- Apr 2016
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Librarians said it felt similar to hosting a book club, but unlike preparing for a book discussion, they had less knowledge in advance. In many cases, the librarians learned alongside students as they completed the course.
This is a helpful analogy that emerges from an innovative use case. Book groups are interest driven, discussion centered and fundamentally social.
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Learning Circles add a social element to what is otherwise a solitary learning experience by bringing people together in person to take an online course together over six to eight weeks, with the help of a facilitator.
I love the concept of learning circles and that a librarian might help organize the face to face work of groups of students who are accessing MOOCs.
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For all the promises of online courses disrupting education, completion rates are notoriously low. Some studies found that about five percent of those enrolled in massive open online courses (known as MOOCs) completed the course. And those who took the courses tended to be more educated already – 70 percent of survey respondents had bachelors degrees and 39 percent identified as teachers or former teachers.
Who is making these promises? In these experimental efforts, it is important to see what different use cases arise for these online courses but higher ed studies them with a fixed set of historical metrics.
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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Dave Cormier
Cormier offers the rhizome as a metaphor for networked, digital age learning, and tests his analogy-as-theory in open online courses named for the rhizome. Here is a foundational text of his describing how community can be curriculum.
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The work of scholarship should be the work of imagination.
This is why the early cMOOCs are so fascinating. They were courses designed to both share and test theories of digital age learning: connectivism, or connective knowledge, or rhizomatic leanring.
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Students with digital access can now go to the library and pore over the books they are most interested in, with or without permission, with or without curriculum, and generally entirely without a rubric, learning outcomes, or scaffolding. Dinosaurs were not a popular subject at my elementary school, and independent study for a fifth grader wasn’t rewarded. My motivations were entirely those of my hungry imagination. For many of today’s students, those dinosaurs of mine are everywhere. In every nook and cranny of their days. And in their back pockets.
This speaks to the power of interest-driven learning and the learners' need to find others with like interests in order to go deep into a content.
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For now, there are no texts, so we’ll go digging in the dirt.
Maybe this means there are no traditional textbooks that are so familiar to the university context.
There very definitely are texts.
Personal Learning Networks, by Will Richardson and Rob Mancabelli
Cognitive Surplus, by Clay Shirky
Teaching in the Connected Learning Classroom, edited by Antero Garcia
Hanging Out, Messing Around and Geeking Out, edited by Mimi Ito
While this is something of a random list presented in a random order, each of the books above had an impact on me. They speak to the way digital tools and the Internet are impacting learning and they offer promising practices that educators can build on. It is important that we can point to texts and a body of scholarship that frame the experiments we conduct when we use open online practices.
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We can no longer look for the old structures of rigor echoed in this more rambunctious learning.
What are the characteristics of this rambunctious learning? Is it an Edupunk notion of following your interests while thumbing your nose at the ivory tower?
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It’s the kind of thing that many instructors new to the digital — or leery of its experimentation — shrug off as teaching that requires no real effort and no real accountability.
The first time I used Genius.com with a group of students, one boy- a senior happily adding notes to a poem- began speaking in a robotic voice saying, "Must... accrue... Rap... Genius... points." He was joking for the benefit of his peers but he was also responding to a social platform with novel features. As a teacher, I appreciated the energy and the sense of discovery that day.
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Audrey Watters
Is Watters an outlier on this list? To me she's an important critical voice who challenges the educational technology industry and points out how it might replicate inequitable outcomes. I don't think she's someone who experiments with teaching and learning in these digital spaces except to the degree that she is a powerful voice in the blogosphere.
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In part, this is because the use of digital technology to widen the parameters of human interaction and knowledge production is still in its most experimental stage. It’s not kids reading about dinosaurs in books, it’s passionate paleontologists picking at the dirt in the middle of Wyoming.
This stage is marked by adults using computers for social and personal purposes in ever increasing numbers while educators generally hold tight to traditional methods and tools due to discomfort with change. Into this stasis disguised as change, software companies offer expensive but simple solutions where the educators should know no solutions exist.
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www.edtechcoach.net www.edtechcoach.net
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BUT...I can empathize with the questions. It's understandable that teachers and principals might want limits on availability.
This strikes me as important... empathizing with real teacher challenges or frustrations.
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Teachers have a lot going on during class and with a rule like this, teachers that move around the room interacting with students can keep their students on the desired site effectively.
The hope, to me, is that active proctoring isn't necessary because the students know that the teacher will be able to see what they have done later and that the work is important, compelling and engaging. Alas, YouTube is instant gratification for the distracted student.
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Then I saw a tweet from Richard Wells @EduWells - “How do we scaffold self-management?” I followed that discussion, and there were some great thoughts - break it into small chunks and help students identify behaviors from Jacque Allen @jacquea, set mini goals within the student’s zone of proximal development from Barend Blom @blominator.
Showing students how you track their progress is one step. Even more important for them to see how they can track their own progress and self assess. Is it possible to get them hooked on productivity and the flow of interest-driven learning, especially if they are able to see and study their digital footprint on their most engaged days?
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At the very least, it lets me know just how far I fell into the seemingly never-ending time suck of facebook or Inside Texas - my Longhorn Football fix.
Cool to test the tool out for yourself. Does it have importance for you personally? Professionally? If yes, then that's a good story to share.
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www.edtechcoach.net www.edtechcoach.net
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Teachers have a lot going on during class and with a rule like this, teachers that move around the room interacting with students can keep their students on the desired site effectively.
The hope, to me, is that active proctoring isn't necessary because the students know that the teacher will be able to see what they have done later and that the work is important, compelling and engaging. Alas, YouTube is instant gratification for the distracted student.
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Then I saw a tweet from Richard Wells @EduWells - “How do we scaffold self-management?” I followed that discussion, and there were some great thoughts - break it into small chunks and help students identify behaviors from Jacque Allen @jacquea, set mini goals within the student’s zone of proximal development from Barend Blom @blominator.
Showing students how you track their progress is one step. Even more important for them to see how they can track their own progress and self assess. Is it possible to get them hooked on productivity and the flow of interest-driven learning, especially if they are able to see and study their digital footprint on their most engaged days?
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At the very least, it lets me know just how far I fell into the seemingly never-ending time suck of facebook or Inside Texas - my Longhorn Football fix.
Cool to test the tool out for yourself. Does it have importance for you personally? Professionally? If yes, then that's a good story to share.
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BUT...I can empathize with the questions. It's understandable that teachers and principals might want limits on availability.
This strikes me as important... empathizing with real teacher challenges or frustrations.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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She hasn’t gone back. A group of friends sitting with her in the Mouse offices, all boys, shook their heads in sympathy; they’ve seen this behavior “everywhere,” one said. I have been unable to find solid statistics on how frequently harassment happens in Minecraft. In the broader world of online games, though, there is more evidence: An academic study of online players of Halo, a shoot-’em-up game, found that women were harassed twice as often as men, and in an unscientific poll of 874 self-described online gamers, 63 percent of women reported “sex-based taunting, harassment or threats.” Parents are sometimes more fretful than the players; a few told me they didn’t let their daughters play online. Not all girls experience harassment in Minecraft, of course — Lea, for one, told me it has never happened to her — and it is easy to play online without disclosing your gender, age or name. In-game avatars can even be animals.
This behavior is everywhere and youth have choices about what communities they frequent and can even design the norms that make them feel safe. Is it possible these virtual worlds are a positive place to learn how to navigate bullies and misogyny?
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Three years ago, the public library in Darien, Conn., decided to host its own Minecraft server. To play, kids must acquire a library card. More than 900 kids have signed up, according to John Blyberg, the library’s assistant director for innovation and user experience. “The kids are really a community,” he told me. To prevent conflict, the library installed plug-ins that give players a chunk of land in the game that only they can access, unless they explicitly allow someone else to do so. Even so, conflict arises. “I’ll get a call saying, ‘This is Dasher80, and someone has come in and destroyed my house,’ ” Blyberg says. Sometimes library administrators will step in to adjudicate the dispute. But this is increasingly rare, Blyberg says. “Generally, the self-governing takes over. I’ll log in, and there’ll be 10 or 15 messages, and it’ll start with, ‘So-and-so stole this,’ and each message is more of this,” he says. “And at the end, it’ll be: ‘It’s O.K., we worked it out! Disregard this message!’ ”
The point is that this isn't rare and that these youth are developing skills because of the complex constraints of an inviting space like this server.
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What this means is that kids are constantly negotiating what are, at heart, questions of governance. Will their world be a free-for-all, in which everyone can create and destroy everything? What happens if someone breaks the rules? Should they, like London, employ plug-ins to prevent damage, in effect using software to enforce property rights? There are now hundreds of such governance plug-ins.
Community norms in these servers are fascinating. Youth set rules for other youth and mediate conflict. It all plays out in a digital space and leaves a fascinating footprint.
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Next year he plans to study computer science in college. “In the redstone community,” he says, “a lot of people around me are programmers.” Teaching himself coding is much like learning Minecraft, he found; you experiment, ask questions on Internet forums. He described his YouTube channel on his college application, and that, too, “seems to have helped,” he says. The university accepted him without even seeing his final school grades.
This connection to college readiness is important.
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Minecraft, as the novelist and technology writer Robin Sloan has observed, is “a game about secret knowledge.”
If you look at the Minecraft wiki and the millions of YouTube tutorials, I think you'd conclude that Minecraft is about shared knowledge and community meaning making.
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One player spent weeks assembling a giant roller coaster whose carts were powered by redstone tracks only to have an update change the way rails functioned, and the entire roller-coaster mechanism never worked again. Others ruefully described spending months crafting cities on their own multiplayer servers, only to have a server crash and destroy everything.
Lessons: save your work and make a note of which version of the game runs the roller coaster correctly.
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Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a founder of Connected Camps, an online program where kids play Minecraft together, has closely studied gamers and learning. Ito points out that when kids delve into this hackerlike side of the game — concocting redstone devices or creating command blocks — they often wind up consulting discussion forums online, where they get advice from adult Minecraft players. These folks are often full-time programmers who love the game, and so younger kids and teenagers wind up in conversation with professionals.
MC play can lead to cross-generational connected learning.
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nytmag.hypixel.net
This server allows players to take a tour of a world that was built to illustrate, sometimes tongue in cheek, the creative capacity of the tool. It doesn't allow players to build or dig.
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These AND and OR gates are, in virtual form, the same as the circuitry you’d find inside a computer chip. They’re also like the Boolean logic that programmers employ every day in their code. Together, these simple gates let Minecraft players construct machines of astonishing complexity.
This complexity is what draws adults to see Minecraft as a design space.
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The game was a hit. But Persson became unsettled by his fame, as well as the incessant demands of his increasingly impassioned fans — who barraged him with emails, tweets and forum posts, imploring him to add new elements to Minecraft, or complaining when he updated the game and changed something. By 2014, he’d had enough. After selling Minecraft to Microsoft, he hunkered down in a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills and now refuses to talk about Minecraft any more.
By creating a sandbox game that allowed players to mod and connect in servers, he created a digital tool that people didn't move on from. Instead, they demanded more and the potential of the tool captivated them. Everyone was invested in improving the original. No one wanted the sequel.
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In this way, Minecraft has succeeded Lego as the respectable creative toy. When it was first sold in the postwar period, Lego presented itself as the heir to the heritage of playing with blocks. (One ad read: “It’s a pleasure to see children playing with Lego — Lego play is quiet and stimulating. Children learn to grapple with major tasks and solve them together.”) Today many cultural observers argue that Lego has moved away from that open-ended engagement, because it’s so often sold in branded kits: the Hogwarts castle from “Harry Potter,” the TIE fighter from “Star Wars.”
A good podcast about the connection between Lego play and creativity. In the first five minutes there are some important thoughts about kits vs buckets of unsorted blocks.
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The Danish landscape architect Carl Theodor Sorensen urged that areas in cities ruined by World War II be turned into “junk playgrounds,” where children would be given pickaxes, hammers and saws and allowed to shape the detritus into a new civilization, at child scale. (Several were in fact created in Europe and were quite popular.) In Sweden, educators worried that industrialization and the mechanization of society were causing children to lose touch with physical skills; they began teaching sloyd, or woodcrafting, a practice that continues today.
Here's an Atlantic article I'll read to learn more about junk playgrounds and risky play. It might inform makerspace thinking.
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Children would start with simple blocks, build up to more complex patterns, then begin to see these patterns in the world around them. Educators like Maria Montessori picked up on this concept and pioneered the teaching of math through wooden devices.
This happens with open-ended practice and can also develop more rapidly with teacher prompting. For example, showing students how to create cylinders and spheres using the world edit mod invites them to start experimenting with the radii and volume of those shapes. Selecting, cutting and pasting cuboid regions also helps them see how objects can be manipulated.
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As Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor of media studies at Georgia Tech, puts it, Minecraft may well be this generation’s personal computer.
Interesting to think about all the skills students might learn in Minecraft and how the game deepens their fluency with computers. They learn about a computer's file structure, how to capture screenshots, how to change or create an avatar, how to read and use coordinates in 3D map, etc...
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Minecraft encourages kids to get under the hood
The company's encouragement of modding is probably key to the longevity. It also expands the complexity of the game as a platform.
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He built a pen out of gray stones and installed “pressure plates” on the floor that triggered a trap inside the maze. He stuck the mooshroom inside, where it would totter on and off the plates in an irregular pattern.
This is computational thinking that transfers to coding and game design. He's thinking about the agents in the game as tools to use to build a trap.
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tachesdesens.blogspot.com tachesdesens.blogspot.com
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If no learners or students depend on us how can we be teachers? "What do you do?" "I'm a teacher." "Oh yeah? But there are no students." "So?"
This is a good point. Is Cormier trying to observe learning in the wild? Is he denying his own role? Certainly he initiates networked interactions and tries to step out of those interactions to see what happens among the learners but he has a role in the sense making, and the norm setting, and the framing of the whole thing. Dependence, dependence, dependence.
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Sometimes, not often, I was almost envious. He had died doing what gave him meaning. This is 'my direction.' I had a short Twitter exchange
I wonder about these Twitter exchanges, which can sometimes sound like people writing rough draft bumper stickers, this exchange notwithstanding. Do we understand one another on Twitter at all? Does it matter?
What did Noah think of this exchange?
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I found the page with the cage that I had drawn at the age of twenty one on graduating.
I wonder how much looking this took. I used to fill up paper notebooks and have set them aside these last few years in favor of the computer. I did so because I wanted to be able to search for and recall quickly my notes.
You must have a good filing system.
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www.theatlantic.com www.theatlantic.com
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Research on the brain is often among the most impenetrable for a lay audience but the knowledge that is being produced by neuroscientists, if communicated well, may be the spark that finally ignites productive change in mathematics classrooms and homes across the country.
This seems wrong. More basic science research that is supposed to inform the classroom but strips away all the complexity of the classroom is not what is needed. Classroom level experimentation and innovation should unearth promising practices.
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It is hardly surprising that students so often feel that math is inaccessible and uninteresting when they are plunged into a world of abstraction and numbers in classrooms. Students are made to memorize math facts, and plough through worksheets of numbers, with few visual or creative representations of math, often because of policy directives and faulty curriculum guides.
I would say these kinds of biases from teachers often exist in spite of policy directives and curriculum guides. They stem more from tradition and teachers' historical experiences.
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Stopping students from using their fingers when they count could, according to the new brain research, be akin to halting their mathematical development. Fingers are probably one of our most useful visual aids, and the finger area of our brain is used well into adulthood.
My youngest daughter never crawled when she was a baby. She just rolled around and scooted, but never really got up on all fours. A pediatrician told us that if she skipped this developmental stage she would probably crawl later, after she learned to walk. Sure enough, at the age of 10, she crawls around the house all the time and most of her pants have worn knees.
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That knowledge is critical. As Brian Butterworth, a leading researcher in this area, has written, if students aren’t learning about numbers through thinking about their fingers, numbers “will never have a normal representation in the brain.”
This is a tough concept for me to grasp. It is interesting that debates like this take place because they reveal how the mind-body problem is relevant in education. Complex stuff, I tell you.
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A mother called me to report that her 5-year-old daughter had come home from school crying because her teacher had not allowed her to count on her fingers. This is not an isolated event—schools across the country regularly ban finger use in classrooms or communicate to students that they are babyish.
Strange when teachers have an aversion to scaffolds and approximations. We can also kill a child's love of writing by fixating on errors and insisting on perfect papers.
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archive.nwp.org archive.nwp.org
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Kids today are learning, engaging, and producing in richly productive and collaborative ways.
This is an asset-focused assertion about youth. Do we accept it?
We look for evidence of this when we go into classrooms. That's an asset-focused lens.
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impedagogy.com impedagogy.com
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I take notes on how Taibbi crafted and organized
I like this reverse outlining.
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ies.ed.gov ies.ed.gov
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At the same time, there is a need for the development or improvement of measures of students' technical, occupational, and career readiness skills. Finally, there are a number of existing career-focused schools or programs and state or district policies or reforms to support CTE that need to be evaluated to determine their impact on student education outcomes: e.g., awarding of vocational diplomas, district use of career-readiness measures, implementation of career academy models, awarding academic credit for CTE courses, schools' offering of online career exploration tools, and CTE teacher certification requirements.
Our badging initiative is a district-level career-focused program that supports CTE. Our badges credential career-readiness measures in the form of Colorado's 21st Century skills as defined by Colorado's Academic Standards.
Is the specific focus on CTE something we want to invite given our research questions?
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connections with employers and postsecondary institutions, increased emphasis on industry credentials, innovative delivery structures such as career academies and pathways, and increases in state funding to enact policies to support CTE expansion.
Connections with industry is a cornerstone of our developing badging initiative because we're developing "handshakes" or value propositions for our badges with industry partners. Further, our project is also an effort to iterate on and innovate on a longitudinal pathways program.
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www.slate.com www.slate.com
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There’s a lot of truth to that. Female bloggers have a long, sordid history of harassment on the Web—Gamergate is just the tip of the iceberg—and while Genius-enabled annotations could theoretically bring a larger audience to unknown writers, some denizens of the Internet are not seeking to broaden their page views; they actively wish to stay in their own circles, avoiding potential readers who are likely to be unfriendly.
This is where the argument gets really thin. While the potential for abuse is there, this seems to be taking a logical leap or two. In this hypothetical, how did social annotation draw unfriendly readers to the blog post of the person who doesn't want their blog widely read? Is this scenario a reach?
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“But your blog is public! People can comment on Twitter, Fb etc; Genius is in its simplest form a more efficient tool for this.”
This strikes me as a fair argument. No one is marking her blog directly, nor are they putting their comments where readers have to encounter them. Respectfully, this blogger sounds conflicted about writing in public space.
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- Mar 2016
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placesjournal.org placesjournal.org
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In those decades everyone, white and black, had jobs at the docks and the plants and the mills, and the middle class was prosperous and unions were strong and income taxes were high and inequality was low. But then those jobs were automated or went to the Carolinas and Mexico and China, and the middle-class and unions went soft and taxes went down and inequality shot up, and because of all this the cities declined.
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$100,000 loan from the Baltimore Development Corporation to help cover the cost of the shuttle
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“As much attention as we give to the trials of the officers who are charged with killing Freddie Gray, we should give to a decision that implicates 10,000 construction jobs and billions of dollars of infrastructure investment in Baltimore that were eliminated in a single day by a single decision made by a single person.
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“What happens to the trees we were planning, the other designs? Who do we talk to?”
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And Richard Chambers, a local transit activist, rose to demand why the cancellation of such a major project wasn’t being challenged from a civil rights perspective. He pointed out that the state legislature had voted on an increase in the gas tax with the understanding that it would be used for a transit project to benefit low-income minorities in Baltimore. Instead, the money was now being entirely redirected to road projects in wealthier, mostly white outlying areas. “It’s almost unprecedented,” he said. “This is a ‘fuck you’ to Baltimore.”
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Not only were the gleaming new buildings — largely focused on stimulating tourism — not doing much to benefit those in nearby West and East Baltimore; the subsidized projects were, quite literally, capitalizing on their struggles: their private sector developers were qualifying for tax breaks from the city on the grounds that things were so bleak so close by that the only way these new projects could succeed was with public subsidy. The men who ran the Baltimore Development Corporation had a phrase for it: “the Baltimore arithmetic.”
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When students got out of Frederick Douglass High and other nearby schools that Monday afternoon, just after Freddie Gray’s memorial service had concluded, and headed for Mondawmin Mall, the transit hub for some 5,000 of them, they found several hundred police waiting, mobilized by social media rumors
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Any fallout Hogan might have risked from his decision was quickly overshadowed by the events of the city’s terrible summer of 2015
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the Democratic former mayor of Baltimore, Martin O’Malley, was more supportive, but over his two terms he didn’t act with much urgency — as much as he championed his city, he’d never focused closely on its inadequate public transit, and the NIMBY resistance to the line in Canton had given him pause
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Schmoke’s efforts to de-escalate the campaign were the partial inspiration for the “Hamsterdam” episodes of The Wire, described by one commentator as its “bravest and most radical story line.
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In these precincts, an air of liberal concern for the rest of the city predominated — these residents were, after all, willing to pay far higher taxes than they would if they moved to the County. But the extremity of the gaps was undeniable: life expectancy in Roland Park was twenty years longer than in West Baltimore neighborhoods like Sandtown-Wincester or Harlem Park or Upton-Druid Heights.
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“And once they get to school and maybe don’t have their homework and maybe haven’t had their breakfast, what’s the teacher’s reaction to that student?” Ifill said in an interview. “What’s our reaction as a society to those children? We talk about that mother, about people not doing their job. But we aren’t willing to follow the thread to that bus stop on Edmondson Avenue — to understand the larger problems in the context of transportation decisions over decades, in the context of why Baltimore doesn’t have a city-wide system.”
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a bewildering scattering of lines that typically followed the old streetcar routes, comprehensible only to those with no alternative but to rely on them
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Baltimore had unraveled — had been unraveling for decades, unspooling itself over a wide expanse of central Maryland
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“Students were trapped in the mess, whether they were choosing to participate or not,” one teacher who’d witnessed the scene recounted in a post on Facebook.
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Flint residents still want to know when they can again safely drink unfiltered water from their faucets.
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his 75-point plan.
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And in Flint, some residents are frustrated that the plan doesn't call for immediately removing all lead service lines.
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www.economist.com www.economist.com
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“How do you fight millions of dollars of fraudulent commercials pushing for crooked politicians?”
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www.blendedlearning.org www.blendedlearning.org
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The definition of blended learning is a formal education program in which a student learns: (1) at least in part through online learning, with some element of student control over time, place, path, and/or pace; (2) at least in part in a supervised brick-and-mortar location away from home; (3) and the modalities along each student’s learning path within a course or subject are connected to provide an integrated learning experience. The majority of blended-learning programs resemble one of four models: Rotation, Flex, A La Carte, and Enriched Virtual. The Rotation model includes four sub-models: Station Rotation, Lab Rotation, Flipped Classroom, and Individual Rotation.
How does this definition of Blended Learning fit our work? Is it missing or marginalizing anything that is important?
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ww2.kqed.org ww2.kqed.org
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1. EVERY SCHOOL NEEDS A VISION.
This is just the first of the four essential principles of BL. The other three are:
- One size does not fit all.
- Don't let software dictate learning goals.
- Support teachers and include them in decision-making process.
What do you think?
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I’ve quickly become overwhelmed by the flood of acronyms — and more and more convinced that they are being tossed around without much consensus about what they mean in terms of course structure and instructional quality. Saying that your course utilizes blended learning may elicit approving nods, but structure does not strong pedagogy magically make. I think that it is important for us as educators to remember that it is our job to mix and match and pick and choose from the tools available and make them work to meet the needs of the students in front of us. As I’ve oft repeated in my posts, it is fundamentally human, relational work (with tech assistance).
Does blended learning mean entirely different things to different educators? Does that matter? What do you think about Nicole's reflection here?
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www.ascd.org www.ascd.org
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A teacher who made a successful foray into blended learning shares five helpful tips for exploring the process. For the past several months, teachers have regularly posted cries for help like this one on my blog: "My school is transitioning to the Common Core State Standards, and teachers are being asked to integrate technology. I'm overwhelmed by the prospect!" Many of these pleas come from veteran teachers with years of classroom experience.
This teacher author uses the Clayton Christiansen Institute's definition of blended learning in a technology integration model that seems typical in our work and thoughtful. Is she stretching the definition?
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www.slate.com www.slate.com
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On Saturday, Lewandowski was again caught getting rough on camera, this time with a protester in Arizona, and again the campaign denied it despite visual evidence.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=szkOYl8IbUY
Again, with facts almost indisputable and so easily accessible, they seem to be devalued as if the law of supply and demand applied.
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We used to fact-check everything, every day,” another reporter told me, “but it gets hard to keep up.” For a writer filing on deadline an hour after a rally ends, there’s not enough time to thoroughly fact-check the dozens of fabrications that spilled from the stage. It’s also hard to know who the fact-checking is for. At this point, anyone who hates Trump has ample evidence he’s a liar. And anyone who loves Trump doesn’t care.
Interesting how humanity's capacity to fact check everything has led to a disregard for facts.
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I ask Hidalgo if she visits news sites or anything political. No way, she says: "I'm paying for this; I'm not going to waste my money on politics."
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www.msnbc.com www.msnbc.com
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People for Bernie, a large unofficial pro-Sanders organization founded by veterans of the Occupy movement and other lefty activists.
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www.nytimes.com www.nytimes.com
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Less than two weeks ago, Mr. Lewandowski was accused of roughly grabbing a reporter from Breitbart News, Michelle Fields, as she tried to trail Mr. Trump to ask a question after a news conference in Jupiter, Fla. Ms. Fields has filed a police complaint against Mr. Lewandowski, who has not been charged. He has denied that anything happened and has called her “delusional” on Twitter.
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In another incident, cameras recorded Mr. Trump’s campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, and a man who appears to be a member of the security detail confronting a protester.
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another in an American flag shirt
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www.mdpi.com www.mdpi.com
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Michael, a CLMOOC participant who had participated in the 2013 CLMOOC and had then spent the school year remixing his classroom space based on newfound desires for creating a learning-centered classroom, tweeted in response that there should be a special in-depth CLMOOC-hosted Make with Me Google Hangout devoted to the conversation. Rather than a space for focused discussion about an idea, Make with Me’s were typically focused on sharing and demonstrating approaches to making and composing. However, the participation structure afforded extended conversations, allowing participants to delve deeply into their shared inquiry questions. In the next tweet, Karen, a CLMOOC facilitator, who had also expressed that she was challenged with the idea of “story” across the weeks, agreed to do the backend work to set up the Hangout through the CLMOOC website. It was then co-hosted by Karen and Michelle with five other participants and facilitators on the screen and several simultaneously tweeting during and after the Hangout. In these ways, they appropriated the Make with Me Google Hangout structure to sustain and grow a participant-driven conversation.
emergent leadership
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Undeterred, both Amy and Terry responded saying that they were not offended or disrupted. Amy tagged Vera again stating that she wasn’t offended by the comments and hoped that the sharing of images would promote a discussion of perspectives on those images. Terry rejoined similarly with, “No exception taken by me here. So glad to see folks engaging”. He then continued to interrogate the United States’ border actions, linking the anti-immigrant tide to issues like the Common Core State Standards, as a sorting and privileging function. He ended with an invocation to elaborate on images because “like quotes, they don’t speak for themselves”. Encouraging participants to come to voice and develop positions and stances that must be articulated in nuanced ways. Amy then posted a comment that agreed wholeheartedly with Terry’s invitation. Next, Vera shared a link to a petition for child refugee resources and a blog post she composed herself in response to this interaction that curated new posts, news, petitions, activism, and blog rolls around both adjunct labor conditions in the academy and immigration issues. Original blog author Ava rounded out the discussion by thanking participants for taking up her work and detailed a para-curricular workshop she taught with undocumented youth which engaged them in analyzing multimodal texts and producing compositions that worked at the intersections of image and words to articulate experience and promote reflective and empathetic connections.
I was unaware of this interaction and was happy to learn about it here. What an interesting study of what can arise in an open course. It strikes me that everyone involved probably was prompted to think deeply about the interaction and reflect on this hands-on experience with connected learning. This retelling speaks to the need to research these types of courses for their potential as learning spaces for engaged participants. If we only judge online courses for completion rates or some notion of scalability, we fail to acknowledge these courses potential for helping us understand learning as discourse, learning as negotiation, and learning as relationship building- potential which is amplified because of the rich digital footprint a course like #clmooc creates.
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a livestreamed Google Hangout which was called “Make with Me”
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plus.google.com plus.google.com
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I want to reiterate that I don't like restricting access and I definitely don't like the idea of blocking YouTube.
I hope we can identify a few things to try and then look to effectively partner with the IT department to test solutions. When we have variables to tinker with like search restrictions, Google domain management tools, and school-level blocks, we ought to be able to work toward a more palatable view of access.
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Since I am unfamiliar with what the Google admin panel allows in the way of customization, I don't really have a ready-made solution to propose, but I do feel strongly that we have to do something or we risk principals and teachers refusing to use the chromebooks in all of the powerful ways they can be used.
I think this is a place where we should identify our ability to test and experiment with solutions. For example, could we whitelist content providers on YouTube? Are there other school districts who use their admin panel effectively to restrict access to mature content?
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Lansing has had three instances of students watching porn and A Hills is having trouble with 7th grade boys doing the same, so we did a quick little test.
I think these types of issues require us to help our schools develop workable solutions. Is it important/helpful that schools can block YouTube for just their sites?
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I know that IT turned off restrictions because what they restricted were so hit and miss; our screencasts got censured while near naked women running on the beach in slow motion were the top hit on a seemingly innocuous search. That said, we’ve got to get with IT and figure something out
This is important to me because you've identified an important inquiry question: How might we establish restrictions that effectively limit access to mature content on our network?
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gamesandlearning.wordpress.com gamesandlearning.wordpress.com
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We’ll conclude with some crowdsourcing of people, ideas, and resources.
This is a great way to end the chat. I wonder if there's a need and/or a way to curate outside of Twitter? Does it make sense to send people to a Google Doc?
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future of open annotation
I think that larger groups will develop norms and best practices the way Wikipedia has established them. I think that will be necessary because of the noises, not because the annotations need to be encyclopedic- they don't.
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what pedagogy
Modeling, for one. Also, a chance to debrief the practice and refine the practice in the groups that form.
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are pros
The possibilities of teaching and learning in open online spaces are just emerging. Open annotation provides another significant frontier in that exploration.
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Readers will invariably use Hypothesis to comment upon – and begin discussions about – the following, and I will synthesize contributions and alter my chat moderation plans accordingly.
A good idea to allow the discussion that takes place in the margins inform the upcoming chat.
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thanks Joe Dillon for organizing
Always happy to try to herd a few cats.
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seecantrill.tumblr.com seecantrill.tumblr.com
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Note: I have been inspired by colleagues of mine to think more about tools like hypothesis that let us create small private groups in which we can annotate articles together and then you can choose to make those comments public or not.
Maybe an inspiring text and the conversations your class has around that text in the margins could be the picnic blanket, or the sets of tables pushed together.
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Now, checking myself here, I realize that ED677 is a graduate class and that one of the “deals” with school, is that we have safe spaces for talking through complicated ideas without always being subject to public scrutiny. And I also know that educators today are under enormous pressure and public spaces are not always safe and supportive (to say the least).
"Public or private?" is decision we all make regularly working online, so "public" and "private" are important concepts to for all of us to understand more deeply. These students will gain practical experience these concepts.
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Most recently I have been learning from two new-to-me online communities of practice – Wattpad for Writers and DeviantArt for Artists. Their online designs and supportive networked ways of working prompt me to continue thinking about the power of open ways of working in such communities.
So powerful to look at people engaged in networked learning "in the wild" in order to design interest-driven learning in classroom settings.
I like to think of this type of experiment as a form of "blended learning," where you're blending elements of 3rd space learning into formal schooling.
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- Feb 2016
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twitter.com twitter.com
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Great to learn about
Can I annotate a tweet this way?
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www.cultofpedagogy.com www.cultofpedagogy.com
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Design tasks that end with a public product: In one of the videos in the collection below, educator Kathleen Cushman describes the highly engaging work students do at High Tech High, a school whose curriculum focuses on project-based learning.
How do public products connect with students' lives?
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When you have constructive feedback to give, follow the same principle and make it specific. Rather than telling a student she “needs to work harder” on her assignments, tell her what to work on. Is neatness an issue? Does she need to read the questions more slowly? Is she doing the advanced math right, but messing up with the basic addition and subtraction? If a student knows what to work on, she will be far more motivated to do that work.
Choice Words.
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I’m going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten are required, the last two are for extra credit. I’m going to give you a sheet of math problems. The first ten should be fairly easy, but I want to see how many of you can do the last two–those are the challenge problems. You guys have learned enough that I think you can solve at least one of them, maybe both.
I love this framing because it shows how language matters and how a teacher might move from a strategy that extrinsic motivation to one that promotes student reflection.
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Consider letting them choose: seating: Could students do some assignments on the floor? In the hall? Or just in different seats? work groups: Some students thrive in groups, while others do better on their own. intake mode: If you want a student to read a particular book, and an audio version is available, you could occasionally make that an option. output mode: For some assignments, it may be possible to have students deliver their response in an audio or video recording, rather than in writing. timing: If students don’t absolutely have to do the same thing at the same time, why not let them choose the order of activities they do?
Possible choices to provide to students.
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Isn’t that kind of prep work more in line with worksheet-oriented teaching, where students are doing low-level work that was largely prepared by the teacher? If students are engaged in more long-term, authentic, creative projects, it’s much easier to provide them with choices, because we aren’t constantly trying to provide them with new busywork every day.
So many digital texts are free and easily curated for students. It should be easier now than ever to connect them with their interests and passions.
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If you want something faster, take a look at the 2 x 10 strategy, shared by Angela Watson, which has teachers spend two minutes a day for ten days casually chatting with underperforming students.
Reminds me of Love and Logic approach of just noticing things about struggling students.
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Are we passing the buck? Maybe. It’s certainly easier to blame outside forces than it is to make big changes in the way we teach. Unfortunately, even if ALL of the above statements are true, we can’t do anything about those things. The only piece we really have control over is what goes on in our own classrooms.
Also, those factors each have potential that we won't tap if we're sure that they are to blame for making our work more challenging.
Tags
Annotators
URL
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gamesandlearning.wordpress.com gamesandlearning.wordpress.com
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Through open annotation, students in Games and Learning are appropriating contexts not designed for play – including graduate education, online learning, and asynchronous text-based discussion.
It strikes me that adopting a playful attitude about these contexts that are so often stripped of their fun increases the potential for innovative ideas to emerge and might also lead to stronger connections between learners. Notably, I don't think playful attitudes detract from the seriousness of the topic.
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What are the playful qualities of learners’ open and socially networked annotation?
This question made me skim through mine and I found a few that are definitely playful:
Here's one where I attempted a Dora the explorer connection while annotating a friend's blog post.
And here's one where I couldn't resist the Robot Rubio meme on a Digital Pedagogy post.
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Like writing in the margins of a book, I too appreciate how easily Hypothesis allows me to author and share “my thoughts as I go” – and to do so for a broader audience (anyone who installs the browser extension), and through a greater range of expressive representation (including text, hyperlinks, and embedded media).
Agreed. It is nice to be able to respond inline because it provides a specificity of context to each comment.
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hybridpedagogy.org hybridpedagogy.org
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A politician whose persuasive stump speech does not rely on the resonance of value-laden memes?
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The increasing use of within-text hyperlinks and QR codes deserves consideration in academic journals. “I’ve done my homework, here are the shoulders upon which I stand, but feel free to read on coherently to process the idea I am trying to convey.” The flow of this in typical journalism is both more immediate and more honest.
This type of online annotation might inform a truly transparent and "honest" process, too.
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MLA and APA police still rule, however, even as the Internet increases available and accessible content at exponential rates, and the real need to teach source and content evaluation supersedes the need to teach note-taking and citation.
MLA and APA police still rule in the classroom and largely in academia, but when academics engage in professional back-and-forth blogging, they are quick to dispense with many of the formalities.
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For substantially all ideas are second hand, consciously or unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them any where except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.
Some "discoloration" might also result from the modality and the digital tools someone employs in the remix, an evolution of phrasing.
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We watch as solid, slow moving, hermetic traditions of the academy are challenged by the fluid, fast-moving, and crowd-sourced affordances of contemporary digital media.
Challenged and replaced, for all practical purposes. Pettitt's concept of the Gutenberg Parenthesis resonates.
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dogtrax.edublogs.org dogtrax.edublogs.org
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I should just put my cynical self aside for the day, and try to pop into some of the conversations when I can (or check out the archives later).
My thought is that you should give cynical Kevin the day off but let critical, reflective Kevin run wild. Critical, reflective Kevin can keep days like this from becoming knee-jerk tech boosterism. He can also call out "fetishization" of tools. Channel your inner Diego the Explorer. He rights wrongdoing and has a jaguar as a pet.
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If we want a brighter future for all of our students, regardless of gender and socioeconomics, then we have to be having these discussions, and here, the folks at Digital Learning Day have given over the stage to it.
We'll know that efforts like #dlday are having an impact when we can see authentic teacher discourse about equity and when the student work that results shines a light on promising equitable practices.
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And I don’t see a Pearson in the mix.
This reminds me of watching Dora the explorer with my daughter when she was young and how we would boo when Swiper the fox showed up. No matter how loudly we yelled, "Swiper, no swiping!" that fox fleeced Dora and confounded her plans every time.
Sticking with that crazy analogy, Dora's friends Backpack and Map are good guys who help her in her efforts. Can we see the good guys on #dlday? In my mind, when teachers have a voice and a platform to model innovative instruction, they can advocate for useful tools (Backpack) and promising practices (Map) that might inch teaching and learning forward.
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It can feel as if it is government influencing our views of how to reform education. The mission statement about digital learning reads like a passage of the Common Core. Still, there is an entire page of video tours of various schools who are sparking change with digital learning opportunities for students. And I do see some classroom teachers will be part of the webinars.
I think you're doing an important critical read of this event. I've looked at the Hour of Code and Computer Science Education Week in a similar way. There is usually some industry influence behind this but it is also heartening that both of these events put issues of equity at the center of their promotion. How can we use events like these to champion equity?
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In the past, I have tried to do digital learning activities on Digital Learning Day, if only to bring my students into the national conversation about learning in the age of technology
This seems like a good rationale. These kinds of events can feel contrived for teachers, especially for those who use digital tools thoughtfully throughout the year. The potential benefit probably lies in helping students connect with the world, so to speak, and to understand how teaching and learning are changing as a result of technology advancements.
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articles.latimes.com articles.latimes.com
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The Indian kids crowd the classroom. Many are writing their own poems, short stories and novels. They have read my books. They have read many other books. They look at me with bright eyes and arrogant wonder. They are trying to save their lives. Then there are the sullen and already defeated Indian kids who sit in the back rows and ignore me with theatrical precision. The pages of their notebooks are empty. They carry neither pencil nor pen. They stare out the window. They refuse and resist. "Books," I say to them. "Books," I say. I throw my weight against their locked doors. The door holds. I am smart. I am arrogant. I am lucky. I am trying to save our lives.
Alexie wrestles with how to inspire "already defeated Indian kids." He tries to communicate his passion for books and the real world urgency of being able to connect with the larger world.
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articles.latimes.com articles.latimes.com
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At the same time I was seeing the world in paragraphs, I also picked up that Superman comic book. Each panel, complete with picture, dialogue and narrative was a three-dimensional paragraph. In one panel, Superman breaks through a door. His suit is red, blue and yellow. The brown door shatters into many pieces. I look at the narrative above the picture. I cannot read the words, but I assume it tells me that "Superman is breaking down the door." Aloud, I pretend to read the words and say, "Superman is breaking down the door." Words, dialogue, also float out of Superman's mouth. Because he is breaking down the door, I assume he says, "I am breaking down the door." Once again, I pretend to read the words and say aloud, "I am breaking down the door" In this way, I learned to read.
Maybe this passage speaks to what a literate life is. Alexie sees the world in paragraphs even before he can decode words. Texts help us understand our world and then share the way we understand our world.
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Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living room. In a fit of unemployment-inspired creative energy, my father built a set of bookshelves and soon filled them with a random assortment of books about the Kennedy assassination, Watergate, the Vietnam War and the entire 23-book series of the Apache westerns. My father loved books, and since I loved my father with an aching devotion, I decided to love books as well.
I recognize that my house is filled with books in crazy stacks and that my daughters might see this the way Alexie saw his father's reading.
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www.newyorker.com www.newyorker.com
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In particular, we don’t know how to educate African-American boys, who, according to the Schott Foundation for Public Education, graduate high school at rates no better than fifty-nine per cent.
It is worth looking at how teacher function in this inequitable system, but blaming them and over-emphasizing their culpability is both easy and misguided.
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Our view of American public education in general has been warped by our knowledge of these failing kids in inner-city and rural schools. In particular, the system as a whole has been described by “reformers” as approaching breakdown. But this is nonsense. There are actually many good schools in the United States—in cities, in suburbs, in rural areas. Pathologizing the system as a whole, reformers insist on drastic reorganization, on drastic methods of teacher accountability.
It is true that we paint public schools with a broad brush when it is easy to see drastic discrepancies in funding and achievement which reveal an inequitable system. Our public schools get results in predictable cases, but they fail to serve all communities well. Focusing on teacher accountability takes the focus off of our inability to support schools in impoverished communities.
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We can admit that bad teachers, if they can be fairly identified, should be removed. But what can be done to recruit a new cadre of better teachers? Most centrally, we can increase teacher pay and status.
This simplification is a big problem. I don't accept the assertion that this is a just an issue of talent and retention. Preparation, support and leadership opportunities for teachers are lacking but where they exists, they help teachers find success and gratification for the work they do. The issue of pay is important but can be minimized as concern if teachers are supported well and provided professional learning that meets their needs.
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We have to make teaching the way to a decent middle-class life. And that means treating public-school teachers with the respect offered to good private-school teachers—treating them as distinguished members of the community, or at least as life-on-the-line public servants, like members of the military. We also have to face the real problem, which, again, is persistent poverty. If we really want to improve scores and high-school-graduation rates and college readiness and the rest, we have to commit resources to helping poor parents raise their children by providing nutrition and health services, parenting support, a supply of books, and so on.
There is an opportunity here to design better community compacts where public schools serve impoverished communities and where teachers serve students from diverse backgrounds.
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Last December, Governor Andrew Cuomo established a task force that recommended temporarily banning schools from making decisions about teacher status based on these scores. But, by that time, teachers had been humiliated yet again.
Schools are so desirous of spreadsheet performance data that they'll sometimes accept any data, even where there is no baseline, even if the story the spreadsheet tells about their school and students is a negative one.
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The political atmosphere in the country has become so polarized that spirited teachers—men and women who actually say something—will not survive hostile parents or a disapproving principal without the protection of tenure. Abolishing tenure would create instability and even chaos.
I wonder about this. I've found that vocal teacher leaders with strong voices are valued. In cases where a teacher can't coexist with a principal, I wonder if schools benefit from constructive teacher mobility. I've seen lots of cases where a teacher devalued in one school thrived in another where she was a better fit with school values.
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As recent surveys have shown, the high-stakes testing mania has demoralized the profession as whole. It has forced teachers, if they want to survive, to teach to the test, in effect giving up curriculum for test preparation. Trying to score high, some schools gamed the system, or simply cheated on the tests; some abandoned such essentials as the arts, gym, and even recess. Teachers were discouraged from coöperating and from sharing material—this competitive ethos found in school, where coöperation and the sharing of information, particularly in the lower grades, is essential.
I see teachers demoralized by high-stakes testing and, in some places, the deemphasis of art, gym and recess. I don't see teachers discouraged from sharing. Instead, teachers are likely to scrutinize ideas and materials based on their perception of test alignment.
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tachesdesens.blogspot.com tachesdesens.blogspot.com
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A map without a story which engages
I read this line and questioned it. Then I thought about the Lord of the Rings and JRR Tolkien's map of Middle Earth.
Hailey, age 10, and I are reading the Warriors series by Erin Hunter. We're on the fifth of six books in this little epic fantasy of anthropomorphized cats forever at war for territory. My daughter and I have committed this map to memory generally but we still break from the narrative to study it when we can't quite picture where the latest cat drama is taking place. At bedtime and in our leisure time we worry, we predict, we rejoice and we study these fictional cats who are forever at war for territory.
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impedagogy.com impedagogy.com
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In no way does it capture the territory
The map isn't the territory. The map gives us a better access to the territory.
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I think that turning the map into a game board is worth considering–research project as game board.
These strike me as two different, related things: a choose your own adventure game vs a research board game. One is a branched narrative, or a narrative maze of sorts, while the other is a set of rules, turns and processes which frame decisions.
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My students asked me for a map
Backpacking with friends, it is one type of experience when I walk off into the woods having only glanced at the map. When my buddy Donald carries the map, I trust his time estimates and his route selections. I know I'm going to stay with the group, following and chatting. When Donald errs and we end up setting up camp in the dark, I get to complain.
On other occasions, when I'm walking on my own with a map in my backpack, the decisions and the trip calculus are my own. I've got more thinking work to do but also a sense of freedom.
When I ask the map it is because I want to make a few decisions or I want to study closely the decisions being made for me.
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Humbling
Good for you. This suggests to me a negotiation where students push back and grapple with project expectations, outcomes and deadlines. It seems really appropriate that the teacher walks away wanting to reflect.
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my map, their territory
I'm on my second read of this piece. My first was on my phone when I knew I didn't have time to annotate. The map looked like scribbles to me until I zoomed in on my laptop. It scares me a little now that it makes perfect sense to me. Looks like a supportive class process, inside of which students' processes will fit.
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tachesdesens.blogspot.com tachesdesens.blogspot.com
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"Sweet is the lore which Nature brings; Our meddling intellect Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— We murder to dissect."
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I am this corpse. I fear they think me dead, yet I haunt these words.
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I haunt these words. I hear their steps. They pause... But I remain static.
Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.
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learning.blogs.nytimes.com learning.blogs.nytimes.com
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Sarah Gross, a high school teacher and contributor to our blog, did recently using Hypothesis with her senior class as they read the Opinion piece “What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech.”
When this teacher asks her class to annotate online about an equity issue, the students are working in an environment where they might encounter public feedback and also influence public opinion.
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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After Gavin came out as male, he began using the boys’ bathroom at Gloucester High. After seven weeks, angry parents raised the issue with the school board. Their complaints prompted the board to pass a policy requiring students to use the bathroom that corresponds with their “biological gender” and requiring transgender students to use separate, unisex facilities.
This is a fight against history and tradition, against historical and traditional fears. We know that youth when surveyed are much more accepting of LGBT rights than adults. How would youth voices inform this situation?
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literature.org literature.org
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Nothing is more painful to the human mind, than, after the feelings have been worked up by a quick succession of events, the dead calmness of inaction and certainty which follows, and deprives the soul both of hope and fear.
The painful fate of the intellectual.
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tachesdesens.blogspot.com tachesdesens.blogspot.com
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How on earth can our growth be measured? Can pedagogy be sustainable if it does not accept change?
My favorite article from Peter Johnston is one called "Teachers as evaluation experts." To paraphrase my favorite part, he says the true measure of a teacher's ability can be judged by their ability to answer the question, "What can your students do?" I have always liked this positive framing and accepted it as a measure of my own teaching. I hope I'm better able to answer the question every year and that my pedagogy changes so that I can better see learner's assets and capabilities.
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"Colossal rigidity, whether in dinosaurs or dictatorships, has a very poor record of evolutionary survival."
In educational leadership conference, I hear the expression, "What is loose and what is tight?" It strikes me that any place we are flexible we have opportunity for inquiry, innovation, and discovery. "Tight" only serves to frame experiments.
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I ask myself questions: "What are the feelings and emotions that lie behind our actions words, as teachers/instructors?" "What are the feelings and emotions that lie behind the words and actions of learners?" "What are the patterns of feelings behind an 'educational system'?" "What patterns of feeling do our rituals conceal?"
So important to create self-discipline for listening.
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"The problem with feeling competent is that we can take on too much," he said. "I ended up with burnout and depression." I listened to him. I nodded.
I like the poetry and the truth in this. It reminds us that the beginner's mind is so useful for learning and the mantle of expert is useful for stubbing your toe, tripping and falling.
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blog.mahabali.me blog.mahabali.me
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Textbooks don’t do that. They are too neat. And knowledge is not neat. Students need to know that as early as possible. And textbooks trick them into believing otherwise.
They are too neat.
They strip away complexity in many ways to create instruction-friendly chunks of content. It strikes me that the web is a complex resource and text to leverage, filter and explore. With curation tools everywhere, it seems like textbooks and their publishers should be obsolete because they are notoriously bad curators of content, historically.
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D. That some faculty would take the digital side of a textbook and feel great by just consuming what has been pre-packaged by a publisher and feeling proud of themselves?
Education is so historically dependent on textbook publishers and that dependency is hard to break in a lot of ways. We've historically depended on them for content and it is frustrating when we look to them now for ways to incorporate digital tools.
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www.edweek.org www.edweek.org
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career-ladder systems for teachers, strong teacher induction, and consistent, high-quality PD that is led by teachers themselves.
How do you ensure high-quality PD that is teacher led? What structures and commitments ensure high-quality?
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"There is a need to become much clearer about what is and is not good instruction," Jensen said via email. "U.S. districts should—and many do—have clear instructional models. But these should not be so granular that they lead to compliance responses," he added, saying that states and districts need to allow more room for educator expertise.
How does inquiry help us arrive at a clearer picture of what is and isn't good instruction? How do we frame it broadly enough so that it isn't a compliance model but a continual inquiry model?
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One case study from the Jensen report offers a glimpse at an elementary school in which the principal acts as the primary substitute teacher so that her faculty could spend time on classroom observation.
A high premium on peer observation.
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An August 2015 study by the teacher-training and advocacy group TNTP questioned the impact of PD activities in U.S. schools and criticized districts for overemphasizing workshops and other trainings that teachers often don't find helpful.
In a large district like ours, we're looking for large scale solutions in response to "challenge trends." This big picture view doesn't usually lend itself to establishing collaboration and trusting the people in the classrooms.
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For all these types of models to operate effectively, channels for teacher collaboration are essential, the researchers emphasized. "This is a profound shift for many systems given the efforts to develop precise school performance measures over the past few years," the Jensen report says. "It requires faith and trust in the people making professional judgments."
The key phrases here for me are "channels for teacher collaboration" and "trust in the people making judgments."
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To that end, advanced Shanghai teachers are turned into researchers, using the classroom to develop and test instructional approaches and interventions, the Zhang report shows.
Develop and test- how do we develop and test approaches in response to the students in front of us? What might development look like? What does testing look like?
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- Jan 2016
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www.edweek.org www.edweek.org
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In addition, Zhang said at the NCEE forum, Shanghai schools aim to embed PD throughout instruction. "Teachers are encouraged to write and reflect so they can figure out why some things work and can share it," he said.
They conduct experiments and reflect. I like the generally positive frame: Why do some things work?
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dogtrax.edublogs.org dogtrax.edublogs.org
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listening to a Tall Tale
I remember just a few - Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, Pecos Bill- but a quick search revealed interesting media representations of these characters. Are these characters evolving (devolving?) from mystical explanations of natural phenomena into second rate cartoon characters?
Do they live on only in the readers and writer's workshop?
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Tall Tale story venture we aim to cook up
I wonder about an origin story for #DS106 itself, or the invention of the Internet. Maybe Al Gore rides a twister.
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www.washingtonpost.com www.washingtonpost.com
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Ferguson protesters, who faced down tanks, tear gas and assorted forms of military-grade hardware, tasted what many activists suffered throughout the 1950s and 1960s. As these examples show, the fight to end the criminalization of black protest, and of black people more broadly, lies at the heart of African American freedom struggles then and now.
I'm reminded of what President Obama said recently in an interview with NPR. Essentially, the racism we see so explicitly on social media as part of #blacklivesmatter is not new. Only smartphones and the ability of the oppressed to leverage media channels is new. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNop1dom1m8
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King observed in the “Letter From a Birmingham Jail”:
In recent years there has been a growing critique of the US media for publishing mugshots of victims when black citizens are shot by police. In these instances, critics point out that the officers under investigation for misconduct are pictured in dress uniforms with American flags behind them while The innocent citizens are shown as criminals. Looking at King in a mugshot now, I know history will remember him as a formally dressed minister but I see the importance of his decision to dress as a common man and subject himself to arrest and jailing. Seeing him photographed this way might slow the judgements we make about the people our popular media frames in mugshots.
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teachingquality.org teachingquality.org
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Between these two incidents I have witnessed and heard innumerable reports from Black parents across the nation of similar encounters. Black students, usually males, being viewed not as potentially gifted, needing enrichment or more academic challenge, but as disrupters and distractions. So-called professional educators not questioning their own weak classroom practices, lack of differentiated instruction, poor preparation, or implicit biases, but instead wanting these non-compliant Black boys drugged into passivity.
I remember early in my career being teamed with a teacher who allowed Vietnamese students to speak Vietnamese in math class, but wouldn't allow Hispanic students to speak Spanish. She insisted that the Vietnamese students were helping each other with the math while the Hispanic students were off task, even though she spoke neither language and couldn't tell. My eighth grade students told me about her practice and even labelled it as racist. They felt safe to do so because I encouraged them to use peer support and their native languages whenever they felt it would help.
I spoke up. I pointed out the inequity in her practice to her and when she dismissed my concerns, I spoke to our administrator about the practice, explaining that I thought it was racist and had a negative impact on student engagement and learning.
This was a challenge for me as a white teacher because I was working in an urban school with a high referral rate and the vast majority of classrooms had white teachers teaching students of color. In this case, because I spoke out, my colleague was asked to change the practice by an administrator. This probably served to add to some ideological friction between she and I. Still, I'd do it again in the same circumstances but my experience was that the system doesn't thank you when you speak out this way. It takes moral courage and a willingness to feel isolated.
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www.natebowling.com www.natebowling.com
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Fighting the impacts of systemic racism and white supremacy in our schools and among teachers.
How can this happen in open spaces, in a way that invites other interested educators to join and support the effort?
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If you ain't talking about the teacher in the classroom, I ain't listening. Teacher quality matters. Too many in the profession are quick to awfulize students in poverty to rationalize poor results. Better teaching inspires students and gets better results. Better teaching engages students and keeps them in classrooms, rather than the streets. Better teaching is the one thing we never really talk about. Better teaching is the only mechanism we have left.
What are some ways to significantly improve teaching in these communities? The teaching doesn't happen in a vacuum and we need a plan to counteract the systemic forces at work that maintain the status quo.
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www.rookiemag.com www.rookiemag.com
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Do you think Caveparents freaked out when the Caveteens figured out how to make fire for the first time? Probably! But then the caveteens were probably like, “Hey, wild idea, but what if we cracked these weird orbs coming out from under the chickens over the fire and then tried eating them?”
This young author reminds me that it is habitual to worry about how youth respond to changing times. To what degree does that cause us to generalize about or inaccurately portray what they do?
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1. The “Why Do Teens Sext? Probably Because They Are So Sad From Meeting All Those Craigslist Killers On Facebook” category. These are the stories that paint teens as reckless drones who are helpless in this new frontier of technology and social media. 2. The “While Other Teens Were Playing Angry Birds, This 14-Year-Old Invented an App That Cures Cancers” category. These stories are inspiring tales of ingenuity but make other teens out to be lazy for, like, just using the internet to unwind by looking at memes.
This author has a different spin than the one presented in Participatory Culture in a Networked Era (excerpt pictured above). In addition to the pseudo snarky tone which is a distinct difference, she reminds us that our culture celebrates the extreme outliers - here, the app inventor who cures cancer - at the expense of understanding real-world, mainstream uses of the web that are constructive for many youth.
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gamesandlearning.wordpress.com gamesandlearning.wordpress.com
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The second thing RoN does to solve the problem of letting players know where the cutting edge of their competence is is to render the whole matter social.
Interesting here how he sees the supports, including the community, as part of the game. Certainly it is part of his game play experience.
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a sandbox
A sandbox tutorial seems different than a sandbox game. A sandbox tutorial keeps novices from experiencing the cause-effect algorithms of the game. In a sandbox game, a learner experiences open-world choices and isn't constrained by the game designer's narrative.
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the very design of the game
...the very algorithm written by some dude on a computer guessing about the learner's needs.
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Information is always given “just in time” when it can be used and we can see its meaning in terms of effects and actions.
Information can't be given a little too soon, or in an unwanted way in this game? Surely this is a variable as game designers create games and surely they can be at risk of over helping and under helping.
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This never happens in RoN or any other good game
Gee claims that learning in a meaningful context is vital and once again sees the simple system of a video game as an ideal compared to the complex systems of classrooms and schools. I wonder if a more appropriate comparison is to compare a good game to strong problem-based learning inquiry. In medical schools, a simple problem is created using a simulated patient or "Standardized Patient." This contextualizes the med students' learning better than traditional lecture or labs. I'd argue that strong simulations provide context and can exist in games and schools.
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failing to be able to learn and enjoy these sorts of games
I'd interrogate this a little. Is he really at risk here when he's determined to learn it, he's built background about the genre and is wanting to publish his results? Instead, I'd say he's faced with a complex task because of his lack of experience with games. I'll take his point that the background we bring to learning tasks can put us at risk of abandoning those tasks or falling short of externally established learning goals.
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sorts of learning that goes on in schools
This critical lens is important but it suffers if we fog up the lens with a generalization so broad that it is almost unapproachable.
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Like all RTS games, RoN involves players learning well over a hundred different commands, each connected to decisions that need to be made, as they move through a myriad of different menus (there are 102 commands on the abridged list that comes printed on a small sheet enclosed with the game). Furthermore, players must operate at top speed if they are to keep up with skilled opponents who are building up as they are. RoN involves a great deal of micro-management and decision-making under time pressure.
Like all stories about history, this one is a narrative crafted by an expert authority. In this example, though, players experience the text as a series of choices framed by the algorithms programmed into the game. Can we critique these and mod them?
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kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu kingencyclopedia.stanford.edu
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We must remember that intelligence is not enough. Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education. The complete education gives one not only power of concentration, but worthy objectives upon which to concentrate. The broad education will, therefore, transmit to one not only the accumulated knowledge of the race but also the accumulated experience of social living.
How do schools and classrooms support the accumulated experience of social living? Does this accumulated experience bolster empathy? Collaboration? Networked learning? (Below is King in his cap and gown at Morehouse.)
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hackeducation.com hackeducation.com
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Decisions like ending Pell Grants for prisoners, for example.
And here's the gap she sees that she wants us to see; the leap she wants us to make. If we break from these traditional learning structures online we can unlock political and civic opportunities. First, we have to see the opportunity to detour. If we can label what we see online as a democratization of sorts, then how do our detours muster influence? How does an annotation flash mob develop political momentum?
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Programmed instruction doesn’t simply fix the content; it fixes the relationship between learner and instructor (whether machine or human). There is no reciprocity there, for starters. And there’s little opportunity to express oneself outside the pre-ordained — the programmed — design.
Can we see potentials for a shift here in cMOOCs? Even those conducted with the "instructors as experts" operate in a space where the traditional authority structure breaks down really quickly as learners connect, interact, and pursue learning paths of their own. Even when those paths are brief detours from the central content, the opportunity to group up and detour is unique and holds promise as a model.
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Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own: “A woman must have money, and a room of her own, if she is to write fiction.”
Interesting to note that we can find this text in seconds, ready for a slow read or collaborative study online. Here it is on genius. Here it is on Project Gutenberg of Australia. Certainly the avenues to being "intellectually productive" have changed.
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One of the most powerful things that you can do on the Web is to be a node in a network of learners, and to do so most fully and radically, I dare say, you must own your own domain.
As I'm currently obsessed with social annotation, I reflect that my experience as I click through texts and engage in these interactions in the margins is very much the experience of being a node in a network of learners.
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The readable, writable, programmable Web is so significant because, in part, it allows us to break from programmed instruction.
Here's a great article by Jim Groom and Brian Lamb which includes an argument against the LMS, and argues for user-driven innovations. Reclaiming Innovation It has also been marked up a little already...
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All teaching — with or without machines — was viewed by Skinner as reliant on a “contingency of reinforcement.”
This reminds me of the Story of Crossy Road. The video game industry pushes designers to create games that engage players in reinforcement loops of clicking, blinging and granular achievement feedback. Computer programs are very good at structuring behaviorist loops.
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I should say that on the average we get about two percent efficiency out of schoolbooks as they are written today
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zq6h5_NUPB0&feature=youtu.be James Gee shares research that shows that a textbook is less supportive as a learning resource than nothing at all.
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The content could not be “delivered,” because our analysis of political violence had to be constructed and deconstructed and negotiated, with full recognition of those who were in the class and had experienced, enacted forms of political violence — whether those students were in the pen or not. The class — connected through telephony — was networked, as in turn was the learning.
Does the interaction cMOOCs begin to make this type of learning visible? Here, it is anecdotal that the class discourse drove and shifted the content but in digital spaces we can screenshot it, mark it up and say, "This qualitative snapshot equals learning."
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Whether it’s in a textbook or in a video-taped lecture, it’s long been the content that matters most in school. The content is central. It’s what you go to school to be exposed to. Content.
This is steeped in tradition and baked into education business models.
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I’d heard some not-too-nice things about the community college statistics instructor, so I decided to take Introduction to Statistics through a correspondence course. I received in the mail a giant box containing the textbook, the worksheets I needed to complete and return to the professor, and half a dozen or so videotapes containing all his lectures.I really had a hard time with the course.
My first experience with an online graduate course was similarly frustrating. Hiding behind the LMS, the instructor piled on a workload twice that of f2f classes and graded harshly. There was no effort to engage with or interact with students, just assign, grade and repeat.
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tachesdesens.blogspot.com tachesdesens.blogspot.com
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I reflect on what I can do... I return to the question of mentoring. I return to the question of wide ranging networks. I return to the question of a more 'hands on approach' to language learning. I return to the importance of communication. I return to the importance of the diverse messages necessary to communicate. I return to the question of who such communication should be most effectively targeted to. I return to Daniel Bassill and his Tutor Mentor Program in Chicago. I am just an English teacher. I am not just an English teacher... I repeat it to myself, it doesn't always help.
This open reflection is powerful. I appreciate how Maha's critical thinking about her conference and how Daniel's passion for his work inform your self talk... and how you put that self talk back out there for a personal learning network. To me, you're an English teacher who's scratching away at something because you know it has potential.
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I conclude that I do not want to be Pasi Sahlberg if I have to cite PISA. Pasi Sahlberg is not the change I am looking for. I return to conversations between Daniel Bassill, Terry Elliott and myself.
How powerful the collaborative conversations you have with peers can be, reassuring you that you can identify measures and goals that will resonate with you.
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I keep having to accept that I am not 'just an English teacher', I am not 'just a teacher'. It is an insidious message that repeats itself: "But you're you, you're hopeless, you know you are...you've got no time, mind your own business....you're just a bloody English teacher."
Fascinating self talk. My sense is that "just and English teacher" doesn't originate with you. There's some cultural devaluing that's been done there that you're fighting against. Recently, I heard Ernest Morrell say that teaching English is a political act. I like that much better.
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www.tolerance.org www.tolerance.org
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Students are able to think about their own thinking and the thinking of their peers.Students engage in deeper thought and comprehension after a blend of verbal, in-person communication and typing/writing that uses technology as portal for students to talk.Sometimes technology comes before verbal and sometimes verbal comes before technology.Students are “heard.”Students go beyond the classroom walls both to get input for learning and to demonstrate/share learning and thinking.Teachers learn from students, students learn from students, and students learn from teachers and other adults.All students are able to share their learning.Tech use supports students in talking through their thinking for an audience.Tech use supports what students are learning rather than usage being the end goal itself.
I appreciate the way they've shared the process- group brainstorm, the tool- Padlet, and the results of the activity.
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But which uses of technology in schools support young people’s development better than, say, using a pencil? And which are, in fact, worse than a pencil?
I appreciate this question because it engages teachers in critical thinking about specific tech uses as opposed to simply asking them to learn a tool. Ultimately, they're asked to identify a strong classroom practice that "supports all students talent development."
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Smart Tech Use for EquityThe Smart Tech Use for Equity participants are K-12 teachers of science, math, special education and English (including English as another language). In 2014-15, 10 founding teachers each explored one tech use with their students, documented the effects and shared their learning with other teachers. The same process is underway for 2015-16. (You can watch videos about their work here.)
This tweet of the article showed that it captured the interest of our Ed Tech coaches. In the retweets and likes, we also see a loose connection with the author, Mica Pollock, and a participating teacher Kim Douillard from the San Diego Area Writing Project.
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www.luminpdf.com www.luminpdf.com
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Cardiovascular exercise is also critical. When the heart muscles pump faster, they release a peptide believed to help produce se-rotonin. That means considering a brisk walk before an afternoon meeting — or better yet, walk and talk. Steve Jobs regularly held “walking” meetings. Mark Zuckerberg does too. The serotonin exercise produces not only will make a person more creative and productive but it also improves the quality of sleep, creating a positive cycle all around.
Where will this post go? I'm viewing a pdf in a Lumin PDF viewer. Will others access the same link? I doubt it since the file is in my Google Drive.
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impedagogy.com impedagogy.com
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We need translation zones where there’s sharing of power between interest-driven, peer-driven, and institution-driven imperatives. The Chicago YOUmedia learning lab, as well as others that are opening up around the country, are examples of experiments in this vein.
I like this idea and I think this is a place where we can see potential for digital badging. When a mentor can identify and badge the work and learning that is taking place in these spaces that aren't school, students can see the connections better and articulate their strengths and learning styles.
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In our New Media Literacies work, we have an activity where we ask students to map their identities as readers, to identify the many different things they read and write and the roles they play in their lives – from menus and cereal boxes to magazines and websites (Jenkins, Reilly, and Mehta, 2013). We’ve had any number of students complete the activity and come to the realization that, while schools have long classified them as not very good readers, they read all the time. Reading is a key part of their lives, but they simply don’t engage in the kinds of reading that schools value. They don’t read the right things or in the right way.
What an important mapping activity! I think there is all kinds of potential for learners to map how they are interacting and learning in social spaces. We could map how we engage with this slow reading book study and that might teach each of us something about how we learn, or how we might approach the next collaboration.
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Teenagers tell me that they’ve been told that Wikipedia is bad while Google is good. When I push them on this, I find that they’re often not sure exactly what this means. But they’ve been taught to read certain platforms as trustworthy and to eschew others, with no critical apparatus to understand why. I’m saddened by the low level of computational and media literacy out there and the broad refusal to engage with these issues. It’s easier to be afraid of technology and media than to engage critically with it.
Usually teens are told that Wikipedia is bad because the teacher sees how heavily they rely on Wikipedia. I usually reflect that the teacher is acting as a "scold" instead of acting as a translator. When we explain how Wikipedia works and how learners can use it strategically, we're translating. These can be really productive conversations with teens that lead to critical thinking.
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What does it mean to be literate in an environment where information isn’t just at your fingertips but flooding your senses?
I like this as an essential question for 21st century learners. It is the question I hear Terry grappling with when he tries to find signal in the noise of online communication. It is the puzzle that newcomers to cMOOCs grappler with when trying to figure out how to engage productively in a swarm of information and participation.
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Rather, we should think about literacy as involving the capacity to engage with networked publics, to share what you write, and to receive feedback from some kind of larger community. In that sense, we were trying to move literacy from the capacity to produce and consume information to the capacity to participate in some larger social system. This expanded conception of literacy brings new kinds of ethical expectations – a greater sense of accountability for the information we produce and share with others given the impact of our communication practices on the people around u
This is a view that is not so far removed from the ambitious goal of asking students to read for authentic purposes and write for authentic audiences. In my experience, writing for an authentic audience is logistically trickier without the web and interactive platforms.
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In the Digital Youth study we found that most young people were going online to hang out with friends in ways that were not particularly focused on academic or expertise-oriented learning. A significant number did use online networks to geek out in areas of interest, such as gaming or fandom, and many of these groups were intergenerational in composition. But only a very small handful of resourceful young people were taking their community-based learning and connecting it to in-school, civic, or career-relevant settings. I realized it wasn’t enough simply to celebrate the cool things that kids were creating and learning in their affinity networks if we wanted to make these activities matter for education and other forms of opportunity.
Hence the needs for adults to act as translators. We know that type of learning matters, can we explain to students how it does?
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gamesandlearning.wordpress.com gamesandlearning.wordpress.com
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And because in the spirit of participatory culture – a key feature of many games, and a core commitment of this course – this blog is a forum inviting others interested in games and learning to connect with us, participate, and build shared knowledge. Welcome!
I appreciate the detailed explanation of why you are using a blog. This paragraph hints at the benefit of thinking and learning in public. Is the public nature of your commitment something you might also highlight here?
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so download the Hypothesis browser extension
Do you want to link to the hypothes.is quick start guide for teachers? It might save you some questions.
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gamesandlearning.wordpress.com gamesandlearning.wordpress.com
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course’s first cycle
"Cycle" is also language we used in #clmooc to highlight the potential openness of concepts that we explored and also to suggest flexibility with the time structure of the collaborative work we were doing. Is there a cyclical nature to how this course will work? Are you pushing back against "units" or "topics" as organizational structures?
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gamesandlearning.wordpress.com gamesandlearning.wordpress.comReadings1
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know via Twitter and the hashtag #ILT5320.
I think it is important that you have a suggested use for Twitter here. It points to the possibility for a public discussion of media resources. I wonder if this is something participants will appreciate being able to contribute to? How do you think they'll see the reading selections and load?
Another idea: is there any benefit to embedding a tweet here that models how one written for this purpose would look?
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dmlcentral.net dmlcentral.net
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The hashtag went viral and sparked a broader dialogue about diversity in children’s literature. I found this hashtag valuable not only because it alerted me to an egregious example of a culturally insensitive text that helps sustain systemic racism, but also because it provided me with a wealth of reading to help me go beyond a single text and think about the larger civic issue of the lack of diverse authors/perspectives in this genre.
To me this is a tension point for educators and newcomers to Twitter. When we're confronted to massive streams of information that also include things like spam, and flaming comments, how do we inquire with students about how to navigate and filter these streams. My contention is that we can't without practice and if educators are unskilled in navigating these media channels, they'll default to safe characterizations of activism as "slacktivism."
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Considering that knowledge is one of the first steps toward civic engagement, shouldn’t we consider Twitter a valuable addition to our civic toolkit?
These four steps are excerpted from MLK's Letter From a Birmingham Jail. It certainly seems that steps 1 and 2 require the use of the web and digital tools today.
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But most of all, I love Twitter because of its ability to bring stories to light from around the country (and around the world) that spark social and political dialogue.
I've been bothered by recent characterizations of the Internet suggesting that it keeps people in a constant state of fury or anger. I prefer this take because it highlights how the web can keep us aware and also present possibilities for civic action.
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www.africa.upenn.edu www.africa.upenn.edu
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First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season."
In this 1- minute clip http://www.tubechop.com/watch/7604174 from a discussion about the legacy of Dr King, Dr. Cornel West asks how we can avoid the sanitization, or the "Santa Claus-ification" of Dr. King. It occurs to me reading this letter that King's disappointment with white moderates, which he expresses here is rarely quoted, for example. By taking his work and words out of context to filter for only the uplifting content, we contribute to this "Santa Claus-ification."
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