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NYSED Tech Plan up for comments

November 1, 2009 in Policies, Technology | 1 comment

Last April, the New York State Department of Education (NYSED) embarked on an outreach campaign seeking input on their new draft technology plan. They started with a meeting leaders of major professional organizations. They set up a survey on their website and met with educational technology leaders at the NYSCATE leadership summit this summer. As planned they have been holding community forums throughout the state this fall.

As a practicing educator in New York State with a keen interest in education and technology, I applaud NYSED in creating such a plan and seeking input. The problem is that I have  no notification of the plan and their outreach efforts through my school. I found out about the plan and survey though Twitter. I learned of the  NYSED discussion at the NYSCATE Leadership Summit though NYSCATE and attended. I missed the community forums because I never received notification.

I, like others, feel that we need to further broaden the conversation and  widen the avenues for input. To that end, I have created another blog based on the digressit WordPress plugin. The blog features the NYSED draft technology plan and is set up so that readers can comment upon it on a paragraph by paragraph level.

Please visit the blog and add your feedback. I will contact Larry Pasca the NYSED Technology Policy Coordinator once feedback begins to come in. Please pass the word to others that may be interested.

NYSED Goal 1: Accessible Digital Content

July 29, 2009 in Policies, Technology | 3 comments

The NYSED Technology Plan’s first goal addresses digital content:

Standards-based, accessible digital content supports all curricula for all learners.

Accessible is defined as: content available anywhere, easy to retrieve using multiple technology devices, and content is universally designed. Aligning digital content to the New York State learning standards is how we will ensure quality and relevance in the PreK-12 environment.

Learners and practitioners both need access to rich digital media. Alignment with standards help make appropriate content more easily accessed by all.

New York has moved in this direction already through the auspices of state public broadcasting stations. EDVideoOnline is a portal to PowerMediaPlus which provides teachers with access to downloadable video, audio, and images for use with their students. They also include worksheets and quizzes.

Unfortunately, this is a subset of what was available in the past. When I started using this program, it included full access to the Discovery Education library. Public stations scaled back the program to the current offerings. They said too few were using it to justify the expense. I didn’t see a lot of teachers using it either, but those who did were excited about it.

Beyond PowerMediaPlus and Discovery Education, New York needs go further in digitizing and providing access to its own holdings. New York museums and libraries hold a treasure trove of material. Some institutions have done a great job digitizing materials and providing access, while others have done little.

I hope this means access to more content in the future. Access to a broader audience is also essential. While everyone can access some of the material, students are shut out of PowerMediaPlus. This repository could provided a wealth of content for independent study, exploration, and working on assignments.

Access to digital content also encompasses licensing. Let me relate my own experience. I have spent countless hours creating media rich presentations for delivering engaging social studies lessons for my class. They include historical documents, images, maps, and embedded digital video. Under fair use, there is no question that I was legally using these materials for my own classroom.

I thought it would be great to share these materials with other practitioners throughout the state (and ideally beyond), so I contacted PowerMediaPlus about doing such. In essence, they replied that there was no way I could do such legally.

We need to be able share what we create with this digital media with other learners and practitioners. They need to be able to reuse and remix that work to adapt it to their individual needs. NYSED should explore Creative Commons Licensing for content that is state owned and that of state funded institutions. They need to negotiate for means to more broadly share the content they pay for through entities such as PowerMediaPlus. Further, it needs to create a platform to facilitate such sharing.

In conclusion, there is more to digital content than availability. There needs to be access and the ability to remix it and share with others.

I will continue a discussion of New York State’s Educational Technology Plan in future posts, including a discussion of each of the six broad goals. I look forward to hearing your comments.

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Will NYSED Tweet?

July 27, 2009 in Policies, Social Networking, Technology | 3 comments

While I attended the NYSCATE Leadership Summit last week for a variety of reasons, the main motivation was to hear the New York State Education Department’s (NYSED) presentation on their proposed state technology plan. Beyond the presentation there were roundtable discussions to provide input and feedback followed by an opportunity to ask questions.

When the opportunity to ask questions arrived, I raised my hand. I told the them that I hadn’t heard about the proposed tech plan through regular channels, rather through Twitter. Then came the question: Would they consider setting up an account and using Twitter?

The answer: We’ll have to check with our counsel.

Let’s juxtapose this with Goal Two of the Statewide Technology Plan:

Learners, teachers, and administrators are proficient in the use of technology for learning.

Proficiency is defined, in large measure, by standards for desired levels of skills, knowledge and performance. Proficiency encompasses such areas as social networks and internet safety.

Apparently, while NYSED wants students, teachers, and administrators to use social networks, they fear doing so themselves. They seem flummoxed by the same issues that technology pioneering districts and practitioners have been wrestling with for years. The message is that NYSED regards the very activities in which they wish us to engage as legally questionable.

Educators know that good leadership involves modeling the desired behaviors. NYSED knows that and should do the same. Using social networking tools shows that they understand them. They could model what they regard as best practices.

To succeed NYSED needs to help cut through the systemic fear and uncertainty that runs from practitioner to district to BOCES and beyond. Hesitation is the enemy of change and innovation. We need some degree of guidance in what are acceptable practices.

Twitter is a simple tool. It’s a good place to start. The US Department of Education, Centers for Disease Control, and President Obama tweet. NYSED needs to tweet too.

I plan on a number of posts on aspects of the NYS Tech Plan soon. I’m eager to hear comments.

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Beware of cloud freebies

January 27, 2009 in Policies, Technology | 8 comments

Sometimes I think I am becoming unpopular on some educational technology websites. I have a keen distrust of free hosted services that are touted by so may web evangelists and those that frequent such sites. Some edtech sites almost seem like clearinghouses for free Internet based services. I have often challenged the use of such site citing student privacy and (less often) data control and ownership.

Today I came across a link to a provocatively worded blog post condemning these free cloud services offered so widely today. Before you click, I want to warn you that this post uses strong language. Jason Scott is an archiver of old BBS data and producer of a five hour documentary on Boston area Bulletin Board Services. He clearly has a larger historical perspective than most who use the Internet today.

Jason warns:

You are going to have to sit down and ask yourself some very tough questions because the time where you could get away without asking very tough questions with regard to your online presence and data are gone.

We increasingly rely on online repositories for our work and can no longer do so thoughtlessly. He isn’t talking so much about data you have so much as data you have created—our photographs, blogposts, videos, etc. Many are relying on cloud sites to store this data. He further states:

Because if you’re not asking what stuff means anything to you, then you’re a sucker, ready to throw your stuff down at the nearest gaping hole that proclaims it is a free service (or ad-supported service), quietly flinging you past an End User License Agreement that indicates that, at the end of the day, you might as well as dragged all this stuff to the trash. If it goes, it’s gone.

The larger perspective shows us that these services have abruptly disappeared in the past and that relying on these services puts our data at peril. Jason Scott does not say we shouldn’t use the cloud, rather we should not rely upon it to store our only copy of content that we created. They let you store your stuff for free in their cloud. Why should they put themselves in legal peril by guaranteeing the safety of the data?

This issue of data safety will be exasperated by our current fiscal climate. Banks and large financial institutions that appear solid one day are collapsing the next. Liquidity is drying up and investors are reluctant to risk money in businesses that do not have a reliable revenue stream such as firms that offer free Internet services.

I’ll go a step further than Jason in regard to the license agreements on such sites. Not only do these sites relinquish responsibility for the safety of the data, they often also tell you that you are giving up the ownership of your data.

This all is made even worse when teachers have their students rely so heavily on these cloud solutions for storing their content. Both students and teachers have begun to take these resources for granted with little regard for the safety of using such sites. Is this the behavior that teachers should model?

The solution is to take responsibility for your data. In most cases that means paying, either for a service that provides a guarantee and a clearly articulated back up plan, or for inexpensive server space that you personally back up. Anything less is folly.

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Creative Commons Licensing

December 12, 2008 in Policies, Technology | 9 comments

You may have noticed the new symbols on my sidebar. That’s because I finally woke up and decided to start thinking about copyright issues for my blog and other content that I put on the Internet. I was moved by the NYSCATE conference to consider Creative Commons Licensing.

Creative Commons licenses allows creators  to share content that they have created, while retaining some rights to the material. Steve Hargadon posted this great YouTube video on his K12opensource site by JustinG4000 which provides a great overview.

Having heard about it at the conference and seeing this video moved me to visit the Creative Commons site. The site makes it very easy to create a license for your content. Just click on the License Your Work on the upper right hand side of the homepage.

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The up comes a page with a few questions and buttons to help you customize the license.

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You can also fill out optional fields, making attribution to your site a function of copying and pasting as snippet of code. You can fill in whatever is relevant.

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Click Select a license and you are delivered to page that allows you to select the appearance of the Creative Commons icon/link and gives you a snippet of code to past into the appropriate place on your site.

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As you can see, the Creative Commons site makes it quick and easy to license your work.

Licensure choices

Creative Commons licenses starts with the premise that you allow others to copy your work as long as they attribute it to you (You can choose their Public Domain license if you do not care about attribution). The first choice presented is whether or not you allow commercial use of your work. I was almost certainly selecting No until Jim Klein responded to my Tweet asking about CC licensing. He cautioned that not allowing commercial use may prevent paid presenters from using your ideas (of course they could always ask permission). For my blog, I decided that I would allow commercial use on the remote chance that somebody would actually use my ideas. For my test prep materials, on the other hand, I barred commercial use.

The next choice is to decide whether or not you will allow others to modify your work. As outlined in the video above, you have three choices:

  • Yes–allow others to change as they please.
  • Yes–”Share alike” as long as they grant the same license to those who might use the derivation of your work.
  • No–modifications are not allowed

I chose “Share Alike.” I feel that if anybody want to use my material and modify it, they should allow others to do the same.

Copyright, creative commons, and pedagogy

Now that students are becoming content creators on the Internet whether or not in association with schools, they need to consider copyright and its implications. The options  presented with the Creative Commons license variations provides a great venue for discussing the implications of copyright in general.

Furthermore, considering the copyright of their own materials will make discussion of intellectual ownership in general more relevant to students than the standard plagiarism lectures. It becomes a real issue and will almost certainly give students a new perspective on the issues involved.

Creative Commons licensing makes sense, particularly for content creators on the Internet. Web 2.0 makes the issue of copyright very important to a widening number of people. Creative Commons also highlights issues in the realm of copyright that make it a great vehicle for discussion of intellectual property in schools.

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