source Eternally Cool http://eternallycool.net/category/exhibits/

I remember helping my father-in-law repair some plumbing. Two pieces of old metal pipe had rusted together and firmly resisted all our cranking with enormous pipe wrenches.

“Let us remember the Gallic Wars,” he said in a waggish way, “and do as Caesar would do–march!”

We propped the stubborn pipe on the floor. He stood on one end and I stomped on the other. The pipes surrendered with a rusty screech and twisted apart.

I don’t know that anyone else has ever has used Caesar’s campaign dispatches as a plumber’s manual; and this afternoon of town-and-gown plumbing endeared my father-in-law to me forever. It endeared Caesar to me, too. His prose is keen, yet understated, unsentimental and yet still full of conviction.

Now I have not doubt at all that when Caesar stood on the northern shores of Gaul eyeing the white cliffs of Britannia, the data stream flowing into his campaign tent was enormous. He writes (in third person, as was the custom):

[...] yet he thought it would be of great service to him if he only entered the island, and saw into the character of the people, and got knowledge of their localities, harbors, and landing-places, all which were for the most part unknown to the Gauls. For neither does any one except merchants generally go thither, nor even to them was any portion of it known, except the sea-coast and those parts which are opposite to Gaul. Therefore, after having called up to him the merchants from all parts, he could learn neither what was the size of the island, nor what or how numerous were the nations which inhabited it, nor what system of war they followed, nor what customs they used, nor what harbors were convenient for a great number of large ships…He sends before him Caius Volusenus with a ship of war, to acquire a knowledge of these particulars before he in person should make a descent into the island, as he was convinced that this was a judicious measure…He orders him to visit as many states as he could [...]

Caesar, Julius. Trans. W. A. McDevitte and W. S. Bohn. The Gallic Wars.

The 21st century is something altogether different, I hear again and again, for example in this video on the progression of information technology:

But it’s entirely misleading. There is a suspicious presupposition at work that says not only that we can have perfect knowledge, but that we should. Both of those notions are contestable. Still, it is a seductive message that traps many: “The twenty-first century demands that a literate person possess a wide range of abilities and competencies, many literacies,” says the U.S. National Council of the Teachers of English, in a position statement that reads like a manifesto. They say:

[...] Twenty-first century readers and writers need to

• Develop proficiency with the tools of technology
• Build relationships with others to pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally
• Design and share information for global communities to meet a variety of purposes
• Manage, analyze and synthesize multiple streams of simultaneous information
• Create, critique, analyze, and evaluate multi-media texts
• Attend to the ethical responsibilities required by these complex environments

I don’t see that those were “literacies” were any different for Caesar in the 1st century BCE.

There is, as I say, a lot of hullabaloo around new web technologies these days. I think maybe we need to go off and think for a bit, like Yeats imagines Caesar did:

The Long-legged Fly

That civilisation may not sink,
Its great battle lost,
Quiet the dog, tether the pony
To a distant post;
Our master Caesar is in the tent
Where the maps are spread,
His eyes fixed upon nothing,
A hand under his head.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

That the topless towers be burnt
And men recall that face,
Move most gently if move you must
In this lonely place.
She thinks, part woman, three parts a child,
That nobody looks; her feet
Practise a tinker shuffle
Picked up on a street.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
Her mind moves upon silence.

That girls at puberty may find
The first Adam in their thought,
Shut the door of the Pope’s chapel,
Keep those children out.
There on that scaffolding reclines
Michael Angelo.
With no more sound than the mice make
His hand moves to and fro.

Like a long-legged fly upon the stream
His mind moves upon silence.

Everything has been thought of before; the task is to remember it again.

Suppose Goethe is right: What do we learn about teaching and curriculum by looking backward, instead of forward?

Art, says writer, technologist and blogger, Darren Barefoot, is the profound, and the profound is that which is deep, timeless and shared. We’ve seen people make profound statements in painting, music, architecture, the book, even radio and television, he said at this year’s Northern Voice . But he asks, Where’s the Art in Social Media?

There are several reasons for the paucity of the profound: crowds aren’t wise, says Barefoot. Artists may turn professional and leave social media before we discover them. Maybe artists just don’t yet have the feel of the new medium, although the Japanese are trying their hand at writing SMS novels. Some are racking up big sales: Rin, a 21-year old writer, tapped out a story, If You, that sold 400,000 copies when it went to print.

But, sales is certainly no measure of the profound either. Maybe, Barefoot suggests, social media discourages profound thinking. Social media is certainly shared and, as we’re lately starting to appreciate, it is timeless, though not exactly in the sense that Barefoot is talking about. However, social media is not very deep. Social media tools like Twitter ask “What are you doing?” which, said one in Barefoot’s audience, encourages “me-ophilia”, not reflection on the profound.

Lastly, it could be that that the profound is just too hard to find because we are awash in images, video, music and text and we haven’t the ability to sift through it all and make sense of it. The power of expression in social media, as an artistic medium itself, is in the aggregation of things, says Barefoot. He points to the Where the Hell is…Matt? videos by self-professed deadbeat dancer, Matt Harding. Although there are moments in individual videos that are moving–when the crowd in rushes in to dance with Matt, for example–we sense something profound about humility or our shared humanity or the diversity of people when we take the videos collectively.

What social media needs–and this was the common thread in all the sessions I attended at Northern Voice–is a curator, someone or something to make sense out of the endless stream of data that is pouring into the web. “No one goes to the Vancouver Art Gallery to see the ‘Ten Most Recent Pics Posted to the Gallery’” said a wag in Barefoot’s audience.

I think we’re seeing a new role emerging for K-12 teachers: that of (web) curator. This is different from knowledge-giver and different again from gatekeeper. Fulfilling that role will require a skill set similar to that of a gallery curator and, above all, it will require wisdom.

The question now is, what are we doing to cultivate those things in new and in-service teachers?

I’ve noticed that from time to time I’ll become caught up in some friendly, but warm discussions on Twitter about how students ought to engage with the read-write web. The most contentious debates are around how open we think the web ought to be. Now it occurred to me that some of the polarity might arise because while we are all talking about the same K-12+ education, not all education is the same from K-12+. Those who advocate more open policies are usually teaching more senior students; those who want more controls are usually teaching younger students. But, generally speaking, we haven’t been all that clear about whom we are talking. It would help in Twitter conversations, and everywhere else, if we prefaced our comments with something like “As a middle school teacher…” or even came up with some useful hash tags: #primaryweb or #middleschoolweb, for example.

I’ve drawn up a table of summing up what I think teachers are saying about web 2.0 at various age levels. The divisions are rough and I trust that teachers understand there will likely be some overlap. But does this makes sense to you? Is this roughly what we’d like to see K-12+?

[TABLE=2]

A couple days ago, Peter Rawsthorne (twitter prawsthorne) and I were talking over our WikiEducator project. In an aside, Peter said we could make an argument–and he’d be willing to defend it–that we shouldn’t introduce web 2.0 technologies to students until high school–maybe even as late as grade 11.

The idea runs counter to so much of what we hear on the subject these days. Yet, in a Gladwell-blink moment, I had to say I think Peter is right. Informed citizens of the 21st Century will indeed need to be able to use the web to get at information essential for democratic participation in civil society. But they will need good judgement no less than they did 2,500 years ago. I have a hunch that if we were to put Socrates or Lao Tzu in front of a computer it wouldn’t be long before they were making more intelligent use of of the web than most. This article in Science Daily, Is Technology Producing A Decline In Critical Thinking And Analysis? seems to give some support to the Peter’s notion. I dearly love Dorothy Sayers’ essay, the Lost Tools of Learning, and in my reading of it, the write part of the read-write-web corresponds to the teaching of rhetoric, which she thinks ought to be introduced to children of about 14-years old. Lastly, in a 1994 interview Alan Kay says

KAY: Put a prosthetic on a healthy limb and it withers. Using the logic of current day education, we could say that since students are going to be drivers as adults, at age two we should put them in a little motorized vehicle and they will just stay there and learn how to be much better drivers. Now, we would think that was pretty horrible. But what if we gave the same person a bike? We’re not going to feel so badly [because] the bike allows that person to go flat out with his body and it amplifies that. [The bike is] one of the great force amplifiers of all time because it doesn’t detract from us–it takes everything we’ve got and amplifies it. Most computers today are sold like cars, where as many things as possible are done for you. You don’t have to understand how it works and, in fact, you don’t have to understand how to think because the most popular stuff is prepackaged solutions for this and that. When you put a person into a car, their muscles wither. You put a person into an information car, and their thinking ability withers. I wouldn’t put a person within 15 yards of a computer unless I was absolutely sure that it was a kind of a bike for them.

Q: What would make a computer a kind of bike?

KAY: Well, it’s complicated. When we start asking questions about how students are thinking and what they’re doing, we have to realize that–and this is sort of an extreme generalization, but it’s not a bad one–most things that need to be done with students are not particularly user friendly. [They] require work on the student’s part. Like when they’re learning to ride a bike, it’s not [easy]. Think how many students might reject a bike today if it were a new product because it’s hard to learn. Today, computer systems are rejected unless they’re easy to learn. But with young students, it’s absolutely important to challenge their internals–challenge their internal musculature, their internal ability to make images, their internal ability to think about things and to make representations of things.

Q: How do educators ensure that happens with computers?

KAY: They have to learn how to ask extremely hard questions about whether there’s any content there. A lot of technology is just what I call inverse vandalism, which is people making machinery just because they can. When educating, the first thing you need is ideas that you want to have the student learn. There has to be some resetting of what content actually is. If you have the ideas, you can do a lot without machinery. Once you have those ideas, the machinery starts working for you. Paradoxically, the most profound ideas I know about computers are easily done on an Apple II. Most ideas you can do pretty darn well with a stick in the sand.

What do you think? When ought we introduce web 2.0-type technologies to students? Comments welcome.

Here’s a great Flickr set by Dave Gray that explains the nature of scientific knowledge and illustrates the driving force behind the WikiEducator project my students and I are working on this term.

I’ve recently had conversations around the ideas of public scholarship Gray presents with SFU professor Richard Smith (Twitter @smith) and Dr. Sam Ladner (Twitter @sladner). Read Write Web also recently posted a story, Scientific Journal to Authors: Publish in wikipedia or Perish,  on the changing nature of academic publishing and authority. Do we need to Wake Up and Smell the New Epistemology?

Richard Baker’s Portraits of Books, which appear in Poets & Writers, make me feel good.

Humans, like the Elephant’s Child, have a ‘satiable curiosity. I remember one of my Grade 9 students explaining the point. Human curiosity, she said, cannot be governed. Alan Kay may be right: some creations do amount to a reverse vandalism. But, we’re still here. We haven’t blown ourselves up, or cloned a conquering army. We haven’t done too badly. And so, she offered, the question we should ask is not whether we ought to pursue controversial or potentially dangerous ideas like cloning–or, looking for the crocodile; we need to ask: What will we do after we’ve found him?

I am not sure she is entirely right. At least, I want to believe we have some capacity for self-restraint. But neither is she entirely wrong. Hers is a perceptive and prudent question to ask. Here we are, as it turns out, at one of those after-the-fact moments. Says Christine Rosen in a great piece, “People of the Screen” in The New Atlantis:

We have already taken the first steps on our journey to a new form of literacy—“digital literacy.” The fact that we must now distinguish among different types of literacy hints at how far we have moved away from traditional notions of reading.

Conservatives, like me, worry that this digital literacy will become faddish, like constructivism or multiple intelligences or multiculturalism in teaching. Rosen worries, too.

But if enthusiasm for the new digital literacy runs high, it also runs to feverish extremes. Digital literacy’s boosters are not unlike the people who were swept up in the multiculturalism fad of the 1980s and 1990s. Intent on encouraging a diversity of viewpoints, they initially argued for supplementing the canon so that it acknowledged the intellectual contributions of women and minorities. But like multiculturalism, which soon changed its focus from broadening the canon to eviscerating it by purging the contributions of “dead white male,” digital literacy’s advocates increasingly speak of replacing, rather than supplementing, print literacy. What is “reading” anyway, they ask, in a multimedia world like ours?

As my former student would ask, What to do now?

One of my colleagues at IPS, math teacher, Graeme Campbell, made some revisions to the permissions diagram. I like the distinction he makes between the how students at various grade levels might “effectively use” and “safely use” the web. You can read his explanation in the comments on my “How Permissive Are You?” post.

I especially welcome the practical view Graeme takes in all our discussions at IPS–he’s a terrific addition to our staff. For example, he asks how effectively do students use a school’s (non-fiction) library? His answer, as he shows in the diagram, is not very effectively until Grade 10. In a sense, he means this the other way around: a school’s non-fiction library doesn’t serve most students very well given the sorts of questions we ask most students–I think that’s an important qualification. Students can find more up-to-date answers, more efficiently on the web, Graeme says, and I think he’s right. He also points out that from K-10, students are not developmentally capable of making the sort of analysis that requires in-depth reading and cross-examination of many sources, and neither have been taught to do so. Now don’t get him wrong. Graeme would be the last sort of person to get rid of books. But I do love that he’s unafraid to ask awkward questions and challenge (my) long-standing assumptions.

I’ve placed various “technologies” teachers might use into three groups. The dark blue set are completely closed to the web or are read only web technologies. The medium blue can be closed, partly open or fully open, depending on teacher and parental preferences; but for the sake of this post, assume that they are partly open and that is an adult is screening incoming information, membership and so on. The light blue set are completely open. (I realize we can restrict blogging and micro-blogging using private networks created in such platforms as Edmodo, but, this defeats their purpose so let’s also assume that these are open and unrestricted.)

I am interested in knowing where people think students in various grades can work independently, with the teacher as an instructor or collaborator, but not as a security supervisor. I’m also interested in seeing how Webspiration works as a collaboration tool.

I’d really appreciate your contributions. I’ve started with four badges for Grades 6 to 9–the four grades in my middle school–that you can copy and paste onto the appropriate technologies. Feel free to copy and edit the badges to add different grades, too. You can add notes, more “technologies”, delete things you don’t think belong. If you want to add your two-bits worth, send me your email at SITS and I’ll make you an editor.

Thanks!