Generation YES Blog

Stage: A whole new world
You hear an inspiring keynote at a conference, read a book, or see a colleague use technology in their classroom. It clicks with something inside you.

Stage: Connection
You try to understand the role of technology in your life as an educator. Coincidently, you start to see this topic pop up all around you. It seems to be haunting you. You set up a blog reader and add a few feeds. You find a guru whose words help you make sense of the murky picture.

You read books, start your own blog, or change something in your everyday life. You go to an educational technology conference and attend every session.

Stage: Stepping into the void
You implement a project you never would have attempted before. You get more and more into the subject and are amazed that there is such a vast network out there. You add more blog feeds, listen to podcasts, buy books, start a wiki, subscribe to magazines, and join other networks and conversations. You wonder why grad school never felt like this.

You feel renewed as an educator and lifelong learner. Your colleagues wonder what’s gotten into you.

Stage: Firehose
You try too many new tools and join too many networks. You start to resent it when someone introduces something new. You hate your pile of unread stuff. Your blog feeds start to overwhelm you. No one comments on your best blog posts. It seems there is just too much to keep track of, and it never stops.

You get a bit depressed that you are so late coming to the party.

Stage: The big picture overwhelms
You wonder if what you are doing is just a waste of time. You find analogies to the failure of school in everyday occurrences. Your regular friends look at you funny when you start using words like “pedagogy” and railing about the “factory model of education” in everyday conversation.

You find that it’s not just technology-using educators who feel this way, that education reformers have been saying things like this for decades, even centuries.

You are sure that “school” cannot be fixed.

Stage: Ennui
You commiserate with your network about people who don’t “get it.” People who are coming late to the party annoy you. You tire of the clichés that seemed so fresh at first. You say things like, “If I hear about sage on the stage / guide on the side (or digital natives/immigrants, or anything 2.0, or insert your own pet peeve here) one more time, I’ll kill someone!” You meet your gurus and find out they are just human, and maybe really wrong about some things.

You stop going to conference sessions. Someone accuses you of being in the “in” group.

Stage: Renewal
You accept that you won’t ever be able to keep up with the hype machine and stop worrying about it. Your project goes well and your plans expand.

You start to narrow down your areas of interest and explore them deeper.

Stage: Building expertise
You attempt something on a wide scale, collaborating with other like-minded educators. You find renewed energy as you work with students or teachers and see things change. You find books, even some written decades or centuries ago that support your beliefs. You become better able to articulate the “why” of all this. You think about going back to school. You find experts outside of your newly constructed network.

People look to you for advice and expertise.

Stage: The circle of life
You connect with new people in their own early stages and give them guidance as they figure out what you have figured out. You mentor someone. A student says you’ve changed their life. You learn something new and feel that spark. You rededicate yourself to changing what you can. You think that if these ideas can take hold, even if it has to happen one person at a time, there is hope for the concept of school after all.

You use the phrase, “sage on the stage vs. guide on the side” - see someone’s eyes light up and forgive yourself.

Sylvia

PS Of course, this is not a recommendation, aimed at any person in particular, or suggests a linear path. Sometimes I feel like this all in one day! Hope you all take it in the spirit it’s intended and get a chuckle out of it.

We’ve all heard calls for various kinds of open curriculum wikis. Districts, states and foundations are designing portals, wikis and other online databases so that educators can upload their lesson plans and activities, learning modules, or other bits and pieces of what they do in their classrooms. The idea is that as more educators upload content, the collection becomes a free, shareable curriculum.

Sounds good, right? The problem is that this reflects a fundamental misunderstanding of curriculum.

Curriculum is a statement of opinion - it reflects the author’s beliefs about the nature of teaching and learning. Curriculum is pedagogy in action, the day-to-day plan for how to teach a subject, based on what we think students should learn and how we believe students learn best.

Curriculum is not just a collection of content. It is more than disconnected lesson plans attached to a list of standards. It reflects a person’s or group’s belief about what order to approach topics and what kinds of activities work best for most students. The pacing, depth, and order are all based on these beliefs, which can differ widely between authors. Curriculum authors have to think long and hard about their philosophy regarding the subject area and presentation of the material. Directions for the teacher reflect a belief of how much scripting a teacher needs to deliver the lesson as envisioned. They have to create consistent assessment plans that support and complement the lessons and activities. The pieces — lesson plans, activities, and assessment– hang on this superstructure. Without the structure of a consistent philosophy, these pieces are useless.

Unfortunately, beliefs and philosophy don’t make good subjects for open wikis, at least not the cast-of-thousands Wikipedia kind of success we all imagine. That’s why the calls for open curriculum wikis, free portals, and lesson plan collections that depend on large numbers of independent educators producing bits of curriculum are doomed to failure.

Without a guiding hand and point of view, anything added to a curriculum wiki will have no anchor in a common belief about the nature of teaching and learning. Even hiring editors doesn’t solve the problem. Sure, editors might be able to clean up things like grammar or level of detail. But how will editors collaboratively decide whether to favor student-centered teaching or direct instruction? It will be useless to a teacher who finds that one lesson calls for student collaboration on a long-term project and the next is a 30 minute lecture with downloadable worksheets for students to silently complete.

I’m all for breaking down the monopoly that textbook publishers have on schools worldwide. I’m completely in favor of people using the collaborative power of wikis to build reference and teaching materials that reflect their views about learning and teaching. I have nothing but praise for people who decide to freely share the results of their hard work in public, like the MIT Open Courseware.

But hoping random lesson plans can knit themselves into a coherent curriculum is just magical thinking. At best, teachers may find a few nuggets they can adapt for their own classrooms. At worst, these pipe dreams soak up time, energy and money.

Sylvia

It’s been two weeks since the Constructing Modern Knowledge 2008 summer institute in Manchester, NH, and I’m still processing it. CMK08 was an exhilarating learning experience, both as a participant, an observer, and as part of the team making it happen. You don’t often get to have all those experiences at once!

Preparation
The goal of the conference was to offer a way for educators to spend time being a learner and using technology in deep, rich, constructive ways. A way to “walk the talk” of taking off the teacher hat and exploring what makes learning with technology different. There was no way this could be another session-session-session conference, or even a typical “hands-on” workshop.

So participating in the planning of the event was an eye-opener. How do you create a climate where people feel supported, but will still take risks? What “stuff” do you need? How to structure a day with enough time for working on projects, learning new things, collegial interaction, and sleep. The man in charge, Gary Stager, has had plenty of experience planning these events, but I’ve had almost none. So listening to him talk about how this could work, drawing on 25 years of experience was informative. I learned a lot before the event even started. In the end, each day consisted of a short opening framework from Gary, one guest speaker, and the rest of the time spent working on individual and group projects. Plus evening social events!

The stuff
OK, we brought a lot of stuff. About 100 books that ranged from academic classics to books that are great for classrooms and students. Here’s the list. Lots of books about the Reggio Emilia philosophy of education - they are all beautiful, with amazing care taken to represent children’s work and discuss it thoughtfully. Two large suitcases of Lego and robotics materials. Lots of articles and how to guides. And then when we got to Manchester, we went to WalMart and Staples for more. We bought bubbles, marshmallows, bubble gum, a whiffle ball and bat, a printer, color pencils, crayons, art supplies, an a bunch of other stuff. What’s it all for? Read on…

More stuff
Once we got to the hotel to set up, we found 10 more boxes. Several companies had donated constructive, creative software and materials for our participants. Tech4Learning sent full suites of their creativity tools, including a whole Claymation Kit. LCSI sent MicroWorlds EX Robotics and Inspiration sent InspireData. Make magazine sent a case of Make and Craft magazines. Sibelius/M-Audio sent 3 keyboards and music composition software for us to use. By late Sunday night we had everything ready.

Sunday excursion
In the midst of all this, Gary took several early arrivals on a tour of Boston, his college home town (Berklee School of Music). They went to the MIT Museum and did a guided walking tour of the Freedom Trail. Once back from that, Gary had to rush back to WalMart to buy rice for some mysterious reason - more about that later.

Getting started
Monday morning started the institute. Everyone started to arrive and settle down, install new software and meeting and greeting. The introductions were amazing. People had come from all over the country, and two from Israel and Khartoum. We had kindergarten to high school teachers, math, science, art, administrators, public and private schools, tech coordinators, district — just about every combination of educators you could imagine. After some opening words, we brainstormed some ideas for projects - dancing clowns, musical sculptures, a video or simulation about the immigrant experience, a boat, a kaleidoscope and more. Then people grouped themselves on a project. My job was to float around and facilitate, connect people with resources, open boxes of stuff, find clay or eyeballs or pipe cleaners or debug programs or whatever.

Some groups took off right away. I spent a lot of time with a group doing a video using the Claymation kit and the Frames animation software. We set up the green screen and brainstormed ideas. Some of the ideas worked, some didn’t, and when we did a test with the software, we had our first AHA moment. Working with our test pictures and the software lead to another, wholly unexpected discovery and that lead to an even better idea. Our story took on a new and different shape before our eyes because we allowed it to and we had time. If we had rigidly stuck to the original plan and schedule, it wouldn’t have happened.

Someone started making turtles out of the clay. Why turtles? Not really sure how that happened. But suddenly they were the stars of the movie. Somebody said, “it’s hard to line the turtles up to the previous frame” and someone pointed to the onion-skinning button, and that knowledge was passed quickly around the table. Then someone else sat down with one of the keyboards and composed a song to go along with the movie. We didn’t have to sit through workshops on music software, frame animation techniques, or turtle carving. The idea of “collaboration through the air” that Gary had talked about that morning had just happened.

But I wasn’t supposed to just help one group! So I walked around and asked people what they were working on. Two or three groups were going strong. But I found some people just “playing” with software. Hmm…. that wasn’t supposed to happen, where were their groups? One of the groups had disbanded, some were sitting at the same table, but not working on the same thing. So, I asked our fearless leader, Gary, what to do - should I try to get people working in groups? No, he says, let people approach things in their own way. Offer them help but let them decide to participate. So although this is against my A-type to-do list mentality, I have to trust him.

A couple of people off in the corner are clearly not working on a project. I ask them what they are doing and they say they are doing lesson plans for fall. I encourage them to join a project and learn about some of these tools, to have the experience of learning. No, they say, this is a good time away from the office for them to work on these plans, but they promise they’ll start working on something later in the afternoon. They look at me and smile, clearly hoping I’ll go away and leave them alone. I do.

Some people are just doing amazing stuff right out of the box. What is the difference?

Sarah Sutter from Maine put it like this, “I figured someone would lead us through some exercises, show us some plans, maybe discuss how best to implement these new (to me) tools in the classroom, and I’d receive enough information to work with it later. Nope. Gary told us to take off our teacher hats, and he meant it. From what I observed, the quicker one transitioned from teacher to learner, the better things went.”

The Rice Sculpture and the Texas Boys
On Sunday, the two “boys” from Texas went on the tour of the MIT museum where they saw an exhibit of kinetic sculptures. They came back with an idea to recreate the moving rice sculpture in Lego, and even improve it by replacing the hand crank with motors. This was the cause of the late-night WalMart rice run. Be sure to read Paul Wood’s and Scott Floyd’s blog reflections with pictures and videos about their re-creation of this sculpture.

Scott Floyd - Drowning in rice and other deep subjects
Paul Wood - Constructing modern knowledge

By Monday afternoon, the first version was done - and it was fascinating. It had an organic movement to it that was both creepy and compelling to watch. This was more than a nice piece of engineering, it was beautiful. That was the first piece for me in what turned out to be my big takeaway from the week - the part that esthetics plays in construction of knowledge.

Closure
Each day ended with a circle where everyone could wrap up their impressions of the day. Typically I’m leery of anything that smacks of touchy-feely kumbayah theatrics. But it was important to bring the meta-analysis back to the day. People had allowed themselves to take their “teacher hats” off for a time, now it was time to step back and think about the meaning behind what was happening to them as learners and what it meant for how they might change their own management of student learning environments. More than a few people expressed how uncomfortable it felt to be “thrown off the deep end” and told to JUST DO something. But then almost all said that the feeling of moving past that discomfort and frustration was meaningful and necessary. Gary had mentioned watching for this “mouth-up frustration” as a good sign. But what’s the right balance of frustration and hand-holding? Obviously, in this group, there were as many answers as there were personalities. What does this imply for students?

What I learned
I know I’ll have more to say about this, but to wrap up this reflection, here’s some of what I learned from Constructing Modern Knowledge.

• A workshop plan needs a lot of space for people to adjust it to their own needs. Gary expressed this by not having a set agenda, but “appointments” - lunch was noonish, the speakers started only after they visited with the participants and saw the projects that were underway. The work was first priority, not the schedule.
• Some people walk in the door ready to hand their hearts and minds over to you, some have agendas you will never understand.
• Uncertainty and frustration signals growth and learning about to happen. On the teacher side, it’s tempting to step in right at that moment to “fix it” — which is exactly the wrong thing to do (assist, answer questions, yes… do it for them, no)
• Having more than enough “stuff” let people focus on what they wanted to do, not just what they could do. It became inspiration, not a recipe.
• You have to have enough time to let the process work. People are different, but I believe this unconventional experience worked for the vast majority of participants. It also signals the kinds of learning environments that work for kids.

There was so much more to talk about — the guest speakers, so many other very cool projects, the role of esthetics in learning, but this is enough for today!

To close, please enjoy a video by Michael Steinberg, shot, edited and presented at CMK08!

Sylvia

Flying home from San Antonio, Texas and the National Education Computing Conference (NECC), my head was full of ideas about pushing the boundaries of teaching and learning. Sitting next to me was an older gentleman from Texas. He was a grandfather nearing retirement, working in the banking industry. We exchanged the usual family and job facts, and as usual whenever I mention that I work with schools, he wanted to share some stories. Of course, everyone is an expert at school. They went, they have children — it’s the one institution that we all have in common. People like telling their stories.

This particular Texas gentleman had grandchildren ranging in age from babies to teens, and his daughter was a teacher too. “It’s not like back when I went to school,” he said after a time, and I braced for the rest of the sentence. I fully expected it to be something about getting back to basics, or how today’s kids don’t value education and the parents don’t discipline them.

But then he said something completely different. He said that when he went to school, his teachers encouraged him to think, and that they helped students do their work, not just memorize facts. He said that he’s often in his grandchildren’s classrooms and “the teachers talk all the time” from the front of the class and wondered how anyone could learn like that. “It wasn’t like that when I was young,” he sighed.

Later on, I sat there questioning all my assumptions. Of course not all “olden days” teachers were drilling students. How could I have had that image in my head? When people think about the past, of course we all have had different experiences. Talking about how school used to be is meaningless; it’s too dependent on your personal experience. Unfortunately, we hear this kind of language all the time, whether it’s to point at the “bad old days” or the “good old days” Neither of them exist in reality.

People are always searching for the new new thing - it’s human nature to enjoy stimulating new ideas. However, things like 21st century skills, where we try to define what students need to know “now” (as if creative thinking wasn’t ever valued,) is a solution to a problem that may not exist. It may just be a reflection of our vast, yet fundamentally faulty collective memory of things that never were.

Sylvia

One of the best things about going to conferences like NECC is meeting up with old friends and finding out they are still doing the same awesome things that made them friends in the first place.

Here are a couple of really old friends… Dennis is going to kill me for that, especially since he is looking all svelte these days…

Pictured here are (from left) Dennis Harper, founder of Generation YES, Scott Parker, teacher and tech coordinator from Hill City, Kansas, and Ed Gragert, executive director of the International Education and Resource Network (iEARN.)

Scott uses both GenYES and iEARN in his schools. His GenYES students teach students and teachers how to access iEARN global projects and use them in every classroom and in every subject. I’ve written about Scott before - Longfellow Middle School wins Kansas in the World Award for Excellence in International Education is just one example.

Ed Gragert and Dennis Harper were both named to the 2008 Edutopia’s Daring Dozen list, which has their images staring at each other across the page as if they were plotting to change the world! How did the Edutopia art director know that’s EXACTLY what happens when you get the two of them together?

iEARN was also prominently featured in the NECC Tuesday morning keynote by Jim Carleton And Mali Bickley. We heard that people really enjoyed seeing the variety of student projects that they showcased. Real work by real students and real teachers - what a concept! (You can get the webcast of the keynote here. Note: I have not tried to watch it myself, and I did hear that the site is very slow. Maybe the traffic has eased somewhat.)

Another treat - a podcast interview with Ed Gragert from The Teachers’ Podcast — The New Generation of Ed Tech PD blog. If you’ve never heard of iEARN, take a listen to this. In 20 years, over 20,000 schools and organizations, over 1 million students in 115 countries have participated in iEARN global collaboration projects. Students connecting, collaborating, and changing the world, one person at a time.

Here’s to good friends, old and new!

Sylvia

I got a message today from Carolyn Foote, aka technolibrary on Twitter, with a link to this article in the New York Times - High Cost of Driving Ignites Online Classes Boom.

I’d almost forgotten that we’d gotten off on an interesting tangent at one of the NECC 2008 EdubloggerCon conversations. It was Will Richardson’s discussion group on Here Comes Everybody, the current bestselling book by Clay Shirky. Will has done a couple of terrific blog posts about this book (here’s one), and recently did an interview with the author.

We were talking about revolutions, and whether education is ready for one, and why is it taking so darn long when it’s so obvious that we need one. My comment was that most revolutions don’t happen for the right reasons, they often happen for disconnected reasons that somehow push a mass of people past a tipping point, or when something happens that shocks people out of behaviors that seem set in stone.

And in fact, my example was that gas prices may well be the catalyst for the educational revolution we’ve all been waiting for; that arguing for a revolution may well be a waste of time, but that being prepared may make all the difference.

Chris Lehmann’s recent blog post, Why Educational Change is Hard (and the limits of “Here Comes Everybody” for schools, brings this up in a different way. He writes, “We have to understand, in ways that Shirky describes, why low-risk mediocrity is almost predictably a better outcome than high-risk success.”

Revolutions stall at the gate because of this. Revolutions are high-risk endeavors. “The devil you know…” (which is such a good cliche that you don’t even have to finish the sentence.) Revolutions aren’t planned by committees of well-meaning citizens. Something unpredictable happens, and then history is written by the prepared and the lucky.

Will gas prices be the tipping point for an educational revolution? Perhaps. Will it be the revolution we want? Maybe. I certainly think it has the potential to deliver the kind of systemic, no-boundaries impact that could shake the basic structure of school as we know it.

Once you mess with the bus schedule, can the bell schedule be far behind?

Sylvia

Scott McLeod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog has invited all bloggers to contribute to an annual tradition of his.

On July 4, 2008, blog about whatever you like related to effective school technology leadership: successes, challenges, reflections, needs. Write a letter to the administrators in your area. Post a top ten list. Make a podcast or a video. Highlight a local success or challenge. Recommend some readings. Do an interview of a successful technology leader. Respond to some of the questions below or make up your own.

In 2007 my Leadership Day post was:

Leadership Day - Leaders of the Future

Last year my focus was on the leader in every learner. This year I’d like to take a short stab at speaking directly to administrators.

Here’s my speech:

Just do it.

OK, that’s it.

Well really, there’s more, but that’s the gist of it. Technology is a fact of life. Allow it to be part of your students’ lives in ways they can control. Give your teachers time to explore new ideas about pedagogy as they introduce technology. Encourage your teachers to use it in ways that shift agency to the student. Fight the tyranny of the new but don’t get stuck in old ways either. Yes, we all know it’s a crazy, impossible balancing act. That’s the job.

Wake up, smell the coffee, the world is not going to wait for another committee meeting or district re-organization or the next version of Windows before it moves on. Don’t worry about China or economic globalization flat-world whatever, the reason to lead your school into the future is because there is no alternative.

Are you worried about parents? Give your students time and resources to produce creative technology projects that will be so compelling that it’s obvious you are doing the right thing. Your PR to the community is crucial. Calm the crazy ones down but don’t let them paralyze you. Ask parents who “get it” to be allies. I can’t tell you the number of times as a parent I found out too late that my kid’s principal changed good policies because of one unreasonable parent and never told anyone.

Are you worried that kids will be kids and something “bad” might happen? When has something bad not happened along with the good. Mistakes are learning experiences. Do the obvious - backups, necessary security but not more, and then if something happens, fix it. It’s up to you to lead with positive energy, not fear.

Are you wondering about “kids these days”? Don’t - they aren’t that different than we were. They want to be heard, loved, respected, taught, and challenged. Technology is just a part of their world, not a secret handshake.

Students are 92% of the population at your school site - to be a leader, you have to lead 100% of the population, not just the 8% who look like you. A leader understands who he/she is leading, but you don’t have to BE the same as them.

So if it feels better to figure out Facebook or ipods or your cell phone, that’s great. But that’s just part of the equation. It always astonishes me when educators go to conferences to hear student panels, and then rave about how much they learned. Why is this a surprise? YOUR KIDS ARE THE SAME, why aren’t you talking to them? They aren’t geniuses, they don’t have all the answers, but they ARE the answer. It’s up to you to unlock that puzzle.

And for goodness sakes, DO something.

Sylvia

Scott McLeod of the Dangerously Irrelevant blog does a semi-annual round-up of edu-blogs, based on Technorati ranking. For the first time, the Generation YES blog made the list of top 50, coming in (drumroll…) dead last in spot number 54. Yes, we are number 54 of the top 50. (I can hear the crowd chanting in the distance… we’re number 54! … we’re number 54!)

Actually, I kind of like the irony of being beyond last. Because as Scott acknowledges, there is precious little on which to base a list like this. Scott looks for blogs with specific tags related to education. Technorati gives a “rank” based on far your blog is from the top of the list, and “authority” based on how many unique blogs link to yours. (Read how Technorati calculates authority) There’s not much else to measure, except of course which blog you personally like to read.

But doesn’t this seem awfully familiar in education - measuring what’s easy instead of what counts? Technorati rankings are the standardized testing of the blog world. And just as misleading.

For one thing, after I finished admiring my unique list position, I quickly scanned it for my favorite education blog - Bridging Differences. It’s NOT THERE. How could this be? I checked their Technorati authority and sure enough, it’s less than this blog. Impossible. That’s simply insane.

This blog is a back and forth conversation between Deborah Meier and Diane Ravitch. These women write beautiful, thoughtful pieces that show respect for the other while standing up for what they believe. They both have long and distinguished careers creating real change in education, and yet they stand on opposite, equally principled sides on many important issues. In my mind, it’s the best education blog, BY FAR. If you aren’t reading this blog, you are missing something special and important.

It’s so good, I often DON’T read it. What I mean is, when I see the “new post” indication for this blog, I save it until I have the time I know it deserves. I’m never disappointed.

So why doesn’t their blog have a higher Technorati authority? Probably because Deborah and Diane are not consciously part of the blogosphere. They don’t link much to others, they don’t announce new cool things, they don’t jump into the latest who-said-what-first discussion, and they don’t blog about blogging. Their blog is simply a vehicle for a substantive conversation about the most important issue of all — how will we make the world a better place for children.

Essentially, Bridging Differences is not making AYP. Bad, bad blog.

So here’s my thought for the day. Everybody link to Bridging Differences. Read it too. Go ahead, make my day, push me off the list!

Sylvia

Wow2! The Women of the Web discussion last night definitely deserved a double-WOW. Lots of great questions and conversation about GenYES and student empowerment, Seymour Papert, technology integration, project-based learning with technology, and more. The hour flew by, and reading the chat log today it looks like the backchannel was just as informative! Lots of great links and questions.

Here’s the podcast link on the WOW 2.0 website.

Many thanks to Sharon Peters, Dr. Cheri Toledo and Cheryl Oakes for being gracious hosts and expert interviewers. And good thoughts out to Jen Wagner who had to instead attend a funeral for a colleague.

Sylvia

Women of the Web 2.0 hosts weekly web chats about education and new technology. Tuesday, June 3. I’m proud to be their 79th guest!

Join us at 6-7PM Pacific time for a chat about Web 2.0, student empowerment, and gender issues in technology and education. Details here at the Wow2.0 website.

Please feel free to add to the wiki if you’d like to suggest questions and topics.

Sylvia