Dan Karleen has received more information regarding the University of Michigan’s School of Dentistry and its private “podcasts.”

A U-M official confirmed to Dan that more such innovations are on the way, but she can’t tell us what they are. That announcement belongs to Apple. As does access to the innovations.

Think different, indeed.

Dan Karleen’s comment on the preceding blog entry is both intriguing and troubling. Mostly troubling. It appears that Apple is providing a private iTunes store to the University of Michigan dental school. Dan, who also has a dog in this fight, explains the basic setup in his blog entry: dental school lectures are recorded and made available for download by means of a “special iTunes Music Store interface from Apple Computer” (quoting from the Michigan press release). Access is therefore limited to users who can authenticate within the University of Michigan network. Plans for future collaboration between Apple and Michigan include even more types of downloadable content.

The arrangement is likely to expand beyond the School of Dentistry. The initial story in The Ann Arbor News reports that “James Hilton, associate provost for academic information technology, said this week two other U-M colleges have expressed interest in podcasting lectures.” I read that story yesterday with delight. Today, in the context of the press release Dan led me to, that delight has evaporated.

What do these developments mean?

1. More walled gardens, and a retrograde attitude toward intellectual property in higher education.

2. Apple is apparently getting into the course management / textbook business.

3. This distribution scheme apparently bypasses public RSS feeds. To get this content, students must use iTunes. Apple’s business plan is thus not to build the best directory, but to lock people into a proprietary system. This is not surprising, but it is disappointing, and antithetical to the spirit in which the podcasting movement began. I smell a hostile takeover–and the very openness of the community makes it peculiarly vulnerable.

4. Apple has simultaneously established a sweetheart deal with U-M for hardware purchases. From the press release:

The University of Michigan School of Dentistry’s partnership with Apple Computer extends beyond the classroom.

Apple is offering students, faculty, staff, and alumni discounted prices on its desktop and laptop computers, iPods, and other products. To take advantage of the discounted prices on Apple products, individuals will have to visit the School’s Web site, www.dent.umich.edu. At this site, they will click a special link that will take them to Apple’s Web site where they can then place an order using a valid credit card.

Apple will gift two percent of the proceeds of the sales to the U-M School of Dentistry Learning Technologies Fund that will be used to develop educational technology at the School.

Aside from the teeth-grinding use of “gift” as a verb, this part of the release makes the larger plan clear: Apple seeks to be a sole-source software, hardware, and content provider for the dentistry school (at least). Apple gets a captive market. The school gets a nice little “gift” in return for leasing part of its core mission to Apple by allowing Apple to control access to content.

Worst of all, from a soul’s point of view, is that the entire press release describes the process in terms near and dear to all of us who work in academic IT: bottom-up, user-driven innovation, 24/7 access to content anywhere, collaborative project management and development, and a hook into a major new communications phenomenon, in this case podcasting. The whole enterprise reads like a textbook example of doing things right.

So what’s the problem?

Something to do with being closed and commerce-driven instead of open and community-driven. Something to do with profits instead of principles. And to be fair, something to do with public schools desperate for revenue in an age in which cutting appropriations for higher education is Job One in many states.

The new “Courses and Lectures” category in the iTunes podcast directory (blogged on here by Amy Bellinger) looks a bit sinister in this light.

More to chew on (apologies–just trying to keep my spirits up):

This “dentistry to go” podcast features a chat “on Apple computers in dentistry,” specifically an OS X dental management application. This podcast, of course, is freely available.

EDIT: (almost typed EDIOT, which would be apt!): I fixed the link below. Apologies to all.

Hey folks, I’ll be here all week.

Dental students at the University of Michigan are listening to podcasts of their professors’ lectures. The initiative was led by a second-year student. The lectures are available through the iTunes music store.

Amazing. What students won’t do in their quest for knowledge.

That’s really only semi-facetious. Perhaps not facetious at all. Think about this quote: “I do walk (to class) often, and I will listen to the lectures 20 minutes there and 20 minutes back.” That’s Jared Van Ittersum, the student who started the project. His words demonstrate the false dichotomy between the “sage on the stage” and the “guide at the side.” The time-and-place constraints of the classroom (beautiful, necessary, misleading constraints) distort our understanding of learning. The classroom is one node of attention and focus, with ramifications we could imagine more creatively.

I think of Bernstein’s monologue in Citizen Kane about the girl on the ferry.

Thanks to eSchoolNews for the tip.

Distributed conversations, augmented intellects, networks of inquiry: though I’ve been blogging for over a year, it’s still a thrill to make contact and find new sources of wonder and wisdom.

Today’s case in point: “Blog of Proximal Development” author Konrad Glogowski responds to my response to his blog, thus teaching me and sharpening my thinking. Konrad then links to Joan Vinall-Cox’s lovely and deeply thoughtful College Quarterly piece on “Teaching Writing in the Age of Online Computers,” which also bowls me over. New horizons for thinking and conversation open up as a result.

I could get used to this.

Pull quote from Konrad’s blog:

This reminds me of what Prensky calls “legacy content” – students need to learn about great minds and the ideas they produced and not just what’s online. They also need good teachers, people who are experienced “connectors” – people who will help students discover that Copernicus, for example, connects to the geocentrism of Plato, Aristotle, and Ptolemy but also to the heliocentric view of the universe and to the notion of immanence, subjectivism, intellectual freedom, the Renaissance, and religion in general.

As the kids say in Peanuts, THAT’S IT!

Pull quote from Vinall-Cox’s article:

Now, in this new digital world, students are more comfortable producing writing and their prose is less constrained and constricted. Some may still have spelling errors or use the wrong words, some may research shallowly and show little evidence of critical thinking, and some may fail to structure their material for the reader, but they all can produce a flow of words. This is new, and, I believe, a direct result of their use of the online computer as a social tool.

Does it improve them as writers? In terms of the amount of their text output, it does. Does it make them good writers of academic papers? Yes and no. They still have to learn how to think critically, how to structure material, how to cite authorities, and how to use the capacities of the new writing tool, the online computer. Some will learn those skills, and some will have trouble learning them. All, however, now start out with the ability to link to their “inner speech” (Vygotsky, 1962, p 148) and that is a major difference.

Ditto the above.

I am grateful to both of these writers. I’m also grateful that the content was on the Web, not in a walled garden. I want to get used to this.

Interesting stuff, as always, from George Siemens and Konrad Glogowski. George’s discussion of meaning making merits a post all its own. Konrad’s blog today also inspires a few thoughts on my end. I hope he would agree, or at least find them useful or provocative extensions of his thinking:

Way leads on to way. Viva la link.

Fred Johnson links to my blog in his new blog “Stemwinder” (love the name). I’m gratified; I go to the blog; I read it; I look for the profile, of course; and like Alice confronted by her comestibles, I obey the implicit command in the “my web page” link and, well, click. Now I find a cabinet of wonders: a fascinating website full of interesting images that are just clever enough (not too clever by half), and a link to a blogroll featuring Fred’s students this term. They’re all blogging. I click on one. The writing is interesting, the prompts are clever, and the mental link to the “Phantom Professor on Voice” blog I just read (by following another of Fred’s links) starts to spark up interesting connections, like the one between a tortilla chip and the perfect strawberry cobbler cookie, as detailed by Malcolm Gladwell in the recent food edition of the New Yorker (blogged about in another context by Jon Udell).

I do not have time to read everything right now. I do have time to put Stemwinder and Phantom Professor on my Bloglines blogroll. All that said, here’s the heart of it, right now, for me: these links (traces of human attention and creativity that they are) encourage me and keep me pressing forward. Always time well spent when I get a bit of that good advice.

NB: don’t miss Fred’s Tell-A-Vision.

Over at Pedablogy, Steve Greenlaw reflects on the end of week two of his experiment in a thoroughly (aggressively? persistently? recurrently?) metacognitive classroom. I’m interested to see that Steve’s exceptionally thoughtful account ends with a student telling him “now I know what you’re looking for.”

My first thought is, “what else would any teacher be looking for?” Identifying major concepts, distinguishing them from minor concepts, and applying either or both to new contexts: these are real school skills of the highest order and greatest importance. My second thought is that the comment typifies intellectual laziness and a kind of cynical cost-benefit analysis, viz., “I’m not trying to get an education here; I’m trying to suss out the teacher’s expectations and take the path of least resistance to meeting them.” My third thought is that it’s an honest question, and that enough teachers (for whatever reasons) don’t ask for metacognition that students are genuinely puzzled about the “rules of engagement” when one teacher does.

Perhaps the truth is some combination of all three thoughts.

I’m still haunted by Walker Percy’s “The Loss of the Creature” in this regard: to say what you’re looking for (which I distinguish to some extent from clarifying the assignment, which is what Steve did) is to guarantee the student cannot find it. It’s interesting that institutionalized education hides this fact from itself, or seems to. Or maybe (probably!) I’m just being willful to say to students, “I’m looking for you to show me something I didn’t know I was looking for.” The catalyst for student discovery can be a lecture, an aside, a moment’s discussion outside class, an email, a clipping, a cartoon. In short, real school is built on such catalysis (footnote here to my IT boss, Chip German), and such catalysis can appear anywhere at any time. The trick is to surround students with sense, or potential sense, and to strengthen them with a persistent feeling of expectation, and with the tools of preparedness.

Steve’s obviously doing that, and in that way his “experiment” feels more like a reaffirmation to me. You go, Dr. Greenlaw.

EDIT: Konrad Glogowski’s aptly named “Blog of Proximal Development” also treats these issues here. I continue to wish for a stimulating synthesis of a) pylons and b) the thrill of the run. Seems to me a curriculum ought to have both (and will need both). Tennis, with a net.

Whoa. Didn’t Bryan Alexander blog about this recently? Or did I dream he did?

There’s so much inspiration and wonder in what Will Richardson does in his job, and generously shares with us on Weblogg-ed, that it feels a little odd to single out one thing. But this little treasure is so compelling that I want to try to explain a little bit of its power over my imagination just now.

Thirty-three teachers at Will’s school are piloting the use of Tablet PCs in their classrooms. I won’t outline the project here for fear that I’ll get the details wrong; consult Will’s blog for more information. I do gather that they’ve got a wireless environment and that they can connect easily to video projectors. So far, so good. What jazzed me this morning, though, is the screencast Will put together to congratulate his teachers on their use of the devices. How did it jazz me? Let me count the ways:

1. The congratulations uses the medium he congratulates them for using, and thus becomes yet another proof-of-concept. That’s elegant, imaginative, and shrewd: a hat trick.
2. As Jon Udell has argued, screencasts can be very compelling mini-narratives. Will’s a fine storyteller, and that makes the screencast very effective. And by drawing on the tablet as he tells his story, he channels Magic Drawing Board, a favorite of mine from Captain Kangaroo (everything I know I learned from the Captain). The writing becomes a kind of animation. The result is an interesting combination of cartoon and manuscript. Imagine opening a letter in which the message writes itself, in the writer’s own script, as you read it. Perhaps the analogue I’m stumbling toward is that of the voice. Just as what I call the “explaining voice” conveys meaning and dramatizes cognition in the microcues of its own unfolding in time (an expressiveness like that of a musical performance), so the tablet writing in this screencast conveys meaning and dramatizes cognition. I’m reminded that “witness” means both spectator and knowledge. The trick is to get the spectacle right, to convey simultaneously the information and the mind’s experience of the information, and Will does this beautifully. (It is in fact a natural thing to do, but one that institutional education finds difficult to scale or sustain. Easier to ask for reports than for these layered performances of seeking-after-understanding.)
3. Did I say already that the presentation was creative? The awards are funny, well-chosen, and easily recognizable from my own experience in the classroom. I see the classroom vividly, in my mind’s eye. I also see Will there, looking on. Will also has a good speaking voice which he uses well in his voice-over. There’s a sneaky emphasis on production values here, all the more effective because the presentation looks utterly extemporaneous. Perhaps it was, and that’s all the more impressive.
4. Now, imagine an annotated bibliography in which a student narrates her research and comments on her sources in a screencast using a tablet PC. She writes notes, uses graphics, whatever, as she talks about what she thinks about what she’s read. The screencast is then shared with the class asynchronously. What’s happened? Not a gain in efficiency: a standard annotated bibliography can be “consumed” (hate that word) more quickly, and no doubt constructed more quickly as well. But the screencast could well be more effective as a learning tool. The drama of cognition and metacognition for both the researcher and her fellow students is amplified, individuated, and perhaps (uh-oh) made more enjoyable. The explosion of social networking as a cornerstone of Web 2.0 should lead us toward more such tools and media of presence. (An explosive cornerstone: what a weird mixed metaphor. Can a rocket be a building?)

Or so it seems to me this morning. I’m beginning to think the idea of the haptic may be worth exploring in this context. The intimate tool that extends capabilities in a way that feels like an extension of one’s presence in the world. Reach and grasp that establish new baselines from which the next reach-and-grasp will occur. The haptic sense makes the thing grasped into the tool for the next reach, because it doesn’t feel like a tool anymore. I’m not using “haptic” to mean simulating touch. I’m using it as a metaphor to investigate the cognitive metaphors of apprehension and comprehension.The former ties in to Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, the latter into the newly-bootstrapped level above which the ZPD reappears. I’m interesting in this metaphor because its kinetic implications include the idea of use, where “I see,” also of course a compelling metaphor for learning, doesn’t fully activate that idea. I see what is shown to me. I use what I grasp. Or something like that.

Thanks, Will. Again.

EDIT: This tablet PC screencast, though thoughtfully presented on the author’s blog, doesn’t work nearly so well, for reasons I’m still mulling over.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (2.5MB)

As my preceding posts relate, I’ve been listening to a series of podcasts originating from Dr. Kelly Blanchard’s Introduction to Principles of Economics class at Purdue University. I am intrigued by the concepts I am hearing about. Some of the concepts I do claim to be learning about as well, though at a casual level that would not survive even the gentle rigors of an early quiz. Is anything of value happening, beyond the salutary spectacle of a fool rushing in where experts (newly warned by my example) would not dare to tread?

I think so, obviously, but I also need to clarify that thought.

I claim no rigorous learning from my little podcast-and-blog experiment. I claim absolutely no expertise in the subject whatsoever. I’ve never undertaken a course of study in economics. I am, however, intrigued by the concepts I’m hearing about. (Bears repeating.) I am learning some things, if only some terminology, and understanding a few of those things dimly enough to keep stumbling on, to realize the potential value of this way of looking at the world, to want to ask questions, to want to be in conversation. I blog about my experience to create a beginning learner’s diary seasoned by the more sophisticated reflections of a putative expert in one field who is most assuredly non-expert in this field.

It is disappointing but perhaps should not be surprising to learn of experts who have resolved, on the basis of the mistakes I’ve recorded here without editing away the traces (of the ones I’ve caught, anyway), never to try such an experiment themselves by blogging on, say, a Milton studies podcast. Too much risk of public blundering.

That’s a shame. I’m always up for a conversation about Milton.