International Education News

Yesterday, I live blogged an address delivered by Tim Magner at the MEGA Showcase at the Friday Institute.  Magner is the Director of the Office of Educational Technology with the U.S. Department of Education.  The single commenter of that blog expressed disappointment that we did not receive a…

..grand ideas for how to change our education system to better prepare this generation of students to compete in a global market.

I commented that I was not disappointed, because my expectations were lower.  I have to say that I was impressed with Magner.  He’s smart and he has an amazing command of the issues, the programs, and examples of innovative working classrooms.  Only once did he sound like a Republican, when he expressed doubt that more money would be coming for technology, explaining that when we ask for money, enterprising reporters will find evidence of waste, publish it, and people won’t vote for more funds.  We’ve been hearing this for more than 20 years now.  We react the way that we do about waste in government, because we’ve been trained to.  Waste is not necesarily a bad thing.  It is can be a byproduct of risk-taking and innovation.

Magner is telling a compelling story about a need for new teaching and learning, for new classrooms, for a rethinking of the entire system.  I do have to admit, however, that I am no more optimistic that we’re going to be able to pull it off.  He said that we have no common language for reshaping a vision for 21st century education, and he is correct.  It’s why the new story has to be plain, simple, and energizing.

The best part of the MEGA meeting, hands down, was the show case.  There were probably thirty groups represented, mostly classroom teachers who were demonstrating various projects going on in their classrooms.  I wish I could remember all of the ones I saw (and I only had time to see about two-thirds of them.  The high points that I remember:

• 

  Two classes were using video games in the classroom.  An elementary school (Williford Elementary School) was using Quest Atlantis, developed by the Center for Reseearch on Learning & Technology at the University of Indiana.  The other was a high school class (Enloe High School), which was using a game developed by the science teacher, on a gaming platform developed and supported by HIFIVES at North Carolina State University.

• I didn’t see any classes that were blogging, but did see two that were using wikis.
• I had a conversation, via iChat, with a teacher in Lee County (above) whose class is visited regularly by pre-service teachers at North Carolina State University.  This was especially cool and very-doable.
• I saw a video about bullying produced by three middle school children.
• I saw a class that was podcasting.

So much of what I saw, we weren’t even talking about one or two years ago — brand new conversations.  Alas, there are far more classrooms out there that still reflect, all to closely, the conversations we’ve been having for decades.

This in from ETAN (EdTechActionNetwork).

Tomorrow evening there is a Republican Presidential Candidates Debate taking place. MSNBC is offering an opportunity for viewers to vote on questions to be asked during the debate. This is a great opportunity to get the candidates talking about education technology as it relates to competitiveness!



Please take 5 minutes to vote for the question Mary Ann Wolf posted by visiting:



http://dyn.politico.com/debate/showquestions.cfm

When the message was sent yesterday, her question had made it to the 2nd page.  at 6:23 this morning, it has a little better than half way up on page one!  Let’s make it climb.  Let’s make this an important issue.

[Live Blogged — please forgive any misspellings or awkward wording]

Each spring, MEGA holds a showcase event where teachers and students from the area (all over central North Carolina) are here demonstrating some of the things that they are doing with technology, and mostly with science.  Interestingly, I’ve seen two classes that are using MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments) in learning.  An elementary school that I did some staff development in a couple of years ago.  They are using a tool called Quest Atlantis.  The children are playing the rolls of humans who have landed in Atlantis to help the people (beings) there to solve their problems.

The high school class is using

Tim Magner, Director of the Office of Educational Technology, U.S. Department of Education.

Tim Magner, the director of Educational Technology with the Department of Education in Washington, is our speaker, and is said to be planing to talk about School 2.0.  I’ll be jotting notes down here.

We’re not in Kansas any more.  Things are different.  Lots of reports that are talking about these changes and education is the engine of our continued economic viability. 

The advantage of using a cell phone over using a pay phone is that we prefer to call a person, not a place.  That was an interesting distinction, but mostly the presentation is the same sort of thing that David Thornburg has been doing for years.  But the message is important.  It’s an information and communication revolution.  We are needing more information, sharing more information, using more information.  “We now connected in more ways to more people and more information than ever before.“

Kids prefer text messaging, but it isn’t just text.  They’re sharing images, audio, and video — multimedia.

He’s talking ab out neil gershenfeld’s predictions about digital fabrication.  What do MUVEs help us in preparation for a world where the fabrication of our things is personal.  You’ll buy the chasis of a cell phone and design and make your own housing.  Very personal.

Now he’s showing a very interesting video about nanotechnology and the ability to have medication gear specifically to our DNA characteristics.  Nanotools that seek out and kill cancer cells.  He states that these are not only the new tools, but also the new jobs.  I would add that it is also the new questions.

Now, we’re getting getting to School 2.0.  The problem is that people talk past each other.  There is no entry point language to use.  It’s the reason that they created the School 2.0 Post.  Now he’s opened it up for discussion. There was a question about the Partnership for 21st Century Skills.  He says that what left out of this description of 21st century skills what it actually looks like in the 7th grade classroom.  “This is the messy stuff.  This is the stuff that doesn’t fit on a bummer sticker.“

While doing some research for an article I must complete today, I ran across this photo in Wikipedia.  The thing is that I remember this like yesterday, meeting with a tech guy at the Microelectronics Center of North Carolina (MCNC) in Raleigh, and his describing what this new World Wide Web tool, Mosaic, would do.  It seemed so fantastic, that I believe that I refused to believe it — something that would be used only among the most hi-tech with the fastest computers — surely not in the K-12.

At any rate, it wasn’t a year before I had it, and was already hearing about Netscape.

Technorati Tags: warlick education technology mosaic
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Last week, I had a unique opportunity — twice.  Lately, when I get to speak at a conference, I am usually doing just that, or only that.  I go in, do my gig, and then leave for another one or for some other type of appointment.  Last week, I was able to attend the entire AIMS (Association of Independent Maryland Schools) conference in St. Michaels, and all of the MICCA (Marylands ISTE affiliate) conference in Baltimore.

While at one of those events, I had a long conversation with an executive of an especially innovative instructional technology company, one I’ve talked about before.  Their specialty is tools that help students to express what they know and professional development that supports their tools.  They offer some highly innovative software as part of their catalog, but they do not develop it themselves.  They have a fail-proof method for obtaining the most creative and interesting tools.  They go to the U.K.

I’m not going to try to read too much into this, except to say that I had the very same experience in 2004, when I was able to attend the SETT Conference in Glasgow, Scotland.  We were in the heart of NCLB, and it seemed that two in three vendors in U.S. conference exhibitor halls were about products that guaranteed higher test scores.  They were about predictable outcomes.

What I saw in the U.K. was many more products that sold themselves based on unpredictable outcomes — open-ended applications that depended more on their creative use than scripted procedures.  Who are we paying attention to as we decide what and how we teach?  Dewey?  or politicians?

Image Citation:

Ozawa, Ryan. “Podcasting.” Hawaii’s Photostream. 25 Feb 2005. 2 May 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/hawaii/5424026/>.

Technorati Tags: warlick education technology software innovation creativity

My sappy gauge registered pretty high on this one! Please do not read to much into this post. I am just trying to understand why we seem to expect our lives to be so clean and safe. I’m exploring this from the perspective of an American in his mid 50s — which certainly influences my impressions.

Many years ago (decades), I watched a program on PBS about the tumultuous ’60s, the years of love, of protest, of experimentation with drugs, and dropping out of society.  It prefaced these years of generational contentiousness — the rise of the hippies and yippies — by going into our childhood, one that was almost as unique as that of our own children.  We were born of parents who had come of age in the Great Depression, survived a world war, and now enjoyed a golden American age of prosperity and a new culture of entitlement. 

Great diseases were cured.  An amazing road system was designed and constructed.  Machines were invented and mass-produced that would afford us leisure time that had only been enjoyed by the elite.  We grew being entitled to food, education, jobs, entertainment, and safety.  From the perspective of the Vietnam War and Civil Rights, we grew up believing that the U.S.A. was the greatest of countries and the golden hope of the future — land of the free and the brave and a land of opportunity.  Then, by our teenage years, we started slamming into the fact that our country was not always so great nor always so right.  We resented it and rebelled…

Yet, we continued to grow up with those expectations, those entitlements of prosperity, entertainment, jobs, and safety.  As news and entertainment have come to merge, we see so much more to be afraid of — fear and death.  As diseases have emerged, we wear blue gloves to protect ourselves from the deadly ailments that we hear about on the news.  We establish elaborate lockdown procedures, search airline passengers, welcome more police, build more prisons, ….

We hide from the problems, rather than solve them.  What are we doing to cure the desperation from which terrorism is born and crime grows?  What are we doing to understand sexual deviancy and predatory behavior?  What are we doing to treat drug abuse, greed, dominance, and a satisfaction to be ignorant and to practice power from that ignorance?  What are we doing to replace fear and hatred with compassionate and creative solutions to our problems?

Have we asked our children what they would do? 

Are we teaching them the learning literacies that they will need to solve these problems?

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Image Citation:

Parks, J. “Safety Vision.” VaXzine’s Photostream. 23 Aug 2006. 1 May 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/vaxzine/222961073/>.

Technorati Tags: warlick education technology safety

Yesterday’s post (And a Picture, Too), about the high school senior whose name and picture were included in her Charlotte Observer review of the movie, Fracture, generated a lot of conversation — especially for a Sunday.  The responses sat pretty much on opposite ends of the issue’s spectrum, initially reporting dismay at the news paper

…readers now have the girl’s name, face, area of residence, approximate age, and school district.

Also expressed, was dismay at all of the hysteria,

It seems to me that the raising of concern about publishing a name and a photo reveals not only a certain sense of unjustified paranoia, but also a real misdirection regarding the source of potential danger.

Given that this misdirection is so evident, one wonders why it would be perpetuated.

Safety is certainly a concern, but what truly concerns me is our desire to be afraid.  Where does that come from?  Why do news sources and politicians get so much mileage out of fear and death.

I saw it again in this month’s EdTech, a CDW-G sponsored magazine, that is actually quite a good publication.  But this month, the cover offers in bold print Cyber Predators, and features an elementary school child, sitting on a raft, using a laptop computer, being circled by sharks.  Fear & Death!

The story reports on two gruesome cases of girls who were murdered.  One met her killer in a chat room, and the other was reported to be active in MySpace.  These stories were directly followed by the sentence…

According to the U.S. Department of Justice, one in five children ages 10 to 17 has received unwanted sexual solicitations online.

Although cause for concern, the Justice Department report is somewhat less shocking with it is read in its entirety.  According to the same report, 16% of the solicitations came from females, 43% were younger than 18, 30% were between 18 and 25.

Again, this is a reason to be concerned and to teach safe practices when using the Internet — and it is quite a good article (Thwarting Cyber Predators) offering valuable tips.  But the image of one in five teenagers being stalked by sexual predators is far from substantiated by the actual statistics.  I look forward to every issue of EdTech and have written for the publication and will continue to if asked.  And although I respect and like their editor, I do not respect their portrayal of the dangers of Internet usage.

It’s all about a system that is floundering.  We’re looking for solid places to pull ourselves to or to push off of.  We’re looking for the new pavement on which we can get traction, and the best way, in my opinion is through these conversations.

What do you think?

Image Citation:

Babick, Betty. “Safety?.” Betty Babick’s Photostream. 28 Apr 2007. 30 Apr 2007 <http://flickr.com/photos/bettybabick/475834261/>.

Technorati Tags: warlick education technology cybersafety

Greg Farr’s post on LeaderTalk a couple of days ago resonated on a couple of levels, but none more than his reference to reframing the timeframe:

As I visited with staff and friends, it became increasingly apparent that I need to adjust my whole sense of timing on this.  A fair analogy would be to say that as I plan for implementation of Everything 2.0, I want to use a stopwatch.  But my staff wants to use a calendar.

I really enjoyed the way he made his own thinking transparent…his struggles are obvious.

But as I try to get used to life off the road for the next five weeks, I keep wondering. What’s the best way for us to define where we’re trying to get? Framing it in the context of schools? Of our own learning? Of the global shifts? All?

And more interestingly, I think, is do we really have a calendar’s worth of time to figure it out?

Every week, my kids bring home their “Friday Folders” from school, usually packed with paper…torn out worksheet pages, handouts from school, permission slips, tests taken, more worksheets, lunch menus, letters from the principal, more worksheets, more tests, an occasional fund raiser, and yet more worksheets. Wendy and I sign our names to much of it, usually in a Monday morning blur, our kids shoving it in front of our faces saying “Just sign it Dad, it’s nothing” or something similar when we ask just what it is we’re signing. And the next week, that signed paper comes back with another flurry of worksheets and tests and quizzes and god knows what else.

We’ve been collecting it, all of this Friday Folder paper, growing what’s become an enormous pile of it in the corner of our bedroom, a pile that I guess in the eyes of their school in some way represents the learning that my kids have done this year. I’m guessing we’re supposed to be proud of all of this accomplishment, this big pile of paper that my kids never, ever revisit as it sits there, growing week by week. Sometimes I look at it and see 1,000 paper airplanes. And sometimes I look at it and wonder if what it really represents is not so much what my kids know as what they have become, a couple of highly dependent learners, enabled by their teachers and their school to produce a constant stream of, of…of what? Knowledge? Learning? Busy work?

I was reminded of this by David’s post today where he writes about the need for students to become more self-directed, to take charge of more of their own learning in a world where, for the kids who are connected, at least, there is so much more to learn. I know this isn’t anything new; we should have been teaching kids that all along. But the fact is that what we’ve taught them is that the teacher sets the agenda, defines the method, assesses the outcome and controls the whole process. And as David suggests, it’s no wonder many teachers and adults in general seem to be waiting for someone, anyone, to teach them instead of taking the initiative to teach themselves; we are most all products of the system.

But I’ve been giving a great deal of thought to what my own children are going to need to be able to do when they get to where they have to support my wife and I in our old age, and I’m convinced that none of what they are learning now is going to in anyway ensure a pleasant retirement for us. They are not being empowered to learn, not being helped to become:

• Self-learners who are able to navigate the 10 or 15 or however many job changes people are predicting for them by the time they are 30
• Self-selectors who must find and evaluate and finally choose their own teachers and collaborators as they build their own networks of learners
• Self-editors who can look at a piece of information and assess it on a variety of levels, not simply believe it because someone else does
• Self-organizers who can manage the slew of information coming at them by developing their own structures and strategies for making sense of it all
• Self-reflectors who are not solely dependent on external evaluation to drive their decision making and their evolution as learners and people
• Self-publishers who understand the power and importance of sharing and connecting information and knowledge and can do it effectively and ethically
• Self-protectors who understand where the online dangers lie, can recognize them, and can act appropriately to stay away from harm

Of course, all of this requires a certain willingness to relinquish control, not just of the things we know but of the things we don’t know. In fact, that second part is even more important, I think.

The teachers in my kids’ school are good people, and I know I’m a tough parent. But the more I look at it, the more I’m convinced that my kids just are not being served by the constant passing of paper back and forth, by a curriculum that’s driven by stupid assessments that require answers that may no longer be accurate or relevant by the time my kids need to actually call them up later in life. It’s the exact opposite of what they need. And I’m not sure I can sign off on it much longer…

(Photo “fly the flickr skies” by gadjoboy.)

From the “Sometimes This All Scares Me” Department comes this item from today’s Wall Street Journal (fee today, but maybe not tomorrow.) Basically, it’s about a couple that decided on their newborn son’s name by…well…just read this:

So when Ms. Wilson, now 32, was pregnant with her first child, she ran

every baby name she and her husband, Justin, considered through Google

to make sure her baby wouldn’t be born unsearchable. Her top choice:

Kohler, an old family name that had the key, rare distinction of being

uncommon on the Web when paired with Wilson. “Justin and I wanted our

son’s name to be as special as he is,” she explains.

So now, thanks to Google, her son is named after a plumbing fixtures company. (Oh wait…buried in the story is the tidbit that they actually came to their senses and went with Benjamin instead. “Kohler,” it seems, whould have subjected him to playground ridicule. Just wait ’til he gets online…)

My kids are going to be so, so unclickable…