Technologically Literate

Sorry about the ghost post, something went terrible wrong when I tried to publish yesterday.  Anyway…

Is it possible that the blur of school is on us already?  I don’t mean school itself, I mean the endless cycle of Monday, garbage day, Friday, NFL game, Monday…I am guilty.  I have a fascination with crossing off dates.  But sometimes that’s not good enough.  I cross off months, weeks, days, and I even find myself crossing off class periods.  You can become so consumed with time that time dictates your teaching. 

How will I fill this time?  Where will I find the time?  Let’s not do that because there is not enough time.  You and your students could be missing out on great experiences when teaching becomes consumed with time.  My unqualified advice, let go.  It will get done or it won’t.   The odds of deep understanding are actually better if you fully explore an idea than if you scratch the surface of 100.  If you model the thinking and learning process well, then you can put ownership of the rest of the content into their hands.        

That said, I want to be better this year.  I myself want to let go of education being a function of time.  I want to be a more thoughtful, more reflective learner and I hope by being conscious of that, I will help others around me do the same. 

Have a great year,

I’ll tell you the Russian story next time I get a moment to type.  It has to do with 21st century tech and one student placed here in good ol’ DuBois PA, that only speaks Russian.  Let the wackiness ensue.

Great conversations today about changing instructional practices.  Similar to the conversation about technology integration, we often think of best practices or effective strategies as activities with a certain outcome.  “Today I am going to do…think, pair, share” or “to cover this novel I’ll put the kids in lit circles.”  Think, pair, share, the activity has now become the focus where if tool or tools are used effectively they are seamless part of the instruction.

An important realization for me relates to daily objectives.  I can put part of the blame on pre-service, but my objectives have largely been content or outcome based.  I focus too much on the product at the expense of the process.  I see now that teaching to a content goal is actually a more difficult method to cover material.  With content there are different interpretations, pov’s, tools, basically a thousand ways to cover content, whereas a focus on thinking skills, such as drawing inferences, lets the learner create there own understanding of the content.

Heady stuff for most of us.

I see so many connections in what we have accomplished over the last four days and what I have explored this summer.  It echoes that change is needed in instructional delivery and not in the student’s attitude toward education.  It is a move to get teachers to teach the thinking and processing skills that will benefit students throughout their lives.  Finally, and if you buy into connectivism most importantly, the group made excellent connections to one another, to the information, and to the world of education.  The next logical step is to connect to and share this with the students. 

I am excited to see the potential of this cohort realized.  I believe it will be a positive change for all parties involved. 

Wanna find out how big your network is?  Ask a question. 

Eliciting participation is the key to a having a reliable network.  Without participation you have a stagnate web space full of old pictures and fragmented comments.  My question is how do you gain prolonged interest and participation without constantly going to hot button issues?  I believe anyone can gain a spark of interest by publishing an angry rant about teacher salaries, or internet nerds killingAmerica, but what keeps an individual engaged and willing to spend time deep in conversation with others?

Over the past few weeks I have been actively engaged in action research.  My subject is professional development.  I see a huge contradiction in the way we are asked to teach (MI) and they way we are taught (in-service).  I envision a future of on-demand PD that is available to the teacher when they need it, at the time of their choosing, but I digress.  It is summer and in order to gather necessary data I needed a different approach.  I called upon my network.  I have access to 1000’s of teachers across the country.  Granted the majority of them are tech savvy, progressive, educators, but I thought that I could gain a relatively large and diverse sample for the simple needs of my paper.  I was wrong.

This is in no way intended to be mean or angry and I want to thank, from the bottom of my heart those of you that have helped me.    It simply raises a point that I am sure others have toyed with before.  How is it possible that one person posts a picture of an airport and receives 30 comments while another asks a serious academic question and receives 4?  I blame it on blog ADD.  Very few stick to one topic (including me) and explore it in the depth that it deserves.  Or could it be that the 3% (on a good day) of people that are willing to participate force us to change topics on a weekly basis just to gain interest?  I don’t know.   

I have to think seriously about these matters because I am introducing a professional network to my teachers in August.  And while the initial excitement will prove fruitful how will we manage to prolong serious discussion over a period of time?  Projects?  Action research?  Do I have to constantly have something prepared to make sure everyone is participating? 

I am sorry if this has offended anyone, but I get a real sense of a hierarchical structure to edublogging and it is off putting.  I do want to take time to thank my personal network that I now believe only consists of a few handfuls of people but those people are amazing.  You folks truly inspire me and always make me feel welcome.  I suppose it’s my fault for drastically over estimating the size of the network, but optimism got the best of me.  I urge you all to take the time and go answer a question.  After all there are no stupid ones, right?

Okay, back to the paper.  I will fill you in on the data when it is complete.  I believe you will find it interesting.

Cross posted at The Bloggers’ Cafe

     In my effort to explore connectivism as a learning theory (see Conduit is King) I immediately find myself wondering, what is the most difficult part in shifting practice.  I am a child of the 20^th century.  I can’t help organizing and structuring information.  I shop with a grocery list for crying out loud.  I personally begin with the most difficult, leaving items or ideas that I consider easy(er) for last.  In the case of redefining knowledge and the learning process I am drawn to the idea of recombination.  Recombination is the act of taking anything (information, web pages, videos, ect.) and manipulating it to fit you and your specific need.  Personalization causes concern for us “industrial learners.”  (I am using industrial learner in the context of 20^th century folks who experienced a linear education from “the experts.”)   
     To us, recombination is frightening, recombination is letting go of ownership.  Industrial education had/has a structure.  We were taught there was a beginning and an end to things and that there is a specific place to go to receive information.  Set information was/is chunked up in to periods of time only to be reviled when you are ready.  It had nothing to do with you as individual it was/is a function of time.  Unfortunately for those of us with one foot in the past and one in the present, a flood of information and tools made personalization both an option and a necessity.  Teachers and schools have become white noise in the competition for a child’s attention largely because a child still has no ownership.  I believe that getting teachers to let go of content and to encourage exploration could be hurdle number one on the path to education reform.  Siemens says, the ability to connect, recombine, and recreate have become hallmarks of knowledge today (p. 82, Knowing Knowledge)  For educators to foster those abilities they will need to offer up information (possible unfamiliar information) and ideas that are intended to spark connection, individual recombination, and unique creation.
     But what will they talk about, what will they learn, and what will they create?  Predictably followed by, how will I assess it?  Those questions are indicative of a person concerned with their perceived authority.   My questions are, how do you tell a person that has been teaching a subject for any length of time that content is secondary, if not completely irrelevant to process?  Content and its mastery is the measuring stick of our profession.  I could not be considered a practicing professional until I passes a multiple choice test on communication models.  (Those have come in real handy)  Also, do they know how they themselves learn let alone how 150 students learn?  Finally, is it the responsibility of professional development to take on such an undertaking or must it be an individual choice?
 

Inbox (1) PD Opportunity: from kpruitt
You are cordially invited to a professional development workshop that will explore the process of learning.
 

Re:  From: teacherx
Are you kidding?  I have been teaching for 10 years!  What are you going to tell me about learning?  My kids learn, look at the scores!  PS.  Quit spamming my inbox, I am busy making sure kids know about the Fertile Crescent!
 

     Even now, knowing what I know, it is a little unnerving to let this post go.  I know that others are much farther along in this line of thinking and to them this is just the 1000^th definition of the same problem.  What causes even more trepidation is that this information will be posted where anyone can accept it, reject it, mix it, mash it and recreate it as they see fit.  I can only imagine what it must be like for educators who spent decades achieving the goal of content mastery. 
 

To accept recombination, you have to let go of ego.  Who among us is willing to do that? 
    
On a personal note I want to thank Jen, Ryan, and Darren for their efforts.  I look forward to participating in a growing network of change.

Ken Pruitt/DuBois, PA/Tech Integration Specialist

It’s 80 degrees, sunny, and there is a slight breeze that keeps the drapes flowing in the room.  I should be outside.  Instead I have a wrist cramp, a tight back, and my eyes feel like they are filled with sand.  Yep, chronic laptop use syndrome and I blame Jeff Utecht… this time.

In Jeff’s post, Pedagogy Defines School 2.0 (revisited) he speaks of connectivism, a theory that, I must admit, I had never heard of.  In fact, I just had a conversation with my super about using technologies to support constructivist practices.   Oh boy…

Fortunately, George Siemens, the mind behind connectivism (Jeff please correct me if I am wrong) acknowledges that it is impossible to know every angle on a given piece of information.  Even better for us, he advocates just letting some things be until all of the connections can be made to achieve a perspective. 

George Siemens authored Knowing Knowledge in 2006.  I haven’t finished the e-book (pdf download), nor have I been able to get a good grasp on how to articulate the information it contains, so I suppose this is more of an advertisement than an original thought.  

E-books, like Knowing Knowledge (Siemens) and Coming of Age (Freedman et all), represent an interesting shift in what is considered text.  These “books” are authored by experts, but they are not products.  The authors are setting up the content so that it can be current and continue to flow.  By attaching blogs, wikis, and in Terry’s case a ning, the authors have started the learning process from their point of view and are allowing the information to evolve as more perspective is introduced.

Is this the responsibility of the expert in our age of information?  You present information, allow others (trusted individuals) to process it, re-define ideas based on new perspective and present again.  Meanwhile ”the others” are presenting the information in their networks allowing their members to add perspective.  (Okay, I am working it out, I think.)

Bottom line in a world flooded with content, the process becomes more important than the content. 

Here are some interesting quotes or ideas from Knowing Knowledge.

“The problem rests largely in the view that learning is a managed process, not a fostered process.” 

“Conversation is the ultimate personalization experience.”

“A product is a stopped process.”

“We have become the filter, the mediator, and the weaver.” 
 

Okay, I need a break.  I will come back to this as I mull through it…hopefully with Jeff’s help and now yours.  Connectivism anyone?