Now back to the explanation of the title. About 18 years ago, I was finishing up my first teaching contract. The principal made sure he had some time to sit down with me at the end of the year to see how my first year had gone. Something he said stuck with me all this time. “Rob, teaching is a funny kind of career. It’s a strange kind of job because we teach other people’s children – instead of parents teaching their own kids, they send them to us.” I think what stuck with me about this was that it is kind of strange, isn’t it, that I earn my living by teaching other people’s children, usually the children of people I don’t even know. I don’t think there are any other species of parenting animal (that is, those who care for their young through a period of infancy) that will let an unknown and unrelated member of the population raise their young. Even amongst humans, for most of our history as a species we taught our own. Children learned by being with their parents and learning what their parents did.

I was reminded of this as I was reading Will Richardson’s Opportunity, Not Threat (which Will wrote partly in response to the conversation resulting from Jim’s post I mention above). He is drawn to this thought from Michael Feldstein:

It’s hard to change the culture of education without getting the kids before their thinking processes begin to ossify, but in order to do that, you have to contend with their parents who, however well-intended, didn’t have the benefit of the kind education you’re trying to provide their kids and often see it as more of a threat than an opportunity.

Maybe part of the threat seen by parents is that some of the current ideas about K-12 education reform imply that teachers stop having sole or prime responsibility for the childrens’ learning (resulting, no doubt, in a garrison mentality amongst teachers who see their sphere of influence being eroded) . This implies that some of that responsibility maybe goes back to the parents. I don’t think parents know how to teach their kids the way we used to – showing and teaching the skills and knowledge that we used to carry out our activities of daily living. I have a pretty shallow set of skills outside of what I do at work. I can cook a few decent meals, I can take care of some necessary household tasks, but for anything bigger than that – like building an addition to the house or planting and keeping a garden, I’m totally clueless. (Notable exception – I can configure and secure a home data network pretty damn well. It might not be too impressive, but it’s the best skill that I have). I don’t know if I have many life survival skills to show my kids, and I suspect many parents feel the same way. Giving me more responsibility for teaching my children life skills is much more frightening than giving me the strange job of teaching a narrow, specialized set of knowledge domains to other people’s (or mine – The Girl™’s teacher is sometimes surprised at how much she already knows about science).

So, what are your thoughts? Is part of the resistance on the part of parents a reluctance on their part to take back some of the responsibility for their children’s learning?

Enough writing. Time to get some lunch ready for the kids. That’s a responsibility that I can deal with.

As I was starting to write this post, I learned via Twitter that Raj Boora wrote this regarding the video:

if we allow ourselves to be creative as we are in early childhood and to play as we ought to, we can achieve great things. Perhaps those people who are very successful – those who never “work” but rather play and are creative with their entire body (the thinking bat returns) – are the ones we should be looking to when we are considering how to teach the contemporary student

I have no idea what he is referring to as “the thinking bat” by the way. If you know, I beg to be enlightened.

Here’s what I think is a strange thing. As students get older, we remove elements of play from our classrooms in order to make room for hard facts and memorizing stuff. I’ll be the first to admit that I am often guilty of that in my classes as well. By removing playfulness as an explicit consideration when we teach, we diminish students ability to learn. There are teachers in the secondary and post-secondary levels who facilitate student playfulness and creativity as part of their teaching. I know first hand that Rick Schwier does this, and from what I’ve read of their classes I think that Darren Kuropatwa and Clarence Fisher do as well. If we want to emphasize the creative aspect of our students, we need to develop that kind of pedagogy of playfulness and teach that to teachers – veteran, novice and up-and-coming.

A couple of lessons emerge in my mind. First, the expensive tools don’t always work better. Elluminate, a paid for service, did not work as smoothly as WiZiQ, a free tool.

Second, feature rich tools are great if you are trained in their use. If not, you can end up causing confusion or damage. Elluminate is like a Boeing 747 compared to the Volkswagen Bug of WiZiQ. The Boeing might do more and go farther but it would be very dangerous for me to fly it. The interface for Elluminate is very feature rich but confusing for novices. The WiZiQ interface is clean and simple.

CC attribution, non-derivative license by Blyzz; http://www.flickr.com/photos/blyzz/2530816698/

Finally, it doesn’t take a lot of work to take some simple tools and use them together to produce the same result as a big, expensive, “do-it-all” tool. We used WiZiQ for Darren’s audio and chat, but we looked at his slideshow in slideshare. It met our needs in a very simple way. This combination was much simpler and met our needs much better than Elluminate would have done.

Here’s one of the statements that made me uneasy:

I am often asked as I travel to various places to present why I would spend so much time talking about technology knowing that with outsourcing and such that I am undermining job security in that computers could replace teachers. To that I respond,  If you can be replaced by a computer then you probably should be! The truth is that technology will never replace teachers, however teachers who know how to use technology effectively to help their students connect and collaborate together online will replace those who do not.

Time for some disclosure of hypocrisy before I continue – I’ve probably said things along this line before. I’ve probably said many things that, in hindsight, seem completely misguided. But when I read this, I thought that we could restate the last phrase to read “teachers who know how to effectively help their students connect and collaborate together will set the example for those who do not.” It’s not about the technology per se, but what we do with it.

Teacher will be/is being redefined. (Lord knows it is time- while the rest of society has changed in its response to technology, education has remained timeless the last 100 years.) What we have to do is ask ourselves what principled changes need to take place in order to remain relevant in the lives of the students we teach?

I don’t believe that teacher or teaching is being redefined. A teacher is someone who teaches which is to say that they facilitate student learning. I would agree that education needs to respond as a result of changing technology and that principled changes should occur but I think those changes are curricular, not pedagogical.

At the end of the post, I was heartened to read:

And teachers need to be driving these discussions and this change- not policy makers. However, it will require you to redefine yourself. It will require you to unlearn and relearn which means an implementation dip in terms of personal power and knowledge

Yes. Absolutely yes that teachers need to be driving these discussions. I would hasten to add that the discussion should be open to all teachers – technocritics and technophilics alike. Also, I would contend that I don’t need to be redefined, although I am the first to admit that my practice can always be refined. I think that this is one of the hallmarks of a professional teacher – continual refinement of our practice.

Maybe I’m misreading the post. If this is the case, Sheryl, I hope you will forgive my misunderstandings and try to help me understand. As I get older, my belief in the professionalism and good judgement of teachers continues to grow. I think that any changes that are needed will be implemented by teachers but as I stated earlier, I think these changes need to be curricular, not pedagogical. And I think that good pedagogy must be flexible so that the learning needs of the students are our first consideration; the resources, practices and technologies we use to enable student learning are secondary to those needs.

Scott Leslie's Personalized Learning Environment diagram

I’d like to help my students develop the same sort of toolset for themselves. As a teacher, I want to be able to help my students grow their PLE in age/grade appropriate ways. Maybe we should even explicitly put that as a learning objective in the K12 curriculum. What I need as a teacher is a way to monitor and/or participate in an appropriate way. I’d like to be able to watch as students grow their PLE and make my presence explicit when I need to.

But I don’t want to look through a dozen different sites to do this. I’m not sure if a straightforward RSS aggregator would do the trick, but I want a similar kind of tool. A PLE aggregator if you will. I’ve decided to call it my Student Learning Dashboard (SLD) and I see it as the flip side of a PLE. It would be a way for me to monitor students as they create and use their PLE, a way for me to participate as I see fit, a way to see how their PLE’s are connecting together, and a way for me to communicate with students, individually or as a group. One of the features I like in Scott’s diagram and explanation for a PLE is the two way communication and I see my SLD as being my tool to not only monitor but to communicate.

OK – this has been a quick brain dump/wish list before I leave the school so it might not make a lot of sense, but I’m wondering if such a tool/toolset exists? If not, how do I/you/we create it?

I’m going to be adding more screencasts/powerpoint-casts to the course during this school year. Watch here for more in the future.

Here’s a short video from the very clever folks at Common Craft on the topic of web search strategies:

There are many other good search strategies. Here’s a video of Patrick Norton interviewing Google Engineer Matt Cuts, who describes various Google search strategies.

The recording – EdTech Posse 4.3 – TLt and edupunk

Shownotes available at http://edtechposse.wikispaces.com/4.3

(photo by D’Arcy Norman – http://www.flickr.com/photos/dnorman/7823971/

The Calgary Zoo is an amazing place. All the exotic animals are there – elephants, giraffes, monkeys, leopards and all those other charismatic megafauna. When my daughter was 2 we went to the Calgary Zoo. It is a big place, much more than a 2 year old can take in during a single visit. We scurried around the zoo trying to take in as much as possible. We don’t get to Calgary too often so we wanted to make the visit a good experience for her. But we were using our adult perspective on good experience, not the 2 year old version. After three hours, she was completely mentally overloaded and physically exhausted. We found a bench to sit down and she wandered over to a fence overlooking a pond filled with ducks. She watched the ducks for 20 minutes, absolutely fascinated by them. She enjoyed them as much or more than any of the more exotic animals. Only then did it occur to me that to her, the ducks were just as interesting and novel as the elephants. It’s only after years of seeing ducks in the ponds by the roadside that we lose our sense of wonder when we see them.

Maybe the assumption that kids want to learn from multimedia resources is as faulty as the assumption that my daughter wanted to see all the uncommon (in North America) animals more than anything else. I’ve certainly been guilty of making both of those assumptions. Ducks were just as new and fascinating as anything else. For kids, especially younger ones I think, books are as new and fascinating as other forms of media. As adults we might have grown used to them and consider them boring and archaic. I’m glad kids are around to remind us of the wonder of ducks and books even when adults have grown used to them being there.