Bud the Teacher

In today’s podcast, recorded during my drive home from ISTE’s final activities, I talk a bit about Tuesday and Wednesday of the conference.  There’s talk of the filtering panel I was fortunate to get to sit on, Howard Rheingold’s resources on crap detection, and also some of my thinking about how we must work to model the things that we want to see in our schools.  Always.  I thought ISTE was a good and useful conference.  Thanks to those of you who made it so for me.

Direct Link to Audio

So yesterday was the first ever ISTE/TIE Leadership Bootcamp, an event that I was happy to get the chance to assist with.  Before it gets too far away from me, I thought it’d be useful to get a few thoughts down about the day, events like it, and what’s next.

The event itself was pretty straight forward – get a bunch of smart people together and talking with each other, as well as sharing some suggestions for how we might best move forward in our various leadership capacities.  Prime folks ahead of time and invite lots of folks to come along in various capacities.  The frame of thinking about leadership as communication I thought was a good one, although perhaps understated.

Of course, at the Leadership Bootcamp, “leader” was defined pretty broadly.  As it should be.  There were teachers in the room.  Superintendents.  IT staff.  Librarians.  Plenty of other folks.  Point being – leaders aren’t just the folks running the ship there’s plenty of leadership for all of us to be engaged in and doing, no matter our roles and/or job titles.  Jeff Piontek got the day started, but I didn’t feel like we were in high gear and rocking and rolling until the first presenters got going.¹

From there, it was a non-stop roller coaster ride of content and conversation across several strands.  Of course, the best part of the day for me was the fact that twice folks were put into roundtable groups to process what they were hearing, seeing and thinking about.  I don’t think a formal “Stop.  Write.  Reflect.” component makes it into our professional learning opportunities.  But, as Chris reminded us during his lunch keynote, if you believe something’s important, but you don’t have it built into the structures and schedules of your organization, then you don’t really think it’s terribly important at all.²

The protocol for the roundtables wasn’t too complex, but it’s worth sharing.  So here it is.  Help yourself to it if you find it useful.  Here’s the graphic organizer that we used to help structure folks’ reflections.  Just a few minutes in a very busy day, but I think those were pretty important minutes.  If you were there, I’d be curious as to your take on that portion of the day, specifically.

The day ended with a panel where we were challenged, and rightly so, to figure out how to keep building momentum and moving forward to make the positive changes that we believe we should be seeing in education.  Chris even suggested that it might be time for a string of little events, Educons everywhere, as a way of keeping things moving.  I like that idea, and it’s one reason why we began Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation three years ago. ³

I hope that little events like the Leadership Bootcamp keep happening.  I hope that folks who attended saw that, yeah, they might could organize such events, too.⁴  The resources, in terms of schedule and process, are freely available.  They need only be used. ⁵  Again, if you were there, I’d love to hear your thoughts on the event.  There will be a follow up webinar to talk through what folks did with the day in October – I’m looking forward to that.⁶

Thanks to all of the presenters and facilitators and behind the scenes folks who made the day a useful one.  Special thanks to Michelle Bourgeois and Alison Saylor for co-ordinating the entire event. There were aw awful lot of really smart folks in the group. Let’s hope it, or something even better, happens again.  Lots.⁷

If you were there, let me know how it went and what could’ve been better.  Or tell ISTE directly – they’ve set up an evaluation survey for your feedback.

And now, on to ISTE.

1. And, I’ve got to be honest, I still don’t understand the “I wrote a book on blogging, but I don’t find it to be valuable and so I don’t do it” position that I’ve now heard Jeff articulate a couple of times.  I hope that I can hear more from him on that at some point, not because I think everyone should have a blog, but because I think if you’re going to value something enough to write a book about it, specifically one that encourages folks to use that thing, then perhaps you should be engaged in that thing, at least from time to time.  Help me understand that if you can. [↩]
2. And writing as a learning tool is terribly and wonderfully important, which is why I’m sitting here writing right now rather than heading off to visit or do something else. [↩]
3. Maybe it’s time that event became Learning 2.0: A Colorado Educon, instead.  I’d be okay with that. [↩]
4. “No one is coming to save us,” Chris says.  He’s right. [↩]
5. Which is, of course, the hard part. [↩]
6. Although, I worry, as I usually do, about whether or not folks will attend.  Seems to me like as much as people say they want to engage in longitudinal PD, it doesn’t happen much.  We seem to have “one shot day” stuck in our brains, and may, by then, have moved on to other things.  Let’s do better. [↩]
7. And, heck, across the street was another group of really smart folks at EduBloggerCon – it was too bad that the events were held at the same time – but it was neat to see so many people moving back and forth between the two.  I was one, if only briefly. [↩]

Today’s podcast, recorded last week, is a response to some comments on the “learning is social” conversation.  I’ll let you give that a listen, then let’s talk some more.  Next up for me, in this conversation, is Claudia’s post.  I’m still working through Stephen’s thoughts on the subject, spoken just before and transcribed and published just after I wrote the social learning piece. Interesting conversation.  I’m learning, I think.

You?

Direct Link to Audio

Learning is most definitely social.  But I think it has to be.

On Twitter this week, Ben has pulled me a couple of times into the question of whether or not learning is social.  And both times, one time in conversation with David, and another time, earlier today, in conversation with Dave and George and Claudia and Rob and Will and some other folks, I had to say that, yes, it is.  Allow me to explain, as Twitter is just not the place for such extended thinking.

As best as I can figure, we’ve got to start with some definitions.  Let’s start with social.  I think Wikipedia’s definition is a fine place to begin:

The term Social refers to a characteristic of living organisms (humans in particular, though biologists also apply the term to populations of other animals). It always refers to the interaction of organisms with other organisms and to their collective co-existence, irrespective of whether they are aware of it or not, and irrespective of whether the interaction is voluntary or involuntary.

In the next paragraph, the article, at least as it exists today, pretty much makes my entire case:

In the absence of agreement about its meaning, the term “social” is used in many different senses and regarded as a fuzzy concept

See, my contention is that learning is communication, and that communication requires language, and that language is socially negotiated. By that, what I mean is that words are just sounds.  Sounds that convey meaning.  And they are arbitrary.  We call cups “cups” not because they possess any inherent cupness, but because, over time, and due to popular usage, the word “cups” came to be linked with the concept of a particular kind of container that you put things, usually liquid, but sometimes cakes and other things, into.

Words gain their meaning through social processes.  Specifically, when people, enough people, use them to mean certain things, then they have that meaning.  Without that social negotiation of their meaning, they mean, well, nothing.¹

And all learning, all of it, as near as I can tell, comes from language and how we use it.²  If language is social, and it is, then any use of language to convey meaning that results in either a transfer of that meaning, or a new understanding of the thing you’re trying to learn about, is social, at least to some level.

So when David asked me the other day about how he can go, by himself, into an office and read a book and think about it, and if that’s social learning, my answer, even though he was the only person then in the room, is yes, that was a social experience.  Let me elaborate further.

A book is a recording of someone’s thinking about something.  To record our thinking, we use language.  Writing, a set of symbols that we use to represent words (which we use to represent ideas), is a technology³ that works with language to convey meaning.  As I write this blog post, I’m locking my thoughts into words and putting those words together to, hopefully, convey something.  Just what I’ve conveyed is a little bit up to me and a little bit up to you.  More on that in a minute.

So, working from the Wikipedia definition above, of social as an interaction between organisms, reading a book and thinking about it involves (at least) two individuals – the author and the reader.  It’s a social process.  Actually, it’s much more complicated than that, as the words the author used were negotiated during the time of the author’s writing, and perhaps even the author was attempting, through brute force, to change a meaning of a word or words.  The reader, too, exists in a social construction of language that might be different, or very similar to, the author’s – but it’s not the same.  Our interactions with language and with each other color and shape our interactions with words.  I think of a house as the first house I lived in as a little boy, a yellow, ranch-level house.  You might think of something different when you think of the word “house,” but there’s enough overlap between our two conceptions of the word – a place with rooms and probably a kitchen and a place or places to sleep – that we can have a reasonably meaningful conversation about houses.

Heck, in the example of reading alone in one’s office and thinking about one’s reading, there’s another set of social forces at work, too.  As I wrestle with an author’s ideas, I’m filtering them and my own thinking about them through my previous experiences – with the concepts being discussed, with my teachers and their thinking, and with my own previous wrestling with the particular topic that I’m reading about.  That side of the learning – my thinking about the reading – is a social process, too.  Saying it’s not isn’t a true thing to say.

George argued, a while back, that learning isn’t necessarily social.  I think he was wrong, largely, about that.  It’s terribly social.  He wrote:

As well, a primarily social view of learning also overlooks many of the affordances of technology. I can learn (learning defined as actuated or actionable knowledge) from a computer program, an intelligent software agent, or a contextually appropriate learning resource (i.e. when I need to do the task, the learning resource is mediated by technology).

Each of those items that he’s giving as examples of ways you might learn, are things, like books, that were made by other people.  Someone wrote the computer program, or the intelligent software agent, or the resource.  Those items, like books, were created in and of a social process.  People make technology, or learning objects, or what have you, whether they’re putting words on pages or building hardware.  These items are a conversation, to a degree, between author and reader.  George is a smart guy, and a good teacher, but I wonder if he forgot that when he wrote that post.

Many smarter people than I have written extensively about how reading is a social process.  Folks like Louise Rosenblatt, who popularized the concept of the transactional theory of reader response, is one of them who I think about a lot.  She postulated that a reader takes from an author an experience that is colored by the reader’s experiences as well as the context in which the reading occurs.  Reading is social.  Writing is social.  Learning is social.⁴

Mikhail Bakhtin, too, is worth mentioning here.  He wrote about the idea that language is a response to other language.  He used bigger words than that, but basically, he argued that language exists in the context of the language that has come before.  Unless you were the first person to ever speak, then you are to some degree influenced by what was said before you spoke.  You might be responding to one of those previous utterances, and you might not. ⁵ You are, whether you are aware of it or not, influenced by what came before.

What about writing a note to oneself? Is that social?  This is where I get confused and curious.

Suppose I write myself a note, say a reminder to do something in the future.  I’d say, at the time of the writing, that my present self is the author.  I write myself the note so that I can keep track of something at a future time.  When I return to the note, I am approaching it as my, from the perspective of the note-writer, future self.  As a reader, I am reading a note from my past self.  Even then, I think, if I am the only audience for the note that I wrote, I am participating in a social process.  For one thing, I’m using language, socially constructed language.  For another, my self has changed in a number of ways since I wrote the note.  I’m a little bit older, I know different things, I might be reading the note many years later, in which case the changes might be much easier to see and identify.  But even if it’s a few minutes or hours later, I am reading a communication from someone else – my past self.  And I am reacting and responding as my present self.  Perhaps the conditions in which I wrote the note have changed – I don’t need to do the thing that I was reminding myself to do because I’ve since realized that it was a silly task, perhaps, or I no longer need to do it because it was done by someone else.  But my present self is reacting/responding/interacting with my past self.  I’d argue that’s a social process, too. The idea that we can communicate, in this way, with ourselves, is pretty interesting.  And social.

Well, if you’ve read this far, then you might be asking yourself, “So what?”  I wonder that, too.  Let me speculate as to why such questions of learning and sociality are important.  For one thing, perhaps we could move on to more interesting questions.  Instead of “Is learning social?’ might we ask “How does my choice of language or text change the conditions for learning?”  Or maybe instead “How does language change over time, and how does that affect policy discussions about teaching and learning?”  How does the illusion of non-socialness perpetuate hierarchy?  Who gets to frame conversations about teaching and learning, and how do they do so?  Just a few of the questions that I am thinking about lately.  You probably have better questions.  But let’s move past this “Is learning social” question – because it is. And it’s essential that we understand that.

What place does an individual have as an agent of his or her own learning since learning is a social process?  Each individual, while shaped by and working within social constructs, has the ability to shift the conditions of that sociality to support their own learning.  You can argue for a redefinition of a word, for example. ⁶ Or suggest a different frame in which a particular type of learning can and should occur.  The fact that learning is social doesn’t lessen the impact or importance of any individual.  It actually makes individuals more important.  Our individual actions, aggregated and amplified by the actions of others, shape the “socialness” of an experience.  That’s important.  Worth thinking about.

This is, clearly, first draft thinking on my part, but I think it’s worth getting down while it’s still fresh on my mind, not so much to say that I’m right, although I believe that I am, as to try to push past this question, which, to me, is a pretty obvious one, and begs some really difficult and important ones.  Those questions are more worth our time, perhaps.

I’m eager to hear your thoughts about the socialness of learning.  Learning is social.  And that’s worth talking and thinking about.  Together.

1. If you don’t believe me, then think about the word “Google.“  It used to represent a really big number.  Then a company.  Now an action.  Language changes over time as people use words differently. I find that fascinating. [↩]
2. George mentioned feral children on Twitter today.  “How do they use language to learn?” was his question.  I’m still thinking that there’s a language piece there, on some level.  But I’m still thinking. [↩]
3. Writing is one of my favorite technologies, and the one that I find the most fascinating, be you a writer with an iPad or a pencil or a keyboard or a telephone or whatever. [↩]
4. Turns out, according to folks like Rosenblatt, that rereading a text results in a different transaction every time you reread.  Because you’re a different you when you read the text again.  Isn’t that interesting to think about? [↩]
5. But you probably are.  There is nothing new under the sun. [↩]
6. You might fail.  But you might not. [↩]

The Digital Learning Collaborative, a project I love and spend ever more of my time with, will be taking a large cohort of teachers through the work of conducting teacher research on and in their classrooms over the next couple of years.  That’s pretty exciting to me, for teacher research has been in my blood since I was a preservice teacher working as a graduate assistant with one of my favorite teachers ever.  And in the current climate, strategies like teacher research have much to offer teachers as professionals and as voices in educational conversations.

If you don’t know much about teacher research, I’d recommend you start with this handy little quickread.  And, of course, here’s the definition that I work from:

So here we go.  And here I go, as well.

It seems only fair and fitting that, as we facilitate teacher research for others, I engage in a teacher research project of my own.  This is slightly unusual – my “students” in this case are the teachers and students of the school district where I work.  My classroom is spread out over fifty buildings and miles and miles of physical territory.  Further, I work more and more in online spaces, so my classroom includes those spaces, too.

What to look at?  Well, that’s the easy part, I think.  Since I went to work in technology, two spaces have consumed much of my time, our Virtual Campus, a district-wide implementation of Moodle, as well as St. Vrain Blogs, our district’s WordPress MU-powered blog engine, also open to the district as a whole.

I wonder about how these spaces change classroom practice.  I think about how writing, and more generally, composition,  becomes an extension for learning, particularly when there is a public audience for the work.  Who is using these spaces?  To what ends?  How do the use of blogs and online courseware change the experience of teaching and learning in my school district? (Does anything change?)  How are teachers using spaces like these?  Is the learning day extended? What kinds of writing are happening in these spaces? To what effect?

Those are the questions¹ I’ll start with.  As for data – well, we’ve got lots to look at.  The blog engine itself is a public repository of the use of these tools.   What are the ethical implications of studying, in public, a public space where learning is taking place?  I plan to blog my research log, a tool that I’ll use to keep my reflections and observations about what I’m seeing and learning as I study these questions.  In addition, I anticipate that I’ll conduct interviews with people using these tools in my quest to understand their impact.  I intend to publish these recordings, as well, prior to my analysis of them.

One question – and it seems a silly one – but should I start a separate blog over in the district blogging engine to collect all this work, or should I separate it a bit by placing it over here, at my place? I’m leaning towards creating a space there.  But I’m still thinking.

So, um, here goes.  Wish us luck.  If we do this right, we’ll be telling lots of the stories of our classrooms that don’t get told.  And, ideally, we’ll be getting better at teaching and learning through the process.

1. They started as these. [↩]

One of the projects that I’ve been working on this year, but I’m sure I haven’t spoken about in this space, is the TIE/ISTE Leadership Bootcamp, a conversation about how communication practices can affect change and serve to support leadership in schools.

It’s an interesting event and a pretty good conversation, and still pretty new.  Perhaps you’d like to join us there, as we’re talking about ideas that have come and gone through this blog over the last few years.  Joining the community is free, and you’re more than welcome to come on in.  In fact, I’m hoping that you will, because I suspect you have something to offer that conversation.

I was fortunate to be asked to give the opening preconference virtual session back near the beginning of the month.  You might want to watch that to get a sense of the Bootcamp.  Larry Anderson will be giving the next one on April 14th, and there are a couple of other great preconference speakers lined up, too.

See you there?

Just a short update – a little earlier today, I received a phone call from Justin Hamilton, one of the press secretaries behind @EDPressSec.  He is in the process of getting some answers to some of my questions and asked me to pass along that he and the Department of Education ARE indeed paying attention.  And are terribly busy.  (I understand both of those.)   It was a good talk.

I look forward to those answers and appreciate the phone call.  After we resolve this inquiry, I’m eager to discuss how we might help the Department use social media in the future.

I’ll update more as I know more.  Thanks to him and to all of you who are asking questions and politely engaging in this issue.

In today’s podcast, recorded on my way into town this morning, I talk about some of my learning and thinking from Learning 2.0: A Colorado Conversation.  Specifically, it’s a chance to respond to a question Zac sent my way regarding just what I meant when I said in my presentation on show and tell that you can choose how much is enough when it comes to transparency, or words to that effect.  Yeah.  It bothered me, too, when I said it, but not because I’m wrong.  I think.  Listen to the podcast and let me know what you think.

Direct Link to the Audio

If you get a chance, take a few minutes to read the responses to the writing prompt from the session.  I’m still digging through them.  Thoughtful.

I tweeted a possible title for this post out earlier tonight, and hurt some feelings.  Understandably.  My apologies – that wasn’t my intention, and sometimes my mouth gets ahead of my brain.  I have nothing but the highest respect for the Science Leadership Academy and my friend and colleague Chris Lehmann.  I think he’d agree with me on what I’m about to say.  We’ll see, I guess.

This weekend, 500 or so folks will descend upon Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA for the third Educon conference.  It’s a wonderfully neat school, with a phenomenal staff and a fine bunch of students.  I’ve been to the school twice, and am in constant contact with teachers there.  They’re my teachers and colleagues and, in some cases, friends, and I think the community and educational opportunities offered there are nothing short of what I would hope for my own children and for all kids.  Simply outstanding.

That said, I guess I’d like to offer a suggestion or two to the folks who will be paying close attention to Educon this weekend, and who otherwise hold SLA up to high esteem. (And I’m one of those folks.)  Take it for what it’s worth.

The Science Leadership Academy is not The Promised Land.¹  No place is.²  The school is a place, a special place, that people made, and that is a response and a reaction to its contexts, geographical, political, social and otherwise.  It is not the only place where great things happen for and with kids, and it is not the only place or way that kids can learn.

You probably know some people who can make great things.  You might be one of those people.  Actually, let me say that again, and slightly differently – You most likely ARE one of those people.  But you have to act like it.  Simply fawning over the achievements of someone else and regretting that you live somewhere else isn’t a useful reaction.

So much of what I see right after a place like SLA is praised is a laundry list of reasons why the praiser’s school/community/whatever can’t be like SLA.   I don’t get that.  Of course your school won’t be like theirs.  You aren’t in downtown Philadelphia.  You don’t operate in the same space.  Your families are different.  So, for that matter, are you.  But that’s not a bad thing. It’s okay.  I live and work in Colorado.  There is opportunity here, too.

Chris and his staff built a place that made sense as a combination of the places they came from, the places they were, and the places and ideas that they wanted to build with.  They made the place.  Together.  With their students.  And you can make a place, too.  But it’ll be different, deliciously, brilliantly different, from SLA.  Not because they’re better than you, or you them, but because good schools are about context and environment and about taking what you have and what you want and striking a balance and working very, very hard. Good schools are about people honestly and intentionally working together very purposefully.

Good schools are not about taking another’s model and applying it without serious consideration to your own local environment, or about lamenting that you are not someone else. That’s irresponsible, and doesn’t honor a fine example.

So as you’re enjoying the school culture of SLA, a place that I would like to be visiting and learning from/with/in this weekend (and I kind of will be), I hope you’ll move past the “Wow,” and towards the critical eyes of “Huh.  Why does this work?  How might I make something work in my own context(s)?”

Because, we all know, imitation, and not worship, is the highest form of flattery.  Imitation without serious thought as to how to make and sustain change in one’s own situation is not useful.  And doesn’t actually honor the fine model that SLA might be for you.

You, too, can make special places.  In fact, you may already have.  Good on you.  Talk about them.  Tell us how you did it.  Help us, as Chris and SLA do, to figure out that there isn’t one way to do school well.  There are many.  And we need them all.

1. I don’t believe that the folks at SLA say such things.  But I see and hear them from admirers. [↩]
2. Again, plenty of folks seem to believe otherwise. [↩]

Earlier today, I sent a link to a student’s Twitter account to a staff member in the school he attends with a request that she share the link with a counselor in the school.  I read some things that caused me to worry for him.  Nothing too extreme, the sorts of things that kids, particularly young adults in the space between adolescence and adult, say and that are important.  I like this particular student; I only met him briefly in a presentation at a school in the district, but I’ve enjoyed getting to know him a bit better from his tweets.  Smart kid.  Needs some attention.  Worth it.

I find much of value in getting to interact with many district students via Twitter, my preferred channel for such interaction. Our students are online, and they are curious about the world, and they have things to teach us, if we are prepared to listen and learn them.

But sometimes, they will say things that may make us uncomfortable.  When that happens, it is up to us to follow up.  That’s the job.

I was reminded today of a counselor that I used to work with some years ago.  I went to her one day during the semester when I really started to wrap my head around social media and the power of the subscribe-able, bring-the-world-to-you Web.  I wanted to show her what I was learning about my students by following their writings on Xanga and MySpace, their public postings coming into my RSS reader.  I saw these students as people engaged in the world.  I laughed sometimes.  Was amazed on occasion.  Worried for them others.  “What an opportunity,” I said to her, “To see a little bit deeper into our students’ worlds, to engage them as people.  Perhaps counselors could and should be paying attention to these public spaces and learning from them, maybe even catching early glimpses of future problems.”  (Thinking back – and opportunities.)

She was hesitant to invade the students’ “personal” spaces, space that they were sharing in public.  She didn’t want to intrude.

Intrude.

I don’t believe that we have the luxury of ignoring our students when they share in public.  I don’t believe that we should duck away from engaging them for fear of finding ourselves in awkward situations.  That said, I think societal climates suggest we should avoid private connections for a bunch of reasons – one reason I like Twitter as a meeting place.  I don’t encourage students to come to Twitter.  But when they’re here, I do look for them as folks to learn from and with.  And while they’re here, I will treat them the same as I’d treat any other person.  Perhaps better than any other – they’re students in my school district, and I have a professional and legal obligation to them as human beings first, students second.  We all get lonely.  We all get down.  We all worry and lose perspective and have rough moments.  Students.  Grown ups.  All of us.  And we’re supposed to look after each other.

That we avoid fumbling through awkwardness is human, too.  It is often simpler to disengage and to not know what happens in the world where our students will spend 85% of their time.  But it’s not right.

No one of us can pay attention to every utterance.  That’s beyond human. But together, we can look out for each other.  Some students will never reach out to us.  But others will.  What a gift.

I learn from and with students in a different way now than when I was a classroom teacher, responsible for the learning of a certain group of pupils.  Now we learn together wherever we can, in the informal publics of our school district, both the physical world of seminars and workshops and classroom visits and also in the virtual worlds of Twitter and the other public spaces of the Internet.  I’ve mentioned to colleagues that I follow students on Twitter and similar spaces.  Often, the response is surprise.  I always worry about that.

I want educators online and paying attention when a student exploring the public voice begins to share some things that are too often left unshared.  I want those educators and students to trust each other to handle those opportunities with respect and care.  I want growth to happen.  I want it to be good. I want positive and supportive models for students to light the way.

And, yes, I do want to intrude.  Each and every kid is worth the intrusion to keep them safe and vibrant and engaged and with us.

And you are, too.¹

1. A gracious thank you to Michelle Bourgeois, who kindly read and responded to an early draft of this post. [↩]