:Connecting the Dots

As a former English teacher, I’ve always been a big fan of the visual thinking software Inspiration.  What a forward-looking application, just about the only one from the early nineties (with the possible exception of Geometer’s Sketchpad) that was open-ended, constructivist, multi-disciplinary, fun.  When everyone else was doing “drill and kill,” these guys recognized that computers could be a platform to support and scaffold thinking, writing, and collaboration.  Even now, 15 years later, I still sing Inspiration’s praises to English teachers, although in this age of the web, those songs had begun to sound a little tinny over the last few years.  New web-based apps like Google Docs, PBwiki, and Mindomo had a little more sheen and could support all kinds of collaboration among students and teachers.

Well, yesterday I learned that the online version of Inspiration, mywebspiration.com, is in beta and I’ve been playing with it on and off all day.  So far, I’m impressed by its responsiveness and its almost slavish adherence to the UI from the Windows/Mac version.  And they’ve added a slew of collaboration features, including versioning.  One of the problems with Inspiration has always been that kids can’t continue working on it at home.  No more, if MyWebspiration becomes a reality.

On the downside, it looks like a number of features from the Windows/Mac versions have been left out– at least in this phase in the beta.  Most notably, I couldn’t find any way to export my diagrams as image files or my outlines as RTF documents.  This is a huge omission, as I always argue that the ability to brainstorm in Inspiration and then quickly shoot it all into Word and start writing is one of the software’s main benefits.  Also, I didn’t see any “arrange” buttons to clean up my diagrams and it is way more difficult than it needs to be to paste text into a diagram.  But hopefully they will work these wrinkles out.  I know I’ll certainly be watching as this product develops in the coming months and I hope they’ll offer a reasonable upgrade price for current customers.

No Comments

Today I got away to Tech Forum NE, a regional technology conference sponsored by Technology & Learning magazine, and spent most of the day thinking about professional development.  I find myself frustrated by the whole topic these days: tired of hearing teachers complain, “why aren’t we being given time to train for this?” yet groping to find a model that goes beyond the superintendent’s conference day and the one-shot click-here-drag-there workshop.

It’s a model that served us fairly well when there were a few applications and no one knew anything about technology.  For motivated teachers, it was enough to get them started down the road.  Others lagged behind.  And all the while the pace of change increased, the number of tools multiplied, and the demands on teacher time continued to rise.  The most interesting question of the day today was one that was posed to a panel that included David Warlick and David Jakes: do we want teachers to achieve mastery of discrete tools or to become master learners?  Clearly the answer is the latter, but how do we get there?  How do we motivate and empower them to learn on their own instead of reinforcing a model of spoon-feeding and dependency?

It’s a project I’ve been working on for many years now, but with few successes.  Today we talked about personal learning networks, building learning communities, online learning– all of the things that are supposed to help make that transition, all things that I’ve tried with mixed results, at best.  What’s missing?  We know there are 21st century skills; we know schools have to change; we know technology continues to evolve at a breakneck pace; we know more now about how adults learn than ever before: so where is the professional development to make it all click?

In a roundtable on “professional development successes,” I really rained on the parade by airing these frustrations and asking where the table was for “professional development failures.”  The silver lining I eventually found was this: the first step on the road to recovery is admitting that you have a problem, and at least I – and I suspect many others – are there now.  So what will 21st century professional development look like?  What’s act II?

No Comments