I’ve set up a reading group on the Canadian Association of Independent School’s Ning where we can have a go at Heidegger’s The Question Concerning Technology. I’ve read it before and think that whether you agree or disagree with Heidegger, he will get you thinking about technology in new ways. But, he is a difficult read; his writing is obscure, elliptical and dense, so I’d welcome another go, especially with others off whom I can bounce ideas.

Membership is open to anyone with a Ning account. We’re just getting the group together now, so the reading schedule hasn’t been set up yet. I’ll post a note here when we’re ready to get going.

I’m borrowing from Martin Heidegger here. In his essay, The Question Concerning Technology, he says that our anxieties around technology is not so much the existence of technology itself or the forms it takes, but rather our orientation to technology. Or, as the University of Manitoba’s George Siemens says, technology is not neutral. (Heidegger, by the way is an important, but tough read; this guide helps.)

I’m speaking on this subject at the Canadian Association of Independent School’s Best Practices conference in Montreal today and tomorrow. My friend Richard Smith calls me an optimistic curmudgeon for my stick-in-the-sand stance against technology; and I do think that educators ought to be cautious in adopting new technologies. I’ve seen plenty of web 2.0 artifacts such as podcasts and video that haven’t engaged students in any higher order thinking than they might have had they used, well, a stick in the sand. Not that new media is inherently a bad thing; far from it. But we need to be able to see that a podcasted book report is still a book report–the game hasn’t changed.

Nevertheless,  it’s hard not to be excited these days. Not since Dewey has so much been going on in education. And never before have teachers had so much opportunity to get involved in the discussion. So it’s ironic for me–the optimistic curmudgeon–to see that schools are moving so slowly in making sense of emerging technologies.

I say “making sense,” not “making use,” because the real cause of the slow uptake comes from not understanding our relationship to technology and the ways it might reshape pedagogy. I’m not sure anyone has the answers yet; as Clay Shirky says, “the old stuff is breaking faster than the new stuff is put in its place.” But I do think it’s crucially important the schools get deeply into the conversation.

Here are the links to my slide deck and the set of bookmarks I’ve gathered in preparing for the talk.

CAIS-BP Conference Talk (Prezi is a great alternative to PowerPoint because it allows you to zoom in and out to reinforce context, something you can’t easily do in PowerPoint. But to be honest, I never find anyone else’s slide decks much use without their voice over; but here’s mine for those who do)

Delicious Bookmarks

Ontario special education teacher, Shannon Smith, blogged a familiar whine about staff development in schools.

I’m currently working on some new tools for evaluating the business model of independent schools. Independent schools typically look at revenue or cash flow per per student–”bums-in-seats”–as their chief economic denominator. I wonder how things would change if they instead considered cash flow or revenue per teacher.

It seems to me that if schools want to systematically increase that number over time, they would have to invest more in better hiring and in staff development: the school’s reputation and business success depends on the success of it’s teachers, not the other way around. Schools would need to give teachers time and resources to develop good curriculum and teaching practices and a place to promote them–the read-write-web seems the natural place for this. There should be a positive feedback loop here: schools that give resources to teachers ought to attract good teachers who want to exploit those resources.

In return, teachers would be expected to do more than teach; they’d be expected to innovate. Part of a teacher’s job, and part of their performance evaluation, comes from contributions they’ve made to the school in particular and education in general.

It’s a win-win deal. Teachers get a job that is challenging and exciting and let’s them feel involved in their profession as professionals. School administration gets everyone working strategically. Students get better teachers.

The biggest challenge I see to adopting this model is that it dramatically changes the structure of schools, especially large schools where development and marketing are concentrated in adminstration.

Ted Spear is one of the best educators I know. He founded Island Pacific School, where I work, and has led me around the boardroom table many times as we’ve hashed out our answers to big questions: What is the purpose of an education, for example. In fact, he built a biweekly professional development half-day  into the school’s schedule so the staff could come together regularly and talk about the nature of their profession.

Ted’s moved on, but I’m thrilled to see him blogging: for all his perspicacity, he also one of the world’s great Luddites–maybe there’s a connection? I’d say this to his face, so I don’t think I’m talking out of school here. In his blog, Four Questions, Ted is laying out his thoughts on what he sees are the four fundamental questions of education:

1. How do we connect, or better realign, the work we do in schools with a philosophical core that expresses the full scope and potential of the educative project?
2. How, practically speaking, do we “invite teachers to become educators” in the sense of supporting and inspiring them to thoughtfully pursue the educative project with their students?
3. How do we structure schools—i.e. in terms of class size, timetables, teacher loads, curriculum delivery, assessment practices, etc.—in a way that will support, rather than detract from, the educative project?
4. How do we incorporate the potential of Schools 2.0 in a way that will realize and expand—rather than trivialize and degrade—the educative project?

I’m glad to see Ted put these on the table again, so to speak, even if–especially because–my current work around #4 leaves little time chat with Ted and colleagues. I see, too that others are asking these good questions. Barbara McLaughlin posted a few thoughts on a conference she attended last January on the same questions: “What is the purpose of education?”

None of the technology matters until first we answer this question.

I often find several stories I collect off the web are related in some way, though not necessarily explicitly so, and I’d like to have some tool that would allow me easily to show and share those connections and realtionships–not just the documents themselves…A cross between mind mapping and social bookmarking, I think.

Here’s an example of what I’d like to be able to do. I have three stories each addressing different but related ideas:

• an audio interview with John Seely Brown
• Clay Shirky on Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable
• Trent Baston’s “Response to Nicholas Carr’s ‘Is Google Making Us Stupid”

I’m interested in each of these stories for themselves: I use Google and have my students use it, too; I’ve been connected to the journalism business for a long time; and I work in education. But right now I’m more interested in the light these three different stories throw on the nature of revolution in thought–in general. That’s the information that will give me insights on the way web 2.0 technology affects my own industry, education.

I’ve tagged them in Delicious as I would normally do, but as you can see these tags don’t really show how I see they’re related. (The “demo” tag is just a way to get the three bookmarks together on one page.)

I suppose I could created a special tag, but it wouldn’t give me the granularity I want: what part of each of these stories connects it to the others? Twine is a great tool for finding and sharing information and for gathering things into collections, but it has the same limitations in this regard as Delicious. Diigo let’s me highlight and comment on web pages–a terrific feature. But if I want to show how the highlighted portion connects to some other piece, I need to cut and paste the URL for the second story into Diigo’s comment box. Then, I have to do the same in reverse so that the two pieces are linked. This quickly becomes unwieldy with three or more pages all connecting to each other.

I want a way to illustrate easily the way I connect these stories. Sometimes, I want to do this for specific reason. When I’m writing a paper, for example, this helps me assemble evidence for my arguments. Often, though, I just like to be able to see what I know, so to speak.

Webspiration, my favourite online mind-mapping tool, comes close to making my wish come true. I can make any symbol into a hyperlink, but it takes some clicking and some copying and pasting of URLs to make that happen. Here’s a diagram I made in about 15 minutes:

But I’d love to be able to drag and drop web pages from my browser’s address bar onto a Webspiration-like canvas, just like I can drag and drop pages onto my desktop. If a window then popped up allowing me to add tags and descriptions that would be even better; perhaps the tags would also colour-code the graphic/link so I could have a visual cue to the categories or tags I’m exploring. If the dropped url showed a thumbnail, something like Apple’s Coverflow, even better still.

Finally, I’d like all of this to be sharable and searchable.

A while ago I said that if I had my druthers,  I’d prefer 1 smart phone-per-child over 1 laptop-per-child. I’m recanting. Sort of.

I still think there’s much to be done with smart phones and that they’ll soon be a key tool in modern education. But after listening to an interview with John Seely Brown on EdTechLive, I’ve reconsidered the role of computers in my classes.

Seely Brown describes the studio model of learning, typical of architectural firms. There, all work-in-progress is public, so that all the apprenticing architects can see what everyone is doing as they work toward the completing the main project–an office tower, for example. From time to time the master architect comes round and critiques the work of one of the apprentices. As the work is public, so is the critique. The teaching and learning are cost-effective: everyone benefits from the one critique. More importantly, the model builds a more nuanced, textured understanding of the project, which, Seely Brown says, shifts learning about architecture to learning to be an architect.

I’ve done something similar using a wiki as the public space with my grade 9s. Each student was required to present a chapter of the novel we were studying then post his or her notes to the wiki. The rest of the class were asked to either make a significant contribution to or constructive modification of those notes so that collaboratively they built the best possible understanding of the book. They reported that they had never before realized that a good novel could be so complex. I saw them engage at a much higher level of thinking than ever before. I wonder now if they weren’t learning to be literature students instead of learning about literature.

So, if I could make my ideal classroom now, it’d look like this:

• 1 laptop per student
• 1 very large SMART board or better yet, a touch display of some kind
• software displaying a window mirroring each student’s work, say 15 screens on display at once, like a TV wall at an electronics store; at a touch I can zoom in any one student’s work and display it full screen

I imagine a project where the students are working individually or in groups to create a comprehensive understanding of a piece of literature, a physics problem etc. They don’t need to be working on the same format: some could be editing video, others text and so on. As I move about the class coaching and critiquing each student, the rest of the class can see the material I am reviewing on the classroom display. If the discussion becomes especially important, we can stop other work and zoom in on one example.

I’ve not been impressed by three different web-conferences or web-meetings I’ve joined lately. Conferencing tools such as DimiDim and Elluminate have a few problems, but more fundamentally I think the basic structure of these online sessions is flawed. Too much is happening all at once to be useful, that is if I can take the web-conferences I’ve participated in as typical.

In the most recent session, a discussion of Moodle hosted by Classroom 2.0 , there were over 100 participants in a one-hour session. That would give each person about 36 seconds of airtime–not allowing for a reply from the moderator, guests or anyone else in the chat room–if everyone had his or her turn. But, as it turns out, everyone speaks at will. With so many people talking the comments come too fast to sustain meaningful dialogue. The back-channel is distracting to me–it always threatens to hijack the speaker who feels pressure to respond to the comment stream. That was the case for guest speaker Miguel Guhlin, a director of instructional technology in Texas, who several times had to stop what he was saying and ask the moderator if he should answer questions or press on with his points.

This phenomenon–or bad habit–spills over into live conferences. At Northern Voice this year, the audience did not give James Chutter a chance to deliver his controversial talk on “Mash Media Storytelling”, which is what I paid for, and we all lost out as a result. I understand that socially-constructed learning gives the audience more say in what it wants to know. But this sort of expropriation is not dialogue. It says “We aren’t interested in what you have to say. We want to hear what we already believe.” and that undoes any collaboration. Anyway, how can anyone carry on a conversation about what a speaker has said before he or she has said it?

The volume of back-channel chat that goes on during a presentation seems to me to be a measure of the audience’s interest and engagement–but it’s an inverse relationship: I know that at Northern Voice the number of my Tweets went down when I was really interested; and when the speaker was really good I didn’t open my laptop at all.

At the very least, it seems rude to me to be talking when someone else is speaking. It would be wrong if everyone in a lecture hall were talking out loud amongst themselves while the presenter was speaking, don’t you think? That the back-channel talk is silent and online doesn’t materially change this. I take simultaneous

The best online conference I’ve attended was on opening up educational (OUE) featuring John Seely Brown, Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar and hosted by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Participants were asked to listen to the keynotes before the chat room opened. This kept everyone much more focussed during the discussion. And, although the interface was a bit clunky, it threaded conversations so it was much easier to follow the various discussions that evolved.

I can see using web-conferencing in small groups–under 20 participants or so I’d venture; beyond that they get unwieldy. In any case, I’d like to see DimDim, Elluminate and others, find a way to thread conversations in chat rooms. And I’d recommend moderators let their guest speakers say their piece first, before opening up chat.

I posted this a while ago on a now defunct blog, but with Rilke’s The Man Watching making the rounds on Twitter, I thought I’d post it again.

……….

I like to show my students Titian’s, Flaying of Marsyas.

Titian's Flaying of Marsyas. Source: Wikimedia

Here is the story of Marsyas, a satyr who challenged Apollo, the god of music, to a musical contest. It was agreed that the winner could do what he wished with the loser. Marsyas, we see in the painting, has lost, and Apollo has chosen to see him flayed alive.

But with what transcendent genius Titian turns this pain into poetry. Titian understood what that meant; to challenge the god, and of course to lose, to have your skin taken off, to be exposed, with all of you to look at. On the left, there is Apollo, the golden-headed god, so meticulously and lovingly taking the skin off Marsyas’ heart. Above him, a butcher, the common man, is working his knife, too: the artist, is exposed to everyone. There is another satyr, trying to help, but pitifully, vainly so. The lonely artist cannot be helped; art is a solitary business.

Around Marsyas are three other figures representing, as I am told, three stages of the artist. There is a child, the potential artist, horrified at what being an artist can mean. There is the young artist playing a viola, looking away, as if unable to face up to the possibility of not being a great artist. And there is the old man, wearing the crown of success. It is Titian himself, in a self-portrait, who seems to be thinking “Have I done it? Have I gone far enough to be stripped bare before the world?”

The answer is in Marsyas’s remarkable face. It is not at all what we expect. Marsyas’s eyes are brilliant. He is ecstatic. He knows he has gone the whole way. And Titian, because he could paint such a picture must know, too, that he has gone so far.

I am no student of art, but I do not think I am putting the brush in Titian’s hand if I suggest that he was not speaking merely of artists, but of human beings, of which he may have considered artists to be the best examples, and not merely of music, but of all the human pursuits. It is the heroic heart Titian wants us to see. Tennyson, later, wanted to show us the same in his poem Ulysses:

…My mariners,
Souls that have toil’d, and wrought, and thought with me—
That ever with a frolic welcome took
The thunder and the sunshine, and opposed
Free hearts, free foreheads—you and I are old;
Old age hath yet his honour and his toil.
Death closes all; but something ere the end,
Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men who strove with Gods.

Titian has something else to show us, however, and that something is in the young lute player. He is healthier fundamentally than so many in the modern world because he at least knows what he is afraid to look at. Excellence can be agony, as we see, and it takes a noble heart to face being human.

But moderns only know heroism because they are so well acquainted with timidity. Titian asked if he has gone far enough: moderns would ask Marsyas if he feels good about himself. The question is silly and irrelevant. Worse, it leads us to an emasculated, sentimental way of thinking. We wouldn’t flay Marsyas today; we’d castrate him and not even Titian could turn that into poetry. Taking into account all the care we must have in encouraging and supporting the children we teach, I would still say that good feelings, any personal feelings if we believe Titian, have nothing to do with being excellent, not directly anyway, and certainly not in the way we commonly think of the words “good” and “feelings” these days.

Actually, modern sorts of people are more likely to ask if the rest of us feel good about ourselves, seeing how Marsyas has been singled out for special recognition by the god. And with that final, fatal turn, they paint us out of the picture altogether. They make us neither the old man, nor the young man, nor even the child. They render us un-human. We cannot even play the forlorn second satyr because we are looking at ourselves when we ought to be looking at Marsyas. We should be looking at Marsyas not because Marsyas is himself great, but because he shows us what greatness itself is. The situation is sad; I can think of no other word. “All previous ages have sweated and been crucified in an attempt to realize what is really the right life, what was really the good man,” G. K. Chesterton wrote. Nowadays we cannot describe good men, not only because we cannot describe the good, but also because we no longer know what it is to be men.

It ought to be obvious at this point that we cannot lay out greatness, such as Marsyas and Titian show us, as a list of criteria to be met by any who are interested, like we would set out the qualifications for an Olympic event. Human excellence is not something to be empirically measured. What would we measure in Titian’s painting? And even in the Olympics, while we marvel at the raw speed of a sprinter, we marvel more at the way the sprinter drives body and soul ever higher, faster, farther. And how absurd it would be to tell Titian that we will call him great only when he has created a painting seven feet high, with these exact pigments, with this sort of composition, with that sort of story. How weird it would be to tell Marsyas that we will call him excellent when he plays such and such a tune at such and such a tempo. Excellence has spontaneity in it; there are too many avenues to it to name them ahead of time. We can’t predict greatness, but we can call out when we see it, as Titian did.

We’ve talked about having Raphael’s School of Athens mounted in the school foyer. I would choose Titian’s last great painting instead. Raphael shows us how and what; Titian shows us why.

George Balanchine

Mark Twain
And I want them back, thank you very much.