LOSING MY FAITH

Twitter = .....er?

2012-01-01T10:23:00.001Z

It took me a while to notice this, but the folks at OK Cupid have laid it all out.

"There are no Apple people"

2011-10-12T11:43:00.001+01:00

Freddie deBoer's piece on the role of the Internet in culture deserves a read. Really, even if the middle (partially US-specific) bit could use a little tightening.

Got this via Dan Meyer who sees this as a complement to the way Will Richardson sees the 'net, but I wonder if this isn't instead some kind of critique of Will's thinking.

The plugged-in generation?

2011-10-12T10:05:00.003+01:00

I've noted in previous posts how my pupils seem much less plugged-in than the gurus wish they were. Things may be changing.

A couple of years ago, I asked a class how many of them had seen something on YouTube within the last 24 hours.

Thirty hands.

How many have ever uploaded anything to YouTube?

One hand.

The rest just looked at me. Upload? Wasn't I saying that wrong? I didn't even bother to ask my planned question about YouTube channels. Queries about other media like Wikis got the same reponse - they look, they don't participate. My conclusion was that teenagers may be on the internet, but they are passive there, not active. I've even made this a topic for analysis in sociology class a couple of times.

This year, however, I asked a year 11 class similar questions and got radically different answers. Half the class actually had their own YouTube channel. Other questions about, say, Wikis showed a similar trend. (Well, except blogging which seems to be getting less popular. And teenagers still don't tweet much.)

So - maybe things are changing. I suspect so.

Update: Interestingly enough, after I wrote this, Ann Michaelsen published a piece that is quite in line with my original post, particularly in its conclusion.

Dan Meyer

2011-09-28T11:35:00.003+01:00

I keep trying to stop wasting my time reading a math teacher blog.

Then he posts something like this shot at Sal Kahn and I know I'm still hooked.

Cory Doctorow on Writing in the Age of Distraction

2011-09-25T19:28:00.002+01:00

Fantastic article.

Re-post: Digital Natives, my @#¤%!

2011-04-07T11:00:00.000+01:00

(Re-post of earlier material for a class exercise)

Overestimation of how plugged-in our pupils are.

If we repeat “our pupils are digital natives” often enough, will it become true? This is part 2 of the series “Sick of gurus”

I feel left out of much of the discussion on the web (and at conferences). The party line just doesn’t match my experience in the classroom.
Example:

Our students are citizens of the 21st century. They read, communicate, collaborate, socialize, work, explore, and learn with personal technologies. They are the Millennials, who share ideas and dreams on social networking sites, follow streams of information from web page to web page, and use technology, reading, writing, and critical thinking skills in almost every aspect of their lives.

This is an extreme example, but the web is full of this ‘digital native’ stuff. I’m sorry, it just isn’t so. It seems to me like a classic case of the Bellman’s fallacy (from Carrolls’ The Hunting of the Snark’) : “What I tell you three times is true”. Cut off from the classroom, the gurus just keep repeating this kind of thing to each other until they believe it. I’m sorry, but while my pupils are literate, media-interested, highly privileged, at-least-4-computers-at-home, online 24/7 types, the large majority of them do not use social networking to learn anything or collaborate and they certainly aren’t out there using ‘critical thinking skills.’

They don’t use cloud computing, they don’t use social bookmarking, few of them blog, very few of them have ever uploaded anything to YouTube. They read Wikipedia, but don’t know what a wiki is and have never contributed to a wiki, looked at a history page or subscribed to changes. None of them know what a podcast is. They may know what RSS is, but almost none of them use it on their own. They don’t tweet. They don’t even use stuff like Digg. They just don’t use modern technology for what we would like them to and even resist adults trying to get them to approach digital and social/digital media in the ways we think are productive.

My pupils are plugged into ‘Web 2.0’ (asked if they have FaceBook accounts, they look at you strangely - it’s a bit like asking if they have noses) but they use it for social connection, not for collaboration. Their approach is fundamentally passive. Their use of things like wikis and YouTube are good examples – these things are deeply embedded in their everyday lives, but in they don’t use or approach these things the way I do (or - aha! - the way I would like them to).

For me, wikis are one of the watersheds in human history: the emergence of massively collaborative systems for organizing information. You read the Encyclopedia Brittanica, you participate in Wikipedia. My pupils read them and use them in the same way.

I am starting to love services like YouTube and its imitators and spin-offs. The ease of embedding content all over the place is another real watershed.
My pupils, however, do not share my mania for mashing it up. They just like the access to pictures and music that the modern web affords.

It’s also interesting that, while many of them know what RSS is, they don’t use it. For me, this is again a fundamental change in the way the internet fits into my life: what I am interested in comes to me. This isn’t an interesting approach, it seems, to a generation that has grown up zapping their way around.

We don’t like it, but the most popular Norwegian social networking site for teens ( I teach in Norway) is this. (Don’t click if you’re squeamish or easily depressed – it’s a site where young people upload pictures of themselves or parts of their bodies for approval from other users. Soon available in English.) I know that the ages of contributors on the first page are high, but don’t be fooled. What teenagers are doing here is indeed uploading and sharing content, but this isn’t what I think of as collaboration or useful learning. They are posing – and competing for attention and approval. They also seem to be participating in their own objectification.

My point is: if we want a generation that “shares and collaborates” on the web and that “uses critical thinking” in its interaction with media, we’re going to have to work hard to produce it. The idea that technology produces these things by itself in some magical way is so hopelessly out of touch with reality I’m amazed I’ve managed to write so much about it here…

Stop linking to 'Top 100 Blog' posts

2011-03-28T10:34:00.000+01:00

From dy/dan

Facebook = the air we breathe? / Etherpad

2011-01-07T11:01:00.000Z

Teaching a colleague's English class as a substitute, so I'm using Etherpad as a collaborative writing tool (details later in this post). When they go to read and comment on each other's work, they need to send the URL for the pad where their work is stored. To do this, they simply send the URL via Facebook. One pupil is not logged on to Facebook, so the others tell him to do so and then they wait for him. They also ask why he isn't logged on, since this seems strange to them. He points out that he is at school, in class and actually working, but this doesn't cut it with his fellow 17 year-olds. The conclusion seems to be that he's a bit odd or that he's trying hard to project a certain image.

Now, my school has an LMS with a perfectly adequate message system and they are likely all logged on here, but it doesn't even occur to them to use such a tool for a practical purpose. Waiting for their classmate to log on to Facebook rather than just send him a message via the LMS is particularly telling. Facebook is the air we breathe; anything to do with school is by definition not relevant for actually doing something.

For anyone interested, here is how I was working with Etherpad:

Since I was a substitute, I didn't have access to the class pages in our LMS, so I needed some easy, free-access web resource. Etherpad seems to have closed, but lots of people are hosting pads that are freely accessible. I like to use PiratePad, mostly 'cause I adore the frog with the eyepatch on the opening page. Maybe it gives me some cred, using a site with the word 'pirate' in it, but I don't know. (Skinny, balding, forty-something white guys probably shouldn't even try to be cool.)

Pupils pair up and write text, preferably tightly defined. (On this day, we had been examining globally available English-language cable channels and had spent some time on Al-Jazeera English. The pupils were to write a letter to the editor addressing some of Al-Jazeera's more controversial practices.) Once a text has been written, the pair send their text to another pair and read the text of a third pair. They can make corrections, suggestions and comments in the text and in the separate chat that goes with each text. A certain amount of F2F also occurs - as a teacher I find this fine to encourage, but having to write comments down also makes them more serious and structured and improves the oral discussion. Having the authors nearby helps keep the written comments polite.

I then get them to send their text to a new pair for a new evaluation, so that each pair evaluates two other texts and gets two evaluations on the text that they produced. One can just stop there, or revise the texts based on the feedback. They can then be submitted to the teacher or used in some other way. I'm using a longer-term version of this in French class for texts that will eventually be used on a web-site.

If you're a teacher and haven't used Etherpad, I do recommend you try it. Easy to use and quite powerful.

Prisoner’s dilemma

2010-11-17T10:16:00.007Z

Back to playing games… I have previously played a tournament of the prisoner’s dilemma with some of my pupils.

The basic idea is that of two prisoners who cannot communicate before deciding on their strategy. Do they rat on each other? If only one chooses this strategy, he wins and is set free. If both rat on each other, however, they are both lying and both lose. The rational thing to do is to keep quiet, but this depends on co-operation without the possibility of communication beforehand.

I introduced last year’s class to a set of rules for a simple re-iterated version of the game in one class and then the next time we met, they launched into a full tournament.

Each pair plays three games and then switches
I use the following score matrix (about the simplest version of the game)

	Player 2 attacks	Player 2 stays passive
Player 1 attacks	Player 1: 0 points Player 2: 0 points	Player 1: 2 points Player 2: 0 points
Player 1 stays passive	Player 1: 0 points Player 2: 2 points	Player 1: 1 point Player 2: 1 point

After a warm-up round, I had each player decide on a strategy in advance. The strategy could be as simple as ‘always attack’ or as complicated as they could think of, including principles for modifying tactics as the game progressed.

The idea was to play a round and then get them to revise their rules before playing a second round, hoping that they would eventually hit on the fact that they have to trust each other to get anywhere. I blinked here, however. Discussion in the break made me think that they were a long way from understanding this and I broke off the game. Afterwards, I felt that this was a mistake. I should have just let them play several rounds until they finally got the point. Sometimes, as a teacher you have to accept the fact that learning takes time.

This year, I just taught them the game and then launched into it. Again, after the first round, they could adjust their strategy and then we played another round. They hadn’t hit on altruism as a strategy, but they were certainly learning. It seemed as if they weren’t going to hit on it immediately, and they began to complain and get bored, so once again I broke off the game. Still, they had experienced enough of the game that I could riff off this experience. A ‘teachable moment’.

What does this teach? Well, I think this is one of the places where game theory is really useful for analyzing ‘real life’. Think about teaching the Cold War, when the whole world was in effect involved in a giant high-stakes round of the Prisoner’s Dilemma. To a degree, this can give insight into all social life, since all social life depends on counting on other people to mostly do what they are supposed to. We can almost always be exploited, but the cost of always guarding against exploitation by others is too high. We have to mostly count on most people doing what they are supposed to do most of the time, even though they could be rewarded by misusing our trust and a game like this can be a way to simplify and emphasize this for young people.

Photo credits: Peter Bruce, Mike_tn's

Save the Oxford comma!

2010-10-26T17:27:00.001+01:00

The utter importance of preserving the final serial comma.

From Bruce Baugh via Patrick Nielson Hayden via Brad DeLong via Jeff Weintraub via Dan Meyer .

"Among those interviewed were his two ex-wives, Kris Kristofferson and Robert Duvall. "

Verily, the mind boogles. No wonder this one made the rounds.

The best has to be vlorbik's contribution on Dan Meyer's page:

"I'd like to thank my parents, Ayn Rand and God."

Fear - How to teach when fear takes over completely?

2010-09-10T13:23:00.001+01:00

I’ve been chewing on this topic all summer, but never really get far. Time to post some disjointed thoughts, maybe. In the holidays, I sometimes take the odd summer job - climbing courses for the Norwegian tourist association. Nice to change my office from this:

To this:

So: there's always someone on a climbing course who freaks out. At least on the inside. For this person, their own struggle with fear becomes the main component of the whole course. It often happens on rappel. Halfway down, the student freezes and an instructor often has to go down/up to them and talk them down, even re-rig and take them down physically.

These people often take things easier afterwards, dropping out of sessions as much as possible and not covering any optional material. Still, even though they may seem to accomplish less than most, these individuals who struggle with fear may be the ones who walk away with the greatest feeling of accomplishment. That's why I do kind of like beginner courses, even though many instructors look down on them.

But what about those who just give in to their fear, or who don't manage to get any further? It happened to me on a course this year: a student just gave in completely to fear each time she attempted something and the course ended without her having achieved anything, really. The question that gnaws me is of course: could I, as a teacher, have done anything differently to help this person?

Fear is often an issue when taking the inexperienced outdoors. Heli-ski guides can have trouble because extremely dangerous situations on winter snow can be perceived as harmless by skiers accustomed to managed ski slopes. Rock-climbing instructors can experience the reverse, with students or clients paralyzed by fear in safe situations. This is what happened on my course. We don’t have beginners in dangerous situations, but they may find themselves in unfamiliar situations and ones that look dangerous. Every so often, someone cracks and doesn’t manage to overcome their fear (fear, again, of a safe situation).

What happens here? My thinking is that this may be a product of our modern, protected lifestyle. This lifestyle can result in a very limited play of emotions, and when different emotions finally occur, the flood of feelings can be so overwhelming, unfamiliar, and awful, that the individual looses the ability to decide on their own actions. Fear, to take my example here.

Fear is not itself a negative thing. It keeps us alive. Our feelings connect us to our lives and help us navigate through them and fear is the most fundamental. I believe that fear is the primeval emotion – all animals must feel some kind of fear. Not all organisms seem to feel contentment or love, but everything avoids what is dangerous to it. Fear is directly connected to an organism’s survival, so it isn’t surprising that fear is a powerful emotion with somatic effects.

My wife thinks that many of us are unable to distinguish between our emotions and ourselves, especially in these moments of powerful feeling. Myself, when I am afraid, I am able to look at my fear a bit from the outside and think about whether or not I am reacting to something real about my present situation or if my situation is simply provoking old emotions. An inability to do this may result in an inability to function when powerful emotion takes over. This seems to be what happened to a couple of my students this summer. Unable to distinguish between themselves and their fear, they have no opportunity to function when they are afraid. Some really absurd situations result. This summer, one woman sat whimpering on a ledge despite being fully secure when another young woman who was full of excitement at something she had just done skipped by her unsecured on the same ledge, smiling and chattering. I frequently see small children waltz up climbing routes chattering to their parents, while on the next route a frightened adult student cowers, completely paralyzed by fear.

Well – is there anything to learn from this? Does any of this have relevance for the classroom? I think so, because many pupils struggle with fear in the classroom. Many educators think of the fear that pupils fear in the classroom as something different than the fear one feels in a ‘dangerous’ situation, but I feel my experiences as a climbing instructor challenges this thinking. One can’t make a distinction between rational and irrational fear. Fear is always ‘real’ to the one who feels it, and fear on a climbing route may be far less rational than the fear of one’s classmates. The key is the relationship the student has to his or her own emotions and their ability to not be taken over by fear but to let other parts of themselves decide on their course of action.

So how can we as educators help students overcome by fear? My thinking above would seem to hint that these are complex issues rooted in the student’s life experience, so the help we can offer is limited, especially in the case of weekend courses. Being supportive (eye contact!) and challenging at the same time seems to help, and so does breaking things down into one task at a time. Present a frightened person with simply the next step they have to do, not the whole project.

Since I believe that the problem may be rooted in the student’s relationship to their own emotions, the teacher / instructor can help by trying to make the student aware that they are not the same as their emotional reactions, but that these things are simply a healthy part of them. This is a long journey for some people and we have to have realistic expectations about what we can accomplish with people in the time we have available.

Death by blogging / Podcast

2010-09-08T20:26:00.002+01:00

A few of my pupils looked disturbed as a mentioned the class blog. "Not another blog! I've already lost track of all the blogs I'm supposed to write." Humn. Maybe we're overdoing it a tad...

I was able to inform them that, this time, this was a teacher-run class blog, not an individual blog. At the moment, it's basically a podcast. Each class, a new student is assigned to sum up the day's work and submit their summation to me as an mp3 file.

I save the mp3 on a free, open web archive. At the moment, I'm using the Internet Archive, which is sort of awkward to use, but works well once you've finally uploaded your file. It saves your file and generates a URL for it.

The blog has link fields enabled, meaning that the title of the blog post is itself a link, in this case to the audio file submitted by my student. In Blogger, it’s simple to set this – you just check a box in the ‘settings’ tab.

When I set this up, Blogger’s built-in feed was inadequate (don’t know if they’ve improved it), so I used Feed Burner to burn a feed for the blog. Feed Burner, now owned by Google, works well for podcasting. All my pupils have to do is open the blog once, click on subscribe, and they then get the podcasts automatically sent to their service (they’re teenagers, so almost all of them use iTunes) every week. The ones who synchronize their iPod with their computer get the podcast automatically on their iPod as well.

I was a bit disorganized last time I did this, but now that I’m a bit slicker, I’m excited to let this run for a few months and then get the pupil’s feedback on this.

Close those machines!

2010-08-31T10:39:00.001+01:00

This year's leader for our student council came to our last staff meeting to introduce herself. She began by asking all the teachers to close their laptops. At the end of her short presentation, she couldn't help but comment with a smile that not all the teachers had done as she had asked.

I've pondered this before: lots of teachers (myself included) spend lots of time managing student computer use. Some of us spend a lot of time lamenting the poor spirit shown by students sitting in the classroom doing something other than what they should be doing. But - adults seem to be exactly the same.

What conclusion can we draw here?

GPS and ugly shoes: Tech and mental flabbiness

2010-08-03T17:46:00.003+01:00

I’ve been on holiday recently, and once again borrowed my Father-in-law’s GPS for the car. It gets me thinking. The GPS is fun to use, and sometimes quite useful, but it can also get one into trouble since it replaces part of the thinking process without thinking itself.

We humans are actually quite good at orienting ourselves in space, extrapolating from incomplete information and reassessing based on observations. It’s probably healthy to stretch this capacity once in a while. The trouble with the GPS is that one quickly gets a far more passive attitude to navigation.

I think of the parallel to the physical world. It’s natural for us humans to find ways of saving energy and making jobs easier. Cars, elevators, wood-splitting machines – thousands of inventions make our lives easier. The trouble is that our bodies are adapted to an active lifestyle and all these inventions actually make us sick. Obesity and other effects of a sedentary lifestyle such as back problems have become major health issues in the western world. There is a growing awareness that we need to be far more physically active than we are, but so far this has mostly extended to filling up our free time with compensatory exercise. We drive to work, sit at our desks and then use the exercise room on our break. A bit absurd?

A new trend is slowly appearing however, based on trying to adapt our everyday life to our needs. I have, for instance, become one of those people who wear those silly-looking shoes designed to simulate walking on a soft, uneven surface. We are poorly adapted for the hard, flat floors that I walk on all day long, so the idea is that by simulating the kind of surface we are adapted to walk on (soft, uneven), we can avoid some of the health problems of modern life. In this case, poor posture, reduced balance, short hamstrings, etc. These shoes are also harder to walk on, removing some of the ease of the modern lifestyle and re-inserting more physical work into daily routine.

Now, the GPS makes me wonder if we have started doing the same thing to our minds that we have done to our bodies: our brains, like our bodies, need exercise, and we are increasingly getting machines to do the tedious work of thinking for us. How does this affect us? I was helping a year nine student with a math problem a while back and part of the path to the solution required him to find 3 times 49. To my surprise (and dismay), he reached for his calculator.

Now, I’ve thought about this and anyone who uses a calculator to find the product of 3 and 49 is …well, damaged by access to calculators. For any normal person, multiplying 3 by 50 and then subtracting 3 is much, much faster than doing the work with a calculator, so dependency on calculators is actually slowing this person down. There are other issues here, however. This student didn’t even consider for a moment an alternative to his calculator, so it seems that calculator use has encouraged a passive attitude to numbers. Math is the subject that is most often a problem for schoolkids, so I wonder if we aren’t worsening the situation by teaching them dependency on pacifying tools.

I don’t mean to be a Luddite. We have become capable of so much more by ‘extending our brains’ onto external aids. Think of how much more we can do with just a pencil and a piece of paper than without. I’m a better shopper when I use a shopping list. Although I could practice mnemonics to use instead of my list, I prefer to use my brain power on other things. There is an urban myth about Albert Einstein not knowing his own telephone number. He had it written down if he needed it and could free brain space for more important things.

Whether this story is true or not, there is a point here. Tools make us capable of more, amplifying muscle or brain power and taking over mundane, repetitive tasks so that we can focus on the big stuff. To get back to the navigation example: I can navigate without a compass, but I’m much, much better if I have a compass. Isn’t the GPS just another step up? To think of my physical parallel: I live in an apartment building and wouldn’t want to get rid of my elevator. When my fridge dies, I don’t want to haul it down the stairs. The trick is to not take the elevator when I don’t have a fridge to carry. Walk to the store, bicycle to work, etc. These things get talked about all the time. Do we need to start talking about the mental equivalents?

(I seem to remember reading a similar piece a while back, also taking a GPS as a point of departure. Can anyone remember seeing it?)
Photo credit: mraoch, Inky Bob

Does this blog exist?

2010-07-29T21:40:00.005+01:00

Bogus question - yes it does. I've just been too busy with other things to spend enough time on it. First with exams (more on exams soon - I've been thinking a great deal about exams lately). And I've been on vacation (this is the house we rented). If you're not the least bit envious, then you haven't studied the picture closely enough.

I'll get back to classrooms and computers soon enough, but first, a little reflection on ugly shoes, mental flabbiness, GPS and ...fear.

Dylan Wiliam

2010-04-22T17:15:00.001+01:00

I’ve been told that computers are about to revolutionize our classrooms for the last 30 years. And I’m still waiting.

Dylan Wiliam

The internet can still be fun

2010-04-19T09:40:00.004+01:00

Every time I go to cut my RSS-feed from the Guardian's technology blogs, then they rake up stuff like The David Cameron anecdote generator. Interestingly enough, the generator itself is blocked at my workplace. I'm going to try not to think too hard about what damage the county authorities believe this could be doing to the next generation of citizens.

I also learned from the Guardian about Gamestation's changing their terms and conditions to include ownership of their customers' souls. It's not boring out there yet.

Does God exist?

2010-04-09T08:32:00.003+01:00

…a post title a bit more in keeping with the blog’s title, perhaps. This blog is about belief, in the end, but it’s not always so obvious.

A little while back I was invited to the library at lunch to debate the existence of God. Amazing that at least 70 pupils showed up in their lunch break to hear such a debate. Here’s a answer to those who wonder if today’s youth are totally shallow.

Not quite satisfied with the debate. We should have agreed on more in advance, as my opponent’s approach was almost poetic and rather hard to attack. We only got going once the audience got involved, so we should have started with questions more quickly.

Worksheet > Exam 2

2010-03-22T12:18:00.002Z

Well, our input to a working group at another school was pretty one-way. We went, we talked about living with computers in the classroom and then we came home. God only knows what they made of it all. Nice contrast between me and my boss, who is more of a gung-ho Web 2.0 educator than I am. I talked mostly about furniture, but in the context of all the other stuff that regularly comes up here.

Back to worksheets and exams. There is a tremendous culture of what I call ‘worksheet’-type questions here, particularly in English class. What was the name of the main character? What happened to him when he was eight? And so on.

Compare that to a typical exam question: “Rewrite the following paragraph to avoid its monotonous and awkward style.” Quite a typical exam question. There is also a part b here: “Explain how your version differs from the original using appropriate terminology.” Now, these are very typical exam questions. Here, they could be used in the year 12 English exam. I find these quite good questions. They demand concrete skills and they enable those pupils who have learned something to demonstrate those skills. They let the examiner differentiate between candidates quite easily without recourse to the dreaded multiple choice or to extremely subjective grading.

Trouble is, many of the pupils being prepared for this exam are being subjected to a strict regimen of short stories and worksheets. It’s no wonder that so many schools do so poorly on this exam – reading tons of short stories and doing worksheets is not a good preparation because the exam demands specific skills and knowledge. Worksheets demand knowledge of specific short stories which can’t be tested on the exam in the absence of a national reading list. This kind of teaching also chases pupils to SparkNotes and the like, and that’s really not building any skills.

Leadership in the digital classroom

2010-03-16T11:43:00.003Z

I’ll get back to worksheets and exams in a moment. Firstly, leadership in the digital classroom. My boss is visiting a school tomorrow to talk about teachers as leaders in the classroom and I’m going along for the ride. We’re visiting a school that has a focus on ‘the teacher as leader’ and we, I suppose, represent a digital school.

What to share? Well, you have a few hours. What do you suggest I say?

Here are some of my initial thoughts:

Stand at the back of a room full of teachers. What do you see? Facebook, email, newspapers. Are we expecting behaviour from children and youth that we cannot expect from adults? There was an interesting post a while back on 1:1 Schools pointing out that we often try to get the kids to learn things that most adults don’t know. It’s a very interesting point to make about school, but schools are also often very focused on behaviour and we seem to have the behavioural equivalent here. My pupils are sometimes confused when I berate them for answering the telephone during class. “But the teachers do it!” Humn….

Leadership in the digital classroom has to rest on three pillars:

The technical. The endless proxy war, the American-style filter war, our own experience with LANschool – these things can make one think that there are no technical solutions. Giving computers to pupils and then trying to control them with filters or piggy-back systems can seem like a losing battle. A few pupils spend lots of time figuring out hacks that then spread. What one needs are simple steering or filtering tools that are robust and that form a part of a wider strategy.

The cultural. One has to build up a culture in school that regards class time as working time and the computer as a tool for work. You can’t avoid frequent and difficult conversations with pupils. It helps if the whole faculty is on board here.

The practical. There will always be a need for ‘eyeballing’. If your pupils are working on screens in class time, you need to be able to see them, and you need to be able to get to them quickly. How are you going to give help and guidance if you can’t get to them and see their work? This is where furniture comes in.

The standard line is often: clear tasks, short deadlines, imposed collaboration. If pupils are going to work on computers, then they should have something clear and specific that they are expected to produce, an explicit and limited time to do it in and ideally this should not be ‘meaningless’ work, but something that is immediately useful for others. This makes some sense, but I think it underestimates the distractive power of computers. Vast amounts of money are spent on training our students to expect entertainment and that’s what you as a teacher in a digital classroom are up against.

Feedback, anyone?

Worksheet > Exam 1

2010-03-05T13:00:00.002Z

I was substituting for a colleague a while back and in one of the breaks started talking to some of the pupils. One of them confided to me that he had never read any of the books they had studied in school. “Thank God for Spark Notes” he said.

This reminds me of an essay from the exams I marked last year:

I must admit I am not a very big book-reader, in fact... I don’t think I have ever successfully finished a single book in my entire life. It’s hard to understand, but it’s true. The school projects I have had when we were supposed to review a book, they were all lies. When I reviewed “The Da Vinci Code”, “Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone”, “Atonement” ect. I had just watched the movies and based them upon that. However, I have read the beginning of some books and I have watched a lot of films in my time. (Anonymous pupil)

Moments like these cut to the heart of the matter for me. How is it at all possible for students to replace reading a book with reading a plot summary? They seem to be equating reading a book with knowledge of its plot. Huh? Are we in schools treating ‘reading books’ as synonymous with ‘finding out what happens’?

Yup.

Consider the following questions from one of the textbooks on my desk to the short story ‘Snow’ by Julia Alvarez:

Where does the family live during their first year in New York?
What impression do you get of the Sisters of Charity?
Who was Yolanda’s favorite?
Where was Yolanda seated in the classroom?
Why was she put there?

Etc, etc. Typical worksheet stuff, right? Now, what exactly is being trained by setting questions like this?

Nothing. There is no skill or important knowledge base that is being pushed here. Such questions are merely control. They also fill the time, keep the students doing something and thus make us teachers feel useful. But – we can’t hide from the fact that this type of work tends to kill interest in something that is intrinsically interesting. It also teaches pupils to equate ‘reading’ with ‘finding out what happens’. Set questions like this and you chase the pupils to SparkNotes. Consider the questions above – if your goal is to answer them, then it’s actually more effective to read the notes than to read the story.

Think about that for a moment. If you are a teacher who sets worksheet-type questions for your class and you find out that they have answered them by reading the notes, how do you react? Shouldn’t they be praised for finding a more efficient way to get the task done?

So, OK, worksheets are out. What do you ask about literature? There are two questions about literature (or film) that I tend to use in my classes:

Did you like it? (and why?)
How does it work?*

These questions are not more easily answered by reading the notes. They correspond roughly to the two mains types of writing about literature and film: criticism/review and academic literary analysis, so they get kids working in real-world genres, not the made-up school-only genres we often get them producing in. Answering such questions well involves important skills.

I’ll post this now and get back soon to part two, which is to consider this line of thinking and ‘worksheet teaching’ in the light of final exams.

* There are, of course, a couple of other interesting questions about film and literature:

How is this work situated in history? (how can we see it as a product of its time and what effect has it had on the world?)
What does this work teach us about the world/ society/ life/ ourselves?

…but I rarely get there with teenagers.

Playing games

2010-02-15T21:43:00.002Z

I used to be a middle school teacher (8-10) and I was known for using games a lot in class. For some reason, the games didn’t accompany me on my switch to senior secondary school (year 12). Maybe I’m afraid that it will be harder to get older kids to play. Maybe I’ve become less playful myself.

Last week, I pulled myself together and played one of my favorites. The Market. Manipulative, lots of fun. Goes like this:

Pupils are told that they are going to play at ‘a market’. They are divided into 3 groups and everyone is given trading cards. There are three types, e.g. red, white and green. The most scarce (I used green) are also the goal of the game. Everyone tries to accumulate green cards. The groups are unequal and the largest group is given primarily the most common ‘base’ type – red. This group should actually be a majority. The next largest group gets more cards per player. They get reds too, and more whites, but still few greens. The smallest group gets a few reds, some whites and also the most green. Ideally, the teacher glosses over the inequality of the groups as much as possible by dealing out quickly and putting emphasis on the rules of play. No attention is given to the fact that the players are not given equal cards. (Put the red cards on top of the pile for each player).

Play occurs in rounds of about 5 minutes. Everyone trades individually. The ideal is to gather ‘sets’ of one red, one white and one green card. At the end of each round, each set ‘generates’ a new green card. During the round, the players trade with each other. At the end of each round, the group that has the highest combined score gets to agree on a new rule for the game. The teacher (the ‘referee’ ) can also come with new rules, usually rules that are only valid for one round. For instance, to stimulate activity in the first round, 3 reds can also ‘generate’ a green. To dampen ‘inflation’, the referee can create tax rules to siphon off green cards. Tax rules can also help level the playing field by being weighted instead of flat, but be warned that this can stimulate solidarity amongst the ‘rich’ group. If play goes on for a while, a rule will be needed for the conversion of green cards into white.

The idea is that the different colour cards represent different types of resources, say red for labour, white for knowledge or human capital and green for material capital. Profit requires combining different types of resources and profit can then itself be re-invested and form the basis of more growth.

The point of the game is what happens. These kinds of things tend to happen:

Most players increase their holdings.
The rich group wins.
Group solidarity forms, especially amongst the ‘poor’, and slowest for the ‘middle class’. In my class last week, pupils quickly got into their roles and began throwing out unfavorable characterizations of the other groups.
The ‘poor’ or ‘working class’ tend to gravitate towards group play, but this requires internal leadership (or heavy hinting from the teacher).
Pupils quickly get into the game and get surprisingly emotionally involved. All manner of underhanded tricks appear, cheating, intimidation, brinksmanship, etc.

The game is intended as a quick ‘Marxism light’ – demonstrating the functioning of class in industrial society, but my pupils pointed out that it could be any market system – modern world trade, for example. If people play rationally, then everyone tends to get richer, but while the poor get a bit richer, the rich get much richer, so it’s a good point.

It’s also interesting from a psychological point of view: how quickly groups form and how they relate to competing groups. My pupils last week from the winning group had a typical reaction: they were disappointed when they learned that I knew in advance that they would win. Even when it became clear that they had started with an advantage, they still liked to think that they somehow ‘deserved’ their position.

Endless fuel for classroom discussion here.

Picture credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/artemuestra/ / CC BY-SA 2.0'>Reuters / Micheal Caronna

Mistaking access to information for learning

2010-02-10T09:36:00.002Z

OK – the party line goes something like this:

‘Before’, information was scarce, so it made sense to crowd people into rooms where they all faced the front so that one expert could enlighten them.

‘Now’, information is readily available, so that this structure is obsolete.

The trouble with this analysis is that it starts with a false picture of the past. Most of what has ever been taught in schools has not been information that is particularly hard to come by.

Nothing I teach has ever been a secret. Most of what I teach is fairly simple, conceptually, and very easy to look up.

So, why do they pay me?

Because learning new stuff is difficult.

Skinner’s famous axiom was that (since we can’t see inside people’s heads) the only way to tell if someone has learned something is that they show new behaviour. Unfortunately, getting humans to act in new ways is difficult. Very difficult.

I feel left out of the party. The information revolution is supposed to be transforming schooling. “Pupils now have all the information in the world in their pockets and can find the answer to any question in seconds.” True, but irrelevant. This does not transform school, because school has never been about digging around for scarce information. This does not transform the role of the teacher, because the role of the teacher never has been the sole point of access to important but inaccessible information.

Information has become much easier to access in the last few years, but that ease of access has meant nothing for my teaching because scarcity of information has never been the issue. The difficulty of learning is the issue and sometimes I feel that all the digital revolution has given me are a bunch of shiny new toys that don’t even work half the time and distract my pupils when they do.

(Part 4 in the series Sick of Gurus)

What distraction?

2009-12-15T19:26:00.002Z

A collegue of mine was speaking to her students about filters and limited student access to the web during class. Some of her students made the arguement that it was less distracting for them to have web access. Without web access during class, the option is games, but games demand too much attention. With the web open, games are abandoned for social networking which the students argued was less distracting. One sends a message and then can return one's attention to class.

I don't make this stuff up. Really. I don't have to.

Technology is its own biggest limitation.

2009-12-06T21:19:00.003Z

Part three in my ‘sins of the Web 2.0’ series

2. Pretending that all this stuff works all the time.

Monday morning. Mid-term to be written on individual computers. I block internet access to prevent cheating, but need to leave a dictionary and our LMS open. This partial block causes chaos with their internet connections. In this digital age, some of the pupils have no paper dictionary, so they need their connection. I also need the LMS open so that they can submit. Our harassed IT-guy shows up and spends ages looking at the problem.

And I’m lucky. Lots of teachers don’t even have an ‘IT-guy’ they can call. The system manager in their school is some eager teacher who gets a 25% reduction in class load or something, but then isn’t always available when problems arise, because they have to teach the other 75%.

I remember wasting tons of time when I was small as some hapless teacher struggled with the 16 mm film projector. What do my pupils get to see me struggle with?

Pupil’s hardware (all 30)
Pupil’s OS
Pupils software (all of these first 3 having themselves dozens of components)
Pupil’s internet connection
Base station
Local net and server
Our line out of the building
Problems with external resources.

…and I’m probably forgetting a few things. ‘Doing school’ in this manner means that someone has to spend a lot of time making sure all this works, or we waste hours of class. It’s a new situation, and I’m constantly amazed that in the endless discussions around digital schools, no-one seems to talk about the technical side of things. The truth is, many teachers experience technical problems much of the time and this is possibly the biggest hurdle to effective use of digital technology in the classroom.

I note that Microsoft’s ‘School of the Future’ in Philadelphia has so far been ticked off as a failure. There have been several factors in the troubles that they have had, but I note that frustration with net down-time has been an important issue. If they can’t get it right, is it any wonder that the rest of us get frustrated?

The question I'm forced to ask, though, is can we honestly expect teachers to integrate technology into their instruction when we can't guarantee that they'll have consistent access to the proper tools to do that work?

This is Bill Ferriter at the Tempered Radical, one of the many web-gurus that I still can’t manage to cross off my personal hero list. Saying teachers need to develop “digital resiliency”, he is talking mostly about other kinds of blocks than the plain technical glitches I’m mostly talking about, but Bill still goes where few go here. In conference after conference, on all the hot EduBlogs, in the latest books, where is this discussion? I’ll say it again: technical difficulties are the single greatest hurdle to effective use of digital technology in the classroom. Not lack of pedagogical vision, not unwilling teachers, not lack of funds. It can be hard to get much of this stuff to work because there is so much that has to work properly to get a class online.

Post Script

Will Richardson (another web-guru I can’t quite cross off my personal list. He’s such a nice man.) wrote a post called “I Don’t Need Your Network (or Your Computer, or Your Tech Plan, or Your…)” while I was working on this one and takes an interesting angle. He asks:

How are we going to have to rethink the idea that we have to provide our kids a connection? Can we even somewhat get our brains around the idea of letting them use their own?

At what point do we get out of the business of troubleshooting and fixing technology? Isn’t “fixing your own stuff” a 21st Century skill?

Wow.

Could we then start to think about...getting back to teaching?

Digital natives, my ***!

2009-12-02T12:10:00.002Z

Overestimation of how plugged-in our pupils are. If we repeat “our pupils are digital natives” often enough, will it become true? This is part 2 of the series “Sick of gurus”

I feel left out of much of the discussion on the web (and at conferences). The party line just doesn’t match my experience in the classroom.

Example:

Our students are citizens of the 21st century. They read, communicate, collaborate, socialize, work, explore, and learn with personal technologies. They are the Millennials, who share ideas and dreams on social networking sites, follow streams of information from web page to web page, and use technology, reading, writing, and critical thinking skills in almost every aspect of their lives.

They don’t use cloud computing, they don’t use social bookmarking, few of them blog, very few of them have ever uploaded anything to YouTube. They read Wikipedia, but don’t know what a wiki is and have never contributed to a wiki, looked at a history page or subscribed to changes. None of them know what a podcast is. They may know what RSS is, but almost none of them use it on their own. They don’t tweet. They don’t even use stuff like Digg. They just don’t use modern technology for what we would like them to and even resist adults trying to get them to approach digital and social/digital media in the ways we think are productive.

My pupils are plugged into ‘Web 2.0’ (asked if they have FaceBook accounts, they look at you strangely - it’s a bit like asking if they have noses) but they use it for social connection, not for collaboration. Their approach is fundamentally passive. Their use of things like wikis and YouTube are good examples – these things are deeply embedded in their everyday lives, but in they don’t use or approach these things the way I do (or - aha! - the way I would like them to).

For me, wikis are one of the watersheds in human history: the emergence of massively collaborative systems for organizing information. You read the Encyclopedia Brittanica, you participate in Wikipedia. My pupils read them and use them in the same way.

I am starting to love services like YouTube and its imitators and spin-offs. The ease of embedding content all over the place is another real watershed.

My pupils, however, do not share my mania for mashing it up. They just like the access to pictures and music that the modern web affords.

It’s also interesting that, while many of them know what RSS is, they don’t use it. For me, this is again a fundamental change in the way the internet fits into my life: what I am interested in comes to me. This isn’t an interesting approach, it seems, to a generation that has grown up zapping their way around.

We don’t like it, but the most popular Norwegian social networking site for teens ( I teach in Norway) is this. (Don’t click if you’re squeamish or easily depressed – it’s a site where young people upload pictures of themselves or parts of their bodies for approval from other users. Soon available in English.) I know that the ages of contributors on the first page are high, but don’t be fooled. What teenagers are doing here is indeed uploading and sharing content, but this isn’t what I think of as collaboration or useful learning. They are posing – and competing for attention and approval. They also seem to be participating in their own objectification.

My point is: if we want a generation that “shares and collaborates” on the web and that “uses critical thinking” in its interaction with media, we’re going to have to work hard to produce it. The idea that technology produces these things by itself in some magical way is so hopelessly out of touch with reality I’m amazed I’ve managed to write so much about it here…

Sick of gurus

2009-11-29T17:48:00.008Z

I’m sick of gurus.

The gurus of Web 2.0 in education seem to be en masse guilty of the Bellman’s fallacy (proof by repetition) and I actually find myself in a state of guru-fatigue lately. Attended a conference a few weeks ago and, while it’s always fun to hear big guns like Will Richardson, the whole exercise left me angry and depressed. For one thing, if I hear one more expert lecture in front of a large, passive audience to tell them that lecturing in front of a large, passive audience is a bad way of teaching, I’m going to scream.

What really gets me is how far removed the party line seems to be from the reality I experience every day in the classroom. So many of the big gurus seem to be saying the same things. What’s wrong? What is it that the gurus do that peeves me so much?

1. Overestimation of how plugged-in our pupils are.

2. Pretending that all this stuff (web-based or web-focused digital technology) works all the time.

3. Confusing access to information with learning. (A related sin: confusing collaboration with learning)

4. Demanding, on a knee-jerk basis, curriculum reform.

and the big one,

5. Underplaying the conflict inherent to schools.

This became a monster post, so I’m going to divide it up and address each of these points in a post of its own in the immediate future. I’ll link forward from here as these posts are made.

Post Script:

What I’m talking about here is slightly different from the ‘social media guru’ debate that has raged in certain quarters of the web lately. That has been more focused on self-appointed experts in the private sector.

So, not quite on topic, but this video has been produced with technology simply overwhelming in its sheer awesomeness. You know who’ll be playing with this soon…

I found this via Jason Falls, who made this video of his own:

So, again, not quite relevant, but the "shut up and get back to work" bit we could all hang over our desks.

This debate has been about what I would call ‘experts’, not ‘gurus’. The difference? You hire an expert to fix your problem. A guru cannot be booked to fix your problem, but some of them can be contacted for advice and many of them will appear in front of the congregation to give an uplifting speech (for a price).

The private sector is also a bit different, clearly, but maybe not soooo different…

Ouch

2009-11-28T07:36:00.002Z

How important is the furniture, really?

2009-11-25T17:31:00.003Z

I’ve received the following comment on my last post, itself a follow-up post to my musings about how we place pupils in the classroom:

“Back to the Eighties”, I find that simply weird. "How structure influences human interaction". This structuralist explanation has been left behind by many of us. Interaction itself is an independent phenomenon, which in its form and content interacts with many more factors than that which physical structures bring to bear. Cognitive anthropology: has to do with thinking, and the thinking of all those thought to be part of this interaction. This structure-interaction thinking is, I believe, based on what some would call an authoritarian mindset. The material structures - what about the social structures, or what about emotional, cultural?
Bottom-up thinking could give us a lot of information about what is really going on, if we let those who have something to say come forward. Do you find this soft-hearted?
You refer to the importance of your role as leader. How much you need to work towards the students to get them to obey you and your structuring. Can all of this be understood as an attempt to gag the students in what you perceive as the more or less hedonistic development of their lives?
Are you perhaps seduced by the computer and desks and horseshoes? Take the computer away for a day and see what the students get up to. Talk to them and let them talk for a whole day. Maybe you can seduce them with more than your ability to organize desks; seduce with what you can mean to them as a person. Maybe they will turn their backs to the wall and listen to you and others in the classroom? Listen, reflect, think, go out of the classroom with new insights and a wonder that can mature and then become well-being. Disorder is not so stupid sometimes. The whole discussion about how the students sit, is for me a complete "fake". Should they also march in a row when we meet them in the hallway outside the classroom? Have we no different role for them than the leadership position we think we need to mark out in some room?

As I wrote in a comment to that post, I may have expressed myself badly. There aren’t too many these days who would argue that the furniture somehow determines interaction. The fact that physical structures influence interaction is, however, beyond doubt. But there’s more: the way we furnish a room conveys expectations, values, etc. Some of my sociology students recently suggested some messages contained in the configuration I call “the bus”:

a) what is important happens at the front of the room. b) it isn’t important to be able to see your classmates (and by extension, hear and interact with them, either).

A configuration where the pupils sit facing the centre of the room, without stuff in front of them suggests that something important might happen between pupils. When they turn and individually face their own work, there is a clear expectation that they do something. I suspect some 0f the resistance I encounter to getting rid of the bus is that some of my pupils have been well trained to a passive role and the horseshoe configurations clearly expect activity.

It’s interesting that the commenter above seems to accuse me of being authoritarian for trying to lead my classroom, but then suggests putting away the computers for a day. Wouldn’t that involve giving orders to my class? I myself find it strange that some of my colleagues get their students to stand by their desks at the beginning of class. Could it be that giving the orders we are used to just seems a natural part of our role, while different kinds of direction seem authoritarian? I can’t understand this comment in any other way, really, since this person is simultaneously encouraging me to do specific types of things with my class (which would require using my authority) and accusing me of being a little…power-mad?

Personally, I’m no natural leader, but the whole project of learning in large groups is doomed unless the adult in the room is willing to take responsibility for what happens. This isn’t quite the same as being a dictator or planning everything in advance, it’s simply being a good leader. My own experience painfully confirms the research here.

Am I seduced by computers? No, but I see their huge potential for learning. I also note that they have radically changed the world outside the classroom. Bringing them into the classroom does not automatically increase learning, however. Unless we as teachers have clear ideas about what we want to use them for, I see a serious potential for decreasing the amount of learning going on.

Is furniture that important? No – there are more important things to talk about. Still, you can’t avoid the furniture. I can’t abandon the classroom entirely (although I’d like to), so the furniture has to be arranged. The question is how. There is no ‘neutral’ arrangement. For me, the classroom is supposed to be an arena for learning, so I want to arrange it to facilitate activities for learning.

So, I want to get off the bus. I teach primarily French as a foreign language and it’s pretty clear to me that my pupils won’t get far by just listening to me talk. I love to talk (probably too much) but my background is as a climbing instructor and I see learning as something that happens when the pupils do something that they haven’t done before.

Photo credits

Mitopencourseware

Sharmee

Furniture revisited

2009-11-12T14:42:00.006Z

As a student of cognitive anthropology back in the ‘80s, I should be highly aware of how physical space structures human interaction, but I’m still amazed at how this works in the classroom.

I continue to focus on my double-horseshoe, backs-to-the-centre arrangement, and the difference it makes is remarkable. It enables a clear switch between activities and thus tends to improve the quality of both individual activity and group discussion. Most importantly, it greatly improves the mobility of the teacher in the classroom.

From an excellent article in ‘from now on’ – a great resource for the 1:1 classroom.

One of the points to having the pupils sit with their backs to the centre of the room is that they need to turn towards the middle for teacher- or group-centered activity. A large number of pupils do not do so unless they are specifically instructed to do so, and then they don’t turn away again for individual work until specifically instructed to do so. It’s clear that the teacher is important as a leader and that re-arranging the furniture does not change this – indeed, the benefits of changing classroom lay-out come only when the teacher is willing to be a clear leader.

Many pupils try to modify or sabotage, as well. Re-arranging the furniture so that their screen is not visible is of course a key goal. Again, the teacher has to be willing to steer the class and to insist on having things their way. (I keep getting burned on that one…)

The picture above is from someone far more experienced than myself, but for me there are some mistakes. The desks along the walls need to be taken to the back wall.

If you leave the corner open, as in the diagram, as below:

Then what happens is this:

And, not surprisingly, the participation of the pupil sitting in this spot becomes markedly different. Of course, we are now back at the teacher as leader, since the teacher can simply order the kid to move. However, there is a pay-off in structuring things to avoid having to give orders too often. Too much conflict gets in the way of the real work of the classroom, learning.

One colleague I told about this seemed all gung-ho, but then when I walked by their classroom, they were all sitting in rows as if on a bus. I asked my colleague “What happened?” and was told “I need to get a grip on them first, establish the right working tone before I try anything new.” This person was worried that they would somehow lose control if they did anything weird. The irony is that from the back of this classroom, you get an excellent view of the laptop screens of the pupils. Facebook, solitaire, chat, games, etc. (The teacher stands at the front.)

A couple of other colleagues have tried the double horseshoe and have come back to me with glowing reports. They were particularly pleased with the clear shift of focus when moving from one activity to another and with the improvement of discussions when pupils are not hidden behind desks and screens and can see each other more easily.

Which way is progress?

2009-10-19T19:13:00.010+01:00

Important message for anyone about to visit Samoa:

If you haven't noticed yet, Samoa became the first country for a generation to switch sides of the road last month, moving from the right-hand-side driving imposed by the Germans early in the last century to the left-hand-side driving that most of the South Pacific practices.

A fun item for several reasons. Firstly, much of the driving-on-the-right world seems to consider driving on the left as odd and archaic. The American novelist Tom Clancy even threw in a comment near the beginning of Patriot Games, calling Britain "one of the few countries remaining still driving on the left."

I love it - driving on the right is some kind of inevitable progress and Britain (of course) is a backward, traditional hold-out. Nonsense, of course. Someone buy Clancy an atlas. Over 30% of the world's population drives on the left.

Samoa's action reminds us that it isn't possible to say in advance what progress is. Progress may even look like what used to be considered regress. Progress for you may be the opposite for me. Also- consensus is impossible to achieve for radical change, even when the advantages are clear and the costs low - the Samoans have learnt this lately.

It's also clear that small size makes radical changes easier. Few large countries today could make such a switch easily. Sweden switched to driving on the right in 1967 and Swedes I have spoken to say that such a switch would be impossible today with the sheer size and complexity of the modern road system.

It's a shame I have no ESL classes this year - this would be a great item for discussion.

Watch out!

2009-09-25T13:13:00.003+01:00

From "Teach Paperless" a little while back...

I do think that teachers and schools in general would be wise to learn something from the example of what has happened over the past ten years in the music industry. Or face a similar irrelevance.

Ouch.

The significance of furniture

2009-09-16T19:44:00.009+01:00

I'm beginning to think that furniture is key, especially in a 1:1 classroom. The layout of my classroom is beginning to irritate me.

So, recently, I've moved from this:

To this:

This is perhaps the biggest eureka-moment of my teaching career (or is that "halleluya-moment"?).

First off, just look at how crowded the first classroom looks, and how much space there is in the second one. I get thirty desks in the classroom with enough space to dance in the middle. Most important is how easy it is to get to the pupils. Look at the first picture and imagine helping a pupil with her work. How do you get to the one in the middle? Or the ones sitting by the window? In the second classroom, the teacher can easily get to every pupil, stand beside them, see their work and help. The second classroom also makes a clear division between activities. When the pupils are working alone, they face away from each other. When the teacher wants their attention, they must turn away from their work. In the first classroom, a teacher standing at the front of the classroom has to compete with what the students have in front of them for attention. This typically requires closing computers every time the teacher wants to say something. In a class discussion, the pupils cannot see each other well, while in the second classroom, the pupils can easily see each other when they turn to the center of the room.

There are other advantages, as well. In the first classroom, the pupils at the back of the room often end up staring at 30 computer screens, and get frequently distracted. The second classroom makes it easy to arrange spontaneous group work by getting the outer circle to swivel. And so on. I'm just starting this, but it seems to work.

A couple of points.

1. You need to have swivel chairs.

Swivel chairs are probably a necessity in a 1:1 classroom, anyway, and a great thing in any classroom.

2. The pupils find this weird. They are used to a passive role, and this classroom expects them to be doing something school-related during all class time. Many of them have become comfortable

with their computers as an alternative to school and this set-up makes this more difficult. In one class this week when I did not have time to remodel the classroom, a pupil asked why, saying she liked my new lay-out. Variations are probably due to differences in motivation and to level of distraction, since the new lay-out provides for fewer distractions.

3. This is not a good lay-out for long talks from the teacher, particularly if they have to take notes from the board. On second thought, I'm not sure if this is a weakness, or a strength...

Technology, anyone?

2009-09-10T13:08:00.009+01:00

Sociology class. 12th years. Each pupil gets one of the key terms we have been working on and is to explain it on a short Mp3. The Mp3s go into a bank that pupils can download for help and repetition. I also want to get everyone familiar with Audacity and exporting to Mp3 so that I can get up to speed with a class podcast and other projects. As well as fun and variation, the effect that different media have on social interaction will be a topic for a later unit - so I want to use varied media in class before that.

One pupil complains:" Why all the technology? Why can't we just talk? Why do things always have to be so complicated? I'm not a technical person and I don't like to use technical methods to communicate. I'd prefer to talk face-to-face, in front of people."

I notice that she has two (2!) different chat pages up on her computer while she is saying this. She has also downloaded Skype (among other things) to her laptop.

Not quite sure what's going on here. Does technology become invisible when you are using it for a meaningful goal, and take all your attention when the goals are external or meaningless? (the claims of this pupil to not be a 'technical person' are particularly weird - in her daily life she does more complicated things than what I was asking her to do) Has technology become an easy place to hang one's general dissatisfaction with school? Do teenagers feel invaded when we use 'their' stuff in school? Or has school suddenly become an irritating 'geeks-only' zone?

Humn.

Photo credit: eBuddy CC

Glogster, anyone?

2009-09-07T12:43:00.007+01:00

Monday morning. Posters. Every pupil has a city and is to make a quick poster. No paper, but, hey, it's 2009. "Log onto Glogster, everyone and you can all make a Glog on your topic."

One pupil looks at me disdainfully. "I don't glog."

How I do it now.

2009-09-03T16:53:00.005+01:00

Onward!

School year has begun, enough existential angst. Now it's time for some practical, pedagogical thinking. For a while, the goal is to give this blog a practical slant by blogging about what I do and what I'm trying.

First, what is it that I already do? Who am I as a teacher? I started with the thing I have probably taught the most, the figure-8 tie-in knot for rock-climbing. I tried to video myself and learned the following things:

Video is difficult (hence the lack of video here - maybe one day)

I rely greatly on feedback from students - modifying as I go along.
I rarely talk for more than a few seconds before getting the students to do something. That surprised me, actually. I thought I talked for minutes at a time. I do when I teach something I don't know so well, but in the things I really can do - I get the students going quickly.
I don't move on until each pupil has mastered each step. The quick automatically become helpers for the slow.
I start with the known and work to the unknown - demonstrating to the students that they already know the basics here, even if they think they don't.
My approach takes about twice as long as the simple 'follow-me' instruction that most people seem to use to teach this knot. I do it my way because I feel I get better retention. On day 2, most people remember.

Now - how can I use this approach in, say, Sociology class?

The gatekeepers of knowledge

2009-08-08T07:15:00.011+01:00

Howard Rheingold recently blogged on evaluating the quality of information. A good post - he says about the same as in thousands of similar texts, but does such a good job that I'll probably use this as a standard text in class for a while. This is quality because he both includes the latest cool tools, but makes his discussion fundamentally about attitude, not gizmos.

The basics here are of course critical thinking and source evaluation - good 19th century skills, it's just that kids have to start learning this stuff earlier nowadays and we have new tools to help us. It would be possible to lament the emergence of a world that requires these changes - wasn't it better when our main access to information was books, with their more rigourous editing process? Andrew Keen has built a whole career lamenting the disappearance of the 'gatekeeper'. He is mostly focused on news and culture, but the idea is valid everywhere: "Before", most of our media exposure was vetted by experts, so what you read in books, for example, you could mostly count on. "Now", any idiot with a modem can publish, so we all have to be our own gatekeepers about thousands of topics we are not experts on. (The Telegraph's technology blogs are a hotspot for the debate around 'gatekeepers'.)

What really got me thinking was a comment on Rheingold's post by someone called dogu4: "Questioning one's sources is useless, unless one is questioning oneself as well. Consider many of the supposedly irrefutable facts regarding human health just in the last decade or so". A seed in the back of my head suddenlty became a full-grown douglas fir. I must admit I think about Warren and Marshall a good deal. They are the two Australian scientists who in 1982 found good evidence to link stomach ulcers and h. pylori bacteria. Despite this connection first having been noticed in the 1890s, this finding went against several received truths of medicine and Warren and Marshall had trouble getting their findings accepted. It took well over a decade for the connection between bacteria and stomach ulers to be fully accepted.

Some of the other commenters clearly didn't understand what all the fuss was, but in my worldview, Warren and Marshall are key figures in the history of ideas. Both as a symbol of how knowledge progresses and practically, as a watershed in thinking about infectious diseases. Try a quick thought experiment. Imagine that the Web existed in 1983. Ulcer sufferers searching for information about their condition come across information about h. pylori. The chances are that neither their primary care giver nor their treating gastroentorologist would have heard of the study and that they would have refused to prescribe antibiotics. Within a year or so, so many people would have stumbled across Warren and Marshall's work that the medical establishment would have been prompted to respond more actively to their ideas - mostly likely producing a wave of anti-antibiotic statements from the medical establishment. (In real life, in those pre-Web days, Warren and Marshall were dealt with mostly by ignoring them.)

The point is, it is easy to find examples of how the old 'gatekeeper' model didn't always work. It was just harder to see its weaknesses and harder to get a debate going. The Andrew Keens of the world can lament all they want - the old model has not fallen apart merely because of new technology, but because it didn't always work so well. Now we are groping towards something new. Rheingold's post is a good example of the kinds of ways that are emerging to deal with this new, gatekeeper-less world.

(An example - this spring I did a whirl around American health web sites, checking for their view on feeding raisins to children. I limited my search to 'serious', mainstream sites, mostly those vetted by medical doctors. I did not find a single site that mentioned mycotoxins - they all limited their discussions to considerations for the teeth. It's odd - mycotoxins aren't some kind of secret (just Google the word and see what happens) - do these people know how to publish to the internet, but not how to do basic research? So in this case, I'm left without a 'gatekeeper' to help me sort the data here - I just have to bring all my research skills and critical thinking to bear to make my own decisions.

This is the world we not only have to live in, but prepare our students for. Clinging to the textbook and locking down all computers looks like head-in-the-sand behaviour from here.)

Niels Bohr and the barometer

2009-08-03T20:10:00.005+01:00

I was recently reminded of a classic urban legend:

The following concerns a question in a physics degree exam at the
University of Copenhagen:

"Describe how to determine the height of a skyscraper with a barometer."

One student replied:

"You tie a long piece of string to the neck of the barometer, then lower the barometer from the roof of the skyscraper to the ground. The length of the string plus the length of the barometer will equal the height of the building."

This highly original answer so incensed the examiner that the student was failed immediately. The student appealed on the grounds that his answer was indisputably correct, and the university appointed an independent arbiter to decide the case.

The arbiter judged that the answer was indeed correct, but did not display any noticeable knowledge of physics. To resolve the problem it was decided to call the student in and allow him six minutes in which to provide a verbal answer that showed at least a minimal familiarity with the basic principles of physics.

For five minutes the student sat in silence, forehead creased in thought. The arbiter reminded him that time was running out, to which the student replied that he had several extremely relevant answers, but couldn't make up his mind which to use. On being advised to hurry up the student replied as follows:

"Firstly, you could take the barometer up to the roof of the skyscraper, drop it over the edge, and measure the time it takes to reach the ground. The height of the building can then be worked out from the formula H = 0.5g x t squared. But bad luck on the barometer."

"Or if the sun is shining you could measure the height of the barometer, then set it on end and measure the length of its shadow. Then you measure the length of the skyscraper's shadow, and thereafter it is a simple matter of proportional arithmetic to work out the height of the skyscraper."

"But if you wanted to be highly scientific about it, you could tie a short piece of string to the barometer and swing it like a pendulum, first at ground level and then on the roof of the skyscraper. The height is worked
out by the difference in the gravitational restoring force T =2 pi sqr root (l /g)."

"Or if the skyscraper has an outside emergency staircase, it would be easier to walk up it and mark off the height of the skyscraper in barometer lengths, then add them up."

"If you merely wanted to be boring and orthodox about it, of course, you could use the barometer to measure the air pressure on the roof of the skyscraper and on the ground, and convert the difference in millibars into feet to give the height of the building."

"But since we are constantly being exhorted to exercise independence of mind and apply scientific methods, undoubtedly the best way would be to knock on the janitor's door and say to him 'If you would like a nice new barometer, I will give you this one if you tell me the height of this skyscraper'."

The student was Niels Bohr, the only Dane to win the Nobel Prize for physics.

(text collected by snopes.com in '99)

There are lots of 'points' to this story, but what stands out to me is the challenge to educators here. Are our 'open' assessement questions really open, or are they multiple choice without the options being clearly presented to our students? How ready are we to accept pupils thinking way 'outside the box', particularly in formal assessment? How ready are we to accept that some of our pupils may be smarter than we are?

The story is also a good one because of the deliberately provacative attitude of the student. He must have understood from the beginning the answer the examiners wanted, yet some combination of self-importance, humour and lack of respect for formal education makes him risk his exam by giving an alternate answer. Even under the second chance he is given, he is deliberately provocative, clearly making a point of his disdain for the exam. I know many educators who would have trouble standing for this kind of disrespect coupled with 'the wrong answer'. How do we react when the next Niels Bohr appears in our classroom?

The choice of physics for this story is also telling - 'doing physics' requires questioning basic assumptions about the nature of reality, but teaching phyics easily falls into a pattern that unfortunately does not nurture the kind of thinking physicists need.

As an educator hearing this story, I am reminded that humility is one of a teacher's most important qualities.

Oh, and the story? Probably not completely true. May have happened, but no-one can prove it was Bohr. The part about him being the only Dane to win the Nobel prize for physics is also not true, but it was when this story first surfaced in the '50's.

A good teacher

2009-06-24T14:50:00.002+01:00

A bit unstructured – but I’m going to throw this out there while it’s still a little rough.

Been listening to Erling Roland from the University of Stavanger’s Centre for behavioural research , hired in for our last PD day before summer.

Mr. Roland’s recipe for a good teacher is fairly simple: organization and an ability to see individual pupils. He claims a solid research basis for these claims. Students do better with organized teachers who notice them.

What’s my problem? Well, I’m a very disorganized person and I’m no good at seeing people. Now what? There seem to be four options:

1. Accept that I am not the right person, do the moral thing and look for another job.

2. Accept that I am not the right person and humbly try to change.

3. Ignore all this and carry on as usual.

4. Reject this ‘recipe for a good teacher’ despite its empirical basis.

Let’s look at 2. and 4. (1 and 3 just seem too wimpy). Why would I think that I have anything to offer my pupils anyway? What does an unempathic, messy person have to give? Well, I’m good at learning things, so not only do I know a lot, but I have a lot to say about how anyone else can get to know a lot as well.

So, if I can learn things, why can’t I also learn to be a good teacher? It’s true that much of one’s personality is stable as an adult, but specific behaviours can be learned. This is one of the attractive things about being a teacher, actually: the job offers almost unlimited potential for personal growth. It takes a deal of humility, of course, to think like this, but I have got to the point where I can’t imagine going into the classroom without seeing it as an arena for my learning as well as the pupils’. I have a deal with myself. When I stop thinking this way, I will start looking for another job.

What about point 4 above? Mr. Roland praised a colleague of mine who had his pupils rise and stand silently by their desks when he entered the room and again at the end of class. There is good evidence that such clear structure around the school day (and around who is in charge) helps pupils learn better. There is also some time and stress to be saved by simply insisting on a certain way of doing things.

There is a danger here, however. I remember waking up every school day when I was a teenager and feeling nauseous. Because I had to go to school. Stand, sit, ask to go to the bathroom, not use the hallway (or my locker) except during breaks, etc. etc. The whole institution seemed geared to getting us to toe the line, behave and conform. No-one was interested in us learning anything, just in us sitting in our desks and doing what we were told. It’s no wonder I didn’t learn anything there. I’m congenitally unable to learn anything while sitting down anyway, and I felt the rigid structure of our school day was fundamentally disrespectful to the pupils. Feeling constantly insulted made it hard to learn anything.

A predictable routine can help create security, and a tone of respect for the teacher and the institution is important to establish, but I’m worried about an overly formal and rigid atmosphere being inconducive to learning. The trouble with empirical evidence for learning is that learning is hard to measure. The easiest thing to measure is rote memorization, so unfortunately, much of the research on what helps learning is actually research on what helps rote memorization.

It’s easy to believe that a rigid, military-style school atmosphere is a good atmosphere for learning facts by heart. It’s harder to believe that it is a good atmosphere for nurturing things like creativity, critical thinking and personal growth – and that’s what I’m interested in.

End of year assessment

2009-06-04T14:39:00.001+01:00

Here we go again. State exams are piling up on my desk, demanding my attention and once again this year I’m not ready. Grades for my own students are not set and I have a backlog of work to mark and portfolios to evaluate.

Why do I let this happen year after year? Well, I could always be more organised, but that’s not the only answer. I have such a backlog partly because I get talked into pushing deadlines a week, and then another week, and then two more days…and then…and then there are always a surprising number of students who have been sick or have had supplementary exams or who knows what. And then there are still gaping holes in my assessment overview. So I make deals, push deadlines some more. I send notes home and beg my administrator for permission to submit grades a few days late (oops, forgot that one this year).

Why on earth am I so soft? Because I know that if I just set a deadline and let it sit, I’ll have a ton of work that is not submitted. As a teacher, it’s my responsibility to secure a good basis for evaluation. The teacher’s traditional weapon of lowering the grade for missing work is not available, and I must admit I agree with the current fashion in education administration on that one. I could just be content to set grades based on what little I already have from work throughout the year, but such grades are often unfair and no good reflection of the pupil’s real achievement. I could refuse to give grades when pupils don’t submit everything, but this has such serious consequences for the kids that I know I would come under severe pressure to set grades anyway. I could be strict and make a note on each pupil’s disciplinary record every time they do not submit something on time. I probably should do this, I know. They don’t like this and are likely to improve with this kind of threat hanging over them. But I don’t like this. This kind of police regime in the classroom is what made me hate school so much when I was a teenager. Education through threats and negative sanctions. School becomes about doing what is demanded of you, toeing the line, instead of being about learning. My job is supposed to be about helping people learn, not about threatening them to behave. I hate what I become when I start using negative sanctions to control pupil behaviour, and I must admit I’m no good at it.

So there I am, back at the central paradox of learning in the context of an institution full of people who do not want to be there. People who have to learn what is demanded of them, not what they want to.

Luckily, I seem to find myself surrounded by colleagues who also see some of the challenges here. There was lots of good discussion yesterday about the challenges of formal assessment. It’s good to feel that I don’t have to solve all of this on my own. Collective solutions will demand that we think very differently about how we 'do school', but maybe that can be a good thing...

Should risk-takers receive help?

2009-05-29T08:31:00.016+01:00

When I started this blog, it was going to be about belay stations. The internet (oddly enough) has changed the way I think about them, and my teaching hasn't caught up to my thinking yet. Since then, the topic that has taken the most space is the use of computers in the classroom. I'm not finished with that and will return very shortly, but first a quick swing by the topic of extreme sports.

Climber Jarle Traa summitted Chomolongma (Everest) two Fridays ago but seems to have gotten lost on the way down. Assumed dead, he was found by pure chance at 8300 m 3 days later by two Sherpas. He is now in hospital in Kathmandu. Sergei Samiolov in the meantime is presumed dead.

No long post here about the meaninglessness of Everest climbing, the bizarre Himalayan expedition industry and so on. There is a lot written about this stuff and I just don't care. Himalayan climbing has never really interested me. What has caught my attention is the outpouring of angry voices insisting that climbers and other extreme sports enthusiasts should not be rescued or at least have to pay for their rescue.

Nepal has no rescue service, so climbers on Chomolongma rescue each other. Western countries tend to have organised rescue services staffed by climbers, so again climbers rescue each other. Why is this system offensive? I listened to lots of angry callers to a radio talk show last week and many of them mentioned the risks rescuers take and the expense to society.

I’ve had some involvement in mountain Search and Rescue and there is such a strong culture of risk management in rescue services that I have trouble relating such opinions to reality. There is of course the use of public money for rescue in many places, but again I have trouble relating these angry opinions to the facts as I see them. In Norway, where I live, there are few rescues of climbers. Hikers are far more often choppered out than climbers. The real expense, in lives, risk-taking and money, is in connection with small boat accidents. Yet no-one clamours against geezers out in small boats. It seems natural that people go out in small boats and a matter of course that massive resources are mobilised to save them when things go wrong.

The boater may be taking a risk, but what they do is so ‘normal’ that this is not seen as risk-taking activity. The climber may be taking less of a risk, but what they do is seen as strange and dangerous. It’s alien and incomprehensible and therefore easy to complain about. If we started to look at the numbers, we’d have to start looking at boaters and accept that everyday activities involve risk that may endanger others. We might have to start to look at driving, heaven forbid.

Photo credits: féileacán, Åmot C. Nilssen (practice, me in white)

Tablet PCs - What can you do with this?

2009-05-20T11:52:00.011+01:00

I occaisonally get asked about these videos that I made about evaluation using the tablet PC, so here they are, rough and amateurish:

Oral Evaluation

Managing students' written submissions

More detail on correcting students' work with the tablet pen

Student blogs

2009-05-20T10:30:00.003+01:00

Fun to see two former students have won mentions in the Edublogger's Student challenge. I especially liked GAH's post. Just like him: stunning English skills and wry humour. Interestingly enough, he questions the whole idea, finding the exercise (obligatory student blogging) rather artificial and feeling foolish communicating to a world that is not listening.

Rather ironic to note all the enthusiastic comments from around the world on his little post.

(I also note that he hasn't added his winner's badge to his blog. And since I didn't have to read his blog....does that make me a ninja?)

VoiceThread

2009-05-13T15:43:00.001+01:00

I've been pondering VoiceThread for some time. What on earth can you use this for?

Bill Ferriter at the Tempered Radical has set up a demo VoiceThread on overcoming cultural divisions in schools. I've been checking it out and, well, things may be worse than I thought.

Some points:

1. The beauty of online text conversations is largely lost. Speech is far more difficult to search through and has no title, so instead of being able to quickly hone in on what you are interested in, you have to listen through whole texts.

2. The speed of reading is lost. One is quickly reminded of how fast the average netizen can read, compared to speaking speed. It just takes so long to listen to all this stuff. Combined with point 1, this quickly makes VoiceThreads unbearable.

3. The quality of writing is lost. Most of us write far more sloppily online, but still, there is a moment of editing, at least. Modern tools make it quick for us to rearrange, edit, root out that sentence that on second thought made no sense, etc. Modern recording techniques (even just Audacity) can do the same for the spoken word, but VoiceThread seems to encourage spontaneous speech: poorly structured, wandering, low information density. The quality of the contributions on the Transforming School Culture thread, for example, is far below what one would expect on an equivalent forum or blog comment roll.

4. The power of the spoken word is lost. If speech is so slow compared to reading, why do we so often get information through speech? Well, speech is easier because it requires no medium. Formal settings like lectures can compete with reading because we like the connection to a living person. The speaker's body language, movement, presence and so on can underline the message and help impress it on us. All this is lost in VoiceThread, so we have the disadvantages of speech without the advantages.

5. VoiceThread has some real multimedia potential.

One clue seems to be to avoid recording your voice unless there is some special reason for it, but simply writing comments. Faster for the viewer, and easier to judge relevance. The combination makes for a richer feel, also.

Slides with writing can be fine, but don't add voice explaining it, as this feels both insulting and bores the viewer before we get started.

Pictures and videos make excellent centrepieces and starting points for conversations.

In this particular example, Bill Ferriter has included a recording interpreting each video or quote. It's quite the turn-off as it is unnecessary (everyone could just read the quote or watch the video) and takes up space. These are always first, as well. No insult if you're reading this, Bill, it's just this sort of public trail-and-error that we need to learn from each other. Thanks.

The good thing about VoiceThread of course, is that once you have got the picture, you can simply skip Mr. Ferriter's comments and dig deeper into the conversation.

So, next year, I'm going to take three similar topics and set up one as a text-only conversation, one as text with links and pictures and one as a VoiceThread. Afterwards, I'll get the students to compare. How do content and format interact?

Tips on conversations from Bill Ferriter.

VoiceThread

...and, well, you can google the rest...

"I'm not cheating, I'm on FaceBook!"

2009-05-08T14:04:00.000+01:00

Class. Friday afternoon. We're in the midst of a game, competing to see who can conjugate the most French verbs. One pupil complains that one of his classmates has her laptop open and is cheating. Scandalized, she says:

"I'm not cheating, I'm on FaceBook!"

I'm not making this up.

Classroom leadership

2009-05-06T09:25:00.000+01:00

Classroom leadership - another buzzword these days.

When I took my degree in education, they told us that the days of teaching as private practice were over. No longer did you close the door to the classroom and do your own thing.

Turned out not to be true. The teacher as private practitioner is alive and well. Some teachers do report that at their schools there is a certain pressure to not be like that and that those teachers who cling to their 'private practice' attract negative comments and even sanctions.

A letter to the editor of the Norwegian teachers' union magazine caught my eye the other day. The writer found it ironic that in this climate of poo-pooing those teachers who act like private practitioners, classroom leadership has become such a buzzword. Isn't "classroom leadership" back to putting responsibility back on the individual teacher, standing alone in front of her class? I'm not sure we can have it both ways. If we are serious about opening up our classrooms and our teaching, then responsibility for managing the classroom also ends up shared. The challenges of leading young people in their learning end up shared by teams and institutions.

I'm not sure, but I think this is where we should be going. However, if your school cannot take the responsibility for classroom leadership as a whole institution or has no teams that can take that responsibility as a team, well, then it's time to admit that your school is made up of lots of teachers who are essentially free-lancers. The role of the school is then to support them in that role. That's maybe OK, too, at least for a time, while we think about how to open up the classroom.

Photo credit: T. Favre-Bull

What on Earth are we up to, Part III

2009-04-26T20:43:00.000+01:00

Been off sleeping in a half-frozen swamp, trying to catch a glimpse of the mythical mating danse of the black grouse (no luck - this hybrid grouse/capercaillie showed up and scared off all the grouse.)

Still riffing off the huge discussion started by CingT on the use of computers in the classroom. (Check my previous posts below.) She described a school situation at least as bad as that on my earlier post What on Earth are we up to? . Pupils FaceBooking through their days, ignoring the teacher, disconnected from the school they are sitting in.

This didn't go far on del&bruk, but went haywire on her own blog and then spread via Twitter and from blog to blog. Guttorm Hveen has links to some of the most visible blogposts on the topic, if you can read Norwegian.

It's great that there's so much interest in this topic, but much of the discussion here disappoints me, particularly the teachers' views.

They tend to have 3 messages:

1. Teachers need to have good familiarity with computers, the web, and with what they can do with all this technology. Much of the problem is described as a result of teachers' lack of competancy.

2. Students need clear tasks and to work to a product that has a short deadline (usually the end of class) and that is visible and/or useful.

3. Classroom leadership, classroom leadership, classroom leadership. This was one of CingT's opening points, as she suggests that all laptops be closed when the teacher lectures. Several teacher bloggers have wondered if many of us need to be clearer about what kind of behaviour we expect at any particulary time and what exactly it is students are supposed to be doing (and why?).

All well and good, I suppose. I myself swing back and forth between apathy and exactly these positions. The trouble is all this doesn't help, because it doesn't address the problem.

The problem is, as CingT commented earlier here in this blog, "students don't care about school". The boredom expressed by many of the students at my own school matches the comments made by 'Beate' on CingT's blog: she doesen't pay any attention in school because she has something more fun to do and because there are no negative consequences.

The problem has nothing to do with computers. Not to do with teachers, either, although boring teachers and weak leaders probably have a worse time of it in the 1:1 classroom.

The problem is that students are well trained to be entertained, see no value in boredom and do not experience school as exciting or relevant for their lives. Giving them a PC gives them an alternative. It just isn't reasonable to expect them not to make use of that alternative.

So, teachers whine a lot, but my point is not to simply whine about the system for the sake of it. My teaching has come to a standstill and I don't think I'm in a position to change this easily. I haven't created the situation, so I need help in creating a different one.

Educating teachers will not help. Foisting responsibility onto individual teachers under the banner of 'Better classroom leadership' will not help. It's time to rethink the classroom more fundamentally.

Picture credit: lygren.blogspot.com/

Existential crisis?

2009-04-23T15:48:00.000+01:00

CingT continues to impress me. A cool teenage blogger has hit the Norwegian edublogsphere with a bang. In a net forum, she nailed me with a quote from my own blog. Yikes. I notice she's even been through here and left a comment in (really good) English.

One of the areas where she sees more challenge than solution is 1:1. The level of misuse of computers she says she sees in the classroom is far beyond what most teachers are ready to admit to. So what do we do now? 'Strolling the classroom' risks making us into a silly kind of computer-use watchdog. Demanding that pupils submit all their work also shows an unreasonable control mentality, as well as being unrealistic.

Two ways to think about this:

1. Students must have something meaningful to do. Sitting in front of their computer, they should be working. The work should lead to a product, and this product must be used for something. (Preferably, something useful or necessary for their classmates. If not, then maybe for publishing, submission for a grade, preparation for exams, etc.) Meaningful work, preferably with interaction built in.

vs.

2. 1:1 is not the problem. School is. School is experienced by many students as a) boring, b) meaningless, c) not useful and d) in conflict with central cultural values. Giving all students a small portal to the world at large has effectively undermined all pedagogical activity. Students finally have something else they can fill their time with and still avoid the problems that occur when you do not show up at school.

This is why I have said that CingT is swearing in Church. Actually, a better metaphor would be to say that "she has pointed out that our digital emperor is not as well dressed as people have said." I'm not sure if there are any good ideas for solving the problems taken up here, because I'm afraid this is not an 'educational challenge' or 'start-up difficulty', but an existential crisis for school.

What on Earth are we up to, Part II

2009-04-22T10:41:00.000+01:00

Here we are again. I wonder if I should write this blog in Norwegian, since I am sitting in Norway, but I did have my reasons for chosing English. Not least that my Norwegian is somewhat limited...

Since my last post, this topic has exploded in Norway, mostly because of an articulate and opinionated high-school student, CingT who has appeared on the teacher's social network, del & bruk. The picture she paints is similar to that from my last post on 1:1, What on Earth are we up to?, if not worse.

Oddly enough, the post she has got the most response to was one more focussed on the presence of students in the teacher's social network. Some teachers welcomed a critical student perspective, others felt that she had no right to be there. In del & bruk, there has been less commentary on a far more explosive post on 1:1 and PC-use in school. On her own blog, the topic has generated a lot more interest and the whole issue has started to get legs in the Norwegian blogosphere.

I'll quote you one of the comments from CingT's blog:

"At the beginning of the year, I took notes on my notepad. Then I began taking notes on my laptop. Then I began playing computer games on my laptop. Now I have no idea what the teacher is saying, in most of my classes."

Wow. This is a high school student who does not feel that what goes on in class has any relevance for her grade, so she has no incentive to change her behaviour. As far as relevance for real life goes...are you kidding?

CingT closes her post with a quote from two classmates:

"Sometimes I wonder why we go to school at all."

"Right! We could just go out and work. We have no use for what we learn"

Why Won't Teachers Learn?

2009-04-10T08:20:00.000+01:00

Riffing off an interesting post from Darren Draper at Tech and Learning, himself lauding Dan Meyer's 'What Can You Do With This?' series.

Pulling apart teacher's use of technology with students and with other teachers: Dan Meyer is particularly interesting here, because he is highly tech-savvy and uses "Web 2.0" technologies all the time, but has tons of posts in his blog sceptical to tech use in the classroom. What he is using it for is connecting teachers. Darren Draper's post wondered about teachers' apparant lack of willingness for PD.

The issue is one of willingness to talk about pedagogy or teaching rather than one of technophobia.

Around here there has been some data tossed around lately that indicate teachers are at the bottom of the heap when it comes to learning about their own job. With a weak knowledge base and lots of exciting things going on, you would think that pedagogy would be a hot topic. Instead, teachers sit in the staff room and talk about anything but.

The weak scientific basis for teaching puts us in a tricky position. We know less about what we teach than hordes of specialists in our subject areas, and teaching itself is...well...what exactly is it that we know that others don't? For the young, brave and tenured, this might make pedagogy an exciting topic, but for others, pedagogy becomes a 'no-go' zone.

Three reasons:
1. We risk weakening our own position by exposing the fact that we have a complicated and sometimes shaky basis for doing what we do.
2. An extension of this is that discussions and experiments about what helps learning best might take us to things that look very different from traditional schooling. Scary.
3. Since there is no consensus about what learning is, how it happens or how best to facilitate it, discussions about pedagogy can turn into deep ideological debates. Many teachers sense this and at the same time feel that their jobs are filled with enough conflict already. Anything that could cause conflict or disunity with other teachers is to be avoided.

So it's hard, getting teachers to learn. That's why people like Dan Meyer are so valuable. If you don't have anyone to talk to at your workplace, then join the blogosphere! Get talking.

Thanks, Dan.

(If you are reading this in Norway, and haven't visited Del & Bruk, then go there right now!)

The Death of the Newspaper

2009-04-01T15:35:00.000+01:00

I'm not going to recap the last couple of week's media storm. For anyone who missed it, Andrew Keen covered it well in his blog on March 20th. There are links to Johnson and Shirky's material predicting the end of the newspaper and lots more related stuff.

The point is, the media word is changing radically. My pupils don't watch CNN or read The Times. And they're most likely never going to. These things are unlikely to survive in their present form until my pupils are adults. How do we teach media studies and the media elements in social science when the ground is shifting beneath our feet?

What on Earth are we up to?

2009-04-01T11:11:00.000+01:00

I've read a lot of things lately that have made a deep impression on me. More on many of those things later. The thing that really blew me away was a survey conducted by a colleague of mine for an academic paper he was working on. Over 300 of our pupils had responded. I started reading it at the end of a staff meeting and became engrossed. I sat there riveted to my screen while everyone else left.

Image stolen from Mike Wesch http://ksuanth.weebly.com/wesch.html

Our pupils are older teenagers, mostly from middle-class areas. We have a laptop for each pupil and wireless net access. Most of the pupils surveyed said they were disturbed or distracted during class by FaceBook, YouTube and other social networking technologies. Ninety per cent (!) said that 5 minutes or more of each 45-minute period was used on such technologies. In a yes/no question, most of them said they used 'Web 2.o' technologies for school-related purposes, but in the comments they wrote, less than 1% mentioned such use. Their written comments on the survey were not directly about Web 2.0, but more about Internet access in itself, despite this not really being the subject of the survey.

The comments divide roughly in half, with half saying that Internet access at school should be limited because they or others are distracted by things like FaceBook during class. Those who defend having access in class with a few exceptions did not do so by pointing to educational value. On the contrary.

Many argue that they cannot concentrate on class for long, so that they need other things to do. A large number said that this was because the instruction was "boring". A pupil said to me directly once that he found the school day so boring that he needed social networking to get through the day.

Many argue that, as it is their education, it is up to them whether or not they participate. If they wish to update their FaceBook profile instead of listening to the math lesson, that is entirely their affair. Many clearly thought that it was no business of the school or the teacher what they did in class. Really.

Many said that they followed FaceBook, etc during class, but that this did not affect their concentration.

Several pupils claimed that they needed to be logged on to FaceBook (MSN, etc) to be able to concentrate. These pupils feel that if they are not logged on, they don't know "what's happening" and become agitated. If they are logged on, they say, they feel they are in the loop and can relax.

What on Earth are we up to? School has always been a problematic arena for learning. With the modern web, are we exploding school and changing it into something new, or are we just finally helping it achieve its full potential as a complete waste of time?

Guess my answer.

A new look at Little Red Riding Hood

2009-03-30T13:04:00.000+01:00

The graphic feel of 'Remind me' used on a fairy tale produces some real humour. Also an example of how unknowns can do great stuff.

This is a great video. Enjoy!

Slagsmålsklubben - Sponsored by destiny from Tomas Nilsson on Vimeo.

Queen Rania

2009-03-29T21:26:00.000+01:00

Everything is different.

If you don't believe this, let me redirect your attention to Exhibit A, Queen Rania of Jordan's YouTube award acceptance video. If you don't remember it or missed it, here it is.

Well? A couple of things pop to mind.

1. This woman is a queen. One of the only real queens left on the planet. Look at her presentation of herself here.
2. She is assuming that everyone watching recognizes the format. Letterman as a cultural universal. The mind boggles.
3. She also assumes a good knowledge of YouTube. OK thinking of her original audience, but as we know, these things move around.
3. Unable to appear in person, she makes a video. If you think YouTube is a natural form of expression solely for pimply 14 year-olds who never leave their basements, then this video is a sharp answer for you.

I hadn't intended to use this in class when I first saw it, but watching it again, I think I will use it. Tomorrow.

Devolution - becoming what I hate.

2009-03-27T09:53:00.000Z

You'd expect that when someone opposed to schooling becomes a teacher, the classroom gets turned upside down and strange and wonderful things happen. I do it for three years and then write a book. Hollywood makes one of those annoying school movies.

Didn't happen. At first, I had no idea I was going to stay, so I just did my job in a simple way and observed. I quickly became so fond of working with teenagers that I could see myself staying, however, and then strange things did begin happening in the classroom. I got lots of fantastic feedback from the kids, who (interestingly enough) often refused to consider me a teacher. Not that they didn't learn anything. They said they learned more in my classes. I was weird, I was funny, I was engaged. I knew lots of strange things. They did things in my class they hadn't done before. I took them seriously.

Now a few more years have gone by and I don't get much positive feedback, just the bored looks and low-level conflict that are so typical in school. When I look at myself, it's not hard to understand why. I've become one of those self-important, disorganised, unimaginative, impersonal, discipline-obsessed teachers that made me hate school so much in the first place. How did this happen?

Research shows that pedagogical education and teacher training have little effect on praxis. I have interviewed a few teachers (and talked to several hundred) and what amazes me is what a clear idea so many of them have of what it is they are supposed to do. I have had teachers admit to me that they haven't had time to read the curriculum for their course, or that they find the Education Act or other parts of the regulations a hindrance that they may actually ignore. So this must mean that they have a clear idea from somewhere else of what it is that they are supposed to be doing. Huh? Come again?

Well, we've all been to school and learned what school is. That script we've learned seems to be stronger than any kind of educational theory or law or curriculum. Even in my case, where I do not remember a single good teacher from my many years at school and where I have no desire to recreate the idiocy that wasted so much of my childhood, this script seems to be stronger than my own idiology.

How did I let this happen? Well, I've got three small kids and never get enough sleep. My wife works more than I do. I'm always behind and when I no longer have a burningly clear idea of what I want to acheive - whamo - I become what I hate.

Le grand content video

2009-03-26T20:50:00.000Z

This is really the best!

It took me a while to discover Jessica Hagy and her wonderful blog Indexed, so I had missed the video that has been made from her graphs. Here it is, although I'm so far behind the times that I'm really showing how outside the loop I am by posting it here now.