As you watch the keynote, we encourage you to reflect on and respond to the following questions.

• Rob Evans shared that for transformation to take place, there must be a balance of enough anxiety to stimulate change without having so much that people shut down. What are your ideas on how to acheive this balance?
• What do you do in your school to manage the overwhelming changes in technology?

In this conversation, Alan talks again to Dr. Eric Mazur, Area Dean of Applied Physics at Harvard University and 2011 Building Learning Communities Conference keynote speaker. Alan and Dr. Mazur revisit his work on flipped learning along with peer instruction that is guided by the questions and misconceptions students bring to class each day. This process, being done using his Learning Catalytics software, is allowing him to visualize student learning in new and exciting ways.

Dr. Mazur will be back for the 2012 Building Learning Communities Conference to work with participants in a pre-conference session. For more information, visit http://www.blcconference.com.

Lachlan will be a presenter at the 2012 Building Learning Communities conference being held this July in Boston. To learn more about BLC, visit http://blcconference.com.

Greg Green will be a presenter at the 2012 Building Learning Communities conference being held this sumer in Boston. To learn more, visit http://www.blcconference.com.

In his keynote, Dr. Mazur shares his vast research on teaching and learning. Students in Dr. Mazur’s class are moving far away from the traditional stand and deliver lectures given in many k-12 and university classrooms around the world, and they are gaining a much deeper understanding of the material being taught in the process.

As you watch this video, we invite you to take some time and respond to one or more of the following questions.

• Where does the balance lie in providing students with answers and having them discuss and apply reason to get to their own answers?
• Would you agree that the more a teacher is an expert in his/her content, the more difficulty this teacher has in understanding how a first time learner in this subject struggles? Explain your thinking.
• How practical is it for any teacher to apply a flipped learning model, like the one Dr. Mazur shares, where students guide themselves through content on their own at home and then send their questions to a teacher before coming to a class where this material is then applied at a deeper level? If it’s not practical, what are the barriers.

One of the threads to emerge out of a number of terrific presentations at November Learning’s Building Learning Communities 2011 conference in Boston was the idea that we are shifting to a new pedagogy.

We might describe the old model of teaching–let’s call it “education 1.0″–as a problem-solving pedagogy. In it, students are asked to solve hundreds of trivial problems in textbooks and worksheets. Page-tall columns of algebra equations come to mind immediately, but we find equally dull work in other subjects, too: book reports in language arts classes, listing provinces and their capitals in Social Studies classes, for example. I realize I’m being a bit hasty here. There is a good argument for drilling in order to build skills. There is also great value in just knowing things. However, it’s not hard to see that if this is all we do we are in danger of creating a classroom of highly skilled but not very imaginative or creative students. This is the lament of China’s education leaders.

Education 1.0 was replaced by a problem-based learning model–let’s call this education 2.0. Here, curricula and student work are driven by relatively complex problems meant to give purpose to the sort of drilling that went on in vacuo before. In order to solve a problem, students–it’s believed–will naturally search for and hone the skills they need to solve it. The critique heard at BLC 11, quite loudly from Ewan McIntosh, is that these problems are artificial. The answers are already known by the teachers or some other authority so the problem is not in fact a problem to be solved at all. More importantly, as Dr. Eric Mazur and Dr. Steven Wolfram pointed out in their keynotes, this sort of contrivance does little to prepare students to be the life-long learners schools universally claim they are creating. Again, I’m aware I’m taking some liberties. It is indeed well worth the effort to walk through some old problems just to see how others went about solving them, to study their methods, as we say. This is what Newton meant when he said he stood on the shoulders of giants. He did not mean, however, that the purpose of that study was to add another hammer in the problem-solving toolbox. He meant the purpose of that study was to find where old methods were insufficient for cracking open knew knowledge.

So here at BLC 11, the buzz is about giving education 2.0 another turn turn to create a problem-finding pedagogy. Let’s call this education 3.0. Here we want students to engage with problems to which even the teachers do not know the answers, to engage with the “unknown unknowns” as Ewan McIntosh says.

It’s there in the terra icognita of knowledge that learning gets exciting. Discoveries in this area have genuine value not just to the student, but to everyone. I’ve heard many teachers express chagrin at the way students toss out their notebooks at year-end. But if those notes aren’t much more than a record of drills–the equivalent of a record of the pushups one has done all year–I can hardly fault the students. Indeed, I think we have a serious moral problem if we are compelling students to attend classes and don’t help them produce something of intrinsic worth.

Something else exciting happens when we pass the edge of the knowns, too, I think. Students are encouraged to work at a very high level of thinking when they are asked to analyze a collection of data, judge it’s worth, synthesize it and draw out a question for further study. (I wonder if structure of education itself inhibits, even excludes, higher-order thinking. That would make the efforts of teachers to encourage students to think more deeply and richly largely misplaced. If we want to change behaviour, we have to make sure the environment supports the new behaviour. It’s a study I’d like to pursue.)

Wolfram created his fabulous apps to relieve the students of the burden of trivial calculations so that they can apply there mental energy to finding the new problem in set of data. Marco Torres looks at apps like Thumbjam and Hex OSC Full  the same way, as tools that let the non-piano player get on with making a soundtrack for a video, for example. (Hans Rosling, not at the conference, created his Gapminder software for the same reason.) I am proposing a model workflow for a problem-finding school that could employ these tools and get on with finding new problems:

This is a sketch. I need to spend some time thinking about what this looks like in practice, especially across all the grades. But I’m suggesting that as the students consider the questions in the diamonds, they must do some hard thinking. They would also have to think carefully–critically–about where to get help. I can see links to building social networks and teaching social search here.

I am especially interested in the final question–”is it worth keeping?” That question, essentially, replaces the final exam. (There’s probably another loop in here that asks if we ran another iteration of the problem would we find a better answer.)

Students also have to consider how they will store that data for later use. I favour a bucket to hold huge piles of unstructured data that users can can reorder as they need, hence my note to tag rather than file. It seems the semantic web, which would be ideal here, is still a ways off, but there are ways to set up unstructured data collections even primary students could use. We had a custom-built prototype bucket at my previous school and I am pretty sure one can build a good workarounds using a combination of off-the-shelf tools. (More on that later.)

I’ll spend the next few weeks of summer tinkering with this plan and have it ready to run with my students when school starts in the fall. In the meantime, I’d appreciate any thoughts.

 Cross-posted in my own blog, A Stick in the Sand.

Dr. Williams encourages your questions and comments through his Twitter account and his blog.

Also, Dr. Wiliams will be a presenter at the 2011 Building Learning Communities Conference being held this July in Boston. For more information, and to register, visit our conference Web site at http://www.BLCConference.com.

What was most startling to me was the degree to which teachers demanded — and got — extra time to go deeper into their interactive projects. We focused all the daily quick writes, reflections and activities around a theme of discovery and had the teachers do things that, sometimes, allowed them to go deeper with earlier writing. I’m not sure we had fully intended the outcomes, but it was truly inspiring to see that adults can learn in many of the same ways as children.

We had the teachers do some quick writes based on words or images or a series of images or sounds. We had them reflect on one point in our discussions that stood out. We had them create fiction and poetry and essays. We had them do a Five-Card Flickr exercise and then had them respond to five related photos we chose and then collaborate on creating a best story out of it. We had them bring in a picture of an elder and write a story about them and then podcast it and then add a music track to their podcast.

They loved that one. And they did it in stages, first the short piece which they revised on the basis of comments and their own desire to improve and tweak. They then recorded themselves narrating the piece. They revised some more and re-recorded. They then added a music track.

One teacher did a piece about her husband’s mother who had died when she was 23 and he was only five months old. The teacher was fastidious and abosorbed, making sure her recorded voice sounded strong, making sure the wording was just so, making sure the music did not drown out her narration. Her piece was powerful and heartfelt; you had a sense of the woman. What was most amazing, though, was the teacher’s desire to do the woman honor. She was nervous about how her father-in-law would react, specifically, would he be annoyed and tell her, “You never knew her.” and grumble away. I have not yet heard back from the teacher, but I imagine a much different picture, her father in law tearing up, being moved by a daughter-in-law who would go to such lengths.

Another teacher wrote about a rock, yes, a rock. But not any type of rock; one that was shaped like a frog which has, all her life, watched over her favorite swimming hole in a lake in Ontario where she goes every summer. “All four seasons Frog Rock sits patiently.  Watching.  Waiting for his little children to arrive.” It is no wonder that she’s so appreciated by her students.

And another wrote about someone she had met in college who died early, unexpectedly but who had always wanted to fly, “to get his wings.” As the teacher writer put it, “Emory had dreams and aspirations as we all do. He earned his wings on June 17th, 2003, but they were not the wings that he, I, or anyone else expected.”

What was so moving about this class was how the teachers leaped at the opportunity to create, to be students, to be like their yearlong charges. It was great to see what they produced, the risks they took and, in the process, the community they created. I so wish there was more time in the year for teachers to do this sort of thing. The teachers have continued to connect online, to read each other’s posts, to comment.

We are seeing the same behavior on a number of the school sites where the kids, simply, can’t stop writing, can’t stop connecting and are posting work their during summer vacation. I visited a summer writing camp at one of the schools last week. The kids were busy with writing when I walked in and, when they were done, we all moved into the computer lab where they did a free write to a piece of music that a friend of mine wrote. Then we talked. I was reminded by the snippet of sound I have included here, some of their reactions, earlier in the year, when asked what they thought of their digital writing classroom, how the writing — not the judging — is the important part.

The teachers in our course felt the same way — how the opportunity just to write and to learn and to explore without being judged, fostered engagement and growth. These teachers, like the students we work with, took creative risks in a supportive digital community. They helped each other take those risks. And they were deeply rewarded. So was I.

I’m looking forward to BLC2011. Hope I meet you.

Geoffrey Gevalt is founder of Young Writers Project, a small nonprofit in Vermont that works with hundreds of teachers and thousands of students in an effort to improve students’ writing skills and digital literacy. He will be presenting at both the pre-conference and main conference at BLC2011. To see the project’s work, visit youngwritersproject.org, digitalteachers.net or ywpschools.net He can be reached at ggevalt (at) youngwritersproject.org or 802-324-9537

Jennifer and Andrew will be presenting a session at this summer’s Building Learning Communities Conference titled Creating Sustainable Change. This session will dig deeper into the ideas discussed in this podcast. To learn more about this session and about BLC, visit http://www.blcconference.com.

How do you make your school library the MOST POPULAR place in the school?
Can you image the day when the majority of your school’s content is on e-readers?
How would the flow of traffic in your library change if teacher mailboxes and good food were placed there?

Dr. Tracy also provided us the following resources to share with our audience.

• Cushing Institute for 21st Century Leadership
• Cushing Academy’s Open Content Curricula
• James Tracy’s Publications

Dr. Tracy will be a presenter at the 2011 Building Learning Communities conference being held the week of July 24th, in Boston. For more information about BLC, and to register, visit our conference Web site at http://www.BLCConference.com.

Both Jonathan and Aaron will be presenters at the BLC11 conference being held this summer in Boston, MA. Click here for more information.

In addition, Jonathan and Aaron provided us with a series of resources to share that pertain to the work they and their students are doing.

• Watch this video to see more of an overview of the Flipped Model.
• Be on the lookout for their new book being published by ISTE Press. It should be available in the Summer or Fall of 20011.
• If you want to learn more about their flipped model, consider attending their conference being held in  Woodland Park, CO. More information can be found here.
• Take part in a learning network with other educators who are interested in and/or utilizing the flipped model.
• Visit Jonathan and Aaron’s Web site with links to good educational videos.

Alan and Brad discuss the uniqueness of this school, the real work students are doing as they build curriculum and resources along with their teachers as well as the lessons they have learned that can impact any school.

Brad will be a presenter at the BLC11 conference being held this July in Boston. Click here for more information.

The jobs these students are doing give them a great deal of responsibility and provide them with authentic tasks that result in meaningful content that supplements their learning and connects them with experts from around the world.

Silvia will be a presenter at the 2011 Building Learning Communities Conference. Click here for more information and to register.

Eric also describes the skills and equipment that teachers would need to start a similar program in addition to new opportunities that his classes are becoming involved with through their work.

Next the researchers subbed-in a new monkey, who didn’t know the hands-off-the-banana rule. As you’d expect, the startled newcomer took a hard lesson form his pals. The researchers eventually subbed-in four more monkeys until none of the original monkeys were left. Nevertheless, none of the monkeys would go near the banana because they knew they would take a lickin’ from the others, even though the researchers had long since stopped spraying water.

Corporate policy–school policy–is too often informed by this monkey-mind.

Writing a blog post/summary of #blc10 Help me. What is was/is your greatest learning moment of the conference? I’ll add your tweet. Go…

Here’s what I got:

A small sampling of responses but take some time to see if those ideas resonate with you. On a side note, notice the number of people that learned that weren’t even here. That’s pretty cool.

What amazes and pleases me is the way in which ideas and concepts seem to arise time and time again but in different context and forms. While diversity exists and is welcomed, so many of the sessions and conversations are focused around good teaching and learning. The tools and shifts we are exploring are being used as ammunition to support the practices which makes living and learning in 2010, a great place to be.

Would you want to?

If you could stay exactly who you are in the physical world, but reinvent your digital identity, would you?

When you arrived at BLC, you arrived with a particular mindset. We are interested in hearing about what views, understandings and/or beliefs of yours have changed after attending this year’s conference.

2. Measure - There are many tools that you can use to measure your use computer use. They run in the background and will give you data on the sites you visit, the applications you use and how much time you spend on each tool.

3. Set goals – Before you open up a browser consider what you are hoping to accomplish.

4. Triage – Filter on the way in, not on the way out. Look through your email and create filters so that not everything comes in to your inbox. For example, if you are CCd on an email you probably don’t have to look at it immediately. Filter those messages into a separate file to look at later. Also check out Howard Rheingold’s resources on mindful infotention.

5. Ask a Librarian – Don’t overlook the human resources in your own building.

6. Don’t check email until lunch - If you are the fastest responder to a problem, you will get all the problems. If you wait to respond, they may figure out their own answers.

7. Be effective, not just efficient - Being efficient is doing things right, being effective is doing the right things. Make sure you are doing the right things right.

8. Use a productivity tool – Applications like Evernote and Remember the Milk can help you to keep track of all your tasks and information. You can learn about other productivity tools here.

9. Mark as read – Don’t be afraid to go through your reader and mark everything as read. Start fresh. If it is important it will come back up to the top.

10. Take time outs – Explore the Pomodoro technique which suggests you use a timer and set it for 25 minutes of work time and then take a 5 minute break. And, during the work time you keep track of your distractions and take a look at when they occur and what they are.
Do you have a good strategy for managing your information overload? Have you tried something on this list that has worked for you? Please leave a comment and share it with us.

image source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelmarlatt/3150759027/

It’s not a new idea but I do think it is an important part of being a teacher in today’s digital world.

As a teacher, do you have a network that you can use to help your students connect to content, ideas, people, and places when they need it? Whether it’s talking about mountains and Skyping someone in Colorado, or studying Eastern Religions and connecting to a school in China or Thailand?

In today’s digitally connected world, the connections you can make for your students are as important as the tasks you give them in the classroom.

Take the example of Haley, a 5th grade student at my school in Bangkok. She wrote a blog post about a science experiment she did in class. Her teacher and I decided it was a blog post worthy of an audience. Using our connections via Twitter and Facebook we were able to give her an audience of teachers and students around the world. Not only that, Allanah, a teacher in New Zealand, took Haley’s blog post and directions and did the same experiment with students at her school. Because Allanah was a connected teacher, she was able to create a learning opportunity for her students as well.

Being a connected teacher can be accomplished in many ways. Twitter and Facebook are just two ways to be connected. You can also join any number of educational Ning’s that are out there. The more ways you have to connect, the greater the opportunity for you as a teacher to be a connector for your students.

As we head into the last day of the BLC10 conference and as a new school year fast approaches, think about ways that you can be a connector for your kids. No matter what your role is in your school, being a connector will benefit your students in some shape or form. Not to mention your own learning that will happen along the way.

Community First

Michael Wesch’s keynote this morning was simply breathtaking. In the follow up breakout session someone asked him: “How do you stop students seeing themselves as students, and as collaborators?”

Mike sighed, put both hands on the podium and said: “That’s really hard work.”

He went on to explain “community first.” He uses the first two weeks of class to build a sense of community and togetherness in a shared quest to solve a real world problem. A problem he himself doesn’t know the answer to.

“Doing crazy things together creates community.”

Micheal plans his most passionate and enthusiastic lectures for those first two weeks. And he has his students do zany ice-breaking activities to help them get to know each other and break through the veneer of passivity they arrive in his class with. But it’s not just about having fun; these activities (like human scavenger hunts) all have a serious edge to them. They have to see that they’ll have fun lerning here, but we are working hard at learning.

The Lesson Design Arc: schedule-research-paper-video

The kids begin by co-creating a schedule on a wiki for the research they’ll do to solve the problem they’ve decided to work on. They begin by digging into the problem and reading everything they can on it. Summaries of all their reading are compiled on the wiki. Typically they’ll read over 90 article, paper, or books in the first week of class as they do this. (In more typical University classes they read about three articles in the first week.) Mike guides them, having a little deeper experience in the field then they do, by suggesting other sources they might wish to explore. They continue this research and co-create a research paper for publication. When that’s all done, they create very brief condensed video summaries of their research, submit them to Mike who then weaves them together into a brief (5 min?) video.All this is only possible because of the community building work they do together in the first few weeks of the course.

There’s a lot more to all this, I’m just summarizing (his integrated, collaborative, calibrated peer review assessment scheme – which goes well beyond <– that link back there – is brilliant), but that’s the broad strokes takeaway I got.

When Things Go Wrong

Sometimes, when people work together closely on a real world problem things wrong. People get upset. Students goof off in class.

When that happens Mike intervenes using a ritual he learned from an African(?) tribe. It’s very similar to the Talking Stick ritual used by many First Nations people of Canada. They use pencils instead. Anyone who is holding the pencil let’s go of the little voice in their head that says “You can’t say that.” and speaks from the heart about what’s upset them. The rest of the group talks with them about it. They don’t put the stick down until they’ve resolved whatever the problem was. Mike usually goes first. Sometimes here cries while he’s talking to his 400+ students. Then the next person in the group takes their turn.

A Pedagogy to Aspire To

Isn’t that an amazing example of “intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?” I had wanted to write about the amazing conversations going here: in the halls, in sessions, over lunch, every time someone stops me to talk really. But this morning’s keynote. Just breathtaking. Good teaching is what comes from building strong relationships between teachers and students; relationships with a serious educational edge. (I hear echoes of John Seely Brown in this.)

I’ve got to think more about how to weave together such a set of diverse sensitivities into my teaching. How do you build a culture of caring in your class?

Attending BLC in 2007 was my the first experience attending a conference where I had “met people’s brains before I’d met their faces”. (Kevin Honeycutt) Because I had spent the previous 2 years posting and sharing online as did many of the presenters and participants, It was a real reunion. Never having gone to summer camp, my wife, told me that’s what summer camp is like. The conversations I had in those three days were some of the most powerful, insightful and challenging I’d ever had. To this day, I can recall specific conversations that I’m still working my way through.

Photo by Marco Torres: http://www.flickr.com/photos/torres21/4788962760/

BLC has from the start been a conference about global learning and collaboration. The numbers of intentional opportunities to network and share is unlike most conferences. People are genuinely interested in how you do things in your district and what schools are like where you come from. But to sustain this learning beyond the final day of the conference there has to be hyperlinks.

Hyperlinks have built the web and connected people. During the course of the three days of the conference, thousands of links have been shared in presentations, on twitter and on this blog and other blogs. Using the the twitter hashtag of #blc10 alone, you’ll discover enough ideas and links to chew on for quite some time. A blog search for BLC10 results in almost 1,000 results. These hyperlinks are allowing learning to be sustainable but more than than, they are links from people and we now are able to connect with the people behind the links and continue conversations of learning for as long as we’d like. Michael Wesch, in his keynote talked about connecting these artifacts with people. And by the way, if you want more from Wesch, and who wouldn’t, head over to youtube to view a number of his past presentations and work.

In my presentations I make a point of sharing my contact information not simply as a courtesy but because I really want to have conversations continue. I hope that most of the 75 minute sessions you attend leave you with as many questions as answers. If they simply had all the answers, I wonder if they might be better learned at home or individually.

I’m guessing there are about 1,000 participants at BLC this year. I wonder how many have a plan to sustain their learning with people beyond Friday? It’s simply a matter of leaving and finding a hyperlink.

At various times in Michael Wesch’s presentation on Thursday, I felt alternately inspired, wowed, encouraged, thrilled and out-of-date, inadequate, woefully behind and, frankly, not as smart as I thought I was. Way not smart. I found myself wanting to create a video that would go viral, to redoing all our software so it could be half as cool or to help students create a project that would change the world.

Michael Wesch should never drink coffee and I wondered how in the world he survived his summers in New Guinea. Then I realized that is what ALL of us need — a visit to New Guinea, a time when we can just stop and listen and learn. That we — not just the girl in the Dove commercial — are getting bombarded, much as the presentation did, with thousands of ideas, and images, and entreaties. Do this, use that, get your kids over here. And that is, in fact, what makes us feel hopelessly inadequate and behind and ignorant. In today’s classrooms there is such pressure to improve test scores, meet mandates, teach to curriculum AND jump into technology. There is also an intense pressure to make a difference, and, on a global scale, to gain a following, to change things. And to do it, we must have 45,367,578 views on our YouTube video which we create with students in one of our classes with the help of several kids in Ghana, Australia and Beijing.

Which was not Michael’s point. I know that. But we are emotional beings, I am an emotional being, and he DID make me want to leap up and change the world. But where? And how? And where do I start?

Which brought me back to what I do, what Young Writers Project does, and what teachers do, and how we only need to go viral in our classroom, in our world. We don’t have to connect with the world. Not yet. There is a first step and while Michael, as he noted, is dealing with a different level of students — college — he is also dealing with a different level of knowledge and capability and a very different culture.

K-12 is restrictive — it is restricted by lack of equipment, lack of trained digital teachers and a culture that emphasizes fear and blocks useful Internet sites galore that, in fact, the kids gravitate to as soon as they leave school. K-12 is restricted by a culture that is used to doing things the old way, that does not have a sense of technology or new media and that is governed by fears — that an angry parent will come in to rant about how their student saw something inappropriate in school, that federal Internet safety guidelines will not be followed, that a kid will post something inappropriate and mean, that a teacher will not know how to do something — so won’t try or, at least, enlist his/her students to give it a try.

In reality K-12 schools are not as far along as colleges or Kansas State University or, particularly, Michael Wesch’s classroom. That’s OK. I’ll say it again. That’s OK.

K-12 schools can — and must — build the foundation by helping students — and teachers — take the first steps and learn basic skills in digital awareness, creativity and media. K-12 schools can teach students how to communicate, how to research, how to function on the Web with each other.

And K-12 schools can teach students how to write.

Because, and this is where I felt good about what Michael Wesch was saying, good writing is absolutely criticical to function in the new media world. Everything, including the videos, that Michael showed involved writing — individual writing, collaborative writing, creative writing. It involved revision and editing and vetting. It was the foundation for all the work he does, and you do and the global digital world does.

And that made me feel better, less inadequate, more with it. So I found myself embracing the exhiliration I — and everyone — felt form Michael’s presentation. I was thrilled by the talk, the sheer volume of activity and achievement and knowledge. I was exchilarated by by the connectiveness of it all and by the sense that if Shawn Ahmed can make a difference, we all can make a difference. Just by doing it.

So we, as K-12 educators, can get the kids started. We can create digital spaces for the students to write, collaborate, create, use media and build community. We can break down walls, we can learn new things with the kids. We can teach them how to be civil with each other online, informed about what they are engaged in and connected to what’s happening outside the classroom. We can teach them to do podcasts and slideshows and videos. Or, at least, we can get them to teach us how to do podcasts and slideshows and videos, in school.

And then we can send them to Kansas State University.

Geoffrey Gevalt runs a nonprofit in Vermont that works with students and teachers to help students engage in writing, get better at it and publish their best work and we do it all in digital spaces. For more: Go to youngwritersproject.org, ywpschools.net or digitalteachers.net.

Yesterday afternoon I presented for the first time as a mainstream BLC presenter. For me, this was nothing short of a VERY BIG DEAL. My session was about data visualization. In short, how new technologies and transparent access to real-world data make it possible to “democratize” visualization. We focused on a site called Many Eyes, the best known application of which is Wordle.

I decided to frame my presentation around myself as a learner, because I’m not the stereotypical person (e.g. statistician, economist) you might expect to geek out over “charts and graphs.” My themes, as such, were “curiosity” and “story,” because that’s what drives me as a learner and meaning-maker. I was hoping for (trusting!) my participants to connect my “presentation story” to their own contexts and lives.

One of my examples of data “telling a story” involved survival on the Titanic. A particular visualization showed that all the children who perished were in Third Class, and we considered the possible meanings and reasons for that. But the comments included a note about a little girl in first class who died, suggesting the data was wrong. However, it gave no source or details. So this became an exercise in information literacy — finding the truth.

I searched for the manifest online and found a family with a little girl. Sure enough, a two-year-old girl from First Class, Helen Loraine Allison (called Loraine), died along with her parents aboard the Titanic. The nanny had taken her baby brother and boarded a lifeboat without telling the family. Mrs. Allison was put in a lifeboat with Loraine, but refused to leave the ship without her son, so she stepped out. I showed participants a photograph of Loraine and her baby brother, reinforcing the theme: “Data tells a story.”  In this case, a very human one. From a “matrix chart” to the fate of an individual child. (And, scene!)

I then asked my participants to explore the Many Eyes site, to “test drive the possibilities.” While they were working, a woman named Cindy approached me and said “Now I need to tell you the rest of the Titanic story.” She then shared that the Allisons were her family, that Loraine was named for her grandmother, and that she had the original photograph that I had displayed. The Allisons nearly missed boarding the Titanic because Mrs. Allison had forgotten her passport. She also told me that some years after the tragedy, some people brought a child to her family, claiming (fraudulently) it was Loraine, and that she had been raised by nuns!

My follow-up slide to everyone’s exploration of Many Eyes contained the question “What did you discover?” I practically Snoopy-danced waiting to share Cindy’s story with the group. I couldn’t have planned for such a gift! And now my third graders, who study Titanic, may be able to interview Cindy on [insert tool here -- whatever works!] and authentically experience the “story in the data.” It really is a web of connections.

I have been part of many conversations about the fear of technology dividing us from each other.  But my gut feeling (and personal experience) has been that it can (and does) powerfully connect us. In his compelling, moving keynote this morning, I think Michael Wesch had it right — leveraging these new tools for “dark or light” is really up to us. What will we create and share? How will we connect? What stories will we tell?

Mitch Resnick opened the conference with a very simple message:

I couldn’t agree more and not just creating for themselves and their classmates, but for the world. Using Scratch as his basis for his talk, Resnick took us on a journey of how students are using Scratch to create, share, remix, and collaborate on creating some pretty cool projects, most of them outside of school.

Resnick’s message aligned perfectly with an article I read in Inc. Magazine last week titled: Revitalizing the American Dream. A fascinating read on how entrepreneurship needs to be revitalized in America.

It’s important to note the view point in which I’m coming from on this next bit. A little history on me: I’ve lived overseas for the past 8 years and when people ask me where I’m from..I hesitate, as do most expats. It’s a hard question to answer. I’m an American and proud to be one, but in the past 8 years America has felt less and less like “home” and more and more like a foreign land. Over these last 8 years, I’ve had the opportunity to visit America only during the summer holidays and at the same time visit 35 other countries.

What I have observed being a some-what outsider to America is the fear that has captivated our country. A fear that I believe is stifling creativity in the country, in our schools, and in our daily lives.

What saddens me most is this country was founded on the idea of anyone can make it. The “American Dream” is written into our Declaration of Independence.

In the American Dream, first expressed by James Truslow Adams in 1931, citizens of every rank feel that they can achieve a “better, richer, and happier life.”^[1] The idea of the American Dream is rooted in the second sentence of the Declaration of Independence which states that “all men are created equal” and that they are “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights” including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”^[2] (Wikipedia, 07/14/2010)

(Too bad the writers didn’t include an unfiltered Internet in that!)

Does this still hold true? Do kids today feel like they can grow up to be anything within our schools? The same schools that block much of the content that allows them to be creative, to communicate with others, and to create opportunities for themselves?

I’m sure many of you have either said this or have heard someone who has said this.

Alan November kicked off the conference today with one simple message:

We need to break down the Firewall fear

The same country that believes in free speech and the freedom of the press is the same country with some of the most restrictive filtering systems in its schools.

I lived for three years in Shanghai, China behind what is known as the “Great Firewall“. As much press as the “Great Firewall” gets for censoring some information and some tools, it is less restrictive than most filtering systems here in American Schools.

We need to break through this culture of fear, we need to empower students to make decisions, to analyze and evaluate good content and learn how to avoid the bad stuff. We need to empower students to protect themselves.

Mitch Resnick asked the question: How can we help students become makers of things in the digital world?

To do this we must first overcome our fear of putting student content out on the open web. It’s not as scary of a place as the media makes it out to be. At my school (International School Bangkok) we have over 1,000 student blogs with over 6,000 blog posts. In the two years we’ve been using blogs we have not had one bad comment or one bad blog post. Yes students get spam comments from time to time, and much like the spam they get in their e-mail they just delete it (Have you ever heard a student complain about spam? They don’t, it’s just a part of digital life that they’re used to).

It’s not just making things in the digital world, because making thing is only half the battle. The other half is finding ways to share those artifacts with the world. Creating something isn’t fun unless you can share it. Very rarely do we create anything just for ourselves. We create things to be shared with others, to share with others, and to be proud of. Once we overcome the fear of access we must overcome the fear of sharing.

Of course once we share our digitally made creations they can be remixed and as Resnick stated, “Being remixed should be an honor.”

We should be encouraging our students to remix, to use, and collaborate with others on ideas. We should be encouraging students to join Facebook groups around a cause, or remixing a Scratch game, or editing a Wikipedia article. Being remixed is an honor, it’s having someone take your blog posts and enhance it with their own ideas, it’s being retweeted on Twitter, and being talked about in a podcast.

Creativity and fear do not mix. Trying to be creative in a culture of fear is nearly impossible. It’s difficult for teachers and it’s difficult for students.

Adora Svitak ended the day on the same note in which it started. This time coming from the mouth of a 12 year old, Adora talked about how our fear of the tools as teachers, our fear of change, is blocking what she calls innovative classrooms. If we are to be innovative in our schools, as well as society, we must overcome our fears of the unknown. If we truly want our students to be creative and we believe that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights including “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” then we need to overcome our fear of the Internet and embrace the global audience that awaits.

In my second session I was not the smartest person in the room with Dean Shareski. School is no longer the primary place for learning. He asked the great question, what does it mean to be a life long learner? How do we move past an educational model that is tethered in time and place. Students have already moved there, when will schools follow?

In Jeff Utecht’s session on Blended Learning, he showed us how his school is using blogs as online portfolios of their work over their entire school career. He suggests finding a container that works for you, whether it be a blog, a wiki or a ning, and using that to hold student work. He also encouraged us to be connectors for our students to use our own networks to help network our students and expose their work to a wider audience.

Finally, I learned about different iPad apps at Seth Bowers’s session. He showed us too many to talk about, but he nicely posted a list here.

If you aren’t at the conference, you can follow a lot of what is going on by searching #blc10 on Twitter or checking out the delicious bookmarks tagged BLC10. If you are here, I hope you will leave a comment and or a link and share some of the highlights of your first day!

On the surface, it’s a wonderful idea. Who would argue that creativity and making things is in anyway a negative? Mitch goes on to say :

We wouldn’t consider someone literate if they could read but couldn’t write. Are we literate if we consume content online, but don’t produce? (paraphrased)

Again, at first glance that seems logical. We want to help our students create and be makers of things. But given the habits of most of us, we generally consume far more than we create. In fact as we consider reading and writing, very few adults write regularly beyond grocery lists and post it notes and emails. We read way more than we write. One of the reasons we teach students to write, is to make them better readers and vice versa.

As I listen to Resnick discuss the virtues of Scratch, it’s hard not to see the deep learning that comes when using a versatile tool like this to tell stories, build games, make music or design avatars. But as a society, what are the expectations that adults become makers of things? Do we need everyone to be makers of things? Is consumption and creation supposed to be balanced or do we recognize that consumption is the predominant role with content? The emergence of the iPad had many educators questioning it as an educational tool because of its lean towards consumption. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing.

Clay Shirky’s recent book Cognitive Surplus and accompanying TED talk, suggests that even if we carve out a small portion of our time to contribute (create) it can make a significant impact on society. I’m thinking about this issue and if we need to back off a bit on our zealous push to make us all creators. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not suggesting we stop encouraging and helping our students create, I’m just wondering if our expectations are unrealistic. I can think of many folks who don’t actively “make” things but are intelligent, competent, successful individuals. Is this a question of empowerment and simply allowing our students to choose or do expect everyone to become “makers of things”?

Riding a Paris Metro David Wong looks up at the ads. All beautiful images captioned with little text. One, an image of the Earth and a single star. The caption: “When you look at Alpha Centauri — the closest star to Earth — you are watching something that happened four years ago.”

In their essay What If Ideas Were Fashion? David Wong and Danah Henriksen (from Michigan State University) explore the learning that comes of creating these images. What if we applied a fashion designer’s design sense to learning? As they ask in the title of their essay: “What if ideas were fashion?”

Early on they write: “The experience of fashion is often characterized by intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought.”

That got me thinking. What if we substitute ‘learning’ for ‘fashion’ …

What if the experience of learning were characterized by intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?

Have you seen anything at BLC that can be characterized as ‘intense imagination, motivation, emotion, and thought?” Any one of those? two? three? all four? I have. I’ll mention some examples in my next post. I’m far more interested what you saw. Please share it here in the comments. Better yet, summarize it in a “slide” like one of those you’ll find in  Dean Shareski‘s flickr group Great Quotes about Learning and Change. (If you’ve not seen it yet I highly recommend putting aside 30 minutes or so to get lost in it.) Find a (cc) licensed flickr image that resonated with your favourite quote from the conference so far about learning and add it to the pool.

Picking up on David and Danah’s work I just started a new flickr group similar to Dean’s. It’s called Ideas with Style. It’s specifically about mashing together (designing) a striking image with an educational thought, fact, or idea. Check it out, maybe add an image to that pool too.

Remember: neither ‘social media’ nor ‘design’ are nouns, they’re verbs, and Design Matters!