Cyberwar

Perhaps it’s cultural conditioning, or maybe it’s genetic a predisposition, but adolescent boys to seem to have more of a predilection for war games than their female peers. The games they like tend to be first-person-shooters, like Call of Duty, and, given the trends toward improved video game graphics and remote, kinetic military action, real and simulated life seem to be converging.

Recently however, the Stuxnet virus exposed a much less glamorous picture of the future of cyber warfare. Kim Zetter has an excellent, extensive article in Wired on the computer scientists and engineers who reverse engineered the virus to try to figure out who made it and what it did. Since the virus seems to have been aimed at damaging Iran’s nuclear enrichment plants their work brought them to the edge of the world of international espionage. And they still don’t really know who created this remarkably sophisticated virus, though they suspect the U.S. and Israel.

One of the most interesting take-home messages from Zetter’s article is the amazing degree of international collaboration it took to figure things out. The virus was discovered by someone in Belarus. Researchers from the anti-virus company Symantec’s offices in California, Tokyo and Paris worked together passing information from one office to the next to keep the project going 24 hours a day. They published their findings to share them, and when they ran into stumbling blocks they couldn’t solve they put out calls for help on the internet – and people responded, bringing in expertise from Germany and the Netherlands.

The virus’ secretive creators and the open, diverse collaborators who untangled the virus reflect two conflicting aspects of the future that computer technology and the internet are making possible. And this conflict is showing up more and more in different areas – take Wikileaks for example – so it will be very interesting to see where the future takes us. Of course, we are not simply flotsam on the tides of history. As citizens of the internet, we have been enabled. We have a certain power, and a concomitant responsibility, to shape what we have for the benefit of our fellow citizens and those that come after us.

Molly Backes on How to Be a Writer

Molly Backes, an author of young adult fiction, considers the question from a mother about her teenager, “She wants to be a writer. What should we be doing?”

Her first answer was, “You really do have to write a lot. I mean, that’s mostly it. You write a lot.”

But then she thought about it, and that’s where it gets really interesting:

First of all, let her be bored. …

Let her be lonely. Let her believe that no one in the world truly understands her. …

Let her have secrets. …

…

Let her fail. Let her write pages and pages of painful poetry and terrible prose. …

Let her make mistakes.

…

Let her find her own voice, even if she has to try on the voices of a hundred others first to do so. …

Keep her safe but not too safe, comfortable but not too comfortable, happy but not too happy.

Above all else, love and support her. …

— Bakes (2011): How to Be a Writer

At the end she posts a picture of her collection of forty-two writer’s notebooks.

It’s a wonderfully written and well considered post that I’d recommend to anyone trying to teach writing and language, particularly if you take the apprentice writer approach. And, I’ve always been a great believer in the power of boredom.

Backes’ advice more-or-less summarizes my interpretation of the Montessori approach: create a safe environment and give students the opportunity to explore and learn, even if it means a certain amount of struggle and failure.

Jungle play area at the Skudeneshavn Primary School in Karmøy on the west coast of Norway is another great example of creating an environment that offers students the opportunity to explore.

It’s also interesting to note how differently writers and other experts think, yet how much their practices overlap. Mathematician Kevin Houston also recommends writing a lot when he explains how to think like a mathematician, but his objective is to use full, rigorous sentences to clarify hard logic, and less to explore the beauty of the language or discover something profound about shared humanity.

My Memory is in the Ether

The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend.

— Sparrow et al., 2011: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips (pdf).

cyborgs-1329b — Internet on the brain. Image creating using internet map by Matt Britt (via Wikipedia).

Last year, my students informed me that humans have a fundamental need for electronics. And I was forced to agree. We’re becoming more inseparable from our devices, practically all of which are connected to the internet. So much so, that people aren’t spending the time memorizing all the stuff they used to memorize, and are instead just remembering where to find it (or what search terms to google).

The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

— Sparrow et al., 2011: Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips (pdf).

Since one of the prime reasons for this blog was to help me remember all the stuff I usually forget (and where to find all the stuff I usually forget), I have to say that these results have the scent of truth. Our cyborgization continues.

So, given this shift to outsourcing our memories, it seems even more imperative that students learn how to think and solve problems, and where to look to find good information they can use in their problem solving, rather than work more on memorization of facts. There are fast becoming too many fact to memorize, and they’re almost all accessible on the internet.

Glassblown Hermit Crap Shells

Robert DuGrenier blows glass shells for hermit crabs. They’re pretty amazing. Aquariums are also using them because they let you see all the parts of the crab that are usually hidden inside the shells.

The Physics and Chemistry of Fireworks

Paul Nicholas Worsey explains the physics and chemistry of how fireworks work. He’s cited in Sophie Bushwick great post compiling online resources that explain the science of fireworks.

San_Diego_Fireworks — July 4th, 2004, San Diego. Image via Wikipedia.

Scaffolding and Peer-learning: Thinking about Vygotsky’s “Zone of Proximal Development”

When a student is struggling with a problem, and they just need that little boost to get them to the next level, they’re in Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development, and it’s appropriate for the teacher to give them that crucial bit of help. The idea implies that students really have been trying to solve the problem so the help they get will be useful.

It also implies that the teacher can recognize precisely the help they need and deliver it, which is often easier than it sounds. As an adult, from a different generation and culture, and with more experience with these problems, I see problems very differently from my students. Indeed, experts solve problems by developing rules of thumb (heuristics) that speed problem solving by amalgamating large volumes of information. Unfortunately, for these heuristics to be meaningful, students often have to arrive at them themselves. Thus the student looking at the details is unable to communicate effectively with the expert who sees the big picture.

Peer-Teaching

One remedy Vygotsky advocated was peer-teaching. By letting students of similar but differing abilities work in groups, they can help each other: often a lot more effectively than a teacher would be able to. The teacher’s main interventions can be with the more advanced students who do not have anyone more knowledgeable to help, but who are best able to communicate with the teacher because of a smaller knowledge gap.

Practically, this suggests multi-aged classrooms, and a high level of vertical integration of the subject matter. Consider, for example, which topics from algebra, geometry and calculus might be appropriate for students from middle to high school to be working on together at the same time in the same room.

Scaffolding

Another, more typical, approach to this problem would be to provide all the extensive scaffolding – all the information including explicit demonstrations of ways of thought – that students need to get started, and then gradually take the scaffolding away so that they have to apply it all on their own.

In a high school laboratory science class, a teacher might provide scaffolding by first giving students detailed guides to carrying out experiments, then giving them brief outlines that they might use to structure experiments, and finally asking them to set up experiments entirely on their own.

Slavin (2005) (online resources): Classroom Applications of Vygotsky’s Theory.

In Combination

Elements of both these approaches are necessary – and they’re not mutually exclusive. The scaffolding perspective is most important when introducing something completely new, because they’re all novices at that point. But as you build it into the classroom culture in a multi-aged classroom where there is institutional memory and peer-teaching, then the job of the teacher evolves more into maintaining the standards and expectations, and reduces (but does not eliminate) the need for repeatedly providing the full scaffolding.

Update

Peer-Teaching

Scaffolding

In Combination