Transcript

Michael McVey: The Windy Side of the Internet at TEDxEMU

every now and then something happens that changes the way you see the world and changes your career uh in the most astounding ways and um the first time it happened to me was when I was in fifth grade and somebody gave me glasses for the first time and um I actually didn't want to show this slide first uh the real thing happened for me in 1981 March 21st a professor came a teacher a colleague of mine came back from a conference and said I've seen the future it's a computer that fits inside your briefcase and some of you see recognize this the Commodore 64 many of us had one um what they neglected to tell you was it required a power adapter the size of a small brick and two pounds of cables a television Monitor and that was all fine and good I never used the game the joystick but what I did use the greatest peripheral the thing that changed my world and the way I was going to do teaching from here on in was the printer for the the first time I could take the words edit edit edit print print print create booklet create all sorts of wonderful things it did it changed the way I taught Flash Forward to higher education many many years later things are changing in higher education and the way we gather data the way we disseminate data the way we teach and the way we teach our students to be and um I'm going to just talk about some of those things right now they have all set administrators hair on fire in the last few years and people are still talking about it and my hair of course as long as since left uh what you're looking at behind me is an electron electronic buoy uh sits on the ocean gathers data water currents wind temperatures wave heights things like this automatically Gathering data now I think that's something from the hard sciences and meteorology and oceanographic science isn't relevant well it actually can be especially when students have the ability now to put out to see messages in a bottle of sorts to gather data uh and what I'm talking about are simple web pages to pick up information let let me give you an example this is as simple example as possible and please you can extrapolate this to far more wonderful things uh I used to live in Canada we drank this fizzy drink called Pop I moved you know that when I moved to Arizona they drank this fizzy drink called soda and I thought oh there's a line we crossed a line in the country how would I fig and I was curious how would I figure out what that line was I suppose I could call restaurants or look this is pre- internet look up you know call people around the country my research my ability to gather data was severely limited Now using a simple little web page that's out there from pop versus soda.com we get websites that look like this we which is this one this is the soda no we are well in the middle of pop country uh I moved to Arizona which was deep into soda country and what I had no idea when I first saw this was was the third one the coke country emanating out of a place you may know as Atlanta Georgia home of got it okay what's next is uh is the dissemination of data the publishing of data it used to be and some of the older grayer heads in the room knew this and it's still the case you write your paper you do your research you uh you you do your study you gather the data you PR print PR a two three 4,000 word paper that's brilliant it drips with Brilliance you walk into the publisher and say here and they say they turn their nose up or the reviewers look at it a scance and say this is not what we're looking for doesn't fit our Journal at this time you know the form letters um it might be too long it might be too short it might be too weird it might be in a strange format I did a paper once for a for a class I did it in the form of a one-a play I thought it was brilliant uh and I got the A+ so I said well why aren't people publishing that sort of thing well they are now we have uh digital Commons at emu a database where we can actually you can put your papers up and what I like about this um you can instantly see the downloads you can see who's looked at your work and what I like about that is that um you can also get comments from people there's one young lady whose P paper was downloaded it was a lesson plan on teaching te Kill Mockingbird downloaded 2,000 plus times another one on on digital encryption was downloaded that many times in just the last two months stuff is happening word is getting out um in the old days the old the old format the printing houses which you had to go to cap in hand to ask them to print you have two reviewers looking at your work before it goes up for the world to see maybe three reviewers if you're lucky if it's a prestigious Journal now you can have as many as 20 30 40 people reviewing your work just like you're tweeting your comments about me on the stage here we have the ability to do amazing things with disseminating information and if your if your pieces are awkward or don't fit we now have the ability to get that out there to the rest of the world speaking of the rest of the world I used to teach classes of 10 when I was a special education teacher I taught classes of two or three moved up to 20 or 30 upgraded to elementary school had bigger classes then it came to college and they got back to a reasonable number we now are in the middle of the moo res Revolution massive open online courses this is I looked I did a Google search for a picture of 40,000 people and this is what I got an Obama rally I believe that is and um when I said at the beginning it's nice to meet you as a teacher teaching uh uh in a Muk I'm not really sure I'm ever going to get to know you at all but it is a extremely important change that's happening to education and I'm not going to be labor it too much but I had to experience it I had to experience it myself um piece of art from my daughter um with thousands of faces thousands of voices I joined a moo and if you do a uh a search for moo and online teaching and the word meltdown you will come across a Fatima worth a Wonder professor at Georgia Tech who ran a Moodle this January I signed up for it I among 40,000 other people signed up for her class and started to take it uh within 20 minutes she put out an email saying that the thing had crashed uh people were deleting columns in her open Google spreadsheet where we're supposed to add ourselves to as a into groups uh the videos were extremely large mostly Talking Heads it was very very frustrating and she hit the the corsera the company running it hit the eject button I have no problem with with worth I believe she's an excellent teacher and she experimented and tried something she is at The Cutting Edge and things are not supposed to work brilliantly the first time out when do they ever so I I praise her mistakes or the mistakes that her team made in designing the course but it's coming up and this is what's setting a lot of our administrators again their hairs on fire um some of you remember my space now this this whole thing about who we are as a teacher got me to think about who what we were asking our students to do um and here's the story years ago I was running a computer lab at the University of Arizona uh in the education building and uh at the time 28 million people were on MySpace got it and I was more of a Facebook guy um I don't I wonder how they turned out anyway uh and I stood behind a young lady who was editing her Myspace page and and I just oh that's interesting and I watched and somebody I I caught her eye and she slow slowly turned around and said excuse me this is private you understand perhaps she doesn't understand what that word means or perhaps I I carried that one second of time with me for years and years and years to the point that I I suddenly I now realize what it is she was saying she says this is not private it's not my words are private that you're not allowed to see what I'm not allowed to see was what was behind her online Persona I wasn't allowed to see the Flesh and Blood person that was behind her words and her ideas and her images and her music that she shared we all have an online Persona we are all developing ourselves in the world and that explained to me very clearly came like a lightning bolt why in my class in my educational technology class two or three people in the class were tweeting 15 20 30 times a week 15 times a day and I was and I couldn't drag a tweet out of other students because they didn't want to ruin their online online Persona or the perception the world had of them they weren't sure they weren't ready and they needed time to develop that so I'm trying to develop I'm trying to make sure my colleagues understand that this is not we don't come out of the box ready to chat online as many of you know uh one other thing that came out of my experiences in high school and teaching was that I always used to think it would be good when I moved to another uh school I thought it would be great to have like the military uh have button and badges that so someone can say oh I see you uh I see you took students abroad oh yearbook for seven years that's pretty amazing that's great um and I thought well what what quasi military group could uh could we use and of course we came to the uh the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guides uh the idea of badges I just want to talk about badges this is coming up and here's how it's going to affect you um badges for computer programming the Linux folks the HTML programmers um um uh Mozilla Corp has an open badge infrastructure that they've created 450 uh institutions are using it now they've given out more than 145,000 badges uh on three pillars and I'm I just had to watch my fingers because I did it wrong last night um the first pillar is great details digital details on who you are the second one is on who the institution is and why they're giving out the badge and the third is what the details are of of the skill that you created um I can now put on my my badge electronic badge has given a TED Talk okay uh but there are many many other things and you can imagine rather than just walk away with an A or a B in a course or a M's in a in a particular program you now have discernable skills that an employer could look at on a database it's going to change the way some serious serious people are giving serious serious thought to how they can move this to higher education and I just wanted to draw your attention to this because it's going going to affect this thing that you see in the slide our transcripts um transcript student X Out of institution y um the reason I'm mentioning this is that so many people are so agitated about what's going on in higher education and how technology is going to affect it they're afraid they're going to lose students they're afraid they're going to lose their classes they're afraid they're afraid they're afraid and I wanted to tell you that well I want to actually show you this this is a wood engraving from an 1833 uh Leonid meteor shower uh it was a very very heavy one we must have been passing through quite a thick dust trail young fella a lawyer named Abraham Lincoln happened to be around at the time in his small village in Illinois said um when people were sore afraid of these falling stars and shooting stars he said don't worry about the shooting stars don't worry about the flashes focus on what's behind on the stars that are stable focus and I'm asking you and all the people in highered to focus on what's the most important thing what we bring to the classroom the teaching understanding what's behind the grade who's behind the grade the humanity of what it is we do as teachers and who we are as students and don't ever forget that and you'll be fine stuff will come stuff will go things will change uh muks will come muks will go they'll grow you'll have to take one we'll see but anyway uh if you take anything away from my talk please remember this that there are some stable elements in the world of Education there are a lot of fancy flashes as well and I I should know about that and uh do the best you possibly can thank you very very much thank