Category Archives: Paradigm Shifts

Fighting Old Battles

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As a former teacher union member and ardent supporter of educators, I am watching the events in Wisconsin with great interest. I can’t claim great union support when I started my career; I really only joined the union because I was required to pay 80% of the fees anyway since I benefited from the contract negotiated by the union. I figured I’d chip in the extra 20% and get some of the perks like insurance and legal representation.

I saw the power of the union when, in my second year, my district went out on a six-week strike. Collective bargaining helped boost our salaries but also made sure that we were paid for all the extra work we did in support of the kids outside of our teaching responsibilities: coaching teams, advising clubs, and organizing community events. When I moved to a non-union state, I saw how the lack of the ability to negotiate meant that pay was low, extra work was uncompensated (and yet teachers still did it), and administrators made decisions without ever feeling the need to consult professional staff. Association membership was low as well, with some veterans afraid to join because of potential retaliation. I couldn’t help but wonder why anyone would retaliate against an organization that had no power anyway.

With that perspective as well as recent frustration with the National Education Association who seems unwilling to stand up for the professionalism of and personal sacrifice made by public educators in this country, I find myself in a quandary. I could dive into the debate: that the Wisconsin governor is using fiscal crisis to break the back of the unions, something he said he was going to do when he ran. I could cheer on my fellow teachers who are trying to remind their neighbors that they are not some elite group that has gotten rich on the backs of their fellow tax payers, who struggled with the decision to abandon their classrooms to protest and yet in doing so provide a powerful example of citizenship to their students, and who will return to those classrooms to again spend their days with the next generation, doing a sometimes thankless job with the spirit and dedication that we have come to expect and yet take for granted.

But, there is another part of me that wonders if we are watching an old battle, based on foundations that are crumbling. More and more teachers can be found outside the usual systems. As schools discover money savings related to online learning, they may choose to do an end run around more traditional educators and create more adjunct-like relationships with their professional staff. Unionists will shake their heads since adjuncting is often seen as the sweat shop of the higher ed world, but adjuncts also have a great level of freedom in terms of their schedules and their responsibilities. I love adjuncting because it means I get to teach, putting my energy into developing courses and working with my students, rather than worrying about getting published or attending faculty meetings.

Do I miss the security of a full time job with its benefits? Not really…I’m willing to make the trade off of less security for more freedom. And, as I look across the landscape, I don’t see the same kind of ongoing security that drove my father’s generation to leave home each day in order to toil for another. Teachers are getting laid off, something that was unthinkable in the past; collective bargaining is under attack; and benefits are no longer a given when you get a job. And in the worst slap in the face of all, workers who devoted their lives to a company are losing their retirement and looking at the potential of a second career as a Wal Mart greeter.

Indeed, foundations are crumbling and the protesters on both sides in Wisconsin don’t seem to understand that they are arguing over the past rather than looking towards the future. If the educators do manage to save collective bargaining, it will be something of a Pyrrhic victory as states and localities find that they simply can’t meet the agreements that they have made.

Naming Things

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I couldn’t find my phone this morning. Not plugged in. Not by my chair. So, I dialed the number and discovered it propped up against the kitchen window. I had used it yesterday for access to a recipe for Thanksgiving. There it was, spitting out the blues riffs that I had chosen for my home number, reminding me of the difficulty of names in this crossover, hybrid, multi-tasking age in which we live.

Earlier yesterday, that 3 X 4 inch piece of technology had been a camera, which I used to record the passing of the seasons as I walked the dog along the road to the winery.

This morning, I was looking for it because I needed it as a book to look up a quote to share with a friend.

Later, I will play sudoku and surf the web and listen to music.

Yet, we reduce it to one name: cell phone. And, we ban it, despite its potential to provide access to all the tools of education from textbooks to videos to pens. Because we can’t control it and schools have a responsibility to keep kids safe and we’ve seen plenty of examples where they’ve gotten in real trouble having unfettered access to the world. But there are also plenty of examples where grown ups haven’t done such a good job either. It’s THE media literacy issue that we need to discuss: consumer/producer/prosumer and the implications.

But even as I write the above, I wonder if we will miss this opportunity as well…the chance to make learning, working, and living all more humane enterprises. Anyone who knows even a little of the history of school reform understands that technology almost never drives real change. Instead, it gets incorporated into the existing structures of the system, maybe making small changes, but ultimately being changed itself.

But, at the risk of flying in the face of history, there seem to be larger forces at work here that are challenging our names for lots of things. Work: Changes in the way people access their jobs may lead them to question a school schedule that no longer matches their own. School: Easy access to educational resources makes it easier to imagine teaching your own children.

Even the word “teacher”…last Saturday I was part of a conference with pre-service teachers and I made an off hand comment about not being a real teacher. One of the 20-somethings looked at me and asked what I meant by that. I explained that while I was a teacher in many ways, since I didn’t teach the grueling schedule of a K-12 classroom teacher, I didn’t really consider myself a “real” teacher. I had it easy with my online courses, afternoon workshops and evening webinars. But, he insisted, I was a real teacher because I was doing the work of teaching. Just because I wasn’t adhering to a particular schedule or killing myself to try and meet impossible demands didn’t make a difference to him.

And, there it is: what will make the real difference in the future. Young people who are questioning everything about the world we have created and the way we have defined words like “work” and “school” and “fun.” His generation is the real force that, when joined with mobile multimedia technologies and other cultural shifts, will change definitions in ways we can’t even imagine.

Post Pencil?

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Sharon has been writing eloquently about Sherry Turkle’s book Simulation and Its Discontents, which I also read as part of the “choose your own reading” part of the course. Go read Sharon’s posts, particularly the one about socks, and then come back…no, really, go…

Turkle’s book is a microcosmic look at experience of the analog to digital transition. I am part of the generation that is living through that transition. Like Turkle’s engineers and architects, I face the fundamental question: As technology replaces so much of what we do “by hand,” what analog practices do we want to keep around? I know that some of my colleagues would probably say none, having developed digital lives for themselves.

But, as I face the transition, I find that there are certain things I like to do with a pencil in my hand and the digital alternative is simply not as satisfying. The main one: my to do list. I use it, in conjunction with a print calendar, to map out my months, weeks, and days. It’s the way I’ve always done it and I have yet to find an online alternative that satisfies me. I begin my day by jotting down what I want to accomplish and still get a thrill when I can draw a line through it at day’s end.

I also prefer using a pencil and paper for brainstorming and drafting. Like Turkle’s folks, I sometimes feel as though word processed text looks too complete and the highlighting and commenting tools do not provide the same level of contact with the text in order to complete detailed editing. Of course, my advisor and I used these tools to pass drafts of my dissertation back and forth but my own work on the draft often include lots of handwritten work from outlines, to diagrams, to chunks of text. My spiral bound notebook is included in the archives of the project because much of the thinking about themes was concocted in its pages. At some point, I tried using a digital graphic organizer but somehow the technology got in the way. I wanted to scribble, to draw wavy arrows, to circle words, to jot pictures, to create messiness, and the software seemed to demand neatness and order. I wasn’t creating for someone else but instead trying to dig into my own thinking and the pencil was more inviting than the mouse as the tool to facilitate that process.

While these activities seem mundane compared to Turkle’s folks who are grappling with the meaning of simulations for their very work, they illustrate in a very practical way the decisions we make each day about our use of technology. I think it’s important to consider these decisions and provide opportunities for kids to understand them as well, lest they become like the younger designers who see no value in the old ways and rely, sometimes too completely, on the simulation.

It’s Really An Environmental Problem, Isn’t It?

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As I read Will Richardson’s response to Jay Mathews’ Washington Post articles related to 21st century skills, I had a lightbulb moment (compact flourescent, of course).  Here’s the quote that flipped the switch for me in terms of some of the cognitive dissonance I’ve been experiencing lately:

But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

Will isn’t talking about student skills or literacy; he is talking about school infrastructure, both the bricks and mortar and clocks infrastructure and the curricular infrastructure.  It’s not as sexy as thinking about kids, but it is becoming the 800-pound gorilla in the room.  We just can’t take advantage of the kind of social networking possibilities that Will envisions within the current environment.   It’s something that Tim Stahmer writes about a lot, how silly it is that for all our connectedness and new understandings about learning, we continue to believe that kids only learn from 8 to 3 in the fall, winter and spring months, they all learn at the same pace and generally in the same way, and everything that’s important to learn can be tested through a multiple-choice test.  It’s also something that Tim suggested recently is nigh upon impossible to change.

If there is a more challenging educational paradigm than the organization of school, I don’t know what it is.  The physical/temporal structure seems to be part of the fabric of America and thus restructuring the school schedule seems to be the most resistant of reforms. There are glimmers of changes on the horizon, mostly wrapped around distance learning which, not surprising to this sometimes cynic, are being implemented to save money rather than in the much loftier interest of helping students engage with the community through social media tools.  They seem to tend to be online versions of face-to-face classrooms, primarily interested in delivering content related to the state standards. So while the format makes it easier to access education, it does not allow for the kind of passion-based, networked learning that Will is really envisioning.

For that to occur, there is a more pressing issue to deal with. High stakes, standardized testing is fast becoming as entrenched as the school schedule in the infrastructure of our national educational system, and I’m convinced it is the biggest problem we face in making any significant changes to curriculum and pedagogy in the schools.  In my state, teaching is all about clearly defined state-provided content.  Certainly there are some process standards but there is defined “essential knowledge,” mostly factual that will form the core of the test so teachers feel responsible for making sure students see all of it before the test in May.  Everyone single teacher I’ve talked to recently has said something to the effect that they know they aren’t supposed to teach to the test, but they also know that someone is going to talk with them if their scores go down to any significant degree and they certainly have to clearly identify which standard they are addressing every single day.  They get very little personal learning time, and they definitely don’t get an experimental year to try out new things.

I can’t help wondering what would happen if we just took a hiatus from the tests.  One year in the life of a classroom teacher and her students without the bubble sheet looming on the horizon.  Teachers would still teach the same subject (we won’t get too radical here), but they wouldn’t have to worry about covering every detail and could allow individual student interest to drive the learning.  So, without that accountability, would teachers everywhere just kick off their shoes and show movies the whole year?  I really don’t think so.  Instead, I think that given the opportunity, they would rediscover their own passion for the content that would lead them to an openness to new technologies and pedagogies that would support student engagement.

Since this is an imaginary scenario, I’ll also add that all teachers would have ongoing  job embedded professional development, technical and pedagogical support and adequate access to technological resources including the web, in short, if we  treated them like professionals.  Will got it right when he described teachers as “suffocating in paper, policies and processes that prevent them from exploring the potential of online networked learning spaces.”

To conclude, here’s the original quote from Will:

But this new potential to learn easily and deeply in environments that are not bounded by physical space or scheduled time constraints requires us as educators to take a hard look at how we are helping our students realize the potentials of those opportunities.

He doesn’t define educators, but I immediately thought of a subset of the citizenry engaged in educational pursuits.  I would suggest this call needs to be extended to the community as a whole.  Infrastructure issues, whether physical, temporal, or curricular, are often not controlled by educators.  Instead, they originated with policymakers and legislators who are influenced by the opinions of many people, not just educators, and often make decisions for budgetary or political, rather than instructional, reasons.

It may be that we are living in an age of incommensurate paradigms. You simply can’t implement the kind of education Will describes within the confines of the prevailing paradigm.  Tinkering won’t do it this time.  Blaming teachers won’t do it either.  This is more than just adding some stuff to the curriculum called 21st century skills but a chance to really think about what Neil Postman called the “end” of education.  Everybody seems to want to have a national dialog: here’s a good starting point for the one about education.

So, It’s Not Just Education…

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I receive the IT Security Bulletin from emedia. I generally don’t read it too closely, but one of the headlines caught my eye this morning (plus I’m procrastinating doing some work for an online class): “The Facebook Headache: How to Effectively Block Blogs, MySpace & More.” The problem, it seems, is that employees are wasting time online and there is now a product that will put an end to that for all time. Another headline promises, “How to Stop Flash Games at Work.” The white paper focuses mainly on issues of malware and security, but I suspect the problem is the same as that with Facebook: employees wasting time.

The main problem here is that all those digital natives who have been wreaking havoc in the schools are now heading out to the workforce as well. And, businesses, it seems, are taking the same steps schools have: block, filter, forbid. Then I think about Wikinomics, which I am finally getting around to reading. The authors–Tapscott and Williams–would probably argue that rather than banning, we should be adopting these new disruptive technologies as a way to increase collaboration. Bring them into the mainstream, encourage employees to chat with their Facebook friends about issues they are encountering in their work. And, just like my state has launched an Internet safety campaign, companies should deal with the issues surrounding malware by educating employees.

After so many years of hearing how business should be more like education, it’s nice to know that businesses don’t always get it right.

Digital Literacy: Reading the Paper Online

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This post was supposed to discuss Chester Finn’s editorial about No Child Left Behind, which appeared in The Washington Post on Sunday. He outlines five myths about the law, taking both Republicans and Democrats to task for the way they mischaracterize the law, while providing some insight into the history of national educational reform.

I think the most important one of those myths–that standards will fix the schools–must be addressed at both the federal and the state level if the standards movement will ever have a positive effect on our schools. Finn writes, “For this to work, of course, good standards have to be in place, and NCLB doesn’t address the problem of mediocre or even downright silly standards.” How much of what our students are learning is about snippets of information that can easily be found when needed? Isn’t it more important that our students know how to use those snippets to develop understandings of larger issues? That rather than knowing Thomas Jefferson was the third President of the United States, they grapple with how someone like Jefferson could write that all men are created equal even while owning other human beings? That even as the country was being put together, the seeds of the Civil War that would threaten to rip it apart were being sewn? (I had this sudden flash to the musical 1776, where Rutledge of South Carolina sings about the link between molasses, rum and slaves. I saw that musical numerous times in the theater where I worked as an usher and sometimes think I learned more about American history that summer than in my high school course.)

While I focused on the content of the article, I was also intrigued with its format. The article is littered with hyperlinks that take the reader to lists of articles, videos and audio related to the link. Here’s an example for President Bush.  What a great example of how online newspapers can take advantage of technology to expand the focus of its readers.

However, one of the links on the Bush page also reminded me of the importance of helping our students become discerning readers.  For instance, I couldn’t help but click on the headline Bush to Phase Out Environment by 2009.  It’s a very funny piece from Andy Borowitz, originally published at Creators Syndicate.   It’s clearly a parody despite its third place ranking in the list of articles related to the President.  It would be a great discussion starter with students about the kernel of truth that makes it funny.  And, it might lead to reading and discussing other famous parodies such as Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal.

The bottom line for me is that we need to be helping our students navigate this sometimes confusing world of digital publishing.   Susan Jacoby, in her current book The Age of American Unreason, takes on Steven Johnson (Everything Bad is Good for You) for suggesting that somehow Internet culture and gaming may be making us smarter.  I think here’s a good example of how Johnson may be right.  It takes a pretty smart reader to move from a serious news piece to a parody and be able to read both intelligently.  What we need to ensure is that they can make that move.

A Finnish Edutopia

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I was planning to post about Finland after reading this article in eSchool News that described a recent visit to Scandanavia by US educators.  Finland was of particular interest since they are often first in international tests of math and science.   I never got around to the post yesterday because I spent the time I had learning more about Finland at Wikipedia and the CIA Factbook.  Then, this morning, Tim over at Assorted Stuff pointed me to a post about a series of articles related to Finland’s education system.  Combine all this with Sheryl’s 9 principles for implementing what she calls the Big Shift, and we begin to see how education can become more than just something students get through.

Tim writes,

While I’m sure there’s much more than meets the eye, their success seems to boil down to a high degree of trust for the students combined with high expectations for their learning.

I agree.  I also agree wholeheartedly with Ewen who points to the trust that they put in teachers.  Being a teacher in Finland is the equivalent of being a doctor or lawyer here in the states.  Only one in eight applicants gets into schools of education and teachers are widely respected.  They are given high levels of autonomy in their classrooms where the pedagogy is very much student-centered.  Hmm…is this the edutopia we’re always talking about?

I also agree with Tim’s comment that there is more than meets the eye, particularly in terms of making these international comparisons.  Finland is not the United States.  My research into Finland led me to see it as one big exclusive private school.  The incredibly homogeneous population equals that of Rhode Island and Connecticut.  Everyone speaks the same language, and, it appears, shares the same culture, values and history.  And, one of those shared values is education.

I don’t want to discourage us from looking to places like Finland for inspiration.  But, I also want us to recognize that America’s great experiment of educating everyone leads us to grapple with an incredibly heterogeneous population that often does not speak the same language or share the same values.

And, while at the national level, we may not seem to trust either students or teachers, at the local level, I’m seeing some of the “big shift” happening. I have been in several high schools this past year where teachers are part of the leadership and are implementing amazing changes in their classrooms, partly from a wider access to technology tools such as blog and wikis, and partly because they are changing the relationship they have with their students.  I would suggest that, rather than sending delegations to Scandanavia, we might be better served by sending delegations to those schools to highlight what we’re doing right in this sometime suffocating standards-based world in which we live.

Is This Cheating?

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Brenda Dyck, over at wwwedu, posted a link to this article about a Canadian college student accused of cheating because he organized a Facebook study group where students worked together on their homework. Turns out it is the university’s responsibility to make sure that students do their own homework. As the students rightly point out, there are many face to face study groups in which students are working on homework, but none of them have been expelled.

To me, it seems like a clear case of the “digital divide” between young people and adults, with the latter having a misunderstanding of social networking. I’m impressed that students are using Facebook for more than just idle chatter. In addition, I would guess that these future chemists will be collaborating with others throughout their careers so they are getting a good start on that skill as well.

Maybe part of the concern is that once the homework problems are posted this semester, students in future courses won’t have to actually do the homework. Hmm…you mean the instructor might have to find new problems? Or reconsider how to teach the course using Facebook as part of the curriculum rather than banning it?

Think Twice

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From a colleague of mine as part of a discussion of protecting privacy:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yIGtf_ula8k&rel=1]

Sorry, if you’re offended that I embedded it, but you need the effect before the story. Here’s the AP version. And, here’s Doug Feaver’s take on it at the Washington Post. Feaver reviews comments from readers on the story. He says, “I’m with the kid, but of course a recording of whatever message he left has not been made available so perhaps I would have a different view if it were.” That’s what I thought was interesting. The only person who can publish Kori’s message is the administrator’s wife. And, as long as we can’t hear Kori’s message, we really can’t judge for ourselves. Did she delete it? Or, is she just not adding fuel? Or was it a pretty reasonable message and she just overreacted? In the end, it probably doesn’t matter, but like, Feaver, I wonder in whose favor the pendulum of public opinion would swing if we heard the original phone message.

Here were two of my favorite back and forth comments about the incident:

readerny said, “I don’t agree with the tirade by the woman who answered the call, BUT as an employer of young adults, I can say that there are some (not all) who are overempowered and think that they know the whole story, or more than you do, and should be running the show themselves…”

But Nicester wrote, “Overempowered kid” and “self-centered youth” – OK, that’s one perspective. Sounds a bit like “whippersnapper” or whatever the Greatest Generation was calling the Baby Boomers when they were dropping acid and rolling in the mud at Woodstock…”

I just feel sorry for this woman, sacrificed on the altar of the digital generation gap. And, like the story about Heath Ledger and the blogs, it’s a story about the future of “news” in the 21st century. What if the kid hadn’t had access to the Internet? He might have sent the tape to the television news, but they have may have demanded to have his recording. He gets to bypass all those gatekeepers and tell his side of the story in a way that kids have never been able to do.

In the end, I find her tirade to be funny rather than offensive. “Snot-nosed brats” was the worst of it. It is more important as a reminder that digital recording and distribution is almost transparent, and perhaps will finally lead to people living by the old adage, “If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.” We have left behind the era of deniability.

I’m tagging this one 21st century skills because I wonder how this fits in? I’m also going to tag it adult learning 😉

State Contractor Files Federal Lawsuit Against Me » Maine Web Report

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State Contractor Files Federal Lawsuit Against Me » Maine Web Report

So, I keep thinking that I need to get back to reading about media literacy and working on my bibliography.  Then, I take “just a second” to check my rss feeds on netvibes and some media story captures my attention.  Today, Andy Carvin pointed me in the direction of Lance Dutson, who was sued by the advertising agent for the state of Maine.  What did he do?  He published a copy of their ad that includes a 1-800 number that goes to a sex site.  I missed this when it first broke in April.  Grad school does that to you.

Stories like this illustrate the fact that the curriculum for a media literacy course is happening right now.  What are the issues here?  If a print or online newspaper like the NY Times published the ad along with the news story, I don’t think the ad agency could do anything but hang its head.  So, why go after the blogger?  Because he isn’t a “real” journalist?  He does belong to the Media Bloggers Association, and pressure from bloggers and others led to the lawsuit being dropped.

This is old media versus new media.  Once again, as in the case of Wikipedia, old media resorts to the courts while new media resorts to public opinion.  Old media thinks it can own stuff, particularly software, so a seemingly cutting edge company like Blackboard, which even though it operates on the web really acts like old media, uses the patent system to put pressure on competitors.