Month: September 2006

Australian educator and blogger, story the other day about a conversation he overheard at StarBucks (StarBucks in Australia?). Moller said,

…the kids were talking about an advertisment that comes up at the movies warning people about the risks of downloading movies online. The advertisment challenges the viewer that because they wouldn’t steal a purse or break in to a house and steal a TV they shouldn’t download a movie because it is the same thing. Makes sense to me – Stealing is Stealing!! However, the insight these teens put on the conversation was interesting indeed. One said that it was a stupid argument because if someone just left a purse sitting out in the open where it was easy to get to then of course you would just take it. He continued, stating that because movies and music is so easy to download and because it is out there in the open for anyone to take so easily then it is ok.

21st Century Educator » 21st Century Ethics

Moller continued…

I think it is an evolution of social networks and the thinking that is being developed by young minds of today. To think that stealing is ok just because it is easy says to me that they have lost a sense of reality and which in turn distorts their understanding of what is right and wrong.

I think that Brett makes a very good point here, that right and wrong appears to have given way to convenience. He wonders what the motion picture industry might do to better protect their assets, but I wonder what we might do, as an education industry, to help students better understand the ethics of information.

Right and wrong is the core of the issue, but I think that value is where the confusion actually lies. The movie files that these youngsters were talking about, were not left out in plain view from neglect or disregard. It is the technology that makes it so easy to take digital property, not that it got lost. It would actually be easier to walk into someone’s yard and take their outdoor furniture, or even their car. But I doubt that the youngsters Moller overheard would even consider doing this. I think youngsters see information, as property (made of bits), differently from the way that they see an object, as property (made of atoms).

So how do we teach students to value information? I think that we must first come to value information ourselves. Teachers must explicitly and conspicuously practice information ethics every day, and this goes much deeper than merely adding citations to our handouts.

What do we (the education institution) value? We value answers. We value performance. We value achievement. When a student turns in a report, research paper, drawing, or what ever, we mark its level of performance, and then give the work back to the student or throw it away. I think that we need to integrate into our teaching and learning experiences, a value for our students’ information work. As students start to perform more digital work, I think that we should archive those information products into a public digital library, so that other students can visit the work, read it, look at it, listen, and watch it. It shows that there is value in their information.

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Beyond that, I would suggest one more analogy for these students. Admittedly, it is a difficult place to get a good foot hold, because our children are not trying to make a living. They are not responsible for generating income to support themselves and their families. So it is hard for them to understand. But I would ask them, “If you are using an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game), and have built a dwelling with the resources you earned in the game, and someone comes along and steals that home — would that be right or wrong?”

technorati tags:literacy, ethics, education, warlick, technology

Blogged with Flock

I got dinged the other day by Larry Bedenbaugh, from the University of Central Florida, and an attendee of last week’s presentations for the Progress Energy – UCF Leadership Institute. He corrects a quote on the opening slide of my Redefining Literacy presentation, which I have miss attributed. I’m posting his comment here to make available to you the entire quote, in red.  It’s good

On the opening slide for the “Redefining Literacy for the 21st Century”presentation, you include a quote, “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn,unlearn, and relearn,” which you (as do many others) attribute to Alvin Toffler. However, in the interest, of seeking the truth and giving credit where credit is due, this thought was not originated by Toffler.The thought did appear in his book “Future Shock,” but Alvin attributes it to psychologist Herbert Gerjouy and cites a personal interview. The full quote is: “The new education must teach the individual how to classify and reclassify information, how to evaluate its veracity, how to change categories when necessary, how to move from the concrete to the abstract and back, how to look at problems from a new direction -how to teach himself. Tomorrow’s illiterate will not be the man who can’t read; he will be the man who has not learned how to learn” (p.414). What I always point out when I use this quote is the date; “Future Shock” was originally published in 1970. (In fairness to those that cite Toffler, he did use the attributed quote in the foreword he wrote for”Rethinking the Future” edited by Rowan Gibson).

Bedenbaugh, Larry. “Thoughts from Progress Energy Leadership Institute.” E-mail to David Warlick.7 Sep 2006.

technorati tags:toffler, education, warlick, leadership

Blogged with Flock

I have had a fantastic week. It started with Pinckney School District in Michigan, where I had an opportunity to speak to their very appreciative audience, and then engaged in several conversations with their tech staff (all arts and humanities backgrounds) and instructors, much of it podcasted (see They’re Out).

And yesterday! Who would know that school administrators could be so much fun to learn with. During my demonstration of RSS, one school principal actually jumped up out of her chair flailing her arms in an ecstatic frenzy. Seriously. Ask them. And I met so many people who helped me to think about so many things. I hope to explore this more in my blog later, but today I have to work on PiNet Library. Moving it over to my new dedicated server has caused some problems for some teachers, so I need to spend time today crawling around in the claustrophobic caverns of code.

I do want to explore one idea very briefly. The other day I wrote an entry called Am I Getting this Wrong? In the article I question a study that recently came out of the National Center for Education Statistics sharing data related to the digital divide. My concern was with the age of the data used in the study, a survey conducted in 2003. Stephen Downes described the study as using pre-internet methodologies, and I think that this is a fair characterization, especially considering that the topic of interest was what youngsters are using the Internet and how they are using it, a picture that I suspect is constantly changing.

Scott McLeod, the director of the UCEA Center for the Advanced Study of Technology Leadership in Education (CASTLE), very fairly described the Department of Educations NCES’ methodologies in a subsequent comment. He says…

I’ve done a lot of work with NCES reports and data. This is their normal time lag. They take a lot of time to collect, clean up, analyze, and report their data because they almost always follow very rigorous research protocols and because their data is so large-scale. This data is probably very accurate, just not very timely. However, it’s the best data we have at the national scale. Welcome to the feds!

This brings me back around to a conversation I had this summer with media specialists about the source and value of information. The NCES is, and remains, a respected source of information and their work is thorough and professional. As a source, it is practically without question. Yet, what is the value of this report, within the context of our struggles to effectively prepare today’s children for their future. For these tasks, I would probably value more casual, anecdotal observations, and casual conversation about today’s experiences than professionally collected and compiled data that is three years old.

Technorati Tags: education, literacy, technology, warlick

Wes Fryer has weighed in on the Wall Street Journal piece on 1:1 education (Saying No to Laptops), in his customarily eloquent and compelling way (School Reform Vision Needed), asking the right questions, questioning our vision of teaching and learning (the stories) rather than…. Well he says it better.

…laptop immersion projects should be all about changing teaching and learning in fundamental ways– NOT simply “doing school” with digital tools. We don’t need digital worksheets.

Partly for the benefit of the central Florida education leaders I’ll be working with today, I want to double-click on Fryer’s four school needs:

1. Administrative leaders who have instructional vision for teaching and learning that includes INTERACTIVITY and STUDENT CREATION OF AUTHENTIC KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTS.
2. Administrators and teachers who insist on not only differentiating learning opportunities for students, but also differentiating the assessment methods they use to measure student learning.
3. An understanding by all educational stakeholders that learning is messy. The standardized tests can’t and won’t come close to revealing the complete picture of whether or not authentic engagement is happening in the classroom on a regular basis– and therefore learning experiences that are NOT FAKED are common, rather than rare.
4. A “just in time” professional development program that supports continuing learning by teachers in the classroom. “One shot” professional development has a place, but the most significant gains in teacher proficiency with digital tools for teaching and learning come from their peers and from instructional support provided at the time and point of need. This means schools paying CERTIFIED teachers (not just technicans) to be available to hold hands and work with teachers as they take instructional risks– trying new digital teaching and learning strategies with students.

Technorati Tags : 1:1 laptops education warlick administration vision leaders leadership

This is being mobloged from the airport, on my phone — so please forgive spelling and grammar probems…

I enjoyed a double treat yesterday. It is impossible to express how impressed I was with my audience in Pinckney, Michigan. It was the teachers’ first official day back, and their children are reporting today. On top of that, many of them were going to host open house that evening. Yet, this audience graciously gave me their valuable time, and by indication, their honest professional consideration of the issues that I shared.

The second half of the day (..and the second treat) was spent with the technology team of the district. They are also the knowledge, personality, and passion behind Geek!ed! (Google it), a regular podcast of conversations about kids, tech, information, news, and the future.

We recorded an episode right after the keynote, and it’s not every day that I have so much fun. We talked for a half hour (the limit for their shows), switched off the recorder, and kept talking. So I pulled out my iPod, and continued the recording. I’m hoping to have it posted in the next few days.

The Wall Street Journal syndicated a story a few days ago, Saying No to School Laptops. It’s a fairly extensive article that describes a backlash to 1:1 initiatives across the country from parents and legislators. One parent says,

“What she learned was how to play games and email her friends,” says Ms. Adam. “School was one big happy gabfest.”

Actually, the image of a classroom as a “big happy gabfest” has some appeal to me, if they are gabbing about history, or science, or health, or math in their worlds. If they aren’t, then that’s not the fault of the computers.

Who’s speaking for the children?
Who’s speaking for the future?

Those are the perspectives that I find conspicuously missing from this story.

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Image Citation
Cicobuff, “Southampton University – Science Week.” Cicobuff’s Photostream. 26 Mar 2006. 6 Sep 2006 <http://www.flickr.com/photos/azrehman/118214623/>.

Technorati Tags: 1:1, laptops, learning, technology, warlick