:Connecting the Dots

I spent part of this evening helping my mother sort through the many belongings that I unceremoniously dumped on her upon my return from college 16 years ago.  What a fascinating thing it is to look at those old papers and photographs, but it’s the letters and cards that are really getting me.  There are many from the junior year when many of my best friends studied aborad while I stayed back in Medford, MA.

I can’t believe how much we wrote, how well we wrote.  In the card I just put down, my friend discussed at length the difficult decision she was struggling with over whether to continue her study of Russian and reacted deeply to news I had shared with her about goings-on in my own life.

Do kids still write to one another like this?  Or does the fact that students in far-flung places remain in constant contact through cheap and ubiquitous electronic devices reduce their dialogue to a shallow ongoing and ephemeral social hum?  Will they be able to retrieve those messages 16 years from now?  More importantly, will they be worth retrieving?

While I welcome new ways of communicating like Twitter, SMS, and e-mail (ok, that’s not so “new” anymore), seeing these letters reminds me of how improtant it is to really be able to think through one’s writing, to develop and explore an idea fully.  This is something that I don’t want to see us lose – in the general discourse of our culture or in the schools that enter children into that discourse.

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I’ve been talking to one of my colleagues in the high school social studies department about working with her students throughout the Fall on understanding how the internet is changing the American electoral process.  Exciting stuff.  From the impact of bloggers to fundraising on the web to Obama’s VP announcement via SMS, there’s a lot to talk about.  To get the ball rolling, I want the students to look at how candidates over the last 12 years have used the web to support their campaigns.  It took some digging, but between the Internet Archive Wayback Machine and 4President.org, you can get a pretty good sense of how things have developed so far:

• Clinton/Gore ‘96 - hard to find an archived copy of the entire site.
• Dole/Kemp ‘96
• Wayback Machine Collection of all 2000 Election Campaign web sites
• Bush/Cheney ‘04
• Kerry/Edwards ‘04
• Obama ‘08
• McCain ‘08

It’s been an interesting exercise for me because I’m not used to thinking of the web as a primary source for investigating history.  Current events, certainly, and a great vehicle for presenting materials such as text, photographs, and video - but until now I’ve never really considered web sites themselves as historical artifacts.  Of course, none of it would be possible without the wonderful Wayback Machine, a tremendous resource whose value will grow exponentially as time goes by. 

I hope you and your students find these sites useful.  I’ve tagged them all as ’election’ on my del.icio.us page.  Enjoy…

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Thanks to Will Richardson for pointing out Michael Wesch’s Library of Congress presentation on YouTube.  I watched the whole thing.  The part that started my wheels turning comes at 22:30 or so:

When we started watching first vlogs and did first vlogs ourselves… it’s like this deep experience of context collapase.  The moment you look into a webcam for the first time and you try to start talking, you have this sense like you just don’t know who you’re talking to and therefore you just come out sounding all awkward.  Do a search for “first vlogs” on YouTube and you’ll see what I’m talking about.

I think about all the attacks on YouTube by K-12 educators, the claims that it is worthless because of the boatloads of trite, childish content that it contains.  And make no mistake – it does contain boatloads of trite, childish content.  But Wesch’s comment made me consider the first time someone pointed a video camera at me – not a webcam but a VHS camcorder.  Even knowing that the audience for that video would most likely number fewer than a dozen or so family members and friends, I had absolutely nothing to say and so I made jokes, turned away, talked at the camera operator, not the audience on the other side of the screen, made peace signs, stuck out my tongue… you get the picture.  I was trite and childish.  And I know I’m not alone in having that reaction. 

How much greater then is our sense of dislocation and confusion – what Wesch calls “context collapse” – when we know that the audience on the other side of that screen could number in the millions when that video is on YouTube?  Is it reasonable to expect people to start churning out hard-hitting documentaries about pollution in the local lake and incisive one-act plays when we are still, as a culture, giggling and holding our hands up to the lens and trying to figure out what to say to that blinking red light on the front of the camera?  I guess that what I’m trying to say is that we need to make cave paintings before we can make Mona Lisas.  This is especially true given the fact that most mass media up to this point have pigeon-holed the vast majority of their participants in the limited role of consumers, not producers.  With YouTube, I think it’s fair to expect that with time – and education – we will become better able to express ourselves in powerful and creative ways through the moving image.  Right now, we are still infants learning to speak all over again.

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Well, Doug Johnson saw my link to LifeHack’s 10 Essential Skills and has challenged the Edublogosphere to come up with their own lists.  Here’s mine:

1. The ability to understand and interpret data: So many people – especially in education – try to prop up weak arguments and ideas with even weaker/incomplete/misleading statistics.  Worse, many people lack the tools to see when others are doing the same.
2. Seeing the big picture/putting things into perspective:  People who consider only their little corner of the organization when making decisions will forever remain in that little corner.  Teamwork means not only understanding your own “stuff” but how it fits in with everyone else’s “stuff” and collaborating to chart a path accordingly.
3. Communication: Okay, I’m a former English teacher, so I suppose this is to be expected.  Whether it’s writing, speaking, reading, or listening, there are few jobs that don’t require us to interact with others in varied settings and through diverse media.  It’s sad that one of our assistant principals had to send out a blast e-mail to the school clericals reminding them to be polite when answering the phone.  And I’ve seen people lose their jobs because they couldn’t write to save their lives.
4. Being a good compromiser: The ability to walk into a room where people are fighting and find a solution that meets everyone’s needs is very valuable.  It’s a creative, thinking-out-of-the-box act: taking a situation that has reached an impasse and finding a way out.
5. Empathy: Right on, Doug.  I would go beyond just understanding the needs of others, however, and ask that all leaders know how to minister to those needs.  Asking about family, sending a note when someone is sick, complementing a co-worker on a job well done: these little actions mean a lot.
6. Critical understanding of technology: It’s about more than just knowing which buttons to push and which icons to click.  People need to be able to recognize appropriate tools for a task and use them properly to achieve the desired outcome.  They need to be able to reject those tools that are poorly-designed, harmful, and/or irrelevent.  Otherwise money gets wasted and there is a backlash.
7. Math and logic:  The greatest value in math is the habit of mind toward logic which it develops.  Geometric proofs, in particular, are valuable because they help students to understand how to work methodically through a problem.   I’ve seen so many poor decisions made because people lacked the ability to temper emotion and intuition with a little hard reasoning.
8. Creativity: In a world where so many insitutions appear to be failing and/or inadequate to meet the needs of such a rapidly-developing culture, people need to be able to dream up innovative, new solutions to the problems we face.  People who succeed are the ones who aren’t afraid to fail, and I think that’s what creativity is all about when you come right down to it.
9. Knowing where you put things- both physically and mentally:  Complexity seems to be increasing faster than our brains’ capability to manage it.  The ability to leverage tools to stay organized – both in terms of physical items, contacts, and appointments as well as ideas and facts – are invaluable.  And perhaps part of that means managing a storehouse of facts that we can quickly and easily recall – you never know when someone will name-drop “Harold Pinter” or need to know how to convert gallons to liters.  No, I’m not saying it should all be memorized and yes, it can be Googled, but we need to be able to contextualize and use that knowledge effectively.
10. Responding well to setbacks:  We all identify this as an important skill in children.  It even shows up on standards-based elementary report cards.  I think it’s equally valuable for adults: the ability to work through any crisis without giving up and without losing your head.   In the words of Judge Smails:

It’s easy to grin, when your ship comes in,
And you feel you’ve got the stock market beat,
But the man worthwhile, is the man who can smile,
When his pants are too tight in the seat!

I know I’ll think of at least 2-3 more over the next few hours now that my motor is going…

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