Tag Archives: Resources

New Ways of Doing Business

Still reading The World is Flat! p. 177.

Introducing new technology alone is never enough. The big spurts in productivity come when a new technology is combined with new ways of doing business.

It took several decades for electrification to kick in and have a big economic and productivity impact. Why? Because it was not enough just to install electric motors …. the whole way of doing manufacturing had to be reconfigured.

Hmm. Sound familiar about the use of educational technology? Learning to be transformed, not just integrated?!

Are we taking advantage of all the new communication tools available to education? Videoconferencing, blogs, Moodle, web conferencing, email, etc.? Why is it such a challenge to use them? How did we use communication in the classroom before these technologies? Only within the classroom! Now we can connect almost anywhere in the world! Does our understanding of knowledge and knowledge creation need to change from top-down to collaboratively developed before we can truly see the possibilities for communication technologies in the classroom? What will it take to combine these new technologies with new ways of doing learning!?

 

p. 236. The way to succeed is not by stopping the railroad line from connecting you, but by upgrading your skills and making the investment in those practices that will enable you and your society to claim your slice of the bigger but more complex pie.

Hmm. How are you upgrading your skills?

Does Access Mean Advantage?

Here’s a question for you! If kids have never seen a VC, are they disadvantaged because they can’t imagine talking to someone through a TV, computer, or cell phone? Does access mean advantage?

I’m still reading The World is Flat. P. 169. “Young people are using our mobile phones today as two-way video-phones,” explained Tamon Mitsuishi, senior VP of the Ubiquitous Business Department at DoCoMo in Japan.

Japanese kids are VCing with their cell phones! And some of our students have yet to see a VC! What does that tell you?

I’ve noticed that when kids see a videoconference, sometimes one of the students will say, “I want one of these at home!” Well the answer is, in your lifetime you will have one at home! And you will have one on your cell phone too! We must increase students’ imagination and help them to see the possibilities of the world around them!

Interesting VC Possibilities

While reading The World is Flat, I’m noticing some unique uses of academic skills in the real-world work place. It would be wonderful to arrange/create/organize a VC for students on these topics/issues. Here’s a sampling:

  • p. 128 Describing the Wal-Mart supply chain: Call it the Wal-Mart Symphony” in multiple movements – with no finale. It just plays over and over 24/7/365: delivery, sorting, packing, distribution, buying, manufacturing, reordering, delivery, sorting, packing….
    Immediately I thought of the elementary economics curriculum in Michigan: supply and demand, scarcity, opportunity cost, producers and consumers. Where could we find someone to explain this supply chain to students? Where everything comes from etc? Or could a classroom-to-classroom project be developed based on this?
  • p. 147. How is math used in supply chain planning? UPS maintains a think tank … which works on supply-chain algorithms. This “school” of mathematics is called “package flow technology,” and it is designed to constantly match the deployment of UPS trucks, shipos, airplanes, and sorting capabilities with that day’s flow of packages around the world.
    So intriguing! This think tank employs mostly math and engineering degrees, including several Ph.D.’s Hmm. How could this fit into a high school math curriculum? Would it help tantalize students to enjoy and be intrigued with mathematical challenges?
  • p. 155. Another intriguing math possibility. Google now employs scores of mathematicians working on its search algorithms. Would kids see it as “cool” to work for Google? Something to make it worth learning and enjoying math? I wonder if any of Google’s mathematicians would want to interact with high school students over VC?

New Technologies in Schools

In the section on running with the gazelles and lions in Friedman’s book, The World is Flat, (p. 114-127) I started thinking about some of the frustration that’s been growing in me on how the latest ed tech technologies are changing so fast! How can a teacher keep up? And is it worth spending time on one technology, such as handhelds or iPods, for a year or two and then move on to the next latest and greatest thing?

I had been leaning towards… no! But in the middle of this section, it occurred to me that maybe it is actually very good to expose kids to different kinds of technology as often as it changes. We should teach them new things and explore new technologies and ways of teaching & learning as often as we learn it. So that both we and the students get used to changing quickly! The students will need to learn to learn all their lives. So we should start them on this learning track by modeling continuous learning ourselves!

On p. 131, I read,

 

Wal-Mart became number one because this little hick company from northwest Arkansas was smarter and faster about adopting new technology than any of its competitors. 

To me, the lesson here is to encourage students along the same lines! If they learn what the technology can do – i.e. with VC we can communicate with other people – then we should ask them – what else do you think we could/should do with this technology? Clearly to keep the competitive edge, we and our students need to keep imagining positive, constructive uses of the tools and resources around us!

So I hope the next time I feel a bit tired about the latest thing and the work it will take to learn it and integrate it into the curriculum, I remember the benefits to my students. Increase in technology skills. But more importantly, increase in learning skills!

Global Business Uses of VC

So, I’ve been slowly working my way through The World is Flat by Thomas Friedman. I know others are blogging on this too, but I’m interested in the business uses of videoconferencing, and other applications I see from the book for VC use in schools. I’m still not finished the book, but thought while I’m sitting in the airport waiting to fly home from NECC that I’d write a bit about what I’ve learned so far.

I am always very interested in how videoconferencing is used in the business world, because I think it informs our use of VC in education. So here’s some examples of VC from the book:

Infosys, he said, hold a virtual meeting of the key players from its global supply chain for any project at any time on that supersize screen. So their American designers could be on the screen speaking with their Indian software writers and their Asian manufacturers all at once. p. 6
Hmm. What kind of project could middle or high school students do with global colleagues that would simulate this type of collaborative work?!

Some of the Indian accounting firms even go about marketing themselves to American firms through teleconferencing and skip the travel. p. 14
Hmm. How about brushing up on your interview-via-vc skills?!

There are videoconferencing facilities on every floor of Boeing’s Moscow office, so the engineers don’t have to rely on e-mail when they have a problem to solve with their American counterparts. They can have a face-to-face conversation.
Hmm. I wonder how they resolve the time zone issues that we struggle with in K12 global VCs?

More next time….

Project Format

I’ve been reading the latest Edutopia magazine and the Go National article caught my eye as a potential project format for partner classes connecting via videoconference.

The students in each school read the same play produced by MTC, identifying major themes and analyzing scenes and characters. They can ask questions and discuss the work online with the playwright. Then they write original short plays based on themes in the work they’ve all read, subsequently posting their scripts on the Web site for comments. In the production phase, a play written at one school is produced by a partner school. Production requires constant intersite communication among partner schools and the MTC teacher/artist in New York who oversees the project. Students in each school select actors, directors, stage managers, and designers. The productions are videotaped, viewed on the Web site, and discussed by all participants.

Imagine the possibilities of two or more classses partnering for projects like this over a semester – connecting via videoconference, web, email, and other communication technologies! What new ideas do you get from this blurb?

VC in the Real World


Just ran across this example of videoconferencing in the world of work. Wired Magazine featured an article on The DreamWorks Machine. Design and development teams from various locations meet virtually to work on movies such as Madagascar. Check out this description of the technology.

By the middle of 2003, DreamWorks was fitted for 21st-century moviemaking with its Virtual Studio Collaboration system bridging Glendale and Redwood City. Headed by Derek Chan, the team built a large conference room, two smaller video rooms, and a remote editing room at each site, linking the large rooms that McGrath and Darnell used to create Madagascar with a dedicated 30-Mbps fiber-optic line, and the smaller rooms with a 24-Mbps line.

The facilities are a work of design genius. The conference rooms are identical down to the maple furnishings and wall paneling, the swivel leather chairs, and the sliding storyboard panels. Chan’s team tested 30 microphones to capture the broadest range of voice timbres and 70 fabrics to identify the color match that would make the remote collaborators seem most lifelike. The rooms have enough lumens to light a movie set and are outfitted with special light scoops to reduce shadowing and to keep participants from getting “raccoon eyes.” Each room contains monitors and camera controls that allow people on both ends to work on the same files, view the same footage, or easily zoom in on a face, picture, or image.

Sounds pretty cool! What a dream VC room! Another great reason why we should continue to expose students to collaborative events via videoconference. Someday soon they will be working with colleagues around the world using collaborative videoconference technology!

Pics from Read Across America 2005

Alpena
I just finished posting the pictures from Read Across America 2005 to the TWICE website. They are sure fun to see! Notice all the ways that vc rooms are set up around the country and all the creative ways students presented to their partner classes. Check them out and enjoy!

New VC Projects Online

Just finished up another successful session of Planning Interactive Curriculum Connections. You may be interested in all the new projects created by participants in the final week of the class.

You are also invited to join the next class, August 1-26, 2005. You’ll have a wonderful experience connecting and learning with other participants from all over the U.S.! In the words of one participant checking out this week,

“It has been a wonderful class, more than I could have ever expected. And to all my classmates, you are icicing on the cake. While expecting to learn something about videoconferencing I never expected how much I would gain by learning about the greatest part of all — getting to know the partners who would be at the far end of the vc. Thanks for all your thoughtful comments on each of our topics, the great solutions and suggestions for making this technology a success for our students.”

Research and Resources on VC

Last spring my student worker collected the research links and articles of the NECC presentations on videoconferencing. We just finished putting it into a bibliography format online on the TWICE resources page: Bibliography of Articles, Books, and Research. It’s another useful collection of reading on videoconferencing.