Kurt Squire - Games, Learning & Society

Interesting stuff....

From: http://website.education.wisc.edu/kdsquire/

"Kurt Squire is an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Educational Communications and Technology division of Curriculum and Instruction and a research scientist a the Academic Advanced Distributed Learning Co-Lab. Squire is also a co-founder and current director of the Games, Learning, & Society Initiative, a group of over 50 faculty and students investigating game-based learning. Squire's research investigates the potential of video game-based technologies for systemic change in education. Squire's work integrates research and theory on digital media (particularly games) with theories of situated cognition in order to understand how to design educational environments in a digital age. Squire earned his doctorate in Instructional Systems Technology from Indiana University and is a former Montessori and primary school teacher. Before coming to Wisconsin, Squire was Research Manager of the Games-to-Teach Project at MIT, Co-Director of the Education Arcade, columnist for Computer Games magazine, and co-founder of Joystick101.org.




From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kurt_Squire

"..., best known for his research into game design for education.He writes a regular column for Computer Games magazine,

[Sadly, the archive of the Computer games columns is not easily available online.]



The 2010 Games+Learning+Society Conference (GLS 6.0) was held in Madison Wisconsin in June.

The Games, Learning, and Society group is a collection of academic researchers, interactive media (or game) developers, and government and industry leaders who investigate how this medium operates, how it can be used to transform how we learn, and what this means for society. As such we seek to understand what cognitive work goes into playing Zelda, World of Warcraft, or Civilization, how these design features might be leveraged to improve learning via the design of learning systems, and how organizations such as schools will need to respond.

Google's "Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age"

Google hosted this 1.5 day worshop earlier this week

"Breakthrough Learning in a Digital Age"

Sessions inlcuded

Session I. The Next Revolution in Learning: How Digital Culture is Shaping Where and How Children Learn

Session II. Literacy 2.0: Creative Strategies to Prepare 21st Century Learners Presentations

Session III. New Learning Designs: Scaling Innovation to Reverse the Dropout Crisis

Session IV: Teachers for a Digital Age: New Strategies to Transform Practice

"Tech Playground "
The Tech Playground is a demo space curated by the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Join us for a look at some of the latest, most promising digital innovations from academia and industry that support children’s learning.

No light at the end of this tunnel

Something is happening that I just do not understand.... anyway here goes.


[Your 'electronic portfolio' SHALL be a website.
The default is http://www.yola.com/
Also consider yudo.com]


Your mission, should you accept it, is to find 10 resources that you will want to refer back to later.


Here are some links to save for the future:

1.
http://www.freetech4teachers.com/
Free Technology for Teachers - Richard Byrne's site.

All the 'resources' on the left side bar link to software, not blogs, articles, etc.

2.
Bryne used yudu.com to publish Twelve Essentials for Technology Integration

3.
35+ Educational Games and Games Resources - This is from Byrne's site.
At 35 the list is too long, but there are likely to be some good sites to allow 5 minutes of games before class starts (if you can control access through something like LAN School)

Here's another one for a quick game time before lesson starts
Ghost Blasters is a fun mathematics game that I learned about last week through Anne Marie's Talking Smartboards blog. Ghost Blasters is designed to help students learn to multiply and divide quickly in their heads


4. {Posting or creating content seems big on Byrne's site - make sense I guess)

This initially looked interesting, but then I realized it is just another video editing tool.
Unlimited Videos For You and Your Students
It takes just minutes to create a video which can bring your lessons to life.

Something called Jing, that does something, that I can't yet understand.
http://jingproject.com/
Jing is a streamlined approach to content creation. It is perfect for adding a quick and simple visual elements to your day-to-day conversations. If you need more, Jing allows you to export your images or video to Snagit or Camtasia Studio for further editing.

http://voicethread.com/#home
VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate pages and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too.

If you want to rip video from youtube etc
http://zamzar.com/

Robin says to use Animoto.com to create videos
http://animoto.com/

And she likes VoiceThread - you or your students can add comments to videos. Interesting.

The best way to keep up with these applications would be to go to Byrne's sit, and search for VoiceThread, or any of these apps, and you get updates on new ways to use them in the classroom.
e.g http://www.freetech4teachers.com/search/label/Voicethread

This site is generally not blocked, and you can share stuff in education circles
http://www.schooltube.com/


Make 'posters' at http://www.glogster.com/

5. Mary Tackle really liked this site that plots worldwide statistics, by category
http://www.sacmeq.org/statplanet/StatPlanet.html

Some really cool graphs that you can use for research or getting attention

6. Byrne blogged about Purpose Games - this sounds exactly like the thing I am looking for.
Purpose Games - Create and Play Games
is a free service that allows users to create custom games, share games, and play games.

Another one from Byrne
ClassTools.net is a free service teachers can use to create their own educational games.

Game Classroom is an educational games website catering to the K-6 market. Game Classroom offers mathematics games and language arts games. Games can be found by selecting a grade level and then a subject area. Both the mathematics and language arts categories are subdivided into specific focus areas. Some of the games are unique to Game Classroom and some are games that are used on other sites.


7.

Technology and _____

Here's another parallel between medicine and education. Technology in diagnosis/assessment, and technology in treatment/pedagogy.

Back in June I posted about an article in The NY Times [Well-Chosen Words in the Doctor’s Office ] that caught my attention for the similarities I saw between doctors and teachers.

Researchers who conducted interviews a few years ago with 192 patients at the Mayo Clinics in Scottsdale, Ariz., and Rochester, Minn., identified seven “ideal physician behaviors.” Patients want their doctors to be “confident, empathetic, humane, personal, forthright, respectful and thorough,” the researchers wrote in Mayo Clinic Proceedings in 2006.

_____ urges _____ to build rapport with their _____ by greeting them warmly by name, asking briefly about important events in their lives, maintaining eye contact, focusing on them without interruptions, and displaying empathy through words and body language.

In today's NY Times, Abigail Zuger reviews two books that broadly cover the effects of technology in the practice of Medicine. And the same thing happened - I am reading an article about medicine, but hearing the words inside a school.

Dr .... [listening to his stethoscope] grumbled at his patient: “Shhhh. I can’t hear you while I’m listening.”

In his collection of essays, Technological Medicine, Stanley Joel Reiser begins in 1816 with the stethoscope, and moves forward in time to the present. In her review, Zuger summarizes

Technology may spawn elevated philosophical discussion, but it also has mundane needs. It needs a home — hence the morphing of the ______ from a ______ to its present gleaming industrial self. It needs expertise — hence the evolution of the ______ sub-sub-specialist and the slow demise of the generalist. It needs regulation — injudicious use can be, in the words of ______, “extraordinary violence in desperate occasions.”

And of course, technology needs to be paid for ....

Looks like the stethoscope had about a 100-year head start on the Standardized Test.

Arne Duncan criticizes teacher training

[From this NY times article: Teacher Training Termed Mediocre]

Speaking at Columbia University’s Teachers College, Arne Duncan said

By almost any standard, many if not most of the nation’s 1,450 schools, colleges and departments of education are doing a mediocre job of preparing teachers for the realities of the 21st-century classroom.

Looks like, in addition to criticizing the education system including all those who work in it, now it is time to criticize the system that trains them too.

This is interesting, since it may continue to work its way back to the very root of the problem, wherever that is.

HW#5.a Random thoughts from today's Technology & Education class

a. What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?

1. Multi-tasking
   
   @mickdc566 made an interesting point about teenagers who were able to multi-task while playing Halo on XBox Live. And I thought about how, as one learns to drive a motor vehicle, you gradually begin to look further and further ahead in time/space, until finally you are able to buy yourself enough dead time to multi-task while driving. That put multi-tasking in a new perspective for me.
   
   I also realized that I probably am just qualifying for my 10,000 hours as an active/involved parent. (3 1/2 years since I quit full-time work).
   
   Which fits in well with what @rangotti said - after 3 1/2 - 5 years of full-time teaching one should be able to multi-task in class. That does not seem so far away suddenly.
   
   


2. Where should the best teachers teach?
   
   Obviously where they are happy.
   
   But was talking to @tzouct about my theory that a place like MIT or Harvard is successful in large part because it can cherry-pick its intake. Just get good enough to have an acceptance rate of less than 25%, and then you no longer have to admit the very best applicants. You just have to remove the obvious incompatibilities from the bottom, and then take any handful from the rest and you are likely to be 'successful.' Which becomes self-fulfilling after that, because more and more people apply to your program.
   
   Public institutions (esp. schools) have it much harder because they cannot cherry pick. Which makes me wonder what would happen if MIT faculty and your local community college had an exchange program for faculty?
   
   


3. The art of fly-fishing
   
   The conversation with @edielie and @kiknudson really helped generalize the concept of 'window of opportunity'.
   
   E.g. You are in a book store, you pull a book off the shelf, and do or do not decide to turn it over. Then you do or do not decide to open the book. Now take that concept and expand it to every single learning opportunity a student has.
   
   As a teacher, if you are taking the trouble to construct a learning opportunity, you also have to pick/make your lure and cast it in a way that they will take it.
   
   


4. Technology and Education
   
   @outofusernames underlined the point that we all like our information to be visual. Historically, limited technology options in the classroom meant that it was a largely auditory environment.
   
   We have the opportunity to change that.
   
   


5. Cross-disciplinary collaboration
   
   @rangotti made the point that as engaged citizens (we, and our students) must be able to see data (wherever it comes from, e.g. news) and see a story in it that makes sense to us, and, ideally, makes us ask more questions. This is a point very close to my heart. But I generalize it to include logical arguments. Citizens should have a reason they support organic food, or stem-cell research, or global warming. In some cases there is data. In some cases it is a logical argument based on a set of premises rather than data-based.
   
   Today I realized that humanities' teachers do spend a good deal of time developing these 'critical thinking' skills. The way we then teach math, somehow conveys to the students that the math set of skills is something very different. That these are somehow not connected.
   
   Getting back to what I have said about teaching not being collaborative enough, .... This calls for working collaboratively with humanities teachers. Encourage the humanities to include more data in their work. As math/science teachers, accept that the arguments will lose their clarity when ethical/moral/subjective standards are over-laid.
   

The purpose of Education

[The living version is a Google Doc. Ask me for permission to collaborate]

[Origin of this project: http://longistood.blogspot.com/2009/10/purpose-of-education-confluence-and.html]

What is the purpose of Education?

1. What is role of the individual?


2. What is role of education with regard to the individual?


3. What is the role of school in education?


4. How should a school educate?

What is role of the individual?

I believe that the role of the individual is to be, to be best of one's ability, an enthusiastic participant in civilization - the ethical and material refinement of one's culture in a sustainable manner.

What is role of education?

I believe that the role of Education is to assist the individual in fullfulling his/her role

a. by making available the collective history of civilization in a manner that he or she may utilize it

b. by nurturing, especially in pre-adults, an ambition for his or her role

What is role of school?

I believe that the role of the School is to assisst the community, from its smallest scale as a family to its largest scale as humanity, in the Education of the individual.

To this end, I believe that the School, on behalf of society, must take on the responsibility for collecting, interpreting, and disseminating the history of civilization. Further, in order to nuture the ambition of the individual, the School must a) actively model the role of the individual and b) provide a setting in which the individual's ambition may progressively grow.

I believe that the School is a trustee, but not the only one, of the legacy of all prior generations.

Comments:

Incoming: Books, movies, etc.

03/22/2010
The Four Agreements - don Miguel Ruiz
[Book I want to check out - in the context of 'managing' student behavior]

10/21/2009
You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices
[Book - purchased]

Quotes that caught my attention

Deborah Loewenberg Ball - Dean University of Michigan's School of Education (& a math teacher)

Teaching depends on what other people think, not what you think.  It requires the ability to step outside of your own head

John Dewey

We only think when we are confronted with problems

This only rule governing the conduct of students at Wabash College

The student is expected to conduct himself at all times, both on and off the campus, as a gentleman and a responsible citizen.

The two basic rules that govern the behavior of Hampden-Sydney students

The Code of Conduct,

The Hampden-Sydney student will behave as a gentleman at all times and in all places

The Honor Code, is in fact a subset of the first

The Hampden-Sydney student will not lie, cheat, or steal, nor tolerate those who do

from my nephew Arjun Jassal

Due to cost cutting, the light at the end
of the tunnel has been switched off...

Khalil Gibran

For their souls dwell in the house of tomorrow, which you cannot visit, not even in your dreams.

HW#4 - Week in Review

a. What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?
Last week's class was devoted to learning Geometer Sktechpad (GSP). I've seen it used before, and it is pretty intuitive to learn to use - although not entirely so.

I was excited during class about the idea of getting images from the Web, or movies from my camera, and fitting curves (e.g. Parabolas) to them.

This ended in disappointment. It turns out you can do this by combining GSP and Fathom, but not in a way that is going to make the task enjoyable to students. It is one thing to fight Excel to the death when one is doing a PhD. It is quite another when you are trying to use it to convey a key concept to students.

On the plus side, just that afternoon I had the opportunity to teach 8th grade parallel line construction with compass and pencil. During class I did the GSP exercise on parallel lines. Later, with Robin's perspective, I was able to come to a point where I so each as supplementing the other. Namely, get the students to use pencil, straight edge, and compass to do the first construction. Then transfer this construction with minimum friction to GSP. In GSP they can explore the properties of parallel lines (or whatever) and ask all the what-if questions that solidifies their understanding. The sheer hassle of pencil and compass construction makes it almost impossible for them to ask the same questions without GSP.

I saw a similar thing today, when too quick a transition to a graphing calculator deprives the student the opportunity to grapple with linear inequalities.


b. What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?
After the last class I chatted briefly with Robin about my thoughts on story telling. Story telling goes very very deep in all our cultures. I am guessing that it is deeply tied to the evolution of our brain, and from there to the evolution of language.

We introduce children to their new world through stories, and for almost everyone the life-long fascination with stories continues unabated.

Is it just a lack of imagination that over all these centuries we have not introduced our children to numeracy through stories? Or is there something very fundamental about math that to learn to like it is to learn to like an abstraction that is different from the narrative form?

If not the literary arts, then what about the visual and performing arts? There is a lot of abstract symbolism there, with juxtaposition and contra position used to define relationships and hence meaning. How do we nurture our children to love these arts?


c. What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?
Over the last year I have been forming my own theory of learning, based around the delta of effort needed to achieve the next delta in skill. In theories of Adolescent Development last week we covered Vygotsky's Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), which got me very excited because it is so close to what I have been thinking.

This makes me even more convinced that there is a very real need for a practice problem generator that that can be tweaked in real-time by the teacher.
This is no science fiction fantasy that I am asking for here.

Imagine your 7th grade class (in what ever physical shape and location) is using the next 30 minutes to work on simplifying algebraic equations (maybe about 10 of them).

They are working with paper and pencil, and you are circulating watching the individuals or groups work through the material. Now imagine the class is small enough that you know each child really well, and you know the material really well, and you have a stack of problems that you know really well. As each child/group finishes a problem, you slip them another one that is just right. They finish 10 problems, each one that challenges them just right. Before they leave, you give them 20 more problems as homework to reinforce the material.

There is nothing fancy here - sports coaches have been doing this for ages.

Fast-forward to the future. They are working with stylus and slate/table-style portable computers. At your desktop computer you see a panel of little windows, each one containing the child's workspace. You can switch to their web-cam view to see their faces when you want to. The module you are working on can generate fresh problems on the fly. Multiple axes exist, either identifying the concepts being worked on, or collating the most common mistakes seen with these problems. There is a slider along each of these axes that you can tweak as they solve each problem. When they have finished for the day, it is only a few mouse clicks to generate twice as many problems for home work for that child. If they work the portable computer at home, you can actually replay the screen for each homework problem they got wrong, and tweak the sliders yet again before the next class starts.

There is nothing fundamentally different between this case and the earlier one (except possibly the class size, but I not arguing for a large class). Of course the technology has changed between the two cases. But adapting problem difficulty based on current performance is something 'educational' software like Reader Rabbit has been doing for 4 year-olds for at least 10 years now. So it is not as if the technology is new.

What would be really new is using everything that computer game designers have learnt in the past 10 years about keeping games just challenging enough. [But for the most part they seem to have come to the conclusion that matching the player against another player in a massively online game is far preferable to matching the player against the computer. The matching problem, although difficult, seems easier than teaching the computer to play a game that a human finds interesting.]

In the news recently

Satire from the Newyorker magazine, teases at what is to come if the today's youth don't grow up to be discerning consumers of media and users of technology.

Shouts & Murmurs
Subject: Our Marketing Plan



A slew of articles in Monday's NY Times,


1.
A very nice graphic in the Op-Ed section comparing various ways to divide the ages of man. I read the whole thing because of the Theories of Adolescent Development course I am taking.

Op-Chart
By Ben Schott


2.
A Twitter-like application called Foursquare that encourages "planned serendipity" had me wondering if I'd ever post

"I'm in aisle 24 at the supermarket. Anyone you want to get groceries together?"

Face-to-Face Socializing Starts With a Mobile Post


3.
An example of how impossible it is to keep control information anymore - it knows no boundaries, legal or otherwise. No doubt this has implications on education - which directly or indirectly claims ownership of civilization's collective knowledge.

Link by Link: Twitter and a Newspaper Untie a Gag Order

NY Times: Fast-Track Alternative to a Teaching Job

I don't know why this article was in the Money section of the NY Times.

It does not say much, although it does point out how quickly and cheaply one can become a teacher. (500 people @ $3,150. 1900 people @ $975.)

Your Money
A Fast-Track Alternative to a Teaching Job
By ELIZABETH OLSON
Published: October 15, 2009
About 600 alternative certification programs contribute roughly 20 percent of the country’s new teachers each year.

What's the shape of a rainbow?

I just used Geometer's Sketchpad and an image that I pulled down from Google to investigate the shape of a rainbow.

Now I understand why conics is called conics!!!

This is really heady stuff. (I feel like a 14-year old, wanting to emphasize every sentence with italics, bold and exclamation marks.)

Yesterday after class, I was talking to Robin about telling stories with numbers, and one word in our conversation just stuck with me. Rainbows.

It took about 10 to 15 minutes of web searches to figure out how to set an image as a background in GSP. Unfortunately, GSP is not that intuitive. (And this functionality has been there since at least 2003.)

It took another 5-10 minutes to get GSP to do this reliably. Actually this was the most frustrating part of the process.

5 more minutes to find an image I liked from Bing / Google. (I liked Google's selection better).

Under 2 minutes to superimpose a circle and a parabola on the image. This was super easy.

Okay, my image is not a circle or a parabola.

You'd think it should be related to a circle in some way, should it not?

5 more minutes of searching on the web to verify what the shape of a rainbow should be.

Now we are in some really serious terrain. I am going to have to figure out how to do projections in GSP. And I have to figure out a mental model of how exactly a rainbow works.

All this in under 45 minutes, or one class period.


The really scary thing is that 2 minutes ago, if you asked me, I would have told you that I know how rainbows are formed. But did I really know?


Tune in next week to find out. [My evaluation version of GSP won't let me export or cut-and-paste images, so I can't show you until I'm back on campus.]

I wonder if I can use this for my class final project...?

[Update, Sunday 10/18: I can now visualize why it is an ellipse. Looks like I will need to use both Fathom and GSP. Fathom can't import images. GSP does not have sliders. Plotting things like conics seems easier in Fathom. Having to move data back-and-forth between applications is always frustrating. I really dislike having to do that. ]

HW#3.5 Tuesday's encounters with technology

Two worries about technology today


1. My biggest worry (spurred by an email reply I wrote on software engineering, see below) is that the pace of innovation may never slow down. This does not allow stabilizing institutions to form. One example of what I mean is that far too few people generating the infrastructure for Web 2.0 understand how fundamental standards are. They are not to blame, because Web 1.0 did not set any sort of example of developing national or international standards. Are we doomed to eternal frustration with new technology?

One of the biggest uses of a PLN today seems to be to have enough people around to help you figure out the technology.

btw, I use 'standards' in an engineering sense, not an education sense. When you go into two hardware stores and buy a nut and a bolt from each, they will still fit together. Or when you walk into a car rental and pick up a car, you can drive it off the lot once you have adjusted the mirrors, and you can figure out the rest in under 5 minutes. Technology needs to be like that if people are going to use it.

It is far from clear if the Software industry is in early stages and will settle down, or if things are going to continue to be chaotic until the planet implodes.


2. The other observation is that education as practiced around the world is not exactly collaborative, even though we have the tools and understanding to be doing so. This idea took seed a while back, but has not done much germinating since then. I wrote about it back in April after attending an MIT open-house for Math and Science teachers.

This course has given me pointers to lots of activity in schools that utilize Web 2.0 in interesting (and hopefully successful) ways. But even while we are encouraging our students' urge to be more social, I don't see any examples yet of how we as educators are modeling that for our students. And I mean more than just co-teaching. Okay this probably requires a whole post of its own, so I will just re-post (RP?) what I said in April, and save the rest for later.

From MIT Open House - musings.

3.One of the graduates has been teaching two years after getting her MIT. She's a career-changer, having previously been a chemist. It struck me as strange have lonely she sounded.

I am still trying to get my head around this. But I really have been very surprised how individual the school teaching enterprise is. I am surprised how little I hear the word 'we' compared to 'I' when teachers talk about their work with students. It is not that they don't say "we," I just expected much more of it.

Part of this might be logistics - if you want to maximize a teachers contact time with students, then they are not going to have much time to collaborate. Plus classroom schedules don't allow any mixing and matching of student and teacher contact time.

I have run into rare examples of co-teaching. But that is rare. And even more rare is where more than 2 people are collectively responsible for a group of students. Okay, so I expected more of a team attitude, and am not feeling it. But what is strange to me is that there is some much buzz these days about collaborative work. How children have to learn to work together, how learning is collaborative, etc. There is a huge push away from a one-to-many delivery style of lecturing. At the same time, I don't see the teachers setting an example of this with their children.

It is like sitting through a 1 hour lecture about inquiry-based learning. 'Do as I say, not as I do.' I need to explore this much more.

Is there a mashup available that will take 33 blogs over one week and
1. plot blog length vs. time?
2. make a Wordle?


Was able to use the 'search' functionality on my blog to find a comment from a friend/follower that highlights one small advantage that accumulates, and her approach to counteracting it.

From neena's comment on What pushes your buttons

My co-teacher and I have been teaching together for 7 years and we have a strategy that came to us in the first year of our teaching together. This is probably absolutely unethical but because the outcome has always been so darn healthy, we do it every year. Around the 2nd month of school (once the honeymoon period is over and the kids begin to show their true colors)we each write down the names of 1/2 of our class. The names have to be of those kids that we love the most. Believe me this is so hard to do because you'll truly feel like you love them all. We then compare lists. We check which kid/s didn't make either of our lists and then we make a point of spending as much time, energy and LOVE into recognizing those children for the rest of the year. My theory is that the children who didn't make it into our lists will probably not make it into any one else's lists and the ones who did make it in our list are the generally popular kiddos anyway. Even though we think we give equal attention to all of our students, the truth is that we actually give more positive attention to those who seem sharper, cuter and more aware. So it is up to us teachers to understand the children who can otherwise fall through the cracks and then love them dearly. Once you have accomplished that, you can teach them quantum physics in Kindergarten and they will understand (well, hypothetically).

The rest of the day.....

Heated frozen pizza pockets in the oven for the children's lunch.

Children and wife are better now - all are back at school and work, which also means I have not excuse not to load the dishwasher when I get back home after the school drop-off.

Was able to email both class teachers to say that we were running late today.

Read some reviews online for exercise/fitness/yoga balls to replace my office chair. Ordered one on Amazon. Avoided the bright pink one.

Did the usual email.

Used Bing and Wikipedia to reply to a long email about the lack of engineering in Software Engineering.

Sent out an excel spreadsheet to help a 9 year old build his confidence in math - it just uses RAND() to setup simple addition problems.

Checked in with the teacher I am helping with Math Club after school.

Checked when soccer practice was now that the days are shorter.

Reminded wife to pay the babysitter while driving to class.

Used Bing to look up new terms during class.

Wondering if a Wordle is good or bad. (Of course there are not absolutes)

Like Google Squared, but am yet to use it.

So all in all what I would call a normal day - at least in Web 1.0 land.

Dichotomies to ponder in Education

Mulling over a couple of things that will need more complete posts later. Of course they are not pure dichotomies, but different ways of seeing things. Like all of Life, it's about finding the balance that works.

1. Scholarship v. What Works
Educators have strong bias towards scholarship. It is what a lot of them do. And it is a significant way in which the collective memory of a culture is interpreted and passed on to the next generation.

But an Education is a preparation for Life. And Life, especially commerce, increasingly does not care for scholarship. It's more about having the creativity to come up with what works.

And you can see that in the classroom. I sense that boots-on-the-ground educators bother less with the scholarship in Pedagogy, and rely more on what works for their students.


2. Conservative v. Progressive

Education as a profession is conservative. It needs to be, since it's mission is to conserve 100s if not 1000s of years of collective cultural memory. You don't mess with such things lightly.

Yet, Educators are Progressives. Like it or not, they have a future vision of society. Their students are their arrows that will travel swift and far.

Or as Dewey begins his 5th (& last) article of faith, The School and Social Progress "I believe that education is the fundamental method of social progress and reform."

HW#3.4 Monday's encounter with Technology

[Today's post intends to get to the 'teaching' of technology via Gladwell and 1st grade soccer. But it continues to mine the earlier theme of relative advantage.]

6-yr old: "Dad, who invented soccer?"

Dad: "I don't know. I think it started in S.America, with people kicking rubber band balls. Let's google it."

I didn't know that

The game of soccer, as we know it today, was officially separated from rugby during the second part of the 19th century

The ancient game could have been from the far east, the Mediterranean, or the Americas. Here's the one I was thinking of.

According to historians, the Meso-American ball game Pok-A-Tok has been around since 3000 BC. However, the earliest found playing court (Paso de la Amada, Mexico) dates back to 1600 BC. The Paso de la Amada court was refurbished and expanded over a period of 150 years. It consisted of an 80-meter-long, flat playing alley bracketed by elevated "bleachers." Scientists believe that this particular court was a part of a network of similar courts throughout Meso-America.

On Monday, after soccer practice one of the Moms approached me asking what to do about the fact that her daughter does not like being on the team. There's many issues here. First, the daughter has never played soccer before, anywhere. Second, she's playing it with a bunch of boys who have been playing it passionately at school recess for at least a year. Third, their coaches are talented semi-professionals who are cutting their chops on 6-yr olds for the first time. All told, the 4 girls are not having much fun compared to the 16 boys and two men.

This is truly a shame. Since when does a child have to start doing anything at age 4 or 5 if they are to stand any chance of enjoying it later in life?

There seems to be a growing industry in outside school instruction for young children. I remember when me son was FIVE, one of his classmates already had 9 distinct after-school instructional activities. Off the top of my head, here are some I have encountered 5-8 year olds doing in the past year - sometimes very competitively. Soccer, gymnastics, skiing, baseball, sketching/painting, musical instrument, choir, chess club, math club, ultimate frisbee, indoor rock climbing, lacrosse, swimming, hockey, Kumon, tennis, golf. The list just goes on and on.

The only hope that a 12 or 13 year-old has is to wait for all the kids above to get bored and drop out, and then come in with passion and determination. Or to pick something that cannot be done physically or legally by anyone younger than 12.

Here's where Gladwell comes in. Gladwell begins Outliers with a detailed analysis of why professional ice hockey players in the Canadian league are most likely to have a birthday in January or February. Basically, since the cutoff date for the various children's divisions is Jan. 1st, the earlier you are born in the year, the bigger and faster you are compared to your 5 or 6 or 7 year-old peers. The early advantage then accumulates year on year.

Gladwell suggest that one way to double the pool of potential professional ice hockey players is to have two cut-off dates (Jan 1st, and June 1st).

Now I see this at school in other subjects, as I will just describe. But you can take the argument all the way into the core curriculum and back, and argue that specific socio-economic and physical advantages that a child comes to Kindergarten with, predispose them to later success. [I am sensitive to this since my son is one of the youngest and smallest boys in his class.]

Technology=Tools.

Teaching technoloy is to teach tool use. However, you can't do that in a vacuum. The tools must be used for something. So you can only teach tool use by using tools. (Duh!) But for a tool of any sophistication, and especially with a cultural history, that takes you into a culture with its own norms, vocabulary, language. Enculturation is the word, I believe. So where exactly do the specific advantages begin, and how do they accumulate?

Phys Ed: At my boys' elementary school, as in schools all over the world, PE is the most popular subject. I find the teachers truly creative about bringing in 'games' that no one in the class has played before. These games develop the same set of skills, but the take away any advantage that soccer or baseball or other outside school coaching has given some of the children in the class.

Music: Music is another story. The proficiency that some of the children bring to the classroom is much higher than in sports. At the same time, the cultural view of what music is supposed to be seems to limit teachers and parents on the vehicles (i.e. instruments = technology) through which music skills can be taught. This leaves some students, some parents, and many a teacher frustrated.

Art: Fortunately for art teachers, fewer young children take art outside school compared to sports and music. (For how long, I wonder?)

Computer-based Technology: I am assuming that most elementary schools don't yet teach basic Computer skills as part of the curriculum. If they do, it is more as a nod to a need/demand, rather than as a well planned and integrated part of the curriculum.

However, when they do start doing it, they are going to slam full-speed into the issue above. Some kids are already creating sophisticated content at home. Some kids can't spell their name or password well enough to log-in. What are we going to do?

Gladwell's analysis suggests that if we continue doing busines-as-usual, then the kids who are going to succeed 20 years from now in the global, professional, digital-content league (a.k.a some significant part of The Real World), are the ones whose early advantage the system nurtured at the expense of others.

Is that going to be true?

All is not lost, however, as we do have the past to build on, or at least learn from in some small way. Don't kids come to their first day of school with a wide spread of literacy and numeracy skills? And don't we somehow manage to squish them all into the same round hole called a Grade?

HW#3.6 Wednesday's encounters with Technology

Gosh, this daily blogging is really leaving me weary. Having to think all day about it, and then make the time for it. I wonder what it feels like to be a columnist at a major news publication for decades. {Does it pay well?}

This got me thinking about the parallel between a modern technology (Blogging) and a much older one (Pencil). My 9-yr old son is still learning to write. He keeps his written work rather short. One reason that I can see is that he tires quickly. He's holding his pencil too tight. He's pressing it down too hard. The small muscles of his hand are fatiguing.

Or like one first learns to drive - I remember holding onto the steering wheel like it was some sort of life preserver.

How long before I don't feel 'tired' anymore? Does the world have to be subjected to my struggle?

[Rant]
On a different note, reading other classmate blogs and twitter posts, I find one thing that seems to bother many of us is the number of different logins and sources of information we need to keep track of daily. It might feel natural to today's high school and college students (still have to ask them), but it certainly does not to me. My own feeling is that they just accept it as the cost of doing business and don't think much of changing it, while I feel that it is pretty dumb.

Sure I could devote half of next Saturday to figuring out how to aggregate all these onto one page, but who wants to try since success is far from certain.

Here's a quick summary of the webpages or applications I have to check in at least once a day. Some of them I have to have open for large chunks of the day. Each of these has its own associated login, password, and associated headaches. And I don't even use IM. And I am not counting anything to do with my personal life (kids' school, affinity groups, alumni groups, etc.)

• Outlook (or equivalent for 2 primary email accounts)

• Twitter

• Facebook (self and 2 groups)

• Technology and Education (on PBWorks)

• Adolescent Development (on UW Catalyst Tools*)

• College of Education (bb.com)

*fortunately the landing page for the university has a link to Catalyst Tools. But they don't provide functionality for adding your own links. Or do they?
[/Rant]

You know, I should take this rant back. I needed to look up some financial information for a form, and ended up logging into 3 bank accounts, one mortgage account, 2 investment accounts, and I did not even go anywhere near the 6 different people we have retirement accounts with. And I did not grumble one bit! I guess because they are managing my money and so I see it as a service. But then I don't do this more than a couple of times a year. Not every day.

HW#3.3 Sunday's encounters with Technology

Educator Zen: Be in the present.

I think that I now have a context in which I can see the need for Technology in the classroom. [Yes, my own learning style has a very high need to form a big picture within which I can then organize knowledge and goals.] Hopefully by the end of this post I will be able to articulate this context, and call out why I, as an educator, need to be alert to getting ‘stuck in time’

It’s Monday afternoon, and I am trying to write with 3 sick people in the house. Sunday’s experience with Technology revolved around being thankful for the ‘invention’ of acetaminophen (or paracetamol, as I know it from my childhood) . There are flu-like symptoms floating around, and modern pharmaceuticals have saved the day, again.

My first reaction when I reached for the Tylenol was “Dang! We are just weeks away from a H1N1 vaccine being available.” Which then made we wonder if there were any families who might opt out of the vaccine*. That led down a whole diversion on the ‘controversy’ regarding the potential link between autism-spectrum disorders and infant vaccinations.

[Update: 10/13/09 - On Tuesday, an NY Times Op-Ed Nothing to Fear but the Flu Itself cited this Harvard School of Public Health finding that 41% of adults said they would not get the H1N1 Vaccine.]

In grad school I was in a Dept. of Bioengineering. It really bugged me at the time that my classmates, by and large, were not inclined to discuss the societal impacts/implications of the type of careers we were going to enter into. (This is a distinct failure of higher education in science and engineering, if you ask me.)

I believe that we, as citizens, will be confronted with more and more debates that involve the intersection of science/technology and society. This is not going to be just with regard to Bioengineering, but that is the area I am sensitive to. Here, for example, are some of the types of public debates I am thinking of.

• GMO foods
• Radiation of perishable foods
• Terri Schiavo
• Stem-cell research
• Universal health care
• Autism and vaccination

This meandering stream of consciousness then ran into the growing seedling planted by John Dewey’s Pedagogic Creed.

Dewey’s piece is really fascinating, and will take me a long, long time to digest and internalize. But right now the thing that has me most in awe is how Dewey has managed to distill the essence of education to its truly time-less themes. If one did not know when it was written, one would be hard-pressed to guess.

Dewey’s opening sentence in answer to the question What is Education? is

I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race.

In the second section What is School? he opens with

I believe that the school is primarily a social institution. Education being a social process, the school is simply that form of community life in which all those agencies are concentrated that will be most effective in bringing the child to share in the inherited resources of the race, and to use his own powers for social ends.

and a few lines later

I believe that the school must represent present life” [Emphasis mine]

Technology, therefore, belongs in the classroom as it exists in present life.

Okay, so I now have my context, and I should leave well enough alone. But of course it’s Sunday, and my family won’t leave me alone with the NY Times, so what else can I do but let me mind wander while I lose at table football to a 9 year-old.

First, here’s more Dewey, just to give you a taste of how 21st century he is.

I believe, therefore, that the true centre of correlation of the school subjects is not science, nor literature, nor history, nor geography, but the child's own social activities.

If education is life, all life has, from the outset, a scientific aspect; an aspect of art and culture and an aspect of communication. It cannot, therefore, be true that the proper studies for one grade are mere reading and writing, and that at a later grade, reading, or literature, or science, may be introduced. The progress is not in the succession of studies but in the development of new attitudes towards, and new interests in, experience.

It is not hard to imagine where Dewey would have stood on Web 2.0

Now I am an émigré (isn’t it so snooty to use that instead of emigrant?); you’ll see why I chose that word over immigrant in a moment.

The first thing that stands out to me as an emigrant is that I have a new appreciation of my past. It seems to me that if you can give yourself some distance from your situation, then you begin to appreciate many aspects of it that you can’t see in the present. (It’s for this reason that I am a strong proponent of the concept of a sabbatical.)

Another thing that really stands out to me about emigrants is that their past/culture/values that they work so hard to preserve in their new world ends up becoming a static snapshot of that which they left behind. They get stuck in time. A person who returns to the parent culture 30 or more years later can barely recognize it because it so different than from what they saw being preserved at ‘home.’

What is the point of all this?

Well, in a sense, when we begin to teach we leave the real world and begin to live in an imitation of the real world - one that is necessarily constrained and simplified to match the developmental age of the children we are working with. The longer we live in this imitation world, the greater the risk that we get stuck in time. This is something that we as educators need to be alert to.

I think the model of medical education is really apt, because future doctors are trained by current, practicing doctors. Not ex-doctors. This is true for many professions, but not so much in fields of ‘scholarship.’

So if we define the general profession that we are training children for as ‘participants in the social consciousness of humanity’ then, by definition, we, as their teachers, need to be current practicing professionals of the same. Teaching does not give you a free pass from civic involvement, rather it requires it.

HW#3.2 Saturday's encounters with technology

Thank God for Mobile Phones!

I was doing my Adolescent Development reading (on a laptop) in the car outside my son's soccer game, when I managed to lock myself out. Suffice to say that I managed to get back in, and stay connected to the rest of what was happening thanks to my phone (13 calls in 1 hour).

And to think that prior to 2003 I used to feel that people talking to the cauliflowers in the grocery aisle were pure batty.

What are the small advantages?

The other thing I thought about a lot today was all the assumptions about the availability of, and fluency with, computer hardware and software that are inherent in the course I am doing now. From applying to get into the program, to preparing for it, to participating in it for just over week, I doubt if I have more than 10 pieces of paper as artifacts of this process so far - it is entirely digital. But I do not recall even the briefest of mention of what one needs just to participate in this program in this (digital) regard.

As a person who was last in Graduate School at a time when people who used Gopher and Lynx thought they were cool, this feels like Rip Van Winkle waking up (although now the phrase is "Which Planet have you been on?!")

This dissection was prompted by the intersection of two strands.

The first was from Tiger Coach - who made me think of the inequalities in access to 'Technology' that we are most blind to. Of course there is a Digital Divide, and the haves and have-nots, the immigrants and natives, and all that. But there are also smaller, less noticed inequalities. There's nothing wrong with that per-se. There always will be, that is fact of life.

Which took me back to Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers. Gladwell's point, as I choose to interpret it, is that small cumulative advantages spread out over a lifetime, amount to enormous differences in where people end up. This is like the graphs that investment companies show you, of how 0.5% less in management fees end up being 10s or 100s of thousands of dollars by the time you retire.

What Gladwell says is unremarkable, on the face of it, although he is a good storyteller. (Plus he reads is work really well.) What was interesting to me is that his analyses are necessarily post-hoc. In retrospect one can trace the arc of a person's life and point to the various small but significant advantages that accumulated over the course of their life. But for each of the people/careers he profiles, they could not have been aware of the accumulation of their advantages as they happened.

The same can be said for class, community, culture, nation, or any such grouping. Due to a long series of events certain groupings accumulated outsize advantages that are very hard to break down.

Gladwell goes on to make his suggestions on how we can apply his analysis to education to make the playing field a bit more equitable. But it seems to me that he's addressing those small advantages that we are now aware of.

What about all the other inequities in access that Gladwell's successor will identify three decades from now? Should we, who are committed to Social Justice in education, even worry about them, because, by definition, we cannot know them?

Q: Should I buy a Kindle / eReader for class?

Ans: I think that in a year or two this would make economic sense.

I returned my Kindle2 after a month because it did not do the job for the three things I wanted to read on it - the Newyorker, the NY Times, and my email.

But now I am reading vast amounts of stuff again in Grad school, so should I buy a Kindle?

Here's how much they cost. Kindle=$150(used), Kindle2=$220(used), DX=$490.

Assumptions

1. You do not like reading on a laptop or desktop, but you learn to like your eReader.
2. You get, and print, about 50 pages of PDF a week to read, per 10-week, 3-credit course.
3. You have, or are willing to buy, an entry-level B&W laser printer.
4. You buy 3 textbooks per 3-credit course, AND they are available on the Kindle.
5. The saving on the Kindle edition is $5.

Total potential saving per course = ($5*3)+($0.05*50*10)= $40.

So I would potentially break-even after 6 courses if I bought a Kindle2 used.

Assumption#4 is probably the weakest of the lot.
If #4 were true, then the saving on #5 might be more than $5 per book.
If there are no textbooks for a course, you probably have more readings, and your printing costs will be even higher (probably more than $15 per course = 300 additional pages).

Technology in Education - Caveat

I was at my son's soccer game this morning, but continued to mull over last night's blog post, as well as what I want to say in today's.

I feel the need to clarify that I am not against bringing new technologies into education (in the classroom, or otherwise). I have a feeling that this is going to be just the first in a string of caveats.

Frist, I think there are some truly awesome examples out there of what creative teachers are doing (both with new and old technologies).

Also, I have been programming almost continuously for the last 30 years, so I am not in the least scared by or intimidated by the successors to Web 1.0.

I am also truly, really excited about the future of education in the next decade or two. There are a lot of new insights on learning coming from basic and applied neurosciences and psychology. And new technologies are allowing educators to apply those insights in powerful ways.

Lastly, regarding the Technology and Education course itself, while the 'instructors' have a breathless excitement about the power of new technologies, when you listen to them carefully, there is a much more nuanced view about how and when and why to apply these technologies appropriately.

So, back to my last rant/post, do I think that Web 2.0 is going to transform education? NO!

Do I think that creative educators are going to continue using the tools at hand to combine their experience with insights from research to transform education? YES!

HW#3.1 - Friday's encounters with Technology

This course (Technology and Education) is making me more worried than ever that everyone is getting completely carried away with the notion that an entire country is going to sustain its current economic advantage by creating 'content'.

Sure, we need to train the coming generations for a future we can hardly envisage. And, sure, that future is going to demand creativity and adaptability on a scale we will gasp at. But, as I said yesterday, it is not about how the Web (2.0 or greater) is going to change education, but rather how we, as educators, use what we know (and are learning) about the nittty-gritty of education to harness the power of new technologies. To me it is important where the cart and the horse are in relation to each other.

So the dominant thoughts running through my head all day were about how much of the technology we use throughout the day is real, hard, material stuff. And how few people it really takes to produce of the creative stuff we consume (free, or paid for)

Take, for example, a software application called Fathom that we used yesterday for the first time. Here you had a bunch of jaded adults squealing with delight, as if they were still teenagers waiting for their music idols to come on stage. KCP Technologies makes both Fathom and Geometer's Sketchpad. As best as I can tell, the entire team, is 9 people. That's it - 9 people.

Last I recall, Twitter employs less than 60 people, and has an estimated 'worth' of $1B, with no profit. That is like each employee getting $16M if they went public today.

Microsoft in its best year must have generated $60B in revenue, with a current market cap of about $200B. Assuming about 90,000 people in its global workforce, that's about $700,000 in revenue per employee. (Note that only about 35,000 employees are in actual Product R&D, or 'content')

Google is likely to be even more profitable/efficient. Not to even mention what used to go on on Wall Street.

Compare these numbers with the United States, which has a population of 300M, a GDP of $14Trillion, and a per capita GDP of $47,000. It takes only 250 Microsoft's match the entire United States in GDP. Where are the other $175 million people going to work?

You can't have half a country uploading and downloading content to YouTube or building community on Second Life.


Here's the 'content' my family consumed today:
[Note that I did not directly pay for the last two, and everyone know how much money the news media is making these days.]

• News: Daily, weekly, & radio.
• Board game (Rummikub, Table Football - from instructions in a book)
• Children's animated movie
• Google/Bing search on the purpose of education.
• Public website hosting John Dewey's My Pedagogic Creed.

Here's the hard stuff that I noticed made my life pleasant today:
[The last four, although they are not hard, and although I did not pay for them, are as good as inventions. The point is that they are not content. The rest I paid for.]

• Phone
• Microwave*
• Alarm clock
• Central Heating
• Weighing scale
• Outdoor thermometer
• Body thermometer
• Kettle
• Pocket radio & headphones
• Sewing machine
• The swimming pool
• Soccer league
• Instant Messaging
• E-mail
• Twitter
• PDF

[*Just tonight my wife exclaimed that Percy Spencer who invented the microwave oven should have gotten a Nobel prize. I think the comparision to a certain someone else was unspoken.]

HW#3 - A daily blog on encounters with Technology

Everyday this week, post daily blogs about your encounters with technology. This could be how technology helped you, frustrated you, made your job more efficient, or helped you relax and play. The purpose of this assignment is to have you think broadly about your encounters with technology in your life—what role it plays (or doesn’t) in your life, and what are the "cultural practices" surrounding technology (ie, texting while driving) that we encounter in our lives?

The Purpose of Education - confluence and coincidences

[Dear Reader, I am looking for your suggestions on how to collectively develop this. e.g. Wiki]

Back in April I read Howard Gardner's Five Minds for the Future. The following quote has stayed with me.

.. an educational system is not worthy of its name unless its representatives can clearly articulate what the system is striving to achieve and what is seeks to avoid or curtail.

Then this week I came across John Wooden's definition of success, and it struck me that I should start developing my own articulation of the goals of the education system I am a part of. I have done this at before work, while preparing for my annual performance review (that hated thing!) - "How do your goals/contributions align with those of your team/group and the larger organization?" - and I have actually found it quite useful.

So here I was mulling over the format - should it be short like a mission statement / elevator pitch? Or more like a short essay? Not a long essay, I hope. Just then, on NPR's Morning Edition, I caught a sample of a This I Believe essay, and I decided that's the format I want to follow.

It was at this point that I recalled a tweet by HB - "reflecting on the many benefits of groupthink." And now I am wondering what technology I can use to develop this essay live.

At this point all I can think of is figuring out a way to create my own Wiki. If you have any suggestions on how I can post a document that others can edit or comment on, I'd appreciate it.

I googled 'Meaning of Education' and 'Purpose of Education' yesterday, and was a bit overwhelmed (not surprisingly). But then this morning I open up the readings for Adolescent Development, and find in them John Dewey's 1897 Pedagogic Creed.

The opening line is "I believe that all education proceeds by the participation of the individual in the social consciousness of the race." He continues, over 11 pages and 5 articles of faith, beginning each paragraph with "I Believe."

What a happy confluence of ideas and coincidences!

'Coach' John Wooden

Part III of Talent Code as about great teachers/coaches ("Talent Whisperers ").

Coyle talks about a basketball coach called John Wooden, whom I had never heard of. So I spent some time looking him up this morning.

Not surprisingly, he spoke at TED.

A couple of quotes from that talk (and I am sure from many other Wooden talks, interviews, and articles).

Success is ... Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction and knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you are capable.

No written word

No spoken plea

Can teach our youth what they should be to be;

Nor all the books on all the shelves

It's what the teachers are themselves.

In the mid-70s a psychologist named Ronald Gallimore spent some time studying Wooden's principles, which resulted in at least three articles/books.

1. Tharp, R. G. & Gallimore, R. (1976). Basketball's John Wooden: What a coach can teach a teacher. Psychology Today, 9(8), 74-78.

2. Gallimore, R., & Tharp, R. G. (2004). What a coach can teach a teacher, 19752004: Reflections and reanalysis of John Wooden's teaching practices. The Sports Psychologist, 18(2), 119-137.

[Have to figure out how to get these from the University Library]

3. You Haven't Taught Until They Have Learned: John Wooden's Teaching Principles and Practices , by Swen Nater & Ronald Gillimore (2006)

I could not find the book in our local library, but found has a short review by Steve Turley

From that review

For Wooden, teaching is essentially a moral and ethical enterprise embodied in the values, beliefs and actions of the teacher

The spark that lights the fire.

Finished Part II of the Talent Code, the bit about igniting the fire of motivation.

That section talks a lot about the very small things that, received at the right moment, can fire up a young person. (Including a KIP academy that names its classrooms after the University the teacher went to).

I am a scientist (once a scientist, always a scientist). So I obviously hold Nobel prize winners in awe. Never thought I'd ever meet one face to face.

Imagine my surprise today when I discovered that I once met one of this year's Nobel Prize winners in Chemistry - at a dinner at his dad's house (my wife is his dad's friend). Can you imagine what sort of spark his school-age nephews/nieces are getting about science?

Do students of science play 6 degrees of separation from other famous scientists? Shouldn't they?


If we're playing, then I can throw in that many years ago I stopped to help someone change a flat tire, and he turned out to be the founder/father of his field - going on to train a postdoc who continued their early work and went on to win a Nobel Prize for it.

Excitement

Something you once knew
Seeing it in a new way.
That's Discovery.

[That also argues for learning being by analogy]

Ignition of Motivation in developing talent.

I am listening to the audio-book The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle.

The first part of the book was about developing "Deep Practice" which is not that different (actually a lot like) "Deliberate Practice" from Talent is Over-rated, by Geoff Colvin

The bit I am on now (Part 2) deals with the source of motivation that allows world-class performers to practice so much and get so much out of it. Specifically, the section I listened to last night was about the examples set by other people on the horizon. It is a really interesting section.

This morning this story was circulating on my alumni list about an above-knee double amputee who studied computer science and has now joined Google, Bangalore. If you ever studied engineering in India, you'd appreciate this story better. But for the purposes of comparison with the United States, it is like an illegal immigrant farm hand's child going to MIT.

What is most interesting about this story (at least for me this morning, given where I am in the Talent Code) is the number of specific individuals that Naga Naresh cites as sources of inspiration or help.

HW#2: My experience Tweeting for 48 hours

The most significant thing I learned this week

This experiment really got me thinking about what exactly a classroom is, and the place that the classroom holds in the learning process.

First, obviously the classroom does not have a lock on learning. Actually, the less it does, the more effective it is at nurturing independent life-long learners. But apart from that, there is the question of who exactly creates the classroom, and who owns it?

The classroom as four walls within a larger building on a specific campus still exists, and has its place. But for the purposes of this course, and in thinking ahead, we are really discussing a much broader concept of classroom. Once you surrender a physical definition of space, then the perceptions held by the users of a space do not need to hew to those of the creator of that space. In which case, whose perceptions have primacy? What are the politics of this? Especially what are the power structures that are torn down and recreated by this?

Since we are discussing school children here, who are not autonomous entities as compared to, say, college students, I think the questions of who holds the power and how are quite pertinent – esp. since the overwhelmingly majority of school-age teaching happens in tax-supported institutions

The time- and space-shifting possibilities created by modern communication technologies allow the classroom to be anywhere, and at anytime. No doubt, this is a two-edged sword. How exactly does one cleave the discussion to highlight the benefits and the costs? The possibilities and the potholes?


Questions I have and what do I want to learn more about?

What I desperately need at this time is a pedagogical framework within I can think about the role of technology in teaching, building community, and in communicating (one-to-many, many-to-many, and many-to-one).

I feel that these three issues are distinct, and are too often covered under one umbrella as if they were all the same.

The framework need not be one I agree with; just one that can help to organize and provoke my thinking. The readings helped, but only a bit, because they were primarily addressing other issues.

[Related to this is my gripe about the use of the buzz-word Technology in schools today. By starting this course with an emphasis on Twitter, Facebook, etc. I feel it too is succumbing to this lack of discernment.]


What applications do I see to classroom practice based on what I have learned?

My first, and very strong, reaction is that Twitter won’t work in the school classroom. However if I do find myself in a non-traditional classroom (e.g. afterschool community-based science explorations) then it might hold out some benefits.

Jan had a really good idea of letting 7-yr olds use Twitter. I initially got bogged down in privacy and safety issues, but then realized that the 140 character limit could be extremely liberating for a child with writer’s block.

Whether Twitter specifically has application or not, the 48-hr experience has been extremely useful in generating the seeds of what I would want to see any and future technologies, and what high-friction points I would watch out for.

I now have a whole list of things I dislike about Twitter.

HW#2: 48 hours Tweeting (topic description)

This homework required the entire class of 33 to use Twitter for at least 48 hours (spanning part of a weekend). And to then to blog about the experience.

There were two readings assigned for this week – as described here. But I did not have the sense (or time) to at least skim them before the Twitter experiment started.

The format of the weekly homework is to post at least ONE blog answering the following questions:
a. What was the most significant thing you learned in class this week?
b. What questions do you have and what do you want to learn more about?
c. What applications do you see to classroom practice based on what you learned?

The idea of blogging as a way of writing a homework paper is really neat. My memories of grad school assignments (almost 20 years ago) was that I wrote something that I thought would impress the professor the most.

With a blog the sense of who my audience is changes considerably, and with that my voice.
The potential of getting insight from other homework blogs too is quite exciting. (Do you do read them before or after the homework submission deadline has past?)

On-ramp to the Information Super-highway (in the clouds)

[Note this post is not about my career change. So I am mixing up blogs. But this parenting issue has considerable overlap with what educators are thinking or need to think about.]

Last night I was asked a question about children using the new and myriad ways of communicating, and realized that I had never organized these thoughts in my head before. So this blog is my way of thinking very aloud on this subject.

Of course, this is something that every parent and educator thinks off a lot. And the answers depend completely on the anxiety of the parent combined with the child's prior experience and ability to handle themselves in 'public' places. So there can be no generalized answers for this sort of thing. That said, here's where my thinking is at the moment.

The other caveat is that each 'technology' I mention has its own levels of sophistication of use, from the very basic, to the highly expert. So it is not as if you graduate from one to the other. But rather that you get introduced to each one, and become an increasingly sophisticated/discerning and independent user, while learning new technologies, and finding out which works best for what.

You, dear reader, have probably had different experiences, and will know of many technologies I have never heard of, so your comments are very very welcome. I'd love to find new ways to communicate (both generally, and specifically).

So here goes.... below is the on-ramp that I consider viable at present.

Telephone. Even a 3-yr old can use this in a one-way manner. You call her. Of course, eventually she is calling everyone from her cellphone! But that's what happens once the firehouse is fully open.

Skype. This actually works better for younger children. They find it easier to talk to a real person in a physical setting, rather than a plastic thing with buttons on it. The only reason I put it after telephone is that at the moment you have less control over your 'phone number' but that will change, especially once you start paying for it.

IM. The child needs to be able to type. But the parent can have fairly tight control over who is allowed in. I have not looked recently, but I am guessing that text-IM can be skipped and one can go straight to audio- or video-IM (a.k.a. Skype)

IM could lead to portal like Club Penguin. I have not been on it ever since Disney bought it. But they paid a heck of a lot of money for it, so I am expecting they will try and get their investment back. There must be other companies trying to emulate Club Penguin too. The draw of Club Penguin is that you get the absolute rudimentary Face-book like page (you can decorate your igloo, give yourself a stage-name, and you can text-chat with others), but under extremely tightly filtered/controlled conditions that will not permit personal details to go public. So as a parent you do not need to specify who your child's friends can be. But you hopefully worry less about what bad things are going to happen out there.

As an aside, the main problem I found with Club Penguin, is that conversations tend to be between children of the same developmental/typing age. This is a significant problem, because one learns the norms of conversation (in any medium) by being a part of inter-age/ability conversations. Assuming of course, that the 'olders' are sensitive to the needs of the youngers, which is not a fair assumption on the internet. This is why the internet cannot be used in an unqualified way as a classroom or learning environment.

Which is a good segue to family portals like Geni. [I put Geni after Club Penguin, because it is less fun.] Parents generally trust their children with extended family and fellow-villagers. Specifically because they believe that there is a shared idea and concern for the development of the next generation. Geni-like portals will probably become more sophisticated, and you can always let friends in that are as close as family. So you get a very wide geographic and age spread in the online community, but you can still limit it to people you have fairly good reason to trust. [These portals are going to resolve privacy issues as people make mistakes, so expect some bumps in the road.]



IM (in all its forms) can lead to e-mail. Longer sentences, more evolved thinking and expression of ideas, but still very tight control possible on who your child is talking to.

E-mail leads to blogs - still more sophistication in expression of ideas, and more public than email. I put blogs before Twitter, MySpace, and Facebook for two reasons. The first is that everyone you are worried about is not hanging out there. The second is that I feel it is more limiting than the other 3 (and their cousins) about what you say about yourself. That is a loaded thing to say, because you can say and show anything about yourself on a blog. My point is that the nature of a blog makes you quite aware of the public persona you are crafting for yourself. And the comment mechanism is extremely limiting on how other people react to this public persona. Thus blogs let a older child or younger adult confront, think about, and make mistakes on the issues of "Who am I?" and "How do I portray Me?" in a slightly more forgiving/safe space than on the other more rapid-fire 'technologies.'

After blogs they are on their own (not entirely, but you are no longer the one making the decision).

For my own children I am hoping they can be at this stage by 13 or 14, because after that they really, really have to be able to use their personal judgement of the situations they get into and be sufficiently savvy to get out of the more simple mess-ups.

An analogy to an older technology may work for what I am trying to say here. At what age can your child catch the bus to a cross-town soccer game? There's all sorts of things that can happen here that are a lot more complicated than just crossing a busy street - the bus is late, the bus is cancelled, she loses her money, the game is cancelled, or the location has been moved, her friends want her to go with them after the game, etc. How well she deals with any of these will determine whether you let her. But, at the same time, she won't be able to deal with any of these unless she has already tried and messed-up at some of them.

[Further qualification: My children's school has a police officer who specializes in internet issues come and give a talk each year about online safety. I have not yet gone for this talk. No doubt, going to one would make me considerably more anxious. But it may also change my opinion on everything I have said above. See very first caveat at top.]

Comments really welcome.