Reach out and hug someone - EDCI 336

Video Review

Spreadsheets!?

So here we are in the next century ... and so is excel! Will surprises never cease? I will do my utter best to use any product but excel for my spreadsheeting needs. I am thinking something like openoffice calc as I really try to avoid anything that is branded, closed-source, and for-profit. Excel is probably the most developed spread sheet tool but I think I will have limited use for spread sheets in the first place. I will likely use a spread sheet program for tracking marks. If I trip over a particularly good example of an excel applet that represents a science concept then I will probably shamelessly lift it but I will still try to run the applet on calc first. The other likely use I can see for excel is that it is a very easy way for students to graph data. Unless I start manipulating masses of data, I am unlikely to spend any more time than I already have on spread sheets. Anyone want to show me a new, inspiring and innovative use for spread sheets?

Not Sylvester's Tweety anymore!

Okay, I love twitter. I think it should be used in the classroom, not only by teachers but by students as well. Why? Because people who are not in your classroom are going to have no idea what your students are tweeting about if they aren't there. So what does that mean? Comments on twitter during your class are either directed at other students or you (the teacher) or they are not. You might be thinking that this makes no sense but I like my chances here. I aim to engage my students, so with any luck, their comments are going to be about whatever we are discussing in class. The people who are likely banning social networks in their class likely can't compete. That's okay, that's one style/need. It's just not mine. Furthermore, useful things get said on twitter. Things that would otherwise go unheard. Students are talking to each other without interrupting the rest of the class and, just as important, they are engaging their teachers with questions and comments too. For some twitter looks a lot more appealing than speaking up in class.

Not only do I welcome twitter into my classroom but I think it is a sign of healthy, happy brains. People who are happy and occupied are likely to get their work done. That is part of staying happy and occupied. If you flip it around the other way, cutting students off from social networks during your class is not going to keep them riveted on you anyway. Furthermore, there are no twitter cops out in the real world and students are going to need to balance their use of social networks with their other work demands. Why shouldn't they learn how to do that in school? Do you really think this is not going to be a workplace issue in the future? It seems to me that it is already one now.

Multiple Intelligences, Yea or Nay?

Alright, I am just going to dive in here and say that I have a lot of reservations about the idea that we are addressing 'kinaesthetic learners' with fancy websites like Prezi. I know, I know ... I get a rap on the knuckles and and I get to wear the dunce cap in the corner (my heart goes out to you Mr. Scotus).

First of all, what are kinaesthetic learners anyway? Well, we need to back up the truck.

I could put a link in here for Howard Gardner but you will do your own searching anyway (as any critical reader should). In a nutshell, Howard Gardner was a guy who mistrusted the concept of IQ. It was a revelation to educators and researchers alike that school typically focused its attention on a few different kinds of learning that Gardner posited as linguistic and logico-mathematical. One of the other six learners that Gardner posited was that of bodily/kinaesthetic learners.

The great news here is that for the past 20 years educators have revised the way they teach to include more of the intelligences that Gardner proposed. This absolutely has to be an improvement because education really was (and in some cases still is) being delivered in only a relatively few modes.

The bad news is that I think the model itself is limiting and not well understood or characterized. For example, why eight kinds of learners? Wikipedia says that Gardner has been considering a ninth called existential learners for some time and I have certainly witnessed other instructors add a bracketed 'spiritual learner.' Not only that but Gardner has also fallen victim to his own sort of oppositional privilege in his own selection of categories. He has been criticized on Marxist grounds concerning the socializing roles of education, feminist grounds, and more than a few others. Please see this link for one summary: http://hss.fullerton.edu/linguistics/cln/Sew-Kincheloe.pdf

Lastly, assuming that we agree that kinaesthetic learning is a distinct category, how is a web page kinaesthetic? A game is kinaesthetic if you get up and swing a controller around - though your input with the controller does not necessarily closely approximate the actions you would need to take if you were performing any given task with your body. I am not so sure that clicking with a mouse is kinaesthetic to any greater degree than turning the pages of a book. Sure, I could modify some things on some pages like wikispaces but I can and do modify real texts when I have them too - I write on them, diagram, circle, underline, paraphrase, object, occasionally swear ... But I don't consider that truly kinaesthetic. I could go on to do a direct activity after having absorbed material from a web site but I could do that just as well after having flipped through a repair manual.

In the end, I think that the use of digital media can revolutionize the presentation of materials. But make no mistake, we are talking about presentation here. Even with the technology advances we have made, we are not talking about a lot of digital developments that involve productive work on the part of students. The doing part is still very much tied to manipulable objects that may or may not have been printed off from digital resources. And this all assumes that we are treating the idea of multiple intelligences in a, well, intelligent way. I can buy that using as many modes and senses possible facilitates better rates of learning but I am pretty concerned that we are using a fairly rough tool here (and I say tool in the sense that the model of learning influences the practice of teaching). And we may not be using that tool well when we describe mouse-clicking as kinaesthetic.

My power hat

So ... hats (amongst other things). I have a hard time with hats. Not students wearing them. Not the fact that they exist. Just that so many teachers are hung up on them.

The problem is really one of power. I am not going to deny that power exists or that it should even be used in the classroom (I'm going to go with Foucault on this one) but hats are not the particular hill I want to die on. Put into context, every student represents a whole bunch of hills. Some will let you die on a bunch of them without really impeding their learning but some will only give you one. That's it; all learning stops. You can watch those students withdraw or have them jump up and spit on you but the end result is the same.

I don't want to die on some foreign hill over a hat. I want my students to learn. I want to have good relationships with them. I like hats. Especially after bad haircuts.

How about we don't draw arbitrary lines in the classroom that will then become exemplary of the respect we (teachers) feel we deserve for having drawn such an artificial boundary in the linoleum. I use my first name too - exclusively! Piercings, dyes, loud clothing, loud ipods, laptops, social media and hats: none of these things bother me too much. It's supposed to be about learning after all. Are these things really impeding learning? No. I would be if they become the new guideposts that I need respected in order to allow a learning environment to form. That would be me not my students. Freedom to learn and freedom to express are powers that I want expressed in my classroom. Period.

EDCI 353B Focal Blog 3

Once again, before addressing the blog prompt I want to take a bit of space to outline some of the discussions and/or materials I have looked at in the intervening week between these blogs ( I know they were not posted a week ago but I have a terrible case of edit-itis that will require some more blogging to reduce (which is pretty interesting when I juxtapose myself with Will Richardson's blog from May 20th about "writing live," "flowwriting," and his shift away from writing in any overtly edited fashion - have a look here). So ... I read everything that was easily accessible on Will Richardson's blog, I have read a pretty substantial hunk of Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You" because I tripped over a copy in the used bookstore on campus, and we had two guest speakers in our class - a teacher-librarian who talked about available internet and library resources, and a library technician who talked more specifically about copyright issues in general, in Canada, and in the classroom.

The big question that forms the basis of the final blog post for my crazy intensive three week Alternative Texts extravaganza is this: discuss four aspects of my own teaching (think of skills, knowledge, and attitudes) that I will need to hold on to and/or let go of within the classroom to engage my students in a time of expanding notions of text.

I am going to need to hold on to my integrity as a teacher. What I mean by this is that I am going to have to teach in a system that uses standardised testing as its primary assessment tool while simultaneously teaching (perhaps even primarily) the critical thinking skills that I (informed by whatever literature I can get my hands on but including Mackey and McPherson) think they need. I know this is not a new dilemma for teachers but it is a tiring one. Tiring because not everyone shares the same view of education and tiring because it will just plain be a lot of work.

I am going to let go of the five paragraph essay (and that is a shame as I can finally say that I am good at it). Not only is it entirely printed-text based (i.e. monoliterary) but it is also a solitary exercise. Students will need this skill, there is no doubt, but how much will they need it? Not much. But if I can get a critically aware blog, movie or web-site, I will be more than happy with that - it will need to be critically aware according to the criteria of its own text-type, it is more in-line with the activities and skills that teens already perform (Mackey's asset model and McPherson's closing the loop between what teens do for fun and what they do in school - an absolute education killer), and finally these are skills that teens are more likely to use in the future (you don't see many five paragraph essays on facebook or in the workplace).

In relation to the last point, I am going to let go of authoritarian control of the classroom. I think students need experiential learning - even when this might seem painfully slow. They need to come up with their own solutions without being told what to do by me. Google can't make you stupid[er] when you need to get what you can from it to overcome the problem in front of you. Steven Johnson spends a lot of time in Section One on games in "Everything Bad is Good for You" making the case that playing video games is more like "learning the basic procedure of the scientific method" in its approach to problem solving than mindless recreation (p.45). I want to open up space in the classroom for collaborative learning like that of Brown and Renshaw used in "Positioning Students as Actors and Authors: A Chronotopic Analysis of Collaborative Learning Activities."

Lastly, I am going to hold on to my own definition of text. It's funny because this is the place that this class took as its starting point and it may seem a little backward to reverse this far. I know what the Integrated Resource Packages list as the Prescribed Learning Outcomes for the province of British Columbia. In fact, I have them saved to my hard drive and I just reviewed them again before I sat down to write this blog entry. The PLOs indicate different outcomes for text and for representations. Furthermore, there are a lot more listings under the headings of text than there are under representations. I will go so far as to posit that the BC Ministry of Education doesn't explicitly agree with Margaret Mackey that literacy is "the interpretation of recorded symbolic representation." Either that, or that the ministry seems to feel that printed-text literacy is worthy of more valourisation than film-text. Blogging, tweeting (otherwise called micro-blogging), and other on-line forms of text are not really mentioned. It looks like I need to interpret the somewhat vague guidelines and I am going to hold on to a definition of literacy that is open the multimodal text types without valourising one type over another - particularly when that valourisation is to my advantage and to my students' disadvantage (I have a vested interest in printed-text and they have a similar interest in on-line forms).