Wherein we run for our lives

Wherein I respond to a panel of great teachers

Last week's panel on integrating tech into the classroom with actual living 46-chromosome mammalian veteran teachers was outstanding. Regardless of content area or grade level, each of the teachers had a great deal that I found useful.

Perhaps most useful of all was Mike's comment about teaching students how to search for things digitally. This is a skill I've had to work out on my own, with like fear and trembling, over the thirteen years that I've been quite active on the internet. Things I don't even think about anymore, like putting "certain words" or "phrases in quotes" to narrow a broad search, are certainly not innate for fourteen year olds. With so much information available digitally, having a decent set of tools for perusing it is basically vital for any sort of higher-level research or creation work.

In the discussion of gaming the classroom, Jamie managed to allay some of my skepticism about how such a thing would work, noting that, just as in any classroom activity, you have to include something for everybody. Not everyone is going to love it, obviously, but his comments made me feel a little less uncomfortable about the competitive aspect being intimidating to some students. I still feel that competition in learning is most of the time beside the point, but I feel a little less cynicism about this now.

One thing that came up in the same discussion was Mike's use of badges in his classroom as a learning incentive. I feel two things about this.

First, what difference is there between an arbitrary badge and, say, a yellow banana sticker?
Second, I wonder whether incentivizing education like this isn't seriously detrimental to any concept that focuses on learning for learning's sake. I take pretty seriously the idea that reading Cather or learning calculus leads to a richer, fuller inner life. That the process itself is the carrot, not the stick. Introducing a rewards system runs counter to my understanding of the goal of education. And while it may prove expedient for students who might otherwise be unengaged by the material or the process, I would rather devote my time and energy to figuring out a way that the process or material could be made valuable for them, rather than figuring out how many yellow banana stickers one gets for reading Moby-Dick.

The answer to which is: all the yellow banana stickers.

Wherein I review Udacity's Introduction to Physics

The course I chose was "Introduction to Physics" on Udacity. While unrelated to my content area, it had the twin virtues of being a topic of interest to me, and of being open in late November. So while it would work with my age group, it would not work in my content area. This is fine by me, since I hope to be of some use to my students even outside language arts. 

Pages like this one have obvious bridges to my content area, providing me with yet another unneeded excuse to talk about Homer and Heraclitus.

And while this is a nice diversion into intellectual history, I wonder whether my time would be better spent learning some principles of physics. Perhaps the course designer thought this would be a nice hook into the topic. But this doesn't assess any real knowledge. It assesses how well one was listening to the previous video. 

A minor nit to pick here was the constant and distracting use of the smart pen wandering around the screen. On a really nice review page of how to do cross multiplication to convert the old Greek measure of stadia into kilometers was rendered hard to watch because of the constant movement on the screen. The screencaster would do well to take notes on how Paul Anderson deals with writing in such a presentation.

The course could be completed in a matter of hours, which has its merits and perils. Part of this means that the rigor in the course is pretty lacking. Here is an example of one of the assessments:

And one more for edification:

This is hardly assessing concept mastery.

The discussions present a problem I hadn't yet thought of in MOOCs: language barriers. I'm often surprised at the level of informality, by which I really mean grammatical ineptitude, on moodle discussions. And while sifting through comma-spliced sentences and misspelled words is a big enough barrier, imagine someone writing about physics while trying to learn English, or perhaps writing in Portuguese. If discussions are to be part of a MOOC, this seems like a big barrier, but I'm not convinced of the efficacy of MOOC discussions anyway.

If the stated objective of this course is to get some facts about the most basic-level physics history, then this course would succeed. But for learning key concepts and being able to do anything with them, this course does not seem like a good option.

In which I plan a lesson with google drive

Lesson plan for implementing some google drive tools into a language arts classroom

1. Target students
1. 11th grade
2. English & language arts
3. Creative short writing
2. The two tools I’m using will be google docs and slides.
1. Docs will serve as a collaborative word processor and aggregator. Students will be split into groups and choose a theme for their work to revolve around, using one document for all their writing. One of the major advantages of using google docs compared to other word processors is that peers can make suggestions in real time with the comments feature. By 11th grade students should be able to give basic substantive feedback, even if it’s as simple as asking a question about how such a story relates to a theme, or to say that thus and such a turn of phrase is handy. Things like poetry, flash fiction, and short nonfiction will all be acceptable. The idea is to express a facet of a theme.
2. Slides will be used for pictures to go along with a voiced-over screencast of the short pieces. Each student takes or finds a photo to go along with their piece, and then make a screencast wherein they read with the photo as backdrop. Ideally the photo is something that serves as a complement to the theme, though perhaps not obviously.
3. The idea is that students will compose a collection of very short fiction stories based around a theme chosen by the group.  Work will be composed in google docs so that they can be peer-edited with suggestions for things like grammar and content and relevance to the theme. Then the students will arrange the pieces in a manner to be determined by the group members. Then the students will find or take photos that somehow illustrate or complement the story. By writing the piece first but then reading it with an illustrative backdrop, students will be engaging more of the senses of the audience.
4. Grading will be done on a participation basis. I find that grading creative writing projects is probably a terrible thing to anyone, especially if they have any insecurity about their stuff.

Presentation technology

Strategies that tended to work for teachers and professors who integrated technology into class were pretty simple. First, there were no struggles with the tech that they were using. Whether this was simply because of their overall competence or because they tested the tech before class, I can't be sure. But they did not struggle. Second, they used technology either as a way to expand a conversation that could happen in class, or to do something new altogether.

For me the best use of technology is one that expands the conversation in class. So often I've had things to say that I thought of outside of class, and something like a class blog or wiki enables students to continue the conversation outside of class hours. It is not demanding in terms of time commitment, and allows students as long as they want to formulate their thoughts. It also allows for linking to outside materials like readings or videos that supplement their thoughts.

The worst practitioner of technology I've ever had was a professor on this campus last year, who did things like repeatedly clink broken links thinking they'd work. For him technology was a crutch. Instead of using old-fashioned lecture notes and talking with us, he'd read off of his powerpoint slides directly. In all it was a distraction and we'd have been much better served by him simply lecturing or conducting a seminar.

Making the PBJ

Making the pbj from escioe

Booing

listen to ‘In which I tentatively and foolishly defend the so-called canon’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘In which we cultivate critical thinking’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘In which I interview a teacher’ on Audioboo

Works & audiences

One idea I'm particularly interested in is a conversational examination. I think an oral approach can allow for more flexibility for both parties involved. With a recorder the audience could grow from just the teacher to any number of other realms. At its simplest such a conversation could be uploaded to a student blog, where their parents and peers would be invited to check in.

At a higher level two students from widely different backgrounds could converse about it, whether in real time or not. Here the most exciting thing is technology facilitating a multicultural, multiviewpoint approach in a classroom in ways not previously possible.

A small idea that I think could improve reading comprehension and retention would be to take quick audio notes while reading a text. Students could ask short questions or share quick comments on a portable device as they're reading and they could be used to foster class discussion the next day. I know that when I'm reading something I'll often have thoughts in a moment that are gone by the end of the chapter. Having an audio record of unedited thoughts could be very useful for whole text comprehension. In this case the audience would be the whole class, and students could refer back to those audio notes while completing other assignments on the same work. 

Some audio

In which I admit my crippling self doubt.

listen to ‘The fantods’ on Audioboo

 In which I plagiarize Hemingway for self gain.

listen to ‘Flash fiction’ on Audioboo

Things about books

Here's the inimitable DFW talking about Infinite Jest, which you ought to go read immediately.



Here is a collection of his stories.

Wallace, David Foster- Oblivion- Stories by Cho Pan

And here's one smarmy BS-ish attempt at miming his style.

David Foster Wallace Writing from nstearns

Water covers 75% of the earth

Jose Iglesias covers the rest.

NYT on valuation in education

I saw this piece in the Times called 'Guesses and Hype Give Way to Data in Study of Education' today when a pal posted it on the facebook. I read through it and had mixed feelings.

I recognize and value the statistics perhaps more than most other humanities-types due to my interest in baseball and especially in the valuation methods detailed in the book Moneyball ten years ago. There is hardly a more entrenched field in America than the baseball diamond, where there is over a hundred years of conventional wisdom regarding what makes players valuable. Moneyball details the breakdown of a great deal of that conventional wisdom.

This article suggests that a similar upheaval is happening in the world of education research. Heretofore ed research, at least according to this article, tended to be mired in abstract concepts and based on shaky premises. But there has been a tendency lately towards clinical trials. And if we trust those clinical trials in the field of medicine to the extent that we will literally trust our lives with their results, then it would follow that we ought to believe their findings in the ed world.

Some of those results are uncomfortable. No teacher who has worked in Upward Bound will be happy to hear that these trials find the program largely useless, for example. But to achieve the end of educating students as well as we can, whatever it is we might mean by that, then we have to be prepared to change our means.

In short: we ought to pay more attention to statistical studies than our forebears have. My addendum would be, however, that since I am not inclined to do these statistical studies myself, I am willing to take others' word for it on a lot of them. I'd rather be reading Blood Meridian than some bone-dry paper telling me that what we do isn't working.

Tech ed history & conversations

Describing a tech-savvy teacher is difficult for me because so many of them were simply not. Of course there were a few in high school and before who tried to integrate things like powerpoint but this never seemed especially creative or useful for any purpose beyond learning how to use a program. And while I was an undergraduate studying a liberal art so many of the classrooms eschewed the use of technology altogether, unless you can count a blackboard, by which I mean a black chalkboard and not a white dry erase board, as tech. Or perhaps the human voice itself counts as tech. In any case with those mostly fine teachers there was little in the way of what we would recognize as technology in the classroom.

My most useful brush with tech has been at this university as a graduate student, where I took Anna Baldwin's Oral and Media Literacy. I liked this class because we spent half a semester learning ways to promote interesting and engaging conversations in the classroom, which was exactly the method that my best undergraduate teachers must have used. But in the latter half of the semester we looked into using tech to make that conversation possible outside of a seminar setting. 

The upshot is that after a mutiny against the sadist-designed moodle forum feature, we began to use wikispaces for our discussions. We had different pages for different topics and we used different text colors followed by our initials to differentiate contributors. Aside from a few jokes about my colorblindness I found this approach to be shall we say mega-preferable to the godawfulness of moodle. I found it so useful that I used a similar strategy in a summer reading group I participated in online with people from three continents.

The point with a thing like wikispaces and a teacher like Doc Baldwin is that what's actually happening isn't the use of technology but the promotion of conversation that just so happens to take place virtually rather than in a seminar room. To me as an English proto-teacher the conversation is paramount and I want to use pieces of technology to make the quality of contributions better or to encourage students who prefer writing to speaking.