Educon 2013 is over and I’m on my way home, the Carolinian, Train number 79, on time with a passable WiFi connection. During this year’s conversations, I tried a new app and technique for taking notes. The App is GoodNotes, which is like a couple of dozen other stylus-based note-taking apps. What I like about this particular one is your ability to connect it with the iPad’s camera and integrate pictures into your notes.
I typically use a mind-mapping program, so that I can organize ideas in relation to others. But I’ve always missed the freedom of a blank page. Writing notes with a stylus has all sorts of disadvantages, but I can already see that I am going back to review my notes much more frequently than I have ever scanned my mind maps.
I confessed to a number of people yesterday, that I attend these things, not so much for new knowledge as for new language. I do not manage a school or classroom, so I am not looking for solutions. I need new ways of talking about education in the age of opportunity – which is often counter-intuitive to the my audiences’ vision of classrooms. New angles, phrases or new stories help to produce shakabuku. They sneak up on the listener and surprise them with new realizations.
The first thing I think, when seeing a panel for educators made up of non-educators is, “Why do we assume that business inherently does it better?” I have to confess that after the panel discussion was over and and I was trudging back up to my hotel (why’s going home always up hill?) through the (more slippery than it looked) snow, I asked myself that question – probably out loud.
But rehashing parts of it early the next morning and reviewing my notes, I see lots of ideas that, when unpacked, apply wonderfully to teaching, learning, and classrooms. Here are some phrases from Jeff Pulver, an entrepreneur and venture capitalist.
- Teachers should model entrepreneurship! I include this statement only because It comes up frequently during unconference sessions on education and entrepreneurship. If we want our children to be creative, then we need to practice creativity in front of them.
- Voice is an application! I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this one, but according to Wikipedia, “an ‘app’ is computer software designed to help the user to perform specific tasks.” One could say that giving voice to learning helps learners to accomplish something with what they’ve learned.
- The fuel for disruption is passion! This one makes a lot of sense to me. Disruptive technologies, techniques and processes change nothing unless someone is passionate enough to audaciously and heroically use them. Learning is disruptive. If it wasn’t, what would be the point?
Are we fueling our students’ learning?
- Be willing to break the rules! I keep playing around with the idea that rules, in school, are designed to contain the learning. However, in the real world, rules are a way of mapping the perceived constraints of reality. Those who accomplish goals creatively do so by rewriting the rules – reshaping the confines of reality. Personally, I prefer “changing the rules” or “re-writing the rules” to “breaking the rules.”
- Find People who don’t know it can’t be done! Is this an overlooked value of new teachers. I keep thinking that there is great potential to pairing experienced teachers with new teachers, when solving education problems – so long as each is willing to learn from the other.
- Make exercise fun! This one hit hard. It’s one of my regrets, as I approach the end of my career, that I have not thought enough or talked enough about our children’s physical education. I think that Pulver, from his own recent experiences in losing so many pounds, was spot-on, that “Exercise should be fun.”
But, for many, it’s not. I’ve never gotten anything from endorphins, though my wife use to claim an addiction to her afternoon jogs. Perhaps its an A.D.D. thing, because the only effect I feel from the (prescribed) stimulants I sometimes take is that I can suddenly express myself in a little more linear fashion. But no other physical sensation.
Some people don’t like sports. I was good at baseball and football, and played on school teams. But I never took the whole winning/losing thing very seriously – and never had fun playing with people who did.
Some people aren’t good at sports. One of my brothers could run faster than anyone in four blocks. But he never learned to catch a ball gracefully.
How do you make exercise fun? Here are a few thoughts.
- Sports should not be limited to those who are good at it and only for the good of the school. Invite everyone to play and celebrate the play. Playing is fun. Winning requires losers.
- (and keep my feet on the peddles).
- Find new human-powered routes. Greenways are huge in large cities, and I’m starting so see them in smaller cities. There are also some instances of walking and biking trails that connect towns, which is something I noticed a lot of in Germany. I believe that there’s a trail between Richmond, Virginia and the shore. Go to TrailLink to find trails in your state and community.
- Find new places to walk to. Just walking or biking is often not compelling enough. There need to be reasons to be on those trails, places to go, reasons to be on your feet. Making your community more bicycle and pedestrian friendly is essential. But how do you make them desirable or fashionable to use. Ask students to invest in them by devising solutions. Take a picture of your downtown and ask students to edit the picture, adding features for the self-propelled. Ask a Maker class to design and build bicycle racks for your community and work with stores and municipal establishments to install them. Get creative. Get going on your own two feed.
Here’s an interesting video showing many ways to incorporate mathematical ideas in to playing with those plastic connectable snakes. This creative girl has many videos on youtube showing math both on paper and represented by every day objects. Hope you like it.
In a world of entrepreneurs and bloggers, travel writing may be something for your students to think about as a future career. First of all, stress to your students the importance of being able to write maturely. While abbreviations are ok between friends, in order to gain respect anywhere, one must learn proper spelling and grammar. Aside from that, an urge to learn about cultures other than your own and an ability to adapt, because they don’t serve Kraft Mac and Cheese in India.
This infographic, produced by HotelClub, goes on to show what blogging platforms, social media sites, and other technology, such as phones and cameras, are most common among travel writers. It can be an expensive, and lonely, occupation, so one must also have money saved up, the proper equipment, and an ability to make friends anywhere.
Take your students on a trip to another country, via the internet. Have them research a part of the country, as though they are staying there, creating a budget and a plan. Have them write about their trip to a foreign country, and even try to connect with another group of students, or someone who lives over there to be fully immersed in the culture. Also, if food allergies are not a problem, have students bring in food and then present where they went to the class.
One of Philadelphia’s many building murals
I’m at Philadelphia’s EDUCON, a unique sort of learning event where sessions start with a proposed question, to be answered by the audience through conversation. The function of the presenter is to generate that problem-solving conversation.
Day one focuses on the Science Leadership Academy, a unique sort of school that hosts the conference. SLA students conduct tours of the school where we can talk with them and their teachers. It was my fourth tour of the school, two during EDUCON days, and two during normal school days walking through with its principal and founder, Chris Lehmann. Of course, nothing about SLA is normal.
Today, I had a personal tour, just me and Tyler, a senior with an interest in astronomy. He is working with the astronomy staff at The Franklin Institute on a number of projects. Needless to say, I shared with him my neighbor, Paul Gilster’s blog, Centauri Dreams.
Each time I visit SLA, I walk away with a different aspect of the place resonating between my ear. I remember my second tour with Lehmann, walking around and people would walk up, interrupting the tour, for a conversation with the principal. I suddenly realized that most of the time I unable to tell whether the person was a student or one of the school’s young teachers. The topics of the conversation never concerned the logistics of schooling, but were about the work of accomplishing some important goal or mission.
Today? Well it was authentic learning, a term I heard and overheard several times in the halls and classrooms. What struck me, was that there was always some sense of apology at the use of the word, like the speaker had not choice but to invoke it instead of some better phrase.
Authentic learning is a term with a long history in education, spanning well before NCLB – and it is a term that, frankly, has seen better days. I suppose it is true in most professions that a term or phrase becomes used by so many people, in so many places, within so many contexts, that the label’s weight shadows it’s original meaning. Many of us come to distrust the term and are left to use examples to convey our meaning – and examples rarely reach its essence.
I won’t presume to define authentic learning here. But during my conversations with instructors at the school and with Tyler, and seeing similarities between the educational practices at SLA and the vocational classes I took as a high school student, I saw a commonality that was informative to me. The linchpin effect of authentic learning is that..
The value of what is being learned is obvious to the learner
Does not have to be explained by the teacher.
There is great power
When the learning why
Is part of
The learning how.
So, continuing from my last blog article, if the answers to our questions are changing and they are constantly available to us, and helping our children learn to find, validate and use valuable information/media has become a central defining component of literacy, then of what use are textbooks. If stripped of the content – the right answers to questions – then what is left and to what purpose.
In my opinion, quite a bit is left. I took one of those remedial classes in my first year of community college, something like “Improve Your Study Skills.” I remember the professor telling us what to do upon receiving our textbooks each semester. We should scan through and register key items and sequence of ideas in the table of contents and also scan the index, looking for names, words and phrases that stand out. Each of these textbook elements provided anchor points within the content, giving it shape and meaning.
If the teacher or learner is starting without a packaged and provided collection of content, then a locally maintained table of contents (outline) and index (list of essential terms) become something quite different. Instead of anchor points, they provide idea magnets, serving to help draw together the most contextually relevant and defensible information in a sequence and shape that provides the deepest meaning to the content. It is, in a sense, a skeleton that gives shape to what might otherwise be an ugly bag of mostly water. (I always wanted to use that phrase – Geurs, Sanchez & Sabarof, 1988)
I had originally written a long technical examination of metadata here, but it would be one of many avenues to this sort of learning tool, and who am I to suggest how this might technically work. But what comes closest to being my personal and professional textbook today is Flipboard, a magazine-forming social network aggregator for both iOS and Android. I’ll be attending the upcoming Educon at Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy this week. In preparation, I’ve configured Flipboard to grab all tweets that are hashtagged with #educon, as well as the resources that are shared by those tweets. The effect is a new chapter to my textbook, capturing content from others who will also be attending or simply paying attention to the event via the social network. My textbook (Flipboard) is a carefully arranged, personal and constantly evolving set of information magnets, that attract the content that I need or want to see.
Might the day come, when a subject to be taught, is conveyed as a flexible outline of tags (so to speak). The job of the teacher would be to locate (or cause to be located) and attach content (both open-source and/or commercial), in any appropriate format, to that arrangement of scope and sequence-forming tags and constantly filter and refine that content based on changing conditions and newly available content?
What might this process look like as an integral part of teacher education? Might the act of starting their own flexible digital textbooks be a part of learning to teach. (Is “Flexbook” trademarked? How about “flexibook?”)
My point is that we have every reason to conclude that learning tools that assume a static, centralized and standard arrangement of content is irrelevant to the needs of today’s learners – and that today’s prevailing information environment provides for us some pretty compelling opportunities.
- That teachers can easily construct and refine learning tools based on local and universal conditions and individualized to the circumstances of specific learners.
- That learners can personalize their learning tools based on their self-discovered learning styles and their evolving personal interests.
- That these learning tools need not be turned in at the end of the course, but carried on, edited, adapted and grown.
- That learners can graduate with more than a paper diploma – that they might take with them a personalized digital library or network of content that they continue to maintain and evolve based on their continuing needs and interests.
- That this action of personal curation can become an integral part of formal education, further shifting it from
Something that is done to children
Something that we learn to do for ourselves.
My niece posted an Instagram photo last night of a stack of textbooks. In her description she wrote, “I never thought I would be so happy to receive textbooks.”
I commented, “But isn't it all on the Internet?” — mostly in jest. She knows me.
The information is out there on the network, of course. But her need for those textbooks is absolutely critical, regardless of what she can Google and in spite of how she will continue her essential professional learning after her textbooks are digested. You see, my niece is preparing for her CPA — and the right answers for that exam are not on the Internet. You can count on that.
A textbook, as a product of packaged content, is essential when we are tasked to learn the right answers — when we are being certified in some way as having x knowledge or y skills. But in my opinion, based on my own rather peculiar career, this is not education. It's training.
Training is not bad. There are certainly elements of formal education that require training — to learn facts and skills that are both useful and stable. 2 x 2 will always be 4 and 9 x 9 will always be 81. Yet, what it means to be educated changes, when answers shift with a rapidly changing world and when a dynamic global library is accessible to us from our own pockets.
Both of my grandparents had college degrees. But after their degrees were conferred, they prospered in a relatively stable world of information scarcity. Being educated was based on remembered knowledge.
Today, we function within a networked, digital and info-abundant environment, whose conditions are constantly changing. Being educated today is being able to skillfully, resourcefully and responsibly mine and utilize this infoscape within meaningful and reliable contexts to accomplish goals — which often involves learning something new. Using a traditional textbook does little to help students become skillfully, resourceful and responsible learners.
If preparing our children for their future means certifying them based on a measure of their remembered knowledge or certifying schools/teachers based on the measured knowledge of their students, then bring on the books, the bigger the better.
But if it is not a trainable/teachable worker who brings prosperity today, but the imaginative information artisan with a lifestyle of learning, unlearning and relearning, then we need to completely rethink the tools of education.
I will confess here that this is not exactly the article that I sat down to write. But it may lead into a next, and slightly more specific (if not more practical) article about these learning tools.
So check back by!
Comparing these two storms is like comparing apples and oranges (and there is an infographic that attempts this). The two storms hit landfall in two very different areas, areas with different natural surroundings, different city developments, and different populations. Hurricanes were expected in the Gulf, and so the areas had some sort of a set up against major storms. The gulf is also populated horizontally, and is on flat land. Meanwhile, the Northeast does not expect major Hurricanes like Sandy, especially not when combined with two other storms. They are much more densely populated per square foot, but fortunately, they are populated vertically. Unfortunately, they are a very technology centered environment, and so they were lost without power.
This infographic compares the storms in other ways. It compares the two as far as power, and its affects. Most of them turned out in favor of Katrina, proving Katrina to be the worst storm. But one has to think about the areas that the two hit. The two storms were nearly equally strong, but if Sandy had hit a primarily horizontal population, things may have been different. Also, the temperature may have been a factor. Snow doesn’t cause as many casualties as flooding, and the flooding that did occur can’t reach the tops of buildings the buildings in NYC.
Challenge your students to compare other storms and natural disasters, and discuss the differences between the natural disasters that lead to one being presumed worse than the other.
Ask your students what they think about daylight savings time. A change of clocks and a change in the times of when the sun is up is most common, but most people do not fully understand daylight savings time. It was originally created to save energy, moving the times people were awake to the times when the sun was up.
But until the 1950s with the economic boom, as well as the further development of the Interstate system, and further travel of people, one could simply rely on local time. It didn’t matter what time it was in the next state over, if they followed daylight savings or not. It wasn’t until 1966 that the Federal Government stepped in and enacted a law requiring all of the United State to use Daylight Savings time.
This infographic shows how the time change works. It shows the average sunrise and sunset, as well as actual sunrise and sunset times, and how it changes when we change our clocks. Have your students imagine what it would be like without the time change. What would it be like without the time change. At what times would the sun go up and down. How would that change our lives?
On November 14, 2012, a full solar eclipse could be seen in Australia for two minutes and 14 seconds. This natural phenomenon brought thousands of visitors and millions of dollars in revenue to the area. They occur so infrequently (on average every 18 months, a full eclipse only occurring every 18 years that many wanted to see this.
This infographic does a great job of sharing facts about solar eclipses. It shows what a solar eclipse looks like from Earth, and if one was in space, looking at the Earth, sun and moon. It also shows the different types of of solar eclipses and various facts about past eclipses.
Challenge your students to be able to explain a solar eclipse in their own words, and create one using your students and flashlights to better understand the concept. Also, look into history and discovery how they have affected history. Before the phenomenon was fully explained, what were theories. How did regular people explain them, and how did scientists explain them. How did religion explain them?
Plugged in with iPod, head set to communicate with game guild members, game controller, game keyboard to text players without broadband, and a laptop for IMing.
Several years ago, I wrote a blog article describing a picture that I'd taken of my son, in the TV room, wrapped up in his “technology.” I'm including the picture here, since he is no longer a minor and I can no longer so easily peak in on his techventures.
In the article I suggested that it wasn't technology that defined his experience nearly as much as it was the information that he was playing with. It continues to be a central theme of my work, that it's a new information experience we should be facilitating for our learners, not simply applying technology to old teaching pedagogues.
A few days ago, an old friend from my state agency days, John Spagnolo, gave me reason to revisit that article, when he commented with some questions that got me to thinking.
Among them was:
How have “smartphones” and cellular connectedness changed the nature of information over the past 8 or so years since this was written?
I think that one significant change that has occurred over the past seven or eight years, is that I, and many other seasoned adults have, for various reasons, begun to utilized this networked, digital and abundant information environment. I often say to friends, as I slip my phone back into my pocket, that we live in a time of no unanswered questions. The answer is almost certainly waiting in our pockets or on our laps. My cellular iPad has become a welcome and valued companion as my wife and I drive across North Carolina to visit with family and old friends. It helps us to continue conversations about the news, movies, the best route around Charlotte and settle minor arguments.
For my son and daughter, I suspect that their use of these connective tools has not changed significantly over the past several years. They cultivate networks of friends and acquaintances, which have probably grown with my daughter, whose interested have expanded, and grown smaller with my son, whose interests have narrowed and become more focused. They use Twitter more and Facebook less, and are probably more likely to be interacting with friends via a specific application, such as a game or Pinterest category.
I also wonder if, in many instances, we might be finding more creative ways of using this new info-landscape than our children.
Spagnolo also asked,
How does your son connect to and interact with his information today?
I suspect that both of my children interact with information more through games and through specific applications. I was so terribly disturbed a few years ago when smart people started suggesting that the Web was dead, that apps were changing the way that we used the Internet. But apps have certainly changed the way that my children use information and I find myself preferring to use Amazon and Craigslist apps instead of their respective web sites.
Apps have become an intriguing new avenue of economy, that I've suggested to me son, where people are making a living by designing highly specialized and compelling tools for using and playing with information.
Finally, he asked,
Has the nature of information influenced the emerging “appropriate technologies” like the digital learning object called an iBook?
My knee-jerk response is, “Not nearly enough.” This current push toward digital textbooks, urged on by our Secretary of Education, concerns me. I worry that we're engaged in a race to modernize schooling, rather than a sober and thoughtful imagining and designing of learning materials and practices that are more relevant to today's learners (ourselves include), today's information landscape and a future that has lost the comforts of certainty, but become rich with wondrous opportunities.
What I enjoyed, though, about my experience in publishing an iBook was learning to hack some features into the book that were not part of Apples general instructions for using their publishing tool. This is the ultimate opportunity of digital learning objects and environments, that they can be hacked into new and better learning experiences by information artisans who see what's there and what it can become.
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