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.
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
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.
(presentation can be found here - just scroll to the bottom)
It was great to see so many people interested and joining in on a conversation about a different approach to technology learning. In particular, thanks to the ISB and ISKL folks who also came as a show of support.
(It helped.)
(And I hope you got something out of it.)
Special thanks to Kim and Jeff for their support during the event, to Chad for the tech support, and of course, as always, to Justin for the work and getting me thinking aloud ;-).
Really, that’s what I’m asking…what’s it good for?
How is the content curriculum that we teach kids helping them?
(And I am not accepting any version of “it prepares them for the next level of school.”)
In older posts on this blog, I’ve written that school curriculum NEEDS a major shift: (whole post here)
21st century learners need thinking skills. They need to be able to find, process, and evaluate information that is EVERYWHERE and always accessible. They need to be able to participate in an interconnected, wired world in effective and responsible ways. They NEED to be taught how to manage/handle/thrive amidst all of the information that is out there and continuing to grow.
Our allegiance to English, Science, Math, and Social Studies as core curricular ideals and the end-all-be-all in student learning needs to make room for higher order thinking, questioning, and information literacy.
And after sharing my thoughts on the NYTimes reported failure of a laptop program, I offered: (whole post here)
Our curricula of content mired in Language Arts, Math, Science, and Social Studies is not preparing students for anything but further education focused on these same subjects.
What students learn needs to be different and how they learn needs to be different.
These are not unique ideas. Throughout the edublogosphere in varying degrees, educators are talking about the importance of a 21st Century Curriculum (for lack of a better name).
So I ask this question, in light of the shared belief that a 21st Century curriculum focused on thinking, communicating and collaborating skills is necessary for a world in which knowledge is so readily accessible.
What is the point of the way current curriculum is setup?
More specifically, break it down into the classic subjects:
Why do we learn Language Arts (or English in HS)?
Why do we learn Social Studies?
Why do we learn Science?
Why do we learn Math?
Why do we learn Art (performing and visual)?
(note: I stick to these subjects, because Language learning seems to have an obvious practicality, as does Health/PE.)
Is this too bold to ask? Can we defend what we do as schools?
No more, “That’s the way we’ve always done it” defense.
Out of the box time.
Prove that what we say we value is useful.
Truly no offense intended to any of these subjects and the educators who teach them. I just want to hear from the experts what the right answers are.
Please feel free to answer any and all in the comments.
Will Richardson followed up his request for contributions to his wiki page mentioned in my last post with a thank you and an expression of appreciation for the power of people getting together to offer their ideas and share with others. To that, I left the following as a comment and since it is so closely related to my previous post, I thought I’d share it here.
(apologies to those who read it on Weblogg-ed already.)
The power of the collective intelligence that we can tap into with the web continues to amaze me. But even more so now, I am impressed and encouraged by the willingness of people to do so.
People continue to want to better EVERYONE’S knowledge and understanding through sharing, collaborating, and conversation.
I remember someone telling me (though I can’t remember who) that true collaboration is when educators recognize that they are no longer responsible for the education of their students, but rather they are responsible for the education of ALL students.
While easy for me to say in my tech coordinator role - it’s a tough thing to let go of and acknowledge for a lot of educators.
At the school level, that means a teacher letting go of caring only about the experience that their own students get and sharing ideas and resources with colleagues so that all children at the grade level or school benefit.
At an administrative level, that means letting go of representing only your own building or division and working cooperatively with other administrators to ensure that all students in the district or school can best learn.
What I see daily on the web is that very concept applied to its greatest level. We share ideas and resources not only so that our kids at our schools benefit, but so that ALL kids at ALL schools benefit.
We want EDUCATION to improve, and together, we are collaborating and conversing to make that happen.
Entries (RSS)