Summer Re-Creation

"Chillin" CC Photo by eviltwin

I've enjoyed making a classroom project one of my summer past times.  This was something I could do on my terms and at the time of my choosing.  Some teachers like to get completely get away, but if you keep an oar-in, consider refreshing with one of these resolutions or practices:


* If you use study guides in your discipline, try for an online hyperlinked guide that your students can access through a computer or hand-held.  These guides are far richer than the paper sort and the experience will acquaint you with the reason that epub is the future of instructional resources.

* Do you make up assignment calendars? Supplement these or replace the paper ones with an online calendar accessible to students through their smart phones.

* Resolve to replace a text assignment with ann audio or video substitute (or make it an option). If you believe that meaningful communication can only be done via the written word, this might give you pause-- this showed me some of the talents and knowledge weak writers possessed and it was a nice break for me from "papers."

* Reflect back on the past semester and consider this:  Was there a cohort of students in a course who did not respond to a given assignment.  Filter out any fault you might rightfully place on them and then consider, might there be a multimedia approach to this group that would increase the buy-in?

* I teach with some colleagues who sneer at lecturing, and instead lead "discussions."  I've lead many of these, myself.  After a "good discussion" I was not likely to think about those kids who said nothing. Perhaps you can help assuage my guilt about this.  Would you consider an online forum in place of the classroom variety?

* Fight the urge to despair about those kids who spend their time outside of the classroom,  texting constantly (or gaming, or Facebooking).  Instead, since you can't control this anyway, make it your mission to find out why this is happening.  Is there any avenue you might take in terms of the "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em" attitude.  Could you organize a picture or note sharing activity that might actually leverage their cell phones?

*Explore the Creative Commons.  Resolve to set a good example for your students by attributing credit to all those fols who lisence their photos for your use with attribution through Flickr.  Get started with Advanced Image Search at Yahoo. The next time you make slides, try this as a source for illustration.  It's served the Drive-thru very well, indeed.

Do any of my readers have other suggestions?

An Interesting Perspective on Teaching

Circumstances have conspired to allow me lengthy conversations with my brother-in-law this year.  Even though he married my wife's sister over thirty years ago, I never considered that we had much in common and polite chat was the norm when we got together now and then.

But Fred is a pretty amazing guy.  A couple of years ago he decided to change careers.  He was doing well with a steady job underwriting insurance for a profitable company.  He had regular hours and good compensation.  However, he had come to loathe aspects of his work, and rather than grit his teeth until retirement, he decided that he wanted to become a teacher.  That meant tons of course work, student teaching, the whole bit.

So now he's teaching, and though he's traded off many of the material benefits of the business world, he's happier.  I really admire that.  I've worked with a number of teachers who seemed to grow unhappier as the years went by and behaved as though they were trapped in their lives.  They became pretty bitter.

But bitterness and life's choices are not the themes of this post.  Instead, I want to offer two of Fred's perspectives on teaching that I think are pretty significant.  He's been subbing throughout his region in all kinds of schools, and he has been struck by . . . .

1) The technology divide between schools and the outside world.  He felt that the schools that he visited were "30 years behind" the business community.  He saw technology in classrooms that was not being used either because A) the technology was relatively useless or B) the teacher was pretty clearly clueless.  He also was asked to develop lessons where "anything goes" if the student was doing it with media instead of text.

In my view education is incredibly insulated from modernity.  Besides the fact that many teachers have a great deal of autonomy, stakeholders in the process-- like parents view old teaching methods of instruction are the right ones, because that's what they know.  Despite a kind of ongoing chronic crisis in USA education, traditional approaches to "information delivery" as instruction remain the norm, even though a global communications revolution has occurred in the mean time.

2) Teachers talk about collaborating, but in many schools the level of collaboration that exists is insignificant compared to business work environments.  Fred described an insurance organization that operated through different groups of teams where members were interdependent and the whole benefited from the individual assets that each team member could bring to bear on challenges.  Fred has visited school districts which are very generous to staff in terms of "prep" time.  But too often, he observed that teachers retreated into their solitude to grade work or follow solitary routines.

Having spent 36 years in the classroom, I know how hectic a typical school day can be.  There just never seems to be time for anything.  But of course there is time. Case in point:  we started and online forum to discuss issues about education at our school.  The response was pretty good, but some teachers complained that they didn't have time.  Oh, please.  It's a matter of school culture, priorities, and motivation.  I know when our CBL Pilot group of teachers were determined to collaborate, they found a common meeting time an held it sacred.  A stronger team attitude at my school would be a plus and I hope we can work harder to make it a priority.

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"Desert Palace" Flickr CC photo by CYNICALifornia

Baker's Half-Dozen

There is . . .growing support for experimentation: in March, Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, released a draft National Educational Technology Plan that reads a bit like a manifesto for change, proposing among other things that the full force of technology be leveraged to meet “aggressive goals” and “grand” challenges, including increasing the percentage of the population that graduates from college to 60 percent from 39 percent in the next 10 years. What it takes to get there, the report suggests, is a “new kind of R.& D. for education” that encourages bold ideas and “high risk/high gain” endeavors" -- Sara Corbett

These days, the homework I give isn't based on some arbitrary idea of how much work a kid should do 'at home' to reinforce something we did in class, but rather it's a matter of asking the students to do something necessary to prepare themselves for the next class. Homework becomes an act ofpreparation -- and hopefully sparks some anticipation not for seeing what you 'got right or wrong', not for seeing if you can jump through that next hoop, but anticipation for taking part in the next day's discussion, activities, and learning. -- Shelley Blake-Plock

A music minister in a local catholic church in my area was in an
article in our state Arch Diocese publication. He uses an iPad for
all of his sheet music. No more lugging around binders and cases of
music. It is all contained on his iPad which fits nicely on his piano
music rack. -- Gabriella Meyers

I lean toward seeing a future where self-organized learning rules, and that the role of school is to develop the passion, motivation and skills necessary to help kids become amazing learners as opposed to pretty good “knowers.” - Will Richardson

"No one has yet discovered transformative changes in curriculum or pedagogy, especially for inner-city schools, that are (in business lingo) "scalable" -- easily transferable to other schools, where they would predictably produce achievement gains." -- Robert Samuelson

“All power corrupts; Power Point corrupts absolutely." --Edward Tufte

Ten Education Quotes for Today

"I failed my way to success" 

-- Thomas Edison


"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge
in pursuit of the child."
--George Bernard Shaw


"Technology: Opening Minds with a New Set of Keys"
-- Anon

"Part of the American myth is that people who are handed the skin of a dead sheep at graduating time think that it will keep their minds alive forever."

-- John Mason Brown

"Nothing is ever achieved without enthusiasm."
--' Ralph Waldo Emerson  

"We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge."
 --John Naisbitt


"The illiterate of the 21st century won't be those who can't read and write but those who can't learn unlearn, and relearn"
--Alvin Toffler

"Schools are among the very few institutions that have remained almost entirely unchanged for most of this century."
-- Judith Aitken 

"Every organisation has to prepare for the abandonment of every thing it does. Be prepared to abandon everything, lest we have to abandon the ship."
--  Peter Drucker

"The principal goal of education is to create [human beings] who are capable of doing new things, not simply of repeating what other generations have done."
--Jean Piaget

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

Rethinking the Confines of Teaching & Learning

You may recall that last year I featured Tom Schusterbauer in "Sage Schuste Seduced by Cyberspace", describing him as "a gifted teacher who has impacted literally hundreds of students by touching their hearts. I've never encountered anyone who more passionately teaches about literature and life." I also marveled that this self-proclaimed technophobe would be having such a tremendous impact on Facebook, sharing his reflections on life with hundreds of "friends-- primarily former students. And he's still going strong on Facebook!

A couple of weeks ago, Tom Schusterbauer commented to one of my blog posts: "And I Quote....". The theme of my blog was the educational system's resistance to forces shaping the world outside it. As a recently retired vet of 41 years in the classroom, Tom remarked:

It is difficult to partially leave a system which you know has worked . . . It is difficult to find the time and the energy (especially for one who has been teaching for decades and in a discipline where so much time is spent in both prepping and correcting) to explore and modify. . . . the goal is to take what has worked and make it work better and more dramatically.

My knee-jerk reaction to this is, well Tom, we must change despite the "difficulty". But that would have been overly simplistic and would not have acknowledged the wealth of knowledge and insight Tom has amassed from all that time prepping. He is exceedingly well versed on such varied topics as the Holocaust, Abraham Lincoln, J.D Salinger, Anne Tyler, jazz, film noir, composition). Despite his high profile on Facebook, this treasure trove of knowledge was more or less unplugged from the educational "system" when Tom he quit punching in at the time clock. But he still loves teaching and sharing about his passions. And memory erasure was not a prerequisite for receiving his pension.

An aside: Once when the Media Center was making tough choices over which expensive resources to add to its collection, I suggested that the faculty could contribute "free" podcasts on race relations, Charles Dickens, mythology, the Elizabethan Age, and other subjects we had immersed ourselves in over the years. Such podcasts, I argued, would be legitimate sources for the kinds of research assignments we conventionally give students. Students would still have to wrestle with the information and synthesize it for their reports or presentations. My suggestion was not taken seriously, but I still think it was a pretty good idea. Isn't it too bad that some of Tom's legacy has not been bottled this way for present students to discover in their research?

Today there are even more dynamic ways to connect Tom back into our students' learning networks. Why not plug him back into the knowledge grid through email, texting, video conferencing, or perhaps, a phone call?

Even more peculiar is this consideration: Why aren't actively employed teachers considered as potentially valuable "nodes" in the learning networks of all students? Why, with the tremendous communication technologies at our fingertips, do we hang onto mindsets that "classroom teachers" are pretty much confined to serving designated students who are scheduled to show up in their rooms for the duration of a "course? This no longer makes sense to me and I've decided to take action with something I am calling a Knowledge Hub Project. More on Wednesday!

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"Schuste" (with his permission) as photographed in '09 by Haley D.

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

Innovating, Failing, Disrupting, and Creating

I find myself returning now and again to a recent op-ed piece by Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google, called Erasing Our Innovation Deficit. It reminds me to keep pushing myself to open up my classroom and to urge my students to think outside of the box. Here are some excepts that really hit a chord with me:

*We can no longer rely on the top-down approach of the 20th century, when big investments in the military and NASA spun off to the wider economy. . . . The ideas that power our next generation of growth are just as likely to originate in a coffee shop as in the laboratory of a big corporation.

*Innovation is disruptive and messy. It can't be controlled or predicted. The only way to ensure it can flourish is to create the best possible environment -- and then get out of the way.

*Risk-taking means tolerating failure . . . Show me a program with a 100 percent success rate, and I'll show you one with 0 percent innovation.

*Right now, somewhere in the United States, someone is working at a kitchen table, in a dorm room or a garage, developing an idea that could not only create a new industry but could also just possibly change the world. If we provide the right environment, she'll do the rest.

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"Break Through Flickr Creative Commons photo by a o k

Why I Don't Teach Technology (much)

If you listen to Lauren's brief clip, you will get the idea as to why I spend little time teaching technology: I think students will learn what they need to use and are more likely to retain this knowledge if they apply it toward a particular project. Lauren describes the expertise she gained using video for her Challenge Based Learning Project. I can relate to this because I learned similar skills when I had a specific, real video project of my own. People react skeptically when I say that I did not teach any technology for these media-rich projects, but it's true.

Currently, I working on modified cbl projects with 85 sophomores. Last semester I began by "teaching" them to create Google Accounts, collaborate on group Google Docs, and start wikis. Last week, I skipped all of that. After they organized into groups, I simply told the groups that they were responsible for getting everyone up to speed.

Guess which method was more calm and more successful. The students were motivated to get each other on board. Instead of trying to put out a dozen or more brush fires simultaneously, I only dealt with two or three tech issues in each class. Sure, I will take time to show them a few tools along the way. But I plan to do these in twenty minute lessons rather than entire class periods.

Lauren is an exceptional student and she independently taught herself exceptional skills. But I am learning not to underestimate the power of student groups to motivate and teach each other basic tech skills as long as the requirements are reasonable and clearly communicated.

AP Government CBL Student Solution -- A Web Masterpiece

In my last post, when we visited The Ideal Voter, I did not mention that the group had been completely intimidated the day before revealing their beautiful site, because the Democracy of Tomorrow group had stunned us all with a finished product that surpassed our wildest dreams. I tweeted during their presentation that I was "being blown away" by what I was seeing.

You simply must visit the site to appreciate what this group has done. But as you click to their site, please note that most of the content you find there is original. They have created most of the videos posted to the site. And the site is divided into three sections in order to meet the needs of kids, new voters and active voters. Similar to the Ideal Voter Group, Democracy of Tomorrow seeks to teach citizens how to get involved in government and why their votes matter.

Other aspects of the site which impressed us and may interest you:

* The group purchased the domain name to their site

* The group drew so much traffic to their site that when they began their presentation they told us to google "Challenge of Democracy" and we were surprised to find that it was the top hit.

* Over 1150 visitors have been to the site. The students created links through Twitter posts, Facebook, and a Wikipedia page.

* Most of the students in this group learned the nuances of the technology they explored or emplyed in the project.

* As with the other groups, the only credit I can take for what these students accomplished was presenting a solid challenge, introducing them to the cbl process, and urging them to set the bar high. Their solution was purely student direced and created.

You might be wondering how I can top this with the last student presentation. I many ways I cannot. But my challenge to the class was to "create an authentic medium for improving our democracy." In the next post you will see the most authentic medium created by any group . . . on Facebook.

Best of 2009: On the Net without a net... The Bookless Course

This week I am re-posting my favorite blogs of 2009: This one frst appeared, Feb. 19 2009:

My school has made considerable progress this year with our laptop initiative. Unsurprisingly, we've had our hiccups over the past four years. Initially, there was a strong desire to find electronic book substitutes for traditional texts. This goal was mainly driven by a desire to justify the expense of the computers (see ....ebook Joy), but I now realize that it reflected our inability to see beyond texts.

Even when I decided to go completely bookless in my American Government course last year, I conceptualized the course as a kind of virtual book on Moodle. If you had checked Moodle last year, you would have seen the course organized by units comparable to those found in a standard text.

This year I reorganized the course and broke it into smaller components (....Tinker Toy Playland). The process has been liberating. The course seems more nimble and flexible, allowing me to easily match instruction to the presidential election calendar. So, now that I no longer feel as though I am conducting a pilot program, here are some observations from the trenches:

Delightful
The mp3 lectures have worked marvelously well and freed me to explore other forms of media for the class. What is more, at no time have we gotten stuck in any kind of rut. Without the book we have far more variety which becomes richer with each iteration. I have also been delighted to experiment complaint-free from students, parents, or colleagues.

Unanticipated
I had not expected that quite so much maintenance would be required. American Government invites this problem because specifics quickly seem dated. And of course, links die and typos are discovered. As noted in (Not!) Collaborating...., the seamless fit of Google Docs with Moodle has eased this problem considerably. Still, it is much less fun to review and maintain the curriculum than create it from scratch.

Disappointing

I have not observed that the new program has developed student independence or responsibility. I expected that providing an online assignment calendar and conditioning the students to use Moodle would cultivate independence, but a sizable minority consistently come to class unprepared and clueless. Though fewer fail the course altogether, many underachieve because I don't take them by the hand and walk them through their assignments. (sigh).

Recommendation
By all means, try a bookless course with Moodle. Two cautions: 1) Try it with a subject you know very well. 2) Make sure that online resources are available for all aspects of the course. Then go for it! The time you invest in transferring materials to Moodle will pay off for you and your students.

As usual, your reactions and suggestions are welcome.

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Above: "Without a Net!" Flickr photo with kind permission of arpsquire

Best of 2009: My 21st Century Stimulation

As 2009 comes to an end I am re-posting some my favorites. This one first appeared January 11.

I began teaching American Government in 1993, and my Congressional simulation has been with me for the entire ride. The idea came from a product called, "Committee" by Interact, but from the beginning I made modifications. It evolved slowly from semester to semester with two enormous convulsive changes along the way. One year I completely updated all the legislation, and another year I recreated and expanded the entire cast of 35 imaginary characters.

Most students love playing "The Game" as they usually call it. And every semester a few will journal about it and mistakenly refer to it as a "stimulation". I still chuckle.

I have recently conducted another radical revision due to the convergence of three factors:
1) "The game" is getting a little stale for me.
2) I have never liked having the players' roles and goals prescripted for them.
3) I've found some great Google tools that will help me and open up the game and make it far more dynamic.

The latest version of the game will revolve around Google Docs and Google Sites. This will provide students with the easy ability to use templates to build their roles and goals. The sites will allow students to post and share some work. I will also be able to make the project 75% more paperless (See Red Herring and Black Book Bag).

Check out the latest '09 Version of the Game. I'd love to have some feedback. And feel free stop by and observe the interaction when we are hip deep in the next semester. Wish me luck!

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Screen Shot of Audrey's Google Site project --- Phil Herbert, White House Director of Legislative Affairs

Drive-thru Triple Play

Three recommended short, sweet, and recent blogs.

From "Adaptation Is Not an Option":

If we continue to define our profession by what we do and where we do it, we're on our way to joining the iceman, the farrier, lamplighter, pardoner, summoner, and the canon's yeoman.

From "21 Things that Will become Obsolete in Education by 2020":

School buildings are going to become 'homebases' of learning, not the institutions where all learning happens. Buildings will get smaller and greener, student and teacher schedules will change to allow less people on campus at any one time, and more teachers and students will be going out into their communities to engage in experiential learning.

From "Twitter Reveals Most Discussed Topics of 2009"

Technology
1. Google Wave
2. Snow Leopard
3. Tweetdeck
4. Windows 7
5. CES
6. Palm Pre
7. Google Latitude
8. #E3
9. #amazonfail
10. Macworld
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"Triple Escalera de Caracol" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by P Medina

Ring a Ding Ning

I finally got off the schneid and activated my Blog Squad Ning. I put out a call for members to come to the aid of my American Government students to help them with the nuances of their web site construction. I was not prepared by the immediate response I received....from adults! Our associate principal came in twice to help students one-to-one. Our library technician came in last week and hopes to come back this week. The chairwoman of our Religious Studies Department is coming in on Thursday. This has been inspiring and fun....It's nice having another adult or two in the room because these tech adventures surface a variety of perplexing and humorous issues. The students have been quite appreciative too. The atmosphere has been charged, purposeful, and fun. It makes me feel really good about my school.

Speaking of Religious Studies, I would guess we may be one of the only schools around where this particular department is leading the way in terms of pushing the social media envelope. They have put together a cool Ning for inter-department communications and two of the teachers are experimenting very daringly with wikis and Diigo. They will be guest blogging in this space very soon.

Following on the heels of the Religious Studies bunch, the English Dept. initiated its own Ning and used the forum feature very effectively to discuss a new course proposal. I thought it was a good way to use the Ning and I suspect the discussion was more balanced and focused by virtue of taking place online.

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P.S. I've become addicted of late to sports gossip-- Not Tiger Woods, but the Detroit Tigers. I check the news aggregator mlbtradrumors.com several times a day as the general managers head into their trade meetings. Great time of year for hot stove trade speculation. The rumors and news tidbits absolutely pour into this site.

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"Door Bell" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Caro's Lines

Clinging to the Industrial Age

Heare are three great quotes, all concerning resistance to change.

From Dangerously Irrelevant:

The personal computer has been around for about 30 years. For most of us, the Internet has been around for about 10 years. And yet we still have a sizable percentage of teachers and administrators who can barely work their computers. What does this say about us as educators? As employees of supposed learning organizations who purportedly are all about 'life-long learning?'

From Craig's Blog, quoting David Warlick:

No generation in history has ever been so thoroughly prepared for the industrial age.


From Academic Evolution:
Academia wants to have the Internet, but not let it change its exclusive knowledge management practices. It wants to exploit the advantages of online communication without letting such communication challenge its expertise model. But you can't have it both ways. You can't participate in a medium fundamentally built around the concept of openness if you insist on a closed model of expertise and knowledge control. You can try (and academia is trying), but knowledge will simply route around the bad nodes. It comes down to this: the more academia wishes to enjoy the benefits of the digital medium, the less it can hold on to restrictive and closed practices in the production, vetting, dissemination, and archiving of information.

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"Industrial Age" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by Skycaptaintwo

Drive-thru Take Out Special-- Hot Links

This weekend's Drive-thru special is a serving of "hot links". Spicy, hot, tasty.

Diigo Education
Faithful readers of this blog know that I am a Diigo enthusiast. With its highlighting and sticky notes it is a fabulous personal research tool, and it offers revolutionary possibilities for collaborative research. Diigo also offers a special account for teachers. which allows you to ...

• create student accounts for an entire class with just a few clicks (and student email addresses are optional for account creation)
• set up Students of the same class automatically as a Diigo group.
• provide students with pre-set privacy settings so that only teachers and classmates can communicate with them

Dangerously Irrelevant

Scott McLeod's at Iowa State collects some great stuff at his Dangerously Irrelevant site. He consistently dishes up good stuff. Click the above link and you will be directed to an interesting set of quote, like this one: "Information and knowledge are absolutely fundamental to what education is all about . . . and it would be impossible for the information revolution to unfold and not have transformative implications for how children can be educated and how schools and teachers can more productively do their jobs."

A Virtual Revolution is Occurring at College

The Washington Post recently published an article predicting that "this year may be part of the last generation for which 'going to college' means packing up, getting a dorm room and listening to tenured professors. . . . Colleges, like newspapers, will be torn apart by new ways of sharing information enabled by the Internet." Can secondary education be far behind?

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"Take Out" with generous permission of americanvirus

Reflections on "Information Rich & Attention Poor"

Today's post centers on Peter Nicholson's Information-rich and Attention-poor (Toronto Globe and Mail). The samplings below provide a context for my reactions, but the entire piece is worthy of contemplative reading:

The three technologies that have powered the information revolution – computation, data transmission and data storage – have each increased in capability (and declined in cost per unit of capability) by about 10 million times since the early 1960s.

This has unleashed a torrential abundance of data and information. . . . .The primary consequence is the growing emphasis on speed at the expense of depth. This is simply because depth and nuance require time and attention to absorb.

There is also under way a shift of intellectual authority from producers of depth – the traditional “expert” – to the broader public. This is nowhere more tellingly illustrated than by Wikipedia, which has roughly 300,000 volunteer contributors every month.

The result is the growing disintermediation of experts and gatekeepers of virtually all kinds. The irony is that experts have been the source of most of the nuggets of knowledge that the crowd now draws upon in rather parasitic fashion – for example, news and political bloggers depend heavily on a relatively small number of sources of professional journalism, just as many Wikipedia articles assimilate prior scholarship.

. . . . Access[ing] efficiently what you need, when you need it. . . depends, of course, on building up a sufficient internalized structure of concepts to be able to link with the online store of knowledge. How to teach this is perhaps the greatest challenge and opportunity facing educators in the 21st century.

The hyperlinked and socially networked structure of the Internet may be making the metaphor of the Web as global “cyber-nervous system” into a reality – still primitive, but with potential for a far more integrated collective intelligence than we can imagine today.

Reactions:

*I think the article emphasizes to educators how poorly we are served by the notion that students are techno wizards and only need to be liberated by their keepers to roam the Net in order to optimize their futures and serve society. Instead, teaching them how to access, assess, and pool information is of paramount importance.

*Though Nicholson argues convincingly for the continued need for trained journalists and academic experts, it certainly calls into question the usefulness of traditional academic "departments" and anything that resembles the traditional newspaper.

The article reinforces my opinion that teaching technology in a vacuum is nearly as great a waste as requiring students to memorize information from textbooks-- information that is accessible with a few keystrokes. Both a liberal arts education and the ability to operate within the global network are absolutely essential....and I will have more to say about this in my next post!

This article came to me through my personal learning network. The recommendation and link came from two different sources. In the olden days (two years ago?) I would have depended on a newspaper or magazine to bring Nicholson to my attention, and then search for it in a library database (quite unlikely). I'll be running a staff in-service on pln's in a couple of weeks. More fuel for the fire.

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"Atrappée dans l'information #1" Flickr Creative Commons Photo by ton3vita

Frustration, Disappointment and Failure

At the ADE Summer Institute we were urged to embrace failure and a natural part of the quest to innovate. I understand the notion, but it does not make the consequences any less painful if you have invested time and effort into a project. Perhaps by sharing my frustration, disappointment, and failure; someone will have some helpful feedback or at least be spared a similar experience.

Frustration
I urge my cbl project groups to map their progress using Google Docs. They are required to include me as a collaborator so that I can add notes and provide guidance. I get the strong impression that usually one group member tends to dominate the authoring. Worse, the comments I make don't elicit any back and forth. A couple of students waited until class to see me about the comments (What happened to email?), in both cases worrying that they were being "marked down". One erased my comments before the rest of her group even saw them, and then asked me if she had fixed the problems, sort of missing the point of collaboration.

I'm hoping this situation will improve after the students become more acquainted with Google Docs and the benefits of collaboration.

Disappointment
Build it and they will come....That certainly is my experience with the Blog Squad Ning. The purpose of this virtual club is to afford students the chance to help other students with commonly used technical tools. I gathered names last spring and issued invitations. Students immediately signed up this Fall. I began a couple of discussion threads and groups. Then . . . . nothing. I am reluctantly conclude that to ignite the group we a physical meeting or email bombardment may be necessary. The members are not used to being attentive to the Ning. This is ironic, because the reason I jettisoned sponsorship of a more conventional club was that students seemed to assume I would be its major force. Now I find myself in the same position with the Ning.

Failure
A) I was very excited about offering my AP students an ebook option for their text, this year (At our private school the students purchase books). It has nice features and is half the cost its traditional text. Strangely, only about 15% opted for it. This I simply do not get.

B) Last spring I offered film students the research option of writing a digital research "paper" with hyperlinks rather than using the conventional MLA model. The result? I got dreadful citation and reference with both options. And I mean, really bad.

Have you noticed than in all of these I've mistakenly assumed that students will adjust readily to digital media?

P.S. While I haven't yet sewn any silk purses from these sow ears, at least they have given me blog content!
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"Angst" Flickr Creative Commons photo by tizzle

Reflections on a Very Special School

After a hundred and twenty blog posts about today or tomorrow, it's time to reminisce about the past.

In many ways, the most remarkable school I ever witnessed in operation, was Riverview School in Cape Cod, MA. This is a high compliment, because I have attended, worked at, and visited awesome schools. My memories of Riverview are now dated. My son attended a few years ago, so I am not up on the present program first hand. But by all accounts it is as great or greater than when Chris (our son) was an enthusiastic member of the Riverview community.

When Chris entered the post secondary program at Riverview, Rick Lavoie was head of school. Rick is a nationally recognized expert on learning disabilities and two features of his approach to education made very strong impressions.

First, the "social autopsies". When students had experienced a socially perplexing situation, staff at Riverview was trained to conduct a "social autopsy" with the students to sort out the missed social cues or to coach the kids on how they might handle a similar experience, next time. This was certainly an invaluable approach to pupils like Chris, who has autism. But what a great idea for any realm of schooling!

Secondly, and more relevant to this blog was the idea that the entire staff was part of the educational experience of the students. They attended all of Rick's workshops and received training in the educational philosophy of the school. Consequently, the school culture at Riverview hit a visitor the moment he or she set foot on campus, and visiting was a profound experience. From the head of school to the maintenance staff, one encountered the same educational priorities and values.

This is why I keep returning to the idea of school culture in this blog. I'm convinced that meaningful technology integration can only be achieved at a school if every adult in the school plugs into learning networks along with the kids. It does not depend on teaching methods, alone. Surely its essential that teachers buy in, but in a school other staff members can't exempt themselves from modeling the use of transformative technologies. In order to help our students embrace the challenges of the future we need to be all in on these challenges ourselves.

First Renewed and then Re-olded

A friend of mine recently said that I was the only teacher she knew who was really looking forward to the start of the school year. While some may see this as a sign of mental disorder, I prefer to think that it has much to do with getting into technology integration-- I've felt renewed by the fun and challenge. But I'm starting to feel a bit reolded. There are crusty old features of our school routine that kind of wear me down. I'm feeling a little grumpy, so I've decided to air them out.

We have a 1:1 computing school, but some folks in my building must believe that online communication only belongs in the academic realm of a school. (I'm sure this is not unique to our school community and would love to hear from others). These are the kinds of things distractions and annoyances I'm talking about:

P.A. Messages- It's too easy to just grab the mic and broadcast a message across the building with a P.A. blast, (even though it may be during class). Often the full school announcement is directed to a couple of class officers or concerns one person's misplaced backpack. Tryouts for teams or groups are announced day after day. Never mind that everyone has their own private communication access in the form of a laptop. A couple of years ago, $50,000.00 was raised at one of our fund-raisers for a new P.A. system. Wow, in my opinion that money could have better spent on more nuanced mediums of messaging or training for individuals on how to set up a group email for their club or team.

Student email-- This piggybacks on the last one. Ironically, I recently sat in a department meeting where a request from our Curriculum Council was shared, asking that we remind the students to check their email. Could it be that the students don't check their email because they know that the messages will be redundantly communicated on the P.A., often several times? (And was this a worthy agenda item for the face-to-face meetings where the rather impotent request was made?).

Staff Meetings (large and small) where one-way communication from behind a podium is featured. Face to face communication may not needed for reports and directions that could be blogged or emailed, but those with the power to gather a captive audience, squander dozens of potentially productive hours of staff time this way. I've noticed that this kind of communication usually involves non-curricular matters.

Vote Tabulations - This "Spirit Week" we will be doing tabulations in our homerooms this week to determine how many students are showing spirit that day. OK, fine, I'm all for spirit. but then staff is required to take these required to immediately walk these paper tallies to the front desk for tabulation. What a waste of fifty professionals' time, when there are innumerable electronic alternatives. Granted this example is only a one week sideshow, but it is somewhat representative of the nondigital nature of our homeroom doings.

You are correct that if you have concluded that I am blowing off steam about pet peeves. But in a 1:1 school they need to be called out. Besides disrespecting others' time and attention these "old tech" habits erode progress toward building a school culture that nourishes 21st Century communication networks. This is about all staff modeling and embracing the new tools that we hope our students will master. The medium is sending the wrong message.

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Amish Parking Sign Flickr CC photo by margotmiller