Remote Access

21st Century Manifesto

Since I first saw Sir Ken Robinson's TED Talk on the importance of education and creativity, these thoughts have been close to the front of my mind. I have long been a believer of the fact that schools often seem to do almost everything in their power to knock the creativity and the curiousity out of kids. Having read The Ingenuity Gap by Thomas Homer - Dixon I often wonder about the raft of problems that humanity is creating for itself that we will one day have to solve.

This is why I find this article on Wired's website so interesting. 10 pictures and ideas on hacking the Earth to solve some of the environmental crisis we are living in the middle of. Innovative thinking and innovative problem solving.

These are the times we are living in.

These are some of the issues we need to be educating people to solve.

As I tried to say in my K12 Online keynote session, classroom 2.0 is about recognizing the power and the potential of education to solve the problems of today. Classroom 2.0 is about creativity, about new types of knowledge that are needed, and about new forms of representation. It is about creating networks of students and teachers who are able to look at the world openly and honestly and work on the ground in real and concrete ways to overcome some of these difficulties. It is about recognising the power of education to change the world.

As teachers, we need curricula giving us the openness and the freedom to work with current topics. We need policies and structures in place that allow us to network students and their knowledge. We need an understanding of the pedagogies and environments that encourage this type of thinking and problem solving.

As we move further along into the twenty - first century, classrooms, districts and nations that can solve these problems in education and learn to work in these ways will reap the economic and innovation benefits. Those that struggle with closing doors and tightening down structures for whatever reason will languish and be left behind.

Openness. Connection. Innovation. Knowledge.

These may be the only goals worth pursuing in education. Those places not working towards them will become the walled fortresses of our time who can only watch from the battlements as others pass them by.    

Tags: innovation, connection, knowledge, TED Talks, Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer - Dixon, education

Revising Wikpedia

Among everything else, I write a newspaper column for several small newspapers in Northern Manitoba. Not much, about 600 words or so each week focused on technology and culture. Not a geeky "how - to" column, I'll often write about ways that technology and culture are intersecting and changing each other. This week, in light of Google's announcement of Knol, I thought it would be a good week to write about Wikipedia, knowledge, and experts. I put a call out on Twitter looking for a page that shows "live" recent changes that have been made to WIkipedia pages. Within a few minutes I received a few replies from several different people, all highlighting this site. Exploring it a bit I found that if you click on the small "diff" tag on each change that is displayed, you are sent to a page that highlights the differences between the new version of the page and the old version like you would be able to see on a wikispaces history page. This live revision of knowledge fascinated me and I looked at a few different pages before I came upon this change that had been made to the Moon Landings page:                                                                  

Now this was even more interesting to me. Vandalism in action. While I am a fairly heavy user of Wikipedia and a strong supporter of their concept, I'll admit that I've made few edits to their pages. I do know that a dedicated team of people watch the millions of pages carefully looking for changes such as this one. But I was surprised to keep my eye on this page and see that it was corrected in under twenty minutes. I had though that "hot button" issues and topics would be watched carefully and corrected, but for a random historical page such as this to be fixed so quickly ensures my confidence of this site.

I encourage the students in my class to use Wikipedia. I encourage them to use it first and confirm what they find there by checking other sites. That being said, I encourage them to do the same at all other sites they find as well. Any site on the internet is just as apt to be incorrect and biased as any other, and with the huge community of users editing and improving Wikipedia, errors, omissions, and biases are apt to be caught and corrected.

Knowledge is out of the gate.    

Tags: wikipedia, vandalism, knowledge

Being Mentored by Mentored Mentors

Sometimes a circle is the most perfect shape there is.

For the past year, Darren Kuropatwa has had several people mentoring his blogging highschool students. Leaving a constant string of in - depth comments on their blogs, these people push his students' thinking into new waters constantly. They are some of the best commenters I have ever seen. This year, Darren and I talked about his students giving back a bit of what they have received.

We have set up a system where several of his highschool students are now leaving comments for the students involved in the thinwalls project. These hugely mature and talented students are driving commenting to new heights in our blogosphere, leaving behind them a string of deep thoughts. Interestingly, these students are posting their comments on a blog here for all to see. As well, one of their math blog mentors, Lani Ritter Hall has picked up on this comment blog and is leaving advice for them about their comments. So lets get all of this straight: Darren's students were mentored on their blogs through comments. They stretch their wings and act as mentors themselves on other blogs. Their original mentors now are mentoring them to be good mentors for others.

Oh. Did I mention as well that Alec Couros had some of his digital interns working as mentors with Darren's kids as well? So university students mentoring highschool students who are mentoring middle school students. LAst year we worked as mentors to a group of grade five students in Georgia so the string was even further extended.

Its all about giving back.

Photo Credit: "Serene Circles" : http://www.kazuya-akimoto.com/2006/2006images/IMG_4777_serene_circles.jpg    

Tags: darrenkuropatwa, lani ritter hall, mentors, blog, alec couros

Students and Skype

Trying to solve many of the communication problems we have been having in our thinwalls collaboration, we have been moving all of our students over to Skype. We tried Moodle and watched it repeatedly crash. We worked with the IM platforms the kids are using only to find that all of my students in Snow Lake were using MSN and the students in LA were using Yahoo Messenger. We then moved to Meebo as a work around and found that some students still could not connect.

So we made the decision to move everyone over to a central platform that we know is stable and also allowing them to extend their conversations into audio and possibly video.

While this still worries me, I was enheartened this morning by several students coming in to class first thing Monday morning telling me about a great audio conversation they had on Skype last night. They had found other people in the class and were having a conference call between them, adding more people from the class as they found them. One of the students even told me, "I changed my MSN name to "everyone get Skype, it's way better." I had sent a note home to parents explaining the need for the change over and asking them to help their child install this software on their machine. I enjoyed hearing from a number of parents who told me that they were learning many new things from their child.

Possibly over another hurdle....

Photo Credit: http://tn3-2.deviantart.com/300W/fs7.deviantart.com/i/2005/247/1/3/heart_by_jhebat.jpg

Tags: skype, classroom, thinwalls

Rethinking Adolescence Rethinking Schools

While I wasn't able to attend, the Canadian Education Association has posted mp3s and such of the workshop they held in Winnipeg at the end of October entitled Rethinking Adolescence Rethinking Schools. While I have not had time to watch / listen to many of them, there are some great nuggets here. I am also very pleased with the openness and willingness to record their sessions and place them online.    

Tags: CEA, conference, online

Apparently I Work in a Filtered Environment

I was truly surprised last week to click on a link in twitter that had been posted by Alec Couros. It was a link to a copy of his Ph.D dissertation. I was absolutely shocked to find this come up:

I know this is a box that many people are familiar with and one that raises the ire and the blood pressure of many people. I've read for months people's rants about their battles with the filters in their systems and I have always taken great pride in the fact that in my building we had no system installed of any kind. It was great to be able to say to people that we believe in education and not censorship. The mode of operation in our building was always very simple. We first of all have students sign a relatively strict internet use policy. Second is that we go through it with students and outline the consequences to them, their grades, and their computer usage if they break this policy. Next, we enforce it. Kids who are places that are inappropriate or nasty are held to account. We check history files and keep an eye on our students expecting them to call us over if they accidentally run into something nasty. This has always worked fine and we have had extremely few cases of students who have needed us to call their parents in and meet with them, having the students explain why they have felt the need to surf porn sites in school.

And the fact is that I know that many nasty and inappropriate sites are not blocked at school. Just last week I inadvertently followed a link while I was checking out new twitter profiles and ended up someplace I should not have been. This is another reason why I was so absolutely floored to see this access denied notice show up on my screen.

I immediately took a screen shot of this notice using Jing, posted it to my flickr account and sent off a ranting email to my tech superintendent. Now this man is fairly new to his job but has embraced it with a sense of vision and interest. He quieted me down with a long explanation email talking about how light filters have been installed at the provincial level and offering to Skype with me about it further. He also told me that it had been in place for awhile and that it only says good things about our building and our students if we had never seen this notice before.

Now I understand all about due diligence and accountability. I understand all about online safety and keeping the focus on "educational" sites. But I have a terrible feeling that this is the end of Eden, the thin edge of a wedge.

And I am incredibly saddened to see it arrive.

Tags: internet, filtering, schools, yuck

Thinwalls and The Outsiders

We are in the final throes of finishing up our study of the novel The Outsiders in our thinwalled classroom. Beginning with a Skype chat back in October (while I sat in a questionable professional development seminar actually), our study of this piece has taken us through different stages and steps.

We read the book in both class in Snow Lake and Los Angeles. Instead of assigning chapter questions to suck the life out of the book, instead we had the students write a reflective blog post every two chapters. At first, we left this wide open to students. We expected them to write a summary of the chapters and we also talked about things that could be written about (traditional elements of literature: characters, setting, predictions, author's craft and style, etc.). Later in this study, we gave the students several words (heroism, fear, survival, and friendship) and had them choose one of these words for each set of chapters and defend their choice based on the book.

This part of our connection went well. We also built time in to our classrooms to get students reading and commenting on the posts of other students. They were involved, interested, and debates raged across the classroom and the blogospere about various things that came up in the book. We ended up with a fair number of pieces we were pleased that the students had produced.

For a final project, we wanted to take a different tact. We wanted the students to become more independent and think their way through this piece of literature. We set up a wiki where we asked kids to choose a theme from the book and organize themselves into the spaces they are interested in. After some shuffling, we had 17 total groups. We hosted an initial chat on Moodle for the students to set up their own times to chat. In this initial chat the students met to fill out a planning template we had posted on their wiki page. A basic outline asking them about their form of representation, a timeline outlining each partner's responsibility and their focus. From this point we provided class time and the students were on their way. While all of the students decided on a presentation of some kind (PPT or Google presentations or Voicethread), this actually might not have been a bad idea considering that we were only giving them two weeks to finish this project.

In the end, this was a successful connection but we learned a lot of things (as usual) about trying to hook kids together long term as we are doing:

- We've learned about the important of commenting on blogs compared to posting. They carry equal weight. They both need to be taught as skills and they both require extended periods of involvement to achieve some sort of mastery. For middle school students to push other learners in their class is something completely new to most of them and getting them to see the value of this difficult task is not easy.

- We spent the majority of our time during this part of our collaboration working with communication skills and channels. Over the course of this project, we had the kids using Moodle, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, Meebo, Skype, email, and the discussion tab on their wiki page. This number of tools shows the number of troubles that we had. We moved into using IM in the classroom after pushing the edges of what we could get Moodle to do for us. We thought this would hep to solve our troubles and increase the capacity of our network. Instead, it brought new problems. In the end, we still had students who had trouble connecting and the number of channels available to them may have led to some troubles and misunderstandings as they were often unsure of what tool they were to be using. But as Barbara has mentioned on her blog, the chat transcripts and the discussion tabs on the students' wiki pages have given us a unique view of their challenges and thought processes. One take away from this process that we have is that we have now made it a classroom requirement that all students have Skype installed on their home computers. We require kids to have specific school supplies, why not specific software?

- A constant stream of email, Skype chats and calls were required by the adults involved in this process to problem solve, open doors for students, and also to bring students together and hold them to account. We had to dedicate ourselves to this openness and these channels between our classrooms and schools. The time involved was not small, but this was essential to the success of this part of our collaboration. This was a "warts and all" process of transparency and openness.

Next up: a short collaboration, a compare and contrast activity of early leaders from Egypt and America allowing us to uncover ideas of what makes a good leader and what a society needs to advance.

Photo Credit: Collaboration http://flickr.com/photo_zoom.gne?id=235290355&size=m

Tags: thinwalls, The Outsiders, collaboration, Skype, dare-to-dream, Barbara Barreda

MacArthur Series On Digital Learning and Media

From danah boyd's Apophenia his AM I find that the MacArthur Foundation has rolled out into publication a full series of books on digital media, learning, youth online identity, play, gaming, etc., etc.

I've just started grazing through the series but it looks to be of enormous wealth and a feast of information and questions for people involved with kids, online behaviour and identity: ie: teachers.

While the series is academic in nature, they are written for a more general audience. Most exciting of all though was something I discovered on my own about these books: you can get each piece in them for free! I followed the links from Apophenia to the site and was searching through the table of contents that is posted about each book. Looking down on the left hand side of each page you will find a link called "Open Access Edition." Click on this link and you will be taken to another site where you can get a pdf edition of each and every essay in each of the books! Love MIT's commitment to making information available to all people. This may be great for educators as there may only be one or two essays that you are interested in. It's always better to have the book, but getting a few of the essays may be all that you want, so this is the way to go.

An excellent and exciting new resource that will give us more of a look into the kids in our classrooms.

Tags: danahboyd, apophenia, MIT, MacArthur Foundation, literacy, digital media

Wikinomics

Yesterday I finally finished reading Wikinomics. I found it fascinating on so many different levels; beginning with the subtitle: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything.

Several ideas still rolling around:

1.) There are and will always be, no matter what you do, large mobs of smarter people outside of your organization than there are inside. From Boeing to Xerox, the book gives numerous examples of ways that companies have developed porous boundaries, allowing them to decide what functions are best performed in-house, while handing over others to individuals outside the company who may be better suited to the work.

Implication for education - first of all, wouldn't it be great if you could outsource some of the things in your classroom (some mindless grading quickly pops into my mind) to someone else, so that you could concentrate on innovation and planning in your classroom? The second thought is that as the teacher, you are no longer the smartest person in the room. Collaborators from across he globe can be brought in to your classroom to mentor your students; and this is OK. As a teacher at this time in history, I feel strongly that our jobs are only partially about teaching. Our jobs are also about connecting. Connecting our kids to other learners and to information. How do we develop classroom structures and routines that both honour and utilize the possibility of porous classroom boundaries?

2.) Customization - Google allows its employees to spend 20% of their time on projects of their own design and development. As well, on the other side, many online businesses allow you to truly customize your experience, the information you receive, the look of a product you purchase, etc. to fit your needs and your life.

Implications for education - On both sides, customizing education could have huge implications. Imagine giving kids 20% of their day to pursue an agenda of their own that is focused on some large issue. What would they design? What kinds of questions could they wrestle with? What could the come up with? Imagine the skills of independent research, growth and learning they could attain. On the other side, the implications for us as teachers are huge. Kids simply need custom designed educational programs. While a nightmare for us at first glance, there needs to be tools that allow this to happen. For us to truly motivate and engage kids they need custom sources of information and assessment that meet their skill level and needs.

3.) Customer Tool Kits - Much was made in the book about places such as Second Life and Amazon that allow their customers to create their own wealth on the companies own platform and backbone.

Implications for education - This is pulling back the curtain and letting the kids see the wizard pulling the strings. Can we give kids more control over the "strings" of classroom life? Can they design their own rubrics and other assessments? Their own projects? What about going beyond that and allowing them to design their own learning agendas and spaces? Can we create a basic frame for the learning that happens in our space and then allow kids to use these tool kits for their own good?

Still plenty to mine out of this book which I think has great potential as a source of ideas for educating our students in new ways that will meet the needs of our emerging, peered, globalising society. Many of them are fringe ideas in business and in education, some of them are simply untried and to the point of heretical as opposed to a "traditional" educational structure. But they have been proven to work. It is time for us to re-imagine what education can be and stop looking at what it is.

Tags: wikinomics, collaboration, classroom, globalization

New Laptops Coming!

Finally... After several years and wanting and advocating..... My classroom is getting ten brand new Asus eee pc laptops! These small machines have a seven inch screen and almost no harddrive space. But they do have enough power and enough expandability for dealing with probably over 90% of computing applications that are used in my classroom. They run on a Linux OS and have a very simply interface with direct links to the web, to Skype, to Google docs and to iGoogle. They come with Open office installed and they have plugs for both headphones and an external mic. They have a built in webcam, speakers and a mic also built in. I received one of these machines form my technology superintendent to test out this week and I have been constantly impressed with it. It has enough power to easily run voicethread, to watch videos on youtube, capture video from its camera and work with audio files. I had trouble with the touchpad and the mouse, but adding a small USB mouse solved this instantly. The only application that I would really like to see installed on this machine is Google Earth and I'm going to have to figure something out for that. I will have these ten laptops, the four desktops that are already in my room and I have another five students that regularly bring their own laptops to class. That puts us at nineteen total machines for twenty three students.... So close..... I've learned that some models of teaching and learning are very hard to move towards without this network capacity. This is not an issue of bandwidth, but of students having access to information and other learners around the globe at the point of instruction. We will have a lot of learning to do as a class to fully capitalize on these machines. While I have managed in the past to design a learning space that revolves around information, having this access is definitely a step I have been waiting for and advocating the move towards. This will push my ideas of studio and of teacher as network administrator further. I am considering making some changes to my classroom layout to allow more for small groups of students to work together with a few machines. I will need to find ways in both my classroom physical layout and my learning structures to make local and international collaboration more central to what I do. Ideas of incorporating white space into lessons as Dean Shareski talked about in his presentation on design loom large. Of course there is a "cost" to being the beta tester for these machines in my division. I've agreed to open my classroom to others who may want to come in and learn about using technology in classrooms. I've also agreed to write a manual of instruction or suggestion for the applications that are on these machines. A basic "how-to" for incorporating technology in the classroom and for these machines specifically. The idea of the division is to construct "plug and play" labs that will come with a set of these small pcs, a wireless access point, a tech manual, and my pedagogical manual. It will be a fair amount of work, but something I am willing to do to get these machines. By early next week I will have an arrival date for these machines. They may be here before Christmas, but with only two weeks left until the break, I would guess early January is more likely. Let the planning begin!    

 

UPDATE: Here are a few more pictures of the eee pc that I took on my kitchen table this morning.

Tags: assus, eee pc, dean shareski, design, classroom