Garland's Podcast Media Center

Leo Laporte talks about Gar's work At Sonoma Academy

admin — Fri, 07 May 2010 08:32:00 -0700

D2 and G2 An Educational Vision "Perfect Storm”

admin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 09:55:00 -0700

Thursday, April 30, 2009
6:46 AM: Gar has asked me to reflect on our hundred minute plus conversation of Tuesday—which he calls a “perfect storm”—with an eye to the rhetorical points that might be made in his paper.

As I think about it, the Vannevar Bush example about the role of the Turkish longbow in the Crusades and the way a student might link this to an interest in the elastic properties of wood and build a hypertextual memex entry that could serve years later in another context suggests a thesis for the paper. Students are motivated and inspired by teachers who are not merely learned in the sense of having assimilated a lot of traditional information but who relate their learning in an engaging way to practical issues in which students can easily be made interested and which the teachers then discuss in a manner that shows how this intrinsically interesting question leads to an array of other topics in which the student might become interested. [Sorry about that gasper of a sentence] A teacher who builds these topical links rhetorically in an effective class discussion will motivate at least some students to take the kind of notes that not only prepare them to write a good exam or paper but enable them to plan a course of more advanced study in which they see the relevance of, say, physics to history.

Vannevar Bush in 1945, awe-struck by the number of new things it was possible to understand and relate as a result of heroic wartime research efforts, imagined what it would be like to easily store text, illustration, and personal reflection on a range of topics, adding indexing and commentary at any point one of the related topics came to mind. In doing so, he captured both the flavor and the practical usefulness of hypertextual media as these became the basis for the World Wide Web 50 years later.

That he could not imagine the actual technologies enabling such a web did not detract from the clarity of his vision. We are now deluged with accounts of the technological gizmos and geewhiz media produced by post-Internet Society, but many smart and well-educated people—particularly those whose business it is to teach the young—are not fluent in their use of these technologies and are unable to capture the attention of the young in settings where such memex-building is most appropriate.

Teachers have been cajoled, admonished, even threatened about the need to deploy such geek skills in the classroom, and they have on the whole both resisted mastering the details and remained unmoved by the pedagogical possibilities. Hence, what they do well—reflecting for a new generation the pedagogies by which they were taught—has seemed increasingly unhip and irrelevant to the young, and they have been my opinion responded with anger, dismay, and shame. These are not conducive to good teaching or to articulate defense of one’s pedagogical practices before parents, school boards, or the media.

I am particularly passionate on the subject because I imagine myself to be an example of such information-technological pedagogy. I loved constructing examples around Freud’s interpretation of his own dreams as hypertextual puzzle boxes, each leading back into an ever-deepening biographical story in which the recurrent themes—the “overdetermined” content—show the student how autobiography is constructed and how an intellectual resource editor for understanding autobiography might become a pattern for the research tool—the Wikipedia—of the future. In this work of my later years I believe I see the adolescent boy who loved running off to the encyclopedia or the local library to learn more about a topic brought up in passing in class or in the completion of my homework, and—from that first Apple II computer on—each improvement in the technology has made the construction of my own memex easier, faster, more satisfying.

File Download (105:04 min / 70.4 MB)

This Week In Tech (Twit) Snippit

admin — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 17:30:00 -0700

This is a snippet taken from This Week In Tech where a discussion about what to teach in school. What makes this interesting is that the conversation moved to the discussion about social versus economic norms.

File Download (15:57 min / 14.6 MB)

Kressel_04_24_09 Part 2

admin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:52:00 -0700

Dr. Kressel asked that I call back and so he could append the dialog. I will be sending the transcript to him to look at and he will add more comments to the.

File Download (12:55 min / 11.8 MB)

Kressel_04_24_09 Part 1

admin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:28:00 -0700

This is the first of my interviews with Dr. Kressel about the challenges of K12 education and the future. This is the first of Kressel Interview.

File Download (24:06 min / 22.1 MB)

Doug Davis and Gar Pre-interview With Kressel

admin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:55:00 -0700

(G) In this podcast Doug and Gar spend time preparing for the interview that Gar has set up with Dr. Henry Kressel, the author of the book Competing for the future: How Digital Innovations are Changing the World. Gar and Doug kick around ideas that will help maximize the interview with Kressel. As has been in the past, a lot of topics are address, those from the technical to the way schools are structured.

File Download (72:07 min / 66 MB)

Class Skype Call 04/08/ 09

admin — Sun, 12 Apr 2009 14:54:00 -0700

File Download (46:48 min / 32.9 MB)

Class Skype Call 03/08/09

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 15:00:00 -0700

File Download (16:06 min / 10 MB)

November 5 - Day After Dialog

admin — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 05:28:42 -0700

Doug Davis and I talk about the election and give each other the the thoughts on how this could change and shape the New America. Imane joined me after a few minutes and we talked with each other before we head off to work.

File Download (29:21 min / 24.5 MB)

Doug Davis Gar Green Digital Copyright

admin — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:50:28 -0700

Doug Davis and Gar talk about the digital rights management project that Gar is working on for Menomonie and for Stout’s masters program. The dissapointing part of this podcast is that the recording was recorded when a background process was running and created an echo effect to the recording. Good content, not so good audio. RATS!

File Download (75:11 min / 68.3 MB)