Following the Backchannel at COSA 11

COSA 11
COSA 11

At my morning keynote I urged the 450 attendees to start tweeting using the #COSA11 hashtag. A few have started and here’s a Wiffiti visualizer that displays their tweets. COSA 11 is the 2011 Summer Assessment Institute sponsored jointly by the Oregon Dept of Education and the Confederation of Oregon School Administrators. (Eugene Oregon. August 3-5, 2011).

Since a group of 450 seemed too large to pass out evaluations. I used Storify to gather up feedback via Twitter.

 

 

My TypePad to WordPress Conversion

 
typepad wordpress conversion
 

If you’re a follower of my blog you’ll notice its new look. Copy / Paste has moved to WordPress.

When I first started blogging back in ’05 I was a bit confused by WordPress, so I opted for TypePad. TypePad has been easy to use, but I’ve enviously watched WordPress evolve into a far superior platform. And I’ve always been a bit nervous wondering what might happen to my blog if TypePad – a paid blogging host – decided to pack up shop. Earlier this year, its parent company, Six Apart, was sold to a new owner. My anxiety level increased. The thought that some new owner of TypePad might one day shut it down was frightening. But so was the idea that in moving to WordPress, I might jeopardize my content and traffic.

Fortunately I found Foliovision – and here’s three reasons why I can highly recommend their work:

My web design skills peaked with FrontPage ’98.

1. I don’t think in html, yet manage to do lots of interesting things with technology with only a veneer of understanding of what’s going on under the hood. Foliovision spent a great deal of time explaining the conversion process before I signed on. (How many times did I make them absolutely promise that a conversion wouldn’t kill off all my bit.ly links?) Since we started working on the project, they have patiently answered questions that a serious techie must find rather naive. Bottom line – while they wrote the book on TypePad to WordPress conversions – they can discuss it in layman’s terms.

2. They manage project workflow with style and efficiency. Through the conversion process I worked with four specialist via their Foliovision’s Basecamp collaboration tool. Replies were timely and each person seemed well aware of what the rest of the team was doing. Alec, Foliovision’s creative director, would periodically pop into the conversation with a great idea, like merging one of my other domains into my new blog. You never would have guessed I was working with a team based in Bratislava, Slovakia – half a world away from Portland, Ore.

3. It turned out to be an engaging collaborative effort. OK – so I didn’t have much to suggest to Martin about programming or Marieta about CSS. But I did have a bit of synergy with Michala, the lead designer and project manager. We shared loads of design ideas and exchanged screen shots as the look and function of the new blog took shape. We even found out we both admire the work of Barbara Kruger – you’ll recognize her influence in my blog.

So this is my first blog post on my new site. I’m eager to learn more about using WordPress and leveraging the custom Foliovision plugins. And, of course, I checked all my content, links, and data  - they made it over successfully. 

For more on Foliovision’s conversion click here.  BTW, I chose the Gold Service Option. 

PBL Resource Site – How to Plan, Manage and Evaluate

pbl stem

This week I led a four-hour training session – “Project Based Learning in the STEM Classroom.” Here’s a link to the Google site I used to support my workshop. You’ll find links to a variety of resources to help teachers get started using a PBL approach in their classrooms – handouts, videos, project ideas – plus tips on how to plan, manage, and evaluate PBL. I included some Google forms as collaboration tools. They didn’t get much action, but they had potential for collaboration. (I reset them to no longer accept new data.)

For more on the workshop approach see my post “Solve This Problem, You’ll Learn the Skills Along the Way

Don’t Teach Them Facts – Let Student Discover Patterns

4794114114_dd895561bf Develop a classification system – analyze patterns, create a schema, evaluate where specific elements belong. Sounds like a very sophisticated exercise. Not really, young toddlers do it all the time – sorting out their toys and household stuff into groups of their own design. They may not be able to explain their thinking, but hand them another item and watch them purposely place it into one of their groups. They have designed a system.

Humans experience the world in patterns, continually trying to answer the question – what is this? Remembering where we’ve encountered things before and assessing new items for their similarities and differences. Someone once asked Picasso if it was difficult to draw a face. His reply, “it’s difficult not to draw one.” We see “faces” everywhere.

Filling out a Venn diagram isn’t analysis – it’s information filing.

It’s unfortunate that student don’t get to use their innate perceptual skills more often in the classroom. Instead of discovering patterns on their own, students are “taught” to memorize patterns developed by someone else. Rather than do the messy work of having to figure out what’s going on and how to group what they see – students are saddled with graphic organizers which take all the thinking out of the exercise. Filling out a Venn diagram isn’t analysis – it’s information filing. Instead of being given a variety of math problems to solve that require different problem-solving strategies, students are taught a specific  process then given ten versions of the same problem to solve for homework. No pattern recognition required here – all they have to do is simply keep applying the same procedures to new data sets. Isn’t that what spreadsheets are for?

Continue reading “Don’t Teach Them Facts – Let Student Discover Patterns”

SmartPhone – Dumb School

Lockedphone This week I attended a panel discussion sponsored by Mobile Portland entitled “The Myth of Mobile Context.” I was treated to an all-star panel that tacked tough questions exploring challenges, opportunities, design considerations and the user experience in the mobile context.

Through the talk,  I kept thinking about a quote from my previous post – The Future of Schools – Three Design Scenarios

“With rare exceptions, schools currently treat the digital revolution as if it never happened. Computers, more often than not, still sit in dedicated rooms, accessible only with adult supervision.

… When students step out the door of the institution called school today, they step into a learning environment … in which one is free to follow a line of inquiry wherever it takes one, without the direction and control of someone called a teacher… If you were a healthy, self-actualizing young person, in which of these environments would you choose to spend most of your time?

… The more accessible learning becomes through unmediated relationships and broad-based social networks, the less clear it is why schools, and the people who work in them, should have such a large claim on the lives of children and young adults…”

While I’ve seen some cutting edge schools / teachers that have effectively embraced mobile technology and social networking, too many educators see smartphones as a distraction from learning. Many schools block Facebook, Twitter and the rest of social web as if it was pornography.

So where’s this put our students? For many it means that they must leave their smartphone at the classroom door and surrender themselves to an information culture controlled by the adults. What’s the mobile context in schools? Not much, it’s banned as subversive to learning.

Every day in school, students must “forget” about the information control and functionally their phone gives them to browse, research, monitor, network, shop and entertain. While they might view a photo just posted to Facebook from a friend’s mobile as the catalyst to a conversation, their teacher considers it a distraction from learning.

Mostly technology in school offers an “illusion of modernity” – automating routine tasks like word processing, or watching a teacher having fun at the smartboard. If students do get online in school – it often involves viewing “filtered” web content with limited functionality.  Of course students need lessons in “digital hygiene.” But curating all their web content and interactions doesn’t teach them responsible use, it just sequesters them behind a firewall. “Suspicion invites treachery” ~ Voltaire

When students do get on a school workstation (laptop or desktop) they quickly realize that it doesn’t “know” them as well as their phone does. Their personal device carries a wealth of information that’s important to them – contacts, photos, data, memories. To the school desktop, students are just a user on the network with a limited range of permissions. The biggest problem with the school computer is that it doesn’t do “place” at all. That’s a stark contrast to students’ mobiles, which geo-browse via the growing number of locational apps and geo-tagged information stream.

Mobile context in schools? Not much.

Maybe it was a bit harsh to entitle the post “Smart Phones – Dumb Schools.” But try doing without your smartphone tomorrow and see if that doesn’t feel like a pretty dumb idea.

For thoughful insights on the mobile web watch this great Slideshare by Yiibu.