In Case You Haven’t Seen the Perceptive Pixel

I met Lauren Rosen at the Central States languages conference last week, and we had an interesting conversation about the new shape of information.  She mentioned a video about how we will interact with computers in the future.  Lauren couldn’t find the link in her computer, but said she would e-mail it to me.  It was in my phone before I arrived back in Raleigh.

Give it a look — and by the way, “Where’s the Computer?”  It’s all about the information.

A Good Day & More Than a Little Disruption

This picture has nothing to do with the conference, except that it is in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency, and it is absolutely mesmerizing.

I may have admitted to my readers before, the apprehension I was felling about keynoting the Central States Conference for the Teaching of Foreign Languages.  No need.  What a hospitable group of people, and a much larger turnout than I had expected.  My message on a flattening world, flattening information landscape, and flattening classrooms seemed to resonate quite well with them, and they were so very welcoming to this mono-lingual lug.  I also did sessions on blogging and podcasting, merely leading up to Apple gal Janet Hills much richer presentation on podcasting.  She’s a real geekster gadgeteer who puts on a very impressive show.  I did leave her envying me and my new Logitech wireless remote — with volume control. 😉 Later in the day, I sat in on Tom Welch’s presentation, Language Learning in a Flat World.  Welsh is a consultant from Kentucky and is doing a lot of work on 21st century skills, and doing some work in my own state.  He use to be a French teacher, so he definitely knew the lingo and the buttons.  Welsh started off with Karl Fisch’s Did You Know? video and then talked about how KFCs in China are out selling Mcdonalds.  The reason?  KFC has adapted their menu to appeal to the Chinese pallet.  I heard exactly the same thing in New Zealand, that KFC stores  have an architecture that is designed to appeal to the Maori and other Polynesian cultures.  This is also being blamed for increased obesity among Maoris. Welch also predicts a coming tsunami in education.  He attributes it to three already established and emerging factors:

  1. The identification of standards (an agreement on the “product”)
  2. The use of common end of course assessments (quality guarantee)
  3. Technology (oportunities for learning 24/7/7 – on demand learning)

Because of my well published predisposition against standards-based education and high-stakes testing, and any emphasis on technology (for technology’s sake), I almost disregarded this list altogether and and quite nearly deleted it right after I typed it into my notes.  However, I continued to listen. As it seems, there is one more factor, that when stirred into this cauldron, could quite easily transform this concoction into something apocalypticly disruptive to the business of education.  Simply erase the Carnegie Unit, the unit of measure for American education, and kaboom. I didn’t get this at first, but as Tom continued to talk, it suddenly rushed over me like a fever.  When a principal is confronted with a group of students who need to learn organic chemistry, and she are thinking of the situation in terms of standards of knowledge and skill to be attained to a specific measurable degree, then the answer is not necessarily an automatic, “I need to find a chemistry teacher.”  The answer is, how am I going to cause that learning to take place, and her options extend well beyond just hiring a teacher.  I’m not jumping up and down with joy over this.  I haven’t rolled the stone around enough.  I suspect that I am going to have mixed feelings.  But I must admit that on of the products that I was especially interested in, in the exhibitor’s hall, was a service where you can hire a teacher in Peru to teach you Spanish via the Internet for $15 an hour. It’s got me scratching my head!

In Harrisburg Thinking about Languages

Tomorrow, I’ll be keynoting the Central States Conference on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, so languages have been on my mind.  Last night, at a gathering of the board of directors and several presenters for the CAPE Conference today, we got to talking about languages as well, since they are using their technology to provide for the learning of Japanese, Chinese, and other less common but emerging high school foreign languages.

But before I say something about languages, I found it interesting, last night, that as people were introducing themselves around the table, most of them mentioned the number of years they had been in education, and most of them had more years in than me — and I’m in my 31st year.  Now what does it mean, that a group who is designing, implementing, and maintaining such a forward reaching and sometimes disruptive application of technology, are mostly in the final years of their career. 

No, let me put it this way — professionals who are operating from decades of experience as educators and education leaders, all during what certainly must have been the most dramatic time of progressive change in human history.  Now it’s starting to make sense.

Several times lately, in talking with experienced educators, names like James Herndon, John Holt, and A.S. Neill have come up.  You youngsters, if you haven’t heard of them, look these writers up.  You might find it interesting.

http://davidwarlick.com/images/clustermap.gifNow as for languages, we got to talking about how much we can learn about culture from learning about their language.  The question was posed, does the culture make the language or does language make the culture?  I don’t know, but it made me wonder about evolving languages, tipping points, and a rapidly changing world.

The word, blog, has only been listed in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary for a few years.  It is a new word, and a new concept.  Publish has been around for many years, it is somewhat different from blog.  Publish is institutional.  blogging is personal.  We can blog now.  We, as individuals, can publish to a global readership, and be responded to.  This word, blog, has become a part of our vocabulary, part of our dictionaries.  That’s a tipping point.  What does it mean to a culture that can practice such democratic activities? 

What do you think?

Best Places to Have your Laptop

And finally, time for one more post before I have to pack for the airport. DailyWireless just published a list of the ten most connected cities.

The 10 Most Connected Cities in the World:

Through a blend of private and public investment, a number of cities have had remarkable success in providing almost complete connectivity throughout their city limits. For residents in these cities, high-speed access is available almost anywhere and at any time, and often for below-market rates.

Here is the count, and please link to the original DailyWireless entry for descriptions of each city…

  1. Seoul, South Korea
  2. Taipei, Taiwan
  3. Tokyo, Japan
  4. Hong Kong, China
  5. Singapore
  6. Stockholm, Sweden
  7. Various Municipal Projects, USA (St. Cloud, Florida; Mountain View, California; Tempe, Arizona; Corpus Christi, Texas)
  8. Paris, France
  9. Shoreditch, England
  10. Silicon Valley, United States

Again, read the article for more details.

Rigid VS Flexible

I did get to attend one session at the MN ASCD conference yesterday, Passion and Culture: Effective Schools for the 21st Century.  The presenter, a university person, visited a number of schools that have been identified as exemplifying twenty-first century teaching and learning.  Among them were:

  • Mission Hill School,
  • High Tech High, and
  • John Dewey School

The presenter talked about the qualities of those schools that were unique, ending out with two areas of interest, Culture (clear, guiding and positive school culture) and Passion (an evident passion for learning).  But what really got my noggin cooking was a question that one of the attendees asked at the end of the session.  The young man asked if the presenter saw, in her studies and interviews, where the line was in these schools with regard to rigid structures of time, space, and expectations; and flexibility.

I talked about these rigid points of traction the other day in my article, More on School 2.0.  I didn’t know it then, but students in the classroom and elements in the community had become these traction points as well as the software that facilitated the communications.

What seemed to be implied here (and it may have been my own pre-conceived notions) was that you can have either a rigid structure or a flexible structure.  That just didn’t ring true for me, and after some time to bounce this around in my head, I realize that it isn’t a matter of either/or, but, instead, it’s a when, where, and who.  The rigidity is an essential element in teaching.  To learn, you have to have something to push off of.  It may be the textbook, the assignment, the lecture, what ever.  There has to be something hard to gain traction from, or else all of that classroom energy just flares out, accomplishing nothing. 

The question is who determines where and when those rigid points will be applied.  Most recently, it has been government mandated tests, turning learners into mere reflectors of their learning.  But in a more flexible learning environment, we might come to trust teachers, once again, to determine the points of rigidity — the traction points.  They might be textbooks.  They might also be blogging software that provides a hard place for students to express their knowledge and beliefs.  It might also be other students, by which blogged ideas will be captured, responded to, and bounced back out.  It might come to be elements in the community who do the same — see what and how their children are learning, and respond, providing yet another point of traction.  All kinds of things are possible, if we can just let go of the fear, and start doing our jobs again.

2¢ Worth

Out of Context but In-Sync

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.

Only a Second Language?

We've had some snow in MinnIt’s 11o outside with a wind chill affect of -2o and it’s Minneapolis.  I’m speaking at the Minnesota ASCD conference today about the millennial generation, and also video games and Web 2.0.  This will be largely curriculum people and I’m very excited about that.  I wish that we had more opportunities to work outside of the technology community and mix ideas with experts in other areas of education.

One of my blog readers has asked me to do just that, regarding foreign languages.  Marcy wrote a few days ago:

David, where does learning a second language fit into your equation of what students today need to know? Is it not a critical component  of a “flat world?” I would like to read your thoughts on this.

First of all, this is most assuredly outside my area of expertise.  Of the three second languages I have taken, I failed two of them.  I know now that it was probably because of some rather severe hearing problems I’ve had since I was nine.  I did well in Latin, but only because I didn’t have to hear it and speak it.

That said, and speaking entirely from the perspective of globalization, millennial learners, and a new information landscape, the question that begs asking in my mind is, “What good is a second language?” What I mean to say is, don’t we really need fifth or sixth languages?  If it is our goal to be able to interact in a global community in the community’s tongue, then one more language (among the hundreds or thousands of human languages) really isn’t that much. 

Certainly conversing in Chinese would be immensely helpful from a business point of view, and Canadians who can speak French and people in the U.S. who can speak Spanish are going to be able to understand more of what’s happening in their countries.  But it seems to me, that what’s most important, is to learn more about the cultures and economies of other countries.  Digital translators will certainly continue to improve, and human translators will continue to be important.  But prospering in an increasingly global world requires us to understand the people of that world, their customs, their heritage, their myths, and their economic place in a cooperating world — and I suspect that clues to these understandings may come from elements in their languages.  So I wonder if rather than requiring college-bound students to learn a second language, that they be expected to study four or five languages, as part of cultural studies — a new style of geography.

All that said, I’m happy that it appears that the social studies may be starting to earn some respect again, after years of second-class status — what has almost appeared to be a fear of it.

On the Road Again, but Thinking about iWorlds

http://davidwarlick.com/images/iworlds.jpgUCET worked me hard.  I had a keynote and three breakout sessions in the auditorium on Friday and then another two seventy-minute breakouts in a classroom on Saturday.  When my last session was over, I knew I could relax, at last, and look forward to my day at home on Sunday.  Then I met Wesley Smith of iWorlds Simulations

Someone had talked with him about my session the day before on video games as learning engines, and he wanted to meet and share ideas with me.  So we sat at a table in the cafeteria and talked for about 45 minutes.  I need to state that I was sooo not ready for this.  I was tired, brain-dead, my computer bag had become entirely too heavy to carry any further, and I wanted to get home.  But after that meeting, I was so energized with the possibilities.

Because of my afore mentioned condition, I do not remember all of the details, sequence, or contexts of that conversation, but there is something on the horizon that is new, and that plugs in magnificently with much that I think and talk about.  So look out for something that is part field trip, part corporate training, part World of War Craft and part worksheets.  There’s a lot Star Trek and a little Oregon Trail, a bunch of video arcade and laser tag, and you should probably throw in some legos for good measure.  And it may actually happen in your local mall.  This guy’s got a vision for something that I think could be huge and he tells the story very well.

So look out!   Also, check out the video on their web site.

Carolina Conference Just Around the Corner

I’ll be attending the NCAECT conference where I’ll see, among others, Will Richardson and Elliot Soloway, our keynote speakers.

The South Carolina Association of School Librarians (3/7/07 – Columbia) and North Carolina Association of Educational Communications Technology (3/12/07 – RTP) conferences are just around the corner.  The are both registered on Hitchhikr so that flickr photos and conference bloggings will both be aggregated on the site.

You can use my Blog Tag Generator (linked from the front page of Landmarks for Schools) to tag your blogs).  Here are instructions for setting up a flickr account and posting photos to your account.

I was Bored Too

Chris Sloan, of Sloanspace said the other day:

Sloanspace: are they really different?:

I hear a lot about how today’s students are so much different than preceding generations. For instance, I heard David Warlick speak this morning at the UCET conference. Among other things he said that kids today are more competitive, risk-taking, sociable and self-confident than the preceding generation. I’ve heard he, Marc Prensky band others say similar things, but I’m not completely convinced.

(They say that) ..these kids are bored with school because teachers no longer know how to hold their attention, they say. But then I think about how bored I was through much of high school, and how I multitasked by listening to a transistor radio with one earpiece, how I daydreamed, wrote song lyrics in notebooks that my teachers never saw, how kids passed notes (a precursor of “chatting”), and I wonder – are today’s kids really that different than kids were back in the day? Have the students changed or are they just using different tools?

I agree with Chris, that perhaps our children, fundamentally, are not that different.  I also do not buy in to this multitasking thing.  I think that they are probably better at moving quickly from task to task — shift-tasking, and I think that this has more to do with their information experience.  That’s what’s changed, and it’s undeniable.  How our children spend their time and the intensity of their information experiences do, in many ways, define them.

I agree, also, about bordom as a somewhat universal condition of teenage years.  I too was board nearly to tears with I was growing up. But, as a result, I suspect that regardless of my less than spectacular grades, my classrooms probably shown more light on my future than todays classrooms do on our children’s future.  I suspect that the shift that’s happened is that our children’s outsidetheclassroom activities have become less boring (more energizing, exciting, challenging, social, etc.), and, in comparison, their classroom experiences (in many cases) have become less meaningful and less relevant.

Certainly the brain research points to children who are wired differently, and John Beck’s (Got Game) listing of children’s qualities is based on exhaustive research.  But I believe that it is their information experience that we need to be paying attention to and coming to understand — and that we probably need to reshape our classrooms as a result.

Thanks so much for continuing the conversation, Chris.


Image Citation:
Powter, Adrian. “Bored.” http://flickr.com/photos/dandini/. 5 Nov 2006. 4 Mar 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/dandini/289717290/>.