Willingham on Technoogy

Last year at this time in the CASTLE summer book club I was criticizing Daniel Willingham for not considering technology in his book, Why Don’t Students Like School?. Scott McLeod thought I was too harsh on Dr. Willingham, and Willingham excused himself by saying, "Well, the book is about the human mind, it's not about the uses of technology in teaching. You may feel that technology is essential to the future of teaching. . .if so, that may prove a lively point of debate in the book group."

Well, this June, Dr. Willingham has, at least, taken a beginning look at how technology fits in with teaching. His piece in the current issue of the American Educator falls way short of being thorough and well thought out, though, despite the twenty-two end notes which are mostly from the last ten years.

As long as we're at the end of his article, let's note that I think the editors must have chopped off his ending, because there isn't one- the article just stops at the end of a list of four things that answer the question- What Does All This Mean for Teaching? The four items are:

1. Encourage your students to avoid multitasking when doing an important task.

2. If a new piece of technology is placed in your classroom with the expectation that you will use it, take advantage of online teacher communities.

3. Think about what the technology can and can't do.

4. There's nothing wrong with engagement.

I don't know many teachers or parents who would argue with the premise of the first point while it's almost a given that there are lots of teen-agers who could offer a very spirited contrary opinion -my daughter being one of them. The second point begs a further discussion about what teachers need to do to insist on being given proper support in the classroom which includes adequate professional development to be competent with the tools of our trade, and the tools are changing and will continue to change.

In his discussion of the third point, Willingham compares a chalkboard to an overhead projector. That's about as useful as comparing a horse drawn carriage to walking as a means of traveling from Minneapolis to Chicago. Horse drawn carriages and walking are both still very lovely things to experience, but neither are practical for traveling from Minneapolis to Chicago. I still really like a chalkboard for some things but I would never buy a new one, and all overhead projectors need to be tossed as soon as possible for lots of reasons - a document camera does everything an overhead does and so much more. I wonder if Willingham has ever used one in a classroom? I guess we shouldn't expect that much investigation from a cognitive scientist- No, wait a minute; Yes, we should, especially one that's writing in a magazine called the American Educator that's published by the AFT.

Willingham reveals his superficial understanding of Twitter by pointing out that while it provides asynchronous communication between two people, the users are limited to 140 characters. I can't really take seriously anyone who claims to be writing about technology and teaching who's that limited in their understanding Twitter. It's in his fourth and abruptly final paragraph that Willingham reveals his lack of engagement with the technology. He suggests that Twitter might be useful for providing a moment of fun or energy and implies that's all it's good for. Willingham asks us to "be clear-eyed" while he's only seeing a small corner of the picture.

Auditory Learning

This was posted in the Online facilitation course I'm currently taking. We were having a discussion about whether or not auditory learning was important.

This is very definitely an aside, but it is still about the issue of auditory or not:

Ira Socol just posted his thoughts on why Ulysses is so important in our literary tradition. For those of you who might not be fans, (you don't need to have read the whole damn thing in order to be a fan, either)next Wednesday, June 16, just after we finish this course is Bloomsday. Bloomsday is a holiday to celebrate Ulysses. All of Ulysses takes place in one day, kinda like a 24, on June 16, 1904. Ulysses was originally released as a serial.

Before I digress into Ulysses and Joyce too much, the point that Ira makes is that it is not really possible to 'read' Ulysses without saying the words outloud, reading with your lips moving, something that we try to drum out of kids.

Try to get through as much of the text from Ulysses as you can and then skip down to Ira's comments at the end. Ira has an opinion about the auditory part of reading.

By the way, and this, too, is an aside, if you look at the background of my profile picture, you can see, if you super magnify it, the Martello tower of Sandycove which is the opening scene of Ulysses and which is across Dublin Bay from where I am in the picture. I had made my pilgrimage out to Sandycove the evening before, and purposely wanted to put it in the background of this picture. If you want another stream of consciousness/auditory type of experience with an Irish flavor, you can go to my facebook videos and play a clip of the great band I heard at Pearce St Station on my way out to Sandycove.

I will also digress to my Chaucer course in grad school: I was outraged, and at 25 yrs old my outrage was barely tempered, that the prof didn't plan on reading any of Chaucer's works out loud in the class. She, the prof, was offended that I was outraged and more than a little dismissive; I think I managed to finally get a 'B' out of the course, but just barely. I distinctly remember 35 years ago being looked at like was silly or something, but I'm still outraged; I mean, how can you rationally expect to really be learning about the Canterbury Tales if you don't actually read at least out loud. I thought then that the whole thing should be read out loud, and then we could start talking about the connections to Italian poets from the 13th Cent., maybe. I think auditory learning is very important. I'm so glad that we can now link to an actual reading of the words. And I'm glad that I'm an elementary teacher and I get to read out loud everyday to my students. Roald Dahl's, The Witches is my favorite.

A Tool that Really Works

I'm excited. I found a tool that really works. Not only does the tool work really well for what I need it to do, it comes with spectacular directions. (Guys do use directions, sometimes; I tried figuring it out on my own first, of course.)

The tool that I'm talking about is the Database Module ; it's a special tool in the very big toolbox called, Moodle. I've discovered that the database module works really well as a reader's response journal for my 3rd and 4th grade students. I use it in place of the spiral notebook or three-ring binder or composition book method. In previous years I've tried both the Workshop Module and the famous Moodle Forum activity module. The Workshop Module is overkill for 3rd and 4th graders; it's like using a cam/cad computer to sketch an elementary illustration. The very flexible Forum can be made to work, but it doesn't have enough of the built-in structure to be really useful for what is needed for my 3rd and 4th grade students. (Although, a couple of them are approaching the level of being able to benefit from the more complex Workshop Module. That's the trouble with teaching; once you teach them something; they want to learn more.)

I learned how to use the Database Module by watching the fabulous short tutorial that Tomaz Lasic created a while ago. I set up the database so students could easily log in the title, author, main characters, settings, plot problems, and plot solutions. The directions at the top of the database input screen directs students to use complete sentences and as much descriptive detail as possible.

The comments feature of the database allows other students or me, the teacher, to make comments on each entry. In that way, it is much like a discussion forum. I was pleasantly surprised when I found that three of the students had discovered the comments feature on their own and had already started commenting on each other's entries. If you use technology in a classroom, you gotta get used to students showing you how to do new things. When I showed the whole class how to use comments, the whole class eagerly took to writing on each others entries. My job as the teacher then became to coach students to expand, clarify, punctuate, relate, etc. - all of the things writing teachers do.

Except that I had one problem. The way that I had set up the database didn't include an easy way to go from the 'list view' to the comments. It was easy enough to search for a particular student or title, but then I or the students had to go back to single view and tab through all of the entries until the desired entry was reached. The students didn't mind as much as I did, mostly because they aren't as familiar with databases in general and didn't sense that there must be an easier way - tabbing through to see what others had written is still new and intriguing.

When I showed my A.E. what was happening, she was as impressed as I was about how eagerly the students took to writing about books. I mentioned that I was frustrated about not being able to go to the comments directly from the list view and said, "I think I'll do a search of the Moodle Forums and post a query if I don't find the answer right away." I'd had a great experience a year and half ago when I was trying to add a pdf file to an online text assignment. That was my first experience with the power of the Moodle user community. It happened again. After about 15 minutes of browsing through the Database Discussions I just posted the question to the forum. It took less than 3 hours to get a detailed response about how to do what I needed to do. Itamar Tzadok from Toronto, confirmed my hope and explained how to do it. I hadn't had time to check on the forum until a few days later, so I didn't actually see his response for a few days. In the meantime, Ivan Dobrovolskij from Moscow, had asked a clarifying question. Itamar explained Ivan's question, too. Talk about collaborating and connecting ! I feel renewed hope for our profession. When students and teachers work together, we both learn how to use great new tools.

My students convinced me today to let them do a literature circle on Jeff Smith's Bone series of graphic novels. I haven't read them yet, but have lately seen noses buried in one of the nine different titles all around the room. The Bone series literature circle will use the refined database with links to comments, and I'll be learning about Fone, Phoney and Smiley.

Collaborate and connect

I couldn't help but think of collaboration and connecting when I was asked this morning for some summary thoughts about the use technology in elementary classrooms- I've been doing a series of a guest speaking talks via Skype in a course for future teachers at the U of Minnesota (we're only blocks apart but without Skype I wouldn't make it back to my classroom in time to meet my elementary students in the morning.) I've also been fortunate to be involved recently in several discussions between educators about sharing, connecting and collaborating. In her recent post, Pam Moran, Superintendent of the Ablermarle County Public Schools, beautifully juxtaposed collaboration-a butterfly with a pendulum-the machine that is the public school system. With my words to the future teachers in the class this morning, I echoed Pam's exhortation to make creating the freedom of the butterfly in our classroom our necessary job. I told them it's our job to bring whatever tools we can to our students; that we needed to teach our students what they needed for their lives, not we we were taught to use for our lives.

In our district, there's an initiative underway headed up by Todd Pierson @tpierson to create MPS specific Moodle courses for both instruction and staff development. Elsewhere, around the world and here in Minnesota, Tomaz Lasic has created a venue for sharing Moodle lessons; Joe Thibault is creating a place to archive every Moodle course ever created; Carl Anderson has just created a site for sharing Minnesota Moodle courses; the Minnesota Moodle users group is growing daily; Nellie Deutsch and friends are sharing ideas and tools vibrantly all over the planet.

All of these teachers know it's their job to connect, to share, to be the butterfly of creation in classrooms. It's what teachers do.

Thanks for sharing, really !

New Technologies

Ira Socol wrote about technologies today. I had written the post below after school today (I'd been thinking about it for a day or two) and submitted it to the StarTribune in response to this piece in Sunday's StarTribune by William Souder. Both Ira and I, unlike Mr. Souder, like the idea that 'books' are available in multiple formats.

William Souder offered the opportunity to judge the essay he wrote that was printed in last Sunday's Star Tribune and which was also made available in the online version of the Star Tribune. His essay fails to prove his point. He proposes that formal writing is dying; that it is being replaced by digital writing. I'm not quite sure what Souder means by formal writing, but he implies that it is writing that does not appear in electronic form, which is a ridiculous proposition since most of what has been written by humans in any language and on any surface with any tool is now available on line. For Souder, digital writing is writing that is not published and printed on paper by publishing houses that published books by Tom Clancy and Stephen King. Souder asserts that those publishing housed used to subsidize a number of less-famous writers whose work was worth reading but who couldn't make money for the publisher or, presumably, themselves. I will acknowledge that that how people get paid for writing is changing. Souder says that this inferior digital writing is somehow lessening the value that existed for the kind of writing that came before it. He makes fun of the what he calls digital writing but fails to show how that harms the other kind of writing. Good writing endures, no matter the form.

I still value what Plato wrote about what Socrates said about writing. Socrates, or at least, Plato using a character called Socrates, didn't think much of writing; he considered writing to be much inferior to oral discourse. http://english.ttu.edu/Kairos/2.1/features/brent/platowri.htm

Anyone now reading these words electronically can with one click be able to the words of Socrates, via Plato, written in fairly modern English. There are probably scholars of both Greek and Latin who could offer alternative translations and thus maybe put another twist on the meaning of the words as they appear to us, today. Was Plato's writing on a kodex in classical Greek formal writing? Are his words dead?

Chaucer significantly messed with the formal writing of his day. He eschewed the old formal Latin in favor the indelicate vernacular English. Now we call him the father of English literature. Chaucer would've been all over Facebook if he were here today. And the rhythms and rhyme he so informally wrote six hundred years ago - “Whan that Aprille with hise shoures soote / The droghte of March hath perced to the roote.”- still delight even though the spellings and pronunciations have changed a bit.

With this 'inferior' digital writing, I'm also able to connect readers of these words to the words of Wordsworth – now there's a guy whose words are worth reading. What I especially like about using an electronic tool is that I can go right to the part of Wordsworth's words that I want readers to notice. I have a hard time remembering the exact paragraph where the line I want to share shows up, but I remember that the word 'torpor' appears in the sentence so all I need to do is type 'torpor' into the little 'find' box at the bottom of my laptop screen and, presto, I'm at the passage which expresses notions which readers familiar with Mr. Souder's essay will recognize. Wordsworth, too, was turning traditional, formal writing on its head in favor of the language of the common man.

It was almost two hundred years ago that Wordsworth said, speaking of the capability to excite the beauty and dignity of the mind, “It has therefore appeared to me, that to endeavour to produce or enlarge this capability is one of the best services in which, at any period, a Writer can be engaged; but this service, excellent at all times, is especially so at the present day. For a multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and, unfitting it for all voluntary exertion, to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident, which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. to this tendency of life and manners the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our elder writers, I had almost said the works of Shakespeare and Milton, are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German Tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.” I suppose Mr. Souder would put blogs and Twitter threads, no matter who wrote them, in with all those sickly and stupid German Tragedies and the deluges of idle and extravagant stories in verse.

The number of English speakers globally continues increase rapidly so the market for things written in English, digital or formal, is also growing. Mr. Souder's main objection to digital writing seems to be that it is endangering the profits of the owner's of the means of distributing writing on paper. Books are not going away; writing is just showing up in new places in addition to books, newspapers and magazines. If there's enough demand for words printed on paper, somebody will figure out how to make money making books. I think the Book of Kells is gorgeous, but I'm not going to suggest that everything written should be written in a book using the same skills required to produce the Book of Kells. Mr. Souder laments the fact that Moby Dick is available for free. I think it's a good thing that a child in the Philippines, or China, or wherever, can download a copy and read it, or almost any other book, with the aid of a translating tool and even online explanatory notes. Lots of people without the ability to hold or read a book can also have the text read to them by this 'inferior' digital tool. Electronically produced writing opens lots of doors for lots of people. Our ability to tell our stories whether we're bards or scribes is not hampered by electronic communication- electronics make both the stage and the seating area a whole lot bigger and more inclusive.

More on iMoot 2010 and the networked creator

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Tomaz Lasic is promising to write about the panel discussion in iMoot 2010 that he moderated and I listened to last Saturday morning; I participated via the chat board. As I mentioned in my last post here, it was a wonderful experience in which to participate. I'm eager to hear/read his report. Tomaz is starting his new job at Moodle HQ soon and he posted to Twitter a comment that a friend of his made to him "So, you're going from environment that doesn't encourage community creation (EdDept) to where comm. is valued & key (Moodle.)" I clumsily tried to expand on that comment by expressing my envy of Tomaz in his new job, but I think the point of the comment that Tomaz's friend made is crucial to what's happening and needs to continue to happen in education. Moodle is by definition a tool that encourages community creation, and Tomaz is a perfect example of John Hagel's poignant observation in his recent post - "Rather than simply pursuing our passion as a hobby, we felt a growing need to make our passion our profession." Tomaz is truly a "networked creator."

I also listened to Martin Dougiamas's keynote talk that kicked off iMoot. Martin, too, demonstrated what a networked creator looks like. In fact, Martin is the gold standard for doing conscious networked creation. His early writing makes his intentions clear. The millions of Moodle users around the planet are the beneficiaries of that conscious networked creativity.

And that contrasts sharply with what is all too common in k-12 school districts- A superintendent holds a meeting that is attended by a group of people. Everybody at the meeting takes notes on paper but nobody records communally what's said. Then, the people at the meeting call another meeting where even more people attend and take separate notes on paper and nothing again gets recorded in common. Each of the people at that meeting then go off to their buildings and call meetings where they mimic the behavior they've just witnessed - they report what they've heard. Sometimes this pattern gets a little 'innovative.' Instead of just having meetings the information is passed via paper, and then, sometimes, even greater 'innovation' occurs and the information gets passed via a chain of emails. That's not creativity - it's passing information. The passing of the information dilutes creativity and accountability.

Instead of welcoming the feedback and criticism that Martin describes as crucial to the quality of the ongoing creative process, the hierarchical information passing system is paranoid about making sure the information is passed 'with fidelity.' Because there's no common record, the information tends to get confused or misunderstood or twisted somehow. And yet, the paranoid system seems to take weeks to get even the a single convoluted idea on paper or into print.

I understand that it takes time to formulate ideas. I've yet to get my thoughts on the page about why Moodle is a model for the kind of 'accountability that is being yearned for by the 'reformers' even though I don't think they would recognize the truth of real accountability if it was staring them in the face. But I won't be surprised if that thought process isn't taken up by someone else via Twitter, or a blog, or even the new and somewhat still puzzling Buzz. I'm not suggesting that this convergence of ideas is the same thing as the recent scandal of the teenage novelist in Germany (I'm not even going to bother to link to that; google it if you haven't yet read about it.) It's just that the speed of ideas that go zipping from Australia to Minnesota to Germany and back to Australia (I was tipped off via Twitter to Hagel's blog by John Mak) is becoming something I'm beginning to trust. I've never met John but I think we've thought about the same things at about the same time and mentioned it to the world via our 'network.' It's work is progress.

iMoot2010

iMoot2010 was the answer I gave to a query this evening asking for the best staff development. iMoot2010 was a gathering this last weekend of people who use, create and promote Moodle. People from all over the world were chiming in online about a wide range of aspects of an education tool that has the potential to significantly alter teaching and learning; actually, it's already changing it. Colleagues of mine have paid hundreds of dollars to travel to a hotel conference room to listen to a presentation that may not even be recorded. I attended iMoot 2010 in my slippers and I can review the recordings for at least 90 days. I suspect that the discussions will move over to the forums on the always reliable Moodle Community sites.
Moodle provides the kind of accountability that Arne Duncan et al are asking for in the RTTT. Moodle goes much farther than the clumsy observation and test score methods being touted as ways to make teachers and schools 'accountable.' I was reminded of the transparency that is and always has been essential to Moodle. Martin Dougiamous reminded us that the strength of Moodle is the fact that it's open source and only gets better as more people use, test, question, critique, modify, and expand the tool. The refreshing openess of the conference reminded me why I like teaching and learning.