Looked at It's a Wild Ride. WOW what a well thought out project. Was this project designed by the teachers or Intel? It would be wonderful to have such a interdisciplinary project, but imagine the hundreds of hours that would have to go into the planning of this. I think it could be done, but you have to have a very committed staff. At a more manageable level I have witnessed two one day projects that took time to organize but more manageable. One was a multidisciplinary unit on bread. Science-making bread, Math-recipes, LA-descriptive writing Soc St- where the breads came from. The other project was a "Trip" to Mexico where the teachers set up a "plane" in the hallway and the students took a "trip" to Mexico. All day their curriculum revolved around this trip.
The TED presentation was very interesting. Although sometimes I was a little lost in his explanations. The point is that we are in real flux right now with the who, what, when, were and why of the Internet. The newspaper industry was one of the early institutions that didn't know how to handle the Internet, they provided too much free information, and now they can not reel that back in and revenues are down because why pay for the news? Is the Internet "the press", as in freedom of the press? As he said the next 50 years will be chaos. On a more personal level, it is imperative that we as Library Media Specialist teach students how to view the Internet. I found a very interesting article recently that looked very professional and sounded very convincing, but when you researched it further I found out the guy was a conspiracy theorist. What if our students take these people at their word?
I love all the information that is available out there, but we still have to think. And I think that, at some point, government is going to step in and try to "control" the internet in some way.
There is a site that I was introduced to, and I wish I would have tagged it, where companies put out problems that they cannot solve to the general public, and anyone can try to solve it, and get paid. A perfect example of what he was saying, the institution has a staff (that have limited ideas and are scared about this approach), but they cannot solve a problem, but one weird person -way out on that graph- with a different way of looking at things maybe can solve it.
Sharing of information - I am of the old school that I don't want all of my information out there in the cloud, but the younger people seem to think it is okay, or they just don't realize the consequences yet. The video was definitely food for thought.
3 comments:
I like how you mention you don't like all your stuff out in the cloud. Being in the "younger" category I feel like sometimes that is what is expected and I guess I'm a bit like you in a way that I like to have my stuff where I know where it is at and who is viewing it. I think there are so many positive aspects of the "cloud" with collaboration, sharing, etc, but sometimes I feel overwhelmed by everything that is out there. I also liked the TED presenter. He had a lot of great information.
What was the "interesting article" that you found? Do you have a link for it? And HOW did you find out that the author might not be as credible as one would think? What is the process involved for finding out such information and is this a technique that is taught to the students?
I'm very lucky that my IB school focuses so much on interdisciplinary work. Nearly every lesson I teach has some sort of connection to the student's classroom work (or Transdisciplinary Unit, as the IB folks call it). For example, the 2nd graders are working on rocks & minerals and are discussing magma (stuff like that). So I show the kids how to use Kidspiration to create a word web starting with rocks and spreading out from there. It's a great way for me to teach technology without having to do in a subject vacuum. I also work with the other specialists. The 4th graders were using pedometers to determine their walking distance, and with me I had them use that info to calculate calories lost online. It's pretty cool, honestly. The amount of collaboration is uplifting.
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