October 2nd, 2006
I had a chance this afternoon to visit an old friend and colleague, Frank Moretti, at Columbia University’s Center New Media Teaching and Learning (CNMTL). Frank and two of his colleagues, Maurice Matiz and Jonah Bossewitch, gave me a quick overview of CNMTL’s vision of “purposeful use of technology in education,” and I’m still trying to digest all of the ideas, trends, and questions they threw at me. To get a better understanding of what they’re all about, visit the “about us” page, and play the embedded video.
We all know that Google is affecting everyone on the planet who wants, needs, and searches for information. We know that young adults are flocking to social networking sites like MySpace and Flickr. We see that YouTube is now getting over 100 million downloads a day. We read that the next generation is gravitating toward intstant-messaging, and that e-mail is for “old people” (thanks for that link, Zip!). And we know that technologically hip young adults are busily creating blogs and wikis while their older co-workers and parents are still grappling with technologies from a decade ago. But what is all of this doing to the educational infrastructure of today’s high schools and universities? How is it influencing the teachers and professors who not only present facts and theories to their students, but also teach them how to think?
I certainly don’t have answers to questions like these. I’m not sure anyone does; but the team at CNMTL is certainly doing some interesting research, and building some interesting tools, to help explore this new world. If you’re a teacher or parent, you should definitely check out their web site and see what they’re up to. And if you’re a manager, or member of the HR department, in the corporate world, you should also take a look at their work: remember, these technology-infused students are graduating and moving out into the work force.
I plan to return to CNMTL periodically in the coming months, and will provide more details once I’ve gotten a better understanding of the details of some of their projects.
October 3rd, 2006 at 10:04 am
Hi Ed,
In addition to the fact that the future workforce is immersed in educational technology, a lot of what we are involved with has a direct correlation to the perceived and not-yet-perceived needs beyond the ivory tower.
In many respects, the classroom is representative of a variety of deployment scenarios, and the communication challenges encountered here are similar to ones found within organizations, between organizations and their constituents, between corporations and their customers, and between governments and their citizens. Currently, our work overlaps most directly with work happening in the NGO and activist sectors, but these cultures are spreading rapidly.
Our project portfolio will give you a good sense of the range of projects we engage in, but some of the technical details underlying these projects may be of interest to you as well. We try to closely follow the advancements on the frontier of web development. We are involved with a few free software projects, and have completed many projects using Plone, MediaWiki, Wordpress, MochiKit, and soon Drupal, often contributing back patches and products. Lately have been developing new activities following this microapps pattern – a technique which can be described as building our own mashups.
Some of the theory motivating these explorations is described in this poster(pdf) and has spawned the yucca project which articulates these principles in code.
We really enjoyed your visit. Come back soon!
/Jonah