Have the Paul Simon Anthology playing in the car and song 1 of disc 2 is the classic Graceland song, “Boy in the Bubble.” In it, he juxtaposes the hard times humanity was facing alongside the wonder and amazement of technological advances. In the chorus, he sings,
These are the days of miracle of wonder
This is the long distance call.
The way the camera follows us in slo-mo.
The way we look to a song, oh yeah.
The way we look to a distant constellation
That’s dying in the corner of the sky.
These are the days of miracle and wonder,
Don’t cry, baby, don’t cry.
Great song.
Hearing that song a lot lately - I don’t change the CD’s in the car that often - I am struck by how much you could add now. The Internet, video skype, everybody writing, medical advances, the way the camera follows us from outer space, the way we pause live TV, and so much more.
We continue to live in “the days of miracle and wonder” (while still immersed in world conflict, tragedy and hate), but at what time will our education system change to embrace this?
How much longer can schools/administrators/teachers/parents resist acknowledging these amazing changes in technology and make the way our children learn reflect and tap into this?
I love it when music makes me think.
Enjoy.
We continue to live in days for miracle and wonder. What new items should we include in a new verse for this song?
The Brain Rules video has been making the rounds. Justin shared it last week in his welcome return to the blogosphere.
It’s it the viral edu-video du jour and for good reason.
Then today I came across this intriguing article by Jeanna Bryner from LiveScience.com. You may have come across it in the Yahoo! Featured headlines.
The brain is simply amazing.
The article describes Foresight Theory and the work of Researcher Mark Changizi of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. His research and theory offer an explanation for why optical illusions do what they do to our minds. But it also throws out there, that people can “ get a glimpse of events one-tenth of a second before they occur.”
We can see the future.
According to the article, scientists have long known about the one-tenth of a second delay between when light hits the retina in the eye and when the brain is able to make meaning of the image. Early explanations theorized that our motor systems compensated.
Changizi now says it’s our visual system that has evolved to compensate for neural delays, generating images of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future. That foresight keeps our view of the world in the present. It gives you enough heads up to catch a fly ball (instead of getting socked in the face) and maneuver smoothly through a crowd.
How cool is that?
The brain always amazes me and the potential of it seems limitless - listen to some of Medina’s examples in the Brain Rules video.
Reading this article, my thoughts drifted back to the movie Phenomenon with John Travolta. In the movie, Travolta’s character, George sees a blinding light and then gains incredible thinking skills, eventually leading to the fantastic telekinesis.
(SPOILER ALERT - com’on the movie is 12 years old!)
For most of the movie everyone believes it was some alien force that gave him this power. Eventually, they discover that George has a massive tumor that while killing him has also created completely new pathways and neural connections in his brain.
Okay, to my point - I loved George’s response, knowing he was dying. He said, that he would choose the tumor explanation over the alien one, because it spoke to the potential of humanity.
“I’ll tell you what I think I am…. I’m what everybody can be.” — George Malley (JOHN TRAVOLTA) (found here)
Maybe the Foresight theory is a desperate stretch, or maybe Changizi is on to something.
This particular podcast, we will be focusing on the question, “How Do We Connect Technology and Classroom Instruction Seamlessly?”
We’ve presented at Learning 2.0 in Shanghai and ETC in Kuala Lumpur on our work at ISB on moving towards an embedded curriculum focused less on tech skills and more on the 21st Century skills that you read so much about in the edublogosphere. We wrote about our thinking in our blogs and as guest bloggers on Dangerously Irrelevant. We’ve put up our work to share and collaborate with in wikis, initially in newliteracy and then as an ISB21 team.Now we are excited to take questions, speak to solutions, and tackle issues that relate to implementation on these very Big Ideas.
SOS is a biweekly podcast produced by educators in the Asian region discussing the latest conversations in the educational blogosphere as well as deep thinking about education and the changing nature of learning. Join us on Ustream.tv for the live broadcast. Listeners will have an opportunity to Skype into the conversation “on the fly” as well as listen to an archived version via iTunes.
Winner and Hetland ask “Why do we teach the arts in schools?”
They argue that despite popular opinion, they had not found causation between arts learning and academic achievement. They cite a Gallup poll that 80% of Americans believe that learning a musical instrument improves math skills.
Winner and Hetland claim that their research in some schools in Boston show that while corelation exists, causation does not. Following up on this and reading around, this gets disputed places, to which they have responded. I’m going to focus on the points in this article.
Interestingly Winner and Hetland refute the commonly held idea ideal that learning the arts improves the math and science learning that schools often focus on in “a test-driven education system”. Instead, art education is valuable for more important reasons:
There is, however, a very good reason to teach arts in schools, and it’s not the one that arts supporters tend to fall back on. In a recent study of several art classes in Boston-area schools, we found that arts programs teach a specific set of thinking skills rarely addressed elsewhere in the curriculum.
They go on to add:
In our analysis, we identified eight “studio habits of mind” that arts classes taught, including the development of artistic craft. Each of these stood out from testable skills taught elsewhere in school.
The other 7 habits are persistence, expression, making clear connections between schoolwork and the world, and in their words, “we were particularly struck by the potentially broad value of four other kinds of thinking being taught in the art classes we documented: observing, envisioning, innovating through exploration, and reflective self-evaluation.”
I have written before about the need for a thinking curriculum - one less focused on content knowledge.
But let’s think about those last four skills: observing, envisioning, innovating, and reflection.
These are the powerful skills that we talk about constantly as required in our 21st Century Learners.
Here’s what Winner and Hetland had to say about each:
Observing - “Seeing clearly by looking past one’s preconceptions is central to a variety of professions, from medicine to law. Naturalists must be able to tell one species from another; climatologists need to see atmospheric patterns in data as well as in clouds. Writers need keen observational skills too, as do doctors.“
Envisioning - art teachers were asking questions “prompting students to imagine what was not there.“
Innovation - “Teachers in our study told students not to worry about mistakes, but instead to let mistakes lead to unexpected discoveries.“
Reflective self-evaluation - Students are “asked to step back, analyze, judge, and sometimes reconceive their projects entirely.”
These are the skills - the only skills - that will allow our students to change the world for the better.
I’ve done a lot of quoting this post, so I’ll let Winner and Hetland’s words finish it off:
We don’t need the arts in our schools to raise mathematical and verbal skills - we already target these in math and language arts. We need the arts because in addition to introducing students to aesthetic appreciation, they teach other modes of thinking we value.
For students living in a rapidly changing world, the arts teach vital modes of seeing, imagining, inventing, and thinking.
Those who have learned the lessons of the arts, however - how to see new patterns, how to learn from mistakes, and how to envision solutions - are the ones likely to come up with the novel answers needed most for the future.
Image “je dois apprendre aux curieux” by drunkprincess, found at Flickr Creative Commons
Ian Shapira from The Washington Post has written an article this week describing how many young teachers in Washington DC have Facebook accounts that are publicly accessible and are filled with content that represents them in inappropriate ways. Essentially, they are being young adults, but in a way that they don’t realize is in the public domain.
It’s almost like Googling someone: Log on to Facebook. Join the Washington, D.C., network. Search the Web site for your favorite school system. And then watch the public profiles of 20-something teachers unfurl like gift wrap on the screen, revealing a sense of humor that can be overtly sarcastic or unintentionally unprofessional — or both.
The article goes on to ask whether teachers should be judged on their out-of-school lives if it doesn’t affect their effectiveness with students:
Do the risque pages matter if teacher performance is not hindered and if students, parents and school officials don’t see them? At what point are these young teachers judged by the standards for public officials?
In states including Florida, Colorado, Tennessee and Massachusetts, teachers have been removed or suspended for MySpace postings, and some teachers unions have begun warning members about racy personal Web sites. But as Facebook, with 70 million members, and other social networking sites continue to grow, scrutiny will no doubt spread locally.
Whether they “should” or not is a big discussion point, but whether they “will” or not really isn’t.
In today’s society where political correctness reigns and public scrutiny and “moral” standards are held in front of everyone’s face, there is no doubt that Washington DC will follow the other states in removing teachers for social networking behavior.
Do adults need to be re-taught what privacy means since it’s meaning has changed with the coming of the internet?
Do they know how to manage their own Facebook accounts - never mind teach students how to protect theirs?
Like several other teachers interviewed, Webster said she thought her page could be seen only by people she accepted as “friends.” But like those of many teachers on Facebook, Webster’s profile was accessible by the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network.
Are young teachers in training ready to defend their Facebook profile in an interview?
“I know for a fact that when a superintendent in Missouri was interviewing potential teachers last year, he would ask, ‘Do you have a Facebook or MySpace page?’ ” said Todd Fuller, a spokesman for the Missouri State Teachers Association, which is warning members to clean up their pages. “If the candidate said yes, then the superintendent would say, ‘I’ve got my computer up right now. Let’s take a look.’ “
Ultimately, the lessons of cyber-safety and responsibility that we teach our students needs to be shared with our teachers too. It should be included in their professional training (along with learning to use web 2.0 tools to enhance education of course).
All students, no matter what future profession they go into, also need to see the importance of knowing what they share and how they share online. And what better way to model this for a teacher than to share the very impact it has on our own lives and how we are perceived through what we and others share online.
Too many believe that the rules of public behavior are abandoned in Facebook. Here’s a terrific video which makes this very clear. Thanks to Brian Lockwood for the link to this on Twitter.
We were all set for the MS Concert for Climate Change on Thursday, April 24th, in conjunction with Project Global Cooling.
Then the storm hit.
Wednesday night we had a storm in Bangkok like we haven’t seen in some time. Power was knocked out and stayed out as lines were down going into ISB. The school administration made the quick call to cancel school for Thursday.
As a result, the MS Concert for Climate Change didn’t happen, but happening all day Friday, April 25th is a live stream of the ES Earth Day Festival. Student music, film, poems, and performances, all part of the Earth Day festivities here at ISB.
Join us and stay tuned for the rescheduled time for the MS Concert for Climate Change.
Cooling the globe with youth, music, YouTube, green schools - and you.
Justin, Kim, and I have joined this network and through the amazing work of Kerry Dyke and the ISB Green Panthers, ISB will be adding our students’ voices to the global voice calling for awareness and efforts for global cooling.
We are in Earth Week here at ISB, with a wealth of activities bringing the school together in its efforts to be more green - all organized by the Green Panthers and supported by the concerned students, faculty, and admin of ISB.
Join us as we stream two concerts of music, performances, student work showcases, and participation in the name of climate change.
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