Blogging on the Brain

If you haven’t read Freakonomics, you should. If you have read Freakonomics, you should read their blog. If you’ve read the book and the blog, you should listen to their podcasts.

If you’ve done all of those things, then you should eagerly anticipate the production of the Freakonomics documentary, like me! (To be produced by the same people that brought us Man on Wire and Food, Inc.)

For those of you back in the first category (those unfamiliar with Freakonomics), it’s this crazy fun book filled with what they refer to as “the hidden side of everything.” The authors work together (one is a journalist, the other an economist) to present data in a way I promise you’ve never thought of before. For instance, in one of their podcasts (which just recently started up), they talk about the dangers of increased safety measures. They look at the number of injuries, specifically concussions, in football players since the advent of good helmet technology – counter to what you might think, concussions are on the rise. Why? Mostly because football players now feel safe enough to use their heads as battering rams. They talk about the same sort of effect in Nascar – the cars are getting safer and safer, so the drivers are becoming more and more reckless.

In a different podcast, they talk about what the country would look like if economists ran it. One ecnonomist, when asked what the first thing he would do would be, replied something to the effect of “Well, I’d get rid of the Department of Education, because they’re not really doing any good, and I’d legalize all drugs and tax them.” So, that probably won’t get him elected, but it’s super interesting to hear about the numbers that really do back up the stuff they’re talking about.

This week’s podcast is about the authors’ first trip to Hong Kong – can’t wait to hear what they have to say!

So I think the presentation went pretty well! On Thursday, my fellow graduate fellow (Ashley Palmer) and I gave a presentation on blogging at Baylor’ s EdTech showcase. It ended up being a relatively small group (6 or 8 people) which was nice, as it felt much more informal and conversational. We talked about some of the issues that initially caused us some anxiety (technology, self-conscious writing, etc.) and it was good to realize how far I’ve come in the blogosphere since then.

I’m certainly still lacking in a lot of the technical aspects (I haven’t made any significant changes to my blog since I started it, you know, that whole “if it ain’t broke” thing…), but I feel I’ve moved past the paralyzing fear of judgment that kept me from blogging very frequently when I started. This is a good thing, I think, although it may lead to more grammatical errors, comma splices, and misspelled words for you to slog through. In addition, I have come to find blogging in itself a very rewarding and useful tool for me, which I wrote about a while back.

Anyway, as is usually the case after a presentation, I’m feeling all excited about this again. Maybe I’ll try changing some things up sometime, like *gasp* adding a new widget or something (don’t judge, that’d actually be a decent step for me!). At the very least, it feels good to want to blog. Hopefully that feeling will continue for a while!

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending the keynote luncheon at Baylor’s Educational Technology Showcase. The keynote speaker was Larry Johnson, CEO of the New Media Consortium. In addition to his impressive background in education, Dr. Johnson is also, apparently, quite a talented photographer and used many of his own photographs as a part of his presentation, which I quite enjoyed.

His talk was entitled “Seven Channels of Change,” and it outlined seven ways that we’ll see computing/technology change in the coming years. Dr. Johnson could be considered an expert in this area, as he – with the NMC – have recently published their 14th edition of the Horizon Report, which outlines emerging technologies in education (and is currently being translated into 10 languages!). As an introduction to his talk, he used two photographs he had taken to illustrate what he wanted to get at.

Both were pictures of water, one of a small waterfall taken in 1/5000th of a second, the other a 5-second time-lapse of the stream that waterfall was a part of. He said that at any given point, the image we have of technology is like the short shutter-speed waterfall – it’s hard to tell what’s happening, what direction things are going it, and what the nature of the water is really like at all. He then said that what you can see over time (as in the long shutter-speed photograph of the stream) is how the water moves, how it gets around obstacles, and where it’s heading. I really enjoyed that analogy, and I think it also served to put us non-tech people at ease by showing us something that we could easily understand.

So here are his seven channels of change:

7. Computing in Three Dimensions: this allows for a level of precision in manufacturing, etc. that would be unattainable using any other method.

6. Games are Reality: He made the point that games have been used for centuries as tools for learning (he used the example of mancala, a very old game that essentially teaches how to count quickly), and we’re just talking about changing the method of delivery

5. Keyboards are for Old People: A very good point – keyboards really aren’t necessary for computing, we’ve just adapted to them because we were already used to the typewriter.  We’re already moving away from it with new interfaces like the iPhone/iPad that’s totally dependent on gestures. (Check out these videos of a new interface called sixthsense – crazy stuff!)

4. Users ARE the Content: This one is becoming more and more evident all the time (consider Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, etc.) He also showed us all the options you can use on Google Maps (which I had previously been unaware of – look at the “more” tab in the window) which is entirely user-generated content.

3. Collective Intelligence is the New Knowledge: This is related to #4 above, in that we don’t do things like read critics’ reviews of restaurants anymore, we read reviews of “normal people” that have been there.In addition, a lot of us “hear things first” through social networking sites like facebook or twitter, not the news.

2. The Network is Everywhere: As seen from space, the area of cell-phone (and therefore internet) coverage is actually more encompassing that the electrical grid, which is pretty impressive.

1. The People are the Network: The internet really isn’t about connecting to files or folders or printers anymore as much as it’s about people connecting with other people.

So overall it was a very enlightening and very enjoyable presentation! Today is the second day of the Showcase, and Ashley and I will be giving a presentation on blogging, which I’ll be sure to blog about later!

Phoebe Prince

I saw an article in the New York Times yesterday that 9 teens have been charged with a variety of felony charges in the suicide case of Phoebe Prince, a 15-year-old high school student who hung herself in January after being subjected to serious harassment by her classmates. Apparently Phoebe had just transferred to the school (in Massachusetts) from Ireland that fall, and after briefly dating a popular senior at the school, several students started taunting her, threatening her, and spreading rumors about her. The day of her suicide was particularly bad, with a car of students following her home, calling her names, and even throwing a soda can at her. From what I heard around the actual time of her death, the students involved didn’t even show any remorse when interviewed about her death by the police.

I, for one, am glad that legal action is being taken. I understand that there are a lot of issues to deal with here (free speech vs. harassment, etc.), but I think someone needs to take responsibility for the actions those students took – and apparently their parents were either unaware or unconcerned with their behavior. The article also mentions that there were several teachers/administrators aware of the situation at the school, but nobody reported anything or tried to do anything about it.

It should be noted that much of the harassment was in the form of text messaging, which again makes me wonder if these kids were being monitored at all by their parents (I don’t have kids, so I’m unaware of how involved parents generally are in the texting/social network lives of their children). The NYT article also links to another article, where it is reported that the average American teenager sends and receives approximately 80 text messages a day. I just can’t imagine anything terrible good can come from teenagers spending that much time texting.

Anyway, as far as the Phoebe Prince case goes, I’m pleased that a precedent is being set for legal action in these cases of extreme bullying in schools. I think it was probably a necessary step to take now that bullying doesn’t necessarily just take place at school, but now, with texting and social networking, can literally be inescapable.

Link to the DA’s statement on Phoebe’s Death

So in an effort to get back into the habit of blogging more (which I have clearly been failing at), I’ve decided to reinstate the 50 Modern Thinkers series, or at least throw a few in now and then. These help me in that the book offers lovely, discrete (-ish) little nuggets of information, then I tell you what I think about them. Sometimes that seems a lot easier to me than organizing my thoughts about some abstract concept (like “education,” or “science”). I know I also need to do more of that really challenging thinking, but in the meantime, I figure reading about other people’s thoughts might do me some good…and keep me blogging!

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Over the span of his career, Donald Campbell contributed to many fields, including social psychology and experimental methods, for which he is best known. Among other things, he often spoke out about the over-confidence and elitism of those in academia, and particularly those in the sciences.  He held strongly to the belief that scientists shouldn’t be proclaiming universal truths, but conservatively suggesting possible explanations for a particular data set. There’s a great quote in his profile about what happens when you get over-confident scientists and over-zealous politicians on the same side of an issue:

Government asks what to do, and scholars answer with assurance, quite out of keeping with the scientific status of their fields. In the process, the scholar-advisors too (along with the politicians), fall into the over-advocacy trap. Certainly the idea that one already knows precludes finding out how valid one’s theories are.

He was often critical of his own field of social science, feeling that more often than not, social scientists set out to validate their own theories, rather than let the data guide them to new theories that might be socially useful. In one of his attempts to follow his own advice, he set out to conduct a study on prejudice and social attitudes (in the 1960’s). With his usual precision, he set out with a great team of statisticians and research associates, and this is what he said about the experience:

We were a high morale team, working on the best integration of theory and data collection I have ever achieved, with an extreme enough sample size to be definitive.

The results were crushingly negative and threw me, at least, into a temporary depression. Our research write-up began ‘This thorough, tedious, expensive, and disappointing study…

Despite feeling pretty bad for the guy, I was actually comforted to know that “grown up” scientists feel this way too. There’s just nothing worse than putting everything into a project only to get nothing out of it. Apparently Campbell had quite a few periods of depression throughout his career, particularly at times when he couldn’t keep up with all his commitments (of which there were many), but he was able to maintain an overall optimistic outlook.

He also felt strongly about the role of government in education, saying tests “that have been valid for describing the state of society become invalid when they start being used for political decision making…Thus, achievement tests once valid for describing educational status have become less valid when used as the basis of rewards to students or teachers.” This is certainly a hot topic in education today, and from what I’ve gathered from almost everyone I’ve spoken with about it is that standardized/state required testing is (one of the things) killing the public school system in the US. I would certainly say that’s the case, but don’t listen to me – you’re much better off taking Campbell’s word for it.

Well, I finally did it. I may have been the last person in the world to do it, but I finally saw Avatar. My overall reaction: very pretty. Because I waited so long to see it, I was primed to think about several different things I’d heard about it over the past months – not the least of which was that it shares pretty much the exact same plot as Disney’s Pocahontas (which, as it turns out, seems pretty true).

The movie also left me with several questions, the first of which is who on the production team was responsible for sneaking so much marine life onto Pandora. I’ll explain – well, first I should mention that, in the pursuit to fulfill my childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist, I took a marine biology course at Wheaton for part of my biology minor. The bulk of the course was covered in a Spring Break trip to Belize, where we stayed on a tiny island a few miles off the coast, and went on several snorkeling dives every day (including one night dive – still one of the most alien experiences I’ve ever had) but anyway, there were a lot of shout-outs to marine life on the planet Pandora that I began to notice pretty early in the film:

Obviously there was a lot of bioluminescence happening throughout the world, which has been well documented in marine life, especially algae, etc. (in Belize, it would sometimes look like patches of water were glowing because of that) but it was something in one of the very first scenes in the forest that tipped me off to the marine life influence – when Jake first takes his avatar into the forest, he encounters some strange, spiral-y looking plants. When I saw them, I leaned over to my husband and excitedly told him that those plants looked exactly like my favorite (gorgeous) little marine critter, the Christmas Tree Worm (Spirobranchus giganteus), which often grows on brain coral (which, of course, I also have an affinity for). You can imagine my surprise, then, when Jake tries to touch the plant, and it sucks itself back down into its hole…exactly what a Christmas Tree Worm does when it feels something approaching in the water! Don’t believe me? Check out this video...and long live the Christmas Tree Worm!

Day 2 of ELI started with a replacement keynote speaker, Gary Marrer, from Glendale Community College. His talk was entitled “Strategic Analysis: A Typical Community College Wondering How to Take Advantage of mLearning.” (For those of you who, like me, aren’t familiar with “mLearning,” it means “mobile learning,” which is different from “e-learning.”) My primary take-away from the presentation was that we need to be sensitive to the demographics and financial restraints of our particular academic setting. For instance, Gary mentioned that very, very few of the students at GCC have smartphones, and if they do, they generally don’t use the internet access because of the cost. On the other hand, here at Baylor, I think I’m about the only person left on campus that doesn’t have an iPhone. Interesting to think about, but I didn’t really get any more than that out of his presentation.

The last presentation I attended was entitled “Mobile Collaboration: Redefining the Classroom,” from William Rankin and Kyle Dickson of Abilene Christian University. They were essentially asking how teaching/learning/formal education would change once every student has a computer in his or her pocket. They went on to talk about some interesting projects they’re starting at ACU, but at this point I started on a mental tangent that unfortunately kept me from paying full attention to their presentation. So I’ll tell you about my little train of thought instead.

So, I get the revolutionary effect of e-learning, that we now have access to way more information than we can ever take in, and communication from wherever, whenever, but I’m really not getting the difference between that and m-learning. Does the learning qualitatively change because I get the info in my pocket instead of at my desk? In a park instead of my home? I guess I don’t understand why the mobile part is so important/revolutionary. In addition, I’m definitely one of those people that likes to check things off my list; when I’m done I’m done. I work at school and relax at home. So what is mobile learning going to do to that type of lifestyle? What if I want to be away from my class/work/etc. (or at least have the right to be)? I’m not saying I think mLearning is a terrible idea, I’m just saying I don’t want my professors texting me. Maybe I’m in the minority, or maybe I just don’t understand why the m- is so different from the e-learning (just to clarify, I’m totally on board with the e-learning), but there it is.

I arrived late for the first session of the ELI Online Spring Focus session, but the portion of the first presentation I caught was very interesting. Judy Brown was addressing the differences between e-learning and mobile learning. Obviously there are a lot of similarities, but from what I caught, the main differences are, obvious, the mobility of the technology available now, and along with that, the sort of all-access all the time approach to learning. She also talked about using a shortened format that would most likely be more useful as a mobile application (she gave the example of hairdressers, who most likely would have access to smart phones, but not computers, and information would be more useful in short, concise bursts).

I missed whatever application this may have in more formal teaching/learning/classroom situations, but the kinds of learning she talked about were really exciting – she mentioned a service called “text4baby.org” which is a free mobile info service. You register by texting in “baby,” then you’ll get free text messages timed to your own pregnancy/birth about nutrition, what’s happening developmentally at that point, etc., which I thought was remarkably cool!

Towards the end of her talk (which accelerated quite a bit as she began to run out of time!), she got to a slide that she referred to as her “take home” message. She said that this mobile revolution is not about the devices, it’s about their (and our) capacity; it’s not about the technology, but the experience. I always feel myself relax a little in these settings when people acknowledge that technology is not inherently good, it’s about how we use it.

The second session was given by a Aaron Wasserman, a senior at Stanford University, who was one of the leaders in the “iStanford” project. The project entailed the production of an app for the iphone that does, well, everything a student would need, really. It integrates an interactive campus map (with real-time bus route updates), course information/registration, directories, and even information about sports and other on-campus activities. It looked really, really useful – and it made me wish that either I went to Stanford, or that Aaron Wasserman went to Baylor.

After showing us the app, several questions came up in reference to the use of this app in the classroom. He said that they wanted to start with more basic stuff (which is where they are now) and get that working, but that he saw real potential for this to expand as a teaching/learning tool in the future. At this point, he apparently kept getting questions about it, effectively giving the impression that if it doesn’t directly impact the classroom, why should we care? I got a little irritated at this point for a couple of reasons (not the least of which is that this guy is maybe 22, has come up with a pretty revolutionary program, and you want to judge? Really?). I feel like maybe some of the faculty are missing the bigger picture with something like this. As a student, even the idea that my University was actively trying to integrate those technologies/trying to make my life easier, encourages a feeling of community (generally it feels here like the administration, etc. is trying to get us to do the most work for the fewest benefits/least pay they can) or at the very least, a feeling that the admins might care even a little bit about my time/resources. Too often (especially at large schools) students feel literally and figuratively lost when they arrive, this is a way for them to integrate much more easily into campus life. In addition, it should lead to a huge time-save for both students and administrators, leading to more time for the “important stuff.” So anyway, there’s my gripe for the day. I thought the presentation was great.

I’ll be attending a couple of sessions tomorrow too; stay tuned for more updates!

I’ve found myself struggling recently with something that I haven’t really thought about in a long time – actually, I’m not sure I’ve ever thought about in reference to myself before – curiosity. I’ve always (sort of by default, I guess) considered myself a curious person. I like knowing how things (especially biological things) work, I loved my liberal arts education because I got to take literature classes at the same time as chemistry, etc.

flickr cc by fotologic

Recently, however, I’ve noticed that my interest in most things outside of my discipline has been waning. I find myself making giant lists of great books that I should read and things I should learn how to do (play piano, train my dog, etc.) and then never getting to it. This isn’t, as I first thought, because I was too busy. I am pretty busy, but I’d be embarrassed to admit how many hours I’ve managed to find to watch the Olympics in the last two weeks. I think I have the time, but I just don’t seem to care very much. When I get home after a long day in lab/teaching, I want to grab a glass of wine and pretty much sit as still as possible on my couch for the rest of the evening.

This is worrisome to me. I’m really hoping is no more than a result of graduate school burnout, but what happens if it’s not? Can I purposefully go about re-kindling my own curiosity in things? I still very much enjoy learning about new things/ideas as long as it doesn’t take much effort on my part (for instance, if you sit me down and tell me about something new, I’m generally very happy to know about it), I just can’t seem to find the motivation to go out of my way to pursue new interests even if I think I’ll enjoy it once I do.

I have no idea if this is a common occurrence, or whether it’s a one-time change (I was a curious person, and I am now no longer a curious person) or just a phase (I was a curious person, and I will be once again…someday…when I finish my PhD). And on a bigger scale, if this is common, what can be done to keep this from happening to graduate students? Anything? Or are we just destined to have all our academic vigor sucked out of us by the time we’re in candidacy? I guess only time will tell.

Here’s a recent article from the Washington Post related to some of my dissertation work in autism. The article talks about a study in which autistic adults took the hormone oxytocin (primarily known for its role in pair bonding) in a nasal spray, and on a subsequent test performed better at tasks involving social interaction and facial recognition. Pretty cool stuff.

In the past, oxytocin (OT) has been used to treat another main symptom category in autism spectrum disorders: repetitive movements. So this new study in addition to that information is now strongly pointing us in the OT direction as far as research and clinical trials.

Obviously this is just one study, so cautious optimism is suggested – certainly until we can replicate the study in a larger trial (as well as considering the efficacy in children). But hey, cautious optimism is still optimism, right?

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