School Change

Once again, Will Richardson has nobly articulated an idea which has been rumbling as an undercurrent through the educational technology blogging and professional development community. His blog post, "School as Node" discusses the future of School as becoming one "node" within an individual's approach to learning and education.This blog post is the closest thing I've read to outlining a concrete philsophical kernel for an evolutionary/revolutionary development of schools operating systems to adapt to the socio-cultural changes being enabled by information technology. Read it!

New Job, Same Challenges

If you notice the dates, it's been quite some time since my last entry. This is because my wife and I moved from Maryland to Tennessee in June and I'm only now getting the chance to get back to my blog. The thing which has struck me most about my new job is the importance of humanware. In other words, the human relationships within a school, among the teachers, and between the teachers, administration, students, parents, and technology department. Having worked in several schools now, and visited many others, I am struck by how the culture of a school and the relationships among its constituencies will impact its success with using technology to improve learning. These relationships seem to me as important as the dollars spent on servers and software. Cultivating them and building a team-based approach to problem-solving is the challenge.

Videos Show Concepts Better

It's amazing how a <good> video can explain a complex concept much better than a text or oral description. For example, try to explain the nature of non-linear digital hyper text. Now show someone what it means with this video. Or, try explaining RSS, then watch this video. Of course, there are also loads of terribly boring videos. Creating a good video takes a lot of work. Do you have other videos that show or demonstrate hard to explain concepts? Videos as a publication medium for student work is certainly a powerful concept, but how many classroom teachers are willing to give the time to this type of project? It's a leap into the unknown if you haven't done it before.

Blogging is HOT

Blogging is a reflective writing activity which can be approached as a way to demonstrate Higher Order Thinking skills. Will Richardson describes this in his book and in this blog entry. As I pondered writing the entry below "Sky is Falling," it struck me how I wanted to tie together all of the various items I linked to there. This process of synthesizing, linking, and evaluating is demonstrative of the thinking skills we want our students to hone. Having them blog seems like a good educational approach, but they will need instruction and practice to do blogging well. I gave my eLearning grad students this blog rubric to help guide their process. The thing I love about blogging is that it creates this physical artifact that shows whether your students are 'putting the pieces' together. Are they really understanding the concepts? Are they drawing connections? Are they expanding on others' thinking?

The Sky is Falling

Freedman's Flat World thesis continues to propogate through the media. See Karl Fisch's "Did You Know?" video. [It's interesting how the music adds emotional impact to the words. Emotional intelligence, or as Dan Pink says, "empathy," is one of six important attributes to possess in order to avoid having your job out-sourced.] All the predictions of global competition for good jobs and the probable surpassing of human intelligence by machine intelligence certainly give one pause, especially as you consider your children's future. Couple this with the growing evidence of global climate change with some scientists even discussing species extinction in terms of homo sapiens, and you really start to wonder, what brave new world are we launching our children into, and what should we be doing now? Gore's Inconvenient Truth points out that we may be at or rapidly approaching a global ecological tipping point (e.g. with the release of trapped methane from the permafrost). I think that suggesting that there is not a scientfic consensus on the importance of these changes, or suggesting that scientists who disagree are being stifled by political correctness is sticking your head in the sand. So, as educators, what should we do? I think schools can open conversations and explore these issues in a number of appropriate ways. Certainly within the social studies and science curriculum students could begin to study and engage with these issues. There are also new online tools that allow us to communicate in new ways, collaborating across the globe. Miguel Guhlin twists a nice phrase as he describes Web 2.0 tools as "disruptive technologies," due to their expanding our communication capabilities.Perhaps these tools will help us move from School 1.0 to School 2.0 to grapple with the issues which face our planet. The NAIS 20/20 challenge project, one of their global education projects stemming from the book High Noon: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them creates avenues for school projects. Do you know of innovative schools that are doing great things? Please add links to them to this wiki. If you want to sign Gore's petition which he presents in congress next week, it is here.

Electronic Classroom Etiquette

This week's Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article commenting on how professors feel challenged by the distractions which laptops, cell phones, and other mobile devices afford students in their classrooms. As described in the article, many students are making poor choices...surfing the web during lectures, IM-ing or emailing off-topic, and generally not taking advantage of classroom dialog. The author makes a good point that we need to create a better ethos of responsibility around the classroom use of mobile technology or "e-etiquette."

I teach every day in classrooms where my students have laptops and I understand this concern. Students need to be taught what is okay and what is inappropriate. They also need to learn to take advantage of class discussion to hone their communication and critical thinking skills. These skills will produce agile flexible learners -- one of the dictums of the 21st century skills report. However, I don't think that removing the technology is the answer; I think teachers need to learn management strategies to skillfully make use of technology which supports and enriches classroom dialog and resources.

Being able to seamlessly integrate virtual classroom tools broadens the opportunity for participation and extends the discussion beyond the time and place of the classroom walls. A simple strategy is to teach your students what "half-mast" means: the laptop screens must instantly be put half-way down so they cannot be seen (for purposes of discussion), but leave the computer on for instant transition back to an electronic activity that supports the learning context, such as taking notes, researching a website, back-channel chat rooms, posting on a discussion board, or collaborating online.

When I was a student I took all of my notes for every class using a tablet. It gave me an unprecedented level of organization. At my fingertips I had every note, every email, every resource that I'd ever explored. When the teacher mentioned a name or topic I was unfamiliar with, I could google it and was able to contribute more to the class discussion because of this. When the teacher presented a topic I had their powerpoint slides in front of me to annotate. I could switch to a concept-mapping program to brainstorm and organize ideas that were being presented. I could pull up Excel to calculate my grades. Using Windows Journal or OneNote I scrawl my notes, doodles, and diagrams that help me absorb what the teacher is saying. I draw diagrams at meetings of who is sitting where to help me remember names/faces, and who had made what contributions. I can't imagine not trying to give students this same tool. It is so powerful. They just need to be taught how to use it appropriately for their own benefit.

Teaching Students You Can't See

Alan November speaking at NYCIST mentioned a Stanford study in which teachers had an experience of teaching online. They overwhelmingly reported that the experience of "teaching students they could not see" fundamentally changed their approach to teaching. Interesting!

The Essential Processes of Learning

I came across a reference to Stanley Pogrow in the Marshall Memo today. I hadn't heard his name before, but have of course studied Higher-Order-Thinking-Skills and Socratic questioning method of teaching. Pogrow's 1987 article about research into his HOTS approach details four essential thinking skills: metacognition, inference, decontextualization, and synthesis. I hadn't realized there was a technology component embedded into this HOTS approach, but it seems that he advocates using computer simulations to provoke problem-solving thinking around the scenarios which are presented.

Great Video Production by Students Misses the Point

A recent post to the ISED list-serv by Matt Frattali who attended the Building Learning Communities 2006 conference sponsored by Alan November recommended that: "This video should be seen by every student and educator in the world." The video is indeed a great example of communicating ideas through the medium of digital video, and the students involved did a great job in using this medium; however, as I watched the video critique the pedagogy of teaching by lecture I got the sense that the students were missing the point. The students repeatedly suggest that lecture is a bad way to learn and instead they should be allowed to make movies or use technology in other creative ways to express themselves. <no argument there!> But what seems to be missing is an understanding that building thinking skills is hard work that involves dialog and grappling with ideas. The socratic method and lecture are a big part of this process. I have no idea how boring the lectures were that these students had to endure at their colleges, but I don't think the answer is necessarily to abandon the expertise of professors for the creativity of the media lab. No doubt the answer lies someplace in the middle, but expressing ideas and advancing arguments with writing is a skill that deserves these students' attention.

Peak Educational Experiences

What is the best experience you remember from your time as a student in elementary, middle, or high school? What was the assignment or project? Who was the teacher? Why was it so great?

What is Learning

We all spend an enormous amount of time going through school, and those of us who are teachers spend our careers in school, so it's probably worth pondering this most elemental of pedagogical questions, just what is learning? How would you define it?