Tryangulation

Don't just sing along

I found out about this song today by way of CC Long on the Classroom 2.0 social network. It's Tom Chapin singing Not on the Test. One stanza goes like this:

Thinking's important. It's good to know how.
And someday youll learn to, but someday's not now.
Go on to sleep now. You need your rest.
Don't think about thinking. it's not on the test.

CC had a link to this NPR broadcast clip (link here), but I dug a little deeper and found that the song has its own website, Notonthetest.com, with additional lyrics that include a stanza about the US education policy package called No Child Left Behind. The website is actually advocating for more art and other programs to stimulate creativity, which are being wedged out of education that targets test performance rather than knowledge.

The website also provides suggestions for parents on how to lobby for change, although education policy out here in the rest of the world might be far less  susceptible to parental influence. Here, for example, the system is highly centralized with a rigid national curriculum that shackles students to test scores even though its leaders know it shouldn't (here's something I wrote recently about that unfortunate irony). Still, pressing for change is always better than just singing along.

Read 7000 posts in under 10 minutes

Today is my first day back to work since August. I've been away to help our sons settle in the US, work on other family affairs, and to attend to some health issues. During that time I pretty much stayed away from blogging, reading blogs, or keeping up much on anything at all.

About ten days ago I started reading again, and was daunted by the nearly 7500 unread posts in Bloglines, plus hundreds and hundreds of email bulletins and notifications from networks and wikis I'm a part of. I felt a little numb and overwhelmed during the first 500 or so, but I  began to see the trends and, stepping back, saw the emerging higher level patterns (á la one of my favorite books).

So here, in flagrant disregard for scientific data collection and analysis, is my summary of the key edublog topics that I was missing over the last six months, roughly in order of frequency, word count, or heft:

1. Buzz around big edutech conferences, where articulate keynote speakers cast visions, inspire, and challenge us to change the world. This buzz then fans out into auxilary visions for overhauling schools, but not enough, in my opinion, about deschooling.
   
2. (In a near tie with #1) Frustration over how unchanged the world is right now: fellow teachers, school technicians, administrators, board members, parents, whoever, who still don't get it.
3. Good news about students who get it: transformed classrooms full of self-directed, project-based, web 2.0 savvy teacher-facilitated lifelong learners. Bring it on!
4. The latest thing. In this case, Ning, Twitter, Voicethread, XO and "flat" everything.
5. Good news about fellow teachers, administrators, superintendents, board members, parents,  who get it, becoming transformed into facilitators, enablers, coaches, and catalysts. May their tribe increase!
6. (In a distant last place) Good stories about learning that aren't focused on the technology.

After 6 months of not reading, and then super intense scanning (slowing down many, many times to read more closely), I've seen the Pareto principle at work: 80% of the good stuff can be found in 20% of the blogs.  A lot of the rest is echo.

The posts I find myself slowing down for are those by people I've had personal (albeit digital) contact with, and those who say something unique. That has helped me clarify to myself why I blog, and I'd encourage others to think more about their own unique contribution. Along similar lines Terry Freedman had an interesting post about how fewer readers, not more, can help a blogger keep focus.

In spite of a lot of the grousing I've read, I have to say that change is happening out there. Up close, blog post by blog post, the change seems almost imperceptible sometimes, but stepping back, I could see that more and more people are experimenting and reflecting. Even though the technology per se is in focus maybe more than I'd wish, more practitioners are thinking more about teaching and learning, examining themselves, and letting go of preconceptions.

Remember that in the open sea, a tsunami is barely perceptible, yet full of tremendous power that is finally realized when it reaches the shore.

The photo is of my office when I arrived today. My desk will probably never be this clean again.

The dark side of teens & cell phones

Over the last year edubloggers have discussed more and more the role of mobile phones in educational technology, recognizing the near-native ability that young people have with text messaging and "info sharing" (read: photos and music). What happens though, after the final bell rings and those same young people head for the school parking lot?

Today was a slow day for me, so I got to watch Dr. Phil for the first time in my life. Today's show was about teens who read and compose text messages while driving. Dr. Phil interviewed a 17-year-old girl who has been driving for 4 months, and who averages 5000 text messages a month. He also had on the show a young man who struck a man on a bicycle with his car while text messaging; the man later died from his injuries.

The tenacity of these teens' addiction to texting parallels that of other substance abuses. I've seen similar cases in Turkey (and not limited to teenagers), but what I haven't seen are programs that impress upon people the seriousness of this kind of behavior while driving. At the very least, we can borrow a question from Dr. Phil and calculate how far a car going 80 kph will travel during the 2 seconds it takes to take your eyes off the road and look at a text message.

I'm going out on a limb here, but I think that before mobile phones get mainstreamed into the classroom there ought to be some way to ensure more responsible phone use outside of class. The last thing we want is to require students to become even more dependent on something that can cost a life.

For more on this episode of Dr. Phil, follow this link:  Dr. Phil.com - Shows - Season 6 Premiere

On a related note, one new TV commercial I've noticed since we came to the US this summer shows a car salesman pointing out the features of a new car to a couple of young men. The best selling point turns out to be a dock for an MP3 player in the car's dashboard. So much for encouraging teenagers to think critically and make good choices.

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Window to the EduBlogger World

Today education bloggers around the world will participate in collaborative events that will showcase the EduBloggerWorld online social network. I joined the network about two months ago, and have enjoyed the interaction between edubloggers from many different countries.

One of the main events of the day is the contribution of blog posts around a common theme from as many edubloggers as possible. Here is my contribution.

I started blogging about three years ago as a way to challenge myself to improve my writing, and hence my observation and reflection, as I looked around for things to write about.  I've started and abandoned several blogs before creating this one as I learned more about the technical side of putting together a blog and also narrowed down my focus.

This blog is where I write about how we learn, how we use what we learn, and whether formal education helps or hinders those processes. I might write about education policy, cognition, education technologies, and my own "aha!" moments as I learn something new. I have studied pedagogy, literature, anthropology, linguistics and public administration, and I have worked both inside and outside the education sector in three different countries; those experiences, and a lifelong urge to find the connections between things, have given me a perspective that I think is worth sharing.

I blog principally for myself, as a way to focus my thoughts and find ways to articulate them effectively. Sometimes my thoughts strike a chord with other edubloggers, and so my blog create opportunities for me to have conversations with fascinating people around the world. I also blog as a way to share my discoveries with my colleagues, and as an example they can follow as they explore the possibilities of this medium in education. 

My window to the edublogger world is supposed to include a photo of either where I blog, or the view I have while blogging. I'm sharing both: the top photo is of my office in Ankara, and the bottom photo is my view of a snowball fight outside my window on a snowy day (notice the open classroom windows in the background?).

edubloggerworldmeetup2007

Reinventing project based learning

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.

n07s606

Still another way to look at the world

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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Can project-based learning learn from project management?

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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Two new resources on ICT in international education

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.

Can we 'unlearn'?

A recent post by Will Richardson on The Steep "Unlearning Curve"  suggests ten things that we need to unlearn as we adapt classrooms and education to global changes. Here are a few items from his manifesto:

• We need to unlearn the premise that we know more than our kids, because in may cases, they can now be our teachers as well.
• We need to unlearn the idea that learning itself is an event. In this day and age, it is a continual process.
• We need to unlearn the notion that our students don't need to see and understand how we ourselves learn.

I've used the word "unlearning" myself, often when suggesting the very same changes as Will. After reading some of the excellent comments on Will's blog I might agree that this is perhaps not the best word for what we want to say. I was gratified that one of the comment writers in fact reminded Will of Ivan Illich's Deschooling Society, a favorite author of mine, and that might actually enlighten us here.

We sometimes use negative words (unlearn, deschool, deconstruct) in the context of a process that seeks a positive outcome: recognizing where we have learned (and taught?) the wrong thing, and finding new words, thoughts and actions that correct the wrong and move us forward.

Will (and many of his commenters) are basically saying, "This is what's wrong with schooling" but with words that also carry the seeds of the solution. When talking about our spirituality we often use words like "reflect," "repent" and "reconcile" to say that we were on the wrong track, and we want to change. In both cases, this process requires self awareness, humility, and a recognition of our responsibility to ourselves and those around us as we seek what Illich calls conviviality.

Maybe that's not such a new idea, but it's the hard ideas that bear repeating.  Thanks Will.

(By the way, Will is author of an excellent book I just got and have started sharing among our teachers.)

Did you know...

Most of us know in a general sort of way that in a few years today's students will enter a work force that is very different from the one we know now. Most of us also agree that, to  better prepare these students, we need to do some (or many?) things differently. I just watched a video that might help the next time you are arguing advocating for change with parents or a member of the board.

The video Did you know created by Karl Fisch gives some statistics that can remind you to think harder about what we’re teaching and why. Here’s just one quote to give you an idea:

According to former US Secretary of Education Richard Riley, the top 10 jobs that will be in demand in 2010 didn’t exist in 2004. We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist, using technologies that haven’t yet been invented, in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet.

Far more than Physics or Literature or Mathematics (although these are important), and way more than blogging, PowerPoint, smart boards and teleconferencing (although these are also important), our students need to learn from us how to learn. Go ahead and assign scribes to  create classroom wikis and podcast your asynchronous debates, but make sure they learn how to learn. Teach them to create knowledge and to communicate it effectively. Let them watch you as you keep learning.

Scott McLeod has reproduced the Did you know video into several different formats for you to  download. Click here for a list.  Click here to see the video on YouTube.

25 June 2007 update: Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod have released a new version of the video to correct some errors and respond to critiques like the comment here. I have updated the links in the post.

Of two minds

I'm feeling ambivalent now about the request for comments on the del.icio.us rubric that I included in the previous post. It's a little strange to take something like social bookmarking that I appreciate for making my job easier and more productive, and turn it into a class requirement.  The "you have to do this because it's good for you" argument never sat well with me, and I'd prefer that students realize that I'm sharing things that will lighten their burden, rather than adding to that burden. 

With all the discussion about how new tools change the way teaching and learning happen -- fostering collaboration and creativity, turning teachers into facilitators who model experiential learning -- I wonder if requirements and rubrics turn our focus back onto the tools, and away from the enthusiasm for the things discovered and made with those tools.

Anybody got del.icio.us rubrics?

I'm halfway through my presentations to 10th grade pre-IB classes about rss and del.icio.us, and just got a very good question from a teacher about assessing students' progress with these tools.

She's thinking about a practical assignment in lieu of an exam that's scheduled next week, and is asking about something related to del.icio.us and/or Bloglines, such as a certain number of bookmarks tagged for an upcoming classroom debate, number of newsfeeds subscribed, etc.

I can think of a few things off the top of my head that might work for clarifying what the assignment entails and how it will be assessed, but I'd really appreciate any comments from readers with more experience in this.  We'd want something qualitative as well as quantitative, and that demonstrates a certain level of mastery of the skills.

We'll end up doing something no matter what comments come in, but my readership's gotten a modest boost lately and I'd like to give you all a chance to chime in.

Each one teach one

Today I started another series of presentations on tools that can help our IB students in web-based research.  I usually design these presentations so that I talk just a little, and then everyone works in a big chaotic group on lists of tasks. I have to do things differently this time because the target group - 140 pre-IB 10th graders -  is bigger than any I've dealt with before.  (Sorry, guys, for making you sit at desks!)

Our strategy is to give quick demonstrations of rss, del.icio.us and such just to show some of the cool stuff you can do, and see who comes back for more. Then we'll recruit a few students from each class to equip them as resource persons for their fellow students and teachers.  I can work with a small group more effectively than with the entire 10th grade class, and perhaps this will be an easy way to multiply my efforts.

So far so good. Today after my first 40-minute frantic demo, it looks like 10-C already has more than it's quota of volunteer experts.

If you want to see the paces I put them through, check this out: link.

IB Regional Conference presentations now online

The International Baccalaureate Organization's Africa/Europe/Middle East regional conference was held in Athens in October 2006, and Powerpoint presentations from that conference are now available for download from here:

IB Africa Europe Middle East conference

Learning about versus learning how

In recent weeks several of my favorite blogs have hit on the clash between the learning about paradigm and the learning how paradigm in the goals and practices of schools.

First, Kathy Sierra's discussion of the failure of university science programs to teach students how to do science.  She says "What experts use to do their work are the things we don't teach. We focus almost exclusively on how to talk about the work."

Will Richardson's recent post says "the thing that seems to be missing from most of my conversations with classroom teachers and administrators is a willingness to even try to re-envision their own learning, not just their students."

Then while tidying up my del.icio.us tags I found this by Ewan McIntosh: "if ... we are looking to give learners the opportunity to direct their learning then what is the role of the teacher? Well, in order to teach you have to be the person you want your students to be."

Last week I had more conversations yet again on the topics of (1) a recent teacher seminar on innovative instruction, delivered as usual in a classical lecture style, and (2) the irony and contradictions of implementing a portfolio based curriculum in an environment where all K12 education focuses on performance on ONE 195-minute university entrance exam (if you read Turkish you can visit this link to read more).

And then today in a meeting colleagues and I discussed how to institutionalize the IBO's recently released Learner Profile when, no matter how much we value the characteristics of the ideal learner, those characteristics really aren't the kind of thing that show up in the standardized tests required by our students to graduate from the national high school program.

Will and Ewan are talking (mostly) about the implementation of Web 2.0 tools to free up learning in schools, and Kathy is talking about the future of innovation (one of the pillars of the US economy), but they're all talking about learning how to learn.  That's why it's good that we learn the scientific method or web-based research tools or collaborative writing with wikis. That's why we also need to learn to risk failure, to embrace error and to reflect on our own experience. I'm liking my recent metaphor of burning rubber more and more.

So in our nicely compartmentalized subject areas like chemistry and history we learn all kinds of facts and theories, but the tools and skills used for creating knowledge in those fields don't look very much like chemistry or history. Even more ironic is that we also teach tools (Internet research, PowerPoint, DreamWeaver, whatever) outside the context of using those tools to communicate and create knowledge. 

Imagine four years of art class where all you do is learn about brushes, and never get to paint!

Those who teach, learn

Here's another installment on the theme of access in the IB

We're excited to announce that we have received funding approval for a project we proposed to the European Council of International Schools (ECIS) under their outreach program. The project we will implement is designed to help our IB students share their experiences in international education and critical thinking with future teachers.

A key participant group for the project is women university students from the interior of the country who live in a government-run student residence in Ankara. We proposed this project because our students will learn from sharing concepts from TOK, literature, CAS and other IB activities, and the university women will also be able to learn some things about cross-cultural understanding that they can one day impart to their students.  The women who will participate in the project are from places where, for economic, social and geographic reasons, there is far less exposure to cultural diversity and learning how, as the IBO puts it, others can also be right.

We'll use the project funding to establish a cultural resources library, attend concerts, plays and exhibitions, host film nights and guest speakers, and sponsor other activities to set the scene for discussions about literature, critical thinking and cross-cultural understanding. I expect we'll all learn a lot.

The name of our project is Those Who Teach, Learn. I think that's a nice way to sum up the two-way street of learning to teach and teaching to learn.  I'll keep you posted.

Why we don't learn more

In keeping with the theme of using technology to improve access to education, I thought I'd share some thoughts about some reading I've done recently on why ICTs haven't caught on more, and how that fits into general theories about how people learn - or in some cases, how we don't learn.

One of my favorite blogs out there right now is Creating Passionate Users. Kathy Sierra writes about how designers and marketers of software and other technological products can do more to help people use their products successfully. However, there is plenty in her site that can be transferred to education, whether or not you're using the latest information technology. A post that Kathy wrote some time back that turned me into a regular reader is titled Most classroom learning sucks. That doesn't sound like something a teacher will want to read, but here's how it starts:

The best learning occurs in a stimulating, active, challenging, interesting, engaging environment. It's how the brain works. The best learning occcurs when you move at least some part of your body. The best learning occurs when you're actively involved in co-constructing knowledge in your own head, not passively reading or listening... Forcing people to sit in a chair and listen to (or read) dry, formal words (with perhaps only a few token images thrown in) is the slowest, least effective, and most painful path to learning.

So why do we all do it that way? I recently found an article by Grandon Gill,  5 (Really) Hard things about using the Internet in Higher Education. Grandon discusses some general obstacles to adopting new technologies in education, but in my opinion none of the excuses he gives (lack of models, having to keep up with changes, not being understood by others), is exclusive to ICTs in education, but rather are the same old excuses used by anyone who resists innovation. By the end of the article you realize that Grandon is actually in favor of being a pioneer,  but I think he creates a picture of innovators and early adopters working in isolation from each other and fighting alone against the current, when that really isn't the case.

Usually with innovations (and not just the ICT kind), you get a few enthusiastic early users, who might enjoy using the innovation for all kinds of wrong reasons purposes not intended by its creator. These early users tend not to be good examples for the ones who follow, those who try to implement those innovations either out of coercion or a misunderstanding of the innovation's purpose. Like I hinted at before in this site, innovations are best adopted when they help us do something that already needed to be done.

In Grandon's case, he teaches in an MIS department, and found that the new ICTs tools available for teaching create opportunities for different ways of learning. Student-to-student interaction becomes easier and more creative, and the role of the teacher changes into that of a facilitator.  Of course if a teacher isn't ready to become a facilitator and co-learner, technology integration in the classroom is going to be a rough ride.

Lastly, David Pollard wrote on why collaboration tools are so underused. Like, Grandon Gill, several of the reasons he gives have more to do with how people think communication, group work, and learning are supposed to happen, and then have trouble with tools that create opportunities for new paradigms. I'm very enthusiastic about the potential for wikis and podcasts and other cool web 2.0 tools for helping people learn and create knowledge. But if people don't know how to work well together in the same room, then the best wikis, intranets and telecom systems in the world won't help. 

So why don't we learn more, or better? I believe that we try too often to learn the wrong thing: a tool that doesn't fit the job we're trying to do, a skill that impresses but doesn't satisfy, gaining more information rather than gaining wisdom. It's always easier to figure out how to go somewhere if you first know where you're going.

Is your school ready for a change?

Ewan McIntosh writes one of my favorite blogs about introducing tools of the new web into schools. Last week he attended a conference at Edinburgh University where one of the speakers, Terry Anderson, gave a presentation on strategies for adopting social software.
Ewan posted some of his notes from Anderson's presentation, and lists conditions that facilitate or accelerate technology changes. First of these was:

• dissastisfaction with the status quo

I would take this to mean that we are aware that things could be better, and this awareness makes us want to learn something new in order to fix whatever is missing or wrong.

What I've read and seen about technology integration indicates that students get excited when they learn tools that enable them to be more creative, even when it means more work. We could say that students felt that these tools gave them an outlet that was lacking before (dissastisfaction motivates learning).

Teachers, on the other hand, might feel negatively about using new technology because they are simply required to do so as part of a blanket tech integration plan,  even though they are not motivated or equipped to do anything with the new tech that they couldn't do with the old tech. So the status quo (and the dissatisfaction it might bring) in some cases could, by itself, hinder genuine integration of technology.

Other conditions cited by Anderson included expertise, incentives, participation, commitment and leadership.  To me this basically means that tech adoption happens best an organizational climate that encourages people to deal with their dissatisfaction in creative, constructive ways. From the looks of Ewan's post, Anderson said nothing about infrastructure, the size of your monitor or the speed of your connection. It's not really about the tools, it's about the people.

I suspect the way a school perceives and strives to enable any kind of learning --with or without computers and Internet-- is what makes the difference between a preoccupation (and dissastisfaction) with knowledge about tools, and an enthusiasm for the things discovered and made with those tools.

Click here to read the rest of Ewan's notes.

Educating the soldier

"It is impossible to give the soldier a good education without making him a deserter."
- Henry David Thoreau

Abraham Lincoln's words to a teacher

Recently the Sabah newspaper published the Turkish translation of a letter by US President (1861-1865) Abraham Lincoln to the headmaster of his son's school; I was prompted to share the original version (to the best of my knowledge) with my colleagues.

The timing seems especially fitting since we have just passed the anniversary of Lincoln's premature death (1865), and the anniversary of the birth of my own father (1912) who turned me loose to learn what I wanted, whenever I wanted. Behind the sentimentality of Lincoln's prose is, I believe,  the kernel of an understanding of learning and well being.

    He will have to learn, I know, that all men are not just and are not true. But teach him if you can, the wonder of books. . . but also give him quiet time to ponder the eternal mystery of birds in the sky, bees in the sun and flowers on a green hillside.

    In school, teach him it is far more honorable to fall than to cheat . . . Teach him to have faith in his own ideas, even if everyone tells him he is wrong. Teach him to be gentle with gentle people and tough with the tough.

    Try to give my son the strength not to follow the crowd when everyone is getting on the bandwagon. Teach him to listen to all men, but teach him also to filter all he hears on a screen of truth, and take only the good that comes through.

    Teach him, if you can, how to laugh when he is sad. Teach him there is no shame in tears. Teach him to scoff at cynics and to beware too much sweetness. Teach him to sell his brawn and brain to the highest bidder, but never to put a price on his heart and soul. Teach him to close his ears to a howling mob, and stand and fight if he thinks he is right.

    Treat him gently, but do not coddle him, because only the test of fire makes fine steel. Let him have the courage to be impatient. Let him have the patience to be brave. Teach him always to have sublime faith in himself, because then he will have faith in humankind.

    This is a big order, but see what you can do. He is such a fine little fellow, my son!

Abraham Lincoln

Update 31 March 2007: Thanks to a tip from Jennifer, I learned that this text has probably been attributed incorrectly to Lincoln. However that will probably not alter very much the impact that it has on my non-American readers.

 

How can ICTs benefit learning environments?

Here's another resource I'm adding as a footnote to my post from 6 Feb 2006, How much have we learned about ICTs in education. This one's entitled Information and communication technologies in schools: a handbook for teachers on how ICT can create new, open learning environments.  To quote the Eldis summary,

This handbook is principally designed for teachers and teacher educators who are currently working with, or would like to know more about, ICT in schools. The handbook focuses on how ICT can create new, open learning environments and their instrumental role in shifting the emphasis from a teacher to a learner-centred environment -- where teachers move from being the key source of information and transmitter of knowledge to becoming a collaborator and co-learner.

Click here to read a summary and download the PDF document.

20 Tech skills for every teacher

T.H.E. journal has an article titled 20 Technology Skills Every Educator Should Have. I'll bet that when you look at the list, you will find several that many teachers would not consider essential. Nevertheless it's a great website to start learning about some of those technologies you've been curious about, since it includes links to online tutorials and other web-based resources. Click here to read the article.

Happy New Year!

Here's to a happy, successful and peaceful year to everyone!

One of my New Year's resolution is to apply more diligence to improving my writing skills. That will mean, among other things, more diligence on this website.

I'm writing this from a new extension that I added to my Firefox browser that opens up a new pane for me to compose blog posts without having to go to my blog hosting site. So far it looks incredibly easy, and if this works it will save me lots of  extra work and time, which means more content with less effort!

Knowing what we say

Continuing thoughts on international (versus inter-nation-al) education.

I thought it was interesting that Wikipedia noted that international is used in the U.S. to mean “outside the U.S.” Such a remark is to me only slightly less parochial than the usage it  referred to, in that it implies only Americans are parochial in their use of English. I have observed similar uses of similar words elsewhere, where international is equated with foreign, just as the adjective ethnic is used in the majority culture to mean other (as if only foreigners or minorities have an ethnic identity).

References to those who are different carry implicit in them, even if unconsciously, reflexive references back to how we think of ourselves. Talk about cultural traits or physical characteristics typically uses relative terms which imply comparisons. When we talk about time-oriented or relationship-oriented cultures, we are making comparisons. When we talk about black, red, brown or white, we are talking comparisons. White people really aren’t white any more than black people are really black.

Unfortunately, stereotyping is normal behavior, since generalizations are part of a natural process for organizing information about our environment. We tend to make more distinctions about things that we deal with frequently and closely, and fewer distinctions about things we deal with infrequently and more distantly. “Different” people aren’t a normal part of our environment, so we don’t allocate a lot of our conscious to understanding them; since different/non-normal probably implies less need in the future for such information. In the short run, it’s more efficient to generalize.  Thus, we allocate more capacity for understanding diversity, inconsistency and unconscious behavior among our own kind than we do for that of Others.

A lot of the literature and presentations I’ve seen that give advice to inter-nation-al businessmen tends to be lists of do’s and don’t’s (“Do accept business cards with both hands in the Orient” and Don’t give chrysanthemums to a hostess in Latin America”). These manuals can get long and confusing and eventually overwhelming, because you begin to realize that you can’t learn it all and it just doesn't seem natural.  I don't mean that this is all there is to serious efforts at international education, but I believe the caricature reveals some underlying truth about a lot of content-based education about Others.

The only cure for this that I see is to make what is infrequent more frequent, and to bring closer what is distant. Expose yourself long enough and widely enough to Others so that your unconscious begins to learn that members of the Other society are as diverse, inconsistent, unconscious (read: human) actors in their environment as you and your kinsmen are in yours.

In the next installment, I’ll look more at how this fits with notions of international education, and I’ll begin reconciling internationalism with inter-nation-al-ism.

 

Saying what we mean

I accept that words mean whatever people want them to mean, but if we don’t establish some approximate shared meanings for the key words in a conversation, a lot of meaning will be lost.

 This happened to me big time at a workshop a couple weeks ago, where we talked about international education (IE), and how to operationalize (my word, not theirs) IE in the classroom. Even if 300 in a room don’t agree on what “international” and “internationalism” mean, communication can be rough, but still manageable, as long as people are conscious of the disagreement. If enough of those 300 are not aware, however, of a lack of agreement on the meanings of these terms, you risk being stuck with just the illusion of communication.

 I have tended to treat the word international pretty superficially, as if it means what it looks like it should mean. That is, inter-nation-al, where there’s the word ‘nation’ with a prefix and a suffix tacked on, which together denote something that bridges a boundary between nations. I’ll use the hyphenated inter-nation-al (-ism) to denote my strict cross-national sense of the word, to help us stay sensitive to the word’s morphology. Hence, international relations, international trade, and international student exchange are all inter-nation-al.

 According to Webster, internationalism is defined as a policy of cooperation among nations. The entry for internationalism in Wikipedia defines internationalism as a political movement which advocates a greater economic and political cooperation between nations for the benefit of all. Note that the key components of both definitions are:

• policy or political movement
• nations (implying states here)
• cooperation between those nations

 With some background in political science and public administration, this is how I have received the terms international and internationalism.  At the workshop I mentioned earlier, many of the participants used the word with much broader meanings, to the point that nations and borders were secondary. Some of this usage referred to the crossing of other, more abstract kinds of boundaries, such as those between culture and ethnic groups.

 There was also a strong sense of the individual dimension added to these words, and they were used to imply a set of individual attitudes and behaviors, invariably perceived positively, that I have generalized as:

• Openness, acceptance of different identities, affiliations
• Suspension of judgment
• Respect
• Multiple forms of cultural discourse (not foreign language only, but understanding and using effectively the language, nonverbal communication, and discourse themes of Others)
• Personalization of Others (understanding Others as individuals, not stereotypes)
• Engagement of Others

 Now, when people are saying internationalism in a workshop on international education, is this what they mean? If it is what they really mean, is this still inter-nation-al-ism, or does the use of that term prevent us from seeing what’s really going on? 

Stay tuned.

A choice of words

George Bernard Shaw said something like "the main problem with communication is the illusion that it has occurred."

Last weekend I attended a workshop with participants from several private schools in the country, to discuss issues related to international education (IE) and ways to operationalize IE in classroom settings with limited diversity. I have been contemplating the presentations and discussions all week, and will begin a series of posts on what I believe is, and what is not, international about IE, and whether we mean something altogether different when we use that term.

But first, since it's Friday, I want to share an interesting website that shows the vulnerability of the nexus between what we mean and what we say.  Lost in translation uses BabelFish  translation software to bounce a text between English and five other languages, making a total of ten translations, ending in English.  If the application doesn't completely break down (which it does sometimes), you might end up with something completely irrelevant, or perhaps oracular.

When I put Oscar Wilde's quote through, I got:

The general problem with transference is the illusion, that one that was here.

Of course it is.

Deja vu all over again

I didn't expect history to repeat itself so quickly. 

Just like Kenya a couple weeks ago, Burundi is now promising free education to its children (meaning I guess that free education is an idea whose time has come in eastern Africa). Unlike Kenya, Burundi is small, resource-poor, and barely able to cope with AIDS, ethnic violence and mass exodus. The population is around 6 million, with nearly half aged 14 or younger.  Click here for the story.

So when they announce free education and estimate that 500,000 children might sign up, that makes me wonder all over again, what is a country going to do when they open wide the gates to the refugees of illiteracy? When, by the way, they estimate that "some 2,400 extra teachers and 2,400 new class rooms will be needed." Fortunately, UNICEF generously allocates $4.2 million for education already which, if it were spent only on all these new first graders, comes out to about $8 per child per year. One dollar a month. That's assuming that none of that money goes to bureaucracy, expensive UN consultants, UNICEF office expenses and international travel, or (ahem) graft.

How far does a dollar go at your child's school?

Iyi dersler, Mr. Maruge

Mr. Kimani Maruge, age 84, has just enrolled in first grade.

An article in the New York Times tells of a man in Kenya who, until the government recently declared free education to all until grade 8, had never been to school in his life.  Soon after the declaration, national school enrolment jumped from 5.9 million to 7.3 million. Most of that increase was children of normal school age, but also among them were older prospective students like Mr. Maruge.  To read the article, click here.

Although the photograph and story of Mr. Maruge create feelings of admiration, the more I thought about the story, the less I focused on this remarkable individual, and more on the circumstances that led to this man's remarkable action.

Why, for example, did Mr. Maruge have to wait so long? We understand the struggle in many parts of the world where families depend on the work of their children to survive. So why have so few places tried to find alternatives to traditional fulltime classroom education in order to reduce the cost to families of educating their children?

Why were the local school officials less than welcoming to Mr. Maruge?  So many people responded to the offer of free education in Kenya that his first grade classroom was overwhelmed with 109 students. It would seem that the authorities did not expect so many to come, an unrealistic assumption when everyone, especially the poor, know that illiteracy will keep you poor. If the authorities had in fact expected people to flood the schools, it then appears that they expected Mr. Maruge's poor first grade teacher to teach 109 children to read this year. One might think that the government is hoping that most of these students (or their families) will give up so things can go back to normal.

Why does this news story appeal to our sentimentality instead of to our sense of justice? Why wasn't the Times reporter outraged that in the 21st century so many childen still do not have access to education and so few teachers are left to do such impossible work? We have known for decades that basic education and basic health care raise the wellbeing of a country more than any other factors, yet for many countries around the world education continually is allocated a disproportionately small share of national budgets, and is administered by agencies with the least political power.  Perhaps it is because education is powerful to change not only economies, but also to change minds.  The rich know this, and so do the poor.

"We never knew that such people would come," said S. K. Karaba, senior deputy director in Kenya's Department of Education. "They still want to be taught. There is an urge."