Category Archives: thinking out loud

The Morning After

Leave a reply

Just a few more days to go until the election and I suspect I speak for many of you when I say I am relieved. Politics has taken over much of my social networking conversation as well as the airways, since I’m fortunate to live in a battleground state. I have a pretty diverse group of friends and colleagues on Facebook so I’m seeing widely varying views on the future of our country, all from people I know to be thoughtful, ethical and well informed. My big question is, “How did these people all come to a different truth?”

There have been some moments of revelation for me and a sense of seeing people for the first time when a colleague posts a status with what I consider an extreme and unsettling view. In cases like this, I wonder how to respond, if at all?

Should I unfriend him? Not because he holds a different view from me; in fact, I think it’s kind of cool that I have a pretty wide group of friends with differing views that help keep me grounded. My Facebook news feed is definitely not an echo chamber this political season.

Comment with my surprise or with a counter argument? I just don’t see Facebook as the place to have these kinds of conversations. I’m not sure how to do it in a loving way, particularly because that will mean taking on a larger group of people that I don’t know and with whom I wouldn’t consider discussing this topic and who I suspect probably agree with him.  I have no interest in being an evangelical with my own beliefs nor having a private conversation in public.

So, message him privately?  Maybe, but I’m really just not sure what to say that wouldn’t make it seem like I was questioning a deep seated conviction, probably rooted in lots of other convictions I might also find very different from my own. We come from very divergent backgrounds and experiences that have shaped us in pretty radically different ways.  Perhaps, when I see him face to face some time, I will ask him about his post but my response for the campaign season has been to let these things go.

I suspect we’ve all had a similar experience this campaign season where people naturally gravitated to their social networks to make their views known. And , the nature of the medium is to offer sound bites of people’s beliefs that, in many cases, are uttered in an echo chamber for friends and family. So, I’m going to celebrate ALL my friends by letting them speak their truths and not try to argue them away from the things they hold dear and care to share.

Plus, I suspect a few of the things I’ve liked or shared have surprised some of them and they’ve graciously let me harbor these ideas without challenging me. My advice: vote your conscience, speak up in the face of hatred and evil intentions, and give your friends the benefit of the doubt.

Taking My Own Good Advice

Leave a reply

I feel like I have been hurtling through life for the past several months…traveling, working, teaching. I love it all and that I can do it from the road. But lately it has also meant that I seem to be online all the time. Yesterday morning, I checked in on email, made a phone call or two, and reviewed the to do list to make sure there weren’t any live frogs and then…I took a digital day off.

I have written before about the notion of digital fasts and my advice then we find the Middle Way. One of my suggestions was to choose a day of the week when you would be digitally unavailable. After all, one of the reasons that all emails seem important is because we are obsessively checking in on our phones, iPads and laptops.

Yesterday was that day for me and I may be extending it through today as well. I cleaned my house, worked in the henhouse, baked bread and made a mostly homegrown spaghetti sauce for dinner. I read, rested, crocheted and talked with our house guest who is helping out with a construction project here on the farm. It was mostly non-digital as I did play My Kingdom for The Princess; I’m trying to beat another one of those bonus levels for which there doesn’t seem to be a walk through. The best part of the day was, after sweeping the front porch, sitting on the swing and watching the sunset.

It was refreshing but a bit disconcerting, too, with an inner voice sometimes nagging me…just check your email, it will only take a minute. Maybe I am a bit too addicted to being connected and need to look a little harder for the Middle Way.

Join A Community of Learners

Leave a reply

I was browsing through some of the bloggers I read looking for blogging fodder to keep up with my 30-day challenge of writing every day. Jon Becker at Educational Insanity always has thoughtful posts and I appreciate his willingness to poke fun at himself sometimes.

The post that caught my attention today is about VCU’s Department of Educational Leadership’s new media ecosystem.  Jon invited us all to get involved in this ecosystem that includes blogs by doctoral students at VCU. I’m already part of the ecosystem as I belong to the Facebook page and follow the Twitter feed. But, it was great to spend time browsing the wide variety of blog entries.  I left a few comments for folks and signed up for the updates.

I think the post that really resonated with me today, perhaps because I feel like I’ve been burning the candle at both ends lately and now have a cold, was one by Andy Wolfenbarger.  He focused on the power of a cohort to support its members, but the main message was that passionate people tend to simply work too hard.  We see all that needs to be done and forget that taking care of ourselves is important, too.  I’m taking his good advice today…work can wait. The henhouse needs some attention and so do I. There’s a sunny spot on the porch calling my name and dogs that will be happy for a long walk later on.

And now that I’ve gotten my blog entry done, I really don’t need to be online the rest of the day! Thanks, Andy, for your good advice.  Your cohort is lucky to have you and I’m lucky to be part of this ecosystem.

The Present of Work

Leave a reply

Tim Stahmer at Assorted Stuff points to an article in Forbes about WordPress and Matt Mullenweg.  The company has employees all over the world who work from home. They do have a big travel budget and are able to meet with their team at spots all over the world. And their work lives along with that of the lives of workers like me suggest that this is rapidly becoming the present nature of work so it becomes all the more pressing to help our students figure out where they fit in this world.

Tim asks the question I asked several years ago when I was describing my own “work” life: what skills and mindsets do we need in order to work in this kind of world?  In 2008, I focused on the need to find a balance between work and play when what passed for work often seemed like play.  For me, that continues to be the biggest issue: when you don’t have a particular start and end time to your day and you really love what you do, there is the potential to simply work all the time.  Additionally, since you don’t have the promise of a regular paycheck, you are always hesitant to turn down offers so you end up working on multiple projects at a time, which requires the ability to juggle activities even as it can create a varied and interesting to do list.

In 2008, my attempt at an answer to Tim’s question got at that second issue: the ability to plan and implement projects. I felt then and still do that we need to give kids more opportunity to not just work independently but to take charge of that work.  I have taught with colleagues who, when assigning individual projects, provided a packet with very prescriptive steps for how to accomplish the work. I know why they did it: they had long experience of students waiting until the last minute (the night before) to tackle what was meant to take a month of ongoing work.  My simple suggestion would be that rather than the teacher developing the schedule, make developing the schedule and interim due dates part of the project. So, learning how to work becomes part of the work itself. That’s how it goes in the real world: a client provides an overview and a due date and then it is left up to the worker to determine how and when the work gets done with check ins along the way to confer and collaborate with the client.

As for finding the balance, I think that’s a tougher problem and one I am wrestling with right now. I have a copy of this article by Tony Schwartz–The Magic of Doing One Thing At a Time–in Evernote, and I find myself reviewing it at odd moments. When I first read it, I bristled a bit, particularly over the third behavior of disconnecting completely.  In that 2008 blog post, I talked about how I almost never disconnect even when I’m on vacation and I had some perfect rationalizations for it.  But is it healthy to always be connected.  The article would suggest that it is not and I find myself annoyed to be answering work-related emails on Saturday or Sunday and then realize it is my fault for checking my email in the first place.

The lessons in the article might be good ones to introduce in some way to students.  We’ve always done it, even in the pre-digital era when we told students to turn off the TV when they did their homework. And we can integrate the three behaviors in our own lives and our classrooms in appropriate ways as well.

This blog post represents my attempt to work on the second behavior: Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. I am hoping to work writing into my daily practice so rather than immediately opening email today, I perused some of my favorite bloggers to find a topic for my own thinking.  (Thanks, Tim, for being the spark.)

 

 

Steve & Me: Living History

Leave a reply

When we moved earlier this year, I found was my stash of Macintosh boxes, beginning with my first one, a PowerBook 500.   Today, I am writing this on my new MacBook Air. In between was an iBook, a couple of MacBook Pros and a first generation Air.  There is a big Mac Pro sitting upstairs, but I rarely use it as my laptops mean I can curl up on the sofa, sprawl on the porch, or nestle in bed.  Add the original iPod that I used to record all my dissertation interviews, the iPod touch that was my first introduction to apps and now the iPad, and I begin to realize what an impact that Steve Jobs and Apple has had on my own life.

Because these are more than just computers somehow…instead they paved the way to a mobile life that offers the chance to get beyond the cubicle and really work from anywhere and at anytime.  Earlier this week, I as I took a break from a long drive, I sat in a Starbucks.  Yesterday, my office was a chair in the School of Education.  And on and on.  Jobs was doing more than just reorganizing circuitry or rewriting code; he was fundamentally changing the way we connect to the world which means we can also fundamentally change the notion of what it means to work, disconnecting it from a schedule and a location and connecting it to the tasks that need to be completed, the contacts that need to be made.  He didn’t create things like Twitter or Facebook but he made it easier to use them, using his creativity to combine resources from his own and others imaginations, something I think is the true mark of genius.

I am a little sad today as it seems like a particularly bright light has been extinguished.  There is also the sense that I am not old enough that the icons who created the world in which I live are beginning to fall.  But, I smiled a bit at the Toon Off over at Daryl Cagle’s cartoon website.  Maybe you will too as we spend our first day without Steve.

A Birthday Reflection

Leave a reply

I turn 48 years old today. When I was born, the Vietnam War was just heating up, the Summer of Love was still five years away, and Kennedy was in the middle of those glorious thousand days that came to be known as Camelot. I am on the far edge of the Boomers and can even claim Generation X status when I get annoyed at what I think is the sometimes smug Boomer culture. All that Boomer optimism had faded by the time I came into the world and those of us in the 13th generation grew up in a much more cynical age. I have a good friend who is on the other end of the Boomers and when we play the Boomer edition of Trivial Pursuit she knows all the answers to questions about Howdy Doody and the Beatles. I get the ones about Watergate and the war.

There have been some positives over the past five decades…such as a focus on environmental conservation. But it doesn’t always feel like things have gotten much better. I lived just 30 miles from Three Mile Island when it melted down and am now sick over the oil gushing into the Gulf. Earth Day began when I was seven because things had gotten so bad that rivers were on fire and whole communities were being poisoned. Now, we regularly see bald eagles flying over head. But we still haven’t figured out how human beings can live without destroying everything else.

And, then there’s education: A Nation at Risk was written in 1982 and I am watching its influence play out now, nearly 30 years later. That report was all about what students didn’t know and that’s what we are busy trying to test now. There was little concern for what they could do or whether they could think and how schools could foster more critical, creative problem solvers. I wonder how long it will take to see any influence from current reform efforts as the slow educational pendulum continues its eternal swinging?

Technology was not absent from my classroom when I started teaching in 1988. They were very old school: film strips, film reels, an overhead projector and an oft-used record and cassette player. I did have a computer in my room…an early macintosh that was used with a laser printer to desktop publish the school newspaper. It was hidden away in the back room. There was no Internet, just the Reader’s Guide to Periodical Literature, most of which we did not have access to. Yet, we learned together with the materials we had. Much of the technologies supported my presentations as a teacher. But they also provided creative outlets for my students. My students used the analog video camera to make public service advertisements. After cleaning the strips in chlorine, they used pens to draw their own film strips. We listened to music as part of our poetry unit and watched the movie versions of Shakespeare’s work which added an interactive element to what was often a text-only approach to literature. I didn’t really think about it as “technology,” the way we talk about digital technologies today, but was glad to have choices related to how I could present and have students interact with information.

The excitement today, I think, is what students can do with the technology. Creating film strips and analog videos seem like cave writing in comparison to digital videos and interactive web sites. My worry? That all this great technology is still mostly being used to enhance teacher presentations and kids don’t get much chance to do their own creation and interaction. I was glad to see that several of my pre-service teachers this semester adopted Google Maps for their lesson projects and allowed students to do the creation. You could argue that it’s not that innovative since teachers have been doing map work with students forever. But what a step away from the flat views with their colored pencil hatch marks. Add markers, draw lines, zoom in and out, check out the terrain, the possibilities are endless.

I’m a huge fan of Google Maps as a great example of the interactivity that I think is really the innovative part of digital technologies. I used it recently to plan and execute my recent walking tour of Denver. I created the map on my laptop, pulled audio from the Denver Story Trek website, and then moved everything to my phone. (Don’t get me started on my phone…I really am in love with my Droid.)


View Denver in a larger map

It’s been an interesting time to be alive. Technologically, watching the world move from analog to digital must be a similar experience to the generation that went from horse-drawn wagons to automobiles. I’ve seen great cultural shifts as well particularly in terms of individual rights. The landmark civil rights legislation was signed when I was a toddler. And while it didn’t pass, the Equal Rights Amendment was part of the milieu as I came to adulthood in the 70s. I’ve grown up surrounded by conversations about race, gender, and sexual orientation and while we are a long way from answers in any of those areas, we’re moving in a positive direction I think as we learn to think of each other as individuals first and then members of particular groups second. We’re complex beings whose identities are woven from disparate threads.

I’ll close with the weirdest thing about being this age: the President of the United States is my age! And, I graduated from William and Mary with John Stewart. My generation is moving in to the leadership, joining but also changing the establishment while the next generation breathes down our necks.

Musing About History

Leave a reply

I have been doing more blogging over at In One Place, my mostly about reading blog. I’m participating in the 75-book-challenge at LibraryThing so I’ve been reading a lot in varied areas. Two recent books made comments that struck me as connected to ideas about education. These are not fleshed out ideas, but rather gut reactions: thinking out loud. Here’s the first one…

The Age of Chivalryis a National Geographic Book about the middle ages, moving from 300 to 1450 AD. The last essay in the book focuses on the Hanseatic League, which I certainly don’t remember from my history courses. Thank goodness for Wikipedia! There is a photo of the Cologne cathedral, which took nearly 600 years to complete (1248 – 1880) with a 300-year break in the work. I was struck by the sense of history, of shared community over time that led people to finish the work of their ancestors. I was reminded that each day I walk on a 300-year-old campus, literally in the steps of American giants. I’m not sure my beloved institution is joining the 21st century as quickly as I would like but they may feel a responsibility for defending those three centuries of tradition.

And that may not be a completely terrible thing. I don’t think our contemporary culture values the lessons of history or the connections created by shared traditions enough. Instead, we see them as outdated, old fashioned even. The builders in Cologne didn’t tear down the medieval cathedral; instead, they added to it, following the original plans but using updated building techniques. Even into the 21st century, Cologne is preserving history, deciding in 2005 to ban development around the cathedral. I know that some people see it as a monument to an oppressive, unappealing past and would be happy to leave it behind, but tradition and history still has something to offer, including beautiful monuments to the beliefs of our ancestors.

Living in the Grey Area

Leave a reply

There’s been a theme to my reading this week: technology is neither all good nor all bad.  In the midst of all the amazing discoveries with their potential to increase human knowledge, understanding and community, there are negative consequences that we must take into consideration.

It began with an article in Forbes about Technologies That Hurt Us.  The article draws on the work of David Friedman whose book Future Imperfect: Technology And Freedom In An Uncertain World discusses the potential dangers of a variety of technologies including biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence.  The ultimate danger, according to Friedman, is human extinction.  Quite an unintended consequence, isn’t it?  The article also focused on more mundane negative physical consequences of technology such as the kid who spends the summer playing video games and then heads to the first day of football practice only to get hurt.  Or, the Wii tennis players who don’t get the breaks found in the “real” game so end up getting a much more difficult workout.  The recommendation from orthopedic surgeons is simple: warm up before you fire up the Wii and, if more sedentary video games are your style, be sure to move around now and then.  As for Friedman and his dire warnings, he says that the answer is not to stop technology:

The benefits of owning a smarter computer than the next guy, for example, are just too great. “This train doesn’t have brakes, and from my perspective at least, the main thing to do is not to say, ‘Should we encourage it, or should we stop it?’ ” Friedman says. Instead Friedman suggests two questions: “Where can we guess this technology will lead, and if we get there, what should we do?”

I was reminded of this article when I read Wes Fryer’s post about the end of his game of Travian.  He described an alliance member who spent so much time playing the game that it took a negative toll on his health.  In the end, he didn’t win but he did get a mention in the letter.  I guess only he can decide if it was worth it.

Then, there’s the whole question of whether the Internet is making us dumb.  Nicholas Carr’s lengthy article in The Atlantic described his concerns about how the Internet was changing his reading habits.  It’s something that Will Richardson has also discussed in response to Carr’s article.  Carr recognizes the grey areas in his argument as he describes the skeptics who accompanied every major technological development: Socrates worried about the effect of writing on memory and humanists worried that the printing press would lead to laziness and revolution.  Yet, these technologies have had amazingly positive influences on human knowledge and learning.  In the end, though, Carr comes down on the side of deep reading.  He writes, “As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.”  Yet, in a recent New York Times article, Damon Darlin defends the use of Google as a technology that actually frees our mind.  He writes, “Over the course of human history, writing, printing, computing and Googling have only made it easier to think and communicate.” He comes down on the side of the optimists who believe in human improvement.

I am reminded once again that we are living in a grey area, trying to find a balance between the positive and negative effects of the technology that surrounds us.  And, as educators, we need to have these conversations with out students.

Since this post is probably already too long for most of you, I’ll write about my own reading experiences later but here’s a teaser: my own reading still involves books, although they are mostly fiction, and I find that I can still do lengthy reading as long as I can have a pencil, either analog or digital, in my hand.

A Pragmatist In a Progressive World

Leave a reply

This year, I have the opportunity to be part of an online professional learning community.  While I will be taking on the role of facilitator, I believe this will be as much a learning experience for me as well as for the other participants.  And, the opportunity has already gotten me thinking about where I fit into the sometimes confusing but always intriguing world of “educational technology.”

Here’s what I know:

Educational technology is about much more than just technology.  In a way, technology is the easy part.  It’s easy for me to show you how to use a flip camera to capture video or a digital microscope to find Abraham Lincoln on a penny.  It’s easy for me to post a link to a wonderful interactive website.  And while all these things may be cool, most teachers want more than just cool.  They want to know that the time and energy it is going to take them to set up microscopes or plug in projectors or to have them or their students create videos will have some positive influence on their students and their learning.  That’s the hard part: helping teachers figure out how to use these technologies in powerful ways in their classrooms.  So, while I may like to explore new technologies myself, my focus with others is on the educational part.  How/why/when to use those computers and gadgets and websites to improve teaching and learning.  This might seem like an elementary idea, but I still go to lots of “educational technology” presentations at conferences where the heavy emphasis is on the technology rather than the education.

Here’s what else I know:

I have a deeply held bias. I believe that technology offers ways to improve teaching and learning.  Even if it’s only because it engages the kids in ways that textbooks and lectures and worksheets do not.  And, most of the educators I talk to seem to share this two-part belief with me.  Part one: technology engages kids.  Part two: engaged kids are better learners.  But they also share a concern about doing it the right way.  They don’t want to just use technology for technology’s sake.  And, I find myself working with them in very practical ways.  Have you thought about using a smartboard to let your kids interact with a sentence?  Do you know that you can put a video in a powerpoint presentation to show to your kids?  Have you accessed the data from the student response system to better differentiate instruction? Have you considered having your students create a digital video or multimedia presentation as an alternative assessment?

I also use this practical approach when I work with technology coaches and school administrators in helping them to encourage technology use.  I’ve created a presentation called Strategies for the Non-Choir.  It draws from Rogers’ work in diffusions of innovations as well as Mishra and Koehler’s Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) model to provide coaches with ideas for how to approach the early and late majority adopters who, according to Rogers, make up some 68% of the population.  I talk to the coaches about the need to consider the relative advantage of a technology as well as how compatible it is with what the strategies already used by a teacher.  In addition, as part of the workshop, we play the TPACK game where we match technologies, pedagogies, and content areas to come up with ideas for using technology in the classroom.

So, I am very much a pragmatist, trying to work with teachers where I find them, helping them use technologies in ways that support what they are doing in their classrooms.  This is a viewpoint that is often in direct opposition to the visionaries in the educational technology blogosphere.  They tend to be progressives who are looking past the current times to a different world where powerful technologies support student-centered, constructivist learning.  One of my favorites, Tim over at Assorted Stuff, summarizes the viewpoint quite nicely, I think:

The powerful tools we now have available make it possible to go way beyond simple reinforcing what we’re already doing. They provide communications links that enable teachers and students to connect with and learn from the world.

If all we do with the computers and networks put in our schools over the past decade is multiply the status quo, then we’ve wasted a lot of money, time and effort.

I know much of the crap I write is very idealistic, maybe even unrealistic. But while we are making small incremental changes, it would be nice to keep a vision of what education could and should be in the viewfinders.

I don’t disagree with Tim.  And I admire his idealism. I am also always inspired by Sheryl Nussbaum Beach. One of Sheryl’s most recent posts over at 21st Century Learning gives some great examples of how are kids are learning to learn on their own, and she calls to us to roll up our sleeves and get to work on creating a learning environment for them.  I try to keep her vision in my mind and for awhile I move into that progressive world.

But then I go to a school or talk to a teacher and hear about the sorts of barriers–time, access, not to mention high-stakes testing–that they face and how excited they get when someone gives them an interactive whiteboard or even just a projector and the pragmatist returns.   To borrow a phrase from Tyack and Cuban, we are “tinkering toward utopia.”  I think I’m more the tinkerer, standing with a wrench in my hand, rather than the utopian, envisioning the future.

Including Punctuation?

1 Reply

Just got a notice from Amazon that because I purchased other books in the technology and society category, I might be interested in Mark Bauerlein’s new book, The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future. Here’s the product description: “This shocking, lively exposure of the intellectual vacuity of todays under thirty set reveals the disturbing and, ultimately, incontrovertible truth: cyberculture is turning us into a nation of know-nothings.”

So, the old English teacher that lives inside me cringed. Is it possible that you could use big words like “vacuity” and “incontrovertible” and still miss the apostrophe in “todays”? I reminded her (the old English teacher) that not everyone was so uptight about grammar and punctuation and maybe, through the disuse of the apostrophe, we were just watching a natural evolution of the language, like standardized spelling in earlier centuries. She suggested that it was simply another example of the intellectual vacuity that this book describes. It goes right along with Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, a book which explores a similar theme of the anti-intellectualism and anti-rationalism rampant in our culture.

It’s too nice outside to ponder this much more but it’s a question that haunts me sometimes and leads to these psychophrenic conversations with my inner English teacher. Is that missing apostrophe simply a sign of a sloppy copy editor? Or, is it a more ominous trend towards utter disregard for the rules that have governed our language, a disregard that I think Bauerlein and Jacoby believe is widespread. That apostrophe is just the tip of the “smart is bad” iceberg, the kind of thing that leads to those “my kid can beat up your honor student” bumper stickers.