters – members of a small group of people engaging in online discussion before it was common, But would that make them less or more likely to ask questions?
       Maybe a much more likely explanation is that the LISTSERV was set up by someone specifically interested in providing a place to ask questions. In contrast, Twitter and Facebook are specifically set up to encourage the declarative – Twitter’s tweet composer specifically asks “What’s happening?” Facebook asks “What’s on your mind?” Both seem to encourage the participant to answer those questions, rather than posing questions of her own. But in any case, my sense is that something has fundamentally changed about the nature of online discourse. And my contention is that it isn’t positive.

       All of the education technology observers I know are all about the deeper end of the learning pool – problem/project-based learning, Socratic method, critical thinking, student-driven learning – lots of implied question-asking in those learning paradigms. But when we look at these same people in the open arena of online discourse, things are quite different. Everybody wants to be a leader using the declarative, and no one wants to be a follower asking the question.
       Well into the 2nd decade of the 21st Century, our society has relegated the question mark to secondary status. If we really want to know something, we ask Google or Bing, though we call that a "search," not a question. (It's a little easier to see now, isn't it, why "Ask Jeeves" died as a search engine trade mark!) A search engine will not notice, or care, that we don’t already know the answer. Of course, we'll have lost that very basic of human behaviors, asking for help.
         And we don’t even have to use a question mark.

High Schools, Part 2: Judi Day, and the Video-Linked Classroom

Judi Day at the beginnings of Fayette Co,'s VLC, 2002

       Judi Day taught mathematics at Lafayette High School, specifically upper level courses such as calculus, retiring several years ago. Two weeks ago (Wednesday, April 17, 2013) she succumbed to cancer. She was a first-rate teacher, and will be missed by those who knew her.
      Although my background is high school mathematics as well, my contact with Judi was never directly about that. I have been the coordinator of the Video-Linked Classroom program at Fayette County Schools for over 12 years, most of that program's existence. The VLC provides technology support for connecting high school classes together though videoconference hardware, providing the ability of one high school to serve classes for which they have no instructor, or insufficient class enrollment to justify providing one. Our district has provided a supplemental stipend for a teacher willing to teach remote students, and the technology office has provided the hardware and logistic support. All the "remote" school need supply is supervision and test proctoring. The idea is such a simple and elegant one, you would think the program would sell itself.

Remote students

       Back in 2002, a local high school had 5-6 students wanting to take Calc B/C (a second year calculus course at the high school level). With those counts there was no way to justify paying staff to offer the course, and the math department chair there asked for a video-link connection. It took a little schmoozing to get Judi on board, but she proved to be the perfect choice. She deeply cared about students no matter where they sat, was willing to become familiar with the small amount of technology required (mostly just a document camera), and, not incidentally, was unafraid of being on camera. She regularly stated that her best Calc II students were at the remote site, a remark that matched most of the research on this style of distance education -- after all, students taking a course through a videoconference link were doing so because the only other option was doing without. Those students tended to be quite motivated.
       Judi taught a least one video-linked class almost continuously over the last 8-9 years of her teaching career. She taught probably 1/3 to 1/2 of all the classes offered this way in our district. She was the program's rock star.
       The program is still active, and the teacher who took over and continues Judi's legacy, has been great. But all of the problems associated with high schools mentioned in my previous posting -- a tendency to be isolated, disconnected, overly self-aware -- have prevented this program from expanding. In the last few years, students and faculty have tended to view a video-linked classroom not as an opportunity, but as a school failure, and the results can poison the successes Judi enjoyed. All too often, the program is a last-ditch attempt to simply "get this staffing/course offering problem off my desk," with no support or enthusiasm for what it then attempts to accomplish.
       This matches similar problems for distance education in general. Although online learning continues to expand at an incredible pace, in all too many cases it is viewed as a way to solve program offering problems cheaply and easily. The result is a mash-up of badly-constructed courses, inattentive online teachers, and sky-high attrition rates. Rather than embracing online learning as a connected, information-rich opportunity, high schools view them as 4th and 5th choices, and their value is undermined even before the first assignment is due. Even negative course design characteristics (quirky teaching styles, bad pedagogy, low-level activities) become the fault of the delivery platform. The result is a huge chasm between a student's otherwise heavily connected personal life, state programs and initiatives looking to save money and embrace trends, and the high school leadership and faculty using (or avoiding) these services. The whole thing ends up being a huge self-fulfilling prophecy, often with high schools congratulating themselves on how well they've protected their students from the evils of low-performing distance learning opportunities.
       But in Judi's case, things were so much simpler. The instructional practice was "real time," the pedagogy was pretty traditional (close to "chalk and talk"), and year after year the program actually served students, providing great test scores. No technology can overcome bad teaching, nor does technology suppress great teaching. When that camera went on, there was a twinkle in Judi's eye, and the kids could see it at both end of the connection.
      We'll miss you, Judi...

What’s the matter with high schools?

       This, of course, is probably unfair as a lead to an editorial. High schools get that a lot -- for some reasons they own, and a bunch they don’t. Yes, they’re slow to respond to change. Yes, they often have bad failure/drop-out/low-performance/low-attendance data. Yes, their teachers often fail to reflect national standards.
       Of course, in our data-driven education world -- and in a political environment where a regional legislature with almost no education experience has more influence than a well-considered and published education researcher -- a lot of instructional practice is changing for some very bad reasons. Not only are we beating up on how well high schools are doing, we’re sending a bunch of mixed messages on what they are supposed to be doing in the first place! Do we really want all students to attend college? Do we really want all students in STEM programs? Do we really want our students to just do well on quantifiable high-stakes tests? Do we really want our education aimed solely at how to be a good college student/employee/citizen?
       The end result is that high school teachers and administrators often feel completely at a loss. The attention brings sanctions, reform initiatives, negative press, leadership changes, teacher accountability measures, more and more tests, and a host of other things intended to help, but, ultimately, end up just contributing to the piling-on. The end result is a collection of professionals who feel threatened and powerless.
       In the face of that, not surprisingly, the response is often to hunker down and circle the wagons. Principals do their best to make sure the school is the source of their reform and change. Teachers close their doors, narrow their focus, and attend to that which is in front of them. As a frequent observer and participant in programs at the high school level, I’ve seen this over and over and over again. Even high schools who are viewed in the district and community as high functioning often exhibit the same behaviors. (As a district tech resource teacher, the most telling response I get from school-based folks is "What are you doing here?")
       But is that "circled wagons" response effective, or is it dysfunctional?
       It can make one feel better – more empowered, more in control, more connected to the immediate school community who have, as their common mission, the correction of that bad image for, at least, their school. I won’t begin to comment on whether it might be effective as a general strategy, but I do worry about how it fits into all of the implications of 21^st Century teaching and learning. If a student has more information instantly available through his smart phone than a teacher learns in a lifetime, will closing doors help? If a student can take a course at the school across town, or online, or from freely-available MIT/Kahn Academy/HippoCampus instructional resources/course syllabi, does it make sense to insist that all learning opportunities come from the school he attends? If a student participates in an international learning community through social networking outside of school, does it make sense to restrict his contact in a classroom to the thirty students there? If there are hundreds of thousands of motivated, involved, attentive experts online, does it make sense to force only one teacher to provide that experience?
         There are lots of education observers who promote an extension of connections to learning experiences as a way of addressing education reform. One of the most interesting of them might be Logan LaPlante, who, as a 13-year-old, did a TEDx talk on “Hackschooling.” His experience, to say the least, is atypical – upper middle class family, parents who took him out of formal schools and allowed him to structure his own educational experiences. But he gets a lot of things right, including connected and integrated learning from a variety of sources.
       What’s the matter with high schools? It isn’t that they don’t care. It isn’t that they don’t have what it takes. It isn’t that they can’t change. In our super-connected world, my only fear is that, it’s because they aren’t listening.

The Paradox of Student-Centered Instruction

William M. Jones

       My dad had a couple of firm observations he would make from time to time. He was a college professor cum university administrator, a true intellectual with a lot of experience negotiating human space. He always used to say, “You know you've had a good idea when you hear it coming out of the mouth of someone else.” He inevitably followed it up with “…and when that happens, you should smile, nod, and agree that it’s a great idea. Nothing more.”
        One could no better define a lot of what is being promoted in education reform today.
       This essay will be unusual for this space on a couple of levels.

        Although the presence of education technology has lent a great deal of support to some of the ideas I’ll address, the presence of technology tools is neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for them. Hence this isn't about that. In addition, I will not attempt to plunge head-long to a conclusion, an answer to a question. Instead (Socrates would be proud!) I will merely ask the question, and hope that by posing it we can make some progress towards answering it.
        My dad’s remarks have two serious underlying assumptions which reveal two different, even conflicting, ideals in human behavior …

“…a good idea…coming out of the mouth of someone else…” Humans are almost desperate to own what they do and say. If an idea is good, it’s remembered, but our pride and focus often removes our ability to remember the source. When this happens in industry, it’s called advertising. After all, every company wants to be the inventor of their product, no matter how derivative it is. If it happens in academia, it’s called “published.” Although there are new ideas coming from academic research, such research is often the rephrasing and re-branding of a small variation on a preexisting idea.
        If it happens in schools, it’s called student-centered learning.
       That might sound cynical, but the research is out there – student-centered learning really does work. If you get students to own what they learn, they are motivated, engaged, and proud of their success. They will do better in school, and they will do better in life after they leave school, because their relationship with learning and success is an internal one, not dependent on the presence of celebrating teachers, grades, and other external motivators.

“….you should smile, nod…Nothing more…” My dad knew all too well that the best chance a good idea would become a program or policy required leveraging the enthusiasm and engagement of the person who just promoted it. Attempting to correct their mistaken ownership would simply cut off the engagement and enthusiasm, and, by extension, the idea itself. (As an aside, one could argue that that which we affectionately call “politics” is simply the process of inducing others to have and promote the ideas we hold as important to our own interests. That explains a lot these days!)

       To be a good teacher is to be a celebrator of a student’s ideas and work. After all, if a student is going to own her ideas, a teacher will have to step aside and allow that to happen. My dad proved that it worked in academic politics, over and over again. To encourage people to succeed, one should provide them the ability to create, and be celebrated in their creations as the owner, which, often, is quite different from true ownership, since most ideas owe a lot (sometimes everything) to previous work by someone else. There is a fundamental humility in the act of being a good teacher/mentor – the ability to set aside ones’ ownership of information, and one’s ownership of the learning or development process.
       So, we've defined a good teacher. The question I have is, if “fundamental humility” is the method by which we can induce others to succeed, it would seem to be a great human characteristic in general. (In fact, I could have spent volumes just on that issue alone.) So, how does one induce a “fundamental humility” in the mind of a student on the one hand, and celebrate their ideas as original ones they own on the other? From a somewhat narrower perspective, is this new education reform movement doomed to fail to produce the characteristics of a good teacher?
       I will admit to deliberately ignoring a few things in this discussion. Our students do learn a great deal from watching what we as teachers do (rather than what we manage to get them to do). And, of course, a “hunger for learning and information” has, built-in, a certain humble assumption – that one doesn't already know everything already. But I watch the rise of arrogance and self-centeredness in everything from politics to reality television, and I wonder whether there might be an inherent paradox at work here, a duality of messages.
        For us in educational technology, student ownership of the learning process is, one could argue, a logical partner to the presence and use of student-owned devices and information pipelines in the classroom. One-to-one computing and “Bring your own device” support encourage such an approach. So how can we have our proverbial cake and eat it too – have students engaged in owning the learning process, but with the selfless sense that, in fact, one’s place in the world of knowledge and learning is humble, connected, and dependent?
        There are several confounding issues which color this debate.

• The nature of technology adoption. People on the “front lines” of technology adoption are often very proud, even arrogant, of the choices they've made – the tools they've selected, the skills they've learned, and the implied behavior changes they have embraced. As has been shown over and over again in history, early adopters tend to become policy wonks and gatekeepers, maintaining their prime location at the head of the curve, and often forgetting the primary goals of the pursuit in the process.
• A teacher’s self-image. It might very well be that a humble, supportive facilitator isn't what the overwhelming majority of teachers signed on to be. If we bring access of external information and experiences to students (with it the change in instructional practice that implies), we may ignore or deliberately subvert a personal vision with which a teacher entered the profession. (This is, of course, separate from whether they should change – after all, reform movements often sort as much as they change, causing some potential teachers to leave or avoid the profession. Can we be sure we won’t simply create a teacher void, or a large number of unhappy teachers?)
• Process vs. information. Owning the process of knowledge construction can be viewed as quite separate from owning the information used therein, and the resultant product. Is this the hair we’re asking teachers and tech-driven tech reformers to split?
• Real vs. constructed engagement. Many of the advocates of information-access-driven education reform feel that this increases authenticity – students are able to use and interact with information sources and players who are actually doing what the students are learning. It’s the same for project-based learning, a movement sharing a great deal with the sorts of ideas we are discussing here. But the overwhelming majority of the learning goals of PK-12 instruction cannot, and should not, be truly authentic. After all, most students cannot write novels or symphonies, nor can they be empowered to do dangerous chemistry or physics experiences. Teachers routinely provide constructed (but safe) sandboxes for such experiences. What happens to student autonomy and ownership then? 

What do you think?

I'm over the Internet

For pure shock value (and readership), it’s always good to title one’s blog entry with hyperbole. Yup, that's today. Fact is, I’ll be giving up my anytime, anywhere access to information, people, and resources, uh...well, OK, never. But I do have a point to make. 

As with all things like this, it was stimulated by a relatively small event. My wife’s addiction to her iPad, and the Facebook and Pinterest it delivers, is pretty pervasive. (An aside: my culinary experiences are extensive and of high quality, so no complaints here!) She discovered a couple of weeks ago that Safari (the iPad’s browser) was only sporadically allowing her to “like” and “comment” in Facebook, which took almost all the pleasure out of it. Her solution, of course, was to post this problem right back into Facebook, where she got a chorus of other iPad users with exactly the same problem. My observation was that FB’s constant tweaking of its underlying code probably delivered something that got stuck in Safari's craw, causing it to give up, mid-page-load, in disgust. Often, the code behind a lot of interactive Internet sites is extensive enough that it pushes the limits of browsers. And, like a YouTube stuck in “buffer limbo,” the whole experience will just hang mid-“sentence.” and the stuff well below what actually broke the stream will fail to work too.

Of course, lots of people would say, “That’s the price you pay for a very full Internet experience.” To which I say, “Bah!” (Usually, of course, with a sufficiently menacing wave of my cane.) Frankly, I got a full phone conversation experience well before there were cell phones, and the fact that cell phones only work 75% of the time, is a step backwards from the “full phone experience.” (Since we’re just talking about the “phone experience," let’s ignore all the other stuff cells do these days, for now. Hyperbole, remember?) In many technology arenas, we’re regularly trading dependability for capability. That’s happening in Internet browsers too.

 This, of course, is all being driven by the fact that the Internet has become one of the biggest cash cows in our society. Although online holiday sales are not yet surpassing traditional retail in volume, the time is coming. Beyond retail (and, one could argue, even inside, throwing Amazon into the mix), there has been a consistent pattern in many online commercial ventures…

1. Come up with an idea which you think will be attractive to a large number of people.
2. Build the site supporting this idea, and give away access to it for free.
3. If it becomes enormously popular, try to figure out some way of making money from it.

That is exactly what’s happening with social networking online. You could argue that Facebook didn’t start out with a business plan, but now that it has almost a billion users (and, even more important, shareholders to make happy), it’s hell-bent on making one happen. That might very well be what caught my wife and her iPad-using “friends” – the code tweaks were a direct result of trying to increase the targeted ads and other commercial clickables on a user’s home page.

 OK, I will fully admit I was probably wrong about that (my wife’s problems disappeared a few days after an OS upgrade), but I’ve had multiple functionality crashes that I know were from this.

Here’s the deal. If the increase in functionality actually improves our experience online – that is, makes it fuller and more valuable rather than just more profitable – and the tradeoff with dependability isn’t too annoying, I’m good. However, the Internet is still basically a place of links, images, media, and connections. All of these things worked quite fine, thank you very much, more than a decade ago. They still do on many sites. But the popups, embedded ads, redirects, survey prompts, and masses of “like” and “tweet” and “follow” buttons aren’t really improving things. They’re there just to distract, herd...and mostly sell.

It is important for us to remember that an awful lot of what we view as educationally valuable content and capability is actually delivered by us. We are the product, as Facebook observers are wont to state. We should make every effort to find platforms which aren't suffering from someone’s business plan. The Internet started out as a military and university project. Its roots are deep in people supporting each other through connections, and leveraging non-profit and cheap hosting services to do so. (Remember Bit-Net, IRC? They were non-commercial services with no interest in profits.)

I just spent an afternoon training on Windows 8. With it, Apple’s iTunes, the Kindle Fire and Barnes and Noble Nook Color, it’s clear this will all get worse. Just like streaming video and cable/dish services are doing right now with TV/movie content, there may come a time when you’ll have to decide which Internet (Apple’s, Microsoft’s, Google’s, Amazon’s, or whatever is the next big thing) you want to use – a decision made at the point of hardware purchase. That’s going to be a very tough thing for public and higher education to digest.

But don’t mind me….it’s probably all just hyperbole…