Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the mind.

John and I also talked a bit about Gilgamesh today. Me talking about Gilgamesh is nothing new. I do that with anybody and everybody who’ll listen. But talking about it to the guy who knew you way back when when you so naively embarked on a conscious search for “Truth” — especially when that same guy joined you, and with exactly the same naivete — that is something new.

It’s like our 20-year old selves were sitting on that beach with us two 47-year-olds all day.

False Starts in the Search for Truth

That 20-year-old me was such a lousy seeker for Truth. He read all the Old Books devotedly — the Greek, the Hebrew, the Vedic, the Christian, the Hindu, the Buddhist, the Taoist, the Gnostic, the Transcendental, “Yak yak yak.” He read them all, underlined passages, filled margins with scribbles, exclamation points, interrobangs. He started (and rarely finished) journals devoted to only copying the choicest of those words of Wisdom — quotes only. The Things to Remember. These were the words of Wisdom and Truth, and they were going to teach him Truth and Wisdom, by god. If he read them real closely to be sure he understood, then he’d find Truth and Wisdom. And life would be better because he’d have those things.

All I could do today while thinking about him was laugh at him.

Because I think I know now that that’s exactly the wrong way to read the Old Books.

If I had read Gilgamesh back then, when I was him, I would have been expecting it to teach me too. Another Old Book that was supposed to be Wise. That’s not how I read it now, thank goodness.

How Moderns Read

Anyway, I sat there on that beach wishing I had my iPod so I could record  what I was trying to aphoristically sum up about what I know about reading now — and wish I’d known well before 20, at your age, my students. I didn’t want this little stab at something essential to slip away. It went something like this:

It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.¹

That mental shift in relation to reading, I want to say, comes close to a definition of the modern reader. A traditional reader gives up his authority to the author. A modern reader takes that authority back. Copernicus did it to Aristotle and Ptolemy, for example — he doubted their scientific authority based on his own observations. Voltaire and Nietzsche did it to the religious authority of popes, preachers, and the Bible.

A modern reader, in a nutshell, doesn’t read on his knees.

The scary thing? It seems that a large number of Americans are not modern readers at all.

And the sad thing? They all went to American schools — which doesn’t speak well about American education.

1. And yes, this is probably true of all books. But moreso, I think, for pre-scientific books.

9 Comments

• At January 7, 2010, hjarche wrote:

  A modern reader doesn’t read on his knees http://is.gd/5Ph7J via @cburell | yes, that’s the big shift!

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 7, 2010, Micah Sittig wrote:

  "Modern"?

• At January 7, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Would you take, "since the Renaissance" (okay, and before Theodosius, maybe)?

• At January 7, 2010, “On Two Ways of Reading” (Maxim) at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] comments Print This Post Second draft: On Two Ways of Reading: Slavery reads on its knees. Freedom reads on its [...]

• At January 8, 2010, Hellen wrote:

  How do I teach that? Or how do I know if what I am doing is facilitating "taking the authority back" for my students? Is this something that can only happen for an experienced, mature reader?

  More ques than answers.

  .-= Hellen´s last blog ..THIS I BELIEVE =-.

• At January 8, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Hellen,

  That it doesn't seem to be a habit of most (?) adults says to me that getting them while they're young and raising them to at least have an inkling that "mature" reading exists is a good idea. That's why I'm playing with aphorisms to point, bumper-sticker style, to what may be a mystery for them now, but through repetition may stick in their memory so they don't forget such a skill exists after they leave me.

  That most adults don't read at all beyond fluff (in America, anyway) tells me likewise that it's a good idea. Maybe they don't read because they were never introduced to liberated reading. Maybe that introduction will turn some people onto the pleasures of reading and thinking that seem endangered practices in American culture.

  On a simpler level, encouraging or requiring them to criticize the people, ideas, and events in their history or liberal arts classes -- to pass judgment on these things -- may be a good start. Then they can graduate to justifying their judgments with reason and evidence.

  I like the phrase "habits of mind." This is an unrelated stab at the general concept.

• At January 14, 2010, Chuck wrote:

  Sage words indeed. If the reverse of the Socratic method is provoking students' doubts, far as "truth", more precisely, facts, students can question you through that mechanical appendage permanently attached to the tip of their finger tips in the form of iPhones. I don't mind that they look for facts or doubt me but surf the phone for the facts while I'm lecturing is down right annoying ;-) Not legitimately lamentable as your point perhaps. I see your point; they have the facts but not the truths or thinking outside the box critical skills.

  I have to veered off a little from yoru path, although it`s more for EAP ``English`` English-class than adult EFL. I have always like the book ``How to Read a Book (Touchstone book) by Adler, Mortimer J. and Charles Lincoln Van Doren`.

  I still make notes on margins... How would you do that with ebook readers such as Kindle or ``iTablet``? I am ambivalent about the these new devices for future readers. (Obviously I`m a Kinesthetic learner :) ...The prospect of traveling with thousands, (maybe long 100s) of books in one little 4x10 plastic encasing is very seductive. Cheap too! The average novel is just below $10.

  Great post as usual. Looking forward to the next.

• At January 14, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Chuck,

  First, I feel your pain about the ereader bit. I haven't tried them out yet, but some are starting to integrate social highlighting and annotating, where readers can share and see each other's responses to passages on the "page," which is an interesting development. Somebody on Twitter shared this link with me: http://www.thecopia.com/

  In 10 years things should be interesting, but right now it's all primitive. I've read arguments that cost levels after purchasing a certain number of books because ebooks are cheaper, but again, I don't know.

  Time to plan the day's lesson. Thanks for stopping by.

  I love How to Read a Book and use it too.

• At January 16, 2010, tonnet wrote:

  Modern reading: “It’s not what we learn from the Old Books. It’s what we see in them.” http://is.gd/6kyX0

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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This is a picture of the Pattaya Beach I wasn't at that I didn't take. Who needs a camera when you know there's a picture on Flickr?

So I’m somewhere in Thailand called Pattaya that I wouldn’t choose to come to except that John, my best friend from my “professional college student/Bohemian vagabond years” from age 20 to 34, is here — I wrote about him and those years of our knuckleheaded intellectual awakening in the In the Crumbling Temple of the Dead White Males post last year — and it’s the first time we’ve seen each other in 15 years, which is really cool. It was only a two-hour flight from Singapore to make this quick reunion. I’m pleasantly surprised we both made it this close to 50. And ditto that the conversations are as comfortable as if we just had coffee yesterday in 1994.

Anyway, this post isn’t about John. It’s about thoughts I had with him as we lounged on an empty stretch of beach away from the tourist-infested area.¹

John went the Ph.D. route and is now a philosophy and religious studies professor in the States. He’s a big Buddhism head, but he also teaches logic and critical thinking.

I watched a nice white cloud float across a nice azure sky, right up there above the palm fronds shot through with sunlight, and asked John with my own big teacher head, “So how do you teach critical thinking, anyway?”

The part of his answer that interested me most was: “The hardest part for me, and the most important part, is getting students to see in what they’re reading what the real issue is. Texts and writers often don’t make that clear.”

I said “hm” and watched more clouds, listened to the same surf’s voice here in Thailand that John and I heard under so many conversations in Los Angeles in the ’80s and Oregon in the ’90s. And I listened to some thoughts that I wish an interior monologue recorder would have recorded so I could play them to my history students (doesn’t it suck that our students get to hear so few of our many — for me practically constant – random thoughts about what we want them to learn, see, understand? That they can’t join us in interior dialogues?).

So I’m going to try to pull those thoughts back up. They’re pretty simple, but that doesn’t mean they’re easy to teach. It goes something like this:

You’re Learning Everything About European History Except What’s Important

I’ve tried to give you what we’ve called “the Big Picture” of how our species left Africa, populated Europe and Mesopotamia, started farming, made civilizations, spread those civilizations, got more complex, created institutions of politics and religions and economics and social organization and, as the Thais say, “Yak yak yak.” We’ve toured this pretty coherently, I think, in the first semester, all the way up to the Enlightenment and Scientific Revolution. I’ve tried to give you that coherent “Big Picture” framework because I never got it when I was in high school, and it took me way too long — into my 30s — to have it. That meant whenever I read or heard about a book or event or person from the past during the first decade-plus of my adulthood, I couldn’t “place it on the map,” give it a mental context — “Oh, that’s when the Reformation and the Age of Exploration and the Renaissance were going on all at once, so everybody was so confused with all the new knowledge when that happened” sort of thing.

Everything that happened before my life began, in other words, was something like an “historical orphan.” It had no relations with the other things going on around it when it was alive.

So I’ve tried really hard for the first half of our year together to make that story coherent, to make you see that A couldn’t have happened before B because B partly caused A, on and on. (I wrote about that a while back in Why History Isn’t Learned, and How Story Helps Change That.) I’ve tried really hard to give you that framework so you’re not the idiot I was for so many of my first college years.

And congratulations: Most of you, judging from your semester exam essays, seem to have got that hiStory in your heads.

But here’s the problem that I saw when reading those essays:

You Think “Western Civ” is About Learning “Western Civ.” It’s Not.

As John put it, you’ve read the text and understood it, but you don’t understand the issue.

And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all you’ve done is learn it. You seem to think that we’re teaching you Western Civilization because gee, it’s a great civilization.

It’s not. Like all civilizations, it has its strengths and it has its flaws. Just because it’s part of the dominant culture today doesn’t make it good. Maybe the dominant culture today would be much better if certain aspects of Western Civilization were different — or even non-existent.

Most of your essays saddened me because they were so full of cheer-leading for the West. Civilizations, Western or Eastern, Northern or Southern, don’t need cheerleaders. They need critics.

So in the second semester, let’s up the game. You’re going to continue learning that Big Picture. But I hope you’re also going to start forming your opinions about it, embracing parts of it, rejecting others, arguing some parts are broken and need fixing, and proposing how, if you were in the position of power to fix it, you would go about doing that.

Because many of you, when I’m losing my last teeth and blogging through bifocals decades from now, may very well be in those positions of power. And I hope you’re exercising that power not with pom-poms, but with sharp-eyed solutions to the problems you’ll inherit.

Otherwise this future old man is screwed.

Jeez, That was Heavy

So I’m going to go get a massage now. That’s one of the beautiful things about Thai civilization. They understand that a trip to the massage parlor is just as important as a trip to the shopping mall. The West could learn from that.

Image by piwaen

1. Thailand travel tip: rent a scooter your first day, then take it 30 minutes minimum from where all the tourists are to find an out of the way place where you can have some peace, quiet, and authenticity.

6 Comments

• At January 6, 2010, William wrote:

  Being drilled to memorize facts don't exactly make you the smartest connector. It only let you win contests like "Are You Smarter than a 5th Grader". We, SAS students, were never taught on how to think, lest critique, about society. We only learned how to comment and praise society's achievements. It was by luck I stumbled upon the Colbert Report and the Daily Show that I realized Huck Finn was right all along.

  Sigh, sivilized society. I wish there was a Being Aware 101 for us.

  .-= William´s last blog ..JudeMaverick: Checking e-mail for updates on my Nigerian prince. Says he needs another thousand US dollars to get a Ferrari to escape. =-.

• At January 7, 2010, Deb Culbertson wrote:

  When I was growing up, we lived as ex-pats in Vietnam. We vacationed in Pattaya Beach, Thailand. Seeing your picture of the beach sets the yearning for more travel in place. As a child, now I'm on the verge of turning 53, the memories of horseback riding on the beach and the Thai ceremonial dancing set my heart racing again! I wanted to thank you for being a blogger and sharing your experiences! Deb

• At January 7, 2010, How Modern People Read at Beyond School wrote:

  [...] comments Print This Post Nothing like seeing a friend from three decades ago, when you were a new and very green adult in the world, to stir up the [...]

• At January 7, 2010, Borderland › Critical Readings wrote:

  [...] of teaching history, noting that his students understood the text without understanding the issues. He says: And the issue, to put it in a nutshell, is this: Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all [...]

• At January 8, 2010, akamrt wrote:

  Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all u’ve done is learn it. http://is.gd/5UDBm (via @cburell) < Great piece! #rethinkschool

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 8, 2010, akamrt wrote:

  Knowing all this stuff is worthless, if all u’ve done is learn it. http://is.gd/5UDBm (via @cburell) < Great piece! #rethinkschool

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

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

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

The Mental Work is Hard….

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

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

….The Tech is Dead Easy

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

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

Too Beautiful for School?

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

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

I don’t know.

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

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

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

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

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

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

8 Comments

• At January 4, 2010, ShellTerrell wrote:

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

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 4, 2010, monika hardy wrote:

  What a find... I love it.

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

  Some current thoughts on your questions....

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• At January 4, 2010, jonessensei wrote:

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

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 5, 2010, Adrienne wrote:

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

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

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

• At January 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

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

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

  Happy New Year!

• At January 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

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

• At January 6, 2010, Zoe wrote:

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

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

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

  Happy new year!

  @fullonlearning

  zoe

  Zoe

• At February 2, 2010, Adrienne wrote:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• Wikipedia:Reliable source examples – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

• • –full Wikipedia page

  • Are wikis reliable sources?

  • Wikis, including Wikipedia and other wikis sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, are not regarded as reliable sources. However, wikis are excellent places to locate primary and secondary sources.

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

    In many cases, no. Most private weblogs (“blogs”), especially those hosted by blog-hosting services such as Blogger, are self-published sources; many of them published pseudonymously. There is no fact-checking process and no guarantee of quality of reliability. Information from a privately-owned blog may be usable in an article about that blog or blogger under the self-publication provision of the verifiability policy.

  • Weblog material written by well-known professional researchers writing within their field, or well-known professional journalists, may be acceptable, especially if hosted by a university, newspaper or employer (a typical example is Language Log, which is already cited in several articles, e.g. Snowclone, Drudge Report). Usually, subject experts will publish in sources with greater levels of editorial control such as research journals, which should be preferred over blog entries if such sources are available.

  • Are web forums and blog talkbacks reliable sources?

    Web forums and the talkback section of weblogs are rarely regarded as reliable. While they are often controlled by a single party (as opposed to the distributed nature of Usenet), many still permit anonymous commentary and we have no way of verifying the identity of a poster. Some however, are edited by reliable organizations, and therefore may possibly be justified as exceptions.

  • Briefly: published scholarly sources from academic presses should be used.

• Wikipedia:Reliable sources – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  • –full Wikipedia page here

  • Self-published and questionable sources

    Questionable sources

    Questionable sources are those with a poor reputation for checking the facts, or with no editorial oversight. Such sources include websites and publications expressing views that are widely acknowledged as extremist, or promotional in nature, or which rely heavily on rumors and personal opinions….

    Self-published sources (online and paper)

    Anyone can create a website or pay to have a book published, then claim to be an expert in a certain field. For that reason self-published media—whether books, newsletters, personal websites, open wikis, blogs, personal pages on social networking sites, Internet forum postings, or tweets—are largely not acceptable.

    “Blogs” in this context refers to personal and group blogs. Some newspapers host interactive columns that they call blogs, and these may be acceptable as sources so long as the writers are professionals and the blog is subject to the newspaper’s full editorial control. Posts left by readers may never be used as sources.

    Self-published material may, in some circumstances, be acceptable when produced by an established expert on the topic of the article whose work in the relevant field has previously been published by reliable third-party publications….

  • Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable secondary sources. This means that while primary or tertiary sources can be used to support specific statements, the bulk of the article should rely on secondary sources.

    Tertiary sources such as compendia, encyclopedias, textbooks, and other summarizing sources may be used to give overviews or summaries, but should not be used in place of secondary sources for detailed discussion. Wikipedia itself, although a tertiary source, should not be used as a source within articles, nor should any mirrors or forks of Wikipedia be accepted as reliable sources for any purpose.

  • Primary sources, on the other hand, are often difficult to use appropriately. While they can be reliable in many situations, they must be used with caution.

14 Comments

• At January 3, 2010, Morgante Pell wrote:

  Would I cite Wikipedia in a paper? No. But it's still where I turn first for an overview or to look up a quick fact.

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

  Sadly, I think far too many teachers misunderstand this. They shouldn't rail against Wikipedia for being editable by many or because it's on the web—just call it an encyclopedia. Any teacher who accepts Encyclopedia Britannica as a source but not Wikipedia is a hypocrite.

• At January 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Morgante,

  That's why I like the following two quotes from Wikipedia in the post:

  Wikis, including Wikipedia and other wikis sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation, are not regarded as reliable sources. However, wikis are excellent places to locate primary and secondary sources.

  And

  Wikipedia articles should be based on reliable secondary sources. This means that while primary or tertiary sources can be used to support specific statements, the bulk of the article should rely on secondary sources.

  Tertiary sources such as compendia, encyclopedias, textbooks, and other summarizing sources may be used to give overviews or summaries, but should not be used in place of secondary sources for detailed discussion.

  I don't think any encyclopedia articles should be allowed in research papers, beyond the intro paragraph for background and context.

• At January 3, 2010, Paul Villavisanis wrote:

  Clay,

  First, I've missed seeing your picture in the tweet stream.Nice to see you posting.

  I tell my students to use Wikipedia as a diving board, a place to find primary sources. They shake their collective heads and whisper, "Well, Mr. Soandso says Wikipedia is terrible and should never be used and we'll fail the paper if we do."

  I'll share with them your post to help them understand a little better how to use it.

  P.S. Do libraries even have new encyclopedias?

  Peace

• At January 3, 2010, Kaelie wrote:

  I rarely use wikipedia. Last time I used it was for an AP Biology definition, because all of our teachers refuse to accept Wikipedia as a valid source. While most of it IS NOT valid, the problem is it is hit or miss with its accuracy.

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

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

  However, teachers now have the ability to create specialized search engines for specific topics that pull out "legitimate sources," eliminating the work that the student has to do to find sources they can actually use.

• At January 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Thanks for the moral support, Paul. Trying to get back in the saddle.

  I get the same cognitive dissonance from students re: WP, so I'm glad WP itself weighs in here. It really is a useful resource for teaching literacy and source reliability.

  I don't know about libraries, but laptops sure have a lot of encyclopedias.

  Happy New Year :)

• At January 5, 2010, amichetti wrote:

  From my Reader: Wikipedia: “Wikipedia is not a reliable source” http://bit.ly/7K8Zde

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 5, 2010, EdTechSandyK wrote:

  The Reliability of Wikipedia: http://ow.ly/SOFK #teaching #edtech

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 5, 2010, Bill Warrick wrote:

  I find it interesting that the post is written without any discussion on the meaning of 'reliability' or 'reliable'.

  I'm of the opinion that no bit of information - regardless of the source is value neutral. No matter how the information was generated or distributed, it carries with it a bias, slant, purpose, or agenda - however benign.

  The value of information - its 'reliability' - then, shifts from the source to the consumer. As the consumer of the information, I determine its reliability based on the context in which I use it.

  I don't think we can generalize about the reliability of various sources. If i'm researching the history of plumbing, the sources I find reliable will be different than if I was researching how to stop a leak.

  .-= Bill Warrick´s last blog ..Hiatus =-.

• At January 6, 2010, helainebecker wrote:

  Wkipedia’s own doc on why its not a reliable source. Thanks @edtechsandyk for the link http://bit.ly/8vIJTv #teaching #edtech

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 6, 2010, taliacarbis wrote:

  This is a great link. RT @jessicalearning: RT @EdTechSandyK: The Reliability of Wikipedia: http://ow.ly/SOFK #teaching #edtech

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 9, 2010, Blurall wrote:

  Wikipedia is not reliable, and the information provided there is in majority of situations wrong. Also, it is not neutral when there are two different reliable sources for the same matter. Because of technicalities they accept just one, even though it is proven is the wrong one.

  Or they quote from one source, just enough for proving a certain point of view, omitting to quote the entire fragment that would change everything (they do not quote in the spirit of the author of the source)

  When it is possible this with verifiable sources, what can we expect from sources that we can not afford to buy.

  From my experience, they do not accept reference, quotes from books that are on the free domain, i.e. Archive sites, even though by indicating the place where anyone can verify information, it is much easier. With their type of site, I am forced either to buy a book or to buy their point of view made by it doesn’t matter who has a computer

  It appears for me, wikipedia is just a matter of business

  This is just my opinion.

• At January 9, 2010, Bill Warrick wrote:

  Obviously, people can go back and forth about the 'reliability' of wikipedia - on its own or in comparison with other sources.

  The point that I was trying to make is that we need to adjust our thinking about the nature of information (as opposed to facts).

  As a teacher, the students I work with don't simply need 'reliable facts'. I'm sorry, I know that's sacrilege to many. What they need are the mental and technological tools necessary to gather, manipulate, assess, manage, and use the kind of information to which they're exposed today - blogs, wikis, tweets, youtube videos. Wikipedia is one of those tools (one of MANY).

  As an information source, Wikipedia is invaluable. The idea of wikipedia is one of the most breathtaking shifts in the nature of knowledge acquisition and dissemination. Through Wikipedia, everyone in the world contributes to the knowledge base of everyone else in the world. We're moving beyond the place where 'experts' are the sole sources of 'reliable information'. I have information about my place here, the events and conditions around me, and from a viewpoint that no-one else in the world has. So do you... Gathering all of those viewpoints is a good thing.

  Wikipedia is current. Events of the world are almost instantaneously entered and written about. Videos and images are included. No other reference source can match that.

  We see this shift in traditional news. How many (primarily local) news organizations now solicit tweets and videos from viewers? How long before those first-hand accounts ARE the news? Not long, I think.

  True, wikipedia from a purely statistical point of view might not have everything right. But as a tool, it is indispensable. My students don't need to have a book of facts, they need to understand how to make sense of the information they gather from all sources.

  .-= Bill Warrick´s last blog ..Hiatus =-.

• At January 9, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Bill, maybe I didn't make myself clear enough: I'm talking about academic, formal research papers.

  I mentioned the "interesting caveats" in the post for lengthier discussions. It wasn't the focus of this quick post.

  So I'm not bashing WP. I'm trying to save students from getting bashed in college for confusing it with peer-reviewed or otherwise authoritative sources.

  For what it is (and it's many things), WP is a wonderful tool. But it shouldn't be confused with what it's not.

• At January 9, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  See my reply to your first comment above.

  The key point for this post is: It shouldn't be mistaken for a reliable source in a formal academic research paper.

  As for the rest of your comment, it should be recognized for the many things it is, as you argue.

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

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

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

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

I’ve been watching UCLA Professor Lynn Hunt’s European Civilization from 1750 to the Present course lectures on Academic Earth to review modern European history before teaching it in the semester beginning next month.¹ I’m also watching Yale Professor John Merriman’s course on the same subject.

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

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

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

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

Here’s the screenshot:

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

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

Talking to Yourself is Good

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

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

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

What about you? Any to share?

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

1. Be warned: the audio is sometimes bad, but the lectures are quite good. Dr. Hunt’s a trooper for not tearing off the microphone and telling the tech crew she’s mad as hell and not going to take it any more.

8 Comments

• At January 1, 2010, Will Richardson wrote:

  Hey Clay,

  How is 2010 treating you?

  You really need to get Evernote to do that audio note taking stuff with. The iPhone app just rocks.

  .-= Will Richardson´s last blog ..2020 Vision? =-.

• At January 1, 2010, diane wrote:

  I run ideas by my PLN - no need to reinvent the wheel, when there are already excellent resources available for sharing & collaboration.

  Happy New Year, Clay!

  .-= diane´s last blog ..Looking Back, Looking Forward =-.

• At January 3, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Hi Will,

  It's good to be alive to see it, so no complaints (publicly, at least).

  Your nudge made me spend a good five or six hours exploring Evernote yesterday. I couldn't make it do basic things like show a page layout for print or pdf, etc. I can't even see how to export files in your basic formats. I can't annotate with it socially in any invisibly easy way. So I'm not feeling a lot of love.

  I can see how it's a great "cloud file cabinet," for sure. But beyond that, why do you like it so much?

  Hope '10's good for you.

• At January 3, 2010, etalbert wrote:

  Interesting ideas RT @cburell New Tech Teaching Habits at Beyond School http://tinyurl.com/y8wdqwa via @ShellTerrell

  This comment was originally posted on Twitter

• At January 5, 2010, Clarissa wrote:

  Good grief; I had NO IDEA that those earbuds had a tiny little microphone in them! Thanks for the tip. (I'm still learning how to use the iPod Touch that I got for my birthday/Christmas.)

  .-= Clarissa´s last blog ..Twelve Days of Christmas: Free E-Books =-.

• At January 5, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Clarissa, you have to buy the set with the mic in them. Costs 40 or 50 bucks, but well worth it if you want to talk to yourself. :)

• At January 7, 2010, Clarissa wrote:

  When I took a peek at the included earbuds that came with my Touch, I saw a tiny little input grill on the same area as the volume controls. I tested it out with the voice memo software (I had been wondering why that was included!) and sure enough, it worked! Someone I was chatting with said it may not have been included with the 1st gen Touches... So I'm not even out any extra money.

  .-= Clarissa´s last blog ..12 Days of Christmas: EFL Classroom 2.0 =-.

• At January 11, 2010, Charlie A. Roy wrote:

  I'm now back in the classroom for the first time in three years teaching a personal finance class. Three years ago i was sans a PLN. This time around i'd say google docs and wikispaces are a new must have as well as a great wireless connection in the room and a liberal filtering policy at the school.

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I’ll have more to say soon about how I’ve been trying to teach the wisdom in this “napkin philosopher” piece in my classroom all year. It’s going to get center stage on my classroom door window first day back to school. Maybe even tattooed on students’ hands.

But right now, it’s off to the airport to send my in-laws back to Korea. (If you haven’t downloaded Seth Godin et. al.’s What Matters Now, follow that link. And see more about Dan Roam’s work here and here.)

Dan Roam, from "What Matters Now" (click image for larger file)

2 Comments

• At December 31, 2009, Lynne wrote:

  As a chemical engineer, I know there's a lot of cool science behind how paint dries. (Not to mention you need to get the viscosity right first so it sticks the the brush, then to the wall, and then stays there... without dripping.) It's a shame that not many people can appreciate it.

  .-= Lynne´s last blog ..$4000 =-.

• At January 1, 2010, Clay Burell wrote:

  Ah, Lynne, you make this science ignoramus sad. I wish I knew.

  You should give a presentation on it.

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

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

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

Via Edutopia:

2. Seth Godin on Curiosity:

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

Via Seth’s Blog:

‘curiosity’ from Nic Askew on Vimeo.

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

2 Comments

• At December 28, 2009, Morgante Pell wrote:

  Thanks for sharing the excellent videos, Clay.

  I think you definitely have something going with social intelligence bit, which also follows with many things the other Clay has been saying (Shirky). One of my favorite quotes from the first video was that "he core skill of an innovator is error recovery not failure avoidance." Unfortunately, our school system actively discourages taking risks and potentially failing. Failures pull down grades just as much as successes pull them up. Indeed, one bad test can keep a student's GPA down for 4 years.

  Seth's video summarized many thoughts I've already had/seen elsewhere, but in a nice, digestible way. That's one of his great skills. I think many people underestimate the great harm which TV causes. When people ask me about my (admittedly limited success), I like to thank the Green Mountains for blocking TV signals and my parents for refusing to get cable.

• At December 28, 2009, Clay Burell wrote:

  Yep, yep. Lots of what's old to one person is new to another, so it never hurts to spread the healthy virus by posting it and passing it forward.

  I love the feel and look of the Godin interview.

  I also love the last line of your comment.

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