Posts by Shelly Blake-Plock
What a Difference a Century Makes
Published July 12, 2009 @ 08:59AM PT
The year 1909 started on a Friday.
And on that day -- January 1st, 1909 -- drilling began in a California oil field on what would come to be known as Lakeview Gusher Number One. Lakeview would go down in history as the largest American oil gusher ever discovered; and over the course of eighteen months, it would pour forth nine million barrels.
On January 1st, 2009, the Czech Republic -- a country that had not even been formed a hundred years prior -- took the presidency of the Council of the European Union -- a governmental entity that had not existed a hundred years earlier.
What a difference a century makes.
The following month of the year 1909 saw the birth of the NAACP (on the 100th anniversary of Lincoln’s birth) as well as the issuance of the first Futurist manifesto. Those Futurists were different than most of the folks who use the title in self-description today; as any art history student could tell you, they were far more interested in fast cars and mechanized weaponry than they were in the altruism of the Network. Many of ‘em died in the trenches a few years later.
The future is a funny thing. It's the only thing we know is going to happen. Yet it remains unknown. It sometimes bears out new realizations and breaks down old barriers. Yet, just as often, it confirms our worst fears and suspicions.
On February 1st, 2009, Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir, the new Prime Minister of Iceland, became the world's first openly lesbian head of government; the world saw something new. But on February 10th, Russian and US space satellites collided over Siberia; and the world was reminded of something old.
The auto industry has had its fair share of mergers of new and old as of late. But that's not in and of itself something new. After all: on February 24th, 1909, a new Detroit auto company was formed: the Hudson Motor Car Company. Despite producing some classic vehicles infused with loads of American style, the company was not destined to outlive the birth of rock-and-roll. It was bought out in 1954.
On March 4th, 1909, Taft took the reigns of the American Presidency and Teddy Roosevelt headed out on an African safari. One hundred years later, a man with African blood coursing through his veins is president of the United States.
On March 18th, 1909, Einar Dessau sends out information via short-wave and in effect invents the radio broadcasting industry. Interestingly, it was Marconi and Braun who shared the Nobel Prize in Physics that year for their work on radio.
Tesla was nowhere to be found.
On March 7th, 2009, just three days past the 100th anniversary of the first short-wave radio broadcast, NASA launches a space photometer on a mission to seek out extra-solar planets.
The future reminds us of our past. It's the ultimate in metonymy.
On March 31st, 1909, work begins on a new oceanliner: the RMS Titanic. Meanwhile, in our future, plans are in the works for a December 2009 maiden voyage of the largest capacity ocean liner in history.
On April 19th, 1909, the petroleum company that would later be renamed BP was incorporated. One hundred years later US politicians would be calling for an end to dependence on foreign oil.
On April, 22nd 1909, the the first Choctaw/English dictionary was published by the Bureau of American Ethnology. One hundred years later, UNESCO launches the World Digital Library.
On May 7th, 1909, the University of Zurich offers a new chair -- in theoretical physics -- to Albert Einstein. One hundred years later, North Korea announces its second successful nuclear test.
On June 9th, 1909, Vassar College grad Alice Huyler Ramsey breaks the stereotype of what young woman are supposed to do with themselves by becoming the first woman to drive across the United States. One hundred years later, a viral video of the death of Neda Agha-Soltan, an Iranian university student becomes a symbol of the protests and further challenges the stereotypes of what young women should spend their time doing.
On July 26th, 1909, the first anti-aicraft gun is built. A week later, the US Army signs a contract with the Wright Brothers' company purchasing the first military aircraft.
You can't make this stuff up.
On August 12th, 1909, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway opens for racing. It is still the largest and highest-capacity sporting facility in the world. In September 2009, the Burj Dubai will open; over 300 meters taller than the Sears Tower, it will be the largest building structure on Earth. Seems we still haven't gotten over 'bigger is better' despite all the indications represented by iPod sales.
On September 7th, 1909, Eugène Lefebvre became the first pilot to die in a plane crash. In the first ten years of the 21st century, about one-thousand people die in airline-related deaths every year.
On September 11th, 1909, astronomer Max Wolf confirms the return of Halley’s Comet. In September of 2009, NASA’s MESSENGER spacecraft will make a flyby of the planet Mercury.
On October 5th, 1909, Henry Ford nearly sold his auto company to General Motors. The deal fell through. Two days later would be the last ever ride by an American president in a stagecoach. One hundred years later, GM goes bankrupt; Ford holds on.
On November 11th, the United States Navy founds a base at Pearl Harbor and on New Year’s Eve, 1909, the Manhattan Bridge opens. In December of 2009, NASA plans to deliver the dome to the International Space Station.
What a difference a century makes.
A mere hundred years. An insignificant speck of time to a geologist. Ten simple decades lined up to be knocked down one at a time.
And yet, this is the stuff of life. This is our history. This is how we understand the world.
Could Marconi and the Wright Brothers and Henry Ford ever have imagined how their ideas would have changed the world? Could they have ever imagined that, in the end, their products would help make their own lifetimes seem so antique?
We're gonna be antiques some day as well, you know.
What we do here now, what we make and what we teach now in the 21st century will forever define us and freeze us in the obsolescence of time.
But such is life.
The best we, as teachers, can hope for is that the students we teach today go on and suffer the same fate tomorrow. It's the fate of innovation and change. And it's cruel. But necessary.
And as this cruel but necessary human experiment continues, let's hope that children always manage to laugh at the simple innovations and stubborn fears of their parents.
We're all worth a chuckle.
I would like to thank Clay Burell for giving me the opportunity to share my blogging with you this last week. I foolishly, perhaps, still believe in the power of words and I stubbornly cling to the idea that conversation is important.
Especially now as we are experiencing a time of great change, unlike any we can claim to imagine.
Think about it: we have already produced babies who will see the calendar flip from the 21st to the 22nd century.
It’s time we raise them.
And as we do, let's raise them to understand what a difference a century makes.
Photo from the public domain.
Goin' Mobile
Published July 11, 2009 @ 11:16AM PT
I’m headed out on a road trip next week.
Will be visiting Knoxville, Memphis, Hot Springs, Austin, San Antonio. The return journey will course through Houston and New Orleans and then on up through Mississippi before heading back due east.
Haven’t been on the road in a while, so I’m looking forward to this trip.
I started going out on the highways of North America back in high school. A sleepless drive from Baltimore to Louisiana; a precarious midnight ride through an Ontario blizzard; mornings waking up in the parking lots of the great charms of this land -- Nashville, Atlanta, Mobile. More trips meant more adventures: taking in the grandeur of Texas; driving off-road into the deserts of Sonora; seeing the lights of Las Cruces seemingly gleaming as bright as Los Angeles after days spent wandering the moonscape of New Mexico.
I never spent much money traveling. My wife and I once picked up a drive-away from San Diego and drove it to Richmond, VA for the cost of gas. I’ve tented in deserts and I’ve tented in the hollows of Appalachia. I’ve asked strangers if I could camp on their front lawn and I’ve met folks living in their vans, endlessly re-describing ‘home’.
Starting at three months of age, my children became accustomed to the inside of a tent. At eight years old, my twin boys can set up a two-man shelter on their own. My wife is even more of a camper that me and can easily turn any 15x15 patch of land into a kitchen/living room/bedroom in minutes.
As we’ve traveled the national parks and forests of this continent, we’ve come to know the different types of folks who make them their home. The fishermen who angle in the dark hours before dawn along the mouth of the Chesapeake Bay; the older couples whose RVs become miniature mobile civilizations; the rangers who always seem to know when you’re low on firewood; and the ones who warn you about dehydration, heatstroke, and rattlesnakes before you trod off into the cactus forests of Arizona.
I like to think of all of these trips as being part of my education. Indeed, you haven’t really been educated in the ways of the world until you’ve had a Copperhead crawl up your boxers late at night, the soft glow of the full moon present like a portrait gauzy just beyond the film of your tent and your screams.
Back in high school, the only way to see the world was to fill up the tank and drive out into it. Nowadays, “goin’ mobile” has more to do with juicing your iPhone.
And despite the fact that I realize that I’ve probably come across the last few days guest blogging here as something of a tech geek, in day-to-day life I still tend to organize my worldview not by what I can find on Wikipedia, but on what I’ve found out there on the real highway.
And I’m nervous about whether our kids are able to make that distinction.
Which is why I’ve been reassessing my thoughts about the way we structure school itself.
Most of our school buildings are made for the Industrial Age. They were meant as incubators of local society, which is precisely why folks like Woody Guthrie and Jack Kerouac resonated with the sorts of kids for whom that localized industrial structure just didn’t cut it.
Today, our kids are living in two worlds. One is the local community of friends, family, neighbors, and marketplaces. The other is the world they enter into when they get online to share likes and dislikes of recent movies or music; the world they enter into via their online gaming consoles and MMOGs.
Schools still function as though kids are still only living in the former.
When technology is applied in the classroom, it’s often done in a didactic manner not so dissimilar from the overhead projectors and filmstrips of our past. So much of what teachers tend to miss in evaluating the understanding of their students has to do with missing what’s going on in that second world. And much of what the students are missing has to do with understanding how that second world relates to the first.
That’s another disconnect.
And the only way we’re going to splice real learning into this problem is by changing the way we structure the educational experience.
Let’s consider the camping metaphor.
When you make that campfire, you tap into something primal. Something communal and creative. A place where you redefine your environment by civilizing fire. There is no technology more powerful than that.
So why do we force our students into environments that are as isolating and uncreative as possible? Have you looked recently at the aging schools comprising what we laughingly refer to as the centers of education for our communities?
Most of our school buildings have more in common with Romanesque fortifications than with the open and creatively vibrant campfires of our empowering human core.
We need the campfires.
We need to set the kids up with what they need and then send them out to spark campfires in our communities and beyond.
We don’t need kids rotting in old buildings being shown how great the world ‘out there’ is via a glorified overhead projector.
What we need is to put the power of mobile media into their hands, teach them how to use it, and then send them out into the world to engage with both their physical and online selves.
We need to stop complaining about the time away from classroom learning that fieldtrips represent and start complaining about the time away from fieldtrips that classroom learning represents.
Very quickly, technology and social media is shifting away from the old clunky hardware and towards easily mobile and very powerful forms. We need to harness this shift and make it a natural part of the learning experience. After all, you don’t need to sit in front of a computer in a school building to learn about farming when you could just as well take your smartphone to the farm itself and get the best of both worlds.
We need to get away from the school building mentality. This doesn’t mean we don’t need school buildings, but it does mean that we need to re-evaluate their function.
Rather than have 2000-student high schools, let’s break it down into community-centered ‘homebases’ of learning. This is where teachers can go directly into the communities. These 'homebases' will be the safe jumping off point for all extensions of learning into both the physical and digital worlds.
We need students to engage both the digital and the real highways of this world, and we need them to apply what they are learning in the ways that really matter.
Why do we go out of our ways to make contrite lessons seem more ‘authentic’ when there are so many real lessons to be had just beyond our classroom doors?
Now, where does this road lead? I don’t know. I’m hoping that you have some ideas, some things you’ve picked up along the roadside stands of your life that you could share. Because it’s time to rethink this whole thing.
The tank is full. Let’s go.
Photo by Matt McGee cc 2.0.
We Are All Health Professionals Now
Published July 10, 2009 @ 08:21AM PT
When I was in eleventh grade, our class was marched down to the auditorium for a presentation on penises.
This wasn’t as strange as it might sound. I was one of a thousand or so guys in an all-boys high school in Baltimore, and this was part of the health program. I remember a teacher standing at a podium in front of huge projections of phalluses ravaged by untreated gonorrhea and other terrible things. And by the end of the presentation, I knew one thing for sure: I never wanted to be a health teacher.
Funny how those types of things catch up to you. Not the gonorrhea per se, but rather the sureness of my conviction about staying out of the health field. Because today I’m a classroom Latin teacher; which in the 21st century means that I am a health professional.
I should explain.
A few years back, a state trooper gave a presentation to our school where -- among others things -- he scared the bejesus out of the faculty by explaining to us how perverts stalk teenaged girls on MySpace. Apparently this was happening everywhere. MySpace was bringing perverts out of the woodwork; it was literally an oozing cesspool of teenaged innocence and depraved sexual criminality.
I did not raise my hand during the Q&A session to ask if he’d like to friend me.
Such were the early years of social media going mainstream.
Having been a BBS-head for almost a decade before our faculty had ever heard of MySpace, I was in an interesting position at school. I immediately noticed what kids were blogging and tried to encourage them away from posting ‘dear diary’ stuff on public pages and to start thinking of Live Journal and their MySpace pages in terms of how deep into the world they could connect. I was the teacher who wrote a letter to the editor of the school paper not ripping student blogging, but rather demonstrating ways of making it sharper while at the same time taking responsibility for the privacy issues involved.
In short, in those early years of social media going mainstream, I was becoming a health professional. I was teaching digital health.
There was a lot of talk at NECC this year about ‘Digital Citizenship’. In fact, digital citizenship itself is included in the new draft of ISTE’s NETS-A standards as one of the five standards for 21st century school administrators . According to the ISTE leadership, in a speech preceding this year’s oxford debate, it's all about students learning how to use technological communication in safe, responsible, and appropriate ways.
So I say, if that’s the case, then we better be darned sure that we’re actually teaching and modeling digital citizenship in the classroom. And a big part of that is talking about digital health.
Digital health involves much more than just explaining to kids the dangers of online predators and email scams. After all, in a regular health class we don’t just teach kids about the effects of diseases, we also demonstrate to them pro-active and positive ways of approaching things. We teach them about the benefits of physical exercise and we teach them about nutrition and preventive medicine.
That’s exactly the manner with which we should be approaching digital health. Because if we just bring in the state trooper to tell kids that meth addicts are going to rape them as they Tweet, then we’re really setting ourselves up for failure. Because the kids know when we’re afraid. And they know when we don’t know what we’re talking about. And they might not know any better, but once we talk out the side of our mouths about subjects so crucial to their lives, they are gonna turn us off.
And they should.
Instead, we’ve got to meet them where they are and talk openly about both the positives and negatives of online behavior. And we’ve got to model digital citizenship in every classroom. This doesn’t mean that teachers have to be clones of one another, but it sure as hell means that you had better realize whatever message you are sending to the kids when you talk about the Net or use it in class.
Because we are all health professionals now.
You can complain and roll your eyes at the latest ‘sexting’ scandal to hit CNN, but ask yourself: what am I doing to help kids to not get into this sort of mess? Am I just blocking access to cellphones and Wi-Fi in my school building? Or am I actively engaging my students in a discussion? Am I reprimanding teachers for using social media in class? Or are my teachers modeling the powerful positive aspects of connectivity?
Where are you as a health professional?
You may think that the filters you’ve set up are the best way to keep your kids ‘safe’ from Internet porn. But, guess what? Your filters are worthless. Any smart kid can proxy around your filter. And any Wi-Fi device will bypass it altogether.
If anything, the road to hell is paved with Internet filters.
Because, in effect, what those filters really are is a representation of fear. That’s what filters and blocks teach kids. They teach them that there are things that adults fear so much, that rather than talk to you about them in the safety of a high school classroom, adults would rather you just go off and find out about that stuff alone in the darkness of your bedroom.
Except that there is no such thing as ‘alone’ online.
Digital Health: that’s what we’ve got to be teaching our kids. We should be covering precise topics -- understanding how to identify an Internet scam, empowering yourself with a strong digital profile, recognizing the social costs of Internet pornography and gambling, learning to balance online and physical life.
If we can't handle this stuff now, what in the world are we going to do down the road when we get into issues of on-demand virtual reality and shared nano-consciousness?
The kids need us to be adults about this stuff.
We shouldn’t be cowering from it. We shouldn't be living as though it's not happening. And we certainly shouldn’t be putting a block on it and then treating it as if we solved the problem.
We should be raising a new generation of health professionals. Health professionals who don’t yet realize their calling.
Photo by Amy_B cc 2.0.
Books Were Nice
Published July 09, 2009 @ 11:46AM PT
Don’t get me wrong. I liked books. They were great.
I had a dream last night recalling the story of Allen Ginsberg’s attempts to get publishers to take a work none of them thought anybody would read. Ginsberg would stop publisher reps and editors on the streets of New York City and plead for them to publish this author, but they brushed him off as crazy. They rejected his inquiry letters. They tried their best to ignore him.
The author Ginsberg was trying to get them to take was Jack Kerouac. A man who in a few short years would be arguably the most famous American author in the world.
What caused this struggle? What was the reason for Ginsberg’s and Kerouac’s anxiety and stress?
They needed a publisher to print their books.
Jeez.
Glad that’s over.
***
Boing-Boing is one of the most popular blogs in the world. Cory Doctorow is one of the co-editors. In 2003, Doctorow’s first book -- Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom -- came out in both book and Creative Commons licensed digital format. It was the first published novel ever to do so.
Now, there are at least a few more free texts available online. Everything from commercially available ISBN’d four-on-the-floor ‘Books’ (with a capital ‘B’), to open textbooks, to the 2 million public domain ebooks available through WorldBookFair. And, I'm sure you've seen Open Library? (Whoa).
When it comes down to the brass tacks, publishing today -- in it's pure form -- is really just a matter of distribution of online content. And you can do that yourself.
Growing up, one of my heroes was Dischord Records founder Ian MacKaye who as a teenager in the early '80s started his own record label. The whole idea was about doing it yourself. Unapologetically. Without a corporate safety net. For your friends. For your community.
Imagine what young DIYers are able to do today. The kinds of ways they can use the Web to level the playing field. Hurdle the old obstacles. Create their own legends.
***
Working in a paperless classroom for the last couple years, you can imagine the amount of times I’ve heard the refrain “But I just prefer the comfort of a real book”.
And I completely understand where that sentiment is coming from. After all, I take my own kids to our public library twice a week and have become over the years somewhat locally notorious on account of the amount of late fines I rack up. Rarely are there less than three or four library books next to my bed; it’s just a matter of fact that the rest of our borrowed selections all too often get lost among the thousands of books I’ve picked up and pack-ratted over the years working jobs in bookstores, universities, and for nearly the last decade as a classroom teacher.
I love books. In college, I used to spend countless hours roaming the stacks. Ever notice old books present what the wine afficinados might call a ‘chocolate bouquet’? In fact, when I met my future wife, I was living in a studio where we made all of the furniture out of recycled mass-market paperbacks. You could say I’ve seen multiple values in the bound tome.
In fact, I was working the rare book trade for a couple of years and I had the pleasure of handling old first editions of Coleridge, Eliot, Joyce, Kerouac… I have nothing but fond remembrances of those days. I have books in my own collection that hold memories and inscriptions from dead relatives and long lost friends.
Books have been important to me. And that’s why I take it so seriously in saying that they are on the way out.
***
We’re an assuming bunch -- myself included -- and we like to think that what is always has been. Especially with the ubiquitous stuff like deodorant, arch-supporting shoes, and printed books.
Fact of the matter is, in the long chronology of literature, printed books have only been around for about five minutes. The rest of the time, we wrote on goatskin. And before that on dried reeds. And before that on wax and clay. And before that, hell, we just talked to each other.
That's where literature came from: not the printed word, but the spoken word. The Epics of Greece, India, Anatolia transmitted orally for generations.
As previously I wrote in a post on my blog, printed books themselves are something of an anomaly. They mark the only time in history that we’ve mass produced perfect copies of literature, text, and illustrations. We’ve assumed that’s been for the best. Certainly it was convienent. But why would we ever have assumed that it would last?
As a species, we are glossers. That’s why there are signs in public and university libraries that read ‘No Marking or Highlighting in the Books’. It’s because we have an impulse to do that. Always have.
If you look at the majority of texts from the Medieval manuscript codex, they are full of glosses. After all, it’s this era more than any other that defines for us the term ‘palimpsest’.
That is, up until now.
I’ll tell you what I think. I think we’re in the process of correcting the anomaly of printed mass produced text. I think we’re going back to our natural instincts. We’re bookmarking online. We’re highlighting and commenting via Diigo. And we’re also doing something unique in the history of our vandalism against text: we’re sharing our glosses globally with immediate effect.
And this isn’t limited to text.
We’re taking back music. Taking it out of the hands of the Great Oz of the music industry and mashing it up to sound like whatever we want. Mash-ups are the first folk music of the 21st century.
We’re doing it with movies. We’re re-dubbing movie clips at a rate the young Woody Allen would never be able to comprehend. We’re pirating and we’re cannibalizing. We’re destroying the entertainment industry and we’re creating a new culture.
And we’ve had the itch to do this ever since we saw our first mass marketed printed books start rolling off the presses.
I've said it before, but: maybe this isn’t a paradigm shift at all. Maybe it’s just a realignment. A way of getting back to our true selves and our true relation to text and information.
A way of getting towards a future where we’ll never have to worry about them burning books and banning books again. Because the books will be ubiquitous; floating on the Cloud; waiting only for us to access them.
And access will be had by all. That was in my dream, too.
Photo by Soul Pusher cc 2.0.
Go Geek
Published July 08, 2009 @ 01:42PM PT
We don’t need Teach for America.
We need Geeks for America.
The TFA program, at best, is only a plug in the dike of an exacerbated American educational system. It assigns recent college grads to two-year terms as instructors in our most under-resourced schools as if it were sending them out on a tour of duty to Afghanistan. Or even worse, as Ira Socol put it in an interview with Open Education:
“Teach for America is a ‘colonial project.’ It is a ‘missionary project.’ It begins with the basic premise that the solution for the underclass in America is to make them ‘as much like’ rich white folks as possible. When you listen to the TFA leadership, they don’t really talk about ‘education,’ probably because they don’t really believe in education. They talk about ‘leadership’ instead.
“This is essentially the British Colonial conversion concept. ‘We’ll fix Nigeria/Ireland/South Africa/India. We’ll just teach them to speak the Queen’s English, give them a Parliament, and make them wear powdered wigs in court. Then they’ll be civilized.’ And like the British Empire, this strategy is adopted because TFA’s board and supporters have no desire to ever relinquish power to a rising colonial population. If it’s all about ‘follow the leader,’ the leader never changes."
Whichever way you see it, the last thing our most needy kids need is another person with opportunities lined up down the road to come in and ‘handle’ them for a few years before getting out.
What we need are Geeks for America. Geeks who aren’t there to put another pretty smile in front of the poor kids, but to help reconstruct and build their local infrastructures to sustain local community development in the Digital Age. Geeks whose mission has nothing to do specifically with teaching, but rather with erasing the Digital Divide so that real teachers can begin the 21st century teaching that needs to happen in every neighborhood in America.
Erasing the Digital Divide is not a matter of charity or volunteerism. It’s a matter of justice and community empowerment.
We need geeks to help get Wi-Fi and access devices into our school buildings. We need geeks to mentor and advise our career teachers on the best ways that they can personalize tech naturally into their teaching so that they can best keep on top of things happening in the culture-at-large and best prepare our children for a 21st century future. We need geeks to demonstrate to our administrators that they could save thousands upon thousands of dollars a year by going open source and weaning the schools off of textbooks, paper, and proprietary software packages. We need geeks to find out what our kids know about tech and help them build on that knowledge to become responsible digital citizens.
One of the most ludicrous things I have ever heard is that younger teachers are either a) better teachers or b) more Geek. The two best teachers I’ve ever worked with have both been 35+ year veterans. The first was the feisty chair of large high school English department where a fifth of the incoming freshmen were functionally illiterate. She took it upon herself to personally teach each and every one of these kids. The second is the current chair of my art department; a veteran and old-fashioned photography teacher with nothing to prove. He’s the one who has so fully embraced Web 2.0 that he worked out an entire school wide summer reading program to introduce students to interactive digital graphic novel creation.
Many of the younger teachers I’ve met, meanwhile, as I travel to different schools and conferences, tend to know how to use Facebook and iTunes but are lost when it comes to integrating real viable social and participartory media into the classroom. And that’s not to dog younger teachers. It was not so long ago that I was one of them. But I fully consider my first three years of teaching to have been a time where I was learning how to teach. It wasn’t until my fourth or fifth year that I really hit my stride. By that time, most TFA volunteers are off working in a different profession.
So we need to stop the blatant agism associated with the likes of TFA and open up a Geeks for America program that includes Geeks of all ages who wish to volunteer.
Geeks are different. They don’t have to be your teachers (though as I mentioned in a post a few weeks back on my blog, it sure helps if you hire teachers who are geeks). The Geeks are your support system. The Geeks for America are the folks who will support your teachers. They will support your administration. They will support your students and parents.
I envision the Geeks going out into the community itself and teaching workshops on Internet access and social media. I see an entire non-profit movement towards closing the digital divide by supplying communities with free hardware and devices with which to access free and universal Wi-Fi, whether in our inner-cities or on our rural byways. I see groups of organized Geeks being there in those communities, almost like Voting Rights volunteers were so many years ago. Geeks to organize, educate, motivate, and supply access. Geeks to teach the communities how to do it themselves; and Geeks to advocate on behalf of universal digital rights.
The TechFoundation in Cambridge, MA has laid down some ground work (including, as far as I can tell, coining the title 'Geeks for America'); but as evidenced by what's on their webpage, noble as it is, this is only a small step towards taking on the big problem. We need a continent-wide tech volunteer core to go into every neighborhood and to bring technology, ed tech mentoring, and tech mentoring for community development.
Will this in and of itself answer all of our problems? No. But, a serious national movement backed by the support of the White House and Congress with the express purpose of ending the Digital Divide is exactly what we need in this moment. Because only with that divide closed can we start to take on the serious problems that face us in the 21st century.
To deny this now, is to tempt fate as we trod further into the Digital Age.
Photo by Half Alive cc 2.0.
Talking 21st Century Skills Blues
Published July 07, 2009 @ 11:01AM PT
“There could be people who helped others on a time scale of years. Something called teachers.” – fr. ‘Synthetic Serendipity’ by Vernor Vinge
In a 1965 issue of Advances in Computers, British scientist I. J. Good wrote:
“Let an ultra intelligent machine be defined as a machine that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any man however clever. Since the design of machines is one of these intellectual activities, an ultra intelligent machine could design even better machines; there would then unquestionably be an ‘intelligence explosion,’ and the intelligence of man would be left far behind.”
Good’s work would usher in the concept of ‘technological singularity’ and all of the hopes and fears that some day human intelligence would be left in the dust. It is not surprising that a couple years after this article appeared, Good would be advising Stanley Kubrick on the production of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Advance to 1999 and Ray Kurzweil’s The Age Of Spiritual Machines and the prediction that by 2019, a regular old $1,000 computer would carry the processing capacity of the human brain. And beyond 2019? Well, let’s just say that there are going to be quite a few mathematicians looking for work.
Now, Kurzweil is a great thinker. And the exponential shift he and others have described is something very real. But all this talk of technological singularity gives a lot of folks the willies. There’s something about HAL that’s all too familiar. So, how do we allow technology to advance and at the same time keep a balanced view of what intelligence is all about to begin with?
That’s where teachers come in.
I spent the morning today with a group of education professors, alumni services folks, and teachers-in-training at the Johns Hopkins University School of Education. They are taking part in my self-described social media bootcamp. That’s just fancy talk for learning how to use the resources Web 2.0 has to offer. But it’s more than just learning to use tools. Like any tool, the apps available for social media now reflect something about how we view ourselves. And how we qualify intelligence.
First, it helps to define what I mean by intelligence. For better or worse, I’m one of those folks who totally bought into Howard Gardner’s view back in ed school. The theory of multiple intelligences made sense to me. And it’s not because I like theories; it's because it made sense to me within the context of my own life. I’ll give the example of one of my sons. Here’s a boy both dyslexic and dysgraphic, struggling through reading and math class in first grade, who at the same time was tackling music theory courses at the Peabody Conservatory of Music. A boy who still at age eight has trouble subtracting numbers, but give him a trumpet and he can harmonize by ear to Miles Davis recordings.
So my first admonition towards the singularity camp has to do with having limited its definition of intelligence to that which can be computed. Now, does that admonition in any way limit technological advances? No, rather – I hope – it contextualizes them within the framework of a broader intellectual ecology. The singularity may well be happening, but we should take perhaps a more nuanced view of what that means.
The second thing we need to do is to consider the definition of ‘singularity’ itself. An early voice in the orthography of the word was Vernor Vinge, the technologist and author who in the early ‘90s predicted that the end of what he called the ‘human era’ would soon follow whatever outcome manifested through the exponential rise of superhuman computer intelligence.
He prophesied the constant creation of the networked global computer environment, and I sort of visualize this constant creation-and-taking of information almost like an techno-intellectual beehive. It’s a situation where serendipity is obscured by the sheer numbers, and vice-versa. Yet whichever is occurring, there’s always a buzz.
Which brings us to the age of social and participatory media and what I hope I was doing in that classroom today.
Whereas, in certain company, the singularity often still bears the connotation residue of HAL and the like, the present result of this exponential curve has actually shaped up as something quite different.
The practical and accessible manifestation of the singularity can be seen in the user reviews of guitar amps and walking shoes on Harmony Central and Zappos. It’s in the work of the hackers and activist Twitterers sharing face time with well-meaning yet wholly uninformed everyday Twitterers on the #IranElection Twitterfall. It’s in the folks joining together in a Naxx raid on WoW who otherwise might never meet – and who are essentially to each other simply the characters they represent in the game. It's in our Facebook comments and our Tweets both mundane and sublime. In other words – at least in the way I read it – part of the way that the singularity expresses itself is in the ‘regularness’ of life in the Digital Age; the thing that makes it so compelling is the regularness, the day-to-day-ness, the humanness.
In other words: it’s not something to be scared of. Rather, as the machine of the Internet grows and becomes fully capable of handling semantic information – the very information we supply it with via our comments and Tweets – we will become more, not less, aware of who we are.
Because in the singularity of a semantic technological age, we will bear out Merleau-Ponty’s quip that (to adapt and paraphrase for the 21st century) “We Tweet, and what we Tweet tells us who we are.”
What does all of this mean for the classroom?
For starters it means that we need to prepare ourselves as teachers to prepare students to live in their future and not in our past.
There has been a lot of talk in the education and ed tech community recently about ‘21st Century Skills’. Proponents for and against have failed, in my opinion, to really center on the reality of the situation our kids and teachers are in. Instead of trying to identify the factors that will influence the education of real students in this Digital Age, they have reacted for and against some pretty mushy-minded ed speak concerning whether or not ‘critical thinking’ is a 21st Century Skill.
I’ve had it with this feeble approach towards preparing our minds to prepare our children for the future. And so, on my blog a ways back, I wrote out what I specifically see as unique 21st Century Skills.
• Critical Media Network Skills: the ability in a networked environment to recognize when you are being taken advantage of via special interests and the ability to argue within the dominant paradigm of a global network with acuity and accuracy based upon the application of historical, philosophical, creative, and intellectual skills grounded in the history of human thought and applied to the spontaneity and immediate global impact of 21st century networked communications.
• Participatory and Networked Information and Communication Skills: the ability to take part in one’s global society on equal footing with any other human via the immediacy and power of digital networks. Long-term, this may mean sharing any variety of networked consciousnesses.
• Collaborative Social Meta-Thinking: the ability to learn from and give back to both local community-based and global-based digital social networks. This may extend in future environments to nanotechnology merging with on-demand personalized virtual reality.
• Creative Network Confidence and Digital Community Stewardship: the ability to use the global network for both the purposes of creative problem solving and for the benefit of peaceful co-existence between peoples, animals, ecologies, and environments.
• Digital Cunning: students will learn that merely ‘using technology’ does not mean that you are either educated in or are a contributing member to the global network. Drawing on a strong Liberal Arts background merged with Digital Age critical thinking skills, students will be able to distinguish between participatory media and authoritarian media even when the latter cloaks itself as the former.
• Awareness of Digital History and Digital Divide: the ability to understand historical analog modalities and to recognize the value of pre-digital and non-digital media as well as the temporary nature of specific technologies within historical evolution; the ability to understand and through social action compensate for and help to eliminate digital distinctions based on economics, politics, geography, and race.
These are the skills students will need in order to navigate life and work in the dawn of the great singularity.
And let it be known, I fundamentally disagree that we should teach these skills as auxiliary to the content we want students to learn. Rather, social and participatory media should be so integrated into the pedagogy of teaching content that it becomes as second-nature, obvious, casual, and useful as chalk and ballpoint pens.
To review: the singularity is coming. We live, as Fisch and McLeod put it, in exponential times. And we do a disservice to our students and our future if we pretend that we can use 19th century methodologies to facilitate 21st century learning.
That’s where teachers come in.
***
sources
I.J. Good ‘Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent Machine’ Advances in Computers, Vol 6. Academic Press Inc. (New York: 1965).
Photo by Brain Blogger cc 2.0.
Disconnected
Published July 06, 2009 @ 11:25AM PT
Romeo and Juliet would have made out just fine if they’d only had a pair of iPhones between ‘em.
“Yo, Julie, what’s up?”
“You are totally not going to believe this, but I’ve got this poison that’ll make it look like I’m dead. So don’t like freak out and kill yourself or anything when you see me, because that would just totally blow.”
I don’t know that we’d be fine had the kids been connected, but they would have made out a tad better.
Thinking about this not because I seek to undermine all the tragedy in that Shake-scene, but because I’ve been thinking about a current tragedy-in-the-works: the tragedy of a generation of students growing up to think that school has nothing to do with real life.
Heard a few weeks back from a colleague at a big public high school in what I’ll leave as an undisclosed district. At the recent National Educational Computing Conference in Washington, DC, a bigwig from that district was getting an award having to do with being a pioneer in educational technology. The irony I gleamed as I watched all this go down was that the teacher a few weeks back had confided to me that students in his high school weren’t even allowed to use email.
That’s a disconnect: accepting awards for ed tech leadership whilst your students aren’t trusted enough to use email in school.
Heard from another teacher a while back about the great things her students were doing combining text and video with social media. And then, suddenly, YouTube was blocked. Totally off limits in school. Well, YouTube and Twitter and various social bookmarking sites and most blogs and etc… and she wasn’t the only one. I hear this time and time and time again.
That’s a disconnect: Time magazine says Twitter is changing the world, yet we’re afraid of letting our students use it. Wouldn’t want our kids to change the world, you know. There are bubble tests to study for.
Heard from a high school student a ways back. Said in his career at a 1:1 computing school, only two teachers ever brought social media into the classroom. He said he asked the tech guy what Web 2.0 meant and the tech guy didn’t know.
That’s a disconnect: We’re wasting valuable education dollars on obsolete technologies whilst a paradigm shift towards open source and shared social media is happening all around us.
I’ve been teaching in a paperless classroom for the last couple years. I’ve watched students engage with their world in ways most of us teachers could never have imagined based upon our own experience as students. And whether it’s using Twitter hashtags to create shared cross-curricular reference bibliographies; or lobbying Web 2.0 developers to redesign parts of their apps to work better in the classroom; or using Skype, YouTube, and social bookmarking as a way to engage parents, mentors, and professionals to take part in the students’ learning, the kids these days demonstrate a day-to-day ease of use with and expectation of use of the immediate global connections the 21st century Web has to offer.
This isn’t your father’s Internet.
If you are reading this, you probably get most of your news online. You also likely have a few online profiles and think nothing about saving your information on the Cloud. Perhaps you blog. Hopefully you Tweet. Surely you must Hulu and Blip. You haven’t bought a CD in years. You don’t quite remember the last time you rented a video from a store. You’d rather play an MMOG than go to the movies. You think MySpace is old-school and kinda lame.
Okay. Maybe you don’t. But your students do.
And they know whether you ‘get it’ or not. And despite your best protestations why none of that matters, it matters. Because we as teachers need to be the role-model in our classrooms for the responsible and beneficial use of the Internet and social technology. Because we as teachers need to model to our students what it means to be a citizen with rights and responsibilities in a global system. Because we as teachers can’t take the chance of missing this generation. Not this one. Not now.
Because we are living in the transition period into the next stage of civilization.
You thought ed tech was silly in 1983? You were partly right. You thought ed tech was silly in 1996? You were partly right. You think ed tech is silly now? You are out of touch.
And what’s changed?
What’s changed is that the ed tech of yesteryear was always about finding ways of bringing technology into the classroom. The reality of today is that your kids are bringing more technological sophistication into the classroom in their pockets than your school has likely managed to accomplish over the last thirty years. What's changed is that our students are living in an immediately connected world where it takes 10 seconds to connect to the whole of human knowledge as well as the billions of people creating it.
The kids don’t expect to be taught ‘better’ because of technology; rather it’s a matter of mindset and authenticity. Schools trivialize their value by at best reflecting a completely inauthentic and misunderstanding view of how technology and social media is so naturally integrated into all of the other aspects of our students’ lives.
Students should expect at the very least that their schools are as socially viable and aware of the times as a burger joint offering free Wi-Fi.
As for the digital divide? Consider the fact that you can now buy a netbook for around $200 and with Wi-Fi access have the world at your fingertips within seconds. Heck, you spend more than that on textbooks. It's really a crime that every student in this country, let alone this continent, hemisphere, and world is not currently guaranteed free universal Internet access and a device for connecting.
A matter of priorities, I guess. A matter of disconnect.
So we gotta face down this disconnect. We need to get those smartphones and netbooks in the hands of Romeo and Juliet. And not for our sake, but for theirs. We need to open schools to the global community. We can’t let fear get in the way. And we can’t keep educating kids as if they aren’t living in the Digital Age.
We have a responsibility to get out of our comfort zone and take an active part in the worldwide dialogue of social media. No one ever said that the first task of the profession of teaching was to make the teacher as comfortable as possible. We need to get into the digital realm, because our students are already living there and they aren’t coming back.
We have to be the models of what we want our students to be out there in the binary plane.
Our students are waiting.
We’re holding the truth.
We can’t afford to let this message not go through.
Because the star-crossed lovers can’t afford a crossed connection. And we are the ones responsible for that connection. In that classroom, we teachers are the only thing that stands between the twin vices of tragedy and disconnect.
Photo by Agelakis cc 2.0.
