Beyond School

Problem:

Your school building has 100 rooms. Each room has 32 florescent lights of n wattage. The hallways and bathrooms have an additional 300 florescent lights of the same wattage. These lights are on for an average of ten hours a day.

1. Given the cost per lightbulb run at ten hours a day, how much does your school pay each month for lighting?

2. If the school changed its bulbs to (your preferred energy-saving lightbulb here), how much would the school save per month in electricity bills?

3. If the school turned off hallway and classroom lights during peak daylight hours, and relied simply on sunlight from the ample windows in all buildings, how much money would the school save per month?

Test:

Present your findings to the school administration in a proposal that they make the change.

–

I’d give anything to find a math teacher who would pose such a problem, and such a test, to our students. I doubt my odds of succeeding in such a search.

“It doesn’t fit the curriculum.” Or: “How do I assess that?” Or: “It’s too messy.” Or: “I don’t have time.”

Any stories out there of similar projects in other schools?

And how could we measure the carbon footprint of the school’s electricity use, and the reduction in carbon emissions by taking the measures listed above?

(Thanks to Karl Fisch for inspiring the thought in his comment to the “Did You Ever Wonder?” video post. Lindsea of Students 2.0 also inspired this question.)

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

[Update: Download link is fixed. Thanks!]

In this one-hour podcast (edited down from 90 minutes, and enhanced with chapter titles and quick navigation if you download it to iTunes), Dean Shareski, District Technology Coordinator in Saskatchewan, Canada, talks with me here in Seoul about NATURAL, “unschooly” global collaboration via student networked learning projects.

Topics:

• Natural vs. “Scripted” global collaboration
• How we see Networked Learning working in the classroom
• Four global networked learning projects in my Seoul PLN/Networked Learning elective
• assessing networked learning
• networked learning is NOT “flat CLASSROOM,” but person-to-person global collaboration
• student addiction to traditional, inauthentic learning, and resistance to real project-based learning
• how so many teachers can only hear through “teacher ears”, and are deaf to natural learning
• how my open network 1:1 PLN class can serve as a useful example to show administrators
• on books versus digital texts: a nostalgic, romantic outro debate.

Many, many thanks to Dean for giving me the opportunity to clarify how radically different this approach is from anything I’m aware of. I think it’s hugely relevant to any evangelistic mission to pull resistant teachers into global collaborations, and more importantly, to keep them doing them. Because I think - and have experienced - how whacked out crazy and exhausting a heavily scripted, assembly-line global project can be for students and teachers alike.

Download the podcast to iTunes for chapter navigation, or simply listen to the player below - and enjoy. I put music and cool sound effects in there for you ‘n’ everything.

Referenced links in the podcast:

• 1001 Flat World Tales
• David Warlick: Is Pedagogy Getting in the Way of Learning?
• KIS PLN/Networked Learning Group Planning Blog
• A Sophomore Grades Himself
• Apple Learning Institute Project on Self-Assessing and Rewarding Valuable Failure
• Scott Schwister’s Higher Edison blog
• The Flat Classroom Project
• Diane Cordell’s Journeys

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I gave this presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok in December of 2007. The conference room was freezing, to explain the ski cap.

Not only does it tell the story of how the international school I work at went 1:1, how that groundswell was created, how admin was persuaded to choose Macs instead of PC’s (hint: comparing total cost of ownership destroys the expense myth), and the challenges of staff and student training; it also shows exemplars of digital teaching and learning in a biology and language arts classroom, as well as highlighting my own teaching journey since embracing technology in my language arts and history classrooms.

Added bonus: it also includes the first showing of the Students 2.0 promotional video produced and scored by Sean “The Bassplayer” Law of Scotland. ADE saw it days before the launch of s2oh, because the ADE Institute was during the fourth week of our pre-launch preparations for that experiment.

Finally, the presentation itself was a conscious attempt to model a minimalism I want my students - text- and bullet-junkies all - to emulate. And to provide information via not exposition, but metaphor and story. My goal was to inform without being a bore. (More on this presentation angle below the video, in a comment I left on an Anthony Chivetta post on Students 2.0 on teaching design to students - what I call “cutting the crap“.)

Here it is. It’s 30 minutes long. As you’ll read below, everybody else was stopped at 20 minutes. It’s not because I was better. It’s because my slides were. And my story.

The Backstory: It Takes a Story. It Doesn’t Take Bullet Points.

Storytelling is prior to and higher than design. Who wants a well-designed crappy story? (And maybe we should call this narrative, not storytelling, to open the frame wide enough to accommodate expository presentations?)

Here’s a story: I was one of three teachers asked to give a presentation at the Apple Distinguished Educator institute in Bangkok last month. We all were asked to address issues in 1:1 laptop schools.

The first guy gave a slideshow about his 4-year old laptop school. Lots of slides, lots of text, lots of pictures, lots of information. When he reached the alloted 20 minutes, he was told to finish up within a minute.

The second guy gave a slideshow with lots of examples of digital student work (much of it, I’m sorry to say, in need of crap-cutting and worse, to echo Dan, ideas worth watching in the first place - probably as much the teachers’ fault as the students, since the teachers assign this stuff). He also got fetishistic, predictably, about tools he uses. Jing this, Skitch that, blah blah blah.

When his 20 minutes were up, he was asked to wrap up in one minute.

(His school was an 18-month-old laptop school, by the way.)

It was my turn next. Imagine my joy at continuing the Chinese water torture with 20 more minutes of my own dripping slideshow.

I gave the presentation. When it was over, I said, “Was that shorter than my alloted 20 minutes?” The Apple guy said, “No - you went 30 minutes.”

Here’s why I think he didn’t make me finish:

1. I did have a story. I knew the age of the other two presenters’ laptop programs - again, 4 years for one, and the other 18 months - and I knew my own school’s 1:1 program was only 4 months old. So I gave this expository speech a metaphor: “Our 1:1 Baby Book.” The narrative thread of this informational “story” was: Conception - Labor - Birth - Potty Training.

To riff off some academic I read years ago in a literary theory graduate course, by giving the information some “narrative rails,” the audience enjoyed the ride and kept anticipating what was coming next.

And the occasional use of “ass” and “poopy” didn’t hurt, either. Somehow we need to mention emotion and voice in all of this. I didn’t talk like some constipated suit trying to impress. I was a guy in love with his story, telling it like the playful, caffeinated, silly bastard I enjoy being. I used my voice.

2. Also, Dean’s “design matters” and other explorations I’ve done since influenced my visual design. I had my story, but I wanted visuals without words. Pictures only. I didn’t quite succeed. I used slide titles and single-word lines of text. But to know my story and receive its information, you had to listen to me tell it. You couldn’t read it along with me.

A picture of a pregnant belly rising from a bubble-bath, of a new-born still gooey and umbilical in a doctor’s hands, of a poopy diaper-changing moment in some Flickr’d household - that was the bulk of my slideshow.

–

I still have a headache, but will try to sum up:

1. As Dan says (and hasn’t Warlick been stressing “telling a new story” for about a century?): storytelling first. I would add - and this was the point of my story - even expository can be transformed into a story via metaphor, extended analogy, allegory, etc. I got ten extra minutes to blather because people wanted to hear how my school is raising its baby. People like babies, generally (”especially with a little salt and pepper,” as WC Fields said ).

2. Visual design: I go back to Dean’s thrust - throw out the templates, eschew text, and arrest with less.

Oops. My twenty minutes was up a long time ago.

People referenced in the presentation: Jason Spivey, Justin Medved, Kim Cofino, Anthony Armstrong, Chris Watson

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

The next time you show “Did You Know?” to anybody involved in education, please consider showing this new video by William Farren, an educator in the Dominican Republic, as a vital counter-point:

.

I’ve invited William to either guest-post here, or better still, be the guest for a student podcast for my Project Global Cooling activity, which is in sore need of traction after months of failed effort.

Invitation to Dialogue to Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod:

Karl, Scott, as two of the biggest voices about 21st century education, due in no small part to the embrace worldwide of the “Did You Know?” video, I hope you’ll take a moment to make whatever comments come to mind after watching the video, either on your own blogs or, for the sake of conversation, in the comment thread to this post (or both). And without meaning to be in any way antagonistic or inflammatory, I’d like to ask if you see any possibility of either giving time, in a future version of “Did You Know?”, to sustainability and green learning, or at the very least to helping William’s video get as much exposure as “Did You Know?”

More Background

Here’s some background to my worry about “Did You Know?” being used so uncritically to frame our educational imperative for the 21st century. It’s from a post I wrote back in July, 2007, called: “Did You Know? There’s More to the Future than Economics.” I only include the last half, which is a response to a Diane Cordell post about “student voice” that includes the following quote:

The principle goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done; men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers, who can be critical and verify, and not accept, everything they are offered. –Piaget

The next generation, which we’re teaching now to be replicants of our own problematic lifestyles, are damned if they’re not equipped - or even conscious of - the world of their future. It’s been said a million times: “Our past is not their future.”

The one wrinkle I see in letting students decide what to learn is this: they are only aware of what their community - parents, teachers, preachers - make them aware of. And that community is generally not cognizant of the shape of the future, busy as it is with its own daily round and daily diet of soft news.

So I still see a role for adult educators to serve as sort of “futurist guides” to the next generation of adults.

Karl Fisch is already an example of someone playing that role, however unintentionally, by virtue of the viral reach of his “Did You Know?” video. According to that vision, largely a condensation of Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat, the future to prepare for is one of economic competition with China and India.

But there’s more to our young people’s future than economics - especially when most of those economic practices are unsustainable. All this talk about “21st century workplace skills” disturbs me to no end for its trancelike oblivion to the unsustainability of that workplace.

Friedman actually mentions “green innovation” as one of those skills, incidentally, but that’s not mentioned in “Did You Know?”, so educators are largely not thinking of it. This isn’t Karl’s fault, since that video wasn’t intended to be anything more than a district edtech professional development presentation. But it’s taken a life of its own, and educators are so wowed by the flash of the animation they don’t seem to think beyond it to what else awaits in the future.

There are other futures we need to alert this generation to that are more fundamental, in my view. Global Warming and Climate Change, combined with the Peak Oil situation, top the list.

If we adults don’t use our capacity for being more informed, beyond the media, about the future we’re creating for our young, they have nobody to educate them in what is relevant to their future. We’ve surrendered our role to the larger forces of culture and media that are stuck in the status quo.

I can’t thank William Farren enough for taking such time and care to self-produce this video. It’s an inconvenient truth, but no less true for it: the hidden curriculum does matter. For all the talk we do about caring for kids, we seem to forget the grandkids - and all the other species on this planet - when we forget to teach the whole future, and not just the (problematic) need for economic competition.

Related reading: “The Year of Global Cooling and Understanding by Design” - project-based learning across the curriculum, for a sustainable future.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)

I haven’t done an open thread in a while - still chewing on that last one on “designing your dream 1:1 school elective”. But here’s a question that’s been nagging me for a while, and that I’ve wanted to put to as many people out there that will weigh in. Because I can’t tell if my case is normal, or the exception.

It has to do with this: of my four years of high school education back in the late ’70s, here is the “knowledge” I remember:

Psychology Class:

“Functional Fixedness” is what I’d now call “inside-the-box thinking.” People with functional fixedness don’t realize, for example, that with a candle, a match, and a fishing hook, you actaully have a “wall-mounting kit.” (Melt the wax on the wall and embed the hook in it. Let it dry and solidify. Voila: hang a picture on the hook.) I never watched the old TV show MacGyver, but whenever I heard about the cool things he could jimmy with the random objects at hand, I always thought: “MacGyver gets functional fixedness.”

Story: A guy knocked on my door once asking for a coathanger. He’d locked his keys in his car. I went out with him to help. The lock peg was one of those chrome deals with no lip or head - nothing for the coat-hanger to grab on to. And the chrome was too smooth to offer traction to the hanger. I pulled the chewing gum out my mouth, fixed it on the hook of the hanger, and sure enough, it grabbed that chrome peg and pulled it up, unlocking the car door, in a second flat. Thank you, MacGyver. And thank you, high school psychology class.

Oh. I remember genotype and phenotype, too. And phrenology. And something about Freud. And Maslow’s Hierarchy.

English Class:

I remember writing an essay on the Iliad based on my reading of the Classics Illustrated Comics version. And getting an A. I remember “Et tu, Brutus?“ I remember writing some lurid report on the serial killer, Son of Sam. (It was fun trying to get the horror of being his victim in the opening paragraphs. That I remember that is noteworthy. This was 1977.)

Social Studies:

I remember absolutely nothing from high school social studies. I didn’t fall in love with history until far into college.

Math:

I remember finding geometry fun and easy. I remember failing Algebra because I skipped too much school.

Science:

I remember nothing from high school science. And I’m trying to right now. Something about cells, mitochondria, metastasis, cancer. Something about kingdoms and phyla and other taxonomic categories.

Art:

I remember making a block print. I remember having a painful crush on cheerleader Cheryl Newman, who always sat with me, but whom I was too shy to pursue. But I digress.

Physical Education and Health:

I remember absolutely nothing. Oh wait: four food groups. And I am what I eat.

I’m really trying here.

Other Disciplines:

If I took any other classes, I’m darned if I remember them at all.

Valuable Life-Skills I Learned in High School:

Don’t hate me. I can’t think of one. Other than “Fight bullies early, or suffer them for years.” And “Friendship is pretty important. It gets you through the high school years.”

So my question for this open thread: What value did high school have for you? What knowledge do you a) remember at all from all those hours of studying and testing? and b) find useful today? Expand if you like.

If you like this post, please spread it: (But don't tag it "education." That will bury it.)