Hanging with the Big Kids

Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

Tonight, as I picked up a mostly sleeping little girl from a car seat and hefted her into the crook of my right arm, balancing the bag of toys and clothes in my other hand, I realized that Teagan just isn’t a baby anymore.

This is a rather absurd observation, in the sense that she will turn 17 months tomorrow, and she has not technically been a “baby” for a while now. She walks. Mutters a bit. Follows instructions (sometimes). Laughs. Chews her food. Plays tricks. Dances. Has a unique personality. She is a little person, and has been for some time.

But today, I could just feel the difference. Not sure why, or why today, but it was, and is, the case. She’s bigger, and a wee bit more difficult to carry. She’s not a baby.

And every day, she’ll get just a little bit harder to carry. I’ve experienced this with my older daughter, but not with Teagan. It’s both wonderful and dreadful. And not at all easier than the first time this happened to me. I can’t begin to fathom what it’ll be like when I won’t be able to twirl either of them around, listening and watching for giggles and laughter.

While I wouldn’t trade it for anything, parenting definitely brings with it some bittersweet moments.

Being a daddy is one long process of letting go.

I’m working with some high school students this week on a research assignment for their Wired 9 course, a class on digital literacy and responsibility.  As a part of that work, I’m helping them to generate some good research questions that they can explore and dig in to.  Since I thought the topics might be of interest to folks who aren’t in the class, and since I also know that you have plenty of excellent questions, I thought I’d seek a little help while also create a resource for others doing similar work.  I wonder if you might be willing to contribute a resource or a question or two.  I’m certain that the 9th graders that I will be working with will thank you in advance.

I thank you, too.

(If you’re not comfortable using VoiceThread, feel free to leave a comment, question or link to a resource in the comments of this post, and I’ll be happy to transfer it to the VoiceThread, which I’ll be sharing with the students.)

I want to put you into the middle of a conversation that I’ve been having with myself and the media for almost four years now by putting you in the middle of a conversation that’s been running on Mark Glaser’s PBS blog, MediaShift. In an entry posted today (that I learned about from Tim), Mark continues the story of Alana, a student in a journalism course at NYU who has been blogging her class. Mark brings us into the story:

After New York University journalism student Alana Taylor wrote her first embed report for MediaShift on September 5, it didn’t take long for her scathing criticism of NYU to spread around the web and stir conversations. Taylor thought that her professor, Mary Quigley, was not up to speed on social media and podcasting — even though the class she was teaching was called “Reporting Gen Y.” And Taylor felt that NYU was not offering her enough classes about new media; she cited the requirement that students bring print editions of the New York Times to class as one example of their outdated mindset.

Not surprisingly, Quigley was not happy with the story and was upset that Taylor had not sought permission to write her first-person report about the class, and told Taylor it was an invasion of privacy to other students in the class. By Taylor’s account, Quigley had a one-on-one meeting with Taylor to discuss the article, and Quigley made it clear that Taylor was not to blog, Twitter or write about the class again. That was upsetting to Taylor, who had been planning a follow-up report for MediaShift that would include Quigley’s viewpoint and interviews with faculty.

What follows in Glaser’s post is a very thorough examination of the issue and the specifics of policy at NYU and the opinions of several of the journalists and teachers involved in the events, as well as some other thoughtful commentary, especially the commentary from Floyd Abrams, whom Glasner labels as “a veteran media lawyer who has argued First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court.”  Abrams, asked if he felt blogging a university class would violate the privacy of other students in the class, answered:

My own view is that while student commentary that is critical of ongoing classes can lead to a level of tension in class at the same time it makes extremely difficult a teacher-student relationship…it does not violate the ‘privacy’ of the classroom and should not be banned or punished. Would it be illegal to do so? It certainly wouldn’t be unconstitutional since NYU isn’t a state school and thus subject to First Amendment limitations. Whether it violates NYU rules I have no idea. I would be very surprised, however, if NYU permitted a student to be punished for writing such a critique. Surprised and disappointed.

The comments to the post are getting quite interesting, too, as journalists and teachers hash out the place of social media like Twitter and blogs in the university classroom, specifically as tools for teaching and practicing journalism.

I’d strongly encourage you to read Glasner’s post, the original piece by Alana Taylor, and the comments showing up in both places, as well as on other sites.  They’re continuing to complicate for me the nature of a classroom, whether it is a public space, a private space, or some funky hybrid that exists in between.

While university classrooms, where the students are adults, are different from K-12 classrooms, I continue to think about the nature of classroom spaces and discourse, and the stance that public educators should be taking in regards to the environment that we’re finding ourselves in these days, where students are plugged in and networked via devices that we have no control over.  More and more, students are literally bringing their own networks and publishing platforms with them to school.  And that means the nature of classroom spaces will continue to become more public, whether or not we want them to.

This isn’t a new issue, but I find the fact that journalists and media folk are stuck in the middle of the same mess as the rest of us both reassuring and frustrating.

So here’re a few of my (continuing) questions:

• In a world where the tools and the access are no longer (and probably never really were) within the control of “us,” the educators, what limits do we set on their use at school that actually begin to balance students’ rights to communicate and reflect and process with the  legitimate educational and institutional need to control some of what is and isn’t “public” information?
• How do we balance minors’ needs with the fact that we work for public institutions and should be open to public oversight?
• How does transparency mesh with some of the more delicate issues in the classroom?
• Where do students’ rights to talk about their experiences begin to conflict with other students’ right to privacy?
• Are public school classrooms fundamentally public spaces or private ones?  (Or that funky hybrid in-between?)

Blanket bans of personal technology or of writing about certain situations or classes don’t and won’t address these needs in a meaningful and educational relevant way.  We need to be thoughtful now about how we teach students to share as the ability to do so becomes even more pervasive in society than it already is.  If I’ve learned anything in the last few years, it’s that there are no easy answers here.  And for the most part, we’re dodging the questions at school.

I’ll share some of my thoughts about how we might proceed in a future post.

At the recommendation of Gary Stager and Chris Lehmann, one of my summer reads is A Schoolmaster of the Great City by Angelo Patri.  Truly, there is nothing new under the sun. The book was written by Patri in 1917. It rings true, though, with much of what I worry about in our schools today. Patri faced the same problems and shares many of my passions. That’s both troublesome and reassuring.  I’ll be seeking out more of his work.  In the meantime, here are some of the lines that jumped out at me as I read today:

• The antagonism between the children and teachers was far stronger than I had ever seen it before. The antagonism between the school and the neighborhood was intense. Both came from mutual distrust founded on mutual misunderstanding. The children were afraid of the teachers, and the teachers feared the children. (p. 14)
• As each day went by, cautiously I put the problem of school discipline before them and they responded by taking over much of the responsibility for it themselves. (p. 15)
• In this restless, uncertain sea of motion, noise, color and goings; of constant goings upstairs and downstairs, one learned to ‘go slow’ and watch and wait for his opportunity. (p. 19)
• The rod idea was at work. Books, benches, crowded rooms, sitting still, listening; talking only when called upon to recite, teaching where the teachers did the thinking; these conditions have meant and always will mean an imposed discipline, an imposed routine, whereas real discipline is a personal thing, a part of the understanding soul. To replace discipline of teacher-responsibility by the discipline of child-responsibility is a long, slow process. (p. 27)
• It was difficult to get teachers away from subject matter, from machinery, and toward children. How could it be otherwise? (p.30)
• I wanted ideas  expressed in color, movement, fun and not lines, ideas and not perfect papers, every one alike . .  .  . I wanted nature that would make the child’s heart warm with sympathy .  .  .that would make him laugh to feel the snow and the rain and the wind beating on his face. (p. 30)
• The feeling for the things that I wanted was rather more definite than the knowledge of how to attain the desired results. (p. 30)(Karl - that quote was just for you.  We all get stuck.)
• (On teaching robins) ‘Suppose you meet the class under the big oak tree in the morning and look for robins. Watch them until you and the children know as much about them as one can learn by looking  .  .  .  . Then talk over what you’ve seen and learned. Let everybody say his say sometime or other.  .  .  . Then when you have all the facts about him select those that are most worthwhile, and present them as the robin story.  You’ll find you’ll need very little drill.’ (p. 32)
• I felt that we had to win the parents as well as the taechers if the changes we were making, our emphasis on the ‘fads and frills’ of education, were to be accepted in the homes. (p. 33)
• Many parents believe that this is education. .  .  . They fear freedom, they fear to let the child grow by himself. (p. 37)
• I wanted opportunity for the masses, the best schools for the crowds, the best teachers for the heaviest load.  I thought in terms of service, they in terms of tradition. (p. 41)

Plenty more good stuff within.  I’d encourage you to read the book.

I always enjoy a good double meaning in a title, so I’m pleased that this podcast, recorded during my drive home from NECC, is called what it is.  I find myself driving at the moment, refreshed and recharged.  That’s what I wanted out of the conference.  I’m pleased it worked that way, and grateful to lots of folks for all the conversation and push back.  It is good to be in community (or communities, or whatever) with smart folks.  I wanted to get this podcast up, mostly for my own benefit, before I lost some of that momentum.

I’m off to the beach for a week, hoping to top off my batteries, and will be doing my best to be offline - but I’d welcome your comments here on the podcast as a way of keeping me driving and moving when I return.

Oh - and below is a piece of the conversation that I mentioned in the ‘cast.  Thanks to Kevin Honeycutt for recording it and Darren Draper and David Jakes for facilitating the conversation.  Not sure if a complete recording exists, but you’ll get the gist of the conversation, one of my favorites.

You can find most, but again, not all, of the K12 Online Conference presentation I reference online over at Wes’s place.

This conference for me has been an intentional immersion in the hopeful ideas of school and learning.  I’m avoiding big talk about products and tools, instead seeking out positive pathfinders - the people and ideas and documents that, to me, are pointing learning where it needs to go - into rich and deep discussions of how and why we learn and what’s worth bothering to “cover” versus what’s worth doing.

As it’s the start of a new school year, I’ve been asked to set some goals for myself for the year.  There are many, many projects that require my attention, as well as the daily work and questions that keep me busy, but I do want to declare some goals that I hope to return to throughout the year and think about more. I’ll be posting them as independent posts here over the next little while - and I reserve the right to develop the final list later - but these are things that I think are worth doing right now.

I’m sure there’ll be plenty of content produced today around EduBloggerCon - this is where I’ll be keeping my notes - please feel free to ask questions and share suggestions.  Help me make the most of my day.

Beginning today, I’m going to be co-facilitating my school district’s CyberCamp, a two-week summer institute focused on teachers building projects that help them to integrate technology into their classrooms.  You won’t see me much here, but I do hope you’ll join us over at CyberCamp’s digital HQ as we do some intense learning and thinking and questioning together.

In fact, I’m counting on it.

One of my hopes for CyberCamp is that we are able to model how transparent and connected learning doesn’t have to be limited to a specific time, place and location, that teachers in my district can learn from you, and that you can learn from them.  We’re all in this together, and that’s a good thing.

We’re putting so much of CyberCamp online in part to honor the wisdom and knowledge of our teachers, but also because we want to model the power of learning networks as professional learning communities.  But that only works if people stop by and join with us in learning and sharing and thinking and questioning and . . . well, you get the point. If you’ve read this blog for any period of time, then you know that I think we’re all better when students and teachers all share and learn and take turns leading.  Teaching and learning can be so isolating - but it doesn’t have to be that way.  CyberCamp, I hope, is an attempt to demonstrate that.

So, I’m writing this post to formally invite you, whoever you are, to come and join in the fun.  And the hard work.  I’ve nothing to offer you except a great deal of learning.  But if you do come and leave a comment or two when you can, our CyberCamp will be all the better for it.  I thank you in advance, and hope to see you at CyberCamp.

Oh, and by the way - we don’t own this model of learning.  There are plenty of folks trying this type of work - and I am grateful to them for sharing what they do as they do it.  That said, I wanted to explicitly remind you that, if you like what you see here, feel free to take it and adapt it to your communities, to your needs.  I pledge to you that I’ll happily come to your CyberCamp.  In fact, I look forward to it.