This from Game On: Games in Libraries.
Merriam-Webster’s word of the year is “w00t!” Further proof that gaming is ubiquitous and invading pop culture. Full article at: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20071211/ap_on_re_us/word_of_the_year
According to the article, “W00t” is a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness or triumph — for those of you who, like me, didn’t know. 😉
I do not like to talk, here at 2¢ Worth, about activities with my clients unless they are very successful. It is not that I don’t want to talk about it, when things do not go well. I simply don’t want to reflect negatively on the client. So I usually wait a few weeks to talk about it, because there’s always something to be learned and shared, especially here.
This time, however, I want to go ahead. I believe that it might be in the interest of the teachers and administrators from Rose Tree Media School District who might be reading this, for me to have my say right now.
First, a little background. Rose Tree Media is implementing Pennsylvania’s Classrooms for the Future program, which provides funding for laptop computers in high school Math, Science, Language Arts, and Social Studies classrooms, as well as projectors and other technologies. It’s a good place for such a program. Their superintendent, Dr. Denise Kerr, seems not only to be a highly energetic and driven leader, but also extraordinarily creative. Think Mall School, just for a small indication of the outside the box orientation of her and her director of technology, Patti Linden, a woman who has been involved in instructional technology since the TRS-80.
The day was part professional development and part celebration. After my address about how what we do with computers has more to do with contemporary literacy than with technology, they held a switch-throwing ceremony involving a brilliantly constructed giant light switch and twelve high school youngsters rolling 12 laptop carts down the isles of the auditorium.
It was fun. The teachers and the kids enjoyed it. Then I moderated a student panel discussion with nine of the students (three had disappeared). I’ve talked about student panels before, about how they can be extremely useful and enlightening, or they may not be helpful. It depends on the students. After that experience, I’m coming to believe that student panels might actually set you back.
First of all, these were bright kids. They were funny and they were compelling — the kind of students any teacher would love to have in their class. But I could tell pretty early that things weren’t going where we wanted them to. My first question was, “How many of you use IM, text messaging, social networks, video games, etc.” The all raised their hands for IM and text messaging, and most raised their hands for Facebook (MySpace seems to be passe now). Only one, and finally two then three, admitted to playing video games.
I realized that many of the questions that I’d planned were not going to work, because I wanted us to learn what these kids were learning from their outside the classroom information experiences and how they were learning it. Instead, we learned that they all spent all of their time doing homework and considered video games a distraction, and the few minutes they spend with Facebook, they consider to be mindless interactions.
I finally asked, “How many of you consider yourselves ‘good students?'”
All nine raised their hands immediately, and a teacher behind me said, “These are all top-notch kids!”
Patti had arranged for a broad cross-section of students, but it was a day off for the kids, and arranging rides was a challenge, and three of the original twelve kids who rolled the carts down, apparently panicked at the crowd of teachers and fled out a side door. We had the “A” students who were enrolled in AP classes. These were the kids we don’t have to reach, the kids who do what they’re told and who have learned, from many years in the classroom, to tell us what they think we want to hear.
The harm of it? They reinforced those teachers who believe that we are doing just fine with our kids, doing things the same way we’ve always done them. I suspect that most teachers saw through what was happening and recognized that there is much more to learn from our students. But I still worry…
I’ve seen this work very well — In Ontario where they brought in “at risk” kids, and at the Council for Chief State School Officers conference in Maine where a couple of the panelists had just finished their Freshman year in college, and were reporting on their K-12 years from that perspective.
I’ve said that these things can be helpful — and they can. But I know now that you have to be very careful in selecting the kids, and you might even consider holding a pre-meeting with the panelists to orient them to what you’re looking for. You want to get out of the classroom and you want to talk about (learn from) the information experiences that are distracting to them and disrupting to us. We want to learn about those experiences.
For those teachers at Rose Tree Media, I say, “The kids you saw yesterday are easy.” What about the kids you are not reaching. What might their answers have been? Where are they, when you’re trying to teach about rhyme and meter, Caesar, plant cells, quadratic equations, and nutrition? They’re being reached by video games and social networks. Might we learn more about teaching today by learning more about those experiences?”
Added later:
Sylvia Martinez quite fairly calls me to task in her comment below, and a corresponding blog post, Don’t Blame the Kids. Well, I hope that it did not come across that I was blaming these kids. We were to blame for thinking that merely asking some kids some questions would help teachers understand something about a new generation of learner. As I said, I’ve seen this sort of panel work and work well. I know now that you have to come at it in a much more purposeful way, and, as Sylvia says so well, because it’s part of her “line,” that we learn about our children from their actions. As she says,
Kids shine when they share their work, and they get better at it when caring adults work with them to support their project development. They should be praised for real accomplishments and the ability to articulate them, not what happens to fall out their mouths. It’s a failure of adults not to create those conditions EVERY DAY.
The question remains, what are the best ways to start those conversations between information-oriented students and teachers who still see their classrooms as places for content delivery.
I’ll be delivering an ISTE Webinar later this afternoon, and it occured to me last night that I might try to suggest some instructional uses of blogs aligned with the new ISTE NETS Refresh. I’m including them here as a reference for the Webinar participants and for you.
Assignment:
In the coming weeks, major news outlets will start talking about the leading events of 2007 and the most influencial (or best dressed) people, i.e. Time’s “‘Man’ of the Year.” Few of your students will remember when these same agencies were talking about the events and people of the century and even of the millennium.
As a creative blogging assignment, we might ask students to look through the lists of the people and events of the year and of the century (People of the Year & Man of the Century) and then speculate on an achievement that might define the 21st century, describe it, and describe a ficticious person who is most responsible for the achievement.
After the original blog posts have been made, then classmates and others could comment on the articles, describing how the achievement of the century might impact on them.
Assignment:
As you are studying a part of the world in Social Studies class, ask students to write blog entries about what they are learning and also their reflections about the places and people they are learning about.
Connect with another class in that part of the world (Use ePals’ Class Finder), and arrange for students in that class to read your students’ blogs and then comment on them with clarifications.
Assignment:
As students are engaged in a major research assignment, as them to journal daily about their experience, listing what information they have found, how they found it, and how they evaluated the information to assure its appropriateness to the assignment.
Read and comment on the blog entries, giving support, tips, corrections, and other aide.
Assignment:
After reading a story, novel, or play, ask students to pretend to be one of the characters, and describe one sentence that might have been spoken to another character and at what time, that might have overcome the roadblocks of the problem more quickly and with less cost.
Ask classmates to read the blog entries and comment what the second character would logically have said in return.
Assignment:
Through class discussions, establish a bloggers code of digital citizenship and then ask students to select one of the elements of the code and write a blog entry about why it is important, describing the harm that ignoring it can harm, and strategies for making it a practice of habit.
Have classmates read and comment on, expressing support and making recommendations about strategies.
Assignment:
Ask students to learn about a new web tool and prepare to demonstrate it to the class. Ask them to journal, in their blog, their process for learning the tool, how the went about finding the answers to questions about operation or reasoning their ways into the solutions.
Then ask classmates to read the blog entries and comment, identifying the skills that seemed to be the most useful to the blogger.
There is obviously a lot of overlap, as many of these blogging activities address a number of the ISTE standards. Bottome line is that blogging is about communication, conversation, language, sharing, and building.
Will Richardson just shouted out into the Twitterverse for our gear lists for Christmas. I may add to this list — but at the moment, all I can think of is a gear-free vacation.
Ahhhhh!
 |
| Blogging Station at the Courtyard Hotel by the Philadelphia Airport |
First of all, congratulations to all of the winners of the EduBlog awards, and especially to all of those who were nominated. While I’m at it, congratulations to all of you bloggers who been doing this for some time, who have contributed in large, small, supportive, and critical ways to the conversation that I consider to be so important to education’s efforts at this time.
I especially want to congratulate the TechLearning blog for winning the best group blog distinction. I feel only a very small part of that effort as I marvel each week at the creativity and energy of these young folks. I say young because I think that Terry Freedman is the only one who is anywhere near my age.
Second, one of the only blog posts that I took time to read from my aggregator this morning came from Mark Alness, announcing to his students that their blogs are back. A few weeks ago, in an effort to ease the stress that the Class Blogmeister server was feeling, both from the 130,000 bloggers who are using it and the nearly one million page views being served up to Citation Machine users each day (End of the semester), I’d cut out to a new database table all of the blog entries prior to May 2007. Admittedly, I’d not considered the impact that this action would have on teachers south of the Equator.
It was only a temporary relief, and as I’ve written here already, I ended out getting an additional server. As it turned out, re-joining the two database tables was much more complex than it was to separate them out. I’d thought it would take some simple MySQL action, but I had to write some script to do the work, and I only got it right yesterday afternoon, here in my hotel room, in Philadelphia.
Mark writes:
To all past bloggers here at roomtwelve.com – all of your blog articles are back online! For the past few weeks, they have been unavailable, while the servers for classblogmeister were upgraded.
So, for those in Room Twelve from 2005-06, your blogs are all intact, right here, where they always have been…
I found it especially interesting that he went on to add:
May not seem like such a big deal, but I had groups of former students coming in to my class asking about their blogs – like, what happened to our blogs? Are they gone?
Although most of these kids are not actively contributing (right now), it’s clear their writing is still important to them – even what they wrote way back in third grade.
Finally, a while back I met a superintendent in California, Jeffrey Felix, who was working on his doctorate, and he’d decided to do his dissertation on classroom blogging. We talked at length about it then, and he continued the conversation, via formal e-mail exchanges. He also sought consultation from Will Richardson and Alan November.
I’d been thinking, for some time, that there was a lot of data and experience being generated among Class Blogmeister users, so I offered to post an announcement to the CB mailing list, asking for teachers who would be willing to help Jeff with his research. Frankly, that’s the last I heard about his study until yesterday, when he e-mailed me a copy of his paper, which has been accepted, passed through peer review (Society for Information Technology & Teacher Education), and he will be presenting it at the SITE Conference in 2008.
Among the findings that I zero’ed in on from the summary that he sent me were the four communication patterns that teachers perceived as a result of their students’ blogging:
Also, he found that edubloggers (his term for teachers who blog) describe student learners who have been a part of a blogging classroom as engaged in four types of learning:
At several points, Felix noted the excitement and enthusiasm that the participating teachers expressed during the exchanges. I would love to see more quantitative data. It’s why I added a readability tool to CB, so that each student blog is given a Flesch Index and grade level score, just to see what teachers might make of this. Not heard much so far. But all things considered, when classroom teachers are seeing something that is working, and excited about it, well that’s good enough for me.
The recent National Endowment for the Arts study, To Read or Not To Read, has reared its disturbing head again. When it was first announced, I chose not to comment. No need, Alfie Kohn, delivered my knee jerk reaction much more eloquently than I could have, in Do Kids Read Less for Fun? Blame Standardized Tests. Of course, blaming it on NCLB is too easy for such a complex issue. That said, I’m glad he did.
This morning, the study was cited in an article on the front page of the Arts & Entertainment section of my state’s capital news paper, the Raleigh News & Observer. The article, A New Frame of Mind, starts by helping us return to that scene in the 1986 comedy, “Back to School,” where the English professor asks Rodney Dangerfield about the books he had read during his long climb to the top, and the look of dismay, when the comedic actor says that he watches the movie.
Then the article pushes the point by including statements from interviews with local university English instructors from Duke and UNC about their use of films in their classes. Said Jane Thrailkill at UNC-Chapel Hill,
“After my students have read the book — “The Last of the Mohicans” or “The Scarlet Letter” — seeing film versions really helps them think about and understand those works,” she said.
Now here’s where the author envokes NEA report and quotes journalist William Allen White’s 1936 statement…
“The best books … are written frankly for the discerning and the wise.” Not so movies. “There, no artists, no directors, no writers, no theaters and no producers are set apart to please people of understanding.”
Even as the notion that motion pictures are a threat to reading continues to resonate among many, the author suggest that something else might actually be happening. “White’s highbrow/lowbrow distinction seems laughable now — the best films are great art.” In coming months and years, English teachers may well be asking students to watch Love in the Time of Cholera and Beowulf, as part of their literary expectations.
I agree, that although much of the media that is out there seems geared for the lowest common denominator of consumer, literature has become richer with the rise of motion pictures. And as video games become increasingly sophisticated, they too, may become a new literature. Have you seen Assassin’s Creed? Spectacular graphics and world-play (View this YouTube video). Might youngsters, on day, pretend sleep in the great hall waiting to do battle with Grendel.
I guess that the question that nags at me is what kind of information experience with these millennials demand when they are adults? What kind of literature will it take? What can we do today to help them make the most of it?
MIT’s OpenCourseWare project recently added its 1,800th course. Started in 2001, MITs OCW has grown from 50 courses to virtually their entire undergraduate and graduate curriculum. The content is out there. The learning is out there. As long as we insist on thinking of education as being something that happens in here — in the classroom, in the textbook, from the mouths of teachers, then it will become increasingly irrelevant for our students — and it seems to me that each dropout is another nail in the coffin.
I think that another difference between MIT’s OCW and other similar projects and the way that we traditionally “do” education, is that those courses use the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike license. The information is usable. What, how, and from where we are accustomed to teaching all seems so proprietary.
“No! You can’t write in your text book.”
Proprietary simply can’t mean as much as it use to, in a world that is changing too fast that it just can rest on a book shelf.
As an aside, Creative Commons turns 5 this month (dec 15). So celebrate in some way their efforts to free information.
John Lennon (1940 – 1980) was murdered today, 27 years ago. His image, words, and impact continue today — and continue to be a resonating chord in the music of American and world culture.
Garr Reynolds, at Presentation Zen, points to some YouTube videos that may be worth viewing on this day, and a web site, Imagine Peace, which includes a video and a note to John from his wife, Yoko Ono.
Here are links to three other videos:
Thanks, John Lennon!
Partly as an avoidance of the mountain of e-mail I have waiting for me, I took a little more than an hour, this morning, scanning through Google Reader. It may be the tail end of an exhausting travel schedule or perhaps I’m at the age, now, where I have the right to start thinking, sometimes longingly, about retirement, but my brain seemed to have turned around while I was reading and watching, thinking more about my own future and not just the future of our students.
The segway, for instance. It’s always seemed like such a futuristic, fringe product to me, a device still looking for its niche, a hammer looking for its nail. But might there truly be one in my future when the mile from my house to the grocery store, coffeeshop, and movie theater is just too much to do casually, and I continue to resist hopping in the car to drive it. Might it be common place for senior citizens to be scooting too and fro with grocery carts tether behind?
Or SecondLife. It’s no secret that I’m not all that terribly fond of the place, paying attention simply because we can’t ignore a thing that attracts approximately 50,000 inhabitants at any one time. But what about my future. Is this sort of virtual life something that will become more important to me — a place where I might continue to contribute when the glamor of travel has finally worn off — or my knees just won’t take the incline of the jetway any more.
Somebody smack me. I need a day off! 😉
Image Citation:
Rupert, Pim. “Grandpa Fedora Core.” Pim Rupert’s Photostream. 29 Nov 2005. 7 Dec 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/prupert/68375339/>.
Yesterday was a good day in Tampa, Florida. The keynote (New Literacy) was well received, and I had the opportunity to talk about the issues of literacy and the changing shape of information during two breakout sessions after the keynote. One thing you can say about school board members is that they ask questions — and the expect their questions to be answered.
Although I wouldn’t call it push back, there was some disbelief about Web 2.0, at least in my characterization of it — as an information environment that our children treat as their play ground. One very nice, polite, and enthusiastic woman said that she didn’t disagree, but that her own teenage children were digital natives (my words), and they were not making machinimas and probably didn’t know what Web 2.0 was. Another asked what percentage of teenagers were doing these things, and I arbitrarily said, “Ten percent?” Curses for not remembering the Internet and American Life Project study that found that 57% of U.S. teenagers have produced original digital content and published it on the Internet.
When I suggested that her children probably knew what machinima was and that they had downloaded machinima from the Net, she interrupted me and said, “My children do not download from the Internet.” Well, that’s another issue. But it’s like someone said a while back. It’s not Web 2.0 to these kids, because a participatory Web is the only Web they’ve known.
Coincidentally, while scanning my embarassingly neglected e-mail on my phone last night, while taxying up to gate 79 at the Kansas City Airport, I ran across a message from an acquaintance, Scott Mooney. He’s involved in instructional design for online learning in Maryland. Scott said in his e-mail,
I was invited into (Dr. Stan Bennett’s) class today to talk about the “real-world” and discuss my experiences in terms of integrating technology and training teachers to do the same. In the room were 20 or so 19-20 year-olds, most with their own laptops, mobile phones, iPods, living in the world that we talk about all the time. During my talk I brought up the present and future of modern tools, such as Web 2.0 and virtual worlds. I thought their eyes would light up, like I was now talking their language. In reality, you could hear a pin drop in that room. I was confused, so I asked if anyone in the room had blogged. No one. I asked if anyone knew what a wiki was. No one. I asked if anyone knew what Second Life was. No one.
I suspect that some people might look at us as wild-eyed profits from the wilderness, spouting off about a new coming. Or, perhaps worse, as opportunists creating a hazy condition, so that we can charge large sums for our expertise.
But change is like this. Today’s change is fast. I suspect, aside from great cataclysms, faster than any at time before. But it’s not so fast that it really stirs up the wind. As we were taxiing in last night, I noticed, painted on the wing of a nearby jet, “AA.com,” and I thought about how odd that would have seemed, how odd URLs on the sides of trucks did seem on a little more than ten years ago. Yet we take the web so much for granted today.
I think that our understanding of our information landscape is changing, not so fast that most people are interested in labeling or classifying it, but we are becoming far more intimate with our information experience than we’ve been since the time of Gutenberg, and that information experience is far more rich than it’s ever been before. ..and I believe that this new information environment has profound implications for teaching and learning. Because it makes both, teaching and learning, an active engagement in conversation about our world, ways that our world affects us, and ways that we affect it.
This is just too good to not kick up some wind about!
2¢ Worth