Speech Outline

If you just want to watch my recent keynote address in Australia — which, as farce would have it, turned into two addresses — just click on the screenshots of each speech below. But I hope you read the little mock-heroic back-story.

Learning Technologies 2009 Keynote, Part 1: Click image to view.

The Missing Link: Texas Politics Distorts US Textbooks
(watch before Speech Part 2. Slide to 5.15 for the kicker)

Learning Technologies Keynote Part 2 (click image to view)

~

Prologue: On Time and Other Thieves¹

Anybody as oblivious to the passage of time and calendar pages as I am knows it can be a source of both bliss and embarrassment: bliss because the hours and days are so damned interesting you don’t have time to notice them; embarrassment because some of those hours and days demand your notice — or else there’s hell to pay.

Common examples: birthdays, anniversaries, blasted holidays.²

Less common: the keynote speech I gave to the Learning Technologies 2009 Conference in Mooloolaba, Australia, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast, recently — d’oh! — not so recently: last November. It’s time to share it, reflect on it, and say thanks. Where does the time go?

~

The Story of the Speech: A Farce

Exposition: Seth Godin as Textbook

I’ve given smaller presentations before at various schools, at the Apple Distinguished Educators Institute in Bangkok a few years ago, and so forth, but they were always in-house. But this one was by special invitation and, cooler still, for the keynote of the final day. I’ve never given a keynote before, and wanted to rise to the occasion with my best creative effort.

But I had other, more important reasons for wanting to do well: I wanted to use the speech to teach my students. The invitation came in September, at the very time that I had assigned my Western Civ and Chinese history students to give “creative speeches” of their own. As you’ll see if you watch the speech, I had tossed out the ’schooly’ approach to oral presentations — you know, the Death by Droning Powerpoint  — and replaced it with a different “textbook” for speeches.

That “different textbook” was online. It was TED Talks. More specifically, Seth Godin’s talk “On Standing Out.” Here it is:

I showed this Talk to all my classes in the first week of school and, in a nutshell, told them that the closer they got to Godin’s delivery and slide creativity, the closer they got to an “A.” It resulted in the best time I’d had watching student presentations in my entire decade of teaching. Not all the students rose to the challenge, mind you. But those that did proved the value of the attempt in spades.

Good for the Gander

So I figured I’d be a good egg and put my money (and reputation) where my mouth was for my students: I’d give my own “Godinesque” presentation³ in Australia and, knowing it was to be filmed and put online, share the link so they could learn, along with me, whether my TED/Godin evangelism had real-world merit, or was just the latest example of teacher BS. They’d get to see me walk the tightrope without a net, and judge for themselves.

Damned Clocks, Blasted Calendars

There was a small problem. I was already drowning in the waves familiar to all teachers in their first year at a new school — above all,  creating curriculum and syllabi from virtual scratch (I didn’t like the textbooks). I didn’t have a lot of mental space for crafting a speech on something as far afield from that teacher-head terrain as the conference’s theme: “The Power of You.” My head was in the Power of History.

I burnt the candle one night brainstorming an outline for the thing, wrestling the whole time with my confusion over that most important question for any communicator: Who, exactly, is the audience? I couldn’t tell if it was teachers, administrators, corporate types; if they were already techie born-agains, or phobic techie infidels. I muddled on anyway, and saved the file for later.

The next time I looked at the calendar it was the Friday a week before the conference. I didn’t have a single slide.

The Pleasures of Masochism

My long-suffering wife of a workaholic listened to another apology that I had to work through another weekend, and watched me slink off into my office/doghouse. I fired up the by-now old outline I’d banged out, looked at it, and promptly deleted that four hours of late-night work. My head was in the Roman Republic back then, and now it was in the Late Medieval period. I had other things to say now. Our classroom had long since moved on from the student presentations to discussions of the “key concept” of “civilization” and its textbooky “five characteristics,” and I wanted to prove to my 15-year-old charges that this bit of schooly knowledge could be put to good real-world use, done critically and creatively. Plus, our class time-travels, since I’d made that outline, had covered an additional 1,500 years of memorizing one damn fact and name after another for ninth-grade tests and essays, and I wanted to demonstrate ditto for those schooly testable items — wanted to show them that knowing history can be golden when arguing in public for a real cause.

The Madness of Blog-Mining and Flickr-Fishing

Then something beautiful happened.

If I was going to address “The Power of You,” I already had my outline: this very blog. It was all there: my years in Germany, in China, in Korea, in Singapore; my path “down the digital rabbit-hole” as a teacher, and my struggles to be a teacher despite working for schools. I looked at the archives page, so conveniently displaying titles and dates of my journey since starting it on New Year’s Day of 2007, and found a multitude of patterns to shape the speech. Better still, I realized I already had a huge amount of images in the posts themselves that I could use in my slides. That extra time searching Flickr for cc-licensed content to enhance my posts, and attributing the creators, turns out to have been time well-spent.

I went ape-shite. Clicking archive links, copying images to slides, animating them, coloring them, coddling them with my best designer’s care, adding “Godinesque” titles and captions and “chapter” headings, on and on, for hours and hours. I filled the gaps for the new ideas — civilization and its “complex institutions,” Jesus and Socrates and Luther and Gutenberg, Moodle and Blackboard and Ning, other Names and Facts — in this slideshow-cum-outline with new images from Flickr, searched for and found them, all in a life-loving delirium.

More seductions came: the speech would aim to play to the multiple audiences enabled by our Brave New Web — beyond the Aussies in the auditorium to my students, to my readers and Twitterverse, to my wife (See? All that work pays off!), and to you, Seth Godin, in playful tribute. You live right next door on the web, so why not invite you in? We’re all neighbors — and you’ll love the clip in the preso showing your influence on the student who explained Confucian philosophy via a Simpson’s slide.

More ideas pushed forward, nudged out old ones, gave a startlingly higher purpose to the speech than originally planned. The thing began to take on the shape of a major life-work, a symphonic summing up of all before and the unveiling, in the “fourth movement,” of a climactic new chapter in the War on Schooliness. It was nothing short of mystical, in the best combination of inspiration and gut-laughter. It was polite but subversive, pedagogical but political — “serious,” to quote Hakim Bey, “but not sober”⁴ – and it so raged against the edu-Philistines that Jesus himself would be proud. It was, in short, completely bonkers — and I had no doubt that it would work.

On and on I tinkered, on and on composed, some god alongside laughing with me all the while. So this was how it could feel to make a presentation of “an idea worth spreading”!  The clock on the desk withered away into air. Sun and moon rose and fell, rose and fell, measured by coffee-spoons that kept sleep at bay.

Centuries later, the clock re-materialized on the desk. The calendar said it was Sunday night. Time, then, for bed, and back to teaching tomorrow.

Mortal Combat, Round 2

After that mad marathon of 50-odd hours, I discovered a slight problem.

I had created a 300mb presentation containing 196 slides. The keynote was slotted for 45 minutes.

(If those figures didn’t make you gulp, you need coffee.)

But no worries, I said. I would arrive in Australia late Wednesday night, rehearse the timing in my hotel room, and be good to go by curtain time Friday morning.

Interlude: In the Classroom

The Chinese history class got interesting that week. It was the week of my war with the Google Fundamentalists in my classroom. Our online forum was heating up with controversy over whether a website I deemed a Mao-smearing disgrace was, or was not, a reliable academic source. Of all the weeks to leave the class to a substitute teacher, it had to be the one with the semester’s best and most  authentic teachable moment — with fiery debate, to boot.

But leave I did, flying off to Australia with all my war gear: my Macbook, my Keynote, my back-up and wireless router and cables and cameras, my kitchen sink. I was prepared.

Taming Time

I arrived in Brisbane, met the driver who took me to Mooloolaba, arrived at the hotel around midnight, found the hotel had no night staff and had left a code for me to get my key from the hotel safe. Front desk staff only worked daytime hours, would return the following morning. I’d never seen that before.

The room was perfect — wireless internet, balcony, ocean view, coffee and coffee-maker — and the night was quiet and balmy. Perfect for rehearsing my slideshow and cutting it down to size.

But since I had wireless, no harm in checking in to the class forum and seeing how that debate had unfolded during my seven-hour flight.

Moth, Flame

The forum was an all-out war of all against all — and quite a few of the students, more glorious still, against me. How delicious: they were pushing back against their teacher with their sharpest arguments and most defiant challenges, not yielding an inch to my authority. Thread after thread they raised their cry: “We’re not convinced — en garde!”

What the hell. It was only midnight. The keynote could wait.

I spent the next three hours on the battlefield, sometimes engaged in direct combat with this or that foe, other times combing through the arguments of student allies in the thread to marshal the force of their best moments in block-quoted volleys across the field. My travel-clock melted away in all the Homeric fun. It re-appeared three hours later, when my laptop warned me: “Your battery will run out in ten minutes. Plug in your computer to avoid losing your work.”

The interruption was annoying, but a good reminder. I needed to get to work rehearsing and timing the keynote.

I dug my adapter out of my suitcase, and then it hit me: I’d forgotten to buy an international plug adapter at the airport. I couldn’t plug my computer in.

The Holy Grail

3 a.m., and no front desk clerk to ask for an adapter. No choice but to strike out into the night.

I discovered Mooloolaba was a quiet little surfer’s resort town at this hour. All the shops were closed and streets empty, the stray and utterly useless packs of drunk teens notwithstanding. For the first time in my life, I prayed for a 7-11 (I usually wish for its destruction) that would have an electronics rack with an adapter, thinking I had decent chances of success. This was a tourist town, after all.

No luck at the first one. I was hungry, though, so I bought a loaf of bread and — “Wait, I’m in Australia, so put the peanut butter back on the shelf and buy the Vegemite next to it instead.” The cashier gave me directions to another 7-11 that I think she had hallucinated. I couldn’t find it.

So I went back to the hotel without the grail, forlornly chewing Vegemite on bread as dawn broke. Two hours later I was at the conference, sleep-deprived, introducing myself and meeting the organizers, begging them for an adapter. I got one.

The only problem was, the conference had started, and I wanted to watch the other presenters, meet the attendees, socialize. That, and I was dog tired. So I put off the editing for later that night.

A Tragic Ending

Of course I crashed that night without rehearsing. I think I even convinced myself that so many of the slides were meant to be rapid-delivery style that it would probably all work out within my 45 minute limit.

The next morning came, and I gave my speech without rehearsal — not a big deal for teachers, who do that every day for a living. It went swimmingly enough, I think — lots of laughs, occasional applause, an audience with great energy — until, halfway through my speech, weird music started playing.

I thought it was somebody’s cellphone, and ignored it as long as I could, but it started getting louder.

Then I was told it was the “wrap-up” signal. Farce had struck.

Have a good laugh at the last 5 minutes of Part 1. I laugh too. I speed through dozens and dozens of slides, saying wistful goodbyes to each as I rush to the end — because I had a new project to launch (I’d given a sneak preview of Students 2.0 to the ADE audience in Bangkok, and wanted to give a similar one to the new project, which is still getting its final pre-launch touches).

So the whole thing came to a crashing, and very awkward end — until.

A Comic Reversal

Teachable moment again: Show the students the value of assertiveness.

An unassertive person would have slinked off like the grandest of dorks, accepting defeat. I figured I’d risk being the grandest of dorks differently: I asked the host — after first asking the audience — if we could make time for the rest of the speech. Maybe out of compassion, maybe out of interest, the audience left him no choice. We scheduled the lunch hour for Part 2.

So we tamed time after all, by forcing our will on it.

Epilogue: The Most Important Thing

As for Part 2? I realized after watching it that I left out an essential piece of the puzzle by skipping the video of the Texas State Board of Education, and how it’s perverting US education by imposing a single, far-right ideology on US textbooks. Thus the Youtube video embedded above.

Luther took on a corrupt Catholic Church with the help of Gutenberg’s printing press, and brought it to its knees. We can take a page from his book and use the web to take on a corrupt textbook industry — by attracting students to find everything the textbooks leave out to please activist extremists dominating the Texas Board of Education.

I’ll be asking for help on that soon. In the meantime, thanks for stopping by.

And thanks to all the wonderful folks in Australia, and to the people I give shout-outs to in my address: Karl Fisch for first blowing my mind, Jeff Utecht for teaching me the tools, Dean Shareski and Scott McCleod and William Farren, and to too many more to ever fit in a list. It’s been a wonderland indeed.

1. “Time and other thieves” lifted from lyrics of Joni Mitchell’s “Furry Sings the Blues,” from the (near-perfect) Hejira album
2. David, one of my all-time favorite students — whose work you’ll see featured in the speech — told me last week he’d found the perfect coffee mug for me from the Onion website. The cup reads, “I hate whatever today is.”
3. I actually use that phrase in class
4. If you think that means alcohol was involved, you’re tragically way off. Go read some Nietzsche for a year.

17 Comments

• At January 31, 2010, ShellTerrell wrote:

  Must read for all presenters! RT @cburell: My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts http://bit.ly/cniGXD

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At February 1, 2010, Dean Shareski wrote:

  You're such an awesome storyteller and then to see my name somehow attached to it was a nice bonus. But seriously I look forward to the presentation but the backstory stands on its own. Well done.

• At February 1, 2010, Miguel Guhlin wrote:

  Great job, Clay! Thanks for sharing!

  .-= Miguel Guhlin´s last blog ..DiigoNotes - Phoebe Prince, 15, Commits Suicide After Onslaught of Cyber-Bullying From Fellow Students =-.

• At February 1, 2010, Jodi wrote:

  Shalom from the last leg of our trip here in Israel, Clay, where we have a "down" day and I'm treating myself to catching up on RSS feeds, including this post AND the accompanying videos (plus a couple of extra TED talks for the hell of it). NB: I don't know if it's just on my end, but the second segment of your speech got all skippy somewhere at the 3' mark, then slow and stretchy, and finally out-of-synch. :( But it was still fun to watch!

  I'm hoping to use the next few months of my own sabbatical to figure out how to re-invigorate my own teaching, even given the constraints of working for my school. :) Though I don't know how you manage it all -- even though I'm pretty handy with the tech tools I still find it takes an inordinate amount of time to get them set up for classroom use and then follow them, too.

  And then there's a certain "Creepy Treehouse" factor that seems to prevent my students from REALLY buying in to the things I set up, even when I've tried to make the work more authentic -- as you point out, exhausting and disillusioning. So I have to re-examine that, particularly how to work within the required confines of my school's program and my province's curriculum, too.

  Sometimes I wish that all us like-minded teachers could just start our own little internet-based school. But then who would fill our bank accounts? :P

  Yeah, yeah... back to being on non-school-related sabbatical. Cheers!

  .-= Jodi´s last blog ..Bunch of Phonies Mourn J.D. Salinger =-.

• At February 2, 2010, Sandra wrote:

  Hi Clay,

  I was wondering if you had another version of your speeches where we didn't have to download the microsoft programme to watch it. Thanks!

  .-= Sandra´s last blog ..Mi nueva página de inicio. Google se quedó corto al lado de... =-.

• At February 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Sandra,

  Unfortunately, all I've got is what the conference published. Wish it were otherwise.

  Clay

• At February 2, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Jodi,

  The tech problems in part 2 are not on your end, unfortunately.

  I'm hoping to make each part of the preso -- all four of them, in other words -- separate "TED"-like talks of high enough quality to do justice to the original idea, instead of the high-speed train-wreck it became due to my lack of rehearsing the timing.

  Not that I cared too much. It was still great fun, warts and all.

• At February 4, 2010, What Did They Tweet? | Teacher Reboot Camp wrote:

  [...] to use the tools we should support and see what they can do. I encourage you to visit his post, My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts, with the video links to parts I and II of his keynote. Here is an excerpt from his post: Teachable [...]

• At February 4, 2010, Jonathan Chambers wrote:

  That was a wild ride down 'collective memory lane', Clay. I enjoyed it, and I appreciate the fact that you still have your spirit and your voice. Your discussion of experimentation that you've rethought and reinvented is what I appreciate most.

• At February 5, 2010, roadster5555 wrote:

  My Australia Keynote Speech: A Serious Farce, in One Thousand Acts http://bit.ly/drvpuj – powerful message re authentic teaching

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At February 5, 2010, Cindy wrote:

  Hey Clay, I also enjoyed it and great to hear about your reflections on the rabbit hole and beyond. Hope you enjoyed your first visit to Australia.

  Cindy

  .-= Cindy´s last blog ..Portal to Media Literacy =-.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Miguel, just a quick thanks not only for the kind words, but for all the help and fun you've provided along the road. Enjoyed seeing you on the list-serv I recently joined. It's a big, small world now.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Cindy (you did hear your name pop up in the preso, I hope?). I loved Australia -- as friendly irl as it is in the virtual one. Hope you're well.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Dean, you're somehow attached to so much of the last three years. I'll be in touch re your email after returning from a school trip to India next weekend.

• At February 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Nice to see you, Jonathan. Now get me a job in Shanghai so we can start Chapter 2. Hope you're well.

• At February 8, 2010, Cindy wrote:

  Sure did! I'm great, loving Ho Chi Minh City.

  .-= Cindy´s last blog ..Portal to Media Literacy =-.

• At February 17, 2010, Bill Farren wrote:

  Hey Clay: thanks for sharing this. It was nice learning more about your journey, the learning that comes from success as well as failure. Nice to see how you don't sugarcoat what it is, like too many tech evangelists seem to be doing. But on the other hand, you do a great job showing how anyone (who is curious) can improve their craft by connecting students to real people and real situations.

  (also, thx. for the shoutout).

  Be well.

  .-= Bill Farren´s last blog ..What’s Your Learning Attitude? =-.

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Just a quick share: I’m giving my Chinese history / China studies students this “starter kit” of RSS feeds about contemporary China from Asian and Western sources to start them on their self-directed explorations (and small group blog reports) about whatever they want to learn.

It’s the cream of my own Google Reader “China” folder, which I created and populated over winter break. If anybody has more feeds to suggest, please add them in comments. Otherwise, I share them to spare any other China studies folks out there the necessity of re-inventing the wheel. Here they are, from our class Ning:

Blogs in Asia (China, Hong Kong, etc) About China:

1. China Digital Times:

It’s my main source of up-to-the-minute news about all things China. Like CNN.com, it covers China-oriented news on all subjects: politics, culture, society, arts, human rights, economics, law, diplomacy and foreign relations, books, law, science and technology, the whole nine yards.

The best thing about it: it’s what we call a “curator” blog. Its writers scan all the important presses — magazines, newspapers, academic and political journals, on and on, for significant writings on China. Then they write a brief intro of the article, give you an excerpt, and a link to the whole article elsewhere on the web. So they do the searching for you, and consolidate the best content across the web each day in one place.

2. Danwei: Chinese media, advertising, and urban life.

3. ChinaGeeks

4. ChinaSMACK

5. The People’s Daily

6. The People’s Daily: Opinions and Editorials

US Sites About China: The Capitalist/Liberal-Democratic View

These sites are from the more mainstream US media outlets. They, too, will have their biases, so read them with equal care. They’re often written by Westerners with little deep knowledge of China and its history, so respect yourself and your own knowledge about China as that knowledge grows. You should be able, increasingly, to find blind spots in these Western views.

7. The Wall Street Journal: China RealTime Report Blog

8. The New Yorker Magazine: Letters from China

2 Comments

• At January 26, 2010, anderscj2 wrote:

  [from scottmcleod] A Starter Kit of China Studies RSS Feeds: Beyond School http://url4.eu/1DyQm

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 28, 2010, Brian H. wrote:

  Thanks for this list. I've got two friends who just applied to teach English in China and I think they'll find this list handy. I'll be checking these links out too even though it may be years before I can get to China. But I can dream, can't I?

  .-= Brian H.´s last blog ..10 Days European Motorhome Hire from Just Go (a great way to experience Europe) =-.

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An example worth sharing to students of a kid who figured out the power of simple blogging — combined, of course, with quality thinking and writing — and blogged his way to stardom by age 27. In China.

From the excellent China Digital Times, with emphasis added:

Han Han was named as the ‘Person of the Year” in 2009 by two influential publications: Guangzhou-based newspaper Southern Weekend（南方周末) and Hong Kong-based magazine Asia Weekly (亚洲周刊). Here are some excerpts of the relevant articles in both publications, translated by CDT:

By Asia Weekly: Han Han: Youthful Citizen vs Power 亚洲周刊二零零九年度风云人物韩寒——青春公民VS权力.

Han Han is a 27-year-old author and race car driver, and his blog has generated nearly 300 million visits since 2006. He follows and is concerned with public rights defending events. On the Shanghai “Fishing” incident, Hangzhou “70 yards” incident, forced eviction incident and other events his clear and powerful writing has generated an enormous influence on public opinion. As a member of the post-80s generation, he lives authentically and freely, and demonstrates the energy of China’s youthful citizens and the hope of civil society in China.

韩寒，二十七岁的作家和赛车手，博客浏览量近三亿，他关注、跟进公共维权事件，在上海「钓鱼」事件、杭州「七十码」、强拆民居事件中，言论清醒、有力，产生巨大舆论影响力；作为「八零后」一代，他活得真实、自由，展示中国青春公民的能量和中国公民社会的希望。

From Southern Weekend: The Name of Han Han Means to Offend [the Establishment]

In the public eyes for ten years, he is now a household name, and still young, he is called by his supporters “Young Master Han.” This nickname is flattering and lighthearted, saying that he has style and quality, and is not a boring person. Young Master Han is an author, the only National Champion of in both field and rally car race, is an idol, and owns a blog which has the highest traffic in the world. He is so famous, that people often forget how extraordinary it is that one person has all these different titles. But Young Master Han became the Han Han that is now widely respected after he started a blog, and began writing social commentary which resonates with our time. His self-styled commentaries caused controversy, but were also widely popular. One day, even the most conservative people started to realize that this young man was not full of nonsense. Behind the 300 million clicks on his blog posts was a fresh humanist radiating the wave of freedom. [read the rest]

Regular readers will know I’ve 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 have to manifest those gifts to the world — and this example is a case in point: Han can write well and think critically, “follows” (surely via RSS?) issues he “is concerned with” and writes about them. In other words, he’s got the gifts of curiosity, passion, a drive for socio-political engagement and reform, and an apparently wicked mind and pen. And a “humanist” to boot.¹

The most delicious detail in this young man’s delicious life? His secondary school held him back a year, and he dropped out of school without graduating.

Han Han was born on September 23, 1982. He won the first class award in the first “New Concept” writing contest in 1999, and was held back in his first year in the Songjian Number 2 High School in Shanghai the same year. He dropped out of high school in 2000, and published his first novel “Three Gates.” This book has sold 2,030,000 copies since then.

{…}

In 2008, he published a selected collection of his blog posts, “Random Texts.” In 2009, he published a novel, “His Nation,” a collection of essays, “Grass,” and a collection of blog posts, “Lovely Predators”…. Also in 2009, he announced he would publish a magazine “A Chorus of Solos.” [Han Han originally planned to name the magazine Renaissance, but the name was not approved by authorities.]

P.S.–To any students at my school: if you think you have this kind of talent, and want me to help you learn the simple blogging tools, come see me. I’ll work overtime with you, and it will have nothing to do with grades, homework, or GPA’s.

1. I’m teaching the Enlightenment right now in European history, alongside my Chinese history course, and Han for all the world sounds like a Chinese Voltaire to me. And good god, just think if Voltaire could have blogged.

2 Comments

• At January 13, 2010, Jenny wrote:

  The idea of Voltaire blogging has made my evening. Thanks!

  .-= Jenny´s last blog ..Confession =-.

• At January 13, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  I <3 people who read footnotes.

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Second draft:

On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet.¹

So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet?

I’m just looking for snappy first principles here. Ones within the 15-year-old attention span.

1. I know, I know — wannabee Nietszchean aphorist indulgence. But cut me some slack. Time is slow here on this beach.

4 Comments

• At January 26, 2010, Emile wrote:

  I have been enjoying the posts at Beyond School quite a bit, so I raise this concern with some trepidation. From my perspective (mostly Holt/Gatto inspired unschooling) I find this painfully ironic. School as an institution is invested in students "reading on their knees."

  Do you see it differently, or just feel that good teachers should subvert the system?

• At January 26, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  The latter. Institutions are made of individuals, and this individual, at least, thinks a critical understanding of history is a valuable service that schools, warts and all, can provide.

  Search "unschooling" or "deschooling" on this blog, and you'll see I'm sympathetic to it in general. But I also have concerns that it can deprive students of discovering interests they wouldn't arrive at without guidance. Not a simple position, I know.

  Thanks for popping in.

• At January 28, 2010, Emile wrote:

  Again, I want to emphasize that, all other things being equal, I would rather have engaged and thoughtful teachers in school than not. Such engaged teachers can make a real difference in the lives of their students, and I continue to comment with no disrespect intended. But...

  I don't think that "a critical understanding of history" is the same as "Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its feet. So a high school teacher’s job: to teach students to find those feet?"

  As I read you, the valuable change in perspective for a modern reader is in the critical approach to a text. We should not accept argument from authority; we should evaluate claims for ourselves in light of available evidence and take responsibility for our own beliefs. I agree with this whole heartedly.

  But then the natural question arises; what should I read? What should I do with my time? And suddenly we are right back to argument from authority. I don't know of any serious advocates of unschooling that believe it should be learning "without guidance." Holt devotes a large chunk of "Instead of Education" to teasing out the difference between "natural authority" (ie. people listen to you because you know what you're talking about and they want to hear what you have to say) and coercive authority (people listen to you because otherwise they will suffer consequences.)

  School as it is currently constituted cannot function without coercive authority. And more painfully, individual good teachers cannot escape wielding coercive authority when acting as its agent. At best they can focus on developing a parallel natural authority.

  Inasmuch as you are saying that the definition of a modern reader is that rejection of coercive authority I don't see how you can say that a high school teacher's *job* is to help their students reject coercive authority.

• At January 29, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Emile, in theory most of what you say (and what unschoolers and such advocate) is right up my alley. In practice, the several hundred kids in my high school aren't part of that world, and neither am I. So we do the best we can with the situation we're given.

  Sorry no time for more. Guess I need a more pragmatic grounds to justify it. Know what I mean? Feels like the world-changing talks we used to have in college: easy to talk, but next to impossible to execute.

  So: proposals?

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I just discovered the 2008 Webby Award-winning “You Suck at Photoshop” series on YouTube. While it may not succeed at making me a Photoshop ninja, it does succeed at convincing me that this kind of project would make the classroom an awesome place.

Here’s why: the series demonstrates a mastery of content knowledge — in this case, Photoshop technique — while at the same time adding a creative element that makes the content-master stand out from the equally masterful but unimaginative competition. Point blank: in the hands of this guy, something as dull as “how to use layers” becomes a vehicle that screams, “Hire me to write for ‘30 Rock‘!” He proves he can turn lead into gold, which is a real-world skill not many people have. Alchemists like that deserve the chance to display their creative magic in school.

The Mental Work is Hard….

“You Suck at Photoshop” displays that creative magic in the form of fiction (see the Wikipedia entry on the series for  more). The host of the tutorials is a persona named “Donnie,” a loser stuck in a lousy life with a lousy wife. We learn about Donnie’s life through a series of such sometimes-subtle details as his choice of photos for the tutorial — “Say you want to use a photo of the Vanagon your wife meets her high school boyfriend in on Friday nights….wait, I’ve got one right here” (scroll past other photos of — gulp — handguns, and one of the high school boyfriend labeled — gulp — “douche-b.png”) — and such sometimes-over-the-top details as the wife barging in to kvetch at him in the middle of his tutorial, or his loser friend Skyping in with a loser-emergency while Donnie is making his screencast.

The creator of this project not only demonstrates his literary creativity by creating the fictional “Donnie” persona and populating his Photoshop folders with props like the pictures mentioned above; he takes it further with his dramatic creativity as he acts out the role of that persona with his voice-over. The vocal acting covers a broad emotional terrain, from dude in his basement chillaxing with his laptop to powder-keg psychopath struggling to keep the flame from his fuse. The acting is just awesome.

….The Tech is Dead Easy

The beauty of the project technology-wise is that it requires nothing more than a screencasting program like the free Jing or Screencast-o-matic, plus a webcam and microphone — your standard kit in most computers today. So the technical hurdles for students to do such a project are basically nil.

That leaves the whole of their energies to devote to the other two aspects of the project: mastery and critical understanding of the content, and creative concept development to deliver that understanding.

Too Beautiful for School?

So I’m wrestling, as usual, with the ways this wonderfully simple approach to creative learning will be complicated by the forces of schooliness:

• Do I have to make a rubric for it, and if so, does that kill the creativity with its prescriptive check-box drudgery, or limit the infinite creative possibilities by dictating “it must be this and not that, and that and not this”?
• Is it sustainable in terms of watching and grading and giving feedback to 100 students doing such an assignment?
• How do I define satisfactory content mastery and creativity for this assignment?
• How do I encourage experimentation and the healthy embrace of possible failure when I have to slap a low grade on it if it does indeed “fail”?
• Should I make it optional, in following with my increasingly elitist impulse to definitely not “push” 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 attempt?

I don’t know.

Nor do I know how to adapt this for a history classroom. Can “You Suck at Photoshop” become “You Suck at History”? How? How can this be used for Europe from the French Revolution to the present, or the complete history of China?

My recent brainstorm on giving a conceptual purpose to learning Chinese history by “interpreting it for historically-ignorant Westerners” seems to have some openings. God knows, there are ample websites of Chinese and Western art, literature, philosophy, religion, politics, and more that students could tab through on their screencasts as they provide their commentary like “Donnie” does to his open Photoshop on his desktop. But the maker of “Donnie” has the luxury of revealing that persona through the image “props” in his folders, while history students wouldn’t have as easy a task of  revealing persona if they were forced instead to work with history websites in their screencasts.

One solution I’m considering is making it a summative, end-of-semester project, in which students have most of the semester to let their creative juices stew and come up with their own ideas over the first few months. Then give a couple of weeks of class time to a workshop in which they design and execute those ideas.

Otherwise, I’m mostly adrift. Maybe you can help.

But if you watch the three-minute first episode below, you should see why I’m bewitched by the idea:

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole playlist. Then help me figure out how I can make this work?

8 Comments

• At January 4, 2010, ShellTerrell wrote:

  “You Suck at Photoshop”: Paragon of Creative Project-Based Learning http://bit.ly/6ugCOn

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 4, 2010, monika hardy wrote:

  What a find... I love it.

  (Just like I'm loving tumblr now thanks to your conversation with Roberto. I was needing an easier/cleaner way to post how-to videos.)

  Some current thoughts on your questions....

  # Do I have to make a rubric for it, and if so, does that kill the creativity with its prescriptive check-box drudgery, or limit the infinite creative possibilities by dictating “it must be this and not that, and that and not this”

  Yeah - I wouldn't make a rubric. I would make the assessment process as raw and real as the project. I'd have the feedback come from the peers needing it - ie: those who suck at photoshop... Post it at school - see how many hits it gets. See how others in the class improve. Assess the project on how well everyone else does with it. I'd also have a couple professionals/parents look at it and give some feedback... some people the kids are going to want to impress. [I guess depending on the topic - that type of career/professional might use a rubric. Whatever - it needs to be authentic.]

  # Is it sustainable in terms of watching and grading and giving feedback to 100 students doing such an assignment?

  I think - done like above - yes - if it's a more authentic feedback process. Certainly not the way we have been doing it - where we all sit in a room and watch each other present, etc, not in real context.

  # How do I define satisfactory content mastery and creativity for this assignment?

  I think - for me anyway - I use *something like this video series as a model (*maybe you could make a cleaner school version for us all to use Clay...?) My kids are so good and motivated for these projects, but rarely do they hit both content and creativity. I think that's my favorite take away from this series - that it models that balance perfectly. Not too stuffy with content so as not to be entertaining and not so entertaining that it has no meat. So I guess I'm saying - set high standards for balance - with a good model beforehand. I think focusing on the balance rather than the topic/form a rubric usually focuses on - will allow for more freedom and creativity.

  # How do I encourage experimentation and the healthy embrace of possible failure when I have to slap a low grade on it if it does indeed “fail”?

  Maybe don't make it an end of the year assignment. Assign it from the get go...with several due dates throughout the year. I think we have really messed with what true assessment and feedback are. Kids and parents believe assessment is a marker - if you're good or bad. When it should be an ongoing iterative process... continually pinpointing areas that need tweaking. It should be freeing to the kids... rather than - I failed - I understand nothing.. they have maybe 2-3 specifics to work on. I love that we're living in a publish then edit period. I hope that lingers forever. And I love that we now have the means... via skype and blogs, etc to have experts help give that feedback.

  # Should I make it optional, in following with my increasingly elitist impulse to definitely not “push” the unwilling to attempt genius, and not even “pull” them, but only to “attract” the three percent of “roses” in any student

  I think you make the choice of topic/platform/mode/medium optional. The goal being... they need to make something that will live on and help others learn. If a kid can't do that successfully by the end of a course... (with ongoing feedback from adults and peers) then I guess we all fail...

  Once again... grazie.. for cranking my brain.

  .-= monika hardy´s last blog ..the ideas project =-.

• At January 4, 2010, jonessensei wrote:

  I have been using this too RT ShellTerrell “You Suck at Photoshop”: Paragon of Creative Project-Based Learning http://bit.ly/6ugCOn

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 5, 2010, Adrienne wrote:

  Clay - a rubric does not have to be a checklist, and it doesn't have to kill the creativity and risk-taking factors. Why can't you build these two areas into the rubric? (i.e., those projects which demonstrate more creativity and risk-taking get better grades) This can easily be done by working in some kind of thoughtful journal / video / other constructed response as a reflection justifying choices and process.

  It will no doubt take you much longer to mark than a "regular" project, but IMO, well worth it.

  .-= Adrienne´s last blog ..… and, that’s a wrap! =-.

• At January 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Maybe I should start a blog called "I Suck at Assessment." I'm taking a grad course in it next month, so let's hope it helps.

  Extra credit if you bang out a mock-up of the kind of thing you're talking about.

  Happy New Year!

• At January 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Monika, read and marked as "return to" after I finish my four days in Thailand visiting an old college friend. Thanks for the input. Gotta pack now!

• At January 6, 2010, Zoe wrote:

  I love the way you've approached this. I've only got a few minutes spare, or I'd fill your comment page up!

  My immediate thought was to suggest that you co-construct your project WITH the students. Work with them to define and agree the success criteria, the assessment methodology and to peer & self assess the project from planning through to end product. In this way, students not only get to design the assessment process and agree the project outcomes but also reflect on the learning process itself.

  Just a thought...great idea and I love the way you're grappling with assessment of mastery & creativity. Look forward to hearing about what happens next!

  Happy new year!

  @fullonlearning

  zoe

  Zoe

• At February 2, 2010, Adrienne wrote:

  Clay - I haven't forgotten about this reply. In fact, I've been thinking of it ever since. I've just been swamped with studies the last couple of weeks. Apologies. I *am* going to get a mock-up to you, come hell or high water, as this kind of stuff is so important (assessing for creativity but not making the assessment dry). I'll post to your email when I do!

  But in the meantime- did you know that the "You Suck at Photoshop" series has morphed (evolved?) into an entire project? Visit http://www.bigfatuniversity.org for some real genuine learning and laughs. My favorite is the series on Music and Garageband. A must see, I think.

  .-= Adrienne´s last blog ..… and, that’s a wrap! =-.

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Watch the two videos below — I even took notes of highlights to prod the attention-deficient — and then show them to your students.¹

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

1. Making co-workers look good, not bad;
2. “plussing” your partners;
3. wanting people not only with “depth” — résumé-based hires — but also a proven record (portfolios? blogs?) of innovation and
4. the ability to recover from failure instead of avoiding it;
5. on the desirability of “mastery of anything” (skateboarding, playing spoons) in a person’s past;
6. “the proof of a portfolio versus the promise of a résumé” (and, I’d add, GPA);
7. 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);
8. communication skills based, again, on social intelligence vis-a-vis audience-awareness;
9. desirability of breadth (great, you’re a tech whiz; it would be nice if you knew, say, art history too);
10. 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:

1. On the mental poverty of religious fundamentalists
2. On the mental richness of the curious
3. On how two generations lead sadly mediocre lives due to television, and how the lucky few have kicked that habit
4. On the curious and the fearful — “the masses in the middle [who have] brainwashed themselves into thinking it’s safe to do nothing”
5. On the difficulty of becoming curious — due to decades of schooling punishing curiosity
6. Nice Mao reference for this Chinese history teacher!
7. Paradox: “The safest thing to do is be risky; the riskiest thing to do is be safe.”
8. How Godin beat the odds and remained curious.
9. 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.

1. Big hat-tip to Katie Day at The Librarian Edge, from whom both of these videos are nicked. Follow that link for an excellent post.

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.

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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,¹ 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.² 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 margins³ 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.⁴

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.⁵

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.

1. Him? them? I’m going to assume it’s a her.
2. Scroll left on the graphic and you’ll see the individual newspapers that have closed their doors over the past couple years.
3. Kaplan Test Prep subsidiary excluded — there’s always money to be squeezed from parents obsessed with Junior going to Harvard
4. Unless the school itself is prohibiting the use of blogs for the newspaper. I’ve seen that policy before at other schools, so it’s entirely possible.
5. I couldn’t fly to the States in time for the recording, so it didn’t work out, but that’s beside the point, which is that it was all because I write on a blog.

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, [...]

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