Last summer Scott Schwister, Frank Hernandez, and I held the first Edcamp Minnesota at Hamline University with East Metro Integration District 6067 as our sponsor. We got such great feedback from that event that it was clear we had to do another one. Scott and I began planning (mostly Scott on this one) last fall and got East Metro Intermediate District 916 to host and sponsor it. Unbeknownst to us, Tom Brandt and Lisa Sjogren from the Osseo School District were also busy planning an edcamp in Brooklyn Park. So, Minnesota teachers have two opportunities to make it to an Edcamp. EdcampMSP in Brooklyn Park on June 2nd and EdcampMN on June 20th in Little Canada.
For those who are not familiar with the edcamp model, it is democratically selected teacher-led professional development. Attendees propose sessions and discussion topics, attendees vote, and the conference agenda is decided that day. Also, as was the case at our Edcamp last year, each of these events will be kicked off with a special keynote presenter. EdcampMPS will feature Brad Hosak from University of Minnesota’s Learning Technologies (LT) Media Lab and EdcampMN will feature Ira Socol whois an educational researcher at Michigan
State University focusing on Universal Design and the history and
structures of education.
Registration for both events is free and just like last year there will be a graduate credit option available for teachers who want to take advantage of it. Registration is open now for both events. I hope to see you there.
I know many teachers and students have used my Digital Backpack over the last four years and for those who rely on that tool I have some bad news to report. The web service that I have used for the past three years to host the content of the individual pages of that tool (Yourdraft.com) has...let it's domain expire. That means that all links to the embedded content in the Backpack are broken. For the time being I am reverting all Digital Backpack links I am aware of on sites I control to a 2008 version before I used Yourdraft.com.
This really stinks because just two weeks ago I was updating and editing the pages in Yourdraft.com and the web service gave me no warning. I have been able to locate the company that registered the domain (Key-Systems) using Who.is and looking at the domain archive. Who.is even gave the IP addresses that Yourdraft.com used to point to before it expired. Problem is, I don't know the rest of the file path at those domains to know how to access my content.
Well, I still have all the links in my Delicious account and most of them backed up on different pages of my Techno Constructivist wiki but it will take some time to rebuild the Digital Backpack. I was thinking of redoing it with a new design anyway. This time I will either use Google Docs or self-host individual pages.
Here is a link to the last working version of the Digital Backpack:
****Update*****
With a bit more hacking and with the help of Bill Yang at Priority One, I was able to get into the YourDraft.com server and retrieve all my links and tool descriptions from the Digital Backpack. It will still take some time to put it all back together again since over half of the image links were broken but this will drastically reduce the amount of time it will take to rebuild this tool. I might even be able to complete it before EdcampMN on June 20th.
I am currently reading John Goodlad's (1984) A Place Called School. I love books that examine the role of school in culture and especially those that take a critical view. If you read this blog you will notice that a running theme for a few years now has been "the purpose of school." One of the reasons this question of the purpose of school is so important, as Goodlad points out, is that its purpose is shifting due to changes in other educational institutions in our society. Two hundred years ago the chief educational institutions were the church and the family. Schools were marginal institutions. Since both institutions have eroded over the past 70 years the school has had to take up more and more of the educative roles that the family and the church once held. When Goodlad wrote this book he also mentioned media as an emerging influence on a child's education. At that time he was speaking chiefly of television and movies. Today this issue is more important because of the growing educative role the computer and more specifically, the Internet, is playing in young people's lives.
Many other authors I have reviewed since the start of Twitter Book Club nearly two years ago (my gosh, has it really been that long?) have discussed the great variety of purposes schools serve. These author's lists of purposes always vary but one purpose always remains: the custodial function. Goodlad begins A Place Called School with a question he ends with in his earlier book What Schools Are For. He asks, if society suddenly were to find itself without its schools, would it find it necessary to invent them? He believes so and cites the custodial function as one reason for this answer. However, he believes that if we reinvented schools today the schools we need would look very different from the ones we currently have.
Now, I have long felt that the custodial function will eventually be school's primarily purpose and that the majority of our education will eventually be done by other things and institutions in our lives. The power and attractiveness of self-organizing learning environments (SOLES), personal learning networks (PLNs), and other forms of self-driven education will one day outpace the ability of school curriculum and teacher-guided instruction. I now feel confident that that time has already come and past but in most of our schools it has done so without our knowing it.
Most schools continue to teach as if media and the internet didn't have such an impact on children's' learning. When they are integrated in the classroom they are usually used to serve the learning objectives set for students by someone else. The real power of these tools is in their ability enhance our own personal learning, not in their ability to personalize learning for others. And, despite every effort made by the system (which both Neil Postman and Seymour Papert do a good job of pointing out is a self-protecting system) to assimilate these tools to serve its own purposes the liberating power of these tools is winning out. We as educators have a choice to make: do we fight it or do we help it to grow?
There are many ways the school system protects itself from tools of educational liberation and each method is tied closely to a changing purpose. For many years now one of the most important purposes schools served was curator and gatekeeper of knowledge and information. People went to school to acquire these things. This was a powerful force in our society when information was scarce. The power to determine what people learned and consequently what made up the publicly shared culture belonged largely to the school. With the liberation of information and the infinitely greater opportunity to learn on our own and connect with people online who can help us this purpose is no longer serving us. The irrelevancy of the school with regard to curriculum and determining what is important to learn can be seen in nearly any school but most prominently in schools with a strict common core curriculum. In many of these schools the daily curriculum is so regimented that there is no room for adjustments to include important and relevant current events be they global or local.
This can also be seen in artificial walls schools put up between what is and is not "school appropriate." Consider what has happened with social media in the past six years. Almost as soon as it emerged most schools considered it not to be "school appropriate." Now today social media tools are helping people to topple dictators, lead revolutions, and report information that would not otherwise come to light. It may not be "school appropriate" to talk about Facebook in school but it is foolhardy to say that we are presenting a relevant curriculum if we present one with its absence.
The blocking of social media websites and the banning of personal devices such as cell phones or iPods also is a self-protection mechanism. This self-protective mechanism tries to preserve the purpose our schools served to maintain a hierarchy. Social media tools and personal learning devices give agency to the learner. The old education system relied on the agency lying with those higher up the hierarchy; first with the teacher, then building administration, then government policymaker. If we reverse that hierarchy the purpose goes away. But, students are learning on Facebook. Whenever polled a significant number of students report that they use social networking tools to help with their education. When we as an institution pretend such tools don't exist we are made to look foolish before our students in just the same way the church looked foolish during the enlightenment when it was too stubborn to accept science as anything but heresy.
The standardized test and data-driven decision making culture is another self-protective measure. It sets up a false argument that can be used in its defense. These high-stakes tests are given to highlight strengths and weaknesses. If a school tests poorly in reading you better bet they will be devoting more resources to reading next year. Likewise if their math scores are down. But, to increase resources in one area means cutting in another. If indeed the chief educative force in a child's life is no longer the school this is a moot point but this data-driven culture still lives under the presumption that the schools our children attend are the primary entities responsible for their education. The result is that by diverting resources away from the things our kids want to learn about and mandating dry and dull curricular experiences students will look more toward other sources in their environment to occupy their minds and feed their education.
In the process of trying to defend its place in society our school systems have become more irrelevant and less educative. As a result, there is the world which is a great, expansive, and wondrous place and then there is the "school appropriate" world determined largely by what can and cannot be measured objectively or reduced to a RIT score. A "school appropriate" world where educators fool themselves into believing that learning can be directed and where tools and devices that help students learn for their own purposes are banned. A "school appropriate" world where computer and Internet technology capable of unleashing unlimited creative and constructive personal learning is instead sequestered into computer labs and put to use as a testing and test-prep center. A "school appropriate" world that eventually looks nothing like the real world but where attendance is compulsory. A "school appropriate" world where students are compelled to be exposed to the harm it does.
In the meantime, students are learning. The are learning on their own and learning for their own purposes. They have been for quite some time. They were forced to when we made them digital orphans by erecting this artificial barrier between the "real" world and the "school appropriate" world. School might not value what they are learning but they are learning an incredible amount about things that cannot be measured by RIT. They are learning things that cannot be seen in the data but are obvious if you ever talk to an actual child. The only people who need data are those who don't see the children. The rest of us can see just fine. So, educators have a choice. In the presence of this false reality that has been erected learning has gone underground. Do we choose to acknowledge it or do we continue to discard it as "inappropriate for school." We are going to need schools at least as places that serve the custodial function. How are we going to choose to spend that time with the kids?
I introduced Scratch to a new group of 8th graders today. I got a little carried away with the example I gave them showing how they could take an existing game on the Scratch website and modify it to make it your own. Since today is Super Tuesday I thought it would be appropriate to make a MOD of Angry Birds using the candidates heads and throw in a bunch of the ridiculous things they've said on the campaign trail. Enjoy!
I don't think that this can be overstated. In case something happens to TwitLonger I'll repost it in full:
"children are by nature smart, energetic, curious, eager to learn, and good at learning; that they do not need to be bribed and bullied to learn; that they learn best when they are happy, active, involved, and interested in what they are doing; that they learn least, or not at all, when they are bored, threatened, humiliated, frightened." Holt
"There are no such things as 'unstructured' situations. They are not possible. Every human situation, however casua... tl.gd/g10jen
Holt goes on in the last chapter of this book to identify the purposes he sees schools serving. Those are custodial, ranking and sorting, social engineering, and indoctrination. He also says that these purposes are at odds with each other and at odds with the educative purpose which gets lost to these other ends.
"We do not need to put structure into children's lives. It is already there." Holt
"most adults, seeing what look like the hopelessly chaotic efforts of children to put some order into their own affairs, never wait long enough to give them a chance to do it."
I have noticed this with my students this year. I have noticed that a lot of them come to me with a kind of learned helplessness, expecting me to tell them everything they are supposed to do and expecting me to give them all the "correct" answers. As a teacher I operate best running an open classroom where students engage in personally meaningful projects and I act as a kind of guide or resource to help them reach their own goals. However, when I try this in my classroom I notice one of two things happen: either I get a lot of students choosing to engage in off-task kinds of behaviors like video games or I get a lot of students raising their hands repeating, "I need help. I need help." It takes a long time for students to break through both of these behaviors. The second is easier to deal with. I've used strategies like telling them to make a guess or ask a neighbor before raising their hand. At first most of them seem astonished by this advice as if I were asking them to cheat. But, after not very long at all these students seem to find their way. The other group is a bit more difficult to deal with only because I know what it must look like to visitors in my classroom to see all these kids playing games. But, for some of them this is what they need and given enough wait time with these students all of them end up finding very interesting projects to get into. The key with both groups is to make accessible interesting tools and to let them see examples of the kinds of things they can do with them. And, it doesn't hurt in the least to take an interest in the games and other diversions these kids engage with. Often that can be a hook that can lead to some powerful learning for that student.
"Every time we try to manage the lives of young people, we give up the chance to see how they might manage their ow... tl.gd/g1k0gi
"Every time we try to manage the lives of young people, we give up the chance to see how they might manage their own lives, and to learn what we might have learned from their doing it."
"One way of defining a bureaucracy might be that it is an organization that has learned so much from the past that ... tl.gd/g2os2t
"One way of defining a bureaucracy might be that it is an organization that has learned so much from the past that it can't learn anything from the present."
It is from bureaucracies that things like curriculum standards are born, the nature of which rests with preserving the past. Makes sense when viewed through this lens.
Ch 5 Authority
"Find instead something to do that you can throw yourself into. Let the students see you genuinely interested. Let ... tl.gd/g2pvi8
"Find instead something to do that you can throw yourself into. Let the students see you genuinely interested. Let them see your intelligence, imagination, and energy at work. Then and only then will you be exercising true adult authority."
I have bumped heads with other teachers and administrators about this issue in the past. As an art teacher I always felt that the best way for me to serve my students was to also be a practicing professional artist. This would give me the authority to teach from experience. But I also felt it was important for them to see me working as an artist. Every project I would give them I would also complete alongside them. In this students could learn from watching me work but in engaging in the same activity as them I was placed in a unique social role in the classroom. Students were free to ask questions and engage me in discussions regarding their own inquiries. This also fostered community building and strengthened bonds between teacher and student. Some of my coworkers felt that by spending class time to work on my own studio work I was ignoring my classroom duties. On the contrary, my studio work was my greatest teaching asset. When I was forced once to give it up I lost all authority in the classroom.
"the more we intervene in children's lives, however intelligently, kindly, or imaginatively, the less time we leave... tl.gd/g3bpju
"What we really need are schools or learning resource centers that are not just for kids, but where adults come of their own free will to learn what they are interested in, and in which children are free to learn with and among them."
Ch 6 The Problem of Choice
"Why do we think that humane learning can go on in buildings that look as if they were designed to hold atomic secrets?" Holt
"A student in a traditional school learns before long in a hundred different ways that the school is not on his side; that it is working, not for him, but for the community and the state; that it is not interested in him except as he serves its purposes; and that among all the reasons for which the adults in the school do things, his happiness, health, and growth are by far the least important."
I asked my students to write on the board every type of technology they could find in the room today. I did this for three different classes. Every time the first technologies to go up were computer or electronic technologies followed by mechanical technologies. In one class students came up with building materials like concrete and plastic and in another class the students actually identified the school itself as a technology. In all three cases it was not until I gave lots and lots of wait time before they made the leap to challenge their internal definition of technology and recognize those things like clocks, pencils, and desks as falling under its umbrella. I think these things have become so familiar that they were invisible.
"if we make this offer of freedom, choice, self-direction to students who have spent much time in traditional schoo... tl.gd/g3tmgv
"The problem is that because of pressure from anxious or angry adults in the community, or our own worries about what is important, we are afraid to let the students think, read, and write about what we know very well they are interested in."
I feel this pressure all the time. All the time.
"an oppressive high school in a low-income community may not be a very promising place for a teacher to work in to ... tl.gd/g3ucua
"an oppressive high school in a low-income community may not be a very promising place for a teacher to work in to bring about educational change."
This is why we see things like the production gap and more conservative education practices used with poor kids. When I read this I got a bit emotional because this statement seems to validate a lot of what I have felt in my current teaching situation. The unjust thing is that it is exactly students in those low-income communities in most need of educational change.
Ch 8 Beyond Schooling
"I have come to feel that the deschooled society, a society in which learning is not separated from but joined to, ... tl.gd/g5iakg
"I have come to feel that the deschooled society, a society in which learning is not separated from but joined to, part of the rest of life, is not a luxury for which we can wait hundreds of years, but something toward which we must move and work as quickly as possible."
"Almost all societies and people now define education or learning as schooling, and measure people's intelligence, ... tl.gd/g5ibjp
"as we put more and more of our educational resources into schools, we have less and less left over for those institutions that are truly open and educative and in which more and more people might learn for themselves."
"How can we measure the demand for what does not exist and what most people have not imagined?" Holt
"To deny or even question the all-importance of growth is to attack Truth itself. Much safer these days to deny the existence or importance of God."
This is a difficult issue to address but I have come to see it as a central issue with our federal education policy. Everything is about progress, moving forward, achievement, etc. Holt says it is the one and only true world-wide religion. What about sustainability, joy, and contentment? Steve Jobs famously said, "stay hungry." This attitude worked very well for him in a world that worships progress. But with progress come costs. At what point do we find ourselves needing to step back and change our mindset from one of moving forward to one of stewardship of what we have?
"If growth has truly done away with some old and painful forms of poverty, it has created some equally painful new ones." Holt
"schools and schooling, by their very nature, purposes, structure, and ways of working are, and are meant to be, an obstacle to poor kids, designed and built not to move them up in the world but to keep them at the bottom of it and to make them think it is their own fault."
"a deschooled society would be a society in which everyone shall have the widest and freest possible choice to lear... tl.gd/g5it5i
"what schools demand of poor kids, as a condition of being given a chance to learn some skills that might get them into the middle class, is that they act as if they were already in it."
Just had a conversation at lunch today with a group of teachers talking about how they would like to mandate that the kids in our school always use proper English while in school. This was suggested all with good intention but I couldn't help thinking about this quote.
"school teaches above all the superiority of the schooled, and one of the very first and most important requirement... tl.gd/g5j5tb
"school teaches above all the superiority of the schooled, and one of the very first and most important requirements for getting ahead in school and rising in the world is that the student accept this myth as true."
"It is only recently, at least on a large scale, that man has come to think that learning best takes place in an in... tl.gd/g5j9dq
"It is only recently, at least on a large scale, that man has come to think that learning best takes place in an institution that doesn't produce anything but learning."
I tried to think on my drive home yesterday how a school might produce something other than learning, how it might make itself self-sufficient. I had a lot of trouble coming up with anything beyond the trivial. Corporate industry and cheap outsourced labor have made it nearly impossible to generate any real income from production of a good or service. The one thing schools do produce are consumers.
"anyone who wants to learn a skill, and knows that as soon as he learns it he can use it, can learn it very quickly." Holt
"Universal compulsory schools are not and were never meant to be humane institutions, and most of their fundamental purposes, tasks, missions, are not humane."
"Our schools, school people, and above all school reformers are ineffective because they are working at cross purpo... tl.gd/g645ti
"Proposals for merit pay are and will remain at best useless and at worst harmful as long as some administrative superior judges this merit, or as long as we try to measure it by such things as achievement test scores."
Yet I have never seen a proposal for merit pay that did not base its criteria on one of these two questionable categories.
"If we turn schools into a kind of cream separator, if we give to schools the business of finding and training a fu... tl.gd/g64d6g
"If we turn schools into a kind of cream separator, if we give to schools the business of finding and training a future elite, if in short we turn education into a race, with winners and losers, as in all races we are going to have many more losers than winners."
Which is exactly what Race to the Top does. Right?
"We cannot expect large numbers of children to trust us if they know, as before long most of them do, that an impor... tl.gd/g64fa5
"We cannot expect large numbers of children to trust us if they know, as before long most of them do, that an important part of our job is compiling records on them which will be used to judge them for much of the rest of their life."
I certainly have trouble trusting anyone with this power over me.
