New Toys: Technology of the Future

My biggest focus in cutting-edge technology recently has been the possibility of color e-ink. In China and Japan, there are already color prototypes for color e-ink readers [1]. I had not been even considering what would replace the dvd player, but my father just brought a new device home that he found on a one-day sale. What he bought is a Smyth-sized [2] piece of equipment that has three USB ports, a wireless antenna, and a built-in 1 terrabyte harddrive and plays most of the file formats with which I have had contact. It is called the ScreenPlay DX and is made by iomega.

The purpose of the device is to play downloaded movies and even to stream movies off of the internet. It's pretty cool. I am loading up the 1TB harddrive with some things to watch and will review it tomorrow.

Update: The machine is pretty cool overall. I have two problems with it. First, although it is supposed to automatically load up access to the harddrive, on neither of the computers could access the media library properly, although I could load movies onto it. The other problem that I have with it is that the remote is a little bit hard to use.

Endnotes

1. Two color e-ink articled to check out are one from Kindle World Blog and one is on PC Mag.
2. When I say Smyth-sized I mean that it's about the same size as one of the most important texts on my bookshelf, Hebert Weir Smyth's Greek Grammar.

The Digital Age: Internet Access and Education

This title is more abstract and promising than my actual thoughts at the moment. I have been having a lot of trouble with my internet access, so posting may be spotty over the next couple of days. However, I have been reading some interesting thoughts on education.

When I finished Phrasikleia while I was proctoring an exam on Sunday, I began reading a free kindle book that I downloaded called The Future of Learning Institutions in a Digital Age. The book is a study of sorts, done with collaboration from UC Berkley and Duke and I think published by MIT that discusses the nature of education in an era of participatory technology. The study itself was placed on a website for a year where readers could leave comments, and many of these suggestions were incorporated into the document itself.

I have really enjoyed the study thus far. It notes that although there is a significant amount of participatory technology available and some of it has been put to educational use (like wikipedia), teachers and institutions are still focusing on the top-down form of IT (information technology) rather than the participatory technology platforms.

I think this educational dilemma is very interesting. There is obviously a lot of value in a top-down system of learning, but as the study points out the US has a ridiculously high dropout rate and perhaps some of the participatory technology (often not accessible to the type of low-income students who drop out of school due to lack of computer and internet resources) could be incorporated into the educational system to help update it and increase graduation rates.

Some of these ideas about participatory technology are already being employed by educators such as Sugata Mitra (see my blogposts on his TED talk: #1, #2). I also discuss some of them in my blogpost on textbooks and opencourseware. I am excited to read the rest of the study and see where it goes.

More on Self-Guided Education

I have been reading Horace (selected poems in Latin, see my reading list) and Euripides' Medea with friends. Although I do not read as quickly or as well as I would like, it is a wonderful and enjoyable experience and it's amazing that skype has enabled me to talk and coordinate with people in totally different places.

But today a fell in love again with the Berkeley webcast website. Today I have listened to the first four lectures of "History 5: European Civilization from the Renaissance to the Present" (well, I'm listening to the fourth one right now). Although his voice is kind of annoying, Thomas Laqueur, the professor, is thoroughly engaging and intelligent. He seems to be a Foucault-influenced scholar with an interdisciplinary approach that involves finding the narratives of power and legitimacy in history an analyzing their progression. I wanted to listen to this for the most part because Cerinthus and I have been debating over Romanesque verses Gothic architecture (he likes Romanesque, I love Gothic) and specifically of the historical quoting and power of religion built into the architecture itself. If anyone wants to share their thoughts for one side or the other for the debate feel free to comment (we would love to have some new ideas to discuss)

Unfortunately, most of the courses do not have any links to their course material, since the material is now contained on b-space, which I believe is a Berkeley-students-only website. A few of them do and the lectures do provide a vast amount of the information so it is still an effective teaching tool.

One other thing that I found recently is a set of free e-books "sold" by Amazon that cover high school math and science from the CK-12 Foundation. This is not very advanced, although the math does go through calculus, but I think it's incredible that a company it making them accessible to students who want to get ahead, review, or just learn on their own. The coolest one is CK-12 21st Century Physics: A Compilation of Contemporary and Emerging Technologies, which intends to introduce high school students to the marvels of modern physics rather than forcing them into only learning the advancements of the 19th and first half of the 20th century. I have not read much of the book itself, but the purpose looked great.

I am continually amazed at the resources out there for self-teaching. It is very cool. It reminds me of the food blog network, from which I taught myself to make bread. It is amazing that people are willing to provide their experience to a public and talk about the techniques for cooking. That is very cool.

The Problems with Free Books

This morning, my mother emailed me a thoroughly amusing article called "The Trouble with Google Books." The article deals with the errors and problems that Google books has, specifically with metadata (i.e. the data that allows you to find the book you are looking for, e.g. publication date, author, etc). Some of the pieces are particularly hilarious, such as attributing a book an the Mosiac Web browser to Sigmund Freud's distinguished co-authorship [1]. My biggest problem with google books was that it always omitted exactly those pages of a book that I needed most when I looked something up because some other enterprising classicist had checked it out of the library before I got there [2].

Although I have always been a massive lover of cheap books and used books (which is the only way I could have amassed the massive collection of books around my house and in boxes in the garage), receiving a Kindle (see my previous blogpost) I have become a zealot for free electronic books. Part of the time while Cerinthus was visiting, I stupidly spent showing him the wonders of ACLS Humanities E-Book Archive (because he still has access to our college's server). It is incredible. Although one can only download PDF pages in three pages bursts, there are some fabulous academic texts on every subject from archaeoastronomy to modern urban planning. If one compiles the books oneself, they're free (provided, of course, access to said archive through school or an academic institution). I also have spent a lot of time searching for books, especially classics books and found a number of different places (to many of which I link on Platonic Psychology). Some interesting ones are as follows:

• Project Gutenberg: An archive of out of print books and audiobooks. Has a pretty awesome variety of formats available, including MOBI documents for the kindle. They are now also compiling audiobooks, as well as adding works in their original languages, such as Greek and Latin (as well as German, French, etc)
• Internet Archive: Very much like Project Gutenberg, this archive includes a variety of out of print books in many different formats, including the Sanskrit Grammar that I included in my blogpost last night.
• Textkit: A selections of out of print materials for teaching Classical Greek and Latin.
• Free Books from Amazon: this is all in kindle format (but can be read with free kindle reading apps), but it includes out of print books, as well as government documents like the U.S. Budget, and a number of new studies on digital media and learning by MIT, like this one.
  

There are some more but this is a start and I would love to hear about more I have not found yet.

Harping on my education theme, again (sorry!), I think cheap used books and free ebooks are awesome. I believe, most certainly, that authors and the institutions who aid in dissemination their work should be paid and that they provide a vital service for society. However, the library near my house has a book section only twice the size of my bedroom. Thus far, I found no classics texts there I am interested in reading. The books are simply too expensive for a small local library. It seems to me that libraries are one of the great places that one can supplement or design their own education. It makes no sense that only university libraries have the necessary academic texts when cities and towns without universities are the ones could most use an extensive library. So I think that used book sites and free ebooks are great because they provide access to a whole range of materials not otherwise available.

Endnotes

1. This reminded me of when I asked a group of my SAT kids what they knew about Charles Dickens' writing, and I got three blank stares and a girl who told me that she had only read half of Alice in Wonderland and did not remember it very well. I was also shocked to learn that out of a 13 person class, not one person knew who Adam Smith was. On the other hand, every one of them can work a smartphone, an art which I have not yet mastered.
2. My junior year this was a particularly pernicious trend, which prevented me from ever getting a chance to read Genres in Dialogue for my Phaedrus paper. Luckily, I received a copy for my last birthday and I am enjoying it thoroughly.

Unconventional Education #2

Two of the reasons that I was so interested in Sugata Mitra's [1] TED Talk in my last blogpost are that I am now working as an educator and that I am a product of progressive education (in my formative elementary school years). From this, I understand the power of working in groups and students teaching themselves and each other.

I went to a progressive elementary school that was built on John Dewey's conception of experimental learning. We spent most of our time in school working in groups, block building, and wood working. We went on field trips to the source of each of the sites that we were studying. I remember vividly sitting through mass at a modern monastery when studying the life of medieval monks and getting up at 3am to go to one of the groups of vendors that supplies restaurants in order to see how the city worked. I gained a curiosity and a passion for learning there.


I picked the college that I did partially on the idea that it would be a return to these unconventional roots. Although it had grades, classes, and majors, like any traditional institution, there was a high premium put on working in groups for certain classes as well as an encouragement for self-competition rather than interpersonal competition. This was a lovely change from my traditional high school, and it fostered precisely the intellectual environment that I craved. In my senior year, I started a Heidegger seminar which met on Friday nights to discuss Being and Time. This class utilized a combination of technology (sometimes listening to Hubert Dryfus' lectures from his Philosophy 185 class, as well as individual in the group finding things online), and group work (the discussions every week) allowed us to gain an incredible amount of information out of the text. Emergence, in Mitra's words. We had very little outside intervention, except for a few visits from a wonderful German professor. I unfortunately was not able to read and participate in this as much as possible due to writing my thesis, but the Heidegger group was productive and wonderful and it was one of the great parts of my education.

The SAT prep that I teach involves some amount of group work in each class. Although often times the group work devolves into talking. The students in my class are tense about school, sports, and college applications, and many of them go to school together. However, the other day I witnessed a great moment. Two of the girls in my class, who have the most trouble with math were working together. One of the smartest, but also one of the tougher girls in my class, ended up in a group with them. When I came over to check on the group, she was helping them-- really explaining carefully how each of the math problems worked and encouraging them. I did not even have to help them out and I was able to focus on some of the other groups that were having trouble focusing. It underlined, for me, the true value of working together.

In some ways, that this self-generated learning is what I am trying to do this year. I am attempting to channel my curiosity in a way to further my own education and solidify those things I learned in the past in my mind. I am not, unfortunately, in a group of any kind (although there is an advanced calculus class at a local school I would absolutely love to take), but I am using the internet, the books I have around, and material from my old courses in order to try to create my own education. Part of the reason I write Platonic Psychology is that I provide a collection of resources for anyone who is out there looking, but more to provide me with a hypothetical group with whom I can interact. By articulating my thoughts to these theoretical people, I solidify my thoughts and allow them to grow (and hopefully generate emergence). So hopefully it will all work out.

Endnotes

1. I just discovered his blog and found it to be thoroughly charming.

Unconventional Education

My mother just sent me an incredible video. I'm not, generally speaking, one of those people who watches a lot of videos online, but this was so stunning that I had to share it. This video is from a TED conference, in which Sugata Mitra discusses the use of computers in child-driven education. The initial premise that he poses is that the places in the world to which good teachers cannot or will not go are not only the places that need them the most, but also the places that become the hotbeds of problems in the world. From there, he started an experiment by placing computers in slums in order to see if children could learn from them without instruction.

Mitra poses this hypothesis at the end of the talk, which he intends upon proving experimentally in the next five years:

"Education is a self-organizing system [1] where learning is an emergent phenomenon [2]."

This video is fantastic and I highly recommend it.

Endnotes

1. Mitra defines a self-organizing system as "one where the system structure appears without explicit intervention from outside the system."
2. Mitra defines emergence as "the appearance of a property not previously observed as a functional characteristic of the system."