Thinking is Dangerous

Fellow educators,

Have you ever had one of those days where you feel that all hope is lost?  One of those days where you start to wonder if anything matters besides AP/IB scores?  One of those days where you wonder what happened to thinking?  Well, I have lots of those – probably too many for my own good.  But the other day I was shaken from my gloom by a shining beacon of student thinking.  As you may have read in previous posts, I am working with students on a social bookmarking site to hold meaningful (digital) conversations on current events in the context of learning history.  Recently, a couple of students started a conversation that was downright dangerous (in a manner of speaking) – they challenged the current systems of political and economic order – and they did it all by themselves.  If you are interested, please read on after the jump to see the conversation these students engaged in.  Remember, this was independent of me as a teacher, and these kids came up with this all on their own.  Also, these are international students – a mix of nationalities, etc.  For privacy, I have excluded the actual names of the students.  Read on at your own peril.  If you’re not careful, you too may get sucked into doing some thinking.  (Also, the conversation is rather long).

Of Arm-Twisting and Educating

When I was in high school, I sometimes imagined that teachers spent their free time sitting around dreaming up new and creative ways to inflict pedagogical pain upon pupils.  Specifically, I recall English teachers who required us to annotate anything we read – History teachers who gave a reading quiz every Friday – and Math teachers who gave daily practice problems.  I hated these things.  But now I see the value to some (not all) of these practices.  For instance, annotating English texts taught me to be a critical reader.  History quizzes taught me to look for main ideas and hidden assumptions in the text.  And Math homework taught me that, even if you’re really bad at something, you can’t just give up on it without putting forth an effort.  The “arm-twisting” of my teachers helped make me a more intelligent human being.

Creating A Monster

    No one knows better than Victor Frankenstein the potential for danger in creating new things.  After all, he harnessed the very power of life, only to be frightened and disillusioned when he could not control it.  Frankenstein’s message is especially pertinent in our age of technological proliferation.  Perhaps we are not to the point of creating the very substance of life, but as educators we face the possibility of watching a seemingly great creation run wild in ways that could be destructive.  So I wonder, where do we draw the line?

Letting “The Man” Get You Down?

This post is about the idea of teaching digital rights management and copyright to students as a part of integrating IT into the curriculum. Wow, could I make this topic sound any more boring? Actually, this topic is anything but boring.   Unfortunately, I have a hopelessly philosophical approach to this question, which will likely make me sound like a pretentious d-bag.  So read on at your own peril (or interest).

There is so much content available about the issues surrounding digital copyright, that one might wonder why the subject even warrants a blog post from a third-rate blogger.  And to that, I respond that I am hoping to take a different approach to this idea of digital copyright.  Much has been made of the economic arguments, the artistic issues, the enforcement difficulties, etc.  But I wonder if this argument about digital copyright is the beginning of a new debate over Marxism, Anarchism, and the very political structures under which we live?  It seems that some of the fundamental issues underlying digital copyright are issues of private property (which Marx finds inherently evil).  And this brings me to the question of how to teach students about the laws and digital copyright.

   

Score!

Recent conversations with colleagues have revolved around the question of ever-elusive student motivation.  What gets kids motivated in the classroom?  And how can technology be used as a way to get students interested in learning?  Armed with these questions on educational philosophy, I set out to investigate the topic of student motivation.  What I found was an acronym – frick!  (Frick is not the acronym, but a little “classroom swearing”).  I hate acronyms.  Acronyms are created by people who are either too lazy to pronounce a few extra syllables, or by people who think acronyms are “cute”.  The latter are the far more egregious language offenders.  They are typically the same people who like the messages on motivational posters, send “singing” greeting cards, or are obsessed with kittens (okay!  they’re cute!  we get the picture, now leave the poor feline alone).  But I digress. . .

    The acronym from the study I found is SCORE – and yet I find it no more memorable as an acronym.  You can read all about SCORE here, or you can wait for me to give you the highlights.

But What Makes Me Want To Read It?

Inspired by some of my recent fascination (misguided infatuation?) with creative uses of IT in the classroom, some of my IB history students have decided to create a wiki that deals with the question, “To what extent can World War Two be considered a total war from the varying perspectives of social, economic, and political history?” I’m sure you are thinking, “with such a riveting and undeniably compelling question, it’s a wonder Kopp even needs to put forth any effort at all to get his students interested in this topic.” But, alas, social history and economic history are just not as sexy as “Valkyrie”, “Pearl Harbor”, “Saving Private Ryan” (from the Internet movie database), or any of the other number of Hollywood adaptations of WWII – hefty on star power, light on historical significance.

This is How We Do

Curriculum coverage:  a sacred idol of the teaching profession that is worshipped (willingly or reluctantly) particularly by teachers of classes with “external examinations”; typically identified as a necessary evil; content without understanding; teaching without learning.

50 Cent wrote “How We Do” to portray the life, sometimes glamorous, sometimes brutal, of the modern-day gangsta [sic].  Perhaps a similar lyrical piece ought to be made about the life of a teacher:  “This is how we do, when we’re all up in the classroom / throwing down words like it ain’t no thing / Dropping all this data as if it’s understood / so we can ease an exam-stained conscience.”  And, in a way, it’s all a game – not life on the street, but life in the classroom.  We teach kids to “play the game” of school.  Those who can’t compete are labeled as difficult, behavior problems, or simply “not college material” (or art students . . . ).  But what do we accomplish through this game?  What do we actually teach kids?  Or, more significantly, what do they actually learn?

    These questions come on the heels of discussions about the use of technology in providing students with more learning opportunities and great differentiation of instruction.  But I’m noticing a pit-fall in that even the “coolest” technology can be made irrelevant by a well-meaning teacher.  If these technological models (blogging, networking, wikis, videos) are turned into another aspect of “the game”, then we simply teach kids that even the most interesting things can be made boring or irrelevant.  So, how do I use IT without letting it become just a part of “the game”?  Thoughts?

More Thoughts on Literacy and IT

Prompted by recent discussions about IT literacy, I have been reflecting on the concept of evaluating sources of information, and how that changes in the world of information technology.  I was drawn to a recent post on Tom’s blog about using Google Docs to create collaborative class documents.  Check out his post here, though I warn you that it’s a bit lengthy, http://tommclean21.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/using-google-docs-in-geography/.

    This idea of having students create their own “text” for class is fascinating to me.  As a history teacher, I spend a lot of time teaching students to evaluate sources of information, exploring potential bias and examining relevant assumptions.  What I do not teach is how to evaluate student-generated information, whether it be from other students in the class, or other students all over the world.  This is powerful.  Wikipedia, for instance, is essentially a peer-edited document that has a lot of value for individuals seeking information about topics as wide-ranging as the causes of World War One and the air-speed velocity of an unladen swallow (African, or European?).  Though Wikipedia (and it’s ugly step-sisters) are generally not considered a “cite-able” source in academic research, it nonetheless presents us with a relevant issue:  irrespective of what students can and cannot use as a specific research source, they will use Wikipedia.  So how do we teach them to evaluate this source of information?  And how do we teach them to value peer-edited and peer-evaluated sources of information without depending solely upon them for research?  As we move further into the world of user-generated content and Web 2.0, these issues are going become increasingly relevant for educators.

    I might propose one thought:  students are loathe to trust one another’s information.  I get a sense (strictly anectdotally speaking) that students are not as engaged in peer presentations as they are in teacher-led, lecture-style classes.  I think some of this may be due to the “credibility issue”.  That is, the teacher is the expert, and students are merely bystanders in the educational process.  Convincing students of the validity of peer-generated content is an uphill battle, but one that deserves to be fought.  Whether that be through student-created, collaborative Google Docs http://tommclean21.wordpress.com/2009/02/14/using-google-docs-in-geography/, or through the use of Wikis to generate a student-created class “textbook” http://brokenworld.wikispaces.com/A+Broken+World (another idea “borrowed” from Clay over at http://beyond-school.org), or even through the use of reflective blogging.  In the end, this kind of content is only becoming more prevalent, and I simply can’t afford to put my head in the sand and hope it all goes away. 

What is Literacy?

The prolific use of technology in school brings up an interesting question with respect to literacy.  Specifically, has the prevalance of IT in education changed the definition of student literacy?  I was prompted to reflect on this question after reading a great entry on Clay Burell’s blog, http://beyond-school.org/2008/12/25/truly-twentyfirst-c/.  Before reading this post, my reaction to educational IT was that we are teaching kids the same things, but we’re calling it something different.  New tools, same ideas.  While I still think there is some truth to that, I definitely overlooked the idea of what Burell calls “online identity management”.  Essentially, students don’t define privacy in the same sense that many of their teachers might.

    But I do believe that literacy in the online world is more similar to traditional print media literacy than some of us would originally think.  For example, just because the New York Times (print edition) is a large, corporate media news source, does not mean that they have no motives or reasoning behind the stories they print, the pictures they publish, and the editorial decisions they make.  Just as a crack-pot with an Internet connection has an agenda, so does anyone in the business of information dissemination.  There is a danger in assuming that print media sources do not require the same level of evaluation and critique as online sources.

    These questions are essential to explore (and to have students explore) as IT is further integrated into the “typical” classroom.

Wiki-Wiki

So I tried to add a picture of a DJ at the turntable, just to drive home the illustrative nature of the title.  But for some reason, I keep getting a password prompt for the proxy server and my computer freezes every time I try putting my password in.  Oh well – insert cool imaginary picture here –

 

Now, on to the wiki.  I am thinking about ways to use wikis with my class, but I don’t fully understand what they can do.  I really like the idea (modeled in our course) of having students take notes in the wiki, which essentially leads to a great collaborative collection of notes.  But I want to go bigger and better than that, as well.  I usually do a “current events” project with my classes, and I would like to figure out how to adapt that to a wiki.  So far, I’m thinking of posting a news topic that our class can follow over the course of the week.  As students find articles, news reports, pictures, etc., they can post the link in the wiki and then comment on it.  Students could then collectively build an analysis of the news topic, with information from varied sources and with a variety of meaningful comments/discussions. 

    I think this is all a great plan, but I have no idea where to start or how to implement this, or how to get my students on board.  Any thoughts?