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A few weeks ago on an episode of the excellent podcast EdTechWeekly, Jeff Lebow, one of the co-hosts, expressed how he is still a little amazed by wireless networking. It started me thinking about how much technological stuff in my everyday life I take for granted these days - and how that’s a good thing.
Then, in a post which referenced my recent issues with a certain VLE provider, Will Richardson linked to a presentation by Clay Shirky. For those of you who haven’t heard of Shirky, he’s the Next Big Thing™ after Thomas Friedman. He’s written a book called Here Comes Everybody that I feel I should read this year. Within the first couple of minutes of the presentation, Shirky said something that made me lose track of everything which followed:
Absolutely! I don’t mean by the title of this post that I want educational technology to be ‘boring’ in the sense of it being tedious. No, I mean ‘boring’ in the sense of it being so commonplace and ubiquitous that it isn’t thought about. I want us to get to a stage with all of this Web 2.0 stuff1 where we’re constantly focused on what we can do with the technology. A bit like wireless networking - at least for most of us…
The world is a scary place. It’s seemed to become even more so in the past 16 months with the arrival in the world of my one-and-only son, Ben. Young people need protecting from the dangers and perils that we, as adults, either know to avoid or can take somewhat in our stride.
It’s the same online. There’s websites and links I know not to click on as my home Internet connection is unfiltered. At school, however, I’m subject to the same restrictions as pupils, which is annoying. I’m a responsible adult and can navigate to relevant parts of websites for lesson preparation and delivery. There’s no good reason for my having the same level of restricted access as pupils.
I had a discussion a month or two back in which my interlocutor, sounding reasonable at the time, said that wireless Internet access should be opened up to students. It’s filtered, so there shouldn’t be a problem. That’ll be why I keep seeing pupils trying to hide that they’re on Bebo via the newest proxy server to have sprung up, yes? Unless you have a whitelisting system, where the Internet is blocked except for those that are put onto a list, then filtering via blacklisting will never be 100% effective.
But pupils accessing Bebo via a proxy server through the school network is small potatoes compared with what’s about to happen. Here’s the five steps:
Schools allow students to bring in mobile devices that can connect to the Internet, realising that having policies which ban them whilst some teachers promoting their use is problematic.
The cat-and-mouse game of students trying to access blocked sites and administrators blocking them continues.
In the wider world, unlimited mobile broadband data plans become commonplace.
Students from wealthier families start being able to connect to whatever they want, bypassing the school network.
A trickledown and pester-power effect begins; soon most students can access the Internet in this way.
This is going to cause a HUGE problem. Why? Schools haven’t realised that the only way to have students behaving responsibly online is to teach them how to do so from an early age. We’re going to see reactionary administrators floundering in an attempt try to claw by some type of control, when all along we should have been educating pupils instead of blocking them…
We need to start planning for this eventuality NOW.
Is this all we’ll need in the future for interactive presentations?
Excited blog posts and Twitter-comments have been flying back-and-forth across the edublogosphere this week. Why? Because it’s now possible to build a cheap interactive whiteboard using the controller from a Nintendo Wii.
I first came across the idea via Mr Platts’ blog which links to the video by Johnny Chung Lee below. Since then, CoolCatTeacher Vicki Davis has done her usual high-quality synthesis job on what’s out there. As she’s a bit of a beacon, the comments section looks like it’s going to be useful.
What I think everyone’s missed, however, is the fact that mobile phones are due to have projectors built into them in the very near future. This would be an awesome system. You could roll up to do an interactive presentation with nothing but a mobile phone, WiiMote and IR pen. Even better, buy several of the latter and students could use their own phones to do the projecting! I really do think someone needs to set up a web store selling those custom-built infra-red pens. I’d buy one.
