EDUC 504: Blogs and Twitter and Ning, Oh My! (Reflections on July 16 readings)

Readings for July 16:

• "No, Never Alone" by Kate Conley in Learning & Leading with Technology, June/July 2010
• Twitter articles by Hadley Ferguson & Shannon McClintock Miller, same publication and date
• The Media 21 Project by Buffy Hamilton and Susan Lester
• Cheating and Assessment by Chris Sessums

From the Conley piece I learned the acronym PLN (personal learning network) and heard of Ning for the first time, which is starting to make me feel like one of those old, out of touch people I mocked last week. (Based on the wikipedia page, I guess this emerged about the time I entered my life of corporate dronedome and stopped having time to monitor what was cool on the net.) The Educator's PLN on Ning looks interesting -- maybe there will be time to explore it in August?

Useful links and acronyms aside, the title does seem a bit hyperbolic -- does Conley really think that we should "never" go it alone? And surely she doesn't really think that social media is the only way to not go it alone... learning and research communities have existed a lot longer than the internet.

I think maybe the most interesting part of this is what's hinted at in Conley's last paragraph and mentioned much more in the wikipedia article -- the different business models Ning has moved through, and the ever-present reality for online content that the infrastructure is very dynamic and could potentially go out of business or stop supporting your key feature at any time. So while publishing costs for online writing and networking are (relatively) cheap, there's probably still a place for books for solidifying and recording for posterity particular moments in time. (But that content should also be available online so it too can participate in the dialogue there.)

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The Twitter articles prompted me to do something I've been pondering for a little while -- made a new twitter account to separate my personal one (which is privacy locked and only readable by a few "real life" friends) from a public persona I can use to participate in online educational dialogues. (It's @dr_vanark if anyone wants to "follow me" -- let me know if you do so I can make sure I also "follow you". Also, it prompted me to download a new twitter client -- not tweetdeck, as the article recommends. I've tried it and I don't like it -- takes up too much screen real estate. I do like echofon.)

While I actually really like twitter, I choke a little bit to see a teacher use the spelling "Gr8t" -- it's only a character count difference of two to spell it out, why not cut those somewhere else? (Do I sound like a crotchety old lady again?) Also? (While I'm on my crotchety bent...) Twaffic?!? Must we?

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The Media 21 project seems very cool. I have a few questions I hope get covered in tomorrow's webinar:

Logistically -- Where did the funding come from? How much was needed? Could this be done with less? How were the two classes chosen?

Academically -- Was the focus more on tools, content, or balanced? Do you think these students will be able to carry over their new independent learning skills to less "blingy" technology environments? Do you feel this group of students will be disadvantaged in any way for not having had the traditional curriculum content?

Technology -- How did Ms. Hamilton and Ms. Lester find the tools they wanted the students to use? Were there any concerns about privacy for the students? Or about all data living in the cloud rather than on a hard drive they controlled?

Teacher / Librarian collaboration -- What was the most challenging part of this? The most rewarding? What would you recommend watching out for or being careful of if we wanted to try something like this ourselves? This project seemed like a fairly intensive use of the librarian's time resources -- can it be scaled up?

I like the phrases "sage on the stage" vs. "guide on the side". They pithily seem to encapsulate a lot. Also, now I've been inspired to download and play with Evernote.

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The Sessions blog on whether cheating is enabled because we are not assessing real learning is very interesting.

I hope that we will discuss further how to address the forces driving teachers towards "inauthentic" assessments -- namely efficiency. While the obvious answer is, "more resources!" (e.g. more teachers, lower teacher:student ratios), I'm especially interested in what clever solutions might exist or we might be able to brainstorm together to enable authentic assessments that are not much more time consuming than designing and scoring a multiple-choice test.

What's in a name?

Is anyone else tempted to name their blogs "SMAC Talk"?

EDUC 606: Boundaries and Tensions (Or: What about my bumper sticker?)

We spent a goodly portion of today's Educational Psychology class debating whether it was ever okay for a secondary school teacher to have a political campaign sign (e.g. Obama, McCain, or Nader for President) posted in their classroom.

This sprung from a question about whether a teacher in today's public schools should attend to moral instruction of their students. (There seemed to be consensus that the answer was yes with regard to upholding the social contract of the classroom. With regard to issues beyond the classroom, it got a lot murkier very fast.)

It spawned related questions such as: "Is there a difference between telling my student I'm a cat person and telling them I'm a Democrat?" and "How might conditions such as the age of the student or the subject matter of the class influence the answer?"

The basic tension seemed to be between the desire to have open and honest relationships with students and the desire to avoid alienating or creating an unfriendly environment for any student. Or, as one classmate put it succinctly, "Disclose or Impose".

The key discriminator seemed to be the power differential between teacher and students -- the age, experience, authority, and maturity differences.

In some situations, a disclosure of a teacher's political affiliation could make the students feel that they should conform to that affiliation, or feel alienated if the chosen affiliation is hostile to something essential to their identity (do I support an anti-immigration candidate in a classroom full of immigrants? or an anti-gay party in a classroom with LGBT students? or a pro-choice candidate in a classroom with pro-life students?).

In other situations, students might be curious about the background and biases the teacher brings to the discussion while being independent and secure enough in their own beliefs to not feel pressured or threatened by the teacher's affiliations.

In other words, the answer is clearly different for a sixth grader and a college student, with high school students in a mushy zone where the answer probably depends on the maturity and independence of individual students and the atmosphere of mutual respect and trust the teacher has (or has not) established with the students to counteract the implicit power gradient. The answer could also depend on the relevance of the teacher's political affiliation as a potential source of bias in the classroom discussions -- it could be different for the history teacher, the science teacher, and the music teacher.

At the end of the day, I think it's fine to say that I, as a teacher, should not use my publicly-funded teaching space to advertise for my political candidate of choice, but should be allowed to use my discretion on when it would be educationally helpful or harmful to verbally share my political affiliation with my students.

But what about the (hypothetical) bumper sticker I put on my privately-owned car three years before I thought of entering the teaching profession, and now drive to the middle school parking lot every day?

EDUC 504: Back to the Future (Reflections on July 9 class)

It's possible the thing I'm going to remember most about today's class is the "cinematic moment" with Dick York.

I'm stumbling a bit on my post-class reflections, because I feel like I covered a lot of the relevant ground in my pre-class reading reflection.

The hour or so of class we spent on reviewing technology content resources will probably be useful in the long run, but (as Kristin acknowledged during class) the lecture presentation style was hard to reconcile with a day when we were also looking at Dewey and experiential learning. Maybe the lesson could be re-spun to a half-hour scavenger hunt in teams of two or three, followed up by some group discussion on how it went, with a long list of the useful and the curious to be found through MEL, including e-library elementary, Lexiles, MEL PR materials, and turf grass?

In the Dewey discussion, my biggest reaction was that his quote, "I believe that education, therefore, is a process of living and not a preparation for future living.", is a false dichotomy. It's not either-or. Education is BOTH a process of living (the life of student, with all of the fascinating questions of intellectual, social, and identity development that entails) AND a preparation for future living. Which is actually true of all of life -- we're all constantly learning something from what we're doing right now that will prepare us for how we deal with our futures.

The post-lunch discussion of "respectful work" was interesting and had some good thoughts to chew on, especially moving kids from "cut & paste" to actually synthesizing content, but the discussion was more dominated by the profs than I would have expected.

The "in-service day" exercise was fun -- it was good to sit down and brainstorm on something as relevant as how the oil spill could be spun into teachable content for the various content areas. It was also fun to finally play with a wiki instead of just talking and reading about them. Tactically, our team (physics) found it somewhat awkward to manage the version control when more than one person wanted to edit -- can other wiki software show you each other's edits live (like google docs) or is this someone an inherent limitation of all wikis? Content-wise we had a lot of great ideas and if we were actually going to come up with a workable final product we would have probably needed to down-select to a few of the best ideas rather than trying to cram it all in. And in a real school context, we would want to make it interdisciplinary and bring in the earth science of the reservoir and the oceanography of the ocean currents and the chemistry of the oil in the water and biology of oil-eating bacteria in the water and gulf and coastal environmental impact.

It was interesting to see what the other groups came up with -- I think the two most awesome things I heard from outside the Physics group were the Language Arts group's rejection of the poetry response blog "because the peoms suck" (after a brief investigation, I agree) and the comment from another group that "Everyone talks about the spill without mentioning Mexico," which blew my mind because it's completely true and such a great teachable topic.

EDUC 504: Dewey: Not just for decimal systems (Reflections on readings for July 9)

This week's readings include

• John Dewey's, "My Pedagogic Creed" from 1897
• A 2006 article by Peter Rich and Thomas Reeves relating Dewey's writings to Educational Technology
• A 2004 discussion of the implications of Google and Wikipedia for librarians by Jeffrey Knapp

I find it fascinating that of the three readings, the one that's easily available online is the one from the 19th century. The 21st century ones are still paper-bound.

In some ways, Dewey's reflections on pedagogy are also still as relevent as the other two articles. That's some longevity! I agree with his central idea that education involves an organic interplay between the core abilities and interests of the individual student and the social construction of reality the student lives in (language, scientific concepts, etc.). I think this interplay is the reason I stumble when friends tell me that they're going to home school their children. It definitely optimizes the content and speed of learning to the individual child, but it seems to deprive them of (and also, my friends would point out, protect them from) much of the richness (and pain) offered by interaction with multiple teachers and peers in a more social schooling environment. I guess that can be compensated by extensive interaction with the community outside the "home" while home-schooling, but then it starts to seem like re-inventing the "school" wheel.

I also think Dewey's statement that, "it is impossible to foretell definitely just what civilization will be twenty years from now. Hence it is impossible to prepare the child for any precise set of conditions." has been proved out multiple times since he wrote it. Which has some strong implications for what we should be teaching -- enduring fundamental skills (arithmetic and reading) and critical thinking, learning, and innovating skills (to enable adaptation to new conditions), but maybe less emphasis on the particular content of a subject matter at the moment, as the "canonical" ideas and content may evolve beyond recognition over the lives of our students.

I think it is a little more problematic to consider Dewey's statement that, "It is the business of the school to deepen and extend [the student's] sense of the values bound up in his home life.", as this seems to assume a much more homogenous community with much higher assumptions of shared values than I think is appropriate for most modern American classrooms. When the children of Baptists, Episcopalians, Conservative Jews, Sunnis, atheists, college professors, yoga teachers, business managers, computer geeks, and manufacturing workers all go to school together, whose home values should the school be deepening and extending? What would define the common core that could be embraced? My first thought would be separation of church and state and free speech. But what about when the free speech makes fun of Mohammed or features a bare breast? Or the separation of church and state conflicts with strong beliefs about evolution? Are there common values in a multicultural society, beyond respect for each other's humanity and tolerance for each other's differences?

Finally, with regards to the subjects I'm preparing to teach, Dewey says, "science is of value because it gives the ability to interpret and control the experience already had." Which aligns quite well with my experience that it's very difficult to teach students in Ghana the following concept: "Ice is less dense than water. This is important because in winter, ice floats to the top of rivers and lakes and insulates them and keeps them from freezing solid, allowing the fish underneath to survive the winter." My students were comfortable with "fish live in bodies of water". They had experienced that. But none of them had any experience with temperatures below 60 degrees Farenheit or chunks of ice bigger than a fist. What might have come naturally to rural students in the northern U.S. was very very abstract for my students, and therefore very very hard to communicate. (Absurd, really.) Which points to the importance of ensuring that the curriculum I teach is tied to the experiences my students bring to the classroom, and the new experiences I can provide them through field trips, projects, and in-class activities. It will be interesting to play with ideas about how technology can be used to create more of those experiences in an authentic way that doesn't come off as too artificial or confined or simplified.

I was hoping the Rich and Reeves article would address this, but it seems more concentrated on showing how much modern theories of learning still depend on Dewey, rather than talking about specific uses of technology.

While Dewey uses quaint language with relatively fresh ideas, the Knapp article about Google and Wikipedia has a faint "old person" whiff to the whole concept of "are [these ubiquitous tools] friend or foe?". The answer seems so obviously to be "friend (to be used as tools in appropriate circumstances with an appreciation of what they are and where they come from)" to anyone under a certain age (30? 40?). On the other hand, I'm old enough that I remember the internet before google. (Ah, Altavista and Excite -- where did you go? Oh yes, I remember now -- you were less efficient and effective than google. We ditched you.) I think this is hilarious, and true: "Early Web searchers were educated in the seeming relationship of every word in the English language to some sort of sexual practice." It reminds me of this.

Who is "Gen M"? I've heard of Gen X and Gen Y... is this a special construct just for this book? Is it too recursive if I google it and then read about it on wikipedia?

I'm not sure whether my favorite part of the "miserable failure" original google bomb is that it existed, or that "Google initially did not consider it a problem to be fixed, since its system was technically working as it was designed." If enough people think the president is not doing a good job, Google will not try to censor that consensus!

I think consensus is actually the key word here. "Old people" grew up thinking that authority came from text that had enough value that someone was willing to pay to print it on paper, preserving those ideas in a static state using expensive capital investments in printing presses and binding machines. That authority may have been valid in the humanities, but in peer reviewed science, authority has always come from a shifting, dynamic consensus around key ideas (hopefully, but not always) due to the current preponderance of data supporting them. And now, in this brave new internet world, authority is still derived from a dynamic, shifting consensus, it just happens in the blink of an eye, as google's computers crunch on what most (internet savvy) people think is the best match for "miserable failure" and wikipedia notifies all interested parties of any changes made to their pet articles. To sum up what I think the article is saying on p.164 -- we're all wrong different ways, and if you average us out, you come closer to the truth (as long as there's a sufficient diversity of opinion, enough attention paid to the topic in question, and we all get feedback from each other).

In the section on why Gen M likes google, wikipedia, and the internet in general, Knapp says, "Some clarification ... about the "shelf life" of knowledge -- that, for example, a survey about the Internet habits of teenagers has a longer useful life than, say, the score of last night's ball game -- might be in order." But really the relevant question is, "is the shelf life of the knowledge longer than the cycle for revising and printing new editions and getting them onto library shelves", and for many topics, including the internet habits of teenagers, the answer might well be "no." (This shift in focus from myspace to facebook to twitter to whatever's coming next has been quite fast in terms of publishing timescales.)

I suppose one connection between the readings is that Google and Wikipedia and "the wisdom of the crowds" represent the kind of socially constructed and interactive knowledge that Dewey talking about 113 years ago. Although I have a hard time believing Dewey would have pictured this outcome, even with his self-proclaimed "prophesy" and his intuition that the world is changing fast.

EDUC 511: Taxonomic tea leaves

This afternoon we practiced classifying questions you could ask a student about an article they had read according to the types of knowledge being considered (factual, conceptual, procedural, or metacognitive) and the types of thinking involved (remember, understand, apply, analyze, evaluate, create). This is based on a learning taxonomy according to Anderson et al.

We spent a solid 15 minutes discussing whether the question, "Which of the three trend lines on the graph in the article shows the greatest amount of change?" represented engaging students in

a) factual knowledge (reading data in front of you, with Understanding / Interpretting cognitive processes)

b) conceptual knowledge (steeper lines represent greater change)

c) procedural knowledge (do you know the process for reading a graph)

The problem is that any of those answers could be valid depending on the context -- depending on the intention of the teacher, and the background and knowledge base of the student.

Then we spent another 15 minutes discussing whether it's possible to use this taxonomy in a unique way -- whether there can be a single correct answer, or whether the individual diversity of minds and cognitive processes makes it impossible for the taxonomy to be unique.

The professor is advocating for a common language to describe thinking, which is fine, and probably useful for lesson planning and aiming to provoke a diversity of types of thinking from your students. But assuming all the students will use the same knowledge and cognition categories to answer a given question just doesn't seem possible to me. It's non-unique, because people are non-unique.

This is probably why I've always shied away from the social sciences -- the fuzziness of it, combined with the discipline-level impulse to overlay scientific precision on human messiness. Wish me luck with ed school.

My favorite phrase from the readings for today:

"Many of the classifications and categories students encounter represent relatively arbitrary and even artificial forms of knowledge that are meaningful only to experts who recognize their value as tools and techniques in their work."

The taxonomy is definitely seeming arbitrary and artificial to me today. We'll see if I become expert enough to value it in my work.

EDUC 504: Memories and Standards and Games, oh my! (Reflection on June 30 Class)

First in a series of posts reflecting on class meetings of Education 504: Teaching with Technology

I have been pleasantly surprised by how all the different classes (5 and counting -- we'll get the sixth in a few weeks) in the SMAC program have been focused on the overall teaching experience in addition to the specific subject matter of the class. That trend continued today with the exercise in discussing our best and worst memories from our high school experience. (My best was my high school orchestra trip to Europe, which provided an exciting adventure, an experience of independence, challenging and beautiful musical performances, and lots of fun with great friends. My worst was when my classmates and I made two different teachers cry due to our disengagement due to their challenges in teaching us.)

That being said, I was a little surprised that we spent so much of the first class (an hour?) walking down memory lane with a pretty lose connection to technology in teaching. Probably valuable overall, and I understand that the instructors wanted to emphasize the focus on Teaching, not just with Technology, but I'm not sure about the use of time.

I thought the technique of using the google form embedded in a wiki was brilliant (it is possible I'm too engaged by shiny tricks), and I look forward to using that to aggregate student responses in say, a pre-unit base knowledge evaluation.

The next hour spent on the national technology in teaching standards was a bit murky for me. I understand that there's a tension between making standards so general as to be useless and so specific as to be stifling. I think these standards were aiming for a middle ground, but ended up being fairly mushy -- abstract but convoluted -- language. I would have been greatly helped by some non-prescriptive concrete examples, and indeed the only way I made sense of it was trying to come up with what they might concretely look like in our "cafe chat" groups.

I'm intrigued by the discussions of texting and video games and looking forward to learning more about how to use them to engage students in meaningful learning, and also how to set appropriate guidelines around their use.