Tryangulation

Something there is that doesn't love a row

Newer readers might not be aware of my contentious school project to protect the beautiful and critically endangered Centaurea tchihattcheffi (yanardöner in Turkish). The natural habitat of this nearly extinct species of the cornflower family is in the vicinity of our school, and for the past few years two of our science teachers and I have bravely fought to propagate seeds on our campus  (click here for photos and text from a happier time).

The flower's habitat is threatened by large scale agriculture, Ankara's urban sprawl and, ironically, its failure to be noticed (behavior which I have commented on before). After first collecting seeds in the wild (natural habitat pix here), we carefully prepared a plot close enough to be observed, but just out of the school bus and recess commotion. For a couple years following, we (that is, I) collected seeds, cleaned and sorted them, and then recruited students and colleagues to get a little dirty in the name of species diversity, sowing the seeds in our gradually increasing garden.

Who would have thought three years ago that we ourselves were a threat to our centaurea's survival?

Like I wrote recently concerning the local aversion to disorder, straight lines and right angles are the norm for flower gardens, and our nonconformist self-seeding weeds were a threat to that system. Our well meaning grounds crews and I were constantly in a race, they to restore order, and I to protect disheveled nature. As soon as I got one crew and crew chief on board with the project, they would be reassigned and new workers would show up, hustling to clean up the mess their predecessors apparently had left behind.

I was away for the entire fall semester this year, a critical time for fending off welldoers. When I returned to school in February I was disheartened to see that orderliness had finally won out: the garden was neatly hoed and planted with shrubs in straight little rows.  The notion of death by PBL crossed my mind.

A few weeks ago I finally went out to see if anything had survived, and felt the faintest whisper of hope when I found that there were, in fact, a few buds creeping out of the ground. I went back today and saw that quite a few more were popping up at the edges of the plot. I found the newest commander of the gardeners (the 4th in the lifetime of this project) and together we assessed the state of the plot and agreed on a plan and a compromise: once the centaurea were in bloom and easy to spot, workers could go in among them and pull up the other less desirable weeds.

While we were examining the grounds, we found that two had bloomed. I took some quick shots with my mobile phone, as evidence that our project had survived all our best efforts at project based learning.

The title of this post is adapted from the poem Mending Wall, by Robert Frost. The photo is unretouched, taken under heavily overcast skies.

Flat worlds of all sorts

As a brief stop on the way from ancient information technologies to the problem of paradigm shifts,  I have to share this video my son pointed me to. The video is a clip of a televised debate from Iraq on whether the Koran permits belief in the round earth theory. The content is disturbing, but maybe not for the reasons you think. If you're reading this via email, click here to see the video.

This poor man is mistaken, but not because he is a Muslim.  Muslim scholars --in Baghdad, no less-- began to reason out a methodology for empirical observation a thousand years ago. Islamic astronomers proposed earth's heliocentric orbit starting from the 8th century, and earth's rotation by the 11th century. Muslim scholars of that period built upon the knowledge of the ancient Greeks, who already had theories about a spherical earth; in the 9th century Arab astronomers even calculated the earth's circumference (they missed it by a few thousand miles), and developed spherical trigonometry to calculate the direction of Mecca from any point on the globe.

Non-critical thinking is not the intent of any religion. All of the monotheist faiths see the intellect and the ability to reason as divine gifts. So what has happened to our poor man with the thick glasses and the anesthetized mind? Why does he hold his beliefs so tenaciously? Does he build arguments upon arguments to protect some hidden, vulnerable thought? Is this part of the famous clash of civilizations?

No, this is a clash of epistemologies. The poor man is mistaken because his paradigm leads him to believe that most knowledge necessary for a good life has already been "revealed" and we should not be worried too much about creating new knowledge. Observe how his feeble empiricism is affected by this grid: he believes a distant ship's narrow masts are easier to see in a blur than the bulky hull, and the eye sees the world with half of the iris at a time (when in fact he is describing very well how the world looks through bifocals).

The scientist, on the other hand, demonstrates an attitude that knowledge continues to be created as we observe and reason. I think he could have made some better arguments, but at least he showed --without attacking one's faith-- that although we still don't know it all, we have the divine gifts of intellect and reason to help us along. 

I love maps, (here's one of my faves) and I enjoy the paradox that maps, in order to represent certain features of the terrain, must distort or omit the representation of other features. Paradigms are like that: they only work when they block extraneous chunks from your view of the whole. Just as "the map is not the territory", so a single paradigm does not encompass the whole of our knowledge and experience. Your world is flat only if you ignore the spiky parts; my problem (actually, it's your problem) is that the spiky parts are what I notice most. Even contemporary, Western scientists have impeded the advance of science because certain things just "couldn't be true."

Some time ago I wrote about dolphins swimming through the center of Istanbul, and the total indifference of those around me to this marvel. I still wonder about that, and about us. What do we fail to see because we are unaware of our own biases and have already made up our minds?

There was irony in the mud

The truth is dirtier than I first led you to believe.

A couple days ago I shared a Turkish television commercial about the virtues of dirt. A comment from Nancy Riffer made me realize that, while trying not to offend my readers who have Turkish moms themselves, I omitted some important keys to really understanding the commercial.

That beautiful commercial is full of irony which is not lost on Turkish viewers. The kids in that ad do the things that normal kids only dream of.  A Turkish city child's life is full of structure, straight lines, and spotless clothes, which makes life easier for moms, but not for kids.

The truth is, kids are normally not allowed to play in the mud. Or in the water, or on the grass, and certainly not in the rain. Elementary schools have plain, paved play areas; the lucky ones have portable soccer goals and basketball hoops. No swings, seesaws, slides, or other dangerous devices. I believe this overprotection and hyper-cleanliness is related to what I've seen as an avoidance of experimental, improvisational and mistake-based learning. We're a long way from the mud-based learning of my childhood.

Omo has a few more gritty commercials that show a clean, well dressed little boy who encounters other kids in the park, but doesn't know how to play with them.  You can watch them here and here. The marbles ad ends with the statement:  "Only 28% of children spend time playing outside or on playgrounds." The hide and seek ad ends with "Only 17% of mothers give their children permission to play outside." Both ads end with, "Every child has the right to be a child."

These ads point to another website by Omo, with a URL that means "every child's right" in Turkish. That website has suggestions for giving children freedom to develop, games to play, and an advice column for worried moms. One of their main pieces of advice is, "give your kids some free time."

But let's not leave things there. There is one more commercial which is my personal favorite. You don't need to understand the words, but at the end the narrator says, "Sports takes bravery -- just like life." Here's the link if you can't see the embedded video.

One last thing: if you're reading this via email, you probably can't see the videos. You'll have to go to my blog (just click here).

Ve Türkçe bilenler --bu siteden hoşlanacağınıza eminim; Her çocuğun hakkı.

Messy is beautiful

April, glorious and muddy, was made for children. Or have we forgotten?

Prof. Ziya Selçuk, formerly of the Ministry of Education here, at the closing ceremony of a seminar on multiple intelligences spoke openly about myths that have guided the design of education and proposed a better way. He debunked ideas about quiet, orderly, unison lessons, where everyone sits straight and is taught the same thing at the same time. Orderly isn't always good.

Turks are immaculate, keep spotless homes, and practice fastidious personal hygiene. While I appreciate and admire that, I also remember fondly those Aprils on the Michigan farm where I grew up, digging mud puddle canals and building mud dams, wrestling on the new grass with the dogs, collecting worms and tadpoles. Having a grand old time while my brain quietly created an understanding of life.

Schools --and Turkish moms-- are in a constant battle against chaos, crooked lines, and grass stains. Learning, however, loves a mess. That's why some of my favorite television commercials here are by a laundry detergent company that celebrates mess, mud, and childhood with the motto, "getting dirty is beautiful."  Probably the first time those words have co-occurred in Turkish.

So here's one of those Omo commercials. Let's pray that YouTube stays online long enough for you to enjoy it! I've also done a rough translation of the voice over.

You can't just watch life from a window.
If you don't start out on the road, you'll never arrive.
You can't always sit on the sidelines.
If you don't get out on the field, you'll never hit a goal.
You'll never swim if you don't get wet.
You'll never rise high if you never climb.
If you never live, you'll never learn.
The stains and smudges of the children's world
are the badges of what they have learned and achieved.
Omo - getting dirty is beautiful.

Radikal'in haberi buraya, Omo'nun reklamların hakkında güzel bir yorum için buraya tıklayın.

Don't be afraid to leave something out

The first rule of listener-friendly PowerPoint use: please don't tell me everything you know.

There's been a lot already on the Web by professional communicators about the use and misuse of PowerPoint (links at the end). The main point is that cluttered slides with lots of images and lots of words inhibit learning.

Now we have a Harvard scientist telling us what we already knew: if you put less in your PowerPoint presentation, your audience will remember more. Stephen M. Kosslyn, psychology professor at Harvard University, explains how to apply cognitive science to your slides, emphasizing visual depictions of information and basic rules of simplicity (read more here).

Before coming to this school, I worked in a public sector agency where we regularly gave briefings to foreign visitors. The briefings were prepared by the public relations team and were designed out of a fear of omission (the darker side of the obsession to impress). Each year the briefing grew longer and more complicated as more projects and other accomplishments demanded inclusion in the presentation.

By the time I left that job, the briefing (we should have called it an elongating) took more than two hours and had hundreds of narcotic slides, many of them full of large numbers, others with nearly a hundred words in miniscule, illegible type. At the end we had aides ready with plenty of Turkish coffee to revive the victims, but it was too late. When the presenter would ask for questions, there was usually just dazed silence, followed by acute memory loss (what did slide #87 say again?).

The fear of omission is cultivated early. When students are required to give a presentation or write a research paper, they feel pressure to demonstrate how much they know about the topic. This feeds the mistaken logic that says that a fact not presented is a fact not known. The purpose of the presentation is focused on the presenter and a motivation to impress or to avoid embarrassment. On the other hand, a well designed presentation focuses on the listener and how she can be enlightened or persuaded. A presentation that is just for the presenter is a waste of everybody's time.

We let students show off their ability to embed animations and create whizbang slide transitions, when we should be teaching them how to communicate. We need to shift the emphasis from displaying information to enabling learning, with an emphasis that is less about what goes on the screen and more about what goes into --and stays in-- the listener's brain.

Here are some more resources for more effective presentations:

Seth Godin: Really bad PowerPoint

Tryangulation: Put your PowerPoint on a diet

a del.icio.us potpourri of links by me

photo by zen

Many years and a few terabytes later

This weekend marks 10 years since I first set foot in Turkey. Funny thing, as I started doing the math, I realized that I have several converging milestones that illustrate some lessons about knowledge and learning, with a little help from a computer.

If you want to skip the history and jump ahead to the moralizing, just scroll down.

1973. Thirty-five years ago I took a computing class in high school. It was basically a mash-up of binary code, the mechanics of card punching, and the virtue of cards as a sortable database record (although I don't recall learning the 'd' word then). Our final exam had problems like converting between binary and decimal numbers, and reading the alphanumeric codes in cards like the one in the photo. Of course we students never actually touched a computer. Let's hope that today all teachers can see what went wrong. I still got an A, but I had a lot more fun in my music independent study and hanging out with friends in my Rambler.

1982-83. Twenty-five years ago I used an Osborne portable computer-in-a-suitcase to work on indigenous language publications in Guatemala. It looked like something out of an old spy movie, with the world's smallest green screen, and couldn't handle more than one keystroke per second. I originally went to Guatemala to get away from a problem (even though the civil war in Guate was at its peak!), but while there I had to face up to some things inside me, and in a manner of speaking start over and move on.

1988. Nearly 20 years ago, in Guatemala again, I got my first Toshiba laptop. It had two 3.5 inch floppy drives: drive A to run your programs, and drive B to hold your data disk. That same spring I nearly died of typhoid fever and malaria (at the same time), which resulted in me learning a lot about the fecal-oral vector and the most effective ways to kill flies (my record was 72 in 10 minutes).

1998. After finishing my masters in development administration in '96, we were back in Houston using our Packard-Bell PC for international job searching. I was designing CVs with graphics on WordPerfect for Windows 95, and attaching them in email to people I was meeting on usenet and --get this-- the World Wide Web, which can never be fully appreciated by anyone who has not used Gopher, a system for online information retrieval that closely resembled climbing in and out of very deep abandoned wells. 

Thanks to the web I networked, followed up on leads, and finally made contact with a friend of a friend who offered to set up some appointments for me in Ankara. We met up ten years ago this week. My appointments led to other contacts, and after I returned to the US I was able to use email to keep in touch with those new contacts. A year later one of them wrote to offer me a job and the rest is, well, history.

That was the short version of my digital odyssey. Through the years I also learned a few languages, a few musical instruments, and I even learned how to teach. What's better, though, is that I learned how to learn: how to work up a guitar piece, how to form linguistic questions in a new language, how to do field research, how to read the look in my wife's eyes.

Here's my take away after 35 years at the keyboard of life:

Knowledge is a means towards doing what you really want. You don't learn databases just because they're there. You learn them because you're data's in a mess and you can't see the patterns. You learn MS Word because you need to update your resume. You learn Spanish because you want to sing like Enrique. You learn music remixing because you want to impress your girlfriend. The corollary to this is:

If you already have what you want, learning slows down. Learning is the most basic form of change management: no change, no learning; no learning, no change.

Latin America was my gig for nearly 20 years, and living there was practically second nature. Turkey is so different that after we came here we had to learn an incredible amount from scratch, including how to live together as a family in our new environment. But here we are, living here for eight years and doing a lot better than just getting by. That's because:

The more stuff you learn, the more you (should) learn about yourself. Which, by the way, is not a new idea. You really get to know yourself when you're uncomfortable (that is, experiencing change). You find out what motivates you and what doesn't. You reconsider the goals you set for yourself back when you were on easy street. You figure out that what matters most is not what you know, but who you are. So...

Don't act your age. I was 45 when I learned Turkish. I was nearly 50 when I learned how to blog, wiki, and Skype. Now I am enjoying these new skills and sharing them with others. Good thing, because our kids in the US are tethered to Facebook and use email, like, never (it's sooo 1999). I have to confess that I've had a lot of personal trials in the last year, and I felt the wear and tear of the last 30 years catching up with me. So now I'm learning that you need others near you to help you wake up again and undo some of that maturity (this is why God created kids). Get renewed, like it says in these lines from Stephen Dunn.  And speaking of the butterfly effect...

It's all connected. My first trip to Guatemala in 1976 was led by my human geography professor. He's one of the world's best teachers, and we still keep in touch. In fact, I wonder if the personal bond is both cause and result of our collaborative exploring. I loved his class and the study trip, but by far the biggest lesson was that geology, topography, climate, social organization, technology, were all connected. Everywhere. Sociology, biology, psychology. Body, mind and soul. It's all there, and they're all in us.

When studying linguistics I learned about splitters and joiners. Some people are better at seeing contrasts (splitters) and some are better at seeing similarities (joiners). I am definitely a joiner, building bridges of comparison, analogy and metaphor, from what I know into what I am learning. I think that has made life a lot more fun. Which is a good thing, because...

It never ends.

Different is normal

Asombrose un portugués
al ver que en su tierna infancia
todos los niños de Francia
supieran hablar francés.

"Arte diabólico es,"
dijo torciendo el mostacho,
"que para hablar en gabacho
un infante en Portugal
llega a viejo y lo habla mal
¡y aquí lo parla un muchacho!"

                       (translation at the end of this post)

The last two posts were a little bit of fun with the Turkish language, but with some serious thoughts behind it. First, a story.

I remember many years ago while living in Guatemala, hearing a surprising comment from a local friend who had traveled once to the United States and was amazed to see there a parrot that spoke English! For him, it was normal for parrots to speak Spanish, and it had never occurred to him before that people in other lands teach their parrots differently. Anyone who has studied a foreign language as an adult has probably had a similar reaction when seeing for the first time small children speaking with no effort that same language that adults struggle with for years, and can never get quite right.

Just yesterday I was on a bus, listening to a mother and five year old son behind me. The little boy made almost no grammatical mistakes even though he was using some pretty complex constructions. Not only does Turkish pile lots of suffixes onto words, but the vowels in each suffix change according to the vowels in the root of the word! That's totally bizarre to us foreigners, but this little boy had it down pat. He even showed some objective awareness of his own language, since he was talking about Spiderman, and conjectured that "spider" meant örümcek and "man" meant adam (he was rıght).

Likewise, in my travels and experience with an unusual assortment of languages, I have noticed different ways in which native speakers relate to non-native speakers.  It seems that the more people see foreigners with differing ability speak their language, the more the native speakers learn to adapt their behavior to facilitate communication. Conversely, the fewer foreigners there are who learn a language, the more difficult it is for a native speaker to understand the foreigner's problem. After all, their language is the normal one; it's only foreign languages that are different.

In touristy areas in Latin America, people readily speak more slowly and adjust their grammar for me, since they can tell I'm a gringo from a mile away. In Turkey, though, many people don't slow down or simplify their statements even when I ask them to (the ones who do slow down tend to be bilingual).  In fact, one time a Turkish gentleman refused to answer a question I asked in Turkish, because he automatically assumed I was speaking English. In a village in western Guatemala where I worked for a while among speakers of a Mayan language, I was the only non-native speaker most folks had seen, and since this was the first time they had seen anyone shred all vestiges of sense out of their language, I became a sought after source of entertainment for the villagers on market days -- all I had to do was talk!

I wonder sometimes in discussions about what education should look like in the 21st century, with schools and classrooms and everything 2.0, if we digital natives and digital permanent residents aren't a little too hard sometimes on those who haven't had as much contact with us foreigners (can I call them digital tourists?). Maybe we need to step out of our assumed roles and stop thinking for a moment that we're the normal ones.  How can we bridge those paradigm gaps and learn to live with other kinds of normal? Perhaps by  speaking more clearly to the "recent learners' among us when we're the majority, and learning and serving with humility when we're the minority?

At the rate technology is changing, I wonder how many of the tools and approaches we advocate now will be obsolete in 10 years, and yet some of us who are at present in the vanguard will insist that we keep using them because they are the norm: Twitter? But teacher, that is soo 2008!

As promised,  a (not so poetic) translation

A Portuguese man was surprised
To see that in their tender years
All the children in France
Already knew how to speak French.

"This must be sorcery" he said,
Twisting his moustache.
"For a child in Portugal
To learn to speak French,
He'll grow to be an old man
And will still speak it badly,
Yet here even a small boy speaks it!"

 

SMS is something of an oxymoron

When we moved to Turkey eight years ago I had the advantage of prior study in several languages, and  actually achieved competence in a few, so I'm particularly interested in how people learn languages. However, I've been immersed in Turkish long enough to occasionally forget how amazing it is that for native speakers this language actually sounds normal. Then I get a jolt like this flier my wife brought home a few days ago.

Turkish grammar is fascinating for its adherence nearly without exception to its many rules, but since word formation and grammar are almost complete the opposite of English (although occasionally it's more like inside out), you have to learn a lot before you can use even a little. In the case of this document, for example, an adjective accumulates enough suffixes to change it into a verb, then a participle, and then into a full fledged dependent clause.

The flier is an advert for a home decor store, and the first sentence reads, Are you one of those whose home we have perfected, (or) are you one of those whose home we have not perfected?

Knowing that much, can you figure out how the second clause was made negative?

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

A different kind of multitasking

"The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn."

-- Alvin Toffler, post-industrial futurologist.

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.)

Fast language learners' brains shaped differently

The University College London has published a report about research showing that people who are faster at learning languages have more white matter in the left auditory regions, and in a different position of the brain than people who learn languages more slowly, and also a greater volume of the parietal lobes in the left side of the brain.

I believe research like this supports the demand for more individualized, learner-centered instruction. We've known for a while about different learning styles and people have argued for instruction that is tailored to the ways an individual can best learn. However studies like this suggest that we are different not only in our temperament and upbringing, but that we may differ biologically in ways that affect what and how we learn.

The news article from UCL can be found here.
 

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.

Burning rubber as a learning indicator

This week I took advantage of an extended holiday to teach my sons how to drive with a stick shift.  We went out to an unused stretch of road, and took turns sitting in the driver's seat and trying over and over to get the car to move:  (1) forward, (2) smoothly and (3) without stalling.

If you drive a standard transmission, you know that just explaining the process is not enough. You have to try over and over again. You learn by failing a lot, letting someone else have a turn while you think about it, trying again and the next time doing a little better. The teacher (Dad) can demonstrate, repeat, encourage, advise, crack a joke, give a break, but the learning is really in the hands of the learner.

It just dawned on me that there's a key here to something that's bothered me about learning in general, and more specifically about a lot of writing on technology integration in education.  It seems there are plenty of cases where the expectations for people learning new IT skills is far higher than the actual learning that is taking place. This gets people thinking about what it means to learn a technical skill versus learning an academic subject like history or math.

In the articles I cited in a post from a few weeks ago (click here), a common thread was that IT skills learning is difficult because there aren't any analogies from our own experiences.  I now believe that this is not the case. There are plenty of analogies in our own experience, but those of us who work full time in education probably overlook at lot of "extra-educational" learning that doesn't fit our paradigm of what learning is supposed to look like.

We learn things all the time. The irony is that--except for just learning to remember facts and theories--  almost none of what we really learn comes from sitting in classes, listening to lectures and prepping for exams. Most of what we really know comes from what we do. Most of what we know best comes from what we did wrong the first few times. And most of what we value knowing is learned continuously and interactively with others. David Pollard's list of reasons why people don't use collaboration tools includes:

• the tools are often unfamiliar
• training doesn't match the way people learn
• we're not used to learning with others

I suppose if Pollard thinks of learning only as what I call education (which is not the same thing as learning), then maybe he's right. But if you look away from classrooms and exam halls, and look at how people learn to bake a cake, play a guitar, or drive a stick shift, you'll see all around you that learning is about getting familiar with the tool, with the teacher, and with oneself.

Learning to drive a manual transmission is hard. You fail miserably and repeatedly, burning rubber and getting whiplash, getting embarrassed because your brother is also in the car, and impatient with yourself for not getting it the first time, and then getting a thrill when it all comes together. But that is the only way you will learn to drive a manual transmission. And the day ends with some awesome successes.

As a Dad I wouldn't have it any other way.

If I had known I'd live this long...

"If I'd known I was going to live this long, I'd have taken up the violin at 60. I'd have been playing for almost 40 years by now."

-- Quote from a woman in her 90s, reported by Kathy Sierra.

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.

60 ways to get it wrong

Back in April I wrote a post titled We're all less biased than everyone else. In the post I mentioned an article from the New York Times which cites research about how frequently people think themselves to be less biased than others.

I have since found on Wikipedia a very interesting List of Cognitive Biases, a  thorough pathology of how we can incorrectly interpret information.  While browsing this shockingly long list of biases, I recognized many immediately, not necessarily by their name (e.g. "the Von Restorff effect") but certainly by the symptoms ("the tendency for an item that 'stands out like a sore thumb' to be more likely to be remembered than other items").

What's more troubling is that not only did I recognize them, but some of them are old friends of mine. How much is there that I don't know because of their interference? Seeing them in this light will maybe make me more aware of them the next time they try to make an appearance.

If you're brave, maybe you can take a look at the list, choose to abolish one of these biases, and see what new things you learn.

Dangerous understanding

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."
- Upton Sinclair

Education versus learning, 14th century version

At least twice a week I find myself in conversations that turn on the point that education is not the same as learning, and that information is not the same as knowledge. A few weeks ago one of these conversations led to my translation last year of a stanza by Yunus Emre, a Turkish mystical poet who lived approximately 1240-1320. Oddly, I had memorized the Turkish original but not my English translation. Just as well, since the translation continues to evolve.

İlim ilim bilmektir
İlim kendin bilmektir
Sen kendini bilmezsin
Ya nice okumaktır

For the English translation it helps to know that the word 'ilim' can mean 'knowledge', 'learning', 'scholarship' or 'enlightenment'. It's possible that the first line uses two different senses of the same word, which would set up a nice chiasmus in the translation of the first two lines. Still, what Yunus meant 700 years ago is open to interpretation.

To know is to gain understanding
To understand is to know yourself
If you do not know yourself
Then all your study is only so much reading

Resources for student leaders (and everyone else)

Thanks to a tip from Lifehacker, I just found a blog that provides resources for student leaders. My first foray into studentl.inc was to look at their Meeting Planner|Organizer|Worksheet but as I browsed through the site I was pleased to see other good resources on leadership, planning, and management issues relevant to leaders of student organizations. If you are involved in student-led activities, be sure to browse their archives (check the Categories listing on the right side of the screen) and pass this on.

Wonderful unseen things

I had meetings to attend in Istanbul, and so late on Friday afternoon I found myself on the public bus that goes from Sarıyer to Taksim. The bus route is mostly on the shoreline drive along the European side of the Bosphorus, and whenever I’m in Istanbul I am fascinated by the scenes along the water.

My colleague Mustafa spotted them, and tried to help me see them, but at first I couldn’t believe it. Then I saw something black arch out of the water, and then another, and then another.

Dolphins.

From the way they played and sometimes leaped out of the water, there was no doubt what they were. They were so unexpected among all the fishing boats, tankers and other traffic in the center of Istanbul, that their presence transformed everything.

The dolphins were swimming in the same direction as we were travelling in the bus, and I was grateful that the congestion on the avenue slowed us down to the same speed so we could watch them longer.

For a quarter of an hour we kept pace, and by watching closely we were able to count at least eight, possibly ten or twelve, of these creatures as they surfaced, turned, and leapt, mostly moving in twos, but occasionally one would circle back as they gradually made their way together toward the Sea of Marmara. Then I noticed something else that was remarkable.

Nobody else on the bus seemed to care.

Mustafa and I were fairly public in our admiration of the dolphins, and I pointed out to several people around me what we were looking at. They would glance, see nothing (since the dolphins spent most of their time below the surface), and go back into a locked stare at the traffic jams ahead.

Afterward, we talked about other rare creatures; Mustafa told how he had seen a wild squirrel once, but had never seen a deer. It intrigued him to hear me tell how squirrels are commonplace back home, and how frequently I saw white tail deer while growing up in rural Michigan. His amazement reminded me of how Michigan could be as exotic and full of wonder to a Turk as his country is to me.

We all experience the mundane, and would sometimes rather nap on the commute home than keep an eye out for miracles. But after our conversation I wondered how the routines of my own life have dulled my perception, and I challenged myself to stay alert for other wonders unseen.

Postdata: Radikal newspaper last year ran a story about a pod of about 14 dolphins residing in the Bosphorus, and published this photo, which is a fair representation of what I saw (click on the image to enlarge).

 

We're all less biased than everyone else

The New York Times oneline has an article titled I'm O.K., You're Biased which reviews different psychological tests of people's assessment of themselves and of others concerning fairness and bias. The results indicate that most people give themselves an above average rating for fairness (even when they cheat), and that most people give others poorer ratings for fairness (even when they don't cheat).

Author Daniel Gilbert writes, "[study subjects] strive for truth more often that we realize, and miss that mark more ofthen than they realize."

Gilbert cites an experiment where subjects had to make assessments of students' intelligence. The subjects examined one by one individual pieces of information about a particular student, all of it negative. However, if the subject liked the student, he persisted longer in looking for positive data about the student than did other subjects.

So why did I put this in my Learning category?

We humans ar driven to find meaning in our surroundings and in our experience, and we are very quick to formulate ad hoc theories about people's behavior before we have adequate information (the transition from etic to emic). The trouble is that we become very attached to our theories, and we unconscously use them as filters that prevent us from looking at information in new ways.   Predudices and biases are hard to overcome,  first because we don't see them in ourselves and, second, we have to reassess all the filtered information that originally brought us to accept those biases.

Which means a lot of hard and potentially embarrassing work.

Click here to read Gilbert's article.

Students learn better without lectures

A university in the US conducted a pilot project in a biology course for non-science majors which tested how well students could learn biology without lectures.  The pilot course was taught without a single lecture. Students instead were given guided learning activities along with training in study skills and independent learning. 

It was no surprise to me to learn that students in the experimental course had higher grades,  higher class averages, and higher satisfaction than the students who were taught with a traditional lecture format.  We already know that talking does not always guarantee communication, so why should we expect lectures to always result in learning?

The project is described in the article, Abandoning the Lecture in Biology, by Robert C. Evans of Rutgers University. The article was published in the Journal on Excellence in College Teaching and is available here.

Learning theory for the rest of us

The Creating Passionate Users blog has a great article by Kathy Sierra titled Crash course in learning theory. It's a little long, but reads fast because it's so well written and entertaining.  The article is actually as much a guide to learning praxis as it is to learning theory. In fact, I'm filing this under the Communication category as well as Learning because there's so much practical advice that's useful for meeting presentations and classroom instruction too.

How to learn from your mistakes

I've been reading The Art of Project Management by Scott Berkun, taking it slowly and trying to absorb the practical wisdom in it.  I recently found out that Scott also blogs, and occasionally writes short pieces that complement the book.  One of the best so far is How to learn from your mistakes. Among the points he makes are:

• accepting responsibility makes learning possible
• observe what small mistakes, in sequence, contributed to the bigger mistake

We all make mistakes, so the sooner we accept that reality, the sooner we can begin learning. Scott writes:

The kind of mistakes you make define you. The more interesting the mistakes, the more interesting the life.

Click here for more. 

Tqana' tin jkwi'yo'

Tacaná is on our minds

It has been strange to see our own Tacaná as a dateline in the international press documenting the tragic loss of life in landslides in Tacaná and elsewhere (click here and here for Reuters photo and article). In Guatemala, El Salvador, and southern Mexico landslides and flooding as a result of Hurricane Stan have buried villages, destroyed crops and left tens of thousands destitute. 
We lived in Tacaná for nearly three years in the late '80s, most of that time on the street shown in the photo above (click on the images to enlarge). The photo includes a view of Tacaná volcano (4000m) which straddles the border between Guatemala and Mexico. We were there to assess the viability of Mayan mother tongue education in the area, so I had many occasions to travel by foot to outlying hamlets to learn the social dynamics between Spanish and  Tacaná Mam, one of Guatemala's Mayan languages, in the local peasant community.
It was here where I first began to learn distinctions between my western, compartmentalized and academic approach to knowledge -- in my case regional studies and sociolinguistics -- and the kind of knowledge born in the midst of the integrated reality of poverty. As remote as it was, people in Tacaná were globalized actors as they picked coffee in Mexico, raised opium poppies for American heroin addicts, withheld their mother tongue and traditions from their children, and then sent those children to work as maids in Miami Beach.  All of my book learning paled in comparison to the object lessons we were given on human dignity in the face of injustice, discrimination, and the deprivation of basic rights and basic needs.  Recent events challenge me again about what I might have learned, and remind me of the debt of friendship I owe to people there. Chjonkye'. Thank you.
I agree with el Canche about the ironic coincidence of tragedies in Guatemala and Pakistan. The scale of of the South Asia earthquake far surpasses what has happened with Stan, yet these are our American neighbors, and we cannot let their story --nor this present episode-- go unnoticed.