In a new video offered by RSA Animate, Matthew Taylor explores the meaning of 21st century enlightenment that is well worth 11 minutes and 10 seconds of your time.

RSA Animate – 21st century enlightenment

Specifically, what do the values that have shaped our world mean? Are they still working for us? Do they meet the challenges that we now face? Taylor argues that critical reflection on such matters is imperative if we are to continue to grow and thrive in a sustainable manner.

Empathic Capacity
What resonated most for me is Taylor’s observations on the importance of our empathic capacity. While the chain connecting inter-personal, communal and global empathy is complex, he suggests that “the stock of global empathy has to grow if we are to reach agreements which put the long-term needs of the whole planet and all of it’s people ahead of short-term national concerns.”

Clearly, if humanity is to thrive in a sustainable manner, we need to live differently in the 21st century. To live differently involves thinking and feeling differently. The powerful insights we are discovering about human nature, sustainability, civil society, inclusion, solidarity, often run counter to our intuition. This realization is what brought us to where we are today. But we are hardly finished.

Taylor suggests that “we are very, very bad at predicting what will make us happy and we are even bad at describing what made us happy in the past.” I have recently seen evidence of this in elementary school research on reflective thinking, wherein students are asked to write reflective essays and are unable to do so because (1) little time is afforded such a process; and (2) it isn’t being modeled very well (Beralt, 2010, under review).

Taylor theorizes that “21st century enlightenment should champion a more self-aware, socially embedded model of autonomy that recognizes our frailties and limitations. This does not mean repudiating the rights of individuals. Nor does it mean to under estimate our unique ability to shape our own destinies.” Instead, Taylor asserts “it is only by understanding that our conscious thought is only part of what drives our behavior that we become better able to exercise self-control… and distinguish between our needs and appetites, and our amazing human potential from the hubris of individualism that is the basis of self aware autonomy.”

Taylor goes on to cite Robert Kegan‘s notion that “successfully functioning in society with its diverse values, traditions, and lifestyles, requires us to have a relationship with our own reactions rather than be captive of them.”

What a concept.

Yes We Can
Yes, we can expand empathy’s reach. Civil rights, social media have further enhanced our ability to put our selves in other  people’s shoes. Yet, has the process of widening human empathy stalled? Specifically, we should begin by exploring what enhances and diminishes our empathetic capacity.

If schools are to become intelligent communities, then we need to spend more time exploring how we come to know one another and how we can foster healthy public debate instead of unhealthy public disparagement.

The idea that “Education” (with a capital “E”) is the most valuable resource in our knowledge economy has become an airy cliche. Instead, Taylor argues that fostering empathic capacity is just as, if not more, important to “achieving a world of citizens at peace with each other and with themselves.”

This not to say a world of peaceful, empathic people will exist sans dilemma and contradiction. Instead, we as a human race should be willing to face these challenges and debate such substantive and ethical questions with knowledge and honor.

Remember: What we aim for can be as important to our well being as what we achieve.

The Role of Schools
How should schools focus on building empathic capacity of its students and citizenry? What role should teachers, administrators, citizens, parents, policy makers play in this discussion? What protocols should we adopt to foster and sustain such engagement?

This where I see the role of college’s of education leading. A college of education can do more than offer pedagogical blueprints. It can instead offer strategies, tactics, and forums for designing a sustainable future. Such a focus would require some retooling and rethinking but clearly the time to act is now.

Similarly, Taylor offers us a quote from Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

As such, I encourage you to collect the colleagues around you that are passionate and committed to equity, learning, and social responsibility and begin mapping your ideas for developing a deeper empathic capacity within our students.

After all, if not you, then who?

My first response was a question: How do we monitor students taking tests here on campus?

This was not the answer my colleagues wanted to hear. Never mind that proctored exam halls still had cheating issues. Actually, the term security issues was how my esteemed colleagues dubbed the matter.

I was then asked to share what I knew about the latest digital lock-down systems which essentially shut off all other applications on a student’s computer except the exam software. These new software systems would record every key stroke, how long each student lingered on each question, as well as time stamp their entry and exit. There was even an option that required students to purchase a digital camera and have it turned on to record their every move (PCs were required by this system; Macs were verboten). The company offering the solution would manage this process or turn it over to us for a large, sumptuous fee.

I suggested to my colleagues that the real issue here was not a matter of security, that it was pedagogical issue. I suggested that the cheating that took place is a result of the way in which students’ knowledge was being examined.

At this point, you could hear a pin drop. Unfazed, I went on to show how research confirmed that most single-instance multiple choice exams did not lead to deeper student knowledge (Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000) and how authentic assessments – cases, exhibitions, portfolios, and problem-based inquiries (or action research) – were a much more robust measure of student learning.

After my brief explication, the elephant in the room introduced him/her self. Clearly, the faculty experiencing the security issue was not interested in authentic assessment. They were simply interested in assessing student work with maximum efficiency and at the lowest personal cost. This was/is a research university after all, where faculty are rewarded for their research abilities and not their teaching acumen. By inviting the distance learning expert, they were expecting a technical answer to what was perceived as a technical problem. Instead they got me – a guy with technical savvy and knowledge who is more interested in innovative and meaningful teaching practice.

Next!

So it was was with a certain level of dysphoria that I stumbled on this New York Times article titled To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery showcasing the ill effects of inauthentic student assessment. The comments offer some salvation and hope, yet overall the author of the article seems unfamiliar with the larger issue of pedagogically unsound assessment techniques practiced by many leading institutions across the U.S. While the article offers a report of the situation plaguing many higher education institutions, it fails to point to the real culprit: irresponsible assessment practice.

For educators
If you are comfortable assessing student work using multiple choice tests, comfortable in the belief that the tests you use accurately and meaningfully measure student knowledge and ability, then peace be with you. If you believe deep down that you are shirking your educational responsibility and are only creating more opportunities for students to cheat, leaving your class with (maybe) a superficial understanding of your content, then I suggest you investigate the topic of authentic assessment. Here, let me Google that for you: authentic assessment.

If your aim is merely to monitor performance then conventional, multiple choice testing is probably adequate. If your aim is to improve student performance, then the tests must be composed of exemplary tasks, criteria and standards.

As Grant Wiggins (1990) deftly notes, that while the scoring of standardized tests ” is not subject to significant error, the procedure by which items are chosen, and the manner in which norms or cut-scores are established is often quite subjective–and typically immune from public scrutiny and oversight.”

Clearly, genuine accountability does not circumvent human judgment. We regularly take steps to monitor and improve our ability to assess through training sessions, model performances, oversight policies, as well as through such basic procedures as “blind reviews” – as occurs regularly across professional, athletic, and artistic worlds in the assessment of performance.

Most importantly, authentic assessment provides parents and community members with “directly observable products and understandable evidence concerning their students’ performance; the quality of student work is more discernible to laypersons than when we must rely on translations of talk about stanines and renorming” (Wiggins, 1990).

In the end, what you assess is what you get. To improve student performance we must first acknowledge that essential intellectual abilities are not accurately reflected through conventional testing, and second, move toward more authentic systems of assessment that more meaningfully measure and represent student and teacher abilities.

References:
Darling-Hammond, L. & Snyder, J. (2000). Authentic assessment of teaching in context. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(5-6), 523-545.

Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 2(2).

Image: Cheating in Exam from crazy_foolish4u

Norman Hall G518

In an effort to catalog the various tactics/tools and resources employed in my undergraduate course, Integrating Technology into the Secondary Curriculum, I offer the following list of items we experimented with over the last sixteen weeks. Students reported that while they have not continued to use all of the applications listed below, they do continue to use many for a variety of purposes. There were many additional resources employed that I have not listed. Most of these can be found by visiting my Delicious account and searching under 4406 and/or 4406spring2010.

GMail
I always invite students to create GMail accounts on the first day of a class. GMail is the gateway drug to the entire Google suite of applications that I find myself using multiple times a day.

Google Docs
Google Docs includes spreadsheets, presentations, word processing, forms, that can be shared and posted online.

Google Sites
Google Sites was used to support student portfolios. It’s free, easy to use, and easy to edit.

Google Search
Google Search can be customized for specific specific student activities and include a filter that permits searches for Creative Commons images. We also explored the Invisible Web through the variety of search sites noted on a Makeuseof.com post.

Google Buzz
We talked about Buzz but did not spend much time with it. Like Wave, Buzz seemed like a solution looking for a problem. It did offer a wonderful collaborative potential, but did not replace our other means of working together.

iGoogle & Google Reader
Students experimented with personal start pages like iGoogle and PageFlakes, and were assigned to explore Google Reader as a means of pulling information across the Web to one site.

Blogger & Word Press
Students kept a learning journal throughout the term and were given a choice between Blogger and Word Press. I chose these applications because of their ease of use and customizablity.  I used to use Edublogs, but alas, the embedded advertising made my stomach turn.

Tumblr & Posterous
Students were invited to play with Tumblr and Posterous for projects involving audio, video and pictoral posting and sharing. I also introduced Flavors.me to create websites using personal content from around the Internet.

Twitter
We played with Twitter as a means of informal communication, formative assessments, social networking, personal learning, and sharing.

Flickr
Students were introduced to Flickr for photosharing and digital storytelling.

VoiceThread
We used VoiceThread to support teaching, learning, reflection, and collaborative learning. VoiceThread worked well when I was out of town as well. I could leave instructions and solicit feedback. Students also used VoiceThread as a broadcasting medium for providing instructions and how-to’s in their own lessons.

Social Bookmarking
While I am still experimenting with Diigo, students were introduced to Delicious to support bookmarking and resource searches.

Wikis
Students were given an option to use PBWorks and Wikispaces to support a collaborative Web presence. One of my major major emphases this term was communication with parents. Wikis are easy to create Web sites that require students to think about design as much as content. If a wiki is hard to navigate, it is hard to use. We spent time reflecting and acting on this particular design aspect as well.

Podcasting
Students and I tested Podomatic to support podcasting capabilities. Overall, it worked well and was simple to use effectively. I have used Audacity in the past, however, I wanted to try something different this time through.

Screencasting
Students were asked to develop a how-to video using either video or screencasting applications such as Screenr and Jing.

Chat
While we did not look too closely at chat applications, we talked about Tiny Chat, but only briefly…

Polling
Polleverywhere was a fun application to use for formative assessments and teaching about using personal learning networks to gather information and answers. Google Forms and Survey Monkey where also employed for formative assessments as well.

Animation
For fun, didactic experiences, and demonstration purposes, we played with Go Animate.

Open Educational Resources Commons (OER)
We explored a host of lesson plans available through OER Commons. We focused on the importance of sharing and modifying lesson plans (with an emphasis on re-sharing).

Open Text
For my student microteaching activity, I asked students to sign up for specific chapters in How People Learn. Students were asked to develop a 40 minute lesson on a specific chapter. Chapter presentations were not summaries, but focused on relevant aspects of the chapter content. Students were required to prepare a presentation, group and/or individual activities, and an assessment for the content presented. They were also forbidden to use PowerPoint (hee hee!).

PLE/PLN
In our investigations of personal/professional learning environments and personal/professional learning networks, we enjoyed Graham Attwell‘s Introduction to Personal Learning Environments (and his delicious Welsh accent) and Richard Byrne‘s presentation on How to Build a Personal Learning Network. Students were asked to join a network (e.g., Twitter, Plurk, Classroom 2.0, or FriendFeed) and describe who they followed, what they learned, and the ways they participated on their learning journal.

Browser
I regularly recommend Firefox as the browser to use. It integrates well into our online course management system, Moodle.

Video
Students and I used YouTube regularly to find and share audio visual resources. TeacherTube was also used to support knowledge building.

Finally, all tactics, texts, and presentations described were chosen because they are free and relatively easy to use and integrate into one’s curriculum. I have avoided prescribing proprietary software, applications, and texts in an effort to support the open sharing possibilities that the Web affords.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/csessums/4259696067/sizes/o/

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” — Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models

After reading this quote from Shirky, I could not help but think of the current state of educational institutions across the U.S. The way most tax-based educational systems are constructed, there are limited ways in which these institutions can cut expenses below their revenue. Consequently, many educational institutions (read: schools, school districts, colleges) will fail and fail dramatically.

In Shirky’s analysis (based on the work of Joseph Tainter), complex societies and systems collapse because, “when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.” When schools and colleges are unable to provide the services, support, skill and content knowledge necessary to support a changing and evolving world, then these institutions will collapse.

The affordances of social media and open educational resources are making the time and space used for formal education nearly worthless. Schools and colleges need to recognize this shift and develop new ways of thinking how to engage and support learners and learning.

Given the communal nature of schools perhaps we can begin thinking of them as a community organization that supports learning from cradle to death. The school house can become a place that supports and nurtures socially responsible community values such as health, education, sustainable growth and development. School clinics can serve as public health clinics providing medical, psychological, and social services to the community. Schools can become a place generations can mix, learn, and support one another. In essence, why can’t a school be the place that serves the community and that the community serves in return?

If we do not take the time to re-imagine the role of schools in our society now, we will soon be left with nothing but the rubble of good intention. This process of recycling our schools into useful social institutions does not require replacing the professional administrators currently in office. Instead, it will require you and me and the people of our community. I am currently exploring sets of protocols that can provide a means to begin the conversation that in turn can lead to meaningful action.

As Shirky deftly points out, “it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” While this may appear as an over-simplification, until we get involved and work with these issues, we will never know. To paraphrase Shirky, when schools and educational institutions fail to respond to reduced economic circumstances and cannot create effective reform measures through orderly reflection and re-sizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. This is important for educational reformers to think about. Yet, more importantly, this is something we as members of our local communities must addresses today.

image: via csessums  http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2121/4506467325_36818326eb.jpg

Escape from IDEO on Vimeo.

Here is a video developed at IDEO imagining “a future shaped by electric power dependency – where schoolyard play offsets the cost of fossil fuel and kids take an active part in their powering their world.” What I found most disheartening is not the kids taking an active part of powering their world–that would be kind of cool, actually. What I found most disturbing is the depiction of the classroom of the future. Clearly, a dystopian future is one where students still sit at neatly aligned desks listening to lectures and taking notes. Pedaling to power your laptop is one thing. Sitting at a desk listening to a sage on the stage, frack!

Oh, IDEO! I was hoping you might have a brighter future envisioned for us. Luckily, the good people responsible for designing our future ask that we tune in next week when they will offer us a shinier vision. Let’s hope so. And let us hope that the classroom of tomorrow looks nothing like the classroom of today.

Stay tuned!

The truth is, effective teaching is a complex art that requires the practitioner to be part subject matter expert, part psychologist, part instructional designer, part expert communicator, and part performance artist. While teaching and wisdom do seem to come more naturally to some than others, what is important to consider is that good teaching ultimately happens by design. The trouble is this design sense is often implicit in teachers. Many good teachers know how to effectively work with their students without being able to describe what it is that they are actually doing. This is turn sheds light on the trouble with many teacher education and staff development programs: teachers are not educated explicitly to be designers.

Thinking and acting like a designer involves more than the ability to teach students to work with graphing calculators. It requires an awareness of one’s belief systems, an awareness of the classroom culture, the social norms and subject matter norms. It involves an awareness of how instructional sequences impact learning and an awareness of the instructional tasks necessary that can lead to the transfer of knowledge and understanding on the part of students. It requires an understanding of assessment and the various ways one can assess student learning. Finally, it requires an understanding of the ways in which people learn.

Ultimately, Lemov’s taxonomy may be quite useful. From a design perspective, the taxonomy should not be considered a set of recipes for success, but instead they may be thought of as a way to help teachers select and apply the most substantive and useful procedural knowledge for specific tasks in their own learning ecologies. From a neuroscience perspective, it is important to consider that the taxonomy in and of itself can only be of limited use. Research has shown that the brain is good at interpreting information, not simply memorizing it. What might work best with such a taxonomy is an iterative cycle of learning, application experiences, and reflection repeated over an extended period of time to enhance long-term memory processes as well as the potential deepening of the practitioner’s understanding of how effective teaching and learning can be designed.

Teacher education will always present us with numerous challenges. Yet, it is important to remember how important this education process is. Teachers are the marrow of our society. They are responsible for inspiring and guiding learners and families that in turn act, guide, and inspire generation after generation. The more research and attention we can bring to this topic, the more we as a civilization will gain.

Reference:
Green, E. (2010, March 7). Can good teaching be learned? New York Times Magazine, pp 30-37, 44-46. Retieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html

Image:

http://csessums.tumblr.com/post/308197313/school-greenbelt-maryland-1938-arthur-rothstein

Batson argues:

“We lack a coherent and comprehensive way to study media and learning that would help us make wise enterprise decisions instead of the constant lurching we’ve sponsored during those 20 years. Where to turn for this new knowledge and wisdom?”

My contention is that this is both near-sighted and patently untrue. Batson himself, a former professor at a large university, clearly suffers from what many at large and small higher education institutions suffer from: individualism. Given the comforts of tenure and the lack of sociality and intra-college mingling that can be documented in one institution after another, it’s hard to see what is going on in college classrooms much less know who is using what digital media to enhance teaching and learning or to what end.

Batson asks:

“But where is the field of media and learning that encompasses all this scattered inquiry?”

In my college and many others like it, it is in the educational technology department. One that is often parked in a remote region of an education college or psychology department. One that you would easily overlook given the culture of  individualism that dominates the institutions. (Perhaps this isolationism and individualism is a leadership and policy issue which should be re-examined by those at a much higher pay grade. Yet, I digress.)

While I agree educators and college professors need to spend more time reflecting on how we, as practitioners, conduct the collegiate enterprise, the chances of this happening are slim on a large, continuous scale. And while this may sound at first like a bad thing, I have come to realize that this is actually a wonderful thing. Let me tell you why.

This thing that we call a call a college education is about to implode. And it will happen in our lifetime. I have heard this over the past decade within the halls of academia, in journal articles, editorials, and blog posts. But now I am hearing it from the students themselves. They see that to succeed in life and develop the requisite knowledge and skills to support a nimble civilization , they do not require university professors. And I could not agree with them more.

As an educational technology professor in a higher education institution, I see it as my job to train and educate the next generations of teachers to make inquiry and participatory intelligence the norm thereby rendering the ivory towers useless (or at least rendering them into wonderful Smithsonian-like museums showcasing relics and antiquities of “what used to be”).

Sure colleges can still offer researchers a place to conduct studies of the hard and soft sciences, but it will no longer be a knowledge accreditation agency or a ticket to future success. We will have all that we need at our fingertips and at the touch of a screen. Teachers in secondary institutions will be equipped and available to model the skills necessary for practical and creative living. At least, that’s my goal and the goal of many educators I know and practice with.

Several months ago, James Gee came to my college and shared an insight with us. He remarked that in the future, colleges of education would become obsolete. That instead, those of us that specialize in pedagogy, androgogy, and technological pedagogical content knowledge, would serve the other colleges and departments on campus by teaching these professors how to create robust, engaging, and media savvy learning environments. This would serve both the hard and soft scientists, educators, and students well by deepening each subject matter experts’ ability to serve up the skills and knowledge necessary for students to become the best, brightest, and most creative stewards on the planet. Not a bad vision.

So while “media and learning” could serve as a new department or enterprise, as Batson suggests, it could instead become a part of every subject area’s enterprise. How’s that for a solution: Let’s work ourselves out of our jobs.

Remember, it was not that long ago that universities employed a Dean of Electricity.

Image: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2530/4110558590_6596cbe4f6.jpg

Recently I was thinking about ways to connect my classroom to the larger world outside our door. I noticed each morning on my way to work, a beautiful space in my building that was not being used for anything. Long corridors of empty wall space. Aha! A perfect space for an art show.

I created an assignment for my integrating new digital media into the curriculum course as a way of getting students to use social/participatory media to share, communicate, create, organize, collaborate, and network focusing on a specific project/problem: creating, organizing, advertising,and managing, a showing of art that they themselves create (see assignment for details).

But there’s a catch: once I introduce this lesson to the class, they are not permitted to talk about it in the classroom physically. They must use social media tools to support the planning, communication, coordination, and co-production of the show.

Sound like fun?

The is art show is part project part celebration, and part teachable moment. Photography and poetry provide ways for us to see things differently, with fresh eyes and an enlightened awareness. Teachers play an important part in helping others see the world through new and different lens’ to take advantage of the creative energy we share [see flow]. Community projects like an artshow require the use of many important participatory skills. Such project-based learning permits a classroom to act and learn through experience, placing ownership of the learning in the participants hands. Event planning, organization and communication will take place outside of the formal class environment using social media [Twitter/Facebook/Blogs].

This art show is a pro-social initiative designed to connect learning, schools, students, teachers, administrators, family, community, peers, and friends with and through digital media. In addition, utilizing digital, participatory media allows us to connect our learning and experience with others interested in participating in similar initiatives.

Wanna rock this party? Your thoughts and comments are encouraged.

img: http://6.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_komzzf3dpc1qzpnf0o1_500.jpg

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.5 Generic License.

Interestingly enough, I am working on developing course called Instructional Computing 2 for our department. And there are so many ways to think about designing a course, so I decided to try something different.

Since June 2008 I began tagging my favorite Tweets from my Twitter network. Twitter has a tool that will allow you to do this, i.e., marking a tweet as a favorite. For me Twitter is a learning network, a place where I can follow the shared thoughts of hundreds of local, national, and international teachers, scholars, movers, and shakers.

I started sifting through the two hundred or so favorited tweets. Some tweets were to weblinks, some were simply thoughtful reflections. As I sorted through them I noticed specific patterns emerging related to topics I wanted to cover in my class, like social and participatory media, identity, change, innovation, life on the screen, trust, safety, opportunity gaps, relationships, sharing, communication, collaboration, social action, civic engagement, and the future.

This process of using Twitter and my learning network (i.e., social media) has allowed me to develop a comprehensive course that embodies the collective intelligence of hundreds of brilliant people. In this sense, social media has clearly impacted the way I think about course content and course design. I can learn from experts, share in their thinking and discoveries, and engage them with follow up questions and comments. This is a large shift in the way I develop course content. I used to begin designing a course based on what I know. Now I start with what others know and and work my way from the edges to the center.

Pretty neat, huh?

image: http://ny-image1.etsy.com/il_430xN.29721697.jpg

[video link: How I am using Twitter to design and develop a course]