Yesterday I was asked by a good friend and mentor the following question: “What’s next?” And it made me stop and think, I guess since I don’t have a Ph.D. and I’m in “IT” I should be thinking about an administrative position, right? I mean you can’t be an instructional technologist forever, right? It’s just a position you take until you become a bonafide administrator or decide to head back into teaching, it’s a liminal identity that ultimately one must surrender to make more money or have more independence or have a bit more power, right?

Well, I answered quite frankly that I really don’t want to do anything else. I do not want to be an administrator, it would completely divorce me from where my particular strengths lie: getting people excited about what they do and helping them muster the courage to experiment wildly. I really, really like what I do a lot, and I think I’m pretty good at it. In fact, I’m better at it than I have been at anything else I have ever done, perhaps with the exception of watching movies. But, there’s no future in it, right?  I mean, come on Reverend, you’re an instructional technologist for Christ’s sake. I’d say 99.99999999999% percent of the population has no idea what that title means, and 99.9% of the instructional technologists aren’t too sure either. Well, that’s what I am, and the more I look around the world of educational technology the prouder I am of this fact. But thinking of how to articulate this idea was immediately daunting. I really don’t have the energy at the moment to write it all up or re-think why I need to say how this question has moved me to the point of reflection and deep consideration.

Well, luckily I don’t have to, because Matt Gold (a dear friend) did something special for me today. He pointed me to a post I wrote almost a year ago that addresses this question head-on. It’s a post I had all but forgotten about, yet he remembered it and commented upon it this very evening (when I needed it most) as if he were intentionally pushing me to re-read it–which his too kind comments actually did. So, taking my inspiration from Matt I am going to “radically re-use” my own thoughts from an old post to answer the question of what an instructional technologist is, at least in my feeble mind. (As an aside, I don’t think I have ever realized the full power of blogging my ideas regularly for the last three years until this evening, where my own ideas come back to lift my spirits in a existential moment of uncertainty and exhaustion, so thank you Matt from the bottom of my heart!)

_______________

What is an instructional technologist?

The difficulty of such a question is in many ways tied up with the larger problems with such a conference as EDUCAUSE, and actually framed quite clearly the heart of the presentation Gardner Campbell and I gave yesterday: it all depends on whether you want to focus on teaching and learning within a community or the ease and efficiency of administrating a system?

The answer to this question will ultimately decide whether or not one professor or ten professors or an entire campus is willing to use dynamic, loosely joined open source tools like WPMu, Drupal, MediaWiki, etc. If the focus is on administration and not teaching and learning than an enterprise, “turn-key” solution like BlackBoard will work perfectly. And you can spend all your time talking about the technical details of the proprietary system’s latest features or even its unbelievably bad “blog” and “wiki” building blocks, or how “open” it pretends to be, etc. I really can’t (or rather won’t) argue with anyone on this count, for the two ideas are conceptual forks in an approach to the digital landscape of education. But if and when one chooses the enterprise CMS more times than not that choice has more to do with administration than teaching and learning. And as a result of such a choice the role of the instructional technologist is effectively limited to routinized training that demonstrates the limited capabilities of any one system. All of which effectively makes the instructional technologist an administrative assistant providing technical help. It is the still birth of a profession that is still gestating. Little or no imagination goes into this process and the limits of possibility are always already defined by the technology mandated. A position that should be exploratory and imaginative is reduced to the administrative realm in the name of efficiency and doing the greatest good for the largest number.

Let me be entirely clear here, an instructional technologist should not, I repeat should not, be an administrator. To conflate the roll of an instructional technologist with administrative work is to sap it of its transformative vitality. Instructional technologists should do three things, and do them well: 1) work closely with faculty on imagining possibilities, 2) live within the latest technologies and 3) imagine and experiment with possibilities regularly. The less time an instructional technologists spends thinking about administering a system, the more time he or she can actually do these three things. This is, without question, the reason why WordPress Multi-user has been so appealing for UMW. The administrative onus is shifted to the teacher and the student. They have their own space that they control. It becomes their charge to think through the possibilities of the system, rather than being told how it works. They have to discover what works, how it works, and why it works. It is this transformative process that is all too often relegated to system managers rather than intelligent people who live in the interstitial spaces of ideas and imagination like students and instructors. It is in this liminal spaces of thinking through and imagining what such a tool can do (rather than being overly concerned with how to actually do it) that our work happens. This is when the possibilities are imagined and old conceptions and new directions coalesce and by extension morph.

In my current job I don’t administer UMW Blogs, I build community and interact with both professors and students on a regular basis. I’m not so much concerned with the technology (and if an instructional technologist isn’t—should students and faculty be?), rather I am an interested and engaged participant in the transparent intellectual life of the university. That is what an instructional technologist must do! There is no other definition that makes sense. The conversations about teaching and learning’s intersection with technology is the inspiration undergirding what has been taking place for the last several years at Mary Washington, and has in many ways fueled the transformation through a larger grass roots effort. The change starts with a conversation, not with a directive. The transformation is imagined, not administered.

Which leads me to my final musings on this topic after the presentation. The point at which I start administering systems or training folks on BlackBoard on a regular basis is the moment I walk away from this occupation. There really is no reason why anyone off the street who has read the respective CMS manual can’t do that as well as me. And I would gladly defer to them. To become an administrator and/or to fashion oneself as a leader means to often extract yourself from the actual relations that are the basis for re-imagining the space of teaching and learning. Why aren’t instructional technologists understood as something other than either one of these categories? You don’t need to be a leader to be a great instructional technologist who catalyzes change in an environment. Moreover, you really shouldn’t be administering anything because it would be taxing the invaluable time spent imagining and exploring the innumerable possibilities of these tools with faculty.

There is no question we are in an absolutely fascinating moment of flux in this field, and what becomes ever more apparent is that the role of the instructional technologist at campuses is understood as transitional at best. A job that will prepare you for a directorship, a higher degree, or some other administrative position in IT. Such a conception of this crucial role is in many ways defined by the hierarchical system of academia much like teaching and learning with technology is defined by learning management systems like BlackBoard: it’s limited in its structural imagination. While I was speaking with people at the conference about their own situations and the administrative route of academia I became evermore certain that budgets, meetings, and management more generally are important for numerous reasons, but in the end often compete with the time-intensive work of fostering conversation and inspiring imagination throughout the community more generally about teaching and learning with technology. And while the right management can foster the conditions for this conversation, the point is that what we are talking about is doing it, not constantly re-visiting the fact that technology and pedagogy “might” have a future on campus. For that is in many ways a given, it is the type of experience a professor or student imagines where a majority of the work still needs to be done. That is the invaluable role of an instructional technologist, and he or she may very well be one of the most crucial figures on college campuses today.

Yet, the position has been circumscribed and denigrated by IT directives and administrative exigencies to the point that this desperately needed space for freedom and experimentation on campuses around the world has become one of obedience, fear, and “service.” And I put service in quotes here because while my role is to serve the faculty and students, as well as to foster a community of openness, tolerance, and exploration (which I value dearly, and firmly believe is the role of everyone who works on a college campus–or in education more generally), an instructional technologist can only accomplish this in their particular field by being granted the freedom to follow their own imaginative and critical ideas about this constantly emergent space. Right now, this is seldom the case, and to be quite frank with you, I have seen the other possibilities out there, and they are meager at best. Mary Washington is one of very few models for what an instructional technology outfit should be doing on a college campus, and the UMW professors are arguably the best example of how faculty should be partnering with instructional technologists to explore the implications of the changing landscape of publishing, discourse, media, and socially created knowledge that everywhere surrounds us.

Instructional Technologists of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your BlackBoard chains!

Disrupting Class is definitely in my top few from the past few years.  The book has changed the way I think about education and education change.  It has provided a road map for the future.  Models to experiment with, and a clear way to test those models of change.

I want this post to be short and sweet, so here’s a quick list of highlights.

• Christensen defines how businesses are displaced by disruptive technologies in the theory of disruptive innovation: The MiniComputer by the PC/MAC; The SLR camera by the The Kodak point and shoot camera; and the vacuum tube radio by the transistor radio.  Christensen sees that online learning that is customized by the learner style is the future and predicts that “by 2019, about 50% of high school courses will be offered online” (p. 98).
• We should all be offering online courses to our students and testing alternatives in our existing schools is places where there is no competition such as APs and/or classes that are not offered already.
• To truly see the change, we will need to have school created outside the dominant system, such as charter and private schools where schools can be left to experiment and define this new type of schooling, find success and then bring it back to mainstream schools.  His business example is the Toyota Prius that was created in an external business unit and then brought back into Toyota’s factories to be built.

When I look back, a number of books fit in the changing my lens on education: Good to Great helped me see the importance of leaders and structures of successful organization planning; Now, Discover Your Strengths helped me see my strengths and how to best use them; Cluetrain Manifesto and The World is Flat helped me see the power of openness and how Internet communications have changed the world;  In A Whole New Mind, Dan Pink helped me see that the types of skills traditional schools teach are the building blocks, but not the end game skills that our students need; and now Disrupting Class has has given me the lens of effective organizational change.  All of these books provide unique and simple ways of looking at problems, clear and articulate writing that include stories as examples, and significant basis in human development and psychology.

Christensen ends the book by stating,

“These technologies and organizational innovations are not threats.  They are exciting opportunities to make learning intrinsically motivating, that make teaching professionally rewarding, and that transform our schools from being economic and political liabilities to sources of solutions and strength.

Thanks, Clayton Christensen, for inspiring me.  I look forward to testing your theories.  Thanks to Vinnie Vrotny for the recommendation.

For all of you, head to Amazon and pick this one up.

Michael Wesch just posted an amazing reflection on his experience in the classroom. He’s frustrated by the lack of engagement, the scattered engagement. The education through “soul murder.”

My teaching assistants consoled me by noting that students have learned that they can “get by” without paying attention in their classes. Perhaps feeling a bit encouraged by my look of incredulity, my TA’s continued with a long list of other activities students have learned that they can “get by” without doing. Studying, taking notes, reading the textbook, and coming to class topped the list. It wasn’t the list that impressed me. It was the unquestioned assumption that “getting by” is the name of the game. Our students are so alienated by education that they are trying to sneak right past it.

and, BINGO!

They tell us, first of all, that despite appearances, our classrooms have been fundamentally changed. There is literally something in the air, and it is nothing less than the digital artifacts of over one billion people and computers networked together collectively producing over 2,000 gigabytes of new information per second. While most of our classrooms were built under the assumption that information is scarce and hard to find, nearly the entire body of human knowledge now flows through and around these rooms in one form or another, ready to be accessed by laptops, cellphones, and iPods. Classrooms built to re-enforce the top-down authoritative knowledge of the teacher are now enveloped by a cloud of ubiquitous digital information where knowledge is made, not found, and authority is continuously negotiated through discussion and participation. In short, they tell us that our walls no longer mark the boundaries of our classrooms.

One of the use-cases for UCalgaryBlogs.ca is for a class to integrate external resources such as OpenLearn courses, or potentially anything that has an RSS feed, to be ingested into the class blogsite. Currently, there are 2 scenarios possible for doing this, each with their own specific benefits, but neither quite matching what I think would make for a more powerful way to contextualize these external resources within the activities of a course.

With the VERY sweet OpenLearn Republisher plugin, you can set up a set of Sources (courses on OpenLearn, etc…) to be pulled into an installation of WordPress Multiuser. The OpenLearn plugin creates a new blog for each Source, and sucks down all items in the provided RSS feed into that blog, and creates blog Posts for each item.

OpenLearn Course Importing Plugin Workflow

The benefit of this is a set of centralized blog sites for each course, which could be shared across multiple courses. But that’s also the big downside of this model - what if you want to contextualize the content differently for each course that’s using it? If you didn’t want to do that, why not just use the online OpenLearn hosted version of the course?

With FeedWordPress (or wp-o-matic) you can pull RSS feeds into a single course blogsite, and all items will be published as blog Posts within that site. Categories can be set up and inherited to help organize the imported content.

FeedWordPress RSS Importing Workflow

But, if the activity of the course takes place as blog Posts, it becomes mixed in with any content imported from the external resources. Conversation and content become merged.

Ideally, a course blogsite would use the Pages feature to manage “content” - the stuff the conversations refer to - and use the blog Posts for the activity and conversation of the course. As such, I think it would be more effective to have the content from external resources be ingested into a blogsite as Pages, created within the hierarchy of pages (select a parent page, and a full table of contents structure is generated as needed).

Ideal open content ingestor workflow

I’m not sure if that’s possible now with the available tools, but I think we’re getting REALLY close to a powerful open content contextualization platform - ingesting prepared resources for use within the spatial and temporal contexts of a course.

Ideally, the power and features of OpenLearn Republisher, with the ability to designate the “host” blog for the ingested content (or have it create new blogsites as needed), and to create Pages rather than Posts. It’s VERY close, and it’s got the potential to change how people interact with (open) content.

Karyn Romeis responded to my South African reflection by linking to her own African tale. Her words struck a chord because I returned from Africa (South Africa and Kenya) only a few weeks ago, and my experiences there profoundly changed me as a teacher and a human being. Her entry took me back to many schools and classrooms that I visited in Kenya as part of the Teachers Without Borders-Canada project.

Here’s a link to Karyn’s entry and to a version I annotated using Diigo.

I’ve been reading Postman and Weingartner’s Teaching as a Subversive Activity (more info), and I’m finding myself extremely drawn into it. It’s the kind of book that I may have read as an undergrad, but just wasn’t ready for. It’s the kind of book where you need to be ready to really engage with it before it makes sense. And it’s the kind of book that has me rethinking pretty much everything, and seeing new patterns everywhere. The book was written before I was born, and published only a few months before I was. But it feels so intrinsically relevant and important today - maybe moreso now than in 1969.

One of the chapters is describing inquiry, and what an honest adoption of inquiry would mean for curriculum, education, and society at large. What does it mean when curriculum isn’t predefined, and must be pulled from individuals and groups through the act of questioning, and the process of making sense? What does that look like?

Although much of it rings as important, even critical, to adopt in education, I think a full-scale adoption of inquiry would require more than just a tweak of the education system - it would require essentially nuking every concept of curriculum, and assessment, which would in turn require nuking large parts of entire educational institutions (and non-educational ones as well) and rebuilding from scratch. Sounds nice, but it’s just not practical.

Then, I turned the page and hit something I hadn’t seen before. A blank page, filled with handwritten sentences. At first I thought there was something wrong with the book. Postman and Weingartner had been talking about eliciting questions from the reader. And their implementation was to actually leave room inside the book for contributions from the reader. Not a blank page at the back of the book with “Notes:” stenciled on the top. Not a generic page for random scribbling. A blank page, with the specific purpose of eliciting responses from the reader: What questions would you ask if there was no curriculum? What is worth knowing?

It’s a simple technique, but shows a few things in action.

1. The simple act of honestly asking for contributions radically changes the nature of the experience. One is no longer simply “reading” the book - they are helping to write it.
2. Inquiry doesn’t need to be a Big Scary Thing - it can be as small and simple as asking a question, and allowing all responses. Note that the authors didn’t say “what topics are important?” or “what are the fundamental subjects that should be taught?” - they asked “what is worth knowing?” and that is a pretty simple yet powerful question, leading to further simple yet powerful questions in response.
3. Starting from a set of open-ended questions, one can start to define some paths for further inquiry pretty quickly. Inquiry isn’t chaos - it’s finding out what matters to the individual participants, and then searching for strategies to finding solutions and answers. It’s not the absence of content, or the absence of direction. It’s placing the focus of the activities of teaching and learning on the individual, and finding what their needs are, in various contexts.

And others have used similar strategies to draw people into conversations and presentations. I was able to help facilitate an inquiry-based session a few years ago with Brian and Alan, and it was one of the most powerful experiences I can remember. Stephen Downes has been doing this for years - I had the pleasure to see his new EduRSS (now gRSShopper) backchannel running at TLt this summer during his presentation.

Sure, some of the responses are silly when there are no restraints placed on contributions. But some responses are deep, thoughtful, relevant, engaging, engaged, and enriching. And the participants care about what is going on.

If inquiry is honest, and participants are working together to identify questions that they feel are valid - and then to answer them - that is a powerfully subversive activity that can change education from simple content dissemination into something that is so much more engaging and relevant. It changes education from being an industrial age “teaching factory” to an organic, adaptive, extensible process.

And I’m not using subversion in a negative sense. From Wikipedia:

Subversion refers to an attempt to overthrow structures of authority, including the state. It is an overturning or uprooting.

I’m working through Teaching as a Subversive Activity, by Neil Postman. I hadn’t read it before, and am seriously kicking myself for that. Some quick notes and quotes from the first couple of chapters. Keep in mind that this book was written in 1968, published in 1969, and reads as though it was crafted in 2008.

3 problems that require schools to remake themselves into training centers for subversion:

Communications Revolution or Media Change:

• “A lot of things have happened in this century, and most of them plug into walls.”
• “A change in an environment is rarely only additive or linear… What you have is a totally new environment requiring a whole new repertoire of survival strategies.”
• “When you plug something into a wall, someone is getting plugged into  you. Which means you need new patterns of defense, perception, understanding, evaluation. You need a new kind of education.”
• “As the number of messages increases, the amount of information carried decreases. We have more media to communicate fewer significant ideas.”

Change Revolution:

• “Change isn’t new - what’s new is the degree of change… Change changed.”
• “Change occurs so rapidly that each of us in the course of our lives has continuously to work out a set of values, beliefs, and patterns of behavior that are viable, or seem viable, to each of us personally. And just when we have identified a workable system, it turns out to be irrelevant because so much has changed while we were doing it.”
• “The trouble is that most teachers have the idea that they are in some other sort of business. Some believe, for example, that they are in the ‘information dissemination’ business.”
• “While (students) have to live with TV, film, the LP record, communication satellites, and the laser beam, their teachers are still talking as if the only medium on the scene is Gutenberg’s printing press.”
• “While (students) have to understand psychology and psychedelics, anthropology and anthropomorphism, birth control and biochemistry, their teachers are teaching ’subjects’ that mostly don’t exist anymore.”
• “While (students) need to find new roles for themselves as social, political, and religious organisms, their teachers are acting almost entirely as shills for corporate interests, shaping them up to be functionaries in one bureaucracy or another.”

Future Shock:

• “Future shock occurs when you are confronted by the fact that the world you were educated to believe in doesn’t exist.”
• “We just may not survive another generation of inadvertent entropy helpers.”

I’ll have lots more notes as I work through the book - not sure I’ll post everything here though, as I may just distill it down into more concise posts…

This is number two in an at least three part reflection on my Educational Technology and the Adult Learner course that I completed last week. I’m saving the ‘what i learned as a teacher’ post for last, so that I have all the grades finished and a full reflection is possible. For this particular (and probably shorter) post, I’d like to sketch out some of my tech design ideas.

You can now visit the website, I had to remove two students information (at their request) but got permission from the other students to share their quite excellent work with you all, and hope that it in some way contributes to the ongoing discussion of teacher training, reverse curriculum usages and my own discussion on rhizomatic learning. See http://edugrids.org

Drupal - the platform
The website was built in drupal six. I’ll post a copy of the build here on the website in a couple of weeks once i’ve cleaned it out for anyone who thinks it may be of help as a start for their own educational websites. It was designed as a site for a single class, with all the navigation intended to serve one class in particular and in no way designed to interact with the outside world. I kept the module selection fairly vanilla, just the usual suspects

CCK
Views
pathauto
token
image
fckeditor (with aspell add on, by overwhelming student request)
userplus (excellent funnymonkey module)

Design approach
I went for an ‘add don’t take away’ design approach to this website. In the first iteration, the students had access to three navigation buttons across the top -

• my work (view of all of an individual student’s work),
• my planning page (rebranded my account page, included personal descriptions, course goals and a literacy plan)
• reflections for review (a view of recent blog posts, sorted by day then by how many comments they had received)

On the side navigation they had the created content button which offered them book, blog and image options. There was an additional sidebar which had the syllabus in it, and eventually grew into the reverse curriculum document, essentially a book with completely open editing rights.

A few other options were added, the contact button and browse by learner (mostly for me) but the students found the simplicity of options and navigation… well… actually they didn’t say anything about it. Which I take as the highest compliment. They were all working in it from day one, and other than two students who registered with email addresses they couldn’t access from inside our classroom, things went pretty smoothly.

URLS (pathauto/token)
I included the day, week, author name and raw title in each of the urls. I just found this the easiest way for me to figure out where i was at a glance of the url and also to use that to sort the content. It’s easy enough to sort in other ways, but i find url sorting to be very tidy… personal preference I guess.

Weird date thingy on the student projects page
You’ll notice on the student projects section that all the pages start with a number followed by a time. I did this (on the spur of the moment) in order to allow the students to choose their presentation day at the same time. They ‘added a child page’ to the book page and were instructed to use the number representing the day of the week followed by the time they wanted. Worked like a charm… not elegant, but… waddaya gonna do. It makes a really nice reference page AND made it so that they could contribute simultaneously.

chat
I used the chatroom in order to give students a way to co-create knowledge during the presentation of other students. If you flip through the pages, you’ll notice chat records. I didn’t, sadly, end up using the chatroom installed on the site. It seemed to work fine, but i just didn’t feel like i knew it well enough to trust it for student interaction… so i used the edtechtalk chatroom.

timeline
I put this together pretty quickly, and spent the vast majority of the time worrying about the syllabus and a very small amount of time worrying about the site itself. It could easily be adapted for multiple classes, but I just wanted a sleak simple interface that would give me my few requirements. Simple user interface. Encourage blogging comments. Allow for co-creation of textbook. Allow for student connections via tags. Allow for personal descriptions via profile. Allow for easy browsing.

overall lessons
My instinct with this build was to stay as simple as humanly possible. No frills, and nothing that could break or confuse the students. Want video? upload it outside and copy and paste the code in. Want editing functions? you’ve got bold, a few more (and i broke on the spelling… wow… did they ever want a spell checker). Some of the students really seemed to identify with the site and the work that they were doing. Most of that was them, some of that might have been my teaching… the website did it’s job… stayed out of the way and structured the habitat within which the real work got done.

upnext - my lessons as a ‘person who stands up and tries to help people learn stuff’.

I’ll keep this rant short. I don’t know what the future of education is, or will be, but I do know that it’s not “web 2.0″ despite the hype.

Education is, always has been, and always will be, about the acts of teaching and learning. It is not, nor has it ever been, nor will it ever be, a form of technology. It is not a suite of distributed online tools, no matter how buzzword compliant they might be.

We need to move past this infatuation with technology, this desire for shiny things to change everything, and get back to basics. To storytelling. To valuing and respecting the work of all participants (students, teachers, and others). To working together to teach our children, and ourselves. To extending the activity outside of some industrialized classroom and into the community.

Sure, “web 2.0″ has a role in this - in providing tools to enable individual publishing and collaboration - but it is NOT the technology that is the future of education. It’s people. Without proper philosophies and pedagogies, all the shiny websites on the planet don’t add up to a hill of beans.

(donning asbestos underoos in preparation for ensuing deluge of fire and brimstone)

First, a mini-photo essay on my own point of view about privileging writing over speaking when grading in the collaborative, networking, multimedia century:

Three weeks after the Diigo stampede, I’ve been concerned that the new trend of putting Diigo annotations on posts instead of leaving comments in the thread was a negative thing. Only Diigo users would see the conversation, and the post’s comment thread would be left poorer for that.

But after a wild four-hour storm of 74-and-counting comments on my Muhammed Ali post about privileging writing over other communication strands when we grade, it occurs to me that Diigo might come in handy here. There are so many incredibly insightful comments there, and the issue is so relevant to the futures of our students, that I fear the sheer bulk of comments might dissuade new readers from discovering the gold shining here and there.

Diigo highlights and annotations of the thread might help. If you want to take part in this experiment, go at it. It could be a great way to demonstrate the value of Diigo highlights and annotations as a complement to, instead of a substitute for, blog comments. Because the debate - particularly the one between Benjamin Baxter, who maintains that writing should constitute the bulk of a student’s grade in English/Language Arts and history classes, and opposing viewpoints that grades should more equally credit speaking, graphic language, and more, as articulated by Arthus Erea, Adrienne Michetti, Kirstin “Keamac,” Dean Shareski, Claire Thompson, Sylvia Martinez, Carolyn Foote, and many others - that debate never seemed to reach any resolution.

It sounds like I’m piling on Benjamin here, but I don’t mean to. Fifty million people saying something is true doesn’t make it so. Moreover, Benjamin works in an inner city school, and his arguments are rooted in his perception of what best helps his students’ futures. It differs with mine, but I’m in a different context. And we’re all running on varying assumptions about things like the future of work, the purpose of schooling, and more.

But that thread drifts into so many tangents - the high school freshman Arthus v. high school teacher Benjamin debates are priceless, but sometimes distracting (or am I wrong?) - that I see Diigo, again, as possibly helpful here. Highlight and annotate the strong assertions, the weak rebuttals, the evasions of direct questions and the red herrings, and let others add comments to those annotations.

(This connects, by the way, to a conversation with “Uninspired Teacher” Tom and Charlie A. Roy on the “Schooly Speeches versus Real Talks” post, about using juries instead of judges in mock trials - or better, real ones - to improve that old practice.)

Peter Rock said it took him an hour to read that post and thread (but he also said he read it slowly). That scares me. So many comments in that thread don’t deserve burial in the noise.

So head on over to that thread, if you’re a Diigo convert - especially if there’s a Diigo group on assessment - and have at it.

At the same time, far be it from me to dictate rules. If you want to just comment instead, of course that’s okay.

—

Photos:Toksik by The Sizemore McCabe Project, Continental Paper Grading Company by quinn.anya, Spring Branding Near Crane Oregon 1982 by mharrsch

5 Comments

• At April 29, 2008, Diigo is for teaching. wrote:

  [...] http://beyond-school.org/2008/04/28/diigo-help-wanted/ [...]

• At April 29, 2008, Benjamin Baxter wrote:

  Heh. Thanks for the link, I guess.

  Benjamin Baxters last blog post..Which Should I Choose?

• At April 29, 2008, Clay Burell wrote:

  Erm. You're welcome, I guess.

  I think I've finally discovered the upper register of the generation gap, as I stare at 46 a week away.

  But I can't tell if it's an age thing. It could be other differences.

  Anyway, I thought I made clear the spirit of ideas this was made in. If you take offense, my apologies.

  Erm.

  The English Teacher

• At April 30, 2008, Diigo | EDUC 628-Spring-08 wrote:

  [...] Burell writes in his Beyond School located here the following: Three weeks after the Diigo stampede, I’ve been concerned that the new trend of [...]

• At April 30, 2008, Benjamin Baxter wrote:

  No offense taken.

  Benjamin Baxters last blog post..Choosing Field Workers’ Kids Over Posh City

I don’t even know where to begin with this recent article from New York Magazine, “Testing Horace Mann,” about the fallout (or lack thereof) from offensive student postings on Facebook.  It’s at the center of the current technology-related problems schools face.  Part of this has to do with new problems the technology makes possible, but much of this has to do with old problems that the technology makes visible.

The most disturbing aspect for me is the lack of guidance, and this is an old problem.  How else do we expect adolescents to act, particularly when given free reign in the technological playground of social networks, when they have no clear or firm guidance from school administrators or parents?  This is by no means a pardon for the students, but the strongest rebuke should fall on the shoulders of the parents for trying to shelter their children from the thing most likely to help them succeed in the world: the trimming down of the ego (a societal problem, really).  Second in line should be the administration for failing to issue that rebuke.

The new problems are the more difficult ones, and require more time, thought, and research than I can put in right now.  Questions about privacy, online identity, safety, censorship, and the like all bear heavily on these events … events that are, to different degrees, happening in every school.

I received this e-mail today and thought that some of the folks who have attended my presentations on Global Collaboration might find it interesting:

American Councils continues to be privileged to administer the Teachers of Critical Languages Program of the State Department’s Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs.  We are pleased to announce that applications to host Chinese or Arabic exchange teachers during the 2008-2009 school year are available and can be downloaded from either [ http://www.americancouncils.org/ ]www.americancouncils.org or [ http://www.tclprogram.org/ ]www.tclprogram.org.

TCLP is a great program that looks to build US schools’ capacities to offer Chinese and Arabic programs as these languages are indeed critically important for both the current and future generation.  Moreover, both China and the Middle East have rich, vibrant, and deep cultures and histories, and our students can learn a great deal from them.  Reciprocally, our exchange teachers can learn a great deal about American culture while improving their English and gaining experience in teaching methodologies.  All said, it’s a great cross-cultural program that really does benefit all parties involved.

From a school’s perspective, the program provides many benefits, as well as numerous opportunities.  Please find them listed below, forward as you feel best, and, of course, feel free to contact me directly with whatever questions you may have:
•
American Councils provides exchange teachers’ monthly salaries ($28,000), health care, round-trip airfare, visa support, and ongoing on-program support including in-person site visits

•    American Councils provides exchange teachers with two-weeks of integrated, scaffolded, and focused methodological and cultural training in DC before the school year begins; a four-day professional development workshop in November; and access to a professional development fund for exchange teachers to acquire training, textbooks, or materials as are relevant to their situations

•    American Councils provides host schools’ participation in a weekend sub-conference within their teachers’ Washington DC training.  Additionally, mentor teachers who support exchange teachers’ professional needs and cultural adjustment receive a monthly honorarium from American Councils

•    TCLP includes alumni grant opportunities for exchange teachers and host schools when they “graduate” from the program in June 2009 so that continued collaboration, cross-cultural exchange, and classroom partnerships can be supported

•    US elementary or secondary schools, both public and private, may apply

•    Applications are welcomed from schools with existing, developing, or planned programs

•    Applications are due May 16, 2008.  Awards and regrets will be sent by the end of May

Best Regards,
Ben Dunbar

Ben Dunbar
Senior Program Officer
Teacher Programs
American Councils for International Education
(202) 833-7522 / (202) 833-7523 (f)
[ http://www.americancouncils.org/ ]www.americancouncils.org

I delivered a presentation last night to teachers who work in a county that only allows them to use Blackboard.  Given that, I saw no point to going in and talking about the possibilities that other tools and services make available, or complaining about the limitations of Blackboard.¹  That’s a presentation for the administration.  Instead, I tried to think of some suggestions to help teachers get the most out of Blackboard.

I discussed forums, blogs, and wikis–first in general, then in Blackboard specifically.  My main point was that the two most powerful elements "Web 2.0" technologies bring to the classroom are audience and ownership.  It’s these elements, and not the tools themselves, that are significant and that can result in genuine learning if teachers know how to respect and protect these elements, take advantage of them, and guide students to opportunities for discovery.

The notes are available on my wiki: "Working with Blackboard."  Feel free to edit the pages or to argue/expand in the comments here or the discussion tab there.

1. Not to mention it’s questionable legal tactics.

I mentioned the notebook/textbook approach in my previous post, so I thought I’d take a minute here to explain it further.  The idea is pretty basic, and something a lot of people already do without necessarily calling it that.  To me, it’s just an approach to these tools that integrates blogs and wikis into a continual (and transparent, interactive) aspect of learning by:

1. maintaining a blog (or a few blogs) as a "notebook":¹ a place to record notes and think through their implications, with little concern for whether or not there is an "audience" and without an emphasis on timeliness or polemics
2. maintaining a wiki as a "textbook": a place to attempt some synthesis of thoughts and ideas over time, with the added benefit of minimizing redundancy and forgetfulness that can happen on a blog

Where the blog tracks fragmented thoughts and hypotheses over time, the wiki attempts to build some cohesive, connected (and still tentative) conclusions.

Certainly, there are more ways to use blogs and wikis, but this personal approach appeals to me right now as I seek to dig deeper into a few topics.  I’ll probably be keeping some notes here about how this experiment is going.

1. a thought inspired by Christopher Sessums’ post

Well folks, tomorrow morning is a big day. I started writing the grant on this in the summer of 2006, have had piles and piles of help along the way and have now come down to it. We’ve got a website, we’ve got some great content researched and written by the kids. I’ll save the thanks to all individuals for when I’ve got a half day to order them all up and thanks them all properly. For now, I have work to do –> Crystallize the lesson plan for tomorrow morning. The kids are coming to the university… and we’re going to get them to do some simple tasks…

Background
It’s a big project… you can see it at http://livingarchives.ca. The ‘kensington’ link reflects the work that is the most complete right now… A class of grade seven students from KISH who just happen to be coming to the university tomorrow. They’ve gone to the provincial archives and records office, to various museums, taken video, pictures and done research to create an online textbook. An online textbook they are now going to round off with a trip into opensim where our crazy good team of developers has (with some fantastic help from the excellent opensim community) built three replicas of period houses in an opensource virtual 3D environment. In each house you’ll find about 25 picture frames. Each frame is to hold one of the pictures used by the students, with an attached notecard that will be the first paragraph of their blog post (see website above) and a link that will send people back to the website. From which, of course, a person could go in the other direction… from the blog to the opensim world.note:Stephen Downes was a great help in working out the elegance of this part.

For tomorrow - background prep
1. Get really cool people to build cool stuff. take video of cool stuff to show to students to give them a sense of what they will see when they get there.

2. Visit students. Encourage them in the belief that they are pioneers… that there are things that ‘are more likely to be easy’ and other things that ‘might make your computer blow up’. Encourage them to try the first ones first, then blow up their computer later.

3. Made the students choose which picture frame they wanted to have their picture/blog associated with. If two students wanted to use the same frame, quick debate ensued, best argument wins. I then attached the numbers associated with each picture frame to the title of the blog post of each student in a comment during the class.

4. I came home and made ‘node relationships’ (linked them together) between the videos and the blog posts.

5. installed the software in the computer labs and tested it. I will not bore with the disaster which was the first step on this road. Installed SL client on each of the computers that were necessary. The final tally… 20 computers for the first classroom (about 50 min) and 10 computers for the second classroom (about 1 1/2 hours). We have twenty-five students… but at least we’ve got computers that will connect to the Grid. That’s key, and they’re tested and ready.

6. The low end goal was to get the kids to go in and tour around and post their picture from their blog posts http://livingarchives.ca/etext_kensington . Step two, if possible, was to get the text from the text from the blog post in some kind of notecard and link back to the actual blog

more on this in the next “what happened” post.

Excerpt from my review of the new Persuasive Games release "Fatworld" -- an ambitious piece of "procedural rhetoric" that aims to leverage the computer game genre to deliver a series of important points.

I had high hopes. I really, really wanted to like it much better than I do.

read more

Lately, I’ve found myself rethinking the way I’ve been constructing my online identity.  Like “real world” identity-building, it’s been a process of shifts and adjustments, cobbled together from experiences and new possibilities.  I’ve created accounts, under a variety of usernames, all over the web just “trying things out.”  I’ve started and abandoned profiles, blogs, and networks in more places than I can remember.  And I know I’m not alone in this.

I equate this with the teen years, the “adolescence” of an online life, in which we explore the possibilities of “being” and “relationship.”  After a while, though, a few services, a few networks, a few subjects tend to sort themselves out as those with the most personal value, just as we sort out the places, people, and ideas that become anchors for our real-world identity.  As part of this “maturing” process, we abandon networks, services, and silly email addresses like we abandoned the outlandish clothing and hairstyles of our youth.

So here, on the cusp of my early-adulthood online existence (I’ve only been blogging for two years, though sometimes it seems longer), I realize how scattered and fragmented my online identity is, and that I need to take some steps to gather and rework that identity in a more purposeful way that better reflects my own sense of self, both personally and professionally.

While investigating ways to accomplish this, I found approaches to the problem of “online identity management” that seem to fall into three categories: scrub it, build it, and claim it.

Scrub It

There are services, like Reputation Defender, that claim to help you clean up any messes you may have already made (R.D. will do it for a fee, and amid some controversy) … though my sense is that there’s no guaranteed stain remover for the Internet.

There’s also the more practical (and free) method of deleting old content and unused accounts.  Of course, nothing’s gone forever, but at least it makes your current online presence more reflective of your current identity.

(Re)Build It

This involves making some decisions about which services you really need and/or want to use.  How many photo-hosting sites do you need?  How many blogs?  I found the article “Re-evaluating Your Online Commitments” on 43 Folders to be very helpful with this aspect of identity management.

Claim It

Once those decisions have been made, then it’s a matter of organizing the services you use and making your association with them clear.  Having one place to collect all your online activity, and verify that it is, indeed, “yours”–for better or worse–is a helpful way to bring some cohesion to the sprawl.  Again, there are services that will help out.

• OpenID isn’t really a service, but it is a possible solution (though not implemented widely enough yet to be truly effective).  By establishing one OpenID, not only do your logins become easier in some places, but you gain a hub for your identities and activities.
• ID aggregators, like Claim ID or Naymz, attempt to create a “public profile” that allow you to definitively state who you are and what you do online.  Google looks like it will be entering this arena soon, too.   Personally, I like that ClaimID provides both an OpenID and a public profile.
• Another way to tackle this is by claiming a domain for yourself and associating your other activities with that domain (whether you use it as your OpenID or not).  This solution also gives you more immediate control over “primary space.”  With that domain you can run a blog (with Wordpress or other software) or create an entire site using  services like Google Apps or others (see “Host Your Domain with Free Apps“).

Where is “I”?

The more we externalize identity, the more we need to guard how that identity is distributed.  I’m not just referring to problems with “identity theft” (a really creepy concept, if you think about it in shamanic terms), but also to problems with identity fragmentation and/or disassociation.  As we distribute ourselves–over friends, groups, locations, and online services–we scatter ourselves, and risk “losing control” of our identities to some extent.

This isn’t something to fear in reactionary panic (”we hereby declare that no person shall have more than two logins per …”).  Rather, it’s simply a fact of managing a life, and the skills to do so are skills we should acquire for ourselves and help students to acquire, also.

All of this sometimes seems absurd.  The time, effort, and mental juice that these kinds of issues can suck up doesn’t always seem justified.  It’s tempting to say: “Who cares?  It’s just the Internet!”  Of course, clothes are just clothes, haircuts are just haircuts, and cars are just cars … but that doesn’t stop us from sinking our identities into those things, either.

Up next: my re-organized online identity …

Download the enhanced podcast here.

Life as science fiction continues.

Here in Korea on a Friday night, close to midnight, I hop onto Twitter, see Chris Craft is there in South Carolina, USA, and tweet him an invitation to talk on Skype. He kindly obliges (and it’s just a free international computer phone call now, so that ain’t hard).

I record it, edit it, and an hour later, self-publish it for anybody in the world who is interested in lessons learned from two humble pioneers of global classroom collaboration.

Our topic? We take up the question of how to refine our approach to global collaborative projects so that they are less prone to fail, or to wear out all parties involved (teachers and students) when they succeed.

I’m most excited by the last 5 minutes or so. Chris and I fell into a spontaneous “pedagogical jam session” in which we riffed on the idea that the best projects are - not projects at all*. Instead, they are authentic uses - and modelings - of Personal Learning Networks (PLN’s) via Twitter, Skype, Facebook, etc: “quick in and quick out.”

Good background reading from the edublogs:

• Sylvia Tolesano’s Collaboration Projects - Doomed to Fail? (USA)
• Graham Wegner’s Parable 2.0 (Australia)
• Susan Sedro’s Learning from My Online Project Mistakes (Singapore)
• My own enthusiastic post on George Mayo’s “Many Voices” Global Twittory project, and my own lessons learned from the 1001 Flat World Tales (S. Korea)
• My “Freshman Arthus Invades Korea to Co-Teach with Me” post

It’s only 15 minutes. It’s enhanced, if you download to iTunes, with chapter markers for quick navigation. And notice, if you play it from this post, you can still see links to URL’s we discuss along the way in the embedded player.

Enjoy! And better still - extend or challenge in comments

—

*I owe a debt to Chris Harbeck’s K-12 Online Conference 2007 presentation “Release the Hounds, Part 4” for planting this seed a couple of months ago. It’s sprouting some healthy shoots now.

Similar Posts:

• Maxim: “Give Me a Unit I’ll Learn for a Day…”
• Many Voices: A Global Creative Writing Twittory for K-8 Worth Joining
• New: 1001 Reflections Podcasts: Chris Watson on Improving Peer Feedback in the Writing Workshop
• Real Flat World Science and the 45 Nanometer Intel Microprocessor: A Revolution
• I Can’t Make Educational History - But We Can: “Networked Learning” Class Update

This isn’t theoretical - necessarily. It could be the beginning of a beautiful relationship.

Given a 1:1 MacBook school, a geeky teacher, no bandwidth or filtering or blocking restrictions, how would you design an elective class to showcase 21st century learning possibilities?

I’ve got an elective “writing seminar” beginning next week, with about ten students from age 15-17. Most have MacBooks.

I’m free to structure this class however I want. And it should be obvious I take “writing” in its communicative (and digital) sense - including multimedia, connectivity, project-based learning, the whole nine yards.

I see this as an opportunity to experiment. And to co-teach with anybody out there with an idea needing a classroom - maybe one of the many administrator, librarian, or academic readers out there who wish they still had a classroom to implement some ideas.

How can we seize this opportunity to do things differently and demonstrate the possibilities?

The conditions: class meets every two days for 75 minutes. There are no issues of filters or bandwidth to worry about: you name the site, from Skype to YouTube, from Twitter to eternity, we have access.

Assessment and grading can be as non-traditional as you please.

So there it is. Sketch your vision(s) below*. And let me know, also, if you want a hand in actually playing “teacher” for this class. You don’t have to be a “schoolyteacher.” Heck, you can be a freelance musician or gonzo entrepreneur for all I care. Socrates didn’t go to teacher certification school.

If I like the idea - and if the students do - we’ll run with it.

Deadline: Tuesday, 8 January 2008.

–

*Remember: this is an Open Thread. That means there is no such thing as a comment too long. The thread is the thing. Also: notice your comment is followed by a link, via my CommentLuv plugin, to your last post, by title. [Update: Check out the 30-odd comments on the first Open Thread, “Your Fantasy Alternative School,” to see how open threads collect great ideas and invite you to visit the blogs of the contributors.] And finally, if you like your comment that much, of course you can post it on your own blog as well. It’s not an either/or. Both here is better, since the thread adds to conversation, and the posting on your own blog keeps your own developmental archive intact. Thanks!

Photo: peter-noster on Flickr

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While I had planned on writing a more esoteric essay on learning, teaching, and computing, I couldn't resist this little gem of a video:

Several ideas floated through my membranes as I watched it:

• Commenting -- The notion of the inner dialogue that one has with one's self when deciding to provide comments or feedback on another's work is wonderfully represented here. I somehow felt like I was looking in a mirror.
• Anonymity -- People will say the darndest things given the cover of anonymity. Would they say the same things if their identity was revealed?
• Where is My Mind? -- I heart YouTube. Yet I have caught myself staying up far too late on occasion watching silly, intriguing, or absolutely mind numbing videos for no other reason other than -- they are there. This then relates to the notion of...
• PLEasure -- The instant gratification/entertainment the millions of videos on YouTube provides can be both exhilarating and debilitating. While time management is key in some respects, I would love to see the productivity/economics research on how many hours workers of the world spend watching videos over doing their assigned work.
• Misbehaving -- Related to anonymity, the Internet Skinner Box has given a new outlet to the Trickster within us all. Is it ethical to yell "Fire!" in a crowded chatroom/Second Life?
• Share-ware or Y'all-ware-- YouTube provides us connections to a diversity of opinions and ideas that we can quickly and easily share with others. The ease with which we can share videos with others leads me to water cooler conversations with others over things we find on YouTube.
• Viral-ity -- One video seems to lead to another and another building what we might dub a "memesphere."
• Voyeurism -- I sometimes feel I am watching things that I would not be able to see anywhere else. And I keep watching....
• Totem/Taboo -- something this much fun, with this much opportunity for good/evil must be bad for us, unless of course, some one is keeping an eye on us....
• Creativity -- The outlet YouTube provides is the auteur's paradise. Hence, we are able to enjoy works like the one above and many others designed to stimulate our neurons/neuroses.
• On-life/Off-life -- Why does the video above assume that spending vast quantities of time online mean one doesn't have a life? What does this say about professionals who's jobs center on being online? Are our relationships with others vastly different online and offline?

Perhaps, this post has turned more esoteric than I originally planned. While YouTube is not my life (but my Internet connections are definitely an integral part), your thoughts, comments, and video links are most welcome.

From Cognitive Daily’s “Does test-taking help students learn?”

Practice tests need not duplicate the format of the final test. Instead, practice tests should require as much effort as possible from the test taker. If the goal is long-term retention, final tests should also be in a free-recall format rather than, say, choosing from a list of possible answers.

If this is true, and holds up under long-term studies, then it’s another powerful argument against the typical multiple-choice standardized test.

Of course, memorizing lists of words is about as far from “learning” as you can get and still be on the same continent.  Interesting study nonetheless.

From Cognitive Daily’s “Does test-taking help students learn?”

Practice tests need not duplicate the format of the final test. Instead, practice tests should require as much effort as possible from the test taker. If the goal is long-term retention, final tests should also be in a free-recall format rather than, say, choosing from a list of possible answers.

If this is true, and holds up under long-term studies, then it’s another powerful argument against the typical multiple-choice standardized test.

Of course, memorizing lists of words is about as far from “learning” as you can get and still be on the same continent.  Interesting study nonetheless.

If I’ve learned anything in this year of blogging, it’s that good ideas need ritual repetition before they gain traction, find support, and become realities. So here goes (and the second point is far more important than the first):

Scott McLeod just wrote a very nice post about the launch, and the future, of Students 2.0 at Dangerously Irrelevant. I replied there, but want to paste a snippet here, since I’d planned to put these ideas out here anyway.

They concern two things: finding more writers for Students 2.0, and applying the same Twitter-social bookmark PR tactics used in the s20h launch to generate political pressure concerning educational issues.

1. Seeking More Students 2.0 Writers

From the comment to Scott, slightly edited:

Getting more staff writers for s2oh is a high priority. (Sylvia Martinez, by the way, already helped me find the first batch of writers, along with Diane Cordell (http://dmcordell.blogspot.com) Carolyn Foote (http://futura.edublogs.org), and Chris Watson (http://watsoncommon.blogspot.com).)

Any readers of any age who know a student already blogging with regularity - and quality - are invited to contact us on the “Contribute” page of Students 2.0. They don’t have to be “edubloggers” per se, just good writers (or multimedia)/ bloggers with the ability to reflect about their experiences in education. They can also contact me [here].

2. One-Click Political Activism via Social Networking: Twitter, Ning, and the e-Blogosphere as a Potential Political Force

On a side note, the launch itself was a learning experience about network marketing, and how it can be used to generate a message. I’m hoping to find a few others who see that this can be duplicated for political/educational purposes aimed at influencing politicians, voters, and the “education industrial complex” (to quote Jim Walker’s brilliant comment on Will Richardson’s recent “End of Year Dreaming” post).

So far, my post about it has been met with silence. That doesn’t mean I’m wrong, to me; it just means either the right people haven’t read it or, if they have, they read it at the wrong time

I’m convinced we can hold a few feet to the fire re: NCLB, the textbook industry, the ETS and College Board, and more, in a series of regular campaigns requiring little more than bookmarking a post to del.icio.us, digg, stumbleupon, etc, in a short time-frame.

You saw the potential of s2oh, Scott. Do you see what I’m saying about the potential political power of the educational networks of Twitterers, Ning-ers (Steve Hargadon, I’ll be in touch again soon, because the numbers in Classroom 2.0 can generate quite a message!), and similar networks to create pressure for change?

Come back soon for more ritual repetition. This can be so easy if we all work together, and at the same time, so powerful. We’ve shown with Students 2.0 that Twitter can be about more than the latest cool tool you found. It can be about creating the changes we all want to see - or at least raising a fun bit of low-effort hell in the attempt.

Photo credit: “see him?” by laihiu

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