Remote Access

Wondering About Metaphors

Do metaphors matter in teaching?

I was thinking about this yesterday when I was talking to my class.

We talk with kids about having them "dig deep", "drilling down" into content to gain a "deeper understanding." Does this matter compared to when we talk to kids about doing research in order to "build up" their understanding, "constructing new ideas" as they go.

A simple thought. But I wonder if these metaphors give different conceptions to students about learning, about the tasks they have to complete and about what it means to actually learn something. Digging into content sounds like breaking into a monolith of knowledge that already exists and give the impression that, as learners, our job is to pierce this skin. Construction and building up of understanding sounds like an opportunity to make something new that is ours. It sounds more like bringing pieces together from various places.

I'm not sure if students would understand these differences, but it was one more of those things that had me thinking.

Tags: metaphors, teaching

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

Twitter in the Classroom

As part of our thinwalls collaboration, we are getting ready to begin using twitter in our classrooms.

All of the kids in each classroom have been reading the book The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton and posting responses on their blogs every two chapters. As well, we have been taking this time to try to teach commenting skills to the students and asking them to write more comments as part of this process.

The time is drawing near for us to complete the novel and head into a final project. We have decided to draw out the themes of this novel (youth and family violence, friendship, heroism, etc.) and ask the students what topics they are interested in working with and what they would like to do for a form of representation. This is similar to the International Teen Life project from last school year. The groups they are designing will have students from both Snow Lake and Los Angeles in them and planning will take centre stage for some time as students make decisions about what they would like to do. We will approve their plans or send them back for clarification or change, but one requirement of their final project is that their representation will have to be accessible by all students in both classes. We have decided that this will leave us wide open enough to allow the students freedom with their learning and the tools, but will require high level collaboration and networking skills.

In comes twitter.

All of the students in both classes have iGoogle accounts so we have been thinking about getting each of them to sign up for twitter accounts and simply pull the RSS feeds of those people in their network (five? six? kids working on the same topic) into their iGoogle homepagest. This would allow them to stay in touch with each other and also give them a tool to ask questions of those who they are working with, post suggestions, share resources, etc. But now I am worrying about the effect of being in a network with only a few other people. As those of us who are heavy twitter users can attest to, a small network often gives small benefits and does not achieve critical mass easily. Five or six kids working together and using twitter as a communication device will be closely connected and able to see what each other is doing, but it will not allow others who may not be in their group to contribute resources, help when trouble arises, or drive forward the conversation. But the 54 kids total we have involved in this collaboration are certainly enough to be a network.

This will all still need to be "OK'd" by my teaching partners in LA, but I believe that if we get all of the students and teachers who are involved in this collaboration into twitter, and get them following each other, we will produce a stream of thought that will be beneficial to their learning. It will have to be monitored as does any tool that we use with students. I am worried about the "signal vs. noise" ratio that may emerge, but I also know that my own network is sometimes used for serious learning, and other times to cajole, laugh, and make general contact with each other. We are human. That is our reality. Their network will be the same. I wish their was a way to subscribe to this feed to allow it be archived and categorized by user. This would give us much more data in the end.

Another experiment in collaboration and networking across several thousand kilometres.

Tags: twitter, classroom, thinwalls, collaboration, networking

I'm Going To Boston!

I was both honoured and frightened when Darren from the K12Online organizing committee asked me to be one of the keynote speakers for this years conference. I was impressed in its first year with the creativity that was shown in the presentations and I knew I was going to have to give a lot of thought to what I was planing on presenting.

Now I've been fortunate enough to have been asked to present at November Learning's Building Learning Communities 2008 summer conference.

I've watched this conference for a few years as the agenda unfolds and the session descriptions are uploaded. It has always looked phenomenal, and this year looks to be no different. I've managed to get myself in the middle of quite a crowd including such people as Ewan McIntosh, Will Richardson, Bob Sprankle, and Brian Mull.

This institute is not until the beginning of July but I think I will have my work cut out for me and I'd best get to work now on a session...

Tags: blc2008, november learning, will richardson, brian mull, bob sprankle, ewan mcintosh, k12online2007

Learning = Connecting

Just over a week ago, I wrote a post called Learning = Remembering? In it, I questioned the idea of learning being equated to simply being able to recall a bunch of facts. I had been to a presentation where the facilitator spent a lot of her day talking and demonstrating brain based learning strategies that were great for "improving recall" in her words. This worried me.

Over the past week, I've spent time thinking about this. If learning isn't remembering, what is it?

I've crawled up the side of the mountain slowly, and who did I find sitting there? George Siemens.

Although I am a great fan of George's work and have written about his ideas many other times, I am interested to begin to understand a bit more of the truth behind what he has been telling us: learning is about connections. Connections between people. Relationships between people and their information as well. Learning is an inherently risky, personal act. It involves changing our thoughts about an issue, our opinions, our understandings. Before this takes place, the relationships and the trust need to be there. Do I trust you enough to value what you are saying? Do I trust you enough to believe what you are saying?

This fall we've heard over and over again about the wonders of tools like Twitter and the power of the network of hyperconnected international educators we can now have almost instant access to. But I'm also realizing that this is moving my ideas beyond tools. The tools have changed and continue to change. We all have chased accounts, setting up at places like Voice Thread, Ustream, Operator 11, etc., etc. The tools will continue to change. So the tools are not important. What is important is that we realize the power of these tools and what they add to our classrooms. The tools let kids connect with each other on a personal level. This is not scary or creepy; this is life. We all connect to each other around us all the time, this is what relationships are about. We do it face to face and over the virtual learning networks we design and participate in. We cannot allow ourselves to be frightened of letting our kids getting to know others on a more personal level. We cannot expect them to delve deeply into academic issues under consideration without first allowing them to spend time with each other learning about others and their ideas and perspectives.

Today we have a third chat session scheduled with our partners at St. Elisabeth in Los Angeles. I guarantee that the first questions issued will be about the tragedy of the fires that are consuming southern California. This isn't what we have on the agenda for the chat session today, but this is about them and their connections to each other. They are humans, not unconcerned, unconnected robots. Last Friday they had a scheduled long weekend at St. Elisabeth's and it felt to me like half my class was missing. I missed talking to their teachers and their students. I wondered where they were and how they were spending their day.

These ideas of relationships between people, between information sources and about the power of the network are central to meaningful learning; much more than any tool will be.

Tags: georgesiemens, connectivism, relationships, learning, john pederson

PhDs Probably Shouldn't Read This

I had an interesting Skype chat last night with Konrad Glogowski. I had emailed him several weeks ago, asking if we could meet up. As we are both junior high teachers and I had questions that I felt I needed to pick Konrad's brains about. If you've spent some time with his blog, it will become immediately evident why I thought I needed to talk to him. He does amazing things in his classroom and thinks at levels several times deeper than many of us do.

We talked for over an hour about our classrooms, a wandering reflective chat, and made plans to meet again; but even from this conversation, I spent the rest of the evening mulling over one of the things we talked about: going against what we had been taught during our formal teacher training.

To say that teachers have an uncomfortable relationship with researchers is often an understatement. I know of no other profession who complains as voraciously about their formal training as teachers. This has always bothered me. The next time my doctor tells me he didn't learn anything during his time at university, I'm running for the door. I always think that there is plenty to learn and that the relationships between classroom practitioners and researchers needs to be cultivated and strengthened as we have so much to bring to the table.

But Konrad and I were talking about how much of what we need to do in classrooms to help develop a community of learners that is involved, caring, and thinking, is counter-intuitive to what we were taught in university. We were taught to be caring, but distant. We were taught to stand off and be objective. We were taught to be critical and constantly drive ahead, looking carefully for every moment to dive in with teacherly voice and advice.

Instead, with a blogging classroom, we often find ourselves deep into conversations and comments with kids about things that are nowhere near our required curricula. We find ourselves part of the community of learners, thinking through issues with kids, "doing" school together, not to them. Once the time has been spent first forming relationships, cultivating the community and building a trusted space, then the learning can take off. But how can we expect kids to post their deepest thoughts, and do their best thinking if we haven't spent time on the relationships?

We talked about how kids' blogs are like their bedrooms, a customized, safe space that is their carefully constructed digital identity; so much more than simply a space to write in. It IS them. As teachers we have an ultimate evaluative role, but getting there with our students together is how relationships to each other, to information, and to learning can dramatically change. Kids are much more apt to listen to us, to take our advice, to value what we have to say if we show ourselves to be human and wiling to listen and learn from them.

So to all of you teacher educators out there: don't forget the relationships and the potential that slowly surfaces, bubbles up to the top after the time has been spent allowing students to become someone in our classrooms.

technorati tags:relationship, konrad, glogowski, blogging, classroom

I Want to Play

"(Writing) is like making spore marks from mushrooms on white paper and swiping them away, looking for patterns."

- William Gibson being interviewed by the CBC.

William Gibson is one of my favourite authors and I spent last weekend getting a good start on his new book, Spook Country. I also realized something else this weekend: I expect to be able to play with the texts I am spending time with.

Fro example, in the novel, Hubertus Bigend is one of the main characters. Wondering who he is, one of his new employees Googles him and finds a Wikipedia entry. The funny thing is, on a whim I tried to find Hubertus Bigend on Wikipedia too; and I found him. Since the book came out, someone has created this entry and has used Gibson's words from the book. The same is true for Node. This is a magazine that turns up in Spook Country. Scary thing is, someone took this magazine and turned it into a real website. Wondering what else I could find I searched around and found William Gibson discussion boards, his own official website, and an hour long interview with him done recently by the CBC. This is what I listened to on my walk in to work this morning.

These texts are all interactive, they are extensions, playing off of the original, an organic growth. This is what it means to be literate. This is what I am demanding from the texts that I spend time with. I want to be able to dig further, to go beyond what I can see and read at first glance. I want to be able to read news articles and blog posts. I want to listen to the podcasts and search out the Flickr photos of the places that are mentioned in the book. I want fan fiction and more.

This is something the kids in our classrooms are getting as well. They want a full multimedia experience growing out from a single piece of text. They listen to the music, read the blog posts, and want to post their own comments, their thoughts, their YouTube pieces. They want to be a part of the discussion, the growth that happens from any text. Rigged up with a webcam, a built in microphone and a keyboard, they move between video, audio and text.

They expect to be part of the discussion, part of the living thing that text itself is becoming.  This is how we get kids excited about language, about writing, about thinking: by giving them the power to be part of the conversation. When we lock our machines down, filter their internet service and not allow them to be contributors we take away the involvement, the intensity, the power. Remember doing grammar worksheets in school? I don't. But I do remember art class, the time I got to take part in making a radio play and another teacher that let us act in class. They involved me, they challenged me, they forced me to think, to play with language, to defend my opinions.

Language fairly pulses and thrives across cyberspace. Let kids in to the conversation.

Rant over.

technorati tags:spook, country, william, gibson, language, classrooms, change

Classrooms as Global Commuinication Centres

"Every classroom ought to be a global communication centre" Alan November speaking in Shanghai at the Learning 2.0 conference, reported by Kim Cofino on Twitter

I want every child in my classroom to be part of an actively constructed, personal network of learners. Helping students to construct and situate themselves at a nexus of activity is my job. Helping them to understand how this will make their learning different, more powerful, more global, and more personalized is also my job. Understanding how traffic travels through a network, a person who is centrally situated in a network, with many incoming and outgoing connections becomes a hub. A learner in this situation will be at the centre of activity and information flow. This is what we want; kids who are connected and working in spaces filled with conversation, resources and feedback.

As I've written in the past, in education, we no longer enjoy a monopoly on information. Kids are just as likely (if not more likely) to have access to a quantity and quality of information outside of our classrooms as when they are inside. So if this is true, what is our key asset in education for the new millennium? If it isn't a monopoly on information what else is it? How else do we position ourselves to best educate those that are in our care?

By being places of connectedness.

By becoming connected spaces where students know that international collaboration is "business as usual" and "how learning happens," we change the possibilities for our classrooms and for our learners.

A global communication centre is a networked, connected space. It is a place where students are creators, commentors and consumers of information. This brings us back to ideas of Personal Learning Networks (PLNs) and having to rethink our pedagogy to make this type of learning possible. Classroom activities for students need to focus on connections and relationships with others and with information. Time needs to be built in to schedules for students chat, to post, to revise their thinking and that of others as essential activities and not as nice extras. Classrooms that are focused on connections value relationship building that is local and international.

This brings us into another level of tools. While the basics like blogs, RSS and wikis certainly support conversation and connection, it is supported to a greater degree through tools that allow a more synchronous, immediate connection. Tools like twitter, video conferencing, and instant messaging allow students more access to others in real time allowing connections to grow and strengthen.

This isn't about worksheets and grammar quizes. This is about authentic knowledge gained through authentic work.

technorati tags:PLN, alan, november, kin, cofino, twitter, communication, classrooms

Classroom Plans September 17th - 21st

Anyone playing along in the classroom planning game can see my plans for the week here.

Still a few challenges to solve but hopefully they will be tackled early in the week.

technorati tags:google, docs, classroom, planning

No Desk and No Plan Book

"This isn't a classroom, it's a place to hang out."

Quote from one of my former students upon walking into my classroom and seeing the end tables, plants, old couch, and how everything is organized in the room.

Exactly I thought to myself.

This place isn't supposed to be a "classroom" with all of the history and baggage that word carries with it......

I'm hoping it's something different.

technorati tags:classroom, organization, studio