Johnny Lee demos his amazing Wii Remote hacks, which hack the $40 game piece into a digital whiteboard, a touchscreen, and a head-mounted 3-D viewer. A multi-ovation demo from TED2008.

These hacks are potentially very disruptive (in a good way). Think cheap educational tools for classroom interactivity. Similar forms of touch/interactive screens require a special surface that cannot be simply activated on demand, like this technology. Weee.

SharePoint is a revolutionary web server technology.  Think of it as a foundation that provides the core user interface and management system to enable mere mortals to design a complex, role based web application.  Many of our business, educational, and social working relationships could be described as membership/role based.  If find myself recommending it to more and more customers at Blue Sphere. 

I actually started using SharePoint eight years ago to help manage my young business.  Microsoft is planning to release version four in the next year.  SharePoint has become their latest rising star.  There are already thousands of add ons that can be integrated with SharePoint to help it achieve a specific task or purpose.  Many of these are free.  And a version of SharePoint is also free with Windows server products, such as Windows 2003 or 2008.  Many more features are available in  Microsoft Office SharePoint Server version of SharePoint (aka MOSS).

As a psychologist turned technologist, my psychometric past is being rekindled by the possibility of using SharePoint to enable testing systems.  SharePoint is fast becoming a revolutionary tool in the software world. Educational and psychological measurement has been software enabled for quite some time, but web enabled versions of these systems are still rare and expensive to create/maintain. 

Enter the SharePoint Learning Kit (SLK), which is a free learning management system built to integrate with SharePoint.  This platform allows teachers to administer elearning content (including online tests) through a web based interface.  Students log in and see their elearning assignments and/or tests.  Scores and completion of objectives are made available to the teacher.  All of this is completely customizeable because of it's open source license.  The price -- also free.

Psychometricians, or test creators as they are otherwise known, are actually in high demand right now.  Test authoring, especially for online test creation, is particulary sought after.  As a society, we are finding more and more reasons to use online testing as form of gathering critical information.  Test authoring tools such as Courselab are now available that enable teachers and psychometricians (with technial skills) to create their own test content.  And these tools are compatible with the SLK and SharePoint. The price for Courselab -- free.

These free tools aren't just for online testing, they are also for creating elearning content.  So with a little customization, and the right tools, we technically inclined souls can now get on with the business of revolutionizing education and training.

There is an amazing disconnect right now between the corporate world and educational institutions that are slowly trying to catch up with the e-learning revolution.  In businesses all over the world, cost reduction is driving the the adoption of e-learning due to the inherent efficiencies gained by moving to a centralized, collaborative technology enhanced model of training delivery.  

Cost effectiveness, and consequently a more environmentally sustainable training system, are the obvious rewards of e-learning.  Student workers are trained remotely without leaving the office and traveling to take classes in some corporate mother ship.  Aptitude and achievement testing are administered through centralized online systems, and evaluated by managers who provide further training when needed with more online content.

Compare that to our schools.  Change in our school systems is painful and slow, and that is understandable.  But Bob Cringely says that some kids are getting too far ahead of their schools:

"We've reached the point in our (disparate) cultural adaptation to computing and communication technology that the younger technical generations are so empowered they are impatient and ready to jettison institutions most of the rest of us tend to think of as essential, central, even immortal. They are ready to dump our schools."

Schools have to enable technology instead of stifling it, or face losing their customers.  Although they are easily frightened by the prospect of technology threats, parents are taking notice and starting to demand change as our schools fail to keep pace.

And here is the discouraging part:  Technology solutions in education are often not designed to reduce cost, but instead are a source of extra expenditures.  Corporations don't add e-learning and keep their training department, they close the corporate classrooms.  Technology solutions can't start on the fringe of a school system and be successful.  They should be centralized, collaborative, and student centered.  Painful changes?  Yep.

So instead of giving every 10 year old a laptop, we need to completely reorganize the educational system.  Hopefully by the start of the 2008-2009 school year ;)

The recent jump in autism cases is reason for concern, especially if these trends continue.  A just released study by Cornell University (Waldman, et al) reveals a significant correlation between autism rates and young children who watched TV frequently.

Previously, vaccines were a leading suspect, but numerous studies have failed to show any definitive link between autism and vaccines. 

Gregg Easterbrook of Slate Magazine points out that further study is needed to clarify the link between autism and television:

"Research has shown that autistic children exhibit abnormal activity in the visual-processing areas of their brains, and these areas are actively developing in the first three years of life. Whether excessive viewing of brightly colored two-dimensional screen images can cause visual-processing abnormalities is unknown. The Cornell study makes no attempt to propose how television might trigger autism; it only seeks to demonstrate a relationship. But Waldman notes that large amounts of money are being spent to search for a cause of autism that is genetic or toxin-based and believes researchers should now turn to scrutinizing a television link."

Bill Gates has given more to charity than any human being in history.  Bono leveraged his celebrity status to entice the leaders of our richest nations to forgive $50 Billion in debt to poor countries.  I wonder how many lives they have saved through their actions?

"For being shrewd about doing good, for rewiring politics and re-engineering justice, for making mercy smarter and hope strategic and then daring the rest of us to follow..."

"These are not the people you expect to come to the rescue. Rock stars are designed to be shiny, shallow creatures, furloughed from reality for all time. Billionaires are even more removed, nestled atop fantastic wealth where they never again have to place their own calls or defrost dinner or fly commercial"

Link

If I was living a life of leisure, without the responsibilities of work and family, I would certainly be a video game addict.  So I wasn't surprised when my son took an early liking to video games (played on our home PC).  How much is too much?

Steven Johnson makes a compelling arguement for the possibility that video games are making us more intelligent.  While I await the arrival of his book, which is on order from the library, I have been observing more closely the interaction of my 6 year old son and his computer.  It does seem that he is engaging in some very difficult cognitive tasks as he battles with Darth Sidious and Professor Dumbledore.

A few months ago Bill Gates gave a speech to our nations governors, warning them that our high schools are obsolete.  Frightening, to say the least:

When I compare our high schools to what I see when I’m traveling abroad, I am terrified for our workforce of tomorrow. In math and science, our 4th graders are among the top students in the world. By 8th grade, they’re in the middle of the pack.  By 12th grade, U.S. students are scoring near the bottom of all industrialized nations. 

Bill goes on to say that our school systems are puposefully designed to limit the upward mobility of most of our students:

Our high schools were designed fifty years ago to meet the needs of another age.  Until we design them to meet the needs of the 21st century, we will keep limiting – even ruining – the lives of millions of Americans every year. Today, only one-third of our students graduate from high school ready for college, work, and citizenship. The other two-thirds, most of them low-income and minority students, are tracked into courses that won’t ever get them ready for college or prepare them for a family-wage job – no matter how well the students learn or the teachers teach.  This isn’t an accident or a flaw in the system; it is the system.  

It's a recipe for disaster.  Countries like India are pulling ahead of us:

In 2001, India graduated almost a million more students from college than the United States did. China graduates twice as many students with bachelor’s degrees as the U.S., and they have six times as many graduates majoring in engineering. In the international competition to have the biggest and best supply of knowledge workers, America is falling behind. 

We clearly have to design our schools to prepare every student for college.  We have low expectations for many of our less fortunate children.  Apparently that's not an excuse in China and India.  At this rate we are in for a serious re-allignment of intellectual and economic power in the coming century.   But we'll have the best damn high school sports teams in the world!