[Stanford Psychology] Professor Philip Zimbardo conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world.

Interesting all the way through, but the gallery below previews  parts that should  interest educators.  See the full vid below the fold.

.

The blurb doesn’t mention Zimbardo’s segue into education (at the 5.40 mark) and the allegedly re-wired brains of teens.  Nor does it  mention that Zimbardo also designed the fascinating Stanford Prison Experiment back in 1971. (Hover over that link to see a popup video via my Apture plugin.)

Ed 2.0 geeks may find little new here, but the RSA Animate production values package the ideas with more bling than usual. This may be useful for tech evangelists who haven’t resigned themselves to the similar inertial laws governing schools and glaciers .

The vid does raise a question for me, though only half-serious. To wit: Okay, so the addled minds of our 10,000-hours-of- gaming-and-XXX-addicted teenage boys now find “analogue” classrooms boring. If we’re to compete with that, what’s the guidance? And how realistic is it to think that rigorous thought about, say, Confucianism can come close to WoW killing and W-o-P0rn [redacted]-ing?

Yes, I have issues with the edu-tainment imperative. Handle with care.

Now the vid:

–your thoughts?

h/t Decrepit Old Fool

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2. Video on The Benefits of Co-Teaching: A Blast from 2005
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4. My Wikispaces in Education Webinar Presentation Video is Up

But this post is as much about that brilliant young speaker, and how he and the other young prodigies at that event need to learn to showcase their brilliance by harnessing the power of the web. So, first, that Korean kid.

The Spoken

Slouched in the back rows of the auditorium, high above the stage, I looked down on this kid approaching the podium with a bit of amusement. Straight bangs down to his mad scientist glasses, thin and slightly hunched frame, he didn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Even less when he took a few beats too many, it seemed to me, to adjust the microphone, pause, survey his audience left, center, right. Had he forgotten his lines? Finally, he hunches forward into the microphone and peers out at the audience from beneath those low-hanging bangs:

To the left: “Tick.”  To the center: “Tick.” To the right. “Tick.” Pause. “Time is passing, and you’ll never get a moment back.”

My cliche-meter activated, I’m already plotting a path to the most discreet exit. But he keeps going: “And that’s why I want to talk to you today about what we’re told is one of the great evils of student life: Procrastination.”

He belts that last word out with such surprising flair, both vocally and physically, wheeling his body in such a way that he takes in the whole audience with his eyes, that I’m inclined to nibble at his bait. I’ll give him a few more seconds.

“You’ve all heard it a million times from a million teachers: ‘Don’t wait until the last minute to start your essay. You’ve got a week: start drafting now.’ Or, ‘Don’t put off studying for that test until the last night.’ ” Pause. “But I’m here to tell you: the teachers are wrong. Procrastination is one of the wisest strategies for living the Good Life.”

The pleasure of the hook piercing the cheek. I relax into my seat to enjoy being reeled in.

The Heard

The student went on to marshal all sorts of evidence that real people often wait until the deadline to do their work, and they do just fine. He’s got me thinking of how I teach writing — the Six Traits of Effective Writing, using the Writing Process to revise, trait by trait, over a number of days — versus how I do it, and have always done it: in one sustained outpouring of words that normally begins around 10 pm with a full pot of coffee, and ends around dawn the next day at the bottom of the second pot. And yes, that day is the day of the deadline.

It worked for me in college, where my professors almost always praised my writing. And it has worked for me since, in all the (admittedly modest) ways my writing has been successful.

So why was I making my students practice a model I myself didn’t practice, had never practiced? Why was I forcing them to sacrifice on its altar so many irrecoverable ticks of the clock, and forcing myself to sacrifice hours as well to assess each of those revisions?

Pitchforks down, readers. I’m a strong advocate of the Six Traits, and sing its praises whenever the topic comes up. It’s a beautifully focused model for zeroing in on the fine points of the writer’s craft, and its internal logic makes it a baby worth keeping. My way of teaching it, though? That’s the bathwater this kid was making me think should be thrown out. (And that points toward my first gut answer to Scot: assessing wikis shouldn’t excessively weight the number of edits. It’s the quality of the final piece that should be assessed. For some writers, excellent quality will take many edits, and for others, none at all. The proof is in the pudding. If the final product lacks polish, the student should be able to show edits as proof of effort. Otherwise, ignore them.)

The Echoes

Then came the moment of the speech that lifted me powerless onto the deck, happily flapping at this young speaker’s feet: “And now let me close by warning you of your fate if you don’t procrastinate: you become that most unhealthy of things in modern civilization” — and he wheels on the next phrase, and spits it out with fire-and-brimstone perfection — “a workaholic!”

Laughter and applause all around as he speeds through the details of a life lost to obsessive perfectionism and a work ethic gone berserk, before putting on the brakes, slowing to a pause, and closing where he started, with the “Tick, tick, tick” of that precious clock that, unless we rule it, rules us: a healthy reminder that some cliches earn their status for good reason.

Toward a Bigger Stage

I left that Original Oratory event the way I had left so many others — the Impromptu Speaking, the Oral Interpretation, the Extemporaneous Speaking — at that Convention: amazed by the talent of the students, and depressed at how boxed-in it all was. That Korean student (Sung Jin J. of Jakarta International School) struck me as nothing less than a young, Asian David Sedaris, able to use his wit and verbal skills to turn his quirky physical package to his great advantage; another student, a Pakistani young man named Raheem of the International School of Manila, spoke in multiple events with such polish and intelligence I would have paid admission to see more; likewise Zach at my own school, with his Original Oratory speech about the degeneration of high school into a breeding ground for “fakes, hypocrites, and cheaters,” an institution devoted no longer to “college preparation,” but to mere “college application preparation”; and an Australian young man whose name I forget but whose speeches I never will: all of these students showed nothing less than genius. And while IASAS deserves kudos for celebrating these prodigies on the same level that we usually (and depressingly) reserve for people skilled at getting a rubber ball through a hoop, across a line, or over a fence, it still falls short of promoting them on a far broader, and at the same time far less labor-intensive scale.

You know what I’m getting at: all that genius disappears into silence or, only slightly better, onto some school website that gets ten visits a month. If they truly had the savvy popular wisdom suggests these “digital natives” do, they could be getting thousands, tens of thousands of viewers a month. And that could lead places for them.

The missed opportunity to showcase them as they deserve killed me. I approached many of them, gave them my card, told them they deserved a wider audience than the auditorium, and I wanted to help them reach it. It was all unplanned, so I cast about in my mind for possibilities: I could propose to my old colleagues at Change.org that they publish these students as guest-writers. I could see about interesting them in reviving Students 2.0. I could feature them on this blog.

But all of those ideas are more complicated, it seems to me now, than necessary. It seems to me that all those students need to do is start their own blog, or YouTube channel for their orations, and share their talents with the world that easily. When they launch, they can tell me, I can tell you, and we can all promote them and send viewers their way. And then the unpredictable possibilities of “Open Living,” to quote Alan Levine — the possible job offers, interviews, feature articles, and the million other serendipities — are given their opening. And maybe these young geniuses can be discovered before they graduate high school.

Image by zoutedrop

5 Comments

• At March 23, 2010, Lynne wrote:

  Wow, I would have loved to have heard those students speeches. I don't suppose there's a recording of it? Speaking of procrastination... I know very few people (in college and at work) who actually follow the writing model. In my case, I need to write a 7-9 pager for my religion and science class. (It's on how we've viewed the universe from Aristotle to Newton, and evaluating if Kuhn's paradigm shifts adequately describe the changes in the scientific thought.) I'll be up late tonight, but I'm confident I'll have a good (if not great) paper by the end of it.

• At March 24, 2010, Diane Cordell wrote:

  I MISS Students 2.0 and still maintain contact with a number of the contributors.

  Please share the links to these young people's blogs, if they ever start writing posts.

  Now that I'm retired, I need to find other ways to stay attuned to student voice.

• At March 24, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Lynne,

  I'm putting out a full-court press to find and persuade those students to do as I propose above. More soon if they take the bait (and a fund-raising drive to pay for their head examinations if they don't--they were so good my head exploded).

  Sounds like a fun paper. Don't procrastinate ;-)

• At March 24, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Working on it, Diane. I've been too preoccupied with the classroom to be active on the network these days, so I wonder if any of the s2oh founders are wanting to revive it?

  After the Change.org experience--writing to the point of burnout--I understand more why they petered out. But between a complete cessation and an arbitrary "write daily" policy, there's got to be a middle way.

  Glad to hear the upbeat tone's still there. I'm dying of the humidity down here and generally droopy as a result :(

• At April 22, 2010, Laura Bridgeman wrote:

  Clay,

  I got completely hooked whilst reading your postings, you have a style of writing that just makes me want to read more - I am very jealous! I'm studying to be a Maths teacher (hence the poor writing skills - more a logical brain), and loved your sentence "Why was I making my students practice a model I myself didn't practice, had never practiced?". This is a concern of mine in the area of Mathematics, where I feel we are losing contact with what students really need Maths for in todays world. I enjoyed Maths at school but mostly because I was good at it - it's going to be a real challenge to keep students engaged in a subject they may only use 10% of in their entire life. Thanks for inspiring me to challenge the current system and to see if I too, like you can teach outside the norm and get away with it!!

  Cheers, Laura

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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.

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.

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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2. Surprised by Snail Goop (or, a Colleague Blogs)
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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?

6 Comments

• 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 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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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.

Related posts:

1. Podcast: With Dean Shareski on _Natural_ Global Collaboration and Networked Learning
2. On Using Technology Without Understanding It
3. Digital Arts Menu for Multiple Intelligences Wiki: Please Contribute Your Favorites!
4. Teaching Grammar on the Titanic: On Fear and Irrelevance in Education

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.

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.

Related posts:

1. Godin Sees It Too: “Recession Skills 101″?
2. Natural Global Collaboration: Schwister and Helfant Visit Networked Learning Class
3. Podcast: With Dean Shareski on _Natural_ Global Collaboration and Networked Learning
4. Yet Another Student Voice on Wiki-Learning: "It helped a lot to improve my writing skills…."

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, [...]

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