Hers is a well-made rubric. But I just don’t think you can use such a thing to guide behaviour on a blog. Oh, it might work for a single post, or when you are trying to evaluate whether a student has the technical skills to embed video, for example. But a rubric is too prescriptive for something as complex and variable as a blog. For example, in @mscofino’s rubric you might be considered just a “Beginner” in terms of “Quality of Presentation” if you have few images:

But you don’t need images to make a a great looking blog; have a look at these minimalist Wordpress themes that focus on the written word. Conversely, there would be no writing at all to assess in an all-photo blog.

The point here is not to critique Cofino’s rubric, although I do think it contains a bias toward one particular kind of blog. The point is to say that I don’t think we should make a blog template, even if it is disguised as rubric, for students to copy. I worry that that will force everything into the same mold. I suggest instead that we find ways to describe to our students habits of mind or ways of being on the we, and then let them create what they will. At Island Pacific School, where I teach, we came up with this set of guidelines for working in the school’s wiki:

And I wrote the following for a ning where our students and those from Calgary Science School will come together to collaborate on a study of Western philosophy:

To be honest, and to be fair to Cofino, we are just beginning to open up our wikis and ning to the public, so it’s too early to say whether this approach works better than a rubric or hard policy. But I think it will. In my experience, young people are capable of much more than we often give them credit.

But I am interested in hearing how other people handle all this.

I’ve spent the last four weeks trying to build the framework for technology at Island Pacific School, trying to figure out which tools we’ll have the students use for producing documents, spreadsheets, video, images, podcasts and so on. And then I tried to figure a way to put this all in one bucket using Moodle or Google sites or something like that.  There are plenty of options in each category, but the staff and I felt it important to choose one and make it the school standard or default tool.

But after a couple good conversations with @pamcoun @prawsthorne and @chriscorrigan I thought, “Who cares?” Working on the web is not about putting content somewhere, it’s about connecting it. I don’t think it matters where or how a student produces and shares a video, using Kaltura or iMovie, as log as they make one and show it to me. After all, I don’t ask all of you to put your content in a convenient format or place for me to read; I go out and connect it myself using RSS, FriendFeed and so on. Or I let the web sort out the translation problems–my browser will let me watch all kinds of video formats. So why should I ask my students to work within specific platforms?

I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer to that question. The need to standardize seems tied up with ideas of control, not good pedagogy, and whenever that issue comes up we need to ask where is the locus of control in the school and does that get in the way of good teaching? So, going forward from my declaration that the internet is the platform, the first thing I’m going to do when classes start again in the fall is let my students decide which tools to use for any given task. The only criteria is that we can somehow connect the content together.

The two bodies of research seem to contradict each other at first. But I think–I’m not sure, I’d really like to read more of the Gate’s data–the two are looking at the same thing. I need to go back over my original review to be sure, too. But I wonder if the reported effectiveness of small schools is only indirectly a result of their size. Perhaps small schools, by virtue of a flatter organization and more intimate work environment somehow recruit, develop and retain better teachers more easily than large schools. The question we need to answer is “Are there proportionally more great teachers in small schools than large schools?”

In the meantime, here’s what all great schools do, according to the NMSA:

In any case, I’m glad to read the comments Gates Foundation CEO Jeff Raikes.

Raikes talked of a study of the Los Angeles Unified School District after an initiative to reduce class sizes led to a liberalization of rules on who could be hired to teach.

He said the district found that whether a teacher had a certificate had no effect on student achievement.

Raikes said the district found that putting a great teacher in a low-income school helped students advance a grade and a half in one year. An ineffective teacher in a high-income school held student achievement to about half a grade of progress in a year.

“We really have to focus classroom by classroom,” said Jim Morris, chief of staff at the L.A. district. “Every teacher matters, just like every student matters.”

Morris said the most important factor to successful schools is excellent teachers and supporting what they do in the classroom.

We can all watch a test of the Gates’ Foundations data at a new charter school opening next fall in Washington Heights in New York City.

The school’s creator and first principal, Zeke M. Vanderhoek, contends that high salaries [$125k] will lure the best teachers. He says he wants to put into practice the conclusion reached by a growing body of research: that teacher quality — not star principals, laptop computers or abundant electives — is the crucial ingredient for success.

I’m detecting a current of conversation about teacher quality in all the web 2.0 chatter and it’s exciting to hear. The web resists–even subverts–institutionalization, says Clay Shirky. In a “here-comes-everybody” world, teachers become more autonomous and accountable and I think that is a good thing because it forces a higher standard of teaching. When the standard is low, we need institutional structures to control quality. But when the standards are high we can instead rely on  professionalism to do the same.

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

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.

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 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.

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.