"Dialogue"

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Actually, I’m being polemical and that’s not entirely true. I like the way a vigorous community of platform developers and users is beetling away at new, clever and challenging ways to teach. But we don’t need no more innovation, not above the level we already have, anyway. First of all, we’re getting carried away by the word. We borrowed it from business, which was a mistake because education is not a business, even if schools might need to keep the bottom line in mind. A modern business in a capitalist market economy grows through innovation, that is through product development. But an education is not a product in the sense that cars are or that TV shows are products and education is not about being competitive, except in the narrowest sense. Innovation relies on obsolescence, and while there may be certain educational practices practice that need to go by the way, there are many that need to stay, too. Innovation is necessary, but not sufficient for securing education’s future. (And, I’ll argue that so far, little fundamentally new is being created. As a small example, most prezi presentations I see, for all their spinning, are still run A-to-B-to-C linearly like old PowerPoints. And the teacher who creates a Ning but doesn’t open it to the public has only recreated the brick-and-mortar classroom. Don’t get me wrong. I’m excited by the potential emerging technologies offer education, I just don’t think we’ve tipped yet. As Clay Shirky says, things are breaking down faster than we can think of ways to replace them.) Secondly, innovation tends to focus on technology, and as I’ve said many times before, the essence of technology is by no means anything technological (actually I’m paraphrasing Heidegger).

Innovation is only half of what we need to get schools moving forward. Emerging web technologies, especially social media, subvert authorities; that is they resist top-down development and give the most payback when they are in the hands of the many, in this case teachers. But for this to happen, schools need to create a climate where experimentation and development by teachers is encouraged. It is the administrator’s job to make that possible. (We can talk another time about what administration looks like in the next iteration of “the school”, whatever that might look like.) To do that job, administrators need certain assurances that that innovation is done safely, accountably and, most of all, with purpose.

And here’s where things become polarized: administrators need control and teachers need freedom. I’m generalizing now, but these two camps are usually presented in opposition to each other. We’re making a mistake if we think one has to give way to the other. And we’re making another mistake if we think the one doesn’t want the other. I will be one of the first to say that control frequently become over-control and stifles real innovation; and even if we–both teachers and administrators–want to let go a little, we may find it hard because structurally, schools are set up as systems of control. Altering control even a little may mean altering the very structure of a school. But just as innovation isn’t inherently good, control isn’t inherently bad. We need a modicum of control–enough at least to hold off chaos and actually get some work done. So, ironically, without some control, there’d be no place in which to innovate. Wordsworth knew this:

We need not more innovation but, rather urgently, to open a substantial dialogue between administrators and teachers–or between control and innovation, if that is a better, less prejudicial way to characterize the players. We need a conversation that recognizes mutual need.

I’m not sure if I’m gazing into a crystal ball or peering into a wishing well. But here’s what I think will be important in 2010.

School administrators will enter the conversation.

They’ll do it because they have to.

Innovation was the buzzword in 2009. It will be in 2010, too, but it will refer to structural or pedagogical innovation, not technology itself. And here we need K12 school administrators–I’m one of them–to weigh in.

They were noticeably absent in online dialogue in 2009. They probably didn’t need to be online at the start of the year. The technology field was chaotic, characterized by rapid pace of development and liberal experimenting, mostly by teachers. But at the end of the year, we have enough data to classify web tools and, more importantly, to draw a reasonably coherent picture of the potential change these tools might make. The big questions raised by web technologies are strategic questions, not technical ones. We’re witnessing the shift from an industrial model of education to…a post-industrial model? That’s a weak descriptor. To call it a 21st Century model is equally weak because no two people can agree on what “21st Century” means, not in terms of education anyway. We should search for a good term, but in the meantime, we can see that just as the web itself is distributed, the new model will be characterized by more distributed learning, facilitated by people I hope we will still call teachers. The big technology trends of 2009 were Structured Data, Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality, and the Internet of Things, but it’s budgets, personnel, assessment, course content and pedagogy–things that have nothing to do with anything technological–that we need to talk about now.

Independent schools should have an edge here. They are, well, more independent and nimble than public schools which are administered at a district level. One school to watch: Think Global School, which has abandoned brick-and-mortar completely and taken the school on the road, is heading to 12 cities around the world in 12 semesters.

Everyone will wake up to the idea that students are not digital natives.

In September I began rolling out wikis, Nings, blogs, Edmodo and even a little Twitter to our Grade 6 – 9 students. But it wasn’t long before they began putting up resistance to the new technologies. “Why can’t we just write this in Google Docs?” they cried. I thought this might be unique to the cohort of students here on Bowen Island or to middle school students. But colleagues in other schools teaching higher and lower grades were seeing the same thing. I called up Chris Betcher in Australia and he was seeing it there, too: Here is his blog post on the idea that the notion of the digital native is a myth.

None of the potential advantages of social media or cloud computing are self-evident. Students are very quick to learn how to work with a new tool, but they still need to be shown why they ought to use it. As with anything else, online skill and even the inclination to work online seems to follow a normal distribution, so it’s unreasonable to expect that a classroom of students will leap onto the social media/cloud computing bandwagon. This means we have to teach the why as well as the how of tools. (Just as we did this with pencil and paper!)

We’ll put philosophy back on the table.

A couple years ago I presented a paper at conference on the humanities at Columbia University calling for the reanimation of the teaching of metaphysics in grade schools. Metaphysics is something of a dirty word, so let’s substitute philosophy. But the idea is that if, even in principle, the web makes all information available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, we are left to ask what should we do with all that data. Google wants to index all the information in the world. What happens when we have perfect knowledge of the facts? Now, unless we are considering trivial decisions, such as what pizzeria should we go to for dinner, the moment we utter the word “should” we enter into a moral or ethical discussion. Yes, students stepping into the data stream need to know how to filter and evaluate information, but they also need to know what to do with it once they’ve qualified it. They need teaching in both practical reasoning and ethics.

I doubt we’ll see schools add courses in philosophy by year’s end, but I do think we’ll see schools start talking about the need.

About a year a go I wrote a post, 2.0 Things I’ll Try in ‘09, on the then-emerging web 2.0 technologies I’d try in 2009, saying

I have two goals for the new term: 1.) to get a better feel for new technologies and 2.) the way each will best add to my teaching–if they can add anything at all. Here’s my list.

• expand collaborative note-taking using wiki
• try Twitter
• try blogging
• bring parents into the 2.0 conversation
• experiment with tagging web content
• buy a cell phone

Did I make my goals? Yes, I’m happy to say, even though I didn’t meet them in the way I had planned as a number of tools and services I hadn’t even considered in December 2008 made their way onto my laptop and iPhone. But twelve months later, I believe I have a good framework for organizing the web tools for middle school students.

Here’s the review in summary:

Here are some detailed notes on what I thought was going to happen and what actually played out.

Expand collaborative note-taking using wikis.
Trial: I’ll open this up to the other three grades, 6 to 8. I’ll also spend a few classes–more with the Grade 6s, fewer with the 8s–working over revising and editing posts.
Biggest problem: The Grade 6 class. They don’t quite have the maturity to be self-policing when working online. 2.) After 5 years of schooling they are so competitive for marks it’s frightening; getting them to work collaboratively will take considerable coaching.

My students and I do use wikis, but as a publishing tool, not a note-taking tool. For notes we use Google Docs. In any class where the students have to take notes I ask a couple students to open a Google Doc, shared with everyone as editors, and make a set of official class notes http://novemberlearning.com/resources/archive-of-articles/digital-learning-farm/. When the note-taking is done, we project the Google Doc on the whiteboard and together review and revise them so they’re as accurate as possible. The rest of the students still take notes in their books or laptops, but they have the official ones as backup.
The policing problem disappeared after a while. In fact, there’s competition to be official note-takers. Also, because the students know their notes will be scrutinized by the whole class, they tend to take things more seriously.

Try Twitter.
Trial: I think this will have to be linked to the WikiEducator project somehow. That means I’d run it with just a small group of eight students. We’ll ow what we’re Twittering about once we settle on content for wikiEducator.
Biggest problem: It won’t do to set up a private microblogging network because that is a closed space and takes away any advantage of Twittering. (For that reason, Edmodo seems like a dud.) So, we’ll need a parent-education program to go along.

Although I am an avid Twitter user, I decided to put off getting students on the service until the end of the year, but only because we had our hands full with other technologies that were giving us a better ROI on our time, in particular Google Apps, wikis and Nings. We may play around with Twitter, especially as a way to establish contact with other schools. but I have a feeling that we will be building our connections mainly through our Nings.

Incidentally, I’ve completely turned around on Edmodo. They’ve revamped their service and I think it’s outstanding and vastly superior to Moodle as course management software for 21st century teaching.

Try blogging.
Trial: I think we have to set up a blogging project with another group of kids outside our school. We may explore this in our WikiEducator project. I’d really like to set up a joint project with First Nations students from the Squamish and Lil’wat nations here in Howe Sound as part of my Master’s thesis. More on this later, but the idea would be to mashup Google maps etc. to rename, redraw, retell the Howe Sound story so it reflects a collective understanding of both cultures.
Biggest problem: I like the idea of having my students engage with people from all over the planet, but getting enough people outside the school actually to engage with them to make blogging significantly different from a classroom conversation will not be easy. Building a blog and driving traffic to it is a lot of work, work that I think takes away from the business of middle school education.

I limited the blogging experiment to my senior students–the grade 8s and 9s. It took them a while to see the purpose–Why not just write a paper? they said. But they seem to be developing it as a thinking tool and a place to experiment with ideas before they hammer out an assignment. Here’s an excerpt from a grade 9 students blog.

I’d like to see more back and forth comments on the blogs, which are run through our Ning, but it has indeed proved difficult to set up and maintain contacts with other schools. I had a philosophy Ning going with some great teachers and students at the Calgary Science School but that group had to move on to other work. I hadn’t anticipated how timetables get in the way of collaborative work. The trick to expanding blogging and to setting up meaningful dialogues between schools will be to get students involved in building the connections as collaboration coordinators.

WikiEducator sits on the shelf for now. The user interface was clumsy compared to wikis such as PBWorks or Wikispaces, and that proved to be a barrier to use. I am however hoping to revive the First Nations project though that runs way beyond blogging.

Bring parents into the 2.0 converstation.
Trial: Host a couple parent information nights. We did this very successfully when we launched a new assessment practice for the school. That gave us great buy in from families.
Biggest problem: Managing the risks, or perceived risks, that come with working on the open web.

This worked very well. We’ve had many parent information nights to roll out, explain and discuss everything from assessment policy to Google Apps. We make a point of scheduling as many sessions as families need to be sure all have their questions answered. This has gone a long way to building trust.

Experiment with tagging web content.
Trial: The WikiEducator project.
Biggest problem: Tagging needs Twitter.

As I said, we dropped the WikiEducator project. And I was wrong–you don’t need Twitter to gather tags, though it’s handy. Tagging remains important. It’s to web 2.0 what filing is to, says, Windows 3.0. We’re still waiting for the semantic web and liked or structured data and until those play out fully, I think tagging is at the very least a good scholarly habit. This will definitely be a focus of our work next term.

Buy a cell phone
Trial: I’ll try calendaring with the Grade 8s or Grade 9s, assuming they all have cells with SMS. Even if some don’t, I may do it anyway as a way of building a case for a bigger trial either in the last term or next year.
Biggest problem: Cost. Data plans in Canada are not cheap–about $70 month.

I bought an iPhone and can’t imagine how I went without a smart phone before. It’s dramatically changes the way I work online and significantly changed the way I work in class. But, we haven’t used mobiles at all with the students. As I said before, the students aren’t really digital natives and it’s enough to keep them all on Google calendar, let alone a host of calendars offered by various phones and telcos. SMS is also uneven at school, although I’d like to put some pressure here.

I introduced my senior students (Grade 8s & 9s) to blogging in October. They weren’t exactly warm to the idea–Why can’t we just write a paper? they asked. I was caught off guard by that question. It suggested that the students saw the only reason to write in school was to generate an essay, presumably for evaluation, a sentiment that belies the notion that young people are digital natives.

As it turned out, it took a great deal of work to change that view of writing; so much that I changed my entire term’s plans and objectives to develop the practice of thinking first, writing later.

My students and I have come to see a blog as a place to think out loud. It’s a discussion tool. I rarely specify length for a blog post, preferring to let the students write until they feel they’ve expressed themselves clearly. Their first post were short, to be sure, but I suspect they were checking each other’s commitment to blogging. I know of at least one student who had tossed off a blog post went back and then went back and revised her thoughts once she saw what the rest of the class had written. “Wow, my classmates really think philosophically,” she said. I don’t get the sense she had been embarrassed. Rather, it was the fact that everyone else was publicly working hard  that allowed her to work hard as well. But since those early days, I’ve sen the average post length steadily increase.

Here’s an excerpt from one of my Grade 9s, comment on our study of Alice in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, Sophie’s World, and Surrealist art. She’s responding to a comment by Flannery O’Connor:

The American writer, Flannery O’Connor” said that distortion is often a way of leading people to see the truth. What do you think she means by that? What truths do the Surrealists want us to see? What truths does Carrol want us to see?

I think that this is all connected to what we define and see as “reality”. Surrealists, Lewis Caroll, philosophers too, have the goal of showing us “many realities”. Or more so, showing us that reality is relative, subjective, and that it’s only a reality for us because it’s so deeply rooted in our everyday life, in what we do and see every day, leading us to being “nestled comfortably in the rabbit’s fur”; it’s comfortable, yes, but reality will never change, never differ for you, unless you climb to the tips of the rabbit’s fine hairs, or as Flannery O’Connor puts it, distort your reality. Surrealism, to me, basically means opening up to – not exactly a “new reality” – but to the fact that there is no such thing as “reality”; just many different ones. The distortion of reality, in the same way that many surrealist paintings make people uncomfortable, and sometimes even scared, is, I feel, another way of pushing past your “reality”. Here’s an example that I feel greatly reflects on what Flannery O’Connor said. Maybe you’ve been living underground for all of your life. It’s comfortable, you’ve created a “nice little home” for yourself, but you’ve never seen or experienced the reality of the outside world. And so one day you climb out of your small home in the ground, the one you’ve so conveniently and safely created for yourself, and enter the outside world. It’s chaotic, hectic, nothing like the warm, comfortable home you’ve always lived in. It makes you scared, uncomfortable; and this is when you either decide to return back to your home or explore this new outside world. And what I think Flannery O’Connor is saying is that the truth, or reality, can be uncomfortable, can scare you at first, but once you push past that discomfort, that feeling that “this is nothing like the real world”, or “my reality”, it can be amazing, it can be a completely different reality than you’ve experienced. Because distortion, or discomfort, or fear, is what motivates you to push past all of those things, and see what Flannery O’Connor says is “the truth”. Whatever that may be. This is why I feel that when in, say, a museum, when someone asks what your favourite painting is, you’ll most always point to a pretty watercolour painting of some nice scenery, or a peaceful sunset, etc. It’s pretty, it’s safe, it’s in your comfort zone. But it’s those other paintings, those strange, bizarre ones, that really make you think, make you wonder. I don’t think surrealists want us to see a truth, but more the fact that there can be many. Many truths, many realities, however “surreal” they may be. It’s just always getting past that initial discomfort, that early uneasiness, that’s difficult. And I think that this is what all these people – Caroll, Surrealists, philosophers – want us to try to see, to try to understand.

My contribution to the Teach Meet 09 EdTechRoundup Edition for December 6, ‘09.

Sorry everyone–ran into issues converting the Jing swf format to a Youtube friendly format. so here’s the link to the screencast.

Link to Alan November’s 6 jobs for students.