Month: September 2007

Vicki Davis, that Cool Cat Teacher, wrote a poignant, and classic, blog post yesterday about her son’s experience researching the 9/11 terrorist attack.

Cool Cat Teacher Blog:

When my son brought out his report on 9/11 facts, I was again reminded of how important it is to teach digital literacy.

You see, when he typed 9/11 facts — he found a conspiracy theory website(s) and came out of it thinking someone had bombed the building.

Yes, he is in seventh grade, and Yes, I’ve talked so much with him about verifying sources, however, kids so often think if it is “on” Google that it is right.

This is a crucial problem for us in education, equipping our students with the skills to critically evaluate the information that they encounter. It is probably the most frequent complaint that I hear from educators about the Internet, as they try to teach that which their students must learn.

So let me see if I can disappoint some people and come at this from an entirely different direction.  What if I suggested that it was our fault.  

We teach from textbooks, from reference books, from journals, online databases, and from our own educated expertise.  It’s part of our arsenal, as teachers, to help us instill confidence in the sources of that which we are teaching.  I’m not saying that textbooks, reference books, and commercial databases are bad, and that we shouldn’t use them.  They are enormously valuable.  But we’re missing something that’s very important when we rely so exclusively on carefully packaged content and then lament that our students and children rely so readily on Google.

We have to practice what we preach, and we have to practice it out loud!

At the same time that we continue to use our textbooks (or what ever they evolve into), reference works, databases, and our own expertise, we should also bring in, at every opportunity, content and resources that we have found, evaluated, processed, and prepared for teaching and learning, and that we should include conversations about how we found it, evaluated, and processed it.  If the are seeing us, every day, asking the questions that are core to being literate today, then perhaps they will not only develop the skills of critical evaluation, but also the habits.

2¢ Worth!

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Image Citation:
Bargmann, Monika. “Googling.” Library Mistress’ Photostream. 31 Jan 2006. 12 Sep 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/library_mistress/93567838/>.

Periodically, my neighbor, Paul Gilster, and I have coffee together at Starbucks.  Paul is the author of Digital Literacy, and several of the earliest books about the Internet, including the Internet Navigator and the Mosaic Navigator.  Most recently, Gilster wrote Centauri Dreams, a fascinating (mind-blowing) book about the future of interstellar space travel.  He also maintains a blog by the same name, which is a daily visit for the astronomy and advanced propulsion communities.

Last week, Paul suggested that we may well get evidence of life on planets outside the solar system before we know anything about life on the other planets of our Sun.  Conservatively speaking, he said that we should have technology within 20 years to take spectroscopic readings of the atmospheres of known planets and the more terrestrial worlds we will soon be discovering.  (I was surprised to learn that 246 extrasolar planets have been discovered orbiting 98 stars.  NASA runs a database of discovered planet, non-solar planets at PlanetQuest.)  Paul suggested that if we decided to fully fund the development of these technologies, we could be collecting readings in as little as ten years..

There are certainly elements and combinations of elements that can only be produced in significant quantities by bio-metabolism.   According to an article that Paul sent me that night,

“The most convincing spectroscopic evidence for life as we know it is the simultaneous detection of large amounts of oxygen as well as a reduced gas, such as methane or nitrous oxide, which can be produced by living organisms. Oxygen, methane, and nitrous oxide are produced in large amounts by plants, animals, and bacteria on Earth today, and they are orders of magnitude out of thermodynamic equilibrium with each other.”1

Another article suggests that oxygen alone may indicate life…

“Once created, molecular oxygen may combine with other molecules in the process of oxidation, and thus disappear as a spectral signature unless it is continually replenished by further photosynthesis.2

In his follow-up e-mail, Paul urged that such evidence would not be airtight, “but it will be persuasive and convincing.”

Why do I care?  Because I remember a time before humankind had entered space.  I remember Sputnik and Echo.  I remember Gagarin and Shepard.  I remember when the world watch a man walk on the moon.  I remember the launch of the first Space Shuttle, our first spaceship, and am continually astounded by our robotic explorations of our own solar system.

I remember a time when we were accountable to more than just ourselves — when we were accountable to possibilities.  Our children well be so fortunate if they live in such times — if they can make such times.

Yesterday, I wrote about the jobs I’ve had, and how I learned skills outside of my schooling that carried me through the decades of rapid change.  It seems a lot more impressive than it is.  I was also a short-order cook and waited tables while I was in college.  Matthew Tabor brings up some issues in his thoughtful comment, that I must admit tugged at me as I was writing that post.  He says,

It sounds as if you were equipped with the tools to teach yourself those skills – what makes you think that you weren’t?

You give an impressive list of things that your 1950’s/60’s school couldn’t have known about but which you’ve mastered – coding, self-publishing, etc. Then you lament that the schools didn’t give you the skills.

If the school didn’t play a role giving you the transferable skills you used to get through a broad array of jobs and professional endeavors in the future, who did?

I’m going to try to comment on this, but it’s important to state that this is my own experience and my own impressions of my own experience.  It is true that my schooling equipped me with essential skills to be a lifelong learner.  My teachers taught me to read, to think with numbers, and to write a coherent paragraph (on a good day).  It also built a context for my life, so that I had a sense of where and when I was living, because I came to know something about the science and history of my existence.

What I question is, “Did that education instill in me a learning lifestyle?  (The more I use that term, the more I like it.)  I remember, standing in line to receive my high school diploma, several classmates behind me saying, “I’m never going to read another book!”  I wasn’t surprised.  But if any student today, graduates with that attitude toward reading, then there is something very wrong with the schools, teachers, and curriculum that served them.

I remember, in the early days of personal computers, when we thought that the best thing we could do with them was teach children to program.   I didn’t do that.  I was much more interested in writing instructional software that helped kids learn to think, make inferences, spell the states.  But I remember teachers and trainers saying, “These kids (and teachers) can’t learn to program.  They can’t think.”

I remember wondering why I was able to learn programming so easily, and most people weren’t.  We thought then that it was aptitude.  But I kept thinking about my father’s woodworking shop in the basement of my childhood home.  He had a pile of scrap lumber in the basement, which I had permission to use.  I could also use most of his tools.  When I wanted a toy, I went to that pile of variously shaped pieces of wood, found the shapes that could be nailed together to make that toy, and went about it.  Seymour Papert tells a similar story in Mindstorms — about gears.  I envied the kids, whose fathers could afford to buy them plastic toys.  But I was learning to take stray shapes, and ultimately pieces of information and put them together to make something new — I was learning to teach myself.

I do not think I was very good at being taught.  I remember ignoring my math teachers, and then reasoning through how to work the problems when I got home.  I think it’s my particular form of A.D.D. that I can’t sequence things well.  My mind is VERY random.  I was  lousy at working  repetitive long division problems.  I was lousy at memorizing rules of grammar.   But when I took Geometry, and had to reason through  axioms and assemble them logically in a way that solved a problem, I found that I was actually good at math.  I was good at learning how to solve a problem, at teaching myself how to solve that problem.   Classmates who had  always made  As in math, were pulling their hair out.  They were good at being taught a process, not so much at inventing a process.

I’m not saying that my schooling was worthless, nor that there aren’t things that need to be taught.  Absolutely not.  I’m just saying that education’s job, in the 1950s and ’60s, was to prepare students for a future that was static and predictable. 

I believe that we  no longer live in those times.  I believe that we need schools where students teach themselves.  We must assure that they become literate, but that it is a literacy to learn — learning literacy.  We should assure that they are gaining a common context for themselves, who they are, what they are, where they are, when they are, and that they appreciate the ways that their environment impacts them and how they impact their environment — and that they learn these things through their developing learning literacies.

Added 2 Hours Later: I would have to say that nothing taught me how to learn more than being a teacher.

Sorry for the personal tour…

Yesterday, master educator, author, and Minnes-oo-ta humorist, Doug Johnson listed the many jobs he has had, after quoting the oft’ cited projection…

The Department of Labor projects that people will hold on average 10.2 jobs between the ages of 18 and 38

Read Doug’s Sept 9 Blue Skunk post for the reference, and to scan a bewildering array of jobs he’s held — way more than 10.2.

This probably doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it looks a lot like where I spent a year working in a chainsaw factory.

For me, I

• Washed cars, delivered newspapers, made picture frames and rubber stamps, and played music in bands for date money.
• After high school, I worked in a machine shop as an operator and set-up man, drove a forklift, loaded and unloaded freight cars in Colorado, moved furniture, and played guitar in coffee shops.
• Since college, I’ve been a classroom teacher, packaged “Jacks cookies,” sold encyclopedias (for one day — wasn’t very good at that one), directed a technology program for a rural school district, state DOE staff consultant and web master, and free-agent educator.
• As a free-agent, I’ve generated income as a web designer, programmer, author, teacher, and public speaker.

Like Doug, considerably more than 10.2 Jobs.

..and like Doug, I never really found that labor department projection very impressive — even though I’ve thrown it into presentations every now and then.  At the same time, I’ve thought it was a bit of a push.

In his blog, Doug down-plays the skills that he developed and that carried him through…

..they were “soft” skills – reliability, cooperation, communication, strong back, high tolerance for boredom, etc. – not really job-specific.

In my efforts to understand what the labor department’s projections and my work experiences mean, within the context of school reform, I ask myself, “How did I learn…”

..to play guitar (bass & Banjo) and organ?  I taught myself!

..to write software?  I taught myself.

..to code web pages?  I taught myself!

..to self-publish a book?  I taught myself!

The schools that I attended in the 1950s and ’60s tried very hard to teach me how to be taught.  I believe that this is one of the shifts that we have to achieve as we try to retool classrooms.  We need to do less of..

teaching kids how to be taught,

and instead,

teach them to teach themselves.

I think that the point is not that everyone is going to have 10.2 jobs between the ages of 18 and 38.  Many of us will only have one job.  But how many times will that one job change?  10.2 times?  Perhaps not, but when it changes, who’s going to teach the new skills?

We need to stop teaching literacy, and teach learning literacy.

We need to stop teaching literacy skills, and teach literacy habits.

We need to stop thinking about lifelong learning, and instead, work toward every student leaving our schools with a learning lifestyle.

We need to be willing to take every piece of furniture our of our classrooms, clear the walls, burn it all, and start all over again.  The world has changed that much.

Anything less is an insult to our children.

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Image Citation:
Pilaar, Paul. “DSC00247.” Pilaar39’s Photostream. 11 Nov 2005. 10 Sep 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/pleduc/62189025/>.

Gary Cooper & Grace Kelly in High Noon

Brenda and I saw two great movies this weekend.  Friday night, I was in the mood to get out, so we walked down to North Hills to the Regency and watched 3:10 to Yuma.  It’s possible that you would have to be my age, having grown up on westerns, to truly enjoy this movie.  It was the closest thing I’ve seen in a long time to the classic western formula — that wasn’t spoofing the classic western formula.

3:10 to Yuma has it all: a greedy land baron, made up saloon lady, prairie mom, prairie youngster coming of age, really nasty mean bad guy (played by Ben Foster), unscrupulous Pinkerton (played by Peter Fonda), eccentric doctor (played by Alan Tudyk), strong quiet Gary Cooper hero (played by Christian Bale) and Henry Fonda-type bad guy/maybe good guy played by (Russell Crowe).

The movie also had the loud percussive gun fire that I enjoyed at the end of Open Range.  I’ll see this one again.

Last night we watched a NetFlix that I’ve been holding for weeks, about to send back.  It was A Face in the Crowd, staring Andy Griffith, who brilliantly plays a jailed hobo who is discovered and coaxed into a media stardom.  It’s said that Griffith got the part when he was invited to dinner with director, Elia Kazan, and, in audition, took on the roll of television evangelist Oral Roberts, took Kazans head in his hands, and healed him — “be healed!” (Simon)

It’s one of those great movies that I wouldn’t want to watch again.  When it was over, Brenda and I both said, in low voices, “Wow!”

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Simon, Scott. “Andy Griffith, Back on the Big Screen with ‘Waitress’.” Movies. 12 May 2007. NPR. 9 Sep 2007 <http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=10145664>.

I guess it’s a bit presumptuous to put the word, conversation, in the title of this blog.  It is impossible for me to predict which posts are going to generate conversations and which aren’t.  Perhaps if I’d included the word, rant, it would stand a better chance.  Perhaps, Wikipedia, guarantees it.

So, here’s my problem.  I’m working on a fairly major writing project, and I want to include a common phrase.  The phrase itself is common enough that it really doesn’t need any support.  It’s relevance and reliability as a working point can rest entirely on the momentum of it’s historic acceptance.  However, I would like to include in my writing, some information about where the phrase came from — and this is my quandary, because I would like to support this information, to cite a source.

When I refined my search down to its essential elements, I was reduced to 9 hits:

• A blog,
• One training manual,
• One TV program script,
• Two other search tools,
• An undocumented quotes site,
• A Political message board,
• A small-group wiki, and
• The wikipedia

You guessed it. 

I want to use the Wikipedia! 

..And, I don’t want to use the Wikipedia! 

My reasons for wanting to avoid using the Wikipedia as a source for my reference are obvious.  Much of this online community encyclopedia is undocumented, including this article.  The Wikipedia, from many perspectives, is a social network (this article has been worked by 11 editors).  And, to many of the readers of my work, the Wikipedia is automatically suspect.

Yet, of the sources I found, the Wikipedia is the one I want to use.  Even though the Wikipedia article is not documented, neither are any of the other sources.  But, for all of the other sources, there is no evidence at all of any attention to quality.  The Wikipedia article has been scrutinized and edited 23 times in the last year, four times in the last month.  61% of the edits were by registered Wikipedia editors.  The wikipedia reference is consistent with all of the other sources.

Perhaps the most important question is, “What does it matter?”  What happens if the Wikipedia is wrong.  In this case, nothing.  The linch pin of my argument is the phrase itself, which, as I said, carries the weight of its own historic common acceptance — more than 600,000 hits on Google.  If the reference to the source of the phrase is wrong, then nothing really happens to my argument.

I think that this might be an important/essential question to ask in selecting a supporting source to cite — “What happens if it’s wrong?”

So, what do you think?

P.S.
Do you have these conversations in your classroom?

Brenda and I have been watching episodes of House, a medical mystery series.  My son left the first two years of it at home when he went off to school.  The medical stuff is more than a little disturbing, but the characters are growing on us.  Not nearly as good as The West Wing, which took us all of the 2006-2007 school year to watch.

One of last night’s episodes ended with Doctor House (played by Hugh Laurie), sitting in his office, with The Who‘s Baba O’Riley playing loudly on his iPod, connected to Bose speakers.  The quirky but brilliant diagnostician has just lied to the Transplant Board to get a new heart for his patient.

House is miming the opening synthecizer on his desk (We’ve all done this before — haven’t we?), when he reaches back and breaks into piano on the credenza.  Just as the drums kick in, and he wheels his chair back to become Keith Moon, the hospital’s new Chairman of the board (who doesn’t like House’s unconventional demeanor) walks in.  House, being House, doesn’t stop.  He simply says, “Here comes the good part!”  Rather than enjoy the show, the Chairman of the Board reaches over and switches off the iPod.

An amiable confrontation ensues, followed by a muting out of the set and the continuation of Baba O’Riley…

I don’t need to fight
To prove I’m right
I don’t need to be forgiven

It made me think, somebody, somewhere, has made a very cool niche job of researching out the perfect song from a vast history of musicology for a specific scene in TV or Movies.

This person could live in India — or she might live in the three stoplight mill town I grew up in.

The other day I ran across some notes I took at a workshop I attended when I worked for the NC State Department of Public Instruction.  I do not recall the name of the workshop, but it was about writing successful reports and memos.  The concepts were research-based (writing that people understand more fully and more quickly) and pertained to how information is arranged on paper — producing messages that it communicate themselves more effectively.  I used many of these concepts when I use to present sessions and teach workshop on web design.

Write in short paragraphs separated by lots of white space. 

Short paragraphs are easier to read and understand.  In addition, a report or e-mail message with shorter separated paragraphs look less intimidating, improving the chances of their being read.

Any list of items that accedes two, should be bulleted. 

When lists are embedded in a paragraph, the reader has usually read two or three of the items before they know that it is a list.  They may, then, have to re-read the information so that they can process it as a list.  A bulleted list signals to the reader, graphically, that this is a list and you need to think about this information as a list.

If there is a reason why the first item in the list is the first item, and the second follows it, then precede items with numbers.  Basically, what you can convey to the reader, at first glance, saves time and increases understanding.

Headings and subheadings should hang out over the paragraphs that follow. 

One of the issues that these recommendations address is the fact that we have so much to read these days.  We’re drowning in information.  Much of the time we scan the information looking for that which is valuable — the answer to our question.  When headings and subheadings are bolded and hanging at a margin of their own, with content indented over, they make better scanning targets.  It is much easier for the reader to find the section of the document that is most relevant to their needs — saving time.

If an idea can be effectively conveyed with an image, then it should be conveyed with an image. 

A picture is worth a thousand words.  Well the math may not be that precise, but pictures communicate.  Our brains are wired for images, not symbolic shapes.  There is much that can only be efficiently communicated with letters, words, and sentences.  But if an idea can be conveyed with an image, then an image is probably the most efficient way to do it.  The same goes for graphs, tables, and diagrams.

If I were writing a manifesto for 21st century teaching and learning, one of the items would be, “The 21st Century classroom does not teach writing — it teaches communication.”   This goes for the writing that students do.  It also goes for the writing that teachers do.  Some of the study guides that my children use to bring home for preparing for their tests were little more than alphabet soup.  That’s a bit of an exaggeration.  But when information is laid out for scanning, for mental organization, for efficient reading and comprehension, then goals are more easily attained, even test scores.

2¢ Worth!

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Image Citation:
Swift, Tom. “And What shall I Write.” Tomswift46’s Photostream. 15 Feb 2005. 6 Sep 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/tomswift/4837657/>.

The stupidest thing I ever did was to buy some rollerblades the day I turned 40.  Completely cured me of any and all mid-life crises I might have harbored during the next decade and a half.  That pavement comes up a lot faster now than it did when I was 18, and no matter where I was wearing pads, it wasn’t what hit the pavement first.

This guy, standing in line at Starbucks, is way stupider than I was.  But he was actually quite good on his blades.  I wonder if mine still fit?

Off for my 12 mile bicycle ride.

I received an e-mail this morning from a colleague who had been flamed for a recent post.  I read one of the blog postings aimed at him and was shocked to see quite inflammatory comments and even image manipulations  designed to bring the attack to a more personal level — and this from an educator who is probably a pretty nice fellow in real life.

Some of it, I suspect, is geo-cultural.  I’ve seen public confrontations in some parts of my country that would have traumatized people where I grew up.  But even though there is little geography on the web, there is still physical distance, and I imagine that some people feel protected by that distance.  I think it’s probably more likely that good people are prevented from seeing injury by the distance that separates them from those they harm.

It’s something that we have to figure out, as adults, and figure out how to help our students to learn.  Information today is property and we want to protect our property, whether its a book, from which we draw income, or an idea that we’ve invested ourselves in.  Information is also a tool, and a hammer can be swung at things other than nails.

In Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century, I wanted to include a information code of ethics for students and teachers.  I quickly realized that I’m not smart enough to write one myself.  So I looked to a community who was already practicing the type of literacy skills I’d been writing about, and quickly realized that it was journalists.  They work to expose the truth, employ information, and express ideas compellingly.  So I found the web site for the Society of Professional Journalists, and looked up their code of ethics — and it was a nearly perfect match.

Their executive director gave me permission to adapt their code for students and teachers and to include it in my book.  I believe that we must help students learn to:

• Seek the truth and express it,
• Minimize harm,
• Be accountable — be responsible, and
• Protect the information infrastructure.

This is not something that we teach in the 3rd grade, check it off, and go on.  It’s not a skill.  It’s habit.  ..and it needs to be a part of almost every conversation that we have in our classrooms.

There is an MSWord version of the Student and Teacher Code of Ethics on my web site.  You are welcome to edit this document for your school community.  It is designed to be explored and talked about.

We all invest time and effort into our ideas and writings.  We need to come to respect that effort, even if we do not agree with the ideas.

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Image Citation:
Tina. “Bully Free Zone!.” Mamabrarian’s Photostream. 1 Nov 2006. 6 Sep 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/mamabrarian/285659149/>.