Thinking Allowed.

The KL ETC Conference was a blast. Wonderful keynote speakers (both student and educator) and interesting presenters.

Thanks to all who attended my presentation on I.T. Curriculum 2.0.

(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 ;-).

It’s all good.

Okay, it’s complete out-of-the-box thinking time.

Why do schools teach what they do? 

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.

Image: “Question!” by Bast, found at Flickr Creative Commons

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.

Together we are all smart AND sharing.

That’s a pretty powerful combination.

Technorati Tags: web2.0, collaboration, education

It’s a new look for Thinking Allowed (for those 15 regular visitors). No real love for the current theme - simply the old theme was not interacting well with Firefox, which many (most?) of you use. Sidebars were going haywire.

Anyway, let me know what you think of this one. Basically, I like having two columns for the widgets and the text on the left. Maybe I’m a creature of habit - regardless, it limited my choices.

On another note, I haven’t posted in ages - so much for my holiday plans - but I have been out there commenting recently, only I forgot to turn on my CoComment extension, so the comments I made are not appearing on the right in my RSS feed of comments elsewhere.

So, to direct your attention to the posts that drew my attention, check out the post and comments of these two solid posts. In particular, read through the comments (not just because mine is there). Some interesting thinking out there.

• Jeff Utecht’s Thinking Stick post on Interview Questions
• Will Richardson’s Weblogg-ed post on the Curriculum of Politics (which busts into a conversation on media coverage)

Commenting is the stuff that makes the blogsophere work, because it becomes a conversation instead of an article, yet I find often that readers digest a post and leave or even leave a comment without reading the other comments. Not sure why that is.

In a related vein, today, I was talking (in person!) with Jeff and Kim (Always Learning) about how there is a real sense of negativity out there.

Is the holiday season getting on everyone’s nerves?

Is the conversation getting tired and repetitive?

Are techies getting frustrated by lack of action?

Do we need more outside voices, chiming in and questioning?

Is the economy just making us depressed?

No answers, just thinking aloud.

So a week ago when I checked this, I was writing at the junior high level. Guess it’s not the most intellectual discourse out there. Luckily the Talking Tech blog is still intellectually superior remaining at the junior high level.

On the positive side, at least I am hitting my key demographic (now who’s level is elementary?) of the 5-9 years olds!

You’ve probably seen this little evaluator out there already. Give your own blog a check. Thanks to Doug Johnson and Justin Medved for sharing this one.

There has been a lot of conversation over the Vision of Students video by Mike Wesch. Scott McLeod referred us to the “dust up” and Gary Stager and Wesch are having a good talk write about it. I see Stager’s point that the blogsosphere can “inflate” the worth of a piece of work, but I still think that the resulting conversation is powerful.

And not possible without blogs and RSS and our edublogosphere.

Whether the video portrays university education’s flaws or whether it gives us a picture of students’ reality or even if it just shows us that students are “whiners”, what has resulted from the video is a conversation that is awesome.

Students in the classroom are talking to teachers about their lives outside of the classroom.

Teachers are talking to their students about relevancy.

Educators are talking to other educators about how to engage students more.

Parents are wondering what their child is getting for 20,000 dollars a year.

And ultimately, people who believe in and love education are talking about rigor and scholarship and lesson design and LEARNING.

And that ain’t bad.

But in the end, what I wanted to share in this post was a quote from Wesch’s response to Stager and other’s criticism. This is why students (digital native or captive or whatever) still need teachers.

The great myth is that these “digital natives” know more about this new information environment than we do. But here’s the reality: they may be experts in entertaining themselves online, but they know almost nothing about educating themselves online.

What a fabulous quote. That whole paragraph is great. Check it out.

Here’s the video if you haven’t seen it yet.

Technorati Tags: mwesch youtube learning web2.0

It’s been a while since my last post.

What can I tell you? It’s been busy.

There always seems to be this guilt that hangs over me when I don’t post for extended periods of time. Like I am letting down subscribers…luckily I don’t have too many (thank you, those of you who are here!).

But not having posted does not mean that I haven’t been involved and getting stuck in. (I also post tech how-to’s on another blog, Talking Tech.)

I truly enjoyed a geek session with colleagues, listening to the Warlick keynote from the K12 Online Conference. We, like many, were active in the live chat which was very rewarding.

Even got a little mention on the 2 cents blog, which was pretty cool. Though, appropriately, it was for something a student said to me, rather than any epiphany I’ve offered.

Figures.

In that same chat online I shared a cool NYTimes opinion piece on Facebook from the students’ perspective. Paraphrasing:

We adults take this networking thing too seriously…it’s all supposed to be fun with our friends.

Definitely a good read.

Then working at home last week, I was twittering at the right time to catch Chris Lehmann’s invite to join his class at SLA in a UStream conversation - a terrific experience that Chris posted about. His students are articulate and offered the best description of the difference between a project assessment vs a test.

Paraphrasing:

Tests are what the teachers thinks you’ve learned based on what they covered, but a project is based on what you need to learn.

(Only more eloquent than that.)

The point was well-made. Students own the learning they do in authentic, open-ended projects. For tests they do what they need to, in order to get a good grade.

And all of this got me thinking…

I worry about getting too far removed from the classroom as an Ed Tech guy or as an administrator. Away from the classroom, we lose touch with the wisdom of our students - the insights into how they see the world and the openings for us to be their educators.

We concern ourselves with the big goals and forget the small goals. We don’t have, often enough, the conversations that allow students to connect with us and us with them. The conversations that show how much we value them and their thoughts.

I think that ALL educators in and out of the classroom need to remember and embrace that they are more than “content delivery devices” or even information facilitators. There is a human connection that must be made with students.

Years ago, I heard or read that so much of teen difficulties come from the fact that they are undervalued in society. In pre-Industrial Revolution days, they were working the farm, contributing to the family. Valued. But now, they have little to nothing to make them feel “of worth”. This was a main argument for Service Learning in schools and I am all for that.

I also think that educators have the power to make students feel valued and worthwhile EVERY DAY. In the way we treat them, the way we listen to them, and the way we ask them what they think.

Chris did this with the students on UStream for us, but I imagine he and the SLA faculty do this all the time with their students. When asked what they valued about being at SLA, these students did not speak of the technology or the technological prowess of their faculty. They spoke of the connectedness and self-worth they felt with their teachers, who genuinely cared about their learning and their well-being.

I can’t say it any better than that.

Technorati Tags: k12online07 warlick practicaltheory education ustream

Listen to this Post

This post has been a long time coming.

For a while now, I’ve been intrigued by the ever-growing need for visual literacy in our off- and on-line worlds. This is not ground-breaking stuff…the sense/need for learners to gain visual literacy has been around for a while – even pre-Web.

People have been studying and manipulating how the eye moves over a page of text (see any speed reader) or scans an advertisement (see any cigarette ad in the past 10 years) or views a web page (see any basic web design course) for quite some time now.

For the most part, it is humanity’s top sense and so our brains are wired to interpret a visual world.

More recently, though, I have been struck by how effective tag clouds have become as a visual representation of popularity or importance. (In today’s web is there a difference? But that’s another post) I remember the first time I saw a tag cloud and thought, “wow, that makes so much sense.”

Does it makes sense because the human brain builds understanding in visual ways (seeing is believing) or is it because I have become so visually sensitive from years of doing this ed tech stuff?

Does it matter?

Ultimately, our learners live in this world. So do we.

This world is requiring of them (us) a sophisticated visual literacy that reaches beyond the “scanning of a page” to understanding visual cues, reading iconography in an instant, and deciphering intent and meaning from intentional layout and design.

A month or so ago, I was on the TED Talks site. Terrific stuff, most of you reading this have been there, seen the videos, bought into the messages.

But have you checked out their homepage? Have you seen how they handle communicating popularity? Or currency?

Squares of various video moments grow or shrink depending on what criteria you click on the left. You want most recently updated? Click that and the videos change size to reflect your choice. Watch them change when you click most talks or most discussed or most emailed.

Awesome.

Don’t trust my little explanation…check it out. View the videos later. For now, learn from how they use visuals to communicate.

A kind of dynamic image cloud - always changing, always user-driven.

That thinking got me thinking, “what if you kept notes that way?”

What if students people became so visually-tuned that they organized thought that way?

Maybe we already do. In which case, what if note-taking matched that visual style?

I’ve always been an “outline” note-taker. You know the type…make a point, related points get indented underneath that point. New points get outdented (I love that that’s become a word). You’ve seen this form of note-taking or done it or taught it.

And that form works. You can study from it. You can remember how points relate and there is a flow to your notes that reflect the chronological time spent listening.

But what if a more visual style fostered better understanding?

I decided to play with the idea.

At the Learning 2.0 conference, I used Smart Notebook software (typically used for presentations on Smart Boards) to take notes in each of the sessions I attended. (They were awesome by the way) I chose this software, because it allows for quick typing and then instantly moving the text object anywhere on the page. Resizing is a click and a drag of the mouse and font color changes are no more than a highlight and click away. Add to that the ease of adding new “slides” (one click) and re-ordering them if needed. The ease of layout manipulation and simplicity of tools made this an easy choice over Word, Photoshop or any other software I had on my computer.

Did it work?

That’s a little harder to say definitively.

All note-taking is subject to personal taste and recall. It’s intent is recall for the note-taker, rarely for someone else. It’s why supplying the notes on the conference Ning was helpful for others, but still NOT like being at the session.

I’ve shared one example from a session I attended given by Alan November. At times I added my own questions in among the notes, emphasizing them with white space, color, size, or alignment.

Have a look…the slides lose a little impact in the export/translation to PowerPoint and then to Slideshare (not to mention the size factor is lost). But you get the general idea. “Order of slides” still handles general flow of the session, but the freedom to go back, add comments and manipulate layout to reflect thought processes was pretty interesting.

(And I wasn’t playing so much with it that I was missing out on what the speakers were talking about.)

[slideshare id=121963&doc=november-teaching-and-learning3188&w=425]

I was putting thoughts to screen in a way that was reflective of how they were being formed in my mind.

That’s pretty cool.

Maybe it’s not the way to teach note-taking to children. Maybe it’s too wishy-washy or hippy or crunchy or new agey or Web 2.0-ey. Maybe children need help organizing their thoughts rather than fostering “cloud” thinking.

But given the visual literacy requirements of the now and the future, we are obligated to show students tag clouds and sites with visual components like TED talks.

We NEED to talk to them about visual literacy and making meaning from color and alignment and layout and design.

And then, we need to ASK THEM to explain to us how they see the world and how they make meaning from what they see.

Because I bet that’s pretty cool too.

And I don’t think we ask them enough.

Technorati Tags: learn2cn visualliteracy novemberlearning tagclouds TEDtalk