21st Century Skills, YouTube, and Education

Do you remember the Powers of Ten video which starts out with a picnic scene and then begins zooming out by a power of 10 every ten second? We realize very quickly that the further back we step, the more we see and each step adds new information and new insights. I had an experience today online that took me on a similar journey.

The Powers of Ten video starts out with a picture of one square meter. My story starts out with an email from a student about job hunting online in the digital age. I haven’t had to job hunt since long before the Internet was invented and didn’t have wealth of specific information at my fingertips, but I knew that with more than a half century employment and my knowledge of the web, online life, and social media, equipped me to get it quickly.

It didn’t take long to locate the information and send back the advice. After sending it, I began thinking about all of the skills that I was using in the hunt. I didn't have much time to think, because shortly after sending the message, my thoughts were interrupted by the ding from TweetDeck with a Facebook update from Leigh Zeitz via Twitter.

It was a link to a video about 21st Century Skills. When I visited the site, I immediately recognized the music as that which Michael Wesch had used in the Machine is Us/ing Us. As I watched, I was sure it was a new Michael Wesch video, and I realized that my thoughts had not been interrupted, they have been expanded upon by the video I was watching. WOW!

As the movie came to an end, I was pleasently surprised to find that it wasn't Michael Wesch, but the Weymouth High School social studies department who had been inspired by Wesch’s video. WOW!

Then something caught my eye. The video had been posted to YouTube as a response to another video, Curriculum 2.0. As I watched this, I began to get that Powers of Ten feeling. It was like mentally taking a step back and seeing a great deal more. A universe of connections powered by 21st century skills was unfolding in my mine and in front of my eyes. WOW!

Then for some reason, I went to The Machine is Us/ing Us for about the 100th time, this time I noticed the version I was watching was a video response, or in this case an update to an earlier version, which was a response to the Web 2.0 video. WOW!

Web 2.0 - 523,269 views
The Machine is Us/ing Us V.1 - 10,728,239 views
The Machine is Us/ing Us V.2 - 1,174,007
21st Century Skills - 6,249 views

That's almost 12 million views on YouTube alone. There's no way to tell how many other viewings took place around the web. WOW!

But why aren't we translating what we see here into our every day practice? Maybe it's because we still have to catch up to The Evolution of Dance and its 134,417,368 YouTube views. OW!

Open Source and Education

I just read an article in Datamation by Matt Hartley in which he takes the educational community to task for not being quicker to adapt Open Source software. I tried to leave the following comment to it, but kept getting a message to "Enter a properly formatted email address." I was able to find a feedback form and left the comment there, but I don't know what will come of it, so I have to vent here.

Take a few minutes to read Matt's article and then you can read my thoughts below.

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Matt, you may know Linux, but you have a lot to learn about the educational system in this nation and more specifically, the state of technology education. I've been working with educational technology and professional development since 1980. The reality is that the state of technology literacy of teachers in this country is abysmal. Technology integration and professional development is woefully underfunded and ignored.

Change in education is slow. It only took 25 years to move the overhead projector from the bowling alley to the classroom. Windows came out in 1985 and teachers still don't have a clue about it's workings, let alone how to use technology effectively with as a teaching a learning tool.

Yes, Linux is free. Yes, Linux is secure. Yes Open Office handles Windows documents. Yes, yes, yes, but until someone figures out how to come up with the money and time to bring teachers up to speed with the technology they have been using for the past 20 years, the answer will be no, no, no.

Linux might be the best OS to ever be built, but "build it and they will come", just doesn't work.

Web 2.0 in Education

Next week I'll be doing a Web 2.0 in Education workshop for Absegami High School. Here's a quick peek at some of the sites we will be visiting and discussing. This trailer was created using a new Web 2.0 beta called Animoto.