Ideas and Thoughts from an EdTech

This post is not intended to spark a debate about religion or Christianity but rather draw attention to an analogy that might be helpful for some. I hope it’s a useful comparison of two huge societal shifts.

I had the pleasure of hearing Bruxy Cavey speak on Friday. Bruxy is a pastor and author of the book The End of Religion. The premise of his book revolves around Jesus’ attempt to stop religion, tradition and liturgy from being the foundations of belief and spirituality. He makes a compelling case for Christs’ desire for people to be free from the law and experience a life built around a person rather than a set of rules.

“What Jesus came to establish was a subversive spirituality outside the boundary markers of traditional religion, and in the process he made religion itself obsolete.”

As he was speaking I couldn’t help think of two educators: Stephen Downes and Clay Burell. Stephen has for a long time given up on the hope that schools in their current state can possibly achieve a true level of personal learning. His and others idea of deschooling is one that for most gets a nod but is quickly tossed aside as “it’s-not-going-to-happen-so-why-bother”. Clay’s unschooliness theme runs through his blog and I’ve stolen his quote many times to say I don’t like school but love learning.

“Personal Learning comes as a subversive education model outside the boundary markers of traditional schooling, and in the process makes school itself obsolete.”

So as I listened to Bruxy I was amazed at the number of connections between his idea about religion and my own beliefs about school. Without getting into too much detail about his talk and book, it became apparent to me that what many are fighting for is to not necessarily abandon school but to eliminate the structure and traditions of school that interfere with learning. This is hard work. Bruxy does many things to remove religion from his own church. Witness his recent podcast with the friendly atheist.

Because everyone on the planet has virtually all come to think of school and learning synonymously, it’s difficult for many to see beyond the structure of school. The people of the New Testament experienced the same thing when it came to religion. They only knew about God in the context of religious structure, not all of which was bad, but it had become the focal point of spiritual life and to tamper with it was blasphemous. Jesus is relentless in pointing out the hypocrisies.

Clay and Stephen and others do this often and often with contrary results. While I know Stephen has largely given up on schools but there is hope. Those of us working inside these institutions recognize that the boundaries imposed on us by the very structure of the organizations aren’t very effective. The structure of current schools was developed largely in an industrial age where it met a particular need at a particular time. So too did the religious structures. Jesus came to change that. In schools our need for change is precipitated by many things certainly access to information and people being a major force. Just as with many churches that are not purely focused on their religiosity, neither are all schools focused on schooliness. There are moments, individuals and leaders looking to make school more about learning and less about structure. When it comes to my specific role as someone charged with making technology seamless in our schools, it’s clear to me that just as there are those bound by structures of school there are those who see often see technology as the structure we ought to believe in. At times I’m guilty of this.

I need to see that learning is the goal. Okay so this may seem obvious but in the daily grind it’s easy to become the Pharisees of modern education. We have difficulty when students don’t respond to school the way we think they ought to. Personal learning has little place in many of our classrooms. The frustrations of those of us who recognize this hypocrisy grows every day. We are looking for someone who can change this. Someone with authority who can break down the traditions and structure that so often bind us from what learning should look like. There are certainly glimmers of hope.

Back to Bruxy. He was asked at the end of his talk, “How do you justify working in a church when you seem to be saying that Christ came to end religion?”. His answer was that it’s not that churches in themselves are bad, structure has its place but believing that the structure itself will save you is where you run into trouble.

He finished by giving the example of a thirsty person licking the outside of the water bottle. Obviously ridiculous. But the bottle represents the structure. What we really want is inside the bottle. Can this be true of schools? If so, no wonder our students are often left unsatisfied and go through the motions of what they think we want from them.

I’m sure you can poke holes in this analogy, but for me I was challenged but this idea and can’t help but doing a little pattern recognition and also practicing what Stephen preaches about expanding your network of ideas.

Technorati Tags: bruxycavey, themeetinghouse, clayburell, stephendownes, personallearing, endofreligion

There’s been a recent uprise in Diigo. I have been aware of it for some time but haven’t seen any reason to use it. So a number of folks in my network have been raving about it and since they act as my filters, I thought I’d give it a go.

As I signed up, I was taken to a page that ask if I wanted to see if I had “friends already on Diigo”. I logged into my gmail account and it displayed quite a number of my contacts already on Diigo. I simply clicked Add to Friends. What I didn’t notice until it was too late, was that below this list was the list of all my contacts not on Diigo. By default all these contacts were checked and so now all my contacts received a request from me to join Diigo. This is in effect spam. Thanks a lot Diigo.

Diigo may be a great service and I’m sure it is but I have spent much of my day responding to emails from people who think I’ve spammed them…which I have. Here’s one in particular that I received from someone I don’t know well but have had the occasional encounter.

Although I appreciate the thought, I would prefer if you would not use my email address in this manner without my consent. I am very careful with my email address and who I give it to and your casual use of it in this manner, although seemingly innocent enough, may result in my address being added to lists that I am not comfortable with.

In the future, if you have something that you think I would be interested in please contact me directly. Thanks for respecting my wishes regarding this situation. TTYL.

Earlier, my father calls me wondering what he’s supposed to do. Sorry Dad for spamming you. Diigo adds this little tag at the end of their invitation:

We’re still working every day to improve Diigo. We hope you’ll like Diigo. We do. And, it’s only going to get better!

I’m rethinking this service. It may be petty but this just seems like a no-brainer. You have a simple thing to improve that I think you could have figured out from the beginning. Don’t check my entire contact list by default! I have a bad taste in my mouth and it’s going to take a lot to de-sour me.

To all my contacts….my apologies.

Technorati Tags: diigo, spam

A dear friend of our family is in the battle of his life. Dr. George Falk is about to undergo some major cancer surgery next week. If you don’t know George, you must know that his passion and energy is contagious. Think of your most inspirational teacher and that’s George. He has inspired many and played a major role in helping our eldest daughter pursue a career in music.

Currently he’s at the Royal University Hospital in Saskatoon awaiting surgery next week. My daughter Meredith composed and performed this song as a tribute to George. The story she tells is one that we’ve shared many times about her wanting to quit choir and he ended up not only convincing her to stay on, but also join another choir. That’s George. So Here’s to You.

 

 Here's To You: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I’ve heard people claim that moving to digital learning can help eliminate “the dog ate my homework excuse.”

My daughter’s shar pei, snagged my 2.0 GB SD memory card and destroyed it. Let that be another lesson for all you kids out there.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Once again a tweet inspired me. This time it’s Mark Wagner at a conference presentation in California:

Will Richardson’s been talking for a while about having teachers examine their learning. Not necessarily their professional development but their personal learning. For many reasons, this is a major challenge. For people that are in the business of learning, it can be really difficult to engage in this discussion at times. Perhaps because of the busyness, the daily grind, the pressure of teaching, teachers have a difficult time recognizing the need to learn beyond the subject areas and pedagogies they spend much of their day grappling with.

So I understand the frustration and in a sense, ground breaking idea of teachers thinking about personal learning. Without this discussion, our ideas of learning are inevitably confined to the structures and traditions of school. Thinking about the last time you planned a trip, researched a political candidate, compared vehicles you wanted to purchase or tried to learn a new instrument.  What did that look like?

I wonder if these two ideas are somewhat at odds?

• “Teachers do not need to learn the technology in order for kids to use them.”
• “Teachers need to model effective use of technology”

Will may not have said it explicitly but the personal learning he talks about involves using the tools of today to maximize learning. Connecting with experts, social networking, publishing ideas are all part of what effective learning looks like. While more and more teachers get this, they really don’t get it for themselves. They want their kids to blog, but they don’t. They want their kids to connect with others but they don’t. They want kids to use all kids of technologies, but they don’t.

I never was all that impressed with Physical Education teachers who were out of shape. It didn’t make sense. They are supposed to be advocates for healthy lifestyles and need to model that. Fortunately most do and those are the ones that will likely have the most impact on kids. Come to think of it, that’d be an interesting piece of research.

If learning is personal, there has to be an element of selfishness. Teachers aren’t very selfish in this area. I’ve posted the Big Ideas of Digital Learning on our school district’s website. I use Will’s Ten Things we May Need to Unlearn idea:

We need to unlearn the notion that our students don’t need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.

That’s way harder than it sounds. Silent reading advocates always demand teachers read with their kids. I was one of those guilty of grading papers or planning when I should have been reading. I guess I just didn’t think it was all that important. I was wrong.

I’ve always been an advocate for teachers to take stuff home and personalize it. That’s how I learned. That’s why today I have a hard time separating professional and personal learning. If I learn a new technique in videography, I play with and use it with my friends or family. It’s not long before eventually I bring it to teachers and students as a new tool.

If you’re a classroom teacher, tell me how do you show your kids how you learn?

Technorati Tags: markwagner, willrichardson, pln

Powered by ScribeFire.

I’ve also appreciated the use of time lapse photography. From watching a flower bloom to the changing of seasons, it’s a powerful technique.

I checked my Canon SD750 and realized it had the feature. So let’s give it a try.

I set it up tonight while I prepared a meal for my family and our friends. The total time of preparation was about 50 minutes. I set the time lapse to shoot every 2 seconds. What you have is about 2 minutes which I cut down to about 80 seconds. If you look carefully you should see a spill, boy in underwear and puppies.

This will prove to be a valuable tool for me. Check your digital camera and see if you can do time lapse. I think it’s very cool.

Powered by ScribeFire.

A local principal told me today she had to suspend 20 students from computer privileges for inappropriate use of school computers. Primarily Facebook. Specifically some of these students were engaging with bullying others socializing. She also suggested most of these student’s parents do not understand the implications of their actions, let alone what facebook is or does.

While my initial reaction was to suggest alternate ways to handle the socializing, the bullying of course raises another issue. She did ask our IT guys to considering blocking Facebook. He was not prepared to make that call. We discussed it later and would certainly like to pursue educational opportunities.

I quickly fired up a tweet and received this responses(for those that do not understand twitter, it only allows 140 characters, thus the IMspeak) :

• cburell @shareski I’d be interested to read a post about that. If they violate AUP, how is it different from any other misbehavior?
• Durff @shareski I would revoke until they had passed bullying curriculum and parental meeting…then when they graduate from tha
• kwhobbes @shareski get them to explore the effects of bullying - do some interviews with people bullied, look at bullying in the media, seek out info
• kwhobbes @shareski work with them on the issue - on their own time. As for the socializing, isn’t that WHY most kids come to school?
• cathyjo @shareski where else but at school in safe env can kids learn to use FB & MS SN sites. Banning not the anser IMHO. Thy’ll jst do it @ hme.
• courosa @shareski: Bullying is against the law in jurisdictions, so let the law deal with, at the same time, let’s educate them, design a program.
• briangrenier @shareski Take away their Math books! No that doesn’t make sense either. Have them create and post a digital anti-bullying ad.
• lucychili @shareski the medium is not the message/problem
• duckie @shareski teachable moment -can they regain their privileges?I’m not to concerned about the social part just the bully part
• plivings @shareski - bullying .and. socialize - these 2 things should be separate and have separate responses imo
• mctoonish @shareski If it was just to socialize I would argue that that could be a part of learning. The bullying part changes everything IMO

All great responses and once again, the value of the network is evident. (For those still not convinced twitter has merit, how else would you get this type of response so fast? Grant it, these are bursts of support but still they are helpful to me) Definitely these are 2 separate issues and honestly I didn’t get all the details so I’m not sure how the students were dealt with individually. The information given by the principal was limited as this was not the intent of our conversation. But I’m trying to develop a response to this for future reference.

The cyberbullying one for me is almost the easier one to deal with. Part education, part consequence, part responsibility. This may involve the law as Alec suggests but certainly requires a well thought out response. The socialization one is the tough one. As Kelly writes, that’s why they come to school. I’ve talked with our administrators and teachers about social learning and its importance. I’m sure most don’t consider the use of tools like IM and Facebook to be a part of formal social learning. The problem is the lines between personal, professional and educational socialization is blurring. Twitter for example, combines the personal and the professional as well as any tool. Even bloggers get personal from time to time and that’s a good thing. Good teachers have always understood this but today we are more compelled to figure this out. I remember spending classtime talking about their personal issues be it sports, or the current event of the day that impacted them. I also recognized that as students worked together, they would engage in conversation not directly related to the work they were doing. And yes, they got off track and had to be drawn back to focus on the task at hand. But I could never think I could eliminate their efforts to socialize.

We have to consider how to provide learning environments where students can learn and socialize at the same time. As we move to a more personalized learning model it only makes sense. How we do this and how we help teachers get comfortable with this is a challenging task. Obviously, many are not ready to shift to personalized learning. But if we continue to ban these tools be it via filtering or simply classroom rules, we perpetuate the notion of irrelevant learning.

What does a learning environment look like where students can use things like IM or Facebook or text messaging in both an educational and social context?

[tags]facebook,contentfiltering,twitter,school,education[/tags]

Powered by ScribeFire.

Alan inspired me to spend a bit more time with Voice Thread than I had a month or so ago. This is a test using images from Flickr and the movie being shot at our house. Might be a great way to ask questions, leave comments or whatever.

[tags]cogdog,alanlevine,voicethread,finnonthefly,movie,shareski,digitalstories[/tags]