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.

It’s not yet clear which approach works better. It may be that there is no one best approach. Aspengrove teachers and students can bring the full power of a Ning to organize a community of learners around a specific subject. They have the advantage of knowing that all the material in the Ning is subject-related; no need to rummage through history and English videos to find the science shows, for example. But the information in those Nings is not easily shared with those outside. My class-groups have fewer tools–really, a group is just a nice looking discussion forum. But because the staff and students must put (and tag) their videos and photos in the general pool shared with everyone, I think this will create more opportunities for sharing, cross-fertilization and inter-disciplinary work.

Phil and I are going to Skype again soon to compare notes. I’ll post more data when we have it.

IPS English 7 Curriculum Review Wiki Page

Closeup of Mind Map Embedded in Wiki

The mindmap, made in MindMeister, is live, so as students add more review notes to the map each week or so those notes will automatically appear in the copy of the map embedded in the wiki. The links to web sites and files in the map are also live so students can download right from the wiki (and the review team only has to add links and upload files once–to MindMeister.) I’m looking at a number of mind mapping platforms but right now I’m leaning toward Mindmeister because it’s easy for students to use and handles the embed so well.

To be sure, the whole tangle of wikis, Nings, Google Apps and maps presents an organizational challenge for both me and my students. But we are starting to get some sense of how all the various technologies fit together in our school: Google Apps, Jing & Mindmeister (so far) for production; Ning for discussion; and a wiki for publication. And, I’m really excited about this embedded mind map.

UPDATE:

Here’s an example of an embedded, live mind map: Wiki Experiments.

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?

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.

He’s done a good job describing what needs to be done when a group prepares a good wiki page. But I have an issue with turning tasks into roles. I worry that this creates an illusion of collaborative work but hides the fact that there is little or no synergy in a division of labour. Delegation of duties amounts to one person, the group leader, multiplying his or her personal resources by using others to move things along in the direction he or she chooses. Ferriter is aware of this, I think, when he says,

One of the lessons that I’ve learned about wiki projects with kids is that the organic creation that defines Wikipedia doesn’t always work with middle schoolers!  [...] If left to chance, that same unbalanced participation pattern becomes evident in classroom wiki projects as well. [...] I’ve found that when using wikis as a group project to assess learning, middle schoolers need a set of specific tasks. Sometimes, shared participation is more important to me than individual exploration. (“Wikis.” Digitally Speaking)

I’m looking to use a wiki as a platform for building socially constructed knowledge, which is something different from both shared participation and individual exploration. When musicians play together in an ensemble, they make socially constructed knowledge. Yes, each plays his or her instrument, like the way each of Ferriter’s students completes a wiki role. But, if they are good, the musicians are doing much more than mecahnically plucking and blowing though the score. They each are telling the other musicians what the mucic means to them. On top of that, there is a give and take in playing off each other that parallels the dialogue, revising and editing that happens in conversation–or on a wiki page. A wiki page, it seems to me, is at heart a a record of a dialogue, out of which comes the truth, if it can be found, or, more likely, a better understanding of the problem at hand.

In setting things up for the project, I’ve drafted what I think are the Wiki Attitudes for Student Projects. They are, as I think may will recognize, the intellectual virtues, traits (very old ones) that support dialogue and critical discourse:

Patience. Building knowledge collaboratively takes time and patience. The point of working in a wiki is not to find an answer–you can often look that sort of thing up, or ask someone directly; the point is to come to a better understanding the matter at hand and that can take a lot of back-and-forth. A wiki can work something like a conversation, but one extended over time and space, where a group of people work together to make sure everyone in the group understands equally well.

Integrity. The wiki is a collaborativeproject and that means we ought to hold everyone–especially oursleves–the the same standards of argument, respect and good spirits.

Courage. Wikis are public documents, shared with many others, and it takes courage to speak honestly and openly on them. Sometimes we will have to stand our ground when many others are trying to push us off our position. Our ideas and comments will be open to critique and we need to be able to face that fairly and with a spirit of good sportsmanship.

Empathy. A wiki can generate many different, sometimes conflicting, ideas and opinions. Even if we do not agree with them, we must try to reconstruct accurately the arguments and reasons for opposing views. This is not to say all views are right. But, in imaginatively putting ourselves in soemone else’s shoes and looking at our arguments from their point of view, we can gain new insight and understanding of ourselves and our own ideas and beliefs.

Perseverance. Sometimes understanding comes easily; but when it does’t, we have to struggle through a lot of hard work.

Faith in Reason. Not all discussions on a wiki will be contentious; sometimes–often, we hope–they will be just telling good stories. But when issues do clash, a wiki tries to give the freest play possible to reason as the tool to resolve them.

Fairmindedness. All ideas presented in a wiki ought to be treated equally, that is without reference to our own biases or vested interests.

I quite like the distinction Brown and Adler make between the Cartesian and what they call the social view of learning:

(Source: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823?time=1223153029)

(Source: http://connect.educause.edu/Library/EDUCAUSE+Review/MindsonFireOpenEducationt/45823?time=1223153029)

One of the promises of the social learning model–not often talked about–is that it moves us away from the deadening effects of reductionism. So far as schools have followed the Cartesian model Brown and Adler describe, they’ve shut off a great deal of important conversation about what we each and collectively believe about the nature of things. Philosophically speaking, the modern world sees fundamental metaphysical matters as relative: you have your world view and I have mine. Contemporary thought says that even if it was to grant that such talk is indeed about absolutes, such things are not clearly and distinctly knowable, as Descartes would say, and therefore they fall outside any profitable discussion. Metaphysical or faith claims are like flavours of ice cream in this sense. Psychologically speaking, the modern world sees any transferring of what it erroneously deems mere opinion as proselytising or indoctrination. Thus, the very structure of modern pedagogy inhibits robust discussion of the very things that move us most deeply. Moreover, and frankly much worse, the structure of modern pedagogy says such discussions are unimportant. I’m not for a minute suggesting that schools should be promoting one view or another–unless they are denominational schools, that’s beyond their jurisdiction. I am emphatically saying that schools must tell their students that it is important to have those sorts of conversations. The aim, as I said in a paper I presented at Columbia University two years ago, is not to promote a particular philosophy, indeed that would be inadmissible in a pluralistic society, but to begin to develop in young people the capacity to make meaningful philosophical conversation. As they are currently woefully ill-equipped to do so, they are cut off from a rich tradition of inquiry into the human experience. A more immediate, practical need also calls our attention. As it comes ever closer to cultures where metaphysical claims still have status as knowledge, and not mere belief or opinion, the West seems ever more befuddled–quite literally unable to come to terms with the world.

I’m hopeful that a social view of learning might reawaken intelligent conversation about first things, or faith claims or metaphysics–whatever we want to call those frames of reference that shape all we say and do. First of all, the social model is about dialogue, which is something structurally different from the essentially one-way communication in the Cartesian model. In dialogue, we seek one of two things: the truth, if it can be known; and if it can’t, which is more often the case, a better understanding of the problem. We come to these by comparing our views with those of others. That simply can’t be done in the Cartesian model.

To be sure, the shift to a social view of learning is a ways off. However good they are, web 2.0 technologies that might enable that shift are still immature. Watch the editors of Opening Up Education, John Seely Brown, Toru Iiyoshi and Vijay Kumar, speak about the impact and implications of emerging technologies and you’ll see what I mean.

Part 2

Part 3

But even when they do mature, as it appears they will, and even if the model of education changes from one of pedagogy-as-knowledge-transfer to socially constructed knowledge, then it seems to me certain social skills–storytelling and critical discourse–will be more important than ever. Otherwise, the opportunity to get together on the web with people from all over the globe is wasted. Recently we’ve begun experimenting with web 2.0 technologies such as wikis, IM, Google Apps at my school. The students quickly master the technologies. They can learn to edit a wiki page without being taught. But they see these things as toys. Teaching them how to use the technology is easy–and will get easier as the technology develops. Teaching them how to think and how to tell a compelling story is, as it ever was and ever will be, immensely more challenging–and immensely more fun.

I can’t think of any more practical tool for the job than philosophy. (It may be a few years away yet, but I think we’ll soon realize what a mistake it was to drop it from the general curriculum so long ago. For a savage critique of Canadian education, read Hilda Neatby’s So Little for the Mind: An Indictment of Canadian Education. Written in 1953 is still largely holds true today.) We’ve been teaching practical reasoning and philosophy to middle school students at Island Pacific School for 14 years. The syllabus covers some formal logic, the structure of argument and fallacies, ethics and a survey of Western philosophy. But we’re an independent school and have more flexibility than any public school.

I’ll admit the program needs work. I need a better look at non-Western philosophies, among other things. And I need to connect it to storytelling. I do not mean connect to novel structure, or those zig-zagging plot diagrams. I’m interested in how you teach what a story is, what it does and in why we have stories at all. “Storytelling is one of the few human traits that are truly universal across culture and through all of known history,” says Scientific American, though it makes a rather cold account of campfire tales. Richard Rorty says the best answers to our philosophical questions will be found in stories. Yet, when I ask my students to tell me their stories, they can’t. “How I spent my summer holidays” just doesn’t cut it. At best that would make a chapter. Students often write pedantically, not because they can’t write well, but because they can’t tell stories well. They have no sense of their own lives being part of a narrative, much less any sense of humanity having a narrative. Granted, there is probably something developmental involved here; I think you need meta-cognition before you can write your own story. But I don’t see in any curricula anywhere trying to coax real storytelling out of students at any age. Neither do I see any requiring students to memorize and tell stories. The best place to learn how is in something else we tossed out long ago, to our shame: Canadian First Nations culture. Their’s is a living model of socially constructed knowledge passed on through storytelling.

I’m glad to see web technologies develop. But I’d like to see concurrent development of philosophy and critical discourse and of storytelling in language/literature curricula in grade school curricula. Without those two, Learning 2.0 just doesn’t add up.

(This is a cleaned up compilation of a couple posts that appeared on an old blog. I post them here again because they are the thinking that led me to create Stick in the Sand.)

I thought this was implicit in my original, but I like Peter’s tweaks better. The point of getting these sorts of conversations going on the web is to work together to make information explicit.

Thanks Peter.

One of the biggest challenges to developing students’ PLNs (I hate that term, mostly because I hate acronyms and abbreviations–a peccadillo–but also because it’s ill-defined: just about anything can be part of a PLN; but it’s convenient here and you get the idea) is in fairly and prudently governing access to web resources. Part of the solution is in developing simple, sensible and secure permissions structures for working online–the sort Flickr co-founder, Caterina Fake, talks about here. I especially want to know how these might map onto a school structure. It would be interesting, for example, to see if a school itself (or every individual?) could develop an online presence like Flickr’s or Vimeo’s with a similar permission structures that let students and teachers easily control access, manage connections and information. Maybe this is what a blog is for? Some of Rice University professor Richard Baraniuk’s ideas for developing a peer-review process for his amazing open source learning project, Connexions, may also work here, too.

But I see two prior conditions for successful development of PLNs:

1. The PLN must be wide open. If it’s not, it’s not socially networked and the PLN will fail to develop in any substantial way. For this reason, I reject building private networks such as the kind Edmodo lets teachers create. Yet, most schools I know severly restrict blogging, Facebook-ing, Twittering and even emailing. They typically say these are distractions, which not incidentally would suggest these schools don’t really know how to use these tools, much less manage their students’ behaviour; but I think their real worry is about liability should any of the students in their care become victims on online predation. That may be a real concern, though I suspect it’s an inflated one, but the stock response of restricting what students can do online is misguided, however well-intentioned. Any risk to students comes not from being on the open web, but from being on the open web unattended or unequipped. Just as adults supervise, guide and coach kids as they learn to walk to school, so adults need to supervise, guide and coach kids as they learn to walk the web, so to speak. So, I think that part of any school’s plan to develop Learning 2.0 must include a significant parent education program:
2. Families must be more involved in developing the students’–their children’s–PLNs. One only has to look at the morning drop-off ritual to see an underlying social structure of brick-and-mortar schools: car pulls up, kids jump out, car drives off. Either parents don’t want to go in or they are unwelcome. All adults have a responsibility to teach children: parents need to be more directly involved in schooling and schools need to be more welcoming of parental involvement. (Added Jan 3 ‘09: Penny Lindballe has a neat blog, Web 2.0 for Parents, where she is doing some good work at bridging the divide.)

I think the exact shape of the permission structures and the nature of the parent-school relationship will–or should–grow organically. Plenty of research from the National Middle School Association says that the best middle schools are the one that reflect the interests and needs of the communities they serve.

My question: What are your communities interests and needs and how would these be reflected in permission structures you’d build for your school? Work from sociologist such as Sam Ladner may be useful here. Please comment.

Again, I made this diagram in Webspiration. If you’d like to revise the diagram, send me an email at SITS and I’ll add you to the list of editors.