Jonathan Harris On “The Web’s Secret Stories”

Nov 122007
 

I just finished watching Jonathan Harris’ TED Talk titled “The Web Secret Stories“. Harris works from the assumption that throughout humanity there is a shared need to express ourselves through various mediums. In the digital age, we have a unique opportunity of charting commonalities and differences in human expressions through innovative ways. Harris has developed some very intriguing visualization tools in this pursuit.

We Feel Fine demonstrates “a madly swarming mass of particles, each of which represents a single human feeling.” All of these “emotional expressions are stated by people”, and it’s amazing to see what is revealed through this visualization tool. By playing with the settings, madness, murmurs, montage, mobs, metrics, and mounds, you can see some really neat results. Although I haven’t checked this for age appropriateness, a tool like this could have amazing potential in getting kids to write, responding to the impetus of a single, real, human emotion.

Universe is also another really interesting visualization tool that aims to “reveal our modern mythology”. I tried a few sample searches in this tool related to education, but sadly, the greater mythology (e.g., politics, presidential affairs, iraq) seems to overshadow anything relevant to my search. However, it is another neat tool. Both of these tools are described carefully in the TED video below.

Although he doesn’t mention it in his talk, Harris is also the developer of the older visualization tool “10X10“. I’ve always thought this was useful. (I believe there is something similar to this, but more powerful, anyone know that that is?)

This TED talk is worth watching if you are interested in visualization tools or looking at new ways of capturing the spirit of the times.

What Is The Role Of The Leader In Educational Technology

Nov 122007
 

It looks like I contributed to inspiring a Graduate student to start a new blog on leadership and technology. This email was sent out to myself and others:

Greetings all,

I am trying something entirely new to me. Alec Couros talked to us in our class last Tuesday and a quote of his has resonated with me. “Knowledge doesn’t exist in us so much but in a network.” I think that I have always believed this. However, I think our leadership day on Thursday and Alec’s talk challenged me to think about using a blog to open up my burning questions to the world. I have no idea if I did it “right” but have begun to explore the idea of “networks of knowledge”. I created a blog to see what others had to say about some burning questions that I have about leadership and technology. Please pass on this link to anyone you think might be interested in exploring these questions.

Here is the link.

http://leadershipinedtech.blogspot.com/

Please feel free to share your thoughts!!

Yours bloggingly,

Laurie

Could we give this new blogger a warm welcome by responding to her first question, “What is the role of the leader in educational technology?” I feel that nothing gets a new blogger more motivated than some initial audience response.

Cyberbullying Resources

Nov 122007
 

I’ve been putting together a few Cyberbullying resources for a presentation to 14-18 year old students. I’ve covered the topic dozens of times, to many different target audiences. Overall, I think I’ve been fairly successful in getting the message across.

I’ve been trying my best to avoid the “checklist” approach to the topic, in other words, I’m not much for presenting a list of do’s and don’t re: cyberbullying or Internet safety. I’m looking to promptg much deeper, more serious responses to this topic. I think that the only way we’ll be successful in this is to have our children emotionally connected to the problem. In some cases this emotional connection comes too late. I’ve unfortunately been called in to a couple of cases where cyberbullying education came after major incidents, including suicides.

While looking for resources tonight, I found a couple of new ones I hadn’t noticed before. First, this tear-jerking ABC News report was particularly powerful. As a parent, this really affected me.

Also, several of these NetSmartz “Real Life Stories” were very well done. Most were done as narratives or based on true stories, and I find this approach can be much more powerful than sensationalized fictions.

For more cyberbullying resources, see my Wikispaces wiki. Please feel free to add others.