:Connecting the Dots

Well, another NECC has come and gone.  My family flew into San Anto yesterday and we’ll stick around Texas for the next week or so.  I was so drained from the conference that I fell asleep at 8:30 PM and didn’t wake up until 7:30 the next morning.  That’s close to a record for me.

Anyway, I’m still sorting it all out, but here’s a few of my initial reactions/reflections/thoughts/questions:

“Student-safe” Social Networking Sites are Big

I saw a number of these guys on the show floor, most notably Uniservity and SayWire.  There were others but these are the two I remember because they were such an interesting study in contrasts.  SayWire felt very provincial with a USA-only focus.  It was demoed for me by a teacher from Ohio and the emphasis seemed to be on collaboration within the school or district.  In contrast, Uniservity, a UK company, decked its booth out with flags of the world and brought students in from Hong Kong to demo their software.  Interestingly, they seed collaboration by launching their own content and projects for schools and teachers to sign on to.  SayWire essentially provides the network tool (similar to Ning, I suppose).  I think Uniservity’s global outlook is much more exciting.  Of course, there’s always TakingITGlobal, which I’ll be taking another look at after hearing about it in a number of sessions.

Going Global with VC

Along the same lines, the conference renewed my interest in moving our district beyond virtual field trip videoconferences and towards collaboration with other classrooms and institutions around the world.  Jody Kennedy’s session with Global Nomads Group, Global Education Motivators, and Global LEAP may have been the best I attended, and having dinner with Wayne from GEM hatched all kinds of ideas in my mind.

Synthesis (?)

I heard the term TPCK (”Technological, Pedagogical, Content Knowledge”) in two separate sessions and, as I understand it, the whole idea is to pull back the lens enough to see how technology fits into the broader picture.  Are we finally almost there?  My friends John Ellrodt and Maria Fico discussed in their session how thier non-profit, GlobalWRITES, supports poetry slams and writers workshops using videoconferencing.  I’ve seen them present on it before but what struck me this time is how uninteresting it probably was to most of the pure techies in the room.  Not because what they do isn’t good - it’s amazing.  But because the technology in their project is at once essential and unremarkable.  The focus is on the content and the learning.  I was happy to learn that John and Maria will be presenting at NCTE, where I think they will get a very warm reception.  Maybe the discussion is finally getting past the tools.  Maybe…

Best Product

As our teachers and students have started to generate more multimedia, we’ve struggled to find a place to put it.  In many cases, we want to limit access to the district’s teachers and students only.  And we want to be able to stream the audio and video files we create.  Our CMS limits the size of file uploads and there is very limited support for RSS, so podcasting would be difficult if not impossible.  Enter Discovery MediaShare.  Each school has it’s own space to upload user-created content and, according to policy, one or more approvers can release files created by students and teachers to the rest of the school, the district, or the whole world.  The media files stream and there are very generous upload limits.  And, yes MediaShare does RSS.  It also integrates with the rest of the Discovery Streaming, so when a user searches the database, the scope of the search can include user-contributed content and the usernames and passwords are the same, to boot.  I’m really excited about this product.

NECC Unplugged

I met Steve Hargadon after the Classroom 2.0 BOF session and shared with him my enthusiasm for NECC Unplugged and my ideas about how it could be better situated near the Blogger’s Cafe next year instead of directly in it.  What a nice, thoughtful guy.  I’m optimistic that NECC Unplugged will be a highlight next year and for years to come.  It’s great to have a place where the “little guys” can share their ideas and successes, try out potential large-scale presentations, and learn from one another.  I’m looking forward to doing multiple presentations next time around.

That’s it for now.  Still leafing through pamphlets, URL’s, and notes.  But also just enjoying this very pretty city.

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Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about something that has nothing - and everything - to do with educational technology. I’ve been thinking about higher order thinking skills and the emphasis that educational reformers place on them. There is definitely a bias among progressive education critics against rote memorization and towards critical thinking, synthesis, and creativity. Let me start by saying that I would generally place myself in that group and I do think that it is important for students to build those skills throughout their educational careers.

Yet something’s been troubling me lately. In reflecting on teaching and learning in schools, I oftentimes find it helpful to consider my own learning experiences outside of the classroom. I think it’s healthy to be someone else’s student and to struggle with something that is new, foreign, exciting, maybe a little intimidating. My recent return to guitar lessons and time spent a few years ago studying karate have helped me to remember how simultaneously fulfilling and frustrating it can be to learn.

As I’ve thought about these experiences lately, though, I keep coming back to one fact: both rely to a great extent on rote memorization, “drill and kill.” In karate, there are the kata: memorized sequences of punches, kicks, blocks, and dodges performed against invisible opponents. To move from level to level, students must spend hours practicing and then perform these kata perfectly. There is no room for improvisation, no room for personal styling. In a sense, it is the most inauthentic assessment possible. You are fighting invisible people according to a script. What good would pinan-nidan kata do me if I launched into it after being jumped in a dark alleyway?

In music, there are the scales. Major, minor, pentatonic, dominant, and on and on. To what end? Who wants to hear a musician walk on stage and play the A major scale in five positions up and down the guitar neck? This is particularly ironic given the association of musicianship with creativity. Musicians are supposed to “just let go” and “play what you feel.” How does memorizing and tuning scales help with that?

I think in both cases, the masters would say that the benefit of these exercises is discipline and automaticity: after a few hundred times, those scales are in your fingers and you don’t need to think about what note you’re playing before you play it. With kata, the form of the kick is perfect because you’ve done it thousands of times. Internalizing the fundamentals and relegating them to muscle memory frees up mental resources to concentrate on the big picture: what are my opponent’s strengths and weaknesses? what mood am I trying to create in this solo? In a recent edition of the excellent Smartboard Lessons Podcast, Ben Hazzard and Joan Badger discussed an online poetry generator that, according to Ben, allows students to focus on content rather than struggling with form. It’s about giving kids a structure, a toolbox to help them be creative, rather than just pushing them out on stage and saying, “do something creative. Do something smart.”

Is there a valid connection here to what we do in K-12 classrooms? What are the implications for technology use in instruction? And if we decide that this is indeed an important activity to include in a meaningful way in our curricula, how do we integrate it to support and not displace those very-important higher order thinking skills at the top of Bloom’s Taxonomy? I think educators are right that students can quickly become bored and frustrated when faced with this kind of work. But maybe we can’t afford not to engage our students in these activities…

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