This was my first interview on a radio show… so let me know how I did and what your take is on this issue.

The idea of iVideos connects with a couple of strands of work that I have been involved in. These include, the TPACK framework, and the learning by design approach. We have written about this in a variety of articles but the specific one that Dr. Kearney points to is:

Wong, D., Mishra, P., Koehler, M.J., & Siebenthal, S. (2007). Teacher as Filmmaker: iVideos, Technology Education, and Professional Development. In M. Girod & J. Steed (Eds.), Technology in the college classroom. Stillwater, Oklahoma: New Forums Press.

In this article we argue that there is great value in having teachers engage in such creative, design tasks since it allows them to “transform ideas and practice by immersing themselves in deep pedagogical consideration of subject-matter, significance, audience, learning, epistemology, and aesthetics.” Some evidence of this comes from a blog post by Dr. Kearney, based on his experience of having his students create their own iVideos. He says that,

We noted a high degree of emotional investment, motivation and interest in these tasks amongst our student teachers and postulate that these outcomes were a catalyst in their TPACK development. [You can read the entire blog post here.]

As in the previous year, Dr. Kearney’s students have been busy working on working on a new set of videos for 2011. In this years edition students created iVideos in three main areas related to the use of ICT in education. These topics include, Teacher professional learning; Curriculum; and Social, Ethical, Legal and Equity issues around ICT. There are over 2 dozen videos on the site and you can access them by going to

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/

Incidentally, you can see last year’s videos by following this link

http://sites.google.com/site/teacherivideos/2010-ivideos

Click the links above to see the these iVideos and, if possible, take a moment to write a comment or response to the videos. It will take you just a few minutes of your time but I know this will be greatly appreciated by the students.

Today, however, I will make an exception to the rule, prompted by a column by NYTimes columnist, David Brooks. As I have written before, I am quite ambivalent in my response to Mr. Brooks. I typically disagree with his political writings but I love his occasional forays into science, psychology and economics. So to read yesterday’s column (which was all about politics) and to agree with almost all of it was surprising. I think that in this column Mr. Brooks has given the best summary of how Obama is (mis)perceived by people on the right and the left, as well as a pretty nice encapsulation of who Obama really is.

This article, Getting Obama Right, is spot on. Here are some key quotes:

Liberals are wrong to call him weak and indecisive. He’s just not always pursuing their aims. Conservatives are wrong to call him a big-government liberal. That’s just not a fair reading of his agenda.

The fact is, Obama is as he always has been, a center-left pragmatic reformer.

In a sensible country, people would see Obama as a president trying to define a modern brand of moderate progressivism. In a sensible country, Obama would be able to clearly define this project without fear of offending the people he needs to get legislation passed. But we don’t live in that country. We live in a country in which many people live in information cocoons in which they only talk to members of their own party and read blogs of their own sect. They come away with perceptions fundamentally at odds with reality, fundamentally misunderstanding the man in the Oval Office.

Martin Luther King, Jr.
January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968

Human salvation lies in the hands of the creatively maladjusted
—in Strength to Love, 1964

What do you think? What do we mean by 21st Century skills? How are they different from traditional skills (such as critical thinking) that were the rage some time ago? What is the role of content knowledge in the 21st Century? What about trans-disciplinary, or inter-disciplinary knowledge? … Important questions, worthy of discussion and thought.

How sad is that!

Tetlock, P.E. (2005). Expert political judgment: How good is it? How can we know? Princeton: Princeton University Press.

I recently came across a review written by him, titled Reading Tarot on K Street (in the September/October 2009 issue of The National Interest) and I thought it captured his work in this area quite nicely (and would be worth preserving).

When we score the accuracy of thousands of predictions from hundreds of experts across dozens of countries over twenty years, we find the best forecasters tend to be modest about their forecasting skills, eclectic in their ideological and theoretical tastes, and self-critical in their analytical styles.1 Borrowing from philosopher Isaiah Berlin, I call them foxes—experts who know many things and are not finicky about where they get good ideas. Paraphrasing Deng Xiaoping, they do not care if the cat is white or black, only that it catches mice.

Contrast this with what I call hedgehogs—experts who know one big thing from which likely future trends can be more or less directly deduced. The big thing might be any of a variety of theories: Marxist faith in the class struggle as the driver of history or libertarian faith in the self-correcting power of free markets, or a realist faith in balance-of-power politics or an institutionalist faith in the capacity of the international community to make world politics less ruthlessly anarchic, or an eco-doomster faith in the impending apocalypse or a techno-boomster faith in our ability to make cost-effective substitutes for pretty much anything we might run out of.

What experts think—where they fall along the Left-Right spectrum—is a weak predictor of accuracy. But how experts think is a surprisingly consistent predictor. Relative to foxes who are less encumbered by loyalties to an all-encompassing worldview, hedgehogs offer bolder forecasts and, although they hit occasional grand slams, they strike out a lot and wind up with decidedly poorer batting averages.

The implications for people who make projections about technology and schools and learning is quite obvious to me. It is the hedgehogs we need to be careful of, mainly because of the vehemence of their beliefs which can sometimes override our “foxy” nature. I say inherent because I think that educators, for the most part, are pragmatists, sensitive to the limits of arm-chair theorizing and big ideas. A hard nosed approach to reality, that recognizes its complexity, that demands multi-faceted problems solving approaches is what is needed, not being wedded to one, just one overarching idea.

“felt from your recent speeches the feeling of hedging and a little uncertainty… We wait for someone to speak for us and back him completely if the statement is made in truth.”

What is amazing is that Ike took time out to write back to this person and something he wrote, struck a chord with me:

I doubt that citizens like yourself could ever, under our democratic system, be provided with the universal degree of certainty, the confidence in their understanding of our problems, and the clear guidance from higher authority that you believe needed.”

At this time, where people compare anybody that disagrees with them to Hitler, where town-hall meetings are disrupted for political and partisan purposes, where the air waves are jammed with birth-certificate controversies, Ike’s sane and pragmatic voice was wonderful to read. You can read the entire letter here.

A few decades ago it was audio-cassette technology that led to the fall of the Shah of Iran. Ayotollah Khomeni had been exiled to France and his speeches would be secretly smuggled into Iran – where an informal underground network of people would dub and re-dub these tapes and pass them around. New technologies lead to new ways of sharing information, new ways to mobilize.

My heart goes out to these protesters as I obsessively track news coming out of Iran. The two best sources of news on this are Andrew Sullivan’s  Daily Dish and The Lede of the NYTimes. Or better still follow the incoming Twitter-feeds collected here.

In particular check out the URL that Dick Cheney sends to Obama, approximately half-way down the page. (You will have to copy and past the url).

Edupunk seems to be a reaction against the rise of course-managements systems, which offer cookie-cutter tools that can make every course Web site look the same.

As with any neologism, there are as many meanings as there are users… here are some links if you want to learn more. First the post that introduced Edupunk to the world, and a couple more that attempt to explain its intricacies, here and here. [Note, this is not a comprehensive or even most important set of links on this topic, just what a few minutes with Google revealed to me.]

Now, the idea behind EduPunk, as Mike Caulfield describes it, “with its implication of technical accessibility, a DIY ethic, quick and dirty over grand design, and a suspicion of corporate appropriation” appeals to me a lot. It is something that Matt and I have been arguing and implementing for a while now, though of course we didn’t call it EduPunk. We often said that our course websites worked through a strange combination of “Duct Tape and Magic”.

In fact many years ago I wrote an essay for First Monday, titled “On becoming a website.” In this I think I articulated a skepticism of corporate sites such as Blackboard and Angel. Speaking of how corporate uniformity cramped me as a teacher, I wrote:

The main bottleneck preventing me from being “present” in the online classroom was this thing called the course Web site. The orthodoxy of online course Web design did not have much place for the instructor. Influenced no doubt by corporate discourse about standardization was the idea that Web sites needed to be consistent in look and feel. What this meant is that all online courses offered at my university (or at other universities for that matter) had to look the same. It didn’t matter whether it was a course on criminal justice or biomechanics. Imagine having all the professors in a university being clones of each other. How bland and stultifying that would be. Contrast this to the variation we have in courses today. In today’s universities, one would be hard pressed to find two professors who take identical approaches to teaching the same content. There is a great value in this variation in how each of us approaches our subject matter and our pedagogy. It offers students (as well as us) some insight into the many approaches there are to scholarship and teaching and to developing a personal relationship with subject matter. Isn’t that what teaching was all about?

As I thought about these matters I realized that no two classes I have ever taught were identical, even if I was covering the same content. I was even different in successive class meetings over the same semester. At a superficial level, I was different because I wore different clothes, cracked different jokes, interacted with students differently. However, at a deeper level, I was different because I came to class with a growing understanding of the content, and the group. However, this variation and richness was anathema to the standard instructional design model in online settings, dominated as they are by corporate discourse about standards and uniformity of experience. This uniformity is further reflected in the fact that the front pages of most online courses often remained unchanged over the period of the semester. This page usually had some introductory text, describing the course and the instructor, and irrespective of whether you were visiting the site for the first time or the fiftieth, this content stayed the same. It was as if you were given the introductory spiel every time you went to a class meeting. Imagine beginning each and every class with “Welcome to CRS568: Learning Technology by Design. I look forward to an exciting semester as we play and learn together.” Imagine how horribly boring that would be, ignoring the shared experience we were building up together.

They have been charged — in the world’s largest democracy, with a constitution supposedly guaranteeing a right to free speech — with “deliberately acting with malicious intent to outrage religious feelings”.

And this, in a secular country!

So far Johann Hari has refused to apologize for what he wrote, and rightfully so. In this piece in the Huffingtonpost titled: Despite the Riots and Threats, I Stand By What I Wrote. The entire article is worth reading in full but here is a key quote:

Every word I wrote was true. I believe the right to openly discuss religion, and follow the facts wherever they lead us, is one of the most precious on earth — especially in a democracy of a billion people rivven with streaks of fanaticism from a minority of Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs. So I cannot and will not apologize.

I did not write a sectarian attack on any particular religion of the kind that could lead to a rerun of India’s hellish anti-Muslim or anti-Sikh pogroms, but rather a principled critique of all religions who try to forcibly silence their critics. The right to free speech I am defending protects Muslims as much as everyone else. I passionately support their right to say anything they want — as long as I too have the right to respond.

I don’t think anybody could have said it more clearly and emphatically. For more information on this read the blog Butterflies and Wheels.

This is what he wrote:

Punya, I read the novel and it does not seem to me, as you interpret, that the character decides to become a fundamentalist. Notice the term fundamentalist is moderated by the term of ‘reluctance’. Which is his way of saying, “look! I am on the edge and my reluctance—which may have its own basis in many things—keeps me from going that way.” The ‘Reluctant Fundamentalist’ is not the ‘Fundamentalist.’ Every pedestrian, the waiter, and others strolling on the mall in Lahore come across as both regular people and also possible fundamentalists and assailants. Fundamentalism in this narrative is seen as precipitated in the reaction and paranoia of the visitor. His use of the term does not seem to me to be a reference to the Wahabist ideology that has typically come to be lumped under the rubric of fundamentalism.

In his novel, this man, that women, any one around is depicted as possibly carrying a concealed weapon that could be pulled out for attacking the visitor. It is merely a depiction, and consequence, of paranoia. That is to say, they appear in the narrative as on the verge. It goes without saying that the reaction and paranoia is adding to the ranks of fundamentalists. What do you think drones, for example, are achieving? Do you really think they are hitting al-Qaida there by drone missiles? The Islamic nationalism can be interpreted as a reaction of being pushed in the corner into the so called ‘Muslim World.’ I always used to say that this damn thing Muslim world does not exist except that we are bringing it into existence by calling it one and by uniting people by providing them with a common denominator.

I can see where Irfan is coming from, and upon reading his comments, I realize that I underplayed the importance of how fundamentalism is “precipitated in the reaction and paranoia of the visitor.” Reading his thoughts also reminded me just how tongue in cheek Mohsin Hamid’s text is – it is never clear whether Changez really means what he is saying or is just playing with the listener (and through that with the reader). That said, I think I stand by my response… though (as I had noted) my response may have been colored by the recent happenings in Mumbai.

Last summer, Johnson Space Center senior management coordinated a center-wide, cross-generational effort to explore well thought out and researched recommendations on improvements that can be implemented to make the center more open minded, collaborative, inclusive and innovative…. This video, which was created by the Barrier Analysis team and posted by Wayne Hale, is the first artifact to make its way into public domain. It highlights many of the barriers an employee with an idea encounters within the organization, including management styles, institutional inertia, organizational silos, and complexity of processes. The Barrier Analysis team did an excellent job identifying the barriers and developing implementable solutions to overcome those barriers [Text from opennasa.com].

Watch the video:

How often have we seen similar things happen in institutions we work in?

Has a novel prize winner ever served on the cabinet before? I wonder.