2 Responses to “Linklog: 2008-09-12”

• Gary S. Stager, Ph.D. on September 12th, 2008 at 8:26 am

  Dear Mr./Ms. Ruminate:

  Thank you for the link to my site.

  I’m confused by your expressed concern. First of all, nobody’s blog is a documentary and the participants in Constructing Modern Knowledge were under no obligation to prepare lesson plans for you or anyone else.

  There are always levels of transparency and opacity in any learning system. You may be looking at a different level of the onion.

  Within the blogs you read are stories of the learning environment, the new skills developed, the projects created, the pedagogical approach modeled and reflections on interactions with some of the most powerful thinkers in the world of education. Do you think it’s possible for someone to spend four days developing personally meaningful projects collaboratively in a high and low-tech material rich environment AND spending hours in conversation with Alfie Kohn, Peter Reynolds or Marvin Minsky without it influencing their teaching practice. Perhaps you missed the lengthy blog by one participant detailing his inner conflicts reflecting upon Alfie Kohn’s view on teaching practice.

  Finally, your critical review may come down ultimately to a critical question asked by Seymour Sarason - What do YOU mean by learning?

  Hope to see you next year at Constructing Modern Knowledge!

  Gary

• chris on September 12th, 2008 at 8:54 am

  Gary–

  Chill out! I didn’t miss that blog entry. The feeling of something missing had nothing to do with your conference but was instead merely my surprise at the relative paucity of reflection w/r/t teaching practice *afterward*. I read through the blogs expecting to find, later, what I would have found most enlightening– how the fun they had engaging at the conference ultimately affected them as educators. This is one of the values that I look for in reading blogs. It’s not a requirement… I think it’s OK to note that something I would expect to see wasn’t there. If I didn’t think it was worthwhile I wouldn’t have linked to it, and my linking to it does not imply any requirements.

  I *don’t* think it’s possible that an experience that sounds as entertaining and engaging with the kind of minds you had there could help but have an influence… that’s why I was surprised that there was so little mention later.

  I’m not quite sure how my tiny annotation is a critical review, though I suppose that the lack of later reflection (which is understandable, in practical ways, but ultimately disappointing to some of the 6 billion people who were not at the conference itself) could leave your activities open to the same attack that you constantly make in educators blogs when they express similar sentiments about their activities and don’t tie them strongly to how it influences (or even matters) to education.

  I don’t believe this to be the case (or perhaps only a tiny, inconsequential, bit that has nothing to do with the conference activities), but listening to a group of educators talk about their experience building with legos without much critical reflection could be seen as a lot like educators sharing how great their students felt building things with Tool X, a practice you rather regularly decry.

  It’s like reading sports blogs. Some people read them for news, some for reflection and opinion, some for analysis. I was surprised, all in all, that the bloggers who attended typically chose to stop with what is, to me, a beginning. To the extent that I reflect a more or less common expectation, this points to something missing.

  I’d love to attend the conference, but it may not be in my economic reality given the distance and current economics in this country

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