Keeping Things Out in the Open

Got a couple of interesting responses to yesterday's post about starting an RPG/MMOG club at school.

Reader Norman sums up many of them writing:

Just watch your back with RPGs. Keep everything out in the open.

Indeed. That's good advice.

And that's what it's all about: keeping everything "out in the open".

That's why my gradebook is available online. That's why I've got parents in my Twitter feed. That's why all of my students' work -- including all tests, essays, exams, etc. -- that's why all of it is posted on their blogs. That's why I have students post projects and documentation to YouTube and ThisMoment. That's why I'm Ustreaming classes to the school community.

The 21st century classroom is all about keeping everything "out in the open".

And yet, so often, the response I get from teachers and admins is: "Watch your back". As though I'm teaching radical dogma in hushed tones behind closed doors.

My room is open to everybody. The students understand this when they sign up for my courses. The parents give me high-fives and smiles for giving them a window into the daily learning-lives of their children.

Have there been problems with RPGs in schools in the past?

Sure.

But it wasn't because of the RPGs.

It was because of the way schools were set up in the past. Schools themselves were these closed-off secretive fortresses. Parents were often in the dark as to what went on on a daily basis.

Some schools are still like this. And that's got to change.

Because we are living in an age where the technology offers us new ways to open up our teaching to the broader community. It allows for real-time transparency.

Because no teacher should have anything to hide. Indeed teachers should want to keep everything "out in the open".

At the End of the Anomaly of the Age of Printed Books

I've been thinking about what we call paradigm shifts and whether what on the surface looks like a major one with regard to the Digital Age, may in fact be part of a much broader situation that's been occurring since the advent of the printing press and the obsolescence of the manuscript codex.

Back in college, I took a course called 'European Culture in the Middle Ages' with Jan Ziolkowski. Now, this was just about the last place I ever would have thought a discussion of the Internet would have arisen. But, in his discussion of the nature of the Medieval manuscript codex, Ziolkowski made an observation that has stuck in my mind ever since: in it's ability to be quickly redacted, altered, and republished, the text-experience of the Internet actually has more in common with the text-experience of the manuscript codex than with the text-experience of printed books.

In essence, as I took his meaning, it was incorrect to think of the text-experience of the Internet as an elaboration based on the text-experience of printed books. Rather, the text-experience of printed books was actually an anomaly in the history of how humans communicated via text. The text-experience of the Internet marked therefore not a paradigm shift forward, but rather a correction of the anomaly of printed books.

There is a distinction to be had between technological paradigms and ideological paradigms. Their influence on one another is what's so interesting.

Take for instance our notion of transportation. A horse gets you from point A to point B just as a car gets you from point A to point B. The technology changes, but the idea and purpose primarily remain the same. However, the car is able to overcome certain obstacles to the speed and carrying capacity of the horse; this shifts the idea of what can be accomplished via transportation. In other words, the idea paradigm changes according to the re-evaluation of what the tech shift means in terms of innovation.

The shift ultimately depends upon the worth of the innovation-exchange that both the technology and the idea produce.

With regards to communication, the situation is a bit different. Communication has sped up -- not unlike the automobile -- but, is it really able to overcome the obstacles of itself? In other words, whereas there are bio-technical distinctions to be made between horse and car, there is no such distinction to be made between written word on manuscript page and written word on computer screen. The distinctions are only in what you do with those words, which then amounts to syntactical hub-bub which could produce a shift but which in and of itself is not the shift.

The words are the words.

During the anomaly of printed books, the printed words took on a different connotation: they became 'the standard'. Newspapers were more 'authoritative' than handwritten broadsides; we argued about whether song lyrics should be considered 'real poetry' if they were typed up in a book.

Neil Simon wrote that once you wrote something down, it was considered truth; I'd append that to read: once you wrote something down that was then mass produced, it was considered 'the standard'.

That's changing.

Our current age of Diigo looks far more like the critical age of Medieval glossing than it does the age of shiny mass-produced magazines and textbooks. Our current age encourages 'writing in books'. No more of those fussy signs in the library discouraging highlighting.

Highlight away.

And look at what he said, and she said, and I said while you're at it.

You wanna know what the real paradigm shift is? It's that the Digital Age itself isn't a paradigm shift. It's a realignment.

The realignment itself is not the shift. The fact that we are realigning and re-evaluating the printed word is the shift.

In this way, 'Post-Print' is a better designation for our current environment than 'Digital Age'. Because, the Internet and Web 2.0 is not something new, rather it is the broad and global manifestation of something much older and more human than printed books ever were.

The Next Friday Chat on June 5th: Digital Plagiarism

June 5th at 1PM EST: The Friday Chat will be on the topic of Digital Plagiarism

A topic dear to the heart of any classroom teacher: plagiarism -- and methods of both discovery and prevention -- has become a fresh challenge in the Digital Age. Join us for informal discussion on June 5th.

June 5th at 1PM EST
http://todaysmeet.com/TeachPaperless

Reminder: Today's Friday Chat about Assessment and Grading in the Digital Age

If it's Friday, it must be the day for the Friday Chat!

Today's Topic: Assessment and Grading in the Digital Age

We'll talk blogging as formative assessment, alternatives to traditional tests and essays, online gradebooks, use of social media in assessment and more.

Friday May 29th, 2009
1PM EST
http://todaysmeet.com/TeachPaperless

What Makes a Great Teacher a Great Teacher in the 21st Century

Classrooms are not idle places. Sure, they may look bare in the bleary 7AM morn and eerily desolate come 7PM. But they are places full of spirits -- spirits of students and teachers past, present, and future.

Education doesn't happen because those rooms are filled, education happens because those spirits are fulfilled.

And those spirits are ever in flux between states of known and unknown. Even the occasionally insolent ones can turn on a dime and suddenly become stars given the right tools and proper motivation -- the knowledge not of encyclopedic histories and perfected answers, but of the courage and understanding of how to light one's own supernova.

And that brings my mind to experimentation and educational technology and what makes a great teacher a great teacher.

When it comes to educational technology, the great teacher isn't the one who merely uses technology in education. The great teacher is the one who experiments and who teaches the spirits within students to experiment. The great teacher doesn't follow the rules. The great teacher doesn't go along with the program. Like a gleeful hacker, the great teacher turns Twitter into a reference library, chat rooms into exit tickets, Skype-casts into global awareness sessions, Wikimedia into a living breathing history of human events, and Pandora into the clothes of sound that wrap around culture and keep us warm on darkest nights.

Great teachers don't follow corporations and their politik of textbooks and proprietary courseware to a best-of-all-worlds dead-end. Great teachers have read their Voltaire. They know a con when they see one.

Great teachers recognize that the real thrust of Web 2.0 is not in getting students to understand the material but in getting students to engage the hidden material within themselves and to thus have body and soul to tear into the heart of human content with such intellectual ferocity that the wolves and beasts both of moonlit night and boardroom conversation quake in the wake of a mighty woken mind.

And in this Digital Age -- an age that will see not the eternal content and themes of humanity disappear, but the methodologies and shrill mechanics of the bygone 20th century and its still-birthed assessment of the almighty bubble shrivel up and fade away -- great teachers will turn again like Socrates to the colluded crowd and in this, our "doomed fad", smile the smile of the blessed.

DigitalAge Twibe

Started a Twibe group for Twitter folks interested in all things DigitalAge! Join up and Tweet away...

The Times They Are A-Changin' (Apologies to Patton)

He calls the Xerox a mimeograph machine. He writes in 'Scantron' on the sheet passed around during the faculty meeting about new technology in the classroom. He might even refer to the Internet in the plural.

But he is a teacher. Maybe a great one. And we need him on our side.

Regarding how the Stimulus should be spent in Ed Tech, reader Ms. Chow writes:

The reality is that school faculties consist of a diverse group of people. For the sake of this argument, they will be the divided into the tech-fearful and the tech-savvy. Billions of dollars spent, thousands of hours of man-power/training/logic utilized, and we will still be left with these two groups.

Ms. Chow, thank you for the honest insight. And Mimeograph Man -- prepare yourself -- 'cause this one's for you.

Teachers are on the front-line. We as teachers know that. Whether you teach in a public school or a private school; in the city or in the farmland; in packed classrooms in over-crowded suburbs or as a home-schooler in your own kitchen, we know the front-line.

It is the future. And it is ever closer. Either we approach it or it approaches us. But it is ever closer.

In light of this, we as educators have to make a few things public with regard to the future and with regard to the role of technology in our classrooms.

First: We have to state to ourselves and to the public that the point of educational technology is not to facilitate the use of technology but to use technology to facilitate education. Why do we need to do it via technology? Because that's where the world is. And that's the world our kids need to be prepared to engage.

Second: Long have we striven for 'authentic learning experiences and assessments'; well, in the context of the Digital Age which is upon us, it is inexcusable to ignore the authenticity of technology in the experience of our culture -- whether or not our students themselves are able currently to afford technology or access.

Third: We need to petition our government: Internet Access is a matter of civil rights; nothing produces democracy and growth like the transparent spread of information -- and especially as educators we need to see to it that all of our school-aged children have equal access to a free and independent Internet.

Fourth: We, as teachers, no longer have the luxury of being 'tech-fearful'. I know that there are people on your faculty like Mimeograph Man who swear they are 'against' technology. While I admire their perseverance, and I respect many of them and see that they possess a wealth of experience and have often delivered excellent educations to countless children, I dare say that they do not realize the precipice we stand upon with regard to preparing our next generation of children for a digital future.

The future of the Internet is going to make paper look like the manuscript codex which made papyrus look like wax and clay tablets which were a minor improvement on a stick and wet sand. There are few instances in the history of communication that produce times as important as this: it is a time to either acclimate to the new paradigm or be left disheveled and confused at how the rest of the world passed us by.

This isn't about our 'comfort-level' with technology. This is about the Digital Age being a cruel reality. Things have changed. Our children need us to buck up, come to terms with and learn how to use the new technology, and help them navigate the digital world.

Please understand, I'm talking not from the point-of-view of a tech guy. I'm not some computer whiz. I'm a high school Latin teacher. And I also teach Art History and dally in the art department to the occasional chagrin of my chairman.

I spent most of my time in college translating Plato and Homer and reading about archaeological digs.

I am a firm proponent of the Liberal Arts.

In fact, I think a Liberal Arts education should be the first qualification for any content teacher in America.

Furthermore, I understand and appreciate Ed Schools -- even when I criticize them. I am the product of an M.S.Ed. program and the tutelage of some excellent professors in GT and Reading certificate programs.

I'm not trying to beat your brains in about this Ed Tech stuff because I'm some geeky square with a chip on my shoulder or a means to capitalize on this stuff; I'm trying to express to you my experience and my admittedly limited insights because I really see this as something that is going to have a direct impact on the future of our children. And that's why I became a teacher to begin with.

So help us out, or get out of the way. But don't just stand there over-analyzing and complaining and pretending this Digital Age is not happening. No one is taking away your paper and pencils; no one is gonna force you to learn HTML. We just want to help you get up to speed and we want you to continue helping our kids. Because the future for my children and your children and all of our children depends upon us doing the right thing in this moment.

Lastly, as I've said before: educational technology is not one of the various useless educational theories that have been recycled again and again in endless classrooms and faculty development meetings over the last thirty-odd years. Rather, educational technology is the way in which the education experience will exist within the broader context of the Digital Age. That age is upon us. We don't have a choice in the matter.

So, Mimeograph Man, think about it this way: when your grandchildren sit on your knee and ask you what you did to help your students during the Great Digital Revolution, you won't have to tell them you were busy complaining in the faculty lounge.

The Boy Who Cried Wolf

Another reader fed up with the way Ed Tech is treated:

People are in denial of just how important technology is to our world now and people need to help the schools of today out and keep them up to date with the technology of the era. Ed tech plays an extremely important role to our future and it needs to be taken into consideration instead of ignored.

As I talk to more folks -- especially teachers -- I see that what we're really experiencing is a 'Boy Cries Wolf' moment in education. For years, theorists and professional development organizers have been rehashing and recycling the same old ideas and presenting them as both something new and something that we just won't be able to live without. Everything that's old is new again. This turned teachers off. Parents too.

Now, we're in a situation where the wolf -- the Digital Age -- is actually upon us, and a lot of folks aren't willing to deal with the situation because they've been burned so many times before.