Bud the Teacher

I guess the biggest frustration to me regarding the “Oh no - we didn’t realize the policy and now we’re certain that ISTE’s out to get independent media and citizen journalists and quash the edupunks and destroy any chance of education reform ever in the history of forever!” hysteria over ISTE’s NECC audio/video policy is that so many of my colleagues, people whom I respect and value, are probably going to end today or start next week thinking that this conversation and its tone was/is/shall forever be a fine example of the power of blogs and new media to make change.  And that would be wrong.

The problem I have with seeing this as a victory is that the bloggers in this one come out looking like a cross between Chicken Little and Tony Soprano.  And that’s not a good thing.  In the past 24 hours, I’ve read misstatements, threats, assumptions, and lazy research.   “I’m taking my ball and going home” lines, too.  From educators.  Attempting to solve a problem. It’s disappointing.  A rational, responsible, and patient tone would have been much better than some most of what I’ve seen and read in regards to this issue.

I’ll be the first to say that I’m pleased to see the policy changed, albeit temporarily. It was an old rule that didn’t fit the current media landscape. ISTE, I hope, would be the first to say that. And I’m pleased that so many bloggers felt compelled to address the issue. But I’d like to think that some more patient and questioning language might have been used in the “investigation.”  Questions inviting dialogue, perhaps, rather than assumptions and anger.  I felt like we were headed up the mountain to the monster’s castle, pitchforks and torches in hand.

We’d never let our students get away with this type of conclusion jumping and invective.  And so, we shouldn’t be happy about the methods, but we should be pleased about the outcome.  I hope the folks who make it to the table in future conversations on this and other matters of policy and disagreement are those who approach with patience and kindness, checking their assumptions at the door.  And I hope that, if I’m ever guilty of such poor choices in language and attitude, that you’ll be quick to call me on it.

My goal here is not so much to place blame - but to suggest that perhaps we could all do better.  I know I’ve been guilty of getting excited and forgetting to do a gutcheck in the past.  Let’s all try not to do that.  There are too many rules and policies and issues and problems and situations that need changing and will require our best work.

Today’s podcast is a short reflection on my learning experiences today, as well as some seriously first draft thinking about information and knowledge.  As always, I hope the conversation continues.

Links

The Colorado TIE Conference

Tom Woodward

The form - share your presence tools!

Chatterous - TwitterChat

Dave Cormier - “Rhizomatic Education: Community as Curriculum”

Sarah Heller McFarlane - “The Laptops are Coming”

Tomorrow night, the folks at Teacher Teaching Teachers will be having a conversation with the authors or the book I mentioned in my last podcast.  How timely.  Here’s the info:

Many of us are planning to use Reinventing Project-Based Learning in our Writing Project Summer Institutes and elsewhere in our work with teachers.  The researchers, teachers, and authors, Susie Boss and Jane Krauss will be joining us on Teachers Teaching Teachers tomorrow.

Join us at http://EdTechTalk.com/live at 9:00pm Eastern / 6:00pm Pacific USA Wednesdays / 01:00 UTC Thursdays World Times

Suzie Boss
Suzie is a veteran journalist who writes about teaching and learning in the 21st century. She and Jane have authored a book on using technology to empower teaching and learning called Reinventing Project-Based Learning. From interviewing and observing hundreds of teachers in both formal and informal contexts, she has seen how innovative approaches to education can engage learners and transform communities. The book is a unique educational resource that integrates interviews with leading experts, storytelling, and suggestions for putting research into practice. She has been an editor for the Northwest Regional Educational Laboratory, a freelance writer contributing to wide range of publications, and a community college instructor.

Jane Krauss
Jane is a long-time educator, curriculum writer, and expert in professional development. An innovative teacher and early adopter of instructional technologies, Jane and her elementary classroom were showcased in a video case study that thousands of teachers have used to learn about authentic, project-based learning. As former director of professional development for the International Society for Technology in Education and a consultant for Intel’s education initiative, she has helped educators around the world improve their practice. She recently co-authored a book with Suzie Boss on the effective use of technology in education, entitled Reinventing Project-Based Learning.

I suspect it’ll be a good conversation.  You might want to join in live.

I’m writing this morning from the National Writing Project’s web presence working retreat, an event I’ve been fortunate enough to have been involved with as a facilitator since its inception last year.  This is the second time we’ve run the event, which is an attempt to provide some time and structure for teams from writing project sites who wish to think strategically about their web presence.  We’ll spend the weekend thinking through the identity of our respective organizations and what we can do online to both reflect and support that identity and the good work that all of us are trying to do in our various locations around writing and teaching and learning. That means lots of things to lots of people, but there’s plenty of intersection in the general trends.

The event is pretty intense, and, while designed for sites to think about their organizational web presences, is very helpful to me as I think about my personal and professional life online.  One of the big questions that we’re asking people to think about is how their web presences are a reflection of and a lens into their work.  My personal web presence should be like that, too.  But I’m not sure that it is.  I’ve got content spread around the web in a variety of places, everywhere from Flickr to Twitter to this blog to my wiki (which is desperately in need of an update or seven) to my work with other groups and schools and people.  There’s plenty of personal mixed in with the professional, and I think the boundaries between those two areas of my life, never truly separate in “real, offline” life, continue to blur and fade and shift from day to day, week to week, month to year.  (That’s a good thing, I think, for the most part.) How do I, as a blogger and a teacher and a learner and a father and a husband and a citizen, do my best to ensure a consistent presence across the Internet that reflects what I believe to be important?  Just as essential - how do I bring all of that content that sits all over the place into some sort of a coherent whole?  Or do I need to, so long as all that content in all of those places, and others, reflects the message(s) that I want so desperately to convey - that learning and writing and thinking and engaging and passionately working for the benefit of others are essential habits and skills for everyone, regardless of background, culture, or profession?

I think, too, about what “web presence” means.  Having a presence and creating a presence are not necessarily the same thing.  Being and doing aren’t necessarily the same, either.

These are some of my thoughts as I head into a pretty intensive planning process, where, if last year is any indication, I’ll learn as much, and probably a great deal more, than I’m hoping to facilitate.  This summer, I’ll be doing a three-hour session on presence tools, a class of software that are about making one’s presence known in some formal and informal ways, Twitter being one of the tools that I’m most curious about at the moment.  I also would like to explore more about digital identity, a conversation I sort of started here a little while back.  My work this weekend will continue to influence that work.  Lots to learn.  Luckily, I’ve got plenty of smart folks here to learn from and with.  We should all be so lucky.

Students at Burlington Elementary School slept over at the school last night to watch the sky.  For the last time, alas, due to a curriculum change, according to the article.  I sure hope there will be other opportunities like this one.  Heck, I’ll volunteer to chaperone, if that helps. I love that stuff.

My favorite line from the article:

“I think there’s a big ‘wow’ factor for the night sky,” Warren said. “It’s the show that never ends. There will always be something to look at.”

We need big wow factors.  All of us.  They help us learn and keep us going.  What’s wowing you right now?  Me, I’m learning about how to capture light for the benefit of preserving moments and memories.  Fascinating.

I read banned books

Originally uploaded by Bud the Teacher

I wonder if there’s a button with the slogan “I surf an unfiltered Internet,” or “I read filtered blogs.” Maybe “I read blocked blogs,” is better - more alliterative.

Along another line, perhaps a button with the message “I’d trust my kids in Al Upton’s classroom,” would be a good slogan, too.
Any graphic artists out there? I’ll buy in bulk.

I didn’t want to let too much time go by before responding to Doug’s post, and the others that have followed it, but I haven’t have time for a thorough response.  There’s plenty of thoughtfulness in the posts and comments, but I did just want to state, again, that I’m pretty sure an awful lot of the “conversation” on the post(s) is based on a bad assumption, which is this:

There isn’t one “edublogosphere.”  Never has been and never will be.  So to ascribe universal characteristics to something which isn’t (universal) is problematic, to say the least.  Here’s how I said it in November:

Mostly, the assumption that’s troubling me so much is that there’s one group (community - whatever) out there that exists for educational conversation via electronic media, and that we should all try to engage and involve everyone in that one (fallacious) group so that we’re all friends and reading and commenting each other.  And that we’ll all agree on where that group should go, when they should meet, and what we’ll all do when we get there.  Or that we ever agreed in the first place.

Ain’t going to happen.  Not now, not ever.  Never did happen, in fact.  We all construct our blogrolls, our Twitter friends, or our other social networking relationships for our benefit and to meet our own unique needs.

Would I prefer to see more reflective or data-driven posts around teaching and learning practices?  Yep.  But me (or anyone else) not seeing them doesn’t mean that they’re not there.  I’d encourage you to read the rest of that November post for more explanation of my position.

Last week, I received a review copy of Relentless Pursuit: A Year in the Trenches with Teach for America.  Thought it was worth taking a minute or two to say that I’m definitely a fan of the book.  I’m impressed with the way the author, Donna Foote, has captured the different teachers, students,  administrators, and classrooms and painted them as actual human beings dealing with complex issues and feelings as opposed to one-dimensional cogs in the educational machine.

While the book’s set in Los Angeles, I recognize many of the folks, or at least the types, she’s written about.  Kids who disappear.  Teachers who will do anything to see their kids do well.  Teachers who burnout.  Administrators who try too hard - and aren’t successful.  The folks who show up because they’re supposed to, but who’ve given up.  I appreciate the portrait.  It’s real and honest and captivating and certainly not pretty.  A fine example, one with which I’m more familiar than I’d like to be, is this paragraph, a stream of consciousness from one teacher struggling to figure out how to help a student he noticed was cutting herself:

Who am I kidding?  I don’t know what I’m doing.  The fact that it’s left to me to identify a girl who is on the verge of killing herself is ridiculous.  You can fake the teaching, but when it comes to this stuff, you can’t.  How can it be that I’m the one diagnosing or even realizing that this girl is in trouble?  I don’t even know who her guidance counselor is.  If something happens, I could be held liable.  I don’t know who to go to.  And if I don’t write it on my hand, I won’t remember to even report it.  It’s crazy.  Oh God, I hope she’s okay.

I’ve been there.  Ignore the TFA aspect of this book - it’s an eye-opening account of what it means to be a teacher in a dysfunctional school in the United States.  Or maybe in any school in the United States.

As for TFA - any alumni out there want to comment on the program?  While I dig their goals, it doesn’t seem to me like the program is necessarily going to result in systemic education reform.  Although, I might be getting cynical on the whole idea of education reform - small group of committed citizens, right?   And perhaps TFA, as only a 20-ish year old organization, isn’t mature enough yet.  Foote, in this interview with U.S. News & World Report, talks about the “two-pronged” approach of TFA as a reform group:

TFA has a two-pronged theory of change. In the short term, it will send smart, energetic, committed young people into these terrible schools. But the longer-term vision, and the one that is most likely to bear fruit, is the idea that, because TFA has culled so carefully for leaders and because these young teachers will be so informed by this unbelievable experience of teaching in underperforming schools, they will go out and make big changes.

Now that the early corps members are approaching their early 40s, we’re starting to see signs that these leaders that have been embedded in society are starting to rise up. If you troll the education reform movements, the big nonprofits, and philanthropies, you’ll see TFA alum[s] in their ranks. I think a real marker was laid down last spring when TFA alum Michelle Rhee was named chancellor of the D.C. schools.

I’d be curious to hear from anyone with TFA experience.  And I’m looking forward to the rest of the book.  Not because I suspect the ending’s a positive one - but because I so appreciate the humanity of the story.

    Mary asked a question the other day that I thought was worth pulling into a main post.  She wrote:

Bud (and others), how do you envision students using CoverItLive for anything related to citizen journalism?
-Mary

I replied:

Mary,

What a great question. I’ve got a longer post that I’d like to write about how we might start thinking about student citizen journalism, but I think it makes almost immediate sense to descend upon a city or school district meeting with a few computers. The teacher can moderate and students can post about the meeting taking place. Later on, the video of the meeting can be combined with the transcript to make for an excellent reflective opportunity.

I think tools like these are perfect for citizen journalists - students or otherwise.

Your turn. Is that a good idea?  Do you promote student citizen journalism in your classes?  If so, what do you do? If not, why not?

Jeremy posts an interesting question from a teacher:

I am very concerned about a small group of AP Environmental Science students (3) who have taken an aggressive stand opposing my teaching of climate change. I already teach it from the perspective of “here’s the data, figure it out” but they think that I made the data up. I showed them where it came from (NASA and NOAA) and they think it is a conspiracy by the left wing to infiltrate and brainwash the American public.

Normally, I would let it go but these kids are being disruptive and belligerent to the point that I have had to refer them to the administration.

I feel like there are two things I need to do here:
1) diffuse the situation so that we can move forward
2) create a packet of peer reviewed literature that is understandable for hs students

Does anyone out there have any suggestions?
Regards,
Science Teacher

There are some very interesting responses, as well as a ton of great links to resources. Worth a click or two.