Converge Online Columns by John W. Rice

John serves as a program/project coordinator for the Texas Center for Educational Technology, and as an adjunct professor in the Dept. of Teacher Education and Administration at the University of North Texas.

John has written a column for Converge Online since Summer, 2005.
Find his current column here. Below are past columns.

AERA, TACTL, and Larry Cuban

This month brought the big annual conference for the American Educational Research Association (AERA). As one professor confided in me a few weeks ago, “This is the big one.” Some 20,000 professors from across the land (along with a smattering from other lands, too) showed up in San Francisco to network, socialize, and present papers to one another.

I was there to present a paper on educational video games in a symposium for the Technology as an Agent of Change in Teaching and Learning Special Interest Group, or TACTL SIG for short. Educational technology has not been the primary focus of AERA in the past, and it still is not. Rather, AERA is focused on researching all aspects of education. Members, according to AERA’s website, stretch across multiple fields in the humanities. SIGs allow researchers with similar interests to group together and hold focused sessions on related research. TACTL is a new SIG comprised of like-minded professors whose research interests includes educational technology and training student teachers with the latest techniques ... [More]

Down-expensing Ed Tech

One of the persistent gripes folks have against educational technology is the amount of money spent on equipment. While it is certainly true some needed technologies will remain expensive, not everything that can be put to effective use in the classroom has to be high-priced. Bearing in mind that school budgets are usually tight, and many teachers wind up buying equipment out of their own pockets, in this month’s column I’d like to offer a few suggestions for some inexpensive items that can be useful in the classroom ... [More]

Prensky, Gee, and Educational Video Games

I had the great pleasure of attending the Texas Computer Educators Association (TCEA) conference again this year. If you’ve never heard of the TCEA conference, think of the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) on a state scale … a big state. TCEA draws in thousands of teachers, professors, school administrators, techies, and vendors from all over Texas and elsewhere. The Austin Convention Center is filled the second week of February with booths, presentations, lectures, dinners, and general hobnobbing as some of the biggest names in educational technology mingle with thousands who work in the field ... [More]

Polishing Apples for Education

I’m a Wintel guy. I’ve been that way since buying my first computer in college. It was a used Leading Edge 8088, with dual 5.25 floppies and a green CRT monitor. Readers of a certain age will know what I’m talking about. It’s not that I wasn’t exposed to Apple products early on. In high school we used the venerable Apple IIc in computer science class. Early in college I got to use the first Mac, the one advertised during Superbowl XVIII in 1984.

The Mac was really nice. In the days before Windows, it blew away anything running on DOS. But, alas, I was a poor college student. The used Leading Edge was $400. Anything approaching four figures was out of my price range. So, I became the proud owner of a used 8088.

I later upgraded to a local box with a 386SX chip. The SX concept let Intel sell a cheaper, weaker chip so that folks would be even more encouraged to stick with PCs and their clones. It won me over. By that time, I was able to afford a budget in the $1000 range so I splurged on a good monitor for my new box, an expensive NEC MultSync. I almost cried 8 years later when it finally died. It had outlived the usefulness of three computers ... [More]

Affordable One-to-One Computing

The idea of one-to-one computing in the classroom is a resilient one, and doesn’t look to diminish anytime soon. This is the notion that every child should have their own computing device for school purposes. It’s sometimes confused with ubiquitous computing, and the terms are occasionally used interchangeably. But the idea of giving every student a computing device continues to surface in multiple areas. Proponents praise it. Critics decry it. States try it out.

The biggest problem with one-to-one computing is that it remains expensive. A good laptop can cost several hundred dollars. Buying or leasing one for every student in a school or district or state can quickly add up to serious money. To get around this issue, some folks suggest ultra cheap laptops are the way to go. Others say handheld PDAs are feasible alternatives to full-blown computers. Cheap laptops are still under development, though, and PDAs, while beneficial for some uses, are not fully functioning computers with large keyboards and screens.

What can we do? How can the idea of one-to-one computing, with each student using their own personal computing device for academic purposes, ever be effectively realized? I think it can be realized, on a budget, too, if we just use a little out of the box thinking ... [More]

Farmer’s Law and $100 Laptops

A technology director in Texas relates the story of his year in Haiti teaching at the American University in Port-au-Prince. He brought with him two used laptops, purchased for $50 each at a Dallas flea market. When he returned home, the laptops stayed behind. His hosts were happy to have his “old” machines.

Those in more prosperous locales often display a snobbish attitude toward older technology. The fact the older technology may function perfectly well is beside the point. Just the taint of age is often enough to bring it below the level of acceptance for affluent techno-snobs.

In 1973, Richard Farmer, the late great international business professor from Indiana University, published a fascinating book entitled Farmer’s Law: Junk In a World of Affluence. His basic premise states the more affluent a society, the higher quality of materiel ends up in its midden heaps. Congruently, the less affluent a society is, the fewer things are thrown away ... [More]