edublogs: Sparknotes straight to mobile:
If your kid called you up in the middle of an exam and asked for help would you be annoyed?
Ewan Mcintosh would be, especially if his students knew that they could access SparksNotes directly with their MMS enabled mobile phones. Go to Ewan’s blog to learn more about SparksNotes on a phone, but I’d like to comment just a bit here.
Many years ago, interested family members were invited to come to the Warlick home, a house that was built buy my great great grandfather, Maxwell, a fifth generation Warlick who still spoke German as his primary language. The last Warlick to live there, a great uncle, had just died and the house was being sold outside the family. So we were invited to come and pick and keep anything that we wanted. I got a quilt. But I also got a very keen sense of the households that lived there over the past nearly two-hundred years.
I knew that education was very important to the family. The sons were sent to a boarding school in Pennsylvania. My grandfather and one of his brothers each got college degrees in the early years of the 20th century. His brother (and the last inhabitant of the family home) earned a degree in engineering at North Carolina State University, and my grandfather a degree in the classics from the University of North Carolina.
Yet, I saw little or no evidence that the house ever held very much information. I am certain that they did not receive magazines or newspapers. The house was many hours buggy ride from the nearest town, Lincolnton. There were probably a few books in the house, but not many and they were not regularly updated. My point is that being educated in that time was defined by how much knowledge you could hold in your head. It’s where Information was stored — in our heads.
Today, we almost literally swim in information. It is in our walls, on our desks, in the very air that we breath. We carry access to a global library of content in our pockets. Yet we still largely define education on 19th century terms, how much you can memorize and recall.
Enough said — except that this how theme reminds me of something a superintendent said to me last year (2006) as he was taking me on a tour of his South Dakota district. He said that we are asking to many questions that require an answer, when we should be asking questions that require a conversation.
I have a lot of mixed feelings about this issue. The current ability to access information almost instantaneously does render memorization less necessary, and as a former math teacher I whole heartedly agree that understanding rather than rote recall is ultimately deeper and more useful. That being said, I am glad I do not need to pick up my calculator to do simple calculations, or consult an atlas any time I want or need to know the capital of New York. In the work world, that would be an inefficient use of time as well. The downside of instant mobile access to information is that the pendulum may swing too far the other way. As with many other issues, a balance needs to be struck between what was done, what can be, and what should be.
I\’m with Jeff on this one – there is a balance to be struck. On reflection, what is contained in the Sparknotes has always been the kind of thing that you could have worked out for yourself had you just read the book in the first place. What Sparknotes do is remove the need for thinking to some degree because the links, on a basic level, have been made for you. This is not the best use of the \’find knowledge everywhere\’ technologies for me. There\’s also what the French call \
Well, I’m an information specialist, so I certainly ascribe to the notion that information technology is important. However, if one does not bring a certain amount of basic knowledge to the beach, you’re going to flounder in that sea of information. Having a core knowledge base helps one choose effective search terms and quickly identify which bits of information are worth pursuing and which should be discarded. The knowledgeable information seeker is far more efficient in accessing pertinent information.
I stress to my students that search engines are dumb and you are smart. You [the student] need to put your brains in gear and think first what search terms are most likely to bring me to the information that I need. I demonstrate to them that searches using “teen” will secure different types of results than those which used the search term “adolescent” But without some basic knowledge on a topic, students (and many adults) are often stymied on how to create effective searches. Yes, the information is out there, but if you can’t find it what good does it do you?
I have read broadly and my brain contains a treasure trove of information. Yes, I’ve been trained in boolean techniques and the pros and cons of competing search engines and that all helps, but the most valuable thing I bring to the search is a broad vocabulary and great breadth of knowledge on a wide varieties of topics. That is what enables me to find the additional information that I seek and to access the value of the information I find.
Students need a core of basic knowledge to aid them in accessing information. Otherwise they’ll be like my student who spent the better part of a period taking notes on bovine STDs for his health report, because it popped up on his Google search and he didn’t know what bovine meant.
Today, we almost literally swim in information. It is in our walls, on our desks, in the very air that we breath. We carry access to a global library of content in our pockets. Yet we still largely define education on 19th century terms, how much you can memorize and recall.
From what I understand, the basic premise of restructuring the way we do education is that information is readily available, which means that teachers don’t need to spend as much time “giving information” to students and instead focus more on other aspects of learning.
However, in developing countries like mine (the Philippines), majority of students don’t have access to this kind of information. True, almost every kid has a cellphone, but only a few can afford to have Internet on the cellphone. You can count yourself among the lucky ones if you have a good computer at home, much less a reliable Internet connection. At school, computer laboratories are inadequate and mismanaged. For most of our students, information isn’t that readily available.
Is School 2.0 only for the technologically and financially blessed? Or are there underlying principles that can be applied even without our Internet tools? This may not be a relevant point for people in developed countries but I hope you’ll be able to give this some thought because for me, this is one of the major factors why education here has not been moving forward.
Certain memorization I’m grateful for. But in I am addicted to resources and take pride in my resourcefulness. Some simple examples:
I’m emailing a co-worker and unsure of the word I want to use… easy: open up a new tab http://m-w.com and check the thesaurus.
I’m chatting with a friend about how we’d love to see The Ellen Degeneres Show. “Trip to …” (where?) Alright: new tab http://www.ellendegeneres.com, click ‘tickets’. Ah! Burbank, CA. Where’s that? New tab maps.google.com ‘Burbank, CA to LA, CA’. Yep, it’s LA. “Trip to LA!”
Online resources are available to find the answers for any Web 2.0 literate person, from directions, looking up new restaurants, or plane tickets to planning new class lessons, developing background knowledge on your new blog topic or novel, or writing a report on WWII. And it’s not just google or wikipedia, it’s the availability to get first hand experiences from different people all over the world, ex: http://www.takingitglobal.org, and the chance to connect to those from completely different worlds or experts on the topic you are studying.
As an elementary school principal, this is an issue I think about often. We are constantly adding more to the curriculum, expecting teachers to teach more each year without extending the school day or school year, and without ever taking anything out. Teachers (and principals) are under pressure to prepare students for high stakes state-mandated tests that will determine whether the school meets AYP or not. Parents often expect their chldren to bring home the same types of activities they completed in school (memorizing mundane facts out of context). All of this appears to make teaching and assisting kids with homework easier.
Something has to give. It is easy to fall back on traditional drill and kill methods and the memorization of facts that easily can be tested with multiple choice tests, and parents certainly find it easier to help with this type of homework. I cringe when I walk into a classroom and the students are memorizing the 50 states and capitals with flash cards. Yet, when I taught 5th grade (14 years ago) that was exactly one of the traditional activities in my classroom. WHY??
With all of the current brain research out there, with immediate information at our fingertips, and with many educators arguing the importance of teaching the 21st Century Skills to our students, why are we having such a hard time changing the way we think about teaching? How do we convince teachers, curriculum designers, parents, and others that we need to teach concepts more deeply instead of trying to cover as much material as possible? Somewhere, there has to be a compromise, and eventually a move toward teaching deeper, higher-level thinking skills. We should be teaching the students the skills to find and evaluate the facts, not how to memorize the facts. Students need to become independent learners who able to find information quickly, determine if the information is accurate and valuable, and then decide what to do with that information. Spending too much time memorizing facts for a test is wasting valuable time and energy. I wonder how many of my fifth graders still remember the capital of New Hampshire.
I’m wishing I worked for the South Dakota superintendent you mentioned in the final paragraph. Can you imagine the planning meetings with a leader with a mentality like that?