Serendipity35

I stumbled upon a Google site to promote computational thinking in K-12 classrooms.  http://www.google.com/edu/computational-thinking/

Computational thinking (which they abbreviate as CT, but I think of CT as critical thinking) involves a set of problem-solving skills and techniques that software engineers use. It makes sense from a Google perspective to approach things like an engineer, but I am not so sure that all things in education need to be approached that way. I always thought that Google's problem with doing social (see Orkut, Wave, Plus) was that it was designed by engineers rather than a mix of people with the emphasis on non-engineers.

Nevertheless, here are a few examples they give of techniques that their engineers use to write programs.

Decomposition: When we taste an unfamiliar dish and identify several ingredients based on the flavor, we are decomposing that dish into its individual ingredients.

Pattern Recognition: People look for patterns in stock prices to decide when to buy and sell.

Pattern Generalization and Abstraction: A daily planner uses abstraction to represent a week in terms of days and hours, helping us to organize our time.

Algorithm Design: When a chef writes a recipe for a dish, she is creating an algorithm that others can follow to replicate the dish.
That last item, Algorithm Design, is something we hear about frequently these days even though most of us have no idea what that measn other than "it has something to do wih math."  They define it as the ability to develop a step-by-step strategy for solving a problem. Algorithm design seems to include the other techniques: look at the decomposition of a problem and the identification of patterns that help to solve the problem. In computer science as well as in mathematics, algorithms are often written abstractly, utilizing variables in place of specific numbers. Look at the examples they provide:
- When a chef writes a recipe for a dish, she is creating an algorithm that others can follow to replicate the dish.
- When a coach creates a play in football, he is designing a set of algorithms for his players to follow during the game.
- In mathematics, when we calculate the percent change between two numbers, we follow an algorithm along the lines of:

If the original number is greater than the new number, use the following equation to calculate the percent change: percent decrease = 100*(original - new)/original.
If the new number is greater than the original number, use the following equation to calculate the percent change: percent increase = 100*(new - original)/original.
If neither is true, then the original and new numbers must equal each other and there is no percent change.

They lose me when they say that you can take it "a step further" and implement this algorithm in Python so that a computer calculates this for us:


original = float(input('Enter the original number: '))
new = float(input('Enter the new number: '))
if original > new:
percent_decrease = 100 (original - new) / original
print 'Percent decrease:', percent_decrease, '%'
elif new > original:
percent_increase = 100 (new - original) / original
print 'Percent increase:', percent_increase, '%'
else:
print 'There is no percent change.'

Of course, the "step further" is the key for an educator. Google says in its professional development section that this is intended for math teachers and on the web resources page it is all math, science and computer science. What I would be interested in seeing are some applications in other areas.

The one site I could find was the Interactive Journalism Institute for Middle Schoolers which is a research project that introduces students to CT via the creation of online magazines. The computational thinking is via digital media, interactive graphics, animation, video and database design in a collaborative setting. It is designed to foster computational and writing skills and they also get to to share their online magazine with family, friends and teachers. This research project is led by three computer science and journalism faculty and a gender-equity specialist at The College of New Jersey.

Google defied the Mayans and before December 21st they released their annual Zeitgesit Year in Review. What is zeitgeist anyway? ?Noun: The defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.

Hmmm. That means that the spirit of 2012 is Whitney Houston, Gangnam Style, and Hurricane Sandy - the top searches in Google's world. You can fine tune the results by country, but for the U.S it only changes to Whitney Houston, Hurricane Sandy and Election 2012 in the top three slots.

For Sweden, they were looking for Hanna Widerstedt, Netflix, Swefilmer, Diablo 3 and Loreen.

Who is Hanna Widerstedt? Turns out she was on Sweden's Big Brother 2012 - the Swedish version of the American reality television series. And she didn't even win! The series was won by another Hanna - a 29 year-old mother of two. Hanna Widerstedt är sveriges mest googlade person!

When we asked the question "What is", we were asking What is SOPA, What is Scientology, What is KONY, What is Yolo and and What is Instagram.

In consumer electronics, the top 3 were searches on iPad 3. Samsung Galaxy S3, and iPad Mini.

If you really want to study the world zeitgeist, it might be easiest to download the pdf copy.

Google Zeitgeist comes from data on 55 countries, but obviously the U.S. dominates the global lists. But Brazil is hot. (Remember Google Orkut?) Of the top 10 TV Shows worldwide, four of them are Brazilian and Brazilians Carolina Dieckmann and Michael Telo made the top 10 Performing Artists.

So what can we learn from this? We humans who are online like entertainment. Sadly, that includes celebrity deaths.

I examine Google Zeitgeist like I watch BBC television and other foreign TV channels - searching for the differences. Maybe a lesson is that we are not so different. 

Okay, now I think I will add my New Year's resolution to Google's Resolutions Map. Google Maps plots the resolutions and Google Translate converts them into 44 different languages and we can bubble through submissions from around the world and filter them by type (love, health, finance, etc.). By the way, my resolution is to get a job at Google. 



     Top 10 Zeitgeist Lists 2008-2012

Today, I opened up my Gmail and was asked if I wanted to connect to Buzz.

Google is really making a push for the social web audience that has so far eluded them. As I wrote recently, they haven't brought to market a successful social web product - at least in the U.S. (Their Orkut hit in Brazil and India.)

Wave hasn't crested yet. Maybe it never will build into a big wave. Most people I talk to in and out of education can't see what it's supposed to do.

Now, Buzz has arrived unbidden and slipped into your Gmail world (and that's a big world and well populated). When I activated it, it grabbed all my Gmail contacts (and some of my non-Gmail users).

Buzz is obviously an attempt to get some of the ever-growing Facebook user base. It has some social-media tools similar to those found on Facebook like photo and video sharing and status updates. I clicked some buttons and it started sharing things I have on blogs, Flickr and other social sites. Actually, I think my "friends" online will soon be sick of seeing the duplication of my online activities in every network they visit.

People had predicted a year ago that Google would buy Twitter as its social stream, but it didn't. For Buzz to work, it will need to connect with existing social networks. It connects right now to Google properties, Twitter and a few others. Actually, it can pull your Twitter posts, but it can't push your Buzz posts to Twitter. Ironically, it probably needs to connect to Facebook to compete with Facebook. If you were Facebook, would you allow that to happen?

Right now, Facebook has 400 million users and is is the world’s largest social network. Twitter, with all the attention it has had the past year, has only about 18 million users.

If Google was able to get all its Gmail users to start using Buzz, it would have more than 36 million (2009 stat). That would make it twice as big as Twitter but still far behind Facebook.

More and more companies are creating a social media strategy. Although the jury is still out on whether Twitter, as one example, will be profitable itself, it's even less clear whether or not the use of social media like Twitter will make other companies more profitable.

It is clear that Facebook earned about $300 million in 2008, more in 2009 and probably even more this year. That has the attention of other companies.

Now, it looks like Google is getting more serious about social networking and has created a Social Web team. It's not that Google hasn't had any social web presence before. Back in 2006, I wrote a few times about Orkut, its social network. (Still big in Brazil, but still a dud elsewhere.) They also have their OpenSocial and Friend Connect projects, but Facebook totally beats those too. Google likes to buy companies and they tried (unsuccessfully) to acquire Yelp which is a business reviews site that has large and active community.

I suppose that if the business world is embracing social media strategies, it will onnly be a decade or so before schools do the same thing. Educators, you still have time to learn and be the early adopters in your school.