:Connecting the Dots

Another year, another NECC.  My conference started with an “extra-curricular” visit to the Newseum, Washington D.C.’s newest museum.  The Newseum’s focus (as you may have guessed) is the media: a history of newspapers, TV news, and more.  The highlight was the top-floor room with a giant timeline starting in the 1500’s and extending through today.  All along the timeline there are pull-out trays containing the front page of newspapers reporting on the events of the time.  It’s all here, from reporting on the Salem witch trials and the outbreak of the Revolutionary War to the crash of the Hindenburg and “Dewey Defeats Truman.”  Wow.  This exhibit was worth the price of admission alone.  Other notable displays included a gallery filled with Pulitzer Prize-winning photographs from the last 50 years, pieces from the Berlin wall and a full-size guard tower, and a memorial to journalists who risked – and lost – their lives reporting the news.  The Newseum is not to be missed in DC and it got me in a good mindframe for the conference: people communicating, connecting, learning about their world.

Then came the keynote, Malcolm Gladwell.  I’ve read The Tipping Point and Outliers: The Story of Success and enjoyed both, so I was looking forward to this.  He basically went through a lot of the material from Outliers but framed it in the story of Fleetwood Mac and made a more direct application to schools.  I’d heard it before but what struck me the most – probably because it’s also a theme in this week’s reading in CASTLE book club – is the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a master at anything.  Both Gladwell and Willingham (the author of the CASTLE book club book) make this point.  Willingham goes even further to say that, since this is the case, we should give up trying to teach students like they are experts – a pretty clear denunciation of constructivism.  Gladwell didn’t go quite that far: he focused on “respect for difficulty”, experimentation, and learning by compensation as the hallmarks of a quality learning environment.  But both of these guys have me thinking a lot about rigor: how difficult should school be, and for whom?  How much repetition in the classroom?  If we’re not teaching kids to construct knowledge and they need so much time to practice things, what does a classroom look like?

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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.

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Forgive the bad pun. I spent an hour or so last night playing with some of the edugames linked from 26 Learning Games to Change the World (which I found in a recent David Warlick post). The best of the lot that I tried has to be Globalwarminginteractive.com. What a great way for kids to learn about the problem of sustainability. You play three roles – policy, economic, and science adviser – to the leadership of Brazil over a 100-year span between 1960 and 2060. The player manipulates tax rates, budgets, and policy in an effort to keep the economy going without burning out the environment. The player is presented with just enough data to make those decisions as he or she proceeds through 10-year “turns.” It’s enough data to understand the underlying systems without over-simplifying this very complex issue. And the data are not just numbers: it’s presented in a very rich but clean Flash interface which includes graphs, text narratives, and brief movie clips. This will engage kids, give them something to think about, and help them to understand this pressing problem. One minor drawback: I would have enjoyed seeing the actual data on how these numbers changed in the “real” Brazil.

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Wow, too long since the last post. Life happens…

I’ve been playing with Scratch for the last two days. It picks up where Logo and Microworlds left off: a simple, graphical programming environment easy enough for kids – and even teachers – to use. It’s a nice introduction to the concepts of object-oriented programming: you create graphical sprites and create behaviors for them to perform by attaching combinations of interlocking command “blocks” to each one. They can react to mouse gestures, keypresses, sounds, and even sensors (via a “scratch board” that you can purchase) attached to the computer. In true OOP fashion, the sprites can also broadcast and receive messages and thus can interact with each other. My first project is a piano that is played using the keys on the keyboard. I’m now in the process of creating an on-screen keyboard that the user can click with the mouse. Once your project is done, you can upload it to a public gallery on the Scratch site, although the best examples can be hard to find among the efforts of the first-timers like me.

Kids will love this although I think the hurdle of learning to “program” in Scratch may still be too high for content area teachers to want to invest the time to support their curricular goals. If I were teaching history and I wanted my students to create interactive animated maps depicting immigration patterns or something like that, it would probably take a significant investment of time to get them to the point where they could even start to accomplish this. Still, I know they would love every minute of it and gain the (more important?) benefits of practicing programming: problems solving, organization, big-picture thinking.

So they’ve lowered the bar again – the learning curve that has prevented wider audiences of students and teachers from enjoying the practice of programming as a support to instruction. Maybe it’s not low enough yet, but it just got a little lower…

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