Beyond School » Networked Learning

Wikipedia: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source”

Clay Burell — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 20:15:57 +0000

I wrote recently about how many of my otherwise sharp students were “Google fundamentalists” who argued, to simplify a bit, that “if it’s in Google, it’s valid.” These are often the same students who insist they should be able to use Wikipedia as a source for research.

I’ve been skimming Wikipedia’s own policies for writing and research, and Lo! The Great Wikipedia itself tells its writers the very things I was trying to tell my young fundies. Maybe hearing from the Great Wiki God’s own mouth that Wikipedia and blogs should not be taken on faith, and are not considered reliable sources, will bring them out of Digital Barbarism and into the Enlightenment.

So below, brothers and sisters in Reason, are chapter and verse from the Wikipedia Scriptures themselves, warning the faithful not to rely on Wikipedia, blogs, other wikis, forums, self-published books, or textbooks for research. Nice caveats apply in some cases to spur further discussion.

I share for those who share my pain [emphases added]:

Wikipedia:Reliable source examples – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- –full Wikipedia page
- Are wikis reliable sources?
- Wikis, including Wikipedia and other wikis sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, are not regarded as reliable sources. However, wikis are excellent places to locate primary and secondary sources.
- Are weblogs reliable sources? (more below the fold…)
  
  In many cases, no. Most private weblogs (“blogs”), especially those hosted by blog-hosting services such as Blogger, are self-published sources; many of them published pseudonymously. There is no fact-checking process and no guarantee of quality of reliability. Information from a privately-owned blog may be usable in an article about that blog or blogger under the self-publication provision of the verifiability policy.
- Weblog material written by well-known professional researchers writing within their field, or well-known professional journalists, may be acceptable, especially if hosted by a university, newspaper or employer (a typical example is Language Log, which is already cited in several articles, e.g. Snowclone, Drudge Report). Usually, subject experts will publish in sources with greater levels of editorial control such as research journals, which should be preferred over blog entries if such sources are available.
- Are web forums and blog talkbacks reliable sources?
  
  Web forums and the talkback section of weblogs are rarely regarded as reliable. While they are often controlled by a single party (as opposed to the distributed nature of Usenet), many still permit anonymous commentary and we have no way of verifying the identity of a poster. Some however, are edited by reliable organizations, and therefore may possibly be justified as exceptions.
- Briefly: published scholarly sources from academic presses should be used.
Wikipedia:Reliable sources – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- –full Wikipedia page here
- Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable secondary sources. This means that while primary or tertiary sources can be used to support specific statements, the bulk of the article should rely on secondary sources.
  
  Tertiary sources such as compendia, encyclopedias, textbooks, and other summarizing sources may be used to give overviews or summaries, but should not be used in place of secondary sources for detailed discussion. Wikipedia itself, although a tertiary source, should not be used as a source within articles, nor should any mirrors or forks of Wikipedia be accepted as reliable sources for any purpose.
- Primary sources, on the other hand, are often difficult to use appropriately. While they can be reliable in many situations, they must be used with caution.

12 Comments

At January 3, 2010, Morgante Pell wrote:
Would I cite Wikipedia in a paper? No. But it's still where I turn first for an overview or to look up a quick fact.

Wikipedia is a great encyclopedia, but encyclopedias should never be considered valid sources for any sort of academic paper. At best, they're tertiary sources.

Sadly, I think far too many teachers misunderstand this. They shouldn't rail against Wikipedia for being editable by many or because it's on the web—just call it an encyclopedia. Any teacher who accepts Encyclopedia Britannica as a source but not Wikipedia is a hypocrite.
At January 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Morgante,
That's why I like the following two quotes from Wikipedia in the post:
Wikis, including Wikipedia and other wikis sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, are not regarded as reliable sources. However, wikis are excellent places to locate primary and secondary sources.
And
Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable secondary sources. This means that while primary or tertiary sources can be used to support specific statements, the bulk of the article should rely on secondary sources.
Tertiary sources such as compendia, encyclopedias, textbooks, and other summarizing sources may be used to give overviews or summaries, but should not be used in place of secondary sources for detailed discussion.
I don't think any encyclopedia articles should be allowed in research papers, beyond the intro paragraph for background and context.
At January 3, 2010, Paul Villavisanis wrote:
Clay,
First, I've missed seeing your picture in the tweet stream.Nice to see you posting.
I tell my students to use Wikipedia as a diving board, a place to find primary sources. They shake their collective heads and whisper, "Well, Mr. Soandso says Wikipedia is terrible and should never be used and we'll fail the paper if we do."
I'll share with them your post to help them understand a little better how to use it.
P.S. Do libraries even have new encyclopedias?
Peace
At January 3, 2010, Kaelie wrote:
I rarely use wikipedia. Last time I used it was for an AP Biology definition, because all of our teachers refuse to accept Wikipedia as a valid source. While most of it IS NOT valid, the problem is it is hit or miss with its accuracy.

I think that English curriculum (especially in America) doesn't put enough emphasis on reliable sources, especially from the internet. A teacher of mine actually complained about some of the papers, because they used sources that were not legitimate. I don't blame the teacher, because she barely had enough time to teach the basics of writing a research paper (yes, they teach it every year, even in the English 3 and AP Language class I took last year) and finishing up Macbeth.

I refuse to use Wikipedia and encyclopedias for papers, because honestly they are kind of useless outside of straight facts, and most of the papers you write in English are analysis that you cannot find there.

However, teachers now have the ability to create specialized search engines for specific topics that pull out "legitimate sources," eliminating the work that the student has to do to find sources they can actually use.
At January 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Thanks for the moral support, Paul. Trying to get back in the saddle.
I get the same cognitive dissonance from students re: WP, so I'm glad WP itself weighs in here. It really is a useful resource for teaching literacy and source reliability.
I don't know about libraries, but laptops sure have a lot of encyclopedias.
Happy New Year :)
At January 5, 2010, Bill Warrick wrote:
I find it interesting that the post is written without any discussion on the meaning of 'reliability' or 'reliable'.
I'm of the opinion that no bit of information - regardless of the source is value neutral. No matter how the information was generated or distributed, it carries with it a bias, slant, purpose, or agenda - however benign.
The value of information - its 'reliability' - then, shifts from the source to the consumer. As the consumer of the information, I determine its reliability based on the context in which I use it.
I don't think we can generalize about the reliability of various sources. If i'm researching the history of plumbing, the sources I find reliable will be different than if I was researching how to stop a leak.
.-= Bill Warrick´s last blog ..Hiatus =-.
At January 9, 2010, Blurall wrote:
Wikipedia is not reliable, and the information provided there is in majority of situations wrong. Also, it is not neutral when there are two different reliable sources for the same matter. Because of technicalities they accept just one, even though it is proven is the wrong one.
Or they quote from one source, just enough for proving a certain point of view, omitting to quote the entire fragment that would change everything (they do not quote in the spirit of the author of the source)
When it is possible this with verifiable sources, what can we expect from sources that we can not afford to buy.
From my experience, they do not accept reference, quotes from books that are on the free domain, i.e. Archive sites, even though by indicating the place where anyone can verify information, it is much easier. With their type of site, I am forced either to buy a book or to buy their point of view made by it doesn’t matter who has a computer
It appears for me, wikipedia is just a matter of business
This is just my opinion.
At January 9, 2010, Bill Warrick wrote:
Obviously, people can go back and forth about the 'reliability' of wikipedia - on its own or in comparison with other sources.
The point that I was trying to make is that we need to adjust our thinking about the nature of information (as opposed to facts).
As a teacher, the students I work with don't simply need 'reliable facts'. I'm sorry, I know that's sacrilege to many. What they need are the mental and technological tools necessary to gather, manipulate, assess, manage, and use the kind of information to which they're exposed today - blogs, wikis, tweets, youtube videos. Wikipedia is one of those tools (one of MANY).
As an information source, Wikipedia is invaluable. The idea of wikipedia is one of the most breathtaking shifts in the nature of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. Through Wikipedia, everyone in the world contributes to the knowledge base of everyone else in the world. We're moving beyond the place where 'experts' are the sole sources of 'reliable information'. I have information about my place here, the events and conditions around me, and from a viewpoint that no-one else in the world has. So do you... Gathering all of those viewpoints is a good thing.
Wikipedia is current. Events of the world are almost instantaneously entered and written about. Videos and images are included. No other reference source can match that.
We see this shift in traditional news. How many (primarily local) news organizations now solicit tweets and videos from viewers? How long before those first-hand accounts ARE the news? Not long, I think.
True, wikipedia from a purely statistical point of view might not have everything right. But as a tool, it is indispensable. My students don't need to have a book of facts, they need to understand how to make sense of the information they gather from all sources.
.-= Bill Warrick´s last blog ..Hiatus =-.
At January 9, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Bill, maybe I didn't make myself clear enough: I'm talking about academic, formal research papers.
I mentioned the "interesting caveats" in the post for lengthier discussions. It wasn't the focus of this quick post.
So I'm not bashing WP. I'm trying to save students from getting bashed in college for confusing it with peer-reviewed or otherwise authoritative sources.
For what it is (and it's many things), WP is a wonderful tool. But it shouldn't be confused with what it's not.
At January 9, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
See my reply to your first comment above.
The key point for this post is: It shouldn't be mistaken for a reliable source in a formal academic research paper.
As for the rest of your comment, it should be recognized for the many things it is, as you argue.
At July 14, 2010, Forrest York wrote:
Do you publish to wikipedia? You seem to know a lot of things, I feel, would make wikipedia at the very least more interesting. You may have covered this in your comments, but just stopping by shortly.
At July 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Forrest,
Maybe not a bad idea, but I have to admit the idea of writing straight expository without "attitude" leaves me cold. Maybe I should assign students to?
Thanks for dropping in, hope you're well.
B

New Tech Teaching Habits

Clay Burell — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 15:37:54 +0000

I think this question would make either a good meme or a good open thread:

What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution?

I’ll share a couple of mine. I think history teachers will find the first one valuable, but teachers of any discipline can find and do similar things in their subjects.

1. Annotating Open Courseware University Lectures on Academic Earth, YouTube, Yale:

I’ve been watching UCLA Professor Lynn Hunt‘s European Civilization from 1750 to the Present course lectures on Academic Earth to review modern European history before teaching it in the semester beginning next month. I’m also watching Yale Professor John Merriman‘s course on the same subject.

Here’s the rub: Yale’s courses are better watched at Yale’s Open Yale site, where you can find transcripts, video downloads for iPods, and all sorts of supplemental goodies for each lecture. But I haven’t been able to find the UCLA course on any UCLA-hosted site, so all we have for Prof. Hunt’s course is Academic Earth’s video. That means no transcripts or text of any sort. [Update: UCLA has a YouTube channel that allows downloads of the lectures -- something Academic Earth doesn't do. I'm putting my floating stickies on the YouTube lectures too. Here's the Modern Western Civ course playlist.]

Dr. Hunt’s a fine lecturer. She opens each class with a musical or artistic piece from the period covered, for example, and discusses its significance in the wider historical context. Her lectures are also well-organized, tight, and interesting. So my new routine, as the screenshot below shows, is a simple one: While I watch a lecture, I have a Diigo floating sticky-note open on the page, and simply outline the lecture with time-stamps. You can see it live here, if you have Diigo [Update: And here on YouTube]. Obvious uses:

I — or anybody else — can use the time-stamp to show exactly the segments wanted in class.
I can also adapt and/or condense the entire lecture for my own presentations in my classes. Simply extract the time-stamp and notes on my Diigo page, print them out if needed, and voila — an outline for a lecture, presentation, or discussion.

Again, this is simple and no big deal. It’s just taking notes while watching a video. But the cool thing is, other teachers worldwide (if they use Diigo) can share mine and add their own. (Among other possibilities.)

Here’s the screenshot:

Dr Hunt's UCLA lecture, my Diigo floating sticky-note (click for larger image)

2. Planning Classes While Walking to School with iPod/iPhone Voice Memo

Talking to Yourself is Good

I love Voice Memo. My daily routine in Singapore is an hour metro ride to school, then a 10-minute walk from the metro station to my classroom. I use it as planning time, and my best tool is my iPod Touch’s Voice Memo app. My iPod earbuds have a mic in the wire, so all I have to do is spend five minutes or so thinking about how I want to structure the day’s classes, and talk it into my iPod. When I get to school, I listen to the voice memo to write my lesson plan on the board.

I know some people can plan classes weeks in advance, but I’m not one of them. Too many ideas worth incorporating come in the days, even the hours, before the class. So this has been a godsend for me. I don’t forget my best ideas, and don’t have to write them down. I literally talk to myself as I walk to class about the best ideas I have for the day.

Again, no big deal. A drunk could do this in his worst hangover. And that’s the beauty: low-labor, high-leverage changes in routine, thanks to new tools.

What about you? Any to share?

And Happy New Year, by the way. May the five-fingered fist of fate always smash the mean person next to you, and pet you like a kitten until 2011.

7 Comments

At January 1, 2010, Will Richardson wrote:
Hey Clay,

How is 2010 treating you?

You really need to get Evernote to do that audio note taking stuff with. The iPhone app just rocks.
.-= Will Richardson´s last blog ..2020 Vision? =-.
At January 1, 2010, diane wrote:
I run ideas by my PLN - no need to reinvent the wheel, when there are already excellent resources available for sharing & collaboration.
Happy New Year, Clay!
.-= diane´s last blog ..Looking Back, Looking Forward =-.
At January 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Will,
It's good to be alive to see it, so no complaints (publicly, at least).
Your nudge made me spend a good five or six hours exploring Evernote yesterday. I couldn't make it do basic things like show a page layout for print or pdf, etc. I can't even see how to export files in your basic formats. I can't annotate with it socially in any invisibly easy way. So I'm not feeling a lot of love.
I can see how it's a great "cloud file cabinet," for sure. But beyond that, why do you like it so much?
Hope '10's good for you.
At January 5, 2010, Clarissa wrote:
Good grief; I had NO IDEA that those earbuds had a tiny little microphone in them! Thanks for the tip. (I'm still learning how to use the iPod Touch that I got for my birthday/Christmas.)
.-= Clarissa´s last blog ..Twelve Days of Christmas: Free E-Books =-.
At January 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Clarissa, you have to buy the set with the mic in them. Costs 40 or 50 bucks, but well worth it if you want to talk to yourself. :)
At January 7, 2010, Clarissa wrote:
When I took a peek at the included earbuds that came with my Touch, I saw a tiny little input grill on the same area as the volume controls. I tested it out with the voice memo software (I had been wondering why that was included!) and sure enough, it worked! Someone I was chatting with said it may not have been included with the 1st gen Touches... So I'm not even out any extra money.
.-= Clarissa´s last blog ..12 Days of Christmas: EFL Classroom 2.0 =-.
At January 11, 2010, Charlie A. Roy wrote:
I'm now back in the classroom for the first time in three years teaching a personal finance class. Three years ago i was sans a PLN. This time around i'd say google docs and wikispaces are a new must have as well as a great wireless connection in the room and a liberal filtering policy at the school.

Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear?

Clay Burell — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 13:31:58 +0000

I expect to be soundly whipped for this post, but in this age of “failure being free,” I don’t mind. I hope to learn from teachers who can offer specific examples, or research, that give evidence that digital learning is superior to traditional. (Or who can contest my framing of the issue, and improve on it.)

I’m having a conversation with Nathan Lowell and Monika Hardy — it’s too long to post in its entirety, but it starts here — on the “Using Technology Without Understanding It” post.

It started with Nathan saying,

Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.

Monika seconds that claim, and adds:

The focus needs to be on the connections web access allows – to knowledge via people. People aren’t buying in because we’re missing the point. Learning how to learn.

And I just replied to Monika with this — which I hope some of you, again, will chime in on to show me the error of my ways:

I’ll start with saying I’m still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher — which to me means “preparation for informed citizenship” teacher — I’m not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.

I see the value of both, though. I’m thinking a separate course — a sort of “Intro to Web 2.0″ — might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.

And I’m still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I’ve recently been calling, in my internal monologues, “barbarians with laptops.”

Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who don’t learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).

And the new tools also enable “connections to knowledge via people” that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.

I think it helps to fine-tune the discussion a bit: “content” breaks down into your “core” disciplines — maths, sciences, social studies, language arts — plus your electives in arts, technology, languages, and so forth. Am I wrong to think some disciplines deserve more emphasis on coverage than others? Maths, for example, and science? Isn’t time lost on digital experimentation in these classes a costly thing, since it may cost students a deeper focus on, say, evolution, or advanced calculus, or whatever?

And if the answer is “yes” — notice the “if” and be nice, readers — then doesn’t it follow that web experimentation in some classrooms should be treated with extreme caution?

Open Thread: School Me

Whatever your subject matter, I’d love to see specific examples of digital tools and practices that, either through research-based evidence or your own direct observation, you think enhance the learning of content or the development of skills in the classroom.

36 Comments

At December 29, 2009, Harold Jarche wrote:
Your description of Idiocracy, which I have not seen, reminds me of the book Feed; an excellent read: http://is.gd/5FwjF
.-= Harold Jarche´s last blog ..2009: year of the tweet =-.
At December 29, 2009, Tomaz Lasic wrote:
Hmm, digital and/versus traditional? I'm sure you'll get a bunch of 'success stories' batting on each side but I think the binary divide above is a false one to start with.

How far do 'traditional methods' go? If we go far enough, we'd probably arrive at the model of mentorship, which could well be extended and supported in this digitally compressed world.

What is digital? A worksheet online?

My goal as a teacher is to help extend my students understanding of the world beyond their immediate personal experience, then act upon that understanding as individuals responsible to the society and the world, not simply narrow self.

'Digital' or 'traditional'? In Aussie-speak: Could not give a rats arse.

Cheers Clay.
.-= Tomaz Lasic´s last blog ..The REAL 140 characters =-.
At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Just read the link and the similarities are striking. Hope the library has it.
At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Tomaz,
I thought "rat's arse" was British.
I'm as suspicious of the frame, as I said in the post, as you are. But I'm still suspicious of the opportunity cost issue too.
At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Money quote from the Publisher's Weekly review of Feed, Harold:
In this chilling novel, Anderson (Burger Wuss; Thirsty) imagines a society dominated by the feed a next-generation Internet/television hybrid that is directly hardwired into the brain. Teen narrator Titus never questions his world, in which parents select their babies' attributes in the conceptionarium, corporations dominate the information stream, and kids learn to employ the feed more efficiently in School. [emphasis added]
"Barbarians with laptops" to a tee.
At December 29, 2009, Jeremy Brock wrote:
What do you mean by content? I need some clarification on that point at least for myself. For me, the content is just the history and we are meant to use the content in order to teach and practice critical thinking skills.
I think that as history teachers our goal in the classroom is changing because the "content" is much more readily available through the Web. However, that doesn't mean our job no longer a focus on teaching content. I know that my most of my students wouldn't care at all if I didn't dress the history up with a nice bow and present it to them. And there are many times when Web 2.0 tools begin or facilitate this conversation. Examples: a webquest I created for students to explore the differences between the Hercules myth and the Disney film so that we could discuss how today we change ideas from the ancient world for our own tastes, use of a wiki to create a medieval society in the classroom, mock Twitter and Facebook accounts to explore Renaissance thinkers.
Again, I believe that as a social studies teacher - which to quote you means, "preparation for informed citizenship" teacher - we are needed to teach the skills to practice critical thought (which is applied toward becoming an informed citizen) that we must be doing something with Web 2.0 tools because they are an essential component to informed citizenship in the modern day.
I'm not saying we should force ourselves to always have the kids in front of a computer but there are many times when not doing so means a great opportunity is being wasted. I don't get to explore this potential as much as I would like because I teach mostly pre-modern history but the most significant primary sources today are online. Thus students need to interact with them. The greatest tools for communication and collaboration are online. Thus students need to interact with them. To not do so means that students are not practicing the skills necessary for informed citizenship in the modern day.
Look at it this way: where would you and I be as informed citizens right now if we weren't skilled in the use of Web 2.0 tools?
At December 29, 2009, Alice Barr wrote:
It's a long process... My very traditional school has been 1:1 for 7 years. We have a ways to go in more innovative ways of teaching and learning, but I would say we are making good strides. We have agreed that technology is not separate from curriculum. Being able to communicate and collaborate in multiple ways are the biggest areas where I have seen change. Teachers feel that they are able to cover more content and students feel strongly that they do much more learning outside of school because it is on their time. They have come up with some interesting ways to study. While this is not hard data, three students from our school spoke about how having laptops has impacted their learning. http://edtechtalk.com/node/4624
At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Thanks, Jeremy. Let's take it further:
I'm with you on using historical content to promote critical thinking about what the past shows us about the present and future. (And I beg you to link to those projects you mentioned above, so we can steal any good ideas ;-) )
Primary sources are online, yes. For the sake of argument, how does that make them better than print versions of the same? (I see the green angle, though I'm beginning to wonder about the environmental costs of electricity, heat, and resources used for digital alternatives.) What do you have students do with them that makes it better than paper?
How are you using Web 2.0 to improve the practice of critical thought? Honest question expecting a quality answer.
I'll stop there. Thanks for chiming in (and share those links! The mock historical characters thing sounds interesting).
At December 29, 2009, Harold Jarche wrote:
One of my favourite items in the book is that kids go to SCHOOL(TM).
.-= Harold Jarche´s last blog ..2009: year of the tweet =-.
At December 29, 2009, Jeremy Brock wrote:
The online sources are better, to me, because the print resources are not available. The Hercules webquest wasn't anything fancy so I won't waste anyone's time posting a PDF. All it really entailed was direction to my Delicious account for links to mythology encyclopedias and articles as well as direction in terms of comparing the Disney myth to the "original" version. I don't have any resources like that in my classroom! My textbook dedicates no more than 150 words to the topic of Greek mythology and certainly doesn't discuss any of the "fun" aspects of mythology like Uranus getting his testicles cut off or the question of whether or not Hercules stealing an Amazonian girdle is symbolic for a sexual encounter.
Granted, those are secondary or tertiary sources. I'm not sure that I have students do anything different with print resources than they might with the same online. But, again, I do not have those resources in print form and my school can't afford to get me a subscription to the New York Times or purchase new books.
And that line of questioning completely ignores sources that are wholly online. What about the Huffington Post? What about Twitter? However, there are difficulties here as well given that Twitter will certainly never be unblocked at my school.
I fear that I'm not using Web 2.0 tools to improve the practice of critical thought as much as I would like in my classroom. Right now I am using them to facilitate more than to inspire creation, which is something I hope to change in the coming months as I finish this semester and begin a new one. I see potential for things like Ning to create a forum that allows all students to participate in ways that I might not always be properly addressing in my own class discussions or that would allow students to practice the skill of commenting that I am attempting to demonstrate now with mixed results.
As for links to the other two projects:
The medieval society utilizes a private wiki that I've currently cleaned out in anticipation of my next class to do the project. Essentially, students assume various roles and document research into their character on the wiki. On the final day we have a medieval feast and each student must accurately portray their character and present a coat of arms they have created to the king (moi in full royal attire).
The mock Facebook/Twitter is a work in progress that I hope to try for the first time in a week or so. Here are the references I've been looking at in preparation Historical Tweets (http://historicaltweets.com/) and Famoust Last Status Updates (http://bit.ly/2IuAxb).
.-= Jeremy Brock´s last blog ..On failed attempts at commenting. =-.
At December 30, 2009, Jeremy Brock wrote:
I have recognized a fault in my own argument about print resources not being available. If we ignore the question of environmental costs then why not just print off articles, blogs entries, et cetera for consumption?
Here is why I believe being on the computer is still more valuable: the print is restricted to what is printed but the use of the actual computer opens the window to further exploration immediately. Hasn't something meaningful been accomplished even if only one student decides to further explore the topic right there and then through the provided resource or any other?
.-= Jeremy Brock´s last blog ..On failed attempts at commenting. =-.
At December 30, 2009, Dan McGuire wrote:
Let's move off your 'content' straw man for a minute and talk just about writing. Would you rather write with just paper and pencils or do you kinda like using a word processor and all of the downstream advantages that come with electronic writing (like we're doing with this discussion.) Actually, I don't think our posts are at all parenthetical to the discussion. I doubt that this discussion would be happening at all if it weren't for Web 2.0 - I wouldn't be trekking off to the post office to send Clay a letter with my ankle in a cast as it is right now.
As a teacher of 3rd and 4th graders, 8, 9 & 10 year olds, who are learning how to write, I much prefer using electronic tools. I really don't want to ask another 8 year old boy to rewrite something he struggled so mightily to put on paper with a pencil when he knows that it can be done so much more easily with a computer. Kids actually like rewriting things with a word processor - it gives them control of the words; it makes them more like the adults who so casually toss around words, paper, and all kinds of other communications media. And then if you give a kid a video camera and some video editing tools, well, now we're talking content - content that the kid created. The kids don't care if you think they're barbarians; they're the ones who are taking over the world.
.-= Dan McGuire´s last blog ..How to Make a Living =-.
At December 30, 2009, Neil Stephenson wrote:
Clay (and others)
Thanks for thoughtful and provoking post. I currently work at a 1:1 school in Canada, and have been wrestling with similar issues for a while. You can read my two bits on it here: (http://thinkinginmind.blogspot.com/2009/12/yesterday-my-wife-and-i-did-something.html) and here: (http://thinkinginmind.blogspot.com/2009/11/using-technology-if-you-want-to.html)
I will share one resource with you - admittedly the best of use technology that I've come up with in my own classroom practice. As a history teacher, I had students remixing historical images to represent their understanding of historical events, themes and conflicts. While you could argue that something similar could be done on paper, it would have been incredibly difficult. Either way, it requires access to banks of historical images through museums, libraries and archives. Along with the remixed panels, the students created 'podcast self-assessments' where they did the work of a curator, first creating, and then unpacking the historical content embedded in each student creation. You can read all about it here: http://thinkinginmind.blogspot.com/2009/04/cigar-box-project.html
While it's never been thoroughly researched, It's the best I've got!
.-= Neil Stephenson´s last blog ..Skyping With Wes Fryer =-.
At December 30, 2009, Hellen wrote:
I hope I'm not being too obvious, but it seems the question is how do we keep human values (debatable issue right there) from sliding right off the the slippery slope in face of corporate domination, which I think is the evil behind technology. Teaching without technology is no longer feasible when our students are so connected, and I have to say that teaching has been more exciting for me with the advent of computers. Differentiated learning and e-portfolios allow me to hand over the reins of learning to my students which traditional teaching has failed to do.
I do think that posing this question is valuable in that we should always ask if a traditional approach is not more effective in a given situation.
My frustration is that whether we teach traditionally or with technology, we are still not teaching important critical thinking skills and social responsibility and awareness that could help our students from becoming corporate drones.
.-= Hellen´s last blog ..Hello blogosphere! =-.
At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Dan,
Either I failed to communicate my concern when I wrote about the opportunity costs of teachers flailing about trying to integrate tech, often unsuccessfully or at best with no better success than they would have had with non-tech methods, due to the waste of time that could have been spent learning in a more efficient and focused way -- or, you failed to read the post with enough focus. I don't know.
In any case:
1) Explain to me how "content" is a straw man. It's a scary thought.
2) Word processors weren't exactly the type of tech I was thinking about. I was thinking more along the lines of more complicated things like using Nings and Twitter and blogs and wikis (all of which I've been using in the classroom for the past four years) -- and again, in thoughtless ways that are "tech for tech's sake," or else in simply ineffective ways.
3) I made your point about the read/write richness of these tools a few posts ago, at length, here. The question is, for teaching -- as opposed as for us adults who choose these things and use them for our own independent purposes -- in what cases, and to what extent, do they impede learning instead of advance it? Especially, to repeat myself, in, say, math or science classes? (Or, for that matter, in my own history classes?)
4) Besides "the kids like it" (they like toga parties as "history," too, and I say no and make them read, write, and talk more about the Roman Empire instead with that hour than they would have wearing togas and eating owl's livers), why or how do word processors or any other tool enhance your teaching of writing?
5) How is making a movie "content"? How is making a movie in a content-area classroom, in which knowledge is to be mastered and critical thinking to be applied to it, by virtue of being a moving picture the best use of time? I've made my fair share of movies, and for me one minute takes about an hour of work. Is five hours for a five-minute movie the best use of that time? Could film class, in which students can create films they want to create instead of films for homework (not necessarily mutually exclusive, I know), give them that skill while you work on extending their writing skills further with the time saved?
6) If the kids do grow up to be barbarians, because we've lost touch with our mission of elevating their ability to reason, think, articulate, and work even when it's not fun, then I care. I don't want them taking over the world. Shouldn't you care too? Shouldn't we all?
This might be a high school teacher's head and a primary school teacher's head divergence thing, I don't know.
At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Neil,
What a holiday gift your links were. I just tweeted, "Just discovered Neil Stephenson's blog. He's awesome. Skeptical, articulate. http://bit.ly/8xEjOU "
I would also point readers to Questioning Student-Centered Learning.
Only glanced at the Cigar Box link, and see it requires longer attention than I have right now. You can bet I'll look at it soon.
And you've got a new subscriber. I love your mind and your writing.
At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Hellen,
I don't know if you've read it, but the student editorial I featured and analyzed is really at the heart of this discussion (along with a fear of a future idiocracy tweeting and blogging about the latest episode of "Ow! My Balls!").
One interesting thing about that editorial was the students' plea that teachers not use tech in many cases. So is teaching without technology really "not feasible" with our connected students after all, when they're the ones saying they often don't like it?
As for the rest of your comment, I'm with you all the way -- especially on the priority we should be giving to critical thinking.
At December 30, 2009, monika hardy wrote:
This is great. I so want to be smarter... and what better way than to sustain conversations... which was my point really .. so if you don't mind - I'm going to add the same comment here I left on your other post.......
I totally agree - this: sacrificing time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation - has been to our demise.
I'm thinking more along the lines of Erica McWilliams term, being "usefully ignorant." Learning what to do when we don't know what to do.
Not - gosh I blundered the tech again - what can we learn from that?...
But, dang, the questions you're asking are beyond my knowledge,... let's google it, or tweet about it, ..etc... to find out. And then obviously research the people, things, etc, we find for accuracy.
I think we have to break away..and do the Clay Christensen disrupting class thing. Kids teaching themselves in a sense, because their journey is their journey. They have created (or their teachers have created) their own network of experts to guide them to knowledge/information. I think the bottom line is relationships... and networking adds a ton to that. We now can differentiate a "group" for each kid.
Currently, in my brain, learning how to use new tools isn't what ed needs. If the need for a tool is there, anyone can learn how to use it. So a separate class for it... hmmm.. I don't know. What we're missing is why we need the tools.
Some reasons I think are good:
I don't want to process static content anymore... I want to follow my passion... I don't want my end project to end up in the recycle bin... I want an authentic audience... I want what I do to matter.....
Voicethread is an example of a great tool.... because it lives on.. It can be tweaked anytime. But I've seen it used as static content... totally lost it's function.
Thank you Clay for sharpening me with these questions. I need that. I crave that. I want to do this right.. this school thing.
By the way.. just watched Cliff Stoll. Man.... Did you look into why he's against laptops in school?.. I still need to go there...
Guessing I now need to look into Neil as well.
.-= monika hardy´s last blog ..insights from keith hamon's blog =-.
At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Neil, Just read your Questioning Student-Centered Learning post more closely, and your point about "the authority of the discipline" deepens what I'm trying to get at with the nature of the discipline strongly determining the degree of experimentation and, more simply, time devotion to tools.
Really enjoying your stuff.
At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Monika,
I'm totally with you on the beauty of saying "I don't know -- Google it and tell us (but also tell us why you trust that source)" bit when I'm stumped on a content question. I love saying "I don't know" and "Google is your friend."
As for the "network of experts" idea, though, I want to push back.
I teach Chinese history. I doubt many, if any, of the 2100 people in my Twitter network have more authority in it than I do, and even if they did, would be available reliably to "co-teach" a student. If I could line up scholars and such to be available to my students that would be cool, but I don't see it being easy. They have their lives, jobs, and priorities too.
(I've experimented with "networked learning" in the past, unleashing my students into my Twitter network to seek further tutelage, but it was, again, however well-intended and interesting, as often of questionable value in terms of opportunity cost. Search this blog for "networked learning".)
You really should read Neil Stephenson's posts, linked above in this thread, about so much you discuss in your comment re: student-centered learning.
I'm totally with you on audience feedback -- if you like to write, are good at it (or at least confident in it), and want that feedback. If you're not, maybe it's aversive to your learning, something to be dreaded, something that raises the affective filter, to riff off Vygotsky.
I'd love to hear what you find out about Stoll's reasons. He (unsurprisingly, given his mental jumpiness in that talk) doesn't explain.
At December 30, 2009, monika hardy wrote:
oh.. some examples...
here's where we're housing a lot of our research and projects: http://voicethread.com/share/705958/
student made tutorials - kids teaching kids - has become huge for my math kids learning straight up content...
slide 91 has an example of kid made math tutorial
slide 73 has kids teaching themselves, via the web, the unit circle
and making me-videos in order to connect to their experts in the world: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I06EXjSnblY or slide 90
this ning site is where much of the learning and collaborating is going on: http://talk-ed.ning.com/
If this is what you mean by examples Clay, and you want more... let me know.
If it's not what you meant - give me more direction please, I'm slow...
Clay - we even added you to the voicethread already - slide 6 - and to our blog on the ning - your schooliness....
.-= monika hardy´s last blog ..insights from keith hamon's blog =-.
At December 30, 2009, Dan McGuire wrote:
I only have time to take on one of your counterpoints. Maybe 'straw man' was a poor metaphor for how I saw you holding 'content.' I think what you're wrestling with is the fact that 'content' as we thought of it in the past, like the content that Fr. Godfrey as presented to me and to my father 30 years previously in his exquisite, masterful Shakespeare class at St. John's U, is essentially irrelevant. And, Yes, there is a loss in that, certainly. I am most definitely not saying that Shakespeare is irrelevant, however. The content my grandfather acquired on his homestaked ranch in South Dakota is also mostly irrelevant, too. Educating barbarians has never been easy, and I think it's getting even more complicated. It's how we define ourselves - that's what you and I are doing.
.-= Dan McGuire´s last blog ..How to Make a Living =-.
At December 30, 2009, robertogreco wrote:
Just a few thoughts from the upper elementary/middle school perspective. Please pardon the fact that not all of them directly address your question.
Laptops make it much easier for students to collaborate on assignments and projects outside of school without needing a parent to take them somewhere. (Google Docs, wikis, shared bookmarks, blogs, commenting, etc.) That's not to say that we should be filling students' time outside of class, but the conversations that begin at school don't necessarily have to end when they leave at the end of the day. And the types of assignments that go home have the potential to be more valuable. For example, students can finish what was not completed in class, but what can't be done without a communication tool (giving feedback to classmates, editing each others work, etc), or watching a video individually instead of losing class time staring at a screen communally. (Wasn't it you that wrote about that a while back?)
Laptops also help with collaboration in a classroom situation. By sharing a document or digitally chatting rather than speaking out loud, students don't distract/interrupt those around them.
Laptops give students access to greater quantities of source materials wherever they have a connection to the internet. Multiple students can reference the same material without waiting for a turn to check out a book from the library or borrow it from the teacher. (Laptops also make it easier to carry numerous resources home without breaking the back.)
I'm getting to the specific examples with links...
Laptops make it easier for students to maintain blogs that can be the take-away portfolio that they use to whenever they want to see how they have developed their writing skills over time (or compare themselves to classmates), and when moving on to the next stage in their education/life. That's why we use an off-the-shelf blogging tool (Tumblr) at my school. The blogs belong to them, not the school. Hopefully, portfolios will eventually become more important in the college admissions process, but a digital portfolio can't possibly hurt.
With a laptop and a connection to the internet, students can engage with a writer whose work they are reading. (Two notes: My students spotted that post of his (he found us first) before I did and commented without encouragement. This is just the start of what I hope will be a longer-term relationship.)
Just an observation: Fewer parents end up taking over the projects that their children are working on due to the fact that they are not fluent in the technology involved. This should not be a reason for laptops — we should work with parents and help them understand how to engage appropriately in their child's leaning.
Also regarding parents: some become inspired by what is going on in the classroom and begin to stretch themselves. (That post came directly from interaction between parent, student, and teacher. It also happens to involve the writer linked to above.) In situations like this, students become engaged in conversations with their parents sparked by their technological expertise (and knowledge of online etiquette), but eventually involving other aspects of their (both student and parent) work (content, writing skills, interpersonal skills, media literacy skills, ability to deliver and receive constructive criticism). This has the potential to build a school community of life-long learners. I have several more examples of parents engagement with students based on what they have read or seen on class or student blogs, but the one above is the only one with linkable evidence.
Finally, keeping a class blog (the other one here) a teacher can share (and students can access on their laptops) related (and sometimes unrelated) content that supplements what is going on in class. And more importantly, it adds a level of transparency to the practice of teaching.
PS (and off-topic): I have been using and loving E.H. Gombrich's A Little History of the World for the past two school years after learning about it here on your blog. Thanks for that.
At December 30, 2009, Hellen wrote:
I guess I was stating the obvious.I do feel more creative in my teaching with technology, but I don't see it as a replacement for debate, anecdotal comments on papers (that few students read, by the way)or discussion. Yet, my response blog gets much more indepth comments and really thoughtful comments between students than I would ever get in class. I'm in a public school where ever diminishing class time narrows the opportunity to have great discussions etc. Forty-seven minutes that are eaten up by testing, forced writing prompts, and administrivia galore.
Here is an example of how I see tech as an advantage. At my school we are forced to give monthly writing prompts tied to our state test. I know that creative writing and other writing opportunities increase my students' writing ability. However, I can only grade and comment on so much. And yes I do use peer evaluation and other methods to decrease my grading. Then I discovered an online writing program that will grade students papers with immediate feedback and practice for weak areas. I love it because I saw it as an opportunity for my students to write so much more with feedback, albeit electronic and somewhat canned. This program does not replace my instruction or my guidance, but it gives my students' writing another source of evaluation.
I do see where you are going with Idiocracy and the editorial, but it is up to us to mold tech to improve how we deliver instruction and perhaps give us the time to have the valuable face to face class experiences.
We have always had to question the method of delivery, why would tech be any different. I know that I sometimes get a skewed view since I follow so many tech oriented folks on my reader and sometimes I feel like I'm falling behind in the race to 21st century learning. Heck it was your video where students created wiki textbooks that inspired me.
Finally, there is a case for the have and have nots. Many of my students are not as "connected" as some of our more affluent kids. They may live on their cells, but they don't have a clue about blogs and wikis or the power of the web. I feel strongly that they need to learn to communicate with the tools that will dominate their future.
In the end, isn't it the same discussion as when discourse was replaced by the written word? The storyteller by the book? The communal nature of storytelling replaced by the solitary act of reading - surely the fall of society!
.-= Hellen´s last blog ..Hello blogosphere! =-.
At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Roberto, you inspire me as usual for:
1) caring not to let these tools turn schoolwork into a 24/7 activity, when nonschool life teaches so much
2) having a pedagogical justification for chat and collaborative documents, and for the use of online sources to overcome scarcity and prevent backaches
3) giving ownership of blogs to students via Tumblr (why Tumbler, though, out of curiosity?).
--I'll note here that high schools don't have the same easy road to such elegant minimalism. I wish they did. If high school staff could agree to have students post whatever reflective work to just one blog -- one owned by the student, not the school server (half the links on this blog to student work are dead because they were on school servers) -- then online portfolios for high school would be a great thing. I may float this idea at my school.
4) the authentic wow of the author-student connections. How cool is that.
5) (back-tracking) the optional use of digital tools for your timeline assignment. Nice to see that it wasn't forced, but was exposed for those who might be interested.
6) the class blog's extension posts. Do your students typically follow and view the stuff you add? If yes, because of any incentive you give? I notice I put a lot of optional stuff on my Ning, but see it used very little (maybe that's okay, since I shouldn't expect everybody to love history, and should be happy that a select few go further).
As for Gombrich, glad something I shared helped you as much as the things -- especially the Doris Lessing quote you share to me on del.icio.us that gave the intro to the Gilgamesh series such a bang. Reader feedback on Stumbleupon and other places often quotes that passage, suggesting it helped hook them into reading the rest of that long series. All thanks to you.
I'll end this epic comment by saying, again, that the student editorial post is what's prompting this bit of stock-taking. I need to be reminded of why these tools are worth students' time. You helped considerably, so thanks again for troubling to answer with such care.
Clay
At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Hellen, again your points are well-taken (and not obvious, though I'm pooped and running out of gas after replying to Roberto above).
I liked your emphasis on using tech to free time instead of consume more of it. That's a motive I can get behind.
I also sympathize with your context. I've never taught in the States, but six months of being paid to write about NCLB and Duncan's NCLB II (let's not kid ourselves) gave me a painful crash-course in how tough it must be to teach in public schools. Your tech solutions are thoughtful ones.
And your remark about the teacher's eternal task of "question[ing] the method of delivery" gets to the bottom of it, really. I think I asked the questions above because I may have lost my moorings somewhat. Many comments here are helping me find them again.
Finally, not to quibble, but this revolution seems to me different from past ones. Storytellers were replaced by texts, yes, but those texts were generally produced under highly selective quality-control filters due to the labor involved in making a book.
The web is replacing books without, one could argue, any filter at all. (Okay, maybe algorithmic authority via Google page-ranking, or social media authority via linklove, filters content in terms of visibility, but still. Tiger Woods' sex life -- "Ow! My Balls!" indeed -- is more important than the Iran protests or the escalation of black ops in Yemen or the almost totally ignored Gaza protests this week.)
Anyway, thanks again for the feedback. It's valuable.
At December 30, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Oh, so it's a post-Arne Duncan/Obama public school system. Got it.
Who's the proprietor? Gates? Broad?
At December 30, 2009, Katie Day wrote:
Great discussion, everyone. I can't help but pass on a few further thoughts and links.

-- "The web is replacing books without, one could argue, any filter at all. "

As Clay Shirky put it last year: It's Not Information Overload, It's Filter Failure ( http://web2expo.blip.tv/file/1277460 )

Cliff Stoll highlighted information overload in his 1999 book, "High-Tech Heretic: Why Computers Don't Belong in the Classroom and Other Reflections by a Computer Contrarian" ( http://bit.ly/8xgxcB ) (and the Nat'l Library of Singapore has 2 copies, so you can read it if you want to, Clay).

Here he is in an interview in 2000 ( http://www.educationworld.com/a_issues/chat/chat018.shtml ):

-------
Stoll: The one thing that computers do extraordinarily well is bring information to kids. Computers give kids access to vast amounts of information.

EW: Don't computers have a place in the classroom, then, if merely as a source of information?

Stoll: Is a lack of information a problem in schools? I've never once had a teacher say to me "I don't have enough information." Teachers say they don't have enough time. The problem in classrooms is not a lack of information. It's too much information.
-----

Stoll makes another point in the same interview -- one that relates to Hellen's comment: "it is up to us to mold tech to improve how we deliver instruction and perhaps give us the time to have the valuable face to face class experiences".

-----
Stoll: ... The problem is that the use of computers subtracts from the student-to-teacher contact hours. It directs attention away from the student-teacher relationship and directs it toward the student-computer relationship. It teaches students to focus on getting information rather than on exploring and creating. Which is more interactive -- a student and a teacher or a student and a computer? ...
-----

Re the importance of the physical experience of being in a classroom with a teacher, I can't help but recommend a commencement address by Margaret Edson, teacher and playwright. There's a link in this blog post I did a while back:
http://libedge.blogspot.com/2008/07/actual-not-virtual-or-love-ideally.html (skip the first 3 min of her talk and get to the heart of it).

Cycling back to the importance of content and Neil Stephenson's post on Student-Led Learning and to what extent teachers should be practitioners of their disciplines, let me throw in the ideas of another computer scientist and curmudgeon -- though one in favor of computers in the classroom and online learning in general -- Roger Schank ( http://www.rogerschank.com/ ). (By the way, I highly recommend his 1990 book, "Tell Me A Story: Narrative and Intelligence".)

Schank gave a talk recently in Barcelona where he goes through everything wrong with existing schools and how he envisions the ideal school ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bx0-2GCfOdo ).

Schank: "Every curriculum should tell a story... and the story should be one that tells what the life of the future practitioner is like (and it should involve lots of practice)."

I.e., he believes teachers need to organize experiences (think: liberating constraints) for students based on practicing disciplines, e.g., if you're going to study history, you need to participate in experiences that simulate the role historians play in life -- rather than being taught history by a teacher.

It's the old master/apprentice approach, though Schank is happy to have technology facilitate that in whatever way it can.

Umberto Eco takes a similar stance on the need for teachers to guide students in their disciplines, especially in relation to the information overload. (
http://www.spiegel.de/international/zeitgeist/0,1518,659577-2,00.html )

---
Eco: ... These [Google] lists can be dangerous -- not for old people like me, who have acquired their knowledge in another way, but for young people, for whom Google is a tragedy. Schools ought to teach the high art of how to be discriminating.

SPIEGEL: Are you saying that teachers should instruct students on the difference between good and bad? If so, how should they do that?

Eco: Education should return to the way it was in the workshops of the Renaissance. There, the masters may not necessarily have been able to explain to their students why a painting was good in theoretical terms, but they did so in more practical ways. Look, this is what your finger can look like, and this is what it has to look like. Look, this is a good mixing of colors. The same approach should be used in school when dealing with the Internet. The teacher should say: "Choose any old subject, whether it be German history or the life of ants. Search 25 different Web pages and, by comparing them, try to figure out which one has good information." If 10 pages describe the same thing, it can be a sign that the information printed there is correct. But it can also be a sign that some sites merely copied the others' mistakes.
-------

I'll end with a paraphrase of Michael Wesch's philosophy of teaching outlined in a video last year ( http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4yApagnr0s).

To create students who make meaningful connections we need to 1) find a grand narrative and provide context and relevance (i.e., semantic meaning); 2) create a learning environment that values and leverages learners themselves (i.e., personal meaning); and 3) do both in a way that realizes and leverages the existing media environment.

That's how I would answer your original query. Technology is about leverage in the service of meaningful connections. So if it doesn't enhance the learning in the classroom and it's not authentic participation in the existing media environment (read: busywork), you shouldn't feel obliged to use it.

Okay, I probably violated the unwritten reasonable-length-of-reply rule several paragraphs ago -- my sincere apologies! (I'll go off and re-work this as a proper blog post now).

But one last note: information filters are very important - and some people function better than others as filters -- like robertogreco (above). Clay may have over 4,000 delicious links (cburell), I may have over 5,000 (thelibrarianedge), but http://delicious.com/rgreco has over 17,000 -- and they all have descriptions. Thanks, Roberto, for giving me so many good things to read over the past few years.
.-= Katie Day´s last blog ..21st C Learning@HK: a team approach =-.
At December 31, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Katie,
Real quick, as it's past time for bed: I've spent the last hours with the resources you linked, and the time before that nodding at the many ways you wove the threads of this long thread to something like, at least for now, closure. (And you violated no policy on this blog, anyway. I like "slow commenting" as much as "slow blogging.")
Thanks a million to you and everybody for a very rewarding 24 hours or so. I feel like college credit should be given to all.
At December 31, 2009, robertogreco wrote:
Clay, the inspiration is mutual. This stock-taking is incredibly important. If we don’t have clear reasons for 1:1 programs (or any other technology integration) before they are implemented and reasons for keeping them once they’ve begun, then we’re wasting valuable time and money. And while it’s a great quote, you’re giving it too much credit for that epic (har har) series of Gilgamesh posts. Talk about inspiring.
Everyone, thanks for an inspiring thread that’s helped me take stock and articulate so much of what I’ve been doing over the past year and a half.
Now to the questions Clay asked...
It’s probably not the difference between high school and middle school, but rather our small size that makes it possible for us to allow students to use only one blog. (As you’ll probably pick up from this comment, I love working in a very small school.) To do the same in a larger environment, tagging post with a class specific tag might work to allow teachers to pull in a feed of the student work that pertains to their class. Unfortunately you’d lose some of that whole-student picture that I get by seeing the math/science, Spanish, etc. post from my humanities students. And I’m guessing that you’d need to do some significant training to pull off that tag and filter to RSS scenario.
Anyway, to answer your question, we use Tumblr for many reasons. Here are a few of them:
a. Simplicity: The interface is easy to use and requires little to no training to get students started. That helps avoid making technology the focus. Plus, there’s a great bookmarklet (kind of like the one available for Delicious) that makes it painless to share links, photos, quotes, and videos.
b. Content hosting: Tumblr has built-in photo and audio hosting saving the need to create other accounts for those purposes. Oh, and it allows for simple polls when you need the input of your followers.
c. Community and flow: Tumblr has a “dashboard” where you can see a stream of posts from all of the other Tumblr blogs that you are following. It’s like an RSS reader or Twitter feed, so students are exposed to those types of technologies. It also gives the user the chance to favorite posts — a nice way to show support/interest when you don’t have the time for more than an empty “Great job!” comment.
d. Ability to ease into comments: Tumblr does not have comments built into the system. You need to use the Disqus system (which is appearing in more and more places and allows you to track your remarks across the blogo-comento-sphere). So, with our sixth graders we begin the year without comments. Once they have become more accustomed to blogging and we’ve had the chance to discuss what quality commenting looks like, then we have the students install comments. Note: The class blogs don’t have comments. This is more of a self-defense mechanism for me — worried that I won’t have the time to tend that shop* considering my class load, administrative responsibilities, and life outside of school.
e. Previous experience (maybe selfishness?): Since before joining the school, I’ve been using Tumblr, primarily as a scrapbook, but occasionally with longer posts. (Shameless plug here... Interested in "(Unschooling and Messiness" or personal informatics or "Branding and Authenticity and Schools"? I’d love to get some feedback from you.) So, with that in mind, I guess I stuck to what I know best and appreciate.
If we didn’t use Tumblr we might use Posterous or Soup.io for their ease of use and clean look.
By the way, other than Tumblr and Gmail (which implies Google Docs, Maps, Chat, Reader, and the likes), Vimeo, and Wikispaces (not using that so much), our students are not required to use any other online technologies. Each of our faculty use their own combination of Delicious (Is there any doubt that’s my favorite?), Flickr, Shelfari, Picasa, etc. (There’s an old list here.) We drop hints (like the timeline software you mention), make suggestions depending on individual student projects (comics, animation, etc.), and even occasionally hold a quick workshop showing specific tools, but we ultimately allow students to build the toolkit that suits them best, just like we do, and that comes from their observations of others (including faculty, parents, and other netizens).
I often correct people who, when speaking about our middle school program, lead with the fact that we have a 1:1 laptop program. That’s not what we’re all about. We are a progressive program that focuses on student-led, project-based learning. Technology just helps us achieve our goal and each time we use technology we should be asking ourselves how it improves the learning process. If we’re doing it correctly, the technology becomes, as Chris Lehmann would say, “ubiquitous, necessary, and invisible.”
As for students following “extension posts” (that’s a great way to phrase it), the mileage varies. I don’t think I’ve ever tried incentives, but occasionally I’ll bait them by showing the first minute of a ten minute video or pointing them out during our Open Studio****. During the end of trimester teacher*** evaluation chat I had with my seventh graders before break, several of them mentioned that those extension posts are one of their favorite elements of my interactions with them.
With apologies to DFW, here are my “footnotes”, some of which have footnotes of their own:
*Another self-defense mechanism: not jumping into the Twitterverse except to dabble with a few students (using a separate handle). My @robertogreco account is just a place-holder. If I ever do explore that option (and it’s becoming very tempting lately), your feed (and Katie's** and Neil Stephenson's) will be included in my first flurry of follows.
**Hi Katie! Thanks for the kind words about my Delicious feed — glad it has been of value to you. And wow! Thanks for all of those resources in your comment. Just a short response to them for now, three paragraphs down if you’re looking.
***I have a hard time with the word teacher, but use it because it takes too long to avoid confusion with whatever other term is more appropriate. (Lately I’ve been using colleague with my students.) That leads to an idea that I go back and forth on: being the expert in the content is not necessary (at least at the middle school level) when teaching history/social studies (what I’m up to these days). I don’t have a degree in history. And each year I end up learning just as much, if not more, than my students about the content. That’s partly because I’m teaching new content each year*****, much of which I haven’t studied since I was in middle school or high school myself.
Maybe we can think of this as the “master learner” approach. Rather than be an expert in the topic, the adult in the classroom is really a model of a successful learner (of one variety) who is learning along with the students. Lot’s of “I don’t know” and “Let’s see what we can find out, then compare with each other” and “how might you go about that?” You know, something like Dan Meyer’s “Be less helpful.” It's easy to not give an answer if you too need to find it.
This is also my response to Katie’s mention of Clifford Stoll. He’s correct. There is too much information. But it’s unavoidable and students are being bombarded with information outside of school. We can help by modeling filtering systems and healthy skepticism/critical thinking skills, and in the process we get time with our students as we seek the information we need: answers to the questions we ask, solutions to the challenges we face, and designs for the problems we’re solving. And we find this information “just in time” as Roger Schank mentions in the video Katie shared. Also, technology adds to the student-teacher relationship. One example (of many more that I can give): the student who consulted with me at home one evening asking for me to advise him about a comment he was composing for the blog of Robin Sloan (mentioned in my previous comment). That was an extra twenty minutes of face time (video chat) with me (and me with him!). We couldn’t have done it without the laptops.
****We don’t have a study hall. Instead we have something that we’ve named Open Studio. It’s our version of Google’s 20% system. (Quote from Wikipedia: “Google engineers are encouraged to spend 20% of their work time (one day per week) on projects that interest them.”) So in Open Studio (45 minutes per day, not quite 20%) students are allowed to pursue a PLP (Personal Learning Project) rather than sit in quiet rows taking a bite out of a heavy homework load. (We don’t have those either.) Students do occasionally take advantage of the time to collaborate on group projects from class that are hard to take home, knock off some homework assignments because they’ll have a busy evening, or catch up on in-class work they’ve missed due to absence. And some do homework so they can work on their PLP at home with materials and resources not available at school.
Again, we’re a small school. We don’t have a dark room, a language lab, an animation studio, drafting tables, a large library, etc. That’s another reason laptops are so valuable — they can serve as reasonable proxy for those things too.
There's more to Open Studio, but that should give you the basic idea.
*****We’re cycling through content each year as we build out a middle school program. It helps to dampen the blow of multiple prep periods. It also makes it easier to share resources, class visitors, field trips, etc. So, last year the sixth grade studied Ancient Civilization, this year both the sixth and seventh grades are covering Middle Ages/Renaissance/Word Religions, and next year seventh and eighth grades will study US History/Civics. The topics are the same, but each grade uses some different resources and approaches based on their reading/writing/technology skills.
I’d never thought much about looping before, but I have really enjoyed building on the relationship I developed with last year’s sixth grade students as they’ve moved up to seventh this year.
Whew! I’m crossing my fingers that this won’t break your comment system.
At January 1, 2010, Status Quo 101: It’s a Race to the End « Constructing Meaning wrote:
[...] a Comment I started this as a response to Clay Burell’s (Blog, Twitter) post, “Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear?” and half way through decided to move it to my blog due to its length. The spark for this [...]
At January 3, 2010, Wikipedia: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source” at Beyond School wrote:
[...] Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear? [...]
At January 5, 2010, Katie Day wrote:
Okay, two new posts of mine that include what I offered here, but in a more readable format and with extended links -- and responses to later posts of yours, Clay, as well. For what it's worth: http://bit.ly/mconnect and http://bit.ly/sstupid ...
.-= Katie Day´s last blog ..It's Storytelling, Stupid! =-.
At January 7, 2010, Nancy Cook wrote:
I don't think it is a question of "is technology better"? or even "does technology work"? Technology is another tool which can be used for presenting content, processing content, and locating content. It can be used as a tool to promote thought-provoking discussions which can lead to deeper understandings. It can be used to engage students with meaningful content. Books can also be used for these purposes as well as journals, pencils and paper, posterboard, movies, etc.
Technology, like any tool or teaching strategy can also be misused and interfere with learning. I think this is what you are talking about. I have taken college courses where the instructors used PowerPoints and filled all the pages with text and then read them to us. THAT was inefficient, ineffective, and boring!!!
Instead of asking if technology makes a difference, we should be asking "Under what conditions can X be used to help my students learn the content and understand the concepts in order to apply them to their lives?" (X might be a specific internet site, a specific software, or a particular hardware product) i.e. It is one thing to read about the facts about the revolutionary war and yet another to create a movie about whether Benedict Arnold was a hero or villain and why--or to simply have a class discussion about a Youtube video clip of a song about him (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YTHgxBvhaFo)
At January 7, 2010, Brett burgess wrote:
I agree that tech on it's own will have nothing but fad Impact if not applied with good pedagogy. One of my favourite sayings is that if you are a crap teacher technology will not help. One of the best uses of tech I have seen is where the teacher sets up the scenario where tech is used to discover and share content ( with guidance) as part of out of class time and the majority of class time is devoted to the higher order thinking processing of what has been discovered - making meaning. Used correctly the tech can prevent the sage on the stage pedagogy. This approach is not easy for traditional teachers. Good advice is to get comfortable with a particular tech that you can use well and build from there. With tech there will always be something new tomorrow or better. Let the learners show you these. The three most important things teachers can instill in students are the abity to search, the ability to detect crap ( postman) and knowing how to categorize/classify/sort their learning (knowing where you saved your file). Teachers are more important than ever however I never want a childs learning to be limited to the sum of the content knowledge of their teacher.
Another advantage of tech is the increasing capacity for it to be used for learners to create content. Digital stories.
Enough for now. I hope I have contributed something to this discussion I certainly enjoyed other contributors perspectives.
At January 7, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:
Thanks Brett, you have. All of this is good for staying anchored instead of flitting off for the Next Shiny Thing.

Videos: Mental Poverty, Collaboration, “Recession Skills 101″

Clay Burell — Sun, 27 Dec 2009 14:32:37 +0000

Watch the two videos below — I even took notes of highlights to prod the attention-deficient — and then show them to your students.

1. Randy Nelson, Dean of Pixar University, on Collaboration and what I’ve been calling Social Intelligence in the Workplace. Key concepts:

Making co-workers look good, not bad;
“plussing” your partners;
wanting people not only with “depth” — résumé-based hires — but also a proven record (portfolios? blogs?) of innovation and
the ability to recover from failure instead of avoiding it;
on the desirability of “mastery of anything” (skateboarding, playing spoons) in a person’s past;
“the proof of a portfolio versus the promise of a résumé” (and, I’d add, GPA);
on wanting people who are interested, not interesting (that is, your piercings, tattoos, hairstyles, and daddy’s bank account are cheap ways to be interesting; much more interesting are people who are interested — hipsters take note);
communication skills based, again, on social intelligence vis-a-vis audience-awareness;
desirability of breadth (great, you’re a tech whiz; it would be nice if you knew, say, art history too);
on collaboration (“amplification” via “interested listening” and breadth and unique contributions to a project) versus cooperation (not getting in each others’ way).

Via Edutopia:

2. Seth Godin on Curiosity:

On the mental poverty of religious fundamentalists
On the mental richness of the curious
On how two generations lead sadly mediocre lives due to television, and how the lucky few have kicked that habit
On the curious and the fearful — “the masses in the middle [who have] brainwashed themselves into thinking it’s safe to do nothing”
On the difficulty of becoming curious — due to decades of schooling punishing curiosity
Nice Mao reference for this Chinese history teacher!
Paradox: “The safest thing to do is be risky; the riskiest thing to do is be safe.”
How Godin beat the odds and remained curious.
How religious fundamentalism has nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with an outlook that rejects curiosity.

Via Seth’s Blog:

‘curiosity’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

2 Comments

At December 28, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:
Thanks for sharing the excellent videos, Clay.
I think you definitely have something going with social intelligence bit, which also follows with many things the other Clay has been saying (Shirky). One of my favorite quotes from the first video was that "he core skill of an innovator is error recovery not failure avoidance." Unfortunately, our school system actively discourages taking risks and potentially failing. Failures pull down grades just as much as successes pull them up. Indeed, one bad test can keep a student's GPA down for 4 years.
Seth's video summarized many thoughts I've already had/seen elsewhere, but in a nice, digestible way. That's one of his great skills. I think many people underestimate the great harm which TV causes. When people ask me about my (admittedly limited success), I like to thank the Green Mountains for blocking TV signals and my parents for refusing to get cable.
At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Yep, yep. Lots of what's old to one person is new to another, so it never hurts to spread the healthy virus by posting it and passing it forward.
I love the feel and look of the Godin interview.
I also love the last line of your comment.

On Using Technology Without Understanding It

Clay Burell — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 17:53:26 +0000

This editorial from our high school student newspaper is a must-read for its criticism of the school-wide technology integration initiative. It’s a must-read for other reasons too — and other readers — but read it first, and we’ll get to that very different party afterward.

The first thing I did when I read this was mentally applaud.

The second thing I did was wish I could reply to it and, better still, promote it for a wider audience than the guaranteed one in the schoolhouse (I’ve always thought school newspapers were a bit like busywork, since they were monopolies without real-world competition, and had no incentive to earn a bigger audience through superior quality — especially silly in the Information Digital Age).

I wanted to start a conversation with the writer, share ideas and viewpoints, extend the topic — you know, basically learn more from her, and ideally give such quality feedback in my comments that maybe the author would learn more too. Surely she knew that authors have far less authority in the Information Digital Age, that the nature of those things called texts and authors has been revolutionized by the ability of readers to write on the same page, to (in the language of AP exams) “challenge, qualify, and extend” the author’s ideas and words and worldview.

Surely she knew that the 21st Century writer learns as much from the 21st Century reader as the reader does from the writer. (Because 21st Century readers — the best ones, anyway — write with the writer. Just look at Nobel-winning economist Paul Krugman’s blog, all the references he makes in his writing to what his readers are saying in comments. Look at Rolling Stones’ Matt Taibbi having conversations with his readers in the space beneath his articles — you know, those silly “forum”-like things. Just look.)

So yeah, I wanted to respond to it, and share to the world here on my (real) blog. I thought the writing and the critique of the rush to laptop use in the classroom were that good.

But the editorial was on that precious resource and traditional tool called — what was it? It’s been so long since I’ve written on it — oh yeah, paper, so no luck there (for me, or the forests, or the atmosphere, or the students’ future environmental situation).

The third thing I did was figure, since the student says her “generation is more than adept at using technology,” that she would surely know that journalism lives more and more online now, that print news is dying. Since she says, after all, that she’s a “member of the Information Age,” she would know that the Huffington Post — a newpaper that has never been in print — eclipsed the venerable old Washington Post (that traditional newspaper that actually still uses paper) to take the number 2 spot, after the New York Times, in total traffic last September. I figured she’d know that the, what shall we call it?, traditional NYTimes itself is taking out loans on its headquarters building, due to its almost nonexistent profit margins in this post-Gutenberg age. But surely this student knew all this stuff too, because I’m sure she uses an RSS reader, and reads links from the thousand smart people she’s built up in her Twitter network — surely Tweetdeck is one of the applications open at the bottom of her screen, and surely it’s populated not by people who share her blood or her table at the school cafeteria, like most of the silly Facebook crowd, but by like-minded peers (and unlike-minded ones) around the world.

Surely she uses these by-now old tools to stay more informed about the world than people who don’t use them.

I figured, in short, that I could find an online version of the editorial — since the student surely knew that that’s not only writing’s future, it’s its present — and be able to respond to it, and promote it to all of you readers dotting the six inhabited continents on my nifty Clustrmap at the bottom of the right sidebar. A simple select, copy, paste, and link to her site so my blog’s readers could follow the link, join the conversation, share their praise (and their experience). Maybe offer her an internship if they’re in the publishing biz, since I figured her blog would surely have a “Contact Me” page for just such possibilities. I mean, she’s technically adept, after all, and so used to troubleshooting Internet Explorer for her parents. (She surely dropped IE long ago with most geeks in favor of Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari, or whatever. It’s a parent thing, surely.)

The fourth thing I did was search for the online version of the paper and, sure enough, I found it — in pdf. You know, the format where, as I saw Will Richardson put it, “good ideas go to die.”

And that almost totally changed my view of the editorial. I couldn’t comment. I couldn’t read other students’, teachers’, administrators’, parents’, and purely authentic Readers-from-the-Brave-New-Web’s ideas about the text. I couldn’t copy and paste the most interesting ideas in the text for fine-grained commentary here, and link to the article to send you there. Instead, I had to take screenshots of it and upload it here. All of which suggested to me that, contrary to the claims of “adeptness” and expertise in the editorial, the editorial writer(s) have much more to learn than they realize.

Parting shots: Last month I took three days off of school to fly to the beach in Australia, all expenses paid, in order to give a talk to an educational technology conference. I got the offer via the “Contact Me” page on this blog, from a reader of this blog I’d never met (because while she did read, I’m not aware of her ever commenting). She invited me to speak simply by virtue of the fact that she said she was a long-time reader who liked what she read here.

Here. On a simple blog.

That wouldn’t have happened if I thought pdf was good enough for the 21st Century writer.

A couple months before that, I got another “Contact Me” bite from a PBS TV documentary producer asking if I’d be available to be a talking head on a show they were doing about classic literature — for the first episode, to be exact, which was about none other than Gilgamesh, about which I’ve written about 20,000 words over the last year here, on this simple blog. She’d read my take, and said it was exactly the kind of approach and tone her team wanted for the show.

That, too, wouldn’t have happened if I thought pdf was good enough for the 21st Century writer.

But at that Australia conference, much of what I said actually agreed with what the student editorial said: I agree that teachers can be excellent at what they do without technology. I agree that, worse still, pushing teachers to use technology before they’re trained, experienced, and ready can indeed lead to worse teaching and worse learning. I really do think the student writer’s criticisms along these lines should be taken very, very seriously. I’ve been in this world long enough to believe that we can’t push the reluctant to use it, and that that’s a fool’s errand. The best we can do is “pull,” I said in Australia. But even that word is wrong, since it still requires more energy than is sustainable for teachers. Now I believe the best we can do is simply attract. The sun isn’t getting muscle fatigue keeping the planets in orbit. It’s simply attracting them, effortlessly, because of its impressive mass. Teachers should be suns in this way, and students the planets worth keeping in orbit. Those with ears, let them hear.

But. What I hope I’ve given the writer pause to reflect on in all of the above is that having “six or seven apps” open on your computer, doing Facebook, and helping Mom with IE is nothing special. It’s about as impressive as publishing to pdf.

And: Here’s my pitch, and it’s to you, student editorial writer, whoever you are:

Our school is going 1:1 next year whether we like it or not. And I’m not sure I like it myself, since I’ve taught at a 1:1 laptop school before, and really wonder, as I wrote lately, if “the Web is too beautiful to waste on the young.”

Because just as you’re arguing that admin shouldn’t force teachers who don’t want to learn new ways to do their job, I’d much rather not force students to learn what I’ve learned after three or four years of self-publishing, podcasting, networking, and more. I’d much rather invite the “three out of a thousand” I see every year to come by after class so I can say, “You’re a great writer (or speaker, or artist, or photographer, or whatever), and if you want my support in sharing your uniqueness with more than the school hallway or your bedroom file cabinet, I’ll show you some things that have worked for me. They might lead places for you.”

Moreover, I’d much rather you use the laptops at home to watch podcasted lectures and whatnot, and come to school to discuss, write, plan, create in a workshop-style setting that applies what you learned on your laptop the night before.

And I have no interest in playing cop to your generation’s Facebook addiction in the classroom. Sometimes I wonder why I should have to. Students who choose to spend their school time writing graffiti on Facebook (and not, in the traditional way, on their schooldesk) instead of learning from the web activity that the teacher, after all, ideally has judged as worth their time — that’s their choice. It’s a choice not to rise. Maybe they shouldn’t rise, then, and they should go ahead and practice their spelling of “LOL,” “wtf?”, and “rotfl.” Meanwhile, the teacher can focus on the students in the room who want to learn, and to peacefully pursue future superiority over the Facebook scribblers sitting next to them. It’s a lesson in real-world responsibility. Sometimes we have to do things we’d rather not do, or suffer the consequences.

And while I’m not sure I believe that, this I do believe: It’s going to be messy for all of us.

And you, student, whoever you are, can help make it less messy. You took a good first step by articulating the problems you say students are talking about. Now take the next step: get those students to join you in generating solutions. (Read my “Recession Skills 101″ posts here, here, and here to get my take on how you should see yourself as a stakeholder in your education — as basically an employee who’s expected to contribute to the betterment of the company.)

Do it openly, do it professionally, do it maturely, and do it constructively. Don’t name names and if you’re going to stab something, stab a solution.

How can you do that? The simplest way would be to start a blog — or turn the newspaper into one.

And one last thing: as you’re helping the school try to launch this thing, as you’re suggesting your changes and communicating your point of view, don’t forget to be open to changing your mind and learning something new. Because there’s more to the web — to “blogs, wikis, and forums,” to quote your example (did you know the CIA and United Nations use wikis now?) — than you seem to understand.

And that’s true for all of us.

37 Comments

At December 25, 2009, Nathan Lowell wrote:
Thanks for this, Clay.

The writer totally nailed the process problem to the floor. Rolling out technology for the sake of rolling out technology is exactly what educational technology is not supposed to be doing.

On the other hand, the reality is that, until you can find out for yourself where the technology can take you, then it's hard to know where you might want to go. Putting out without training is actually a good thing, IMHO, because when you train somebody to use a tool a particular way, you predispose them to use the tool *only* that way.

How much more valuable it might be to put great tools in the hands of teachers and students and ask them to figure out ways they could be used to foster learning. Oh, sure, there'd be a period of "what the heck do we do with THIS?" but ... as your writer points out, there's a certain modicum of expertise in the wild that can help shape the exploration. Moreover, there are a lot of resources already available to help bootstrap the inquiry process. You don't need to leave them floundering in the dark, but the excuse of "we didn't get trained" is paper thin.

There's another point that makes me a little twitchy and that's the tendency to lump it all into "technology." We use technology all the time, every day. The school building itself is technology. The lights, heat, paper, furniture -- even the design and layout of the space -- it's all technology. I'm exaggerating to make a point but not by much.

What technology are we talking about that needs to be used more effectively? Display technology? Communications? Network? Information architecture? Collaboration? Feedback? Print? Spoken language?

Even just limiting it to Digital Technology encompasses such diverse items as mp3 player, digital camera, and wireless routers. We don't make the "technology" any less homogeneous by saying "laptop computers."

Furthur, we are doing nobody any favors by blaming the "technology" or even the process for failing in the implementation of "technology" if we're not more precise about what we mean when we talk about it.

The term "technology" -- and even "digital technology" -- lacks sufficient granularity for meaningful conversation. I think we need to be talking less in generalities if we intend to actually make a difference.
.-= Nathan Lowell´s last blog ..The hidden curriculum… =-.
At December 25, 2009, Patrick Murray-john wrote:
Interesting. It seems like this student has fallen into the "digital native/digital immigrant" binary that sounded good a few years ago, but now from what I see is largely discredited. But the twist is that it's coming from a putative digital native and they're using it as a claim to authority.
.-= Patrick Murray-john´s last blog ..VoCamp To The Rescue! =-.
At December 25, 2009, Concretekax wrote:
This reminds me of a student panel I listened to at an ed-tech conference. The students had very little technology in their schools and strict filters. Their opinions echoed those of adults who do not know how to use technology to support learning. If they would have had at least one student from a 1:1 school with a successful implementation then the panel would have been more interesting.
Unless students have experienced an effective integration of technology then they often parrot the fears of teachers and administrators who see no reason to change teaching and learning from the past 100 years. We can't blame the students anymore than we blame a toddler for imitating poor behavior of his parents.
.-= Concretekax´s last blog ..The Purpose of Grades =-.
At December 25, 2009, Jason Kern wrote:
I think the student nailed the problem. If teachers use blogs, wikis, etc. just to use them then they are going to simply be more busy work.
However, if the student would have had Mr. Burell as a teacher then they would have realized all the benefits of taking their paper/lesson online. They would have realized how they could be creating, controlling and leveraging their digital footprint.
This is why we will always need teachers. Students may understand the technology but they do not always realize that it is only a tool to accomplishing their goals.
Technology just amplifies the teacher and the lesson. It's not about the technology, it's about the pedagogy!
.-= Jason Kern´s last blog ..Google Teacher Academy for Admins - Why I'll apply =-.
At December 25, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
The students had very little technology in their schools and strict filters. Their opinions echoed those of adults who do not know how to use technology to support learning. If they would have had at least one student from a 1:1 school with a successful implementation then the panel would have been more interesting.
Unless students have experienced an effective integration of technology then they often parrot the fears of teachers and administrators who see no reason to change teaching and learning from the past 100 years. We can’t blame the students anymore than we blame a toddler for imitating poor behavior of his parents.
--word, word, word. Outstanding points. I think I'll suggest to my admin (and the student newspaper) a call-out for input from students at a good 1:1 school.
At December 25, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Good to hear from you, Nathan, and interesting thoughts.
Your point about the dangers of teacher-training "pre-disposing" them to use these multi-purpose tools for fewer purposes than possible is well-taken -- to a degree. I put "experience" and "readiness" in that phrase about "training" for roughly that reason.
I have reservations, though, about the negative consequences of students having to suffer through their teachers' floundering first steps, and the opportunity costs to learning of letting teachers muddle through that stage.
(That being said, in all honesty my students are surely still suffering those very costs every time I try something new. We're all still in the pioneer stage, after all, aren't we?)
Something along the lines of a "digital driving school" requiring teachers to spend a certain amount of time/energy behind the wheels of various tools before they can try them in class appeals to me, warts and all.
At December 25, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Interesting point. I think I've read that the fastest-growing demographic on FB is middle-aged and older women.
At December 25, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
I agree with everything you said, Jason, except the "if the students had had Mr. Burell as a teacher" part.
In the past, this may have been true. But at the end of my first semester at my new school, in which the plate was just too full to do anything well, it wasn't.
But that won't stop me from trying to change that next semester :)
At December 25, 2009, Nathan Lowell wrote:
An excellent point and I agree to a point.
The opportunity cost of the initial floundering is a challenge, certainly, but I think it might go back to two ideas.
1. As a teacher you have to "cover" the material.
2. A teacher teaches the way they're taught.
Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.
The second is more difficult. Getting teachers to understand that the *first* thing they need to learn about these tools - the ones we lump loosely into a box and label "technology" - is how to *learn* with them. Instead, my experience is that teachers only want to know how to *teach* with them.
It comes down to realizing that teaching is a communicative art and each teacher is an artist. How they use the tools will be - must be - unique to their particular practice. How many ways are there to use a paint brush? Are there fewer ways to use a digital camera? How many different media might an artist use to create a feeling, a mood? Does it make sense teachers would use a fixed subset?
How do we get this level of skill and awareness inculcated in teachers? An artist struggles with media and tools and tries and fails, again and again. While this might seem like a waste of time when held up agains the production model of factory-school, if we value learning and not just curriculum? Does that change our paradigm?
.-= Nathan Lowell´s last blog ..The hidden curriculum… =-.
At December 26, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Nathan,
When you write,
Does the challenge become one of changing the politics so that learning is more important than coverage? If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.
--you take me back to my roots, in a sense. Or maybe one of my finest flowerings/flounderings. It's when I was letting students "fail" at being independent writers for weeks throughout a writing workshop course, so they could experience the hoped-for "finding their feet" in their first experience of classroom freedom to find themselves as writers (instead of, you know, writing whatever I told them to write).
You nail the challenge that the "coverage" imperative presents to this approach. In my last post before this one, the "think-aloud" about the Chinese history course I just ended, I think I found a way to cut a lot of the coverage for the next iteration, which will maybe make room for the type of learning you remind me is important.
As for
Getting teachers to understand that the *first* thing they need to learn about these tools – the ones we lump loosely into a box and label “technology” – is how to *learn* with them. Instead, my experience is that teachers only want to know how to *teach* with them.
--it's often true for students too. They only want to know how to do "traditional homework" with the tools, as the student editorial hints when it valorizes traditional learning at a certain point or two.
I used the "tools as paintbrushes" metaphor in my keynote in Australia (and threw in a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" motif for good measure). You're totally right: at its best, a teacher approaches his craft like an artist.
So I want to ask, anyway, how we get students to "value learning, and not just curriculum"?
I think Christian Long's Alice Project (a recent and belated obsession of mine for the last few days) is very relevant to this.
At December 26, 2009, diane wrote:
Clay,
As a start, I'm going to share this posting via my Google Reader and on Twitter, Facebook, and Plurk . It deserves a wide readership and many thoughtful responses.
Your title is beautifully ironic: it applies equally to the "adept" generation and us older folk.
.-= diane´s last blog ..Old Friends =-.
At December 26, 2009, Nathan Lowell wrote:
You asked:
So ... how we get students to “value learning, and not just curriculum”?
We have to stop rewarding them for chasing grades.
In my grad school courses I exhort my students (who are, for the most part, US K-12 teachers) to think like learners instead of students. If they're worrying about the points of their grading, then they're missing the points of the learning. I give them one task all semester. "Prove to me that you're thinking." I change the focus weekly, but their task each week remains the same. Of course, I have a lot more flexibility in grad school than most teachers who have to certify that they've covered X chapters of material ... which brings us back around.
BTW, I don't give "tests" in the traditional sense, but remind them that there *will* be a final exam. It'll come long after the class is over and it'll be graded by the learners they're trying to reach.
.-= Nathan Lowell´s last blog ..The hidden curriculum… =-.
At December 26, 2009, sylvia martinez wrote:
Clay,
With a terribly broad brush, this is partially "our" fault (ed tech enthusiasts). I'll step up and take this rap too. Enthusiasts promote anything with the barest whiff of technology, talking about "low hanging fruit", "gateway drugs", and "baby steps". We should not be accepting bad educational practice as some sort of entry to good practice. That's just nonsense.
We have to be braver and point out areas where technology does not make things better. We have to be braver and not buy inferior products from large companies who simply co-opt the language of education for their marketing campaigns. And we have to be louder and more critical when we see these things happening.
The students certainly aren't fooled. We often hear how "engaged" students are when using technology, but if it's just busywork, the initial thrill will soon disappear. We hear about how teachers are reluctant to adopt technology, but what if they are actually making good judgements about bad implementations?
There has to be student ownership of the technology, in a way that allows them to make choices both good and bad. That's what teachers do - help students make the better choice. By allowing corporations and publishers to control the technology, rather than the teacher and the student, we remove that agency and create powerless students and worse, powerless teachers.
All technology is not created equal.
At December 26, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Diane, one reason I love librarians (at least ones like you) (and you) is that they know how to read. Thanks for noticing the irony.
And know, in return, that I see the subtlety of the first part of your comment. I hope the intended audience does too (unless I'm projecting, which I doubt).
Happy Holidays, D.
At December 27, 2009, monika hardy wrote:
Great conversation. Thank you....
This is huge:
If you can take away the opportunity cost of floundering and instead *use* that floundering as the lesson, then this is no longer an obstacle but an advantage.
The second is more difficult. Getting teachers to understand that the *first* thing they need to learn about these tools – the ones we lump loosely into a box and label “technology” – is how to *learn* with them. Instead, my experience is that teachers only want to know how to *teach* with them.
The focus needs to be on the connections web access allows - to knowledge via people. People aren't buying in because we're missing the point. Learning how to learn.
At December 27, 2009, » On Using Technology Without Understanding It at Beyond School wrote:
[...] On Using Technology Without Understanding It at Beyond School. [...]
At December 27, 2009, Ian Gay wrote:
An interesting post. The whole article really made me think and I was enjoying the by-play of the comments until I got to all the Twitter links which added nothing (in fact detracted) from the whole conversation. Sometimes I feel Twitter could be renamed Chatter.
At December 27, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Ian,
I'm playing with a Twitter plugin that has various settings for displaying tweets as comments (it was much worse when they were mixed in with real comments, rather than put after them as now).
In the context of this post, though, I wonder if you miss the significance of those tweets to the entire topic of the post. I see it there in spades, and hope students do too.
Finally, besides telling us in your comment that you enjoyed the post -- which is pretty much what the tweets suggest via a simple retweet -- and that you don't like twitter, do you care to add anything about the ideas you say you enjoyed?
At December 27, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Hm. Ian, Your complaint about Twitter did make me think about how that plugin affects reading my blog in an RSS reader (I have another plugin that includes comments to posts with the post itself in the feed).
Thanks for making me see that using the "display tweets as comments" setting, while being a negligible inconvenience if read on the blog itself, is surely a pain in the rear when scrolling through a feed reader. I'm thinking of changing the settings.
What I like about keeping them is simply their display of Twitter as the new Google Search, in terms of bringing readers to a text. Since installing the Tweetmeme plugin, the proportion of my readers coming from Twitter instead of from Google has risen dramatically. That seems significant for students to understand -- or at least any who want their writing to be read in the real world.
At December 27, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Sylvia,
We hear about how teachers are reluctant to adopt technology, but what if they are actually making good judgements about bad implementations?
is the money question, for me.
But if you read my response to the student editorial, it makes clear to me that many students think adults can't teach them anything about tech, when they clearly have much to learn (from some, at least).
And for the sake of argument, since "bad choices" by teachers and students result in the same waste of learning time -- though your point that students learn from those bad choices is well-taken, probably moreso if they made those choices themselves -- I still wonder if it's worth the opportunity cost in terms of more valuable learning of, yes, content, that could have taken place otherwise.
At December 27, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:
I'm late to the show, so most of the pertinent points have already been covered, but I just wanted to address this: the editorial author really doesn't have much control over the format of the newspaper. She might very well have a blog elsewhere, but most newspapers require exclusivity, so you wouldn't be able to find it. Furthermore, since this is likely a one-off editorial, she wouldn't have the influence to get the newspaper moved online. Don't fault the message, fault the messenger.
At December 27, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Points well-taken, Morgante (and a concession to that hinted at in one of the footnotes), but there's an irony to note too, maybe.
The editorial suggests it's a collective one by "The Eye Editorial Staff," first of all (not exact wording, but I'm too lazy to scroll up right now).
If that's the case, a) they're presumably the power-clique of the paper this year; b) they're the ones implying they know more about tech than their teachers, while also c) claiming their teachers and traditional educational methods should be respected.
So since the post-pdf digital revolution has passed them by, who better to make the real Reformation happen in the newspaper now, if not them?
I wonder how many of the staff do have quasi-professional blogs, by the way. And how far they've gone in learning the ropes.
At December 27, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:
I noticed your footnote, but completely missed the "Eye Staff" headline. Clearly, my reading skills need some improvement.
In that case, if it really is a staff editorial (which it likely is), you're absolutely right: they shouldn't have such a high opinion of technical skills if their paper is still published on dead trees and their technological equivalent.
I'd be pushing for my school's newspaper to go online, but at this point the internet is better off without it.
At December 27, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:
I just wanted to note I find the separation of tweets out from comments at the bottom extremely confusing.
From the comment form, I was trying to scroll up to find my comment yet was seeing dates from before it was published. Since there's an expectation that everything is ordered chronologically, I was mystified as to where my comment had gone.
I'd say either abandon the tweets or integrate them into the chronology, maybe with a filter to remove simple "retweets."
At December 28, 2009, sylvia martinez wrote:
Well, all of these generalizations are being built on a pretty flimsy base -- all we have is one editorial with no real knowledge of the situation at the school, who wrote the article, or anything about the technology at the school.
School curriculum around the world is permanently stuck in the pre-Internet world. To expect students to rebel against a newspaper assignment would be the same as expecting them to revolt against logarithms. Instead we give them a song and dance about how learning these things that they'll never use is good for them. Some passively revolt by not showing up in mind and/or body. Some chant along with the party line (usually the ones who are winning the game.)
.-= sylvia martinez´s last blog ..Free guide – How to keep your teen safe on the Internet =-.
At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Ian, this post by a new blogger who just discovered the depths of Twitter made me think of your comment.
Don't get me wrong, sometimes I agree with you about the chatter. But if you haven't experienced it beyond that, the above-linked is a good read.
At December 29, 2009, Lindsay Jordan wrote:
The point that resonated with me the most in your post was the frustration of processing static content - whether it's 'electronic', printed, scribbled with a biro or painted in illuminated letters on parchment.
I downloaded Curtis Bonk's new book - The World is Open - last week. In true Digital Age style, I purchased it through Amazon on my iPhone and it was sent directly into the Kindle app. It was the first e-book I'd bought in this way and the feeling of 'connectedness' I felt as the words appeared on the touchscreen was very satisfying.
Such a strange feeling, then, to be turning the pages, annotating and adding notes, and for none of this activity to be accessible to anyone else. I had no idea who else was reading this material, whether they were responding in the same way or had a different perspective to offer. I couldn't even grab and tweet a link.
Many people have proposed that we are losing the capacity to focus on one thing for sustained periods. Maybe they have a point, but this is not the most accurate or helpful way of describing how the way we engage with ideas is changing. We are social animals who benefit intellectually and emotionally from talking over these ideas together. In a beautifully choreographed collaborative movement, we have created the tools we need to bring people together from all over the world to talk about the ideas that interest them. Now we have this, what is the value of static, non-interactive content? Does it have a place?
Given its title, it's ironic that Bonk's book isn't at all, in any sense of the word, open. There *is* an interactive accompanying website though - which is a positive step, and perhaps an appropriate compromise in a world that is still largely working with a traditional publishing infrastructure. The next time I pay $20 for an e-book though - Amazon take note - I would want to be able to communicate with the other readers.
At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Lindsay, you're further along the digital curve than I am. I still read paper books, and like them. Do you prefer the Kindle?
I'm also behind the learning curve in Evernote. I've heard of people taking photos of pages from books they're reading and adding annotations there, which seems horribly clunky for manic annotators like me. I'm also unclear on whether Evernote allows open access to files.
Although most days I'm so satisfied with the fullness of my life to this point that I could easily die tomorrow, the evolution of literacy -- and we know we're in the clunkiest of early stages of this revolution -- does make me hope for a few more decades. It's all so fascinating.
Thanks for the very thoughtful post, and see you on Twitter! (By the way, what do you teach, and where? I see you're in the UK, yes?)
At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
I've tried to respond to your comment a couple times, Monika, but couldn't nail what I wanted to say. Still can't, so I guess I'm still not ready.
But I'll start with saying I'm still uncomfortable with the opportunity cost notion. As a history teacher -- which to me means "preparation for informed citizenship" teacher -- I'm not sure I want to sacrifice time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation.
I see the value of both, though. I'm thinking a separate course -- a sort of "Intro to Web 2.0" -- might be more useful than teachers across the curriculum failing and flailing about with the tools when their primary job is teaching content.
And I'm still traditional in thinking content is more important. Without it, we risk churning out what I've recently been calling, in my internal monologues, "barbarians with laptops."
Teachers and philosophers across the centuries have taught successfully without the new tools (to whatever degree we can certainly debate, and could also debate whether the percentage of students who learn well under traditional methods would learn any better via digital means).
And the new tools also enable "connections to knowledge via people" that can be unreliable, which opens a new can of worms.
But I'm still hazy. :)
Thanks for the comment.
At December 29, 2009, Lindsay Jordan wrote:
I definitely prefer digital to paper books... I like to lie on my side while reading and it gets too fiddly holding the book open. And with Kindle you can annotate with the same hand you're holding the iPhone with - very good if you're reading while standing on the train and you need to other hand to hold on with!
I'd agree that everything is still at the clunky stage - converting a pdf into a format that you can read on the iPhone in Kindle or Stanza is a rather complex operation (it gets easier after the first time and if you're doing lots of files in bulk).
I teach Arts educators on the PG Cert in Learning & Teaching at the University of the Arts London. I also support teachers across our colleges in using technology for teaching & learning - this involves some community development work as well as supporting individual projects.
.-= Lindsay Jordan´s last blog ..lindsayjordan: @Psythor Me too! I assumed Flash Gordon, or Colin Firth or someone, was going to fly in at the last minute and save the day... :-/ =-.
At December 29, 2009, monika hardy wrote:
Lindsay - thank you for your comment. The whole idea that the masses just keep changing up ... "processing static content" seems so invisible to others, maybe because it's so ingrained, esp in ed. And dang - what is the value of it now that we have created the means to do better....?

Clay - this bit:
Now I believe the best we can do is simply attract. The sun isn’t getting muscle fatigue keeping the planets in orbit. It’s simply attracting them, effortlessly, because of its impressive mass. Teachers should be suns in this way, and students the planets worth keeping in orbit.
...reminds me of Seth Godin. He's taught me what remarkable means. Something has to have enough value that it's worth talking about...by others. We're not pushing or pulling - we are your impressive, attractive sun.

I think devalue, unattractiveness, the need to remark on our own activity, doing things only for a grade... comes when we think we have to have the masses buy in. As much as I want everyone to get it.. to have all ears hear it (those who have ears let them hear)...I am continually saddened by the cheapening of this beautifully choreographed collaborative movement.

I love the ideas of podcasting as homework.. experts connecting with the few that do get it.

Maybe this is where I need more patience. It makes so much sense... to be attractive and remarkable, because I want the learning to be geniune... but when I get in "school," waiting is hard. I want them (teachers and students) to get it now. I don't want them missing out on the beauty of it all. How long does/will it take to debunk? You'd think in it's true form, networking would/could debunk overnight.

I just want to make sure that those moments when ears do open up to the possibility that this really is different... they aren't barraged with talk of new tech tools.... that just glorify the processing of static content.
.-= monika hardy´s last blog ..the science of motivation via dpink =-.
At December 29, 2009, Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear? at Beyond School wrote:
[...] Nathan Lowell and Monika Hardy — it’s too long to post in its entirety, but it starts here — on the “Using Technology Without Understanding It” [...]
At December 29, 2009, monika hardy wrote:
I totally agree - this: sacrificing time that could be used learning and drawing conclusions from human history on the altar of failed web 2.0 experimentation - has been to our demise.
I'm thinking more along the lines of Erica McWilliams term, being "usefully ignorant." Knowing what to do when you don't know what to do.
Not - gosh I blundered the tech again - what can we learn from that?...
But, dang, the questions you're asking are beyond my knowledge,... let's google it, or tweet about it, ..etc... to find out. And then obviously research the people, things, etc, we find for accuracy.
I think we have to break away..and do the Clay Christensen disrupting class thing. Kids teaching themselves in a sense, because their journey is their journey. They have created (or their teachers have created) their own network of experts to guide them to knowledge/information.
Currently, in my brain, learning how to use new tools isn't what ed needs. If the need for a tool is there, anyone can learn how to use it. So a separate class for it... hmmm.. I don't know. What we're missing is why we need the tools.
Some reasons I think are good:
I don't want to process static content anymore... I want to follow my passion... I don't want my end project to end up in the recycle bin... I want an authentic audience... I want what I do to matter.....

Voicethread is an example of a great tool.... because it lives on.. It can be tweaked anytime. But I've also seen it used in static mode... it lost it's use.
Gosh I was I was smarter...
.-= monika hardy´s last blog ..let's not keep processing static content =-.
At January 4, 2010, “You Suck at Photoshop”: Paragon of Creative Project-Based Learning at Beyond School wrote:
[...] the unwilling to attempt genius, and not even “pull” them, but only to “attract” the three percent of “roses” in any student population who might blossom in the [...]
At January 12, 2010, Students with Eyes, Let Them See: 27-Year-Old Chinese Blogs His Way to Fame at Beyond School wrote:
[...] become somewhat of an elitist when it comes to urging the young to blog, only wanting to “attract” those rare students who have the gifts but don’t seem to understand the tools we now [...]
At February 2, 2010, Part 4: What is important to know? wrote:
[...] beyond school.org [...]
At February 6, 2010, Some teacher resources… « RTOA wrote:
[...] 100 videos showing new classroom techniques http://beyond-school.org/2009/12/25/on-using-technology-without-understanding-it/ -here’s an article on using tech without understanding it Tags: classroom techniques, [...]

A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West

Clay Burell — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 20:46:12 +0000

I’m a 21st Century Education Rip Van Winkle with a twist: I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. This post is long, but I hope some of you will plod through it and advise me on what helpful solutions I’ve slept through. I put my pleas along those lines in red.

Feel free to skip to section three for what’s really the meat of this post. I’d love feedback there especially.

I told my students in the just-concluded semester-long Chinese History course that I gave myself a B/B- for the way I taught it this first time out (call it the Beta version). This post will return to my early “teacher think-aloud” habit on this blog to reflect on ways to raise that grade for the second semester

Since a B supposedly signifies “above average” without signifying “excellent,” I’ll justify that grade first by listing what I thought were the course’s strengths and weaknesses. Then I hope I’ll have enough steam left to dump the brainstorm of how to re-figure the course — using Diigo to heighten the academic rigor, and an “in medias res” narrative structure to heighten the engagement and provide the essential purpose for studying Chinese (or any) history at all — that’s been brewing in my mind over the last (typically post-midnight) hour.

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Improvements

1. Replaced the textbook

Strengths: A week before the course began, the returning teachers arrived to work and I was finally able to see the resources and scope of the course. The textbook, to put it generously, was great for 12-year-olds, but not my 16-year-olds in this supposedly “rigor”-driven school — so I tossed it and replaced it with the China chapters from an introductory Asian History college textbook (Rhoades Murphey’s excellent A History of Asia).

Weaknesses: Murphey’s text led to an embarrassment of riches: there was simply too much information in it for a brief survey course. I was also concerned that its readability level was too challenging for some students, but I did a Poll-Daddy poll and found 33 of 36 responded from “It’s a bit challenging, but I can handle it” (my definition of the Zone of Proximal Development for reading) to “It’s just right for my reading level” to “It’s easy.” Still, for the three who couldn’t handle it, alternate texts or resources were necessary, and I didn’t have them.

Another weakness was in the photocopied packet I made of the Murphey readings. I didn’t include the Index in the copies, so it was surely difficult for students to be able to locate information from the text for review purposes.

A final weakness: It had been four years since I’d used the text, which means I’d forgotten most of it, and spent the semester “two days ahead of the students” in terms of content mastery. (Students seem to think teachers remember everything they’ve ever known, which is interesting, since a brief reflection on their own forgetting of content from courses from prior years should demolish that idea. They seem to think the adult brain is of an entirely different model, some new design inserted in the skull upon college graduation or something. So here’s a dirty teacher secret, kids: Our brains are at least as limited as yours.)

Future Improvements: I’ve ordered The Cambridge Illustrated History of China to be the textbook next year. An Amazon “Reader Reviews” and “Look Inside” perusal satisfied me that this is a reasonably solid high school China history text. (We’re looking at ABC-CLIO database as a possible digital replacement for paper textbooks altogether for next year, when we go 1:1. Anybody know how feasible this is?)

2. Replaced Blackboard with Ning

Strengths: I haven’t written about it yet because I’m waiting for the video to be released, but I gave a keynote speech at the Learning Technologies Conference in Australia last month, and during it I declared a “pox on Blackboard.” I meant it. It made my first month trying to get to know my students’ backgrounds, preferences, and literacy skills utter hell. First I assigned an “About Me” forum that most students put a lot of effort into, apparently….. “Apparently” because I never saw it. Some glitch in Blackboard didn’t save the things, so I never got to read them. That damned me to fogginess about the general skills of my class for the first couple of weeks. Later attempts to use the forums, once the glitches were ironed out, were still clunky due to Blackboard’s horrible user interface (in all fairness, my school is using an old version, and I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive). Example: answering a forum in Blackboard confused most of my students because of the language of the User Interface. Instead of hitting “reply” after my prompt — no “reply” link existed — they had to somehow just know that to simply reply they had to click on “Start New Thread.” Talk about unintuitive.

Then there was Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning. (I wasn’t about to install and manage my own Moodle. Been there, suffered that. Anybody have solutions along these lines I don’t know about?)

The strengths of Ning: It’s way more straightforward. The Main Page is a one-stop overview and link-list for all necessary tasks and documents for the week. Videos, photo slideshows, forums, blogs, RSS feeds of China News from Google News and from my Diigo China bookmarks in widgets on the sidebars for any advanced student wanting to read more. Hell, even student birthdays announced on the sidebar (it never hurts so sing Happy Birthday in class). So good riddance, Blackboard.

I kept things pretty minimal, as far as assignments went. Rotating groups of four or five students had to blog each week on the prior week’s content — open, whatever idea struck their fancy — and the others had to reply to two that appealed to them (authentic audience response awards students with the best ideas, hopefully stirs those whose posts elicited cricket chirps to reflect on how to do better next time). It was hard for me to participate in the blogs and forums as much as I’d have liked because of the afore-mentioned “two days ahead of the students” reading the textbook.

Weaknesses: Organization. I’m not going to beat myself up for this one, because I had to design the airplane while I was mid-flight in the semester. But I need to set all forums so that replies are threaded under the comments replied to, which isn’t the default, for one thing. Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. I also need to figure out how to instruct students to subscribe to email notifications when somebody replies to their comment or post. I’m not sure this finely-tuned of an option is even available. If not, that means students are getting 40-odd notifications every time somebody replies to the forum they replied to — which means they understandably delete them all, as I do, without looking at them. Clunky. (Help?)

Future Improvements: Frankly, I’m still puzzling over this one. I‘d love to have students use Diigo to comment on other students Ning blogs and forum readings, but since the site is locked and the content is dynamic, I’m not sure Diigo highlights would be visible to other students visiting the pages. Anybody know? [Update: Well that was easy. Diigo told me on Twitter, while I was writing this, that the highlights will indeed show. They also set me up with an Education Account within 20 minutes of my applying for it, which will make class registration much easier. So cool.)

**3. Content Organization: From "From the Beginning" to "In Medias Res" (or, "Teaching History Backwards")**

Strengths: Covering the 4,000 years of Chinese history from the semi-legendary Xia Dynasty of 2,000 BCE to the present in a semester course was no easy task -- especially since China, unlike Europe, doesn't have any gaping 1,000-year Dark Age through which to conveniently fast-forward, but instead boasts an unbroken string of literate centuries across four millennia. Survey though it was, the students did receive an education in the broad (and with Murphey's text, often impressively deep) flow of Chinese history from the Xia, Shang, Zhou, Qin, Han, Sui, Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, and Qing dynasties, and on into the 20th century's Nationalist and Communist regimes -- right up to the present day. (And though I know they couldn't know how skinny their "education" in Chinese history would have been had I just used the old textbook, and thus didn't have the perspective to appreciate just how superior their introduction to that history was in terms of depth and scope, I'm still pouting over the lack of a single expression of appreciation for the bang they got for their semester's buck. I know, I know: Cry me a river. Then send me to a shrink for expecting gratitude from teenagers.)

Weaknesses: The pacing was too fast. Again, I'm not beating myself up on this one because the textbook was new and I'd never used it as the primary text for teaching Chinese history before.

But more importantly, despite the oomph of knowing the highlights of all of China's major dynasties, at a certain point it starts feeling like a stuck record. Most of China's classical dynasties follow very similar "Dynastic Cycle" patterns in which a new dynasty begins, implements some impressive reforms in its first century or so, and over the next century or two becomes complacent and corrupt, and finally loses "the Mandate of Heaven" in the eyes of its subjects, and falls to whichever rebel or neighbor state emerges triumphant in Ye Olde and Verye Predictable Ende-of-Cycle Civille Warre or Forynne Invasionne. It brings to mind the title of an old Bowie song: "Always Crashing in the Same Car."

Most importantly, that almost-never-ending 3,000 years of dynastic cycles becomes, without a purpose for knowing it, an exercise in what Jared Diamond calls "history as one damn fact after another." Diamond insists on what most history buffs would assent to: that there are patterns in history that point towards essential understandings of who and what we are -- and those understandings, of course, separate the naive and ignorant from the educated. More importantly, they separate the citizen who you pray, for the sake of democracy, will not vote, from the one you pray will always vote.

Future Improvements: The course fell into the One Damn Fact Trap because I covered it chronologically: "In the beginning....." Tonight I think I arrived at a better approach.

I'm going to start the next course with the end of the dynastic era in 1911, when the Nationalists threw out the Qing -- more accurately, when the Qing just collapsed due to its own decrepitude -- and went through a painful and practically literal "crash course" in modern governance: nationalism, socialism, dictatorship, fascism, and democracy all in a stew from 1911 until 1949, and then totalitarianism and various shades of communism from 1949 to the present.

But before doing any of that, I'm going to assign the final exam essay questions in the first week of class, and have the students Diigo the hell out of our readings and forums on Ning for the rest of the course in order to arrive at their "answers." Here are the questions:

Essay Questions:

1. Western Liberal Democracies in Europe and (especially) the USA typically criticize the PRC for its lack of human rights – freedom of speech, religion, and assembly – as well as for its one-party dictatorship. Based on your knowledge of Chinese history in the “long view,” how valid do you think these criticisms are? Give as many specific examples from Chinese history as you can to support your arguments.

2. Mao Zedong waged the Cultural Revolution as a last-ditch attempt to prevent party Moderates (Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and others) from implementing capitalist reforms to China’s economic system; Mao believed instead that a planned economy relying on the social spirit of the people was the path to prosperity and justice for all. Based on your understanding of the effects of the Moderates’ reforms from the rise of Deng Xiaoping around 1980 to the present day, to what degree do you think Mao’s resistance was justified? Use as many specific details from the successes and failures of the planned economy during the ‘50s and early ‘60s (the First Five Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward), and from the successes and failures of the Four Modernizations to the present, to support your argument.

Why Diigo highlights and sticky-notes (online, on-site, on specific segments of text annotations) instead of simple forum and blog responses? A discussion on a Diigo forum last year that Cliff Mims started -- see my highlights on it here -- sold me. Diigo's Maggie Tsai said it most succintly:

Fundamentally there is a difference between Diigo's annotation and traditional blog commenting. Diigo in-situ highlight and sticky note allows fine-grained discussion to specific part of a webpage - which opens up the possibility for more meaningful exchanges...

So in a nutshell, as students read, they'll be highlighting and bookmarking the evidence to answer our semester-long "essential questions" that traditionally I would have sprung on them as "surprise" cram-questions at the end of the course. This will very much raise the "rigor" bar, and provide a similar routine for individual research projects. But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)]

The Beauty of a Real Project: Interpreting Modern “Communist” China, from an Historically-Informed Perspective, to China’s Historically Uninformed Western Critics

Wordy, I know, but that says it. China might not have made the finals for George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” award, but I’ve no doubt it made the short-list. Add to that the endless refrain, from at least the days of Ronald Reagan, of the evils of “godless Communism” and the blessings, historical and contemporary evidence aside (Iraq anyone? Or Afghanistan? or or or?) of one-size-fits-all “Democracy” and “Capitalism,” and you’ve got all sorts of articles of Western ideological faith to complicate with those lovely things called facts.

And please notice I said “complicate.” That’s the beauty of the idea: easy answers to the above essay questions, if pursued across a semester, with all evidence nicely aggregated on a simply-tagged Diigo page, will surely give way very quickly to the type of answers our future adults should have when considering modern China: and I mean nuanced answers.

Now my last two questions:

1. Assuming students will be able to offer valuable evidence and insight into the questions above — questions I’m convinced are relevant enough to the real world to deserve an audience — what’s the best way to present their findings to the world via the web?

2. How can I keep the project alive after its first iteration? Different questions for each successive class?

A million thanks for any who took the time to read and respond. If you see any beautiful ways to extend or enhance the idea further — Skypecast interviews from my students in Singapore with American students about their stereotypes of China and its government, for example? More? — please pitch those in the mix too.

26 Comments

At December 31, 1969, lindseybp (Barbara Lindsey) wrote:
Terrific @cburell reflective post on Beyond School http://bit.ly/7VEyC7 fav part: fnl exam ?s guide student-led learning from beg
At December 23, 2009, Damian wrote:
Clay, if I'm understanding your PDF sharing/annotating needs correctly, I'd offer two suggestions:

1) http://bookgoo.com supposedly offers these services (I say supposedly because the reviews say so, but I haven't been able to get the site to load)

2) This takes a little more virtual elbow grease, but if you only want students to share w/each other and you, as opposed to the whole web, get them free Evernote accounts, let them annotate in Adobe or some similar offline program, then save their PDFs to Shared Notebooks (Mashable has an overview of the service here: http://mashable.com/2009/06/25/evernote-shared-notebooks/ ). Depending on the settings you use, students can share just with small groups or with the entire class (set up different Shared Notebooks for each purpose).
.-= Damian´s last blog ..The Fine Print =-.
At December 23, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Thanks for those, Damian. Book-goo (horrible name!) isn't loading for me either, so what we're to make of that is up to us.

Evernote is a great idea, though. I'm looking at the link you gave and will let that brew for a while. Group eds are available only with a premium account, so maybe I need to finally rethink my cheapskate approach, since I've heard such great things aboout EN. (I have an account, but force of habit has prevented me from using it much at all. Diigo seems so easy by comparison.)

Another option I thought of post-post is to convert the pdf's to text, and copy those to Ning. That way they can be annotated and highlighted.

But definitely good to consider EverNote in the mix.

God I'm rusty. Thanks for the help!
At December 23, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf's what Diigo does for websites.

A good find. (They tweeted after I called for help on Twitter.)
At December 23, 2009, Clif Mims wrote:
I remain a big, big fan of Diigo. Thanks for the other tips, Clay. I especially appreciate the encouragement to consider consider substituting the use of Ning for Blackboard (Desire2Learn, WebCT, Angel, etc.). I'm going to give that some serious thought.
At December 23, 2009, beth wrote:
Clay--I love it when I hear teachers discussing databases. The ABC-CLIO is a great option! I can put you in contact with our humanities head who is also a great fan of this database. As you probably know you have the additional option to create tailor-made reading lists for your students. We are successfully using this with our 8th graders. We have had an excellent response from our students with this database—so good in fact, we have added Daily Life Premium: Daily Life through History, World Folklore and Folklife, Daily Life America.
We are not a 1-1 school, but since you are there are additional options. Have you looked at Proquest's History Study Center? Berkshire Publishing has just published this year a a digital Encyclopedia of China, which looks quite good and they are open to a consortium pricing. And since you are discussing China history--have a look at my blog posting on Education about Asia; it is a worthwhile subscription. And any China syllabus must have Spence on it.
And BTW thanks for the suggestion A.nnotate. Diigo has wonderful possibilities, but it is currently blocked in China right now (OUCH!)
.-= beth´s last blog ..Looking East =-.
At December 23, 2009, Mrs. Fuller wrote:
Hey Clay,
Regarding the .pdf dilemma . . . I clicked on the a.nnotate.com link that you posted & noticed that it could be quite pricey. Have you tried foxit reader? I have had great success with it--it is free for the reader & mark-up version, with upgrades available for a small(er) cost http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/reader/reader3.php (I am not affiliated with them in any way, just a teacher on the lookout for cheap/free stuff!)
At December 24, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Will try indeed, Mrs. Fuller, thank you :)
I will say that what I'm liking at a.nnotate is the ability to socially bookmark the highlights. For collaborative research in the classroom, that has benes. I haven't looked at pricing too much there yet, but from what I recall, it didn't seem spendy at its lower tiers.
At December 24, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
D'oh! It's just for Windows, and I'm married to a Mac. Still a nice tool to know about, so thanks again.
At December 24, 2009, Jodi wrote:
Dude, haven't read the whole post (or all comments) yet, but will slowly make my way through. In the meantime, this is what has resonated so far:
"I only went to sleep for a single year’s sabbatical, but the changes over that year make 2008 seem like 1808. " -- OMG, my biggest stress about going back after my sabbatical, especially since this year, my school has switched from PC to Mac, and I haven't had the time to play around on the Mac and feel as native with it as I did with my PC.
"Blackboard’s use of Frames, so cutting-edge in 1995, and its general “why click once when you can click ten times for the same task” workflow. The tool was as schooly as its name. It took way more of my time than necessary on Moodle to deliver a look, feel, and functionality less satisfactory than Moodle’s. A month into the course I’d had it. I left Blackboard for Ning." -- AGREED. Though this year our school will have installed the new Bb, over the past year I often considered "going rogue" and shifting just my classes -- or even just my AP Lang classes -- to Ning. But our school is very lock-step, not to mention obsessed with the "security" of its students (read: We.Must.Use.School.Protocol) that I'd probably get a big wrist-slap for doing so.
"Also, having 36 students on a single forum got unwieldy. I didn’t want to use groups because I wanted richer conversations between the two class sections, but this made navigation of forums difficult. " -- My solution to this in the past on Bb has been to create a single course page out of my two AP sections and then create cross-sectioned groups (with about 3 kids per section in each group). They'd then interact with a slightly smaller group that included kids from the other section, and at the end of the exercise I could open the groups up for them to see one another's forums. Not 100% satisfactory (partly b/c of the Bb unwieldiness), but it had some benefits, including cross-pollination of ideas from one section to another in a relatively manageable way.
Gonna keep reading to see if anything else twigs, but didn't want any one comment to get too long.
.-= Jodi´s last blog ..Romancin’ the languages =-.
At December 24, 2009, Jodi wrote:
Continuing:
"But uh-oh: what about pdf files? How can students highlight, bookmark, annotate those? Any work-arounds, dear teacher-geeks? (Much of our content is in pdf format.) [Update: Re: highlighting and annotating pdf files: http://a.nnotate.com does with pdf’s what Diigo does for websites. A good find." -- Thanks for this. V cool. Also, I have this vague inkling that the latest versions of Adobe allow PDF sticky-note annotation. But it may be something attached to pay-only versions...? Will have to play around with a.nnontate, as it's also two-tiered.
That's it for now. Funny, cause I had a dream last night that I was working at a new school that wasn't 1-1 and it was so awkward, b/c I was trying to get students to share their responses to the work online with one another.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from Padova, Italia! :D
.-= Jodi´s last blog ..Romancin’ the languages =-.
At December 25, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:
It's good to see you back, Clay. Now if I could only summon the will to break from applications and schooly writing to post...
I think your questions are excellent will drive students to see that history, rather than being a set of facts, is nuanced and, at its best, controversial. To present their answers, it seems like a WordPress blog might be the way to go. In particular, I'd hope that you support a variety of media responses: written essays (which do still have their value), but also YouTube recordings of speeches.
Another idea, which might just stem from my enjoyment of argument, is to have Skype debates between your class and American students. Push for thinking based on facts, but keep students from simply posting facts without thought.
Also, about Blackboard/Ning: "I think later ones have copied enough from Moodle to be more intuitive" — I don't think Moodle is, by any means, a standard against which usability should be judged. Its usability is questionable enough that I've considered making my own dozens of times. Depending on application results, I might end up making it this summer, giving you a potential alternative next year.
At December 25, 2009, Stian Haklev wrote:
Great post, very inspiring to read teachers reflect that honestly and openly about their teaching. I would love to see the teachers at my school of education do the same. I was just yesterday discussing with some of my friends how there seems to be a singular lack of concern for pedagogy (or andragogy) at schools of education... Do as I say, not as I do...
I have played a bit with Diigo, but never in a large group setting. I'd love to experience that. It's something we've thought about experimenting with more at Peer2Peer University. I guess a lot has been written about it already, but I wonder how to best structure it. Do they only comment on the "curriculum", or do they go out and find any resources that are interesting, and comment on them?
It's also annoying with PDFs. I really wish all these online publishers could serve us with HTML, rather than PDFs... I am doing research for a paper right now, and I keep ending up with a download diretory full of PDFs with enlightening names like 3094032492034.pdf.
.-= Stian Haklev´s last blog ..Harper Valley PTA/Fru Johnsen/Fröken Fredriksson =-.
At December 25, 2009, Ning und Diigo im Unterricht einsetzen | Tim Schlotfeldt » E-Learning wrote:
[...] 3 Aufrufe Clay Burell beschreibt in seinem Blogpost A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West sehr anschaulich wie er seinen Kurs über chinesische Geschichte weg vom Learning Management System [...]
At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Beth, I know I followed your link and commented there, but I just want to urge others to follow it too. It's so very rich.
Thanks for the input and enjoy Tianjin! How long have you been there, anyway?
At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Good suggestions, Morgante.
The problem I'd need help with on debating students in the US is the time-zone problem. We're GST+8 here, the US is around GST-8. Do you think asynchronous debate would be worth the effort? If so, how would you do it? (Why am I thinking VoiceThread?)
What do you mean by "recordings of speeches"? Original student speeches, or historical ones? I don't get it.
Moodle 2.0 is coming soon and sounds promising. Anything is better than Bb, and I do like Moodle well enough. But I'm not going to host it myself, so it's moot anyway. I just looked at Edmodo or whatever it's called, and it seems so minimal I'm not sure how it would do the job. What would you use? (If/until you make your own, which of course you will tell me about. That's an order.)
Get back to your schoolywork now.
At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Stian,
You did see a.nnotate.com as a pdf version of Diigo linked above, didn't you?
I've never mandated Diigo before, so it's going to be a first for me. I think the open surfing option is a good idea -- but only if (and mostly in order to) website evaluation is required.
As for the honesty, I figure it was pre-emptive (bad word for an American like me to use in the post-Bush era) strike before my students might launch their own critiques ;-)
At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Hi Jody,
Adobe and other pdf readers allow annotation, but I want the social annotation a la Diigo for collaborative research and annotation discussions.
You should see a shrink if you're dreaming about 1:1 schools while in Italy. I order you to instead dream of Petrarch and Botticelli.
At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Thanks for input on "cross-pollination." I'll see if Ning allows this kind of approach.
At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Clif, a belated hi and thanks for starting that Diigo discussion. It was very helpful, and you moderated it well.
At December 28, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:
Good point on the debates; I forgot about the time zone issue. Asynchronous debates might work though, especially if spread over multiple days—record 1 speech, then 1 response, etc. VoiceThread could work for this, so could simple video uploads to YouTube.
By recordings of speeches I meant student recordings—presenting thoughts through oratory rather than solely writing.
Edmodo does seem too minimal, but I've also lost faith in the Moodle model: individual schools/teachers all hosting their own instance doesn't seem the best way, especially if we want to see true global collaboration. It just seems to bring the restrictions of the school walls onto the web—and not in a particularly elegant fashion. I'll certainly let you know if I get anything going.
Now back to studying for the SAT, since I'm on break.
At December 29, 2009, Adrienne wrote:
I know I'm late replying, but on a Mac, I think the simplest way to annotate PDFs is using Preview. You can highlight or at the very least circle / box text and add your own notes. When you save it, it saves all annotations. A.nnotate looks good, but a bit complicated if all you want to do is mark up a PDF and show it to others.
.-= Adrienne´s last blog ..Resuscitated: Assessment — For What it’s Worth =-.
At December 29, 2009, Tim Drown wrote:
Your reflections on your teaching experience about China was helpful. In January 2010 I will be (co-)teaching Asian History for the first time. One of the countries I will be teaching is China. I have been reading everything I can get my eyes on about China. I have a tougher job than you. I will only have about 2-3 sessions to help my students grasp something worthwhile about China's immense history. Do you have any suggestions for a very brief overview and analysis of China's history that would be helpful for university reading level (EFL students in Indonesia reading in English, their second language)that I could have online access to?
At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
I know how to annotate on a Mac, Adrienne. What I'm looking for is the social annotation equivalent of Diigo for pdf's for the class. A.nnotate is the closest thing I've found.
Thanks for pitching in, though.
At December 29, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:
Gosh, Tim, I have no idea how a person could do China in three classes. I guess I'd go deep on the PRC or the 20th C. to the present. There's a good short textbook by Josh Brooman, China in the 20th Century (Longman) that might fit the bill, but even that would be tight.
Also google Fareed Zakaria Newsweek the rise of China for an article about China today.
PBS has a documentary online called Tank Man that's a good watch on Tiananmen to the present. Transcripts included on site.
Zhang Yimou's movie "To Live" is a great historical drama about one family from the 1940s to the 1980s that nails the main political events.
Of course, you'd need to do Confucianism too.
Hope that helps.
At December 31, 2009, Jodi wrote:
Yes, well... maybe it's all the rich food and wine... :D
.-= Jodi´s last blog ..New Posts in the New Year! =-.

How to “Smart Mob” against Creationism in Textbooks (video)

Clay Burell — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 13:16:51 +0000

Picture this: enterprising students in cities in Texas, particularly, and other cities nationwide – along with counterparts in Romania, which just mandated a Creationism-only science curriculum (I kid you not), and maybe Turkey, for good measure – organize Smart Mobs to strike, peacefully and simultaneously, out of the blue to demand only 21st century science – yes, I mean evolution – be included in their biology and other science textbooks.

And they do it quickly, before Texas’ Creationist-dominated Board of Education votes next Spring to insert Creationism yet again into its science standards. (See this post.)

They happen at such places as the Texas capitol building, the lobbies of textbook publishers’ headquarters, science museums, the national capitol, and wherever else seems like a good idea.

And they simply follow the steps of this excellent video (h/t to the Personal Democracy Forum):

And, because they’re good, peaceful citizens showing the will and responsibility to act for the education they deserve, the students who organize these events (more than once, please) include this as a bullet on their college application, to show that they’re more original and more consequential than the herd that joins the schooly National Honor Society and such. And the admissions officers at the best colleges see that bullet, and place their applications in the acceptance pile.

And they live actively and powerfully ever after.

If Obama’s doing it, kids, maybe it’s something you should consider as worth your time to learn. It might just help your future more than a couple hundred extra points on your SAT.

(Add to TheIndyDebate map)

7 Comments

At December 8, 2008, Sean Nash wrote:
Wow. Every human in Romania needs to read Dubner & Levitt's Freakonomics. This seems like a massively-ignorant move approaching the level of Ceausescu's reform of abortion laws.

The book makes a really solid case for the fact that his total and complete ban on all forms of abortion ultimately led to the creation of a generation of kids with terribly substandard human care. ...the very same generation that publicly executed him.

Anyway- cool video and appropriate post.

Sean
Sean Nashs last blog post..Inspire First, Instruct Later
At December 9, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:
Interesting point, Sean. Funny how these "do something" posts seem to go nowhere. But who knows.
At December 10, 2008, Secular Extremism: Smart Mob for Evolution Education « relationary wrote:
[...] – Clay Burrell, how to smart mob against creationism in textbooks [...]
At December 11, 2008, A Blog Around The Clock : How to organize a Smart Mob wrote:
[...] instance, to protest Creationist bills in state and local [...]
At December 12, 2008, Imbecilitatea anului 2008 | Sorin Tudor wrote:
[...] Precizari: 1. Nu sunt interesat in niciun fel de disputele creationism vs. evolutionism. Tot ce vreau sa spun este ca elevilor ar trebui sa li se permita sa opteze - in cunostinta de cauza! - daca vor sa se situeze intr-o tabara sau in alta; 2. Cand altii ne iau la misto pe nedrept, se umfla mamaliga in noi (ex: aici si aici). Dar ce facem cand ne iau la misto pe buna dreptate (vezi aici si aici)? [...]
At December 15, 2008, Bush Accepts Evolution, not a “Literalist” (video) | Beyond School wrote:
[...] In case you missed the post on Smart Mobbing against creationism in U.S. science textbooks - my, how I’d love to see high school students jump on this idea - the post is here. [...]
At December 20, 2008, Reply to Gary Stager’s HuffPo Post on Duncan | Beyond School wrote:
[...] I’ve been thinking the same thing since I began watching the Texas Board of Edu-Creationism try to jimmy Genesis into science classes and, worse yet, textbooks nationwide (Texas standards wag the national textbook industry dog: if Texas votes to deny Darwin, all the science textbooks will aim to please. I still pray somebody stateside takes on the Smart Mobs idea to protest this putsch). [...]

Beyond School » Networked Learning

Wikipedia: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source”

Wikipedia:Reliable source examples – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Are wikis reliable sources?

Are weblogs reliable sources? (more below the fold…)

Are web forums and blog talkbacks reliable sources?

Wikipedia:Reliable sources – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Self-published and questionable sources

Questionable sources

Self-published sources (online and paper)

12 Comments

New Tech Teaching Habits

What new routines have worked their way into your teaching-and-learning life as a result of the digital revolution?

1. Annotating Open Courseware University Lectures on Academic Earth, YouTube, Yale:

2. Planning Classes While Walking to School with iPod/iPhone Voice Memo

7 Comments

Barbarians with Laptops: An Unreasonable Fear?

Open Thread: School Me

36 Comments

Videos: Mental Poverty, Collaboration, “Recession Skills 101″

2 Comments

On Using Technology Without Understanding It

37 Comments

A New Diigo Vision and Call for Advice: On Students Teaching China to the West

Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Improvements

1. Replaced the textbook

2. Replaced Blackboard with Ning

**3. Content Organization: From "From the Beginning" to "In Medias Res" (or, "Teaching History Backwards")**

The Beauty of a Real Project: Interpreting Modern “Communist” China, from an Historically-Informed Perspective, to China’s Historically Uninformed Western Critics

26 Comments

How to “Smart Mob” against Creationism in Textbooks (video)

7 Comments