I put this round up of sites that gave me pause this week for my practicum students.
The thread that connects these pieces involves rethinking the role of educators, both inside and outside the classroom. It is important to note that whether you work directly with students in formal settings or loosely through your personal and professional networks, the way we approach a dynamic and ever-changing world is critical to our success. I know it’s a big concept, almost abstruse. First, I believe it is important to formally recognize that our growth as individuals is a matter of becoming, that is, in an Aristotelian sense, a recognition of our potentialities and moving them toward a higher level of actuality.
Attempting to control our situations as opposed to being aware of the dynamic nature of them introduces a greater potential for disappointment. Leveraging the advantages (and disadvantages) placed before us, recognizing the flow, being open to, and listening to others, in a sense, permits you the opportunity to influence the situation through your ideas and actions. In other words, attempting to control others in our world at best leads to complacency. Real innovation, real meaningful change, requires a non complacent world view, one that recognizes that things work best when we are aware of the myriad of relationships and resources and the dynamic paths they take us on.
For educators, the topics below offer a place to begin rediscovering what we know and think about learning design, networks, experiencing information, volunteerism, instructional technology and educative roles. I hope you enjoy.
DESIGN
Games like World of Warcraft give players the means to save worlds, and incentive to learn the habits of heroes. What if we could harness this gamer power to solve real-world problems? Jane McGonigal says we can, and explains how. (Recorded at TED2010, February 2010 in Long Beach, CA. Duration: 20:04)
SOCIAL NETWORKING
Five Tips for Smarter Social Networking by John Hagel III and John Seely Brown
Practices are still evolving, but here is some brief, and often contrarian, advice that comes from our decades of experience studying networks and the way people act within them:
1. Express more vulnerability.
2. Mix professional and personal lives.
3. Provoke.
4. Promote others.
5. Actively seed, feed and weed.
It is important to remember that these tips work best when one is open to letting the context help guide decision making. Read more here.
INFORMATION EXPERIENCE
Check out Qwiki–A mix of animation, images and facts read aloud about people, places, things. Think of it as a video-based museum exhibit. Ask about Leonardo Da Vinci, “or your most well-traveled friend about Buenos Aires: this is the experience Qwiki is attempting to deliver, on demand, wherever you are in the world… on whatever device you’re using.”
COGNITIVE SURPLUS & VOLUNTEERISM
Would You Volunteer More If You Could Do So in Your Pajamas? Sparked.com–a site that allows professionals to turn their spare time into social good. How it works: when an individual volunteer signs up, he or she lists their skills and the causes they care about most. Sparked then culls challenges from nonprofits that require those skills, and users can choose which ones to take on. The challenges can be anything from critiquing an organization’s tagline to redesigning an entire website. “Sparked is a skill-based platform….We appeal really well to professionals who have years of expertise who are also incredibly busy.”
Read more here. From Jessica Roy–GOOD
TECHNOLOGY IN EDUCATION The received opinion is that technology, like any other “solution”, will only work if it is integrated in the social structure. It must become an integral part of the lives of the people. There are remarkable exceptions to this rule. Few communities have had problems with embracing telecommunications technology, i.e., movies, radio, TV, or fixed and mobile phones. If you allow people a chance to hear, view, or speak [with] other people, they will grab it with both hands. All these communication technologies have caused revolutions in the lives of people all over the world (e.g., Charles Kenny, 2009). But in general, it is true that an externally supplied solution only works if it can be integrated in the life of those who receive it.
–Excerpted from Rob Van Son, The question is not whether, but how ICT can be useful in education. Educational Technology Debate. Read more here.
EDUCATOR ROLE That’s one reason why it is frustrating when people identify the role of the teacher as the central factor influencing the success or failure of a student’s education. Leaving aside any influence of external factors, such a statement begs us to question what aspect of the educator’s role it is that is so vitally important. And while the likely answer may be that they all are, or that it depends on the individual student, it seems clear that continuing to treat them as a single role, to be performed by a single person, increasingly defies the reality that is today’s educational system.
–Valuable points to consider from a master informal educator–Stephen Downes, Huffington Post (seriously?)
In a recent post on the AIR-L (air-l@listserv.aoir.org), Susanna Haas Lyons, Public Participation Specialist and Senior Network Associate with America*Speaks*, shared a host of online tools for citizen engagement that are worth re-gifting.
Lyons notes that the most often used tools “for top-down public engagement, since the Obama Administration came to office,” has been crowdstorming or ideation tools like:
When I read the term crowdstorming my brain immediately drew connections to brainstorming and barnstorming–like a large cognitive flying circus being performed overhead.
These tools provide ways to organize and analyze participation allowing the organizers to see voter trending, average vote counts, user karma, and email analytics.
These examples range from places to leave a comment to fully interactive simulations.
Hopefully you will find that these crowdstorming and ideation tools and examples inspiring. Lyons also teaches a workshop on this subject at Simon Fraser University which I encourage you to check out or share: DLOG752 http://www.sfu.ca/dialog/study+practice/certificate.html
One important side effect of social networking, user video, and app-based interactions has been the empowerment of consumers. Pro-regulatory advocates worry about what giant content providers such as Google or access companies including Verizon and Comcast might do in a future absent government intervention. But I have faith that consumers, users, and citizens increasingly have the tools to make their views known and effect change when necessary—quickly and effectively.
Early on, unfortunately, we may also have to endure episodes of digital mob rule, with all the negative consequences that go with it…. But over time, the posse and the hanging tree gave way to local sheriffs and circuit-riding judges. The frontier civilized itself.
– Larry Downes, author of The Laws of Disruption & Unleashing the Killer App
By deliberately imposing scarcity of one kind or another on their problem-solving, inventors became demonstrably more creative, and the ideas generated under such conditions enjoyed greater success in the marketplace and society than ideas invented in more “blue sky” modes.
Ask a politician and you’re sure to get answer based in statistics.
Ask a school administrator and the answer will lead you to dollars.
Ask a teacher and the answer will probably involve particular people.
The idea of there being a problem associated with America’s schools is really a matter of perspective. The majority of the population has attend some school and have an idea of what school is and how it effected them. This experience alone entitles the person to speak critically of education and schooling. This does not necessarily insure expertise on schooling and can lead to many false arguments. For many politicians, addressing school reform at a national policy involves selling something. For the rest of us, that means we will need to buy something that involves little if any real choice.
Politicians
Bandwagon
From a political perspective, school reform is a tale about clothing and fashion. The fashion industry is built on an ever changing, fickle mood. What’s in style today, is out of style tomorrow. The beautiful thing about this from the fashion industry perspective is that they are aware of this. They are aware that the publics taste for new, fresh, bold, practical, daring, sophisticated, charming, elegant, changes season to season. Some politician’s have picked up on this and offer school reform. School reforms are trendy, competitive, business minded, with winners and losers. A yummy carrot to the good, a nasty pink slip to the bad.
Bottom line
So what are schools all about?
Before anybody can speak meaningfully about what’s best for schools, we need to have some level of agreement on what the goals of schooling should be(come). For hospitals, it’s patient care. For schools, it’s often student achievement.
If the purpose of schooling is student achievement, the question is: what does that look like?
To a politician, it looks like statistics.
To a school administrator it looks like dollars.
To a teacher it boils down to test scores.
Testing
Let’s take the importance of students care off the table for a moment, and talk about test scores. Test scores can be useful. They are snapshots; they capture a moment. They document and preserve what we know about student achievement. In toto, a student record is like a series of snapshots all showing and demonstrating different forms of intelligence and creativity. Like hospitals, schools conduct hundreds of tests on their “patients,” documenting and diagnosing issues, as well as creating plans to promote health, success, and well-being. So much depends on how tests and scores are used. If they are used to diagnose and inform rather than shame and reduce students, then we are moving in the right direction. If we want to use current high stakes test scores to indicate academic achievement, then we need to rethink how schools are organized and to what end. Not an easy job. Boiling down school’s purpose to achieving test scores might strike one as dubious. Especially if positive test results lead to increased pay for educators. (See RSA Animate – Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us.)
Get Local
For schools, so much depends upon the conditions in which they operate. And unfortunately, institutions often try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution (Shirky, 2008). Politically, school reform should be a grass-roots concern. However, if the grass is unhealthy, the community offers little value. In the absence of this support, what fills the gap? Often in this case, state and government policy, arguably offering some value, provides an operational structure to guide a school. But in this policy, it is important to understand in what ways can the community be involved to build and sustain a healthy school? Can something be done to insure strong community spirit and support for local schools? Or does that spirit need to come from outside formal government accountability structures?
INITIAL TAKE-AWAYS
People first
Schools need strong people. People with strong organizational and communication skills. Schools need people with content knowledge, but more importantly, schools need people who can show how to learn, how to discover, how to observe, question, design, document; how to share the love and appreciation of knowledge and skills. Without people like this, schools will suffer, communities will suffer, and kids will suffer. No doubt.
What if we thought of the school as a human body (the school as patient).
What do schools need to be healthy?
What does a healthy school diet look like?
If a story is needed, who will tell it? You or a politician.
Organizing without organizations
What is your school’s story?
What vision does your school have?
Who’s inside?
What can be learned from each other and the community?
Can we set up a system for schools to tell their story?
Connect them to a grid so resources can be shared easily?
A space where feedback is available, where networks could share, collaborate, publish, celebrate? A space where research connects and supports practitioners?
Could this be done in an authentic manner?
Invitation to action
Is there an organizational structure that can support such a network?
Without sounding too obvious, the critical exploration of the values and norms that have shaped our world is essential to the continued progress of humankind.
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.
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.
Several years ago I was asked to address the issue of cheating in online courses for a large, notably visible college at my institution. Being a distance education “expert,” I was asked specifically to discuss the latest means by which we could monitor distance education students as they completed requisite, high stakes exams at a distance.
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.
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).
In a post I wrote earlier this year, I spoke of the importance of empathy as a skill that needs as much attention as play and critical thinking. The following video featuring Jeremy Rifkin adds additional yeast to this argument as it offers further investigation into the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and society.
Rifkin notes that the growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species. The information communication technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history. Thus, by extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole, this “communication revolution” will provide an evermore inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand.
In what ways is this important for education?
Recognition that we are all in this together is a powerful concept–from cats and dogs, to children in Darfur, to bankers in Singapore. Recognition that each of our actions can have both a direct and indirect effect on each other is crucial in our flattened world. Empathy can help lower inhibitions and increase our sense of purpose as we seek to understand and feel what others are experiencing (emotive solidarity). The disadvantage of this approach in most school settings is that teaching students how to build empathy takes time and skill. I do not recall many opportunities for building empathetic skills in colleges of education, nor do I see it emphasized in any high stakes examinations. However, given the increased access to news and information and our increased ability to act and serve others in a crisis, empathy could be adopted within our current curricula frameworks as a form of social literacy–that is, the ability to read and understand people and situations.
Ultimately, learning how to empathize helps learners work more effectively with others and in teams. This in turn can lead to the development of such useful skills such as planning and organizing with others–a task that is essential in most social environments.
Reference:
Rifkin, J. (2010).The empathic civilization: The race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.
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
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.
