Cafe CBone

December 19, 2007

Interdisciplinary Teaching in a Standards-Obsessed Environment

Our internship supervisors have been meeting to create a more rational explanation for Unit Plan expectations. Of course our schema for the abstractions of essential questions, big ideas, topics, themes, disciplines, assessments, grade level equivalents, etc. (ad nauseum?) crashed together in a delightfully challenging mix. Here's one big picture I offer through the good graces of CMAPing. Clicking on the smaller image will get you a larger jpeg!

You can also access through my Interdisciplinary Unit weblink.

Posted by crathbon at 8:09 AM | Comments (0)

November 17, 2007

A Blast From The Past: Ray, Jerry, and Fats

Sent to me my an old friend. You gotta hear it to believe it! The video was made in 1986 at a New Orleans nightclub. Included in the group are Rod Stewart, Rod Wood from the Stones, and Phil Shaffer, producer. Have fun. If you don't start groovin' with this, I would definitely recommend motion therapy!

Posted by crathbon at 4:56 PM | Comments (0)

November 6, 2007

Not Having Enough...Teaching Kids Across The Economic Chasm

November's Teaching Tolerance newsletter is powerful with respect to working with kids whose families can't "get ahead." After seeing on the news the other night that 93+% of children attending public school in Louisiana are under federal poverty guidelines, this article takes on special significance.

Why don't we get angrier about the state of affairs in this country?

Rigor + Support = Success
One-sixth of American children live in poverty. Experienced teachers offer a formula for change.
by Jeff Sapp

According to the Children's Defense Fund, 17.6 percent of this nation's children live in poverty -- about one of every six children. The numbers are rising, and, alarmingly, the number of children living in extreme poverty -- families with incomes at or below 50 percent of the poverty line -- is rising even more dramatically. They live in cities, towns and rural areas. More than 30 rural counties in 11 states, for example, have poverty rates higher than the poorest big cities. Other factors also come into play, including race and ethnicity, class and immigration status. Fifty-eight percent of children of immigrant families, for example, live in low-income families, compared with 35 percent of children of native-born families.

Teaching in Poverty
Some teachers find themselves teaching impoverished children by happenstance. Others have been recruited, with various incentives, specifically to work in high-poverty areas. But are they equipped to teach children in poverty? And what might help them succeed? Teaching Tolerance visited three schools that successfully work with children from impoverished backgrounds. Educators in each school offer a glimpse of what works.

Some have created their own programs. Others draw from established programs. In the end, their words echo each other, focusing on the motto of Advancement Via Individual Determination, or AVID, a school-based academic support program for grades 5 through 12: Rigor plus support equals success.

Rigor.
Support.
Success.

Not the words usually uttered when people speak of children in poverty. And maybe that's part of the problem.

A Rigorous Road
Consider rigor, the first factor in the AVID equation: Students from impoverished backgrounds need structure, routine, challenging work and rigorous demands.

"We're blunt in AVID," says Katherine Dooley of Orange Glen High School in Escondido. "Education is a way out of poverty. The goal is that you're going to get into a four-year university, and that is going to change your life."

Repetition, too, plays a vital role. It took Dooley some time to learn that lesson, feeling frustrated on the third and fourth times she'd repeat instructions and a student still wasn't getting it.

"Finally I just began repeating it four, five, six and even seven times until they did," she says.

Another sign of rigor: Dooley links AVID students with gifted and talented students in the same courses. "AVID students need socialization. Left alone, they use a very informal discourse with me like, 'Yeah.' I tell them they need to say, 'Yes.' I want to build their cultural capital. I owe them that as much as knowing the derivative of something."

Of the eleven AVID teachers at Orange Glen, six are Advanced Placement teachers, including Dooley, who teaches AP calculus. This, Dooley feels, is another important tenet of working with children in poverty.

"You don't lie to them," she says. "(You) tell them it is very hard work."

Rigor, too, is at the core of TAAS's success. At the school for homeless teens in San Diego, curriculum is not limited to math, science and the arts; an array of social rules and behavioral expectations complements the more conventional academic challenges. Student success in abiding by school rules is rewarded with points they can use to purchase items in the school store.

"The rules and structure are important because typically people who are homeless live in a world void of structure," says Scott Gross, who facilitates community trainings on poverty for The Village Training Institute in San Diego. "To be successful in society, people need to be able to operate in structured environments. TAAS gives students an opportunity to practice that structure."

The Structure of Support
On any given day at West Powellhurst Elementary in Oregon, 10 parents speaking three different languages can be found reading to kids in the library. This is Raisa Balashov's English Language Learner Parent Read Aloud Program, now in its sixth year. The program encourages parent partnerships with the school, involving families in their children's educations. "Relationships are paramount," Balashov says.

The reading program is just one of the supports the school offers. Others help impoverished students learn skills and rules they'll encounter in the professional world:

• In Jason Adam's 1st-grade classroom, a stuffed dinosaur serves as a "talking stick." Only the student holding the dinosaur is allowed to speak, helping children develop more formal social skills.

• In Annie Falconer's 2nd-grade class, students use an appointment book to pair up for group work. Guided encouragement also helps students improve social behaviors. When Sina is bothering her neighbor, for example, Falconer calmly says, "Sina, can you make a better decision right now?" Teachers never raise their voices to students at West Powellhurst, another model of respect.

• In Meghan McLaughlin's 4th-grade classroom, students make presentations about what they have learned over the course of the school year. In response, classmates fill out slips of paper giving them kind, specific feedback. Feedback sentences begin with such phrases as, "Perhaps maybe next time you could..." or "It was helpful to me when you..."

For Dooley, at Orange Glen in Escondido, Calif., support starts before the first bell rings and doesn't end when the final bell sounds.

"I keep my room open late because they can do their homework in here with me," she says. "This space is important for that reason. Also, I teach them to work in groups so that they can help and tutor each other. And that's just what happens in the late afternoons in here. Students are in cooperative groups, naturally tutoring each other. They only come to me if they've exhausted all other resources."

In reiterating AVID's higher-education goal, teachers talk bluntly with students about what obstacles stand in their way. Dooley asks students, "What's your biggest obstacle now? And what are solutions to get past it?" Dooley constantly helps students understand they are in charge of their lives.

As Dooley speaks about overcoming obstacles, a student named Jesus bursts into the classroom. A senior, he's there to tell Mrs. Dooley that he just received another scholarship, bringing his total to $20,000. He is off to Berkeley in the fall.

Earlier, a former student of Dooley's dropped by for a visit. He had just finished his second year at Chico State. He and Dooley gave each other a big hug. "Are you getting smarter?" she asked. "Yes," he replied. "I told you that you would!" she exclaimed.

At TAAS in San Diego, Jeff Heil is frustrated when he sees adults lower academic expectations for his students because they are homeless.

"Our students need safety, respect and high expectations," Heil says. "They don't need charity, but opportunity."

Celebrating Success
Given such opportunity, TAAS students excel.

The school is gaining a reputation as a hotbed of aspiring filmmakers. Two years ago, a TAAS student-produced film, Runaway, ran away with the grand prize at the San Diego County Innovative Video in Education competition. The film went on to garner a nomination in the 2003 Syracuse International Film Festival. This spring, another film, Shadow, written and produced by a TAAS student, received the iVIE award in the Social Issues category.

Bolstered by success in a competition that draws entries from wealthy school districts, TAAS students learn that drive and intelligence are not tied to socio-economic class.

That's true at West Powellhurst, too, where students' reading test scores are off the charts. In April 2005, the school won a Celebrating Student Success Award as one of 12 schools in Oregon that over-achieve. Ninety-five percent of the children in the school -- including ESL students -- passed the state 3rd-grade test. Typical scores of other schools in Portland run in the low 80s.

In the end, the underpinnings of teaching students in poverty are the hallmark of any good educator: create an emotionally safe environment where students have a sense that the classroom is a family, and offer academically rigorous school work with the structure that supports success. For educators working with children in poverty, these cornerstones need to be firmly and deliberately laid.

Dooley sent 56 seniors off to a new future last year. She hopes the ripple will be felt by the world. "I always urge them to get out and vote," she says. "Be political! And remember when the revolution comes, I was on your side."

A poster quoting Cesar Chavez in Heil's room supports the concept of revolution as well:

"Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot un-educate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore."

>> POVERTY LESSON FOR TEACHERS

Go (http://www.tolerance.org/teach/activities/activity.jsp?ar=651)

>> RESOURCES

The Toussaint Academy. (http://www.toussaintacademy.org)

AVID Supporters Help Students Find Success

by Jeff Sapp

When Orange Glen High School's demographics shifted from middle-class to poor, Katherine Dooley and a handful of her colleagues in Escondido, Calif., teamed with AVID, a local program that has now gone national.

One of AVID's most impressive indicators of success is the rate at which it sends students to four-year colleges. More than 70 percent of AVID students were accepted into four-year colleges last year.

How is it possible that AVID succeeds so dramatically?

"Constant connection," Dooley says.

AVID teachers don't just see students for an hour and a half a couple times a week. AVID students are with Dooley every single day for four years.

"This long-term connection with kids ... is an integral part of helping them succeed," she says. Dooley sees students supporting each other emotionally, tutoring each other academically and spending considerable time in her classroom.

This safe space is vital for student success. "They live in here," she says.

Posted by crathbon at 11:34 AM | Comments (0)

October 12, 2007

Happy Birthday, Dr. Dewey

Dewey's way of placing human activity at the center of his theorizing has always been inspirational to me. I assembled a list of quotes that I sometimes have students read when we visit his memorial at UVM. They continue to ring so true. Here they are, in honor of his birthday, October 20, 1859. Burlington, VT.

Quotes: John Dewey
1859-1952

Democracy and Education, 1925
Experience and Education, 1928
Schools of Tomorrow, 1915

*1. Social control of individuals rests upon the instinctive tendency of individuals to imitate or copy the actions of others. The latter serve as models. The imitative instinct is so strong that the young devote themselves to conforming to the patterns set by others and reproducing them in their own scheme of behavior. 40 d&e

*2. We do not have to draw out or educe positive activities from a child, as some educational doctrines would have it. Where there is life, there are already eager and impassioned activities. Growth is not something done to them; it is something they do. 50 d&e

*3. Emphasis upon the value of the early experiences of immature beings is most important, especially because of the tendency to regard them as of little account. But these experiences do not consist of externally presented material, but of interaction of native activities with the environment which progressively modifies both the activities and the environment. 93 d&e

*4. In order to have a large number of values in common, all the members of the group must have an equitable opportunity to receive and to take from others. There must be a large variety of shared undertakings and experiences. Otherwise, the influences which educate some into masters, educate others into slaves. And the experience of each party loses in meaning when the free interchange of varying modes of life experience is arrested. A separation into a privileged and a subject class prevents social interchange. 98 d&e

5. The evils thereby affecting the superior class are less material and less perceptible, but equally real. Their culture tends to be sterile, to be turned back to feed on itself; their art becomes a showy display and artificial; their wealth luxurious; their knowledge overspecialized; their manners fastidious rather than humane. 98 d&e

*6. Upon the educational side, we note first that the realization of a form of social life in which interests are mutually interpenetrating, and where progress, or readjustment, is an important consideration, makes a democratic community more interested than other communities have cause to be in deliberate and systematic education. …Since a democratic society repudiates the principle of external authority, it must find a substitute in voluntary disposition and interest; these can be created only by education. 101 d&e

7. It also follows that all thinking involves a risk. Certainty cannot be guaranteed in advance. The invasion of the unknown is of the nature of an adventure; we cannot be sure in advance. The conclusions of thinking, till confirmed by the event, are, accordingly, more or less tentative or hypothetical. Their dogmatic assertion as final is unwarranted, short of the issue, in fact. 174 d&e

*8. Study of mental life has made evident the fundamental worth of native tendencies to explore, to manipulate tools and materials, to construct, to give expression to joyous emotion, and so on. When exercises which are prompted by these instincts are a part of the regular school program, the whole pupil is engaged, the artificial gap between life in school and out is reduced, motives are afforded for attention to a large variety of materials and processes distinctly educative in effect, and cooperative associations which give information a social setting are provided. 228 d&e

9. Regarding freedom, the important thing to bear in mind is that it designates a mental attitude rather than external unconstraint of movements, but that this quality of mind cannot develop without a fair leeway of movements in exploration, experimentation, application, and so on. 357 d&e

*10. A primary responsibility of educators is that they not only be aware of the general principle of the shaping of actual experience by environing conditions, but that they also recognize in the concrete what surroundings are conducive to having experiences that lead to growth. Above all, they should know how to utilize the surroundings, physical and social, that exist so as to extract from them all that they have to contribute to building up experiences that are worthwhile. Traditional education did not have to face this problem; it could systematically dodge this responsibility. 40 e&e

11. I am not romantic enough about the young to suppose that every pupil will respond or that any child of normally strong impulses will respond on every occasion. There are likely to be some who, when they come to school, are already victims of injurious conditions outside of the school and who have become so passive and unduly docile that they fail to contribute. There will be others who, because of previous experiences, are bumptious and unruly and perhaps downright rebellious. But it is certain that the general principle of social control cannot be predicated upon such cases. It is also true that no general rule can be laid down for dealing with such cases. The teacher will have to deal with them individually. 56 e&e

*12. It is not enough to insist upon the necessity of experience, nor even of activity in experience. Everything depends upon the quality of the experience which is had. …Hence, the central problem of education based upon experience is to select the kind of present experiences that live fruitfully and creatively in subsequent experiences. 28 e&e

13. Education which ignores this viral impulse furnished by the child, is apt to be “academic,” “abstract,” in the bad sense of such words. If textbooks are used as the sole material, the work is much harder for the teacher, for besides teaching everything herself she must constantly repress and cut off the impulses of the child toward action. 73 sot

14. No book or map is a substitute for personal experience; they cannot take the place of the actual journey. The mathematical formula for a falling body does not take the place of throwing stones or shaking apples from a tree. 74 sot

15. In another building all the pupils above the fourth grade have organized into civic clubs. They divided the school district into smaller districts and one club took charge of each district, making surveys and maps of their own territory, counting lamp posts, alleys, and garbage cans, and the number of policemen, or going intensively into the one thing which interested them most. They each club decided what they wanted to do for their own district and set out to accomplish it, whether it was the cleaning up of a bad alley or the better lighting of a street. 82 sot

16. A truly scientific education can never develop so long as children are treated in the lump, merely as a class. Each child has a strong individuality, and any science must take stock of all the facts in its material. Every pupil must have a chance to be who he truly is, so that the teacher can find out what he needs to make him a complete human being. 137 sot

17. But if every pupil has an opportunity to express himself, to show what are his particular qualities, the teacher will have material on which to base her plans of instruction. Since a child lives in a social world, where even the simplest act or word is bound up with the words and acts of his neighbors, there is no danger that this liberty will sacrifice the interests of others to caprice. Liberty does not mean the removal of the checks which nature and man impose on the life of every individual in the community. 138 sot

*18. We send children to school supposedly to learn in a systematic way the occupations which constitute living, but to a very large extent, the schools overlook, in the methods and subject-matter of their teaching, the social basis of living. Instead of centering the work in the concrete, the human side of things, they put the emphasis on the abstract, hence the work is made academic – unsocial. 165 sot

*19. There are three things about the old-fashioned school which must be changed if schools are to reflect modern society: first, the subject-matter, second, the way the teacher handles it, and third, the way the pupils handle it. 170 sot

20. Our world has been so tremendously enlarged and complicated, our horizons so widened and our sympathies so stimulated, by the changes in our surroundings and habits brought about by machinery, that a school curriculum which does not show this same growth can be only very partially successful. The subject-matter of the schoolroom must be enlarged to take in the new elements and needs of society. 171 sot

*21. Hence, the daily experiences of the child, his life from day to day, and the subject matter of the schoolroom, are parts of the same thing; they are the first and last steps in the life of a people. To oppose one to the other is to oppose the infancy and maturity of the same growing life; it is to set the moving tendency and the final result of the same power over against each other; it is to hold that the nature and the destiny of the child war with each other. 71 sot

*22. It is fatal for a democracy to permit the formation of fixed classes. Differences of wealth, the existence of large masses of unskilled laborers, contempt for work with the hands, inability to secure the training which enables one to forge ahead in life, all operate to produce classes, and to widen the gulf between them. …The only fundamental agency for good is the public school system. Every American is proud of what has been accomplished in the past in fostering among very diverse elements of population a spirit of unity so that the sense of common interests and aims has prevailed over the strong forces working to divide our people into classes. 314 sot

Posted by crathbon at 10:25 AM | Comments (0)

October 3, 2007

Podcasting for Learning

Students Thinking

I felt crummy about the sharing I'd done at the faculty workshop. Asked to present my work with Podcasting, I told my interested colleagues that I was a "sometimes user" of the technology. Why sometimes? Well, I needed to be convinced that the work that went into creating a podcast was worth the effort. And for me, an education professor of an embarassingly long number of years, "worth" means high quality learning - personal understanding and depth, not just acquisition of someone else's knowledge. I needed to be convinced that aside from having a good time with a new technology - I love the challenge of just getting the stuff to work while 35 pairs of eyes hold you accountable - my students were actually learning more and better than they would in a more conventional task.

This little essay is about my next steps and how I've come to understand and see that different, and yes, better learning is happening. I've figured some things out.

My class is a first year required 8am in the morning two days a week introduction to learning theory for maybe-teachers-to-be. It is my personal wish that the students who walked through the door on day one wanting to be a teacher emerge from my class more psyched than ever, and more real in terms of their perceptions about what their future classrooms of children will call upon them to do. It is my personal wish that the students who walked through the door on day one not so sure they wanted to be a teacher at least emerge from my cocoon clearer in their vision of who they might be and more informed of what the profession will call upon them to do. For all my students I wish they realize they are not the center of this universe and that they must appreciate the similarities and differences in the people who populate the world around them. I want them to know that being a teacher in the 21st century will call upon them to more skillful than any generation of teachers coming before them. Finally, I want all my collegiates to be able to articulate how all students "learn in the same way" as a way of developing an informed perspective on that potential cop-out phrase, "Well, all students learn differently."

It's a form and content issue for me. I do believe we all learn differently when it comes to the content of our lives, lives that have populated our conceptual structures. I also think that those conceptual structures of prior knowledge get built in pretty much the same way for all of us, biologically speaking. Our learning process is a whole lot more similar than it is different. At least that's the mantra I want to discomfort their lives with two days a week at 8 in the morning. Did I mention that already?

So, where does Podcasting and learning enter this picture? As my bridge to understanding the similarities of learning of all human beings, we dig into James Zull's The Art of Changing The Brain right off the bat. And for purposes of this little essay, I want to immediately narrow to my point. After spending some time describing how the brain works, and how that working can be described quite nicely through the descriptive learning cycle research of Kolb, Zull begins to deepen the reader's understanding of how the rear integrative cortex and the frontal integrative cortex work to structure active thought and action from prior knowledge. Of the writers use of image and text, he notes the "unskilled use of language by the learner is one of the greatest challenges for the teacher." Delving into the work of Robert Leamnson, he goes on to say he was "intrigued" by the idea that "insisting that students speak to him about the academic content of subject matter using complete, grammatically correct sentences." He admonishes us that planning done by the executive functions of the prefrontal cortex (metacognitively speaking, of course) "requires learners to carefully assemble their plan for speaking. This plan must have specific content, and that content must be arranged in a way that accurately conveys the image that is in their brain. No clear image, no plan!" Here, Zull is talking about the importance of students being asked to write informational text, non-fiction text that is written to explain an idea or demonstrate understanding of a concept or set of rules or to establish connections between events or whatever. It is, as my literacy colleagues note, writing for a purpose.

Plans mean a good deal to Zull, for it is in the plan of action, the sequence of steps that helps transform prior knowledge to newer understandings through action, that understanding and comprehension get constructed. What I figured out and am about to explain, is that the Podcast requirement created a context for my students to have to plan a way to verbally explain a consolidation of big ideas and details from the chapters they were reading. Read on.

Reading Zull, especially these latter chapters, is a bit of a challenge. He writes iteratively. Having established his big ideas in the first part of his book, he goes back in the latter chapters and deepens his analysis of the relationship between what teachers and learners do and how the workings of the brain might inform the teaching / learning relationships so both teacher and learner might at the end of the day, feel they had spent good time together. I wanted my students to "get deeper" along with Zull. I'd had them meet in chapter groups, process and unpack the chapters, and take responsibility for connecting the high points by means of a webct based discussion. In short, I wanted them to achieve a deeper synthesis between the big ideas and the details.

I get the fact that students have to actively work on the ideas of our class learning and I get the fact that doing it together in class pays special benefits. It is way too important work to assume they are going to do more than just passively read their work and answer whatever assignment I put before them. If I want them to process our work, I want them to do it where I can see it and hear it and comment on it. Podcasting, on the heals of collaborative classroom discussion, extends the benefits of active learning by providing a reason for putting things together while at the same time, after the amygdala calms down, can create a little fun and laughter as well.

What I got on the webct discussion board were big ideas and details but not much synthesis. Some of why that happened might have been the way I structured the discussion, some of it might have been due to the nature of webct threaded discussions. Nevertheless, my joy in realizing my astuteness in noticing that I'd arrived at little synthesis was dulled by what I in fact noticed. My students' prior knowledge hadn't really been deepened by establishing more connections between the details of the chapter and the bigger ideas introduced in the first part of the book. Most of them had merely stated the big ideas, and merely stated attendant details. It was underwhelming, or in some cases, to quote the late Howard Cosell, merely whelming work.

Here's where the podcast came into play. We spent our last class period back in those same groups. This time the classwork assignment to each group was to create one 45 second to two minute podcast that "pulled together" the information in their chapter. What I'd realized on an early morning dogwalk (1) was that unlike an individual writing assignment, the group podcast might force the synthesis they'd been unable to achieve in the group based discussion board offering. I gave them twenty minutes to review their discussion entries (which I graciously provided), plan their podcast content and presentation and then come find me. I, with my trusty iPod, iTalk microphone, and later, Garageband software, would record what they had to say, make a podcast, and place it on UVM's iTunesU site.

The first group was ready to go in twenty minutes. They passed the iPod around and created a 1 minute 30 second synthesis of their chapter, effectively tying together detail and big idea unlike their first attempt. Each of the other four groups followed, each employing a slightly different style but each having achieved a degree of synthesis that gained a smile from their teacher. These reports ranged from whelming to overwhelming, again to quote Cosell. This was synthesis and this was deepened thought. Tenderly attached, no doubt, but Zull would have us believe, this was concrete, physical brain change.

The pressure of the Podcast forced the synthesis. In that way, the Podcast was not only a jazzy new tool, it was a tool employed as an agent of active learning, a form of learning that has had a long and occasionally controversial place in higher education (TP Msg. #818 Quick-thinks: The Interactive Lecture). Important active learning, I might add. I do understand that some students just because they have to speak into an device will be rehearsing new material in a more meaningful way than if the were to sit in a chair and "think about it" or even draw a webbed diagram. But the idea that the social conversation in the groups was directed at forcing a synthesis across the different student's individual offerings is a powerful impetus to me to do more work with p-casting now that I have a way of understanding how it is indeed more "worthwhile" as a learning tool. I realized, "just talk" can be something quite powerfully rendered with the right directions and the right tool Granted, their work on webct might have been a really effective way of structuring a rehearsal for the final pod casting performance. Whatever. What I left feeling good about was that I'd figured out another way to scaffold my student's understanding of content I feel deeply about. I want them to reconsider their thoughts about children's learning capabilities, particularly those children who can so easily be stereotyped as at-risk and incapable of learning anything that's worth very much simply because they are "different." As new "maybe-teachers," I want them to see all children as capable learners; this information about the biological basis of learning helps support that assertion. Many learning problems are teaching and schooling errors. But that's a conversation for another time. Maybe the next Podcasting presentation.

Thanks for listening.

(1)

Posted by crathbon at 5:40 PM | Comments (0)

August 6, 2007

Podcast Sharing

I've been asked to share my humble attempts at Podcasting during a session at the Center for Teaching and Learning, Univ. of Vermont. Here's my outline for the event.

Sharing Podcasting
C. Rathbone
CTL 8-07-42

1. not a Podcaster...can see its benefits...haven't gotten there yet

not really sure how to manage the complexity of it
realize this is a curricular control issue for me...not sure how to negotiate the "ownership" issues yet

2. bottom line criteria

for me...

can't add too much additional instructor time to managing the course
I have to be relatively comfortable with the technology
the technology is a tool to enhance learning - it doesn't magically compel learning by itself

research: focused talk leading to beneficial cognitive growth ie. new neuronal networks
research: situating the podcast process in the known lives of the students
research: M = V x Pr success
research: the more personal the choice, the more likely higher value will be obtained

notice: none of these have to do with the technical aspects of creating podcasts: they are all learning issues

3. I think, therefore I dabble

Example One: boring lecture on Instructional Expertise

self conscious
mercifully short (I'd never do a pcast over 15 minutes)
used my iPod, recorded, uploaded directly into iTunes, exported and posted as mp3 file
objective: provide clarifying follow-up to a confusing classroom presentation

processed at the beginning of class next class period using mc assessment and clickers

Example Two: class reflection on Presentation by visiting professor (Paul Martin talking about his podcaster experience)

not so self conscious, more intentional
better thought through

had students use 3x5 cards to record questions, areas of investigation, prior to Paul's visit
asked students to write responses to their questions/additional a-hahs that emerged during the talk
passed the iPod around, they recorded publicly in front of each other (9 in class :-) )
edited in Garageband, cutting embarrassing remarks, Uhhhs, adding a little pizzazz
pizzazz is actually important to lift the tenor of the podcast...I can get better at this

objectives:

a. focus the listening of Paul
b. make it personal
c. demonstrate ease of it all (ironic, right??)
d. force a response
e. listen to others
f. seamlessness in course http://261sm07.wikispaces.com/For+Friday+the+6th

met the criteria stated in #2: focus, situated, value and Psuccess, personalize

4. Thinking this through as a learning tool...there's help out there and in here (CTL)

a. web commentaries Blog of Proximal Development http://www.teachandlearn.ca/blog/
b. containing the blogs 21Classes (instead of setting up feeds - I need help with that)
c. individual and/or collaborative virtue in both, not sure which way to go

Posted by crathbon at 11:33 PM | Comments (0)

July 21, 2007

Jeff Chang's Reflections on Abandonment and My Reflections on Burlington's Poor

Hip-hop shows how deeply the last thirty years of American history have been affected by the politics of abandonment. These inner cities where hip-hop took root were abandoned by government, business, and frankly, the white middle class. What comes out of that is this intense mass longing to create history, to paraphrase Don Delillo, a deep desire to crush invisibility, to make culture that impacts the world and says "we're here". That's hip-hop.

What formal training I have is in ethnic studies, which has always been about recovering voices outside of the mainstream. But more to the point, hip-hop is the voice of the unheard. Hip-hop looks at the world from the street corner up. You could call it the "Straight Outta Compton" approach—to go right back down to the street corner, to the neighborhood, and to understand, say, how urban style develops and evolves on a block. In a global era, what we need to recover is The Local.

This comes from Jeff Chang's personal history of HipHop. An unbelievably detailed (Does this guy know all these people?) exposition and analysis of hip hop and an American sensibility that begs wider understanding.

http://www.cantstopwontstop.com/qa.cfm

this is like the poor in burlington
the current struggle in establishing voice in this city is epic
the parents of certain schools won't be denied
the invisible parents lurk behind their doors
the privileged parents move to contain this radical notion that schooling across classes can be good
they move with their usual threats
they will move out of town
they will withdraw their support
they will, and on and on it goes
they assume of course that the rest of us will really care

well, we do care
we care what they think and feel
just like we care what other parents in btv think and feel
of course they will not be denied
and they will go on fighting this demon across their lives
but the voice of equality and opportunity and being heard and stating the fear of oppression and consignment to schooling for failure will not be denied, either

the truce of course needs to happen
is it possible to sit down and figure out how to do this so we are all winners

spike lee's do the right thing ended in a paroxism of violence
no one won

1968
2008
forty years later
do we dare to have a different outcome?
why can't we get beyond personal fear and self interest
just this one time
what kind of organizing will it take to achieve this

who remembers 1968
bobby kennedy
malcomb X
1968 is a mythical moment, the year in which students around the world are protesting—from Columbia University and San Francisco State to Paris to Mexico City—the year that Martin Luther King, Jr. and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated, the year that Tommy Smith and John Carlos raise the black fist at the Olympics, the year that riots break out in Chicago, Washington D.C., Cincinnati. The anti-war movement and the black power movement are at their peak. 1968 is when the baby boomer/civil rights generation come of age.
you/we are the baby boomers
what will be your legacy?
shutting down the very freedoms your mothers and fathers died for?

who will step forward?
who will say yes to tomorrow
and no to the politics of singular privilege
let us all be privileged
and walk this journey together
burlington united will be so much more than
burlington divided

SHALL we overcome?
shall we OVERCOME?
shall WE overcome?

parents need to show compassion as never before
politicians need to show political courage
we all need the will power to see this through

Such an interesting city.
In many ways, the north and south of Burlington - because of its stretched out nature along the lake - are "the suburbs." City center are the ten or so blocks on the east west dividing line between the new north end and the south end. Geography plays a huge role in this city's politics. Suburbs. Center City. Old North End. Think about these in light of the economic discussions now happening and Wimsatt and Chang's commentaries.

Chang quotes WIlliam Wimsatt in Bomb The Suburbs.

The suburbs is more than just an unfortunate geographical location (Wimsattt), it is an unfortunate state-of-mind. It's the American state-of-mind, founded on fear, conformity, shallowness of character and dullness of imagination. "I say bomb the suburbs because the suburbs have been bombing us for at least the last forty years. They have waged an economic, political and cultural war on 'life in the city' (WImsatt wrote). Bomb the Suburbs means let's celebrate the city. Let's celebrate the ghetto and the few people who aren't running away from it.

[I would add "lack of recognition" to the above list. People have worked hard making this a great city for their kids. And they (the middle class and up) have made this a terrific city to live in, for their kids. We just have to realize all the kids in this city should be "our kids." Right now we deliberately and blindly limit educational opportunity and outcome for the poorest kids of our city, the ones living in the core.]

And then Change goes on to write Here was the idea of the "urban" addressed with a thorough-going optimism. Hip-hop separated from marketing imperatives was still something his generation could control and define. Suburbanites could unite with ghetto-dwellers, Whites could learn to respect Blackness, not merely consume it. Wimsatt, the militant dreamer, wanted a world that was not just polycultural, but postwhite (p.422).

Is there a new idea of class and relationship in this postwhite idea? Can we grow it here?

Posted by crathbon at 7:19 AM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2007

Remembering Alex

Alex Chirelstein died suddenly last week. This was a person whose presence was felt even though his physical being was miles away. An avuncular, embracing, rat-a-tat-tat speaker of a man, I will miss him...we all will miss him...deeply.

His synthesis project for a class was brilliant.

He rendered a collage of Vygotsky's life that brought together many elements from class and more than one of two from Alex's imagination. There were layers upon layers embedded in this work and it was an example of fun and work at play all at the same moment. That's the way it was with Alex. Though he was intensely serious, just underneath his passion for what he believed was a perspective that kept nudging his absolute devotion to whatever he was talking about in that moment. Seconds later, he could reverse his thoughts and argue the point from a totally different perspective, all the while with a twinkle in his eye, a twinkle that signaled his love for the engagement.

I barely knew Alex. And yet because of his "what you see is what you get" qualities, of what I knew, he let me know those parts well.

The vastness of this world has shrunken a bit because it (and we) lost this complicated, brilliant, new friend.

. . . .
From the Free Press, forwarded by Dr. Penny Bishop.

Posted by crathbon at 9:38 AM | Comments (0)

May 24, 2007

Teaching and Learning for Grandparents

This was just a wonderful entry that shows in a few strokes, the possibilities of fully integrated technology in the classroom setting. It's another link from Wil Richardson's wonderful WebBlogg-ed. I'm thinking about integration where the teacher's ideas about what should be learned and how that "should" should be learned come first. Technology is the tool that does it. Technology is backgrounded. It is not "the point."

Posted by crathbon at 10:14 PM | Comments (0)

May 4, 2007

Kyra's On The Move...

A few years ago I had the honor/pleasure of attending a summer seminar on hiphop culture and its pedagogical connections at NYU. That seminar was the first time UVM had participated in the Faculty Resource Network. It was an eyeopening if not eye popping experience for me. We dug simultaneously into the real live roots of hiphop in nyc, met new practitioners, read arcane scholarship, talked, listened, danced. My world expanded exponentially as a result of that visit. My teacher, Kyla Gault, has since published the book she was finishing at the time - The Words Black Girls Play - a cultural/historical/musical perspective of kinectic oral traditions in black female culture. Kyra has since moved to the faculty of Baruch College in NYC. She is an academic, a poet, a performing artist, a living presence personifying what it is she wants to teach and bring to the world. She writes I consider myself an organic musical intellectual focusing on people, performance, pedagogy, entrepreneurship, and public advocacy. I see myself as accountable for the possibility of sustaining affordable living and performance spaces and transforming the economic well-being and marketability of musicians of African descent in the creative economy of New York City.What an amazing model she is for walking your talk. Check out her website and blog. Politics is indeed personal.

Posted by crathbon at 10:34 PM | Comments (0)

April 20, 2007

Dedication to Alicia

Opening Remarks
Alicia Shanks

Don McLean, a pop culture poet to at least one of the generations gathered in this room today, writes...

A long, long time ago...
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

This has been a most unusual year for us at UVM. With the lives taken at a sister institution in Blacksburg, VA, we end our year in tragedy; and with the taking of lives of those close to us, on August 24th 2006, and sometime in the hours between October 4th and October 6th, 2006, we began our year in tragedy. I speak of Michelle Gardner Quinn, a student of environmental studies at UVMs Rubenstein School, whose time with us is to be celebrated tomorrow in at EARTHFEST 07, and Alicia Shanks, a second grade teacher at Essex Elementary School. Alicia was a mentor to students in our professional programs in elementary education and early childhood education. Alicia was also a member of the council of advisors to our Professional Program in Elementary Education; two people who didn’t know each other, two people whose manner of living life touched those around them in ways still being discovered. We wanted to take a moment to recognize Alicia at the beginning of this honors day ceremony.

I knew Alicia personally and professionally. We worked together supervising students she agreed to mentor in the intense student teaching phase of their eled preparation. You, Alicia, would demur, I think, the honor, attention, and accolades that have accrued to you since your sudden incomprehensible death. If there was ever anyone who walked the face of this earth with feet planted firmly on the ground, it was you Alicia. You were as many have remarked, salt of the earth and you had an uncanny ability to spot anyone or any program effort that seemed to you to be putting on airs. Sooner than later one of us would get a phone call and have a little talk about what was on your mind. You possessed a constantly open heart for your school children, especially those growing up in challenging circumstances, as you did. And yet knowing you well, I think without a doubt you were the last one to let a child pull the wool over your eyes in an attempt to do less than that little girl or boy was capable of. And you were always was quite clear that you would be the judge of that “capability.”

These dispositions are a good thing to keep in mind as we head into this important and joyful ceremony of recognition. The really good teachers of this world see in us what may be unseen by us. And in their own way – sometimes inspirational, sometime provocative, sometimes downright irritating - they provide a certain urging that moves us over time in those directions. The disposition towards creating instructional environments that support the actualization of self, of becoming not who we are but who we are growing to be, is one of the hallmarks of the professional programs honoring students here today. We like to think we know something about how to do this.

I would like to suggest, that these two people did, too. I also think they knew, that even when the music dies in one place, when you can bring yourself to listen really carefully once again, when the shock begins to dissipate, what begins to awaken in our dulled spirits is the sound of other musics to be heard. John Dewey constantly reminded us as their lives did, that there is music all around us in the communal spheres in which we live. Other people’s music. The music of other journeys. And this communal music, when we finally hear it, is the music that sustains us and beckons us to move on. Ultimately, this is the music that will redeem us, this is the music that is grace, even through the thickest of tears.

So we thank you Alicia, and we thank you Michelle, and we thank all the teachers who work with us in all our programs, for walking with us on the communal journey we take with each one of our students. The journeys we celebrate here today. Welcome, each one of you, parents, students, honorees, grandparents, faculty, friends, honored guest, to Honors Day, 2007. Let us celebrate and let us feel in the deep places of our hearts, the joyful music generated by the lived lives of those we honor today.

Posted by crathbon at 5:17 PM | Comments (0)

April 14, 2007

Why Can't Schools Be Like This?

The George Lukas Educational Foundation holds rich resources for any educator wanting to explore the kinds of learning opportunities that keep children/youth coming back for more. This film is one of my favorites. My emotions are absolutely captured every time I watch it, in class or otherwise. This story of teaching and learning at Ascend evidences the conditions that every school should aspire to if we deign to keep kids coming back for more.

Posted by crathbon at 8:59 AM | Comments (0)

April 13, 2007

Building Classroom Relationships: Putting the Amygdala To Rest...

I've recently had the opportunity to collaborate with some of my Senior students during their most intense teaching internships and I have a new understanding of the importance of relationship building. I've be able to spend time with them, watching and commenting on the goings on in their professional field site. The site is quite unique. It is a small school, and it is a tough school to become a teacher in, especially after relationships have been formed. Relationships have a fragile place in the teacher education literature. Their announced importance seems to come and go. When we are forced to employ high stakes measures to assess academic outcomes, the centrality of relationship to the teaching/learning process seems to fade. When the emperor's new clothes of high stakes testing is revealed as it inevitably always is, the importance of relationship in a child's grounding in school reasserts itself. We are in a time of reassertion. In this time, I have been reading more about the art of changing the brain, helped mostly by a book of the same title by James Zull. But first, a little more about the school and how relationships are central to its inhabitants.

The school is filled with children from mostly challenging backgrounds...resettled refugee families newly arrived, resettled refugee families who have been here a while, families challenged and battered by short and longer term conditions of poverty, families where dysfunction is normal, where being on guard is what gets you through the night, into the light of the next day. Even if you are six years old. The children I am most concerned with are the children whose ears are assaulted by negative comments far in excess of positive ones. Research by Hart and Risley confirm negative to positive comments running at least at the ratio of 2:1.

In the teaching world, the teachers who work in such schools do so because they have no other choice, they are on their way to someplace else, or they feel called to do so. Those who feel called, and maybe some of those other categories, share a common language about the importance of relationship. The share a belief that it is important to spend copius amounts of time building relationships with "these" kids especially. These kids can be very hard on you. They are fractious, suspicious, easily adjitated, and in some cases, dangerous. Their on-the-edge emotions are often hair triggered and it doesn't take much to cause the explosion. Others don't explode as easily. This latter group just keeps after you. They seem to have no fear, they have walls all around, and their best defense is a strong, often coarse offense. I saw it this morning. One particular girl. Wasn't doing her work. Loud and obnoxious, dressing down the teacher. When the teacher kept up her quiet insistence that it was time to do her writing, she stormed out of the room and waited just outside the door. When the teacher didn't come out after her, she came back in, tossed a few more epithets her way, and walked out again, purposefully knocking over a couple of chairs in the process, all in a primary grade setting.

In later processing, one of the gentle veterans of this place said, "That's why I spend so much time in the early part of the year building them up. It's funny, but just putting stars on the board next to their name seems to work. They seem to need the assurance and evidence over and over again that I like what they are doing, that I mean my praise, and that they can do things that earn it consistently and lavishly. That's how I build them up, that's how I establish my relationship with them, each one of them, that's why its so hard for them now, to give that trust to another person when I move out and turn the classroom over. You'd like to think that trust transfers. But it doesn't. It has to be earned. That building up process has to start all over again until they know you are there for them, each one of them.

This trust thing has been with me a long time. I'm old enough to remember Carl Rogers

imploring us to see our relationships with kids as helping relationships and helping us understand what time it took to establish these connections. Unconditional positive regard, active listening, being there now with our kids, all this was central to how I came to understand the vital firm underpinning of the student/teacher relationship. All this and a good deal of solid planning and firm guidance when needed.

With Zull's help, I see the process with a whole new layer of understanding. 2007, meet 1972. Here's what the trust component means to me now.

"These" kids, the children in this school, the ones I'm talking about with my students and their mentor teachers, grow up in environments that are unpredictable with respect to dangerous events. I'm talking about psychologically dangerous events. Events that scare them, put them on guard, force them to develop defenses that lash out before hurt can get to them. The reality of course is that by the time hurt is perceived, it is too late. The amygdala has already lept into action.

This vital part of the brain, buried deep in the midbrain, has been with us for a long, long time. We can probably credit our being here in current form to its existence and its successful functioning. The amygdala is the flight / fight / freeze early warning system of our perceptual apparatus. Its operative powers are immediate, unencumbered by more sophisticated frontal reasoning. The body perceives danger, it reacts. Instantly. Period. Muscles tense, adrenalin flows, perception narrows, cognitive processing stops, reactivity dominates, all to alert and ready the organism for combat in whatever struggle is to occur. Eons ago, it was the creeping of the saber-tooth in the night that triggered the amygdala's functioning. Now, it is the strident voice tone of an unfamiliar person signaling potential damage or danger on the way.

School, in amygdala-speak, is a crowded place of many people. Some of these people are known on the streets and avoided. School is perceived to be a place where you need to be on guard, a place where danger lurks, a place where you have to be ready for the affront, the attack, the challenge that can come at any moment. This ever present perception of danger triggers the response of readiness and it is a stressful, hyper-aggressive, highly focused state. This is the given when most of these kids walk in the door. This is the given when something out of the ordinary occurs. This is the given, when a teacher's voice tone signals an attack that must be protected against. This, for these children, is the natural, biological response.

The good teacher's know that what has to happen for these children is to structure a setting where the amygdala can lapse into a restful state, almost going to sleep; a state that tells the rest of the brain's early warning network that all is well, do not beware, be off duty, it will be okay. I think that's what happens when the stars go on the board. I think that's what happens when the first six weeks of school is spent in relationship building. I think that's what happens when children get to know each other on a far deeper level that what we ordinarily think is necessary. The conditioning dulls the arousal functions of this survival center; the conditioning literally grows a neurological pathway through the reactive system that causes the fire alarm not to ring. What it looks like on the outside is the formation of relationships and "classroom community." What it looks like on the inside is the construction of neurological pathways that lets the sleeping amygdala lie. Until someone new takes over.

When someone new takes over, someone new like my students, the environment changes immediately. It looks different, and more significantly, it feels different. It is intuited differently. New players assert themselves in new ways. The room sounds different, the comfortable routines change, and if I'm one of "these" kids, I'm not getting the comforting assurance I once had learned was there that everything will be alright. That new teacher may speak the same words as the old, familiar teacher; they may even see themselves as equally if not more secure and comforting as my old number one teacher, but words are only words and every other internal warning light is now flickering off and on in my perceptual apparatus. My fire alarms buzz loudly. I am once again on guard! It isn't personal. You did nothing wrong to me except replace my teacher, the person I'd learned to trust would not hurt me or let anyone else in this classroom hurt me. The person whose stars on the board reassured me that I was liked and that I was capable of being recognized for doing good things. You can't just tell me you like me. Lots of people had said that very thing and then hurt me or violated me or abandoned me. That's why I'm now once again on full alert status. Take me through the calming process. Once again. Take me through that process with you. Teach me I'm okay in your eyes. It will take some time to put my guard down, to teach my early warning network not to be aroused in your presence. It has nothing to do with how you see yourself. It has everything to do with how I learn you learn to see me.

How does that happen? Show me. Show me you know me. Show me you see me doing good things. Show me you see it when I dare to show you I'm competent. Put a star next to my initials when I read my book. Put a star next to my initials when I ignore Sean giving me the finger, put a star next to my initials when I decide not to shove my way into line, put a star next to my name when I pick up Abdulabakar's pencil. Speak in softer tones. Smile genuinely. Let us laugh and have fun even if it means Harry will take it too far. We all know that. Don't sweat the small stuff. Greet me when I come into the classroom or when you see me ready to walk in the front door. Tell me you are glad I'm here. Remember Hart and Risley? It's going to take a lot of positive comments to help me not expect the negative. That note you put inside my desk this morning? No one has ever written me a note like that. It was nice. Thank you. Are you going to stay and be my main teacher? Did we drive our old teacher away? I'm only trying to protect myself the best way I know how. You changed the game on me.

Give me a chance to figure out that it's going to be okay.

Posted by crathbon at 8:30 PM | Comments (0)

Imagini Me

Well this was fun. Give it a try - get your own visual DNA...for the moment, anyway! http://imagini.net/aboutimagini.html

Posted by crathbon at 8:17 PM | Comments (0)

March 10, 2007

One step further with brain based work, Part One.

I teach an entry level course to mostly first year students called Learning and the Learner. It is a course for students anticipating full entry into the eled program at my university. The goals of the course are to get them thinking more as learners than as teachers, to help them begin to think systematically about their own thinking, and to force (?) them to identify and start to process how they need to work with their own normative reference groups in almost everything they do.

Up to this semester, I've used a good but typical heavy (literally) edpsych book - this one by Anita Wolfolk. It is her 10th edition and like all books of this genre, the text is dense, the voice for the most part, impersonal (though I loved it when you actually heard Anita's voice leap out of the text) and the information, overwhelming. Good stuff for sure, but way too much of to justify the >$100 price tag. Over the ten semesters I've used the book, I've rarely used more than half of its pages, much less half of its content. I am finally (read: professionally confident enough) to select slimmer texts.

An ongoing goal of mine for this course is to establish a grounded knowledge base for them so as they move through the program, they can critically work with other "have to's" that come their way. For this reason, in the last few semesters, I've resisted the urge to avoid fad and increasingly worked with information coming out of neurobiology figuring if we could establish a firm grounding in how we think the brain works, then that base would be a solid one to accomplish the aforementioned critical thinking.

So, long story short, I started this semester with a reading of James Zull's The Art of Changing the Brain. It has been a fascinating read, both for me and for my first year students. I have to say, for a course that meets 31 first year students at 8am, two days a week, this book - and our learning - has kept them coming. (Okay, they have to come all but three times before they incur a penalty. Still, my attendance records show they are coming because they want to.)

Zull has not spoken down to us one bit as he takes us through the increasingly clarifying picture of how the brain learns. This is not a text that ends with a simplified list of what teachers should do. This is a text that attempts to explain the biology of learning and invites the reader to suppose what this might mean for teachers. I could go on and on, but I haven't said what I wanted to say with this entry yet so I'll make one more introductory point and then go to why I'm really writing this note to you. This semester is the first time, without prompting from me, a host of my students expressed with different words, the following realization: I think what I'm realizing is that teaching and learning are different enterprises. That if a student doesn't learn, that is a result of poor teaching. I always used to think that when I learned to be a really good teachers, that all my students would be learning and those who weren't it was because they didn't want to.

Bingo. To have arrived at this thought is huge to me. The longer I'm in the profession, the more I see just how hard it is to change the belief my predominantly white middle or upper middle class students have, a belief deeply embedded in their prior knowledge, that students who don't do very well in the public school don't do well because they choose not to, not because they've been taught poorly. I have to say, I can stand on my head and teach as well as I can and still, at the end of the day, most of them still believe that good teaching leads to good learning except for those kids who don't want to learn. Poor learning is the fault of the learner, not the teacher. Until Zull, that is. Deconstructing the process of learning biologically speaking has raised the unsettling issue of teacher fallibility in a way it has never been raised before. That is a very good thing.

The other very good thing is they now have themselves to consider as a really good example of just how conservative prior knowledge is and just how hard it is to change it. We've worked on this stuff for fourteen weeks. I hope they remember that when they start to blame a child for not understanding how to use proper consonant blends after they've completed two worksheets and one text analysis!

And I"m going to leave what I really wanted to say in this entry for my next entry, One step further Part Two.

Posted by crathbon at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)

February 17, 2007

RLC's revised

Our subgroup has worked intermittently but inspirationally on a plan for an RLC since the initial ideas of entry 10/23/06. Here's the latest plan, a bit more shaped and focused.

Pawprints

1. Theme
Making sustained positive differences in the lives of Burlington children and families through our Pawprints, intentional actions of civic awareness and community engagement.

2. Objectives

Major Objective A. Make a positive difference in the lives and aspirations of children and families of the Burlington Schools.

Major Objective B. Develop the civic awareness and social responsibility of each participating resident.

Major Objective C. Establish, monitor, and assess the connected relationships between UVM participants and Burlington’s children, youth, and families. These relationships are our Pawprints.

Objectives: Collectively, Pawprints will:
1. demonstrate a visible UVM commitment to children, youth, and families in Burlington
2. provide venues for UVM students to establish relationships with children and youth
3. establish relationships with children and youth that are sustainable beyond the usual semester to semester brackets of time and task
4. create and nurture cross disciplinary student inquiry
5. create aspirations for higher education for first generation children and youth
6. establish and nurture personal multiage friendships between UVM students and Burlington children and youth that enrich the lives of both
7. create an awareness of the need for life-long civic awareness and community engagement in UVM’s young adult participants
8. explore the role and range of various forms of public engagement, the kinds of public engagement that create responsible and caring communities
9. develop and affirm the power of social interest in both the UVM student and their protégés in the public school
10. utilize technology to connect and extend communities of learners
11. utilize technology to create and express stories of connection
12. utilize technology to learn and communicate about community structure and function, especially with regard to forms and distribution of personal and political power
13. assess community building developmental assets across the entire range of projects
14. equip every UVM participant with a laptop computer (making Pawprint an Apple Computer Project)

3. Outcomes
As a result of Pawprints, we would hope to see…
1. increased efficacy in University participants in community development
2. increased pro-social behavior of children and youth
3. research projects and presentations from a variety of disciplines
4. Burlington children and youth visiting campus for specific events
5. targeted instruction for UVM participants related to community development
6. increased knowledge of how the different populations within the Burlington community access and take advantage of community resources
7. the ongoing development of student understanding, action and commitment to the responsibilities of citizens in a democracy to make communities positive places to live for all their diverse groups of people
8. “Pawprints” from every student: a reflective record of their connections with a child or youth from the Burlington community
9. an increase in community building developmental assets
10. a home page for Pawprint that stores a video record of each participants inquiry

4. Academic Component
1. participation in a required one credit civic awareness seminar lecture series
2. an electronic collection, record and reflection of civic engagement
3. Pawprints: a defined, enacted, and evaluated service learning components that frames the civic engagement of each participant
4. an assessment of community building developmental assets across all participants, focused on but not limited to:
• planning and decision making
• interpersonal competence
• cultural competence
• resistance skills
• integrity
• youth as resources

5. Experiences
If successful in enacting a modicum of our objectives, we would hope to see experiences like the following:

A drummer who organizes a salsa rhythm section at the boys and girls club.

A baton champion who organizes a twirling group for girls 8-11 years old.

The engineering student who directs an egg drop contest.

The environmental education major who organizes a waist watch program at the girls and boys club.

An evening with the Superintendent of Schools, talking about what it means to run an urban school district.

A psychology major who studies the developmental assets of a group of middle school students.

A guitar playing composer who posts his songs, composed with two youth, on U-Tube.

An afternoon with the Mayor, talking about how to keep a community alive and functioning and solvent.

A biology major who builds a living environment with a group of fourth grade girls.

The multi-racial poet who starts a poetry slam every Friday afternoon in city hall with youth from the high school.

The middle school teaching candidate who begins an after school digital story telling project with a multiage group of middle school students.

A doctoral student teaching four evening seminars on her personal research of what it was like to grow up poor.

The people of this University and its home community celebrating together, in one place, “downtown,” its shared symbiotic bonds and relationships.

Posted by crathbon at 9:54 PM | Comments (0)

January 8, 2007

Telling Grandma about IMg

TidBITS#861/08-Jan-07

Younger Than Thou: Instant Messaging

  by Dan Pourhadi <pourhadi@gmail.com>

[Adam here. I recently turned 39, and as much as I don't feel old physically, there are times when reading about how teenagers use technology - the stuff I've been writing about for 17 years! - make me feel simply ancient. Oh, I understand how the technology works; I just don't always get why these people - all of whom are much younger than I am - find it so compelling, to the point where a recent study found that teens use electronic media for more than 72 hours per week. I don't think I spend 72 hours per week doing anything short of breathing.
Rather than curmudgeonly harumph around about the good old days of scouring BITNET for joke files and extracting 400K floppies from Mac Pluses, I've instead recruited an actual teenager, college freshman Dan Pourhadi, to write about how and why teenagers use the technology they do. Dan last wrote about choosing a Mac to take to college on a $2,000 budget, an assignment he carried off with aplomb, so I figured he was the perfect person to explain his generation to those of us who actually remember the Soviet Union and East Germany (see Beloit College's Class of 2010 Mindset List for other facts about today's college freshmen). To kick things off, I've asked Dan to explain instant messaging to his grandmother, but I'd like to open this sporadic column up to suggestions from you. If there's something about how young people (we're talking 15 to 25 here) use technology, send me or Dan a note and we'll see what we can do.]
"Hi, Danny dear..."
Hey, Grandma!
"What are you doing there?"
Oh, nothing, Grandma. Just talking to my friends online.
"Hi, Danny's friend! I'm his grandmother!"
No, no, Grandma. I'm instant messaging them. We're not on the phone.
"Oh, you're typing to him? Like the emails. Who are you talking to? That girl you introduced me to yesterday? She was nice."
Yeah, Grandma. Her, and my friend Mike, and Kim, and Jennifer.
"You're talking to all of them? Right now?"
Yep, we're all having separate conversations. See, this is my buddy list on the left. That shows all of my friends who are at their computers right now. I can send messages to anyone I want, and they can respond and we can have a conversation right here in this window - it's free and there's no telephone or anything special needed. And I can talk to as many people as I want.
"That is amazing. But it seems kind of complicated."
It's a pretty great tool, really, once you get the hang of it. Imagine being able to talk to multiple people at once, while going about your other business. The more you IM, the better your typing becomes, and eventually typing messages becomes second nature - holding a conversation online feels nearly as natural as speaking on the phone.
"That's crazy."
Crazy, Grandma?
"Crazy. What if you want to show yourself as sad or happy? How can you know what the other person is thinking if you can't see or hear them?"
Well, I'm sure that was first said about the telephone - how can you gauge emotion if you can't see his or her face? Simple: contextual clues and talk patterns. If you upset someone on the phone, they're likely to pause a few seconds before answering. Once you're a phone-speaking veteran, understanding the tone of the conversation is simple.
The same applies to text-based instant messaging. When I'm talking to my friends, we use various techniques to relay feeling and tone through the conversation. Ellipsis can mean confusion or uncertainty; a fast typist who's responding unusually slowly is probably unhappy; italics emphasize words or phrases; capital letters typically denote yelling or excitement. There are also the smiley faces that help broadcast a particular feeling.
"But how do you know they're not lying? Someone could be lying about how they feel."
Very true, Grandma, very true. And that happens a lot. But the more you talk to certain people, the better you're able to understand their real tone. It's hard to hide emotion, in any medium.
For example, I have a friend who unknowingly adds a period at the end of every message when she's upset. Most folks I know don't really use periods in instant messages (sentences are typically separated and sent in separate messages) - so when periods are used, they tend to have a special meaning.
Everything is manipulatable online. Take laughter: if you're trying to show that you're amused by something, you'll typically type "lol" (short for "laugh out loud"). If something is funnier, you might type "hahaha." The funnier it is, the more "ha"s you add. If something is freakin' hilarious, you might go all out with a bold "HAHAHAHA." Capital letters add emphasis, see?
Strategic use of speed, pauses, capital letters and italics, emoticons, punctuation, abbreviations, even word choice - an IM veteran reads and understands all of that to mean something, and that makes IM conversations as natural to them as anything else.
"Um, Danny..."
Yes, Grandma?
"Your friend sent something to you. Why aren't you answering?"
See, that's another great aspect of this whole thing: If you're talking face-to-face or on the phone, you're forced to answer right away. An IM conversation is completely controllable. You can pause a few seconds to think of an answer, type "brb" (be right back) and take a few minute break, or just a simple "g2g" (got to go) to high-tail it outta there. You tailor the conversation to your liking.
"That's terrible!"
Why's that, Grandma?
"It's rude! Leaving someone like that, in the middle of a conversation. Imagine!"
Grandma, what's rude on the phone or in person isn't necessarily rude online.
IM vets tend to follow certain etiquette rules that make conversations manageable for both sides. You shouldn't leave a conversation, for instance, without first saying "brb" or "g2g"; if you're not at your computer or if you don't want to respond to IMs, you put up an "Away" message - something that's sent automatically when you receive a message, like "I'm away from my computer." so your buddies know not to expect an answer.
When everyone follows those rules - which honestly are pretty common-sense - then rudeness is all but eliminated.
"That's not so bad I guess. So what do you talk about?"
Gossip.
"Oh."
I'm kidding, Grandma. We talk about anything and everything. School work, work work, regular friend stuff. As odd as it sounds, I tend to be more open talking online than I am in person. Sure, doctors may say "that's not healthy," to which I'd respond "YOU'RE not healthy!", but really, instant messaging is a lot easier for people like me. You have those extra seconds to analyze what's being said and to plan your response; you can still convey and judge emotion; you can scroll up to re-read what's been said; there are no awkward silences or odd looks or funny noises accidentally coming from your mouth.
Looking at it from a conventional, face-to-face-talking-is-the-best perspective, it may seem insincere and fake - a tailored, analyzed conversation - and it probably is, a little. But it reduces the risk of misspeaking and miscommunication, and it promotes honesty by making a conversation a lot more comfortable.
"You've thought about this a lot, haven't you?"
I have, Grandma.
"So you're talking to four people right now?"
I am.
"Doesn't that get confusing? Saying all those different things to different people?"
You'd think so, wouldn't you? It's a habitual thing, like driving. When a newbie driver gets behind the wheel, he's blown away by all the different tasks he's supposed to accomplish at once - keeping his eye on the road, measuring his speed, watching for signs and anticipating other cars' behaviors. It seems impossible to the poor sap.
But the more you drive, the more each task becomes habit, the easier it all becomes. The very same concept applies to instant messaging: At first, managing even one discussion is a hassle. But the more you do it, the more you're able to compartmentalize the conversations; you learn to take clues from context and previous messages to know where you left off. Before you know it, you're having conversations with ten or more people at once without batting an eye.
There is always the case of the mis-sent Message, though. Happens all the time: someone clicks the wrong conversation and sends a message that was supposed to go to someone else. It's not necessarily a result of confusion: just acting before thinking.
"I'd never be able to do so many things at once. How in the world do you get anything done?"
Well, that's when the Away message comes in handy. If I have work to do or TV to watch (both of which share a spot on the priority List), I'll put up an Away message, hinting that I'm busy, unable, or even just unwilling to talk. I might talk with one or two people, but the Away message keeps other people from IMing me and helps to prevent distraction. It all has to do with willpower: if IM gets distracting, you shut it off. It's not really a new concept - you probably thought that Mom talking on the phone got in the way of her homework. The solution - shutting down the distraction - is the same.
"Yes, she spent way too much time on the phone when she should have been doing her homework. But this all seems pretty neat to me."
It really is. And there are all sorts of other cool features of IMing that make it an addictive form of communication: you can send pictures and files to your buddies; you can have IM chat-room conversations with two or more people; you can stay connected with people all over the world for free; it takes very little effort to initiate or participate in a conversation, which is great for lazies like me; there's always the comfort of privacy; and it has what I call the "iPod Appeal": you can enjoy it without making it the center of your focus. It's entirely possible to have a serious meaningful conversation in the background while doing other things.
Case in point: I'm talking to you right now, Grandma, while writing a paper and talking to four of my friends. I'm obviously focusing on our conversation the most, then the paper, and then I'm answering my friends whenever they send me something. It works amazingly well. Try doing that on the phone, or even in person. I bet you couldn't.
"Nope. You kids and your 'younger than thou' attitudes."
Wow, Grandma. That'd make a great name for a column.
"I'm sure. So what about that paper you claimed you were working on?"
Sorry Grandma, g2g.
"What?"

Auto-Response: I'm away from my computer right now.

Posted by crathbon at 8:04 PM | Comments (0)

October 23, 2006

RLC Brainstorm

Pumped up about the possibility of an interdisciplinary RLC that brings undergraduates together across campus who have a social interest in schools and kids. Pumped up about the possibility of a RLC that comes together out of a common agreement between UVM and the Burlington schools. Pumped up about the possibility of UVM students learning about their responsibilities as citizens to the schools and to all children through direct action with schools and kids. Pumped up about the possibility of a group of students who might include a sociology major, an anthro. major, a forestry major, and an eled. major, working together as a team with a class at a school and following that class for a couple of years from one teacher to another. This idea is an idea grounded in a kind of reciprocal social interest. The benefactors are as much the UVM students as they are the students in the schools.

Here are the ideas.
Residential Learning Community
Idea collection

1- Grounding
Social interest
Developmental assets

2- Relationship with Burlington
Forged with principals
Ideas grown with teacher groups

3- Objectives
• Develop commitment to all kids
• Build an idea of responsible citizenship is with respect to public education
• Participate in interdisciplinary study
• See schools as places where important questions can be asked, investigated, and addressed with multiple solutions
• Do things with kids that will build kids
Self esteem
Achievement
Language
• to study what it is to become and ally
to recognize privilege
to learn how to use privilege
to become an ally
• to keep track of you own goals, growth, and projected development with repect to the catalyst program
• to conduct research. Present same at a regional or national venue.

4- Interdisciplinary inquiries
Question based
What are the forms of poverty
What relationships are there between the various forms and school achievement
Tracing the presence of social interest across various school groups
Climate surveys in the school
Who says what where
What is the public space
How is it used
Language
Behavior
Interactions
Social position
Status, power, authority
Resistance

5- Thematic based kid support systems
Bridge usual semester presence
Two year commitment?
Follow a group of kids through?
Connect outside as well as inside
Meet parents, create relationships

Possibilities
Art blast
Technowizards
world travelers-web explorations
muralists
tricksters
dancehoppers
broomballers
Drum Project
Odessey of the Mind

6- photoproject
large mural like bw photos of kids learning posted in public places in schools and perhaps even in display venues around town…firehouse. Competition? Kids create documentation around the photos. Use or purchase the huge printers plus several good cameras…8mgpxs or more.

7- Apple connection
Forge an agreement with apple corporation to supply the sixth grades at one school with apple computers and take responsibility for developing and monitoring the use of same. Or, supply uvm students with loaners for one year to develop projects with kids linked to school programs. Becoming expert in iLife. Several students take the lead. Get them to applecamp.

8- university aspiration building
tours
kids become university ambassadors in their own schools
researchers as in the FM mode
commitment to pursue education
meeting various persons of interest

9- possible names
The Catalyst coalition

Posted by crathbon at 9:57 AM | Comments (0)

My Doggy Zappa

Adult Perspective: All of a sudden she's drawing representational figures.
Cianya's Perspective: I've finally got the control of how to make these lines go where I want them to. This is Zappa, my doggy. I've even got those dark eyes exactly where I want them! (Cianya is just four years old. This picture was drawn perhaps two weeks into her fifth year on earth.)

Posted by crathbon at 9:47 AM | Comments (0)

October 13, 2006

Wil Richardson on Marco Torres

Marco Torres is the film maker that Martha Nichols wrote to me about. He is a brilliant teacher in LA and was hired by Apple to do a series of films with kids on schools where technology (iLife06) is change the way of learning life. The films are brilliant and brought multiple lumps to my throat. They show kids and teachers in stereotype-busting schools embracing inquiry and learning and having fun doing it.

When Martha wrote, I had no idea who Torres was and I indelicately wrote him and asked. Tonight, I find Wil Richardson's blog on Torres speech last Spring at the K-12 Online Conference. I clearly have to learn more about this man's work! Here's his speech.

Marco Torres–”Quit, Complain, or Innovate”

So I had the distinct pleasure of getting a chance to chat on and off with Marco Torres the last few days and to watch and listen to his scintillating keynote yesterday. Let me be clear: there is no one “out there” right now who delivers the message about how schools need to change better than Marco. No one. He’s a teacher, a learner, a father, a visionary…I can’t say enough good things about him. And he just totally gets it in a way that we all have to get closer to.
His kids and his work are, I think, as close to the new story as we come. And it’s rooted, I think, in the way he looks at what he asks his kids to do. As he says, whatever it is that they create, “it must have wings.” As far as I can tell, there is no work for the teacher in his classroom. Instead, it’s work for the community. Work for the world. Real, purposeful stuff. So different from the way most of us look at our classrooms. And he does it in difficult circumstances. At his school of 5,000 kids, only about 650 graduated last year. Eighty percent of the state of California does better than his school. “Teachers can either quit, complain, or innovate.” Guess which he chooses.

Marco had his kids list all of the ways they have to receive, produce, share or broadcast information. The list, as you can imagine, is long. Then, he had his kids call school districts from around the country and ask for the age of the principal or the chief school administrator and they found the average age to be 48. Finally, he had them list the ways those administrators had to receive, produce, share or broadcast information when they were 16. The difference in the lists is telling, and the moral obvious. The world has changed drastically, and we just are not taking advantage of all of the other ways that we now have available to assess what our students are learning. Marco speaks with passion about finding a student’s “channel” for learning. He tells the story of asking a group of professors to write down the events that have had the biggest impact on their lives, and they wroted down things like the Vietnam, the Challenger accident, 9/11, all things that they had seen. Nothing that they had read. A lot of our kids know it by seeing it.

And, “learning is not just how you receive information but how you produce it.” He tells the story of how his Socail Studies department a few years ago took three weeks to decide that the appropriate number of pages for a research paper was 15 pages. That was frustrating, he says, because it’s all about process. “Work has to fly.” Then he showed this video, “The Power of One.” “If I passed out all the A papers,” he said, “it would not have had the same impact. Could the classroom be the stage for the world? It’s been a risk for me, but making sure that my target audience is not just my principal but instead the community and business makes it relevant.”

Some other ideas in short order:

* If you can be replaced, you will be. Creativity is what is going to set you apart.

* A lot of my teachers are like skiiers, they want smooth ride, no bumps, no ice. But if you change the perspective and become a snowboarder, bumps and ice can be an awesome ride. We need to be snowboarders.

* Make it relevant, make it meaningful, make it applicable.

* It’s all about your network. Who is in your “now” network?

* We need to connect students and family. We have to include them. (See this video as an example.)

* It’s not about technology. It’s about creativity, about a business plan. Are you aware of your target audiences? Who are you going to market to? How will you assess it?

It was just a great, great talk that has me motivated to want to learn more and more and more. Those are the best kind, I think.

Posted by crathbon at 10:59 PM | Comments (0)

July 22, 2006

Connecting Virtually: The Big Disconnect

This is going to be a bit of a roundabout. In this short essay, I make the point that computer mediated learning is "cool" learning. By "cool" I mean "devoid of felt connection." I establish a research basis for this conclusion and end with a warning about cookies and baskets. Along the way, I celebrate the resolution of a thirty-year question in my mind.

When I was an intern in Syracuse University's Urban Teacher Preparation Program (1964-65), I had to make sure any lesson/unit/curriculum I designed attended to three human needs: power, connection, and identity. If curriculum addressed these three needs as well as the "content" that needed to be addressed, then the learner would be "hooked." Motivation, intrinsic motivation, the motivational desire to want to do something, motivation that comes from the heart and gut is tapped when these three needs are addressed. The intern group of which I was a part worked hard to write stuff that was relevant to our kids and relevancy was achieved by attending to power, identity, and connection.

For the record, to design lessons for power meant your lesson had to enhance a person's ability to influence others (in positive ways) and to have increased control over self; to design lessons for identity meant your lesson had to enhance how a person felt about themselves and what they knew about themselves as a human being; and to design lessons for connection meant the lesson had to designed in such a way as to enable to person to see themselves as part of a larger world. Designing with these hooks in mind was intellectually challenging and forced us to continually try to see the world from the perspective of our kids.

"Connection" is the need I want to unpack here. The need to belong and to see yourself as an accepted part of a larger whole is central to the individual psychology of Alfred Adler. Adler, and later his colleague Rudolf Dreikurs, went on to develop the idea of social interest, the idea that we live our lives as part of many groups and part of our basic motivational structure is to enhance our group lives. We need to watch out for each other and we need for others to watch our for ourselves. Community, then, becomes something much more than a nice place to live. Community becomes a necessity for establishing and maintaining our basic mental and spiritual and physical well being. Adler, Driekurs, and others were suggesting to us that our emotional health was grounded in our social relationships. Driekurs was particularly dogmatic on the point that classroom teachers need to attend to the social emotional climate of our classrooms. Our number one task as teachers is to manipulate the social and academic structures in our rooms so that the relationships between and among our children and ourselves are supportive, challenging, and filled with opportunities for us to discover and live out who we are as unique individuals within unique group. To be en-couraged is to be filled with courage - the courage to be yourself, the courage to discover who you are among peers, the courage to know your power and identity through your connections with others. Pretty heady ideology, ideology born of an era that saw millions turned to ashes in the ovens of Hitler's grand plan. Adler and Driekurs were both German Jews. I can imagine for them, their formulations about social interest were thoughts that held life and death meaning.

I spent over thirty years considering their views as ideology: theory, practice, theory and practice that worked in magical ways, by the way, when you watched Rudolph Driekurs work with kids and teachers. It was another German Jew, Kurt Lewin, who noted there was nothing so practical as a good theory.

Yesterday, I made a connection that tells me I no longer have to consider these ideas of social emotional connection and social interest and whole human beings as soft ideas, embedded in the clouded certainty of social science research. A chain of three events has brought me there.

Event One. My partner in crime in 1982 was Frank Watson. Sometime in 1982 or 1983, Frank brought the first Commodore Vic 20 to our Apex program. The Commodores were rapidly replaced by a bank of Apple 2e's and soon, our interns, our teachers to be, were tapping out commands to move Seymour Papert's turtles around a virtual space. I was at once, fascinated and repelled. I could see these early computers were more than virtual typewriters. Fifteen years before I'd read O. K. Moore's research on establishing autotelic environments to help struggling urban readers learn to read. But were these newer versions of Moore's huge vacuum tube computer going to replace cuisenaire rods and base-10 blocks and language experience as the vehicles to get young learners, learners who were suspicious of what schools could do for them, turned on to the power of their own brains? I thought not, but I was worried. In all these years, I have not been able to wrap my mind around the substance of my suspicion. There was something fundamentally different about mediating the learning of place value by manipulating virtual materials on a computer screen than there was by mediating the same learning by manipulating real blocks in a classroom! In short, learning with a computer was different than learning with what I called the real thing. And to be sure, I had strong opinions that it wasn't as good, at least for children up to the age of say, twelve or thirteen. There was something essentially cool and disconnected in the tap tap tap of the keys that I didn't like.

Event Two. During my sabbatical research last year, I came upon two articles authored by a crew of researchers at Duke University who had the capacity to dig deeply into the structures of how we think and feel, virtually. Their work establishes the physiological reality of emotional memory. I remember re-reading these two articles over and over and saying to myself, that's it. Adler, Driekurs, and all the other educators who knew how important it was to teach children as if they were whole thinking, feeling, emoting, running, playing people now had physiological proof of their ideology. Their ideas were not longer ideological invocations, they were simply good practice grounded in what we know about the way we are hard wired. The Duke researchers establish the circularity of thought and feeling because they have been able to trace the actual neurological connection between raw feeling and the interpretation and meta-processing of feeling. Thinking, feeling, behaving are connected now more than just by logic. They actually are connected in the circuitry of our mental processing. Now I knew that what I believed was not only right, it was also true. How important is the evidence condition to knowing? Very. At least to Israel Scheffler (1965), and to me. [Reference: Conditions of Knowledge.]

Episode Three. Gavin is one of my students in my current directions course, a two week intensive we are currently in the midst of. In his project, Gavin is struggling with a dilemma that approximates the dilemma I had when those Commodore 64s arrived in the Apex room in 1982. Although Gavin is coming at the issue a bit differently. Gavin is as personally connected to "community" as I was to base-10 blocks in 1982 and Gavin is sensing a threat to what he believes is central about one's actual experience and membership and participation in community. He's worried that people will equate the virtual communities so easily attained through a keyboard and the internet with the real communities that are so basic and necessary to him. Basic and necessary. Human beings need community, they need to belong and feel belongingness. Gavin and I are coming from the same place on that one. So how, we were discussing, does the virtual community experience differ from an experience of actual community? And as part of that discussion, we'd also talked about virtual warfare, the capacity of male human beings to kill, maim, torture, and do awful things to each other. We'd talked about kids, kids from conditions of generational poverty and their inability to show any real kind of social interest beyond defending themselves in the most physical of ways, and what was the influence of mediated environments on all this. How did the continual viewing of television as babysitter, how did viewing the news night after night with its images of car bombs, dismembered human beings, people running from mortar attacks, sobbing women in burkas, how were all these things connected to the fact that lots of kids simply can't feel much empathy for their fellow human beings?

Snap! It all came together. THe commodores, the base ten blocks, Alfred Adler, Rudolph Driekurs, the classrooms full of kids who hit and yell and scream at teachers, the inability to empathize, the experience of tap tap tap communities on a cold computer screen - they all come together for me now. Here's what I think. In our face to face experience of community - five people sitting or standing close to each other talking, arguing, listening, laughing, crying, whatever - our emotional systems are activated and processing every single moment of that interaction. I think the mere fact of being that close, physical proximity, sets the amygdala pulsing. Being with each other in real time is an emotionally mediated event. We are whole. The Duke research shows the emotional memory loop for every interaction we have. It shows that the ones that register strongly are the ones we remember and how we remember them is important. Merely by being in a situation, we can "get a feeling" that sets us on call for what is about to happen even if we don't remember what it was that happened that caused the feeling. Or, we can be in a situation that triggers the feelings of another similar situation. Messages are running back and forth between the seat of emotions and the processing centers for emotion all the time and it makes no difference where the stimulus comes from. Being in the real live situation is a thinking feeling moment.

I doubt the same is true for the mediated computer environment. I don't think the amygdala is triggered in the same way. The "distance" of the virtual world insulates us from having to feel and although the repetition of "bad things" opens up a whole other area to talk about - the area of desensitization to horrible events - I think the computer world exacts a multiplier effect on our numbed experience. In other words, virtual communities are literally felt differently because they are mediated. I'm suggesting they are more an experience of pure thought, an experience at once distanced and disconnected from our emotional processing centers. The computer world by itself is a disconnect. And perhaps, the computer world as a disconnecting medium of experience has to be reconsidered as a teaching tool.

So Gavin, thank you. I think you are on to something here and I'll look forward to learn where you take our conversation. For me, a thirty year question has achieved some resolution and of course, will lead to new questions and considerations. Just in case you want to use these ruminations as a diatribe against computers, don't! Life is an aptitude-treatment-interaction, so you know I'm gonna say computers somewhere, with some kids, for some purpose, in some situations, you couldn't get a better tool. But as the medium through which we achieve our learnings about life? I think not. Absolutely not.

Posted by crathbon at 6:54 AM | Comments (0)

July 18, 2006

Shared WebSite, continued.

Assessment Issues from the shared space.

Human Issues:
What I'm seeing is more variety now among the six, relative to being able to use the site beyond simple things:

Simple - being able to click and drag, placing the cursor efficiently and successfully, loading the right browser, smoothly getting the url entered, signing in, moving around the site.

Moderate Complexity - editing print on a page, adding a link/making a page that's yours, adding information to a page, cooperative.

Complex - editing someone else's writing, adding links to external sites, adding links to sites within the wikispace, adding images, collaborative.

Infrastructure Issues:
1. VPN kicks off way too fast. There were probably twenty instances over two and a half hours that the VPN protocol turned off. This is very disruptuve to the momentum of almost any kind of directed instructional experience. You have to stop, wait, or face the choice of leaving someone behind as you go forward.
2. Add to this that some individuals are at the simple level of complexity meanss the momentum slows down even more as they get their sites up and running once again.
3. Batteries begin to die after 2.5 hours.

Helpful knowledge/skills to have.
1. clicking and dragging
2. create multiple tabs so you can click back and forth from a website to the wikispace - especially helpful when you are finding urls to create external links

Observations of how good things have become.
1. most get on the site automatically
2. the computers work fine with the exception of the vpn kicking off.
3. people are finding their way around the site exceptionally well.
4. people use each other quite effectively.
5. people cooperate quite well with each other - the talk that is "in the air" creates conditions of informal support across and around the table

Possible To Dos?
1. have a sheet of paper on the table so every person can reach it. Ask them to place a √mark in a column for every time vpn times out.
2. structure an exercise in which people have to edit each other's work.
3. ask them what we want / need to keep track of

Posted by crathbon at 5:48 PM | Comments (0)

July 17, 2006

Moving Into The Read/Write Web

I have the incredible opportunity to be teaching a class of six students right now. Six. I've never taught a class of six students. And having just come out of an intense EdPsych Seminar with 18 students, I wanted to try something a little different. I've been reading Will Richardson's Blogs, Wikis, Podcasts, and Other Powerful Web Tools for Classroom - or perhaps the better words are "playing with" Will's book, I've been wanting to use a shared website. Never done it before.

I love the idea of sharing the intellectual space with students in such an obvious way, and of forcing them to deal with each other (and me) in this very real tangible letter-by-letter collaboration. So I selected wikispace as the program to use after finding out the the original program I had selected was going to take five days to get approval. Hmmm. Five days would have taken me into the second day of the course. No thank you. I wanted to dive in day one. And dive in I did.

We seven are a varied lot. No one, myself included, super sophisticated in terms of tech expertise. Some still trying to figure out the click-and-drag thing. But we took it slow, everyone had an iBook, we hauled tables into the room from another class so we could sit around a table face to face, and I started to take them through the course using a projector and then had them put themselves into the course by interviewing each other, writing up the interviews, and uploading the text. The last half hour was spent talking about the "current directions" we were going to be interested in and I think we are "off" in terms of finding a topic of interest. Now tomorrow, I'd love to get at least one or two pairs of students to work together on a trend or at least to create one page for two closely associated trends. We'll see.

What have I learned so far.
1. start simple - demonstrate all, assume nothing.
2. build a way into the first moments of the course for students to get in, write, and publish
3. build a way into the first moments of the course for students to edit someone else's work (in this case, someone else's writing of an interview with you)
4. be aware of students who have limited access and have paper backup
5. constantly monitor if the technology is driving or serving the daily outcomes - my goal is to serve, not drive
6. I don't have to know it all. Hmm, where have I heard this before.

What I need to get better at.
1. putting myself out there in terms of being one of the content providers
2. provoking discussion
3. immediate feedback to students

Posted by crathbon at 11:26 PM | Comments (0)

April 3, 2006

Complex Instruction PodCast / KWL from Class

My Seniors are getting ready to implement a complicated Complex Instruction cooperative learning rotation in their classrooms. Part of our preparation was to focus their panic in a KWL we did in class last week. I offer this podcast as one way of responding to their questions. It's corny, but perhaps informative.

These are most of the "What I want to know about what I'm about to do with CI" questions I responded to in the Cast:

W – “What I want to know about what I’m about to do with CI.”
1. If a group of students just aren’t working well together, is it okay to switch them?
2. For resource card, can I use a non-fiction book?
3. For the pre/post test should we measure knowledge of content or multiple abilities?
4. What do you do with the activities/projects that are finished each day? Do the kids present them during the closing meeting?
5. Can I give a first grader two roes?
6. Will four different activities on food from around the world be too narrow?
7. How do I describe the role of facilitator to very young students so they do not find it unfair that this person is a type of leader? Perhaps they won’t have a problem with it.
8. I want to know more about getting slower processors and lower academic students involved.
9. How can I encourage students to work as a team so everyone is as engaged as possible?
10. Are there ever and groups of students that do not benefit from ci?
11. How often would it be beneficial to do CI? If it occurs once a week, do the benefits not become as