Friday Take out from the Drive-thru

Jean Piaget
The principle goal of education is to create [persons] who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done- [persons] who are creative, inventive, discoverers

Tony Wagner

Students who have learned to collaborate, to think critically, and be more confident about their own ideas also tend to make better moral judgments.

George Siemens

When I hear people talk about the neutrality of technology, I get worried. . . . We are controlled by what we’ve created as much as we control it . . . . Today, I view my iphone less like a device than I do as a part of my cognition. We need to surface technology’s hidden ideologies and philosophies. If we don’t surface these aspects, we dance blindly to a tune that we refuse to acknowledge, but still shapes our moves.

Trung Le

Even before students set foot in a classroom, most schools still are built like factories: long hallways, lined with metal lockers, transport students to identical, self-contained classrooms. . . . Encourage learning to happen throughout a school building by creating spaces that allow ideas to circulate as readily as foot traffic. At Thomas Deacon Academy [click for virtual tour]. . . learning spaces freely flow into each other. Students can see different types of learning occurring all around them and every inch of the school can be used to educate.

Megan McArdle

Forget the literary giants who once traded barbs at Elaine’s or the Algonquin. Now the battle over the world’s literary territory, a contest on the epic scale of Mothra vs. Godzilla, is between Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

M-Hub Student Leadership

M-Hub is my new passion. Its object is to "help students build personal learning networks through contact with real persons in real time".

My inspiration is most directly based on recent experiences with Apple's Challenge Based Learning. I have watched my students network with amazing "experts" when they have ventured outside of the box.

As I reported last week in Hub-Cap,we had very strong student participation at our launch. In order to take advantage of this initial burst of enthusiasm, I invited these kids to form a core leadership group for the project.

I was thrilled by the response. Nine of the ten invited students attended the meeting forty minutes before school. And they are already busy with tasks:

* We are setting a platform discussion meeting the database manager in our school "Advancement" office and one of our top-notch IS guys, next week. We hope to have 3-4 student leaders in attendance.

*"Branding" M-Hub. We are developing a logo and trying to express our "mission" in an easy-to-understand statement. We will receive reports back to the group, next week, from the individuals who are leading these explorations.

*Club Life - We are exploring how to incorporate ourselves into the school culture. Will we be a "club" that any student may join? Right now, the thinking is that leadership will meet before school but that the club schedule may be used for general meetings.

We scheduled a follow-up leadership meeting after school on May 6. I will report on our progress!


P.S. One of the coolest things observations about M-Hub came from Bob Kirkland: M-Hub can serve as a type of "collective memory" for MHS. I love the idea, and continue to receive support for M-Hub from alumnae around the world.

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"Athena" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by brianglanz

Group Accountability during Challenge Projects

I have now put 85%* of our school's class of '12 through modified Challenge Based Learning projects. The experience, has given me a handle the biggest general objections to group work: How can you evaluate individuals fairly? How do you prevent "free riders" who benefit despite doing little work? Even worse, is it fair to penalize the entire group if a member or two entirely drop the ball?

In response to past blog posts, I have received two suggestions for dealing with this issue: 1) Weekly conferences and or self-evaluations to monitor individual contributions. 2) A detailed accounting at the conclusion of the project as to who did what.

I applaud any teacher who doesn't simply turn a blind eye to the problem and either wimps out by not applying any standards to group work ("A's for all!") or supposes that the students should "just work it out, just like the real world". (Hello, in the real world your employer has not retained employees with zero work ethic). But I have found the weekly interventions too time intensive for both teacher and group. And in my opinion both approaches put center the teacher's role in the project more than is desirable.

Here's how I handle group evaluations these days:

*As students select their groupings, they are informed that any ensuing "group chemistry" issues will be addressed with a group sit-down.

*Students write group goals at the outset and are instructed that these must be measurable.

*At two intervals, I require each group to create a specific work schedule that creates a road map to completion of their goals. At this time they must also log individual responsibilities that all members have agreed to

* These goals and schedules are logged onto Google Docs that the groups share with me. I give them feedback on their goals and insist that their expectations be concrete.

*At the end of the process, the groups complete assessments of their goals. They are urged to note individual break downs and heroics. Individual members are told that they may append a dissent to the group report (This is rare).

This school year, I received no interventions or complaints from parents. Only two students approached me during the process to "tattle" on other students who were supposedly not doing their share. I listened to the students but insisted that they work within the system, trusting that no group would be brought low by a dead-beat member.

Such dead-beats were regularly identified in the group assessments. In some cases these individuals agreed that they had dropped the ball (and were penalized accordingly). In other cases, the entire group took responsibility for procrastinating and putting individual members in a situation where success was unlikely.

The group assessments and presentations were refreshingly honest, reassuring me the project had taught the students about more than just their topics. They also learned about working with other people.

As I move forward, I will definitely continue handling group evaluation in this way.
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*American Government is required of Mercy sophomores and I was assigned six of seven sections this year.

Image above is a CBL slide for my M-Hub presentation on April 20, 2010.

Celebrating Failure

"Success is the ability to go from failure to failure without losing your enthusiasm."
- Winston Churchill

After thirty-five years in education, I have learned to walk away briskly from failure.

Anyone who tries new things will make mistakes, and if you are my age, you realize that you are wasting precious time if you A) invest more of it in a losing cause B) brood over "ingenious" ideas that do not catch fire with others.

So, I am going to now officially categorize The Blog Squad as an official dud. Last May, I envisioned the Squad this way:

What I would like to establish is something like a "Blog Squad" which would offer message board help to students who are having specific challenges with wikis, web sites, podcasts, blogs in our classes. Believe me, tons of little issues arise with projects using Web 2.0 apps, and they occur when class is not in session. Usually the problems are easy to solve and do not warrant tying up valuable tech department or class time. I envision that the "club" would initially recruit kids who are adept at Audacity, WikiSpaces, Google Sites, and/or Blogger and give them "genius" (apologies to Apple) status as problem solvers.

But I also promised . . . .

I am also not afraid to declare that I have failed. The plan will die a quick death if a critical mass of users is not achieved by mid-semester. . . .

Well, here is the declaration: I failed.

I tried to run the Squad through a Ning . Faculty and students signed up in droves. . . .But they did not return. I was pretty much the only active participant on the Ning. (No surprise on that score!). But I also realize two other factors. 1) Face-to- face meetings are probably necessary to fire up enthusiasm for a virtual project like this. 2) Students need or expect immediate help for their tech frustrations, and on-the-spot assistance is simply not feasible within a conventional school schedule.

Before bidding adieu to the Squad, let this be noted: when I sent out the call, fellow staff members actually came to my classroom to offer hands on technical help (Ann, Will, Cheryl -- you were awesome). And I have since learned that the best way for students to get on-the-spot help is to place them into groups during project launches and let them teach each other.

Thus, by no means was the Blog Squad a total loss. But instead of trying to pump life into this inert Ning, I'm going to walk away from it and try to apply the lessons learned to my new passion: The Knowledge Hub Project: Unlike Blog Squad, I am evangelizing M-Hub through face-to-face gatherings and identifying student leaders who will hopefully keep our momentum going through next year and beyond.

I'm giving this my best shot. But . . . . If next spring, we are dead in the water, I will abandon ship and venture off in a new direction in a different virtual vessel.

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"lydney cannon festival" Flickr Creative Commons photo by the longhairedgit.

Hub-Cap

The M-Hub Project is officially launched. Twenty of us shared ideas for building a digital platform that would network our extended school community. The idea is to help students learn to build personal learning networks from "the inside-out".

The students had terrific ideas for using the hub. They also impressed the adults with their sophisticated suggestions on the technical side of the project. Staff in attendance represented the Art, the Media Center, Counseling, English, Tech, and Religious Studies. An alumna joined us en route to the Horn of Africa where she will work to cure tropical diseases. Needless to say, we had a rich variety of perspectives.

Perhaps the best sign of the meeting: When I arrived home from the meeting, I had three emails waiting from attendees that bubbled with more ideas for our enterprise.

The next step is to build a leadership team with the students. I want to meet with them next week. Another general meeting is scheduled for May 11. The topic? A platform for our network! I will keep you posted.

Visit the Marlin Knowledge Hub Project Site
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Photo by L. Baker, April 20, 2010.

The Knowledge Hub Project

My last three posts have led me to the launch of M-Hub. As explained in The Inside-Out Knowledge Network, our schools generally do not A) teach our students to network B) utilize expertise within reach of the school and local community.

I propose setting up a "knowledge hub" database with spokes that connect to staff (past and present), parents, and alumnae. We will also identify other professional and academic "experts" in the extended community who are willing to serve as "nodes" on our learning grid. M-Hub will allow our students to shake off the conventions of school calendars, meeting times, and classrooms. The M-Hub will be designed to network passionate learners and serve as a model of collaboration. Its greater purpose will be preparing our students for life-long learning beyond MHS.

I believe this is called a stretch goal. But why not dream big? The first meeting is scheduled for tomorrow and I've invited dreamers to come and help choose a platform for our database. Naysaying will not be featured on the agenda.

I have set up a web site which describe the philosophical underpinnings of the Hub.

Any member of our school community will be welcome at the meeting and may join the virtual discussion at our M-Hub Project Ning. (If you wish to join the ning, please contact me by private email). So far, the Ning has attracted a very nice blend of students, staff, and alumnae.

You can be sure that you will hear more about M-Hub at the Drive-thru!

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Screen shot of M-Hub web site. Visit for more information.

The Inside-out Knowledge Network

In my last post I advocated helping our students learn to build personal learning networks by encouraging them to seek specific information to their questions in real time from real people. I think that this should be done "inside-out" by guiding them to familiar resources within their schools, families, and local community.

In Five 10th Graders Jump Outside of the Box, I think I demonstrated how authentic and self-directed this can be. In Rewiring the Learning Networks for Schools, I shared a video which shows how students can "cultivate their curiosity"* by asking nuanced questions to experts and then expressing the experience through multi-media.

Now, granted, at a college prep school like ours we teach students to write research "papers" with formal annotation using vetted sources from academic journals and the like. I am not demanding that we abandon this age-old "college prep" system for culling information and synthesizing it to support a thesis. But in terms of guiding our students to authentically learn about topics and get their real questions answered, why aren't we networking them with real-time experts and real-time persons? It would be ironic to suppose that the teacher down the hall is only an expert on her subject when she is assigned to teach a certain set of students a certain time of the day. To heck with the schedule. Let's make her available to any student in the school.

Then, let's build this network "inside-out". Let's add folks within the reach of our school community to our grid. Whenever I've brainstormed with classes of students about finding "experts" we've always identified parents, friends' parents, or persons these parents know. We have alumnae who are experts in all fields imaginable. In virtually every instance, whenever a student has approached one of these persons for knowledge, they have enthusiastically welcomed this. Why can't we start collecting persons like these in a database so that we can tap them with an email question, an interview or even invite them to one of our classes as a speaker?

And don't you dare shoot this idea down by suggesting that I am trying to replace a school library or setting up these "experts" to be barraged by inquiries. Our conceptual framework of research is so far removed from this at the present time to render these concerns absurd. Besides, we would not add someone to our grid without his or her explicit permission.

Yes, I have very definite ideas about approaching this exciting challenge. In my next post I am going to explain (drum roll, please) The M-Hub Project-- "A knowledge hub project designed to leverage new technologies in order to facility authentic learning experiences for Marlins of all ages."

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Screen shot of 6th period "Teen Rights" Wikispaces page
*From Tony Wagner's "The Global Achievement Gap"