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Saturday, May 30, 2009

Thought for the Day 5-30-09

If your organization requires success before commitment, it will never have either.
Seth Godin, Tribes, p. 132.

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OpenID andrewbwatt said...

Amen.

Truer words may never have been spoken.

5/30/09 10:54 AM  

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Monday, May 25, 2009

Why Should Your District Continue?

Ben Grey had an interesting post recently where he asked:
Why should your district continue to use and pursue technology?
I think it's the wrong question, albeit asked for the right reasons and it certainly is generating some interesting discussion. So I left a comment on Ben’s post and suggested two different questions that I think are more interesting (to me, at least, we’ll see if they are to you).

First question:
Why learn?
I think a discussion around this question might ultimately help with what Ben was trying to get at.

The second question, and really the reason I decided to post this on my blog, simply removes the last five words from his question.
Why should your district continue?
I think this is a much more interesting question, and one that I’m not asking lightly. I think we need to go back to first principles - or perhaps first “principals” :-)
Why do we exist as an institution?
I’d like you to pretend for a moment that you live in an alternate reality, one where right now, for the first time, someone is proposing universal schooling for all children between the ages of five and eighteen. Now, pitch me your proposal for your school district (or, for folks not in a school district, for your institution). Justify your existence. Tell me what your mission is, and why your institution (as constructed in our current reality) is the best solution to achieve that mission.

If you were starting your school right now, from scratch, would you? Or would your solution look very different?

I think your answer is very important. Don’t you?

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Blogger lesliekm said...

This is a really important question. I would argue it is extremely timely as well. As we see district across this country taking on a new tune of fire everyone and rehire who we want in efforts to create change. It tempts you into thinking, at first glance, "yea! Clean slate! Let's do this!" But is it a clean slate? How are they making the choices of who to keep and who to let go in these situations? My obserations are showing me the decisions are poorly made and based on the wrong ideology of what education should be about. This is why your question is needed and SO timely.

Your description of starting from the ground up is critical now- this is where our heads need to be in education. Whose heads are here? How do we create a critical mass to actually begin again anew?

5/25/09 9:16 PM  
OpenID andrewbwatt said...

Mine would be a middle school or high school. I would start with a high-powered webserver, a laptop or netbook for every child, a high-quality printer, and a store-front classroom with a well-equipped science lab, a lounge, a movement lab (yoga/dance/martial arts), workspaces, and a gallery at the front. In other words, I'd give kids access to the world, and I'd make the school permeable to the larger world by placing downtown right outside the front door. And their work would be visible at the front of the school, all the time.

We'd have ten subjects instead of five: Western Humanities (English Language and grammar, Spanish and one other Romance Language), Eastern Humanities (Chinese, Chinese characters, literature & grammar), Mathematics, World Culture, Art, Music, Biology, Physics/Chemistry, Computer Programming, and Body (health, sex, athletics).

Each 'classroom' would have a guide, whose job would be partly as a teacher, an administrator and as a social networker. Her job would be to connect students in her space with competent adults in chosen fields, help assess students' abilities, schedule group programming, and schedule labtime for other 'schools' in the same system within her 'school's' laboratory.

The 'campus bounds' would be set as a neighborhood line, and kids would be able to travel through that area on errands, on drawing and interviewing assignments. All school work would end with public projects, either visible as written work on the school website, or as physical art in the school windows, or a concert/recital in the gallery.

Every two to four years, the students would work at the direction of a general contractor, electrician, plumber and architect to redesign and rebuild their space.

To graduate, a student would need to demonstrate spoken proficiency in three languages, writing in two, mathematics through trigonometry, drawing, a musical instrument, completion of a long-term science project, and a successful computer program.

There would be no grades.

5/26/09 5:21 AM  

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Monday, May 18, 2009

Cory Doctorow Interview: Ustream Archive

Today was the day our students Skyped with Cory Doctorow asking him about his book Little Brother. Overall, it went very well. He spent about forty-eight minutes answering their questions (well, more like forty-one minutes, as the first seven minutes before the official start was small talk as we connected early just to make sure we didn't have any issues). He was very engaged, listened to their questions, and made some passionate arguments.

I've embedded the ustream below. Please note a few things. First, as I indicated above, the first seven minutes are small talk (although interesting as well, I think); the formal question and answer portion starts at about the seven minute mark.

Second, the audio quality starts decreasing about halfway through. Not sure if that was a Skype issue, or bandwidth issues on his end or ours, but you'll have to concentrate more as it goes on to understand his end.

Third, you'll notice there are three students asking the questions. This was actually a group of four students, but the fourth student was in a final exam so couldn't be present for this part. Due to scheduling conflicts, this was the best time we could come up with, so the students asking the questions, as well as about twenty-five other students in the audience, were all there in between their scheduled final exams.

Finally, this was part of an assignment where students are reading books that are sometimes controversial and then making a case for why the book should be approved or not by a school board. This particular group was presenting during the final exam period that was directly after this Skype call with Cory Doctorow. They purposely made their first formal question to him be why he though the book should be read by ninth graders so that, less than forty minutes later, they could pull up the archived ustream and easily play his answer (since it was at the beginning - well, after the small talk) as part of their presentation (which they did). Very. Nice.






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OpenID andrewbwatt said...

I'm really envious that you can get Cory Doctorow to speak live to your class. Is it easy to do? Several kids in my ninth grade class were big fans of Little Brother, and I'd love to connect him to them before the end of the year, if it's possible.

Of course, the "end of the year" for us is Friday, so it's probably too late.

5/21/09 5:04 PM  

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Thursday, May 14, 2009

Things Just Changed. Again.

Do you teach math? Science? Geography? Economics? Health? Business? Language Arts?

Wait, let me start over.

Do you teach?

Wait, let me start over again.

Are you alive, and curious?


Okay, that’s better. I think this is worth 13 minutes of your time. Go watch it, then come back.

I believe Wolfram Alpha is supposed to go live tomorrow. It’s obviously still very, very new (will they change its name to Wolfram Beta later? That will mess up the URL’s. Kidding.) It will be interesting to see what kinds of searches lend themselves to this more computational approach and what kinds don’t, but I still think this is another big step in how humans find, access, digest and repurpose information. Designed to “compute answers to your specific questions,” this once again should make us examine what we are doing in our classrooms, and how we should best prepare our students to be successful in an age with this much computational firepower.

What facts (discrete pieces of information?) do we need to know in order to develop deep understandings of important concepts, and what facts can we just google or wolfram (or will the verb be alpha)? What previously unknown relationships might be teased out of the data by the Wolfrom Alpha algorithms, or what will humans looking at this data in new and unique ways discover? What new questions will we learn to ask, or will we learn to ask old questions in new ways? (You can also view a much longer talk by Stephen Wolfram at the Berkman Center. No, I have not watched it all yet.)

Also note that Google is evolving as well. Joyce Valenza has a good summary post over at School Library Journal that discusses the new features. I also thought this quote she shared from a Google presenter was interesting,
If users can’t spell, it’s our problem. If they don’t know how to form the syntax, it’s our problem. If there’s not enough content, it’s our problem.
Hmm. I wonder whose problem it is if our students don’t know how to question, ask/search, find, evaluate, synthesize, repurpose, remix, and solve problems using tools like Google and Wolfrom Alpha?

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Blogger DXR said...

Very cool! Thanks for the link and educating me...today.

5/14/09 9:19 PM  
Blogger Teach42 said...

Way cool! I think I had trouble wrapping my mind around it because I kept wanting to think of it as a search engine. It looks like a search engine and behaves similarly to a search engine. But obviously it isn't one. And quite simply, there will be things this will work for and things that it won't. It'll be interesting to see how it develops and how many of these basic 'computations' it can really incorporate.

Looks ambitious, can't wait to play around with it! Thanks for sharing.

5/15/09 6:04 AM  
OpenID heidical said...

Oh, wow. THIS is what I learned today. Thanks for alerting us!

5/15/09 8:06 AM  
OpenID Andrew B. Watt said...

I experimented with Wolfram|Alpha over the weekend, then alerted my faculty colleagues to it via school email this morning.

As I said in my blog this morning, "Blocking content on the Internet is tantamount to admitting that your school can’t do better than what your students find there on the ‘Net. It’s proof that your institution can’t deal with change. It’s a demonstration that your teachers and administrators are unable to cope with new knowledge or new means of accessing knowledge."

I'm saddened to admit that most teachers responded with hopes for a block, or suggestions that we should just not let students know that this website is out there. Sad, very sad.

5/18/09 12:29 PM  
Blogger lesliekm said...

HOLY Smakerel! WOW! This is a game changer. In the 90's "we" were saying, why teach kids to memorize basic computational facts because they will have calculators, instead teach them how to think about math and problem solve. Now THIS takes that whole idea to a WHOLE 'nother level. But the underlying premise is the same...TEACH kids to THINK and QUESTION and LEARN! Inquiry will be the core of learning...Thanks so much for sharing this with us.

5/21/09 2:22 PM  
Blogger JK said...

Wow. That was awesome. I will now withdraw from the world for several hours to explore and learn, which is exactly what we need our students to be able to do!

7/8/09 11:40 AM  

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Tuesday, May 12, 2009

Create A Movement

This TED Talk by Seth Godin is worth 17 minutes of your time. After you watch it, some thoughts are below the embed.



Here are a few semi-random thoughts that were generated by this talk. I’m not saying that he’s necessarily right about everything, but he raises some interesting questions that are worth thinking about.

What do I do for a living? Seems like a simple question, but – as Seth Godin points out – perhaps it’s not. I used to answer, “I’m a math teacher” or “I teach math.” Over time that shifted to “I teach students math” and then simply “I teach students.” But I find myself agreeing with him that perhaps that’s too “narrow” of a definition of what we in education try to do: we try to change everything.

Every day we should at least try to step on that light bulb, clearly indicating that there was “before,” and now there’s “after;” that at this moment in time we changed something in our students’ lives. If we don’t aspire to that, if we accept a too-narrow definition of what we do for a living, then we relegate ourselves to mediocrity.

Godin says that the way we make change is by leading, and that leading is simply helping to connect people and ideas. And, at this moment in time, we are at a tipping point (dare I say a moment of “shift”), because the technology allows us to connect in ways that previously were unimaginable or impractical (see Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody). And we can find others that are interested in and passionate about the same things, not by forcing them, but because we want to be connected. We need to be connecting as educators and, just as importantly, we need to be helping our students connect.

He goes on to say that we need to find folks that are disconnected, but already have a yearning; people who are just waiting for someone to lead them. (Sound like anyone you know?) We need to be heretics, who look at the status quo and say, “I can’t abide it.” (What’s wrong with the status quo? Unless you don’t see any need in the world, any disaffection, any hurt or disconnectedness, then we must try to improve on the status quo.) Is this in your curriculum? Perhaps not in so many words, but it should be, so I’m asking you to add it. Right now.

Godin then says there are three questions to ask yourself if you’re trying to lead something. If educators are leaders, then we need to ask ourselves these same questions.
  1. Who are you upsetting? If you’re not upsetting anyone, then you’re not changing the status quo. (Note that this is not upsetting people just to upset them, but rather with a purpose, with a goal, with an important change in mind that’s necessary to improve things for someone. Editor’s note: I’ve got this one nailed. Unfortunately, I don’t think it stands on its own.)

  2. Who are you connecting? (Think outside your classroom walls for a moment here. Nothing wrong with connecting inside your classroom, but some of those students have yearnings that don’t match up with others in their classroom, so help them find their tribe.)

  3. Who are you leading? (Don’t limit this to the students in your classroom, or the adults in your building/department; leading is not limited by proximity or geography anymore. Also some folks will protest that they don’t want to lead or that’s not in their job description. I say it should be, and I’d ask you to add it now.)
Godin concludes by asking his audience to create a movement, to find their tribe. So, what are you waiting for?

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Blogger PNaugle said...

I had just watched the TED talk featuring Seth Godin shortly before I saw your tweet. As he talked about connecting with tribes I couldn't help but think about Twitter. I have only been a member since February, but I am making so many wonderful connections with other educators. I have even joined some "tribes" on Twitter.

If leading is helping to connect people and ideas then I am slowly starting to be a leader. Thanks to Twitter I have grown my PLN and love connecting and sharing ideas with these people.

I was a teacher who used to say I teach 4th grade math. Now I say I teach students how to find answers and become lifelong learners.

I really like the light bulb analogy and plan to step on at least one light bulb one each day.

5/12/09 10:27 PM  
Blogger blog for peace said...

nice connections to teaching karl. thank you. upsetting, connecting, leading. i appreciate the focus you helped create in my head just now.

speaking of connections -
how did your expanded school board grading session go?

i just finished richardson's blogs, wikis, podcasts - (i think that should be standard reading for teachers today.) the whole idea of making those connections.
when richardson talked about the need for kids to publish - and publish usefully - not just to end up in a recycle bin at the end of the year - i thought of you and that grading process. how meaningful for the kids - to connect to others and find more meaning/purpose to their project/product.

hoping you'll post sometime the benefits your kids got from that specific process. that's one of my goals for next year. useful end products.

5/13/09 3:39 AM  
Blogger Karl Fisch said...

@PNaugle - I like the "shift" in what you say you do. Go break some light bulbs today.

@blog for peace - the virtual school board sessions are coming up Friday, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday.

5/13/09 8:17 AM  
Blogger Mike H said...

I agree with what you mean about upsetting people. Yesterday, a teacher who is almost 2 years behind in fulfilling her state mandated technology standards asked if it was okay to use Google to demonstrate one of the requirements (an internet search, difficult, huh?) Well, it asks for a Boolean search and most teachers when they turn in their work don't do a Boolean search, so they have to do it over.

Anyway, to avoid that, I told the teacher that while using Google, make sure it's a Boolean search. She replied back via email,"tell me what that is."

So I told her that really, she should find out on her own instead of me just giving her the answer. I even explained it as a skill that teachers should model for students so they can learn on their own, rather than just relying on teachers to give them the answers.

She still isn't talking to me.

5/14/09 12:06 PM  

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