Quick Takeout from the Drive-thru

"The University of Michigan Athletic Department will paint the FieldTurf at Michigan Stadium with the hashtag #GOBLUE for the upcoming Mott Spring Game . . . . It's believed to be the second time that a collegiate program has painted a hashtag on its football field." -- MGOBLUE.COM

"Progress is a nice word, but change is its motivator and change has enemies." 

- - Robert F. Kennedy

"Companies everywhere are adopting tablets. Forrester Research Inc . . .estimates that about 25% of computers used for work globally are tablets and smartphones, not PCs." -- SHARA TIBKEN, WSJ

 "The authority of those who teach is often an obstacle to those who want to learn." -- Cicero”

"Digital networks antagonize planned information structures. Planned information structures like textbooks and courses simply can’t adapt quickly enough to incorporate network-speed information development."

-- George Siemens

"You hav 2 disrupt something to move forward. eg Youtube disrupted MTV. 1:1 disrupting teacher as knowledge controller." 

-- tweet by Dorothy Burt

The Future of Education and Other Matters

"Linked Together" by willowmina

The Future of Education is Mobile"

by Daniel Donahoo
The revolution in technology, and subsequently educational technology, is an opportunity, but not a guarantee.

http://huff.to/k1CTqB

"10 Facebook settings to check right now!" by Mark W. Smith

As Facebook becomes the window to the Web for its more than 500 million users worldwide, the security of the social network has never been a hotter topic.

http://bit.ly/kNQQaV


"Apple is Killing the WWW"  by Ben Camm-Jones

Venture capitalist thinks the company's iOS app model is winning the battle for the internet.

http://www.cfoworld.com/technology/7255/apple-killing-world-wide-web

"Peak Social" by George Siemens

Social is one of those lovely words that can be added to anything to make it better.

http://www.connectivism.ca/?p=317


"Bring Your Own Device Catching on in Schools" by Jason Ohler
It is especially important to understand how students use mobile devices for learning, and how educators can encourage that use, so that technology is not incorporated without a positive impact.
http://www.infosavvygroup.com/blogpost.cfm?blogID=1925




" . . . Please Make My School a Prison"  by Scott Mcleod'
A school superintendent in Michigan has written a public letter to the editor asking Governor Rick Snyder if his school can become a prison instead.


http://bigthink.com/ideas/38573

This week the Drive-thru begins its twice-a-week summer schedule.

Six Short Education Quotes for Your Weekend

Jean Piaget

I think that human knowledge is essentially active.




Cathy Davidson (via Will Richardson):


Learning’ is the free and open source version of ‘education.




Overheard from a "Job Coach":


"Educators like to measure success in activities rather than results."




Gwendolyn Brooks:


A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.



John Dewey:


The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs.


George Siemens:


When faced with learning in complex environments, what we need is something more like network-directed learning – learning that is shaped, influenced, and directed by how we are connected to others. Instead of sensemaking in isolation, we rely on social, technological, and informational networks to direct our activities.




Next week the Drive-thru will go on its twice-a-week summer schedule.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

A Baker's Half-Dozen Quotes

"half dozen farm eggs"  Flickr CC by bimurch

The future of Ed Tech is “Bring Your Own Device”, (BYOD), and schools will more than likely move away from providing devices for students sooner than later.  While BYOD is far too radical for many school districts at this time, it is inevitable that this is the future.  The sooner districts embrace this future and begin to plan for it, the more effective this transition will be.   -- Scott Meech


[The] web is the long slow death of the middleman. - Mike Wesch


Unfortunately, the vast majority of teachers are still waiting…for something. What is it? Permission? Direction? Inspiration? Enlightenment? - - Will Richardson


What makes the biggest impact in online classes I believe is how you cultivate a classroom community. Some teachers do that with synchronous tools such as Elluminate, others do that by having students get to know one another asynchronously. One of the best online teachers I know does weekly, if not daily 5 minute webcasts to update her students on how the class is going.   -- Bethany Smith


PowerPoint   . . may help speakers outline their talks, but convenience for the speaker can be punishing to both content and audience. The standard PowerPoint presentation elevates format over content, betraying an attitude of commercialism that turns everything into a sales pitch .  --  Edward Tufte


Information is no longer something humans seek – it is now starting to seek us. -- George Siemens

And I Quote . . . .

When we make our learning transparent, we become teachers.

~George Siemens

 But the biggest roadblock today is that so many of America’s best-educated, best-placed people are too invested in old social models and old visions of history to do their real job and help society transition to the next level.

~Walter Russell 

When you have exhausted all possibilities, remember this - you haven't.

~Thomas Edison

Stay ahead of the Culture by creating the culture.

~Hugh MacLeod

We need to move beyond the idea that an education is something that is provided for us, and toward the idea that an education is something that we create for ourselves.

~Stephen Downes

The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.  

~Sydney J. Harris

If you want to know who’s doing the parenting part right, start with immigrants, who know that learning is the way up. Last week, the 32 winners of Rhodes Scholarships for 2011 were announced — America’s top college grads. Here are half the names on that list: Mark Jia, Aakash Shah, Zujaja Tauqeer, Tracy Yang, William Zeng, Daniel Lage, Ye Jin Kang, Baltazar Zavala, Esther Uduehi, Prerna Nadathur, Priya Sury, Anna Alekeyeva, Fatima Sabar, Renugan Raidoo, Jennifer Lai, Varun Sivaram.
Do you see a pattern?

 ~Thomas Friedman

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"George Simens" Flickr CC Photo by Stephen Downes

Disruption Versus Inertia

Katie Hafner

Open courseware is a classic example of disruptive technology, which, loosely defined, is an innovation that comes along one day to change a product or service, often standing an industry on its head. Craigslist did this to newspapers by posting classified ads for free. And the music industry got blindsided when iTunes started unbundling songs from albums and selling them for 99 cents apiece.

George Siemens

Absent someone being assigned the explicit role of thinking about innovation, most of us spend our time doing our work. And the daily drubbing drives out creativity to reflect on what we could do differently, what we could do better. Which is why we need an explicit focus on innovating the system itself.

2010 Horizon Report
Traditionally, a learning environment has been a physical space, but the idea of what constitutes a learning environment is changing. The “spaces” where students learn are becoming more community-driven, interdisciplinary, and supported by technologies that engage virtual communication and collaboration. This changing concept of the learning environment has clear implications for schools.

Tony Wagner
Virtually all forms of work in American life today, are based to some extent, on team structures-- all work, that is, except in education.

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"113 - Puzzle Texture" Flickr CC Photo by Patrick Hoesly

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

Weekend Take-out at the Drive-thru

Katherine Mangu-Ward-- Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it's like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of "Avatar" in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare's day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction. . . .

George Siemens-- We are at a point where we ought to be conceiving new models driven by the affordances generated by networks, technology, openness, and social software. Instead, many systems are at the equivalent stage of being pushed down the hall in a wheelchair at a senior care home.

Ellen Kumata (as quoted by Tony Wagner)-- Our system of schooling promotes the idea that there are right answers, and that you get rewarded if you get the right answer. But to be comfortable with this new economy . . . you have to understand that you live in a world where there isn't one right answer, or if there is, it's right only for a nanosecond."

David Pogue on iPad-- Hulu.com, the Web’s headquarters for free hit TV shows, won’t confirm the rumors that it’s working on an iPad app, but wow — can you imagine? A thin, flat, cordless, bottomless source of free, great TV shows, in your bag or on the bedside table?

National Educational Technology Plan (as quoted by Will Richardon): In connected teaching, teaching is a team activity. Individual educators build online learning communities consisting of their students and their students’ peers; fellow educators in their schools, libraries, and afterschool programs; professional experts in various disciplines around the world; members of community organizations that serve students in the hours they are not in school; and parents who desire greater participation in their children’s education.

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

And I Quote . . . .

Tony Wagner: Most high school educators do not feel a real sense of urgency for change--perhaps because their work isolates them from the larger world of rapid change and they've lived through too many failed education fads.

George Siemens: When [social] connections calcify and become dogma and rigid structure, they fail to represent the chaotic and continually shifting world outside.

Faire Alchemist: The future of education is bound up in the ways that we relate to our alumni via the social connections of the Net. Because the future of education isn't about the classroom; it's about the world. And your alumni are the bridge between the two.

Nicholas Bramble: Educators should stop thinking about how to repress the huge amounts of intellectual and social energy kids devote to social media and start thinking about how to channel that energy away from causing trouble and toward getting more out of their classes. After all, it's not as if most kids are investing commensurate energy into, say, their math homework.

Terry Freedman: Using social networks, and by implication other Web 2.0 applications, is more and more starting to be an economic imperative. Schools which do not recognise this, and act on that realisation, are doing a disservice to their students .

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"The people in charge" Flickr Creative Commons photo by Scott McLeod

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

Watching the Hierarchy Disintegrate

George Siemens recently wrote a very thought-provoking piece called Struggling for a Metaphor for Change. I haves sampled from one portion of it where he lists "broad trends influencing our relationship to knowledge":

An expectancy of relevance and currency of knowledge, for a cycle of years and decades, has now been reduced to months and years for many disciplines. A picture released by an observer in a disaster zone (war, hurricane, earthquake) is worth many times more than the commentary of an expert. Knowledge can be woven, connected, and recombined in limitless ways…creating the possibility of personalized networks of knowledge. We have moved from hierarchical to network. It is end user driven.

What does this mean for us "teachers"? Well, obviously our usefulness has diminished as dispensers of information. The sooner we begin to see ourselves as network enablers or personal learning enhancers, the better. We also need to recognize that the formal lines that have structured the life of the classroom are fading. Academic "departments" make less sense. How relevant are the school schedules and school buildings themselves? I sometimes wonder if educators have become so consumed with activities only indirectly connected to learning that they have taken their eyes off the ball. Many schools are trying to wall off the students from social media and filter internet access in the most extreme ways. One way of looking at this is the old regime trying to maintain its hold on power (knowledge). And you know, the farther up the hierarchy you go in many instances, the less aware they often are about what happening down here on the ground.

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"Grass Network" Flickr Creative Commons photo by cperaza_ca

Baker Manifesto (part 3)-- Bridging the Great Divide

In parts one and two I explained how I have come to embrace George Siemens' educational model of Connectivism. But my past blog posts,
have noted that many educators resist the technologies which make the best features of Connectivism possible. And too often tech evangelicals actually motivate the resistors to dig in. Consider the following blog exchange that debated whether cell phones should be allowed in the classroom:

Ira:
None of this is new. Socrates and Diogenes opposed literacy and writing on the same grounds you oppose phones - they disrupt the learning environment - the cognitive authority environment - preferred by the teacher. Monks opposed Gutenberg technology on similar grounds. Schools long fought the use of film and television, even typewriters. Today, educators continue to fight against utilizing the technologies of communication which define our age. An endless retrograde action which ensures that "ability" and "disability" remain traditionally defined and that power never changes hands.

Marcelle:
So what you are espousing is that the world bend to the student? That the teacher, with all their knowledge and experience, knows less about what a student will need to learn what the teacher knows? Sounds arrogant to me. You make it sound as if no learning can take place if the student can't have their mobile. What did students in America do before 2005?

The vehemence reflected in these views is not unusual when it comes to technology integration in schools. So how could such disparate views ever be reconciled in a school building?

I actually think that the Connectivism model itself goes far toward crossing this great divide. I was struggling with this issue when preparing a staff development proposal for my school administration, last winter. After Siemens reviewed my white paper, he pointed out,

We have different groupings of people when we take different perspectives. A "naysayer" in technology may be a "pathfinder in pedagogy". . . .The development of technology use (PD) and culture is important, as you state. It's worth drawing distinctions between the different roles we play in fostering change...and the stages we need to consider.

Connectivism holds out the prospect that each member of a learning network (for instance, a school faculty) could contribute at different points to a learning challenge (for instance, whether/how to use technology). Siemens hypothesizes that

A tipping point occurs when [an idea] has created a strong enough network to begin to influence the entire thought process.

He proposes "using . . . the IRIS Model for creating change around technology in organizations: "Innovation, Research, Implementation, Systemization."

I think that Connectivism not only offers a model of student instruction-- it is provides a process for changing a school's entire technology culture. I envision innovative pilot programs planting the seeds of change within a school or district. If the innovation is properly hooked into the network, change can occur within networked teachers, who can then help kids build their own learning networks. This is a pardigm shift to be sure, but it's one that can evolve if a collaborative environment is cultivated, allowing the school to become a vehicle for all members of the network to obtain and share knowledge from a virtually limitless number of connections.

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"Rio-Antirio Bridge" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Ava Babili

Baker Manifesto (part 2) -- Connectivism

As I indicated in part one, my interest in and authorship of Web 2.0 educational activities has led me to George Siemens' evolving model of "Connectivism".
Here's a sampling so that you get the gist:

*The strong reflexive and iterative aspects of learning contribute to its frequent misclassification as largely a content consumption process.

*Learning is not the content consumption process the formal education system perceives it to be.

*Instruction is currently largely housed in courses and other artificial constructs . . . Moving towards a networked model requires that we place less emphasis on our tasks of presenting information, and more emphasis on building the learner’s ability to navigate the information.

*Blogs, wikis, and other open, collaborative platforms are reshaping learning as a two-way process. Instead of presenting content/information/knowledge in a linear sequential manner, learners can be provided with a rich array of tools and information sources to use in creating their own learning pathways.

When I asked George to review the Staff Development Plan I submitted to our Technology Integration Committee (and administration), he responded with an incisive review that he said I might share. In my next post I will place this review in the context of what I consider to be a great divide between those who see learning as presenting information and those who perceive education as navigating the information flow. Stay tuned.

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"Connexions Digital Networks" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by cstmweb

My Ed Tech Manifesto (part 1)-- Creeping toward Connectivism)

I have never really contemplated my "educational philosophy." Even on my first job applications out of college, I fudged that section, blurring principles with methods. This is in part because I am a practical person. I'm willing to compromise and change course. When I coached basketball, I adapted my approach to the players rather than teach them my offensive or defensive "philosophy".

Also, my formal introduction into educational philosophy and was a bit of a disaster. Rebounding from the Sixties, my profs were all about completely open schools and Teaching as a Subversive Activity. Once my grad assistant teachers simply brought two children to our class, and we watched them play for half an hour. The profound lesson of this escaped me. I think it had something to do with not letting these poor innocents become just another brick in the wall.

So why would I start musing about educational philosophy in my thirty-fifth year of teaching? Well, as usual for me these days, it's the unintended consequence of my tech activities. Through the Fall of '08, I had been consumed with the classroom ramifications of the read/write Web. Then, in winter '09, I grappled with writing a staff development proposal for our tech integration committee. In it I called for changing the school culture by establishing school wide social media"projects":

Staff would engage in the same kinds of collaboration experiences we wish to provide our students. And really, if the school is committed to the program, no one should be exempt through special pleading of being "too busy."

Since writing those words I came across a statement by faire alchemist that nailed what I was going for:

. . . .computers have been around for a long time. But that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about the network itself. We're talking about the paradigm of immediate global connection. [We need to] engage this thing for the benefit of the students who are already living their own lives in this digital domain,

When I was drafting my staff development plan I shot it off to several experts, requesting feedback. A thoughtful, nuanced reply came from George Siemens. His paradigm of "connectivism"-- hit me right between the eyes. . . .and is the subject of part 2 (September 16 post).

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"Skirt on a Box Bike" Flickr Creative Commons photo by Mark Stosberg