Chris Lott

Like the rest of the cool kids, I finally rendered some of my music listening via LastGraph. LastGraph munges my data from Last.FM, my favorite, unobtrusive, social music service and listening recorder. A snippet from last year showing who I was listening to (click for larger size):

I also find the artist history quite interesting, such as this graph of my Aimee Mann listening habits (click for larger size):

For geeks, the data: by artist and time period is available in Excel, CSV and JSON format so you can play with it yourself.

[via Iconolith]

Is coming from those who spend their time worrying about a research basis for a phenomenon that is easily observable in any classroom, followed very closely by those who presume that the net-gen is determined by biology. I still can’t post comments to George’s blog, so I will respond to his Net Gen Nonsense post here.

George: The Net Gen Nonsense blog fits right in, of course, with your predisposition– perhaps borne of seeing too much extremism ala Prensky– to be against the notion that learners are changing. And you seem to equate the idea, again ala Prensky, with being mostly– or even significantly– biological.

I suspect that we will see, in retrospect, that there are biological and neurological changes occurring due to technological changes, but it’s not really important. The remonstrations about the evidence remind me of scientists concluding that bumblebees can’t fly and philosophers concluding that there is no physical reality. Like Berkeley, I refute you thus, with the students I teach every term… but I will refrain from kicking them as proof!

More importantly, a whole lot of learning is not about biology but about cognition and the mental processes built on top of that biology. The two points with which you conclude your post ("1) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and create information, and 2) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and connect to each other.") are changes in learners, and they are changes that happen as a result of living in a very different and quickly changing technologically mediated environment than others. Fight it all you want, but those learners are different. It has nothing to do with age and the biological origins are at best unclear… but it is immaterial. Anyone who pays attention to their students can see this in the divide they face within their classes between the haves and knows and the have not/know nots. Whatever the label, a host of educators nod in recognition of the characteristics regardless of the question of the origins, which has always been my central point in this debate: I don’t care about the reasons as much as I care about the solutions, and I won’t discount what I see and experience because the research (which hasn’t been an enviable guide when it comes to education so far, but that’s a different discussion) isn’t there or isn’t unclear. A refutation would make a difference, but there’s an obvious reason why there isn’t one, and I don’t mean the philosophical bit about proving a negative.

I don’t know how much you teach and how many of those you teach are adolescents, but clearly you see these changes or you wouldn’t so explicitly point out some of the conditions effecting that change in your two concluding points. It’s not as if all of us who teach are likely to be suffering a mass delusion and I think too many people with too many different, varying backgrounds when it comes to experience teaching and knowledge of technology and communication hear the squeaky wheel to be convinced that it’s just an illusion they are bringing to the table.

David Warlick, blogging about a presentation by Stephen Heppell, pointed to this incredibly cool video demonstrating a visual method for solving math problems. These are just the kind of alternative approaches we need to incorporate to be an expansive teacher. I love one of the last comments, presumably in response to an earlier expression of mystification: "Brilliant visualisation. Compare this with the ‘normal’ way and you are doing real mathematics."

I can only hope that Doug was kidding when he said this:

"Words are for saying things, not doing things."

I’m going to omit all the obvious arguments that this is clever-sounding hogwash, an empty slogan that ironically contradicts itself, because Doug is smarter than I am and already knows them. Because of what he does and teaches, I don’t think Doug believes it either. Irony? Sarcasm? I don’t know. I’ll admit I couldn’t make it through the endless Yippie Manifesto it was attached to, so perhaps it’s some kind of joke too subtle for rubes like me.

But I will say I believe this to be not just a philosophically untenable position on its face, but one of the most dangerous statements I’ve seen come out of an educator’s mouth (or do Tweets come from beaks?) in a long time, representing a facile diminishing of one of our most potent and (sadly) too often untapped and untrained powers as human beings, cultural participants, and members of communities.

If you need an example, look to Washington. We have a President right now who would agree wholeheartedly with– and who lives out– this sentiment about sayin’ and doin’. Words are action… misunderestimate them at your peril.

[photo by babasteve] 

"When nothing seems to help, I go look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before." –Jacob Riis

If there’s a line from the music and cultural punk themes of the 70s to the edupunk of today, it has to veer into the hacker ethos– and I’m not quite sure that it emerges distinct. When Jim and D’Arcy write about edupunk it sounds like eduhacking to my ears. DIY, unintended use, subversion, exposure, open, sharing– it’s hacking the richest possible sense. For me, the attraction lies not only in fighting the man and being subversive through alternative means, but also subverting the monolithic technologies from the inside and not forgetting all those people trapped in there.

I’m game. If I’m going to stay in this business, I’m ready for the tattoo. Subvert, disrupt, innovate… there’s a reason my card says "Disruptive Technologist."

Twitter is having problems again and I have to admit that it’s even trying even my boundless patience. The closer you get to real-time services the more impatient people will be. I get it. The comparable instability of Flickr and del.icio.us back in the day felt less intense.

But I have to laugh at the Net Pundits giving Twitter a few weeks to live before it dies because "the luminaries" such Scoble, Winer, Arrington, etc. will leave. Do people really care if these one-way broadcasters who aren’t following them, aren’t listening to them, and who care as much or more about their statistics than anything either themselves or their followers might talk about, migrate elsewhere?

I have a theory that the pundit migration would actually be a great boon to Twitter. I won’t miss anything actually important that the luminaries say– when they do it gets endlessly amplified in the tech guru echo chamber and I’m bound to hear the echo– and perhaps removing the load on the servers represented by stats-sluts and their ego-searching, Twitter Karma sifting, constantly shouting Tweet personae would improve system stability for the rest of us.

As for me, it’s a stand-off. I won’t move until a significant part of the group I follow moves. The platform pales in comparison to the people… I’d rather get the good stuff with the occasional speed-reducing hiccup than wander a desert landscape inhabited mostly by the bloated carcasses of the punditocracy erecting elaborate, Ozymandian structures to honor themselves.

In some great news on an otherwise trying day, Harvard Law School has become the first institution to commit to open access to all of their publications. This is a great step in the right direction and I hope soon see other influential institutions following their lead!

[linktribution: @phaedral]

After an immensely frustrating conversation a few days ago in which various stereotypes were thrown about w/r/t techies, women, leadership and more, this frame from Clint LaLonde’s fabulous intro video for a Brian Lamb keynote (hey, where’s the archive of the presentation?) caught my attention.

"From what I knew of learning to write I asked Harold Bauer if it wouldn’t be possible to learn to play by playing tunes from the beginning without preliminary finger exercises. He cheered me with the assurance it would. Many second raters present were scandalized. Children are learning now without finger exercises. Think how much easier their education is to listen to."

–Robert Frost
from Notebook 26