In my external blog, WebToolsforLearners   I have pointed to Christian Long's Blog, think:lab and, in particular, his post Blogging and the Changing Environment of Education and Collaboration. For a selection of excerpts to give you a taste of his fine writing and his observations, check out my post.    

 

 

One of the big advantages of being a teacher is that you can learn from your students. In my Oral Rhetoric class last week, students gave presentations, and I learned something important from each of them. Two tools I learned about, I must pass on to you. Anyone who is doing academic research, or showing others how to do academic research, needs to know about the following;

GoshMe is different from any search tool I've seen before. You put in your search topic, check off the areas that you want to look in, and then it gives you a list of Search Engines with the links each of them has found. I gave it a whirl, and found very different responses from when I simply used Google. I think it is a very powerful search tool. To find out more about this Brazilian initiative, check out GoshMe's AboutUs page, especially the section on the Invisible Web.

The other tool Rizwan Choudary, Vibhuti Gupta, and Mehreen Hasan alerted me to in their presentation on research using the web was an aspect of Google Scholar I wasn't aware of.

Not only can you use Google Scholar to search for academic papers and other research material, you can use it to search the databases of institutions you are associated with IF said institutions have made that arrangement with Google Scholar - see Support for Libraries. In Google Scholar Preferences, you can search for your institution, and, if it has agreed, you can set it as part of your preferences. A proviso and a positive:
1. You have to be able to access these databases already using your I.D.
2. It's actually an easier interface and one-stop.
So, thanks to Rizwan, Vibhuti, and Mehreen, I can pass this information on to you.

When I was absorbed in writing my thesis I often woke up with words running through my mind, - sweet phrases - images unwrapped in words. If I rose and wrote immediately, I could catch some of these and then build with and on them. It was joyful.

My writing was powerful and insightful. I wrote knowing I would be read by a small number of academics, my committee and future thesis writers who might explore the OISE thesis collection. I wrote with  the sense of privacy one has in a diary combined with the desire to please respected teachers I was righly grateful to. I didn't expect to be read by "a long list of strangers" (p. 225) so I wrote very differently than I currently do when I write in my blogs.

Jim, my husband, has always loved bookstores, and kept mentioning a book called blogs! that he'd seen roaming Chapters.

http://static.flickr.com/36/104151040_9006ce2c99.jpg

For Valentine's Day, he gave it to me. Eventually I picked it up, and found it tremendously confirming. You see, I'd prepared and given a lecture, a month ago, on the educational and business uses of blogs and wikis, and much in blog! I had already discovered simply by slogging my way through the wildermess of searching the web - using Google, Technorati, Google's Blog Search and my del.icio.us archive, etc. In fact, I had actually read some of the chapters in blog! that were online.

I am fascinated by the web and blogging and convinced that we humans are in the process of another developmental change in our culture, caused directly by a new communication technology, so reading - in a BOOK! - the same ideas that I have arrived at, well, for a digital immigrant, a book-person, this is wonderful! I recommend Kline & Burstein's blog! - a really good read.

In their interviews with many early bloggers and blogging experts, what is repeatedly stressed is the voice. If the blogger's voice isn't authentic and interesting, forget it! If the blogger's voice's isn't casual and rather exclamatory, their blog will remain at the far end of the long tail. And who want to be unread! Well that's an interesting question.

There's an interesting paradox for me there. I like the idea of being read, but I'm afraid I'll get carried away and blurt out something offensive or forbidden. I am hyper aware that  potentially millions could read this post!!!!!!!! I am also aware that I get tremendously excited when I get any comments. I don't really expect to be read. So I court by trying to be useful, but when my teacher persona dominates, I grow dry and write in a style appropriate to wikis - businesslike and depersonalized, but with an explosive desire to burst through my self-imposed (but often wise) censorship and write in extreme terms. I miss the safety of having respectful and wise editors.

Here's my question: can I be an honest and open blogger?

In a writerly move, I will return to the beginning. In the morning, sometimes I can extend that liminal space - where threads of images and words move through me, - by rising and right away opening my always-on computer and writing. As I have today, inspired by blog!  In that liminal space, I am neither constrained nor blurting; I am simply present and following the thread of my thoughts. Even the technical pauses, where I find urls so I can link to them, or copy images and upload them to Flickr so I can include them, don't stop the flow.

And maybe that's the answer - writing in that liminal space for a while before going to read the Saturday comics! 

 

Works Cited

 Kline, David, and Dan Burstein. Blog! New York: Cds Books, 2005.

 Christopher D. Sessums' post Competing Paradigms and Educational Reform set me thinking. As I live in an area until recently ruled by a political party which appeared to believe, quoting  Chris's post, that -

      1.    Objective testing uncovers school failure.
       2.    Demonstrated failure justifies punishment of failing schools.
       3.    Punishment justifies reduced funding.
       4.    Less funding makes it harder for schools to improve.
       5.    A cycle of failure ensues.
       6.    This cycle of failure justifies privatization.
       7.    Privatization will lead to good schools. (end of quote)

 The government of Mike Harris in Ontario, Canada, is over, but he was elected at least in part on those premises. What is interesting is that, while he tipped his hat to a conservative moralistic family approach, that wasn't a significant part of his agenda. He criticized teachers and public education because it got him votes.

Why did it get him votes? Because of how many people feel about their own experiences in public schools and what they want for their children. I don't believe there is a paradigm to shift; I believe we need to understand the source of the feelings that have created an anti-public school stance. Here is my analysis:

Learning is hard work, especially if you are being taught in a manner or area you are not strong in. I believe -

1. humans have different kinds of "intake capacities" -  that is - some of us learn most easily in a "hands-on" or kinesthetic situation, some of us learn most easily by listening to information, as auditory learners, and some learn easiest by watching and/or reading, as visual/conceptual learners. This is, of course, a massive over-simplification, but has an important degree of truth. And, all of us have to use all these channels at different times for different purposes.
2. humans have different kinds of intelligences, as Howard Gardner describes, and we have the differing capacities to "get" what we are being taught or trying to learn. (I base that on my own experiences with math and phys.ed.)
   
3. humans have different kinds and strengths of types of memory, maybe connected with our profile of intelligences or with such things as Attention Deficict 'Dis'order or autism. This area, as far as I can tell, is highly under-researched in terms of learning and the "general"population, but over 30 years of teaching and studying learning have convinced me that humans vary in how they remember - and that is significant in learning.
4. humans are emotional when we learn. When we learn something and/or please an authority figure, we feel happy and strong. When we fail at something, we like to find an excuse, and often that is to blame someone. If we blame ourselves, we feel unhappy, and our capacity to learn is diminished. If we blame someone else, and the teacher is the easiest and currently the most fashionable target, we feel angry, resentful and stupid. Not emotions  that are easy to deal with, not to mention what it does to our capacity to learn.

Then there are demographics. When I was in Grade 9, there were at least 12 other classes of grade 9 students. When I was in the final grade of high school (Grade 13 in Ontario in the mid-Sixties) there were only 3 classes.  At least  three quarters of the  students had been failed out or dropped out. Even with the changing patterns of what happens in schools today, that's a large crowd in the voting population, some of whom are bound to see their lack of success as their teachers' or the system's fault.

Tie that in with the fact that we humans remember our bad experiences more vividly than our successful ones, and that we usually see our learning as a credit to us rather than to the teacher, and I think it's easy to see why there are many voters prepared to be negative about schooling in general and especially the kind of schooling they had.

 I totally agree with Chris that -

"Real education is built on meaningful relationships. We do not learn things in isolation from each other. The core components of education are based on learner-centered values, a respect for diversity and complexity, tolerance, and empowerment. The developmental needs for learners are widespread and cannot be easily or meaningfully reduced to a pencil-based exam."

I also believe that many teachers are committed to this belief and working very hard, but I think we may be into the "cycle of failure" already, caused by the industrial model that is still being used to structure public education at all levels - but that's a subject for another post.