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Today's the last day for teachers, so I snapped this to remember the IB coordination office cohort of 2006-07. That's Mustafa, our program coordinator and chemistry teacher on the left; then me; next is Hande our secretary, and Ünal, veteran IB physics teacher.
Ünal is going into retirement after the summer, and we wish him lots of rest first, followed by much success in his new endeavors.
I just had a great experience participating in NECC (National Educational Computing Conference) in Atlanta, Georgia, from my desk here in Ankara.
Around the same time I wrote a post about project-based learning I got in touch (via Ewan) with Jane Krauss, who has just written a book with Suzie Boss titled Reinventing Project-Based Learning: Your Field Guide to Real-world Projects in the Digital Age. Jane and Suzie also write a blog on the same theme and created a Flickr group to collect photos of school projects around the world. Yesterday in Atlanta Jane and Suzie gave a presentation on project-based learning. They surprised me by inviting me to join in the presentation via Skype, along with Linda Hartley in the UK. It was a little strange talking to a room full of people I couldn't see, and because of the headphones I had some trouble hearing my own voice as well, but still it was very cool and fun. Linda created a wiki to write a summary of the presentation.
After my little piece during the session, I started wondering (since I couldn't see faces) if maybe I miscommunicated one of my points, so I'm offering a clarification here by way of a short case study:
Our school is in the vicinity of one of the last remaining habitats of a critically endangered wildflower that in Turkish is called yanar döner (Centaurea tchihatcheffi). Teachers and students had been thinking about how the school could get involved in this problem, but a lot of the thinking was limited to what students could do inside the school building, so most of the suggestions were for creating a website, slogans, a poster contest in the school, and other media projects targeting the school community.
I conducted a simple problem analysis exercise with the students and one of our biology teachers, where we stated the problem (threat of extinction), and then ask why (loss of habitat). You ask why again (urban sprawl, intensive agriculture), and keep asking why until you get the big picture that shows how this problem relates to a larger system. As we looked at the bigger picture, we saw that a media campaign in the school community would not touch people who were close enough to the problem to make much of a change. But we did realize that we could take a different and more effective approach by collecting seeds in the wild and propagating them on our campus. The creative juices started flowing and we saw the potential for producing enough seeds to share with other schools in the area, and even for establishing a low-tech seed bank to help protect other endangered wildflowers in our province.
Although some of our students might have felt content with a nice website and a contest, bringing in a learning tool from "the real world" helped us find a solution that could have a genuine and sustainable impact.
There's plenty of talk about the global war on terror, but several headlines from the last couple of weeks remind me that there is another war going on, over the right of children --and especially girls-- to basic education. Among the major factions are poverty, greed and misogyny.
The timing of the recent spate of news items was interesting, since several of the education bloggers I read regularly are now off to various conferences to discuss educational technology, one laptop per child, school 2.0 and reforming education so that children are better prepared for a future we can now only guess at.
Maybe I'm envious because I don't get to be around edubloggers very much, that I'm the only adult in my school with a flickr account and a feed aggregator, and I miss being among like-minded folk. But then again, my perspective is colored by experiences that many people at those exciting conferences can only imagine: communities where there are no teachers, schools with no books, girls with no future.
Change needs to happen on both sides of the digital divide. At the same time, it's good for each side to be more aware of the other. This blog is about "triangulating": determining your position by its relation to other known points. Know where you are.
Now for some points to plot on your map:
Child soldiers in Sierra Leone The Star.com "The United Nations-backed war crimes court for Sierra Leone handed down landmark convictions against three men for recruiting and using child soldiers." That's a good start, but there are still more than 300,000 children forced to serve revolutionary armies around the world.
Girls in Sudan leave school to earn money as prostitutes IRIN Africa: "As many as three-quarters of female students [in Juba] drop out because of pregnancy, some as young as 11. Money and gifts are often an incentive to have sex with older men as well as age mates."
Girls in Afghanistan under fire for learning EuropaWorld: "A shooting outside a girls' school in Afghanistan's Logar province left two students dead and four people injured, including a teacher. Two gunmen on motorbikes opened fire as teachers and students were leaving Qalai Saeeda girls' school... UNICEF is concerned that similar incidents -- and the intimidation aimed at stopping families sending girls to school -- could undo some of the educational progress achieved so far."
Corruption diverts billions of dollars from education worldwide Guardian Unlimited: "Bribery and graft in schools and universities is seriously undermining education systems worldwide and costing governments billions of dollars, according to a new report funded by Unesco (full report available at the link).
Photo by Mehmet Seven.
"I left Harvard with no real awareness of the awful inequities in the world -- the appalling disparities of health, and wealth, and opportunity that condemn millions of people to lives of despair... It took me decades to find out."
-- Bill Gates, on receiving an honorary doctorate at Harvard University.
Thanks to Tim Cohn (via John Connell) for the link to the text of the speech. Click here to read the whole (short) speech.
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One of my goals in this blog is to stimulate conversations among the people I work with here in Turkey and to encourage them to test the waters of Web 2.0. However, I find that often this blog reaches an audience quite different from the one I intended. 
There's nothing wrong with that, it's just an interesting twist in the blogging experience, since I'm always telling students that the best writing is supposed to be targeted toward a specific audience.
A few weeks ago I gave presentations to our International Baccalaureate students about the extended essay requirement for the IB Diploma. In order to help them pay attention to me instead of their notebooks, I prepared my notes ahead of time and put them in a wiki, along with several other resources.
The funny thing is that now nearly half of the visitors to the wiki are from outside Turkey ('FI'=Finland??). I guess those unexpected guests found me somehow on their quest to answer questions about the extended essay, and then moved on. That has made me appreciate comments on my blog even more, and makes me resolve to be a better commenter.
Sometimes writing a blog is like timidly starting a conversation with a stranger in a crowded room, and finding out out your paths have crossed many times. At other times, it can make you feel like someone passing out handbills in Kızılay (or Times Square). But never mind that. Just keep casting your nets and sharing what you've got, because you'll never know what will come back.
My readers in Europe and North America are probably wondering why I'm so late to announce the end of school. Actually, in Turkey today was the last day.
In Turkish, geçmiş olsun is what you say to someone who has just come through a difficult experience such as an illness, or a year of school. It's what the teachers say to each other after wishing all the students a happy summer and shooing them out the door.
I'll still be around through July, and look forward to calmly cleaning out my office, finishing my filing, and meeting with students about some new projects for next year. This is also the time we take off our ties, leave campus for lunch in the village nearby, reflect on last year and imagine the next one.
Last night our son Andy graduated from high school!
It's been a long journey since his first classes in Guatemala (in Spanish), then public schools in Michigan and Texas, followed by several years of private tutoring and homeschooling in Ankara, Turkey until the Oasis International School opened three years ago.
Oasis has around 300 students from 35 different countries, and the warm relationships among teachers and students in such diversity created a great environment for all kinds of learning. Reports are that he'll be remembered as a fun and inquiring student, an entertaining classmate, a leader, and a good friend. In case you can't tell from the photo, his parents are nauseatingly proud! (click to enlarge if they don't look happy enough) 
Andy's lifelong dream has been to enter the film industry, and he was voted by his class as "most likely to win an Oscar". He starts a film making program in Houston this fall, and though we will miss having him around every day, we know he'll put his creativity and unique perspective to good use.
So, without becoming too mushy, we congratulate you, Andy, and wish you much success and many wonderful surprises ahead!
Teaching union calls to 'scrap exams before the age of 16' | the Daily Mail
In England, the General Teaching Council has recommended that Standard Assessment Tests (SATs) be abolished for students aged 7, 11 and 14. The GTC argues that schoolchildren in England are among the most tested in the world, averaging 70 tests and exams before the age of 16. This distracts both teachers and students from focusing on broader knowledge and skills that students need in order to be more prepared for the world of work.
The government however argues that they still need a system to keep schools accountable to the public and to identify weaknesses in the schooling system.
Looking at this from a country where one's university career depends on a single multiple choice qualifying exam, I sympathize with the teachers. The exam our students take doesn't really test anything taught after 10th grade, and students obsess over exam prep courses for years, sacrificing most of what Westerners think of as a normal teenage lifestyle.
To read the rest of the news from the Daily Mail, click here.
I'm collecting sites that have interesting ways of depicting data, and came upon Worldmapper, which uses unusual maps to show all kinds of economic and development indicators, such as literacy and life expectancy. The maps are reshaped so that the relative distribution of the indicator value is shown in the relative size of each country. 
I played around with some of the maps showing education indicators and economic development, and was struck by the similarity in the distribution of spending on primary education (first image), secondary education, and research/development (second image). 
Countries with high spending in one category tended to also have high spending in the other two categories. Likewise, countries with low investment in education also had low investments in R&D. I also found a lot of similarity with the map showing the distribution of new patents, a good indicator of innovation. Draw your own conclusions, or read more in the Eldis resource page on education and economic growth.
Worldmapper currently has 366 different maps, and they keep adding more. Visit their site, pick a few indicators, and see if you can guess what shape the world is in.
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I've had more professional experience with "real life" projects in rural education, rural health, refugee services, and so on, than with "project-based learning" as conducted in the classroom. I continue to do a fair amount of reading in project management and how it benefits from the fields of knowledge management and organizational learning, and have been contemplating for several months how there ought to be more convergence of learning from real-life projects with learning from classroom projects.
One major difference between these two kinds of projects is this: Real-life projects (please be patient -- I know that classrooms are 'real' too and I'm working on a fairer way to distinguish) have as their main objective the creation of something you can leave behind for others; these projects are evaluated for the effectiveness and appropriateness of their outcomes.
Classroom projects, on the other hand, will also create something, but the main objective is that the persons who design and execute the project will have also achieved one of the school's learning objectives, and they will be graded according to what is learned; ideally a classroom project might even fail, yet the student could still succeed if she/he learned the intended lesson inherent in the project. In high school I tried to manufacture rayon in a lab experiment; I failed to create rayon but I still got a good grade on my analysis of why the experiment failed.
So can project-based learning learn from projects? Managers interested in organizational learning look at how to learn from mistakes, how to learn together, and how to improve their success rate. Classroom projects, though, are still going to put priority on learning subject content: biology, history, physics. The assessment might include the student's collaboration, communication, and meta-learning, but these will still be secondary to the content learning objectives.
I'll keep mulling over this during the summer, and will try to put together some readings that would be of special interest to teachers who supervise classroom projects. Your comments are welcome!
Image is of children participating in the planning of a village reconstruction project in India following the tsunami of 2004.
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Well, they're new to me, anyway. Why not tag them for summer reading on del.icio.us to get some ideas for next year?
Teachers’ Guide to International Collaboration
This online publication from the United States Department of Education’s International Education Initiative. was designed to “help teachers use the Internet to reach out globally”. The guide includes chapters on cross-cultural interaction, guides for specific subject areas such as mathematics, science, and social studies, and tips on planning and executing projects.
International Journal of Education and Development Using Information and Communication Technology (IJEDICT)
The IJEDICT is an free electronic journal that publishes articles by researchers and practitioners to share best practices and to contribute to the understanding of the potential for integrating information technologies in education. Among the articles in recent issues are Computer-based testing on (a) physical chemistry topic and Exploring Turkish science education faculties’ understanding of educational technology and use. You can sign up for notification of updates by both email and RSS.
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