Question 81 of 365: What can we reverse engineer?

I would love to be able to talk about the reverse engineering of DVD encryption or iPhone firmware intelligently, but mostly I would be quoting from wikipedia entries on the topics. I love the fact that people can take a look at an object or technology and see just how it was put together. It makes me hopeful that anything we create could be undone. That is a very safe and satisfying feeling, knowing that people are working on undoing all of the problems that technology presents for us in the hopes of figuring out just what benefit was there in the first place. Yet, I can’t speak with any authority on any of it because I am not a part of those communities.

The best I can do is approximate.

I can compare their reverse engineering with my own. And I reverse engineer ideas. More accurately, I reverse engineer the stuff between ideas. Let me explain.

It is my belief that in-between any two ideas there is a machine that connect the two and makes the first one the “input” and the second into the “output”. It is a technology so highly advanced that no manual exists and therefor it must be reverse engineered in order to achieve the insight that both ideas represent.

Concretely, the idea of our schools as they exist now and the idea of our schools as they exist in the future or as they might be are ones that are both fairly easily juxtaposed. You can hold the two of them in your head quite easily. And yet, going from input to output is a massive problem for anyone who endeavors to be the machine in the middle. They are trying to exist where a mechanism is clearly supposed to go. The machine is something that is more complex than one person or even a single group of people. It must be reverse engineered, just like DVD encryption to figure out just what it takes to get from one to the other. Simply plugging in already made mechanisms for change, simply doesn’t work. You must understand every single circuit and ghost within that machine.

Other machines that require reverse engineering are between the ideas of collaboration and time management, community and creation, and data and decisions.

Because these machines are so complex, they require many people to work on figuring out how they work. There must be huge teams of people who are doing nothing but taking them apart and putting them back together. We need people courageously braking through the barriers intentionally put there by the machine’s manufacturer. We need people to talk about and promote every step of the process. The in-between machines don’t want us to know everything that they have to offer. They are interested in being intentionally obtuse and confusing, which is why we have to share all of the information that we have gathered as widely as possible, so that someone who is coming at the issue from a different angle take take up where we left off.

Another problem that I face in my work for Reverse Engineering is that many people do not believe that these machines exist. They believe that you have to create the go-between for big ideas and goals. They are okay to achieve part of the machine and then stop there because they have established at least part of the conduit from one idea to the next. Only some people can travel through their machines because they are kludgy and can’t perceive the whole problem. These half-baked machines are never enough to really place the two ideas next to one another. There are always intermediate steps that can either lead closer or further away from what it is that we really need.

I reject this premise, however. I believe that there exists a certain technology, community, and innovation that will allow us to place chaos in the middle east and peace in the middle east next to one another. We just have to figure out what that is. Let’s assume it is possible. Let’s assume that we aren’t just going to byte off a tiny bit of what we have promised. Let’s assume that we just have reverse engineer our way to understanding.

So, while I can’t reverse engineer my computer, I am doing it for ideas. The next one I want to tackle can be expressed like this:

Me [machine] funding for my ideas.

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A question

This is a really interesting question.

First, if you are looking for engaging videos to show for professional development, I would look here:
http://www.speedofcreativity.org/resources/videos-for-pd/

As for introducing the subject of engaging students with technology, I think that you would really have to find a good itch that you think all of the teachers want to scratch. What is the one thing that they can do with technology and students that they couldn't do before? Why should they care about technology?

Places like http://classroom20.com, or http://supportblogging.com, or even something as specific as http://voicethread4education.wikispaces.com/ would work well to figure out just how deep the topic goes with your teachers.

As for an article, I like http://blog.futurestreetconsulting.com/?p=94, many of the posts from http://weblogg-ed.com, or any of the presentations at slideshare about educational technology.

If you are really interested in starting this conversation, I would recommend that you start up a discussion group over at Google Groups or set up a wiki for this purpose. Or, simply get an e-mail group going if that is where your teachers are at. Creating an avenue for this kind of conversation is the only way to make it last. Let me know where you want to go from here. Creating change is not an easy business.

Posted via email from olco5′s posterous

Community requires tending.

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a story mostly about tyranny and the corruption of utopian ideals, but in the very beginning there is a passage that means something very different to me. It deals with the leadership of Mr. Jones before the rebellion, before the animals decide to take the farm into their own hands.

“The fields were full of weeds, the buildings wanted roofing, the hedges were neglected, and the animals were underfed.”

This quotation represents all of the things that happen when Mr. Jones gets too distracted to work, to maintain his environment, and to make life better for all those involved. To me, this is about not tending the community. It is about letting things lie fallow which must be uprooted and overturned to see what is underneath them.

Our communities are just like this I think, both in our classroom and outside of them. The communities within our classroom, especially the collaborative ones that we are all striving for, require an immense amount of tending. The Discovery Utopia wiki that my students are working on (and the reason that we are reading Animal Farm in the first place) is not an exception. If I do not constantly draw attention to the great things that are going on there, the community seems to just pass right on by them. If I do not look for the troubling points, the issues that nearly every student seems to be struggling with, students stop using the community. They find other ways to occupy their time. And that is one of the most interesting parts about our communities. They are communities of choice.

All communities of choice are ones that can be thriving in one minute and vacant in the next. So, how do we tend for consistency? Well, we feed the animals (is it weird that I am referring to my students as animals). We put up new buildings for them to play in. We design the space so that it is inviting and provokes the best kind of authentic creativity: their own.

I think that the lesson is pretty clear. If we do not tend to our communities, they will fail. The inhabitants will rebel and either stop using them, or turn them into something that rejects their purpose. And, if Animal Farm is any indication, the inhabitants of a untended community will become just like us and not tend to their communities. I mean that in both a virtual and real-world sense.

I hope this comes across as something other than a Language Arts teacher’s metaphorical analysis.

Beyond Rubrics

This podcast was created because of a discussion I had with my students about the merits of rubrics in a School 2.0 classroom. The data was mixed. Some students felt very comfortable with rubrics because it let them know how to get an A. Others believed that rubrics would hinder their creativity and ability to be authentic. Although I had asked students to help me create a rubric for an assignment, I had never asked them if they thought a rubric was a good idea at all. This podcast is a summary and a discussion of what I decided to do: Student-Centered Youbrics.

Show Notes:

• 00:00:00: Intro to Rubrics 2.0
  The Podcast Blog

• 00:01:46: The Great Rubric Debate
  The Value of Amateurs

• 00:03:15: Rubrics in Authentic Learning
  In the Students own Words

• 00:04:45: The Youbric

  The Decision

• 00:06:11: The Downside of Rubrics
• 00:07:16: A Geek!Ed! Moment
  Episode 67

• 00:08:35: Youbric Vs. Messy Assessment
  Messy Assessment according to Wes Fryer

• 00:12:14: The Teacher and Student Assessment Connection
• 00:12:57: Conclusion
  The Discovery Utopias