Yesterday night, while eating dinner, I caught my daughter Flavia while humming an obviously known tune. So, I quickly youtubed it, and found the song I so much loved in 1992: What’s Up, by 4 Non Blondes. I really loved that song, and I heard it over and over for a long time. Of course, there was no YouTube in 1992, and then I simply forgot about it. So, yesterday was an epiphany: the very first time I watched a video of the band, in synch with my daughter who was humming the song.

But the fact is that she was humming a different version of it, a much newer, processed version, which comes together with a video. In fact, she didn’t believe it was the same song at all! Here it is.

Watch the new version and enjoy the comics, the surreality and irony of it. Ah, it is a triumph of pop culture! Also, the music processing and arrangement is genius. It is a preview of what our youngsters are looking at.

And it was a moment of sharing with my daughter. Long live rock’n'roll!!

La amiga Dolors Reig (de El Caparazón) acaba de publicar y lanzar a la venta en el mundo entero su libro Socionomía. ¡¡Muchas felicidades, @dreig!! Me gusta el hecho de que el libro lleva su nombre completo, por supuesto, pero también el nombre de su Twitter. Y me gusta el subtítulo: “¿Vas a perderte la revolución social?”

Leemos y escuchamos a menudo que internet nos está aislando. Sin embargo, la experiencia demuestra que la hiperconectividad con la que vivimos nos acerca justo a lo contrario, propiciando una revolución social nunca vista. La nueva web social, que ha tenido un papel importante en recientes revoluciones como la de Túnez o Egipto, está aquí para quedarse. Dolors Reig defiende en este libro que las «redes sociables», como las llama ella, son entornos creados para que podamos recuperar una sociabilidad innata que otros medios anularon tiempo atrás.

Yo he ya mandado a pedir par de copias para el proyecto STEMmED y para mí. ¿Y tú?

Justamente otra cosa interesante (luego, después de leerlo les contaré más del texto) es que el libro está disponible en el mundo entero en versión tradicional a un costo de US $17.99 a través de Amazon.es y Barnes & Noble, pero también en versión e-book Nook. La globalización a veces es placentera y genial.

Doing a bit of backlog reading of @dreig’s posts at El Caparazón, I just viewed this video. Watch it, buy the Raspberry Pi for $25, because it is a full computer with HDMI output and join the Scratch community by learning how to program starting in kindergarten.

Related articles

• Review: How Good is Raspberry Pi? (pochp.wordpress.com)
• Raspberry Pi passes critical test – almost set for sale (zdnet.com)

I am getting ready for New York!

June 4 through 30 I will be working as Scholar-in-Residence with NYU’s Faculty Resource Network on my research. The Zen of Teaching is so going to continue its trajectory, and hopefully I’ll be able to write some more and polish and complete the Website zenofteaching.us. I have been publishing my interviews and the next will be Michael Wesch and Gardner Campbell, whom I molested at EDUCAUSE ELI in Austin some weeks ago. That wonderful interview (their merit!) will be published here and at zenofteaching.us shortly; later I’ll have the zenlike interview of Mario Núñez, taken in Ponce some time ago. Mario’s interview is very interesting and the awesome Gabriela, my student assistant, is finishing the transcription and editing the English subtitles for YouTube. So, tune here soon.

Now, I just want to add that while preparing for NYC and trying to add more great people to my list of interviews, I am also preparing for a very enriching opportunity I’ll have June 12, when I’ll be leading a Zen of Teaching Workshop at NMC’s 2012 Summer Conference in Boston, and precisely at MIT. The workshop will be a good chance to discuss the main issues I am researching about the Myths of Teaching and Learning, with a special eye on Technology. I urge every soul interested to participate! The first part of the workshop will be a presentation of the work done and the main ideas under scrutiny that can help us define a fuller, enriching dialogue with our students. The presentation will be more or less like the one I gave at the Change 11 MOOC of George Siemens and Stephen Downes last April. Here it is.

Then, in the second part (which will be actually the lion’s share of the workshop), we will collaborate to add, subtract and define together the various components of the project. I’ll set up also an open Google Doc or wiki to have people add and express things. Those things will in turn fuel the main book materials and Website. I hope the workshop group will help me better define the scope, purpose and functionality of the Website itself.

Workshop Session Description

So, come ye faithful! Register here for NMC 2012, and then enroll in my Zen of Teaching Workshop!

John Seely Brown (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In my recent travels I have had the opportunity to meet and share with a lot of people who are really big thinkers in education, technology and the new media. I was fortunate to have also a few interviews with some of them, and these interviews I am finally trying to publish here. I just published a splendid group interview with Mikhail Gershovich and his group  at at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute of CUNY’s Baruch College from June 2011, and next week it’s going to be the turn of the latest, a great informal interview with Michael Wesch and Gardner Campbell at Austin, during EDUCAUSE ELI 2012.

I was also fortunate enough to attend recently DML 2012, and the keynote speaker was nonetheless than one of my heroes John Seely Brown. I will try and build a Spotify from his talk (lots of Tweets at 9am, March 1st, SFO time under hashtag #DML2012), but cannot resist a commentary that John did following Andrew Sullivan’s 2008 article Why I Blog (Atlantic Monthly, 2007): Blogging is a joint context creation. It seems fine to me how things converge at times, especially when they seem to be right.

Blogging is a collaborative (if at times not consciously so) construction of stories which, in their whole make (build, in the sense of sense-making, like Siemens would like saying) the contex upon which we derive meaning, sense.

So, blogging is fundamental to our educational apparatuses, and I am happy that Jim Groom, Gardner Campbell, Mike Wesch, and JSB all coincide in this.

This is also why my students continue blogging in every semester. And why I do so. Mario Núñez says that blogging is the equivalent of a shrink in your Web!! Nicely put. But mostly, blogging allows knowledge construction to form contexts from which meaning emerges. In a way, blogging –for instance to resume a class discussion or a lecture, is in itself an act of reflexion, and quite often self-reflection.

Some of us remember what we called that action, that space/time when and where we sat down with ourselves and thought. Yes, we called that, to study. A word most forgotten, amidst the passive ‘learning’ and other pedagogies. Consider this: when you study ou make a volitional act: you decide that you want to study, reflect, meditate upon something –because, presumably, you want top learn it. Our politically correct emphasis on ‘learning’, on the other hand, puts all the effort on ‘other subjects’, not the student, who by definition is she who studies, more than he who learns. Of course, much learning ‘occurs’ informally, without our being even conscious about it. But usually, the learning we want to occur within the framework we call ‘education’, is mostly of the other kind, the active kind. Why then, studying is not the subject of education? Could it be that we decided to focus on learning –and not studying’– to project a constructed image of non-responsibility. I mean, if we learn magically because the teacher and school use great pedagogies, why should we bother to work toward it?? The politically correct version of education wins. It seems easier, if we don’t put responsibility in it. Learning –we seem to be saying– happens, and you don’t even need to study!!

I wish I began –apart from this Myths study– a meta-research on the use of the verb ‘to study’ in academic pedagogy papers. We’ll see. For now, I was talking about this with Mike and Gardner, who agreed with my view. Then, I discover that Siemens’ great book “Knowing Knowledge” contains that verb exactly zero times. Coincidence?

Related articles

• Myths of Teaching & Learning: Interview at CUNY’s Baruch College! (blogs.netedu.info)
• A personal cyberinfrastructure (moocblogcalendar.wordpress.com)
• Some Reflections – Gardner Campbell (ds106.wordpress.com)

I was called to cover for my friend and colleague Rosa Ojeda when she reported she wouldn’t be able to do her talk two weeks ago for George Siemens‘ and Stephen Downes‘ MOOC “Change 2011“. I was thrilled to be able to share with the George, Stephen and their co-teachers in this extraordinary feat and feast of learning that i their course. Of course, I was also panicked to be there, on the same spot where Siemens, Downes, Tony Bates, Rory McGreal and Howard Rheingold had talked, among many other giants.

But it seems I didn’t do a very bad job, either. And it was a fascinating and again, thrilling experience. Here is thus my presentation: Zen of Teaching: Myths of Teaching & Learning and Technology.

Just a little comment on the side: Somebody, after I had said how much I appreciated having mentors on my side, helping, encouraging and inspiring me all the time, put this genius line up on the chat:

deMentors?

A big thanks to Siemens and especially to Stephen Downes, who helped me feel at ease and confident with the Elluminate wizardry.

Related articles

• What are the main differences among those MOOCs? (downes.ca)
• Education as Platform (slideshare.net)
• Learning from MOOCs (hollymccracken.wordpress.com)

Since my last post was biblical, allow me to continue here along the same tonic. I am writing this on Easter Sunday, so the inspiration comes from the beautiful words of ancient liturgy.

Christus heri et hodie, Principium et finis, Alpha et Omega, ipsius sunt tempora et saecula. Ipsi gloria et imperium per universia aeternitatis saecula.

Christ yesterday and today,
the beginning and the end,
Alpha and Omega,
all time belongs to him,
and all ages;
to him be glory and power,
through every age and for ever.

Yes, this is Imperium, Power. Expressly pronounced in the heavy and powerful words of Latin.

No, the Vatican is not a corporation, as the nice article (in Spanish) by Carlos Alberto Montaner, Vaticano Inc (con perdón), suggests. The Vatican is a power, a nation-state -sanctioned by Mussolini’s Lateran Pact. It is the continuity of the Roman Empire.

From his novel Le perfezioni provvisorie (in English: Temporary Perfections; in Spanish: Las perfecciones provisionales), a detective story, Gianrico Carofiglio quotes a few gems, that I want to share further.

First,  from the Song of Solomon 6, 10:

«Chi è costei che sorge come l’aurora,

bella come la luna, fulgida come il sole,

terribile come schiere a vessilli spiegati?».

Cantico dei Cantici 6, 10
Who is she that looketh forth as the morning, fair as the moon, clear as the sun, and terrible as an army with banners?

¿Quién es ésta que se muestra como el alba,
Hermosa como la luna,
Esclarecida como el sol,
Imponente como ejércitos en orden?

Cantar de los Cantares de Salomón 6, 10

Splendid poetry! A woman opens herself up to be loved. But in the novel, there is also a note of possible danger for the man whom the woman offers herself to. All the danger that comes from exposing oneself to something which is manifestly stronger and more powerful than ourselves, seems to say the author in adapting the quote.

After Googling it, however, I discovered that also Umberto Eco, in his In the name of the Rose, quoted the same verses, adapting them in a slightly different way.

Ma chi era costei, che sorgeva davanto a me come l’aurora, bella come la luna, fulgida come il sole, terribile come un esercito schierato in battaglia. Temevo di essere preda del demonio, il quale sa bene come afferrarti l’anima e illudere il corpo. E poi, capii l’abisso e l’abisso invocato dall’abisso. Mi resi conto che avevo peccato.

In this segment, Eco adds a new thing: The beauty, the power of femininity which not only frightens the man, but ultimately drives him to commit sin. “And then I understood the abyss and the abyss invoked by the abyss”. A meta-sin. The mother of all sins.

Carofiglio adds another little gem in his book, when he quotes a song by De Gregori, perhaps the songwriter who has always been closer to me. The song is Atlantide (Atlantis, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WbbvPD3aNUQ).

As it happened before, the quote opened up a door to other (uni)verses.

Tell her I lost her when I understood her

Tell her I forgive her for my betraying her.

At last!! After some full 9 months of delay, I’ve nailed down another big important chapter of the Myths project: Myths of teaching, learning and technology. I have really no excuses, except perhaps the superwork I surrendered to after I got our STEMmED II grant approved last fall. So, without further ado, here are a wonderful interview and its videos. I hope you all enjoy it as much as I did.

***

The following is a summary of a conversation held on June 22nd 2011 at the Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute of CUNY’s Baruch College in Manhattan. I had the privilege to share this conversation with Mikhail Gershovich (the Institute’s Director), Suzanne Epstein (Deputy Director), Lucas Waltzer (Assistant Director for Educational Technology), Thomas Harbison (Instructional Technologist) and Gulmeene Khan (Coordinator). Tom Harbison captured the meeting on video, which I am publishing here for the first time. Before anything else, I wish to thank all the participants for their interest, help, and for the patience they showed during the months the video has been waiting for this moment. The interview/conversation was held as part of my project on the Myths of Teaching, Learning and Technology which I pursued during my stay at NYU during June of 2011. Unfortunately, classes and administrative functions prevented me from following up the work done during the summer, until the awesome Gabriela Rivera Torrado came along to rescue the transcript work from its dormant state. This is the result of her transcription work, which she then summarized into the following article. We hope we have conveyed all of the ideas expressed faithfully. Unlike some of the other videos utilized for my research, this one has been summarized thoroughly, since it represents more of a focus group conversation, rather than than a “simple” interview. The videos and this article will be also cross-posted within the site zenofteaching.us, which holds the key to human knowledge, and most importantly, holds (or will hold) the ideas, text and interviews for the book and the whole project. Thanks, everyone!

***

We are living during a very interesting moment in history, as we now have the power to transform education with the technological resources available to us. Currently, there may be some sort of denial about the changes occurring in technology and their possible applications in the field of education. We need to recognize that we are not using these technological resources to their maximum potential. The time has come to experiment with a wide variety of tools available for education, as these tools may play an important role in the development of new pedagogic tendencies.

The first obstacle that exists is the resistance to experimentation. In many institutions research is well compensated, but teaching is not. Therefore, educators that show interest in experimenting with various teaching methods are usually not compensated for their efforts. We need to promote a freer academic environment with a progressive dynamic, where a faculty’s experimental achievements are recognized. Bernard M. Baruch College, better known as Baruch (of The City University of New York) has developed Blogs@Baruch (B@B) as part of the  “Writing Across the Curriculum” initiative which was active under the auspices of CUNY central since 2000. This program is a wonderful example of how experimentation with technology can be successful. As early as 2006, a group of professors composed of Jim Groom, Mikhail Gershovich, Lucas Waltzer, and Zach Davis began publishing daily blogs on WordPress. Soon after, they began to ask themselves how they could use the blog platform in an academic environment. Starting with the premise that many students showed difficulty with writing, they decided to utilize the blog model in order to provide students with the opportunity to develop their writing skills. Blogs@Baruch was launched in 2008. The “Writing Across the Curriculum” program unites various courses from different faculties with the common goal of helping students get used to writing more about a variety of subjects. It is evident that the more students practice writing, the better they read and write.

The Bernard L. Schwartz Communication Institute managed to establish a website with at least twenty individually installed courses. Further along,  WordPress multiuser was launched, facilitating the integration of a variety of blogs for each faculty. This lengthy process demonstrates that even though the experimental process may be tedious and filled with obstacles, the payoff is more often than not quite favorable. Suzanne Epstein explained to us, that from the institutions point of view, many of the initial ideas they had about integrating blogs into the curriculum, were discarded in the experimental process. It is important to promote reflection within the students and to encourage them to maintain communication with other students and faculty through the blogs. Thanks to the wonderful amount of feedback produced in the blogosphere,  Baruch’s professors have been able to modify their blog system according to their preferences and academic needs.

Another example of technological innovation at Baruch college is the development of their VOCAT tool. VOCAT stands for “Video Oral Communication Assessment Tool”. This tool, developed by Mikhail Gershovich and his team at the Schwartz Communication Institute in collaboration with  Zach Davis’ Cast Iron Coding, allows faculty and students to assess oral presentation videos. VOCAT allows users to assign numeric values to presentation video clips. More than 7,000 students have used the program to evaluate their peers.  Eventually, VOCAT’s creators hope to distribute this tool to other institutions.

It is quite evident that education is changing, not only in the way we learn but also in the way that we teach. Online courses have represented a great advance in education.  Asynchronous education has been around for more than 100 years. Soon after the development of the postal system, distance learning courses were developed, where students received learning material through the mail and later sent home work back.  Online courses are a sort of evolution from that system of learning, and the various advances in teaching that have developed over time are evident. The vital element that holds distance learning together is communication. Thanks to communication technologies, in recent times we have seen an exponential increase in how much we communicate and significant advances in the technology we use to communicate. Nowadays it is possible to have real-time communication online, facilitating the necessary feedback essential to education.

Besides the presence of these advances in technology and the benefits that they provide, in some cases there exists a certain resistance from faculty to integrate themselves into an online curriculum. Some professors tend to be a bit more conservative. These educators have a certain idea of what education is and should be. Mikhail Gershovich brought up the example of a certain professor who, when proposed with the idea of having his students give oral presentations, expressed in frustration:

The way that students learn is sitting down to listen to hour-long lectures, that’s how I learned, that’s how my father learned and that’s how his father learned…

It is evident that these fears and myths about education are alive within many educators. Yet this resistance to technology is not exclusive to the faculty. Many students have shown insecurities about the idea of committing to an online course. In Suzanne Epstein’s opinion, many of the students are focused on getting an education, creating a professional persona and bettering their social and economic situation. Therefore, they may hesitate at the idea of taking an experimental online course. Even though there may be quite a few students that are interested in such a course, she believes that the majority hesitate in considering an online course as a viable option.

One challenging obstacle is fear. Many fear change, this is typical amongst human beings. Many faculty members have expressed certain worries about their privacy in online courses, especially in courses that are open to the general public. There is the issue of what happens in the classroom and how it is exposed to the world. They worry about privacy, copyright and the perceived value of tuition. Many students that pay large amounts of money to take certain courses would not think it is fair to provide these courses free of charge online. All of these elements would change the current profit system for universities, and this causes fear within the administration of these institutions.

It is evident that for many professors, the most important thing is to cover all of the content in a course within a certain amount of time. By having this kind of pressure, the faculty finds itself less inclined to experiment with other methods of teaching. The majority of these conservative professors utilize resources such as Blackboard. This resource provides them with a convenient and easy to use platform where they can organize and share their Power Point presentations. Blackboard is a very useful system for disseminating information to students, but many other innovative alternatives exist.

Even when we recognize the pressure that the faculty has to cover a certain amount of content within a parameter of time, we notice that the results of this style of teaching (with a focus on content) does not produce favorable results. The results of the Programme for International Student Assessment (or PISA), have been quite negative for the US.  We can observe a clear dichotomy between the focus on content and the negative results that the method produces.

We keep thinking in terms of this outdated model that dictates that professors must take all of the knowledge that they have accumulated over years of study and then transmit this content to the students, who are supposed to be sitting in class with open minds, absorbing all of this information. They have a difficult time believing that the students may not absorb about 90% of the material covered in a lecture. Blogs and other technological developments can stimulate us in deciphering another method for measuring content and how it is absorbed by the students. One of the negative aspects of standardized testing is that they only measure what they intend to. In this way, it is difficult to have an idea about erroneous concepts that students may have, unless they are asked about them in the exam. On the other hand, this a positive aspect about blogs, they allow the faculty to observe what the students are doing correctly and what they need help in, in order to correct them.

According to Lucas Waltzer, we are in the midst of profound changes that are occurring in our society, which affect the way that we teach and learn. These changes exist across multiple scales, there are global changes and then there are changes that occur at a personal level. The field of technology is flowering and this creates great opportunities for collaboration between institutions. We are even noticing a change in the students. For example, Mikhail Gershovich expressed how before, the students demonstrated more difficulty as they integrated themselves into online courses. This process would take a few days, while the student registered and became familiarized with the use of the system. Now, we see that, in a certain way, the students live in this digital environment. It is evident that many of them have adapted to the changes and in some cases have exceeded their professors in terms of their confidence level in dealing with new tools, such as WordPress. It is important that we continue to innovate in terms of the resources we use to teach and the methods that we use to evaluate the absorption of knowledge and content. It is important to emphasize that perhaps content is not as important as previously thought. With the use of computers in the classroom, we see an important change in the role of the instructor. Their purpose is not to impart knowledge or information to the student, due to the fact that nowadays students have access to much more information than the professor could possibly know. Their true function should be to create students who ask more questions, and to help them think critically about the world that surrounds them. The role of the modern pedagogue is to guide students in the process of analyzing information.

Many times we encounter people, be they students or professors, young or advanced in years, that show certain difficulty when it comes to adapting to the digital changes that have occurred recently. Lucas Waltzer highlights the fact that there is no such thing as a “digital native”. This concept needs to be discarded because excuses members of the previous generations from the rigors necessary in order to commence utilizing and understanding these tools (such as WordPress). Some individuals postulate that technology makes us less intelligent. They believe that because all the information we seek is available to us at the tip of our fingers, we don’t have the need to learn the same methods of research we were required to learn twenty years ago. For example, nowadays we have mobile phones that save all of our phone numbers, and many of us have lost the mental capacity to memorize a variety of phone numbers, simply because we don’t need to. Now, does that mean that we are less intelligent, or that our intelligence has simply adapted to the world that surrounds us? We still have the capacity to, for example, memorize the periodic table of the elements by utilizing online resources we access through our phones, all while riding a bus to class.

We have a wide variety of tools available that assist us in the moment of educating and learning. If we make the effort to dispel negative myths about the use of technology in education, and we decide to experiment with the available resources, we can develop new methods for disseminating information and measuring academic achievement.

Caro Dalla,

Ti scrivo. Ed è la prima volta che in questo mio blog scrivo in italiano. Per dirti quanto mi piaceva la tua musica. Non tutta, vero. Ma quando uscì il disco Futura io me ne sono innamorato. Quante volte l’avrò sentito!! Migliaia: Futura, poi, la canzone che preferivo. La bellissima Cara, e le altre. Avevo una ventina d’anni. Da lì ho poi conosciuto meglio le altre canzoni. Prima, 4/3/43, Piazza Grande. Poi, Cosa Sarà, Ma come fanno i marinai, quel Natale insieme a De Gregori. E poi Banana Republic, un disco che avrò ascoltato un altro migliaio di volte.

Grazie, non so cos’altro dire. Non mi piacciono le pagliacciate di questi giorni al tuo funerale, con tutti che hanno sentito il bisogno di dire di tutto. De Gregori, che non si è fatto vedere, non ha avuto parole, perchè davvero non ce ne sono.

Ma a parte le volte che ho sentito e cantato L’anno che verrà, da lì viene il meglio della tua ironia:

E senza tanti disturbi, qualcuno sparirà,

Saranno forse i troppo furbi, e i cretini di ogni età.

Purtroppo no, tra tanti cretini, spesso ci casca anche qualcuno che cretino non è, e quelli che lo sono davvero, stanno lì, a guardare. WTF.

Ma finiamo questo post con una bella strofa, proprio da Cara:

Quanti capelli che hai, non si riesce a contare

sposta la bottiglia e lasciami guardare

se di tanti capelli, ci si puo fidare.