[image by jef safi]

As the organization I am working for goes through a number of serious and mysterious changes, my blogging volume might lessen for a while. Not knowing what I will be working on and what projects and initiatives will continue– basically not sure what my future looks like at all– throttles back my energy a bit.

In the meantime, I wanted to share a few items that have been swimming in circles in my “ToBlog” bookmark stream:

Room for PLEs?
As many of you will know, I’m particularly interested in the concept of Personal Learning Environments, particularly how to help people grow theirs and how the PLE does/doesn’t/can/can’t fit into the processes of institutional education. In this article, George Siemens takes a look at whether there is room in educational institutions for the PLE, particularly w/r/t the LMS. I’m going to ride the fence on this one. Given that the way institutions operate as a whole will always have perpetuation of their existence and relevance as their most important objective, and given that this leads to an oversized attachment to business as usual and an endemic resistance to change, then the idealized form of the PLE doesn’t really fit… inside the tent, at least. But in real practice I witness too many productive uses of PLEs, in partnership with institutional LMS systems or not, to maintain that they can’t work in tandem with existing educational structures. The Platonic form of the eternal PLE may be inimical to older models of teaching, and it certainly can engender some resentment of– and resistance to– those approaches by faculty. Perhaps it can only come to be with a drastically revolutionary reconception of the mechanisms of teaching and learning… but I’m not holding my breath.

Most Likely to Succeed
Malcolm Gladwell’s article on teachers and assessing teaching performance has been getting a lot of attention. I know Gladwell’s exposure of late has lead to a (ahem) tipping point in perception– the polarized groups of haters and defenders are in full force. Regardless, there’s some interesting thinking going on in this piece about the difficulty in evaluating good teachers:

Educational-reform efforts typically start with a push for higher standards for teachers—that is, for the academic and cognitive requirements for entering the profession to be as stiff as possible. But after you’ve watched Pianta’s tapes, and seen how complex the elements of effective teaching are, this emphasis on book smarts suddenly seems peculiar.

And the need for a different model for producing good teachers:

In teaching, the implications are even more profound. They suggest that we shouldn’t be raising standards. We should be lowering them, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don’t track with what we care about. Teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree—and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before. That means that the profession needs to start the equivalent of Ed Deutschlander’s training camp. It needs an apprenticeship system that allows candidates to be rigorously evaluated. Kane and Staiger have calculated that, given the enormous differences between the top and the bottom of the profession, you’d probably have to try out four candidates to find one good teacher. That means tenure can’t be routinely awarded, the way it is now. Currently, the salary structure of the teaching profession is highly rigid, and that would also have to change in a world where we want to rate teachers on their actual performance. An apprentice should get apprentice wages. But if we find eighty-fifth-percentile teachers who can teach a year and a half’s material in one year, we’re going to have to pay them a lot—both because we want them to stay and because the only way to get people to try out for what will suddenly be a high-risk profession is to offer those who survive the winnowing a healthy reward.

Epigenetic Education
D’Arcy’s back from vacation and giving his blog (welcome him back to Twitter, too) some love. This post caught my eye because I’m an absolute sucker for models– explanatory and predictive– of educational practice and institutions. The model of epigenetic factors is appealing because:

• It makes an intuitive sense for representing how those of us working at the edge– and even a bit outside of– institutions that are our homes operate, in ways that both enhance and limit our potential effect
• “Epigenetic” is just a great term. Scientific and epic, of the living organism– the kind of thing I might say to myself repeatedly if I were still a partaker of the wacky weed…. epigenetic, ep-i-ge-netic, epigenetic, etc. Repeat a dozen times then desperately eat any foodstuff no matter how abhorrent.

A Paean to Activists and the response: Activists
Dave Pollard’s post put a voice to many feelings I share, some of which are logically contradictory. I feel a strong need and desire to help effect change that sits atop a pretty solid foundation of hopelessness about the bigger picture. With that I alternate between trying anyway, sometimes with enthusiasm, and a lethargy that lends itself to despair. The activist anonymous approach– one day at a time, change what you can, it works if you work it– might help me survive, but it does little to help me thrive. Stephen Downes’ response is, for my money, one of his sharpest and most elegant posts ever, out of many great blog entries. Besides adding a book to my reading list (Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death), his post also just spoke to me:

Activism isn’t about guarantees of success. It isn’t bout knowing that, in the long run, your work will lead to a better future. Activism is about being alive, about there actually *being* a civilization to which we all belong, and about that civilization being worthy of a life, being worthy of a future.

Even were we to think that the current ills afflicting our society are terminal, we continue the struggle. For, of course, a great many of us do not, for we do not see the death of the current state of civilization as death, just change. And even those who feel we cannot survive continue to build a legacy, to build an achievement worthy of literature and song.

It is as though we activists believe that it is not enough merely to live well, it is also important - perhaps most important - to die well. To go out swinging, with our heads held high, believing to the last breath that there is something worth living for, something worth fighting for, that so long as there is a breath in our body the dream lives on and can be carried forward.

Program for the Future
Celebrating the 40th anniversary of Doug Engelbart’s Mother of All Demos and focusing on Engelbart’s vision of Collective Intelligence, I’d heard nothing about this conference before Gardner Campbell’s live Tweets started appearing (I look forward to the future blog posts this event will surely inspire from Gardner). Interesting thoughts and observations started coming in from others, such as Alan Levine and various tidbits you can find by browsing the PFTF Ning community. I don’t have a clear mental construct to understand Collective Intelligence, but intuitively I grok its relevance and importance in a world that is increasingly connected, and as rich in information as it is relatively poor in sense-making. Pierre Levys book Collective Intelligence was fascinating, but as such books do left me with more questions than answers. There are various slide sets and links available from the conference, but sadly I haven’t found any archive of video… as many have noted, this was a super high-power group including some of the greatest minds and most interesting innovators around: Engelbart, Alan Kay, Steve Wozniak, Peter Norvig, and others.

I went to this session with less interest in MERLOT than in seeing other models of faculty and course development. I found Lisa Pirinelli-Dubuc’s part of the presentation rather interesting in that way, seeing that the SUNY Learning Network that she was representing has 4300+ online courses– almost all of which are wholly online– with 100,000 students and 2000 faculty!

Among other things she pointed out the SUNY TLT cooperative which provides online faculty development courses in a 4-course sequence, various 1hr webinars and an annual workshop at their Conference for Instructional Technologies (for example, the 2007 CIT conference). Also mentioned: the Course Redesign Initiative and their Faculty Development Program.

Information to be found in the MERLOT Pedagogy Portal could be quite useful in our own faculty development efforts.

Although we are not particularly into MERLOT, the SUNY TLT also shares planning and production materials to help others who want to put on Faculty Development workshops, and I suspect there will be much there that is broadly accessible.

Phil Moss stepped in for a presenter who could not make it and shared another interesting MERLOT subject area, the Developing and Delivering Online Courses Portal, sponsored by McGraw-Hill.

Is coming from those who spend their time worrying about a research basis for a phenomenon that is easily observable in any classroom, followed very closely by those who presume that the net-gen is determined by biology. I still can’t post comments to George’s blog, so I will respond to his Net Gen Nonsense post here.

George: The Net Gen Nonsense blog fits right in, of course, with your predisposition– perhaps borne of seeing too much extremism ala Prensky– to be against the notion that learners are changing. And you seem to equate the idea, again ala Prensky, with being mostly– or even significantly– biological.

I suspect that we will see, in retrospect, that there are biological and neurological changes occurring due to technological changes, but it’s not really important. The remonstrations about the evidence remind me of scientists concluding that bumblebees can’t fly and philosophers concluding that there is no physical reality. Like Berkeley, I refute you thus, with the students I teach every term… but I will refrain from kicking them as proof!

More importantly, a whole lot of learning is not about biology but about cognition and the mental processes built on top of that biology. The two points with which you conclude your post (”1) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and create information, and 2) the changed ways in which we can access, interact with, and connect to each other.”) are changes in learners, and they are changes that happen as a result of living in a very different and quickly changing technologically mediated environment than others. Fight it all you want, but those learners are different. It has nothing to do with age and the biological origins are at best unclear… but it is immaterial. Anyone who pays attention to their students can see this in the divide they face within their classes between the haves and knows and the have not/know nots. Whatever the label, a host of educators nod in recognition of the characteristics regardless of the question of the origins, which has always been my central point in this debate: I don’t care about the reasons as much as I care about the solutions, and I won’t discount what I see and experience because the research (which hasn’t been an enviable guide when it comes to education so far, but that’s a different discussion) isn’t there or isn’t unclear. A refutation would make a difference, but there’s an obvious reason why there isn’t one, and I don’t mean the philosophical bit about proving a negative.

I don’t know how much you teach and how many of those you teach are adolescents, but clearly you see these changes or you wouldn’t so explicitly point out some of the conditions effecting that change in your two concluding points. It’s not as if all of us who teach are likely to be suffering a mass delusion and I think too many people with too many different, varying backgrounds when it comes to experience teaching and knowledge of technology and communication hear the squeaky wheel to be convinced that it’s just an illusion they are bringing to the table.

David Warlick, blogging about a presentation by Stephen Heppell, pointed to this incredibly cool video demonstrating a visual method for solving math problems. These are just the kind of alternative approaches we need to incorporate to be an expansive teacher. I love one of the last comments, presumably in response to an earlier expression of mystification: “Brilliant visualisation. Compare this with the ‘normal’ way and you are doing real mathematics.”

I won’t pretend to understand most (much!) of Beckett’s Nohow On, but there are two phrases in it that have stuck with me since the dizzying experience of reading those three slim volumes. The opening of the third movement “Worstward Ho”:

“On. Say On. Be said on. Somehow on. Til nohow on.”

Coupled with its famous closing:

“Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.”

This extremely loose couplet is Beckett’s exhortation to the tune of “try, try again” or “outwrite the bastards” but with higher stakes than a good poem or story… Beckett is reminding us that to say and do– repeatedly– is to be and and it is imperative that we keep at it until there is nothing else.

I was reminded of this extremely loose couplet while reading “Quantity Breeds Creativity” at Lifehack. There are two obvious educational aspects here which sometimes get overlooked (particularly if you believe, as I do, that the creative process is one of the most important parts of learning):

First, creativity isn’t efficient. There has been a lot of focus in the past few years on network effects, collectives and connectives, learning community and collaboration, much of which has explicitly or implicitly embraced a desire for efficiency. In my experience, creativity is most often fuzzy, vague, messy and characterized by a feeling of not really being sure what one is doing until they have done it. Creativity is driven by a variety of overlapping and sometimes partially opposing forces of experience, knowledge, and desire. In between making something great and making nothing lies a whole lot of making the mundane, mediocre, inessential, and irrelevant. Making something finally real– and thus being in the world– is harnessing the wisdom of the crowd of one… our multiplicitous self.

Second, creativity depends on repetition. This is really an extension of the lack of efficiency. We know from other aspects of our lives that where there is less efficiency there must be more effort to achieve the same goal. There’s a limited– but important!– amount that can be achieved by waiting for the intersection of the perfect moment and the muse. I’m not discounting the inspired stab in the dark, but most creative thought emerges from repetition, and most of that repetition will be, if not failure, something other than success.  Flannery O’Connor once said that she wrote every day because who knew if a day she skipped might have been the day she would choose well?

I see ramifications of ignoring these two facts at work in the classroom all the time. As educators we try to find the most efficient way of teaching, the combination that– when right– will facilitate a particular learning process, frustrated when it doesn’t “work.” It’s not wrong, of course, to want to be efficient– we all have limited time and resources– but I wonder how often we go too far or simply hope for too much clarity in a process that is so individualized. Educators and learners alike often don’t put the tools, concepts, or techniques to work often enough and for long enough to really understand them. If lightning doesn’t strike immediately or consistently enough, promising and productive paths are abandoned.

There’s a bit of magic in the process where wholes become more than the sum of their parts and tools and creativity are melded. No matter how clearly and often I try to explain the value and nuance of blogging, for example, it must be engaged regularly and for a length of time before those lessons become real. It was the same with regular paper journals before and it will be the same when we have cyborg monkey servants in the future. It isn’t luck that these proven models work for some but not for others, it is a product of practice (of the repetitious kind that leads to the Zen kind). To end with a sports analogy to complement the video, think of Arnold Palmer’s famous response to the accusation that a tough shot out of the rough he had just made was luck: “All I know,” Palmer answered, “is that the more I practice, the luckier I get.”

[linktribution: Doug Belshaw]

 
[art by Perla*]

…these forceful teachers did have a few qualities in common: they enjoyed using their minds; the paid attention to what was going on outside the classroom; they were demanding and generous and patient; they cared passionately about learning; they lived in light of what they knew. They left their mark on me not merely because they passed on knowledge, although that was crucial, but because they demonstrated ways of being fully and richly human.

[...]

“I thought professors had it all together,” a woman said.

“I’m hardly a professor,” I answered.

“You don’t know everything there is to know about these books?” a man asked.

I laughed. “Not by a long sight.”

“Like what Moby Dick stands for? Or why Anna throws herself under a train?”

“I’ve got my hunches,” I said, “and I’ve read what a lot of other people think. But I don’t know fur sure. Nobody knows for sure. Not even Melville and Tolstoy.”

“No wonder literature’s so confusing,” someone said.

“Just like life,” another student remarked.

“Just like life,” I agreed, “only books hold still so we can look at them.”

After that exchange I felt less afraid. I kept making notes for discussion, but left them behind when I entered the classroom. I tried to ask only genuine questions, ones for which I had no certain answers. I learned to bear silence, realizing that it might cover the presence as well as the absence of thought. I allowed my enthusiasm as well as my ignorance to show. When I got worked up, as I often did, about a book or an idea or a cause, the students watched me with shy bemusement, and when I hushed they spoke up with passion of their own. The excitement in their voices gave me courage to keep on trying this difficult profession.”

–Scott Russell Sanders
from “Teacher” found in The Country of Language

Put the emphasis on whichever word in the title works for you, but a small listing would have to include:

• That being open to learning often means being challenged, being surprised, being overwhelmed, and being wrong. Sometimes all of these things at once. And it’s OK.
• That some of the best learning experiences come from being vulnerable– a key part of being open– and vulnerability’s OK.
• That vulnerability– even the good kind– often involves fear. And fear’s OK.
• That none of these things matter if you don’t care and the fact that you don’t care isn’t always– or even often– your fault. It’s not a permanent condition. It’s OK to care.
• That the upper register of caring is in harmony with passion and while we can’t all be passionate about the same things we can respect it when we see it, hold onto it when we discover it, and look for it everywhere. Go ahead: dig through the drawers, go for dessert first, wonder aloud, and ask big questions. It’s OK.
• That being passionate can make us strangers in our own skin– not to mention our world of friends, acquaintances, peers and family– and that’s OK.
• That wonder is just one down-stroke past wander, you can’t have the first if you don’t do the second, and wonder isn’t only wanting to know something you don’t, but a state of being, as in being awestruck or being in love.

Jen is asking questions in an area that I remember D’Arcy talking about some time ago: handling digital identity for children and students. How do we protect them? Will they resent the stuff we have them putting out into the social web later?  It’s an important and ongoing issue. I’m synopsizing/abridging/adding to my latest response and putting it here in hopes of enlisting more thoughts for Jen. In my first comment I advocated for consideration of the opposite approach– perhaps we have an obligation to facilitate these activities. I theorized that the idea of limiting participation comes from the same kind of idea of protection that has lead to school filters (not that they are the same idea or that Jen is advocating filters in that sense).

I didn’t say that your post and filtering were the same, but that they seem to come from similar sources, in particular the idea of “protection” and what it means as a parent and teacher. I understand what you are saying– and I’ve taken this position when others have tackled these questions. I just happen to have a different perspective. In the end people will opt for what makes sense to them and have no obligation to agree with me. Which is good, since not very many do!

You are asking about the potential negatives of your child having a socially mediated part of life and I am responding that I am more concerned if they don’t have a rich life there. You are asking about ramifications for employment and judgment and I am saying that I think the negative ramification are a temporary issue borne of change and soon will evolve to wondering about people who don’t have that trail behind them. I see this already when I look for someone’s social presence and can’t find it… it makes me wonder where they are coming from and, potentially, what is wrong with them. What if the first graders of today don’t resent us for putting stuff out there but resent and question why we didn’t or didn’t do more?

This is where I diverge from many others-– I think part of our responsibility as parents and educators is precisely about identity, digital and otherwise. I don’t trust the environment by itself to shape my child offline and I don’t do so online. I also don’t see it as a binary issue where only one thing can happen if I am involved and that is “foisting”– I see it as part of the developmental process. Children and students are at a stage where the co-creation of their identity involves parents and teachers, and for good reasons. Eventually they move on to be more aware add in control (but never wholly), and it continues to change. It’s not as if they are stuck (or blessed) with only what came before they asserted greater control and assumed greater involvement. It’s an ever-changing story.

The definition of the “true story of who we are” is subject to change… and is changing because the nature of public and private acts are changing. I think this change is generally for the better, even if it is a bit uncomfortable at times for everyone.

I don’t want to dismiss taking a judicious approach. The difference between a judicious inquiry like Jen’s and the pernicious effects that we see when institutions end up trying to do with individuals should be doing is the difference between a powerful and thoughtful approach that a good teacher like Jen seeks to take and the stupidity of broad filters and creativity killing, overly restrictive firewalls… but I do think this is an issue in which reasonable people can– and will continue to– disagree.

If I had to pick a single teacher from my past as the “best” (I feel fortunate at having more than one!), it would be Dr. Doom, teacher of a senior-level class in Romantic Literature that I took as a freshman because I could get away with it and because I thought I was quite a literary hotshot.

I vividly remember Dr. Doom teaching a poem I’d been hearing and reading since I was a child (Blake’s “The Tyger”), a poem that, in my youthful arrogance, I thought I “got” already. That day taught me different. Dr. Doom blew the doors off the room, teasing out hidden nuance in seemingly every word, spinning a captivating explanation of the Romantic impulse, the industrial revolution, marginalization and factories, religious ritual and the Romanticized view of animals, the evolution of philosophy of self leading to Blake’s time… and reading the poem itself. By the time he reached the third stanza he was tense with energy, by the fourth he was up like a rock singer belting out a crazy tune bellowing, and by the end he had assumed this strange, almost tortured position half-standing/half-crouching on the seat of a desk, declaiming each word like it was the last poem in the world.

I was riveted and awestruck by a poem that, until that moment, I considered to be a diversion for children, and by the way Dr. Doom taught it. You have to understand that Dr. Doom was unimaginably old in my 19 year old eyes (he was probably in his very early 60s), and a pipe-smoking scholar of Victorian era poetry in general and Robert Browning in particular. I was astonished at his knowledge and erudition, but I was most amazed by his obvious passion.

I think of Dr. Doom often, particularly the glowing grad-school recommendation he would later write for me, suggesting a belief in my promise as a literary scholar that I still regret never really pursuing. It haunts me.

Today I thought of Dr. Doom again after listening to Gardner Campbell’s moving reading of Coleridge, because listening to Gardner made me realize I’d been wrong about Dr. Doom’s influence this whole time. I thought he was a my favorite teacher because of his infectious passion. I thought he was my favorite teacher because I realized at that moment that this was someone who loved poetry as much– maybe even more– than I did, something I didn’t think possible at the time.

But that was only half of the story. The part I didn’t realize until today was that by sharing some of his passion for words with me, I also intuitively understood that this was someone who would not just hear me when I spoke, but who could actually listen and understand. Many people talk about teachers needing to listen to their students more, but not a lot of thought is given to the fact that listening means nothing if the student doesn’t believe they can be understood… and we have to provide that reason rather than just assume it by virtue of knowledge, position, authority, or even our own passion kept to ourselves.

I came across Conrad Glogowski’s edublog while searching for existing material on learning communities and Third Places (turns out we share a similar theoretical framework in this area), and have remained a fan because he regularly provides very concrete, useful details and artifacts of his approach to teaching usually reinforced with examples of student work.

In "Towards Reflective BlogTalk" he shares a useful practice, examples and a handout he’s developed (The Ripple Effect) to encourage students to engage with (and thus reinforce) the blogging environment in their classroom:

While not always unfamiliar or far out on the cutting edge, I also applaud educators sharing their "fundamentals." It’s amazing how often these philosophies and principles turn out to fulfill a critical need for readers. In that category I put Conrad’s first shot at his stages of Creating Learning Experiences: