engaget photo of Steve Jobs & his iPad1

I was riding back from Salisbury, yesterday, while Steve Jobs was announcing Apple’s new iPad. The best I could do was read a live blog, updating with the features and peppered with the writers skepticism and acknowledgement of the Jobs mystique. I left it a bit underwhelmed, hoping for something a little more earthshaking.

However, upon getting home and doing a Google search for iPad and video, I found a link to this Mashable blog post (Official Apple iPad Demo [VIDEO]) with an embedded Apple promotional video about the device — and “I’m sold,” as I announced on Twitter just after viewing piece.

I’ve been thinking about the device since — and why I am so sold on it now, despite my admitted disappointment over not being rocked by something really “Amazing.” A core question I’ll be asking myself as time goes on is the iPad’s suitability as an institutional learning tool. But, quite frankly, we have bigger problems than that.

Today, I am writing about a viewpoint article published in The Daily Gamecock, University of South Carolina’s student newspaper. Written by freshman literature student, Michael Lambert, the article (Education, Technology Share Weak Connection), at first, affirms what we already know, that technology is changing and it is changing us. Lambert writes,

Life before text messaging feels harder to imagine than life before the wheel.

Then he writes something striking to me, especially as I am reading Jaon Lanier’s You are Not a Gadget (see Another Great Tilting). He says,

I neither glorify nor decry the digital age. Technology does change us and how we act, but so does every minute of the day: every handshake, every look skyward, every farewell.

Continuing on to answer the question that haunts us all, new technology impacting teaching and learning?

I have never understood how technology enhances learning. The only digital age staple I see nowadays is PowerPoint, a tool that has become more of a crutch for teachers than a study guide for students. And we all have our experiences with Blackboard (and its pandemic lack of use by professors). From what I see, little has changed in education, given all the technology that has been imposed on it.

Although there are many valid reasons why formal education has resisted the transformations indicated by technology, and more importantly, by a new information landscape. There’s no excuse. But we all know about the barriers.

What truly disturbs me about Michael’s piece is that he seems so indoctrinated to a teacher-, textbook-, standards-directed education experience that information and communication technologies seem to have little impact on his vision of himself as a learner.

To illustrate his dismissal of digital technology as a learning tool, he shares an anecdote.

A film historian once asked my high school media class what we thought films were stored on. He answered: old 35mm. DVDs, Blu-rays, even VHS — he wouldn’t touch the stuff, he said. It takes advanced technology to play those. But 35mm takes light, a wheel and something with which to turn it — nothing else.

It is an interesting observation, and one I might use some time. But it makes sense only within the narrow context of one who studies film. Michael believes that

We aren’t quick to embrace technology in our learning because the old lecture-and-notebook way of doing things works (and has always worked). Most of the time this technology requires experts to work it correctly and the right generation to receive it. We aren’t that generation.

It’s a perspective that is narrow, institutional, and wholly out of date — and it percists.

Perhaps Michael will become an academic; reading, write, and submitting for publication — and teaching college students comparative literature. If so, I sincerely hope that he discovers, somehow, that finding ways to help students learn, by making them knowledge workers, will better prepare his students for a lifestyle of learning better than helping them learn to “Be taught.”

1. Attias, Cyril. “Apple iPad Keynote.” Flickr. 27 Jan 2010. Engaget, Web. 28 Jan 2010. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/newyork/4309048745/>.
   

!afterclass! Emotion
Janss Mall, Interactive Fountain
Thousand Oaks, CA¹

Unable to find a table at Starbucks Thursday morning, I took a chair offered by a woman who looked like she was finishing up her pastry and would soon be leaving her table — to me. She was a regular and knew why I was there.

We started talking and she told me about the numerous and wildly varied jobs she had held since graduating from UNC with a degree in “Peace, War, & Defense.” I finally asked her, “So what do you want to be when you grow up?” I hope I asked it in the playful way that I’d intended — because she seemed a bit taken-aback by the question.

The thing is, it seems that when posing that mostly fun-poking question to adults, what you are really asking is, “What is the last thing you want to learn to do?”

Thinking about it this morning and visualizing my archetypal learning-resistant educator, what I see is a grown-up, someone who is doing the last thing they want to learn to do. Of course we’re all always learning and we all plan to develop new interests, skills, hobbies, etc, as we go along. No one ever intends to stop learning, and being “grown-up” is certainly not an exception.

I just wonder, though, if resisting change and the learning required to adapt to change is a characteristic of feeling “Grown-Up?”

We don’t stop playing games because we’re getting older – We get old because we stop playing games. _{(author unknown)}

I saw that quote on a slide at a conference I attended last year, and it rings true to me. But it doesn’t say to me that we should resist growing up.  It’s says that we should never stop playing and being playful.

I wonder, if I should add an “eleven” to my 10 Ways to Promote Learning Lifestyle in Your School, “Find ways to be playful at your school — and perhaps feel less grown-up.”

1. Lehrer, Nancy. “Children at Play.” Flickr. 11 May 2008. Web. 23 Jan 2010. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/rovernl/2483220921/in/photostream>.

Hardcover: 224 pages
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0307269647
Average Customer Reveiw: 5 of 5 stars

Gary Stager pointed this one out, via Twitter, @’ing it to Will Richardson, Chris Lehmann, and myself — including me in very fine company, I might add.

It’s about a new book by Jaron Lanier, You are Not a Gadget.  Perhaps most known for popularizing the term, Virtual Reality our paths intersected several years ago through Advanced Network and Services, where he was exploring potential VR applications of Interent 2 and I was working with ThinkQuest, which was created by Advanced Network.  He’s a fellow that some readers of my blog might find a bit odd, but mostly he is oddly talented, described as a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.

Jaron Lanier, computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author

I’ve not read the book, though it’s on order and should be in by Educon.  But it appears, from it’s Amazon page, that Jaron is rejecting Web 2.0. “(the) emerging Golden Age of information sharing and collaborative achievement, the strength of democratized wisdom.”  His position, according to the Amazon.com review, is that,

(the) unfettered–and anonymous–ability to comment results in cynical mob behavior, the shouting-down of reasoned argument, and the devaluation of individual accomplishment.¹

Not having read the book, I can’t comment on its content.  But the Amazon page includes an interview with Lanier, which reveals many of his objections, carrying on themes that seem to be pretty consistent with his ongoing philosophies of technology and humanity.  Acknowledging that the Internet and Web have enabled individual expression and empowered “vast classes of people” in the developing world, he claims that,

The problem is not inherent in the Internet or the Web. Deterioration only began around the turn of the century with the rise of so-called “Web 2.0″ designs. These designs valued the information content of the web over individuals. It became fashionable to aggregate the expressions of people into dehumanized data.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0307269647?ie=UTF8&tag=resourcesforprog&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=0307269647

Lanier readily asserts that a group, collaborative, and frictionless (my words) exchange of information are useful in solving some problems, such as setting a price in the marketplace and elections.  But, he continues…

The phrase “Design by Committee” is treated as derogatory for good reason. That is why a collective of programmers can copy UNIX but cannot invent the iPhone.

There is nothing in the interview that I disagree with, and some things, about which I have expressed deep concern in 2¢ Worth.  He rightly claims that, “..if the issue is contentious, people will congregate into partisan online bubbles in which their views are reinforced.”  “Partisan Mobs,” he calls them.

But all in all, I think that Jaron is attacking, what is attackable about Web 2.0, specifically questioning the arguments of its champions, and not so much the evolving applications that regular people are using in the participatory Web.  I look forward to reading this book on the train, on my way to Philadelphia.

Added 10 Hours Later:
I just watched an interesting video archive of a Q2Cfestival session (October 2009, @ Perimeter Institute, Waterloo, Ontario).  The panelists were Neil Gershenfeld, Director of the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT; Raymond Laflamme, Director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the Perimeter Institute; Jaron Lanier, Computer Scientist, author, composer, musician, & artists; Neal Stephenson, Author; and Tara Hunt, Author and Marketing Consultant.  The title was Wired 24/7?

Powered by ScribeFire.

1. ”You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto.” Amazon.com. Jan 2010. Amazon.com, Web. 21 Jan 2010. .

A Learning Commons¹

On the 14th, I wrote a blog post (Applying PLN — a Continuing Question for Me), questioning some of my own assumptions about expecting educators to embrace learning practices — cultivating personal learning networks.  I wrote about my feeling stumped by administrators in Colorado last week, wishing that I had the answers to their questions about promoting more relevant learning in their classrooms. In truth, like most of the rest of the session, some excellent ideas came out of the conversation that erupted, after it was revealed that I had no easy answer.  The thrust of the discussion was the culture of the school, and the expectations that the culture places on its members.

So, what does that culture look like?  What do we see in the school and classroom where learning lifestyle pops to mind?  I think that we see is conversation — and not just conversations between teachers and students.  There is a much broader conversation that permiates the entire building and beyond, about new learning and about learning new things.  It is a school that says, out loud,

“We go beyond the basics.”

“Standards are the starting place for what’s exciting here, not the end goal.”

“This is where learners of all ages are not just memeorizing facts and mastering skills — but working with new knowledge, constructing new knowledge, and impacting others through their work.

Here are just a few suggestions for administrators for promoting these conversations:

1. Hire learners. Ask prospective employees, “Tell me about something that you have learned lately.” “How did you learn it?” “What are you seeking to learn more about right now?”
2. Open your faculty meetings with something that you’ve just learned – and how you learned it.  It does not have to be about school, instruction, education managements, or the latest theories of learning.
3. Make frequent mention of your Twitter stream, RSS reader, specific bloggers you read.  Again, this should not be limited to job specific topics.
4. Share links to specific TED talks or other mini-lectures by interesting and smart people, then share and ask for reactions during faculty meetings, in the halls, or during casual conversations with employees and parents just before the PTO meeting.
5. Include in the daily announcements, something new and interesting (Did you know that a California power utility has just gotten permission to start buying electricity from outer space?).
6. Ask students in the halls what they’ve just learned. Ask them what their teachers have just learned.
7. Ask teachers and other staff to write reports on their latest vacation, sharing what they learned – and publish them for public consumption.
8. Ask teachers to devote one of their classroom bulletin boards to what they are learning, related or unrelated to the classroom.
9. Include short articles in the schools newsletter and/or web site about research being conducted by the teachers – again, related or unrelated to the classroom.
10. Learn what the parents of your students are passionately learning about, and ask them to report (text, video, Skype conversation, or in person to be recorded).
    —————————————- added later ————————————–
11. Find ways to be playful at your school — and perhaps feel less grown-up. (see Do Grown-ups Learning?)

1. Lower Columbia College. “Learning Commons.” Flickr. 19 Feb 2009. Web. 19 Jan 2010. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/lowercolumbiacollege/3293381635/>.

BETT Show, photo by Danny Nicholson¹

Last week was BETT 2010, the British Education and Training Technology conference, in London — arguably the largest education and technology conference in the world.  I have not attended one, but it is one of my goals to do just that.  Although we are all facing similar problems and challenges in education, Great Britain is in a different place from us, in the U.S.

Terry Freedman, with whom I will be working in Singapore at the iCTLT conference in March, wrote a very useful list of 7 Things to Do After the BETT Show — or any ed tech conference.  Here is an shamefully abbreviated version, so please go to Terry’s ICT in Education blog to read it in full.

1. Meet with your team members
2. Draw up an action plan
3. Meet with your Headteacher or Principal — and be prepared
4. Share with school staff
5. Listen out for suppliers, with whom you shared your business card
6. Find out what others thought (read blogs and Twitter bytes), and
7. Well, read Terry’s blog.

Powered by ScribeFire.

1. Nicholson, Danny. “BETT2010.” Flickr. 14 Jan 2010. Web. 18 Jan 2010. .

Mapping an appurtenance point during a GIS field trip on Auckland — photo by Cristel Veefkind¹

I was just scanning the news and saw “West Virginia Expands Science, Technology, Engineering, And Mathematics Education with ESRI Software.”  I think that this is great and that West Virginia and other states should invest in ramping up their STEM programs.  But am I the only one who feels a spasm in my back as we STEM here and STEM there and continue to be feed the line that Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics are THE key to a prosperous future?

We are not in this state of near desperation today, struggling to fund education and other essential services, because people didn’t have enough STEM.  This happened because some educated people thought that they could game the economic system for their own selfish and greedy gain, under a “see no evil” administration, and that they could do it without consequences.

What history teaches, is that THERE ARE ALWAYS CONSEQUENCE. 

Interestingly, I find that the article, appearing in The American Surveyor, was actually written by ESRI, the GIS software that West Virginia is licensing for its schools, and that the focus of its use and the state offices that are promoting it are all social studies.  I guess that “West Virginia Expands Social Studies with…” doesn’t have the right punch — that it wouldn’t make us more “competitive” in the culturally diverse global market place.

Am I the only one who is afraid that the cost for STEM is Art, Music, Drama, and history, culture, geography, and economics?

Thinking and problem-solving are over-rated, if you don’t have a valid context to think and solve within.

Powered by ScribeFire.

1. Veefkind, Cristel. “GIS Field Trip.” Flickr. 14 Mar 2007. Web. 15 Jan 2010. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/zusje/420919459/>.

I’m pretty sure that, at this point, the learning had already started happening

I had a great couple of days, last week with folks in Loveland, Colorado, starting off with a wonderfully stimulating dinner conversation with some of the district’s (Thompson School District) tech coaches.  I wrote about it here.  The next day (Saturday) started off with a keynote for area educators involved in a district initiative and other invited members of the local ed community — great to meet Jim Folkestad, from Colorado State University.

The keynote seemed well received and was followed by some closing remarks by the districts superintendent, Ron Cabrera.  All was well until I spent forty-five minutes of casual conversation time with some of the districts administrators.  First of all, being a conversational session, I tried to extract answers from the audience, going for conversation rather than Q&A — and  it always makes me uncomfortable, not being the source of all answers.  I admit it.

Then someone asked, how to get teachers on board with transforming their learning environments — and all eyes were on me.  I launched into my position that although formal professional development opportunities are important — we will not be able to just workshop teachers into the 21st century.  Then I touched on personal learning networks, trying not to give away too much, since that was the presentation I would be doing after lunch.  I started to run through a process that I have suggested in previous blog entries, of starting with about four or five teachers, and introducing them, at-ready points, to a progression of Web 2.0 tools, starting with asking them to start blogging about their daily experiences.

Heads started shaking, almost immediately.  Now these administrators were there because they chose to spend there Saturday with other educators exploring technology.  So they were not looking for excuses — which is often the case.  They saw real barriers to what I was suggesting, which was particularly disconcerting, since I’m just started that chapter in my current book project on PLNs.  They rattled off a string of challenges facing their teachers, foremost being Colorado’s high stakes tests.

It’s  forced me to table my writing for a few days and think through how to promote personal learning in your education community.   I’m actually wondering if it might it be unrealistic to be expecting all teachers to take on the role of “Master Learner.”  There’s just too much of the instructional industrial complex that’s standing in the way.   It’s one of many reasons why high stakes tests are actually harmful to our children and their opportunities.

Mainly, I am telling this story because of a link to a recent Alfie Kahn article, to be published soon in Education Week, Debunking the Case for National Standards.  He does a much better job than I of making the case.

Also, contributing to my current mood is Chris Lehmann’s wonderful keynote address at the ‘09 NYSCATE conference.  One of the big takeaways from Lehmann’s words was this paraphrasing:

While our students can do so much more as active learners than ever before, we are measuring their learning in the oldest and most limiting ways possible.

Another one that resonated with me was his comments about project-based learning, a concept that nearly everyone agrees with and subscribes to.  But he said that if a teacher is applying projects to meet standards and improve or maintain test scores, then it isn’t project-based learning.

It’s doing projects along the way.  …The work that students are doing is the most important thing, not the answers they can put on the test.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I took this picture, walking out to the car last night.

I know that some keynote speakers do not do this as a general rule, because it is “work,” and I understand this position, but one of the best parts of my job is getting invited to dinner by local district ed tech leaders or conference organizers the evening before the event.  Granted, I’m not always excited about it, when I’ve been traveling all day and I’m tired.  But I’m always (ALWAYS) energized and I’m always going back to my room with something I didn’t know before.

Last night it was with four folks of the Thompson School District, in Loveland (love´-lund), Colorado, just south of Fort Collins.  Diana (sorry if I get the names wrong) is experiencing her first Colorado winter, a former eMints coach from Missouri.  She shared a lot about the structured eMints approach, and the adaptability that is enabled by their constant collaborations.  Jenny comes from the media side and is with redefining the school library and asking all the right questions.  Monica Monika is one of the most innovative and open educators I’ve met — and courageous.  In a district that has things fairly locked down (like most), she’s convinced the PTB to open her classroom and ask her students to bring their computers to class and integrate (students are asked to integrate the tech).  And then Kellie Bashor, the district technology integration coordinator, did what good leaders do — she listened.

I think that the high point for me was when Diana was asked what she would be presenting tomorrow (today) at the district’s staff development event.  She said, “It’s Not the Same Thing it was Going to be a Few Minutes Ago.”  That is the perfect title for a conference presentation, and I got her permission to use it.

One of the stats I’ll be including in my keynote this morning is that only a few years ago, the world was doubling technical knowledge every two years.  At some point, during 2010, knowledge will be doubling every 72 hours.  The the test answers are going to be changing.  We need to get rid of the high-stakes tests.  They are irrelevant, counter-productive, and harmful to our children and their future.

In a time of change, we should not be asking, “Did you learn this?”

Instead we should be saying, every day,

“Show me what you’ve learned!  … and surprise me!”

I think it’s going to be a good day.

Powered by ScribeFire.

I think that what has haunted me about Chris Lehmann’s recent blog post on engagement and empowerment is that the two terms seem related to each other in some logical and almost mathematically way.  But it was like completing a puzzle that is bigger than the only two pieces we have sitting in front of us.  So, as is often the case, I wake up early, on the morning I’m to take off for somewhere (Fort Collins, CO [-14f]) with visions of stuff yet to be done.  And then, my attention shifts to meandering thoughts about Chris’ post.

So I thought I would take this opportunity, early hours of the morning, to map this out and explain it to myself, as a way of processing the parts of the puzzle.  Without belaboring the point, here’s what I came up with, at 3:30 AM:

Now that I look at it, written out, it seems a bit ridiculous.  But let’s play this out.  I can always decide not to post this.

What got me going was that when I think of the way that we seem to talk about engagement and even empowerment, It seems to be something that we want to apply to our students or infect them with.  A more worthy conversation might be to clarify that, which is our over-riding goal — at the heart of every talk I’ve ever had with Chris Lehmann

I express it as E(V), just because I couldn’t think of a better way. The E is for enrichment — another frequent term used in teaching (enriching the curriculum). But in trying to go beyond mere learning, as the goal, it seemed more useful (at 3:30 in the morning) to want our students to be and to feel enriched by that learning. The relationships between the elements of V still seem a bit fuzzy to me, but essentially, it’s New Knowledge and/or (with/without) New Skills equals Value. To feel enriched, the learner needs to feel more valuable in some way to himself, to others, to his environment, than he did before.

Now for the more complicated part.  The elements are:

• for reference

  IS — started out being just I, for information.  But what’s necessary is an information system, such as a textbook or other packaged instructional materials.  Of course, what is far more relevant today is a socially moderated hypertext environment, such as the World Wide Web or some subset.

• S — stands for skills: reading skills, reasoning skills, mathematical skills, technological skills, etc.
• R1 — I ended up with two Rs so I needed an R1 and an R2.  R1 is one of several effects of teacher facilitation.  It’s resourcefulness.  When we do not provide all of the information or even all of the skills necessary for the experience, then we expect the learners to be resourceful in their work.
• SM — is another creativity-stimulating effect of teacher facilitation.  It’s simple.  Teacher says to the learner, “Surprise Me.”  We shouldn’t want the same thing from every learner.  We should not standardize our expectations.  It is a disservice to them and their future.  We should expect to be surprised.
• R2 — notches everything up exponentially.  It’s Responsibility.  Feeling responsible to the teacher — well that’s like two to the power of one, and what’s the real point of that?  When the learner feels responsible to himself, that ramps the action up a bit.  But if the learner feels responsible to classmates, or teammates (carrying Chris’ empowering coach metaphor a little further), or some other audience, customer, or community, then we’re starting to multiply the action of learning, times itself — again and again.

So, I’m saying that learner enrichment (newly gained value from newly gained knowledge and/or skills), and its artifacts, result from working accessible information with attained or attainable skills, applying resourcefulness and a whimsical desire to surprise, all to affect somebody in some value-adding way.

If this still makes sense at 9:30, at the airport, then I’ll post it.

Powered by ScribeFire.

Go Ahead, by Xavier Donat¹

I’m with Chris Lehmann concerning his sense of discomfort over our recent near obsession with “engagement.”  He says, in a December 27 blog post (Engagement v. Empowerment…) that

“..first and perhaps most disconcerting, is that engagement too often got translated to ‘fun.’”

I agree with Chris that we’re going to lose that battle — and it’s the wrong battle.  We have invaded childhood enough already, and venerating their hyper-connected, hyper-transparent culture as something we need to replicate in our classrooms results in a creepy tree house effect — which just makes us look foolish.

We want our children to learn and we tend to believe that if we see more engagement in them, then we will see more effective and perhaps more relevant learning.  This is possibly true, though I can’t help but feel that the formula that ignites these results is far more complex.  I pulled up the little dictionary app from my dock and read through the definitions of engage in its various forms, and nothing magical jumped out at me.  In fact, most of the definitions seemed to treat the word from the observers’ point of view — we see another person occupied, unavailable, attracted, involved, employed, or having agreed to marry.

Engagement is the learner acting to learning.

Empowerment feels better to Chris, as it does to me.  I see us contributing more to the actions of learning when we empower learners than when we engage them.  It seems easier to facilitate as well.  Lehmann says,

..that in the end, (empowerment) is the word — the idea — that sets us up for a more student-centered classroom because it is about what the students get from the experience once the class is done, not what happens during the class.

What my mind’s eye sees, when I think of empowered learners is that “..it is about what the students are able to do to get (some gain) from the experience once the class is done.”  If students are empowered, as learners, to accomplish learning goals, instead of its being done to them, then fun simply stops being a factor.  Chris writes about the empowering coach who is going to put the team through un-fun and sometimes grueling drills so that they will play their best basketball.  The drill for skills and endurance is work and it feels like work — and, “It’s o.k.” says Lehmann.

..we have to understand that school is work… but that it can be meaningful, powerful, empowering (and even engaging) work.

But my notice that the definitions of engage seemed to be from the observer’s perspective applies here.  The learning experience needs to be meaningful, powerful, and empowering to the learner.  It is not something we should try to see or do, but something the learner should feel.  It’s what fuels the work that enriches the learner in some self-realizing way.

I’m incredibly engaged by my work.  I’m incredibly lucky, that way (see “U.S. Job Satisfaction at Lowest Level in Two Decades“).  And much of my work is fun, though that’s not important.  Fun can’t really be measured or handed out. What engages me is success, and what enables that success is empowerment (appropriate resources & tools), and what is fun is when my imagination is empowered to make success more certain and more interesting.  ..but that’s me.

I just did a Twitter search for “fun” and before I’d read the first two tweets, that little yellow refresh notifier popped up, telling me that there were 63 more tweets with “fun,” then 132, then 349.  Maybe we shouldn’t underestimate the importance of fun.

Powered by ScribeFire.

1. Donat, Xavier. “Go Ahead.” Flickr. 10 May 2009. Web. 8 Jan 2010. <http://www.flickr.com/photos/xav/3519476035/>.

In brief, it delivers notifications of various social updates directly to your iPhone — “Ding.”  It supports Facebook, Twitter, email, etc.  For Twitter, it will notify you of tweets that mention you, and also hash tags, which might be really useful during certain hyper-tweeted events, such as Educon, in Philadelphia, the end of the month.  So I downloaded it.

What’s interesting is the way the money part works.  You get the app for free.  However, as you add notification services (first one is free), they charge a small one-time fee.  It’s a small charge, and I’m not complaining.  But it’s an interesting way to generate income from a phone app.  In a way, it’s a lot like buying ringtones, but your are buying a process — a piece of code that makes your phone behave in a certain way.  Actually, it’s not at all unlike how our phone companies work, the more I think about it. 

Powered by ScribeFire.

Words as Skin, by Maurizio Abbate1

Brenda forwarded this one to me — some folks at Lake Superior State University, who have, since a fateful New Year’s Eve party in 1975, published an annual list of words and terms that should be banished from the “..Queens English for Miss-use, Over-use and General Uselessness.”

Include for banishment in 2010 are:

• Shovel-Ready
• Transparent/Transparency
• Czar
• Tweet (what a surprise)
• App
• Sexting
• Friend as a verb
• Teachable Moment
• In These Economic Times
• Stimulus
• Toxic Assets
• Too Big to Fail
• Bromance
• Chillaxin’
• Obama as a prefix or root

What is most interesting is the comments made about the various terms. It’s a conversation about words and language. I do not agree with a lot of it, but reading comments about words and terms may be useful to some students — demystifying words, revealing that we are constantly hacking the code.

1. Abbate, Maurizio. “Words as Skin.” Flickr. 8 Mar 2007. Web. 5 Jan 2010. .

This is Gopher, one incarnation of what the Internet looked like before the World Wide Web1

In Internet is to WWW as Education is to…, Willy Kjellstrom reflects on his recent reading of Lawrence Lessig’s The Future of Ideas — and how he (Willy) discovered that there is a difference between Internet and World Wide Web. We often use the terms interchangeably, without loss of meaning. They are, at this time, practically synonymous.

From January 1 Blog Post (click to enlarge)

Then, at the end of his article, Willy questions my January 1 resolutions post, where I resolve to avoid using certain terms, including education, preferring to emphasize learning.

Now I recognize the futility of complying fully with ones post-New Year’s Eve promises to one’s self. But I would like to draw on two distinctions between my perspective and that of Kjellstrom.

Number one, Willy appears to be younger than I am — “Harvard Alum ‘05,” according to his Facebook page. Of course, that could be graduate school, which he, like me, may have attended over a decade after general college. But for the sake of my objective, I’m going to assume that Kjellstrom is decades younger than I am.

You see, I have always known the difference between the Internet and the World Wide Web, because I knew an Internet before WWW. I remember when you navigated the network of networks using Telnet and FTP — when, if you wanted to look up the meaning of Telnet, you had to know the IP number of a server that housed a file with definitions. I remember the rise of Gopher and the slower but formidable rise of the World Wide Web. I recognized these as protocols for shaping how information logically connected, so that we could navigate the network of ideas. Yet, I grant that in most contexts, I can exchange the terms in my conversations without losing meaning.

Also, being 34 years out of college and 16 years out of graduate school, and especially because of the shifts we have seen during the most recent decades, I understand that learning is an integral part of life, not just something that you do in school — a realization that I know Kjellstrom and you readers understand as well.

But, and this is my second point, in this time when so much is shifting (industrial to post-industrial, machine age to knowledge age, whatever you want to call it), learning has become a critical life skill.

I can remember, standing in line, at my high school graduation, and two graduates behind me claiming that they would never read another book. At that moment in history, and at that moment so close to our formal education, it was a perfectly plausible proclamation. They were, no doubt, getting jobs in one of the town’s mills and expecting to work the same job tasks for the next 35 years. We had been prepared for the next 35 years. What none of us knew, was that in less than 15 years those mills would all be gone, and my classmates would have to, as Toffler predicted, “learn, unlearn, and relearn” as a way of life.

Education is still characterized as a place you go, to get taught — where we teach and our students learn how to be taught. Yet, in the real world, learning is not something that is done to you, but something that you do yourself, in your own way, with your resources and sense of resourcefulness. I am not saying that every student moment in school is spent in passive receipt or that teaching should never happen. But “being taught” is still the character of the beast, and it is getting in the way of helping people learn to teach themselves.

If our global connectivity and sharing of ideas — our network of networks — was in desperate need of reform and the World Wide Web was getting in the way of that reform, then the distinction between Internet and WWW would be much more important.

Thanks, Willy, for continuing this conversation.

1. ”Types of Internet Protocols.” Online Library Learning Center. The board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, Web. 2 Jan 2010. .

The Post-it Man by Tim Ove1

It is customary to offer your new year’s resolutions — a custom I usually avoid. Why set yourself up for disappointment. But over the past few mornings I’ve been thinking that NYRs might be an interesting way to make a statement — something I’m obviously not very shy about.

So, here are my 2010 New Year’s Resolutions.

1. I will accept that I may no longer be a believer — Over the years, I have been gradually, and not without resistance, losing my faith. I am afraid that I may no longer believe in education.
   There is no problem with education.
   Education is the problem.

   Our goal is preparing our children for their future, and I am becoming convinced that education — our belief in education — is preventing us from accomplishing that goal.

2. I will avoid, at all (most) costs, using the following words:
   • education — It gets in the way. Anybody know what I might substitute the word education with? ;-)
   • student — Implies learning as passive and separate from living. I’ll try to use learner instead.
   • technology — What does it mean to you? ..to me? I think it is better to tell the story — what the learner is doing, with what, and to what ends.
   • teach — The active and accented verb in our conversations should be “learn” not “teach.”
   • teacher — I’m actually not too sure about this one. I may start referring to us a teacher-learners.
3. I will try, at all costs, to speak plaining and to clearly paint pictures for what I am striving to convey. If we agree that “it takes a village to teach a child,” then we need to be speaking in villagese, not schoolese. We need to try to avoid the vague terminologies that portray us as experts, and instead, use sentences that more effectively spread our knowledge and experience.
4. I will more aggressively and compellingly speak out against standardized testing, and to direct conversations toward alternatives.
   I believe that standardized, high-stakes testing has done far more harm to more children then all the social networks on the planet.
5. I will try to spend less time sitting at my computer and more time doing something unrelated to “education” and “technology.”  Anybody know where I can download the guitar tabs for It is One, by Jackson Browne?
6. OK! I will also get my weight down to 190, hug my wife more, be nicer to the dog, and eat less meat.

Happy New Year, My Friends!

1. Ove, Tim. “The “Post-it” Man.” Flickr. 22 Dec 2009. Web. 31 Dec 2009. .

Looking for the UnExpected

One of my most anticipated activities, during extended times at home, is going to the movies. Alas, I am always surprised with how busy I become, and so, I haven’t been able to see as many as I’d hoped — which means that I have more to look forward to.

Brenda and I drove up to the Regal last night to see Sherlock Holmes with Robert Downey Junior. The movie was all that I’d hoped it would be. It was visually rich, the characters were real, the script was fine, the action was almost overwhelming, the audio was loud (even for me) but effective, and the special effects were as transparent as I’ve seen. Yet, it was missing something. The movie wasn’t very interesting. Walking away from the theater, Brenda and I both agreed that we were bored — a mystery to me, because I couldn’t think of why.

Getting back home a little too early for bed, I posted comments about my disappointment on Twitter and Facebook, and just now (6:50 AM) scanned through a surprisingly large number of responses. Many people agreed, but just about as many people seemed to love the movie, mentioning the attributes I have already listed, especially the FX.

Then my friend Gail Lovely hit it.

We found it to be boring… I think part of the problem was they forgot to include the audience in the mystery and in solving the mystery. There was no way you could watch the movie and say “why didn’t I see that clue?!”

For an icon of “mystery,” there was no mystery. You knew the villain the first time you saw him, and regardless of his court-ordered demise, you knew — well enough spoiler. I agree with Gail’s observation. I was not a part of the show. I was not invested. I was merely a spectator, and for that, I felt short-changed and wondering why.

It reminds me a bit about some research I explored a while back (can’t find the blog post) showing that we learn well, what surprises us. It’s the unexpected discovery that impacts our memory.

No impact in this movie. Though Robert Downey Junior, Jude Law, and Rachel McAdams are all three memorable visions — no surprises will, no doubt, leave no lasting impressions.

Surprise your learners!

Today? Avatar!