Reflections on EdTech

I've never been a Luddite. Or at least, never for terribly long. When I was in my mid-thirties my life was abruptly cast overboard when I found myself divorced and having to re-forge a career. Fortunately for me a newly discovered ability to embrace and explore change allowed me to become quite comfortable with technology.

I loved the facility of word processing to enable to me to write quickly and cut and paste on a screen rather than on the floor amid scraps of paper, scissors and tape. Excel recreated time. What had taken me, literally, weeks to do in 1980 I was able to do in less than an hour in 2000 through the magic of database management.

And all that stuff I struggled to remember for the sporadic times I needed it could be parked outside my memory and found instantly via Google (or Alta Vista then)! I had far more important things to keep track of than the state capitals. And the beauty of Chart Wizard in converting data that was daunting into visuals that told stories was invaluable in telling numbers stories to those who were inumerate in sophisticated analysis.

So, I like technology. And I'm a bit on the fence when sides are drawn up whether technology is enhancing education or damaging it. I think we all have a tendency to want the next generation to learn as we did; I'm not sure what the spiffy German word is for this mind-set, but I know that it exists and is unfortunately one of the more powerful tenets underlying education.

I was shocked and not a little disturbed when a twenty-something classmate, not even a year out of college, exclaimed her disapproval that fourth graders looked up words on dictionary.com rather than thumbing through a three dimensional dictionary. While I hope these children do know the alphabet and can look up something in a abecedarian index if they are faced with it, I am thrilled that they cared enough to look up the definition and had learned that instant meaning gratification was available and desirable.

If this twenty-something who has never been out of school...first as a student and now as a grad-student and teacher is the future of teaching and she herself is wed to her own past learning experience, I fear for all of us.

Teaching requires an open mind of the teacher if it is to open the minds of the students. Technology is a great enabler for open exploration and may provide a forum for the teacher and student to take that journey together.

Lately on Dangerously Irrelevant

A fabulous, open video to educators everywhere was recently posted on Dangerously Irrelevant.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P2PGGeTOA4

As I develop my own learning curriculum which will enable me to do policy work on behalf of tortured adolescents everywhere, this struck a great chord. As Dan Brown, the young creator of this video aptly points out, educational institutions today are still stuck in the days of yore when information was scarce and therefore valuable. As information has become fully socialized and available for free to all, facts and data points have become commodities. The analysis, contextual interpretation and predictive hypothesis of aggregated facts and data is where the value proposition lies.

So why are we still so keen on having our students memorize facts when we have no idea whether they can develop informed points of view of what those facts meant, mean or might mean to the future. Why are we using one dimensional textbooks when the stories we wish to tell can be brought to life with the multi-media experiences available to anyone with a modem and a computer? Especially, since the textbooks are coming out of Texas which wants our students to believe that evolution is a theory like creationism and that the civil rights movement created unrealistic expectations for minorities. Do we really want to codify that kind of thinking?

The embrace of the present and future of the information age requires that teachers and educators be familiar and comfortable with information technology and able to use it in their pedagogy. This also means distinguishing between what kids do naturally with media and what needs a bit more encouragement and edification from the instructor. Throw a chart of numbers in front of anyone, adult or adolescent and watch their eyes glaze and their palms sweat. Show how those number visually tell a story of relationships and comparisons through the magic of ChartWizard and suddenly those who leaned away lean forward. Especially if they are learning how to use the pie charts to understand their own finances and find a way to save money or buy that new iPad.

Why make kids read dusty literature from the 19th century while deriding their own culture. How much more might Huck Finn, and maybe just a chapter or two, mean to a teenager if he can explore through hip hop and Eminem? Why write a paper if a student can write a lyric or produce a digital story or podcast?

We want kids to think, not just spew back facts we've asked them to commit to memory until such time as the test is over and they can promptly forget those facts so they have space for new, equally dead facts. Thinking is active and thus requires interactivity between the students and the educators. A lecture hall with a professor and a powerpoint in front of 200 students is sooooooo last century.

Inquiry Model and Discipline Re-Integration

For me there is no learning without the inquiry model. Period. I believe this fervently as both a permanent student and a former business woman. If we do not ask questions we do not have a vested interest in information. The questioning process is the gateway to engagement. Moreover, if the teacher and student ask the questions together and the teacher also learns from the inquiry, the students will be likely to be more engaged. As a team-leader for many years in the workplace, I found that the more the team and I discovered new solutions together, the better the quality of the work and the esprit de corps.

Frankly, I found many of the charts and pictorial displays of the inquiry model rather distracting. That said, the theory of "habits of mind" resonates loudly for me. The recognition of "ground rules" is also quite useful and validating and affirming varied approaches to information gathering and analysis. Moreover, this construct provides the basis for the effective re-integration of compartmentalized educational disciplines.

Accordingly, I find the four components to habits of mind useful and essential to effect the interdisciplinary thinking that is so acutely and sadly missing from public education:

1. Inference questions: What can content tell us?
2. Interpretation questions: If we expand our thinking about content in larger conceptual frameworks, what themes can we recognize?
3. Transfer questions: If we then look at the content and prospective themes in broader context, what can we hypothesize about their generality or application?
4. Questions about hypotheses: How do we call upon nurtured and incorporated habits of mind to organize, interrelate and communicate the information we research to prove or disprove our hypotheses?

Inquiry is iterative and builds upon prior knowledge and experience. In a world where apprenticeships are rare, inquiry can be a proxy for experiencing cause and effect and a driver of higher order critical thinking.

Importantly, in the process of designing the question the search for the right answers is born. In any inquiry, even as seemingly mundane as "When did the French Revolution end?" the process to the answer is in clearly defining the desired outcome, or success metric of the answer.

For example, there are several dates that might be proffered as the end of the Revolution: the end of the Reign of Terror, the execution of Robespierre, the ascension of Napoleon to First Consul. But these are what Dewey would have called "dead facts." Dates are nothing more than points on a timeline and memorizing them without inference, interpretation, transfer and hypothesis is an empty learning process.

By contrast, we might ask ourselves what we believe signified the end so that we can draw inferences from the content: was it restoration of public order? Was it restoration of aristocracy? Was it the rise of Napoleon? Was it war with Europe? Each of these content points provides us with different inference cues and thus questions for further interpretation, contextual implications and hypotheses for what occurred in France, Europe and what we might learn about human behavior.

Importantly, there is ample opportunity for this process of defining the answer to incorporate currently segregated disciplines. What does the art of Jean Jacques David tell us about the emotional impulses of this period? What does the fascination with Greek and Roman classics mean in a country where the Catholicism is the official state religion with all of the economic and political power this entails? How did Napoleon revolutionize warfare? Was Napoleon a despicable tyrant like Hitler? How do we assess the contributions of Napoleon to world and historical knowledge such as finding the Rosetta Stone?

Napoleon referred to the necessity of religion to "inoculate" the populace to maintain social inequity; the rewards for the poor came in the afterlife. How does religion over the course of human history become a political tool for maintaining social hierarchy whether it is the secondary status of women in most orthodoxies or the evangelical chauvinism that leads to chronic conflict in human history?

And so on. The opportunity to frame an event through defining what we wish to learn about it and asking the questions that will get us there can assist students to become lifelong learners, students of their own curiosity.

We see how religion, sociology, philosophy, art history, architecture, history, science and technology all interact, interrelate and organize to provide us with a more satisfying view into how our contemporary society connects to the past.

I found a fabulous webcast that would assist in inquiry learning and connect disciplines and timelines. It is a webcast on propaganda and it is highly engaging and very versatile.

Address as follows: http://gozips.uakron.edu/~jat28/hypermedia/final/index.htm