Tryangulation

A license to teach

Ta dah! By virtue of my credentials from Michigan (from 1978, no less) I just got my Texas Educator Certificate from the State Board for Educator Certification, so that I can now legally impart my knowledge of Spanish to unsuspecting Texas teenagers. In consideration of the SBEC's legitimization of my competence, I will refrain today from any thoughts on Ivan Illich or John Taylor Gatto. 

Just today.

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?).

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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.

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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.)