Richard’s Educational Technology Blog

Google, who has recently been proving itself as the only true competitor to Microsoft in the internet industry (with it’s products like gMail, Froogle, web search, and soon to be released IM application, blowing the Microsoft equivalents out of the water) has just declared a new competitor - Amazon.com. Google’s product Google Print scans publisher’s books and includes the content of the book in the results of web searches. So when you perform a Google search you will not only get matching results on the internet, but in thousands of print books. After “browsing” through the book, should you want to purchase a copy you will be transported directly to an online bookstore. Google has made the internet like Christmas morning, I just can’t wait to see what’s under their next brightly wrapped package.

Back in the day when Netscape was new and gigabyte was an unfamiliar word, I took a job at the University of Rhode Island to pilot a tool to improve teaching: technology. One of the instructors that I worked with, hoping to teach gravity equations in a more tangible way, captured video of himself throwing eggs off the tallest building on campus. By pulling out still images of the fall and using the windows on the building as fixed distances, he was able to show the increase in distance per second caused by the force of gravity on the egg. This was accompanied by a graphic display of the equations and the music “Free Falling” by Tom Petty.
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In his blog, Rick West metions the new learning options that can happen thanks to the enormous amount of content that is now available on the internet. We no longer have to re-create the wheel everytime we want to use media-rich content in our classes. Other than the staple sites (like Google images), I’ve found several other sites that have great educational content. One of them is called MERLOT :: Multimedia Educational Resource for Learning and Online Teaching. It’s sort of like a Napster for educational materials. If you aren’t familiar with the site yet, check it out. The e-Skeleton project is one of the coolest examples I’ve found thanks to MERLOT.

I feel like I go against the grain on a daily basis with other educators on the issue of evaluation in education. I want to make the point that evaluation and (dare I say) testing are not inherently evil things. Most of the comments that I hear about No Child Left Behind (NCLB), or other educational data collecting initiatives, are negative. Last week I heard Dr. Winfried Bohm present at BYU. In his presentation he pointed out some limitations with evaluation in education, which I agree with. However, one of his comments was, “You can weigh a cow as many times as you like, the cow will not gain weight’ – things do not improve by evaluation”. This is a comment much like the ones I hear from educators, usually (but not always) from the ones who don’t want to take responsibility for improving the quality of their teaching. I can’t help but thinking that this comment from Bohm is one of the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! While there are holes in educational evaluation, saying that it hasn’t led to improvements is really milking it for all it’s worth.
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According to the Encyclopedia of Educational Technology (an excellent resource), Human Performance Technology (HPT) is all about “improving productivity and learning in human resource systems. In other words: It’s about people and improving how they do things.” HPT comes into play whenever questions like “Can we do this better? Faster? or more efficiently?” arise.

The basic method behind HPT (I realize this is oversimplified), is to look at current performance, look at ideal performance, and then figure out what has to happen to get current performance to change to ideal performance. As many articles point out, this method can be used very effectively at an organizational level. My experience with HPT, however, has been at an individual level.
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