Thanks to ??? (@josanku) of KT, I had the opportunity to play with an iPad today while hanging out at COUP (pictures below). I didn’t have a chance to play with it for long, but my first impression is that it’s a nice device… but not all that. It won’t replace your laptop, and it won’t replace your smartphone, but if you have money to spare, I can see how it could be a fun toy.

Personally, though, I will wait for the Notion Ink Adam. Same form factor, but none of the limitations of the iPad… plus it has the awesome Pixel Qi display.

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Late 1990s were the haydays of the Korean internet because we had broadband infrastructure that was unrivaled anywhere else. Cyworld, Dialpad, digital goods and other web services and ideas emerged here long before they did in the west.

Korea, China, Japan are the big economies in the east. In regards to the economy their is not that much of a discrepency but in regards to landsize it is very small. If China was a watermelon, and Japan was a strawberry, then Korea would be a pea… actually half a pea.

There are 48 million people in a very small land area. This is bad… until you look at connectivity and broadband penetration. 94 percent broadband penetration in Korea.

Koreans are a homogenous group of people. Things / ideas spread very quickly because of this.

Tehran Valley is the equivalent of Silicon Valley in the US.

Cyworld preceded Facebook by 5 years.

Korea leads the worlds in many areas including how much time ppl spend online.

11 million went to gaming sites. 13 times/ month

Usage is here. But innovation seems to have stopped. Why?

Walled gardens. Portals have lots of traffic coming in but little being sent out. Also mono-culture for browsers… only uses Internet Explorer

Many types of phone plans in Korea but no unlimited data plan in Korea. Korean companies are not giving consumers what they want.

47% of all internet users in Korea illegally downloaded 55 movies per year.

Korean used to be innovators in internet web service but seems to be going backward now.

Mobile data usage is very low too because of the cost.

Entrepreneurs are here. But VCs need to support them.

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Today’s talk will be focused on changes of the web due to technological development and the emergence of the social web.

Our world is like Jampong (a combination korean chinese noodle soup dish).

The future of the web. The next web. What is it? Instead of the PC being the node… people will be the node. Our conversations, pictures, and the stuff generated by us will be the future of the web.

Action Potential – In the brain… neurons need a sort of critical mass to do something.

For the web this is also true. The old web is the data web. The focus was on the structure and connections, not the energy that was created.

Today it is evolving. Take for example Twitter… most tweets and comments get lost. But certain tweets / videos / conversations pick up enough steam that they achieve critical mass. They have action potential.

Twitter party example in Korea – create an event in Korea where Korean twitters can meet each other. It was a success. Got me curious about creating a social action event… so I looked for an example and I found Twistival

I have been using Twitter to test ideas. I throw an idea out there and if people like it… it gets picked up and it snowballs. Large amounts of energy can be gathered and focused in a short time thanks to these new technologies like Twitter.

The brain works similar to this. Brain connections that are not used are pruned away.

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Presentation is paraphrased:

Design is a natural innate human ability that is waiting to be released. By educating everyone in design thinking… it is possible to change the world.

Hosted many design thinking workshops and the results are always exciting. People who attend are from all fields and ages.

Participants build mockups at these workshops.

Three part process to get people to design:

1. Provide the opportunity and enviroment (encouragement) to solve real world problems
2. Materials and coaching to build their solutions
3. Show creative results at the end

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The first speakers are Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – both practicing general physicians

We have a cafe attached to their medical office to bring some humanity back into medicine… so rather than making the doctor office a sterile scary experience… we try to bring some warmth back into the situation. So we are focused on creating a human oriented medical experience using medical design.

Something as simple as hiding a stethoscope in the doll can make listening to the heartbeat of a baby a much more enjoyable experience than it otherwise would be. And putting candy on a tongue depressor makes sticking that piece of wood in your mouth pleasant… who would have thought?

Enhancing communication between doctors and patients begins with looking at the way the space around a doctor and patient is organized. In a typical doctor/patient consulation a desk and all the stuff on it sits between the doctor and the patient. How can we overcome this?

In a conversation between the doctor and patient, also lose the story that the patient tells. In an effort to capture the symptoms that the patient in complaining about, the doctor focuses on distilling the patients story to a few keywords… headache, vomiting, shortness of breath etc. The patients story in the end is lost.

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The line up of speakers is quite impressive, from a former Apple lead designer to the Founder of Tattertools (Korean version of the Wordpress blogging service). For speakers who present in Korean, they even have headsets so that us Hangul inepts can understand what is going on. Not to mention the Microsoft Surface sitting outside the conference room to play with… also a first for me.

The event host is this guy…. didn’t catch his name

Here is a list of the speakers:

Jaram Lee – a traditional Korean music performer
Dongwon Hong – designer and founder of Typomedia (Geulsee Media in Korean)
Hwang Doo Jin – Architect fusing traditional Korean and modern western design sensibilities
Jihoon Jeong – Medical engineer
Bill Dresselhaus – former designer at Apple and founder of a design consultancy the Dresselhaus Group
Eungyul Lee – world class magician
Seungbum Kim and Haejin Jung – General physician
Yeonho Oh – Journalist
Chang Kim – founder of Tattertools and blogger at Web20asia
Chibok Song – Copywriter for among other things ex-president of Korea Roh Moo-Hyun

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My response: I was a teacher in Korea. And the system here is just as f’d up as it is in the United States. If you want to compare math and science scores… ok Korea and Japan do have a significant edge on the United States, but you should see what these kids have to go through. A lot of these kids are addicted to coffee by the time they start middle school. It is not unusual for them to go to school from 7am to 10pm, Mon thru Fri and throw in another half day over the weekend. This can’t be healthy in the long run. And now I hear that people in the United States are saying that we should make our education system more like Korea and Japans? My honest opinion is that that would be a terrible mistake.

Why? Well if you are looking for solid data proving why this would be a terrible move, I don’t have any. But I do want to show you a YouTube video that I recently came across that will serve as my anecdotal evidence. This video (created by Kutiman) is a compilation of other user created music videos scattered across YouTube, blended together to create one longer video song. The result, an incredible creative audio endeavor.

But more important than the result itself was how it was created. You think that somebody went to school and was taught how to do this? You cannot be taught to be creative. Creativity comes from free time. And as Kevin Kelly suggests creating this video must have been a total waste of time and it will probably bring the artist immeasurable success.

What I am trying to suggest with this is that free time is important. The ability to waste time is important. Granted many of the things children do with that free time will be pointless (in our eyes) but we must still give them that time because one day they will create something that will bring them immeasurable success using that free time. 

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For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, Manga refers to a style of comic books that can be found in every book store / newspaper stand in Japan. Everyone from students to business men can be seen reading it.

So how does this affect education? According to a report from Matt Ford at Ars Technica, Manga will soon be used to introduce students (and others) to various topics in science and technology – everything from relativity to statistics to biotechnology.

Entitled The Manga Guide, the series of comic books will be drawn in the style of Japanese Manga and each book will focus on a single topic or field. The series is a translation done by No Starch Press and will be distributed by O’Reilly. The first Manga to be published will be entitled The Manga Guide to Statistics.

On a similar note, this reminded me of another article that I came across while I was stuck in my World of Warcraft obsession period. From a report by Iconoculture, Kaplan Publishing has partnered with TokyoPop to bring SAT/ACT prep to Manga. Psy-Comm, Von Van Hunter and other full-length graphic novels in the World of Warcraft Manga series are studded with highlighted words commonly used in the SAT/ACT tests.

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In an effort to simplify the search for emerging e-learning / edtech, I have reviewed four new products that can be used inside and outside the classroom to bring new media technologies to education. In order of review they are:

• Social Media Classroom – an open e-learning platform developed by Howard Rheingold and offered free to students and teachers
• iKnow – an e-learing social networking platform developed by Cerego that focuses on language learning
• Edmodo – it is Twitter for educators… enough said
• Xtranormal – this application allows you easily create your own flash movies complete with dialogue and 3D animated characters

That was for the busy people. For a more complete look at each of these new platforms / application, continue reading below.

Social Media Classroom

Social Media Classroom is the brainchild of Howard Rheingold, a professor at UC Berkley and Stanford and the author of Smart Mobs. Social Media Classroom is built on the free Drupal CMS platform and provides teachers and learners with an integrated set of social media tools.

Each course created can use these tools as required and customize its usage for its own purposes. SMC has integrated forums, blogs, comment, wiki, chat, social bookmarking, RSS, microblogging, widgets, and video commenting.

The idea behind SMC was to create a free, easy to use, “student-centric pedagogy that engages students in actively constructing knowledge together about issues that matter to them, rather than passively absorbing it from texts, lectures, and discussions.”

Further enhancing its potential is the ability to utilize SMC in enterprise level organizations. The SMC becomes a collaboration platform where “groups, teams, nonprofit organizations, communities of practice can bring the advantages of online media to the purposes of their enterprises.”

So what is my personal take on this? I have not yet had the chance the chance to explore SMC, but I love the idea. I have been using Wordpress and Ning to enhance the classroom experience and bring the learning out of the classroom environment. One of the things that I appreciate most about Wordpress and Ning is the ability for every individual to customize their blogs (Worpress) or their profile pages (Ning). I have noticed that this feature does a lot toward encouraging students to take it and adopt these platforms for more than just classroom assignments. And I hope that SMC supports similar customization features. (If you have information on this… please let me know)

iKnow

Cerego introduced iKnow at DEMO Fall 08 as “the first intelligent social learning platform.” iKnow is built on sophisticated learning algorithms that is supposed to enable individuals to learn faster and improve memory retention. (Anyone have any data to back this up?) Because individuals learn at different paces each person’s training schedule is unique and customized according to their periods of time for studying and learning.

Even more exciting though is the community that iKnow is building around this platform. iKnow is not only a tool to help users learn but also an intelligent social network where they can share and collaborate with other users. The goal is to create a member-centric platform where members voluntarily help each other learn within these customized online systems. Ultimately, users from all over the globe will be able to remix content and share it with others within the learning community.

Reading about this I couldn’t help but remember the post that I had written on the XPrize for Education idea. There is no XPrize for Education yet, but already with iKnow it seems that we are seeing some of the ideas being bounced around there coming to life. The future is an exciting one for educators.

Edmodo

Edmodo is a tool for students to ask questions either within the classroom timeline, pose questions to the teacher directly, and submit their assignments. Edmodo is the brainchild of Jeff O’Hara and Nic Borg, two techies who work in the field of education. The simple explanation is that it is a microblogging platform (think Twitter) for education.

But it is much more than that. Edmodo contains the all the functionality of Twitter, but then adds some very useful applications on top of that, such as a calendar that teachers can use to post events and assignment due dates. But Jeff and Nic plane to expand Edmodo even further so that teachers can use it as a grading system and a way to interact with parents.

For more information on Edmodo, check out this interview with Jeff and Nic of Edmodo.

Xtranormal

Xtranormal is my favorite program on this list. Not because it is better as an educational platform… it isn’t even an education platform. But rather because it is a lot of fun. Xtranormal gives anyone the ability to create flash movies complete with 3D characters and dialogue… simply and painlessly – all you need to do is click and type. No programming required.

Now this won’t dramatically change the way we teach our students, but it can make teaching and learning a hell of a lot more fun. Want to make your student’s watch the Presidential debate? Why not have them create their own mock movie of it, rather than having them write a report.

I have not yet had a chance to use this for my classes yet, but you can be sure that I will. This would make a great project for my writing class… script writing plus animation. I wish something like this had been around when I was going through school.

Once I have given it a try, I will let you know how it works out.

Concluding Remarks

I hope you found this information useful. Check back regularly to find updates on new educational technologies. I will post them as I find them. If you have any suggestions, or if you have used any of the above, I would love to here about your experiences. Leave a comment below, or link back to this post.

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Furthermore, as we try to integrate these technologies into the classroom environment, it would be good for us to understand both the abuse that is possible with it, and also the point (legally) at which a students actions go from harmless fun / teasing to something deliberately hurtful.

J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District

Earlier this month a court ruled that a school was within its rights to suspend an eighth-grade student (J.S.) for 10 days after she created a fake page on MySpace.com that depicted her principal as a pedophile and a sex addict. (
J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District)

This is an interesting case because it speaks to the rights of students to express themselves. Had I been J.S.’s age I would more than likely have used MySpace or YouTube to make fun of my teachers, but I think that making fun of someone and slander are two different things.

Although I am a proponent of freedom of speech, I think that in this case I would support the judges decision mainly because the MySpace profile was a public one and also because from what I have read of the case, it was not so much a parody as it was meant to slander the principal by painting him as a pedophile and degrading him.

Additionally, J.S. made it a public page so it was intended for anyone and everyone to see. Had it been private, I don’t think the school would have had a case.

The one problematic point of this case is that J.S. did not mention the principle by name on the MySpace page.

What legal precedents are really being debated here?

First is whether or not the principle constitutes a public figure. If the principle is considered a public figure then the burden of proof is higher for him.

A public figure is a legal term applied in the context of defamation actions (libel and slander). A public figure (such as a politician, celebrity, or business leader) cannot base a lawsuit on incorrect harmful statements unless there is proof that the writer or publisher acted with malice (knowledge or reckless disregard for the truth).

So does the principle of a school fall under this definition of a public figure? I would say that he does. Although the case did not seem to think so (or at least the judge made no mention of it), he is the face of his school and so should be considered a public figure, and thus a valid target for students or parents who want to ridicule him and his policies, as long as such ridicule is truthful.

However, ridicule does not entitle one to libel or slander. So the next question is was this a case of libel? In order for that to be established actual malice must first be proven.

The legal definition of actual malice was established in New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, a Freedom of the Press / Civil Rights Case.

The actual malice standard requires that the plaintiff in a defamation or libel case prove that the publisher of the statement in question knew that the statement was false or acted in reckless disregard of its truth or falsity…. Proof of “actual malice” was required in order for punitive damages to be awarded, or for other increased penalties. Since proof of the writer’s malicious intentions is hard to provide, proof that the writer knowingly published a falsehood was generally accepted as proof of malice, under the assumption that only a malicious person would knowingly publish a falsehood.

So in this case I think that actual malice can be legitimately established. The information about the principle was obviously false, and very few would consider the label pedophile to be a harmless one. Furthermore because no punitive damages were being asked for, rather only that the school be allowed to suspend a student for disrupting the learning environment, I believe that the burden of proof is even lower in this case.

Some may cite the Draker v. Schreiber as evidence that the court made an incorrect decision in this case. But the biggest difference between these two cases is the scope of the penalty being enacted. In the Draker case, the principle was asking for punitive damages, while in this case the school was only asking to do what it already had the authority to do.

Therefore I believe that the court made the correct decision in this case.

Legal Cases

:

New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
Tinker Case

J.S. v. Blue Mountain School District

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