The classic example is Ethan Allen.  Enter the term into Search and you’re out furniture shopping.

But all kids really want to know about Ethan Allen is that he was some great Revolutionary War figure from Vermont.

Wading through a cluster of furniture ads is confusing and takes away from the task at hand.  Other examples: Long John Silver, Madagascar (the movie or the place?)

If Google doesn’t want to create a student version they could simply make it one of the options–like Images, News, or Buzz.  A Student option would tailor searches more to academic terms and less towards advertising.

When the homework’s done you can just click back to regular ‘ole commercially funded Google.  School and homework should be given the importance of having a specific search engine optimized for learning not consuming.

Whaddaya say Goggle?  Introduce a study mode or run the risk of slim pickings for the next generation’s workforce.

]]> http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/02/26/why-google-needs-a-student-version/feed/ http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/02/02/tech%e2%80%99s-early-zealots-are-singing-a-different-tune-has-age-made-them-wiser-or-just-older/ http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/2010/02/02/tech%e2%80%99s-early-zealots-are-singing-a-different-tune-has-age-made-them-wiser-or-just-older/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 20:58:46 +0000 admin http://www.robinraskin.com/blog/?p=707 Maybe you haven’t noticed that we’ve become the nation with the collective attention span of a tsetse fly. Or that we’re a nation utterly convinced that the more things you can do at the same time the more gifted you are.

The signs of the impending wreckage are everywhere. In London, they’ve padded certain phone poles to stop overly focused texters from walking into them. In the U.S., approximately 40% of automobile accidents (one occurs every 13 seconds) are based on inattentiveness, with cellphone distractions being the primary cause. Facebook makes it way too easy to fritter away the day trading repartees with kindergarten buddies, leaving you wondering where the day went. Our kids are more comfortable texting it than saying it. The latest study from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds our kids spend more than 50 hours of screen time each week. Not 50 serial hours though; they just multitask screen time better than the rest of us. (The homework/iPod/Facebook/texting/TV combo is fave.)

But this week was the high tech equivalent of the fat lady singing. The original zealots have started to defect and ponder what tech hath wrought.

The first time I heard Jaron Lanier speak, he was a dreadlocked college student talking about something he coined “virtual reality.” He talked of avatars floating around new worlds. Well, he’s just written a new book (that’s right, a book) called You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto. In the book he laments that some of the Internet’s most basic tenets like anonymity and crowdsourcing (the notion that the crowd always knows best) have made the Internet a place where quality information is hard to come by.

Last week in Davos at the World Global Summit, Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, slipped off the tech bandwagon when he suggested that kids would have a “deep reading” problem—reading for deeper cognition—because of the proliferation of instantaneous (never mind small-screened) devices.

And on Tuesday evening (for the few of you who don’t watch On Demand), you can see Digital Nation, a PBS special devoted to the yin/yang of living digitally. Does it bring us further apart or closer together? Open our minds to new ideas or shut them down? There you’ll find Douglas Rushkoff, another early cheerleader for all things digital and a co-producer of the program. Rushkoff makes the Internet sound a bit like Woodstock—the ideal that will never be realized again and admits that he does not use the Internet for fun.

There’s some truth to the notion that, like Woodstock became Altamont, the Internet became big business. But there’s even more truth and an imperative to the notion that we’ve got to learn some new digital survival skills. Those who know how to get the information they need and then get out will be the smart ones moving forward. Those who learn to control the Internet, and not vice versa will win. I could surf the web all day for more anecdotes in defense of my story. Discipline, willpower, and knowing that none of you have the attention to read this in its entirety trump more surfing.

Back to the Genius Bar. I made my maiden voyage with some trepidation, after upgrading my iPod Touch to Version 3.0 and encountering troubles. I brought my shhh…HP Pavilion along to show that I buy my music, most often from iTunes, and that while my podcasts, movies, and photos all made the upgrade, my music was still stuck in my PC’s library.

Quick Observations On the Bar

If I were a single woman looking to meet really smart, gangly, slightly geeky men, I would keep trouncing my Macs and heading back to the store. My visit gave Apple lust a new meaning.

Second, I felt as if I’d walked into some Lake Wobegone where all the shoppers were above average. The crowd was the same crowd that I see at NPR fundraisers and indie movies (with a strong pinch of foreign visitors tossed in for good measure). These were happy people and really smart looking–two things usually in short supply in any store in NYC.

Third, I had no idea you had to BOOK an appointment with a Genius. I thought it was spontaneous sort of thing, like the deli counter where you take a ticket number. So, I watched the LCD display behind the Bar for a few moments. It showed people’s rank on the waiting list, interspersed with did-ya-knows for Genius-wannabes. Finally, a competent young woman spotted me to ask if I needed anything.

“Help,” I said meekly.

“Did you make your appointment online,” she asked.

“Sorry,” I said, “I thought they ran it like a bar, not a doctor’s office.”

Sizing me up as a virgin, she somehow worked some magic and got me in as the last appointment of the Genius Bar’s day.

I stood, waited, and watched. (Stood because the two small benches in the Bar area barely held five size 6 bodies apiece.) I pulled out a hard copy of my New Yorker to read (definitely the only piece of hard copy in the store).

One guy was turned away from help because he’d bought his phone from an ASAP (Apple Authorized Service Provider), hence that needed to be his first stop. I’d be pissed. He was Hakuna matata.

Another guy did get a little testy when he explained he drove in from Brooklyn, paid for parking, and had to get his girlfriend’s Mac fixed. They gave him a place without an appointment, too.

Despite the fact that the woman estimated a 15-minute wait for my turn and I waited something more like 45 minutes, I, too, was happy (well, I would have been happier with a Starbuck’s franchise in the store).

Then came my turn. Displaying my Touch was no problem; maybe it was my paranoia, but I saw a bunch of raised eyeballs when I pulled out my HP Pavilion to show the synch stats. My Genius was clearly uncomfortable and uninterested. (Not helped by the fact that my battery was nearly dead, I had a few dozen Windows open as the machine awoke, and Vista was even slower than usual.) I was living confirmation of everything wrong with PCs even though it was my Touch that was not working.

First, he turned the cover of my HP notebook so that it faced the back of the Bar. Then he told me I should drive the PC. (Not my job, man.) The old Mars/Venus thing reared its ugly head and I know he was thinking that if I’d had a Mac I wouldn’t need a genius. And that I’d never be a genius because I didn’t have the sense to buy a Mac.

Ultimately, he did not fix the problem, but gave me enough information so that I could do a tedious restore and then manual synch myself.

I sent out a quick Facebook note asking others to share their Genius Bar war stories with me. I know a lot of people who like to complain. But all of them reported visiting the Genius Bar was more like visiting the spa than the dentist and were thankful for the help they received. As one friend so aptly nailed it, “I wonder what the lines would be like if the PC mfrs offered a Genius Bar for Windows products?”

Of course, if they browse without some structure or keep their IM and Facebook accounts open while working, the web can be a disaster. But if you help them hone in on the problem, the homework helpers on the web are pretty darn good.

Young kids need to reinforce what they learned (or daydreamed through in school). In the traditional classroom if you don’t “get it” when the teacher presents it, you’re bound to suffer as problems get complex.

I like Discovery Education because it’s engaging and fun. Its homework help site provides skill-building sessions in math, science, English, social studies, and others; many of the lessons use smart, engaging videos. Click on “Whole Number Multiplication,” for example, and you’ll get a video that walks you step-by-step through the problem using a marathon race and gym as examples. For English, you can learn nouns by taking a pictorial video tour of the desert.

OK, he’s got an unfortunate name, but one of the best stops for older kids (junior high and above) on the homework help circuit is BJPincheck’s Homework Helper. BJ started organizing websites that can help with various subjects when he was just nine years old. Today he’s in college and he’s still at it. He picks good references and indicates the targeted age.

Of course, every parent wants to know whether it’s OK or not to use Wikipedia when the kids are doing homework. Remember that Wikipedia is a collection of articles written by anyone who feels they have expertise in the subject. For the most part, Wikipedia is terrific, but there are biased and mistaken articles. Many teachers ask that kids use only one Wikipedia source, if any, in their research. In general, Wikipedia is more accurate with historical articles than recent current events. Recent articles are subject to more personal interpretation and less vetted by time.

Not sure of when the War of 1812 took place? If you want the facts–facts on every science from geology to weather and every period in history–try FactMonster for a quick dose of reality.

Now, the greatest guilty pleasure of the school-aged set…YouTube. Kids will watch fart movies or fornicating kitty cats for hours, but when tamed, YouTube can be a homework helper. For older students and lifelong learners, the YouTube Education site has lectures and talks from the great universities and professors worldwide. For kids, all you need to do is filter out the crap and leave the benign. Special web software like Vidzui or Kideos weed out inappropriate materials. Both are fun and carefully arranged from ages pre-K through grade 9.

If all else fails and you parents haven’t a clue as to what the gerund in the sentence is, you might consider an online tutor like the ones at Tutor.com. You register at the site and specify the problematic subject and your grade level. Just like a good date, you’re matched with the perfect tutor for a one-to-one session. There is a charge, but there are lots of ways to pay–for a single use, a monthly fee, or a number of sessions.

So why did Disney decide to offer a full refund to families who bought its Baby Einstein DVDs because they were supposed to make baby smarter? It’s because Baby Einstein DVDs and Disney were accused of making false claims in their marketing materials. The Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood (CCFC) faulted Baby Einstein for stating that the software would improve infants’ thinking skills, thus paving the way for future Einsteins. According to news reports, the feud between Baby Einstein and CCFC has gone on for years.

I’m no lover of false or overinflated product claims, especially when it comes to kids, but the question of infants and screen time has never been more important. In fact, we should be steeling ourselves for an explosion of apps made to engage infants and toddlers.

YouTube is filled with videos like this one showing a one-year-old competently touching his way through an iPod. Sweet little applications like Old McDonald from Duck Duck Moose and Giggle Computer Fun Time for Babies are being used and enjoyed by kids barely old enough to touch and point.

To date, the authority of screen time and kids has been the American Academy of Pediatrics. Its position is that kids younger than two-years-old should have NO screen time. But that rule was a world ago, before interactivity and the ability to explore virtual worlds was an everyday reality. The main argument against screen time was that it didn’t engage all of a child’s modalities. Now that the world of touch has been added, the game may change.

Personally, I’ve admired Baby Einstein’s founder, Julie Clark, as an early pioneer in the stay-at-home-mom-turns-entrepreneur movement. I never thought leaving a baby in a crib to stare at a screen for hours on end was a very good idea, but most parents I knew used Baby Einstein as a way to participate: singing, pointing, and sharing with their children. It’s all in how you use the tools.

Baby Einstein and the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood have both expressed their points of view. What’s yours?

Disclosure: My company, Living in Digital Times, is in talks with Baby Einstein about participation in an upcoming event.

The answer of course is a featherweight netbook.  I recently got a new Acer Aspire Netbook to try out for a few weeks.  The Acer weighs under a pound.  The keyboard, though smaller than full size, is big enought.  The battery life is decent enough.  The screen display is has plenty of resolution. I can even get used to the fact that the Aspire running Windows Vista is like asking Roger Bannister to run the four minute mile in snowshoes.

What I can’t give up is having my ALL of my precious data close at hand.  This made me realize that netbooks, tantalizing as they are, are just not ready for me you.  I can’t always be sure whether the next place I’ll be will have an  internet connection and there’s not much you can do with a Netbook that isn’t logged on to the web. I can talk to my PC at home using LogMeIn, but I can’t depend on my home computer to keep running reliably if I’m gone for more than a day. (Curse you Time Warner Cable.) And I’m not too keen on putting call of my most important data “in the cloud” using programs like Google Docs. I can’t back up the data that’s stored on Google Docs

I can’t accept large documents;  I can’t use Outlook — which, dated as it is — is still the best way I know to organize my frazzled life.

I’m not giving up, but I now understand the true limits of a netbook, and you should too.  There are far too many people who think that they’re buying a low cost PC only to get it home and find out that a netbook is a horse of a different color.

I’m going to face my netbook head on and start devising systems to keep my netbook and my PC in synch.  I’ll learn to trust data that’s stored somewhere in the Google ether instead of my hard disk. I will do it or my back will never forgive me. So this time ’round I’m asking you for advice. If any of you have learned to have a full life on your netbook (creating documents, answering emails, opening attachments, sending edited revisions, let me know how you’re managing. For the moment I figure that I have a very inexpensive, very small Internet surfing machine, not a working PC.

Organizations like WiredSafety, FOSI, getNetWise, NetSmartz, Pause, Play Parents, and Common Sense Media are all committed to helping parents understand the dangers of the Internet, offering tips, advice, and survey data. Sometimes the messages are the same, sometimes not. The Department of Justice, the FBI, the Federal Trade Commission, and the FCC are just a few of the government agencies that have their hands in the Internet safety pie, too. And the Internet safety industry has grown its own brand of celebrity: John Walsh, Parry Aftab, Donna Rice Hughes, and others who have been delivering the safety stump speech for over 20 years each.
For years, Internet safety messaging was based on fear. Fear of predators coercing children to meet them in the real world. Fear of adults soliciting our children for various forms of online sex. These issues have not gone away, but it turns out that while predatory problems are the headline makers, they are not the most frequent problems.

Today’s Internet problems are more nuanced and require a more nuanced approach to safety. The groups that “get it” are shifting away from the scare tactics and looking at ways to help kids protect themselves (often from themselves). Sexting, cyberbullying, and sharing of private information are the activities that are more likely to occur on a daily basis.

What will it take to bring Internet safety advocates into modern times?

1. Recognize the ubiquity of the Internet: We’re not just talking about protecting your PC any longer. Mobile phones, game machines, handheld devices, music services–these are all equal opportunities for predatory behavior.
2. Involve the hardware manufacturers: Fostering a culture of responsibility and awareness takes the efforts of all involved. Companies like Verizon, Disney, Microsoft, and AOL have all played a part in shaping the Internet safety environment. Conspicuously absent in the conversation are the hardware folks. Giving kids tools like smartphones, PCs, and netbooks demands that their makers have a stake in the process too.
3. Get the schools on the program: Recognizing that Internet skills are arguably the most important skills to cultivate for today’s students, schools should be doing much more to incorporate best practices. Computer ethics, codes of conduct, and other Internet behaviors should be part of the curriculum. Use of social networking and other popular technologies should be incorporated into academia so that kids can have good role models for how to use the technology.
4. Disclose funding and consolidate: When it comes to Internet safety we may have too much of a good thing. The sheer number of sites and bloggers devoted to keeping kids safe detracts from the message. A bit of consolidation would be beneficial. At minimum, sites should state where their funding comes from since funding sources can certainly affect the tone of a site.
5. Get kids involved in dialogue: Creating Internet savvy kids means including them in the conversation. Everyone knows that when kids learn from other kids, with humble opinion instead of dictum, the message is likely to create a deeper impression.
6. Be a role model: Parents who steal music and software, or are flippant about their own privacy and security on the web reinforce the notion that the web is the not subject to societal laws.
7. Create a national program: We ask kids to take a test to prove that they’re ready to get behind the wheel, and many states have implemented graduated licenses where you earn driving privileges (like driving at night) one at a time. Learning to navigate the Internet is at least as important as learning to drive a car, so maybe there’s something to be learned from the driver’s license model.

I spent two days being a voyeur at ISTE/NECC, a conference about technology’s role in education. It provided me with a welcome call to 21st century education in the classroom. While there wasn’t one single “killer product” on the show floor, the sum of a bunch of solid technologies is giving teachers a real chance at cultivating the original thinking part of their students.

Collaborative Education: We all have memories of the group project where one person did the lion’s share of the work, but the new collaborative tools bring both novelty and structure to group projects. Systems like Promethean’s ActivClassroom, eChalk, and Saywire offer schools complete collaborative systems. Promethean’s is centered on its electronic whiteboard. Saywire includes a suite of social networking tools that includes blogs, wikis, document sharing, and more.

Digital Storytelling: Digital storytelling has become the new buzzword for the old fashioned research paper. Images, audio, first person research, videos, drawing, and other elements create reports that are more lifelike and encompassing than ever before. The student plays the role of multimedia author and a new sort of research product is born. Tools like Google Apps for education and Apple’s iLife are helping students create complex and visually arresting reports. Some good examples of the modern classroom’s projects can be found here.

Distance Learning: There are many who think that the savior of ridiculously priced colleges will be online learning. The cost per student to have access to top notch curriculum and personalized instruction is lower when you eliminate the physical bricks and mortar. Video, online assessment testing, and multimedia  curriculum are the enabling technologies.  The University of Phoenix and Kaplan are the 100-pound gorillas, accredited full degree schools, but watch for newcomers like University of the People (a free degree based on open source curriculum) and institutions like MIT, Stanford, and others to incorporate online components into their regular courses of study.

Personalization: What happens to the student who’s never learned his multiplication tables? As he progresses through the school curriculum, he never recovers from missing a piece of the puzzle. Students who fail to master basic concepts fall behind forever. Software and hardware that can track a student’s progress, giving them remedial or accelerated instruction as needed, sometimes tailored to their specific learning style, provides some assurance that every student will master a unit of information before moving to the next. Solutions include products like McGraw-Hill’s Acuity Unwired, which relies on hardware clickers distributed to students who use them to “click” on an answer and makes tracking progress easy. My eCoach offers a full solution for individualized lessons.

Learning Games: There’s a part of school life that is just a big game of Jeopardy—with laundry lists of facts and figures. Sites like BrainPOP that teach odd facts in strange and humorously hip ways have their place in the classroom.

eBooks: E-books may not be particularly satisfying for reading the next great novel, but there’s a lot to like about them as textbook replacements. They are easier on the back, easier on the pocketbook, and easier on the eyes (with adjustable fonts). With tools for underlining, note taking, web lookup, and immediate downloads, they hold tremendous potential to be more powerful than a traditional book. The Kindle DX, with its larger screen format, is currently being tested as a textbook replacement in five universities.

Electronic Smartboards: Blackboards are erased without a trace, but smartboards keep the knowledge flowing. A teacher at a smartboard can “write on the board,” interact with software and the web, track student progress, and record lectures and then distribute content to the entire class.  Blackboard is the big kahuna in this category, but some of the most interesting products you’ll see in this space are ones like mimio that turn any wall surface into a smart electronic board.

Held in NYC this week, CEALineShows/Digital Downtown a June preview event focused on innovation and a sneak peak at the holiday season drew its share of news. Here’s what some attendees had to say.

The Geek in Chief Addresses the Crowd

Does it take to long to renew your driver’s liscense?  Is high speed bandwidth a problem in your neighborhood? Do you want to feel more secure about your privacy?  You’ve got a friend in The Whitehouse in  Chief Technology Officer Aneesh Chopra.  He addressed the gadget-loving crowd at CEALineshows by stressing that “digitalness” of the Obama admininistration and his focus on innovation and efficiency in government.

Chopra drew accolodades from the crowd as he described technology as pivotal to much of our policy and job creation in the coming years. He covered the success of the DTV transition, the need for public/private partnerships and the proliferation of applications for a mobile world.

The nation’s first Chief Technology Officer, the audiencec reaction was something approaching the geek equivalent of American Idol.

To find out more about Mr. Chopra.

To lend your voice to the discussion of why America is falling behind in the technology infrastructure race.

Asking Nicely

One of the best ways to manage your reputation is to show up and have your case heard. Asking people to stop saying what they’re saying, apologizing for things you’ve said, clarifying misconstrued statements…these are things we’ve been doing in the real world since the spoken word began.

When people hurl the first things that come out of their mouths into a note, a simple reminder that the recipient is a living, breathing, feeling human being often helps. Giving a body to the disembodied voices of the web brings civility back into the equation. “I’m sorry,” “my mistake,” and “I didn’t mean to cause you grief” are terms that are in short supply on the Internet.

As a blogger (who incidentally finds that being wrong generates the most traffic), I’ve apologized for making mistakes, confronted those who don’t care for my ideas, and tried very hard not to be offensive. Sometimes it’s hopeless. But nine of out 10 times you establish a personal relationship with the enemy and move on.

Reporting a Problem

Your next recourse would be to report a problem to your service provider. Most have a “report problems” button. If it’s easily verified that there’s something wrong going on, the service provider will attempt to suspend, if not cancel, the troublemaker’s account. If complaints from a number of sources trickle in, it’s more likely the complaint will be addressed.

The Legal Route

Of course, there are legal options to seek compensation when someone says something you feel is untrue and harmful. Hard enough to prove in the real world, these libel cases are almost impossible to win in cyberspace. In part that’s because you can quickly defend yourself and correct the record on the Internet, and in part because the courts are likely to play ostrich when it comes to libel rulings on the web. A simple explanation of libel, easy enough for non-lawyers to digest, comes from Larry Lessig’s blog. (He’s a professor and Internet law specialist at Stanford.)

The Reputation Scrubbers

Now to the juiciest part of reputation management. A cross between a personal private eye and a personal vigilante, these are new services that combine the good old craft of PR and spin with search and linking technologies.

Reputation Hawk, ReputationDefender, and International Reputation Management are three of the leading sites that attempt to fix their clients’ sullied profiles. How do they do that? They flood the web with good content, drowning the bad. And they cross-link favorable content in order to get the good stuff to appear higher in a web search.

Just like in the real world, where reputations can be fixed for a price using a PR firm, there’s bound to be a skewing of reality. Case in point: I spoke with Michael Fertik, CEO of ReputationDefender, after he helped spin Sue Scheff’s web situation into gold. Scheff, who runs an educational consulting firm that places troubled teens in residential programs, recently won $11.3 million from the Florida courts. Scheff sued a woman named Carey Brock, a disgruntled customer who expressed her displeasure by posting complaints about Scheff’s services. The posts called Scheff a crook and fraud.

If you aren’t following this case you should be. It’s a clear example of how those with the money can manipulate their reputations. Some commentators believe Scheff is a heroine who stood up against Internet falsehoods to emerge victorious. A few voices rally behind Brock as a consumer without the media savvy to sway the court, but as a woman who simply wanted to warn others about what she considered terrible business practices.

The only certainty is that Scheff is litigious. She recently took action against another website whose owner took the name Sueschefftruth.com as a way of criticism. You can follow along at Topix with its recap, or straight from the horse’s mouth at Sue Scheff’s site.

The Scheff story is troubling. I wrote a note to ReputationDefender’s Michael Fertik a few months back:

“It’s one thing to write a nice ‘cease and desist’ letter to the person or site that’s giving you agita; it’s another thing to populate the web with verbiage and links in an attempt to tip the search scales. You are not alone in providing these services and, in fact, you may be the most honest of them, but you are still using the Internet to manipulate the truth.”