On Specific Dates of Change

Interesting question via Tweet showed up via @AdrienneCorn:

So, what year are you guessing this full blown paperlessness will debut?

I guess my response would have to be that there isn't going to be a single year in which society decides paper's time has run its course. (And mind you, when I say 'run its course', I'm pretty much talking about paper's role in the printing and publishing industries; we'll still see paper used in a variety of formats from cardboard to toilet-paper to napkins... and I hope that paper-in-schools will see its growth actually in expanded art and hands-on arts and crafts classes.)

Rather than try to pin-point a specific date, I'd reference back to the changes digitization has already brought to the music industry, audio-video production, and library cataloging.

In the first case, the decade has seen 'invisible' MP3s by-and-large replace physical CDs. No one would have seen that one coming back in '91 when Nirvana broke. Likewise, no one really knows what the forecast looks like for the magazine, newspaper, and publishing industries. Schools might wind up going paperless by default.

Second case: I remember when I started recording music we had to scrounge up money to buy tape and rent time in a recording studio. While studios are certainly still around, tape is now pretty much just the domain of audiophiles who can afford to shell out thousands of dollars on reels and reel-to-reel machines. The rest of us use our Macs and record whenever and where-ever we like (for better or worse, this isn't a matter of comparing analog to digital... it's just a statement of fact).

Same goes for digital access. Whereas in the past, a good question from a kid in class might prompt a "Good question. Go look that up on your free time.", a good question from a kid now prompts: "Good question. Let's look that up right now". And within seconds, we've all learned something.

I think this has enormous implications for school libraries. Where earlier, libraries were prized for the breadth and depth of their collections, the new libraries are prized for quality of and savvy in access. I recently visited a huge school library which upon first glance looked quite impressive; until upon closer inspection I noticed that no less that a third of the collection consisted of out-of-date encyclopedias, atlases, and job-reference books.

The third case should be obvious: Boolean search killed the card catalog. It's a case where technology fundamentally altered the way an institution functions.

All three of these cases took place over a period of years. And none of them completely wiped out what came before (at least not yet). You might want to go to your local (natch, 'corporate') CD/Book/Magazine/Coffee joint to pick up a CD for $20. Surely you might be in a band so rocking, you don't mind paying $10,000 to record your new album. And maybe -- and I admit without shame that I fall into this catagory -- you just love roaming the stacks of a big old library.

Well, you can still do all of those things. It's not the purpose of paperlessness to destroy any of those things. Just like it wasn't the purpose of the cell phone to replace the landline.

On Change and Predictability

It's funny, within minutes of publishing my last post, a friend commented:

A little heavy handed on the change business, huh? And predictability? Don't kids need more rather than less than that in their lives? Especially in school?

As to the former: I think (for once) I'm actually not being heavy handed concerning my position on 'change'. The reason I like the WoW comparison is that it gives us the example of change coming in while the game is already on top. In other words, the real 'cataclysm' going on here is that they've got 11 million users who love the game as-is and now they are in effect destroying the very fabric of the world those people love. That takes guts. But by-and-large as I watched the chats play out in the backchannels of Azeroth's cities over the weekend, most folks are thrilled by what's coming; it was a total love-fest for this move.

We as educators have to understand that while we may at times be wary of change, our constituencies -- both students and parents -- are ready for it. For example, I hear over and over the question of how parents will respond to social media in the classroom. And I always respond that after a full year of using blogs, Twitter, and a variety of Web 2.0 tools, I haven't received a single parent complaint. And in fact I have received a handful of thank-yous from parents who want their kids to be using this stuff in an authentic way.

As for 'predictability', I do understand the notion that classrooms need to be a place of stability and safety for students; but I don't think that challenging predictability in any way undermines that. In my own experience, I remember changing the entire format of a term-paper assignment on the spot in front of a class of Juniors because an idea one of them had was much better than the idea I'd worked up over the course of a few days. In another case, I saw a veteran teacher suddenly up and change his course requirements in the middle of a course -- to the benefit in learning of all of the students (you should've seen the projects they accomplished after the upheaval!). I know another teacher who scrubs predictability out of his classroom environment by carrying on twice-a-week lotteries for seating arrangements. Again, this doesn't make the class less stable, rather it fosters more interaction between kids who otherwise wouldn't. And lastly, I caught a teacher over the summer learning everything he could about Twitter after reading about it in TIME; he ended last June totally bummed out on ed tech, but coming back into it this fall post-Twitter, he's pumped and he's starting by having all of his students Tweet.

So I'd say that you've got to be open to spontaneity. That doesn't mean you can just wing it; after all, as any jazz musician will tell you, you've got to bring your A-game to any improvised set. Improvisation is an artform. It needs to be practiced and honed; the artist needs to learn from mistakes and assumptions. But, in the hands of a serious practitioner, improvisation -- and the disruption of predictability -- is a nuanced method of expressing understanding, compassion, and new forms of accessibility.

And I'd argue that these are the things kids need more of in school.

What WoW Can Teach Us Teachers

Something happened over the weekend that really impressed me.

The ‘thing’ was Blizzard Entertainment’s announcement of the next World of Warcraft expansion. On the surface, this might seem like nothing more than a video game promotion. But, when your ‘video game’ consists of an online world inhabited by more real human citizens than New York City, we as folks working with tech on a daily basis should take notice as to what they are up to.

And what they are up to is something phenomenal.

Whereas previous expansions of the adventure game have offered users new quests and new areas to explore, this expansion does one of the most radical things ever attempted in a virtual reality MMOG.

It destroys the world.

Literally. The expansion, called Cataclysm, actually destroys and re-creates the entire multi-continent virtual world that WoW players have come to know over the past few years.

In effect, what the folks at Blizzard Entertainment are banking on is that serious gamers want change.

And what could signal a greater change than actually turning the entire virtual environment on its ear?

Now, in my thinking, there is something to be learned here. For thirty+ years, we’ve treated schools like boardgames. And every few years, we’d announce that the game was changing, but we kept using the same board and the same pieces. We changed the rules, but forced the players to use the same old dice.

Now, we have the opportunity -- as in what Blizzard is doing with WoW -- to dramatically change the environment itself. We can keep the knowledge we've gained through our experiences, but apply it and let it manifest in new ways over a changing and changed world. And we can let that changing and changed world to inform us. To inspire us. And to push us off onto new adventures.

Because our kids are dying to take on new adventures. After all, they live in a world where they expect upheaval and change; they don't understand why so many of us are so afraid of it. Change -- whether in school or in an MMOG -- is a challenge; it's not in and of itself a good thing or a bad thing. In a way, change is worth only what you put into it.

And by destroying the very virtual world so many gamers have come to expect, Blizzard is really putting everything they've got into change.

So here’s the challenge to teachers: be like Blizzard. ‘Destroy’ the world you’ve created for yourself. All of those things you’ve spent years working out -- from seating arrangements to the way you assign homework -- take all those things, crack ‘em like eggs, and see what’s inside.

Try something new at least once a day. Don't let the kids predict you. Mix it up. It's not going to confuse your students (for long...); it's going to intrigue and inspire them.

Don’t be afraid of the cataclysm, embrace it.

On Big Ideas

Scott Marion from Center for Assessment in response to a question I posed during an Education Sector discussion on the 'Beyond the Bubble' report. My question concerned the wisdom in focusing our ed tech energies on creating assessments that focused on current content and assessment achievement rather than using the more holistic and community focused methods offered by Web 2.0 assessment to prepare students better for an unsure future.

There is no question that we need to prepare students for things for which we don't even know about yet. But we can't do that by guessing at the content that is coming in the future. Rather, we need to ensure that our current educational approaches focus on the big ideas of the disciplines (because these big ideas do not change that fast!) and on the process by which students develop expertise in these disciplines as well as the skills to continuing their learning when faced with novel situations.

While I totally agree that it is illogical to 'guess at content' coming in the future, it is by no less means ill-advised to think that 'big ideas do not change that fast'. The argument hinges on what type of ideas we consider.

Take for instance Latin. Latin admittedly hasn't changed much in a while. But the way in which Latin literature is thought about has changed in the most drastic way over the last few years.

Consider: it was the critical practice of Structuralism that had one of the most profound effects on the way that we think about 'close reading' no matter what discipline we teach. In Latin, 'close reading' means taking a single detail -- an image, a word, a manner of speech -- and tracing its use throughout the corpus of either a single work, the work of a single author, a school of authors, or with regard to all of extant Latin literature. A great example is in this essay by Barbara Gold on the issue of the image of the rose and how it relates to time and nature in Horace's poetry. To make a long story short (and with apologies) Gold tracks each time Horace uses 'rose' imagery in his poetry. She then looks for patterns in that usage, finding that his mentions of roses usually accompany thoughts concerning time and nature. And she makes her case for why the poet does this. This is a model close reading and each year I present it as an example of such to my students.

While I will not attempt to make any assumption as to the way in which Prof. Gold goes about her close reading, a technological marvel born at Tufts University makes this whole way of working a whole lot more accessible than back in the 1950's and 60's of Structuralism's beginnings.

That device is The Perseus Project.

Wide-ranging in scale, the interesting aspect of the project for me as a Latin teacher is the section dedicated to hyperlinked Latin texts. From Ovid to Tacitus, each text is chunked into small bits. Each word of each text is then hyperlinked to an online Latin/English dictionary and morphology/grammar tool. From a Latin I perspective, this gives students that ability to work through much more difficult passages of authentic Latin than they ever would be wont to otherwise. For the upper-level students, it presents a unique opportunity to take on scholar-level philological work.

How does it work? Well, say I give the students the word 'ignis' meaning 'fire' and tell them to look up each time the word appeared in the Aeneid. Within seconds, following easy directions which link the hyperlinked words in the dictionary to every use of the word in not only the text at hand, but also to every use of the word in the individual author's work as well as in the whole corpus of Latin literature, the student now has a complete list of every use of the individual word. This used to take WEEKS to do. Now it takes seconds. So the student can focus on finding the patterns, making connections, and analyzing the variety of 'meanings' the poem offers rather than the mind-numbing task of going on a word-search.

The Perseus Project has not changed Latin. But it has changed the way in which Latin is studied and analyzed. In this case the 'big idea' is the idea of 'critique' itself. Kant spent quite a while working on that one. So did Barthes. And Derrida. I don't mind my students working amongst that august company.

Ideas will change quickly. They are changing quickly. It's just that it's not always either the 'idea' or the 'change' that we expect. That's more and more the nature of a world where so many people with so many individual brains are working together at the same time all the while connected by the Net.

We need to teach kids how to think about how big ideas DO change and often change quickly. And that kind of meta-thinking -- which is ever evolving and will never come to a fixed 'conclusion' -- is best supported by the types of tools available in changeable, customizable, flexible, and holistic Web 2.0 apps and interactive Internet media as well as the types of tools good teachers have always used: Socratic Method, conversation, and compassion.

One last thing... this Perseus Project method is just one lesson. It teaches the kids a certain way to look at literature. Over the course of the four years I have most of my Latin students, we look at a wide range of critical styles and to practice each of them, we look at a broad range of content. Breadth of content and methods of analysis and understanding need not be at odds with one another, just as liberal arts and technology need not be at odds with one another. The sooner we realize this, the sooner we can get to worthwhile teaching.