iSean

there has been much hype about the Google and Verizon proposal for the future of Net Neutrality. my experience is that many people are fairly ignorant about Net Neutrality and have not given the subject much thought. now, if you’re reading this blog then chances are likely that you’re not ignorant on the subject. but i wanted to provide an account of why Net Neutrality is something that i desire . . . that i expect . . . and that i require to be effective in my profession.

let me first provide a brief overview of Net Neutrality as it’s being discussed here in America. Wikipedia provides a fairly succinct description so i’ll quote it here:

Network neutrality (also net neutrality, Internet neutrality) is a principle proposed for user access networks participating in the Internet that advocates no restrictions by Internet Service Providers and governments on content, sites, platforms, on the kinds of equipment that may be attached, and no restrictions on the modes of communication allowed.

The principle states that if a given user pays for a certain level of Internet access, and another user pays for the same level of access, then the two users should be able to connect to each other at the subscribed level of access.

now i want to provide a description of how i currently teach and how that could be disrupted without Net Neutrality. i teach at a decent sized public university in Michigan with about 25,000 students. i largely teach online or hybrid courses to graduate students enrolled in an education technology integration master’s program. i use open source tools like Moodle and phpBB and even sometimes Drupal. i am eagerly looking forward to using Big Blue Button, which is open source web conferencing software that allows me to synchronously meet with students and share classroom resources — all online (e.g., VOIP; but also other protocols). in the meantime, i use Skype to video conference with individual students or we’ll use iChat to video conference for an advising session or to discuss current curricular issues in a specific class.

Net Neutrality fits into my workflow because it ensures that the tools i use also continue to work for my students and me during the semester these students have paid for an education. i understand that discussing my fears about Net Neutrality will inevitably make me appear to be a conspiracy theorist since many of these fears have year to materialize. however, we have already seen Comcast block users from using peer-to-peer file sharing protocols. a peer-to-peer file sharing program allows users to share large or small files easily. so, if i were to make an instructional video for my students that was 25 minutes long, i could place this video into a Bit Torrent file sharing program and provide access to my students who could download this 25 minute video directly from me without using a service like YouTube (which has a 15 minute time limit anyway). this Bit Torrent connection is a direct connection between my students and me and it is efficient. unfortunately, the bigger use for a Bit Torrent service is to share music, videos, software and files, which are often illegal depending on the copyright and so it gets a bad rap. but the fact remains that i can use this service to better educate my students and Comcast blocked this service. this has already happened so the fears are not unsubstantiated.

my concern is that Comcast (my provider) would enter into a deal with Blackboard (now the owner of Elluminate Live). Blackboard could make a deal with Comcast ensuring that their Elluminate tool gets priority access. Elluminate is a tool that is in direct competition with Big Blue Button. potentially, Comcast could make Big Blue Button no longer work or become extremely slow so that video fails, which would force my students and me to use the more expensive Blackboard Elluminate for our needs. while my university provides Blackboard for my use, i do not use it because there are no school districts around who also use it. i would rather use tools that are being used or can be used by public and private schools who are strapped for cash — thus, open source solutions like Moodle. the notion that Comcast or another ISP could block access to freely available tools or websites should be the catalyst for most citizens to contact their various elected officials in congress. tell them you want Net Neutrality right now.

now the Google and Verizon proposal does propose enacting Net Neutrality to the wired internet that most homes have. unfortunately, they specifically noted that they do not want this policy to apply to the wireless internet. this includes mobile phones, for example, but it also is starting to go beyond mobile phones. here in Grand Rapids, we now are a little over 1 week into having WiMax 4G from Clearwire & Sprint. this means we now have a wireless BROADBAND network for the city of Grand Rapids — this is happening more and more across the USA. and here, they are even providing broadband to individuals who cannot afford typical broadband at a very reduced rate (potentially $9.99). this network would be excluded from the Net Neutrality proposal that Google and Verizon outlined last week. but we should be against this even if it just included mobile phones as my students will often email me when they notice a problem on our class website. i need to be able to get in and fix the problem right away and i’ll typically use my smart phone. i need my smart phone to be able to access the websites and tools i use and that wouldn’t be guaranteed under the Google/Verizon proposal. why should my smart phone be forced to access a different internet than my laptop? it shouldn’t!!!

the internet is certainly an entertaining tool much like television. many people see it very much like the tv industry so it’s harder to prioritize Net Neutrality when you think the internet is just a giant fun toy. however, the internet is much more than entertainment and has now become an important way for citizens to participate in all aspects of society. a few years back, democrats in Michigan were able to vote in a primary election from their home using the internet — read: citizens participating in a democracy online. many people learn about political candidates or issues by using the internet; we pay our city water bill online; we can go online to check the latest appraisal on our home and fight property tax increases when we feel the appraisal is wrong. many people rely on the internet for their employment and/or to comparison shop and find local businesses, etc. — in fact, e-commerce is now pushing towards $200 billion spent online each year. the next Google or Amazon could be starting in a garage as i type this and a lack of Net Neutrality could prevent them from ever getting off of the ground. enough from me, but if you want to read a nice review of the Google and Verizon deal from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, please see this link.

once again, i urge you to contact your elected officials in congress and tell them you want Net Neutrality right now for wired and wireless access to the internet. do not allow Google and Verizon to shape the future of how we educate our students.

the Center for American Progress (the think tank that John Podesta runs) has a new report out describing the failures of teacher prep programs. the report can be found here: http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/07/teacher_accountability.html

the gist of the report is that a new accountability system is needed to ensure that more quality is being injected into teacher prep programs and teacher licensure. the report provides a number of recommendations for individual programs and also states. for example:

• Program accountability—and teacher preparation itself—must focus exclusively on what improves instruction and produces necessary school changes.
• State accountability for teacher preparation should be built on a set of clear signals about program quality that policymakers can understand and program faculty and institutional leaders can use.
• Signals of program quality must be empirically based, measurable indicators and should be derived from a small number of key outcomes.
• Every state’s teacher preparation program accountability system should include a teacher effectiveness measure that reports the extent to which program graduates help their K-12 students to learn.

i suspect that this report is not going away; certainly reform is coming. i think it’s time for those of us in ed tech to promote how technology can play a larger role in improving teacher education and k-12 teaching. if new accountability models are going to be developed then having future teachers held accountable for information literacy skills is necessary, for example. this is our chance to help build classroom observation standards that include integrating educational technology effectively. i encourage everyone in ed tech to be involved in helping to shape our future for the better. this is no time to be passive.

if nothing else, read through the report and start thinking about how you can help shape our future for the better. and then act!

i spent the past week at the SITE Conference in San Diego and had a great time and learned much. however, one of the featured speakers was Chris Dede of Harvard speaking about Teaching and Assessing 21st Century Skills and this was one of the sessions i most wanted to see. the room was large and a lot of people were in attendance eager to learn the latest and greatest. Dede operationally defined 21st Century Skills with a few examples, but not once did he simply define these skills. from my experience, when you bring these skills up each educator thinks of something slightly different as it’s a nebulous topic. not only that, but these schools i am currently studying are having great difficulty in measuring these skills. it’s just not something that can be done easily. in fact, no school we studied has figured it out. and this gets back to Chris Dede’s lecture on the topic. i had hope that he would come through with a promising new development or practice. unfortunately, after describing a current project he’s working on he then proceeded to explain that the real audience for his product is not educators; rather, the real audience is the Educational Testing Service (ETS). so the future of 21st Century Skill assessment is via ETS and schools paying a fee per student to learn whether they are teaching the correct 21st Century Skills or not? hmmm. i certainly didn’t expect a free system to emerge, but i was hopeful that a more simple site-based solution could be described or suggested (and it didn’t have to be THAT simple either). ah well, this still leaves me room to figure it all out . . . then again, perhaps Dede is on the right track??? if there was a simple solution to 21st Century Skills assessment then we’d know about it by now, eh? /sigh.

I am missing much of Thursday and i had 2 sessions i really wanted to see. dang. but later today and tomorrow i have a full day planned.

Thursday
• I Can Do What With Moodle? in the Vandenberg B room (4:00 pm- 5:00 pm)

Friday
• Evaluating K-12 One-to-One Laptop Initiatives in Lower West Michigan in the Nelson room (8:30 am- 9:30 am) *I am a presenter
• Resources for Assisting in the Transition to Online Learning in the Nelson room (10:00 am-11:00 am)
• Twitter: #Teaching #Learning in the Emerald B room (11:30 am-12:30 pm) *I am a presenter
• Transforming Our Classrooms With a One-to-One Laptop Program in the Grand Gallery B room (1:00 pm- 2:00 pm)

perhaps i’ll see you around at MACUL 2010.

i use Google Reader to read all of my students’ blogs. it works very well for reading news stories and blog entries . . . so i suppose the name of the application is perfect. however, i want to participate in dialog with the authors of the various blog entries i read, particularly since the vast majority of the blogs i follow are my students’ blogs. currently, Google Reader requires me to read an entry and then click on the title of the entry to actually go and visit the blog on Blogger.com. when i arrive i can leave comments and then i have to type in a security word verification. when you have a lot of students, this word verification becomes quite burdensome. add the step to actually leave Reader to visit the blog to physically leave a comment there and Reader loses some of its appeal. now, it’s still nice to quickly grade blogs and find all of my students’ blogs in 1 place, no doubt. i just find it curious that Google owns Blogger and they fail to link these 2 services together any better when these 2 services should work together like a hand and a glove. it’s hard to complain when you are using tools and services for free, so let’s pretend that i am not complaining and instead just offering some constructive feedback in the hopes that Reader gets improved in the VERY near future.

i am teaching a graduate class to teachers who want to learn to teach their own online class(es) so i am planning on being a little more mainstream in the tools i use this semester. i have previously been pleased with Drupal even though it’s not technically made with an education focus. but, i want to use tools that can be easily modeled by the teachers i’ll teach. thus, i am shifting to Moodle this semester. i’ve previously only used it in a quick 2-week summer course that met every day, all day. that experience was too quick to really get into the ins and outs of using Moodle. this will be my first semester really using the tool.

i am not overly impressed with the discussion forum built into Moodle. i am thinking about using phpBB forums, which i’ve used for much of the past decade. but i’ve also heard good things about MyBB so i plan to install it tomorrow and start exploring whether it’ll work for the two classes i am teaching. with all of these internet hosting sites providing free installs with the Simple Scripts and/or Fantastico it’s been a while since i’ve installed a MySQL database and MyBB is going to require that i do it manually so that will be a nice refresher.

but i plan to venture into exploring many tools so that my students can experience a nice variety. i want to use a Wiki for teaching one week. i also asked all of my students to already request a Google Wave account so we’ll see if we can’t even incorporate it. fun times ahead.

i’ve surveyed my students this week after having so many contact me last week during the midterm and immediately after to note problems with Blackboard (our university provided online learning management system). by far the biggest problem was that the “new” Visual Editor in Blackboard (NG) was covering up some of the questions on the exam. in fact, this was the case for the vast majority of students.

some of the responses on the midterm started this way, “I couldn’t fully read the question, but I am guessing that you want us to . . . ” or something to that affect. this is coming from students using the 9th version of Blackboard (i believe it’s also called, Blackboard NG). i have to guess that our university pays hundreds of thousands of dollars for this service and this is what are students are getting in return? seriously? i am appalled that this is even acceptable. perhaps we received a big discount to upgrade early, but if we paid to be the beta testers then someone at my university should be fired. beta testing a buggy system should not be a part of the learning experience; beta testing is for software developers and volunteers. student’s grades should not be affected by the tools we use to deliver an assessment. EVER. and beyond this one issue, more than 40% of my students noted that they had, “other problems on the midterm because of Blackboard.” i’d be disappointed in the product if a few students had issues caused by Blackboard, but this is nearly every student in my classes.

that being said, i don’t use Blackboard for anything beyond administering exams and keeping grades in the grade book so that the university is responsible for that sensitive data. but i think i’ll look at using Moodle exclusively for this stuff next semester.

as i analyze data from student surveys conducted late last year there is much that is surprising me pleasantly. as i have previously noted, i surveyed well over 700 students in grades 6 – 12. one of the questions i asked was how often students use a computer at home.

that’s over 30% using a computer at home for more than an hour a day. 80% are socializing with friends during this time as well as surfing the internet for fun. however, 75% also report to doing homework on the computer at home, so that’s a respectable showing. heh. playing games on the computer was also high at 65%.

amazingly enough, 63% of these students report that they have a wireless network at home (16% weren’t sure). best of all is that under 3% reported having no internet connection and fewer than 10% had just dial-up. i should point out that this district is would be classified as mostly middle class (e.g., lower middle class to regular middle class).

more to come . . .

WordPress MU ended up failing for my use. Almost all of my students now use blogger.com with 1 student choosing to have me install a wordpress blog for just his use (not WordPress MU; rather, regular WordPress). i wonder if the Buddypress plugin caused my WordPress MU installation to fail? in any regard, my WordPress MU installation was determined to try and create the URLs like this (student_chosen_name.seanlancaster.com/blogging/) but students were not able to post a new entry to this address. i had a blog on this site as well and my blog entries showed up like this: seanlancaster.com/blogging/the_date_entered_and_title or something like that. that method worked, but none of the add-on accounts followed suite. i had made a test account and it worked just fine when i tested things, but i think i made the test account prior to installing Buddypress so who knows? i had to quickly drop the notion of using my own blogs via WordPress MU. ah well.

my university just shifted all student email to Google’s Gmail accounts. everyone has access to Google Docs using these accounts as well. unfortunately, the student Gmail accounts do not include the use of blogger.com. so we hit our second wrench. each student had to sign up for a second Gmail account to then have access to blogger.com. what a hassle. and my university doesn’t give me a Google account through the university so i couldn’t test this stuff out prior to class starting.

in the end, we made it through week 2 and i think there should be some pretty smooth sailing from here on out. i am still contemplating the use of Diigo and maybe twitter, but i’d like to let students get accustomed to the new tools we’re now using first.

i am teaching 3 sections this fall of an online course for undergrads preparing to become teachers. i have been fiddling with tools all month trying to determine which will work the best and be easiest for my students to use. this past summer i used Moodle with some success and i am sure i could have improved its functionality next time around. however, i decided to go with Drupal and phpBB as my class staples again. these are the same tools i used last year. Drupal is a CMS and phpBB is an internet discussion forum and both tools are free and open source MySQL databases installed on my server. i am growing somewhat disillusioned with Twitter as an important ed tech tool, so i am scrapping my plans to have students sign up for that service — i’d largely just use it to pass along links, which i can do elsewhere on my class site. meh. i’ve dropped Ning as a potential teaching tool after much consideration, but i might have my students create a Ning site (i just wasn’t sure if Ning would work as well as Drupal for my needs). i am still entertaining the thought of using Diigo — i have an educator account and i’ve explored it a bit, but i also don’t want to use something that isn’t necessary just to be using something so i’d need to make it a meaningful part of my class. my university just switched all students to a gmail account, so i’ll continue using Google Docs and other services as the students are already all signed up, which is nice. should be a fun and action-packed semester.

P.S. i do have buddypress and wordpressMU installed on a server as well. i think it’ll be a last second decision on whether to use my tools or the easier blogger.com. thoughts?