- I worry about the dependence on technology out of our control. Sometimes I even think that students enjoy getting away from it, secretly enjoy projects and assignments that do not require getting on a computer. I am (pleasantly) surprised by the number of students in the art room who don't want to use computers in their work. That said, there are plenty that do...
- I'm amazed at how gung-ho Tim (Sidmore) is about technology and the digital world. He once told me about how he had converted his music collection over to .mp3 files, but then had a problem (was it a hard drive, or a permissions issue?) and lost ALL of his music. As much as I love my ipod, I make a point of buying all of my music on CD-- a format I own and control. I may lose or break my ipod, or the hard drive where all of my music files are stored may become obsolete (remember zip disks, anyone? That was only a few years ago), but I still have the physical CDs, records, and cassettes, (some I've owned since grade school) and the means to play them. Short of a devastating fire or theft, I should still be able to enjoy them for years to come. The reason the ownership piece is important to me is because of the ephemeral nature of the web. Last year I discovered a website called lala.com, which was a music site that let the user stream an entire album once for free, and then elect to download (for the usual fee) or stream (for a third the download cost) the files. I loved it so much I was tempted to start building a collection of streaming files, as I could log in to any computer anywhere with an internet collection and have access to the songs I paid for through the lala website. Cool, right? Well, just this spring apple bought out lala and shut it down-- which would have left me out of luck. I also remember reading about people who had all kinds of personal information (digital family photos, journal entries, etc.) stored on some aol-spnsored website, who lost everything when aol went under and pulled the content from the web. So as much as I see the benefit of using google this or that, or setting up wikis, if the host site is some entity who has no direct connection or loyalty to the school, or to me, I am leery about entrusting them to store the results of my hard work. For example, I could be typing this to a .doc file stored on my computer, but instead it's on the blog company's server-- who knows what will become of it?
- Until the infrastructure is more reliable, and equipment more accessible, it seems almost an exercise in frustration to encourage so many teachers to build curriculum around computers or other equipment. I began this week thinking I would work on updating the Visual Communications curriculum, using Web 2.0 in a series of in-class projects. Quickly however, I realized that I probably will not have access to the computer lab during that period, and so decided to plan to incorporate Web 2.0 as homework or otherwise outside-of-class assignments. I'm sure I'm not alone there. And Tim himself demonstrated the danger of relying on the school network when his online final exam crashed during the exam period. Great ideas, scary to try and count on in a day-in-day-out fashion?
Next post: Curriculum Liaison?
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