From time to time I share with groups to whom I present, usually the administrative groups, Jott. Grab your cell phone. Press the speed dial for Jott. Talk. Jott then transcribes your voice and sends a text message or email to the person you sent it to (might even be yourself, your spouse, your family). It can even send to groups–maybe your staff, or a department, or the leadership team. The service does many other nifty things as well, and the transcription is amazingly accurate. Aside from the phone call, Jott also offers several other quick and easy ways to interface with its service: the web, an application for your iPhone or BlackBerry, and a desktop dashboard.

But the free ride appears to be over.

After becoming very comfortable with a workflow that includes Jott, the service now is moving out of beta and is offering a tiered user plan: Jott Basic (free, but with ads and limited services), Jott ($3.95/month), Jott Pro ($12.95/month), and even pay as you go plans with longer transcription times. Current Jott users do get a 26% discount for their first year if they sign up for a year.

I've often said that free isn't a sustainable business model. I knew this service eventually would have to become fee-based. But it still stings.

As people become more and more comfy with "cloud computing," they will need to get more and more comfy with opening up their bank accounts to these services: $47.40 here, $24.95 there. This will not be just nickeling and diming you to death. The price point will be whatever the market will bear. The cloud does indeed have some significant things to offer, not the least of which is that you must pay your licensing fee or be dropped from the cloud to your more mundane terrestrial habitat. While many technology enthusiasts appear to be charging forward, embracing the cloud with enthusiastically open arms, I still remain highly skeptical of the cloud, for any number of compelling reasons–compelling to me any way. :o)

So, I don't know what I will do with my Jott account, which I have grown to love. Will we break up? Will we commit to each other? I have until September 8th to decide.

I came across this post over at lifehacker about other services, similar to Jott, that, as of this writing, remain free.

Slate's Farhad Manjoo has some great tips for outsmarting the greedy, lying sensor in your printer that wants you to change the super-expensive cartridge before the ink runs out:

"This guy had also suspected that his Brother was lying to him, and he'd discovered a way to force it to fess up. Brother's toner cartridges have a sensor built into them; OppressedPrinterUser found that covering the sensor with a small piece of dark electrical tape tricked the printer into thinking he'd installed a new cartridge. I followed his instructions, and my printer began to work. At least eight months have passed. I've printed hundreds of pages since, and the text still hasn't begun to fade. On FixYourOwnPrinter.com, many Brother owners have written in to thank OppressedPrinterUser for his hack. One guy says that after covering the sensor, he printed 1,800 more pages before his toner finally ran out."

[From HOWTO trick your printer into using ALL its ink - Boing Boing ]

Take about 20 minutes to watch this presentation on the norms of institutions being challenged by new collaborative infrastructures. "The printing press took us to 200 years of chaos. ... [With this new, emerging, digital, collaborative infrastructure] I'm predicting 50. ... Institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure. And the more rigidly managed and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. ... The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific."

I have to listen to him at least a couple of times to get my head around the magnitude of what he is saying!

Photo credit: CC by eirikso @ flickr

When new technologies challenge existing norms, we see interesting ideas and application emerge. Some compete against others. Some ideas flourish and evolve in transformative and empowering ways. Overall, I think we will see huge potential for learning develop in the emerging technologies surrounding iPod Touch and iPhone. We just have to get beyond the adolescent exploration and trial and error phase of the implementation cycle—the one we seem to still be in with the internet and Web 2.0.

Beauty, in all of the many forms it can assume, is near the very core of a satisfied human experience. I wish I had a lot of training in design as I think it represents very critical and creative thinking and problem solving. But, alas, I don't. I just go with my instincts, try to pay attention to why I think something is well designed when I come across it, and read about the topic as I can. In fact, I even have an RSS folders on creativity and design in my aggregator.

Often, presentation slides are visually unappealing, cluttered, sterile—well, just boring. Often website and blogs are noisy and hard to read. The information is so cluttered I don't feel welcomed into the site. In fact, sometimes I feel repelled: too many widgets, banners, animations, and links all competing for attention and mouse focus.

I suspect many children are attracted to this as they get excited when building their social networking pages. After all, one of the things our minds crave is motion: add those animated gifs! More, more! But as I have grown older, the noise wears thin. I find I need a balance between efficient message as well as positive emotional connection.

And I confess to really getting exasperated on corporate sites when I have to click more than 3 mouse clicks to get to what I need. Ease of use is another huge part of design: focus on function and form, in emotionally compelling ways.

At any rate, all of that to say this: I came across two posts a couple of months ago that offer some insight into how people read blogs and web sites. How the eyes move across the web page, just like how the eyes move across the stage in a production or the screen in a movie, matters. This is the quiet, unseen, gentle nudging of attention by the creator.

The writer of these posts then gives some basic, easy ideas for improving your blog or web site's readability. I don't recall the author explicitly suggesting the generous use of white space, but I'll toss that one on the table, just in case it wasn't. These are a quick read for those who have an interest in making your blog or web site easy to read and visually welcoming.

What to do with a visually noisy blog: Part 1: Your template as your visual foundation

Suggestions for a visually noisy blog: Part 2: Ideas for visually simplifying a blog

I was in the new middle school drama teacher's classroom yesterday and noticed a sign that said . . .

Acting: Finding the Truth within the Imaginary Circumstances of the Play

I thought to myself, there is something here - what if we changed this quote a little . . .

Teaching: Finding the Truth within the Imaginary Circumstances of the Classroom.

I'm only on iteration two and am still debating if "Contrived" is better than "Imaginary," but I may be on my way to being able to answer the simple question of what is great teaching.

I suppose that learning is generally initially removed from doing. But how do we as educators collapse the distance between the two? School should never become the replacement for doing but rather a path to propel us further into the meaningful significance of doing that which is relevant and valued, of living truth, of authenticity of being, of creating beauty, of finding creative solutions to the problems faced in human condition, of lifting the soul to a higher place of being and doing.

As you teach your students this year, I hope you strive to supplant the "artifice of school" with a deeper quest for Truth in ways your students can embrace with their passion of soul.

P.S. I love the arts! They reflect Truth. I love people that think! They illuminate the path to Truth. Have a great school year!

I suspect I was so caught off guard I probably gasped.

Against that thought: I'm trying to unbury myself this week. In catching up with my RSS feed aggregation, I came across three interesting things to share.

Thing #1 on YouTube

Thing #2 from Chris Lehman at Practical Theory quoting Gary Stager's article in GOOD Magazine

Go read Gary Stager's article "School Wars" in GOOD Magazine?

Here's a sample:
The tragedy of No Child Left Behind, and the private and public efforts to undo its damage, is that not every child is given the chance to achieve her full potential in a caring, creative, dynamic, and intellectually rich environment. And in the absence of ongoing classroom innovation and grassroots advocacy, NCLB has taken over.

These days, anyone who attended school is an expert in education and everybody has a plan to “fix” the public schools—the philanthropist, the businessman, the bureaucrat, the politician. For ages, business leaders and politicians have wanted to privatize the entire system and let the marketplace sort things out—as it did with Enron, Chinese pet food, or oil prices. Now, they’re taking control of schools through philanthropy. Parents of means, meanwhile, are opting out in record numbers, sending their children to private schools, or charter schools, or are homeschooling them. Indeed, as the federal government has steadily eroded public support for the public school system, through propaganda and failed policies, children are the collateral victims. The winners of the school wars remain uncertain; the losers can be found in almost any classroom.

[From School Wars - Practical Theory]

Thing #3 from Doug Noon at Borderland, When the Levee Broke
Doug always makes me think. His post, linked above, is too long, too rich, and too thought provoking to merely excerpt. Educators really need to read it. Well everyone does, actually.

I have always wondered, sometimes aloud, "How on earth can private, corporate, for-profit business do public education better than the non-profit sector?" In my thinking, the minute you introduce profit into the model, something that could have benefited students has to go. Public education is already resource starved. Doug's post begins to pull back the curtain to explore and expose this very question against the backdrop of New Orleans in a post Katrina world. I was schooled to think "government of the people, by the people, for the people..."

I suspect that schools fail our communities when policy fails and people are powerless to affect a correction of policy and its actualization! American education needs deep, fundamental change at the policy level--a complete overhaul. We need to get in touch with our soul. Can such a thing happen?

Too often technology just complicates my life. (Some of you are thinking: I can't believe you just said that! But it's true.) I guess we have to take the good with the bad, because life in any time has both. But sometimes a technology comes along that really makes me smile. This post is about such an application: Shazam.

How many times have you been someplace and wanted to know the name of the song you are hearing: on the radio, in a movie, in the grocery store, at a restaurant. Maybe the song is a blast from the past (you can't quite remember the name or group) or maybe it's a song you have never heard and really like--would like to purchase. Now the information you need is just two touches away!

Shazam is a free application at the iTunes Store. Touch the Shazam icon on your iPhone so it will "listen" to the music. A few seconds later your phone vibrates, and Shazam gives you a picture of the album cover and all of the details of the music! I am blown away. This is an awesome idea. And It really works! Click on the picture in this post to go to the app on the iTunes Store.

You also get links to purchase the song right then on your iPhone from the iTunes Store. (You have be on a WiFi network at the time for this feature to be available.) You get links to any YouTube videos featuring the song. You can even attach a photo (from your iPhoto library or one you just snapped with your phone) to the song and share it via an instant email to anyone in your address book. "Hey! Remember 10 years ago when we heard this here..."

This is just insane. Loving it.

It hasn't recognized any of the classical music to which I've had it listen. Music educators, we need to request this feature!

You have to upgrade your vintage iPhones (free) or have a 3G iPhone so you have access to the applications on the iTunes Applications Store. Many, perhaps even most, of the iPhone Apps are currently free or very inexpensive. Some are utterly frivolous.

I've been thinking a lot lately about the business/production models of successful companies like eBay, Flickr, et al in this knowledge based economy that swirls around the generative, participatory technologies that are beginning to thrive in the world wide web ecosystem. The value of their business models is based, in part, not in what their factories produce, as they have none, but in what their consumers voluntarily contribute and share. This is such an enormous thinking twist for the industrialized mindset of my generation's brain. And, frankly, as an educator trying to think outside the box, this makes my head hurt. But it still fascinates me.

In their essay, Xavier Comtesse and Jeffrey Huang state:

Value chain 2.0 takes into account the active consumer in the production of value, across every level of a company’s activities. [emphasis added] Henceforth, we call the active consumer the “ConsumActor “ to indicate this reality.

The ConsumActor acts along two dimensions, as a:
- creator of context (action)
- creator of content (knowledge)

The whole essay is a rich exercise in "thinking different," which, of course, I love. But, always the educator, I'm asking myself, "What are the implications here for best practices in education?" Leveraging student "consumers" in the production of value as creators of context and creators of content... This blows my mind as these ideas significantly extend my former questions: "Who owns the learning in your class? Who is doing all of the thinking work in your class?" Now, add, "Who is creating the value in your class? Who is 'actioning' knowledge creation?"

Though some educators seem to suggest this, I suspect it would be naive for us to assume that the students alone are capable of doing this. If they could, we wouldn't need schools as anything beyond a baby-sitting service. No, as Value Chain 2.0 indicates, this is a complex joint venture.

The hard part for our profession, is figuring the implementation out. What does this look like?

I'm with Scott McCloud, who issues a brilliant challenge in this post on the alarmist empty rhetoric of bystanders. (It's just way too easy to criticize the hard, often thankless work of our educators.) He basically asks, "What else you got?" If we could just get the finger waggers to join us in figuring out what implementing very complex and exciting ideas like those offered in Value Chain 2.0, that alone would be no less than a kind gesture and perhaps even a tremendous help. Criticism and fear are too cheap and easy.

Using today's tools, what does leveraging the participatory generative creative potential of your students look like in your school setting? How can students substantively participate in the creation of context (action) and content (knowledge) in our present techno-centric world? What can "school" learn from eBay, Flickr, Amazon and the like? We need these discussions in school.

Here are two pictures to get you started:

Halong bay with a community of around 1600 people live in four fishing villages. They live on floating houses and are sustaining by fishing and marine aquaculture. This is one of the floating schools of the floating fishing village.

Schools the world over, just like people the world over, face some real challenges!

And of course this tool is not just limited to the media specialists. Teachers can use tools like this to promote subject-specific reading. Principals may want to recommend books to parents. Guidance counselors may want to have recommended readings. I encourage you to explore age-appropriate social sites that promote reading!

You could include a widget on your site, like the one you see below from my list of books I plan to read. Your bookshelf widget can display books you have read, are reading, plan to read, are your favorite books. You can even assign tags to books, like "SummerReading" and display just the books with that specific tag. You can also customize the look of the widget on your blog as well.

To date such activities largely have been entertaining and benign as this video by "Improv Everywhere: We Cause Scenes" demonstrates. They mobilize large groups of people via the internet to show up and stage an improvisation in a public setting.

But in the last couple of days two videos have been posted to YouTube that I suspect are an omen of things to come: people leveraging these tools to make global statements challenging the status quo. In this first example, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer begins a lecture at a university in Hungary as a protester stands up, accuses Microsoft of stealing billions in Hungarian taxpayer money and then throws three eggs at the CEO.

Then Russian presidential candidate Garry Kasparov was delivering a speech when a modified, remote controlled, toy flying helicopter carrying male genitalia came flying toward him. Russian speaking commenters over at Wired.com's post about the incident offered the following translation of Kasparov's comments after the flying object was smashed by security:

I think we have to be thankful for the opposition's demonstration of the level of discourse we need to anticipate. Also, apparently most of their arguments are located beneath the belt." Someone in the audience shouts, "Finally the political power shows its face!" Kasparov quickly replies, "Well, if that's its face..." to laughter from the audience.

I do not speak Russian and have no idea if the translation is accurate or not, but another commenter seems to indicate it is. (Don't watch the video if it will offend you. That's certainly not the point of my including this link to it.)

I include these examples, not to entertain, embarrass, or offend, but to make the point that these tools will inevitably be used for activism--probably in more significant ways that these examples begin to demonstrate. Perhaps this is among the reasons we have seen China's efforts to centrally control the internet in China.

And while governments and corporations the world over have been increasingly leveraging technology for surveillance of their citizens, citizens the world over are going to turn that surveillance, that reporting, that global transparency on the goeverments and corporations themselves. The fact that the technology is readily available to everyone will disturb a delicate balance.

As a photographer who reads numerous photo-related blogs around the world, I have seen an increase in posts about the legal rights of photographers as increasing numbers of photographers, while taking pictures in public places, are claiming to be harassed by police and security. In fact a large protest rally is being organized in Los Angeles.

But It Just Got Even Easier
A company in Israel, FlixWagon, has now made it possible to broadcast live from your Nokia Series 60 3rd edition cell phone! (Here is a link to an interview with FlixWagon by Robert Scoble over at FastCompany.TV.) Now, as long as a cell phone signal is available, security will not be able to confiscate the video shot of a staged incident or event as it will already have been broadcast. Certainly this is only the beginning of an increase in this capacity to broadcast your life coming to market. People seem to love it!

As I have mentioned before, our capacity to develop technology is vastly outpacing our capacity as a society to come to terms with how to use this technology in ways society feels are appropriate, fair and proper. Social norms have yet to be formed about any of this. What is private? What is public? What expectations should I have to anonymity of person, of information, of data?

Implications for School
This technology has significant implications for learning. If I were a teacher today, I would be all over uStream.tv! For some time now educational technology enthusiasts have chided our profession for banning cell phones from our classrooms. The more cautious educators have been reluctant to change practice citing the ways the cell phone can be abused in the school setting.

And now that live CellCasting (remember you first read the term here!) is possible, I can see this debate heating up significantly. I for one do not blame schools for wanting to proceed with cautious deliberation and informed integration. But, in the long term, school is likely to be the place this new disruptive technology has the least impact.

The world is being carved wide open, and, for better or worse, we will all get to see what it looks like.

In March a principal was reportedly arrested in Texas because he allegedly threatened to kill the science teachers at the school if the students didn't pass the end of year high stakes test--and apparently he seemed to actually mean it.

Anita White, who taught at New Braunfels Middle School for 18 years before being transferred this month to the district's Learning Center, said Principal John Burks made the threat in a Jan. 21 meeting with eighth-grade science teachers.

She said Burks was angry that scores on benchmark tests were not better, and the scores on the upcoming Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills tests must show improvement.

"He said if the TAKS scores were not as expected he would kill the teachers," White said. "He said 'I will kill you all and kill myself.' He finished the meeting that way and we were in shock. Obviously, we talked about it among ourselves. He just threatened our lives. After he threatened to kill us, he said, 'You don't know how ruthless I can be.'

"We walked out of the meeting just totally dumbfounded because it was not a joke," White said.

New Braunfels Police spokesman Mike Penshorn said the incident was filed as a verbal assault, but is being investigated as a terroristic threat.

[Source: Education | MySanAntonio.com]

And now I read this from Georgia, my home state of 20 years, where I invested 20 years of my best professional efforts as an educator:

State notifies parents before releasing awful test scores
In social studies CRCT, less than 30 percent pass; In math, 40 percent

By LAURA DIAMOND
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 05/19/08

Georgia school leaders were so shocked by dismal scores on state math and social studies tests, the state superintendent released a statement Monday to prepare parents and others for the results.

According to the unofficial results, only 20 to 30 percent of Georgia's sixth- and seventh-graders passed the state social studies exam. In math, about 40 percent of eighth-graders could be held back because they failed the test.

The state will release official scores from the Criterion-Referenced Competency Tests next month.

Parents whose children failed the math test will be notified by local schools. The state requires eighth-graders to pass the reading and math exams to move to high school.

[From State notifies parents before releasing awful test scores | ajc.com]

Where will the school districts in Georgia find enough teachers to teach summer school for the increased number of children who can not be promoted? What educational programs will have to do without, or be eliminated in order to fund this enormous additional expense (that now includes sky rocketing transportation costs)?

Will a significant number of 9th grade teachers have to be reassigned next year to 8th grade to teach those students who could not be promoted based on these results? Will the test results from the summer retakes be "fixed" to solve these enormously disruptive issues?

How many assessments are our students required to take from K-12? And how much money has been spent developing and grading all of these tests? What is the total amount of money spent to date on this accountability agenda that is producing these results? The sum must be staggering! Would this money not be better invested in hiring teachers in the schools that can actually offer services to students that promote academic achievement? Is it time to hold this accountability agenda into account for expense versus value added results?

But the two most important questions that come to my mind: What will be accomplished if we completely break one of our most precious and essential democratic institutions--our public schools?! What of the children?

Photo Credit: e-magic on flickr.com

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