educating for the journey

A great friend of mine teaching in Northern California got so worked up at a teaching conference recently that he ran home and wrote this gem, now i know if you are reading this you are “the choir” and need no preaching - but maybe something like this help you or someone you know understand the movement.

Written by an experienced public school science educator
Imagine the following scenario:

A UCSC student is sitting at a table in the window of an unnamed café in downtown Santa Cruz, California, video chatting with his friend sitting at a table in the food court of a mall in Beijing, China.  They are sharing experiences, and reminding each other  about all the stupid stunts they never got caught pulling while they were in high school. As the student in China comes to the middle of the story that details the theft of a 50 ft. blow up gorilla from a local car dealership, the UCSC student begins laughing.  Although the storyteller in Beijing thinks the laughter is in anticipation of the reminiscence’s fated punch line, the student from Santa Cruz interrupts the diatribe by blurting out, “What the hell is he wearing?”.

The chatter in Beijing realizes that her confidant is not laughing at her story, but instead commenting on the person who just walked behind her dressed in a fuzzy bright orange jump suit and purple knee high boots.  After shaking her head while taking a quick glance, she turns back to face her laptop camera, and puts icing on the story by describing the eventual re-inflation of the ape on the top of the high school gymnasium.

As the story finishes, her UCSC counterpart glances towards the street and views a sight uncommon in nearly every part of the world.  The spry young man uses his quick reflexes to coordinate his immaculate move in one fell swoop. In unison, he twists the camera built into his computer towards the street, while leaping over a chair and under the folded arms of a woman reading the caffeinated libation menu posted over the counter of the coffee shop. Weaving around two lovers kissing in the doorway, he bolts outside to the sidewalk where he finds that the windows of the coffee shop windows indeed had not created a mirage.

Walking down the center of the avenue are fifteen to twenty men, each dressed as a Tyrannosaurus Rex and walking a leashed pit bull wearing a pink ballerina tutu.  Thinking that a little something extra had been slipped into his latte, he immediately realizes that he must document the moment or be accused of blasphemous acts later when he recounts the story.  He pulls his cell phone out of his pocket, and begins to snap as many photos as possible before the bizarre cadre of reptile, man, and beast passes completely. 

Meanwhile, his friend in Beijing is looking through the lens of his computer’s camera, and so also has a ringside seat for this unfolding debacle.  Her own quick thinking leads her to begin recording a screencast copy of the incoming video feed being transmitted from half a world away.

After the procession passes, the UCSC student dumbfoundedly strolls back into the cafe in order to share a “Can you believe that just happened?” moment.  The pair immediately exchange an all-knowing glance across the pacific rim, and simultaneously begin a furious banging upon their respective technologies.  In California, the student punches his cell phone keypad as quickly as he can in order to upload his photos into his online Flickr photo album.  In China, the friend whacks at her computer keyboard just as quickly in order to convert her recorded video file into a sharable format, and uploads it to YouTube. 

As his photos finish posting from his cell phone to the internet, the student sends a text message from his cell that reads “c flkr & yt” (Translation: See Flickr and YouTube) to his brother hanging out at a pub in Dublin, Ireland, where he is visiting friends.  The brother excuses himself for a moment, walks next door to an internet café, and signs in to his younger brother’s online photo album where he promptly burst out laughing.  He then searches on YouTube for “tyrannosaurus + tutu”.  Within seconds, the video first shot by a computer in a coffee shop eight hours to the west and then recorded by another computer in a shopping mall eight hours to the east, is playing on a third computer screen in Ireland.  He views the footage and  exclaims “Oh, this is too good not to share!” Immediately, he decides to update his online personal blog journal with a story describing the antics of the crazy people who live in his younger brother’s city.

In the cramped cyber café surrounded by teens playing coordinated online war games with fellow troop members scattered around the world, he downloads what he thinks are the best photos to his computer from his younger brother’s online photo album, and inserts them into his blog entry with his own humorous comments written underneath each image.  In order to prove that he had not altered any photos using the photoshop computer program, the post script to his journal entry is an embedded link to the YouTube video.

Instantly following the publication of his blog (A portmanteau of WeB  log), the older brother’s friend automatically receives an RSS (Really Simple Syndication) notification that there has been an update to one of the blogs to which he is subscribed.  While out to breakfast with co-workers in Yokohama, Japan, he views the online post and it’s added media on his iPhone.  After the breakfast club asks him why he is doubled over with tears streaming down his face, he leads them over to a television displaying lottery numbers, and connects his A/V (audio/visual) cable from his iPhone to the television inputs.  Everyone in the lobby of the restaurant stares in riveted awe at the LCD screen while the insane parade meanders across it.

The important fact that must be noted regarding this hopefully amusing yet definitely possible  tale is the time needed for the information in all it’s digital forms to literally travel around the world was less than ten minutes.

Is it any wonder that my students are bored by their static science textbook written a decade ago?

written by:  C. Miller
December 2007