‘Teach Naked’ and complacency natives

‘Teach Naked’ Effort Strips Computers From Classrooms – Technology – The Chronicle of Higher Education.

This is one of the stories where you have to actually read the whole thing. At first you think, “Terrific, another educator who hates technology and refuses to join the 21st century.”

College leaders usually brag about their tech-filled “smart” classrooms, but a dean at Southern Methodist University is proudly removing computers from lecture halls. José A. Bowen, dean of the Meadows School of the Arts, has challenged his colleagues to “teach naked”—by which he means, sans machines.

But you would be wrong – read a bit more. He’s not really against technology, he’s against being boring, especially being boring with PowerPoint. He thinks when students come together, the best thing to do is have a conversation. Let the students read the material, or listen to a podcast ahead of time. Use class time to talk, ask questions, and interact with the teacher and other students.

Even though he is taking computers out of classrooms, he’s not anti-technology. He just thinks they should be used differently—upending the traditional lecture model in the process.

Aha! He’s talking about pedagogy, not tools. He’s against lecturing, with or without slideshow accompaniment. And guess who he has to convince about this — yes, those digital natives, the students. Because what they really are is complacency natives. They are used to waiting passively to be told what to learn, how to learn, and then repeating it back.

But he’s taking computers out of the classrooms! Oh no! Evil! But wait, keep reading. He’s removing the fixed computers hooked to projectors. And buying laptops instead. And unbolting the desks and replacing them with movable chairs and tables so the teachers and students can adapt their classroom to suit their learning needs. Oh, hmm… not so crazy.

It’s a great lesson in the sloppy vocabulary of the ed tech world. All “technology” is not created equal. It’s not a technology = good, removing it = bad. We have to be more precise about this. What’s the learning environment? What do you believe about learning? How is technology supporting those goals?

Teach naked? Ok, got to give the guy credit for coming up with something catchy. Getting attention for advocating doing away with lecture is OK in my book. A worthy goal for K-12 would be to produce students who aren’t complacency natives, who arrive at college ready for deep discussion, real learning, and meaningful interactions with other human beings.

Sylvia

Students are not the enemy

The upcoming NYSCATE conference includes this session.

The Enemy Within: Stop Students from Bypassing Your Web Filters

So this session (by a security software vendor) sets up students as the  enemy. The job is not to educate the people who come to this session or help schools provide the best educational Internet experience (by those same evil students.) No, the idea is to create a climate of fear, demonize students, and imply that there is a war between students and IT administrators.

And why not? You need weapons to fight a war. Fear the children, buy our stuff.

Kids are not the terrorists, kids and teachers are being terrorized by outrageous IT policies and vendors eager to stir up fear to make a profit. Sad.

Sylvia

Deliberate Tinkering

Presentation Zen: 10 Tips on how to think like a designer.

Design in the real world is often a process of deliberate tinkering. Sometimes the goal may be clear, with timelines, budgets, and constraints. Or the goal may be less clear, as you struggle to come up with something “better” even though no one quite knows what that means. Sometimes you work for days or weeks, making small incremental steps, sometimes things come in a flash of brilliance.

Yet in school, there is often a rigid “design process” with stages that imply a linear progression from start to finish. Whether teaching writing, video production, the “scientific method”, or programming, it often seems most efficient to provide students with step-by-step assistance, tools, and tricks to organize their thoughts and get to a finished product.

However, this well-intentioned support may in fact have the effect of stifling creativity and forcing students into creating products that simply mirror the cookbook they have been given. In fact, some students, having been well-trained to follow directions, will simply march through the steps with little thought at all. On the other hand, students need some kind of support and structure, right?

So how do you combine the benefits of tinkering (creative chaos, brainstorming, time to reflect) with getting something done. I believe the answer lies in looking at the design process in the creative world – such as graphic artists and designers.

Presentation Zen is a website devoted to simplicity in design and a recent article provides some great direction for classroom projects: Presentation Zen: 10 Tips on how to think like a designer.

Here are the tips from the article:

(1) Embrace constraints. (2) Practice restraint. (3) Adopt the beginner’s mind. (4) Check your ego at the door. (5) Focus on the experience of the design. (6) Become a master storyteller. (7) Think communication not decoration. (8) Obsess about ideas not tools. (9) Clarify your intention. (10) Sharpen your vision & curiosity and learn from the lessons around you. (11) Learn all the “rules” and know when and why to break them.

I hope you read this article; it provides much food for thought.

Sylvia

Free Back to School Resource for Laptop Schools

It’s back to school time again in the US! Time for fresh new school supplies, backpacks, or maybe some new laptops?

studentsupportlaptopcover

Student Support of Laptop Programs – new laptops? old laptops? Are you getting the benefit of making students allies in your laptop initiative? Peer mentoring, student-led training on new hardware and software, student tech support and other ideas can be time saving, cost effective, and best of all, good for students and the whole learning community.

This whitepaper contains research, case studies, practical information that you can use right now, whether you have one cart or are a 1:1 laptop school.

Student Support of Laptop Programs (PDF)

Sylvia

Still no free lunch 2.0

So the dominos continue to fall in the force-march to reality that is the current economic crisis. Surprise! Companies can’t give away stuff for free, even to educators. This week, two popular Web 2.0 tools made announcements that will impact educators who developed classroom activities based on these tools. Bubbleshare.com (free photo sharing) is closing. Wet Paint Wikis announced they will no longer provide ad-free wikis for educators for no charge.

Every day there are more announcements about companies pulling the plug on free services. (Techcrunch runs announcements in what they call the “deadpool.”)

Last year I posted some rules for deciding whether a Web 2.0 tool is worth investing in for the classroom, and these are still good strategies..

…don’t assume that their business model will stay the same, and that your use won’t be affected. A few will just disappear without a word. But there is no doubt that all these companies will have to make money off these services to survive. Don’t expect them to send out a memo, these people are fighting for their lives. When you find Viagra ads embedded in your “free” videos in the middle of a class project, that’s when you’ll find out how they decided to monetize their service.

At the end of the day, using a free tool is a gamble. If it’s just you as an individual taking a risk on a free tool, that’s one thing. But if you are recommending these tools to others, spending money and time implementing them, planning lessons, or shifting your “business” to them, you really need to think about it. You may decide instead to use tools you can really own, like a do-it-yourself open source implementation, or tools from a company you can trust. They might cost a little more time or money up front, but give you peace of mind as bubbles burst all around us.

Sylvia

Every day is leadership day

Scott McLeod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog has declared July 12, 2009 as Leadership Day 2009. He’s been doing this for two years now, and each year I’ve participated with a post.

  • 2007 – Leaders of the Future where I focused in developing the leader in every learner.
  • 2008 – Just Do It where I urged administrators to stop waiting for the district reorg or the next version of Windows or that bandwidth you were promised 3 years ago and get moving. Listen to kids, don’t listen the teachers who can’t seem to manage an email account, damn the torpedos and full steam ahead.

So what to do for 2009? I still believe that leadership has to be nurtured at every level. I still believe that we can’t wait for some perfect storm to implement our perfect plan. So what’s new?

What’s new in my mind is that it’s all linked together with choice, and more specifically agency. I’ve become increasingly aware that there is no leadership without choice at every level. I’m not talking about the now politicized “school choice” nor a meaningless choice between two barely distinguishable options. This isn’t about picking a red or blue cover for your 5 page essay. Students must have choices and true agency over their own learning.

To accomplish this, you must also have teachers who have choices and true agency over their own classroom and a say in their own school. Administrators who are leaders must have agency, choice, and a vision that others can follow – if they choose. If they are leaders, people will follow. But only if there is a real option to not follow. You aren’t a leader if everything is decided in advance. You aren’t be a leader if your followers are just there for the paycheck, or if they are students, graduation credit.

Leadership is inextricably bound to free will, in the same way democracy is.

And to insist on choice and agency, you must believe that learning is natural and that most children want to learn. You must believe that most teachers really do want to reach children and nurture that amazing natural spark; you must believe that most parents love their children and want what’s best for them. To believe otherwise is to crush that delicate flower with the iron glove of control. That’s not leadership.

Unless the people who live in schools day in and day out, principally the kids and staff, are entrusted to use their intelligence on behalf of the task at hand, we’ll not get change for the better. Anything else is inefficient, a waste of our precious time and resources.” Deborah Meier, The Power of Their Ideas 1995

I like Scott’s graphic for Leadership Day 2009 – but if it were up to me, every light bulb would be lit. That’s leadership.

Leadership Day 2009 logo

Sylvia

Should your school participate in the XO G1G1 program?

One Laptop per Child: Give 1 Get 1Thinking about creating a school program around the One Laptop Per Child XO laptop computer? At the recent NEIT 2008 conference (see my post, The people in the room are the right people), several schools were thinking along these lines. Would the Give One, Get One (G1G1) project be a perfect holiday project, raising funds for something that would help the poorest children in the world, and potentially benefit the school as well?

For example, if a school raised $2,000, that would be enough money to purchase ten XO laptops. The school would get five, and five children somewhere in the world would get the others.

As we talked about the options, there were some good ideas for using the XOs that I’d like to share.

  • “field trip” computers for recording audio, video and notes
  • start a computer club where students participate in the XO community
  • have them in the library for check out
  • use them in lower grade levels

At the end of the day, it’s really up to the school and how involved they want to get. Even something as small  as promoting the program as an option for gift giving with a global purpose is worth doing.

Here are some questions that came up, with the answers if we could figure them out from the XO site.

Q: How does the XO compare to other small, inexpensive laptops on the market?
Its different!A: There are technical details on the Amazon XO site and even more on the OLPC wiki. However, my contention is that for most Americans, unless you are willing to buy-in to the XO learning principles and participate in the grand global experiment, the XO is not for you. If you are choosing a laptop simply on technical specifications or price, I’d suggest passing on the XO. (My checklist of “what not to expect” when you get an XO.)

Q: If my school participates in the G1G1 program, do we find out who gets the “other” laptops?
A: As far as we could find out, that is not possible. This isn’t like and “adopt a child” program, you don’t get a letter telling you who gets the computer. However, you can find a lot of stories about what kids are doing with their XO laptops around the world on the XO wiki. I imagine that it would be fairly easy to find a school somewhere to establish a “pen pal” relationship with. Also, with the Give Many program, if you donate enough money to purchase more than 100 XOs you can have your donation go to a particular country.

Q: Should we tell parents to do this and get a laptop for their child for home use?
A: If you do, you need to manage expectations for parents. These computers are not just cheap laptops or expensive Leapfrogs. Most parents will not be expecting to have to do their own tech support, system updates, or learn a new operating system. Again, see my checklist of “what not to expect” when you get an XO for some suggestions of what you do and don’t get with the XO.)

Q: We have lots of computers, we don’t need more. Can we just donate money?
A: According to the XO site, you can simply donate money in any amount. You can also just purchase one laptop that goes directly for donation for $199.

Q: Does it come with Windows?
A: There have been recent news reports about the XO being able to dual boot Sugar (the operating system designed for it) and Windows. The laptops purchased through the G1G1 program will NOT have Windows installed.

Q: Does it come with a hand crank?
A: No, that was just an early prototype that seems to have caught a lot of people’s imagination. It comes with a regular AC power adapter.

Q: Should we do the G1G1 program and then donate the computers to a nearby, needier school?
Only if the school wants them. These XOs are different than other computers and will need special maintenance and care. Some schools have created “exchange” programs, where students provide support and training for other schools. If you are willing to create such a long-term relationship, this might be an extraordinary learning experience for your students.

Q: How long is the G1G1 program running? Holidays are too busy, but we could do something in the spring.
A: This is one question we couldn’t find a really solid answer to. The OLPC wiki says it will be an ongoing program, and that “While the promotion has no scheduled end date, the advertising will run from Nov 17 to Dec 26, to take advantage of the holiday giving season.” However, much of the news about G1G1 has stated that the program ends Dec. 31, 2008. There is an open question on the “talk” page of the OLPC wiki about this, but no one has responded yet. It’s possible that people are also confusing last year’s program which ran for a limited time.

My inclination would be to trust the OLPC wiki and assume that Amazon is committed to this for the long term… but keep checking back!

Sylvia

More on Fair Use and ending copyright confusion

Last week’s post, Fair use explained for educators announced a new resource, The Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for Media Literacy Education. In the comments, Kristen Hokansen, a Pennsylvania educator and tech coach added more support resources that deserved a new post all their own!

Kristen actually attended the announcement event in Philadelphia and helped create a wikispace called Copyright Confusion that will become a forum for educators. If you have time, watch the ustream and a live blog of the event that are archived here, there are some really great points brought up. Kristen also wrote about the event on her own blog The END to Copyright Confusion~and a new beginning that adds more explanation and nuance to this very confusing subject.

Kristen says, “I encourage folks to visit, and join, and share how they are dealing with this release and encouraging folks to exercise their rights as content creators under fair use. I also recommend checking out the Teaching About Fair Use page on Temple Media Lab’s site. There are all kinds of great lessons, examples, case studies and materials that can be used to help develop understanding.”

Sylvia

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