Bud the Teacher

Clay Burell’s challenged me (or tagged me, or whatever) to engage a meme that he’s passing along.  I might.  I’m bad about memes.  I don’t mean to be.  (And I am thinking about a good passion quilt image and will post one.  Eventually.  Thanks to all who tagged me.) But I did want to encourage you to read his post.  Mostly because of this idea about teaching Lolita:

I think I can say they all love it. I also think I can say they can handle it - and if they can’t, they should learn to, now more than ever.

As a high school language arts teacher, I encouraged my students to pick many of their own books in consultation with me and other trusted adults.  I would encourage you to do the same.  But that’s another post.

But when you do decide to read a book together, I’d ask that you never insult the intelligence of your students, emotionally or intellectually, by hiding the world from them through picking “safe” books.  Safe choices are pretty much always about you (or your administrator, or your school board) and not about your students.  They live in the worlds being represented in literature.  Many educators live in these worlds, too.  Let’s not pretend otherwise.  Instead, let’s challenge students to engage ideas and concepts that are weighty, essential and enthralling.

Let’s ask them to dream and to dare and to risk by talking about difficult ideas in safe places.  Let’s ask them not to agree with the stance of a particular author or book or teacher or administrator or board policy, but instead to struggle through finding their own way.  With help, of course.

Most good teaching is all about finding balance.  Safe and scary.  Old and new.  Today and tomorrow.  Child and adult.  Easy and hard.  Choice and “have to.” Too often in schools, we lean way hard on one side of the teeter totter and completely avoid the other side.

What fun is that?  And what good is it for anyone?

    I always hate being at technology conferences that focus too much on tools and not enough on learning.  I’m pleased that this conference wasn’t one of them.  I attended one "tools focus" session, and that seems like the right ratio for me this conference. 

    Over the past three days, I’ve had some great conversations with folks from my district about tools and strategies and learning and teaching and "21st Century Skills" and lots of other buzzwords and whatnot.  But the big takeaway reminder for me at this conference is the reminder that most of what I want to do with students, and most of what I think the folks that came with me want to do, too, is to promote the progressive ideas of the 19th and 20th Century and (hopefully) the early 21st Century.  Conversations with Chris Lehmann really helped me to re-focus that in my own head (Thanks, Chris!).  We might not say it that way, but really, amidst all of the talk of computers and interactive whiteboards and Internet access, I think we want to create rich spaces full of relevant information for our students and teachers to be able to interact with and contribute to and ask questions of and be in awe of and concern about.  Sometimes, that means using computers.  Other times, it means using paper and pen(cil).  Still others, crayons, or perhaps clay or chemicals.  Or guest speakers.  Or whatever. 
    I think we just want to be able to offer teachers and students and administrators options for how to make their learning goals happen. 
    I was talking with one colleague this morning about textbooks and why we can’t yet get rid of them.  I was having this conversation in whispered tones during a keynote speech, so I wasn’t able to articulate my points as well as I’d like.  Since I know that he’s now a subscriber of this blog (Hi, Jeremy!), as well as a soon-to-be new blog author himself, I thought it would make sense to further elaborate here. 

    I’d like to shut down the textbook flow tomorrow.  Textbooks are un-authentic ways for us to distribute information to teachers and students.  But, rightly or wrongly, they’re the tools that we have.  In our current paradigm (I know - buzzword - but work with me here), they are also the tools that are not considered frivolous or unessential.  In a better paradigm, we would have ubiquitous access to the information streams around us.  We’d have a meaningful 1:1 program for every student.  We’d not have to beg, borrow and steal to provide sufficient bandwidth to all of our classrooms.  But we’re not there.  Yet.
    As a language arts teacher, I preferred to use real-world, authentic texts with my students.  Newspapers, novels, magazines, literature anthologies and many other authentic texts are far better tools for helping students to navigate the information of the human experience, as well as the world of the media and popular culture.  These texts are real and not specifically designed for educational purposes - and I think that’s a good thing.  We need to teach and learn about interacting in the world. 
  Specifically, as I think about providing the most information to students as possible, I think about the Internet.  (I bet that’s no big surprise.)  The Internet is a full-on fire hose of information that I would much rather be using with students.  That information can be authentic, at least more so than a textbook can be. And we can take that information and fiddle with it before, during and after it hits the classroom in ways that maximize the authentic-ness AND the educational value of it.  Our students can and should be a part of this process, too.    1:1 shouldn’t even have to be an argument.  But it is. 

    So when I say that I want to get rid of textbooks, but that I can’t say let’s get rid of them yet, that’s more of what I’m trying to talk about.  We need to provide lots of good raw information to our students so that they can do all of the wonderful things that we want them to do.  Then we need to help them connect to and with that information and each other in some really authentic ways.  But since we can’t provide that information authentically, for too many logistically complex reasons, we’re stuck with textbooks, at best an inefficient information delivery system.  For now.  I hope we can change that soon.  I really don’t believe it’s that hard to do - once we decide we should be doing it.

    Chris wrote a post today about the perils of using third-party services for hosting content:

in two clicks, he or she has seen images of a rave party with
suspected drug use, and if he or she clicks on the home page,  we see
anything from a caricature of Bruce Willis smoking to a sultry anime
lady who is barely dressed to other inappropriate material. I can just
see an otherwise innocent student (can I remind you my students are
11-12 years old?! and yes, some are quite innocent) seeing this!?

It’s not worth my job.

    And while I see his point, and have sometimes felt the same way about Blogger, what with its "next blog" link, I guess I’d like to carry the logic out one or two steps further. 

    From Google, a search engine that I teach people how to use, I can,  by typing only a few letters or words, instantaneously get to pretty much anything else on the Internet, from cute, language confused kittens to, um . . .well, some pretty awful stuff.  Should I not use Google, either, because there’s potential there that students might find something "harmful?"

    Where’s that line between student responsibility for their actions and a teacher’s responsibility to not be negligent?  I completely understand Chris not wanting to discover that he’s on the wrong side of it - but I also hope/wish that American society understood the difference. 
  This is an old question, one that’s come up repeatedly in discussion of tools like Flickr, Blogger, MySpace, Facebook, and countless others.  While I see the advantage to consider creating a separate world of content that’s only for educators and students (and I’ve been involved in these sorts of projects), I think, long term, that’s no better than turning off the Internet.  I struggle with this, as I don’t ever want to put a student in harm’s way, but I think isolation might be a greater harm than accidental exposure.  I don’t know for certain, and in my practice, like Chris, I tend to play it safe.  Inf act, I didn’t link to the language confused kittens above because there are some images in that collection, too, that are not "okay" at school.  I’m not altogether comfortable with the fact that I self-censor in that way - but it’s worked okay so far.  (Or has it?)

  This is why we need to teach students how to act responsibly online and to figure out when we turn which parts of the "system" on (or turn the filters off/down)  so that, by the time our students graduate, they have been inoculated against all the bad, icky, not-so-good for you stuff that’s out there.  (And, we also need to realize that, far too often, one man’s "bad, icky" is another man’s "AOK," which doesn’t really simplify anything, does it?)

    Otherwise, they’re all just cannon fodder the moment they find an unfiltered stream.  And that’s not okay, either.

Good news from my hometown school district.  Jason writes:

I’m actually sitting at my computer at school writing this post.

My district FINALLY decided to unblock Blogger for educational purposes.  They used my TOK blog as
evidence for its usefulness and they finally agreed… so now you are
free as PSD teachers to utilize it in your classroom… and please do.
The more of us that stand up and show how we can properly use blogger
for students and teachers alike, the more likely that they will see it
as a step forward in our use of technology.

   Congratulations, Jason.  Well done.

    I have a hunch that 8e6 Technologies, the group that filters our school area’s Internet, recently decided that Google Video is "R Rated."  I noticed that the site became blocked here a few days ago.  YouTube has been blocked, for the same reason, for a while. 
    Dear 8e6, please remove those sites from "R Rated."  We use Google Video to host our video work for OldeSchoolNews.com.  In my experience, their content is community policed for decency.  The same can’t be said for the stuff that isn’t being blocked. 
    Ben provides a far better rationale than I do.  I simply contend that no one thought much about it when they hit the filter switch.  And that’s unacceptable.  That switch should only be pulled as a last resort, not as a first line of defense.

UPDATE (2/21/07):  I didn’t do a good job of making my point in the post above, so I’ll try again.  The reason I’m mentioning the block of Google Video is because it appears to me that someone in a private company somewhere made a decision about the value (or lack thereof) of a particular website.  Then, that individual, without consultation with or consideration of, schools that (are required by federal law to) use their product (or another one like it), applied the filter to that website.
  That’s too simple.  It should take more thought and effort and discussion to turn off a piece of the Internet in a public school in the United States of America.  It should be hard.
    But it isn’t, and that’s sad.
    I am not against the careful use of filters.  Some stuff has no business at school.  But we should be erring on the side of too open, not too closed. 

I’m curious to see if this idea works, in spite of the fact that I’m not sure I agree with it. 

(Actually,  I wrote this post on Sunday night, but held off on publishing until I could reflect on some of the really good questions asked in the comments to Tom’s idea.   Now that I’ve read this follow up by Tom, I’m definitely in, although there’s still much to consider when it comes to treating the web like a special episode of American Idol  .  .  . or the US Congressional elections.)

Bombs away.

Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.
Martin Luther King Jr.

Brian offers a really positive way to do something about DOPA for those folks who only have a few minutes to spare.  I’ve been delaying taking action here at home — and that’s pretty much inexcusable.  I’m going to fire off some letters.  I hope you will, too.  In fact, I’m guessing that you already have — and that I’m the one who’s dragging his feet. 

Yikes.

    Today’s 5:00pm radio news update combined with the filtering conversations of late inspired this podcast.  As always, first draft thinking.  One note: I named a couple of different states.  I was wrong about both of them.  The news blip that pushed me over the edge today happened in Kansas.

Links:

• Will Richardson’s blogbanning wiki
• The Value of Xanga
• Podcast: Choices
• Myspace.  Myspace.  Myspace.

    Bloggers mentioned in this podcast include:

• Miguel Guhlin
• Wesley Fryer
• Andy Carvin
• Christopher Harris
• Doug Noon (On a tangent, Doug has a really fascinating and introspective post on being a witness that you should really, really take the time to read.  Then again, all of the bloggers in this list are usually worth reading.) 

    So just saying MySpace might be a censorable offense in some school districts.  (MySpace.  MySpace.  MySpace.  There.)   Such a ridiculous action is what happens when we let technology do the work that we should be doing in the first place — paying attention to what our students are doing online at school.
    Miguel, I’m somewhere between you and Tom on this one.  How about we name names?
     Andy Carvin has.  (Speaking of Andy’s blog, take a look at the really interesting and somewhat sad first comment to this post to see the rationale behind this anonymously maintained collection of edublogs.)
    Who is that masked librarian?  Will sneaking RSS feeds into a school really accomplish anything?  And has it really come to this?

    (UPDATE:  Will’s started this wiki to collect known instances of blog blocking.  Please contribute if you know of any.    Thanks!)