on teachers feeling disrupted …

Man the lifeboats!

Teachers are feeling disrupted here.  There’s a lot of stress.

Librarians, as a profession, have been rowing along in our lifeboats for a while now, but I think we’re going to be getting a lot more company (and, hopefully, some help with the rowing).  In the twelve years I’ve been a librarian, we have gone from from a world of information scarcity to a world of information abundance.  In a world where students and parents walk around the planet with computers in their cell phones a library’s business model and the CEO’s or Head of School’s perceptions about a librarian’s value-add to an institution had better change or the library will be seen as little more than an expensive department providing services that are no longer essential. In other words, the library becomes a cost cutting opportunity.  That, you see, is why we’ve been rowing along in our lifeboats while the rest of our independent school faculty colleagues cruised along on the Lido Deck.

Alas, I think that the pleasure cruise on the Lido Deck might soon be over–at least for a while. There have been increasing numbers of stories, recently, about the disruptive forces beginning to be felt in higher education.  This morning, NPR ran an interview with author Jeffrey Selingo about his book College (Un)Bound: the Future of Higher Ed and What It Means for Students where he discusses disruptive forces like MOOCs that are quickly making the business models of many middle tier institutions of higher learning obsolete.  In Napster, Udacity, and the Academy, Clay Shirky provides one of the clearest descriptions of just how the disruptions are playing out that I’ve read to date.

Ultimately, teachers feeling disrupted here is a good thing as complacency is almost always a really bad state for any institution or organization to be in.  It bothers me, however, that I suspect many of our teachers are ascribing their feelings of disruption (and in many cases the anxiety that comes with disruption) to the introduction of a 1:1 computing initiative that is being launched with our seventh graders in the fall.  To put it bluntly, they are wrong.

1:1 computing’s arrival at our doorstep is not causing disruption in our lives, 1:1 computing has arrived because a disruption in our lives has already occurred–teachers, however, are only now finally having little choice but to have to take notice.  Let’s face it, disruption is stressful and disruption is hard so the typical human (well, me at least) often makes it a habit to ignore stressful and hard things for as long as possible.

For librarians, while it probably isn’t the state-of-being or condition that I’d choose if it were up to me, being in a state of disruption, flux, and change is just a state that we, as librarians, have come to accept as our new modus operandi.  Perhaps the silver lining  in the black cloud (black cloud if you are a traditionalists at least), is that because the disruptive change in information access affected librarians so early and so very starkly, it was impossible for us to ignore.  When wonderful colleagues in other independent schools running wonderful, but traditional, programs retired and didn’t get replaced, we had no choice but to take note.  When our counter-parts in public schools and public libraries were the first to receive pink slips when budgets got tight, we had no choice but to take note.  As a result, now that the disruption that swept over libraries during the last ten years has found it’s way into the halls of higher education and the protective bubble around the cozy world inhabited by independent school teachers has also finally been burst.  Teachers are realizing that the curtain has been pulled back and projects and lessons that were “best practice” ten years ago, no longer fit that bill.

Don’t get me wrong, libraries are still under the gun to reinvent ourselves, but we have a lot more company in the reinvention boat.  And … We’ve had a ten year head start on thinking through what our programs should be and where our programs should go.  It’s quite scary and quite exciting all at once! Welcome to our world, folks!  Now, grab an oar and start rowing or get the heck out of the boat.  We have no room for dead weight.

The USS Learn or Retire has set sail …

on the awesomeness that is middle school …

There are days when I feel old and jaded and burned out, but when push comes to shove I really think I have one of the BEST JOBS EVER!!!

Here’s a sampling (and this is just from today).  At Monday assembly this morning, our new Head of Campus stood and got everybody’s attention.  When we began the new semester, he had given a rousing “locker room” half-time talk to our kids about the inspiration that is a late-in-the-game comeback.  ”If your academic year hasn’t been all that you had hoped it would be or all that you promised yourself it would be, now is the time to make a comeback to set yourself up to finish well or to build momentum for next year!!!  And if you’ve been playing well, let’s remember, that there’s nothing quite so painful as snatching defeat from the jaws of victory because you took your eyes off the ball and stopped doing the little things that put you in a winning position in the first place …”  Our Head is a young, funny, bright, former Princeton football player and coach so he really does know how to give a half-time talk to his team.  Today, however, he got up and started, “Back at the beginning of the third quarter, I got up here and gave you some reminders about finishing well.  It occurs to me that this is probably a good time for a reminder …” after which he broke into song with lyrics about meeting with your teachers, cleaning up your locker, recycling your books, etc.  The lyrics were set to One Day More from Les Miz and as he sang, one-by-one, teachers came out from the wings and the audience and joined him in song.  The kids went absolutely BONKERS!!!  They ended with a standing ovation from 700 screaming 7th, 8th, and 9th graders.  Leaving assembly, kids were heard to say, “Teachers putting on a musical … This is the best school ever!”

Well, that’s hard to top, but this afternoon in my 8th grade debate class, we were working on a project identifying logical fallacies in media when one of my boys ran out of the room.  He returned to explain that he was chewing on a pen that then exploded and flooded his mouth with black ink. He stuck his (very black) tongue out and asked if he could, “Go to the school store to try to by a toothbrush and some toothpaste to clean his mouth out.”

What can one say to that but, “Uh … Yeah … Look dude, that’s WAY more important that logical fallacies right now!!!”

I mean, singing teachers and mouths flooded with ink!!! Holy @#$% it just doesn’t get much better than that, huh?

#BestJobEver!!!

on the value of school in a world of information abundance …

My effort to upgrade my information diet by watching three Ted Talks a week continues to pay nice dividends! I absolutely LOVED this talk that Will Richardson gave at TedxMelbourne.  At about the 11:30 mark he asks,

“What is the value of school at a moment when we don’t really need school to do school in a traditional sense?”

Wow! Pretty cool stuff here!

See for yourself.

on slowly I turn, step by step …

Blended learning or connected learning … That is the question!

Sometimes I read things that speak to me!  Ideas that seem so transformational!  These big transformational ideas tumble around in the cavern that is my head and try to grab hold of one of the slippery sides, but … alas … they eventually fall out of my noggin onto the vast heap of potentially transformational ideas that have died without having made any true long-lasting change.

At other times, I read things and they’re just things.  These ideas don’t make a lot of noise at first. They just kind of hang around … And hang around … And hang around … Eventually, you come to realize that they’ve taken up residence in your head and they’re beginning to rearrange the furniture and put up new curtains.  All of the sudden, you find yourself thinking about old information in all new ways.

A week or two ago I read one of those quiet pieces that seems to just be hanging around in my head.  Justin Reich over at the Education Week Ed Tech Researcher blog posted Connected Learning Versus Blended Learning: New Terms, Old Debate.  His basic premise is that much of the push for education technology reform is focused on the development of “connected learning” environments, yet the aims of this movement are very often conflated with “blended learning” which is a very different paradigm.  According to Reich,

“Blended Learning generally takes the position that the curriculum of schooling is fine, that schools are the proper institutions of education, and structures of instruction are inefficient. Blended Learning advocates argue that students can move more quickly through a prescribed curriculum when supported by digital tools that allow for computers to do some of the work of teachers:delivering instruction, grading assessments, identifying student learning needs, and fulfilling them with a combination of human and computer instruction.”

Reich explains that by contrast,

“Advocates of Connected Learning hold more radical beliefs about the inadequacy of fundamental structures of schooling and learning. Connected Learning advocates argue that universal curriculum is a dated concept for an era of infinite subspecialties and a deeper understanding of learner variation. They argue that understanding learning through the activities of schools is far too limited a canvas for the age of lifelong and lifewide learning. They argue that technologies are not best suited to optimizing student pathways through a prescribed curriculum, but for connecting learners with mentors, peers, and resources for learning experiences that tap into students interests and passions and span from school to home to library to cultural institutions to informal learning spaces.”

The distinction that he draws is one that I had to let bounce around and live in my head for a while.  Now that they’re well into the redecorating and remodeling process I think that I’m coming to look at the way that we’re trying to integrate technology here in very different ways.

We’ve had two nationally renowned educational technology speakers address our faculty in the last few years.  Both Alan November and Tom Vander Ark talked to our faculty about the need for change in general and the need for technology integration specifically and both were good speakers in their own ways.  I think, though, that our faculty as a whole found it a challenge to embrace the paradigms both espoused because the connected learning paradigm is so vastly different than the paradigm that currently dominates among our faculty. I think in the minds of many on our faculty, they were … “OUT THERE!!!”

What I wonder now is “Where do we go from here?”

Is it reasonable to expect a teacher to go from a heavily prescribed curriculum paradigm to a connected learning paradigm in one fell swoop?  Is the transition from a traditional paradigm, to a blended learning paradigm, to a connected learning paradigm like the Piaget’s stages of development in that one has to move through the stages in order or can you skip developmental steps (here that would be blended learning) along the way?

By conflating blended learning and connected learning in our professional development offerings, I think the muddled picture has made change seem impossibly confusing and, therefore, fear inducing.

We need to take a step back, take a breath, and get ourselves sorted out or we’ll never overcome the inertia borne of fear.

Slowly we’ll turn, step by step …

on story telling …

A few months ago, I realized that I needed to go on an information diet. Just like in my physical life where I need to eat more fruits; veggies; and whole grains; and fewer sausages; Marie Calendar’s pie; and less processed meat, I needed to stop obsessing about the fiscal cliff, the sequester, some crazy ex-LAPD nut case, and all the rest and start putting happier and more inspiring things into my information diet. Just as I’m never going to be a vegan, I’m never going to completely ignore the important news of the day. I just needed a little better balance in my daily information diet.

Part of my information diet was that I decided to try to watch two or three Ted Talks a week for as long as I could manage it.  Let me tell you, Ted Talks have become this incredible launching pad for ideas that I’d love to share with students.  This afternoon while I was on the cardio machine at the gym, I watched a wonderful talk by Nigerian writer Chimamanda Adichie on The Danger of a Single Story.

Her talk about the stories that we come to know about other people, other cultures, and indeed, I think, about the stories we tell about ourselves really made me think about what our kids are learning.  Our 8th graders do some pretty interesting research about different countries and cultures of the world, but I’m not so sure that they are even beginning to develop a sense of the multiple stories that exist in the countries that they’re studying.  We have them gather some demographic and economic data and put together travel brochures about the cultures and the people, but it all seems quite superficial in the end.

I, for one, would love to see them watch this talk, then be asked to “Write one of the stories from the country you’ve been assigned that you think most Americans probably wouldn’t know.”  Asking them to uncover the untold story would require them to identify the obvious story, but then to go deeper and uncover the one that isn’t so obvious to us through mainstream culture in the west.

Unfortunately, I don’t teach history so I don’t get a vote.  If I did, though, that’s what I’d do …

Sometimes being “just a librarian” can be a really frustrating thing …

on growing curiosity for a changing world …

I came across this really interesting video of John Seely Brown on Edutopia where he talks about motivating learners. The video originally caught my eye because it is shot on Maui and well … It’s Maui … But it is what he says at about the 5:42 minute mark, as he talks about “skills” that 21st Century learners need in order to thrive in a rapidly changing world that keeps resonating in my head.

“In a world of rapid change, any particular skill that I learn is apt to have a moderately short shelf-life.  So … What I really need to do is to know how to create context for myself that I keep scaffolding, and learning, and accelerating what I know to increase my own performance …”

Lots of folk out here in educationland talk about “21st Century skills” and “21st Century learning,” but they often can’t help me understand what it is that they mean.  I often take that upon myself and assume that the fact that I can’t get my head around what they’re saying is my fault, but I’m coming to realize that, often, my inability to grasp their meaning is really based on the fact that they don’t really know what they mean either.  I really love that in this video, he gives us a concrete example of surfers using video of themselves to learn new tricks and sharing their learning with others in their community (many of whom, I’m guessing, are their primary competitors).

I’m not a gamer, but I have a friend here at work, Mr. U., who is very excited about game-based learning and gamification.  I think when it comes to game-based learning, I’m in the space that Mr. Brown describes at about the 7:30 minute mark.  ”What happens when things don’t work is that it frightens you … Then you’re not going to be very willing to embrace change.” I think I just need to get into a space where I shoot for something that’s a little bit frightening and then just tinker with it until we get it to work.

Otherwise,  maybe retirement needs to be closer than I had expected …

on three cups of tea with sugata mitra?

I haven’t posted here for ages, but I finally have some time to get back to blogging here.  I’ve been taking an online course, Assessment in Elearning from UW Stout, and I’d been blogging as part of my coursework so I just didn’t have the time or energy to blog here as well.  The course was actually really great and I recommend it heartily!

Anyway, now that the course is done, I’ve had some time to get back to messing about on my own.  I watched a Ted Talk by Sugata Mitra on his dream of building a school in the cloud that I found completely inspiring!  Sugata Mitra was actually awarded the Ted Prize and given $1 million dollars to help to make his vision into a reality.

Interestingly, though, with the attention, there has also been some post award criticism.  I find the interplay between what you see in the form of these wonderful and inspiring Ted Talks and the discourse that goes on online afterward to be fascinating and, really, a lot about what learning in a connected world is about.

Judge for yourself …

Sugata Mitra’s Ted Talk is here:

 

In the aftermath of his Ted Talk and winning the Ted Prize, Sugata Mitra’s work as come under some scrutiny and the issues raised and the discussion about both his work and the culture that has grown up around the Ted concept has made for interesting reading.  Hacking at Education: TED, Technology Entrepreneurship, Uncollege, and the Hole in the Wall by Audrey Waters and Sugata Mitra: Slum Chic? 7 Reasons for Doubt by Donald Clark both raise some interesting points of concern.

The controversy Watters and Clark raise feels very similar to my experience with Greg Mortenson’s Three Cups of Tea.  I loved and was inspired, as many were, by the book only to learn of some of the possible issues and controversies with time.

Am I overly desperate for inspiration?  If someone’s Ted Talk or book inspires me, does it matter that it might be based on faulty memories or exaggerations or some “iffy” research?  Is it too much to ask to once in a while just to be inspired and not find out the guy who inspired you took steroids in order to win?

Sigh …