iSean

i just came across an interesting article that got me to thinking well into the future. here’s the link: Beginning Of The End Of E-Mail - Forbes.com

According to a study by the Pew Internet and American Life project, barely 5% of American teens aged 12 to 17 prefer e-mail over instant messaging as their digital communications method of choice. Teens view e-mail as a way to talk to “old people” or institutions like companies. Kids, it seems, prefer the immediacy and mobility of instant messaging and text messaging to e-mail, which they might some day refer to as snail mail, the same way most people over 30 refer to the U.S. Postal Service.

the article goes on to explain that email use is not waning but IM use is picking up and that children are our future. i guess i am troubled by this prospect (not that children are our future, mind you; rather, that they prefer IM over email and that it has implications for the future). for one, i personally hate being interupted and asked to participate in a conversation on someone else’s schedule. with email, i can set aside some time each hour or in various segments of any day to choose to participate in correspondence; IM doesn’t have that same luxury. sure, i could turn my IM off, but eventually i am going to have to get back with anyone wanting to talk with me and now i am becoming the person who is interrupting others. am i just being old-fashioned in this thinking?

further, i think anyone who has watched two high school kids chatting with an IM client knows that what they are witnessing is far from anything taught in school and certainly never encouraged . . . a whole new language (that’s being kind) that butchers the English language. l8r; brb; IMHO; peeps; ROTF; ;~); {rolls eyes}; etc. at least with email, most people make some semblance of an effort to communicate using something a bit more formal and proper. as educators, shouldn’t we encourage proper use of the English language?

what do you think? any chance we’ll see email use drop off in the future as people shift to IM? perhaps a new technology will replace them both??? my IM client (iChat) allows me to have audio and video chats with other iChat users. then again, most kids have access to the telephone or a cell phone and they still tend to prefer the IM, so who knows what the future holds?

We’re on a vacation this week, so there will be no entries.

this link (to a PBS op-ed) starts to look at the shift apple is making from IBM chips to Intel over the next 2 years. the thinking here is that the shift has more to do with the potential of Intel beyond just computing:

Another shoe fell recently with the announcement of Intel’s investment in actor Morgan Freeman’s online movie distribution startup, ClickStar. Here is the most important part of that announcement: “The company’s strategy is to provide the marketing and distribution expertise required to enable the release of first-run films before they’re released on DVD and delivered directly to Intel’s digital home entertainment devices.”

What digital home entertainment devices would these be?

I’ve looked and can’t find any. Sure, Intel has plenty of information on its Digital Home web site about digital home entertainment products from its many hardware OEMs, but there is very little you can buy right now under the Intel brand name.

Press releases aren’t written lightly or without nuance. In the ClickStar announcement. Intel was declaring its intention to introduce, presumably in time for Christmas, a family of Intel-branded home entertainment devices. If they had meant devices from Dell or HP, they would have written that.

Now take a look at the ClickStar web site. It isn’t clickstar.com, but clickstarinc.com, which tell us that the name is probably a placeholder. If they really intended to use the trade name “ClickStar,” they would have tied-up the domain prior to the announcement. When the service finally appears, then, it will probably be called something else.

I think it will be called the “iTunes Movie Store.”

i think this is a natural next step. i think apple has their finger on the pulse of pop culture and they are one of the few companies that has shown that they have the infrastructure to handle this sort of a digital lifestyle change. time will tell.

personally, i am more excited about the focus on video and finding ways to get video compressed better and better at a higher quality. i can’t wait to incorporate video into my own teaching. unfortunately, i surveyed students in my two online classes this summer and about 75% of them were still using dial-up. that’s horrible and that doesn’t bode well for any full scale implementations of video for me any time soon. Shucks!

surprise, surprise, surprise . . . well, actually no surprise at all. a school district in louisville commissioned a study to evaluate the money they spent on technology (article linked here) and the results are in. they found that that the money being spent on education technologies is not being used effectively largely because the teachers are not prepared to take advantage of the technologies — they don’t know how to integrate technology in the curriculum to enhance learning.

in one of my graduate classes, i have students evaluate their district technology plan. every single plan is supposed to have an extensive component related to the training of teachers to best use technology; however, almost every student who does this activity reports that the technology plan is not a document that appears to be followed. the schools seem to create the technology plan to fulfill state requirements and then the plan sits and gathers dust. if the plans were really followed then the training of teachers would be specifically addressed in the budget and steps would be taken to ensure that more teachers can take advantage of the millions spent on technology. sigh!

interesting tidbit from the above linked article, which is also related to my last blog entry and this speaks for itself, “. . . some colleges are finding that while students seem comfortable with e-mail, Google and downloading music — they are less familiar with technological skills they can use in the workplace, such as locating and verifying reliable online information.”

this article is similar to an an article that appeared earlier this year from a report on No Child Left Behind. and, this is as good a place as any to provide a link to the national educational technology plan, which specifically addresses the training of teachers . . . when are we going to learn? as soon as taxpayers realize their money is not being spent appropriately, perhaps.

this article talks about the need to stress technology classes more in our k-12 schools. while i don’t doubt that the number of students going into computer science could be higher to fill positions, i think the people in this article are missing an opportunity to make real change with regard to technology in our schools . . . information literacy! knowing how to find information and how to determine if the information is valid or not should be at the forefront of our technology emphasis in schools. and this thought will take much more time for me to explain and my kids just arrived home. to be continued many times in my blog . . .

if you’re teaching in a higher education institution and reading this blog then i have just the community for you to join — the apple digital campus exchange. obviously, this community is built by apple, but the majority of the content is related to technology in education in general. rarely is a topic related to just macintosh or apple (i’ve seen one iPod topic and one iChat topic). i’d really like to see this community succeed and to do that it needs more members. here’s the link: Apple Digital Campus Exchange.

the community just started in May and has members from many content areas of higher education (e.g., journalism schools, business schools, colleges of education, humanities, arts, medical, sciences, leadership, etc.). most of the professors in education are teaching in Ed Tech. if you’re teaching in higher education, you might consider joining the community. lots of neat ideas and solutions to be found.

my wife and i have been exploring group response technologies and have considered purchasing a classroom set for our own teaching (obviously, not for online teaching). group response technology is a set of “clickers” that students have and use as a means of providing feedback to the instructor. so, you could be having a discussion on a particular topic and then pose a multiple choice question to your students who choose the answer that best reflects their thinking and the teacher can instantly see if the content is being learned. teachers can use this information to decide whether to provide remediation or enrichment type activities or to move on to new content or not. additionally, the clicking technology gives students some input into their own learning. i just came across an article in Wired magazine that discusses the technology and how it’s being used in the classroom and figured i’d share in case you wanted to read a more in-depth review:
Wired News: Classroom Clickers Make the Grade

so, i know quite a bit about Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but practically nothing about php. this blog uses a template to give it its look and layout. i spent the better part of the day designing the CSS and the images that go with it. i also tried to play with some php files because i want my links on the right to be divided according to some categories that i’ve defined for the links, but that will have to happen another day because everything i tried tended to end in errors. sheesh! then again, i really like that my blog looks unique and i am sure enough time on the WordPress support forums will get my links fixed. all in due time.

well, i just checked my admin files for the themes and there is weird code everywhere. apparently, i did something wrong. i guess i’ll keep this theme as long as it works for you, but i’ll probably spend another day soon just trying to figure out what i did wrong and how to fix it. fun times ahead.