This is my week of working out of my normal audience realm. Yesterday, I keynoted and delivered two presentations at the MN ASCD conference. There were some teachers in the audience, but most of the attendees were principals and curriculum supervisors and directors. By all indications, my message about millennials and later sessions on video games and Web 2.0 connected with the audience, many of whom had laptops and were connected to the conference center’s ubiquitous WiFi. Of course I don’t know how many of them were doing e-mail.
Today I fly to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, where I’ll be Telling the New Story for CAPE’s 2007 Conference. CAPE stands for Center for Advancing Partnerships in Education, and although technology is an explicit part of their description and mission, the organization seems most devoted to facilitating partnerships between education institutions and initiatives, and other community organizations, business and cultural. This will be one of those very rare events, where I’ll do a single talk and then jet away to some place else — so I’d better tell a REAL GOOD story. 😉
By jetting off, I mean to Kansas City, Missouri (second time in Missouri in as many weeks), for the annual Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. I wrote the other day about second (and forth and fifth) languages, and revealed my very definate lack of grounding in this area. I’ll be doing sessions on blogging and podcasting, and a half-day workshop on Web 2.0 applications on Saturday. These will be button pushing sessions, how-tos, with some discussion among the audiences about instructional applications. No worries!
But I’m also doing the keynote, and that worries me, because I am not a practitioner. The topic is flat word, flat information, and flat classrooms. I think that it will connect — but will they forgive me for being monolingual. Miss Profe assured me this morning that I am multilingual because of the programming languages that I know — but somehow, it doesn’t seem the same. You just can’t impress people at the coffee shop, with your fluency in PHP. 😉
All that said, yesterday, seemed to be a success. I felt an extraordinary sense of being in-sync with the audience, many of whom, as I said, had laptops. As usual, I asked (how many of you understand blogs, wikis, RSS feeds, and a majority of the hands rose, with the fewest understanding RSS. I’ve talked about this before, and people have, rightly, cautioned me that there are many educators who are still very much in the dark (ages) about the new web. But I was especially impressed with this group, who have less reason to be tech savvy than my usual audiences.
The millennials message seemed to resonate especially well. RoAnne Elliot, a curriculum coordinator for Mounds View Public Schools and president of the MN ASCD, introduced me for my keynote. In doing so, she talked about a meeting they’d had in her district with board members, folks from the community, and teachers and curriculum leaders. As part of these meetings, various subject area teachers are asked to bring students with them to add a learner/customer point of view to the discussions. In this most recent meeting, social studies teachers from the district brought in students. Just after describing the recent changes in their curriculum, efforts to make it more “rigorous,” the social studies students were asked to comment. Their consensus was that there was almost nothing about what they were learning in their social studies and how they were learning it that was especially rigorous. One student said, “I have to power down when I come to school!”
“Coincidentally,” Elliot said, “in reading through David Warlick’s web site, I saw that very quote (attributed to Marc Prensky), where a high school students says exactly the same thing, ‘I have to power down…'” I find this a bit peculiar as well, unless it’s a common phrase that students are using among themselves. It’s still important.
I looked up rigorous in the Merriam Webster, and, as a result have become entirely unsatisfied with the term, as it is commonly used in education contexts.
Rigorous: manifesting, exercising, or favoring rigor : very strict
Rigor: harsh inflexibility in opinion, temper, or judgment (from Latin rigor, literally, stiffness, from rigēre to be stiff)
Is stiff rigidity what we really want in today’s classrooms when we are preparing our children for a future of rapid change? And how do we accomplish the richness that we imply in our claims toward rigorous curriculum when we limit teachers to paper textbooks, two-dimensional white boards, mind numbing lectures. Can it be done with anything less than blunt force mental trauma?
Again, I think that we have got to pay a lot of attention to our students outside-the-classroom information experiences, which are responsive, collaborative, information and media rich, dependable, and that present content as a raw material. Of course, this is a tall order — and it will get us no where as long as we are not willing to pay for the time and resources to retool our classrooms.
Dave,
Last week, I had a focus group of high school seniors at my home to hear student voices as part of my campaign for school board member. What I found so interesting was how “traditional’ their thinking was. They saw their school and out-of-school experiences as so completely different with no cross over at all. It really struck me how they accepted the 20th century teaching methods employed by their teachers and didn’t expect anything more. There were very clear distinctions between life in school and life everywhere else.
One student, the valedictorian of the class, told me he would get his brother off the computer so that he could continue his multiplayer online game when he left the focus group. I saw him several days later and spoke with him about computer games/video games, etc about how engaged he was by them, about the learning experiences they offered among other things. When I mentioned the possibility of those instructional methods being assimilated into his classrooms, he looked bemused, as though the thought never occurred to him.
It was an interesting conversation with these bright students….and very informative to me. They have very few expectations for their educational experiences in school.
David,
You spoke at our annual EdTech Conference last fall, but I wasn’t able to get out to the keynote, but what I did hear about what you were saying was intriguing.
What is rigor? What do the students mean by “powering down?” Is it an attention thing? Modern media and interactive games are so much more fast-paced and interactive, that kids may mean that they have to slow down their reactions to be more inline with the pace of teaching.
Games and interactive media almost across the board require that users speed up reaction time, and speed up decision making. I think that what it will take to engage learners is to take some of the techniques out of the world of game play and game design, and apply them to learning methods and learning software.
Micah
This will be short, because I’m typing this into my phone.
As I continue to do this video game presentation, bouncing the ideas off of attendees and listening to great conversations afterward, many of the concepts of vgaming and the educational implications are evolving & solidifying.
One thing that occurred to me yesterday was that although it appears that instant gratification is one of the fundamental elements of the experience, this is certainly not always the case. So many of the games extend on for hours and often for days and months. The player is participating in the game, engaged in quests and in business, in order to earn currency or experience points so that they can acquire position and digital assets at a later date.
I talk about the responsive nature of our students’ info-experiences, but I’m realizing that the response does not have to be immediate, the way that it appears to happen in the game. What is important is what David Williamson shaffer calls Role & Rules. The player/learner must have a convincing sense of playing a meaningful role, playing off of logical and authentic rules.
I think it’s more than speed. It’s that many of these games are more intellectually and even academically challenging than their classroom experience.
Two more cents worth!
I think you are correct about the challenge and the rewards of game playing, but I think that there is also an element of safety involved. To use myself as an example, I play World of Warcraft, have for about a year. I started because my brother living in Arizona was ingame all the time and it was a chance to play with him. We even set up a ventrillo server so that we could talk to each other while we played. After a year I have to admit that it is an addiction, but it is also my time to visit, chat, play, relax, etc. Although I enjoy the questing, exploring and fighting, I spend a huge amount of time on the Auction House buying and selling. I spend probably 20 minutes a day just looking for items to buy low and sell high. Between all my toons I have probably earned, invested, spent and lost, thousands of gold. I sometimes think about why I don’t play the stockmarket the same way, I could make a bunch of money!
But it comes down to risk. If I lose 50g on a bad investment in WOW, np, if I lose $500 dollars in the real world it will hurt my budget! I can be the business man in WOW that I can’t in “real” life. For students, they can be challenged, take risks, etc, without any real risk of failure. You can always rez and run back to your body in WOW, go earn some more cash, or even abandon the toon completely and start over.
Is it possible that the risk in the classroom is what is holding our students back?
David,
I was at the MN ASCD conference yesterday, and thanks for helping me, personally, to get a better handle on RSS feeds… I have had students ask me as we visit various websites whether they have RSS and now I have my own aggregator set up and can more confidently respond!
I especially appreciate your ruminations about rigor as MN Governor Pawlenty is promoting a program or “Rigor, Relevance, & Results.” I think, I hope, that this initiative is based on Daggett’s definition of rigor.
http://www.leadered.com/pdf/Academic_Excellence.pdf
As you are likely aware, Daggett suggests that rigorous learning experiences are those which challenge student thinking processes (his framework reflects Bloom’s taxonomy). He suggests that relevant learning experiences are real-life and might integrate interactive technologies that hopefully reflect those “outside-the-classroom information experiences” you so passionately describe.
But I think the big lesson is here is students’ perspectives and, as Karen notes, student “expectations for their educational experiences in schools.” What 40-year-old teachers think is engaging and relevant (or even rigorous) is not effectively so unless (or until) students believe the same.
Thanks for a great day in MN. Kara
The really cool thing about English is its dynamic nature. Words that were meaningless only hours ago are now ubiquitous: skyping, googling, blogging. And used as not only nouns, but verbs as well!!
But I really wanted to comment on the definition of rigor, or more precisely, the problems inherent with using a dictionary….even an online dictionary. Using a dicitonary is a lot like using Google….oftentimes, one must scroll down the page to find the search term used in the context being sought. Had you looked a bit further, you would have seen the second definition for rigorous or rigor, either one: “marked by extremes of temperature or climate, barrenness of comforts or necessities, or other strenuous challenging obstacles.” This, I believe, is the context in which educators and education sees the term being used. Even the third defintion is much more precise for the context being sought.
Another point–I agree, we don’t want our students “powering down” because they are coming to school. But students aren’t the only ones who need to “power up”–so do teachers and administrators and parents. Our society just doesn’t know how to teach the 21st century learner. Part of the problem is a difference in vision–they’ve been drowing in a sea of trite images for so long, they cannot retrieve and sort important concepts for retention or analysis. They need relevance, but the funds of their teachers (parents and formal educators–money and skills) are limited and shallow. On the other hand, what generation hasn’t clamoured for the same–relevance in face of shifting realities. Dating myself, I remember the 70’s and wasn’t that far removed from the 60’s unrest or restlessness (however you see it).
My concern–if those who were students then cannot provide relevance for students now–where will the students of the future generations be? How can those who are “powering down” possibly hope to capture the attention of the post technology learners if techgen checks out before the learning starts?