Apr 29
Real learning (education) is a product of social agency. That’s precisely where it differs from training.
Apr 22
“No matter what the studies say, bullying happens and it must be our goal to stop it,” says the visiting ‘expert on bullying’ who runs a ‘Stop the Bullying’ foundation, before going on to quote shallow (and debunked) ideas about video games and aggression.
A cynic might think that this is a person who is enjoying his paid Alaskan vacation– the fruits of his alarmist scare-mongering– just as he enjoys dozens and dozens of others each year to spots around the country, and that the last statement just planted the seeds for a return visit in the future. But I’m a realist, I suspect he means what he says and is merely ignorant.
In the meantime we have a very real weapons and school-terror drama happening at nearby North Pole Middle School, where six students have been arrested for plotting to kill peers and staff alike.
Does anyone really believe that the ministrations of the platitudinous bullying expert– if he’d just been heard earlier– would have prevented the North Pole incident? Maybe a few. Will we be hearing about how video games must be involved in this near tragedy? I’m sure. But both of these represent either outright ignorance or a willful desire not to face the fact that what we are seeing here is nothing new.
School violence hasn’t increased since 1990; in fact it has decreased. This may well be due– in part– to a focus on bullying and discipline. It also creates a chafing, hidebound system that encourages the festering of small-scale conflicts and social friction with no remaining outlets to escalate to tragic proportions.
Back in the late seventies and early eighties when I was a teen, we not only had violent video games, but actually played outside practicing very real violence on ourselves. We beat (literally) and shot at (literally) each other as cowboys and indians, GIs and gooks, and commies and Americans. My father had 22 slug buried in his leg from his days of playing war as a teenager.
The fact is, as poor Piggy discovered, children have an intrinsic tendency to violence and exclusion that is matched by a natural tendency to explore and embrace. It’s the paradox of the human animal, evolved (or not) as we are.
The solution– as usual– lies in the simple things. Parents need to stop looking for blame and start fully loving their children. This means paying attention, participating in their lives, providing firm but rational discipline. Stop paying for outside, fear-mongering experts to go on vacation and pay the good teachers who actually care about and provide innovative nurturing learning environments for students… and fire the rest.
Mar 29
Among other speakers at our Internet2 Day was Doug Van Houweling, President and CEO of Internet2, etc. Just about every discussion of Internet2 seems to come back around to video delivery. I was hoping Doug, speaking on the topic “Beyond Tomorrow’s Internet” would help open peoples’ minds to some real innovative ideas. Unfortunately, while his notes about partnerships, neutral nets, and the nuts and bolts of Internet2 becoming everyone’s bandwidth were well taken and on-point, when he had a chance to talk about innovation he fell right back into the same old song and dance I’ve seen a dozen times before.
Doug’s house of the future was essentially my household with some Jetson’s style video layered on top. So you have kids surfing the net and using IM and eyeball cams, and you have work and downloads happening with impressive speed. But beyond that it was just more video: high def videoconferencing, video phones, high def delivery of movies, high def entertainment delivery and storage. I’m not denying that most of these are good things that will happen. They are happening now, they’ll just be happening faster and with more clarity.
But that’s exactly the problem. When it comes to communication, there’s a reason George and Jane Jetson’s video phones haven’t become ubiquitous, and it’s not about bandwidth. It’s because people don’t want them. Videophones are a dead idea. Videoconferencing, no matter how high-def, is a highly constrained technology. The fourth wall remains, the high transactional distance remains in full force. Video conference works in certain settings and with a certain definition of “works” that is usually based on there being no other technology available. But adding increased clarity and more frames-per-second will have almost no effect on that rate of success. Videconference is simply a very poor educational tool that is highly desired by those who don’t have it, valued by those who have nothing else, and easy to understand by those who don’t use it.
No matter how speedy and how many pixels there are, the heart of videoconferencing is hollow. You can make it bigger, you can make it faster, you can make it sharper, but it doesn’t make it better. It has an undeniable hold on the imagination of administrators (and when it comes to entertainment it makes great sense), but ultimately it’s just what I’ve started calling “polishing the poo.” No matter how lacquered and attractive, it’s still a turd. It’s not innovation.
Mar 29
Our Internet2 Day demo went quite well (a few photos here– I actually did present despite the picture of me in apparent stasis). Our basic question was: if you had Internet2 connectivity right now (we do in fact have access to Internet2 bandwidth, but since it doesn’t go anywhere except to other Internet2 participating institutions it isn’t particularly useful) what would you do with it?
Doing a demo on this question is a bit tricky– we don’t spend time developing for extremely high-bandwidth, so anything we did would have to be theoretical, but it was important to me that we tie it to real practices. So we basically came up with a demo that talked about creating a unified interface that would pull together the three main segments of a future classroom interaction:
- “big data”, video, visualization space
- interactive, synchronous classroom space
- interactive collaborative space
All three of these are achievable now, but bringing them together cohesively is the big-bandwidth dream. Not incidentally, the three pieces align perfectly with the “arc of technologies”: broadcast, transaction, and transformation.
My idea to do real-time scanning electron microscopy and analysis was scuttled because the remotely controlled scanning electron microscope was being used for a different session right after ours. So we decided on a hypothetical class bringing together remote biology and geography students to study the Avian Flu. The basic layout was:
- Center-stage was the big data channel for scientific presentation (lab techniques, field techniques, visualization of the virus, microscopy, and GIS visualization of viral spread). I provided a narration of a few minutes of video presenting these modes, some simulated.
- Stage right we had the Elluminate! live classroom where I worked with the remote students on analysing the potential spread and detection of Avian Flu in relation to population centers and migratory bird routes from Southeast Asia. The “remote” students were actually in the audience on laptops representing students from all over Alaska, some along bird routes, some near high population centers, some neither. With Elluminate they interacted using voice, whiteboard interactions, text chat, and various presence indicators (hand raising, emoticons, etc).
- Stage Left was a GroupSystems collaboration session facilitated by colleague Bob Briggs allowed the students to collaborate on a divergent brainstorming session about facts and factors based on what they had learned that were important to everyone as well as to their specific location, then a convergent session to create a clean list for further learning, research, study, writing, etc. with a goal of creating a place-based resource on Avian Flu for their communities.
There were only two minor technical flubs on the part of the sound and light stage crew, but they were basically invisible to the audience anyway. The important things were we were on-time, the transitions all worked seamlessely, and we were able to hammer home the most important messages: creating a learning environment that allowed for creation of new meaning, place-based relevance in the learning environment, reaching a distributed cohort across disciplines, real-life examples of the educational arc, that much of this was available now and that Internet2 could be about more than just video (more on that in my next post). I may have ranted a little bit towards the end in reaction to earlier speakers that kept talking about making the location of users irrelevant (equal access) where I want to see the location take on a new, important relevance in learning!
Mar 22
At least in Georgia. The real problem here can be seen in the headline: if these are going to be acceptable in a public high school, then they shouldn’t really be “bible classes” should they?
I heard a news segment on this legislation this morning. Even proponents argue it will be hard to teach. But it shouldn’t be hard at all if the subject is actually taught as history and literature not as religion. While the sponsor of the bill said that this wasn’t about religion or indoctrination and that the subject matter would be taught in a secular manner as a subject of social studies, history, and literature, he is proposing this in a heavily conservative state with a strong Christian conservative lobby.
It was ironic, but not surprising, that the first legislative supporter interviewed talked about how this class was needed because students “need faith… they need to understand the power of scripture.” Sounds real objective to me.
Mar 14
I’m late in noting the hiatus of Stephen Downes’ blog (and site), the announcement coming– as it did– during a busy time. So I add my voice to the chorus of farewells, but would like to note that it’s with only a touch of selfish sadness at this particular river of information drying up for a while. Whatever the circumstances, Stephen is hopefully doing what all innovative thinkers must do from time-to-time– stepping back, contemplating, and eventually moving in a new direction (or back in the same direction with renewed vigor and insight). I wish him great success!
Feb 18
My son, in 7th grade, is doing your typical 7th grade science project– find a topic, do some research, create a display of some kind, make a presentation. I’d like to see this activity, which carries significant points, be a little more innovative, but this is my second child so my protest reserves are low and this can be a great activity.
Unbelievably, though, in addition to a selection of books, he is limited to using a few dozen selected, vetted online (and necessarily– since chosen ahead of time– generic, and shallow) resources. The “summarize the Britannica” exercise has become a “summarize one of these selected resources” exercise.
Why are teachers so intent on keeping kids out of the deep end of the pool instead of teaching them to swim? I saw a news segment about 6 month old infants being taught to swim and survive if they fall into a pool, but my 13 year old, who manages an online “clan” of gamers, can’t look for original resources on the web? How about providing a rubric for evaluating resources and letting the students take a stab at it? Have the students provide a printout, a link, and their own evaluation? At worst the teacher can reject a resource. At best, Galen could include information like the emergent use of ragworms as a model for a new method of endoscopy– which is pretty darn cool!
It’s ironic that this project stresses choosing a topic that is important and interesting to the students, relevant, timely, etc… but the students are fed musty resources from the Hallowed List of Approved General Reference Materials.
Feb 16
Alan’s post on finding a way to narrow and get more depth into his training/demos has been calling to me from my “To Contemplate” news bin (that’s another things aggregator’s should make easy– a way to share our clippings/news bins/etc… more of that attention stream). There’s never enough time to do it, and yet there’s so much about the breadth– the connections and small pieces and (dare I say it) synergy– that is important if people are really going to grok what we already know.
Frankly, I’m afraid to go narrow in my own training because I worry that the regret over not at least exposing my audience to the larger continuum will be greater than the guilt of forcing them to drink from the firehose…
But maybe. Flickr does seem like a good place to start if one is going to drill down into the meat. Flickr is on my list like everyone else’s because it’s a nice visual way to approach folksonomy, tagging, and meta-data. I find that users respond to RSS and aggregation coming from Flickr more readily because the juxtaposition between browsing Flickr and using the feeds is a lot clearer than blog feeds which, to the uninitiated, don’t seem that different from the blogs themselves. And, of course, the blog posting features make a natural bridge. I’ve got a thousand upcoming opportunities, I guess I’ll just have to try it.
(I know, another link to CDB– I can hear the jeers– why don’t I marry him already? Guess I’m just propping up My A-List)
Feb 09
I’m not an evangelist. I’m an educator implementing solutions for myself and for faculty, staff, and students I’ve worked with, mostly in higher education. I’m a learner, learning from my students and colleagues. And I try to be a connector, working within my professional network to enhance my ability to teach and to learn.
I’m not an evangelist. It’s not my job to convince anyone that a technology is interesting. It’s not my desire to convince someone that a cool is tool regardless of its application. It’s not my calling to figure out for someone else what is missing in their experience as an educator.
I have colleagues who are– for better or for worse– evangelists. Their work is to convince a reluctant, even hostile, group to make particular changes. I’m fortunate not to have to do that. If you feel that you are able to achieve all the outcomes you have in mind in your classroom (particularly at a distance), then you probably don’t have any need for my input. Maybe you use social software and a constructivist, socratic, discover-based learning environment… or maybe you are a charismatic lecturer inspiring students through your role as “sage on the stage.” Either way, it’s ok with me. Rock on.
I don’t have desire (or time, or energy) to convince the skeptics– there are too many people actively looking for new solutions. I don’t have any desire to argue abstractly that blogs, whiteboards, journals, pencils, or paper-clips are good or bad technology. They simply are and I’d rather talk about sharing how they have been used successfully– and how they have failed– to meet specific pedagogical goals.
Nor do I have time to argue about definitions. It’s very clear, when I (and many others out there) talk about blogs, wikis, discussion boards, social bookmark managers, social photo sharing, folksonomy, and other what we are talking about because we aren’t talking on an abstract level. Maybe with a few drinks in me I’d be up to discussing some of these in the abstract, but generally I’m interested in where the rubber meets the road, where the generally agreed upon conventions are clear enough to focus on making things work rather than theorizing about whether they can or not. The philosophical discussion can be interesting, but trying to divert either kind of engagement to the other is at best frustrating, and at worst evidence of bad faith.
I’m not an evangelist. An evangelist is a persuader, a lobbyist, and a true believer in a specific idea who wants to roll around on the rhetorical mat in service of a philosophy. I’m a mechanic with a toolbox that can help with certain problems and enable certain constructions, those tools and constructions subject to constant change. An evangelist never walks away willingly. A mechanic is there if you need what he has to offer, otherwise you can forget he or she is even there.
Feb 03
Picked up two quotations picked up in the last week that resonate strongly with how I see life and my work as an educator and as one involved in educational technology and transformation:
“People don’t mind problems that can’t solve… but they hate solutions they don’t understand.” (Eric Bonabeau)
I can think of no one for whom this is more true than educators who are given technologically mediated solutions without the proper information to understand them. Most would rather live with the problems.
“Simple elegant rules give rise to complex, intelligent behaviors.
Complex rules lead to simple, unintelligent behavior.” (Dee Hock)
As someone else noted, this really explains bureaucracy and politicians, but I was thinking more along the lines of how aptly it describes the almost magical transformation that can occur when a real community of learners develops… and how difficult it is to establish such communities if one has too many rigid, complicated rules for participation.