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Earlier this month, I wrote a "rant" in 2¢ Worth that garnered a good deal of response. The post, Teachers & Technology - a Rant!, came mostly from a blog article written here, by a Technology & Learning Blogger, but also from some of its comments and other posts that I had read that day. It was a bit of a stress releasing vent. It's why I called it a rant. And it's part of what's difficult about blogging, that you(I) see each article as a continuation, just one point along a spectrum of our knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, aspirations, and emotional condition.
However, when people read your blog article, they are typically seeing only that one point, looking through that single break in the fence, and, therefore, reacting to only a small part of my story -- and this is not necessarily a bad thing. When you teach history, it is usually one decade, or one influence, or one event at a time. If done right, then the result is a broad and useful perspective.
Yesterday, while scanning through my aggregator, I ran across two more references to that article. Chris Lehmann (Practical Theory) wrote Don't Blame the Victim..., which I'd actually read before but hadn't had time to respond. In that post, Chris Wrote:
There's a lot of writing going on about how teachers don't have the right to be technologically illiterate today, that they can't, won't shaltn't... And, and I don't mean to be picking on David or Karl, two voices I deeply, deeply respect, there seems to be a sense that, if it weren't for those darned teachers who won't learn, we'd have the schools we need.
That little blurb is highly misrepresentative of Chris' entire article, so I strongly recommend that you link over and read the whole thing. After reading it, I commented with...
Thanks for this post. It is, perhaps, the best thing about blogging, that the greatest value comes out of the conversation, the sharing and growing of perspective. ..that a simple rant can expand into a much larger, more accurate, and useful examination of a topic.
In my state, we are facing a potentially catastrophic shortage of teachers. The are leaving the profession faster than we can replace them, and I do not believe that it is (just) the pay. It's that teachers pursue this job because they have a healthy notion of what it is to succeed with students. They know, because they've experienced those moments as students, when a teacher succeeded in helping them to grow, to be more than they were before.
But then they enter an institution that seems set up for failure. Barriers at almost every point prevent that success -- barriers of policy, barriers of expectations, barriers of time, support, resources, and barriers of shear political cowardice.
I happen to think that there is only a very thin line between a mediocre teacher and a great teacher, but it takes some pretty large steps from the entire institution to cross that line.
Jamie, a school librarian in Houston, wrote an entry in Books and Bytes, a piece called Teachers as Learners. Again, I highly recommend that you click over and read the entire post. But the small part of it that I am responding to reads...
More than a few times, teachers have stated to me that professional development & technology training should be on school time, not personal time. The overriding perception is that "in the "real" (business) world, people are paid to be trained, but the poor teachers have to do it all on their own time. By and large this is not true, from my observation of friends and family members not in education!
 I commented...
Thanks for this post, Jamie, and for linking to my blog. I think that you make a valid and useful point, that other professionals do engage in professional development on their own time, and they often take work home with them, etc.
But I would also side with your teachers in that one of the problems with teaching, and one of the barriers to education reform, is the notion that what teachers do is teach. That the job is to work with students to help them learn -- and that is all.
We both know that there is so much more to being an educator than teaching -- especially in a time of rapid change and a dramatically shifting information landscape. It requires research, collaboration, material and strategy development, professional development, information management, planning, teacher field trips, and professional reflection.
I think that we need to figure out a way to re-image teaching, for the community. We need to project it as a dynamic profession that is more than just teaching the same old thing. It's about crafting learning experiences for students that introduce them to the world that they will inherit.
This is obviously a complex issue, as education should be. Its more than can be expressed in a single blog. The job is not simple -- not any more. The world that we are preparing our children for is complex, dynamic, and it may never be the same again. But it is also intensely exciting -- a fact that I only discovered after graduating from school. ..and learning about that world, should be just as exciting as that world really is.
This is a turn around. Usually my head turns when a newspaper article has the word blog in it. But today while reading my Sunday newspaper, I even read it on Sunday, my eye caught the title, “Storytelling evolves to reflect its era.”
The editor Jeannine Guttman wrote an exquisite column about storytelling. I have read it 3 times already and each time I thought of a new connection. When I first read it, I heard a voice inside me saying I needed to blog about this column. But, why?
Continue reading "Are Bloggers Storytellers for the 21st Century?" »
Because the clock is ticking, and I'm not sure if we have years or only months.
Continue reading "This is the Testing We Need to be Paying Attention To" »
Our job is not to hide inaccuracies from our students, but to teach them how to tell the difference and to care about the difference.
Continue reading "Martin Luther King -- According to the NeoNazis" »
There is something comforting about having aunts and uncles who are in their 90s. It can also be very enlightening.
Continue reading "Do Not Be Afraid!" »
I'm not a librarian. However, I have spent an intense two days with librarians from around the country at the School Library Journal's annual Leadership Summit. Their conversations and struggles in a time of declining budgets coinciding with a time when their expertise is especially needed, has become a part of my thinking. A question posed to MIT's David Cavallo was a perfect example of where their thinking was coming from.
Continue reading "Speaking as a Librarian" »
This state educational technology conference is doing something new. Take it home with you! Too cool for school!
Continue reading "Take your Conference With You" »
How often do we take the opportunity to stop teaching and listen. It's part of what blogging is all about -- not blogging, but reading. I hand you this to read, from a Hong Kong-born, New Zealand student, Cherrie Kong.
Continue reading "A Read from a Learner" »
In Doug Noon's blog, Borderland, he says, "My name is Doug. I'm from the government. I teach your kids." This got my attention. Doug also got my attention when he wrote an article called, Contested Ground a couple of weeks ago, and I got his permission last week to post the piece in the Tech Learning blog. Some people just say it so well.
Continue reading "Doug Noon's Take on Best Practice -- Contested Ground" »
There's an article in last months WIRED Magazine that I have just gotten around to reading -- and it's got me thinking.
Continue reading "The Rise and Fall of the Hit -- and the Textbook Industry" »
Preparing for presentations over the past couple of days, and in transit today (Sunday), I've been wondering about what I would write for today's T&L Blog. Then fate took my hand as the latest press release arrived from the PEW Internet in American Life Project, ever with their ears to the grid. I loaded the page, harvested it, and took it with me to the airport.
Continue reading "Glance at the Future from the PEW" »
For the past week, I have been writing about best practices over at 2
Continue reading "New Century School House" »
Several years ago, schools and districts were busy writing up their Acceptable Use Policies in an effort to deal with the new challenges of modern computers and the Internet. These documents defined the guidelines and procedures for using school technology and addressed the issues of the Internet -- the fire-hose of information.
Continue reading "AUP 2.0" »
In most schools, it has begun. We are forcing our children back into containers. For weeks, they have lived, played, learned, and worked without boxes -- through gadgets on their desks, on their laps, and in their pockets. Their schedule has been theirs -- often sleeping until 11:00, and playing and working until 3:00 and 4:00 the next morning. They have roamed a limitless realm of information with friends whose geography means absolutely nothing. Walls do not exist, because of the gadgets they carry.
Continue reading "Our Schools are Leaking!" »
School starts soon. For some, classrooms are already filled with curious, eager to learn, and savvy millennials, who, while they pay attention to you, are skillfully texting their friends with cell phones under their desks -- typing with one hand.
I have continued to work through the summer presenting at conferences, staff development institutes, administrative retreats, and school openings. The most requested topic continues to be 21st century literacy. I prefer to call it "Contemporary Literacy." It is a good presentation, but the topic can be provocative, as it goes against a lot of the conventions that years of schooling have instilled in us.
Continue reading "Getting Right Down To It" »
There has been a background buzz going on in the edublogosphere, a conversation that seems, to me, to be a net that is surrounding and bringing more relevance to a lot of the conversations that are taking place right now. It actually started with a conversation at NECC that was webcasted by the conference. The participants were Will Richardson, Tom March, and Tim Wilson, and the topic was Web 2.0. During that conversation the issue came up about there not being a central location for finding instructional and professional applications of blogging in the classroom. Of course this is not entirely true. There are lots of locations, including Richardson's book, which he was to professional to mention.
Continue reading "Blogging Best Practices" »
Introduced on May 9, 2006, by Pennsylvania Representative Michael Fitzpatrick, the Deleting Online Predators Act of 2006 (DOPA), seeks to protect children from the dangers of commercial social networks and chat rooms. the first sentence of the bill claims that it is:
Continue reading "A DOPA Update" »
Last week was a big one for blogging search engines. Not only did Ask.com introduce their new blog search feature (reviewed at Read/WriteWeb), and Bloglines unveil their improved blog search tool, but Australian blogger, Ben Barren, introduced his new Aussie blog search engine, gnoos (reviewed by TechCrunch).
Continue reading "Searching the Blogosphere" »
Today, we (in the U.S.) honor those fallen in battle. To learn about this holiday in America, you could go to your history teacher, or...
Continue reading "Memorial Day ... and Net-Learning" »
In late 2004, blogger and WIRED Magazine Editor & Chief, Chris Anderson wrote an article called, The Long Tail. Based on research into the behaviors of an evolving information industry, Anderson produced a graph that illustrated the sales pattern of commercially available books, movies, and music. His graph exposed a new world with a new ecology, where people are mining out a living by telling their story.
Continue reading "Living in the Long Tail" »
Last week, a new bill was proposed to the U.S. Congress, the Delete Online Predators Act, or DOPA. The proposed bill seemed to initially come to the attention of the edu-blogosphere from an online Article in C|net's News.com. The article, Congress Targets Social Network Sites, was snagged by blogger, Andy Carvin, and from his blog, the bill was captured, researched, reflected on, and discussed by other education bloggers around the world, though mostly here in the U.S. The furor intensified, especially in my own 2
Continue reading "Our Classrooms are Flat" »
That's how I addressed my e-mail message to Paul Gilster, my neighbor and Linux guru, when I installed Ubuntu Linux on an OLD Dell (P2) desktop computer last week. Don't know why I did it. Certainly didn't have time. I just felt like having something running in the background while I worked on the code for Son of Citation Machine.
My first foray into the world of Linux.
Continue reading "Jumped off the Cliff & in Freefall -- a Linux Tale" »
Gravity is a wondrous thing. Given a high place and a low place, things can very easily be moved, by the reliable force that makes all things come down. But as we desire to move stuff from one place that is no higher than its destination, then we must rely on muscle. Muscle is effective, but it is limited and it insults the animal who is pressed into labor. So we invent engines.
So what about flat classroom learning engines?
Continue reading "Flat Classrooms" »
On Friday, I spoke at the NSBA Annual Conference, keynoting the TLN Executive Briefing. Ken Kay, President of the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, and a school reform advocate I've been aware of for many years, followed my address with a compelling description of their work. I must confess some apprehension about getting up and talking about my vision of new literacy (contemporary literacy), and then being followed by Ken and his organizations 21st Century Skills. I suspect he was a little uneasy as well, about our getting mucked up in each others models and vocabulary?
Continue reading "21st Century Skills" »
I worked at a wonderful regional conference a couple of weeks ago, in Southern Illinois, put on by their Regional Office of Education #21. While strolling through the exhibitors hall, a woman came up and asked if she could talk with me about a project that she was involved in.
Continue reading "Brain Drain" »
This month, Encyclopedia Britannica launched a counter attack against Nature Magazine's December news story, Internet Encyclopaedias go head to head. In the story, Nature stated that...
Continue reading "Wikipedia vs. Encyclopedia Britannica ... or not" »
One of the most interesting topics being discussed at education technology conferences today is the instructional potential of video games. Much of this has come from talks and writings by Marc Prensky (Digital Natives, Digital Immigrants), but many others from MIT, Harvard School of Education, and other people and places. So what is it about video games that compel students to learn, and might we leaverage it in our classrooms?
Continue reading "Classroom as Video Game" »
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