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Skype Interview

Here is an interview with my friend Sarah about how she uses technology in her classroom. She is a Special Ed. Language arts teacher, so she loves some of the ways tech allows her to engage students with different learning styles or learning disabilities. She also talks about the issues her class faced with sharing information; they couldn't handle a wiki. She shares about that experience and what she decided to do instead.




About Skype in general, I think it's great! I look forward to using it a lot in my Social Studies classrooms to talk to students around the globe. Right now I use it to talk to my friends in Malawi, Africa. I have also recently been enjoying google video chat. It's super easy, and the video quality and speed are impressive, even across the Atlantic! This is one of the technologies which is most appealing and accessible to me.

And here is the link for the i talk, the recorder she uses to connect to ipods for her dyslexic students in particular.

ttyl

So, since we're on the subject of linguistics, how about texting? I know I hated it to begin with; why do all that stupid typing on the tiny keypad when you could just call? Now I have to have unlimited texting on my phone plan. I love the way you can communicate the essence of your point so quickly, without small talk.

This article and interview are with author David Crystal about his new book, the Gr8 Db8, about the linguistics of texting. Similarly to the misconceptions and fear Tapscott cites coming from the non-digital generations, Crystal quotes apocalyptic warnings about the coming demise of the English language. He basically ends up saying that it's not that big of a deal, and that this adds a new dimension to our methods of communication, but won't encroach into the primary uses of the English language.

This story is from September; I actually heard it on the way to our first tech class. It's just interviews with high school students in Chicago about texting.

Pidgin vs. Creole

Here is an article and interview with Don Tapscott, the author of Growing Up Digital, and now the author of the sequel, Grown Up Digital. He wrote the first in 1997, after observing how his children took to tech like ducks to water. He researched this idea of digital natives, and is following up his earlier book with a look at how the generation is doing. He cites some of the accusations facing the Digital Generation, "they have no shame", and "they never go outside". He rebuts the cynicism and looks again at how the Digital Generation is changing the way we all interact.

These concepts make me think about a linguistics principle I learned in college. A pidgin language has no native speakers; if you put a French, Chinese, Swahili, and Urdu speaker on an island, they would come up with a way to communicate. That would be a pidgin language; without set structure, or consistent grammatical rules. As soon as one of those folks has a baby, and the baby learns to talk, you have a Creole. A Creole language comes from a combination of languages, but once the pidgin goes through the filter of the developing mind of a native speaker, it comes out structured. The mind of the child imposes consistent grammatical structure, and the first generation of native speakers refines the language without even realizing it. So it's not just that native speakers speak a language better than non-native speaker. It's that a native speaker can make a mush of ideas into a language. I belong to the early wave of digital natives (1982), but in many ways feel non-native. I didn't have a computer until late elementary school, and no internet until middle. College was really my first exposure to unlimited, high speed internet. I wonder how we will continue to see the digital world grow and be refined as the current crop of college students and high schoolers, from my perspective the first true native speakers, grows up speaking this newly refined creole.

Do you feel like a digital native? Our class includes a spread of ages, the youngest end of which might be much more digitally native than me, even though we may only be four years apart... What do you guys feel about yourselves?

As we discuss technology in the classroom, one of the most interesting and inspiring places I keep running into good ideas is in the office. Not my office, I'm a pastry baker, but in business articles and models. Fast Company Magazine is always full of cutting-edge applications of the latest technology within the business community. And since the business world is faster, more competitive, and better funded than the education world, it makes great sense to me to keep an eye on what they're up to and glean the most useful bits.

This article by Ellen McGirt, in the latest December '08 issue, is on Cisco's new de-centralized organizational structure, rooted in excellent communication via technology. Here is a clip:

"Trust and openness are words you hear a lot in the endlessly optimistic world of Web 2.0, but at Cisco, it seems to be more than a PowerPoint mantra, even to my jaundiced eye. As Mitchell and I settle down to our conversation in an open space not 25 feet from Chambers's office, I can hear the CEO chatting on the phone with customers. Mitchell, who is charged with encouraging the company's rank and file to adopt new technology, is undistracted. "We want a culture where it is unacceptable not to share what you know," he says. So he promotes all kinds of social networking at Cisco: You can write a blog, upload a video, and tag your myriad strengths in the Facebook-style internal directory. "Everybody is an author now," he laughs. Blog posts are voted up based on their helpfulness. There are blogs about blogging and classes about holding classes -- all gauged to make it easy for less-engaged employees to get with the program.

The goal is not just tech for tech's sake. For Mitchell and his bosses, vice president of IT, communications, and collaboration technology Sheila Jordan and chief information officer Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco has become a laboratory of connectedness and productivity. They are teaching people to use the stuff that Cisco sells -- the routers, switches, IP telephony, data centers, mobile devices -- by starting with their own people. As chief marketing officer Sue Bostrom puts it, the first wave of the Internet was an exercise in installation: "Really, it was all about just getting people online." In the second wave, the job is to show people how to best use the tools, she says: "Now that I'm on, what can I do?" So that Facebook-style directory at Cisco serves not just as a way to make lunch plans or find a second baseman for a softball game. It is a real-world, real-time sorting apparatus, designed to help anyone inside the company easily find the answer to a question, a product demo, or precisely the right warm body to speak to a waiting customer or present at a conference -- in any language, anywhere around the globe."

As the company has experimented with these digital communities, all sorts of great collaborations have come about. Even the CEO blogs in video format, because he's dyslexic. However, as Cisco has innovated their inner-company communications through the latest networking tech, the company has also restructured itself as a much more decentralized, Web 2.0, the author even posits: socialist organization. Could all of this great technology work in a classroom with the same traditional structure? The CEO of Cisco says, "Without changing the structure of your organization, I would argue that [innovation] will not work." How might the structure of a high school classroom have to change in order for collaborative technology to really be integrated into the experience, rather than a superimposed prop?

Here is the link to the Fast Company Cisco article.