Whenever I start a literature study I like to have the kids make a simple timeline of one kind or another, just to put the things in historical context. But, I’ve never liked how much time it takes students to draw, cut and paste, whether on paper or in a drawing or charting program–all we need is a quick picture. BeeDocs (Mac only) handles all that grunt work and automatically creates high quality timelines with a novel 3D interface that combines both context and detail (see their promo video). All the students have to do is drag & drop an image, write a few notes and add a reference URL. It’s the sort of thing a class tutorial team can master with just minimal instruction from the teacher. Best of all, the timelines can be exported as video for iPods and iPhones so kids can take the timelines with them.

Here’s are two samples:

Early development of empiricism & rationalism in Western philosophy, created by my Grade 9 philosophy students last year:

Comparison of ancient Egyptian, ancient Greek and medieval Christian European civilizations, created by this year’s Grade 7 tutorial team:

The internet is the platform. Let me make that declaration.

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 problem for WolframAlpha is not that people don’t see it as a serious research tool; the problem is that they take it too seriously.

If Twitter is any measure of consensus, most are intrigued, but feel that it didn’t live up to the buzz. I don’t know if Wolfram was driving the marketing or if it was our own runaway desire for something magical, but my sense is that people are disappointed. This, says Chris Brogan, is lacklustre:

And when you enter “woman” you get different sorts of data then when you enter “man”, which suggests it structuring od data is not quite worked out yet. On the other hand, you can do this sort of thing reliably:

Clearly, there’s work for Wolfram to do yet. It’s not a Google killer, but I don’t think it was ever intended to be. On the other hand, Google’s GoogleSquared is not a Wolfram killer either. But that disucssion is beside the point here.

The really neat thing about WolframAlpha, at least from a K12 point of view, it that is is a wonderful tool for playing with data.

For example, kids can calculate the nutritional value of their lunch:

And this is downright fun and, I think, rather more instructional than straight up data because it employs higher order thinking (if we take simple searching as locating then this kind of search would be comparing–3 steps up on Bloom’s taxonomy):

The typical elementary school country comparison projects are a snap to create; and I’m all in favour of a tool that lets’ me get the data I need quickly so I can move my students on to higher order thinking, e.g. analysis. I get this when I search “Canada Ghana” to compare our country with that of our school’s penpals:

WolframAlpha is not yet perfected, but it’s as good as perfect as a data sandbox for grade school kids. It gets at idea of a “play tank”–as opposed to a “think tank”–that Margaret Wertheim talks about near the end of this TED video on the beautiful math of coral and crochet:

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.

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?

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0: an excellent paper on opening up education, or OUE, by John Seely Brown, Visiting Scholar and Advisor to the Provost at the University of Southern California (USC) and Independent Co-Chairman of a New Deloitte Research Center, and Richard P. Adler, Research Affiliate at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto and Principal of People & Technology, a research and consulting firm in Cupertino, California.

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 agree with Alan November that students need to develop a new kind of literacy to be able to work intelligently online. But–surely–that’s only a means to some other end. Yet, most of the conversations about technology I hear, on Twitter for example, but in staff rooms, too, are about working with new technologies, rather than working with ideas. I worry that we are putting the cart before the horse. A lot of technology is just inverse vandalism, says Alan Kay in a 1994 interview called A Bicyle for the Mind, Redux. Teachers, he says

…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.