Without sounding too obvious, the critical exploration of the values and norms that have shaped our world is essential to the continued progress of humankind.

In a new video offered by RSA Animate, Matthew Taylor explores the meaning of 21st century enlightenment that is well worth 11 minutes and 10 seconds of your time.

RSA Animate – 21st century enlightenment

Specifically, what do the values that have shaped our world mean? Are they still working for us? Do they meet the challenges that we now face? Taylor argues that critical reflection on such matters is imperative if we are to continue to grow and thrive in a sustainable manner.

Empathic Capacity

What resonated most for me is Taylor’s observations on the importance of our empathic capacity. While the chain connecting inter-personal, communal and global empathy is complex, he suggests that “the stock of global empathy has to grow if we are to reach agreements which put the long-term needs of the whole planet and all of it’s people ahead of short-term national concerns.”

Clearly, if humanity is to thrive in a sustainable manner, we need to live differently in the 21st century. To live differently involves thinking and feeling differently. The powerful insights we are discovering about human nature, sustainability, civil society, inclusion, solidarity, often run counter to our intuition. This realization is what brought us to where we are today. But we are hardly finished.

Taylor suggests that “we are very, very bad at predicting what will make us happy and we are even bad at describing what made us happy in the past.” I have recently seen evidence of this in elementary school research on reflective thinking, wherein students are asked to write reflective essays and are unable to do so because (1) little time is afforded such a process; and (2) it isn’t being modeled very well (Beralt, 2010, under review).

Taylor theorizes that “21st century enlightenment should champion a more self-aware, socially embedded model of autonomy that recognizes our frailties and limitations. This does not mean repudiating the rights of individuals. Nor does it mean to under estimate our unique ability to shape our own destinies.” Instead, Taylor asserts “it is only by understanding that our conscious thought is only part of what drives our behavior that we become better able to exercise self-control… and distinguish between our needs and appetites, and our amazing human potential from the hubris of individualism that is the basis of self aware autonomy.”

Taylor goes on to cite Robert Kegan‘s notion that “successfully functioning in society with its diverse values, traditions, and lifestyles, requires us to have a relationship with our own reactions rather than be captive of them.”

What a concept.

Yes We Can

Yes, we can expand empathy’s reach. Civil rights, social media have further enhanced our ability to put our selves in other  people’s shoes. Yet, has the process of widening human empathy stalled? Specifically, we should begin by exploring what enhances and diminishes our empathetic capacity.

If schools are to become intelligent communities, then we need to spend more time exploring how we come to know one another and how we can foster healthy public debate instead of unhealthy public disparagement.

The idea that “Education” (with a capital “E”) is the most valuable resource in our knowledge economy has become an airy cliche. Instead, Taylor argues that fostering empathic capacity is just as, if not more, important to “achieving a world of citizens at peace with each other and with themselves.”

This not to say a world of peaceful, empathic people will exist sans dilemma and contradiction. Instead, we as a human race should be willing to face these challenges and debate such substantive and ethical questions with knowledge and honor.

Remember: What we aim for can be as important to our well being as what we achieve.

The Role of Schools

How should schools focus on building empathic capacity of its students and citizenry? What role should teachers, administrators, citizens, parents, policy makers play in this discussion? What protocols should we adopt to foster and sustain such engagement?

This where I see the role of college’s of education leading. A college of education can do more than offer pedagogical blueprints. It can instead offer strategies, tactics, and forums for designing a sustainable future. Such a focus would require some retooling and rethinking but clearly the time to act is now.

Similarly, Taylor offers us a quote from Margaret Mead:

Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.

As such, I encourage you to collect the colleagues around you that are passionate and committed to equity, learning, and social responsibility and begin mapping your ideas for developing a deeper empathic capacity within our students.

After all, if not you, then who?

Several years ago I was asked to address the issue of cheating in online courses for a large, notably visible college at my institution. Being a distance education “expert,” I was asked specifically to discuss the latest means by which we could monitor distance education students as they completed requisite, high stakes exams at a distance.

My first response was a question: How do we monitor students taking tests here on campus?

This was not the answer my colleagues wanted to hear. Never mind that proctored exam halls still had cheating issues. Actually, the term security issues was how my esteemed colleagues dubbed the matter.

I was then asked to share what I knew about the latest digital lock-down systems which essentially shut off all other applications on a student’s computer except the exam software. These new software systems would record every key stroke, how long each student lingered on each question, as well as time stamp their entry and exit. There was even an option that required students to purchase a digital camera and have it turned on to record their every move (PCs were required by this system; Macs were verboten). The company offering the solution would manage this process or turn it over to us for a large, sumptuous fee.

I suggested to my colleagues that the real issue here was not a matter of security, that it was pedagogical issue. I suggested that the cheating that took place is a result of the way in which students’ knowledge was being examined.

At this point, you could hear a pin drop. Unfazed, I went on to show how research confirmed that most single-instance multiple choice exams did not lead to deeper student knowledge (Darling-Hammond & Snyder, 2000) and how authentic assessments – cases, exhibitions, portfolios, and problem-based inquiries (or action research) – were a much more robust measure of student learning.

After my brief explication, the elephant in the room introduced him/her self. Clearly, the faculty experiencing the security issue was not interested in authentic assessment. They were simply interested in assessing student work with maximum efficiency and at the lowest personal cost. This was/is a research university after all, where faculty are rewarded for their research abilities and not their teaching acumen. By inviting the distance learning expert, they were expecting a technical answer to what was perceived as a technical problem. Instead they got me – a guy with technical savvy and knowledge who is more interested in innovative and meaningful teaching practice.

Next!

So it was was with a certain level of dysphoria that I stumbled on this New York Times article titled To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery showcasing the ill effects of inauthentic student assessment. The comments offer some salvation and hope, yet overall the author of the article seems unfamiliar with the larger issue of pedagogically unsound assessment techniques practiced by many leading institutions across the U.S. While the article offers a report of the situation plaguing many higher education institutions, it fails to point to the real culprit: irresponsible assessment practice.

For educators
If you are comfortable assessing student work using multiple choice tests, comfortable in the belief that the tests you use accurately and meaningfully measure student knowledge and ability, then peace be with you. If you believe deep down that you are shirking your educational responsibility and are only creating more opportunities for students to cheat, leaving your class with (maybe) a superficial understanding of your content, then I suggest you investigate the topic of authentic assessment. Here, let me Google that for you: authentic assessment.

If your aim is merely to monitor performance then conventional, multiple choice testing is probably adequate. If your aim is to improve student performance, then the tests must be composed of exemplary tasks, criteria and standards.

As Grant Wiggins (1990) deftly notes, that while the scoring of standardized tests ” is not subject to significant error, the procedure by which items are chosen, and the manner in which norms or cut-scores are established is often quite subjective–and typically immune from public scrutiny and oversight.”

Clearly, genuine accountability does not circumvent human judgment. We regularly take steps to monitor and improve our ability to assess through training sessions, model performances, oversight policies, as well as through such basic procedures as “blind reviews” – as occurs regularly across professional, athletic, and artistic worlds in the assessment of performance.

Most importantly, authentic assessment provides parents and community members with “directly observable products and understandable evidence concerning their students’ performance; the quality of student work is more discernible to laypersons than when we must rely on translations of talk about stanines and renorming” (Wiggins, 1990).

In the end, what you assess is what you get. To improve student performance we must first acknowledge that essential intellectual abilities are not accurately reflected through conventional testing, and second, move toward more authentic systems of assessment that more meaningfully measure and represent student and teacher abilities.

References:
Darling-Hammond, L. & Snyder, J. (2000). Authentic assessment of teaching in context. Teaching and Teacher Education, 16(5-6), 523-545.

Wiggins, G. (1990). The case for authentic assessment. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 2(2).

Image: Cheating in Exam from crazy_foolish4u

What? Me Worry?
Are you of the mind that today’s youth are “blindly self-aggrandizing?” Does all that entitlement send you through the roof? Is it just me or is there some truth to the patterns of behavior many people report seeing? In a paper presented at the Association for Psychological Sciences in Boston (May 2010), Sara Konrath found that college students today are 40 percent less empathetic than their counterparts in the 1970s, with percentages plunging primarily after 2000. Her paper, Changes in Dispositional Empathy in American College Students Over Time: A Meta-Analysis, offered a measure of four aspects “interpersonal sensitivity” (n=13,737; ~63 percent female) :

• Empathetic concern (or sympathy) over the misfortunes of others;
• Perspective taking;
• An intellectual capacity to imagine other people’s points of view;
• Fantasy (or people’s tendency to to identify imaginatively with fictional characters in books or movies; and
• Personal distress (referring to the anguish one feels during others misfortunes).

The synopsis of this study, reported in the New York Times on June 27, 2010, shows that today’s college students scored significantly lower in empathetic concerns (48 percent) and perspective taking (34 percent)–considered the more important indicies of empathetic behavior. Shared social ideals such as “I often have tender, concerned feelings for people less fortunate than me” and “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” are considered less important than they were by college students 30 years ago. (The results reported were not disaggregated by gender, socio-economic status, or parents’ education level and marital status. A closer examination of the results associated with these independent variables might be useful in determining if there are any correlational effects.)

So what happened?
How did narcissism become so popular? In the Times report, Konrath and her report co-authors suggest that a mixture of cultural forces associated with video games, social media, reality TV and hyper-competition have left the younger generation “self-involved, shallow, and unfettered in their individualism and ambition” (Paul, 2010). The implications are biting, indeed. Research on low empathy in children is associated with violent behavior, aggression, and other anti-social behavior (Damon & Lerner, 2006). As these low empathetic youth grow into adults, these tendencies can lead to the results we are seeing in Konrath’s report. For educators, low empathy in students could make communication, group work, collaborative and networking activities exceedingly challenging.

I do not believe video games, social media, reality TV, and hyper-competition are necessarily the main culprits here. Perhaps the amount of cognitive surplus afforded today’s youth has some impact. Perhaps kids today are spending less time on chores, i.e., contributing meaningfully to the household, and more time in front of their computers and TV. While a recent reports suggests parents are spending more time with their children, it is not clear the ways in which parents are modeling pro-social behavior for their children. Are parents plopping kids down in front of the TV or computer or are they interacting together meaningfully?

So what can teachers do?
The implications for the reported low empathy findings are complex. For teachers, the Times article and report provide an opportunity to discuss these findings with their students. The key here is opening up an opportunity for dialog with students allowing them to share their thoughts on the issue of empathy. Keeping a journal that shows what kids are doing with their time outside school and a class discussion around their findings might also be useful and revealing to students. Role-playing is another safe and pro-social way to engage students in a discussion which, in turn, can help deepen their knowledge of empathy and empathetic behavior. While these suggested activities only scratch the surface, developing empathy and empathetic behavior is a critical skill that cannot be overlooked. If we want this depressing news regarding empathy in children and young adults to change, then we need to act now. If we don’t, as the Times article suggests, “don’t expect the next generation to sigh over it, too.”

References:
Damon, W. & Lerner, R. M. (2006). Handbook of Child Psychology: Social, emotional, and personality development. Hoboken, N.J., John Wiley & Sons.

Paul, P. (2010). From Students, Less Kindness for Strangers? New York Times, June 29, 2010. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/fashion/27StudiedEmpathy.htm

Image:
http://www.wickedresistance.com/blog/wp-content/postimg/2009/01/Meh-Web

In a post I wrote earlier this year, I spoke of the importance of empathy as a skill that needs as much attention as play and critical thinking. The following video featuring Jeremy Rifkin adds additional yeast to this argument as it offers further investigation into the evolution of empathy and the profound ways that it has shaped our development and society.

RSA Animate – The Empathic Civilisation

Rifkin notes that the growing scientific evidence that we are a fundamentally empathic species has profound and far-reaching consequences for society, and may well determine our fate as a species. The information communication technologies (ICT) revolution is quickly extending the central nervous system of billions of human beings and connecting the human race across time and space, allowing empathy to flourish on a global scale, for the first time in history. Thus, by extending the central nervous system of each individual and the society as a whole, this “communication revolution” will provide an evermore inclusive playing field for empathy to mature and consciousness to expand.

In what ways is this important for education?

Recognition that we are all in this together is a powerful concept–from cats and dogs, to children in Darfur, to bankers in Singapore. Recognition that each of our actions can have both a direct and indirect effect on each other is crucial in our flattened world. Empathy can help lower inhibitions and increase our sense of purpose as we seek to understand and feel what others are experiencing (emotive solidarity). The disadvantage of this approach in most school settings is that teaching students how to build empathy takes time and skill. I do not recall many opportunities for building empathetic skills in colleges of education, nor do I see it emphasized in any high stakes examinations. However, given the increased access to news and information and our increased ability to act and serve others in a crisis, empathy could be adopted within our current curricula frameworks as a form of social literacy–that is, the ability to read and understand people and situations.

Ultimately, learning how to empathize helps learners work more effectively with others and in teams. This in turn can lead to the development of such useful skills such as planning and organizing with others–a task that is essential in most social environments.

Reference:

Rifkin, J. (2010). The empathic civilization: The race to global consciousness in a world in crisis. New York: Tarcher/Penguin.

Purple Chair, Downtown; Denver, Colorado

Here are my takeaways/notes from a May 2nd session titled Web 2.0: Research Issues, Results, and Future Directions hosted by Lynne Schrum and starring Chris Dede, Dan Hickey, Diane Jass Ketelhut, Donald Leu, and Allan Collins.

These reflections are my synthesized notes and not direct quotations. My hand/brain speed and coordination are no match for the rate of human speech, but, I do try. Enjoy!

• Web 2.0 = Rorschach test — there is no one right answer/definition. It’s what we make it. (Dede)

• Web 2.0 or interactive media permits creativity, collaboration, co-creating and sharing. (FYI)

• I used to believe in collective intelligence until I attended my last faculty meeting (Dede).

• Link love: University of Pittsburgh Learn Lab: http://www.learnlab.org/research/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

• New digital media are easy to use, but not easy to use well (Dede).

• New digital media requires fluency in their rhetoric/critical thinking skills (Dede).

• Web 2.0 redefines what, how, and with whom we learn (Dede).

• In most formal learning environments, new digital media is still an add-on (Dede).

• We should be using new digital media to support wisdom building (Dede).

• Wisdom includes*:

1. A cognitive dimension involving rich understanding of a variety of intellectual disciplines and fields


2. A practical-experiential dimension of sophisticated, pragmatic comprehension about how to act given the unresolvable questions, philosophic issues, and unavoidable problems (such as personal mortality) associated with everyday life (Baltes & Smith, 1990)


3. An interpersonal dimension of insightfully appreciating the interactions and contributions of diverse groups, cultures, and societies in shaping civilization


4. An ethical dimension encompassing what the ancient Greeks meant by “knowing and doing the good”


5. A metacognitive dimension of reflective judgment, awareness of the limitations of knowing and of how  these limitations affect the resolution of ill-defined problems (Birren & Fisher, 1990; Kitchener & Brenner, 1990).

This definition draws from, but is more limited than, the concept of extraordinary wisdom delineated by Randall and Kenyon (2001).

• What should we as a society be investing in to support the development of wisdom in children and adults? (Dede)

• Achievement tests undermine achievement in schooling (Hickey).

• If you haven’t already, go read Understanding By Design by Wiggins and McTighe.

• Participatory assessment offers a new way to examine student work that supports a student-centered approach. (Hickey)

• Social collaboration sites present a rich resource for exploring identity for teachers and youth. (Ketelhut)

• For many pre-service teachers, there is a reported incoherence between their online identity and their in-class identity. Specifically, their in-class identity conflicted with their online identity. (Ketelhut)

• When examing online identity issues, consider examining Kegan’s (1996) model of psychological development consisting of six “equilibrium stages”: the incorporative stage, the impulsive stage, the imperial stage, the interpersonal stage, the institutional stage, and the inter-individual stage. (Ketelhut)

• The Internet presents a reading comprehension issue for learners. (Leu)

• The Internet presents a literacy issue. (Leu)

• If the use of the Internet is limited to educational technology courses, subject area specialists will defer responsibility for integrating it into their curriculum. (Leu)

• For new digital media to be taken seriously in education, it needs to be integrated into subject areas more completely, not as an add-on. (Leu)

• Online reading represents a problem-based comprehension issue. (Leu)

• Web 2.0 is a static construct; we should recognize it as New Literacies instead. (Leu)

• To advance this notion, teacher education must focus on pedagogy, skill development, and a health professional development diet. (Leu)

• It is important for all educators to consider: What should we be teaching in classrooms? (Collins)

• What is important to learn? (Collins)

• What about Web 2.0 or New Literacies fosters wisdom? (Collins)

• New digital media does nothing to promote morals or ethics. (Collins)

• Web 2.0 has insiders and outsiders. (Collins)

• School culture (closed) contrasts Web 2.0 culture (open). (Collins)

• Do social collaboration and social networking sites invite us to questions our identities? (Collins)

• Web 2.0 is making the equity problem in schools worse. (Collins)

• There will be a tremendous price to pay if we do not address this participatory divide. (Collins)

• Critical New Literacies include (Leu):

1. identifying important questions


2. locating information


3. critically evaluating information


4. synthesizing information


5. communicating information

[*The definition of wisdom cited above was pulled from Dede's 2009 Educational Research article: Dede, C. (2009). Comments on Greenhow, Robelia, and Hughes: Technologies that facilitate generating knowledge and possibly wisdom. Educational Researcher, 38(4): 261-262.]

AERA 2010, Denver Colorado

Here is a collected list of notes culled from my first day reflections at the American Educational Research Association 2010 annual meeting in Denver, Colorado. Names appearing in parentheses are referenced at the bottom of this post. While I tried to capture speakers’ thoughts directly, most are paraphrased and filtered through my limited ability to listen and write at the same time. I apologize in advance for misrepresenting any of the speakers’ thoughts and ideas.

• Most schools are surrounded by fences. This is a loaded metaphor. (Ching)

• How should we define learning?

• Why does learning inside a school define learning outside of school? (Ching)

• How is learning outside of school relevant to school learning? (Ching)

• What role does technology play in learning outside of school? (Ching)

• Kids’ access to culture of participation is increasing. (Barron)

• Research suggests production activities using the computer build technical fluencies (Barron).

• There are multi-fold learning opportunities despite the myth of the digital native.

• Parents are a critical factor as learning partners (Barron).

• Given roles parents play in kids’ lives, there are significant experience divides (Barron).

• There are significant divides between the ways in which kids use technology as producers of content. (Barron, 2009).

• Production uses of technology depends on community that surrounds kids (Barron).

• In terms of the different forms and pathways of engagement with technology, parents can play several roles (Barron):

1. Teacher


2. Learning Broker


3. Project Collaborator


4. Resource Provider


5. Non-technical Support (consultant)


6. Learner


7. Employer

• How parents engage technology personally and professionally impacts kids’ use.

• For more information on informal learning research, visit http://life-slc.org

• Strong theoretical framework for designing technologically engaging activities: Cooperative Constructionism (Chapman + Papert).

• Design Experiment Methodology reference: Brown, A. L. (1992). Design experiments: Theoretical and methodological challenges in creating complex interventions. Journal of the Learning Sciences, 2 (2), 141-178.

• “Science is built up of facts, as a house is built of stones; but an accumulation of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house.” — Henri Poincare, 1905 (via Steinkeuhler)

• Examples of learning in out-of-school environments: Computer Clubhouse (Chapman) and Casual Learning Lab (Steinkeuhler).

• There is a tension between intentional learning (other directed) and interest-driven learning (self-directed). (Steinkeuhler).

• Research shows when students are allowed to choose reading material, reading scores are markedly higher on standardized measures associated with fluency and reading level (Steinkeuhler).

• Paradox: Out-of-school learning is always compared to in-school learning. (Sessums)

• Learning happens. Schools need to rethink time, space, and their purpose. (Sessums)

• Let students do more of the driving. (Steinkeuhler)

• Teachers need to play more of a designer and advocate role in schools. (Sessums)

• More research is needed around critical periods for learning (Kuhl).

• Research shows social context and social support are CRITICAL when it comes to knowledge acquisition and skill development (Kuhl).

• Given the critical nature of social context and social support in learning, the garbage-in-garbage-out rule is easily measured. (Sessums)

• The complexity of language use impacts a child’s language and knowledge growth and development (Kuhl).

• Imitative learning is powerful (Meltzoff).

• Imitative learning is closely associated with observational learning (Meltzoff).

• Shared or joint attention is a powerful learning mechanism before we formally acquire language (Meltzoff).

• Cultural stereotypes effect a child’s’ self-concept and learning ability (Meltzoff).

• Cultural stereotypes and self-concepts are effected by observation of and engagement with peers, parents, media, teachers, and mentors (Meltzoff).

• Stereotypes can be overcome with the help of peers, parents, media, teachers, and mentors (Meltzoff).

• Educational policy: How we choose what to do defines a course of action (Malcom).

• Educational policy is influenced by our ability to choose between alternatives, by our present circumstances, and by future goals (Malcom).

• Educational policy challenges (Malcom):

1. Over (and under-) interpreting research findings (looking for the silver bullet);


2. When research collides with conventional wisdom;


3. When research collides with politics;


4. When action is seen as too hard and/or too expensive; and


5. When it is unclear how to get from the present to a future informed by research.

• Educational policy is a blunt instrument (Malcom).

• The “work:” converting research into practice (Sessums).

• To get teachers to change how they conduct their classrooms requires a skilled expert to “tow them into the big wave” (Hickey).

• What are teacher practitioner’s learning about/sharing on Twitter? (Craft)

• How teacher practitioners are being educated about integrating technology into their curriculum varies (Sessums).

• Many technology integration courses are still focusing on teaching PowerPoint, Word, and Excel (1990s) (Sessums).

• The use of participatory media is limited in many colleges and schools of education (Sessums).

• Given an imitative learning model, many teacher practitioners are not being exposed to meaningful uses of participatory media (Sessums).

• Research suggests that most teacher practitioners are at the early stages of technology integration (Mouza, Hughes, Richardson, Niess).

• Reasons cited for limited technology integration include lack of resources, prescribed curricula, and practitioners/administrators being less open to innovative ideas (Mouza).

• What is effective technology integration? What does it look like? How should it be defined? (Sessums)

• What are we trying to achieve by integrating technology into the classroom? (Sessums)

• In what ways does participatory media transform teacher practice? (Sessums)

• Technology is still considered an add-on. It is not yet viewed as an essential part of the educational process in schools (Sessums).

• What will it take for parents, teachers, school officials to move beyond thinking of technology as a teaching tool? (Sessums)

References to people noted above:

Cynthia Carter Ching

Brigid Barron

Robbin Chapman

Constance Steinkeuhler

Patricia Kuhl

Andrew Meltzoff

Shirley Malcom

Dan Hickey

Chris Craft

Joan Hughes

Karen Richardson

Chrystalla Mouza

Margaret Niess

Norman Hall G518

In an effort to catalog the various tactics/tools and resources employed in my undergraduate course, Integrating Technology into the Secondary Curriculum, I offer the following list of items we experimented with over the last sixteen weeks. Students reported that while they have not continued to use all of the applications listed below, they do continue to use many for a variety of purposes. There were many additional resources employed that I have not listed. Most of these can be found by visiting my Delicious account and searching under 4406 and/or 4406spring2010.

GMail

I always invite students to create GMail accounts on the first day of a class. GMail is the gateway drug to the entire Google suite of applications that I find myself using multiple times a day.

Google Docs

Google Docs includes spreadsheets, presentations, word processing, forms, that can be shared and posted online.

Google Sites

Google Sites was used to support student portfolios. It’s free, easy to use, and easy to edit.

Google Search

Google Search can be customized for specific specific student activities and include a filter that permits searches for Creative Commons images. We also explored the Invisible Web through the variety of search sites noted on a Makeuseof.com post.

Google Buzz

We talked about Buzz but did not spend much time with it. Like Wave, Buzz seemed like a solution looking for a problem. It did offer a wonderful collaborative potential, but did not replace our other means of working together.

iGoogle & Google Reader

Students experimented with personal start pages like iGoogle and PageFlakes, and were assigned to explore Google Reader as a means of pulling information across the Web to one site.

Blogger & Word Press

Students kept a learning journal throughout the term and were given a choice between Blogger and Word Press. I chose these applications because of their ease of use and customizablity.  I used to use Edublogs, but alas, the embedded advertising made my stomach turn.

Tumblr & Posterous

Students were invited to play with Tumblr and Posterous for projects involving audio, video and pictoral posting and sharing. I also introduced Flavors.me to create websites using personal content from around the Internet.

Twitter

We played with Twitter as a means of informal communication, formative assessments, social networking, personal learning, and sharing.

Flickr

Students were introduced to Flickr for photosharing and digital storytelling.

VoiceThread

We used VoiceThread to support teaching, learning, reflection, and collaborative learning. VoiceThread worked well when I was out of town as well. I could leave instructions and solicit feedback. Students also used VoiceThread as a broadcasting medium for providing instructions and how-to’s in their own lessons.

Social Bookmarking

While I am still experimenting with Diigo, students were introduced to Delicious to support bookmarking and resource searches.

Wikis

Students were given an option to use PBWorks and Wikispaces to support a collaborative Web presence. One of my major major emphases this term was communication with parents. Wikis are easy to create Web sites that require students to think about design as much as content. If a wiki is hard to navigate, it is hard to use. We spent time reflecting and acting on this particular design aspect as well.

Podcasting

Students and I tested Podomatic to support podcasting capabilities. Overall, it worked well and was simple to use effectively. I have used Audacity in the past, however, I wanted to try something different this time through.

Screencasting

Students were asked to develop a how-to video using either video or screencasting applications such as Screenr and Jing.

Chat

While we did not look too closely at chat applications, we talked about Tiny Chat, but only briefly…

Polling

Polleverywhere was a fun application to use for formative assessments and teaching about using personal learning networks to gather information and answers. Google Forms and Survey Monkey where also employed for formative assessments as well.

Animation

For fun, didactic experiences, and demonstration purposes, we played with Go Animate.

Open Educational Resources Commons (OER)

We explored a host of lesson plans available through OER Commons. We focused on the importance of sharing and modifying lesson plans (with an emphasis on re-sharing).

Open Text

For my student microteaching activity, I asked students to sign up for specific chapters in How People Learn. Students were asked to develop a 40 minute lesson on a specific chapter. Chapter presentations were not summaries, but focused on relevant aspects of the chapter content. Students were required to prepare a presentation, group and/or individual activities, and an assessment for the content presented. They were also forbidden to use PowerPoint (hee hee!).

PLE/PLN

In our investigations of personal/professional learning environments and personal/professional learning networks, we enjoyed Graham Attwell’s Introduction to Personal Learning Environments (and his delicious Welsh accent) and Richard Byrne’s presentation on How to Build a Personal Learning Network. Students were asked to join a network (e.g., Twitter, Plurk, Classroom 2.0, or FriendFeed) and describe who they followed, what they learned, and the ways they participated on their learning journal.

Browser

I regularly recommend Firefox as the browser to use. It integrates well into our online course management system, Moodle.

Video

Students and I used YouTube regularly to find and share audio visual resources. TeacherTube was also used to support knowledge building.

Finally, all tactics, texts, and presentations described were chosen because they are free and relatively easy to use and integrate into one’s curriculum. I have avoided prescribing proprietary software, applications, and texts in an effort to support the open sharing possibilities that the Web affords.

Image: http://www.flickr.com/photos/csessums/4259696067/sizes/o/

When ecosystems change and inflexible institutions collapse, their members disperse, abandoning old beliefs, trying new things, making their living in different ways than they used to. It’s easy to see the ways in which collapse to simplicity wrecks the glories of old. But there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” — Clay Shirky, The Collapse of Complex Business Models

After reading this quote from Shirky, I could not help but think of the current state of educational institutions across the U.S. The way most tax-based educational systems are constructed, there are limited ways in which these institutions can cut expenses below their revenue. Consequently, many educational institutions (read: schools, school districts, colleges) will fail and fail dramatically.

In Shirky’s analysis (based on the work of Joseph Tainter), complex societies and systems collapse because, “when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.” When schools and colleges are unable to provide the services, support, skill and content knowledge necessary to support a changing and evolving world, then these institutions will collapse.

The affordances of social media and open educational resources are making the time and space used for formal education nearly worthless. Schools and colleges need to recognize this shift and develop new ways of thinking how to engage and support learners and learning.

Given the communal nature of schools perhaps we can begin thinking of them as a community organization that supports learning from cradle to death. The school house can become a place that supports and nurtures socially responsible community values such as health, education, sustainable growth and development. School clinics can serve as public health clinics providing medical, psychological, and social services to the community. Schools can become a place generations can mix, learn, and support one another. In essence, why can’t a school be the place that serves the community and that the community serves in return?

If we do not take the time to re-imagine the role of schools in our society now, we will soon be left with nothing but the rubble of good intention. This process of recycling our schools into useful social institutions does not require replacing the professional administrators currently in office. Instead, it will require you and me and the people of our community. I am currently exploring sets of protocols that can provide a means to begin the conversation that in turn can lead to meaningful action.

As Shirky deftly points out, “it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.” While this may appear as an over-simplification, until we get involved and work with these issues, we will never know. To paraphrase Shirky, when schools and educational institutions fail to respond to reduced economic circumstances and cannot create effective reform measures through orderly reflection and re-sizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t. This is important for educational reformers to think about. Yet, more importantly, this is something we as members of our local communities must addresses today.

image: via csessums  http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2121/4506467325_36818326eb.jpg

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Institutional change surely will come, often starting at the periphery. There are market opportunities in offering services related to responsiveness, yet, big, traditional organizations such as school systems will be slow to adapt.**

“Ten years is too little for major changes. Efficiencies will of course occur, by automating more interactions – just as all became telephone operators, so we are increasingly all becoming travel agents, information managers, and so on. Small businesses will spring up that are more customer-centered and others will become more responsive at one level by some customized interfaces, but also more impersonal and less responsive to exceptional requests. On the whole, though, change here will be slow. Educational institutions will be the ones to watch, they are highly logical candidates for change, yet it is difficult to imagine much by 2020. By 2030, definitely.” – Jonathan Grudin, principal researcher, Microsoft

“There is a tipping point on the horizon between competition and cooperation. Scarcity of natural resources will require us to work together in ways we have never been required to before. It will take us a few generations to really see a significant change in the ways we currently do business, but it will come. This type of change requires us to plan for a long ‘now,’ which is antithetical to the way populist governments often work. Change will come from the edges and work its way toward the center. First, businesses will see the value-added new digital media provides in terms of access to markets and supporting quality interaction, distribution and customer feedback. This model will then be slowly adopted by government. I also believe the US is too big to govern the way it has been (thus all the red tape and claims of ineffective programming). Perhaps government would be more nimble as productive/supportive if it were to focus geographically (think Netflix or FedEx).” – Christopher D. Sessums, post-doctoral associate at the college of education, University of Florida**

** “This material was gathered in the fourth “Future of the Internet” survey conducted by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project and Elon University’s Imagining the Internet Center. The surveys are conducted through online questionnaires to which a selected group of experts and the highly engaged internet public have been invited to respond. The surveys present potential-future scenarios to which respondents react with their expectations based on current knowledge and attitudes. You can view detailed results from the 2004, 2006, 2008 and 2010 surveys here: http://www.pewinternet.org/topics/Future-of-the-internet.aspx and http://www.elon.edu/e-web/predictions/expertsurveys/default.xhtml. Expanded results are published in the “Future of the Internet” series published by Cambria Press.”

http://pewinternet.org/Reports/2010/Impact-of-the-Internet-on-

Escape from IDEO on Vimeo.

Here is a video developed at IDEO imagining “a future shaped by electric power dependency – where schoolyard play offsets the cost of fossil fuel and kids take an active part in their powering their world.” What I found most disheartening is not the kids taking an active part of powering their world–that would be kind of cool, actually. What I found most disturbing is the depiction of the classroom of the future. Clearly, a dystopian future is one where students still sit at neatly aligned desks listening to lectures and taking notes. Pedaling to power your laptop is one thing. Sitting at a desk listening to a sage on the stage, frack!

Oh, IDEO! I was hoping you might have a brighter future envisioned for us. Luckily, the good people responsible for designing our future ask that we tune in next week when they will offer us a shinier vision. Let’s hope so. And let us hope that the classroom of tomorrow looks nothing like the classroom of today.

Stay tuned!