Browsing articles tagged with " author"

Question 154 of 365: What are fences good for?

Jun 4, 2010   //   by Ben Wilkoff   //   365 Questions, Uncategorized  //  No Comments

Nearly all of the houses in my neighborhood have fences, many of which are in severe need of repair. They are coming down because they were all built in the early 80′s. So, every few days I see new fenceposts being dug and placed. Pretty soon, all of the fences will be new again and we the peer pressure will mount on any house that doesn’t pony up.

But, whenever I see a new fence I am reminded of the Robert Frost poem about good fences making good neighbors (or not, if you read the poem according to the author’s intent). The fences that are around our houses are serving to separate us and to ensure our isolation, and for the most part, we are all in agreement that they are a good idea. We know that we are demarking the land that is ours versus the land that is yours. It isn’t egalitarian; it is ownership.

We know that we will never be as good of friends or find the kind of close community that places without fences seem to be able to achieve, but we are good with that. Until we learned that the people who live behind us are the most loving and amazing family. The husband and wife are genuinely attracted to one another and the three children play together and with their parents in a real and wholesome way. There are fits and there is yelling, but they love each other just the same. And my family and their family anticipate living in these two houses for years to come. We are looking forward to that, too.

So, what else would we do, but start planning to put a gate or a enormous slide between our two houses, circumventing the fence in the hopes of bringing our two families even more together. We have decided that it is more important to have the ability to roam freely and rely on one another for things than it is to preserve all of the privacy that was originally envisioned.

And that is the way that I feel closed platforms like the iPad are moving. In the beginning, all of the apps worked on their own and could only speak to their own data. This was great for focusing your attention on a single thing (this goes for many facebook applications and even Google web apps as well), but it was terrible for portability and ease of use. Now, though we are starting to see a sort of convergence where apps can open up files within another app. For example, the mail app now allows you to open productivity documents in any program that allows for editing of those documents. Apps like Documents to Go allow you to edit Google Docs and then sync them back up or upload them to another service like Dropbox. We are moving away from the default of emailing yourself objects and moving much more toward the requirement of syncing objects with all of the things that need access.

All closed systems need to be able to do both. I get the benefit of a neighborhood of applications or houses, with walls seoarating them. This allows each one to be the best house or app it can be. But the value of a neighborhood is when people come together. Be it through slides or garage sales, we all need to find those others that can add value to our existence. The fences are good for preserving privacy, but they are terrible at creating new spaces or relationships.

I want both. I want to be able to have an unique identity and also find a way to see how that idenity fits in to the greater picture. Without the grater picture, there really isn’t much left but being a shut-in without the capacity for collaboration or knowledge sharing of any kind. As enticing as that sounds sometimes, I don’t think it is in anyone’s long term interest,

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Question 127 of 365: Whose hands are we in?

May 8, 2010   //   by Ben Wilkoff   //   365 Questions, Uncategorized  //  2 Comments

I used to have trouble reading. Not with the words that were on the page or with figuring out the metaphorical language either. I had trouble listening to what the author had to say. I constantly let my world view crowd out anything that was being intended. It can be said, that for a time, I couldn’t read.

Specifically, I couldn’t read Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God. I couldn’t understand that there could have been a time when people thought of God as only angry and not filled with grace and love. I kept apologizing for the author. I kept on injecting my evangelical upbringing into the equasion because that is the only way that it made sense. My background blinded me to the truth that was meant to strike fear into anyone that heard those words. When I spoke from this ignorant perspective, my English teacher corrected me, and rightfully so. He wanted me to be able to see what was really there and not what I was putting there in its place.

I would like to think that I can read now, that I can listen to everything that is coming in and respond to it as truth. I would like to believe that my response to the world is not of replacing reality with my own, but in responding to the reality that other represent so that we can all exist without modification.

But, I’m not sure I still can read things while I suspend my own world view. I’m not sure that I can have conversations without my narrow-minded focus getting in the way.

Today, I had a discussion about the virtues of collaboration, as I do on many days. This time, though, I monopolized the conversation because people were looking to me for possibilities. I brought forward options for co-authoring a resource. I put together a collaborative document, and then let the idea fly.

My question is, what didn’t I read by doing this?

What world-view, no matter how steeped in my own experience, is causing me to keep reliving the same event with my English teacher all those years ago. Back then, I was told I was wrong. Today… nothing.

The biggest reason for it is that I didn’t allow allow silence to occur as it naturally would as people are thinking. Akward pauses do not mean that people have nothing to contribute, but I treated them that way. I didn’t allow the pause to mean as much as the note (to borrow one of my favorite musical metaphors). If I was half the collaborator that I am claiming to be, I would have let people not talk for more than 30 seconds. I would have asked people their stories about their own co-creative endeavors. I would have not tried to “push-back” on others ideas, but simply listen and try to absorb what it is important.

Here is one thing that I believe: All the world is a text.

Not a stage or a performance or a game or a challenge. The world is a text, to be read and understood. To be listened to and noted. It doesn’t need my additions in order to be complete. It needs me to underline and annotate. It needs me to put up sticky notes and tell others just how great it is.

And if the world is a text, I need to read it better. The information is there, I just have to try and figure out what it is telling me.

So, here is what I would like to do:

1. Take 1 e-mail a week and try to figure out with other people exactly what is being communicated. I would like to dissect the diction and parse the syntax. I would like to analyze the stories and try and see the significance of the words. I would like to ascertain the author’s purpose and use all of this information to better figure out just what the relationship is between the sender and myself.

2. Take a single meeting a week and not talk. I would like to take copious notes on everything that I hear, but I would like the luxury of not talking in at least one meeting a week. I would like to use this time to hone my listening and contextualizing skills.

3. Draw a lot. I am a terrible artist, but there is nothing that is so honest as a few chicken scratches. I don’t feel awkward about being wrong in a drawing. I can represent the texts that I see around me, and be proud that I am doing my best to represent them alone because I don’t know how to be more artful. In writing, I can make things more descriptive (and perhaps deceptive) than they really are. In a crappy drawing, they are what they are.

In the end, I want to be in the hands of anyone that is angry. I want to get caught up in the text of those experiences. I want to know them intimately and believe that they are someone’s truth. Those hands are the only kind that matter to me at this point because the hands that I chose to create only support an increibly small amount. I want big strong hands, those that support everything we need to experience the texts around us.

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Guest Teaching 10.29.08

Oct 29, 2008   //   by Ben Wilkoff   //   365 Questions, Uncategorized  //  No Comments

Cores 1+4:

  1. Write-on: 
  2. How can we decipher the symbolism of Maus 2, extracting more meaning from only the images?
  3. Frame analysis:
  • Describe- Describe the frame in detail. Make sure you find even the smallest pieces of information that are hiding within the illustration.
  • Explain- Explain the meaning of each of the objects and details in this frame. What do these things symbolize or represent? Why does the author use this image instead of another one? What message is the author trying to convey through this frame?
  • Expand- Show how this frame and its different meanings relate to the rest of the book or to your own life.

4. Use Photo Booth to take a picture of the frame you would like to analyze.
5. Annotate the photo with description, explanation, and expansion using preview (after you have converted it to a PDF)
6. Go to Slideshare.net and upload your file… Make sure that you tag it with maus2.
7. Look at our greatness.

Cores 2+3:

  1. Write-on:
  2. Using a backchannel to discuss and ask questions about Animal Farm (While we read).
  3. Text animalfarm and then your question or comment to 41411.
  4. I also need a google jockey to get images that help to express what is going on in Animal Farm.
  5. Read Chapters 9 and 10 of Animal Farm.
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    The Ripe Environment: Interdependent vs. Independent Questioners

    Jun 26, 2008   //   by Ben Wilkoff   //   Uncategorized  //  No Comments
    The Ripe Environment: Independent Questioners [ 10:30 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (326)

    For as long back as I can remember we have squashed the questions that only help out the individual and focusing only upon the questions that benefit the most students. The tangential question is not allowed because it is a distraction to the learning, rather than an enhancement. The student who thinks divergently is allowed to do so only if she doesn’t speak. An environment such as this is not ripe for learning. In fact, I would make the case that it is rotten.

    The students that are dependent upon one another to guide their learning may learn in an environment where only one voice is heard at a time. But it takes so much longer to get to true point of significance because each of the learners can only move as fast as the question or the answer. The backchannel allows many students to ask questions, but the learning doesn’t happen until those questions are answered. Backchannels inherently are also not very searchable or friendly to going back through and pulling out the most important elements. Rather, they are representations of the thinking going on in the background of a session or class period.

    Rather, the Interdependent students need a place for an organic question and answer that they can all edit and work within. They need a collaborative document or wiki that is a constantly reworked FAQ for the content. Each student is able to learn from one another and save that learning. They are dependent upon one another for their learning, and that is the way that they wanted to be.

    However, it is something so much more amazing to allow the independent questioner to come into the mainstream of the classroom or session. The Ripe Environment allows for this type of learner to engage in the experience without feeling like an outsider.

    Traditionally, independent questions are a challenge to authority… and they should be. They should challenge what is truly the most important content being presented. But, rather than having students distracting everyone with a question, they will be creating learning for everyone by proposing a solution. The independent questioners most times do not really want an answer from the presenter, teacher, or workshop facilitator. They would much rather answer the questions themselves; they just need the okay to go and research it themselves and the opportunity to present what they find.

    So, my proposal is this: Let learners get engaged by a divergent question. Let them find out what they can on the answer. Let them have time at the end (or middle, or beginning) of a session to present their findings. Let them be authentic. Let them create something new.

    Maybe this isn’t revolutionary. Maybe this is simply building and letting the learners come. Regardless, we aren’t doing it enough, and for that I am regretful.

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    The Ripe Environment: The Markers

    Jun 26, 2008   //   by Ben Wilkoff   //   Uncategorized  //  No Comments

    The “I know it when I see it” form of collaboration is no longer valid.

    We need new ways to tell if learning is happening through group contribution. We need to be able to assess collaboration, but we can’t do it the same way that we assess writing or proficiency. Those skills are much easier to boil down to a continuum or rubric. Others have tried, and we have been for the most part satisfied with their traditional, enigmatic, and mostly non-educational continuums for collaboration.

    These forms, however, are not worthy of our cause. They provide us with a way to see things in an abstract sense, showing a fictional path to collaboration that is just as hopeless as using the term as a buzzword to show that change is occurring.

    Instead, I would like to outline the types of collaboration that occur in The Ripe Environment. These are the markers that we should be striving for and looking for:

    1. Learning objects to be used by multiple learners, created by multiple learners. (This does not include one person writing or creating and the others supplying their input. True collaboration means that everyone has their fingerprints on the potting wheel.)
    2. Collaborative asynchronous lists. (Never underestimate the power of listing. And yet, the power is not in the listing. It is in the reordering, reorganizing, and reconstituting a list. Think of wiki collaboration here.)
    3. A followable thread of discussion (This can be through linking, commenting, or something like voicethread)
    4. Shared Space with over 10 revisions (Any object or space that has been edited or revised more than ten times by multiple authors can be considered a respectable work of collaboration).
    5. A mash-up or remix of anything (This type of collaboration marker is the halmark of true collaboration. The best examples are when the masher doesn’t know the mashee. That is when the unintended (but most amazing) concequences of sharing and collaboration kick in.)

    Obviously this is not an exhaustive list. What are the other markers of collaboration in The Ripe Environment?

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    The Ripe Environment: Backchannels exist.

    Jun 26, 2008   //   by Ben Wilkoff   //   Uncategorized  //  No Comments

    Whether we provide students or teachers with a backchannel, one will form. So long as there is more than one voice in a learning environment, the need to be heard will be undeniable.

    Students may pass notes or they may text message in their pockets.

    Teachers may point to a highlighted passage or simply make a face of disgust.

    These things are not meant to stay in the background. They are essential, and as such, must be elevated to their rightful place in the classroom. The backchannel must influence the front-channel and must become the front-channel if the discussion and learning going on there is more important.

    But, before I get too ahead of myself, let me set my definition of a backchannel:

    A backchannel is the running commentary (critiques on, questions about, distractions from, references for, resources under) the dominant information stream. This dominant stream could be a lecture, discussion, video, or any other attention getting activity that would normally occupy the majority of the learners.

    This may sound like quite a distraction. Why should we bring the note passers into the discussion? Why should we encourage distraction? Because it is how we learn.

    Kelly Christopherson does a really great job of highlighting how a backchannel actually functions in a Ripe Environment, but I think the hardest thing to understand about a backchannel is balencing the two things that inherently have to go on within an classroom, but are not always so center stage. He says it this way:

    Watching the crowd made me realize that we have a long way to go as educators. Many people in the room seemed to be having difficulty with the two things going on at once. Maybe that is why so many educators become frustrated with the use of cellphones or laptops in their classes; they don’t see how the two things can be going on at once.

    The rapid fire writing down of resources, texts, or quotations is all well and good during a class or PD session, but what about questioning those things. When does that happen? If all learning is conversational and requires relationships, when are those relationships born and when do those conversations occur? They occur during the backchannel, if and only if one is set up and is relevant to those in the audience.

    The experience that Kelly describes above is one that happens far too often. Those who do not find the backchannel relevant write it off as distracting, or worse, destructive. They want the front-channel to be the only channel, even though their brains and pens are commenting non-stopped on what is being said. We need to teach the value of commentary, fact-checking and questioning. We need to construct The Ripe Environment for the backchannel.

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    The Great Remix Debate

    Dec 18, 2007   //   by Ben Wilkoff   //   Uncategorized  //  No Comments
    The Great Remix Debate Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (142)

    March 28, 2007 04:56AM

     

    I give all of the credit for this podcast to my amazing students. They were the ones that kept a debate on intellectual property, remixing, and mash-ups going for nearly thirty minutes. They were the ones that came up with the amazing examples to support their points. They were also the ones to inspire many thoughts on creating rules for how we use content in the classroom. I am now convinced that each classroom of students should decide for themselves just what they want to be done with their content. Should teachers be able to use it for next year’s class? Should teachers remix their content into more polished work? We need to be asking the students to come up with what their own boundaries for intellectual property are, and we need to be teaching them where the boundaries are drawn already. I have decided to split this podcast up into about 40 chapters because that is how many different ideas were thrown around (mostly by different students). I have attached each student’s blog to the chapters in which they spoke. The one request I have is that you comment on this post and tell us which side won the debate. (Although, I’m sure my students wouldn’t mind if you commented on some of their blog posts either.)

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    The Great Remix Debate

    Mar 28, 2007   //   by Ben Wilkoff   //   Uncategorized  //  No Comments

    itunes pic
    I give all of the credit for this podcast to my amazing students. They were the ones that kept a debate on intellectual property, remixing, and mash-ups going for nearly thirty minutes. They were the ones that came up with the amazing examples to support their points. They were also the ones to inspire many thoughts on creating rules for how we use content in the classroom.

    I am now convinced that each classroom of students should decide for themselves just what they want to be done with their content. Should teachers be able to use it for next year’s class? Should teachers remix their content into more polished work? We need to be asking the students to come up with what their own boundaries for intellectual property are, and we need to be teaching them where the boundaries are drawn already.

    I have decided to split this podcast up into about 40 chapters because that is how many different ideas were thrown around (mostly by different students). I have attached each student’s blog to the chapters in which they spoke. The one request I have is that you comment on this post and tell us which side won the debate. (Although, I’m sure my students wouldn’t mind if you commented on some of their blog posts either.)

    Share