Monday Musings at the Drive-thru

Monday Musings at the Drive-thru....

People still say things to me like, "This will make you happy - I'm not using paper for [such and such]." This is odd, since to my recollection I have never scolded other teachers not to use paper.

I subscribe to a weekend newspaper and a magazine simply so I can have full access to their online services. When the dead-trees arrive at my house they usually go straight to the recycling bin. This is a horrible business model, no?

Over the last year and a half, I have had more questions from other teachers about Google Docs than any other tech subject. Rather than highlighting how tricky Docs are, this testifies to their ease of use and classroom functionality-- folks are eager to adopt them.

Recently, I sent my Consumer Technology Revisits my Film Class to Netflix and the MHS English Department for comment. The comments? The deafening sounds of silence from both parties .

I have totally succumbed to one social media addiction-- tracking #mlb trade rumors on Twitter.

After maintaining this blog for almost a year and a half, have really come to appreciate the ability of bloggers like Tom Schusterbauer and Patrick Hayes to spark a discussion.

We had a staff appreciation dinner, last week, where I was honored for thirty-five years of service. I came away not only feeling appreciated for things that I have done in the past, but also how genuinely my school supports me as I try our this new tool and that new method. Despite complaints to the contrary MHS is still a place where teachers have considerable autonomy.

I've reached an age where now and then folks ask me about my "retirement plans." I have none. But, the other day I was thinking that if I did retire from teaching, I would enjoy creating a daily sports blog-- basketball or baseball. Lots of tweeting too!

It's become fairly common for peers to request tech consultation with me-- usually involving new projects. I really enjoy these collaboratio, but almost always have to schedule them before or after school. It's also tough to follow-up on the projects. I wish I had some release time to do more. That's my pre-retirement dream.

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"Ceiling Detail" Flickr Creative Commons photo courtesy of Onion.

Crazy Eights -- Eight Favorite Blogs

Back in May, I recommended ten RSS Feeds. Here are eight more from my Reader that I think offer something special, depending on your interests

*SeanNash is a biology teacher and "instructionalist coach" in Missouri. He is also a terrific writer who lucidly communicates his enthusiasm for technology and teaching in nashworld.

*faire alchemist, the paperless teacher of classics has boundless energy and extremely provocative ideas-- pure dynamite. He's edgy and out there. though he posts a little too much for my tastes I check them all out at TeachPaperless.

*For a more main stream turn at ed tech, follow Liz Davis's The Power of Educational Technology. Her ideas a always sound and she clearly is a great Director of Academic Technology at Belmont Hill School.

This is the most cerebral recommendation, but I am a George Siemens devotee and if I have made anyone curious about his educational model, you'll want to follow him in Connectivism.

This is a niche recommendation. I teach film, but rarely go to movie houses anymore. I watch dvds by the dozens, instead. Most of these come from Netflix and the library, but I am hooked on Criterion flims and have a small collection, favoring Akira Kurosawa and film noir classics.
The Criterion Contraption. Matthew Dessem has the object of viewing all the Criterion films and reviewing them one by one. His reviews match the high quality of his subject matter.

Pat Caputo's Open Book remains my favorite Detroit area sports blog, but John Niyo of the Detroit News does a terrific job blogging on pro football. If you are an NFL fan, place his Lions Blog in your reader, posthaste.

If you are an Apple aficionado like I am, you will definitely want a daily hit of Cult of Mac.

I recommended The Big Picture from the Boston Globe before, but it is so good that it bears repeating. The high definition photos are invariably fascinating.

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"Management Decision Making Tool" Flickr Creative Commons photo by rbieber

Education "Suicide Watch" (with apologies to Frank Rich)

Dramatic blog title? It's not totally off the wall. As a resident of Southeastern Michigan I have been following the wrenching decline, diminution, and possible deaths of GM and Chrysler with anxiety and fascination. When an acquaintance from Massachusetts referred to this process as "creative destruction", I considered it callous, even offensive.

On the other hand, I think I have been guilty of the same emotional distance as I have followed the Newspaper Death Watch. I spoke often and openly with the journalism students in my AP Government classes about their pursuit of a rapidly evaporating dream.

I was jolted out of my emotional disconnect from old media death-throes when the Ann Arbor News suddenly announced it would cease publication in July. Grandfather Baker worked for Booth newspapers his entire career and ultimately became editor of the Ann Arbor News. The end of the paper seems a slight against his memory.

But the problem seems so obvious, doesn't it? How could the a business model based on the processing and physical delivery of ink-on-tree-pulp to the nation's doorsteps be sustainable? The high-speed internet kicks the traditional newspaper's butt on the all important issues of immediacy and cost. But naturally, many of us are concerned real journalism will die along with the old media. Might this not have dire consequences for our democracy?

In Sunday's New York Times (which I read online of course) Frank Rich reflects on these very issues. In a piece entitled "The American Press on Suicide Watch" he chronicles the industry's "self-destructive retreat from innovation" and suggests that newspapers might survive this technological revolution, just as the movies adjusted to tv and music evolved in a post-Napster world. His darkest concerns focus on the future of investigative journalism and the inability of "blogs" to substitute for true reporting:

Opinions, however insightful or provocative and whether expressed online or in print or in prime time, are cheap. Reporting the news can be expensive. Some of it — monitoring the local school board, say — can and is being done by voluntary “citizen journalists” with time on their hands, integrity and a Web site. But we can’t have serious opinions about America’s role in combating the Taliban in Pakistan unless brave and knowledgeable correspondents (with security to protect them) tell us in real time what is actually going on there. We can’t know what is happening behind closed doors at corrupt, hard-to-penetrate institutions in Washington or Wall Street unless teams of reporters armed with the appropriate technical expertise and assiduously developed contacts are digging night and day.

Personally, I think the best chance of something like our old newspapers surviving is Kindle. Last week Amazon introduced the Kindle DX, which may set the standard for newspapers, magazines, and books the way iTunes has done for digital music.

What does any of this have to do with education? Much. In the short term, teachers can enjoy the tremendous windfall of free information being provided by old media as it offers free content online in order to lure advertising . Without this free-for-all my digital anthology project would be much more difficult.

But how different is the education "old school" mind set from "old mainstream media" titans who steered their industry into the rocks. "Old school"continues to privilege ink-on-paper, brick and mortar, one teacher to 30 students. Administrators treat school calendars and schedules as sacredly as the old-time newspaper editors treated "deadlines".

But news doesn't stop happening at deadlines and learning doesn't stop when the bell rings. Most in the ed establishment still conceive of teaching as something that happens when an old guy like me stands in front of students at desks and delivers lectures from the podium. For them, "technology" means the old guys does death-by-PowerPoint instead of death by chalkboard.

Since education is so heavily subsidized by public funds, it's not on the verge of dying as my teaser implies. But how can we suppose that a process so stale and outmoded can contribute to a thriving society which competes in a flat world of rapid change? We risk a great deal by clinging to the old ways.

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"Old Man with Newspaper" Flickr Creative Commons photo by andreas.plesnik

Swimming with a School of Red Herrings

My December post, Wrap that Red Herring in Paper, concerned a brouhaha at school over whether digital communication should eliminate paper altogether. Framed in such a ridiculous way, the debate allowed technology Naysayers to indignantly defend their use of paper. We never even discussed the reasonable matter of whether digital communication might not be better suited for many of our communications (rather than all). In this context I used "red herring" to describe a diversion that distracted from the main argument. Since that time I have encountered some other ed tech red herrings.

"I don't have time to integrate technology". Interesting. Isn't this the same lame excuse we hear from our students? Implicitly speaks to priorities, doesn't it? As applied to technology I find the excuse rather ironic, since in many cases time would be greatly saved in the long run (see Using Mp3s in Education). And if the ever-so-busy teacher means classroom time, it might be useful to have someone else look over the syllabi and suggest where time savings might be realized. It's been my experience that teaching a particular lesson class after class sometimes gives us the idea that it is essential. A few nips and tucks might give us more time.

"We Mustn't Lose Face to Face Social Interaction". Simply because technology allows for collaboration to occur anytime and anywhere does not mean face-to-face has no value. When I assign collaborative projects, I always allow for in-person meetings. These sessions are provided for hammering out logistics rather than tooling around on the computers. Social media does not eliminate the usefulness physical meetings, unless by "face to face" the teacher means "I want you to take notes while I talk and see your face." I hope these teachers who fret about losing valuable "face to face" opportunities to technology also reconsider the social benefits of work sheets, reading time, lectures, etc. What exactly is the social benefit of those in-person activities? By the same token, administrators who are calling for more collaboration should reconsider how the school schedule might be adjusted to fit more flexible meeting demands.

"We have to use technology because these kids have grown up with it". The ed tech evangelists love to point to Facebook, cell phones, YouTube, and video games to argue that popular technology has made our students receptive to or even dependent upon technology for learning. Sorry, but down here in the trenches an assignment is still an assignment for my students. And they are still inclined to look for short cuts and complete the bare minimum even if all the bells and whistles of technology are used. They need to be prodded and encouraged whether the demands include technology or not. Those in the ivory tower would probably blame this on "bad design." Nonsense. Our students need to learn to solve problems and think and sometimes their lack of curiosity and motivation undermine the method regardless of how much it resembles their favorite past times. Challenging students and teaching them to problem solve is more important than giving them toys. An engaged, inspiring teacher will always be more critical to their education than a delivery system.

Are there any tech red herrings that bug you? Perhaps some of my own? Please join in.
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"red herring" Flickr photo with permission by JudyGr

Hyperlink Heaven

I have rediscovered my love for writing. I remember crafting a major paper on the late novels of Charles Dickens during my senior year in college. It was a strangely luxurious experience as I drafted and redrafted my treatise. When I was in my twenties, the principal asked me to help compose our application for "exemplary school" status. I was honored and actually enjoyed trying to find just the right words for this composition.

I'm not sure exactly what "day the music died", but its been at least a thirty year hiatus since I've actually enjoyed a writing project. Oh yes, I have continued to teach writing and I have continually written for work. But it has been work.

Recently, I rediscovered the joy. The key? Hyperlinks! I am intoxicated by the way they allow me to add another dimension to my expression. In fact, though I know I should restrain myself from overusing them, I still compulsively hyperlink whether blogging about vlogs, proposing a staff-development plan, or preparing a collaborative project for my students. I am excited by the way hyperlinks have animated the study guide for my film class. I actually enjoy searching for the links, just as I have done in this paragraph.

Now for the dark side. I have developed a sense of indignation over traditional "research". As I indicated in Oh, How I Miss Ibid. . . . , I can't imagine anything more outdated than "Works Cited" when hyperlinks allow us to jump directly to the source. I also think that presenting research on paper verges on the preposterous. Learning to search, discriminate among sources, and then remix them. At my school, our students have laptops have more access to information than we could have even dreamed of ten years ago, but my department is still paying tribute to the antique "accoutrements of scholarship". It staggers that hours of instruction are still spent on teaching a teaching a traditional "research paper" in the year 2009. Teachers chronically complain that they don't have time to learn about Web 2.0 technology. Well, gang, here's some time for you: chuck the research paper of yesteryear and let your students compose with hyperlinks.

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"Moleskin Concept Diagram 1" Creative Commons Flickr Photo by jazzmasterson

Resolved......a Book, a Blog and a Black Back Pack

I have three resolutions for the New Year:

#1 My short term resolution is to finish reading David Weinberger's Everything is Miscellaneous by the next blog. I believe this book was a recommended by Will Richardson, and I'm glad I put it on my Christmas list.

#2 My second resolution, to carry my black back pack through June, relates to this quote from chapter 1 in Miscellaneous :

We have entire industries and institutions built on the fact that the paper order severely limits how things can be organized. Museums, educational curricula, newspapers . . . But now we
. . . do it ourselves and, more significantly, we can do it together, figuring out the arrangements that make sense for us now and the new arrangements that make sense a minute later . . . The miscellaneous order is changing how we think the world itself is organized and—perhaps more important—who we think has the authority to tell us so.

The black book bag resolution is pretty significant, because until this year I have always carried a brief case to and from work....and it was always packed with student papers. Of course for the English teacher this is a badge of martyrdom, but also considered a necessary trade-off for loving lit. But this year, I put the briefcase aside, and to date, I have not taken a single paper home. Now, as my Red Herring post indicates, I am not phobic about paper, but I am trying to radically change my approach to "work" and to vary the media that my students and I use to communicate and (I hope) learn. This change was not a cinch for me, but I feel I am over the hump, and I look at it as a lifestyle change instead of an experiment.

#3 This blog began as a sprint with a backlog of material. Now I am going to ease off the throttle and shoot for one a week in 2009. I still look forward to writing each post as I have not enjoyed composition for some time. If my job were to accommodate more time for writing, I think I would really enjoy it. In the mean time I am going to strive for a steady pace as well as quality over quantity. (Check back soon for my favorite multi media class project).