Learning is Change

I am trying to create a learning environment worthy of my kids. That’s all.

I am working feverishly every day so that by the time my kids need more education than I can provide at home, an environment will exist that I would be proud to show to my son and daughter. For all of my hard work, though, I do not believe that it exists yet. I do not believe that a single school out there has gotten it right in terms of balancing pedagogy and technology or in terms of getting all of the right tools into the hands of the kids and asking them the right questions so that the tools actually get used.

I feel terrible about the fact that someone else’s kids have to settle for “the best we can do right now.” The fact that they can’t log in once and find all of their classes, all of their connections in their PLN, and all of their created works (or access these things at all) is shameful. All we can provide them with now is, at best, a set of tasks that will approximate a truly connected world, and at worst, a set of tasks that is simply helping to purpetuate an outdated form of education (disconnected learning).

In the interest of making promises and then keeping them, I am going to challenge myself and everyone else around me to create a learning environment that I would be proud to introduce my daughter to by the time she is of school age (3 and 1/2 years away from now). I guess I have been inspired by Obama’s moonshot rhetoric during his speach last night.

I’m not sure what the learning space looks like yet, but it is starting to take shape a little.

One of the biggest things that I learned from CoLearning 2009, was that if the conversations about change in education are easier to have with people around the world than they are to have with people around the state, there is something intensely wrong about that. It also challenged me to think up new ways to connect with those immediately around me and to break down all of the barriers to those connections as possible.

One of the easiest barriers I see that needs to be broken down, is simply not knowing who the other people are who are working similar projects around my state. As much as I would like to think of myself as holding a unique position and looking for unique answers about online learning, I don’t know this to be the case at all because I have only talked with a few of the people that could possibly be a part of the process.

In an effort to rectify this, I have gone ahead and created a Google Spreadsheet of all of the Online Learning programs that were registered with CDE this year. I have populated it with all of the information that I could find on each program’s “change agent”. Now, I don’t necccesarily want to talk to the directors or chief academic officers of these organizations. What I really want are the people who would be most interested in sharing trade secrets and opening up the lines of communication within the group of people. I have highlighted red all of the people that I believe are already change agents within their organizations.

My hope is that by leaving this spreadsheet open to any editing (go ahead, edit it and add your own information), we will be able to get enough people together to have a good conversation about the best way to do Online Learning in Colorado. I have also put a second sheet in the spreadsheet to examine the timeline of all of the Colorado online programs. I don’t have everything in there, but I think it is a good start. Feel free to change the contact information, website, or even the name of a program. I have claimed no monopoly on truth here. I am simply asking for the network’s best effort. Have at it.

As much fun as I will have reflecting on CoLearning 2009, I am too burned out to do so tonight. I am too burned out on conversing with anyone but my wife about anything but my two children. And I am glad for this burn out. I am glad that my brain can and does reboot from time to time on matters of educational importance. My wife is glad too.
 
But, tomorrow is another day, and I plan on starting the work for CoLearning 2010 (or even a fall version of the conference, if I am reading the wind right). I encourage you to burn out sometime soon too.
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I am sitting in a session at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation on Remixing in the classroom and I was drawn back to an activity that I did with my kids to teach them about remixing. I think that it allowed them to own the topic in a way that telling them the rules does not. Does this activity still work?

 

   Write-on: Create the following diagram on a piece of paper (or computer if your prefer… Notebook or Word would probably be quickest) to show your

      opinions of what should and should not be allowed of the following

      remixing or mashup situations:

Isn’t Illegal Is Illegal

Should be Illegal

Shouldn’t be Illegal

   1. Creating a collage using a famous piece of art and some of your own drawings.

   2. Hacking someone’s computer game and making it better then selling it.

   3. Taking someone’s direct quote from a book without citing it.

   4. Taking someone’s ideas from a book and listing them as one of your biggest influences in the bio.

   5. Using two pieces of different music to make a new one.

   6. Creating a replica of a building in Google Sketch-up.

   7. Creating a parody of the latest blockbuster film and putting it up on YouTube.

   8. Typing out a chapter of someone’s book and putting links to pictures of all of the places it mentions.

   9. Taking the beat or melody of a famous song and looping it to create

      something new to sing or rap over, without asking for permission to use

      the sample.

  10. Using a well known movie clip, and dubbing you and your friends

      making up funny, rude comments over top of it so that it looks like

      they are saying what you want them to.

Discuss each situation with your neighbors when you are finished.

    * Use the these definitions and real life situations and in order to complete your 30-minute-expert blogging session on the following debatable topic: Solved: Any idea or work that you create should be able to be remixed, modified, and repackaged for the purposes of another person.

Also, if you are interested, here is the podcast that my students did with their debate after this activity.

 

 

 

I am sitting in Anne Smith’s classroom listening to students talk about the ways in which students believe they are seen vs. the way they see themselves (her student teacher is actually teaching the class at the moment, however). I really enjoy listening to students talk about their own identities. They are so definite and expressive, questioning and purposeful.

The part that grabs ahold of me, though, is the fact that everything that is done in this classroom is in the pursuit of the question: What’s the point? Today I am not sure that there is any question that is more important. I asked it this way about two years ago:

The essential question for 21st century learning is “How is this meaningful?” and the only way that students are going to be able to answer that is to collaborate with one another to create that meaning.

I like the rephrasing of this question as “what is the point?” It is beautiful in its simplicity.

So, with Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation staring me directly in the face tomorrow, I would like to ask that simple question during every session. I would like every speaker to ask themselves the question before they speak. And, I would like for all conversations to answer that question question passionately and with gusto.

Because I really want to know. What is the point of all that we are doing in education?

I have my idea, but what is yours?

I wrote a single thing on the back of a paper at a meeting today:

Scaling a system that exists vs. Creating a different system that includes networked learning.

What I meant by this I am not exactly sure (nor can I talk about all of the good and hopeful things that transpired during the meeting, either). All I know is that we shouldn’t be looking to make our current teaching model work in more and bigger ways. We should not be extending traditional pedagogy into online environments. We should not be taking something that no longer works for one school and then trying to emulate it for all schools.

I guess it makes sense to say this as well:

Just because a system can scale doesn’t mean that it should. And just because a system can’t scale, doesn’t mean it isn’t valuable to someone. While I believe that all of our learning should be scalable, that doesn’t mean that we need to have every learner doing the exact same thing. Creating multiple entrances makes sense. There is no one ring to rule them all. We need spaces that work for every single one, not “everyone”.

Forgive my obtuse discourse tonight. I am having trouble with getting concrete at the moment. I hope you glean some meaning from the words. If not, I will try again tomorrow.

This Saturday, at Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation, we will have the privilege of hosting a student panel. During which , we will be able to ask the burning questions of intelligent and engaged students. I didn’t realize it until today, but it is so rare now that I take the chance to ask difficult and reflective questions of students.

I can’t believe that is rare. I never thought it would be when I left the classroom. But somehow, now that I am no longer in the classroom, I am starved for answers from students. Why should it be rare to ask important and big questions of students, for any educator (in the classroom or not)? For example, I want to ask some students about how facebook is changing the way that they write a research paper. I want to ask them why they aren’t using twitter. I want to ask them what they want to preserve from their school career into their working career. I want to ask them what matters in learning.

Does it makes sense to have a place to ask questions of students, to have them engaged in a larger learning network with adults (not as a selfish way of simply asking and not answering anything, I would like to give back to students in a wider network too)? I am struck that this may sound weird and kind of creepy, but I’m really interested in the idea of where the space is that adults and students interact. I know that Students 2.0 did a lot of work around this topic, but I am not sure that they/we have come up with a real learning environment that includes both adults and students.

Where does this exist?

Perhaps it starts with asking those questions of our panel on Saturday.Perhaps.

Submit the questions you would like engaged students to answer.

Sorry for the long title, but I don’t need to talk all that much about this particularly cool tool.

I just wanted to convey just how excited I am about being able to drag and drop my documents, presentations, spreadsheets, and pdf’s into my google docs accounts. This will allow me to back up my documents very easily, but I can also see the applications for letting students create a much better organized e-portfolio with Google Docs.

I will leave it to someone else (or perhaps, myself when I have a little more time) to figure out other uses.

(You can also use this plugin to upload to flickr, slideshare, facebook, and a bunch of others… so it is okay if you don’t use Google Docs):

My wife and I were joking last night about just how much the edubloging community likes to think it is the greatest thing since sliced bread, doing great things for kids and moving the conversation about learning on to greater things. When I first started blogging, she kept asking me why I was always Blarbing and talking about other Blarbs. She likes to kid me that everything is 2.0 this and edu-something that. Well, being the funny woman that she is, my wife came up with the absolute best conference title of all time (plus a great subtitle and tag line).

Edublarbification: A 7.0 conference for a 2.0 world

Tagline: If you can figure out what it is, then you can come, virtually.

While this was always a big joke (which I didn’t stop laughing about for a long time), it got me thinking about just how much elitism there is in the edublogosphere. I noticed it when I was at Educon last month. There were a lot of references to the fact that “we get it” and others don’t. I engage in elitism whenever I use the word “we”, in fact. As if there was a community that I could possibly speak for… Every time I use that word, I am essentially saying that there is a “them” as well, all of those people who aren’t in the community.

As inviting as we (and I) try to be, I never really get the feeling that we get there. We seem to expect a certain level of devotion to “the cause” right off the bat. I’m not convinced that a little bit of elitism is a bad thing, but I do think that when my wife can lampoon it so easily and be so spot on with the sentiment that I see so clearly in the words that we write and the studies that we perform, it is hard to not believe it isn’t a little troubling.

So, I guess my questions are these: Do we need an event in the edublogosphere that will take us down a notch? Is there anything that will make us stop believing that “we” have the answer? Why do we constantly search for something new to know, so that we know something more than others do?

(Or, was it just a funny joke at our expense?)