Exploding Beakers

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch. 11

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 15:59:00 +0000

This turned out to be one of the most galvanizing chapters in the entire book, based simply on Shirky's assertion that all effective groups must negotiate three simple things he calls: The Promise, The Tool, The Bargain. To me, these three things help explain the student engagement crisis occurring in the upper grades of K-12 education.

Shirky claims that all groups contain an implicit (and sometimes explicit) promise to all members that makes the desire for a form of collective action possible. The strength of the promise makes members willing to contribute. As teachers, we routinely conceptualize our classrooms as groups of students, but it's difficult to imagine what we offer them by way of a promise that Shirky might recognize. Most of the activities that occur in the classroom invalidate the premise of a group promise, since most of it involves students acting in isolation. I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that if pushed, many teachers might admit to the existence of such a promise between the teacher and the collection of students as individuals, specifically something along the lines of 'Do what I instruct, and you will pass this course'. Taken as a whole, this might be the kind of promise the school offers students individually, 'Follow our instructions and you will graduate'.

However, the kinds of classroom inquiry activities that my department has been advocating does allow for the kind of group promise Shirky discusses. In terms of science education, having students investigate elements in their school or community allows them to identify reasonable goals based on areas of interest ('we will measure the pH of the local pond' leading to a goal of 'we will help restore the pond ecosystem') lends itself to creating that kind of social consensus based not around individual rewards (top marks) but collective action (restoring the pond).

For Shirky, the tools in question are often types of social media, but even he recognizes that the group needs to find a tool that fits the needs of the group. Too often, teachers not only specify 'what is to be done' but also 'how it is to be done', robbing students of the chance to develop those crucial decision-making skills related to problem-solving and negotiating in a group dynamic. Plus, the how is often something to be done alone.

Finally, the bargain is the reward that the members of the group will get from the successful action as well as belonging to the group. Thus, rewarding a group of students with top marks is not an incentive to high-end students who might rationalize they could achieve a better performance individually, similarly some low-end students might realize that their past performance has been so poor that even superlative marks in the future will still not enable them to pass the course. The reward for cleaning up the pond might be a more interesting place for students to gather, they might earn the appreciation of the community and a sense of accomplishment, especially if an activity tied to the clean-up of the pond was how to make the pond more enjoyable with a minimal impact on the ecosystem.

I would hope that moving forward I will be able to keep those ideas of the promise, the tool, and the bargain in mind as I plan classroom activities.

It certainly seems more engaging than worksheets and readings.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, Ch.10

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Thu, 09 Jun 2011 20:31:00 +0000

It was difficult finding a link to this chapter in terms of school reform, and perhaps that is the most illustrative thing about a chapter on the rise of Open Source software. I have already suggested that the emphasis on the school->teacher->classroom linear organizational strategy goes far to inhibit collaboration, both for teachers and students. Yes, the provincial teachers' union has its own online repository and collaborative space, but if it is a challenge to get teachers to collaborate and share between schools (although it's improving), it's even more difficult to facilitate that across districts.

The absence of a viable community of practice that meets beyond the school level made me question where it was teacher's get their new ideas from? Opportunities to meet and talk with other teachers from outside of our district takes on more importance and I think a real push needs to be made to incorporate this into city and provincial conferences and conventions. I don't think we need more presenters to teachers, but rather more facilitators of conversations and sharing sessions between teachers.

I'm sure there's some kind of Wikipedia re-invention of the K-12 system waiting to be created by someone, but I find the current system so deeply entrenched in my thinking that it's hard to even guess what that might look like or how it might function. But it's there, I'm sure.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch. 9

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 21:31:00 +0000

Fitting Our Tools To A Small World or how links between small-scale networks help facilitate the formation of resilient large networks. This is a very intriguing chapter, but mostly because of how foreign it feels to the school and classroom environment where we actively discourage most of our students from maximizing the diversity of their potential networks. Again, much of what we do reinforces what happens at the School->Classroom level. The number of physics' student networks at my school might be limited to one per year, if my school only happens to offer one physics class per year. My physics network might be limited to only those fifteen students who are in that class with me. If we're generous, we could double it to take into account the students who took the course last year. This is a small drop in the bucket when compared to the number of students in my district who take physics annually. Roughly 800 students write Physics 30 in my district, allowing for some degree of attrition among those who enroll but never write the exam, as well as students who decline to take Physics 30, we could easily imagine the number of students annually enrolled in Physics 20 (the precursor) to be 1000 students. Would you rather have the opportunity to be in a support network with 1000 people all having the same basic experiences and problems, or fifteen? The other school district operating in my hometown is twice as large as mine, which means we could increase the number of students in the Physics 20 network to 3000 if we allowed for some degree of cross-District interaction.

Currently these sort of connections are impossible because the starting unit of our online organization is the school.

Not the student.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody Ch. 8

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 20:57:00 +0000

This particular chapter dwelt with using online social tools to increase collaboration, often from Shirky's perspective towards some kind of social action, but as I noted in the previous chapter, schools currently do not do social engagement well (poverty engagement, meaning helping the poor, doing food drives, etc, they do better and more often). Schools also manage collaboration in a limited notion only, at least in my city.

For the most part, collaboration is limited to students taking the same course, from the same teacher, at the same time. Increasingly, out-of-school collaboration has come under fire as homework policies become revised to take into account the extra demands on student life outside of school as well as changes to assessment policies that seek to limit the amount of work done for assessment outside of the direct observation of the teacher. Furthermore, programs of choice and increased suburban cachement areas also means that students are physically tending to live farther and farther apart, inhibiting again their ability to get together.

The rise of various content management systems would superficially seem to be capable of reversing this trend, as their data capture techniques allow for chronicling user activities. However, again, we see these systems being set up to reinforce the District ->School -> Teacher-> Class file structure, with very little cross-over. Only recently have some teachers in my district started experimenting in Desire2Learn using the 'cohort' function, a tool with some potential to allow cross-class collaboration under the same teacher.

Ideally though, any online education system would give students the freedom to collaborate with any other student who wanted to collaborate with them at any given time without the current restrictions of School-> Teacher-> Class. Once students are given their unique user identifier linked to their demographic data, we have all their key School->Teacher->Class data on hand and should be able to track them across the system fairly easily. If our assessment activities are linked explicitly to outcomes from the Programs of Studies, it would not only help establish a context for student work common across all schools and classrooms, but also help foster a standard for collaboration among teachers from different schools as well.

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.7

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Mon, 16 May 2011 18:32:00 +0000

This chapter was mostly on how the use of online social tools can aid in the organization and execution of collective action. It's somewhat hard to interpret or envision how these tools might function within an educational or school-based setting since, upon reflection, schools actually do a pretty good job of limiting student-based collective action. We do individual and group work often and in a variety of ways, but maybe it's time we start thinking about students and the bigger picture?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.6

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:11:00 +0000

"Collective Action and Institutional Challenges"

This chapter looks at the speed with which resistance and confrontation to the sexual abuse committed by Roman Catholic priests in the Boston diocese manifested, organized, and became international. Shirky points out that organizers were able to do this because the cost of spreading information, as well as the cost of assembling like-minded people had fallen dramatically by 2002, to the extent that geographical boundaries no longer represented a significant barrier.

I guess sometimes we assume that all of the students present in a classroom represent a "like-mind" even though we know that each student wears multiple identities. We also know that different students bring different attitudes to school in regards to learning, particular subjects, the school itself, and even towards the nature of work expected from them by their teachers, parents, and peers. It is really difficult to consider a group of 30-40 students, brought together by geography and a timetable, to represent a "like-mind," even though much of current pedagogy appeals to teachers to develop such consensus as a precursor to inquiry activities, and related teamwork.

Shirky's comment that the Roman Catholic Church in Boston had forbidden lay organizations (that is groups of Catholics not necessarily led by priests) from organizing across parish lines resonated with my as school boundaries are always hot button topics. As Shirky said, organizations like the Church, and from my perspective schools, were developed at a time when geography represented a significant barrier to organizing institutions. Students could only walk or ride a bus so far. In the United States, policies regarding busing have become tied up in the ongoing conflicts about integration, segregation, and freedom of movement.

However, even putting aside the question of boundaries for physical school attendance, why must students be limited to work only with students and teachers co-present with them in a particular classroom, at a particular time, in a particular place? Surely different web 2.0 tools could allow students to collaborate with other students taking the same subject but at different times within the same school, or even the same district? Most online Learning Management Systems give teachers and students the ability to notify and message each other as they log into the system; couldn't students access any teacher teaching a particular subject matter for help? Most schools in my district have a dedicated tutorial period where different teachers rotate through fielding questions from students in particular subject areas (ie. each chemistry teachr shows up once a week to offer assistance for all chemistry courses). Why not extend this online? Would opening up the system to allow for collaboration across schools really be that difficult?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody Ch.5

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Wed, 23 Mar 2011 16:52:00 +0000

It finally happened. I came across something in Chapter 5, where Shirky gets down to discussing some of the details of how collaboration occurs, that diminished my enthusiasm for mass collaboration and social networking as potential frameworks for organizing classrooms around. In his explanation of the frequency of user contributions to websites like Wikipedia, Shirky mentioned that they tend to follow a power law distribution (you can read a similar essay Shirky wrote on the subject here). In making edits to Wikipedia, there was a tremendous imbalance between the volume of contributions between most users and a few users. This is fine for a voluntary organization like Wikipedia, where user-members can float to their comfort level. A classroom however presents a different sort of environment in so far as we have different expectations.

Teachers are accustomed to rewarding student performance with grades. Most mass collaboration software allows for the tracking of contributions, so it is easy enough for teachers to see who has done what, and issue a grade based on frequency. Similarly, teachers could also develop criteria for contributions (ideally this would be done jointly with the participating students) so that students would understand how the value of a contribution might be judged. On the one hand, my concern is that setting any kind of parameter on what constitutes a "good" contribution is going to undermine the collaborative spirit of the venture. If we set minimum and maximum contribution thresholds, I worry that students will feel coerced into making contributions, while others might be disincentivized to make as many contributions as they would have otherwise made.

Further, and more to the point, there is a prevailing notion of fairness that teachers try to honour in the classroom, that the inherent inequality of a power level distribution makes problematic. Effective mass collaboration appears to require a few self-selected individuals to do the majority of the work willingly, allowing the rest of the users to enjoy the benefits of this labour. The classroom environment is not typically set up to reward this kind of altruism, and views it's opposite, as a kind of freeloading parasitism to be discouraged, if not punished outright. Dealing with this view will require a fundamental rethink of classroom values.

Arrival City vs. The Fraser Institute's School Rankings

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 21:10:00 +0000

This weekend I read Chapter 4 of Arrival City, but since it dealt primarily with push factors in rural to urban migration, I didn't find to much to think about in terms of an educational context. However, the publication of the Fraser Institute's annual rankings of Alberta schools was published on Sunday. The report takes over 600 schools and ranks them according to government exam results. It's a fairly contentious issue, especially as the rankings also publish information on the percentage of ESL students and special needs students at the school, as well as the average family income. Predictably, schools with higher percentage of ESL and special needs students and lower family incomes tend to rank lowest. The inclusion of this data makes it easy to consider comparing schools of similar composition, but still presumes that making predictions about future government exam performances based on past performances is a valid exercise.

Arrival City helps to highlight the dangers of this thinking. In an editorial that went along with the published rankings, a representative of the Fraser Institute mused that the bottom ten schools in the rankings tended to be chronically under-performing, and perhaps educational chains from the United States ought to be allowed to operate within the province to "fix" these schools.

Without commenting on the fitness of the government exams for comparisons, or whether private groups ought to be allowed to run schools in Alberta, whether or not these schools are "failing" their students cannot be assessed strictly by exam results. A notion of failure here carries with it an idea that the students who fail these exams are doomed to remain among the poor communities of the neighbourhood. If the neighbourhoods these schools are located in are functioning as "arrival cities" as author Doug Saunders might suppose, then we need to see what percentage of students writing government exams at the Grade 3 level remain within the neighbourhood to write them again and again at the Grade 6 and 9 level. If significant numbers of students are transferring out to other schools in different neighbourhoods altogether (with potentially better exam results) we might presume that the school, and by the extension the neighbourhood, is doing a good job giving those students the tools they need to integrate into the larger society. The continued existence of low exam scores at these schools might be better explained by the neighbourhood's attractiveness to the same demographic looking to integrate successfully into the city at large. In other words, the school's success at educating and enabling a particular kind of student to leave, encourages more of the same kinds of students to come to the school.

By contrast, an under-performing school that retains a large proportion of its students might be more fairly judged to be under-performing and in need of more considered reform.

My Issue With Alfie Kohn

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Sun, 06 Mar 2011 04:01:00 +0000

I happened to meet a friend of mine earlier today who home schools her child. We were with a third parent and my friend mentioned the ideas of education writer Alfie Kohn. My friend was surprised to hear that Kohn's writings inform a lot of the work that I do for my large urban school board.

Granted, Kohn's ideas about progressive, constructivist education focusing on the transitioning away from such standard practices as homework and rewards are controversial, but while I find some of his ideas worth pursuing, I enjoy far more that Alfie Kohn ought to let us have a meaningful discussion about education reform.

Thus, my issue with Alfie Kohn isn't actually with him or his ideas, but rather how we go about implementing new ideas like his.

Take for example his idea that competition is counter-productive to student learning. Much of his early writing is devoted to demonstrating how deeply competition is embedded in the structure of education, particularly in the awarding of grades. In Kohn's view, grades are used primarily to rank students relative to each other, based in part on the premise that particular jobs or university seats are naturally and deservedly scarce, going only to the best and the brightest (I'd like to imagine for a second a system that allowed anyone who wanted to train to be a doctor or lawyer to try and become one). His subsequent work investigates the negative effects that grades and other forms of external rewards have on student motivation. His arrival at a constructivist position is the result of shifting the focus from external to internal student motivation.

As controversial as his ideas are, I rarely find teachers willing to state that he is wrong, or that the education system ought to function differently from what he suggests. Rather, most teachers will suggest his ideas are "impractical" and that a modern education system could not possibly function effectively as he described.

I like this argument because it puts teachers in a position to accept his premises if a practical manner of implementing them could be found. However, this is precisely where the problems tend to occur.

The first problem happens to be that regardless of whether collaboration may be the natural and most desirous state of student learning as Kohn would have it, or whether things are indeed competitive, the fact of the matter is that there now exists students whom the education system has conditioned to be competitive and expect external rewards. The few instances I have experienced, or been made of aware, where teachers have tried to create a more Kohn-esque learning environment have often reported resistance from students, leading to complaints from parents. In retrospect, I think it is fair to expect students to complain if it appears that the so-called "rules of school" are being changed in mid-stream, especially if these are the students currently reaping the rewards.

This isn't to say that students can't or won't adapt. We have much evidence that suggests they can, even in non-constructivist situations. Students adapt to different or new learning expectations every time they change schools. In fact, students often appear to expect to have to change. Thus, more thought needs to be put into how and when such reforms are implemented. In my experience, these initiatives are often the result of individual teachers experimenting in their own classrooms with the support of the school admin, but ultimately fail when they cannot achieve a critical mass in their own building.

This is the crux of any educational reform? How do you achieve the critical mass necessary to insure the reform's survival and success? Is it better to implement gradual, incremental change, starting at the school's entry level grade? Does a school need to provide dual streams when embarking on a building-wide reform, meaning a traditional and non-traditional stream? Would the one undermine the other?

Thoughts on Clay Shirky's Here Comes Everybody, Ch.4

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 22:25:00 +0000

I think this is perhaps one of the most famous chapters from Here Comes Everybody where Shirky talks about the imminent failure of traditional print media. He claims this comes from a lack of awareness of newspaper editors of their role as mere gatekeepers and failing to realize that their value was undermined once anyone could publish to the internet.

It's the idea that prompted me to pick up his book, because I'm trying desperately to consider how teachers might be functioning in a similar manner. Certainly educators in charge of curriculum act as gatekeepers when they determine what points of knowledge are required for students to learn, and classroom teachers perform similar roles when they choose which media students will use to become aware of these points.

So, the problem becomes trying to identify what the role of the teacher ought to become, and how schools and classrooms might be organized, once students can be trusted to find their own appropriate media to reach the desired learning outcomes. In my view, it is even worth wondering to what extent students should be involved in determining what particular knowledge outcomes might relevant to the courses they study.

Arrival City, Ch.3

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Wed, 16 Feb 2011 20:39:00 +0000

My favourite part in Chapter 3 occurs when Saunders describes the Arrival City neighbourhoods as being "richer than they appear" in that accounting practices can only measure the resources that exist within the neighbourhood, but fail to account for family members that have moved out though still maintain economic ties to the neighbourhood. Saunders writes:

"This paradox has created a sense among outsiders that the city's immigrant districts are poorer or more disparate than they really are, which leads to a misunderstanding of the forms of government investment they really need - a serious policy problem in many migrant-based cities around the world. Rather than getting the tools of ownership, education, security, business creation and connection to the wider economy, they are too often treated as destitute places that need non-solutions such as social workers, public-housing blocks, and urban-planned redevelopments."

In reflecting on previous chapters, I have suggested that perhaps school districts need to take flexible approaches to school development. The perception of a particular school's identity and social role cannot be seen as static. In this chapter, it would appear that Saunders might suggest that school districts should dialogue with current and former inhabitants of the neighbourhood about the kinds of programs that ought to be offered.

Arrival City: Thoughts, Pt.2

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Thu, 27 Jan 2011 16:49:00 +0000

Having just read Chapter 2 of Doug Saunders' book on rural-urban migration, I am drawn to his focus that successful transitions to the urban environment is dependent on the success of relationships being created in these neighbourhoods. This intrigues me since, as an educator, I find that those of us interested in the 21st Century Classroom, tend to talk about the new emphasis of schooling as being on the development of relationships between students, especially between students of different backgrounds. Elsewhere on this blog I have suggested that the function modern K-12 institutions is to be more socialization than knowledge transfer, and it would seem that this is in keeping with the needs of these "Arrival" districts.

One of the immediate concerns that I have though is in regards to the quality of the physical school building. There is a tendency of school districts to believe in promoting universal values and attempting to insure a minimum of standards (in this case health and engineering ones) for all students. Creating a building along these lines in shantytowns is a very jarring idea, and one that would almost force the legitimization of these neighbourhoods. On the otherhand, I am not certain that the creation of a school as transient and immediate as the surroundings would necessarily be a bad thing. I'm not sure, either way.

The one problem that I keep thinking about, especially within the context of Calgary, is that immigration to "arrival" neighbourhoods, seem to promise eventual social mobility, but what about non-arrival neighbourhoods that appear to be stagnating? What is to be done here? Is the key to find ways to make them more attractive to urban newcomers? Is gentrification a different form of what Saunders is talking about, a kind of internal urban migration?

Here Comes Everybody, Clay Shirky, Ch. 2

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Sun, 23 Jan 2011 03:07:00 +0000

I've finally gotten around to reading Clay Shirky's 2008 book Here Comes Everybody, despite having already read several of his articles (particularly on the collapse of print-based for-pay journalism) and watched a few of his talks. My takeaway from this chapter is Ronald Coase's discussion of transaction costs in the formation of management structures, dating back to 1937. Part of my hope by the end of Shirky's book is to have a better understanding of how to conceptualize the management structures inherent in the delivery of information found in our schools. While it's pretty easy to draw up District hierarchies running from the superintendent on down, I am suspicious that the route information needs to take in order for students to gain knowledge is not the same as that required to keep the lights on in the buildings.

Arrival City: Thoughts, Pt.1

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Mon, 13 Dec 2010 19:48:00 +0000

In Arrival City, Doug Saunders makes the claim in chapter one that certain peripheral cities, suburbs, or neighbourhoods function as transition zones for migrants. The social and economic role of these areas is to ease newcomers into an urban environment. It goes as a given then, the living conditions in these areas will be much lower than in other parts of the urban conglomeration, but still represent a step up, either in economic or social terms, than the other areas these migrants are leaving.

The problem, from an educational social reformist perspective, is how to mitigate or "raise up" the living conditions in these transition zones. But maybe, the more effective strategy is to concentrate on what happens to these zones as they build up, gaining economic and social clout, and in essence, cease acting as transition zones, forcing the urban periphery and the development of new transitions zones, further out. Perhaps this suggests we need a different idea of what a school looks like, one that encompasses a notion of different types of schools for different neighbourhoods. A school in Doug Saunders' transition zones has different social functions to fulfill than one in a more established, stabilized neighbourhood. There is a role to be played in assisting the transformation of schools from one type to another.

One of the problems with this idea however, is that the notion of different schools for different neighbourhoods also seems to suggest different learning outcomes for different neighbourhoods. The dream of educational reformers of the 1960s valued equality of outcomes for all students, regardless of locale. I'm not sure I'm ready to accept the death of that dream.

Gender Differences in Schools

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:50:00 +0000

I came across a very interesting article in Educational Leadership today that suggested there was very little difference between the brains of boys and girls, implying that teaching strategies aimed specifically at each gender were misguided. What was different however, was the actual difference between behaviours of boys and girls, with a notion that these behaviours are reinforced through social interactions. At one point, the author even notes that gender-specific teaching strategies might actually do more to increase differences between boys and girls than to remediate them.

You can read the full article here.

Lately I've been puzzled over what teachers in the classroom, and schools in general, ought to do when faced with two different social groups performing at different levels in different curricular areas. Under a previous philosophy of schooling, it was believed that by the end of Grade 12, every student ought to arrive at the same endpoint. If a group of students were lagging behind in certain areas, extra instruction would be required. However, given that classroom time is a finite resources, extra instruction meant less instruction in something else. The current problem, as I see it, is if social groups perform at different levels primarily because of the social interactions they engage in, both in and out of school, then I question the school's ability to offset the social behaviours that are occurring in the two-thirds of the day that a student spends not in school. In essence, I no longer believe that if outside-of-school social behaviours are the causes of different performance or achievement levels that schools can produce a scenario in which all students perform at an equal level. It seems to me that an inequality of performance is inherent. Unfortunately, if the goal of school is no longer to insure an equality of outcomes, I'm not sure what the purpose of school ought to be.

So, if girls are better readers than boys, should we make boys read more? Should we cut back on gym and math time, since these are areas that boys could use less instruction? Should we do the opposite for girls? Less reading and more math? Would this make students more willing to go to school? More likely to be engaged in their learning? In this case, the push for student engagement seems in conflict with the desire for optimal learning in all areas of the curriculum. It all seems very messy.

Hybrid online courses

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 16:32:00 +0000

An e-School news article from earlier this year suggests that students in online courses "do better" than students in traditional courses within a post-secondary context. It goes on to say that students in "hybrid" courses, that is a course that offers some form of mix between online and in-classroom activity, do best of all.

It's probably too early to call these studies definitive, but there's a lot of focus on the increase in student engagement that online courses are thought to create. Higher student engagement = increased student success.

However, I wonder about the extent to which online and hybrid courses offer students more opportunities to reflect on their learning. In the past, I have been critical of the pacing of traditional classes. Often on-campus activities are stacked back-to-back, to maximize a students time. Within the k-12 system, it is an endless conveyor belt of activitiy, with students not gaining an opportunity to rest until often well into the evening. I would like to think that part of what we are seeing in hybrid courses is the ability of students to select times to engage in online school opportunities that also (perhaps subconsciously) provides them with a period of reflection.

Jane Addams and Student Engagement

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Fri, 28 May 2010 16:01:00 +0000

I just finished reading an essay on Jane Addams, a pioneer of early 20th Century education, who was one of the first to pay attention to multi-cultural education. While her ideas have been quite influential in that regards, I also found it very interesting the way her ideas of socialized education speak to the general isolation that stems from education. Schools not only function to isolate students from their parental ethnic cultures, but also from the daily experiential cultures that their arents partake in, most notably work culture. Schools tend to provide students with a unique cultural environment that references nothing else in the lives of students except school. Addams charged that this kind of formalism prevented children from conceiving of proper ways to integrate themselves in the adult world. This also provides a unique perspective of many so-called "GenX'ers" from the 1990s who experienced significant personal distress when it came time to enter the "real world" after graduation. In fact,the 1990s saw many developments such as the "permanent student" and record increase in graduate school enrollments, the "Slacker Movement" which encouraged well-educated middle class youths to take up menial service sector jobs such as dishwashers and parking lot attendants. Even the media's fixation on something called "the quarter-life crisis", a noticable increase in the number of students who dramatically change careers a few years after graduation, underscores that even youths who made a career choice often felt it was the wrong one.

All of this points somewhat to the circular nature of contemporary schooling, although the situation has changed somewhat. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, the school setting became increasingly self-referential. Students came to school and had few options to engage in activities that were not in some way related to school. The development and increasing proliferation of personal communication devices, along with access to Internet resources has given students more options and means to carry their non-school lives with them into school. Recent student engage surveys, such as those being conducted under the What Did You Do In School Today banner, are clearly demonstrating that students recognize the isolating and divorced nature of their current situation.

The problem is time

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Fri, 23 Apr 2010 22:30:00 +0000

As education budgets decline, it remain static in the face of increasing needs, school districts tend to respond by asking teachers to assume more responsibilities, ranging from increased instructional duties (teach more students in more classes) to clerical (tracking attendance, inputting student course selections), to adminsitrative (monitoring earned student credits, writing individualized student performance plans). Advances in technology has made some of this easier; teachers with computers in the classroom can enter attendance or grades directly into central systems with the students right in front of them, other advances, like email an online learning management systems, extend a teacher's responsibilities to students beyond the ringing Tod the tradional end of day bell. Currently teachers, especially new teachers, are under tremendous pressure to contribute to the culture of schools through volunteering to host extra-curricular activities, such as hosting clubs or coaching athletics, all of which occur at the margins of the school day.

It is becoming increasingly difficult for good teachers to balance teaching with other aspects of their lives. Good teachers often became involved in teaching as a way to incorporate and share passions and hobbies in a constructive way. Lengthening commitments to schools leaves less and less time for these other interests. Furthermore, many specialized teachers view themselves as members of multiple communities. A science teacher, for example, might view him or herself as a member of an educational community, as well as the larger science community. Similarly a
music teacher could have membership in the local music scene in addition to the education community. Again, participation in these other communities is made difficult by the increased demands of the school system, which often responds to these criticisms by giving teachers the option of starting a school-based club around these interests, thus involving the teacher ever more with the life of the school and increasing their professional isolation from other communities.

It is clear that teacher retention is an issue for many jurisidictioms and I would contend that a contributing factor is the inability of school systems to allow teachers to maintain healthy lives outside of the school day.

Books in the mail: Teach Like A Champion

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Wed, 14 Apr 2010 16:42:00 +0000

Doug Lemov's new book about improving classroom arrived on my desk today and I'm quite interested in reading it. My understanding of the premise is that he has developed a new vocabulary to describe teaching processes that will improve the kind of feedback that teachers receive. I'm not sure if this is what he actually does, but those are my beliefs as to the book's contents, and something I would argue are dreadfully needed in education as it's not enough simply to demand higher scores or lower drop out rates - the idea that there are more effective and less effective techniques seems straightforward, but a good job describing these has yet to be done.

One word of caution now that the book has arrived, I do take a little issue at his subtitle: 49 techniques that put students on the path to college, as if to say the whole purpose of the k-12 system is to move the roughly 1/3 of high school students who attend any form of post-secondary education (at least here in Alberta) to something resembling 1/2 or higher. It also suggests that a k-12 education that terminates in a successful high school graduation is not a success unless the student enrolls in further study.

Are high schools still sites of conflict?

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Mon, 29 Mar 2010 18:05:00 +0000

(cross-posted with What Sister Ray Said)

A few friends of mine recently made a passing reference to the period of time starting in the post-grunge years (1994) to some unidentifiable terminal year that has only recently passed, as being a kind of “neo-Sixties.” Their evidence, and none of them made any kind of claim to academic accuracy, was the resurgence of pot use, focused demonstrations against global capitalism (notably the Battle In Seattle and anti-G8 protests), and other protests against the “unjust wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq post-9/11. While this might be superficially true, I’ve always thought that the general rebelliousness and questioning of institutions during the 1960s was much more far-reaching than we tend to remember it today. One of my favourite classes of stories was the surprisingly common one I call “The Day the Hippies Came and Took over My High School.” The number of incidences of “hippies,” whether they be actual bearded longhairs, or members of the SDS, SNCC, Weathermen, sympathetic Black Panther group, or other civil rights/anti-war group, storming the local high school to institute “teach-ins” is pretty high across the eastern US. The same cannot be said for the period 1994-present. Part of this might be the difference that the Internet has played in distributing information, but I wonder how much might also be the case that the K-12 system, and high school in particular, is no longer seen as the part of the general “system of coercion” that it appeared to radicals in the 1960s. Or maybe that idea is now just taken for granted, but attacking it is assumed to be futile. I’m not sure, but this extended 1971 quote from Michel Foucault seems to outline the thinking at the time pretty good:

“…in a general way, all teaching systems, which appear simply to disseminate knowledge, are made to maintain a certain social class in power; and to exclude the instruments of power of another social class. Institutions of knowledge, of foresight and care, such as medicine, also help support the political power. It’s also obvious, even to the point of scandal, in certain cases related to psychiatry.

It seems to me that the real political task in a society in such as ours is to criticize the workings of institutions, which appear to be both neutral and independent; to criticize and attach them in such a manner that the political violence which has always exercised itself obscurely through them will be unmasked, so that one can fight against them.

This critique and this fight seem essential to me for different reasons: first, because political power goes much deeper than one suspects; there are centers and invisible, little-known points of supports; its true resistance, its true solidity is perhaps where one doesn’t expect it. Probably it’s insufficient to say that behind the governments, behind the apparatus of the state, there is the dominant class; one must locate the point of activity, the places and forms in which its domination is exercised. And because this domination is not simply the expression in political terms of economic exploitation, it is its instrument and, to a large extent, the condition which makes it possible, the suppression of the one is achieved through the exhaustive discernment of the other. Well, if one fails to recognize these points of support of class power, one risks allowing them to continue to exist; and to see this class power reconstitute itself even after an apparent revolutionary process.”

- from The Chomsky-Foucault Debate on Human Nature

Thoughts on iBrain and engaging students

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 16:56:00 +0000

Last summer I was part of a reading group that looked at the book iBrain by Gary Small. I was also part of the selection committee that picked the book. We were looking for something that would prompt teachers to think about changes that young people were undergoing both in terms of how they lived their daily lives and the way they thought about particular things. At a Reaching & Teaching presentation earlier that spring, Ian Jukes seemed to endorse the book (he might also have just as likely been name-dropping it, to give the appearance that he had read it).

After distributing the book to our reading group, and explaining our hope to have conversations around it over the summer via Twitter, we left them to their thoughts. Our efforts to have teachers use Twitter ended up not amounting to much. In retrospect, I think that had we prompted via email teachers more over the summer to use Twitter, we might have had better uptake.

When we returned to discuss the book in face to face meetings in the fall teachers quite upset over some of Gary Small's ideas. Part of the problem lay in a misunderstanding that teachers had regarding our purpose. They thought that we had picked the book in order to discuss how best to implement it, not as a discussion prompt. Many teachers reported breezing through the first few chapters, until they got to one of two parts. For some, Small's use of the word "evolutionary" to describe his idea about how children's use of technology causes the rewiring of a child's neural network, caused them to question many of Small's scientific credentials. For them, "evolutionary" refers solely to a process that occurs on a multi-generational scale - "adaptive" might have been a better word choice for what Small had in mind. For other teachers, it was Small's endorsement of a study that seemed to link TV-watching to autism. Once suspicious of Small, they became far more critical about what they were reading.

My thoughts on the experience run as follows:

1. I was surprised that teachers did not begin reading the book critically from page one. It seemed that the very fact that we suggested the book gave it a critical endorsement. Since teachers accepted our informal expertise (insofar as it went towards the book selection) they accepted that the book had a certain intrinsic merit. The conversation we wanted to have was actually about whether the book had that very same merit, whereas the conversation they expected was about how best to implement the merit of the book. I can't help but assume that this same confusion over purpose happens everytime we ask students to read something.

2. Teachers believed the book had merit, then felt betrayed when their own experiences caused them to question certain aspects of it. I think this is a very important part of the reading process, the bringing to bear of personal experience, and part of the question then becomes, how do you prepare students to read books on subjects that they do not necessarily have any experience in.

3. After falling out with Small, teachers were extremely reluctant to endorse any of his ideas, but curiously, did not link Small's idea that use of digital technologies causes a change in the ordering of dendrites, to those of Marcia Tate, of Worksheets Don't Grow Dendrites fame. If you accept that Tate and Small are both talking about worksheets, ipods, and computers as tools that aid in learning, there is no real difference in their argument. I know a fair number of these teachers are big fans of Tate, so there appears to be a bit of a disconnect there.

Building a Better Teacher

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 12:55:00 +0000

Last week The New York Times ran a piece on education reform. It's a topic that's quite near and dear to my heart, so I was intrigued. The article was essentially a pre-release interview with Doug Lemov, the author of a new book entitled Teach Like A Champion. Lemov's basic thrust was that teachers lack the basic vocabulary to describe the act of teaching and this undermines many of their efforts to teach better. My experiences with teachers and teacher improvement certainly validates this idea. True, teachers have no shortage of conceptual frameworks to explain and support the activities that they are having students engage in, they are considerably weaker in using language to describe their day-to-day activities to their peers. This is an important shortcoming to remedy because it prevents teachers from properly identifying what it is that's working in their classrooms as well as offering each other constructive criticism aimed at improving weak practice.

In the last five years or so, I think there has been a tremendous degree of improvement in the language of assessment; teachers have a better capacity to explain what they are assessing, when, how, and why, but assessment and instruction are not the same. I'd like to think that the one follows the other, that from a better understanding of assessment, we will be better able to zero in on what exactly students need to do better in order to understand better.

Having said that, I was a little disappointed to see that much of the article's focus was on techniques for classroom management, rather than instruction. I am intrigued enough to have ordered a copy of Lemov's book, but I find that conversations that focus on classroom management tend to miss the point. When looking at ideas related to classroom reform, I ask myself the following questions:

- who decides what the student will learn on a given day?

- who decides how the student will learn?

- who decides when the student is done learning?

People who answer these questions with "the teacher" are not moving in the same direction as me.

Undecipherable Notes: CES 2010 Higher Education

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 04:02:00 +0000

Higher ed tech pt.2

Will anyone ever go to class again

***follow-up: Dreyfus initiative for civics, is it possible to consider that former ideals of citizenship, nationalism and patriotism are based on printing press techonology?

Followup: m2kidz, anytime, anywhere learning, Arizona state university using google suites throughout campus

Followup: John katzman, 2tor
Eduardo Moura, cengage learning (formerly thomson media)

***key takeaways: more time spent in online environment = more time on task and greater success. UofPhoenix assigns three staff to each cohort in a TA role, because students need feedback and guidance (always, eh?)

***LMS puts emphasis on teacher, social networks on students, and virtual worlds highlight community

How disruptive innovation will change the way college students learn?

Michael Horn, innosight institute, harvars book I read,
Suggests that higher education institutions like harvars centraliZed
Access to knowledge in one place. The rise of state colleges was a decentralizing act, furthered by the development of community colleges.
***the Internet has decentralized things even more, by changing the locus of information access from institutions to my pocket

Peter smith, kaplan higher education
University graduation process is based on training (and weeding) students based on the premise that the jobs they are preparing for are scarce. However, given and environment of
Global mobility, the scarcity of such jobs drops dramatically.

The locus of the higher Ed experience will become the governing architecture of the course, no simply the physical architecture of the campus.

Followup: kaplan higher education looks to translate existing student experiences and learning into portable course accreditation

Christopher dede wants accreditation to be based on compentency not seat time (Carnegie unit)

***key to disruptive succeses is to setup shop on the borders of existing regulations, on areas where the market is non-existent, gather market growth and then chip away at existing regulations as regulators take notice of your activity
***so what are the borders of the k-12 system?

Followup: high tech back pack companies

Key Takeaway From Kids@Play 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 03:34:00 +0000

Undecipherable Notes from CES 2010

noreply@blogger.com (Elvis Bonaparte) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 04:35:00 +0000

Kids@play
Alan Kay
Children want to learn the human universals
To be successful, a product or service must "amplify" one or more of these universals
Look at towards a theory of instruction by Jerome bruner

Low-pass filter idea? Many good
Ideas of The 1960s still lay dormant

Michael resnick
As if students had learned to read but not write

***too much of teacher education emphasises mastering of knowledge and knowledge specialization, while this is fundamentally important, the vital activity in the teaching of students is not specialized knowledge transfer, but an understanding and appreciation of the variety of activities and uses that might allow students to engage and deconstruct it.

Follow-up: scratch.MIT.edu

Family story play by sesame workshop and nokia. Appears as heavy covered book with two screens, one with video-conferencing capabalities. This allows for a partner on the other side with the same book to engage in paired reading facilitated by Elmo.

Disney is working on flash based vision recognition software that can recognize movement and text, using a webcam to interact with online
Environments

****robots are huge here, as is hardware skins and customizations, and 3D hi-def tv with glasses

Disney toybridge allows for universal
Interfaces, suggests the ability of extra-user or actor using the flash based cloud based programmer to control one of their motion sensing robots

Zoodles and leapfrog toys and sites provide parents with usage feedback - how similar is this to the feedback in students provided to teachers in our LMS?

Kevin Clark George mason university
Black college football experience
On doing social outreach: It's a long haul. You can't just build it, copy it and hand it out.

Followup: Common Sense Media

Karen cator: Obama considers education a civil rights issue and the social justice issue of our time.
Want to move to continuous improvement based on immediate data collection ***how will they do this?
Preliminary draft forthcoming online

Cator: calling for more social network use in schools to further digital citizenship developmet

FCC chairman: calls broadband penetration the engine of future economic activity

***seems to be a disparaging trend to feel that computer technology is being used primarily for entertainment and not education - this is really no different than any other piece of information technology. What, after all, is the ratio of published works of fiction to non-fiction?

Higher Education Technology
***if someone steals all my personal information, in terms of behaviours, preferences, and physical attributes but not my name and address, if they use this to create a bot that impersonates these features, have they stolen my identity? Is there not a doppelgänger out there who behaves in the online world the same as I do, but simply does not reference itself as me?

However, statistically speaking, how many other people online naturally have these attributes? What then is te difference between them, me, and my doppelgänger?

***full room, slightly older crowd, higher ed must be big money

Undersecretary of education dr. Margaret cantor
Obama Administration has the ambitious aim of producing the most college graduates worldwide by 2020
Looking to expand (introduce?) early childhood learning to prepare students for kindergarten. ***what does this look like? Is this pre-school?

**video-congerencig capabilites needs to be ubiquitious. Time for Alberta Supernet 2.0, to provide the massive amounts of bandwidth required.

***If we have the bandwidth, we could partner up with senior centres for reading partnerships, or high schools, or hospitals, or even parents at work

**is it a question of bandwidth per se, or is it a question of piping and distribution? If we treat the school like an apartment building, would we do things differently?

Follow-up: race to the top, achieve.org
**want to update graduation requirements by 25%, how will this impact graduation rates?

***part of the issue is that contemporary schooling seems out of synch with the public's desire for education as an aspirational goal. Before, in the early days of the last century, the education system was not expected to graduate everyone, and I do not beleive that every parent sent their child to school with goal of graduation in my mind, consider that none of my, or my wife, have grandparents with high school diplomas. There's a lot of talk of 1/3 of children not being ready for kindergarten, primarily in terms of language acquistion and socialization. Cantor is suggesting that these children are at risk for falling behind and finally falling out if the school system. I'm not sure this is significantly different than 100 years ago, only that no expected the Italian or Ruthenian students who spoke solely Italian and Ukranian at home to graduate, so these students lagging behind educationally and dropping out, or being shifted out of an academic track and into a technical one, was not seen as a bad, or less worthwhile, thing.

Obama adminstration is considering income based student loan repayment schemes as well loan forgiveness for students who enter careers in public service for ten years.
***might this encourage young graduates to teach for ten years before moving on to other careers? Would this higher teacher turnover promote innovation?

***is it time to push for an on-going teacher training professional development system that ties into mandatory periodic re-certification of teachers?

***follow-up: Dreyfus initiative for civics, is it possible to consider that former ideals of citizenship, nationalism and patriotism are based on printing press techonology?