Design. Learn. Solve.

Beauty and Curiosity

I found these two videos today. They are interviews of Richard Feynman, the acclaimed physicist, and both really resonated with me.

As educators, we are expected to assist our students as they grow and define themselves. These two videos highlight a few principles that, in my mind, are some of the most important lessons we could ever teach our students.

be “madly” curious

explore the little things

beauty surrounds us in all things

it’s ok not to know the answer

Hopefully these videos will inspire you as much as they did for me.

Beauty
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cRmbwczTC6E[/youtube]

Curiosity
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lmTmGLzPVyM&feature=related[/youtube]

Photo and Video Credit: damewse

We Are All Designers

“We are all designers.”

Some may balk at this statement. Some may say that they don’t even actually know what that means.

I don’t make that statement lightly.  I taught history, am  a “techie”,  and  can’t draw very well (i’m trying though). In the past, I did not consider myself as the creative type.

With that in mind, design is not about making logos, building websites, or creating an inexpensive incubator for countries in the third world. Design is a mindset. It is an approach that addresses how we collaborate, how and what  we create.

Design is about creating interactions. Design is about understanding our users. Design is about developing something that will make a difference. As educators, we do this ALL the time. We create lessons and experiences that support our students’ learning. Design is at the core of what we do.

This past weekend at Next Chapter in Atlanta, GA, we heard this over and over again: “ design is a verb not a noun.” I know some people may say, “What does that even mean?” but it is at the core of how we can improve how we teach and learn. Design is about how we interact and create.

To understand and embrace this concept of design takes time. I’ll be the first to admit, seeing ourselves as designers does not come easily. You are not the expert. For some, this may be antithetical to how they were trained, how they have operated, how they have built their career. The outcomes, while undefined, may not be what they suggested or had in mind. It may not come easily. We were taught to have structure and a clearly defined outcome or argument.

Despite that, I ask you to try to let go. Try to embrace the uncertainty of the process. Many of our colleagues cry out for empowering our students, to create curriculum that is authentic. We talk about teacher as “facilitator” or as “guide on the side”. If we are truly to embrace the concept of authentic and student-centered learning, we must be open to letting go: to embrace a process that is messy and does not have a pre-defined outcome.

I am not suggesting that you upend your life to embrace the design process. Rather, find small ways that you can incorporate  the process into your life. Start by  addressing  a small challenge that your colleagues, students, or family is facing. For example:

1. Use the process with students and teachers to define how to recreate a space in the  library to best suit the needs of the community.


2. Build it into a unit for a class you teach.


3. Brainstorm exercise with a few of your colleagues during a faculty or department meeting.


4. With your family, reconsider how you use your backyard.

Give yourself the time and space to explore the process in a way that suits your personality and needs. Do not try to copy an approach. Think about who you are and what you need.

If you  need guidance, find someone who would be willing to explore this challenge with you. Do you need to research before you begin? See below for some resources. Find an approach that speaks to you and adapt it to suit your particular need.

The idea of design and design thinking is not to uproot  our core values but to heighten  our ability to create experiences that will extend how we teach and learn. It will empower our students and colleagues. It will create experiences and outcomes that we could never have imagined.

Release. Play. Make. Celebrate.

Resources

• IDEO - “Design Thinking for Educators”


• Stanford - “k12 Lab Wiki”


• Prototype - Design Thinking Resources

Photo credit: Hugh MacLeod

Driven to Distraction?

A Model For Learning

For the past several weeks I have been mulling over the idea of participation, transparency, and connectivism. All ideas that I believe are the corner stones to the next big shift in education. Several people have been influential in helping me reach this point. I have been reading work from the likes of Henry Jenkins from Project New Media Literacies, Mike Wesch from Kansas State, David Wiley from BYU, and George Siemens and Stephen Downes from Canada.

Today I went to a conference at MIT hosted by Project New Media Literacies. The focus of the conference was on participatory culture in education. As the day went on I began to piece together some things.

Our students participate. They want to be involved. They are connected, ALL the time. If we ignore that fact we will lose our students. Henry Jenkins alluded to this fact in his 2006 white paper on participatory culture. It is vitally important that our students create, circulate, connect, and collaborate. Research by Project New Media Literacies highlights this point. But not only will this participatory model be useful in engaging our students, it is an opportunity to teach ethical behavior when working with digital media.

If schools follow a participatory model, using open education resources to examine real issues through our curriculum, while using a framework that promotes collaboration and discussion, we can change the game.

The idea is based upon what I heard today and have read from Mike Wesch, Stephen Downes, David Wiley, as well as countless others.

This is what I have in mind for a grade 6 through 12 school:

The Framework

All course content is free using Open Education Reources (OER) available via online resources.  All disciplines would frame their course curriculum around the free materials. This would not only cut costs for a school but also lend itself to opening the class to the online community.

Individual courses, their syllabi and resources would be housed on a Course Management System (CMS) like Moodle, Wikispaces, or EduCommons. Having the platform online would allow the class to include participants from around the world.

All student work would be created and managed via a blog based e-portfolio. This system would be build off of Wordpress Mu. Every student would have a blog. This would be their home for all written work, digital media, and presentations. It is an opportunity to not only record a student’s work but have their voice be a part of a larger conversation. The work would be separated by tag and each class would have a site where the aggregated feeds for the class appropriate posts and comments as well as all relevant information would be posted.

Here is the Google Doc of the proposal I created.

The Participation

Create

If students create online content, whether written or media, that is a part of a larger conversation, the work takes on a new meaning. Students who can express their ideas and produce something concrete that they can publish, will be more more engaged.

Connect

If there is anything I have learned in the past few days, it is that to make a model like this work, it MUST connect to our students. There must be relevance and it must mean something. Whether it is a Biology class creating HIV/AIDS PSAs for a local AIDS center or working to develop tutorials on algorithms for a village school in Ghana, if curriculum can not only teach content but connect students to something bigger, it will make an impact.

Collaborate

At the heart of this model is collaboration. When the curriculum is designed to have students work with experts outside the classroom, community organizations, or other classes around the world, the learning becomes real. When a student’s blog entry on civil rights gets comments from a community leader who the class had been working with, the connections becomes real, the work meaningful. These collaborations can take place in many forms: Second Life, Skype, Elluminate, uStream, on a wiki, or Google Doc, or in real life. No matter the venue, what makes the work engaging and relevant is the collaborations and relationships that stem from creation of the content.

Circulate

The blog becomes a platform for the circulation of student created content. It a means to promote not only writing but all digital content created by a student would be available online. Here, the e-portfolio plays a role. Now all of the work that a student produces over four years is housed online on one site. The ability for a student to simply send a URL to a friend, family member, or potential college and show their work speaks to the true nature of the platform. Their works is now accessible to the world.

This model does not only support the ideas of transparency, participation, and connectivism, but it teaches another important lesson: digital citizenship. Using a platform like this, digital literacy and the ethical use of digital content becomes interwoven into each class. Students will become aware of fair use and copyright not because they read a case study but because all their work is online.

I borrowed a lot of ideas from people much smarter than me who have been proving this model in higher education but I believe this is an idea that could work in a grade 6-12 environment.

This is a very rough outline of what I am envisioning but to be true to the idea of participation, please leave your comments and criticisms. They will be extremely helpful as I improve this model.

Photo Credit: Today Is A Good Day

Where Do We Find The Time?

Like most technology integrators, the biggest hurdle I have faced as the Director of Academic Technology has been the issue of faculty buy-in.

I consistently hear the “I don’t have enough time” argument. This video of Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody”, presents an interesting perspective in regards to the use of time. Are we really lacking the time or do we need to reallocate our time?

In the following video, “Where do people find the time?”, Shirky argues that investing our time in learning these technologies or spending your extra time on the Internet learning is not useless, rather it is more productive than watching TV and that we should reconsider how we “waste” our time.

So as I look at the impact for educators, my argument for teachers who say they don’t have enough time is this: rather than watching that episode of “American Idol”, go online, develop and learn from a Personal Learning Network. You have the time and this is much more rewarding.

Part 1

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyoNHIl-QLQ

Part 2

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNCblGv0zjU

Thanks to @arvind for reminding me of this video.

Joe’s Non-Netbook vs. The Internet

Today I was reading Jeff Richardson’s blog entry, Textbooks… Are they old-school?, and it touched on a point that has been brought up in several recent conversations.

Should we move away from textbooks?

Jeff posted the following video made by Joe, a student at Science Leadership Academy in Philadelphia, PA, which highlights this issue.



While the video takes an amusing look at textbooks, Joe’s Non-Netbook ties into deeper questions about the direction schools should be taking.

Inquiry And Textbooks

No matter how you slice it, a textbook cannot provide the same richness, depth, and perspective as the Internet.  A textbook limits a student, it prevents inquiry and further investigation.  As educators, if we are attempting to develop critical thinkers and challenge our students to ask thoughtful questions, they need to have access to multiple points of view and should be able to investigate on their own.  A textbook cannot provide that, the Internet does.

The Cost Of Textbooks

The argument is presented, but it would cost too much to put a computer in every students hands.  If you compare the cost of bound textbooks over four years (at least one textbook per class) to the cost of a having all texts housed on the Internet through an online course management software (CMS) and a top of the line HP netbook ($499), it’s not even close.  You would save hundreds of dollars.

The Environmental And Economic Impact

Whether a school is trying to cut budgets, support efforts for environmental sustainability, or both, it is a good call to invest in online texts.  The amount of paper that is printed can be cut substantially when using online texts and laptops.  If a school invests in high speed scanners and all paper resources are made digital and posted online, a school is able to cut down on not only the amount of paper used but the number of copiers and printers needed on campus.

Conclusion

Joe’s video may of taken a satirical look at bound textbooks but it definitely hits a nerve.  When we look at transforming our schools and truly preparing our students we must reconsider what we use to teach.  In a world where our students are constantly connected online and have access to the world, are we really going to turn that off and give them a book with no hyperlinks or alternatives and expect them to really learn?

Using Video To Communicate To Your Class

Are you looking for a different way to post your assignments?  I wasn’t but I have started playing with an option that I think will be beneficial in the long run.

I use Moodle for my course management.  It is simple, clean, and effective.  While it has been useful, i figured there should be a better way of posting assignments, giving instructions for a class that I would have to miss, or supplementing the content to be covered in class.

Homework

I have started using YouTube’s quick capture feature to fill this gap.  See my first post below.  Not only can the students comment on the video to ask questions but by keeping the video broadcasts in a central location, it is simple to find assignments or instructions that the teacher wants to send out to the students.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HERTERyPZhU

Lectures

Another use of video I have been thinking about comes from the fact that I teach AP World History.  One of the challenges I face is the fact that I want to do too much in class.  I believe that getting students to practice the art of examining documents or debating theories is much more powerful than listening to a lecture.  The idea is simple, screen cast my lectures and post them on Vimeo the night before class.  Have the students watch the lecture for homework.  Then use class time to create lessons based upon historical discussion or investigation based upon the ideas introduced in the video lecture.

We’ll see how this turns out but as I try to reexamine how my students learn and how to best use my classroom time, it’s worth a try.

Teaching Through Social Networks: Help Someone

The following video by Seth Godin, author of Tribes, addresses a question that many teachers bring up.  How can social networks help teach?  While Godin’s response is for marketers, the same concept applies in education.  Help someone.  If social networks (Facebook, Delicious, Twitter, Wikis, and Blogs) are used by classes to help others, this will be more powerful than any test the students will ever take.

Lets say students in a Biology class learn about AIDS and its role in Africa.  Rather than simply taking a test, the students could use their social networks to connect to a community in Africa that has been ravaged by AIDS.  The students would then Tweet about the community and what they are facing.  Using Delicious, the students would post links about the disease.   A fundraiser could be set up through Facebook and students could invite all their friends.  A blog could be dedicated to the effort of raising money and awareness about the true impact of AIDS.   If we used our social networks like this, we would not only help others, our students would learn a lot more about the content covered in class.

Social networks are not going away.  We must use them to our advantage. Use them to help others and learn from the experience.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OujgPgNCLvk

CoverItLive Session On How To Reform Our Schools

Using TV For Class Without the TV

I remember when I was a kid and one of my teachers would show a 8mm film from the 60’s in class.  Those film strips were painful to watch.  Not only were they boring but they lacked any substance.  Later, with the advent of cable and the hundreds of TV channels, our options increased.  Now better shows could be recorded on VHS.

Now as many of you are sure aware, the Internet can provide those shows to us for free and on demand.  No longer do you have to have a pile of VHS tapes laying around.  With the creation of tools like Slingbox, which brings live TV to your computer, and Hulu.com, access to relevant shows has never been easier and simpler.

While Hulu.com may not have access to all the shows you want yet, the model itself is worth acknowledging.  As we move further into the 21st century, it will be Internet’s ability to provide the resources we need for education to greater and greater numbers of people that will truly change the world.  The equity that an Internet connection has brought will not only enhance education but provide more and more people with the opportunities to learn.

While streaming video and it’s potential cannot be overlooked as a fad, it’s potential is only as good as how it is implemented.  As educators we must make sure that while we provide access to these tools, they do not stand alone as the only means of instruction.  The video is a tool that must be supported by the proper activities and methods of reinforcement for a true educational impact.