Shifting Platforms/Shifting Paradigms

Tomorrow Is Another Day!

Let me start by wishing all a very happy new year with all the challenges, opportunities, and occasional solutions that make us love ed tech so much.

I am taking a break from my usual curmudgeonly outlook to be optimistic as we broach a new decade (please don’t insist that the new decade starts until 2011…we fought that war in 2000 and the 01’s lost).

Reading the many articles outlining the progress of the past ten years, I see a clear pattern of progress in the classroom and the world in general.  In day to day battles with others and myself, it feels like nothing is happening, but looking at an arc of 10 years belies this perception.  If nothing else we are asking the questions and challenging assumptions that were sacrosanct not ten years ago.

The world is changing, and time is on our side!

Happy New Year!  Time to get moving!

Teaching Our Children to Make Buggy Whips

Like many of those whom I read and admire, I spend much of my time moving between excitement and frustration and terror.  As I read the ideas and plans of the wonderful digital education community, I’m always seeing new possibilities as the digital vision becomes more and more a reality.  Yet facing the realities of my school and myself, I’m frustrated by the long distances and enormous hurdles between today and tomorrow.  Likewise I am sometimes overwhelmed by fear of unintended and misintended consequences.  After all, when children and their future are the laboratory, a disastrous experiment can not be wiped up and washed down a drain.

That being said, I still wonder whether we are serving them with the current curricular skills taught in schools.  Too much of the subject matter and accompanying skills seem to be designed to serve the needs of our generation, and again I worry whether we teach the world we learned because this is how we understand education.  We teach them how to make buggy whips because that’s what we learned because we’ll always need buggy whips.

What started me thinking about this today was reading a few assignments for high school term papers.  The term paper is one of the sacred cows of the high school experience.  It is generally a miserable experience for students to research and write and for teachers to teach and grade, and there are very few if any life applications for these skills short of research itself.  With these qualifications, one would think that this buggy whip would be well on its way toward extinction, but parents, teachers, and in an odd way students hold to this totemic rite of passage as an educational bootcamp.

I want to be reasonable about this, I’m certain (at least somewhat certain) that at some point in history someone learned something from this experience.  However, the way the research paper is assigned and taught ignores several essential shifts.  Research and note-taking skills are based on a model of information scarcity rather than information ubiquity (and why would anyone write something on paper cards that could be bookmarked and made instantly available?).  Similarly the lengthy paper presenting the totality of others’ ideas (in the student’s own words) besides being a template for plagiarism is also based on an information scarcity model.  finally the paper itself is dissimilar to the bulk of writing done in the professional world.  In an average day I write thousands of words, most of these are emails, some are articles and blogposts, some are responses to other’s blogposts (in fact, I wonder if the paper assignment itself is on it’s deathbed, but that’s another day).

Yet a suggestion that this buggy whip be abandoned is greeted with fear and disdain.  Teachers and parents are fearful that something will be “lost” with the disappearance of this dinosaur.  Some sneer that the rigor of the educational process is being lost.  Some retreat to the last refuge of the educational traditionalist, “They’ll need this for college.”

To all of these objections I want to shout, “Shut up, voices in my head!”   I understand the fear and I feel it.  What if we make these changes and we BREAK A GENERATION OF KIDS?

Still it’s no longer possible for me to embrace the teaching of 20th Century skills.  We need to teach students skills (including research and writing) that they will actually use in the way they will use them.

For example, I wish someone had taught me how to bring a blog post to an effective close, but I never learned this, so I guess I’ll just stop…

I invite your comments.

A Painful Lesson

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bunny/ / CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

I’m not particularly inclined to write self-revelatory prose here, but my experience yesterday related directly to the issues I discuss in this website, and the insights I took from it have some broader applications.

Yesterday I was presenting my “Shifting Platforms/Shifting Paradigms” talk at the CLMS/CLHS conference in San Diego. Though I had limited time, I was lucky enough to attend Alan November’s opening keynote before my session time. His talk was exciting and inspirational, and though I worried that a few of his points were similar to mine, I felt that my talk was actually a great (if less expert) companion to his.

I went to my assigned room, set up, and waited…and NO ONE CAME!

Well, it didn’t turn out as badly as that, as I started to pack up with my tail between my legs, a couple of people came in, and we sat down and had a good conversation, roughly following the outline of my original talk (I did skip the small group breakout however).

I’m not posting this as a public licking of wounds (well, maybe just a little bit), nor am I suggesting that the conference attendees should have come to my session.  Rather, I came to a couple of realizations about this new world that I’m attempting to enter.

These may seem completely obvious to those of you who have been attending and speaking at conferences over time, but I write them as advice to myself as much as others.

First, for breakout sessions people want skills more than big ideas.  The “Shifting Platforms…” talk is pretty good, but it was the same type of territory explored in the keynote.  In a brief walkaround I noticed that the largest and most enthusiastic crowd was in a session dedicated to exploring Google Wave (if no one showed up, I was going to go in there myself!).  People need to be inspired and given food for thought, but they want concrete takeaways as well.  Luckily the two new presentations I’m writing have a much more concrete “hot button” angle, so I hope to address this.

Second, people attach to presenters as much as to topics.  Beside the issues with the general topic, people didn’t come because they didn’t know who I am and whether listening to me would be worth their limited time.  In part this is a function of time and experience, but it is also a function of direct networking.  I was not able to get to the conference until immediately before my session.  I might have had more success if I had come the night before and talked to some people about what I was doing.  I can’t forget that this is a people business, and if I make a PowerPoint, they won’t necessarily come.

Humbled by the experience (and who can’t use a bit of humiliation now and then?) I hope I can learn the lessons it brings to me and focus on giving people what they want and not just what I want to do.