Teaching for the Future

NEWS:
Schools test Edugaming in Classroom from Joystiq: This is not a new issue and we have been talking about the pedagogy of video games. I'm just glad to see the video game industry is taking notice of this gap in the market. I'd love to see some of the innovation in gaming be applied to educational games.

On Hit Lists, Anger Finds an Outlet from the NYTimes.com: Though school violence is down, student created hit lists are on the rise. Though some may consider these harmless many schools are treating these like threats.

Stitched into Memory from the Boston Globe: This is a great art project being done at a local Massachusetts school. Students are stitching small figures to signify each of the fallen American soldiers who died in Iraq and Afghanistan. Not only is this a creative way for students to make connections and honor soldiers who were lost in the war.

TOOLS/RESOURCES:
The Boring Store from Laughing Squid: This strange store is a front for a 826 National Writing Center which were founded by author Dave Eggers. These hidden gems are spread all over.

• Brooklyn - Brooklyn Superhero Supply Co.
• Seatle - Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co.
• San Fransicso - The Pirate Store
• Chicago - The Boring Store

USB Drive helps find lost child from Daily Cup of Tech: This is an interesting story about how parents who used a program designed to retrieve lost USB drives to find their three year old son. Though this could have also been done with a dog tag, but I think this is an interesting application of a neat trick.

EDITORIAL:
I was inspired by short film that I found through a blog post at think:lab called "You Were Supposed To Sing and Dance...". The short cartoon created by the team that puts out South Park led by Matt Stone and Trey Parker uses audio from Alan Watts.

Notes:

• Cartoons are "easy to swallow" media.
  
• New Media's Effect on our Culture.
• New Media allows kids to be cultural producers.
• The whole point of Teaching for the Future
• My goals
• Research
• Collaboration
• Filling in Gaps
  
• What I've learned
  
• My upcoming "Podcast-iversary"
• Upcoming Changes to the Show
• What can I do for you?
• More listener participation
• Voice Mails
• Email
• Comments
• Link Backs
  

UPCOMING:
I sat down to talk with Diane Farsetta is a Senior Researcher at the Center for Media & Democracy and PRWatch.org. She explains the current penetration and the potential dangers of Video News Releases.

OTHER LINKS:

• Puffle Kerfuffle from Wired: An interesting article about discipline in a virtual world.
• Alan Watts Podcast
• Aaron "the Art Guy" Smith
  

If you want to help out or participate with Teaching for the Future you can leave a comment on the homepage or link to us on your blog or podcast. If you want to get in touch, feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com.

TAGS: Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching, Video News Release, media literacy, visual literacy, new media literacy

Labels: bostonglobe, dave lamorte, education, financial aid podcast, gaming, interview, media literacy, new media literacy, nytimes, podcast, teaching, technology

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 3/26/2007 01:45:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

News:

Does Public Relations Equal Propaganda? from Ed Lee:

Ed blogs over at Blogging Me Blogging You, where he talks about social media and marketing. He points out an interesting YouTube video from a group called PR Watch. It's interesting and really well done and asks a lot of interesting questions.

Americans Devoting More Time to Media from VOA News: from the article:

"This year, the average American will spend 3,518 hours (nearly five months) watching TV, surfing the Internet, listening to the radio and reading. That's a prediction from The Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2007. This is the 126th edition of the Statistical Abstract, which is published annually by the U.S. Census Bureau."

• Americans Devoting more time consuming media
  
• More content
• More delivery systems.
• iPods, Podcasts, PVRs allow people to have more control.

Education As Portable As A Pop Song from The Unofficial Mac Blog: This post looks at how portable media is changing how we look at distance learning. As media players become cheaper, this will become more prevalent.

Follow Up:
Chris Penn from the financial aid podcast sent me this link. Thanks Chris!!!
http://www.iveyfiles.com/my_weblog/2007/02/moron_tries_to_.html

Upcoming:
I'm going to be going to the Beyond Broadcast Conference at MIT this weekend. I'm going to try to get some interesting audio and video that I will share with you on the podcast. I hope to see Steve Garfield and meet Henry Jenkins.

Other Links:

• Ads Made By You, In a Click from the NYTimes
• Iraqi-American Rapper Timz on YouTube
• Armed Forces Welcome Suicidal Teens? from Neatorama
• Reverend Billy and the Church of Stop Shopping
• Intellagirl's take on why Teachers Need to Understand Computers Or Risk Prison
• Bum Rush the Charts

Tags: Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching, financial aid podcast, media literacy, new media literacy, beyondbroadcast

Labels: dave lamorte, education, financial aid, financial aid pocast, gaming, lesley, media literacy, mobile technology, new media literacy, podcast, stevegarfield, teaching, texting, video

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 2/21/2007 10:59:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

News:
Google Opens Dialog with Book Publishers from CNET News: Google hosts their "Unbound" event to convince book publishers that they are not their enemy. Though there has been a lot of debate over Google's efforts to digitize text and create a printed text search engine, I think that ebooks make a lot of sense. During the resent episode of Boing Boing Boing editors Cory Doctorow and Mark Faurenfelder discussed ebooks as both readers and content creators. Faurenfelder talked about the use of ebooks as the publisher of Make Magazine and how easy it is to distribute the pdf versions. Doctorow believes that a lot of the success of his print books are due to the buzz created by releasing his works electronically under a Creative Commons liscence.

The Camera Phone from Slate: This is an interesting article looking at the camera phone and how it has changed the way we communicate. The article focuses on many of the negative effects of the almost ubiquitous device in spying on our neighbors, invading other's privacy, and catching others at their worst. I think their is a great deal of truth in the quote of camera phone inventor Phillpe Khan who said in a 2000 Wired interview "With this kind of device, you're going to see the best and the worst of things." There is also a link to an Mp3 of this article available on the article page.

Gaming advances as a learning tool from eSchool News: As you are already aware there are a great deal of teachers who are beginning to integrate video games into their classroom practice. The article discusses how video games can help reach the digital natives in their classrooms. In my mind this seems that teachers are just trying to meet their students halfway and trying to address the interests of their students.

National Slowdown Week from Adbusters: Did you miss National Slowdown Week? Well so did I. This is another campaign from the folks at Adbusters. I think the video is really cute, but I'm not sure if slowing down is an option for most of us. This is a nice reminder to slow down.

Seven Reasons You Should Text Your Teen from Totally Wired: I found this post particularly interesting after sitting on the Student panel for Lesley University's Technology Institute. I was one of seven students who was on the panel that served as an introduction to social networking. Of the panel there were five undergraduate students who spoke about how they used social networking sites like MySpace and the Facebook. I could tell that a lot of the faculty were surprised by the role these sites played in their lives. It was not that they were dismissive of the technology or dismissive of it's usefullness, but they had no idea how these students were invested in social networking.

Though schools and universities are starting to examine social networking, this has been a long time coming. One technology that I think many teachers and adults do not understand the role of text messaging in the lives of teens. Where many adults use email, it does not have the convenience or the immediacy of text messaging or instant messaging. This blog post tries to explain to adults why they need to pay attention to this important moblie technology.

Anastasia Goodstein writes on teens and preteens and their relationships with technolgy. While most adults are not interested in text messaging, she gives 7 good reasons parents should be texting their teens.

1. Parents get a quick answer to their questions.
2. Kids are more apt to respond to text messages when they are with their friends.
3. You, or they, don't have to worry about tone of voice.
4. Texting allows you to enter your child's world.
5. Text messaging allows parents to compose and edit a message before pressing send.
6. Texting vs. calling gives kids more space but allows parents to keep in touch as often as necessary.
7. Text messaging can also be used to strengthen parent-child bonds, and let kids know that their parents are thinking of them.

Thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music.

If you want to help out or participate with Teaching for the Future you can leave a comment on the homepage or link to us on your blog or podcast. If you want to get in touch, feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo

Tags:
Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching

Labels: adbusters, ebooks, education, gaming, mobile technology, podcast, slate, teaching, texting

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 1/21/2007 12:03:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

I'm excited to have finally reached episode 50. Thank you for all of your help and your support over these few months. Also expect to see a new video post during the week around Tuesday or Wednesday. I got a chance to go to the Boston Media Makers meeting in Jamaica Plain. You should definitely check out the Meeting Report. I'd expect to hear some of my audio from that meeting over the next few weeks.






News:


Madden Birds & Bees '07 via The Out Route:
This is a weird story of a young man who received pornography instead of a copy of the new Madden 07 game for XBox. I think that this was probably a freak accident, but I think this is evidence that consoles, like computers, should be kept in main rooms where kids can be supervised.





Saddam Video Copycat from The Copycat Effect:
Loren Colman is a researcher and author of The Copycat Effect. He discusses the resent rash of "Saddam Imitators". This is the first blog post, but Coleman has recently posted about 2 more incidents. Though he does not really seem to comment on the incidents himself he describes the copycat effect at the top of the page as "The copycat effect is what happens when the media makes an event into a "hot death story" and then via behavior contagion, more deaths, suicides, murders, and more occur in a regularly predictive cycle, as per the book The Copycat Effect (Paraview Pocket - Simon and Schuster)". I first became of Loren Coleman when from his interviews on the RU Sirius Show and The Boing Boing Get Illuminated Podcast and he's a favorite reference for Gene and Bryan from Hometown Tales. He seems to be an interesting guy with a lot of interesting ideas.




Boy hangs himself 'like Saddam' from News 24:
This is the orignal story that Coleman refers too.





Education projects on the Teen Grid - A Glimpse from The Official Linden Blog:
This is not really news in a true sense, but I find SL as an interesting environment for learning. This post talks about some resent developments in the SL Education group and a link to sign up for the SL Educators mailing list.





Boy killed unplugging Game Boy from GameSpot News:
Recently a young boy was killed while on vacation with his family. After swimming in the pool the boy was still wet when he tried to unplug his Game Boy and was subsequently electrocuted. This is a tragic story of another freak accident that could have been prevented. What worries me most is that if this boy had unplugged anything else this may never have been a news report at all.






Couple Arrested After Web Posting via Fark:
A man and woman were arrested when the man's 12 year old daughter posted about them giving her drugs and alcohol on her MySpace page. They were discovered when the mother of the girl saw the information on the girls MySpace Page. This story is troubling to me on a few levels. One parents should not be allowing their twelve-year-olds to have controlled substances. Two this girl is twelve and I'm pretty sure you have to be thirteen to join MySpace. And finally that the article talks about how many parents are afraid to confront their children. Parents shouldn't be afraid to be parents.






Study Finds High Schoolers Believe We Have Too Much Free Speech... from Snark is the New Sarcasm:
This blog post talks about an interesting study that showed up in USAToday that found that most teenagers probably do not have a good grasp of the Bill of Rights. This is not really news but it seemed to fit with the theme of the show.









I watched one of the most interesting interviews on the popular machinima podcast This Spartan Life. In episode four Damian Lacidamian(Chris Burke) interviews McKenzie Wark who teaches media and cultural studies at the New School in NYC. Wark is best known for his work studying hacker and game culture.







Don't forget to Digg me on Digg.com's new Podcast section! It is a great way to get the word out about the show.

Check out http://digg.com/podcasts/teaching_for_the_future_with_dave_lamorte







Thanks to Above These Cares(aka Tom Mantzouranis from The Out-Route) and thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music. Make sure you make Dan your MySpace friend.





If you want to help out or participate with Teaching for the Future you can leave a comment on the homepage or link to us on your blog or podcast. If you want to get in touch, feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo





Tags:

Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching

Labels: dave lamorte, education, gaming, media literacy, podcast, teaching

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 1/04/2007 10:43:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

News:


Simulations give safe but realistic training to military, teachers, airlines from The Associated Press: No this isn't an article about fighter piolets or Second Life. This is a class simulator to allow rookie teachers to get a chance to deal with class room management in a controlled environment. This is actually all over the news, so I'll just give you a list of these articles here. What I find interesting that the student dialog is acutally provided by an actress who is hidden in another room, or out of site. If you had to hire an actress to run this program it seems that is would be hard to make this scalable. I find this article really funny because nothing will get you ready for students like the real thing. But it all seriousness we should be teaching teachers how to prevent fires and not how to put them out.



This does make sense in context to how our students learn. David Warlick often talks about how students play school and often treat school as a role playing game. It might work with younger teachers to get them to play school as well. It would be interesting to see how you would collect items, score points, level up in a virtual classroom. I do think this virtual class thing is an interesting toy and I'd love to get in front of it and go for the high score. The spit balls may be digital, but your shame is still real.





Nevada Senator Proposes Letting Teachers Carry Guns from KRNV 4 News: Senator Beers(Republican) is vying to have teachers to get weapons training and be allowed to carry hand guns in schools. I think this will totally change the way we look at classroom manangement. I know there is a lot of statistical evidence that states that allow conceelled weapons have less gun deaths than states that don't. I would argue that states that allow people to carry concealed weapons are areas of the country where there are less people.


I think that having guns in schools would only turn teachers in a kind of police force. Not that I think teachers would use the weapons to enforce school rules, but they would seem much more authoritarian. This would cause a huge rift between students and teachers in urban schools where many young people feel target and do not trust the police. I would not want students to feel like they would have to defend themselves from teachers.






Promo:


I wasn't able to get a hold for a promo for the Open Source Classroom Podcast so I'm going to do my own. Maybe Chris Craft can use this audio for his sho.



Follow Up:


Chris Penn sent me some links to stories about the ongoing Nelnet saga as well as an audio comment. If you're still curious feel free to check out the following articles:


Nelnet Received $278 Million in Overpayment, Inspector General Finds


Ed. Dept. IG Calls on Nelnet to Give Up $1.2 Billion in Student Loan Subsidies


Lender Overcharged U.S. $1 Billion, Audit Finds





Don't forget to Digg me on Digg.com's new Podcast section! It is a great way to get the word out about the show.

Check out http://digg.com/podcasts/teaching_for_the_future_with_dave_lamorte






Thanks to Chris Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast, thanks to Brad Niessen for the great intro, and thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music. Make sure you make Dan your MySpace friend.





If you want to help out or participate with Teaching for the Future you can leave a comment on the homepage or link to us on your blog or podcast. If you want to get in touch, feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo





Tags:

Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching

Labels: dave lamorte, david warlick, education, gaming, jobs, media literacy, podcast, teaching

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 12/16/2006 09:30:00 AM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post

News:

Games 4 Girls aren't from DS Fanboy: It would seem that GameStop's "Games 4 Girls" display seems to be a little insulting to it's targeted audience. It would seem like a better idea to try to offer games that would appeal to both sexes instead of making everything pink.

Young Children Don't Believe Everything They Hear from Science Daily: It would also seem that kids are smarter than scientists previously thought. I think they could have saved some money and just asked me. Of course kids don't believe everything, they're just leveraging their parents for better Christmas gifts.

Promo:

C.C. Chapman is going to be hosting a Live Concert with Uncle Seth in Second Life on November 25th. C.C. will be putting the concert at his virtual U-Turn Cafe.

Commentary:

I wanted to play a clip from Julien Smith's In Over Your Head because I feel like he and I may have had some sort of mind meld. It could just be that Julien is on the forefront of a media revolution both trough podcasting and independent music. I think this clip just illustrates how Julien gets it, and understands how the media targets it's audience. If you enjoy hip hop at all you should check out Julien's show.

Thanks to John Wall from the M Show for the great intro and thanks to Dan Flannery for the great music.

If you have a podcast I'd love to hear about it, so feel free to email at teachingforthefuture@gmail.com or send me an audio message through Odeo



Tags:Dave LaMorte, teaching for the future, technology, education, podcast, teaching, podcamp, hip hop






http://www.teachingforthefuture.com/teachingforthefuture43.mp3

Labels: education, gaming, julien smith, media literacy, podcast, teaching

Stumble It!

Posted by Dave LaMorte at 11/18/2006 11:02:00 PM | Permalink | Comments | links to this post