Challenging Assumptions about Technology Professional Development

Another K12Online Conference session goes live today – Challenging Assumptions about Technology Professional Development.

When people talk about “why aren’t teachers using technology?” the point is invariably made that there is not enough professional development. This session questions that assumption, and makes some points about how typical professional development may serve to actually increase teacher discomfort with technology, rather than alleviate it.

This session has a lot of ideas in it – community of practice, what is a constructivist, project-based classroom, students as co-learners, what professional development can be, and more.

Challenging Assumptions about Technology Professional Development is available both as a video and audio only podcast on the K12Online 2007 conference site. Teaser Trailer (2 min): on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdYJIJc1oQE

 

Practical Guide to Constructivist Teaching

Just announced from The Institute for Learning Centered Education – a new book by Pat Flynn, Paul Vermette, Mike Smith and Don Mesibov:

CAPTIVATING CLASSES with CONSTRUCTIVISM

This book is for teachers, administrators, staff developers, college students and professors of pre-service students looking for lessons, practical tips and assessment strategies for constructivist classrooms. Veteran teachers share their secrets and years of classroom experience in creating authentic experiences for students.

Includes:

  • Constructivist-based lessons in math, science, English and social studies that were taught by Paul Vermette. These are not summaries; these are step-by step narrations of what Paul actually did in the classroom to engage, motivate, assess what they are learning and cause them to increase their learning through reflection.
  • Four specific strategies to teach students that which we want each of them to learn. The strategies are carousel, concept mapping, jigsaw, and literature circles. There are 81 pages of examples from kindergarten to 12th grade – in math, science, social studies, and English.
  • Seventeen Intentions of an Effective Teacher; these can serve as guidelines for lesson design. (I previously wrote about these 17 Intentions in this blog.)
  • Two chapters by outstanding teachers. Beth Konkoski of Virginia has written about the role of the teacher while students are engaged in group activities. Sonia Basko who teaches in Rochester, New York devotes a chapter toward the importance of preparing students for a constructivist classroom. Each of these chapters contains pages of practical suggestions and strategies that can be applied to all classrooms.
  • There are chapters on important aspects of assessment that are critical for any classroom, but often not addressed in staff development. And there is a focus on reversing the traditional way of teaching or parenting; instead of explaining and then giving students a chance to apply, the authors suggest that Engagement Must Precede Explanation.

For your copy, send $20 to:
Institute for Learning Centered Education
414 Bagdad Road
Potsdam, New York 13676

For more information, you can visit the website of The Institute for Learning Centered Education.

Student-Centered Support Systems to Sustain Logo-like Learning

It’s been crazy since I got back from Eastern Europe, but I promised to put my paper online once I returned. Here it is!

Student-Centered Support Systems to Sustain Logo-like Learning (PDF)

Abstract
Conventional wisdom attributes the lack of effective technology use in classrooms to a shortage of professional development or poorly run professional development. At the same time, logo-like learning environments require teachers to develop more expertise not only in technology but also in pedagogy.

This paper proposes that the perceived lack of technology professional development is a myth and that traditional professional development is ill-suited to teaching teachers how to create logo-like learning environments. Furthermore, it proposes models of student-centered, student-led support for teachers that support classroom practice aligned with the attributes of logo-like learning environments. These models situate teacher learning about technology in their own classroom, reinforce constructivist teaching practices, provide support for technology use in the classroom, and enrich learning environments for students.

Sylvia

See ya in a bit!

I’m heading off tomorrow for Eastern Europe, a vacation wrapped around a presentation at a conference on the children’s programming language Logo in Bratislava (Eurologo 2007). My paper, Student-centered Support Systems to Sustain Logo-like Learning, was also selected to be included in Informatics in Education, an international journal published by Institute of Mathematics and Informatics, Lithuanian Academy of Sciences. Very cool!

When I got my masters in educational technology ten years ago, I promised myself that I would continue to write and challenge myself academically. It’s been interesting to me that while writing this type of paper is one type of mental exercise, blogging is another that can be similarly powerful. Blogging is like doing wind sprints, while academic articles require pacing and endurance. They support each other nicely.

 

Connecting ed-tech to ed-reform

The design of American education is obsolete, not meeting the needs of our students and our society, and ignores most of what we have learned about education and learning in the past century. This panel will explore a new paradigm, including some specific examples, of how education in America can be reshaped in more productive and democratic fashions. YEARLYKOS: Education Uprising / Educating for Democracy

At the annual Yearlykos 2007 conference, a group of educators, including teacherken from The Daily Kos, will discuss a year-long project to implement education reform in America. The opening paragraph above is followed by an essay on education reform and links to support resources.

What does this have to do with technology?
As educators find themselves re-imagining learning based on their own tech-based awakening, the sense comes quickly that this is not about new technology, access to information, 21st century skills, or even 2.0-goodness, but broader-based education reform. But just as quickly, it starts to feel like there is no hope of changing a lumbering, entrenched educational system with a tiny lever called technology.

However, we are not alone, and it would be a win-win for both tech-loving educators and education reformers to join forces. The tools of Web 2.0 could tip the balance in the effort to reshape education “in more productive and democratic fashions.” The virtual voices of students and teachers alike could finally be heard in force.

Roadmap for education reform
The online handout from this session is a roadmap of current education reform efforts focusing on teacher autonomy, authentic student work, and educator-driven reforms.

Just a few gems:

Forum for Education and Democracy, founded by a group of prominent thinkers in education, including Deborah Meier, Angela Valenzuela, Pedro Noguera, Linda Darling-Hammond, Ted and Nancy Sizer, and others: http://www.forumforeducation.org/

The Education Policy Blog
http://educationpolicyblog.blogspot.com/ is group blog in which both Sherman Dorn and Ken Bernstein participate. It has the purpose of examining education from a social foundations perspective, and many of the participants teach social foundations of education in teacher training programs.

Educators Roundtable http://www.educatorroundtable.org is the product a group of educators who came together to attempt to stop reauthorization of NCLB in anything like its current format.

Coalition of Essential Schools, based on the thinking of Ted Sizer: http://www.essentialschools.org/

And wait, there’s more… This is not just whining about how bad things are, it’s a positive call to action. Be sure to read all the way to bottom of the page for a manifesto of how to change the teaching profession, not from the top down, but by leveraging (and listening to) teachers themselves.

Teachers and Teaching: Prospects for High Leverage Reform
Peter Henry (aka Mi Corazon) http://www.newteachernetwork.net

Wedged between two Byzantine bureaucracies—unions and school districts, constrained by unreasonable public expectations, hammered by ideologues, criticized by the media, saddled with policies shaped by non-educators, America’s teachers have almost no room to maneuver. Their training, workplace, schedule, and assignment are mostly determined by others, and their curriculum arrives “canned” in the form of textbooks from large, well-connected corporations. In some schools, extreme instructional strategies tell them what words to say, when, and how, as if teaching can be reduced to a standard script.

There is, however, reason for hope: If teachers are liberated from these structural limitations, they have tremendous potential as “high leverage” reform agents. As Peter Senge maintains in his thoughtful classic, The Fifth Discipline, small, subtle modifications of a key organizational element can have a major systemic impact.

It goes on to call for two fundamental reforms:

  1. Giving teachers autonomy, power, control and authority
  2. Ending teacher isolation

And ends on this uplifting note:

A great and resilient society, capable of successful adaptation and change, cannot thrive with an educational system built in the 19th century—managed by top-down hierarchies, one-size-fits-all models and ruled by the cudgel of fear. Excellence is achieved through individual mastery, a collegial network awash with inquiry and creativity, undergirded by trust and tangible support from the larger community. If we want teaching excellence and the resultant development of full student potential, teachers must be lifted up, given the responsibility, authority and training which enhance their natural human abilities, and then respected for taking on this most crucial and challenging work.

Educators inspired by technology and looking to create their ideal of authentic learning will see parallels in these resources with many of the thoughts expressed daily in the ed-tech segment of the edublosphere. There is much to learn and much to do.

But finally, at this time in history, we have to tools to actually make this happen. Ed-tech reformers have an important part to play… and we are not alone.

Sylvia

Web 2.0 and historical perspectives

There’s been an interesting discussion on David Warlick’s blog about what Web 2.0 means, and is it really new. David Thornburg weighed in with some historical perspectives on the subject and the discussion really took off.

The historical perspective is important, but I think it got techno-centric very quickly. My concern is that we’ve already forgotten (or never knew) the history of what happened to the last education reform that starred technology.

Right now the concept of Web 2.0 in schools is in the hands of excited educators who have felt the power of learning something new and want to share it with their students and other educators. It’s a contagious, revolutionary feeling that we are on the cusp of something that will change the world.

This feels SO much like the 80’s, when computers first started trickling into schools. But the dark side is how schools, instead of letting educators show the way, turned to corporations and publishers to commercialize and pre-package the computer into school-friendly forms. It deprived students and teachers of authentic chances to program, to make music, and to create. Instead of the revolution in learning that seemed to be ever so temptingly on a permanent horizon, it turned computers into test prep machines that reinforced the way school “delivered” information to students.

The score: Technology – 0, “School” – 1

Now we have a chance to recapture the authentic use of computers for education. It is, however, just as likely that history will repeat itself, since schools tend to purchase “solutions” that meet administrative needs for control and search for ways to “scale” any innovation until it becomes a bland caricature of itself.

Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. I hope that people who are new to educational technology as a result of Web 2.0 know that a whole movement of school reform started by technology pioneers had a tragic history, because its meaning was co-opted by corporations and the willingness of schools to give up their control of the educational process.

Maybe it won’t happen again, maybe the free/open source concept is a weapon that will help this time. Maybe we’re smarter, maybe we can stay more connected on blogger networks. But free stuff can be bad and mis-educative just as much as stuff you pay for. Lines of communication can become self-referential. The vigilance HAS to be on individual educators to stand up for what they believe in, and unfortunately vague, techno-centric Web 2.0 terminology is not much of a educational foundation to stand on.

As I wrote in a post a while back, the use of fill-in-the-blank 2.0 is what marketeers call an empty vessel. It’s a way to convey feeling without meaning, using words to convince a buyer that the product is good because the wording is so vague that everyone can write their own script. Watch carefully as school product marketeers co-opt the language of 2.0 and turn it on its head.

I’m not here to lecture people about what the right term is. Find your own — it’s the ownership that makes it concrete and actionable for each individual. Project-based learning, constructivist, inquiry-based, student-centered… whatever. But make it educational, not technical. Tell me what you believe, not what tools you use.

By the way, I’m guilty too! I’m not going to give up saying “2.0”–it’s way too convenient a shortcut. But I will try harder to say what I mean by it. That’s my Promis2.0.

Sylvia

Second Thoughts on Second Life

When I joined the group of educators in Second Life called the CAVE (see previous post) I promised myself I would do two things: 1) approach Second Life with an open mind and 2) write about it along the way.

I have written about it to some extent (another previous post, My First Second Life Lesson), but it still feels like I have a long way to go. The last dozen times I’ve been there it’s been a very frustrating technical experience (freezes, crashes) and very little real time to do anything interesting. Even when it works, it still feels like a place that is looking for a use in education, or just reminds me of the dozens of other places I’ve hung out at in my long life online, like Tapped In or various text-based virtual worlds.

My thinking has somewhat crystallized around 3 topics:

  • Second Life as a place for professional development (vs. professional collegiality)
  • Second Life as a place for learning with K-12 students (have to save for next time!)
  • Second Life as a platform in general (another next time!)

I apologize in advance for the length of this post. It’s both too long and too short. Too long for a blog, too short for real insight. It’s a work in progress, and I only really got to one of my intended three topics. so please forgive me!

And finally, to gain any REAL insight and perspective, I needed to re-read more seminal works in this area. I’m still working my way through some and I’ve written about them at the end of this post. It’s easy to get carried away with small technological advances, and think about Second Life (or any currently available 3D virtual world) in a vacuum. But why not stand on the shoulders of giants? So if you want to skip my musings in this much too long blog post, jump down to the end and read some of the people who really count in this field!

Professional development vs. professional collegiality
It’s been fun having nice chats with educators in Second Life, some random, some planned. I can really see the need for educators, who are a traditionally isolated profession, to bond in new ways with other like-minded individuals. Like many conferences, I’ve found that simple conversations and random meetings with new people are more interesting than the formal events. This is more about collegiality than professional development. Also like many conferences, the format of formal events is even much more instructionist than in real life, simply because of the limits of the interface. Sitting in a virtual lecture hall is hardly revolutionary, even if you do it wearing wings or a cat costume.
Isolation of professional development from professional practice
Professional development, in my opinion, has to have a component that links back to your actual place of professional practice, and for most teachers, this is a classroom. Lectures alone cannot be professional development, even in real life. Professional development to me has to include professional practice, and unless you are learning to teach in Second Life, it seems like a distancing element, rather than one that enhances professional practice for a classroom teacher.

For K-12 educators especially, Second Life constrains any educator/student relationship because of the age regulations. The forced separation of teachers and students, except for isolated instances, creates an experience that is further distant from the teacher’s own classroom. For professional development to be ultimately successful, I think that it has to re-integrate at some point with the teacher’s actual professional environment, which is the classroom. Second Life offers a dead-end in that regard. (I’m planning to write more about the age separation issues later!)

Collegiality – it’s a good thing!
I think Second Life used as a professional collegial environment is terrific, but similar to other such environments such as Tapped In–in other words, not terrible, but hardly revolutionary. I know, I know, there are people who love it and have learned a lot. You can certainly learn through collegial interaction with other professionals, and really, there should be a lot more opportunities for teachers to do that. But counting on Second Life as a platform for more than just voluntary, informal collegial interaction seems premature at best.

Some people are going to be taken with the fun of flying around or visiting virtual museums, but many more are going to be put off by the “bleeding edge” aspect of constant freezes, crashes, high bandwidth demands, and the difficulty of simply moving your avatar around. At this point, I think the constraints of the platform overwhelm any advantage as a reliable professional development environment for educators.

In addition, what early adopters of any new technology often fail to realize is that the things that hook them about new technology are exactly the reasons the next wave of adopters will hate it. The high-risk, high learning curve, first-to-market excitement that is so attractive to early adopters is like a big red warning light to the next wave. Enthusiasm for the new new thing has a short shelf life, and most people are quite willing to wait for someone else to shake all the bugs out. So while Second Life as a professional development platform may be just the ticket to rev up the engines of early adopters, the rest of the educator population is going to look at every crash, every naked avatar that shows up in the middle of a meeting, and every interface quirk as confirmation that technology is not ready for real classrooms or worthy of their time.

The S-word
Second Life is primarily a platform for adults to explore their sexual identity. Ignoring the overtly sexual nature of Second Life is like going to a strip club and then wondering why there are naked people there. The owners of Second Life, Linden Labs, have expressed their support for education, and have discussed their intent to provide more educationally appropriate worlds. However, this is a business model that has to work for them and it’s not going to be driven by education no matter the best of intentions.

It’s perfectly fine to explore Second Life as a platform for different kinds of professional interaction, but getting married to specific features or its proprietary scripting language seems short-sighted, given that the platform will always be tuned to make more money from the primary function of the world, which is sexual in nature.

Epiphany as the ultimate educational goal
Finally, I can see that people who get deeply excited about Second Life have had a life-changing experience, a learning epiphany, that they want to evangelize. I have the feeling that it’s not a function of Second Life that they find transformative, it’s the experience of learning something that’s hard fun that clicks for them. I know that when I found programming, it did the same thing for me, and even after 30 years, I still have difficulty not yaking about programming as a transformative experience that everyone should be doing.

Learning ABOUT Second Life is different than learning IN Second Life, but the two get conflated. Learning to navigate in a new world and becoming an expert in something that very few people know about are heady experiences. The experience of learning Second Life also tends to confirm what many educators feel about learning, that learning by DOING is the way they learn and the right way to facilitate all learning, adults and children. Dusty research articles and ed-psych terms that were meaningless in grad school suddenly come to life. The excitement of learning, and of sharing that experience with others sparks ideas and interests in learning more, sharing more, and evangelizing.

Even now as I share my doubts about Second Life, I would NEVER begrudge someone else their epiphany. I hope educators who are having transformative experiences in Second Life continue to share them with others, but realize that it’s the epiphany that counts, not the vehicle. Providing multiple avenues for such learning epiphanies, for both educators and children, should be the ultimate goal, not to force others to re-experience your own personal transformative event.

Re-reading seminal works
Back when computers were first connected to each other, some of the earliest uses were text-based chats and virtual spaces where people could hang out. I’m even so old that I had access to ARPANET when I was an engineering student at UCLA. I think I’ve had the same conversation in Second Life as I did on ARPANET with teletypes chattering out one line at a time. (Where are you? What time is it there? What do you do? How’s the weather?) I think the only conversation I’ve had in SL that I’ve never had before typically starts out, “where did you get your shoes?” and I probably have enough of those in real life anyway!

People really aren’t that complicated, and it doesn’t matter if you can “see” an avatar or not. Imagination can fill in most blanks. Believe me, there were text based and 2D long-distance love affairs, people who were “addicted” to dial-up BBS worlds, spats, identity crises, crazy times, and serious discussions. There were people who could program fairy-tale lands full of unexpected surprises around every corner, using scripting languages that had no user manual and no relationship to any known programming language. It was just as fun as Second Life, really!

There were also serious researchers who took on the job of documenting this new culture like anthropologists, predicting where it would go, what impact it would have on human culture, and how it could be used for education. No serious consideration of Second Life would be complete without re-reading these works. Here are just a few I’ve been reading — I’m sure there are many more.

The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit by Sherry Turkle. I took this off my bookshelf a while back and re-read it. Written in 1984 (and she worked on it for 6 years before that), this book is about identity and self in the age of the computer and specifically talks about children and computers. Even the chapter titles are timely, “Adolescence and Identity: Finding Yourself in the Machine”, “Hackers: Loving the Machine for Itself”, “Video Games and Computer Holding Power”, for example. It’s tempting to try to explain the book in a few sentences or link to Dr. Turkle’s wikipedia entry (ok, here it is), but really, it’s a book you have to read for yourself. (If you buy a new copy, be sure to the the 20th anniversary reissue.)

Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet  Written 10 years later, this book continues her ethnographic exploration into computer culture and human identity. This book could be written about Second Life, and has some really interesting early insights into people using virtual worlds to try on different identities, genders, and personas. (Sherry Turkle website)

Tapped-In. A virtual world for teacher professional development since 1997. Research conducted in and on Tapped In is extremely relevant for Second Life educators.

MOOSE Crossing – PhD project of Amy Bruckman. (Dissertation) This virtual world was designed specifically for children and research into Seymour Papert’s theory of constructionism within a virtual community. A terrific read!

“The central claim of this thesis is that community and construction activities are mutually reinforcing. Working within a community helps people to become better dancers/programmers/designers and better learners. Conversely, working on design and construction projects together helps to form a strong, supportive community.”

and

“In research about the Internet, too much attention is paid to its ability to provide access to information. This thesis argues that the Internet can be used not just as a conduit for information, but as a context for learning through community-supported collaborative construction. A “constructionist” approach to use of the Internet makes particularly good use of its educational potential. The Internet provides opportunities to move beyond the creation of constructionist tools and activities to the creation of “constructionist cultures.”

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding TechnologyHoward Rheingold wrote this series of essays in 1985 about the pioneers of the computer age, from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage to Alan Kay, Brenda Laurel, and many more. I have a newer edition published in 2000 that contains what Howard calls a “retrospective futurism” where he re-addresses his predictions in the light of what really happened. Before I went to see Alan Kay speak at Educomm in June (that post here), I pulled out Tools for Thought and read the chapter “The Birth of the Fantasy Amplifier”. The perspective gave me a different lens with which to view Alan Kay’s speech. Even though he was talking about the One Laptop per Child global initiative and the programming language Squeak, the seeds of the “Fantasy Amplifier” concept that fueled his many contributions to this field were evident.

Seymour Papert. Even though Dr. Papert didn’t specifically focus on virtual worlds, he’s the father of educational computing and constructionism, and is a key link between everything I’ve mentioned here. I think I’m going to have to save that discussion for later, since this has gotten WAY too long! But here’s a link to some of his articles and speeches that exist online. His three books, Mindstorms (for researchers), The Children’s Machine (for teachers), and The Connected Family (for parents), are also amazing and have changed the way many people view the computer as a “tool to think with.”

Constructivist Celebration Slideshow

Hello folks who attended the Constructivist Celebration before NECC 2007! This is a slideshow of the photos I took during the day at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. If you have photos you’d like to share, you may post your links here, or tag them if they are on Flickr.

(constructivistcelebration07 constructivistconsortium07 necc07)

Created with Paul’s flickrSLiDR.

If you see a photo you would like a full size copy of, email me: sylvia at genyes dot com.

Constructivist Celebration

CC LogoOver 100 educators came to the Atlanta Botanical Garden the Sunday before NECC to play, construct, and share at the First (dare we say Annual?) Constructvist Celebration!

Peter Reynolds and Gary Stager kicked off the day with inspirational words about children’s ability to use computers to “reach their North Star” and “BE mathematicians, poets, artists, and programmers, not just learn ABOUT mathematicians, poets, artists or programmers”. Shooting photos in the gardenEvery member of the Constructivist Consortium introduced themselves and a few project ideas that the participants could jump into. And jump everyone did! There were photographers taking close-ups of the garden’s amazing array of flowers, trees, orchids, and sculptures. People were painting, thinking, and talking. Suddenly movies, animations, videogames, mind-maps and more were taking shape on everyone’s laptops.

Everyone ran around, and shared ideas, files, and solutions. The noise level was “joyful” as one wise teacher put it!

TechYES students from nearby Barber Middle School and their teacher were there to lend a hand, and soon were immersed in making their own projects–at the same time as helping out, running a “sneaker-net” with thumbdrives, and pouring lemonade.

Constructivist Celebration sharingAfter lunch, everyone wrapped up their projects and we walked around the room in an impromptu exhibition. Amazingly enough, in just a few hours, a group of 100 educators had created an wonderful variety of projects using multiple pieces of software without one minute of instruction from the front of the room.

In the sharing session that wrapped up the day, educators shared their feelings of being “nourished” and of finding instant friends and collegues who understood their passion for putting the power of technology into student’s hands.

This was the first event of the Constructivist Consortium, a group of educational technology companies who have passion to support progressive educators using technology in the classroom in student-centered, project-based ways. The six founding members–Generation YES, Fablevision, Inspiration, Logo Computer Systems International (LCSI), SchoolKit, and Tech4Learning all hope that the spirit of the day gives these educators collegial support and ideas–who doesn’t need that!

That’s hot – Web 2.0 and the empty vessel

“____ 2.0” is turning into a catch phrase for educational technology bloggers and conference presenters, who know that anything with 2.0 in the title gets attention. Taking a dip into the marketing world, it’s easy to see why. Although Web 2.0 has a definition that relates to the underlying technology, it has come to mean much more. It’s a social movement, a defining line between who “gets it” and who doesn’t, a feeling, a look, and a value system.

It’s what marketing mavens call an “empty vessel” – a phrase or name that has no real meaning, but sort of suggests someting. In that vacuum, people can insert their own interpretation and actually feel like they understand the product or brand better as a result. By simply adding 2.0 to pretty much anything, it neatly implies the “second generation” of something with a techie twist.

So themes like Classroom 2.0 and School 2.0 become a shared idea with no real meaning. They signal that something is changing without anyone having to say exactly what that is. We can all agree that “Classroom 2.0” is a good thing, because each of us fills that empty vessel with our own idea of what a new version of a classroom looks like.

Hey, I’m the first to admit I do it – I did a conference presentation this morning about including students in Web 2.0 implementations. My version of Classroom 2.0 has students involved in constructivist projects using open-ended technology tools in a collaborative learning community. It drew a nice crowd, even though everyone came in with a completely different idea about what Web 2.0 meant to them.

But that’s OK – at least we agree that something is changing and that’s hot*

Sylvia

* For those of you who hate TV and never read trashy magazines, “That’s hot” is the catch phrase of Paris Hilton, who has turned being famous for nothing into a major career.